Books I Am Currently Reading

As some of you already know, about a month ago I bought myself a Kindle DX. I have subsequently stopped reading printed material (except perhaps for rereading some of the 800 printed mystery and sci-fi titles in my personal library). I really like the ability to purchase a title in the Kindle store and begin to read it in a matter of minutes -- no more trips to the bookstore. (I will have much more to say about my Kindle experiences in another post.)

I will confine myself here to titles that I have read since I acquired the Kindle. I started with a science-fiction story: the last volume of a tetralogy, the first three of which I had read in printed form. The transition from the printed-word to the Kindle-word was relatively seamless. After reading that last book: "Strength and Honor", I went on to read "Stormbreaker" the first book in the Alex Rider children's series.

I often find juveniles to be entertaining -- I, like many others, really enjoyed the Harry Potter books, and there are several other juvenile series that I have enjoyed. From this I moved on to "Point Break", the second in the Alex Rider series. Both were enjoyable enough (and certainly the pacing is quite breathless) but the characterizations and their ongoing development  was fairly simple -- so I probably will not continue with the series.

I should point out that when I read for pleasure, the stories and the plot are less important to me than the characterizations of the principals, and their evolution throughout the life of the series.

Next up was a Heinlein juvenile that I had read before: "Space Cadet", which was enjoyable, and I will probably read other of the Heinlein titles available in the Kindle store (since Heinlein is long dead, these are quite reasonably priced).I have never found a Heinlein story not to be enjoyable (although I prefer the earlier titles to the later).

I then turned to more current fare: "Pursuit of Honor" by Vince Flynn, a series I have been reading for about a year or so. This author is much praised by Glenn Beck (I won't, however, hold that against Mr. Flynn). I then bought a book that Amazon was giving away for free, and it was okay -- but you get what you pay for.

When browsing the Kindle store from the Kindle device itself, it is quite easy to click on the "buy" button, and, if you're not careful (especially when the Kindle store is responding a bit slowly), to hit the "confirm purchase" button as well. This happened to me, and I ended up as the proud owner of: "Vintage Cheever" a collection of writings by John Cheever. I was initially quite annoyed because this was not a genre (I thought) of fiction for which I had any fondness. After a bit I realized that I had been confusing John Cheever with John Updike (Cheever has been long dead; Updike died only recently). Anyhow I decided to take a look at what I had so inadvertently acquired: mostly a collection of short stories and novel fragments -- apparently Cheever was noted more for his short stories than anything else. Scanning down the table of contents my eye snagged on one title: "The Swimmer". Not too long ago I had been sort of watching a movie of the same name starring Burt Lancaster about a man at a party in the suburbs of New York City who decides to swim home swimming pool by swimming pool -- a distance of about 7 miles. I was (as is my wont) switching back and forth from this to another movie to avoid commercial interruptions, and so I came to the end of "The Swimmer" a little bit confused as to what had happened. So I figured ah hah! Here's a chance to read the story behind the movie and learn what was behind it all -- after all the book is always longer and more detailed than the movie. Boy was I wrong. "The Swimmer" is a short story of perhaps 10 pages in length very spare, and to my mind a metaphor of a man passing through his life from vigorous youth to somewhat decrepit old age; whereas the movie comes across as a story of a deluded man who thinks he is a well-to-do suburban bon vivant, who was ultimately forced to face the reality that he is a somewhat deranged bankrupt.  The movie, which it turns out was made by the producers of "David and Lisa" has stuck with me, and while a small thing, I would nevertheless not hesitate to recommend it should it again be shown on cable.

Back to browsing the Kindle store, where I made a marvelous discovery: many complete works out of copyright, in the public domain were available for a dollar or two. I was thus able to acquire 33 Wodehouse novels, all of the Jeeves stories, and "Piccadilly Jim" for less than five dollars. Wodehouse never ceases to provide chuckles and much merriment. If one were ever to create a top 10 list of the funniest novels in the English language, number one on the list would probably be: "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome (written in the latter part of the 19th century). Evelyn Waugh would perhaps scrape on in position 10 with: "Decline and Fall" -- all of the remaining eight positions on the list would have been written by PG Wodehouse.

Lastly, we come to the original Tom Swift series (which I have mentioned in a previous post), and the whole of which can be bought in the Kindle store for the ridiculous sum of one dollar. I have just finished rereading "Tom Swift and His Motorcycle", which is interesting less for the story, more for the background it paints of what everyday life was like circa 1910. The state of technology, and its prevalence within the society depicted is interesting -- I will probablywrite a post about technology as a backdrop to life in the 20th century at some later time. One minor warning: much of the dialogue and attitudes expressed in this first Tom Swift outing are far from what today would be regarded as "politically correct".  One other note: the action takes place in and around the fictional town of  "Shopton" in upstate New York.  Shopton is on the shores of "Lake Carlopa", believed by many to actually be Lake George. I, with some of my brothers and sisters grew up for a time in Ticonderoga,NY -- which is also on the shores of Lake George.

Reading

My first recollection of reading anything comes from the second grade where I remember the teacher was having us read passages from whatever Dick and Jane reader was part of the educational orthodoxy of upstate New York in 1952. I remember these readers as being pretty lame, and none of it was of any difficulty for me, but was not so easy for many of the other members of the class. I remember being so bored by it all that I would fain difficulty with passages just to make the session more lively, and get some attention from the teacher.

At about the same time I was also reading comic books of a particularly grisly sort -- the kind with dripping zombies climbing out of the mud of their graves, or skeletons walking about to terrify all and sundry. I remember this because my mother attempted to dissuade me from buying these as they would make me afraid, and "I'd be sorry". She was of course right, and after a few nights of disquieting nightmares, I stuck to more mundane matter -- mostly Scrooge Mc duck.

About a year later I was spending a Saturday afternoon with my grandmother Boyhan, and she, finding me too much underfoot said, "why don't you read this -- your father read it when he was a little boy". She then handed me a copy of "Tom Swift and His Motorcycle" which was written in 1910 (my father was born in 1922). Anyhow, this was the first real bound book that I ever read from cover to cover. From time to time thereafter I would read other titles from the original Tom Swift series, but I found them horribly dated (a motorcycle that can go "a mile a minute!" seemed quite tame even by the standards of 1952). By 1953 I was spending all of my weekly allowance (a princely sum of one dollar) on titles from the Tom Swift Junior series. I read these through about the 15th volume by which time I had moved on to meatier stuff.

One afternoon I was at my grandmother Thomas's house with my mother with nothing to do, and I asked her for a reading suggestion (she was an avid reader of mysteries and particularly liked Perry Mason and The Saint). She suggested I read "Fer de Lance" by Rex Stout -- "I really like all the arguments between Nero Wolfe and Inspector Cramer, as well as all the beer he drinks". Thus began my lifelong love affair with one of my two favorite authors (the other being PG Wodehouse).

Most of my reading for pleasure since then has been of the mystery, or science fiction variety (with more lately a soupcon of thrillers added to the mix).

Level-Setting: “Let’s all get on the same page here”

The other day I was starting to write a post about shows in the current TV season that I liked. Suddenly I looked up and realized that I had written two or three rather lengthy paragraphs, and had not yet mentioned a single show! Today, I was thinking of putting together a post on the books that I am currently reading, and what I thought of them. Again I ended up with several paragraphs, and had not discussed a single book! After some reflection I realized that I have a strong desire (a pathological need?) to provide background -- in a word to "level set" whatever area I was intending to talk about.

In order to avoid this unhappy circumstance I have decided to do a series of "level setting" posts on the variety of topics upon which I wish to discourse. These posts will be placed under the category of "level-setting". Henceforth, whenever you see this category, you will know that this is just me attempting to provide some background information about a subject that I intend to post on at some future date.

Hopefully, this will enable me to write shorter more pithy posts. I will attempt to provide a link to whatever level setting posts seem appropriate before I get too far in to the res.

Readability

One of the things I've hoped to do with this blog is share with you all the little useful Web 2.0 applications, browser buttons, and what have you -- that have changed, and are in the process of changing the ways that I (and I suspect many of you) improve our day to day lives with their assistance.

I have a long list of these, but the first that I would like to share with you is an application called "readability". I came across this in a column written by David Pogue of the New York Times (link is here:). This little application (it's a button really) strips out all of the advertisements and non-germane clutter from web articles and formats them in a pleasing reading format (that you can choose at installation time) for a variety of devices, font styles and sizes, and surrounding white-space.

To install "readability" in Firefox just drag the white button from the readability homepage to your bookmarks toolbar. To install "readability" in Internet Explorer, it is a little more complicated: on the readability homepage, right-click the white button and select "add to favorites", then go to your favorites, find the readability favorite just added, right-click it and select "add to favorites bar" -- then anytime you click on the "readability" button on the favorites bar, the readability action will be performed on the currently displayed webpage. Needless to say in both browsers you will need to have the bookmarks (or favorites) toolbar enabled to get maximum convenience from this feature.

The reformatted page is very clean and readable with buttons in the upper left-hand corner allowing you to: reload the page in its original format, print the page in its reformatted layout, or e-mail the reformatted page to the favored correspondent of your choice.

I have mentioned in these postings and elsewhere that I dislike reading from screens; and that I tend to print out most of what I eventually read. This has presented a problem in the past because most modern WebPages are not in and of themselves printable (if you try and print them you get some pretty gosh awful outputs). Some WebPages have buttons to reformat them in a printable form -- increasingly, however, webpage authors are not providing these buttons (perhaps for copyright reasons?). I have tended to get around this by manually selecting the parts of the page I wish to read, and then printing these selected parts (not always successfully), or copying the selections to OneNote where (with some light manual editing) a pleasing printable page can be created. Needless to say this can be a labor-intensive process. Lately, with my acquisition of a Kindle DX (more on this in a coming post) the ability to format webpages for delivery to the Kindle and eventual reading has made this capability even more critical.

Consequently, "readability" comes along at a very opportune time (one of the device targets it can format for is the Kindle).

In any event with or without my idiosyncratic reading necessities, the ability to get rid of all of the advertisements and other non-germane clutter should be a big plus for anyone wishing to read a Web-hosted article.

For those of you wishing to bypass the New York Times article and go straight to the readability page, the link is here.

EDIT:

After using this for a while I want to point out that there are some pages that "readability" just cannot process correctly -- this is because the add-on misidentifies the parts of the page are important.  The output is still nice and clean, it just doesn't contain the information of interest.  Still for most pages this is a great add-on.

Climate change Thoughts

 

The following editorial in the Wall Street Journal: Climategate: Science is Dying prompted this comment/response to them from me:

 

 

The sheer arrogant hubris of it all!!

 

Problems with the data:

In the late 60s and early 70s I worked alongside some scientists developing early climate models. The problem back then (as it is today) is the lack of good finely detailed temperature and wind data from all the points (and altitudes) over the whole surface of the earth. We only have any data at all going back maybe 150 years (and as we have recently learned even there the raw data has been irretrievably lost). We only have "good" data perhaps going back 80 or 90 years; and even that data is fairly sparse on the ground -- located mostly at major concentrations of human habitation. It is only in the last 30 years or so with the rise of satellite technology that we have reasonably good data for points over the whole of the earth. Even then the graininess of the data is still unacceptably large.

 

Problems with the input parameters:

The Earth is an extremely complex system -- no model can hope to encompass every possible variation and situation. Consequently it is quite normal in these models to adopt various simplifying assumptions that in some way encapsulate our best understanding of the underlying processes and science. Stable or "good" (useful?)models do not vary much in their predicted outcomes when small changes in these input parameters are made. Models with large, wide variations in outcomes upon small changes to the input parameters are deemed to be "chaotic". Climate models are mostly of the latter "chaotic" form. Need a "hockey stick"? I can give you a parameter that will return you that output. Want a 1° average rise in temperature over the next century -- there's a set of parameters for that too. Or suppose (mirabile dictu) you actually desire a temperature decline -- why there's a set of parameters for that as well!

 

Problems with the timescales:

The Earth as a scientific system operates at energy levels and timescales far beyond those of human lifetimes. We are as mayflies in the geologic scheme of mother Earth. Planet studies of our sisters Venus and Mars have shown us just how unique the Earth biosphere is. Venus could have been like the Earth, but isn't. Climate scientists frequently like to point out that Venus is in our future, if we don't clean up our carbon-emitting act. The fact is that in many ways the biosphere of the earth has been remarkably stable for a very long period of time (easily hundreds of millions of years -- perhaps even billions). Over this very long time, the Earth has been subjected to a variety of large disturbances and shocks, yet the biosphere is still with us. Clearly there are stabilizers in the Earth system -- operating on timescales of thousands and millions of years that keep things ticking over nicely. The thought that we could in our puny way somehow alter these processes (when as yet we have almost no good scientific understanding of them) is arrant nonsense.

Conclusions:

At the end of the day what the scientists are engaged in is a statistical exercise. They take a certain amount of data, and from that attempt to project what that data might look like in the future. This is not science as we were taught it in school (in fairness given the timescales there is really nothing else that scientists can do); there are no hypotheses followed by experiments under rigidly controlled conditions with a looksee at the end of some results. I have mentioned before the problems with the data that we have. The "good" baseline data is probably only 30 to 40 years long (and even that is pretty sparse on a global scale). This baseline is good enough to do weather prediction, but not nearly long enough to do any kind of longer-term prediction of the sort that climate scientists are using as the basis of all their alarums and warnings. As I stated before: the Earth is an extremely complicated system operating at energies and time scales far beyond those of mere mortal men (sorry Superman). For us to then therefore turn around and say we can drastically modify how we live, and dramatically lower our standards of living, and thereby have some material impact on a climatological outcome is arrogant folly of the first order!

 

Scientists should stick to science and keep their noses out of public policy (politicians already mess this up quite nicely thank you very much)-- too much of what has already transpired (as others here in the Wall Street Journal have pointed out) has been driven by a money trail whose corrosive effects are even now only dimly perceived.

 

Pasted from <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html?mod=djemEditorialPage>

 

ADDENDUM:

I thought I had finished with this when I posted my
comment yesterday, but after reading all of the direct responses, and other posts at the Wall Street Journal, and upon
reflection, I feel impelled to add a couple of additional observations.

 

Much of the
discussion here has been in the form of ad hominem attacks against Mr.
Henninger, scientists in general, readers of the Wall Street Journal, and
certain individual posters to this thread. This is not at all helpful.

 

I don't know
whether the climate scientists are correct or not. I wouldn't even begin to
venture a guess as to what mean global temperatures might be 100 years hence. We
do, however, seem to be losing the main thrust of the editorial, which is that
climate scientists (and their policy allies) are arguing for a "precautionary"
action agenda. To me this is a little bit like chicken Little running off
shouting "the sky is falling" as the first nugget of hail bounces off his
noggin.

 

We need, I think
instead, to adopt the principles used by doctors, and those engaged in medical
research (the Earth is after all our very dear, and only home): that principle
is best expressed in the Hippocratic oath by the words "first do no harm".

 

Climate scientists
and many policy wonks are advocating radical restructurings of just about every
facet of human existence. As several have stated here: thousands of climate
scientists all have come to similar conclusions, and they can't all be wrong.
Well, thousands of scientists thought that the Ptolemaic view of the solar
system was the correct one and that Copernicus was wrong (and in fact the
Ptolemaic view produced better planetary predictions for many years after --
until Kepler came along). Not to demean the scientists, but I find arguments
based on the "authority" of thousands of scientists not very compelling.

 

Luckily, most of
us live in democracies, and I doubt that the precautionary principle is going to
get much real traction. Take the behavior of most of the signatories to the
Kyoto protocol and the emissions levels they agreed to achieve: not one of them
even came close to hitting their targets; and most European nations didn't even
try (from a political standpoint) to put in place anything that would move them
towards their climate goals. In actual fact, the United States, which was not a
signatory, came closer to hitting their projected targets (even though they
missed them by a wide margin) than their European cousins. Politically Kyoto,
Copenhagen, and the endless stream of climate change conferences to come will
achieve nothing meaningful (other than increased funding streams for our
friendly climate scientists -- which is not necessarily bad -- new knowledge is
never a bad thing; and if the scientists are right, understandings grounded in
better science will lead to better policy options should they be needed sometime
in the future).

 

If there is a real
problem here, it is one of pollution: the pollution of too many people; but you
will find few willing to address "that" 500 pound gorilla sitting at the table.
Another point which I find consistently overlooked is the fact that, even if
global temperatures were to rise on average, the actual effects on individual
areas over the whole of the Earth would vary widely (I have even heard
projections from climate scientists saying that if global temperature rises
overall, it will nevertheless result in a dramatic cooling in many areas -- one
notable example of which would be Great Britain).

 

I am not
advocating a do-nothing strategy here (in fact I think many "green" initiatives
will have beneficial outcomes -- certainly moving away from fossil fuels is
something we ought to be doing whether the temperature is rising or not). On the
other hand I think given the timescales, the enormous complexities, the
"apparent" uncertainties, and mostly because much of this is based on computer
simulations, we ought to be a little bit humble, a lot cautious, and as I said
above: "first do no harm".