The Universal Library

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

2012-02-12T14:43:00.000Z

What an awesome collection of short stories. Kelly Link has a mind that captures the fragility of ordinary and the magic of incompleteness. She mixes a gentle sense of humanity with the uncompromising alienness of the fairy story and in so doing delivers a magical series of stories.

That's not to say it's an easy read. When one finished story after story where you're not quite sure if the author just stopped writing or intended to leave it feeling unresolved it can be jarring - especially when we're so used to having stories hold our hands to a well sign posted ending. This is not for the dumbed down.

Yet if you like adventurous reading, stories that will take you to the unexpected realms of the commonplace made weird then Link's writing is for you. In some ways I'd place her close to an American (and specifically female) version of Rushdie in his Midnight's Children phase. She's not similar politically or culturally but they share a magic of the unexpected but somehow fitting that I've rarely experienced.

I could go on, the world ethereal, silk, comforting and double edged need mentioning but like Link I'll think leave you with a sense of the unresolved.

Experiments in self-publishing

2012-02-11T14:12:00.002Z

So quite a few people have come back to me and I've now got a few paces towards the goal.

Cover for all three books in the series are going to be done by Tom Derrett, a professional designer who I've worked with before. Another friend, Mrs Yaffle, is going to proof read for me (I hope).

But the big question is about copy-editing. An other friend of mine, Minty, pointed out that this is a serious issue that needs addressing but with it comes time and cost. Time for the job to be done and cost of paying someone a fair wage to do the work.

Anne Lancaster and Craig Borlase have both put me in contact with people who are likely to give me an idea of just how much work they think needs doing.

However, a question remains - do I want to pay somewhere in the region of a thousand pounds (guesstimating here) to get this done on what could, ultimately, be a vanity project. I phrase it that way because I want this to succeed but I'm not sure I have the money to invest in something that could be, and probably will be, seen by just a few hundred people if all goes well...Given that I'm going to charge 99p for book one, the break even is nearly two thousand copies.

I'm going to take up those offers of sample review from people who know what they're doing but the question remains - unless they scream with horror at what they find, should I get book one copy-edited?

Part of me thinks that if book one starts to sell then get subsequent books treated properly. Another part of me says - if I'm really serious about this then I should give the first book every chance of success I can.

Of course there's another issue. This blog is read by a lot of North Americans - in fact you out number my Euro readers by 3 to 1. Would the text being in UK English be an issue for you? Could you stand to read colour instead of color?

What do you think?

The Cold Commands by Richard Morgan

2012-02-07T09:34:00.003Z

I hadn't thought Morgan would produce a sequel to The Steel Remains but here it is. Same characters, same world, new story. I thought he wouldn't produce a sequel because the first in this series (if it can be called that) was an obvious homage to other writers of action fantasy. You've got an Elric of Melnibone, a Conan and a female 'wizard' who's the last of her kind, all combined together in a world which appears to be the convergence point for scientific and magical races who have quite some history.

The ideas in here are awesome - the concept of beings who transcend three dimensions, who live in probability space - is really very cool.

More of an issue is that this book seems to take 350 pages to get to the point where the story really starts and then wraps it up in 50. That's a tad unfair as I enjoyed the journey to the third act but nevertheless it's a flaw in the writing. Either the book needed to be longer or shorter...you decide.

As ever Morgan's prose is fun to read and the characters are pretty interesting but for all the preamble I do think that for two of the three there's probably not enough change within them - they go through some pretty intense experiences but don't seem to suffer, develop or otherwise reflect on what happens to them over much. Sure it's action adventure but Morgan has a decent track record of character development and bringing you to really care about his protagonists. That was missing here.

Finally, I hope there's another one because I don't think we've really understood half of what's going on here or what he's got in mind. I get the feeling the birth of The Cold Commands was difficult and I wonder if it was rushed out before it was ready...either way my own view is that it could have been much longer and dealt with at least four unresolved major story lines which remain unaddressed by the end of The Cold Commands.

Economic Gangsters by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel

2012-02-05T21:46:00.002Z

This is an awesome book. It's hugely readable, brilliantly researched and profound without losing subtlety or consideration for the complexities of what it's looking to discuss.

The authors are two economists - field economists for the main part - and they restore, in my mind, a shred of belief in a discipline which has over the last ten years had about as much of substance to say about the global economy as Hello Kitty.

They present a series of different discussions, starting with how corruption can be laced through society via networks of the powerful and entrenched and show how this can be measured in stock price movements for companies associated with individuals rather than products of businesses themselves. They move on to show how the behaviour of diplomats at the UN in New York may, or may not, reflect the level of corruption of that country and finish up by examining how wealth, foreign aid and natural resources can not account for the outcomes of different countries' development.

Not only is it replete with case studies that illustrate what they are trying to say but these two guys are looking at stuff and saying "it's not all about rationality - it's about culture and personality too". This, for me as someone who models markets to make money, is a breath of fresh air.

There is a brilliant discussion about how aid can help people out of poverty but also about how it may leave them there and even hold them down. They discuss how targeted aid - for instance looking at providing aid as insurance for when things go wrong (like drought or commodity price volatility) - rather than a steady stream of money is nearly always more effective and look at countries such as Japan where aid was effectively non-existent but the country leapt back after devastation anyway.

Who is this book for? I think that if you believe people deserve a fair chance, if you wonder how corruption can be stamped out, how law can make people's lives better or even if you sometimes think - where on earth does all this money go when Live Aid comes to town - then this book is for you.

At a time when discussion is all about incentives and how to get bankers' pay to reflect performance (yadda yadda yadda) a discussion on how incentives can transform how we behave is a must read.

2WUUJDUJF2CS

Halting State by Charles Stross

2012-02-04T12:23:00.001Z

Halting State is pretty interesting. It is really a book about new tech - instant communication, augmented reality - how the world will change for us Developed Worlder's once these things become really established. In that sense it's a fascinating exploration of how society might be impacted. It's also already dating as it misses out on huge tech developments such as the overwhelming (if temporary) importance of social media.Is this a fault? Of course not - that's the one issue with near future fiction - you're going to look both visionary and limited to readers down the line. Stross, I'm sure, isn't concerned with that.

However, the story does have other issues. It's written in this kind of accusative inner monologue where every character's viewpoint is written as "You'd normally do this and then you'd think that." It's disturbing at first because it feels deeply gimmicky but I got used to it fairly rapidly and in the end found the approach pretty neat if not completely immersive. Additionally, I know Edinburgh pretty well (having lived there for a time) and although the city itself feels authentic the language and idioms, whilst completely accurate, seem too twee and contrived for the story. In a book about how society changes to see professionals and people exposed (if not completely at one with) globish use far colloquialisms (as opposed to near ones - those that someone from another part of the world who speaks their own English could understand) seems anachronistic.

The story does zip along at a decent pace and I read it as a happy punter but its nearest rival is Reamde and it doesn't compare well. It's not really fair to compare I think but if there's one thing that the two differ in it's the depth with which the characters are drawn. Here, the two leads are fairly well developed and I felt something for them but the rest of the cast was out of casting central and I really wish Stross had spent a little more time helping those bit part characters (including the villians) feel more real.

Did I enjoy it? Yes, but it would be half way down my list. Alternatively, it's a great read for for holiday, long journey or saturday afternoons.

An Experiment begins

2012-01-31T21:20:00.001Z

I have, over the last few years, written a number of stories. Some short but, amongst them, a number of novel length tales as well.

All of them are, to some extent, science fiction - if I were snobby about it I'd say they were 'Speculative Fiction' but I'm not and they're sci fi. My passion isn't space operas or cowboys and aliens but more in the Spirit of William Gibson or Arthur C Clarke. I'm interested in big ideas, politics, power, greed, meaning and hope. I will continue to be.

So my stories reflect my preoccupations - excitement, consciousness, humanity, identity and hope in adversity. The fact that I also use some of the trappings of Sci Fi is just a part of that.

So where does the experiment come in?

Well, having been pestered for some time by friends that I should try to get published and having that sentiment agreed to by another friend who IS actually an editor I thought I would give it a go. However, I'm more interested in creating an ebook than traditional publishing and this is the experiment.

I'm going to self publish - the cover will be professionally designed and the stories will be properly proof read (unlike some of my posts...) so it should be able to live (or more probably die) on the actual writing.

But I'm stumped about marketing. Sure I can prevail on friends via Facebook (and in person!) - they might go so far as to buy it at the princely sum of 60p (or whatever I end up charging). I might even look at a low key effort at self-publicity via my business networks but once I've tapped that I've no idea how to make this work...so can you help? Ideas, thoughts, strategies (including those which can help take over the world).

Small Unit Leadership by Dandridge Malone

2012-01-31T00:06:00.000Z

Not quite sure why I picked this out for my Amazon list...I think it's because I was trying to avoid rubbishy guru driven leadership books but not wanting to go quite academic about it. Indeed I've done quite a lot of 'leadership' training over the years, some of it good, some of it bad and most of it irrelevant.

I think part of it was being in a mass melee last summer and towards the end of the four hour engagement seeing our lines break after a disastrous spell poorly handled by the field commanders of a mixed group of units. It was the first time I saw a contingent properly move from coherence to panic to breaking. I stood in the middle of it and found myself powerless as around me (and a couple of others) an entire body of several hundred people simply collapsed and ran - for no directly discernible reason and in a way that cost us dearly. There was a paucity of leadership on the field that day - particularly towards the last third of the engagement but that didn't explain (well not in a straight line) why the field was over run.

This book made me both laugh out loud and carries with it some pretty interesting ideas and thoughts about leadership. Laughs are provided because I'm a civilian reading a book for soldiers and the language is truly meant for them and not me. Setting that aside (and that it's thirty years old) it's a pretty decent practical manual for the basics of leading people in achieving task oriented activity. I emphasise the practical nature of the guide - it refers frequently to more scholarly work and makes no bones about it being a manual for use in the field. That's fine because it's often practice that's more difficult than theory.

For instance, we all know it's helpful to encourage the willing but unable but it can be a great reminder on easy ways to actually do that effectively.

I read a review of this by a Major in the British Army and he was pretty sniffy about it (even down to an ad hominem attack on the author's competence). I don't think that's fair - the writer knows his audience and packs some pretty dense ideas into this book - smuggled in in the guise of a plain talking CO trying to talk to his officers. Missing that and the practical nature of the text is a shame as I would probably recommend this to people leading small teams who have goals to achieve and who are under pressure, part of a larger organisation or even on their own.

Skyrim

2012-01-28T20:12:00.001Z

This is my first (and perhaps only ever) game review. I think I'm moved to write something because of an ongoing discussion with a couple of friends over why we play games - so this may be more about games and narrative than Skyrim really.

I maintain that I play games because I enjoy narrative, challenge and discovery. I don't play sports games as I'm not a sports fan in general (except for cricket) and I've never been into online games in any real way (I've dabbled, got bored and left). Why not?

There is an undoubted rush in playing Call of Duty multiplayer, in the same way as there is in playing Assassin's Creed multiplayer. They're fabulously well executed, incredibly crafted EXCITING experiences. But I tire of them rapidly. My normal life is, while not full of steel, assassins and terrorists, quite stimulating enough.

However. I am also a story lover. I believe quite firmly that everything is about story. Whether it's how we go about constructing prices for 3 year senior unsecured fixed rate bonds on rated institutions or how we convinced ourselves we love someone - it's all story. Human's are narrative beings. Sure, this might not be rocket science to you. You are probably sitting there thinking one of two things, hopefully "D'uh, glad to have you join the rest of us", or maybe, "I've no clue what you're talking about".

I think there's a strong argument that all meaning that humans come up with is understood via narrative. And if you want a hint as to how I've gotten good at getting my way in business, then watch me tell a story of why something makes sense. Being convincing isn't about having a loud voice (although that can help), it's about constructing a version of the world that seems more plausible than the next person's.

Anyway, back to Skyrim...and story in games. Games are bad at telling story. Some games are worse at it than others. Some are better than films and perhaps, the very best are as good as good books. If you're old enough you probably remember the first Half Life and how that changed your world. Or maybe you remember the stories told in Legend of Zelda or Citadel...they changed the way we saw the world, they changed what we thought could be done. They reconstructed what we saw when we used our eyes and in that sense they hit the very core of what stories do.

Having said that, those games are legendary for exactly the reason that they were landmarks...oft imitated but never matched. Games are bad at stories. Why? Well because both commercial but artistic reasons mean that good games aren't necessarily interested in telling stories in the way that humans are probably best at taking them in. Repeating challenges isn't a part of narrative. Convoluted plot twists to allow another level aren't part of stories, nor is killing everything that moves and rushing police cars of the road at every opportunity. Bizarrely, many games allow us to create our own stories via the experience of playing them. The cheers of beating a friend on Fifa, the cheer of winning a map on Call of Duty. The beer drunk, the tragedies of nearly achieving victory against the odds. It's all there, but it isn't story. That's life. Ha.

Skyrim is awesome because the world is crafted with care. People appear to really live in it and they have their stories. Those individual stories may not be deep or layered but they're legion and those hundreds of stories sit on top of one another, creating a world that is long slow and deep. It's was a pleasure to experience it and more amazingly, to discover just how endless it seemed to be.

Yet here's the rub. Skyrim shows, in its comprehensiveness, exactly the problem with games. The world doesn't change in response to you. Even in epic stories like Beowulf, or Haiwatha, where the world revolves around the central character, the rest of the cosmos responds and changes along with the central character. It's called development. Skyrim, and most games actually, achieve a sort of sit-com level of character development where one might engage for the limit of specific event and then, just as at the end of a TV episode, by the next time you see these characters, everything they've ever done has been forgotten and you start with them with a clean sheet. They are static and once the one liners dry up they become stale. Skyrim is wonderful as an episodic experience but no one changes. If you steal from them they don't respond, if you are some sort of mass murderer or sexual deviant they don't change. If you are a hero, they don't change. The world exists as your foil and not in its own right.

Compare this to Heavy Rain or The Witcher (the two games which I think have told story whilst remaining true games the best in the last 5 years). These games cut out entire parts of the story if you choose to behave in certain ways. Characters, indeed the whole world, will respond to as if you are an ass if you behave like one. They change their mind (or at least demonstrate the convincing illusion of having done so) and may not even speak to you again. It feels like you're a journeyman amongst a world of peers - not a god amongst a world there for your convenience.

Can games ever deliver proper stories? Possibly, they're getting better, but ambition and execution are often far apart and not simply because of a failure of skill but because telling a novel in which I star is not something that necessarily works...Who actually wants to live out the life of Kevin's mother from We Need To Talk About Kevin? Nor does a strong story make a sure fire game. I felt the story from the first Assassin's Creed was wonderfully grey and subtle but the mechanics were hugely repetitive. They lost that depth of story for later sequels even if the games themselves improved dramatically and were more engaging to actually play. And truth be told, does Fifa really need a drama? No, I don't think so either.

So I play narrative driven games and I long for games for adults where not everyone has to die, where the world is responsive and where if you're a good guy they respond to you, where if you're a sociopath the people there will make life difficult for you (if not downright impossible).

This is already a long post, so I won't go on about persistence, the need to be commercially successful or any of the hundreds of elements of this that interest me...perhaps when I review Mass Effect 3...

In the meantime Fus Ro Dah.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2012-01-25T19:36:00.000Z

I thought that Cloud Atlas was overblown. Don't get me wrong, Mitchell can write the leaves off a tree, but as someone familiar with Sci-Fi I've seen it all before - whether it's 1984 references, cloning, post-apocalyptic wastelands blah blah blah. So I've had this on my list for while but never gotten round to it.

Once again Mitchell captures some of what makes him a brilliant and captivating writer together with what makes him hard to read. It's taken me a few days to puzzle it out and my referring to Cloud Atlas is because it helped me get there. Both these books, but perhaps TAOJDZ more than Cloud Atlas, suffer from plot difficulties. This is meant very narrowly and let me explain by saying what I don't mean. Mitchell is superb at crafting characters and motives, events and drama but it's his plotting that is harder to stick with.

Again, with a negative definition...I don't mean he can't tell a story either. I found the end to this book satisfying in the extreme (and I do recommend you read it) but the narrative journey to get there, whilst successfully creating a context in which the end was so psychologically pleasurable, felt listless at times, unsatisfactory at others and frequently left me wondering where exactly he was going. Without dissecting it too much for those of you who will go and read it later the book is really split into two halves which feel like an ascent and a descent with the whole constructed as an elaborate series of ironically mundane kabuki plays with a wonderful suggestion of fable about them. It's an interesting and, one suspects, knowing structure but not one I think many people would be able to follow through with as the 'episodes' can be too distinct to bring a smooth sense of narrative progression.

At the same time, individual episodes - a discovered graveyard, a hesitant escape, an honest man's downfall - are intricate, subtle and beautiful to savour and experience. I'm torn; this book is excellent and I have no hesitation in recommending that people should read it...however, I know it's not the most accessible story even if it is a triumph and the problems with it are structural not accidental. Whatever...I personally suggest you read it and make your own mind up.

SOPA, due process and democracy

2012-01-22T17:10:00.002Z

So SOPA is dead. Apparently and perhaps only until there's a new President of in the White House. Cause for celebration right? Maybe not.

In the same week that most of us who know about this stuff were wiping sweat from our brows the US Government casually (and perfectly orchestrated too) demonstrated why SOPA is trying to stop the horse from bolting. What do I mean? Check out this - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/20/megaupload-shutdown-guns-cars-cash-seized - if you can't be bothered to look it up, it's the story of Megaupload being shut down. Like a cruise missile fired casually across the bows of campaigners who are clinking glasses of Prosecco thinking they've stopped the invention of the handgun.

Now, this smacks of a message being sent to those people involved in the fight over SOPA - both that it's irrelevant to object but also to encourage those who were trying to get it passed.

As a non-US national who's never downloaded an illegal file in his life (call me old fashioned but I think people who create content should be paid fairly for it - regardless of whether that includes paying for a self-indulgent and wasteful infrastructure) I worry about the US' insistence that it has the right to violate other states' borders for the sake of its own commercial interests. This isn't Japan in the 19th Century and the rest of the world isn't a superpower's plaything. Setting aside the violation of sovereignty this represents (and there are strong arguments that the US acts like this because other countries DON'T respect intellectual property robustly) there's also the issue around who gets to decide what content is and how we can consume it.

Salon.com, via Glenn Greenwald, has a superb piece on the implications of this event although not necessarily completely robust in its interpretation of what's happening. However what is clear is this:
1. There are MASSIVE commercial interests in ensuring that you and I don't write our own novels, make our own music and film our own films. That's free and means we're not glugging down what corporate interests want us to.
2. Where big commercial interests are concerned, there's enough weight both legally and financially, to ensure that filing a complaint is enough to warrant authorities and courts taking action - regardless of actual proof or merit. This flies in the face of both "Innocent until proven guilty" and where extradition is based upon a one sided filing - Habeas Corpus.
3. Democracy, as it is currently constituted within the English speaking world, is too narrowly focussed as a political concept - being only on who gets elected to the executive legislature and not, legally at least, extending to any other area of life.

It's the realisation of number 3 - which flies in the face of the way most of us assume we live our lives - that is the revelation for me. Legally, we can't say the voice of the people is correct, except where it concerns political representatives. That is absurdly narrow and allows companies and other corporate entities (such as governments) to act explicitly undemocratically and against the interests of the greater number of people while remaining thoroughly within the scope and spirit of the law.

I think the founders of MegaUpLoad will fight a good fight. They may even win - they are very rich after all - but the case itself is revealing to all of us who think about these things. Social media is offering us something we cannot legally defend - that is full democratization. If Social Media is unable to deliver what we thought it might, it's because our legal systems are predicated on protecting the rights of those with rights to protect (and that is a truism only because designing a legal system on another basis is nonsense). Can we overhaul our legal systems to create the space for full democratisation? Unlikely - at least I doubt it within my lifetime and that's because I don't think we've understood the nature of what it is we're asking for. Without knowing what the implications are of what we've created, defending it is essentially impossible.

Does fighting SOPA make sense? Of course. However, we should all remember that law is a series of declarative statements and boolean logic with acres of greyspace between the black and white of the page. All interpretation of law resides within this grey space and the operation of our legal systems and those who preside over them, is arcance, complex and one of confidence, precedence and foresight. Just because SOPA is defeated it doesn't mean the US can't still act as if it was in existence.

But this is also where the glimmer of hope remains - if we can crowd source it - and that is this same grey space exists for us too. European Courts, at least, are not the creatures of their governments and as with all fights for civil liberty from powers who think they know what it is that's best for the rest of us, we can bring a broader truth out of our legal systems - that they work for the people and not for the providers of the people. This should be true whether I want to write a book, congregate in a crowd or simply go to work and keep my head down.

House of Fear edited by Jonathan Oliver

2012-01-13T19:17:00.001Z

A friend of mine, David Moore, works at the publisher of this book as an editor and a fine chap he is too. I think I've already established that I don't scare easily so it was with some trepidation that I picked up this collection of ghost stories centred around the idea of haunted houses. It's not that I don't like ghost stories but it takes a writer of some skill to actually tell an interesting story free of cliche and repetition.

I'm pretty pleased that many of the stories in this anthology are solid, well crafted ghost stories with interesting ideas and even some unpredictability. In a field cluttered with lazy writing it's always impressive to find something new. Stand outs amongst the group are Windmill, Trick of the Light and Moretta. As one might expect Christopher Priest's story is the best written but it isn't as good as the three I've picked out. I enjoyed Windmill because it's properly about justice. Trick of the light is a haunting tale about loss and is expertly crafted while being moving and Moretta is the only story with really sensible people in it.

The others are quite varied. Four, possibly five, are pedestrian and a number of the others fall into the obvious traps. Setting a story in a particular time works fine if it's the time that informs the story but using a time to escape having to be original is tedious and the absence of mobiles or modern tech seems to be a bit of a failure of imagination. Additionally, almost all the poorer stories are characterised by characters who refuse to believe what's in front of their own noses, express attitudes completely at odds with other aspects of their characters (and one wonders just how many of the authors consider themselves rationalists as I'm willing to bet I could name each of them just from reading their lead characters) and offer no way out.

You might enjoy characters who have no way out but we're not talking the heights of Greek tragedy here and I found the fact that from the opening line some characters were obviously dead men walking stultifying.

However, on the whole this is pretty enjoyable. A caravan park, a play and even a copse of trees all form enjoyable contexts for a better than average collection of stories.

Revelation by Richard Swinburne

2012-01-10T22:55:00.002Z

I had no idea what to expect from Swinburne's book - having picked it up in a second hand book store for a quid based mainly on the title. It's a tremendously mixed bag; a bit like buying a car and discovering that the engine is 5 litre v8 but it's got no seats and the steering's broke, even though the stereo is awesome.

It's broken down into three sections, on literary theory and the philosophy of meaning, the probability of God and how to read a complex body of literature like the bible. That makes it seem as if the book has more of a structure than it does. Swinburne is all over the place with arbitrary arguments and weak (technically) propositions and structures for positions he has taken in advance and needs to support. Argument from an a priori supposition is not ever going to convince me of a point and seems a particularly weak way of making one's case. More on this later.

The first part is excellent and lays out quite clearly a number of important points about the nature of meaning, communication and language. He carefully summarises the idea of analogy, literalness and metaphor, all of which are crucial when we are trying to think clearly about meaning. If you're familiar with my thinking at all you'll have heard me criticise logical positivists as much as other types of fundamentalist and Swinburne does lay out a useful framework for thinking about complex ideas.

However, it begins to fall apart after this. Part two, on the probability, or likelihood of God, is weak. Very weak. It mistakes being able to create a plausible story for creating a case for a probable event and crassly ignores the ideas of boundaries in consistent logical propositions and argument by inference. It's almost as bad as reading some evolutionary mumbo jumbo about why we're altruistic or mainly right handed.

It's certainly weak both technically and from the point of view of being convincing.

Part three starts out better, looking at how meaning in complex documents (and he focuses on the canonical catholic/orthodox bible - that is including the apocrypha which protestants exclude) and how as a collected work they are a genre of themselves and, more interestingly, how to read them for what they might actually say. THe application of literary theory to the bible has a long history but the freshness in Swinburne's work is how he marries this with a discussion of how one can regard literal, analogy and metaphorical aspects of the texts are complementary and layered. It's a mature view of a complex collection of works.

He also looks at how the Christian community has viewed the texts over the last couple of millennia and makes the interesting point that most communities and their thinkers have read the bible extremely richly and with much colour and it's only really the more recent, imaginatively poor English speaking protestants who have eschewed the vivid pictures and metaphors in the text for a rather crude and mean set of interpretations. Like a poor man's rationalism.

Unfortunately it all falls apart again as he tries to look at how such texts can provide moral teaching. He comes here with a clear conservative catholic slant and rather than honestly look at the texts provides weak arguments for how his own orthodoxy/praxy is correct. Some of the arguments are painful in their convoluted nature or, worse, just how flimsy and arbitrary a set of reasons is advanced to support something that by analogy is rejected in other situations. Even within this book.

Finally there's an appendix on the probability of God. Written by someone who clearly doesn't understand statistics. Dear oh dear. If he did he'd know that this category of argument is about as meaningful as arguing about the number of angels that can be fit onto a pinhead. Both a category error and completely unfruitful.

Like I said at the beginning, a very mixed bag.

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

2012-01-07T18:41:00.001Z

Like in any particularly bad episode of mid-sommer murders, Commander Vimes finds that the countryside is chock full of crime and self-satisfied traditionalists. It's an entertaining, if strange, book which contains the best and worst of Pratchett's style. By the best I mean his jovial and deftly indulgent (without being fattening) ability to take familiar tropes, icons and ideas and play with them lovingly and without poisoning them with cynicism. By worst I mean trying out genre's and styles which don't work for his style of writing.

I've always found Pratchett weakest when trying to directly thrill. His chases and plots are most gripping when they come naturally to him and when they aren't aping those who have gone before. Here it sometimes feels a bit like CSI meets Countryside Alliance and both concepts on their own are awkward.

Nevertheless Snuff is good fun, light hearted and full of his trade mark social commentary. I know others have said it elsewhere but Pratchett writes like a modern Dickens - finding a medium in which contemporary issues can have their skirts lifted in a way that's palatable to his readers. I think Pratchett's characters are always immensely humane and the evil they find themselves pitched against always attempts to reduce them to objects. Having said that I can't help but wonder if his characters aren't just a little bit lonely at times - bereft as they are of communal belief systems of any sort. I'm straying into deconstructing the author's own philosophy here which can be terribly boring.

Snuff is a good romp with a bit of seaside thrown in. If you like Pratchett there's a lot here to commend.

Way of Kings part two by Brandon Sanderson

2011-12-16T10:36:00.001Z

This is the second part of the first book of the Stormlight Archive. Yes I know, confusing. Par for the course for fantasy fans though who seem to have been singled out for longer and longer books in longer and longer series by publishing houses desperate to lock in revenue streams and minimise development and marketing costs...or at least that's what the business model looks like to someone who's used to examining monetising potential.

More charitably you could say that when something's not broke then don't fix it. It's a strange phenomena - thinking that Epic means having a gargantuan word count but there you go.

Sanderson's book. Or part two of the first book. Tightly written, well paced and continuing to develop an interesting world. Several of his themes from the Hero of Ages series recur - including the nature of the supernatural, borrowing from Aristotle's/Paracelsus' philosophy of sympathies, ossified and creaking empires based upon obvious misreadings of their own histories. Not to say that those tropes aren't well explored or plausible - they are and I actually enjoyed this book quite a lot. So much so that when the final act began I was positively enthralled.

I think Sanderson does something that quite a lot of fantasy authors don't manage - that's write stories and plots that aren't completely conventional. So much fantasy holds to the mainstream ideals of western society. Sanderson tacks away from that fairly successfully.

If you like fantasy I think this is a recommend. If not? Well you knew you weren't going to experiment with something different before you started - so off with you - back to whatever you think is 'worthy' and I wish you the best of (middle of the road) luck.

The Threat To Reason by Daniel Hind

2011-12-04T22:59:00.001Z

I ordered this after hearing Dan Hind on the radio. I was intrigued enough to want to see what he was actually arguing. Starting the book, and making it to the end of the introduction I was left wondering when, exactly, the other shoe was going to drop. I was left nonplussed (in a good way) when it didn't. Let me explain.

Hind's goal is to lay out what the idea of 'Enlightenment' actually is and then use that definition to examine just how closely current culture cleaves to that definition when it's being deployed to attack people or ideas that don't fit with the mainstream. It's a very interesting project and one I found myself warming to a great deal as the book progressed. Hind is most cross and dismayed by people who use the Enlightenment to shore up their own ideals, to make their ideals middle of the road and to rubbish other people's ideas and world views. More than that, he reckons that so many of us simply have it all wrong. We're getting cross about stuff that really is nothing to do with what we claim.

Take the 'sceptical' position on homoeopathy and other alternative medicines. Hind, brilliantly, doesn't argue that we should take them seriously. What he does do is say - look, if you're really serious about open enlightenment when mankind seeks to advance its store of knowledge and improve its standard of living then you should be less worried about alternative medicines and much more concerned about big pharma and the scientific process. He argues (and as a scientist with a bit of self awareness - unlike people such as Dawkins for instance - I think he's absolutely right) that science is massively political and just as ideological as any other human endeavour. He argues that closed research done for profit is anti-enlightenment because, in the end, it means the greater part of humanity doesn't benefit from advances in medicine, that indeed the very flavour of research ignores the greatest scourges of mankind. As an aside - why have we not got new anti-biotics to take on MRSA? A key reason is that researching these new anti-biotics hasn't been profitable, so science and those who pay for it to be done have ignored this area - sure it's now going to be flavour of the month again but how many people have had to die because the profit motive drove science to look at Viagra rather than life saving medicines? Hind argues then that the process is anti-enlightenment and the outcomes are decidedly not in our interest. He also substantiates this with examples of where Scientists have wilfully hidden the truth of poor medicines (including fatal side effects) from regulators and the public for the sake of making more money. So much for cold hard objectivity eh? Comparing the damage done by cigarette companies to humanity vs. that done by practitioners of alternative medicines he comes down on the side of reason - neither are acceptable but you know what? Mainstream science and its applications have wilfully killed millions more people than alternative medicines incompetent bungling ever has and what makes it worse is that it employs the idea of 'enlightenment rationality' to deflect attention away from its own systematic abuses.

The above is just one example and he notes a number more - such as the focus on the fear of religion by those supposed to be rationalists. A good argument but I won't repeat it here.

What Hind makes clear is that those committed to enlightenment ideals of public knowledge and examination, or transparent and self aware exploration will inevitably find themselves at odds with the powers that be - be they politicians, big business or media. Why? Because they will not stand for nonsense such as setting up straw men to attack to protect one's own position. Is Daniel Dennett interested in the Enlightenment? Obviously not. What about Dawkins? What about Fundamentalist Religions? What about Big Science and big media? I'd say no to all of the above. Indeed I'd put each of them in the same freaking bucket - out to protect their own interests and suppress all who disagree with their editorial stance. Hind's case is robust on this front.

However it all starts to unravel when he looks at how to make it better. His solutions are, at least to my mind, starry eyed. Humans organise themselves. Without it we have no civilisation. Organisation isn't perfect because we're dynamic, messy, living creatures who change through time. To suggest everyone should be able to fulfil all roles is to suggest that the greatest achievement of mankind - the organisation of society so we can make life easier for everyone - should be set aside in favour of achieving only what individuals can achieve seems naive and retrograde. Personally I'd suggest we refuse to allow profit to be our only source of rationality (economists seem to feel it appropriate to opine on everything these days on nothing more than the ability to tell a good story). I'd suggest that all science is done in the open, that all studies should be registered and results published (regardless of the outcome). I'd suggest that we maintain the idea that wonder should be central to society and our experience of life. Not 'experiences' but the sense that we are small and the universe is big and isn't that amazing. I'd suggest that we applaud real talent that comes about from dedication and hard work - not celebrity, nor consumption and certainly not 'reality tv'. But then I'm probably hopelessly elitist and naive as well.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

2011-12-04T22:57:00.001Z

So Stephenson's latest. It's another beast of a book but one with more personal ambitions I think. Gone are the world changing themes of almost every other of his 'alternate' world books such as Quicksilver and Anathem and instead a focus on a group of disparate individuals thrown together by accident.
There's been a lot of comment on the fact that 'gold' features in the plot and it's about 'gold farming'. I'd say these comments are both lazy and inaccurate conclusions of what Stephenson is getting at. It's kind of like saying Crime and Punishment is about a flat where a mother and daughter live. Both factually correct but entirely missing the point of the story, the messages and the splendour of the tale.

I'd propose that in the same vein to Stephenson's other works he is actually interested in the grand themes of the day - it's just that for the first time his story is entirely contemporary - and hence the themes he's looking at are entirely up to date. I'd deflect the comment that gold farming is old news. It is. Which is exactly how Stephenson portrays it in the book - something everyone knows about and has gotten to grips with. I think it's more instructive of the reviewer's general ignorance of the impact of these activities on the wider world that leads them to focus on it rather than the real issues the story grapples with.

What are the issues? Well I don't want to spill the beans for risk of spoiling the story but I'm comfortable saying that he's looking at diaspora in the modern era - not simply movement of people but of value, power, ideas and their progenitors as well as the concept of reality being what we (as in the different peoples around us) make it.

As always he loves finding difference and then bringing out the similarities. He loves drawing a broad canvas and then showing us that the first glimpse was misleading and filled with our own prejudices not his images. Yet the story is about a small number of people whose lives interact and unfortunately (for me) crosses the border into the highly unlikely. I think the implausibility of some of what happens is harder to swallow because the novel is so current in its themes - it's easier to glide over contrivances when the landscape is more distant from the one we see when we look out the window.

Is it sci fi? Yes - in the grandest most triumphant sense. It grapples with the big issues and articulates problems, developments and ideas you won't find discussed outside of academia in an accessible and frequently invisible way. It's sci fi Margaret Atwood would love to write (except she'd call it speculative fiction). It's something to be proud of and it deserves your time.

So we come to the end with the acknowledgement that Reamde is about big issues but it's told with a focus on the people in a way his other books have never done. An interesting development for an author who thrives on making complex arguments compelling tales.

Unnatural by Philip Ball

2011-12-04T17:11:00.001Z

I'm torn by Ball's attempt to understand the idea of making ourselves. On the one hand there are substantial sections of it that are poorly written, sleight pieces of thought - and to be honest those occur in the first half more often than not. However, at the same time he has also written some of the most coherent and clear essays on reproduction, the politics of genetics and the culture of 'scientific' self-improvement. Indeed, chapters on test tube babies, stem cell research and gene therapy are clear, insightful and thought provoking.

Ball is intelligent, generally reasonable and struggles honestly with some complex issues.

And yet.

There remains a central problem, so huge that most people will be put off within the first two chapters, it needs to be discussed at some length. Ball tries very hard to build a narrative of why, almost to our cores, we find the idea of creating people both problematic and irresistible. He touches on ideas such as taboo, danger, sanction and belief. The problem is, he doesn't really know what he's talking about. It's not enough to base one's ideas of historical (and purely western by the way) strands of political culture on poorly constructed caricatures when James Hanam's book on science and its emergence is lying there begging to be read. Caricatures may help you build you case but it undermines, fatally to be honest, the idea that you're either objective or substantial.

It's also pretty thin to rely on a high school student's level of literary criticism of Shelley's Frankenstein to build your case. It's akin to those pop-intellectuals who once read the Brother's Karamazov and then write whole tracts where their only real reference is that text. Not only is it too narrow, it's also too shallow and reveals its ignorance of entire swathes of human academic innovation. In this case the field of Anthropology, specifically that pioneered by Wildavsky and Douglas.

Even with that said, one could respect someone who, through their own learning, built a reasonably argued case, but Ball has an ideology to push, one I'm not sure he even realises he's articulating and that is what really left me sucking my teeth and wondering what Mary Douglas would make of it all.

Shame really. I'd give this one a miss.

The Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach by Steven Erikson

2011-11-29T19:38:00.001Z

These two reprobates turn up a couple of times in the Malazan Book of the Fallen and always seem to confuse matters (in a good way). A particularly memorable encounter involving Quick Ben remains one of my favourite scenes from the entire series.

Anyway, knowing that these two are quite absorbed in whatever passes for their own codes, this is quite an interesting and fun trilogy of short stories. Korbal is, if anything, less understandable here than in the wider series, but it's Bauchelain's character, the origin of Emancipor Reece's affiliation and a rather charming zomie invasion that make for such fun.

Looking at their construction, I'm always struck by just how meticulous Erikson is in his plotting and rendering of people, scenes and events. The stories do not quite have his more nuanced skill so on display in the Malazan books - for instance, some of the morality and solipsising by the characters is distinctly occidental and jars with the setting and the world. Nor do the characters themselves seem as well fleshed out as you'd hope. In some ways it reads as an author stretching out their wings for the first time and I do wonder how this might have benefited from a full edit by a writer at the end of a masterful ten book series.

Still, I think there's probably enough here for new readers (and is decidedly more accessible than Gardens of the Moon) alongside plenty for fans to reference and enjoy.

Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago

2011-11-27T13:34:00.001Z

Saramago is an acquired taste - even at his best. I'm not sure this is his best although, as with all his work, once you're into it the tale is invigorating and interesting. Somewhat surreally, the plot is quite similar to the recent Torchwood miniseries on TV. It's better executed and makes more sense, but if you've seen that then many of the main concerns (i.e. what happens to society if people stop dying but don't stop ageing, getting injured or getting ill.) I believe this came first and it's hard to step away and believe someone, somewhere, hadn't seen this when they sat down to write the TV show.

Nevertheless, this is funnier and less self-absorbed than its visual companion and, as always, Saramago's story, the questions it asks and the issues it raises will remain with you long after you reach the final word.

It's not as profound as the Cave, nor as visceral as Blindness but a good little story nonetheless. If you're new to Saramago, I'd start somewhere else.

God's Philosophers by James Hannam

2011-11-24T21:09:00.001Z

This book was a revelation. It is accessible, beautifully written, exhaustively researched and perfectly paced. However, above and beyond all of that it is one of the most even handed, objective and cool headed pieces of work on medieval society I have even come across.

The stories it tells are fascinating but the Story it tells is immensely important - exploring the nature of knowledge and thought across Europe and across centuries of time always focussed on understanding the culture and time within which characters existed. For sure, the people he discusses lived fruity, outrageous, contemplative and profound lives but if there's one thing Hannam makes certain of - it's that we don't think they were just like us but without iPhones.

I know a little of the theology and scientific thought of the time. I'm familiar with concepts such as nominalism and holism, The Philosopher and his ilk, but Hannam's triumph is in bringing them alive with such splendid vigour I feel I know them better even while I am forced to acknowledge that these hugely important thinkers and explorers existed in a time and culture I barely comprehend.

Even his asides, such as stories about the Inquisitions, Galileo's suicidal arrogance (coupled with well documented plagiarism and lying) thrill. I'm not a history buff by any stretch, typically preferring my non-fiction either more pure or current in scope, but this is easily one of my favourite books of the year.

Highly recommended.

The Small Hand by Susan Hill

2011-11-19T11:54:00.001Z

This is a well crafted little ghost story. I think Susan Hill can write people deftly and with feeling. Yet I wasn't remotely scared, chilled or perturbed by this short novel.

Reflecting on this, I think the problem lies with me. Hill has crafted all the elements into a neat package - the ending isn't telegraphed early on, the characters are interesting and the story well paced. Even though I enjoyed the journey I felt more of an observer than a passenger.

This led me to think about what I do find scary. Looking back at the last few years, I can identify a few incidents or times when I was scared and to be honest, none of them had supernatural elements (which is perhaps reassuring...)

I was scared when I started my last two jobs; I was worried they wouldn't keep me, that the risk I'd taken in moving wouldn't pay off, that my family would suffer as a result.

I think of the time when I was most scared for my life (in East Germany surrounded by skinheads who 'demanded to talk to me'...because they felt compelled to tell me they weren't racist but chose skinhead gear because it made them feel part of something...) and I wonder about fear.

I'd rather climb a mountain than go on a rollercoaster - the feeling of overcoming danger is alive in the former (for me) and certainly not in the latter. Right now I feel a sense of deep anxiety when I consider the outcome of the Euro Sovereign Crisis and what it means for me and those I love (if you don't understand why, suffice to say I work in the City and live with it on a day to day basis - that kind of proximity gives a perspective you're not going to get from reading the papers or watching the news).

The prospect of loss, the prospect of damage that isn't final, is more chilling for me than ghosts. I'm not a believer in simple inevitability and often watch/read 'horror' with a feeling of incredulity because I know I would behave differently - if only because the faith I hold suggests a different way of looking at and handling the world than that I see portrayed in these kinds of fiction. If anything, inevitability - especially when expressed as consequences - is a source of tragic narrative not fear. Consider Oedipus or Crime and Punishment.

Yet they clearly do get to other people, they clearly do unnerve others in a way that I'm not touched by. We love to tell stories that frighten us - that nervous laugh elicited at the end of a story where we know that despite our identifying with the characters we, ourselves, are ok.

Fear is a funny thing. I sense it isn't something we westerners feel very often in an imminent sense and my own compass is definitely calibrated to a North that's defined by loss, not the unknown per se, but the fear of losing that I love.

Now, back to ghosts...I'm a physicist at heart but if you're interested in ghosts and the like...next time we grab a beer ask me about my thoughts on this and I'll tell you a couple of stories of my own.

John Dies at the End by David Wong

2011-10-30T13:22:00.003Z

This book is awesome. It's also quite, quite gory, bat-shit insane, funny and probably very bad for you. On this basis you must read it. It's like Cthulhu woke up one aeon and thought....I know I'll write a comedy where two nut-job slackers with psyche problems, Gen-Y morality and poor hygiene fail to save the world, themselves or even their dog (and my dears, it's quite a dog). However, what I will do is this...I'll make it compelling, exciting, funny, and I'll really let my imagination go to town.

After that I imagine Cthulhu decided to have a frozen mexican ~~burrito~~ and an afternoon nap.

Wong (really Jason Pargin) has written a book with such gusto, style and energy that I basically stopped reading anything else for the four days it took to get through this. That means I put down Reamde and stopped playing Arkham City. It's that good.

What more can I say? I think Lovecraft would have hated it but that guy was a nasty little misanthrope anyway so who cares what he would have thought. Personally - I loved it.

Word of warning though. It's filthy and gory but somewhat bizarrely, despite the reviews on the cover, it isn't remotely scary.

The Philosophy Of Time edited by Robin Le Poidevin & Murray MacBeath

2011-10-30T13:06:00.001Z

I did a whole raft of stuff on this as a part of my masters degree. I was looking at it from the point of view of a scientist - so my study was focussed on the physical rather than the metaphysical. Poidevin notes in his introduction that the essays come from the philosopher's point of view - they're interested with necessity and ontology rather than interpretation of evidence or speculation arising from mathematical theory. Which is quite different from what i'd done before.
However, I'm not sure that a pre, or a-, scientific exploration of this kind of theme is really sustainable when one has to deal with ideas such as quantum mechanics and all its varied self consistent interpretations. If you can demonstrate that many worlds with branching timelines is mathematically viable then arguing about it's credibility from a non-mathematical point of view seems a bit redundant.

Some of the other discussions are more interesting - focusing as they do on the idea of multidimensional time schemes and whether speculating using possible worlds even makes sense.

In all this was interesting but particularly clear was the essay on Time's Square. However I think the metaphysics on display arising from considering the mathematical frameworks we've built over the last one hundreds years is likely to be more profitable - even if those frameworks turn out to be too limited and simplistic in their view of the cosmos.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

2011-10-22T18:11:00.001Z

This is last year's Booker prize. I wasn't really sure what it was about, even having read the blurb on the back but was feeling a little adventurous and need of a new author who I could get my teeth into. Jacobson is good. Very good. Hey, he won the Booker, so you don't really need me to go on about that.
I think what surprised me most was the honesty of Jacobson's novel. It's about Jewishness and how British society intersects British Jewishness. It's a strange book on that front and could have been preachy, morbid, angry or mawkish. It's none of those things. Instead it's funny, black and at once honest about the predicament of Jewish people and those they live with - that is, the rest of us.
I think it's hard to write honestly about issues of race and religion but Jacobson writes unashamedly through the voice of his non-Jewish main character about his life with a collection of different people across the spectrum of Jewish culture and belief that it's hard not to admire the depth of argument and conflict he brings to the surface without ever getting lost in it.
If Jacobson says there are few satisfactory answers to questions like the Shoah, Israel, Orthodoxy or belonging then I can only admit he has done something many others wouldn't be brave enough to do - look hard at these subjects and then (perhaps rather Jewishly) throw a hard long shrug and carry on with life.

You could argue that by refusing to pick a side and argue its case Jacobson has chickened out - I'll defend his choice as being the bravest of the lot. Everywhere I turn people have an opinion on Israel, the Palestinians and the Shoah. They have an opinion on religion, culture and the rights of people to defend themselves. I do too but before I'll ever admit to my true feelings on a subject like this I'll demand an hours worth of discussing the problem with trying to call out the good guys from the bad and deciding when enough history is enough. The world is too big and individuals are too small for clear cut judgements to be so easily arrived at.

I've found it hard to marshal my feelings on this book. I think because it's so flat in its view of the rights and wrongs of this subject but if there is one thing that comes clear it's the impact of the Shoah on the Jewish people. I think most non-Jewish people have essentially forgotten the nature of the Holocaust. Genocide has become a much misused word and even if there are other very legitimate examples (the Armenian Christians in what is now Turkey) it's something the normal non-Jewish British person knows is a Bad Thing but it's little more real than the achievements of Harold Shipman.

What Jacobson does is help you remember that the Shoah has defined a people, the survivors and observers of such an event in ways that, at risk of speaking of where I don't know, they have yet to fully work it through. Is that a surprise? No. Is it something we can process - I'm not so sure, most people find it hard to think on scales of weeks let alone months. This is an event whose repercussions are still swamping whole peoples decades after it officially ended. That is both immense and a cause for us to pause when we try to work out what we think on such a subject.

Now, as someone of mixed-race background I'm not a stranger to racist abuse - either from white people or from brown and black (which may be a surprise to my white friends - but hey I'm not Indian and I don't know Urdu or Hindi so I don't fit there either...and don't get me started on how great swathes of sub-Saharan African people feel about Indians). However, what saddens me most is the racism Jacobson writes of. The casual hatred fostered towards Jewish people makes me cringe but also frightens me a little too - because I know what it feels like and I know how close to the surface it bubbles in so many people.

This IS a novel, one which made me laugh. Yet it speaks to an issue that is one of the most important our society faces today - how we treat the stranger who will never wish to be like us. I don't think it will ever be resolved for us but that is because I don't think there will ever be an answer.

The Stranger by Max Frei

2011-10-22T17:45:00.002Z

This is a strange book. It's a translation from the Russian of the first of the books of Echo. I sincerely don't know what to make of it. I'm generally a great fan of Russian literature and have been following a number of authors as their work is translated.
This was given to me by a friend who couldn't get on with it and after the first fifty pages I knew exactly what they meant (although they did say they thought I'd like it...so that's something to talk to them about). It's a bit boy's own, almost like Enid Blyton's version of Harry Potter but at the same time it's also a bit like Rupert Bear. In some senses it's never quite clear whether the protagonist is not even maybe just mad and experiencing all of this in their own head.
At the other extreme part of me is wondering if it's all an elaborate joke, a fabulous parody of the end of the Soviet era (which one can see some distinct parallels in the history of Echo and the real Russian experience of the last few years) and at the same time a very dark satire of how the KGB and ruling Russian Oligarchy has changed and adapted, finally re-emerging in their current incarnations but still ruling Russia pretty much as they have done for the last century.
Potentially biting satire aside this is a strange book and it's difficult to know whether the translation is poor or whether the writing in the original is lacking but there is never any tension in this book and barely any real explanation. Couple that with the fact that the book is really a collection of lengthy short stories featuring the same hero and it's hard to come away from it with a positive outlook.
The best thing about The Stranger? The backcover blurb, which makes it seem much grittier and more interesting than it actually is.
One to avoid if I'm honest.

Big Business Big Responsibilities by Wales, Gorman & Hope

2011-10-09T10:50:00.002Z

My good friend Andy Wales co-wrote this book. Conflict of interest out of the way - I'm sure you'll be proud Andy. So, the dilemma; how does one critique, effectively in public, a book written by a friend. Questions of whether the friendship are strong enough (or well maintained enough) aside, does one have a duty of honesty when speaking about the efforts of those one likes. At least, is it different than when discussing the work of those you don't know...For me the answer is yes. If you can't be honest with your friends then you need better friends.

So the book...It is, unashamedly, a pamphlet extolling how big business is changing the world for the better. Watching the non-coverage of the wall street protests...looking at the cool dispassionate actions of many corporations (cf the actions of oil companies in the run up to the Arab Spring) it can be hard to come to such a book with an open mind I'll admit. However, the point they are making is a serious one - that business has a role in the way we shape our societies and environments. Demonisation is as simplistic as it is foolish. Companies are made up of people and those people are as human as the next person. I particularly like the chapters on networked society and regulation and complexity. They showcase some clear thinking and irrepressible hope for the good that can be achieved.

However.

Reading it I am frequently put in mind of the abused wife who tells everyone they stay with their partner because they're good people who can change, that their violence is not their fault, that they are abusive because they're misunderstood.

And as I'd say to that person...I don't think so.

The problem I have is that they deploy a post hoc ergo proctor hoc argument about the good that businesses have done, explaining it as if it wasn't driven by public outrage of things revealed which, crucially, had been kept hidden for as long as possible because the perpetrators knew they were committing outrageous actions.

This is problematic because, as far as I think the evidence points, the progressive businesses around the world are limited in number, limited in impact (for instance, the businesses calling for a climate agreement at Copenhagen failed to achieve that end) and it's not about size or quantity, it's about quality. One mining company can destroy a landscape regardless of how well its peers are behaving.

The authors lay out a series of 'myths' about business and while some of them are properly mythical others are, at least from my perspective (as someone who is also in business) a matter of perspective and frankly I disagree as to their interpretation of the way the world works.

I've been trying to work out the problem I have with their argument (the root of why they've mistaken action after the event as caused by the event itself) and I think it boils down to this:

There is no discussion of the psychology of incentives here, and hence they fail to discuss the reasons why morally neutral people take debatable actions because they're in a place where that action is rational.
There is no discussion of the failures of big business. It's all very well dismissing myths about business but it's also equally important to truly, and humbly, acknowledge the nature and size of the struggle. The biggest part of the struggle necessitates a consideration of the first point.
Curiously I think the authors should have been MORE positive about their own actions and what they have seen change, with their own eyes and by their own hands, since they've been in business. None of the authors is old and all have, at least as far as I can see, helped transform the sector of the business world they've been in. That, to me at least, is one of the reasons why I hope that their vision can progress - because these guys have made it happen for real. The lack of the autobiographical means that those parts of the argument that are about the possibility of change lack conviction.
Finally, I think, this is also a discussion of what values society should care about. Mixing up the first three points, if we receive our cornflakes of a morning with no sense of its real cost (and see this to make you shudder "How Many Slaves Do I Have?") then there's little chance a few dynamic and visionary insiders can make the changes they hope for.

Should you read this book? Yes, regardless of its flaws (or otherwise) it's a thoughtful and exciting collection of ideas and hopes for what, together, we can achieve.

Neutrinos, Time Travel and the Speed of Light

2011-10-03T19:51:00.001Z

Ok, this will be short but probably mind bending. I'll aim to keep it as simple (and correct) as possible.

Quite a few of my friends have expressed some confusion over the experimental result by the Opera group measuring Muon decay into neutrinos which has "apparently" yielded a surprising result - namely the appearance of a particle that is travelling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (that is the c from e = mc^2)

Setting aside that they have probably made some error (I say probably because it would be awesome if they haven't), let's discuss some of the issues around this:
1. It is a myth that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Nonsense. We even have a word for anything that is faster than c - the Tachyon. Geeks amongst you may have come across this in SciFi. The issue, as I've always understood it is that we shouldn't be able to knowingly detect anything travelling faster than c.
2. The barrier that c represents is actually one of progression not existence. No particle can accelerate through c either from going slower to faster nor from faster to slower. If you like, it's a wall through which we can't pass but neither can anyone on the other side.
3. Relativity is still a sound theory, it's just that this rather esoteric particle, the neutrino, has possibly done something we didn't expect or believe possible. If relativity was rubbish you're sat nav wouldn't work. So if you want to restore your faith in the applications of how we understand the world today - curse it for taking you the wrong way down a one way street, but not for actually working.
4. Not all neutrinos travel at superluminal velocities. We have had a number of supernovas to watch in living memory and we have also been able to detect the particles coming from those dying stars. Their neutrinos did not arrive appreciably faster than the photons...i.e. they were not breaching c.
5. FAQ - If neutrinos do travel faster than light, then is time travel possible?. May be, but never in the way you're thinking. Yes you. The one scrolling up and down. You. Why not? Because the main implication is not that time isn't linear - we've kind of deduced that already, more that it much of the universe strongly doesn't see sequences of events in the same way we do (that is, as connected and related to each other.) This doesn't imply I won't get drunk because I drank alcohol but does perhaps imply that we could run time backwards and undo my inebriation (although there are some funny quantum aspects we should probably not forget about rerunning anything - it's entirely feasible we'd run time backwards and not notice the change...)

The more I know about the universe, the more I realise we know almost nothing about it. Not in a "well 90% of the universe is unknown to us" but in the sense of 90% OF THE UNIVERSE IS UNKNOWN TO US.

Just as with theology, there's only one thing you can be sure of with scientific theory - it's going to change as we experience new things our old ways of thinking can't handle. Just as with the ways we humans organise ourselves, what we do accept will be very useful in the meantime.

One last thing. People often scoff at the importance of just exploring the universe for its own sake. Mean spirited, small minded fools think we shouldn't spend the money unless it's got 'practical' applications. This event, regardless of the probably outcome (an error in their experiment), has provoked wonder, mirth and discussion and that, really, is completely priceless and worth every penny of funding we've ever provided. Not to mention the Sat Nav, LCD tvs, hard disks, iphones, skype, cars, antibiotics, photographs etc etc etc. yawn, etc. etc. etc.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

2011-10-01T17:15:00.000Z

Imagine a boys own version of The Terror by Dan Simmons. I wanted to like this book. I'm not a very timid person and stuff that can genuinely creep me out is something I relish (for reference the last time was a very small section of the Wind Up Bird Chronicle).

Sadly this book was too Biggles to be scary and it was no surprise to discover that the author normally writes fiction for Young Adults. Of course, I'm cynical and jaded. I haven't ever been scared by a book and the last time I was scared of a movie was Clash of the Titans when I was about 5. So I'll admit it's an uphill struggle. Yet you can admire a show without necessarily being completely immersed.

Additionally, although she clearly loves the frozen north, the central (and neat) idea of the book, that 90% of the universe is beyond even our ability to interact with, it is wasted because that isn't explored. The protagonist loves science, but that central facet of their life effectively doesn't inform any of their experience in this tale and that is something I wish was otherwise.

Paver's novel is ok. It moves along at a reasonable pace but in the end it can't really decide whether it wants to be a psychological horror, a proper supernatural ghost story or something in between. Much of the time it settles for something in between but doesn't quite get the balance right between horror and psychology. Doris Lessing, Patrick McCabe and Dan Simmons have all done this better and in a more compelling fashion.

Zero degrees of empathy by Simon Baron-Cohen

2011-09-30T18:41:00.000Z

An explanation of human cruelty. That's something this book isn't. Which is massive disappointment since that's how it's billed from the very beginning. Baron-Cohen's thesis is actually very narrowly focussed on mental disorders that appear to have some underlying genetic component. The narrow focus is based on sound science and to that extent is accomplished science writing and I found the subject matter interesting, mildly provocative and somewhat infused with cultural zeitgeist.

I want to set aside discussion of the science, which itself is thorough and well presented, and instead focus more on two features of the book that actuate themselves as problematic both to Baron-Cohen's thesis (namely that cruelty can be explained by identifiable abnormalities in the "empathy circuit") but also to the context within which these arguments are articulated.

The philosophical underpinning of the argument can be summed up as follows;
1. Empathy is an internal quality that represents a socialised good. In other words, people with high empathy are highly unlikely to treat others cruelly.
2. Aggressive behaviour is exclusively explained by abnormalities in the brain.

Can you see where I'm going with this? I don't want to be too critical because Baron-Cohen has done a valuable service by raising this question and attempting to offer a narrative explanation. It's just that he doesn't succeed.

So let's demolish the arguments. Firstly, empathy as defined and understood by most people is the ability to understand what others might feel. Sympathy is being able to actually feel that too. The author suggests that there is no ability to understand and act in spite of or because of that understanding. For him all acts of cruelty originate from an inability to understand the impact one might be having on others.

Now it's a challenging proposition but his own examples of "evil" cannot be explained by his thesis. Indeed, beyond the narrow disorders he discusses it has no real explicative power.

A key example is a group of soldiers forcing a mother to kill her own child in a horrific fashion. The theory does not explain why they might do this only that they might. Except that to choose to make a mother kill her own child demonstrates an understanding both of cultural values and also that other people will be damaged in breaking them. This is not a lack of empathy. This is action via empathy to destroy others. Indeed without an explanation of why people can objectify others as an act of cruelty in and of itself, any explanation of evil is empty. The explanation resented here is entirely internal, it doesn't explain cultures that practice cannibalism, or scalping, or destroying whole populations by giving them virally infected gifts.

To explain cruelty one has to have a theory of societal minds not just internal minds. Without an understanding of what cruelty is normal people wouldn't be able to commit it. It's simply poor science to say that sometimes anyone can have a lack of empathy as if that explains everything for us normally functioning folk.

It seems much more likely that the causes of cruelty between people, of the normal banal kinds ranging from meanness on the subway to genocide involving millions of perpetrators finds it's genesis in a categorisation of the target as worth less than oneself whilst still being recognisably of the same substance as the agent. In order for this to happen to normal people they need socialising not in being nice but in attending to what their own aero Yale culture considers an ultimate good. Make no mistake, it is not empathy that leads to mob violence but a cultural theory of mind that captures the ability of ordinary people to classify others around then as Other and then treat them as aliens. The key difference here is that empathy is not absent but becomes a tool of the action, making it highly effective as a destructive reality. This kind of context is not available to Baron-Cohen because his thesis rests on the root of the problem being internal and not related to the web of relationships that constitute our embodied identities.

Part of his blindness comes from a cultural blindness that leads him to embody his definition of empathy with a moral framework - that aggression is always bad, that not being able to empathise is always bad and that an inability to empathise means you will necessarily be unable to function effectively in society. By this definition Soldiers and Doctors are deeply suspect characters, able as they are to cut up others in spite of any empathy they may feel. God help heir children...

These flaws are systematic in everything I read in this field and it is a subtle cultural imperialism to suggest that selecting for one gene is preferable to another (as he seems to suggest, unwittingly, when discussing Maoris). It's disappointing that he has so little multi-cultural awareness that he expresses western liberalism s an ultimate moral good.

I applaud his drive to explain cruelty, I think the science is excellent. I find serious fault with the interpretation of this science and the kinds of applications he thinks are only natural corollaries to his conclusions.

It is an enormously thoughtful book and it had me reflecting on my parenting style as well - so really it's a very mixed bag and I wish people would take more care to tread carefully especially when the narrative in their own heads seems compelling.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

2011-09-25T18:05:00.002Z

This is a curiously beautiful, gently moving tale of the Minotaur. Separated from his roots by 5,000 years and now, and only recently, griddle chef at a small town diner in the States, the Minotaur is a shrunken shadow of his former self. No longer the hero (as in half human, half god) but a painfully shy and introverted human being, given to bouts of melancholy and sorrow as he remembers what once was with the peace of distance and the shame of having been someone he now fears and despises. How many of us look at our younger selves and wish it wasn't so...?

Sherrill has crafted something wonderful here. Never losing touch with the sense of the bovine in the Minotaur, the sense of discomfort with being human but struck with the longings and desires of a herd animal. Sherrill's whole book, the prose and its structure gently resonate with the lowing of a ruminant struggling with human feelings.

The Minotaur lives in the present and if he's compassionate it's accidental as much as it's his heart moving for another. Whilst there is a sense of him growing in this book, one can't help but be gripped by the loss of who he once was in his very growth and it all plays against the background of his immortality and the unchanging nature that bestows upon him.

Yet so many of the problems facing him are those we deal with every day. Loneliness, belonging, connection and knowing when to act. In the end the misfits and acquaintances he finds himself amongst show their true colours and the Minotaur shows us as much about who we are as he continues to remain timeless and diminished himself.

I'm struggling to convey the gentle sense of love with which he is written and so I can only say - if you find a copy of this book...join him on his break and see what you can see.

Why We Lie by Dorothy Rowe

2011-09-23T22:55:00.000Z

Like being preached at by an angry mother. That's the best way to describe this book. It's irrational, angry (sometimes at Daily Mail levels of FURY!!!1!!1!!!) and completely undermines its own case with poorly evidenced arguments, personal vitriol and lazy claims.

For example, and this really sums the book up for me, at the beginning of Chapter 8 (How Important is the Truth to You?) she writes [...Homosexuality ceased to be a mental disorder when it was removed from the psychiatrists bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. However, there are still people who regard Homosexuals as being bad.]

What the hell? Where to start with statements like this? Talk about category errors, failure to understand the nature of classification, the failure to state anything insightful or the failure to actually dig underneath why cultures adopt certain specific views of the world. Furthermore this comes at a point when she's trying to say everything we believe is made up. Only to, a few pages later, claim that anything without evidence can't be real...only to then claim that nothing can really be proved anyway.

Except of course the language fallacy - if you can understand these words then we have common understanding between us and in having it we demonstrate that some things are real even if their edges are fuzzy.

This book made me increasingly incoherent with my own anger. Anger at her own need to dismiss anyone who disagrees with her. Anger with Rowe's own caricatures of what lies are (such as, and thanks for your insight on this, the fact that the people at Bear Stearns were stupid. Well knock me down with your feather of profundity don't you). Not for Rowe nuance and complexity. Not for her the fact that people tend to act rationally within their own frameworks regardless of what observers see. No. Apparently, everyone she dislikes is guilty of lying, especially people she thinks have committed the heinous error of having religious faith or holding opinions about psychiatry and psychology she doesn't agree with.

Hilariously, at one point in the book she claims that others always talk about the faults in others and never talk about how their own opinions change...before ensuring throughout the rest of the book that she never, ever, stops to use language that suggests anything other than everyone else is at fault (and can change if only we heed her advice) and those whose beliefs she doesn't understand or that her own victories never involved her doing anything except clinging to radical truth in the face of deceptive enemies of reality...it's enough to make one wonder if she's angry because other people don't think she's the messiah or because she really does think she's somehow figured out a great mystery the rest of us haven't.

Basically she takes an entire book to tell us nothing new or insightful about ourselves. Every piece of apparent insight appears cobbled from some other field and poorly presented here. Worse than that are her references. A great example is the one where she presents the ignorant view that the inquisition somehow ruled Europe for 600 years and burnt or murdered everyone who was different to them...and you thought their secret weapon was no one expected them...me too. However, to back up this crude and embarrassing claim she references....no not a historian. No, not a historical document...no, not even statistics...but another psychologist attacking the catholic church...! Ha. Brilliant.

I heard her on the radio and was less than impressed with her jargon filled rants about why all lying is wrong (duh?) and her simplistic view of human motivation but the FT is quoted on the back of her book suggesting it's "Astute and Incisive."

I guess not all lying's wrong after all.

You know what? If you want some insightful info on lying watch House, or Lie To Me or even read something like Atonement or Jane Eyre but don't waste you time on this.

Nature and Mortality by Mary Warnock

2011-09-15T15:21:00.001Z

A self conscious reflection on her own life as it has intersected with public policy in the areas of education, genetics and rights this is an interesting book. Two things stick out in my mind having just finished with it.
The first is that process of discovery that any sort of committee must go through to understand what it is they are pondering and to wrestle not only with the material but with each other, the considerations of those who support their process and their own prejudices - be they cultural, religious, scientific or political.
The second is that many of the issues she writes about as as a live and controversial today as they were when she worked for the public good. One senses and intense sense of keeping morality as a thoroughly secular preoccupation when it comes to civil society and here I sense (perhaps most apparent in her discussion on their struggles with Human Fertilisation and Embryology) that this is something of a surrender to the laissez faire of trying to legislate for activities that respect no sovereign border which argues that if other people are going to be comfortable with it then we should wake up and wise up as well.

Whilst it certainly isn't the province of religious sentiment to highlight that hers isn't much of an argument against what can seem a procession of hurricane force it nonetheless is a necessary part of her position to undermine all those other positions that continue to hold that they do not wish to agree for their own reasons. Acknowledging that religious, political or cultural reasons have their own force in these contexts is tantamount to saying that one should fight a battle that feels futile before one steps up to the front line. I can see how that is difficult to stomach psychologically. However, it doesn't make it right.

I'm not saying that one should jettison Secular notions of morality but I think one must remember that they are simply part of the cultural landscape and should be privileged no more than any other approach to deriving a morality. The hoary thing is, the privilege occurs when other forms of morality (take religious for example) are denigrated and denied validity within the public realm. I admit that this is a tense position to hold reasonably but I think if you are to respect others' positions (even if you don't respect their conclusions or their lack of respect for your own stance) it is an essential tension to hold. Personally I think we must respect others in this context otherwise they become objects or projections of ideologies we wish to reject without engaging with.

An interesting collections of essays but in other ways not enlightening nor expansive on committee processes nor replete with how members interact beyond Warnock's own, extremely brief, allusions.

Degrees of Freedom by Simon Morden

2011-09-08T15:54:00.001Z

The final in Simon Morden's trilogy this ties up Samuil Petrovich's adventures in the London Metrozone. I'm not quite sure what to write about this as it's the end of a series and more to the point, it zipped by so quickly I wasn't quite sure where I was by the end of it. Petrovich is kind of a hugely agressive and good looking Sheldon Cooper but without the charm. In other words, he's very very smart. I've remarked on just how easy much seems to him even if his physical body takes a pounding there doesn't seem to be much that can phase him.

Petrovich does grow through the books and he is different enough by the end to regard him as having been impacted by what he's gone through but at the same time the plot never slows down to make room for the story and I think there's something more interesting to Petrovich than the misanthrope on the surface.

It's curious really, the novel is a decent length but I still felt the characters and their feelings were rushed. For instance, there's a crucial event relating to a character called Michael and representatives of the Vatican and it's barely referred to and then only obliquely. I would have enjoyed seeing that meeting and understanding what they discussed. Instead we rush past at 70mph. It's a shame because for a book so bursting with ideas and interesting concepts many of the more provoking possibilities are simply left on the cutting room floor.

To sum up, this novel is Battle Beyond the Stars when it could have been Star Wars (Episode IV obviously).

The Way of Kings Part One by Brandon Sanderson

2011-09-05T11:32:00.002Z

I'm on gardening leave. This was part of a 3 for 2...it's slush but decent enough and if you're a sword and sorcery type I'd recommend it. Except that it's only the first of a proposed 11 part series and the second book (part two of the first book is out) is not due until Autumn 2012...so if you like waiting around this is for you.

The story is interesting enough and the world is pretty well realised and sufficiently different from ours to make discovering it intriguing enough. However, there are some characterisations that are so out of "world building 101" that I really hope he takes it in a surprising direction. It's not edgy and as per most fantasy it's really very conventional from a moral and cultural point of view.

Yet, as with the Mistborn books, Sanderson has a serious and interesting take on spirituality that many others don't. It does elevate his story telling and I'm interested to see where this goes. Don't get me wrong, it's epic in the way that only Fantasy can be, but nevertheless it's a good distracting bit of fun.

Sunshine State by James Miller

2011-09-03T17:35:00.002Z

Take one part global warming, one part hurricane Katrina, one part spy thriller and mix liberally with three parts J G Ballard's The Drowned World.

In other words I was completely miss-sold this book. The back cover indicates some sort of techno-thriller. Instead what it is, is a dark and dystopic aftersmudge of doom and loss. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad but the writing is simply not up there with Ballard and it clearly wants to be. The ending, abrupt as it is, is murmuringly lost in amidst a build up that pretty much stretches across the entirety of the rest of the book.

I like it, but it's strangled by its ambitions and its dreams of being more than a thriller. Which is problematic. If it was less aspirational it could have survived such failings, however, it's looking to triumph on the basis of its scope and form and so the flaws become somewhat fatal. As an experiment it's interesting but as a story it's hard to take and for me it doesn't work.

I'd definitely pick Miller up again as I have a soft spot for experimenters and those who want to break the mould and I think given some room to stretch his talent he will, in the future, achieve the ambitions which so clearly break this particular book.

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver

2011-08-30T23:10:00.003Z

A book about cancer, dying, degenerative disease and the american healthcare system. There's no denying that this book is a punch to the gut. The thing is, the preceding sounds like a recipe for a sanctimonious rant, a political platform or a morbid pretentious preach. So much for that is none of these things. Instead it is a powerful, acerbic and blackly humorous about subjects that we just don't want to talk about. For all that, Shriver's book tackles the central taboo of our culture - death and the process of dying.

From across the Atlantic it could be easy to look at this as an insightful dissection of a medical system based upon profit and not Hippocrates Oath (and it is) but that would be to caricature both the message and politics. Shriver makes no bones about the fact that medical care is only really available to those with cover in the US but she also plainly tells the story of what that care actually buys. She doesn't assume that medical care is worth having, even when it's available and asks us to think about whether extending life at all costs is as valuable as it might sound when we discuss it at dinner.

The book remains more than a tale about cancer though. It's about relationships, family and the dreams we live our lives by. It's about the value of a life well lived and what the impact of our smallest decisions may have on our lives. Most of all Shriver writes about people you can believe and about situations that strike home with plausibility and compassion.

And then there's Shephard Knacker; possibly the most humble man I've ever stumbled across. When his story ends and liberation comes I found myself inordinately pleased with an ending that could be described as heroic.

So much for that is about a difficult subject. I'm sure plenty of people won't want to read it. I wish they would and I hope that they do because it's a wonderful story.

Symmetry and the Monster by Mark Ronan

2011-08-16T18:20:00.003Z

There's no two ways about it, this book is badly written. I don't really know where to start...

Ok, I love ideas and I have a decent enough scientific education so I reasonably expected this popular science book about group and number theory to be accessible and interesting exploration of an incredibly difficult and esoteric subject.

Unfortunately Ronan was let down by his editor because the structure of the book is painful, the writing difficult to follow and the arguments poorly presented. Sure, Group theory is immensely complex and anyone would think twice about trying to explain the farther fields of a subject that I know turns the brightest of mathematicians into gibbering wrecks pleading for their mothers. However...to be told no less than a dozen times that something will be explained later (and then to have no real link back when those ideas are presented again in a different context) is unforgivable. Furthermore, simply presenting lists of names and telling us they were wonderfully impressive mathematicians is about as enthralling as listing moves you once made in a game of Risk. Without drama, without a decent framework that suggest WHY these ideas are so important it's pretty much like reading Numbers (see what I did there?).

I knew a little about group theory and a little more about symmetry (from a physicists point of view) before reading this. I do not feel I've learned anything new at all now I've finished. You might counter that I'm a scientist and popular science books are not going to educate me...fair enough, but Ronan covers areas of mathematics that I've not even heard of and does little or nothing to explain them, their significance or their context. One crime amongst many is to tell us that people used clever techniques...well thanks mate, I think I guessed that already!

Again, Group theory is horrendously difficult but all the more reason to take ones time in telling the story and presenting the concepts that make it such an important uncovering of what might just be one of the fundamental organising principles of the cosmos.

Oh well.

Pascal's Fire by Keith Ward

2011-08-15T18:53:00.002Z

I have flip flopped around the idea of consciousness this year - in particular because I allowed myself to be influenced by some impressive philosophers I had a discussion with. They were both articulate and materialist (although weak materialists really). I then read Eagleman's Incognito which was also a weak materialist pamphlet (although a good deal more reflective than the philosophers). This left me feeling somewhat deflated, and harried as I was at the time I kind of surrendered to the idea of materialism without forcing myself to recollect why I have thought (for decades) that it's a bankrupt philosophical position. Then I picked up Keith Ward's book and was reminded both of some of the more complex science I should have remembered but also some pretty elementary philosophical arguments that I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I had actually forgotten in my 'moment of weakness'.

Ward's book, an exploration of a wide variety of scientific theories and general approaches to looking at their potential impact both on theology and their shaping by theology in society was a remarkable breath of fresh air.

As a one time physicist who tries to keep his hand in I was impressed with his grasp of modern physics (and by modern I mean post logical positivism, by which I mean after General Relativity was published in 1916). In particular I was delighted to be reminded about issues concerning the limitations of induction based upon the assumption that the visible universe is the only stuff there is as well as some fascinating stuff on consciousness.

In particular it reminded me of a couple of items regarding consciousness; firstly that even Eagleman's attractive notion of warring ideas which decide before we're even aware of them just hides the problem of decision making (by shoving it back into 'unconsciousness' and secondly, that the argument that Quantum Mechanics has no role in explaining consciousness is wrong headed.

The anti-QM argument is wrong for two reasons, first it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of QM (it's not really about randomness at all but about entropy and information) and secondly, that we have no real scooby of how consciousness emerges from our physical instantiation. I'm not a believer in a disembodied consciousness at all. However nor am I a believer in a complete instrumental explanation either. I'm generally quite happy with combining the philosophy of Raymond Tallis and John MacMurray.

That's my own tangent though, because Ward's book is a broader project than consciousness, or evolution or even cosmology. It's about explicitly looking to the most modern philosophy of science and forcefully crashing it into theology and social ideas of meaning to see what happens.

I have written before that I find this problematic because I hold a faux notion that because ideas in science change all the time there is a danger that integrating them into our ontologies is always going to lead us wrong. However, Ward has accomplished a fascinating integration without losing core ideas and without surrendering to the idea that 'once integrated never changed' fear I have. I know it's a stupid position on my part and this book has encouraged me to be more aware of the ideas I love so much be tend to keep (at least on the surface) separated to keenly.

Ward also posits a very (technically not in terms of the arguments actual strength) "Weak" notion of intelligent design that I have an instinctive problem with. I think my gut reaction is because of the term rather than his formulation of Tillich's notion of God as the Ground of Being. In the end it is an interesting interpretation of Tillich's idea and it is tremendously unfortunate that fundamentalists have so poisoned the phrase with their nonsense.

In the end this book was a wonderful, and easy, read. It reminded me of some stuff I should have remembered earlier in the year (sorry Shaw) and helped me realise I'd forgotten some of the more forceful arguments for why I'm not a materialist (even if I'm thoroughly down with the idea of physical laws etc etc etc.) In fact I was moved to write to him and thank him for it. Can't say more than that really.

Theories of Flight by Simon Morden

2011-08-07T20:03:00.002Z

I liked the first of these quite a lot. Interesting ideas, good fun and a main character that was unlikeably likeable. This is really more of the same with some new stuff thrown in. If I have one reservation it's the same one I have about Lisbet Salander - that they both exhibit unreasonable levels of genius. It's fine to have clever characters - in fact I love sharp heroes who aren't winning or surviving because they're brawny. However, Petrovich sometimes falls into the 'too clever to fail' category and you feel that, like with poor genre writing where the McGuffin solves all plot problems, his genius is also used to solve otherwise unresolvable dilemmas. All the character flaws in the world won't hide this misuse of a character's identity.

It's a shame because Morden has constructed a well thought out world and characters who are also, generally, believable even if (I'm thinking of Wong here) they're so cliched as to jump right out of a pulp novel from the 50s.

Still, Theories of Flight rattled along and passed the first couple of hours of a flight to Miami in style. I'm looking forwards to the last of the trilogy and whatever my reservations I enjoy the pace and atmoshpere immensely.

S&P are not to blame

2011-08-06T11:27:00.004Z

I am not a fan of the agencies. Not for political reasons but because they're staffed by the guys who couldn't get hired by the Investment Banks. Sure specific individuals within are decent but generally they fail to understand that which they're talking about.

And I say that as someone who works closely with them day to day. It's also the only negative thing I'm going to say about the agencies (probably) in this post.

There's a lot of hatred for them right now and it's of the shameful 'shoot the messenger' variety. Shameful because, for once, they're standing up and telling the truth. Setting aside that it's only one of the three global agencies demonstrating any real cajones, this is what they're supposed to do.

I was recently in the States and in discussing this with a number of very well informed players there I was stunned at the level of willful denial, delusion and dissimulation regarding the state of the US economy and political system. Sure I'm going to be unpopular for saying this - but from the outside world the US currently looks like a banana republic on the decline. The real tragedy is that it doesn't have to be this way. The US is awesome but right now it's destroying itself rather than be bold. Much of this comes from some popular idea of individualism (sometimes dressed up as 'bible believing' Christianity - which it most assuredly isn't). Really it's bible believing Ayn Randism...if you'll forgive my murdering of the language. It's like huge swathes of people have swallowed Atlas Shrugged with their mother's milk and no one ever gave them their shots.

Sorry, I'm drifting. The agencies, and S&P in particular, are speaking the truth. It's not about politics (except in so far as US politics is driven by Big Business) it's about economics and the US is locked into what seems to be a tragedy of the commons. Everyone wants what's 'theirs' but no one's willing to pitch in to make that possible.

The function of an agency is to voice an opinion (and it is just an opinion) on the probability that an investor will get their money back if they invest in a particular risk. If that's IBM then fine but what we have here is the real problem.

At the heart of the financial and economic regulatory system we have the idea of Ratings, propounded by economists, politicians and sovereigns for the last 40 years, the Ratings Agencies have been put solidly in the centre of this framework as the gold standard. I mean, come on, we've enshrined it into the heart of our global legal system. To complain that now the news is bad the bringers of that news are to blame is to willingly engage in ignoring the truth. But the truth won't go away no matter how loudly you shout at those speaking it. Sure they may be made to shut up but that's just silencing the voice giving expression to the facts. As Canute would tell you were you his advisers...facts have a habit of doing what they will whatever 'truth' you construct for yourself.

Should S&P be hated? No. Should they be taken seriosuly? In this instance...Yes. Where are Fitch and Moodys right now? Good question. Still, it's always useful to know there are other opinions available.

S&P's downgrade is only telling me what I, and everyone in my industry already knew, the US is a profligate wastrel and who can't balance it's books. Who refuses to balance its books. Yet we're the ones who've put them at the heart of our process. If our markets tank because of their news we have only ourselves to blame; on two fronts.

Firstly, they're speaking the truth as they see it

Secondly, we've geared our international legal framework to take their words as gospel.

If we don't like it we should put them in a more tenable position, as pundits with authority, not as legally enshrined gatekeepers to economic well being.

Let me be clear...S&P aren't to blame for this downgrade. We are. Nor are they solely to blame for the potential impact of this ratings action...we are. After all, we're the ones who gave them the seat at the head of the table. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea when the thought of a US downgrade appeared as outlandishly ludicrous as Lehman Brother's going bust.

nb. I could make this post substantially more technical, going on about risk free rates, IFRS, regulatory capture, risk weightings, CRD, BIS, Basel, Money Markets, Market Makers, Fund Investment Criteria etc etc. But I was aiming to make something everyone can understand. I'm sure some people will assume that because I haven't been technical I don't get it. Trust me, I can technique your arse, this blog is simply the wrong medium for considering the hardcore theory being played out live before us right now.

Moon over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

2011-07-22T12:52:00.000Z

This is the second of Ben Aaronovitch's books about a magical and hidden London. It is obviously a sequel, picking up as it does just weeks after the events in Rivers of London, but it takes a significantly different direction. The same brightness and creativity is apparent but Moon over Soho is more focussed (and narrower in scope) than Rivers of London and I think probably suffers for it too.

Also, one minor quibble, for a novel that revels in Zeitgeist and post modern self referentiality there are a couple of painful factual errors that, although they don't impact the story, jar precisely because Aaronovitch spends so much time referring to The Real World (tm).

The story is solid enough but I think he could slow down a little and spend more time dwelling on people and the social webs they live in - sometimes the story moves so rapidly that major events (such as the fate of three sisters) don't carry the weight that they should given the set up and consequences of peoples' decisions.

More conventionally it's clear he's setting the scene for more to come, not least with the introduction of a 'Big Bad' who will no doubt turn up again in future and I actually felt, at the end of the story, pretty interested in seeing where he takes the series. Moon over Soho is interesting and London certainly feels alive, as puzzling as she does in real life, and full of intrigue and secrets.

A Kind Man by Susan Hill

2011-07-22T12:40:00.000Z

A Kind Man is a story about a couple who meet when young. The time and setting is fairly indeterminate but can be placed somewhere in the fifties, maybe earlier and in an declining industrial community. That's hardly important. Hill writes with a fluid spare prose that has an unblemished melancholy as pure as driven snow. Almost from the first page I knew this book was going to make me cry - like only one other author has ever done (Marilynne Robinson) and I loved it for that even whilst bunching up my face and frowning hard to stop the tears rolling down my cheeks on the train.

Hill captures the desperately fragile and invaluable sense of vulnerability being alive and facing uncertainty and loss leaves us with and she moves through the story she has to tell in as short a time as others may set about introducing their characters. This doesn't leave you feeling distant, on the contrary, Susan Hill's writing is so effective that my heart was broken before we'd even reached the main conceit of the book.

Do I have any criticisms? No. I have been out and bought another of her books today. If you read only one book this year make it this one.

The Undercover Philosopher by Michael Philips

2011-07-21T08:42:00.000Z

Billed as a guide to scams, delusions and lies I was hoping for something more systematic in this book. Maybe a tour of bad thinking, poor argument types and delusions together with their debunking.

Instead Philips focuses on the fallibility of the mind, the weaknesses of induction (in its many forms), why research studies aren't all their cracked up to be and why faith positions (at least in his view which is profoundly simplistic) are questionable. Some of the preceding is interesting and fun - particularly if, like me, you like to go to dinner parties and puncture blowhards and the delightfully ignorant. However, the weakness of memory and the poverty of incentives for honesty in critical environments are well documented ideas and much of this wasn't really enlightening. I can sympathise because Philips is clearly attempting to craft something for the lay man but for me it doesn't quite work because it never honestly grapples with examples that make a difference in every day life. Whilst it's interesting to know that less than 10% of corporate fraud is typically uncovered by their actual auditors this isn't really a guide to uncovering lies, shams and delusions.

Philips has an interesting discussion of scientism and post modernism but in both cases he's attacking extreme positions (although scientism is, almost by definition, an extreme position, Post modernism in most guises isn't.) and it's simply too easy to shoot those straw men down. Yes materialism is a profoundly parochial, flawed and weak philosophy of the universe, coming as it does from a time when we couldn't even imagine atoms or EM fields etc. but really I think he would have made it more accessible if he's looked at the idea of a realist/anti-realist view of the world and explored why materialism can only exist at the far uncritical edge of the realist position and why that in itself should give us pause to wonder just what we have to sacrifice to accept a materialist view of the universe.

The final section is about 'faith' positions but it feels rushed and unnuanced. There is a lot to be discussed when considering faith positions - especially given the human minds approach to knowledge and memory but he doesn't tie any of that up and nor does he offer the thought that much of this needs careful handling if we're going to remain open minded. It's a shame really as bits of this make for good quoting but much of it is instantly forgettable.

Agent-Based Models by Nigel Gilbert

2011-07-13T21:47:00.000Z

This is a short little guide written for academics coming at the subject for the first time. Not quite what I'd imagined when I picked it up. Not really worth reading unless you have some completionist sense of literature. Personally I had already worked out the key points for myself and this is now hidden away on my shelf of network theory books. Moving on.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

2011-07-12T19:54:00.001Z

Animal Farm is one of those books we're all supposed to have read. Until Thursday of last week I hadn't read it. The edition I have contains additional material including a forward by Malcolm Bradbury and Orwell's original preface to the book. These are interesting pieces and certainly help set the context for the book itself. It would be easy to simply read it, see the communist era and nothing more but Bradbury's forward also helps illuminate some of what Orwell was trying to achieve. This illumination is helpful because Orwell's writing is spare, frequently instrumental and often leaves the motivations of the characters obscure.

For instance, whilst it is easy to infer Napolean's motivations it is actually dependent on our own subjective interpretation of why the animal hero; first class acts the way he does and even why he waits as he does to expose his true feelings about sharing power and opinions with others. In Orwell's mind, at least, the book is not truly about communism but about the rise of totalitarianism in the ideological sense - be that communism, nazism or whatever. However, given the structure of the book I think his stated ambition doesn't stand up to scrutiny when compared to what he actually delivers. Clearly driven by ideas of the liberation of the serf from feudal society (and hence one could argue deeply concerned with class rather than capitalism) he shows just easy it is for the disenfranchised to be manipulated by the clever technocrat. This is a book about how the powerful use our every day communal instincts (our decency if you want) to drive us into the ground, wringing every last drop of energy from us in the process. You could draw analogies with the inexorable drive for efficiency at the heart of lassaiz faire capitalism and you wouldn't be far from the mark. However, without the serf the theory falls apart.

One particular element of the story is as bang up to date as possible and that is the role of propaganda. Seeing how the pigs mess with the stories the animal's tell themselves, looking at how they construct enemies to hate and reasons for sacrifice it is hard not to see a hundred different contemporary news stories in play every time Squealer opens his mouth. Not the crass poster but the subtle and insidious charismatic spokesperson. The devil Wormtongue by another name.As we should all be on our guard, Squealer is a powerful reminder of why we should be reasonable but sceptical of truth claims from those in power.

I suppose the question for the modern thinking is this - if you have a truly entrenched middle class what's the best way to restore power to the new aristocracy? I think Orwell answers - create an environment in which the middle class is squeezed out, the poor are disenfranchised and all are manoeuvred in the name of 'their own good'

Setting aside Orwell's style, the story is precise, clinical and deadly in execution. I'm glad I eventually got round to reading this piece of history and current affairs. Highly recommended.

Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

2011-07-11T19:19:00.001Z

I wasn’t going to review this book. Instead I’ve decided to write a post on self-censorship and discuss why I’m not going to review this book. In short I know some of the people in it and the book made me angry. Looking at something I do for my own personal record I feel it’s simply not sensible to put my feelings about what Sorkin has written into the public realm. Now you could infer a number of things from this decision – not least that what I think may be controversial. However, I would steer you away from that a little.

I am both disappointed with myself for deciding not to write up my thoughts – and to be clear I’ll happily discuss with you in person – but I also find myself stood somewhat detached wondering at what it is in me that has worked in such a way as to accept censorship as it’s been applied by myself. Is it fear that has driven me not to speak out about what I both know to be fact and then to voice my own opinion? I’m not sure. I’m definitely not one to be fearful of voicing my own opinion as anyone who knows me in person will tell you. I am driven to speak truth to power and yet here I am writing a post about why I’m not writing a post…and if that seems confusing try being in my head.

I have a sense that I have shied away from doing this because of two things:

1. I am nervous that much of my response to the book is subjective – based on facts sure – but ultimately my own feeling about a very difficult subject and too easily ranted about. This doesn’t normally stop me but…

2. I work at the heart of this industry, I know the instruments that crushed these banks intimately and make my living in amongst them. Can I really rant when, even if tangentially, I am connected so thoroughly with the problem at hand.

I have, in the past, written strong defences of this industry as well as having also been happy to outline what I think is wrong, corrupt or both. However, as far as Too Big To Fail is concerned I think I have to close my mouth, admit I’m in the middle of it, and recommend you read it – but remember that behind the neutral ‘objective’ tone of Sorkin’s epic lies the truth of cause, effect and delusion. In my opinion, Sorkin captures the facts of the matter but not the truth.

Reason, Faith and Revolution by Terry Eagleton

2011-06-29T17:54:00.000Z

Eagleton is a professor of literary criticism, a marxist (a lonely position these days) and is clearly in possession of a razor sharp wit and clarity of thought. The subtitle of the book is "Reflections on the God Debate" and it really does read like the thoughts of someone looking in from the outside. If that someone was acerbic, refused to suffer fools and was confident enough of their own mind to call out self-deception, mindlessness and crass idiocy for exactly what it is.

I love this book and in some ways it's a huge antidote to Will Hutton's Them and Us because it reminds me why I care about justice, fairness and mercy in the first place and so also reminds me of the reasons why I shouldn't get down about a lack of progress and why one should keep fighting regardless. (more on that later).

Eagleton skewers the New Atheism, or the Brights or the Fundamentalist Athiests, whatever the papers are calling them this week. In fact he skewers them with wicked humour and a sense that it's almost too easy for anyone to spend too much time on and whilst a good portion of the book is spent ridiculing Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk (with clear precise arguments not simply straw men) he also devotes time to understanding WHY these kinds of mental frameworks are so attractive to a certain form of culture and why they are so strong.

For that matter he is no less devastating when taking apart Fundamentalist Christianity (and he openly admits he has stuck with this because it's what he knows better than any other religions out there). He is substantially more accommodating towards considered atheism, 'orthodox' christianity and ambiguity which I, at least, find hugely attractive and certainly more self-consistent than some of the nonsense spouted by both extremes in the debate. Eagleton leans fairly heavily on his central 'proper' arguments about society, politics, culture and belief on Charles Taylor - which is no bad thing - after all Taylor's work is magisterial in scope and profound in its depth.

Eagleton is no friend of fools but is very warm towards the thoughtful - and one suspects this is true regardless of whether their thoughts are in agreement with his. I suppose one cannot afford to suffer from hubris when one is a marxist in contemporary society but whatever the reason, his commitment to understanding the limits of knowledge of all types is refreshing and is the real weight in his approach to dismantling the positions taken by the American Right and the Ditchkins of the world.

It could have been a longer book. It could have been more academic, but that would have been a waste. This short book, based as it is on a series of lectures, must certainly be shocking to many, it scabrously funny and hugely recommended for anyone at a loss with how to engage in discussion about belief when the mainstream seems so determinedly ignorant, closed minded and willfully ideological.

High recommended stuff. And no, you can't have my copy - I've got two people already queuing up to borrow it.

Them and Us by Will Hutton

2011-06-27T18:30:00.000Z

Or Why Britain needs a Fair Society.
I'm a libertarian, in the old fashion sense of the word. I'm not an egalitarian although I am strongly in favour of systems that allow for equal opportunity for all. I also don't believe everyone's made equal but I do think many of us would achieve much, much more given half a chance at the right moment.

Hutton's latest book is an emotional, driven plea for a fair society. In the same vein as Amartya Sen or Joseph Stiglitz he writes out a compelling case for why fairness is, ultimately, good for almost everyone. His case is focussed on Britain, but it's no less wide ranging for that. I like Hutton and if this book is strewn through with a sense of someone pushing back against the tide then that's something I'm wearied by even if, when writing this book, I have to wonder what else he could have done, whether there was a different approach that could have made it seem more hopeful. And hopeful is something I don't feel having finished. If it's not entrenched political parties, media families, corporates or even the upper middle class's sense of entitlement, there are not many of those with power and influence in this country who appear to think fairness, moderation and equality of opportunity for all is a good thing in actual practice. Oh, sure, they all say schooling should be improved (but then send their children to private schools), they 'volunteer' like the patronising self-satisfied wealthy that they are, but ask them to commit and it's all too hard to make any real sacrifice for others. They may even vote Liberal...but come opportunities for fairness and they vote loudly and with their feet.

I leave Hutton's book not knowing what to do. I want to believe in politicians but frankly they represent lobbyists. I want to trust newspapers but working with our PR firm I know that they basically print what they think will sell news regardless of the facts. I want to be part of communities where discussion, difference and opportunity are encouraged and sought out but I'm generally not. The problem is not me either. The politicians have seen normal people leave them in thunderous droves but instead of asking why they've simply turned to corporate backers - and one wonders why...Media write what sells and despite our public claims to want fairness, what sells is gossip, slander and binary morality tales.

Bah. This book has made me angry, not with Hutton, but with the seedy, miserable little Englander society I find myself in and the desperation I feel in knowing there's pretty much nothing I can do to change it.

Should you read it? Probably.

Equations of Life by Simon Morden

2011-06-26T21:22:00.000Z

Imagine a London after the world was decimated by unknown terrorists with nuclear bombs. Now imagine it twenty years later. This is the novel setting for Morden's book (and as it turns out, the first in a trilogy) and it's a ramshackle place full of squalor and pain, think gangland Los Angeles, Russian Mafia and Hi tech corporate crime. In some ways a caustically recognisable London and in others completely different.

The story is complicated but can be boiled down to boy tries to save girl but gets resisted by all of the above and then some. It's also got high level physics thrown in as an after thought - the author's a physicist and one can't help feeling he couldn't write a protagonist who wasn't at some level a fantastic scientist - with a background that reads part Jason Bourne and part Good Will Hunting. To be honest though, despite the valiant attempt at avoiding cliches (which is only sometimes successful) and the sketchy descriptions of the world his hero lives in, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It rips along at a fair old pace and doesn't get bogged down in too many Basil Exposition moments even if it does have a number of pop culture references that Petrovich is simply too young to know of...

Morden's take on the future is interesting and underneath it is some solid thinking, not least about tech, the nature of intelligence and the point of doing good. I like this book and will definitely be picking up the other two he's written.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

2011-06-23T10:29:00.000Z

I reviewed Kraken by Mieville recently. I was underwhelmed. For a novel so bursting with ideas and potential it felt that it lost it's way and failed to grasp some of the central questions of both mythology and the nature of cities. Now you could forgive a book that didn't achieve these things if it hadn't set out so consciously to grapple with them. Kraken wasn't bad, more a heroic failure (in the best sense)

Aaronovitch is more prosaic a writer but he achieves what Kraken didn't - a coherent, engaging romp through the idea of London. It's writ through with gentle humour but what helps it work is that places itself within a much broader canvas but doesn't get lost in it. I feel that Aaronovitch has some detailed ontology of the world he's writing about but has very wisely introduced the reader to it via a narrow vista that, although hinting at the big wide world he has in mind, doesn't drown the story or the reader's interest in trying to get it all onto the page.

I read the whole of this on the way to and from Brussels - so it's a quick read, but that shouldn't make you think it's simple or dumb.

If you like fun, boys own, adventures with interesting ideas about the world then this is one for you.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

2011-06-23T10:19:00.000Z

Imagine taking EVERY modern day cliche about vampires - the virus, patient zero, 28 days later, The Walking Dead etc etc. Then mash them up in a paint by numbers novel written according to the guidance given at a creative writing course. Try, but not to hard, to hide the slot A into Tab B of the plot and then liberally sprinkle Steven King's ideas about morality into the mix.

If you were to follow my instructions you would create the Passage. It's not that it's bad (it is) but that every twist and turn should be apparent to anyone familiar with the genre by page 100.

There are decent vampire novels out there, even in today's completely saturated market - Let the Right One In remaining my favourite - but let's face it - this is a genre that needs more entries like a dead man needs more meals.

Complexity: a guided tour by Melanie Mitchell

2011-05-20T18:29:00.000Z

This was a very interesting book and undid almost all of the reductionism at the heart of David Eagleman's book, Incognito. This is an interest of mine that's endured a few years now and I continue to seek ways through understanding what I consider a very exciting area of science.
The idea that properties emerge from complex populations following relatively simple sets of rules (I have called this Axiomatic Systems in my own work modelling financial decision making in markets) seems so intuitively obvious to me that I sometimes forget just how mysterious and hard to grasp it is. I'm far from gripping the implications of network theory, complexity and emergent behaviour but I think the whole field has some fascinating possibilities.

For instance the idea that our metabolic structure exists in 4 dimensions not the three that we experience - we are creatures of four dimensional packing. Now that is very cool. It also hints at the really deep complexity of nature and that a reductionist approach, whilst eminently useful for many things, is not going to get us to a comprehensive understanding of what we're made of and how the world works.

Anyway, Mitchell does a very good job surveying the landscape of complexity theory, from game theory, to Turing machines, to ant colonies and immune systems. It's a very interesting and inspiring tour of the major areas of research and exploration. It made me wish that I'd known about this when I was a proper scientist - it might have changed the course of my life.

Incognito by David Eagleman

2011-05-15T19:48:00.002Z

I came across Sum last year and thought it was a winsome intellectual curio, both striking in its central idea and light in its presentation. Incognito is something else entirely. Popular science is never a great attraction to me but this is fantastic, breezily written and enlightening. Eagleman is most engaging and thought provoking when looking at the actual science which he presents with a winning sense of sober enthusiasm.

There are almost too many points to consider when discussing the subjects he covers but a couple stand out - the complete embodiedness of consciousness - that we seem to be so thoroughly dependent on our physical state of rour sense of identity and being. Secondly that this sense of who we are is not secondary in importance but most definitely in terms of getting to vote on individual decisions. Eagleman does come down fairly solidly on the side of the individual, without much consideration of socialisation or the actual drives that push us to learn or discipline ourselves, although he talks about the actual processes. However, that does not take away from his taking the bonnet off the engine to allow us to peek underneath.

Where he is weakest is in some of the more speculative conclusions he draws, whether about the fact that people are statistically more likely to marry people with similar names or when he is discussing the nature of moral culpability. These arguments are weak (and idealistically naive ) and one shouldn't forget that he is a scientist not a philosopher and so his method is particular to his training. It's not a great sin to be accused of, because at least he's looking for new ideas and explanations to fit the data that we have now.

This book has changed my mind on one key aspect of consciousness - and that is it's reductive deterministic nature. I've been holding out on determinism for more than a decade now and this, coupled with an In Our Time on freewill have pushed me over the line to determinism. However, I've gradually been moving this way as I've studied complexity and network theory in the last couple of years. This final step is the biggest as I think that complexity leading to emergent behaviour still allows for a sense of freedom even when LaPlace's Demon seems to have won the day.

For all of this, and the fact that this is a majestically humane effort I recommend this book wholeheartedly.

Started Early And Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

2011-05-15T19:47:00.001Z

The last couple of pages of this novel broke my heart. I think it's because I'm a dad of young children. This is another Jackson Brodie novel, although to say it's about Jackson, is to say too much. Like any of the novels where he appears Atkinson populates it with a huge number of well fleshed out characters with their own hearts, minds and foibles. What makes her winding novels work (and they're not tightly plotted but live with the nature of her characters' decisions) are the people she is writing about. They care, they fail and they move through life like most of us; sometimes getting it, sometimes failing, sometimes reaching standards that we all know fall short of what we'd like to be.

Started Early is a hymn to Yorkshire and, having spent more than a decade living there, I share her delight with the places visited and the love shown to them - regardless of whether it's Harehills or Harewood. Her own love for the county is pretty evident, although her style of writing leaves sentimentality behind to reveal the kind of affection long married couples share - that of people who know the unpleasant aspects of their lovers but love them whole not in part.

If I have any criticism, it's that I would sometimes like more Brodie and a slightly tighter narrative, but I can forget that pretty easily as really I enjoy his grumpy company (he's a bit of an old woman really) and he's always finding reasons to hate trains.

The Infinities by John Banville

2011-05-15T19:45:00.004Z

Where to start? I actually finished this a few days ago but haven't known where to begin my review. Banville's writing is precise like a surgeon's but carries as much feeling as I think it's possible to cram into each and every sentence. You might, if he were writing in a different genre, accuse him of tremendous over writing. However, he makes no pretences about the fact that his characters' their stories, and their interactions are almost incidental.

Do we ever actually get to know them well enough to become attached? Well, I was somewhat attached to Hermes but not the mortals Banville constructs the tale around. The Infinities is a modern parable, an approach to examining humanness that owes as much to Bunyan as it does to Moliere or Socrates and the characters have such loaded and unsubtle names as Adam Godley, Benny Grace, Petra and Helen (of Troy, the temptress of both men and gods).

As a parable it's allowed to be contrived - and the fact that gods and sprites appear in it doesn't excuse contrivance - but this, amongst a number of other challenges make it a far from satisfying read. As someone who reads widely across fiction and non fiction, I'm not sure whether people who thought this so amazing simply haven't seen the tropes on display here done better elsewhere (Vellum and The Master and Margarita both spring to mind).

Unusually I think this book might need a second read to pull out some of the more interesting ideas about identity but in the end I was disappointed in the people, the world they seem to live in and the gods themselves appear only as faded hedonistic octogenarians. The last isn't a flaw but it is quite tedious but that might, in itself, be a good review of the booked. Not bad but fairly tedious.

Shadowheart by Tad Williams

2011-04-28T08:48:00.000Z

Shadowheart is the last of a quartet by Tad Williams.

Is it any good? It's ok. The Dragonbone Chair was one of my seminal reading moments- I was fifteen and pretty bored with what I had been reading and I stumbled across this in WHSmiths with scarcely enough money in my pocket to pay for it. It was big and had a cast of hundreds - something I'd been in love with since I'd read Lord of the Rings when I was 11.

So I have picked up nearly every TW book since then. Caliban's hour is still my favourite although Memory, Sorrow and Thorn will be the books that had most impact on me.

Back to Shadowheart. It's the climax of the series, and it roars along at a terrific pace, pulls together a great many threads and ties pretty much everything together. This is all good but in some ways it only serves to show up the weaknesses of the overall cycle as being overlong and underwhelming.

I can't criticise his world building but I think part of the problem is that he takes such care to reveal everything about his world that one feels it's completely exhausted. The most memorable stories, for me at least, have been those where worlds (real or fantastical) continue around the characters, where they are part of a larger tapestry even if they change the very nature of the world they're in. In some ways I find this difficult because nothing's left to the imagination. So, could it have been a book shorter? Maybe. Could it have been less comprehensive? Probably.

Still, it's a decent ending to an ok series.

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

2011-04-21T19:41:00.000Z

Lev is an immigrant from the unspecified borders of the EU (There is a Baryn in Ukraine). Still mourning for his wife and without a job at home following the closure of the saw mill (they've chopped down the last tree) he comes to the UK to work and to find money and a life for what remains of his family.

Tremain captures something so lost and longing in Lev that I found this book heartbreaking to read. It has a profound sadness to it; the isolation of the lonely when surrounded by others. Specifically others who have lives, who appear to be leading them whilst all around you are dulled and made dumb by their very vitality.

Lev, who despite help and friendship, seems to wander through the pages of his life misunderstood because he himself is lost. Lev, who is remembered by those he struggles to hold on to, and who provides hope to others without ever really understanding it, is a character who eventually discovers echoes of himself in others and remembers enough to look to the future.

There is a scene in this story so wrenching that I burst into tears in the middle of my commute and had to stop reading lest I started blubbering like a child. Sure, I'm a father with a daughter the same age as Maya, his own child, and so I can identify with that, but Tremain's writing is fluid, caring and gentle without ever recoiling from the casualness with which we use each other.

This is a fantastic book and will remind you of your humanity.

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

2011-04-16T09:29:00.000Z

This is the second book by Patrick Rothfuss, the first being The Name of the Wind. It's a high fantasy, although it's in the realm of a Midsummer's Night's Dream rather than Lord of the Rings. Medieval Universities, courts, warrior tribes and Fae are on the menu but Rothfuss' shtick is to take an unusual approach to telling the story.

Well, perhaps not that original, his protagonist, Kvothe, is a bard, the last of his family, a precocious genius and a young man making good. After Graeme Green it's text that can be run through at quite a pace without pausing too long. However, Rothfuss has a charm which is a lack of over writing and imbuing his character with a lack of centre, a number of gentle but interesting flaws and a cast of supporting characters (and they are no more than that) that are just developed enough not to answer guilty to the charge that they've been seconded from 'Generic Fantasy Pool Number 1.'

Rothfuss has obviously done quite a deal of research into medieval society and the world rings true enough for the levels of technology and even the information available (at a mundane level) to scholars and medics.

Yet I finished the book with a pretty deep sense of disappointment. This is the second book with the same character but I still don't know where it's going. The books don't really stand alone, yet at the same time they do't deliver a Big Bad nor do they really offer a sense of progress. I'm off to Rose Tremain next and I am looking forward to someone who knows how to write a narrative rather than a story.

Is this worth a read? Truth be told, I enjoyed it. Can I honestly recommend it? No.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

2011-04-15T18:18:00.000Z

This is a great, and very quick, book. I read it in just three commutes to work. I also think it's spectacular both in its delivery of complex subjects such as how CDOs work and about some of the characters at the heart of what was going on from 2005 through 2008.
I confess I know most of the names already and have even met a couple of these guys and this book rings completely true. My own work environment at the time was somewhat morally sound - compared to these guys it was pretty much like working for the Archbishop of Canterbury - but I know people across the industry, both on the buy and the sell side and this account is accurate in many respects.

For sure I definitely know many of the people who were churning this crap out like it was going out of fashion and in my current role I deal day in, day out, with the aftermath of what was being done in that period in the Capital Markets.

Now, this book does deal with the instruments and the actual events but what makes it compelling and a book I would recommend to anyone who's even slightly interested in why we're living in an Age of Austerity, is that Lewis brings alive the characters, their adventure in this period of history and in many ways it will be the definitive history of a time that probably won't be repeated for at least a generation (I hope).

Get this book and read it, you owe it to yourself to understand what happened out there.

Injustice by Daniel Dorling

2011-04-15T18:12:00.000Z

I heard Dorling on the BBC radio show, Start The Week. I was impressed and he clearly rattled some of the more conservative guests who appeared with him. I work in an industry that doesn't stop very often to wonder about the impact of its existence except to perhaps nervously laugh about its position in the world. RIght now, most of our cynicism is reserved for those who caused the financial crash who seem to have popped up to advise governments (including an entire team from one notably failed bank who, obviously, went to help 'prudently' run the newly government owned banks).

So I opened this knowing he'd have someone like me lined up in both barrels. I wasn't very surprised then to be hit squarely in the chest. Dorling has some very pertinent points, especially about exclusion, wage slavery, class and racial segregation via access to wealth and last but not least, the deleterious impact of income inequality.

However, his rattling away at anyone who wants to make more stuff, or earn more money, or to have the best things in life (be that education, travel, learning or healthcare) is somewhat pointless. His message, when nuanced, is battering enough for people who value 'stuff and more stuff at others' expense' he doesn't need to shout at the top of his lungs about how evil they are. Firstly they probably aren't evil - they simply have a society that has allowed itself to believe these are the unspoken goods to which it is committed. In that sense I'm surprised there isn't more of a focus on why people don't and haven't objected to this shift away from decent wages for the bottom 80% of society over the last 30 years.

Globalisation isn't really mentioned and I was surprised that he wasn't a stronger advocate of some of the more sensible measures for restoring a sense of fairness to societies that have swallowed the 'we can all get richer' lie. Ideas such as higher tax rates for the rich, for inheritance tax, for robin hood taxes on financial institutions and for paying certain sections of government enough to actually do their jobs (such as inland revenue, regulators such as the BoE and the FSA, fraud office etc.). Unfortunately what is based upon strong research and solid moral commitment is undermined by a confusion of the rich with the problem. The rich defend their position (not many can easily declare that they are the problem!) and they necessarily have a loud voice but that's not the end of the story as all of human history has shown us. Indeed as Egypt and Tunisia have shown us recently.

The issue is though, would our government listen to a million people on the streets of London?

Well, we still invaded Iraq on a series of lies didn't we...so perhaps Dorling is right to be so strident. Is the book a call to arms? Nearly but not quite and even though it's helped stir up my own moral centre I'm not sure where to go with it.

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

2011-04-02T15:54:00.000Z

I had high hopes for this and was disappointed. I think most of the reason for my lack of affinity is personal.
I'm a physicist and I love numbers - so I had kind of hoped that I'd see that love translate into an easy read of what Alex writes about. Unfortunately this book doesn't seem to have a destination in mind and most of the chapters feel like stand alone essays with little or no connection to each other.

Additionally, there are a number of 'conversation's Alex has in the book that go nowhere. The best example of unresolved exploration is occurs early in the book and revolves around a conversation with a numerologist.

I'm not even remotely convinced by the nonsense that is numerology BUT Bellos does little more than tell about the conversation. He doesn't explore what's behind the idea of numerology, why it's nonsense or even explore the more fascinating statistics about how numbers does impact our lives (whether it's the idea that people born in the years immediately following the post war era were bound to have opportunities to 'be' Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, or something akin to what the authors of Freakonomics look at). Instead he simply moves on to something else. It's quite frustrating because it's not informative and nor is it particularly entertaining.

Now, I found the maths itself tiresome - but that, as I open with, is personal, I'm numerate, and so the basic explanations were not what I was looking for.

Still, setting that aside I really wish this felt like an adventure. Sadly, most of the time, it felt more like a journey on a delayed train. It took far longer to get there than I'd have liked and the stations I passed through on the way had no more meaning than being names on boards where other people wait.

Our Man in Havana by Graeme Greene

2011-03-28T18:30:00.000Z

I love The Power and the Glory.

This is a comedy, or an entertainment as Greene would have it. It is funny. It is also a hugely pertinent satire that resonates today. When you have sexed up dossiers, ex-prime ministers schmoozing Gadaffi in secret and political parties and corporations simply making up stories to bolster their voice then this story remains solidly relevant.

Wormold is a flaccid and really post modern character. The people he comes across as feeble, ruthless and futile as any you might bump into in Louis De Berniere's South American Trilogy but without the magical realism.

It is a lovely piece of writing and is what one might call a sideshow attraction. However, it's a sideshow attraction with heart and a punchy message.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

2011-03-28T18:23:00.000Z

I have a curious affection for her earlier work Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard and so hoped that this was really worthy of the booker - Desai certainly has the chops for this.

However, reading this is like eating a sumptuous nine course banquet the morning after...in someone else's house. Certainly enjoyable but tinged with having missed the party itself and guiltily eating that which does not belong to you.

Desai's prose is tinged with sadness, a melancholy heaviness to the structure and composition that leaves the heart sombre and tinged with regret regardless of the characters and narrative. In that it is certainly a triumph.

I suppose part of my less than overwhelmed response to such a finely written piece of storytelling is that I feel I have been here before, seen these sights elsewhere. Maybe not in such a powerful way (although the themes dealt with here have strong echoes with the God of Small Things) but precedence can be as powerful as technique in its impact.

Can I recommend this? Not really. It's completely personal and I almost feel wrong in not recommending it but that's the point I think. I like this book, but anything that leaves the reader feeling guilty from their experience isn't going to be coupled with pleasure.

Guilty? Yes. I have a life that overshadows the characters in this story. I would wager you do too. And that is a challenge the book speaks to loudly.

The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies

2011-03-09T09:21:00.000Z

Ostensibly a book about SETI (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence) it's really a book about why, after 50 years of trying fairly hard, we have yet to find any evidence of any forms of life (or even the right conditions) elsewhere in the galaxy.

Davies' view is that there isn't intelligent life elsewhere in this galaxy. He hopes there might be and hopes the very long odds are balanced by the depth of possibilities but he comes down on the 'it's pretty unlikely there's intelligent life out there. This chimes with my own thinking, partly because of the Fermi Paradox (if there's life out there, then where the hell is everyone) but also because it does seem that the conditions for life to emerge at all do seem to be pretty thin on the ground. Setting aside gamma ray bursts, stable star trajectories, appropriately sized planets, moons, solar system stability, position in the galaxy, tectonic activity, chemical mix etc etc etc. The odds would seem very long indeed.

In fact it's proved pretty damn hard to even find forms of life here on earth that aren't the standard - i.e. that might use arsenic instead of phosporus. We might be so improbably a feature of existence that it takes an entire galaxy (or universe) for us to arise...now there's a thought.

However whilst fairly easy to read the book is unsatisfying on a basic level - so many of Davies' thoughts don't go anywhere and quite a few are simply plopped onto the page as if he'd just thought of them at a dinner party (or read about them in a sci-fi book) and hadn't actually critically examined them.

For instance his views on inorganic lifeforms (i.e. machine intelligence) makes massive assumptions about the nature of intelligence as if it can be reduced to a purely quantitative understanding (the number of teraflops is his preferred approach), or that religions would not be able to facilitate finding life elsewhere - his misunderstanding of the 'only begotten son' text is particularly outstanding.

Also, having briefly touched on SETI as a religion, which is a very very interesting topic, he shies away from the implications of this and why supposedly rational scientists (who grew up with star trek, cold wars, Arthur C Clarke and post modernism) plump for attributing god like powers to aliens at every turn. The idea that we could rely on aliens to be altruistic is one of the more amusing and relies on such a romantic argument about moral goodness it never fails to make me slap my forehead in the lack of self awareness it reveals.

So it's a good book from two perspectives - the science is interesting and it reveals a whole lot about the social reasoning of a particular branch of science (cosmology and its hanger on fantasy subjects astrobiology, evolutionary biology etc.). One has the sense Davies shied away from really laying out the flaws in the more speculative regions for fear of a backlash. Shame really because blunt honesty could help the SETI project more than pandering to personal prejudices dressed up as scientific endeavour.

Should we do SETI? Given what I've already written you might think not but personally I think it's a useful activity and one to be appluaded. We may well be in a galaxy teaming with intelligent life and we'd be fools not to be humble enough to think the odds of there being others could be just as much in the favour of life as against it. Life might be tenacious and aggressive. It might always find a way when given half a chance. That's something I'd love to know the answer to.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

2011-03-05T11:12:00.000Z

This is a Hugo Award winner. I fail to see why. I think because it's set in Asia rather than the west and deals with some (media) hip subjects. That's interesting but hardly merits such attention. I have read four other books whilst this has languished on my bed side table.

The problems? It's painfully slow to start. The science is...narrow. There are many ideas here but they're limited to a very small part of real science and hence the world he's constructed, whilst interesting, appears to be missing huge parts of what one might expect from a near future world.

The dystopia was very reminiscent of early Ballard, especially the Drowned World, and the lusciousness of the environment is very interesting.

The politics is also interesting but hardly as deep as non-genre comparables and really, when compared to writers like Stephenson or Ryman, doesn't stand up against the best within the genre either. In some ways I think this was acclaimed because it s a cross over book not because of the ideas within it. Oryx and Crake has much the same feel (although I would suggest this is better than that cliché ridden smugly condescending piece of writing).

I eventually took this on my commute and made it through very quickly. However, I remain unconvinced by the story and wouldn't recommend it.

The Good Angel of Death by Andrey Kurkov

2011-03-05T11:04:00.001Z

I like Kurkov. Ever since Death and the Penguin I've looked forwards to new translations into English. He's a Russian Murakami. However, he is much more hit and miss than Murakami and this book, with a couple of caveats, is a real miss.

Granted, I don't know Ukranian culture and it's possible that I am under the illusion that it's closer to my own than Japanese. But I doubt it, so it's with a sad feeling that I am left with a feeling of a disjointed story with many missing parts. If it was because I'm missing bucket loads of cultural references I could forgive it for my own shortcomings would be to blame. Whilst there are some lovely moments in this book, it feels, on the whole, like a collection of disparate short stories without some substantial drama. The characters are blown along but rarely feel anything in the face of death, kidnapping, sudden marriage or enrichment. The absurd (e.g. the embodiment of the spirit of a people) does little to cover up thin characterisation and there are a number of strands which had promise but are never explored in a meaningful way. These problems only highlight the main weakness of the novel - that so much is assumed to be satisfactory when, from a reader's perspective it isn't.

Is the sense of powerlessness that steeps the pages of this book a reflection of Ukraine at the moment? I hope not because it would be a terrible state of being. Regardless of that possible satirical bent, this is not something I could recommend

The Crippled God by Steven Erikson

2011-03-05T10:56:00.001Z

This is the last in the cycle of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. For a long cycle it has one of the most complete and satisfying endings out there. I laughed out loud whilst reading alone and I cheered at least once. It is a very good ending to an epic story.

Erikson has not made the mistake of people like G R R Martin and Robert Jordan in coming to a story without knowing the ending and then struggling to get there over ever increasing numbers of 'filler' books. That is perhaps unkind (or at least could be perceived so) about those authors, but take Jordan, whose Wheel of Time series was supposed to only be 4 books when it started...then 7...then 10 and now 14.

Erikson avoids many of the normal clichés and you never feel he's written himself into a hole. There remain a couple of mysteries I would have liked resolved (I'm looking at your conversation with Mother Dark mister high mage) but that's just me. Overall I loved this and read it in a week of late nights.

If you've not read the previous 9? Well I'd suggest you go find Gardens of the Moon and get cracking. At 3.5 million words it's going to take you a while.

The Elephant in the classroom by Jo Boaler

2011-02-16T21:56:00.000Z

I love maths. I don't do enough any more and at the heart of my love for maths is my love of physics and my natural aptitude for pattern spotting. I am also married to someone who doesn't like maths in a "Panic and run for the hills" kind of way.

I'm also a father with two young children. I'm hugely concerned that they don't see what I view as a beautiful language as a horror to run from.

Jo Boaler's book is a great little introduction and guide to why some people find maths so traumatising and how we can help ourselves and young people avoid developing this relationship. Sure some of it is about studies say this and that, some of it is about bad teaching at school but a lot of this book is about how to get it right.

Boaler concentrates on resources, on how to make learning a complex and fascinating subject interesting, accessible and meaningful for children. It has practical tools and approaches which I'm hoping even my wife can look at and not feel daunted by. I could go on as to why having an ease with maths is so important but I won't; that should be a post in and of itself.

However, I will say this; I have already recommended this book to everyone I know with children. I have also recommended it to people I know who are smart but hate and/or fear maths in their everyday lives.

Why? Because Jo Boaler captures something about turning maths from the bogey man into a best friend and that's a relationship I wish everyone had.

The Rule of Law by Tom Bingham

2011-02-15T20:18:00.002Z

I have an enduring fascination with power and how people constitute themselves. With how we organise ourselves successfully enough to build roads, invest lasers and create money. It has always seemed to me that stability is a lucky accident but there are certainly things we can do to extend the incidence of that accident when it comes along.

Having a legal system one can know, access and rely on is, for me, one of the essential instruments to creating islands of stability within which societies can last long enough to build something bigger than their individual parts.

Tom Bingham's book is heartfelt and passionate. It is, perhaps surprisingly, only political where political decisions and the idea of a fair, accessible and equitable legal system is impinged for the sake of personal or political preferences. However that does make it all the more powerful as a book.

Bingham explores not simply the basic concept of what the rule of law actually is but then goes on to examine how it manifests itself across the world but with particular emphasis to Britain and the US. Explorations of Habeus Corpus and knowing that the UK effectively outlawed torture in the 14th Century because it was considered unreliable and cruel even then are exciting and humbling statements for us to consider in light of today's actions by our governments.

Tom Bingham also examines the successes of law, of where it has been a greatly progressive force whilst never losing sight of the fact that laws without context can be absurd and dangerous.

I also learnt that although we have a body of law that could be realistically viewed as a constitution we are not a constitutional democracy. We are a parliamentary democracy - which implies parliament can pass legislation that flouts the rule of law with gusto and never be challenged legitimately by its people. That is one flawed system but better, I think, than a constitutional democracy where the Law is King. Here, with the US as a perfect exemplar, the system fails more seriously because the law cannot help but become politicised and then suffer from capture by the powers that be much more insidiously (because it persists and there is no mechanism for ending such capture).

A superb, short, clear book about an idea we should all be interested in.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2011-02-04T19:23:00.004Z

I should say upfront that I'm a Franzen fan. I have been since the Corrections was first published and I'm now a happy owner of the uncorrected preprint of Freedom. Did I like Freedom? Yes. If you like Franzen there's no point reading further.

If you didn't like the Corrections (or his others such as Strong Motion) this won't convert you.

If you have never read Franzen and enjoy proper novels (and by proper I mean stories that glory in their own telling and don't need to be driven by a tab A into slot b structure) then this book and indeed all of his works are for you. Would I start with Freedom? Sure, why the hell not.

Freedom. The book is about Freedom. Not politically (well it is but not in some Rawlsian sense) but Freedom as America thinks it understands it. Freedom is about America, about its peoples and the stories they tell themselves about this, their most precious, commodity.

Franzen has taken the pulse perceptively and the story is fantastic, sympathetic, unflinching and poignant. I began it and then couldn't put it down. I nearly missed my stop on the underground more than once and in the end began taking it to bed with me (abandoning another book in the process). Franzen peoples his story with profoundly ordinary people looking to make the best of their lives. Mistakes are made and War and Peace invoked both in terms of the underlying structure of the book but also by the characters.

In some ways it shouldn't work - it's so close to being a pastiche of those books that promise a powerful story of three generations of a family. Yet it does. Here's how it affected me - I spent numerous hours reflecting on my own life, how close it was to those in the story and whether I could fall into the pits they had fallen into whilst trying so hard to avoid them. When one has a chance to wonder about one's own life because of characters with whom one has only passing similarities in real life it's a testament to just how well the author has captured what it means to navigate a normal life.

There's so much here; I'm sure academics will study it. Sure, but the real power? It's layered sympathy for its protagonists leaves you wistful when it finally ends. Sure they've moved on but you wish they hadn't. You wish they'd turned to look at you and wish you well before they left.

So how long do I have to wait until his next book? Anyone?

Christianity and Contemporary Politics by Luke Bretherton

2011-01-30T22:06:00.002Z

Written by a friend of friend - I originally picked this up to read on behalf of someone else.

It is a thought provoking book and I think it is also a very important book. It isn't really about politics and in some very real ways, it is only tangentially about Christianity.

However, it is extremely provocative, challenging and in the end very much worth reading if you are interested at all in any of the following:

the idea of the state in contemporary society
the idea of community in modern culture
the impact of individual identity in modern culture
the intersection of contemporary European Christianity and post war liberal consensus politics.

Sure the last of those bullet points could appear so specific as to be a niche with no one in it but to be honest I know many people for whom that last point is something they've grappled with at length without getting to a satisfactory destination.

I, personally, can't subscribe to Luke's view of the State, nor for what he considers is the difference between the 'two cities' and I find following after Augustine in areas where his profoundly greek dualisms guide his theology deeply problematic. However, I have had a tough time reading this book, not because I disagree with it but because it's challenged me to think very carefully about what I DO think and about what I've accepted as the end of my previous explorations of this area. Luke offers some superb thinking in this area and even where I find his arguments problematic it has only served to make me think harder about my own ideas.

If there's one thing to take away from this book it is that there is real substance yet to be mined from thinking through how European (and specifically British) Christianity intersects with the political establishment and wider culture.

Highly recommended.

Sources of Power by Gary Klein

2011-01-26T14:00:00.002Z

This book is superb. I am currently recommending it to anyone who works for a living, who plays games, who eats dinner or sleeps. It is one of the most interesting but also influential books (at least on me) that I've read in at least a year and has caused me to reconsider a number of strategies I have historically adopted for making decisions but also about how I manage teams and groups I am a part of.

Most interestingly for me is that Klein has, in this book, gently overturned a lot of what I've been taught (and ignored) down the years about effective strategising and decision making. It's helped me understand the point of a lot of my own unarticulated rules for making choices both when at leisure, under pressure and how I differ in that from many other people I know.

The book is peppered with anecdotes that clearly explain the points being made and most importantly they're interesting and there's not a lot of wasted space. I am generally very nervous about 'management books' and to be honest I bought this because Amazon recommended it and it had the word power in the title. To my surprise it was about something I'd normally avoid as pseudoscience and was both articulate and well researched.

I can't recommend this enough.

Kraken by China Mieville

2011-01-26T13:27:00.002Z

So, I liked The City and the City. It was thoughtful and the central premise was interesting (although quite close in nature to Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde). As a procedural detective story and a postmodern morality play (i.e. morality itself was under ther microscope) it read well and was tightly plotted.

I found Kraken hard work. And please, if you've read some of my other reviews you'll know it's not because i shy away from difficult books. It was hard because of three things.

Firstly he engages in pointless neoligism. In a book about cults, many of which are less bizarre than those found in the real world but rather than fall back on the words that exist already he sets about creating new ones. Whilst interesting and a demonstration of his own cleverness it's kind of disappointing that more respect wasn't accorded to the real source material.

Second, he can't decide if the fantastical elements are real or not and so vacillates between giving them real substance and then calling them for fakery. Well, you have to decide, in a book where a giant squid could be god and real 'magical' powers are exhibited by characters you can't then claim that they aren't real at the same time. This is a big problem and undermines the entire idea of a secret london based upon the crypto cultic.

Finally, his ending is cheap beyond belief. A minor character with no development is crucial to plot resolution and does so in the awful 'star trek' widget manner for no discernable reason (or at least the reason given is flimsy beyond credibility). There are rules to telling stories. Sure contingency is a great concept to explore within the story but making the story contingent? Does. not. work.

This book was a huge disappointment. It's brimming with ideas but they're undisciplined and out of control and in the end it feels like they took control of the author rather than the other way around. And on a personal note...creationism is the cheapest plot device EVER. I felt as soiled by that element as if I'd spend ten minutes reading a guardian cif feedback on an article by someone who discusses faith. Enough already.

Fludd by Hilary Mantel

2011-01-09T13:49:00.003Z

I loved Wolf Hall. It was one of my favourite books of 2010. It touched me, both in the humanity of a reviled figure such as Cromwell but also in how I saw pieces of myself in his choices and commitments.

Fludd is a completely different tale. Not historical fiction and now epic in its sweep. It is, however, a gentle parable about love found, transformation and hope rediscovered. It takes place in the most dour town in England and this comic (book) backdrop provides the symbol of the landscape of the main characters' souls.

At heard it is a shaggy God story but it is saved from sentimentality by a sharp eye for human drifting and rootlessness. It is honest and sharp tongued but never mean spirited.

At around 200 pages it is short and sweet and the ending is both thrilling and poignant. Mantel's pose is poetic, measured and never wasted. It is rare that someone with such command of language also captures stories worth telling, she is a talent to follow.

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

2010-12-31T16:22:00.004Z

Awesome start to a very good series. I'm not a great reader of fantasy or sci-fi so I've handled this a few times in the stores and never really committed. What got me over the line was buying it for someone else as a guinnea pig. They loved it so I gave it a try.

Erikson's books are not short, nor are they forgiving and accessible. However, they are well worth the investment. This is a great opening to what the world Erikson has created is all about. In particular you meet a number of key people (although you won't know it until later books). On that note it is difficult to review the first of a ten book cycle because so much relies on the plot arcs that find their fullness only over the course of 11,000 pages...However, Erikson does a good job of keeping each book somewhat traditional with a beginning, middle and end. More importantly perhaps is that you know that his series has a definite ending in mind, unlike some authors I could mention.

What I find especially satisfying about Erikson's work are the world views he has built into the narrative and you can sense an intimate understanding of our own histories in what he lays out amongst the cultures he explores. What keeps me coming back are the moralities, the ambiguities. Erikson's religions and characters are not great on redemption, in fact, as with most of our own religions, there's no concept of religious forgiveness or redemption. It's a very nihilistic approach (with elements of gnosticism) and as such quite realistic if you know anything about religions other than the Judeo/Christian/Islam family. I don't see this as a criticism of monotheism as such just that Erikson has deployed those ideas which underlay just about all religions outside of this family.

If you like the moral contrasts of simpler fodder then steer clear but if you want realistic nuanced characters then Erikson is a good choice.

Finally, let's be clear, this is fantasy and one doesn't read it to savour each word (like you might with Hillary Mantel or John Banville) but nevertheless what Erikson has accomplished are stories that grip you and demand to be experienced and enjoyed from beginning to end.

Not Completely Gone

2009-01-27T11:07:00.003Z

Sorry for the absence - I've lost a hard drive and am waiting for a new one. It died completely, do I've been a bit set back. That and working like a dog...

Will be back soon I hope - reviews of Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Programming the Universe, Altered Carbon, Vol 1 of Tillich's Systematic Theology and another which I can't remember right now...(being at work and away from my bookshelves...)

Plus a couple of essays, one on information and decision making and another on information and rationality.

Stew

Delays

2008-12-29T14:34:00.003Z

Well one of my pc's is suffering the dreaded bsod because of a software update...so until that's fixed I'm actually short of a number of essays I was planning to post...

Will hopefully be back up to speed within the week. Hope you've had a good Christmas and a good new year and I hope 2008 wasn't too painful for you!

Stew

The difference between structuring and valuing complex securities

2008-12-18T12:21:00.002Z

I’ve been thinking through the ideological background to the various discussions I’ve been having about methods for pricing complex securities these last few weeks and wanted to put some thoughts down, perhaps to have a subsequent discussion but also to sort, in my own mind at least, some of the issues. I’m thinking this through as I go so apologies if it’s not robust…

I think key to the discussion is that the market is trying to find efficient ways of valuing instruments in illiquid and dark markets. Moreover we aren’t typically trying to read the future per se but we are trying to determine what the value of the instrument would be if they were to exit today. The adjunct of this is that we need a view on future performance in order to determine what we think any prospective bidder is likely to think of the asset being sold.

However, the anchor here is its exit value today rather than its exit value in the future. In the last couple of days I’ve been comparing the types of analysis I would have performed when structuring CDO/CMBS/RMBS etc in my previous role with those types of analysis used to value these instruments. They differ in two key respects.

Firstly the analysis carried out in structuring these types of transaction is a ratings based approach. Always Monte Carlo but Ratings based nonetheless. The implication being that risk is horizontally tranched in order to capture parts of the risk profile for differing levels of reward for investors. By definition different tranches are expected to pay out under their own specific stress scenarios – AAA are harsher and more punitive than BBB for instance with the proviso that the rest of the structure can collapse in a AAA scenario but the AAA investors will get all their money back. i.e. to get AAA on a tranche that tranche has to survive all the stresses one would reasonably expect it to suffer under a multitude of possible outcomes. When assessing value on these bases the approach is again to anchor analysis around the ratings. The circularity here is obvious but still unrecognised (and by that I mean people see the emperor has no clothes but no one’s prepared to start laughing…yet) by most of the market and especially the regulators. Indeed I have argued strongly in the past in various official forums that we are in a state of regulatory capture via the Basel II accord which enforces a ratings based approach. Even if that approach, by definition, leads us to the problems we have now by conspicuously incentivising agents to work the rules (e.g. banks working the AIRB/IRB/Standardised approaches in the Basel II rules to manage their core capital ratios as thinly as possible).

However, the point was not that we determined some value using these approaches but rather that we defined our assets according to a market recognised benchmark. The market would then price to the benchmark. The pain has come, in part, because the benchmarks have been found to be wanting as fundamentals have deteriorated – in two ways. There was an implicit assumption that at worst the environment was in equilibrium – that is it was stable and wouldn’t get any worse even if it didn’t continue to improve indefinitely. The second is that even though historic numbers covering previous periods of stress were used to determine the benchmark they were, because of the probabilistic approach, given an appropriate weight depending on how likely it was considered that such events would occur again. The subtlety here, often missed, is that the probability of occurrence was essentially derived from translating an event relaxation time (the time between successive periods of stress) into a probability that at any particular point that stress would be experienced.

Somewhat differently the traders worked to an alternate mindset. We sold instruments designed to give a certain return. Traders bought based not upon potential capital returns but upon income streams for a set risk profile (our aforementioned ratings based view). Now the traders I know in London used similar methods for analysing instruments as I used to structure them – Monte Carlo based approaches for getting sign off from credit (short hand approaches like DMM/DCFs for getting a feel for the instrument). The better ones also factored in correlation assumptions which are typically entirely absent (or at best extremely crude) from structuring models. However, regardless of their sophistication they were buying for two reasons:
1. To meet investment criteria which are/were normally ratings based. It was generally accepted that the idea of a rating giving an indication of likely full payout on capital for the older was established within structured finance.
2. The investment would generate an acceptable return when set against a particular rating

For them a valuation was important but not the primary driver for buying (at least during periods of stability – this has changed now both as those caught long deteriorating investments are in trouble and those with cash are wondering when the best time to make a capital based investment will be.

For all these parties though it was the time the instrument was being held that was the key feature of their behaviour. These types of instrument would be traded as margins changed (and if there was a significant change in their principal value) but generally they were held and considered based upon their longer term worth. In marginally volatile markets where Fair Value isn’t pogoing like a kangaroo one could damp any concerns one might have about potential sensitivity to discontinuous perspectives regarding credit quality.

This differs significantly from the essential nature of what valuation is for. It is attempting, in most cases, to provide a value of an instrument for reporting purposes as if it was being exited today. Investment criteria, strategy and sentiment are irrelevant in so far as they are not quantifiable. What it cares about (per accounting standards) is what a party would be able to sell the instrument for if they had to do so. Now setting discussions about distressed markets, forced sales, illiquidity and market inefficiency aside a number of issues raise themselves in light of the type of approach structurers have.

Fair Value assessment is not fundamentally concerned with the future value of an instrument just in the risk neutral value of the instrument today. So whilst the future value is an important component of the analysis it isn’t the driving force as such. It’s a second order concern. If we think of it in terms of Boolean logic, it is one of the second order inputs that feeds into the first order result in our hierarchy. This means the methods we may consider suitable for determining fair value may well differ from those the market would employ if it was seeking to structure or invest. (i.e. this is the difference between buy side and sell side and presumably one of the reasons accounting standards define Fair Value as the amount sold for not the amount it could be bought for).

It strikes me that two approaches could be characterised thusly:
1. Ratings based approach – this looks to the market to determine what the market currently thinks suitable returns are for the ratings benchmark.
2. Asset based approach – this looks to the underlying assets and attempts to determine what the market believes will happen to the underlying assets. This is fully decoupled from the ratings of the tranched Notes.

Both seek to build up an idea of appropriate default rates and recoveries – one referencing the benchmark, the other taking its lead from current implied market expectations regarding the underlying assets. The two clearly overlap. However I’d liken it to trees planted in the same soil which have grown together over time.

In this sense I think both can capture current market expectations of value from a Fair Value perspective and this is what we’re asked to do by the majority of clients. However, reading this article from Bloomberg made me think through where and how the market is likely to change structurally.

Now the thrust of this article is that AIG is looking like it will have to write down an additional $30bn of assets – mainly relating to CDS contracts. However they made, their defence, the following statement: “Our methods have been thoroughly vetted and externally evaluated,” Lewis said.

However, regardless of this it’s becoming apparent that these vetting procedures (and the external evaluators) have failed to capture the real risks – indeed they have consistently valued the instruments too highly. Criticising the methods AIG used, Tanya Styblo Beder said “It’s not that all of the models are wrong,’ said Tanya Styblo Beder, chairman of risk-management adviser SBCC Group in New York. “The problem is that people made simplifying assumptions so the calculations were manageable and then had no warning labels to help the users understand the ramifications of these assumptions.”

And finally in a paper titled “The Economics of Structured Finance” that will be published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a group of Harvard Business School professors says the greatest problem in the market for CDOs and other structured securities isn’t the decline in value of the underlying assets because of the credit crunch. It is that the securities were overpriced from the start because the models failed to assess the risks, the professors said.

Now, the market is doing as international accounting standards require, and we do so using cutting edge technology. I have no problem with our integrity or expertise in relationship to the work we do.

What I’m thinking about is the road ahead. It is a plausible scenario that ratings will continue to be downgraded and as such will offer a declining credibility within the market (but not disappearing as long as the state of regulatory capture pertains) such that valuations performed one day could collapse on another as ratings are downgraded (e.g. consider CDOs which were Lehman originated which were downgraded overnight from AAA to D). The downgrades imply a deterioration in the instruments which is not necessarily related to the fundamental performance of the asset.

What is likely to happen here? The market is likely to remain confused, as both approaches to valuing these types instruments are valid under accounting rules and hence are used by members of community as authoritative measures of value.

A new route to valuation needs to be constructed. One that allows us to effectvely capture the risks we face.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

2008-12-17T19:48:00.001Z

Amazing. Some books are carefully written, heavy on 'plot' and demand you to consider them. This is by contrast effortlessly written, gracefully plotted and put together with such skill and flair that the craft and furious intelligence just beneath the surface are hidden quite thoroughly from sight.

I loved it. The language was sumptuous, feastlike, the flavours and textures settling on the mind like the most complex wine accompanying the most exquisite meal. The story is ludicrous and bizarre. One has flavours of the grey mouser, of dungeons and dragons and yet it's this world we're exploring, there is no magic. It's no surprise that it's dedicated to Michael Moorcock.

I read this yesterday. I suggest you read it today.

Complex Adaptive Systems by Miller and Page

2008-12-17T13:26:00.002Z

I've had this a few weeks and I was supposed to read a different book on quantum information theory but in an early morning haze I picked this up by mistake...

I have to say it's one of the best written science books I've read in a long while. The language is straightforward, well written and carefully clear. It avoids unnecessarily long terms and technical jargon as well. Which for a book aimed at graduates is no mean feat.

The authors present three things in the book - the idea of modelling as a useful scientific tool, the basics of those models currently in use and current areaas of open debate. All in all a very interesting tour of current thinking around complex systems and how they arise, evolve and can be modelled. The book is just one in a series of like themed explorations so I shall definitely be getting a couple of the others. It's even prompted me to go back to my agent based markets model to do some more work.

Perhaps one question it carefully avoids is the nature of accessible information. Whilst they do discuss what questions we can hope to answer I'm not sure enough is made of the subjects we can't look to models to answer (or perhaps any mathematical reasoning). Having said that though they are clear about this being a subject in its infancy and it was refreshing to read a book like this that was devoid of grandiose claims regarding what can be accomplished.

All in all a highly recommended book, even for those with only poor math skills (as long as your ability to think logically is reasonably developed).

The paradox of predicting the unknown

2008-12-14T13:28:00.002Z

Demitry Sevastianov of Multi-Criteria blog posted a comment about one of my posts on methods within Finance. It was a good one highlighting some loose terminology on my part...

So this is kind of a corrective to that, addressing both his comment but also trying to take that debate forwards as I like some of his ideas about fuzzy logic sets. So when I used the phrase efficient system I was being a but naughty - what I meant was the implied efficiency of systems that fit the central limit theorem.

There are many systems that exhibit randomness and complexity (ironically ordered systems are the ones which don't exhibit complexity in a mathematical sense) and these are, by definition, extremely hard to model predictively.

Part of my thinking is that efficient market theories are lacking - in two respects:
1. They fail completely to account for systemic risk - i.e. they only work within their own definition. Now that's a truism, of course they only work within their own frameworks, but when one is truly trying to capture the behaviour of a market it is very well worth emphasising that because when an entire market models itself on a methodology that fails to capture its behaviour reminders that the methodologies are inadequate can never come too often.
2. They fail completely to account for the complexity that agents introduce to the system. It's a central tenet of these theories that agents have no impact, that they're reduced to noise within the system but this isn't the case. Whilst there are emergent structures within complex systems they are led by individual actions (even if once they've commenced their overall shape is decided by axiomatic foundations rather than further individual decisions.

The market uses monte carlo and even simpler methods (although the mind boggles at that!) to manage its risk. I'm continuously surprised at the schoolboy simplicity of the models deployed - and normally on the premise that that's what everyone else does! In my experience, when pressed, people don't actually know the issues and even if they do they aren't capable of distinguishing between the severity of different flaws in different models.

A sea change is coming - at least I'm hopeful it is - where people will recognise that it's inappropriate to use methods for modelling risk on the basis that they're what has always been done. In some senses this level of blind orthodoxy belongs only in fundamentalist religion.

My own view, and the area I think is probably most productive in future, is that agent based modelling is the way forwards. We're never going to be able to model the world 1:1. It's a nonsense anyway, the whole point of this is to gain an operator that produces key features of the real world without having to model the whole world.

Axiomatic agent based models have within their very foundation the rules for complexity and for appropriate levels of predictiveness. The issue with complex systems is that they can't be used for prediction. At least not in the fashion that finance professionals would like - exact results.

One of the key unintended effects of the current crisis is the refocussing of what constitute acceptable ideas of risk. Previously it was in the heart of investing that investments can increase as well as decrease in value. Now we're being pressured to think of ways of insuring our investments can only ever increase in value. Now this ain't never goin' ta happen cowboy. The revelation that most people don't have a clue about the meaning of the word risk is quite scary but the revelation that we're allowing these numpties to guide our legislation and future shape of the market is downright hallucination inducingly moronic.

I like fuzzy logic, I think it's a useful bridge between pseudo-random models and reality, but I'm not yet convinced it's the way forward. Like I say I think agent based modelling, still in its infancy, is the most likely discipline to give us insight into capturing systemic and individualistis factors into market risk. Having said that I'd be as foolish as those people I'm criticising if I was to say that because I've a hunch about which approach may be best at solving the problems ahead of us I wouldn't consider alternatives. I will be looking at Demitry's blog in the future to keep progress of what may very well be quite an exciting approach.

Ultimately though, the rules about arbitrage are model independent. If one exists, people will take advantage of it until it's closed down and people will always be naturally poor judges of long term risk.

Power as Deal Doing

2008-12-10T11:02:00.004Z

I've spoken before about how dialogue is crucial to the functioning of power. More recently I've tried to lay out some of the more objective features of power in such a way as to make them appear as the positives they can be.

I want to talk a little about power as the act of compromise, as the capacity to bring differing needs and requirements together so that the parties involved can all achieve some limited realisation of their ends. This may appear idealistic, especially if ones reads history books. I'd suggest this is because history is written by those who, in the end, get a dominating role in shaping our narratives. The truth is I'm aware I'm proposing a scheme of power that only really has room to flourish within a stable society. I'd propose though that the creation of stability for the sake of communities should be the end of power in itself. Creation of stability is an adroit phrase and it hides the real details - the need for physical requirements to be met, the space for dialogue, the safety for people to express differences over time without being quashed etc.

The reality is that stability like this isn't static but is an oscillating equilibrium (or more likely equilibria as there'll be numerous spots at which temporary stabilities emerge.) and even this should be seen as something which will come and go, sometimes mapping to greater parts of communities than at other times.

The existence of power within this kind of framework isn't then just the expression of individual will to achieve an end, it is the living of relationships (even where that relationship is destructive and can potentially end in the death of all parties). Of course I'm spreading the net widely here, talking about all sorts of broad concepts when really I'd like to be particular about the here and now and the societies I'm a part of.

The reason I want to focus on a particular aspect is because otherwise we're in danger of the content being so broad as to be meaningless.

I'm interested in the nature of power in societies where the State and its agents effectively have the monopoly on the exercise of violence and that that monopoly is part of the contract between the people and the executive. i.e. stable democracies where the military is an organ of the ruling class not an independent power in its own right.

In this kind of society, like our own power is typically invisible - as discussed in the past. When raw power must express itself it is generally because the channels complex societies have put into place for its routing and self-discipline have failed. Failed either to offer the participants suitable routes for resolving their issues or because the issues are not ones evisaged by the current relationships and the channels they use to express themselves and their content.

One of my main fascinations is that beyond the popular idea that power is for obtaining what one wants at other people's expense is the fact that in real politics power is typically used to obtain something in the face of competing demands. To that extent the most effective power users are those who not only focus on the immediate item but act within the framework of possible future requirements and the agents who may then require negotiating with.

The concept of political capital can be summed up using an financial analogy: I have £100. If I want things I need to spend my money (or political capital). I can spend it all now but then what will I have for the future? Nothing. It leaves me penniless and unable to deal with what may come tomorrow. Instead the most effective use of my money - in most situations - is to use some now but invest some to insure I have income in the future. In the same way effective users of power ensure that they use the poer they have today so that in the future they will have more power to use. Crudely it is planning for survival. More conspiratorially it is planning for the best for the future even if others aren't. There isn't really anything devious in this but the appearance of power as contained and disciplined via strategy and tactics can appear so for two reasons:
1. Most people don't, and don't know how to, plan for their futures. Most people are content enough to live with the vagaries of other people's plans and the cards they're dealt with.
2. Most people can't see beyond the immediate and so see the occasional visible aspects of power as pointing towards something they are aware they haven't a full grasp of but also that they aren't involved in.

These rightly make people uneasy because any fool can recongise that those who plan are likely (although not guaranteed) to get what they want when we don't. If they get what they want through planning when we don't, and even perhaps at our expense, then it can appear as if they're devious, abusive and selfish. The latter is technically true perhaps - although not necessarily immoral for that.

What remains invisible is that the achievement of one's ends over a lengthy period of time is built up out of many negotiations, many concessions and many compromises for all the parties involved. This is the heart of power; the art of compromise.

Theology and Social Theory by John Millbank

2008-12-10T09:46:00.002Z

I bought a copy of this for a friend for their 40th birthday and thought I'd read along with them! Wow it was hard work. I'm not averse to hard philosophy but this wasn't just hard it was verbose and frequently delighted in being deliberately obscure in order to demonstrate its own intellectual substance.

Sadly such behaviour leaves me thinking that the pleasure of knowledge and the profundity of learning is best demonstrated to others by making hard concepts as simple as possible to understand. The one defense the author might advance is they were writing for a cut throat field of little feudal lords. Fine, but please why stoop to that level.

The book is broken up into 12 chapters and if one wants to get to the nub of it, skip the first 10. Seriously, the rest could have been edited down to 5 concise and clearly explained chapters, instead we get 10 poorly written and wafflingly difficult movements leading us to what is actually important to the author.

It is an interesting subject - there are fascinating things inside about the idea of the secular, the religious feel of nihilism and the development of much of these concepts. I also found Millbank's thesis - about peace and the 'two cities' of Augustinian origin very engaging. Even if I think Augustine's view is lacking, that peace subsumes violence into itself rather than negates it and think the Trinity is a more important mediative operator between the one and the many than Millbank.

Millbank's use of music as a metaphor for harmonious difference is brilliant and insightful and was something I appreciate both for its relative simplicity but also for the melding together of different concepts. It's also interesting to note that Tolkein's Silmarillion starts with a creation story taking up this idea as well...harmonious difference expressed as music. (Yes I know, the music of the spheres etc.).

Millbank is a strong Catholic and so he, perhaps inevitably (although sadly), takes short shrift with protestantism and seeks to demonstrate that only a theology of peace as constituted within Catholicism can be adequately used to counter nihilism (or paganism - the inevitable triumph of chaos). In the end I don't agree with the constitution of his theology of peace - lacking as it is in Trinitarian thinking as well as negating violence wholesale. Nor can I agree with his primacy of Catholicism...

I will read more of his stuff, but I'll be taking a deep breath before I do.

The Positives of Power

2008-12-05T18:31:00.004Z

In some ways this is teaching my granny to suck eggs...(although she has dentures so it's kind of useless saying eh?)

Some time ago I wrote about why we should fear power. I'm not going to recap but it's probably worth referring to that for context on what I'm about to write.

There are lots of theories of power out there but one thing that interests me is our current feelings about power in this society. We have gone through the decline of an empire, we live in a society where pluralism is enforced and secularism is a religion which preaches tolerance of all except the intolerant...

We have social structures that govern millions via the operation of a few hundred, or a few dozen. We have a monetary system so effective in capturing desire and driving technological innovation that probably half the globe lives under its thrall with no recourse and no escape from its boundaries and pathways.

In that British society is fundamentally suspicious of power, of those who wield it and of its exercise. Coupled with that we are also a society where social connections are fragile and not supported by communal life, thus we find neogiation (for the main part) a difficult skill to learn and to deploy. I suppose I'd also highlight that our conception of power is frequently that it should be used to obtain what it is we think should happen without compromise.

So with that as a context, let's talk about some of the positives.

Power gets things done. I know it's daft to say something so simple but...I tend to experience life as something where power doesn't really explicitly effect my actions of influence my life. Power tends to be hidden most of the time and it's explicit exercise tends to be something we 're uncomfortable with for good reason - it reminds us of just how arbitrarily others can impact our lives if they are so minded.

But it's worth concentrating on a bit more. Power is the activity that gets things done. To unpack a bit. Power can be defined as the operator that acts to move reality from one state to another where human society is the reality being considered. Power within physics is clearly a different (and indifferent to humanity) concept.

Where humans are considered we act, and it is action that makes power manifest, and in our acting we change the world around us. Power is what permits us to act and to watch people fail in to achieve the intention behind their acting is to observe power not being sufficient to actualise its hopes.

Power is the vital force. Now I'm not claiming some fundamental motive impulse here but am trying to capture the fact that without power we are effectively helpless to achieve our intentions.

If will is the ability to choose to remake the world in the image we desire then power is the action of the will remaking the world. Nietzsche claimed we had a will to power, but this gets the relationship between will and power wrong. Power is not the end of will. Indeed if someone wishes to aggregate power (for whatever reason) their will must be able to envision this state of affairs in the first place. In a sense to claim 'the will to power' is to say nothing more than I wish to aggregate the ability to exercise my will. It is a statement of intent not of being. Misunderstanding this relationship is perhaps a root of nihilism because it subverts the idea of the self into serving the idea that the will can only actualise itself in one direction. Rather the self is the ground in which the will finds itself formed and which shapes the ideas open to the will in the first place. That is the self is fundamental to the will not parallel or subsequent to it.

Power is postive because it allows us to change the world. It is one of the three legs that are the core components of our ability to be. The others are creativity and hope. Without the belief that the world can be different (and hope here is a set that can contain despair) then no difference can be seen.

Power is positive because we can all exercise it, we all do. If we allow ourselves to stop and think we can see that power is not inherently evil even if its ability to allow us to change the world makes it something we should be mindful of.

Power is positive because if we were minded no one could stand beyond our own ability to influence them. It is the abrogation of power (and the decision to abandon our responsibilities to one another) that makes power dangerous and affords those who will exercise it to achieve their ends the room to aggregate power and isolate themselves from others' visions of how the world should be.

Power is not to be feared. It is to be understood. It is to be learnt. It is to be exercised.

The Social And the Individual Redux

2008-11-28T19:14:00.002Z

I think I deluded myself the other day. The idea I presented doesn' t deal with the issues I set out. Indeed it is actually a peculiarly individualist scheme, denying as it does the possibility of trans-human structures and patterns of behaviour. I was despairing for a couple of days, thinking:

1. Had I been naive enough to submit an individualist's charter whilst not even perceiving that that was what it is?
2. Am I then thrust back to the confrontation between social and individual as the language we are forced to use if we want to speak of what it means to be a human in a community?

You see the second point is the one that is more worrying - what if there is no escaping from this duality, where the interface is murky at best? It's the social equivalent of being presented with the results from the Young's slits experiment...we would be both and but neither individual or society (particle and wave) are connected in a direct fashion. I admit it's kind of elegant but I couldn't bring myself to accept defeat so readily.

The schema of networks, with the physically located person as the node where the self emerges is attractive but it is, at best, incomplete. Even if I can be described as this thing here amongst these others it still doesn't account for the fact that these others have common meaning with me or that a framework exists that predates me and will survive me (in one form or another) which is relatively insensitive to my existence.

What is missing? What does this incompleteness look like?

I think it looks like time. I think in focussing on the physical location, on the network as it is, the implicit assumption is that time is standing still. I may as well have said, "I am this thing here now..."
The extension then is to describe us in terms of space and time, because that is really where we are located. Our coordinates are fixed by time. After all, maps are drawn by time, not space.

If we allow ourselves to be described across the stretch of time then we can see that relationships, even at the smallest level will follow patterns, will develop along certain lines or grooves. As the matrix of relationships grows these patterns not only grow with them but as they bed down, get repeated and carry with them the meaning we communicate to one another they come to embody the ideas and meanings themselves. This does sound superficially like memes, but it's not the same. For me the genetics of culture is as much nature as it is nuture. There are many cultures but many fewer behavioural axioms that cultures are built from - it's the fact that we are all members of many cultures, many networks that makes it appear more complicated, more diverse. Don't get me wrong, life is diverse, but perhaps not as incomparable as we might tell ourselves.

The fact that the grooves our relationships carve can influence others with whom we are only tangentially connected is fascinating but mainly because we are here demonstrating that patterns of behaviour and thought that arise amongst groups as small as two can influence many more or long periods of time after those originators have exited the system.

It is time that is the key to linking the superstructures within which we allow our lives to be guided and those lives we are living. It is the play of our lives through time that creates these superstructures in the first place. These structures do exist in their own right, but only from moment to moment as the relationships of people renew them. In that sense I would propose that the fundamental, irreducible factors in humanity are relational; networks of critical self-other reflection which not only permit the self to arise but allow meaning beyond the instinctual to come into being via its communication between ourselves.

Cool.

The social and the self - an exploration in misunderstanding ourselves

2008-11-25T20:39:00.006Z

I'm not really a believer in the individual. You may have picked up from a number of my posts that I am of the mind that the individual doesn't really exist except within their particular physical context. There are no disembodied minds for me, no souls which float free of the body upon death - which find some sort of release. Not a bit of it.

For me the individual is a misleading term. Yes of course I exist. And so do you. Probably...

Yet what are you? For me there is a powerful argument that we should abandon the idea of 'society' and 'the individual' and the juxtaposition of the two as an explanatory tool.

Let me run through some of the problems. For a start both concepts have problems as they are both effectively self referential and self contained schemes which only really need the other half of the pair as balast for their own lopsided presentation.

The individual - is an individual a single, self contained 'thing'? Is man essentially an island? Self sufficient and uninfluenced by anything except his own self? If they are then there is no social. There is nothing greater than the sum of the individuals. Indeed, if each individual is self-sufficient then summing them up is to overstate the value of community as it is only likely to hinder the goals and aspirations of individuals.

Society - is this concept capable of explaining everything about our behaviour? Are we nothing more than memes, is consciousness found at the level of society? (The irony is that it's materialists who hate individual consciousness who shove it, in disguise as a meme, onto 'society' which is apparently irreducibly greater than the sum of its parts...) If society is such a powerful force, how exactly does anyone achieve anything individually? How does anyone exercise choice, fall in love, become socially mobile, cope with moving from one culture to another? The idea of society cannot explain the political, the economic, the religious adequately. It pushes individuals down into statistics, into cyphers for unfounded axioms of truth. It requires faith to believe the concept of society, and hence sociology, can explain individuals. The retreat into the argument that it's useful statistically at a macro level is just that - a retreat from its originaly great goal of categorising and explaining the individuals within it.

Then we have the meeting point. Where exactly does the social become the individual, where does the individual let go of their self sufficiency. At their most pure the two should never meet, there should be a line we don't cross when exploring our activities which is where we are both social animals and individuals. Any attempt at putting both into play sacrifices the ideas contained within the logical systems supporting them as concepts. Yes when we allow ourselves to see that both are required to give us insight we actually find it helpful but this is also an admision that the scheme has failed us as it is defined.

there is obviously loads more, in defence of the idea and attacking it as painfully difficult and unworkable. Most notably perhaps the baggage it brings on the basis that it is a historical idea which has been developed with a number of a priori assumptions built into it about how the world should be. These assumptions, such as politics is always a way of hiding power plays, are typically unquestioned and hence are dogma. Articles of faith. Sociology on that basis is a religious epistemology.

So what do I think...?

I like the idea that humans can best be described as a mash-up of their relationships and their physicality. I like the idea that we aren't complete as individuals, that we are only fully human when we are in relationship, that our likes, that our feelings, our knowledge and our physicality are only meaningful when expressed and that meaningful expression can only happen amongst others who can empathise with us. This is obviously tied to language but isn't completely dependent on it.

The allows us to abandon the concepts of individual and society and more importantly frees us from the conflict inherent in having such two platonic ideals weighing us down. If we can describer ourselves fully only in relation to others then the wider we explicitly cast this net the more we capture what might ill-advisedly be called society.

What I love about this idea is that it embeds in us two concepts. The first is that we must consider others to be as real as ourselves and ascribe to them feelings and motivations as powerful and relatively rational as those we hold for ourselves.
The second is that we are more than immutable personalities. We are multitudinous selves, capable of being one person in one context and another elsewhere, the common thread of who we are being our experience, our history, our genes and our values.

It allows for us to say that I'm a brown male and recognise that that both fails to capture all of my expression as a self within my relationships but also to offer some insight into the relationships where this may be of some relevence. We don't have to give up on understanding people, we give up on forcing the individual to struggle against the community.

This has implications for how we view justice and freedom, about how we express all the values we might hold dear and even those we hold as transgression. I also think it is helpful when we think what consciousness might be, what the self might be. If the self emerges from consciousness only upon encountering other selves then relationship, the network of selves becomes crucial for us to become fully human. Without relationships we remain nothing more than conscious animals, never emerging into selfhood.

I find the whole idea that I can think of myself as the node where all my relationships meet, the physical point where the history of those relationships and the material of the universe coallesce quite liberating. I find I no longer think of government or society in terms of them and us. There is only us.

I'm not suggesting there are no differences between people, I'm suggesting that the very nature of that difference should form the central point of how we understand ourselves. It is because we express ourselves to others that we can think of ourselves outside of the categories of individual and social.

The Social Vs. The Individual (or should we let banks fail?)

2008-11-24T22:19:00.002Z

There goes an argument - we should let the world's biggest financial institutions go belly up. It's a quick cure to what ails us and it will teach those greedy bastards a lesson. As to point one, it may well detoxify the patient but a word of warning; cold turkey can kill you. Besides, I'm not sure we're ready to be cured of our addiction to money, to stuff as defining who we are relative to our peers...so even if we got clean, chances are we'd fall off the wagon given half a chance.

As to point two...well it might teach bankers a lesson; probably that some people are so myopic that a better word for them is stupid.

The world is inter-connected. Never was there a bigger lie than the song 'my way'. No one's done it their way. Ever. Never ever. Why? Examining the facts should sober us up from the drunkenness we may suffer in the guise of assuming we define our destinies...when we're born we would die without being looked after. That's enough of an argument but let's proceed. Not only are we helpless, we don't even know it, we don't have a concept of ourselves, of mind, of time or space until we're much older and even then we're still pretty much incapable of looking after ourselves until other people show us how and how not to do it. If we're really fortunate we receive this support for an extended number of decades. Most of us make do with 10 or 20 years of guidance before we're ready to 'make our own way'. Then we're guided by magazines, TV, our peers, our education, our upbringing, our genes, our culture, the weather, our wealth and our physical location in the world.

It is quite something to assume we're individuals who act without reference to the world around us. It's quite something to assume that an 'individual' is even how properly to define a human. I think a reasonable argument can be made that a proper human is only such when seen within their relational context. That is, when understood on the basis of the religious, scientific, economic, cultural, gender, age and political networks they live within.

Now the above appears to be a detour, and it is. I admit it. I want to talk about the fallacy of the individual and the social. Problem is I've chosen to do so via the financial crisis.

Here's my clumsy segue; we could let big banks fail, we could let AIG or Citi go down. We could rub our hands of it. Then we could watch our entire culture collapse. I'm not overstating it to say that if AIG had closed its doors the entire global financial system would have crashed overnight (although the following example does have a health warning attached). You would have woken up the next morning to discover that the hole in the wall was literally that. Our monetary system would have failed instantly. Just take a moment to think through the implications of that - that ALL the money you have in the world, that EVERYONE has, was put beyond their reach...

Having thought that through for even a moment one can begin to see that 'simply letting the buggers drown' is perhaps not in our best interests. Too big to fail isn't just a cynical label, it's a statement of fact. If we wish for the world we've built since the second world war to continue in some form we find even faintly familiar we are all going to share the pain.

A friend asked me recently if he thought there was a preach in the current crisis. I don't think there is. I'm not sure what one says. Well I can, but I'm not sure saying 'we've all egregiously wasted the wealth we had and it's not coming back and our parents are going to live longer and enjoy more free cash than the next three generations put together' is either edifying or useful. I also don't think it helps us very much because the discussion itself if framed around the idea that it's us and them or that money is bad. Neither is going to get us anywhere.

It's not them and us. No matter how comforting it is to blame someone else (even if I can tell you some HORROR stories about stuff that goes on in big banks/private equity/hedge funds...). This isn't really the right sort of post to say we need to find ways of speaking about what happens next that don't resort to cheap shots and a culture of blame. Really I'm interested in trying to broaden how we think about this - if you're a part of a large system and events transpire that could bring that system down, you are well advised to consider doing everything you can to protect it, because if you don't you are going down with it.

You could be radical and reject the system but you'll still go down with it. I'm not arguing for the status quo. Absolutely not - indeed I'm passionate about insisting that the financial system needs a serious rethink - but there are ways and there are ways.

I want my kids to grow up not worrying about if they'll get clean water. To that end I'm prepared to defend the system we have despite it's grotesque flaws. It's reform for me, not revolution. Blah, what a ramble.

More Finance? Please! No!

2008-11-21T09:56:00.004Z

Is debt culture done with?
Not yet.
Should it be?

Yes. No. Yes, the level of excess we have submerged ourselves in is disasterous. We must learn to adjust to buying what we can afford, to planning for the future and to accepting there are things we will never be able to afford.

However the reasons for our current predicament as well as the benefits of a more appropriate approach to debt should not be ignored or abandoned.

I am not a fan of buying on credit. I think one should only buy what they can afford to buy - with the exception being a house. I'm still part of that generation that was brought up with the idea of a property ladder written into my genes...I also think that some investments, such as a home, are bigger than individuals and as such should be approached as such - there is nothing inherently wrong in buying a home based upon the likely income one will earn during the time one uses the property. This is a concept called value in use and determining ones income on the same basis is not irrational or risky (per se) but is a logical way of attempting to secure an asset.

What people need to adjust to is the likelihood that going forward credit won't be made available to them. Perhaps unsurprisingly the vast majority of people to whom credit will be denied are also those who can't calculate percentages. i.e. the financially illiterate. The people who didn't even know what a yield was when they bought their first buy to let, the people who didn't think "what happens if the interest rate doubles?" There will be complaining about this, probably at the same time as people are complaining about not being able to afford their outgoings...oh the wonders of unwitting hypocrisy. The funny except it's true "I thoguht the rules were fair until I realised they applied to me too" variety.

Debt isn't bad. Not knowing how to calculate one's obligations is stupid; allowing people who can't work out what they owe, what percentage of their income that is and how they're going to pay their debts off is irrational and negligent. Debt isn't bad.

Debt culture - now I'm really entering into generalisations, but bear with me for a paragraph or two. Debt culture is problematic, especially because it can probably only really take root amongst people who are financially illiterate. For sure there are plenty of Lehman's bankers who are financially able still rueing the purchases they made before they became redundant, but one has less sympathy for those who understood the risks and took them anyway because you can at least comfort yourself that they knew what the downside could be and if they didn't make arrangements then what were they thinking... (my arrangements are...adequate...I think...?)

Having said that I don't have much sympathy for people who lied on their income forms or who can't tell me what 10% of 100 is without having to use a calculator but do have three credit cards. These people have no business borrowing any money at all. And they have less business being blaze about their ignorance. If nothing else I can only hope that the kind of comfort people have at being maths morons will start to evaporate so it comes to be viewed with the same horror as for those who finds themselves unable to read or write. It shouldn't be allowed and we should be ashamed that we let it happen. For sure one can only lead a horse to water etc etc but we can be positive about being able to do basic arithmetic in our heads.

Debt culture is probably done with. And from my perspective it is, on balance, a good thing. Debt is not bad but it is a dangerous tool where the consequences of misuse or use by those who don't understand it can be as persistent as losing a limb.

Will I continue to have a mortgage. Yes. If I could pay it off completely would I? Probably. Not Definitely though. If nothing else I am more determined than ever to ensure my children have a sound education in the nature of money - earning, borrowing, managing and understanding the role it plays in our lives. As a responsbile parent I owe them this as the minimum outworking of my duty of care.

Why Consciousness?

2008-11-18T19:41:00.003Z

We've got here eventually. I think the reason it's taken so long is that this is something like a confession.

The idea that there is this state which is something more than consciousness, the idea of the self, which is effective in both being human but also in making real the me that is me is something I consider vital both in my epistemology of humanity but also in the practical sense that from it so much of what I consider to be the praxis of ethics and values flows.

A friend of mine wryly made comment today about blaming geneticists for the increase in people blaming supposed disorders for actions that they could have chosen not to perform. He was joking but was also serious. If we are automatons, even highly sophisticated ones, then there is no me. There is no self writing this essay and indeed the point of writing this essay is moot as it will have no impact on anything except the illusion of me. It is my belief that we are more than automatons but I also hope that my essays over the last 6 weeks have spelled out that I don't suscribe to the common myths about consciousness that are so often perpetuated and accepted as the folk idea of the mind.

For me the capability, even just the potential that the self, floating on the currents of consciousness, can exist, that in reflection of itself in others it can come into being offers the idea that meaning can be real.

By real I mean that the realities we create have objective power over the world around us. We can create medicines, trains, societies and ideas as much as they are a part of us they are descendents.

Without this physical capacity within the human body (and again I'd suggest that Tallis has it right - the self is consituted by the whole body and its location - I am this thing here) is not even meat. It is just a collection of carbon and water in a temporary form.

Forget for a moment the arguments from physics, from necessity, even from logic that saying I don't exist is a non-sense and almost by definition the structure of the sentence proves the absurdity of the content. Concentrate on the implications of there being no self. Weak materialists avoid this by saying 'there's no reason to abandon the illusion' whilst at the same time proudly proclaiming themselves to be heroes of unvarnished truth. They slide round the problems they create and continue to act as if they didn't have any objective impact. But if the self doesn't exist, if I don't exist, then it's not simply that this is an illusion, this is nothing more than movement of stuff. There is no morality, paedophilia couldn't be seen as wrong because it's just stuff. Murder wouldn't exist as it's just stuff. These conclusions can't be escaped.

Now this isn't to say that for someone who identifies the self as arising from the phyical basis of the brain( and identical with it in some fashion) subscribes to the above because I do and I don't accept those points. This is because I depart from the materialists into harder and better science. I also reject Kant and Neitzsche who would lead us to supposing the self is both generated in the individual but also something opposed to the body, to the material. The self is consituted in community even if all the components are contained in the individual and it is identical with the physical brain. However we also suggest that the physical brain isn't simply the individual components but is built around structures that are much more than individual neurons.

I start from the idea that if I experience myself as a self then that's a good reason to start with that possibility as being plausible. The opposite approach, that we must somehow convince ourselves we don't exist when everything we are suggests otherwise is bizzare.

For me, the chance to be human is the chance to be in relationships, to have families, to be able to care and to be able to know that if I love I actually love. It is also the chance to know that the other is different from the self.

And it is central to the possibility of the transcendant. Without a real, substantial self, the idea of there being the transcendent, of there being more than the individual parts evaporates like everything else particular.

If man is material and does not exist then nothing else exists either. Nothing more than atoms in motion.

I believe in God, but if that is to be more than anything I must be able to truly believe, I must be free to believe and there must be the possibility of the transcendent as well as the possibility of its lack.

Unintended consequences of the world deleveraging

2008-11-17T19:36:00.003Z

Firstly I need to rant a bit. I was with some people on Sunday who thought that being ignorant was to be praised and celebrated their own lack of either desire to learn more and the limits of their knowledge with the kind of response to other people's serious questions that makes me fume. Coupled with the fact that I was moderately sleep deprived (through every fault of my own...) the whole thing left me pretty irritated. The main issue here is not simply a wilfull pleasure in not knowing about something but the refusal to give other people air time when they wish to explore an issue (and it wasn't me they were dismissing like spoilt brats as I wouldn't have wasted more than five minutes with these feckless numpties if I hadn't already kind of agreed to hang around).

Fortunately there wasn't time to reach boiling point as I would have been less than constructive had I lost my temper...

Anyhow. Moving on.

some unintended consequences of the coming recession (or depression depending on how bearish you are).

1. Footballers are going to be paid less as their sweet tv deals and sugar oligarchs find they are without funds to pay barely literate oiks money to turn up and push a piece of dead ruminant around a field and ensure the rest of us don't act on our agressive impulses. (Yes I'm in a foul mood).
2. High end restaurants and shops are going to go back to being exclusive (and lose a lot of branches as a result).
3. We will see much more space on shelves in supermarkets dedicated to 'essential' own brands. Basics will suddenly be fashionable and across all the Sunday supplements.
4. The cult of celebrity will find itself diminished somewhat as money becomes less a focus of undisguised lust and more a focus of 'we need some'.
5. Greenhouse gas targets are more likely to be met in advanced capitalist societies and less likely in emerging economies as industry declines but raw extraction and cost cutting in EEs regains its former prominence.
6. Eco-tourism is going to disappear
7. Fish are also going to disappear from our dinner tables.
8. It's likely that flying will again become the preserve of the middle classes.
9. A generation of young people who have had a lackidasical approach to work will discover two things: firstly that having no ambition won't even get you enough work to live on and having no education is REALLY going to bite you on the arse.
10. Whilst it's unlikely the living standards of the poorest will decline, those in the 25 to 75% income bracket will see their real quality of life decline.
11. It's more likely now that the olympic facilities in London will be completed on time and on budget...
12. I would expect to see adherence to religious groups (and I cover pseudo-religious groups in this as well as generalised unfocused post-modern 'interpretations' of old superstitions etc) to increase.

And here's some hopes:
1. We may, in this country, just decide that knowing things is good for us.
2. We may decide that being able to do basic maths is good for us.
3. We may decide that looking after each other is a good thing too.

Financial Gloom

2008-11-12T21:49:00.003Z

People keep asking me where we're going. Well the first thing I want to say is if you want to understand some of what's happening now, please follow FT Alphaville as, in my mind at least (well actually amongst most of those I work with too) it is THE single best financial gossip website in the WORLD.

Now to business. How bad is it going to get? Well how deep is a bottomless pit? Yes. That deep. Yes. That bad.

The press is frankly both ignorant and lazy, these facts when combined with the general inability of most people to genuinely believe bad things can happen means that we haven't even begun to realise as a society just how bad it is going to be.

So yes, people are talking about the credit crunch and saying aren't bankers bad but frankly that simply betrays an ignorance so pathetic it's almost not worth responding to. We have an entire society built on debt, an entire economy built on using tomorrow's finances to buy today. And no one can blame the bank's for that type of attitude. What's coming next is going to simply wash away any consideration of the bad things some investment bankers did. We're going to see pension funds collapse as their utterly out of their depth investment managers wake up to realise their investments are worth nothing (and hence our pensions)
We're going to see a wave of corporate defaults as companies who have borrowed like the sin of gluttony was going out of business discover there's no one shovelling debt onto their plate willingly anymore but are actually asking for it to be repaid...
We're going to see high streets boarded up as we discover our credit cards simply don't work anymore.
We're going to see crime rise (and it already is - see Sainsbury and Tesco's press releases on the dramatic rise in shop lifting in the last six months) as we discover that as a generation used to getting what we want now we have no idea how to cope with not being able to afford what we want on credit...

The next 24 months are going to be very very difficult. I'm advising anyone who asks that if they're benefitting from the drop in interest rates then they should pay off any and ALL debts they have NOW rather than waste the extra income in STUFF which will be worthless when they lose their jobs.

With interest rates likely to fall to what is effectively negative (indeed with an RPI of 5.2% and interest rates of 3.5% real interest rates are already -1.7%) there is no rational reason to have cash in your bank account beyond rainy day money that will cushion you for unexpected shocks. Otherwise all cash should be used to delever - that is pay down your debts.

If you have no debts (and I don't meet many people like that, although I do know some) then one should be thinking of buying property with cash at prices that would make people living in 2007 collapse with despair. I would go to auctions and offer 40% of the guide price. If I had some money to spend...

Believe me, austerity now will mean getting by in the future for a great many people for a long while.

Is the west finished as a powerhouse for the world economy? Don't be so daft. Without us everyone else falls apart too. Don't believe these idiots who are still selling the idea of de-coupling. The tide is going out for everyone and if it's going to be painful for us try and spare a thought for those who already live on a dollar a day. Hardship for them won't mean not being able to buy that new phone the day it comes out, it will mean the difference between living and dying.

If disaster comes from us, recovery won't happen without us either. But the world is changing, it won't return to what we've known in the last two decades possibly in our lifetimes, if at all. Oh booms will come along in future but I'm convinced this is a once in a generation event...

I've got another post on what worries me about what this means as well as unintended side effects we might find amusing/interesting, but that can wait till tomorrow.

FOr now it's enough to say: it is going to be bad and I've been so incensed at the rubbish in the press I thought I'd finally write something controversial here so at least those of you who read this can take some sensible decisions about what you're going to do with the money you do have.

The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan

2008-11-11T15:45:00.002Z

A literary agent recommended Richard Morgan to me after reading some of my work. He is a good author and whilst he plays with many of the cliches in the genres he writes in he always has a novel take on the subject at hand. His writing and characters are hyper-contemporary, in Sci-Fi, which is the majority of his work to this point, that's somewhat forgivable but I found the jarringly modern aspect of his characters in this work awkward and hard to swallow.

Having said that I couldn't put it down as was quite peeved when it finished without any clear sense it was over. I am looking forward to anything further in the world he's created here.

As with his other work the cliches are all here but with the twists that make him fresh. I'd also add that his writing is tight but doesn't lack for well put together symbolism and metaphors. It is smarter than most of the rest of the pack but that's not really saying much is it?

The Steel Remains is by far and away better than the Affinity Bridge which I reviewed a few days ago but it's not really a recommended read; after all cliches, even when twisted, are still cliches.

Quantum Smugness

2008-11-07T12:35:00.003Z

The key conjecture in my theory of consciousness has been the idea that the universe can be expressed via information theory. Specifically I have considered the idea that if the universe can be expressed informationally then one can consider that it is the degrees of freedom of interaction between the bits of information that would give rise to a type of indeterminacy which is analogous to the idea of a poorly posed problem, or in our case a poorly posed state. This poorly posed title is simply a way of saying that interactions are indeterminate because they could arise in a number of equivalent ways without those ways being trackable or provable after they have happened and would not be predictable in advance. Indeed I go further and suggest that since this is possible and that the interaction of information with itself is not bounded materially it can also permit real distinct structures to emerge in those interactions that are not identical with the individual components that lead to their emergence.

This emergence is founded on the components but not identical with it in the same way that a set is constituted by its members but not identical with them.

From this one can argue successfully that consciousness could emerge as an informational structure based upon a physical substrate (i.e. the physical brain) and that from that awareness could further come to pass as information is handled over time and physical mechanisms create an environment where a metastatic stable feedback within consciousness creates a space we can call awareness, or more precisely when this encounters other such emergences and those interact, the self.

So now I was reading Physics World (my society journal) and came across a remarkable article by Seth Lloyd. Seth Lloyd is director for the Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory at MIT. Lloyds area of research is in quantum gravity. He has been researching into the idea that quantum gravity is best expressed informationally. i.e. that the universe is best expressed informationally...which was my original piece of speculation. (and I might add entirely independently)

Of course where Lloyd has the kudos is that he's done the math. He's worked on the dieas within physics rigorously. I'm so exicted I'm going to order his most recent book Programming the Universe today...hehe

So here I am, thinking that at least the one original piece of speculation which I felt had to exist in order to build an idea like the one I've been exploring is being explored rigorously by others. Fantastic.

Scattered Thoughts

2008-11-06T19:35:00.003Z

I'm feeling a bit scattered at the moment. Part of me wants to write about the strange feeling of amazement at the election of Barack Obama, the hope that democracy in the US could still continue to function. Part of me wants to talk about the awe that a half caste (like myself) could become president of the US. It's a feeling that has grown in me after watching the election with some friends until very late at night.

But ultimately I'm not really sure I have anything to say. I could ramble (see above!) but I'm not interested in reading that so who else would be!?

Another part of me wants to talk about the financial crisis - there is quite a lot I think could be said without me risking my job(!) or talking nonsense but to be honest whilst I live and breathe it at work it's not something I really want to address here - unless responding to someone who's asked a question. The financial environment is in a dreadful slow down and I can only see a dreadful period of poverty and depression coming towards us in the coming years and frankly all the discussion in the world around reasons and concepts isn't going to make that fact any more palatable of easy to live through.

I'm not done yet reading through ideas about networks and human beings within them - I'm fairly sure it's going to be some months before I post again on the nature of consciousness - I've come to a point where my current thinking has reached its limits and I know I'm only just beginning to put more substance into it.

Interestingly what I am reading right now is also challenging some of the sociological categories I've been so comfortably using and that's also causing me to reassess my approach to describing my thoughts on the subject of being human.

These periods can seem, at least during them, barren and somewhat unfocussed, but then I've often found some of my most useful thoughts arise after times like this, as if the creative heart benefits from resting, from wallowing in nothing particular. It's like after having a big meal it can be helpful to then explore new tastes before attempting to create another new recipe.

I haven't forgotten some streams of thought on the idea of the secular - they have been bubbling away at the back of my mind but they're not quite there yet - they've not announced to me that they're ready to be articulated. Right now I'm looking at them as newly recognisable characters; imagine having come to a play and you reach the second act and suddenly the different characters begin to make themselves and their motivations clear to you. I'm there but there's still a third act to come.

What's in the the third act? Funnily enough quite a lot to do with the interaction of the individual with his community - the same stuff as for consciousness. Add to that some thinking on the nature of objectivity vs subjectivity and the limit of knowledge in the context of secularism as a way of expressing the limit of what we can know but hiding that fact in the telling. I think there's also some stuff about the idea of the mystical and how one can reconcile (perhaps not reasonably) it with the secular.

Finally I think the last of the topics I'm mulling over is something inspired by a friend of mine who is now wrestling with the choice of choosing between inaction, reform and revolution. I think it would be helpful for me to articulate why i choose the middle option and how I then decided it should be realised.

So not empty of content but no themes for a while.

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

2008-10-28T20:13:00.002Z

I picked this up because I enjoy novels with twisted premises. Zombies and Steampunk in Victorian London sounded intriguing. Furthermore I was perhaps drawn in by the fact that if the writer had been a long time editor and publisher of Sci-Fi he might know what he was doing.

Instead what I got was No.1 Lady's Detective Agency with a dash of class and added robots. Actually it's more like The Diary of a Nobody crossed with Zombie Dawn...

The book is a curiosity. Mann manages to write at least in the style of the time but his characters are parodies of victorian archetypes - the chief inspector, the man about town, the crazed industrialist, the local asylum, deferring underlings, the progressive heroine and of course a cameo from Queen Victoria.

We have robots, we have murder, we have zombies but at no point are any of these really structured and laid out in a satisfying way. The ingredients are there but for all the effort and flights of imagination the final product is bland and very forgettable.

Having said that, if I was getting a plane and saw this I might pick it up - it is certainly easy to read, if a bit repetitive, and wiles away the short time it takes to read. I started by saying I'd hoped that as a successful publisher of Sci-Fi he might have avoided the pitfalls the reality is this has every one of them.

This is lightweight stuff and I guess it has no ambitions to be anything more. If that's what you're looking for then this might offer some diversion. Otherwise I'd avoid it; not because I disliked it but because I'm truly indifferent to the result.

Having read this I'm now going to try Richard Morgan's first attempt at fantasy and see what that's like...after reading Exit Ghost by Philip Roth first.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

2008-10-27T23:34:00.003Z

I've come to this for a number of reasons, not least of which is that a fair few friends claim it is perhaps the best graphic novel ever written and perhaps one of the best books ever written as well.

So at last, spurred on by the prospect of the film arriving next year (I think) I picked this up whilst looking for some other reading material.

I know this is a review, but the story is hardly important. This is one of those pieces of art whose very existence changed everything that came after it. To be honest it's had such an impact on the world around it that I felt I knew the story before I was even half way through. I'm not basing this on knowing who claims to be an heir of this work, I'm basing it on how familiar I feel with the story - and I felt very familiar with the story, with the forms and mechanisms used to deliver the ideas. Techniques perhaps pioneered here (or realistically in cinema first) are now ubiquitous and feel as comfortable as warm gloves. The story itself is pretty cliched, dark, gruesome and quite bizarre. Yet none of it was surprising, none of it was revelatory as my friends had claimed.

The story is interesting but it is hardly up there with Frantzen, Bulgakov, Greene or Murakami. It is very English and one can see where Neil Gaiman has obtained his grounding - it's almost as if Gaiman was a cutting taken directly from the Moore and Gibbons tree.

It is a piece of art, but it has dated. I can put this down solely to what it has influenced and the influences it took into itself originally. It's also a child of its time, Thatcher, Regan and the Cold War loom large all through it. Questions of ultimate doom and what lengths we might go to in order to knock some sense into a world playing chicken with nuclear weapons.

Watchmen is interesting, but if it was written today we'd tell it very differently, both in terms of narrative but also in the fabric of the story itself. In some ways it's a pastiche of 1950s sci-fi and in the sense that it's backwards looking it doesn't survive the journey to the 21st century.

It's not one of the best books ever written, it's simply too much a story of its time for that accolade; it will fade. It's not the best comic book ever written - I still feel that the Dark Knight is perhaps the most influential graphic novel ever written and that has stood the test of time a fair bit better.
It is highly influential, even now, but I can't help wondering whether audiences are going to look at the upcoming film and feel that they've seen it all before. That's the main problem for me, perhaps as a victim of its own success, or perhaps as nothing more than the first of an inevitable cultural development, Watchmen feels tired.

I really wish I had come across it as a younger man, closer to the time it was originally published, I suspect I'd now be with my friends. As it is the power of this story passes me by and I'm left unmoved.

The Volitional Brain by Freeman, Libet & Sutherland

2008-10-26T11:16:00.004Z

The Volitional Brain has been on my bookshelf since Christmas. I read a lot about consciousness last year and this was my last gasp that time. I had reached the end of my enthusiasm at that point and so it stayed on my shelf whilst read some other stuff. However, after I read Anathem by Neal Stephenson I was re-enthused for thinking about the nature of the self. For me it is the BIG question for our times.

The Volitional Brain is a collection of papers from the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Having read them all now I can say that the quality ranges from the interesting to the mind-blowing. Having read them straight through one does, after a while, get to feeling a sense of deja vu, but it's never prolonged and it's never so strong that I felt I'd gotten the point already and could put the book down without finishing.

A variety of points are covered and I have to say the level of rigour in terms of opinion is much more objective than that of certain other collected works on consciousness I've come across and thank God the Churchlands are absent!

It is a technical book but the book also contains essays by psychologists and philosophers, so it's not all physics!

It was both heartening and somewhat depressing to see many of my recent 'original' ideas about consciousness being discussed within the book - especially as it was published in 2000. One area I was particularly excited to see was the discussion of how the self is constituted by its place in society. Whilst I'm not sure I buy the story with its lack of explanation of its genesis or failure to explain why other social higher mammals don't have the same sort of experiential features that mark us out as human the concept seems ineluctable. It's certainly something I've felt for a while is vital to understanding what the self is. (I suppose it's also comforting to know that philosophers like MacMurray preceded all of this by 60 years...)

Overall I can't recommend it - but for one reason - it's a technical book on consciousness...that's not exactly best seller material is it...so it's a qualified recommendation. If you're interested in this subject and have the requisite logic and semantic tools necessary to handle the arguments it's essential...if not? Read Anathem!

Illness and Consciousness

2008-10-26T09:53:00.002Z

We've lightly discussed mental health, but something I've thought more clearly about is the impact of physical illness on the sense of self.

I've got tonsilitis, or pharyngitis since I had my tonsils removed as a kid. Now for sure, some forms of illness lead one to reflect and may bring clarity of mind but many illnesses, be theycolds or headaches or sore fingers do the opposite. One of their key features is that they drag our focus to them, they make us struggle to think of anything else. Often the reason for this is good - we need to attend to them, to work out how to remedy the problem. Yet this drag on our ability to reflect, on our ability to exercise our agenthood is a fascinating example of how the physical can and does shape our selves and our ability to simply be.

I think one of the most frustrating and depressing aspects of illness is that we can feel ourselves fragmenting, falling away if you will. If our focus is on the phenomenon, the experience of illness, be it pain or irritation, then our sense of self, our awareness is diminished somehow, its bounds shrink or its domain is seen through lenses informed by illness.

The converse is more obviously true when we are not ill, we are free to 'forget' the physical as we contemplate, to look through our bodies and consider that which is not them. As Tallis puts it - if I can consider myself as I am this thing here it frees me from my embodiment whilst also permitting me some form of control over it.

Illness, and indeed the terminal decline of death, threatens to and ultimately does take away from us our ability to locate ourselves and recognise what makes us. It is this destination of losing ourselves, of a forced surrender of our awareness, that can be so frightening.

Right now the side of my head feels like someone has taken a hammer to it, my mind is dulled by antibiotics and ibuprofen and pretty much all I can do is activity that is restful (this does not count as restful by the way!). It's taking me twice as long to write and more time than that to compose my thoughts. Why? Because pain distracts one from the items one is trying to hold in focus, it's as if the oceans of my consciousness are all being dragged to one place, to the location of my illness and as a result my instinct is to dwell first of all on my symptoms but then to let myself go, to stop thinking and to try not to be at all. It is easier not to be aware when in pain. Somehow it relieves the symptoms if one can let oneself diffuse.

I also learnt this morning that a friend of mine has cancer today and this only brings me back round - it's what has helped me focus on this issue enough to post today. I don't know yet what type or the prognosis but I do know that the news is very sad. What we prize in our friends is their selves, their life; them.

Illness reminds both ourselves but those around us that we are temporary. Our Self is here for a while only. This is why it's so precious to us and why I can't, in the end, accept it's an illusion. If nothing else, the fact I find joy in other people's personhood is all the empirical evidence I need to know my own self is real.

Consciousness and evolution

2008-10-24T10:02:00.003Z

Having read an interesting article in New Scientist this week on the move of the intelligent design lobby into the debate over consciousness I feel I need to state my own position on this.

The best arguments of the IDers are superficially sound and I was slightly disturbed by the similarlity some of their positions have with my own current thinking. However, we are very different people.

I am a proponent of a mathematical universe, one characterised by physics. Physics sees the cosmos as fundamentally indeterminate, but in a way that means we will never be able to stop learning new things abou our world. It is fantastically exciting to know that there will always be more for us to understand. It is also fantastically humbling to know that there are questions to which there are no problems and this is a feature of the universe. By unanswerable questions I mean technical ideas such as the halting problem or what happens in the moments after the big bang that are shorter than the Planck time. I also mean the infinite number of questions to which there are multiple (or infinite) correct solutions. Consider many body problems in mechanics...fundamentally irresolvable.

I think that if God created the idea of the universe then the one we have, which is a physical one (and by that i don't mean classical materialism but one based on physics and maths) is surely the most elegant solution I can think of...evolution is a process but it does not deliver progess. There is a whole debate here about efficiency but let's be clear, evolution does not deliver efficiency, it delivers those organisms which at a particular moment were able, relative to others and their environment, to prosper. It does not deliver progress of efficiency. Although perhaps it does deliver convergence when faced with the same problem in different places at different times.

Regardless of the complexity, or perhaps because of it, I am utterly convinced that biologically at least, evolution is the only game in town. I have no time at all for arguments about irreducibility because you only have to understand the maths to know that if it's probable it's possible and over the life of the universe a lot of highly improbable states can be played out.

Personally I regard ID as a lazy solution, it is a failure of imagination and is driven, a priori, by a desire to reject other ways of thinking. Now ignoring the physics illiterate such as Dawkins and Grayling we can say science is not predicated on disproving any particular world view. It is predicated on understanding and it is seditious because it will not hesitate to accept what it finds.

The trick is to avoid interpreting based upon our own prejudgements about how the world is. Part of my concern about consciousness has been that much of the field appears to start with the assumption that consciousness is an illusion and proceed from there. I personally find that unscientific and dangerous as science then becomes a pretext for supporting the beliefs the researcher has. I find now that the same is true of IDers as they come to the field...

So where I differ is:

Consciousness is a physical phenomenon that emerges as a real structure from a complex physical system.
Awareness, the self as agent is something that emerges from consciousness and is both socially constructed but dependent on quantum like effects which permit a metastatic feedback type system which can, with some stability, influence itself.
Without the body there is no consciousness.
I hold that the body and mind are holistic. I do not accept any form of dualism, irreducible, compatabilist, interactionist or otherwise.

I hope that's clear.

Conscious Health?

2008-10-22T21:54:00.002Z

Can we think of mental health in terms of a physical brain, emergent consciousness and persistent awareness?

I believe we can, but some of the groundwork for developing any insights worth their while is not yet laid down. I remain convinced that, along with MacMurray there is a vital role in the development of awareness for the relationships individuals have with other individuals. Let's not worry about whose consciousness arose first, the fact remains that part of who we, perhaps much of it, is defined by the relationships that constitute our communities.

Books such as Savage Girls, Wild Boys provide us with ample evidence, perhaps the only evidence we'll ever gain of such cases, where socialisation is utterly lacking. The results are unambiguous - without other humans, without other agents with some sense of self-awareness - the self never successfully emerges. Language remains stunted and after some point, which remains unclear (although Pinker would suggest towards the end of early childhood) our faculty for adapting to a course that permits the aware self to emerge along with our grasp of language fades away. The window for becoming human seems to be limited, regardless of how long we might live, if we miss our chance to grow into aware beings it may be final.

I would go further than some though and remind us of the evidence that the self can rewire our physical brain. It's not simply a case of the aware self emerging as a structure in addition to consciousness, or indeed forcing consciousness to act in certain ways but rather that consciousness, under the right conditions permits the emergence of something more than its fundamental constituents.

It's late today though, so I want to return to the idea of health, or regular functioning rather than explore at length the role of socialisation in the emergence of awareness amongst individual agents.

We can posit that unusual functioning arises from one of a number of possible positions of relationship between physical brain, consciousness and awareness.

Physical origin, conscious origin, aware origin, physical/consciousness, physical/awareness, conscious/awareness and finally a combination arising from all three. This is just an idea right now, as it may be that certain combinations simply seem unviable (physical/awareness springs to mind upon initial reflection).

However, simply finding a slot to fit unusual functioning, such as clinical depression, or OCD, doesn't really offer us much insight or indeed any ways forward when possibly attempting to look for new ways of thinking about engaging with and perhaps offering help to those who find themselves acting unusually.

I'm not a fan of the idea that we are all acting within some distribution of 'usual' behaviour. It implies, at least to me, that we could all be medicalised and pronounced mentally ill and hence require pharmceutical help - whether we want it or not...so I have this baggage. However looking at the matrix above we are suggesting that there is some sense to the idea that mental activity is likely to fall along spectrums of expected results - at least as it may form the background to the activity of the aware self.

It seems obvious that numerous issues may be thought of as arising purely from physical causes - perhaps in our picture of the physical brain and consciousness, one could imagine that the shape of the sea bed is such that it disturbs the ability of consciousness to arise, or if it does arise it does so in a form or structure that ultimately impacts upon the ability of the aware self to act as is considered 'normal'. Possible avenues for exploration here is to examine types of mental impairment or hindrance that are driven by physical causes and look at how these can be rectified. Physical causes do not necessarily imply physical solutions but knowledge of causes provides us with ways of tackling the problem.

It also seems clear that one can suggest consciousness itself, as an emergent structure, can be constituted in such a way that this impacts upon the ability of the aware self to act. One may consider that even if one can measure the activity of depression, for non-clinical forms of depression, it becomes harder to locate the 'cause' as such in the physical brain. However if one can consider consciousness itself as the structure within which depression (in some forms) arises it also offers ways of tackling the issue.

We could go on, and probably will another time. One key item to think on further is the idea that awareness may at times be able to 'heal' itself whilst at others will be at the mercy of those aspects which allow it to be in the first place. This could give us a very useful way of thinking about how to tackle unusual mental functioning. However the other feature to consider is the role of socialisation in the development of all three elements of the self; the physical brain, consciousness and the aware self.

So in thinking about mental health, two areas really offer themselves for further exploration - the first is the now frequently mentioned role of the wider network of individuals that constitute the self's context and the second is the inter-relationship between consciousness, the physical brain and the aware self.

Hmmm.