I just finished The Miocene Arrow by Sean Mcmullen, the second book in his low tech, far future trilogy.

Set in a complex, and fairly original, world, this trilogy explores ways limited technology can be used to mimic higher technology. For example, in the first book, wind engines and a computer built out of human components feature heavily. In the second book, it is simple gasoline engines and heavier than air aircraft.

They are both interesting books, but the number of new characters and locations with weird names swamps the reader at the start. With persistence, it mostly becomes clear but Mcmullen's prose is sometimes too vague to follow well.

Best post I've read yet on how we got in to this financial meltdown comes from Megan McArdle.

She takes a higher level viewpoint - not getting into the nitty gritty of who lent what to whom and why, but instead thinking about what lead all sides to fundamentally misjudge risks. People made fun of him at the time, but Donald Rumsfeld was right, it's the unknown unknowns that you really have to look out for.

Sadly, we probably won't see any fixes based on this kind of thinking coming out of our panicked politicians. Instead, they will probably find ways to make it worse.

This weekend, I spent a lot of time at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.

On Saturday, I was there for most of the day and I saw Dry Branch Fire Squad (with a special appearance by Warren Hellman on old time banjo), Waco Brothers, Richard Thompson, Desert Rose Band, Laurie Lewis and Del McCoury.

The best thing on Saturday was a tie between hearing Richard Thompson's amazing solo guitar playing and hearing a few songs from Laurie Lewis + friends - including Alison Brown, Chad Manning and Dudley Connell.

On Sunday, I was only there for a few hours and saw Bill Kirchen and Riders In The Sky.

The highlight was definitely Riders in the Sky, with Ranger Doug's great swinging rhythm guitar playing, but Bill Kirchen was a pleasant surprise. I'd never heard of him before but he is a famous guitar player, originally with Commander Cody but going on to a good career on his own playing a mix of country, rockabilly, texas swing, boogie-woogie, etc. Very fun show.

Hardly Strictly is a great event in a lot of ways, from being free, to including some of the great bluegrass/country/whatever acts, and having a great setting but it also has a lot of serious flaws.

First, the crowd has become ridiculously large. By mid-afternoon, it is almost impossible to move around and the crowd has transformed from a genial, music appreciating festival crowd to a mix of local yokels that are there to get stoned/drunk, chat with their friends and appreciate "the scene" and whole families that have brought the parents, kids, aunts, uncles, pets, etc to have a picnic in the park where the music is, with the accompanying talking, pets running around, kids playing, etc.

The second is the sound mix. I assume most of the sound people are from the rock/country scene because they can't figure out how to properly mix a bluegrass band for their lives. They always mix the bass way, way too high and don't know what to do with the other instruments. I saw a few minutes of Heidi Clare's set and the sound guy seemed to think that the bass and guitar were the most important (i.e. loudest) instruments in the mix, and that Heidi's fiddle was strictly background, since he had it mixed the quitest and it could barely be heard.

The third are the festival rules/setup. The website says that people aren't allowed to setup till 10am, but everyone knows that is a lie and shows up early in the morning if they want to preserve their space. And they are allowed to save space by using large tarps. The result is that the first 50 feet before the stage is a quiltwork of tarps, half of them un-occupied until later in the day. Early on Saturday, a friend and I were near the front of the main stage looking for a friend, and decided we wanted to stop and listen to the band for a minute. We sat down on an open tarp and a minute later we were told by the people sitting in front of the tarp that the people using that tarp would be back in a minute to eat lunch but that if we wanted to stay they had a "free, spare" tarp just behind that wasn't being used. So that tarp sat there right in front of the main stage, empty for 90% of the time.
barely be heard.

Yesterday I finished Escape From Amsterdam by Barrie Sherwood.

Surprisingly, the book doesn't take place in Europe. Instead, it's set in Japan and the titular "Amsterdam" is a theme park. The protagonists sister is a performer there, and is also being kept there by a senior Yakuza. At the same time, he needs to get her out to help him get some money to pay back some gambling debts before his legs (or other parts) get broken.

The portrayal of Japanese youth culture from someone who lived there for many years - even though not an insider himself. The characters are well drawn, if not exactly sympathetic, and the plot avoids most of the obvious cliches.

I just finished The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes

The Forgotten Man of the title comes from this passage from an essay by William Sumner :

The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man.

During the 1930's, "The Forgotten Man" was a commonly used phrase in political speeches, but it was transformed from referring to the victim of welfare schemes to the recipient. Amity Shlaes' book tries to reverse some of that by re-examining the Great Depression from the point of view of those who were affected by Roosevelt's New Deal schemes.

It's a well written book, and I learned a few things about the Great Depression that I didn't know before. For example, I had read about how the gold standard didn't help, and may have hurt the economy at the start of the crisis but I didn't know that the Hoover administration was practicing what is known as "sterilization", where the effects of the gold inflows that would have naturally helped inflate the economy out of it's deflationary problems were artificially limited because Hoover's team incorrectly thought the problems were actually inflationary.

The one obvious weakness is the large cast of characters, from Roosevelt's brain trust to the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The chapters are organized by time, so they necessarily skip around from person to person which leads to easy confusion about who is being discussed.

Overall, very interesting, particularly in light of the current financial meltdown. Whether this crisis ends up being handled better, or lingers and drags down the rest of the economy like happened in the Great Depression will be interesting to see.

Yesterday I finished Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Set in the same universe as the more famous Vorkosigan Saga but not including the same characters, Falling Free is more welding focused than most novels. In this case, it's welding in a microgravity, vacuum environment, but welding nonetheless.

The story involves the interaction between a welding instructor and the genetically enhanced property of a big corporation. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the corporation and the people it owns doesn't turn out well.

An OK read but nothing too special.

Last night we saw The Dave Holland Sextet at Yoshis Oakland.

I've seen Holland's various bands a few times, and they always put on a great, high end, modern jazz show. The pieces they play are almost avant-garde in their complexity, but is such a great musician, and has such great musicians playing for him, that it comes across very accessible.

One other thing that is very noticeable is the way Holland helps develop new musicians, and lets them really stretch out rather than just featuring himself. All the musicians in this band got a lot of room to show what they could do and gave wonderful solos.

Last night I finished The (Mis)behavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson.

Though it was published in 2006, this book provides an interesting background to the current financial mess. The main thrust of the book is that the assumptions underlying much of modern finance are invalid, and have been known to be invalid for many years.

In particular, Mandelbrot argues that the distribution of prices in the market follows more closely a fractal/power law rather than the standard assumed Gaussian/Normal distribution, and that there is a dependence between current prices and past prices, though not in a way that is useful for so-called "chartists" who try to predict today's price based on previous data.

The first point doesn't seem to be very controversial anymore. Many studies have shown that markets do not match the Gaussian/Normal distribution very well, particularly in the "fatness" of the tails - the markets show much higher proportion of large price shifts than would be expected under Gaussian conditions - even though most finance courses still teach the CAPM/Black-Sholes types models that are based on this assumption. The second point is more controversial, and the book does not fully present that argument in enough detail for me to judge it, nor does there seem to be sufficient agreement in other studies.

I was hoping this book was more of a middle ground between detailed (and usually near incomprehensible to non-specialist) academic papers and pop-science type descriptions, but the authors chose to go the pop-science route and drop almost all mathematical detail from the book.

Last night I finished The Philosopher's Apprentice by James Morrow.

Part action adventure, part science fiction, part philosophical exploration, this is not an easy book to categorize.

The protagonist is a failed philosophy Ph.d who gets dragged into tutoring a girl with amnesia about ethics, or at least that is how things appear. The twists come fast and furious in this book which mixes elements from, and satirizes at the same time, Pygmalion, the Island of Dr. Moreau and Atlas Shrugged.

Good enough that I will be looking for other books by the same author, it does peter out a little half way through - the setup/buildup is more fun then the payoff and denouement.

I just finished The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland.

As I read more of his books, it seems like I am enjoying Douglas Coupland more and more. I've read Generation X, Microserfs, Jpod and this book.

In my post about Jpod, I complained about the post-modern extras being annoying and distracting from the main virtues of the book. The Gum Thief lacks most of those distractions, possibly because there are a lot of self-referential things going on in the epistolary entries already. There is a coda to the book that is just too self referential and undermines the rest of the book a little, but mainly there are fewer gimmicks and that lets the characters and the story shine through.

The plot involves a middle aged drunk, his ex-wife, and some of the people he knows from the Staples he works at, particularly one young Goth who he forms a connection with. It also features a novel within the novel that is hilarious.

Highly recommended, particulary for people who have liked his other novels.

Last night I finished Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, his autobiography.

It mainly covers his youth and the years up to when he gave up stand up comedy and started making movies, with a few mentions of events after that. As the title indicates, it is really about him as a stand up comedian and there is a lot in the book about how his act developed, his influences, the ideas behind his act, and why he gave up stand up comedy.

Like a lot of autobiographies, it's a light read, but fun and pretty informative. Unlike most, Martin actually wrote it himself.

On Saturday, we saw smooth jazz icon David Benoit at Yoshi's in San Francisco.

Smooth jazz is not my favourite format, but David Benoit is a skillful enough performer that he overcomes the limitations of the genre. It was a good show, mainly built around material from his latest CD Heroes, where he does songs from some of his jazz heroes. The highlight of the show was his version of the Dave Brubeck tune Blue Rondo à la Turk.

This was our first trip to the new Yoshi's in San Francisco, located in the somewhat scruffy Fillmore district. The feel of the new Yoshi's is more upscale than the old one in Oakland - particularly the restaurant/bar section. The auditorium itself has what looks like exactly the same floorplan as the old Yoshi's, which makes for a weird deja vu when you enter it, but with the addition of a balcony with additional seating. This makes the space much more cavernous, and while the acoustics sounded good, there was a lack of an intimate feeling due to the very high ceiling.

Cthulhu as seen at Woodstock

This morning I finished The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson, the philosopher and prolific novelist.

The Mind Parasites was inspired by Wilson's conversations with August Derleth. After those conversations, Wilson decided to write a Lovecraftian novel, using some of his own philosophical ideas. The Lovecraftian themes are recognizable throughout, but the book is unlike anything Lovecraft wrote in a number of ways, mainly in the efficacy of the main characters. Lovecraft's characters are almost always helpless in the face of the horrors they encounter, and an overriding theme of his seem to be the insignificance to humans in the face of the cosmos.

On the other hand, Wilson is very much infused with the 60's ideas of human potential, including psychic and consciousness exploring potential. Out of the later comes the most innovative twist in the novel - instead of being an external, physical monster, the titular parasites exist inside the depths of human consciousness, where the interfere with people exploring their evolutionary potential and feed off human psychic energy.

The rest of the book is not as innovative - a simple struggle against the mind parasites more reminiscent of the pulp science fiction writings of the 30's - but the newness of the central idea is enough to carry the rest of the book.

I just finished Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.

We had watched the DVD recently and that made me interested in finding out more, but all I could find in the library was an audiobook. I've never spent much time listening to audiobooks, prefering the act of reading to that of listening, but this one was enjoyable so I may start listening more, particularly on my commute.

Into the Wild, the book, is better than the movie, though it does have its flaws. The greater detail available in the book allows us to get a better feel for Chris McCandless, and for the people he met in his travels. But it is also clearly a streched out magazine article. Krakauer spends a few chapters randomly listing other young men who had at least something in common with McCandless, and a few going over his own foolhardy attemp to solo climb an isolated Alaskan peak named Devils Thumb. Neither of these two sections feel well integrated into the rest of the book. The material about McCandless is always compelling, but the other material is not.

McCandless himself was clearly a Romantic, in the 19th century meaning, as one who rejected society and civilizations in favour of the spiritual aspect of Nature, and it resulted in his death. One of the reasons he is interesting is that we see few people in real life that live consistently by an explicit philosophy, and stick to that philosophy even in the fact of great challenge. Had he survived, it would have been interesting to see if he went on to a more standard lifestyle, or had continued what he was doing and became just another old bum.

Last night I finished Longitude by Dava Sobel, the story of how the problem of determining longitude at sea was solved.

Longitude is fascinating, but fairly short book. It's main focus is the watchmaker John Harrison, who created the first chronometers that could give accurate time even when subjected to the motion, temperature changes and rough conditions of a seagoing voyage. The chapters describing the problems, and Harrison's eventual solutions are fairly short and would be much better with illustrations to explain the chronometer's methods, or photographs of the surviving chronometers. The bulk of the book is about the political struggle that Harrison had to go through to be awarded the Longitude Prize, against rivals that proposed to use the lunar distance method and who were better positioned politically -- one of whom actually sat on the board that judged the outcome.

Nicely written book.

Last night, I finished Farthing by Jo Walton.

Farthing is an alternate history story, one of many involving WW2 and the Nazis. In this one, the peace mission Rudolf Hess was on was successful, and a peace was made between Germany and England, allowing Germany to tackle the USSR without interference and the US ends up under the leadership of the fascist sympathizer Charles Lindbergh, similar to Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.

But all that aside, Farthing is really a pretty straightforward mystery/police procedural where we get to explore the inner workings of a rich, upper class British family after a murder that may, or may not, have political motivations. It's well written and doesn't follow the obvious cliches of either of its genres.

Yesterday I finished The Face of Battle by John Keegan, a military history book.

The book is Keegan's attempt to influence the form of most military histroy books. He focuses on the lower level troops, rather than the generals and high level strategy. Keegan goes through three battles - Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme - in detail and uses them to illustrate his points about how battles should be described. The sections on actual battles are interesting, but the sections before and after about his new ideas in military history are harder to read - he writes in large blocks of text and doesn't always give the background necessary to understand what he is referring to.

I originally picked it up because I had an ancestor who fought in, and was knighted after, the battle of Agincourt.

Yesterday I finished The Sunday Philosopher's Club by Alexander Mccall Smith.

Smith has three series - the Ladies Detective Agency series, the Sunday Philosopher's Club series and the 44 Scotland Street series. This is the first book of the second series and I wrote about the first book of the first series here.

This book doesn't have the weird point of view problems that the other book had, but it also doesn't have as much charm. It's a perfectly serviceable mystery with some OK characters but nothing remarkable.

Last night we went and saw Town Mountain at the Plough and Stars in SF. I last saw this band at the Freight and Salvage and wrote about it here.

I only stayed for the first set, but it was another good show. Their previous show was almost all original songs, so it was interesting to see them do some bluegrass standards in this set.

I preferred the show at the Freight because the bar was very loud and filled with idiots who preferred to talk loudly and stand around rather than listen to music, but as I said before, I will definitely try to see this band any time they come to town.

Last night I finished The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton.

The Dreaming Void is set in the same Universe as his last two books, Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained ,which I wrote about here and here, but is intended as the start of a new trilogy.

It has the same highlights, and problems, as the previous works - great high energy space opera, with thin characters and very complex, hard to keep track of story. The one interesting new feature is a series of dreams, told as a separate story. The story in these dreams is more of a standard fantasy and it shows that Hamilton could easily write a good fantasy novel if he wanted to.