A company company

I checked out another non-fiction book from the Northfield Public Library a month ago. The fact that it took me a month to finish it ought to be an indicator. The book was Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory, Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

This book had been on my "to read" list since I'd seen a laudatory review of it last year. In addition, I grew up in a Ma Bell family. My dad worked for one of the Baby Bells and was a true believer. So, I grew up seeing the company magazine and hearing stories about the great Bell System, including that wonder, Bell Labs. When I was in high school (in the early 1960s), I got a Bell Labs kit for making a solar cell and another for making a transistorized buzzer circuit that was powered by the solar cell. They both worked for me.

Gertner's book, like Sam Kean's book on genetics, was disappointing.

I decided that The Idea Factory... was a good set of notes which could be used to write a book, but it wasn't a real book. Like Kean's book, it had no voice. There were stories to tell, but the disjointed anecdotes were not a story. There were characters, but their appearances and disappearances in the pages of The Idea Factory... were hard to follow. I'm sure there are more dramatic stories about the development of the first kinds of transistors and the rivalry among the ambitious inventors, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.

Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ

Gertner kept relating anecdotes and when he finished with one, he'd circle back to the decades between 1939 and 1959 to begin another (sort of like the circles around the Bell Labs HQ, above). As a reader, I felt like a tether ball winding round and round a pole until reaching the end of my rope and then being pushed back in the opposite direction until I hit the pole again.

There are other important stories to tell about the relationship of business, research, engineering, and product development hiding in this book, but they're not there. Gertner describes a bit about the lengths to which AT&T went to preserve their telephone monopoly, but that probably deserves its own book. (That book might exist in the business school library for all I know.) There are hints about things like business decisions to promote picture phones and initially discard fiber optics, but they're only mentioned.

There are hints about the revolving door between Bell Labs and the U.S. government (especially top secret R & D), but it's not told.

There are hints about patron-client relationships and keeping friends on the payroll even when they no longer worked for Bell Labs.

There's a brief description of the break up AT&T and the disappearance of Bell Labs into Lucent and then into Alcatel•Lucent. The merger of some parts of the old AT&T's engineering, manufacturing, and research organizations probably also deserves its own case study in business schools, and it might also exist (in the history section now). And what about the developments outside of Bell Labs that became competitors with AT&T? I really expected to read about how Bell Labs was involved with DARPA in some of the initial development of the Internet. There's nothing in the book, and Bell Labs isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the development of the Internet. How'd all those smart guys working in communications miss that?

That last bit made me realize that, in spite of the propaganda I grew up with, Bell Labs was not unique. Every really large corporation does R&D. Bell Labs did come up with some remarkable inventions, like the transistor. But Texas Instruments came up with integrated circuits. Xerox PARC came up with laser printers and computer mice. Hewlett Packard developed scientific calculators and thermal printing. Microsoft, Apple, and Google invented themselves. And, to go back a bit, Thomas Edison, James Watt, Eli Whitney, and Henry Ford came up with some amazing things. So, to call Bell Labs' heyday "the Great Age of American Innovation" is a pretty big overstatement.

So, what I was looking for was a book, not a collection of notes and anecdotes. I guess I'll have to go back and read something more by Neil deGrasse Tyson or Tim Berners-Lee.

Have you read Jon Gertner's book, The Idea Factory?

What did you think about it? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The author's web site
• Walter Isaacson' review of The Idea Factory in The New York Times
• Robert Teitelman's review at Huffington Post
• Ira Flatow's interview with Jon Gertner on NPR

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More non-fiction

Okay, it's not a book.

But this thinking and reading project took some time.

Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing pointed me at an old essay in Natural History Magazine by Neil deGrasse Tyson, "The Importance of Being Constant." Most of it was written for me. I learned things and I learned to think about things differently. I've been looking for someone to write like this since Stephen Jay Gould died.

What a way to begin a Saturday. I have plenty of things to think about as the temperature falls from the present 34° to an expected low of −5° tonight.

From Tyson's article:
"… the universe has its own constants, in the form of unvarying quantities that endlessly reappear in nature and in mathematics, and whose exact numerical values are of signal importance to the pursuit of science. Some of these constants are physical, grounded in actual measurements. Others, though they illuminate the workings of the universe, are purely numerical, arising from within mathematics itself…"

Okay, I had never thought of the fact that some constants are natural and others are artifacts of measurement ("purely numerical…"). Very interesting. Confusing, but very interesting.
 
He also wrote:
"Whenever a repeating pattern of cause and effect shows up in the universe, there's probably a constant at work. But to measure cause and effect, you must sift through what is and is not variable, and you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause… "

Oh, the time I've spent trying to teach those ideas.
 
Later in the essay, Tyson wrote:
"Kepler figured out that if you square the time it takes a planet to go around the Sun, then that quantity is always proportional to the cube of the planet's average distance from the Sun…"

I will never understand how someone could "realize" that squaring and cubing numbers that measure things create relevant relationships. If somebody wants to square time and cube distance measurements (which are not even measurements of the same things), my response would probably be, "So what?!" 
 
Even though I got lost somewhere in Tyson's description of Newtonian constants (never mind the quantum physics), he was quite clear about some things:
"No matter when or where you live, no matter your nationality or age or aesthetic proclivities, no matter whether you vote Democrat or Republican, if you calculate the value of pi you will get the same answer as everybody else in the universe. Thus constants such as pi enjoy a level of internationality that politics does not, never did, and never will—which is why, if people ever do communicate with aliens, they're likely to talk in mathematics, the lingua franca of the cosmos, and not English."

Another thing I've spent hours trying to teach. 

Although, I do wonder if the universality of these constants is a safe assumption. The Chinese spent millennia convinced that their culture was the center of the world (whatever shape it had). Where did that get them? And the author describes at the end of the essay how some physicists are looking for evidence that constants change over time. Why not look for evidence that they change over space as well?

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• Neil deGrasse Tyson's web page
• 11 Badass Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes
• Tyson's essays at The Big Think

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Tales mostly lost on me

The world lost a number of wonderful people that I knew in the past year. In 2008, I shepherded one of them, at the age of 88, into the local Democratic caucus, and the excitement of a thousand or two people milling about the Northfield Middle School so she could cast her vote for Obama. Another, at age 90, asked a friend to take her to an exquisite dinner, and announced afterward that she was ready. A few days later she died. A third asked me, through her daughter, why I seemed to read nothing by mysteries. (I never got to answer the question.)

But the question stuck with me for months. It's true that all of the books I've read in the past couple years have been mysteries.

Now, in another part of my life, I read political science and scan the headlines of a dozen online news sources every morning looking for things that might help teachers of high school courses in comparative politics. I post the things to a blog that attracts a couple hundred people a day. (That's about 50 times as many people as look in at this blog.)

That's all to say that I read more than mysteries. But non-fiction books? Not so much.

In any case, I scanned the new non-fiction shelves at the library recently and picked up The Violinist's Thumb by Sam Kean. It's subtitled Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius as Written by our Genetic Code.

I feel particularly ignorant about our genetic code, so I thought this might be a good introduction.

Not so much.

Now, I've heard about this thing in Literature that's called "voice." I think Sam Kean could use some study about the voice in which he writes. I had to get to the second half of the book before I caught on to the fact that Kean was telling stories. I wasn't always sure there was a connection between the topic he started out with and the examples ("stories") that accompanied his explanations.

The structure of the DNA double helix. The atoms in the structure are colour coded by element and the detailed structure of two base pairs are shown in the bottom right. -From Wikipedia
Describe this in words. I dare you.

It seemed mostly like an inadequate textbook. I had to go online to make sense out of his description of chromosomes, genes, and all the other bits of DNA. Then, every once in awhile, Kean would throw in a sentence or two that sounded like a smart alec remark a high school student might make. Other times he'd try to describe an incredibly complex process like making DNA sculptures without a diagram.

There were some interesting stories and lots of facts about our genetic code. I've forgotten most of them.

I do think I'll go looking for another bit of non-fiction to read and hope it's more Literary.

Have you read Kean's The Violinist's Thumb? What did you think of it? Do you think non-fiction can be Literature?

Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• The author's web site
• Jesse Singal's review in the Boston Globe
• Allison Bohac's review in Science News
• Monica Hesse's interview with Sam Kean in the Washington Post

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Non-fiction can be "lethal?"

In another part of my life, I post excerpts from bits of journalism to a blog. The bits are related the countries and the curriculum of the AP course in Comparative Government and Politics.

I don't usually post excerpts here, but this appeared in an op-ed section of the New York Times and it's a good introduction the book I just finished.

You can tell I haven't studied Literature because I don't know what that means. As a teacher and a social scientist and historian I always assumed that non-fiction could be Literature.

Gould

Now any of us who have been subjected to textbooks knows that some non-fiction will NEVER be Literature. I don't know why most textbooks are so poorly written that they induce sleep more than admiration. That's an argument for the study of more non-fiction.

Why anyone would find more study of non-fiction a "lethal dose," is beyond my ken. Unless, of course, the objection was to the lack of good examples. How about beginning with the essays of Stephen Jay Gould? There's a guy who wrote Literature. Literature about ancient things and evolution.

Well, the book I finished is not Literature. That's coming up next. Meanwhile, what do you think of Sara Mosle's ideas about non-fiction?

Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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What Should Children Read?

By Sara Mosle

[T]he Common Core State Standards [are] a set of national benchmarks, adopted by nearly every state, for the skills public school students should master in language arts and mathematics in grades K-12...

Depending on your point of view, the now contentious guidelines prescribe a healthy — or lethal — dose of nonfiction.

For example, the Common Core dictates that by fourth grade, public school students devote half of their reading time in class to historical documents, scientific tracts, maps and other “informational texts” ... Alarmed English teachers worry we’re about to toss Shakespeare so students can study, in the words of one former educator, “memos, technical manuals and menus.”

David Coleman, president of the College Board, who helped design and promote the Common Core, says English classes today focus too much on self-expression. “It is rare in a working environment,” he’s argued, “that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”...

One education columnist sums up the debate as a fiction versus nonfiction “smackdown.”

A striking assumption animates arguments on both sides, namely that nonfiction is seldom literary and certainly not literature...

As an English teacher and writer who traffics in factual prose, I’m with Mr. Coleman. In my experience, students need more exposure to nonfiction, less to help with reading skills, but as a model for their own essays and expository writing...

I love fiction and poetry as much as the next former English major and often despair over the quality of what passes for “informational texts,” few of which amount to narrative much less literary narrative.

What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call “narrative nonfiction”: writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways...

Narrative nonfiction also provides a bridge between the personal narratives students typically write in elementary school and the essays on external subjects that are more appropriate assignments in high school and beyond...

There are anthologies of great literature and primary documents, but why not “30 for Under 20: Great Nonfiction Narratives?” Until such editions appear, teachers can find complex, literary works in collections like “The Best American Science and Nature Writing,”...

If students read 100 such articles over the course of a year, they may not become best-selling authors, but like Mr. Gladwell, they’ll get the sound and feel of good writing in their heads. With luck, when they graduate, there will still be ranks of literary nonfiction authors left for them to join.

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Sacred Treasure

On the top of Gary Sankary's Best of 2011 Reading List was Rabbi Mark Glickman's book Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Genizah. The subtitle is "The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic."

Gary explained to me (and probably to most of us) that a "Genizah is a storeroom/closet/attic that synagogues use to store scared texts that are no longer legible or usable." Often the old documents a genizah are collected and buried in a cemetery. But, the The Ben Ezra Synagogue Genizah had basically never been emptied since the synagogue was founded in the 9th century CE.

Scottish sisters on a Victorian-era adventure in Cairo bought an old document from the Ben Ezra Genizah they couldn't identify, in spite of their expertise in ancient languages. Cambridge don, Rabbi Solomon Schechter identified it for them. It was a one-page fragment of "a Hebrew manuscript of the book of Ben Sira or as it became known in Greek, Ecclesiasticus. Today that book is found in the Catholic Bible, it was excluded from the Hebrew and King James versions." It had been written around the year 900.

That discovery sent Rabbi Schechter out looking for funding and then off to Cairo. There he found the Genizah stuffed with hundreds of thousands of documents. The Genizah which began as a place to store old sacred documents had become a place to store old written documents of all kinds.

In Sacred Treasure, Rabbi Glickman tells the story of the Cairo trove of documents. Rabbi Schechter is only the first in a century-long line of scholars who have worked to identify, read, analyze, and catalog the thousands of documents.

Rabbi Glickman looking into the Cairo Gehizah, Photo: Jacob Glickman

Back in the '70s, I spent a lot of time volunteering on archaeolgical field work projects. I have a real appreciation for the careful work that goes into uncovering and interpreting material culture from long ago. I still recall the thrill of uncovering a large clam shell, cleaning it off, drawing it into the unit's map for its level, and photographing it. When it came time to remove the shell, I (we, because no one can do all this alone) found a small, 800-year-old corn cob under it. Wow!

So, there was Rabbi Scechter, peering into a room full of a thousand years' of history. He was able to purchase most of the documents and take them to England. Back in Cambridge, he began the process of cataloging, reading, translating, identifying, and understanding documents. It was tedious and tremendously exciting work. I understand that. What would any philosopher, historian, or religious scholar give to find something written by Moses Maimonides? What was the value of many things written by the famous sage? But that just begins to tell the story of what was found in the Cairo Genizah.

Rabbi Glickman does a great job of telling this story in all its complexity. He profiles the people and the problems -- like institutional competition. I really appreciated how well the various threads of the story track in Rabbi Glickman's skilled narrative.

I learned that Medieval and modern Jewish religious movements are as numerous and varied as Protestant demoninations. If I thought about my little knowledge of Israeli politics, I sort of knew that, but reading about the varieties of Jewish ritual and rules made that diversity come alive. Rabbi Glickman makes a point of that and a few other ways that the Genizah's contents illuminate the present as well as the past.

I wish he'd written more about what the documents tell us about beliefs, worship, diet, families, law, economics, and other things that are described in the Cairo documents. But, this is not a long, scholarly tome. It's an adventure story. And a darn good one.

Thanks, Gary for recommending the book. I'm passing on his recommendation.

It's not hard to get the book. It's available from Amazon.com. I ordered my directly from Rabbi Mark Glickman, 15030 232nd Ave. NE, Woodinville, WA 98077. The cost is $24.99 plus $3.50 shipping (Continental US) and $2.25 tax if you have it delivered to an address in the state of Washington. And he'll autograph your copy.

If you read it, write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought of it.

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Expedition: Genizah, Rabbi Glickman's web site
"Cairo Genizah author describes treasure trove" from The Jewish Review
"Cairo’s Jewish medieval manuscripts" from PRI's The World (includes some great photos, including the one above)

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Old gem

I'm working my way through Laurie R. King's latest book very slowly. So, I'm posting a 2002 entry from the old ReadingOnTheWeb site. It's about a book full of important ideas that's still one of my favorites.

To keep my sanity and to keep my brain cells functioning I must read something besides mysteries and depressing things like Michael Moore's commentary.

Chinua Achebe, like Stephen Jay Gould, is one of my heroes. A wise and perceptive man, he's written several beautiful novels about Nigeria. They may have been works of fiction, but they were true stories.

I picked up his most recent publication, Home and Exile at the Carleton bookstore. It's based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard a few years ago.

Achebe gave me hope and made me doubt that hope in the span of these few pages (105 to be exact).

He makes the case for the power of story telling. His thesis reminds me of George Orwell's.

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative.

Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything..."

He then cites an epiphanal experience he had in a university classroom as the central metaphor for a discussion of how the "civilized" world captured the African narrative for over 400 years. At first it was done out of wonder, then to justify slavery. Later, the civilized world wrote to rationalize colonialism and then to defend its reputation.

He and his generation of African students, scholars, and writers began recognizing their loss and began inventing their own narratives.

Even today, as "the empire writes back," Westerners fight a rear guard action to maintain possession of the Third World's narrative.

V.S. Naipaul wins plaudits and is discussed in suburban book groups for describing the depravity and deprivaton of the Third World and deploring the childish resistance of Third Worlders to assimilation into Western civilization. And conservative scholars react to multiculturalism as if recognizing validity in something other than Judeo-Christian civilization threatens the importance (not to mention the superiority) of Greek, Roman, and Anglo Saxon values.

Achebe offers hope that more peoples will reclaim their own narratives, but one bit of pessimism startled me. It's possible, he says, that the damage done by "civilization's" control of the description of Africa and Africans for so many centuries and the propaganda sown by those narratives has made it impossible for us and them to see each other as equally human.

My idealism was challenged directly in a humanistic way. The shock was a danger to my naivete. At my age I shouldn't be vulnerable to such shocks. It does mean I'm still learning, but has my idealism been that superficial? Perhaps so. When confronted by Achebe's words, I knew I shared his fear.

Dehumanization of Africans by Europeans began before slavery. It grew more powerful and even scientific later. In the USA, slavery and the accompanying racism has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Can we, the purveyors of the toxic myth, overcome it? I sure don't know. We've made some progress in our civic behavior during my lifetime, but internalizing common humanity may be beyond us. Furthermore, can the victims of such description overcome the lies, the insults and the dehumanizing treatment? I can only accept Achebe's doubts.

This is an important book. If we're going to survive as a world, as a civilization, as a culture, and as a nation, we need to learn the lesson taught by this wise man. Read the book. If your library doesn't have it, ask them to find it. If you can afford the $10 it costs, buy it. It's Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe, published by Anchor Books A Division of Random House, Inc. The ISBN is 0-385-72133-1.

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• Alastair Niven's review in The Independent (UK)
• Kole Omotoso's review at Africa Resource
• Amy Reads' review

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What's good?

While at the cabin called Sidetrack, I read both of the library books that I'd brought with me. There's an interesting library there of books we've finished at the cabin and left behind as reminders, but I wasn't interested in starting a major reading project. So I picked up Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver. It was (and still is) on the bedside stack of potential reading.

I only read a couple of the essays, but one of them addressed a topic that I've wondered about here, why do I like some books more than others. I do know that my state of mind has a lot to do with my affection for a book. But there are other reasons. For instance, I really do like a well-told story.

Here are a couple of Kingsolver's comments that had me shaking my head in agreement. They are from "What is a good story?" that she wrote about her experience editing a collection of short stories.

Her first answer sounds like a textbook declaration: "What makes writing good? That's easy: the lyrical description, the arresting metaphor, the dialogue that falls so true on the ear it breaks the heart, the plot that winds up exactly where it should."

A couple pages she later, she is more personal: Good writing, she says, "should pull off the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces... It will tell me something remarkable, it will be beautifully executed, and it will be nested in truth..."

I'm not sure I demand "large truths," but the rest of what Kingsolver says sounds to me like a good beginning definition of good writing.

By the way, her praise for short stories, tempts me to look up the volume she edited and read some short stories. She wonders in her essay why people don't read much short fiction. I usually avoid it. I wonder why?

Do you read or avoid short stories? Why? Write and tell this little bit of the world.

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• The author's web site
• 366 reviews from GoodReads
• The publisher's reading guide

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Stieg Larsson, political reporter

In the shadow of the terrorist attack in Oslo, Joan Acocella posted a bit in the New Yorker, "Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right."

The killer in Oslo was exactly the kind of guy who Stieg Larsson spent his pre-novelist career trying to warn the Scandinavian people about. Maybe they should have listened before Larsson created Lisbeth Salander.

In the Times' heavy coverage of the killings in Norway... the name of Stieg Larsson has not come up. That is curious. The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway... to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence... [H]omegrown fundamentalist movements have been gaining power in Scandinavia since, decades ago, the citizens of those countries began to lose faith in the benevolence of their vaunted welfare states...

Larsson had an unglamorous job as the Swedish correspondent for a magazine, Searchlight, that was English journalism’s watchdog against right-wing movements in Europe. In his articles for Searchlight he describes the car bombings, the rallies, the magazines of Sweden’s extreme right. He has only one message: fascism is on the rise. “For too long,” he writes, “Nazis, in the eyes of society, have been simplistically and credulously equated with a few dozen skinheads on a Saturday-night stampede.” That’s not the case any more, he writes. They are men in suits and ties, and they are getting elected to office...

Larsson’s main concern was the abuse of women, immigrants, and Jews... Eventually he turned his attention primarily to women...

The summer camp that Anders Breivik invaded last week, a hatchery for the children of the liberal ruling class, included young people whose parents and grandparents came from Africa and Asia.

Such inclusion—or, from another perspective, infiltration—is what the Scandinavian right wing opposes, and political parties ruled by that refusal are gaining power...

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More about Montana before mid-century

I was enchanted by a four-year-old recently. It probably helps that she's a granddaughter, but she's pretty wonderful without that status.

I was planning on spending a couple evenings with her, but for most of that time, she'd be asleep. So I grabbed a small paperback by Ivan Doig (another of those books I picked up at the used book sale). I figured it would be easy to hold on to while I read to stay awake.

The book was Heart Earth. It was written about a decade after Doig wrote the autobiographical This House of Sky. In This House... Doig told the story of growing up with his widowed father and his maternal grandmother. The time wasn't easy for any of them. Doig's mother died on his 6th birthday. His grandmother joined the household because there was no other way for his father to continue earning a living and maintaining a family. Father and mother-in-law never seemed to like each other, but they joined forces to create a family.

I haven't read This House of Sky, but I did read Heart Earth. Heart Earth is a recreation (or reimagining) by Doig of his mother. After his uncle died, he was handed a packet of letters from his mother to her brother. Doig's uncle served on a warship in the Pacific during World War II, and his mother had time and inclination to write to her brother and share a lot of her thoughts and feelings with him.

From these letters, Doig attempts to describe his mother and her married life. There are many holes in the description, as we'd expect. In spite of the apparent intimacy of the letters, he writes about events more than about the person who was his mother. Maybe that's to be expected, too. Doig was too young to have many memories or first hand impressions. This writing exercise seems primarily to be a personal project in which Doig tries to find out more about the mother he never knew.

I never really got engaged with the story or the people. And it wasn't because I read most of this during a couple nights of babysitting. Doig's prose is rich and smooth. It's also pretty passionless and non-judgemental. His other books have plot that this real life biography doesn't. The book ends with his mother's death. As the number of unread pages dwindled, I knew where the death was going to happen. No dramatic build up or climax here. Just sorrow, but even that was mostly implied.

Maybe you've read Heat Earth and found things there I didn't. If so, write and tell this little bit of the world about your experience with the book.

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• Ivan Doig's notes on Hearth Earth
• Beth Fish's review of Heart Earth

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That's what I get

Every once in awhile, my ego whispers in my ear that I ought to read something more "important" than merely entertaining fiction. Sometimes, I listen to that voice.

Prelude: Forty-some years ago, I trotted off to one of my first college classes. It was a math class titled Math 10. It was the most basic math class offered. The topic was something called calculus.

I had no idea what calculus was. It sounded like calculation. I'd taken all the available math classes in my small town high school. I'd done well, even in the most advanced class: solid geometry and trigonometry. I knew I had to take a few math/science classes to earn my degree even if I wanted to major in political science. What better time to fulfill one of those distribution requirements than a couple months after finishing the math curriculum in high school?

I was lost in the calculus class from shortly after attendance was taken. I don't think I knew how lost I was for a couple weeks, but I was in over my head. Indeed nearly everything that was said in the class went over my head. Unfortunately, the prof lectured. I have no idea what he said. He didn't ask us to do problems in class. He had no way of knowing how lost I was until the mid-term.

I asked a friend for help. She'd graduated from high school at 16 and had taken calculus in high school. She tried to explain things, but it was probably too late. I started hanging out at the prof's office during office hours. That's when he found out how lost I was. He helped me figure out how to solve some basic problems, but he never did succeed in teaching me what calculus was or why anyone would want to know how to use it. I think I passed the class because I hung out asking for help.

What is all this reminiscing about? I picked up an important book recently that I'd read about. The topic sounded interesting and the review I saw was enthusiastic. It turns out, the reviewer was enthusiastic about the anecdotes that dot the book's chapters. But most of the book is about abstract math and quantum physics and genetics, none of which I understand any better than I understand calculus.

The book? The Information by James Gleick. Some of the anecdotes are indeed interesting, but finding them is a chore. They should have been in a different typeface than the other stuff. And since I never really understood what the book was about, I never figured out why Gleick told the stories when he did. I know what a fibonacci series is, but why would anyone care enough to even identify it?

There were whole chapters where all I could do was scan the first sentence of paragraphs looking for an interesting story, because the textbookish stuff was opaque to me. Numbers, to me, are meant for counting and measuring. What do you do with a sentence like, "Turing proved that some numbers are uncomputable." I shrug and say, "So what?"

The book was big, 525 pages with footnotes. The cover was white. It reminded me of Twain's so-called autobiography. It was less interesting, but it was easier to ignore the boring (incomprehensible) parts. I would have been very satisfied with a New Yorker article.

I should have focused on this line from the review, "Gleick ranges over the scientific landscape in a looping itinerary that takes the reader from Maxwell’s demon to Godel’s theorem, from black holes to selfish genes. Some of the concepts are challenging..." Challenging, hell. For me most of the concepts were meaningless.

Anyone have a more basic introduction to information theory? You don't have to answer that question. I'm not sure I want to know anymore.

Have you read The Information? What did you think of it? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Geoffrey Nunberg's review at The New York Times
• Janet Maslin's review at The New York Times
• Nicholas Carr's review at The Daily Beast

I get the impression that none of these people really understood much of what Gleick wrote either.

Freeman Dyson, I am sure understood what Gleick wrote about. His review in The New York Review of Books helped me make some sense out of The Information even though it didn't help me understand the math and science that Gleick chronicled. But, by the time I read it, I didn't much care anymore.

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Reading in Antarctica 80 years ago

In 1928, Admiral Richard Byrd led a scientific expedition to Antarctica. His chief scientist and second in command was geologist Larry Gould. Gould did real science and confirmed that Antarctica was geologically similar to the other continents.

When the Byrd explorers returned to the US in 1932, they were famous heroes and many of them went on speaking tours around the country. Gould also wrote a book about the expedition titled Cold.

Gould went on to become a geology professor and president of my alma mater, Carleton College. The college has kept the book in print for decades. (Used copies are still available at Amazon.com and ebay.) Then last fall, Northfield's Cannon River flooded. The basement of the college's West Gym filled with water. The swimming pool's pumps and the building's HVAC system had to be replaced. And the remaining copies of Cold became sponges.

My talented wife now has the job of editing the text for the next edition of Cold. She reports that it's well-written and interesting. And, luckily, the 50+ photographs in the book are available for republishing in the national archives.

In the process of editing, she found these amazing discussions of reading in Antarctica over 80 years ago. (What was Jean Christophe, by the way?)

[Reading during the "winter night"]

I believe the most important single source of recreation that made the time pass easily was our library of some 3,000 volumes.

When we were looking forward toward the winter night all of us anticipated great times with the books, but few of us, I think, had such ambitious projects as did one man who came to me one day early in the winter and said: “Larry, do you know what I am going to do during this winter night?” Of course I hadn't the slightest idea.

“Well,” he said, “I am going to learn aerial surveying and navigation and read the Encyclopedia Britannica through.”

It seemed a fairly ambitious program to me, but I didn't want to discourage the man so I assured him that if he carried out the project he would certainly achieve the essentials of a liberal education. His literary aspirations were rather short lived. He did start with volume I, letter A of the encyclopedia and got as far as “ammonium tetrachloride.” I saw him throw the book down with a look of disgust and asked him what was the matter.

“The stuff in that d--- book is no good for an aviator,” he replied.

Commander Byrd had charged me with the responsibility of collecting the library as part of our preparations back in New York. I asked him what sort of books he especially liked to read. His reply indicated considerable catholicity of taste: “Dickens, detective stories, and philosophy.”

And of all the various classes of reading matter that were represented detective stories were the most widely read, with accounts of other polar expeditions making a close second. The most widely read single book of all was W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions. Donn Byrne and Joseph Lincoln were more exhaustively read than any other two authors -- Mark Twain came next. We had a complete set of Kipling's works which was scarcely touched. As for myself, had the winter night given me opportunity for no other reading than Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe and Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga in its entirety I should still have considered it well spent. To me these are two works of this day that will live if any do. Jean Christophe is the most satisfying work of art with which I have ever come face to face...


[Reading while returning from the Queen Maud Mountains, a three-month geology expedition by dog sled that encompassed a total of 1,525 miles .]


We were in such excellent physical condition from the hard work of the summer that we travelled along with great ease, especially as compared with the hard work that had accompanied our southward trek. But the dogs were showing the effects of the gruelling summer's work and we had to be careful for their sake, and, purely on their account, we decided to limit ourselves to 23 miles per day. Some days when the surface made sledging easy for them we made good this distance within six or seven hours, nevertheless we forced ourselves not to get impatient but stopped and made camp…

There is much more variety in a polar night than there is in a polar day, and besides, one can create light when he tires of the darkness. But there was no way for us to induce even semi-darkness...

I don't know just what I should have done with all my free time had it not been for the few books that we had brought along with us. Each man had been allowed one book and ordinarily I should have brought Browning with me, but I had been reading him off and on all winter and elected to bring a thin paper edition of Shakespeare, complete in one volume. I regaled myself with Hamlet and Macbeth and King Lear and Love's Labor Lost and The Passionate Pilgrim, trying to fall asleep. When the day's journey had been particularly easy we would have supper over and be finished with the work for the day, ofttimes as early as 6 o'clock. I would crawl into my bag and lie there and read until 12 o'clock or later before going to sleep.

But I ran out of Shakespeare. One doesn't realize how much reading he can cover when he has five to seven hours per day without any kind of interruption. It had never before occurred to me that one of the real advantages and benefits of an Antarctic Expedition would be the opportunity to read Shakespeare in his entirety. I have never appreciated all the tragedy of Lear quite so much as I did in this reading of it out in the midst of the Ross Shelf Ice.

Mike Thorne had brought along W. H. Hudson's Purple Land and though I had read it but a few weeks previously, I read it again with the delight I always find in Hudson's exquisite prose. Eddie Goodale had brought a volume of English poetry which I devoured and in which I was glad to find one of my great favorites by Browning, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb." O'Brien had a big thick volume containing H. G. Wells short stories. I read this too, and it would have afforded me no end of satisfaction to have dropped this volume down the deepest crevasse I could find, but O'Brien objected strongly. He had borrowed the book from Russell Owen who wanted it returned...

The Research Vessel Laurence M. Gould was commissioned in 1995 and is chartered by the National Science Foundation for use in the oceans between Chile and Antarctica.

The RV Gould at Ross Station, Antarctica.

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Neurological anthropologist

While we were in California, I finished a book and had thoughts of finding a bookstore, when I spotted Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars on Jeff's bookshelf. Jeff was generous in allowing me to borrow it, and implied that returning it was not necessary.

Once again I was more intrigued by the idea of Sacks' book than by the book itself.

I probably should have known after my ambivalent reaction to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks profiles people with quite peculiar problems that result in quite peculiar behavior. His goal in his observations is determine how people's brains work and don't work by observing their behaviors. In this respect, he's very much an anthropologist.

But he's a scientist and a neurologist and he offers much more than sideshow curiosities. He describes clinical details and elaborate hypotheses about how the brain functions. He relates the people he's writing about to other people he and others have written about. Once again, that's more than I really wanted. I skimmed a lot of pages.

The best of the profiles in this book is of the blind man who, in middle age, gains eyesight after surgery. What makes it the best is that Sacks raises questions about differences between seeing and looking. Those of us who are sighted don't understand how much learning goes into the process of looking. We have been learning since birth, and were pretty good at it before we could speak. The middle-aged man who had never seen anything before has to learn to distinguish foreground from background; to distinguish between spheres and cubes with his eyes, not just his fingers; to recognize eyes and noses and faces. It's not easy, and people like the one Sacks describes often fall into deep depression after experiencing sight for the first time. This man did.

In other profiles, Sacks marvels over the artistic and musical skills of a child who can barely speak, a surgeon who has Tourette's syndrome, and a man with literally no short term memory. These are out-of-the-ordinary people, but most of Sacks' book is more textbook than I wanted.

It helped me pass the time on the flight back from California, but skimming through the last half was more a self-imposed chore than a pleasure.

Have you read it? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reaction.

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Global warming, competition, and more people

So, I picked up a copy of Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded at the Northfield Library.

Friedman seems like a reasonable observer. However, a decade ago I tried to read The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and couldn't get far because his explanations of his observations seemed so incomplete.

This time, I couldn't read very far either. Friedman's subtitle is "Why we need a green revolution and how it can renew America." I don't need to be persuaded.

My problem is that it's depressing to read about why we need a green revolution, when it seems so impossible. Friedman himself catalogs the reasons: we're walling ourselves off from the rest of the world (one of the reasons the Olympic committee didn't want to send the summer games to Chicago) and the national attitude seems to be that IF there's really a problem, we'll get around to it in our own good time.

Of course it didn't help to read Scott Canon writing in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, that we can't call on politicians to lead us out the big messes we're in now. Because making things better is going to require sacrifice. And we all know what happened to politicians who asked Americans to make sacrifices. Remember Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, and Ross Perot?

Even when I skipped ahead to the section titled, "How We Move Forward," I kept feeling worse and worse. I read nothing that would lead me to have a bit of hope. Friedman's insistence that it's the creativity and entrepreneurship so powerful in American culture that will lead us out of the woods doesn't convince me. Of course, I didn't read the whole thing.

Did you read Hot, Flat, and Crowded? What did you think?

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See also:

• Friedman's web site
  
• Garrett Graf's comments on Wired.com
  
• An unsigned review at Weakonomics

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Neurology text (almost)

While reading another of Jonathan Kellerman's books (about which I'll write soon), I was taken with the opening section. It was the fictionalized, and probably idealized narrative of a course of therapy for a fictionalized, and probably idealized patient.

I thought I'd like to read more things like that. So I picked up Oliver Sacks' [left] The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. From what I recalled having heard about the book, I thought it might be full of stories therapy and analysis.

I was wrong. There are some notable stories, a couple of which I remember reading in the New York Review of Books: the man who couldn't tell the difference between his wife and his hat and the man whose memory extended back only about 20 seconds.

But, most of the book is clinical diagnoses of patients and very little about therapy. There were the inseprable autistic twins who amused themselves by sharing prime numbers. There was the savant who knew the music, words, performances, and stage settings for nearly every prominent production of Bach's choral music.

Sacks offers intriguing literary allusions to help explain details of many of these case studies. But I'm not familiar with them. Sacks' references are meant for a more literary audience.

Much of the book includes references to seminal works in neurology. I've never heard of any of them, and Sacks' comments are directed to a more informed audience.

However, what I didn't expect and found fascinating were Sacks' philosophical questions.

• How is abstract reasoning different from simply knowing?
• Are there advantages to visualizing knowledge over knowing things by their verbal labels?
• What does it mean to know?
• What does it mean to be able to calculate?
• How do the talents of visual savants manifest themselves?
• Is it good therapy to direct autistic savants away from their natural talents and direct them to more socially useful (though not very valuable) activities?
• What makes it possible for someone to understand the narratives of stories but not the narrative of her own life?
• How can a person who cannot do simple calculations identify 12-digit prime numbers?
• Why are so many numerical savants preoccupied with prime numbers?
• Are numbers part of our brain's biology?

I would be interested in more about many of those questions, but they're beyond Sacks' professional expertise, so he's just asking.

The book wasn't what I expected, but it gave me a lot of ideas to think about.

While I was reading the book, Sacks appeared on The Daily Show, publicizing his latest book and a television production based on it. It's about music and the role music plays in human thinking and understanding. I missed the television production and I'll have to watch for a rerun, but I'm intrigued.

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Anecdotes, anecdotes

Carmilla Washburn is a wonderful 94-year-old neighbor of Jo Ashmore. One of the many reasons she's wonderful is her book recommendations. More than a month ago she said, "You've got to read the book I just finished, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell." She's waiting patiently for me to finish so we can discuss it.

A few years ago, one of Gladwell's [left] earlier books, The Tipping Point, had been the common reading for new students at Beloit College, so David read it. Nancy and I were interested enough to read it too. Interesting perspectives on how change happens.

The subtitle for Outliers is The Story of Success. Gladwell's purpose is to explain some of the variables that go into making people extremely successful. The Beatles and Bill Gates are two of his primary examples.

Another of Gladwell's purposes is to poke holes in claims of the self-made man. I think he enjoyed quoting Jeb Bush who said (more than once) that he was a "self-made man" and that being the son of a president was a disadvantage to him as he pursued his political goals. Yeah, right! (Reminds of the joke about George II. He's the guy who was born on third base and always believed he'd hit a triple.)

Gladwell describes how timing, luck, good fortune, practice, and culture accounted as much as intellect, ambition, drive, and skill in creating "self-made people."

The Beatles were hired to play 8 hours a day in a Hamburg strip club for several years. That was a lot of practice time. Bill Gates had nearly unlimited access to an early computer terminal for a University of Washington computer at which to practice his programming.

Age is an important determiner of success in youthful competition. An incredible percentage of the all-stars in the Canadian Hockey League were born in the first three months of the year.

Gladwell's grandmother got to go to school in Jamaica because another student won two scholarships and gave one up.

The way numbers are named in East Asian languages might well give Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students an advantage in learning mathematics.

A girl who succeeds in a Bronx KIPP school has incredible determination and was lucky enough to get into the school.

Some children identified at very early ages as geniuses are incredibly successful. Others are not.

Some children from affluent, successful families are neither as adults. What makes the differences?

Gladwell catalogs bushels of reasons. Few of them offer solace to the Jeb Bushes of the world.

By the way, this is all anecdotal. Gladwell refers to some studies in his footnotes, but he's making his case by telling stories about outliers among the outliers. I'd like to see more integration of his stories and the studies. I read The Tipping Point four years ago, but I think there was more to think about in that book than this one.

Have you read any of Gladwell's books? What did you think?

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• Gladwell's web site
  
• Business Week review of Outliers
  
• Louis Bayard's review of Outliers in Salon
  

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Audio Book


For Kindle

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Nickel and Dimed

David read Nickel and Dimed recently as part of his summer internship. We haven't had a chance to talk about it yet, but here's what I wrote about it back in August 2004.

Small Change and Common Sense

My sister-in-law the banker gave me Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed, On (not) Getting By in America for Christmas last year. I had heard of it. When it was published, it was widely reviewed because it was seen as an important book.

The importance came from the fact that it opened a window into a world unfamiliar to most reviewers. The unfamiliarity was real even though the reviewers (and the rest of us) see it every day.

Even in Northfield, the "Molly Maids" cars are visible reminders of the 21st century version of hired help. The waitresses at Mandarin Garden are likely to be college students, but the servers at Applebee's are more likely supporting a family. The people who care for the hundreds of nursing home residents in Northfield are mostly invisible, but without them we'd be in crisis. In Northfield, those of us who write about books we read might see the woman who checks out our groceries playing softball at the South 40 field, but we don't know much about her job -- or the jobs of the cleaning ladies or the servers or the nursing home aides. Barbara Ehrenreich's book is meant to reduce our ignorance.

She set out to tell us a first hand story about these nearby but unfamiliar worlds. In addition, she wanted to explore the job opportunities available to women "fired" from the dependency of welfare.

She went under cover to work at Wal-Mart, a restaurant, a cleaning service, and a nursing home. She tried to live on what she earned. She even took a second job during one of her undercover stints to make ends meet.

Even considering she had little experience in living near the edge materialistically, she would have had a terrible time without the safety net of her rental car (Rent-A-Wreck it may have been) and some cash to start with. As it was she raised some serious questions about the effects of welfare reform. Is welfare dependency more degrading than Wal-Mart dependency? How can it be that even two low-wage jobs don't offer enough income to rent decent housing? Where does parenting fit into a day in which work consumes 12 hours? And that says nothing about health care, stress relief, healthy food, and quality time with friends and family. This book ought to be required reading for all high school students who are tempted to make careers of after school jobs at stores, restaurants and fast food joints near their parental homes.

In spite of her intellectual goals, Ehrenreich was distracted by the people she met and the stories they had to tell. I'm not at all sorry that this isn't exclusively a polemic. The people she met and cared about ã albeit for a short time ã make this all the more worth reading. Like the little anecdotes on the note cards that Ronald Reagan used to pull out of his pockets, these vignettes humanize the issues and the dilemmas.

The executives can sit in the home offices and, with their accountants, write business plans dependent upon low wage workers and high turnover, but they'll never worry about the welfare of any of their employees ã who are merely factors of production with a price. In our society, that's "not their job." Politicians and bureaucrats can run numbers in DC offices to demonstrate that reducing government spending and taxes is good for the economy, but they won't worry about the welfare of their constituents liberated from the heavy hand of government. That's "not their job." That's the job of employees and constituents -- individually, not as members of some coercive union or special interest group.

If something sounds awry in that description, you should read Ehrenreich's book.

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• More Ehrenreich essays and on-line discussions
  
• Bio of Ehrenreich at Columbia Journalism Review
  
• Interview with Ehrenreich
  

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Learn more about Iraq

Susan Schnurr wrote from her island in Maine with a review and an assignment. It sounds like the book some of the White House officials should have read six years ago.

I will take the opportunity to add my recommendation for Stop-Loss, a powerful movie about American soldiers' experiences.

"The time has come for a book recommendation. The Mid East is VERY complicated, and nowhere have I found it better explained than in the book War Journal: My Five Years In Iraq by Richard Engel.

"Normally I do not read books full of blood and gore and gratuitous violence, but the author has the credentials to make a person sit up and take notice. He speaks Arabic, has lived in the Near East for years, and was in Iraq before we invaded it.

"He has a lot more to say than the sound bites in the evening news. The book is both hard to read and hard to put down, and we learn a lot about Iraqi culture and Islamic culture as well. We have to give thanks for every minute Richard Engel survives to report another day. If he keeps doing it, he will die there. He risks his life every minute he is in Iraq.

"I am extremely impressed with his summary of the differences between Shia and Sunni. I read Islam for Dummies and didn't get as clear a picture. Also, with examples, he is able to give us insight into the paranoia of Islam. Some examples are absolute lunacy: Israel has trees that are loyal to Allah, and, when Judgement day comes, Jews will try to hide behind the trees, but the trees will call out to the Moslems that here is a Jew behind it. Jews, knowing this, are trying to cut down all the trees, but there are too many. Other examples sound almost rational: We would not be making the huge mistakes in Iraq if it weren't part of some larger plot so that the Sunnis can rule again because obviously we wouldn't want the Shia to rule. Or the obverse, we came in to put the Shia in power. Clearly to most Iraqi rational observers that can't be true because that is virtually handing Iraq over to Iran so there must be some sort of conspiracy not yet clear.

"Engel got to meet with Bush. The account is fascinating because Engel is another person who finds Bush to have a good mind. This is the second book I have read which shows that Bush is motivated by idealism.

"There are some parallels that show up in the book From the Islamist: Egyptian Politicians are corrupt; Islam is the solution. Israel is on our border; Islam is the solution; Dirty water is making my child sick; Islam is the solution. From George Bush: The Palestinian Authority has collapsed; Democracy is the solution. Iraq is in chaos; Democracy is the solution.

"This was a painful book to read, but it is not hard reading. You can probably never find a better book to increase your understanding as to what is happening in Iraq.

"EVERYONE should read it."

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Funny thing about philosophy

Last fall I noticed a little ad for a book in The New Yorker. The title caught my eye: Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar... The subtitle, Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, convinced me to buy it for David for Christmas. The book is by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein [below].

David and I have enjoyed listening to Garrison Keillor's joke shows, reading political humor, and reading and talking about philosophy. (Sophie's World was one of his favorite books a few years ago.) So, I bought the book.

David read it in the days after Christmas. When he went back to Beloit, I asked him if I could read it.

There are some good jokes, but the title is just about the best thing about the book. The punchline is at the end of the book.

The jokes are illustrative of the topics in chapters on metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, existentialism, et al. But I was really lazy when I read the book. I often wanted more explanation for the connections between topics and jokes. In other words, I didn't always get the philosophy.

If I were still teaching philosophy, I would probably "borrow" some of these jokes to use in class. Well, maybe. I'm not one of those people who readily remembers jokes and tells them spontaneously. The jokes would have to be in the lesson plans and I'd have to rehearse them.

Well, what, you ask, are some of the jokes?

Here's an epistemological joke: "A scientist and his wife are out for a drive in the country. The wife says, 'Oh, look! Those sheep have been shorn.'

"'Yes,' says the scientist. 'On this side.'"

How about an existential joke?

"Norman began to hyperventilate when he saw the doctor. 'I'm sure I've got liver disease.'

"'That's ridiculous,' said the doctor. 'You'd never know if you had liver disease. There's no discomfort of any kind.'

"'Exactly!' said Norman. 'Those are my precise symptoms.'"

There's this from the chapter on the philosophy of language: "As the poet Gertrude Stein lay on her deathbed, her partner, Alice B. Toklas, leaned over and whispered, 'What is the answer, Gertrude?'

"Replied Stein, 'What's the question?'"

Finally, there's a meta-philosophy joke: "A blind man, a lesbian, and a frog walk into a bar. The barkeep looks up at them and says, 'What is this — a joke?'"


Okay, my reaction is definitely mine. Your reactions will vary. If you're curious check it out.

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• Plato and Platypus official website
  
• A YouTube video of an authors' reading
  
• A review from BuzzFlash

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Tiny reviews

Rob Bingham, who had a couple careers before he braved teaching licensure and secondary physics classrooms, has written again about his reading.

In the old days of Reading as a paper newsletter, Rob wrote about some of his books and about scouting.

He's being very brief with these reviews, but they communicate:

• Logos Run, by William C. Dietz, 2006 , AIrline read... cheery mayhem!
  
  
• Rising Tide by Weir & Boyne, 2003, history of cold war submarines - that was my watch!
  
  
• A Mind at a Time, Mel Levine, MD, 2002, ADD/ADHD point of view; interesting.
  
  
• Labyrinth, Kate Mosse, 2005, Will make good movie; quick read, catchy mystery.
  
  
• Assault on Reason, Al Gore, 2007, Well edited ... more of the unlikely should read it.
  
  
• Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan, 2007, Fun, for an Econ major like me; what a neat background!

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Thanks for the thoughts, Rob.

Now, everyone else can see how easy this is.

Write. Tell a little bit of the world what you think.

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Books that smart people read

Books That Make You Dumb

Here's a badly mis-titled research project that has interesting results. (Interesting does not mean meaningful to me.)

It's not about books that make you dumb. It's not even about books popular with dumb people. It's about the favorite books identified by college students and the relationship of those preferences to the average SAT scores at the colleges the students attend.

But that doesn't make for a snappy title, does it? (Or an easy-to-remember URL)



Go look at the details for yourself: Books that make you dumb

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