Books: The Surreal Art of Robert Vanderhorst

This spring, painter Robert Vanderhorst will be publishing a comprehensive collection of his surreal paintings in The Paintings of Robert Willem Vanderhorst. The book will feature twenty-six of Vanderhorst's oil paintings, as well as an introduction and an original short story by Night of the Living Dead directory George A. Romero. Romero's story was inspired by the Vanderhorst painting The Yacht Club, and will also be published in three installments on Vanderhorst's website, www.twoartists.ca, over the next few weeks. The announcement of the final publication date for The Paintings of Robert Willem Vanderhorst will also be announced at www.twoartists.ca.

Robert Vanderhorst's The Yacht Club


George A. Romero (left) and Robert W. Vanderhorst (right)

Robert Willem Vanderhorst is a self-taught artist with a talent inherited from his father and a technique born of a strong Dutch tradition in art. Emigrating from Holland to Canada in 1951, he now lives in Toronto, Canada. In 1979, he began publishing limited editions of his images under Vanderhorst Graphics. In 1973, he held his first solo exhibition. Over the next three and a half decades, Vanderhorst's imagery has been used in many diverse ways, including in music videos, television programs, live stage productions and record jacket designs, as well as illustrations in psychology journals and aviation book covers. His paintings have been featured in almost thirty exhibitions, culminating in two major retrospectives at the St. Lawrence Hall, Toronto in 2004 and 2005. Vanderhorst's work has also been featured and explored in two DVDs titled View from the Gallery 1 and View from the Gallery 2.

George A. Romero, the celebrated directory of Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, met Robert Vanderhorst at the 2005 retrospective in Toronto while filming Land of the Dead. Impressed with Vanderhorst's talent and fascinating imagery, he struck up a friendship with the painter that has led to his contribution of not only an introduction, but an original short story, to The Paintings of Robert Willem Vanderhorst.

Check out Robert's site at http://www.twoartists.ca/ to see his paintings and keep up with news about the book. Read more!

Books (Science): Voodoo Science

Voodoo science is bad science for fun and profit -- mostly profit. Bob Park's Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud is one of the best books on the subject, a great introduction to various kinds of bad science and, more importantly, the harm bad science does.

Voodoo science includes traditional pseudoscience like ESP or UFOs, but Park spends relatively little time on those subjects. These are the most blatant examples of bad science that you'll see, but not the most insidious. Park is more interested in other kinds of voodoo science -- junk science twisted to suit ideological ends, incompetent science used to prop up pet theories or sell shares in inventions, and so on.

One of the most interesting chapters in Voodoo Science is the one on the EMF scare of the 90s. In 1989 the New Yorker ran a series of articles by Paul Brodeur about how high-tension lines cause cancer. The entire premise of Brodeur's articles (and later book, Currents Of Death) was a basic piece of biased observation and mixing correlation with causation. Study after study showed that there was no connection, and Brodeur dismissed every negative study as part of a conspiracy to cover up the truth. Park reports an estimate that dealing with the fallout of Brodeur's book cost the US about twenty-five billion dollars, and nothing ever came of it. However, the mythology that Brodeur created around EMF still persists, almost 20 years later, with some new variations (the cell phone/brain cancer scare being very similar).

Another favourite target of Park's are the free-energy inventors, such as Joe Newman. Twenty years ago, Newman created an "Energy Machine" based on a basic misunderstanding of how motors and generators work, and sold "shares" in his company, which he claimed would revolutionize the energy business "very soon".

(Note another great example of how voodoo science infiltrates public consciousness: the Wiki page that "Joe Newman" links to above says that "a perpetual motion machine is regarded as (probably) physically impossible within mainstream physics". The "probably" is completely spurious: any competent physicist regards violations of conservation of energy as impossible.)

Again, even though Newman is old news, the example is relevant. Another free-energy inventor was Yull Brown, who claimed that "Brown's Gas" was the fuel of the future. It turns out that "Brown's Gas" was just electrolyzed water (water split into hydrogen and oxygen) that was then recombined to produce power. There's nothing special about this, except that Brown claimed that it was free energy: he never mentioned (maybe didn't realize) that it takes more energy to electrolyze the water than you get by burning the hydrogen.

Just this year, various news sources (especially Fox) have been running stories about "HHO Gas", a new miracle fuel. But a quick skim of the articles shows that it's just "Brown's Gas" come back to haunt us.

If you have any interest in pathological science, but don't want to read yet another debunking of Uri Geller (who's still out there, making money by scamming gullible people), Voodoo Science is a good place to start. Also check out Park's What's New column, and his interview in the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. Read more!

Books (Math): Chance

I've been reading David Whitehouse's The Sun: A Biography, but on Friday I forgot to bring it to work. Stuck without anything to read, I dropped by the book store and picked up Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, The Stock Market, & Just About Everything else.

Chance is a rather slim book -- which was what I was after, something to tide me over until I got back to my copy of The Sun -- that covers a lot of the same ground as Struck By Lightning, though more it covers that ground more lightly (the chapter on game theory is all of one page long!).

The book is so slim, in fact, that each chapter feels like it's ending about halfway through. It's hard for me to tell if it actually has enough material to be a good introduction for someone unfamiliar with statistics -- it seems too thin to me. But it is well-written and accessible, so it may well be a good starting point for the subject.

My biggest problem with the book is actually with the typesetting -- specifically, the typesetting of equations. There are some serious gaffes. When talking about the Gambler's Ruin, the book presents this formula:

1 - (q/p)m

P = 1 - (q/p)m+n

Of course, what they actually mean is:

P =	1 - (q/p)m
	1 - (q/p)m+n

It's not so bad in this example, but in some cases it gets very hard to figure out just what's supposed to be equal to what.

Another example is in the chapter on statistical sampling. The formula for the standard deviation of the normal distribution is:

√(sample proportion) × (-1 sample proportion)

sample size

Of course, the correct formula is:

√(sample proportion) × (1 - sample proportion)

sample size

There's a big difference between (-1 sample proportion) and (1 - sample proportion)!

This isn't Aczel's fault (on the next page, when values for sample proportion and sample size are substituted in, the formula is correct), but it should have been caught before the book went to print.

In spite of the book's lightness and the typographic problems, it's still an enjoyable book. There was even a nice coincidence in the chapter on coincidences. Aczel mentions his friend Scott Petrack who, when flying from Paris to Boston, discovered that the person he'd been sitting beside had sung in the same choir in Tanglewood (the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) about twenty years before. A week later, Scott got a business call from a stranger, and discovered that that person had sung in the same Tanglewood choir.

As it turns out, my father was also a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus about twenty years ago. There's a good chance he sang with Scott Petrack and the other two people, and that I heard them all. Not bad for an example of coincidence. Read more!

Books (Science): Trying to catch up

The problem with posting here is that I end up burning an hour or two on each post. So, when I don't have an hour or two to spare, I put off the posting -- and then it never gets posted. Of course, I also don't know if anyone's actually reading any of this, so it ends up not feeling that urgent. I never put off reading, though. I can't function properly if I don't have something to read during quiet moments.

As a result, I'm now several books behind in posting. So I'm going to short-change the books with an attempt at being brief, so I can catch up.

Jared Diamond: Collapse

Collapse is Diamond's follow-up to his first two books, The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs, and Steel. I haven't read The Third Chimpanzee yet, but I found Guns, Germs, and Steel fascinating.

Collapse deals with the collapse of civilizations -- both past and future. Diamond examines how various past cultures have failed due to environmental problems (often self-inflicted), attacks by hostile neighbours, the loss of friendly trade partners that provided essential resources, and so on. He draws examples from all over the globe: Easter Island and various other South Pacific cultures, the Anasasazi and Maya in the Americas, the Viking settlements in Newfoundland and Greenland, and so on.

Collapse also examines current crises, comparing them to the past ones: the genocide in Rawanda, the economic collapse of Haiti (contrasted with the more successful, but still troubled, Dominican Republic next door), the environmental problems caused by irresponsible logging, mining, oil drilling, fishing, and so on. Diamond's also careful to point out examples of how responsible logging, drilling, and so on can be enormously helpful, not only to the environment, but to the economies affected.

Robert Kandel, Water from Heaven

Water from Heaven: The Story of Water From the Big Bang to the Rise of Civilization, and Beyond is just what its subtitle says: a very wide-ranging examination of water from a number of perspectives: cosmological, astronomical, physical, chemical, meteorological, environmental, sociological, and so on. The subject matter is fascinating from many perspectives, but the writing is rather dry, nowhere near as engaging as Diamond's.

Mario Livio, The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved

Mario Livio's previous book, The Golden Ratio, did a great job of prsenting the history of the famous "Divine Proportion" while cutting through a lot of the mythology around the number. The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry is another engaging book of math history, this time dealing with the development of group theory and the mathematics of symmetry.

The book follows the quest for a formulaic solution (or a proof of the absence of one) for general polynomial equations. High school algebra covers the solution to the quadratic: for ax² + bx + c = 0, the solutions for x are x = (-b + √(b² - 4ac))/2 and x = (-b - √(b² - 4ac))/2. Cubics and quartics have formulaic solutions as well. But what about quintic and higher-order polynomials? It turns out that, while particular subsets of higher-order polynomials can be solved with formulas, there is no general solution.

Livio centers the story of the quest for the solution (and the proof that there is none) around biographies of two contemporary tragic mathematical figures -- Niels Abel, who died at 27 from tuberculosis resulting from his poverty-stricken living situation, and Evariste Galois, who died at 21 in an idiotic duel. Abel provided the basis for Galois's great breakthrough, group theory, which forms the foundation of modern mathematics, and has provided valuable insight into the other sciences, especially physics but even anthropology.

Like Diamond, Livio's an excellent writer, providing deep social and historical context for the mathematics he describes.

Alexei Sossinsky, Knots

Knot theory is not something you hear about a lot in popular writing about mathematics. I'd been curious about how one would go about creating a mathematical model of knots long before I found Knots: Mathematics with a Twist.

A mathematical knot is slightly different from an everyday knot. Mathematicians close knotted strings into loops, so that there's no way to slide the knot off the end. Mathematical knots are more like Celtic knots than anything you'd find on a sneaker.

The big trick in the mathematics of knots is figuring out how to tell if two knots are essentially the same or different. If you take a trefoil knot (the simplest kind of knot) and, say, pull one of the loops through another, you haven't changed the essential nature of the knot -- you can restore it to its basic shape without cutting it anywhere. So the plain trefoil and the distorted one are essentially the same. But if you had a mirror image of the first trefoil, there'd be no way to change it into the original without cutting it.

The basic story of Knots is the story of the hunt for a perfect knot invariant -- a value you can assign to a knot which will be the same for all equivalent knots and different for all non-equivalent ones.

The problem is, the hunt hasn't really been successful yet. Each invariant presented has a fatal flaw -- there are some differing knots it can't distinguish, for example. Each one's better than the previous, but each one has a flaw.

Or, at least, I think that's where we end up, because there's one big problem with Sossinsky's book: it looses me for a while in the middle.

In the first half of the book, you get very used to seeing the phrase, "the proof is too complicated to present here". This isn't a big book -- 119 pages with lots of pictures on 5"x7" pages -- so it makes sense that you couldn't get too deep into elaborate proofs.

Unfortunately, when the book gets to the point of Vassiliev invariants, Sossinsky decides to go into detail about how Vassiliev invariants came about but never seems to quite explain what, in the end, they mean.

According to MathWorld, we still don't know if Vassiliev invariants are actually able to discriminate knots properly. The advantage they have over previous invariants is that they haven't yet been shown to fail.

Which basically boils down to, knot theory is so new that no-one's figured out it's "fundamental theorem" yet. Which helps explain why you don't see a lot of popular books on the subject.

Steven Squyres: Roving Mars

In 1999, Donna Shirley, who managed the Mars Pathfinder mission that put the Sojourner rover on Mars, published a great book on the mission called Managing Martians. That mission paved the way for the enormously successful Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission that put the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars in 2004 for a mission which was supposed to last 90 Martian days, or sols -- about three months -- but is still going even now.

Roving Mars covers the story of the MER mission from the point of view of Steven Squyres, the principle investigator who developed and ran the mission. The book starts with almost a decade's worth of failed attempts to get a mission accepted by NASA, and the string of failed missions which put NASA (and JPL) on the spot for a sure-fire success.

Squyres goes through the development of the rovers (on an extremely tight schedule), which adopted some of the innovations from the earlier Pathfinder mission. The new rovers were bigger and heavier, which meant that even though they were using an earlier design, it had to be adapted and expanded, leading to all sorts of testing nightmares.

Throughout the book it feels like the mission is on the verge of collapse. I can't imagine how stressful it must have been for everyone invovled -- no-one wants to be known for blowing the $250 million mission that shut down JPL!

The book ends at around Sol 250, when the mission had already run almost three times its original length. Anything accomplished after Sol 90 was bonus as far as NASA was concerned, but everyone expected the rovers to die by around Sol 150, most likely due to dust build-up on their solar arrays.

It is now almost Sol 850. Spirit has a lame wheel and Opportunity's arm-stowing motor is stalling, but both are still functioning and still collecting scientific data. After the catastrophic failures of three missions before the MER, Squyers's project has revitalized Mars exploration. Read more!

Books (Science): Struck By Lightning

I haven't posted much about books lately, except for the bit on Tezuka's Buddha. Recently my reading has been rather scattered -- until yesterday I had four books on the go, jumping between them, not really able to stay focused on any one for long.

But yesterday I finished the most recent of the four, Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities by Jeffrey Rosenthal, a University of Toronto professor of statistics. It's a plain-language guide to common sense about probabilities (what Rosenthal calls "the Probability Perspective"), something that is often lacking in the general public, written in a light-hearted tone. It doesn't go as deep into the math as, say, Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to Statistics (which is not damning with faint praise: the Cartoon Guide gets right into the details!), but it covers its material in an accessible and friendly manner that makes it very approachable, with lots of examples from everyday life and popular entertainment (including The Simpsons and Monty Python).

Sometimes Rosenthal goes a little overboard. His sidebar examples get a little too cutesy at times, especially the "Ace Space, Probability Perspective Investigator" interlude chapter in the middle. Colin Bruce did that schtick better in Conned Again, Watson!, another common-sense guide to stats presented as Sherlock Holmes stories. Though, to be fair, Rosenthal does warn you at the beginning of the Ace Diamond story that "Serious, sober-minded readers may wish to skip this chapter".

Probably the biggest gripe I have about the book is in the first section of the chapter "Evolution, Genes, and Viruses". Rosenthal's explanation of evolution has a serious flaw:

The process [of natural selection] ensures that less fit offspring do not survive and reproduce. Thus, surviving offspring are weighted towards being more fit, more advanced, better able to live and flourish. In practical terms, this means that surviving offspring are weighted towards being more intelligent, more adaptable, and more cunning -- in short, more like humans.

The problem here is that there is no necessary weighting towards being "more intelligent", "more advanced", "more cunning", or "more like humans" in evolution. The only weighting is towards being "better able to reproduce in the current environment". Amoebas today are evolutionary descendants of amoebas from three billion years ago. Their evolution has not made them "more like humans" -- they're perfectly capable of reproducing in their modern environment.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about evolution in the general public -- that it's goal-oriented, and that we are the goal. Rosenthal hedges a little with a parenthetical "or some other sophisticated, intelligent life form", but even that isn't the case. Sure, intelligence seems to be a pretty good survival trait, so if there's a chance for it to show up, it'll probably flourish. But if there were to turn out to be microscopic life on Mars, for instance, it will be the end-product of billions of years of evolution that never even got close to a "sophisticated, intelligent life form".

That's more of a pet peeve than a real problem with the book, though these days, with the creationist scientist-wannabes of the Intelligent Design movement muddying the waters in the US, it's something of a disservice to the public to muddy the waters about evolution. Or, more accurately, to fail to help clear the waters -- this is an already well-established misunderstanding. Rosenthal isn't making anything worse, he's just missing an opportunity to help make things better.

With luck, I'll soon get a chance to post about the last two Miles Verkosigan books I've finished (I'm a little bogged down in the latest I've started -- I'll explain later) and the most recent popular book about a very narrow aspect of science book I've started.

I'll also be doing more photo posts like the Sharp Sentre For Design one yesterday between book posts. Read more!

Books (Manga): Buddha

I'm not a religious person. I don't have a lot of time or patience for organized religion or supernaturalism. But I am fascinated by the history of religion and religiousness. You can't properly comprehend human history without knowing something of human religion, after all.

The three Abrahamic religions make the most news around here, of course. Western history makes no sense without taking those three into account. Since the 60s, though, there has also been a fascination with "Eastern religions" (though often in bastardized forms). The Beatles were a major source of that interest, with their involvement with the shyster Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Trancendental Meditation movement.

Naturally, the "Eastern religions" fad involved Buddhism as well (think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for example). As with many religious fads, there's a lot of confusion and over-simplification of the Buddhism in the general public -- no doubt this makes it easier to convey through TV. Buddha's this serene-looking (or fat and jolly) guy with big earlobes who talked about one-handed clapping a lot, and so on.

Well, what better way to clear up popular cultural misconceptions about an ancient religious figure than a comic book?

Actually, it turns out that a comic book is a good way of doing this -- provided you do the book right. Which, among other things, means letting it run almost 3000 pages.

A year or two ago, I was browsing through Pages, an excellent book store in Toronto, when I came across the first volume of a new edition of Osamu Tezuka's magnum opus, Buddha. This weekend, I finally finished Volume 8. Originally written between 1974 and 1984, it has now been translated into English and released as a gorgeous series of hard-cover books, in eight volumes of about 350 pages each.

Osamu Tezuka is best known in North America as the creator of Astro Boy. Among general animation fans, he's also known for creating Kimba the White Lion, which is widely believed to have been a major influence on (or ripped off by, depending on how you look at it) Disney's The Lion King. (This lead to a great gag in the Simpsons episode Round Springfield, in which Bleeding Gums Murphy dies. He appears to Lisa in a cloud, and is joined by other characters voiced by James Earl Jones, including Mustafa from The Lion King, who says, "You must avenge my death, Kimba... I mean, Simba.")

Fans of Japanese animation and comics (anime and manga) know Tezuka as the father of manga. Influenced by early US animation (including Disney), Tezuka almost single-handedly created the Japanese animation and comics genres.

Tezuka's Buddha starts with the birth of Prince Siddartha Gautama -- the man who would become the first Buddha -- and follows him through his entire life, from his growing up as a sickly but pampered prince, to the shock he received the first time he witnessed sickness and death, his departure to become an ascetic monk, his rejection of ascetism and his enlightenment, his teaching as the Buddha, and his death at the age of eighty.

The subject matter is pretty profound (the nature of human suffering, etc -- not exactly Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff!). Odd as it already seems that someone would write a comic book about it, it's even odder that that someone would be Tezuka. Tezuka's style (especially in his works known in North America) is very cartoony. Not to mention that 3000 pages of deep Buddhist sermonizing would get pretty tedious!

Tezuka, though, is a master of his craft. He tells the stories though an incredibly deft mixture of storytelling ranging from cartoonish slapstick to the profound. Scott McCloud, in his wonderful book Understanding Comics, uses several examples from Buddha to demonstrate some characteristically Japanese forms of graphic story telling.

Tezuka tells the stories not only of Buddha but of those who surround him: Tatta the theif, his first disciple; Ananda the murderer, whom he redeemed; Devadatta, the monk who wanted to follow Buddha as leader of the sect, who eventually tried to murder Buddha; and so on. Some of the characters (such as, I think, Tatta) are Tezuka's invention, but many are from the established Buddhist traditions. Tezuka also spends a lot of time on the political situation in India during Buddha's lifetime, as this affected Buddha strongly. His own people, the Shakya, were conquered by a neighbouring king after he left on his quest for enlightenment.

Tezuka's not afraid to mix humour, slaptstick, and anachronisms into his storytelling, either, which helps lighten the mood at times. Characters often make reference modern events, television, and even other Tezuka works. In one of the scenes in which Buddha heals someone, he suddenly transforms into Tezuka's fugitive-surgeon character, Black Jack for a couple of panels. Tezuka himself even appears for a couple of fouth-wall-breaking moments. Which is not to say that everything is fun and games -- many of the stories around Buddha are violent as well.

There are a number of example pages from the first two volumes at this Scandanavian review.

Tezuka also demonstrates that his drawing skill extends far beyond well-known cartoony style. His drawings of the mountains of northern India are breathtaking, incredibly detailed and beautifully rendered, while still meshing well with the much simpler character renderings.

Getting the complete set is expensive: each volume is around $22 CDN, which means that the whole Buddha set is even pricier than The Complete Calvin & Hobbes. But if you have an interest in the history behind Buddha, it's definitely worthwhile. Of course, I collected the eight volumes over a period of several months, rather than buying them all at once! Read more!

Stuff: News of Fresh Disasters

So, where have I been? I've been banging my head against various aspects of real life, and not finishing as many books as I'd like -- though I have several going at once right now. I must post soon about Jared Diamond's excellent Collapse, which I finished recently. I also intend to do more photoblogging as well.

For the moment, though, I have some News of a Fresh Disaster*.

You'll remember the rat adventure we had at Christmas. After that expensive experience, we stopped up all the rat holes we could find with steel wool and flooded the garage with mothballs. (We didn't want to put down poison, as many people in our neighbourhood let their cats out at night).

Unfortunately, we missed a rat hole that was behind some garage clutter. So a week ago Thursday we get into the car, turn the key, and GRRND GRRND GRRND GRRND -- that same not-good sound from Christmas Eve hits our ears again. It's quite a memorable sound, like walnuts in a blender.

So, we backed the car out and popped the hood. The first thing I spotted was a quarter of a bagel. Sliced, with cream cheese. On top of the engine. There was no doubt about it being rats again.

There was insulation missing from the battery cables again, but no other damage was visible. No blood on the floor this time, either. So we called CAA again, to get the car to the (now closed) dealership. I biked down to drop the keys off and fill out the problem form.

The car was ready the next day. Fortunately, the repairs were only about 10% as expensive as the Christmas ones, about $130. The invoice told the story quite well, we thought:



So we are now rat-proofing the garage. Whoever did the current landscaping in our backyard was not too bright -- they piled the soil in some raised gardens right up against the wooden siding, leading to serious rot. The rats didn't have to chew their way into the garage, they could just push the rotten wood out of the way.

We've razed the raised gardens and pulled out all the junk (rat-eaten or otherwise) out of the garage ($766 to get it hauled away by 1-800-Got-Junk). We've filled all the spaces between the studs in the garage walls with cement and sheet metal. After two weekends of work, we can finally put the car back where it belongs.

Interesting discoveries included a well-tunneled painting drop-cloth (the tunneling was interesting, the stench was not), and many bones -- too big to be rat bones. I think they're chicken bones, stolen from our garbage.

In the process of doing all this, we've also discovered that the somewhat shaky fences in our yard are shake because most of the fence posts have rotted away at ground level. They're basically supported by the garage at one end and the house at the other. Anyone know how much 25 metres of privacy fence costs to install?

* The "Tales of Fresh Disasters" line comes from an old Beyond the Fringe routine called "The Aftermyth of War", about life during WWII. "Every night the BBC would bring us news of fresh disasters." -- cut to BBC voice -- "This is Alvar Liddel with news of fresh disasters." Read more!

Books (Science): Rats

After our little Christmas rat adventure, a very striking book cover caught my eye. The cover depicted a map of Manhattan, with the island modified to the shape of a rat, with the title Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, by Robert Sullivan.

The title and subtitle suggest the book is about rats -- which it is -- but, as the cover illustration suggests, it's very much about Manhattan as well. Sullivan for some not-entirely-explained reason, had become fascinated with rats, and spent much of 2001 observing rats nightly in Edens Alley in southern Manhattan. These observations lead him not only to a greater understanding of rats and rats' relationships with humans, but also to a lot of Manhattan history. He relates the stories of such fascinating locals as Jesse Gray, who started the tenants Rights movement in New York City; John DeLury, the man behind the great garbage strike of 1968, and Isaac Sears, who led one of the very first battles of the American Revolution not far from Edens Alley. He also tells of the difficulties facing New York's pest control people after the September 11th attacks, which occurred during his year of rat-watching -- Edens Alley is not that far from the World Trade Center site.

There wasn't that much new rat-related information in the book (though we will be using one exterminator's suggestion of mixing steel wool with cement for blocking up rat-holes when we repair our garage). The novel stuff was mostly the material concerning how humans relate to rats, directly and indirectly, and the historical material concerning New York.

Manhattan has always been a fascinating structure. It's hard to really think of it as a city -- it often seems more like a single gigantic building, packing onto its island. Sullivan both reinforces that notion, when discussing the many layers of subways and sewers in the city, and helps dispel it, with his reflections on Golden Hill (now unrecognizable, it used to be a major landmark in Edens Alley's area in Isaac Sears's time).

Early in the book, Sullivan describes Edens Alley (actually two alleys, Edens and Ryders, which form an L shape between Gold & Fulton streets). One thing he mentions is that the alleys contain a single ailanthus tree. Curious about just where in Manhattan the alleys are, I looked them up on Goggle Maps, and discovered that you can not only see the alleys, you can see the tree. Read more!

Books (Science Fiction): Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance [Spoilers]

I'm falling 'way behind -- I'm now on my fourth book since the last one I posted about. So I'm going to try again to catch up, this time by doing two at once.

Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance are two more in the Miles Vorkosigan series that I've been re-plowing through. They go together well for a double-post because they both center around a new character in the Miles universe: Miles's heretofore unknown "evil" clone, Mark.

Of course, evil twins/evil clones are a bit of a cliche (well, a lot of a cliche) in science fiction, but Bujold does some interesting things with Mark.

In Brothers in Arms, Miles is forced to take the Dendarii fleet to Earth for repairs after the Dagoola IV incident recounted in Borders of Infinity. While there he's assigned -- as lieutenant Vorkosigan of Barrayar -- to the Barrayaran Embassy on Earth, but he also finds himself having to deal with -- as Admiral Naismith of the Dendarii Mercenaries -- with problems with his fleet. As a result, for the first time, he ends up having to deal with someone who has met both of his personas. With his rather distinctive appearance, he has to come up with some sort of story to explain the two characters. He whips up a story that Naismith is a renegade clone created by the Cetagandans as part of a plot against Barrayar -- all unaware that the leftover Komarran resistance (Komarr being a world conquered by Barrayar many years before) had had a clone created on Jackson's Whole as part of a similar plot.

The clone, fortunately, is not just an evil puppet type plot device. He had been created in Jackson's Whole by the same House that creates clones for brain transplant -- only, while those clones are treated delicately and groomed to physical perfection, Miles's clone was put through horrible medical ordeals to duplicate Miles's deformities. Every time Miles broke a bone or had one replaced, the clone would have to go through surgery to do the same thing to him. Naturally, this has left him less than well adjusted!

The official plot using the clone was that he would take Miles's place on Barrayar. Miles is third in line for the Emperor's throne after his father, so a few assassinations would make the clone Emperor.

In actual fact, there's no chance for this to succeed. The Komarrans running the plot don't really care -- they just want to sow chaos on Barrayar so they can stage a revolt on Komarr. The clone has realized that he's expendable, though he has enough of Miles's "I'll show them what I can do" personality that he's convinced himself that he can really pull the plot off.

When Miles finally encounters the clone, he immediately considers him to be his younger brother -- as he would be under the laws of Miles's mother's homeworld of Beta Colony. And, under the the Vor aristocrat traditions of Barrayar, the clone, as a second son, would be named for the second names of his grandparents, making him Mark Pierre Vorkosigan.

The clone, of course, is rather paranoid at this point, and doesn't believe Miles's assurances that he could actually be accepted as a Vorkosigan in his own right. Miles does eventually manage to rescue himself and the clone (and sundry others) from the clutches of the Komarrans, but Mark is unwilling to trust him to the end, and heads off on his own path at the end of the book.

Mirror Dance picks things up a couple of years later, when Mark returns, posing as Admiral Naismith, and manages to make off with a ship and some commandos from the Dendarii Mercenaries to stage a rescue of the current batch of clones on Jackson's Whole.

Much of the book is told from Mark's point of view. Miles himself doesn't show up until a few chapters in, and soon he's off to Jackson's Whole to rescue Mark, who has discovered that book study doesn't make up for field experience.

In the course of rescuing Marc, though, Miles is killed by a grenade. Fortunately, it's long been established in this SF universe that quick freezing of a body can permit revival (though with a less-than-ideal success rate), and Miles is quickly stuffed in a cryo-chamber -- which is promptly lost in the confusion of battle.

The middle section of the book deals with Mark's being taken to Barrayar, to meet Miles's parents -- his parents, too, though he has trouble coming to terms with that concept -- and provides a good chance to see Cordellia and Aral Vorkosigan, as well as Barrayar, from a new perspective.

In the end, of course, Miles is recovered, though not without complications, naturally! Some of the complications set things up for the next book, Memory, in which an even bigger spanner than Mark is thrown into the works.

As I said before, the evil clone has been a cliche for ages, but Bujold turns him into an interesting (if even more neurotic than Miles) character in his own right. Fortunately, she doesn't insist on dragging Mark through everything from this point on, though -- he's around, but in the background, in the subsequent books, though the after-effects of his ill-conceived trip to Jackson's Whole reverberate through the rest of the series. Read more!

Books (Science Fiction): Borders of Infinity [SPOILERS]

Since my last post on the Miles Vorkosigan books, I've finished three more -- I'm way behind in my writeups. So I'm going to try to catch up over the weekend.

The first book I read after Ethan of Athos was Borders of Infinity. Normally, I follow Ethan with Brothers in Arms, but I decided to change things around this time.

Borders is sold as a novel, but it's actually three short stories wrapped in a very thin excuse for flashbacks -- Miles has to explain his expense report to Simon Illyan, his commanding officer, while hospitalized after the events in Brothers in Arms. All of the flashbacks take place before Brothers, but since the framework is set after, I usually read Brothers first. However, the events in the third story in Borders lead directly tothe opening of Brothers, so I decided to read them chronologically this time.

The first story, The Mountains of Mourning, is not part of Miles's report. Rather he thinks back to his investigation of an infanticide in his district shortly before The Vor Game took place. Miles's world, Barrayar, was cut off from galactic civilization for centuries, resulting in the development of a feudal, largely aggrarian society with (among other things) a pathological fear of mutations. Physical deformities in infants usually result in infanticide, though Miles's father, the Prime Minister of Barrayar, has been working hard to change that. Miles, with his (non-genetic) deformities, is often on the receiving end of the anti-mutant prejudice that plagues his homeworld, and The Mountains of Mourning gives Bujold a chance to dig a little deeper into the backwoods of Barrayaran society.

Mountains was reprinted between The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game in the omnibus Young Miles collection, which includes an essay by Bujold about the creation of Miles as a character and the beginning of the series.

The next two stories, Labyrinth and Borders of Infinity, start a chain of events which tie the next several Miles books together. The first few novels are fairly independent -- while each depends on the previous for context, there are few specific incidents in any that directly cause any events in the subsequent ones the way things start snowballing with Borders of Infinity.

Up until now, I've avoided spoilers, but at this point I'm so deep in the series that I can't talk about it coherently without giving away some details of what went before. So here's a recap:

The first Miles book, Warrior's Apprentice, sets the context for everything that follows. By the end of the novel, Miles, who has not yet completed his military training on Barrayar, has (rather accidentally) conned his way into the command of a mercenary fleet under the name "Admiral Miles Naismith" (Naismith is his mother's maiden name). Driven by a desperate need to prove his worth in spite of his deformities -- and a rather bipolar personality -- he convinces Imperial Security and the Emperor to turn his Dendarii Mercenaries into a covert force, secretly operating in Barrayar's interest while appearing as an independent mercenary fleet to everyone else -- and most of the people in the fleet. Only a handful of people anywhere know that Admiral Naismith is Miles Vorkosigan. Most of the members of the Dendarii wouldn't even know that Miles Vorkosigan exists, as Barrayar's a bit of a backwater. Naismith becomes a safety valve for Miles, to keep Barrayar, with its rather oppressive society and prejudices, from driving him mad. Or madder -- he's not exactly the most stable fellow.

Labyrinth gives us our first detailed look at the planet of Jackson's Whole, a former space-pirate base that has evolved into a free-market capitalist's fantasy world. The only law is what you can buy, and you can buy just about anything. The planet is run by "Houses", each specializing in various products -- House Fell sells weapons of any sort, House Ryoval specializes in prostitution and genetics, and House Bharaputra in cloning -- especially growing clones for brain transplants, a practice condemned everywhere outside Jackson's Whole It involves growing the clone as an awake and aware human to the age of ten years (though accellerating the body's development to twice that), then killing the ten-year-old child's brain to replace it with the clone's progenitor's brain. Jackson's Whole plays a major role in the next few books.

In Labyrinth, the Dendarii are commissioned to help a geneticist escape employment from Jackson's Whole (contracts are pretty tough there). Naturally, complications set in, and by the end ofthe story they're leaving Jacksonian space with the geneticist, a quaddie musician, and a 16-year-old genetically engineered super-soldier experiment whom Miles has convinced to join the Dendarii. In the process Miles managed to infuriate Baron Ryoval to the point that the Baron puts a significant price on his head.

Borders of Infinity relates another Dendarii mission, but a very different one from Labyrinth. The Cetagandans are trying to annex the planet Merilac, and Miles has been comissioned to rescue a rebel commander from the Cetagandan war prison on Dagoola IV. Though the Cetagandans are strictly follownig the letter of interstellar law, the prison is a nightmare. It consists of a circular area several hundred meters across encased in a force-field, containing ten thousand prisoners. The law requires a certain amount of space per prisoner -- no problem, the dome is made larger by exactly the right amount every time someone new is added. Prisoners must get 8 hours of light a day -- so the dome glows day-bright all the time. Each prisoner must have so many calories of food a day, so the Cetagandans dump ten thousand nutrition bars through the force field every feeding time, and let the prisoners fight it out.

The story starts with Miles's arrival in the dome as a prisoner. Within moments he's assaulted and stripped. The officer he was to rescue went catatonic long before Miles arrived, so he works out a nwe plan -- rescue everyone, starting with nothing (though we know that the Dendarii must be out there somewhere, figuring into things). The scenario gives Bujold a good chance to play with Miles's manic charisma as he tries to convince the prisoners, some of whom have been in this nightmare for years, to follow him.

By the end of the story, Miles successfully rescues the prisoners, but not without some losses both among the prisoners and his Dendarii.

As I mentioned before, the events in Borders of Infinity lead directly to the opening of the next novel, Brothers in Arms. You don't need to know the story of the Dagoola IV raid to follow Brothers, though -- enough is covered in the opening of the novel to set the scene.

I don't have much to complain about concerning the cover art this time -- it actually does depict a scene from the book (near the end of the Borders of Infinity short story) with reasonable accuracy. Though Miles's hand was quite specifically described as being broken, numb, and bandaged in the story and looks quite healthy on the cover.

That's a lot of typing for first thing in the morning, and it's cold in my office (my fingers are stiff), so I'm going to put off Brothers in Arms for a bit. Read more!

Books (Science Fiction): Ethan of Athos

I just finished the fourth of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Verkosigan books, Ethan of Athos. Back when I started the series, teflonjedi mentioned that he has a copy of this but never got into the rest of the series.

Ethan of Athos is not a good place to start on the series. It's my least favourite of the four books I've re-read so far (though I still enjoyed it overall).

The book is atypical of the Vorkosigan series. Miles Vorkosigan never actually appears, though he's mentioned via his "Admiral Naismith" alias. I can't remember the order the books were written, but unless I'm mistaken, Ethan was the third book Bujold wrote set in this universe, and Miles himself was not in her original plan. The first book written was Shards of Honor, the story of Miles's parents, which I treat as a prequel to the Miles books, though it's more accurate to say that the Miles books are sequels to Shards. The Warrior's Apprentice was next, continuing Miles's story from Shards, and Ethan followed, continuing Elli Quinn's story from Apprentice. The Vor Game and Cetaganda, the two books that precede Ethan chronologically, were written well after, and the jump back to a less mature version of the world is quite noticeable.

(Bujold, when she came to write Cetaganda, makes a reference to Ethan when a Cetagandan is momentarily distracted by a problem concerning L-X-10 Terran-C. It turns out that that problem is what started the chain of events that leads to the story in Ethan.)

The second problem with the book, and the one that grated most, was how socially out of date it felt at times (the book is 20 years old). The title character, Dr. Ethan Urquhart, comes from an artificial society of fundamentalist misogynist homosexuals -- their Founding Fathers took advantage of the (then new) invention of the uterine replicator to colonize a planet (Athos) without involving women, whom they seem to picture as a stereotypical Moral Majority type's stereotype of a radical feminist. This certainly sets up a lot of potential for culture shock when Ethan has to leave Athos to seek out new ovarian cultures to replace the 200-year-old ones on Athos, but it comes off as rather clunky in the novel. For one thing, Ethan runs into anti-gay bigotry on Kline Station (his first stop-over after leaving Athos, and the site of most of the action), which seems very out of place in an advanced galactic culture. Perhaps it was more believable in 1986, but these days it just sounds anachronistic.

Ethan, of course, gets tangled up in intrigue on Klein Station and is forced to work closely with Elli Quinn (a woman), but Bujold never really goes anywhere with the conflict which should have been happening due to Ethan's background -- Ethan, it turns out, is far less prejudiced than some of the Stationers he met early on, and so manages to work with women without too much trouble. In the end, Athosian attitudes towards women turns out to be nothing more than a plot device to bring shipments of genetic material into the story.

As I said, though, I did enjoy reading the book -- I just wouldn't recommend starting the series with it. For that matter, one can skip over it when reading the series without missing much.

And, of course, the cover art has almost nothing to do with the book. It shows a dramatic fellow in a flight suit standing in front of a big spaceship, looking much like George Bush wishes he'd looked during his "Mission Accomplished" photo-op. It's a scene that never happens in the book. Not only that, the art doesn't make much sense: the fellow's flight suit has an oxygen mask with goggles and a hose leading down to a waist-level pack (he's wearing it hanging around his neck by its strap) but he's also holding a full space helmet, meant to fasten to his collar. There's no reason to have both -- if he were wearing the mask, the helmet wouldn't be able to lock down over the hose, and if he were wearing the helmet, there'd be no point to the mask. Read more!

Books (Comic Strip): Frazz Addendum

I was working my way through the third volume of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes over the weekend and I realized I wasn't really fair to Miss Wormwood in my Frazz posting when I compared her to Mrs. Olsen. There's no evidence that Miss Wormwood is actually a bad teacher. Susie Derkins doesn't have any problems with her that we can see, for instance. In Frazz, though, it's quite clear that Mrs. Olsen hates the students (though, as Frazz points out, that's only because she hates everyone).

One strip in particular emphasized the difference in attitude between Calvin and Frazz, when Calvin tells Miss Wormwood that "You can teach me the material, but you can't make me care". Caulfield's attitude in Frazz is more along the lines, "I care about learning, but you don't have anything left to teach me", a significant difference. Read more!

Books (Comic Strip): Frazz: Live at Bryson Elementary

One of the more common comic strip clichés is "kids hate school" (of course, this isn't restricted to comic strips). Calvin & Hobbes is probably the best example of this ("best" as in both "best example of" and "best executed"), but it's hard to get away from. FoxTrot first caught my eye because it actually had a character who loved school. Of course, Jason's a geeky science nerd type, another cliché, but a well-done one.

Jef Mallett's Frazz takes a rather different approach. It's set almost entirely in a school (a grade school -- most of the students seen are 6 to 9 years old) and covers a much wider range of school experiences than any other strip. Frazz: Live at Bryson Elementary is the first collection of the strip.

The strip centres around its title character, "Frazz" Frazier, a successful songwriter and grade school custodian who has taken upon himself the job of making sure school is fun for the students, even of some of the classes aren't. Most prominent among the students is Caulfield, named for Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye -- the first of a great many literary references in the strip.

Caulfield squares off against Mrs. Olsen, one of those teachers who really has no business being a teacher. He isn't a Calvin to her Miss Wormwood, though -- Calvin's smart, but lazy. He wants everything handed to him on a platter. Caulfield (aided and abetted by Frazz) is smart and enthusiastic about learning. He reads Hemingway and Faulkner, for example. He's just bored to death by Mrs. Olsen's classes, and hates regimented learning. Truth be told, for all I love Calvin & Hobbes, I identify with Caulfield more than Calvin. I had the good fortune of getting into an "Advancement Program" for bright students who were being held back in the general classes. Unfortunately, those sorts of programs have fallen out of style lately, often in favour of giving the smart kinds Ritalyn to keep them from getting bored and impatient.

Frazz is the kind of guy who could have turned Calvin into a Caulfield. The Foreword by Gene Weingarten points out that Frazz could even be Calvin, a "brilliant underachiever" (and with the same hair), grown up having finally learned to love learning. (Frazz was also a student under Mrs. Olsen when he was in grade three, 21 years earlier. Perhaps "Wormwood" was her maiden name?) Though Mallett says he didn't mean for Frazz to be adult Calvin, you can definitely see the influences Watterson had on Mallett's writing. Curiously, one the places it shows up best is in the use of pacing and silence in the strips -- which could get me 'way off track into a discussion of Scott McCloud's "Count Basie" analogy for pacing comics, but I'll save that for some other time.

The Frazz world is a little broadly populated than the Calvin & Hobbes, too. Bryson Elementary has popular, inspirational teachers as well as Mrs. Olsen, and lots of students other than Caulfield (though Olsen and Caulfield are the ones whose name sticks in my memory). It's not all stuck in school as well -- Frazz is an avid mountain biker, and is often off riding, especially in Sunday strips.

One of the best things about the strip is that it's not just Caulfield and Frazz who are well-read -- it assumes the readers are as well. The jokes work best if you know something of Salinger, Hemingway, Faulkner, and so on. (At one point Caulfield gets his Walkman confiscated by the principal, and Frazz mentions that it might not have happened if Caulfield had explained he was listening to a Faulkner book on tape. Caulfield says, "That's ok, I was getting tired of changing tapes in the middle of sentences anyway.")

And, as if to emphasize the strip's literacy, two of the three blurbs on the back of the book are by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. (Coincidentally, the first time I encountered Frazz, it was in the middle of a story about Frazz reading Hiaasen. I think the book was Tourist Season).

The third blurb is by 1988 Giro d'Italia champion Andy Hampsten, just to cover Frazz's fondness for cycling.

Wikipedia has a good entry about Frazz which covers its literary allusions in more detail.

I don't actually know if Frazz is running in any Toronto papers. I should see. I follow it online, and I will certainly be buying all the books. My only fear is that a comic strip that expects so much literacy from its readers may not be able to survive long. Read more!

Books (Science Fiction): Cetaganda

I finished the third Miles Vorkosigan book, Cetaganda, yesterday. Another fun read, and a bit of a change of pace -- no space battles this time around, just political intrigue in the Cetagandan Empire.

The Cetagandan Empire is an enemy of Miles's homeworld of Barrayar, though at the time of the novel they are at peace (mostly). Cetaganda's a genocracy -- a society ruled through control of genetics and reproduction -- with a power structure based loosely on shogunate Japan. The Emperor and the ruling class are called "the haut", and the military class are "the ghem". Unlike shogunate Japan, though, the haut has real power, something a little surprising to outlanders (in Japan, the shogun was the de facto ruler, and the Emperor and his court lived off stipends provided by the shogun and his vassals). The haut's control over the ghem comes through their control over the haut and ghem gene pools. To complicate matters, haut power is divided between the men (who have the political power) and the women (who control the gene pool). It makes for an interesting hypothetical society.

So now I've just started Ethan of Athos. Back in my first post on the series, teflonjedi mentioned that he had this one. It's also atypical: I don't remember if Miles even appears in this one. He's mostly represented in the story by Elli Quinn, a commander in the mercenary company Miles is associated with, on a secret mission for Miles. Quinn had a bit part in The Warrior's Apprentice when she was injured in one of the first combat missions Miles commanded, but she becomes much more prominent in later books. Read more!

Books (Science Fiction): The Vor Game

Monday night I finished the second Miles Vorkosigan book, The Vor Game. I'm not going to go into details about it (I don't want to post spoilers), though I will mention that it's a little odd in structure, more like a short story followed by a (related) novella than a single novel -- about a quarter of the way in Miles changes commander, location, and mission completely.

One complaint I do have about the books -- or, rather, the editions I have -- is the cover art. I've complained earlier about the way the Garrett, P.I. cover art almost always shows Garrett with a hat, even though Glen Cook explicitly says in the books that he never wears one (except once, as part of a disguise).

One of the central elements of the Miles Vorkosigan books is that Miles is severely deformed because of a poison gas attack when his mother was pregnant, which left his bones extremely fragile. He's four-foot-nine with a hunched back and legs that require braces to keep them from breaking. But so far, in the three books I've looked at this time through (I haven't dug out the others to check their covers yet), the cover art has largely glossed over this. The Vor Game is the best of the three in this respect, showing Miles's short stature next to a six-foot-plus sergeant; Cetaganda, the book I'm reading now, is probably the worst, showing Miles from behind, on his knees, before a Cetagandan haut-lady (a member of the highest aristocracy on that planet). As far as I can tell, given his position, he's about the same height as the haut-lady (who are described as extremely tall), and there is no sign of a hunch in his back.

I'm not sure what the process is for approving this artwork. The artist has obviously read something about the book, as some of the details are correct: the haut-lady is in a floating chair wittin a bubble, for example. The figures of Miles and the haut-lady are flanked by profiles of Miles and a ghem-lord (a member of the lower aristocracy) staring each other down, and the ghem-lord's face is painted in swirling patterns. So some of the more minor details are there, though major ones are missing.

The first book, The Warrior's Apprentice, had the strangest bit of artwork of the three. It's a typical "character faces floating in front of a space scene" cover, showing Miles and what appears to be Fu Manchu. I have no idea why there would be the face of a Chinese stereotype (complete with droopy moustache, scar over one eye, and a 19th-century Chinese hat) floating next to Miles's. The only thing I can think is that one of Miles's allies later in the book is a fellow named Commodore Tung who is Chinese (presumably -- it's never stated, though in Cetaganda Miles quotes him quoting Chou En Lai). I have no idea why the artist would make Tung look so sinister, though. The closest thing The Warrior's Apprentice has to a personal villain is Tung's rival, Oser, though for the most part the book is a "Miles against circumstances" story, with no single antagonist.

The cover art business is a minor irritation, but it suggests to me that the authors have little input into the process, which bugs me. And it's not as if correcting the mistakes would hurt the artwork. Garrett would look less like Sam Spade, and Miles would not be as attractive -- but Garrett shouldn't look like Sam Spade, and Miles's unattractiveness is vitally important to the Miles books (and Miles's personality). Is it really that hard to get it right? Read more!

Books (Science Fiction): The Warrior's Apprentice

I mentioned earlier that I was between books -- a little overdosed on science books after my last run (ending with The Ancestor's Tale, and not getting anywhere with fiction.

I'd started a couple of fantasy series by new authors (well, new-to-me authors), but couldn't get into them. One I had started a while back, dropped, and tried to pick up again; the other was all new, based on a recommendation about the author from a friend. It wasn't until I was about 1/3 of the way into the newer book that I figured out what was really missing: humour. Everyone was deadly serious all the time.

It's not that I only want to read comedies, but no-one in these books ever seemed to even crack a smile -- not even a dark, ironic, gallows-humour smile for when things were deadly serious. Or a light, carefree, help-the-reader-identify-with-the-character smile before things got serious.

I guess that's one reason why (as I mentioned when discussing the Garrett, P.I. books, I have a few series I fall back on when I'm between major reads, ones that I can be sure I'm going to enjoy -- and ones with some humour to them.

The Garrett books can be very dark, but Glen Cook has a sharp sense of humour that works perfectly. David Eddings may have only one story in him (the four series of his that I've read -- the two five-book series about Belgarion and the two three-book series about Sparkhawk -- are all chase-the-magic-rock-all-over-the-map stories. The two rocks involved are even the same colour (blue)!), but his characters are enjoyable and their banter is fun to read. The third series I re-read fairly often is Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series, which I've just re-started with The Warrior's Apprentice.

The Miles series is space opera, centered around (naturally) Miles Vorkosigan, an aristocrat on the militaristic feudal world of Barrayar, which has only recently (that is, a couple of generations ago) re-emerged from isolation from the rest of galactic society.

To complicate matters, Miles's mother was poisoned during a coup attempt while she was pregnant, leaving Miles with extremely brittle bones. As a result, Miles's growth has been severely stunted (he's 4'9" after extensive surgery) and deformed -- a major problem on Barrayar, where, thanks to nuclear wars earlier in their history, mutant children are often killed at birth. Miles isn't a mutant, but the distinction is a little subtle for Barrayaran prejudices.

Miles is driven by a manic personality and an obsessive need to prove himself which, in The Warrior's Apprentice, leads to him fast-talking his way deeper and deeper into trouble. By the climax of the book, he's fighting in a planetary war while commanding people he'd conned into signing up for a mercenary company he'd made up off the top of his head. The overall effect is like watching someone juggle chainsaws while dancing on the roof of a runaway train heading towards a bridge laden with explosives. Laser chainsaws.

The best summary of Miles's personality comes from his first "recruit", who'd given him a green, 120-proof drink earlier in the story, which Miles had been slurping on regularly to settle his nerves (a little abridged):

Quite dizzy. And nauseated. Blast it, this wasn't free fall. He sat abruptly on the deck, weak from the near-disaster.

Mayhew stared, looking first alarmed, then sardonically understanding. "It's about time that stuff caught up with you," he remarked.

Bothari snapped to alertness at Miles's hunched huddle, and quizzed Mayhew with angry eyes.

"His creme de meth just wore off," Mayhew explained. "Drops you in a hurry, doesn't it, kid?"

Miles mumbled, an inarticulate groan. Bothari growled somthing exasperatedly under his breath about "deserve," picked him up, and slung him unceremoniously over his shoulder.

"Well, at least he'll stop bouncing off the walls, and give us all a break," said Mayhew cheerfully. "I've never seen anybody overrev on that stuff the way he did."

"Oh, was that liquor of yours a stimulant?" asked Elena. "I wonder why he didn't fall asleep."

"Couldn't you tell?" chuckled Mayhew.

"Not really."

Mayhew's laughter faded. "My God," he said hollowly, "you mean he's like that all the time?"

One of the nice things about the Miles series is how Miles matures over the run of the books (now up to 10 books, with three prequels -- though the prequels are best read after you've read at least the first few of the series books). In The Warrior's Apprentice he's 19 and has just failed the physical trials to get into the Imperial Service (breaking both legs on the first obstacle of the course in an attempt to prove himself). By the most recent book, he's 30-somethng (I don't have it on hand to check) and getting married, with a long and successful career, if complicated and convoluted, career. Bujold even includes a timeline in the back of the books, summarizing how all of the novels fit together.

The Garrett books don't have a grand arc like this. Garrett's always the same age and doesn't change much, though characters will come and go over the course of several novels. Of course, in the case of the Garrett books it's sometimes only a couple of weeks between novels, whereas it can be several years bewteen the Miles books. The Eddings books aren't really so much series as multi-volume novels, so the dynamic is different there as well.

In any event, I've just finished The Warrior's Apprentice, and I have nine fun Miles books ahead of me (and three prequels) before I have to worry about new fiction again. I just need to find some new series authors I can use to fill the gaps! I can't just re-read these things over and over, enjoyable though they are. Iain M. Banks has been good, but his Culture series is too heavy for "between book" reading. I just don't want to get bit by yet another humourless slog. Read more!

Stuff: Toronto Hawks

I'm kind of between books at the moment. After The Ancestor's Tale I'm having a hard time getting into anything else. I've started a couple of things, but haven't been all that engrossed by them.

Usually what I do when I'm in this sort of state is get out one of my old standby series out -- Lois McMaster Bujold or David Eddings or Glen Cook, for example -- and plow through them. Specifically, I wanted to re-read Cook's Garrett P.I. books, but I can't find the first volume (Sweet Silver Blues) either at home or in book stores, and I don't want to read them out of order. So I'm at a loss for books right now.

All of this is completely irrelevant to Toronto hawks, except to explain why I'm not posting about them and not books. The hawks -- well, one hawk -- came in this afternoon on our way back from groceries. We noticed a couple of flocks of synchronized pigeons circling over the street. We found that a little odd, as Toronto pigeons are not known for exerting themselves, until we noticed why they were flapping around: they were chasing a hawk, who fled the pigeon-infested area and settled down on a TV aerial on a nearby building.

Fortunately, this was quite close to home, so I ran in and got the camera. It was rather tricky photographing a hawk that was ten stories higher than me -- with the aerial in the way to boot -- but I did get a couple of not-bad shots. The image links to the shot on Flickr, where you find the best of the shots. Read more!

Stuff: It's Author's Week at '77 Track 7

Apparently I'm starting to show up on Google or something. First, Jessica Sachs commends on my post about Corpse, and now Roberto Casati has dropped in on my post about his Shadows.

Thanks for the comments! Read more!

Book (Science): The Ancestor's Tale

It's been almost a month since I started Richard Dawkins's
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. It's a pretty hefty book, and I got interrupted a few times.

It's hefty, but it's fascinating. There was a lot of good material I hadn't seen before, or only new about vaguely, and the novel presentation put an interesting perspective on everything.

As I mentioned in my preview post, the book is told as a backwards trip through the evolutionary tree, starting with modern humans, with a chapter at each of the branching points between our history and that of any still-surviving cousins we have. Dawkins calls these branching points "rendezvous" (since we're going backwards) and refers to the last common ancestor between the two branches as the "concestor" for that rendezvous. For example, Rendezvous 17 is with the amphibians, and concestor 17 would be the last animal who had some descendants who went on to become modern amphibians and other descendants who went on to become humans. Naturally -- and this is an important point Dawkins repeats often for the various concestors -- concestor 17 was not an modern amphibian itself! That may seem obvious, but when Larry King asks questions like "If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?" on his show, it's a point that's obviously lost on many people.

Each Rendezvous has its own chapter, and most of those consist of one or more tales of modern animals from the other branch. For example, Rendezvous 26 -- Protosomes -- is where the our branch and the one that would give rise to insects, crustaceans, spiders, worms, and so on, join. That chapter includes The Ragworm's Tale, The Brine Shrimp's Tale, The Fruit Fly's Tale, etc.

What wasn't clear when I wrote my preview post, though, was that the animals in these tales are actually excuses to tell much more varied tales than just histories of various evolutionary paths. Rather, Dawkins uses them to explore evolutionary concepts exemplified by the subject species. The Fruit Fly's Tale deals primarily with Hox genes (whose function were first determined through experiments on fruit flies). Hox genes are responsible for turning other genes on and off within a cell based on a cell's position within a body: they're what make arms become arms and legs become legs (among other things). Mutations in Hox genes in fruit flies can turn antennae into legs or give the fly extra wings.

Similarly, The Platypus's Tale is about electro-sensitivity (platypuses can detect electrical fields with their bill), The Redwood Tale is about dating methods (starting with dendrochronology, taking by patterns of tree rings), The Salamander's Tale is about ring species and racial distinctions, and so on.

There are also two summary chapters at the end, Cantebury and The Host Returns. Cantebury represents the start of it all, the root of the tree from which all these Rendezvous descend, and Dawkins uses it to talk about important first step in evolution. Not so much the origin of life, but the origin of heredity -- without heredity, you can't have evolution. He discusses a fascinating experiment I hadn't ever heard of, done using a RNA virus called Qβ.

Qβ, like any virus, is a genetic parasite which hijacks a cell's DNA/RNA transcription systems to make copies of itself and the proteins that it uses (one to enclose the RNA, one to stick the virus to the cell, one to destroy the cell to let the copies free, and one that assembles the Qβ copying protein, Qβ replicase, out of proteins found in the cell).

The experiment consisted of putting Qβ RNA and Qβ replicase in test tubes away from any cells to see what happened. Before long, even without the cell's full-fledge copying system on hand, the Qβ was being copied. Not only that, but as the experiment was iterated through successive "generations" (samples from one experiment moved to a fresh test tube), the Qβ RNA changed, loosing the genes that encoded the shell, glue, or escape proteins, since they weren't needed in the test tube environment. The Qβ RNA was reduced from 3600 codons to only 550. In some experiments, the Qβ RNA wasn't even necessary: the experimenter simply mixed raw material for making RNA with Qβ replicase, and soon a very Qβ-like RNA virus appeared.

Dawkins found this interesting because it demonstrated that you could have an evolving system with heredity with only RNA (or RNA components) and a single protein. I found it interesting because it reminded me of Tierra and Avida, experiments in genetic programming. Tierra lets you write short, self-replicating computer programs and then runs them in an environment where they are subject to selection pressures and mutation. Avida is based on Tierra.

One of the early results from Tierra (or maybe Avida, I can't remember which one this actually happened on -- maybe both) was a program which, through evolution in the system, shortened itself substantially, making itself more successful by reducing the amount of steps it took to copy itself. In fact, the code was tightened so much that it was hard for the developers watching it to figure out how it worked -- it was more optimized than any human author would think they could make it.

This being Dawkins, there are some interesting sociology-of-science bits as well. Naturally, he discusses the shortcomings of creationism in addressing the results biologists have been getting in their research, and throws in a couple of light barbs at creationists' tendencies to quote biologists selectively. Though the thing he harps on most of all is how the rules of biological nomenclature have stuck us with a number of rather inappropriate names for species, processes, and theories. Unfortunately, I didn't think to make notes of examples, and they're rather hard to find by flipping through the book.

My only real complaint about The Ancestor's Tale is Dawkins's writing style. His tone tends to wobble between lectorial and conversational, rather than going for one or the other -- or striking a balance somewhere in between. It's not at all a major problem, but it did make the book's flow a little uneven in places. Still, he got to marry Romana after being introduced to her by Douglas Adams. I suppose it'd be too much to expect him to write like Isaac Asimov on top of all that. Read more!

Stuff: This is cool

You probably haven't noticed -- unless you actually make a habit of watching for new comments on two-month-old posts -- but a couple of days ago I had an unexpected visitor at my post on Jessica Snyder Sachs's book on forensics, Corpse -- namely, Jessica Sachs herself.

Corpse was a fun book (and one that comes to mind any time any of the CSI coroners makes a pronouncement about time of death). Sachs is now working on "a book about the microbes that colonize our bodies while we're still alive", which may be less -- or maybe more -- disturbing that her stories about the ones that colonize our bodies after we're dead.

She has her own weblog at http://www.jessicasachs.com/ -- be sure to drop by. Read more!