keep a record of interesting things I have read

This popped up on Amazon a while ago and I thought it sounded interesting. It’s by Joe Navarro, an ex-FBI agent, and as the title suggests is a guide to body language. It’s organised by body part – legs and feet, torso, arms, hands and face.

It contains a lot of interesting anecdotes from his interrogation experiences, e.g. cases where they showed a suspect cards with lots of different names on, and could pick out the ones who were dodgy by the way the eyes of the suspect widened slightly when he saw them come up. Even if you’re not in the business of figuring out whether everyone is constantly lying to you, there was some useful advice e.g. to keep your hands visible to others so as not to appear shifty, and how to project a confident image in meetings.

I was particularly interested in the bit about feet – you can tell someone wants to leave by the fact that their feet will be pointing at the door, and you can tell someone is very comfortable if they are standing up with legs crossed – this all goes back to the “limbic brain” apparently, with freeze, flight and fight being the three responses to a threat. If you’re standing effectively on one leg, you’re not as well-balanced as you would be if you were standing with both feet firmly on the ground, which means you’re showing you’re very comfortable with the other person and don’t see them as a threat.

At several points he discusses gravity-defying behaviour e.g. happy, bouncing feet, which can give away poker players even when their faces are calm, and people waving their arms in the air – think of football fans when their team has just scored a goal – these are examples of very positive body language. This reminded me of tai chi and some exercises involving raising weights above the head, which I’m convinced make me feel good because I get to wave my arms around, something I don’t tend to do much in normal life. Maybe there’s a weird reverse cause and effect thing going on here – just as they say that deliberately smiling can make you feel happier, perhaps deliberately waving your arms above your head tricks your body into thinking you must be happy.

He cautions against reading too much into any one particular thing – it’s more a cluster of signs that you have to look out for. He’s also quite endearing and includes stories about things he missed as well as things he spotted. There are lots of pictures to illustrate the points he makes. Overall, a very accessible and enjoyable read.

by Jeff Warren is one of the most interesting non-fiction books I’ve read in ages. It’s about 12 different states of consciousness, from sleeping to waking, with 6 mini chapters and 6 chapters where he goes into more detail.

The 6 proper chapters cover:

• the hypnagogic state, when you’re just going to sleep
• the “watch”, when you wake up in the middle of the night
• the lucid dream
• the trance i.e. hypnosis
• the SMR – this stands for sensorimotor rhythm, and it’s a state of consciousness where you are alert, calm and sharp
• the pure conscious event, which is the pinnacle of meditation

His writing style is friendly and it’s a much easier read than most neuroscience books. It’s quite autobiographical as he incorporates his own experiences trying to get into the various states, and discusses his interviews with and impressions of leading people in the field.

It’s also a book full of nuggets of information. For example, apparently in fifteenth-century literature there are references to the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” and it was common for people to go to bed at dusk, sleep for a bit, wake up for a bit, then go back to sleep again until it was light in the morning.

This reminded me of Lights Out which I read a few years ago and is all about how our circadian rhythms are totally messed up by artifical light, and we should aim to sleep when it’s dark and make the cave room in which we sleep as dark as possible. Since taking this advice on board I have definitely found that I sleep better.

There was also a brief allusion to “uberman” polyphasic sleep, which reminded me of someone on here a while ago who was trying to do it. Fascinating stuff, but strangely am not tempted to try it myself.

There are some really nice illustrations and cartoons too. I loved the illustration of forager sleep which had a goat sitting inside next to all the people!

The night after reading the chapter on lucid dreams I had a lucid dream. And one time when I woke up in the middle of the night, instead of letting it disturb me I relaxed about it because I reinterpreted it as “the watch”.

I enjoyed this book very much and would lend it to my dad if my lunchbox hadn’t leaked balsamic vinegar all over it on the way to work – think I’ll get him a copy for his birthday actually ;)

Bertrand Russell was one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century and an all-round good egg. I came across a reference to this book somewhere and thought it sounded interesting.

It was published in 1930 when Russell was 58 (he went on to live for another 40 years) so I suppose it’s not surprising that it feels dated, in the same way that some of Orwell’s writing is. There are a lot of references to sin and similar old-fashioned language. But the message is timeless.

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

Russell says that he was a miserable blighter when he was a child and was continually on the verge of suicide in adolescence. It was only when he became interested in mathematics that he became less self-absorbed. So his argument is that self-absorption leads to misery: “interest in oneself leads to no activity of a progressive kind” and the way out of this is to become interested in external things.

The other piece of advice I thought was pretty good is to worry about things only when there is some purpose in doing so. “When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon as all the data are available, give the matter your best thought and make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”

I was quite relieved to get to the end of this book, mainly because of the style. It felt like being lectured by a wise old man, and even though Russell was undoubtedly wise and extremely progressive by the standards of the day, constant references to things like “the happy man” start to get on one’s nerves after a while. But I am glad I’ve read it.

Read both of these recently.

Gut Feelings is by Gerd Gigerenzer and I thought it would be about intuition, but it wasn’t really, more about how people make decisions in real life. He disdains the “write a list of pros and cons” approach and spends most of the book uncovering rules of thumb that people actually use e.g. “do what everyone else does”. It’s quite readable compared to his book on statistics, and there were some interesting bits. I liked the discussion of “fast and frugal decision trees” which keep things simple – I wonder if the NHS Direct decision tree is based on this? But sometimes he seemed to repeat himself, and his tone throughout was rather self-congratulatory – he went on about what a brilliant director of the Max Planck Institute he is just a bit too much ;)

I enjoyed Quirkology by Richard Wiseman more, and positively rattled through it this week. This is quite a random book about weird social experiments, e.g. arranging for a newsagent to give people too much change and seeing if they are honest and give it back. Some of it was already familiar from his book the Luck Factor which I read a while ago (review here) and some of it, e.g. the Milgram experiments, was familiar from other places but there were quite a few things that were new to me too. For example, there’s a bit where he investigates haunting, and discovers that in some places there is something producing infrasound which is too low to be heard by humans but can make things vibrate and make people feel uneasy without knowing why. I’d never heard of that before! Overall this is a fun book which covers a range of interesting subjects and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Makes me wish I’d studied psychology at uni!

This novel starts with the death of an artist who has failed to take her medication. She is an old lady by the time she dies, and the novel is concerned with unravelling the mystery of who she really was. Her bi-polar disorder has shaped her life and the lives of her husband and children, and anyone who is interested in this condition will find this book very enlightening.

It is also a tragic story and beautifully told. All the characters hav some difficulty to resolve, and they are fleshed-out people with inner lives and a Quaker spirituality, which is also beautifully described.

I have not been reading a lot of fiction lately, because I really can’t be bothered by stories of who stole whose husband, but this novel is excellent, as good as a biography! and better.

Anyone who has read “Daddy we hardly knew you” by Germaine Greer will know that she is a very thorough researcher, who can research the woodworms out of the wood and the moles out of the earth. This time Germaine tries to find out what Shakespeare’s wife might have been doing while he was away in London, and what sort of a person she might have been. On the way she is extremely scathing about the suppositions other biographers have made about Shakespeare’s own actions and feelings about his wife and children, and of course she is terrifically sarcastic.

Her research sheds a lot of light on the Elizabethan England, when times were very hard for the townspeople of Stratford whom we like to imagine living in a kind of Merrie England of prosperity. Yet Germaine makes the point that in Elizabethan England women worked: they were not allowed the same legal status as men but they could run their own businesses; in Anne Hathaway’s upbringing she would have learned a countrywoman’s skills with animals. Most housewives could brew ale and make malt, they could let rooms out; they could knit and spin. We know that Anne Hathaway stayed in Stratford and she may have played her part in the drama that was unfolding there when the unscrupulous squire decided to enclose the common land, throwing the poor of the parish upon the charity of the Aldermen of Stratford. Stratford suffered a great deal at this time but I would recommend you read the book for all the surprising details.

Germaine is also interested to find out whether or not Shakespeare loved his wife, and she examined the plays and the sonnets to see whether any of them seem to express his feelings for his wife.

I think that this book may change the way many of us imagine Shakespeare; for some reason we want him to be a likeable guy, maybe with an artist’s failings but heart in the right place etc. The evidence does not suggest that he was – or that he wasn’t, but he had some pretty unsavoury friends. There is also a strange business of his daughter’s dowry. One got a dowry and a doctor husband, the other didn’t – very unfair and all unexplained. But Germaine looks at all the evidence of what happened to the other daughters of the town to try to understand it.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes history and good research.

This book deals with economics as we know it more than Freakonomics does, and I was pleased that it analyses data about what is happening in the market place. It looks at the change in buying habits that has occurred as a result of the huge range of choice that’s available on, for example, Amazon and iTunes, but also looks at the history of developing choice from the inception of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

When a store has limited shelf space it stocks the things that sell – the hits. So that’s what we buy. That’s all we can buy! When a store has unlimited shelf space (think iTunes) it can sell everything. So we don’t just buy the hits; we buy the misses too!!! We buy the things we really like. We use all the reviews and filters and the recommendations and the “People who bought this also bought…” and the “If you like this you might like…” and of course Word of Mouth, and we buy more things that not everybody likes but people like us love.

Thus we fit ourselves into niches and more and more niches develop. I found this very interesting because I have found myself exploring more of the things I like due to Amazon, for example, recommending things based on what they know I like, and I do read the reviews by other readers and even the lists, sometimes, that people post. so my buying pattern has changed because of what is available.

It has a very interesting chapter of how a rock band can become famous through MySpace. Myspace is a launching pad for bands and may be the only launching pad a band needs. It may be that record companies become unnecessary to a band, when once upon a time a record deal was what every band dreamt of.

The book looks at various kinds of business, not just books and music but also items – like e-bay and gadgets to see how the market there has changed. It looks at business software and how the seller can reach the buyer with customised business software. There are many aspects to the Long Tail. But one thing is for sure, the ability to browse through recommendations and reviews is vital. The feedback one gives is vital. The Waterstones website, for example, tries to interest me in books which I will never want, and there is no mechanism for me to feedback to them that I am not at all interested in, for example, Jordan’s novel, so that they can get me right. They are still working on the “Hit” model and they are never going to compete with Amazon until they have got a better system going for revolving feedback from readers and matching them with products they sell.

I don’t know if the Thames is more sacred than any other river. It seems to me a very marvellous piece of creation and worthy of celebration. With gusto this book celebrates the Thames and is just packed with facts – actually, there seem to be too many facts just tucked in together as though Ackroyd loved them all too much to leave any out.

The 3 pages of maps at the front, especially those showing the tributaries of the Thames, will be useful to me as I go about the South of England, trying,for example, to make out where the Mole comes from, and the Wey, and how the Kennet comes into the Thames – the Thames basin stretches from Gloucestershire to Essex and from Wiltshire to Kent.

However, the writing style is too various, from lyrically gushing to bald, and Ackroyd’s thesis that the Thames has ancient sacred qualities is pushed at one too many times and from too many directions.

Here is a quotation from chapter “The ancient trees”. “where the wood and the water and in harmony, helping to create an enclave of peace and stillness. It can be a place of secrecy, or of isolation. It can represent a kind of escape. For some people too, the presence of the trees and water can induce a sense of some earlier and forgotten time before the encroachment of the human world, some sylvan and primaeval state that can never truly be found.”

This is perfectly true, of course, as I know well from time spent alone on the island, but I find the way he writes it annoying. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be written?

Here is another passage from the chapter “The river of Death”. “Water is the melancholy element, with its appearance of transitoriness. The water dissolves and passes. It is the material out of which the house of despair might be constructed. [Gawd!!] There is always the sense in which the flowing water induces repose and forgetfulness, but what if that repose and forgetfulness were to be indefinite? What if the charm of isolation and withdrawal were to attach itself to the swirling dark water itself? This is the way of the suicide.” There follow about a hundred examples of suicides and murders, many of them very interesting.

Ackroyd posits that the river induces feelings of equality in those who live and work on it, and also notes that these same people are very foul-mouthed, traditionally.

I may write more about this book because it is very long and has a lot of interest to report: it’s only my strongest impressions that I have posted.

_Post script: From song lyrics The Hudson by Dar Williams:
If you’re lucky you find some thing that reflects you,
Makes you feel your life protects you
Cradles you and connects you to every thing._
I guess the Hudson is that thing to Dar and the Thames is to me.

This was a fun read, so it doesn’t take that long and some people who’ve posted reviews find it rather light. If so, they were expecting a serious work of economics, which this isn’t – it’s pop social science, probably not even economics as such, although the writers say they are concerned with the study of incentives.

I wasn’t convinced by their hypothesis that crime has fallen as a result of legalised abortion, but I consider it a likely contributory factor. I am convinced that an estate agent is not paid enough commission to really work at getting top dollar for your house – a quick sale is the priority. I am convinced that being a successful professional yourself is more likely to make your child become a successful professional than anything you actually do for or with your child – though as a parent it probably does make you more behave more “educationally”, as a general rule.

And that’s about it, nothing there about freaks but an interesting account of a guy who wrote a first person account about how he went undercover with the Ku Klux Klan but he didn’t actually do that himself, he got someone else to do it and report back.

is a fictional computer game, and forms the basis of this novel by Tim Etchells. I don’t know much about computer games as have the feeling I could easily get obsessed with them – one of my friends plays World of Warcraft or whatever it’s called, and I get the impression it’s like her equivalent of 43T. Your character in the Broken World is a chap called Ray who has to save the world from the evil GOVCORP and various other baddies while searching for his girlfriend Rachel.

The narrator of the book seems to live in an unidentified town in the USA and is writing a walkthrough guide to the Broken World. The novel consists of this plus a lot of diversions when he starts talking about his real life – his job at the “cooked circular food” emporium Domenicos, his relationship with his girlfriend, and hanging out with his mates. He doesn’t ever talk about his parents but some of the best bits are where he talks about his girlfriend’s parents who ring him up to ask questions ranging from how to get a virus off their computer (I can relate to that one) to does he think it’s possible that someone could be stealing the gravel from their drive to is bbq food safe? After each of these episodes he says “They are going crazy in the suburbs. You read it here. You read it here” or words to that effect, a running joke I really liked.

The Broken World is pretty nasty and the narrator is trying to provide instructions on how to get through it. “HINT: To get out of the Last Chamber you have to start thinking more laterally. HINT: Check thru those items that Ray got on the colony and try to think what might be of some use. Bro, sometimes it happens that you stare and stare at Items in some desperate situation, thinking like WTF, and the suddenly – ping – the answer comes and you know what to do. HINT (in this case): What about something you might eat?”

I loved the way that the use of upper case made its way into his accounts of the real world too. There’s a bit where the narrator is getting himself some food and describes it as “Noodles in a kind of Sauce”. His asides to the audience are also great – clearly the walkthrough is being posted on a website somewhere and the readers (who have names like Napalm70) are getting irritated with the real-life stuff. At one point one of them gets quite threatening and sends the narrator some nasty emails which start to freak him out. It’s also very clear that the walkthrough wouldn’t be much use if you were actually playing the game, as there are large chunks where he says he will come back later, and at one point his computer crashes and all he can recover is a load of gobbledygook, which he includes anyway.

What keeps the narrative drive going is actually the real life bits, as you wonder what’s going to happen with the narrator’s job, his girlfriend who walks out on him halfway through, and his friend who’s gone missing. The atmosphere of a messy apartment with this slightly nutty guy spending all his time drinking beer at the computer is brought to life very well, as are the descriptions of the grim minimum wage job at the pizza place.

I enjoyed this book a lot, especially after the Night Watch, and am going to see if I can get hold of a copy of one of Etchells’ other books, The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer), which apparently is a “mischievous portrait of the modern world in the form of a dream interpretation manual” – sounds fun.