Walking on the Moon

I think Amir Alexander’s Infinitesimal is better in principle than in execution.  However the principle is so good that it’s worth reading anyway.

The topic Alexander is exploring here is how the society of the 1500’s and 1600’s reacted to the fundamental ideas in geometry that became the basis for Netwon’s and Leibnitz’s calculus.  The mathematical ideas are compelling in their own right, but Alexander wisely focuses on their effect on thinking outside mathematics.  The result makes the forces driving philosophy and religion of these eras clearer and more vivid.

Infinitesimal shows us why the institutions of the day had any interest at all in an obscure mathematical movement and why that interest ebbed and flowed.  It’s quite fascinating to see the combinations of personality and politics that caused the interest.  I hadn’t realized the reach and vividness of the ideas until I explained what I’d learned from the book to a friend.  Quite powerful and surprising ideas.

There are some problems.  The book’s longer than it needs to be, partially because the chapters are somewhat repetitive and not so well integrated as one would hope.  I got the impression that they were individually composed and that the editing process was compartmentalized in such a way that the considerable overlap wasn’t spotted.  The resulting book is satisfying enough in the small and repetitive in the large.  Many parts benefit from skimming.

Overall an interesting discussion of a fascinating topic. Recommended.

I never expected that my worst wake turbulence encounter would be on a bicycle.

I’ve been biking to work pretty regularly the last week or two, and honestly one of the highlights has been going past LAX airport.  I’m way too much of an aviation geek not to enjoy being close to the big iron. Aviation Blvd. goes right behind the runways and has bike lanes.  I get excited when I hear a jet push in the power levers and take off.

I’ll stop to watch from now on.

I was coming home Thursday night (19 May) when I heard an American Airlines jet firing up its engines and taking off.  I’m crossing behind it, and I’m assuming my face looked like Tom Cruise’s in Top Gun when he’s pacing the F-15 on his motorcycle.  Then it got windy.  I began to realize that I was moving laterally toward the curb and didn’t have enough power to stay on the road.  I hit the curb and went down hard on my side.  Folks who know my history can imagine that I was extremely concerned when my hip hit concrete (as did my helmet).  It’s not like there’s even a lot of concrete there, but evidently I’m a concrete-seeking missile. The adamantium inserts held and I rode away with road rash (contusions) and some bruises.  I did need to straighten the trucker’s handle bars.

Two very kind people did stop to make sure I was OK.  And I was delighted to tell them I was fine.  I suspect I was the most cheerful person either had seen crawl from a  bicycle wreck, but I was experiencing the simple joys of femurs bearing weight.  It’s nice to know people will stop to help a stranger.  I’m much happier I didn’t need it this time.

One woman said that she felt her car (a BMW MINI) blow right as well – “a gust of wind” she said.  “It was the jet, ” I told her and the light dawned.

Anyway, I’ll be being more careful and I expect to be biking around again Monday.  I was very stiff and sore Friday.

Of course I filed an ASARS.

I recently read Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth for the first time.  This is the first time I’ve read it in prose, from a Dover Thrift edition on Google Play.  It claims to be unabridged, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the edition it’s reprinting were abridged.  It feels short-winded  compared to the version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea I read a few years ago.  I also read a Classics Illustrated adaptation years and years ago that I recollected as I went along.

For me, reading Verne is to get a glimpse at the beginnings of hard SF.  I feel like I getting an excellent lesson in the science of the day sweetened with an adventure story.  As an older reader who loves science, history, and writing that sweetener is hardly necessary, but much appreciated.  I appreciate the story from the perspective of seeing the craft with which the science and story are woven, not because of breathless anticipation of the resolution.

Surveying the science is rewarding as well.  Most of Journey is showing off the state of paleontology.  It’s very interesting to see what’s stood the test of time there and what hasn’t.  I also appreciate the extent to which Verne shows how this is a field of argumentation from limited evidence.  There are only so many fossils and the hunters get prestige out of both the finds and the theories.  Verne’s protagonists are active participants in those arguments and reap the practical benefits of success in them.  That’s as important to understanding scientific progress as the dry descriptions of the scientific method are.  That’s a great bit of medicine to wash down with a two-fisted adventure story.

Recommended, if a bit dry and tame to modern ears.

I have been trying to reconnect with major league baseball (MLB)for a while.  Baseball is  my kind of spectator sport.  It’s essentially an excuse to sit in the stands and have a few beverages and jaw about the game.  That game is paced to encourage speculation about strategy, rumination on the history, and statistical analysis of any aspect of it.  Perfect for me.

Lately, though, I’ve been noticing that there’s lots of little stuff that’s just understood about the game that I missed out on as a casual fan.  I’ve been looking for a primer that I can use to fill some of those gaps.  Something like David Benjamin’s The Joy of Sumo, but for baseball.  Zack Hample’s Watching Baseball Smarter is a cut at it.

Hample’s a hardcore fan who comes at the game from interesting angles.  He’s also published a blog and book about the best ways to freely acquire baseballs used in games.  For example, those works describe the best places and techniques for catching foul balls (I think).  He’s not just a collector, though; he’s a student of the game and enthusiast.

The good thing about Smarter is that it covers a lot of ground without getting too deep into any one thing.  That’s its limitation as well.  Hample writes intelligently about everything from the basics of fielding and positions to the statistics fans quote most often.  The stats description shows how the depth is set.  Baseball is undergoing a revolution as amateur and professional analysts are mining MLB’s vast troves of data looking to understand and predict the game better.  Smarter recognizes this without attempting to lead the fan/reader too deep into that area.  I came away with a clear impression that there’s more to know and a good description of the most commonly used stats (as in the ones an announcer would mention).

Of course, the broad coverage means that there are areas one would like to know more about that get short shrift.  I expect that there are areas I want to delve into that were completely unmentioned.  I don’t think of that as a terrible shortcoming. I came in with knowledge and ideas of what I want to know more about.  More importantly, Hample’s focuses largely match my own.  Overall I both enjoyed Smarter and learned some things.

Recommended.

There are people who will assert that Mary Sue characters are solely the product of female writers.  These people have never read a Stainless Steel Rat novel.  Harry Harrison’s Slippery Jim DiGriz only fails to fit the bill by being older.

I hadn’t read a Stainless Steel Rat novel since I was in high school, but I remembered them rather warmly. I did remember that I stopped reading them after a few because they had become formulaic. I was right.  Even with a couple decades of time off, the formula is pretty easy to spot.

It’s a shame that Harrison’s execution leaves me so cold.  There are a few fun ideas running around in here, including the basis of the series.  The idea is that in the future as authority gets more repressive and effective, criminals must similarly become more ruthless and effective to continue their trade.  The insights that we’ll always have rule-breakers and that evolution improves everything are well taken, as is the To Catch A Thief conceit that some criminals – like DiGriz – will use their skills to help society.

But, like I say, the execution leaves much to be desired.  DiGriz and his family of hyper-competent criminals are never challenged by any of the plot twists.  None of the main characters experiences the slightest self-doubt or concern about taking on a planet of corrupt officials.  No one ever breaks a sweat or really slows down to do anything but compliment DiGriz.  The rest of the family are machines, right down to having no agency.

Worse than simply being lazy writing, it undermines the main premise.  Everyone outside the DiGriz family is so ineffectual that the very idea that society bred a super-criminal is unbelievable.  If these guys are all DiGriz has to go up against, he’d never develop the super-competency that he needs.

There are a couple nice set pieces in here.  DiGriz is an atheist with a code against killing.  Harrison supports those positions simply and clearly, and it’s a welcome change from today’s bloody action heroes.  Still, overall I can’t recommend the Rat.

I hope Daniel Handler made a huge amount of money on those Lemony Snicket books, so he can continue breaking my heart with the projects he publishes under his own name.

Why We Broke Up shares a lot of setup with and many of the merits of The Basic Eight. Both capture and breathe life into the vulnerability and rush of adolescence.  Handler’s recreation of being in love and being in study hall both resound with authenticity.

To its considerable benefit, Why We Broke Up is more intimate and personal than The Basic Eight. Everyone in Why We Broke Up has real depth and motivation.  No one is a symbol or a plot device.  Or just those things.  Everyone has irredeemably bad moments and inexplicably selfless ones.  Everyone has best and worst times, and no one gets away with being words on paper.

Its a deep trifle and a moving read.

Strongly recommended.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is a sprawling, intricate novel constructed of well-crafted parts.   It is literally broken into sections that are broken up further into individual narrative bits – usually a day’s events – that interconnect to form the decades-spanning whole.  The sectioning is clear and explicit. Mitchell seems to be pointing out the parts that make up the whole.  At the same time, the whole is economical and sleek, though it didn’t feel that way as I read it.  It felt like it meandered in places – pleasantly – but on reflection there was no wasted prose.

Each section covers a different age of the world and a character. Most are told from different character’s points of view. Mitchell does an excellent job making each novelette stand on its own.  They all have a strong sense of place and time.  Each seems its own self contained work.  In addition to the strong location and point of view, each is tonally and thematically complete unto itself.  They feel like individual novels, but also link together in terms of plot and larger themes and tones.  It’s an impressive effect, this holographic fractal structure.

Bone Clocks has a significant fantasy component, complete with magic and secret societies that are largely unseen by mortals.Mitchell is such a good writer that these elements often seem unnecessary.  Several times I noticed that I preferred to escape the escapism parts and get back to the characters’ day-to-day lives. One of the characters running away from home and breaking her heart felt more important than the brushes with a secret society that led to. Mitchell’s literary skills are on vivid display there, making the prosaic more engaging than the magical.

The magic is key to the literary power and vice versa, though.  I think Clocks is ultimately more engaging and interesting for its inclusion.

Overall Clocks is a vast clockwork of ideas, passions, and interconnections that is well worth exploring and chewing on over time.

Strongly Recommended.

Tom MacCarthy’s Satin Island is a very beautiful and evocative work.  His prose captures images, ideas, interactions – many powerful moments one encounters in moving through our interconnected world – with clarity and dynamism.  Reading Satin Island is a tour of the time from an engaged guide.

What Satin Island didn’t give me was enough of a structure for those moments to cohere into something that MacCarthy wanted to tell me about.  Of course that undersells the work.  By his selection and juxtaposition of images and incidents, MacCarthy forms a whole.  I’m sure Joyceans will enjoy pulling on threads of subtext to get any message that MacCarthy is sending.

I’m not much of a Joycean.  I do like rich works of literature, but I do prefer a more explicit literary structure around it.  Many of the moments are thought provoking or plain breathtaking, so Island may be worth a trip.  But don’t tell them I sent you.

I could probably skip this post and just mail Marc Zorn directly, but in case someone else wants to hear an aviation confession, here it is.

I filed a NASA ASRS form today. NASA is responsible for both space flight and for aeronautics – aviation – and one of the best ways that they address that part of their responsibilities is ASRS (pronounced a-sars), the Aviation Safety and Reporting System.  It’s a system for collecting and analyzing data about incidents in which unsafe things happen in aviation with the intent of improving overall safety. The data is largely self-reported by pilots, air traffic controllers, and other aviation professionals.  In order to get people to admit when they screw up, filing an ASRS indemnifies the reporter against FAA punishment when (loosely speaking) the incident was a genuine accident and the infraction did not result in significant damage or danger.  I had one of these today.

I took a long-ish trip this morning to work with some of Sleipnir‘s en-route systems and get some brunch at Fresno’s Chandler Executive Airport.  Slippy has a dazzling array of features to help a poor pilot cope with her complexities, and most of my time to date in her had been working practicing landing, taking off, and other activities that happen at the ends of flights.  So today I went further and spent some time on the middle phases. I practiced using the autopilot, leaning with the engine monitor, flying an IFR flight plan and some other things.

That was all interesting and fun and enlightening.  It was also apparently distracting enough that I took my feet off the rudder pedals.

Actually, now that I think about it, I know exactly when I took them off.  I was looking for a landmark and was adjusting my position relative to the higher cowling position.  Hurm.

In any case, the upshot is that when I landed, I had one foot on a steering pedal and one off.  On the ground, one generally steers an aircraft with one’s feet.  Left pedal turns left, right pedal turns right.  If a pilot has one foot on a the left pedal, and none on the right, it means they can only turn left.  This is the situation I found myself in, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Slippy lands pretty fast – touchdown is in the 80 mph range – and the runway I was landing on was one of the more narrow I’ve attempted.  So, I get her on the ground, and suddenly she jerks hard left.  And doesn’t stop doing that.  It feels like I’m countering it, but I’m not, because I haven’t realized my right foot is pushing on the floor, not the pedal.  Runway edge markings are not happy things to see when you’re not expecting them.  When they’re approaching at 80 mph, discretion is the better part of valor.

My go-around technique is not beautiful yet, but it is good enough to recover from a near-loss-of-control on the runway.  In other news, Slippy’s engine is quite powerful.

Unfortunately, I did pass through Fresno’s Class C airspace before I finished cleaning up.  That’s what I filed the ASRS about, though the controller indicated that I hadn’t caused any problem.

I did think it was bad form to go back to Fresno after basically buzzing the place. The trip to Porterville gave me enough time to work out what I’d done, and I had a great lunch.

Reading Michael Faber’s Under the Skin right on the heels of Distraction highlights the range of storytelling in the SF genre.  Distraction is a high velocity romp through big ideas. Under the Skin is an almost meditative exploration of humanity.

Faber (no relation) hangs his exploration on an SF conceit that superficially is more suited for a Twilight Zone episode than a literary novel.  While I intend no disrespect to the Zone, its allegories and allusions are not often subtle.  Under the Skin starts from a premise that is right on the nose and then proceeds to challenge, undermine, and reinforce the themes opened by the trope.

He does this by committing completely to the (ludicrous) premise and constructing a flawed, damaged, unbowed, believable character and putting her through the wringer.  He keeps the action mostly centered on his main character by circumscribing her role using plot twists born of genre convention.  That effectively keeps us inside the head of his perfect outsider as she confronts our world and her own ideas.

The whole narrative hangs on his characterization, and he carries it off completely.

I’m being deliberatively vague about the particular hoary SF in question since there are mild spoilers getting to it.

Recommended.