Posts Tagged ‘reviews’
Saturday, August 13th, 2011
When Mindsight was recommended to me, I immediately bought it.
It arrived a couple of days later, and promptly sat on my bookshelf—through a move—for months.
I just wasn’t ready to read it.
But times and circumstances change1 and, as with so many things, I find myself asking “Why didn’t I read this sooner?!”
Mindsight is Daniel Siegal’s newest book2. His writing style is both conversational and engaging, even though he often refers to complicated brain chemistries and structures (You’ll never look the same way at your enclosed fist again). His patient histories provide the lively characters for a book whose major plot is a scientific exploration of the “squishier” parts of our most important organ.
The question at hand: how can we understand and experience our consciousness as an interested, yet compassionate third party—a concept Siegal dubs “mindsight”—to achieve what he calls integration3 within our minds.
Mindsight provides medical research to back up the technique, which interestingly is what I’d describe as a form of guided super-meditation; as an engineer, I appreciate the scientific digressions discussing why meditation has been humanity’s go-to for psychological serenity across both centuries and cultures.
My only disappointment was that the book doesn’t get as far into the details of Siegal’s techniques as I would have liked. He does talk at a very high level about what has worked for his patients, but leaves just enough out that trying it yourself can be a bit daunting. It doesn’t help that his patient case studies make it all look so easy4.
To be fair, Siegal doesn’t intentionally mislead his readers; from the epilogue:
This proposal is no easy task. Dissolving fixed mental perceptions created along the brain’s firing patterns and reinforced relationally within our cultural practices is no simple accomplishment. Our relationships engrain our early perceptual patterns, deepening the ways we come to see the world and believe our inner narrative. Without an internal education that teaches us to pause and reflect, we may tend to live on automatic and succumb to these cultural and cortical influences that push us toward isolation.
Maybe it’s someone whose conflict resolution process involves stabbing her co-workers in the back, figuring they’ll never compare wounds with each other. And she can’t figure out why she’s not the success she thinks she should be.
Maybe it’s an acquaintance who proudly boasts about his dating flavor-of-the-week. In between shots at the bar.
Maybe it’s the guy who became angrily exasperated with his friends when they couldn’t sooth the grief from my father’s death. And couldn’t figure out why they became frustrated and left
We all know people similar to these, either out about in the world or within the confines of your own consciousness. Mindsight provides insights into the tools to start figuring out the most important question in addressing them: why.
(If you’re in a hurry, or just curious what this is all about, you can listen to Siegal’s Google Tech Talk on Mindsight.)
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1 And bookshelves
2 One of many
3 Siegal discuses eight “domains of integration”: consciousness, horizontal, vertical, memory, narrative, state, interpersonal, and temporal
4 They’re all so happy at the end of the chapter! And always cured!
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Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
It all started a number of months ago when @dolske randomly linked to an innocuous video about fluffy unicorns.
Little did I know the first time I watched it, but I’d end up spending hours upon hours listening to Pantaloons’ videos, and would eventually be led to his current collaborator, Mr. Gunnarolla, only to spend another host of hours watching his great material.
When they announced they were going on tour, I jumped at the thought of being able to watch them perform the songs live that had been bouncing around in my head on repeat for the last few months.
I dragged my roommate along since I had caught him singing the delightful earworms that are their tunes; we got to the San Francisco venue—a cute cafe in the Outer Sunset—slightly before showtime, but it was already so crowded we spent the entire concert by the door.
I actually saw Gunnarolla outside looking for Pants1, saving the space for him to park in; I surprised myself when I leaned to my roommate and said “OMG THAT’S HIM!” He surprised me when he went over to Andrew and said “Hi! We’re big fans. He got me started watching you!”
Andrew said “Aww, thanks guys, that’s great!” And then surprised us both with a hug.
Unlike other shows2, we were treated to an opening set by Sam Hart (which had been announced in a really catchy way). Sam’s songs were beautiful ballads to the things he loved: loves-that-weren’t, loves-that-were, his cat, and MarioKart.
Then the Andrews took to the stage, and… how can I put it? Singing. Contests. Singalongs. Awesomeness. Just like their videos… except, y’know, not on YouTube. And we were in the videos.
My day started with a corrupted source control server and went downhill from there. But it ended with this:
Team Andrew finds the sauerkraut in my lederhosen after the San Francisco concert
I also nabbed one of their awesome tour posters and got them to sign it!
It started out a lil’ rocky, but all things considered, it was a spectacular day.
I can’t wait to see them on tour again, hopefully soon!
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1 Wait, that… sounds wrong…
2 I think
fun, not work, reviews
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Monday, June 20th, 2011
I went to the Computer History Museum this weekend, in part, to work on a mini-project.
Since it had been the first time I’d been there in probably over a year, I was excited to see what had changed.
I was totally blown away by the transformation.
My first couple of visits to the Museum made its roots quite obvious: housed in an old SGI building, the purple was pervasive, but that was about all that remained. They had exhibits… sort of. The actual “museum” consisted mostly of their “visible storage” room.
It basically looked like a warehouse of old junk—one of the exhibits was famously covered in bullet holes1—that someone had cut a path through. The layout was well-suited to illustrate the progression of computer history, from abacuses to today’s video game systems.
But even for a geek like me who was genuinely interested in artifacts like racks of vacuum tubes, the room really didn’t come alive unless you went on a docent-led tour. (It was totally a bonus that many of their docents were ex-employees of the various companies’ whose products were on display, and had many personal anecdotes that one would never hear in another museum2.)
But if you weren’t lucky enough to have that experience, it could get kind of… well… boring. The significance of all of the awesome artifacts they have wasn’t immediately palpable.
That has been totally addressed in the last year!
We got to the museum too late for a docent-led tour this visit. I had expected to be dumped in the warehouse-esque room again, and started trying to dig up from my memory what I had gleaned during my two earlier docent-led tours. But to my pleasant surprise, this visit started with an introductory video that not only did a great of setting the stage for what we were about to experience, but pleaded the case why the Computer History Museum as an institution is important.
We then walked into the exhibit hall, and I was utterly blown away.
This concept of the path through the history of computing remained, but that was about it. I recognized many of the exhibits from my previous tours, but they had been set on display, professionally lit, and had tons of placarded information surrounding them. I would have loved to have had a docent led tour, but the lack of one no longer translated to a difficult-to-impossible to digest set of artifacts and a disappointing visit.
While I was totally blown away by these positive changes, there were still a couple of things I hope the museum will address:
- It always bothered me the discussion on IBM’s rise as a business omits the “minor detail” of their involvement in the Holocaust. None of the docent-led tours ever mentioned it, and I didn’t see a display that made reference to it… which is odd, since there were at least two displays discussing how wonderfully effective the “C-T-R machines” were at the United States census.
To be fair, during IBM’s recent 100 year celebration, they “kinda forgot” about it in the review of their corporate history as well, so… the Computer History Museum is in… well… company…
- Ditto any discussion of the environmental impact of early chip-makers’ activities; this is especially ironic given that most of the land surrounding the museum had long been superfund land, because Intel, IBM, and Fairchild Semiconductor dumped the industrial acids and heavy metal runoff in the Valley’s backyard for years.
I understand these topics are hard to address, especially since the museum gets a lot of donations from these companies3, but they’re a part of history and I can’t imagine a better institution to fairly tell those stories in the context of the history of computers and the Silicon Valley than the Computer History Museum.
With these recent changes that make the Computer History Museum feel “all grown up,” omitting difficult topics seems passe and detracts from the Museum’s (hard earned and well deserved) credibility.
Despite these minor areas for improvement I still consider the Computer History Museum a gem of Silicon Valley, and feel a personal connection to it that many feel to SFMOMA or the Academy of Sciences.
The Museum will remains one of my top recommendations for anyone visiting the Bay Area, but with these recent improvements that really bring the history of technology to life, being a hard core geek is no longer a prerequisite for admission to a fun, engaging time.
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1 Someone’s son thought it looked useful for target practice
2 I really fear these will be lost to time; I would love to see the museum undertake a spoken history project to collect interviews with these individuals
3 Of both money and artifacts
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