Reading Freely

Teaser Tuesday (14 December)

Posted on December 14, 2010 by smellincoffee

Every week, ShouldBeReading hosts “Teaser Tuesday”, in which participants share two-sentence excerpts from their current reads. Some of us are terrible at counting.

“Which of you is Rolf?” I shouted as I drew near them.

“I am,” a black-bearded man urged his horse toward me. “Who are you?”

“Your death, Rolf,” I said, and I drew Serpent-Breath […].

p. 231, The Lords of the North. Bernard Cornwell

Writing, a cultural tool, has evolved to make use of the inferotemporal neurons’ preference for certain shapes. “Letter shape,” Dehaene writes, “is not an arbitrary cultural choice. The brain constrains the design of an efficient writing system so severely that there is little room for cultural relativism. Our primate brain only accepts a limited set of written shapes.”

p. 74, The Mind’s Eye. Oliver Sacks

“Tell her I’ll be on Earth as soon as Enterprise can get us there,” he said, “And with bells on.”

One of T’Pol’s eyebrows launched itself skyward again. “Respectfully, Captain, I would recommend a more dignified choice of apparel.”

p. 18, Kobayashi Maru, Martin and Mangels

Posted in General | Tagged Teaser Tuesday | 12 Comments

The Kobayashi Maru

Posted on December 11, 2010 by smellincoffee

Star Trek #47: The Kobayashi Maru
© 1989 Julia Ecklar
254 pages

Captain James Kirk and most of his senior officers are adrift in space aboard the shuttlecraft Halley after having struck a gravitic mine. With no engines and minimal power, they’ve nothing to do but wait for Mr. Spock to find them: they are helpless, and the circumstances remind most of the shuttlecraft’s occupants of the Kobayashi Maru scenario, in which cadets take command of a simulated starship and attempt the rescue of the Kobayashi Maru, a stranded fuel freighter adrift in hostile territory. To cross enemy lines is to invite war and destruction — but they can’t just leave those people to die. Every choice the tested cadet seems to be the wrong, leading inevitably toward defeat — fo this scenario is designed to test not a cadet’s strenth in battle, but strength of character. How do the best minds at the Academy, who believe they can do anything if they’re clever or hard-working enough, react to defeat?

To pass the time while they wait, Kirk and his other officers with command-track experience — Chekov, Sulu, and Scotty — share their experiences with the test while McCoy grouses in the background. Kirk is famous for having beaten the scenario by reprogramming it (countering the simulation’s ability to cheat by cheating himself), but his three fellow command officers all took interesting approaches. I won’t spoil anything (though you can do that yourself here), but suffice it to say all four took interesting approaches, ones that reveal the officers’ characters. Chekov is flamboyant and brash, eager to live up to the legacy of Kirk: Sulu is deliberate, wily, and pragmatic: Mr. Scott thinks outside the box and uses his engineering interest; and Kirk, of course, defies defeat. His solution is here is more entertaining than that of nu-Kirk in the most recent film, and audacious enough that Chekov’s desire to follow in his footsteps is understandable.

While each of the four stories task the officers with the same scenario, they don’t limit themselves to the few minutes each man spends inside the simulator: instead, readers are treated to full stories about these officers’ lives as Academy students contemplating their futures. Ecklar’s characterization is superb. The framing drama isn’t completely hollow: action picks up toward the end of the book when circumstances force the officers to take action. The Kobayashi Maru stories are the major draw of the book, though, and Ecklar fulfills the promise: this is one definitely worth picking up..

Related:

Kobayashi Maru, Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin, which depicts the scenario’s ‘real life’ inspiration from a period shortly before the start of the Romulan War, early in Starfleet history.
Sarek, A.C. Crispin, in which Kirk’s nephew takes the scenario on himself.
Starfall, Brad and Barbara Strickland. This novel aimed at middle-school readers depicts a young Jean-Luc Picard encountering a similar scenario while failing the Starfleet entrance exams.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged ST TOS, Star Trek | Leave a comment

Coal: A Human History

Posted on December 11, 2010 by smellincoffee

Coal: A Human History
© 2003 Barbara Freese
308 pages

I never expected to be so fascinated by coal. This book’s cover and title compelled my interest from the first moment I spotted it on my library bookshelves, and the text itself never disappointed me. Coal is well-written, provoking, and oddly humorous, not to mention one of the most interesting history books I’ve read all this year. I read the book late into the night, fell asleep on the couch, woke up reading the book with my breakfast, and stayed fixated by it until shortly before lunch. Freese uses three case studies (Britain, the United States, and China) to examine the history of human coal use and the myraid ways that coal has shaped industrial society. Britan leads the book, its use of coal turning a rapidly deforested island into an economic titan and world power. Across the Atlantic, coal allows a collection of thirteen agricultural colonies to subdue a continent and create a cohesive nation-state and industrial powerhouse in just a little over a hundred years — and beyond the Pacific, coal throws an isolated nation of warlords into the modern age, where it now threatens to overtake the United States as the economic giant of the world.

Freese began her studies of coal as an environmentalist, but her Coal is no polemic or rant: observations of coal’s modern environmental impact don’t arrive until late in the book, at the end of the section regarding the United States. They appear again in the book’s conclusion, where she reflects on coal’s past, present, and future role in enabling and assisting human society. After presenting a variety of historical attitudes toward coal — Coal the Saviour, the gift from God that allows humanity to finally conquer nature; Coal the genie, which allows unparalleled economic prosperity at the price of clean air and traditional communities; Coal as king, enabling corporations to control governments and run roughshod over the millions who depend on it. My primary area of historical interest is the early industrial period, so Freese’s account of coal’s primacy in the early industrial period held me rapt. I had no idea how many varied purposes it served, and how important they were to the making the modern world. I knew from other readings that coal drove nations’ foreign policies in part, but Freese also reminded me of how important coal was to creating the working class. Before textile mills, there were miners. The book is overflowing with little historical tidbits: I would have never imagined people mining coal in the Tudor period, for instance.While the engaging narrative needs little help, Freese throws in plenty of humor to boot — I’ve never found coal so entertaining.

Freese chiefly focuses on Britain and the United States: China gets but one chapter before she moves into her conclusion, in which she lauds coal for its contributions to human progress but maintains that its day is passed: coal, which once allowed humanity to accelerate its progress at a pace never witnessed before, now inhibits it. She’s unexpectedly charitable toward the king of dirty energy, though chastising its modern proponents for holding on to the old achievements and limiting further energy progress.

Compellingly written, entertaining, eminently fair, and informative — Freese’s Coal is excellent. If you’ve any interest in the Industrial Revolution or in coal’s history, I’d definitely recommend this.

Related:

The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell. which documents living and working conditions of Britain’s coal miners in a particular community.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged goods/services, history, technology, Technology and Society | 1 Comment

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

Posted in Reviews, science | Tagged cosmology, Physics, science, Stephen Hawking | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Andy Mangels, Michael A. Martin, ST Enterprise, Star Trek, The Romulan War, thriller | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged week in review | 2 Comments

The Earth Shall Weep

Posted on December 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

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:

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann
The Great Journey: Peopling the Americas, Brian Fagan

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged critical history, history, Native America, survey | 1 Comment

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.)

Posted in General | Tagged Teaser Tuesday | 11 Comments

Reading Freely

Teaser Tuesday (14 December)

Top Ten Anticipated Reads for 2011

The Kobayashi Maru

Coal: A Human History

The Grand Design

Kobayashi Maru

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

The Earth Shall Weep

Top Ten Places to Read

Teaser Tuesday (7 December)

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