Dangerous Rails: Murder on the Railways (Haining, 1996)

  Peter Haining. Murder On The Railways. (1996) An anthology in four themed parts, making a fat book that’s ergonomically awkward. The contents make the bother worthwhile. Haining provides a potted publishing bio for each author, including references to film and video adaptations. Very useful.
     The selections are all very good or better. Railways from the beginning were a romantic as well as a convenient way to travel. A long-distance sleeper train provides a closed setting, a limited cast of suspects, and a limited time to solve the crime. Just right for a detective story.
Trains are also targets for crime. The largest heist ever was a train robbery in the UK in 1963. The thieves took £2.61 million, about £45 million ($77 million) in today’s money.
     Section one deals with crime on the express trains. Section two introduces railway detectives. Section three shows that crime on subways forms a subgenre. The last section extends suburban, mostly domestic, crime to the commuter trains. All in all, a good spread of goodies
     Recommended. *** to ****

Murder on The Basle Express (Coles, 1956)

Manning Coles. The Basle Express (1956) A cloak and dagger spy thriller, very much of its time. Characters, setting, plot, ambience etc are just interesting enough to keep you reading, mostly to find out how the writer will get his hero out of the scrapes prepared for him. No romantic interest, though; that was added a few years later to the James Bond stories. But like them, essentially an adventure romance aimed at male adolescents of all ages.
    The McGuffin is a set of missile plans, the hero is Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon (“British Intelligence Service”) travelling on the “Anglo-Swiss” express to Basle and then on to Innsbruck for a hiking holiday. Unfortunately, his sleeping compartment co-passenger, Edouard Bastien, is murdered.
    So we get anicely devised story of disguises, just barely believable escapes, cross-purposes, and a final reveal that ties up a poorly clued loose end. Never mind, the book would make a neat little B movie. As written, it’s already about 70% film script. An easy read. Mildly funny, Coles tries hard to lighten the style. There is no "romantic interest", which suggests the book was aimed at schoolboys. I found my copy at a yard sale with no dust cover, and the illustration online, It’s part of my collection of railway set or themed fiction. Coles wrote a series of Hambledon tales. I won’t be searching for other titles though.  **

Reporter or influencer? (Hillerman, The Fly on the Wall, 1971)

 Tony Hillerman. The Fly On The Wall (1971) My copy is a well-read 1979 paperback reissue of this novel, reprinted about 1982, when The Dark Wind (No. 5 in the Navajo Police series) was published. The hero is John Cotton, political reporter for the afternoon Tribune in Capitol City. MacDaniels, a colleague elated that he’s uncovered a story that will cap his career, dies a few minutes after telling Cotton he‘s looking for his notebook. Cotton finds the notebook (of course), and begins to decipher a story of political corruption. He nearly becomes a murder victim himself, pieces the story together, and goes to see Korolenko, a former State Governor, to tell him what he’s found.
     But if the story is published, a corrupt opportunist will win the next election. Should Cotton withhold the story? Should he publish? Is he really the fly on the wall, seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly objective? Read the book to find out.
     By bibliography dating, this is Hillerman’s second novel. In style and pacing not up to his later standard, it’s still a very good read. The descriptions of political shenanigans and calculations show that politics hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. It’s maybe more openly vicious than it was back then. As a story about journalism, it’s become a historical novel with the ring of truth. Hillerman was a reporter for several years before he became an academic and a novelist. It took me a while to read this book. It’s a must for the Hillerman fan, a good read for anyone who likes crime stories, and a nostalgia-inducing experience for anyone who remembers when newspapers mattered more than any other medium.
     Recommended ***

Unusual Brains: Thomson's Unthinkable (2018)

 Helen Thomson. Unthinkable. (2018) Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat showed that suitably edited case histories could help people understand the effects of stroke and other insults to the brain. His sensitive descriptions, his reports of interviews, his attempts to translate his patients’ accounts into accessible narratives, these and more have inspired generations of readers. One of them was Helen Thomson, who cherishes her interview with him a couple of years or so before he died. This book is in part a result of her admiration for Sacks, coupled with a wide-ranging curiosity, and enough neuroscience background (she has a B.Sc) to make sense of the topic of this book: how people with unusual brains manage to survive and thrive.
     Thomson tells the stories of nine people with congenital or acquired brain oddities. There’s Bob, who never forgets a moment. Or Tommy, whose personality changed utterly when he suffered an aneurysm. Or Sharon, whose sense of location is so bad that she has trouble navigating around her house. Thomson interviewed them all, as well as similar ones that she found along the way, and the scientists and psychiatrists who worked with these extraordinary outliers. The result is a reminder that we are our brains. When our brains don’t function as expected, we become different people. That’s the reason we are afraid of dementia, I think. Dementia shows us that what we think of as the most reliable component of our experience, our sense of self, is in fact the most fragile.
     The book confirms my belief that the brain constructs a simulation of reality with the Self, the “I”, not only at its centre but as the essential component, the part that holds it all together. Our “I” knows itself to be “here”, at the centre (the pathological version of this knowledge we call narcissism). If the connection between Self and some component of the simulation is broken or compromised, then not only the awareness of what’s “out there” is altered, but so is the Self.
     I believe that all brains, human and animal, construct such simulations, every one of them good enough to ensure that most members of a species will live long enough to produce offspring. But all of them incomplete and distorted in some way. The outliers that Thomson describes show the common features of the human simulation of reality. They also show how far from the norm any given simulation can be and still function as a human Self. So in the limited sense of the stable Self thereby implied, the Self is what makes each of us a person.
     Footnote: The Christian creeds assert the “resurrection of the body”, which suggests that one of the innovations of the Christian faith was the insight that a Self without a body is impossible. The Incarnation may be understood as another version of this insight. This insight has been slighted or ignored ever since the notion of a disembodied soul was introduced by Augustine and others..
     Recommended. ****

Math History: The Secret Lives of Numbers (Kitagawa & Revell)

Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell. The Secret Lives of Numbers (2003) A history of mathematics taking all currently known mathematical texts into account. The Eurocentric view of mathematical development is shown to be egregiously wrong-headed. Miscellaneous theorems (and some proofs) were discovered or invented in many different places at many different times well before Euclid’s demonstration of the logical coherence of all mathematics. Algorithms for solving trade and other complicated problems ditto. The notation that freed European mathematicians to discover number theory was invented in India, and brought to Europe by Arabs. The need to plan planting and seed-time prompted the study of astronomy, which was perhaps the first science to be mathematised. Either it, or geometry, needed for land surveys. Formal mathematics is at least as old as writing.
     The history of mathematics is not even a winding road; it’s a maze of paths leading in all directions with surprising shortcuts, connections in unexpected places, and backtracking. What’s constant is that whenever possible mathematicians exchanged ideas and knowledge. Powerful rulers recognised the value of mathematics and other knowledge, and sponsored the collection of texts, and their study and collation by the best minds they could attract. And ever and again, barbarians with limited insight into anything beyond their immediate goals of getting treasure and women destroyed those collections. We owe a great debt to the scholars who preserved what knowledge they could and taught their students to do likewise.
     I think that Kitagawa and Revell deprecate Euclid’s achievement. True, pretty well every theorem he proved in his books, and many of the proofs themselves, were known before him. Compilations of all known mathematics were made centuries before him. But he seems to have been the first one to organise all known mathematics into a logical system, in which rules of inference applied to a handful of axioms, carefully defined, would connect all theorems. It is the critique and emulation of his methods that has led to new mathematics.
     I also think that Kitagawa and Revell don’t examine the source of mathematics in ordinary language. As far as I know, it’s possible to express distance, time, size, weight, quantity, similarity and difference, direction, etc, in all human languages. The only variation seems to be in emphasis and detail. Mathematics is the more or less systematic formalisation of these concepts when people found it necessary to do so for some practical purposes involving trade and taxes. (Aside: Where I grew up, distance was expressed as time. A certain relative lived one hour away, for example. That’s an hour’s walk. This may be one reason why I find it easy to accept Einstein’s proposal of a space-time continuum, even though I can’t do the relevant math.)
     A keeper, worth an occasional reread. Breezy style, often cliched, which makes it seem easier to understand the math than it really is. The title is a teaser, possibly intended to attract the unnerdy.***

Drunk or High? (Lapham's Quarterly 06-1, Intoxication)

 LQ 06-1: Intoxication (2013) Not only about alcohol and drugs (though they figure prominently) but also about poisons. For all of our known history, we humans have taken (usually mild) poisons in small doses because they messed up our brains, thus creating an “altered state of consciousness.”  We aren’t the only animals that seek this experience: not only mammals but insects and birds have been observed slurping fermented fruit.
     A wide-ranging selection of first-person reports on the joys of getting drunk or high, praises of the grape and other intoxicants, scoldings for over-indulgence, severe frowning on any kind of intoxicant, etc. But the one question that I would like to see some answer to is hardly touched on: Why do we do it? The evidence suggests that we mostly seek the pleasure drugs provide, and some seek what they believe are transcendental visions of ultimate reality. The hangover or withdrawal are accepted as a (relatively) small price to pay for these treasures.
     Intoxication I think touches on the question of consciousness. The drugs’ effects show that our experience of reality is constructed by the brain. Deflect the brain from normal functioning, and that experience changes. Drugs and alcohol aren’t the only means of doing this, but they are the most reliable. That’s why we seek them out. That’s also why moralists of all stripes condemn them: the easy alteration of the brain’s function shows that the sense of self, the “I”, is a construction of the brain. That implies no independent Self or Soul to transcend this mortal life. It also makes nonsense of the belief that the Self can be somehow “uploaded” into an abiological, possibly electronic, but potentially immortal body (as envisioned by Ray Kurzweil among others).
     The Matrix is real: it resides in three pounds of jelly encased in a bony shell that protects it, mostly. We can mess with the program, and we like doing that. That’s what this collection demonstrates. I’ve been drunk twice in my life, and don’t want to repeat the experience. It’s enough to get a mild buzz, which I can also get without ingesting chemicals. Knowing that my experience of the world around me is not an exact replica is strangely comforting.
     Recommended. ****

Existential Physics (Hossenfelder 2022)

     Sabine Hossenfelder. Existential Physics (2022) Hossenfelder has made a YouTube reputation as a disturber and explainer. Search for her videos; they’re fun and enlightening. She believes that modern physics is in crisis because it claims more insight and understanding than is warranted by experiment and observation, especially when it comes to dark matter and energy. The theories, the sets of interlocking equations, describe what’s measured, but for consistency’s sake, theorists have added entities that haven’t been observed to interact with the entities that we know about. In her Warning (Foreword), she says, “Science has limits, and yet humanity has always sought meaning beyond those limits.” Quite so.
     Then Hossenfelder goes on to show how science can inform some of the answers to the questions that exceed the limits of science. Science can clarify and disambiguate some of those questions. For example, do we have free will? The scientific answer (summarised) is: “No, if by free will you mean the ability to choose without being subject to the laws of physics.”

     For choosing is a brain-function, and brains function according the laws of physics. This fact has funked recent philosophers, who see no way out of the answer. But there is one: when we deliberately choose we figure alternatives, and weigh their desirability. We may choose differently than we chose in the past or will choose in the future. We will often choose differently than others choose. Thus, while our choices may not be freely willed, neither are they automatic. We aren’t automatons; we are agents. But we can’t choose without preferring one alternative to the others. Since our preferences are shaped by our genetics and our experience, in that sense, the choice is not “free”. However, we can choose to change our preferences. Odd, that. Is the choice to change our preference free or not? At the neurological level, I think no. At the psychological level, I think yes. And then there's  the spoiler question: How would you distinguish between free and determined choice? To choose is to exercise preferences and desires. Even if those preferences and desires are determined, the choice could still be free. You just can't tell.
     Hossenfelder does fall into what I think is the common philosophical error of physicists: She believes that physics reveals reality as it really is. Or at least that it is closer to doing so than the messier, less abstract sciences such as chemistry, biology, psychology, and so on. She reminds us that every "emergent property" that biology describes can be explained by chemistry and physics, and that everything that chemistry describes can be explained by physics. Neurology is solving some of the puzzles of psychology by showing how brain function varies with different behaviours, and emotions. Or at least suggesting how to reframe the puzzles.
     In short, she says, no so-called “emergent” phenomenon has (so far) been found to be inexplicable by the lower level from it which supposedly emerged. AFAIK, she’s right. But since the more abstract theories are derived from and explain the less abstract ones, that’s not, I think, a surprise. Logically, the more abstract explanation is equivalent to the less abstract one, just simpler.
     As I see it, physics describes the structure of reality. Einstein’s space-time makes this absolutely clear: What we observe depends on where in space-time we are and how we are moving relative to other entities. Special relativity describes how one observer’s worldview (measurements) is precisely transformable into another observer’s worldview: a clock runs fast from one POV, runs slow from another, and we can calculate exactly how much the measurements differ. (These calculations are necessary for GPS systems to function.) General relativity (GR) describes the geometry of space-time, within which we entities live and move and have our being - and observe each other within the constraints descibed by special relativity.
     Quantum mechanics (QM) shows that what we observe depends on the event’s context: Electrons behave like particles in some contexts, and like waves in others. Or better, wave equations describe some electron behaviours, and particle equations describe others. None describe electrons. And those equations are the best descriptions we have, so far. There are probably better ones “out there”, and maybe they’ll be discovered. But not in my lifetime, I think. Bummer.

     The fact that GR and QM cannot (at present) be reconciled should not surprise us either, I think. Both are highly abstract descriptions of what’s common and different in our perceptions of reality. Our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains. We can compare each other’s perceptions, and note whether we perceive the same differences and similarities. That’s the beginning of science, and it’s already one level of abstraction away from the simulation which is our experience of the world around us. But that simulation is itself an abstraction, constructed (computed?) by our brains from the sense data delivered  to it, data that already processed by the sensors. The simulation is sufficiently accurate that we can navigate the world, get our food, find our mates, etc. It must be structurally similar to reality, else we could not survive. It may make sense to say that the topology of our experience (the simulation) must be similar enough to the topology of reality to enable our survival. I don’t know enough about topology or brain function to be able to say. I also haven’t a clue how the brain’s simulation becomes what “I” experience. I suspect it’s because “I” is part of the simulation, probably the essential part, but how would one test that notion?
     I enjoyed this book, because (as the above may show) it prompted rethinking many of my ideas. I will read it again. Hossenfelder is an excellent explainer.
     Recommended. ****