- Sloane, Eric.
The Cracker Barrel.
Mineola, NY: Dover, [1967] 2005.
ISBN 0-486-44101-6.
-
In the 1960s, artist and antiquarian Eric Sloane wrote a
syndicated column of which many of the best are
collected in this volume. This is an excellent book for
browsing in random order in the odd moment, but like the
contents of the eponymous barrel, it's hard to stop after
just one, so you may devour the whole thing at one sitting.
Hey, at least it isn't fattening!
The column format allowed Sloane to address a variety of topics which
didn't permit book-length treatment. There are gems here about word
origins, what was good and not so good about “the good old days”,
tools and techniques (the “variable wrench” is pure genius), art and
the business of being an artist, and much more. Each column is
illustrated with one of Sloane's marvelous line drawings. Praise be
to Dover for putting this classic back into print where it belongs.
- Foden, Giles.
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth.
London: Penguin, 2004.
ISBN 0-14-100984-5.
-
Only a perfect idiot would undertake to transport two forty foot
mahogany motorboats from London to Cape Town and then onward to Lake
Tanganyika by ship, rail, steam tractor, and teams of oxen, there to
challenge German dominance of the lake during World War I by
attempting to sink a ship three times the length and seven times the
displacement of the fragile craft. Fortunately, the Admiralty found
just the man in Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simpson, in 1915 the oldest
Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, his ascent through the ranks
having been retarded due to his proclivity for sinking British
ships. Spicer-Simpson was an inveterate raconteur
of tall tales and insufferable know-it-all (on the ship bound for
South Africa he was heard lecturing the Astronomer Royal of Cape Town
on the southern constellations), and was eccentric in about as many
ways as can be packed into a single human frame. Still, he and his
motley team, despite innumerable misadventures (many self-inflicted),
got the job done, sinking the ship they were sent to and capturing
another German vessel, the first German warship ever captured by the
Royal Navy. Afterward, Spicer-Simpson rather blotted his copybook by
declining to engage first a German fort and then a warship both later
found to have been “armed” only with wooden dummy guns. His exploits
caused him to be worshipped as a god by the Holo-holo tribe, who
fashioned clay effigies of him, but rather less impressed the
Admiralty who, despite awarding him the DSO, re-assigned him upon his
return to the routine desk job he had before the adventure. HMS
Mimi and Toutou were the boats under
Spicer-Simpson's command, soon joined by the captured German ship
which was rechristened HMS Fifi. The events described
herein (very loosely) inspired C.S.Forester's 1935 novel
The African Queen and the 1951
Bogart/Hepburn film.
A U.S. edition is now available, titled
Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure, but at present
only in hardcover. A U.S. paperback is
scheduled for March, 2006.
- Radosh, Ronald and Allis Radosh.
Red Star over Hollywood.
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005.
ISBN 1-893554-96-1.
-
The Hollywood blacklist has become one of the most mythic
elements of the mid-20th century Red scare. Like most myths,
especially those involving tinseltown, it has been re-scripted
into a struggle of good (falsely-accused artists defending
free speech) versus evil (paranoid witch hunters bent on
censorship) at the expense of a large part of the detail and
complexity of the actual events. In this book, drawing upon
contemporary sources, recently released documents from the FBI
and House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and
interviews with surviving participants in the events, the authors
patiently assemble the story of what really happened, which
is substantially different than the stories retailed by
partisans of the respective sides. The evolution of those
who joined the Communist Party out of idealism, were repelled
by its totalitarian attempts to control their creative work
and/or the cynicism of its support for the 1939–1941
Nazi/Soviet pact, yet who risked their careers to save those
of others by refusing to name other Party members, is evocatively
sketched, along with the agenda of HUAC, which FBI documents
now reveal actually had lists of party members before the
hearings began, and were thus grandstanding to gain publicity
and intimidate the studios into firing those who would not
deny Communist affiliations. History isn't as tidy as
myth: the accusers were perfectly correct in claiming that
a substantial number of prominent Hollywood figures were
members of the Communist Party, and the accused were perfectly
correct in their claim that apart from a few egregious
exceptions, Soviet and pro-communist propaganda was not
inserted into Hollywood films. A mystery about one of
those exceptions, the 1943 Warner Brothers film
Mission to Moscow,
which defended the Moscow show trials, is cleared up here. I've
always wondered why, since many of the Red-baiting films of the 1950s
are cult classics, this exemplar of the ideological inverse
(released, after all, when the U.S. and Soviet Union were allies in
World War II) has never made it to video. Well, apparently those who
currently own the rights are sufficiently embarrassed by it that
apart from one of the rare prints being run on television, the only
place you can see it is at the film library of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York or in the archive of the University of Wisconsin.
Ronald Radosh is author of
Commies (July 2001)
and co-author of
The Rosenberg File (August 2002).
- Kurzweil, Ray.
The Singularity Is Near.
New York: Viking, 2005.
ISBN 0-670-03384-7.
-
What happens if Moore's Law—the annual doubling of computing power
at constant cost—just keeps on going? In this book,
inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist Ray Kurzweil extrapolates the
long-term faster than exponential growth (the exponent is itself
growing exponentially) in computing power to the point where the
computational capacity of the human brain is available for about
US$1000 (around 2020, he estimates), reverse engineering and
emulation of human brain structure permits machine intelligence
indistinguishable from that of humans as defined by the Turing test
(around 2030), and the subsequent (and he believes inevitable)
runaway growth in artificial intelligence leading to a technological
singularity around 2045 when US$1000 will purchase computing power
comparable to that of all presently-existing human brains and the new
intelligence created in that single year will be a billion times
greater than that of the entire intellectual heritage of human
civilisation prior to that date. He argues that the inhabitants of
this brave new world, having transcended biological computation in
favour of nanotechnological substrates “trillions of trillions of
times more capable” will remain human, having preserved their
essential identity and evolutionary heritage across this leap to
Godlike intellectual powers. Then what? One might as well have asked
an ant to speculate on what newly-evolved hominids would end up
accomplishing, as the gap between ourselves and these super cyborgs
(some of the precursors of which the author argues are alive today)
is probably greater than between arthropod and anthropoid.
Throughout this tour de force of boundless
technological optimism, one is impressed by the author's adamantine
intellectual integrity. This is not an advocacy document—in fact,
Kurzweil's view is that the events he envisions are essentially
inevitable given the technological, economic, and moral (curing
disease and alleviating suffering) dynamics driving them.
Potential roadblocks are discussed candidly, along with the
existential risks posed by the genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics
(GNR) revolutions which will set the stage for the singularity. A
chapter is devoted to responding to critics of various aspects of the
argument, in which opposing views are treated with respect.
I'm not going to expound further in great detail. I suspect a majority of
people who read these comments will, in all likelihood, read the book
themselves (if they haven't already) and make up their own minds about it.
If you are at all interested in the evolution of technology in this
century and its consequences for the humans who are creating it, this
is certainly a book you should read. The balance of these remarks
discuss various matters which came to mind as I read the book; they may
not make much sense unless you've read it (You are going to
read it, aren't you?), but may highlight things to reflect upon as you do.
- Switching off the simulation. Page 404 raises a
somewhat arcane risk I've pondered at some length. Suppose
our entire universe is a simulation run on some
super-intelligent being's computer. (What's the purpose of
the universe? It's a science fair project!) What
should we do to avoid having the simulation turned off, which
would be bad? Presumably, the most likely reason to stop the
simulation is that it's become boring. Going through a
technological singularity, either from the inside or from the
outside looking in, certainly doesn't sound boring, so
Kurzweil argues that working toward the singularity protects
us, if we be simulated, from having our plug pulled. Well,
maybe, but suppose the explosion in computing power
accessible to the simulated beings (us) at the singularity
exceeds that available to run the simulation? (This is
plausible, since post-singularity computing rapidly
approaches its ultimate physical limits.) Then one imagines
some super-kid running
top to figure out what's
slowing down the First Superbeing Shooter game he's running
and killing the CPU hog process. There are also things we
can do which might increase the risk of the
simulation's being switched off. Consider, as I've
proposed, precision fundamental physics experiments aimed at
detecting round-off errors in the simulation (manifested, for
example, as small violations of conservation laws). Once the
beings in the simulation twig to the fact that they're in a
simulation and that their reality is no more accurate than
double precision floating point, what's the point to letting
it run?
- Fifty bits per atom? In the description of the
computational capacity of a rock (p. 131), the
calculation assumes that 100 bits of memory can be encoded in
each atom of a disordered medium. I don't get it; even
reliably storing a single bit per atom is difficult to
envision. Using the “precise position, spin, and quantum
state” of a large ensemble of atoms as mentioned on
p. 134 seems highly dubious.
- Luddites. The risk from anti-technology backlash is
discussed in some detail. (“Ned Ludd” himself joins in some of the
trans-temporal dialogues.) One can imagine the next generation
of anti-globalist demonstrators taking to the streets to
protest the “evil corporations conspiring to make us all
rich and immortal”.
- Fundamentalism. Another risk is posed by fundamentalism,
not so much of the religious variety, but rather fundamentalist
humanists who perceive the migration of humans to non-biological
substrates (at first by augmentation, later by uploading) as
repellent to their biological conception of humanity. One is
inclined, along with the author, simply to wait until these folks
get old enough to need a hip replacement, pacemaker, or cerebral
implant to reverse a degenerative disease to motivate them to
recalibrate their definition of “purely biological”. Still,
I'm far from the first to observe that Singularitarianism (chapter 7)
itself has some things in common with religious fundamentalism.
In particular, it requires faith in rationality (which, as Karl
Popper observed, cannot be rationally justified), and that the
intentions of super-intelligent beings, as Godlike in their
powers compared to humans as we are to
Saccharomyces
cerevisiae,
will be benign and that they will receive us
into eternal life and bliss. Haven't I heard this somewhere before?
The main difference is that the Singularitarian doesn't just aspire
to Heaven, but to Godhood Itself. One downside of this may be that
God gets quite irate.
- Vanity. I usually try to avoid the “Washington read”
(picking up a book and flipping immediately to the index to
see if I'm in it), but I happened to notice in passing I made
this one, for a minor citation in footnote 47 to chapter
2.
- Spindle cells. The material about “spindle
cells” on pp. 191–194 is absolutely fascinating. These are very
large, deeply and widely interconnected neurons which are
found only in humans and a few great apes. Humans
have about 80,000 spindle cells, while gorillas have 16,000,
bonobos 2,100 and chimpanzees 1,800. If you're intrigued by
what makes humans human, this looks like a promising place to
start.
- Speculative physics. The author shares my interest in
physics verging on the fringe, and, turning the pages of this
book, we come across such topics as possible ways to exceed
the speed of light, black hole ultimate computers,
stable wormholes and closed timelike curves (a.k.a. time machines),
baby universes, cold fusion, and more. Now, none of these things
is in any way relevant to nor necessary for the advent of the
singularity, which requires only well-understood mainstream
physics. The speculative topics enter primarily in discussions of
the ultimate limits on a post-singularity civilisation and the
implications for the destiny of intelligence in the universe. In a way
they may distract from the argument, since a reader might be
inclined to dismiss the singularity as yet another woolly speculation,
which it isn't.
- Source citations. The end notes contain many
citations of articles in Wired, which I consider
an entertainment medium rather than a reliable source of
technological information. There are also references to
articles in Wikipedia, where any idiot can modify anything
any time they feel like it. I would not consider any
information from these sources reliable unless independently
verified from more scholarly publications.
- “You apes wanna live forever?” Kurzweil doesn't just
anticipate the singularity, he hopes to personally experience
it, to which end (p. 211) he ingests “250 supplements
(pills) a day and … a half-dozen
intravenous therapies each week”. Setting aside the shots,
just envision two hundred and fifty pills each and every
day! That's 1,750 pills a week or, if you're awake sixteen
hours a day, an average of more than 15 pills per waking
hour, or one pill about every four minutes (one presumes they
are swallowed in batches, not spaced out, which would make
for a somewhat odd social life). Between the year 2000 and
the estimated arrival of human-level artificial intelligence
in 2030, he will swallow in excess of two and a half million
pills, which makes one wonder what the probability of choking
to death on any individual pill might be. He remarks,
“Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually
conservative—and optimal (based on my current knowledge).”
Well, okay, but I'd worry about a “strategy for preventing
heart disease [which] is to adopt ten different
heart-disease-prevention therapies that attack each of the
known risk factors” running into unanticipated interactions,
given how everything in biology tends to connect to
everything else. There is little discussion of the
alternative approach to immortality with which many
nanotechnologists of the
mambo chicken
persuasion are enamoured, which involves severing the heads
of recently deceased individuals and freezing them in liquid
nitrogen in sure and certain hope of the resurrection unto
eternal life.
- Goscinny, René and Albert Uderzo.
Le ciel lui tombe sur la tête.
Paris: Albert René, 2005.
ISBN 2-86497-170-4.
-
Credit me with some restraint—I waited ten whole days
after volume 33 of the
Astérix
saga appeared before devouring it in
one sitting. If it isn't sufficiently obvious from the author's remark
at the end of the album, note that planet “Tadsylwien” is an
anagram of “Walt Disney”. The diffuse reflection
of the countryside in the spherical spaceship on p. 8 is magnificently
done.
- Paul, Pamela.
Pornified.
New York: Times Books, 2005.
ISBN 0-8050-7745-6.
-
If you've been on the receiving end of Internet junk mail as I've been
until I discovered a few technical tricks
(here and
here) which, along
with Annoyance Filter, have
essentially eliminated spam from my mailbox, you're probably aware
that the popular culture of the Internet is, to a substantial extent,
about pornography and that this marvelous global packet switching
medium is largely a means for delivering pornography both to those
who seek it and those who find it, unsolicited, in their electronic
mailboxes or popping up on their screens.
This is an integral part of the explosive growth of pornography along
with the emergence of new media. In 1973, there were fewer than a
thousand pornographic movie theatres in the U.S. (p 54). Building on the first
exponential growth curve driven by home video, the Internet is bringing
pornography to everybody connected and reducing the cost asymptotically to zero. On
“peer to peer” networks such as Kazaa, 73% of all movie searches are
for pornography and 24% of image searches are for child pornography (p. 60).
It's one thing to talk about free speech, but another to ask what the
consequences might be of this explosion of consumption of material which is
largely directed at men, and which not only objectifies but increasingly, as
the standard of “edginess” ratchets upward, degrades women and supplants
the complexity of adult human relationships with the fantasy instant gratification
of “adult entertainment”.
Mark Schwartz, clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St. Louis,
hardly a puritanical institution, says (p. 142) “Pornography is having a dramatic
effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways—and
nobody outside the sexual behavior field and the psychiatric community is talking
about it.” This book, by Time magazine contributor Pamela Paul,
talks about it, interviewing both professionals surveying the landscape and
individuals affected in various ways by the wave of pornography sweeping over
developed countries connected to the Internet. Paul quotes Judith Coché, a clinical
psychologist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has 25 years
experience in therapy practice as saying (p. 180), “We have an epidemic on our hands. The
growth of pornography and its impact on young people is really, really dangerous.
And the most dangerous part is that we don't even realize what's happening.”
Ironically, part of this is due to the overwhelming evidence of the pernicious
consequences of excessive consumption of pornography and its tendency to
progress into addictive behaviour from the Zillman and Bryant studies and
others, which have made academic ethics committees reluctant to approve follow-up
studies involving human subjects (p. 90). Would you vote, based on the evidence in hand,
for a double blind study of the effects of tobacco or heroin on previously unexposed
subjects?
In effect, with the technologically-mediated collapse of the social strictures
against pornography, we've embarked upon a huge, entirely unplanned, social and
cultural experiment unprecedented in human history. This book will make people on
both sides of the debate question their assumptions; the author, while clearly
appalled by the effects of pornography on many of the people she interviews, is
forthright in her opposition to censorship. Even if you have no interest in
pornography nor strong opinions for or against it, there's little doubt that the
ever-growing intrusiveness and deviance of pornography on the Internet will be
a “wedge issue” in the coming battle over the
secure Internet, so the message of
this book, unwelcome as it may be, should be something which everybody interested in
preserving both our open society and the fragile culture which sustains it
ponders at some length.