→ April 8, 2016
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The Unfinished Game.

I’m still playing a bit of catchup on stuff I read during March (and just finished Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War over lunch today), but one title I definitely want to bring to everyone’s attention is the delightful, short book by mathematician (and NPR’s “Math Guy”) Keith Devlin called The Unfinished Game, which explains how one specific letter in the correspondence between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat opened the door to the world of probability and everything that this branch of mathematics makes possible.

The unfinished game of the book’s title was based on a common, popular controversy of the time surrounding games of chance, which were largely seen as incalculable – our modern, simple way of calculating odds of things like throws of the dice just did not exist at the time. Pascal and Fermat discussed the question of how to divide winnings in a game of two or more players where the players choose to abandon the game before any one player has won the requisite number of matches. (So, for example, they’re playing a best-of-five, but the players quit after three rounds, with one player having won two times and the other one.) The controversy in question will seem silly to any modern reader who’s taken even a few weeks of probability theory in high school math, but Devlin is deft enough to explain the problem in 1600s terms, so that the logical confusion of the era is clear on the page.

The confusion stemmed from the misunderstanding about the frequencies of subsequent events, given that the game would not always be played to its conclusion: You may say up front you’re going to play a best of seven, but you do not always need to play seven matches to determine a winner. If you quit after three games, in the situation I outlined above, it is possible that you would have needed just one more match to determine a winner, and it is possible that you would have needed two more matches. Pascal’s letter to Fermat proposed a method of determining how to split the winnings in such an unfinished game; the letter was the start of modern probability theory, and the problem is now known as the problem of points. (You can read the entire surviving correspondence on the University of York’s website; it also includes their conversations on prime numbers, including Fermat’s surprising error in claiming that all numbers of the form 2(2n)+1, which is only true for 0 ≤ n ≤ 4. Those five numbers are now called Fermat primes; Euler later showed Fermat’s hypothesis was wrong, and 2(25)+1 = 4294967297, which is composite.)

Fermat realized you must count all of the potential solutions, even ones that would not occur because they involved playing the fifth game when it was made unnecessary by the first player winning the fourth match and taking the entire set, so to speak. (The problem they discussed was slightly more involved.) Pascal took Fermat’s tabular solution, a brute-force method of counting out all possible outcomes, and made it generalizable to all cases with a formula that works for any number of players and rounds. This also contributed to Pascal’s work on what we now call Pascal’s triangle, and created what statisticians and economists now refer to as “expectation value” – the amount of money you can expect to win on a specific bet given the odds and payout of each outcome.

Devlin goes about as far as you can when your subject is a single letter, with entertaining diversions into the lives of Pascal and Fermat (who corresponded yet never met) and tangents like Pascal’s wager. At heart, the 166-page book is about probability theory, and Devlin makes the subject accessible to any potential reader, even ones who haven’t gone beyond algebra in school. Given how much of our lives – things like insurance, financial markets, and sports betting, to say nothing of the probabilistic foundations of quantum theory – are possible because of probability theory, The Unfinished Game should probably be required reading for any high school student.

Next up: I just started Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, winner of the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

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→ December 30, 2015
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Beyond Einstein.

Some great boardgame apps still on sale, including Splendor for $0.99 (iOS or android) and Ticket to Ride for $2.99 (iOS or android).

I enjoyed physicist Michio Kaku’s book Einstein’s Cosmos, a biography of the founder of relativity theory that didn’t skimp on details of Einstein’s work, so when I spotted another of Kaku’s books, the 1995 work Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe (co-authored by Jennifer Thompson) for half price at Changing Hands in Tempe during my annual AFL trip, I picked it up without a second thought. The book covers a little of the same ground as the Einstein bio, but is primarily a history of superstring theory and the search for a “grand unified theory” (up to 1995, of course) that would bring together the four fundamental forces of physics, building the reader up from the mid-19th century forward through various stops and starts that included the proposal, discarding, and resurrection of string theory from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Strings, in particle physics, are theoretical subparticles that would constitute all types of matter and energy in the universe: the hundreds (or more) types of subatomic particles known to physics may all be manifestations of strings, with different vibrations of the strings showing up to our devices as different subatomic particles. String theory would solve a large number of problems with our current understanding of the nature of matter and energy, from the existence of the aforementioned four forces (gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism, although the last two have been shown to be the same thing) to the origins of the universe itself. Most theoretical physics has rested on the assumption that the universe is orderly; the complexity involved in having hundreds of fundamental particles, or even in having four independent forces, has in and of itself led physicists to try to unite these under a single umbrella, with string theory the leading candidate and quite possibly the only game in town.

Where Kaku and Thompson succeed is in guiding the reader to a basic understanding of string theory by gradually working their way through the various milestones in physics research over the 120 or so years before string theory became widely accepted as a serious candidate for the “theory of everything.” That means we get our fill of Maxwell and Einstein, but we also get Feynman diagrams (which apparently are rather a big deal, but were new to me as a lay reader) and the best concise explanation of Schrodinger’s cat paradox I’ve come across. Kaku also explains symmetry and supersymmetry, the suspected nature of dark matter, and the connection between Lie groups (from group theory) and quantum field theory, without ever drowning readers in math unless you go to the footnotes. I wouldn’t say that the book taught me enough about string theory – I think I’ll have to get Brian Greene’s best-selling The Elegant Universe for that – but it gave me more than just a superficial explanation along with plenty of the mind-bending stuff that makes theoretical physics seem fun to someone like me.

There are some sections at the end of the book that seemed to me to go beyond science and into the highly speculative, although some of you may be able to tell me that my impression is wrong. Some of it is just strange, like the argument that the universe was originally in ten dimensions but collapsed into two separate universes, ours with four dimensions and another, minuscule universe that held the other six (are dimensions really additive?). Some seemed borderline metaphysical, like the argument that the universe came from nothing in a sort of quantum leap, even though sudden state shifts like that don’t occur … well, ever, or wouldn’t we stand in constant risk of winking out of existence (or perhaps into another, parallel universe)? Kaku’s book leaves lots of questions unanswered, but I suppose it fits, since theoretical physics has yet to answer many of those same questions.

Next up: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, another Hugo Award winner.

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→ November 9, 2015
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Ada’s Algorithm.

My top 50 free agent rankings went up Friday for Insiders, following by the “deleted scenes” post with capsules on four guys whom I wrote about before their employers picked up their club options. I’ve also got buyers’ guides to catchers and to corner infielders up, with middle infielders due on Tuesday.

Everything seems to be coming up Ada Lovelace lately; largely overlooked in her own time because she was a woman in the early Victorian era and was better known as the one legitimate offspring of the rake Lord Byron, she’s now widely recognized as the creator of the first machine algorithm, the primary ancestor of the modern computer program. The Department of Defense named a programming language (Ada) after her in the early 1980s, and she’s appeared in numerous works of fiction (such as William Gibson’s The Difference Engine) and non-fiction (including a brand-new short work aimed at schoolchildren called Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine) over the last 25 years. Since my daughter was working on a short presentation on Lovelace – all the kids were asked to pick a scientist, and she was pissed off because there was only one woman (Marie Curie, of course) on the original list of assignments – I picked up James Essinger’s 2014 biography, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age, which had most of the key details but is padded with a lot of less critical material.

Ada Lovelace’s place in history comes from her friendship with Charles Babbage, who designed (but never built) the first computers, one called the Difference Engine, of which he built one-seventh, and another called the Analytical Engine, which he never built at all due to the prohibitive cost and lack of manufacturing facilities capable of building all of the cogswheels the device required. Babbage was a bit of a mad scientist, prone to emotional outbursts and self-destructive arguments that cost him any shot to gain the funds necessary to build even part of either Engine beyond what he built. He also lacked Ada’s communications skills, and when the Italian mathematican (and later Prime Minister of Italy) Luigi Federico Menabrea wrote a paper describing Babbage’s Analytical Engine, Lovelace translated it into English and supplemented it with her own Notes, the latter of which ran more than twice as long as Menabrea’s original article, and included the algorithm that earned her posthumous fame. She saw the potential of Babbage’s machine that even Babbage did not – that programmers could use it to solve all kinds of mathematical problems beyond mere arithmetic, as long as the programmer could conceive the necessary series of steps for the calculations.

Lovelace died of uterine cancer at 36, and much of the detail of her life is lost both to time and, it’s believed, to her mother’s decision to destroy much of Ada’s correspondence after the latter’s death. Even many of the letters she exchanged with Babbage are gone, leaving any biographer with relatively meager material from which to construct a story of her life. Essinger barely makes it past 200 pages, and even to get to that point he has to fill with material that’s not all that relevant to the reader primarily interested in Ada’s Notes and the algorithm of the book’s title. For example, we don’t need two chapters on Lord Byron, and I was certainly glad I got the book away from my daughter (who found it boring anyway) before she got to the mentions of his incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta or the story of how his nanny would take him into her bed, masturbate him, and then later turn around and beat him, often doing both things in the presence of her friends. (That material would seem essential in any biography of Byron himself, though, since it probably explains his later promiscuity and other “immoral” behavior relative to the mores of the era.) Byron was out of Ada’s life for good while she was still an infant, and including such details on his life seems more than just out of place but almost pandering.

Essinger gives us too much of the text of some of her less relevant letters, and inserts his own speculation on things like whether she might have met certain personages of the era, like Charles Darwin, or whether Babbage was in love with Ada, for which there’s no tangible evidence. The first hardcover edition also has numerous typos and minor errors in the text – for example, using “inconceivable” when he meant “conceivable,” which is kind of a weak word anyway – that further added to my impression that I was reading Essinger’s thoughts and opinions rather than a narrative rendering of her life. It seems that we don’t know enough about Ada Lovelace for a full biography, but that doesn’t quite justify surrounding what we do know with speculation or tangential details.

Next up: Speaking of Gibson, I’m reading Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third book in his Sprawl trilogy, which began with the Hugo-winning Neuromancer.

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→ September 25, 2015
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The Sixth Extinction.

My annual column on players I got wrong is up for Insiders.

I was feeling okay until I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, winner of the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, an unbelievably well-written and thorough accounting of the history of mass extinctions with a particular emphasis on the current one that is the first to be caused by another species – us.

The various scientists who work on the history of life on earth and of the planet itself agree that we’ve seen five mass extinction events since life first began, including the one we all learned about in school, the massive impact of a foreign body on earth that ended the Cretaceous period, killing all non-avian dinosaurs and three of every four species extant on the planet at that time. That wasn’t even the most damaging to life on earth – the end Permian event wiped out over 90% of extant species – and other extinction events had differing causes, including widespread glaciation or gradual oceanic acidification. But these events did occur, along with numerous smaller extinction events, which is why the current biosphere looks like it does, with our species the dominant one … and causing the current mass extinction event, which could lead to the loss of half of the biodiversity on the planet by the end of the century.

Kolbert has a lot of what could be some very dry paleontological and geological research on the history of mass extinction events, but instead weaves them into numerous narratives around specific species that we’ve lost or are trying to protect. She flashes backward into historical research to discuss long-vanished species like graptolites, which were wiped out in the ice age that ended the Ordovician period roughly 444 million years ago, or to discuss the various natural environmental phenomena that caused previous mass extinction events. In many of these chapters, she traveled to conservation sites, to zoos, or to natural habitats to follow scientists attempting to stave off extinctions or learn the causes of population losses. She travels to Panama to witness the desperate attempts to save various golden frog populations from the chytrid fungus, which eats away at amphibians’ skin, and to a cave in upstate New York where the native bat population was decimated by “white nose syndrome,” caused by another fungus called Pseudogymnoascus (formerly geomyces) destructans that thrives in the cold temperatures the bats favor.

By the end of the book, Kolbert has devoted a chapter to each of the major effects of human development on the biosphere that are now factors in the ongoing mass extinction event, including climate change, ocean acidification, habitat destruction, geographic fragmentation, spreading invasive species, and hunting/poaching. It’s utterly horrifying, not least because there’s so little we can do at this point: Our very existence, and our (temporary) supremacy atop the evolutionary pyramid, has led to numerous extinctions, from our hunting the great auks out of existence to deforestation that has wiped out numerous bird and amphibian species. Global warming is a dire threat to marine life in particular, and ocean acidification, climate change’s “equally evil twin,” is killing the world’s coral reefs. We’re bringing pathogens to ecosystems where the native species haven’t evolved any resistance, and bringing invasive plant, insect, and reptile species to environments where they lack natural predators. We suck.

Of course, we are also the only species in the history of the planet to actually care about stopping extinctions, although our efforts tend to focus on single species and to come very late, rather than trying to stop massive factors like climate change that threaten thousands of species simultaneously. Kolbert can’t even muster a high note on which to end the book, not that she should sugar-coat the truth, and concludes with the open question of what consequences these environmental catastrophes and the consequential loss of biodiversity might have for us.

Kolbert goes into the suspected causes of the mass extinctions, four of which are more or less tied to the current event. The end Permian “impact” event makes for a fascinating story because the hypothesis is so recent (first proposed in 1980) and was so widely derided at the time, including a famous New York Times editorial from 1985 titled “Miscasting the Dinosaur’s Horoscope,” which concluded with the line, “Astronomers should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the cause of earthly events in the stars.” While it’s the one kind of mass extinction event cause we’re not currently putting in play ourselves, it makes for a compelling side story as Kolbert explains both the discovery of the evidence that backs it up and the scientific establishment’s resistance to the idea when it was first proposed.

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→ August 26, 2015
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Einstein’s Cosmos plus seven other books.

I’ve fallen way behind in book reviews, so rather than procrastinate further and get upset with myself for letting this many pile up, here are my thoughts on eight books I’ve read recently.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku does a remarkable job of taking a dense scientific topic and making it accessible in Einstein’s Cosmos, part of the same Great Discoveries series that includes Everything and More by David Foster Wallace and Incompleteness by Rebecca Goldstein. Part biography of Einstein, part survey course in theoretical physics, Einstein’s Cosmos takes the reader back to Einstein’s childhood, dispelling some myths about his youth and eventually leading to the best lay explanation of special relativity I’ve come across. Kaku doesn’t stint on some of Einstein’s less flattering moments, such as his early opposition to quantum field theory, but presents him as a man of great principle as well as an uncommon ability to visualize difficult problems in physics, a skill that first allowed him to formulate the theory of special relativity by asking what would happen if he could chase a beam of light while he himself was traveling at the speed of light. Kaku has to give the reader a substantial amount of information to get to the point of special relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy, including a basic discussion of Maxwell’s equations, four partial differential equations that describe the formation and behavior of electromagnetic fields (above the quantum level, which Maxwell’s equations can only approximate). None of this is easy, but Kaku’s explanations are accessible even if you’ve never taken calculus, because his focus is on the meaning of these formulas and theories rather than on their precise functions. He also gives color the portrait of Einstein, who was an eccentric and widely beloved figure, without reducing him to caricature by repeating old tropes about him being a terrible student (he was a superb student when he cared about the subject) or a mere patent clerk (university politics kept him out of academia at first, not a lack of skill or background). I recommend it very highly if you’re at all interested in the man or his discoveries and, like me, are a long way removed from any coursework that might otherwise be necessary to understand it.

—

Michael Blanding’s The Map Thief tells the story of rare map dealer turned thief E. Forbes Smiley III, and follows in the footsteps of an earlier book about another crook who cut rare maps from ancient atlases, Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps. While Blanding’s book is better written and organized, giving a breezy history of cartography and explaining why some of these maps are so rare, the subject of the book, Smiley, is a fairly milquetoast character, even when Blanding tries to give him more dimension by talking about his attempts to remake a small town in rural Maine. This sort of non-fiction book tends to work best when the central narrative involves a literal or figurative chase, but Blanding spends scant time on the portion of Smiley’s story between the discovery that he may have taken some maps (or even that maps were missing) to his arrest. Harvey’s book, on the other hand, tells the story of the appropriately-named Gilbert Bland, an antiques dealer with no apparent personality, by turning into more of an old-fashioned crime book, documenting his crimes and the process of tracking him down in a way that covers up Bland’s lack of character. Both books are solid reads in their own rights, with Blanding’s shorter and more tightly organized, while Harvey’s has more narrative greed.

–

I’m still gradually working my way through the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners, and read two winners from the 1990s that were good-not-great, although in one case I could at least easily understand why it won. Steven Millhauer’s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer reads like a fable, detailing the titular character’s rise from his youth as the son of a cigar-store owner to successful hotelier and entrepreneur, only to find with each new venture that his ambition is unsated, eventually pushing himself to build a hotel so grandiose that it fails. Along the way, Dressler marries the wrong woman, an entirely unconvincing subplot that undermined much of the novel’s narrative force. I could see the Pulitzer committee loving the book for its exploration of the superficiality of the American Dream.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, later adapted into a Best Picture-nominated film that starred three of the best actresses of its specific time (Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar for her performance as Virginia Woolf), seemed to fit the Pulitzer Committee’s loose standards less, but was a more literary, well-rounded work. Cunningham crafts three vaguely interconnected novellas and weaves them together with frequent shifts between them, setting them in three different times, with the only overt connection via Mrs. Dalloway: one story follows Woolf as she’s writing it, the other two revolve around women who’ve read the book and felt a deep connection to it. I would probably have enjoyed or appreciated The Hours more if I’d actually liked Mrs. Dalloway or had at least read it more recently, although the way Cunningham eventually connects the two non-Woolf stories, while somewhat predictable, is touching without devolving into mere sentiment, and still left me wanting more of that unified storyline.

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I love Evelyn Waugh’s novels, but Helena, a short work of historical fiction, did nothing for me. It’s missing most of his trademark humor, instead telling a fictionalized version of the life of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, who made a pilgrimage to Syriana and, according to legend, rediscovered the True Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. Waugh converted to Catholicism after writing his first novel, Vile Bodies, and while there are strains of his religious belief through all of his later works, Helena feels maudlin and ends with a passage that you might characterize as magical realism depending on your point of view on Christianity. Waugh apparently considered this one of his best novels, but since his satirical prose and eye were what made him a great novelist, Helena feels inconsequential in comparison.

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William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, winner of a National Book Award in 1982, came recommended by my friend Samantha, an avid bibliophile who favors shorter fiction where I go for novels. So Long is a 135-page novella that explores loss and memory through the eyes of an old man remembering his broken connection with a friend when the latter’s father committed a shocking murder. The narrator goes back to the time of the murder and recounts the circumstances that led up to it, although I imagine his account is supposed to be unreliable (as with the imagined recollections of the narrator of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime). Maxwell depicts the life of the small town in Southern Illinois in often painful detail, walking through the minds of the three principals in the affair that led to the murder, and actually devotes little page time to his friend, the unfortunately-named Cletus, whom I couldn’t picture as anything but a slack-jawed yokel.

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Dodie Smith’s name may not be familiar to you, but you know her work: She wrote the children’s book that Disney adapted for 101 Dalmatians. She also wrote a novel, I Capture the Castle, that’s highly regarded in England but seems to have never caught on here, perhaps because its subject is so very British. The 1949 novel starts out like a Jane Austen book: Two sisters move into a remote castle with their author father, who subsequently falls into severe writer’s block and finds himself unable to produce another novel – or any income, with the girls’ stepmother only barely more able to provide. A wealthy family moves into the neighborhood, with two very eligible bachelor sons, one of whom takes a fancy to the narrator’s sister … but Smith avoids the predictable and crafts a compelling narrative by having the younger sister, Cassandra, tell the story through her journal, with scrupulous honesty. I was hoping for a little more humor, but the seventeen-year-old narrator’s voice doesn’t have Austen’s wry comic style. The descriptions of the family’s privations early in the book wore on, but the denouement justified much of the time spent to get there.

–

The final book in this list gets the shortest writeup. Cesare Pavere’s The Moon and the Bonfires tells of an Italian expatriate’s return to his hometown after the devastation of the Mussolini regime and the second World War, and the tragedies he uncovers while obviously hoping to return to a town unchanged. Without any knowledge of the specific history of Italy under fascism, however, I failed to connect with the story or any of the characters. The isolation of the protagonist and the sparse prose reminded me of Camus, and not in a good way.

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→ July 27, 2015
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Undeniable.

I’ve had three Insider pieces go up in the last 36 hours, on the the Johnny Cueto trade, a few Binghamton Mets prospects, and the Tyler Clippard trade.

Bill Nye’s Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation should be required reading for every American high school student, and I’d hand the book to anyone who indicated s/he plans on voting in our next election. Nye demolishes the many ignorant anti-evolution arguments out there, while eloquently and ardently presenting a case for science in a world of denial and fear-mongering.

The title refers to the persistence of evolution deniers, those folks who refuse to accept the scientific proof of evolution because it interferes with other aspects of their worldview. Nye engaged in a well-known debate with a particularly ardent denier, Ken Ham, who also refuses to accept the actual age of the earth, substituting his own fiction (I believe he says it’s 6000 years old, although some other deniers go with 10,000 years, not that it matters in the least because they’re wrong) for geological fact much as he substitutes his own fiction (that the first book of the Christian Bible is the literal truth of our creation) for biological fact. That debate, in which Nye clowned Ham, who continually referred to the Bible as his “evidence,” was one of the spurs for Nye to write Undeniable, but it serves more broadly as a frontal assault on the anti-science/anti-intellectual movement that hinders or prevents us from facing major societal or global problems, from disease eradication to feeding the planet to slowing anthropomorphic climate change.

The book should convince anyone who still denies evolution yet is willing to listen to some basic facts. We know now that all mammals descended from a common ancestor that lived some 70 million years ago, something demonstrated by patterns in the fossil record and the similarities between our DNA and those of many species seemingly unrelated to us. We’re barely distinguishable at the DNA level from chimpanzees, sharing 99% of our DNA with the related primates called bonobos, while we share about half of our DNA sequences with bananas (themselves the product of cloning; every yellow banana you eat is a Cavendish and is genetically identical to all of the other Cavendishes in the world). NOTE: I edited the common ancestor bit, as I conflated two numbers when writing this review from memory. Thanks to the readers on FB who pointed this out.

He attacks some of the most common (and dumb) creationist arguments against evolution, swatting them down like so many genetically-similar-to-human fruit flies. The argument that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics fails because that law only applies to closed systems, whereas the Earth – getting energy from that big yellow ball in the sky – is very much an open system. The argument from irreducible complexity, that current organisms are too complex to be explained without an Official Designer™, fails on multiple counts, not the least of which is all of the suboptimal designs we see in nature; Nye even mentions ulnar collateral ligaments for pitchers in an amusing aside on this topic. He points out more significantly that the only reason you’d see the “designs” we see in nature are as the result of a process of incremental changes through genetic mutations, and that the “what good is half a wing?” variation of this argument misstates how features like wings evolved. He takes down the false dichotomy of macroevolution versus microevolution (which creationists claim is only “adaptation”), including how the latter is the inevitable result of the former – and how there’s plenty of tangible proof of the latter, despite what Ken Ham might claim.

Once Nye has explained the theory of evolution by way of the various insubstantial criticisms levied at it by creationists, he takes on multiple issues that are related to or follow naturally from our understanding of evolution, all of which are significant issues in the science policy sphere.

* GMOs. Nye has already walked back some of his criticisms from this chapter after taking fire from the scientific community at large, although the concerns he raises about the introduction of DNA from distant species into food crops – notably that their effects on the crops’ ecosystems are difficult to predict – are valid. Humans are particularly terrible at foreseeing unintended consequences, as explained in The Invisible Gorilla and demonstrated in nearly every public-policy decision or the entire Bud Selig reign in MLB, and such genetic modifications entail lots of unpredictable ramifications. Nye has continued to raise the alarm about the massive reduction in the monarch butterfly population thanks to the widespread use of glyphosphate, the enzyme-inhibiting herbicide marketed as Roundup, which has decimated the natural supply of milkweed plants. You should plant some in your yard if you’re in the right part of the country; we have for the last two summers and were rewarded in 2014 with several visiting monarch caterpillars.

* Abortion. Nye points out that the claim that life begins at conception is untenable, as a successfully fertilized human embryo may fail to implant in the uterine wall or fail to successfully undergo gastrulation; if such eggs are considered to be alive and human, then a woman who miscarries for these reasons has committed murder. Nye broaches the topic when discussing stem cells and the concerns, most of which are baseless, about harvesting such cells from fertilized embryos that would otherwise be headed for the sewer.

* Antibiotic drug resistance. If you’ve read my stuff for a while, you know this is a huge issue for me, particularly as it relates to food safety. The problem exists because evolution is true: bacteria that have beneficial mutations that allow them to survive an antibiotic purge reproduce and eventually spread, leading to resistant strains that defeat our drugs. We can’t ever win this battle, but we can certainly fight it more intelligently than we do now.

* Race. It’s not real – that is, not biologically real. Race is a social construct, and Nye explains why.

* Space exploration. Ah, here’s where Nye and I diverge in our views. Nye discusses the possibility of life on other bodies within our solar system, naming a few likely candidates (Mars, Europa, Enceladus), and argues in favor of fairly expensive missions to try to determine if there is life of the microbial variety on any of these planets or satellites. I won’t try to paraphrase his case for fear of doing it an injustice, but I did not find the case satisfactory. A multi-billion dollar mission like this has to have a significant potential payoff for us, and he doesn’t provide one. Knowing there’s life on other worlds would be interesting, but does it advance our knowledge in any practical or meaningful fashion? How would it? Perhaps we’d find microbes that can produce energy in a novel way, or that can consume chemicals that are pollutants on earth … but he doesn’t even broach those possibilities. And, of course, that $10 billion or $20 billion mission has a very high probability of finding no life at all, so the potential payout has to exceed the cost by a significant factor.

* Another chapter, on the evolutionary explanations for altruism, also fell a bit short of the mark for me, but for different reasons. I’m strictly a lay reader on this, and can’t put my opinions on the matter on par with those of Nye or his sources, but it seems even after reading Nye’s explanation that the evolutionary psychology explanation for human altruism is too post hoc – crafting a narrative to fit the facts, rather than working from the facts forward as evolutionary biologists have done. The comparison of human altruism to altruistic behavior in other species also struck me as facile, an argument by weak analogy that did not address the extent or nuance of human altruistic behaviors.

Nye does not explicitly offer any arguments against religion or theism, although he is arguing heavily against creationism, Intelligent Design, and any sort of Creator force behind life on this planet. He also makes several points that are inherently anti-religious, such as the fact that we are not “special” from a genetic perspective and the fact that we aren’t the end product of evolution because evolution has no end product. Nye points out that some readers may find these points depressing, but says he finds evolution and the march of science inspiring, especially because of the breadth of knowledge out there waiting for us to discover it.

I listened to Nye’s narration of the Audible audio edition of Undeniable, and there is no question in my mind that he made the book more enjoyable for me. He brings tremendous enthusiasm to the subject, and his comic timing and delivery are effortless and natural. It’s hard to hear him exude over these topics and not feel his excitement or his indignation. Nye says he wrote this book because teaching anti-scientific topics like creationism hurts our children and our country, a point with which I agree wholeheartedly. Hearing those words from his mouth made the message seem more potent.

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→ June 15, 2015
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The Golden Ticket.

Lance Fortnow wrote a piece for Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2009 on the state of the P vs NP problem, one of the most important unsolved problems in both mathematics and computer science. That article led to the short (~175 page) book The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible, which I recently read in its Kindle edition (it’s also on iBooks); Fortnow does a solid job of making an abstruse problem accessible to a wider audience, even engaging in some flights of fancy describing a world in which P equals NP … which is almost certainly not true (but we haven’t proven that yet either!).

P vs NP, which was first posed by Kurt Gödel in 1956, is one of the seven Millennium Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000; solve one and you get a million bucks. One of them, proving the Poincaré Conjecture (which relates to the shape of the universe), was solved in 2010. But if you solve P vs NP affirmatively, you can probably solve the remaining five and collect a cool $6 million for your problems. You’ll find a box of materials under your desk.

Of course, this is far from an easy question to solve. P and NP are two classes of problems in computer science, and while it seems probable that they are not equivalent, no one’s been able to prove that yet. P is the set of all problems that can be quickly (in deterministic polynomial time – so, like, before the heat death of the universe) solved by an efficient algorithm; NP is the set of all problems whose solutions, once found, can be quickly verified by an efficient algorithm. For example, factoring a huge composite number is in NP: There is no known efficient algorithm to factor a large number, but once we’ve found two factors, a computer can quickly verify that the solution is correct. The “traveling salesman problem” is also in NP; it’s considered NP-complete, meaning that it is in NP and in NP-hard, the set of all problems which are at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP. We can find good solutions to many NP-hard problems using heuristics, but we do not have efficient algorithms to find the optimal solution to such a problem.

If P does in fact equal NP, then we can find efficient algorithms for all problems in NP, even those problems that are NP-complete, and Fortnow details all of these consequences, both positive and negative. One major negative consequence, and one in which Fortnow spends a significant amount of time, would be the effective death of most current systems of cryptography, including public-key cryptography and one-way hashing functions. (In fact, the existence of one-way functions as a mathematical truth is still an unsolved problem; if they exist, then P does not equal NP.) But the positive consequences are rather enormous; Fortnow gives numerous examples, the most striking one is the potential for quickly developing individualized medicines to treat cancer and other diseases where protein structure prediction is an obstacle in quickly crafting effective treatments. He also works in a baseball story, where the game has been dramatically changed across the board by the discovery that P=NP – from better scheduling to accurate ball/strike calls (but only in the minors) to the 2022 prohibition of the use of computers in the dugout. It’s Shangri-La territory, but serves to underscore the value of an affirmative proof: If we can solve NP problems in deterministic polynomial time (as opposed to nondeterministic polynomial time, where NP gets its name), our ability to tease relationships out of huge databases and find solutions to seemingly intractable logical and mathematical problems is far greater than we realized.

Of course, P probably doesn’t equal NP, because that would just be too easy. That doesn’t mean that NP-complete problems are lost causes, but that those who work in those areas – operations research, medicine, cryptography, and so on – have to use other methods to find solutions that are merely good rather than optimal. Those methods include using heuristics that simplify the problem, approximating solutions, and solving a different but related problem that’s in P. If Fortnow falls short at all in this book, it’s in devoting so much more time to the brigadoon where P=NP and less to the likely real world quandary of solving NP-complete problems in a universe where P≠NP. He also gives over a chapter to the still theoretical promise of quantum computing, including its applications to cryptography (significant) and teleportation (come on), but it seems like a digression from the core question in The Golden Ticket. We don’t know if P equals NP, but as Fortnow reiterates in the conclusion, even thinking about the question and possible approaches to proving it in either direction affect work in various fields that underpin most of our current technological infrastructure. If you’ve ever bought anything online, or even logged into web-based email, you’ve used a bit of technology that only works because, as of right now, we can’t prove that P=NP. For a very fundamental question, the P vs NP problem is scarcely known, and Fortnow does a strong job of presenting it in a way that many more readers can understand it.

If this sounds like it’s up your alley or you’ve already read it, I also suggest John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession, about the Riemann Hypothesis, another of the Clay Millennium Institute’s six as-yet unsolved problems.

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→ June 3, 2015
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Incompleteness.

My final top 100 draft prospect ranking for 2015 is up for Insiders, and my latest review for Paste covers the Temple of Elemental Evil boardgame.

Rebecca Goldstein’s Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, part of the same “Great Discoveries” series that includes David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, takes the abstruse topic of Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems and folds it into a readable, compelling biography of both the man and his ideas. Using the logician’s friendship with Albert Einstein as a hook, Goldstein gives us about as intimate a portrait of the intensely private Gödel as we can get, while also laying the groundwork so the non-metamathematicians among us can understand the why and how of Gödel’s theorems.

There’s very little actual math involved in Incompleteness, because the two theorems in question revolve around the nature of mathematics, notably arithmetic, as an axiomatic system that mathematicians and philosophers of the early 1900s were trying to use as a basis to describe arithmetic as a formal system – that is, one that can be fully described via a system of symbols and syntax, used to construct well-formed formulas (wffs, not to be confused with wtfs), some of which are the axioms that define the whole system. If such axioms can describe the entire system in a way that an algorithm (which is probably easiest to conceive as a computer program) can use those axioms and only those axioms to prove all truths or assertions about the natural numbers, then arithmetic would be considered a complete system, something Gödel proved was impossible in his first theorem. His second theorem went even further, showing that such a system of arithmetic also could not be consistent within itself by demonstrating that a statement of the system’s consistency would generate an internal contradiction.

Gödel imself was an incomplete figure, a hypochondriac who degenerated into outright paranoia later in life, and a socially awkward man who would likely have been diagnosed in today’s world of psychiatry and medicine as a depressive or even somewhere on the autism spectrum. He formed few lasting friendships, feared that no one could understand him (and given the meandering paths of his mind, I don’t doubt this was true), and was often shockingly aloof to what was happening around him. He fled his native Austria before World War II, even though he wasn’t Jewish, because his association with the secular Jewish scholars of the Vienna Circle (most of whom were logical Positivists, arguing that anything that could not be empirically proven could not be considered true) cost him his university position. Yet he remained unaware of the state of affairs in his native country, once (according to Goldstein) asking a Jewish emigré who had fled Nazi persecution for the United States, “What brings you to America?”

Goldstein does a superb job setting the scene for Gödel’s emergence as a logician/metamathematician and as a figure of adulation and controversy. The Vienna Circle was, in Goldstein’s depiction, somewhat insular in its unwavering acceptance of Positivism, and as such certain that Hilbert’s second problem, asking for a proof that arithmetic is internally consistent, would be proven true. Gödel’s second theorem showed this was not the case, leading to his own intellectual isolation from thinkers who were heavily invested in the Positivist view of mathematics, a bad outcome for a man who was already prone to introversion and diffidence. G&omul;del found it difficult to express himself without the use of logic, and while his station at Princeton’s illustrious Institute for Advanced Study – a sort of magnet think tank that became a home for great scholars in math and the sciences – put him in contact with Albert Einstein, it also deepened his solitude by limiting his orbit … although that may have been inevitable given his late-life delusions of persecution. Goldstein did encounter Gödel once at a garden party at Princeton, only to see him at his most gregarious, holding court with a small group of awestruck graduate students, only to disappear without a trace when his spell of socializing was over. He was, in her description, a phantom presence around campus, especially once his daily walks with Einstein ended with the latter’s death in 1955.

While giving a basic description of Gödel’s theorems and proofs, focusing more on their implications than on the underlying math, Goldstein does send readers to the 1958 Gödel’s Proof, a 160-page book that attempts to give readers a more thorough understanding of the two theorems even if those readers lack any background in higher math. Incompleteness focuses instead on the man as much as it does on his work, producing a true narrative in a story that wouldn’t otherwise have had one, making it a book that I could recommend to anyone who can stand Goldstein’s occasional use of a $2 word (“veridical”) when a ten-cent one (“truthful”) would have done.

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→ May 3, 2015
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The Victorian Internet.

I first encountered Tom Standage’s work when a friend gave me Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses, a brief history of a half-dozen fundamental drinks common to most global cuisines. At some point after I wrote about that book, Amazon put Standage’s 1996 book, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph, on sale for the Kindle for just $1.99, so I picked it up because it seemed – as Paddington Brown might say – very good value, and I like to stash a few ebooks on my iPad in case I’m traveling and am caught without a book. Standage’s book was more than worth that price, as it’s a breezy, enlightening book on the invention, rise, and fall of the telegraph, with many parallels to the invention and rise of the modern Internet – although the latter’s fall has yet to come.

Standage covers a lot of ground in a short book, so he’s rarely bogged down in excessive detail; what detail there is he concentrates toward the front of the book as he describes attempts to invent the first telegrpah and then to improve it. The telegraph was preceded by what now seem comically inept attempts to transmit information over long distances using towers that would send signals using light by moving large panels that were visible from the next station. (Such towers live on in the many places around the world named Telegraph Hill.) It took a couple of crackpots who either didn’t know of the difficulties they faced or simply wished them away to come up with the first real devices that transmitted very simple signals over electrical wires – and then the inventors had to convince others that these things would actually work. Telegraphs first caught on thanks to some basic economic needs, not to actual foresight on anyone’s part: Railways and stock traders were among the leading early customers, and the rapid increase in the demand for immediate information via telegraphy led to attempts to increase what we’d now call the bandwidth of telegraph lines. These efforts eventually led to the fortunate accident, also described in Standage’s book, that led to Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson (as all good assistants are named) discovering that they could transmit sounds over electrical wires, leading them to invent the telephone. Thomas Edison also makes a few appearances, as his first paying job was as a telegraph operator, a task at which he was so adept he quickly raised his pay and status and eventually used his work as leverage to fund his first laboratory.

Once that technical material is out of the way, Standage can focus on the social and economic aspects of the telegraph’s invention and rapid spread and adoption. News agencies were also early adopters, leading to the now-ubiquitous organizations Reuters and the Associated Press. Diplomats made heavy use of such cables for several decades, with the telegraph playing significant roles in the Dreyfuss Affair (which led Emile Zola to pen his “J’accuse!” column) and the Zimmermann Telegram fiasco during World War I. But there were also dreamers who thought the telegraph would lead to world peace and skeptics who thought the telegraph a parlor trick or feared its impact, similar to pronouncements on all sides of the earliest days of the World Wide Web (and the Segway, which didn’t work out quite so well). It’s an instructive look at how new technologies can disrupt entire economies, and how people and businesses react to such disruptive technologies in the first place, with massive investments made as if the telegraph was going to last forever, only to have it supplanted by the telephone within a few decades.

Standage wrote his book in 1997, so even in the short period since then we’ve seen substantial upheaval from the explosion of the Internet around the globe and through new access points unthought of when most people got online via a computer and a 28k modem. He adds an afterword, written in 2007, where he correctly foresees the rise of mobile phones as Internet access devices, and even draws a parallel between the economy of characters in text messaging and the various methods of shorthand used to send cheaper telegraphs. The afterword gives The Victorian Internet the finishing bow it needs to tie together its subject with the subtitle, and to allow Standage to emphasize the broader point about the creative destruction wrought by highly disruptive technologies. It’s a quick, educational read that, if it pops up for $2 again, would even make a bear from darkest Peru smile.

Next up: I finished Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena last night and started Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.

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→ March 24, 2015
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Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster.

Pope Brock’s Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam tells the story of con man J.R. Brinkley, the forerunner to today’s “FoodBabe” and “HealthRanger,” a man whose scams were so successful (at extracting money) and popular that he nearly won an election to become governor of Kansas. He helped create the modern radio industry, launched the first real “border blaster” from just over the border with Mexico, and spent about twenty years evading the pursuit of the American Medical Association’s lead investigator Morris Fishbein before finally coming to justice. It is so bizarre and so extreme that it defies belief, both that anyone could get away with a scam so brazen and that his name isn’t that well known today.

Brinkley’s main con was to pass himself off as a surgeon (despite a lack of any medical degree other than honorary ones he received later) who invented an operation where he would implant the glands from goat testicles into the scrotum of a human to give the latter added virility. In other words, he was selling penis pills before Al Gore invented the Internet. And it worked – the con, that is, not the operation, which was complete bullshit and left many patients maimed or worse. Brinkley built a huge practice in the backwater town of Milford, Kansas, in part by also constructing one of the country’s first radio stations and using it to promote his own business. He also filled much of the station’s airtime with country music, spreading the popularity of that genre and thus further building the audience for his promotion of his own business.

When the authorities in Kansas eventually forced him to stop killing people with scrotal operations, Brinkley first staged a write-in campaign for governor that, in just five weeks, may have garnered him enough votes to win, only to have a back-room deal invalidate thousands of those votes and hand the election to one of his rivals. Brinkley later decamped for Del Rio, Texas, opening a new surgery and setting up a half-million watt radio station just over the border that was so powerful there were days the signal could reportedly reach Canada. That station, XERA, introduced mexican and “tex-mex” music to the broader public and later gave us the outsized personality known as Wolfman Jack. Brinkley was a ruthless, sociopathic confidence man, but he was also quite brilliant and kept ahead of his enemies and adversaries for so long because he was a visionary. He saw potential in radio before anyone else did, and rewrote the rules of political campaigns, and also found a fine new way to part gullible people from their money, whether they had it to give him or not.

Fishbein enters frequently into the story as a secondary character, giving the story some narrative greed as he and Brinkley collide several times before the final denouement at a trial where Brinkley was actually the plaintiff, suing Fishbein for libel for calling the fake doctor a charlatan. Whether Brinkley actually believed his “operation” – which barely qualified as such – helped the patients is never clear, as he may simply have been convinced of his own invincibility regardless of the truth. He succeeded for nearly twenty years, running variations of the same scam, frequently upping the ante after he had to pull up stakes in one location, amassing enormous wealth and political power before his ultimate downfall.

That power in particular reminded me of the recent efforts by the soi-disant “FoodBabe” Vani Hari, a woman with no scientific or medical training (and no evident knowledge of either) who has used social media to run protests against specific ingredients in processed foods while encouraging people to do stupid things like take useless “natural herbs” or buy her book. Her post on staying healthy while flying is legendary for its ignorance (such as her beliefs on the chemical composition of air), and she fosters the same kind of anti-science sentiment that encourages vaccine deniers, climate change deniers, and 9/11 “truthers.” Her effort is hardly the only one of its kind; look at NaturalNews, another anti-science site run by a mountebank who peddles misinformation like claiming a raw food diet can cure cancer and fibromyalgia in what amounts to one giant appeal to nature. (Prepare to be shocked: Mike Adams, the self-styled “Health Ranger” who runs Natural News, is a vaccine denier and an all-around quack.) So while it’s easy to read Charlatan and convince yourself that such a sham could never happen today, in reality the fraudsters have just moved online.

Next up: I read S.S. Van Dine’s first Philo Vance mystery, The Benson Murder Case (just $1.99 for Kindle), on the flight yesterday, and will start Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum later today.

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