Books and literature – Page 39 – a sibilant intake of breath

Something New Under the Sun

Happy Birthday Zandara Kennedy

Extensively footnoted and balanced in its claims, John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun is an engaging and worthwhile study of the environmental history of the twentieth century. It covers atmospheric, hydrospheric, and biospheric concerns – focusing on those human actions and technologies that have had the greatest impact on the world, particularly in terms of those parts of the world human beings rely upon. People concerned with the dynamic that exists between human beings and the natural world would do well to read this volume. As McNeill demonstrates with ample figures and examples, that impact has been dramatic, though not confined to the twentieth century. What has changed most is the rate of change, in almost all environmentally relevant areas.

The drama of some documented changes is incredible. McNeill describes the accidental near-elimination of the American chestnut, the phenomenal global success of rabbits, and the intentional elimination of 99.8% of the world’s blue whales in clear and well-attributed sections. From global atmospheric lead concentrations to the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, he also covers a number of huge changes that are not directly biological. I found his discussion of the human modification of the planet’s hydrological systems to be the most interesting, quite probably because it was the least familiar thing he discussed.

Also interesting to note is that, published in 2000, this book utterly dismisses nuclear power as a failed technology. In less than three pages it is cast aside as economically non-sensical (forever dependent on subsidies), inherently hazardous, and without compensating merit. Interesting how quickly things can change. The book looks far more to the past than to the future, making fewer bold predictions about the future consequences of human activity than many volumes of this sort do.

Maybe the greatest lesson of this book is that the old dichotomy between the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’ world is increasingly nonsensical. The construction of the Aswan High Dam has fundamentally altered the chemistry of the Mediterranean at the same time as new crops have altered insect population dynamics worldwide and human health initiatives have changed the biological tableau for bacteria and viruses. To see the human world as riding on top of the natural world, and able to extract some set ‘sustainable’ amount from it, may therefore be unjustified. One world, indeed.

Euphoric

In my mind, the return to Vancouver has already become a mythic journey – far more exciting than the prospect of going anywhere else could be. It’s a return to arche, in both senses with which that word is impregnated.

On a seperate note, I am coming to realize that Mortal Engines may be the most interesting thing I have read entirely by chance since Ender’s Game. The translator, Michael Kandel, has been added to the list of people I hope to meet. I assume the author of the stories is already dead.

Science fiction fairytales

Between attempts at thesesial ponderation, I have been reading Mortal Engines: a book of short stories by Stanislaw Lem. It is one of a collection of books abandoned by departing graduate students that I have come to possess, and which has been mocking me on the basis of being unread among so few books I possess here. When one only has a few dozen books in one’s entire room, it is really intolerable to have not read them all.

Written in the form of the science fiction fairlytale, Lem’s stories remind me of certain parts of Orson Scott Card‘s superb collection Maps in a Mirror, as well as some of Isaac Asimov‘s more lighthearted work. On a beach on Hornby Island, many years ago, I remember a story of Asimov’s that involved the following response from a ‘wizard’ who gets exposed to a dragon:

“Of all things, an Apatosaurus!,” [the wizard exclaimed.] But he often spoke nonsense, and was ignored.

If anyone can recall the name of the story, I would be much obliged to learn it. Since I was stealing the book from Kate at the time (racing to finish stories before she demanded its return), perhaps she will be able to enlighten us.

Going back to Lem, the most notable thing about the stories is how he combines the eminently plausible (even scientifically necessary) with the fanciful and allegorical. Being able to forge subjects out of uranium so that their coming together in conspiracy automatically makes them explode in a chain reaction is doubtless a fantasy that has appealed to a monarch or two. When I finish it, I will quote some of the cleverer bits here.

Something to try over the weekend: cryptography by hand

For about three and a half hours tonight, I awaited essays from next month’s tutorial students in the MCR. Having exhausted what scaps of newspaper were available, I fell back to reading a copy of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, abandoned by some departed grad student.

Two hundred and sixty pages in, and unlikely to proceed enormously further, I note somewhat pedantically that there have been no codes presented. At best, there have been a series of riddles. The book would be interesting for its historical asides, if I could consider them credible.

Rather than go on about that, I thought I would write an incredibly brief primer on how to actually encrypt a message:

Crypto by hand

In the next few paragraphs, I will show you how to use a simple cryptographic device called a transposition cipher. If you really want to learn it, follow along with a pen and paper. As ciphers go, it is very weak – but it is easy to understand and learn. For starters, we need a secret message. The following is hardly secret, but it will do for a demonstration:

“DAN BROWN IS A DUBIOUS HISTORIAN”

Next, we need an encryption key. For this type of cipher, we need two or more English words that do not use any letter more than once. It is quicker if they have the same number of letters, but I will use two with different numbers of letters to demonstrate the process:

“DUBLIN PINT”

Write the first word of the key onto a piece of paper, with a bit of space between each letter and plenty of space below:

“D U B L I N”

Now, add numbers above the letters, corresponding to their order in the alphabet:

“2 6 1 4 3 5
D U B L I N”

Now, add your message (hereafter called the plaintext) in a block under. If necessary, fill out the box with garble or the alphabet in order:

“2 6 1 4 3 5
D U B L I N
D A N B R O
W N I S A D
U B I O U S
H I S T O R
I A N A B C”

Note how each word of the first keyword now has a column of text underneath it. Starting with the first column in the alphabetical ordering (B, in this case) copy out the column, starting at the top, as a string of text. Make sure you understand what is happening here before you go on. The first column, read downwards is:

NIISN

Now, add to that string the other columns, read from top to bottom, in alphabetical order. You can leave spaces to make it easier to check:

NIISN DWUHI RAUOB BSOTA ODSRC ANBIA

Clearly, each column section should have the same number of letters in it. Make sure you’ve got the transcription right before going on. Note that the string above is the same letters as are in the original message, just jumbled. As such, this system isn’t smart to use for very short messages. People will realize fairly quickly that “MKLLINAIL” could mean “KILL MILAN.”

Moving right along…

Take the strong you generated a moment ago, and put it into a block just like the one you made with the first keyword, except with the second keyword. This time, if you need letters to fill out the rectangle, make sure to use the alphabet in order. You will need to remove the excess letters when working backwards to decrypt, so you may as well make it easier.

“3 1 2 4
P I N T
N I I S
N D W U
H I R A
U O B B
S O T A
O D S R
C A N B
I A A B”

Now we have the message even more jumbled. The final encryption step is simply to copy each column in that grid out, from top to bottom, in alphabetical order according to the second keyword:

IDIOODAA IWRBTSNA NNHUSOCI SUABARBB

Note: the shorter the key, the longer each column will be. The above string is your encrypted text (called cyphertext). This final version is a jumble of the letters in the original message. Remove the spaces to make it harder to work out how long the last keyword is. If you like, you can use that put that string through a grid with another word. Each time you do that, you make the message somewhat harder to crack, though it obviously takes longer to either encode or decode.

To pass on the message, you need to give someone both the cyphertext and the key. This should be done by separate means, because anyone who has both can work out what kind of cipher you used and break your code. The mechanisms of key exchange and key security are critical parts of designing cryptographic systems – the weakest components of which are rarely the algorithms used to encrypt and decrypt.

To decode it, just make grids based on your keywords and fill them in by reversing the transcription process described above. I am not going to go through it step by step, because it is exactly the same, only backwards.

If anyone finds out about the credibility of Mr. Brown’s historical credentials, it won’t be my fault.

One word of warning: this system will not keep your secrets secure from the CIA, Mossad, or even Audrey Tautou. This cipher is more about teaching the basics of cryptography. If you want something enormously more durable that can still be done by hand, have a look at the Vignere Cipher.

PS. It is rumored that this very blog may contain a tool that automates one form of Vignere encryption and decryption. Not that it is linked in the sidebar or anything…

[Update: 27 July] Those who think they have learned the above ciper can try decrypting the following message:

BNTAFREEHOOI-LTOSIRISOTWD-FTNWAOEYSOXT-ERASEAAAKGVE

The segment breaks should make it a bit easier. The key is:

SCOTLAND HIKE

Good luck, and please don’t post the plaintext as a comment. Let others who want to figure it out do so.

On editing: a noble task and profession

Editing

The academic stages of my life have involved a huge amount of editing. I have read countless essays written by friends, papers submitted to journals, chapters destined for books, scholarship essays, and the like. It seems to me that there are three major types of editing that occur: low level, high level, and contextual.

Low level editing is what I have been doing for the last three hours: the careful reading of someone’s written work, with the major aim of identifying minor errors of spelling and grammar. The remit frequently extends to include the identification of sentences that are particularly unclear or otherwise problematic. Low level editing is distinguished by the fact that large amounts of knowledge about the topic of the work being edited are rarely required. Knowing terms of art can be an asset (those who do not often misunderstand how they are to be used), but I am essentially capable of giving a low level edit to anything written in the social sciences or the humanities.

A high level edit is much more intellectual. Alongside language, argument is evaluated. Contradictory evidence might be brought up; logical flaws might be highlighted. A high level edit usually incorporates a low level edit, but need not do so. A high level edit is rarely effective or comprehensible to the person whose work is being edited without one or more conversations. While a low level edit might get you thanked in a block of names in the acknowledgements section of a book, enough high level edits might get a book dedicated to you. Indeed, I am personally extremely grateful to people who have done high level edits of things I have written over the years: particularly Kate Dillon, Meghan Mathieson, Tristan Laing and Ian Townsend-Gault. Virtually everything important that I’ve written in the last five years has passed an inspection from at least one of them.

Contextual editing is the kind I have done least. It is the process of adapting a written work to fit into a particular place: whether a journal, a book, or somewhere else with specific requirements for length and content. I’ve done a lot of that on the fish paper – as well as when I worked for the international relations and history journals at UBC. Contextual editing has the virtue that it generally takes the quality of text and argument in the original piece as settled. It has the pitfall that it is generally an arduous process of sorting, summary, and re-jigging that is rather less rewarding than either of the other sort of edits.

Anyone who has ever been irked to see a tense or pluralization error in the middle of a huge academic tome might pause to consider the amount of error checking that goes into such things. The essential fact is that the brain that wrote a sentence is often badly placed to pick out any flaws within it; they have long-since been papered over in the mind of the author. With regard to errors in books, I have certainly noticed a great many such things myself. These days, I am likely to angrily correct them with a four-colour pen. I tip my hat to all the friends, spouses, significant others, teachers, and supervisors who have reduced the number of times it takes place. You are true heroes of the intellectual process.

Reading in the rain

Between bouts of thesis reading and lecture preparation, I finished the copy of Milan Kundera’s Immortality that I was leant during the Walking Club expedition to The Weald. It is very much like his other Czech books: full of observations about how human beings think, how they interact, and how they continually misunderstand one another. Reading it had become essential not because I really had time, but because I was embarrassed about having borrowed it for such a long time. I am to return it to the mailbox of a certain name at Queen’s College – the owner of which almost certainly does not remember my name.

For the thesis, I am wading through The Skeptical Environmentalist again. It is a long and opinionated book. The difficulty of establishing whether Lomborg’s figures are used well or badly make the wander through the book a somewhat exhausting one. Alongside it, I am reading Clapp and Dauvergne’s Paths to a Green World. The RDE reviewers were critical of me for calling it philosophy – “a book about political economy.” At the same time, the critical part of the book is undeniably philosophical: it lays out four different environmentalist strands, or world views, on the basis of their assumptions and prescriptions.

For Friday’s lecture, I have re-read a couple of short books and articles on security cooperation between Canada and the United States. With only an hour to speak, that probably wasn’t terribly necessary. Far more important, though more difficult to develop, is the general speaking skill that good lecturing requires. In that respect, I miss no longer being part of the UBC debate society. Nowhere now do I have cause to speak for more than a minute or two without interruption: hardly good training for one hour lectures.

PS. Antonia has reminded me that I should re-read Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, which wasn’t finished when I last read through them. They are an engaging depiction of an alternative version of America, with many fantasy elements and the general good craftsmanship that marks Card’s earlier work.

Theorems and conjectures

As strongly evidenced by how I finished it in a few sessions within a single 24-hour period, Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem is an exciting book. When you are kept up for a good part of the night, reading a book about mathematics, you can generally tell that some very good writing has taken place. Alongside quick biographies of some of history’s greatest mathematicians – very odd characters, almost to a one – it includes a great deal of the kind of interesting historical and mathematical information that one might relate to an interested friend during a long walk.

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ

The idea that the above equation has no whole number solutions (ie. 1, 2, 3, 4, …) for x, y, and z when n is greater than two is the conjecture that Fermat’s Last Theorem supposedly proved. Of course, since Fermat didn’t actually include his reasoning in the brief marginal comment that made the ‘theorem’ famous, it could only be considered a conjecture until it was proven across the span of 100 pages by American mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1995.

While the above conjecture may not seem incredibly interesting or important on its own, it ties into whole branches of mathematics in ways that Singh describes in terms that even those lacking mathematical experience can appreciate. Even the more technical appendices should be accessible to anyone who has completed high school mathematics, not including calculus or any advanced statistics. A crucial point quite unknown to me before is that a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is also automatically a proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (now called a theorem, also). Since mathematicians had been assuming the latter to be true for decades, Wiles’ proof of both was a really important contribution to the further development of number theory and mathematics in general.

Despite Singh’s ability to convey the importance of math, one overriding lesson of the book is not to become a mathematician: if you manage to live beyond the age of thirty, which seems to be surprisingly rare among the great ones, you will probably do no important work beyond that point. Mathematics, it seems, is a discipline where experience counts for less than the kind of energy and insight that are the territory of the young.

A better idea, for the mathematically interested, might be to read this book.

Essays in Love

As a study of human relationships, Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love is insightful, as well as concise in a sense reminiscent of Milan Kundera’s earlier work. Like love itself, it can easily become over-indulgent in the examination of minutiae, but – like love itself – it manages to be charming on the whole, in spite of that.

de Botton’s book documents the falling in love, experience in love, and ultimate betrayal and downfall of what might be considered your classic contemporary western romantic couple. Adult working people, living in London, and interacting against the backdrop of career and city and family in all the familiar ways. (How fitting that the cover shows a young woman in red, reading in the aisle of a room closely resembling the Oxford Social Sciences Library.) What makes the book remarkable is when the narrator expresses an idea that you are sure has been fluttering about in your own mind for years, but which you never quite had the language to pin to a cork board with such definiteness and precision.

The greatest flaw of the book is the way in which the narrator can become hopelessly pedantic and intellectually Narcissistic (especially when making forays into introductory-level philosophy and psychology). Of course, that’s largely a reflection of how the thoughts about love of those in love will always be of limited interest to others – where they confirm what we believe or have experienced, they seem to spark and crackle with the energy of our own passions. When they are tied up in the contemplation of things peripheral to us, they cannot sustain our interest. Writing about love, much like love itself, is a selfish thing.

Written in the form of twenty-four ordered lists – each a succession of numbered paragraphs – the book gives the general sense that it was written in little snatches of notebook examination of recent events. While it does tell a story, it’s more like a study of love based upon a single case study, with the underlying hope of producing generalizable conclusions. Whenever the reader discovers one, there is a sense of having learned, or at least identified, something important and useful. The frequency of such insights makes the book worthwhile reading, though the author is self-referentially critical of them:

Love taught the analytic mind a certain humility, the lesson that however hard it struggled to reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series) analysis could never be anything but flawed – and therefore never stray far from the ironic.

The corresponding danger inherent to using a story to provoke awareness of patterns is the inescapable sense that much of what is being read is a cliché. Of course, love is rarely original – though it often feels that way at the time. The book leaves you with a certain sense that love is a fairly well-defined mechanism by which human beings can achieve things that are necessary but generally impossible to find as an individual; to return to an old metaphor of mine, it provides essential amino acids that cannot be synthesized, an idea that is generally too unromantic to maintain while meeting with success.

The World is Flat

The World is Flat cover In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman provides a reasonable introduction to some aspects of globalization for the general audience. The strength of the book lies much more in the examples than in the analysis, which can sometimes be glib and patronizing. Even so, I would personally have appreciated fewer wonder stories about the internet transforming business and more discussion of the kind that concludes the book: on the complexities and caveats of the globalization process.

Friedman’s argument that the ‘world is flat’ strikes me as little more than a different way of saying that it is ‘smaller.’ Further perpetuation of the outrageously false notion that the world was thought flat pre-Columbus is never welcome. Sorry, Mr. Friedman, but Eratosthenes of Cyrene identified the size and shape of the Earth correctly back in the 2nd century BCE. That trifling correction aside, it can be little disputed that Friedman uses his analogy far, far too often.

At its best, the book is a fairly robust defence of the practice of outsourcing. Friedman argues effectively that the benefits are nearly universal, while still pointing out the importance of having societal systems to assist those who are harmed by the changes. Insofar as the book demonstrates the extent to which change and competition look set to become ever-more constant features of the lives of all people, I find it worrisome. India and China might not be quite as ready to take over as he seems to indicate, but the extent of competition in an increasingly globalized world has undeniably expanded. Like most people, I worry about whether I am going to be able to manage.

Friedman’s analysis of global terrorism includes some insightful discussion: especially with regards to the importance of humiliation as a motivating phenomenon. Understanding the psychology of terrorism – and why well-educated Saudis have become suicide bombers, but virtually no Indian Muslims or any type – is clearly essential for dealing with the problem.

In summary, while the book is overly long and sometimes lacking in analytical quality, it is worthwhile to have a look through, especially if you’re looking for examples of how business practices are changing as the result of increased global communications, competition, and supply chains. I don’t think The Economist was entirely justified in calling the book “a dreary failure,” but it certainly isn’t a stunning success.

Changing gears, I am going to read Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love next. It has been on my discretionary reading list for so long now that I can’t remember who was the other party to my promise that I would read it.

Summer employment: bookshops

Reasons for which working at a book store for the summer – ideally Blackwells – is an increasingly appealing option:

Working in a retail environment without a ‘hard sell’ character would be a refreshing break from Staples. Nobody is going to tell you that you need to ask probing questions to determine the literary needs of shoppers, then argue why a particular book suits those needs, then overcome their objections and sell them accessories. I enjoy being in a position to help people, but strongly dislike being in a position where I am under pressure to put them under pressure.
Friends of mine who worked in book stores (especially Kate) really seemed to enjoy it.
You can never know enough about literature or contemporary fiction.
Staff discounts: useful both for summer reading and the acquisition of thesis related books.
A high probability of literary discussions and the meeting of fellow appreciators of books.

The biggest potential liability is that such an employment environment might not allow the flexibility required for the travel I am hoping to do. It’s something to ask about if I get interviewed, in any case.

Having already dropped off a resume and cover letter at Blackwells, what other book shops might I apply to? There’s IQ, but it seems to be a really small place – though one that seems to be quite well admired. There are Borders and Waterstones, neither of which has the same institutional feel as Blackwells, but which are nonetheless possibilities. Since Blackwells is something of a tourist attraction in its own right, they are also more likely to take on extra staff for the summer, despite the exodus of students.
What other possible summer jobs do people recommend?