Eight Little Piggies (Book review)

Eight Little Piggies S.J. Gould, 1993. Collection of Gould's essays in Nature since last book. As good as ever, but somewhat repetitious in his concerns, naturally. He seems unaware of complexity theory (CT), which amongst other things suggests that evolution must be "punctuated." CT holds that a complex system can exist in limited number of states. Change from one state to another may be very rapid, catastrophic even. Thus, if an organism is a complex system, then its form (genome or phenotype) has a limited number of stable states. Thus, selective pressure (or genetic drift?) would shift the form from one stable state to another very quickly. Intermediate forms are not stable, and therefore could not exist for very long. Anyhow, Gould's emphasis on non-Darwinian mechanism and processes in evolution solves a number of puzzles.
     The most moving essay tells of the snails in Tahiti, which have disappeared since a British scientist spent his whole life describing them as a base-line for future study of evolutionary changes. Makes you wanna cry. (August 1994)
     Comment 2012: I realised some time ago that the Gould-Eldridge hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium is Darwinian to its core: when an environment changes very slowly, there is little selective advantage in the vast majority of changes, so that selective pressure operates against change. Thus the equilibrium, a time of very slow evolution, driven almost entirely by genetic drift. Evolution is the effect of selective pressure on the genome. Natural selection will operate to drive rapid change when the environment changes rapidly, and to conserve existing genotypes when the environment changes slowly. The question then becomes, How rapidly must the environment change to promote rapid evolution? The answer, I think, is a function of the generational die-off rate of any given population of organisms. If the die-off is too high, the organism will become doubly extinct: it will cease to exist, and it will have no progeny.

The Nursery Rhyme Murders (Book review)

THE NURSERY RHYME MURDERS. Agatha Christie. (Dodd, Mead & Co, 1970). The biography inspired me to read some Christie again. This book was a rummage sale item, but a good "reading copy" as they say. And it is good reading, too, vintage Christie with just enough realism in the characters to get you involved and ignore the preposterousness of the murder methods. Poirot in Hickory Dickory Death is not at his best: Christie had tired of him by this time, and gave him a very mechanical role. Miss Marple in A Pocket Full of Rye is very good. This story is more of a psychological thriller, with the killer being a true psychopath: charming, self-centred, and utterly without pity. The Crooked House is unusual, in that the hero is only peripherally engaged in the solution, but is personally very much part of it, as he is engaged to one of the suspects.
     Update 2012: A Pocket Full of Rye and The Crooked House were dramatised as Poirot cases for TV. I didn't notice this change, which indicates a) that I don't know or take the canon as seriously as many other Christie fans; and b) that the investigator matters less than the plot.
     Footnote: I will be posting some of book notes from the past from time to time. This one dates from 1991.

White Elephant Dead (Book review)

Carolyn Hart White Elephant Dead (1999) One of a series featuring Annie and Max Darling, she the owner of “Death on Demand”, a bookstore specialising in mysteries; he principal of “Confidential Commissions”, a company specialising in solving problems, which Max occasionally does. As here, when a blackmailer turns up dead in a van collecting donations for the annual White Elephant sale on the island which serves as the setting for this traditional puzzle mystery. Four suspects, a tangled path to the solution, with a final twist.
      A genre-tale stands and falls on the illusion of reality; its universe is after all what Northrop Frye termed romance. The trick is to entice the reader into the fantasy and accept it as life-like, if not like life (a distinction beautifully explained by C S Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism). We want fully rounded main characters, and a cast of secondary characters with enough hints of back stories to give us the same feeling of living in a community that we get from real life: for we do not know all that much about most of the people we know. The physical setting, the weather, the ambiance must also give that impression of there being more than the words convey. The best genre stories do just that, and that’s why huge numbers of people happily enter their worlds, and make their authors very rich.
     This book is middling-average. It’s a workmanlike job, but it lacks that intensity that makes me want to find the other books in the series. The characters have tics rather than traits. Annie’s quirk of recalling mystery characters and plots as she goes about her work of detection becomes mildly irritating after a while. There are arch references to “other pleasures” in her relationship with Max, but little of the dialogue that reveals nuances of love and respect. We know too little of the secondary characters, which the blurb describes as “dotty eccentrics”, but which consist of one quirk each. The ambiance is vague, with generic talk of sunshine and cool shade and such. So what kept me reading? The puzzle, which is well done, well enough that I spent a couple of enjoyable hours with this book. **

Subways without people (link)

Eerie subway photos. Take a look here: Nick Frank's Subway Photos Nicely done. Show how digital has changed photography completely. ****

Kid uses trash electronics to make stuff (link)

Here's a link to an article on the MAKE blog about a kid who impressed MIT engineers. Kelvin Doe at MIT

The Illusion of Progress

That's the title of an article in a recent New Scientist. Thesis: that we have lost more technologies than we currently have. Good point, and illustrated in a variety of ways. For example, the ballpoint pen has nearly eliminated the fountain pen. But what if a crash of some kind eliminated the factories that make pens? We know, in a fuzzy historical-fiction kind of way, that goose quills and other feathers were used for writing. I don't think we'd have much trouble reinventing that technology. But what about the ink? Who knows how to use oak galls to make ink? Or soot and, well, what exactly?. Could one use other dark, brownish liquids, such as coffee? I've occasionally tried tinting paper with tea or coffee, and believe me, they don't work every well.

The rule is: new technologies displace old ones. Our cumulative knowledge doesn't include obsolete technologies. At any rate, most of us don't. Specialists in certain histories may have the book knowledge, but very, very few have any kind of hands-on skills. Curiously, archaeologists are the most likely to have such skills. They've learned them in order to understand the tools they find, and sort them from bits of naturally fractured rock that aren't tools.

Turn on the Heat (Book review)

A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) Turn on the Heat Another Bertha Cool - Donald Lam tale. In mood a noirish version of the Thin Man stories plus a mild satire on the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin genre. Pure pulp fiction. Lam tells the story, and does most of the legwork. Unlike Wolfe, agency head Bertha Cool doesn’t solve the case. As in the Wolfe novels, the plot is incredibly convoluted; but Fair plays fair with the clues, if you want to keep score. Unlike the Wolfe novels, the solution hides a good deal of the truth from the police. A pleasant enough entertainment, if you don’t read too critically. One oddity: the cover shows an electric typewriter, but the story is set ca. 1940, when it was written. **