Applied Abstractions

October 5, 2008

Education and technology - a historic view

Nice review of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz's The Race Between Education and Technology which goes into my ever-expanding pile of books to get. Main point: Income inequality decreased in the first half of the 1900s, then, after 1980, increased again. In chapter 8, available in PDF format, is the following conclusion:

Our central conclusion is that when it comes to changes in the wage structure and returns to skill, supply changes are critical, and education changes are by far the most important on the supply side. The fact was true in the early years of our period when the high school movement made Americans educated workers and in the post-World War II decades when high school graduates became college graduates. But the same is also true today when the slowdown in education at various levels is robbing America of the ability to grow strong together.

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September 22, 2008

Little brother pretty fast

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (available for free download here if you don't want to buy it) is a "young adult" book on the topic of surveillance and personal freedom and privacy. The story is about Marcus, nicked M1k3y, who after a terrorist attack hits San Francisco gets detained by the DHS, denied his rights, and decides to take revenge. This involves quite a bit of hacking, security, cryptography and subterfuge.

The purpose of this book is both to tell a story and to teach the (young) reader something about personal freedoms, critical thinking and how to preserve your privacy in an increasingly connected and digitized world. This shows - there are some quite detailed discussions of this, somewhat simplified versions of Cory Doctorow's speeches and writings on these subjects.

I sort of liked the book - it is important from the perspective of raising a generation of youngsters that know enough about the technology to maintain some sort of privacy, and encourage creative thinking - loosely defined as demanding logic and actions in proportion to consequences from the authorities. Cory's book has gotten to the NYT bestseller list, and deservedly so. This is something to be happy about, for Cory spreads the word of his book electronically (as well as the book) and this nicely vindicates that strategy and points towards the future for aspiring authors. And, as someone struggling to get young people to read about and be interested in technology - not just what it does and how it looks but how it works - I see the value in the book.

But I do wish the literary qualities, such as the plot and the character development, were a bit more ambitions. On the other hand, Neal Stephenson does that, and Little Brother is an excellent introduction to Cryptonomicon, which set the reader up for the Baroque Trilogy and the idea that, well, history matters.

So, highly recommended. Wonder when we will see the first Norwegian translation? (I have translated for Cory before, but am a bit under the weather here. Anyone for a "dugnad"?). It is not like anyone needs to ask permission...

(On a side note, the paper copy I got from Amazon had half of page 197/8 torn out. Rather than sending it back to be replaced (which I know Amazon would do without argument), I printed out those pages from Cory's web site and put them inside the book. Saves work and time. Same thing as when I switched from a static web page to a wiki for my course syllabi - now the customers, i.e., my students, fix broken links without bothering me.....)

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September 15, 2008

David Foster Wallace dead at 46

This is sad news indeed. David Foster Wallace was one of my favorite writers. I never made it through Infinite Jest, but loved his essays - on television, cruise ships, and tennis (I, II and III) - with incredible humor, deep knowledge of many an arcane subject and limitless playfulness with language. Side sentences with parentheses with footnotes with footnotes, yet all of it making sublime sense.

And then he goes and hangs himself. What a loss, and what a waste.

(Via Paul Kedrosky.)

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September 14, 2008

CAMRB

Mary Beard wants a campaign for real bookstores, and solicits suggestions for "real" bookstores. Here are my favorites (and woefully incomplete, I know):

• The Harvard Book Store, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. A must since Wordsworth disappeared. Good basement with used books and remainders.
• The Harvard COOP, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. Managed by Barnes and Noble, but with enough sophistication and volume both for staff and clientele that the selection is good and the advice competent, unless you happen upon an employee from the days before B&N took over.
• City Lights, San Francisco. A bit of a legend and a tad long in the underground tooth, but excellent selection and very knowledgeable staff (even if you arrive in a business suit.)
• Tronsmo, Oslo. Small bookstore with interesting books (and really good on cartoons, which is not my thing). Truly independent, good for a surprise every time you stick your head in.
• Blackwell's, Oxford, UK. Enormous and somewhat disorganized, but selection, selection, selection.
• The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop, Amherst, MA. Only been there once, but liked it a lot (and so did my elder daughter.)

Other suggestions (or, by all means, leave comments over with Mary.)

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September 10, 2008

Classic writing...

ACM Ubiquity re-published something referred to as a classic today, which to me came as a surprise, especially since, well, I wrote that thing in an hour or so as the result of a direct question from John Gehl, former editor. But hey, being called a classic can't be all bad, can it?

Alternatively, cucumber season is raging across the pond...

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September 4, 2008

Big data in Nature

Nature (the magazine) has an excellent special report on big data, with articles on analysis, history, data centers, and much more. Best of all, it is freely available - enjoy!

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August 21, 2008

Not exactly anathema

Steven Levy goes nuts over Neal Stephenson's latest over in Wired. And I am on my way over to Amazon....

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June 24, 2008

Seagulls and Pixar

This review (by Michael Hirschhorn) of a new book on Pixar contains the best sentence I read today: "[Intellectual property lawsuits] follow successful entertainment businesses the way seagulls trail fishing boats."

Anyone else remember the "bert, bert, bert"* "mine, mine, mine" seagulls in Finding Nemo? Imagine them with briefcases.....

*see comments...

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June 11, 2008

Shared blindness

Ben Elton: Blind Faith, 2007

Ben Elton describes a society where reason is not allowed - where everything is based on faith and feeling, where everybody has to share what they are doing, where everything is ostensibly permitted, even encouraged, where everyone is famous. By law.

This world is a Web 2.0 version of 1984, nightmarish in its shallowness. Elton manages to make it both scary and believable - aside from the the inevitable screw-ups when it comes to technology (the hero creates some software that is decidedly primitive given real search-engines' capabilities for sentiment analysis and finding links between information items.

Recommended.

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May 25, 2008

Thinking about warfare, the last 100 years

Martin van Creveld: The Changing Face of War, Presidido 2008

Martin van Creveld gained fame for The Transformation of War, a book that should have been read by the USA before venturing into Iraq (see previous review). In this surprisingly succinct volume, he summarizes the changes in thinking about warfare "from Marne to Iraq", showing how war has changed from something conducted in a short and contained spurts by an army via the "total war" first voiced by Ludendorff to today's prolonged insurgencies, where the perpetrators blend back into the general population and advanced weapons fired from afar only can make the situation worse.

(As a digression, he characterizes the German invasion of Norway as rather risky and badly planned - it worked largely because the Norwegians were unbelievably unprepared.)

van Creveld divides war into two main phases: Before and after the atom bomb. After the atom bomb, total war was no longer possible, since it would mean mutual destruction. Instead, war has (for the most part) become guerilla war, where a militarily equipped power is battling a much weaker enemy, and, because the enemy is weak, become weak themselves.

There is almost no instances military powers successfully fighting insurgents - though since the history of fighting insurgencies are largely written by the losers, who argue that they could have won if not hindered by politicians, the press or lack of resources.

To fight an insurgency, the power in question must be legal, i.e., treat the insurgency like a criminal activity rather than a war (much as the British did in Northern Ireland, where they, incidentally, had a local police force and spoke the language.) Either that (which takes a lot of patience) or they must use cruelly applied force, with openness and without apology (as Hafez Assad did in Syria.) Trying to fight the war from a distance leads to a quagmire, but going in to fight the insurgents with their own means leads to losses and loses the war on the home front.

The book is admirably succinct when it describes the evolution in thinking about warfare up to about 1950 (showing, among other things, the increasing use of the scientific method in weapons and, to a lesser extent, tactics evolution.) It gets a bit repetitive on the question of how to fight insurgency. But the verdict on the US' fight in Iraq leaves no doubts about what the author thinks about the technical "revolution in warfare" and what it does:

Once the main units of the Iraqi army had been defeated and dispersed, most of the sensors, data links, and computers that did so much to aid in the American victory proved all but useless. In part, this was because they had been designed to pick up the "signatures" of machines, not people. But it was also because these sensors did not function very well in the densely inhabited, extremely complex environments where the insurgents operated. Myriad methods could be used to neutralize or mislead whatever sensors did work. Worst of all, sensors are unable to penetrate people's minds. As a result, almost four years after the war had started, the American troops still had no idea who was fighting them: Ba'athists or common criminals, foreign terrorists or devout believers. [...]

Soaking up almost $450 billion a year, the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen was vainly trying to combat twenty to thirty thousand insurgents. Its ultramodern sensors, sophisticated communications links, and acres of computers could not prevent its opponents from operating where they wanted, when they wanted, and as they wanted; [...] To recall the well-known, Vietnam-era song: When will they ever learn? (Ch. 6.5)

van Creveld offers few conclusions, aside from patience, people on the ground and good intelligence, all of which are hard to acquire and maintain. Otherwise, the insurgents will eventually win, if only because the military powers' only way of winning is not participating.

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Formula for spying

Mark Seal has a great article in Wired about how McLaren got hold of Ferrari's designs and the twists and turns that followed.

What blows my mind is the size of the budgets these guys are willing to throw away. A company like McLaren spends a lot of money and develops technology that eventually goes into production cars (at least, that's the theory), but with the hundreds of millions spent here, how can anyone recuperate it? Ferrari, at least, has a brand of car to sell, McLaren cooperates with Mercedes, but it still looks like rich man's game to me.

Anyway, an entertaining story, showing that you better treat your employees right (how could Ferrari management not react before their chief mechanic had spilled the beans?) and do your own scanning if you are hoping to avoid betrayal or getting caught betraying.

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May 9, 2008

You are what you eat, and we eat oil

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, 2006

Michael Pollan is the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, where he basically took on the flood of diet advice and replaced it with "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In this book, he discusses the problem of what to eat today, which is not something most species wonder about, either because food is scarce and they will eat everything they can lay their hands on, or because they are so specialized that they can only eat one kind of food (like koalas and eucalyptus leaves, of pandas and bamboo shoots and leaves.) This choice is faced by all omnivores, such as humans.

The book tracks down the history of three meals: One industrial, one pastoral (i.e., organically grown), and one personal, where Pollan had to make everything himself, including hunting down the meat. Or, in other words, one meal from industrial society, one from the traditionally agricultural, and one from a society of foragers. The further back you go, the more he has to fudge the experience (and the same goes for the producers/foragers, I suspect.)

The industrial part of the book talks about corn, a plant that supplies the basis for most of what we eat (from corn flakes to meat (cattle now eat corn rather than grass) to sweeteners). Corn is highly productive, but cannot exist without human intervention. The rather twisted logic here is that the productivity of the farmer destroys farm life, and may destroy food as well.

The organically grown part is based on an analysis of an organic farm ("small" organic as opposed to "big" organic such as Whole Foods) which relies on local markets, crop and species rotation, and quality rather than quantity for profits. Back-breaking work and battles with a regulatory regime set up for industrialized farming (for instance, the meat processing plant needs to have a bathroom specifically for the USDA inspector).

The foraging part, of course, verges into the artificial - Pollan hunts feral pigs, but does it by SUV and with a high-powered rifle with a scope. But it is fun, and allows for some pretty interesting discussions of our relationship to food.

The book is full of interesting viewpoints and facts, and tells you things that you did not know - for instance that "free-range" chicken means that the chicken have access to grass and air. However, since they only live 8 weeks and have access to grass and air through a door that they don't dare venture out of, having always lived inside, this does not mean the chicken has had a life that much different from the fully industrialized chicken.

Here is one quote I liked (page 293): "The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from carbohydrates. Food faddists take note [...]"

In other words, the book is the supply-side prelude to In Defense of Food. I have not read that one, but it is on my list of books to read, triggered by Omnivore's Dilemma. In the meantime, I listen to his talk at Google, and so can you:

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April 25, 2008

Cellphones against poverty

Excellent article about how cellphones reduce poverty from New York Times Magazines.

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April 12, 2008

The longest love story

Audrey Nieffenegger: The Time Traveller's Wife, Vintage, 2004

One of the favorite movies around our house, the kind that you bring out with a bottle of wine when you want to kick back and not think about anything in particular, is Groundhog Day.  The premise is rather simple: Phil, a self-important and cynical weather man, played by Bill Murray, goes to small town to do a rather boring job of reporting on the annual awakening of the groundhog. A snowstorm closes the roads, the team has to stay another night - and when Murray wakes up the next morning, it is the previous day all over again. And so it continues - every day he wakes up to the same day, nobody except him remember what has happened.

Groundhog Day is a great movie not for that simple idea, but for how the movie manages to build on that simple premise. Aside from the one little thing of repeating the same day over and over, nothing Phil does is illogical, as he progresses from enjoyment to despair through development to, eventually, redemption. Anyone seeing it could imagine being Phil. It is a very intelligent comedy.

The Time Traveller's Wife (the book, that is, I haven't seen the movie) has a similar concept: The main protagonists are Henry and Clare, "who met when Clare was six and Henry thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. This can happen because Henry time-travels - involuntarily, always showing up buck naked in unexpected places, but very often around Clare. He even meets himself, at various ages. Clare and Henry have to come to terms with the misery of sometimes knowing what is going to happen in the future (which, of course, can be useful if you want to play the stock market) as well as the more practical difficulties of showing up in various places without clothes and with only a dim recollection of where you are and, especially, what time it is.

The novel succeeds for the same reasons that Groundhog Day succeeds: It manages to tell a believable story in an unbelievable setting. Clare and Henry must somehow shape a normal life out of an incredibly difficult situation, and how they do it is both funny and moving - a love story where you can never be sure of anything. At no point does Niederegger veer off into science fiction-like explanations of why Henry has this "rare condition", just as Groundhog Phil never tries to find out why he wakes up to the same day every morning. The book is also delightfully free of New Age-isms and spirituality. Instead, the focus is on the central characters and the relationship between them, how they have deal with the practicalities (stashing clothes in places Henry is likely to turn up, learning to pick pockets and locks to survive) and emotional turmoil. Both Clare and Henry learn things about each other's futures - how do you deal with knowing that something bad is going to happen, for instance,  do you tell the person about it or not?

This is an extremely well thought out novel, at no point does the time-hopping (not to mention the oral form, where the characters tell their story in short episodes) get tedious (with a possible exception for their wedding, which gets a little contrived and sugary). It is a long love-story (76 years, to be exact) but worth the time spent.

Recommended.

(and thanks to Julie for leaving this one around the house so I could take it with me and make Frankfurt-LA seem a tad bit shorter.....).

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April 8, 2008

Geronotagressiveness

John Scalzi: Old Man’s War

I don’t read much science fiction – so far I think I have managed one Heinlein novel, a thick collection of classical sci-fi short stories (some of them extremely good, such as E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops,) most of what Neal Stephenson has written, and now John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. The latter was available as a free download from Tor Books (you have to sign up for their newsletters to be allowed to download it), and as such an excellent way to check out Scalzi’s serious writing (I am a faithful reader of Whatever, his blog.)

Well, I apologize, shouldn’t-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth and so on, but this was a bit of a disappointment. The starting premise is fine, the language is straightforward, but I kept looking for a plot of some kind, and instead got a very basic picaresque about old people volunteering to be intergalactic soldiers fighting aliens in return for brand new bodies. (Not very picaresque either, since the hero becomes a highly decorated commander as the story progresses.) Entertaining and all that, competently written, the world Scalzi creates and populates is interesting, at least in the beginning, but the lack of any non-obvious plot to drive things forward makes it hard to get enthusiastic about the book.

It is obviously the beginning of a series, but still: Where are the surprises, the plot twists, the exciting insights? Not to mention, where are the personalities - these old people going out to fight a war all seem very cartoonish, without much difference in what they say and do, and certainly not much reflection about the task their are given, a few tactical shrewdnesses excepted. They all seem to shelve a lifetime of experience (and, presumably, thought) in favor of a "well, we would be dead now if it wasn't for joining up, so dying is no big deal."

I think I know why I don’t read sci-fi so much: Most sci-fi is, to put it bluntly, to the male mind what bodice-rippers are to females. Sci-fi works best, at least for me, when it says something about our own time, which is another way of saying that it works when it takes a current phenomenon and projects it out into the future. Excellent examples include Ann Warren Griffith's  short story Captive Audience (written in the 50s, about how every product contains advertising, a surprisingly relevant point in these adsensical times); Philip K. Dick's Second Variety (written about 1953, too), about a future earth which has been evacuated by humans because autonomous weapon systems have taken over; or Neal Stephenson’s novels about virtuality (Snow Crash) and nanotechnology (Diamond age). This approach is hard work, for there has to be science – and thus research – in the fiction, or fiction in the science.

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March 9, 2008

Existential walkabout, in comfort

Walker Percy: The Moviegoer (1960)

Reread this one after 10 years, to see whether if I could understand better what the fuzz is about (The Moviegoer is regularly held up as a major event in American novel-writing.) The protagonist , Binx Bolling, lives a comfortable if nondescript life as a small-time stockbroker in New Orleans, going to movies and hitting on his secretaries. During most of the book goes on a "search", essentially trying to figure out what to do with himself. In the background lurks a changing society and traumatic experiences from Korea. Whether he succeeds or not is not clear by the end of the book, since the most dramatic thing happening is that he takes the train to Chicago from New Orleans and eventually figures out what to do (and whom to do it with).

I don't know. Somehow I have read this before, be it with Crime and punishment, Age of Reason, Hunger, or even Catcher in the Rye. The main distinction is that Binx Bolling is relatively well off and competent in what he does, even if most of his family and friends do not think much of it. The overwhelming theme of the book is Bolling trying to come to term with whether this comfortable life is all there is. Perhaps the book signaled the start of a more rebellious 1960s (it is comparatively racy for that time) but I think its time, unfortunately, has passed.

Or maybe I am just missing something. Is this really all?

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February 28, 2008

Wisfulness in portions

Neil Gaiman: Smoke and Mirrors

I haven’t read anything by Neil Gaiman, but one of my daughters has a copy of Coraline in her bookshelf. Nevertheless, he comes highly recommended from people I respect, so when I was picking over the airport bookstore in Orlando (admittedly not the most fertile of cultural hunting grounds) before an 18-hour flight to China, Smoke and Mirrors was a natural choice (actually, the only one).

The book is a collection of Gaiman’s early short stories, most of them realistically written with a slight twist of the supernatural. Each story at some point crosses into fairy-tale territory, but does it so discreetly that it seems natural and to be expected. I particularly liked Troll Bridge – about a young boy who meets a troll under a disused railway bridge – and Gold Fish Pond and other stories, which isn’t magical at all (it is a partly fictional reminiscence about a movie writer’s visit to Hollywood.) Gaiman's stories have a certain wistfulness about them, they are stories about people who want, somehow, to escape their surroundings and eventually do.

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February 1, 2008

The scientific method

I am currently re-reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and came across this section, which is one of the best explanations of the scientific method I know of (explained in terms of motorcycle maintenance, of course). So, here goes:

...this morning I talked about hierarchies of thought--the system. Now I want to talk about methods of finding one's way through these hierarchies--logic.

Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then it goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then it goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then it goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, then it goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, you can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps. That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.

Deductive inferences do the reverse. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation. For example, if from reading the hierarchy of facts about the machine, the mechanic knows the horn of the cycle is powered exclusively from the battery, then he can logically infer that if the battery is dead, the horn will not work. That is deduction. Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences that weave back and forth between the observed machine and the mental hierarchy of the machine found in the manuals. The correct program for this interweaving is formalized as scientific method.

Actually I have never seen a cycle-type maintenance problem complex enough to really require full-scale formal scientific method. Repair problems are not that hard. When I think of formal scientific method, an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut. A huge bulldozer--slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic's techniques, but you know in the end you are going to get it. There is no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. When you've hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brains and nothing works, and you know that Nature this time has really decided to be difficult, you say, "Okay, Nature, that's the end of the nice guy," and you crank up the formal scientific method.

For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so you know at all times where you are, where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complicated you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don't know and have to give up. In cycle maintenance, things are not that involved, but when confusion starts, it's a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problem straightens out your head as to what they really are.

The logical statements written down into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypothesis as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high school lab notebooks. But the purpose here is no longer just busywork. The purpose is precise guidance of thought that will fail if they are not accurate.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't mislead you into thinking you know something you don't actually know. There is not a mechanic or scientist or technical alive who hasn't suffered from that one so much that he's not instinctively on guard. That's the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don't give it opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.

In Part One of formal scientific method , which is the statement of the problem, the main skill is in stating no more than you positively know. It is much better to enter a statement "Solve Problem: Why doesn't cycle work? Which sounds dumb, but is correct, than it is to enter a statement "Solve Problem: what is wrong with the electric system?" when you don't absolutely know the trouble is in the electric system. What you should state is "Solve Problem: What is wrong with the cycle?" and then state as the first entry in Part Two: "Hypothesis Number One: The trouble is in the electrical system." You think of as many hypothesis as you can, then you design experiments to test them to see which are true and which are false.

This careful approach to the beginning questions keeps you from taking a wrong turn which might cause you weeks of extra work or can even hang you up completely. Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on.

Part Three, that part of formal scientific method called experimentation, is sometimes though of by romantics as all of science itself because that's the only part with much visual surface. They see lots of tubes and bazaar equipment an people running around making discoveries. They do not see the experiment as part of a larger intellectual process and so they often confuse experiments with demonstrations, which look the same. A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars' worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his effort are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to Nature. The T.V. scientist who mutters sadly "the experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicated results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.

Skill at this point consists of using experiments that test only the hypothesis in question, nothing less, nothing more. If the horn honks, and the mechanic concludes the whole electrical system is working, he is in deep trouble. He has reached an illogical conclusion. The honking horn only tells him that the battery and horn are working. To design an experiment properly he has to think very rigidly in terms of what directly causes what. This you know from the hierarchy. The horn doesn't make the cycle go. Neither does the battery, except in a very indirect way. The point at which the electrical system directly causes the engine to fire is at the spark plugs, and if you don't test here, at the output of the electrical system, you will never really know whether the failure is electrical or not.

To test properly the mechanic removes the plug and lays it against the engine so the base around the plug is electrically grounded, kicks the starter lever and watches the spark-plug gap for a blue spark. If there isn't any he can conclude one of two things: (A) there is an electrical failure or, (B) his experiment is sloppy. If he is experiences, he will try it a few more times, checking connections, trying every way he can think of to get that plug to fire. Then, if he can't get it to fire, he finally concludes that A is correct, there is an electrical failure, and the experiment is over. He has proved that his hypothesis is correct.

In the final category, Conclusions, skill comes in stating no more than the experiment has proved. It hasn't proved that when he fixes the electrical system the motorcycle will start. there may be other things wrong. But he does know that the motorcycle isn't going to run until the electrical system is working and he sets up the next formal question: "Solve Problem: what is wrong with the electrical system?"

He then sets up hypothesis for these and tests them. By asking the right questions and choosing the right tests and drawing the right conclusions the mechanic works his way down the echelons of the motorcycle hierarchy until he has found the exact specific cause or causes of the engine failure, and then he changes them so that they no longer cause the failure.

An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don't like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.

(pages 99-103 from Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Bantam.)

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The technology canon

My first real boss, Erling Iversen, used to say that there were two kinds of IT people: Those who had read Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and those who hadn't gotten around to it yet. In his opinion, what you got out of that book said much about how you thought about technology. Which leads me to wonder - do we have a canon of technology writing?

A canon is a list of books that you have to read to consider yourself knowledgeable - or, rather, educated in the classical sense - within a field. Creating lists is always controversial, and canons are more controversial than anything (witness all the discussions when Harold Bloom wrote The Western Canon.

The list I would like to create, though, is rather specialized: It consists of the books any technology thinker should read. I am not sure what I mean by that, aside from wanting to put together a list of books I like and that have influenced me, but hopefully the criteria becomes clearer as the list grows. One criterion is that the book must have stood the test of time, to be relevant even though the technology has changed (and, consequently, a book that I will occasionally re-read). A second (or perhaps it is the same criterion) is that its lessons apply outside the technology it discusses, whihc is another way to say that it will be readable by non-technologists.

Here is a brief start, just off the top of my head:

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
• Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age by J. D. Bolter
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
• The Mythical Man-month by Frederic Brooks
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• The Control Revolution by James Beniger
• Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation by James Utterback
• The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen
• Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
• The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler
• The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

...and probably others (a whole lot of Internet-oriented stuff missing here), but I am beginning to stray. Anyway, ideas for books that every technology thinker should have read.

Suggestions?

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January 26, 2008

Delightfully Absurdistan

Gary Shteingart: Absurdistan

Absurdistan bears the same relationship to Russia that John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces bears to New Orleans: It paints a wildly satiric picture that somehow comes up more true than the original. The Ignatius O'Reilly of this book is Misha Vainberg, the grossly overweight, rich and rubbed son of a Jewish oligarch who eventually finds himself stranded in the rapidly disintegrating Republic of Absurdistan (known for its TV remote control factory), an oil-rich enclave by the Kaspian Sea. Misha wants to return to New York where went to Accidental college and learned to appreciate rap, junk food and assorted versions of psychoanalysis:

At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicate white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those smposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn't just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.

It really is no point trying to explain the plot here, to the extent that there is one. The language and the casual kicks in many directions (the role of the Golly Burton company in instigating civil war to get various military contracts, for instance) is howlingly funny and yet oddly irritating. Misha Vainberg is a despicable character, but with enough money and borrowed cachet that nobody seems to care. he blunders through a disintegrating republic where people are shot in the streets and bombed for the benefit of television, returing to his hotel room to read today's menu and seeking to escape on the American Express VIP train:

"Wow", I said in English. I turned around to look at my manservant. "Did you see that, Timofey? We did it. We saved a life. What does it say in the Tamud? 'he who has saved a life has saved and entire world.' I am not religious, but my God! What an accomplishment. how do you feel, Sakha?

But Sakha could not supply the words of gratitude I deserved. He merely breathed and drove. I decided to give him some time. I was already componsing an electronic message to Rouenna about the day's exploits. What had she told me in that dream about the eight-dollar apple? Be a man. Make me proud. Done and done. [...]

Respectful of the Hyatt sign, the soldiers waved us through, the locals banging on the sides of our vehicle, hoping we could enable their safe passage to the hotel. "Unfortunately we have to save our own hides first," I said to Sakha.

Unfortunately, Sakha, a local democracy advocate with uncertain background and appalling dress sense, gets shot about two minutes later. This eventually earns him a statue and Misha the post of Minister of Multicultural Affairs, with the job of trying to get Israel to finance a Holocaust center and the USA to invade.

And there you are - a novel impossible to classify, howlingly funny, and highly recommended.

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January 24, 2008

Carr on computers as current

Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

In his excellent book Holidays in Hell, P. J. O'Rourke visits Future World (an attraction at Disney World) and says that it is "like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, 'Soon you'll be finished with dinner.'"

I get the same feeling reading Carr's book (an advance copy) - it is well written, stylish and easily recognizeable like Disney World - and understandable to the masses. The main message of the book is that because of faster networks, computing will be centralized and made accessible like electric power. Carr even draws a line back to the history of electric power provisioning. All very well, we already see this happening with Google applications and Gmail. But I first heard this prediction in 1990, spoken not as a wild speculation of the future but as a likely and not particularly exciting outcome by my thesis advisor, professor Jim McKenney at the Harvard Business School.

The centralized and ubiquitous computing future Carr eloquently predicts is, in principle, a return to shared mainframes accessed over telephone lines, only cheaper and faster by orders of magnitude. The mainframe lost dominance to the PC because people wanted control of their own computing and their own data, so they chose a cheap, weak and unreliable computing platform over one that offered stability, performance (at least in the aggregate) and reliable backups. Otherwise known as a disruptive technology.

Many hard disk crashes and viruses later, a significant portion of the populace have not yet moved their files to Google Docs and are unlikely to do so. For that matter, I would venture that more information and computing is still done on mainframes than on Internet-accessible servers. That is not where the innovation is, true, but new computing platforms come in addition to other platforms, not as replacements.

So we will move into the Cloud, but for social computing, collaboration, and information lookup. People will still want their local storage and (at least perceived) local control. And will end up with a three-tiered personal computer architecture: Traditional centralized computers for transactional systems that demand global recalculation (like airline reservation systems), personal storage and processing for the very personal (where are you going to store those photos, you said?) and cloud-based computing for stuff we want to find and share.

Oh well. This is not news. I know Carr's book is written for the great unwashed, and I admire his language and clarity of examples, but it is like Tom Friedman's The World is Flat: If you have been reasonably awake and facing in the right direction the last 10 years or so, you will not find any surprises here.

And that's a pity, for I read books for ideas, not for summaries. And this one, for all its elegance, had me dozing off more than switching on.

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January 22, 2008

Atlantic wall tumbling down

The Atlantic is following the New York Times lead (or, rather, example) and tearing down its paywall so that even non-subscribers can access its articles and archives. This is yet another indication that in the media world, the choice is now between not-quite-penniless relevance and no-longer-so-profitable obscurity, and that the scale is tipping further and further over from the latter to the former.

The point, of course, is that The Atlantic now is linkable, debatable and taggable in this Next Generation Enterprise of ours. I will celebrate by linking to two classic Atlantic articles by Tracy Kidder: Flying Upside Down and The Ultimate Toy, both of them from The Soul of a New Machine (1981), still the best case study (and, come to think of it, introductory text book) on leading techies I have ever read.

Enjoy. And link.

(Via The New York Times and Undercurrent.) 

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January 7, 2008

Henry James taking a bow

David Lodge: Author, Author

I have seen this book described as "tepid", apparently because it does not contain scandals or a hard-hitting plot or whatever, but it is a study in indecisiveness - an author wanting to find money and fame as a playwright, but lacking the will both to shape his work to fit the format and a willingness to commit his best work to it. Many a scientist seeking money as a consultant will recognize the feeling, at least I do....

And it works - the "not quite documentary, not quite biograhy, not quite novel" format gives a great impression of the era moving from Dickens to Wilde, with Henry James wanting the latter's fame using the tools of the former. Another fascination is the time scale of things, and the easy living - while worried about money and deadlines, James had money for servants, a secretary, and leisurely trips to Paris and Venice for weeks and months to write and contemplate. His meticulousness with language was such that a large expense was telegraph fees for last-minute corrections. One suspects he would have been a great blogger, with infrequent but meticulously crafted, long entries.

Recommended, as is anything by David Lodge.

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January 3, 2008

System from the mess

David Weinberger: Everything is miscellaneous.

(Somehow it seems fitting to link to the blog rather than the Amazon page here.)

Weinberger argues (and here, for once, I can say that I have been there as well) that with the Web and digital, searchable information, we can rely on categorization less. We can move everything into the category "miscellaneous" and establish order by search, metadata extraction, etc.

The book lays out a detailed and very well written argument. I my summary seems overly short, it is because many of the ideas were familiar to me - but Weinberger writes beautifully, yet tersely, and this will, no doubt, be a standard reference for years to come.

Highly recommended!

Chapter summary (very short):

Chapter 1: The new order of order

Chapter 2: Alphabetization and its discontents
- alphabets are arbitrary, and alphabetization took a long time to be adopted
- topic-based ordering fails because of disagreements about order and the rate of change of knowledge

Chapter 3: The Geography of knowledge
- lists (the first order of order)
- Dewey decimal system
- knowledge is evolving, so system quickly becomes outdated

Chapter 4: Lumps and splits
- trees (the second order of order)
- Linnæus
- facet-based ordering (Colon Classification)

Chapter 5: The laws of the jungle
- tags (the third order of order)
- del.icio.us and Wikipedia

Chapter 6: Smart leaves
- metadata application; identification by UPC, RFID, tags

Chapter 7: Social knowing
- recommendation engines

Chapter 8: What nothing says
- metadata generation

Chapter 9: Messiness as a virtue
- semantic web too ordered, Flickr is a better metaphor, include and postpone

Chapter 10: The work of knowledge
- how the work of knowledge is changed, things defined directly in terms of their relationship to other things
- include and postpone, order applied later, emergent order

Coda: Misc.

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December 16, 2007

Goodreads is pretty good

My old colleague and fellow bookworm Nick Morgan invited med to Goodreads, a book community. This is a dangerously addictive site, I could envision moving my entire book collection into it. Slanted towards bestsellers and classics, but hey, that's what the world looks like...

 

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December 15, 2007

A really cool tool

For some reason, I have always like this passage from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

Now, when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he'd been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes.  A certain amount of time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal in to smaller pieces.  Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others.  A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand would be accomplished with a power saw.  Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and there fore called for larger power saws.  But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was  imposing some kind of stress on the machine.  It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam.  But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw.  The bandsaw, its supply or blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room.  It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure.  It was the size of a car.  The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things with that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives.  its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a  mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop.  When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it.  Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes.  Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but id didn't seem to notice that it was doing anything.  It wasn't even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down.  Never heated up.

This is what constitutes a really cool tool....Stephenson followed this up in his comparison of various kinds of computer systems in In the beginning...was the command line, a similar snippet of philosophy of the tools we use and the tools we are in awe of.

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November 27, 2007

Jipi and the paranoid chip

I just stumbled across this wonderful little story by Neal Stephenson: Jipi and the paranoid chip. Just the thing to assign to my students for the discussion of whether computers can be smarter than human beings some day.

In typical Neal Stephenson fashion, it has some of the meandering storyline of a shaggy dog story, with witty details on technology and economics. But fun, especially with the little twist in the penultimate sentence...

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November 24, 2007

A view from 2027

Cory Doctorow has a great short story called Other People's Money in Forbes - a snapshot from a future where it pays to be small and do physical fabrication. I remain unconvinced that the market for artfully designed retro-statues created from discarded consumer electronics would scale as elegantly as the fabrication and design process would in this story. But the take on VCs and the term "Silly Valley" made me smile.

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November 18, 2007

Shaken, not speared

Apparently, Bill Bryson's latest book (published in the UK in September) is about Shakespeare. The Sunday Times had an essay on Shakespeare by Bryson in August. Looks like the introduction.

Chalk it up as a stocking stuffer... 

Posted by Espen at 7:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2007

In a flat world, literally

Tom Friedman has come out with an updated version of The World is Flat, and on page 302, he cites my Ubiquity essay on why you should study math in high school:

Fame! Now, if only fortune would follow.... 

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Paul Fussell video interview

One of my favorite authors, Paul Fussell, is interviewed for two hours on Doing Battle - The Making of a Skeptic and The Boys' Crusade.

This shows the value of Wikipedia (where I found the link) and distribution of video over the Internet. I don't think there are that many people interested in an hour's interview with an author not much published in Norway. On a Sunday morning, to boot.

By the way, here is "The Mucker Pose", the essay Fussell talks about, unfortunately behind Harper's paywall, but they will learn eventually.

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September 18, 2007

The irrelevance and dangers of religion

Christopher Hitchens: god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve Books, 2007

Synopsis: Religion is, on overwhelming balance, a force for evil in the world. It is unnecessary, malevolent, and impedes mankind’s march towards truth and a livable future. Time to rid ourselves of it.

Christopher Hitchens, the current pretender to the throne of the independent and skeptical intellectual first occupied by Mencken in about 50 years ago, does not pull his punches in this extended essay. He sees no value in religion at all - “religion poisons everything”:

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs.) Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell. (p. 64)

The man can write. And read. He analyzes the old and the new testament, the koran, and every other religion in between, including those long dead and those yet rising. For all of them, he shows how their foundations are built on sand – “fabricated non-events” – and have been changed up through the ages to suit the agenda of clergy and state. Hitchens speaks from first-hand experience: He has traveled widely, has been seen as a god himself (in Turkey), and was a witness against the beatification of Mother Theresa, showing how one of her purported miracles was due to new technology and old-fashioned journalistic gullibility and wishful thinking. 

Hitchens systematically smashes each claim religion may have on our lives: Religion kills more people than it saves, it can be hazardous to your health, its claims to holiness and history are false (the three large monotheistic religions are largely plagiarized from other, older religions and each other), has nothing to offer when it comes to explain why the world is here and how it got started. It does not offer moral guidance – he argues that chances are people would behave more morally and ethically if they were sure this was the only life. God did not make man in his image – man made god in his.

The recent resurgence of fundamentalist religion, be it Christian or Muslim, has nothing to offer either: 

Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path [as a state form] had to pay for it. Their societies would decay, their economies contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. […] Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as negation. (p. 280)

Hithchens calls for a new Englightenment. Rather than the sordid and brooding atheism of Dawkins and Dennett and their establishment of a new grouping called “brights” (which, I assume, means fighting religion on its own terms, rather than those of rationality), he takes the more optimistic view that fighting religion no longer is the job for the outlandishly brave and superhumanly principled: This is an age where you can argue against religion and be safe. Not popular, perhaps, but relatively safe. The world moves forward, the new tools of analysis and knowledge dissemination mean that it gets harder and harder to misinform: 

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and destruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two. Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitutes our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” It is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit. (p. 282-3)

Mr. Hitchens is not an easy read, but he is very enjoyable. His references and examples go wide and deep, he has read everything and refers to it with little explanation and sometimes little context. But his searing wit, mercilessly logical chains of argument, and illuminating illustrations comes down on the better side of something that could have become a rant with any other writer. This is not a hastily composed monologue or an unconnected series of articles – Hitchens has been writing this book all his life, and will continue to write it.

Now if he would only make the next version include an equally powerful argument against alternative medicine and New Age superstition….

Highly recommended. If you are religious, you need this book to understand what you are in for (and what you need to surmount if you really want to believe.) If you are not, read it for pleasure and to stock up on arguments. In any case, read it for the language and the power of logic and learning.

PS: Here is a fun account by Hitchens himself about the book tour. Heaven forbid (there we go again) I would have to argue against him in any debate....

PSPS: Here is a great interview/radio debate with Hitchens, from WBUR Boston.

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August 28, 2007

Arrows and armour

B. H. Liddell Hart: History of the Second World War.

One of my enduring frustrations with books about WWII is poor mapping and relatively little focus on operational strategy. One reason for this, I have now found, is that Liddell Hart wrote the definitive book on the war in 1971, and every book since then either will have to concentrate on more details (such as Anthony Beevor's books on Berlin and Stalingrad) or take a more "themed" approach (such as John Keegan's WWII).

The book is cold-blooded and argumentative - with a focus on maneuver (nicely mapped) and evolving tactics. Liddell Hart spends more time on tank battles (in particular Rommel's campaigns in North Africa) than strictly necessary, and frequently introduces footnotes about his own role, pointing out how he had written critically about various weaknesses in British and US defenses long before anyone else. Then again, he has the right to do so - many of the newer tactics such as the Blitzkrieg and the "indirect approach" were developed or inspired by Liddell Hart's pre-war writings. This is war from the viewpoint of a professional soldier, with the benefit of hindsight and not a little admiration for the other side's competence and fortitude.

Liddell Hart is opinionated - he contends that the war could have been prevented if Britain and France had displayed more fortitude towards Hitler in the beginning, and that it could have been shortened if, among other things, Eisenhower had allowed Patton to surge towards Berlin. He also contends that the Allied policy of demanding an unconditional surrender prolonged the war both towards Germany and Japan, and that the dropping of the atom bomb was unnecessary, since Japan, having had all supply lines cut, was facing starvation and was actively looking for peace at the time they were dropped. I certainly am no historian, but his viewpoints seem very sensible, even with 35 years' worth of hindsight. 

Liddell Hart's book is the one book every other historian refers to, and it is easy to see why. Indispensable reading. Go get it (I got mine on sale at Borders, so there.) 

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August 19, 2007

De-programming the collective

Toby Segaran Programming collective intelligence (full description here) looks really interesting (brief pause here while I go to Amazon to get it.)

Note that Tim O'Reilly writes about his product on the corporate blog himself, with obvious interest and knowledge. That's CEO blogging the way it should be - and a role model for the publishers of the future, who otherwise will go the way of the music industry executive.

Changing that mindset, of course, would mean de-programming collective intelligence (or, perhaps, lack of it). The result remains to be seen.... 

 

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July 31, 2007

Reading about writing

Two books on writing: Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them and Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Read Prose for practical advice (her main argument is that the writer should be concerned with writing good language, beginning with a good sentence, and ignore trends and fashion) and sheer enjoyment of good writing (with many examples). Read King for inspiration (the book is partially a memoir of his career, partially an exhortation to just write, with fairly simple advice, most notably "Second draft = First draft - 10%".)

Actually, both are good for inspiration, countering the dread of entering an airport bookstore and realising you have read it all....

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July 20, 2007

Moving writing (literally)

John McPhee (2006): Uncommon Carriers

John McPhee specializes, like Tracy Kidder, in detailed and ruminative reportages about things and people we see everyday, but seldom think about. In this collection of articles, he primarily studies transportation, describing the workings of long-distance trucking, coal trains, cargo ships, barges and a memorable case study of the workings of "The Sort", UPS' humongous sorting facility in Loisville, Kentucky.

I plan to use at least two of these articles in my classes - definitely the one on UPS, and perhaps the one on coal trains (following a crew from Union Pacific between strip mine and powerplant) or the one on interstate trucking (following a driver with a highly polished chemical truck moving WD-40 all around the US. Business school students (as, indeed, most of the population in Norway as well as the USA) have little experience with industrial scale enterprises, and McPhee's excellent reportages instill not just and understanding (and admiration) for the scale of these enterprises that no Harvard Business School case can come close to, but also an understanding and respect for the people running it, the unsung heroes of the eCommerce and air conditioning revolution.

Moving writing, quite literally. An example for any academic writer trying to explain what makes modern society tick.

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July 17, 2007

The science of the spooky

Mary Roach: Spook - Science tackles the afterlife, 2006

Roach does a fun romp investigating claims of the supernatural: Reincarnation (even going to India to investigate a purported case), various "scientific" investigations of spritism, ghosts and other kookery from the Middle to the New Age. She manages to be somewhat open - at least in the beginning, before becoming scientific and debunking things without descending into the at times tiresom earnestness of full-time skeptics.

The best part of the book is the language and the many funny foonotes, full of quips like reporting on someone communicating with a dead "Chopin (who has, we learn, resumed composing following a brief stint decomposing)". She looks into people trying to weigh the soul (by measuring body weight loss as a person dies) and various echtoplasm claims (spooky white material produced by mediums, mostly turning out to be cheesecloth.) An interesting explanation for ghosts may be that they are caused by infrasound, which can be produced by fans and other electrical equipment and be detected only by a few people, who may experience unease and blurry sights in the corner of their eyes.

Anyway, fun summer reading. 

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July 14, 2007

Vacation slouching

One of the really great aspects of vacationing in friends' apartment is going through their bookcases. In this case, this is a little like reading boingboing on paper - and discovering small treasures such as Calvin Trillin's American Stories. A collection of New Yorker articles that never, ever would have been published in a Norwegian magazine on account of being more than 10000 characters long.

Anyway, it is now noon and all I have done so far is read while the family is waking up (some of them returning from an early morning shopping jaunt.) This is life. 

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June 17, 2007

Airline overview

The Economist has a survey article on airline travel - not much new, and it goes into details less than what I would expect from such an august publication, but still a useful and updated overview of an interesting industry. Also an interview with Paul Markillie, the author of the ar