Walking on the Moon

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.

The Higgs Discovery is a short discussion of the recent Higgs Boson announcement from Lisa Randall.  It includes a couple relevant chapters reprinted from a couple of her books.  I picked it up because I wanted to know more about that announcement and what it means for physics.  I’m not a physicist, of course, but I like to believe that I know enough to not completely make a fool of myself in intelligent discussion.  This Higgs thing was outside my range, though, and I’d like to be less lost.

The Higgs Discovery helped. I’m far from completely understanding how this all works, or how we think it all works, but I’m doing better.  After reading it, I have the beginnings of an intuition.

To an extent Discovery didn’t make things simple enough for me, and felt jargony where I thought that jargon wasn’t necessary.  I’m picking nits.  This is a very short primer on a complex topic in quantum physics.  Randall’s goal has to be to tell me enough to get me interested enough to pick up a more complete discussion.  Discovery did that very well.

The fine folks at Kim Davidson Aviation have repaired my tire after the sad events last Sunday, and I took some time this afternoon to try it out. It looked like a tire that holds air when I walked around, so, off we go.

I put 5 landings on it in the heat of the day and had no problems, so I feel good about taking passengers again.  I know that Kim’s guys do a great job, but I like to test these things before I put someone else in the plane.

Incidentally, spending an hour in the pattern at SMO is one of my favorite things to do.  It’s my home field so I know the place well, but there’s always something interesting to put a twist on things.  Today it was fairly busy and had SMO’s patented late afternoon gusty winds.  The airport sits on some of the higher land in the area, cut off like a little mesa and gets a strong ocean breeze.  The result is a set of air currents that are surprisingly stong to a newbie and offer something new to the old hands as well.  The field was also busy enough that one self-confessed country boy was very appreciative of the (excellent) controllers’ help getting in, around, and out of the field.

While I was gassing up afterward I saw this puppy parked by the pumps.  It’s a SeaRay – a homebuilt/kitplane flying boat.  Click through to see the bigger pics, the thumbnails don’t do it justice.

I have been very lucky so far with the things that have gone wrong in my flying career.  Most of the things that have gone wrong for me have (knock wood) been small.  I had another small one go wrong this weekend.  I blew a tire rolling out on a landing at Santa Monica.

I was out with Marc Zorn flying approaches for instrument currency.  We were actually delayed departing Santa Monica because the nose wheel tire was low.  American Flyers helped us out and filled that tire.  I always check the tires during my walk around, but because the nose had been low and because I’d recently had the left main tire filled, I double checked the mains when the lineman came over.  No sense asking him to come back.  I was surer than usual that everything was properly inflated.

Marc and I shot approaches into Riverside and Chino that went pretty well.  We scoped out the various interesting planes on the ground at Chino and had lunch at Flo’s Diner.

From there we filed back to Santa Monica and took off.  In retrospect, the roll out was my first clue something was up.  Just as we were lifting off, I felt a sharp jerk to the left that  didn’t feel like a wind gust.  I even joked to Marc that I hoped we still had three wheels down there, but I wasn’t positive it was anything  more than a crosswind gust on takeoff.  If I hadn’t had the confirmation of tire failure on landing, I might have forgotten the incident.  Now I know what a tire blowing feels like.  I think.

Anyway, we landed pretty uneventfully at SMO, until we had cleared the runway (and, I later found out, cleared the runway safety area).  As the plane slowed, it began pulling to the left and felt like a blown tire on a car.  I got as far clear of the runway as possible and told the tower I thought I’d blown a tire.  Sure enough, I had.

The blown left main

The airport police towed us off the apron after removing the fairing that protects the wheel, and made an incident report.  The responding officer also gave us a lift back to our car.  The officer – whose name I unfortunately forgot – was really excellent.  He helped us get the plane safely out of harms way before collecting the information he needed for his report.  He was polite and helpful in every way.

I contacted my mechanics the next day and they towed the plane back to my parking spot and put a new tire on.

I’ve been thinking about whether I should have declared emergency or handled it differently.  I think I did OK knowing what I knew then.  The takeoff at Chino was abnormal, but it was abnormal in a new way and only slightly so.  With only that evidence, I don’t think that I had enough indication of trouble to declare emergency.  I thought my joke to Marc was a joke. And honestly, I don’t know that the tire blew on takeoff.   It may have been fine at Chino.  Beyond getting as far clear of the Santa Monica runway as possible once I had the problem, there wasn’t much else to do.

But, I will take a similar abnormal takeoff more seriously in the future.

Hopefully I won’t have to deal with tire trouble again for another 1600 hours.

Some Remarks is a very mixed bag of Neal Stephenson’s shorter writings.  Stephenson’s novels are usually tomes, so it’s interesting to see some of his shorter work.  But then about a third of the book is an epic article for Wired that describes laying an undersea telecom cable, so shorter is relative; the article is as long as a novelette.

One of the things I enjoy about Stephenson’s writing is that he often sees commonplace things in new ways, combined with a close correlation between the things he and I think are commonplace.  This collection treats me to his take on the Star Wars movies as well as the aforementioned telecom cables.  We look at similar things and I like the way he sees them.

As much as I enjoy his writing, I can’t really recommend this as a starting place.  The topics, formats, length, and genres of the pieces vary widely.  There are short stories, addresses, interviews, articles and a book foreword. I found them all interesting and engaging to some degree, but I think new readers would be best served by one of his novels.