What I am reading

Closing this Blog

2009-05-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

I moved all my book related postings to here: Good Reads

Check there if you are interested in seeing what I'm reading now.

Technical - "Release It!"

2007-11-06T04:29:00.000-08:00

This is another very nice book from Pragmatic Programmers written by Micheal T. Nygard. The main topic of "Release it!" is about putting software into production and what can happen there.

The book discusses a number of principals to consider when setting up large production systems. They are divided into anti-patterns (what not to do) and patterns (what to do). The two major parts of the book deal with stability - what to do to prevent systems from crashing, and capacity - how to design systems that will not crumple under load.

But perhaps the best part of the book is the examples of failures that occured in the real world and how those could be avoided. This is in tradition of best engineering books - which analyze failure in order to avoid it in the future.

Here is a one example. The author had to find a problem with a web based system that would "crash" every morning because its connections to a backend databases became "broken". Typically these sorts of systems have a pool of available connections that sit idle and are used when needed. The idle connections are kept, because creating a new connection to a database server is slow.

Now a connection to a database server means a TCP/IP socket connection. When a socket connection is established the two end system agree to communicate over a certain route, and the data between them can pass via some other computers or routers etc. However, when the connection is idle no data is sent at all.

Now it turns out that there was a firewall system between the web application and the database server (a typical set up). A firewall needs to keep track of all the connections that go through it. Firewalls are limited in how many concurrent connections they can handle, and if they see a connection that is idle they will drop it after some suitable time interval (could be hours of inactivity).

It turned out that during the night there was not enough activity in the system to use the pooled connections to the database, so the firewall silently dropped them. Then when people began to use the system in the morning all of a sudden the connections to the database were gone and the system had to be restarted.

The solution was simple - database connections had to be kept active by periodically sending some data to the database server. But this is not the kind of thing that people think about while developing systems.

As with most of the Pragmatic Programmer books I found this one very useful and entertaining.

Science Fiction - "Space Merchants"

2007-10-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

"Space Merchants" is a novel by Fredrik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth about marketing in the future. The main character of the book, Mitch Courtenay, is an executive at an advertising agency and he is given the project to market colonization of Venus. At this point in time, only one person has gone to Venus (a rather short astronaut - since weight was a consideration) and he found that the environment on Venus is not particularly hospitable to human life. Still, good marketing can overcome such problems, especially in the hands of a talented executive.

In the "Space Merchants" universe the world is controlled by large corporations, which fight among themselves like gangsters. There is also a large working underclass, who are also the consumers. The consumers are not smart enough to understand the subtleties of marketing.

In any case the Venus campain does not go as expected. Our hero winds up in strange places (still on Earth), is forced to live and work as part of the consumer class and has to fight his way back to his rightful executive position.

The book was fun to read, as the plot twisted and turned in unexpected ways. I also like the slight fun poking at marketers. On the other hand, the technology was all wrong. Everyone travelled via rockets, but there were no computers or computer networks.

There is a sequel to this novel, I think it is called "The Merchant's War" - but I am not planning to read that.

Non-fiction "The Big Con"

2007-10-13T18:39:00.000-07:00

This is a political book written by Jonthan Chait, a writer for the New Republic. In the book he tries to explain how certain economical theories became to dominate the public policies (especially of the Republic party), even though they are considered wrong.

The principal idea he criticizes is "supply-side" economics and the now famous Laffer Curve. The premise is that reducing taxes will actually result in more revenues for the goverment. Since supply side economics was first
applied under President Regan, historically the principal appears to be incorrect. Deficits rose during the Regan era, and went down during the Clintor ear when taxes were raised.

Supply side economics benefits mostly very rich people, especially those who get most of their money as investment income. The puzzle then is why do regular working class people keep voting for Republicans (or were until 2006), even though this is not in their economic interest.

The author's main theses that the people in power simply con the voters, by obfuscating the actual issues (eg. "death tax") and distracting them with social issues that have no economic impact.

This was an interesting book to read - sort of a companion to "What's the Matter With Kansas?" (although I haven't read that book).

Science Fiction - "The Gods Themselves"

2007-10-01T02:47:00.000-07:00

This particular novel written by Asimov started as challenge issued to Asimov by a fellow SF writer Rober Silverberg. He dared him to write a story about Plutonium 186 (which does not exist in our Universe). Asimov started writing and instead of a story wrote an entire novel.

The book has three distinct parts, and the three items motif repeats though the whole book.

The first part speaks of discovery of the Electron Pump. An Elecron Pump is a device build around plutonium 186. Plutonium 186 is unstable in our Universe and transforms into another element, giving off energy at the same time. It turns out that this element is "pushed" into our Universe from a parallel Universe with slighthly different laws of physics - there Plutonium 186 is possible.

The man who accidently discovers the bit of Plutonium 93 uses it to create essentialy free source of energy the world. Naturally, he becomes quite famous and admired as the Father of the Electron Pump. Everyone accepts the Pump, except few malcontents who look for a problem with the Electron Pump, in order to discredit the discoverer.

They conclude that the exchange of matter between the two Universes will result in a change of the physical laws of both Universes - this comes from the general principle of conservation of energy. Plus their calculations imply that the Sun will explode as a result of this change and relatively soon. As you can imagine no one believes them, after all this would shut down free supply of energy for the entire Earth.

At this point part one ends. Part two takes place in the parallel universe. There we meet a trio of beings ("the soft ones") who form a family. They are a Rational named Odeen, Emotional named Dua and a Parental named Triit. In Asimov words Dua is the onle "she". It appears that the three are in process of rearing children - they have two already and must create a third one to complete the cycle.

To make children the three must meld together into one entity and stay that way for a while. However, Dua seems to be having some emotional issues, and does not want to meld. In fact, unlike most other Emotionals, she is very interested in what Odin and the "hard ones" are working. The "hard ones" seem to be scientists working on the Positron Pump - but this is not entirely clear.

This part of the book is a bit weird, as Asimov describes how the "soft ones" interact - they can go through rock for example. In the end Dua discovers more about what the hard ones are doing. Plus they all find out what happens after they produce the final child and "move on". But I don't want to give away the details.

Finally, the third section is back in our Universe. Once of the characters from the first part migrates to the Lunar colony and there he finds a way and a device that will allow humans to keep the Electron Pump and not blow up the Sun. This is a good thing.

This book of Asimov was somewhat different than others that I read - the Robot stories or Foundation. It was OK to read, but I don't believe I will read it again.

Oh, the names of the three sections are: "Against stupidity...", "..the Gods Themselves...", "..content in vain".

Science Fiction - "Bios"

2007-08-15T18:00:00.001-07:00

"Bios" is another book by Robert Charles Wilson (the author "Darwinia"). At the center of the story here is a planet, named Isis which contains very diverse bio-sphere. The problem is that this biosphere is lethal to humans. Any human exposed to any microbe from Isis will in very short time die a very nasty death.

The main main character of the story is a young girl, named Zoe, who has been genetically and mechanically augmented to be able to survive on Isis in light weight gear, as opposed to a fully armored space suit. Her mission is to test out the new gear in the actual environment of Isis.

The human presence on Isis consists of an orbiting space station, and three stations on the planet surface - one at the pole, one in the ocean and one on land. Zoe is sent to the ground based station, which is to be her base of operations.

Zoe gets to explore some of Bios's surface through a flying remote robot. She gets to see some of the larger animals that inhabit Isis In particular she gets to see "the diggers" - a humanoid animals that appear to have some intelligence, who live in underground tunnels (hence the name "diggers").

Shortly after her arrival on Isis she is a witness to an accident which kills a member of the stations crew. He was out fixing stations seals from the outside and his excursion suit is damanged, so that Bios's organims can enter.

While Zoe is getting ready for her first trip outside, bad things begin to happen at the ocean based station. The barrier between the station and the ocean collapses, and sections of the station become uninhabitable. A number of people die, however a small contingent manages to escape up to the space station. At the station these escapees are isolated and quaranteened to prevent any further spread of Isis's microbes.

Meanwhile Zoe goes on her first excursion. Her equipement works well and she is allowed to camp outside overnight. At one point during the night she encounters some diggers, but the encounter does not go well. She is knocked out and dragged into digger's tunnels.

At this point in the story, the microbes on Isis get an upper hand - and all the stations have to be abandoned. Even the space station is not spared.

Unlike in "Darwinia", the author does not pull a trick out of a hat, but takes the story to its logical conclusion. I actually like this - I hate these stories that are "saved" at the last minute by some miracle. There is a touch of mysticism at the end - where Zoe seems to be hearing the voice of the planet, as though Isis itself was a concious, living thing. But the author does not dwell on this.

"Bios" ends with a hopeful postscript - where humans from a later time arrive again on Isis but this time are able survive the enviroment without any problems due to genetic modifications.

Science Fiction - "The Proteus Operation"

2007-08-05T18:17:00.001-07:00

This book, by James P. Hogan, is a book describing an alternate history of the world along with a project - "The Proteus Operation" - that uses time travel to actually correct it. When the story opens in 1960s, United States is the only free country left. All others have been conquered by the Germans and the Japanese. Apparently in early 1940s Germany developed the atomic bomb and was able to defeat Russia and England, and handily win WW II.

In late 1960s time travel is discovered and President Kennedy orders a mission to go back to the 1940s and prevent the Germans from getting the bomb. A team a scientists and military men go back and then the book seems more like a WW II action thriller.

Some historical characters appear at various points: Churchill, Einstein, Roosevelt and other famous scientists.

One unusual feature of the time machines in this book is that they are able to communicate with the future from which they came. The author makes use of the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum physics and adds the restrictions that the comm link to the future, once established cannot be broken - because on re-connections it may connect to a different world.

I found the book enjoyable, because I do like WW II action/thrillers, but I found that after a while the plot became too large. There were too many countries in the present, past and future involved.

Ultimately there is a happy ending for the team that went back to the 40s. They redirected that wold-line to our time. However, they had to stay there.

Fiction - "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"

2007-07-27T12:35:00.001-07:00

Since I read all the other Potter books, I also read this one. The book was as expected. Fun to read, kept you wondering what was going to happen next. I really enjoyed the culture of witches and wizards invented by the author. All I can say about the plot is that in the end Ron decapitates Harry with a spoon! (OK, not really. You'll have to read for yourself though)

Science Fiction - "Jurassic Park"

2007-07-25T02:46:00.000-07:00

"Jurassic Park" is a typical Micheal Crichton book. It starts little slow, but then you are in a whirlwind of action and suspense, and the book becomes impossible to put down. I usually finish his books in a day or so (I read "Sphere" in one night).

The basic plot of the book is that some very rich guy manages to clone dinosaurs from pieces of DNA found in insects in amber. These dinosaurs are kept on an island of the coast of Costa Rica, where they will sever as a main attraction in Jurassic Park.

As the story starts a group of people visit the park to certify that everything is safe for an opening to general public. But it turns out that the dinosaurs are not on the plan - instead they like to chase and eat people.

The bulk of the action of the entire book takes place over a single weekend - which I suppose makes it easier to adopt to the screen (the movie made from the book was quite good).

This is the third time I read the book - it was a selection of our local SF book discussion group - and I still enjoyed it, even though I knew what would happen.

My favorite character from "Jurassic Park" is the mathematician Ian Malcolm, who explains how chaos theory predicts that a Jurassic park cannot be controlled.

This was probably my favorite of Micheal Crichton books. His later novels follow a similar pattern as "Jurassic Park" and as result are too predictable.

Non-fiction - "No god but God"

2007-06-07T04:55:00.001-07:00

"No god but God" is an excellent history of Islam written by Reza Aslan. I did not know much of Islams history, other than what I picked up from the news and the "Two Towers" book. This book gave me a more complete picture.

I have seen the author of this book on TV many times and I was always impressed with knowledge and ideas. He is an Iranian Muslim, who immigrated to the US when he was still a child.

What struck me first how close the three major religions are: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is not often pointed that Allah of the Muslims is the same as God of the Old and the New Testament. Islam seemed to be the final triumph of mono-theism over poly-theism in the Arabian peninsula. Sometime, Mohamed would refer to these three religions as "People of the Book". The idea being that Old Testament. New Testament and the Koran, are but pieces of the same book in Heaven, partially revealed to humanity.

Mohamed started the Muslim community fairly late in his life, when he started to received Revelations from God. This is precisely why he is often called the Messenger of God.

According to this book the initial Islamic community established by Mohamed in Medina was quite egalitarian Men and women were treated equally. One important obligation of members of the community was to take care of the poor - a tax was collected for this purpose. In many ways the initial community in Medina was socially quite advance (this is in 7th century).

One the threats that the Medina community posed to the established order was quite political. Mohamed did not believe that an intermediary was needed for people to commune with God. That is there was no need for a priest class. This upset a lot of people, especially in the tribes that controlled the Sanctuary at Mecca.

Mecca itself was already a place where pilgrims came to pay homage to their gods. The sanctuary there was shared by many religions and access was controlled by a single tribe that got quite rich from the pilgrims.

One of the reasons that Mohamed's Revelations were considered the word of God was that they were beautiful poetry (I have to trust the author on this as I do not know Arabic). At the time the ability to write poetry was considered quite mystical and great poets were celebrities in the Arab world.

All in all I enjoyed reading this book as I learned quite a bit about history of Islam from its inception until now. The author ends with a proposition that today Islam is in the state of Reformation - very similar to they way Christianity was few hundred years ago, when Catholics and Protestants were killing each other (see 30 Year War). Sadly our ways of killing had gotten more efficient.

Science Fiction - "Frameshift"

2007-05-31T04:38:00.000-07:00

"Frameshift" - written by Robert J. Sawyer - is a book on a border between suspense and science fiction. The books takes place in present day (actually a bit in the past - they have no Google) and the main character is a geneticist Pierre Tarvidel. Pierre is doing some research on junk DNA and on how things that happen there may have lead to the rise of human race.

Meanwhile his girl friend, Molly Bond, has a weird genetic mutation that gives her close range telepathy. One of the things Pierre attempts to do is to figure out what is it about Molly's DNA that made this possible.

Thrown into this mix is a large subplot about Nazi hunters and possible war criminals working at the same labs with Pierre and Molly. Finally there is whole other subplot of unexpected deaths of people with potential genetic diseases.

Although it sounds unlikely, all these plot elements actually melt well and create a fun to read book. You keep wondering what is going to happen next and you want to keep on reading.

The story even has a Hollywood action-movie style ending.

Though not particularly deep, the book was fun to read.

Science Fiction - "Brave New World"

2007-05-31T04:34:00.000-07:00

I had read this book long time ago and as it turned out I remembered little. One thing that I wondered was about the author's name and his relationship to Thomas Huxley who was a defender of Darwin and theory of evolution. Since "Brave New World" was written in the 30s Darwin's Huxley could not be the author. Turns out the Aldous Huxley, the author of "Brave New World", was a granson of Darwin's defender.

"Brave New World" is one of the distopian visions of the future, written by an author who is not a science fiction writer. The book was written in response to some of the utopian novels of the future published by H.G. Wells.

In the world of the novel all disease, wars and conflicts between humans have been eliminated. Babies are produced in hatcheries. By carefully controlling growing embryo and then by repetitive conditioning each person is prepared to take a specific role in life. There are Alphas - the thinkers, then Beta, Gammas and Deltas with what we would consider lower social standng. However, the conditioning has prepared each person to be satisfied with his position in life.

Because parenthood has been eliminated, all the emotional stress of love, sex and coupling have been also eliminated. In fact in the "Brave New World" universe "mother" is an obscene world. Sex drive still needs to be satified - so everyone is encouraged to have many partners, with periodic and compulsary orgies.

All material needs are provided for, and everyone is encourage to consume more - why try to fix things, when you can get a new thing. This way everyone can be occupied producing new material goods.

Finally, there is Soma. Soma is a drug, freely given to everyone, that makes you happy but has no ill effects like for example alcohol might.

However, even in this world there exist areas that are considered "savage" - mainly in North America - where descendents of American Indians still live the same as always. These areas serve as tourist attractions, where people from the Soma world come and see.

During one such trip a man is discovered, living among the Indians, who is in fact a child of a woman who was accidently lost there many years ago. This man, named John "Savage", is rescued and brought into the civilized world. The bulk of the story is how he tries to cope with this change.

While he was living within the savage preserve his mother taught him to read and his only book was a collection of all Shakesperean plays. The title of the book comes from one of these plays - "The Tempest" - which he quotes when he arrives in London: "Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!".

While we were discussing this book at our SF group meeting a question came up as to which book is more relevant to present day "1984" by Orwell or "The Brave New World". I thought that Huxley's book is more relevant. It shows a recipe on how to control society without overt fear, but by simply making everyone want certain things that can be easily provided.

I thought that "soma" could be seen as a metaphor for the mindless entertaiment that amuses us all, while important subjects are not discussed and the controlling elites (our Aplhas) get us to go along with nearly anything.

Science Fiction - "The Foundation Trilogy"

2007-04-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

At my science fiction book discussion group I was accused of not being a real SF fan, because I never read Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy". So I spent few weeks and read "Foundation", "Foundation and Empire" and "Second Foundation".

When the book starts the Great Galactic Empire is in decline. A psycho-mathematician, Harry Seldon, develops a theory that predicts 30,000 years of chaos after the Empire's fall. However, he realized that if knowledge can be passed from the current civilization to the future one the years of chaos can be reduced to about 1000.

He then proceeds to establish a society on a planet on the fringe of the galaxy to preserve the scientific knowledge - the society established there is referred to as "The Foundation".

The three books cover several hundred years of time and show how the Foundation manages to control the disintegrating empire form completely falling apart. First is uses scientific knowledge as sort a religion, then through political influence of traders.

Of the three books I think I liked the middle one best. There a character name Mule appears, who has a gift of being able to control other people's emotions so that they are happy to do his bidding.

I probably would have enjoyed this book more when I was 15, but still it was fun to read.

Non-fiction - "Naked Economics"

2007-02-17T13:36:00.000-08:00

This was a very nice book about economics by Charles Wheelan. The full title is "Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science". If you haven't studied economics in school, then this book makes a great introduction. It's very well written and a pleasure to read.

Non-fiction - "Effortless Mastery"

2007-02-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

"Effortless Mastery" is a book by a jazz pianist name Kenny Wener about how to become a better musicians. The book is not much about actual technique but about your attitudes towards music. The title refers to the observation that most master musicians seem to perform with extreme ease - efforlessly - yet what they play is wonderful (check out some videos of Wes Montgomery, my favorite jazz guitarist, in YouTube).

Althought I enjoyed reading this book, the authors suggesstions do not paticularly apply to me - I still have a long way to go in basic mechanics of playing and understanding music, before the attitudes he talks about would be a problem.

Non-fiction - "The Ghost Map"

2007-02-07T18:12:00.000-08:00

This is a short history of the cholera epidemic that hit London in 1854, written by Steve Johnson. The bulk of the story is how Dr. John Snow with some indirect assistance of Rev. Henry Whitehead, managed to prove Snow's theory that cholera is a water-borne disease. This last fact was not known at the time, in fact the germ-theory of disease was not yet born, and the prevaling view was that sickness was cause by bad air or bad vapors.

Some time after the outbreak of the epidemic, Dr. Snow created a map that showed where people got sick in relation to the Broad Street pump - a popular water pump that was contaminated with cholera germs. This map, along with the papers that the doctor wrote eventually turned the tide against the idea that cholera spread through the air. This was the "Ghost Map" from the title.

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book were descriptions of what life was like in 1850s London. You can be sure that it smelled really bad. The waste recylcing system consisted of people who waded through the sewage to find the useful bits. Among them were "bone-pickers", "nightt-soil men", "rag-pickers" and others. You could actually make a living collecting dog poop and selling it to hide tanners.

The actual writing in the book is somewhat disjoined. It jumps from the story of the epidemic to some comments about evolution of cities to some biological facts about cholera. I would have liked a more linear story of Dr. Snow's work and how he came to the conclusion that cholera was waterborne.

It it interesting to think that by that time the microscope has already been invented and some scientists actually observed the cholera bacteria, yet no one connected it with the actual sickness.

Science Fiction - "The Lincoln Hunters"

2007-02-04T14:48:00.000-08:00

In the year 2578 Benjamin Stewart is employed at the Time Researchers company. His job is to travel back in time on assigment by paying customers of employer. The jobs involve verifying some hitorical fact, taking a picture of something in a past, or maybe retrieving some artifact from the past. In doing this he must be able to assume a personage of some a person from the past. Others, who like Benjamin travel into the past are collectively known as Characters.

In "The Lincoln Hunters" Benjamin is given an assigment to record a speech by Abrahan Lincoln. The speech has become known as the lost speech, since it was never written down. However this particular Lincoln oratory became legendary, because of it's subject - abolition of slavery - and it's effect on the audience.

In any case, Benjamin's job is to attend the rally Major's Hall in Bloomington Illinois and record the speech. As in other jobs, the leader - that is Benjamin - had to visit the place first, before the rest of his crew, three other characters, joined him to complete the job.

From the start things go wrong. The engineers controlling the time machine make a mistake in their computations and Benjamin arrives in Bloomington the day after the famous speech. He decides to go into town to find the Hall and get familiar with the environment. Once in town he bumps into someone, who apparently had he had met the day before. From the brisk conversation, it appears that the initial meeting was not pleasant.

To his further consternation, he finds remains of a recording device that he, or one of his crewmen brought into the past.

As the author explains, if a time traveller meets himself in the past, or even just crosses paths with his other self back in time, he will immediately self-destruct. So, Stewart knows that if he comes to complete his mission day earlier, he will have to leave well before the next morning - or else he would meet himself and then self-destruct.

To complete the job Stewart returns to the office and then he and his crew (three other Characters) arrive back in Bloomington on the proper day. One of the members of the crew, is a man who thinks himself a Shakespearean Actor (with a capitol "A"), and who really enjoys a drink. Since Licoln's speech was given at a polical conventions (one of the earliest conventions that led to formation of the Republic Party), the town is full of people having a grand time.

As planned Stewart and his crew attend the speech and make a proper recording. However on the way of of the Hall, the Actor is lost in the crowd, and he does not show up at the appointed time to go back to the future.

The rest of the story is centered around trying to find the missing crewman and trying to get back before the other Stewart arrives in the past. Let's just say that the ending is not unexpected.

This book was fun and easy to read. I read it as a selection for our SF Book Discussion group. There were few interesting sidelines - for example, at one point a Character is explaing the "big lie" theory to Benjamin Stewart. He recounts of a war waged by an Egyptian Pharoagh (sp?), which the Egyptians decisively lost. Yet, when the pharoah came back to Egypt he announced that a glorious victory was won - and that's how history recorded the event. Only much later, work of meticulous historians uncovered the lie.

Some of the technology of the future was bit odd - for example the recording devices used thin wire to hold the recording. But since the book was published in 1958 this is entirely understandable. By the way the author's name was Wilson Tucker.

Non-fiction - "The God Delusion"

2007-01-16T18:11:00.000-08:00

This is the third book of the bunch of atheist books I have read in past couple of moths, the other being Breaking the Spell (D. Dennett) and A Letter to a Christian Nation (S. Harris). I think I liked "Breaking the Spell" best, perhaps because the author of that book tried not to be overly critical. Richard Dawkins speaks his mind and is unafraid of saying things that are confrontational. Since my natural inclination is to avoid confrontations, Dawkins's style makes me uncomfortable.

However, after having read the entire book and after seeing Dawkins's documentary about religion called Root of All Evil, I admire Richard Dawkins's stance much more than the other two writers.

I must say that I liked reading "The God Delusion" - it is very well written, does not bog down in some esoteric philosophy, and of course I agree with 100% of what it says. The book begins with the discussion of which God is being talked about. There is the very personal God of the Bible and then there is the God-as-nature view. To illustrate the distinction the author recalls Einstein's position on all this. Eisnstein sometimes used the word "God" and as a result he was often mistaken for a believer. He was not, as he said himself:

"I am a deeply religious non-believer. This is somewhat new kind of religion.
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose of a goal, or anything that could understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a mgnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly [...]
The idea of personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive."

For this statment Einstein got severely critized by priests, ministers and rabbis.

The other theme that starts the book is the social convention that gives too much respect to "faith". I indirectly witness this myself. There is a teenage girl I know, who recently celebrated the Winter-eemus (link) - a fake holiday made up by computer gamers. She made a yellow crown from paper and wore it in school. When someone made fun of her for celebrating Winter-eemus she seriously said "Are you making fun of my religion?". The fun-poker freaked out, and started to appologize profusly. This little story illustrates Dawkins's point that it is socially unacceptable to critize or question someone's religion.

The following chapters discuss various "proofs" of existance of God and what is wrong with them. My favorite the one that says "God is a perfect being. To be perfect you have to exist. QED".

Perhaps the two sections I found most intersting were the chapters titled: "The Roots of Religion" and "The Roots of Morality: Why are we good?". Thes chapters covered ground similar to "Breaking the Spell", trying to come with a testable hypothesis on how religion came about. Dawkins presents few new ideas that were not in Dennett's book. One idea he explores is that religion is simply an accidental by-product of some other human trait. For example, the fact that children tend to believe what they parents tell them is an adaptation that helps children survive - they don't need to test everything (like don't put your finger in the fire). But as a result children will believe if their parents tell them that world is sitting on top of a giant turtle, which is on top of even bigger elephant.

The chapter on morality answers - very convinvigly I think - the question where morals come from. Some of the discussion is puntuated by quotes from the old testament - which prescribes some things that today we would not consider moral (for example death sentence for committing adultry).

As I noted at he start, Richard Dawkins is often considered hostile to religion. He dedicates a chapter to explaining his position. His view is not that he is hostile, but that we are not used to religion being questioned in this way. In other areas of human relations much more "hostile" arguments are considered quite normal - in politics or in science. I must say that I admire his courage for going against such strong social conventions.

When I saw the "The Root of Evil" documentary, some of the scenes were quite depressing. The conversation with some religious people were quite frigthening. They know they are right and are willing to kill those who do not believe the same. Very nasty tribalism at a large scale.

However,the book presents some hopeful thoughts. In particular Dawkins talks about our social "zeitgeist", which is the set of conventions we consider normal today. This "zeitgeist" is slowly getting better. He illustrates his point by quoting from some prominent thinkers, when they say things about slavery or women's rights that are completely unacceptable to our ears. The example of slavery is a good one, considering that no societal group today (no matter how "backwards") advocates keeping of slaves. Just 150 years ago this was not so.

The book ends with a plea for an appreciation of the human life and life in our world. We do not need a supernatural being, we need to appreciate the beauty of life and world around us, just knowing how rare and precious it is. I'll end with a quote from Douglas Adams that appears at the start of the book:

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beatiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Science Fiction - "Blood Music"

2006-12-31T14:56:00.000-08:00

Blood Music (by Greg Bear) tells a story of a brilliant, but quirky, bio-researcher Virgil Ulam. At the begining of the book Virgil is in trouble at work. He had strayed from the worked assigned to him and instead developed intelligent cells. When his boss finds out about his extra-cirricular projects, he orders him to shutdown it down and destroy all bio-matter. Virgil manages to keep a small sample of the super-intelligent cells in a fridge, and when he is fired from his job he injects himself with the organisms - with the plan to extract them when he gets a job at another lab.

Unfortunately, Virgil gets black-listed by his former employer, and is unable to quickly find another job. Meanwhile, his creations multiply inside his body. Initially there seems to be no particular effects of the injection, but after a week or two Virgil notices that his body is "improving". His health gets much better, he taste changes and he looses weight. His stamina increases greatly - a fact appreciated by his new girlfriend.

But all is not well. Eventually Virgil begins to observe unusal effects within his body - for example a network of white lines just under the skin. Eventually he stops going out all together. In the end of the first part of the book, Virgil seems to go insane - he has "conversations" with the beings livining within his body - and eventually he seems to dissolve into a pile of bio-matter.

This is not where the book ends though. Turns out that the micro-organisms that Virgil created spread to others via exchange of fluids (including sweat).

The second part of the book describes what happens to the world as Virgil's organism spread across the North American continent. This part of the story is told from several differnt points of view. There were few people in North America that were resitant to the "infection", a girl in Brooklyn and few hippies in San Francisco.

Another person was a friend of Virgil who gets infected, but manages to get himself to a lab in Germany. There he is placed in isolation chamber. He experiences a slow transformation from a human being into the new kind of organism. Eventually, as he transforms, he is able to communicate with his "invaders". Although the "invaders" consider him to be the entire "universe" and are suprized to discover at some point that there is an "outside".

This was an odd book to read. It went from experiences of a single person to a collapse of the world. At first, I didn't like the world-wide disaster that Virgil caused, but the story was engrossing that I continued reading.

In the end it appears that the age humans has finished and the new intelligent micro-life took over.

Science Fiction - "Eden"

2006-12-09T15:19:00.000-08:00

"Eden" is one of the earlier books written by S. Lem. It was first published in the 60s. The plot is simple - a spacecraft crashes on the planet Eden, and the crew works on survival and repair, and little exploration. Eden is civilized, but our explorers have hard time figuring out what is going on.

For me the strength of the book lies in its descriptions of the alien planet, its plants, animals and the local intelligent beings. The crew calls them "doublers" - as they appear to be a combination of two different bodies.

The first order of business after the crash is for the crew to find some drinkable water, as the ship's supply is mostly radioactive, and all purifiers are not yet working. This leads to initial explorations of the planet. They find some weird plants that can hide under the surface when disturbed, they discover breathing plants - they name these "lung trees".

On one of the first trips they stumble upon a "factory" - a large structure that seems to be making something, but they are unable to divine the it's purpose. The Engineer follows through the process, but the production process just seems to loop on itself - producing objects that are at the end thrown in the input hopper.

One odd thing about the book is that the characters do not have names, but are referred to by their function. We have the Captain, the Doctor, the Engineer, the Physicist, the Cybernetist (to manage the robots), and the Chemist. We only learn the real name of the Engineer - Henry.

As the story progresses the crew makes a contact with the "doublers", but not particularly successful. As they accumulate observations they are unable to make any sense of what is going on. This, I believe, is the main point of the story - we as humans would have a very difficult time trying to explain a completely alien culture. We naturally tend to apply human patterns, and on an alien planet they do not make any sense.

Lem explores this idea in several of his other books: "The Invincible", "Solaris" and much later in "Fiasco". Of these, "The Invincible" is my favorite.

The beings on Eden appear to fence in and attack the crashed ship, but in the end our crew is able to leave Eden. Just before the departure, they do establish contact with a doubler, who appears to be a scientist, but the communication between them is imprefect and they get only an inkling of what has happened on Eden.

I liked this book, because it explores the idea of communication between us and aliens without the benefit of a universal translator.

Non-fiction - "Letter to a Christian Nation"

2006-11-26T17:23:00.000-08:00

Sam Harris, the author of this book, is also the author of End Of Faith". "Letter to a Christian Nation" is Sam Harris's reply to critics of the first book. As he says in the introduction the responses he received were not only threatening him with hell, but also with bodily harm. He says that "The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians". The purpose of the letter is to challenge some of the Christian beliefs and to expose the hypocrisy of the believers.

The book makes many references to the Bible and to some of the doctrines and ask why they are not followed to the letter? For example, the Bible says that homesexuals should be stoned. But it also says that anyone who does work on the Sabbath must be stoned too. You don't have to believe me, check Leviticus.

For me this book clarified the method for figuring out what is and what is not moral. The fundamental idea is that moral acts will lead to relieve of suffering of others and immoral ones will cause others to suffer. For instance, being against distribution of condoms in Africa leads to more deaths from AIDs and to more suffering, so it is an immoral act. Now, as you know, the Catholic Church stands strongly against birth control and as a result of this stance many suffer and die.

Other sections of the book "pick on" various Christian beliefs. I know the author's goal was to expose the hypocrisy, but to me it felt as though you stuble into an ugly family secret that should not be exposed to all. Some of the points are almost too easy to make - for example, Jesus said that to gain entrance into Heaven you should sell all you possessions and give the money to the poor. I know many Christians, some who are quite devout, yet none of them did this.

Sam Harris also blames religious fervor for much of the violence in the world (after all it was not atheists who flew airplanes into WTC). However, I don't believe that absence of religion would necessarily lead to less violence as the author seems to imply.

If you are interested in challenging Christians in verbal arguments, this book provides quite a bit of amunition. However, I thought that Danniel Dennett's "Braking the Spell" was a much more interesting book about religions.

Non-fiction - "102 Minutes"

2006-11-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

The full title of this book is "102 Minutes: The untold story of the fight to survive inside the twin towers" and it's authors are Jim Swyer and Kevin Flynn. The book describes the experiences of people who were in the two World Trade Center towers on September 11th.

Some of the stories told in the book are well known. For example, I have read and seen some films on how Brian Clark helped Stanley Praimnath get out of the 81 floor on WTC 2, shortly after the second plane hit. Other descriptions I was reading for the first time.

The book contains some drawings and details of the damage done to the buildings. From these it is obvious that in the first tower all escape routes were cut off for the people who were above the impact zone. In the second tower one staircase survived and it was used by a handful of people for escape from above the impact zone. More people might have escaped if they had known about the route. However, the advice they got from 911 operators was to stay put and wait for the firemen.

One section of the book describes how the NY City building codes were relaxed in the late sixties, just in time for the WTC construction. So, for example, WTC had only three staircases as compared to six that are present in the Empire State building. Furthermore, the older buildings were required to have a hardened staircase - "fire tower" - but this requirement was dropped for newer buildings.

Parts of the book are very sad as they include the conversations that people trapped in the building had with their families, when they began to realize that there was no way out. Suprizingly a handful of people survived the building collapse, including two policemen who were a subject of a recent movie.

I felt a little eerie reading the book, as I was downtown Manhattan and I witnessed the second crash and I saw the first building collapse. It was quite a surreal day - as I was close enough to see everything, but I was in no danger. As I was reading the book I kept remembering what I was doing at a specific time...

Science Fiction - "A Scanner Darkly"

2006-10-22T17:58:00.000-07:00

"A Scanner Darkly" is another Philip K. Dick book. It is a book about drug culture in Dick's future. Since he wrote the book in the 70s, the action was supposed to take place in the 90s. In this future the drug that is most common is called "Substance D" - where "D" is short for "Death". The main character of the book a drug dealer named Bob Arctor, who also happens to be an undercover drug agent named Fred.

In order to maintain their cover, the agents wears a "scramble suit" that disguises his identity when the visits the police station to file their reports. In a typical Dick-sian twist Fred is assigned to track the doings of Bob Arctor. Part of this survaillance involves installation of holographic scanners in Arctor's house and then recording and reviewing what happens.

At some point in all this Arctor/Fred takes a large dose of Substance D. This has the effect of similar to having a split brain - where the two halves of the brain do not communicate (as in epilepsy patients whose corpus collossum has been cut).

Ultimately, Bob/Fred is unable to deal with the drug addition/survaillance and is sent to rehab place where the source of Substance D is finally exposed.

I had trouble finishing this book. Although it was at times funny and had interesting descriptions of what having a split brain may feel like, it did not hold my interest. I could not figure out where the story was going and I didn't really care. On the other hand I hear the movie was pretty good and I'm planning to see it.

Non-Fiction - "On Silver Wing"

2006-10-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

The author of thei book, Carol Ann Garratt, flew her Mooney around the world and this book is a travelogue of her trip. Carol Ann came to our airport (Old Brige, NJ) and gave us a talk about her trip. That's how I got copy of the book.

There is a website you can visit to see pictures and see pictures of her, her airplane and the map of her trip.

Part of the reason for the trip was to participate in the re-union of her father and his sister in New Zeland, after her mother died of Lou Gehrig's (ALS) disease. In fact she has donated all the proceeds from sales of the book to the ALS foundation.

The descriptions of the flights include lots of details of interest to pilots. For example, her Mooney was reffitted with addition fuel tanks so she could make the over-water flights across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Or that when you are flying across oceans communications can be accomplishe only via HF radios, which require a long antena that has to be reeled out after takeoff and reeled in before landing.

But perhaps the nicest message I took from the book that aviation people all over the world are the same. Always happy to take in and help a fellow pilot. In fact, comparing the author's experiences with what we see on the news you'd be led to think she flew around some other planet.

Science Fiction - "Remake"

2006-10-02T18:07:00.000-07:00

This was another book by Connie Willis. It is about near future world in which no more movies with live actors are made. All movies are produced digitally and most are simply digital remakes of old films. The main character is a guy who works on custom remakes or some more extensive studio projects - like removing all A.S. (addictive substances) from the movies. This can be difficult at times - just think about removing all cigarettes and alcohol from "Casablanca".

Our hero meets a girl, named Alis, who is obsessed with musicals and dancing. She dreams of dancing in the movies, even though no one makes "live actions" anymore. With a bit of time warping and some computer magic she eventually gets her wish.

There were two things I liked about this book. One was that the author invented a lot of new words for the future world (things like chooch, paste-ups and others) and you had to figure out what they were from the context, like you would if you were transported into that culture. The other thing I like about the book is that I had no idea where it was going. The ending wasn't quite like I expected.

On the other hand the plot was not as engrosing as "The Bellwether" was. I also found it somewhat funny that in this future Hollywood the only movies that were available were ones from 1980s and before. The author did not invent any future movies.

I read this book for our SF discussion group meeting. It was a quick read, although when I skipped few days between chapters I had hard time remembering the jargon from the future.

Non-fiction - "The Looming Tower"

2006-09-01T05:08:00.000-07:00

This book, written by Lawrence Wright, is about the history of islamic extremism and the rise Al-Qaeda in particular. The author also devotes a large sections of the book to the FBI's and CIA's efforts to find and stop the terrorists.

The intellectual father of the extreme islamic movement was an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb. He spent time in the USA in the late 40s (after WW II). Although he appeared as a westerner while living in the US, he was repulsed by the US culture of materialism and freely expressed sexuality. Even in the early 50s he found the sexual lives of American's repulsive. When he returned to Egypt he wrote a lot about Muslim identity and he blamed the failures of Arabs on the lack of purity of their religion.

In Egypt, he was involved in the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood and went from being an employee of the state to being a jailed dissident. Eventually he was hanged for his views. Many in Egypt were inspired by his writing to try and overthrow the secular goverment, to replace is with an Islamic state.

One of the future Al-Qaeda leaders, who was influenced by Sayyad Qutb early on was Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri was an Egyptian who was mostly interested in overthrowing Egyptian goverment. He spent several years in Egyptian jails, where he was tortured. He became a more determined radical after his time in jail.

An interesting comment, attributed in the book to Zawahiri, is that it is nearly impossible to have an insurgency in Egypt because of its geography. Egypt is basically a valley around the Nile surrounded by desert, there are no places for insurgents to hide. Compare this with Afganistan or the Balkans, which have mountains and plenty of hard to reach terrain where fighters can hide.

Finally the book discusses Osama bin Laden's rise to radicalism. He came from a very rich family - the family became rich because of his father's work. His father was in construction business at the time when oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia. He became a favorite of the Saud royal family, at times even lending the king money to keep the goverment afloat. Osama himself worked for some of his father's businesses - he learned some of his management skills there.

Bin Laden was already radicalized by the movements to Islamic purity and the defining momement in his career came when the Soviet Union invaded Afganistan. He saw this conflict at the start of the war between Islam and the western world. He became invloved in recruiting and financing Arab fighters (mostly young unemployed Saudi men) to go and fight against the infidels in Afganistan. Eventually he also wound up in Afganistan figthing the Soviets.

Although the role of the Arab figthers in the Afganistan war was fairly minor, bin Laden was ecstatic when the Soviets finally left. He attributed the fall of the Soviet Union to its defeat in Afganistan. From this he jumped to conclusion that similar "method" could be used to bring down the only other secular power left - the United States.

His animosity against the US increased after the fist Gulf War. When Iraq invaded Kuwaitt, there was only desert sand stading between Saddam' tanks and the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden offered his "army" of fighters from Afganistan to the Saudi goverment. He claimed they could win because God was on their side. The Saudi goverment rejected bin Laden's offer and asked for help from the US. Mind you, this was not an easy decision to the Saudi's to bring "infidels" into the land that's holliest to Islam (Mecca and Medina are both in Saudi Arabia). However, the Americans promised to leave once the danger was over.

There is a parallel thread in the book discussion FBI's terrorist fighting unit. The leader and the main champion of this unit was a man named John O'Neil. To me O'Neil seemed a very "James Bond" type character - he was married, but had several permanent girlfriends, he always dressed sharp and he was extremely dedicated to his work. He was one the first few Americans to realize the danger posed by bin Laden and AL-Qaeda.

The book explains some of the differences between FBI and CIA. Where as CIA's role is to gather intelligence outside the USA, FBI's task is to investigate crimes against American citizens anywhere in the world. For example, FBI agents investigated the attacks on American embassy in Africa and the bombing of the destroyed Cole in Yemen.

Because there is a law from the Watergate era, which puts up a vitural wall between intelligence and criminal investigations, a lot of information that could have been useful to the FBI anti-terrorism unit was not supplied by CIA, even when the FBI explicitely asked for the information. According to the author part of the problem was not just the specific law, by the strict interpration of it by the people in charge. People who were bit too much concerned with organizational politics and internal turf wars.

Another agent who is portrayed extensively in the book is a Lebanese-American agent named Ali Soufan. He was one of the main agents investigating the Cole bombing and he was the first one to firnly establish the connection between Al-Qaeda and this crime. Ali Soufan has been tracing out the Al-Queda network, though some contacts in Yemen. Al-Queda was using a phone in Yemen as a kind of switch board. When the 9/11 attacks occured Ali Soufan was given all the information that CIA had about several of the people FBI was tracking:

(...) Inside were three surveillance photos and complete report about the Malaysia meeting - the very material Soufan had been asking for, which CIA had denied him until now. The wall had come down. When Soufan realized that the agency and some people in bureau had known for more than a year and half that two of the highjackers were in the country, he ran into the bathroom and retched.

John O'Neil resigned from FBI in June 2001. He left, because through the constant agitation he created a number of powerful enemies. His new job was to be a directoror of security at World Trade Center in New York. He was in his office on 9/11 and was killed in the attack.

Fiction - "The Great Gatsby"

2006-08-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

I read this book because my daugther had read it this summer and wanted to discuss it with someone. I have never read this F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, although I remember seeing parts of the movie while ago. The book is a tragic love story between Jay Gatsby and Daisy. Tragic, because the two lovers are forever separated and because in the end Gatsby ends up dead.

However, the story was not as I had expected it to be. For example, I was under the impression that Daisy fell in love with Gatsby when she met him while he was a rich tycoon. But it turned out that Gatsby fell in love with Daisy while he was a poor young man, and when he came back to claim her after he made his fortune it was too late.

Since the book takes place on Long Island and New York City during the 1920s, it gives the reader a peek at what life was like in those times. For example, imagine a hot New York summer without air conditioning. The only thing that could cool you were iced drinks.

My daugther liked this book, because she said it was well written and because of the symbolism she found. I didn't especially noticed the writing, although the book was pleseant to read. The final resolution, the death of Gatsby, seemed logical to me. He was better off dead that alive without Daisy's love.

Science Fiction - "The Rowan"

2006-07-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

This book by Anne McCafferey describing the life story of a Talent child who's the only survivor of a mud slide on planet Altair. In this universe people with various levels of psychic ability exist and the one's with strongest psycho-kinetic talent are used to make interstellar travel possible (they use their ability to push spaceships between stars). Since the disaster where the child was found destroyed a mining town of the Rowan Mining Company, she decides to call herself "the Rowan".

The book describes how she grows up on Altair under tutelage of the Prime Talent of that planet - Siglen. The story follows a typical coming-of-age pattern and the science fiction parts at times seem to be besides the point.

About half way through the book Rowan finds the love of her life - another strong Talent from the planet Deneb. They both work together to stop an alien invation from another part of the galaxy. The invading aliens and the final battle scenes reminded me a little of "Ender's Game" - another insect-like society attacking the humans.

I didn't particularly like this book. Mostly because I found the science fiction parts used as just a background and the rest of the story was not that compelling. Mind you I'm a sucker for a good love story (eg. nearly anything by Jane Austen) but the love stories in this book were not that appealing.

Non-fiction - "Breaking the Spell"

2006-07-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

This book is a philosphy book, written by Daniel Dennett, about "religion as a natural phenomemon". The premise of the book is to begin the study of religion as a idea that spreads and "lives" amongst humans. How this idea came to be and why has it persisted for so long. Note that. although the author is an atheist, the actual question of existence of God is orthogonal to his discussion.

He begins by trying to define more precisely what religion is and is not. He also considers the question whether analysis and questioning of religion should be done at all. After all, we may not want to "break the spell" - just like a magic show might be ruined if you know how all the tricks are done.

The author uses little quotes at the start of each chapter. One that I particulary liked was describing the difference between religion and philosophy: Philosophy asks questions that cannot be answered. Religion provides answers that cannot be questioned.

The second part of the book is titled "The Evolution of Religion". Here the author talks about possible natural explanations of how the idea of religion came to be, how it survived and how it changed over the years. He proposed number of ideas, however all are just little more that pure speculation at this point. He acknowledges this - he would like the book to server as the beginning of scientific investigation of the phenomenon of religion.

In the final part, "Religion Today", he considers the question of whether religion is a force of good or bad and whether religion is necessary pre-condition for rise of morality. Although he remains fairly neutral on on goodness or badness question, he firmly believes that religion is not needed for humans to develop a strong moral sense.

I found the book quite fascinating, although frustrating at times. Frustrating because the author would describe some compeling ideas to explain some aspect of religion and then say "this is just my hunch, I could be wrong". Still, despite its faults I liked this book because it made me consider and think about questions I would not have come up with myself.

It's a true philosphy book - it asks questions, but provides no answers.

Science Fiction - "A Chain of Chance"

2006-06-08T11:24:00.000-07:00

This is one two odd books by Stanislaw Lem, which is only bordeline science fiction. In the story and ex-astronaut investigates some unusual deaths at a resort in Naples. Since the investigation has not been going anywhere the main character is sent on a "mission" to retrace the steps of one of the victims. The deaths in question were always little odd, some appeared to be suicides, and many occured after the victim spent time at a Naples spa.

The book, which was published in the 70s, has a section describing a terrorist attack by a suicide bomber at an airport in Rome. But the attack does not seem to be relvant to the plot.

There is a long section in which our hero explains the details of the investigation to a French computer scientists, who is working on software to recognize patterns in crimes.

Ultimately the solution emerges. Somewhat atypical to Lem the explaination is quite detailed - although other possiblities are left open still.

The orginal title of this book in Polish is "Katar" - which means "nasal congestion" - which described the afflication experienced by all the victims in the book. The English title gives you more of a hint of the solution of the mystery.

The second book in this flavor that Lem wrote is one called "The Investigation". In that book a detective is investigating unexpected movements of dead bodies at morgues, but he never really discovers the reason.

Science Fiction - "The Man in High Castle"

2006-05-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

This is another weird book by Philip K. Dick. It is an alternate history in which Germany and Japan won the second world war. America is a second rate country divided into several independent areas. In the South the slavery is again legal. German rockets carry passangers between continents, but TV does not seem to have been invented.

Main action of the the story takes place in San Francisco and it involves a somewhat disconnected group of characters. There is dealer of authentic American artifacts (like revolvers from the Civil War) which appear to be very desirable to the Japanese. There is a craftsman who quits his job making fake artifacts and starts a jewerly making business.

There are some Japanese diplomats and and German spies.

A thread connecting these various characters is a book, "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", which some of them read and talk about. "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" is an alternate history in which the Japanese and the Germans lost the war.

Part of the story involves a woman going to visit the author of this book. He lives in a fortified house somewhere in Colorado and the house is known as The High Castle.

Throughout the book many of the characters use I, Ching hexagrams to decide what to do. "I, Ching" is their Oracle.

I found the book very confusing. There are a lot of characters to keep track of. They are only loosely connected, plus towards the end of the book the author throws in some weird scenes that make you doubt the reality of the universe he has created.

I had to read "Ubik" twice to understand it better, I think will have to read this book again.

Non-fiction - "e: The Story of a Number"

2006-05-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

This book, written by Eli Maor, is a history of logarithms, calculus and the discovery of the number "e". The story begins in 1614, when John Napier published a book about his invention of logarithms. Although they were not in the form we used them today, still the use Napier's idea revolutionalized computation. We tend to forget in this age of computers, that until about 30 years ago a slide rule and logarithms ruled (pun intended) all engineering and physical computations.

There is quite a lot in the book about the begining of calculus. One of the problems that calculus solves is the computation of area under a curve. Archimedes developed a method for estimating the area under a parabola, and later Fermat extended it to all functions f(x) = x^n ("x" to the power "n"), as long as "n" was not -1. Fermat in fact the formula for the area that is the usual formula obtained with integral calculus in Calculus I.

The curve that resisted until Newton and Leibnitz invented calculus was f(x)=1/x. This an equation of a hyperbola and the area under this curve needs the function logarithm to the base "e".

The constant "e" was further analyzed by Euler and he derived many interesting formulas for it's computations. One of the most famous mathematical formulas was discovered by Euler and it is this:

e^i*pi + 1 = 0

Where "e" is the base on natural logarithms, "i" is sqrt(-1), and "pi" is pi.

All in all this book was a lot of fun. It included enough real mathematics to make precise and enough history and stories to be quite entertaining. I find that my understanding of certain areas of math can improve if I can see how ideas developed historically. Sometimes the presentation as it is in standard math textbook and courses gets too abstract and harder to follow. The historical stories make the math easier.

Fiction - "Lincoln's Dreams"

2006-04-26T05:14:00.000-07:00

After reading Bellwether I passed it to a friend who read it and like it. He in turn, picked out this book, "Lincoln's Dreams", and passed it to me. It's another book by Connie Willis.

The main character of this book is a man named Jeff - who works as a research assistant for a famous author of Civil War novels. Through his old college room mate he meets a girl, namae Annie, who is having disturbing dreams about the Civil War. It seems that she is re-dreaming the dreams of Robert E. Lee.

I found the story engrossing, although somewhat depressing, as it dealt with the effects of war on people. It was engrossing because I could not tell where the story was going. In the end, as in Bellwether, the story was left somewhat open, with just a hint what may have been causing Annie's dreams. In fact I found the ending quite confusing and I read the last chapter twice.

The fun part of the book was some of the Civil War trivia woven into the plot. For example, did you know that Robert E. Lee's before the war home was Arlington (now the National Cementary)? Or did you know that one of the horses Robert E. Lee rode through better part of the war was named Traveller and that the horse outlived his master by several years?

Fiction - "Animal Farm"

2006-04-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

My daughter was reading this book as a class assigment. Since I never read it before I borrowed her copy and read it. This is the George Orwell classic parable about the animals that take over a farm from the humans and proceed to run it.

In the book the pigs, being the smartest farm animals, take over the management and direct the others. The story then moves from the idealistic days right after the "revolution" to the rise of a dictator. Although, Orwell seems to be talking about the rise of facism or stalinism, a lot of his observations in the book reminded me of politics today.

From the propaganda of Squealer, the pig that controlled the information and revised history, to the constant reminder by the top pig "You wouldn't want farmer Jones to come back and opress you, would you?".

I think this book will remain relevant for as long there are people and politics.

Science fiction - "Bellwether"

2006-04-16T16:11:00.000-07:00

This book, written by Connie Willis, is a borderline science fiction story. It is fiction and it is about scientists and some speculative science, but it is not typical of the genre. This actually made "Bellwether" fun to read, as I did not know what to expect and where the story would end up.

The main character of the story is a statistician, named Sandra Foster, who is analyzing fads. In particular she is trying to understand where and how the idea of hair bobbing started. Accidently she meets another scientist who works at the same company as she, who happends to study chaos theory and is trying to set up some experiments on how information propagates in a population of monkeys.

However, due to various management actions the chaos theorists looses his funding and winds up working together with Sandra Foster. Instead of monkeys, they borrow a flock of sheep to be the experimental subject. This is where the title of the book comes from. A bellwhether is a sheep that other sheep in a flock follow. Typically such a sheep would be marked with a bell (since sheep all look alike to humans).

There are number of things that make this book fun to read. First of all, each chapter begins with a short history of some fad. For example, hoola-hoop, Rubik's Cube and poulaines. Second is the recurrring parody of coorporate life. Every few chapters the Management revises some important forms, makes employees go through "sensitivity exercizes" or promotes someone incompetent.

I also liked this book, because the end is left somewhat open, with just hints of explanations. I like these types of endings better then ones that leave nothing to the imagination.

Non-fiction - "Abel's Proof"

2006-04-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

After reading "The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved" I wanted to read more about the problem of solving equations, but wanted to read a book that had more math in it. Peter Pesic's book "Abel's Proof" was it. This book covered similar ground as "The Equation the Couldn't Be Solved", but got deeper into the actual mathematics.

In the history of equation solving the author explains the methods that Babylonians used to solve quadratic equations. Using the basic geometrical idea of the Babylonians method it is very easy to derive the standard formula for the roots of the quadratic equation.

One interesting part of the history of mathematics is the rise of algebra The modern notation of using variables in formulars was invented by Francois Viete in the 16th century. Imagine trying to solve equations without using variables.

The main section of the book discusses Abel' proof that equations of degree five or greater cannot be solved with radicals. Reading the proof I can understand the basic idea, but not all the details yet.

Final section of the book includes discussion of Galois theory and implications of symetries.

Finally, the text of Abel's actual paper, with annotations, is included as an appendix.

Science Fiction - "Darwinia"

2006-03-26T16:50:00.000-08:00

"Darwinia" was written by Robert Charles Wilson. It presents an alternate history of the 20th century with a twist in the middle. The story begins in 1912 with the "Miracle" - Europe disapprears and is replaced by a completely wild and uninhabited jungle with strange plants and animals. The new continent is sarcastically named "Darwinia".

The main hero, Guilford Law, is a photographer who is part of an American expedition to explore Darwinia. As the expedition begins, Guilford leaves his wife and daughter at the New London settlements (since England was swallowed by the Miracle too) and continues with expedition to Europe. They plan to travel up the Rhine and explore the new continent.

About two thirds of the book cover what happends to the expedition. This was my favorite part of the book. The feeling was that of reading a Jules Verne exploration novel, like "20,000 Miles Under the Sea"or "Mysterious Island". I liked the descriptions of the unusal flora and fauna - I wished the book had real illustrations.

Throughout this part hints are dropped that things are not quite as they seem. Guilford has dreams about a soldier in what are clearly World War I trenches, even though the no such war happened in his world. Moreover this soldier seems to be Guilford himself.

There are other characters in the book, who seemed to be taken over by "gods" - what they perceive as supernatural beings that tell them what to do.

Then, shortly after a disaster befalls the expedition in Darwinia, we are given an explanation for the unusal state of the world (spoiler warning!). The world is fact a simulated history that is a part of a cosmic Archive maintained by some outside intelligence. Unfortunately the archive has been invaded by "viruses" which are changing the past and messing up the recording.

Guilford and a number of other people, known to others as "Old Men" are actually immortal and are being readied for the final battle to save the Archive.

I must say I was disappointed by this turn of the plot. For one thing it's yet another rehash on the "Martix" idea, for the other I find such complete explanations disappointing. I would have preferred to be left with a mystery.

However, I did enjoy the book and I read it less than a week.

Science Fiction - "Dying Inside"

2006-02-23T19:32:00.000-08:00

This book, written by Robert Silverberg, was the February selection for my local SF book discussion group. The book is a sort of a diary of a man named David Selig, who was born with telepathic powers to read other people's minds, and now, as he is reaching middle age, this power is dying.

The story is set in mid-seventies New York. Despite his powers David Selig is a misfit and a looser. He barely gets by - his main source of income is ghost-writing papers for undergraduate students at Columbia University.

The book is barely a science-fiction book. Only the telepathic power is unusual and it seemed to me that the book could have been written without the need for it.

The chapters meander through various episodes of Selig's life. A lot of time is spent on relationships with various women. There seems to be plenty of sex - I would not have been surprized to read some of these chapters in "Playboy". Couple of chapters are just the ghosted papers Selig wrote - for example, there is one paper comparing "The Trial" and "The Castle" two books by Kafka.

In the end Selig seems to have lost his telepathic powers and he is still a looser.

I wasn't greatly impressed by the book. It didn't seem to go anywhere. It was barely a science fiction book. According to some reviewers (on Amazon and on back covers of some editions) this book was an attempt to make the SF genre more "literary". At least the book was easy to read - it had short chapters and was not that long.

Non-Fiction - "The Equation That Couldn't be Solved"

2006-02-23T18:54:00.000-08:00

This book, written by Mario Livio, is a short history of group theory and the two main mathematicians who created it. These two guys are Niels Henrik Abel and Evariste Galois. Both of these mathematicians died very young. Abel at 26 from tuberculosis and Galois died at 20 from a pistol shot in a duel.

The book begins with the history of the problem that led to the invention of group theory. The problem was finding a formula that used only basic arithmetical operations and radicals (i.e. taking of roots) to write a general solution to an equation. We are all familiar with the quadratic formula. Similar, although more complicated, formulas exist for the cubic and quartic (i.e. degree 3 and degree 4) equations. However, no one was able to come up with such a formula for the quintic (degree 5).

It turns out that there is a very good reason why no one found such a formula. It does not exist. This fact was proved both by Abel independently by Galois. In the process they laid the foundation for modern abstract algebra - group theory in particular.

The life story of both of these man is rather sad - although some were able to appreciate their genius - they were both unrecognized during their lifetime. Throughout his short life Abel was unable to secure permanent employment and he died dirt poor.

Galois was passionate about politics and in early 19th centuary France this got him into all kinds of trouble - he was expelled from school and spent some time in jail. It is not entirely clear why Galois accepted a challenge to a duel. However, he was sure he was going to die because the night before he worked hard to organize his papers and write down his most important ideas.

Both Abel and Galois had the bad luck of submitting their papers to the French Academy (which was the center of math research at the time) and the mathematicians assigned to review them just lost them. These were guys like Fourier and Cauchy. In the days before copy machines this was a pretty serious setback.

The historical and biographical chapters were the best part of this book. The math was unsatisfying because the author would stop just as the arguments became interesting. I suppose he was trying to avoid having too many equations in the text.

The last part of the book talked about applications of group theory. In particular group theory is used in places where symetry occurs - and the author comes up with tons of examples from art and sciences. One well known finite group is the group composed of the face rotations of a Rubik's Cube.

But I found this talk about symetries little dull and shallow. I want to find out more about Galois's and Abel's proof. I have bunch of books on the subject but I will have to brush up on abstract algebra.

Technical - "Programing in Ruby"

2006-01-28T19:39:00.000-08:00

This is another book from The Pragmatic Programmer publishers. This is a pretty thick book, which includes an introduction to Ruby as well as a long library reference. I've read some of the introductory chapters, but I use it mostly for reference while hacking some Ruby code.

One early program I wrote was to help my friend Jack download a bunch of MP3 files that were refernced by a specific web page. Here is the code:


require "net/http"
require "open-uri"

def get_page (uri)
 # split into parts
 uri =~ %r{http://((\w|\.)*)}
 @@domain = $1
 file = $'
 # connect to the web server and fetch the page '
 puts "-->> Connecting to domain #{@@domain}\n"
 #"
 result = ""
 Net::HTTP.start(@@domain,80) {|http|
   response = http.get(file)
   result = response.body
 }
 result
rescue
 puts "Unable to open #{uri}"
end

def download_mp3 (base_uri, file)
 u = base_uri + file
 # Replace blanks by _ in file name
 fname = file.gsub("%20", "_")
 if (File.exists?(fname))
   puts "--> Already have #{fname}"
 else
   puts "--> Saving <#{fname}>"
   f = File.open(fname, "w");
   u = OpenURI.open_uri(u)
   f.write(u.read) 
 end
rescue
 puts "Unable to save #{fname}"
end

if (ARGV.length == 0)
 puts "Usage: get_mp3.rb "
else
 base_uri = ARGV[0]
 page = get_page(ARGV[0])
 count = 0
 page.scan(%r{<a href=((.)(.)*\.mp3)}) {
   download_mp3(base_uri, $1[1..-1])
   count += 1
 }
 puts ">>> Downloaded #{count} files...\n"
end

This program probably could be made shorter, but it does work. I had fun trying to come up with proper regular expression.

This book is "the" Ruby reference at this point and I have so far only scratched the surface. Meanwhile I'm working on another project with Ruby and Ruby on Rails - a program to index MP3 files.

Science Fiction - "The Futurological Congress"

2006-01-28T19:22:00.000-08:00

This is another one of Stanislaw Lem's Ijon Tichy stories. In this one Ijon Tichy attends a Futurological Congress in Costa Rica. While there a revolution breaks out and various hallucinogenic chemicals are used to subdue the revolting population. As Tichy is exposed to various chemicals, after a while we cannot tell what is imaginary and what is real. There are walking rats, rockets packs etc.

Eventually it appears that Tichy is frozen and revived in a future (year 2039) world where everything is controlled by psychem. There are drugs for everything. If you need to feel happy you take a pill - no one dares to have un-chemical emotions.

The funny and frustrating thing about this book that when describing the world of the future, Lem goes insane with making up new words. Some of these are obvious puns or somewhat logical names for new drugs, other are completely arbitrary.

At one point in the story Ijon Tichy discusses how futurology operates in this world with a professor of the subject. The way futuroligists work is to randomly generate new words and then attempt to assign meanings to them. This got me thinking about how language changes due to technological changes, and how incomprehensible it would be to someone from the past.

What would you think when someone told you 30 years ago: "If you want to hear the song, just google the lyric, download the mp3 and put it on your iPod".

Non-fiction - "Unweaving the Rainbow"

2006-01-08T11:30:00.000-08:00

"Unweaving the Rainbow" is a collection of essays by Richard Dawkins, subtitled "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". The book was prompted by a poem (I think is was by Keats) which complained that Newton, by unweaving the rainbow (that is by splitting the light) somehow reduced the beauty of the natural world. Dawkins argues the opposite - the scietific explanations give us much deeper and much more wonderous view of the world. In fact there is a quote at the start of the first chapter from Mervyn Peake: "To live at all is miracle enough".

The various essays cover some implication of spectrum splitting - for light and for sound. The author provides very nice explanations of how we know the composition of stars, based on analysis of star light.

There is an essay, called "Barcodes at the Bar", which explains in detail how genetic testing is used in criminal investigations. It turns out that your genetic fingerprint is based on the DNA that lies between the genes that specify your body. The strings of junk DNA are unique for each individual. Even so, genetic testing can sometimes give a false positive. This has to do with how these tests are performed, since it is clearly inpractical to compare person's entire genome.

Several of the essays talk about debunking pseudo-science. In particular he explains the probablities behind coincidences.

I've been working through this books slowly, as I get distracted by other books. Some of the debunking stuff I've read about elsewhere, and after a while it becomes little boring to read.

Still, this is a nice book to give to someone who wants to learn more about what science is really about.

Science Fiction - "Bring the Jubilee"

2005-11-20T17:12:00.000-08:00

"Bring the Jubilee", by Ward Moore, is an alternate history of the United States. In this version the South had won the war of Southron Independence and by the 1930s the United States is a backwards, nearly a third world country.

The hero of the book is a man named Hodgins McCormick Backmaker. When the story starts he leaves his family farm in Wappinger Falls, New York and goes to New York City to seek his fortunes. He describes himself as "lazy boy" who is only interested in reading books - a skill that is not particularly useful in the 1930s United States.

In this altername history, airplanes have not yet been invented and the most common mode of transportation is horse an buggy.

In any case, Hodgins finds work in a New York bookstore and spends his time studying the War of Southron Independence. Over the years he becomes an expert on the topic and is invited to join a Haggershaven - a college of sorts, in which resident scholars can pursue their work. This institution had been founded by a Confederate officer who decided to settle in Pennsylvania after the the Southern victory at Gettysburg and the end of the war.

At Haggershaven Hodgins meets Barbara, a brilliant physicist, who just happens to invent a time machine. As a historian of the war, Hodgins travels back in time to Gettysburg to witness the battle.

As you may expect his presence changes the course of events and the rest is history - our history.

Technical - "Beyond Java"

2005-11-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

"Beyond Java" is a book by Bruce Tate, on possible future of programming after Java. The author was inspired to write this book after the following experience. He and a friend built a web based application for a startup company using the current set of Java tools and frameworks (Spring, Hibernate etc). The project took about two months, with about 20 hours of work a week dedicated to it. Then, on a lark, the two guys decided to build the same application using Ruby on Rails framework. To their surprize, they built the same application in about 4 evenings of coding.

Even given the familiarity with the problem, the productivity speedup was amazing - not to mention that the Ruby application performed better. This experienced was a wake up call for the author, not to be too comfortable with his current tool set and to consider what else might be coming up from the non-Java fields.

Besides describing the above experience the first part of the book covers some problems that exist with Java and Java based tools and frameworks. For example, the fact that the basic types in Java (int, char etc) are not full classes leads to all kinds of ugliness and unnecessary complexity in Java APIs. Ironically features like these helped Java become so popular among the former C++ and C programmers.

The other main problem he sees with Java is that the frameworks and tools build around Java have become too complex. One reason is that Java is now used in many large "enterprise" systems - where this complexity is needed. However, in so doing Java has left behind those who do not wish to build "enteprise" size systems. Just to write a simple application that retrieves data from database and shows it in a web page, requires several frameworks, each of which needs to be configured in its own flavor or XML. That's why PHP and Ruby on Rails are so popular.

Following all the complains, the author provides some possible answers of what the future may be like. He believes that more dynamic languages (like Ruby) are the future. In fact he dedicates a chapter the to Ruby on Rails framework and another to "Continuation Servers" and Smalltalk (in particular he discusses the Seaside Smalltalk continuation server). "Continuations" are feature of may functional programming langauages (although they are present in Python, Ruby and Smalltalk) which allow us to invert the stateless model-view-controller approach to writing web applications into a more natural way of programming (i.e. ask for some input, wait until it comes, process it and display output).

The book is fairly short - I read it online using my O'Reilly Safari subscription. You may not care about Java that much, but if you are interested in the future of programming this book presents some intriguing possibilities.

Science Fiction - "Ender's Shadow"

2005-10-31T18:10:00.000-08:00

This book is a co-sequel to the well known "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. It's a "co-sequel", because it tells the same story as "Ender's Game", but through the eyes of another character - Bean. At the start of the book Bean is a tiny street rat barely surviving on the streets of Rotterdam. However, he appears to be extremely smart - he learns to read by age 3.

Eventually Bean winds up in Battle School, where he is trained along with other children to be future commanders of the Earth's space fleet in the upcoming war with the Buggers. Buggers are hive-insect beings that have once attempted to attack Earth, but weremiracously defeated.

In any case, Bean becomes one of Ender's most capable and trusted lieutenents. And, they both go on to lead the Earth's fleet to defeat the Buggers. However, whereas Ender thinks the entire campain is just a simulation - Bean early on figures out that in the children are not playing games, but fighting the actual war.

"Ender's Shadow" stands on its own. You can enjoy it without having read "Ender's Game". However, for me it was fun to go back to the original book and re-read some of the sections that covered the same events. I've read "Ender's Game" several times by now.

Besides these two books, there are number of other Ender books and my favorite is the direct sequel to "Ender's Game", the book titled "The Speaker for the Dead". However, I must say that "Ender's Shadow" comes in a close second.

Non-fiction - "My Job Went To India (and all I got was this lousy book)"

2005-10-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

Cover of this book shows a picture of a dishsheveled looking street person holding a sign "Will Code for Food". We all hope that this is not the fate of software developers in the USA. But hope is not enough and this book presents ideas and strategies of what you can do to not only preserve your job, but flourish as well.

The author, Chad Fowler, is a software developer who wrote this book after spending year and half in India training remote development teams for his company - he knows what he is talking about.

To begin with, outsourcing is not going away. As the communication infrastructure improves more and more intelligent and motivated people will become software developers. Some of these people are seriously motivated - as they maybe the only ones putting food on their extended family table. Work can easily move around the world to find these people, and we need to adapt.

The author presents 52 essays with specific advice in each, including action items for you to follow. Many of the ideas are self-evident, others are little suprising, but it is hard to disagree with any of his suggestion.

The book divides the essays into six parts, each on a specific theme. For example, Part I is titled "Choosing Your Market". Clearly there is too much technology out there for a single developer to learn. Therefore you need to pick some area in which to become an expert. One suprizing suggestion the author makes is not to pick the most popular technology there is. There will be plenty of people who know the same stuff and the laws of supply and demand will keep prices for your services low. In the worst case popular technologies are the easiest to outsource. Instead pick some less popular, perhaps more bleeding edge technology to learn. This strategy is more risky, but can lead better work.

Whatever technology you concentrate on, even if it becomes a hit, you know it will be obsolete in five years, so you need to keep on learning. This is the theme of the Part II - "Investing in your product". There are several obvious suggestions: try to work with people better than you, teach to learn things really deeply, and constantly practice. A less obvious suggestion is to learn more about the business in which you work, learn how companies work and why sometimes they do things in seemingly (to us) illogical ways.

Where as Part II talks in more general terms, Part III, "Executing", suggest some concrete things you can do to keep your skills sharp. For example, rather than surfing the web while some long build is running - read a technical article. Always have something new to learn and explore. In the essay "A Pebble in a Bucket of Water" the author talks about job security and being irreplacable. Well, there is no job security and no one is irreplacable. A company is group of people working together and when you leave, everything else will continue without you and with fewer problems than you'd expect. Think how the level of water in a bucket changes when just one pebble is removed.

Even if you are the hottest programmer since Bill Joy, people will not beat down your door with bags of money. You need to market yourself. This simply means that you and your work should be visible. This can be done in many ways - for example by writing status reports for you boss, or developing open source software, or by writing book reviews for your blog. People should know who you are and good things about you should appear when your name is entered in Google. All this is covered in Part IV - "Marketing... not just for suits".

Part V is about maintaing your edge. One of the essays here discusses the story from "Zen and Art of Mortocyle Maintanence" on the south Indian monkey trap. That's the one where a monkey reaches into a whole to get some rice, but cannot take its hand out because the opening is too small to fit the fist through. Do not get stuck like this with a particular technology or a job, expecting it to last forever. You need to keep an eye out for new stuff that will became the next great wave. Java or .Net seem to be market leaders today, but maybe you should be learning Ruby.

The final part is called "If you can't beat 'em...". Instead you can "Lead 'em" or "Manage 'em...". In software development globalization is here to stay so learn to deal with it. Being able to lead, train or manage remote teams is a skill that is and will be in demand.

The book is a fun and a quick read. It makes you think about your work and what you can do to get better. These days, instead of spending too much time on Slashdot I've been brushing up on regular expressions and writing small apps using Ruby in Rails.

You can get a copy of this book from Pragmatic Programmer web site.

Technical - "Agile Web Development with Rails"

2005-09-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm always on the lookout for new tools and programming languages to play with. My latest fun language is Ruby. Ruby is an interpretted, object oriented scripting language that seems to combine features of Python, Smalltalk and Eiffel.

Rails is a framework based on Ruby that can be used to build web apps. At this moment I'm maybe quarter of the way through this book - I'm implementing the coding example as I read. The example is a simple book store app that lets you order books.

Rails uses a lot of code generating scripts, so it is real easy to get started and have basic applications up and running. The cool thing about Rails that the generated code is just a simple scaffold that then can be modified.

I will probably post more about this book as I get further into it.

Science Fiction - "Software" by Rudy Rucker

2005-09-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

This is a book I read long time ago and re-read it recently because we'll be discussing it in my SF reading group. The plot of the story involves intelligent robots, who live on the Moon, and their creator Cobb Anderson. At the start of the book Cobb is old and retired, spending his last days in a retirement community in Florida. He is a "pheezer".

But his robots, who have rebelled against humans have better plans for him. They want to transfer his "software" - that is his conciousness and memories from his brain into the computer brain of a large robot. Too bad the process destroys the brain and the body.

Cobb makes the jump and is given a new, mechanical body. The cool thing is that once your mind is converted to "software" you can back it up. So, if your current mechanical body is destroyed the software is just loaded into a new one.

This book is written in the "cyber-punk" style and it was one of the early novels of the cyber-punk genre. It was still fun to read. It's not very long and the open ending invites sequels. I believe that Rucker wrote follow up novels, but I haven't read them.

Fiction - "Labyrinths"

2005-08-29T17:49:00.000-07:00

Labyrinths is a collection of stories and essays by the argentinian write Jorge Luis Borges. I read this book for my local SF discussion group. Borges' stories are not quite science fiction, but they are not quite straight fiction either.

I had read this book one before, years ago, and it was interesting to see which stories I remembered. The main two that impressed me last time were "The Library of Babel" and "Funes the Memorious".

"The Library of Babel" is a description of a nearly infinite library that contains all possible books of 400 pages or less (this number has to be finite of course). The author talks about wondering through this library looking for the special book that describes one's own life. I actually found the story available online here, together with a picture of what the actual library may look like.

The other story I remembered, "Funes the Memorious", was about a man who remembered everything. And I mean everything. He could compare the shape of the clouds on Tuesday,, five years ago, with the shape of the clouds today. He could name every object, every instance with its own unique name.

I wonder if Borges was inspired by a neurological case study by A. Luria, which is described in the book called "The Mind of a Mnemonist". The two stories are strikingly similar.

Reading the book this time, there were other stories that I liked. It appears that Borges like to play with some recursive ideas (i.e. a dream within a dream) or the mathematical ideas of the infinite or nearly so.

There was one essay that was a clear parody of literary criticism. In the essay he reviews a new version of sections of "Don Quixote". These were written by a present day author, and although the text is exactly the same as the original, the meaning is clearly (!) quite different.

I didn't finish all the essay. At times they were little tough to read - especially when I was tired in the evenings.

Science Fiction - "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"

2005-08-13T20:02:00.000-07:00

This is another story by Philip K. Dick that served as a basis for movie. The movie was called "Total Recall". The story basically matches the first part of the movie. It starts with the main character, Douglas Quail, dreaming of a trip to Mars. Since he cannot afford it, he decides to get a false memory of such a trip implanted in his head.

To make the memory more exciting he asks that he remember the trip to Mars as a secret agent. Unfortunately during the memory implantation process he discovers that he in fact did go to Mars as a secret agent, and the life he is currently living is based on an implanted memory.

At this point the story diverges from the movie. There is no trip to Mars and big shootouts with the bad guys. Instead once the police (called the Interplan) discover that he remembered his trip they attempt to kill him.

However, he eludes them and negotiates a settlement, which is to have his most deepest desire implanted as a memory instead of the real memory of the trip to Mars.

You'd have to read the story to check the clever twist that this second attempt at memory insertions leads into..

Fiction - "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"

2005-08-07T16:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I've read all the Harry Potter books so far, mostly because my kids read them, so we can talk about the plots. My daugther finished the book in a week, it took me about seven days .

This book is the 6th of the series and it sets things up for the last 7th book, which is not yet written.

The only thing I can say that the book has a sad ending. At the end Harry is 16 and getting ready for the final confrontation with "You -Know-Who". If you don't know who "He-who-must-not-be-named" is, then you better go and read the book.

Otherwise you will forever remain a muggle....

Technical - "The Best Software Writing"

2005-08-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

This book is a collection of essays about software development written by various authors, selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky. Joel write a web column Joel On Software and in this book is his reaction to having to read yet another boring book on software development.

The essays range from some musings on social software by Clay Shirky, to Paul Graham essay on great hackers (from the book "Hackers and Painters"), to a short introduction to the programming language Ruby.

There are couple of essays that short and whimsical, but deal with serious topics. Some of these are: "Starbucks Does Not Use Two Phase Commit" or "How Many Microsoft Employees Does It Take To Change a Lightbulb".

The book ends with three essays by Eric Sink on some problems facing small software companies. Two of his articles are about marketing and one on hiring programmers.

I really liked this book and I'm making all my friends read it.

Non-fiction - "The World is flat" (part II)

2005-07-27T04:41:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a deeply analytical essay on "The World is Flat", when I finished reading it. But then I got distracted by other books. So instead, here is a short summary of the second part of the book. The second part of the book contains Friedman's advice to various global actors, as to how to deal with globalization.

For America he suggest that we embrace free trade (no mention is made of US goverment's farm subsidies). He says we should worry about the state of our education and in particular science education. Other countries are outpacing us. We should also spent more on scientific research. He says that Americans lack ambition - we have become complacemant about our place in the world.

Developing countries in order to attract and keep bussiness need to have democtratic and transparent goverments. This way companies will not be afraid to move into those countries.

His advice to companies is not to "build walls" and to "outsource to win". Rather than to hide behind proprietary processes, companies should be much more open to colaboration with other companies, and should be ready to outsource those parts that can be done better by others.

On geopolitics. There are places in the world (i.e. Africa) where the largest productivity losses are due to sickness. When people are sick with malaria, they cannot do anything. Unless we can deal with some of those problem, benefits of globalization will not extend to those countries.

In Middle East, the political systems leave the people too frustrated. There is too much unemployment and lack of desire to work. There is no incentive for governments to improve, as they are funded by oil money and not taxes, so they are not accountable to the people. This makes the area a fertile ground for extremists.

He mentions the theory that no two countries that have McDonalds have been in a real war against each other. He proposes the "Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention" - if your country is involved in a production chain of something like a Dell computer, your goverment will remain reasonable and will not attempt to start wars in order to keep the business. To me this seems to be correct - I hope.

Overall I think the book is bit too much of a cheerleader for globalization. The author only talked with people who directly benefit from it (i.e. CEOs, business leaders). He did not spent much time with the people who are negatively affected. He also seems to have bought into some of the marketing literature passed out by the various companies and ignored some non-free market practices of US goverment (i.e. farm subsidies).

Science Fiction - "Ubik"

2005-07-12T17:38:00.000-07:00

"Ubik" is a short novel by Philip K. Dick. It's very weird. I had read it long time ago and all I remembered was that it was weird and confusing. This time I think I understood the story, but I keep wondering what else I missed.

The plot of this book concerns members of a company, which specialized in neutralizing the influence of pre-cogs, telepaths and other psi-capable individuals. They anti-paranormals are called "inertials". In the beginning of the story the company's president and his top intertials are summoned to a lunar base to try a find a telepath. When they get there, an attempt on the life of the company's head is attempted - via a bombing.

This is where things start getting weird. In "Ubik"'s universe, if you are killed but are placed in "cold-pac" quickly, your mind can be preserved in a state, referred to as "half-life", where your body is kept in suspended animation and you brain waves continue. People in the outside world are still able to communicate with you via some specialized devices.

In the second part of the book, once weird things start to happen, you begin to realize that some of the characters are in fact dead and in "half-life". The plot revolves around people discovering who is and who is not alive.

What is Ubik? Beats me. Maybe I'll know better after our SF book discussion group meets.

Science Fiction - "The War of the Worlds"

2005-06-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

This book was the June book for our local SF Book Discussion Group. The book was written by H.G. Wells and is one of the first SF books that describes aliens from another world. "The War of the Worlds" was first published at the very end of the 19th century in 1898.

One interesting aspect of this book is how quaint and old fashioned the human culture and technology appears from today's point of view. For example, when the first martian "cylinder" lands in Horsell Common, after three days of it being there the narrator says that only people within 5 miles have heard of it. Imagine this happening today - in the era of instant communications.

There were several devices that were mentioned in use by the army trying to fight the Martians. One was a heliograph. I never heard of such a device and had to look it up.

Somewhat eerie were the descriptions of the Martians using chemical weapons. They launched carnisters that released a "black gas" that killed people. This was written more than fifteen years before World War I.

Although it did not occur to me, my book discussion group members pointed out that the Martians were sort of a metaphor for the British Empire and the book was meant to show a bit what it is like to be underfoot of invaders with much superior technology.

Since I knew what would happen in the end, there was no suspense in reading the book. This time around the fun in reading the book again was in seeing how different the world was only 100 years ago, and the technological inventions of H.G. Wells - which are suprisingly modern. In fact the Martian fighting machines are very similar to the imperial walkers from "Star Wars".

Non-fiction - "The World is Flat" (part I)

2005-06-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

"The World is Flat" is a new book by Thomas Friedman on the current globalization trends and how they will affect everyone. The subtitle of the book is "A Brief History of the Twenty First Century", although the history covered is really the second part of the 20th century.

The "flat" in the title was inspired by a comment made to the author by a CEO of an Indian company. He said the world's playing field is being leveled, by the technologies of computers and communications, so that people in India are now able to compete in the global markets. It is this "leveling" that leads to a "flat world".

In the first part of the book, Friedman, examines the ten "forces that flattened the world". Here is a short description of each of these:

11/9/89 - the Fall of the Berlin wall.

8/9/95 - the day Netscape went public

Workflow software

Open Source software

Outsourcing

Offshoring

Supply-Chaining

Insourcing

In-forming

The Steroids - digital, mobile, personal and virtual

This first part of the book is certainly thought provoking, especially for people working with these technologies. However, one problem I found is that the author seems to have gotten his material from marketing brochures and CEOs who have something to sell. Parts of of story read like a Gardner Group Report (this is not a complement).

The following parts of "The World is Flat" discuss the implications of all this. I will write more on this in a follow up entry.

Non-fiction - "How We Got Here" by Andy Kessler

2005-06-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

I read an electronic version of this book, which I got for free from this web site. You can get your own copy here (in PDF format). The book is a short history of technologyand capital markets, starting from the start of the Industrial Revolution, until today.

The story starts with the invention of the steam engine and the results that followed. The point that the author makes in several places, is that innovation takes time. In many cases several decades pass between the idea occuring to someone and the successful deployment of the invention.

The extreme example of this mechanical computation. The first mechanical calculators were built by Pascal and Leibniz in 17th centuary, and look how long it took before we got actually programmable computers. Even considering that Charles Babbage had figured out all the major concepts (i.e. machines that stored programs and executed them).

The technological history is aimed at showing how computation and communication evolved, into what we have today: our computers and the internet.

The history of capital markets is kind intertwined into all this, because to bring these inventions to market someone had to put up the money. Throughout this history the words "bubble" and "panic" occur rather regularly. One of the early examples is an "ipo" of a company whose stock went on sale on July 4th at $25 per share, month later was trading at $280, and ended the year at $150. No, this wasn't an Internet company. These were the stocks for the Bank of United States in 1793. (see Wikipedia)

One of the more interesting subjects covered, was the author's criticism of the Gold standard - that is hooking up value of the country's currency to a chunk of gold (in England the Gold standard was defined by Isaac Newton). The problem with the gold standard is that the only way to create more wealth you have to get more gold.

England had a problem because of this, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. They had a big trade surplus - which meant that they had a lot of gold and their potential clients did not. At the time the Parliament (which was controlled by land owners) had passed protectionist laws (Corn Laws) to protect english farmers, so other countries could not sell food to England.

The result is that english factory workers were not being paid well (as the stuff they made was expensive to sell abroad, and the potential buyers lacked enough gold), but local food was expensive (since imports were severely limited) and this led to an unhappy working class. A ripe field for Karl Marx and his buddies.

Overall the book has a flavor of the James Burke series "Connections" (this was a show produced by the BBC, and shown in public TV in USA).

There were two slightly annoying things about the book. The author would stick silly puns/jokes here and there. Now, you know I do like puns, but these were not particularly clever and wound up being more of distraction. The second problem was that I spotted several minor factual errors. None of them were large, but it made me wonder about some of the historical facts. For example, the author refered to "Fermat's Last Theorem" as "Fermat's Last Algorithm". I mean, come on! (grin)

All in all I enjoyed this book. I read the entire thing (nearly 200 pages). This book seems like a nice pre-quel to Thomas Friendman's "The World is Flat: A Short History of 21st Century". My next blog entries will be about Friedman's book.

Technical - "Spring: A Developer's Notebook"

2005-05-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

This book is from a new O'Reilly series, called "Developer's Notebook". The idea behind the series is to present some piece of software or a tool in a way a developer might want to see it. Basically, with all the fluff removed and just pure technical discussion on how something should be used. with lots of coding examples. The book even looks like a notebook, with fake coffee stains and post-it notes on the cover. So far I have seen maybe five or six books in this series.

The book I read is "Spring: A Developer's Notebook", which covers the Java Spring framework (I know, a big suprize). What is the Spring framework? The official, buzzword compliant, definition is that Spring is a "lightweight container". In plainer language, Spring is an enviroment for running Java applications. Spring provides number of services (such as security, transactions, remoting etc) that are often provided by the heavy weight J2EE application servers (like Weblogic or Jboss), but without forcing your application program into a heavy J2EE type structures (EJBs etc).

Spring gains a lot of its power from few very simple concepts. The first one is a design pattern called Inversion of Control (IOC) or sometimes called Dependency Injection. This is a fancy name for using Java interfaces to decouple components of your system. Spring provides facilities where interface implementations are configured via XML, and objects are connected by Spring during system initialization. This connecting is called "dependency injection" - I think Martin Fowler came up with this term. Don't blame me.

The use of IOC is illustrated to the n-th degree throughout. The book consists of a graduated example. As you are reading the book you can actually implement the example and have running program at the end of each chapter (I didn't do this). The book's example is a system to manage a bicycle rental shop and the class that implements the storage of bike information is implemented in several different ways - depending on how we plan to store the data - and is "injected" into the system at startup time.

Another big advantage of using Spring, is that the application objects are POJOs ("POJO" means Plain Old Java Ojects - who comes up with these?!), that is they are not required to implement any weird interface or extend any container classes (as you would under Weblogic let's say). This makes automated unit testing a lot easier. Again, nearly every chapter includes some unit test examples (see JUnit and continous integration if you want to know more about testing).

The other big part of Spring, that makes it much easier to use, is the AOP framework (AOP stands for Aspect Oriented Programming). With AOP you can insert code into exiting system to do stuff like manage transactions, or handle security, without the need to touch the basic objects of the application. One of the central ideas of AOP is that a call to method can be intercepted and something can be done either before or after the method runs. The cool thing about the Spring's AOP is that although the interceptor code has to be written in Java, the insertion into the system is done via XML configuration.

In any case the good thing about "Spring: A Developer's Notebook" is that it contains only the meat of the subject. There is no unnecessary narrative on the history of Spring, or definitions of XML, or what OR mapping is. Things that you'd expect the reader to know. Instead you have a worked out example that demonstrates the key concepts of the framework, and if you work through it yourself at the end you will gain a deeper understanding of the topic.

After having been stuck with needing to read 400 page technical books, which are 80% useless fluff, it's a pleasure to read a book like this. But again, since this is an O'Reilly series I'm not suprized. I already started to look at developer's notebooks on "Hibernate" and "Java 1.5".

Science Fiction - "Paycheck"

2005-05-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

This is another story by Philip K. Dick, which was used as a base for a movie by the same title. I recently saw this movie (picked up a DVD in discount bin at Wal-Mart), and found the movie pretty bad.

The story was little better. The plot is about a mechanic who gets a job at a secret company for two years and at the end his memory of the two years is erased. When he goes to get his paycheck instead of money he gets a bag of , what seems like useless, trinkets. At first he is upset and puzzled, because it is he himself who prepared those objects.

In the rest of the he finds each of the trinkets very useful and realizes that somehow in his job he had been able to forsee the future. Turns out the technology the secret company was working on is called a "time scoop" - a device that lets you retrieve objects from the future.

The interesting difference between this story and the movie, is that in the movie the company that made the machine was evil and was destroyed by the hero. In the short story, the company is one of the last bastions of freedom, waiting to overthrow the bad goverment. In the story the hero has to avoid the Secret Police, who want to find the location of the hidden plant.

In the end the hero winds up working for the company, to help save it and save himself from the goverment.

Again, as in "Minority Report", the technology described is bit skewed. There are rocket cars, but computers are not mentioned.

Science Fiction - "The Minority Report"

2005-05-16T17:15:00.000-07:00

Few months ago I watched the movie by the same title and since then I have been wondering how far from the original story has Hollywood strayed. "The Minority Report" is a short story by Philp K. Dick that was the basis for the movie.

The basic story elements include Pre-Crime police force, three pre-cogs, who predict the future crimes, and what appears as a false prediction about the story's main character. But this is where the similarity to the movie ends.

Whereas, in the movie the events lead to discrediting of Pre-Crime, in the story the main characters commits murder in order to preserve Pre-Crime police department.

The title "The Minority Report" refers to the dissenting prediction of one of the three pre-cogs (as in the movie), however, and this point is made strongly in the story, there is no majority report - all the reports are "minority reports". Because they never really agree that precisely. In the case of the story's hero, the subsequent reports are affected by his knowledge of earlier ones.

The story itself is pretty short, maybe 30 pages, and I read it over two evenings.

One funny thing about the story is how it gets technology wrong. The story has flying cars, but the computer still produce their output on cards.

"The Minority Report" is one of the stories in "The Philip K. Dick Reader". I bought it because I wanted to read all the stories that were basis for the movies: "Total Recall" and "Paycheck". When I read them I will report further.

I presume that you know that the movie "Blade Runner" was based on Philip K. Dick's book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". I read that book ages ago.

Technical - "Jython Essentials"

2005-04-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

Jython is the programming language Python, but implemented in pure Java and meant to run on Java JVMs. "Jython Essentials" is an O'Reilly book on Jython. Python is a scripting language that's been around for a while. Python came into being little later than Perl, but from a programming language design point of view is a much cleaner language.

The cool thing about Jython is its seamless integration with Java. Unlike other languages that can be compiled to run on the JVM, Jython supports full access to all Java libraries. In fact you can write Jython classes that extend Java classes.

You can also imbed Jython into Java programs to give your program scripting control.

I'm working on a small Jython project at work, so I have been refering to this book a bit lately. I haven't actually read the book from cover to cover, but I just read selected chapters (like the chapter on Swing or reflection). Some of the Jython examples in the book are pretty neat - there is a page long Web browser (!).

One thing I'm learning while doing the little project, is to use some of the functional language features of Jython. Some of these are just basic things from Lisp (like applying a function to each element of a list), but others are more sophisticated. For instance I finally figured out what "closures" are and I was actually using this construct in my code.

If you want to learn Python/Jython this probably not the book to use. But if you want to quick overview of Jython features or you need a quick reference, this is the right book.

Unfinished - "The Trial"

2005-04-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

Ocassionally I read some classic book, some turn out to be really great (for example "War and Peace") and sometimes they are not so good. This time I tried to read Franz Kafka's "The Trial". Unfortunately I lost interest in the story after about 60 pages.

"The Trial" is a story of Joseph K., who is arrested for some reason and then goes to trial for some reason, but none of the reasons are explained. In fact this description is already too clear for what happens in the book. At the start Joseph K. is arrested, but it is not what you would think of as an "arrest". Some guys show up at his house and tell him he is under arrest. They stay for a while and then they leave.

Joseph K. continues with his life as before. Until someone hints to him that he needs to go to a hearing before a judge. He manages to find this surrealistic "court" on a Sunday morning, where he tries to argue his case.

The whole book was just too weird and too "kafkaess".

I had read "Metamorphosis" years ago and didn't find it particularly readable (except that it was shorter).

The tone of this book reminded me a little of "The Stranger" (by Albert Camus). It was also a story, told from the main character's point of view, but at least the plot there was more engaging (the "hero" had murdered someone for no reason).

Perhaps I'll get back to at some other time...

Fiction - "The Caine Mutiny"

2005-04-19T18:01:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading "The Caine Mutiny", by Herman Wouk. This book
was recomended to me by Jayne. She had read it long time ago and
liked, and thought I would like it too. Turns out that I did. You
maybe be familiar with the story, as it was made into a rather famous
movie with Humphrey Bogart in one of the main roles. I have seen
pieces of the movie, but I never sat down and watched it thorugh.

The book is a story of a ship in the US Navy during World War II. The
is named "Caine" and it is an old mine-sweeper/destroyer, which was
first commissioned during the first world war. The story is told from
the point of view of Willie Keith, a young, rich boy, who joins the
Navy to avoid the army. The first part of the book covers Willie's
"adventures" as a midshipman in New York City.

Once Willie graduates from the initial training he becomes an ensign
and is assigned to the Caine. The captain of the Caine, when Willie
joins is a man, named DeVries. Under DeVries the ship is chaotic and
falling apart with little discipline - at least that's how it appears
to Willie. In fact, when Willie first reports for duty, and he meets
the captain, the captain is standing in his cabin in the nude.

Anyway, DeVries is soon replaced by Captain Queeg, to Willie's
relief. Unfortunately the relief does not last long. Queeg turns out
to be much worse captain. He is petty about even smallest breaches of
Navy discipline as he himself sees it and is vey mean about enforcing
his way. He also appears to be a coward - he "earns" the nickname "Old
Yellowstain" among the officers in his wardroom.

The middle part of the book is taken up by the description of the war
time "adventures" of the Caine. They were mostly assigned to boring
escort duties, with little participation in combat operations. During
this time the tensions between the captain and the crew increased to
the point, when during a storm, there was a mutiny.

Up until now, the story has been presented from Willie Keith's point
of view, and the actions of the officers appear to be entirely
justified and even heroic. However, in the next several chapters that
cover the court martial of the mutiniers things become less clear.

I really liked the character of the defense lawyer: a jewish, naval
fighter pilot - who was only available to take the case, because he
was recovering from burns he received after a crash on a carrier. I
don't want to give up the ending here, but the insight of this
character into the whole situation changed my perception of the entire
affair.

The court scenes were perhaps the most suspensful parts of the book.

For the romantics the readers there is also a love story between
Willie and a girl he met in a night club, May Wynn. The thread of this
relationship is woven throughout the entire book, and nearly resolved
at end.

Jayne was right. I really liked this book. There were many parts that
were exceptional - there was the letter of a father to his son, there
were the court room scenes and there were descriptions of taifuns and
kamikaze attacks.

Now I'll have to get a copy of the movie and watch it.

Science Fiction - "Tunnel in the Sky"

2005-04-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

"Tunnel In The Sky, by Robert Heinhlein, is the April book for my SF book discussion group. It's a fairly short book (about 200 pages), about a survival test given to senior high school students. But this is not a typical survival test, the subjects are transported via "tunnels" which connect Earth to other planets, to an unsettled planet, where they need to survive for a week.

The reason that such tests are needed, is that in this universe humans have been colonizing other worlds - via the "tunnels in the sky" - and the test is there to prepare the students for future work. As it turns out the tunnels are very expensive to operate, so in most cases when colonists are dropped on some world they must be able to fend for themselves for quite a while, before the next bunch of materials can be sent from Earth.

The main character in this story is a fellow named, Rod Walker. He has an older sister, who is now in the millitary, but who went through a similar test. I liked the way she advised him to bring only knives as weapons, because having a gun would make him less careful.

Rod and his classmates are dropped on a planet, resembling african savanna, with the requisite predators. Rod survives the first week, but then an odd thing happens. No tunnel opens and he is stuck on the far away planet.

The main part of the story has to do with how he and the other people abandoned on an uncivilized planet survive. It's an interesting story, seeing how just knowledge of advance technology can help, even when you don't have the actual tools.

Although I haven't read "The Lord Of the Flies", this story seems to have a similar feel.

I enjoyed reading this book - it was quick and entertaining. It would make good summer reading, when you don't want to concentrate too hard.

Science Fiction - "Star Diaries"

2005-04-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

My local library has several book discussion groups. Jayne and I have attended some of the meetings every now and then. Last summer I found out that one of the groups was dedicated to Science Fiction books, and since the book they were going to discuss next was "Snow Crash" (Neil Stephenson),which I read, I decided to attend. Since then I've attended many of the meetings and they are always a lot of fun.

The composition of the group is pretty eclectic. There are a couple of people retired from Bell Labs, who seem to go around to many sciene fiction conventions and are involved in voting on SF awards (like the Hugo). There is a man, named Charles, who's college room mate was Ted Nelson. Ted Nelson, if I need to remind you, was the guy who invented hypertext. There is an older lady, Shirley, who comes to all the groups and who seems to have read everything.

The book we discussed in March was "Star Diaries" written by Stanilaw Lem. I suggested this book, as Lem is my all around favorite SF writer. First time I read "Star Diaries" I was twelve (that's back in the Jurasic Era ;-) ), and since then I read it again every few years.

"Star Diaries" is a collection of "voyages" of intrepid Ijon Tichy - a kind of space age Gulliver, who travels around the space and time, and gets into trouble. The actual stories that comprise this book have been written over a number of years - first one in late 50s the latest in the 70s.

Some of the stories are downright silly. For example, when Tichy's rocket stearing mechanims breaks and he falls into a large field of "space vortices", with many space/time loops and winds up arguing with himself from another day on how to go about fixing the rocket. Things get out of hand pretty quickly - there are so many Tichy's that committees have to be organized...etc.

In another voyage Tichy is recruited by his future self to be the leader of the project to correct human history. In the furture, after time travel is discovered, Earth is embarrassed of its history and naturally a large project is started to fix it. The only person, according to psychological profiles, who can lead it is Tichy.

When he arrives in the future, the project turns out about the same as any large government type of project. There is incompetemce , back-stabbing politics, and all around nastiness. From this story you will learn why Earth's axis is tilted, who killed the dinosaurs and what happened to project members Lenny D'Vinch and Pat Lado. This particular voyage is so full of awful jokes, that I find few more each time I read it.

My favorite voyage is bit serious though. Rather than being funny, it consders the problem of a really really advanced technology and the Church. In particular on the planet that Ijon Tichy visits two major biologal evolutions took place. Bio-tech is so advanced you can grow anything - i.e.
furniture or a tape recorder. While on the planet Tichy stays with an order of robot monks and studies the history of the relation between the Church and the advancing bio-tech. For example, if the soul enters the body at conception, what happens if conception is reversed?

I was surprized that the people in the group did not like this particular voyage at all. They were more impressed with the language play and silliness of other stories. We all agreed that the translator has done a great job.

The Ancestor's Tale

2005-03-28T18:41:00.000-08:00

This book's author is Richard Dawkins .The book is rather long, nearly 700 pages so I'm working my way through it slowly (it was a Christmas present). The subtitle for The Ancestor's Tale is A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution and it is a collection of "tales" about human evolutionary ancestors.

The book moves backwards through time, starting with the present and moving though a series of common ancestors of humans and other species. These are termed "concestors" by the author. For example, the concestor of chimps and humans lived about 6 million years ago.

The structure of the book is loosely based on Chaucer's Cantenbury Tales (which I never read), where for each concestor (also refered to as a "pilgrim" by the author) there is a tale that illustrates some interesting fact about evolution and the particular concestor. I especially like the various explanations of how evolutionists know certain things. Some of these get quite technical.

I liked the explanation of the method that evolutionary biologists use is to evaluate how the DNA of different organisms relates to each other. This method is similar to how Chaucerian scholars try to figure out which versions of Cantenbury Tales cames first. At the time Cantebury Tales were written, books were copied by hand and the scribes made errors. By studying where these errors occur we can figure out which version of the text came earlier and how the texts relate.

The same holds true for DNA. When organisms reproduce the DNA is copied and sometimes errors (i.e. mutations) occur. By comparing DNA sequence of related organisms, we can get a very good idea of what species descended from what other.

For example, did you know that the nearest relative species to whales is the rhino?

In case you didn't know Richard Dawkins is the author of the famous book The Selfish Gene (I haven't read this one, but Google seems to have the text online). I've read another one of his books: The Blind Watchmaker.

At the moment I'm on page 269 reading about sexual selection, the is about characteristics that evolve because either the male or the female of the species likes something (eg. the peacock's tail).

Hackers and Painters

2005-03-24T18:17:00.000-08:00

I have been using O'Reilly's Safari service, which gives you access to O'Reilly books online. One of the books they added recently is a collection of essays by Paul Graham called"Hackers and Painters". I have read some of these essays from Paul Graham's web site, but several of the essays in the book were not published elsewhere.

Yesterday I read the title essay. In it the author compares hackers to painters. They are both "makers" - hackers create software and painters paintings. He makes an interesting point that hackers don't fit in academia, because they are not scientists, nor do they fit well into companies, because they are not engineers.

One other neat observation that he makes, is that the way he write code is equivalent to an artist's sketch. That is, you do not do a big formal design, but jump into coding and then work with the code as the primary medium.

You need to know that Paul Graham made a lot of money writing software in Lisp. In fact, he has written several essays and a book about Lisp. The book is available for free on his website.

Today I read another essay, titled "The Road Ahead" - it was a story of his startup company and his philosophy of startups. One thing he said is that when you are a startup and you have a choice between doing something easy and something hard, always pick the hard thing. This will make it harder for any competition to cach up to you.

I'll post more as I read additional essays - but if you are impatient, just visit Paul Graham's web site and do your own reading.