The Stuart Little movies are racist

Stuart Little is a charming book I fondly remember reading as a kid.  About a family where one of their biological kids is a mouse.  (Yes, the mom gave birth to Stuart.)

However, when Hollywood decided to make a movie based on the book, they saw fit to change the color of the mouse.  In the book, he's clearly a brown mouse.

But in the movie they decided to change that to white.

Because Hollywood can only make movies with white heroes.  Even when it's a white mouse.

They also changed him from being a biological child to being adopted, because realism is important with a movie about a talking mouse who wears clothes and has opposable thumbs.

Ready Player One - awesome book

I stumbled upon the book Ready Player One at my library, and I LOVED it.  It's a veritable nerdgasm of pop culture references.  (Badass scifi author John Scalzi nailed that description.)  It's a tale of a kid in the future trying to find easter eggs in a virtual world to inherit Steve Jobs' fortune.  I mean, not Steve Jobs, "James Halliday".

At one point, there's a party where R2D2 DJ's, and a Klingon bartender serves Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters.

It's a really fun ride, with very clever nerd culture references.

Machine of Death

I just finished a book called The Machine of Death, and it's awesome.

It's about a future where someone invents a machine that can tell you how you're going to die. With around 30 different short stories exploring that concept. Some of those stories are still haunting me. And some of them are hilarious and even adorable.

The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.

The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn’t actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.

You can get a PDF of the book for free off the website, and even listen to a podcast of people reading the stories. My personal favorite is probably DESPAIR, although NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING is also awesome, as is NOTHING.

Enjoy.

Data: Google Books

You can search the collected history of all books ever, thanks to Google. And see how different words trend. A group at Harvard did a bunch of interesting analysis about some words and phrases (See how Great War is replaced by World War One! Thrill at how pizza is much younger than ice cream, which is much younger than steak!)

And, you can search for words yourself. I found comparing Jesus and Buddha really surprising. Also, a LOT of books on Oregon were published in the 1930s. I have no idea why. And "email" used to mean something else in the 1860s. Something about enamel, and maybe about bacteria.

Google Groups suggests Google Books might not be great

Google wants to scan all the out of print books and save them from becoming the next lost library of Alexandria.

Unfortunately, last time they rescued an archive from the flames, it didn't go so well. Their storing of all the USENET archives in Google Groups has made the archive unsearchable.

There are lots of flaws in the Google Books plan. This is an example of why we shouldn't trust Google to just get it right, but make sure they're contractually obligated to.

Graphic Novel about math

I'm kind of curious to read Logicomix. It's a graphic novel about mathematicians arguing about the philosophy of math, and whether logic exists and can be useful in the real world.

And most of them are crazy. Which you always kind of suspected about really brilliant mathematicians.

More Google Books problems

Google got sued for scanning books. They reached a settlement with the association of publishers, or NAMBLA. But it turns out there's a lot of problems with giving one organization, even one that's not "evil", the power to control all books online.

For example, Google has decided not to make available any "inappropriate" books. Who decides what's inappropriate? Google.

That could be ok, if others could have access to those books and make them available. But only Google is allowed to have access to out-of-print books. Specifically, the Internet Archive has been banned from participating in the agreement that Google has obtained from the publishers.

This is not a good thing. Google does have as its mission to make information accessible to all. But concentration of power in any one center is a bad, bad plan.

Supreme Courtship

From the author of Thank You for Smoking, this book is an over-the-top ridiculous satire. It's hilarious. The character names alone are worth perusing. President Donald Vanderdamp, and his consigliere Graydon Clenndennynn are stuck in quite a pickle.

I was vaguely aware of this writer before, but now that I've read one of his books, I'm going to read them all. If they're half as entertaining, it'll be awesome. It is a farce - halfway through the book I realized the characters were going to embrace the worst possible choices they could make, and I stopped cringing and just enjoyed the ride. Read this book, laugh at the characters not with them, and hope for the worst outcome of their schemes. You'll enjoy it.

The Eyre Affair

How have I not written about this book yet? It's fricking awesome!

The Eyre Affair is the story of Thursday Next, British intelligence officer in the Literary Crimes division. In a world where airplanes were never invented, Wales is an independent nation, and Richard III is as popular as the Rocky Horror Picture Show is in our world, the investigation of literary crimes is a very big deal. She joined the police probably because her father is a cop, although he's a time traveling cop.

This book is the first in a series. I've read the first 3, and he gets even more imaginative and weird in the later books. I had looked forward to exploring more of the bizarre world revealed in the first book, but he goes further up and further in, giving you more surreal landscapes to imagine than you can handle, dashing across the literary landscape in a mad chase to save literature from the forces of evil.

A very weird book, but also very awesome.

The Compound

This book is fascinating. Very much a page turner of excitement. A family hunkers down in a nuclear fallout shelter, struggling to survive in the post-apocalypse. It's an entertaining read - I'm sure if you look beneath the surface the characters have their two-dimensionality, but the suspense of the story kept me hooked until the final page.

Company

A novel from the author of Jennifer Government, Company is a Dilbertesque novel, but with a wonderful chaotic lord of the flies twist. I enjoyed it very much. It starts off with a chaotic, dysfunctional work environment, and then it spirals into destruction and violence and awesome.

Gut Feelings

This fascinating book is by a psychologist who studies decision making processes. He argues that we make decisions typically based on simple rules of thumb, and not by the complicated weighing of pros and cons that is usually suggested. In fact, he gives many examples of how simple judgments which we are evolutionarily adapted to make very quickly, can be as accurate or even better for making decisions than much more complicated formulae.

He also gives several great examples of overthinking, when people who interrupt their natural process of gut intuition with rational thought decline in performance.

It's a good book. A very interesting read, with lots of fascinating examples explained in a very clear way. I do feel like the book needs a counterbalance - not against the truth of the argument, but about how good it is that we use intuition to decide things. The Science of Fear is a book all about how we use rules of thumb to make intuitive judgments, and how they lead us astray, or allow people with selfish motives to manipulate us into acting against our best interests.

Either way, it's interesting and useful to know more about our unconscious processes of decision making. But no book has been written yet that perfectly balances the story about this feature of ourselves.

Light at the Edge of the World

I did not like this book. It's a preachy book by an anthropologist about how we need to save all the native cultures around the world that are dying out because they have knowledge we can benefit from.

If he had made a case about botanical knowledge that traditional cultures possess, that would be a great book. But his contempt for science and Western ideas is so immense, and his sketchy descriptions of the cultures he mentions are so brief and shallow, I was deeply dissatisfied. He describes people who have visions as being able to see the future uncritically. My least favorite part of the book is when he claims that a native tribe can explain firewalking spiritually and that scientists can't explain it. He's wrong.

He's not wrong about the richness of human diversity, or the priceless knowledge in native cultures and the need to preserve it, he just makes a crappy argument for it. I wish he had written a book about just one of the cultures, going into great detail about all the complexity and richness of their culture, instead of shallowly surveying many. I longed for a book that was as good as Things Fall Apart, a detailed accounting of the many people in an indigenous culture, their ancient knowledge of the nature they live amidst, and the threats that modern society pose. Instead it's just skimming across the surface of some of the places he's visited. What he did was at the level of complexity of a TV show, not a book. (It's good that it also exists as a coffee table book with pretty pictures and TV show, but don't read it without pictures.)

Stiff

A book about dead people. Awesome. Despite being a catalog book, where each chapter explores another bizarre way your corpse could make itself useful after you're not using it anymore, it's a totally engaging and highly entertaining book.

From real-life crash test dummies to medical schools to museum displays, Mary Roach explores all the different things to do after you die. There are a few chapters that are particularly gross, like the description of the decomposition lab in Tennessee. But if you're up for that, you should read this most excellent book.

Your Inner Fish

This book is a typical science catalog book. The author takes a single idea: you can see our evolutionary history in the structure of various body parts, and then devotes a chapter to each one. See your history in your hand. See your history in your eye. See your history in your jaw. And so on.

It's pretty interesting, and there's a lot of cool stuff. But about 3/4 of the way through, it starts to get repetitive and boring. Early chapters break up the monotony with stories about particular scientists and how they discovered the various things we know about fossils and DNA and developmental biology. I wish more of the book were that story.

Dr. Tatiana

There are two kinds of science books that I've read lately. They tend to be catalogs: a single idea repeated in a series of variations from chapter to chapter, or they tell a narrative story about an adventure of discovery. I usually prefer the second kind, because the excitement of what will happen next moves the story along and keeps me reading.

A good book of the first kind, however, catalogs something awesome and amazing. And Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to all Creation does that very well indeed. Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, reviews all the insane variety of reproductive strategies the animal kingdom has to offer. And it's wild. If you can imagine it, there's an animal that does it. Banana slugs are among the weirder creatures, in fact. Not to mention species where the male is 100 times smaller than the female, and for years was mistaken for a parasite or an organ.

The book generally takes the style of an advice column, telling spiders and squids that their bizzare sex lives are in fact normal. The finale is a description of a pan-creation Jerry Springer show, which is even more engaging than the rest of the very enjoyable book.

Botany of Desire

This book is pretty good. An engaging series of tales, about 4 plants and the entwining of their fate with human history. We have involved ourselves in their evolution, and they have obliged our desires by evolving new properties to suit us.

The four plants are the apple, the tulip, the marijuana and the potato. There's lots of fascinating stuff to be learned, particularly about the genetics of these plants. And plenty of interesting anecdotes about people and their desires for what these plants should be.

The only flaw with the book is the Chaucerian structure. There is a thread that connects the four stories together, but it's a very thin one. Each story is good, but the parts are greater than the whole. It's a good book, and I recommend it, but it's not the best of the books that I've read recently. To put it another way, I enjoyed it very much, but I COULD put it down.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting this book was. I thought that a good book should exist about the creation of the internet, but I also secretly feared that it would be too nerdy and not human enough.

I am biased, being a huge computer nerd, but I found it totally engaging. The book does contain a large number of technical details, but explains them all with very accessible metaphors. And the story of the various people and personalities is very interesting. It seems like the internet could very easily have never been built - that there were lots of reasons for it to not happen, lots of competing interests that had to compromise, but that they just managed to pull it all off. All in all, I think it's a pretty good book.

The Ghost Map

This book is awesome. It's the story of London's last cholera epidemic, and how a scientist and a preacher working in parallel were able to discover how cholera is spread and inspire the invention of modern sewer systems.

It's a really hypnotizing book; I was sucked in by the foreshadowing of disaster, how you see people going about their everyday lives, not knowing that they're doing things that will kill them. And the detective story of the people solving the mystery of disease, coupled with a villain who denies the evidence even as it mounts higher and higher, makes for a compelling human story that's also the story of the scientific process. I recommend it greatly.

Evolution of Invention

This book tells interesting stories about how the fork, the paper clip, hammers and the zipper (as well as some other inventions) developed gradually over the years from simple primitive tools into highly refined tools for very particular jobs.

It's an interesting, but pretty dry book. The story is not a human story, of a particular inventor struggling to overcome hardship. (Except for the zipper people.) The stories are interesting because you use forks and paper clips and zippers all the time, but I was a little disappointed at how the author didn't bring the topic to life.