For anyone who hasn't read it, I just started Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard Feynman. It's pretty fantastic - not much about rationality - but it's quite funny. He tells one story of how he made his fraternity brothers at MIT look really dumb. One of them asked if French curves were made in any special way. Feynman told them that French curves are specially made so that the tangent at the lowest point is always horizontal to the ground. Of course, this is obvious for any point that the tangent (derivitive) at the lowest point (minimum) is zero. But the guys didn't realize that this was definitional and raved as though Feynman had made a brilliant explanation of French curves.

I read Principles of Product Development Flow recently and was very impressed. It gave me a mostly new, significantly orthogonal perspective with which to view the processes resulting in shipped code. The book, summarized, is:

• Let's apply queuing theory to software development!
• If you learn nothing else, remember to reduce/control/watch/cost your queue sizes before other things you think are bottlenecks
• Translate benefits and costs approximately into dollars. Especially the delay costs of a product sitting in a queue. You will likely be surprised.
• Also here are dozens of more fine-grained considerations and interventions like how to push costly variance to someplace less costly, keeping superstar developers at lower load so they can firefight at whim, and the fact that variance isn't always bad like it is on a factory floor.

I'm currently about half way through Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", and I'm enjoying it very much, though I'm taking the exact numbers with a grain of salt after seeing some criticism of his scholarship that looks solid enough to me.

I fill my phone with books. (So yeah, I'm paying £20/mo for an MP3 player and book reader that occasionally annoys me with phone calls.) Mostly nonfiction.

I've just finished Actually (the last collection of essays and reviews) by Christopher Hitchens. A doorstop, a lot of which is still available on the original magazines' sites. Patchy - quite a lot was clearly dashed off in half an hour after a boozy night out, and he was brilliant but skated by on brilliance rather too often - but ultimately worth ploughing through. I would recommend the curious start on better Hitchens (god is not Great, Hitch-22, Letters To A Young Contrarian in that order) where he wasn't phoning it in.

The nice thing about books of reviews is pointers. So right now I'm on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, the 2007 Penguin edition with a lengthy intro by Hitchens. The book is a doorstop-sized travelogue of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a subject I have little interest in; I'm bothering only because a literature fan like Hitchens raved about it. And so far it's page-turningly good.

I've also just finished the audiobook version of god is not Great, read by the author. A book so clearly written to be read out loud. If you liked the book, I most strongly recommend the audiobook. Even if you dislike audiobooks, as I do.

(I am assuming that comics can go here as well) Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" is incredibly well written, and also has characters with a positive spin on immortality. Beautiful art, great story, it's a gem. "The Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer" is a manga with a standard plot (group of mostly teens with magical powers must save the world) which subverts your expectations in a big way. If you like manga, anime, or just fantasy adventure stories, you will absolutely love this.

Homestuck. Four and a half thousand pages of it. I'm wondering if Andrew Hussie has somehow worked out how to make a manic phase last six years. I need to go back and reread it, when I have way too much time on my hands.

And the Brainbent AU, which is just heartwarming.

I'm reading some of the Nebula/Hugo award-winning SF novels of (mostly) the last few years; so in the last couple of months I read (lightly plot-spoiling, but not too bad):

• Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl - a 'biopunk' novel, set in 23rd century Bangkok, in a world where a couple of mega-corps (mega-Monsanto's) have screwed the whole eco-system, and made the world dependent on their bio-engineered calories (where are very hard to come by). The story is interesting, switches between the perspectives of different sides, including the one of a come-alive Japanese love doll. While I liked that, the whole tech/bio background did seem very improbable. Still, liked the book
• Scalzi's Old Man's War series. There are 4 books -- it starts with a bunch of old people that undergo some rejuvenation treatment, and end up in a whole lot of wars with alien races all over the reachable universe. The rest of the books discuss various aspects of the wars, the people involved, colonization, etc. Overall, I Iiked the stories, but I did not like the melodrama Scalzi put in at various places. And there were too many story lines (secondary, but still) that never got resolved. (e.g., the werewolfs). Tech-wise, of course everything is pretty advanced -- but then his weird limitations, very convenient for the plot...
• Haldeman's Forever War (1974) is somewhat of a granddaddy to Old Man's War, following some guy's interstellar military career; it's inspired by the writer's Vietnam experiences. Overall, enjoyable (dated fairly well, although some of the 'future tech' is pretty common today...).
• Just started with Connie Willis' Blackout); about a bunch of future historians time-traveling to various episodes in World War II. So far, the hints to the concepts behind time-travel seem a bit...questionable, but let's see what's still to come...

It's old school, but Haruki Murakami's work is pretty much the best fiction I've read since American Gods. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle has a pretty good translation, and once you've read that the callbacks in Haibane Renmei start making more sense. Also 1Q84 (Q = kyuu = 9) is out, but I haven't read it yet.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's "36 Arguments for the Existence of God". Easily one of my top-10 favorite books ever. Beautifully written and hilarious (a particularly difficult combo for an author to pull of, IMO), a non-linear, recursive loop through the lives of several atheist characters who are inextricably tied to religion in one way or another. The author has quite an interesting life history: philosopher, biographer of Gödel and Spinoza, famous novelist, currently married to Stephen Pinker, among other things.

David D. Friedman has written a bunch of blog posts promoting his novels Harald and Salamander. Both of these significantly draw on economic concepts, although in very different ways. Harald is a historical novel, albeit one which is set in a fictional universe. Salamander (available in a Kindle version) is especially interesting in that it realistically portrays both a form of magic and characters conducting empirical research to extend their magical abilities.

I'm hesitant to recommend this, since I'm sure everyone has heard it/likely started reading it when they were young adults, like I did, but I thought Inheritance (The final book in the series that spawned from Eragon, if you didn't know) was a pretty good ending to the series. Pretty light reading, and not too insightful, but very good, if you like fantasy type books (as is the entire series, of course).

At the end, (Not really a spoiler, don't worry) there was a brief discussion about immortality, which was the only time an LW trope was really touched on. I was really hoping he would come out and take a strong pro-immortality stance, but he didn't really. It was something to the effect of "I wouldn't want to keep living after 2-3 thousand years".