Seven internationally renowned writers address the theme of Power from the perspective of their own disciplines. Energy expert Mary Archer begins with an exploration of the power sources of our future. Astronomer Neil Tyson leads a tour of the orders of magnitude in the cosmos. Mathematician and inventor of the Game of Life John Conway demonstrates the power of simple ideas in mathematics. Screenwriter Maureen Thomas explains the mechanisms of narrative power in the media of film and videogames, Elisabeth Bronfen the emotional power carried by representations of life and death, and Derek Scott the power of patriotic music and the mysterious Mozart effect. Finally, celebrated parliamentarian Tony Benn critically assesses the reality of power and democracy in society.

Franken also talks about the reality of media talk shows and how the right-wing is overrepresented with Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, et al. He doesn’t say much about Limbaugh, as he has an entirely separate book dedicated to that guy, but he does take apart O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity pretty well. He seems to view O’Reilly as some sort of freak that is amusing to watch, and he openly despises Coulter, but he saves his really vicious stuff for Hannity.

Anyway, it’s quite enjoyable for the type of people who love the Daily Show, but people like my dad will hate it.

Keep an eye out for the bit about Bob Jones University. Good stuff.

SPOILER FOLLOWS:
When I say that there wasn’t much complexity, I mean that the book seemed extremely linear. A little character establishment in the beginning for Hiro and KT (and Uncle Enzo), along with the explanation of this corporate franchise city-state version of America. Then da5id gets crashed, and Hiro goes off after Raven. He chases Raven more or less to the end of the book, without much else introduced except for annoying religious psuedohistorical background. The path Stephenson went to get to this bullshit is pretty clear. I can see him saying “You know what would be cool? A book about computer viruses that can infect your brain!” Then, in order to justify this plot, he comes up with some hand-wavy Sumerian stuff. Somehow, though, rather than letting that just be a plot device, it takes on a life of its own. He ends up blowing like 200 pages of the book having characters explain this stuff to each other. I put down the book thinking that it would be a great screenplay, if someone could just compress all of the weird Sumerian mind-virus stuff into about one-minute of dialogue. Consider: even after all the pseudohistoric justification that he tries to create, he still has to infect the hackers by having them look at bitmaps. He says: “because they understand binary.” That’s just dumb.

On the upside of things, since the book was written in 1992, I thought the Metaverse thing was rather foresightful in anticipating how people would use the Internet. Obviously we’re not to his level of interpersonal interaction, or world simulation yet, but lots of things are there. I assume that every legitimate real-world hacker that has read this found (him|her)self thinking about trying to create a Metaverse. In fact, I see that there are a couple of open source projects out there trying to do just that. Frankly, I’ve been thinking about it, too. Actually, I was thinking about it before reading the book, but he creates a nice picture. Also on the upside, I thought the book itself was much better organized than Cryptonomicon. The linearity obviously helped this, as Cryptonomicon is quite nonlinear. I haven’t decided which book I prefer. I enjoyed the greater complexity and reduced bullshit of Cryptonomicon, but I thought that Snow Crash tied things up and ended in a more satisfying way.

Comments from other people who’ve read this?

That said, I loved it.

As someone who seems to spend a lot of time thinking about math, I find the history and context of it all to be somewhat impenetrable. Mathematics, to each generation, is an edifice. Research is only at the fringes. However, the book makes it clear that every generation sees it this way, and yet mathematics is a lively and flowing subject. Here are a couple of excerpts that I found particularly enlightening:

Stewart talks about the discovery of the first-ever copy of Archimedes’ The Method as a palimpset.

It has mathematical as well as historical significance, because The Method lets us in on how Archimedes thought of his ideas. Like most mathematicians, he first obtained his results by totally unrigorous methods, and then polished them up into a decent proof. And of course, only the polished version was ever displayed for public consumption. It’s a habit that has deprived generations of researchers of the insights of their predecessors. Among the heuristic methods Archimedes used was a technique of slicing solids into infinitely many pieces of infinitesimal thickness, and hanging these on the arms of a notional balance, where their sum could be compared with some known object. He found the volume of a sphere this way. A great many problems are easier to solve rigorously if you know in advance what the answer is, so the method was of great value to Archimedes. Other mathematicians have made use of similar ‘infinitesimal’ arguments, and usually (but not always) apologized for their lack of rigour, waved their hands a bit, and asserted that ‘of course it can all be made rigorous if you take a bit more trouble.’

About complex numbers:

For philosophers nothing is better than some obscure but mysterious idea that nobody really cares about and certainly can’t test, because then you have plenty of room for clever arguments. Angels on the head of a pin and so forth. But when something actually becomes useful, most people stop arguing about the philosophy and get on with the job instead. They don’t care what the deep philosophical essence of the new gadget is; they just want to churn out as many results as they can in the shortest possible time by taking advantage of it. If you can actually see the angels dancing on the head of the pin you stop trying to count them in favor of persuading them to dance on a microchip instead. And that’s exactly what happened to complex numbers between 1825 and 1850. The mathematicians discovered complex analysis – how to do calculus with complex numbers. And it turned out to be so powerful that it would all have been dreadfully embarrassing had some ingenious but unwary philosopher proved that complex numbers don’t really exist. Philosophical questions (‘What is this stupid thing?’) can sometimes be excuses for not getting on with the job of developing an elusive idea. Overnight the complex number concept became so useful that no mathematician in his right mind could possibly ignore it. So the question mutated slightly, into ‘What can you do with complex numbers?’, and the philosophical question … evaporated. Unmourned, unnoticed, forgotten, buried. There are other cases of this nature in the history of mathematics but perhaps none more clear-cut. As time passes, the cultural world-view changes. What one generation sees as a problem or a solution is not interpreted in the same way by another generation. Today, when the ‘real’ numbers are seen as no less abstract than many other number systems, complex numbers included, it’s hard to grasp how different it all looked to our forebears. We would do well to bear this in mind when we think about the development of mathematics. To view history solely from the viewpoint of the current generation is to court distortion and misinterpretation.

Reading it now, I think I finally understand what Feynman was really trying to convey. He wasn’t trying to mimic the feel of “Surely You’re Joking” but this format and style was simply his way of communicating. His topics are quite serious and he intends them to be considered as such. When I read the book in high school, I had no idea what it would be like to love someone the way that he loved Arlene. Certainly, I had had girlfriends and such, but the way he worships her and the pain he expresses at her untimely death are things that are difficult to appreciate unless you have felt the same way about someone. So reading it now, having met and married my own Arlene-equivalent, his loving descriptions of her mean much more to me. I cannot begin to fathom what it must’ve been like to deal with her death. Even more compelling is the realization that Feynman faced the loss of the love of his life, while under the tremendous pressure of the Manhattan Project.

The second half of the book, as I have mentioned, deals with the investigation into the loss of the shuttle Challenger in 1986, in which Feynman played a significant role. Again, at the time that I first read it, I could not have understood the sociological issues that Feynman was trying to address. Specifically, he talks a lot about the conceptual gap between the engineers and the managers at NASA and the political pressures to get the Shuttle up. Of course, as a kid, I thought the shuttle was just great and NASA could do no wrong. I see now the validity of some of his criticisms of the program as a whole, and now having worked at NASA I can appreciate the bizarre nature of the organization. Also, at the time that I read it before, I had no idea what it really meant for something to be well-engineered and I certainly had no conception of the amount of politics involved in such a large enterprise. Now as I read it, I’m a real engineer who has worked in large organizations and his words ring painfully true.

So, should you read it? Well, let me say first that if you have not read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, you need to go buy it right now and read it. In fact, I think I am going to read it again in the next couple of weeks, just for good measure. I feel that this book contributed massively to my perspective on life. You will not regret reading it. You can finish all of Feynman’s books in like ten minutes, so it’s not a big commitment or anything. I’ve mentioned the main downside to this book already – that it is not terribly lighthearted. Also, I read The Pleasure of Finding Things Out a while back and I think there is a fair amount of overlap between the two.

My second complaint was with the writing style. I got used to it after a while, but it is extremely Slashdot-pretentious. It plays to this sort of vague feeling of superiority that modern tech geeks want to feel is the reward for their knowledge. Even though by almost all measures, I fall into firmly into this demographic, I find this attitude extremely grating.

Two questions:

• Why does Stephenson call it “Finux” when he calls most other things by their real name?
• Are Stephenson’s other books worth the read? Are my complaints with this one deviations? I know he has a seriously devoted following.

Having said this, I absolutely loved the content. The overall structure – examining these two similar but opposite situations in Beirut and in Jerusalem – added tremendous insight. I am no expert on the topics he discusses, but I felt that he went very far out of his way to present a neutral point of view. It may be that I agree with Friedman on various issues and that I consider neutrality to be hearing what I want to hear, but I think he even criticized his own point of view (which seemed to sympathize most with the liberal Israelis). He even went as far in the book as to try to present solutions. His solutions may not be perfect and may not please everyone, but I have a great deal of respect for people who will put it on the line and present concrete ideas. It is too easy to stand on the sidelines and complain, without offering constructive suggestsions. Friedman does not fall into that trap.

In some ways, reading this was a life-changing experience for me. I have heard about the West Bank and Gaza my whole life, without really appreciating what the basic problem is. Friedman presents it simply and concisely (although from an Israeli perspective). He says that the Israelis want three things: a democracy, a Jewish state, and all of ancient Israel up to the Jordan river. They can only realistically have two of these things, because the vast number of Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would cause any true democracy to move away from Judaism. Their solution right now is inaction through political deadlock, and the result is that the part they have chosen not to have is democracy: they effectively have a big Israel and a Jewish state, but not everyone living there gets to vote.

Some people might find all of this boring, but as an amateur foreign policy wonk, I was completely captivated. It is full of great first-person accounts, anecdotes that portray both the savagery and beauty of human nature. He ties all of this together with insightful analysis and descriptions of the major players at high levels – people that are still relevant today: Arafat and Sharon in particular. In some ways, I feel that every American needs to read this book in order to understand what the basic undercurrent of our foreign policy really is. It is not that I am positing some kind of Israeli conspiracy, but rather that we cannot escape the reality that the middle east dominates our lives now that we have declared a “War on Terrorism” and are occupying Iraq. I just wish that there was a version of this book for the past fifteen years since this one’s publication.

I have had QED on my shelf for some time now, and I finally got around to finishing it off. It is an extremely short book, but for one reason or another, I’ve always pushed it down the queue.

In general, I would say that it is my least favorite of his books so far, although that is not necessarily an indictment of the book itself. QED is a set of lectures where Feynman essentially describes quantum electrodynamics to a lay audience, in a way they can understand. One of Feynman’s greatest gifts was his ability to explain extremely complex topics in simple, yet accurate ways. This book is no exception. While I certainly am no expert on the subject matter, however, I do have more than a lay understanding of the math and physics underlying the phenomena he describes. This presented me with a problem reading his book because he uses a rather “hand-wavy” approach to describe things that are pretty basic concepts for someone with a little physics background. For example, he talks a lot about “arrows” and various manipulations of them, such as “turning” them or “shrinking” them. I understand that he is referring to vectors and that vector math would scare the bejesus out of a lay audience, particularly with complex numbers. However, over the years I’ve built up an intution for complex numbers and vectors, so when he talks about “shrinking and turning an arrow” I have to translate that into the vector operation that I presume he is referring to. The result was that I spent the book trying to appreciate the underlying picture that he was skirting around with “intuitive” diagrammatical arguments.

So, if you already know something about these topics, I suggest you skip the book. However, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys a Scientific American article on physics (i.e. a smart person with a lot of curiosity, but who doesn’t have the background), then you will probably enjoy the book a great deal, and I would recommend it.