Category: Books and literature

Discussion of books and other literature

Kindle Keyboard 3G: first impressions

I have had a Kindle Keyboard 3G for four days now and have read a couple of books and long essays off of it.

The device has a good shape and size, and the screen is pleasant to read from. It doesn’t work terribly well with unconverted PDF files, which is quite a pain since the main reason I got it was to read thesis sources with. That being said, you can use Amazon’s free PDF conversion service for files under 50 megabytes. The converted files get delivered to your Kindle via WiFi. Unconverted PDF files load very slowly and clunkily, and sometimes cause the device to freeze up. All told, the interface of the device tends to be frustratingly slow. Even highlighting a passage of plain text can be a patience-trying task. Often, interacting with the Kindle consists of pressing a button and then waiting 5-15 seconds for it to have an effect.

The built-in web browser is poor, but good enough to let you use the free WiFi at Starbucks by clicking the button to accept the terms and conditions. One nice connectivity feature is that you can select a passage, write a short comment on it, and post the whole thing to Twitter. This is available by WiFi only, not over the 3G connection. I also like how the Kindle automatically collects all the passages you highlight in all documents into a single ‘clippings’ file.

The keyboard is tolerable for writing short notes, but you certainly wouldn’t want to write an essay or email on it.

All told, the Kindle is a pleasant and effective way to read plain text files and other properly-formatted documents. It isn’t great as a PDF reader, though perhaps future versions will be better in that way. One thing to be aware of is that – in my experience – the claimed battery life of the Kindle is a vast distortion. Amazon says that it will be good for 1-2 months, based on 30 minutes of reading per day and no wireless connectivity. I have found that I use about 1/3 of the battery every day. Admittedly, I have been using it for a lot more than half an hour. Still, my own use suggests that the battery lasts for about 10-15 hours with wireless turned off, which is better than a laptop or iPad but not sufficient to let you travel without worrying about finding places to charge.

The End of Nature

In The End of Nature, Middlebury College professor and 350.org founder Bill McKibben makes the case that humanity has put an end to nature by altering the climate, and then goes on to consider the implications. McKibben’s book – first published in 1989 – briefly explains why human activities are increasing the quantity of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and why this will produce change on a planetary scale. His tone is mostly one of lamentation. He expresses sadness about that which is already doomed to destruction, before progressing extensively into the question of what can still be saved, and what means might achieve it. Reading The End of Nature in 2012 is dispiriting. It proves how everything important about climate change was well understood decades ago, including why our political and economic systems have done nothing serious to slow it down. Nonetheless, McKibben’s appeal is a poignant and effective one. By putting humanity’s current activities in context, McKibben conveys the reality that what happens to the Earth now will mostly be a matter of human choices, and that the philosophies we adopt in the decades ahead will affect the prospects of all the life forms that depend upon this planet.

The basic idea of the book is that humanity has no so thoroughly altered the planet that nothing can be considered ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘unpopulated wilderness’ anymore. Climate change is the most important and dramatic change humanity has produced, but our chemical signature is also written in the form of novel isotopes from nuclear tests, changes to the ozone layer, and in the legacy of pollution and pesticides. According to McKibben’s definition, nobody my age has ever seen nature – only nature as modified through human industrial activity.

Along with climate change, McKibben devotes a fair bit of space to talking about genetic engineering. He sees it as a possible way of keeping humanity’s billions alive in a world that is increasingly damaged by our choices. But it is also another step away from ‘nature’. He envisions a world of trees and fish and animals modified to tolerate a changed climate, and modified further to better serve human needs. Reading these passages in 2012, it seems like he over-estimated the importance of genetic engineering, or at least under-estimated how long it would take to arrive. For instance, he imagines custom organisms that draw in nutrients through tubes and produce the parts of chickens many humans enjoy eating. Margaret Atwood’s ‘ChickieNobs’ from the dystopian 2003 novel Oryx and Crake are described in basically identical terms in McKibben’s book, but nothing remotely like them seems to exist in the real world. So far, genetic engineering has been more about experimentation than implementation, and nothing too world-changing seems to have arisen from it. Perhaps that perspective reflects ignorance on my part, especially given the evolving character of the global ‘agribusiness’ and biotechnology industries.

Because I borrowed a copy of the book from a library, rather than buying one, I didn’t take the detailed marginal notes that I usually do when reading a book. I did, however, pick out a few passages that I think are especially evocative and worthy of discussion:

On the habits of humanity

“The problem, in other words, is not simple that burning oil releases carbon dioxide, which happens, by virtue of its molecular structure, to trap the sun’s heat. The problem is that nature, the independent force that has surrounded us since our earliest days, cannot coexist with our numbers and our habits. We may well be able to create a world that can support our numbers and our habits, but it will be an artificial world, a space station.

Or, just possibly, we could change our habits.” (p.144 2006 Random House trade paperback edition)

Timing

“I have tried to explain, though, why [dealing with climate change] cannot be put off any longer. We just happen to be living at the moment when the carbon dioxide has increased to an intolerable level. We just happen to be alive at the moment when if nothing is done before we die the world’s tropical rain forests will become a brown girdle around the planet that will last for millennia. It’s simply our poor luck; it might have been nicer to have been born in 1890 and died in 1960, confident that everything was looking up. We just happen to be living in the decade when genetic engineering is acquiring a momentum that will soon be unstoppable. The comforting idea that we could decide to use such technology to, in the words of Lewis Thomas, cure “most of the unsolved diseases on society’s agenda” and then not use it to straighten trees or grow giant trout seems implausible to me: we’re already doing those things.” (p.165)

On caring for future generations

“We flatter ourselves that we think of the future. Politicians are always talking about our children, our grandchildren, and, as individuals, we do think about them, but in the same way we think about ourselves. We lay aside money for them, or land. But we do not really think of grandchildren in general. “Future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions,” said a perceptive introduction to the United Nations report on Our Common Future. Future generations depend on us, but not vice versa. “We act as we do because we can get away with it.”” (p.170)

Beyond what one person can deal with

“The inertia of affluence, the push of poverty, the soaring population – these and the other reasons listed earlier make me pessimistic about the changes that we will dramatically alter our ways of thinking and living, that we will turn humble in the face of our troubles.

A purely personal effort is, of course, just a gesture – a good gesture, but a gesture. The greenhouse effect is the first environmental problem we can’t escape by moving to the woods. There are no personal solutions. There is no time to just decide we’ll raise enlightened children and they’ll slowly change the world. (When the problem was that someone might drop the Bomb, it perhaps made sense to bear and raise sane, well-adjusted children in the hope that they’d help prevent the Bomb from being dropped. But the problem now is precisely too many children, well adjusted or otherwise.) We have to be the ones to do it, and simply driving less won’t matter, except as a statement, a way to get other people – many other people – to drive less. Most people have to be persuaded, and persuaded quickly, to change.” (p.174)

So McKibben lays out the challenge that has been occupying some of the most capable and driven people in the world for decades (occupying them, but not yet producing even the beginnings of success) and which seems likely to be the defining activity for humanity as a whole for the decades and centuries ahead.

Since 2007, McKibben has been an important organizer of environmental campaigns and the founder of 350.org, an organization that aims to keep the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide below 350 parts per million. Beyond that level, the sensitivity of the Earth to greenhouse gasses is such that we would likely see the disappearance of nations like the Maldives along with large parts of nations like Bangladesh and the Netherlands, accompanied by profound changes to physical and biological systems around the world. Keeping the level of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere below 350ppm is incredibly ambitious and far beyond what any large country on the planet is meaningfully aiming for now. If implemented globally, Canada’s policies would probably put us more in the territory of 1000ppm by 2100 – territory that involves changes so profound that they might threaten the future of the human species, as well as the future of countless other less resilient species in the ecosystems of the world.

The End of Nature is a reminder of the scale of the fight we have on our hands, as well as of the stakes involved. If we are to have any chance of succeeding, we must be committed, passionate, strategic, self-sacrificing and willing to do what has never been done before.

Distrust that Particular Flavor

This book contains about 20 pieces of short writing by William Gibson. They vary in style and content, from his essay on the culture of Singapore (“Disneyland with the Death Penalty”) to long discussions of his history with buying mechanical watches to his thoughts on the future of technology and the societal importance of science fiction.

Not every piece was terribly resonant with me, but I found the book very worthwhile overall. Gibson makes a reasonable case for the importance of technological development in the evolving character of societies, though he may go a bit too far in saying that “all cultural change is essentially technologically driven” (p.123 hardcover).

“Googling the Cyborg” was probably the most interesting essay – discussing the way in which human biology and technology have already started to compliment one another to a remarkable degree.

The magnitude of the original contribution of a PhD

I am reading Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh’s How to Get a PhD: A Handbook for Students and Their Supervisors. One interesting section is entitled: “Not understanding the nature of a PhD by overestimating what is required”.

Some quotes:

The words used to describe the outcome of a PhD project – ‘an original contribution to knowledge’ – may sound rather grand, but we must remember that, as we saw in Chapter 3, the work for the degree is essentially a research training process. and the term ‘original contribution’ has perforce to be interpreted quite narrowly. It does not mean an enormous breakthrough that has the subject rocking on its foundations, and research students who think that it does (even if only subconsciously or in a half-formed way) will find the process pretty debilitating.

…

We find that when we make this point, some social science students who have read Kuhn’s (1970) work on ‘paradigm shifts’ in the history of natural science (science students have normally not heard of him) say rather indignantly: ‘Oh, do you mean a PhD has to be just doing normal science?’ And indeed we do mean that.

…

You can leave the paradigm shifts for after your PhD, and empirically that is indeed what happens. The theory of relativity (a classic example of a paradigm shift in relation to post-Newtonian physics) was not Einstein’s PhD thesis (that was a sensible contribution to Brownian motion theory). Das Kapital was not Marx’s PhD (that was on the theories of two little-known Greek philosophers).

…

Overestimating is a powerful way of not getting a PhD.

Googling the Cyborg

In his engaging essay “Googling the Cyborg”, William Gibson effectively argues that the expectation that ‘the cyborg’ will be a human being with an electronic eye and a robot arm is mistaken. The cyborg – he argues – exists in the physical interactions between human beings and machines: “The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerve”. (The terminology there is strangely incorrect. Cathode ray tube televisions emit photons, which are produced when the electrons fired from the back of the vacuum tube hit a phosphor screen – and the optic nerve is made of neurons, it isn’t a channel that conveys them. No matter.)

Gibson argues that the cyborg is the “extended communal nervous system” that humanity has grown for itself, with all these sensors and processors and network connections.

He also argues that there is a short-changing that occurs, when we deny that the humans who are behind machines are using them as true extensions of their own being. In the context of remote-controlled rovers on Mars, he says:

Martian jet lag. That’s what you get when you operate one of those little Radio Shack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an airbase in California. Literally. Those operators were the first humans to experience Martian jet lag. In my sense of things, we should know their names: first humans on the Red Planet. Robbed of recognition by that same old school of human literalism.

Gibson, William. Distrust that Particular Flavor. p.251 (hardcover)

I am not sure what should be counted as the first cyborg on Mars. Specifically, did it need to be able to move on human command? Or is moving camera shutters enough to count? In any case, hardly anyone knows the name of the person who was controlling it when it first activated on the Martian surface.

The Hobbit

I recently re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The book is a wonderful one, with a compelling story, beautiful language, well-crafted characters, and moral complexity. It’s a classic journey tale, in which a protagonist goes from one place to another and changes along the way.

I first read The Hobbit in high school. One of my English teachers was reading it aloud to the class. While pleasant, the slowness of listening to a read book prompted me to use paper route money to buy paperback copies of both The Hobbit and a single-volume onionskin copy of The Lord of the Rings.

Reading it now, I can definitely see what appealed to me about The Hobbit back then. In many ways, it comes down to the character of Bilbo. He is a rather soft, comfort-loving sort to begin with, but Galdalf propels him on an improbable adventure and he succeeds in the face of considerable difficulties. My favourite chapter was the first one where he is really on his own, lost in the caves after getting separated from his companions. It’s where you first really see that Bilbo has capabilities of his own, in reasoning, silent movement, negotiation, and a good measure of jumping skill. Bilbo may grumble about inconveniences and discomforts, but he is actually quite a resilient fellow. He demonstrates this amply in his later interactions with the dragon Smaug.

I think Bilbo’s character also connects to the biggest theme of the book: that it is good to live a peaceful and comfortable life, when circumstances allow it, but that there are times in which more is expected of people. Of course, this is fleshed out much more thoroughly in The Lord of the Rings. After all, Frodo’s adventure is for the good of all of Middle Earth, whereas Bilbo’s is mostly a fortune-finding expedition, albeit with a measure of reclaiming what has been unjustly taken.

Bilbo certainly makes ethical choices throughout the book. He decides not to attack Gollum while armed and invisible, despite the clear threat Gollum poses; he saves the dwarves from spiders and then elves at considerable personal risk; he is even on the cusp of returning into the goblin tunnels alone in search of his friends when he discovers their camp. Later, Bilbo puts his assessment of right and wrong (in this case, avoiding war) above his loyalty to his friends and his own safety. It’s interesting how Tolkien creates Bilbo’s role as a peacemaker between his dwarven friends and the lake men. It’s a situation that calls for tact, fortitude, and a willingness to accept personal risk for the greater good. It’s much more morally complex than Bilbo’s interaction with the dragon.

The language of the book may be its finest characteristic. Throughout, there is a playful storytelling relationship between the narrator and the reader. The reader is given hints about what is to come, explanations of some consequences that were quite unknown to characters in the story, and occasionally comforting indications that dire circumstances will be resolved favourably. For instance, when the eagles drop off Bilbo and the dwarves near the house of Beorn, the narrator mentions in passing that Bilbo sees the eagles again: “high and far off in the battle of Five Armies”.

The level of attention to language is illustrated in one section where Bilbo has been rescued from goblins by eagles. He is concerned to hear himself and his companions referred to as ‘prisoners’. The narrator, however, explains:

“As a matter of fact Gandalf, who had often been in the mountains, had once rendered a service to the eagles and healed their lord from an arrow-wound. So you see ‘prisoners’ had meant ‘prisoners rescued from the goblins’ only, and not captives of the eagles.”

To me, this short passage illustrates a lot of what is special about Tolkien. Bilbo’s initial concern arises because of his attention to language. The explanation – which Bilbo never learns in the story – is part of an elaborate backstory created by the author, part of the rich verisimilitude of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The narrator takes an opportunity to clarify a point about language, using a sentence structure that demonstrates his interest in linguistics, while also illustrating a point about reciprocal altruism or perhaps just telling an interesting miniature story.

Tolkien’s work is also set apart from a good deal of other fiction by the complex motivations of characters and the moral complexity of the situations in which they find themselves. Bilbo’s allies are not candy-coated one-dimensional sources of aid, but rather figures with agendas of their own that sometimes conflict with his. Similarly, his opponents are rarely purely evil. The Hobbit also establishes some of the most complex moral relationships that develop in The Lord of the Rings, such as the One Ring as an entity with a will of its own and an ability to corrupt its bearers, the sometimes strained alliances between the free races of Middle Earth, and the ethics of requiring a disproportionate sacrifice from a person or a group in order to improve outcomes for a larger mass of people.

Given that a film of The Hobbit is forthcoming – and that films have a tendency to permanently over-write some of our memories from books (that’s why I have refused to see the film of “The Golden Compass”) – this may be a good time to read or re-read Tolkien’s short novel. It really is a literary accomplishment, I think. It is simple and accessible but also deep and thoughtful. It’s a book to hang on to.

My first exposure to the value of mindfulness

After having my interest piqued by some iTunes University lectures, I have been reading Mark Williams’ and Danny Pengman’s book Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. In the midst of a number of urgent projects, I am reading it in fits and starts, so I am not really following the program as prescribed. From the outset, I have also been deeply skeptical about how useful a program that essentially consists of guided meditation could be for managing stress.

Already, however, I think I have taken one fairly valuable thing from the book. When a person is nervous about a subject – and particularly if they are prone to anxiety – it is exceptionally easy to get into a spiral of connected painful and frightening thoughts. For example, something might remind me of the ongoing covert war that is happening in Iran. That, in turn, makes me think about the assassination of scientists, the possible bombing campaigns that could occur against Iranian nuclear facilities, the terror of nuclear weapons themselves, the danger of conventional or nuclear war in the region, and so on. Confronted with thoughts that have powerful emotions linked to them, the mind goes into a ‘problem solving’ mode, but in relation to problems I can do nothing about. The result is counterproductive attempts to either minimalize the seriousness of the issue being considered, or try to find some trite mechanism for explaining why I shouldn’t be worried. “We’re all going to die sometime” is the sort of pathetic rationalization the brain sometimes coughs up when presented with a mortal problem well beyond the capacity of a single human to solve.

My very preliminary understanding of mindfulness is that it is all about being able to pause for a moment and just see things as they are, without wanting or trying to change them. You can simply say: “The possibility of war in the Middle East is deeply frightening”. Looking at the emotional situation that way, simply as an expression of fact, without creating a mental map of linked fears or deploying psychological self-defence strategies, seems to allow the mind to recognize the fear and move on, without trivializing or ignoring the reality of it. It’s possible to just say “that’s tragic” or “that’s terrifying” without getting caught up in the hopeless task of trying to immediately remedy the problem.

This also works with some of the other substantial fears that crop up periodically in a person’s thoughts: from the inevitability of aging and death (both for yourself and for family and friends) to the frightening state of the global environment to the countless terrible injustices that are always ongoing around the world. All of those observations are accurate, well-justified, and emotionally charged. Nothing we can do will make any of those things go away. But pausing for a moment of honest recognition can allow us to keep functioning, despite the frightening and overwhelming character of the world.

A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI

Graham Chapman, one of the Monty Python gang, drank himself to death at 48, having already been an alcoholic for 23 years when he was 37. He died exactly 20 years after the first recording of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI was published nine years earlier, written by Chapman, his long-time romantic partner David Sherlock, Alex Martin, David Yallop, and Douglas Adams. As you might expect from the autobiography of a man who quite knowingly drank himself to death (he was a doctor, after all), the book is pretty depressing in places. Despite that, I thought it conveyed an honest and intimate perspective of a man who was generous and humanitarian but who often struggled with life.

I am not sure what to make of a self-confessed “liar’s autobiography”. The whole concept of autobiography is that a person uses a reasonably honest re-telling of their life events to share their experiences and personality with you. When you don’t know which (if any) experiences are genuine, it makes it difficult to know what Chapman and his cabal of co-authors were really trying to convey. If the general thrust of the anecdotes is reasonably accurate, it seems fair to conclude that it was easy to be drunk nearly all the time and have a great deal of casual gay sex in England at the time when Monty Python was performing and making films. The book includes quite a few rather terrifying and tragic stories, including hangings, physical assaults, aggressive police questioning, and perilous mountain climbing accidents.

A Liar’s Autobiography is also a reminder of how all fame is fleeting, and perhaps provincial as well. Chapman is constantly name-dropping, but the names he uses to try to impress readers are virtually all totally unknown to me. The book is aggressively non-linear, and features relatively little discussion of how Monty Python worked. There is more, all told, on the many sufferings associated with alcoholism, from the chronic liver damage that accompanies ongoing drinking to the agonies of withdrawal after a high level of dependence has been reached.

In an epilogue, fellow Python Eric Idle calls Chapman “the only true anarchist in Monty Python”. Chapman himself explains that he is “against any large organization, communist, capitalist or religious, that pretends to know best”. Chapman expresses a libertarian view of how the state should let people use their own bodies how they like:

I’ve always believed that people should be allowed to do what they want with their bodies. After all, it’s all they’ve got. I agree with that law that it is wrong for everyone to go round poking other people with sharp pointed sticks, but if someone wants to poke himself with a sharp pointed stick, that’s fine by me. They can go and batter themselves to death with huge lumps of poisoned granite for all I care.

This seems somewhat linked to Chapman’s rather mechanistic view of life itself. People, he says, are “tubes – hollow cylinders of flesh”.

Eric Idle’s epilogue summarizes this book better than I can: “What shines through in this book is the staggering honesty – the brilliance of truth that only a self-proclaimed liar could achieve. Facts and stories that we would have murdered our grandmothers to conceal are cheerfully paraded for our edification. This is life viewed as comedy, that only a doctor faced constantly with the physical comedy of our bodies can see”.

Advice to supervillains – killing your own scientists

One classic mistake made by cartoon supervillains concerns the complicated piece of machinery that is inevitably at the heart of their secret plan. It might be a time travel device of some sort, or a machine that strips the opposing superhero of their power, or a key part of a world domination scheme.

As a way of illustrating just how evil and ruthless they really are, supervillains will often kill the whole team of scientists who built the thing, perhaps by having them all drink poisoned champagne. This does make a certain measure of sense. Killing the scientists keeps them from going off and telling people about what they did, which could cause problems for you.

That being said, I strongly object to the timing that is frequently used for these killings. The supervillain will kill off the science team right before testing the device for the first time. As anyone who has worked on anything remotely technical and complex can tell you, this is the worst possible time to kill off all the people involved. Chances are, the machine will not work properly on the first try and that the only people who can figure out what went wrong are the people who designed and built the machine.

By all means, kill the science team once you are confident that you have a machine that will do what you want. Build it, test it, build an improved model, build a backup copy or two, and then hand out the glasses of killer champagne.

Inside Canadian Intelligence

Edited by Dwight Hamilton, Inside Canadian Intelligence: Exposing the New Realities of Espionage and International Terrorism is an interesting read, though I would say that there are some important counterarguments to the main ideological positions adopted by the various authors.

The book describes Canada’s various present and historical intelligence services, including the intelligence branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), military intelligence, and others. There are chapters on counterintelligence, on the Air India attack and subsequent investigations, on special forces (including JTF-2), and on various other topics connected to matters of Canadian security and intelligence. For those wanting to get a better understanding of the history and present operations of these organizations, it is probably a worthwhile read. There is also some interesting information on technical capabilities and techniques, such as some information on the RADAR and infrared data fed into NORAD, how internal government security screenings are conducted, automated facial recognition, how some information from human sources is validated, and voice recognition in mass surveillance of telecommunication.

Most books written by people closely linked to intelligence organizations have a tendency to represent the officers of those organizations as heroes who can do no wrong, opposed by inhuman monsters, and hampered by meddling politicians and judges (for example). What this ignores is the dangers posed to the general public by intelligence services themselves, as well as the willingness they sometimes demonstrate to protect their own interests at the expense of the general public. Oversight may occasionally prevent good things from being done, but it surely prevents abuses as well.

Another assumption I question is that it is appropriate to categorize counterterrorism efforts as a ‘war’. First, I don’t think that is accurate. Terrorism is a tactic, not an entity that can be defeated. Secondly, I think it causes problems when we describe the fight against terrorism as a war. It justifies a lack of oversight, and can be used to justify human rights violations. It also creates the misleading impression that the ‘War on Terror’ could end. In reality, as long as there are people willing to use violence for political purposes, there will be terrorism. It can no more be ended than tax evasion or petty crime.

Above all, what this book lacks is a sense of perspective. Terrorism really isn’t such a huge problem. It kills far fewer people than chronic or infectious diseases, war, or accidents. It’s a mistake to turn our society upside down or spend an excessive amount of money trying to stop people from using certain violent tactics. We need to remain aware of the importance of other priorities, as well as the ways in which ‘being at war’ corrodes the integrity of democratic states. One example of such corrosion is the dangerous tendency of states to spy on everybody, in hopes of catching the few people who may be up to no good. Because it is so powerful, and has so many abilities to hide its mistakes and abuses, the state is far more dangerous than any terrorist cell, and it is critical to human freedom that the power of states be kept in check.

By all means, we should be grateful for the good work done by the security services, but we must also recognize the danger that they will go too far and become violators of rights, as well as the much greater importance of other governmental undertakings. Dealing with cancer and providing a better education for children are far more important to the welfare of Canadians than stopping terrorist attacks. It’s a shame that we are continuing to spend billions on the latter, while government is cutting back on virtually everything else.