Conti is a computer scientist who researches things like security and information disclosure. As this job description requires, he’s both sharp and paranoid. I bookmarked a dozen or so passages that showcased one attribute or another. He starts out by saying that he considers Google “a sovereign entity equivalent to a nation . . . because of its top-tier intellectual talent, financial resources in the billions of dollars, and world-class information-processing resources,” a viewpoint which strikes me as patently absurd. Throughout there are asides like, “every time an old friend contacts you from a webmail account, a little piece of your privacy dies.” But in the chapter on maps, Conti offers this provocative scenario:

Let’s say [your company] has 1,200 employees located at 10 locations, some not publicly known. Imagine mapping activity form the IP address ranges used by our corporate headquarters, as well as the other locations, all seeking directions from Ministeri Pistarini International Airport in Buenos Aires to the street address of a meeting site at the outskirts of the city. Because this activity is out of the norm, you’ve just created a unique set of characteristics that ties together your various company offices with a potentially sensitive meeting. You’ve also disclosed with a high probability, the travel plans of the meeting participants, as well as given a clue to the strategic importance of Argentina to your company’s planning.

In the chapter on cross-site tracking via embedded content, after dissecting the roles of the (many) sites involved in serving up content for a typical MSNBC.com page, he makes the trenchant point that, “your real privacy in terms of visiting a web site is the equivalent of the worst [privacy] policy of all the sites embedded there.”

Far from accepting Google’s famous “don’t be evil” precept at face value, Conti continually ascribes the worst possible motivations to Google. He makes insinuating comments like, “Note that these are the publicly acknowledged uses of machine processing of communications. It is a safe bet that many other uses will never be discussed overtly.” In discussing the Google Analytics javascript, which has been through a “minification” process that makes the code hard to read, he saves the admission that “the density of code could also be seen as an attempt to reduce the size of the file, to improve response time.” He fails to mention that minifying javascript for performance reasons is standard practice for high-performance, real-time websites. Conti assumes Google (ab)uses information in ways it has publicly states it does not; one could imagine that at least some of the data mining Conti describes might be technically challenging even for an organization like Google.

But Conti makes another interesting point: Google won’t endure forever, certainly not in its current form***. The individuals who defined Google’s culture and ethics won’t live forever, and there is no guarantee that their principles will be adhered to indefinitely. If Google doesn’t, or even can’t, exploit data in certain ways now, it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty that that will always be true. This sorts of threat isn’t even hypothetical to me — when I signed up for a Flickr account, I was comfortable with Flickr’s privacy policy. I was not at all comfortable with Yahoo!’s privacy policies, which are the ones that matter now.

I don’t plan to make many changes to my web browsing habits as a result of reading Conti’s book, mostly because I already aggressively filter tracking cookies and minimize my use of problematic sites like FaceBook. But I did find it interesting and thought provoking, if sometimes a little shrill.

* I also didn’t remember the author or the exact title. I made a game of trying to track down the book without using Google, pretending that showing interest in this book might set some blackmark flag in Google’s servers. I searched on Amazon, Yahoo!, and even Bing. But I couldn’t track it down without recourse to Google.

** Or at least that someone is trying to establish a connection, which may be interesting in an entirely different way.

*** If nothing else, the end of normal matter in the universe will eventually impose significant changes on Google’s technical infrastructure.

needs more demons? I wouldn’t want to wish more demons on Conti; he seems to have enough of his own.

During our month of wandering around the United Kingdom we intended to have fun and failed. Finding our flat was an ordeal and I won’t bore you with our tales of misadventure. I can’t help but remember the bedsit we found in Brighton as an act of desperation to end our wanderings. Electricity in the bedsit was coin operated. You ran out of coins, you ran out of light. I had always heard of such things in the old world,but in all my travels this was my first coin-op bedsit. I was feeling robust enough to be amused. Warren, on the other hand, sat on the edge of the bed catatonic, staring at the wood chip wallpaper.

needs more demons? James Clerk Maxwell is mentioned several times, but his famed little critters never come up. But I can’t really say that’s a flaw.

Drive strikes me as a perfectly designed business book. It’s a slim, fast read (it’s substantially padded by a section which essentially recapitulates the book’s content, with some putting-into-practice tips sprinkled in). It invents some new jargon — Motivation 2.0 and 3.0 (Motivation 1.0, if you’re curious, is subsistence-level gotta-survive type stuff) and Type I(ntrinsic) and Type X(trinsic) — in which to frame ideas that have been floating around for a while. Of course there’s a gotcha here as well: implementing many of these concepts requires people in positions of control to give up a lot of it, and they will be threatened by much of what this book proposes. (It does get a little hippy-dippy in places for a biz book, at one point Pink hints that management itself could become an outdated concept.)

Porter’s key concept is that you can examine any decision in cost/benefit terms, and you can almost always find a way to quantify the cost and benefit in monetary terms (whether it’s explicitly transactional or not). For instance, here’s how Porter analyzes why the 55-mph national speed limit didn’t work: A 70 mile trip takes 16 minutes more at 55mph than at 70mph. At $4.30/hr (the average wage of “production workers in 1974″), that represents $1.15. At the time gas cost $0.53/gal, so to break even, the average driver would have needed to save 2.17 gallons for every 70 mile trip — substantially more than the fuel efficiency of 1974 cars would provide.

Porter doesn’t suggest that most production workers worked out this equation and made a rational, informed decision to disobey the speed limit — I infer that he thinks people made gut-decisions perhaps based on a subconscious sense of time-value lost at lower speeds. But I would argue (albeit without stacks of research to back me up, whereas Porter’s book is meticulously footnoted) that the psychological dimension was significant outside of economics; the 55-mph limit was an assault on macho cowboy car culture. (Consider: if economics were that much of a factor in velocity determinations, you’d see a lot fewer jack-rabbit start and sudden stops with current fuel prices, especially in sub/urban commuting, where it avails the driver almost nothing.)

Porter’s framing of the problem also ignores that travel at 70mph for sustained periods of time is a comparative rarity for most drivers. (With long-haul trucking one notable exception, and, other than cowboy culture, one reason always advanced for the trucker/cop cb/radar conflicts of the mid-late seventies was that the truckers’ work schedules required violating posted speed limits.)

Porter also ignores other factors which might reasonably be considered part of the valuation: reduced loss of life, reduced emissions, reduced engine wear, et cetera. (Although I think it’s fair to assert that many drivers would likely ignore these factors as well.)

Although Porter’s analysis of what to do about greenhouse emissions ultimately concludes that given the uncertainty of the models, voters might as well follow their guts, his analysis of the issue omits a very important factor. (It’s also quite different from traditional risk valuations.) He suggests thinking of the problem as balancing lives positively impacted now and in the future, the economic cost of curbing emissions now and in the future, and the potential impact of climate change on the economy. (I infer that he doesn’t discount “there is no more economy” as an outcome, but thinks it fairly unlikely.) It’s easy to tweak the model to suggest taking only limited action in the short, in effect “investing” funds needed to address the problem in the future: spending money on policies that promote economic development so there are increased financial resources to address global warming later on. But he ignores the opportunity cost of not taking action now. I think of it as the “toothache problem” — the longer you put off the dentist visit, the bigger the bill is likely to be.

However, I should probably admit that phrases like, “the standard family deal, in which women exchanged the service of their uterus, child care, and household chores for their husband’s wage,” get me spoiling for an intellectual tussle with their author, irrespective of how historically accurate they might be and what the author’s personal attitudes are. And if I sometimes found the book infuriating, it certainly challenged some of my attitudes and preconceptions, and made me think.

Aside: Porter is kinda in the Chicken Little camp as far as the future of paying for intellectual content goes, and seems to think more/stronger DRM may be part of a solution. So maybe this is relevant, not just petty: A glowing review called The Price of Everything to my attention, and if it had been priced like other e-books I’ve bought recently, I probably would’ve bought it on the spot. These days my determination of whether and how to read a book includes among other factors, the cost of physical storage, the ease of library access, my estimate of re-read/reference value, and whether an electronic version is DRM-encumbered. Half-again the maximum price I typically pay for DRM-trapped content? Not a winning strategy for publishers who want revenue from me.

needs more demons? I might’ve found the content I disliked easier to swallow if I thought the extrapolation had been a bit more rigorous throughout.

I’ve read a lot of books that covered similar topics, but if you don’t read new ones (this one was published in 2008), things tend to change. For instance, we used to think that our sun was in the class of stars that could go nova, inexplicably increasing in brightness for a period of hours or days — possibly long enough to fry the Earth to a crisp. In the current understanding, stars like ours don’t go nova; only hydrogen-gorging white dwarfs do (whew!). On the other hand, I’m a little more scared of big meteors than I used to be; turns out blowing them up with nukes probably doesn’t work at all, and even deflecting them is likely to be much harder than I thought. So while Plait’s book covered a lot of ground familiar to me, there were usually new wrinkles; I learned plenty.

One reasonable quibble I have is that Plait is a little glib about scale. Only in the chapter on the death of the universe does he rely on exponential notation, and then only because the numbers are so unimaginably huge. Throughout most of the book he uses million and billion in adjoining sentences. Even these numbers are so beyond human scale that I think they’re difficult to keep hold of; I think our brains tend to render them as “really big” and “really big (but bigger)” — it’s hard (for me anyway) to keep in mind that a billion is a thousand million and that a trillion is a thousand thousand million. It’s geeky, but I kind of wish he’d used exponential notation throughout.

My unreasonable quibble with the book illustrates why I’d make a spectacularly lousy scientist, particularly in the chapter on “Deep Time” and the end of the universe. I can accept that we can make assertions about the age of the universe and what happened to bring us to the current point — if we look at an object that’s 6 billion light years away, we’re seeing it as it was 6 billion years ago unless pretty much everything we think we know about physics is wrong. So we can learn about state of the universe 6 billion years ago by direct observation, and extrapolate backward.

But foretelling the end of the universe involves quantities of time that literally, I think, beggar the imagination. As Plait acknowledges, you can’t use metaphors — you can’t say, for instance, that the 14-ish billion years age of the universe to date is an eyeblink compared to Deep Time, because an eyeblink is way, way, way, too long. It’s certainly scientifically reasonable to extrapolate from our observations of the universe now. But for us to presume we really know what’s going to happen on those scales strikes my unscientific, intuitive mind as enormous hubris. Suppose for a second that there’s some big change in the universe that happens once every 20 billion years. It hasn’t happened once yet, but in the Deep Time scale, it would happen billions upon billions upon billions of times. That’s not a scientific notion — I certainly can’t propose a mechanism for some fundamental shift in the universe, or draw up equations to describe whatever it might be.

But what I can observe is that throughout recorded history, when we think we have things pretty much figured out, something upsets the apple cart and we discover it’s way more complicated than we thought. And, from the oldest historical records to just last week (with news story about experimental results failing to match the predictions of string theory), the strangification of the universe is happening faster and faster.

So while I don’t know when, how, or why (although pseudo-scientifically, dark matter still seems to be a bit of a wild card), I’d (intuitively, unscientifically) bet that long before the universe gets to the Deep Time that Plait describes, our understanding of it will significantly change. Probably before the sun swells to a red giant, or within my lifetime, or possibly even next week. And that’s what I love — the notion that despite our best efforts, the universe will always reveal complexities that transcend our understanding. We need something even weirder than string theory? Bring it on!

My irrationality aside, I liked Plait’s book a lot. Certainly found it thought-provoking.

Needs more demons? Nope.

Packing for Mars devotes a chapter apiece to several aspects of the ticklish business of getting human beings off of Earth and back to it relatively undamaged. Topics range from earthbound research, like psychological evaluations of crew dynamics and people paid to lie in bed all day while their muscles and bones waste away, to discussion of just how gross it is to wear a spacesuit (answer: very) and pondering the question of whether anyone has yet joined the 286-Mile-High Club.

As in previous Roach’s previous books, particularly the cadaveriffic Stiff, she doesn’t shy away from gruesome or unsavory topics. (The chapter on crash survivability research was actually the most wince-inducing for me.) She approaches her topics with a lively, mordant humor, which often pops up in gleefully grim footnotes. And she’s clearly a gifted interviewer — she gets actual astronauts and researchers to say things you wouldn’t necessarily expect in an on-record interview.

But some of Roach’s footnotes deploy more-or-less random factoids, not at all related to space research. After a while I got a “hey,here’s another weird crazy thing!” vibe from these — entertaining, but not elucidating. And Roach devotes — maybe even wastes — several pages to debunking the claims of an adult DVD producer that one of its videos featured the world’s first zero-gravity, er, “money shot.” (The video was allegedly shot in an airplane flying a parabolic pattern to induce brief weightlessness, not actually in orbit.) There’s no science involved; it seems to be more about Roach establishing herself as an “edgy” journalist. Which, after Stiff, Spook, Bonk and the rest of Packing for Mars, seems to be something already well established.

needs more demons? Despite a few misgivings, no.

Braun has a particular fondness for debunking headline-making research that is not supported by following studies or where the headline soundbite misses important qualifying aspects of the research (perspective is applied to the factoids “alcohol kills brain cells,” and “red wine reduces risk of heart disease,” for instance).

On a personal note, I’m entering day six of my attempt to ratchet down my own caffeine consumption. A key fact from Braun’s book that the “half-life” of caffeine in the body is roughly 5 hours has helped me establish my transitional caffeine schedule.

One caveat: Buzz was published in 1996 and has not been revised; I’m certainly not qualified to assess how scientific understanding has changed in the intervening years.

Dept.-of-neither-here-nor-there: Buzz is the first book I’ve noticed that is available for the nook but not the Kindle, but it’s a whopping forty-one bucks in Barnes and Noble’s e-book format. Can you say “hello, library!”? I can.

needs more demons? Not really, but a glossary might not have been amiss for readers who (like me) have a smidge of trouble keeping receptors and organic compounds straight after a while.

Standage with opens Herschel’s discovery of Uranus by way of background, pays some attention to the contention-fraught business of planet naming, discusses “Bode’s law” and the “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter, and goes beyond Neptune to Pluto and other similar objects that were never called planets — and even beyond that to extrasolar planets, which take the radical idea to its ultimate conclusion: since planets around other stars are too distant to observe directly with an optical telescope, the only way to find them is through the pertuberances of orbits. (Strictly speaking, the planets of the solar system don’t actually orbit the sun; the sun and the planets orbit their mutual center of gravity. Since the sun is far more massive than the sum of the planets, this basically means the sun wobbles a little bit, and through similar wobbles the presence of planets around other stars can be detected.)

The previous two books of Standage’s that I read, The Victorian Internet and The Turk were so lively and well-written that I recommended them to pretty much anyone, not just those with an interest in history. The Neptune File perhaps has less sizzle. I wouldn’t push it on someone with no interest whatsoever in astronomy, or someone with no tolerance for history. But if the phrase “astronomical history” makes your eyes light up a little (instead of glaze over…) this is a definite must-read.

needs more demons? no.

And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the amygdala and the fear response that will be helpful when I’m allowed to ride a bike again; since I don’t remember the accident itself, I can expect not to be particularly afraid. And now I understand why for the past several years I’ve reacted so strongly to the sight of a car door opening ahead of me, even ones I can easily avoid and that pose no signficant threat.

I was also especially fascinated by Johnson’s chapter on laughter and tickling. After discussing compelling research that illustrates that laughter has very little to do with humor — maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the long-decay idea; it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush, but makes increasing sense as you think about it — Johnson stops just short of suggesting that laughter may have been a precursor to language. He argues that it’s a form of communication, and I’m inclined to think that what it communicates is largely “I’m going to interact with you in a non-threatening way.” (Even though we sometimes use it now to communicate the reverse.)

I didn’t find Johnson’s insight all equally affecting (and I’d bumped into some of them before, blunting their impact a bit) but they were all certainly interesting. As with The Ghost Map I found Johnson an exceptionally lucid writer.

But my naval-gazing response to his fear response chapter was no accident. Throughout Mind Wide Open, Johnson draws parallels between his personal anecdotal experience and the research he is writing about. The Ghost Map was so good that it earned Johnson a lot of leeway with me, and I’m glad I started with it instead, because otherwise I think I might have found passages like this irksome:

As I write these words, my attention is divided roughly between tw primary actions: thinking about the words as they are geneated in my head and materialize on the computer screen, and half listening to familiar songs playing in the background…I also have a vague background sense of mood — a bright midmorning working alertness, slightly caffeine enhanced.

Fortunately, that’s about the peak of the book’s self-involvement, but I can really recommend it strongly only to those who don’t mind a good bit of Steven Johnson the writer/husband/father mixed in with their brain science.

Perhaps predictably, I also became interested in the things Johnson might be saying without intending to say. He lives in New York and the book was written (judging from the interview dates) during 2001-2003 — and even so it was startling to me just how much of a shadow the events of 11 September 2001 cast over this book. (Speaking, for what it’s worth, as a resident at the time of the other city in which an airplane was flown into a building.)

needs more demons? perhaps just a touch fewer personal demons, actually

The Ghost Map is smart and ambitious, but it’s also remarkably accessible and readable, even gripping. Johnson impressively juggles human and intellectual interest throughout.

My only real criticism is that I wish the endnotes were footnoted in the text. Since they’re not, reading The Ghost Map required two bookmarks, one for my place in the text, and the other to for my place in the endnotes. You will note the underlying implication: even the endnotes were (often) interesting.

needs more demons? not a bit of it.