The book I was talking about that I was reading while I made my last post (which was about another book that I had already read) was Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character (which is actually all the stories from two older books: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and What Do You Care What Other People Think). I finished it a while ago though. I guess I forgot to say anything about it here. Anyway, I'm still kind of sick right now (stomach was killing me yesterday) and don't feel up to giving this book a proper review, even though I have a lot that I could potentially say about it.
Actually, I'm kind of torn when it comes to this book: I don't know whether it's a fascinating and quirky set of mostly lighthearted stories that make for an easy and entertaining read or a mindblowing collection of some of the most profound stories I've ever read. Which one would be preferable anyway? I do highly recommend this though, especially since it's more convenient than reading the original two volumes separately.
Since then, I've finished another book. So now I need to find something else to read before I go to work today (would have already done so if I hadn't been sick in bed all yesterday and this morning). The book I just read is Blackout by Connie Willis. I don't normally read science fiction novels (or any novels for that matter) that are less than ten years old. Not out of principle or anything, it's just that there are so many good older books for me to read and they tend to be easier to find. Well, I'd read the two previous books in this "series" (or whatever you'd call it) earlier this year, and found out about this one while I was reading one of them, so I put it on hold.
My tendency to not read books that are too recent has probably just been reinforced. At first, I was excited to once again explore the world of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last. Comparing it to them, I found that there were more returning characters from the former, but that thematically it seemed more like the latter. About halfway through, I started to become a bit irritated, though. My train of thoughts went something like this, "The book keeps jumping back and forth between all these characters, but doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'm already halfway through this and I'm only just getting into it. This book isn't nearly as good as the other two. Well, finally we're getting somewhere. Wait, there doesn't seem to be enough book left here to finish the story. There's not going to be any room for denouement here. Something is wrong. Am I reading an unfinished book here? But nothing indicates that this is unfinished. Well, just a few more pages left, so let's see what happens. It's definitely implausible that this story will be finished by the time I reach the last page, but let's finish this weirdness. What's this? 'For the riveting conclusion to Blackout, be sure not to miss Connie Willis's All Clear. Coming from Spectra in Fall 2010.' Oh. Dammit, I'm never reading a recently published book again."
So yeah, somehow I'd missed the fact that I was reading the first volume of a two-volume story, the second of which is not even released yet. I know that there are other people who do that sort of thing. Like the people who waited eagerly in anticipation of each new book in the Harry Potter series or whatever. But I've never really been that guy, nor wanted to be. Enough of this. Time to find something else to read.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Book Review: The Hidden Forest by John R. Luoma (and a note about what I've been doing)
I haven't posted much on books here lately, and that really is because I haven't been reading as much. Up until this week, a lot of that could probably be attributed to playing Oblivion all the time. I've eased up on that for now.
Runswithsnails IV has come a long way since March and passed up his predecessors in every respect and then some. In fact, it's one of my little qualms with the game: it could be fun to do a character that focuses on blunt weapons and healing or one that only uses bows for damage and backs then up with illusion spells or one that uses poisoned daggers and sneak attacks or whatever. The possible specializations, while finite, are quite extensive. But because I'm such a completist, I had to go and make my first character one that can do anything.
Sure, I could make a character that specializes in only a few skills, but that character would be strictly inferior to the one I spent so much time on already, so there'd be no point. I mean, I do like my invincible character, I really do. But I wish the leveling system were more "choose your weapons" and less of a counter-intuitive mess that leaves you with a puny character if you don't know what you're doing, but lets you take as big a slice of the broken pie as you want if you are willing to put in the effort. And I ended up taking the whole pie.
Right now, Runswithsnails has completed every quest in the entire game (including all the official plug-ins and the expansion) that can be completed except for the ones that require the character to get kicked out of a guild and one other one. Also, when I called him invincible, I kind of meant it: his gear gives him 101% Reflect Damage and 110% Resist Magic, so the only things enemies can use (successfully) on him are arrows, and he'll win any shoot-out because he has maxed out armor rating, insane healing, maxed out marksmanship, a bow that will eat your soul, and the option to become completely undetectable whenever he feels like it. So while I haven't cleared out all of the dungeons littering the world, it's basically a formality.
And with all that in mind, I've been cutting back (somewhat) on video games in favor of reading and stuff. I'm halfway through a book that is absolutely fantastic, so I suppose I'll say some words about my most recent read: The Hidden Forest. I borrowed this book from a friend a while back. I initially declined the offer because I knew from circumstances at the time that it would be a while before I'd have a chance to read it, but he insisted, and now I'm kind of glad that he did, as it's not a book I would normally have read. I think it's the only book with ecology as its main subject that I've actually read, and broadening my horizons is cool.
The most impressive thing about this book is, by far, the content. It's a short read, about 200 pages, but it's packed with interesting information. I've studied biology and had some notion of most of the processes that Luoma writes about, but not at this level of detail. While I don't know how many books have that information, I know that lots of books carry information of the same sort. But the parts about the history of forestry, up to very recent history indeed at the time the book was written (1999), were unlike anything I'd encountered before and were certainly the main force behind this work. Given the choice, I'd read a more general account of the history of forestry rather than this one, which is more specifically confined to a single research forest, but it was enlightening nevertheless.
That's the good. Now for the bad. Maybe I'm spoiled because lately I've been reading good science writers. I know bad science writers are out there in droves, but I've been reading the really good ones. Luoma just doesn't compare to the great writers I've grown accustomed to. If it's possible to rate style and ignore actual content, I'd say that while none of this is awful, none of it is great either. It looks like it should be a draft, perhaps a late draft, but not the final product.
On a lighter note, The Hidden Forest is dated, sometimes hilariously so. And 1999 doesn't sound like a long time ago to me, but I guess it was. I got a kick out of him using "World Wide Web" with the capital letters like that and a bigger one from "electronic mail" (I hadn't seen e-mail called "electronic mail" since, well, probably before this book was written). He also made some of the technologies he described researchers using sound awesome and oh-so-very advanced when now it all seems pretty routine.
If that was the worst of it, I'd be praising this book as a solid introduction to the topics discussed. But sometimes, The Hidden Forest inexplicably takes a turn for the stupid. Since I still haven't returned the book, I just flipped through it for a particularly egregious example...
...or not. Wait. Oh wow, that's even worse than I remembered. I was planning to write something emphasizing that my issues with this excerpt aren't just me being pedantic, but that this is seriously messed up. I would then have addressed the problems. But now that I've transcribed it and seen just how many errors there are, I don't even want to bother. So I'll just color the offending parts...
Orange = Misinterpretation of the facts.
Yellow = Doesn't make sense.
Green = Really stupid diction
And that's just the parts I could note by changing the word color. All this leaves me wondering just how accurate the rest of the book is. I was easily able to spot errors like the conflation of glucose and sucrose because of my chemistry background. But when Luoma writes about fields where I have little knowledge, I'm a lot less likely to catch such errors.
That's the bad. Now for the ugly.
The end. Seriously, the end is the worst part. It gets very, very ugly. Luoma kept things relatively apolitical for the first 200 pages or so. He covered controversy and disputes over logging, but did so in a convincingly journalistic manner, not taking sides but telling story and at least looking like it's an objective rendition (whether it is or not is another matter). Then in the last handful of pages, he goes off the deep end, delving into philosophy of science (a field that Luoma is apparently clueless about) to explain why ecological research isn't getting enough funding, then seemingly arbitrarily hating on the space program and advocating that ecological research should get that money instead.
This is one of my pet peeves. There are lots of people who think that sure, space is cool and all, but we have so many problems down here on Earth, so let's just stop spending so much money on space and use that money for things that are more important because, after all, space will still be there once we deal with this other stuff. Do I really need to point out that, with that line of reasoning, we'd be cutting ourselves off from space travel forever? There will always be something more important or more pressing. Suck it up. If you want more funding for ecological research, fine, but don't attack the space program.
Runswithsnails IV has come a long way since March and passed up his predecessors in every respect and then some. In fact, it's one of my little qualms with the game: it could be fun to do a character that focuses on blunt weapons and healing or one that only uses bows for damage and backs then up with illusion spells or one that uses poisoned daggers and sneak attacks or whatever. The possible specializations, while finite, are quite extensive. But because I'm such a completist, I had to go and make my first character one that can do anything.
Sure, I could make a character that specializes in only a few skills, but that character would be strictly inferior to the one I spent so much time on already, so there'd be no point. I mean, I do like my invincible character, I really do. But I wish the leveling system were more "choose your weapons" and less of a counter-intuitive mess that leaves you with a puny character if you don't know what you're doing, but lets you take as big a slice of the broken pie as you want if you are willing to put in the effort. And I ended up taking the whole pie.
Right now, Runswithsnails has completed every quest in the entire game (including all the official plug-ins and the expansion) that can be completed except for the ones that require the character to get kicked out of a guild and one other one. Also, when I called him invincible, I kind of meant it: his gear gives him 101% Reflect Damage and 110% Resist Magic, so the only things enemies can use (successfully) on him are arrows, and he'll win any shoot-out because he has maxed out armor rating, insane healing, maxed out marksmanship, a bow that will eat your soul, and the option to become completely undetectable whenever he feels like it. So while I haven't cleared out all of the dungeons littering the world, it's basically a formality.
And with all that in mind, I've been cutting back (somewhat) on video games in favor of reading and stuff. I'm halfway through a book that is absolutely fantastic, so I suppose I'll say some words about my most recent read: The Hidden Forest. I borrowed this book from a friend a while back. I initially declined the offer because I knew from circumstances at the time that it would be a while before I'd have a chance to read it, but he insisted, and now I'm kind of glad that he did, as it's not a book I would normally have read. I think it's the only book with ecology as its main subject that I've actually read, and broadening my horizons is cool.
The most impressive thing about this book is, by far, the content. It's a short read, about 200 pages, but it's packed with interesting information. I've studied biology and had some notion of most of the processes that Luoma writes about, but not at this level of detail. While I don't know how many books have that information, I know that lots of books carry information of the same sort. But the parts about the history of forestry, up to very recent history indeed at the time the book was written (1999), were unlike anything I'd encountered before and were certainly the main force behind this work. Given the choice, I'd read a more general account of the history of forestry rather than this one, which is more specifically confined to a single research forest, but it was enlightening nevertheless.
That's the good. Now for the bad. Maybe I'm spoiled because lately I've been reading good science writers. I know bad science writers are out there in droves, but I've been reading the really good ones. Luoma just doesn't compare to the great writers I've grown accustomed to. If it's possible to rate style and ignore actual content, I'd say that while none of this is awful, none of it is great either. It looks like it should be a draft, perhaps a late draft, but not the final product.
On a lighter note, The Hidden Forest is dated, sometimes hilariously so. And 1999 doesn't sound like a long time ago to me, but I guess it was. I got a kick out of him using "World Wide Web" with the capital letters like that and a bigger one from "electronic mail" (I hadn't seen e-mail called "electronic mail" since, well, probably before this book was written). He also made some of the technologies he described researchers using sound awesome and oh-so-very advanced when now it all seems pretty routine.
If that was the worst of it, I'd be praising this book as a solid introduction to the topics discussed. But sometimes, The Hidden Forest inexplicably takes a turn for the stupid. Since I still haven't returned the book, I just flipped through it for a particularly egregious example...
...or not. Wait. Oh wow, that's even worse than I remembered. I was planning to write something emphasizing that my issues with this excerpt aren't just me being pedantic, but that this is seriously messed up. I would then have addressed the problems. But now that I've transcribed it and seen just how many errors there are, I don't even want to bother. So I'll just color the offending parts...
Snap a photograph with a camera and you engage in a photochemical instant: a pattern of light moving through the lens hammers its photons at a silver-sensitized bit of film, photochemically reconfiguring the molecules into a pattern that will become an image on a negative. Similarly, a photon hurtles its way into a molecule of the pigment chlorophyll and triggers a chain reaction, destabilizing a "light trap" molecule so vigorously, and exciting its spinning electrons so wildly, that one electron from a molecule in the green light-trap literally achieves escape velocity and spins out of orbit. All in an instant of time, that wildly careering electron hurtles its way into the orbit around an atom behind it, in turn energizing and destabilizing that atom, until one of its own electrons spins out into the next atom in the chain. The pattern replicates in the next atom, and the consequence blazes through the green membrane and into a wet solution of water and proteins. There, the sheer force of energy that moved electron to electron severs the strong bonds between hydrogen and oxygen in a water molecule. The foundation act of photosynthesis has been accomplished.Red = Complete factual error.
The split of a water molecule leaves free atoms of oxygen, which snap furiously together in pairs and then diffuse out of the leaf's stomata, the pores that allow it to breathe O2—the oxygen of the atmosphere. Trees and other plants manufacture the Earth's atmosphere. Virtually all of the oxygen in the air we breathe was made by green plants, photosynthesizing over hundreds of millions of years, ripping apart molecules of water for the benefit of their hydrogen, sending the residual oxygen into the skies.
In the leaf, the liberated hydrogen proceeds through a series of tightly linked reactions with enzymes in a complex process called, with intimations of mysticism, the dark phase. Just as oxygen has diffused out of the stomata, carbon dioxide has diffused in. Now the hydrogen atoms and enzymes react with that carbon dioxide.
The finished product is a molecule made of one carbon, two hydrogens, and an oxygen. You can find it abundant not only in the sap of the living tree but, for that matter, in packets on the table of any diner. It is sucrose, simple table sugar. The sweet of the sugarcane or of the beet or of maple sap is simply an amplification of the sugar-rich bath in which every plant cell lives. It is photosynthate, the child of sun, and carbon in the air, and photosynthesis.
Scientists, in their labs, have tried to replicate this wonder. To a degree, they've succeeded. With enormous, detailed effort and excellent equipment, a trained scientist can indeed produce a few motes of sugar from the same basic chemical recipe. But perhaps an ornamental maple sits outside the window of that clever scientist's laboratory. If that tree happens to be mature, and in full leaf, it offers to the sun, in layers, about half an acre of total leaf surface. That half acre of leaf absorbs some 188 million calories of sunlight per hour, just under thee billion calories on a long midsummer day. If each square meter of leaf is photosynthesizing optimally, it produces about a gram of sugar per hour. Over the course of one growing season, the biochemist might dither with high-tech equipment to produce an iota of sugar. In the same time, the tree silently produces about two tons.
Orange = Misinterpretation of the facts.
Yellow = Doesn't make sense.
Green = Really stupid diction
And that's just the parts I could note by changing the word color. All this leaves me wondering just how accurate the rest of the book is. I was easily able to spot errors like the conflation of glucose and sucrose because of my chemistry background. But when Luoma writes about fields where I have little knowledge, I'm a lot less likely to catch such errors.
That's the bad. Now for the ugly.
The end. Seriously, the end is the worst part. It gets very, very ugly. Luoma kept things relatively apolitical for the first 200 pages or so. He covered controversy and disputes over logging, but did so in a convincingly journalistic manner, not taking sides but telling story and at least looking like it's an objective rendition (whether it is or not is another matter). Then in the last handful of pages, he goes off the deep end, delving into philosophy of science (a field that Luoma is apparently clueless about) to explain why ecological research isn't getting enough funding, then seemingly arbitrarily hating on the space program and advocating that ecological research should get that money instead.
This is one of my pet peeves. There are lots of people who think that sure, space is cool and all, but we have so many problems down here on Earth, so let's just stop spending so much money on space and use that money for things that are more important because, after all, space will still be there once we deal with this other stuff. Do I really need to point out that, with that line of reasoning, we'd be cutting ourselves off from space travel forever? There will always be something more important or more pressing. Suck it up. If you want more funding for ecological research, fine, but don't attack the space program.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)