The Grand Design

Posted on December 10, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Grand Design
© 2010 Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
198 pages

Though modern physics is considerably harder to understand than say, anthropology, I continue to be fascinated by it — for physics, it seems to me, is the most fundamental science. The constituent elements of the universe that compose both our bodies and celestial bodies are all essentially composed of particles driven by natural forces.  As I’ve enjoyed Hawking in the past and am in need of a physics refresher, I approached this book with great anticipation. The book’s slenderness shocked me: though a physically attractive book, its contents are brief, almost truncated.

Hawking and Mlodinow start of promisingly by introducing the reader to the scientific understanding of the universe as being a thing ruled by laws — not the fickle will of mysterious gods and ethereal forces. From there, they move quickly into quantum particle physics and M-theory — altogether too quickly for me, for though I reread troublesome passages repeatedly, they left me confused.  Though it is true my knowledge of modern physics has waned sharply in the last two years (as my formal studies have been primarily historic), I remember reading Dan Falk’s The Universe on a T-Shirt  and coming away with a fuzzy appreciation for what string- and M-theory meant for science — and when I read Falk in 2007, I was completely unversed in modern science.

The essential idea presented in the book is that M-theory, with its multiple and parallel universes  explains why our own universe appears so fine-tuned and congenial toward the existence of intelligent life. If everything that can happen has and does happen, well naturally the things that needed to happen for US to happen happened.  That is…what I have derived from reading this several times and wincing because something I thought I had a slight handle on now seems utterly foreign.  If you have a solid appreciation for the subtleties of quantum physics, you may be able to apply that to the chapters which are about M-theory specifically.  As for me, I will be returning to Brian Greene at some point in the New Year, because I remember his The Elegant Universe being hard to read, but thorough enough that I could understand it provided I was willing to take the time to ponder its ideas. The Grand Design is unfortunately  simple to the point of being simplistic.

Related:

  • Universe on a T-Shirt,  Dan Falk
  • The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
  • The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, Brian Greene
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Kobayashi Maru

Posted on December 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru
© 2008 Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels
482 pages

“This is the Kobayashi Maru, nineteen periods out of Altair VI. We have struck a gravitic mine and have lost all power…”

The Kobayashi Maru has a special place in Trek lore,  featuring prominently in both Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek (2009).  A training-command scenario based on the ship’s destruction tasks a cadet with effecting the rescue of the Federation fuel transport disabled in enemy territory against impossible odds — literally impossible, for the simulation is rigged. No matter what brilliant tactics and deft maneuvering ordered by the commanding cadet,  there are always more Klingon ships to contend with: their every choice leads inexorably to death. That is, of course, the point of the scenario — the “no-win” scenario. It forces the student in command to face fear, defeat, and death.
Authors Martin and Mangels set the original (“historical”) Kobayashi Maru in early Federation history, shortly before the Romulan war. The Federation as we know it does not yet exist, and its predecessor — the Coalition of Planets — is still young and fragile. Its four founding members are strong-willed, driven by separate ambitions. They don’t hesitate to deal behind the others’ backs to gain an advantage, but such disunity is dangerous. The Klingon Empire is strong and mighty, its warships formidable and intimidating even to Vuclans. Skulking in the shadows are the Romulans, who live by Julius Caesar’s “divide and conquer”: having failed to prevent the coalition alliance from forming in Enterprise’s fourth season, they are nonetheless still at work attempting to sow division between their rivals until such time as the Star Empire is ready to rule them.
As Earth, Vulcan, Tellar, and Andoria grouse amongst themselves, seemingly anxious to go poking dozing Klingons with sticks,  Captains Johnathan Archor and Ericka Hernandez ply the trade routes looking for foes in the wake of recent attacks against Coalition shipping rumored to be the work of Klingons. Archer sees the string of mysterious attacks as the work of Romulans, and is anxious to prove it — but his best friend and former chief engineer Trip Trucker is still working as a covert agent inside Romulus,  hoping to prevent the Star Empire from creating a warp-seven capable starship. Drama mounts throughout the book as attacks on Coalition interests increase and Trip’s ‘Romulan’ comrades become more paranoid. Archer, feeling increasingly alone as the only commanding officer in Starfleet working to keep the peace with the Klingons and urging the Coalition to take a harder look at Romulus, is left without his first officer and best tactical hand when two of his senior staff steal a shuttle and attempt to infiltrate enemy territory The drama reaches its climax around the same time that Archer receives a distress call from the Kobayashi Maru, a fuel freighter stranded in enemy territory, forcing Archer into a difficult decision.
Though it started out slow,  I liked Kobayashi Maru more the deeper I ventured into it. Drama abounds, mostly political and character-driven. Though I knew how the book would end (I bought this at the same time I bought its sequel, Beneath Raptor’s Wings: the Romulan War),  Martin and Mangels still managed to provide plenty of tension, sending Archer to Quo’nos to be manhandled by insulted Klingons and sending Trip on a path so perilous that he sighs in text at the prospect of having yet another disruptor leveled at his head.  I didn’t expect the plot twists in Trip’s thread of the story.  The authors pepper the text with humor and little tie-ins to other Trek books and episodes, though the frequent uses of “Jesus Christ!” as an expletive were jarringly anachronistic. This is, unfortunately, not simply a trait of Martin and Mangels: I’ve noticed it in other authors, as well.  While I’ll cop to being plenty biased (I like the predominant secularism of Roddenberry’s Federation culture) the all-too-frequent use of contemporary expletives, Jesus Christ among them, make the characters seem more 20th century than 24th. I will admit, though, that Archer’s silently mouthing “Whiskey…tango…foxtrot” got a smile from me. The only major flaw of the book is that it seems strangely-titled: while the Kobayashi Maru appears at a climactic moment, it’s really more a moment of personal crisis for Archer than a question of strategy. The ship’s legendary appearance is overshadowed completely by the diplomatic crisis that leads us straight into the Romulan War miniseries. 
While I generally disdain quantitative scales in regards to books, rating my reads on Shelfari has broken down my resistance somewhat. I’d probably call this a 3.7- 3.8 out of five, or a “pretty good” on the vernacular scale. 

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This Week at the Library (1 Dec. – 8 December)

Posted on December 8, 2010 by smellincoffee

This past week I continued in Bernard Cornwell’s excellent Saxon Chronicles with The Pale Horseman, started the Typhon Pact series and declared myself ~Caught Up~ in trek lit with Zero Sum Game by David Mack, and finished The Earth Shall Weep, a brutal history of native America interactions with European colonists, U.S. settlers, and a federal government hell-bent  on effecting their total assimilation.  I also read most of The Grand Design, and will finish it off soon — possibly tonight.

Next Week’s Possibilities:

  • The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking. I could have finished this last night, but I loaded up Civilization III and was soon knee-deep in the conquest of another continent. I’m only short forty pages, though, so that will be finished soon.
  • The Lords of the North is next up in the Saxon Chronicles, and I’m looking forward to it. 
  • Possibly reading Kobayashi Maru by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels and thus continuing in on the Enterprise relaunch. I’d like to finish off the relaunch before the New Year,  though admittedly that’s a fairly arbitrary goal. Another Enterprise book won’t be released until late in 2011. 
  • The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks is also of interest.
  • I need to jump into The Eye of the World, which a couple of friends have asked me to try.
  • I’ll be distracted by Coal: A Human History, though. Mm — nice shiny coal. 
  • And I’ll be reading from The Confessions by Augustine. 
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The Earth Shall Weep

Posted on December 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America
 © 2000 James Wilson
466 pages

Having grown up in Alabama, I don’t know what it’s like to live among buildings that testify to history. I’ve never stepped onto a sidewalk with paving stones that were there before my grandparents were born, or chanced to see ruins from a millennium ago on a weekend holiday. The closest I can come to experiencing these echoes of the past is to visit “historic” downtowns, or the few preserved sites of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw people who once called the southeastern region of North America their home.  There are few such sites — Moundville is one — in Alabama, for despite the populations’ extended presence in the Americas,  they are long vanished. Aside from the odd ruin, they’ve left behind only a smattering of place names.  I remember being fascinated by the idea that entirely different cultures had dominated the landscape before European colonization as a child, and have had an interest in certain cultures like the Aztecs and Iroquois since.

James Wilson’s The Earth Shall Weep tells the story of the native Americans, first offering general introductions to the major cultures and tribes by region (Northeast, New York-Ohio, Southeast, Southwest, Far West, Great Plains), tapping into their oral history and mythology to present them as they viewed themselves. Telling the native American story from their own perspective is a priority for Wilson, judging from the book as a whole, for he continued to point out differences in which the natives perceived arrangements with European colonists and American settlers and the way the settlers viewed them. He then begins the long, wretched history native Americans have had with Euro-American civilization.

The relationship between North America’s native cultures and the newly arriving Europeans began with disease turning entire communities into graveyards and inviting aggressive European settlement — settlement that didn’t cease when American colonists ran out of ‘vacated’ land to acquire. The result was a long retreat for the natives, where their every attempt to hold their own — either through war or assimilation — ended in the same result: the complete loss of land.

Wilson’s account also tracks the natives’ dealings with the federal government through to the 1980s, instead of stopping after the conclusion of the “Indian wars” as is common. The cruel and heavy handed attempts at re-education depicted here seem far worse than the theft of land. While Wilson doesn’t set out to demonize the lawyers, political leaders, and soldiers who drove the natives to ruin, their own records make them look disingenuous at best. Their initial excuses for seizing land were laughably transparent, and that they were offered at all indicates that the settlers realized they were in the wrong. Succeeding generations forgot this, seemingly, adopting the attitude that might makes right.  Brutality visited on the natives by the newly-established United States only increased with age, culminating in the forced educational assimilation Wilson details in the latter third of the book.  Though much of the book details a long tragedy, it ends on a happier note with the rise of the ‘New Indians’, who take notes from the Civil Rights movement.

Wilson’s region-by-region survey at the outset gives the reader a broader perspective,  portraying the various people of North America as members of a great patchwork quilt. His information prior to contact with Europe remains more general than detailed, though, and seems more an introduction than anything else. Wilson offers many interesting facts and observations: for instance, while some tribes chose to modernize themselves in hopes that this would encourage the new United States to see them as neighbors on an equal footing, the prosperity that followed only invited conquest all the more quickly. Cultural comparisons also interested me: in many respects, people such as the Iroquois were socially more evolved than the christian, western Americans who dismissed them as savages, particularly in regard to women’s rights and communal government.  The high point of the book for me, though, was its extension into the 20th century: I’ve never read an account that went past the battle of Wounded Knee, and was completely ignorant as to the government’s policies toward native communities in the modern era. I’ve heard about natives  taking over Alcatraz, but had no idea as to what precipitated that. The Earth Shall Weep functions better as a history of native retreat, defeat, assimilation, and resurgence than of ‘native America’ in general. For that, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus is superior. I do recommend it for for the post-contact history, though.

Related:

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Top Ten Places to Read

Posted on December 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

This week the folks at the Broke and the Bookish want to know just where we like to spend all of our time reading…

1. The Reading Tree

When I lived on-campus, I lived across the street from the main quad, and this beauty attracted my attention one autumn afternoon while walking from supper. I sat down there, found its roots perfect for my back, and subsequently spent many hours sitting or laying under the tree during seasonable weather. I’d spend my Sunday mornings and some Saturday afternoons here,  with a jug of water and good company on ocassion. This tree’s canopy and several others joined to create an unbroken roof of greenery and I thought of it as my arboreal cathedral.

2. The Corner

This is a hidden corner in the top-most floor of my university library where I have spent more hours than I care to contemplate preparing notes for term papers. Strange as it seems, I looked forward  to spending the weekend tucked away here, taking notes for my papers and listening to the hush of library conversations and the wind howling between the library and the theatre next door. From time to time I could get up to stretch and admire the view of campus from the nearby windows.

3. The Sunroom

Attached to my university’s dining hall is a long eating gallery where the walls and ceilings are made of glass. Because my university campus is so gorgeous, it’s a wonderful place to sit once the crowds have thinned out.  I always had my breakfast here on campus, surrounded by lush greenery. Birds and squirrels climbed overhead while I had my bagel and coffee .  I also enjoyed relaxing here after lunch, sipping coffee (during the winter, anyway; in the  late spring and early autumn I preferred hot tea) until it was time to go to work.

4. My Couch
The only picture I have of my couch comes from when I was chasing a lizard with my camera, but those pictures are a little too-zoomed in. My couch sits with its back to a large window that affords a view of the woods and brambles behind my home, and I like nothing more than to put on some soft classical music, sprawl out on the couch looking outside while tucked under a cover. Of course, I tend to change positions if I’m in the grips of a good book and am liable to sit there for several hours.

5. My Bed
Laying down or sitting up cross-legged, my bed is a pretty good place to read.

6. Library Courtyard

When my home library expanded back in 1997, doubling its size, it built a little courtyard out in front, but shielded from the open by a fetching stone wall. (Or brick wall with a stone facade…)  There are trees, a fountain, and somewhat comfortable benches. While I don’t often read here, I enjoyed it in high school and still check in from time to time.  This picture only shows half of it.

7. Behind the Statue

This is a statue which sits in the center of campus. Its official title is the “Becoming” statue, and it is meant to portray teachers handing the keys to the future to their students. Everyone calls it the “Hands” statue, though, and on-campus directions tend to start there.

I enjoy having my lunch or reading right behind the statue, sitting on its concrete base and taking shelter from the sun and wind with the large bronze hands around me.

8. The Office
When there’s no work to be done, I enjoy reading at my desk while professors can be heard softly across the hall. My coworkers also make for good company, being readers as well.

9. The ‘Knowledge is Power” Bench

I enjoyed this spot near the center of campus mostly in the late spring or early fall when waiting for classes or work following lunch.  I usually sat here following lunch because when it gets warm, I happen to like a soft ice cream cone, and  the bench is halfway between the dining hall and where my work and classes were.

10. The Ersatz Reading Tree
There’s a tree in my front yard at home that I can sit under and read. It’s not a bad spot; the trunk is fairly comfortable. Some stickler things have made their home at the base of it, though, and they poke me in the back. The tree is also popular with ants who bite me.

All of the pictures were taken by me in May 2010, shortly after I received a digital camera as a gift and went wild taking pictures for posterity. I never imagined I’d be using shrunken copies of them this way! 
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Teaser Tuesday (7 December)

Posted on December 6, 2010 by smellincoffee

On every Tuesday, MizB of ShouldBeReading hosts Teaser Tuesday, in which we share two-sentence tidbits from our current read(s). As always I cheat. My teasers are below. On a more serious note, 7 December is also the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed thousands of people and forced the United States into an active role during the Second World War. It might be appropriate at some point today to consider the lives lost in Hawaii and the Philippines, for whom a quiet Sunday morning turned into a fight to survive.

And now that I’ve depressed you with thoughts of explosions and death, here’s a little levity.

“How long until I stand for reelection?”

“Two years, three months, and nine days, Madam President.”

“Is there any way to rig it so I lose next time?”

“I’ll try, but I regret to inform you that your approval ratings are excellent.”

“Do what you can.”

(p. 184, Zero Sum Game. David Mack.)

As insightful as some of their speculations about nature were, most of the ideas of the ancient Greeks would not pass muster as valid science in modern times. For one, because the Greeks had not invented the scientific method, their theories were not developed with the goal of experimental verification. So if one scholar claimed an atom moved in a straight line until it collided with a second atom and another scholar claimed it moved in a straight line until it bumped into a cyclopes, there was no objective way to settle the argument.

(p. 22, The Grand Design. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.)

“Captain Dax,” he said. “I am Commander Marius of the warbird Dekkna. Your vessel is outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded.”

“I’ll give you two out of three,” Dax said, flashing a cold smile at the Romulan. “You definitely outnumber us, and I can’t deny we’re surrounded.”

Her cockiness seemed to throw Marius off. He frowned. “You will lower your shields, surrender your vessel, and prepare to be boarded.”

“The hell I will.” 

(p. 151, Zero Sum Game. David Mack.)

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Zero Sum Game

Posted on December 3, 2010 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game
© 2010 David Mack
336 pages

‘I think it’s safe to say that Julian Bashir, Secret Agent, will return.’ – Bashir, “Our Man Bashir”

On the cover: Nicole de Boer as Captain Ezri Dax, Alexander Siddig as Dr. Julian Bashir, who has apparently grown a Beard of Sorrow. CGI as the USS Aventine.

The Federation has known many great enemies in its few centuries of existence — the Klingons, the Romulan Star Empire, the Cardassians, the Dominion, and the Borg have been the most notable. Time has worn them all down: the Klingons have become allies, the Romulans are weakened by civili War, Cardassia is impotent, the Dominon has retreated into the Gamma Quadrant, and the Borg are…gone. In the wake of the last great Borg war, various second-class powers of the galaxy (Gorn, Tholians, Breens, and more) have banded together in a military and partial civil union known as the Typhon Pact. The Pact has existed in a state of cold war with the Allied powers since A Singular Destiny, but their recent theft of the plans for Starfleet’s latest and greatest asset — the Slipstream War Drive — threatens to turn hostility into a general war.

The slipstream drive is vastly superior to standard warp drives and has so far discouraged the Pact from waging open war against the battered and diminished allied powers. They cannot be allowed to turn their stolen data into effective plans for a slipstream drive of their own, and so Starfleet tasks Captain Ezri Dax with inserting two operatives into the suspected home of the Breen slipstream project. Dr. Julian Bashir and his genetically modified peer Sarina Douglas have been hand-picked for their improved physical and mental abilities, which include a heightened ability to adapt to strange and changing situations. Given that next to nothing is known about Breen culture, adaption is a necessity. While the two operatives descend into the belly of an alien city, Dax lurks outside the Breen orders attempting to evade a Breen-Romulan* fleet which knows that the Aventine is up to something.

Zero Sum Game is an interesting change of pace: political/spy thrillers aren’t all that pervasive in Trek lit to my knowledge.  I enjoyed David Mack’s worldbuilding; I imagine giving life to a long-established power was quite the responsibility, but the civilization that Bashir and Douglas explore is fascinatingly believable. He treats them as more than just villains, although the Breen Confederacy is plainly ruled by an intrusive military state with a kind of secret police. When the Breen official in charge of the shipyard discovered his operations center littered with dead bodies, he is horrified that the enemy operative (in this case our hero)  had taken so much innocent life just to destroy the slipstream project.  On that note, readers are also treated to Dr. Bashir’s inner conflict, as he is driven by his responsibility as a physician to “do no arm” and his duties as a Starfleet officer to do what needs to be done.

Par for the course for Mr. Mack; Zero Sum Game has a lot to offer Trek fans beyond the fast action-spy plot and discovery of Breen civilization. Bashir’s long been my favorite DS9 character and I enjoyed the spotlight being on him for a change: the last time that happened was during the first run of Trek relaunch books. He’s changed quite a bit from the bubbling young lieutenant who first appeared in “Emissary”: once full of idealism and energy, he’s now a mature veteran of several horrific wars who feels lonely in a station now populated by total strangers: aside from Quark and Nog, no one remains on the station from the old (television run) crowd, and now even his newly-met comrades from the relaunch have been leaving him. It’s tough to see him put through the mill like this, especially considering a revelation at the end of the book. The action remains interesting and varied throughout the book: while Bashir and Douglas are exploring the Breen industrial center, Ezri is engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with some irritated Romulans, and by the time that action settles down our two operatives are in the thick of things.  Even the Federation president gets a little attention. 
Recommended to Trek lit readers, especially given that this is the first book in the Typhon Pact series, which will explore the ‘new political reality’ throughout next year. Book #2, Seize the Fire, came out in the last week or so. 
Related:
  • Abyss, the last Bashir novel (not counting Worlds of Deep Space Nine #1, where he just tagged along behind Ezri) One of my favorites, focusing on Bashir, Ro Laren, and Taran’atar. 
  • David Mack’s homepage and Memory Alpha bio.
  • Typhon Pact on TvTropes. Note: this book was released in late October, and it’s already got a full page. Some of the people in TrekBBS’s TrekLit forum have been busy. 
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The Pale Horseman

Posted on December 3, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Pale Horseman
© 2006 Bernard Cornwell
349 pages

Only the small kingdom of Wessex stands between the Danes and total control of England, and few are convinced that the sickly King Alfred is a man capable of leading the Saxons to freedom. He cares more for bishops and churches than warriors and fortifications, and many refugees in Wessex see his defeat as inevitable. Alfred is one of the few men who truly believes England can and will free herself, however, and his hope rallies men with a stake in freedom to his side.  Even Uhtred Ragnarson, who despises Alfred for his weak-willed piety,  has pledged to help Alfred prepare to drive the Norse away before the increasing waves of soldiers, women, slaves, and settlers make such a goal impossible to achieve. Alfred is still mulling over possible routes to victory when thee Danes launch a preemptive strike at the onset of winter: Wessex, the last hope, is lost. Fleeing into the swamps, Alfred and a few isolated followers prepare for the worst. The next fight could very well be their last.

The Pale Horseman follows The Last Kingdom in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles  series,  being told by Uhtred Ragnarson, a Saxon prince-king turned Danish warrior who is  capable of supporting either side.  In every way but birth, he is a Dane — but his ambition to  return to his family’s ancestral domain of Babbanburg as its rightful lord keeps him  defending a man he hates. Fate gives him plenty of opportunities to reconsider the object of  his loyalties, and he proves himself time and again a ‘rogue agent’.

Uhtred tells his story in a confident voice — he is ruthless, strong, blunt, and often dramatic,  as befits his character. Cornwell uses his narrator’s voice and a detailed, realistic background  to draw the reader into a setting of uncertainty, war, and competing forces. The armies of the  Saxons and Norse clash, but so do the values of the effete Alfred and those of his subjects,  whose worldviews are sometimes more influenced by the ‘old ways’ than imperial Christianity.  Cornwell is certainly evocative: he draws me into his stories like no one else. I could feel as though I was at Uthred’s side, my feet slipping in the muck of the swamps, a sword at my side as the lightening flashed and the thunder rumbled above. I tend to read ‘around’ combat scenes in historical fiction, but that is not the case here — the author keeps my attention even in the thick of battle.

The Pale Horseman is not quite as good as The Last Kingdom in my judgment (not as many fun-loving Danes, alas, and there’s less mystery as to the end-page resolution),  but remain excellent historical fiction nonetheless featuring good writing, a lively atmosphere,  and compelling characters. This is an easy series to recommend, and I anticipate continuing in it.

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This Week at the Library (24 November – 1 December)

Posted on December 1, 2010 by smellincoffee

Not a bad last week; revisited Shulman in I Was a Teenage Dwarf, which was fairly fun. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head offered a peek into the life of a psychiatrist,  and I finished off Mapping Human History. Using genes to explore history is an interesting approach. The week’s high point was Christopher L. Bennett’s Orion’s Hounds. I’m enjoying the Titan series more than I anticipated I would and look forward to resuming it once I finish the Enterprise relaunch.

I’m excited about this week’s reading, but it’s rather like this past Thursday’s  Thanksgiving feast. So many good dishes, so little space to enjoy them.

  • Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game, David Mack.  Here I am reading Trek lit released only within the last month!  This is the first in a new series of stories set in Star Trek’s new ‘political reality’, in which a handful of second- or third-rate states have banded together to form a major political bloc to threaten the weakened Federation and Klingon empire.
  • The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking. This was missing when I first went at it, and now the library’s found it and put it on reserve for me. I’ve been wanting to start boning up on my physics again.
  • The Pale Horseman is splendid so far. 
  • The Earth Shall Weep is still driving my attention, but Mack will give it serious competition.
  • I’m still reading from The Confessions by Augustine, whom I’m now calling ‘Gloomy Gus’.
  • I’ve read the prologue of The Eye of the World, but I am not ‘into’ it yet. I want to follow up on my friends’ recommendation,  but it has too much competition this week.

Selected Quotations:

If the Caribbean natives suggested the Golden Age, the urban societies of Central American and Mexico must have seemed like a nightmare version of Islam, rekindling and intensifying all the Spainiards’ old feelings of hate and insecurity  when confronted by a powerful infidel civilization. Mexico City was larger than any city in Europe at the time, a bast expanse of canals, plazas, markets, temples, and brightly colored houses, shops, and schools. An army of a thousand men kept the streets clean; waste was removed by barge to be processed as fertilizer and the elite, like Moorish nobles, bathed every day. (When meeting Spaniards, they often held flowers to their noses to disguise the stench.) But in a world where the Islamic faith was routinely described as diabolical, the Aztec religion, with its cult of human sacrifice, seemed inexpressibly appalling. 

(p. 35, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America)

As the historian Francis Jennings eloquently puts it, “The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one. Jamestown, Plymouth, Salem, Boston, Provident, New Amsterdam, Philadelphia — all grew upon sites previously occupied by Indian communities…. the so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers.”

(p. 77, Earth Shall Weep)

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Mapping Human History

Posted on November 30, 2010 by smellincoffee

Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes
© 2002 Steve Olson
292 pages

Mapping Human History caught my attention a couple of weeks ago given my interests in evolution and anthropology. Author Steve Olson offers a quick history of human settlement throughout the globe, throwing in some light genetics discussion along the way. He uses specific populations as case studies to demonstrate how genetic historians can track certain haplotypes through time. This is more difficult than it sounds, because despite the distance between human populations and the role of geography in separating particular groups from the other, human beings as a group are unusually homogeneous: the little differences of skin tone and nose width are infinitesimal compared the many similarities, leading Olson to discount not just ‘races’, but most ethnic groups. In Olson’s research, finding long strands of ‘junk’ DNA that have no known purpose was easier than tracking genes with a role in influencing our outward appearances.  He believes that as time progresses and globalization continues its course, race as a concept will fade away. He uses Hawaii to imagine what a society might be like.

Interesting and readable; it’s a different perspective for history students like myself, one worth considering. Especially interesting to me this week given that I’m reading a history of native America is that there’s some genetic evidence to support the idea that there were humans in North America before the big Clovis expansion which is usually the attributed cause of the Americas’ indigenous population. While archaeologists have found some artifacts on the east coast and Central America  that are far older than previously expected,  some native Americans also carry in them a particular haplotype absent in Asians, but present in but long-time removed from Europeans. This would mean that people carrying European genes arrived and intermarried with the various people of North American before Leif Erikson and the Age of Discovery.  This haplotype has also appeared in northern Siberia, which might mean they followed the same course that the Clovis people did. Historians already utilize clues from language and art styles to piece together the histories of people, and genetic seems a fascinating new addition to the ‘toolbox’.

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