Lev Davidovich Bronstein - Leon Trotsky

I have long wanted to read books by the very erudite Stephen Pinker. (Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.)

I started his book How the mind works in December 2004 but did not really get into the meat of it. (See more about that in my previous post.)

I recommend seeing this TED Talk by him in 2005, in which he previewed his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, which looked at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. He questions the very nature of our thoughts -- the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others.

Now, in another TED talk, Pinker argues that our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and we are living in one of the most peaceful times of human existence. Seems the decline of violence is a fractal phenomena! Do see the talk to hear more about his interesting argument.

Update: Amit Varma has a quote for the day that goes quite well with the above post.

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.

It is om The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, a book Amit strongly recommends.

Though I still have not finished Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra* ...

... I have started with two other books since I need a dose of good literary talent. And so I am reading two renowned names that I have always wanted to read but not read so far. (Actually, I think I may have cursorily perused through Roth's Portnoy's Complaint in the 90s.) And so I began Wedding Song by Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz and The Counterlife by (future Nobel laureate?) Philip Roth. Aah...such delight in reading good literature after suffering through the pulp fiction of Vikram Chandra.

Coincidentally, both had an interesting snippets about September, with the former novel, which I started last night, started with the short but powerful lines:

September. The beginning of autumn. The month of preparations and rehearsals.

And this excerpt from Roth's book, which I started this morning and already got through the first chapter (which I thoroughly enjoyed. The writing style is very different than Updike but Roth still reminds me more of Updike than Saul Bellow. It is amazing how good writing about a 39 year old dentist, his inadequacies, his affairs, and his death has gripped me and gave me more satisfaction than the cat-and-mouse games of a cop and a gangster and all the interesting side characters in Sacred Games!):

It was early in the afternoon at the end of September; from the cold touch of the breeze and the light heat of the sun and the dry unsummery whish of the trees you could easily have guessed the month with your eyes closed - perhaps have even guessed the week.

Related:

• Deciding to do the impossible - NYT
• Philip Roth: Life and Counterlife: A Review Essay - Modern Judaism, Vol. 9, No. 3, 325-339, Oct., 1989 - available via JSTOR, which you may have free access to through your public library. At least you do through Boston Public Library.
• A review by The Book Diva
  

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* I am trudging through it only to say that at 900 pages, it is the longest book I ever read! I have somehow gotten to page 500 or so and given how little it has interested me - with every passing day, the story interests me less and less --- I wonder if I will have the patience to get to the end. Given how long it is, it meanders too much and is easy to lose focus and interest. It started with a gripping encounter between Sartaj and Gaitonde, which I had read elsewhere before as an independent short story ... but this book meanders around and has petered to a very anti-climactic boring middle. Hope there is some surprise or good ending because so far the story has been only mildly interesting in parts. And the writing quality is sub-par at best. I wonder what all the hype was about!

I had picked up Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, from the public library. However, I am reading too many other books at the current time and probably will not read this book now but managed to find an excerpt in the Foreword that I read.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.

From the little I read about the book, I learned about the impact bias i.e. "people seem to think that if disaster strikes it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will emotionally benefit from it." Here is an interesting wiki entry on various cognitive biases.

You can read the NY Times review of the book or hear the author at TED talk about "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?" (I think I linked to this before.)

Also, every released book seems to have a blog these days.

A study finds why attempts to restore a native trout haven't worked: They used the wrong fish!

A 20-year government effort to restore the population of an endangered native trout in Colorado has made little progress because biologists have been stocking some of the waterways with the wrong fish, a new study says.

This continued for 20 years? This is more incredulous than the NASA goof-up over inches versus metric units during the launch of the Mars Climate Orbiter robotic probe in 1999. Ok...no... that case takes the cake given the millions (billions?) of dollars involved and the fact that it was the brainiacs at NASA in charge. (Want me to be patient with them NASA scientists... they are not rocket scientists ... oh wait...in a way, they are! :))

Thank god NASA finally decided to go metric this January for all operations on the lunar surface when it returns to the Moon. Don't want any more "big oops for mankind" scenario as they plan to send men back to the moon!