When Skateboards Will Be Free by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Is it mandatory to have an out-there childhood to write a good memoir? As a white male engineer from the midwest who likes to write a spot now and then, I hope not. Sayrafiez, though, had a hell of a go growing up, and this book needed to be written.
I generally consider myself to be more or less a socialist, in a best-fit sense. But this memoir, about a socialist childhood, signs on to the platform 100 percent. Although political books can often cause headaches one way or another, I loved that this book written through the wondering eyes of a child. Although anyone in the hardcore socialist movement is likely to be authentic, the author was only growing up, and so wasn't yet sure what all to believe.
The book heavily features the socialist publication The Militant, and by the end I felt myself vicariously not reading them, just as the author's mother dutifully subscribed and kept every back issue, despite rarely if ever reading anything in them. Interestingly, the website for The Militant shows 14 domestic distributors and 7 international, big cities like Paris and London and New York and San Francisco. Amazingly, little old Des Moines, Iowa makes the list. Who knew? If you want a little political adventure, visit the socialist bookshop in Des Moines.
Good book if you like politics and memoir.

The Great Equations by Robert P. Crease

So, it's been almost a month. Comic-Con took up over a week in which I added to my to-blog list. But I have a bunch ready.
Anyway, The Great Equations is a good read, but the enjoyability seems to be monotonically decreasing. I'm not sure if that's because the first few were genuinely more interesting, or if it was some combination of mental drag and the increasing specialization of the sciences. At any rate, the first bit about Pythagoras was brilliant. I didn't know just how many proofs there are, including the guy that wrote hundreds as a hobby.
From there it goes into the details about a lot of our favorite equations, written at a good level for those with some maths background and those without.
All in all a good way to revere the beauty of math and science, and great if you don't yet want to read books for each of the equations featured.

I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes

This book is definitely best when browsed or kept in the bathroom, but as it was I got it from the Leisure section of Parks Library, thus 4 weeks only with no renewals. Quite a fun book, it gives the pop(?) culture origins of all sorts of phrases, both for fun and to help those of us who weren't quite born when, say, people were keeping meats cooled in the icebox (turns out that's the equivalent of a refrigerator, not a freezer). Although there is an exhaustive list of word phrases, I often thought of ones that didn't show up in the index. More frustrating, Keyes often threw out references in the middle of the text that were prime candidates for the book but weren't actually included.
Again, great book, best if you can enjoy it in small chunks.

Crunch: if the economy's doing so well, why do I feel so squeezed? by Jared Bernstein (audio)

Another "hidden-economics-of" book, but without the hidden part. This book takes a look at a lot of everyday economics questions, about topics like un- and underemployment, healthcare, and taxes. The main take-home point is that a lot of important economic goods, like wages and healthcare, are not regular goods, and thus econ 101 principles don't apply.
In addition to clarifying what a lot of confusing words actually mean, this book gets bonus points for actually taking an observational approach to economics. For example, when debunking the myth that increased minimum wage will result in employers cutting hours, Bernstein actually looks at the records after minimum wage increases and shows that this was not the case. It's kind of like the moment when philosophers stopped determining things like the number of teeth a horse has by thought experiment, and finally going out and counting them. Too bad so many economists are several centuries behind on this chariot.
A good listen if you want to understand the tax and healthcare debates.

In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent

Klingon. Say what you will about Star Trek fans, and sci-fi fans in general, but just try to say it in Klingon. The book begins and ends with Klingon, because of all the attempts that have been made at inventing languages, Klingon has been apparently the most successful. And facts like this are just par for the course in the story of language invention.
I know I'm supposed to be an engineer, but reading this book made me feel as though English is a completely reasonable set of lexicon and grammar, as even the simplest and most obvious changes never seem to take.
The book explores some of the major movements in language invention. And for the record, a minimum of 900 well-documented invented languages in the last 900 years gives us enough examples to identify trends and movements. The movements seem to largely attempt to get increasingly logical as time progresses, with a fixation on making every aspect of the language come from some logical foundation, from spelling to pronunciation to infixes to case markers.
One reason why invented languages have never taken hold is because it takes a certain, particularly strong, personality to undertake the task. Unfortunately, this personality is thoroughly incapable of taking the language from dictionary and grammar book to actual real-life product. It doesn't help that all were convinced that their language would soon spread around the world and change everyone's life, and when that didn't happen they took it personally.
One of the best-known invented languages, Esperanto, suffered from some flaws but was ultimately brought down by a clash of personalities all intending to move it forward. One of the major modes of death, or at least destruction, is the irresistible urge to continue improving the language. While this is an understandable impulse, after all the would-be-reformers are themselves interested in making a perfect language, a language can only take hold if it remains relatively static. After some infighting, a number of derivative languages were invented, of course just as mutually incompatible as natural languages. And the reformers, intent on saving the world in their own way, end up losing the 90% of the world that didn't go with them.
Another problem with language inventors is heavy-handedness of the inventor. Blissymbols, invented by Charles Bliss, are an ideographic system, which of course have the only obvious and logical meaning possible. And they look vastly different from other logically obvious symbols. Blissymbols, however, were used for mentally disabled children in Canada with great success, including as a bridge to reading English. And when the organization using them didn't use them exactly to Bliss's standard (they sometimes didn't give the "correct" explanation for combinations of symbols), he naturally sued. That's right, he ended up stealing $160,000 from disabled children who committed the offense of using his invented language.
Loglan (logical language) is perhaps , paradoxically, the most intractable of all. In an effort to eliminate ambiguity, the language only has one possible parsing for each sentence - different senses of any word get different markers, and relations like subject-object are always clearly specified. As a result, it's unlikely that any two loglan speakers have ever held a "real" conversation. One upshot is that flamewars on loglan sites are virtually impossible, as an attempt to successfully render "fuck you" in a thread led only to heated discussion about whether the right constructions were used.
Which brings us to Klingon. Like other invented languages, it pulls directly from other existing languages, but rather than attempt to match common word roots and grammatical constructions, the idea seems to be to select only the most difficult parts of existing languages. And yet people learn it and use it. It has one central authority for decisions on new words and disputes. It is complete, at least in the sense that you can at least work around to any idea you want to express. There's even a Klingon Hamlet. And this is where the story ends so far. Perhaps we will never come up with a truly neutral and universal lingua franca, as testified to by the fact that one of the only languages not meant as such is about the most successful.
Read it now!

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell (audio)

If you must read history, do it right and read Sarah Vowell. Or even better, get her book in audio. Sarah Vowell's voice at first comes off like that of a nonplussed gum-smacking valley girl, forced to do something serious for the first time in her life. As you listen, though, you will start to notice that she's one smart cookie, and her voice is merely the perfect one to deliver her lines. Thrown in a sprinkling of guest voices, including John Hodgman and John Oliver, and history comes to life in the way we all secretly hope it had been
It would be unfair to characterize Vowell's books as historical standup comedy, or observational humor about events no one alive today observed, or a collection of witty barbs aimed at the cast and crew of American history. Really, you should come for the history, and stay for these things and more. Although you could maybe learn as much from other history books, Vowell will make you think, and make you happy to think, and more likely to remember.
The Wordy Shipmates tells the story of the first Europeans to settle in what's now the United States, with ample looks at their sometimes unsavory motivations and actions. The book gets at the heart of the America we think was invented at this time, and how many current shortcomings to living up to this ideal are really not much worse than before, as the ideal of course never existed.
One main reason to be interested in these stories is that politicians and others today want us to go back to this utopian past and live up to the lofty standards of our founders, when in fact there was no such utopia, nor particularly worthy standards.
I would say I can't recommend The Wordy Shipmates any more highly, but I can't quite because you should go out and listen to her previous book, Assassination Vacation, first. After that you should immediately pop this one in.

The House of Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons

First "live" post! I've started out by posting on my recent reads, and I still have a few more, but this one I finished today. Okay, here comes the real post:
Warning first: this book is not for the casual reader. Only 201 pages, but oftentimes thick in the other sense. That said, a good book if you're interested in how knowledge and common knowledge get passed down through the ages.
The book traces how the Arabs held down the fort of knowledge whilst the silly Europeans were struggling in their dark ages. Most of us know that algebra comes from the Arabic al-jebr/al-jabr, and chemistry comes through alchemy, or al-kimiya, but few realise what this means, and how pretty much everything there was to know would have died with the Greeks if it weren't for the Arabs holding the reins for a bit.
A fascinating development of how our branches of knowledge developed and matured, and why certain branches were favored and others ignored. One of my astronomy textbooks mentioned that the only thing astrology ever contributed to astronomy was a convenient set of subscripts for the planets, but in a larger sense astrology was essential to astronomy. Dates and calendars were important, and much work on astronomy may not have been undertaken if not for the fact that it was thought that the planets actually influenced human lives directly. Many other branches of knowledge have similar interesting entries in their backstory.
The book takes pains to mention that it was Arabic learning, not Muslim, and the West generally, not just Christendom, that were interacting, but the important parts of the story seem to always revolve around religious themes. In this respect the book is a cautionary tale of what can go bad when religion has a check on science, but not the other way round. In fact, the story arc seems to be that early on, Christianity disfavored science while Arab (/Muslim) science thrived, and the balance shifted to where we largely are today when that situation reversed. This quote sums up the problem: "One medieval Latin scribe appended his own succinct commentary to a fresh manuscript copy of Albumazar's great astrological textbook: 'Finished, with praise to God for his help and a curse on Mahomet [Muhammad] and his followers.'" But the whole book was originally researched, compiled, and written by one of his followers! Argh!
All in all an informative read, and makes you appreciate that all of this knowledge finally made it with us to the twenty-first century, instead of us needing to rediscover it all from scratch. Even if it only just barely made it.