false 5 45 33 true 5763517 read 3 true 5092157 currently-reading 9 true 5092156 to-read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78230891 1776 (Paperback) by David McCullough
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78233484 Shadow Divers (Paperback) by Robert Kurson
Harrowing, and fascinating.
A mystery and an adventure, and the recapturing of history.

There was also a PBS special on the submarine aspects of the story, but this details the diving aspects, and the unique dangers associated with shipwreck diving. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/79133906 High Fidelity: A Novel (Paperback) by Nick Hornby
bookshelves: to-read
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/158860-recommended-reading Ed made a comment in the The Proust Project group:

I am reading Proust's Way.

It has several interesting points. One, whenever you wonder what Proust is up to, never forget, he is often being ironic.

Another, that Proust is subject to three seductions: the lure of famous names, which degenerates into sightseeing, socializing, and especially snobbery; the lure of love, which degenerates into jealousy; and the lure of art, which degenerates into the worship of artistic prestige and reputation. None of these things is unhealthy in itself, but M's consciousness distorts them all with false consciousness.

There are several other points, all made much better than I can. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/213118-volume-vii-the-past-recaptured Ed made a comment in the The Proust Project group:

Another thought. Proust uses a variety of desires, often at the level of near parody so that many readers experience some of them without participation or identification at first. Then as he puts the distanced reader into the head of the character, to gradually come to the realization that there are more similarities to the reader's soul than he would first accept, and to lead the reader to understand and accept some of the contradictions in their own soul. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78237947 Stuff of Thought, The: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Paperback) by Steven Pinker
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/77489572 In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography (Hardcover) by John Gartner
I picked this up in the library, as a quick, "let's look for the good parts, is this book any good?" browsal, and I found that it was much more interesting than I had expected.

First of all, one of many of President Clinton's psychological characteristics is a charismatic unstoppable high energy level. It turns out that there is a psychological personality category called hypomania, which is a personality type, as opposed to mania which is dysfunctional. Hypomania shares many characteristics with mania such as low need for sleep, entertaining a large number of enthusiasms or ideas at the same time, extremely high energy, and glowing charismatic extroversion. Hypomanics (Theodore Roosevelt appears to be another presidential example) are often very successful and well liked.

And it also turns out that the author is an expert on hypomania.

But the other thing that struck me is that the author was willing to do actual research, unlike the psychological biographies done at a distance (that conclude something like Leonardo had a mother fixation.) He interviewed about six dozen people.

And there are very interesting insights that come from all the personal interviews. The author comes off as an unabashed Clinton admirer (as many who actually meet the man are) without either being an apologist or simplifying his character.

Another thing to recommend this book is that is only treats the Lewinsky scandal as a part (albeit a dramatic and significant part) of the story. The temptation would have been to only focus on the scandal, as that would sell the most books in the short term.

]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78235049 to: The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (Paperback) by Joe Conason
Fascinating if a bit byzantine look at attack politics at its most destructive. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78234315 Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) by David B. Fogel
What is thinking? What is learning?

The story of a project with the aim of developing a learning artificial intellegence. Blondie24 is a program with a neural net and an evolutionary algorithm, which without much guidance learned to play checkers and crack a rating of 2000.

It never reached the high performance of programs that have been explicitly programmed with rules, but the way it reached its high function was extraordinary.

A set of weights were assigned to programs on a random basis, and the worst performing were culled; the remnants were used with slight random variation, to parent the next generation and so on.

It is interesting evidence for biological evolution and against the complexity argument of intelligent design, as the program was set up with the most elementary model of what checkers was. But I digress.

The programs were not "told" how good any move would be, or that they won or lost any game, but were selected on how they performed on a set of five games. Even so, natural selection produced a superior model of play. Rather than giving the programs rules, the rules were generated by inheritance from their slected ancestral lines over many iterations.

(BLONDIE??? The program was entered on a checkers game site, originally with a Obi-Wan Jedi name, but they found that males tended to get very nasty if they lost, so they switched their identity to a female. (They got some undesirable responses there too, but they got asked out on a lot of dates.) To play they would manually run the program to whatever depth it could go in the time limit, and enter that move against the human.) ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/78234052 Frances Perkins: That Woman in Fdr's Cabinet (Hardcover) by Lillian Holmen Mohr
bookshelves: currently-reading
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