Pablo Nogueira | Reading Corner Updated:  15 Mar 2010

DISCLAIMER

In this corner I occasionally hook type-written notes on books or articles. They are merely personal reminders, not reviews or abridgements.

SOME QUOTES

It is fine to come up with good thoughts, but much better to know them when you see them in the works of other persons. You can get a lot more done that way.
(Guy L. Steele Jr., On Growing a Language)

Read the works of the masters on living, come to understand the true meaning of their words, form your own idea about what you want to do with your life; give up the ingenuous idea that you don't need a master, or a guide, or a model; that you are able to find out in the lapse of a lifetime what the greatest minds of human kind have discovered through many thousand years, based on the pillars and the outlines left by their predecessors. (Erich Fromm, From Having to Being)

I […] am very different indeed from the most sublime invention I have produced and the most deeply felt conviction that pervades me, and I must never permit these inventions and convictions to get the upper hand and to turn me into their obedient servant. I might even ‘take a stand’ (though the practice and even the phrase with its Puritanical connotations put me off), but when I did so, then the reason was a passing whim, not a ‘moral conscience’ or any other nonsense of that kind. (Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason)
Whatever topic or subject under the sun you may come across to think about, there's probably somebody somewhere who thought about it before, sat down to write it, and expressed it better than you would.

The time of individuals as measure and unappeasable determination of existence itself, which goes inexorably linked to the idea of ending, of an end as inevitable as radically incomprehensible. Our time appears here as the undetermined and threatening lapse in whose course humans struggle with the external world, only partially and occasionally apprehensible, and with their own being: their origin, their strange and disconcerting condition as limited and finite beings, as entities that pretend by essential imperative the appropriation of their environment and of themselves, of their destiny, and nevertheless realise in each step the radical impossibility of fulfilling their aspirations.
(Ramón Sánchez Lizarralde. Words taken from his review of the novel Viaje de Estudios published by Siruela)

AUTHORS
(alphabetical)

Juan Domingo Argüelles

  • What Do Read Those That Don't Read? (Notes of 16 Nov 04) [txt]
    Original title in Spanish: ¿Qué Leen los que No Leen?

    Why should we read? What is the real value of reading? How can we pass it on? What is the role of reading in the so-called "information society"? Argüelles gives wise answers to these and other questions, with much help from the authors he quotes.

David Brin

  • Tierra (Earth) (Notes of 13 Mar 2010) [txt]
    Spanish title: Tierra. Published in 1992 by Ediciones B.

    Tierra is a long and mostly boring novel with occasional glimmers of interrelated themes such as life's and existence's contingency and finiteness, ecology, evolution (competition and cooperation), and the human condition (politics, social organisation, relationships, etc) set against the futurist backdrop of a global information society. I've recorded some bits.

Rodney A. Brooks

  • Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines (Notes of 7 May 08) [html]
    USA title: Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us

    The director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab explains with a bit of history the origins of his "intelligence without representation" approach to developing intelligent creatures. He announces the forthcoming robotics revolution where humans will integrate with intelligent machines. Behind what initially looks like another far-fetched sci-fi proposition there lies some intriguing stuff and some unsatisfactory argumentation.

Michael Crichton

  • Esfera (Sphere) (23 Jul 07) [txt]
    Spanish title: Esfera. Published in 1993 by Plaza y Janés.

    Excerpts and comments to this roller-coaster of a novel which I read (almost in one sitting) in its Spanish translation published by Plaza & Janés. I very much enjoy Mr Crichton's scientific digressions and criticism of the scientific establishment. You can tell the novel was written like a script. The movie adaptation was appalling despite the starred cast.

Terry Eagleton

  • Material Girl No More (21 Feb 07) [txt]

    Some excerpts from the article of the same title published on The Times Higher Education Supplement, 16 Februrary 2007.

The Economist

  • Merit in Motion (26 Nov 05) [txt]

    A few excerpts from the article published in The Economist on the 26th of November 2005. The article is a review of the book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel, published by Houghton Mifflin. In short, Mr Karabel's conclusion is that "the idea of meritocracy … is inherently unattainable."

Arhur Koestler

  • Arrow in the Blue (Notes of 7 Feb 06) [ps.gz]

    Excerpts (with interspersed remarks) taken from the 1954 Readers Union edition of his autobiographical book. The choice of fragments is personal and they don't constitute an abridgment.

    I have found the following chapters of special interest:

    - The Hour Glass and Arrow in the Blue, where Koestler attempts to explain, respectively, the origins of his boisterous nature and his "thirst for absolute values", which drove him to utopias, science and, eventually, to the paranormal.

    - The Blessings of Unreason narrates Koestler's decision to "burn his bridges" and "jump off the track" after a late-night dicussion on determinisim with Russian student Orochov. He introduces some of his terminology: oceanic feeling, tragic plane, trivial plane, etc.

    - The Psychology of Conversion is an acute description and commentary on closed systems of thought. Koestler lists Marxism, orthodox Freudianism, and Catholicism as stereotypical examples. Closed systems dreprive their proselytisers of an objective view of the world by means of indoctrination and scholastic casuistry.

Bart Kosko

  • Fuzzy Thinking

    Even if at times demagogic, lampooning, and propagandistic (e.g., constantly selling fuzzy systems as the panacea to machine intelligence), Kosko's popularising account of fuzzy sets, fuzzy inference systems, and their philosophical implications in other human concerns (laws and rights, life and death, truth, paradoxes) is really worth reading.

    Outstanding shortcomings: all he sweeps under the rug. For example, not explaining why fuzzy theories should be applied to problems other than those where there is imprecision or vagueness; not explaining the openness of the logic's connectives (T-norms, T-conorms, Negation, etc.), and hence that his examples of results and concepts (fuzzy cubes, fuzzy entropy) assume an underlying (Max, Min, 1-x) calculus. Finally, he repeats ad nauseam the motto "to some degree" (elements belong to a set to some degree, men are tall to some degree), but barely explains that such degree is established by convention (expert and designer) and therefore the intelligence of a fuzzy inference system reflects the designer's ability to establish a fuzzy ontology.

Milan Kundera

  • Ignorance (Notes of 27 Feb 06) [txt]

    Kundera wrote this novel in French. It touches upon some of his usual themes: emigration, misunderstandings, memory, laughter and forgetting, lightness and weight, the communist occupation of the Czech republic, etc.

Glyn Moody

  • Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Notes of 20 Jun 03) [html]

    Although it does not encompass the whole story (otherwise it would have been many more pages long), this well-written book is an excellent introduction to the ideas of Free Software, Open Source, and the GNU/Linux world.

Peter Straub

  • Casas Sin Puertas (Houses Without Doors) (13 Jul 07) [txt]

    A book of short psychological-horror stories. I read it sometime ago in its Spanish translation (published by Ediciones B). I don't remember plots and characters. I do remember the author managed to immerse me into some of the character's strange and asphyxiating microcosms. I underlined a few paragraphs and sentences that called my attention.

Fernando González Urbaneja

  • Pero, ¿Hay Ricos en España? (3 Jul 01) [html]

    Artículo completo publicado en ABC Economía el 3 de Julio de 2001.

Colin Wilson

  • The Occult (10 Jan 03) [ps.gz] [pdf]

    This book is a mixture of history of the occult (focused on important personalities and cases), of the author's personal ideas about the subject and, more importantly, of his own humanistic philosophy, which is what I find interesting. Indeed, I have stripped away most of it into an annotated document in Spanish (I used the out-of-print Spanish edition entitled "Lo Oculto", published by Editorial Noguer). Even if I don't agree with all he says or the way he categorises, I find Mr Wilson stimulating.

NOTES

Hyperlinked commentaries within some of the above notes

  • Turing Test Rant (15 Apr 09) [html]
  • The Chinese Room (19 May 08) [html]
  • AI = Alchemy of Intelligence (4 May 09) [html]

Incomplete list of books