Thursday, June 25, 2015

The Martian

I'm not the only one who liked 'The Martian' by Andy Weir. My friend Chris told me about it, so I downloaded it and read it on my phone that day. I liked it. My wife read it on her kindle. I gave the ipad to my 13 year old son and he read it (see, we're device and OS agnostic in our house)

Randall Munroe liked it (I assume - I guess just because he wrote this comic, doesn't mean HE liked it...)

But I bet he did. I'm on my third time through. It's good.
So you're stuck on Mars, you have a lot of resources but a lot of threats too. You have no way off the planet and it's four years before a rescue mission can get to you from Earth. Oh, and you have only a finite amount of food. Guess what? Not four years worth.

You should read it before the movie comes out





What Has Been Seen

read approx 19 June 2015
Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett

Published in 2009, fitting in the Ankh-Morpork series between Making Money and Raising Steam, this is a book that felt to me as though, like these, it was crossing the boundaries between Discworld and Roundworld rather too often. Like Going Postal and The Truth it was using an extended metaphor in Discworld and I felt, sometimes, that the escapist magic of earlier Discworld was giving way to a darker vision. In Thud, the vision was dark but the message was bright; in The Night Watch and The Fifth Elephant there was more darkness but a candle (a large, white candle) was held up against the darkness. But there was a nagging splinter, a thread that I didn't want pulled. In Thud it was the cubes of power and the implied equivalent of a Metro/Subway that Moist von Lipwig would doubtless be called to manage (but instead, steam power arrived). In Going Postal it was the Golem horses that upset the balance of the Discworld I love. It felt as though Discworld was going through rather more of an industrial revolution than I was entirely happy about - to the extent that on reading Dodger I became mentally confused about the world I was in in my mind.

So - UA is about football (the soccer kind) in as much as a Discworld book is about any one thing. Of course it's really about people, the way people treat each other, and about what it means to be an individual in a complex social setting. It uses the magical Discworld environment, and the accumulated 'world through a warped, and possibly slightly cracked, lens' background stories that it has built up, to examine the behaviour of people, human and otherwise, in various states of change.
It is a story about power and control and self determination, and about choice, and about chafing (although it missed the chance to make a joke about chafing dishes) and the consequences of  having just one drink too many -  whether a wheelbarrow of Winkles Old Peculiar or one or more glasses of sherry.

I think that Terry would have pointed to the Crab Bucket analogy as the clever creation in this novel, and it's a good one - though for me the scene when Juliet bakes a whole shift's worth of pies is the best of the night kitchen story arc. It's brief, it gets left a bit cold, but it says a lot about the seeking of worth which previously was all from Nutt's perspective.
I'm going to let you in on a secret here - I don't always get the references first time through. Sometimes I never do until someone points them out. So I got the 'My Fair Lady' references, but the Romeo and Juliet ones with the feuding families completely went over my head despite the obvious name. Terry tried to pack an awful lot into this book, in that sense. Nutt and his story is drawn from all sorts of places - the Uberwaldean ideas we saw in Raising Steam and The Fifth Elephant are enfolding all sorts of European/Transylvanian tales that link to the pagan ones we saw in Hogfather and Witches Abroad.

Better people than me have written about the Discworld books, and if you are reading this you either know the books enough to be able to quote them back to me, or you are about to -  either way you don't need me to explain them to you. Let me leave it by saying, in case you hadn't guessed, I love these books, I miss Terry and mourn his loss, and am just glad I have the books that have been part of my life since Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun that I brought home from the school library in1981.

If, as I said two posts ago, it's true we all read 5000 books in a lifetime, then there are books I have read and which therefore claim their place in my 5000, which I resent and wish I'd skipped. None of Terry's books will ever be like that. Most of them will be read and reread many times in my life and that's fine with me. I've read UA three or four times already, and I find more to enjoy, and different things to enjoy, each time. The complexity and familiarity work together to keep them fresh - and the disquiet I mentioned earlier about their creeping towards our world is settled when I think about the power of metaphor. 'Have I found worth?' asks Nutt. Yes, you have.


Pattern Recognition

I've been so busy reading that I lost track of the point of this log...until I returned 'The Drunkard's Walk' today and it reminded me that I'd intended to be good and keep this up to date. I also looked at the previous post and realised that absolutely nobody is likely to be interested in a huge block of text with no apparent point, so I'll be a bit more restrained and just keep it simple for a few.
So - Here is a book that ought not take too long to summarise
'The Life and Death of Cody Parker' by Remington Kane
Author 'Remington Kane' is following in the traditions of the pulp writers of the early 20th century; the Tanner novels are being written and released rapidly, are usually following a simple structure with a two-threaded narrative, and are gloriously addictive to read. They follow the exploits of 'Tanner', a lone wolf assassin who has a professional obsession with finishing the job no matter what, but who is being hunted by an equally obsessive ex FBI agent. The plots are pulp grade revenge fantasy stuff, there is an element of back story (including some revelations about the past of the main character) that keeps you reading the way you keep eating the popcorn. The action is fluent, moving through the plot arcs with good pace and a fair bit of violence. The books are cut down, without too much exposition or introspection by the characters, which makes them fast to read and relatively brief, but not unsatisfying for all that. The Tanner character isn't Jack Reacher, but there are elements of the genre here, and in the sense that Reacher is both Everyman and Superman, so is Tanner.
So - if you need a novel/novella to grab on the kindle for a flight/long wait/sleepless night, search up Kane on amazon and grab 'Inevitable I' for a few cents (OK, $3.99). In my opinion, the books improve, but you have to start at book one really...

OK that made me think back to a point made in the book I read before - it was made in a discussion about the events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941
- that there were all sorts of clues and signs that, with hindsight, made it clear that the attack was coming. In fact, if you want to experience this in full, watch the classic movie on the subject (No, not the one with Ben Affleck, fun though it was), Tora Tora Tora

Now the point that was made in 'The Drunkard's Walk' was that hindsight enables us to create links between widely separated events because we have outside knowledge (as an observer from the future) that underlines their significance. The participants in the real time drama lack the knowledge or breadth of overview to make those links, and so it is missed at the time, lost in the noise of millions of competing and equally significant data points - until we select for significance.
So an author like Lee Child (or Remington Kane) can give a character like Tanner (or Reacher) great powers of observation and deduction, prescience and prowess simply by allowing them to have knowledge of events, or to see links, that we as reader may not have. It's the opposite of the horror genre, where we know in advance that the couple should stay away from the haunted house, that nobody there will help them to change their tyre, that there's something horrible behind the door. In this case the fascination lies not with the cleverness of the protagonist in anticipating the plot, but with the suspense as we wait to see just how the disembowelling will take place. I'm sure I ought to have used 'denouement' in there, but disembowelling just seemed to need to be there, so it can stay. Autocorrect doesn't like it, but hey, what are you gonna do?
The creation of links in this way is a great strength of our human brain, but the book pointed out that it has a tendency to find links even when there aren't any, and to obsessively seek to do so - our search for patterns can be dangerous as well as useful. It is reasonable to assume that our pattern recognition comes from a successful evolutionary trait where recognising a leopard in the long grass or up a tree was more useful than not recognising one, the false positive being less dangerous than the false negative. (This is why we need to use eg statistics to analyse for significance, or we would be forever running away from metaphorical leopards when we ought to be hollowing out gourds).

To conclude my thoughts on the Tanner novels in general, 'Cody' in particular, the fast pace of production of these books means that there are some typographical errors in them (particularly in the first, but I bet I couldn't find them again). The plot is pretty linear, with not a lot of set up for the action - it tends to build up, pay off, then find another action piece to build up. Thats why it's perfect for late night or airport reading, though, so no complaints here. No author wants to hear their book put me to sleep, but that's exactly what it did - every night until it was finished. Exactly what I bought it for.


Sunday, June 21, 2015

Thoughts on a dwindling resource

Someone* once wrote something along the lines of 'we only read 5000 books in our life' and went on to admonish the reader that they should, presumably, make sure that all of them were worthy, worthwhile, and each should be chosen for the benefits they would be expected to bring the reader and their community.

This preyed on my mind for a time. I'm naturally a skeptic so when presented with a number like that, the first thing I do is to some mental arithmetic to work out how close this claim is to my own experience - and to see where I might fall on the continuum of people who read a lot.

I read a lot, and it defines me in that it fills a large part of my self image, and it creates a shared collective conscious with other people who read similarly. That's a subject for a long and dull essay, so I'll leave that alone for now. It creates a slightly inflated feeling of self worth (there's a smugness among those of us who read, isn't there?) and a corresponding anxiety that I measure up to the numerical count, the quantitative, but also that the books I read meet with the approval of the hypothetical 'them' before whom I'm displaying my habits for approval - that's the qualitative side.

So - first of all, the count. 5000 books in a lifetime? That sounds, well, low. I read more than one book a week, unless of course there's a task I'm avoiding, in which case the number goes up. How many more than one a week? It's hard to quantify, since I usually have several on the go at a time. Ballpark? Suppose I read two books a week, that's 100 a year, so the 5000 comes up in 50 years of active reading. Alright, leaving aside books read before the age of, what, 10? So we're starting with The Hobbit and all those other books that became the first ones you read that counted as 'grown up' books, ones that your parents had read, ones that you could discuss with adults (if you wanted to). And at two a week, I hit the 5000 at age 60. Hmm, that is a challenge then. The anxiety kicks in again - what the Hell am I doing re-reading trashy books when there is a tonne* of good stuff I've never read? 

So this is an attempt to report on a sample of my reading. It's a blog - anyone is welcome to read it and comment, but its purpose is as a journal. It's public because that forces me into a kind of intellectual honesty. I'm going to record everything I read, even the dross. I'm going to try not to edit the list (too much) so I can track my reading and (perhaps) learn something about myself. And where I can I'm going to write a review or a prĂ©cis so I can look back and remember what I read, since I worry that often I read really good stuff and have no idea what it was, which makes it hard to refer back to in a discussion**.

So why do this out in the open? Really to make myself be more honest than I would otherwise be? Hardly - it's just me showing off really (or will it be? If I am honest, I might not be as fancy as I think I am) BUT there is the thought that someone might respond with suggested books or leads to other things I might enjoy. Nobody is going to do this unless they know what I've been reading and whether I liked it. So I'm crowd sourcing the 'other things you might like' algorithm from our favorite internet sales sites. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.

What do I expect will happen? Right now, nothing much - it takes time to build up something worthwhile, so for now I'm shouting at the wind.
Next step - start a list and start a review. I might keep a master on a spreadsheet but for now let's get under weigh.***


*autocorrect tried to make 'tonne' into 'tone'. It did it again here. I will battle this with all I can, but let it be assumed that all errors, omissions and inaccuracies are due to autocorrect. Yeah, that should work.

**wild attributions without references - how liberating - but I really will try to list everything with close to APA referencing just so I can track the titles and authors. And when I make these wild assertions I will TRY to back them up, but this isn't an academic document so it'll depend on time and enthusiasm. Feel free to challenge and ask for links.

***It's really under way, but I like the archaic form


http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-und2.htm

This is the famous 'jump' that you see on blogs that put in an advertisement and then say 'we'll be back after the jump' as if they're a 60's gameshow. I'm new to this as it isn't a feature on the software I use at work. Bear with me while I play with it and work out what I like the look of…OK in the edit I took it out  - it just meant you had to click to read more instead of seeing it all on one page. Silly blogger...

The first book on the list, on the first date on the list

21 June 2015 (Winter Solstice) - the solstice is a fine time to look at starting or finishing things, which is why all this happened today. Perhaps I was also aware that, having been to the library, I had a pile of intellectual and interesting books that would make me look good, get this series off to a rollicking start, and imply a level of sophistication that would so impress people that I'd gain kudos and the halo effect would see my star on the ascendant without me having to do any real work to earn it. Anyway


'The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives' Leonard Mlodinow, 2008, Allen Lane, Penguin Group, London.

This is one of a series of books I picked more or less at random from the Napier library. I was lured by the card at the end of the aisle that said 'mathematics'. I have no idea why, but for some reason I have been buying maths books whenever I am given a voucher - I'll list them later. I picked this one as the blurb on the back cover had review quotes from Stephen Hawking, and John Gribben. Hawking is well known, and a very dull author, although I doubt that matters to him. Gribben however writes books I have enjoyed enormously - everything I know about main sequence stars and the formation of elements heavier than iron, I learned from John - I believe the book I read back in the early 1990s was 'In Search of the Big Bang' but it may have been 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat'. Either way, he makes science accessible in a way that Bill Bryson does in 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' - also highly recommended. But I digress.


Mlodinow also wrote 'A Briefer History of Time' with Stephen Hawking, which may reduce the value of the back cover blurb as it's hardly disinterested - or perhaps, it makes it more so since Professor Hawking would hardly collaborate with someone he didn't rate. Anyway, 'The Drunkard's Walk' is a study of the history and modern application of probability theory and statistics. Wake up at the back! No, really, it's interesting. There are great stories - Galileo, Fermat and LaPlace are in there, but so is the game show 'Let's Make a Deal' and discussion of the flawed logic in DNA evidence as presented in trials such as O.J. Simpson's. Remember him?

There are chapters on why some people are born losers and some are born lucky, and why sports teams go through winning and losing streaks. Why Moonlighting and Bruce WIllis, and the Three Mile Island Leaks, and Pearl Harbour shouldn't worry you (or perhaps, why they very much should).

Where some similar books I have read lose you in the mathematical details and leave you (me) with a feeling of 'well, ok, if you say so' as I move from the argument to the conclusion, this one is clearly explained and is almost without equations (another Stephen Hawking link - famously he said on publishing A Brief History of Time "Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all.")

Mysteriously, the book also left me interested in refreshing my understanding of Chi square assessment of trials, reminded me to check my R squared values on my research project, and since it talked about the Normal distribution of random natural events quite a lot, but only mentioned the Poisson in passing, rekindled that curiosity in me too. I respect statistics but can't say I enjoyed or mastered them in my degree - just used them as a tool. But this book made them a little bit more 'real' and part of the world rather than outside of it, as I suspect they are for most of us despite that fact that we live our lives completely within a system that is described by statistical methods. And in the end the book is not about statistics but about the people they describe - it uses the word 'population' occasionally in the statistical context - the group from which the sample is taken - but in the end Mlodinow comes back to the idea  that we are individuals within a population that is made up of individuals - he brings us back from the language of the statistician to that of the humanist - and that our choices are made based on decisions we come to depending on our understanding of chance and cause and effect. In the end, he says, the way to success is to keep trying (P(success) x n trials = nP) and he says 'we ought to appreciate the absence of bad luck' and 'appreciate the good luck that we have and recognize the random events that lead to our success'. 

There is an excellent chapter on Determinism that I need to reflect on and may come back to later in here as it's a topic I find interesting and so do others - C J Cherryh writes about the Azi in the Cyteen books - the idea that you could clone a person (in this case, a leader who was killed but considered essential to the survival of a planet/population) and replicate their upbringing so precisely that, with other training, the clone would grow into a replacement for the dead leader in emotional an intellectual as well as physical terms. Preposterous in Sci Fi since we all know you'd just download the late person's personality into an AI, right?
Anyway in he book in question, determinism is what you might think of as God mode - being able to know everything about everything means you can predict everything. Lorenz n the 1960s tried that with the weather computers and discovered what we know call the butterfly effect. See, it's interesting….

Anyway - the Drunkard's Walk
It's a good read, a hopeful book, and one worth re-reading if only to remind us that if behind door number 1 there is a car, then behind door number 2 there is a goat. So you can't really lose.

Next Up - Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett, A More Perfect Heaven  - Dava Sobel, The Life and Death of Cody Parker - Remington Kane