Review: Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from Vhs to File Sharing

Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from Vhs to File Sharing by Caetlin Benson-Allott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book in parallel with a video series by the same name curated in part by the author at the Alamo Drafthouse in Yonkers. As of now, Jan 2018, it seems as though she is going to be a future editor of "Cinema Journal" which is a scholarly academic journal on various film topics that I happen to subscribe to. The book starts out with some heavy theory from the 1970's, Christian Metz, apparatus theory, Marxist film theory, etc. that I need to do some reading on, but the rest of the book is close to a breeze, being that the movies referred to are fortunately available rather easily. When I read "Guide for the Perplexed" about Werner Herzog, I had to track down by hook or by crook, 30 or 40 movies to back fill my reading. These are all common titles for even a moderate horror movie fan. The thesis is essentially that the viewer's role as a spectator, (and maybe as an object themselves) has changed with the development of the VCR, and then the DVD, and current day VOD and Blu-Ray. It's convincing, and the final page of the concluding chapter packs a good punch - spectatorship is a power play, one way or another. An interesting read, with a few $5 words to look up here and there. Recommend if you're a gentleman or gentlewoman and a scholar, and a horror movie fan.

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Review: Schrödinger's Killer App: Race to Build the World's First Quantum Computer

Schrödinger's Killer App: Race to Build the World's First Quantum Computer by Jonathan P. Dowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazing book for the layperson by someone who is clearly a well-known and knowledgeable person in the field, Jonathan P. Dowling. I will absolutely have to read it again however, and note to anyone who reads this book, pay attention to those quantum gates, the CAT, the ENT, and the RAT as they are referred to heavily thereafter. I think any layperson will get a lot out of this book even if they have to glaze over at the myriad of characters involved and some of the engineering techniques that are hard to understand, (for the layperson). I believe I found this book recommended by Zach Weinersmith who writes "Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal" and has his own book about cutting edge tech, "Soonish." It's got some humor in it, but quantum mechanics is hard to understand, but I'll take another stab at it down the road. Also, there is an interesting criticism of Roger Penrose toward the end of the book, regarding the "consciousness is weird, quantum physics is weird, therefore they're both related" kind of arguments made in "The Emperor's New Mind." John Searle's Strong AI hypothesis as related in this book is not something I'm as on board with as the author is, but I guess until proven otherwise, it'll have to do.

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