Category: Interesting

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer read by Dick Hill

A short sharp meditation on how we know what we know and how we decide what we decide by the director of the Center of Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

When I became director of the Max Planck institute of Human Development, I wanted to create an interdisciplinary research group whose members actually talked worked and published together–a rare thing. Unless one actively creates an environment that supports this goal, collaboration tends to fall apart within a few years or may never get off the ground in the first place. The major obstacle is a mental one.

Researchers like most ordinary people tend to identify with their in group and ignore or even look down on neighboring disciplines. Yet most relevant topics we study today do not respect the historically grown disciplinary borders and to make progress, one must look beyond one’s own narrow point of view so I came up with a set of rules, not verbalized but acted upon that would create the kind of culture I desired.
Those rules included: EVERYONE ON THE SAME PLANE.

In my experience, employees who work on different floors interact 50% less than those who work on the same floor. And the loss is greater for those working in different buildings. People often behave as if they still lived in the savannah, where they look for others horizontally but not above or below ground. So when my growing group needed an additional 2000 square feet in which to operate, I vetoed the architect’s proposal that we construct a new building, and extended our existing offices horizontally so that everyone remained on the same plane…..

This pancake theory of organizational vitality is just one demonstration of the non-logical rules that govern human environments.

Intelligence is at work in what we call gut feelings, hunches and intuitions — despite the fact that we cannot account for them. Intelligence is also at work in the non-logical rules of thumb we use to navigate and predict the behavior of others.

Consider a woman waiting for a black suitcase at Kennedy Airport, and a cop who is looking only for a woman who is looking out for him. How does he zero in on the woman?

Consider a baseball player who wants to catch a ball: how does he calculate where the ball will be so he can catch it?

How does Harry decide on which of his two girlfriends he should marry?

Different heuristics and rules of thumb underlie intuitions, enabling fast action, utilizing ‘recognition memory’ and the ability to track moving objects… But these rules are not logical. Gerd Gigerenzer navigates the place that gut feelings hold within human knowing, inviting us to re-evaluate both knowing and feeling.

Still Life by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

Even little old Canadian villages have murders, and artists. Jane Neal lived and painted in a big house and kept both her canvases and her home private. Except for the kitchen. To it she invited her circle of friends and fellow-artists, poor and English speaking. They and their language migrate to Three Pines to continue the war between French and English sensibilities.

The death of Jane Neal re-invokes these French and English factions, in a series of tense encounters between Police Inspector Gamache and the local folks: the usual suspects.

The plot is crisp and economical, but the descriptions are sweet, pastoral, even poignant. We want to know who murdered Jane because we like her more and more as we reconnoitre her life.

Every day for Lucy’s entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up….Every morning Lucy’s prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelled like roses… and lived in the kitchen.

Next by Michael Crichton read by Dylan Baker

Increasingly, the essay, the critique, the report and the annunciation are being reconfigured in the form of fiction.

Michael Crichton has mastered this form. His Next is more than a story about the re-distribution of genomes; it is Critique, Satire, Farce and Science Report, with:

  • just the right amount of irony in representing jerks, like Brad the idiot nephew who attaches to underage teens, and relies on his rich uncle for jobs, cars, and bail;
  • just the right amount of irony in depicting the social-emotional infantilism of scientists who can’t navigate their way out of their self-made moral sinkholes;
  • just the right amount of Hollywoodability in scenes with children, animals and cars;
  • just the right amount of Doris Day type silliness in domestic showdowns between a sorry husband and his forgiving but disciplinary wife: here Blondie accepts the half-son, half chimpanzee Henry has brought home from the Lab, welcomes her role as Mommy, and scolds Henry for not thinking ahead.
  • just the right amount of mad British eco-alienated humour to work its way into the next Cadbury or British Air commercial…

(more…)

The Mistress of the Art of the Dead by Ariana Franklin read by Roslyn Landor

Before Patricia Cornwell, before CSI, did anybody read dead bodies or examine them for traces of their killer? Yes, as it happens. Where there are bodies, there are secrets and where there are secrets, there are readers. Gaudinus the African, for example, who remembers people only by diseases, and greets his visitor from Palermo, the personal secretary and keeper of the King’s royal secrets such:

“Hemorrhoids!!” He said triumphantly, at last. “You had piles. How are they?”

Hemorrhoids distinguishes Mordechai Fils Barachia, who brings news of the murders of children in Henry II’s England. Representing the King of Sicily, Mordechai calls for a medical examiner, a reader and decoder of dead bodies, a Mistress of the Art of the Dead, to go to England and find out if indeed it is the Jews are the murderers of children.

The Fifth Vial read by Michael Palmer read by J. Charles

There is more than one mystery here. First, how does one make sense of the handful of quotes from Plato’s Republic which are scattered about this book like annoying commercials for a new Greek candidate? Especially when there is no candidate. Plato’s ideas are credited with breeding a monstrous economy of organs, stolen from the many, given to the few, by a gang of happy scholars with an Old School knowledge of Latin and a gamey love of Greek nicknames and Latin roots. And here, then, is the second mystery: how would a greedy ruling class locate, trace and seize particular bodily organs for their own use?

Natalie Reyes, overconfident, overcompetitive, overaggressive fourth year medical student finds out how. We meet her on the day she challenges the diagnosis of a resident in charge. We watch her being summoned to the Dean’s office, judged and condemned by an informal medical school tribunal, and cut down like a too high stalk of wheat. Suspended for four months, she is sent by her boss to present a paper at a conference in Brazil. She lands in Brazil but never makes it to the conference.

Old Cops Meet New Technologies: Harry Bosch & Jack Reacher, 2007

Amusing this particular intersection of history where the living instruments of the law (cops, detectives, Special Forces, Army MPs) meet the live ones (text messaging, Live search, cell phones, Google…). What results is something Lacan called the ‘missed encounter’ — in other words, the subject is there, but somehow misses it, the thing, the point, the sense of it. So Harry Bosch meets the cell phone. And Jack Reacher meets the CD.

What also results is a humility, a vulnerability, a wry deference to the inscrutability of the new, the next, the insensible. Harry Bosch, stubborn, bullish, deductively logical, steps aside to let his farty new partner decode the victim’s cellphone. Jack Reacher manipulates the entire series of rational numbers in his head, but doesn’t own a cell phone.

Jack and Harry are both post-retirees. Jack flashes back to Heidelberg and Seoul; Harry to Vietnam. Neither are married, neither trust women, or men, for that matter.

Harry Bosch listens to Jazz saxophone and indeed so do we: Overlook features the original instrumentals of …. Jimi Hendrix’ second album, sixth track contains a secret message with the name of a DIA secret weapon. (Yes, this is a test. What song?)

P.S. The Coca-Cola Plastic Bottle Silencer in Connelly doesn’t work according to Childs. Not even if you use an Evian bottle.

Nerve Damage by Peter Abrahams read by Alan Nebelthau

In the yard a piece of shiny scrap metal from a nuclear power plant is waiting for Roy to see it. But Roy is reading a not yet published New York Times obituary:

Roy Valois a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces around the United States and in several prominent museums, died today at INSERT. He was INSERT. The cause was INSERT according to INSERT. The self taught Mr. Valois worked almost exclusively with recovered materials, usually scrap metal but he was “no primitive” according to Kurt Palmeteer …. Roy Valois was born in the western Maine town of N. Grafton on TO COME. He went to local schools where he excelled at sports, eventually entering the University of Maine on a hockey scholarship. But it was while working at a summer job that involved welding and other metalwork that Mr. Valois found his true calling…. It was also at Georgetown that he met his wife Delia Stern, an economist later employed by the United Nations. She died in an airplane crash off Venezuela in TO COME…

Delia is also the name of the sculpture that occupies the center of his house, and reminds his next ex-girlfriend that he is still, in some sense, married. The obituary is wrong about his wife, he tells the journalist at the NY Times. Delia worked for the Hobbes Institute, not the U.N. The journalist is killed the next day.

And Roy himself is not well. He has a cough. His nose bleeds. His arm breaks. A doctor tells him that he has asbestos-caused cancer: . After his treatment in a Fung-Shui designed office, a man in a wheelchair, his age, but skeletal, is wheeled out or wheeled in by a nurse. Roy doesn’t want to be anywhere near the man in the wheelchair, because from the point of view of the unconscious anywhere near = anywhere like. And Roy scales his way through the world more or less unconscious, feeling his way around like a hockey player or a hydraulic excavator.

Roy has shovel fulls of partial information. From Dr. Choo. From his now dead wife. From the past. And we imagine that Roy will piece together something like the truth out of what remains. Scrap metal, memory, curiosity.

Le Mariage by Diane Johnson read by Suzanne Toren

Yes, this is about a French woman who is preparing to be married, about the dozens of chores, duties, invitations, financial arrangements, foods, realtors, contracts and miscommunications fringing the prolonged event called a ‘wedding’. But it is more about the bureaucracy of French life, the stiff protocols, the delicate rules of engagement, the intricacies of public manners and traditions, and the entire merde-ridden fantasy of a plan of the couple.

It is, in short, about the beginning of one couple at the intersection of many others, slowly or not so slowly decomposing, when this couple is located in France, at a time when Americans were even less popular than usual….

Americans weren’t popular this season… The U.S. was embarked on a rescue mission in the Balkans that was seen by the French as a barely submerged drive for world domination…

Tim, the American reporter on the brink of marrying a Parisian woman who buys things in the Pouc, the flea-market, and sells them at high prices to decorators et al., is accused of his intrusive, neo-colonialist birthplace at a party where he meets another American ex-patriate, Clara, the beautiful, vulnerable, devoted wife of a rich, vulgar Hollywood director.

Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani read by Adriana Trigiani

Daughter of an Italian beauty who somehow wandered into the wrong mountains, Ave Maria is still considered a ‘forner’, despite spending 35 years in Big Stone Gap, driving the volunteer Rescue Squad truck, and directing the annual town play. Charming, stubborn, hot tempered Ave loves theatre in all it’s forms. Especially the drama that can be overheard and observed from above, from her perch in the pharmacy, where she slowly grows into role of the town spinster.

Ave has real friends, wonderful friends. Iva Lou, who drives the bookmobile, gives her the best advise about men, clothes, makeup, and sex. Frieda, her down to earth perpetually retiring 55 year old employee, gives her the local gossip. Theodore, a pretty boy, director of the high school band and fellow forner, gives her verbal comfort, companionship and culture. But Ave has learned most of what she knows from books, specifically, the Chinese Art of Face Reading which helps her decode the illegible faces of the miners and families of miners that populate the Appalachians.

Ave Maria’s persona is so operatic,  so heavy with the pathos of each and every mood, so out of proportion to the somber sensibilities of the mountain folk, that it is difficult to imagine her as inside the skin of a couple.  Indeed, even in love, and then in marriage, and then in motherhood, Ave Maria sticks out.

Hide by Lisa Gardner read by Maggie-Meg Reed

A family is a system. For Annabelle, aka Tanya, aka Sienna aka Sophia, it is a rigorously cheerful, rigorously protective, rigorously mobile system. It packs up and moves every 18 months. Until Kansas City, when the system’s mother drinks herself to death, and the rules are preserved by the father and the daughter.

The 32 year old remains of the system is now a woman, who wants to live in the suburbs,  plant roses, and forbid her husband to buy suitcases.