“recommendations”

Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:

oSkope many views are a nice, rich way to browse Amazon (for other engines it isn’t nearly as successful) but this simple diagram in particular —plotting book covers against price and sales rank— is genuinely useful. Shame there’s no option to choose your axes. How about price vs stars? Stars vs. length?

Apropos of trusty old Cartesian planes, ain’t it weird they weren’t with us 500 years ago? What could be more straightforward than a coordinate system?

Where, but the web, would you find someone like Oliver Steele? This ain’t no metaphor. That name was a link. I’m not talking about Oliver Steele the person, I haven’t met him (though I apparently am 1-degree of separation from him; weird, that). I’m not talking about the sweating, walking, pinchable, space-and-time-and-flesh-bound avatar, I’m talking about his online persona. And either I’ve gotten crazy enough or technology has advanced enough that I’m ready to treat Oliver Steele —the link, his blog, words, diagrams, code, and further media— as a person by its own merits.

And, boy, is he an interesting guy:

• My no TV. It is, too, one of my most valuable possessions.
  
• Functional JS is a sweet, sweet library, with one of the best documentations I’ve ever seen. Stuff like this is what makes the interwebs the best place on earth. And no, I don’t mean that as a metaphor either.
  
• Addition fractions. Y’know how fractions deal with multiplication? They need not be!
  
  
• Interactive regular expressions. Live regex! Nothing like interaction to make easy and fun once chores.
  
• Why are far things small? and other really hard questions from Steele’s kids.
  
• Visualizing basic algebra.
  
  
• Fluently: a construction kit for chainable methods. Finally, a word for the programming style I’ve been hinting at: Fluent interfaces!
  
• Learning about constraint diagrams
  
  
• A metaphor of computer’s history.
  
• The true advantages of Macs. I agree.
  
• The metaphor of the rock.
  
  
• Aargh!. How to spell it? It’s genius’s mark to have this much fun with such a trivial question.
  
  

Whoodathunkit? Yahoo!’s omg! gossip rag is one of the most enticing and innovative web interfaces I’ve seen in a while.

Just that, an emotion. Often sudden, arbitrary, and against our (as opposed to our gene’s) best interest. Not a revelation nor the distillation of reason nor its conclusion—whence this fancy that reason leads somewhere? “Gut feeling” is, you guessed it, nothing but a feeling. Just as we have unique emotions about concrete things—say, lust—, we have unique emotions about abstract ideas and statements—say, certainty. Emotions, concrete or abstract, are enzymes, catalysts: they shortcircuit dillydallying, they trigger action. Ruminating all day without acting makes as little evolutionary sense as ogling all day without fucking. Hence lust, hence certainty.

That, in a nutshell, is On Being Certain’s premise, and though I have but skimmed it in one of my epic B & N skimming marathons, I was certain of its truth the moment I read it.

When out of dumb luck I found myself the owner of an advance-reading, not-for-sale copy of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Little Brother (Amazon, Facebook, Cory’s reading), due to be released this April the 29th, I knew I’d have to gulp it down in one rapt, sleepless night. Cory’s a writer worthy of that, but it was also, well, my first “scoop” ever.

It’s past 6am and I’ve done just that. And before crashing into bed I just want it out that it is Cory’s best novel yet. Science fiction about our present, with our current, unevenly distributed future only slightly jiggled. A novel about America after a terrorist attack bigger than 9/11 and the young hackers who rebel at the idiotic police state that ensues.

It made me feel I belonged to San Francisco, to California, more than ever. It was stomach churning and exhilarating and fun. Yeah, it can be a tad over-educational and preachy at times but just a tad and to its great merit it makes security topics accessible and immensely interesting. The teenage voice of the main characters is a gem (Cory has always shined in dialogue, the more technology mediated the better) and their sexual fumblings are so masterful and eerily accurate (to me, at least) that wistfulness tore me apart. It made me want to hack a new world.

An important book, sure to change many lives.

Believe.

To be is to change
    for how can something that never changes itself or others be said to exist?
    one might as well call it even with nothingness
To change is to die
    for something else always results
    something always is no more
To die is to birth
    for something else always results
    something new always is

This strange text above was inspired by Greg Egan, who has in a few months become my favorite author, and who in all his novels I’ve read—Schild’s Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora—is obsessed by identity in far deeper and more interesting ways than everything I’d found, thought, or imagined before—how to grow up without being replaced by a stranger, asks Tchicaya? how to be immortal without changing to death, asks Peer? how not to unravel without bounding oneself, asks Yatima?

I’ve been meaning to learn me some physics since forever and I think I’ve finally found the right textbook in Motion Mountain: a beautiful, massive (1498 pages!), free book on physics.

The brainchild of one Christoph Schiller, after some 17 years it’s in its 21st edition (though still unfinished!) and has been enriched by the suggestions and contributions of the web community. Elegantly type-set, full of multimedia (graphs, photos, animations, tables, videos), problems, experiments, and excellent quotations (in the original Latin, Greek, German or French), the book covers pretty much the whole of physics with a passionate, philosophical approach (there’s a whole subchapter on language and many a Wittgenstein quotation!). Forget condescending, dull textbooks, this is one man who thinks (and argues! see subchapter 39) that “exploring physics is more fun than making love” (“Sex is the physics urge sublimated.”).

Truly breathtaking. One of the best web finds in quite some time. Download the book and flip through it just to marvel at one’s man labor of love.

Boy, how much fun has this book been! Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion emocional en veinte lecciones [review] is exactly what the title implies —an emotional education, a coginitive-behavioral approach to learning to handle your emotions—, I just never thought it would be this much fun.

I stumbled on it combing the city’s book fair for books originally written in Spanish, as has been my custom for the last couple of years. It was a difficult choice, it was pricey ($200 pesos), had too facile a title and yet managed to be intimidating with its 300 pages of dense prose. It apparently lied somewhere between selfhelp and psychotherapy, both of which I dislike. But then its recency (2006), its being written by a Mexican UNAM professor, its initial quote:
its excellent typography (!), its suggestive index and its author being a renowned poet besides a psychologist made me put out.

I’m glad I did. Whatever the book’s merits the best compliment I can give it is that it has changed me, far more deeply that I can tell this close to the reading but I think and feel different ever since.

How not to love a book that manages to be densely precise and technical while still being fresh, humble, and (Mexicanly) casual—always struggling for clarity, for precision.

How not to love a book that manages to delve deep into theory while being chock-full of practical suggestions—always struggling to convince you, to change you.

How not to love a book that suggests buying a pornographic magazine as an exercise in selfcontrol, proposes a condom-buying dare, explains respiratory meditation, entrances you with the stream-of-consciousness of an addict, and finishes lessons by sprinkling a sufi story (the tale of the two brothers) or a beautiful metaphor (“Se como el sandalo que perfuma al hacha que lo hiere” / “Be like sandalwood that perfumes the axe that hurts it.”)?

If you care about selfhelp books this is by far the best I’ve ever read. If you care about psychotherapy this is by far the best I’ve ever read too (no Freudian bullshit!). I earnestly and sincerely recommend it, grab it wherever you can find it.

(I’m personally looking for extra copies to give away but Gandhi doesn’t have it in stock and its editor, Paidos, doesn’t list it online—do drop a message if you find it somewhere).

Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)