I've finished watching the seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager and, even if I enjoyed watching it, I also think it was the series with the most potential lost from all of them.

First of all, the show should have been called Star Trek Condescension. Each Star Trek series before it had some obnoxious characters, like Bones in The Original Series, even if he was saved by the clever interactions with his counterpart, Spock, or like Deanna Troi in Next Generation, intrusive and opinionated about just about everything that did not concern her, or like Kira Neris, who always had some cause to fight in the detriment of all her other colleagues on Deep Space 9. It was OK, it part of the concept. Voyager has broken that rule, making just about everybody as annoying as possible.

Top of the list: Captain Janeway, who was not only acting like the headmistress of a high school, placed there by divine powers to have children under her care and control, but who was also a complete hypocrite, changing her views whenever it suited her, but quoting larger than life "directives" whenever she wanted out of something. For all her talk of saving lives, if the show was reality, she would have killed her crew numerous times and would have insured just about every major force in the quadrant was an enemy of the Federation. And the worse part is that her acting was perfect: from the condescending tone of her voice to the raised eyebrows, from the hand on her hip to the dismissive smile, her body language was more obnoxious than anything she could have said.

Second in command Chakotay, a man of native-American origins, would have no problem breaking any rule when his Maki training would surface, only to justify anything by either invoking his spiritual ancestors or spouting truisms while fully inhaling before each sentence. While Janeway's condescension was authoritative, Chakotay's was always thuggish, but just as strong and annoying as his captain's. Also, he was making mistakes almost every time it didn't involve physical activity. Not the best choice for a second in comand.

Neelix deserves a special place in the annals of obnoxiousness, as a rodent like alien who comes on board as the lover of this pixie like beautiful blonde. After suffering more than a season rude and abusive bouts of jealousy from him, we spend the rest watching him intrude in everybody's personal lives from his self appointed position of "moral officer" and later of "ambassador". Only in the last season a Q is fusing his jaws and lips and removes his vocal cords, a humanitarian move who only lasted till a few minutes later. Blessed be the silence, though.

There are more, from the loud mouthed doctor who is "evolving" from very rude to intrusive and almost destroys the ship twice with all the good intentions to the duo B'elanna Torres and Tom Paris, who act so superior towards anybody not like them that they would have undoubtedly made the alpha couple in a high school drama.

A good thing about the series is the design. All the technology is consistent in aspect and apparent functionality from the start to the end of the series. Considering Voyager was produced during amazing technological advancements in television and computers, it was probably an effort not many noticed. The human component, so easily removable via computers and nanotechnology, was preserved during the entire length of the series, maintaining that theatrical feel and enforcing the idea that the sci-fi in the series was just a prop for some larger ideas. Unfortunately, the ideas was not that large, and were mostly human centric and ridiculously optimistic.

About the plot, the show is about a Federation starship stranded in the Delta Quadrant, seventy thousand light years from Earth. The way people travel is the most inconsistent part of the series, as they are always struggling to get home, while the same aliens are attacking recurrently, even with less advanced technology. How could they "ambush" Voyager, if they were left behind?

The holodeck and the holographic doctor were used extensively as a plot crutch, whenever they were out of ideas. Meetings with the Borg are common, even if the results are mind baffling. One of the most disgusting things in the series is the treatment of Seven of Nine, a Borg that is being coerced back to individuality despite numerous declarations that it wants to return to the Collective. But Janeway knows best and all the list of annoying characters above proceed thereafter to piss on the Borg heritage of Seven and insist on developing her "humanity". If Voyager would be watched by the people described in the show, it would undoubtedly be considered crass human propaganda for the Federation.

And still, for all the reliance on Borgs to move the plot on, the technological side of the equation was repeatedly ignored. Seven is part Borg and will remain so for the rest of the series, including nanoprobes in her blood. Yet she does not attempt to assimilate anyone, including enemies, when it would have been the best way of solving some of the problems. Borg technology is added to Voyager, but most often reluctantly and only temporary. Seven never develops cybernetic tools for herself, even after her implants save the ship several times. Also the Borg Collective is presented as a mindless community of interconnected people, but at the end a Queen of the Borg is revealed, who has total control and presents a target and a persistent enemy.

Bottom line, for a technological person as myself, I was almost attracted more to the Borg model than the Federation one. While the words "democracy", "freedom" and "openness" were spouted at every occasion, true freedom of thought was only tolerated on Voyager when the captain agreed. The Borg at least used the individual as a conduit for the general thought. The morality lessons in the series were simplistic and antiquated. Voyager, with the idea of a ship stranded somewhere, with problems that needed solutions with limited resources and lots of ingenuity, could have been a series to open minds. Instead, it force fed US concepts from the 60's.

I have to admit, the quality has increased dramatically in both writing and storyline in this second part of the Wheel of Time series. Robert Jordan's The Great Hunt follows our heroes in their quest to heal Mat, deliver the Horn of Valere and escape the endless machinations of the Aes Sedai.

I was saying in the review of the first book, The Eye of the World, that the story was ridiculously black and white, reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. The Great Hunt features good and evil Aes Sedai, sympathetic Darkfriends, political Cairhienians that see every action (or lack thereof) as a move in The Great Game of lords and not less than three new major threats, not counting the Black Aes Sedai, as well as parallel worlds, resurrected heroes and epic battles. So there is a good range of shades of grey, washing away the simplicity with which the series started. The characters gain volume, developing in their own unique ways.

There are some issues, though. Rand is exhibiting wonderful skill and ability exactly when needed, being pretty much clueless most of the time. Women again appear rather one sided: proud, intelligent, manipulative and always in some way of authority over men. The "The wheel spins as the wheel wills" quote is used way too much and the blatant logical hole ignored: if it does, then no one needs to get involved in anything, especially the Aes Sedai. Nynaeve find a new strength and acts more like a Wisdom and less like a scared little girl.

So I am caught up in this. Too interested to start reading the tech book I was planning and too much work at the office to really feel the need to. Let's see how the next book in the series will be.

The Eye of the World is the first book in the series called The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. Written in 1983, it is very similar to Lord of the Rings. It features a complex world of nations and races with their own languages and cool sounding names, a battle of good light versus evil dark that is so ridiculously polarized that at first I thought I couldn't finish the book, a party of different people in which the main character is a poor country sheppard boy, a quest that has the goal of saving the world via a long trek of personal transformation.

Actually, if I think about it, it seems almost entirely inspired by Lord of the Rings, with none of the innovations that appeared since playing any effect except maybe The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, when describing the Blight. Something that is clearly different in the book is the role of women.

While Tolkien had them placed high on a pedestal, queens and princesses that were supposed to inspire men but not be touched, Jordan presents them as important members of the party, with Moraine, the "wizard", holding most of the authority. Actually, it goes further than that, giving all women characters an almost indomitable ability to influence men. Only one female in the entire book is evil, and that for a very brief period of time, and none of them are weak in any way. It doesn't even matter much that The One Power has two sides, one female and one male, and that the male is tainted by The Dark One. Even if they would have magical power, men are doomed to be ruled by women in The Eye of the World and probably the rest of the books.

The evil Shai'tan is a dark entity with burning eyes and eternal rage, imprisoned yet powerful, corrupting everything he touches, while the power that opposes him is white pure light that heals, purifies and avenges. The only shred of ambiguity comes in the shape of The Children of the Light, a warrior sect dedicated to fight evil, but that are nothing more than pompous gang members that define evil as anything they don't like.

All and all the book was pleasant enough and, being December, I plan on reading at least the next book in the series before I start with a technical one. However, it doesn't come close to most of the books I've read recently. The simple design and clear inspiration is probably the reason why they want to adapt the story to television, now that the likes of Game of Thrones have shown the model successful. If the quality of the books does not improve in time, it may be so that it would be more effective to wait for the films instead of reading the book. Then again, I will make up my mind after I've read more. I have hope.

Long time since I've posted a song. I heard this one at a lunch with a friend and then I dug up this rare video of the last performance of Shakespeare's Sister before they split up. Enjoy!



Here is the original video of the song:

This book touches a very uncomfortable subject for me: the mindless, visceral hive mind of the crowd. There is nothing more horrible, I find, that being powerless in front of a mob of people united by only their stupidity and fear. Lord of the Flies is the archetypal book about this subject. It tells the story of a bunch of British kids stranded on a small island without any adult supervision. They create a parody of human society which ultimately fails horribly towards the end.

The book is short, but to the point. Sections of it are almost unbearable to read, not because it features monsters or supernatural creatures, but because you feel deep inside that it is the truth, that these things happen and that they do because of something deep inside each of us.

The only failing of the book, I feel, is that Jack and Roger are portrayed as classical psychopaths and it is clear from the beginning that one cannot empathise with them. A slightly longer story that would have made the effort to make these characters slightly likeable would have had an even deeper impact. In that case, I fear, the book would have become completely unbearable. People need their illusions about the society around them; shattering them completely would not do.

This book is a must read for any student of human psychology and one of the best books to reference at parties to make you look smarter than you are :-) I've actually read the book because I was doing that too much, but had only seen the movie. I wonder if I should get other works from William Golding, since I liked this one so much.

I was looking for autobiographies, since I liked quite a few of them lately and I felt like more, and so I got two. One is interesting because it is finally in print after 100 years since the author's death. I am talking about the first volume of Mark Twain's biography. However, I really could not make myself read it: the language was so pompous and the content so lame that I felt pain trying to.

Not so the second book, which seemed even more unlikely for me to like it: THE PLEASURES OF STATISTICS: The Autobiography of Frederick Mosteller, but which I did. It started with a few projects that Fred Mosteller participated in, explaining the day to day concerns and situations of a statistician while working on them. I thought at first that the book is going to be all like this, so after about a third I was about to abandon the read. You see, it was all very interesting from a professional statistician's point of view, but I wanted the more personal viewpoint of the man. And so I got it. Suddenly the book changed pace and went with the early life and education of Mosteller. The end of the book again covered some cases of work, but this time with a personal touch that explained the motivation behind the acts. And finally, the editor's epilogue, written from testimonies of friends and colleagues.

In this review, a Theodore M. Porter argues that the autobiography was flawed, as it covered little of his family life and couldn't reconcile the different viewpoints that appeared in the book, like the scientific and personal. But I disagree. The autobiography was unfinished and I guess the editor did the best he could with what he had, but it couldn't have been a lot different from what Mosteller himself intended. You start with the actual work: statistics, explained in layman's terms, then you continue with the actual man, explaining the origins and education, then you get back to statistics, but examining the work from the personal viewpoint of the man described. Yes, he could have written about his family more, but it wouldn't have been about statistics. The little he does write about his wife is about how supportive she was throughout his career. And yes, the tone of the book is a bit clinical, but this is how the writer actually thought like; he was a scientist in the true sense of the word and I liked this book exactly because it made me understand how such a man thinks and feels.

Even more than the structure of the book and the insight in the mind of a conscientious and brilliant scientist what I liked most is the peek at the world in the middle of the 20th century and how strikingly different it was from what we see today. The concerns of a teacher towards the best method to get his students to understand and like the subject, the way people were getting together to solve problems and worked for years on a book or bunch of science papers, the way academia was also supportive, not only political, and most of all, to see how people can be both brilliant and empathic, both clinical in science and warm in person.

I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone. I had a hard time reading it to the end and paying attention to every bit. Nor should one study it like a school manual, because as far as I see, the book is about a man's soul and you only have to understand and feel that. Whether it is because of my autobiography fad or because I resonated with the man or for some other reason, the bottom line is that I enjoyed reading the book. Maybe you will too.

Luckily for me, some chess videos are for beginners like me. Here is one from OnlineChessLessons, describing a simple, clear opening called The Stonewall Attack. After watching the video I played a game with my trusted Nokia phone and managed to create a game starting with this opening. I then analysed it using chess engines Houdini and Rybka and annotated it manually. Check it out, including the variations.

Video first:

Make sure you also follow the article attached to the video.

And now my game:
[Event "29/10/2011 1:08:49 pm"]
[Date "29/10/2011"]
[White "Siderite"]
[Black "Nokia Easy5"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "D05"]
[Opening "Colle"]
[Variation "5.c3 Nc6 6.Nbd2 Bd6 7.O-O O-O"]
[TimeControl "600"]
[Termination "normal"]
[PlyCount "59"]
[WhiteType "human"]
[BlackType "computer"]


1.d4 e6 2.e3 d5 3.Bd3 Bd6 4.f4 Nf6 5.Nd2 O-O 6.Ngf3 c5 7.c3 Nc6 8.O-O c4 9.Bc2 Ng4
{At this point, the engines suggest Bxh7, a classic sacrifice.}
10.Qe2
{However, I moved the queen to defend e3.}
( 10.Bxh7+ Kxh7 11.Ng5+ Kg8 12.Qxg4
{This variation wins the h7 pawn, but moves away from the spirit of the original game.}
12...Qf6 13.e4 ) 10...f5
{At this point, engines suggest Ne5, followed by knight exchange from black.}
11.h3
{I chose to shoo the knight away, but weakening g3, where the knight would love to come later.}
( 11.Ne5 Ngxe5 12.dxe5 Be7 13.b4 ) 11...Nf6 12.Ne5 Qa5 13.g4 fxg4 14.hxg4 Qb6
{engines would want me to attack the knight on f6 before moving the rook out.}
15.Rf2 ( 15.g5 Bxe5 16.dxe5 Ne8 17.Kg2 g6 18.b3
{Engines decide to try a queen side attack as well, in order to weaken the black pawn chain. I was not interested in that.}
) 15...h6
{engines suggest attacking the rook and with Ng6, which is a natural attacking move and a lovely outpost.}
16.Rh2 ( 16.Ng6 Rf7 17.g5 Nh7 18.Qh5 Ne7 19.Nxe7+ Rxe7 20.gxh6 Nf8 21.Rg2 Qc7 22.Qg5
{However at this point the game moves into queen side attacks and a slower attacking pace.}
) 16...Ne7 17.g5 hxg5 18.fxg5 Bxe5 19.dxe5 Nd7
{engines suggest now a beautiful move: Rh8, followed by a munching of black pieces or/and mate. Make sure you check out the variation.}
20.Nf3 ( 20.Rh8+ Kf7 ( 20...Kxh8
{Taking the rook leads to a quick mate.}
21.Qh5+ Kg8 22.Bh7+ Kh8 23.Bg6+ Kg8 24.Qh7# ) 21.Qh5+ g6 22.Bxg6+ Nxg6 23.Qh7+ Ke8 24.Qxg6+ Kd8 25.Rxf8+ Nxf8 26.Qf6+ Ke8 27.Nf3
{Try this variation on a chess engine to see it to the end. White is only one pawn up, but it is a passed one. The king is safe as well.}
) 20...Rb8 21.g6 Nf5 22.Rh3 Nh6 23.Kh1
{I felt like the pin on e3 was annoying and stopping me from using the black bishop. The engines recommend moving Qh2 instead, which is much better.}
( 23.Qh2 Nc5 24.Ng5 Ne4 25.Bxe4 dxe4 26.Nh7 Qc7 ( 26...Rd8
{If you wanted to know why black did not move the rook when attacked by the knight, follow this variation through.}
27.Rxh6 Rd1+ 28.Kg2 Qd8 29.Nf6+ Kf8 30.Rh8+ Ke7 31.Qh4 Rd2+ 32.Bxd2 b6 33.a4 Qxd2+ 34.Kh1 Qe1+ 35.Rxe1 Bb7 36.Rxb8 Bc8 37.Rxc8
gxf6 38.Qh7# ) 27.Nxf8 Qd8 28.Rxh6 Qg5+ 29.Kf2 Qxh6 30.Qxh6 gxh6 31.Nh7
{At this point white is a knight up, but what a boring continuation.}
) 23...Nf5 24.Qh2 Ng3+
{Engines suggest I move the king and concentrating on the attack, but I took the knight with the rook.}
25.Rxg3 ( 25.Kg1 Qxe3+ 26.Bxe3 Ne2+ 27.Kg2 Nf4+ 28.Bxf4 Rf5 29.Rh8# ) 25...Re8 26.Qh7+ Kf8 27.e4
{At this point, a mate in 8 is found.}
27...Qc7
{But with this move, mate will happen in 4.}
28.Bg5 Nf6 29.exf6 Rd8 30.Qh8# 1-0


Enjoy!

P.S. I am currently looking for a method of displaying the game as I want it on the blog: dynamic, with annotation and variation support, preferably something that is not Java and optimally something that reads the PGN from a span and replaces it with a nice looking chess interface. Right now, the usual game engine fails for some reason I need to analyse.

The complete title of the book is How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom, which is a mouthful, but very precise. It does explain how principles of chess, economics and politics apply in all three fields and how Garry Kasparov has evolved from chess player to world champion and, nowadays, into a political anti-Putin figure.

If you ask me, abandoning chess to get into business and worse, politics, it's a complete loss. However I do understand the guy, he got bored. Someday I may abandon computer programming.

Back to the book, though, it felt a lot like The Art of Learning, also written by a brilliant chess player (who incidentally also abandoned chess... hmm). It was more precise, most logical, though, looking at things from a more of a clinical perspective. I would have wanted to learn more about Kasparov's relationship with Karpov, for example, since he is always calling him his nemesis, but never says anything about how he felt about the guy.

This book is peppered with good advice, historic comparisons and great quotes from chess players and great men. Also, short descriptions of the relationship between famous "chess pairs" are giving the book an extra chess dimension. All in all I recommend it highly, although it felt more like a useful reference than a soul book like The Art of Learning.

Geek Love is another title that mislead me. Geek, in this book, refers to the original definition of the word "A carnival performer who does wild or disgusting acts" and not a cool lovable geek as myself. The subject is "controversial": the life of an albino hunchbacked dwarf woman as a member of a carnival family.

There is a lot going on in the book. Carnival people poison themselves in order to make their children as freaky as possible. Said children are then raised only if they are strange enough. The failures are either preserved in glass jars if they are too mutated, or given away if they are too normal. The successes range from the main character, to a sociopath hairless cult leader with flippers instead of members, to siamese sisters that have the same lower body to a telekinetic God like child who only wants to be loved and gets manipulated into doing stuff for others. The sisters later give birth to a grotesquely obese child, fathered by a man with half his face blown up who squirts inside their vagina in his death moment. The death and the face blowing are unrelated. There is more, like a rich heiress who pays beautiful women to mutilate themselves in order to have a better life, unencumbered by the sexual desire of her subjects or of the people surrounding them.

The book itself was pretty innovative, but rather boring. If I had an alternative, I wouldn't have finished it, but as I had not, I am a bit proud of having finished it. If nothing else, the book is strange enough to be interesting. Also the writing is pretty good, introverted, taking the reader inside the mind of a person who considers normal people too bland and treasures her deformity and that of her daughter, fathered through telekinesis with the sperm of her brother.

Don't get me wrong, it was not painful reading the book and I do not regret having reading it. However I wish there was something more interesting in the story other than the strangeness of one's thoughts.

As an avid viewer of TV series and movies alike, I am always discussing the latest shows with my friends and I have been surprised to notice that not many knew about Entourage. I consider it a shame, as this series is exactly what a TV show needs to be and so few actually manage to do what it does.

Entourage is the story of a young talented actor who rises from anonymity with the help of three childhood friends. They are practically brothers and, even if he is the only one of them who "made it", they still live together and share everything, while navigating the weird world of Hollywood. The format of the show is short half an hour episodes that never leave you hanging when they end and that, for me at least, always provide a good feeling. I am not talking about silly ha-ha comedy here, I am talking about a lightweight dramedy that makes you smile. At the end of an episode you don't want more, you feel content, and you only begin to crave more when that contentment wears off. This is what today's media shows have forgotten how to do!

I was a bit sad to see the eighth and last season of the show end with its eighth episode a few days ago. I really wanted more of this and now that Entourage is no more, I know it would be hard to find a show that would bring the same peace of mind after each episode. And you haven't heard or tried Entourage, you should. Good show!

The Sparrow is, in my opinion, a good example of politics in literature, as it won several prestigious prizes, but is, in my own view, slightly above average. To quickly summarize the book, it's a Jesuit meets New World story, only the plot is set in the future and the new world is another planet.

Maybe I am just bitter because after tedious chapters about the relationships between the characters, the sci-fi was minimal and outdated. In fact, the author herself admitted that the kind of story she wanted to write could not be set on Earth because there are no new worlds here; this leads me to believe that the sci-fi was incidental and it bloody feels that way, too.

I will give credit where it is due, though. The woman documented herself well and presented interesting characters in great detail. Also the story itself is pretty solid, albeit a bit boring and focused too much on the religious. Other than that, it felt like a 1960's book. I was shocked to see that it was published in 1996. Some of the technical details described in the book were outdated even then.

About the plot, a discreet mission to a nearby planet is organized by the Jesuits, because all the other players in the field like the United Nation are too bureaucratic and talk about it more than actually doing something. The story starts with the return of the only survivor, priest Emilio Sandoz, and then the book continues with back and forth lines of now and then. The ending felt rushed and a bit anticlimactic. Maybe I was just not in an empathetic mood and couldn't care less about the religious and cultural sensitivities of the people involved and from all the characters, only Jimmy, the tall technical guy, felt agreeable. Who would have guessed? :)

Bottom line: I will not read the sequel book and that should say a lot. The book is not bad, though, and I may be berating it too much. A thing is certain, this is at the lower edge of the sci-fi scale, regardless of writing quality.

Update: In lack of a good book to read, I started on Children of God, the sequel to The Sparrow. Russell's talent for tedium, futile philosophy and rape fantasies reaches new heights in this book, so much that I just couldn't finish it. I usually finish watching movies and reading books even if they are bad, just for the experiential value alone, but I couldn't do it with this one. You have the same pointless priest, wallowing in self pity and then pathetically letting himself be used again, all the time asserting that he won't. And just so the reader would have no thoughts that the man could find a way out, a chapter of one of his kidnappers getting old on Rakhat, smack in the middle of the book, erases that possibility. What would be the point of reading on? Just for the ridiculous discussions about different Gods between random people? No. Just avoid this one.

When I was a child I watched with huge eyes movies like Hackers, enjoying the shenanigans of computer rebels fighting the stupid law enforcement and the "evil" hackers. Of course, there was also Angelina Jolie. Even then I knew that my pleasure was a guilty one: no way could the police be that stupid, no way it would be that easy to penetrate all kinds of systems and produce effects so flashy. A while after that I watched Skeet Ulrich in the movie Operation Takedown, which was a more realistic hacker movie (and one I think Skeet did a great job in). It depicted how Kevin Mitnick has been apprehended by the authorities. I really loved that movie, although it had a lot of eye rolling moments.



Fast forward to now, reading Ghost in the Wires, Kevin Mitnick's book about himself, practically a hacking autobiography, and I loved this book every bit as much as I liked those movies as a kid. Not only I couldn't leave the book out of my hands once I started reading it, but was shocked to see that reality is not that far away from what was depicted in hacking movies. It was also interesting to read how the script of Operation Takedown came to be, which Kevin considers defamatory and mostly untrue.



Long story short, Mitnick is a smart kid with a great memory, an absent father and no real friends. He starts dabbling with radio and telephones and manages to get access to phone systems way before computers where personal or connected to each other. He's a kid, though, and he gets caught a few times. Nobody seems to understand he does it just for the fun of it and he can't seem to understand why nobody gets him. In the end, pushed by the desire to challenge himself, but also by authorities baiting him all the time, he becomes a life long hacker and eventually gets caught.



A shocking part of the book is how easy it is to penetrate any system, not by whatever technical wizardry, but by simply tricking people into giving you information and access. Called "social engineering" it was Mitnick's strongest point and at several times in the book, when the technology would not allow him to enter one system or another, he would just abandon the tech stuff and go with tricking people. Already having knowledge on how to manipulate phone systems made that a lot easier, as well.



Another, less shocking, but utterly disappointing part is about authorities. Just as they are now about file sharing and whatever "crisis" they are in, law enforcement agencies are basing their entire existence on pure power of coercion, ignoring the rules that they themselves are enforcing and being motivated only by keeping that power in their hands. Technical morons, they only seem to be getting into the action when their pride is affected. In this book Kevin Mitnick dances around security personnel, local cops, FBI, NSA several steps ahead of them, but they only seem to really mind when newspapers start publishing articles that makes law enforcement look bad. And once they have him, caught only with the help of other hackers, they are using all the dirty tricks in the book to bring Mitnick to his knees. Nothing has changed from then to now, just look at cases like Gary McKinnon's. Intimidation is a bully's greatest strength. That's sad.



I would have to say that the most unexpected thing was the tone of the book, which is almost exuberant. Mitnick has not become a bitter and paranoid man after countless personal betrayals and authority abuse and he is not angry at all. If anything, the guy is happy to have lived as the lead actor in the "Myth of Kevin Mitnick", which has grown way bigger than the real person. There is a scene when he gets outside of a building and there are hundreds of fans there, shouting, and he looks behind to see if there is a celebrity around.



Bottom line: this is a book you can't miss. It is easy to read to the point of instantly addictive, it is well written with enough juicy technical details to keep one interested and, most of all, makes you feel good, even in the horrible moments of his detention. It makes one wonder, did Mitnick socially engineer himself into remaining an open and cool guy in the face of adversity? Or is it he had this strength all along and that is his most powerful "magic"?

I've always felt that a lot of movies and books lack realism, that when the hero survives and gets the girl, while the villains get their rightful punishment the whole story becomes null and void. Therefore I believed that the opposite of this - a character centric plot, a realistic story, unexpected outcomes - would spell a good story and wonderful books/movies. Such is the tale in A Song of Ice and Fire, the seven (until now) book saga that I am currently reading, in which A Dance with Dragons is the fifth book.



Imagine my surprise in discovering that the other extreme is just as bad. In ASOIAF, there is no real main character. A lot of heroes and villains to choose from, but, completely unexpected, heroes suffer and die, while villain prevail. Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe nobody truly prevails. Certainly they all suffer. So what is wrong with this picture? George R. R. Martin went too far. His tale is now more of an alternative history than a true story. Maybe the sixth book will be different, but how can it be and still remain faithful to the first five? How can it continue the way the story went so far without a pointless struggle, where random things happen to random people? I mean, if I like this, I should start reading history books. My father would be pleased, I am sure :)



A Dance with Dragons takes place in a period in time that mostly overlaps the fourth book. The author acknowledged that there were too many characters doing too much in that short amount of time and, rather than split the storyline in the middle and create the "left hanging" effect, he opted for a geographical (more or less) division of the plot.



I liked the book. It started with a lot of setup, and that is what most of the book is about, but it also got deeper into magic and Arya's assassin training and what Jon and Tyrion did. I would say they are my favourite characters so, in that respect, the fifth book is better than the fourth. Can't say more about it without ruining the fun, but I was not disappointed, only slightly annoyed to see that what I really wanted in a book I got and I was still not completely satisfied.



My theory is that the stern characters in the book represent Martin's own father, while Tyrion and Jon are reflections of his own persona. Sansa may be the clueless girl who broke his heart, while Arya would be his daughter or younger sibling. I am just theorizing here, as I have not read any bio information of the author. Perhaps he represented himself as Wun Wun :)



I am waiting for the sixth book to appear, but the second book in the saga appeared two years after the first, the third two years later, then five years, then six! At this rate the sixth book will be published in 2018, with Martin of 70 years of age and waiting for the seventh eight or nine years later.

Kary Mullis is a chemist who, in 1983, invented Polimerase Chain Reaction, something that would revolutionize DNA analysis in terms of increased speed. He won the 1993 Nobel prize for that. He also is a controversial scientist who claims possible alien encounters and telepathy, denies global warming as an effect of human intervention, is skeptic about HIV causing AIDS and generally believes that most scientists are inventing reasons to get funded rather than doing anything scientific. He also admits smoking pot, taking LSD and generally experimenting with any mind altering chemical that he can make. He likes women and some of them like him. That is what this book is all about, a sort of "I am Kary Mullis, hear me roar!".

I started reading the book because I was falsely led to believe that he describes how training his mind with LSD lead him to the idea of PCR. The book is not about that at all, and if the article above is true about Mullis had an advantage over his colleagues: he had trained his brain to think differently by using hallucinogenic drugs, there is no mention of that in this book.

It is simply an autobiography, but written with gusto and sincerity. Some of the things he says are both logical and hard to accept (because so many others are of opposite views), some of them are simply personal beliefs. As many a talented person, he is intelligent, he had early opportunity to practice his passion (chemistry), a close friend to share it with and support from a local chemistry business owner who kind of adopted him for the summers and gave him the tools he needed to grow. The way he writes his book reminds me of the style of another scientist friend of mine: devoid of bullshit and intolerant of stupidity.

Bottom line, it is a nice book, simply written, short, I've read it in a few hours. It is a window in the life of an interesting person, and as such, I liked it. I can't say I've learned much from it, though, and that is somewhat of a disappointment coming from a book written by a man of science.

The Art of Learning is a wonderful book, both concise and useful, with tremendous sources for inspiration at every level. It also has more meaning to me, as it started with an investigation in the life of Josh Waitzkin, prompted by my renewed attention to chess.
To start from the beginning, I've first heard of Josh Waitzkin when I've started going through the "academy" section of ChessMaster XI. The first chapter in this section was Josh Waitzkin's academy, which taught with examples of both life and game. I was intrigued, so I looked the guy up. This way I found references to Searching for Bobby Fischer, a Hollywood movie about the early life of chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, based on a book by his father. I watched the film, with both positive and negative feelings, but at the most I was even more intrigued. I then found out about the two books that Josh wrote: Attacking Chess and The Art of Learning and started reading the latter, since I had to read it on my old Palm in the subway and I am not yet at the level in which I can mentally visualize chess notation.
The Art of Learning is everything I wanted in a book about learning: the personal introspective view, the theory of learning and its mechanics, clear examples and methods of achieving the same results. Frankly told, I doubt many people can learn at the same speed as Josh Waitzkin can - clearly the guy is a genius - but there are insights in this book that blew me away.
The book is structured in three parts:

• The Foundation - describing the early experience of learning, the downfalls, the insights, the situations in which Josh found himself as a child discovering the game of chess and then becoming National chess champion.
• My Second Art - the part where he finds less peace in chess and decides to abandon it in favor of the martial art of Tai Chi Chuan, which centers him and presents new opportunities for learning. Here similar principles are found to the ones related to chess.
• Bringing it All Together - where Waitzkin describes methods for identifying your own method of learning and reaching the state of mind most conducive to high performance

It all ends with a climactic Taiwan International martial arts championships that Josh wins, overcoming adversity and malevolent judges, a story that rivals any of Van Damme's movies, but also shows where the inspiration for those came from.

There are some ideas that I could understand immediately, seem obvious, but I've never thought of before:
One of them is that the unconscious mind acts like a high speed parallel processor, while the conscious mind is a serial decisional engine. An expert in a field does not think faster than a beginner; he only placed many of the underlying principles in the subconscious, running them at high speed, and leaving the conscious mind decide, like a manager, from the granular information that is precomputed and available. That makes sense at the smallest biological level. Think of the frog eye that sends a yes/no signal through the optical nerve when a fly enters the field of view - the frog does not have to decide if what it sees is a fly or not. But it also explains quite clearly the effect of training, something that I, to my shame, had not understood until now. Training is not simply learning, it is also moving the information downwards, "internalizing" it, as Waitzkin calls it. GrandMasters do not think about the possibilities on the chess board from the bottom up, they already see structure and work directly with the aggregated, higher level information. Martial arts experts don't count the steps in a complicated move, they just make them. Normal people do not put a foot in front of the other, they walk, they don't string words up, they speak.
Another idea is that the process of learning, done in small increments, allows the direct internalization of concepts before we use them in combinations. First move a few pieces until you know how they work, don't start with complicated chess games. Reduce the scope of your training and the internalization will come a lot faster. Then, in a complex game, you just use the things you have learned previously. When training to fight, train each small move before you start combining them.
This is an important idea in The Art of Learning: the difference between what Waitzkin calls entity-learning and process-learning. Entity learners will try to find the quick way out, find the small trick that get the problem done; they will care only about the end result, collapsing under the fear of losing. The process learner would enjoy the challenge, see each problem as something that can be solved if attacked metodically and chipped away at bit by bit. They will value the process of learning over the end result. An entity learner will try to learn as much as possible, in the end reaching mediocre levels of understanding in all fields, while a process learner will take each process as far as possible before engaging another. Process learners would say "I didn't learn enough" when losing, while entity learners would say "I wasn't good enough".
I am sorry to say that I apparently fall towards the entity-learner category. It is obvious that must change and I hope it can. What I gathered from this concept is that entity learners identify themselves with the solution of a problem. Losing makes them losers, winning makes them winners. Process learners identify themselves with the process of learning, making them bad or good learners. A very good point Josh makes is that the type of learning is usually caused by the way parents reacted to the early success of their children and also that it can be changed, it is not set in stone like just another cemmented childhood psychological baggage.
An interesting thing about the book is that it also provides some mechanisms to improve, to reach that "zone" of serenity and presence in the moment. Borrowing from Taoist concepts, Josh Waitzkin advocates leaving in the moment, being present, aware, and he provides methods to train to reach that present state at will. I find that very interesting.

In the end I would call this one of the most useful books I've read and I certainly intend to improve on myself using some of the guiding principles in it. Josh is an extremely competitive and intelligent person and, given the opportunity of having good and talented parents, made the best of it. I am not saying that all can reach the same level of success and internal balance, but it is surely refreshing to see one of these great people lowering themselves to the level of the normal guy and giving him a few pointers. That is exactly what The Art of Learning is.