Reading 2023

Currently Reading

Nonfiction

Intentionally left blank

Fiction:

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft (Translator)

The Stand by Stephen King (Audiobook)

The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North [On Hold]

Deciding Better:

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes

Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Volume 2: Patterns of Plausible Inference by George Polya

The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, Adam Bulley.

Jewish Studies:

Shaarai Teshuvah (The Gates of Repentance) by Rabenu Yonah

2023 Reads

Fiction:

In The Distance by Hernan Diaz

On Target by Mark Greaney

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang

Trust by Hernan Diaz

The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands by Stephen King (audiobook)

The Gray Man by Mark Greaney

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (audiobook)

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The Dark Tower I:The Gunslinger by Stephen King (audiobook)

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norris by Susanna Clarke (audiobook)

Slough House by Mick Herron

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Joe Country by Mick Herron

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (audiobook)

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

London Rules by Mick Herron

Bad Actors by Mick Herron
Children of Time</em> by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

All of the Dark Tower books by Stephen King on Audio Book
Under the Dome by Stephen King

Nonfiction:

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog

Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, Volume 1: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics by George Polya

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

Novelist as Vocation Haruki Murakami

Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang

The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together by Luiz Pessoa. Note that free PDFs of the book chapters are available here.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being Rick Rubin

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen

The Marvelous Clouds by John Durham Peters

Nefesh Hachaim by Rav Chaim of Volozhin

Reading Plan

I’ve got three categories of reading running. Fiction, nonfiction general reading, and books related to the On Deciding . . . Better project. The idea is to have variety but focus on finishing a book in each category. Always having a few ready on deck of course.

In fiction now I’m branching out from pure SciFi and SciFi tinged Fantasy into more literary picks with SciFi overtones. I loved reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel last year, so I’m pushing a bit in that direction this year. But probably alternating that with finishing the Slow Horse series and maybe pickup another spy series- for the variety.

The nonfiction category is for general information, filling in gaps in my understanding of the world. I’ve enjoyed reading popular presentations of quantum physics like Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, history or art. Right now, after two books of political US history, I’m drawn to asthestics and am really enjoying Rubin’s book.

Next is my project specific reading for this project, On Deciding . . . Better which has been going on 25 years now. Last year, I spent time on the fundementals of statistics and Baysian reasoning. This year it’s catching up with neuroscience to ensure the current accuracy of the ODB manuscript.These books get written and then reviewed for note taking as I described here.

Finally, I spend time every morning on a work of Jewish ethics and philosophy. Having read through some recent commentaries over the last few years, I’m going back to sources like the famous Nefesh Hachaim. Now this doesn’t generally so directly enter my notes here, it is foundational to my thought and personal growth.

Reading: Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

I think I first saw Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen reviewed by Tyler Cowen. After reading about it a few more time, I decided to read it primarily to improve my rudimentary understanding of Native American history.

During the upheaval that was the 2016 election, I wrote here about why seeking diverse sources of information was critical to providing a rich idea environment for optimal decisions. Bad information is like a pollution of the environment of mind, but with diversity and differential survival of ideas, we have the principle of natural selection working for us to provide a model of the world that best reflects reality and thus should allow us to act most appropriately in the world. So I try to read widely in subjects that I feel I don’t have a good grasp on.

Indigenous Continent is a scholarly work. Actually a refreshing change from the current trend for books to be edited into collections of anecdotes and stories that illustrate points. Here, it means that the book is often a catalog of groups, people, events with some historical context but little biographical or psychological background presented other than in passing.

But it’s a book of grand historical sweep with a point of view firmly from that of the indigenous people of the Americas and how the arrival of Europeans occured to them. And the thesis of the book, that the continent remained largely indegenous through the mid 1800’s, until after the Civil War puts my understanding of American history into a new perspective. I knew about the death by epidemic from reading Jerad Diamonds’ Guns, Germs, and Steel when it as well as other sources. I had read about the forced relocations of eastern tribes during my travels through the US.

Two points struck me while reading the book. One was how adaptable these indigenous cultures were as their situations and locations changed. There was a strength to the culture in being cooperative societies without centralization and authority based on a nomadic cuture that could continue to function as situations changed drastically.

But then I was continuously struck by how dependent on European technology the indigenous survivors were. Guns, metal utensils, farm implements and other means of survival meant trade and reliance on the Europeans. The relationship was always so unequal that the outcome seems to have been determined from the start. Survival ended up being dependent on either capitualtion or hiding. The book ends on a positive note as our Indigenous Americans have survived and are experiencing something of a renaissance in todays multicultural America.

Reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

When I heard about The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, I knew I had to read it. A book about AI and octopus intellegence grounded in neuroscience definitely hits a bunch of my interests. I’ve been fascinated by the octopus brain for a long time, both because my daughter growing up had a stuffed octopus that she loved and we saw them in the National Aquarium here in Baltimore.

Several years ago I read Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith which made the case that the octopus, with its convergent evolution of eye and brain, was a real example of an alien non-vertebrate intelligence. I understand my puppy’s behavior by analogy. Not so the octopus. I wasn’t surprised to see Other Minds acknowledged by Nayler at the end of the book.

The describes the meeting of man, a cognitively advanced colony of octopodes and an AI self conscious android. the AI description is a nice creation, building on current neural network concepts, but does have a bit of mind transfer magic through connectome mapping. Oh well, I always surrender my predjudice at the door as the price of admission. Plenty of SciFi is build on the plausibly impossible and mind transfer seems plausible but is impossible.

Also, some nice reflections on complex systems and ecology. Nayler also cites How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn as an prime inspiration from the book. So that’s now on my list to read. I had thought about it after finishing Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy last year which is a meditation on being present that owes much to the idea of deep ecology and the emergent reality of environment.

A well written first novel that’s heavy on the philosophy and neuroscience and not deep in character building or plot. For me, a compelling read.

A bit more conventional image of the puppy.

Operant conditioning is a powerful tool for shaping behavior. Still, much is to be gained by thinking about what the world looks like from the puppy’s point of view. Facinating how a puppy shows stress through affection, aggression and play dependiing on context. I’m learning to see through the surface appearance to see where the behavior is coming from.

The Experimental History experiment – by Adam Mastroianni

From The Experimental History experiment – by Adam Mastroianni:

Last March, when I had barely begun blogging, I happened to meet a big shot author who writes pop science books, and I told him about my dreams for this blog. “Maybe this could be what I do,” I told him, hopefully.

“It’ll never work,” he said. “People want to read about what they are interested in, not what you are interested in. I’m successful because I write stuff that will sell. I don’t actually like the stuff I write about.”

I’ve been writing here going on 25 years now. I write what I need to since this is my journal. But I’ve long been aware that my posts on photography equipment and notetaking process get the most reads via search engines. Not lots of referals from other blogs these days, just some of my old friends here. But of course, this is just my way of thinking out loud.

The Emacs and LogSeq excursions

Once I had my Linux box up and running with Regolith and i3wm, I wanted to integrate it into my developing Zettelblogging workflow.

First, I explored the world of Emacs. There is a wonderful community around Emacs currently with great YouTube videos and blogs. I’d be remiss if I didnt’t mention Prot, Sachua and David who served as guides to integrating Emacs into my workflow. It took a program called SyncThing to hook the Linux box into my Apple-centric iCloud workflow efficiently although seeing folders from the Mac over my home network is pretty easy in Linux, particularly having the Gnome tools available.

In the end, Emacs, like Linux itself, is a high customizable environment that was engaging but in the end just didn’t bring that much utility to the actual work. In fact, both act as potent distractions to actual research and writing.

Next I explored LogSeq, which is one of the new generation of note taking apps like Roam, Notion and Craft. I kind of liked it and found it more straightforward in use than I had imagined with its backlinking and autotagging style. But in the end it was too much a self contained system and really not easily integrated with the Drafts/DEVONthink/text/PDF workflow I had built up over the years.

So I’m back using the tools on the Mac and iOS where each piece of software is a bit more opinionated and fits a particular use case while all working well together. Suprisingly, the Kindle Scribe is my latest useful tool, giving me a nice way of reading PDFs in depth. I’m hoping the notetaking side becomes better integrated, but for now my notebooks and fountain pens are just as good as a digital notetaking tablet. Notes are an initial step in input and my goal is working in public on that input.

Why Linux captured computing and not the desktop

It’s clear that the Linux desktop failed even as Linux became the single most widely deployed OS behind the scence. And as Linus Torvalds, the creator of the OS knows, the reason is the fragmentation of the user experience.

Even knowing this abstractly didn’t stop me for spending a good bit of the first half of 2022 building a PC and playing with Linux, I’ve built a few PC with my youngest son as gaming rigs. I fell in love with the Teenage Engineering mini-ITX case they call the “Computer-1“. So when they became available again at the beginning of last year, I bought one and then the parts to put together a Linux box. Just Intel on chip graphics since the case is too small for a high powered graphics card and I wasn’t looking to use the build for gaming or other graphics uses.

What I wanted was a fast, minimal system not filled with distractions and extras. Since Linux runs fine on hardware ranging from my Raspberry Pi to multiprocessor servers, I figured that a well configured box would be about as fast as possible on standard tasks like text editing and browsing.

My biggest motivation was to really try a tiling windows manager. One of my biggest frustrations with MacOS is how inconsistently windows are spawned and so randomly placed. Working with two large external monitors multiplies the problem. I’ve mostly dealt this this by using a utility called Magnet which quickly allows screen tiling. And the new Stage Manager OS approach actually helps a bit. But using a minimal system with a tiling WM is just another experience altogether.

So I used a Linux distro called Regolith which integrated the I3 tiling windows manager with the Gnome System Mangement tools on Ubuntu. Sounds complicated already, doesn’t it. These distros on Linux are absolutely necessary because of the complexity of putting together a full suite of system management tools. There are literally dozens of distros. I found it pretty easy to find a distro and get it loaded on my newly built machine. But when something goes wrong or you want to add a functionality and keep it updated, it starts taking time to look up how to install or change some settings file to get things right. So far from the experience of running MacOS or Windows.

I can see how if one were running a certain configuration and just wanted to maintain function, it would be a reliable way to go. But as a user, there’s just so much friction that I can see how any casual user would be detered from continuing. Lets just say that to run Linux as a user, one needs to be at “Hobbyist” level. Willing to invest time into running the machine to learn how it all works and customize an experience.

So I got my Linux machine up and running. In the end, I ended up with a full Gnome install running with I3 loaded as the window manager at startup. That was just the start of the journey though, as I spent more time after that going down the Emacs and LogSeq rabbit holes. But I think those are tales for another day.

First book read of 2023: London Rules

Finished my first book of 2023, London Rules by Mick Herron. It’s the 5th book in the Slow Horses series which has been made into a series streaming at AppleTV+.

I watched the first season and was taken by the story as well as the way Gary Oldman’s brought the character of Jackson Lamb to life. As I’ve often done when given a choice between book and show, I stopped watching the show and read the source material so that I could enjoy the reading experience without having to substitute the show’s cast and choices for my own construction of the story. I think it was Game of Thrones that served as my first introduction to the problem. After watching the first season on HBO, I read through the books, only erasing with difficulty some of the actors from my mental images of the characters.

The first 4 books were a nice diversion during 2022 from my usual reading habits which haven’t included spy thrillers too often. On the other hand, after my accident, I read 6 or 7 of the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connely, all library Kindle downloads. This too was inspired the show Bosch on Amazon Prime. Now there I had already watched several seasons, well binged several seasons, and so Titus Welliver will always be my mental image of Harry Bosch.

The Hobonichi Year that was 2022

I’ve written summaries of my Hobonichi use in some previous years: 2017, 2019, and 2020. This Japanese daily journal is a popular Instagram and Reddit subject as it’s part of the larger craft journaling scene, like the Bullet Journal.

This year my Hobonichi has served its customary purpose as the tool to plan my day every morning. I always buy the Japanese version of the planner as the layout just suits my use a bit better than the English version, even though this means that the daily quotes on each page remain mysteries to me. Each morning, I block out the day’s calls, errand times, times to fit in the daily training ride and make some notes on what really needs to get done that day.

For me it’s a planning exercise. It’s rare that I refer back to the Hobonichi after the planning is done. My work calls are driven by the Microsoft Outlook calendar and when the slots open up for the ride, errand or appointment, I’m ready for it. The next morning, I’ll glance back at the previous day for a quick assessment as to whether there’s some impact on the coming day.

I also use the monthly calendars for long term planning- particularly holidays, business trips and cycling events. Even though it’s all duplicated on the phone/iPad/PC calendars, I’ve long relied on doing the planning and thinking on paper- just because I can’t see the big picture on a computer calendar for whatever reason.

The biggest change this year has been adding more special purpose notebooks to capture reading notes. This was kind of a breakthrough for me this year, finding an efficient way to take notes on reading. As I mentioned, this was based on a reread of Ryan Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method. I now read a text straight through, then go back, skimming for the purpose of rapid logging the main points I want to record.

Since it’s now been 3 months, I think I can say I’ve added a daily Bullet Journal habit to the morming Hobonichi ritual. So at times during the day, I make some progress notes in the Bullet Journal. If I’m taking notes on a book, those go into the the same notebook.

Unfortunately, while analog note taking has been a success this year, on the digital side I’ve still not really developed a good methodology for my current needs. I’m using DEVONthink as a hub more consistently to store documents, but the input really just isn’t there- seems like too much work. So my aspirations to funnel notes into DEVONthink and then out into this website have just not panned out as hoped. I know that the key is to keep friction down and the efforts casual. I’m drawn to thinking with pen on paper, so the formalization of typing it in is the friction that holds the process back. Small steps, always just the next action and no more.