Philip J. Davis. The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn (1989)

     Philip J. Davis The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn (1989) A charming book, telling how the author, a mathematician, became curious about Pafnuty, the first name of his hero, Pafnuty Lvovitch Tschebyscheff, a pioneer in the mathematics of approximation. Approximation has become a central motif of computing, since every computer can calculate only to some finite number of decimal places. It was the rounding off the 17th digit to display a 16-digit result that led to the discovery of chaos theory. That tiny difference of a few parts in 100 quadrillion made all the difference when the result was fed back into the equations for a second run of a weather prediction model.
     But I digress. Which is what Davis does. Some of his digressions are personal, some technical, some historical. But he leads us down these byways so gracefully that we hardly notice that we are moving further and further away from the ostensible theme of the book: whare does the name Pafnuty come from? Davis brings the thread of his narrative back to this question several times, and finally gives us the answer: it derives from an Egyptian god’s name.
     Along the way, Davis instructs us in all manner of interesting facts. He illustrates one of my dicta: There is no such thing as useless knowledge; at the very least, a fact will serve to link two others. I’ll now add another corollary: and usually, this linkage satisfies our thirst for order and meaning. For order and meaning are fancy words for linkages.
     This is the second time I've read the book, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time. ****

John Updike. The Same Door (1964)

     John Updike. The Same Door (1964) Updike’s first collection, mostly from The New Yorker. The earlier stories have the feel of experiments, but his melancholy view of the world is there already, as is his acute awareness of social class. North Americans deny the existence and/or importance of social class; Updike is one of many writers who remind us how wrong we are to do so. But unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates, who tends to look at lower class life from above, Updike merely shows us what’s there. These stories tell more of adolescence, while his later books tell of young married life and the onset of middle age. Updike chronicles our lives; he observes accurately but without rancour. But this book will be enough Updike for a while. The stories range from *-1/2 to ***. (2002)

John Updike. The Music School (1966)

     John Updike. The Music School (1966) A very sixties collection, in which we see Updike’s other great gift, the ability to show you the nature of the times. These people’s choices are circumscribed by self-generated limits, mostly unconscious, certainly unexamined. At the same time, the heroes and heroines of these stories break social conventions, not from any sense that these conventions need changing, but simply because they get in the way of the fulfilment of desire. A more uneven collection than Museums and Women; Updike is still trying out what he can do. **½

John Updike. Museums and Women (1972)

     John Updike. Museums and Women (1972) A collection of Updike’s stories from the 60s and 70s. Most of these were first published in the New Yorker, and it shows. These are New Yorker stories, and then some. All the same, Updike has a gift that transcends that genre. From time to time his sentences make you gasp. He felt her wonder, Who is this child? It was as if the roof of the house were torn off, displaying the depths of the night sky. (From “Solitaire”.)
     He is very good at delineating that vague melancholy that invades people who have nothing much to struggle for, and have found no compelling passion in their lives. They just go on doing what they do because they can think of nothing else that they would rather do. They want happiness, yet their search for it is undercut by a suspicion that they don’t know what happiness is. Updike’s people have everything they could desire, and nothing that they really want. A steady diet of Updike causes a kind of spiritual queasiness. One wonders whether anything has a any sort of point. *** (2002)

Stephen Jay Gould. The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2000)

     Stephen Jay Gould. The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2000) These essays are grouped, the first bunch telling the early history of palaeontology and evolutionary theory. The latter group are a mixed bag. In this collection Gould exhibits a vice that must grow with the awareness that one has made it as an author: he overwrites, rambling on with numerous digressions (and many that aren’t, like the one in this parenthesis), he repeats himself, he builds tangled sentences. In other words, his style gets in the way, which for him is some achievement. Nonetheless, the information is as sound as recourse to original sources can make it, and he does his usual job of debunking common misconceptions and clarifying and deepening common vaguenesses. A book worth reading, despite its flaws.
     He’s especially useful in reminding us that, given a stable environment, organisms will not change - that natural selection can work to stabilise as well as change an organism’s form. *** (2002)
     Update 2020 03 16: Natural slection will also not select against neutral mutations. Hence genetic drift can create subspecies. Also, organisms with insufficient genetic variability are likely to die out if and when habitat changes. That's why rapid habait change will cause extinctions. And because we humans cause rapid habitat change, we also cause extinctions.

Mark Buchanan, Ubiquity (2000)

     Mark Buchanan Ubiquity (2000) A discussion of the concept of the critical state as it applies to diverse phenomena. In such systems, an event can trigger a large or small change, but nothing indicates the size of the change prior to its happening. There is no proportion between the triggering event and its consequences. In fact, in the simplest models, such as the sand pile on which one drops grains one by one, the triggering event is the same in every case: a grain of sand. It may trigger a small avalanche or a huge one. It may trigger one or several avalanches. The size and number of the avalanches is unpredictable.
     Buchanan’s thesis is that human systems also are often critical, that in fact human society is an assemblage of critical-state systems. Thus, changes large and small will happen. The only thing we know for sure is that larger changes are less likely than small ones. Of course we notice the large changes and seek for explanations with the hope and aim of preventing them in future. They are not preventable, says Buchanan, because they are not predictable. Moreover, attempts to prevent them may well set off different unpredictable events. Correction: Such attempts will set off different unpredictable events.
     As I noted some years ago: explicability is not the same as predictability. We can explain, or at least describe, the chain of events that led to the first world war, but no one at the time could have predicted it. In fact, people had put in place a system of alliances designed to prevent large-scale war. Critical-state physics deals with systems whose history matters. Therefore, the mathematics of critical-state physics should be applicable to history. Buchanan goes further: critical-state physics is the science of history, he claims.
     A very useful book, and a well written one. Buchanan has the knack of explaining difficult (because unfamiliar) ideas by means of homely analogies and examples. But if he’s right, the best we can do is what we do when a hurricane threatens: prepare for the worst, just in case.

     What we can’t do is devise a system that a) will do exactly what we want it to do; and b) won’t change. 

     Recommended. **** (2002)

Update 2020 03 16: The current corona virus crisis is a case in point. The triggering event was likely the sale of an infected pangolin in a wild-life market in Wuhan, China. This critter was infected by a corona virus that was able to infect at least one of the people who handled it or its carcase. Now we have a world-wide pandemic, whose course in general is predictable: infections will rise exponentially to some peak and subside at approximately the same rate. Who will die can't be predcited, only the probable number of deaths by demographic slice. And all because, this time, a virus mutated just enough to survive in a human being. It will happen again. We just don't know and can't know whether the next cross-species infection will cause a major or a minor  illness, nor can we predict how many it will infect.

The concept of critical systems should be taught to everyone who manages any kind of system, at whatever level. In short, it should be taught to all of us. 

The World The Railways Made (1990)

     Nicholas Faith The World The Railways Made (1990) Readable social and economic history of the railways. There are a few minor errors, and a few too many typos, and the picture selection has little bearing on the text (which seems to be a common fault of British books.) Faith’s journalistic training shows in the breezy style, the unerring selection of the telling anecdote, and the logical muddle of what little analysis he attempts. A fun read, and probably a good source for high school students. **-½ (2002)