The Plateau Effect is a powerful law of nature that affects everyone. Learn to identify plateaus and break through any stagnancy in your life— from diet and exercise, to work, to relationships.

The Plateau Effect shows how athletes, scientists, therapists, companies, and musicians around the world are learning to break through their plateaus—to turn off the forces that cause people to “get used to” things—and turn on human potential and happiness in ways that seemed impossible. The book identifies three key flattening forces that generate plateaus, two principles to guide readers in engineering a plateau’s destruction, and three actions to take to achieve peak behavior. It helps us to stop wasting time on things that are no longer of value and to focus on the things that leverage our time and energy in spectacular ways.

Here at Emergent Chaos, we’re fans of both of the authors of the Plateau Effect. Bob Sullivan is the journalist who got us on a ChoicePoint kick, which might have been something of a Plateau Effect, good and bad, for us.

I look forward to reading the book, and finding out!

You can learn more about it at http://www.plateaueffect.com/.

A friend is trying to track down a science fiction story in which the president had a death sentence at the end of their term.

I know you’re all smart and good looking and at least one of you will know the exact author and title.

You probably know Dennis Fisher because of his writings on Threatpost or his Digital Underground podcast, where I’ve appeared several times. I wanted to help him spread the news that his first novel “Motherless Children” is now available. You should check it out.

I’ll get my review done shortly, but I wanted to help spread the word.

A while back, Kai Roer graciously sent me an electronic copy of the book Cloud Security Rules that he co-authored with an all-start cast including luminaries Wendy Nather and our very own New School’s Alex Hutton. All in all, it’s a solid read covering the gamut of topics from Risk and Compliance to technology versus the human factor and finishes nicely with a section on business models. A few chapters about more about security without being a particular focus on the cloud(tm), but that’s not particularly a problem.

My only real complaint about the book is that with so many authors, things don’t always flow as smoothly as they could when moving from chapter to chapter. This is however made up for by the general high quality of the work. In particular, un addition to the authors mentioned above, you’ll also want to make sure to read the sections by Lori MacVittie, Brian Honan and Kevin Riggins.

This book is targeted at decision makers, managers and othesr who need to understand cloud from business view, so if that’s you, I encourage you to read this book. Definitely worth the price.

You should go read The Lost Books of the Odyssey. You’ll be glad you did.

I wrote this review in April of 2008, and failed to post it. Part of my reason is that I have little patience for, and less to say about most experimental fiction. I am in this somewhat like a luddite, unwilling to tolerate experiments which ought to have been kept confined to a laboratory. And so, knowing that this book won a prize worried me greatly, but for reasons which I’ll get to in a moment, I persevered, and I’m glad that I did.

The “lost books” consist of very short stories, usually of a few pages or so. The context, is of course, the Odyssey, and the actions of its heros and villians.

It falls into that class of writing which is simply a delight to read. The stories are beautifully crafted, surprising and casting new lights on old stories.

The richness and character of the writing is exceptional and engaging, all the more so for the origin and nature of the work. As Zachary Mason explains in the introduction, “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” were in fact lost and recovered, in a feat perhaps nearly as impressive for its cryptanalytic acumen as for its literary importance.

It is entirely worth reading, and since I first read it, it has been winning substantial literary prizes, and the New York Times calls it “dazzling.”

Finally, I should mention that Zachary and I were roommates at Miss Hall’s School for Precocious Youth in Arkham, Mass. I would like to offer my most sincere apologies for anything he remembers.

[Updated, fixed a spelling error]

I just finished reading RSnake’s new book Detecting Malice and I can say without a doubt that it is one of the best technical books I have ever read. Furthermore, I can tell you that it is, without a doubt, the best web security book I have ever had the pleasure to read. Imagine a book that is as engaging as RSnake’s or Jeremiah’s blog, but even more so.
This is not a book on how to build secure websites, there are plenty of those already. This is a book for security practitioners who get to deal with the site after it’s been built and deployed. It is full of great advice and information about not just how to detect attacks, but also how to distinguish between human attackers, regular users, bots and spiders.
This book should be on the purchase list of every security geek and if Rob hadn’t graciously given me a copy, I’d have already sent him my $40. Send him your money and make him a rich man.