Anathem (and Kindle)

For Christmas, Lillian gave me a kindle, so I thought I'd try to read something on it. This wasn't a slam dunk, most of the things I like to read are books that have been around a few years and have accumulated enough good reviews for me to decide they're worth reading, and many of those aren't on the kindle. A significant number of the books I'm interested in are available second-hand for less than they cost on the kindle (even with shipping). Also, some technical or science books have diagrams or other color photos, and the form factor and display capabilities of the kindle are not well suited to them.

Anyway, Anathem had enough good reviews that I figured it would be a good book for giving the kindle a try. Snow Crash still carries a lot of weight with me, especially the first 50 pages which are maybe the most enjoyable 50 pages of 90's science fiction. I'll forgive Neal Stephenson a lot for that.

As a reading experience, the kindle is passable, but not great. Some things are more difficult to do than they should be. For example, sometimes I want to review a passage I read half an hour before— the story refers to it, and I want to look again. The small size of the 'pages' on the kindle make paging cumbersome, and there's no obvious way to, say, jump back 20 pages or so. With books this process is much easier, you can jump back a lot or a little, as you need.

The pages are too small. In particular, they are too narrow. The kindle justifies the text, but doesn't have a hyphenation dictionary, and so often the spaces between words are jarringly wide. It's more like reading a newspaper than a book. While I suppose this is a tradeoff for battery life, I find it annoying. There isn't quite enough content on each page in any case— I'd rather have a screen that can display the same contents as a page of a trade paperback.

Anathem uses a fair number of terms in an invented language. 'Dictionary' entries punctuate the story, often indirectly foreshadowing events to come. Kindle has a built-in dictionary, which is pretty handy, since it makes it much easier to look up words on the spur of the moment. Unfortunately, the book's dictionary isn't part of it. It would have been pretty cool if the book's dictionary could have been used by the kindle, but such a special-purpose use was not envisioned by the creators of the kindle or of the digital book format it uses, and probably would not be worth the effort when translating into book form. On the other hand, just the smallest support for linking, as on any web page, would have made it easy to get the same functionality.

One thing that is nice about the kindle, though, is the element of instant gratification. Delivery over the air means you can get the book immediately. There's a certain enjoyment in that, silly and unfortunate as it is. Impulse purchases are, of course, bad for consumers, so the facilitation of this is actually not a good thing. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy it, but (as is always the case with me) I can't escape feeling a bit disappointed with myself, and like I've let myself be taken advantage of.

Despite all this, the kindle works for me. Reading Anathem on it was fine even with the poor formatting. The screen is readable in lots of lighting conditions. I like the faceplate images the kindle puts on the display when it goes into sleep mode. Search functionality (I need to learn more about this) is handy. You can keep several books in a small package thats portable and can go for days without power. I definitely see the appeal, and I've purchased another book to read.

Back to Anathem. The comparisons to A Canticle for Leibowitz are apropos, especially in the first quarter of Anathem. The monastic setting, with an initiate puzzling out the mysteries of the order in which he finds himself, is quite familiar. This goes on a long time (like all Stephenson's recent works, the book is a long one) and many reviewers find it slow going. I wasn't particularly bothered by this, though— in a sense, the relatively slow pace of the story worked well to convey the stately pace of the monastic life and the long historical time scale (thousands of years) that is the background of the story. Long, slow immersion in another world can be fun, and with science fiction, much of the enjoyment is putting together a coherent picture of the alternate reality from the brief glimpses offered to you as the characters go about their business.

The action picks up when the principal characters are removed from the monastery and start encountering the outer world (which they normally have very little contact with). I'll avoid spoilers but suffice to say the long historical record is about to receive a major jolt.

Both settings (inside and outside the monastery) provide Stephenson an opportunity to present chunks of detailed information (in this case, about mathematics) in story form. Unlike Snow Crash, where I found the story suffered from the long intricate detour into the of the doings of various Sumerian gods, the astronomy, physics, and math concepts in Anathem are treated more lightly and woven into the story better. Part of the enjoyment of the story is identifying the relationships between our (western) scientific/philosophical history and those of the world of Anathem. So this works well, too.

But... I still ended up being a bit dissatisfied with the book. And I think it's because I'm too old. If I were in my early twenties (about the age I was when I read A Canticle for Leibowitz) this probably wouldn't have bothered me, at least not nearly as much.

First off, I'm not sure it would have carried the same resonance with me as Canticle does, because Canticle is ultimately dystopic— the scientific and technical knowledge preserved by the religious faith through the eras of darkness after civilization's collapse is ultimately restored to the world, first to great benefit, but ultimately leading to an even greater disaster and the complete collapse of civilization. In short, there's a moral story here, which is that perhaps we are not morally or culturally capable of managing the technology we are intellectually able to develop, that our best instincts still lead to unintended and unwanted consequences, and that ultimately we cannot help but destroy ourselves and our planet. Written in the early 60's, in the middle of the cold war and the nuclear race and at the tail and of a long era of 'gee whiz' science fiction, Canticle is a pretty serious story. Like all genre fiction, it's easy to dismiss, and the moral message is unsubtle and blunt, but the moral concerns are true and stir some unease.

Anathem has nothing so serious to say. The implication at the end is that the word continues pretty much as it has before, and in fact the corrections and insights brought about by the dramatic events will be of limited duration, at least on the historical time scale that is the backdrop of the novel. Nothing to shock you into serious reflection here.

But that's ok, really. I don't need a moral, and I'm naturally dystopic enough so that I don't need more of it. So if this was it, I'd still be happy with the book.

The big problem for me— and again, this is due to my age— is the lack of adult personalities and relationships.

This book seems to be written for, well, intellectually precocious but socially lagging teens. (Yeah, I know, it's science fiction). The monastic life is basically undergraduate life at a small college, and the young (19-year-old) protagonists are essentially the key driving actors in what is nominally an adult world. In this way it feels like the new Star Trek, where cadets, friends and rivals in the academy, end up taking all the command positions in a starship— I mean, sorry, but kids are not going to take control of a starship. Similarly for Anathem, the chances that a small group of students all the same age, who all know each other, from the same monastery (just one of a number around the world), are going to all be major players in a world-sized drama are, well, nil. Even characters introduced later in the story turn out to be related— the 'spy' they uncover and get to help them turns out to be the husband of the (one) woman who rebels and dies delivering information to them. Um, my willing suspension of disbelief goes only so far, and it breaks under the stress.

Furthermore, the relationships between the characters are frustratingly simple. There's a crush, a first kiss, going steady. Sorry but it's been too long for me to relate to this. Granted the story involves students in a monastery, but the romantic relationships are ridiculously immature even for that age. Rivalries are minimal and play virtually no part in the plot. There's no real jealousy, competitiveness, frustration, schadenfreude (love that word), or personal struggle and growth. Even in science fiction there ought to be something resembling real personalities and real relationships. But instead, you get what basically are stock teen characters. There's the bright guy, the determined-and-pretty-in-her-own-way girl, the guy who's more physical (martial arts), the guy who's not remarkable in any particular way but is just well-rounded enough and has enough street smarts to somehow be the leader and central protagonist (read: stand-in for the reader)... Aieee! It makes my brain hurt just describing these characters.

And it's too bad. As science fiction— a story whose plot line is driven by science and speculation based on science— it's great, but as engaging adult fiction it just doesn't work for me. Perhaps the tropes of science fiction are just too difficult for me to digest when it's a group of characters instead of the usual protagonist, love interest, and enemy or rival. I suspect, though, that the book was just written for a much younger audience. At least it doesn't have his Shaftoe character (who just isn't amusing to me and gets on my nerves, it's why I couldn't read Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy). But it doesn't have either a real adult protagonist or an interesting genre parody of one. And I guess these days I need one. Even a reasonable 25-30 year old I could relate to. But not these teens. Pity.

Goodbye, Eric

Yesterday, MeiLi held a small gathering at her house in memory of Eric, who passed away two weeks ago today from a heart attack.

It was entirely unexpected. We'd seen them two months ago, and Eric looked healthier than he'd ever been. He was his usual self, chatting knowledgeably about his current hobby, making stringed instruments. He showed us the guitar he'd been making for Anan, his younger daughter. It was almost finished then, and in fact he finished it and gave it to her a few weeks before he died. We'd run into him quite serendipitously, at a performance at Gryphon where Allie's guitar teacher was one of the performers. He had so changed from his earlier yangzi that I didn't recognize him at first, and Lillian didn't recognize him for several minutes. He'd invited us over to his house, a few blocks from Gryphon, and after the performance we went over and hung out with him and MeiLi. They were quite content— Anan had recently gone off to college, Ping was about to graduate, and Eric was about to start working again after an enjoyable three-year hiatus. I was reminded then, as I had been when we'd seen him in the past, just how intelligent, friendly, interesting, and knowledgeable Eric was. When he developed a passion for something, he became an expert in it, and his joy in learning every small detail about things was always evident. He'd recommended an author he'd been reading, and had loaned me a book about a famous folk-singing family (part of learning about making stringed instruments, for Eric, was learning about the history of folk music in the U.S). I'd been meaning to return it, and off and on over the intervening weeks had been musing about seeing them again over the holidays, and how nice it would be to reconnect with them, especially since our own children were about to leave home. And suddenly, he was gone.

It's clear that MeiLi is still in shock. She hadn't been able to reach us for several days, since our land-line connection has been having problems and she didn't have any of our cell phone numbers. We went over as soon as we heard to keep her company; their daughters had returned early from school. MeiLi is so used to being firm and in control, and it's difficult for her to handle the sudden, extreme pain and helplessness. She apologizes for asking for help, is concerned about being a burden to her friends. She'd taking medicine for sleep, but is still having trouble, and there's much to take care of, financial issues, funeral arrangements, daily routines like paying bills that Eric used to handle. The stress suffocates her, it covers her face, weakens her posture, tightens in her hands, and I feel very sorry for her.

I'd known Eric since I met him in Taiwan almost 30 years ago. I'd met MeiLi there too. Afterwards, when we continued our college careers, I met my future wife Lillian when the three of us were in a small seminar class in Chinese Literature class together. I went with Eric to the airport to greet MeiLi when she arrived in the states to study. After graduation we held a Chinese book reading club for a few years, the "Xin BiHu SheHui" a fondly grandiose Chinese title for ourselves that Eric enjoyed. We looked for houses with them, and later on they suggested houses for us to look at. We baby sat their eldest daughter a few times, kept some of their belongings for them during the five (?) years they were overseas when Eric was working in China, put up MeiLi once or twice when she was here alone. But in more recent years our contacts had grown fewer and further between. Eric was always a rather private person, and we rarely saw him in the company of his other friends. Yet he was always friendly, and seemed easy-going and content.

Yesterday, at Mei Li's house, eight of us buried Eric's ashes under the various fruit trees he'd planted around his yard when they first bought the house 25 years ago. We brought shovels (those of us who had them handy). I took a handful of his ashes and threw them in the small hole I had dug— not everyone handled the ashes, they were gritty and real, and the touch was probably too much for some— and then pushed the dirt over the top with my hands, trying to make sure the hole was deep enough and tamped down enough that it wouldn't be dug up again by animals. It felt right to get my hands dirty— Mr. Toad said he felt same thing— and seemed like the kind of low-key ceremony Eric would want and approve of. Like everything he did, Eric had selected and tended the fruit trees with great care and after significant research, choosing them for their novelty, appropriateness for the climate, and the size of his yard. He'd appreciate the value to the plants of adding bone meal to the soil.

It's tough, growing old. People your age, even those younger than you, start dying because their bodies just wear out. We'd lost an earlier acquaintance, Al Garber, earlier in the year, and Lillian just lost someone she'd worked with to complications from a stroke. Our parents are dying too. One of Eric's friends had just lost his father in the past few months, another's mother was back in the hospital attempting to recover from an unsuccessful hip surgery, and it wasn't clear how good that was going. Lillian has lost both her parents, and in the next decade, if not sooner, I'll lose mine. Your memories and experiences get riddled with holes— you see a place, or a thing, and remember a person dear to you— then realize they're gone. There's an emptiness there— the memories patch it over, but they're thin, translucent, not quite substantial, and they don't hide it. And over time, more and more of your world fills with such holes, so that what was once a whole cloth of experience becomes a skein of weakened threads.

I find it difficult to comprehend, emotionally. Eric was there, and I'd imagined a future with him there, and was looking forward to that future. Now I'm sad for the loss of a future with Eric that is not to be. I can reconcile myself to that loss, because it was more abstract than real, and I wonder about that. Mine is a small loss compared to MeiLi's, and it is so much easier to bear, I feel guilty about it at the same time that I feel it. But there it is. Last week while walking back from lunch at work, the grass was covered with crumpled, fresh-fallen leaves, and all I saw was the ground covered with dozens of Eric's, struck down by a sudden blast at 49, waiting for the wind and rain to grind them back into the soil. As with us all.

Goodbye, Eric. I miss you.

Ground Truth

Just read "The Ground Truth" by John Farmer, about what the 9/11 commission was able to find out about the events around the 9/11 attacks. I picked it up from the library on a whim, just because there was a blurb from William Langewiesche on the back.

In brief, the book summarizes discrepancies between the actual series of events and the version presented in the days and weeks following 9/11, which has become the dominant narrative of those days. He provides transcripts of logs/tapes and compares them with official statements. As I read it, his overarching conclusion is that government fails to prepare for and react to catastrophe because it refuses to publicly acknowledge and thoroughly address mistakes. This causes a failure to prepare adequately, which increases the likelihood of future mistakes.

I suppose there are those within government who expect it to function better than this. Mr. Farmer was attorney general of New Jersey, and served as counsel to the 9/11 commission, and certainly seems to feel it should. His book ends with some recommendations for 'reinventing government', basically by trying to bring policies in line with what actually happens during a crisis. But from what I've experienced in my (mercifully) limited experience with bureaucracy and government, these failures come as no surprise. The primary objective of most organizations is CYA&mdash' "cover your ass" — and the primary goal of high-level figures in government is to construct a narrative of events that reaffirms their importance and effectiveness. The Bush administration was not different from previous administrations in kind, and only perhaps to degree. That they lied to the press and to the commission in order to make themselves look good, well, that was standard operating procedure for them. It's always easy for the powerful to conflate their own interests with the interests of the organization they manage or those it serves. I'm sure they felt that providing a reassuring, if false, narrative of how the government was in control of events was best for the country, and if it was 'incidentally' also in their own self-interests, well, what's the big deal?

Fundamentally I see this as a divide between those who get things done, and those who take credit. Those who get things done have to pay attention to reality, because if they don't, ultimately their efforts will fail. Their goal is to effect a change in reality. Those who take credit pay attention only to how things are perceived, and their goal is to effect a change in perception. There's a symbiosis and a tension between these groups. The symbiosis is due to the fact that in order to marshal the resources to get big things done, the perception has to be created that the change is necessary, and that the people in charge know what they're doing. And in order to manufacture the perception, there has to be a germ of reality that the manufacturers of perception can leverage (well, some of the time, anyway). To the extent that people can perceive the reality, it can't diverge too much from the perception. So, there's the symbiosis, which is, I suppose, obvious. The tension is yet more obvious— the doers need to acknowledge and learn from mistakes, while their counterparts need to hide them. Thus the 9/11 commission wants to learn all the facts so that it can address the problems, while the white house and the military want to keep the inconvenient facts hidden.

They also operate at different time scales— the doers operate long-term, while their counterparts operate short-term. From the perspective of those who take credit, delaying apprehension of inconvenient facts is sufficient. They appreciate that information has time value, and that the information available while the narrative is being formed is the most important, because the narrative, once formed and widely adopted, will persist. Thus immediate suppression of inconvenient facts is the goal. The trickle of books that come out years later (as this one did) is not really of interest to those who shape the narrative, because they know that after sufficient time most people have lost interest— their perceptions will have been set, the narrative established. So, for example, the narrative of 9/11 is that we were attacked by evil, wily foes who had the advantage of surprise, but that the government, at all levels and especially at the highest levels, reacted swiftly and effectively to protect us. Once this narrative was established, they just had to delay until the actual information no longer mattered. Thus the delay in, and timing of the release of, the results of the investigations in response to the 9/11 commission findings.

Farmer notes, for example, that the narrative has our F-16's tracking flight 168, ready to shoot it down if need be, when the passengers assaulted the cabin and the plane went down during a struggle with the hijackers. The central issue there is the difficult decisions the leaders must face in determining whether to sacrifice the lives of those on board the plane. This narrative affirms that the military and government was in control, and that the leaders were making quick, informed decisions and wrestling with large moral issues under time pressure. In reality, he points out, we didn't even know where flight 168 was, had no F-16's anywhere near the aircraft, the plane had gone down before the leaders even knew it existed, and the eventual directive to take down the plane if necessary was never passed to the pilots because the military official in charge knew that there were no suspect planes currently in the air when the order arrived.

Being allied, as I am, with the 'reality-based community', I agree with Farmer that the facts need to be acknowledged and addressed. But I cannot share his surprise (though I share his dismay) that they were not. And while I appreciate his suggestions for improvement, I think he doesn't fully appreciate the reality that must be addressed. The "ground truth" is that those who wield power do so because they know that perception matters, and know how to manage it. The only way to make reality drive policy is to make reality drive perception, and it can only do so when the facts are timely and relevant. I'm glad he wrote the book, and it's a small push in the right direction, but it's too little, too late. It won't be read except by those who still care, and they are few and wield relatively little power. Priorities won't change, and policies that align better with demands won't be effected. Guess I'm pessimistic, or perhaps a cynic, but that's how it's always been.

p.s. Also read "The Atomic Bazaar" by William Langewiesche. I'll write about these soon, I need to return these books to the library before it closes.

World Distribution of Wealth, 2008

 

I was feeling frustrated with a book on socially conscious investing that I was reading, and so turned (of course) to wikipedia for more solid information. This took me (via reference links) to some UN publications, in one of which I found the above chart.

The chart shows the distribution of adults whose personal wealth is in the top 10% of world wealth. As can be seen, the US has 25% of the richest 10%. (As several publications pointed out, it's important to be mindful of the distinction between wealth from income.)

The paper (note: it's a discussion paper only) is from UNU_WIDER (United Nations University — World Institute for Development Economic Research):

Discussion Paper No. 2008/03
The World Distribution of Household Wealth
James B. Davies, Susanna Sandström,
Anthony Shorrocks, and Edward N. Wolff
February 2008
ISBN 978-92-9230-064-7 (printed publication)

I found the following paragraphs especially notable:

"Table 2 summarizes our results on the distribution of household wealth across the world population of 3.7 billion adults, based on official exchange rates and figures for the year 2000. According to our estimates, adults required just $2,138 in order to be among the wealthiest half of the world. But more than $61,000 was needed to belong to the top 10 per cent and more than $510,000 per adult was required for membership of the top 1 per cent. The entrance fee for the top 1 per cent seems surprisingly high, given than the group has 37 million adult members. Furthermore, the figure refers to the year 2000 and is now likely to be considerably higher, especially when measured in US dollars.

"The wealth share estimates reveal that the richest 2 per cent of adult individuals own more than half of all global wealth, with the richest 1 per cent alone accounting for 40 per cent of global assets. The corresponding figures for the top 5 per cent and the top 10 per cent are 71 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively. In contrast, the bottom half of wealth holders together hold barely 1 per cent of global wealth. Members of the top decile are almost 400 times richer, on average, than the bottom 50 per cent, and members of the top percentile are almost 2,000 times richer."

"... The final column of Table 3 records wealth Gini estimates ranging from 0.547 for Japan to 0.801 for the USA and 0.803 for Switzerland. The global wealth Gini is estimated to be even greater at 0.892. This is equivalent to the Gini value that would be registered for a 100-person population in which one person receives $900 and the remaining 99 people each receive $1."

Amazing. The world is a rough place.

Sahara Unveiled

Well, I was going to write about this book, but it's been summarized much more capably than I could here. Not that I read this blog, just found it when searching on the title to confirm the spelling of William Langewiesche's name. I should investigate this blog a bit... Anyway, I'll forgo my own description of it. Suffice to say, I enjoyed it, and it left a big impression on me: Africa is a hard, troublesome, difficult place.

But I can talk about my experiences around reading the book. I'd seen it in the living room, and picked it up and put it in my bag when we were packing to take Nick to Philadelphia. Even at the time I knew I probably wouldn't have time or inclination to read it while we were there, but I did read it after we returned. And...

It wasn't until page 150 that I realized that I'd read it before.

At that point my memories came back. I'd enjoyed the book— his writing, his observances, his attitude— a lot. My impressions on rereading it were substantially the same as when I'd read it the first time, ten years earlier. But I hadn't noticed.

I was rather taken aback, and sat in wonderment as this all sank in. Years ago, in my twenties, I'd recognize within half a page that I'd read something before. Granted, I hadn't read quite so much at that point in my life. But the contrast between then and now bothered me. How could I read so far into the book and not realize that it wasn't the first time I'd read it? Is this what aging does?

Now, this post isn't really about aging and what it does, but about my distressing tendency to notice events and relate them to aging. It may be that the book just hadn't made much of an impression on me up to that point (this is where he describes the family with the 5-year-old boy taking a car trip into the desert, getting lost, and dying, slowly, of thirst). So, maybe I was just not engaged enough with the book until that point for it to make enough impression on me to remember it ten years later. And then, part of me responds "yes, but that wouldn't have made a difference when I was 25." So I argue with myself about whether something is or is not a sign of aging, and whether it really matters all that much. It's a bit troubling, and part of it is wondering to what extent I will inherit my father's proclivity to worry about himself, his anxiety about losing his mental abilities— and, well, his actual loss of mental acuity.

Sheesh. I'm 51. There is something about turning 50 that makes it no longer possible to ignore the fact that you're aging, which I had managed to do during my 40's. But I'm not old. Am I?

More on Jonathan Lethem

Salon has an interview with him too. Guess he's on a book tour.

Also read recently

I'll write notes on these eventually, some I read almost a month ago.

Read:
"Kill All Your Darlings"— Luc Sante
"His Master's Voice"— Stanislaw Lem
"Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone"— Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshenberg
"The Gatekeepers"—Jacques Steinberg
"Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert"— William Langewiesche

Reading:
"The Philosophical Baby"— Alison Gopnik
"Outliers"— Malcolm Gladwell
"Irrational Exuberance (2nd Ed.)"— Robert J. Shiller