Book Review: Earth (The Book)

A while back Jon Stewart and the other writers from the popular The Daily Show with Jon Stewart wrote a parody of high school Social Studies textbooks called America (The Book): A Guide to Democracy Inaction. That was a great piece of satire because it lambasted something most Americans were familiar with and it had a structurally solid skeleton on which to drape its parody. We all knew what he was talking about, or at least we knew we should know, which was often kind of the point. It had a target that was specific enough to structure a book around, but multifaceted enough to offer plenty of material. Earth (The Book) is also pretty funny in places, but not quite as much so as its predecessor, partially owing to the fact that it’s kind of a mess and doesn’t have much of a structure.

Stewart et al. cast Earth (The Book) as a guide for the benefit of alien visitors who arrive on our 3rd planet from the Sun after the human race has managed to annihilate itself in one way or another. Kind of a friendly guide book aiming to hit the highlights. None of us will be here to explain all the stuff they’ll find in the ruins, so it falls to this tome to explain not only the basics like Earth’s geology and weather, but also such inexplicable nonsense (to an outsider, anyway) like commerce, culture, religion, art, and science. Rather than large paragraphs of text, the book relies on a lot of gags derived from pictures, fake newsclippings, charts, photographs, and other visual aids with scattershots of text to go along with them. This being a Daily Show production, every page oozes irony, sarcasm, and humorous self-deprecation, and it often works. Noting on the page about film that “We called Hollywood the Dream Factory; unfortunately most people who went to work there ended up working at the Cheesecake Factory” is pretty witty, as is crediting Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of “The Watson Summoner.” And there’s lots of stuff like that spread throughout the book.

Unfortunately, Earth (The Book) is fairly uneven, with a few too many of the jokes falling flat or relying too much on the same gag that you had just read a dozen pages earlier. The graphic-heavy nature of the pages also make the book tiring to read in long sittings, but you may get much better experiences out of it by just reading it a page or three at a time when you find yourself with a few spare moments. Whenever that might be. I’m not judging.

In the end, Earth (The Book) is worth reading if you’re a fan of Stewart’s (and probably more to the point, his writers’) brand of irony comedic self immolation. America (The Book) worked much better both as a concept and in execution, though, so if you haven’t read that one yet I’d start there.

New Cuts

Like some kind of little zen garden, we had been growing both Sammy and Mandy’s hair out for some time. After a point, though, they began to scream a lot more than zen gardens when you tried to comb the tangles out of their lengthy locks, so we decided to get them some breezy new cuts just in time for winter.

We had actually been trying to grow their hair out long enough to donate the trimmings to an organization called Locks of Love which takes such donations and and weaves them into wigs for children suffering hair loss on account of medical treatments or conditions. It turned out that only Sam’s hair met the minimum length requirement, so she got the most extreme cut, as you can see in the before and after pics below. Mandy also got a much needed trim, but not quite as much.

The place that Geralyn took them for the deed was, by all accounts, very strange indeed. Apparently they do parties for little girls where they will pick up your party goers in a big pink limousine, take them to the spa, let them dress up as princesses, get mani/peti treatments, and have glitter infused into their scalps by a machine that probably started its existence as a sand blaster. As someone whose most extravagant childhood birthday party was headlined by a fat guy who wore a Spider-Man outfit and fooled no one, this seems almost too alien for me to contemplate.

Book Review: Packing for Mars

Man, I love Mary Roach. She does popular science books with just the right mix of humor, personal involvement, hard science, and irreverence. In Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void Roach examines space travel from just about every odd angle you can imagine. Looking at the table of contents, you kind of get the impression that the author just sat down with a pad of paper, tapped a ball-point pen against her lips, and murmured, “Space. What’s the deal there? I wonder…” and then just jotted down topics without any care for impropriety or intellectual merit.

As a result, it’s all stuff that any bright and honest person would want to know about. It ranges from the curious (what other weird things do other countries do to select astronauts?) to morbid (what exactly does a crash landing do to a human body) to morbidly curious (just how does one poop in zero gravity, anyway?). This isn’t stuff that you’d get by reading the NASA website or a Popular Science article about the International Space Station. It’s real-life concerns, and perhaps more interestingly, it’s the real life account of how scientists, engineers, and astronauts have had to deal with those concerns. Sometimes Roach shares a little bit too much graphic detail –and I’m thinking of the chapters on the visceral perils of space flight, not the ones on deep space sex, though your results may differ– but it’s always interesting and it leaves you with the odd feeling that you’re glad someone is thinking about this stuff.

And, as with her other books, one of the best things about Packing for Mars is that Roach throws herself fully into the research. She does plenty of typing away on Internet search engines, but she also jets over to Russia to talk with former cosmonauts, tours NASA, observes interviews for the Japanese space program, and even experiences zero gravity by way of a parabolic flight on a type of plane affectionately called “a vomit comet.” And more. I think what I appreciate so much about this approach is that it makes you feel like you’re not so much reading about firing monkey-laden rockets into orbit, supposedly filming the world’s first zero-g sex tape, or abstaining from basic personal hygiene for the sake of science. You’re learning about these things alongside her, or at least strolling alongside an extremely informed and slightly cheeky tour guide. It’s fun and fascinating at the same time.

Also see these other reviews of Mary Roach’s books:

The Psychology of Horror

If you can get your hands on the new issue of GamePro magazine (#267, December 2010 with Diablo 3 on the cover), check out my article on the psychology of horror. The timing with Halloween was better a week or so ago when the issue first came out.

Aaaaaaaahhh! Why is this so scary? Aaaaaaaahhh!

This is another one of those topics that I was unsure of when the editor at GamePro asked me to tackle it. Not only did I not t really know much about the topic, I’m not even a fan of horror movies or games in particular. I’ve never seen a Saw movie or any other “gore pr0n” in my life, nor do I want to. Still, that’s why they call it “research” so I hit the library and found some more informed experts in the fields of psychology, media studies, and communications to help fill in the blanks. I got some great material, and the article turned out to be a lot of fun to write.

I turned Bobo the Quote Monkey loose on the article, and he returned with this:

Bobo want banana.

So I gave him a banana, reminded him about the performance standards in his contract, and sent him back. This time he came up with the following:

A second set of explanations for horror’s delight posits that we hate the horror, but like the proverbial man who bangs his head against the wall because it feels so good when he stops, we love the relief that comes at the end.

Excitation transfer theory, credited earlier with enabling spooky soundtracks to do their job, has also been hypothesized to give us a kind of “thank god that’s over” high. “People become physically aroused due to the fear they experience during the media event –and then when the media event ends, that arousal transfers to the experience of relief and intensifies it,” Sparks says. “They don’t so much enjoy the experience of being afraid –rather, they enjoy the intense positive emotion that may directly follow.”

Other explanations for the appeal of horror are cited, plus I also ruminate on what the research tells us about scary video games in particular. I really don’t have any feedback on how well these GamePro pieces are being received, so if you’re reading them, post a comment and tell me what you think.

Also, I couldn’t find an image of the relevant magazine cover anywhere. If you find one of those, let me know, too.

Soccer / Hooligan

Sam’s soccer season is coming to an end, so I thought it high time I pop on my telephoto lens and get some action shots. I paid enough for the thing, so I’d better. BEHOLD!

She’s really gotten much better in a short period of time. I hadn’t had a chance to take her to a game in a while, and I was surprised at how much more aggressive towards the ball she was being and how much more she was generally trying. She had also written “Winner!” on her palm prior to the game, presumably to help her remember to …win.

Mandy was also in attendance, and due to unusually warm weather she got hot in her fleece sweater and stripped down to her tank top undershirt. This showed her little belly, which she proudly displayed to everyone as she ran around in circles. So, in a sense, everyone wins.

I did have one spot of trouble earlier in the weekend when Sam was out in the area where several of our neighbors’ back yards merge into one common area. She was in the neighbor’s back yard playing with some friends, so I was keeping one eye on her while I made dinner. During one check-in I noticed that another neighbor was talking to Sam and her friends, and judging by the body language involved it was not a friendly chat. By the time I got out there the neighbor had already departed, but I managed to glare at Sam enough to get her to admit that they had been throwing rocks at the nice lady’s flower pots and had broken some.

Groaning, I marched Sam over to the lady’s front door and made her apologize in person. We decided that she would come back the next day (it was late) and help clean up the mess, which is exactly what we did. I also made Sam write a note of apology and give it to the neighbor. Sam seemed appropriately upset over her actions, and I took the opportunity to not only reiterate that destroying other people’s property was bad (I’m almost positive this point had come up in casual conversation before) but that sometimes she had to be brave and stand up to her friends when they were doing something wrong –or listen to them if they did so with her. All in all I think I handled it okay. We’ll just have to see if dead rats and pottery shards start showing up in our mailbox.

Book Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I was originally going to wait and read all three of the books in the “Millennium Trilogy” before writing any reviews, but I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever get around to reading the rest. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first in Stieg Larsson’s series, published posthumously and taking airport bookstores everywhere by storm. Really, people seem to love it, but I don’t understand why.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo largely follows the story of Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced magazine editor in need of a long holiday. Blomkvist takes on a weird job of trying to solve a decades-old murder mystery in a remote village, but the twist is that the job is being done for a wealthy industrialist who asks Blomkvist to keep things quiet and pretend like he’s writing a family history. In exchange, he’ll get the dirt he needs for a career-making story. Also in the mix is Lisbeth Salander, a mentally unhinged but brilliant hacker and “researcher” who takes an interest in Blomkvist and the mystery he’s trying to solve. As far as a murder mystery slash thriller goes, the book is fine. There’s danger, sex, intrigue, excitement, sex, a serial killer, sex, and also sex. Did I mention sex? Seriously, Blomkvist sleeps with every female character under the age of 60 in the book in a very James Bond-ish fashion.

The shortcoming of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, though, is that it seems a little amateurish. Maybe it’s an artifact of it’s being translated from Swedish, but I frequently found weird repetitions of words and phrases along the lines of “he walked to the door and stood in the doorway” that seem like an editor should have caught. Larsson also has this odd predilection for detailing every street and neighborhood in Stolkholm that his character walk down, regaling us with their proper Swedish names. I completely understand that in the author’s native language the effect is simply banal, but for the rest of us it keep sounding like some 14 year old trying to make his fantasy world sound exotic by throwing in the elvish or dwarfish names of everything. Entirely my fault for speaking the wrong language and never having been to Sweden, for sure, but I nonetheless couldn’t escape the effect.

The book is also oddly paced. Large chunks of it are spent hearing about the characters clomp around Stolkholm or the tiny village of Hedeby, else we’re hearing about the sausage and liverwurst sandwiches Blomkvist had for lunch. It’s really boring exposition that seems to serve no purpose. There’s also one sequence where Larsson goes into excruciating detail about the laptop computer Salander buys, providing breathless details about processor speed, hard drive space, and RAM that serve only to make the device seem laughably outdated by the time someone from six months in the future reads it. Sequences of action or insight –OR SEX– punctuate the story, but it’s really uneven. There’s also the problem that Lisbeth Salander is a way more interesting character than Mary Sue Blomkvist, yet she disappears entirely from the tale for huge swaths of time. I think Larsson corrects this some in later books, but it accentuates the dull bits here and makes a long novel seem even longer.

So, not sure if I’ll continue on to the other books or not. I’ve got them, though, so maybe I’ll plod on. Does it get better?

Welcome to jmadigan.net v3.0

Hello, and welcome to the third redesign of jmadigan.net. I’ve been meaning to convert the site’s content management system from Movable Type to WordPress for some time now, but never hit the annoyance or motivation levels necessary to do it. This changed recently, though when the site pretty much just stopped working. I would write a post and tell the blog “Hey, here you go, post this,” at which point the blog would do the computer equivalent of staring off into space and pretending that it couldn’t see me. So I gutted it.

I wish I had done it a lot sooner. WordPress is an orders of magnitude better system, and the installation and importation of my 1,289 posts, 2,005 comments, over 14,000 files (including several hundred photographs) was a snap. After tweaking the CSS files a bit to achieve the green and orange color palate, I’m back in business.

Good stuff about the new system and site:

  • It works and I can post new articles and comments without having the server time out. This is somewhat important.
  • It’s super easy to create photo galleries and I don’t have to manually create thumbnail images. WordPress does it for me.
  • You can browse photos for a given post in a cool overlay and go straight to other photos a by clicking next/prev links. Scroll down to the previous post on Halloween and try it.
  • Better comment spam protection and Gravatar images.
  • Easier to maintain my lists of read/saw/played media.
  • Clean design is cleaner.
  • Oh, yeah, the HTML and CSS is generally better and not broken on account of my having coded almost none of it.

    The one major downside to the move is substantial, though. All my links are broken. Like, ALL of them. This includes links from one blog post to others, and links to photographs. I’m pretty sure I could have solved all or some of this through some kind of httaccess redirects or some other wizardry, but you know what? Screw it. I’m just going to go back and fix each one of the posts that need it by hand. The ones with lots of photographs are mainly the ones that need it, and I want to redo those to get the new galleries anyway. I’m just going to do 5 or 10 entries per day.

    So anyway, enjoy the site. If you notice something in the archives that doesn’t look right, don’t worry. It’ll probably get fixed within a year.

October, 2010 Photo Dump (Part 2)

Halloween! Mandy changed her mind about what she wanted to be at fifteen minute intervals right up until the time she needed to get ready, but finally settled on a fairy. Samantha, on the other hand, had been resolute all along to engage in some gender bending and go as Harry Potter. We suggested Hermione, his female friend, but Sam was not going to play second fiddle (lyre, whatever) and wanted to be the main character. Good for her.

Book Review: Tongues of Serpents

Descriptions of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series usually invoke the phrase “the Napoleonic Wars, but with dragons.” But after reading the last few books in the series, including the latest, Tongues of Serpents, I think “travelogue of a dude and his dragon with Napoleon doing stuff somewhere else entirely” would be more apt.

Tongues picks up with (supposedly) disgraced and former Captain William Laurence and his draconic companion Temeraire being banished to the unsettled continent of Australia for having chosen his conscience over orders from his superiors in the previous book. And so it becomes apparent that the reader, having visited locations such as China, Africa, and the Middle East in previous books is in for a dragonback tour of the land down under. Indeed, it isn’t long until Lawrence, Temeraire, and their companions are soon chasing a macguffin into the continent’s sunburnt interior and telling us all about the sights, sounds, and tastes (all three of which largely involve kangaroos).

It’s not like Novik hasn’t learned how to tell a ripping good yarn in this setting and with these characters. She has. There’s danger, mystery, challenges, and hardships. But at the same time, Novik can be a bit transparent in her practice of drawing from a bulleted list of “Danger/Excitement Ideas” and plopping them down in the narrative to break up the travelogue. There’s a bar room fight here, conflict with the natives there, a wildfire over there, and a snake bite induced fever tucked in somewhere else. But at least things pop.

That being said, though, it seems like little of consequence happens during the book. It’s mostly flapping around the outback. Any larger plot about England and the war with France is abolished to the background, and there’s no big ideas like in earlier books, such as equal rights for dragons or the morality of deliberately spreading a virulent disease among their enemies. Laurence’s situation doesn’t even really change until the final pages of the story.

I’ll probably read the next book, though, because they continue to be decent adventure stories if nothing else. The next one seems primed to take us to the Americas –either North or South or maybe both. I just hope something more interesting happens.

October, 2010 Photo Dump (Part 1)

Okay, here’s some photos of the kids from the early part of October. Figured I should get these out of the way before Halloween. Sam wishes to be Harry Potter (NOT Hermione), and Mandy changes her mind every time you ask her. Though as you can see, she has vampire teeth and a hula skirt. So maybe a vampire Hawaiian.

As you can see, Samantha lost one of her front teeth, giving her that coveted adorable gap-toothed hillbilly look. She wears it well and was quite excited to lose that particular tooth.

Mandy is turning into quite the little ham who will mug for the camera and perform silly dances on command if you catch her in the right mood. She really seems to love getting reactions out of people, and will make faces and prance around in front of them until she does. Great fun!

Summer 2010 Photo Dump

All summer long I’ve been meaning to put up some pictures of the girls, and all summer long I’ve been letting it slide. So instead of not doing it at all, I thought I could at least just do a huge photo dump. So here it is.

This covers a lot of ground, including lots of time at the pool, swim lessons, trips to the Farm, the 4th of July, our vacation in the Lake of the Ozarks, and culminating in Sammy’s first day in 1st grade. Of them all, this one is probably my favorite because of how it tells a little story. Enjoy.

Book Review: The Last Colony

The Last Colony is set in the same sci-fi universe as some of John Scalzi’s other books, like Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. It also features the same hero, John Perry, joined again by his ex-supersoldier wife, Jane Sagan. And like those other books, this one deals largely with the macro-level drama of the human race’s (or really the Colonial Union, which calls most of the shots on behalf of humanity) frantic quest to stay alive and propagate in an unfriendly universe rife with competition for limited resources.

But not right away. At the beginning of the book, Perry and Sagan are retired from the military, mostly enjoying their lives on a pastoral planet and raising their adopted teenage daughter. Soon they’re convinced to help seed a new planetary colony, but it becomes quickly apparent that the Colonial Union is playing them crooked and using them as an expendable pawn in an attempt to outmaneuver The Conclave, a coalition of other races bent on putting a stop to colonization by non-member races such as the humans. The Conclave welcomes everybody to join its team, but otherwise plays really rough, so things get dirty and the two heroes have to figure out how to survive the situation.

I like Scalzi’s stuff, but The Last Colony is easily my least favorite book in this series so far. What I liked about the earlier works was that they were all about adventure, genetically and technologically modified supersoldiers, nanotech, and fightin’ dudes. The Last Colony has a bit of that in spots, but far too much of the book contained simple talking heads. There’s even one stretch where we’re actually watching Perry watch a video of two talking heads, so you kind of get a double down effect. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit boring in places. Scalzi drew some parallels about Western imperialism and colonization that were a bit on the nose, but they were generally interesting and it was fun to see if you could figure out what (if any) message was there about the American empire (i.e., the Colonial Union) and its chances of standing against a world set against it (i.e., The Conclave, a.k.a, the United Nations).

So The Last Colony isn’t bad, but it’s not as enjoyable as the other books I’ve read so far. I’m going to continue reading the series, though, in the hopes that Scalzi returns to form.

The Psychology of Video Games: An Update

As I noted before late last year I decided that my blogging project for 2010 would be writing one article a week about the overlap of psychology and video games. Thus psychologyofgames.com was born.

While the site hasn’t exactly “blown up” mega huge, it has developed a readership that’s sizeable enough to surprise me. At first I halfway expected it to exist purely for my own pleasure and maybe a few friends and the random stranger or two, much like jmadigan.net. But soon I was getting comments and e-mails from real game developers and other people who said they really dug it.

So I kept at it and started putting not insubstantial amounts of effort into writing the weekly articles. In addition to drawing on books I had read, I actually started going to my local university library and doing research in scientific psychology journals. It was cool, because I love writing, I love learning new stuff, and enough people seemed to appreciate it.

A few months ago the Editor in Chief at GamePro contacted me to tell me that he liked what I was doing and that he wanted to know if I’d be interested in doing some freelance writing for the GamePro print magazine. I jumped at the chance, as writing this stuff for a “real’ magazine had been one of the things I had been daydreaming about since I started.

My first article, which is on the psychology of anonymity, is now appearing in the August issue of GamePro, which has this cover:

I also have a second article written, submitted, and in the pipeline for September’s issue, plus I’m just now finishing up a third article for October. Woo!

So while the GamePro thing is one of the biggest things to come out of this little blogging experiment, it’s not the only cool outcome. Here’s some others:

  • I partnered with my friends at GameSpy to lecture on the psychology of games at a conference in Seattle
  • I made Internet friends with another psychology Ph.D. who works for Valve Software, one of my favorite game developers.
  • Actress and nerd celebrity Felicia Day tweeted about one of my articles, resulting in a 1000% spike in traffic.
  • A graduate student in psychology took one of my off-the-cuff ideas (the effect of time distortion on the enjoyment of a game) and is using it as the basis for his dissertation
  • I’ve been interviewed by a handful of people writing about psychology and video games for other outlets
  • A marketing consulting firm interviewed me about video games to tap my supposed expertise on the topic (I did my best)
  • One of my articles was discussed on one of my favorite video game podcasts, Idle Thumbs.
  • Gamasutra.com started syndicating some of my articles for reprinting on their website
  • A literary agent contacted me asking me if I’d like to write a book proposal that he could evaluate and maybe shop around

So, at this point, I’d call the blog a success –much more of one than I ever experienced with jmadigan.net. So I’m going to obviously follow through with the rest of the weekly updates for 2010, and most likely beyond. At this point I’m thinking seriously about making 2011 the year of that book proposal; here’s to hoping things continue on the same trajectory.

Book Review: On Stranger Tides

Tim Powell’s On Stranger Tides caught my interest because it’s apparently the story on which the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie is going to be based. I could see it: Powell’s book is set at the twilight of the great age of piracy in a world where magic is possible, but almost exclusively in the new world of the Americas and Caribbean.

As far as world building goes, this struck me as a pretty darn interesting premise. The magic is a mix of voodoo, old-world hexes, necromancy, and good old fashioned “burn the other guy to a crisp” approaches. The author plays it pretty loose with the internal logic and rules of his system, so that I never really did understand it and there were several aspects of it that were transparently there in service of the plot. But it was creative and fun, and that’s enough. Plus I like pirates and all that nautical talk.

The plot of the book is kind of another story. Our hero is Jack Shandy, a former English gentleman forced into piracy by his capture and a series of unlikely events –a standard trope of stories that want to have a pirate hero, but want to side step that whole “he’s a murdering murderer who murders” problem. Shandy spends most of the book trying to track down and rescue his inexplicable love interest, a young woman form whom her sorcerous father has nefarious plans. There’s also the Fountain of Youth, Blackbeard, and lots of zombies.

All in all it was a pretty fun book, but mostly for the world building an the pure novelty of it. Jack Shandy and the other characters in the book aren’t inherently interesting, though, and Powell didn’t strike me as a writer that could hold my interest once the novelty of the setting wore off.

Book Review: Grand Theft Childhood

I came across Lawrence Kuthner and Cheryl Olson’s Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Games (And What Parents Can Do) while doing some research for an article on the psychology of video games. The book is the end result of a research program by the authors, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice weirdly enough, focusing on violent video games and kids. Kuthner and Olson claim to be impartial researchers who don’t have any particular axe to grind on the issue, unlike activists, politicians, professionals working in the games industry, or gamers themselves. Their aim, they say, was to let their data do the talking.

The data in question are those collected by the researchers from surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews with kids and their families. Right away any reader who has taken anything beyond a Research Methods 101 class could tell you that this is a limiting factor –self report data are subject to a range of biases and using only one or two methods of data collection represents a substantial flaw in any program. But that’s not to say that the data are worthless or that the conclusions the researchers (who readily cop to these limitations) draw from them can’t be used to inform continuing research or draw some conclusions with the right caveats.

And the claims that come out of all this make a certain amount of sense: kids are vulnerable to some of this stuff, but bullying and warped senses of gender or race roles are more likely outcomes than sociopathic killing sprees. Some kids are more vulnerable than other on account of good old fashioned individual differences. Actually, girls play and enjoy violent games, too. Kids think guns and weapons are cool, but what they really like are chances to develop skills, make choices, and interact with other people. Some games may only be single player, but kids build social relationships around them by talking about their common experiences. There is a ratings system in place (the ESRB) but it’s pretty flawed and kids are savvy about how to acquire restricted games. Anyone who has a reason to lie to you about the effects of violent games on kids and culture may very well be. That kind of stuff.

Overall, it’s not a bad read, and a pretty quick one. There are some chapters, like the one drawing parallels between the uproar over violent games to past uproars over every other media you can think of, were a little too long and turgid, and despite claims to be impartial the researchers occasionally pinned their political views onto their sleeves, it is a pretty impartial look at the topic that doesn’t toe any particular line. It’s not the last word on the subject, but I hope that other social scientists pick up on these research programs and build on them.

Book Review: The Upside of Irrationality

Dan Ariely’s previous book on behavioral economics, Predictably Irrational was fantastic. It explored the way that economics work on a personal level when you stop assuming that people are completely irrational and provided a great overview of the many kinks in the human brain that lead us to make weird, suboptimal decisions. His new book, The Upside of Irrationality, flips that coin onto its other side and looks at hour our penchant for irrational decision-making can actually benefit us and make us better off. Or how it could if we let it.

Like in his last book, Ariely draws from a deep well of research conducted by himself and his colleagues in order to provide context for everything he discusses. What I love about this aspect of the book is how clever off-the-wall many of the experiments are. Ariely and company send researchers to villages in India to measure the surprising effect of extravagant rewards on task performance. They construct fake and experimental online dating sites to see how we might better construct our online interactions to capitalize on what it really is that people –especially those of us south of “supermodel” in the looks department– look for in a mate. They talk about subjecting lucky subjects to massages and unlucky ones to excessive vacuum cleaner noise in order to see how we adapt to pleasure or pain. And a lot more. Every chapter contains descriptions of scientific research, but it’s almost all really interesting and takes you to conclusions that will stick with you.

So while I still think Predictably Irrational is the better of the two books because it’s more interesting and instructuve to see how people fail than to see how they might succeed, The Upside of Irrationality is still a very quick and very interesting read. What’s better, it’s practical and may change how you think about your own behavior.

Carnival Season, 2010.

It’s been a while since I posted anything about the girls, so I thought I’d throw up a few pictures I’ve taken during “carnival season 2010.” About this time of year the local churches and municipalities call in carnival companies employing people with more cigarettes in their mouthes than teeth to run rickety rides. The girls love it, of course, so we usually hit up a couple. There’s also some father’s day pics in there.

It’s worth calling out a few of the pictures below. This year Sam informed us that she wanted to go up on the tallest, scariest ride in the joint, which was this tower structure that took you up quite a ways before letting you free fall for a second or two on your way back down. Sam bravely strapped herself in, and I captures some of her reactions photographically. This is how she looked going up, this was captured during free fall on the way down, and this is the expression she walked around with for about half an hour afterwords.

She’s a little thrill seeker, I think.

Mandy, by the way, won second place in the coloring contest she’s seen working on here. None of us knows exactly what she’s won yet (we have to pick it up tomorrow), but whatever it is, Sam is absolutely, positively sure that she wants it.

Book Review: Priceless

I’ve always been interested in the psychology of consumerism, along with related topics like marketing and purchasing behaviors. Both for how shameless it is and how readily we (myself included) seem to fall for what really amount to simple psychological slight of hand. Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone looked like it was going to scratch that itch, and while it does to some extent I’m left a little off balance by the book.

If you look at Priceless as a whole, it seems to hit a lot of the right notes for me. It takes practical questions like why we buy what we do and why marketers do what they do, and it answers them by turning to theories and well established phenomenon from psychology –most notably Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s prospect theory. There’s chapters on how menu consultants use psychological anchoring and the contrast effect to get you to order what they want, an examination of the effectiveness of prices ending in “.99” and other such “charm” numbers, the allure of all-you-can-eat buffets, the power of breaking out many small benefits in a sales pitch (i.e., the “But wait! There’s more!” trope), and other such fascinating topics. And overall I’d say it’s a good read for all that.

The main thing that keeps me from whole heartedly recommending Priceless to any reader, though, is that none of that good stuff really starts until page 143 out of about 290. The entire front HALF of the book focuses less on the specifics I listed above and more on the general case of prospect theory and its history. In places it reads more like a mini-biography of Kahneman and Tversky as well as some of their predecessors. And when he’s not doing this “history of science” thing, Poundstone is going into some pretty gnarly specifics on the science (both from psychology and economics) of all this. Now personally, I loved all this and ate it up because while I knew most of it I was interested to get some biographical information and see it all in a different context. It’s just kind of hard to recommend to someone who’s walking into the topic without any other education.

And while the book does turn the corner halfway through when it starts getting into some practical and fascinating specifics, those chapters do assume that you’ve read and understood most of the stuff in the earlier, technical parts. The discussion of our preference for all-expenses-included vacation resorts, for example, assumes that you grokked an earlier discussion about the convex nature of the value function to the left of an individual’s reference point. Or somesuch.

It’s an interesting way to structure the book, as opposed to the typical approach of tackling one topic (say menu design or the fallibility of real estate agents) and then presenting all the related research in one chapter. One advantage to the approach in Priceless is that the latter, topical chapters are all really short, averaging just 3 or 4 pages each. I think this will make it a pretty good reference book and I enjoyed it overall, but any recommendation has to come with the caveot that you should know what you’re in for.

Book Review: The Drunkard’s Walk

Yeah, that’s right. A book about probability theory. And actually, it’s not bad if you can either shrug off or endure a bit of lecturing on basic mathematics and statistics. Author Leonard Mlodinow sets out to review the history of probability, starting with the ancient Greeks and following the field’s evolution and application. Mlodinow has a pretty good style, keeping things relatively low level so that anyone with a high school education in math can probably follow along. He also peppers the narrative with jokes and asides to break up the otherwise less-than-fluffy subject matter. And it works pretty well, though I suspect the lengthy discussion of the normal curve might have lost me if I hadn’t already had all that info drilled into me in graduate school.

My favorite parts of The Drunkard’s Walk were the historical bits dealing with the personalities and biographies of the people who helped define the field. It’s interesting to see how one, for example, labored as a would-be academic for years and years, before turning his burgeoning probability theory to gambling and making more money than he ever dreamed of. Actually, that theme shows up a lot –another section describes how another researcher working in the field went to a casino and used his meticulous study of roulette tables to uncover flaws in the system and make himself fabulously wealthy before they kicked him out.

Where The Drunkard’s Walk falls down (ha!) a bit is in its examination of the practical problems to which probability theory can be applied. That is, why it matters to YOU. The best books on popular science do this really well, and it moves the work from being academic to accessible by anyone looking to be both educated and entertained. Don’t get me wrong, Mlodinow does some of this, but he doesn’t really nail it as well as some others I’ve read. Still, if you’ve got a little bit of grounding in the topic and want to add some context to your knowledge, The Drunkard’s Walk should do that quite nicely.

Book Review: Influence: The Science of Persuasion

I first read Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Science of Persuasion when I was in graduate school studying judgment and decision making. I was amazed not only by the power of the psychological levers for influence that the author describes, but how easy he makes them to understand. It turns out that MANY things guiding my every day decisions have their roots in psychology, but what’s really amazing and a little distressing is how these levers are used deliberately by people in the know to influence me. Free samples at the super market? They’re given out because the reciprocity effect makes you more likely to buy the product. Fraternity hazing? The consistency principle makes you put up with it. Buying things on sale when you don’t need them? It’s the scarcity principal and loss aversion making you do it.

What’s equally impressive about Influence is how effectively Cialdini communicates these ideas. He provides one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of straddling the line between practical examples anyone can recognize and how it relates to academic research published in scientific journals. Each chapter focuses on one major concept and then dives deep into it before ending with a set of recommendations about how we can guard against unwanted influences. The latter often boil down to “You just gotta be aware of it,” but sometimes they offer pointed advice that can be quite useful.

For anyone interested in the topic of psychology and how it relates to what you buy, what you like, who you support, how you act, what you value, and what you think in every day situations, you can’t do much better than this book. It’s a great combination of empirical science made accessible (and relevant) to the masses.