I loved this book. The baseline narrative is what the cover suggests: here are 7 games, each with a subtle twist or wrinkle (e.g. chance, bluffing, etc.) that allows humans to discover something about themselves or society while playing it. If there were nothing else to the book, this would be a very abridged “According to Hoyle,” or it could have been the basis for a seven-part premier podcast on NPR.

Roeder, however, with his background in programming and game theory, adds to this preliminary angle a modern layer: how have programmers sought to find perfect games and optimal moves within these games? Some games can be perfected by powerful computers; other games cannot. What does that say about us? What does that say about the game? And who are these code-obsessives and how are they different (if at all) from the obsessives that master these games?

With these two layers in place, the means for driving a tension that drives the narrative is established:

1. An anthropological study of gaming
2. Describing the seven games themselves and their strategies
3. The arch-nerds seeking to crack the games’ Platonic code with CPUs

Again, this would be a more satisfying podcast, but it would still be on familiar ground. I think Roeder opens the gateway to a deeper and an more interesting consideration of games when he brings in the observation that programming is like unto magic/divination is like unto playing games. And that made me sit up and read with deepened enthusiasm.

When one visits Amsterdam, one is constantly confronted with monuments to those who died in the Holocaust, those dockworkers who resisted the all-too-easy accommodation of the Nazi occupiers, and those who bravely burned typewritten records that would have helped the occupiers find victims for their international campaign of murder. This is the easy story.

But when you lives in the Netherlands and sticks for longer than a 3-day lost weekend amid the canals and cannabis, one starts to understand that the reality was a bit more dirty.

As Sullivan notes:

…by the end of World War II, the Netherlands would have the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: 73 percent of Jews in the Netherlands died. In Belgium, 40 percent of Jews were killed; in France, 25 percent; in Denmark, .6 percent. In Fascist Italy, only 8 percent of Jews were killed.

What accounts for that percentage being so much worse? Humans are awful at statistical thinking. So this holocaust hidden by statistics is offset by the very personal and non-statistical, very real, very gripping tragedy of Anne Frank and her tragically brief life. By asking the question of who betrayed Anne Frank, Sullivan takes us on a longer journey into the uncomfortable truths of collaboration, cooperation, and betrayal within occupied Amsterdam.

I remember that I read in the Dutch journalist Geert Mak’s De Engel van Amsterdam (The Angel of Amsterdam) that the city had offered safe haven for iconoclasts, the intellectually persecuted, the religiously persecuted, the different for centuries. Its promise was tolerance if not acceptance. Mak concluded, as I recall, the first chapter with the ominous sentence that the only time it betrayed that promise was to its Jews under the Nazi regime.¹

This book is also available freely via Project Gutenberg Australia.

One of the best parts of living in New York is our custom of leaving finished books out on stoops or leaned against apartment buildings for others to pick up.¹ I was walking back with my cart from Trader Joe’s a few weeks ago when I found Only Yesterday and picked it up. This book, written in the early 1930’s, was a chance, on the morning after the party, to answer “What the hell just happened?” for the decade that had just gone past.

As a history, it’s a lot more jaunty and fun than you might expect, and Lewis has dozens of delightful turns of phrase that really put the screws to the malefactors and high-minded boobery of the era: Prohibition, Teapot Dome, and religious fundamentalists meddling with science in schools, et al.

I love The Third Man, it’s a film with possibly no equal. I’ve always known its author, Graham Greene, to have been an English wordsmith of the highest order. The idea of him covering the humid, malarial, slow-motion blunder of the US in supplanting the French in Indochina-to-Vietnam, has always seemed fated, doomed, damned, and beautiful. It was.

A painful childhood is made more painful by a narcissistic mother’s use of religion, and its more plainly anti-modern tenets, to abuse her daughter. Along the way, the author reveals her experience as a woman in a secular society that shirks its responsibility to confront inhumane abuses under the progressive rubric of “tolerant, liberal society.” Along the way, she ends up being forced into a marriage with an al-Qaeda operative.

For some light vacation reading during my trip to Aruba, I finally took my the recommendation of my colleague Abid to check out P.G. Wodehouse. I went to the Strand UWS bookshop and picked out a book at random and Code of the Woosters was it.

I was familiar with the Jeeves & Wooster characters by Fry & Laurie televised presentation through my general awareness of global humor, but I didn’t know that Wodehouse was the originator of these trope characters.

I re-read the novel that defined the cyberpunk genre for the first time since the 1990’s

Note: This take is entirely based on the original comic, with some light reference to the theatrical film in preparation to watch the HBO series. I am writing ignorance of the latter.

A lot of the best parts of college come come fast and furious in those early months after you move in: local food dives, parties, outdoor hangouts, new friends, new habits, new hobbies, strange professors, strange friends, new books, new music, and new ideas.

Around October Fall 1995, Watchmen came my way. After having been a fan of Vertigo’s The Sandman series in high school, I knew that there were serious comics about adult (not per se sexual, although…) ideas out there, but I was unaware of just how serious Watchmen was.

Throughout the years, many of Watchmen’s ideas came true:

• venal narcissism in the Oval Office (beyond a Nixonian level)
• massive information culling, prioritizing, interpreting, and stock market-gaming intelligences
• morally rigid puritans exerting their will through murder of those who would lead them astray
• wűnderkind billionaires giving natural selection a helping hand by setting the species’ targets among the stars

Additionally, Watchmen itself went through some strange intellectual property waters:

• re-issues
• an original-intent-obscuring movie release that didn’t quite hit the mark
• a direct-sequel series on HBO that was widely-acclaimed and has proven to be a forum wherein the formidable talent of Regina King was finally recognized

With the desire to watch and grab some of the background context of HBO’s “Watchmen,” I decided to give the paperback a re-read and see how it’s held up. Spoilers can be assumed for anyone reading onward.

I read this book a while back, but I never managed to post about it.

I liked it a lot. Similar to 1Q84, there was world-bending and a magical substructure to daily life, but I enjoyed the characters’ journeys and the beautiful descriptions of rural Japan. If ever I make it there, I truly hope to be able experience the fields and forests of the more-remote islands.

Having looked through the notes I marked, I’m really in awe of the quality sentence construction expressed in the annotated lines. In particular, I’m really picking up on the theme of that sometimes things bear a name that doesn’t change, but they are, in definite ways, something entirely than they were previously. Take a look at Murakami’s thoughts, recalling Heraclitus, about things being new, all the time, in the illusion of the “present moment.”

Review

Having heard a few interviews with her, I’ve enjoyed Ms. Harris’ perspectives on consciousness. I became familiar with this work via Sam Harris’ podcast where the Harrises facilitated a discussion with Donald Hoffman.

Both Conscious and Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality suffer a primary problem: what they propose is extremely jarring to our daily experience. They bear the burden of presenting some evidence that reality is not what you think of in daily awareness. Their method is to jar the reader one millimeter so that they can open them to being willing to move 1 kilometer. As a result, the books recount anecdotes and experiments designed to “freak the squares” as the hippies might have said.

John Hodgman’s Vacationland is a very funny and very touching book.

The Hodgman character (of dubious relation to the actual person, John Hodgman) is a delightful know-it-all. This persona served as the basis of his “PC” character in the Apple computer ads of the early aughts and was also the know-it-all voice of his book “The Areas of My Expertise.”

So to have this persona describe the problems and terrain of the Trump era and its attendant commitment to non-reality is bound to produce some comedic sparks. How does this Yale-educated, Park Slope-dwelling early-Gen-Xer, whom Fortune has blessed, face the prospect of aging, the maturation of children, and meeting his musical heroes of his youth? How does he reckon with his fame? What are his friendships like?

“Vacationland” explores these questions, but never coldly. Hodgman is doing his best to face difficult questions about who he is and who we are. He’s also facing that there are but only so many days he has left with his wife and children. And he’s also realizing that the memories of his mother and his time with her are now all that remains of her, and the same fate will befall him. So while our adorable egghead can target a keen observation at the heart of a matter, he’s also terribly human, modest, and gentle at the same time.

In a conventional Western philosophy degree program, the course of study is divided into two primary divisions: ancient (Greek philosophy) and modern (Descartes through present-day). The gap between is dominated by superstition and religion that ends when Descartes re-proposes a fundamentally ancient idea: “Which sense-data are able to be called into doubt (…quae in dubium revocari possunt) and which are not ([quae] perspicuae veritates in suspicionem falsitatis [non] incurrant — Meditationes)?”

According to Donald Hoffman’s book, for practical purposes, none of our senses’ apprehension of the world can be trusted, for they are liars that have been trained by the most patient and skilled algorithmic learning program ever: natural selection.

Guided by game theory payoffs, that is, natural selection, our senses have selected for a non-veridical apprehension of reality that provides humans data enough leading to offspring production for minimal resource inputs (i.e. calories).

Since our apprehension need only be “good enough” for this all-to-animal and carnal purpose, heuristics that lead to error (optical illusion, states of perception incompatible with physics’ experiments) are tolerable as long as the strategy, on the whole, produces evolutionary fitness.