Book Reviewed: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness by Patrick House

Comprehending the cosmic design Where does consciousness begin? And where does it end? Where is the line between an individual biological entity and the rest of cosmos? Between life and non-life? Between living (not necessarily a biological entity) and a non-living entity? In this book, the author discusses a number of facts about consciousness and physical reality; the neurobiology, physics and philosophy of it. But he keeps the characterization of conscious experience open to discussion. At any given time, a brain is taking in more information than it can handle, with more possible ways of configuring itself than the universe has atoms. There is no single conscious experience that is unique and that cannot be listed, cataloged, and reproduced with electrical, physical, or magnetic stimulation of the brain. A simple bit of shunted electricity can cause a brain to compile, run, and display to the conscious clipboard. The author derives the ideas from the work of Eliot Weinberger “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei,” which tracks the English translations of a short ancient Chinese poem, “Deer Park,” written in the Eighth Century C.E. Wang Wei’s original poem established the Buddhist propensity for parallelism, and śūnyatā which interprets that all things in this world are empty of intrinsic existence and nature.

Book Reviewed: How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History by Samantha Cole

Virtual porn In a virtual world, experiencing love, heartbreak, and healing are real. It creates a fantasy world where your thirst for online sex becomes unquenched, and drives you to desire for more. The technology has worked well for both the sides of the economy, the supply and demand chains controlled by the government legislation and the activists who fight for individual rights. Porn industry generates billions of dollars and offer employment for online sex workers and the investors of the platforms. Sex industry has strongly influenced the way the world wide web operates, and it has provided a relatively safe place to explore sexual fantasies from porn pictures to porn videos for all kinds of interests. The author provides an historical look at the public and private shows between cam models and their customers, from exotic dancing and pornographic videos to masturbation shows and erotic chatrooms. There are many virtual brothels and strip clubs with limitless potential for many avatars and make the Old-Time bedroom sex obsolete and unnecessary. In video games, "emergent" content occurs when two or more things collide in a game to produce something that was not programmed or scripted. The online porn is not free from racism or age discrimination or the physical attributes. In 2014, Chase Bank shut down the accounts of hundreds of porn performers. The adult industry suspected this was due to the Department of Justice's "Operation Choke Point," a 2013 initiative that demanded that "bankers behave like policemen and judges. Customers' access to financial services provided by PayPal, Venmo, and Google Pay were shut down, Denying payment services to service providers was a big blow. But the online creators produced creative ways like pre-paid tokens to access porn sites and their services. In one of the chapters, on deepfakes that allows making celebrity face-swapped videos as if the videos are real. The author discusses actual cases and some of these are either exaggerated or simply untrue.

Book reviewed: Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal by Juan José Millás and Juan Luis Arsuaga

The Smart Neanderthal Juan José Millás literary work in Spanish literature is psychological and introspective. In his work, everyday story is transformed into an experience that allows the reader to understand physical reality in philosophical terms. In this book he presents himself as Neanderthal living in the modern world and likes to know the perspectives of homo sapiens about the cultural evolution from Neanderthals. This book records his conversation with Juan Luis Arsuaga, a leading archeologist, and paleobiologist who specializes in Neanderthal research. This book is more of a work of literature for which the author Millás is known for. In fact, there is very little about the paleobiology of Neanderthals, the extinct species of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. The genetic evidence clearly demonstrate that the two species coexisted and interbred; about 1.8 to 2.1 percent of the genomes modern Eurasian population contain Neanderthal genes. This book is about curiosity, a good conversation, great food, nice place, and thoughtfulness that reflects on the exuberance of a wonderful relationship the two species had for a few millennia. This metaphysical enquiry reflects on the nature of José Millás and Arsuaga’s approach to the culture that evolved (or remained) when one species ceases to exist. This book turns out to be a work of literature and not evolutionary biology. In his 2006 novel, “Laura y Julio,” we find similar enquiry to the problem of identity, symmetry, love, and inhabitable spots within our space.

Book Reviewed: Location Filming in Los Angeles by Karie Bible

Filming in Los Angeles For more than one hundred years, the Los Angeles area has been shaped and reshaped to accommodate filmmakers' visions. It has played everything, the old South, Africa, Switzerland, Rome, ancient Greece, the Middle East, and even outer space. The location images in this book capture a time, a place, and a culture. The book is by no means comprehensive, but it presents a survey of the filming locations from the 1910s through the mid-1970s. This is the result of a runaway production in Hollywood and greater Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce enticed filmmakers with sunshine that promised 350 days of sun. Film pioneers like Thomas Ince and David Wark Griffith found LA the best location. Griffith filmed his 1915 The Birth of a Nation at his studio on Sunset Boulevard and on location in the Hollywood area. In 1925, after a wasteful stint in Italy, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer brought its multimillion-dollar Ben Hur to Los Angeles and recreated Rome on a vacant lot at the intersection of Venice Boulevard and Brice Road (now La Cienega Boulevard). The show-stopping chariot race was one of many epic scenes staged by creative filmmakers in the Los Angeles basin. There are numerous black and white pictures of some of most successful movies of the golden age and early Hollywood. You get to see film locations around downtown, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Malibu, Long Beach, Culver City, and Beverly Hills. The pictures are absolutely adorable and bring back the glory of the old studio era and its efforts to become a major industry in entertainment. This book is a must have for anyone interested in the history of Hollywood.