Tag: books

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The Beatles, Unanticipated Uses of AR

Issue 11 of my newsletter – subscribe here

Despite growing up near Liverpool, I never visited any Beatles attractions other than popping into the Cavern a couple of times. It’s like living in London and never visiting The Tower: there’s always something more exciting going on.

I broke the habit of a lifetime by finally going to The Beatles Story, a museum on the Albert Dock. It was just about fine given entry cost £17. The whole place felt worn down and cramped, as if it hadn’t been properly refurbished since opening in 1990.

Back then, it would’ve been much more impressive to the hundreds of thousands it attracted every year, but nowadays it comes across as dated and irrelevant, for fans only. Even so, it attracted 266,614 visitors in 2017 – numbers that most attractions would kill for.

The odd thing was just how little Beatles stuff it had; there were a few nice pieces like Lennon’s glasses and piano, but I gather that a lot of impressive objects have been sold off to richer collectors and US institutions.

Not that a Beatles museum needs a lot of objects to be successful; The Beatles Story clearly has the band’s blessing, along with a few band-adjacent voices on the pretty reasonable audio guide. If they found a new space that was quadruple the size and hired the V&A designers behind the visually stunning and immersive Bowie and McQueen exhibitions, they could easily make their money back. Throw in a better restaurant and bar, and they’d print money.

Then again, this is an obvious idea and I can only assume the rights holders just don’t care. Paul McCartney is a billionaire, getting a few million extra a year from a museum would hardly register on his bank balance. Maybe he isn’t interested in that kind of legacy.

—

I had yet another call this week with a major tech company about augmented reality and gamification. It’s pretty clear that all the big companies have AR glasses coming out in the next 1-3 years and so they’re thinking very hard about possible applications, because, well, they don’t have any.

So here’s a free idea, albeit one that won’t be feasible for a few years: selling used goods.

I’ve started selling a lot of stuff on Facebook Marketplace lately. I used to sell things on eBay but after being burned a couple of times by buyers who claimed their item didn’t arrive, I gave up; but with Facebook Marketplace, you can get people nearby to meet you at a location of your choice. The listing process is also free and extremely fast.

It’s mostly been games I’ve finished, along with tech that I’m replacing or not using – old TVs, Kindles, iPads, that sort of thing. It turns out you can get a really good price for solid brands, and I feel good about this stuff being used rather than gathering dust in a closet. And yeah, the money helps.

I am temperamentally suited to selling my stuff in this way because I like not owning many physical things. Other people are different, and that’s where I think AR could help. Imagine glasses that tracked your activity, and could say, “Hey Adrian, you haven’t used this exercise bike in six months! I can have someone pick it up tomorrow for £180, what do you say?”

Is this creepy? For sure – especially if it was operated by Facebook. But if it was under your control, I think it’d be helpful for a lot of people. Right now, there’s a huge amount of friction that prevents community tool lending libraries from being set up – few people enjoy keeping a database of items up to date – but if it was completely hands-free and your glasses could instantly identify the make and usage levels of a particular item, I think most would be much more willing to opt-in and share or sell their items.

In other words, AR glasses could introduce a true sharing economy – not Uber, not Airbnb, but a true non-profit version – by dramatically reducing the friction involved in data entry and maintenance.

Of course, this is the optimistic view. AR glasses will also be used to sell us all sorts of useless shit in ways we can’t possibly imagine now, like putting virtual products in your wardrobe and virtual burgers on your plate, and saying “this burger could be yours in only ten minutes for just £5!”

Playing

🎮 Valleys Between on iOS. Imagine if Monument Valley and Alto’s Adventure had a baby that wasn’t as fun as it’s parents. It’s a paid game (which I like!) so I wanted it to be good, but it was devoid of challenge, and frankly, of gameplay.

Watching

📺 Stranger Things Season 3 on Netflix. I’m only halfway through but it’s hitting the perfect 80s nostalgia family action adventure spot. This season, I feel like they’re relying on the old Mad Men trick of making fun of olden times a bit more heavily, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

📺 Legion Season 3 is a welcome improvement on the previous season, being a soft reboot and also the final season of the show. I have high hopes.

🎞️ Yesterday. I was hoping it’d be a 7/10, but instead it was a 6/10. The concept remains gold, but the romantic relationship was poorly written and unbelievable. Although now I think HBO should make a prestige series about The Beatles.

🎞️ Spider-Man: Far From Home wasn’t as good as Homecoming, which had Marvel’s best villain after Black Panther, but I enjoyed the lighthearted teen comedy bits. Can’t wait to see what they do with Spidey once they get over their Iron Man fixation.

Reading

📖 Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik. I knew the legend of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates ‘stealing’ the idea of modern windowed interfaces from Xerox PARC, but this book documents the far more impressive and interesting truth behind Xerox’s research labs. It turns out PARC didn’t just invent the modern windows UI but also Ethernet, laser printers, VLSI, and (sort of) Postscript, SGI, and TCP/IP.

The lessons of PARC may not be widely known in detail but you can be sure they are familiar to Silicon Valley founders from the 90s and 2000s (e.g. Google) because they would have been advised by people who lived through it (e.g. Eric Schmidt, who worked at PARC from 1979-83). As such, you wonder if Google’s penchant for releasing every product they can think of is a response to Xerox’s releasing nothing due to internal politics. Of course, now we can see the problems with Google’s approach…

📖 The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton. Glowingly reviewed, the author is either wilfully obtuse or downright dim – you choose. I’m planning to write a longer review, but this book essentially boils down saying “Haha, technologists haven’t figured out a better way of killing whales than the harpoon – so much for iPhones, right?”

Listening

📻 Something For Your M.I.N.D. by Superorganism. Suitably weird.

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Reading More = Reading Better

Issue 8 of my newsletter – subscribe here

It’s hard to shake the feeling you’re having the same thoughts and ideas as everyone else if you just watch and read and listen to the same content – which these days tend to be the most upvoted or retweeted.

This is a problem if your job involves coming up with original ideas. You could find other ways to discover content, like trusting editors to find you the best stuff, but ultimately you end up in the same place.

The best answer I’ve found so far is just to read a lot more. This means you can be less picky and just read whatever interests you, rather than whatever a newspaper or blog or prize name as the top ten or twenty books of the year. So that’s what I’ve been doing this year – instead of reading my usual 30 books in twelve months, I’ve finished 66 books in six months.

I haven’t gotten any better at picking winners than before – the average quality of those books is probably the same as it has ever been. Even so, I’ll read four times as many great books this year as I did last year.

At the same time, I’ve started reading more broadly because it doesn’t matter if I read a few duds. I pay a lot more attention to the books that appear in my local library’s ebook selection, and I’ve discovered a bunch of great books I never would have otherwise.

You’ll enjoy reading more if you read more. It’s as simple as that.

So, how do you read more?

  • Be more impulsive. If a book takes your fancy, read it.
  • Don’t sweat over Goodreads and Amazon ratings. I’ve discovered they barely correspond to the books I like, so I might as well just ignore them.
  • Listen to audiobooks to get started, if that’s your thing.
  • Set time limits on social media apps. I’m not saying you should stop using Twitter or watching TV, but if you want to read more, you should shift some of your low quality reading time for high quality reading time.
  • Read older books. People don’t talk about them as much as newer books, but chances are, they’re a lot better.
  • Let it go. Not every book has to be great. And when you do that, there’s more chance that some will be great.

—

If you’re looking for a good book to get started, I can recommend The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It’s hard to me to explain why I adore it so much.

I could connect Tom West’s tale of leading a motley team of engineers and ‘microcoders’ to build a new computer to my own experiences as a producer, desperately trying to make something new and worthwhile and original while protecting my own team beneath a “shit umbrella”.

There’s the book’s marvellous grasp of the intricate technical details of how computers work, just as accurate today as it was when the book was published in 1981, and how they’re balanced with Kidder’s equally penetrating observations of what motivated the engineers who crafted those computers. How this is all bound together with a deep understanding of organisational psychology, and yet it’s as gripping as any thriller.

Or there’s the dozens of generous sketches of the engineers, sometimes as short as a few sentences, belying the days and weeks Kidder must have spent with each one to identify that perfect anecdote. A colleague of Carl Alsing, a character in the book, describes it here:

A few years later [after the book was published], in 1986 to be specific, I started a job at an OCR company. My cube was directly across from the office of Carl Alsing, the guy who managed “the microkids”. I didn’t put two and two together at first. Alsing was one of the people who interviewed me for the job, and I got to know him a little bit for a couple months before someone told me about the book connection.

So I went to the library, got the book out, and read it again. When Kidder got to the part where he introduces Alsing, it was amazing. In a paragraph he captured details about Alsing that I hadn’t even realized myself (e.g., his personality projects the image of a smaller man, though he was actually decently tall).

Towards the end, Kidder mulls over the future of computing and employment and, yes, artificial intelligence, in a way that presages our own worries, nearly forty years on.

The book is accessible, but its details are pinpoint accurate, making it that rare book that’s beloved by both expert computer engineers and general readers.

Bonus reading:

Delayed Followup

Simon Carless notes about overpaying mortgages vs. index funds:

One interesting point from a U.S. perspective – our mortgage rates are just under 4% (even for remortgaging things!), and then your mortgage interest is a tax write-off, meaning the effective return to outdo ‘paying down’ your mortgage is a lot higher than the U.K.

Nonetheless, it still makes sense to do index funds instead of mortgage paydowns! Just not such a large differential…

Yup, I forgot just how much the US tax code favours homeowners…

Watching

📺 The Women’s World Cup. Today’s Japan vs. Netherlands match was one of the best so far, if desperately sad for Japan.

Reading

📖 Fall; or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson. Started out mediocre, attained greatness, returned to mediocrity, descended into grinding tedium. I’ve said Interstellar is 2.5 movies long and only one of them is good; well, this is three books long, and once again, only one is good.

📰 China’s Most Advanced Big Brother Experiment Is a Bureaucratic Mess (Bloomberg). Turns out there isn’t just one social credit score in China, but dozens of them, and none work particularly well.

📰 Why Weather Forecasting Keeps Getting Better (New Yorker). Notable for this incredible story:

So, as Blum explains, in 1942 the German government came up with an ingenious solution. With help from the Siemens-Schuckertwerke group (a predecessor of the modern-day Siemens) and others, it developed a series of automated weather stations: these were an intricate array of pressure, temperature, and humidity sensors, encased in storm-resistant metal containers and equipped with batteries and a radio antenna. Some would hitch rides with the Luftwaffe and transmit weather readings from remote locations on the edge of Europe. By 1943, the devices were powerful enough to communicate across the Atlantic. That year, a Nazi submarine sneaked to the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, where a team of German soldiers took ten cannisters ashore on two rubber dinghies. For the plan to work, the weather station needed to stay undetected after it had been left in the wilderness, so they labelled the equipment “Canadian Meteor Service” and scattered the site with a host of American cigarette packs. Only in 1981 was the ruse discovered.

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Telling Tall Tales on Twitter

Issue 7 of my newsletter – subscribe here

When you listen to a stand-up comedian, you probably know their stories are being exaggerated for comic effect. That’s fine! Everyone understands they aren’t watching a documentary. We don’t need a disclaimer on the front door telling us the events depicted inside are fictional, even if we might appreciate it if there’s an element of truth.

Similar unspoken conventions apply to everything from like Playboy letters, to Chicken Soup for the Soul, to pretty much everything David Sedaris writes. The older the medium, the more established the conventions. Some thought Robinson Crusoe was a true story when it was first published in 1719, but today you just need to glance at the cover of a book to know whether it’s fiction or not.

The corollary is that new media hasn’t yet developed those conventions – and the newer the media, the greater the uncertainty. Take these heartwarming tweet threads by @sixthformpoet about visiting his dad’s grave, saving up for Disneyland, and helping his neighbours. All went fearsomely viral, nearing a million likes and retweets in total, and they all have picture-perfect happy endings.

Perhaps this is a confession of just how cynical I’ve grown, but I only had to take a single look at the first tweet to sense it probably wasn’t real:

The fact it was a pre-written thread (“ONE”), a “funny story” that was clearly going to make him look good, with a happy/funny ending? For me, it was damning evidence. And if you actually read the threads, the towering pile of coincidences should make anyone think twice about its truthfulness – especially when other authors of viral tweets have subsequently fessed up.

“But does it matter if it’s true, Adrian? Why can’t we have nice things?”

To be clear: the stakes are so low on these stories that I’m hardly suiting up for war. But we all know that if the author had, at the start of the thread (not at the end!) said, “THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION”, the threads wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. You only need to glance at the replies to realise that many, if not most, readers thought these were true stories.

So why do I care? I feel there’s a deliberate attempt to exploit people’s fundamental trust towards strangers’ stories. As much as we say we don’t trust Twitter, I think the opposite is true – at least with heartwarming tales like these. Why would someone lie to us in this way? What’s the gain?

In the past, there wasn’t much gain other than getting a few free pints down at the pub. But today, popularity on social media has very real value. It’s not just social currency, it’s real currency. So to that extent, it’s unfair because it’s diverting attention from writers who aren’t exploiting readers’ trust.

Perhaps there is little harm in the end. There’s only so many times you can do this. If @sixthformpoet had written a dozen more stories with astonishing coincidences and perfect conclusions, people would rebel. And letting go of the crutch of telling “true stories” to become a writer of avowed fiction or fact requires more courage and hard work than many are willing to give.

A few make that transition. They’re able to use their gift for words and extend it into novels, or they can tell their own stories in a way that doesn’t seem too untrue. And the rest just disappear, having told a few tall tales that made some people happy.

—

We don’t have a convention for tall tales online. Or maybe we’re getting one. In Five Signs a Viral Story Is Fake, Madison Malone Kircher suggests some ways to spot – or to telegraph – a tall tale:

  1. The person tweeting the story is the hero.
  2. TOO! MANY! CAPITAL! LETTERS!
  3. It takes more than one tweet to tell.
  4. “Story time!”
  5. There are follow-up threads.

Each medium has its own conventions, whether that’s Creepypasta or ARGs. That doesn’t mean we need enormous disclaimers at the start of books and movies, but rather a better understanding of how to convey whether a story is broadly true or not.

As I’ve argued before about ARGs, far better to improve your craft than rely on confusion or exploitation.

Additional discussion on Metafilter…

Watching

📺 Killing Eve Season 2. Not quite as shocking as Season 1 but still refreshing.

Reading

📖 Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. As usual, Lem displays a casual, almost insouciant, familiarity with science and physics that threads through this story in way that seems almost entirely unnecessary given the plot, but lends a measure of realism that makes his wild imagination seem more believeable. It’s like you crossed Tom Clancy’s knowledge of modern weapon systems with Tom Stoppard’s understanding of the human soul.

Solaris is about nature of knowledge, of books, of schools of thought, all circling round and round something they cannot understand.

As such, the movies are almost unrecognisable. They have a similar setting and ideas but plot is completely different. I would have said that Arrival and Solaris were equally unfilmable, but time makes fools of us all.

📰 HS2 is the only option for Britain’s railways by Jon Stone (Independent). A good primer for why HS2 isn’t for rich people who want fast trains:

Speed is not the main point of the new line. The objective is capacity, and not just capacity for fast intercity services, either, but for those local regional and commuter services between small towns that have been so neglected. The complicated bit is explaining why that is.

Britain’s railways were largely built in the Victorian era, for a different kind of travel. Today, the same lines carry a mix of express intercity trains – the kind which HS2 will take – and stopping local and commuter services, the kind people use to get to work, or pop to a neighbouring town.

This mix is a very inefficient way to run a railway, for a reason that is quite obvious if you think about it: trains cannot overtake each other on the same set of tracks. They would bang into the back of one another if they tried. Not good. To get around this, local stopping trains need a large gap behind them in the timetable, so the express trains behind them do not catch up. That reduces the number of trains you can have per hour on a line, dramatically reducing its capacity for every type of service – local and express.

The engineering thinking behind HS2 is to take those express services off the older mainlines, leaving them for stopping local and commuter services. When trains are all travelling at roughly the same speed on a line, you can fit a lot more in, because the gaps needed between them are smaller.

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How to Get eBooks, Audiobooks, Magazines, and Newspapers from Edinburgh Libraries

Like many library systems, Edinburgh has an odd collection of digital resources for members, including multiple providers of eBooks, audiobooks, newspapers, magazines, and reference materials. Last week, I joined in the hope of getting access to some newspapers and magazines I read, and if you’re curious or also want to join the library, you may find this interesting.

How to Join

This is very easy. You can either do it in person at any branch with some ID (e.g. passport, utility bill). If you want to borrow physical books, you’ll need to do it this way.

Alternatively, you can process online by filling out a form, which will get you a temporary ‘UNREG’ number. Next, email informationdigital@edinburgh.gov.uk with that number and request a permanent card. You’ll get a membership number via email, with which you can start borrowing books online immediately. If this seems weirdly insecure, yes, but apparently it’s deemed to be low risk since it’s just for ebooks.

Once you’ve joined, you will have:

  1. A library membership number with the format B00XXXXXXXX (where the Xs are numbers)
  2. A four digit PIN code (absurdly insecure, but what the hell)

These two things will grant you access to all the digital resources you need. In some cases, they only need your membership number ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s typically not necessary to create logins for the resources, although in some cases it can be useful.

Digital Resources

I’m not going to detail all of Edinburgh Libraries’ digital resources, but here are some that I find particularly useful:

Overdrive has the single largest digital book library with over 11,000 eBooks and 1400 audiobooks. It also has the best apps. The Overdrive app is mediocre, but the new Libby app is well-designed with a good reading experience. It’s not perfect though – it didn’t sync my progress between my iPhone and iPad.

You can also request new books, ebooks, and audiobooks online.

Pressreader offers almost 4000 magazines and 3500 newspapers. Most aren’t in English, but plenty are. These are exclusively print versions – you won’t get access to the online versions of the magazines or newspapers. You’ll definitely find something useful here, whether it’s British broadsheets like The Guardian and The Telegraph, or US papers like The Washington Post. There are also some very fine periodicals like The New York Review of Books and Bloomberg Business Week. You’ll want to read these on a computer or high resolution tablet, since most of the time you’re looking at PDFs (Pressreader’s text view is execrably formatted).

RBdigital has over 1700 audiobooks and 130 British magazines, including Time, New Scientist, National Geographic, and Wired. It’s a smaller selection than Pressreader, but generally higher quality in the UK, and with back issues going back around 1-2 years. Its app has a surprisingly good text view, but overall, the app is not pleasant to use, lacking the ability to favourite magazines.

You can also get around 800 audiobooks from Borrowbox and 300 from uLIBRARY. Yes, it is absurd that these resources are so spread out – ideally, libraries should collectively demand a common API that makes things much easier for members to search for and browse titles.

There’s also full access to the Oxford English Dictionary, the British Newspaper Archive (millions of pages of newspapers from 1710-1955), The Times Digital Archive (1785-2011), and the John Johnson Collection, “an archive of printed ephemera”. These are a puzzle-setters dream.

Overall, I’m pleased with the resources available but disappointed by their fragmented nature. There’s a very limited number of eBooks – popular titles are there but you don’t have anything close to the selection of printed books in the library – so I imagine it’s really the audiobooks, newspapers, and magazines that will be the most useful to most people. And it’s free! So if you live in Edinburgh, take a few minutes out of your day and sign up.