Walking on the Moon

It took me quite a while to develop an opinion about Christopher Hitchens’s Arguably, a collection of his essays. My recollection was that many of the essays were book reviews for the New York Times.  These are a kind of essay unto themselves, often touching only lightly on the book under review and letting the reviewer expound their ideas at length in the service of evaluating the book.  These are most interesting to read if you have a horse in the race.  For a lot of the essays in Arguably, I did not. They’re all well written, but often turn on what I would consider minutae.

Then I got to “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” That’s a well-written, completely wrong essay.  Understanding why it irritated me was a very illuminating experience, both about these essays and persuasive essays in general.  The essay in question is as good an argument as could be constructed for the position.  Hitchens points out the job statistics about numbers of professional funny women, trots out some evolutionary justification, mixes in a few personal observations and structures it all in a way that draws the reader’s attention to where his points are strong and away from where they’re not.  It combines the techniques of a good legal argument with the rhythms of a troubadour.  I just disagree with virtually all of it.

That’s where I understood that Arguably is exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s a collection of arguments – or argument starters – not a philosophy.  It’s good to remember that most opinion pieces are exactly that, and that scholarship and compositional skill do not imply one’s position is correct.

Looking at Arguably through this lens, it becomes a more interesting and less vexing experience.  There is much to like about the essays in terms of composition – and certainly in the vocabulary.  I even agree with much of what Hitchens says (that I care about anyway).  There are a lot of them here, too.

Recommended.

I read and enjoyed Halting State, so it was only a matter of time before I picked up the sequel, Rule 34. In this series, Stross writes mostly about ideas, so Rule 34 isn’t a sequel in the sense that the characters have further adventures, but in the sense  that exciting things happen in the fictional world.  It’s much more like a Foundation story in that sense.  Foundation stories are mostly puzzles wrapped up in drama, but Rule 34 is more a drama created by ideas in conflict.

While I was most impressed by how Stross takes ideas and puts them into the world, Rule 34 is an engrossing, propulsive read.  Exciting things happen to interesting characters.  It’s mostly a police procedural so there is a murder (or murders) to solve. Old lovers surface, crusty superiors are confronted, and plucky street kids get in over their heads.  Stross brings it all alive with zippy prose.  You won’t be bored with the narrative.

Beyond a snappy story, Rule 34 takes some great ideas from the minds of futurists and shows what happens when they meet the real people who give those ideas flesh.  An engineer like me might call it a cautionary tale about the perils of implementation, but who would read that?

The big ideas are big: organization of human systems around engineering principles; micromanufacturing and 3d printers; advances in pharmacology and the marginalization of the mentally ill; the global communication network, spread of memes, and thoughtcrime.  Get a bunch of futurists in a room and they’ll talk about the pleasures and perils of these things at a dry remove.  Put Stross on the case and you’ll get an international criminal syndicate and the Edinburgh Police department organized as different startup companies clashing over distributed production of backyard viagra and horrifying sex toys.  And that’s just where he starts.

The result is a great set if meshing and clashing gears that gives the reader a fresh perspective on the future, which is what I like SF to do.

Strongly Recommended.

On one of my recent work trips, my venerable IBM Thinkpad T42 finally gave up the ghost.  Even if it hadn’t failed on me, I was reaching the point where I wanted more out of my laptop.  Having the thing die the day before a demo certainly forced the issue, though.

I generally run free operating systems on my machines, including my laptops.  My desktops have been FreeBSD since I migrated from an Amiga 3000 in the early 1990s.  So, yeah, I’m one of those guys.  Laptops are a particular pain in this regard.  There always seems to be something that isn’t quite supported or that you have to tweak to get working.  Even with the T42, I wound up running Ubuntu rather than FreeBSD.  Love FreeBSD though I do, I like to be able to suspend – and the Linux install hibernated, too.

I had bought the T42 from Overstock.com on the theory that an older machine would be well supported.  That was true as far as it went, but older hardware does mean fewer capabilities, Rather than pick another machine that was older in the hope that the OS support would be seamless, I decided to get something more modern from a company that packaged Linux on the machines.  I suppose Dell or someone like that would also load Linux, but I would much rather support a company that supports Linux at a more grassroots level.  I poked around and decided to buy a Lemur Ultra from System 76.

The Lemur had the right mix of small size and power that I wanted.  Well it did after I upgraded to 4-core i7.  The availability and  pricing of that option lured me away from ZaReason.  I probably could have gotten equivalent hardware a little cheaper, but the price was definitely competitive. And I looked forward to a laptop where things worked out of the box.

Buying was painless, and even though I ordered the weekend before Thanksgiving, things shipped on a reasonable schedule.  They claim 5-8 business days to ship, and they certainly got it out within that time.  They also sent e-mails as the order progressed.  Not enough to annoy, but enough that I knew it was coming.  In fact, I got it the day they shipped it.  That’s one of the joys of living in SoCal, I guess.

The Lemur arrived in box-in-box packaging, with no real frills.  Ok a little frill; here’s the inner box:

My cat took them up on the offer:

(OK, that’s the outer box…)

Everything was well protected, but not excessively over-packaged.   Excess packaging is something we like to avoid when we can in my house, and this was all reasonable.  The contents were just what I ordered.  A laptop, a power supply, and a single paper pointing to the System 76 web site and Ubuntu docs was all that was inside.  (And 2 “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers.)

Plug in the power brick and hit the on button, and the laptop jumps into the Ubuntu install process.  That process  is very straightforward and user friendly, and I’ve been through it a couple times.  I imagine even a complete newcomer to Linux would find it a pretty pleasant experience.

After finishing the install, things just worked.  That was a welcome change from the usual hours or days of fiddling with settings, tweaking the BIOS, or finding or modifying drivers.  Now I could fiddle to get the machine comfortable.

The Hardware

Overall I’m very pleased with the Lemur hardware.  I chose the T42 after getting sick of lugging a heavier Dell model around.   The T42 was small and solid feeling.  The Lemur is a little bigger, but feels lighter.  The materials feel thinner, somehow, but I have no indication as yet that they are any less durable.  I’ll follow up in a couple months when I’ve had more experience.

While the laptop itself is lighter, the power supply is a brick in every sense.  Upgrading to the i7 means upgrading to the 90W power supply, and any weight savings from the machine is eaten up by the brick.  Now, that’s hard to complain about.  This box has more than 4 times the processing power of the T42, and every indication is that the battery lasts twice as long, which I both like and asked for.  And the power supply itself is longer and sturdier looking.  But I wish I had a lightweight option.

Another thing I liked about the lemur was its keyboard.  The IBM Thinkpads are tough to beat for keyboard feel, but the Lemur’s keyboard is decent.  The keys have a nice travel, and feel like keys, not chicklets or buttons.  Unlike the larger System 76 laptops there is no keypad, but I don’t miss that in a laptop.  The trackpad merges seamlessly with the wrist rest.  There is literally no seam, which is pretty neat.

The trackpad supports edge scrolling or two-finger scrolling.  I prefer the two-finger, but am happier that both work.

One of the Lemur’s extended function keys toggles the trackpad on and off.  I haven’t had to use it, except figuring out what it does.  (I actually thought I’d broken something until I realized what the somewhat obscure symbol meant.)  The other extended function keys also work seamlessly, which is a simple thing, but much appreciated.  The only complaint I have about the controls is that there is no LED to indicate that the integrated webcam is on or off.  (There’s nothing indicating that for Bluetooth, either, but I don’t use that feature much at all).  I also miss the thinklight, but no reasonable person could condemn a machine for not having one.

The other hardware just works. Both the wireless networking and the ethernet port do exactly what they should when activated – even when used together.  The Intel 5000 graphics adapter works without tweaks, and the 720p screen looks good running Unity and playing DVDs.

I’m sure I’ll test the real performance of the system more in the coming months, but initial indications are that it does everything I need it to do.

I haven’t done an exhaustive test on the battery life.  I have had the laptop disconnected for a couple hours at a time in meetings at work, and the system projects something in excess of 3.5 hours of life doing meeting kinds of things.  Again, this is something I’ll get a better feel for as I use it in more strenuous conditions.

Overall, after only having the Lemur a couple weeks, I’m very pleased with it.  I’m enjoying tweaking Ubuntu and spending time working on and playing with the machine.  Based on this short experience, I’d recommend System 76 and the Lemur.  Check back in a couple months and we’ll see how it’s going.

Harry Houdini apparently liked to write about the sorts of things you would expect Harry Houdini to write about: showmanship, magicians and their ethics, and ways that the public is fooled. The Right Way To Do Wrong collects some of these writings, including excerpts from the book of the same name.

It is always fascinating to see the ways that people deceive one another, both for mutual amusement in performances and in predation.  Houdini’s success was rooted in his research and understanding of both kinds of deception that informed his practice of the harmless form.  Right Way lets him share much of that knowledge with us here in his future.

Right Way is fairly short and the brevity helps quite a bit.  My experience with books exposing or dissecting flim-flam is that they tend to be longer and more exhaustive than I care for.  Both Randi’s The Faith Healers and Barnum’s The Humbugs of the World are catalogs of deceptions.  Right Way does not organize the information it presents under guiding principles any more than the others, but its brevity means that more of the repetitive cases are dropped.

Recommended.

When I talked about Steven Pinker’s Words and Rules, I complained that the topic was not worthy of the quality of the writing and science on display.  His work has steadily been becoming more universal, while his skills as a writer and scientist have remained at their high level.  The Better Angels of Our Nature stakes out a universal claim of great importance and defends it meticulously, working from the demonstrated facts to an affirmation of the Enlightenment’s classic liberal ideals.  It’s one thing to believe that those ideals – reason, empathy, commerce – are worth affirming.  It’s another thing entirely to build an objective case that this is so.  As with any social science, there are still points to argue, but the scope and quality of Pinker’s arguments are dazzling to behold.

It is clear that Pinker is a defender of the Enlightenment and classic liberalism – though not necessarily of liberalism in modern American politics – and that he has a stake in defending that position.  He remains a meticulous seeker of truth and believer in science and statistics.  When he’s confronted with the choice between making a stronger, vaguer claim or explaining the limits of what he believes science can prove objectively, he does the latter.  It is refreshing to be written to as an adult about an interesting and important topic rather than being recruited to an ideological position.

Explaining a nuanced argument about a topic as large as human violence in a manner suitable for adults takes a lot of space.  Angels runs some 800 pages.  Pinker needs to first convince his readers of his counter intuitive thesis – that violence is declining – and then make the connections to the causes of that decline.  His arguments that there is a real decline in violence run several hundred pages and require the reader to internalize ideas from statistics and cognitive psychology.  It is to his credit that he brings in the relevant ideas from those fields comprehensibly, and is able to make a lucid case.

In a lesser writer’s hands the arguments would be opaque and unconvincing, but Pinker guides the reader through convincingly.  He does this through careful explanations of the relevant science (including lots of citations) and well-chosen examples.  His honesty is at least as great an asset as his eloquence.  He is always careful to quantify and qualify what he believes the data shows and how strong the consensus is around it. This comes off not as hedging his bets, but as being open about what humans know and can know about these inherently slippery topics.  He’s willing to admit what he doesn’t know, which makes the principles he can establish more compelling.

All that clarity and nuance, explaining the supporting evidence and context, and working through the examples takes time.  While Pinker keeps it as lively as possible, the exposition can be dry at times.  It never becomes a complete slog, but there’s a lot to get through. While I believe that the supporting evidence makes his remarkable case stronger, I also believe that if the reader gets too tied up in the details of the earlier chapters, and starts to flag, it’s worthwhile to peek ahead at Chapter 9 and see where it’s all going.

Chapter 9 is Pinker’s gentlemanly and scientific paean to Reason and Enlightenment making the world a fairer and safer place.  That song, sung in the most scientific and objective voice, is one of affection and joy for ideals that have objectively improved life for the majority of people on this Earth. Mankind collectively has slowly, in fits and starts, built a culture and collective mindset that has objectively reduced the violence and cruelty we inflict on each other, even though we barely realize it. Reading this chapter, I felt a little like one of those omniscient aliens from a SciFi B-movie must when it tells the humans that there’s hope for them yet.

Strongly Recommended.

Today was cloudy in Southern California, which means it’s a great day to fly.  Chances to get real time in real clouds are rare, so I took the time to bop off to Oxnard and Camarillo and play in the clouds on the way there and back.  These were instrument flight plans, so, “play in the clouds” really meant “fly where air traffic control (ATC) tells you to fly and hope there are clouds there,” but I had pretty good luck.  I had some lunch at Camarillo and was flying back to Santa Monica when I got to do a little visualization.

One of the things about instrument flying is that you have to learn to visualize where you are with only a little bit of information.  It can be the angle and distance your aircraft is from known locations, or other fairly arcane bits of info.  When I was learning to fly on instruments I spent a lot of time learning to decide where I was based on those kind of deductions, but these days I have a moving map that’s telling me where I am all the time.  It makes flying much safer, but it’s nice to flex those visualization muscles.

Here’s how I got to do that today.  Take a look at my route here (image from FlightAware):

I’m flying from KCMA on the left to KSMO on the right.  The green line is my flight path.  The extra northward (upward)  line at the end of the flight is a data error of some kind – I landed at Santa Monica.  The visualization happened at the little loop halfway along.

I’m in and out of the clouds along that part of the flight – exactly what I was hoping for – and I’m practicing some control under instruments and the distractions of coming in and out of clouds.  I’m listening to the radio, too, because (1) I’m listening for instructions and (2) I want to hear what else is going on.  It’s that second part that was interesting today.  As I’m cruising along I hear the controller issue landing instructions to a Southwest 737 inbound to Burbank.  If you’re playing along on the map, that’s the grey ‘>’ near the right side of the map.  The 737 is west of the field, being told to fly to SILEX intersection at 4000′.

That’s pretty much where I’m going to be shortly.  Of course, I’m also going to be in a cloud shortly.  And I say to myself “Is there something you’d like to share, Mr. Controller?”  Sure enough, I get a message to turn more than 90 degrees to my left.  And, I’m not sure, but it may have been a different controller – meaning that an instructor decided to make sure Southwest and I were far enough apart to be legal.

While I make my circle, the much faster jet goes into Burbank and I’m back on my way about 2 minutes later.  If I didn’t visualize the jet’s route, this would have been a fairly unfathomable circle to make.  But since I know this airspace well, I knew exactly what was going on.

As an aside, we were certainly never close enough to be dangerous.  There are a couple other layers of safety systems that would have activated if we were actually close together.  I should also point out that, strictly speaking, I don’t need to know why I’m making that circle.  But understanding what’s going on gives that extra layer of comfort.

Other Cool Stuff

While I was at Camarillo, I saw a Diamond DA20 two-seat trainer.  I know they’re out there, but this is the first one I’d seen.  When I was covering my plane after the flight, I got to see two what I think were Chinook helicopters overhead.  Even with a cell phone, I think the pics are pretty good.

Hello Goodbye Hello is a unique bit of fun by Craig Brown.  The idea is simple and intriguing: start with the unlikely meeting of two well known people and tell that story, then follow one of them to another meeting and describe that, then follow the new one to another meeting, and so on.  And make a circle.  It feels like a party game, and reading Hello Goodbye Hello gives that feeling of improvisation and fun.

Brown makes a couple choices that make the whole thing more compelling.  He keeps each anecdote short, which keeps the players from wearing out their welcome.  He also allows himself a fair amount of leeway.  Some of the stories are about famous people in their youth who are literally dumbstruck by encountering someone more famous.  It’s to his credit that Brown can usually make even these glancing collisions interesting.

Of course not all of these meetings are interesting.  Over the course of the book he spans English nobility, Russian composers, American movie idols, and Mark Twain. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and there were some dry stretches for me.  It doesn’t help that Brown is British, and some of the folks he includes were completely unknown to me, though from context well known in Britain.

Overall, the book keeps the feel of an interesting dinner party where everyone seems to have an interesting story to tell.  Even the tales that are about people you’ve never heard of are told with style.  There are plenty of new things to hear, even if they’re not all about the stars of the anecdotes.

Recommended.

A good title can sell a book, no question, and this title is instantly charming to me.  I like dogs; I like physics; what could go wrong?

Plenty could go wrong, of course.  I generally like popular science books, but I have been disappointed as well. While I like the title, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to take a couple hundred pages of the conceit. To his credit, Chad Orzel carries the physics and the dog characterization off well.

The science isn’t the easy stuff, either.  Orzel’s peddling quantum physics, not that easy Newtonian stuff.  Quantum physics is bizarre  and counter-intuitive, so having it explained at a dog’s level can be helpful.  It helped me.  I have heard the basics of quantum physics many times, and I consider it a success when I figure something new out from a fresh explanation.  This was successful.

Now, about the dog part: the book is structured as a series of conversations between Orzel and his dog.  Who talks.  And that works out pretty well.  Orzel does a nice job using the conversation to pace the material.  The discussions help the material flow naturally and conversationally.  It’s easy not to notice when topics are being reviewed or emphasized when they’re wrapped in the rhythms of a man-to-dog heart-to-heart.

Orzel takes a goofy idea and uses it to wrap up a lot of good science explanation that holds a sense of wonder.  He does an equally nice job of supporting the theoretical explanation with experimental evidence.  All that solid science is wrapped in charming prose.

Strongly Recommended.

Battleborn collects a bunch of short stories from Claire Vaya Watkins, who I’d not read before.  The stories are mostly set in the Pacific Southwest, which is to say in an enormous desert.  When I first came to live out here, I thought that the desert was barren and monolithic.  I’ve learned that it is spartan and demanding, adjectives that can be applied equally well to Watkins’s prose.

All these stories show an economy that seems to come not from the human editing process, but from an erosion and cleansing by the elements.  The stories seem not honed by a writer, but formed by the elements. Now, of course, no natural forces created these stories, but at their best they capture that simultaneous sense of timelessness and history.

Strongly Recommended.

P.T. Barnum believed in aggressive marketing and wasn’t shy about separating people from their money.  It may be surprising to see that he wrote this book exposing scams and balderdash as well.  He claims that exposing this kind of stuff makes his entertainments look better by comparison, and I believe him.  I don’t believe he never stretched the truth, though.

Whatever you believe about Barnum’s personal ethics, the book is a nigh-comprehensive explanation of ways that people fleece the unwary.  Spiritualists, Religious crooks, and cults all take a licking, but it’s interesting to see Barnum take shots at adulterers of food and liquor, and at unscrupulous businessmen cashing in on bubbles. It’s also interesting to see his religious commentary given that he takes a very pro-Christian point of view.

Skeptics wont find a ton of new information in here, but it is remarkable how few new tricks have premiered since the 1880’s.  I enjoyed seeing just how many of these scams continue unchanged to this day, as well as how easily new tech gets incorporated.

While Barnum’s writing is clear, I did find that the book seemed long.  Some of this is that there were few new revelations; some is that many of the names here are otherwise lost to history.  The parade of historic scams gets a little tedious when you don’t recognize any of the players.