March 18, 2008
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)
Arthur C. Clarke died from breathing complications today at his home in Sri Lanka. He was 90 years old.
How do I express the profound impact of Clarke on my own life? He co-wrote the screenplay to my favorite film (2001: A Space Odyssey), and wrote several science-fiction novels that deeply affected me (e.g. Childhood's End, Rendevous With Rama, and Fountains of Paradise). He had an extensive career in both space and undersea research and helped bring the Space Age to the common man. Few writers have had the personal impact that Clarke has (only Vonnegut, Jr., Heinlein and Larry Niven -- whom I've met on several occasions -- are in the same Pantheon).
Like Al Gore, he is credited with promoting some advanced concepts that eventually became reality, including geosynchronous satellites. He's been a staunch supporter of the Space Elevator, which if ever built, will almost certainly be named the Clarke Elevator as has the geosync orbit of Earth (the Clarke Orbit). He left three wishes at the event of his 90th birthday, and among them was the desire for humanity to discover life on other worlds. This is a common theme of his works.
I would be remiss if I didn't weigh in, so to speak, on Clarke's eccentricities. I was dismayed when the accusations of pedophilia arose around the time that Clarke was being knighted. I would not be surprised to find out if he was a homosexual, and that would hardly diminish my respect for him and his work. It certainly has been a particular spectre for British geniuses, with the suicide of Alan Turing being the most painful example. No wonder Clarke chose to live abroad most of his life. His insistence on staying in Sri Lanka always exposed him to danger from extremists, but he apparently felt safe there. I'm sure the island nation is a spectacular place to live.
In his later years, his productivity naturally diminished, but not before he could pen 3001, a fitting and moving end to the 2001 series. He ties up some loose ends, reveals the limits of the interstellar intelligences (they being vulnerable to software virii), and makes a strong threat about global warming and zero-point energy. He also gave an interesting "look back" on our times, and that is always the hallmark of excellent science-fiction.
Clarke's writing was usually crisp, technically brilliant, and in his later work, richer in character development. The profound ideas in his stories are what shaped my own views of the Universe and our place in it. I will miss him, and always cherish his work.
Posted by Steven at 09:42 AM | Comments (1)
November 20, 2005
Gaia
by James Lovelock
Lovelock was hired by NASA to help design experiments for the Viking Mars Lander mission; specifically, to detect 'life' on Mars.
Early on, he discovered that there is no scientific definition of life. "We know it when we see it" is a common mindset about the problem. Unfortunately, this is hard to convey to machines. His thinking about the problem, on a planetary scale, led to the contraversial Gaia Hypothesis:
Life regulates the biosphere of planets in a way that creates habitable conditions.
The practical upshot of which is, a living planet looks very different (chemically) from a dead one. And a notion arises from this hypothesis: the planet itself is a huge, living thing.
This idea is (not surprisingly) very contraversial. It brings a quasi-religious aspect to a Scientific observation, and makes many mainline religious people uncomfortable. Afterall, they didn't just spend the last two thousand years attacking any animistic or naturalistic deism just to find their place at the top of the religion food chain blown away by Science.
Is the Science behind the Gaia hypothesis sound? Earth's atmosphere is almost 20% oxygen, in a form (O2) that readily combines with almost any other element in a highly exothermic reaction. In otherwords, Earth's air is explosive, and that's not the way it would be if it were a dead world (like, say, Mars). Life puts the oxygen in the atmosphere in a complicated balance between plants and animals that runs completely counter to chemistry and the laws of thermodynamics.
When I read this book, I was blown away by the idea that the entire Earth was somehow alive itself. Lovelock makes some pretty amazing and reaching statements (like the idea that plate techtonics are driven by living processes) but the basic premise seems pretty sound to me. I don't have any problem with his basic notion, and the environmental movement has embraced this wholeheartedly.
Really, the only groups that hate the Gaia Hypothesis are those that have planetary reach and planetary domination in mind (e.g. international corporations and religions). This idea means that they are subverting a huge structure, and even the parent of us all. Apollo 8 gave us (humans) the first view of Earth as a planet, alone in space. Lovelock gave it a soul.
We're all children of Gaia.
Posted by Steven at 04:56 PM | Comments (1)
November 13, 2005
The Discoverers
A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself
By Daniel J. Boorstin
I got this book through the Quality Paperback Book Club in the mid-80's, not really knowning what to expect. It turned out to be a gem of a work, covering many, many facets of human history in several "Books".
I remember being enchanted reading it the first time. The prose is easy to follow, and the events, places and people chosen were quite interesting. What I didn't appreciate until much later is how much depth there is in this work.
Boorstin popularlized history in his works during the 80's and 90's, but this book, in addition to being very non-technical, was also quite rich in it's selection of history's important events and people. Since I've taken up reading Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, I'm impressed with all the information in The Discoverers that maps back to Stephenson's work.
Anecdotally, I should add that the section that covers the discovery of Iceland, Greenland and America by the Vikings is particularly interesting to me now that I work for an Icelandic company.
The book covers humankind's discovery of Time, Space, Nature and Himself. As a text that one might consider for a college level "History of Man", I find myself wondering how much pure information is buried in the stories Boorstin tells to bring this history to life.
Finally, I think the colored woodcarving on the cover is one of my favorite pieces of Medieval Art, and it perfectly summarizes the subject of the book.
The Discoverers, by Daniel J. Boorstin, ISBN 0-394-72625-1
Posted by Steven at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)
November 06, 2005
Accidental Empires
Accidental Empires
How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions,
battle foreign competition,
and still can't get a date.
by Robert X. Cringley
Few books about the history of the PC are as salient and insightful as this. Taking us from the 8-bit world of early hobbiest-businessmen to beginning of the Internet bubble nineties, this insider's look at the industry is a must read for computer professionals of all stripes. Cringley, who had an epic battle with Infoworld over the use of the pseudonom, has a fun writing style that bounces from Dave Barry to Ken Burns. He tells the story, warts and all, and it is engaging.
This book revealed the insanity of the early days of the PC. How IBM marketed and sold a product called the "Personal Computer" that they were certain no other company could copy and sell for less at a profit. How a snot-nosed rich kid from Seattle would eventually run a software company like a cult, even onto the point where he believes he audits all the software it produces (this chapter, by the way, is titled Chairman Bill Leads the Happy Workers in Song, making it far and away the funniest titled chapter in the book). How so many great ideas never turned into products, and how so many people got lucky and hit it big without ever knowing why or being able to survive the success.
This novel formed the basis of the PBS series Nerds 2.0, which is a shadow of the book. Cringley has a weblog, of sorts, on PBS's website. His industry insights continue to be a valuable source of where the computer business is heading.
Posted by Steven at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
Programming Perl
Programming Perl
by Larry Wall and Randall Schwartz
Ok, you should know by now that there will be computer books in this list. There are several that "rocked my world" but of all the programming langauges I've put on my toolbelt, few emcompass more ideas and capabilities than does Perl. This is the definitive book on Perl (now in it's fifth or sixth edition), the infamous "Camel Book" (can you guess why?).
Perl rocked my world because it builds from the C Programming Language, adding bits of Fortran, BASIC, Pascal, and even Bourne Shell and LISP, to create a dynamic mess that has incredible power, but which is probably too ungainly to use on large projects. Having said that, a lot of the infrastructure of the Internet is built on Perl running on UNIX™ OS. It's more than a "scripting language".
Perl is the first language to provide robust text processing features (e.g. dyanmic strings, regular expression handling, and powerful string manipulation through the grep() operator), seamless hash tables (i.e. associative arrays), and the very-LISP-like concept of self-modifying code (through the exec() operator). These features were never in one single language before Perl came around.
After this edition of Programming Perl came out, Perl added object orientation, database (and SQL Database) support, the concept of "packages" to simplify sharing code (Perl is, of course, open source) and even a web-based database to find those packages (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). The language continues to evolve, and the book continues to change and expand (there are now seven or eight Perl add-on books), but this will always be the edition that introduced me to Perl, and to the jocular philosophy of Perl:
There's more than one way to do it!
Posted by Steven at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2005
The Whole Earth Catalog
The Whole Earth Catalog
Stewart Brand, et. al.
Subtitled Access to Tools, The Whole Earth Catalog and the sequels (The New Whole Earth Catalog and The Next Whole Earth Catalog) are a strange product of the Sixties. A bunch of Berkeley intellectuals collected information about real tools, essays about using them, and bound them all together into a single volume that tried to be a one-stop reference for the emerging Environmental Movement.
Lead by the polymath Stewart Brand, who later founded the online community The Well, it was one of the most interesting catalogs around. The products described in it included information on how to buy them (and even the price), but it was the sheer practicality of them that astonished. And they covered everything from world-spanning products to minutiae. It really was the Whole Earth.
Posted by Steven at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2005
Neutron Star
Neutron Star by Larry Niven
I was given a copy of Neutron Star by my Jr. High friend Greg Jones after a conversation about science-fiction and astronomy back in 1976. He thought I might enjoy the book. (Almost needless to say) It rocked my world.
I hadn't read much SciFi at that time, (as I recall) only Red Planet and The White Mountains and the other books of the Tripods trilogy, and a few Caldecott winners like A Wrinkle in Time. Certainly nothing "hard" (which in the vernacular, meant cutting-edge speculative fiction using the latest scientific discoveries as launching points). Niven's book read like a documentary on a space-faring future that I would see expand in a short time to nearly overwhelm the universe of Star Trek in my imagination.
Niven took Heinlein's paradigm of building a "future history" and made it his own. He fleshed out other worlds humans would discover in the future, and made them as weird as possible. He worked from scientific principles, but always stretched one's imagination to the breaking point, as is the case with his first Hugo winner, Neutron Star.
In this collection of shorts, we meet what will become the major players in Niven's future history. The Puppeteers, Louis Wu, and Beowolf Sheafer. We learn about Niven hyperdrives, Puppeteer hulls, and Slaver stasis fields. We are introduced to human colonies like "We Made It" and Jinx. It's a wonderous, terrifying place, Niven's "Known Space" (itself, a small bubble of stars merely 30 light years across).
The title story is itself a brilliant lesson in Newtonian physics, distorted by a new discovery (back in 1966). Radio astronomers had just detected regular, intensely strong pulses coming on the microwave band (Bell Labs scientists and some microwave techs wrangled over the Nobel Prize in Physics for this; for once the techies won). These signals turned out to be coming from insanely dense objects composed almost entirely of neutrons, massing as much as stars but compacted into volumes that resembled small moons. These objects spun wildly due to conservation of angular momentum and also emitted powerful electromagnectic waves through their charged poles, thus causing the regular blips that were at first presumed to be a signal from an interstellar intelligence.
The astronomical community called these objects, likely the radioactive remains of supernova, neutron stars.
Niven introduces his first of two main characters as a down-on-his-luck interstellar pilot of hyperdrive ships who is legally bribed into flying a special starship around a neutron star. The catch? The last crew to do so was horribly killed in the otherwise "indistructable hull". I won't spoil the ending, but you have to think hard to guess the way out of this "ship in a bottle" conundrum that Niven constructs. It turns out to be a fascinating lesson in orbital mechanics that the layman should be able to follow.
This book, and the others to follow, gave my imagination a whole new Universe to play in. Niven's ideas bled into role playing games like Traveller and even into TV shows like Star Trek (an episode of the animated series is based loosely on one of the short stories in Neutron Star). Larry's clever use of current astrophysics, and even his Libertarian philosophy, became embedded in my psyche (hey, I even voted Libertarian in 1980).
If you haven't read it, give it a look. You should be able to find this book in any used bookstore for a modest fee.
Posted by Steven at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2005
Creation
Creation by Gore Vidal
Set in the Fifth Century BCE, this historical fiction novel chronicles the travels of Cyrus Spitama, at times the ambassador of the King of Persia, but always the grandson of Zoroaster. His travels through Asia and the Mediterranean intersect with some of history's greatest people, including the Persian kings (Xerxes and Darius), the great Greek philosophers and mathematicians, the man who became Buddha, and Confucius.
The novel is dense and the characters come and go in great numbers, as is the nature of the historical fiction. The complexities of court in Susa (in modern Iran) consume a lot of pages, but the flavor they give the story brings the whole era to life. Like Graves' I, Cladius, the people we meet in the story are larger than life, yet humble in their own ways (even the kings).
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this work is that it spans a period of human intellectual expansion that has seen no equal. Philiosophy, mathematics, politics, communications and international trade erupted in this time across Asia, and the breakthroughs in thinking and the model of the world became distinct from the more anamistic one that preceeded it. Vidal's genius is inventing a man who would have been able to take in the span of it for as the ambassador of the Persians, he travels across the whole of Asia, itself so vast and impassible that many of his trips are once-in-a-lifetime adventures.
If I were to pick a starting point for homo symbolis, it would be in this time, and with the people Vidal re-creates with such a rich texture.
Finally, when Confuscius spoke, he did not address himself directly to the issue. "You know, when I was fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had my feet planted firmly in the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from ... perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of heaven. At sixty, I submitted to them. Now I am in my seventieth year." The master looked at the edge of the mat on which he was seated. Carefully, he smoothed out a wrinkle that was imperceptible to us. Then he looked up. "I am in my seventieth year," he repeated. "I can follow the dictates of my own heart because what I desire no longer oversteps the boundaries of what is right."
Creation, ISBN 0-345-34020-5.
Posted by Steven at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)