Recently in Books Category

We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn't matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively.

Rilke, as quoted by Coetzee, as quoted by Donald Ritchie, as collected in "The Japan Journals", as editted by Leza Lowitz
p441

K. Eric Drexler informs me that his book "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" has a new home on his website (migrated from its previous hosting at the Foresight Institute).

Check out the attribution on the entry page... I did the work 10 years ago, but I deeply appreciate the continuing credit.

William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, called upon writers of the future to not write merely "for the glands." Of course, at that moment, Faulkner was being rewarded for being the best writer for the glands this country has ever known. Incest, serial killing, insanity, race war, castration, burial of the dead, biblical flood, hunting bear, rape with a corn cob - Faulkner did it all. The guy played our genome like a xylophone. Faulkner, in a suddenly noble moment, called upon writers... to transcend the endocrinological. He didn't set the best example.

Joe Quirk
Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women, p118

Here's another from my collection, a 1960 Signet Books edition of the 1949 classic of George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Yesterday, I scanned the cover of a pocket WWII English-Chinese dictionary published by the U.S. War Department in 1943, at the height of the war. Today, I've scanned the cover of another from my collection, published shortly after V-J Day, in September 1945: TM 30-481, "The Supplementary Japanese-English Dictionary", this one a very large hardcover which I just barely fit on my scanner's flatbed:

This dictionary of 43,000 terms is supplementary to the following six standard Japanese-English dictionaries with which it forms a complete set of seven:

• a technical manual of about 100,000 terms which was in "final editorial stage" at the time;
  
• another technical manual of about 4,000 terms which was claimed in a similar state;
  
• Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, Harvard Univ. Press;
  
• Kato's Medical dictionary, 1944, German language edition (!);
  
• "Ozaki's Sea Terms";
  
• "Creswell's Military [Dictionary];
  

I'd love to see a copy of the 100,000 word technical manual... anyone know if this was ever actually published?

In preparing yesterday's "Little Red Book" post, I discovered that my US $99 Canon all-in-one scanner/printer/copier is an excellent proxy for a macro lens on an expensive camera (I have an Olympus E-1 but don't yet have that lens.) Here's another old school example from the many I have in my personal book collection, this one from 1956, "New Worlds of Modern Science":

A few hours ago, I went on a somewhat controlled shopping binge at one of my favorite used book shops, one in Sunnyvale, California. I found this little gem, TM-633, "Chinese Phrase Book" published by the U.S. War Department in 1943:

...the digital (PDF) version I'm reading now, but Charlie Stross tells his readers not to do so. I will, however, be buying several copies from Amazon as gifts to friends. Damn it's good!

I recently did some driving through Nevada and California, working remotely from a number of hotels. I loaded up my iPod (which I connect to a Pioneer black box installed behind the dash, itself interfaced with the sound system's head unit) with music, podcasts, and audio books (almost all of it purchased on iTunes,) including an unabridged copy of:

"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side to Everything," by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 6 hours of sometimes humorous, often surprising and counterintuitive anecdote. I highly recommend it: I do enjoy economic storytelling, from Braudel to Postrel to Friedman Jr. and now these guys.

Anyone else encountered this book or its audio equivalent?

I will add the qualification here that the work does gloss over the correlation between concealed carry laws and violent crime, primarily since the authors took John R. Lott as the authority on the matter... which is a double shame, since there's much there to explore, and since Lott seems to have screwed the pooch with respect to the issue of academic integrity.

Curt Howland has pointed me to a relevant blog entry hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

A new online bookseller recommended by a member of my extropians mailing list: "Bill of Rights Press," for those hard-to-find titles that Laissez-Faire Books won't carry.

In the heart of Beijing is the huge, well-stocked Wangfujing Bookstore. If you need maps, there are thousands of them available on the first (ground) floor, just inside the main doors. English-language books can be found on the 3rd floor. Here's a pic I snapped with my Treo 650 cameraphone:

Speaking of good martial arts training, which I just mentioned I undertook last weekend with Don Angier (and the weekend before with great teachers from my own art), I just stumbled across this Jan 2005 article by Peter Boylan, "The Costs of Training with the Best" author of "Angry White Pyjamas: A Scrawny Oxford Poet Takes Lessons From The Tokyo Riot Police" (which I've read and recommend).

Boylan has some good points to make, and some sad observations to share.

This just in from my distant friend James Bennett: his announcement today of the website supporting his new book "The Anglosphere Challenge." This seems like a very enticing book, and I plan to read it during winter school break.

The enemy was repelled. But victory was not won. The war dragged on for a year and there was no decision. Gold grew scarce, and again the Government was in despair.

"I easily relieved them. 'Write,' I said, 'promises on paper to be repaid in gold.' They did as I advised, paying me (at my request) a trifle of half a million for the advice. I handled the affair on a merely nominal profit. I punctually met for another year every note that was paid in. But too many were presented, for the war seemed unending and entered a third year."

"Then did I conceive yet another stupendous thing. 'Bid them,' said I to the Sultan, 'take the notes as money. Cease to repay. Write, not 'I will on delivery of this paper pay a piece of gold,' but, 'this is a piece of gold.'"

"He did as I told him. The next day the Vizier came to me with the story of an insolent fellow to whom fifty such notes had been offered as payment for a camel for the war and who had sent back, not a camel, but another piece of paper on which was written 'This is a camel.'"

"'Cut off his head!' said I."

"It was done, and the warning sufficed. The paper was taken and the war proceeded."

Hilaire Belloc
The Mercy of Allah, 1922

A few days ago, I finished reading Henry Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are," a breezy exposition on the origins of things most people take for granted, usually considered not worth wondering about. In a similar vein, and coincidentally well-timed, Curt Howland forwarded me yesterday a pointer to an essay lauding one artifact in particular, "In Praise of the Oh-So-Dependable Cardboard Box," by Russell Roberts.

I'm reminded of an essay I read in the summer of 1990, a copy of which was given me by its author, Phil Salin, at a house party in Palo Alto, before leaving for my 1st work assignment in Europe. The essay, "The Ecology of Decisions, or 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Kitchens,'" opened my eyes to what Petroski often refers to as the "artifactual intelligence" encoded in the seemingly mundane, the things we don't consider.

Phil's work, by the way, is maintained on the web by friends who deeply care about him: he succumbed to stomach cancer sometime around 1993, and is presently in cryostasis at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. I didn't have the chance to personally thank Phil for his strong influence on my thinking, but I hope to have that chance someday.

Prakash Chandrashekhar, a libertarian blogger in India, recommends L. Neil Smith's "The Probability Broach" on AnarCapLib.

I'd mentioned yesterday I'd be seeing this film, and I did. I also mentioned in a short comment followup that I'd seen a few old friends leaving the cinema, who confirmed my suspicions that the film was very loosely based on Asimov's work of the same name, so I went into the cinema not expecting a film realization of the original story.

There were tips of the hat all over the film to Asimov's original work, mostly in the naming of characters (Sonny, Dr. Susan Calvin) and in partial buzzword compliance (e.g. "positronic"), but as the credits honestly acknowledged, it's "based on a work of" Isaac Asimov. With that in mind, I determined to enjoy the film on its own merits, and was not disappointed. I was particularly impressed with Alan Tudyk's portrayal of Sonny (as an aside, I hope whatever name recognition this earns him - as a greenscreen actor - helps in the success of the forthcoming Firefly movie "Serenity".)

It's interesting to see that the movie treated Asimov's 3 Laws as sacrosanct, considering that Asimov himself later saw flaws in that approach to robot safety, working in a hack he called the "Zeroth Law." See this interesting commentary for a summary of the Laws... which might have prevented the disaster dramatized in the movie (that's the closest I'll come to a spoiler), or might not, given the rationalizations employed by the villain, which were the same as almost every tinpot dictator of the 20th century or before.

Here's a related amusement: the Singularity Institute apparently saw fit to ride the wave of the movie's popularity by launching a website called "3 Laws Unsafe".

Ted Maitlin on "The Truth About Ayn Rand and Gay Porn Stars."

A big thanks to James and Steph for their gift of the Springer title Name Reactions by Jie Jack Li, a compact atlas of 331 reactions in organic chemistry, from "Abnormal Claisen rearrangement" to "Zenin benzine rearrangement." This should be truly useful from the fall term onwards; thanks guys!

A few days ago, I found a copy of the 1959 translation (published by Philosophical Library) of Karl Marx's "A World Without Jews," which should be a profoundly embarrassing tract to modern leftists. Contained within are little "gems" such as this "The law of the Jew, lacking all solid foundation, is only a religious caricature of morality and of law in general, but it provides the formal rites in which the world of property clothes its transactions."

Anders Monsen informs us of the publication by Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings of "ANARQUÍA: An Alternate History of the Spanish Civil War," which sounds like a great deal of fun in the vein of L. Neil Smith's "The Probability Broach." I'm a fan of Linaweaver's work, such as his excellent "Moon of Ice," which comes to market far too rarely.

A few days ago I picked up a pristine copy of the book "Letters of Ayn Rand" which is a fascinating comilation of Rand's personal and business correspondance over a span of decades. The book seems to be selling everywhere at remainder prices, about US $6.

When the war finally came to an end, I was at a loss as to what to do... I took stock of my qualifications. A not-very-good degree, redeemed somewhat by my achievements at the Admiralty. A knowledge of certain restricted parts of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither of them subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published papers at all... Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things... Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice...

Francis Crick
What Mad Pursuit, Basic Books, New York, 1988, pp 15-16.

Huh... Peggy just got physical mail advertising the products of:

Omaha Steaks, Inc.
10909 John Galt Blvd.
Omaha, Nebraska

I had the pleasure of first meeting Barbara Branden very briefly at the November 1987 Future of Freedom Conference (FoFCon) in Culver City, California, but didn't engage her in conversation, since she was on her way to a talk at that convention centered around "The Passion of Ayn Rand," her biography of novelist Ayn Rand, with whom she had been associated professionally and personally for a number of decades. Her book had been published the year before, and I'd bought my own copy as soon as it hit the bookstores (this was the pre-Amazon era).

At the end of March this year, a few weeks ago, I finally got the chance to chat with Barbara in a comfortable venue where she was wasn't being shuttled around to talks, in the course of other business: her apartment in southern California. What a lovely, intelligent, funny and benevolent lady she is! I must once again thank my friend Glenn Cripe, who had business to conduct with her that afternoon, for allowing me to tag along with his crew, and of course to Barbara for her warm hospitality... and for autographing that book I bought 18 years ago.

I imagine respirocytes as minuscule objects consisting of roughly 18 billion atoms arranged in small balls about a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter. Each respirocyte is a tiny pressurized gas tank equipped with small pumps. Respirocytes are nanobots that move with the blood. In the body's periphery, they release oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide. In the lungs, they do the opposite, recharging themselves with oxygen. The exchange of gases is regulated by minute sensors. Though the respirocytes are modeled on red blood corpuscles, they transport oxygen two hundred times more efficiently than the natural item. A small syringe-full of respirocytes could carry as much oxygen as your entire bloodstream.

Robert A. Freitas Jr
28 July 2000

Michael Reed strongly recommends to me in email Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan as "an absolutely knock-out sci-fi novel", so I've put it in my queue. I've not read it yet, so I'd welcome opinions.

I don't generally read science fiction nowadays, having gotten increasingly picky as time goes by (and science fact often holds more fascination for me the better educated I become). I did however take a weekend recently to relax with Ken Macleod's Dark Light and Engine City, which were a mixture of disappointment and amusement for me. I've read all his work so far, and will continue to do so, but the man seems to be afflicted recently with the problem Heinlein had during the late period of his life when he was stricken with a cerebral arterial blockage: at some point near the end of each story, he seems to simply get tired, and tries to wrap up the story abruptly.

My bedside reading the last couple of days: Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded, a fantastic book I very highly recommend.

On Friday during his office hours, my chem prof was deeply surprised to find that I didn't yet own a copy of Zumdahl's "Chemistry", which is not our school's official text... so he gave me one of his, a new copy, the Instructor's Annotated Edition (5th)! He had an extra, so it became mine... a good, good man, and deeply flattering.

A couple of people in a chemistry forum I frequent had recommended Linus Pauling's "General Chemistry". I saw a copy in my local Border's - the 1989 Dover reprint of the 3rd edition (the last, 1971) - and flipped through it. I was impressed, so I took note of its ISBN. The shelf price was $20, but I found a pristine copy on Amazon Marketplace for half that price and ordered it. Can't wait to get it.

A caveat, by the way - and this is no hit on the book, given its age - if you're going to study coordination compounds of metals, you'll need to supplement your reading with Zumdahl, or another modern source. Although Pauling mentions the work of Alfred Werner in a sidebar of a couple of pages on the matter, he (quite understandably) doesn't mention crystal field theory & d-shell splitting (of course he wouldn't). Very highly recommended.

Competitive systems can operate to check each other's excesses. Consider the codes governing the relations between U.S. corporations and their shareholders. The fifty states compete to offer standard corporation codes; companies can either use these default terms or tailor specific provisions in their corporate charters. (A company does not have to be physically headquartered in a state to claim it as the corporation's legal domicile.) Agreeable state rules, backed by well-established case law, can significantly cut the cost of doing business. The competition among states for incorporations and the taxes they bring makes legislatures responsive to new ideas and changing business conditions.

Equally important, company managers can't get away with adopting just any code that makes their lives easy. These rules govern a two-way agreement—between the business (essentially, its managers) and the shareholders. Opportunistic managers who try to use state laws to help themselves at the stockholders' expense are checked by another source of competition: the financial markets. So, for instance, when Pennsylvania passed a law designed to make hostile takeovers difficult, protecting managers but making stock less valuable, pressures from falling stock prices pushed most of the state's publicly traded companies to opt out of the law's provisions. Few other states adopted the same law, lest they lose incorporations.

The legal scholar Roberta Romano, who calls this federalist system of competing rules "the genius of American corporate law," writes: "As the Pennsylvania experience illustrates, the federal system provides a safety net against the consequences of harmful state laws. Some jurisdictions will have no or only mild takeover regulation, and this constrains how much other jurisdictions can act in this area and how much firms can take advantage of value-decreasing laws, especially when major commercial states such as Delaware and California have less onerous laws." Having many sources of competing rules, rather than a single, national standard, makes finding good rules—and eliminating or limiting bad ones—more likely.

Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, p145 (from Chapter 5, "The Bonds of Life")

I do not know what you mean when you say you do not agree with me on the VN war. Are you referring to opinions expressed by Oscar of GLORY ROAD? If so, be assured that my fictional characters speak for themselves, not for me--and, in any case, that book was written six years ago. My private opinion of the situation in 1968 I have never expressed publicly.

Robert A. Heinlein in a personal communication (letter)

The textures of life that so fascinate dynamists are full of such historical surprises. Consider a strange fact about doughnut shops in California: More than 80 percent are owned by Cambodian immigrants. Doughnuts are not a Cambodian food; indeed, Cambodians don't even like them that much. But when Ted Ngoy fled to southern California in the 1970s and got a job in a doughnut store, he realized the possibilities. Here was a niche that matched his skills (or lack thereof) and had potential to grow. The business required hard work but little start-up capital and little English. Ngoy soon owned several doughnut shops. He hired and trained many other refugees, who then started their own stores, hiring and training still more immigrants. Over time, the community developed special expertise and suppliers, making it much easier for a Cambodian immigrant to California to get started in the doughnut business than in other ventures. By 1995, Cambodians ran almost 2,500 of the doughnut stores in California. They also expanded the market, giving Los Angeles one doughnut shop for every 7,000 residents—ten times the concentration in Phoenix.

The doughnut story is surprising, but not a random accident. It represents a complex order of selection and feedback: A perceptive entrepreneur discovers an opportunity. His knowledge spreads through communal networks, which develop specialized product, labor, and capital sources. More and more Cambodians learn how to make doughnuts, and how to make them well. Competition among shops improves doughnut quality, and the mere presence of so many stores reminds potential buyers of their product, leading to more sales. This legacy, an example of what economists call "path dependence," does not keep non-Cambodians from owning doughnut stores or block Cambodian immigrants from other businesses. It was not predetermined, nor does it guarantee any particular future. But it makes some choices more likely than others.

Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, pp49-50

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.

Daniel Dennett
Consciousness Explained

Big-game hunting could indeed be dangerous, but generally for the professional, not the client. It was the white hunter who went into the long grass and finished the job. Losing a client was unheard of, even injuries were rare. It was the code of the Alpine guide: if only one man comes down the mountain, it must be the client. The best client did not just pay his bills, however. He was the one who hunted cleanly, understood the ethic, respected the Africans, was courageous but not foolish, and slept with the right woman.

Bartle Bull
Safari, 1988

My friend Glenn Cripe today informed me that he and his Russian business partner Dmitri Kostygin have good news to share: "The next printing of Atlas and Fountainhead in Russian is due out next week!" In his mail he also send copies of the cover proofs for the 3 volumes of Atlas; here's a copy of the cover for volume 1:

Glenn notes:

We are also looking for sponsors. For $500, you get your name in all future editions of the books, a few free copies for your own use, a tax deduction, our undying gratitude, plus the chance to participate in changing the course of history! Inquiries should be sent to randinrussia@yahoo.com

It's worth noting that copies of Rand's works have found themselves into some interesting places in Russian society, such as the lending library of Vladimir Putin's chief economic adviser, a strong advocate of Rand's economic philosophy.

J. Neil Schulman's two nonfiction books on Second Amendment matters cover the territory [a reader] describe(s) pretty well. For what it's worth, you're wrong, too, about the 18th century meaning of "regulated". Back then, it meant "adequately provided for" and even later, regulation meant "facilitation", not "interference" as it does today.

He makes an even more important point by consulting two well-thought-of grammarians. The phrase containing the words "regulated" and "militia" do not condition the rest of the article in any way. In fact, as you'll read, it actually works the other way. This may be the best argument ever, as people like Madison (who wrote the amendment) and Jefferson (for whom, essentially, it was written) were very careful with their words.

There were two types of militia back then: a government-sponsored "organized" militia into which men were often conscripted - the 15,000 troops that marched on Pittsburgh in 1794 were of this sort - and volunteer "unorganized" militia. Unfortunately, the general incompetence of the former has rubbed off historically to some extent on the latter, which actually had an excellent record. The best source on this is Jeffrey Rogers Hummell.

L. Neil Smith

A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay -- such as dentists, lawyers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients?

It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.

Robert A. Heinlein
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of a long lunch with Glenn Cripe and Dr. Chris Tame, at Harris Ranch in central California. Chris is an old and trusted friend from London, head of the U.K. Libertarian Alliance, who was in California on business. Glenn is a recently made friend of Chris, and now a new friend of mine. Glenn and Dmitry Kostygin were responsible for getting Ayn Rand's 4 novels (and one other book) translated, ironically, back into her native Russian, and published and distributed there.

Glenn has sent me a pointer to what he says is (and I agree) "an incredible event" in Russia: "A Liberal Agenda For the New Century: A Global Perspective". Note, if don't already know, that the word "Liberal" has a different meaning outside the U.S.: free markets and limited government. Speakers include Vladamir Putin and Andrei Illarionov, the latter of whom I have on good authority is a Randian free marketeer who's had some influence on Putin. Russia may still be a basket case, but it's in some ways an improving basketcase, as evidenced for example by the recent elimination of a progressive income tax in favor of a sweeping lower flat tax.

As an aside, I find it amusing to see that Dmitri's Ayn Rand website is supported by advertising from a Russian mail order bride service.

I've been slightly busier than usual the past few days. I did manage to meet up with friends Mark Quon ("Genghis Khan") and Alan Weiss on Friday before Alan's departure for Austin, for lunch and for some indoor shooting at the excellent Reed's Indoor Range in Santa Clara, California. Here's Alan with his EAA Witness in .45 ACP with Wonderfinish coating (he favors the isosceles stance):

Thanks to Anarchist on the smith2004-discuss list for passing on SciFi.com's report today that Tim Minear is working on a screen adaptation of Heinlein's libertarian classic novel:

Genre TV producer Tim Minear (Angel, Wonderfalls) told SCI FI Wire that he has been hired to write a screenplay adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 SF novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The novel deals with a 2076 rebellion on a former penal colony on the moon and has been read as an allegory about libertarianism and its costs.

Being elected President and taking my cues from Alexander Hope. L. Neil Smith would be my Secretary of State ("go fuck yourselves, fellas -- TANSTAAFL!"). Russell Whitaker would be my John Pondero ("don't even THINK of reaching for it, sucker.") Genghis Khan [Mark Quon] would be my Secretary of Defense. Tom Knapp would be in charge of destroying every other Cabinet level department. ALL of you would be free to take whatever jobs you wanted, with the goal of putting yourselves OUT of a job in 60 days or less.

Alan Weiss

Speaking of content on the AnCap Wiki, Terry Egan just posted a pointer to John Ross, author of "Unintended Consequences," pointing out that Ross does have a personal website.

It is a sign of intelligence to make generalizations. Frequently, after observing a property to hold in a large number of cases, you may guess that it holds in all cases. You may, however, run into difficulty when you try to prove your guess. Perhaps you just have not figured out the key to the proof. But perhaps your guess is false. Consequently, when you are having serious difficulty proving a general statement, you should interrupt your efforts to look for a counterexample. Analyzing the kinds of problems you are encountering in your proof efforts may help the search. It may even happen that if you find a counterexample and therefore prove the statement false, your understanding may be sufficiently clarified that you can formulate a more limited but true version of the statement.

Susanna S. Epp
Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 2nd edition, p123

[This is a book recommendation I originally published April 10, 2003 on my other blog. I no longer maintain that blog, so I've decided to move most of the substantial articles to this blog to consolidate the materials - Russell]

I'd meant several weeks ago to post this recommendation of "The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary", but am only now getting around to doing it. I can claim a good excuse for not having done so, however: for those weeks, I've been busy heavily using this dictionary in Japanese classes.

You can check out the detailed recommendations of the book on Amazon.com; I won't echo them here. I will say, however, that I wish I'd had something like this - because there is nothing else like this available from another source - when I started studying Japanese 10 years ago. This book is truly useful... and an outstanding example of the publisher's art. Everyone to whom I've shown this book, including native Japanese speakers with whom I do regular language exchange, has expressed admiration and astonishment.

I have a goal in the medium-term future: take and pass the 1-kyu level Nihongo Nouryoku Shiken (the Japan Foundation's Japanese Language Proficiency Test). Every step along the way, I plan to have this dictionary at hand. Assuming the book survives the journey, I'll keep it in my bag for a long time thereafter.

Sometimes people lump together the ideas of validity and truth. If an argument seems valid, they accept the conclusion as true. And if an argument seems fishy (really a slang expression for invalid), they think the conclusion must be false.

This is not correct. Validity is a property of argument forms: If an argument is valid, then so is every other argument that has the same form. Similarly, if an argument is invalid, then so is every other argument that has the same form. What characterizes a valid argument is that no argument whose form is valid can have all true premises and a false conclusion. For each valid argument, there are arguments of that form with all true premises and a true conclusion, at least one false premise and a true conclusion, and at least one false premise and a false conclusion. On the other hand, for each invalid argument, there are arguments of that form with every combination of truth values for the premises and conclusion, including all true premises and a false conclusion.

Susanna S. Epp
Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 2nd edition, p37

About a year ago, I recommended Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier" to my readership. I just re-read this by Ricky Roberson in his memorium of Kerry Pearson:

I learned about a few other things besides Firefly from him on his [Kerry's] website, such as some insights into political anarchy as a philosophy that I don't personally agree with but still have to acknowledge more than a few grains of truth in...

Enamored of their vaunted "uniqueness," the Japanese have been as eager as anybody to promote the illusion that their language is vague and mysterious. Not all of them buy into the myth, of course. Take the linguist Okutsu Keiichiro, for example. "Japanese is often said to be vague," he notes, "partly because subjects and other nouns are often deleted, but if the speaker and listener are both aware of the verbal or nonverbal context in which the utterance takes place, all that is really happening is that they don't have to go on endlessly about matters they both understand perfectly well. Japanese is an extremely rational, economical language of the context-dependent type."

Jay Rubin
Gone Fishin': New Angles on Perennial Problems (Power Japanese), pp25-26

Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.

Daniel C. Dennett
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
pp154-155

Novelist Victor Koman was dead right, when he said (in his great work, Kings of the High Frontier) that the actual mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — its not-so-hidden agenda, having nothing to do with the development of space travel and exploration — is to keep scum like you and me from ever getting into space.

At the same time (as Victor also points out), NASA mouthpieces have been telling the public since the 1960s that our being able to visit space, perhaps even vacationing on the Moon, or in zero gravity at a space station, was "only about thirty years away". That's what they said in the 60s, that's what they said in the 70s, that's what they said in the 80s, that's what they said in the 90s, and that's what they're still saying today. It's always just about thirty years away.

L. Neil Smith

Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the "good things that don't ultimately matter to most businesses" there is a tycoon struggling to get out. It's not the system that he hates. His gripe is with the price the system initially offers him to collaborate.

Michael Lewis
Next, p136

Almost 10 months ago to the day, I wrote a short blurb on this blog about Shenzhou V, which was supposed to have carried 2 taikonauts. That launch happened today, in the same type of communist secrecy which surrounded Yuri Gagarin's launch so long ago, and featured only one taikonaut, Yang Liwei. CNN reports:

Quoted by Chinese media just before he blasted off into space, Yang said he would "gain honor for the People's Liberation Army and for the Chinese nation."

All hail the "motherland": another ersatz superpower dedicated to making space its military summit. Yet another incident which compels me to recommend Victor Koman's Kings of the High Frontier.

As for Christianity's alleged concern with truth, Christian faith is to free inquiry what the Mafia is to free enterprise. Christianity may be represented as a competitor in the realm of ideas to be considered on the basis of its merits, but this is mere disguise. Like the Mafia, if Christianity fails to defeat its competition by legitimate means (which is a forgone conclusion), it resorts to strong-arm tactics. Have faith or be damned -- this biblical doctrine alone is enough to exclude Christianity from the domain of reason.

George H. Smith
Atheism: The Case Against God, p169

Yesterday, I published an article by John Sebastian on the amusing topic of homemade wines done on the cheap. John made some assertions about "sulfates" (actually "sulfites") which generated some informative response from James Rogers in refutation. As a chemistry student with a burgeoning personal library on the science and some of its applications, I happened to have a copy of the proceedings of the 12-13 April 1973 "symposium sponsored by the Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry at the 165th Meeting of the American Chemical Society" held in Dallas, Texas: "Chemistry of Winemaking", A. Dinsmoor Webb, editor (published 1974 by the ACS, Advances in Chemistry Series #137).

I've scanned in several pages of this out-of-print book, pp280-285, from the Webb article "Home Winemaking", which mention sulfite production and supplementation. I've included the section entitled "The Course of Fermentation" below simply because my OCR program flawlessly reproduced it... why waste the material by not including it? I have reproduced "Table I" manually with the published values, and placed it inline, after the first reference to it in the original text.

Those with a chemistry background will also note that this was written 30 years ago, before IUPAC nomenclature standarization.

- Russell

Excerpt follows:

Addition of Sulfur Dioxide

Certain fruits and some of the white varieties of vinifera have a tendency to brown during crushing and other early processing operations because of oxidation. This oxidation may be promoted by enzymes in the fruit, or it may be a direct reaction between phenolic material of the fruit and oxygen from air. Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) is a strong enough reducing agent that it is oxidized in preference to the phenolics of the fruit juice. Sulfur dioxide may also function by denaturing the oxidizing enzymes. Therefore, to prevent browning, add 25-200 ppm SO₂ to the fruit immediately after crushing. The quantity of SO₂ is governed by the ease of browning of the particular Juice being vinified. SO₂ in addition to preventing oxidative browning in juices, inhibits growth of bacteria and wild yeasts. Thus it provides a more nearly sterile field for the action of the desirable yeast starter added by the enologist. The quantity of SO₂ to be added to the juice is varied according to the condition of the fruit-clear, cool, sound fruit fresh from the vineyard requires very little while fruit that is in poor condition and warm needs more. The amounts of SO₂ to be added to a juice can be estimated from Table I.

SO₂ is a pungent and unpleasant smelling, dense gas at normal temperature and pressure. Under moderate pressure it condenses to a liquid which can be stored in steel cylinders. The large winery usually adds SO₂ to the crushed grapes by carefully metering a small stream of the liquid from a cylinder to the inlet line of the pump that transfers the must from the crusher to the fermenting tanks; this ensures that SO₂ is uniformly mixed into the mass of crushed fruit. For the small winery and the home winegrower, however, the relatively small amounts of SO₂ required are difficult to measure and transfer as liquid, so either water saturated with SO₂ or a SO₂-liberating salt is used.

You cannot truly appreciate Atlas Shrugged until you have read it in the original Klingon.

Sea Wasp

I've not yet read this book, but when I have some time off from my studies, I plan to. My friend Perry Metzger has given me permission to reprint this recommendation he sent a few minutes ago to a mailing list I own:

So I finally finished the book. My verdict is still not in - the book is very obviously just 1/3 of the overall story. However, I'll say that I rather enjoyed the first 1000 pages of the story that Quicksilver represents. It isn't quite at the level of my favorite Neal Stephenson books ("The Diamond Age" is at the top of my list), but it is a very interesting read.

It also has the interesting feature, which a history book would not, of giving you a much wider view of what was going on in the 17th century than you could otherwise get. Usually history is taught or read in narrow vertical slices - you learn about Louis XIV, but not that Robert Hooke was off in London discovering that all living things are made up of cells at the same time, and that all that while the Turks were attacking Vienna. The irony is, in spite of being a work of fiction, it gives you a wider and better lens on the birth of the modern age than a non-fiction book would have...

Looks like I'll be ordering my copy soon.

I should have done this years ago, but I've only just now gotten around to reading Voltaire's Candide. I finished it in a few hours. It's pretty short: the actual text of the story embedded in the Daniel Gordon translation I have is 79 pages, surrounded by commentary and historiography. I'm going back through my marked-up copy of the text and looking into some of the parts I found most interesting. Near the end of Chapter 3 is this little gem:

A man who had never been baptized, a good Anabaptist named Jacques, saw the cruel and ignominious treatment inflicted on one of his fellows, a two-legged creature without feathers and with a soul [emphasis mine].

Does anyone else find this as funny as I do? One of my longstanding interests is philosophy, so I immediately recognized the reference. Here's one short account of the dispute between Plato and Diogenes on the nature of man:

Plato once defined man as a "featherless biped". When the philosopher Diogenes heard about Plato's definition, he presented his rival with a plucked chicken. "Here," he then declared, "is Plato's man!" [Plato then added "having broad nails" to his original definition.]

Priceless.

The case against agriculture's being a natural cultural advance began to gather momentum with the surprising discovery that hunting and gathering isn't such a bad way to make a living. The !Kung San, Richard Lee found in the 196os, work just a few hours a day - hunting, digging roots, harvesting mongongo trees - and then it's Miller time. In 1972, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (a former cultural evolutionist turned skeptic of cultural evolutionism) dubbed hunter-gatherers "the original affluent society" on grounds that "all the people's material wants are easily satisfied."

And the problem isn't just that primitive agriculture may have been a regression in terms of sheer efficiency. The more populous villages that farming ushered in would presumably foment disease; and the low-protein, high-starch content of some staple crops might be unhealthy. Studying the bones of early farmers, some archaeologists have concluded that they had shorter lives, and more rotten teeth, than hunter-gatherers.

Robert Wright
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
pp66-67

The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right—and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

Robert Wright
The Moral Animal, p280

"...only at Katsura [Detached Palace] does there exist that overwhelming freedom of intellect which does not subordinate any element of the structure or the garden to some rigid system. At Nikko, as in many architectural attractions of the world, the effect is gained by quantity - about in the same way that an army of two hundred thousand is larger than one of twenty thousand. At Katsura, on the contrary, each element remains a free individual, much like a member of a good society in which harmony arises from the absence of coercion so that everyone may express himself according to his individual nature. Thus the Katsura Palace is a completely isolated miracle in the civilized world."

Bruno Taut, in a speech given 1936 to the Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkoukai) in Tokyo
as quoted in Japanese Culture by Paul Varley, 4th edition, 2000, pp325-326

"It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. This means that when men are born from heaven they are all equal. There is no innate distinction between high and low. It means that men can freely and independently use the myriad things of the world to satisfy their daily needs through the labors of their own bodies and minds, and that, as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others, may pass their days in happiness."

Fukuzawa Yukichi
Gakamon no Susume (An Encouragement of Learning), 1876
as quoted in Japanese Culture by Paul Varley, 4th edition, 2000, p243

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

Sherlock Holmes, from "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans"
Arthur Conan Doyle

I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

Herman Melville
Moby Dick, Ch. 17, The Ramadan

So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment.

James Joseph Sylvester
(1814 - 1897)

As I looked at my two young sons, each with his gun, and considered how much the safety of the party depended on these little fellows, I felt grateful to you, dear husband, for having acquainted them in childhood with the use of firearms.

Elizabeth Robinson
The Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss
Unabridged version

In real life, however, even in our worst circumstances we have always been a relatively minor interest of the vast microbial world. Pathogenicity is not the rule. Indeed, it occurs so infrequently and involves such a relatively small number of species, considering the huge population of bacteria on the earth, that it has a freakish aspect. Disease usually results from inconclusive negotiations for symbiosys, an overstepping of the line by one side or the other, a biologic misinterpretation of borders.

Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell, Germs, p76

As we have seen, the first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of "self-defense." In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
Chapter II, Black Power, p55

The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell

The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.

Robert A. Heinlein
Time Enough for Love

Greetings, large black person. Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feets on some ass of the giant lizard person.

Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins
Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head

Those who do not have swords may still die upon them.

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers

The ultimate in disposing one's troops is to be without ascertainable shape. Then the most penetrating spies cannot pry in nor can the wise lay plans against you.

Sun Tzu
The Art of War, p100

As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class - personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy - are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them.

Steven Pinker, via Brian Micklethwait
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Dr. Ken Lunde of Adobe Systems (author of CJKV Information Processing) surprised me a few days ago by sending me a large gift box of O'Reilly & Associates books, including half a dozen titles I'd actually queued in my "buy when I find my next job" list I carry in my Sony Clie:

Essential Blogging
Java Swing, Second Edition
Programming Jakarta Struts
Java Performance Tuning
NetBeans: The Definitive Guide
JDBC Pocket Reference

I can't adequately express how much I appreciate this gift. I'd mentioned in an earlier post that I'm retooling for a new career (I'm in school again, and looking for work), and these books are exactly the types of mindfeed I need right now. Again, thanks!

I've been on the "Miss Liberty's Film & TV Update" weekly mailing list for a couple of months, and recommend it. Sample pointer:

TUESDAY (3/18)

9:30PM~COM~ South Park ~ "Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub. In a Waco-like incident, the ATF kills a bunch of innocent partygoers because it mistakes them for religious fanatics."

I also recommend Jon Osborne's book "Miss Liberty's Guide to Film and Video: Movies for the Libertarian Millennium".

The sitting around is the hardest part. They may sit for a year, and then be called to five minutes of all-out action of deadly importance. But they have to be instantly ready for that five minutes the whole year. Quite a strain. I much prefer attack to defense.

Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar, pg. 32, 1991
(courtesy of Curt Howland)

But slavery is another matter -- the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break. It starts up in every new land and it's terribly hard to root out. After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men's habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground -- there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their 'natural' right to own other people. You can't reason with them; you can kill them but you can't change their minds.

Robert A. Heinlein
Citizen of the Galaxy

The Meiji Restoration had not really changed the feudal status quo, it had only "repainted the signs", as the Japanese put it. An elite addicted to wealth and status was afraid to give ordinary Japanese more than cosmetic democracy. For a thousand years, it was the policy of emperors and shoguns to keep people ignorant, and to keep taxes high enough so families had to struggle to survive, because this kept them fully occupied and harmless.

The Yamato Dynasty, p149
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

Lazarus Long
Time Enough for Love, by Robert A. Heinlein

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T.E. Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

The enemies of the Industrial Revolution — its displaced persons — were of the kind that had fought human progress for centuries, by every means available. In the Middle Ages, their weapon was the fear of God. In the nineteenth century, they still invoked the fear of God — for instance, they opposed the use of anesthesia on the grounds that it defies God’s will, since God intended men to suffer. When this weapon wore out, they invoked the will of the collective, the group, the tribe. But since this weapon has collapsed in their hands, they are now reduced, like cornered animals, to baring their teeth and their souls, and to proclaiming that man has no right to exist — by the divine will of inanimate matter.

The demand to “restrict” technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind. It is nature - i.e., reality - that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whenever and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind - not the state - that withers away.

Ayn Rand
“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” from Return of the Primitive

For the better part of those eight centuries under the shoguns, most Japanese were unaware that emperors still existed, and only a small circle of court nobles continued to regard them as divine. When the shoguns were toppled in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan's new strongmen gained control of the current Son of Heaven, a boy of 15, and announced that the whole country had "submitted to rule by the divine emperor." This was sheer bluff. Even today, there are huge credibility gaps in Japan. If there were a Japanese version of the fable The Emperor's New Clothes, the tailor would be executed for exposing the truth, the little child for speaking the truth and the peasantry for seeing the truth.

The Yamato Dynasty, p15
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave

I'd opined a few days ago that Bill Whittle, author of the essay Courage, should publish a book of his writings (an opinion neither original or unique to me). Looks like he'll be doing exactly that, soon.

"...when we want to know whether something was worth making, we look for the answer in a discovery machine called the market. When we want to know how something works, we have another discovery machine, called science. When we want to know if somebody was right to kill somebody else, we have a discovery machine called the law."

Jon Wilde
Ken MacLeod, in The Stone Canal

Our government gets more than thugs in a protection racket demand, more even than discarded first wives of famous rich men receive in divorce court. Then this government, swollen and arrogant with pelf, goes butting into our business. It checks the amount of tropical oils in our snack foods, tells us what kind of gasoline we can buy for our cars and how fast we can drive them, bosses us around about retirement, education and what's on TV; counts our noses and asks fresh questions about who's still living at home and how many bathrooms we have; decides whether the door to our office or shop should have steps or a wheelchair ramp; decrees the gender and complexion of the people to be hired there; lectures us on safe sex; dictates what we can sniff, smoke, and swallow; and waylays young men, ships them to distant places and tells them to shoot people they don't even know.

P.J. O'Rourke
Parliament of Whores

I have to agree with Russell's earlier posting about the Koman book cover and the lackluster marketing of the book itself. I tried to get the book on Amazon.co.uk, and it wasn't even listed. So I ended up going to a Barnes and Noble site instead, and to be fair they shipped it over pretty fast.

Book covers do make a big difference, to state the obvious. I quite like the cover on Kings of the High Frontier but I agree that the cover could be a lot better. The covers on books by folk like Vernor Vinge, Peter Hamilton or David Brin are in a different class, and draw the readers in. Also, SF art is still a much under-appreciated art form in its own right.

Perhaps, in the light of the current flurry of interest in what we do next about space travel and commercial development up there, there may be more interest in Koman getting a decent publisher with more flair and drive. It bugs me that his magnificent book was so hard to find while there is so much garbage on our bookshelves here in Britain and elsewhere.

I once went into a huge Waterstones bookshop here in Chelsea and there was not a single work by Heinlein, Anderson (Poul) or Larry Niven on the shelves. It's a bit like going to a classics section and seeing nothing by Hugo or Tolstoy. How the hell are young people going to get inspired by science and technology if there isn't the fiction out there to whet their appetites? After all, I am pretty sure many of the astronauts in the 1960s and subsequent decades first got their taste for their activities by reading a book by Heinlein or a Buck Rogers comic strip.

However, we Londoners can seek solace in The Forbidden Planet bookstore in New Oxford Street and Babylon 5!

Just two days ago, Friday, I received by mail my only copy of a book I'd lent out to a former co-worker, who surprised me by finally returning it to me by a private express carrier. I'd been warned by Murray Rothbard many years ago never to lend out my personal books, as I'd never see them again... even if that book was one of Murray's own (which it was, which was a reason we were having the chat at school... another story).

Friday's mail gifted me Victor Koman's Kings of the High Frontier, to my relief - and to my erstwhile colleague's credit, in exactly the same good condition as I'd lent it. The events of the last couple of days, including my truly belated and short account of a visit I made a little over a year ago to private space transportation startup XCOR, prompt me to write at least a short recommendation, if not a comprehensive review, of this superb novel.

The story surrounding the publication of this book is a bit of an unknown to me. From what I can gather so far, Victor Koman first published it online, then arranged with a small publishing house, Bereshith Publishing, to publish the novel as the first book in Bereshith's new "Final Frontier Books" imprint. My "First Limited Edition" of 1998 is signed on a page that was sewn into the book, and numbered 545 of "...1250 signed and numbered copies". The frontspiece is enticingly subtitled "Book One of the High Pilgrimage", but I know of no as-yet published "Book Two".

The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might suspect, by the ignorant mass - which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught - but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a two-fold threat to academic mediocrities; it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole laboriously constructed intellectual edifice may collapse.

Arthur Koestler
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

Some two million foodborne illnesses beset Americans annually, yet not a single case is associated with wild game meat. The hunt is truly a spiritual workout, with the flesh its ultimate reward. And grand flesh it is. You want the ultimate health diet? Go hunting and kill dinner naturally. Each step of the hunt will teach a deep and abiding reverence for the price paid for each meal, and never again will a forkful be taken lightly or for granted. It's not only the best food anywhere, but it is the very best way there is to connect with the reality of nature and the necessity of the harvest.

Ted Nugent
God, Guns, & Rock 'n 'Roll, p124

I remember as a teenager having been deeply affected by journalist-adventurer Rose Wilder Lane's account of the Saracen markets of learning in her classic The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority.

Few modern readers are familar with the 700-year flowering of knowledge and culture in the "Saracen" lands of north Africa, during the era most school-goers are taught were the "Dark Ages" of Europe. The Dark Ages did indeed occur - though most of what's popularly taught about the subject is pure bunk - but no mention is ever made of the flowering of civilization in the lands south of Europe.

"The refugee scientists in Persia were popular now - respected, admired, listened to. No Authority suppressed them; no police kicked them around. They opened their schools; from Baghdad to Granada, their schools were crowded with students. In two centuries, they were great universities, the world's first universities...

...These universities had no organization whatsoever... A Saracen university had no program, no curriculum, no departments, no rules, no examinations; it gave no degrees nor diplomas. It was simply an institution of learning. Not of teaching, but of learning. A man, young or old, went to a university to learn what he wanted to know, just as an American goes to a grocery to get the food he wants.

Men who knew (or thought they knew) something, and wanted to teach it, opened a school to sell their knowledge. Sucess depended upon the demand for the knowledge they had. If they prospered, other teachers joined them..."
[pp89-90]

There are still a few people around who "get it" when it comes to thinking clearly about education and learning; Brian Micklethwait is one of them. In his post today, "Why is the Sky Dark at Night?", he recalls the experience of a presentation given by guest lecturer scientist Herman Bondi at his school in the '70's:

Bondi's talk didn't turn me into a scientist, but it did turn me into a lifelong science fan. It taught me that one of the great things about scientists is, not just their enthusiasm to discover obscure things, but their ability also to register amazement at the commonplace. Commonplace facts like the fact of gravity. We all know that "gravity" – or something like it – is a fact. But what is it? What, deep down, does "gravity" – this bizarre tendency of things to fall to the ground for no apparent reason – actually consist of? It takes an Isaac Newton to think like that, at a time when people as a whole tended not to and even to forbid themselves from such thoughts, and to carry on thinking like that until he had an answer that satisfied him.

Brian's commentary is particularly interesting not only in respect of the "love of learning" angle, but from what it says about the natural human tendancy to novelty-seeking - which I consider a defining survival trait of our species - and the psychological value of seeking learning dynamically, supplementing your regular studies with people you'd not otherwise consider:

As I say, the same bloke droning on yet again can sometimes work, but there's nothing quite like a visiting shooting star for lighting up the world. Failing that, if you are that same bloke droning on, at least try to talk sometimes about different stuff from your usual stuff.

Col. Jeff Cooper has said, "The goals of life are three: To understand, to accomplish, to appreciate." It's in this spirit, I think, that Brian says:

Bondi may have inspired some in his audience that day to become practising scientists, but not me. What he did for me was not to tell me anything about how to make money or be more "successful". What he did for me was make the times I already found myself living in more interesting and entertaining and profound and enjoyable

I share these feelings myself, which is a major reason I seek learning with known teachers - continuing with them over committed periods of time - and supplement with the different, the novel, the additionally challenging. All learning is done at the margins of our existing learning - that's how our brains are wired - but the committed dynamist extends that learning by making that extra stretch with the occasional new teacher. By such means do the important parts of ourselves remain young.

Why is babbling so important? The infant is like a person who has been given a complicated piece of audio equipment bristling with unlabled knobs and switches but missing the instruction manual. In such situations people resort to what hackers call frobbing - fiddling aimlessly with the controls to see what happens. The infant has been given a set of neural commands that can move the articulators every which way, with wildly varying effects on the sounds. By listening to their own babbling, babies in effect write their own instruction manual; they learn how much to move which muscle in which way to make which change in the sound. This is a prerequisite to duplicating the speech of their parents. Some computer scientiests, inspired by the infant, believe that a good robot should learn an internal software model of its articulators by observing the consequences of its own babbling and flailing.

Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct, p266

...if contemporary hunter-gatherers are any guide, our ancestors were not grunting cave men with little more to talk about than which mastadon to avoid. Hunter-gatherers are accomplished toolmakers and superb amateur biologists with detailed knowledge of the life cycles, ecology, and behavior of the plants and animals they depend on. Language would surely have been useful in anything resembling such a lifestyle. It is possible to imagine a superintelligent species whose isolated members cleverly negotiated their environment without communicating with one another, but what a waste! There is a fantastic payoff in trading hard-won knowledge with kin and friends, and language is obviously a major means of doing so.

Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct, p367

Technology is all that matters. Technology is all that makes us human. You want books on technology? Every goddamned book is about technology. Every conversation is technology. Technology is all we got. If you don't like technology, you don't like humans. If you want the above premise written by authors who aren't smartasses, try Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology (1993), by Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth. They're a nutty couple that went out, lived in the bush, made stone-aged tools, and used them for wacky stuff like butchering an elephant. Is that science or performance art? It's the best of both. Read it.

Penn Jillette

I'd mentioned a couple of weeks ago that mutual friend Geoff Metcalf's new book, In The Arena, is out now. Well, Teri Seago tonight in class brought me her copy for (I presume) a short lending period until I have my own. So far, looks like great stuff... off to bed now to read it.

I have TechTV playing in the background while I'm working here, and just now saw an intruiguing ad for a book, TechTV's Catalog of Tomorrow. The images flashing by included some Foresight Institute graphics illustrating nanotechnological cell repair machines, apparently contributed by my friend Chris Peterson. The other thing that caught my eye was a dewar with an Alcor Life Extension Foundation logo: I'm a neurosuspension member of that cryonics organization myself.

This is another book I've not yet read, but find sufficiently interesting to point out to my readers. I'll review it when I lay my hands on a copy. In the meantime, the Amazon entry I point to here has 52 sample pages for perusal - lots of eye candy - with the index pages listed in full.

I'd mentioned earlier that I'd seen "Conquest: Bow & Arrow" on the History Channel last night, but didn't mention that Peter Woodward had cited a work I've not yet read, "Toxophilus or the Schole or Partitions of Shooting", published original in 1545 by Roger Ascham, which Woodward described as the first European book on the practice of archery.

There are some interesting excerpts from Ascham's book quoted in the web-based survey of the art "Construction of the Medieval Arrow", e.g.:

The deep and long nock is good in war, for sure keeping in the string. It must be narrow enough to hold the string, not grip it too much, strong enough for the sudden blow of the string not to break the shaft, and smooth enough for it not to cut the string.

and:

In Crete and Italy they used to have their shafts of reed... But, because such shafts be neither easy for Englishmen to get, and, if they were gotten, scarce profitable for them to use, I will let them pass, and speak of shafts which Englishmen, at this day, most commonly approve and allow. . {which} may be of such diverse woods as: Brazil, Service-tree, Turkey wood, Alder, Fustic, Blackthorn, Sugar-chest, Beech, Hardbeam, Elder, Birch, Asp, Ash, Sallow, or Oak.

I've not yet acquired a copy for myself - anyone have one I can buy, or, better, have one to donate for review here? - but will eventually lay my hands on one.

Interestingly, Webster's dictionary of 1913 has "Ascham" listed as a noun.

Here's a useful exercise: when watching a politician speak on TV, turn down the volume. Notice the gestures. Note their similarity to the gestures politicians everywhere in the world use - exhortation, indignation, and so on. Then turn up the volume. Listen to what the politician is saying. Here's a virtual guarantee: he (or, more rarely, she) is saying things that appeal to the group of voters most likely to get him into power or keep him there.

Robert Wright
The Moral Animal, pp258-259

Thanks to Teri Seago for alerting me to the fact that Geoff Metcalf has written a new book, In the Arena, featuring interviews with "doers of deeds" he has interviewed in his radio career such as Col. David Hackworth, Ted Nugent, Dr. Khidri Hamza, T.J. Rodgers and a number of other interesting people.

For the 2nd month running (since I started this blog), my stats package indicates that of all the referrer links from Google and other search engines to content on this site, most readers seem to be looking for references to O. T. Nelson's book "The Girl Who Owned a City", which I reviewed here a few weeks ago.

This is not what I expected, but it's an interesting surprise nonetheless.

They went north, into the teeth of the Ice Age, into direct competition with giant carnivores and stocky Neanderthals who had already adapted to life in the cold. They went north, into a world of challenge, where fruit, vegetables, and game were not available all year long and where efficient weapons, clothing, and housing were necessary. In abandoning Africa, they embraced a wider world that could be survived only through the development of technology. Thus was born Homo technologicus, man the inventor, amid fire and ice. Thus humanity transformed itself from an East African curiosity to the dominant species on this planet.

In a sense, the biblical tale of Genesis tells this story but has it backwards. It was not eating of the Tree of Knowledge that forced humankind to leave Paradise. Rather, it was the abandonment of Paradise that forced humanity to seek the forbidden fruit.

Robert Zubrin
Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization

One of the most useful, yet rarely found, skills for hunting and survival is tracking. Tom Brown's book, "The Science and Art of Tracking" is the best book I have found on the subject.

No other text I know of goes into the depth you will find in this book. If you want to go beyond moving slowly from track to track in ideal soil conditions to tracking on hard surfaces, at night or through thick debris this is the place to start. Of course, just reading a book without spending a lot of "dirt time" won't do you much good. Those who truly wish to master the art of tracking should consider a class from Tom Brown's Tracker School.

If you're interested in learning more about the AR-15/M-16 system I mentioned in my previous post about the History Channel special, I recommend purchasing and studying a few choice books. First start with Boston's Gun Bible, which I mentioned in an earlier review on this site.

After checking out Boston's opinions on the weapon system, pick up a copy of the 2002 edition of Duncan Long's "The Complete AR-15/M16 Sourcebook". It's an excellent, detailed account of the history of the weapon system, a compendium of historical and available weapon variants, and a critical review of the panoply of accessories available for the system, from the useful to the goofy to the downright dangerous. Highly recommended.

Patri Friedman's review of the NOLS course he attended reminds me I should mention an emergency medicine textbook I've been meaning to recommend: Tactical Emergency Care: Military and Operational Out-of-Hospital Medicine, a Brady imprint from Prentice Hall.

A few weeks ago, I attended a prototype "mission essential medicine" course, for which this book was highly recommended reading. I was not disappointed. I'd completed an urban EMT course around 15 years ago, and to my recollection had used a Brady manual of the time, but this 1999 military-oriented textbook was an eye-opener. It's densely informative, and would be a useful adjunct to any emergency medical training with wilderness (there's some overlap) and military orientation.

I'd run across this reprint article earlier, but had to bookmark it for reading later, which I've just now done over coffee. Bob Shimizu does an excellent job of chronicling his 6-day rifle class at Gunsite under Col. Jeff Cooper. His 2001 experience is very similar to my own of 3 years before under the Colonel at the NRA Whittington Center in New Mexico, minus the Quad Runner the Colonel uses in Arizona.

On a related note, I was told a few days ago by Julias Shaw that Col. Cooper's book The Art of the Rifle has been revised and expanded for 2002. My copy dates from 1997, and does not have the new material dedicated to the use of the Scout Rifle system, so I'll hold off on recommending the version I've not yet read, but if it's at least as good as the older one, I strongly recommend buying a copy and reading before attending any general rifle course at any school.

I'm working through a very short but fascinating book by Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 (this link refers to the 1995 reissue edition of the 1979 original I'm reading). I disagree with the author's central premise - Perrin praises the reversion to the sword as a shining example of "it can be done here too" - but his slant on the facts in no way, so far in my reading, detracts from the fascinating and detailed account he offers.

Here's one of many interesting excerpts (from p10, Shambhala edition of 1979, no longer published):

"But the thing Japan manufactured most of was weapons. For two hundred years she had been the world's leading exporter of arms. The whole Far East used Japanese equipment. In 1483, admittedly an exceptional year, 67,000 swords were shipped to China alone(1). A hundred and fourteen years later, a visiting Italian merchant named Francesco Carletti noted a brisk export trade in 'weapons of all kinds, both offensive and defensive, of which this country has, I suppose, a more abundant supply than any other country in the world'.(2) Even as late as 1614, when things were about to change, a single trading vessel from the small port of Hirado sailed to Siam with the following principal items of cargo: fifteen suits of export armor at four and a half taels the suit, eighteen short swords at half a tael each, twenty-eight short swords at a fifth of a tael, ten guns at four taels, ten guns at three taels, and fifteen guns at two and a half taels.(3)"

Reference #3 is attributed by Perrin to Ludwig Reiss' History of the English Factory at Hirado, which I suppose I will need to pick up during my next trip to Tokyo, since I can't find it in print on Amazon or elsewhere.

I'll be reviewing this book at length in a few days.

I rarely recommend children's books: I have no children. I am, however, an Uncle at Large for my friends with children, and as such can freely engage in the joyful intellectual corruption that such a role entails.

A few months ago, I read O. T. Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City, and was impressed sufficiently to have given a birthday copy to a friend's pre-teen daughter of roughly the same age as the protagonist Lisa. The real-life girl is unfortunately in a joint-custody situation, and is under the influence most of the time of the erstwhile husband, a wimpy liberal. The mother, a good friend of mine, is a strong believer in the virtues of personal responsibility and leadership, but is unfortunately unable due to her custody arrangement to exercise as much parental guidance as she'd like.

So, I hope this book helps. It's the story of a girl, the oldest of the children in her family, who finds - along with all the other children in her city and, for all they know, in every city - that all the adults and pubescent teens have died of an unexplained plague. As an adult, I had to remind myself not to consider this necessary plot device as entirely contrived, and remember the audience. Having done that, I immersed myself in the storyline set up by the disappearance of the adults.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be stocking this new site with recommendations I've been wanting to make en masse somewhere... and this is the place. I've already mentioned Boston's Gun Bible in my opening salvo, so I'd be remiss not to follow up immediately with John Ross' Unintended Consequences.

I've never used this comparison with any other work, but I'm not the first to call it "the Atlas Shrugged of the gun freedom movement". As a matter of fact, Vin Suprynowicz is quoted saying so himself on the book's dustcover: "A modern novel of liberty to rival Rand's Atlas Shrugged... a masterwork." So, there you go... I stand in good company making such a bold comparison.

I should add that our own Dr. Edgar Suter proclaims on the same dustcover: "The most important work of fiction I have read in over a decade." There, I've shamelessly dropped friends' names to bolster my own already heady feelings about this work.

As an advocate not only of the principle of RKBA (Right to Keep and Bear Arms), but an active proponent of actually using that right actively, I'm often asked by novice gun owner friends how to start along the path of learning.

Helping those friends usually entails lots of email back-and-forth, assistance in the way of gun shopping trips, and usually arranging a panoply of firearms-related range and martial arts training.

Most of my friends are libertarians, and as such are a bookish lot. They actually read huge tomes and selectively absorb worldview. It's not atypical for a conversation between a couple of them to result in one or both walking away with a small armful of books, the subtext being "read this and we'll have a shared base from which to talk further".

When talking guns with friends, I typically engage in the same behavior. I never fully accepted Murray Rothbard's personal admonition to me never to lend out my books, though I have become very much more careful in the way I engage in the proliferation of meme packages I've acquired through purchase. One of those packages I share out carefully is Boston's Gun Bible, which I can announce with pleasure is out in a newly revised and expanded edition.