I use to consume more non-fiction. Back when I had no job, family, or responsibilities beyond dissipation. Nowadays, reading non-fiction feels like, indeed is, work.

Fiction, on the other hand, is my opiate of choice, and it should not surprise that I have consumed it in large quantities these past weeks.

Sookie Stackhouse: 7 cheesy vampire novels. These books are not good, but they were entertaining enough to hook me and pass the time. If they were a little worse I could not have born them. Hick vampires are somewhat entertaining. The author has an exceedingly dirty mind, yet is reluctant to give it full voice. I shall neglect to catalogue its other flaws, as they are numerous, but it did make the hours pass.

Mary Russell series, by Laurie King. While I could do without the respectful viewpoint towards theology as a useful practice for a sharp mind, the series is a brilliant re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes franchise. Frankly, I find it superior to the original, which I read many years ago. What a wonderful statement of the advantages of remix culture, that an author can take an iconic world popular for its deft creation of a genre with deep resonance for the human psyche, rather than literary sophistication and, nearly a century later, resurrect it with a fresh perspective, add nuance, and create something even greater, yet which would not exist without that earlier creation and would not be so great did it not build on the Holmes already in our heads. I'm 3 novels in.

That's what I can remember of recent reading. Next are two treats from authors in my small set of read-everything-by that were lurking in the ether, awaiting a new Kindle to receive them - the 4th Bujold Sharing Knife and 3rd Dave Duncan Assassin novels.

An upcoming book from Cochrane & Harpending about the human evolution since the agricultural revolution - looks fascinating!

Much of humanity’s past is a mystery. Until recently, we had only bones and artifacts to help us understand prehistoric human life. But today we have a new window into the past: the historical record that survives in our genes. We can now examine material from our own genomes and analyze it in light of evolutionary theory—a combination Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending call evolutionary genomics. The overwhelming surprise emerging from this new field of research is that human evolution did not stop with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Instead, it sped up—and has continued accelerating into historical times.

The 10,000 Year Explosion is the first book to introduce the new ideas coming from evolutionary genomics that will revolutionize humanity’s understanding of its past. Harpending and Cochran reveal the genetic changes that led to behaviorally modern humans and that allowed our ancestors to adapt to new environments. The majority of these changes, including adaptations to physical and social inventions such as agriculture and urban environments, seem to have started in a huge burst only 10,000 years ago. Cochran and Harpending make clear that many of the important transitions in human history involved biological changes that were the products of natural selection.

Full of revelatory and wondrous findings, The 10,000 Year Explosion proves that humanity’s genetic inheritance can change remarkably fast—and that our own civilization can cause the change.

And for you math-crunchy types, from this review:

There is a good theoretical argument for why evolution may speed up due to population growth. Given a particular probability distribution for producing beneficial mutations, a large population implies a faster rate of incidence of such mutations. Because reproductive dynamics leads to exponential solutions (i.e., a slight increase in expected number of offspring compounds rapidly), the time required for an advantageous allele to sweep through a population only grows logarithmically with the population, while the rate of incidence grows linearly.
...
Thus civilization, with its consequently larger populations supported by agriculture, enhanced rather than suppressed the rate of human evolution.

p.s. This John Derbyshire review is an excellent antidote to Blank Slate-ism:

At a somewhat lower level, there is a great hunger for books about human nature that reinforce the state dogma—the dogma I call “culturism.” Jared Diamond has made a nice bundle for himself with books explaining human differences without breathing a word about human biology. Plenty of lesser lights have done the same. I picked up Harvard psychologist Richard Nisbett’s book The Geography of Thought with great expectations, but I found that the book was weakened by its punctilious culturism.

If, on the other hand, you publish a book that contradicts the “culturist” dogma, you had better get the wife and kids filling sandbags, beause you are going to take a lot of fire from the intellectual establishment. You could ask Charles Murray about this. Geography is in fact a great friend to the culturists.

Question: Why is this human group over here different from that one over there?

Answer: Ah, because they’re different places, you see. Different fauna, different climate, so the inhabitants react differently.

Question: I see. But then, over a few hundred generations, wouldn’t the selection pressures from these different environments cause these two populations to diverge in average characteristics, as Darwin observed with lesser animals?

Answer: Guards! Guards!

My dad's new book is out:

Future Imperfect describes and discusses a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past. It is worth starting to think about it now.

I've been reading/listening to The Power of Now, and I just managed to pick up and finish Stumbling on Happiness, which I'd stopped awhile back. The combination is interesting.

Part of the basic idea of the power of Now is, like the title says, the importance of the present moment. To give my own interpretation of a passage in the book: we have no direct access to the past or the future. Our only direct interface with reality comes at the present moment. Whenever we are remembering the past or imagining the future, we are not actually remembering or seeing reality, but only a copy that is in our mind.

Anything that happens to us will happen in some moment, be part of some present time. Anything not in the present is, in a sense, all in your head. (To be fair, though PoN doesn't mention this, even the present moment is in your head in that it is filtered through the senses which introduce lots of bias. But much less bias than when you are just accessing a cheap low-rez copy of reality).

The basic idea of Stumbling on Happiness is very simple. There is lots of evidence about how bad our memory is, how we make a lot of it up, how even eyewitness testimony is unreliable. Well, our imagining the future is even worse. He focuses specifically on imagining what will make us happy, vs. what people reports as actually making them happy. It turns out that there are large, consistent biases. Some things matter much more than we predict, others matter much less.

(brief aside: I was left rather disappointed in SoH, because it didn't offer any solutions. The ending was a total cop-out. My favorite template for things in this category is: present some human irrationality that we've learned about in the past couple decades, talk about how it affects people's lives negatively, and then explain some rules of thumb for overcoming it. That's useful. SoH forgot about the last part, which makes it feel very incomplete to me).

Anyway, the combination should be pretty obvious. There is a sense in which SoH is quantifying/proving PoN's claim that most time spent imagining the future is wasted and futile. Not only does imagining the future mean neglecting the present, which is the only place where we can act, but we are terrible at it! Some time spent in mental simulations of the future is of course absolutely necessary for planning, goal setting, and accomplishment. But we humans have a tendency to drift off into imagination (and recrimination) at the slightest excuse, which is of limited use even when accurate - and it ain't accurate!

I'm going to stop reading the book for awhile as I focus on other habits, but here are some quotes to give you the flavor:

From the intro: "The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life."

Rule: Resist the temptation to clear up small things first.

Remember, whatever you choose to do over and over eventually becomes a habit that is hard to break. If you choose to start your day working on low-value tasks, you will soon develop the habit of always starting and working on low-value tasks. This is not the kind of habit you want to develop or keep.

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to continue. A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind continually.

I think this must be a hack of some deficiency of how our minds work. There must be part of our cognitive architecture that in order to start a task, our mind has to contemplate the fullness and importance of that task. Because I've found it very true that it is much harder to get started on something not fun than to continue doing it once I've started. And this doesn't seem rational - why should all the mental effort be the context switch or activation energy, rather than the work itself? But, rational or not, this is how our brains seem to work, so developing habits to force yourself to get started on key tasks is likely a major element of personal productivity.

There are very few authors where I read all of their books (when there are more than a couple). I think this is a complete list:

Lois Bujold
Dave Duncan
Dick Francis
Robert Heinlein
Georgette Heyer
Elizabeth Moon
Neal Stephenson

I wish there were more authors where I just bought everything they wrote. More Bujolds would be too much to ask for, and more Stephensons would denude the world's forests. But more Duncans and Moons seems reasonable, and would reduce the repetition in my reading.

Anyway, Duncan is one of these new guys who I think a lot of people haven't heard of, so check him out if you like...err....the kind of fantasy I like. It's actually a bit bloody and barbaric for me, but the quality balances that out.