In the second Robots novel from Asimov, The Naked Sun, he explores a new dynamic between robot and human. This time, on a world called Solaria where robots are so plentiful human beings can really sit back and relax and let them do all the work. The flipside is that the population has to be tightly controlled and all human contact is weeded away through the force of culture. Elijah Baley makes his first trip off Earth, meeting with his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw to investigate a seemingly insoluble mystery on Solaria, and to make his own conclusions about the future of human-robot interaction.

Hmm, I’m still finding that this series comes up short for me. I really like the character of Olivaw though. I think he doesn’t get enough playtime and Baley bullies him too much :-) He manages to be formal and robotic, and yet somehow affectionate and – rather human – at the same time.

Having finished Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, I was pretty intrigued by the character of R. Daneel Olivaw, so I’ve checked out the Robot Trilogy of which this book is the first. In this book, Elijah Baley, a human detective, is paired with the humanoid robot Olivaw. He has to overcome his native prejudices against robots to solve the case of a murder that brings tensions between humans and Spacers (descendants of humans who colonised outer worlds centuries ago) to a boil.

It also includes interesting looks at Asimov’s (scary) picture of a future when overpopulation crowds the earth’s people into walled-up cities, where a rigid caste-like system based on your utility to the world determines what privileges you get (like whether you can have chicken on Sunday), and going into the open is frightening for even a seasoned detective like Baley.

Overall, though, I found Foundation a much more thrilling and mind-bending story. But maybe the next two books will be better?

This graphic novel intersperses anecdotes from the Chinese epic Journey to the West (or Monkey as it’s sometimes known in the West) with the author’s personal experiences growing up as an American-born Chinese. As a half-Chinese growing up in Singapore I can sympathise slightly with the author’s predicament, trying to fit in and yet holding onto your own identity. The book sort of bears out my observation from my college days in the States that ABCs seem to be more American than the Americans. Quite an interesting look at growing up as a minority.

As usual for Donald Norman, this is a thought-provoking book on design. This time he focuses on things that are automated – that have a mind of their own, so to speak, and how we can communicate with each other.

It’s not as inspirational as The Design of Everyday Things, but Norman as usual makes provocative remarks that really stimulate your mind. At one point he mentions that robots are rather like the elderly – they have limited mobility, limited agility and limited vision. Therefore, fitting a home to allow the elderly to move around comfortably is just like future-proofing your home to allow for the influx of robots that will undoubtedly come in the future! Quite an interesting argument to persuade buildings to retrofit their fixtures.

The most useful part of the book though is of course his recommendations for how we should design machines to interact well with humans. They are:

• Provide rich, complex and natural signals.
• Be predictable
• Provide good conceptual models
• Make the output understandable
• Provide continual awareness without annoyance
• Exploit natural mappings

Looks familiar? Actually he recommended a lot of these in DOET. I guess good design is good design, whether you’re designing a robot or a teapot (he’s obsessed with teapots).

This book is sorta like “Piers Anthony’s meditations on life and death”, but couched in an amusing form. Zane is a young man who hasn’t seemed to do much right in life, so he resolves to die. But when he tries to kill himself, he accidentally kills Death instead – and has to take over Death’s duties, much to his horror. As he tends to the dying he reflects on what it means to live a good or evil life, and why some wish to live while others wish to die. Along the way he finds love, and himself embroiled in a struggle between G(o)od and (D)Evil.

It’s quite interesting and philosophical, and quite funny in its fantastical form. This is only book one of his Incarnations of Immortality series, each of which stars one of the Incarnations – here, Death, but in future stories Nature, War, etc., some (all?) of which are introduced in this series. I’m definitely going to be reading the whole series, I hope!

Basically a series of short articles showing DIY gurus who’ve built their own solar death rays, submarines, robots, etc, etc. It’s pretty interesting to see what other people have done in their own spare time (or sacrificed their careers to build) and their motivations, but other than that, this book was a little lightweight on technical detail and all that. More human interest than technical interest, let’s just say.

I’m not really sure what inspired me to pick up this book at the library. Maybe it was my recent trip to Tokyo. Anyway, it has a pretty interesting thesis: that despite Tokyo’s building hyperdrive in the past few decades, the patterns of land-use today reflect the patterns of land-use that were laid down when Tokyo was still the warrior capital of Edo. In fact, Jinnai says that every city is this way – that people build and rebuild according to the lay of the land and their memories of the land.

Except when they don’t, of course. There was a period (around the 60s and 70s I guess) when Tokyo was getting built up at a frantic rate and all such considerations were forgotten. A new skyscraper’s blocking the view from one of the traditional scenic spots of Tokyo? Progress! Gonna fill in a waterway that’s been flowing for thousands of years to make room for apartments? Progress! Jinnai of course disapproves heavily of this – he says sometimes that Tokyo is getting “boring” and sterile because of the lack of consideration, but the pendulum’s swinging back and people are beginning to remember again.

I’m not really sure whether on balance he thinks Tokyo fulfills his original hypothesis or whether they went overboard – perhaps in some places Tokyo still has its traditional charm and in other places it’s just overbuilt.

This book kinda resonated with me though because I’ve been thinking a lot about how I identify with my neighbourhood, which has largely been the way it is my whole life. More and more, higher buildings are being built and new people are moving in, and I find myself fearing change.

This has been a neighbourhood of no-higher-than-four-stories condos and terraced houses and old, old bungalows, except for HDB (public housing) flats, which run up to 15 stories. But it won’t always be this way – the pressure to build in Singapore is enormous – and I can see a day when this place will be totally different, and I don’t want it to be. I don’t mind individual condos getting replaced with others – so long as the patterns of land use are the same, Jinnai might say.

The book’s also made me thing about Singapore as a whole, whether it’s a liveable city. I don’t think there’s enough connection with nature here (in Tokyo, according to Jinnai, “[t]he people of the city, perceiving the existence of the spirits of the land in such places, always strove to create an environment imbued with the personality of place.”). I don’t think that it’s human-scale enough, except in small pockets. But things are getting better in some respects – they’re going to redevelop the waterways, and I think a connection to water revitalizes people. And we need to start thinking about how to move people back to the focus of the city, away from cars. There’s a conference on Liveable Cities going on right now in Singapore. I wonder if they’re going to just congratulate themselves on how good a city Singapore already is, or look to improving ourselves for the future?

In Prelude to Foundation, Hari Seldon is a young mathematician who’s just given his first paper on psychohistory, to popular acclaim. He immediately discovers that giving it was a huge mistake. Now forces far beyond his control are jostling with each other for control of the predictive and persuasive power of psychohistory. Seldon is forced into flight, in the company of a history professor named Dors, a flight that takes him to some of the weirdest sectors of Trantor, the capital world of the Empire.

I wasn’t sure if Asimov meant for this book to be read last – it was recommended to me that it come last. Some of the “mysteries” in the book weren’t mysteries because of clues/answers dropped in other books. There isn’t all that much on psychohistory in it, either, although it certainly shows how Seldon was set on the path to psychohistory. It’s more interesting than Forward the Foundation, and there are links to the Robot series, which I now have to read, darn it!

Basically a love song to Ideo. There’s a bit about the Ideo process and some of the stuff they’ve come up with, but nothing really earth-shaking in here. Look at the books The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation if you really want to know Ideo goes about kicking ass in design.

Although it’s listed at the end of the Foundation series authored by Asimov, Forward the Foundation is chronologically the second book. Hari Seldon has gotten psychohistory off to a good start with his collaborators. He uses his new-found understanding of politics and human nature to defuse a bunch of political crises that come along, and is eventually appointed Chief Minister, much to his horror. The story then continues all the way up to the establishment of the two foundations and Seldon’s death.

It’s a useful book to understand what went on, but I confess I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as any of the others I’ve read so far. It seemed a bit more pedestrian, especially towards the end of the book. Oh well. One last “canonical” Foundation book to go – Prelude to Foundation, which so far seems really quite fascinating.