Men are complex creatures. Half the time we can’t remember our wedding anniversaries or our childrens’ birthdays, but we have no trouble remembering Derek Jeter’s slugging percentage with two outs and runners in scoring position or quoting obscure lines from The Big Lebowski. We can’t find the time to mow the lawn or shop (online) for our wives’ birthday presents, but somehow we still find 18 hours a week to analyze our fantasy football teams. And every one of us still thinks – in his own self-deceiving way – that we’re just as cool as we ever were.

Of course, the only thing worse than a clueless man is a clueless man with a bruised ego, so what to do? Enter Dan Consiglio’s Of Course You’re Still Cool, Honey: And 75 More Lies to Keep Your Aging Man Happy, which combines “oh, that’s unfortunate…” photos of guys being guys with witty, satirical lies that any woman can use to keep the goofy man in their life happy. The result is hilarious, even if a little painfully close to home.

Adams Media, a division of F+W Media, Inc. will publish Of Course You’re Still Cool, Honey next year. In the meantime, Dan’s first book, The New Dad A-Z will be coming out from Andrews McMeel next month. Congratulations, Dan!

Robert Pierre and Jon Jeter’s terrific new book A Day Late and a Dollar Short: High Hopes and Deferred Dreams in Obama’s “Postracial” America is now out from John Wiley & Sons and The Washington Post just published a short adaptation from the book. Here’s a clip:

What does Barack Obama mean to black America? This is the running debate taking place somewhere in the country every day, and the answer so far is this: everything and nothing; epic transformation and elegiac stasis; a stark symbol of how far black people have come and a painful marker of the great distance left to travel.

The transcendent, jarring truth for blacks is that they celebrated their most triumphant moment at the worst of times. The housing market triggered the greatest loss of wealth for African Americans in history. Nearly a fifth of all black workers are out of work, a figure that rivals the nation’s unemployment at the peak of the Great Depression. In the country’s largest cities, the high school dropout rate for blacks is nearly half.

Over nine months of interviews beginning with Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, from the mountains of Appalachia to the Bay Area, blacks from all walks of life — entrepreneur, ex-offender, soldier, union leader, single parent, South African émigré, retiree, hip-hop activist and more — pondered the meaning of President Obama, and in doing so, laid bare the political identity of the nation’s most liberal voting bloc. Their stories, some of which are excerpted here, provide some insight into what Obama’s election meant to black Americans, and whether, one year later, it has brought the promised change to their lives.

It’s a fascinating piece and is well worth reading. You can check out the rest here.

Congratulations go out to Mark Stephen Meadows on the sale of his fascinating book We, Robot to Lyons Press.

When the Terminator said, “I’ll be back” he wasn’t kidding around. In fact, he’s been waddling about on the battlefields of Iraq since 2007. The problem, though (aside from the fact that he’s a robot assassin), is that he still needs some debugging; when he gets stuck or falls over – as he does from time to time – he can’t figure out who the bad guy is, and so he starts shooting at his friends.

In December of 2008 the US Navy’s research division received an extensive report titled Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design.  The authors of the report discuss a rather mysterious 2008 event in Iraq in which several American-made robots armed with machine guns malfunctioned and opened fire on ‘friendly’ US soldiers. The authors also point to a 2007 incident when an autonomous “robotic cannon deployed by the South African army malfunctioned, killing nine ‘friendly’ soldiers and wounding 14 others.” The authors outline how hard it is to stop potentially fatal chains of events caused by autonomous military systems, or even systems in cities, homes, and schools that “…process information and can act at speeds incomprehensible to us.” They then coolly conclude, “It would be naive to think such accidents will not happen again.”

What was probably logical, and most interesting about the report, was the advice that was given to address the ethical and moral problems that can occur on the robot-occupied battlefield; give the robots a sense of ethics and morality. But the report takes a turn for the bizarre when the authors offer Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, from the science fiction novel, I, Robot to solve the problem. They offer science fiction as a guiding light by which the US Navy can navigate the rather foggy waters of ethics, war, and autonomous robots. When roboticists for the military begin to rely on science fiction as a solution for their work, we have something worth noticing.

Science fiction has always influenced engineering (the term “Robot” came from Science Fiction) but now science fiction is taking the lead, directing robotics research. While robots have always been the children of science fiction, they don’t just live on faraway battlefields anymore. Science fiction has guided engineering fact. This means that we can now look at science fiction and determine where engineering will go. By doing this we can not only learn more about the world of robots that are emerging and surrounding us but we can also understand where this powerful technology is at, predict what is coming, perceive new industries, learn new trends, and anticipate new problems.

We, Robot will introduce readers to the latest discoveries in robotics and artificial intelligence by looking at science fiction universes (Blade Runner, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc) and robot residents (Wall-E, Iron Man, Terminator, Robocop, HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I, Robot, to name a few), and will show readers how close they are to becoming a reality. It will also categorize them by which will appear earlier than others, which won’t happen for another 50 years, and which ones just won’t happen at all. Through a discussion of robots loved and hated by millions it will provide an informed, entertaining, and often surprising look at what to expect in the next decade as well as in the next year.

 Congratulations to Douglas Gayeton, whose book SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town is being released on September 29th by Welcome Books. I just received my copies of the book and the final result is absolutely stunning. The book is a photographic journey of Douglas’ time spent in Pistoia, a small town in Tuscany. The images themselves are amazing, as he often shot thousands of photos of a scene and then later went back and selected only those that best captured his memories of the scene, combining them into a tableu and adding handwritten notes and stories. Critics have called the technique “flat film” because of the way it folds time into a single image. The end result is simply fascinating, as you not only get to see these wonderful images, but you also learn something about the people in the images and their lives.

In fact, here’s a video where Douglas both explains the technique and shows how the images come together. Wonderful stuff and well worth checking out.

The book also features an introduction by legendary chef Alice Waters, as well as a preface by the founder of the Slow Food Movement, Carlo Petrini.

Last week The Economist wrote a terrific review of Jonathan Baskin’s innovative branding title Branding Only Works on Cattle. Here’s a snippet:

In chatty, bumptious style, Mr Baskin calls the bluff of some traditional branding assumptions. He disputes that people buy products on the strength of brand alone: once distribution, product quality and salesmanship are taken into account, the brand may have very little impact on sales. He also waves away evidence that brain scans reveal high levels of brand awareness, responding that those brand-aware brains don’t necessarily go on to buy the product. “All we can say for sure is that branding might help create awareness, and that awareness is generally better than non-awareness.” But not all publicity is good: “a dumb commercial …is still dumb the third time I see it.”

Mr Baskin does not simply rail, but redefines branding. “For branding to mean something, it has to do something.” In other words, branding must be generated directly by the experience of the user. At a basic level, straplines such as Nike’s “Just do it” and Las Vegas’s “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” work, he says, because they play to feelings that are related to how a product might be used. His notion of branding goes much further, taking in, for example, the way an airline deals with its stranded passengers. The amalgamation of all such company-wide actions emerge to create a brand, he argues.

You can read the rest of the review here. The Economist also gave Branding Only Works on Cattle the lead in their latest newsletter here. Congratulations, Jonathan!

Congratulations(!) go out to Chris Steiner, the author of $20 per Gallon, as we just found out that the book landed on the New York Times non-fiction hardcover extended bestseller list that will be published on August 16th.

Also, the website for the book is now up. It’s at www.20dollarspergallon.com and is worth checking out, as it has a very cool interactive timeline and you can also read an excerpt, check out the reviews, etc.

More great news for Chris Steiner and $20 per Gallon, as he was on The Today Show this morning. Here’s the clip. Congratulations, Chris!

Chris Steiner’s fantastic book $20 per Gallon published yesterday and is generating plenty of positive attention. He was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday, and has reviews published in Publisher’s Weekly, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Chris’ publisher Grand Central has gotten behind the book in a big way as well, running significant ads yesterday in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And here’s a snippet from a TIME Magazine piece that ran yesterday, as well:

In researching this book, what surprised you the most?

Perhaps nothing more than some of the paths our food takes around the world: Norwegian Salmon, for instance, can go from Scandinavian fishing boats to China, where the fish are gutted and cleaned by workers making so little the cost is almost negligible. From there, the fish travel back to their home country, neatly packaged as “local” to smitten shoppers in Norway’s supermarkets.

You mention the relative successes of Shai Agassi, of A Better Place, and Tom Casten, of Recycled Energy Development. What’s been holding back other people with big ideas about energy efficiency?

Congratulations, Chris!

Author Chris Steiner spoke today with Newsweek about his incredible book $20 per Gallon, which is hitting stores now. Here’s a snippet:

In his new book, $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better,Forbes writer Christopher Steiner argues that the increasing cost of fuel will radically change the way we live, from the cities we choose to call home to the way we grow food. NEWSWEEK’S Nancy Cook spoke to Steiner about why he thinks Americans will be forced to restrict plane travel to once a year at most, why solar panels will line the rooftops of apartments, and how gas prices will force suburbanites back into cities. Excerpts:
Cook: What prompted you to write a book that looks so far into the future?
Steiner: The genesis came about a year ago when gas was $4.50 and $5 a gallon. It just got to a point when people who drive a lot were approaching the $1,000 mark a month for their gas. You couldn’t get rid of an SUV. I said to myself, “This price of gas is clearly a psychological trigger that totally got people to change their minds. What other trigger points lie ahead?”

Here’s a link to the complete piece. Congratulations, Chris!

Here’s an interesting CNet piece with author and security guru (and the world’s most famous former hacker) Kevin Mitnick. Here’s a snippet:

Do you feel that your hacking has led to positive change in some way?
Yes. It led to my career. Today I speak around world, I do pen testing all the time–and deep penetration testing, where I go after the most sensitive credentials at a company to see if I can get to the crown jewels. I see what I can do as an ethical hacker. I really enjoy this work because when is it that you can take a criminal activity, legitimize it, and get paid for it? Ethical hacking. It’s not like you can be a drug dealer and go work for Walgreens…A lot of pen testers today have done unethical things in their past during their learning process, especially the older ones because there was no opportunity to learn about security. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, it was all self-taught. So a lot of the old-school hackers really learned on other people’s systems. And at the time, I couldn’t even afford my own computer. A dumb terminal was like $2,000. A 1,200-baud modem was like $1,200. The cost of this technology was out of my range as a high school student so I used to go to local universities and use their system, albeit without their knowledge, to learn.