This is a fascinating book. The story develops over a couple of generations whilst exploring culture, history, colonialism, family and relationships. The author provides a warning at the beginning of the book suggesting that this is a book to be avoided if you are looking for a story. But its an unnecessary warning. The book holds your attention because it explores pain, death sadness and joy in a particular cultural context. It is written well, but I did feel sometimes an editor would have removed some minor niggles. I do hope there is a volume 2.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Book Review: In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
When you’re packing for a trip halfway across the country, and you know you’ll be sitting in airports and on planes, you need good reading material. When your trip halfway across the country will deposit you into cold weather and a household full of family members and children filled with the holiday spirit, you need something more. You need the literary equivalent of “Calgon, take me away.”
And that’s where Bill Bryson comes in.
For the uninitiated (poor you!), Bryson is the author of a myriad of humorous travelogues, memoirs, and works of narrative nonfiction. His A Short History of Nearly Everything makes science and history exciting, and A Walk in the Woods actually had me thinking that I, too, wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. When I need an escape that is both informative and entertaining, Bryson is my first choice, and In a Sunburned Country—his account of adventures in Australia—has everything I’ve come to know and love.
Bryson jumps right in with a brief introduction to the history of Australia, beginning with the history of colonization and the fact that Britain orginally used Australia as a prison camp. Interesting, right? As he explores Australia from the big cities to the desolate outback (it gets really hot there, by the way) and discusses the social and cultural history of Australians and its scientific significance (Australia has more species of plants and animals found only in one place in the world than any other location), Bryson works in anecdotes from his personal experiences and misadventures down under, and that’s why I love him so much. His narrative agility and his ability to weave research into story so deftly is unparalleled, at least in travel writing, where so many books feel like “Day One: Went to X, Did Y, Saw Z; lather, rinse, repeat.”
In a Sunburned Country taught me about people, places, and things I’d never heard of before, including a number of snakes, spiders, and insects who could kill me with a single bite, and it provided a beautiful, dangerous, occasionally frightening escape from the “real world.” I didn’t even mind that Bryson took a turn for the serious to explore Australia’s treatment of its indigenous people, the Aborigines, because he did it with great intelligence, insight, and depth of feeling.
And that just goes to show you that travel writing doesn’t have to be vapid, reliant on jokes about poop, or filled with convenient and stereotypical epiphanies. It can be substantial and educational, and it can assume a certain level of intelligence and worldliness from its readers, and still be wonderful and successful and widely read.
Oh, dear God, how I hope Bill Bryson will continue to be widely read.
Whether you’re looking for a virtual warm-weather getaway, an adventure in a faraway land, a few good laughs, or a new favorite author, Bill Bryson and In a Sunburned Country will deliver….even though this isn’t my favorite of Bryson’s books (the aforementioned A Walk in the Woods holds a special place in my heart for most chuckle-inducing read ever), it is most excellent, and I highly recommend it. 4.5 out of 5.
Win a Michelle Sutton E-Book
First Impressions, by Michelle Sutton
Tombstone Treasures, book one.
Desert Breeze Publishing, inc.
Releases January 1, 2010.
Back Cover blurb from Desert Breeze Publishing, Inc.
Sammie Carpenter understands how a uniform influences behavior. Wearing her Army fatigues puts her in the mindset of a soldier and donning her Class-A Uniform always helps her shift into Captain Mode. So what harm could come from her dressing like a saloon girl and strutting through the streets of Tombstone? She didn’t know how to flirt to save her life, and she wasn’t getting any younger.
When she met the lonesome stud cowboy, Jimmy, she knew he was the one. So why was their communication always so awkward? Couldn’t he see that she was interested in him? No matter how hard she tried to win him over, she couldn’t seem to get him to see past his first impression of her. But Sammie didn’t give up easily. Somehow she would make him see that they were meant to be together, but how can she do that when all of her plans keep falling apart?
My Review:
I’m a big fan of Michelle Sutton’s writing. With each of her books, she grabs me by the heart and tugs like nothin’ else. Now, I’m not big into western-type stuff, just a personal preference, but this book has a little twist on that genre that I wasn’t expecting, which kept me reading. Oh, and the sizzling romance she twined in between the characters. Very steamy. Loved it.
I love how Michelle paints the character flaws of her hero and heroine. I mean, let’s face it, we’re all flawed, we’re human, right? She’s so good at honestly portraying the struggles of her characters. I read this book in one sitting. Yep, ONE sitting, and it kept me up past my bedtime.
***NOW–ONTO THE CONTEST***
To be entered to win this E-BOOK (it is NOT a print book), leave a comment ***but it doesn’t end there*** Tell all your friends/acquaintances to stop by the blog and leave a comment. Make sure they reference who sent them here, because the one who has the most referrals will win a download of the E-BOOK. If there is a tie, I’ll put the names in a hat and draw the winner.
The contest will run through January 2nd and I’ll announce the winner Sunday January 3rd!
Monday, December 28, 2009
Eighth Grade Bites by Heather Brewer
Vladimir Tod is a normal middle school kid. Except for the fact he has fangs, a fear of garlic and drinks blood that his guardian Nelly brings home from the hospital. Yes, he’s a vampire. Lately some weird things have been happening in Bathory, like Vlad’s favorite teacher Mr. Craig has gone missing leaving them with a nosy subsistute who may or may not have it out for Vlad.
It was overall a pretty good book. Although there were times I felt the characters got too over-emotional, making them a bit unrealistic. It is a good book if you’re looking for a short read to occupy time, (it’s only about 180 pages). I’m looking forward to what happens in the next book but I’ll probably read a few book in between even though I already have the second book.
Book Review: Alfred Edersheim- The Temple: It's Ministry and Service
A Jewish convert to Christianity, Alfred Edersheim writes with an in-depth understanding of Old Testament and New Testament principles. His insights and writings on things such as the Old Testament history and concepts such as the Temple are outstanding and a must for anyone that wants to further broaden their understanding of Old Testament culture, setting and its people. This book takes on the Temple as it was in the time of Jesus and is a book that you may have to read a couple of times in order to truly grasp each chapter. Each time I read this I am amazed at the new things I come across that somehow I missed before.
First published in 1874 Alfred Edersheim made this bold declaration in the preface, “It has been my wish in this book, to take the reader back nineteen centuries; to show him Jerusalem as it was when our Lord passed through its streets, and the Sanctuary, when He taught in its porches and courts.” Adlred Edersheim managed to do just that and brings to life with great imagery Jerusalem and the Temple as it was in the time of Jesus.”
Here is an excerpt from the book:
‘The Royal Bridge’Of the four principal entrances into the Temple— of them from the west— most northerly descended, perhaps by flights of steps, into the Lower City; while two others led into the suburb, or Parbar, as it is called. But by far the most magnificent avenue was that at the south-western angle of the Temple. Probably this was ‘the ascent…into the house of the Lord,’ which so astounded the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10:5) *
* According to Mr. Lewin, however (Siege of Jerusalem, p. 270), this celebrated ‘ascent’ to the house of the Lord went up by a double subterranean passage, 250 feet long and 62 feet wide, by a flight of steps from the new palace of Solomon, afterwards occupied by the ‘Royal Porch,’ right into the inner court of the Temple.
It would, indeed, be difficult to exaggerate the splendour of this approach. A colossal bridge on arches spanned the intervening Valley of the Tyropoeon, connecting the ancient City of David with what is called the ‘Royal Porch of the Temple.’ From its ruins we can reconstruct this bridge. Each arch spanned 41 1/2 feet, and the spring-stones measured 24 feet in length by 6 in thickness. It is almost impossible to realise these proportions, except by a comparison with other buildings. A single stone 24 feet long! Yet these were by no means the largest in the masonry of the Temple. Both at the south-eastern and the south-western angles stones have been found measuring from 20 to 40 feet in length, and weighing above 100 tons.
The Temple PorchesThe view from this ‘Royal Bridge’ must have been splendid. It was over it that they led the Saviour, in sight of all Jerusalem, to and from the palace of the high-priest, that of Herod, the meeting-place of the Sanhedrim, and the judgment-seat of Pilate. Here the city would have lain spread before us like a map. Beyond it the eye would wander over straggling suburbs, orchards, and many gardens— among them the royal gardens to the south, the ‘garden of roses,’ so celebrated by the Rabbis— the horizon was bounded by the hazy outline of mountains in the distance. Over the parapet of the bridge we might have looked into the Tyropoeon Valley below, a depth of not less than 225 feet. The roadway which spanned this cleft for a distance of 354 feet, from Mount Moriah to Mount Zion opposite, was 50 feet broad, that is, about 5 feet wider than the central avenue of the Royal Temple-Porch into which it led. These ‘porches,’ as they are called in the New Testament, or cloisters, were among the finest architectural features of the Temple. They ran all round the inside of its wall, and bounded the outer enclosure of the Court of the Gentiles. They consisted of double rows of Corinthian pillars, all monoliths, wholly cut out of one block of marble, each pillar being 37 1/2 feet high. A flat roof, richly ornamented, rested against the wall, in which also the outer row of pillars was inserted. Possibly there may have been towers where one colonnade joined the other. But the ‘Royal Porch,’ by which we are supposed to have entered the Temple, was the most splendid, consisting not as the others, of a double, but of a treble colonnade, formed of 162 pillars, ranged in four rows of 40 pillars each, the two odd pillars serving as a kind of screen, where the ‘Porch’ opened upon the bridge. Indeed, we may regard the Royal Porch as consisting of a central nave 45 feet wide, with gigantic pillars 100 feet high, and of two aisles 30 feet wide, with pillars 50 feet high. By very competent authorities this Royal Porch, as its name indicates, is regarded as occupying the site of the ancient palace of Solomon, to which he ‘brought up’ the daughter of Pharaoh. Here also had been the ’stables of Solomon.’ When Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple, he incorporated with it this site of the ancient royal palace. What the splendour and height (Professor Porter has calculated it at 440 feet) of this one porch in the Temple must have been is best expressed in the words of Captain Wilson (Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 9): ‘It is almost impossible to realise the effect which would be produced by a building longer and higher than York Cathedral, standing on a solid mass of masonry almost equal in height to the tallest of our church spires.’ And this was only one of the porches which formed the southern enclosure of the first and outermost court of the Temple— of the Gentiles. The view from the top of this colonnade into Kedron was to the stupendous depth of 450 feet. Here some have placed that pinnacle of the Temple to which the tempter brought our Saviour.
Friday, December 25, 2009
How causality relation and invariant are perceived by the brain
How causality relation and invariant are perceived by the brain; (Dec. 24, 2009)
We are born with 25% of the total number of synapses that grown up will form. Neurons have mechanisms of transferring from one section of the brain to other parts when frequent focused cognitive processes are needed. A child can perceive one event following another one but it has no further meaning but simple observation. A child is not surprised with magic outcomes; what is out of the normal for a grown up is as valid a phenomenon as another to him (elephant can fly).
The brain attaches markers or attributes to impressions that it receive from the senses. Four markers that I call exogenous markers attach to impressions as they are “registered” in the brain coming from the outside world. At least four other markers, I label “endogenous markers” are attached to internal cognitive processing and are attached to information when re-structuring or re-configurations are performed during the dream periods because massive computations are needed to these endogenous markers. There are markers that I call “reverse-exogenous” and are attached to information meant to be recorded on external means such as writing or performing art work. Maybe animals lack these reverse exogenous markers since evolution didn’t endow them with external performing limbs for writing, sculpting, painting, or doing music.
The first exogenous marker directs impressions in their order of successions. The child recognizes that this event followed the other one within a short period of occurrence. His brain can “implicitly” store the two events are following in succession in a qualitative order (for example the duration of the succession is shorter or longer than the other succession). I label this marker as “Time recognizer” in a qualitative sense of sensations.
The second marker registers and then stores an impression as a spatial configuration. At this stage, the child is able to recognize the concept of space but in a qualitative order; for example, this object is closer or further from the other object. I call this marker “space recognizer”.
The third marker is the ability to delimit a space when focusing on a collection of objects. Without this ability to first limit the range of observation (or sensing in general) it would be hard to register parts and bits of impressions within a first cut of a “coherent universe”. I label this marker “spatial delimiter”
The fourth marker attaches a “strength” of occurrence as the impression is recognized in the database. The child cannot count but the brain is already using this marker for incoming information. In a sense, the brain is assembling events and objects in special “frequency of occurrence” database during dream periods and the information are retrieved with a qualitative order strength of sensations in frequency. I call this attribute “count marker”.
The fifth marker is an endogenous attributes: this marker is attached within the internal export/import of information in the brain. This attribute is a kind of “correlation” quantity that indicates same/different trends of behavior of events or objects. In a sense, this marker will internally sort data as “analogous” or contrary collections on a time scale. People have tendency to associate correlation with cause and effect relation but it is not. A correlation quantity can be positive (two variables have the same behavioral trend in a system) or negative quantity (diverging trends). With the emergence of the 5th marker the brain has grown a quantitative threshold in synapses and neurons to starting massive computations on impressions stored in the large original database.
The sixth marker is kind of a “probability quantity” that permits the brain to order objects according to “plausible” invariant properties in space (for example objects or figures are similar according to a particular property, including symmetrical transformations). I label this the “invariant marker” and it re-structures collections of objects and shapes in structures such as hereditary, hierarchical, or circular.
The seventh marker recognizes interactions among variables and interacts with reverse exogenous markers since a flow with outside perceptions is required for comprehension. I label this the “design marker”. Simple perceived relationships between two events or variables are usually trivial and mostly wrong; for example thunder follows lightning and thus wrongly interpreted as lightning generates thunder. Simple interactions are of the existential kind, the Pavlov reactions, where an existential rewards, such as food, are involved. Interactions among more than two variables are complex for interpretations in the mind. Designing experiments is a very complex cognitive task and not amenable to intuition: it requires learning and training to appreciating the various cause and effects among the variables.
The brain is very performing for rhetorical associations and cognitive methods are basically formal decoding the various alternative procedures that brain may process information. Whatever is created or conceived by any individual the brain has already the mechanism of processing it.
I need more time and reflection to figure out the reverse exogenous marker. This is a first draft to get the project going. I appreciate developed comments and references
Note: This article was not meant to analyze sensations, emotions, or value moral systems. It is very probable that the defined markers are valid for the moral value systems with additional markers that might be needed to store and retrieve data from the special moral system structured . In general, rational thinking retrieve data from specialized databases that are already processed and saved for pragmatic utility. I conjecture that emotions are generated from the vast original database and the endogenous correlation marker is the main computation method: the reason is that emotions are related to complex and almost infinite interactions with people and community and the brain prefers not to consume time and resources on complex computations that involve thousands of variables. Thus, an emotional reaction in the waking period is not necessarily “rational” but quick and dirty resolutions. In the dream sessions emotionally loaded impressions are barely processed because they are hidden deep in the vast original database structure and are not refreshed frequently to be exposed to the waking conscious cognitive processes and thus they flare up within the emotional reaction packages.
Fairy Tales: The Book That Never Ended
And just when I thought this book would never end …
Review: The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman*Be advised, some reviews may contain spoilers.*
GoodReads Book Description: A solitary New Jersey librarian whose favorite book is a guide to suicide methods is struck by lightning in Alice Hoffman’s superb novel, The Ice Queen. Orphaned at the age of eight after angrily wishing she would never see her mother again, our heroine found herself frozen emotionally: “I was the child who stomped her feet and made a single wish and in so doing ended the whole world — my world, at any rate.” Her brother Ned solved the pain of their mother’s death by becoming a meteorologist: applying reason and logic to bad weather. Eventually, he invites our heroine to move down to Florida, where he teaches at a university. Here, while trying to swat a fly, she is struck by lightning (the resulting neurological damage includes an inability to see the color red). Orlon County turns out to receive two thirds of all the lightning strikes in Florida each year, and our heroine soon becomes drawn into the mysteries of lightning: the withering of trees and landscape near a strike, the medical traumas and odd new abilities of victims, the myths of renewal. Although a recluse, she becomes fascinated by a legendary local farmer nicknamed Lazarus Jones, said to have beaten death after a lightning strike: to have seen the other side and come back. The burning match to her cool reserve — her personal unguided tour through Hades — Lazarus will prove to be the talisman that restores her to girlhood innocence and possibility. Hoffman’s story advances with a feline economy of language and movement — not a word spared for the color of the sky, unless the color of the sky factors into the narrative. Among the authors who have played with the fairy tale’s harsh mercies (e.g. Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter), Hoffman has the closest understanding of the primal fears that drive the genre, and why, perhaps, we never outgrow fairy stories, but only learn to substitute dull, wholesome qualities like personal initiative or good timing for the elements that raise the hairs on our neck and send us scrambling for the light switch.
Rating: 
Recommended For: Anyone looking for a non-habit forming sleep aid.
My Review:For being such a short novel, this seemed like one of the longest books I’ve ever read. There are no short supply of characters in this story … but none of them were all that engaging. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in a book. The characters are such an integral part of the story. How do you get away with writing weak characters? Simple. You don’t. If you can’t even make your protagonist enjoyable, pack it in. It’s over. The narration was all over the place. One minute our nameless narrator is grief stricken with mourning over the mother she thinks she eliminated and the next she is caviling over what poor creature her villainous cat has slain. She’s so capricious, selfish, and incredibly whiny that she’s almost impossible to identify with (let alone root for). I was more interested in the damn cat than the narrator. The book bills itself as being about a cool and distant young woman whose life is altered forever by a lightning strike and the love affair with a mysterious stranger who has also survived a strike. But, because the book is everywhere and nowhere all at once, you barely explore any of this. The relationship between the narrator and her lover is not even discussed in any depth until a hundred or so pages in and even then, as quick as the flash of lightning that strikes our protagonist, the mystery is over and you’ve got another hundred pages to go. The rest of the book deals with the numerous side stories that have cropped up through the book. Since none of these story arcs are really developed, it felt like a chore to continue reading this book. Every possibility to progress this book in any sort of interesting way was just hopelessly squandered.
The book’s only saving grace is in the lovely and lyrical writing style of Alice Hoffman. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save this book from the dismal one-star rating.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
In the likeness of God by Dr. Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey
No other book separate from the Bible has captivated my attention more than this book. Phillip Yancey is perhaps one of the most notable of literary writers in the Christian non-fiction scene. His works in my opinion are true masterpieces and he has a way of connecting to his readers in a way that I have not seen from many other writers. This book brings together the masterpiece of the human body and connects each aspect of the body to the spiritual. Dr. Paul Brand who co-authors this book with Phillip Yancey was a leading Christian doctor that dedicated most of his life working with leprosy patients. I cannot even begin to explain the sermon material pastors and evangelists will glean from this book. This is a must for your library and you will not regret it.
Below is a lengthy excerpt from the book:
I remember the first time I saw a living cell under a microscope. I was twenty-one years old and taking a short course in tropical hygiene at Livingstone College in England. We had been studying parasites, but our specimens were dead; I wanted to see a living amoeba. Early one morning, before the laboratory was cluttered with students, I sneaked into the old science building. The imposing red brick structure stood next to a pond from which I had just scooped some water in a teacup. Bits of decomposing leaves floated in the turbid water, smelling of decay and death.
But when I touched one drop of that water to a microscope slide, a universe sprang to life. Hundreds of organisms crowded into view: delicate, single-celled globes of crystal, breathing, unfurling, flitting sideways, excited by the warmth of my microscope light. I edged the slide a bit, glancing past the faster organisms. Ah, there it was. An amoeba. A mere chip of translucent blue, it was barely visible to my naked eye, but the microscope revealed even its inner workings.
Something about the amoeba murmurs that it is one of the most basic and primordial of all creatures. Somehow it has enlisted the everyday forces of millions of spinning atoms so that they now serve life, which differs profoundly from mere matter. Just an oozing bit of gel, the amoeba performs all the basic functions that my body does. It breathes, digests, excretes, reproduces. In its own peculiar way it even moves, plumping a hummock of itself forward and following with a motion as effortless as a drop of oil spreading on a table. After one or two hours of such activity, the grainy, watery blob will have traveled a third of an inch.
That busy, throbbing drop gave me my first graphic image of the jungle of life and death we share. I saw the amoeba as an autonomous unit with a fierce urge to live and a stronger urge to propagate itself. It beckoned me on to explore the living cell.
* * *
Years later I am still observing cells, but as a physician I focus on how they cooperate within the body.
Now I have my own laboratory, at a leprosy hospital on swampy ground by the Mississippi River in Carville, Louisiana. Again I enter the lab early before anyone is stirring, this time on a chilly winter morning. Only the soft buzz of fluorescent lights overhead breaks the quietness.
But I have not come to study amoebae. This morning I will examine a hibernating albino bat who sleeps in a box in my refrigerator. I rely on him to study how the body responds to injury and infection. I lift him carefully, lay him on his back, and spread his wings in a cruciform posture. His face is weirdly human, like the shrunken heads in museums. I keep expecting him to open an eye and shriek at me, but he doesn’t. He sleeps.
As I place his wing under the microscope lens, again a new universe unfolds. I have found a keyhole. The albinic skin under his wing is so pale that I can see directly through his skin cells into the pulsing capillaries which carry his blood. I focus the microscope on one bluish capillary until I can see individual blood cells pushing, blocking, thrusting through it. Red blood cells are by far the most numerous: smooth, shiny discs with centers indented like jelly doughnuts. Uniform size and shape make them seem machine-stamped and impersonal.
More interesting are the white blood cells, the armed forces of the body which guard against invaders. They look exactly like the amoebae: amorphous blobs of turgid liquid with darkened nuclei, they roam through the bat’s body by extending a finger-like projection and humping along to follow it. Sometimes they creep along the walls of the veins; sometimes they let go and free-float in the bloodstream. To navigate the smaller capillaries, bulky white cells must elongate their shapes, while impatient red blood cells jostle in line behind them.
Watching the white cells, one can’t help thinking them sluggish and ineffective at patrolling territory, much less repelling an attack. Until the attack occurs, that is. I take a steel needle and, without waking the bat, prick through its wing, puncturing a fine capillary. An alarm seems to sound. Muscle cells contract around the damaged capillary wall, damming up the loss of precious blood. Clotting agents halt the flow at the skin’s surface. Before long, scavenger cells appear to clean up debris, and fibroblasts, the body’s reweaving cells, gather around the injury site. But the most dramatic change involves the listless white cells. As if they have a sense of smell (we still don’t know how they “sense” danger), nearby white cells abruptly halt their aimless wandering. Like beagles on the scent of a rabbit, they home in from all directions to the point of attack. Using their unique shape-changing qualities, they ooze between overlapping cells of capillary walls and hurry through tissue via the most direct route. When they arrive, the battle begins.
Lennart Nilsson, the Swedish photographer famous for his remarkable closeups of activity inside the body, has captured the battle on film as seen through an electron microscope. In the distance, a shapeless white cell, resembling science fiction’s creature “The Blob,” lumbers toward a cluster of luminous green bacterial spheres. Like a blanket pulled over a corpse, the cell assumes their shape; for awhile they still glow eerily inside the white cell. But the white cell contains granules of chemical explosives, and as soon as the bacteria are absorbed the granules detonate, destroying the invaders. In thirty seconds to a minute only the bloated white cell remains. Often its task is a kamikaze one, resulting in the white cell’s own death.
In the body’s economy, the death of a single white cell is of little consequence. Most only live several days or several weeks, and besides the fifty billion active ones prowling the adult human, a backup force one hundred times as large lies in reserve in the bone marrow. At the cellular level, massive warfare is a daily fact of life. Fifty thousand invaders may lurk on the rim of a drinking glass, and a billion can be found in a half-teaspoon of saliva. Bacteria enshroud my body-every time I wash my hands I sluice five million of them from the folds of my skin.
To combat these threats, some of the blood’s white cells are specifically targeted to one type of invader. If the body has experienced contact with a severe danger, as in a smallpox vaccination, it imprints certain white cells with a death-wish to combat that single danger. These cells spend their lives coursing through the bloodstream, waiting, scouting. Often they are never called upon to give battle. But if they are, they hold within them the power to disarm a foreign agent that could cause the destruction of every cell in the body.
* * *
Often I have reflected on the paradox of the amoeba and its mirror image, the white cell. The amoeba, a self-contained organism, alone performs all the basic functions of life, depending on other cells only when it ingests them as food. The white cell, though similar in construction and makeup, in a sense is far less free. A larger organism determines its duties, and it must sometimes sacrifice its life for the sake of that organism. Although more limited in self-expression, the white cell performs a singularly vital function. The amoeba flees danger; the white cell moves toward it. A white cell can keep alive a person like Beethoven or Newton or Einstein … or you and me.
I sometimes think of the human body as a community, and then of its individual cells such as the white cell. The cell is the basic unit of an organism; it can live for itself, or it can help form and sustain the larger organism. I recall the apostle Paul’s use of analogy in 1 Corinthians 12 where he compares the church of Christ to the human body. That inspired analogy takes on even more meaning to me because of the expanded vistas allowed by the invention of microscopes. Since Paul’s analogy renders a basic principle of God’s creation, I can augment it like this:
The body is one unit, though it is made up of many cells, and though all its cells are many, they form one body…. If the white cell should say, because I am not a brain cell, I do not belong to the body, it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the muscle cell should say to the optic nerve cell, because I am not an optic nerve, I do not belong to the body, it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an optic nerve cell, where would be the ability to walk? If the whole body were an auditory nerve, where would be the sense of sight? But in fact God has arranged the cells in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If all cells were the same, where would the body be? As it is, there are many cells, but one body.
Book Review: Drood
February 09, 2009
I was trying to think of how I wanted to write this review and I still haven’t really decided, but I thought I’d take a whack at it anyway. The problem is there are just so many little twists and turns that I would love to share with you but I don’t want to give too much away.
~In fact, I really hope someone replies and says they’ve read it so I can talk about it with them!~
The book is an examination of the last years of Charles Dickens’ life and his obsession with an entity (Phantom? Mass murderer? Hallucination?) known simply as Drood. It’s told in the voice of Wilkie Collins – fellow author, collaborator, and protegé to the famed Dickens – who begins the tale with a graphic and intense description of a railway accident that Dickens survives, never to be the same again. That first chapter hit me like a sucker punch in the stomach and I instantly knew that I was going to be drawn into the story.
Wilkie soon finds himself tangled up in a macabre world of underground opium dens, wild children, ancient Egyptian rites and rituals – and of course – murder, all while battling his own personal demons (and juggling his two current mistresses). While most gentlemen of the period partake in medicinal laudanum a few drops at a time, diluted in wine, by the middle of the book Wilkie is downing glass after glass in addition to regular visits to the aforementioned opium den to smoke the drug in its most potent forms.
He’s also haunted by a sickening and terrifying hag-phantom, who gets ever more violent and corporeal, along with the doppelgänger that has been with him since childhood (who sometimes pens his works when he’s in a laudanum induced sleep).
It’s obvious that the relationship between the two writers has never been one of equals and throughout the book Wilkie struggles to prove himself as superior to the beloved Dickens, who styles himself the Inimitable, and it’s hilarious when he launches into tirades about how ridiculous he finds Dickens’ writing to be. Meanwhile, Dickens is becoming increasingly obsessed with mesmerism and mind control as Wilkie teams up (unwillingly at first) with a private detective who’s hell-bent on catching the infamous Drood. The detective’s plan is to follow Dickens at all hours in the hopes that he’ll lead them to the wanted man himself.
I absolutely loved this book. I was completely captivated and fascinated right up to the last sentence. The last word in fact! Wilkie is a well-written, wonderful character who’s incredibly witty and sarcastic and I loved being along for the ride as he struggles to distinguish reality from fantasy and unravel the mysteries of London’s undertown and Drood and his minions.
Aside from all the gritty, gruesome moments (and there were plenty of those), I really enjoyed reading about Wilkie’s books as they were being developed. Writing The Moonstone is a central theme and he also writes Man and Wife as well as adapts several of his works into plays throughout the course of the book. As an aspiring writer I was particularly interested in learning about the lifestyle of a novelist in the 19th century and how different it was doing research (no internet!) and dealing with publishing and publicity back then.
The mystery of Drood kept me guessing until the very end, and again I’m trying my best not to include any spoilers here. And if you’ve ever read Dickens’ last (unfinished) book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, you’re almost given satisfaction as to who the murderer was (if Edwin Drood was actually dead) when Dickens is about to reveal the truth to Wilkie before being interrupted. I haven’t read it myself, but after this story I’m dying to get my hands on it along with more Dickens and definitely some of Wilkie Collins’ books (especially The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which I hear are both fantastic).
Kudos to Dan Simmons, I really enjoyed this book. It was dark, chilling, and masterful, dotted with dark humor and filled with danger, violence and excellent imagery and descriptions. I would definitely give it a spot in my top five reads for the year.
Has anyone else read this or Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood? How about our narrator Wilkie Collins?
Monday, December 21, 2009
Confessions of a Book Addict
I have a confession to make. I’m ‘addicted’ to books as well as to reading~and have been for years. I mean right now, I’m working through three biographies, a book of letters, an historical novel, another novel and assorted books about Christian spirituality~and in the midst of these active reads, I’m tempted to drive to Barnes and Noble to buy a few more. After all, I’m purposing to finish at least three of these by the end of the year~a tall order. So the question is, how in the world did I get so hooked on books?
It happened like this. A long time ago when, in elementary school, my fourth grade teacher encouraged her students to join a book club. She did this as she taught us that those who read well and like it are able to travel all over the world, and even back in time, to any place or era they want to visit while never leaving their home. She added how for readers the world would be both larger and smaller~larger because as readers we would gain a broader view of it and smaller because we could bring events and lands far off very near. And she explained how we could even meet characters from history who lived before by simply reading their biographies. To her, the world of readers was a much richer world.
Now even in the fourth grade, riches~and living in a rich world~was desirable so I took her advise and along with several other fellow students, joined the book club. The way it worked was, every month an order form came out with multiple choices of books on various subjects. After looking over the choices we, the students, could choose one or all the titles appearing there, pay a small price for the books (they were paper backs in the ’60’s so were really cheap~I mean in those days gasoline was $.25 cents per gallon even) and in a few days, usually a week, said books would arrive at the school. Our teacher would then distribute the treasures to we who were eagerly waiting and away we went~reading ’til the next order form came out.
I would usually order three or four books at a time~one per week ’til the next order came~which is where my habit of buying multiple books at one time must have come from~and would try and have the books read within the month. This cycle lasted for about nine months, through the school year~and by the end, I was~you guessed it~a book addict~and I’m afraid I’ve been that way ever since. Even today I can’t pass up a good book; and as far as I know there is no cure in site~but then, even if there was I wouldn’t take it ’cause frankly, it’s a good addiction.
You see, I’ve discovered that what my teacher said so many years ago is very true. Good books DO enable one to travel to regions beyond. They DO enable one to meet all sorts of characters from history and fantasy. Good books enable one to experience events of the past on the page. Good literature DOES make the world both larger and smaller. And books are even better than movies cause in a book one is privilege both to the events in the story but also the very thoughts of the actors. Books entertain. Books enrich. Books equip. Books expand ones mind and horizons~and if they are of a certain nature they even bring glory to God, exalt Jesus Christ and equip those who have faith in Christ to know, love and serve Him more.
Yes, I’m addicted to good books and will be, I guess, until my eyes grow dim and I can’t read anymore or I quit this life and go home, to the city whose builder and maker is God. And truthfully, for all the benefits acquired through reading, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Book Review: Bankroll
As I get into making my movie, I hope to provide some reviews of how-to books I’ve read and will be reading. -ES
Having seen this book at a bookstore in Chicago (where I traveled to this past August), I had high hopes for this book. I flipped through the pages and thought it might be a worthwhile read. I figured that even if it wouldn’t helpful to me now, that it may be useful to me down the line.
Author Tom Malloy is clearly passionate about what he does and the movies he makes. I also realize that there are readers that are genuinely interested in making the type of movie Malloy makes. If you want to make a straightforward genre film without the bureaucracy of studio system, this book may be for you. But I’m interested in making specialty films, which have similar size budgets to Malloy’s, but are riskier ventures. At face value, this book is Film Producing 201 to Dov Simens’ From Reel to Deal 101. I have my problems with that book as well (I don’t think it lines up with the current realities of independent filmmaking). The subtitle of this book is “A new approach to financing feature films”, but using private equity to raise money for movies has been around for awhile now. That said, Malloy does a fairly good job of demystifying private equity, and I even picked up a few ideas on places where I could find money that I hadn’t considered previously. At the end of the book, Malloy makes recommendations for further reading. I appreciated that as well, even if I had already read a few of them. As I got further into the book, I began to run into parts where I seriously disagreed with him. Clearly, Malloy doesn’t have experience in making specialty films, and if you read his book, you’ll realize he really doesn’t have much interest in making them, either.
To show you what kind of producer Malloy is, read this passage:
I had an actress friend who was a TV comedy star. When I told her I was looking for attachments for an indie drama, she asked me to consider her. I think she got insulted when I told her it would be a tough sell. She said to a mutual friend, ‘What? He doesn’t think I’m famous enough?’ The fact is, any fame she had from the comedy world would actually hinder my little indie drama.
When I read this, I thought of Wyatt Cenac in Medicine For Melancholy. Cenac is a comedian by trade—director Barry Jenkins knew that when he cast him—and Medicine is a straightforward drama. Between the time the film made its debut at South By Southwest in 2008, and its release at the end of January this year, Cenac got hired by The Daily Show. My point is, some of us don’t mind taking chances. “Medicine for Melancholy” director Barry Jenkins took a chance, and it may have paid off. Opening weekend, Medicine For Melancholy made $12,625—on one screen. While I’m really speculating here, his casting probably attracted people who otherwise would never have heard of the movie. Medicine may have had a smaller budget than Malloy’s features, but the point is, nobody knows anything. At another point, Malloy dismisses VOD, saying there’s no money in it, which I found irritating. (I couldn’t relocate the passage; this is where an index—nonexistent in this book—might have been helpful.) VOD has provided many young, up-and-coming filmmakers, VOD can be an opportunity to reach out to an audience who otherwise might not have heard of it.
When I was first seriously entertaining the idea of stepping into the production end of filmmaking six years ago (I had previously aspired to be a screenwriter), I read Christine Vachon’s Shooting to Kill. In that book, Vachon and film critic David Edelstein discussed a variety of approaches when it came to financing her films. Unfortunately, it’s been several years since that I read that book, so my memory is fuzzy, but I would still recommend it as a starting point for those interested in making larger budget specialty films. My problem with Malloy is that he provides a very narrow point of view of mid-level budget films, and my professional goals as a filmmaker don’t dovetail with his.
Neophytes who want to make a genre movie might find Malloy’s advice genuinely useful. Those whose goals are a little more specialty minded, however, might find themselves seriously questioning or disagreeing with Malloy’s book.
Take it with a grain of salt.
Mediterranean Cookbooks for Health and Longevity
Who knows where this is?
Here are some Christmas gift book suggestions for someone trying to eat healthier via the Mediterranean diet.
-
The Mediterranean Heart Diet: How It Works and How to Reap the Health Benefits, with Recipes to Get You Started by Helen V. Fisher.
[More than 140 delicious and healthy recipes from an experienced cookbook author and a doctorate-level clinical nutrition specialist.] - The Mediterranean Diet by Marissa Cloutier and Eve Adamson. [The Mediterranean-style recipes here get you close to an ovo-lacto-vegetarian diet. The authors complicate the Oldways-Willett Mediterranean Pyramid and promote soy milk products. Nevertheless, this is "good eats."]
- The Mediterranean Kitchen by Joyce Esersky Goldstein.
- The Essential Mediterranean: How Regional Cooks Transform Key Ingredients into the World’s Favorite Cuisines by Nancy Harmon Jenkins.
- Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health by Nancy Harmon Jenkins. Updated in 2008 as The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook.
- Mediterranean Cooking by Paula Wolfert.
Steve Parker, M.D.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Book Review: DITA 101 by Anne Rockley, Steve Manning, and Charles Cooper
DITA 101 by Anne Rockley, Steve Manning, and Charles Cooper
I’ve benefitted so much this week, from reading DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers (2009), by Ann Rockley, Steve Manning, and Charles Cooper—all of the Rockley Group. Finally, there’s an overview available, which explains DITA at a high-level, as well as describes the benefits of using this XML standard for content reuse. Previously, authors and managers would need to have read the full technical specification to attempt to gather such information.
What is DITA?DITA 101 explains what DITA is in an easy-to-read and understandable format for the average writer or manager. Is DITA ”a technology? a format? a product? a process?” (p. 1) the book opens, referring to the confusion about the term. By the end of the chapter, we understand that DITA (short for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an open XML standard for structured content:
DITA is an open content standard that defines a common structure for content that promotes the consistent creation, sharing, and reuse of content (p. 7).
Building Blocks of DITA: Topics and the DITA MapUsing recipes to explain the structure and models of DITA, the book presents these culinary examples to first illustrate the semantic (meaning) structure of the recipes, and then later on to map the examples to the DITA structure.
In DITA, the major components—the basic building blocks of any output—are ”topics.” The mechanism for putting the topics together is the “DITA map” (p. 31).
Adobe FrameMaker users will recognize the DITA map as similar to the book file, as the DITA map is “a series of topic references that point to the topics to include in the output when the map is processed” (p. 41).
Separating content from format, DITA provides topic structures for these common types of information:
- Concept: conceptual (descriptive) information
- Task: procedural information
- Reference: look-up-oriented information
(p.2 and 3).
DITA 101 explains the elements of each information type at a high level, also providing a chapter for more advanced users, with discussions on domains, conrefs, selection attributes (conditional content), relationship tables, and specialization. The appendix also provides detailed quick references for DITA topics and for prolog metadata.
Content StrategySince, as DITA 101 points out, “the move to DITA often goes hand-in-hand with an organization’s adoption of content management,” (p. 1) the book further integrates strategies for effectively developing and reusing content. In addition to “the architecture (reflected in the models), authors need content development and style guidelines that will help them write content so it is consistent” (p. 15). To this end, the book provides tips on developing style guidelines (p. 17) and on how to write a topic (p. 47).
The Collaborative Authoring EnvironmentIn the chapter on planning for DITA, there is an interesting section on roles and responsibilities, for working with DITA in a collaborative authoring environment. These jobs include a combination of new and modified positions, compared to the traditional technical writing organization: content coordinator (new), information architect (new), DITA technologist (new), authors (modified role), content owners (modified role), and editors (modified role).
MetadataThe useful chapter on metadata describes an often over-looked topic in technical documentation, which is “very important to an effective unified strategy and is critical when working in a content management system” (p. 61).
DITA and TechnologyDITA 101 further provides an especially valuable chapter on ”DITA and Technology,” with a list of key features to look for in an authoring tool (p. 73), and questions to help you decide whether you need a content management system (CCMS), which often goes hand-in-hand with an organization’s move to DITA:
- Do you have lots of authors (greater than 10)?
- Are your authors in multiple locations?
- Do you have a large content suite?
- Do you translate your content?
(p. 76).
DITA 101’s clear and practical examples were created using the following editors to capture examples and create content:
- Adobe FrameMaker
- JustSystems XMetal
- PTC Arbortext Editor
- Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution for Technical Publications
DITA 101 explains the benefits of using this structured approach to writing as speed, consistency, predictability, and reuse (p. 14). Reusing content can also dramatically improve the way content is created in an organization, providing benefits such as reduced development, review and maintenance, reduced translation costs, increased consistency, and rapid reconfiguration of modular content (p. 22).
XML Alternatives to DITAIn Appendix C, the book continues to do a great job describing XML and structured content at a high-level, in addition to presenting XML alternates to DITA, including DocBook and S1000D. I especially appreciated the history of DITA, which explained why using DITA can often be preferable to starting an XML implementation from scratch.
The process of creating content models, Document Type Definition (DTDs) or schemas, and stylesheets can be quite time-consuming. Being able to start from an existing markup standard like DITA takes you a giant step along the development timeline (p. 113).
According to this appendix, the benefits of implementing DITA, instead of just developing your own SGML|XML markup scheme, or implementing a different XML initiative, are these:
- Starting from scratch is expensive.
- DITA is output independent.
- DITA was designed to support reuse.
I highly recommend DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers to anyone who wants to come up-to-speed quickly on DITA basics. According to the authors, who run a content management consultancy at the Rockely Group, the book covers the major concepts that you will need to understand to implement DITA:
We often get asked how much XML and DITA people need to know. In the early days of DITA everyone, including the authors really had to know XML and DITA, not so now. Today the tools have matured to a point where much of the “guts” of DITA can be hidden from the authors; however, they do need to understand the concepts of DITA at the level presented in this book. Someone who understands the technical details of DITA will be required to be your DITA technologist/systems administrator, but only they need to understand the intricacies of the technology under the surface (p. 55).
Given that the book is only about 135 pages, and some of that includes examples and reference material, most technical writers should feel up to the challenge of mastering the high-level concepts, which this book so clearly presents. Online help writers especially should easily adjust to the topic-based writing approach.
My only small caveats are wishing that the chapters were numbered, in the print version of the book. I also wished that the high-level discussion on XML in Appendix C had come earlier in the book, as I wondered until the very end why one would use DITA instead of an XML implementation from scratch.
Except for these slight criticisms, I found DITA 101 to live up to endorsement in the Foreword, as a “valuable contribution to the technical communication literature,” as noted by the Content Wrangler’s Scott Abel. I would further observe that DITA in the long-run will make technical writers’ jobs easier, not more difficult.
Related Links:
- DITA 101: Free Chapter from Ann Rockley’s Book
- Book Review: Conversation and Community by Anne Gentle
- Scott Abel’s The Content Wrangler
Book Review: Growing Up In Grace
Growing up in Grace, by Murray Brett, is a book you probably have not heard about. I received my copy free when I attended The Gospel Coalition’s breakout session on blogging. Honestly, based upon its cover, I had no intention of reading it any time soon, however, when I read the recommendation on the back cover, I decided to read it “real quick.” It took me over three months! Not because it is hard to read, but because I read it with a friend taking one chapter a week to read and meditate on, and I am grateful that I did! This book really is a great tool to do exactly what the subtitle suggests, “The Use of Means for Communion with God.”
Here are the contents:
Introduction
1. Finding Happiness in Communion with God
2. The Grace of Humility
3. The Grace of Confession
4. The Grace of Repentance
5. Lord, Keep Me from All Sin
6. The Highest Motive of Repentance
7. The Price of Brokenness
8. How to Repent of Daily Sins
9. A Catalogue of Sins Too Seldom Confessed
10. The Grace of Prayer
11. A Guide for Personal Daily Prayer
12. The Grace of Law
13. Lay Your Gold in the Dust
Making the Most of this Book in Small Groups
Brett seems to have a strong grasp upon the Puritans and their theology of loving God with all your heart and finding God’s grace in every aspect of life. This book acts as a very readable and almost devotional application of this theology. I found each chapter to be a primer for thinking deeper upon the grace of God and realizing God’s grace is not some “out-there” hope that I may someday realize, but rather, an everyday experience as I live my life for His glory. How Brett focuses on his topics guides the reader in self evaluation in critical areas of our faith. How Brett writes, with helpful anecdotes and illustrations keeps the book very practical which is its highest praise.
If you are looking for a book to recommend to a young believer in Christ, or one who is wanting to explore what God’s grace looks like in one’s life, this book is an excellent choice. Solid, faithful and practical, Brett has given us a wonderful resource in our pursuit of holiness!
BOOK REVIEW: The E-Myth Revisited
The E-Myth Revisited
Tonight I just finished reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. This book was recommended reading for an MBA course I took last spring. Needless to say, I didn’t get around to reading it for class but recently found the time. I haven’t read Gerber’s precursor, The E-Myth, so I do not have that context to draw on.
One of the interesting things about Gerber’s approach in this book is his use of a central story to apply the various themes he draws. Throughout the chapters and in the final chapter, Gerber counsels a small business owner on how to view and operate a small business. I appreciate his discussion of multiple personalities or “people” in each person that decides to go into business for themselves. Gerber explains the source of the confusion and frustration many small business owners encounter. Later on, Gerber discusses the “new view” of business, how the concept of franchising plays in, and specific strategies to follow.
I recommend The E-Myth Revisited for new business owners and those contemplating starting a business. Gerber provides new ideas along with some time-tested material. Those with sales or management experience will find sections of the book more or less review material. Still, there are some ideas Gerber mentions that are worth reading through to find the gems.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Time Out London Guide 2008
The Time Out travel guides are amongst the most well written, handy, informative, useful, and overall best guides in the world, with a wide series covering cities and countries across the globe. This edition, relating to London is no exception, giving the reader valuable insight to the city, as well as providing information on the best places to go, monuments to see, and restaurants and bars to visit. Not initially being a fan to these types of guides, being a believer that you should go, be surprised, and experience the world for yourself. However, for less adventurous travellers, families, and couples – no trip to London should be complete without this.
The structure of the book is laid out in an easy to understand manner, with London split up into different districts, a map for each, and subdivided into categories such as places to see, events which are on, shows to see, places to eat etc. The descriptions are simple to follow, and are never boring as many guides can be. There are many photographs of famous buildings and streets to colour the guide, listings for opening and closing times, train time-tables, and even planned daily guides of where to go if you want to be led around. Also, there is a map of the metro system which at first may seem daunting is easy to understand with a little time. This map certainly helps when deciding where to go next and how to get there. If you’re heading to London soon for the first time, and are unsure of going it alone, then this guide will act as your… guide.
Book Review: Dead as a Doornail
Dead As a Doornail
Charlaine Harris
Paperback, 320 pages
Penguin Group (USA) IncorporatedApril 25, 2006
Sookie Stackhouse is back in the fifth book of Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries – and she just can’t catch a break. First, her brother Jason – recently turned into a werepanther - is having a hard time assimilating into his new life. When weres and shifters become the target of an unknown sniper, Jason becomes the prime suspect among the supernatural community of Bon Temps. Sookie has to use her telepathic abilities to try to discover who the real murderer is before the pack condemns him to death.
When Sam is numbered as one of the shooter’s victims he enlists Sookie to ask Eric, the owner of the vampire bar Fangtasia, to lend Merlotte’s a bartender while Sam’s broken leg heals. Still conflicted about what happened between her and Eric when he was under a witch’s curse, Sookie is reluctant to get involved. Eric presses her for information about what went on before he recovered his memory and agrees to lend a hand only when she tells him what he wants to know.
She soon finds herself in the middle of yet another supernatural phenomenon when the packleader of the werewolves is killed in a car accident and his replacement is chosen after a series of contests in agility and strength.
A bartending pirate, a devastating fire, an abusive new vampire who has his claws (or fangs, I guess) in Sookie’s friend Tara, another trip to the ER (after her oh so pointless New Year’s resolution of not getting beat up anymore), and of course the reappearance of her first love Bill, keep Sookie quite busy throughout the story. Throw in some sexual tension with Sam, Eric and Alcide and you’ve got another great Southern Vampire Mystery.
I love this series because it’s so fun and fast - pure brain candy. I think I read this last one in about a day. I’m glad Sookie isn’t quite so obsessed with Bill anymore, although she’s not quite over him yet, and Harris manages to keep throwing in new problems without the characters’ reactions getting old or overdone. This one focused a little too much on shifters/weres for my taste but I loved it anyway, especially the parts with Eric and Sam. If you liked any of the previous books it’s safe to say you’ll like this one too.
These books always pull me into the story and leave me impatient to find out what happens next.
Have you read them? What are your thoughts?
Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
review by Gabriel
I didn’t grasp a lot of this book. Of course, I enjoyed it. Hell, it’s Hemingway – I loved it. But I missed its significance due to my ignorance of the historical context, and my failure to pick up its subtleties. As a result, I understood Fiesta only as a story about hedonism and ennui. Masterfully written with engaging characters, but essentially superficial. A seductive account of the privileged class having fun in an exotic locale. I picked up on the theme of masculinity, but couldn’t understand what Hemingway was trying to get at. I knew I was missing something. It turns out, there were two key things I was missing.
The first regarded the novel’s hardboiled narrator, Jake. The central conflict is the unfulfilled attraction between Jake and the charismatic, promiscuous Brett. I greatly misinterpreted this relationship. I wrongly assumed they had sex near the start of the novel, but that their loyalty to Brett’s fiancée, Mike, prevented them from being together. In hindsight, and with greater knowledge of the characters, I realise how silly an assumption that was.
It wasn’t until I was two thirds through the book that my mistake was pointed out to me. Last night, chatting after book club (we discussed The Boat), one of my mates told me that Jake was impotent due to an accident during World War I. At first, I was gobsmacked. How could something so important not be explicitly stated? Reading the remainder of the book, it put Jake’s actions in a whole new perspective. This was why he let opportunities with women pass by, and why Brett would not enter into a relationship with him despite her proclamations of love. Still, I wasn’t sure, because the events that hinted towards this revelation were so subtle.
Which leads into the second thing I was missing, which I discovered on the excellent website, Sparknotes, my port of call when I feel like I’m missing something in classic literature. This novel was published during the interwar years. World War I, the Great War, wasn’t supposed to have a sequel. It was supposed to be the War to End All Wars. The horror of large scale, mechanized war fare destroyed man’s faith in himself and in his civilised values.
Most of the male characters in Fiesta fought in the World War I, and the injuries sustained by Jake are central to the novel’s themes, symbolic of a wider decay of conventional notions of masculinity. But again, I didn’t grasp the significance of the war because it is so rarely mentioned.
The only other Hemingway novel I have read is For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is much easier to understand because the depiction of war lends to easy interpretation. Fiesta is a very different book that requires a closer reading to be fully appreciated. Hemingway’s simple style works because he implies a lot. This technique makes his characters interaction dynamic, and otherwise mundane events significant. He rarely needs to illustrate his character’s internal states – their actions and words signify them. His writing is like an instruction manual on the “show, don’t tell” approach. In Fiesta, it is what his characters don’t say that is important. As a wanna-be writer, I’ll be trying to use these lessons in my own writing, and remembering them in the future when enjoying the works of this master author.
Incidentally, my copy has an awesome, 70s film poster style, painted cover. Why don’t they make covers like that anymore? The modern covers seem so dull in comparison.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Current Reading: The Dresden Files
In two months I’ve managed to fly through the series of books called The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. I’m up to book 9 already, and it’s been a ball. This series of books is about a Wizard called Harry Dresden, in modern day Chicago, who advertises himself in the yellow pages and takes on cases involving mysterious beings, Faerie, Vampires, and all manner of other nasties. The first book starts fairly light, with Dresden taking on a mysterious case with links to the criminal underworld and a vampire. But over the series of books it becomes clear that something much bigger is on the move, and Harry Dresden is at the centre of it.
The books are done in a generally pulp detective/ film noir style, a kind of Maltese Falcon meets Harry Potter sort of writing which is easy to read, very plot-heavy, and self-consciously deals in stereotypes and plot twists you are meant to guess. The plots are clever but never so complex as to be misleading, and Harry Dresden is a likeable and funny chap who is just imperfect enough that you are willing to believe it when his emotions lead him astray, or he makes silly mistakes. Like every good private Eye, he has his own dark past which is continually coming back to bite him, and he isn’t always on the side of the righteous – and all the “good” powers in the book are pigheaded and silly, just like they should be. Every story is a tale of an ordinary man with ordinary flaws, overcoming extraordinary challenges to ultimately triumph because he is, ultimately, a good man.
These books also remind me of the Flashman Papers, in that the anti-hero is immediately likeable, and they mingle the pulp writing of the genre with some really nice writing. In the first book, for example, the scene where Dresden traps a faerie by a lake using pizza, in order to get information, is both very pulpy, very funny and eerily otherworldly. It is well written and classically pokes fun at every genre it is part of, while self-consciously revelling in the details of those genres. Even in the later books, when the challenges facing Harry Dresden are much greater, the books remain light-hearted and well aware of the rules of their genre, without being bound by them. This makes them both entertaining, engrossing and very impressive. And, at the same time, just as with the Flashman Papers, the reader (well, me at least) is confronted with that most artfully constructed of characters – someone whose beliefs and motivations you don’t necessarily agree with or support, but whose humanity and believability cause you both to support him through thick and thin, and to challenge your own views and assumptions. This is, I think, a rare and well-written character.
So, having consumed 9 of the buggers in 2 months, I strongly commend them to you, dear reader.
“Sophie’s World” on Hellenism
“Sophie’s World” on Hellenism; (Dec. 11, 2009)
After Alexander the Macedonian defeated the Persian Empire around 335 BC the entire region in the Middle East and Egypt became Hellenistic; which means the elite and functionaries learned to speak and write in the Greek language and to study Greek philosophies. Athens got a new life as center of philosophical schools and the newly built Alexandria in Egypt flourished as the center of sciences and medicine. Four major philosophical schools captured the interest of the people and had repercussions in Rome till the year 400 AC when the Christian Church got established as the state religion after the defeat of the last Germanic Emperor in Rome.
The Cynics school was founded in Athens by Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates in 400 BC. The frugality of Socrates was the guiding idea as he wondered before a stall: “So many things that I never used or needs”. The dogma of this school is that happiness is learning to feel independent (detached) from external advantages such as material luxuries or political power. Happiness is in the reach of everyone if he so desired and it can be lasting. Suffering and death should not be disturbing events. Feeling concerns for other people should be overcome.
Diogenes is the best representative of the Cynics; he lived in a barrel and carried no belonging but a stick. It is reported that he asked Alexander to step aside for he was blocking the sun rays. The Church of Rome coined the pejorative term “cynical” referring individual who exhibits a sneering disbelief in human sincerity with penchant insensitivity to people’s plights: The Church was competing with all the Hellenistic schools of philosophy and religions.
The Stoics school was founded by Zeno in Athens around 300 BC. Zeno was not Greek by origin and he studied in Alexandria before he landed in Greece following shipwreck. Socrates and Heraclitus were his favorite philosophers and he used to teach under a portico (stoa). Zeno dogma was that each individual is a complete microcosms reflected in the macrocosms; thus, first, there was a universal rightness or natural law based on human and universal reason that didn’t alter with time or place. Second, there is no conflict between spirit (ideas) and matter; this concept was coined “monism” in contrast to Plato dualism of the two worlds of ideas and matter. Third, sickness and death are within the natural law phenomena and must be accepted since everything happens out of necessity. Fourth, happy events and moments should be received in natural composure with no undue exhilaration.
Stoics got involved in politics and social problems. Cicero, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca were staunch stoics. Seneca wrote “mankind is holy”; thus, considering individual dignity and well being as goal for improvement and care. The Roman Christian Church coined the connotation stoic for individuals who do not let their feeling take over.
The Epicurean school was established by Aristippus, another disciple of Socrates. Epicurus founded this school around 300 BC in Athens. He developed the pleasure ethic of Aristippus and adopted the “atom soul” theory of Democritus which says that after death the soul disperses in all directions. The story goes that that Epicureans lived in gardens (safe-harbors): a notice hanged at the entrance said: “Stranger, here you will live well. Here pleasure is the highest good”
The dogma of the Epicureans was: first, pleasurable results of an action is always counterbalanced with side effects that we need to mind of; second, short-term pleasurable results should be analyzed compared to the potential longer-term alternative pleasures if we control our actions; third, pleasure is appreciation of values in friendship, art, and self control in sensual tendencies. Epicurus summed up his doctrine in four “medicinal” treatments: first, the gods are not to be feared; second, Death is nothing to worry about since when we die then we no longer exist; third, Good is easy to attain; and fourth, the fearful is easy to endure.
Epicurus advice was to learn to live in seclusion. Epicureans had little concern for politics and community services. The roman Church coined a bad connotation such as “Indulge in or enjoy the moment”
The Neo-Platonist school was founded by Plotinus (205-270 BC) and he was from the Near East and studied in Alexandria and settled in Rome. Plotinus doctrine was influenced by Plato. The world span two poles: the One that constantly shines and the world that does not receive the light. The immortal soul (concept of salvation) is the world of ideas that is illuminated by the One (or God), it is “a spark from the fire”. The material world has no real existence until the light reaches it. Plotinus experienced mystical moments of fusion with the world of spirit.
The Roman Christian Church had a hard struggle with this powerfully competing school of Neo-Platonism and ended up adopting most of its concepts.
Review of Ship of Fools by Fintan O'Toole (Faber and Faber, 2009)
Fintan O’Toole is one Ireland’s best known social and economic commentators and cultural critics, and Deputy Editor of the Irish Times. Never shy about airing his views, he doesn’t pull his punches in telling it as he sees it, and in Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger he provides a damning critique of both the Celtic Tiger model of development and the Fianna Fail (and coalition partners) government since 1997. Rather than focus on one particular aspect of the present crisis – as with The Builders or Banksters – O’Toole provides a broad sided polemic on how Ireland went from bust to boom and back again in a twenty year period.
Written in a clear, engaging prose that is often angry and sometimes witty, he makes a compelling case that Ireland has experienced an acute case of crony capitalism – that is, the Irish government rather than steering the ship for the benefit of all its crew, became the vehicle for capital accumulation for the small group of friends milling about on the bridge. Indeed, it is telling that the book starts with two shipping anecdotes – one about the Sean Dunne’s (a developer) wedding to which high profile developers, bankers and politicians were invited for a two week Mediterranean cruise on board the yacht Christina O, owned since 2000 by an Irish consortium who wrote off up to two thirds of the €65 million cost against tax; the second about the Irish national yacht, the Ashgard II, which sank in September 2008 and which remains on the sea bed with little hope of salvage or replacement. The book consists of nine polemical essays, each focusing on a particular theme that together provide an overview of why Ireland finds itself in the mess it’s in.
The first chapter takes to task the notion that Ireland ever had a planned and coherent model of economic development (which it has recently been selling to every other wannabe developed nation), but rather was the beneficiary of a series of fortunate events largely outside of its control (such as the general, huge overseas expansion of US capital, structural funds from Europe, English language competence, social partnership, access to European markets, Northern Ireland peace process, etc), aided by lax regulation and a tax regime which enabled the attraction of significant foreign direct investment. Rather the narrative of economic development happened after the fact to explain Ireland’s catching up with other advanced economies, rather than forging ahead. And it was an economic model that had two fatal flaws: it only worked if there was sustained growth, and in O’Toole’s terms it was driven by stupidity and corruption that meant it became dangerous overheated so that collapse was inevitable. Simply put the economic model was geared towards over-extending ordinary citizens and over-rewarding those that were already wealthy.
The stupidity was the policy decisions of government and the head-in-the-sand approach to fiscal management and regulation, and the corruption was the blatant use of the state system for the benefit of high powered Fianna Fail supporters, the very close ties between business and state (particularly in the banking and property development sectors), and the general lack of accountability, transparency and prosecution of those defrauding the state (the focus of chapter 2). This corruption was powerful because it not only worked on a system of bribes but it: 1) fostered a sense of insider and outsider, wherein all other interested parties knew they had to participate to maintain competitive advantage (if one stock broker paid a bribe, they all had to to their maintain access to decision makers); 2) was largely condoned by the both the public sector regulators and the general public; 3) there was a culture of impunity wherein nobody was ever prosecuted for corruption and what is more if their corruption was ever exposed they maintained their access to power. In other words, corruption was allowed to flourish, and even now in the depths of the crisis it is still at work – for example in relation to how the banks have been bailed out, especially Anglo-Irish, and the setting up of NAMA protects the interests of high powered friends of Fianna Fail.
The vast majority of the electorate, he argues, let this happen because corruption, self-interest and self-duplicity and denial are embedded into Irish society. Low-level corruption, such as DIRT evasion or social welfare fraud, was widespread. Moreover, lots of people did well out of the boom with rising salaries, home equity, and small business growth. The politicians might have been corrupt, but many people were the beneficiaries. And if all politicians are corrupt, why wouldn’t you re-elect one that you knew to be so (because a tribunal had exposed them)? As long as they served local needs, they were welcome to skim a bit off the top.
In turn, he writes about the banking system, financial regulation and tax evasion; property development and the new class of super-wealthy; land speculation and development tax incentives; Ireland’s role in global financial markets and the crash; the failure to future proof Ireland for the next phase of development with respect to education, information communications infrastructure, and key transport and energy infrastructure; and the ad hoc approach to addressing the crisis once it appeared that seemingly had more to do with protecting self-interests than the national interest.
Central to O’Toole’s analysis is the notion that Ireland is not yet democratically mature, with a weak civic morality and underdeveloped system of political governance, and an electoral system that encourages and condones local clientelism and corruption. He suggests that Ireland failed to create a proper democratic republic, to go through a process of political and social reform, the establishment a strong welfare system and collective interest, and to create a state independent of Church and local interest, as in other post World War Two, European countries. Instead Ireland persisted with two, essentially ideologically barren, middle right parties that were for all intents and purposes identical and which used a form of machine politics that were highly clientalist, reactionary and short-termist.
For him, the Celtic Tiger represented an opportunity to lay the foundation for long term economic prosperity, but it was squandered by a political party more interested in short term economic gain for a small elite. The solution is to complete the democratic project in Ireland through a radical overhaul of our political system and consciousness. This means in the short term the election of a party with a radically alternative vision to Fianna Fail, and in the long term the establishment of a ‘second Republic’ with reform of the Irish electoral system, reform of the tax system, and systematic tackling of political and economic corruption accompanied by much stronger modes of governance and regulation
Overall, O’Toole’s analysis is compelling. The first half of the book is a lucid, tour de force polemic. The second half is more patchy in its argument and content, and its focus drifts a little. The book is driven by strong observational analysis, and to my mind could have benefited from some explanatory frameworks derived from the social sciences, particularly political science. There has, for example, been a debate between social scientists in Ireland as to the extent to which Ireland is a developmental state. It would have also been nice to have some comparative analysis that placed Ireland – economically, politically and socially – in relation to other European nations. Personally, I felt the conclusion also needed further elaboration on what needed to change and why, using examples from elsewhere, to really push the point home. Nevertheless, it’s a fine piece of work that will no doubt be popular reading for many people in Ireland keen to understand the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.
Rob Kitchin
Friday, December 11, 2009
Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman
There was a boy called Odd, and there was nothing strange or unusual about that, not in that time or place. Odd meant the tip of the blade, and it was a lucky name (p 1).
For those who enjoy mythological tales, Odd and the Frost Giants is a must read. Employing Norse mythology, Gaiman tells the story of Odd, a crippled young man with an unsettling smile. With the aid of a crutch, Odd leaves home to reside in his deceased father’s hunting cabin.
His adventure really begins when a fox knocks on his door. The fox leads him to a bear caught between two trees during an attempted honey comb heist. A one-eyed eagle flies overhead. When Odd assists the bear, he becomes entangled with the lives of these animals who are soon revealed to be trapped Norse gods.
At only 117 pages, this is a very quick read with only a handful of challenging words for a young reader.
The days were long here in Asgard. The sun was a silver coin that hung in the white sky. Odd pushed himself to keep walking, one step at a time, remembering when he had walked with ease and never thought twice about the miracle of putting one foot in front of the other and pushing the world towards you (p 76).
The writing is, of course, excellent and perfectly paced. As someone who enjoyed the story of Atlanta, elements of stories like the Riddle of the Sphinx, and the tricksters featured in The Sign of the Qin and Trickster’s Choice, this story was a sweet peach.
Who is towing sciences?
Who is towing sciences? (Dec. 6, 2009)
In the previous two centuries it was mathematics that was towing sciences and especially physics in the theoretical aspects. Actually, most theories in the sciences were founded on mathematical abstract theorems that were demonstrated many decades ago by mathematicians. It appears that this century is witnessing a different trend: sciences are offering opportunities for mathematicians to expand their fields of interests away from the internal problems of solving conjectures (axioms or hypotheses) that were enunciated a century ago.
Cedric Villani, professor of mathematics at the Institute of Henry Poincare in Paris, thinks that physics still remains the main engine for mathematicians to opening new fields of study. For example, equations of fluid mechanics are not yet resolved (those related to Navier-Stokes and Euler); compressed fluids; Bose-Einstein condensation; rarefied gas environment; we even cannot explain why water boils. There is also the study of how the borders that separate two phases of equilibrium among chaotic, random, and unstable physical systems behave. The mathematician Wendelin Werner (Fields Prize) has been interested in that problem and I will publish a special post on how he resolved these phenomena.
There is an encouraging tendency among a few mathematicians to dealing with new emerging fields in sciences. The most promising venue is in computer sciences or “informatique”. In computer sciences the problems of verification (for example, theory of verifying proofs) is capturing interest: mathematical tools for validating theorems in the realm of logic or exhuming errors are challenging.
Biology is an exciting field but it didn’t capture the interest of mathematicians; the big illusion that mathematicians will approach biology faded away simply because fields related to the living world is too variable in complexity to attract mathematicians: Variability is “absurdly” numerous and does not lend simple and clean cut laws that prove that the world is well structured and “mathematically” ordered. This has been the case in the 70’s for cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence: scientists in those two fields hoped that mathematicians would get interested and drive them to innovative results but nothing much happened.
The good trend is this kind of social re-organization within the mathematical community for deeper cooperative undertaking in solving problems. The web or internet has kind of revolutionized cooperation; it opened up this great highway for sharing ideas instantly and cooperating among several researchers. For example, Terry Tao and Tim Gowens propose problems on their blog (Polymath project) and then the names of contributors are disseminated after a problem comes to fruition. Still, individual initiatives are the norm; for example, Tao and Gowens end up solving the problems most of the time. Mikhail Gromov (Abel Prize) has given geometry in new life line in mathematics.
It appears that “Significant mathematics” basically decoded how the brain perceives “invariants” in what the senses transmit to it. I conjecture that since individual experiences are what generate the intuitive concepts, analogies, and various perspectives to viewing a problem then most of the mathematical theories were essentially founded on the vision and auditory perceptions.
Journalist Paul Wells
Independent piece Dec. 5, 2007
By Roselyn Kelada-Sedra
Last Refuge of the Vaguely Talented: Interview with Paul Wells
With his words strewn all over the floor, I wait for the phone to ring. Today, I interview Paul Wells, columnist for Maclean’s, author of the bestseller Right Side Up, former political beat-writer for the National Post and altogether brilliant journalist. Anticipation has been building since I first made the contact, and I’m officially daunted.At 4 p.m. on the nose, it rings. As sort of a gesture of apology for breaking our appointment in person, Wells is calling from Paris. The frank, spastic manner I perceived in his emails has made me pretty comfortable, and I’m ready to ease into conversation, chatting about Paris and jazz. But after nearly 20 years in the business, Paul Wells doesn’t ease in too much.
Born and raised in Sarnia, he’s been on the political beat since university at Western. With a BA focused on Canadian federalism and a portfolio full of entertainment pieces for the campus paper, he landed a summer internship with the Montreal Gazette. Summer became nine years.
“Someone said journalism is the last refuge of the vaguely talented,” Wells relates, and that’s how he got into it. Without pretence, he explains how journalists hold numerous interests without mastering any. The tone of his voice takes on a little awe as he recounts how a press pass got him conversations with musicians, film makers, politicians and the like, people who “might change the world and in some cases already have.” He encapsulates his career in one phrase. “Essentially, what I do is have conversations. I talk to people, and I tell stories.”
This seems a fairly modest ambition for someone whose thoughts on current events and world leaders highlight Maclean’s every week. I didn’t realize I’d made assumptions, but looking back over my prep questions, I see– I expected this man to tell me how to uncover lies and make performers stop performing. He tells me, with neither a grin nor apology, he isn’t an investigative reporter because “I don’t have a clue how to do it.” Simply, he accounts for sparkling pieces about the past three prime ministers and one-on-one interviews with renowned scholars, musicians and world leaders. “I ask questions, and my assumption is that people will basically tell the truth… Sure, they’ll gloss over the ugly parts,” but it isn’t because they’re trying to hide; they have their own point of view. “It basically comes down to trying to listen… Then,” he tosses off, “you throw it all in the hopper, try to organize, and Bob’s-your-uncle.”
After umming awkwardly, Wells names one interview that stands out as one of the most interesting: twenty minutes with Lucien Bouchard a few months back. “He’s probably the smartest guy I’ve ever covered,” he says, “and I can count the words from that interview that I used in the article. Six.” He explains that sometimes, the level of complexity in an interview can’t be translated into the piece. “I try to portray realities in a way that’s not much work for the reader.” On occasion, he breaks down a complicated issue and brings a few readers through it step by step. He knows that most will lose interest, “but those that don’t will thank you.”
His worst interview springs to mind instantly: Mavis Collant. In the first or second year of his career, a last-minute interview came his way. He read about 40 pages of her essays and went into it cold. “I think I started out with something like, “So, how do you like Montreal?” Laughing at his ridiculous nerve, he says he got nailed in five minutes. “She was very gracious to me… But I knew enough to know that Mavis Collant deserved a real interview with someone who knew what he was talking about, and that wasn’t me on that day.” Even so, he tells me good journalists should be able to bone up fast using “dumb questions.” “You feel awkward, but you should never be so embarrassed that you can’t ask about what you don’t know.”
To Wells, journalism is “the greatest work you can hope to do divided by what’s possible.” My latest idol doesn’t offer the advice I thought he might. “You just try not to be awful all the time.” You’re not going to be profound or definitive every day. And if you try, you’ll disappoint yourself constantly; plus, you’ll be a boring writer. “Try to have a reasonable batting average… which means for every swing, you miss 2 out of 3.” Wells says newspapers cost 50 cents “because that’s about what they’re worth.” Journalists don’t spend 30 years on each piece, and their work lines TTC seats every day. “But within that ephemeral, vanishing world, it’s possible to do great work.” You don’t do it every day, he repeats, and “a lot of times, it’s just a job. But just often enough, it’s more. What you hope is that a reader can finish what you write a little less confused and a little more hopeful about something that matters to them.” After listening to Wells, I’m a little of both.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Review: TAMAR by Mal Peet
Writing Wrongs recently reviewed Tamar by Mal Peet for the WWII Reading Challenge 2009. Please click on the link for the full review, but here’s an excerpt:
I loved the characterization in the novel. The bits and pieces of character information that surfaced during the novel made it all the more real.
**Attention participants: Remember to email us a link to your reviews, and we’ll post them here so we can see what everyone is reading!**
Ironing out a few chaotic glitches
Ironing out a few chaotic glitches; (Dec. 5, 2009)
Philosophers have been babbling for many thousand years whether the universe is chaotic or very structured so that rational and logical thinking can untangle its laws and comprehend nature’s behaviors and phenomena.
Plato wrote that the world is comprehensible. The world looked like a structured work of art built on mathematical logical precision. Why? Plato was found of symmetry, geometry, numbers, and he was impressed by the ordered tonality of musical cord instruments. Leibnitz in the 18th century explained “In what manner God created the universe it must be in the most regular and ordered structure. Leibnitz claimed that God selected the simplest in hypotheses that generated the richest varieties of phenomena.” A strong impetus that the universe is comprehensible started with the “positivist philosophers and scientists” of the 20th century who were convinced that the laws of natures can be discovered by rational mind.
Einstein followed suit and wrote “God does not play dice. To rationally comprehend a phenomenon we must reduce, by a logical process, the propositions (or axioms) to apparently known evidence that reason cannot touch.” The pronouncement of Einstein “The eternally incomprehensible universe is its comprehensibility” can be interpreted in many ways. The first interpretation is “what is most incomprehensible in the universe is that it can be comprehensible but we must refrain from revoking its sacral complexity and uncertainty”. The second interpretation is “If we are still thinking that the universe is not comprehensible then may be it is so, as much as we want to think that we may understand it; thus, the universe will remain incomprehensible (and we should not prematurely declare the “end of science”).
The mathematician Herman Weyl developed the notion: “The assertion that nature is regulated by strict laws is void unless we affirm that it is related by simple mathematical laws. The more we delve in the reduction process to the bare fundamental propositions the more facts are explained with exactitude.” It is this philosophy of an ordered and symmetrical world that drove Mendeleyev to classifying the chemical elements; Murry Gell-Mann used “group theory” to predicting the existence of quarks.
A few scientists went even further; they claimed that the universe evolved in such a way to permit the emergence of the rational thinking man. Scientists enunciated many principles such as “the principle of least time” that Fermat used to deduce the laws of refraction and reflection of light; Richard Feynman discoursed on the “principle of least actions”; we have the “principle of least energy consumed”, the “principle of computational equivalence”, the “principle of entropy” or the level of uncertainty in a chaotic environment.
Stephen Hawking popularized the idea of the “Theory of Everything TOE” a theory based on a few simple and non redundant rules that govern the universe. Stephen Wolfran thinks that the TOE can be found by a thorough systematic computer search: The universe complexity is finite and the most seemingly complex phenomena (for example cognitive functions) emerge from simple rules.
Before we offer the opposite view that universe is intrinsically chaotic let us define what is a theory. Gregory Chaitin explained that “a theory is a computer program designed to account for observed facts by computation”. (Warning to all mathematicians! If you want your theory to be published by peer reviewers then you might have to attach an “elegant” or the shortest computer program in bits that describes your theory)
Kurt Gödel and Alain Turing demonstrated what is called “incompletude” in mathematics or the ultimate uncertainty of mathematical foundations. There are innumerable “true” propositions or conjectures that can never be demonstrated. For example, it is impossible to account for the results of elementary arithmetic such as addition or multiplication by the deductive processes of its basic axioms. Thus, many more axioms and unresolved conjectures have to be added in order to explain correctly many mathematical results. Turing demonstrated mathematically that there is no algorithm that can “know” if a program will ever stop or not. The consequence in mathematics is this: no set of axioms will ever permit to deduce if a program will ever stop or not. Actually, there exist many numbers that cannot be computed. There are mathematical facts that are logically irreducible and incomprehensive.
Quantum mechanics proclaimed that, on the micro level, the universe is chaotic: there is impossibility of simultaneously locating a particle, its direction, and determining its velocity. We are computing probabilities of occurrences. John von Neumann wrote: “Theoretical physics does not explain natural phenomena: it classifies phenomena and tries to link or relate the classes.”
Acquiring knowledge was intuitively understood as a tool to improving human dignity by increasing quality of life; thus, erasing as many dangerous superstitions that bogged down spiritual and moral life of man. Ironically, the trend captured a negative life of its own in the last century. The subconscious goal for learning was to frustrate fanatic religiosity that proclaimed that God is the sole creator and controller of our life, its quality, and its destiny. With our gained power in knowledge we may thus destroy our survival by our own volition; we can commit earth suicide regardless of what God wishes. So far, we have been extremely successful beyond all expectations. We can destroy all living creatures and plants by activating a single H-Bomb or whether we act now or desist from finding resolution to the predicaments of climate changes.
I have impressions. First, what the mathematicians and scientists are doing is not discovering the truth or the real processes but to condense complexity into simple propositions so that an individual may think that he is able to comprehend the complexities of the world. Second, nature is complex; man is more complex; social interactions are far more complex. No mathematical equations or simple laws will ever help an individual to comprehend the thousands of interactions among the thousands of variability. Third, we need to focus on the rare events; it has been proven that the rare events (for example, occurrences at the tails of probability functions) are the most catastrophic simply because very few are the researchers interested in investigating them; scientists are cozy with those well structured behaviors that answer collective behaviors.
My fourth impression is that I am a genius without realizing it. Unfortunately Kurt Gödel is the prime kill joy; he would have mock me on the ground that he mathematically demonstrated that any sentence I write is a lie. How would I dare write anything?
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