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Book review: Guns, Germs and Steel

If you like to ask "why" questions, this book is for you.  Jared Diamond answers why some societies succeeded and why some, like the Mayans or Aztecs, didn’t.  I don’t want to give away the book, but here are some examples that he uses:

  • Agricultural societies could store food.  Storing food enabled them to have people who specialized in something besides food gathering, like writing or medicine or fighting.
  • Storing food allowed them to conquer other societies because they could take their food along and so they didn’t need to stop fighting to gather food.
  • Keeping animals brought a lot of diseases.  The people that kept the animals eventually became immune to most of the diseases but they would bring those diseases (like smallpox) to other societies and it would wipe them out.

Jared Diamond also spends time explaining that he doesn’t think industrialized societies are necessarily any better than hunter-gather societies – hunter-gatherers might have actually been healthier, taller, stronger – but he is just explaining why some succeed and others die out.

It’s a very interesting book and worth reading if you like knowing why things happened the way they did.

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Book review: Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs and Sharks


These two books make great presents for boys.  Our son got his first one when he was five years old and he loves them.  Each page has a great big pop-up in the middle and lots of smaller pop-ups in the corners.  There’s also lots of interesting information – I usually just read a couple of sentences per page.

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Book review: The Secret

First off, there are three versions of the Secret by Rhonda Byrne:

  • the book, The Secret.
  • the audiobook, The Secret.  This contains many different people’s voices, presumably from the movie version.
  • the movie, The Secret DVD!  Most of the reviews you’ve seen are about the movie.

I listened to the audiobook version.

I think how you are introduced to a book greatly influences how much you like it or at least how open you are to liking it.  I first heard about The Secret from a group of friends who watched the movie together and they couldn’t say enough good about it.  I was supposed to beg, steal or borrow a copy to watch!  So I downloaded the audiobook version.  I enjoyed it but if I hadn’t listened to The Attractor Factor first, I would have dismissed it all as hokey.  The Secret introduces the law of attraction with a lot of hype and very big promises.  They make it seem like it is possible to wish a bike or a winning lottery ticket into existence through sheer will power.  Now while I believe that remaining positive and open will mean that many more opportunities will be available to you than if you are always negative, I don’t think you can wish tomorrow’s winning lottery ticket into your hand.  So while the audiobook was uplifting and positive, it was a bit unrealistic.  So, I wonder, if I’d read this negative review first, or if I hadn’t learned about the law of attraction from The Attractor Factor, I wonder if I would have liked The Secret at all?  Would the negative review have set me up to think negatively about it, would I have concentrated on the hokiness and would I be writing a really negative review now?  If so, it just goes to show you that thinking positive brings positive results (I enjoyed listening to the book) and thinking negative brings negative results (I might not have made it through the book!)  On the influencing positively side, The Secret made the top ten list at Amazon.com and The New York Times.  Does that make you want to read it now?

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Book review: Law of Attraction

Usually I read an entire book or I try not to express an opinion because there have been books that I had to start multiple times before I made it through and then I really enjoyed them, like The Reality Dysfunction.  However, I don’t think I can make it through the The Law of Attraction and I think there’s a slim to none chance I’d end up liking it. 

I got The Law of Attraction because it was about the law of attraction that I’ve enjoyed reading about in other books such as the The Attractor Factor by Joe Vitale.  In addition, I did my research and it got a rating of 4.5 stars on Amazon from 26 people.  That’s pretty solid.  However, in spite of enjoying the topic, and in spite of the fact that lots of other people liked the book, I really didn’t like it.  I didn’t even make it through the whole book!

I should have paid attention to the whole title: The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham and asked who Abraham was.  It turns out he’s a spirit that talks through Esther Hicks, one of the authors, when she’s meditating.  So the whole audiobook is Esther meditating, talking in this strident, almost yelling, voice.  She speaks as Abraham and always in the first person plural "we" as Abraham/Esther says he’s speaking for all the spirits.  The first half an hour was full of very vague advice to those of us in the material world.  I fast forwarded through the book and the rest seemed to be more of the same.

I’m sure I could have dealt with the book better if Jerry and Esther Hicks had just written about the Law of Attraction and the other knowledge they wanted to impart without sharing the fact that they got it from a spirit.  To top it off they spoke in the spirit’s voice and to top that off, the spirit’s voice was very annonying.

So the book annoyed me because (1) the voice was grating, (2) I don’t believe in spirits talking though people (at least not taking over their bodies and speaking with their voice) and (3) there seemed to be little practical advice.  If you really want to read The Law of Attraction , definitely read the book instead of listening to the audio version.  However, unless you believe in spirits speaking through people, save your time and energy and read The Attractor Factor instead. 


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Do you want to read a good science fiction book? Stormy’s list of top science fiction and fantasy books.

Do you want to read a good science fiction book?  Here’s my top list.  In general, my top list is authors not particular books so I’ve listed at least one book from each of my favorite authors.  Although I usually prefer science fiction, there’s a few good fantasy books here too.

 

And this is by no means the end of the list of good science fiction!  Enjoy!

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Book review: Sunrise Alley

Sunrise Alley by Catherine Asaro is a book about artificial intelligence and androids that develop self awareness.  What defines who is human?  The main character, Samantha, is an AI researcher who becomes involved in a cross country chase with a man most people think is an AI.

It’s not as good as Catherine Asaro’s other series, the Saga of the Skolian Empire series.  The Skolian Empire books are a romantic space opera with lots of good science and great character development.  They weren’t published in order (she wrote different books at different times) so I created a list of them in storyline order.  The first one is Skyfall (Saga of the Skolian Empire) if you want to get going!


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Bad thoughts never hurt anyone … but you

I was listening to The Secret on the way home and loved this thought:

Your negative thoughts never hurt anyone but yourself.

How many times have you complained about someone, sworn at the driver in front of you or fumed about the rude customer service rep?  All those negative thoughts didn’t hurt the people you were mad at at all – those thoughts just put you in a bad mood and probably started a spiral of negativity for the rest of the day.


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Books about open source software

I often get asked to recommend reading on open source software so I thought I'd share with everyone.

Here are the two staples I recommend to everyone:

Then, depending on who was asking and what they were looking for, I might also recommend:

  • The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source
    by Martin Fink. This book does a good job of explaining why and how
    open source software can be useful in an enterprise. How does the new
    model fit into business?
  • Succeeding with Open Source
    by Bernard Golden. If Martin Fink's book is the why open source fits
    into business, Bernard Golden's book is the how. It goes over the ROI
    of using open source software and describes a selection and evaluation
    process in detail.

Then there's two books that I haven't read yet but are high on my
list and come highly recommended by others. (I actually own copies of
them which shows my good intentions!)

  • Open Sources 2.
    This is a sequel to Open Sources and contains essays by some of the
    newer people in the field and people that I think of more as enablers
    and business people – the people bringing open source to businesses –
    than the people that created the actual open source software.
  • The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber. I've been told that this book does an excellent job of explaining the open source movement at a broad level.

So there you go. In case you didn't have anything to read over your
holidays, now you've got a whole list on one of my favorite topics!

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The Joy of Not Working

While I was on maternity leave I decided I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.  Most of my friends work so they weren’t available to do things with in the middle of the day and the few that didn’t work were pretty busy living their lives.  So what was I supposed to do all day? (Actually, I alternated between not knowing what do do and feeling like all I had time to do was run errands.  How do we get all those errands done when we are working full time?) A lot of the things I normally would have done weren’t possible.  For example, I couldn’t work out for the first couple of weeks after giving birth.  I couldn’t go hiking or bike riding with a two week old infant.  So when I stumbled across a book called The Joy of Not Working:  A Book for the Retired, Unemployed and Overworked- 21st Century Edition, I ordered it.  However, by accident I got How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free: Retirement Wisdom That You Won’t Get from Your Financial Advisor.  They both turned out to be pretty interesting.  Since then I’ve bought another copy of the retirment book and lent them to my in-laws and my 89 year old grandmother – at their request!

Ernie Zelinki‘s main point is that most of us don’t know what to do if we aren’t working.  (And to those of you who read my blog who are happily retired, I congratulate you!)  He says we get some of our basic social needs from work:

  1. Organization – What time do you wake up?  What are you supposed to do all day?
  2. Purpose – What’s your purpose in life?  What are you trying to accomplish?
  3. Community – Who do you do things with? 

The books are written in a pretty simplistic style but he has a lot of good points.  He strongly encourages people to get interests outside of work and to not be dependent on work for a sense of community and purpose.  He also gives lots of just basic good life advice like maintain your health, make good friends, etc.  In addition, he provides a few exercises and ideas for doing that.  I agreed with a lot of what he said, like making a few good friends instead of lots of casual friends, not watching tv, and participating in lots of different activities.

He also advocated working for yourself at something you enjoy rather than working for somebody else.  I’ve been listening and reading a lot of self development books and blogs and this seems to be a common theme.  Work for yourself, follow your passions, develop your interests, don’t drone on and on at your desk job.  Ernie as well as many others point out that money and/or retirement will not make you happy by themselves.  You have to have a sense of purpose, a group of friends and a set of activities you enjoy in order to be happy in life.


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How big is that spaceship?

I just found the coolest website that shows you how big those
spaceships really are.  Ever read a science fiction book or watched a
science fiction movie and wondered how big that ship must be to have
the whole story’s set inside it?  Jeff Russells STARSHIP DIMENSIONS
is a website that shows you mockups of the spaceships in science
fiction books and movies and compares them to each other size wise. He
has 218 so far.

Have fun!  Happy Friday.