The Riddle of the Compass.

Amir Aczel’s The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World isn’t as strong as his first two books, Fermat’s Last Theorem (a very math-heavy book but one that relies on the centuries-long efforts to solve that problem for narrative greed) and God’s Equation (a more accessible work about great “blunder” by Albert Einstein that turned out to be correct). Although the story within Compass is mildly interesting, the book – just 159 pages in paperback, including diagrams and a few blank pages between chapters – is so superficial that we get neither story nor an interesting character. In fact, the predominant character in the book probably never existed.

Aczel argues that the compass was, at the time it was invented, the most important invention since the wheel, and produces a reasonable case for the argument while splitting time between the western “invention” of the compass and the evidence for a much earlier invention in China, where the device was used in medicine and by magicians but seldom if ever used for navigation in a country that rarely took to the sea. He takes a detour into Italian history, including an interesting chapter on Amalfi (now known as a tourist mecca, but briefly a maritime power and a flourishing city-state) that is itself a digression from the early inquiry into the alleged inventor of the compass, Flavio Gioia. It seems likely that Gioia himself never existed, and while it’s amusing to see how a missing comma could lead to the creation of a historical personage, it’s not much of a basis for a book.

Aczel accentutates the problem by himself glossing over details that, even if tangential, would add color to the book. While bemoaning both the west’s dismissive and patronizing treatment of Chinese culture during for most of the last millennium and China’s refusal (under multiple regimes) to reveal many scientific and medical secrets, he mentions the very recent discovery that an herb that Chinese doctors have long used as a treatment for malaria has had promising results in tests in western studies. He never mentions the plant’s name (it’s a type of wormwood known by the Latin name Artemisia annua) and lets the matter drop after the one-paragraph teaser.

Next up: A little Wodehouse for the holidays, with a trip to Blandings Castle in Summer Lightning , available only in the compilation Life at Blandings.

Comments

  1. This is related to Law’s baseball blog.

    Keith, you are wrong about salary caps. In a vaccum they will transfer wealth to owners. However, I am not aware of a salary cap that is not tied to overall revenue.

    If one sets the cap at X % of total revenue and then sets a mandatory salary floor at Y % of total revenue, it is revenue neutral for players. In the NFL, the numbers are around 60% and 55%.

    So in baseball, look at the range for player salaries as a % of revenue over the past 10 years, and then collectively bargain two numbers in the range.

    The hard parts in baseball are (a) teams don’t want to share their financial info (b) even if they did, teams that own their facility and broadcast network can cook their books to show glaring losses each year; and most damning (c) the salary floor won’t work with the current system of revenue sharing.

    These may be insurmountable problems given the vagaries of MLB.

    You would, however, be hard-pressed to suggest that the heightened level of competition that the salary cap era has brought to the NFL has not lead to increased success, and as a result, increased revenue for the league and higher salaries for the players.