Went to Powell’s today. After 10 years of appreciating the fact that Barnes and Noble had two whole shelves full of books about science, it was a shock to find a whole store - about the size of my previously local Barnes and Noble - full of books about science.

The first 8 books I picked up were OMG-I-could-read-this-all-day books. I had to get outta there before I became lost in the singularity.

If you ever find yourself wondering “Where’s Kevin?” the answer, to a first approximation, will be “he’s at Powell’s”.

S’funny how your perspective changes with a new piece of information.

While I was briefly under the impression that Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent was written by the cuddly old curmudgeon pictured on the back cover I rated it LOL for very funny. But once I found out that it was actually his first book, written when he was 33, his lovable vitriolic ways sounded a lot more spiteful.

The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn’t hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that they would soon be dead.

I still enjoyed it though.

The book is a standard Bill Bryson travelogue with scathing, spur of the moment honesty uncensored by any regard for the recipient’s tender feelings. It’s funny to read the reviews at Amazon by all the people who’s town he trashed. They are all like, “No wonder he found BFE dead on a Thursday night. If he had come the night before, he could’ve have played bingo”.

Bill has an unnerving ability to say what you are thinking but in half the words and with twice the bile.

About casinos…

I wandered through room after room trying to find my way out, but the place was clearly designed to leave you disoriented. There were no windows, no exit signs, just endless rooms, all with subdued lighting and with carpet that looked as if some executive had barked into a telephone, “Gimme twenty thousand yards of the ugliest carpet you got.” It was like woven vomit.

That’s like every casino I have ever been in. When we lived in New York, G and I took the bus to Atlantic City - not to go to a casino, just for a day out.

As we got off the bus, they gave us $10 in quarters and a big plastic pot to keep them in so we felt obliged to go spend them. We managed to spend about $1.25 each and then wandered around for hours trying to find the way out. When we got back on the bus we still had about $18 in quarters.

…and who hasn’t done this?

And the toilet seat did not have a sanitized for your protection wrapper on it, denying me the daily ritual of cutting it with my scissors saying “I now declare this toilet open”.

The Lost Continent is very funny but not quite Bill Bryson funny. If you’ve read all the others, read this one too - unless you are a waitress or you live in BFE - but if you haven’t, read In a sunburnt country first.

Atlas Shrugged is a classic tale of good versus evil.

The heroes are easily recognized by their strong profiles, high cheekbones and tendency to speech rather than speak. Heroes always know the precise angle to present their bodies so that the setting sun can highlight their virtues and their flat hips while the bright red glow of morality from the furnaces blazes in their Rearden Metal brooches and their steely blue eyes.

The villains, or looters, meanwhile (you can almost hear the boos from the cheap seats), are made of blancmange and have names like Tinky and Kip and Balph (Balph!) and Cuffy and Orren and Chick. The blancmanges don’t have profiles, they have pendulous jowls and sagging, tired features and, when they are not starting organizations with phony names like Friends of Global Progress, they stoop and they slouch and they deny everything that’s obvious and honest and true.

The blancmanges don’t have conversations either. They blubber nonsense about everything being self-evident and how it’s not their fault - it’s nobody’s fault. They have no independent thoughts of their own and they regurgitate half-digested ideas scavenged from the waste bucket of philosophy and they speak in unfinished sentences (the heroes always finish their sentences).

“It wasn’t real, was it?” said Mr Thompson.

“We seemed to have heard it,” said Tinky Holloway.

“We couldn’t help it,” said Chick Morrison.

“Who permitted it to hap-” he began in a rising voice but stopped ;

“We don’t have to believe it, do we?” cried James Taggart.

The overall effect is like a child’s pantomime where all the children boooo when the unshaven villain, in the stripey jumper and with a bag of swag over his shoulder, twirls his moustache as the lights grow dim and a badly played organ heralds his entrance on its lowest register.

There is no dialog in this book. In place of normal conversation, the heroes take it in turns to practice their oratory while the blancmanges barf out platitudes that can only have been retrieved from someone’s maiden aunt’s sick bucket after she’d had a little too much tincture of laudanum.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonestly; the man who respects it has earned it.”

The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden’s face, as if in salute and farewell.

When the heroes and looters actually do speak with each other it’s like some absurd Monty Python skit wherein the leprous townspeople, armed only with a bowl of radishes and a pound of liver, try to do battle with the Noble Paladins in Shining Armour mounted on Noble, Snorting Stallions only to be cut down one by snivelling one by the Paladins’ Virtuous Steel Blades. Terry Gilliam could not have drawn it better.

“All you want is production without men who are able to produce.”
“That…that’s just theory. That’s just a theoretical extreme.”

Even the adulterous sex is virtuous with the moral flame of righteousness reflecting in her chaste dampness and his thrusts like the pistons that power the engines of prosperity.

She lay back, conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her. Yet her mind kept racing. Broken bits of thought flew past her attention, like the telegraph poles by the track. Physical pleasure? - she thought. This is a train made of steel…running on rails of Rearden Metal…moved by the energy of burning oil and electric generators…it’s a physical sensation of physical movement…but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?…Do they call it a low animal joy-this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now-it won’t-but I wouldn’t care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?

Oh, wait…maybe that really was about a train. It’s hard to know with these people - they live their whole lives in metaphor so it’s impossible to tell when reality begins…or if it ever does.

Perhaps passages like that help to explain why Ayn Rand is every budding libertarian’s favourite philosopher. Perhaps they got their first hard-on while imagining that Ayn was Dagny and Dagny was Ayn and that, when they closed their eyes, Ayn stood before them naked saying “I want you <insert name here>. I’m more of an animal than you think…[snip 100 pages]… If I’m asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with <insert your name here>.”

The only possible reason that the book is so popular among that kind of conservative is that, around age 19, they became confused between Ayn Rand’s prescription for a new Utopian Republic and Dagny’s high breasts and animal depravity. Now and forever, when they think of steel production, they become aroused by thoughts of themselves as Hank Rearden driving his train into Dagny Taggart’s tunnel.

I can’t count the number of times, on Usenet and on mailing lists, when a comment about cooperation causes a shotgun response, Earnestness set to Stun, with a one-line directive to “now go read Atlas Shrugged”. Just today, in the comments after an article about Ron Paul in the Times, someone grumbled about the fate of the dollar, sighed “Where is John Galt?” and resolved to buy gold presumably until the Industrial Philosopher Kings return.

I wonder how many of Ron Paul’s supporters have on their desk a framed, signed picture dedicated with “To Marcus. May you care about no-one but your self. With Love and Virtue, Ayn xxx” and a Heroines of Objectivism calendar on the back of their bathroom door? I’ll bet Greenspan had one.

I really wanted to like this book as I enjoyed The Fountainhead thoroughly. I had intended to write a mini review when I was about three hundred pages into it, while it was still just a fun ride on a moralistic steam train through Objectiville, but events conspired against me and I missed my stop. The book started to judder about a third of the way in and finally came off the rails on page 606 as Ayn, furiously shovelling coal and with whistle blowing, described, to the rhythm of a rickety train on an out-of-control track, why everyone who disagrees with her deserves to die…

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence…

The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion “for a good cause”…

The woman in Roomette, Car No. 3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards,by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil…

[...skipping cars 4 through 15 until...]

The man in Bedroom A, Car No.16 was a humanitarian who had said “The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer”….

…and we are still only half way through our journey. Having now fallen into a ditch, the book ploughed on through some heavy mud until the surreal interlude where the publishers accidentally printed 60 pages of someone’s 10th grade homework on the subject “Why we must fear communism” (it turns out that From each according to his ability to each according to his needs was a terrible idea) and finally comes to rest, with a final mournful sigh, about 900 pages after the ending became obvious.

Still, there is a lot to like about Objectivism. Like many philosophies, it tries to scale a simple idea from a Personal Guide to a Virtuous Life up through an ethical system for interacting with one’s family, friends and business partners to a political recipe for Utopia.

At the first level , her moral philosophy is spot on. Colour me Objectivist when it comes to “What is the Good?” and of how to structure one’s hopes and dreams and, most importantly, actions to achieve The Good. It all gets a little shaky when ask our friends and family to earn the love we give them and then it totally falls apart when we imagine that we could structure our society around the idea that captains of industry and politicians are paragons of virtue (in the Ayn Rand sense).

In Ayn’s topsy-turvy world, successful businessmen would be successful precisely because they play by the rules and have a strict code of honour. Thy would channel their enlightened greed into production, commerce and other activities that benefit society accidentally but with supreme efficiency. Not once would they clear cut rain forests or dump plastics in the ocean or pollute rivers or poison thousands of Indians or any of the things that real businessmen do.

This is ultimately where the book, and the philosophy, gets it dead wrong. Sure we can all think of politicians and industrialists enlightened by self-interest but the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them and the James Taggarts and Wesley Mouches and Orren Boyles outnumber the Hank Reardens a thousand-fold. I am a dyed-in-the-wool elitist but even I would not trust the elite to decide who is or is not elite.

Perhaps, in 1957, when she wrote it, fear of communism and fascism and other collectivist disasters was very real and she saw herself as writing a cautionary tale against the submission of the needs of the individual to the needs of society. But that does not explain why she seems unable to distinguish between, say, the enforced starvation of one group for the benefit of another (usually more privileged) group and a government program to build schools. It also does not explain why so many modern day Objectivists equate income tax with slavery.

In Ayn Rand’s fairy tale, the collectivist Utopian dream of the looters ends in dystopia and apocalypse. It’s hard to imagine the Objectivist dream ending differently.

If you are one of the many people who wondered about the Maltese Falcon, you might enjoy this brief history.

In 1523, after a continual onslaught by the Ottoman forces, the Order was ejected from Rhodes and in 1530, under a Spanish Crown/Papal edict, were granted the island of Malta as a perpetual fiefdom in exchange for an annual fee of a Maltese falcon

Bibliodyssey

Lots of pretty pictures too.

I only had 15 minutes when I nipped into B&N during Jazz’s piano lesson and I wanted to pick up a copy of V for Vendetta for Dylan. Since he had dressed as him for Halloween, I thought it only fair that he read the book too.

I was distracted though by a display of mini hardback books by the door - ooh those clever marketing people! I am most cured of impulse book buying these days. I rarely buy books any more and the times when I would just walk past a bookshop and end up with three books on photography are long gone. But there was something about these books…they were calling my name like a tiny voice from the past.

The little books were on various subjects - physics, geometry, chemistry, about a dozen others - and I didn’t have much time so I just grabbed the philosophy one and the geometry one and rushed off to find V. On the way to the checkout I realised that I couldn’t go home with books for me and Dylan but nothing for Jazz so I picked up a quite beautiful Inuyasha book making this my biggest book purchase since 1999.

Oh my word, this book is fantastic. If you only ever read one book on philosophy, read this one. Every important point is illustrated with a joke and the jokes are hilarious. As I finish each chapter (all very short), I go do a stand up routine for my family to great applause. I am trying to pace my reading to make it last but it’s mostly unputdownable.

Here’s a sample joke, (adapted for my own nefarious purposes):

Atheist: Look! All the sheep on that hillside have been sheared!

Agnostic: Yes. On this side.

Read the introduction online. Then buy it. You’ll thank me for it even if you think posts on philosophy are too cerebral for a blog.

Still catching up on my book reviews here…

I have read a bunch of books about philosophers but I have never before read a book about philosophy. The trouble with reading about philosophers is that by that time you have slogged through 18 Greeks with similar sounding names they all blur into one and you can’t recall the difference between an atomist and an epicurean. It’s much easier to read about, say, ethics when it is all in one chapter.

Reading the book pretty much confirmed for me what Paul Graham said that the only thing 3000 years of philosophy has taught us is that there are limits to what we can know.

I am glad I read it but I won’t recommend it to anyone else.

The most disappointing thing was to read so many chapters about aesthetics, ethics, justice and morality and never once come across the word ‘evolution’. It seems a shocking oversight and I have written to Professor Grayling asking him to rectify that in a future edition.

I was really looking forward to reading this since I read an essay that Bart Ehrman wrote on the moment he lost his faith as a Born Again Christian.

I was pretty sure Professor Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me. He wrote: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake”.

This essay happens to be in the introduction of the book.

I was a little disappointed when I actually came to read Misquoting Jesus but that probably says more about my expectations than about the book itself. Last year I read the quite marvellous Who Wrote the Bible and I was expecting Erhman to do the same thing for the New Testament that Friedman did for the Old.

All the facts were there, and he did a bang up job of telling the story but, overall, I felt like he was trying too hard.

Where Friedman just told a fascinating story about a fascinating episode of our history, Erhman felt like he had an agenda - to persuade the people who believe that the bible is the literal Word of God that it was written by fallible humans with agendas of their own. Since I already believe it was written by fallible humans, the advocacy got in the way of my enjoyment and, since I already knew the broad thrust of the story, it didn’t go deep enough to quench my thirst for knowledge.

It was a good read for all that though. I firmly believe that if kids were taught the history of the bible in school, it would inoculate them from some of the weirder fantasies conjured up by the literalists and they could enjoy the text for the beautiful literature that it is (in parts).

Recommended!

For a long time, I have had a handful of questions that I kept handy in case I ran into a famous scientist but, one by one, I keep finding the answers to my questions. Questions like: “If the primates got wiped out, from which class would the next Intelligent Species to Dominate The World come?” (answer: Rodents. Thanks to Richard Dawkins in the Ancestors Tale - best book of the century so far).

My last remaining question was “How long would it take for all traces of humanity to disappear when we are gone?” so imagine my delight when I heard that someone had written a whole book on that very subject - The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

The answer is quite encouraging. Much better than I had dared hope.

Starting with the example of what happens to a barn when you cut an 18 inch hole in the roof and then working up through a house with a loose shingle (once the water gets in, it’s all over) he talks us through the destruction of New York City (reverts to forest in a 100 years and then the next ice age removes all trace (but see below about bronze statues)).

Some of our artifacts - like Houston and all its refineries - will cause 100s of years of pain before fading into nothingness but, on the whole, he expects the world to recover quite well. All the rivers will revert to their original courses and all the forests will grow back. In many cases, the original species will also recover and much of our meddling (wheat, cows, maize, dogs) will get eaten or out-competed very quickly.

Cats (and a few ornamental shrubs) are a sad exception to this rule. Apparently they are responsible for an avian holocaust (second only to plate glass in their ability to take down whole species). I always suspected that cats were evil and now I have confirmation.

Some of the best chapters in the book are about some accidental experiments where humanity has temporarily left an area because of war (Cyprus, Korea’s DMZ) or disaster (Chernobyl) and in each case the native species returned very very quickly or lived on when the same species became almost extinct in other areas.

I also enjoyed the mystery of why all the North American mega fauna died out around the same time that men with spears were crossing the Bering Strait (coincidence or…?). Don’t worry though. They will grow back. Not exactly the same of course. Maybe there will be Sabre Toothed Sloths and Giant Ground Tigers instead of what we had before. Meanwhile, we can join the campaign to Bring Back the Elephants!

More depressing are the sections that enumerate our waste products that will stick around for a long time like plastics, tyres, U-235 and dioxins but, one day, some clever bacteria will figure out what to do with them (except the U-235. nature will just have to learn to tolerate that). It’s actually quite shocking what we are doing with plastics and nuclear waste. Before I read the book, it was shocking in an abstract, distant way but now the problem appears quite real and close at hand.

Some of our artifacts that will be around longest include Mount Rushmore, bronze sculpture and the Voyager probes (which will probably outlast the earth) but they are all fairly innocuous so I don’t resent them too much.

All in all, I found the book very uplifting and it almost wants me to hasten our demise so that nature can make a start on restoring some of the beauty that we have destroyed. Which is why I just signed up with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

May we live long and die out!

I vaguely remember that my first hamster, Uncle Muncher, was named after a cartoon character but I didn’t remember anything more than that until…

…through the magic of Google:

BOBO BUNNY (early ’70s)

Surreal fare for the under eights. Bobo of the title was a blue rabbit, who lived with his family of assorted brightly coloured and bizarrely named rabbits, like cousin Read-to-me and Aunty Shut-that-door. Our favourite was Uncle Muncher who was orange, and ate everything in sight (”Oh no, Uncle Muncher has eaten the front door.”). Other stories in the comic were Pinkie Puff the Magic Elephant, and ‘We All Live in a Big Yellow Caravan’, in which around 30 people lived in a caravan that was both big and yellow.