jameswharris

The Best Books of 2012- The List of Lists

If you wait long enough on the Internet, someone else will write the blog you dream of writing. Every year I think about gathering all the Best Books of the Year lists and putting them into a database. That’s a lot of work. So this year I configured a Google Alert to notify me whenever someone published anything on the Internet entitled Best Books of 2012. I figured sooner or later someone else will have compiled my mega list.

I was right! The folks over at the Williamsburg Regional Library compiled a spreadsheet with 12 categories of recommended books. Each category ranks the books that were on the most Best Books of 2012 lists. They asked that bloggers not link to the results, but to their blog that explains everything. So click on All the Best Books Compilation (ABBC) 2012, First Edition. Ah, and it even appears it will be updated, because this spreadsheet is called the first edition. Williamsburg Regional Library used 175 different Best Books of 2012 lists. See the 13th tab at the bottom of their spreadsheet called Sources. Their spreadsheet even include hyperlinks to the original best of lists. This will provide an orgy of reading about the best books of 2012.

Their General Fiction – Novels list, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain got on 27 different Best Books of 2012 lists, and that’s a book I don’t even remember hearing about, reading about or seeing at the bookstore. However, the second book on the list, and on 19 best of lists, is Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. I saw reviews of it everywhere, and I’ve already read it and can highly recommend it. If I created a Best Books of 2012 list, it would be right at the top. Book number 3, also on 19 lists, is The Round House by Louise Erdrich, who my friend Linda has been recommending. Luckily, my wife bought it this weekend.

At the top of their Speculative Fiction list is The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker that I read when it came out and loved. Third on the list is The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, which I also read and loved. It’s always fun to discover great books when they come out.

At top of the YA List is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I bought it, and my wife has read it, and I hope to get to it soon.

And I’ve read or bought several top non-fiction titles, however, I’ve been avoiding the most acclaimed non-fiction title, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, which is on 28 best of lists, ten more than Passage of Power by Robert Caro, which I’ve bought but haven’t read. Being on 28 recommended lists makes me feel like I should overcome my prejudice and give Wild a try.

The fact that the new books I loved the most last year were the ones on the top of these lists say quite a lot about the value of this tabulation list. Books on five or more best of the year lists are almost guaranteed to be great reads. And I wonder if I’m cheating myself if I don’t read books that were on ten lists or more. There were many books on just one list, or two. And those books might be great too, but their success are probably determined a lot more by personal tastes than overall excellence.

I’ve always asked my friends, why read any book when you can read a great book? The trick is finding the great books.

If you love books, visit the Williamsburg Regional Library link and download their spreadsheet. You will need Excel or a clone to read it. Also visit their site for lists from previous years, 2008-2011.

JWH – 3/2/13

Kindle Magazines FYI

Last year I started subscribing to several magazines at the Kindle Newsstand and read them on my iPad. For $1.99 or $2.99 a month, it’s very easy to try out a magazine. Then towards the end of the year I realized I wasn’t reading these magazines and cancelled my subscriptions. I figured I’d wait until I had time to read, then go through the back issues and decide if I really wanted to subscribe again. Well, today I went to look at some of the back issues and they wouldn’t download. I got a message “License Limit Reached.”

At first this message seem to imply that I had too many registered devices. I have two iPod touches, two e-ink Kindles, one iPad, one Kindle cloud reader, and six different PC readers. I deregistered everything but one touch, two Kindles and one iPad. Still got the message. So I called Amazon. The first lady I talked to was very nice, but she eventually bumped me up a service level. The second lady knew exactly what my problem was. If you cancel your subscription, but haven’t downloaded the magazines you bought to a device yet, you will get the license limit reached error.

I told her I felt I had bought those magazines and assumed I’d always have them. She said unfortunately, that’s not how the system works with the licensing agreement they have with the magazines. I didn’t think that was right, but the lady I was talking with was very nice, and I assumed she was stuck with this policy, so it wasn’t Amazon’s fault. The helpdesk lady did apologize and gave me a token credit.

FYI: always download your magazines from the cloud to your devices before you cancel your subscription. And I noticed that I didn’t have this problem with my old issues of The Rolling Stone Magazine. I had just re-subscribed to it. But then I couldn’t remember I had previously downloaded all those issues. So just for kicks, I re-subscribed to The New York Review of Books, and viola, my old issues were again available to download.

Crazy Subscription Pricing

I read on the iPad with the Kindle reader to save trees. It just ecological. Also, you can try a magazine without buying a whole year’s worth. Most magazines at the Kindle Newsstand are available for a monthly fee. But pricing is crazy.

Yesterday, at my favorite bookstore, I saw an issue of The Rolling Stone Magazine I wanted to read. It was $4.99, plus tax at the book store. It’s $1.99 a month at Amazon, which means I get 2 issues for $1.99, a savings of $8 over the newsstand price of two issues. 26 issues is $19.97 a year via a paper subscription – or 77 cents an issue. So I’m paying Amazon $23.88 a year for the electronic version, or 92 cents an issue.

So the cheapest way to get The Rolling Stone is to buy the paper copy and have them mail it to you. How is that even possible? I’m paying them $4 a year more not to print the magazine and mail it to me. Not only that, but if I subscribed to the paper copy I’d be eligible to read the entire archive of back issues online. This is a conundrum for me. I want to be ecological. A lot of carbon goes into printing and mailing, and that makes me feel guilty about the physical copy subscription. But for $4 less money I’d get the digital archive! That’s so tempting.

You’d think they’d charge less for the Kindle edition because there’s no printing or postal costs. Maybe Amazon’s cut requires the increase, yet Amazon also sells the paper subscriptions for $19.97, just two cents more than Rolling Stones does with it’s fall out cards in the mag.

The New York Review of Books is $41.88 yearly at the Kindle Newsstand at $3.49 a month, but it’s $69.00 a year at their site, or $74.95 a year for the paper and online edition. So Amazon is a bargain, except once again I don’t get access to the digital archive. I’d rather pay less and read The New York Review of Books on my iPad, but I sure would love access to the digital archive.

The Future of Magazine

It seems obvious that we’re moving toward a digital future. Why waste all that money on printing and postage when magazines can be instantly delivered. To me the perfect magazine subscription would be the cheapest with the least commitment, along with access to the entire archive of the magazine’s history. I’m willing to pay a monthly fee for new and old. What I’d really love is paying a monthly fee like Netflix’s and get access to a bunch of magazines. Next Issue does offer such a service now for $10-15 a month, but they don’t have the magazines I want to read. It’s like cable TV, 200 channels and nothing to watch. I’m currently subscribing to two magazines that totals $5.48 a month. If The Rolling Stone and The New York Review of Books were available at Next Issue along with 1-2 other magazines I wanted, then $10 a month would be a good deal. I’d need 5-6 magazines I really wanted to make it worth $15 a month. I’ll keep my eye out on Next Issue, but for now it seems weight towards women’s magazines.

JWH – 2/24/13

Why Can’t We Be Good When We Know What’s Bad?

I’ve been reading about how our western diet is spreading around the world and bringing obesity, diabetes, hypertension and a host of other non-infectious degenerative diseases to people who used to eat differently, and lived healthier. It’s quite obvious that our high fat, high sugar, high salt, high calorie diets are bad, so why don’t we eat better? Why can’t we be good when we know what’s bad?

We just can’t seem to resist sweet, salty and fatty foods when they are in abundance. Generally, where humans are thinner, more active, with little diabetes and hypertension its because they didn’t have a whole lot of food choices to begin with. The western diet is really one of abundance and variety, and people around the world if given the opportunity to eat like us, become pigs like us.

My question is: Why can’t we say no?

I have no answer. I weigh 240 pounds. I certainly can’t say no.

Actually, that’s not completely true. I’ve given up many favorite foods over the years, and I still gained weight. I do eat healthier, but I don’t eat less. I am driven by hunger. I can’t say yes to being hungry.

I keep eating more than I should knowing that I will suffer degenerative diseases in the future. That’s insane.

I find this philosophically fascinating. Obviously the rational mind has little influence over the physical body and the hormones that regulate it.

What if science could create a pill that makes us shun desserts, fatty foods, fried foods, salty foods, etc., and made us crave just the right amount of healthy foods, would you take that pill? What if this pill made food a non-issue, so you just ate exactly what your body needed to be healthy. Would you take that pill? It might kill off gourmet eating, fast food, candy, pastries, soft drinks, and all the other stuff we so love.

Yeah I know, you’re thinking, “Why can’t what’s bad be good?” See that opens up another philosophical question. What if bad food is what we want. What if bad food is what makes life good? That’s easy to believe, but remember the heart disease and diabetes? Remember all the obese children and young adults? Brownies and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream are evil.

What if our current stage of humanity is a paradigm shift like going from hunter and gatherers to an agricultural society? Humans have always pretty much eaten anything they could put in our mouths that didn’t kill us. That’s why we’re called omnivores. But what if we’re moving into a new phase of existence where we must become healthyvores? Can our species make the transition? If I had a time machine and could jump ahead a hundred years, or five hundred years, would I find homo sapiens 2.0 living a much longer and healthier life?

I don’t know. It’s something to think about. I’m not sure we can always change, to always evolve.

JWH – 2/18/13

Spending a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Ripping LPs with Audacity

Sometimes, it’s just pleasant to to putter around the house, doing small tasks. Getting little jobs done, checking them off the To Do List, provides a nice sense of accomplishment. One task I’m working on this afternoon is recording LPs to MP3 files. My goal is to hear my album music on Amazon Cloud Player. I’ve recorded some favorite albums before, but it wasn’t until I discovered a long forgotten album, On the Flip Side, by Ricky Nelson lurking among my Amazon Cloud Player albums that I realized how much I appreciated having my vinyl on the Internet.

The Internet is such an odd driving social force. It make us want everything at our fingertips. For decades I only had once place to play my music. As a kid, it was in my bedroom, but after I got married, it was my living room. Now I can listen to a lifetime of music anywhere I have network access. When I got back into LPs I found I enjoyed the old ritual of playing albums on my stereo system. That was very satisfying. Shopping for albums and having friends come over and listening to records was very retro, very nostalgic.

Alas, the modern world is so relentless. In recent months, the time I play music the most is between 4am and 6am, when I have a bout of insomnia. Pretty funny huh? Strange time to rock out, but surprisingly, it’s a good way to start the day, or even to add a soundtrack to those early morning dreams if I’m lucky enough to drift back to sleep.

I keep my iPod touch and a pair of headphones by the chair I sleep in. (Long story, but I sleep in a chair.) If I wake up early, or stay up late and can’t get to sleep I call up some tunes. Either from my favorite playlists on Rdio, or from the Amazon Cloud Music Player. Being in a semiconscious state is a wonderful time to listen to music. Sometimes I fall back asleep and even wake up again floating weightless in a sphere of music. Pretty damn cool.

Learning to convert LPs, or even cassettes, to MP3 files is not that hard. Audacity is a free software program that works on PC, Mac and Linux. The trick is to get your turntable connected to the computer. You can even buy turntables designed for working with computers. Older turntables require a preamp. You can buy cheap ones for under $20, or spend a fortune if you’re a audiophile. Newer turntables have a built-in preamp, and the latest turntables are specifically designed to work with computers by having a USB jack and cable.

I set up an old turntable on my desk that allows me to play LPs through my computer speakers while I work. When I want to record an album, I just launch Audacity. You also to get LAME to export to MP3, an auxiliary program, but it’s free. The export feature on Audacity will link you to it. All this can be a bit technical to get going, and instead of me going through all the steps I’m just going to link you to some very fine tutorials. Just remember, the setting for bit rate is in the File|Export menu that calls up LAME. I use 256 kbps. LAME’s default is 128 kbps.

The tutorial – Audacity Manual
Sample workflow for LP digitization – Audacity manual
Convert your music and sound to CD
How to rip anything: recording from LP or cassette
How To Rip Tunes From Vinyl to MP3 (Without Them Sounding Like Junk)
How to Properly Convert Your Vinyl Record Collection to Digital

Here’s a video tutorial where the guy is using his receiver for the preamp. The setup is much simpler if you have a turntable with a built-in preamp, or USB output.

I bought a preamp from Amazon for my old turntable. It looks like this and is currently $17.14.

The sound quality would be superior if I used a superior preamp or good receiver, but I find this little cheap gadget works well enough for me.

The simplest setup is a turntable with USB and a laptop. Next easiest is a turntable with built-in preamp. You’ll need an adapter with 2 RCA inputs that converts to a mini stereo jack that plugs into your line-in. After that involves adding a portable preamp like I did. After that, you can use an existing receiver using your tape out RCA jacks to mini stereo jack.

I’m a lazy LP recorder. I record a whole side and end up with two MP3 tracks for each albums. Side 1 – Album Name, Side 2 – Album name. I store these in My Music folder, under a folder named for the artist, and then another folder named after the album. If you want to record each song separately, you can record the entire album, using pause between sides, and then use Audacity’s editing feature to pull out each song and export it separately with the track name. Some people get very fancy and save the recording as WAV files, and then burn a CD. As you learn and play with Audacity you’ll see all kinds of possibilities.

I also use a similar setup with a tape deck to convert old audiobooks to MP3.

After a recording session, I run the file upload program for the Amazon Cloud Player and my songs are added to my library. Tomorrow, in the middle of the night, I can call them up.

Audacity is fun to play with. Think of it as a word processor for sound. If you have a microphone you can even record and edit your own speeches, or if you have a digital sound recorder, interview people and later edit the files. I’ve helped people who do oral history to clean up their files. Audacity does take a bit of learning, but isn’t that hard. I helped a 70 year old lady who was very computer phobic use Audacity because she had about twenty hours of interviews with a man who constantly cough. Audacity let her take out all the coughs, and clean off the white noise that was in the background. Her final product was published as an oral history without the constant cough and annoying background noise.

I don’t buy many LPs anymore, just the ones that aren’t available on CD. I use MusicStack.com to find out of print LPs, like the 1971 LP Never Goin’ Back to Georgia by The Blue Magoos. Audacity can look intimidating, but it doesn’t take too long to learn. It can be annoying if you can’t easily configure it to your computer. Most of the time the default install finds your soundcard and speakers and everything is copacetic. If you have a motherboard soundcard and an added PCIe soundcard, you might need to select the right device.

The Audacity interface looks like this:

Depending on your level of audio fanaticism, you can use Audacity to clean off pops and hiss. I’m lazy. My recordings sound like I’m playing an album, and that doesn’t bother me. I does seem like a minor miracle to put an album on, record it, and then play it by clicking on a file name.

Like I said at the top of the page, I like puttering around with little jobs. I like scanning photos to .jpg, or scanning old documents to .pdf. I like organizing my files into filing systems. I like recording LPs and cassette audio books. Slowly all my life is ending up in Dropbox.

JWH – 2/17/13

Books That Show Us Reality–The Power of the Red Pill

We live in strange times.

Science is under attack by the faithful. Most people prefer fiction over fact. We know more about the nature of reality than ever before, yet few people want to look reality in the eye. Everyone claims they want to know the truth, but do they?

It’s like in the movie The Matrix, when Neo is offered the red and blue pill. Morpheus tells Neo the red pill will show him the truth and the blue pill will return him to forgetfulness. On this planet, most people take the blue pill.

What if you wanted to take the red pill?

Naturally, a red pill to reveal the truth does not exist. But there are read pills, called books, that do.

Up until the middle of the 20th century, an exemplary education involved the knowledge of the great books of the western world. For the last fifty years we have been rejecting the great books kind of education, but we haven’t substitute a new canon. A well educated person no longer has to know Greek, Latin and French, or the defining books of the classical world. Science started in the 17th century, got up to speed in the 19th, and launched into orbit in the 20th.

Yet few inhabitants of planet Earth embrace scientific thinking. Fear of oblivion push many into the opium of religion, and most of the rest hide out in escapists fantasies and games. Science is the only path to the truth, but few follow it.

What we need is a new set of great books, a new canon, whose content will define a well educated person.

I want to create a new definition of education. Let’s start with a cockroach. When you go into your kitchen in the middle of the night and turn on the light and see a cockroach run for his life, think about what it knows. Think about what reality is to a cockroach. The poor little fella knows nothing of physics, biology, history, mathematics, literature, or even language. He has no tools to describe or analyze reality. He’s a tiny little machine with sensors that help him search out food. He also has a sensor that tells him to run for cover when the light goes on. He doesn’t know your foot is about to squash his little body. His awareness of reality is without thoughts. His potential for education is nil.

Now, lets step up to a border collie. Her awareness of reality is far richer than the poor cockroach. We’re not sure if dogs think or have a language, although recently scientists claim that dogs can learn a couple hundred words, but they don’t perceive words like we do. Our border collie is well adapted to education and can be trained to do all kinds of work and tricks. She is even eager to learn. But alas, she knows no more of physics, biology, history, mathematics, literature than our friend the cockroach.

We all approach reality like the blind men caressing separate parts of an elephant and speculating about the whole animal. Some creatures can perceive more of reality than others. Educated humans with all our senses are able to see the elephant complete in many dimensions, even all its component molecule and atoms, and even trace its origin in its evolutionary past. We see a lot of reality, but far from all – and nothing blocks us from seeing further.

Cosmologists see the largest aspects of reality. Particle physicists see the smallest parts of reality. Yet neither see the ultimate largest or smallest. Our universe is probably one of an infinity of universes, so there is no end to big, and probably there is no end to small either.

Science has turned on the light, and scurrying humans can see it all, from immensely tiny particles to the furthest reaches of the universe, from the Big Bang until now. Yet most people choose to hide in the cracks of darkness.

On a recent PBS show NOVA, “Earth From Space” they showed a map of the US with a squiggly ling running from New York to Los Angeles to represent the size of the electromagnetic spectrum. The scientist interviewed explained the visual part of the spectrum we use to see would be about the size of a dime. We have built new senses to see all of reality, we are way beyond biology. We are now cyborgs. But for the average human, there is little knowledge of our true capabilities.

My definition of education is learning to see as much of reality as possible. Unfortunately, most homo sapiens hide from reality, lost in their fantasies of religion, desires, fictional diversions, games, routines, habits, impulses, etc. We are closer to the cockroach when we spend so much time pursuing food and sex. We are like the border collie when we learn to work and earn a living. But we are the most human when we’re examining the scope of existence.

Now to the great books. Books are a tool like the telescope, microscope, or interplanetary robot, they let us see further. If we read the right book, we’ll add details to our personal model of reality. We never see reality directly, but model it in our minds. Tragically, humans are prone to delusions and fantasies that distort their models of reality. Think of the wretched conspiracy theorist who builds highly distorted views of reality, or the faithful who shape reality by ancient Bible stories that pander to their fear of oblivion by promising eternal life.

Yes, it’s easier to take the blue pill and forget. Taking the red pill requires a lot of study and work.

A great education is developing an internal model of reality that closely mimics our external reality. A great education is learning about all the models of reality that failed. Plato’s model of reality is abysmally wrong, yet we still study Plato. Science is a long history of getting it wrong, but it’s cumulative history is a collection of good working models. The theory of evolution is one of the most successful models of reality ever imagined. Evolution is now the key tool for understanding how reality works. Evolution explains change, and reality is constantly changing.

It’s time to get to the nitty gritty of this essay.

What books are the red pill for showing the truth about reality? My knowledge and experience is limited, so I can only make a crude guess. What I’d like to see a collective development of a canon of great science books. The Scientific Canon needs a small set of introductory books that will illuminate the uninitiated into the world of science. Then it will need a more extensive list of books for further study.

Coming up with a list of introductory books will be hard. It won’t be like religion, with The Bible or Quran, where one book will do, science will take many. And where do we start? At the beginning with The Big Bang and cosmology, the science of the very big? But to understand cosmology requires understanding particle physics, which is the study of the very small. Science really doesn’t make sense without understanding evolution. It really helps to grasp how unintelligent design, in a random chaotic system, can produce order even when the second law of thermodynamics exists. Entropy is such a backasswards slippery concept to mentally wrestle.

Developing the Scientific Canon will be hard. Obviously our school systems are failing at the job, even when they have a captured audience and powerful textbooks. Can anyone list twelve books that will give the average person a basic grasp of science? Even with a longer list, like Harold Bloom’s Western Canon list, how well verse in science can a reader become without knowing mathematics? Is a scientific understanding beyond most people?