Tsaiberspace

Samurai Boogie by Peter Tasker is essentially an anime graphic novel in book form. The story itself is fun, something one might expect to read in a graphic novel or see in an action movie. The reader essentially follows around an old grizzled private eye as he deals with Yakuza gangsters, rich and powerful politicians, and other assorted characters.

When 24 the TV show first came out, it had a novel gimmick: the show would cut to a split screen format and show events simultaneously unfold in different parts of the story in “real time”. Over time, that gimmick went away; it remains only in the teaser leading and ending clips just before and after commercial breaks.

Samurai Boogie has a gimmick of its own. The text for the first few pages reads like the text of a graphic novel: short terse semi-sentences, leaving the reader free to draw the frame in his mind:

At the top of the stairs, a logn corridor. At the end, a sliding door with panels of translucent paper. Behind it, a hunched silhouette. Human, male.

Mori takes a half-step backwards. A floorboard groans. The silhouette stays motionless. So does Mori. Stillness. The only soudn the patter of the rain.

Go forward or back? Mori’s instincts decide. He moves down the corridor like a cat, slow motion, rolling his weight over each step forward. At the sliding door, he waits a lifetime. Then his fingernails open a millimetre of light; he lines his eye to the crack.

The gimmick is fun for a chapter or two, but Tasker thankfully backs off and allows the story to tell itself without gimmicky narration.

I like to buy used books for $3 or less. For every few stinkers like W.E.B. Griffin Special Ops, I get a gem like Doppelganger by David Stahler, Jr.

The fact that it was $3 should have been a good signal that it would be good. As a counter-example, I await with trepidation a 1066-page $1 copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth.

Doppelganger is a short 258-page read; I finished this book in one week of Muni time. I can’t say much about the plot without spoiling it since the story is very very tight, but the story contains what I would expect a good book noir to contain:

• Enough to make me disappointed that Muni is running on time, for once. For comparison, there were days when I’d rather stand amidst a horde of zombie commuters than work my way through another chapter of Special Ops.
• A nice, tight noir plot, with a complementary completely unresolved ending. Good book noir is everything that formulaic weekly television is not: no episodic stories that are neatly resolved within a neat 30- or 60-minute time slot.

I suppose Doppelganger’s story could be described as putting Smeagol into a John Cusack story, in book form.

The sequel was less-satisfying than its predecessor, but these days (and even those days; The Fall of Hyperion was written in 1990), that hardly surprises.

I borrowed the book for free from a friend, so I can’t complain about the cost. And I read it on the Muni, so I can’t complain about lost time.

(Spoilers ahead.)

Read the Full Story…

Dan Simmon’s Hyperion marks the first book I’ve completed completely on public-transit time, about 1½ work-weeks of commuting, about 50 minutes each way (total 1½ hours per day). It is the kind of science-fantasy space opera I like to read when I want to kill time.

On its own, the Hyperion has everything: romance, sci-fi military action, spaceships, alien races, and time travel. It is nominally a book about a group of seven people traveling together on a pilgrimage.

However, in the context of all the other books I’ve read (probably an unreasonable judgment to make), the book’s story uses the very clichéd device of having the travelers tell their stories to all the others, the series of stories punctuated by brief intermissions of travel incidents. By the time everyone has told their story, the book is over, and no forward progress has been made towards the end of the originally-offered plotline (you have to buy the sequel to get that).

Each of the stories is interesting to read, but I finished the book feeling more like I had read a bunch of novellas or short stories (The Bachman Books), instead of the expected epic space opera (The Stand).

But I do have the sequel (The Fall of Hyperion), and many bus rides ahead of me.

Now I’m only 8 years behind on my reading.

I liked the Sorcerer’s Stone better.

My comparison is much akin to that between the “first” (episodes IV-VI) and “third” (episodes I-III) trilogies of Star Wars. In IV-VI, we have simple good-vs.-evil stories. Then in I-III, we have more complicated stories about politics and disputes over trade routes.

The Chamber of Secrets is undoubtedly a darker story, but I can’t help but think it could have done so without introducing the complications of “governors” and the “board” and politics behind appointing the head of Hogwart’s. The Sorcerer’s Stone had child protagonists more in the vein of the Hardy Boys or Scooby-Doo; The Chamber of Secrets felt more desperate in having to resort to a child hero.

I’m about 10 years behind on my reading.

I saw the movie first. I liked the book better. I know they’re supposed to be children’s books, but I couldn’t help but feel they were too much Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-ish. On the plus side, I didn’t have to read pages and pages of oompa-loompa lyrics.

What a coincidence from the company lending library! The acknowledgements page of Robert Buettner’s Orphanage references Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (believe it or not, all these books really were just grabbed off the shelf).

So does the rest of the book. It is a decent read, but it follows the same formula of the above-referenced works:

• A juvenile delinquent gets shipped off to basic training; dramatic boot-camp accident straightens him out.
• More nifty exoskeletons.
• Humanity fighting a hive-mind enemy.
• A twist at the end.

But … whereas the earlier two books seemed OK on their own, Orphange seemed formulaic, more derived from those works than influenced by them.

One of the cool things about my current workplace is the “lending library”: employees just drop off and pick up books. And since this is a high-tech company populated by geeks like me, the reading selection is heavily skewed towards my interests: science-fiction, fantasy, and Tom Clancy (in addition to the correctly-assumed collection of technical books).

Last weekend I read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I intended it to last me my plane flight out and back; it was disappointing only because after the first chapter I got sucked into what I thought would be an epic space opera, only to finish the book before the plane landed at my destination, leaving me with no book for the flight back home. It has some neat ideas about interstellar warfare, in particular, time dilation, which figures prominently in Ender’s Game.

Yesterday I picked up Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, also a quick read (I finished it last night). After chasing down Heinlein, the book, and the movie (Wikipedia is great for this kind of thing), I’ve decided I like both the book and the movie, each on their own merits. The movie is standard Paul Verhoeven fare, emphasizing the romance and action (with an essentially Aryan cast) at the expense of Heinlein’s philosophy (and ethnically-diverse cast). Heinlein’s book, despite being written in 1959, has ideas in it that are still very cool even now (in particular, the mobile exoskeleton).

What struck me most was the similarity between the books (well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I haven’t read anything in a very long time). They both, in the first person, follow the main character’s path through:

• Basic military training (emphasizing the difficulties of operating a powered exoskeleton) and graduation.
• Some episodic R&R and temporary “return” to (and rejection of) civilian life.
• An indefinite term of military service in a species-vs.-species war to extinction.
• A twist at the end. Their respective twists aren’t even really Old Boy- or Sixth Sense-caliber, but they are “twisty” enough to warrant “no spoiler” protection.

Examples of adultless societies in literature easily come to mind (Children of the Corn, Lord of the Flies, Peter Pan), but not so for childless societies (well, not for me). Ironicially, childless societies are all around us.

These articles both describe the same things about the rising costs of living in their respective cities (Boston and San Francisco): housing prices are going up because the per-capita income is going up. Increased per-capita income is simply total income divided by total population. At first it sounds good (most people think about increasing the numerator), but in reality, it is the denominator that is shrinking. The presence of more incoming-earning childless adults and fewer income-depleting children are causing more money to be spent on civic things like housing and neighborhoods, restaurants, and cultural institutions (the things that tend to make a place desirable to visit and live), and less money to be spent on child-related things like schools and parks (the things that don’t necessarily attract visitors and press):

• There Goes the Neighborhood (Boston Globe, May 14 2006)
• Fortune Shines on Sunnyside (San Francisco Chronicle, November 20 2005)

When these childless people have children and need to upgrade from their apartment or condo to a bigger house, the factors that drew them to these cities in the first place are now responsible for driving them and their children away. Both articles identify their respective cities as having among the lowest per-capita child population in the country.

2nd edition, Robert J. Shiller, 2005.

Irrational Exuberance claims that there is no rational explanation for the 1990s stock market boom, that it was simply human nature taking its due course. In this second edition, Shiller attempts to broaden the applicability of this hypotheses towards other markets, in particular, real estate.

Structural Factors for Irrational Exuberance

• Increased legalization of gambling. The increased social acceptance of gambling (casinos, track betting, state lotteries) has made it a natural progression for people to participate in other forms of risk taking: speculation in securities.
• Increased media coverage and mispresentation of the stock market’s true “value”. All graphs show that “the stock market goes up”. However, these graphs are almost never corrected for inflation. While the stock market’s nominal value has indeed increased over time, its real value has increased nowhere near as much. Fred’s Intelligent Bear Site (heh) serves up some nice eye-candy graphs of the DJIA with nominal and inflation-corrected values graphed over time (5.1% vs. 1.6% return, before taxes), along with a healthy side of stock market doom-and-gloom.
• Related to misrepresentation, analyst bias (or “recommendation inflation”). In 1999, only 1.0% of recommendations were “sell”. In 1989, the figure was 9.1%.
• Amplification Mechanisms. Interest in the stock market tracks its performance (unsurprisingly); various surveys show close correlation between market performance and things like numbers of registered social investment clubs, and mentions of the “stock market” in the media. The repeated exposure of and public attention to the market simply increases demand for participation in the market, which drives it up. These gains lead to an increase in consumption, which gets reported in the media as signs of a “strong economy”, and the cycle feeds back on itself, until the inevitable point at which price increases stop. These positive feedback loops are simply natural manifestations of Ponzi schemes.
• Applicability to real estate. Worldwide, real estate booms have been shown to trail stock market booms. The stock market winners are simply diversifying their enthusiasm (and winnings) into real estate, while the stock market losers, tiring of waiting for a recovery, are cutting their losses and looking for another “safer” investment vehicle. Either way, demand for real estate rises.

Cultural Factors for Irrational Exuberance

• News media and crashes. Shiller finds that the biggest news stories on days of significant market crashes (October 1929 and October 1987) is news about past price declines - a negative feedback loop.
• “New Era” thinking and booms. The first major peak in market P/E ratio was in June 1901, at the turn of the century; radio was a new technology, and household electricity was introduced. The next peak of July 1929 was immediately preceded by automobiles, commonly-available household electricity and electrical appliances, mainstream radio, and talking movies. The plateau of the 1950s-60s was accompanied by television, the baby boom, JFK’s promise of landing on the moon, and the Dow reaching for 1000. The 1990s had the internet and sock puppets, and Y2K.
• Applicability to real estate. Railroad companies brought a real estate boom to southern California in the late 1880s. The automobile brought warm-climate-seeking retirees to a regional real estate boom in Florida in the 1920s. In the late 1970s, “new era” political changes brought a real estate boom to California (again) with zoning changes that restricted new-home construction, and a Proposition 13 that cut property taxes.

Psychological Factors for Irrational Exuberance

• People have a tendency towards overconfidence in one’s own beliefs (”70% of people believe they are above-average drivers”), which encourages speculative behavior.
• Nonconsequentialist reasoning is a phenomenon where people are unable to reach conclusions based on hypothetical events; people cannot decide on courses of action until events actually occur. People can think ahead in logical games (chess, checkers), but in real life, emotions cloud their thinking. News stories about the markets evoke emotions that then spur actions in the markets that would not have been taken otherwise.
• Herd behavior is very powerful. For example, people will tend to patronize the more-crowded restaurant, even if the first patron made a random choice between the two. The stock market is not a reflection of people’s rational behavior (as the Rational Man would behave); people are simply electing not to waste their time and effort to exercise any judgment.
• Interpersonal two-way communication is much more powerful than one-way media communication. The 1920s’ telephone spawned “boiler rooms” that enabled brokers to encourage their clients to do stock trading. Today’s internet chat rooms and web forums facilitate a great amount of day trading.

Attempts to Rationalize Exuberance

• Efficient Markets and Random Walks. All financial prices accurately reflect all public information at all times. Price changes (”random walks”) are unpredictable because they only occur in response to genuinely new information, which by definition is unpredictable. Evidence supporting “efficient markets” is simply that it is difficult to “buy low and sell high”; everyone else (”smart money”) would have already done so (competing against other smart money), stabilizing prices. The problem is that efficient markets does not necessarily preclude the possibility of markets going through extended periods of significant mispricing (booms) where smart money can’t make a profit because no one sells low and everyone is buying high. Even if the smart money tries to short the stock of a valueless company, irrational investors can still bid up the stock, causing the smart money to lose.
• Investor Learning and Unlearning. This theory states that today’s exuberance is simply due to the public’s increased awareness of the value of the markets; the markets were inefficient before, but are becoming more efficient now. This is easily argued against with the fact that there have been multiple booms; either this “investor learning” theory is false, or investors are quick to forget what they have learned from the past …

A Call to Action

The concluding chapter is what really destroys the book for me. Shiller makes a bunch of recommendations that might help avoid speculative bubbles, all along the lines of a government behaving paternalistically towards its uneducated mob-like citizens (fine, he is entitled to a bleeding-heart opinion). But then the last paragraph cops out in a big way with “[u]ltimately, in a free society, we cannot protect people from all the consequences of their own errors”, so we end up back where we started - bubbles will happen and we can’t do anything to stop them.

Shiller’s book is fine as a walk through the market history and human psychology. It makes a decent argument that markets are in fact not governed by the Rational Man, but rather by irrational human beings. But beyond that, it is rather weak in simply describing anecdote after anecdote of how humans are in fact irrational, which really should not be news to anyone. Finally, the “second edition” expansion of these ideas beyond the stock market to other speculative markets (he only ever mentions real estate) is also rather weak. The real estate examples always seem contrived and duct-taped on to the end of the stock-market discussions.

Irrational Exuberance never pretended to promise entertainment value (although the cheeky title inspired unfulfilled hopes for snarky commentary), but it also falls somewhat short of its expected educational and thought-provoking value, which leads to my ultimate conclusion that I am disappointed with having spent time reading this book.