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Readings: Isolated Man, Straddling Bus, Truthful Airline Magazine

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Here are the three most interesting articles I’ve read over the weekend:

1) “The Most Isolated Man on the Planet” [Slate] – we don’t know his name, or whether he even has one. He is the most isolated man in the world and happens to live in the Amazonian jungle. Slate has an excellent piece profiling his existence:

He eats mostly wild game, which he either hunts with his bow-and-arrow or traps in spiked-bottom pitfalls. He grows a few crops around his huts, including corn and manioc, and often collects honey from hives that stingless bees construct in the hollows of tree trunks. Some of the markings he makes on trees have suggested to indigenous experts that he maintains a spiritual life, which they’ve speculated might help him survive the psychological toil of being, to a certain extent, the last man standing in a world of one.

2) “A ‘Straddling Bus’ Traffic Solution in China” [New York Times] – a novel idea about a bus which takes up no road space. It’s a fascinating look at what one company in the southern Chinese town of Shenzhen has proposed:

Though it is called the “straddling bus,” Huashi’s invention resembles a train in many respects — but it requires neither elevated tracks nor extensive tunneling. Its passenger compartment spans the width of two traffic lanes and sits high above the road surface, on a pair of fencelike stilts that leave the road clear for ordinary cars to pass underneath. It runs along a fixed route.

Read the article for more or watch the video below:

3) “An Airline Magazine That Makes Travelers Want to Pull the Rip Cord” [Wall Street Journal] – this isn’t your ordinary in-flight magazine. The in-flight magazine for Safi Airways tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

One recent edition featured a long, approving piece headlined, “Live Entertainment in Kabul: Dog Fighting.” The writer says dogs in Afghanistan don’t fight to the death, just until one proves dominant. “They are usually pulled apart before they can inflict serious damage on each other,” the article assures passengers, despite the photo of two worried Afghans carrying away a limp black-and-white behemoth from the fight.

And who would be interested in advertising in such a magazine?

The magazine’s audience attracts advertisers as specialized as its content. There are an Australian firm that offers medical services in scary places; a Middle Eastern satellite-communications company whose gear works in the phoneless hinterlands; and a war-zone car-repair service with outlets in Kabul, Baghdad and Monrovia. The ad for Alpha Armouring Panzerung, a Munich company, shows an armored Mercedes SUV cruising through the flames of a roadside bomb.

In a world where in-flight magazines only taut the beautiful and the flashy, this magazine certainly sets itself apart from the competition. No word on whether the magazine is planning a SkyMall expansion.

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Editor’s note: more posts are coming this week. In the meantime, feel free to subscribe by email using the box on the right.

Readings: Steinbrenner, Cryonics, Caffeine, Journalism

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Here’s what I’ve been reading:

1) “Reign of ‘The Boss’ Was a Wild Ride” [ESPN] – George Steinbrenner, a long-time owner of the New York Yankees, died today. This piece by William (Bill) Knack profiles The Boss’ life beautifully. A few quotes not to miss:

On his early life (I love this description):

George M. Steinbrenner first began breathing on Independence Day, 1930, and he did so into a life of privilege and wealth — the son of a successful marine company owner who had been a star hurdler at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and who later pushed his son into the world of competitive athletics. The father, Henry Steinbrenner, had a bit of “The Great Santini” in him when it came to dealing with his son. George took up the hurdles at age 12; whenever the boy finished second in a race, his father would materialize at his side and demand an explanation.

On Steinbrenner’s influence on free agency:

Surely his most important legacy is the push he gave to the free-agency revolution, feeding his fragile ego as he threw around bags of cash. He was, in a very real sense, baseball’s first truly modern owner. Steinbrenner was always in a hurry to win, sensing his father standing at his side. He wanted to win today, not tomorrow, and certainly did not want to wait until next week, or next year. For Steinbrenner, at least in the first 20 years of his reign, developing talent in the minor leagues was a bridge too far.

On losing:

And what could be said, in sum, at the end of his run? There is this: More than he loved winning, Steinbrenner hated losing. “I hate to lose,” he said. “Hate, hate, hate to lose.” So he threw everything he had into the race not to lose those World Series titles — all his money and energy, his will and fire, all his anger and pride.

There are other Steinbrenner obituaries posted today (the one at The New York Times is notable as well), but I’ll take Roger Ebert’s advice that Bill Knack’s is the one worth reading.

2) “Until Cryonics Do Us Part” [The New York Times] – an interesting, somewhat whimsical piece on how some people want their brains frozen when they die. The piece is not as morbid as it sounds… For instance, one of my favorite passages was one couple’s dispute on the merits of The Brothers Karamazov vs. The Lord of the Rings (both of which I’ve read):

Shortly after they met, Peggy and Robin decided to read each other’s favorite works of literature. Peggy asked Robin to read “The Brothers Karamazov,” and he asked her to read “The Lord of the Rings.” She hated it. “I asked him why he loved it, and he said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. This guy has invented this whole world.’ He asked me why I hated it, and I said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. There was nowhere for the reader to imagine her own interpretation.’ ” Robin, less one for telling stories, describes their early days more succinctly. “There was,” he says not without tenderness, “a personality-type convergence.”

On what it takes to run a cryonics facility:

Alcor’s Patient Care Bay, filled as it is with 10-foot steel canisters packed with human bodies and connected to monitors, may appear self-regulating but in fact requires a very human vigilance against entropy. There is a man charged with topping off the liquid nitrogen. There is a man who mops the floors. Those in charge of the Patient Care Bay are only the last in a long chain of people called upon to assist “deanimated” members. Someone must perform the perfusion, for example, whereby blood is replaced with an antifreeze-like solution that will harden like glass rather than freeze like water. Someone must accompany the body from the site of death to the cryonics facility. Someone must deal with flight schedules, local coroners and byzantine hospital bureaucracies generally unfriendly to those who would march into the hospital and whisk away the freshly dead. This is all vastly more likely to succeed if the legal guardian of the remains is willing to help.

3) “What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain” [Lifehacker] – a good primer on the subject. Briefly:

Every moment that you’re awake, the neurons in your brain are firing away. As those neurons fire, they produce adenosine as a byproduct, but adenosine is far from excrement. Your nervous system is actively monitoring adenosine levels through receptors. Normally, when adenosine levels reached a certain point in your brain and spinal cord, your body will start nudging you toward sleep, or at least taking it easy. There are actually a few different adenosine receptors throughout the body, but the one caffeine seems to interact with most directly is the A1 receptor. More on that later.

Enter caffeine. It occurs in all kinds of plants, and chemical relatives of caffeine are found in your own body. But taken in substantial amounts—the semi-standard 100mg that comes from a strong eight-ounce coffee, for instance—it functions as a supremely talented adenosine impersonator. It heads right for the adenosine receptors in your system and, because of its similarities to adenosine, it’s accepted by your body as the real thing and gets into the receptors.

4) “Journalism Needs Government Help” [The Wall Street Journal] – a feverishly sensational piece in which Lee Bollinger argues that our media/journalism system “needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters.” I’m surprised this piece even made it into the WSJ, frankly. What do you think?

While the Women Are Sleeping

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The best thing I read today was a short story in The New Yorker titled “While the Women Are Sleeping.” The story is by an author I haven’t heard of before: Javier Marías.

The story starts out with more questions than answers…

For three weeks, I saw them every day, and now I don’t know what has become of them. I’ll probably never see them again—at least, not her. Summer conversations, and even confidences, rarely lead anywhere.

It’s kind of an intriguing opening: who is them? What have they become? And summer conversations rarely lead to anywhere?

The story concerns a couple from Madrid vacationing on an island. While there, they observe another couple; the beautiful Inés, described as so:

She was beautiful, indolent, passive, and, by nature, languid. Throughout the three hours a day that we spent at the beach (they stayed longer, perhaps taking their siesta there and, who knows, staying until sunset), she barely moved and was, of course, concerned only with her own beautification

and her older, less attractive male companion named Alberto Viana. What the observing couple find remarkable (and so does the reader, no doubt) is that Alberto constantly, without interruption records Ines on video camera. The video camera has become an extension of him…

The story, admittedly, starts out slowly (I had to step away from reading it in the evening, and came back to it the following day)… But then it picks up and absolutely sucks you in. At least, it did for me. What could be so interesting about a guy videotaping his girlfriend? The answer is explained in the story, which begins with this conversation between the narrator and Alberto:

“I’ve noticed that you’re very keen on video cameras,” I said after that pause, that hesitation.

“Video cameras?” he said, slightly surprised or as if to gain time. “Ah, I see. No, not really, I’m not a collector. It isn’t the camera itself that interests me, although I do use it a lot. It’s my girlfriend, whom you’ve seen, I’m sure. I film only her, nothing else. I don’t experiment with it at all. That’s fairly obvious, I suppose.”

And the conversation picks up from there. What I find fascinating is our abilities to remember things; some go about life, cruising. Others write things down. Others photograph the world around them. This was an intriguing conversation between the narrator and Alberto Viana:

“You don’t have a camera? Don’t you like to be able to remember things?” Viana asked me this with genuine confusion.

“Yes, of course I do, but you can remember things in other ways, don’t you think? Memory is a kind of camera, except that we don’t always remember what we want to remember or forget what we want to forget.”

And still others prefer to record things on video, as Alberto explains to the narrator:

“How can you compare what you can remember with what you can see, with what you can see again, just as it happened? With what you can watch over and over, ad infinitum, and even freeze?

But there is something sinister (though arguably honest) in Alberto’s declaration…

I won’t say much more except that this is an incredible story of obsession, vision (literally and figuratively), memory, human misconceptions, life, and death. Shortly put, it is one of the best works of fiction I have read in 2010, so I highly recommend reading it.

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A hat tip to @etherielmusings for pointing out this story via Twitter.

William Deresiewicz: On Solitude and Leadership

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The best piece of writing/advice I have read this week comes courtesy of The American Scholar; it is a lecture delivered by William Deresiewicz (formerly a professor of English at Yale University) to a plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009.

The lecture explores a number of ideas: how we think, what it takes to be a leader, and even the influence of Twitter/Facebook in our lives. A few of my favorite passages are below (keep in mind that I always recommend reading articles in their entirety, but if you want the general idea, see below).

What does it take to be a leader?

So I began to wonder…what leadership really consists of. My students, like you, were energetic, accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them, certainly didn’t seem to me like  leaders. Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even ex­cellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning. And it seemed to me that that had to be especially true of the kind of excellence I saw in the students around me.

I loved this paragraph on students described as “excellent sheep” (I saw quite a few of these in my high school and college years):

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.

Why is there a crisis of leadership in America?

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision. [emphases mine]

There’s a great case study in General David Petraeus in the lecture. On his leadership:

No, what makes him a thinker—and a leader—is precisely that he is able to think things through for himself. And because he can, he has the confidence, the courage, to argue for his ideas even when they aren’t popular. Even when they don’t please his superiors. Courage: there is physical courage, which you all possess in abundance, and then there is another kind of courage, moral courage, the courage to stand up for what you believe.

This is the paragraph that stuck with me. What exactly is meant by thinking? William Deresiewicz’s explanation:

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

An excellent point that the first thought isn’t one’s own:

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

William Deresiewicz take on Facebook, Twitter, and even The New York Times as distractions:

You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself.

I’ve made this argument before in my previous post (does the Internet make us dumber or smarter? I claimed that it makes us more distracted). The question is: what can we do to get away from all this distraction in our lives? This is the importance of solitude:

So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.

There is one passage with which I disagree:

Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself.

I think “marinating” in other people’s thoughts helps me develop my own: I probe what I already know, what I believe in, and what I question by examining what others have to offer. Of course, it is important to take what anyone says with an inquisitive (some would say skeptical) mind.

Finally, an excellent point on why it’s important to read books:

So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself.

Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today. Even if they merely reflect the conventional wisdom of their own day, they say something different from what you hear all the time. But the great books, the ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people have continued to read, don’t reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today.

The goal of this blog has been to profile the books I’ve read in 2010. Over the last few months, I’ve shifted more to profiling interesting articles I have found on the web. It seems to me people are less interested in reading book reviews compared to reading interesting articles on the web (at least, that’s my interpretation; let me know if you think otherwise). I absolutely hope you read the entire lecture. It’s one of the most lucid pieces of writing I have read in a while.

The Future of News: Google

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One of the most interesting pieces I’ve read recently is James Fallows’ “How To Save the News” in The Atlantic. It’s a fantastic piece of long-form journalism, and if you’re into journalism and the way news is delivered online, it’s definitely a must-read. The article explores Google’s delivery of news, whether customers would (or in what circumstances) pay for news, the customization of news tailored to specific users, how Google and traditional media companies rely on advertising, and quite a bit more. If you think the nearly 10,000 word piece isn’t worth your time, I want to point out the most interesting passages below:

The premise of the article is that there is “a larger vision for news coming out of Google” — that the world’s largest search engine company is more than that; according to Fallows, Google is the world’s most important media organization.

Who’s behind Google News? Interesting to learn that it was someone from Georgia Tech, my alma mater:

It was Krishna Bharat who identified a more profound form of inefficiency [in news delivery]. As a student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, Bharat had written for the campus newspaper while taking his computer-science degree. “In a second life, I would be a journalist,” he once told an Indian newspaper. (When the Indian newspaper asks me, I will say: In a second life, I would be a successful Google executive.) He got his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech and was an early Google hire, in 1999. After the 9/11 attacks two years later, he grew worried about the narrowness of news he was receiving through the U.S. media. “I felt that we really had to catch up with the world’s news,” he told me. “To get a broad understanding, you had to visit sites in Europe and Asia and the Middle East. I was wondering if Google could do something to make the world’s news information available.”

There are some people who claim that Google aggregating the news is bad for the news industry (because viewers wouldn’t click through the articles, occasionally). However, a rebuttal with which I strongly agree:

Google’s rebuttal to the claim of stealing is that it doesn’t sell ads on the Google News site, and moreover provides hardly any of the newspapers’ original content. Indeed, in this practice it is the opposite of “aggregators” like the Huffington Post, which often “excerpt” enough of someone else’s story that readers don’t bother to click through to the source. Google News gives only a set of headlines and two-line links meant to steer traffic (and therefore ad potential) to the news organization that first ran the story.

What grabbed my attention is how a piece of news could get thousands of “hits” on Google’s page. Is it a case of news organizations choosing to write on the same topic because it’s important, or is it a copycat effect at work?

The Google News front page is a kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world’s media, in real time. “Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” he told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.”

On the three pillars of the new online business mode (distribution, engagement, and monetization):

[G]etting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads. Conveniently, each calls on areas of Google’s expertise.

But the most insightful part of the article was my new understanding on how news can be incremental. What does that mean? For example, if you’ve never read The Wall Street Journal before, and you started reading it today, it might be a significant challenge to get into it. Why? Because some stories are built on what was reported yesterday, and the day before, and so on for quite some time. Here’s Fallows describing this incrementation:

News reporting is usually incremental. Something happens in Kabul today. It’s related to what happened there yesterday, plus 20 years ago, and further back. It has a bearing on what will happen a year from now. High-end news organizations reflect this continuous reality in hiring reporters and editors who (ideally) know the background of today’s news and in the way they present it, usually with modest additions to the sum of established knowledge day by day.

And so, prior to reading the article, this important facet of journalism didn’t really cross my mind (in the scope of Google aggregating news). So why is this incremental news important? Because a well-done journalistic piece, which took days and days of research, collaboration, interviewing, writing, and editing, might not be deemed “worthy” in the eyes of Google search (i.e., careful, insightful journalism is punished, while “tabloid-style” reporting rises to the top of Google search). To me, this is the most important take-away from the piece:

The modest daily updating of the news—another vote in Congress, another debate among political candidates—matches the cycle of papers and broadcasts very well, but matches the Internet very poorly, in terms of both speed and popularity rankings. The Financial Times might have given readers better sustained coverage of European economic troubles than any other paper. But precisely because it has done so many incremental stories, no one of them might rise to the top of a Google Web search, compared with an occasional overview story somewhere else. By the standards that currently generate online revenue, better journalism gets a worse result.

There is so much more in the article which I didn’t cover in this short post. If you have some time (more like an hour or two), this is an article definitely worth bookmarking for a later read.

On Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses

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No one has ever really read Ulysses. And if they try to convince you otherwise, they’re either lying or pulling your chain.

That’s what our high school English teacher used to tell us about James Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses. The natural skeptic that I am, the day after I first heard this proclamation, I went to my local library and decided to check out the book. However, it didn’t happen. I found the book on the shelf, opened it up, and started reading:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI

It was at this point that I said, “Whaaa?” Nevertheless, I decided to keep reading. I finished the first page. The damage was done. I put the book back on the shelf, defeated. I realized that perhaps those who say that they have read Ulysses, they maybe read the first page, or even the first chapter. But I have a hard time believing that they’ve read the entire book and understood what they’ve read.

Here is Joseph Collins writing in the New York Times in 1922 (I echo his sentiment and appreciate the critique):

A few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend Ulysses, James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it—even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it—save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.

I recently met someone—let’s call her Emma—who mentioned that Ulysses is one of her favorite books. Curious, I inquired further. The conversation went like this:

Eugene: Wow, so you’ve read James Joyce’s Ulysses? [Editor’s note: I am always careful to preface works of literature with an author’s name; for all I know, Emma might have thought I was talking about Tennyson’s poem of the same name]

Emma: Yes, it is one of my favorite books. I’ve put blood, toil, tears, and sweat into that book, and I am proud of having read it.

Eugene: Okay, I understand the tears, sweat, and the toil. But did you really bleed while reading Ulysses?

Emma: Yes. Paper cut!

So there you go. Apparently that’s what it takes to read Ulysses.

Question for the reader: have you read Ulysses? Have you, really?

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[Resource: Analyzing Ulysses, in which Avinash Vora estimates that the book contains a (unique) vocabulary of 30,030 words. That’s incredible!]

Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: Book Review

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Today, I finished reading Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading. It’s a fairly short novel, at around 220 pages, and I finished reading it in a span of two days.

This is an interesting work, full of vivid imagery, surreal settings, and twisted, sometimes irrational, dialogue. The plot revolves around a young man named Cincinnatus C., who is condemned to death (by beheading) for committing a crime of “gnostical turpitude.” The crime itself is imaginary, so no definition is provided. The majority of the novel takes place inside a prison cell, where Cincinnatus is visited by jailers, an executioner who pretends to be a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who bring their furniture (not to mention household utensils and “sections of walls”) with them into Cincinnatus’s prison cell. The musings of Cincinnatus are bizarre: in one part of the novel, the protagonist imagines the characters as miniature people.

You’re unsure at first, but you discover maybe a quarter through the novel that Cincinnatus has grand visions (or illusions of grandeur). He has a notebook where he writes down his thoughts and what he encounters in his daily life (“to write letters to various objects and natural phenomena”) within the fortress in which he is confined. At times you think he is absolutely clueless about his situation, as the questions he asks may be mistaken for those coming from a child. Still, he tries to reconcile his (grim) situation…

You don’t really read this novel for its plot, absurd as it may be. You read it to digest the dialogue and Nabokov’s eloquent narration. At the end of the novel, Cincinnatus is taken to be hanged, and the way the ending unfolds is just sublime. I read it over multiple times just to make sure I followed (a foreshadowing three-fourths of the way into the novel: “Cincinnatus allowed them the right to exist, supported them, nourished them with himself”).

If you haven’t read any of Nabokov’s work, don’t make this your first. I would recommend reading Nabokov’s Magnum opus, Lolita, first. Then, I highly recommend reading Pale Fire (which I enjoyed much more than Invitation to a Beheading).

Nabokov himself said of this novel: “The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures.” But prior to that sentence, the best line: “It [Invitation to a Beheading] is a violin in a void.” Take it for what it is.

The rest of this review is the presentation of certain quotes I found interesting, and where appropriate, my dissection of these quotes.

Continue reading →

Link of the Day (01/25/10)

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There is one article I want to highlight for today. It is so interesting that it deserves to stand on its own as the link of the day.

(1) “The Chess Master and the Computer” [New York Review of Books] – an incredibly well-written and thought-provoking piece by Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time. In the article, Garry Kasparov discusses his play against computers, from the 1980s to the showdown with Deep Blue in 1997 to playing against modern computer chess programs.

Most intriguing to me are Mr. Kasparov’s thoughts on the possibility of solving chess. Imagine this scenario: you make a move in chess, and the computer would be able to calculate the best move under the circumstances and predict the likelihood of achieving mate (and in how many moves it will occur). The concept of solving chess is something I have been thinking about for over ten years, so it’s refreshing to read a Grandmaster’s opinion:

Another group postulated that the game would be solved, i.e., a mathematically conclusive way for a computer to win from the start would be found. (Or perhaps it would prove that a game of chess played in the best possible way always ends in a draw.) Perhaps a real version of HAL 9000 would simply announce move 1.e4, with checkmate in, say, 38,484 moves. These gloomy predictions have not come true, nor will they ever come to pass. Chess is far too complex to be definitively solved with any technology we can conceive of today.

So Mr. Kasparov is not excluding the possibility of chess being solved one day; he simply argues that it is inconceivable to solve the game of chess with the hardware we have today. Mr. Kasparov goes on to explain:

The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can’t solve this ancient board game.

If you are at all interested in chess, computer science, or algorithms, I highly encourage you to read the entire article.


Links of the Day (01/24/10)

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Here are two interesting articles I read today:

(1) “Moscow’s Stray Dogs” [Financial Times] – a descriptive and insightful look into the population of roughly 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow. The articles goes in depth into the four types of dogs roaming the streets of Moscow (based on the dogs’ character, how they forage for food, their level of socialization to people, and the ecological niche they inhabit). What was most interesting to me was reading about the evolution of the dogs. Most intriguing are the Moscow Metro dogs:

They orient themselves in a number of way…They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their ­biological clocks.

The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles.

(2) “Underwater, but Will They Leave the Pool?” [New York Times] – an interesting look into why the mortgage default rates are so low.

Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Book Review

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This is the third book I have finished reading in 2010, but Seth Godin’s Linchpin is the first book I will review here. I found out about this book from reading Seth’s blog (which I read daily, and I recommend you start reading as well, if you don’t read it already). In December 2009, I saw Seth’s post about launching his book in advance to motivated readers:

For a select group of motivated readers, I want to send you a copy of Linchpin (at my expense) three weeks before anyone else can buy one. My US publisher is not sending free review copies to magazines (the few that are left), newspaper editors, TV shows, any of the usual media suspects. Instead, we’re allowing people like you to raise their hands and, if they like the book, asking them to tell the world about it in January.

The filter for these motivated readers? A minimum $30 to Acumen Fund. I made my donation within two minutes of reading Seth’s blog post and was subsequently put on the mailing list (to receive updates about this book). I received my copy of Linchpin in the mail about a week ago, and finished reading it yesterday. What follows is my brief review, with snippets of my favorite quotes and my thoughts, where applicable.

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