The book is effectively a series of essays, that together loosely tell the story of the Long Now Foundation’s motivations to encourage and inspire long-term thinking. The chapters touch on such subject as:

• Time
• The rush of technology
• Religion
• Monuments of human ingenuity & persistence.
• Preservation of knowledge.
• Understanding the scope of the future.

Their intent is to build The Clock of the Long Now:

• The clock will run for 10,000 years accurately, with only bronze-age technology for maintenance.
• The clock will tick once a day and dong once a year.
• The clock will be a large facility, grand in scale.
• Such scale and simplicity is meant to awe and give one pause, for the breadth of such a time-scale, past and future.

They also are designing The Library of the Long-Now:

• encourage long-term knowledge curation & scientific studies.
• preserve human knowledge to transcend the possible collapse of current civilization.

One notable chapter, called “Burning Libraries”, describes various movements to destroy artifacts of human knowledge / history.  They describe movements that try to wipe the slate clean.  Generally all of these movements fail within a generation, and society looks back with aghast shame at such events.

Another memorable chapter is on Religion and time, specifically how they interact with optimism / fatalism.  One poignant point was that most religions ( particularly the Abrahamic ones ) reinforce the idea that the world in time is close to its the end.  One quote:

Jews are waiting for the Messiah to come, to end history.
Christians are waiting for him to come again, to end history.
Muslims know that he already came; history's over.

In short, religious often deny the future as a time worth working towards.

On the whole, the essays cover allot of philosophical ground about human nature and potential.  The book definitely isn’t for everyone, but has many nuggets that I’ll come back to again for inspiration.  3.5 of 4 possible stars.

Daniel Pink is a freelance author, columnist and speaker.  His works to date focus on the ever-changing nature of work and society.  His works have been featured in everything from Wired to Harvard Business Review to The New York Times.  He formerly was a speech-writer and aide within President Clinton’s Cabanet.

This book focuses on what Dan calls “Free Agents”, how this group is growing in America, what has allowed for this growth, and the challenges they face.  “Free Agents” refer to all independent workers, ranging from self-employed workers, micro-business owners, consultants, temp-workers, etc.  Pink conservatively estimates that in 2001 there were 33 million workers in the U.S.; that’s 23% of the U.S. workforce.  He sights four factors that are driving people to be independent workers:

• the old American work social contract of loyalty for security, has completely failed.
• the half-life of companies are shrinking, forcing individuals to work multiple jobs.
• prosperity has allowed individuals to work beyond the need for money to having satisfying careers.
• the means of production for some old and many new industries are cheap and easy to use.

Many other Free Agent issues are addressed such as:

• they achieve satisfaction through: freedom, authenticity, accountability, and self-defined success.
• security is achieved through diversity; loyalty is spread to colleagues, professions, customers, family&friends
• they can blend their work and their personal life, instead of partitioning it like most employees do.

Dan explores the issues further:

• investigating the small and dynamic social networks Free Agents form
• diffuse production tools such as Kinkos, Starbucks, Barnes& Noble, MailBoxes Etc., Staples, Fedex, and rental offices.

He also explores some of the issues independent workers face, including Health Insurance, Taxation, and Zoning Laws.

Overall, I found the book and ideas intreguing.  Perhaps it’s my independent spirit, or growing up with a self-employed father.  It’s a trend that I think all should keep they’re eyes on into the future.

I give this a 3 of 4 possible stars.  I liked the concept, ideas, facts, exposition, etc., but it wasn’t a compelling must-read.

Steven Reiss is a Ohio State University Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry.  He has studied, amongst other things, anxiety sensitivity, and mental retardation.  He has won several awards for his work, and has many published papers.

In this book, Dr Reiss describes his theory of 16 Basic Intrinsic Motivations.  This theory argues that, humans are motivated by intrinsic psychological drives, and that these drives are ends in themselves.  Each drive is measured as a continuum for an individual, from weak to strong; it is the particularly strong and weak drives that best explain an individual’s motivations.   The combinations of these 16 motivations describe the variability of human personality.  These 16 motivations are irreducible: any other described drive or motivation can be expressed by the fundamental 16.  These values are not short term “feel-good” happiness, but long term “value-based” happiness.

The 16 basic desires are:

• Acceptance, the need for approval
• Curiosity, the need to think
• Eating, the need for food
• Family, the need to raise children
• Honor, the need to be loyal to the traditional values of one’s clan/ethnic group
• Idealism, the need for social justice
• Independence, the need for individuality
• Order, the need for organized, stable, predictable environments
• Physical Activity, the need for exercise
• Power, the need for influence of will
• Romance, the need for sex
• Saving, the need to collect
• Social Contact, the need for friends (peer relationships)
• Status, the need for social standing/importance
• Tranquility, the need to be safe
• Vengeance, the need to strike back

These motivations were selected by a Factor Analysis of a set of 328 enumerated goals / motivations surveyed over 400 people.  Interestingly, this places things that to some seem independent, into the same category.  For example: “Romance” includes the desire for aesthetic beauty as well as sensual pleasure; “Power” includes a drive for competence as well as power over others.

The book describes each motivation in some detail, if not in predictable, monotonous fashion.  It’s interesting to mediate on and understand these “overloaded” meanings of the fundamental desires.

Later on, the book dives into four broad aspects of human society:

• couples
• work
• family
• sports
• religion

These aspects of human society can be built around many, if not all, of the 16 intrinsic desires.  Also, particular social institutions attract similarly profiled people.  For example, 65 ROTC Cadets scored very low for Tranquillity, and high for Power, Physical Activity and Vengeance.  45 Seminary Students tested high for Idealism, and low for Independence, Status, Family and Tranquillity.

Overall, I find the theory very intriguing.  The idea that there is a irreducible, intrinsic set of end motivations is appealing to me somehow; it seems elegant to me.  That said, I’m still wrestling with the overloaded-ness of motives like Power: I’m not motivated to have power over others, but I’m motivated to be competent in my skills/knowledge.  I’m sure it can be explained in terms of other factors, but I haven’t cracked that yet.

After reading and ingesting this book & other online information, I found myself locking onto these motivators in my daily experiences.  I suppose that’s a sign of it’s allure, at least for me.  However, I’m treating it as entertainment, when it comes to applying it to others, and taking it lightly for introspection.

The book itself was a fascinating, yet painful read.  The organization / presentation of the material was dry and repetitive: parts of the book felt like a template was created and populated, without much wordsmithing afterwards.  Many more case studies, or anecdotes could have made this a much more pleasurable read.

Overall, this is a 3 of 4 possible stars book.  It’s a 4 for the concept, but a 2 for presentation.

Steven Johnson is a popular-science author, who’s written for various scientific magazines.  He’s also been involved with several nascent website services like online magazines and geo-aware search & communities.  He writes on various loosely related subjects about modern scientific developments, both in subject and in community.

“Emergence” is about just that, emergent systems, or Complex Adaptive System( CAS ) that exhibit synergistic properties.  The author uses various examples in the book, including:

• self-organizing “slime mold“
• ant-colony behaviour
• emergent cities, and neighbourhoods within cities
• cognitive abilities from neurons
• artificial intelligence techniques

The author also covers the underlying processes of these emergent systems.  These include:

• complex systems – deterministic systems whose outcomes are sensitive to initial conditions
• feedback loops, both positive and negative.
• competition – something to drive system selection

There was allot of interesting details conveyed in the book, including work done by various people in the field of CAS, as well as implications for internet phenomena of the future.

Overall though, I wasn’t really impressed.  I wasn’t left with a strong message at the end of the book, and I had been exposed to most of this type of analysis / field of study before.  I was interrupted for a week in the middle of the book, so perhaps that plays part of my unimpressiveness about this book.  2 out of 4 possible stars.

The Long Tail is about how information technologies are transforming many markets, and about the true shape and character of market these technologies reveal.

Information technologies are transforming many markets, notably media and consumer goods.  The technologies are:

• efficient inventory storage and retrieval, providing vast, near infinite inventory
• search and filtering technologies to navigate these huge inventories
• increased availability of production tools for the population

Such markets include:

• books ( Amazon )
• music ( iTunes, Rhapsody )
• movies ( Netflix, YouTube )
• consumer goods ( Amazon, eBay )

For example, let’s take books and Amazon:

• Amazon has huge centralized warehouses where it stores all the goods it sells.  It must be able to receive and ship orders quickly.  Also, through it’s Marketplace program, resellers use their storefront, but have their own warehouses and shipment systems.  Thus, Amazon doesn’t even store these items.  Thus, Amazon can store millions of items.  The largest brick&mortar super-bookstore can only have about 175,000 books.  With 6.1 million books available in the world, and 100,000 being published per year in recent history, traditional stores cannot cater to everyone’s desires.  Amazon can offer nearly 350 times the variety.
• Amazon tracks user’s ratings, stores useful customer reviews, tracks what other customers have bought, based on usage history, and utilize this information to help you search and filter the vast catalogue to your current interest.  Traditional stores can only choose one presentation of their goods, and every person must search within that specific constraint.  You will find things through the Amazon website that you’d never know about in a normal store.
• While not specific to Amazon’s operations, book publications have sky-rocketed, as tools for production, such as desktop publishing software and reduced costs of printing, such as print-on-demand services, mean that more of the populous can produce books.  This increases the number of books to catalogue, search and recommend.

The shape of markets, when sorting items based on popularity, follow a “power-law” long-tail distribution.  In short, this means that, while the popularity of any one item out on the tail is small, there is just so-much in the tail that, if made available to customers, it would comprise a significant part of one’s business.  For example, 90% of the products on Rhapsody or Netflix is not available in any stores, but this 90% make up roughly 25% of their profits.

Another interesting feature of long-tailed markets is that, as one moves into the tail, one is more satisfied with the goods, compared to the the goods at the head of the tail.  A few factors here are:

• everything in the head has broad appear to the whole audience.  Therefore, it is a bit mediocre compared to each individual’s tastes.
• everything in the tail has very specific niche audiences.  A gem item for one individual will be utter rubbish to 10,000 others.

To capitalize on the tail, one must connect each user with the content they value.

There any many more points in the book than I can outline here.  Many transformative businesses and websites are discussed, such as Google, Wikipedia, etc.

For anyone who’s exerienced these technologies and recognizes something fundamentally different’s going on, this is a great read.  For anyone who’s heard about the buzz, but doesn’t feel they understand it, this should be a great exposee.  And for anyone who works in any IT industry, you should really read how our world is transforming many aspects of human business and activity.

4 of 4 possible stars, without hesitation.

Jeff Goodell is a contributing editor to both Rolling Stone and The New York Times.  He wrote the New York Times bestseller book “Our Story: 77 Hours That Tested Our Friendship and Our Faith“, which covered the Quecreek Mine accident of 2002.  From this writing experience, he became interested in the coal industry as a whole.  What he finds there is a grim reminder of America’s energy reality.

“Big Coal” refers to the coal-mining industry, the railroad-freight industry, and the electricity companies.  Together they have allot of interdependency and allot of clout.  The book’s order roughly covers the mining, transportation, and burning of coal, taking in-depth detours along the way to discuss miner’s safety, environmental safety, pollution ( both in heavy metals and noxious fumes, ) and global warming.

Unfortunately this book is not fresh on my mind, but there were several notable things:

• the interdependency of the coal-mining, railroad, and power companies.
• the ever increasing demands for energy consumption creating more coal-fired plants, despite their ugly environmental & health impacts.
• the undeniable evidence of the G. W. Bush’s administration giving Big Coal a free-pass.

There were other interesting bits, mostly political intrigue, along with some sorta notable technologies like CO₂ sequestration and coal liquidification processes / IGCC power plat design.

Overall, it was a good book.  I just read through it too fast, and didn’t have enough time to reflect upon it.  2.5 of 4 possible stars.

Dr. Strogatz is a professor at Cornell University, and has had a prolific career examining complex systems in diverse fields such as circadian rhythms, Josephson Junctions, and “small-world networks“.  This book captures many of the stories of progress in these and related fields of today’s progressive minds.

The book covers a very diverse set of discoveries and domains, with many notable scientists along the way.  It’s too much to recount here, without creating a 10 page review.  However, the most notable subjects to me are:

• the basic conditions of connectedness and similarity of components of a synchonized system.
• circadian rhythms, and how nice it is to know I’m normal, not lazy.
• Kirkwood Gaps, which are gaps in the Asteroid Belt which coincide with orbital ratios with Jupiter.
• the spooky magic of quantum mechanics in Josephson Junctions.
• coupled chaotic systems synchronizing.
• spiral and scroll waves in excitable media
• small-world networks, where the cliquiness/clumping is still high, yet the average path between two nodes is very small.  Scale-free networks are a sub-category of these types of networks.
• the spontaneous nature of brain cell synchronization in memory and cognition

Unfortunately, I didn’t read this book in a dense set of settings, and there’s many names a disciplines to go around, so I’m forgetting many notable details.

Still, it’s a very good survey book regaring dynamical / non-linear / complex / systems science that has taken place in the past few years.  3 of 4 possible stars.

Gweneth Cravens is a writer and journalist, and was a anti-nuclear activist. She met and debated the merits of nuclear power with Dr. D. Richard (Rip) Anderson over the course of many years, and eventually one day Rip asked her: “Why don’t you go on an American nuclear power tour?” This book is the result of that journey.

This book starts out with her background, and her suspicions, her initial interactions with Rip, and then a chapter by chapter walk through the life of nuclear power, “cradle to grave”. Many fascinating comparisons with all other viable energy sources are discussed, safety analysis dissected, and places visited.

The short, inescapable conclusion is that nuclear is the only viable, safe, and plentiful power source that can carry us through the coming decades, centries, and millenia while allowing us to undo man-made damage to the climate and environment, foremost of which is global climate change.

A fascinating journey, and arguable one of the most important issues of my generation. 4 of 4 possible stars.

The book at three sections, which are basically: old and broken way, new and shiny way, and finally a summary of points to take away from the book.

I’ve not economics or financial training, so the first chapter was quite educational, pretty much capturing the development of modern practiced financial theory. Along the way, he shows many of the assumptions and estimations that went into each step, and also alludes to studies that show these assumptions are not true.

The second section was also educational, in respect to fractal analysis that’ve been done to financial data. Along with many nifty details about fractals and probability distributions the basic results is to show that:

• price variations at any time-scale are Power Law distributed, not Gaussian distributed as theory assumes.
• price variations at any time-scale are time-dependant or Fractional Brownian Motion, not independent or traditional Brownian Motion as theory assumes.

It goes on to demonstrate a multi-fractional construction that seems to account for these factors. as well as “fractional time” to create a time series that manifests all known anomalous characteristics of market behaviour by traditional analysis.

The book has a rich history, and fascinating contradictions to what I was taught. However, it… wasn’t very moving at the end. It didn’t have a silver bullet. I know this is science, and science’s best discoveries are the new anomalies. Yet, I couldn’t help being disappointed. In a literary sense, this book had a “pathetic” ending.

Despite all the educational aspects, ground-breaking work discussed, I didn’t get as much from it as I had hoped. 2 of 4 possible stars.

The book is best categorized as a Philosophical Logic work.

The premise of the book is to define what finite and infinite games are, differentiate the two, and then apply those patterns to many aspects of everyday life to surprising consequences.

For example, imagine a suburban neighbourhood where a group of kids gather for baseball games every afternoon during the summer. Anyone can play, and teams are divided so that they are evenly matched. Players are implicitly ranked by their peers from performance over past games.  Poor players are welcomed to play, even if it makes a team perform worse.  The point is to keep playing and keep changing the game.

Next, imagine a little league team from a nearby neighbourhood. They had to try-out, and poor players are screened out. Practice games are required several times a week. Players are ranked against each other according to various stats, and players are encouraged to perfect various skills for the betterment of the teams performance.  The point is to win as many games in the little league series that summer.

Now, imagine what would happen if the two groups were to play together. If the daily neighbourhood game players had the little league team come over, two things would happen: the little league would insist on playing against each other, not mixing the teams, and would adhere to their strict rules, and likely the neighbourhood kids would loose since they don’t play this way. Eventually the neighbourhood kids would get bored and stop playing the little league game.

Finally, image the little league team hosting the neighbourhood kids in a game. As part of the invite they mix members like the neighbourhood kids games do. The little league players would become immediately frustrated because the neighbourhood kids haven’t seriously practiced and each team doesn’t work efficiently together. They would perceive the neighbourhood kids as not playing seriously, perhaps making a parse of the whole enterprise, and would not enjoy the game at all.

Although a contrived scenario, ( kids learn early on which style they enjoy, and that these are two fundamentally different activities, ) this demonstrates the two styles of play and how they compare to each other.

The book also has an almost lyrical component: James chooses words which we’d normally use as synonyms, but in the context of finite and infinite games become antonyms or complementary terms. Notable examples were “powerful” / “strength” and “theatrical” / “dramatic”. I found this amusing and thought provoking, as I tend to obsess on the connotations of words in certain works.

Overall, I didn’t agree with all the points of the book, but it’s premise, it’s style, and ability to inspire make me give it 4 of 4 possible stars.