Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Six Easy Pieces

In 1964, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman gave a series of introductory lectures on physics to undergraduate students at CalTech. Six Easy Pieces is an abbreviated version, with six chapters on the essential elements of modern physics including atomic theory, conservation of energy, gravitation, quantum mechanics, and the relation of physics to other sciences.

The lectures highlight Feynman’s particular style, in that they are engaging and accessible. The book contains hardly any mathematics and – aside from one dated and strangely detailed departure into categorizing elementary particles – everything in the book should be reasonably accessible to anyone with a passing knowledge of science. At many points, Feynman identifies things that were unknown to science in 1964. Contemporary readers may find themselves wondering how much has changed in the intervening time. Indeed, it would probably be a valuable exercise for somebody to write an update. Ideally, a talented science writer like Simon Singh who could bring a talent in expression to the update that would mirror that in the individual.

Feynman does accord some space to more philosophical issues, such as defining ‘science’. He repeatedly asserts that: “Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth” and uses that criterion to distinguish it from other kinds of knowledge, including mathematics.

The best thing about the book may be some of the elegant ways in which Feynman explains fundamental truths about the universe, and how they relate to each other. He doesn’t simply assert things like the nature of gravitational attraction or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but in many cases illustrates how they arise from other pieces of known physics. For instance, Feynman elegantly explains how Kepler’s Laws on planetary motion can be elaborated into Newton’s universal theory of gravitation.

The Warrior’s Honour

It is strange to read Michael Ignatieff’s The Warrior’s Honour now, when he is leader of the official opposition rather than a journalist. Back in 1998, Ignatieff described the purpose of the book:

I wanted to find out what mixture of moral solidarity and hubris led Western nations to embark on this brief adventure in putting the world right.

Ignatieff is making reference to the whole notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ which emerged strongly after the scale of both killing and western inaction in the 1994 Rwandan genocide became apparent. The book is certainly dated in some ways, which can be a liability. At the same time, it has value insofar as it does express one perspective of that time, and facilitates consideration of what has changed since.

The central concept of Ignatieff’s book is the ethics of warriors themselves – the internal moral forces that sometimes help to constrain behaviour within the most limited bounds of ethics, even in wartime. He explores the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as special representatives (‘enforcers’ is too strong a word) of the Geneva Conventions. He explains how Henry Dunant – founder of the organization – established a continuing tradition in which delegates of the ICRC have “made their pact with the devil of war” and “accept[ed] the inevitability, sometimes even the desirability of war” while “trying, if it is possible, to conduct it according to certain rules of honour.” Ignatieff also describes the consequences when warriors abandon honour, as he alleges took place during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when former neighbours destroyed their collective homeland driven by “the narcissism of minor difference.”

The Warrior’s Honour is not an especially practical book. The tone is more mournful and ambiguous than certain or persuasive. It doesn’t offer much guidance to those trying to decide how to respond to the humanitarian emergencies of today. Ignatieff’s book does more to describe the predicament than to suggest paths out of it, though that is a valuable undertaking in itself. In the conclusion, he explains:

The chief moral obstacle in the path of reconciliation is the desire for revenge. Now, revenge is commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion, and because it is regarded as such, its deep moral hold on people is rarely understood. But revenge – morally considered – is the desire to keep faith with the dead, to honour their memory by taking up their cause where they left of. Revenge keeps faith between generations; the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for the community’s dead – therein lies its legitimacy. Reconciliation is difficult precisely because it must compete with the powerful alternative morality of violence. Political terror is tenacious because it is an ethical practice. It is a cult of the dead, a dire and absolute expression of respect.

One has to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for humanity to simply forget the outrages of the past, given the tragic way in which they perpetuate conflict into the present and future. Like feuding gangs, human beings feel this constant compulsion to respond to every slight with a larger slight, and pay back every rape and murder with two more.

Given the course of Michael Ignatieff’s life, the book also highlights the tragic theatrical character of government and opposition. As a journalist, Ignatieff could grapple with major political and ethical questions with a kind of integrity and with acceptance that the answers derived from history are usually imperfect and uncertain. As a politician, he must engage in a much less sophisticated slinging back-and-forth of accusations. One of many unfortunate facts about political life is that proximity to power tends to be accompanied by a cheapening of discourse.

The Periodic Table

In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain voted Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table to be the best science book ever written. On the basis of that endorsement, I was expecting something along the lines of a very well-written history of the discovery of the elements. Levi’s book differs substantially from that expectation; it is a kind of post-Holocaust memoir, presented in the form of twenty one sketches named after elements. Most have an element of mystery to them, usually involving an investigation of the nature of a substance or the cause of a change. Ultimately, the book feels deeply personal, set against a backdrop of very practical chemistry: the sort where a couple of men in Italy scrape together a living synthesizing pyruvic acid, or making stannous chloride from tin, to sell to small-scale mirror manufacturers.

In many ways, the one of the book is established in relation to the second world war, and especially the Holocaust. In a story focused on the dynamic between prisoner-chemists and one of their masters in Auschwitz , Levi contemplates some of the ethics of complicity:

I admitted that we were not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him is, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.

For the most part, however, the book meditates on much more ordinary sorts of human relationships and is full of wise observations. Describing the purpose of the project, Levi explains that:

[I]n this book I would deliberately neglect the grand chemistry, the triumphant chemistry of colossal plants and dizzying output, because this is collective work and therefore anonymous. I was more interested in the stories of solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine: but it has also been the chemistry of the founders, who did not work in teams but alone, surrounded by the indifference of their time, generally without profit, and who confronted matter without aids, with their brains and hands, reason and imagination.

At times, the abstract realities of chemistry provide solace. A compound used in high-end lipstick is most abundantly found in the excrement of vipers, but that is as good a source as any since molecules are molecules without reference to their history. Near the end, Levi tells the true story of a single atom of carbon that finds it was around the Earth – incorporated into rock and plant and animal – and explains how the story must be true, given the sheer multiplicity of carbon atoms circulating in the world.

Ultimately, that Levi excels at is the sketching of character: whether it is his own, that of the various objects of romance or curiosity he encounters, or that of compounds and the elements themselves. As such, the book is very human: a consideration of how a thoughtful person functions in a world where some conditions are established through immutable physical laws, and others through the opaque decision-making of the powerful.

Recent BuryCoal posts

Increasingly, I am putting my climate change related content over on the group blog BuryCoal.com. There is a bit of a trade-off to that. It’s convenient to have a site on that topic exclusively, and makes things easier for people who only want information on that.

At the same time, I think there is some value to exposing people who are interested in the general subject matter of this broader site to information about climate change. For the sake of those who don’t visit BuryCoal often, here are a few recent notable posts:

Please consider keeping an eye on future BuryCoal updates. You can subscribe via RSS or receive updates by email. We are also on Twitter.

If there is anything about BuryCoal that bothers you (or that you think is especially good), I would like to know about it.

Intelligence claims

There have been a few passages from Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story Of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency that have struck me as especially worthy of discussion, so far.

Spying as a stabilizer

Discussing the 1960s, Aldrich argues that improved intelligence from signals intelligence (SIGINT) and satellite sources “made the international system more stable” and “contributed to a collective calming of nerves”:

Indeed, during the 1960s the penetration of the NATO registries by Eastern Bloc spies was so complete that the Warsaw Pact had no choice but to conclude that the intentions of Western countries were genuinely defensive and benign.

Previously, we discussed some of the major problems with spies. In this book, Aldrich brings up a partial counterpoint. Countries tend to consider secretly intercepted communications to be a highly credible source of information. If a country tells you it is planning to do Thing X for Reason Y, there are all sorts of reasons why they could be deceiving you. If you secretly overhear the same plan within their internal discussions, you have more reason to think that it will go forward and that the reasons behind it are genuine.

Revolutionaries and symbolic violence

Discussing the actions of the Turkish People’s Liberation Army (TPLA) and Turkish People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) during the 1970s, Aldrich says:

Both consisted of middle-class intellectuals who regarded themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Like many revolutionary leaders, they suffered from a ‘Che Guevara complex’, believing that symbolic acts of violence could trigger a wider social revolution. Che Guevara had come to grief in 1967 during a futile attempt to stir the revolutionary consciousness of Bolivia, and was captured and shot by a police team, advised by the CIA. Turkey’s would-be revolutionaries would soon suffer a similar fate.

The TPLA and TPLF figure into Aldrich’s story because of their targeting of intelligence facilities: initially accidentally, and later intentionally.

How far ahead are the spooks?

The codebreaking success of the Allies against the Germans and Japanese during the second world war was kept secret until the 1970s. Most of the documents about codebreaking being declassified now extend up to the 1970s. Because of such secrecy, it is impossible to know what technologies and capabilities organizations like America’s NSA, Britain’s CGHQ, and Canada’s CSE have today.

Describing the early 1970s, Aldrich explains how the microwave relays used by the telephone system beam signals into space accidentally, because of the curvature of the Earth. Forty years ago, the United States was already using satellites to intercept that spillover. Furthermore, they were already using computers to scan for keywords in phone, fax, and telex messages.

As early as 1969, the British and Americans had a system in place somewhat akin to what Google Alerts do today: tell it what keywords you are interested in, and it can pull related content out from the torrent of daily traffic. You can’t help but wonder what they are able to do now: whether the increased volume of communication has overwhelmed their capability to do such filtering effectively, or whether advances in secret techniques and technologies mean that they have even more potent methods for intercepting and processing the world’s commercial, diplomatic, and interpersonal communication.

Penetrating the secrecy

Aldrich also describes the investigative journalism of people like Duncan Campbell and James Bamford – people who used open sources to reveal the true function of GCHQ for the first time. Aldrich claims that their actions “confirmed a fundamental truth: that there are no secrets, only lazy researchers”.

Some recent journalistic undertakings – such as the excellent ‘Top Secret America’ – do lend credence to that view.

Spying between friends

Richard Alrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency describes a number of instances of longstanding allies conducting espionage against one another, including signals intelligence (SIGINT). Aldrich describes how the ‘Echelon’ system run by British and U.S. intelligence was used to “read the traffic of their minor allies, including France and West Germany”. This system is now estimated to process five billion intercepts per day, probably filtering them for suspicious words and phrases. Aldrich talks about how, after the second world war, Britain’s codebreakers were “doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both”.

Of course, more awkward allies have been a higher priority for codebreaking and other forms of covert activity. During the interwar period, Russian ciphers were the the “core business” of Britain’s codebreakers, and apparently work on them didn’t stop despite their subsequent alliance. The Soviets were also spying on the allies, though with more of an emphasis on human intelligence (HUMINT). For example, John Cairncross worked at GCHQ’s predecessor – Bletchley Park – and warned the KGB of the impending German armoured offensive at Kursk, one of the decisive battles of the war. He also saw some of Britain’s early thinking on atomic weapons while working at the Cabinet Office, while his fellow Russian spy Klaus Fuchs was virtually able to provide the blueprints of the devices built at Los Alamos. The Soviet Union achieved other notable HUMINT successes throughout the Cold War, such as the John Walker espionage within the navy. Surely, there are other examples that are still secret.

Allied SIGINT against Soviet targets continued after 1945, as GCHQ and others started to intercept messages between Moscow and the capitals of new client states.

The most subtle reference to inter-allied spying comes from a passage on the Diplomatic Wireless Service, developed in 1944 and 1945. Aldrich describes how the DWS was primarily a system of military SIGINT collection stations, but that it also “doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions”. High Commissions are only located in Commonwealth countries, on whom Britain is presumably still spying. They seem to be returning the favour, as demonstrated by another anecdote from the book, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair discovered his hotel room in India to be laced with listening devices that would have had to be drilled out of the walls to disable.

Abusing the word ‘green’

I have written before about how the word ‘sustainable’ is frequently abused. People often refer to anything done with the slightest bit of environmental awareness as ‘sustainable’. Thus, it is ‘sustainable’ to bring your own mug to Starbucks or turn off the lights when you leave the room. In reality, a sustainable process or situation is one that can be carried on indefinitely. Sustainable electricity generation must be based on renewable sources of energy, and sustainable agriculture must have no non-renewable inputs.

If anything, the word ‘green’ is even more abused than the word ‘sustainable’. The U.S. Air Force claims that its synthetic jet fuel is ‘green’ even though it is made with fossil fuels. Any time there is a marginal improvement in a dirty process, it is heralded as a ‘green’ accomplishment.

None of this is to say that small improvements don’t matter. The global energy system needs to be reformed from the ground up, in big ways as well as small. What I am arguing is that we should not allow the definition of words like ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ to be diluted to the point where they are just public relations tools. A green initiative or innovation is one that contributes meaningfully to the kind of sustainable world we need to build. It is not just something that can be marketed to those who find it chic to care about the environment.

Your Money: The Missing Manual

J.D. Roth’s Your Money: The Missing Manual is a sensible and accessible guide to personal finance. It covers the psychology of money and happiness, goal-setting, budgeting, managing debt, frugality, banking, credit, taxes, investing, and more. While at least some of the contents are likely to be familiar to any reader, before the pick up the book, I found it valuable as a kind of checklist. It helped to identify areas in which I didn’t know as much as I should, and helped me come up with a half-dozen financial tasks I should undertake.

The book places particular emphasis on the importance of cashflow: getting into a situation where income each month is serving sufficiently to cover basic needs, work toward reducing debt, set resources aside for emergencies, and advance long-term financial plans like home ownership and retirement. The book isn’t shy about giving advice. For instance, it expresses the view that actively managed mutual funds are an exploitative industry from the perspective of investors, and endorsing regular contributions to index funds as the best long-term investment strategy.

Two flaws with the book, from my perspective, were an inconsistent level of detail and a U.S. focus. I cannot legitimately complain about the latter, since that is the target audience. Still, Canadians should know that some of the content on insurance, retirement, and taxes is not appropriate to them.

One nice little thing about the book is that it is printed on unusually good paper, with a pleasantly robust cover for a paperback. The author points out how getting value for money doesn’t mean going for the cheapest option, but rather for the one that serves your needs best relative to its price. The book’s philosophy is reflected in its construction.

Sharpie pens

I am particular about my pens. I want them to work reliably, produce nice looking text, and not bleed through pages. For several years, I used Pilot’s excellent line of G2 pens. Unfortunately, these have become harder and harder to find. In fact, they seem to have been displaced by imitators that resemble them, such as the Zebra Sarasa.

I have been reduced to stocking up on G2s when visiting friends and family in the United States (especially the green and red models, which seem to be totally unavailable in Canada). When visiting Vermont a few months ago, I cleaned out a Staples location of their entire stock of four-colour packages of G2s. I only really needed the green ones (for taking notes in books and magazines), but they are only available along with the rest.

Given that awkwardness, I decided to take Emily’s suggestion and try the new Sharpie pens. I have been using the blue and black models for a couple of weeks and am generally very happy with them. They have fine points and ink that dries quickly. They don’t bleed through even thin Moleskine pages, and seem to write well on a variety of surfaces. The only downside I have discovered is that the ink from the blue model looks rather thin and translucent compared with the Pilot G2 blue.

In any event, it’s worth spending $4 to give a couple of Sharpie pens a try.