Results tagged “reading” from Eccentric Eclectica

My top 7 scholars:

1. Donald Davidson. Reading “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is still one of the high points of my philosophic career. I was a pretty naive cognitive relativist in college when I read this essay and it convinced me then and still convinces me now that humans share much more intellectual and cognitive background than not.
2. Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions altered my perception of science and forced me to question my belief in a naive, progressivist narrative of scientific development. It also put a great word into wide circulation — “paradigm”.
3. Lorraine Daston. A relative newcomer to the list within the last 5 years. I still haven’t finished reading Objectivity by her and Peter Galison, but the short essay on the history of objectivity I read for my STS (science, technology, and society) class still echoes in my memory.
4. George Lakoff. I first encountered Lakoff through his work on moral metaphors in politics. There are a number of times when I think that he pushes his ideas further than they can be sustained, but the whole nation-as-a-nuclear-family idea is still powerful.
5. James P. Carse. I read Finite and Infinite Games in the final years of high school so I actually own an original hardcover edition. I’m still enamored of the idea that there are games played to win (finite) and games played to continue play (infinite). Breakfast at the Victory, his book of essays is also great.
6. Douglas Hofstadter. Godel, Escher, Bach made me want to be a cognitive science for a couple of years. I’m still interested in the field but took a turn toward the philosophical end of the topic.
7. Ian Hacking. I read The Taming of Chance a few years ago while working on a paper about the history of statistics in the nineteenth century. Hacking’s book was a central part of my thesis.

Inspired by a post I found while trawling through the MinneBar links. An old link but still worth considering.

In February 1997 Richard Stallman published “The Right to Read” in the Communications of the ACM. The piece is a short science fiction story about two students in 2047 who run the risk of jail by surreptitiously trading e-books on their computer.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

Just a couple of days ago Amazon deleted digital copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from customer Kindle’s at the request of the publisher.

Stephen Downes has a good collection of links about the incident.

The Wall Street Journal had a good quote from Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, about the fiasco.

“In essence, Kindle is licensing you access to the book,” said Peter Brantley, director of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library. “It is a purchase, but you are actually not owning the book in the same way that you go to the book store and own it.”

But digital books–especially if they’re sold as part of access to a networked system such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Google’s online books collection–don’t necessarily fall under those same rules. “We have not matured our understanding of copyright to work in a digital environment in way that provides a set of protections and meets people’s expectations for how we use digital content,” said Brantley.

Now that last bit is a great bit of understatement.

1. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Rereading after seeing previews for the upcoming movie. Movie looks good. Book is still pretty good as well.

2. Choices, by Michael D. Resnik Primer on decision theory, probability, and game theory from a philosopher’s point of view. Good stuff as a reference.

3. Fashionable Nonsense, Bruce Wilshire Rutger’s philosopher attacks ‘analytic philosophy’ and over-professionalization of philosophy. Not quite clear on what his alternative program would be but he does give some good props to the American pragmatists and hints at a more phenomenological point of view.

4. Renewing Philosophy, by Hilary Putnam Some interesting hints about Wittgenstein and religion in the end chapters. Again not giving it enough time to find out what kind of renewal for which he wishes. Read a bit more and the book feels scattered, a number of lectures without connecting theme that I can detect.

5. On the History of Film Style, David Bordwell Basic outline of how the idea of film style has changed over time. Starting with the early standard picture which told how film became a medium and achieved it’s greatest visual synthesis in the silent era before sound brought it back to the staid confines of theatrical metaphors.

6. Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin Memoir about Martin’s early career in standup comedy. Quick read, some good bits of time period nostalgia. I hoped for more meat and reflection on how he created his standup comedy but the moments of reflection are slim.

7. The Family Trade, by Charlie Stross Fun and entertaining story about a young woman who finds she has the ability to walk between alternate worlds. The trait is controlled by the Clan, a group of feudal nobles who run the alternate-Earth society like a medieval fiefdom. She decides to modernize their trade by creating a better business model than mercantilist import/export.

8. The Powers to Lead, by Joseph S. Nye Brief and cogent book about the sociological research on leadership. Much better than most anecdotal business treatments of this topic - actually wrestles with power on a conceptual level.

9. A Demon of Our Own Design, by Richard Bookstaber Bookstaber was a quant on Wall Street from the 1980s to the early 2000s and witnesse the expansion of complicated financial instruments. He writes in 2007 that all of them are subject to normal accidents and tight-coupling which threatens to derail the entire financial system.

My favorites of the month were Stross for a rollicking good yarn and the Nye and Bookstaber.

When I worked for Barnes and Noble one of my favorite recommendations for children's picture books were the work of Jon Scieszka, who wrote The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. I enjoyed his titles and the illustrations.

Today I found an essay by him at the Washington Post about Why Johnny Won't Read. He contends, and I think sadly it is true, that boys don't see enough role models reading.

The 10-year-old boys in my neighborhood, the boys I talk to when I visit schools, the boys who write to me -- "I don't like books, but I kind of liked one of yours" -- these boys don't see reading as a "guy" activity. And this perception of reading is showing up in grim statistics, most notably those provided by U.S. Department of Education reading tests, which have shown boys scoring lower than girls every year, in every age group -- for the past 30 years.

I know I got my first taste for reading from my father who used to sit in his armchair with the latest copy of Analog, smoking a cigarette. I skipped the second addiction but went whole hog for the first. I used to carry three or four extra books to every one of my junior high and high school classes. I still remember how astonished Mrs. Nichols was in 6th grade when I told her that I was reading Watership Down. I loved reading and I still do. So visit Jon's web site www.guysread.com, download the poster, and read to your sons.