The High Window
Raymond Chandler
Mystery
I got this to fill a gap in the collection. To be honest, it's not one of Chandler's better books. The plot is by turns too baroque and too obvious, and there are too many characters who make an appearance and disappear again for no apparent purpose. It does contain some sharp character portraits, descriptive prose, and dialogue, though, so it's hardly a total loss. Marlowe's role as knight-errant is unusually explicit in this one; there's only one person in the story who's really a victim, and that's who Marlowe chooses to help.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
*coughs modestly*
Check out what I said about why humans, unlike other primates, don't have a dominant male who controls mating opportunities.
Nice to see that those scientist johnnies are following up on my lead. Leave me a comment if you need to know where to send my share of the prizes.
Nice to see that those scientist johnnies are following up on my lead. Leave me a comment if you need to know where to send my share of the prizes.
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Book Review: The World in a Grain
The World in a Grain: The story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
Vince Beiser
Engineering, ecology
Hooray! I thought. Another biography-of-a-substance book! And one that promises to amply fulfill the implied contract of all such books, viz., to take a thing that nobody thinks about and make us think about it.
Chapter 1, the introduction, met all my expectations. Did you know there's a sand mafia--which sounds funny, except that they kill people? That the Arab states import sand, because desert sand isn't suitable for making concrete (it's too rounded)? That China alone used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century? That there's an impending sand shortage?
With all that, I figured chapter 2 would dive into the basic facts. I was hoping to find out something about the geology of sand, the geography of sand, the chemistry of sand, how sand moves, maybe a little history.
These things are not in chapter 2. They're not anywere in the book, except in small incidental doses. That's because The World in a Grain isn't really about sand. It's about advocacy journalism. Vince Beiser is a Prophet rather than a Wizard. He wants to sound the trumpet, rally the troops, sing a few choruses of "We Shall Overcome," and basically change the world. Sand--specifically concrete--is something we're addicted to, he says, and it's bad for us. Repent, ye sinners!
Oh, he does his best to be objective. He interviews people who are in favor of commercial fracking-sand mining as well as those who are opposed. He scrupulously describes positives of things like roads as well as negatives. But his heart clearly isn't in it. A few examples:
Vince Beiser
Engineering, ecology
Hooray! I thought. Another biography-of-a-substance book! And one that promises to amply fulfill the implied contract of all such books, viz., to take a thing that nobody thinks about and make us think about it.
Chapter 1, the introduction, met all my expectations. Did you know there's a sand mafia--which sounds funny, except that they kill people? That the Arab states import sand, because desert sand isn't suitable for making concrete (it's too rounded)? That China alone used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century? That there's an impending sand shortage?
With all that, I figured chapter 2 would dive into the basic facts. I was hoping to find out something about the geology of sand, the geography of sand, the chemistry of sand, how sand moves, maybe a little history.
These things are not in chapter 2. They're not anywere in the book, except in small incidental doses. That's because The World in a Grain isn't really about sand. It's about advocacy journalism. Vince Beiser is a Prophet rather than a Wizard. He wants to sound the trumpet, rally the troops, sing a few choruses of "We Shall Overcome," and basically change the world. Sand--specifically concrete--is something we're addicted to, he says, and it's bad for us. Repent, ye sinners!
Oh, he does his best to be objective. He interviews people who are in favor of commercial fracking-sand mining as well as those who are opposed. He scrupulously describes positives of things like roads as well as negatives. But his heart clearly isn't in it. A few examples:
- "When pressed, though, [anti-desertification entrepreneur Wang Wenbiao] acknowledges that about half of the company's $6 billion in annual revenues come from "traditional" industries, including chemical production and coal power plants." This dig--I could cite many similar examples--contributes nothing to understanding the topic of the chapter (which is "can China stop deserts by planting trees?"). Its only purpose is to imply, without saying it, that Wang Wenbiao is morally compromised.
- "The bigger question is, can the planet handle the whole way of life that Dubai both represents and embodies--the air-conditioned, car-dependent, energy-dependent, resource-intensive 'good life'?" Gosh, thanks for pointing that out, complete with scare quotes. I would never have thought of it myself.
- "In an ideal world, [fracking-derived oil and gas] could be replaced with solar and wind power." Yes, and in an ideal world magic sparkly pink unicorns would cure cancer and poop ice cream. This is not that world, nor is it likely to become so.
- "At the same time that freeways have brought these benefits, though, they have also hollowed out cities, killed off countless small towns, wreaked environmental havoc, and spawned a car-dependent culture based on sprawling suburbs and soulless shopping malls." Agree a thousand percent. Go write a book about it, Vince--a different book. In this book, passages like this read like mere venting.
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Book Review: Talk on the Wild Side
Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't Be Tamed
Lane Greene
Linguistics
I'd probably like Talk on the Wild Side better if I could pinpoint what it's about. Nominally, the topic is something like "how do people react when confronted with the ambiguity of natural language"? If that sounds a bit unfocused, you've put your finger on the issue.
It begins tamely enough, with a couple chapters lightly bashing linguistic prescriptivists--material that will be familiar to readers of Stephen Pinker and John McWhorter. There's a long digression where Greene takes pot shots at one particular grammar loon, one who's apparently a big noise among the kind of critics who conflate crankiness with eloquence. It's amusing enough. There's a more sympathetic pass at the people who have tried to create genuinely logical artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban). That's interesting, although the only point seems to be that not many people speak these tongues.
Then we start getting into the tangled history of machine translation, symbolic AI, and deep learning. Okay, that's a sidestep, but I see the connection. Natural language is chaotic and ambiguous and hasn't been "tamed" by rule-based methods (current translation algorithms are, loosely speaking, statistical in nature).
Then we turn to vowel shifts, pronunciation, and the fact that words drift in meaning over time. Has someone been disputing that there have been changes in pronunciation? But, sure, there are probably people out there proclaiming that the changes must stop here and now. The next chapter, though, is about the politicization of languages--minority languages, language nationalism, and so forth. It's starting to get a bit ambiguous as to who's doing the taming here. Are the Quebecois, who have succeeded in making Quebec markedly more francophone, really domesticating English? It's more like they're just replacing it. This drifts into a discussion of different registers of political speech.
Oh, and somewhere in there Greene talked about code-switching (shifting into and out of standard English as the occasion demands; he's for it), language acquisition in children, what constitutes good writing . . .
It's all pretty interesting, taken piecewise. It's entertainingly written, too. What the whole thing adds up to, though, is harder to discern--other than an appreciation of "wild" language. Greene works at The Economist; his book might have worked better as a series of connected articles in that publication.
Lane Greene
Linguistics
I'd probably like Talk on the Wild Side better if I could pinpoint what it's about. Nominally, the topic is something like "how do people react when confronted with the ambiguity of natural language"? If that sounds a bit unfocused, you've put your finger on the issue.
It begins tamely enough, with a couple chapters lightly bashing linguistic prescriptivists--material that will be familiar to readers of Stephen Pinker and John McWhorter. There's a long digression where Greene takes pot shots at one particular grammar loon, one who's apparently a big noise among the kind of critics who conflate crankiness with eloquence. It's amusing enough. There's a more sympathetic pass at the people who have tried to create genuinely logical artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban). That's interesting, although the only point seems to be that not many people speak these tongues.
Then we start getting into the tangled history of machine translation, symbolic AI, and deep learning. Okay, that's a sidestep, but I see the connection. Natural language is chaotic and ambiguous and hasn't been "tamed" by rule-based methods (current translation algorithms are, loosely speaking, statistical in nature).
Then we turn to vowel shifts, pronunciation, and the fact that words drift in meaning over time. Has someone been disputing that there have been changes in pronunciation? But, sure, there are probably people out there proclaiming that the changes must stop here and now. The next chapter, though, is about the politicization of languages--minority languages, language nationalism, and so forth. It's starting to get a bit ambiguous as to who's doing the taming here. Are the Quebecois, who have succeeded in making Quebec markedly more francophone, really domesticating English? It's more like they're just replacing it. This drifts into a discussion of different registers of political speech.
Oh, and somewhere in there Greene talked about code-switching (shifting into and out of standard English as the occasion demands; he's for it), language acquisition in children, what constitutes good writing . . .
It's all pretty interesting, taken piecewise. It's entertainingly written, too. What the whole thing adds up to, though, is harder to discern--other than an appreciation of "wild" language. Greene works at The Economist; his book might have worked better as a series of connected articles in that publication.
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Book Review: Never Home Alone
Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
Rob Dunn
Nature, medicine
Don't read this book if you're squeamish. Really, seriously, don't. It'll make you want to burn your house down and then shower with industrial-grade solvents and then cover yourself with sterilized plastic wrap and you still won't feel safe.
If you are lacking squeams, Never Home Alone is a very good book about . . . well, it's about several things. Most fundamentally, it's a celebration of the microbial ecosystem. Dunn's major point, I think, is that we are deeply mistaken if we think that we can exist--much less thrive--separate from the fungi, bacteria, protists, microscopic crustaceans, etc. etc. etc. that surround us. In the first place, we evolved to live with them. In the second place, they're everywhere. In the third place, heavy-handed attempts to engineer this microenvironment tend to go awry, sometimes spectacularly so--wiping out benign strains of Staphylococcus both weakens the immune response and leaves a gap for virulent strains to fill, for example.
Okay, there's a little bit of drum-beating for these ideas going on. Thankfully, it's comparatively muted. Even more thankfully, it's backed up by sound observation and testable hypotheses, which is not invariably the case.
Dunn writes in a pleasingly non-technical style, so Never Home Alone should be accessible to almost any reader. (He's also restrained in using the vertical pronoun--also not invariably the case, and nice to see.) He even offers readers a number of ways to join in the scientific fun. If you have any interest at all in natural history, you should read this book.
Me, I'm off to change my showerhead.
This book pairs nicely with Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes. It also overlaps thematically somewhat with Charles C. Mann's superb The Wizard And the Prophet, particularly in its critique of the technocratic approach to environmental problems.
Rob Dunn
Nature, medicine
Don't read this book if you're squeamish. Really, seriously, don't. It'll make you want to burn your house down and then shower with industrial-grade solvents and then cover yourself with sterilized plastic wrap and you still won't feel safe.
If you are lacking squeams, Never Home Alone is a very good book about . . . well, it's about several things. Most fundamentally, it's a celebration of the microbial ecosystem. Dunn's major point, I think, is that we are deeply mistaken if we think that we can exist--much less thrive--separate from the fungi, bacteria, protists, microscopic crustaceans, etc. etc. etc. that surround us. In the first place, we evolved to live with them. In the second place, they're everywhere. In the third place, heavy-handed attempts to engineer this microenvironment tend to go awry, sometimes spectacularly so--wiping out benign strains of Staphylococcus both weakens the immune response and leaves a gap for virulent strains to fill, for example.
Okay, there's a little bit of drum-beating for these ideas going on. Thankfully, it's comparatively muted. Even more thankfully, it's backed up by sound observation and testable hypotheses, which is not invariably the case.
Dunn writes in a pleasingly non-technical style, so Never Home Alone should be accessible to almost any reader. (He's also restrained in using the vertical pronoun--also not invariably the case, and nice to see.) He even offers readers a number of ways to join in the scientific fun. If you have any interest at all in natural history, you should read this book.
Me, I'm off to change my showerhead.
This book pairs nicely with Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes. It also overlaps thematically somewhat with Charles C. Mann's superb The Wizard And the Prophet, particularly in its critique of the technocratic approach to environmental problems.
Sunday, January 13, 2019
Book Review: Capitalism in America
Capitalism in America: A History
Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge
Economics, history
Capitalism: Alan Greenspan is for it!
No, that's not the whole review. For the first half of Capitalism in America I thought that it might be, though. That's the half that's purely descriptive. It's stuffed full of statistics, sure enough, and not badly written, but it's a fairly standard economic history of the U.S. into the early 20th century. I already knew that railroads were important, that slavery was bad, that Standard Oil was big; Capitalism in America added only some numbers to my knowledge, which I have since largely forgotten.
The book gets more interesting when the authors finally start constructing an argument, instead of a play-by-play. Thank the reformers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who put the brakes on the laissez-faire free-for-all. Greenspan and Wooldridge have to come to grips with what they did, which forces them to assess the system's successes and failures. The result is a pretty good argument for capitalism, broadly speaking, as an engine for innovation and as a proven way of lifting people out of poverty.
That's not to say that I think their analysis is a complete success. On the contrary, I think it's open to some fairly serious criticism. For example, Capitalism in America rightly contains some ringing denunciations of the slave economy. Good for you, gentlemen! But nowhere--literally nowhere--does it acknowledge that this country's 19th-century prosperity was based on spending down a metaphorical trust fund, consisting of land that had been looted from its native inhabitants. It's easy to make one group (white settlers) prosperous by making another group (Native Americans) poor. How much should we credit that to the success of capitalism vs. the profits of theft? Greenspan and Wooldridge are silent.
Similarly, G&W are decidedly . . . let's say "myopic" . . . when it comes to their critique of the New Deal. They make a fuss, several times over, about the fact that the New Deal recovery under FDR was interrupted by a second downturn in 1937. They do not see fit to mention that many other economists blame that downturn on FDR's premature decision to end a lot of New Deal spending in favor of balancing the budget. They also fall into the classic trap of saying that "It wasn't government spending that ended the Depression; it was World War II." Okay, and World War II did this how? Hint: who paid for all of those tanks, airplanes, salaries, jeeps, Liberty Ships, prophylactics, bullets, cans of Spam, uniforms, etc.? Could it have been the U.S. government? Why, I believe it could!
Perhaps the most telling small indicator of this myopia comes near the very end of Capitalism in America. "There were good reasons for complaining" about the effects of industrial capitalism, the authors concede. . "Deaths from industrial accidents in Pittsburgh per 100,000 residents almost doubled . . . between 1870 and 1900." Then, in the very next sentence, "Politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson whipped up all this discontent into successful political movements" (emphasis added). Note that verb phrase. Now, "whipped up" is a dismissive phrase. The strong implication is that those people who were complaining about the doubling of the death rate were a bunch of slow-witted hoi polloi malcontents, who--instead of being property grateful for the beneficence of their betters--were so crass as to actually agitate for a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The nerve! What right did they have to interfere with the process of accumulating wealth, by questioning the purposes for which the wealth was accumulated?
What's particularly ironic is that it's a version of an argument that southern slaveholders used. Chattel slavery (they avowed) made the country richer as a whole. If some people were the losers in that process, well, too bad for them. Greenspan and Wooldridge would surely have no truck with that version of history; but when it comes to more recent developments they are blind to the parallel.
In the end, Capitalism in America is what I'd call tactically convincing. Its final argument--in favor of "creative destruction" (a cliche that the book rather overuses), and against the growth in entitlements and regulation--is well put, and well-supported by facts. I'm not unsympathetic. It's easy to close the book thinking, "well, that makes sense." But I've read other books that take the same facts, put a different slant on them, and evoke the same reaction towards a quite different set of policies. It's worth reading, but not worth accepting uncritically.
One of the best books on finance out there is Liaquat Ahamed's The Lords of Finance, focusing specifically on the role of central bankers and the gold standard in bringing on the Great Depression. Broader, and also excellent, is Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes/Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics.
Also, G&W refer several times to Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands. I didn't like the latter book much, but I have to say that future historians could be pardoned for thinking that it was describing a completely different country than the one in Capitalism in America.
Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge
Economics, history
Capitalism: Alan Greenspan is for it!
No, that's not the whole review. For the first half of Capitalism in America I thought that it might be, though. That's the half that's purely descriptive. It's stuffed full of statistics, sure enough, and not badly written, but it's a fairly standard economic history of the U.S. into the early 20th century. I already knew that railroads were important, that slavery was bad, that Standard Oil was big; Capitalism in America added only some numbers to my knowledge, which I have since largely forgotten.
The book gets more interesting when the authors finally start constructing an argument, instead of a play-by-play. Thank the reformers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who put the brakes on the laissez-faire free-for-all. Greenspan and Wooldridge have to come to grips with what they did, which forces them to assess the system's successes and failures. The result is a pretty good argument for capitalism, broadly speaking, as an engine for innovation and as a proven way of lifting people out of poverty.
That's not to say that I think their analysis is a complete success. On the contrary, I think it's open to some fairly serious criticism. For example, Capitalism in America rightly contains some ringing denunciations of the slave economy. Good for you, gentlemen! But nowhere--literally nowhere--does it acknowledge that this country's 19th-century prosperity was based on spending down a metaphorical trust fund, consisting of land that had been looted from its native inhabitants. It's easy to make one group (white settlers) prosperous by making another group (Native Americans) poor. How much should we credit that to the success of capitalism vs. the profits of theft? Greenspan and Wooldridge are silent.
Similarly, G&W are decidedly . . . let's say "myopic" . . . when it comes to their critique of the New Deal. They make a fuss, several times over, about the fact that the New Deal recovery under FDR was interrupted by a second downturn in 1937. They do not see fit to mention that many other economists blame that downturn on FDR's premature decision to end a lot of New Deal spending in favor of balancing the budget. They also fall into the classic trap of saying that "It wasn't government spending that ended the Depression; it was World War II." Okay, and World War II did this how? Hint: who paid for all of those tanks, airplanes, salaries, jeeps, Liberty Ships, prophylactics, bullets, cans of Spam, uniforms, etc.? Could it have been the U.S. government? Why, I believe it could!
Perhaps the most telling small indicator of this myopia comes near the very end of Capitalism in America. "There were good reasons for complaining" about the effects of industrial capitalism, the authors concede. . "Deaths from industrial accidents in Pittsburgh per 100,000 residents almost doubled . . . between 1870 and 1900." Then, in the very next sentence, "Politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson whipped up all this discontent into successful political movements" (emphasis added). Note that verb phrase. Now, "whipped up" is a dismissive phrase. The strong implication is that those people who were complaining about the doubling of the death rate were a bunch of slow-witted hoi polloi malcontents, who--instead of being property grateful for the beneficence of their betters--were so crass as to actually agitate for a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The nerve! What right did they have to interfere with the process of accumulating wealth, by questioning the purposes for which the wealth was accumulated?
What's particularly ironic is that it's a version of an argument that southern slaveholders used. Chattel slavery (they avowed) made the country richer as a whole. If some people were the losers in that process, well, too bad for them. Greenspan and Wooldridge would surely have no truck with that version of history; but when it comes to more recent developments they are blind to the parallel.
In the end, Capitalism in America is what I'd call tactically convincing. Its final argument--in favor of "creative destruction" (a cliche that the book rather overuses), and against the growth in entitlements and regulation--is well put, and well-supported by facts. I'm not unsympathetic. It's easy to close the book thinking, "well, that makes sense." But I've read other books that take the same facts, put a different slant on them, and evoke the same reaction towards a quite different set of policies. It's worth reading, but not worth accepting uncritically.
One of the best books on finance out there is Liaquat Ahamed's The Lords of Finance, focusing specifically on the role of central bankers and the gold standard in bringing on the Great Depression. Broader, and also excellent, is Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes/Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics.
Also, G&W refer several times to Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands. I didn't like the latter book much, but I have to say that future historians could be pardoned for thinking that it was describing a completely different country than the one in Capitalism in America.
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