To Engineer Is Human

I finished up To Engineer Is Human a few weeks ago, but have been considering how to blog about it in the back of my head. It is a book from 1982 that is supposed to be about engineering in generally, but is almost entirely focused on structural engineering (and at the very end has a short chapter about using computer aided design). While it does have some general engineering lessons, it really isn't very relevant to pretty much anyone I know reading this blog. So while I'm tempted to dig into a bunch of examples in the book I'm going to try to just skim some highlights.

First off is he mentions The Deacon's Masterpiece which is one of the few engineering poems I've ever read. The poem itself is rather long, but the idea is that someone decides that for any wagon there's always one thing that breaks first. So he's going to design each piece of the wagon so it won't be the first to go. And the thing works great for years and years and eventually every part fails at once and the whole thing falls apart. It's pointing out that in any design, no matter how good there has to always be a weak point.

One of the main themes of the book is that the reliability of structures kind of goes in cycles. Once a type of bridge has been design properly with a certain set of materials so it doesn't fall one of a few things happen:
1. The same design is used in a different set of conditions and fails. Then the engineers figure out what is required for that set of conditions.
2. Lessons of the past are forgotten and repeated. Once the new bridge fails the lessons are remembered and the next set of bridges are good again.
3. Since the current bridges are good it is time for progress and new designs or new materials or the same idea but with less safety margin are used. Then if there are failures the issues are worked out and then some better reliable bridges are built.

Along similar lines he suggests that every design is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is the design will work without failure. When the hypothesis fails it can be very unfortunate, but it is also the most informative. When the structure doesn't fail it doesn't say much because who knows what slight change in conditions would cause it to fail.

The two themes above suggest the problem with using structural engineering to draw general lessons for all engineering. In many areas of engineering failure is not as catastrophic and as long as failure rates are within acceptable limits meeting performance requirements can be far more important.

A lot of the book is going through various structural failures and talking about why they happened. One of particular interest to me is the Kansas City Hyatt Walkway Failure. Less than a month after I was born the Kansas City Hyatt was hosting a large party, which some of my family members almost attended, and the walkways over the lobby where the party was held collapsed and killed 114 people. Some of the initial thoughts were that the walkways simply weren't designed for people dancing on them. What actually happened is that the original design used beams that stretched from the ceiling and each beam supported multiple levels of walkways. But getting bolts to the middle of a long beam was practically very difficult so someone modified the design to have one beam from ceiling to the top level and then another beam from the top walkway to the bottom walkway. The problem is that now the bolt holding the top walk way had to support the weight of two levels instead of just one. Besides the personal relevance of the story I think this is interesting because it is tempting to blame whoever made the change at the last minute. But it is also the fault of the original designer for creating a design that couldn't actually be built or as someone else put it:

A detail that begs a change cannot be completely without blame when the change is made.

Few other random items:
-Kind of cool to see a book from 1982 mention a congressman working on improving safety regulations and it's Al Gore.
-Excalibur and other sword myths have a lot to do with engineering (why when a bunch of swords are built one is especially reliable). So is Icarus (wings melting as he tried to fly to the sun) - this one is really about a good design being used improperly (for the SGU fans - get it, the Icarus planet, get it? - oh and for the SG1/SGA fans, Daedalus is the guy that built the wings). And the liberty bell is an engineering failure.
-In this book written in 1982:

Computer models that predict the behavior of the economy have come increasingly to be relied upon to justify major economic decisions, and yet these models are not necessarily any more infallible than the ones that predict the fatigue life of a bus frame.

-This one is actually an important lesson in many aspects of life - random failures can be mitigated by having two of something, but to backup against systematic failure the backup must be of a different design (a friend has a story about a bunch of people backpacking who all brought water pumps so they'd be ok if a few broke, but then the temperature dropped and all of the pumps froze - luckily some of them had iodine tablets).

Oh crap, so much for not writing too much. Sorry.

Wheel of Time 4-7

I figured there's no point in putting up a post for each Wheel of Time book. But I just hit the half way point by finishing book 7. Since I'm in the weird position of being 5,926 pages into the series and thus would have to write a whole book just to summarize and yet only half way in so not even sure where the whole thing is going I won't say much other than good stuff so far.

Actually I take back the summary thing - several young adults plucked out of a small town are exposed to the larger world and meet a variety of other people while on their mission to fight evil using their newly found magic and special powers. I could totally be an author, all Robert Jordan did was fill in some details.

Shop Class As Soulcraft

Today I finished Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work by Matthew B. Crawford.

The book makes the argument that separating knowledge from being able to work with the physical world is bad for workers in many ways. It is push back on the knowledge economy. The story is based on his own experience working as a motorcycle repairman after getting his PhD and working some office jobs.

If the subject makes you think of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, there are a few shared ideas, but this book isn't insane.

I have mix feelings about this book.

First some good:

Sections of the book are clear articulations of thoughts that have guided my career and education. If anyone wants to understand why I chose electrical engineering over computer science and engineering over other fields, this book would be a good place to start - the core idea being working within the constraints of the physical world and seeing ones efforts cause something to actually work both theoretically and practically. Even though he does makes some comments about repair being superior to design (I think most of those comments are based on ignoring several aspects of design).

He even made some comments on creativity that very nearly matched my own.

Some ok:

He makes some good points about the modern office. Especially about how when people work in teams on poorly defined tasks it is difficult to evaluate the success of both the group and individual, vs in repair where either the repairman gets the motorcycle to work or doesn't. And how this puts managers in a strange position. Also how the knowledge of success vs failure is key to satisfaction in work. He also gets into how demoralizing it can be when the goal is something monetarily based, such as number of pages written, instead of working towards quality.

He also discusses how advertising and marketing reveals people's desires to build and repair their own stuff. He discusses marketing campaigns such as the Scion where they have people purchase options to make them feel like they are working on their car, when they are really just buying more stuff.

Some bad:

He takes most of his points to extremes - such as I toned the comments about the office way down.

My biggest issue with the book is that he encourages people to consider vocational school over college, especially since for some people they can make more money if they are willing to accept blue collar jobs. First, I question if that's true, much of the recent discussion of the labor market I've seen is about how recently those with college degrees are pulling even further ahead of those without. Second, even if it was, there are other reasons to go to college, such as just being an education person. Also this is one of the most "academic" books (outside of science and textbooks) that I've ever read which seems somewhat ironic given its subject matter. It's also a bit odd that a book suggesting going to votech made me feel like I should have taken a philosophy class before reading it.

The author doesn't bother at all with balance. He's all about getting away from specialization of labor as well as other aspects of corporations, but doesn't address what would happen if there was actually a major shift back to engineers doing their own building and writing their own user manuals. It never comes up that products would be significantly more expensive and the economy would tank. Not to mention that he does not suggest how reasonably complex projects would be designed or built. A good example of the lack of balance is when I made comments about creativity on this blog several people made good counterpoints and that's my personal blog - this book did nothing to address that there is more than one side to it.

Finally the size:

I really like the size of the book - it isn't a little pocket book, but still fits in a pocket so as I read through the wheel of time at home, I've been reading this book while doing laundry and hanging out on castro st. All books should be this size and if they need to be longer they can be split into multiple volumes. Also makes me wish there was a mini-kindle that bends a little.

The Dragon Reborn

I recently finished The Dragon Reborn which is part of the wheel of time series. It now strikes me that the title is a bit odd, since this book is almost entirely about everyone but the dragon. Weird, anyway, good book although I'd claim not as good as the previous two.

The Great Hunt

Having finished The Great Hunt, I now have a mere 12 books left in The Wheel of Time Series. Well this book did answer my questions from The Eye Of The World.

This one seemed a bit less LOTR like. Some similarity to Dune - the power that is primarily used by women, but on rare occasion can be used by men. It might turn out to be something different, but the whole connection to the multiverse through the stone tablets seems overdone (although this book does predate Stargate and Anathem so guess I can't blame it), and there do seem to be clues that something else is going on.

Anyway, good stuff.

A Walk In The Woods

I read A Walk In The Woods over winter break, but since I haven't felt like writing I'm just now posting about it.

It's a fairly funny story of a guy who decides to hike the appalachian trail. The author, Bill Bryson, was unprepared for the challenge and his hiking buddy was hilariously unprepared. So it is an interesting view of hiking and America through the eyes of someone who doesn't have backpacking experience. He did do some interesting research and include it in the book - such as he's very down on the national forest/parks services.

Overall if you're into hiking/backpacking it's a funny read.

The Eye of the World

Lending someone a book you think they'll like seems like it would be nice, except it is a bit less clear when it is first book in the third longest novel series (in latin or cyrillic characters). Wow, just looked up #1 on the list - that is a giant ball of silliness.

There is a definite sense in the book of struggling against an overwhelming enemy who can be set back but never really defeated. I think Robert Jordan helps bring this out by giving the reader an overwhelming number of pages to read. No matter how much I read in a day it barely dented the book, and finishing the book is barely denting the series.

I actually really liked The Eye of the World and appreciate Julie lending it to me. This book is very lord of the rings, although based on the ending I expect it to start diverging in the next book. And I think the actual writing style is somewhat different (well the most obvious is there aren't many songs and poems in this one).

One of my few criticisms of LOTR is that Tolkien made Gandalf so powerful that he then had to handicap him by giving him orders to not intervene too much. I still think Gandalf is awesome, but I do think that in The Eye of the World the power of the characters is a bit more balanced so no one is artificially holding back (well, later books might correct that). Although I am left wondering if those three characters are so important why is there only one Aes Sedai with them? What are the others up to that's so important? I imagine this will be answered later so if you know the answers to these questions don't tell me.

802.11 Wireless Networks

About a year and a half ago I bought 802.11 Wireless Networks The Definitive Guide and I've been slowly making my way through it since then. I finally finished.

I got a lot out of reading the book since it answered a lot of my questions about how the circuits I design at work are used, what is going on around them, and why certain features are required. But for anyone else I think you either know you want to read a book about WiFi or you don't. Although if I was going to get a book about WiFi I would look for something more recent, especially since 802.11n was still poorly defined when the book came out in 2005.

I'm trying to think of any interesting details to share. But a lot of the user stuff really only applies to large networks, not setting up a single access point in a home.

Traffic

Just before heading off to Boston I finished up Traffic, Why We Drive The Way We Do. It's strange because I normally remember why I pick out books to read, but I can't remember why I picked this one. The author is a writer for slate so that could have had something to do with it.

In my own words I would say the main point of the book is - you suck at driving and you suck so bad you don't even realize how bad you suck. The book actually covers a number of topic related to driving. Some of it is about the psychology of how drivers interact with each other and with pedestrians, traffic planning, safe driving, estimating risk, local driving habits...

On the one hand I thought the book is interesting because it does explain a lot about driving and traffic, which considering I spend a decent amount of time in a car it is cool to know. On the other hand most of it is just telling you what the problem is, not what you can actually do about it. And on the weird mutant third hand, it is a book about traffic and driving so it can only be so exciting.

A few interesting things I picked up from it:
-Dialing a cell phone seems way more dangerous than talking on a cell phone. And for a set time it is more dangerous. In fact talking on a cell phone almost imperceptibly increases the second to second risk while driving. But when you integrate the increased risk of talking on the phone over a half hour conversation it adds up to be significant and far more than the moment it takes to dial.
-One of the best ways to be safer on the road is to have a passenger (except if you're a teenage boy and the passengers are teenage boys). Both because you'll drive safer for the other person and because it is the rare time when you actually have feedback about your driving and a second set of eyes. The you suck so bad at driving you don't even know it has a lot to do with the fact you almost never get feedback about your driving.
-The book talks about numerous safety measures and traffic designs tried by traffic engineers and they all seem to come down to two things, the main one is getting people to slow down and pay attention. One village in Denmark (or one of those northern european countries) has a city with zero traffic signs. They never have accidents because they make the roads seem dangerous and integrated with pedestrians (narrow roads near pedestrians and lots of round abouts) so people slow down and pay attention. Actually the idea that what seems dangerous is actually often safer because it gets the drivers to slow down and pay attention is a common theme in the book.
-There were some interesting descriptions of how traffic jams travel as waves which is why when you see a slow down it seems to be at a completely random spot and time.
-He also discusses issues with traffic reduction schemes. One interesting part was about people often wish they'd just open another lane on a busy road. But adding extra lanes almost never helps because more people will use that road (you might think that would clear up other roads, but a lot of it is added traffic that wouldn't exist otherwise). He talked about evidence that it is only a matter of a day or two before people will re-route to use the added space.

While the book is really about driving it does have some interesting insight into other topics like psychology and risk assessment.

One odd thing about the book is it is 402 pages long. But if you don't count the acknowledgments and footnotes it is 286 pages. So it is much shorter than it first appears.

The Crippled Angel

Last week I finished The Crippled Angel the last book in The Crucible Series which includes The Wounded Hawk and The Nameless Day.

Semi-spoilers ahead.

I really enjoyed the series. It takes place around 1380. Although based on a quick look through wikipedia I think that some the "real" parts of the story are a bit off and shifted in time. Since I don't know anything about the time period I don't actually know, but it seems like she makes it feel like you are in the 1370s.

The part that makes it far more interesting is the religion/magic mix which gets more and more hilariously anti-religion. She does a good job of changing things up through out the story. Which is extra nice since so many fantasy stories take the LOTR approach - Froto you have to destroy the ring then a whole bunch of pages later he destroys the ring. Actually there is some similarity to part of LOTR - Froto finds out he is going to take away the power of the Elf queen and that Elven town would be destroyed. This series kind of takes that idea and runs with it. Plus add in some Harry Potter where the main character is interlinked with the bad guy (except by then who's bad and good has gotten mixed around). I'm trying to be somewhat vague because of the number of twists.

Overall good stuff - I'd recommend it to any fantasy fans out there. I would say that the series really reads as a single book so approach it that way. The first one is good, but is really the background and build up. The action, humor and more interesting stuff (such as explanations for what the heck is going on) is really in the next two books.

One thing I did pick up from this book is being king really wasn't such a great deal in a feudal society. I'd really rather be king at a later point when kings had more direct control rather than just trying to get the support of the lords who have the real military power and money. In general I always figured I'd rather be the King's cousin than the King - nice life style without all the responsibility and people trying to kill you. But in a feudal society that just meant being a lord so there was still responsibility and assassination attempts. So the take away is if you are going to become European royalty at some point in history think more 1600s than 1300s.

Mountain Rescue Doctor

I was at the library looking through some books to see what they had to say about altitude sickness and noticed the book Mountain Rescue Doctor. The author Christopher Van Tilburg is an emergency room doctor who is part of a volunteer mountain search and rescue team called the Crag Rats in Hood River Oregon.

Each chapter is the story of a rescue (and/or search). In addition to each rescue story he goes into discussions of other topics like the risk reward trade off of outdoor activities (and how having a family changes that), his background, tips for survival, and so on.

There are search and rescue teams that run in with a litter (stretcher) and carry the person out. The group this book is about take care of the situations where they need to set up ropes and climb to get to the person.

The individual stories are fairly good. Even though he describes a variety of situations, it does get a little repetitive to read about, but not too bad. I liked getting a sense for the search and rescue side of rescues. I was actually surprised by how willing they were to send out rescue missions. I was also surprised that in most states, unless you do something especially negligent the state actually pays for the rescue mission and that large parts of rescue missions are done by unpaid volunteer groups. One amusing item is that while everyone says you should have basic survival stuff (like a map, compass, whistle...), in a large portion of the rescues the most helpful item was a cell phone (well, sufficient food, water and shelter were also fairly key). In one of the stories of an extended search they even had the cell phone company triangulate the position of the climbers.

The book did drive home the need to make sure rangers know your plan in as much detail as possible. Even knowing stuff like what gear you have and your experience level can help guide their search (more important when doing technical climbing than hiking). Also making sure you have enough equipment to deal with unexpected situations and how helpful it can be to have a partner with you. He also pushed that if you get in trouble you should stop and take a moment to evaluate your situation rather than just pushing on. He also discussed how important it is to get medical attention quickly for serious injuries and that the first hour is especially critical (this is where cell phones become really helpful - normally someone would have to hike out to get to a phone, add in a gps device and the search can be way faster).

Semi-related, after reading the book I bought a gps app for my phone that gives me the raw gps data since knowing the closest address isn't terribly helpful in the woods. I find it kind of strange that the standard map program won't just tell you the raw coordinates.

The Wounded Hawk

Finished up The Wounded Hawk a couple days ago. This is the second book in the same series as The Nameless Day.

Still going to wait to finish the whole series before saying much. But this book definitely kicks up the action and the heresy a notch.

Thanks again to Julie for letting me borrow the series.

Three Cups Of Tea

While I was in Tahoe I read most of Three Cups Of Tea and then finished it up a bit after getting back. My Mom introduced me to the book and let me borrow it. The book is about Greg Mortenson who has spent about 16 years building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The book starts out talking about his attempt to climb K2 and some of his life story. I really enjoyed reading about his attempt at K2. The life story stuff is good build up to understand where he is coming from, but not the most interesting part. Then when it really gets into his work building schools in Pakistan it is very cool. It has a great message about the power of small contributions to education. Also some cultural info and a look into the life of the mountain villages. There is a bit of back and forth over if people who live in small mountain villages have a simpler better life or if living in tough conditions with minimal money isn't so great. I actually almost wonder if that's some natural back and forth or perhaps the voices of the two different authors coming through. And there's some good adventure. Just getting from place to place is a bit of an adventure, but the peak is when he gets captured and held for 8 days with minimal explanation.

This is far from the main point of the book, but often times when I hear about adventurous travel or outdoor adventures I think, oh that would be so cool to do (even if it is far beyond what I'd really do). But this book showed me someone who takes risks beyond what I have any interest in taking. So that was kind of cool to bound my interest in adventure by reading the book. (Note, just because that is an upper bound doesn't mean something far less adventurous would not also be an upper bound).

Not that I've read a lot of biographies, but I think this may be the first that was about someone who is still alive. It doesn't make a big difference, but it is a bit different. I found myself sometimes questioning how well he remembered all the details and feelings, but I think that was one of those MST3000 "It's just a show, I really should just relax" moments. And I do get the sense that the main author did a lot of interviewing and fact checking on all the important stuff.

Unlike a lot of what I read which tends to have a more focused audience, I'd really recommend this book to basically anyone.

The Nameless Day

Julie let me borrow The Crucible Series by Sara Douglass. I read the first book The Nameless Day. I liked the book and I'm enjoying the story. But at this point there's a lot that still isn't clear so I'm going to hold off on writing more till I finish the series (I think it would be like talking about The Fellowship of the Ring before reading the other two, except in this case it is not even clear that Frodo should destroy the ring). I will say she does a good job of putting you in the world (Europe in the 1300s), and does a good job with the main character's transition. And unlike some authors who write long books with lots of characters (Neal I'm looking at you) she's nice enough to sometimes remind you who they are and what happened that you should remember.

Epistemology

I'm having a reasonably packed May, but I'll get to that in another post. But while waiting for my flight back to CA I finished up Epistemology by Richard Feldman. The book is, not too surprisingly, about Epistemology, aka Theory of Knowledge. Reading Anathem got me interesting in checking out certain areas in philosophy. In particular the parts discussing if pure mathematical concepts live in a universe of their own and then filter down to our own, and if so does our universe filter down to other universes. Also if I stayed in high school in Paris I would have taken a theory of knowledge class for the IB and I always kinda wondered what it was about.

Well Epistemology was nothing like the stuff in Anathem. On one hand I liked finding out what theory of knowledge is all about, on the other hand as someone who took mostly science and engineering classes in college it's really weird to see a subject that has been studied for thousands of years and yet has no definitive answers.

So quick(ish) summary. The traditional analysis of knowledge is that the requirements to know something are: 1. it is true 2. you believe it (not in a blind faith way, but a generally think it is true way) 3. you are justified in believing it 4. the justification for the belief does not essentially depend on any falsehood (the last one is just to deal with certain weird cases). There are a lot of ways to describe what it takes for a belief to be justified. The main one the author backs is you know what you think you see and what you think you remember and from those essential facts you can build up beliefs. Others involve things like you're justified if the belief fits into your whole system of beliefs or if you are able to track as something goes between true and false. But he shows why those others really have problems.

Then he goes into skepticism which is asking if there's much you can really be justified in believing. Gets into a lot of the how do you know you aren't a brain in a vat with a computer making you think things are happening to you. And almost all knowledge is built on induction, but just because something has always worked a certain way in the past do you really know it will do it the same way in the future. The main response is even if you aren't absolutely certain it will happen the same way you are justified in thinking it will. So if you distinguish knowledge from absolute certainty then it still works. There are a number of other skeptical arguments and not all of them have been dismissed by the traditional analysis of knowledge.

He talks about science and epistemology. One part is scientific studies show that humans very often get some basic logic and probability questions wrong which along similar lines to skepticism makes you ask if there's much that people are really justified in believing. The author's arguments against this seemed the weakest of any in the book. He also discusses if epistemology should take a more scientific approach. He argues it doesn't really need to which also comes off a bit weak (maybe I'm showing a bit of a bias).

I sort of expected the book to be a bit more concrete about how you evaluate when you know something and distinguish what knowledge is justified and what isn't. I guess it does exactly that, except more philosophically (not surprisingly) than I expected.

Not sure that I'd recommend the book unless you've been wondering what theory of knowledge is about for over 10 years or if your name is Angie.

Martian Time-Slip

I actually got a response to my search for scifi with multiple governments. Of course the one response I got was from the one time I asked someone in person, hm. Anyway, while it wasn't exactly what I was thinking of, Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick does fit the criteria.

The book is actually mostly about mental illness and crazy shifting through time stuff (as you might guess from the title). While the story does have some good what is reality stuff, a lot of it seems out dated. The book involves some mix of what was accepted views of schizophrenia and autism and Dick's crazy ideas about them. But not knowing what the state of psychology was in the 60s it's hard to tell where that line is.

I'd read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Ubik before I'd read Martian Time-Slip. Both of those seem less dated.

The Perfect Villain

I bought The Perfect Villain: John McCain and the Demonization of the Lobbyist Jack Abramoff by Gary S. Chafetz a while ago because a friend knows the author. I finally got around to reading it. It would have made a lot more sense to read it before the election, but at that point I didn't need any extra reasons to dislike McCain.

The book describes some of Abramoff's life and work as a lobbyist. The point of the book is to try to show that while he may not have been a great guy and may have cross a few lines, he was no where near the villain that McCain and the Washington Post made him out to be. And that McCain and the Post bent the truth and hid evidence to make Abramoff look worse. My spidey sense was kicking in as I read the book. Partially I'm just wary of any book that comes out against a presidential candidate not long before an election. And the other part is it suggests the truth is rather different from my impression of what is generally accepted (which doesn't mean it is wrong, but requires more supporting evidence). Neither of these is enough to make me think it is false, just enough to make me not sure. Normally with stuff like that I can look it up online and reasonably quickly get at least some sense about it. But I'm coming up with very little on this book. It almost seems like no one read it or no one cares. If anyone knows anything about it or can find any better info I'd appreciate it.

Anyway, even if you ignore the claims about McCain and the Washington Post it still has some interesting info since it details several examples of how lobbyists work. One good example was an Indian tribe that funneled money through charities Abramoff had some control over to a christian right leader so he could lead an anti-gambling movement in a neighboring state to prevent other tribes from starting casinos and creating competition. All of the stories also seemed to involve getting his clients to make large donations to key lawmakers' favorite charities and setting up fact finding missions for senators that happen to involve trips to famous golf courses.

If Chafetz is right about the whole thing then it's that much more to dislike about McCain. But I'm not sure I'd feel that different about Abramoff. Partially because he was doing a lot of questionable stuff. But even more than that, because he plead guilty so I don't feel any conflict about the possibility that he was wrongly convicted since he didn't go to trial.

Anathem

Last night I finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Normally by time I finish a book I have a reasonably good idea what I want to say about it on my blog, but for some reason I'm struggling to review this one. It's not that I didn't like it, because I did like the book and as I was reading it I often found myself thinking thank goodness I'm back to reading scifi (or speculative fiction as Stephenson likes to call this one). I think the struggle to summarize comes from two things. One there is just a lot of stuff in the book (which is partially because it is long). The other is that in typical Stephenson style it would take a while just to describe the starting point and from there it just gets crazier and crazier. Well, time to stop making excuses and say something about the book.

The story is set up in such a way that he can have several characters go off on a discussion of science, math, philosophy, or religion at just about any point, which he takes advantage of often. Because so much time is spent on exploring philosophy and science I think some of the other aspects suffer a bit. Normally at the end of a book like that I really care about the characters, but in this one I didn't have the same attachment. There were a couple of huge adventures in the book which were cool, but Stephenson does action/adventure/humor better in his other books. But the technical description of the last adventure is very cool and I think the religion that seeks salvation through recursion is hilarious.

He does pick out some very interesting areas of science and philosophy to discuss and takes them to some very cool conclusions. In addition the structure of society in the book is an interesting take on the interaction between scientists and society. While I didn't know much of the philosophy, I did know pretty much all of the science which on one hand may have made it less interesting since I didn't need his science explanations (I definitely needed the philosophy ones), but on the other hand was nice because it made it easier to separate the fact from fiction and speculation. The book is nothing like the Da Vinci Code, except that it does use a combination of fact, fiction and hypothesis without telling you which is which. But at the end of the book it does give a website where he helps sort it out and gives a bibliography.

One immediately apparent aspect of the book is that it uses a lot of made up words, as Randall mentions. It does have a glossary in the back so he doesn't force you to figure it all out on your own. But I think that it doesn't take too long to get a feel for the words and mostly stop noticing them. I think they get in the way a lot less than the ones in A Clockwork Orange. I sort of see how the made up words fit into the story, but I'm not totally convinced it was necessary. What I did enjoy about them is he renamed all of the science he was talking about so it was fun to identify the correct names.

In most of Neal Stephenson's other books he tells the story from a variety of different perspectives and of course they all come together in some way throughout the book. But this one is told from the perspective of a single character. I really like the effect he can produce by telling the story through the eyes of multiple characters, but given where this story goes I think it is clear that it had to be written from a single point of view.

I guess I came up with some stuff to say. As I think through it I really would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in philosophy and metaphysics. If you already think you might read the book STOP HERE (seriously I think a lot of the fun of the book is seeing him build up and stretch some ideas so it is best not to know where he is going with it). Otherwise here are a few SPOILERS (although if you're not going to read the book not sure why you would care, oh well).



A lot of the science/philosophy/scifi in the book is about the multiple universes view of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics things occupy multiple states at once, until they are observed then they settle into a single state. The multiple universes view is that each time an observation is made multiple universes branch off and in each one a different one of the possibilities happens. What you observe just depends on which of the tracks you are now in (hence the need to tell the story from a single perspective). Up to here is a combination of fact and speculation from respected scientists. Where Stephenson takes it is what if someone came up with a way to occupy multiple tracks at once.

Another recurring theme is the idea that certain fundamentals of math are true independent of the human mind, or even our universe (prime numbers were prime long before humans came along) and so maybe they occupy a universe of their own that only contains things like fundamental theorems and proofs. And if that's true is there somehow a way our brain pulls information from that universe? Sounds crazy, but up to here is actually from Godel. Then if that's true could there be a whole hierarchy (or other linked list type structure) of universes goes from the theoretical perfect on down and ideas leak universe to universe down the hierarchy? Then after that is where Stephenson really makes it extra weird - what if you could travel up the hierarchy.

In addition to the philosophy and science the end of the book involves several characters going into space and getting into an alien spaceship. The technology they use to get up there undetected is very cool and partially based on some real research. The alien spaceship also has an interesting design that he describes. And for the more traditional adventure several characters have to make their way across the north pole (partially by foot) to get to the other side of the world.

He also broaches the subject of what's after Diamond Age (nanotechnology) - altering the nucleus of atoms by changing some of the fundamental, but seemly arbitrary, constants of physics. The idea of altering the constants is pretty crazy. But while there are some constants that seem to have a certain value for a reason, there are others that seem like they could just as easily have other values. Lots of those values would cause the universe to just fall apart, but there should be others that make a different, but stable universe.

Well, that's a few paragraphs - as you could imagine with 900 pages there's a lot more he discusses and he has a lot more room for better explanations.

The 5 Books of Moses

I finally finished the 5 Books of Moses in The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version.

First of all - I'm commenting on what I read. Not on modern Judaism or any other religion based on these books or the books that follow these.

Obviously I went into reading this with a reasonably strong bias. But even accounting for that as much as I can, I was quite surprised by what's actually in the Torah. First of all, I was expecting it to be somewhat boring, but just in an old stories are boring kind of way. I had no idea how many long lists of details there would be. I can sort of understand the detailed instructions for making an arc or how to diagnose and deal with leprosy, but long lists of names and ages of people who don't show up anywhere else or exactly what animal to sacrifice for a given event made reading the Torah very boring. Deuteronomy was also a bit odd since it was largely a recap of the previous books (as if it wasn't boring enough the first time), but some places it was consistent with the previous books and some places it wasn't.

Another bit of a shock was that prayer is barely mentioned. I sort of knew that prayer had replaced animal sacrifice. But since prayer is one of the biggest aspects of modern Judaism it seems like a bit of a disconnect. Especially since there are so many rules about who, when, where, how to pray. Which as far as I can tell the only aspect of that from the Torah is that it had a completely different very specific set of rules about who, when, where, how to sacrifice animals. It almost seems like the lesson taken from the Torah is that there should be lots of specific rules.

Once you screen out all the lists of details you're left with some stories and some declarations by The Lord. Stories are obviously open to interpretation so I'm willing to grant that even if some are disturbing and some seem to have really bad moral lessons and portray The Lord as jealous, vengeful, petty, short-tempered, and fallible, people can interpret them how they want. But the other big shock is the declarations by The Lord are very direct and while some of them have good morals, I'd claim that at a minimum the majority would be considered very immoral now. And The Lord is "loving" as long as you do exactly what he tells you and never doubt him, but stray a bit and he'll do horrible, horrible things to you. And sure you could claim that having it say a bunch of stuff forces the reader to sort out their own morals, but if that's all the Torah is, it could be replaced by a two page list of actions of varying degrees of good and bad. Although if the method for diagnosing leprosy is valid then you should also include that since up till very recently that could have been very useful (of course curing it by sacrificing animals could get left out).

I'm also a bit surprised by how not timeless it is. As Hitchens pointed out there is a whole lot of human history and the Torah really zeros in on a very specific place and period of time - at this point I'm sick of hearing The Lord go on and on about he delivered the people from Egypt - why not find something else to brag about, like creating the universe (not even to get into who put the people in Egypt to begin with).

I could go on and on, but I'll cut myself off here. Mostly because I know there is a huge amount of scholarship on understanding the Torah and I have made no effort to read any of it (and at this point don't plan to - I'm just so bored from reading the Torah I need to switch to a different topic). But I would encourage people to take a look and see what's really in there. And don't just look at Genesis and Exodus and figure the whole thing is a collection of stories. Get to Numbers and Deuteronomy where the lists of rules get into full swing.

I will say that people have questioned exactly what translation of the Torah is the right one to read. Obviously by reading one that is part of the bible I got different wording than a Jewish Torah would have. But I would claim that even if you picked up perfectly copied scrolls and read it in Hebrew you would be reading an interpretation. Because language changes a lot. Even if you just go back a few hundred years words and phrases have changed significantly, much less going back several thousand years. So I would claim that no one should be expecting to get the exact words or phrasing (or at least claim to know the exact meaning of those words). Although I will admit that it would have made more sense to get a Torah rather than just buy whatever they had at the book store.

The Harafish

During the trip to Egypt (hm, have I mentioned that I went to Egypt?), I finally finished The Harafish. The book tells the story of 10 generations of a family (each chapter covers a generation) living in Islamic Cairo at some point in history (I never figured out exactly when). The stories are somewhat interesting, although not interesting enough to recommend the book to someone who isn't headed to Egypt. The book became far more interesting once I got to Egypt and saw Islamic Cairo. The idea of each alleyway being a community with a clan chief suddenly made a lot more sense. And we had tea (twice) where the author used to hang out (as mentioned in a previous post). So if you are going to Cairo I would recommend picking up something by Naguib Mahfouz (and if you forget to before you go, there will be plenty of opportunities once you are there).