Mind expanding books: a list

It's easy to be ready for the future -- just read a certain kind of science fiction. No, not Asimov, rest his soul (my fave: The Gods Themselves, for its take on the generation gap). Nor Ellison, he wrote about people and horror, noteworthy but different. Not LeGuin, she wrote about sociology.

No, these days, the memetic fiction to read is produced by a handful of writers who often have credentials in the sciences. Whatever the outward appearance, there's a core set of ideas that are better developed and more persuasive than any effort at traditional futurism. These writers often try hard to imagine what humans will be like in very different environments or with very different abilities.

Read this gang, and nothing will surprise you. I've put a sample of books together in one place for your mind-expanding pleasure: Amazon.com: "Mind expanding fiction". Warning -- don't read these all at once. I suggest starting with vintage Vinge (superficially less radical) or Iain M. Banks (superficially conventional) before tackling Egan or Stross. Excessive consumption by an unprepared reader may result in explosive cranial decompression.

Oh, and yes, they all take a stab at resolving the Fermi Paradox.

Update 4/26/10: Current names on the list, in alphabetic order with one exception...

Greg Egan: Egan goes first because he's 90% mind blowing. He's the straight whisky and black espresso of mind expansion. Don't start with Greg, you need to work up to him. It can be hard to find his books [2], they are a bit too demanding to stay long in print (mind expansion is not a commercially optimal strategy). Incandescence, for example, walks the reader through the derivation of neo-classical orbital mechanics in an environment where general relativity is personally relevant. It also obliges one to think of the relationship of individuality to the hive and the historical peculiarity of renaissance.

Charles Stross: One of my favorite writers, like any mind expander who's going to be commercially successful he balances novel ideas with character and plot. Of this list he's probably the most story-driven and least idea-driven -- which of course can make him very readable. Halting State is one of his most idea-centric works.

Greg Bear: Greg has largely moved on to the more profitable thriller/horror genre, but his early works (Eternity, Eon) earn him a lasting spot on the list.

Iain M. Banks: Iain is the gateway drug of mind expansion. Some his culture books seem like mind candy, but they're laced with the hard stuff. Soon you work your way to Consider Phlebas, Feersum Endjinn and Matter.

Robert Sawyer: Despite an atypical sympathy for deity, he definitely pushes the envelope.

Stephen Baxter: An excellent introduction. Evolution is astounding. [2]

Vernor Vinge: Like Banks and Stross he's relatively approachable. Another great place to start.

[1] Here's hoping eBooks will one day be a friend to writer and reader alike.

[2] Update 8/23/2010: One of my favorite scenes in Evolution concerns sentient spear using dinosaurs. Baxter makes a great case for a sentient, warm blooded, raptor-with-digits dino. In the story they hunt their primary prey to extinction - with obvious consequences. I thought that was quite original, but today I read Asimov's "Day of the Hunters" (1950) published in "Buy Jupiter and Other Stories" (1975). It's a less sophisticated version of the same story! Asimov was gem.

Fossett: is this the same search everyone gets?

The lost wealthy adventurer Steve Fossett is getting such an intense search that it's turning up wrecks never seen before...

ABC News: Old Plane Wrecks an Ominous Sign

...The intense, weeklong search for aviator Steve Fossett has turned up no sign of his plane, but it has revealed a graveyard of other small aircraft that have crashed sometimes decades ago in the rugged, concealing landscape of western Nevada. Search teams have spotted nearly one uncharted wreck a day since the search began Tuesday. To some, that is an ominous sign of how hard it will be to find Fossett...

I sure hope they find Fossett, and that he's alive. I do wonder, though, would a 60 year old black man get the same search? Military planes, satellite images ...

Update: This reminded me of the search for James Gray, also a wealthy man, sailing alone, who received a very impressive search effort including extensive coast guard resources. Mr Gray's disappearance remains a mystery (Wired has a comprehensive article on that search.).

Amazon's Flexible Payments service

This is the best explanation of Amazon's new payment system I've read ...

Mobile Opportunity: Impact of Amazon Flexible Payments Service: Computing as a utility

... FPS is a web service, meaning it's a set of online APIs that the creator of a website or web application can use to perform tasks. What FPS does for you is billing -- you can use it to accept payments for something you sell online. Basically, you transmit the customer's info to Amazon, and they take care of the credit check, credit card processing, billing, and so on. They send you the money, less a percentage cut that they take. That's not at all revolutionary. PayPal and Google Checkout offer the same thing already. Amazon's cut is about the same as PayPal -- about 2% to 3% of your revenue, depending on the amount of business you do, plus 30 cents per transaction.

Google is a tad cheaper, plus you get AdSense credits for using it. (For more information on FPS, there are good articles here and here). What impressed me about FPS is its flexibility. Amazon says you can set different payment terms for every customer, set up subscriptions and multiple payment schedules, manage a store in which you pass payments from a customer to your suppliers, set up either pre- or post-payment systems, and most importantly you can manage micropayments down to a couple of pennies per transaction ..."

Mace talks about the other implications for online commerce -- it's well worth a read. Google checkout is not available internationally, so if Amazon can extend this outside the US it could be a real winner -- esp. for selling software. It's a big deal because, like Google Checkout, it seems to work around the high transaction costs that credit card companies charge, thus allowing small charges to be cost-effective.

Forgotten things: dial phones, record players, rust

Boomer geezers often talk about the things their children don't recognize, such as dial phones and record players. Actually, our children know those. They had childhood toy dial phones, and their preschool used a record player.

What they don't know is rust. I knew rust very well. In my childhood my father drove an ancient 1965 Valiant held together, honestly, by multiple layers of duct tape. Yes, the apple does not fall far, my father was a bit of an eccentric. Every so often we'd have to add new layers of duct tape, as gaping holes appeared along the top front sides of the Valiant.

Rust was everywhere in my world, but it's rare in our children's world. Cars don't rust. Plastics don't rust. Even their metal toys barely rust. Rust is passing into history...

Cruelty of the young, or how to tell you're a geezer

Every so often, I wipe out. Flip, bump, spin, skid, slide, etc. Bright red road rash patches here and there (looks worse than it feels). It's bad enough, but invariably there's some young whipper-snapper who, despite my gray hair being under a helmet, instantly calls out "Sir! Are you hurt?!" in a terribly anxious voice.

Hmpp. Bad enough I've botched a move, but there's no need to remind me I'm a Geezer. The young are cruel.

Shared music, shared ringtones, iPhone - uh-oh

Despite all chatter about iTunes and DRMd iPhone ringtones nobody seems to have caught on that Apple is going to make it very, very, hard to share a family music library. Apple is has the same goals as NBC -- eliminate sharing of music and videos among family members. They're just much smarter about it (so much for Jobs anti-DRM message!).

The problem is that an OS X music library belongs to a user account. So do the contacts, phone backup, DRMd ringtones, etc.

So what happens if two people in a family both have an iPhone? They need to sync within their user account. That means they can't share music, because only one account can own the music library.

There are workarounds, but they're awkward, unsupported, and Apple can break them at any time. I've posted a few times about this topic, this 2005 post is the most extensive.

Senator Klobuchar and cell phone contracts: America, bow before Minnesota

It's hard to believe, but Minnesota wasn't always the coolest state. I confess when I lived on the coasts I didn't really know where it was, and when I moved here 15 years ago the twin cities were only beginning the ascent to greatness. Now, of course, the coasts bow down to us.

Klobuchar is one of ours:

Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) today unveiled legislation aimed at empowering the 200 million cell phone customers nationwide to make informed choices about a wireless service that best fits their needs and their budget. The Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act of 2007 will require wireless service providers to share simple, clear information on their services and charges with customers before they enter into long-term contracts; a thirty-day window in which to exit a contract without early termination fees; and greater flexibility to exit contracts with services that don’t meet their needs.

Of course I have to take some credit here, because I'm sure my senator was inspired by a Jan 2007 post of mine:

Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies (Jan 2007)

...The bottom line: If you don't want to change your contract expiry date, you go to a Sprint store and pay full price, or you buy a used phone on eBay or Craigslist. I'm told some Radio Shack stores will sell used phones, but I distrust the quality there. I have a visceral distrust for eBay, so it's Craigslist or list price.

Lastly, looking over the scam I first documented above, I'm thinking Amazon's a part of the deal too. In other words, they sold out. Well, it's not the first time.

The next time a politician hits me up for a donation, I won't ask them about healthcare reform or global warming, I'll ask them if they'll vote to require any cellphone vendor to accept a compatible unlocked phone.

Ok Amy, send me another request for a donation.

Dang, I really thought he was dead

Google News: The Bin Laden stuff

Honestly, I figured he was dead. For an egomaniac he was awfully quiet.

Does this guy take longevity lessons from Castro? If all the atheists of America claim to convert to Islam would that make him happy?

No, I didn't think so.

Virginia moves to eliminate the father

On the one hand, I'm comfortable with the idea of eliminating males, though it is a bit of a slippery slope. As bad as human males are, human females are not necessarily qualitatively better.

On the other hand, I do hold my children's hands when we walk, and since they're all adopted, Rebecca Odor would be very suspicious ...

Moving On - WSJ.com

... This summer, Virginia's Department of Health mounted an ad campaign for its sex-abuse hotline. Billboards featured photos of a man holding a child's hand. The caption: 'It doesn't feel right when I see them together.' More than 200 men emailed complaints about the campaign to the health department...

Virginia's campaign was designed to encourage people to trust their instincts about possible abuse, says Rebecca Odor, director of sexual and domestic violence prevention for the state health department. She stands by the ads, pointing out that 89% of child sex-abuse perpetrators in Virginia are male...

Really, Rebecca, let's just eliminate fathers altogether. These half-way measures will never suffice.

Are all smartphones bad?

A journalists had a bad Treo experience, and decided to turn his investigative talents on an interesting question -- is there such a thing as a good smartphone? Despite his avowed non-geek credentials, he has some interesting comments ...

The Case of the Subpar Smartphone - New York Times
September 8, 2007
By JOE NOCERA

My Treo died.

It happened about three weeks ago, and I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. I bought a Treo 700p in early January and have had buyer’s remorse pretty much ever since.

The 700p, of course, is a member of the Palm smartphone family; it’s the one that uses the Palm operating system (the 700w uses Windows). I chose it because I was a longtime user of the Palm Pilot, and had all my data already stored on the Palm application on my computer. In other words, it was the kind of completely rational technology decision we nongeeks tend to make — and then, sadly, come to regret.

Practically out of the box, my Treo froze on a regular basis. I could never get my Gmail account to sync with the Treo, and had to use the Web to retrieve e-mail — which required the patience of Job. It had all sorts of weird glitches: sometimes it raced around the menu while I watched helplessly; at other times, it would switch from one application to another for no reason. It would ring randomly. By June, it was shutting down completely two or three times a week, even in the middle of phone calls, and then powering back up again.

Maybe, I thought, I’m just unlucky. Maybe I’ve bought a lemon, in which case I should try to get my carrier, Verizon Wireless, to replace it. You know how it is, though: life kept getting in the way, and I never got around to it.

But I also think my avoidance was due to a darker, more painful thought: maybe Treos were simply lousy devices. ... Maybe I was a fool to assume, as I clearly had, that just because Palm had once made great products, it was still making great products.

Then my Treo died, and that gave me my answer. What killed it was, of all things, a software upgrade from Palm...

... Then came the hours of working with the valiant Verizon technical support guy, as he struggled to get my [new[ Treo up and running. There was the software that refused to work. The continued difficulty of synching with Gmail. The “soft resets.” The frustration. The constant refrain of “Let’s try that again.” And finally, after everything was more or less up and running, the painful realization that the new phone was almost as problematic as the old one had been...

... It’s hard to make a good smartphone — so hard, in fact, that no one really has it right yet [jf: almost right, but wrong. See below]. BlackBerrys are great at e-mail, but the phone is barely adequate and its Internet abilities are not very good at all. The Motorola Q crashes almost as often as the Treo. The Apple iPhone is terrific for music and media, but lousy for e-mail and phoning.

Part of the reason has to do with what’s called the “form factor.” For marketing reasons, everybody is trying to cram all these complicated features into ever-sleeker, ever-thinner boxes, while also adding longer battery life, and so on. Invariably, smart phone designers have to make compromises that mean some functions don’t work especially well...

... On the one hand, believe it or not, the company is still using the same operating system it used when it was churning out Palm Pilot, which, please recall, had no Internet, no e-mail and no telephone. [jf: wrong. It's the same name, but the old apps are running in emulation - they're slower now than they were ten years ago!] ...

I'm chopped out most of the article where he's definitely wrong, though I left in a few of his goofs. Really, he needs to talk to some old geeks with (some) memory. Even so, he's exposing a market problem that deserves attention.

He's right that today's smartphones fall short (though I suspect he's exaggerating the iPhone's flaws), but he's quite wrong that it's not possible to build a great smartphone. The Samsung i500 appeared to be a very good phone when I had it, but in retrospect it was a fantastic phone. There's never been anything like it since it was discontinued about 3 years ago; those who have working i500s coddle them. I gave mine to my wife when her old phone died, and I've suffered ever since.

Since the Samsung was a great phone, and it ran the Palm OS, why is the Treo so unreliable? Ahh, well, the Samsung ran the original PalmOS, the one with Graffiti One. That OS was written by cyborg infiltrators from the 32nd century. Shortly after the i500 came out Palm was essentially destroyed from within (Microsoft gave a push or two) and it's never recovered. The Treo runs a botched descendant of the original PalmOS that's held together by bailing wire.

That eliminates the Treo, but it's also true that every non-Palm smartphone OS, to date, has been unreliable or has placed disabling demands on the phone, or both. The old PalmOS was designed to run fast on a hamster-powered CPU, so the i500 was positively capacious. All of today's OS's ask much more of the host phone.

We'll see if Apple can break this trap, but I wouldn't look for anything from Palm. Their secret genius took his stock options and ran ...

Blah, blah, quantum entanglement, yawn, hacking reality, zzzzz

I'm almost caught up with modern physics, but it's taken a toll.

It's started my reading a few months ago when I realized I'd fallen hopelessly out of date, but I'm now only a few chapters from finishing Greenes latest tome. Alas, between Gribbin and Greenes, I'm a broken man. Modern physics is so consistently and cumulatively weird that a steady diet has eliminated my critical capacity. No wonder science fiction writers feel beaten down -- no work of fiction can be as mind-bending as today's physics. It's enough to make the idea that we're all living in a simulation seem comforting by comparison.

Which is to say that latest proof that the universe is every bit as weird as predicted is a bit of a yawner ...

'Spooky' science points to quantum internet - Internet - www.itnews.com.au

Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how two separate atoms can communicate with a sort of 'quantum intuition' ...

The scientists used light to establish an "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped one metre apart in separate enclosures...

... David Moehring, the lead author of the paper who performed the research as a University of Michigan graduate student, explained that the most important aspect of the experiment is the distance between the two atoms.

"The separation of the quantum bits [qubits] in our entangled state is the most important feature," he said.

"Localised entanglement has been performed in ion trap qubits in the past, but to build a scalable quantum computer network (or a quantum internet) the creation of entanglement schemes between remotely entangled qubit memories is necessary."

The researchers used two atoms to function as qubits storing a piece of information in their electron configuration. They then excited each atom, inducing electrons to fall into a lower energy state and emit one photon, or one particle of light, in the process.

The atoms, which were actually ions of the rare-earth element ytterbium, are capable of emitting two different types of photons of different wavelengths.

The type of photon released by each atom indicates the particular state of the atom. Because of this, each photon was entangled with its atom.

By manipulating the photons emitted from each of the two atoms and guiding them to interact along a fibre-optic thread, the researchers were able to detect the resulting photon clicks and entangle the atoms.

Professor Monroe explained that the fibre-optic thread was necessary to establish entanglement of the atoms. But the fibre could be severed and the two atoms would remain entangled, even if one were "carefully taken to Jupiter"...

I wasn't being entirely supercilious. My reading suggests this is a perfectly prosaic result, indeed anything different would have been shocking. The reason the paper was published is because of the experimental genius required, and perhaps because it suggests new ways to build a quantum computer.

The real reasons airplanes tell us to turn off our iPods ...

While suffering through another flight (45 min on the runway, air conditioning broken) I wondered again why we can use our cell phones, but not our iPods, on landing. The "interference" explanation, of course, is nonsensical. Salon's pilot in residence tells us it's all about the egress ...

Ask the pilot | Salon Technology

... Part of that pre-planning is knowing exactly where the doors are -- all of them, as smoke, fire or debris could render one or more exits unusable. You must also understand that should an evacuation be necessary, you will not be taking your carry-on luggage with you. Doing so could put yourself and others in considerable danger...

... This is the reason, by the way, for the litany of prohibitions during taxi, takeoff and landing: Tray tables need to be up, window shades open, laptops and iPods put away. It's not about electronic interference, it's about the need for a speedy egress and situational awareness should anything happen...

Passengers are prone to try to take their gear. One wonders how many lives that has cost. If the items are stowed it's easier to leave them behind. Makes sense, surprisingly.

I'm going to pay more attention to the exits in future (though often I'm sitting in the exit -- noticing that there's usually some undocumented plastic shield in the way of the door release handle ...).

We don't know what life is ... (Zimmer)

I thought biologists had a working definition of "life", albeit with a bit of fuzziness. Ok, so that's what I'm remembering from my high school biology, but that was less than 237 years ago.

Carl Zimmer tells me I'm quite mistaken ...

Zimmer: The Meaning of Life

...There is no one definition that we agree upon," says Radu Popa, geobiologist and the author of Between Probability and Necessity: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life. In the course of researching his book, Popa started collecting definitions that have appeared in the scientific literature. He eventually lost count. "I've found at least three hundred, maybe four hundred definitions," he says.

It's a peculiar state of affairs—biologists have learned more in the past decade about how living things work than we've learned collectively over the past several centuries—and an intense debate has arisen over what to do about it. Some are skeptical of science's ability to come up with a definition of life that's accurate enough to be meaningful, while others believe a definition is not just possible but essential for the future of biology.

"A science in which the most important object has no definition—that's absolutely unacceptable," says Popa. "How are we going to discuss it if you believe the definition of life has something to do with DNA and I think it has something to do with dynamic systems? We cannot have a conversation on any level. We cannot make artificial life because we cannot agree on what life is. We cannot find life on Mars because we cannot agree on what life represents."

Recently, a new voice has entered the debate. Carol Cleland, who teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado and works with NASA's National Astrobiology Institute—essentially as their philosopher-in-residence—is making a more radical argument: Scientists should simply give up looking for a definition of life. They can't even begin to understand what life really is, she claims, until they find forms of life profoundly different from those we know here on Earth. Only when we can compare alien life with life on our planet will we understand the true nature of this ubiquitous, ephemeral thing.

Cleland believes biologists need to build a theory of life, just as chemists built a theory of the elements and physicists built a theory of electromagnetism. Definitions, she argues, are concerned only with language and concepts, not true understanding. By taking the semantics seriously, Cleland is calling for nothing less than a scientific revolution. Only when we change the way we think about life, she argues, will the true study of it begin...

Once again, familiar territory to readers of the past twenty years of science fiction. I've really got to learn to trust mscience fiction writers more ...

Jobs reads customer emails?!

Apple's Steve Jobs is going to compensate early iPhone buyers for the recent price drop. That seems to be a smart business move, but it didn't surprise me. This is what surprised me:

Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles - Salon:

.... I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions....

There was no reason for him to lie about reading the emails, it's not something we expect CEOs to do. This fits with some other stories I've read about him. He actually reads some customer emails (there's no way he could read all of them -- he wouldn't get any work done!).

Weird. There really is nobody like Steve Jobs, for better and for worse he takes his products personally. Given Apple's success over the past five years perhaps reading customer emails is going to catch on ...

Update 9/7/07: Cringely has a wickedly delightful essay on the man he calls "The Puppet Master". A bit of sado-masochism is probably helpful for Apple customers.

Nuclear canary dies: flying the warheads

It's one thing to fly a few nukes around the US, it's another thing to demonstrate that the complex network of protocols governing nuclear weapons aren't working:

Nation & World | Air Force fires commander in nuke error | Seattle Times Newspaper

...For the six warheads to make it onto the B-52, each one would have had to be signed out of its storage bunker and transported to the bomber. Diligent safety protocols would have to have been ignored to load the warheads onto the plane, he said.

"I just can't imagine how all of this happened," said Philip Coyle, a senior adviser on nuclear weapons at the Center for Defense Information. "The procedures are so rigid; this is the last thing that's supposed to happen...

If this is broken, then what else isn't working? There ought to be some very serious media pressure to dig into this story. NYT, your nation is depending on you...