Angela J. Hill

I’ve just read two outstanding photography books. I’ve been going through the entire photography section at the library (and neighboring libraries) and looking through the sections in virtually every bookstore in my path, and I’ve only bought a very few books–just the ones that I think I’ll want to refer back to. Both of these have jumped to the top of my list.

Striking Poses: Creating a Visual Dialogue is a book of environmental portraits shot all over the world, with each one accompanied by a short conversation with Max Fallon, the photographer. His focus on people and relationships as a way to tell the story of a location, to enhance what one normally sees in location photos, gave me a lot of food for thought. I enjoy shooting closeup portraits with a wide open aperture–but now I want to try doing more wide-angle portraits. I got a taste of that shooting Mina’s going-away party and I need to spend more time with that. (I also need to buy some new gear to really be able to explore it…which is its own whole quagmire.)

The absolute best photography book I’ve read since, well, ever is Masters’ Guide to Wedding Photography: Capturing Unforgettable Moments and Lasting Impressions by Marcus Bell. He’s a very successful Australian photographer. Don’t let the title fool you; although wedding photography is the explicit subject, the lessons here would apply to any type of photography with people. The images in this book were unique and timeless, but what really made the book outstanding was the balance of different styles of information–technical and artistic, personal and logistic, etc. It goes from gear info to developing relationships, then shows some ways to demonstrate and highlight relationships photographically, talks about workflow and processes, and gets into step-by-step descriptions for selecting and creating master images. After reading it, I went back through all of my Tibet photos and did selects and edits, and now I feel like I have a real album. Then there were some great ideas about client management, marketing, and sales. It just hit all of the bases and did so in a way that was thoroughly relatable and highly educational. Outstanding!

I’m almost not sure where to begin in recommending this book. It’s an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism, as it says in the tagline. This book feels so familiar to me–I wonder if I read it when I was much younger and couldn’t understand it, which is just the kind of thing that my brothers and I used to do, so it’s entirely possible. It’s a best seller from the 70s and has since been translated into 23 languages. A great modern physics primer wound together with an overview of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen, and Chinese thought. I’ve been aware of the similarities in processes and thought between these for as long as I can remember…but again, maybe I read it as a kid? In any case, I’m halfway through (or so), making slow progress as I simultaneously read bajillions of photography books.

…or at least, two of the books I’m reading:

James Gleick wrote Chaos, which I loved, and the subtitle here (”The Acceleration of Almost Everything”) has been taunting me for …some…time. Ha. Anyway, when he got around to talking about car phones, I thought, huh? And realized that it’s copyright 1999, which is surprisingly outdated in this context. Which kind of brought the point home. Anyway, recommended, especially if you realize that everything here is increasing exponentially.

Apparently this is the gold standard for lighting textbooks and I think I understand why, although of course I have no frame of reference for such a statement. Anyway, I’m trying to cram as much photography information into my head as I can before I go on my next big trip. After the first 100 pages I feel like I have a much better understanding of lots of intuitive stuff.

…by getting the joke in this xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/599/.

Thank you, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers! Currently in my reading rotation–it’s the bigraphy of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös. He was an author of about a bazillion papers and proofs and was known for a few things in particular: 1, being a great collaborator, 2, the elegance of his thinking, and 3, his itinerant lifestyle–he traveled all the time and would often show up on the doorsteps of fellow mathematicians with the pronouncement, “My brain is open.” He’d stay long enough to work on a problem together and then move on to the next place/idea. I like that guy.

Oh, and the joke is basically that mathematicians play their own sort of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game with Erdös because of his prolific collaborative papers, using what’s referred to as an “Erdös Number”. Erdös himself has an Erdös Number of 0; immediate collaborators have an Erdös Number of 1; those who collaborated with those collaborators have an Erdös Number of 2, and so on. It’s been said that 90% of the world’s active mathematicians have an Erdös Number lower than 8.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m reading some short works of Richard Feynman. This is the conclusion of his talk entitled “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society” which was given to an audience of scientists in 1964.

What then is the meaning of the whole world? We do not know what the meaning of existence is. We say, as the result of studying all of the views that we have had before, we find that we do not know the meaning of existence; but in saying that we do not know the meaning of existence, we have probably found the open channel–if we will allow only that, as we progress, we leave open opportunities for alternatives, that we do not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth, but remain always uncertain–[that we] “hazard it”. The English, who have developed their government in this direction, call it “muddling through,” and although a rather silly, stupid sounding thing, it is the most scientific way of progressing. To decide upon the answer is not scientific. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar–ajar only. We are only at the beginning of the development of the human race; of the development of the human mind, of intelligent life–we have years and years in the future. It is our responsibility not to give the answer today as to what it is all about, to drive everybody down in that direction and to say: “This is a solution to it all.” Because we will be chained then to the limits of our present imagination. We will only be able to do those things that we think today are the things to do. Whereas, if we leave always some room for doubt, some room for discussion, and proceed in a way analogous to the sciences, then this difficulty will not arise…”

This explains how I feel about any endeavour that attempts to give finite, unquestionable, permanent answers to anything. At times this is at odds with my dramatic nature and general desire to make bold statments.

This makes me both happy and sad, and triggers the kind of immersive memory that usually only comes from a scent…

I enjoy reading more than one book at a time, especially when they’re sort of at odds but possibly complementary. Following a lovely afternoon at the library on Saturday, I’m reading The 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas, with commentary by Geshe Sonam Rinchen, and Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

The 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas explores the teachings of Gyelsay Togmay Sangpo, a 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist monk. Bodhisattvas, in Buddhism, are people who have attained enlightenment but postpone nirvana to help others attain enlightenment as well.

Richard Feynman was a physicist, writer, and professor, sometimes called the “Great Explainer” because of his love of creating simple explanations for complex problems. He participated in the development of the atom bomb and in the investigation into the Challenger disaster. He was also considered a free spirit, learned to play the bongos, enjoyed some success at drawing, and (this is my favorite part) had some synesthesia with the letters in equations (n, apparently was “mildly violet-bluish”). This book is a collection of his short works. It is FANTASTIC.

I like reading these two together because I find the connections between physics and philosophy (and I’d say Buddhism could be considered both religion and philosophy) fascinating.

The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea, by John Craven, deserves a place on the shelf right next to Blind Man’s Bluff. That is, if you can put it down. John Craven, who pioneered the use of Bayesian Search Theory to find lost objects at sea, recounts some of his adventures as an integral civilian working with the Navy throughout the Cold War. This is science in action; it’s critical thinking under life-and-death circumstances; AND, it’s SUBMARINES.

The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street, by Thomas Bass, managed to combine my excitement about two recent books I’ve read, Chaos and The Black Swan.

Two things: One, I was really glad to realize that several of the predictive models I built for a recent analytics client followed some of the same methods of looking for patterns and of building models that would evolve automatically over time. Two, how can I invest with these guys? Because this is my style.

Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born by Denise Shekerjian: I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s a study of creativity based on interviews with 40 MacArthur Fellows. If you’re not familiar with the MacArthur Foundation’s Fellowship program, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about how it works:

The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the Genius Award) is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation each year to typically 20 to 40 United States citizens or residents, of any age and working in any field, who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.”

The Fellowship has no application. People are nominated anonymously by a body of nominators who submit recommendations to a small selection committee of about a dozen people, also anonymous. The committee then reviews every nominee and passes along their recommendations to the President and the board of directors. The entire process is anonymous and confidential. Most new MacArthur Fellows first learn that they have even been considered when they receive the congratulatory phone call.

In addition to a steady diet of fashion magazines, I’m reading a lot of math stuff. (Obviously.) This book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is sort of a cross between math, probability, philosophy, biology, and history.

The thing that’s getting me about this is the description of two different types of systems: one where things cluster in the middle, and one where they cluster at the outer edges (the author refers to them as “Mediocristan” and “Extremistan”). The second reminds me of the Lorenz attractor–a system where values cluster around two values instead of one.

Taleb applies his Mediocristan/Extremistan model to financial systems, which seems like nice work if you can get it. In the context of money, it seems to make sense that there would be two clusters–basically, big successes and big failures. And the Lorenz attractor has two “clusters” as well. But there are plenty of other strange attractors that are more complex. Is it possible that Taleb’s one-dimensional Extremistan has two-, three-, or more-dimensional counterparts that we can use to discuss highly improbably events?

My brother Aaron is a great saxaphonist and is bizarrely obsessed with throat singing, which is NEAT but can indeed draw attention when done in public. Not always good attention…

Throat singing is a way of creating more than one note at a time with your voice. Follow the link above to hear/see an example. Multiphonics is a more general term for this; it often refers to creating more than one note at a time on a woodwind instrument. It sounds impossible–any type of horn is set up to create only one wavelength, and the presence of two notes indicates that there are two wavelengths supported at once.

At any rate–I just came across this piece of research (from 1989…but it’s new to me) that concludes that woodwind multiphonics can be described with strange attractors (a main concept in chaos theory). Given my ongoing chaos obsession, the audio background, and all of the thought I’ve been putting into how web analytics relate to each of those individually, this seems like it could sort of close the whole loop! Hopefully I can find some followup research.

My dad works on submarines, so I’ve been around them here and there (and certainly heard about them) since I was a little kid. I vaguely remember going on a tour of one when I was probably about 9 or 10. Last Christmas my dad took me & Gabe on a tour of a sub in Virginia, and let me tell you, they seem a LOT smaller inside when you’re a grownup.

But I digress. At some point I was talking with my dad about an analytics problem I was working on, and describing the process I was using to try to figure something out. He told me the tale of the USS Scorpion, a sub that went down somewhere in the Pacific, and the process the Navy used to locate the sub. I was transfixed as he told me about John Craven, the mastermind behind the search effort, and his use of an old mathematical theory that quantifies the value of hunches. They used it to successfully locate the sub. (More about that soon.)

Anyway, that was enough of a motivation to get me to read this book, and now I AM OBSESSED WITH SUBMARINES. Seriously. It’s out of control. But they’re fascinating! The book is full of all true stories of submarines from WWII through the Cold War, and it was the first time that a lot of these stories were made public. I can’t recommend it enough.

My brother Adam recommended this book: Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It was the first book to introduce the principles of chaos theory to the general public, and it’s FASCINATING. A really readable description of some very advanced mathematics.

I find myself drawn to population dynamics, which is really not the focus of this book at all, but does get referenced several times. The more I think about this, the more likely it seems that techniques used to predict populations could extend almost seamlessly to web analytics. We already see that people online behave as populations (and we can segment visitors into all sorts of populations of our choosing). And many of the graphs of population groups look like they could be web analytics data if the axes were re-labeled. Case in point:

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