July 2013 Media Thread
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you’ve found that you enjoy. Post what you’re reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules:
Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don’t personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person’s recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
- 26 Jul 2013 0:17 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Open thread, July 23-29, 2013 by (
It’s a funny line, but is it plausible? Is it just that wizard law is less complex?
From Chapter 79:
I read this as implying that Magical Britain doesn’t actually have a codified legal system. (Although it seems like a waste of the Wizengamot’s time to vote on all crimes; perhaps there’s some commitee that the delegate minor crimes to?).
Short Online Texts Thread
SEP has a new article up on Analogy and Analogical Reasoning.
Herbert Simon, the anti-Philosopher.
I have previously taken some flack for being rather dismissive toward most of mainstream philosophy, and for treating AI as “real philosophy.” Eliezer has an even stronger position of this type, and has taken flack for it as well.
But as this article explains, this is actually pretty normal among AI folk. Here’s the abstract:
Online Videos Thread
Fanfiction Thread
Nonfiction Books Thread
Awwww, how nice. The section about Luke_2011 in God in Proof is rather flattering:
Richard Rhodes—“Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb”
The title says it all—a book about the development of hydrogen bomb, in both its American and its Russian incarnation. The book is the sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (which is really great).
The book roughly starts where its predecessor ended, and tells the story of the main characters in the Manhattan project, and how they started work on the Next Big Thing—the hydrogen bomb, as invented by Ulam/Teller. The book is a bit less about the science and more about the politics of the H-bomb project, but still there are quite a few details—though the DIY-crowd might need some more...
The book also details the Russian parallel development, first of their own atom-bomb and then also the h-bomb, and how they were much helped by espionage, in particular from Klaus Fuchs, who came off very lightly, and ended his days in the DDR.
Overall, slightly (only slightly!) less interesting than its predecessor, still a great read. Well-researched and detailed, but also very interesting—esp. if you’re interested in politics.
Just came across the book Behavior Modification in Applied Settings, which I don’t think has been mentioned on Less Wrong previously. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks like it could be useful for those of us interested in boosting productivity and personal effectiveness.
Jon Ronson—“The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry ”
Some light reading about psychopaths (!) --how are people diagnosed to be psychopaths (often using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist), can this 1% of the population be cured (apparently, to a large extent the answer is “no”). In between, the author solves some kind of mystery, discusses some fun therapies from the 70s, and chats with some psychopaths-or-not, and the famous Rosenhan experiment makes an appearance.
Once more, the stereotype of psychiatry as an, at best, proto-scientific field is evoked. Not a bad book, good for a light read on a long flight.
Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure by Michael Strevens (a philosophy professor at NYU). From the blurb:
There is also a brief chapter summary here.
Would you recommend it?
Logic: The Drill by Nicholas J.J. Smith and John Cusbert.
Free 300 page PDF that contains a variety of solved exercises from propositional and predicate logic. Description from the authors:
Fiction Books Thread
I’ve been reading A Song of Ice and Fire a.k.a. the source material for HBO’s Game of Thrones. It lives up to the hype both in terms of quality and character deaths.
I was going to post something similar!
If you haven’t yet jumped onto the GoT bandwagon, you should consider doing so. As a data point, I did not want to get into A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones mainly because so many people were into it (I know, silly; another reason was that I have high expectations for fiction that will take up much of my time), so if that describes you, I highly recommend giving it a shot.
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. Read through it once yesterday (it’s short), will do again today and tomorrow. It seems good. It’s also very nice and very loving, but I expect that of Gaiman.
Despite authorial disclaimers, it’s particularly interesting if you know something about how Scientology claims the world works. In that context, it comes across as a personal exorcism.
Not really books but meta-books: I was recently introduced to Calibre, which was a revelation for me and which I now use to organize all of my books. Previously it had been very hard for me to keep track of what books I had and what books I was reading and that sort of thing. Courtesy of Calibre, here is a list of fiction books I’ve read recently:
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Has some interesting social criticism.
Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. I really like the idea of the Primer but the book also basically has as a theme that strong AI is impossible, which was less cool.
Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series #3 and #4. I read #1 and #2 as a kid and never got around to the rest of the series, so I wanted to fix that. They’re shorter than I remember and Duane bandies around terms like entropy without really understanding them, which always annoys me in an author.
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. This is probably one of the better children’s books in existence, but it may not hold an adult’s attention. If you haven’t read any Gaiman before, American Gods is probably a better introduction.
Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series #1, #2, and #3. I think I started reading these because Eliezer mentioned them here. I wasn’t really expecting all the sex and religion but I ended up finding it quite interesting. These books were hard to put down. They’re also quite long: I felt like in each book somewhere between two and three books’ worth of stuff happens.
Calibre is the most useful software with the worst interface ever. I use Sumatra PDF when on a Windows box or the epub reader addon for Firefox.
When I had a BlackBerry, though, I did find Calibre’s command-line interface stunningly useful, ’cos the only ebook reader for BB is old stray copies of MobiReader, and ebook-convert is just the thing to convert epub to mobi.
Calibre really annoyed me every time I tried it—it seemed intent on moving my whole collection to another folder and the interface was horribly unintuitive. I’d really like a better program with similar functionality, but alas, I haven’t been able to find anything so far.
I felt that book was half “yep, I can see things going that way, interesting” and half “no, stop, things don’t work that way.”
Have you read The Jungle Books, which it was (in some ways) styled after? I found Kipling’s significantly better.
After years of looking, I finally found a copy of Day Watch and Twilight Watch that match the paperback edition of Night Watch that I got accidentally years and years ago.
In brief: Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch are the first three of a currently-five-part series by Sergei Lukyanenko. He’s—more or less—the greatest currently living Russian fantasy novelist. It’s urban fantasy; I’ve been describing it as a much better version of Beautiful Creatures set in modern-day Moscow.
It follows the standard “Masquerade” style supernatural plot line: there are Others that live alongside humans, but never reveal themselves. Light Others tend to protect humans; Dark Others tend to manipulate them for their own purposes. To prevent all-out war, the two sides signed a treaty establishing the Night Watch (composed of Light Others who police the Dark) and the Day Watch (which does the opposite). The delicate nature of the balance inspires lots of political plotting and backstabbing of an order not seen in contemporary fantasy—I’d say it’s even better than A Song of Ice and Fire as far as political intrigue goes.
The series follows Anton, a middle-ranking magician of the Night Watch with some reservations about the group’s motivations. Day Watch takes place in the aftermath of the climax of Night Watch and develops his romance with the great enchantress Svetlana, who is much more powerful than Anton. This causes a great deal of drama. Day Watch also introduces the mysterious Inquisition, who serve as the executive and judicial branches of the treaty.
Twlight Watch then follows Anton and Svetlana as they try to fulfill the destiny revealed at the end of Night Watch. It quickly spirals into a chase after a long-lost witch and her long-forgotten artifact that can potentially destroy the balance altogether.
Lukyanenko’s style revolves around a densely written main plot—he’s not as big a fan of B-plots as most fantasy authors. He’s written Anton as a character that likes to listen to music, and so many lyrics are lifted from Russian pop and rock, but because Anton is listening to them in the context of being in the Night Watch, he interprets them in non-standard ways. The books are also quintessentially Russian: characters use diminutive names frequently; vodka and kvass are both on the menu; and Anton has staunch opinions about Russian politics....
I’d regard Night Watch by itself as a 9⁄10 book, no question. Day Watch was even better, but not perfect. Twilight Watch was, in comparison, disappointing, but still somewhere above a 7⁄10. The first two books were turned into films (first Russian-made, but I think another version of Night Watch was made in the US), but I’m told that they diverge substantially from the plot and end up being pale imitators, in the way so many book-to-movie adaptations go.
I don’t read very much fiction, but recently I’ve read
The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan—book two of his Orthogonal series, where he imagines life in a universe with different spacetime symmetries, where the velocity of light is a function of its wavelength. In this instalment, alien scientists on a generation ship try to discover the secrets of matter, and of their own biology, which will allow them to return home. There is a lot of focus on the scientific method and the character of physical law, and the treatment of the (made up) physics is much, much more rigorous and principled than earlier physics-centric Egan books like Schilds Ladder, Diaspora, or the dreadful Distress
Neuropath by Scott Bakker—a disturbing psychological thriller that explores a radical reductionistic view of the mind and consciousness. If you still think that consciousness is a some sort of unique, special phenomenon, an inevitable byproduct of intelligence, than this book may be for you.
I recently picked up the (presumably) final collection of Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers Tales, The Return of the Black Widowers. There are some great stories in here including:
The Acquisitive Chuckle
The Obvious Factor
Northwestward
The Haunted Cabin
In the latter (originally published in 1990) I was amused to find this section:
The Black Widowers Tales are right at the top of my 2ndhand bookshop foraging list, although I seem to only find copies of the one volume I’ve already read. Still not sure how I would justify my existence, but they sure are a great read.
I just blew through six or seven of Ted Chiang’s short stories, and when I finished “Hell Is the Absence of God” I had to stop. I was physically shaking, my knees went weak and I was reduced to gasping and making inarticulate sounds for the next several minutes. I don’t know if that was a fluke, but I would really like it if someone would point to similarly horrifying stories or books.
There’s a good one that begins, “A basilisk, a shoggoth, and a cenobite walk into a bar together”, but I can’t figure out the rest of it.
Television and Movies Thread
Music Thread
Not really music but meta-music: I recently learned that Spotify lets you organize playlists into folders, which I didn’t know before. Previously I’d been very hesitant to make too many playlists because I didn’t want them to become disorganized, but now I’ve made a whole bunch of playlists containing music I just hadn’t been listening to because I didn’t have a system for reminding myself that it existed.
Just so this comment contains an actual music recommendation, Pentatonix is a lovely a cappella group.
For the EDM fans out there, some semi-pony themed dubstep/progressive house/electro music: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj5ceb5aLKALh-g6vhAcpxw
Kanye West’s Yeezus is an absolute masterpiece. It’s like the black Kid A. Highly recommended.
I thought it was terrible.
Why?
I find it tough to explain stuff like this. I just thought it was crap, and didn’t understand an ounce of the hype or adoration. There may be nothing deeper to it than I just didn’t enjoy it.
Fair enough, I guess. Out of curiosity, did you like MBDTF?
For the record I loved all of MBDTF, and thought Yeezus was awful (bar Blood on the Leaves and Bound 2). I can’t quantify my dislike particularly, beyond noting that to me Kanye is great as a great producer. His voice can be pretty annoying, and his lyrics dodgy. Usually his production is enough to make me overlook it. I thought the production on Yeezus was all over the place, so I didn’t have much to distract me from not liking his voice or lyrics, and in fact was bad enough that I rated the sound of the album as something that dragged it down instead of the usual propping it up.
I definitely agree that the lyrics on Yeezus don’t stand on their own, but I absolutely loved the sound of the album. To each his own, I guess.
I really liked about half of it, and thought the other half was meh.
Kanye West is an extremely talented musician, so even when he sucks I find it interesting.
Edit: Playing Yeezus now … yeah, this is entirely disappointing compared to MBDTF and I’m thinking “what happened?” I realise he’s going from deliberate maximalism to deliberate minimalism, but nevertheless … He’s also under the delusion he’s as good at words as he is at music.
Nanda Collection by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, which is mostly hyperactive and annoying with a paucity of actually good songs. Yasutaka, this is not as good as the previous one. I want a new Capsule album for this.
Playing the complete-except-the-first-three-albums-nobody-wants-to-know-about Kraftwerk catalogue. Amazingly elegant music.
Podcasts Thread
Other Media Thread
Deadly Rooms of Death is the hardest and best puzzle game I have ever played. I very strongly recommend it. Until July 6, you can get all 4 DROD games for 3 dollars (normally 80) http://www.indiegala.com/summerdream#.UdR38udDv5J If you enjoy challenging games that make you think, you should take a look at this sometime in the next 3 days when you can still get the 96% off.
PS: I liked this game so much, I bought 10 copies of this bundle (at a bulk price of 1.40 each), just so I can give them out to friends I meet in the future who like puzzle games.
I really enjoyed the browser game BROFORCE. Warning, it’s very violent. Protip, you can complete the first few levels by just walking.
Unity 3D ⇒ Browser-based, but Win/Mac only :(
Meta Thread
Is it acceptable to post a “someone else recommended this book, but I did not find it compelling because of these reasons” on the current thread instead of the thread on which the recommendation was originally made?
My personal preference would be to keep the discussion in the original thread with the original recommender; but perhaps include a link to one’s reply here. (eg ‘- I read Bar; it was the best book ever and I’m now founding a business based on it\n- I also read Foo but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as $RECOMMENDER did; see [my reply] to them for reasons why not.’)