Anathem

Neal Stephenson writes ambitious books. I got hooked with Snow Crash(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), an amazingly imaginative book about near-future virtual worlds; Zodiac(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) is required reading for anyone interested in chemistry and the environment; I had mixed feelings about Cryptonomicon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but only because it was two books in one, and only one of those books was excellent; The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was a fabulously weird exploration of a New Victorian culture with nanotechnology; and
I ate up his big trilogy, The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Confusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)
, and The System of the World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)), which I consider his best to date — historical fiction bubbling over with a fascinatingly skewed perspective on the Enlightenment. He’s definitely one of my favorite authors. He’s an acquired taste; he often seems to abandon the narrative of his book to go noodling about with strange ideas, and it can be frustrating if you read a book with the goal of getting to the end. On the other hand, all of those little distractions and detours seem to culminate in fireworks, so as long as you’re willing to go along for the ride, they’re great.

Now he has a new one out, Anathem(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to finish it. I’m about halfway into it, and it’s a difficult read (most of his books are), but no fireworks. It definitely has an interesting idea at the core, but it doesn’t seem to be one that translates into an interesting novel.

The premise is that it is a story of an alien culture where the philosopher-mathematicians are set aside and isolated from the general population, living in monastery-like “concents” where they live a life focused on ritual and contemplation of their work, undistracted by the outside world of saeculars or even the interests of the applied science and technology class, the itas. The life of these mathematicians very much parallels the life of monks in our world, except they aren’t religious at all — they’re even called “avout” (rather than devout) to emphasize the agnostic nature of their existence. Every once in a while, the outside world intrudes: there are regular events every decade, century, or millennium when the doors of the concents are opened and avouts briefly mingle with the extramuros, or world outside, and in times of need the saeculars will evoke individual avouts, calling them to work in their specialty in the world beyond the concent. Anathem is about a small group of avouts who are suddenly called to carry out a little peregrination after astronomers notice something peculiar in the sky.

As I admitted, I’ve only made it halfway through so far, so perhaps there is some excitement coming up, but I have to admit: the lives of scholastic hermits are excruciatingly boring. No offense intended to any mathematicians reading this, but I think even you would find these math monks tedious, since the excitement (I presume) of their discipline is only described vaguely and indirectly, since no actual math is directly described in the text (there are a couple of appendices that describe some proofs). Of course, this is a small blessing to the rest of us, because perhaps the only thing more dreary than describing the lives of obsessed mathematicians would be a book describing the actual mathematics of a collection of obsessed mathematicians. It does not, however, enthuse the reader to contemplate how easily this book could have been rendered even more uneventful and abstract.

So far, in my progress through the book, we have explored this strange world of Stephenson’s and been introduced to the life of the avout, and a small group of central characters. They have been evoked, and are crossing over the North Pole on their way to a remote continent, where, somehow, they are going to solve (I presume) they mystery of a pattern of lights observed in orbit around the world, which for some so-far unexplained reason, has unsettled many influential people among the saeculars. Not much has happened, actually. It’s a fine exercise in science-fiction world-building, especially if you are fond of dessicated academics, but as stories go…it’s a little less than enthralling.

I should mention that being halfway through it means I’m on page 450.

Like I said, I’m beginning to doubt that I will make it to the end of this epic journey. I am parched and fading, and there aren’t even any fireworks. I may bring it along on my next plane trip, but even there I fear it will only promote more napping while airborne.

The book has another flaw, which you may deduce from my summary. Stephenson is making up words like a Pentecostal on a meth/caffeine/LSD cocktail. I can understand why he’s doing it — it’s to give his philosophomathematicians an atmosphere of the cloister and the cathedral while not freighting them with any kind of religious sense — but it makes the whole book even more wearing. I got this book for fun (fireworks!), it’s already turning into a hard slog, and on top of that, I have to learn a whole new language in order to understand it? Ouch. Even the title is one of his odd hybrid words!

Randall Munroe seems to be feeling the same way I do.

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This book is only for True Fans™ of Neal Stephenson, and even at that, I suspect there will be much shuffling of feet and averted eyes when it comes up for discussion at the SF cons.

Bookclub on autism

The ScienceBlogs Book Club has started up again, and this time around the book under discussion is Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Offit has an entry over there right now, and more will be piling on soon.

This is a good subject to tackle, too: the anti-vaccination clowns are yet another outbreak of lunacy and innumeracy and anti-science nuttery, and Offit’s book fights the good fight. Expect howls of outrage from the clowns.

(By the way, one of the circuses full of clowns is trying to oppose our poll-crushing. If you haven’t voted for Amanda and science yet, get on over there and make them cry.)

Like MST3K for fundagelifiction

Many of you already know that Slacktivist has been doing a detailed deconstruction of the first book of the Left Behind series. He has posted a long, painful, entertaining analysis of a few pages in order every Friday for over four years: it’s been like gawking at a major train wreck, since the book is terribly written and an incomprehensible edifice of illogic and anti-realism gussied up with the most appalling lack of imagination.

At long last, he has turned the last few pages of the last chapter. There about 11 more books in the series, I think, and some spin-off books and prequels (I saw one for kids about kids living through the End Times), and I kind of hope for his sanity’s sake that he doesn’t start plowing through them, but on the other hand, it has been an entertaining exercise in the schadenfreude of truly bad literature, and I don’t want it to stop. It seems a little unfair that the one enjoyable part of this series, the demolition of its tawdriness, has to come to an end, while the hacks who created these potboilers and milked millions of undiscriminating, credulous readers continue on, making megabucks on dreck.

Pop-sci book meme

Jennifer Oullette has put together a pop-sci book meme (and John Lynch has joined in). It’s the usual thing, a long list of books and you’re supposed to highlight the ones you’ve read, this time with the theme being that they’re all about science somehow. I detect a physics bias in Ms. Oullette’s choices, however, despite the excellent beginning — and it’s to that I ascribe my poor performance. That and some weird choices: since when is Neuromancer pop-sci? Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon or Snowcrash would be better choices if we’re going to throw fiction in the mix, or Sterling’s Schismatrix. If we open the door to SF, though, the howling hordes will pour in and we’ll never get anything done.

Anyway, here’s my copy of the list:

  1. Micrographia, Robert Hooke
  2. The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
  3. Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
  4. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
  5. Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
  6. The Devil’s Doctor, Philip Ball
  7. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
  8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
  9. Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman
  10. 1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow
  11. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
  12. Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer
  13. Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore
  14. Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley
  15. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
  16. A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes
  17. Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
  18. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
  19. Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz
  20. Vermeer’s Camera, Philip Steadman
  21. The Code Book, Simon Singh
  22. The Elements of Murder, John Emsley
  23. Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer
  24. Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis
  25. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson
  26. Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
  27. Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
  28. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine
  29. A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre
  30. The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss
  31. E=mc2, David Bodanis
  32. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife
  33. Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman
  34. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin
  35. Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
  36. Apollo’s Fire, Michael Sims
  37. Flatland, Edward Abbott
  38. Fermat’s Last Theorem, Amir Aczel
  39. Stiff, Mary Roach
  40. Astroturf, M.G. Lord
  41. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
  42. Longitude, Dava Sobel
  43. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
  44. The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle
  45. The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio
  46. Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay
  47. This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin
  48. The Executioner’s Current, Richard Moran
  49. Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
  50. Pythagorus’ Trousers, Margaret Wertheim
  51. Neuromancer, William Gibson
  52. The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios
  53. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel
  54. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik
  55. Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, Peter Galison
  56. The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
  57. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
  58. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
  59. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
  60. Consilience, E.O. Wilson
  61. Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould
  62. Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
  63. Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel
  64. The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
  65. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
  66. Storm World, Chris Mooney
  67. The Carbon Age, Eric Roston
  68. The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind
  69. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
  70. From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
  71. Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
  72. Chaos, James Gleick
  73. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
  74. The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
  75. Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais

Jennifer did suggest that we make additions, so let’s beef up the biology a bit with a few more off the top of my head (OK, McPhee and Rudwick are geology…but that needs bolstering, too!).

  1. Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski
  2. Basin and Range, John McPhee
  3. Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
  4. Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod
  5. Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, Olivia Judson
  6. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll
  7. Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Carl Zimmer
  8. Genome, Matt Ridley
  9. Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
  10. It Ain’t Necessarily So, Richard Lewontin
  11. On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
  12. Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran
  13. The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins
  14. The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd
  15. The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson
  16. The Great Devonian Controversy, Martin Rudwick
  17. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
  18. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
  19. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, Richard Lewontin
  20. Time, Love, Memory, Jonathan Weiner
  21. Voyaging and The Power of Place, Janet Browne
  22. Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier

What I’m reading right now is Top Secret

Sastra here.

I’m about halfway through, and really enjoying, Robert Price’s new book, Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today’s Pop Mysticisms.

Bob Price has an interesting background: he started out as a roaring Pentacostal Minister, gradually grew into a high-end Christian theologian, and eventually evolved to his present form as secular humanist. He’s currently teaching classes in comparative religion — and also happens to be an expert on HP Lovecraft and science fiction. I think this wide-ranging perspective gives him a particular advantage when dealing with religious topics. He’s been into almost everything, and can compare, contrast, and understand different mindsets with apparent ease. His analogies are often original, and spot on.

Even atheists are still influenced by the religious beliefs they once held. I was raised “freethinker.” Nobody at school knew what that meant, and I had a hard time explaining it, since I wasn’t sure what the alternative was. I wasn’t taught any particular religion, but it seemed to be a cultural prerequisite for having a “meaning,” so I would pick up bits and strands of things that seemed interesting to me, and try them on. I remember deciding in 5th grade to worship the Greek gods, since they would clearly be available, and very grateful for the attention. It seemed odd that they had so few current fans. But, by the time I was a teenager, I became enamored of the “psychic sciences,” and got into New Age.

Having since gotten myself OUT of New Age, I am particularly interested in books and articles that address and critique these self-proclaimed more enlightened, sophisticated, “holistic” forms of spirituality. My interest is not merely personal: such views are still held by many intelligent, well-educated, liberal-thinking people – and many of them take it all very seriously, and yield the power to have it taken seriously in secular arenas. These are not really marginal beliefs. As Price writes:

[Read more…]

Only a Theory

I published a review in Nature this week, of Ken Miller’s Only a Theory(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and boy, was that a tough one. The catch was that I want the book to do well, and I definitely think it has a place as an appeal to the religious majority to support good science (you know, all those people who see my demonic visage leering out at them from the top left corner of this page and want to call for an exorcist), but it also irritated me greatly on several important points.

I think it’s a much better book than his previous, Finding Darwin’s God(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). That book had one point where it simply drove off the cliff with a bunch of handwaving about god dwelling in quantum indeterminacy, which made it virtually unreadable beyond that point. There is no cliff in this one; instead, it’s threaded with some annoying biases throughout.

The big one for me was a lot of naive American exceptionalism, and that’s the issue for which I took him to task in the Nature review. Why does the US have such an aberrant problem with creationism, while Europe does not? I would have answered with something about a tradition of religiosity and anti-intellectualism, and maybe something about a rough-and-ready credulity that allowed for the rapid proliferation of widely variant sects; the recent renascence of creationism under the guise of ID owes something to raging relativism, too. In Miller’s eyes, creationism has absolutely nothing to do with religion at all — it’s all about the American virtues of rebelliousness and disrespect, to which we also owe our eminence in science.

This is news to me, especially lately since Miller’s co-religionists have been madly flinging bricks at me for daring to disrespect their peculiar superstitions. I also don’t think the sheep flocking to the mega-churches are flaunting their rebelliousness…it’s more an expression of conformity. There isn’t one true revolutionary among the creationist hordes, only a mob trying to defend hallowed superstitions from the encroaching modernity. Any explanation for the popularity of creationism that discounts the impact of religion for the worse is like trying to explain the motion of a car while completely ignoring the engine compartment.

The other annoyance of his book creeps in gradually. He’s clearly a fan of Simon Conway Morris’s view that life roughly of our sort was inevitable, that while evolution would lead to variations in the details, a human-like mind was a consequence that was programmed into the starting conditions of the universe. If we restarted the Earth at a point 4 billion years ago, the planet would eventually cough up a pile of social animals that would start going to church and praising their heavenly creator — maybe they wouldn’t be mammals, but our molluscan or reptilian or echinoderm replacements on Alternate Earth would still be occupying a similar niche to ours, and would still be fulfilling the rough outlines of the vision set in motion by a loving god.

This is, of course, untestable wishful thinking, and not at all supported by the science, which shows a genuine role for chance. Real chance. Not the chance of Miller, which is that of a god who throws dice most of the time, but when it is really, really important, he fudges the results a little bit to make sure he wins.

Still, you should read the book. Ignore the apologetics, and don’t trust anything he says about the origins of creationism in the US, but do read it for the excellent rebuttals to common creationist claims. This is a book I’d hand to any creationist students who try to argue against evolution on religious grounds, but I think it would only take them partway to a realistic view of how life came to be.

Ice, Mud and Blood

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I’m very fond of Chris Turney‘s book, Bones, Rocks, and Stars. It’s a slender, simple description of the many tools scientists use to figure out how old something is, and when arguing with young earth creationists, it’s become the first thing I recommend to them. It’s short and easy to read, and focuses on explaining how dating methods work.

Turney has a new book out: Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). This is the one you’ll be able to hand to climate change denialists, and it’s a winner.

Its virtues are the same as his previous book, the careful documentation of exactly how we know what we know, and less dictation of the conclusions. This is useful, because as we all know, climate is a phenomenon that shows a lot of variability, exhibits patterns in its history, and also has large degrees of uncertainty, phenomena that denialists can seize upon to magnify that uncertainty into a basis for an unwarranted rejection of well-supported hypotheses. So while we can see distinct variations from simple linear uniformity of climate change like the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, that doesn’t change the fact that greenhouse gases profoundly influence earth’s temperature, and it’s clear that CO2 has risen to levels the planet hasn’t seen in at least 650,000 years. The past tells us what we can expect in the future, and it’s grounds for serious concern. Yes, Turner comes down firmly on the side of an anthropogenic cause for the current trend of global warming, and he explains exactly why, step by step.

Where Turner departs from the formula of his last book, though, is that this one, while still fairly short, is much denser and more technical. Anyone can read it — I managed, despite knowing next to nothing about climatology — but it’s not the kind of thing you’ll be able to do in an evening or two of light reading. There are a few places where the level of detail slowed me down to a steady slog rather than a fast flit, but face it, any book that tries to untangle ocean currents, monsoons, El Nino, and past current reversals is going to occasionally demand the same level of studious, focused attention you’d need to clean up a snarled fishing reel. This is a book that is describing some extraordinarily complicated stuff.

If you want just one book, not too thick or too technical, that will give you the intellectual tools to at least understand what the climate change experts are talking about, this is the one. I recommend bringing it to the beach and reading it there — you’ll appreciate the rising tide and the ocean beaches a little more, and perhaps regard them with a little more respectful dread.

Two book lists

I’ve been sent two lists of “10 Books That Screwed Up the World”, and I’m not very impressed with either of them. The first is from a new book by Benjamin Wanker Wiker of the same title, published by Regnery Press, the imprint of right-wing wackaloons everywhere. Here’s Wiker’s list:

  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Discourse on Method, Descartes
  • Leviathan, Hobbes
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • The Descent of Man, Darwin
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey

Here’s another list, which seems to be inspired by Wiker’s, but with a few substitutions.

  • Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger
  • Democracy and Education, Dewey
  • Baby and Child Care, Spock
  • The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • Darwin’s Black Box, Behe

Bleh. A list of books that screwed up the world ought to include books that have actually had some major impact for the worse on the lives of large numbers of people: I can definitely see that for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the Malleus Maleficarum. Others, not so much. Coming of Age in Samoa may have confused the discipline of anthropology for a while, but putting it on the same list as Mein Kampf is simply ridiculous. The work of Marx has been potent and maybe deserves to be on these lists because we’re still living with the ideological struggle that it was part of…but really, it ought to include both sides, and Adam Smith’s work doesn’t seem to be here.

Darwin’s book is a science text that describes an empirical reality. To claim that it screwed up the world is like declaring that Newton’s Principia, because it described difficult facts, hurt us. It’s only on the list because Wiker is a Discovery Institute cretin.

Kinsey is on the list because he makes homophobic wingnuts feel uncomfortably icky. I don’t think that making the likes of Benjamin Wiker feel all squirmy in his pants qualifies as screwing up the world.

And Behe? You’ve got to be kidding. His book is inconsequential noise, error after error larded with silly egotism. It’s the work of a popular crackpot; if you’re going to include that, then we need to include the works of Velikovsky and Chopra and every astrologer, acupuncturist, homeopathist, quack, and faith healer ever written.

And most damning of all, it is impossible to take these lists seriously when they’ve left off the works that have been overwhelmingly influential, incredibly widely read, and have led billions of people into delusion and stupidity: the Christian bible and the Koran. Toss in the Book of Mormon and Dianetics and any holy book you can imagine as equally fit for condemnation. Isn’t it glaringly obvious that both lists omit any work that is explicitly religious? It’s another example of unthinking privilege handed to theological gobbledygook.