Wired for Story

I finished listening to Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (Unabridged) by Lisa Cron, narrated by Wendy Tremont King on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B0767ML4NK&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

As someone who has dreamed of becoming a writer my entire life, I've started and stopped many times. Why? I'm a reader. I have writing skill, I pay attention to my surroundings, I have voice, I understand philosophy as well as anyone. What I have always wondered about is how to write commercially, how to get paid!

Lisa Cron, in Wired for Story: a Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Senrence, presents as a professional editor,  an industry insider, and I have little doubt that if I utilize the lessons from her case studies, and avoid the pitfalls, I too can realize that lifetime goal.

As New Years Day 2019 approaches, four years before Kurzweil's singularity, and my 60th birthday, I could use a little fire in my belly, as well as a reason to suspend disbelief. What the Hell!

What we wanted

What we wanted to say was left unsaid,
Volumes encoded in a single thread.
Hearts were broken, times were lost.
Survival came at a bitter cost.

Possibilities of better times
Littered the avenues of our minds.

Matters of state beyond our control,
Unpredicted by political polls,
Caused us to wonder,
What was our role?

Possibilities of better times
Scattered red, yellow, and brown,
Like leaves

Two days before the votes were counted
We waited in silence.
Resistance 1.0, chapter closed.

Picador

Picador, picador
Red flag, red flag
Angry bull skewered
Matador gored.

Dog days

The pulse of cicadas whizzes faster and faster, reaches a climax, and fades away.

Gators bask for audiences on hazy summer days.

Spanish moss drapes from loblolly dinosaur legs

.

Turtle congregations

Send hosannas across circular arrays.

Radio signals crackle and die.

Darkness descends.

Lost in translation, news bends to the political lens.

Benny & Dolly ride shotgun in my Chevy S10,

On Putin's puppet strings, the president defends.

How Emotions Are Made

I finished listening to How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Unabridged) by Lisa Feldman Barrett, narrated by Cassandra Campbell on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B01NA0TG25&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

How Emotions Are Made addresses a matter that is central to learning in a manner that forces us to radically rexamine some of our most persistent biases about the brain. Most of us have learned a faulty model of the brain and have adopted a classical view - the triune brain - that, as the author shows, does not hold up to scientic scrutiny. The search for blobs in the brain that contain specific fingerprints of emotion has yielded a surprising result: none exist. Instead, the author shows how the predictive brain constructs conclusions based on steady streams of inputs from throughout the entire network, consistent with body budgets, concepts, culture, and other factors.

The Innovators: a counterpoint

I finished listening to The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Unabridged) by Walter Isaacson, narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00M9KA2ZM&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

Walter Isaacson is my favorite biographer, but in The Innovators Isaacson departs a little from his focus on a singular genius, in order to extract the zeitgeist of the digital revolution.  In brush strokes evoking the genesis, development, & future of the digital revolution, Isaacson presents an argument for the primacy of symbiotic relationships, teamwork, and evolutionary bootstrapping in fostering the innovation and spread of digital tools that will continue to augment human capabilities instead of the nightmare of robots replacing us.

Isaacson contextualizes the philosophies, breakthroughs in hardware, software, networking, and Artificial Intelligence , as well as individuals and teams who have made significant contributions. He presents a view skeptical of visions of Terminators and super intelligence, and emphasizes more of a human-machine partnership, with humanity providing the creativity, hopes, and dreams to the partnership moving forward.

Isaacson only briefly addresses the premise of futurists such as Ray Kurzweill, Yuval Noah Hariri, and Max Tegmark, that within a few decades a highly competent super intelligence will evolve, sparked by advances in processing power and the reverse engineering of the human brain. Because of this limitation, Isaacson 's work shoukd be supplemented. Life 3.0 presents a plausible scenario in the first chapter of a superintelligence escaping a pandora's box that is must reading. How To Create a Mind provides a layman's technical overview of the development of AI alongside the reverse engineering of the human brain. Homo Deus, similar to Life 3.0, places the development of AI in an biological and post-biological evolutionary context.

American Gods: Poetic Insights

I finished listening to American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (A Full Cast Production) (Unabridged) by Neil Gaiman, narrated by Ron McLarty, Daniel Oreskes, full cast on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B0055274U2&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

American Gods was recommended by a friend,  I had recently read the author's book about Norse mythology, and I needed some fiction - so I was curious enough to dive in. Some of the character names and scenarios initially made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. The plunge was worth it, because Neil Gaiman was able to capture the intersection of banal American pragmatism and mythic exceptionalism in a light-hearted, entertaining American spirit.

Gaiman's liberal employment of cultural icons including a road trip, a down on his luck ex-con hero, prestidigitation, a murder mystery, a small town, conspiracies, fast food, folk music, poetry, and shared legends, chipped away at my disbelief. Despite the improbability of my suspension of disbelief  about a mythology set in a place where it can be difficult for gods to survive, Gaiman managed to hook me. He weaved in a plethora of anticipation and surprise, which kept me curious enough to take in a whale of a tale.

Behave: not my favorite, but as important as any

I finished listening to Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Unabridged) by Robert M. Sapolsky, narrated by Michael Goldstrom on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B06XW3MVNF&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

Behave is not my favorite book because it casts such a wide net, yet it is so important precisely because it casts such a wide net. Sapolsky proposes a grand multifactorial theory evidencing how complicated behavior is, largely in counterpoint to a proliferation of oversimplifying single factor explanations skewing public debate about what causes the best and worst of public behavior. The author's command the nitty gritty of neuroscience, endocrinology, and primatology lends gravitas to his pointed challenges to sociology, theology, and legal traditions. The skeptic in me revels in the mastery with which the author pops intellectual balloons, but my pragmatic side, always seeking prescriptions to daily and longer term problems wonders: how can I use this? It reminds me of an all-in-one tool when I'm in need of a hammer.

Kardashians go to Washington

I finished listening to Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Unabridged) by Michael Wolff, narrated by Michael Wolff, Holter Graham on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free:

https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B077GG86LW&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

Timely, obviously. Entertaining, like junk food. Wolff's fly on the wall methods give insights worth considering, but the book is not a revelation, as anyone following #trumprussia for the past year already knows the story. What has emerged in drip, drip, drip fashion was simply poured in a Big Gulp cup for quick consumption.

Life 3.0: Essential Reading

I finished listening to Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Unabridged) by Max Tegmark, narrated by Rob Shapiro on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B0742K1G4Q&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 is probably the most important book I've read since I read Ray Kurzweil's Age of the Spiritual Machines over a decade ago. Having recently read Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, Yuval Noah Hariri's Homo Deus, Sidhartha Mukergee's The Gene, among a fairly extensive list of books on Audible converging on developments in AI, Biology, Neuroscience, biographies of scientists and engineers, Life 3.0 offers a way forward through a confusing thicket of possibilities. The questions the author raises in Life 3.0 are reminiscent of Sir Francis Bacon's admonition at the dawn of science that science be used for the purposes of life.

Visit Max Tegmark's Future of Life Institute