Thomas

Pretty good! Typical whodunit set in the Prohibition era. Lots of jazz, glasses tinking, and flatter's dancing in speakeasies. The actual mystery is sufficient; I didn't think it was mind-blowing, but it keeps the reader engaged. I enjoyed the portions of the book showing textile working conditions and the living conditions of Vivian and her sister, as well as the exploration of race and gender in this time period (though that exploration is a little sparse).

I'd recommend the book to fans of the genre.

DNF. I got to page 97 out of 220 pages of content in this book, and the writer made me work to get there.

This is a shallow recounting of Cage's filmography. If you would like pages spelling out summaries of Cage's films loosely connected by biographies of the various people directing, writing, and casting them, you may enjoy it. Very little of Cage's personal life is covered. Very little of what informs Cage's decisions is covered. The writer often suggests things very boldly with not much in the way of evidence — thankfully these are typically opinions, but it still feels odd.

The writing is shoddy. Maybe I'm on high alert for adverbs having just finished Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and King's On Writing, but wow! The author loves writing sentences like, “Hugh Wilson never really fit into Hollywood...” (that's the hum-dinger that made me put the book down). At 97 pages, you could build a little home for yourself with all the “never reallies” in this book. I never really liked that phrase!

You know what else ‘never really' satisfaction'd me? The pattern of sentences. The writing here feels reportorial, but not in a New York Times or David Simon way. It feels like writing where the author is paid by the word, and the sentences written as such. They are repetitive, and the structure repeats itself over and over again.

I'm annoyed, I'll admit. Cage's career is interesting! It beggars belief that this book is so dry and boring. For all the talk of Cage's karate kicks and high-energy, I'm not sure this book would kick if you hit its knee with one of Gallagher's hammers.

2.5/5

I'm unusually conflicted about this book. On the one hand, some of the story ideas and characters are interesting and I found the book very readable. On the other, it's pretty repetitive, some parts don't make sense, and the editing is poor.

Most of what I have to say is about the editing. I stopped about 90 pages in to flip through the publication details and then the acknowledgements to find out the editor's name, because I had to know who let this thing out the door like this. I've never seen an author use so many commas and comma-set phrases and em-dashes and em-dashed phrases and commas inside of dashes and dashes inside of commas and such and such. Holy cow! I found it so distracting. The author is saying a lot that doesn't need to be said, and then covering it in a web of commas and clauses. The writing could do with simplification. If the story were any less interesting, this writing would have been inexcusable. The editor should have worked more with the author to hone this a little more.

The work has many influences and it wears them on its sleeve. Sometimes they're in neon green. There are clear-cut character lifts from other series, clear themes from other works, etc. Most of the time this is a workable shorthand for telling us what these characters are like.

Some of the original ideas (or at least ideas I haven't seen before) felt promising but a little under-exposed. Throughout the book, we hear a lot about the Ifs/“them”/“they”, but they aren't explained thoroughly and are only sort of tangential to the story. They really serve more as a vehicle for the protagonist's mental processing. It would be been more interesting to explore these rather than have two segments of the novel that feel more or less the same (the Pit and the trading post bit).

The writing is very melodramatic. Sometimes characters say or think things that made me groan. I wasn't into Ten's whole tally guilt until the origin of it was fleshed out a bit (which is all well and good). What really made me cringe was the romance(?)/fling(?) between two characters in the last third of the book that I found totally unbelievable almost to the point of it feeling nonsensical.

I think some of the melodrama comes from so much internal monologue. Many parts of this book could be improved by having characters speak or think less. Ten is an interesting character, but I found her internal monologue almost whiny and annoying. I didn't feel like it matched well with how she behaved otherwise.

If you're skimming goodreads reviews wondering if you should read this or not, just skip this review. I bought the book because I'm a fool.

There I was, in my little local bookshop one day for their summer sale. There I was, such a fool, spotting THE WASTE LANDS from across the room, this giant edition with author's notes. “Oh look, T.S. Elliot. He was Lawrence of Arabia, you know?” I said to my friend who was with me. I'd always known that Lawrence of Arabia wrote a book or something and that the film was in some way apparently inspired by this. Awfully small little paperback for such a long film.

Reader, T.E. Lawrence and T.S. Elliot are not the same person. They were born in the same year, but in different countries and certainly had different experiences. In picking up T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land, I mistook it for what I found out later that afternoon was actually T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. By some bizarre cosmic coincidence, both works have 1922 as a year of origin (though Lawrence's work was only finished in 1922, it didn't release until 1926, apparently).

In any event, the book was bought and on my shelf and now it's read and on my shelf. Unfortunately for me, I'm not much for poetry and when I read it I feel a little like Brad Pitt in Seven—smashing my head on the limits of my intelligence. Reportedly, TS Elliot is one of the 20th Century's greatest poets and this one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. I wouldn't have known it if Google hadn't told me, because reading it didn't mean anything for me. Bummer.

This is a high 3-star rating as this one is surprisingly good. Most of the stories in this volume are interesting, but “She's a Rainbow” and “Like a Rolling Stone” in particular are perfectly fit as Bebop stories and they flow quite well.

I picked this up because it is at one point referenced in [b:God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning 56097578 God, Human, Animal, Machine Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning Meghan O'Gieblyn https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611107182l/56097578.SY75.jpg 87380849], and then I also saw it referenced in Carl Roger's [b:On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy 174879 On Becoming a Person A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy Carl R. Rogers https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348329148l/174879.SY75.jpg 168933], which I was thumbing through in the bookstore the other day. I picked this up with little knowledge of Kierkegaard beyond those two citations, other than a vague awareness of his status as a philosopher/theologian.This is a strange text to approach as someone without belief. Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham and his task to sacrifice Isaac four times and then engages in a discussion. Part of the problem with my read of this is that I can't meet Kierkegaard at the same starting point. After his description of Abraham's tale, in the Preliminary portion of the Problemata, he begins: “Thus, then, my intention in telling the story of Abraham is to extract from it, in the form of problems, the dialectical element it contains, so that we might see what an enormous paradox faith is, a paradox that is capable of turning a murder into a holy act that is well-pleasing to God, a paradox that restores Isaac to Abraham, which no thinking can master, because faith begins precisely at the point where thinking leaves off.”It is simply that I do not believe there is any virtue by which a murder transmutes into a holy act. It is not even that I do not believe in the holy, it is that I cannot find it in me to condone a murder. That is not to disparage self-defense or even to some extent revenges of passion or something, but the cold, hard, murder that Abraham sets about towards his son. I do not think there is any circumstance in life that could make this admirable or awesome. Kierkegaard says repeatedly through the text that he cannot understand the act, but that he admires it. I do not admire it. I find it befuddling.There are some other groundfloor values that I cannot meet Kierkegaard at. In Problema I he discusses a scenario involving a father sacrificing his daughter, “for the good of the whole community.” He then speaks at some length about what a hero this makes the father, but nothing compared to the heroism demonstrated by the girl's fiancé. Of course, there is no consideration to how the girl feels. What the hell!? This is crazy stuff. The murder of a person is not heroic. Least of all when it is in some so-called sacrifice to figments.I know that there is much I did not get out of this that maybe I would if I had faith, but I am a doubter. I have always had doubts, about god, the world, myself, everything. I am beyond the point where I have doubt in faith and a god and am at the point where I am simply concerned by those that don't. Kierkegaard describes infinite resignation, which I can understand and relate to. He describes the final movement beyond that to be the movement to faith, the leap of faith. He expresses difficulty with that. He at one point describes faith as the leavetaking of thinking. That I cannot understand and cannot relate to and do not desire.Of course I have had times where I've fallen down and begged to nothing. I've talked to the air like it could hear me, and sometimes wished it could hear me. But I can't make that leap. I think that leap is a salve for some, to accept how difficult life often is. Sometimes I wish I could use that and be supported by it, but not often. Certainly not if it meant condoning some of the things taught as heroic in the Christian bible. I just can't do it.These are some of the lines/quotes that stood out to me, for whatever reason:* “What those ancient Greeks (who, after all, did have a bit of understanding of philosophy) assumed to be the task for an entire lifetime because expertise in doubting is not acquired in days or weeks; what was attained by the old, veteran combatant (==who had preserved the equilibrium of doubt through every seductive snare, fearlessly denying the certainty of the senses and of thought, uncompromisingly defying the anxiety of self-love and the flattering advances of sympathy==)—in our times, this is where everyone begins.” (I really love the phrase equilibrium of doubt, and I think this is a splendid description of doubt. I will probably quote this at some point.)* Abraham: “Lord in heave, I thank you; it is after all better that he believe me to be a monster than that he should lose faith in you.” What provokes such dedication to a thing so terrible?* “No one who was great in the world shall be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.”* “the power whose strength is weakness, great through the wisdom whose secret is foolishness, whose form is madness, great through the love that is hatred of oneself.”* “The entire content of his life is contained in this love, and yet the situation is such that it would be impossible for this to become a reality, impossible for it to be translated from ideality to reality.”* “Only inferior natures forget themselves and become something new.”* In Problema I re: a peasant more or less and approaching the King's chamber. See page 77 for full context. “On the contrary, he should find joy in observing every rule of decorum with happy and confident enthusiasm, which is precisely what will make him openhearted and cheerful.” Difficult to suppress the chortle I made at this. Get real.* “It is far more difficult to receive than to give—that is, if one has had the courage to do without and has not proven a coward in the hour of need.”

This was a very, very good and fun read. I love this sort of setting (aesthetic??) – the sort of near-future science fiction where everything is pretty grounded in reality (with a few exceptions). I couldn't put the book down! More than that, I wanted to keep picking it up. Big change from things I've been reading lately.

I could see one critique being that it's basically The Martian but Kind of Different, and I suppose that's true. I still enjoyed it!

There are only a couple of things keeping this from 5 stars for me. The biggest is a scene taking place from pages 191 to 194. I'm not sure why the editor let it through. The scene does not involve our protagonist and serves only to show Stratt's authority–something already well-established. Stratt's character and this whole operation sort of push the reader to suspend their disbelief, and that's fair for a fiction book. This scene beggars belief. It is simply nonsense and really took me out of the story. Stratt is kind of an odd character, to begin with (why does an administrator at ESA seem to know so little basic science? Kind of weird), but that's okay. You could lose this scene and lose nothing of value from the book.

I really enjoyed Rocky! I loved the language learning, I liked the description of the species, and the exploration of xenobiology. This was really fun and I was worried for Rocky.

This is good - but at times repetitive. I recommend treating this like a reference text. Parts 1 and 2 (Principles and Methods) are required reading for the mechanics. You'll have fun reading them, too. Part 3 the reader can pick and choose from. I'd suggest Chapter 11 as a starter (Nonfiction as Literature), and then reading the section relevant to your project. Skim the rest, except Chapter 19 (Humor), which you should read.

Part 4 (Attitudes) blends the mechanics and Zinsser's experience. I found this part to be repetitive, but I would recommend Chapters 20, 21, and 23 (The Sound of Your Voice, Enjoyment, Fear, and Confidence, and A Writer's Decisions). If you're interested in his thoughts on working with editors, Chapter 25 (Write as Well as You Can) as well.

Published first in 1976 and reissued repeatedly (this edition in 2006), the text shows its age in some places. I would take a crack at updating the whole section on “pronouns” for today's times and understanding. I'm not as big a fan of the King James Bible as Zissner seems to be from his several references from it, though the references make sense.

Some of his core advice:
* Ask yourself - what am I trying to say? have I said it?
* Eliminate any element not doing useful work - put brackets around things not doing useful work in editing.
* SIMPLIFY
* Write for yourself
* Read your writing out loud
* Maintain unity in pronoun, tense, and mood (and time)
* Write sequentially - make sure you're telling the reader when and where you're at
* Subjects - think small
* Use precise, active verbs
* Most adverbs and adjectives aren't needed
* The quickest fix for a difficult sentence is often getting rid of it

* Rewriting is the essence of writing.
* Never let anything go out into the world that YOU don't understand.
* When writing memoir - think NARROW with detail

* Zinsser's 4 Tenets: Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, & Humanity

I have a few notecards of notes, but these stand out.

My friend Laleh's review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4955092306) starts: “I'm not quite sure why I expected to dislike one of the most popular science fiction books of all time, but I did.” I felt the same, going in. When Denis's DUNE came out a few years back, people raved. I kept hearing, “you've just GOT to see it on a big screen!” Sometimes when things are universally loved and praised, and I'm told how perfect they are, I have a spiteful urge to abstain. I didn't go see the movie. Eventually, when I watched it on my TV at home, nothing really stood out to me. The second movie did get to me and I really enjoyed it.

Thus, the book. I found myself thinking a lot about the adaptation choices that Denis made in his (so far) two films. Most of these are quite interesting! Only a little of the complex webs between characters are lost, and sometimes for the better. I heard once that the book has so much inner narration that it would be “unadaptable” — but I think Denis proves otherwise. Reflecting on the two parts of Denis's film and my first read of the book, I think the adaptive choices made work.

I am impressed at how this book jumps from character to character seamlessly and in a way that does not cause confusion or consternation. There is an interweaving theme of ‘plans within plans within plans' and ‘feints within feints within feints' and the reader is aware and unaware of these at all times, often not overtly.

At an event recently, I asked an author (of a different book) about a choice they made to start a novel in such a way as to be confusing. The author explained that they wanted the reader to be confused. They went on to say that they didn't like the notion that writing had to be accessible to everyone or easy to read. I can't quote the person exactly because this has been a few weeks ago, but I've been thinking about their statements. I didn't agree in the moment, and after reading Dune I feel even more sure of my belief. Writers can create confusion and a sense of unknowing without making the reader frustrated and feeling stupid. This is something the author at the event—in my view—failed at. It's something Herbert demonstrates mastery at in Dune.

I started reading with some concern that the films would overwhelm my imaginings of characters and locations. I didn't have this problem, in fact I found myself thinking a little more about Lynch's Dune than Denis's (and even then, little, as I've only seen stills). My mental illustration of the Baron Harkonnen is remarkably different from that in Denis's film (I had a lot of trouble shaking Stellan's incredible accent, though). The one character/casting I had trouble dislodging was Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck. I resisted it at first, but in the end found that I really like the casting and enjoyed it even more as I continued reading.

Another friend asked me, early in my reading, if I found the book too philosophic. I hadn't encountered much of the philosophy in the book, yet. Or, I had but didn't detect it. In the far past I subjected myself to Ayn Rand's scribbles and thus often forget that philosophy doesn't have to be in-your-face monologuing for a hundred pages. Herbert weaves in a lot, sometimes in-your-face (“an old B-G axiom:..”), sometimes with subtlety. I found I enjoyed these little tidbits, and enjoyed sorting through the broader philosophical exploration of identity.

I will certainly read, at least, Dune Messiah, if only because the ending to this book is so abrupt. I almost feel it incomplete, as though there's a missing coda.

—Mild story details follow—

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,” a character says. Throughout much of the book, Paul Atreides contends with visions and his overriding desire to prevent them. The book has ideas on identity, prophecy, and most of all self-fulfilling prophecy. The way Herbert weaves these together is splendid. There is a time jump that covers a lot of work, and I wish we'd gotten to experience some of what is in there. There are several key events that I think a reader could point to as a “moment of transformation” for a certain character, but I don't know that there is any one moment. I think we experience a gradual building of ethos and a look at the way in which the stories we tell others become the stories we tell ourselves, and how quickly these can cause us to betray ourselves.

I was not planning to read the other books in the series, but I feel compelled to at least read Messiah. As much as I enjoyed the book, especially the last few hundred pages, it comes to an abrupt stop that left me a little bumfuzzled.

Not sure where this falls on the spectrum of “entry-level” to “intermediate.” On the one hand, the questions posed are accessible and make sense for beginners to ponder. On the other, it gets pretty philosophical pretty quick. Many of these are also questions that practitioners will have already encountered or at least flirted with in day-to-day work.

Light of the Jedi is an enjoyable Star Wars book. With its plentiful Jedi and optimism, the look into the High Republic era is an interesting setting. There are very many characters, perhaps so many as to make them a little hard to keep track of or care about. That said, some recur enough to build a relationship - such as the Padawan Jedi Bell and his Master Greatstorm, or Avar Kriss.

A few of the decisions made in the book are a little questionable to me. Especially in later chapters, the timing is hard to understand. The book's chapters rotate between characters. That gives the impression that events depicted are happening concurrently (and to add to this, it is often that transitions move to another character in the same setting, perhaps on an opposing side). A situation unfolds on a relatively remote planet, for example, which is ongoing for many chapters. While that rather fast-paced thing is happening, it seems that other characters are crossing huge distances, doing big tasks, etc. I don't want to give away any of what happens, but it seemed like bizarre timing, which somewhat took me out of the story.

Further, the writing at times is repetitive. To emphasize some things or thoughts of characters, the author repeatedly repeats lines or writes lines with similar ideas. This is a little tiresome, especially at the start of the book. About 1/3rd of the way through, this became so tiring I stopped to consider if this was written for a younger audience that might need things restated so frequently.

Towards the end, this line shows up: “I wouldn't call it a plan. It's more like five impossible things in a row.” And I wonder - would the Jedi Master that said this actually say it? While the padawan references the Master being demanding of “impossible tasks” - that's a padawan. Throughout Star Wars, it's made clear that all things are possible through the force, so that a Master (or even a Jedi Knight) is approaching things this way is a little strange. Just a small trifle.

In the end, the book is worth a read, but be prepared to set some small irritants aside.

Overall, the book retains much of what made it interesting and compelling on my first read of it around the time it came out. I think some sections of the book are less compelling on a re-read because of the way they are written - those parts of the book that blend narration and quotation with story retelling start to feel overdone.

Similarly, the organizing structure of the book does a lot of handholding — sometimes too much, and makes the reader feel like the author thinks they might be stupid. I'm not sure how much of this impression is because I am re-reading this after seeing the adaptation “Origin” which lifts so much of the text word-for-word for narration/voice-over. Possibly a lot.

Those two points aside, this remains a great contemporary text that is accessible and approachable for people.

This review is for, I think, my third read of The Drawing of the Three. I've spent November re-reading a bunch of King's works, and am surprised at how nice it feels. Apart from the nostalgia—not so much for the times in which I read these at first, which were not good times, and these books were escapes from—there is the familiarity of the world and characters.

Just like my re-read of Duma Key, I found myself remembering things just before they happened, or picking up on things that I remember from later books I hadn't realized were being foreshadowed. I still have a sense of anticipation, suspense, as I read about Roland's sickness, Eddie's detox, and Susannah's emergence.

I only vaguely remember the first time I set down to read The Dark Tower. I got fed up around book 4 or 5. It took years for me to come back, restart, and ultimately finish the first time. I wondered if I'd ever read through it again. I used to never re-read books, but more and more I have a set of books that I really enjoy re-reading. I don't think The Dark Tower is a series that'll ever be annual for me, but I can see myself re-reading these every 5 or 10 years. The world is so rich and I love these characters.

Ka is a wheel, after all.

Good entry-level text on data and how it is/can be used for the public good. In many ways, it feels like a contemporary cousin to Tufte's Data Visualization.

I am thoroughly impressed with Christian's documentation of AI's development and emergence from nascent geekery to world-altering capital-T Thing. This book released in 2020, and a mere 3.5 years later basically every tech product you're likely to see has had “AI” thrown at the front or back of its name. There is so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt around this technology that half of the conversations I'm in that involve it seem to want to resolve into people fleeing for the woods.

Christian does a good job of documenting the historical, psychological, ethical, and epistemological origins of AI. I was particularly drawn to the psychological analogies, many of which surprised me. I rented this from the library in physical form and so to save my notes for future reference had to painstakingly write page numbers on index cards and go back to scan/dictate the text to my Notes app, but I'm posting those here for my convenience.

—

Notes:

The Alignment Problem

P30 - In one of the first articles explicitly addressing the notion of bias in computing systems, the University of Washington's Batya Friedman and Cornell's Helen Nissenbaum had warned that “computer systems, for instance, are comparatively inexpensive to disseminate, and thus, once developed, a biased system has the potential for widespread impact. If the system becomes a standard in the field, the bias becomes pervasive.”, ^40 (Representation)

P49 - As Princeton's Arvind Narayanan puts it: “Contrary to the ‘tech moves too fast for society to keep up' cliché, commercial deployments of tech often move glacially-just look at the banking and airline mainframes still running. ML [machine-learning] models being trained today might still be in production in 50 years, and that's terrifying.” ^93 (Representation)

Feedback loops

“Machine learning is not, by default, fair or just in any meaningful way.” - Moritz Hardt (^3, Fairness)

“No machinery is more efficient than the human element that operates it.” (??)

“One of the most important things in any prediction is to make sure that you're actually predicting what you think you're predicting. This is harder than it sounds.”

P123 - Thorndike sees here the makings of a bigger, more general law of nature. As he puts it, the results of our actions are either “satisfying” or “annoying.” When the result of an action is “satisfying,” we tend to do it more. When on the other hand the outcome is “annoying,” we'll do it less. The more clear the connection between action and outcome, the stronger the resulting change. Thorndike calls this idea, perhaps the most famous and durable of his career, “the law of effect.”
As he puts it:

The Law of Effect is: When a modifiable connection between a situation and a response is made and is accompanied or followed by a satisfying state of affairs, that connection's strength is increased: When made and accompanied or followed by an annoying state of affairs its strength is decreased. The strengthening effect of satisfyingness (or the weakening effect of annoy-ingness upon a bond varies with the closeness of the connection between it and the bond. ^7 (Reinforcement)

P127 - Continuing to develop machines that could learn, in other words—by human instruction or their own experience-would alleviate the need for programming. Moreover it would enable computers to do things we didn't know how to program them to do.

P141 - “this is apparently the first application of this algorithm to a complex non-trivial task,” TESAURO wrote. Re: use of algorithms to play go, I got you got, learning from guesses steadily coming to learn one adventure position look like. ... “it is spelling it, with zero knowledge built in, the network is able to learn from scratch to play the entire game at a fairly strong, intermediate level of performance, which is clearly better than conventional commercial programs, and which in fact, surpasses comparable networks trained on a massive human expert data set. This indicates that TD learning may work better in practice than one would expect based on current theory.“

P151 - Meanwhile, we take up another question. Reinforcement learning in its classical form takes for granted the structure of the rewards in the world and asks the question of how to arrive at the behavior-the “policy” —that maximally reaps them. But in many ways this obscures the more interesting—and more dire—matter that faces us at the brink of Al. We find ourselves rather more interested in the exact opposite of this question: Given the behavior we want from our machines, how do we structure the environment's rewards to bring that behavior about?
How do we get what we want when it is we who sit in the back of the audience, in the critic's chair—we who administer the food pellets, or their digital equivalent?
This is the alignment problem, in the context of a reinforcement learner. Though the question has taken on a new urgency in the last five to ten years, as we shall see it is every bit as deeply rooted in the past as reinforcement learning itself.

P160 - But Miyamoto had a problem. There are also good mushrooms, which you have to learn, not to dodge, but to seek. “This gave us a real head-ache,” he explains. “We needed somehow to make sure the player understood that this was something really good.” So now what? The good mushroom approaches you in an area where you have too little headroom to easily jump over it-you brace for impact, but instead of killing you, it makes you double in size. The mechanics of the game have been established, and now you are let loose. You think you are simply playing.
But you are carefully, precisely, inconspicuously being trained. You learn the rule, then you learn the exception. You learn the basic mechanics, then you are given free rein.

P161 - in both cases, the use of a curriculum – an easier version of the problem, followed by a harder version – succeeding in cases we're trying to learn the more difficult problem by itself could not.

P169 - “As a general rule,” says Russell, “it is better to design performance measures according to what one actually wants in the environment, rather than according to how one thinks the agent should behave.”^50 Put differently, the key insight is that we should strive to reward states of the world, not actions of our agent. These states typically represent “progress” toward the ultimate goal, whether that progress is represented in physical distance or in something more conceptual like completed subgoals (chapters of a book, say, or portions of a mechanical assembly). (^50 Shaping).

P185 - Learned helplessness; “As the celebrated aphorist Ashleigh Brilliant put it, “If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.” ^11 (Curiosity)

P202 - All rewards are internal. ^61 (Curiosity).

P222 - Conway lloyd Morgan - “Five minutes' demonstration is worth more than five hours' talking where the object is to impart skill. It is of comparatively little use to describe or explain how a skilled feat is to be accomplished; it is far more helpful to show how it is done.” ^32 (Imitation)

P228 - At its root, the problem stems from the fact that the learner sees an expert execution of the problem, and an expert almost never gets into trouble. No matter how good the learner is, though, they will make mistakes – whether blatant or supple. But because the learner never saw the expert get into trouble, they have also never seen the expert get out. In fact, when the beginner makes beginner mistakes, they may end up in a situation that is completely different from anything they saw during their observation of the expert. “That means,“ says Sergey Levine, “that, you know, all bets are off.” (Cascading errors).

P247 - Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote an influential 2004 manuscript in which he argues for imbuing machines, not simply to imitate and hold or norms as we imperfectly embody them, but rather, we should instill in machines what he calls our “coherent extrapolated volition.“ “In poetic terms, “he writes, “our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wish we were.“

P251 - Warneken, along with his collaborator Michael Tomasello of Duke, was the first to systematically show, in 2006, that human infants as young as eighteen months old will reliably identify a fellow human facing a problem, will identify the human's goal and the obstacle in the way, and will spontaneously help if they can-even if their help is not requested, even if the adult doesn't so much as make eye contact with them, and even when they expect (and receive) no reward for doing so.^2 (Inference)

P261 - We are now, it is fair to say, well beyond the point where our machines can do only that which we can program into them in the explicit language of math and code.

P268 - Russell dubbed this new framework cooperative inverse reinforcement learning (“CIRL,” for short).^40 In the CIRL formulation, the human and the computer work together to jointly maximize a single reward function - and initially only the human knows what it is.
“We we're trying to think, what's the simplest change we can make to the current math and the current theoretical systems that fixes the theory that leads to these sort of existential-risk problems?“ says Hadfield-Menell. “What is a math problem where the optimal thing is what we actually want?“^41 (Inference)

P282 - He has the students play games where they must decide which side of various bets to take, figuring out how to turn their beliefs and hunches into probabilities, and deriving the laws of probability theory from scratch. They are games of epistemology: What do you know? And what do you believe? And how confident are you, exactly? “That gives you a very good tool for machine learning,” says Gal, “to build algorithms—to build computational tools —that can basically use these sorts of principles of rationality to talk about uncertainty.” (...) Gal: “I wouldn't rely on a model that couldn't tell me whether it's actually certain about its predictions.” (re: uncertainty in models and models communicating uncertainty; ensembling; dropouts...).^14
There's a certain irony here, in that deep learning–despite being deeply rooted in statistics—has, as a rule, not made uncertainty a first-class citizen.
Note from TB: thinking about uncertainty in prioritization. Weighing measures in a prioritization algorithm.

P292 - Another researcher who has been focused on these problems in recent years is DeepMind's Victoria Krakovna. Krakovna notes that one of the big problems with penalties for impact is that in some cases, achieving a specific goal necessarily requires high-impact actions, but this could lead to what's called “offsetting”: taking further high-impact actions to counterbalance the earlier ones. This isn't always bad: if the system makes a mess of some kind, we probably want it to clean up after itself. But sometimes these “offsetting” actions are problematic. We don't want a system that cures someone's fatal illness but then-to nullify the high impact of the cure-kills them. ^43 (Uncertainty)
Note from TB: thinking about uncertainty in prioritization again, and how to measure / quantify “impact on PEH,” in algorithm. What is the impact of each stage of the prioritization process, from inflow to referral, etc.

P294 - Turner's idea is that the reason we care about the Shanghai Stock Exchange, or the integrity of our cherished vase, or, for that matter, the ability to move boxes around the virtual warehouse, is it those things for whatever reason matter to us, and they matter to us because they are ultimately in some way or other tied to our goals. We want to save for retirement, put flowers in the vase, complete the sokoban level. What if we model this idea of goals explicitly? His proposal goes by the name “attainable utility preservation“: giving the system a set of auxiliary goals in the game environment, and making sure that it can still effectively pursue these auxiliary goals after it's done whatever points-scoring actions the game incentivizes. Fascinatingly, the mandate to preserve a tangible utility seems to foster good behavior in the AI safety gridworlds even when the auxiliary goals are generated at random. ^49 (Uncertainty)

P295 - One of the most chilling and prescient quotations in the field of AI safety comes in a famous 1960 article on the “Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation” by MIT's Norbert Wiener: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it... then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.”^51 It is the first succinct expression of the alignment problem.
No less crucial, however, is this statement's flip side: If we were not sure that the objectives and constraints we gave the machine entirely and perfectly specified what we did and didn't want the machine to do, then we had better be sure we can intervene. In the Al safety literature, this concept goes by the name of “corrigibility,” and—soberingly—it's a whole lot more complicated than it seems.^52 (Uncertainty)

P299 - But, they found, there's a major catch. If the system's model of what you care about is fundamentally “misspecified”-there are things you care about of which it's not even aware and that don't even enter into the system's model of your rewards-then it's going to be confused about your motivation. For instance, if the system doesn't understand the subtleties of human appetite, it may not understand why you requested a steak dinner at six o'clock but then declined the opportunity to have a second steak dinner at seven o'clock. If locked into an oversimplified or misspecified model where steak (in this case) must be entirely good or entirely bad, then one of these two choices, it concludes, must have been a mistake on your part. It will interpret your behavior as “irrational,” and that, as we've seen, is the road to incorrigibility, to disobedience.”^63 (Uncertainty)

——

Notes

Representation
* 40 - Friedman and Nissenbaum, “Bias in Computer Systems.”
* 93 - Narayanan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/993866661852864512

Fairness
* 3 - Hardt, “How Big Data Is Unfair.”

Reinforcement
* 7 - Thorndike, The Psychology of Learning.

Shaping
* 50 - Russell and Norvid, Artificial Intelligence.

Curiosity
* 11 - See Henry Alford, “The Wisdom of Ashleigh Brilliant,” http://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/BrilliantWisdom.html, excerpted from Alford, How to Live (New York: Twelve, 2009).
* 61 - Singh, Lewis, and Barto. For more discussion, see Oudeyer and Kaplan, “What Is Intrinsic Motivation?”
* Sing, Lewis, and Barto — “Where Do Rewards Come From?” In “Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society,” 2601-06. 2009.

Imitation
* 32 - Morgan, “An Introduction to Comparative Psychology.”

Inference
* 2 - See also Meltzoff, “Understanding the intentions of Others” which showed that eighteen-month olds can successfully imitate the intended acts that adults tried and failed to do, indicating that they ‘situate people within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions.'
* The citation for the Warneken paper: Warneken, Felix, and Michael Tomasello. “Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees.” Science 311, no. 5765 (2006): 1301-03.
* 40 - Hadfield-Menell et al., “Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning.” (“CIRL” is pronounced with a soft c, homophonous with the last name of strong AI skeptic John Searle (no relation). I have agitated within the community that a hard c “curl” pronunciation makes more sense, given that “cooperative” uses a hard c, but it appears the die is cast.).
* Note from TB: I agree w/ the hard c note.
* 41 - Dylan Hadfield-Menell, personal interview, March 15, 2018.

Uncertainty
* 14 - Yarin Gal, “Modern Deep Learning Through Bayesian Eyes” (lecture), Microsoft Research, December 11, 2015, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/modern-deep-learning-through-bayesian-eyes/.
* 43 - As Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, “If you're going to cure cancer, make sure the patient still dies!” See https://intelligence.org/2016/12/28/ai-alignment-why-its-hard-and-where-to-start/. See also Armstrong and Levinstein, “Low Impact Artificial Intelligence,” which uses the example of an asteroid headed for earth. A system constrained to only take “low-impact” actions might fail to divert it—or, perhaps even worse, a system capable of offsetting might divert the asteroid, saving the planet, and then blow the planet up anyway.
* 49 - Mind Safety Kesearer o
* designing-agent-incentives-to-avoid-side-effects-elac80ea6107.
* 49. Turner, Hadfield-Menell, and Tadepalli, “Conservative Agency via Attainable Utility Preservation.” See also Turner's “Reframing Impact” sequence at http://www.alignmentforum.org/s/7CdoznhJaLEKHwvJW and additional discussion in his “Towards a New Impact Measure,” https://www.alignmentforum.org/ posts/yEa7kwoMpsBgaBCgb/towards-a-new-impact-measure; he writes, “I have a theory that AUP seemingly works for advanced agents not because the content of the attainable set's utilities actually matters, but rather because there exists a common utility achievement currency of power.” See Turner, “Optimal Farsighted Agents Tend to Seek Power.” For more on the notion of power in an Al safety context, including an information-theoretic account of “empowerment,” see Amodei et al., “Concrete Problems in Al Safety,” which, in turn, references Salge, Glackin, and Polani, “Empowerment: An Introduction,” and Mohamed and Rezende, “Variational Information Maximisation for Intrinsically Motivated Reinforcement Learning.”
* 51 - Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation.”
* 52 - According to Paul Christiano, “corrigibility” as a tenet of AI safety began with Machine intelligence Research Institute's Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the name itself came from Robert Miles. See Christiano's “Corrigibility,” https://ai-alignment.com/corrigibility-3039e668638.
* 63 - For more on corrigibility and model misspecification using this paradigm, see also, e.g., Carey, “Incorrigibility in the CIRL Framework.”

A great profile of the most powerful woman in US political history.

I grew up during the years, and in a geographic area, dominated by conservative media. My entire knowledge of Nancy Pelosi (until the famous White House meeting with which this book opens), was that she was Democratic Leadership and that the Right utterly hated her. To say I had no opinion of Pelosi would be an understatement, it was only a vague knowing that she existed.

In the more recent years of the Trump administration, I came to be far more aware of her. As I'm sure is true for many, however politically engaged or attentive I was during the Obama Administration, attention heightened during the 4 years of Trump. Her method of handling the situations presented to her was admirable, and it should be hard to find someone who has paid attention to her who does not, at least, respect her.

In the past few years, I have often been grudging about what I saw to be a too-conservative Democratic party in many ways manifested by Pelosi in the Speakership. I made the mistake of many: confusing her political machinations with her policy beliefs. This book does a fantastic job of examining Pelosi's early years and rise, and how they have shaped her approach to this work. You come away with a much different understanding of Pelosi: that she was not unlike an AOC of her generation. The author, Molly Ball, in an early portion of the book cites Pelosi's affinity for a Lincoln quote: “...public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.” Ball notes that many people misinterpret this saying; observing it to mean that politicians should follow the public sentiment. Pelosi is not a victim of this misinterpretation.

Unlike Sam Rayburn, who would not question a Representative who said, “This vote will hurt me in my district” - Pelosi expected action. Ball describes that Pelosi's expectation was that Representatives should go to their districts and sell - the shape public sentiment and find power in that work. Later in the book, a series of interactions with AOC are discussed, and an AOC tweet is quoted, “That public “whatever” is called public sentiment. And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.” (https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1147668951834476545?lang=en) - interestingly delivered in retort to Pelosi's critique of Twitter power.

The profile examines Pelosi's rise to power and her mastery of those levers and notes that her pragmatic approach is not a dereliction of her liberal early days, but the recognition that comes with so many years of wisdom: power is only useful if you can get something done. Speaker Pelosi has certainly accomplished much in her career. I'm hopeful that years later, Molly Ball or another biographer will take another look at this figure of our lives who has gone unstudied by most outside of GOP strategy sessions.

I don't have any deep thoughts on this one. As far as books go, it's a good length, funny, and I had a good time reading it. There were a classic Vonnegut lines in it, and the whole thing is as Vonnegutty as you could want a sci-fi / near-space-opera thing to be.

There's a passage where a character writes lists to himself for later reference. This is a great vehicle for Vonnegut to get some of his one- or near-one-liners out. “1. If the questions don't make sense, neither will the answers.” “I am a thing called alive.”

This was my favorite: “The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of the pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.” It reminded me a lot of the line in Fahrenheit 451: “If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you, and you'll never learn.”

Two more:
“Theology: (15.) Somebody made everything for some reason.”
“Psychology: (103.) Unk, the big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe that there is such a a thing as being smart.”

There is also a really nice little parable of Tralfamadore presented later on, which is simply classic Vonnegut, using a foreign entity (in this case the history of an alien species) to comment on humanity. I know we've been doing this for an awfully long time, but nobody does it quite like Vonnegut.

Thrilling!

At first, I struggled to get into it. I think because of the plethora of names, locations, factions, etc., that are explored to set the scenery. Possibly because I knew absolutely nothing at all about The Troubles except whatever I've picked up from the odd Tom Clancy book/movie (and, thus, very probably less than nothing).

The book is exceptionally well paced, and the author threads the stories so delicately that when the pictures start to come together there are times when you can't help but sit upright.

The book explores themes of moral injury and ambiguous loss in ways I find deeply fascinating. More, the book explores the stories communities tell themselves and how factions interact with communities as mitigators and agitators. From page 402:

“In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalized in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals—and a whole society—make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.”

A great opportunity, and there are plenty of things we can view as analogous re: how populations/communities warp around themselves.

Great read — would recommend!

Thanks to my friend Erin for loaning me this book!Standard disclaimer about poetry: I don't know anything about it and am rating based on my response.I liked these! Not as much as I did [b:The Sun and Her Flowers 35606560 The Sun and Her Flowers Rupi Kaur https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499791446l/35606560.SY75.jpg 57044162], but still. I thought the poems dealing with themes of trust, belief, self-compassion, and acceptance were my favorites (list of page numbers at end). There are several that speak to Kaur's experience as an immigrant, particularly as a child. While I don't relate to the immigrant experience, a lot of them felt familial to growing up very poor. I related to those aspects, both the experiences of them and the sensitivies and anxieties the experiences leave you with. Several I really did not quite get / they did not speak to me at all. That's okay. I bumped on a few. That's okay too!I thought the introduction(?) of poems on productivity and anxiety around success or putting out an image of success/competency was really interesting. I don't remember those from Sun & Her Flowers. I appreciated the inclusion and liked these, particularly the ones around kind of acting a certain way or working your way to happiness (like p105).Favorites (page numbers): 22, 27, 35, 42, 65, 97, 105, 119, 120, 153, 156.

An enjoyable little popular retelling of the search for longitude. Interesting and compellingly told. Some of the prose is a bit novel and I had to re-read a few sentences to get the meaning. Overall, quite nice.

At some point, I want to give individual ratings, because I really liked “Binti,” “Binti: Sacred Fire” and “Binti: Home” - I liked “Binti: The Night Masquerade” until the closing chapters when things started to feel a little strange. I'd probably call this a 3.5/5 instead of just 3, but it's closer to a 3 than a 4 for me, and I can't do half ratings.

The writing is pretty splendid. It's approachable, and the stories are interesting. I was interested in all of the devices, the cultural examinations, and Binti's exploration of her different identities and how they impacted one another. I did get a little annoyed at frequently seeing the phrase, “a Meduse-like people” - it made the world feel much less diverse than it portends (that world being Oomza Uni). I think using the word “astrolabe” for that device is a very cool detail.

Binti's reactions to some events and people in the second half of “The Night Masquerade” really puzzled me. Some of it just didn't make sense. I needed a lot more out of Dele and I have to say I agreed with Mwinyi's assessment of the rather performative mourning over one character.

I also thought the frequent incorporation of other species DNA to be a little challenging. How many things can one person be? That is explored very lightly in here, and would be something to explore further. It started to feel very trope-ish with the last one. Similarly, I felt some things got very rushed and convenient explanations (especially at Oomza Uni), but that's the price to be paid for short form.

I think I'd love another story or two about Binti's time at Oomza Uni! All in all, I enjoyed reading these.

The first time I read this book, I was in Kansas with bupkis to do except read and trounce around in the woods. I remember reading this and [b:Under the Dome 6320534 Under the Dome Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1511289992l/6320534.SY75.jpg 6760952] together, inhaling them over what was probably a week. Duma Key is the one that stands out the most to me, even though Under the Dome is certainly much closer to my life experience.King likes to say that writing is telepathy - and it shines through in this book. Everything feels so clear to me as I read, and I was surprised at how much stuck in my memory. There are certain scenes (and paintings) in the book that have always bounced around my brain, but sometimes as I read, I remember something I've forgotten just as it is happening, and it's a delight.This is probably one of my favorite King stories because of how tangible it feels.

I grew up in a rural part of the country and didn't like it. And yet, reading Cormac always makes me want to put on double denim and a pair of boots and go horseback through the American Southwest as if I would enjoy that. Also strange given that none of the characters in Cormac's book have a particularly good time in the borderlands.

Here are some lines that stopped me in my tracks, either because I found them beautiful, relatable, or despairing (often all at once):

Blevins rolled down the leg of his overalls and poked at the fire with a stick. I told that son of a bitch I wouldnt take a whippin off him and I didnt.

...I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all oter betrayals came easily.

I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it. That the desire was the thing itself. The thing itself. I could think of nothing else of which that was true.

...the weight on his heart had begun to lift and he repeated what his father had once told him, that scared money cant win and a worried man cant love

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

hates

This is not a review, just some rambling. I liked this book, a lot.

At one point in Fun Home, Bechdel wonders what a father is. She ventures into the dictionary and finds a tautology. I think about what it is to be a father a lot, and what it is to have a father. I haven't spoken to mine in a long time.

Later, Bechdel recounts a period of life where she and her father have a currency, a common language. I put the book down there and wondered if my father and I ever had one. It's probably been close to ten years since I spoke to him; certainly, since I meaningfully spoke with him. More? Even so far removed in time, it's hard to get through my immediate simmering rage or cold disdain to think about positive traits that he had. I have spent my life doing all that I can to not be him, searching for similarities and erasing them if any sprout. Positive traits. He must have had some, sometime. What drew my mom to him? It surely wasn't the 9-year age difference.

I know that he was charismatic. Perhaps he still is? Sometimes I'll describe him as a master manipulator, though I suspect that's a bit grand. Perhaps I pump it up because, in some small way, I want to feel that I won something. I'm not sure master manipulators flame out in St. Louis or central Illinois and have their lives collapse in on themselves. At least, not before the age of 50.

I know that we have the same name. Nearly. He is a Junior, I'm a Third. Rich man's title, poor man's bank account.

I know that he worked on cars. He had a 1967 Mustang, a glistening blue bolt. He worked on it in his blue Morton building. Raspberries grew on the north side of it. I remember being in the side seat with him going from — to — on the highway. I remember him asking me something, my enthusiasm. The engine. The thunderous horses as the fields ripped away. Smiling and laughing.

I remember driving from St. Louis to —. I remember sitting next to him in the 1966 Impala. Screeching doors and mumbling engine. A color theoretically white, once. I remember seeing a Lamborghini in the contraflow and turning my head to follow as he tearfully explained the newest collapse of life. Always the crying.

I lived with him in —, a suburb of St. Louis. Not enrolled in school, but variously wondering alone around town or sitting in the bodyshop's office. Snooping around and finding an ancient green-on-black computer terminal, or a closetful of porno discs in a black trash bag at the bottom of a closet. Or burnt spoons. The smell. Always the smell.

We came home to the little green house his sponsor rented to him. Locks changed. I'd moved most everything I owned into the house. I never saw it again. The little maroon King James Bible my great-grandparents bought me.

How long before that — I remember thinking that I could end it if I went outside and got a shovel and hurled it into his head. ‘It' being his beating down a door that my mom was behind. Who remembers what the fight was about? He wasn't a hitter, though.

I remember him picking up a little, thick, white-covered copy of Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I think it was the Signet Edition, though my memory has it about twice as thick. Perhaps it seemed bigger because I was nine or ten years old. It certainly seemed thicker when it smacked into me. Punishment for taking books out of the library, unchecked. Returning them without alerting the librarian was a logistical affair, but what stands out is his condemnation between blows, “I won't have a thief living in my house!”

I remember at most two years later his firing and conviction for embezzlement. When I looked later, did that court website say more than or less than one-hundred thousand dollars? Certainly, enough to buy all kinds of photographic equipment to take nude pictures of prostitutes. Not to mention a lot of crack cocaine.

Goodbye bungalow, someday to be pushed in. Hello, little factory-adjacent apartment. Do you remember the way the air smelled at the top of your closet, where you'd hide and write on the topmost shelf? Yes. A green stain on pink, plush carpet. Silly putty. Bright side: no more mowing.

I remember after that drive living with his father. Grandpa Tom, rather than Dad. Grandpa Tom was nice, as was Grandma Debbie. They still are. I remember getting angrier and angrier, having been snapped out of my brainwashing by the loss of my material possessions, and whatever shattered illusions I had. Very capitalist. What had possessed me to think so fondly about that one night spent alone in a roach-filled motel in East St. Louis? Was it its freely available, grainy, porn channel that my little eleven-year-old self found so novel? Maybe it was the interesting way that the police cruiser circled the parking lot once an hour. I only know because I kept looking out the window, wondering why going to grab some Marlboro's was taking so long.

Some time later, after his release from prison, I had a confrontation with him. I'd envisioned a fight. Anticipated. Craved? Relished? Intended to relish. How best to take all of the anger out but to tell him I was gay. I'd hoped to wait until my great-grandma was dead, but she was still inside the doublewide in her slow death. Destined for a hospital and for that black bile to be pulled from her in a tube. Compassionate healthcare at the age of 92. He was sitting on her patio, in her glider. The glider is a double seater with a little table-like space built in. It has two hearts in the center. It is still there today, unmoved.

Of course, I did not get the fight that I wanted. He pivoted so easily to whatever was said, some variant of everlasting love. Unconditional Who knows its depth? I didn't believe it for a moment, and I can't remember anything more of the conversation, not even anything worth lying about. I just remember spoiling for a fight. You can never tell the truth when you always lie.

———

I had that reaction a lot, coming out. I remember standing in the UIC Forum when the gay marriage bill was signed in Illinois. I was standing at the very back of the room, so terrified that my mere presence would say something I'd said to so few people. I had no reaction at all to the bill signing other than to think, “I'm too late, the fight is over.” What fight did I think I had in me? Imagine being in 2013 and thinking the fight is over. I'd just turned 19 a few weeks before, what did I know? I didn't even know myself.

The fight I was spoiling for probably wasn't about being gay. Twelve years after that moment, it isn't being gay that I have rageful dreams about. At most, my dreams about being gay are vaguely frustrated at not being both pretty and gay.

———

This to say, I do not know what common language I have with my father. Unlike him, I am not currently in the Midwest dying of lymphoma, or some such cancer. Dying awfully slowly, as far as it seems. I know that when I started watching Top Gear, I was afraid to enjoy it, because cars were my dad's domain. While I could be in that Morton building, I couldn't touch anything, and I wasn't taught anything. The progeny of a long line of mechanics that doesn't know how to change a tire and refuses now to learn.

When I started taking pictures I had a nagging somewhere in the brain matter, too. Just like pops, hm? What lovely local prostitute will you be photographing? Will you seek one out with the same name as your mother, like he did? Thankfully, I don't know any male sex workers. Let alone any called Jennifer.

———

There must be good things about this person. They're for other people. They are, I hope, for the little blond-haired and blue-eyed boy that his partner seems to have in the pictures. It is impossible to see pictures of that child on his lap and not recall the picture of me in my little white button-up shirt and suspenders, blond-hair and blue-eyes, looking so happy in whatever local JC Penny the picture was probably taken in.

———

All this wallowing to say that the book made me tearful. Bechdel's life and my life are not similar. Other than, perhaps, the fleeing to the library stacks and trying to understand just what the fuck is going on by reading books. That, I understand. It is beautiful, and honest, and searching. I loved it.

Pretty weird that it made me want to read Joyce's Ulysses, though.

This short little book of short stories from Hemingway is good. I've read some of these, mostly the Nick Adams stories, before in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway which I've gotten about halfway through on my Kindle years ago.

Some of these stories worked better than others, for me and for the place I'm at in life. There are classics like Indian Camp and The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife, and they are good. I loved The End of Something and The Three-Day Blow the most. These are all Nick Adams stories, the latter two dealing with the end of an important relationship. Hemingway often depicts relationships (and particularly men behaving in them) in ways that I do not really understand or feel frustrated by. Nick basically detonates his relationship for little reason. Maybe I need to read it again. But I love The Three-Day Blow because Nick is upset and depressed about it but trying to put on a face. Then he finds hope and is pleased with that hope of something in the future. I don't think any of the other Nick Adams stories in this book return to this.

Of course the writing is swell. One of Hemingway's favorite adjectives. It's funny, reading Ernest Hemingway On Writing the other day, he specifically notes in a letter that he tries to avoid timely words and talks about his use of the word swell. It cracks me up.

Pretty good! Will probably re-read some of these. I am not typically a short story person but I'm trying to get more into them.

* “He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards,” Bill explained. “That's right,” said Nick. He was impressed. He had never thought of that before. He had always thought it was solitary drinking that made drunkards.
* Pages 46-48. Nick is exploring the end of his relationship and is clearly depressed and trying to put on a brave face in front of his friend. His friend is telling him all the ways in which he is better off, which is always high on the list of things you do not want to hear and do not believe, anyway. Then the idea of hope comes to him. Then, of course, he is happy.
* “He says he's never been crazy, Bugs,” Ad said. “He's got a lot coming to him.”