Gleick manages something incredibly, a deeply scholarly work that is also highly accessible. Today, information is like air, or water to a fish, so omnipresent we do not even see it. But Gleick traces the origins of this strange concept back through the technologies of the difference engine, telegraphy, writing, and speech; and the theories of mathematican Claude Shannon and a host of allied thinkers. Information has infected biology, physics, psychology, mathematics, and almost every other science, placing limits on what can be known.

The history of technology and science is well-done, but Gleick doesn't quite live up to his potential in examining the social and political consequences of information. Words and their flow have shaped the course of history. What does it mean now when every object is linked to a stream of information? Has information theory truly overtaken and unified science? (CERN and the Human Genome Project, both epicenters of 'Big Data' might argue so). Has the immense agglomeration of facts, and the news ways in which they are created, made us better, worse, or just different? In the face of these big questions, Gleick retreats to platitudes, but that doesn't detract from the scope and power of the rest of the work.

The book (review) everybody has been waiting for! Unless you've been under a rock, you know that this is the fifth book in A Song of Ice and Fire, that the fans have been waiting six years for it, and that the last one, A Feast for Crows, was not very good. Is aDwD a worthy addition to the series, or has GRRM lost his mojo?

Well, maybe. On the one hand, everybody's favorite characters are back, the plot is advanced, and Shit Happens. on the other hand, too much time is spent wandering around the East for little to no reason, and the plot stops right before The Shit Hits the Fan. Think A Clash of Kings, if it ended right before the Battle of the Blackwater.

Martin's characterization and description are as good as ever, and the exotic East is a fun setting to explore. A Feast for Crows relied on cheap cliffhangers and unnecessary sex to keep us reading, and while there's some of that in A Dance with Dragons, it's balanced with character and plot progression. Not a perfect book by any means, but a step in the right direction.

Do you think you're hard? Do you think you're some sort of Tier Zero Modern Warfare Elite Ops Deniable Badass? Do you even think you know about such people? Until you've read this book, you don't know shit.

Cu Chi was a district just 25 miles from Saigon. Starting from the French Indochina War, local guerrillas carved tunnels out of the strong laterite clay that made up the district. By 1968, the Iron Triangle had over 200 miles of tunnels, with three and four level base camps including barracks, hospitals, and weapons shops. This book covers the Vietnamese men and women who lived and fought in the tunnels, and the American soldiers tasked with going in and smoking them out, the stone crazy tunnel rats.

The authors have compiled an extensive body of interviews with veterans on both sides of the conflict, bring forth the survivors own words as they describe living without sunlight or fresh air for months on end, and the terror of chasing the enemy into the bowels of the Earth. A secondary topic is weapons, from madcap high-tech schemes to destroy the tunnels, to the trained wasps and snakes that the VC used to defend their bases. Both the human and military elements are well-represented.

In the end, America never learned how to fight in the tunnels. Instead, in the wake of the Tet offensive, the army simply obliterated the entire district, first with defoliants, then with Rome plows, then with B-52 strikes that blew 10m craters in the ground. The guerrillas were essentially destroyed, but only at the cost of the entire region. The Tunnels of Cu Chi is a fascinating micro-history that amply demonstrates the fractally fucked up nature of the war.

ludicrously cute

I had a review, but the browser ate it. In brief, late-period Heinlein about a secret agent who has unlikely erotic adventures while navigating a libertarian dsytopia. The plot exists mostly to just string together action and sex scenes, and while the bones of the setting are interesting, it doesn't match up to fleshed out details of Heinlein's better work. Oh brain eater, why do you have to hit my favorite authors?

On the plus side, all characters are of legal age, and I don't recall any relatives sleeping together.

In this book, Collins and Pinch explore several scientific controversies, ranging from settled historical examples like the non-spontaneous generation of life in sterilized mediums, and various proofs of relativity, to modern examples of experimenter's regress in the detection of gravity waves, solar neutrinos, and cold fusion. They amply show that science is a human endeavor, and at the cutting edge it is the human qualities and foibles that matter. As an exploration of relatively non-political controversies, this would make a great introduction to the messiness of real science in an intro STS course (which is in fact where I read it). A deserved classic.

Tom Wolfe should probably tattoo "I'm a lover not a hater, baby" on the inside of his eyelids. The problem with being a hater is that it's just so much fun. In this book, Wolfe goes after two of the more hilariously misguided White Guilt efforts of the late 60s; the brief fling between the Black Panthers and New York's society elite, and various Community Development programs in San Francisco.

There's actually some decent journalism in here about conflicts between charismatic and bureaucratic styles of leadership, the romance of revolution and the hard work of hustling money from people who have and are willing to turn it over. Sure, it's a little racist, but at least Wolfe digs that it's all a game, that's there's a fundamental symmetry between New York society and SF Mission pimps. Unfortunately, this is buried under a lot of swipes at society wives for being useless and ornamental, which is kinda the point of society wives. At this point, a good 40 years removed from the subject matter, it's easy to see what parts of the 60s endured and which parts faded. The Black Panthers are far more interesting than Unfortunately, Wolfe treats it all with the same level of excited derision. Well, at least it's short and moderately sparky; Wolfe would have to hate a lot harder than he does here to be boring.

In this book, Laws introduces a way of analyzing texts as a series of 'beats', mostly procedural or dramatic, which serve either to increase or resolve tension and danger for the protagonists. While this is supposedly a guide for GMing, the advice is rather scanty: alternate upbeats and downbeats, procedural and dramatic moments, and follow a long slide of downs with a triumphant up. The majority of the book (80%+) is a very detailed beat by beat summary of Hamlet, Dr No, and Casablanca.

Simply an amazing game. Fiasco emulates the kinds of movies where hapless people engage in criminal misadventures that invariable hilariously and tragically fall apart with elegance and grace. The system is a paragon of rules-light mechanics, avoiding task resolution nearly entirely in favor of getting the group to generate a fascinating and bizarre cast of characters, and having them stumble towards catastrophe. Both readable and playable, Fiasco is on of the best indie RPGs I've played.

There has to be something wrong with you if you don't like submarine movies. Hunt for Red October, Das Boot, Crimson Tide, even relatively schlock like K-19 is solid in my book. Take a bunch of men, cram then in a steel tube deep beneath the waves, throw in a nuclear reactor and a dozen ways to end the world, and you have instant drama.

Well, sometimes the truth surpasses fiction. Blind Man's Bluff covers some of the most harrowing intelligence battles of the Cold War from the point of view of American submariners, and the scientists and engineers who supported them in trailing Russian missile subs, recovering lost warheads, and tapping cables in the Soviet Navy's backyard. The book is gripping, detailed both personally and technically, and simply an amazing piece of history.

This book has earned a well-deserved place on my "you will never be this badass shelf."