Persistent Visions

The Wave Watcher’s Companion
From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life’s Undulations
Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Gavin Pretor-Pinney has a gift for presenting general science factoids in an amusing manner. Compared to many non-fiction books whose authors take themselves too seriously, Pretor-Pinney knows that he is writing not only to educate, but also to entertain.

The book is about waves, of course. It is also about things other than waves, such as sand dunes and surfing. The title is self-explanatory. The only glaring shortcoming is that the book ends rather abruptly. I wonder if he couldn’t figure out how to end the book, and so just gave up and handed the manuscript in to beat the deadline.

Also check out his previous book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide.

From amazon.com

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind
by Guy Claxton

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (link goes to www.amazon.com)

Good lesson, bad execution. This book could be condensed to half its length, so I recommend reading enough of the book get get the point, then ditching it. (This kind of “wringing all the water out of the washcloth” style of writing appears not uncommon in pop psychology books. My guess is that the authors are paid for a certain number of words and they have to churn out that number even if it meant torturing the readers to death with repetition.)

But the point the author tries to make is a good one: humans are capable of thinking both is a quick, analytical, logical style, as well as a slow, intuitive style. The two styles are suitable for different problems. Unfortunately, modern society worships speed and logic so much, that they try to apply the first style to situations it is unsuitable for.

I can believe that. My experience is that I seldom get a solution to my problem through logical reasoning. If I follow the logical reasoning backwards from a solution, it has to start somewhere, and it doesn’t start with logic, because logic follows from assumptions and axioms. These assumptions and axioms are changed and altered by … I guess it is “I have an idea, maybe…/what if…/perhaps…”.

My problem is usually that I jump directly from flash of intuition to applying the flash of intuition, which leads me to jump headfirst into incorrect ‘solutions’ then realising after I’ve wasted time. The correct sequence is flash of intuition to analyse whether intuition is correct, then apply or discard the flash intuition. Nobody is perfect, so I’m working on that.

Self-made Man and his Undoing: The Radical Reworking of Evolution Theory

This is a relatively old book, so the “radical” reworking is probably not so radical nowadays. However, the title is catchy and the author tells a story like a champ. The pictures of humanoid skulls from past and present and of different races are also fascinating to look at.

The book is about how human beings spread from East Africa to the rest of the world. One key idea I took away from the book was how all species have a “home range” where they diversify from and where they retreat into depending on advantageous or disadvantageous climatic conditions. For humans, it is East Africa.

The radical reworking of human evolution is the notion that humans drive their own evolution through their own technology. It was the environment created by technology that drove humans to evolve along a certain direction, rather than the natural environment. For example, the small teeth and jaws of humans evolved because mouth power was no longer needed for food processing. The reason for that was that human technology could cook and process their raw food. With small jaws, large facial muscles were no longer required. Without large facial muscles, thick brow ridges were no longer required. Without all these extra physical structures taking up space on the human head, human skulls could balloon.

This argument also meant that physical indicators of human evolution lagged behind their actual social/intellectual/technological development. A humanoid fossil that may outwardly appear to be “primitive” would internally (i.e. socially/intellectually/technologically) be more alike modern humans than we would expect.

The End of the Line

There’s nothing new in this documentary, but it’s worth watching and promoting it to other people. There’s nothing new about overfishing and collapsing fish stocks. But people are still eating overfished or even endangered stock. Let’s remind ourselves again why we should stick to sardines and anchovies. I love sardines and anchovies anyway. It’s the tuna that I miss.

I don’t think we’re there yet, in Singapore. The origin of the fish we eat or buy is never made clear. If it were beef, you will be sure they’ll be concerned where the beef was from. If fish started having mad fish disease… but then, you’d think people aren’t so keen eating fish from the Gulf of Mexico right now, and still no labels. Go figure.

Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures
by Carl Zimmer

A bug swims around, gets into a fish’s mouth, and latches onto the fish’s tongue. It sucks blood from the tongue and the tongue slowly atrophies and dies off. Uhoh for the fish, right? No, because the bug clings onto the tongue stub and takes over the purpose of the fish’s tongue!

This sounds like science fiction but it’s real. The bug’s name is Cymothoa exigua, and you can see it in action here. It’s ok though. According to BBC, “the creature does not pose any threat to humans and only attaches itself to fish tongues.”

If you like that, read Zimmer’s book:

Parasite Rex
(Click to go to Amazon.com)

The Shocking History of Phosphorus: A Biography of the Devil’s Element
by John Emsley

Why would anyone write an entire book about an element? Ok, maybe an super-nerdy chemist. But what is there to say about one element to fill an entire book? A lot, it turns out.

The Shocking History of Phosphorus
(Click to go to Amazon.com)

Phosphorus was discovered by alchemists from human urine, and thought to be the manifestation of the flame of life. The part why anyone would associate urine with the stuff of life is lost to me (the “golden stream”, guh?), but that led to phosphorus being used for medicine for ages. The fact that people died from phosphorus poisoning didn’t seem to deter anyone.

Phosphorus was then found to be useful for (in the following order) matches, bombs, fertilizers and detergents. Phosphorus bombs became outlawed, but fertilizer and detergents are still in huge demand. Oh…and (al)chemists figured out sources of phosphorus other than urine. That was a good thing, because for a period phosphorus had to be made by heating huge amounts of excrement…

…so I have a potty mind. So what. It’s a good book. Read it.

The Cult of the Amateur
by Andrew Keen

I dislike Keen’s style and I disagree a great deal with his opinion, which is that internet is destroying “our” culture. In fact, I had the urge to just stop reading after the first chapter. That was why I decided to finish reading it. If I disliked something that much, it’s worth reading and finding out what the author has to say. It turns out that Keen does indeed make good and valid points about the negative impacts of the internet on our lives. Some of his concerns I do also share. However, I disagree with his final evaluation of the internet. I charge him with cultural myopia.

[Minor digression: I personally dislike authors who have only one point to make and do nothing but repeat it throughout the same book. I think they should come up with at least some major variations and reasoning structure to rationalize their viewpoint. The Cult of the Amateur unfortunately reads like one of these books.]

Keen believes that the ease with which intellectual property is stolen on the internet, and how people expect things to be “free” on the internet, is leading to a death of high quality creations (books, music, movies, pc games). This is because professionals can no longer live off their creation. I agree. This is why I buy PC games these days, because if a game studio creates a good game, I want to support its continual existence. In addition, I try to get my books from the library or buy them if the library doesn’t stock it. But I am not going to go out of my way to be good to publishers. If publishers are afraid of losing their revenue, as a capitalistic business the onus is on them to make sure their goods are easily available to me. If the goods are not easily available to me then I don’t think there is any moral compulsion for the consumer to spend a lot time and effort hunting down legal copies of those products.

One thing to remember is that a great deal of what we pay for in traditional media does not actually go to the artist. When (for example) record companies had an ogliopoly on music, they could set the price of a music CD to whatever they wished, and pocketed most of what we paid for those CDs. Academic textbooks are hugely overpriced — I could pay a few hundred Singapore dollars for one if I bought it in the USA, then find an international edition in the local bookstores for a quarter the price. But not everything has an international edition, and I’m not exactly keen to shell out half my monthly income just to get a few textbooks. Are those textbooks really so expensive to print and do the tenured professors with endowed chairs who write those books need my money that desperately? Doubt it.

The second charge Keen makes is that everyone is producing information, and it is impossible to tell truth from falsehood, high quality form low quality products. There is a kernel of truth in this; the mob mentality and mass hysteria of internet masses can be quite shocking. But who is the mob? The mob is make up of us. Keen divides people up into two kinds: the expert and the amateur. The expert is capable of producing high quality works, and the amateur incapable of it. How this worked in the past, Keen asserts, is that traditional media only allows the expert to be published. Therefore, traditionally produced media is high quality.

Keen’s notion of the expert elite and the amateur mob is very flawed. The reason is because everyone is an expert in something and an amateur in something else. Expertise does not come because one is a made man by being published. This is putting the cart before the horse. Expertise comes from time and energy devoted to a certain pursuit. The rest of a million other things that one has not devoted time and energy to, one is an amateur. When one has expertise, one speaks with an authoritative voice and becomes published. If just being published is a mark of being an expert then all the tripe that has been published on traditional media won’t exist. How did people then figured out if something on traditional media was valuable, or just tripe? Because the people who are going through that published work have a certain level of expertise themselves, and this enable them to judge if that piece of work is good or not.

Which leads me to that charge of cultural myopia. Throughout the book, Keen extols the virtues of the professional journalist, the objective newspaper, the cultural artist… it’s great that he exists. What if they don’t? What if there is no press freedom in a country, and the government of the country is dedicated to cultural genocide? What if there is censorship everywhere, and the artists all have to toe a line of heavy censorship? Keen bemoans the lack of accountability on the anonymous internet, but he doesn’t see the irony when he attacks Yahoo for releasing the identity of a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government. The Chinese dissident was jailed for 10 years.

But in spite of all the rhetoric and cultural myopia, Keen does make very good points and I recommend the book. The problem of a complete lack of accountability in anonymity. The fact that what is “free” on the internet is actually taking its toll in the form of professional jobs lost and niche companies destroyed. That cut-and-paste is not creation, but cannibalizing existing works. And what I think is the most serious, the huge amount of information that is created by everyone and anyone, but is under no quality control at all.

A pleasant surprise. I’ve been fighting the urge to watch this movie but finally gave in, believing it would be awful. The reviews haven’t been kind to it, reminding us that it’s violent and ambiguously gay.

Shall I say: What tosh!

This representation of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson is more faithful to Arthur Conan Doyle than many of the popular intepretations out there. I suppose Sherlock Holmes had to be made palatable to the bourgeoisie housewives and children when he went on teevee. The real Sherlock Holmes of Conan Doyle was a maniac depressive, a drug-addict, and a fighter and overall messy and filthy.

What I’m really glad about is an interpretation that does Dr. Watson justice. I’m really fond of Dr. Watson. More fond of him than Sherlock Holmes, who is supposed to be the subject of the stories. Unfortunately, Sherlock Holmes reminds me too much of all the ugly tendencies inherent in myself waiting to take over if I don’t consciously keep them in check. So I love Dr. Watson, and hate those portrayals of him as a bumbling buffoon. And Dr. Watson in this movie is just kickass, if a bit too active for a man with a bad leg.

As for the ambiguously gay accusations, I don’t know what’s up with that. It’s called the stiff upper lip. The thing British have. You have two men who are fond of each other, and have gone through dangerous and life-threatening situations together. One of them is about to get married, and the other feels their friendship is threatened. The two of them try to negotiate this separation with a stiff upper lip.

So? What’s so “gay” about this? I don’t read anything gay or uncomfortable in the whole movie. Quite touching when Sherlock Holmes blinks and uncomfortably said he was glad Dr. Watson was “still with them” when Dr. Watson was not killed by the villain’s explosives.

I wonder if all the people who complain about ambiguous gayness have some kind of sexuality hang-up. Men cannot express intimacy or caring about other men. Otherwise it’s eeeek gay. (Or even, men cannot express intimacy or caring towards anyone at all, unless it is a woman, who is his romantic interest. Blech.)

The movie isn’t perfect. There are various details that are wrong. There is, I admit, a tad too much violence, what with the kneecap busting and all of multiple victims. The appearance of Professor Moriarty, who would hardly deign to get his own hands dirty. The greatest misrepresentation was of Irene Adler, who was an opera singer rather than a thief, and was married. People desperately love to pin a romance on Holmes. Why can’t they just accept he wasn’t interested in romance and his admiration of Irene Adler stemmed not because she had “the face of the most beautiful of women”, but because she had “the mind of the most resolute of men”?