If I Did It cancelled
Update: OJ Simpson’s “If I Did It” book and TV show cancelled; Fox called it “an ill-considered project”. Gosh, you think?
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Discover magazine picks the 25 greatest science books
Discover magazine picks the 25 greatest science books of all time. Darwin, Newton, and Galileo top the list.
I mentioned earlier the new paperback version
I mentioned earlier the new paperback version of Infinite Jest; here’s Dave Egger’s introduction to the new edition. “[Wallace] was already known as a very smart and challenging and funny and preternaturally gifted writer when Infinite Jest was released in 1996, and thereafter his reputation included all the adjectives mentioned just now, and also this one: Holy shit.” (thx, nick)
OJ Simpson has written a book
OJ Simpson has written a book detailing how he would have killed his wife and Ron Goldman if he were the person that did it. That and a TV special (during sweeps!) on Fox are both being distributed courtesy of News Corp. My mind, it is BOGGLED.
Interview with novelist James Ellroy. “I do
Interview with novelist James Ellroy. “I do not follow contemporary politics. I live in a vacuum. I don’t read books. I don’t read newspapers. I do not own a TV set or a cellphone or a computer. I spend my evenings alone, usually lying in the dark talking to women who aren’t in the room with me.” Ellroy also knows his place in the world: “I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.”
A new paperback version of David Foster
A new paperback version of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is out. You get 1104 pages of Wallacian goodness for $10 (it’s only $8 on Amazon) and I’ve heard it’s physically a lot thinner than the previous paperback.
Zadie Smith active and passive reading
Zadie Smith on the distinction between reading like you passively watch TV and reading like you actively interprete a musical piece at the piano. “When you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it.”
How the fizzle did I miss this?
How the fizzle did I miss this? Mountain Man Dance Moves is a compilation of some of the best McSweeney’s Lists.
Ethanol, corn, and Mexico
At PopTech a few weeks ago, Lester Brown, who has been a leading advocate of environmentally sustainable development for almost 30 years, spoke about the impact of the increasing production of ethanol. As more corn gets used for making automotive fuel, that reduces the amount of grain available for food production. As demand rises, so will the price…no matter what people are using the corn for, be it fuel or food. The countries that will really suffer in this scenario are those that import lots of grain for food.
When Brown said this, I immediately thought of Mexico. When you consider the food culture of Mexico, one of the first things to mind is corn. Corn (maize) was likely first domesticated in Mexico and remains the cornerstone of Mexican cuisine; in short, corn is far more Mexican than apple pie is American. In 1491, his excellent book on the pre-Columbian Americas, Charles Mann tells us that despite corn’s high status, Mexico is increasingly importing corn from the United States because it’s cheaper than local corn:
Modern hybrids are so productive that despite the distances involved US corporations can sell maize for less in Oaxaca than can [local farmer] Diaz Castellano. Landrace maize, he said, tastes better, but it is hard to find a way to make the quality pay off.
Those great tortillas you had at some local place while on vacation in Mexico? There’s an increasing chance they’re made from US corn. Mmm, globalizious! Of course, Mexican farmers are getting out of the farming business because they can’t compete with the heavily subsidized US corn and Mexico is losing control over one of their strongest cultural customs. Now that ethanol is changing the rules, there’s a bidding war brewing between Americans who want to fill their gas tanks and Mexicans who want to feed their children. Odds are the tanks stay fuller than the stomachs.
For reference, here’s what increasing ethanol production has done to the price of corn over the past three months:
And that’s despite a fantastic US corn harvest. The graph is from this article in the WSJ, which contains a quick overview of the effects that the growing ethanol industry might have.
Will Wright’s bibliography
The recent New Yorker piece on Will Wright is a thorough profile of the game designer, but also functions as a bibliography of sorts for the games he’s created over the past 20 years. Bibliographies are something normally reserved for books, but Wright draws much of the inspiration for his games from articles, books, papers, and other games that a list of further reading/playing in the instruction booklet for SimCity wouldn’t feel out of place. Because I like utilizing bibliographies — they allow you to get into the head of an author and see how they sampled & remixed the original ideas to create something new — I’ve created one for Will Wright. Sources are grouped by game; general influences are listed seperately.
SimCity
The Game of Life, John Conway.
Montessori school. “It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori — if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design.”
Urban Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester. “This study of urban dynamics was undertaken principally because of discoveries made in modeling the growth process of corporations. It has become clear that complex systems are counterintuitive. That is, they give indications that suggest corrective action which will often be ineffective or even adverse in its results. Very often one finds that the policies that have been adopted for correcting a difficulty are actually intensifying it rather than producing a solution.”
World Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester.
The Sims
A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander. “By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design.”
A Theory of Human Motivation - Abraham Maslow. Paper on human behavior and motivation.
Maps of the Mind - Charles Hampden-Turner.
Other Sim Games
Gaia hypothesis - James Lovelock. “The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological theory that proposes that the living matter of planet Earth functions like a single organism.”
The Ants - E.O. Wilson. “This is the definitive scientific study of one of the most diverse animal groups on earth; pretty well everything that is known about ants is in this massive work.”
Spore
Powers of Ten - Charles and Ray Eames. “The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic.”
Drake Equation - Frank Drake. “Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space.”
SETI. “The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.”
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick.
Panspermia - Freeman Dyson. “This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson’s notion of Panspermia - the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic “spores” of life from other planets. (Dyson’s concept is also the origin of the game’s title.)”
The Life of the Cosmos - Lee Smolin. “[Smolin’s] theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole.”
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - John Barrow, Frank Tipler, and John Wheeler. “Is there any connection between the vastness of the universes of stars and galaxies and the existence of life on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way?”
The demoscene. “The demoscene was originally limited by the hardware and storage capabilities of their target machines (16/32 bit micros such as the Atari and the Amiga ran on floppy disks), they developed intricate algorithms to produce large amounts of content from very little initial data.”
General influences
PanzerBlitz - Avalon Hill. “PanzerBlitz is a tactical-scale board wargame of tank, artillery, and infantry combat set in the Eastern Front of the Second World War.”
Super Mario Bros. - Shigeru Miyamoto. “[SMB] encouraged exploration for its own sake; in this regard, it was less like a competitive game than a ‘software toy’ — a concept that influenced Will Wright’s notion of possibility space. ‘The breadth and the scope of the game really blew me away,’ Wright told me. ‘It was made out of these simple elements, and it worked according to simple rules, but it added up to this very complex design.”
Go. “[Go] is a strategic, zero-sum, deterministic board game of perfect information.”
—
Sources: Game Master, The Long Zoom, Master of the Universe, Interview: Suzuki and Wright, Spore entry at Wikipedia, Will Wright entry at SporeWiki, Will Wright Interview.
Update: This interview with Wright at Game Studies contains a list of references from the conversation, many of which have influenced Wright’s body of work. (thx, phil)
Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st
Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century is out today. “[The book] is a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.” The authors came up with a clever stunt to promote the book: have everyone buy the book on Amazon today at 11:11am PT to drive up the sales rank and let the “rich get richer” effect take over from there. The book is currently at #13.
Review of a book celebrating Spy magazine. “
Review of a book celebrating Spy magazine. “You can’t overflow with young, reckless rage forever.” (thx, emily)
Short review of New Partridge Dictionary of
Short review of New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. “‘I like the cut of his jib’ resonates a lot differently than ‘shizzle my mizzle fizzle dizzle!’”
Looks like a good issue of the
Looks like a good issue of the New Yorker this week, including a profile of Will Wright and a review of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map.
Scott Rosenberg interviews Steven Johnson about The Ghost Map.
Scott Rosenberg interviews Steven Johnson about The Ghost Map.
Robert Birnbaum interviews Michael Lewis about The Blind Side.
Robert Birnbaum interviews Michael Lewis about The Blind Side.
Richard Dawkins is keeping a journal while
Richard Dawkins is keeping a journal while he tours around in support of The God Delusion. “This Washington signing was remarkable for the number who bought not just one copy of The God Delusion but up to half a dozen. ‘Christmas presents?’ I inquired of one man. ‘Winter solstice’, he instantly corrected me.”
The Royal Institution of London has named
The Royal Institution of London has named Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table the best science book ever written. Other authors in the running: Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins.
A new book called They Never Said
A new book called They Never Said That debunks some famous phrases that were never actually said by those that supposedly coined them. “Hundreds of pithy remarks from ‘Let them eat cake’ to ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, turn out to be adaptations of comments that were more clumsy or more boring — or which were never said by those thought to have coined them.”
The Moleskine City Notebooks, the cool make-your-own
The Moleskine City Notebooks, the cool make-your-own travel books, are being released in the US on Nov 1 and moleskinerie has information on where to find them.
Cory posted a nice review of Julian
Cory posted a nice review of Julian Dibbell’s Play Money. I loved the book as well and Cory’s review captures what’s so compelling about it. It’s a shame that it didn’t gain a wider readership (and a less unfortunate cover as well)…it’s not just some nerdy book about g@m3rz.
A collection of artists each picked a
A collection of artists each picked a page from The Pat Robertson and Friends Coloring Book and “colored” them in. (thx, gk)
Because of his open source programming connection,
Because of his open source programming connection, Hans Reiser’s arrest for his wife’s murder was big news in that community. After his wife disappeared, Reiser bought 2 books on murder, including David Simon’s Homicide. Simon is the creator of The Wire.
The Ghost Map
The Ghost Map is a book about:
- a bacterium
- the human body
- a geographical map
- a man
- a working friendship
- a household
- a city government
- a neighborhood
- a waste management system1
- an epidemic
- a city
- human civilization
You hooked yet? Well, you should be. As the narrative unfolds around the 1854 London cholera epidemic, author Steven Johnson weaves all of these social, geographical, and biological structures/webs/networks into a scientific parable for the contemporary world. The book is at its best when it zooms among these different scales in a Powers of Ten-like fashion (something Johnson calls The Long Zoom), demonstrating the interplay between them: the way the geography of a neighborhood affected the spread of a virus, how ideas spreading within a social context are like an epidemic, or the comparison between the organism of the city and the geography of a bacterial colony within the human colon. None of this is surprising if you’ve read anything about emergence, complexity, or social scale invariance, but Johnson effectively demonstrates how tightly coupled the development of (as well as our understanding of) viral epidemics and large cities were across all of these scales.
The other main theme I saw in the book is how inherently messy science is. Unlike many biographies, The Ghost Map doesn’t try to tie everything up into a nice little package to make a better story. The cholera epidemic and its resolution was sloppy; there was no aha! moment where everyone involved understood what was going on and knew what had to be done. But the scientific method applied by John Snow to the situation was solid and as more evidence became available over the years, his theory of and solution to cholera epidemics were revealed as actual fact. Johnson reminds us that that’s how science works most of the time; science is a process, not a set of facts and theories. During the recent debate in the US over evolution and intelligent design, I felt a reluctance on the part of scientists to admit to this messiness because it would give an opening to their detractors: “haha, so you admit you don’t know what’s going on at all!” Which is unfortunate, because science is powerful in its nuance and rough edges (in some ways, science is what happens at the margins) in helping us understand ourselves and the world we live in.
[1] Had Mark Kurlansky written this book, it would have been called “Shit: How Human Effluence Changed the World”. ↩
The Blind Side
In addition to the race and class aspect that interests me about the book, The Blind Side is, oh, by the way, also about the sport of football, specifically the left tackle position. In the 1980s, the quarterback became increasingly important in the offensive scheme and rushing linebackers, specifically Lawrence Taylor, became a bigger part of the defensive scheme. This created a problem for the offensive line: protect the valuable & fragile quarterback from the huge, fast likes of Lawrence Taylor, whose Joe Theismann-leg-snapping exploits you’ve seen replayed on a thousand SportsCenters. The solution to this problem was to hire giant-handed men the size of houses who move like ballerinas to protect the blind side of the quarterback. Thus has the left tackle position become the second-highest paid position in the league behind the quarterbacks themselves.
When I read Lewis’ profile of Michael Oher in the New York Times, I had a crazy thought: why not cut to the chase and make the men fit to play the left tackle position into quarterbacks instead? Lewis covers this briefly near the end of the book in relating the story of Jonathan Ogden, left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens:
Now the highest paid player on the field, Ogden was doing his job so well and so effortlessly that he had time to wonder how hard it would be for him to do some of the other less highly paid jobs. At the end of that 2000 season, en route to their Super Bowl victory, the Ravens played in the AFC Championship game. Ogden watched the Ravens’ tight end, Shannon Sharpe, catch a pass and run 96 yards for a touchdown. Ravens center Jeff Mitchell told The Sporting News that as Sharpe raced into the end zone, Ogden had turned to him and said, “I could have made that play. If they had thrown that ball to me, I would have done the same thing.”
Having sized up the star receivers, Ogden looked around and noticed that the quarterbacks he was protecting were…rather ordinary. Here he was, leaving them all the time in the world to throw the ball, and they still weren’t doing it very well. They kept getting fired! Even after they’d won the Super Bowl, the Ravens got rid of their quarterback, Trent Dilfer, and gone looking for a better one. What was wrong with these people? Ogden didn’t go so far as to suggest that he should play quarterback, but he came as close as any lineman ever had to the heretical thought.
Many of the left tackles that Lewis talks about in the book can run faster than most quarterbacks, they can throw the ball just as far or farther (as a high school sophomore, Michael Oher could stand at the fifty-yard line and toss footballs through the goalposts), possess great athletic touch and finesse, have the intellect to run an offense, move better than most QBs, know the offense and defense as well as the QB, are taller than the average QB (and therefore has better field vision over the line), and presumably, at 320-360 pounds, are harder to tackle and intimidate than a normal QB. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Abridged version of Bob Woodward’s State of
Abridged version of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, which “details the infighting, disarray, and mistakes made by the Bush war council during the Iraq war”.
Lemony Snicket has finished the last of
Lemony Snicket has finished the last of his 13-book Series of Unfortunate Events with The End.
Books on the American civil rights movement
At the end of my Eyes on the Prize post from earlier this week, I asked people for their favorite books on the American civil rights movement. Here’s what I got back:
- Lots of people recommended America in the King Years by Taylor Branch, a trilogy of books on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement.
- The second most frequently recommended book was Common Ground by J.A. Lukas, a book about busing and segregation in Boston in the 70s.
- Walking With the Wind by John Lewis and Michael D’Orso.
- Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter.
- Old news: Resurrection City by Jill Freedman.
- The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 by Steven Kasher.
- Stride Toward Freedom and Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Eyes on the Prize by Juan Williams.
- Black Boy and Native Son by Richard Wright.
- Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Raymond Arsenault. (Eric Etheridge is photographing the Freedom Riders and pairing those photos with their Freedom Ride mugshots for a new book.)
- The Promised Land by Nick Lemann.
- You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train by Howard Zinn.
- We Are Not Afraid by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray.
- Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin.
- A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner.
- The Struggle for Black Equality by Harvard Sitkoff.
- Angela Davis An Autobiography by Angela Davis.
- Death at an Early Age by Jonathan Kozol.
- The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois.
- Southern Horrors and Other Writings by Ida B. Wells Barnett.
- Civilities and Civil Rights by William Chafe.
- I’ve Got the Light of Freedom by Charles Payne.
- Local People by John Dittmer.
- Speak Now Against the Day by John Egerton.
- Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown.
- Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
- Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves.
- I’ve Got the Light of Freedom by Charles Payne
- Local People by John Dittmer
- Speak Now Against the Day by John Egerton
Thanks to everyone for the recommendations; these all sound great.
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