Fantasy

A friend of mine was recently reading the first book in the Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan. I am snobbish about many things, and the subject of books is one of them, so of course I had to give her a hard time about reading what was, in my mind, a "pulp" fantasy series. Being the good-natured person that she is, she smirked at me and asked for some suggestions for more worthwhile reading. Naturally, I couldn't come up with anything off the top of my head, and ended up looking like the bumbling fool I am. Since then, however, I've had some time to collect my thoughts, and put together a list of books I enjoyed.

Now, ya'll have got to take everything here with a grain of salt. This is all just my opinion. Obviously, this is true of everything I write on this site, but people can get a little more excited than usual if someone starts criticizing their favorite author (I know I do). If you see something here with which you take strong issue, remember: I'm not trying to present it as some kind of absolute truth. It's just what I think. With that said, let me lay out for you my theory of books.

I've got this idea that good books and good writers fall into two broad categories. The first category is for books that are awesome. They have great stories, great language, great ideas, and are entertaining. They are just all-around solid books, books that I was happy to have read and would read again. They do not make it into the second category, though. There are a great many authors working today who fit in this category. In the sci-fi/fantasy genres, I place authors like Neil Gaiman (the Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline), Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age) in this category.

The second category is for writing that has all of the aforementioned qualities and more. These are works that have a focus and perfection of construction, that are complete, moving, and beautiful; they stand above other writing to achieve true and lasting worth, and are art. Shakespeare goes here. So do the Lord of the Rings and Dune.

I do not intend with the above descriptions to belittle those works which I place in the first category. There is a place for them, and they fill a vital role. The difference between the two is that books from the first category are transitory; there are always excellent writers working to produce excellent fiction, and as time goes on, the excellent writing of today will surrender to the excellent writing of tomorrow. Those books that stand above, however, are something unique. They will not be supplanted.

What follows is a spotty list of books that generally fall into the fantasy (/sci-fi) genre which I believe are worthwhile. Although I consider these to be a bit more interesting than Robert Jordan, the ultimate test of any art is whether or not you enjoy it. Here, then, are books I enjoyed. The first entries are those books which I believe will stand; the rest are merely outstanding.

• Lord of the Rings and Dune certainly top the list. Their status as classics is well earned, and I won't spend too long talking about why they're so amazing. Suffice it to say that these books are considered the granddaddies of fantasy and science fiction for good reason.
• The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe, is a tetrology that is justifiably on par with the Lord of the Rings. That is a popular statement to make about a work of fantasy, and everyone has their own opinion of a book's merit; however, this is the only work I have ever read to which I would unhesitatingly offer that praise. It has not had, and will not have, the kind of societal impact that Tolkien did, but it is nonetheless a classic. Wolfe, like Tolkien, also has a keen interest in the stories and myths of antiquity, and as in the Lord of the Rings, Wolfe puts this knowledge to good use in his writing, fleshing out a world that has been flung far into the future but is still based unmistakably on the past. Although Wolfe took inspiration from many sources when he wrote these, what he created is something that is completely unique. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how wonderful these books are; everyone should read them. Wolfe has continued to write, and, while all his writing is very good, very interesting, and very literarily informed, I have not been as impressed by any of his later work as I was by the Book of the New Sun.
• The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, is probably better known for the movie adaptation (which Goldman also wrote the screenplay for). Both the book and the movie are so whimsically charming, clever, and fun that you would be doing yourself a tremendous disservice if you didn't check them out. A classic fairy tale, updated for our modern lifestyle.
• Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin, is a book I just recently finished, and it's been fantastic. Helprin has a list of credentials a mile long, has published fiction, non fiction, and written for many publications, but this is apparently the only fantasy novel he's ever produced. Although the plot does not hang together well enough for this to be everything it could have been, his language is so inventive and rich that you keep reading just to see what he can come up with next. A great deal of fun to read. It's about New York City.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, is also quite a lot of fun to read. It stands out for Clarke's rich reimagination of English history and amusing characters. It is dark and brooding, but the very seriousness with which the story is treated lends a (deliberately) comic undercurrent to many parts. For its use of the flowery language of Jane Austen, this book is frequently likened to an Austen work with a fantasy twist, but I find that comparison less than apt. For one thing, Strange & Norrell isn't boring as hell. For another, Clarke's use of that characteristic diction becomes less prevalent as the book nears the end and the action picks up; it struck me as being more of a comedic device than anything else. Either way, the book is very engaging and highly recommended.
• The Gormenghast series, by Mervyn Peake, is a very surreal set of books. I have only read the first one (Titus Groan), and it was very good. It centers around the events at Gormenghast castle, which is a sprawling, decaying monstrosity that is peopled by a number of very odd characters. It's kind of hard to say anything definitive about the book; although I enjoyed reading it, Titus Groan is not exactly entertaining. Like the castle itself, the book feels very large and very musty. Still, very interesting and worth the time.
• Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, is a children's story, but damn if it isn't creepy. Short, well-constructed, and disturbing as only English children's stories can be. Also, though they're not traditional fiction, Gaiman was the writer for the long-running Sandman series of graphic novels. Although I was not a fan of most of the art, the writing was quite good.
• Snow Crash and the Diamond Age are the two books by Neal Stephenson that I've read, and they were great. As I understand it, basically everything he writes is interesting and fun. More sci-fi than fantasy, but who cares, right?
• The Golden Compass, by Phillip Pullman, is the first volume in a trilogy he wrote called His Dark Materials. The series is aimed towards a young adult audience, but I read the Golden Compass just a few years ago and thought it was excellent. What impressed me about it was the extremely rich world Pullman created without leaning at all on the crutch of traditional fantasy archetypes, as well as his willingness to expect the reader to discover the conventions of his world without being held by the hand. The second two books were not, in my humble opinion, worthy followups; they lost much of that creativity and devolved into what I saw as little more than morality stories with a predictably sappy happy ending. Judging from popular reaction, however, I believe I'm alone in that assessment. Also, it looks as though they're going to be making some movies based on this trilogy (expected January 2007), which could have gone either way if they hadn't gotten Tom Stoppard on board as a writer.
• The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett and the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy by Douglas Adams. These two venerable series stand as counterparts in my mind; both are primarily comedic, the former with a fantasy flavor and the latter science fiction. Pratchett's series is much longer running; I think there are something like 30 books now, and although I feel that the overall quality is not quite as high as when he first started, they are still quite entertaining. The earlier ones are definitely better, though. As far as Adams goes, the first two books of the Hitchhiker's Trilogy are outstanding, but they worsen severely after that point. These books are on the list because everyone talks about them, they're a ton of fun to read, and it will take you all of a day or two to get through one.

That's it. Hope you found at least one book that piqued your interest.

Two Things

The first is that I just recently finished reading a book called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. It was really good. It's about New York City and comic books and the early part of the century. Chabon is engaging like John Irving, has a command of English as vast as Conrad's, and tells a story that is slightly fanciful but steeped in reality. Actually the reason I like it so much is that Chabon perfectly captures the spirit of the age he's depicting. Reading Kavalier & Clay feels very similar to reading Fitzgerald, if Fitzgerald had come at his subject from a very different direction. But that's just what I think; what the hell do I know, I'm a math major. Soon to be a math graduate. If I don't drop out of college before the end of the semester. Anyhow.

The second thing is Google Earth. The other day I was fiddling around on Google Maps, and was very impressed by the technology they've got powering that. You can drag maps around smoothly, you can zoom in way far, you can not only get satellite imagery of most places, but actually overlay Google's road map on top of that satellite image, and they've got all this linked with their database, so searching for things close to the spot on earth you're looking at is easy. Very impressive. Then I found Google Earth.

Google Earth has one caveat: unlike many of Google's technologies, it is a program you must download, install, and run, rather than load in a web browser. Should you choose to do this, however, you will lose yourself for hours in what has to be one of the most impressive displays of web integration available today.

Google Earth is a program which models the entire globe in real time 3D. It uses satellite imagery to paint the surface, so you can start by looking at the entire Earth framed in your window, and zoom in to a bird's eye view of your house. Depending on the age of the imagery, you might see your car parked in the driveway. Of course, that's an awful lot of satellite imagery to store on your hard drive. How does the program pull this off, exactly? In point of fact, whenever you run Google Earth, the program connects to Google's servers, and they stream you satellite imagery to power the program. That alone is a ridiculous technical accomplishment, but on top of this unprecedented model of the world, they have added their map technology so that you can see not just roads, but businesses, parks, points of interest, and everything else on this true-to-life picture of the earth in addition to viewing flybys of any trips you might be planning; they have built three dimensional models of the metropolitan areas of major cities; and they have linked all of this to an online community that allows users to add their own markers to the globe for all to see. And they are giving all this away for free.

If the fact that this blog is running on Blogger didn't immediately tip you off, I am a Google fanboy. It's hard not be a fanboy for a company with Google's philosophy, though. They look at the internet, and they find something that people are using. They say to themselves, "We are going to take this idea that works pretty well, and we are going to make it work beautifully. We are going to make it do everything that common sense says it should do. We are going to base it on cutting-edge technology, we are going to make it elegant and straightforward, we are going to make it so stultifyingly simple that anyone who knows how to click a mouse can immediately use it, and we are going to give it away for free." It's hard to argue with free.

The ETS

Those of you in high school or college are likely familiar with the Educational Testing Service, or ETS, hereafter referred to as "those insufferable craphounds." Those insufferable craphounds are running an organization that markets itself as nonprofit while still finding it mysteriously necessary to charge students exorbitant prices for the privilege of subjecting themselves to tests such as the SAT or GRE. Examining their webpage, one finds that they make much of "listening to educators, parents, and critics" (notice the exclusion of "students" from that list) in order to do a better job of helping "teachers teach and students learn." All I can say to that is they must be pretty goddamn hard of hearing, because I have not ever in my entire life heard a single, solitary word of praise for those insufferable craphounds from anybody, be they student, teacher, parent, or disinterested third-party critic. At best, people grudgingly put up with them as some sort of necessary evil. And I can also say to them that, speaking as a student, the only thing those insufferable craphounds have ever helped me to learn is to exploit common fallibilities in multiple-choice tests, which is, interestingly, a skill that will be completely useless in my professional life.

Examining their mission statement, one discovers some intriguing claims. Let's quote them, shall we?

Our Mission: To advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research, and related services. Our products and services measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and educational performance, and support education and professional development for all people worldwide.

Those insufferable craphounds state that their products measure knowledge and skills. In a certain sense this may be true; in fact, if they intend "knowledge and skills" to mean "ability to quickly answer standardized test questions," then they have hit the nail on the head. If they intend "knowledge and skills" to mean "ability to effectively learn, ability to succeed academically, and ability to critically analyze and solve a variety of problems," then their mission statement is more than a gross misrepresentation, it is an outright lie. According to those insufferable craphounds, I correctly identified the relationship between "obsequious" and "stipendiary," but remarkably, I had not a clue what either of those words meant, and could not have used them in conversation or writing. According to those insufferable craphounds, I can correctly answer the majority of 28 questions relating to pre-calculus mathematics in under 45 minutes, which is clearly an important thing to know, because having a crazed lunatic point a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I can't correctly tell him how far Farmer Bob has to go to get to the market in under two minutes is a DAILY FUCKING OCCURRENCE in my world. According to those insufferable craphounds, when I walk in to a testing center unprepared and get a good score by relying on my ability to guess well on multiple choice tests, I am more qualified to study at graduate schools than people who earned a slightly lower score by working hard to prepare for the test.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the entire situation is that colleges and graduate schools seem to actually put stock in the tests that those insufferable craphounds administer. Particularly graduate schools. Come one folks, use your damn heads. I have been at college working hard for four motherfucking years, and you hope to glean something meaningful about my academic ability from a two hour standardized test? You're already looking at my academic record, my GPA, letters of recommendation from people who know me. What are these test scores going to relate to you? How accurate do you think that is as compared to those other piddling bits of information?

Universities, please, take Mr. T's advice and don't be fools: SAT and GRE scores are not telling you anything useful about your potential students. Look at GPAs, look at the classes they've taken, look at their recommendations; Christ, you could even try talking to them. Don't continue to subject us to the pointless and degrading ordeal of standardized tests.

I am sorry for that diatribe, 'cause I bet that I was basically just screaming at the choir. But goddamn, it did feel good to write it down. Fuck you, ETS.

Our campus has been overrun...

By anti-abortionists. There was some guy standing outside the physics building this morning shouting at us to embrace Jesus and stop killing infants, and a dude standing next to a huge picture of bloody, dead fetus was trying to hand me a flyer saying not to get an abortion. Because, you know, being a guy and all, I had really been considering one.

There was also some guy standing outside the library, telling us we're all going to hell for being at college. Because, clearly, if God had wanted us to learn, he would have given us brains. Oh, wait...

Not that anyone around here is really all that ticked off; this is the most entertaining thing to come through campus this semester. But for any anti-abortionists or other generally crazy people out there, let me give you some tips: You are not going to win a single, solitary convert by coming to a college campus and being loud and obnoxious. At college, if you're being lound and obnoxious, it usually means you're drunk, and we don't pay a lot of attention to you. The way you're going to win converts is by logically persuading us that your position is the more sensible one. Why religous fundamentalists have yet to try using this approach will no doubt remain a mystery...

Random Notes

I was about to sit down and write a post about Nintendo's recently announced Revolution controller, but I didn't really have anything original or insightful to say. I think it's an incredible idea, I really hope they make it work, and I have no doubt that if I end up buying any of the new generation of consoles, I'll be buying a Revolution first. Because Nintendo, you see, makes interesting games. I will grant you that they don't make many, and they don't make them fast. But, examining the Gamecube and Xbox from a position that's pretty close to the end of their product cycles, let me observe that the Xbox still has not one single game which is proprietary to that system that I have any interest in playing, where the Gamecube has a sizable library. You will not find Pikmin on the Xbox, and despite being backed by a behemoth like Sony the PSP is not the most popular handheld in the world; the DS is. If you want to read an extremely interesting and lucid commentary on Nintendo's role in the gaming industry, you should check out this article.

On a completely unrelated note, and because I don't have anything more interesting to talk about, here are a couple of things I've run across recently that are cool:

Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs is the newest album from Andrew Bird, violin virtuoso formerly (nominally) of the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The new album is a long way from the hot jazz-style stuff of his first couple of solo albums. It is kind of folksy, very chill, and extremely good.

Sin City in movie form is out on DVD. Sin City is a series of comic books by Frank Miller that was recently adapted into a movie. It is certainly very violent, though like so many films its detractors don't seem to notice that the vast majority of the violence occurs offscreen. However, it is extremely graphic in its implications, and if you don't like violent movies you won't like this one. But, if you have ever read and enjoyed noir, or seen and enjoyed film noir, then Sin City is highly recommended. It is noir to the maxx.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is my lord and savior.
(That was sarcasm. If you are an actual, honest-to-God creationist or intelligent-designist, don't tell me, because we can't be friends anymore.)

I have no idea how many people have already heard of Mitch Hedberg, but the man is amazingly funny. You should definitely download yourself a copy of one of his standups from that thar inter-net.

Pulsed Laser Deposition

This summer after returning from Germany, I spent the rest of my time back at William & Mary doing research for one of my physics professors. One of the areas in which she does experiments is using ultrafast laser pulses to ablate or deposit materials. The basic idea is this: if you have a little chunk of some metal, say nickel, you can shoot it with a laser pulse. If this laser pulse is fast enough and powerful enough, it can actually excite the electrons in the metal so much that they vaporize and form a plasma plume that shoots off the surface of the metal. This is called laser ablation.

You can also repeat this process in quick succession using a laser that generates, say, 1000 pulses that each last for 150 nanoseconds. Each pulse will generate a plasma plume. Now, if you take some kind of substrate or gridwork and place it directly in front of the material, then whenever a plume shoots off the surface of the material, some of that vapor plume is going to recondense on the substrate. By using several thousands laser pulses, it's possible to build up a film of material that's only a few atoms thick. This is called pulsed laser deposition, and the sorts of films you generate are apparently useful in fields such as superconductor research.

Although the idea is pretty straightforward, the process itself becomes very complicated when you try to do one of these experiments in reality. There are a tremendous number of interactions that need to be considered- what kind of atmosphere should the experiment be conducted in, how should you set up the laser pulse so that it vaporizes the material without melting it, how do the characteristics of the plume change as you whittle away a hole where the laser is impacting, how do successive laser pulses interact with the gas from the previous plume, and so on. The work I did this summer was kind of a basic first step in coming up with a computational model for one of these experiments.

I spent the last few weeks of summer looking at how the temperature of the material is affected by the laser pulse. Mathematically, this is modeled with a system of differential equations by considering the temperature of the electrons in the material and the temperature of the lattice in which they are held to be two separate but related quantities; it's referred to as the two-temperature model. In very special, restricted cases, it's possible to solve this system analytically, but these solutions are not of much practical use. I put together a Mathematica notebook that numerically models the initial laser pulse as well as the period of time during which the heat diffuses throughout the material. Although this project was mostly a chance for me to learn a bit about using Mathematica, it was also an interesting twist on the classic heat diffusion boundary problem, as one side of the material is not held at a fixed temperature. The solution turns out to be using an "insulation" condition for that boundary, which amounts to setting the first derivative of the temperature function with respect to space equal to zero; this represents the fact that heat is not passing through that boundary; it's insulated. Although this wouldn't be strictly true in practice, we didn't get around to including heat loss to radiation in this model before college got rolling again.

Anyhow, for your viewing pleasure, below you can take a look at what I came up with, both as a Mathematica notebook if you've got the program, and as a pdf. If anything I've done would actually be of help to you on a project of your own, feel free to use whatever you find, but please, credit where credit is due. Additionally, if you have any suggestions for improving the code in this notebook, I would love to hear them.

>Mathematica Notebook
>Portable Document Format

Comics

You may have noticed in the past few years that comics are getting quite a bit more press than they historically have- there have been any number of articles on the internet commenting on their wider-spread acceptance as 'serious' art, how the form has finally matured, and so on and so forth; the number of movies based on comics that have been made in the past five years also bears testament to this phenomena. Scott McCloud is probably the most well-known comic advocate, and has written extensively on the theory of comics, but it seems like these days everyone from literary journalists to college students is writing about the comic as a medium.

I won't make any claims about being a comic aficionado; I know next to nothing about their history, or the history of their acceptance in the mainstream. However, the result of seeing several writeups about comics and some comic-inspired movies was that I broke down and actually read a few of them. Now, right up front let's be clear on the fact that, when people talk about the comic as an art form, they're not usually thinking about X-Men or Batman. Not to say that those kinds of comics are bad; they are, in fact, excellent in the same way Harry Potter is excellent- entertaining, fun reads. As well-executed as they are, however, you probably wouldn't point to them as the vanguard of the 'new seriousness.' Comics (believe it or not) are just as capable as book or film of treating all manner of issues from the timeless coming-of-age story to discovering someone you love has cancer, and the infinitely nuanced way in which a story can be told through pictures is what makes these works so fascinating.

If you're interested in more wonderful background, certainly click on the things above. Although I'm certainly not well-read as far as comics go, here are the books that initially got, and held, my attention:

• Hellboy- I'm a dork, right, so naturally I saw the Hellboy movie at some point. Although it's not one of the better comic-based movies, I was interested enough to check out the source material; it turns out a few of them are available online for free. Despite my undying hatred of H.P.Lovecraft, I'm a huge fan of the whole occult/folklorish kind of atmosphere this comic creates, and thoroughly enjoyed the two in the series I've picked up so far. This particular comic undoubtedly falls more in the Batman/X-Men category than that of Mom's Cancer, but it nonetheless stands out in my mind for its very sharp, distinctive artwork. Plus, like I said, it's a ton of fun to read.
• Bone- This is a fairly well-known and respected comic from Jeff Smith, and despite being highly regarded by other comic artists, I was somewhat disappointed with it. It was initially published in several volumes over the course of a decade or so, and with the recent conclusion was collected into a one volume edition. The drawings themselves are consistently excellent, the characters are wonderfully well-developed, and the opening third of the series has an immediate charm; in all these respects, the series was a great read. For me what held it down was the plot, which becomes very Dungeons & Dragons-ish the farther into it you get. Much as I enjoy playing D&D, the sorts of stories you see in a game session are not the kind of thing you want to be reading. Tenuously connected plot points, the princess thought dead secretly living as the woodsman's daughter, a magic force permeating the world that an ancient evil seeks to corrupt- these are things I could have done without. It's won a whole stack of awards, though, so don't put too much stock in this opinion.
• Flight- This is an anthology of short pieces, all drawn by up-and-coming webcomic artists. That may not sound too promising, but the collection is, in fact, really fantastic, and I hear that Vol. 2 is as well, though I haven't read it yet. Many of the stories in this book deal in some manner with flying, but not all of them- the book is really a showcase of artistic styles, some of which depart pretty drastically from what most people would consider "traditional comic," to very impressive effect. Relatedly, the guy who edits the Flight series (Kazu Kibuishi) also draws a monthly webcomic called Copper that has some of the best artwork you will see in a webcomic. His Daisy Kutter series has also won or been nominated for an award, something like that.

That's about it. I'm hoping to get into the Sandman series when I've got some cash, also Heavy Liquid by Paul Pope. And as far as honest-to-God syndicated comics go, Complete Calvin & Hobbes is hitting this Fall, and will rock. AND there's some comic-based movie called V for Vendetta coming out soon. I don't know a thing about the comic, but the movie is starring Hugo Weaving, and what he does in the movie is kick ass, so chances are it will be really good.

If any of you guys have recommendations or comments, you should, you know, leave a comment. But not if you have a remark. We don't truck with those here.

Globetrotter Grady in Berlin

Despite the fact that pretty much no one else in the group was all that impressed by Berlin, I had a great time there and thought it was an amazing city. We only got to spend about four days there, and what little time we had was sometimes spent on pointless activities, but after all was said and done we got to do some pretty neat things.

We arrived at our hotel Thursday evening, and quickly discovered that it had communal showers in the grand European tradition. Sorry though I am to admit it, I am still a bit of a prude when it comes to such things, and spent an interesting and uncomfortable four days showering with large, talkative European men.

Thursday evening about five of us went to see a variety show at the Winter Garten on Potsdamer Strasse, which is this beautiful theater in the classic vaudeville style. Brass handrails, the flashing lights outlining the stage, employees in evening dress- the place had everything. The show was equally excellent, with a variety of gymnasts and so forth, and one really outstanding old school entertainer. That guy was pretty amazing. Let me tell you about him.

He comes out on the stage and starts chatting with us, dropping little jokes here and there that were really pretty clever- quite a few of them were plays on words that you wouldn't get unless you knew a little German and English, and he's dropping in references to American radio shows from the '30s. And while he's got his patter running, he's doing little tricks for us- a bit of juggling, a bit of balancing a top hat on his nose. Except he's not perfect; every once in a while he wouldn't quite catch the hat he was trying to flip from his foot to his head, or he'd miss a ball juggling, or something. But he was great fun to listen to, and everyone in the audience was like, "What a charming old man, I certainly don't expect him to pull off every trick flawlessly." So as he continues with his act, he pulls out a teacup and saucer. He balances the saucer on his foot, and flips it up and catches it on his head, and we're all like, "Yay! Good job!" Then he puts the teacup on his foot and flips it up, catching it on top of the saucer. So now we're all like, "Wow, that's pretty cool." Then he takes out another teacup and saucer (all while keeping up the banter) and does the same thing. And we're suitably impressed, but we're getting worried, because he keeps wandering around the stage with these teacups balanced on his head, and he's good, but he's not perfect, and they're rattling around a lot, and we don't want him to embarass himself by having them fall. So next he breaks out another teacup and saucer. Has a little trouble balancing them on his foot without letting the other fall off his head, but manages it. Flips the saucer up, and catches it. Flips the teacup up, it almost misses, the whole stack is wobbling, it almost falls, we gasp, but he manages to catch it. So now he has a stack of three teacups and three saucers balanced on his head, and we're impressed. Next he takes out a tea kettle.

Teacups rattling, he leans down and balances the tea kettle on his foot. We're all thinking, "Oh, come on man, you can do it. You're so old and funny, don't screw up now." He flicks his foot. The kettle flips up through the air and lands squarely on top of the stack, which doesn't even quiver.

The man was stringing us along the entire time. He knew exactly what he was doing, and had perfected the technique of making deliberate failures look like mistakes. The whole act, he was building a skeptical audience up to the point where they were completely empathizing with the performer. I have never seen anyone work the audience as well as he did.

On Friday, we had some tasty, tasty Brötchen for breakfast, and then piled on the bus for a "Grand Tour through the City." It was conducted by some random friend of Professor Klabes', and wasn't the greatest. Bus tours to begin with leave quite a bit to be desired, and the high point of this one was the moment when the guide said, "Oh, and by the way, that was the Brandenburger Tör we just passed, turn around quick and you might get a picture." Ah well. Friday afternoon we visited the Checkpoint Charlie museum, which is small and badly designed but very interesting. After that, I strongarmed a couple of people into visiting the Judisches Museum, which is an architectural marvel, and also a damn good museum, following which we wandered around the streets of Berlin and grabbed some dinner before taking the S-Bahn back to the hotel.

Other highlights of the trip included visiting the Pergamon Museum, and getting to see the opera Eugene Onegin. Now, Pergamon was a city in ancient Greece that built a huge altar to either Zeus or Athena, and it's been reconstructed inside this musuem. And when I say 'huge' there, I mean, seriously, you walk into the first room of this musuem and are dwarfed by this massive, wide set of steps leading up to the altar. It's just unbelievable. They also have just a shit-ton of other artifacts from antiquity, from several different areas of the world. The other things that really stick out in my mind are the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way from Babylon. Babylon, folks. Now, keep in mind that these are building-size structures that have been reconstructed inside this musuem, and I didn't even come close to making it through the entire thing. If you should ever wake up one day and discover you're in Berlin, this is a good place to spend a week or so. And the crazy thing is that this is just one museum on this island in the middle of Spree River with something like four other world-famous museums on it.

Moving on, the last thing I wanted to mention was Eugene Onegin. The text is a poem written by Pushkin using an unusual rhyme scheme that has since become known as an Onegin stanza. The music was by Tchaikovsky. I won't pretend to know exactly what was going on, but the music was pretty, the staging was interesting, and after I got back to the states I read a little about the text, and it turns out it's got a fairly interesting history. Nabokov did a crazy translation of it that a lot of people hate. And interestingly enough, Douglas Hofstadter, the mathematician who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach has also written a verse translation of Onegin. All this has convinced me to read it. Right after I get through the new Potter...

Charles Johnston's translation of Eugene Onegin

In conclusion, the most consistently amusing thing about the entire German trip was Herr Klabes. As proof positive, I submit this photo:

Globetrotter Grady in Amsterdam

Continuing in the travel journal mindset, let's talk a bit about Amsterdam, where I went along with a bunch of other people on the Münster program this past weekend. And what a weekend it was.

First off, we left the Münster Hauptbahnhof on Friday, and made it as far as Bad Bentheim on the German border before we found out that the railroad employees in the Netherlands were on strike. So we piled off the train the train and onto buses, for which we paid 35€. The theory was that we would be reimbursed, but it looks as though Deutsche Bahn might have other ideas. Anyhow.

We got to Amsterdam without a definite place to stay, which is not the best idea in the world, but luckily there were enough spots left at a place called Hans Brinker. Not quite expensive enough to be a hotel, not quite sketchy enough to be a hostel, it occupies a delightfully ambiguous middle ground. It had hostel style rooms, so you probably get to stay with a bunch of people you don't know, but it was cheap, not horribly dirty, and it had a bar/resturant/common room type of thing on the first floor. Quality place.

The most important thing to know about Amsterdam is this: when you're walking around the city, there will be signposts at many corners with writing on them. Those are not the names of streets. The names of steets are on placards attached to the sides of buildings on the corner. Very important.

So over the course of the next two days, I got to see the Van Gogh Musuem, the Rijcks Museum, the Heineken Experience (actually really cool), walk through De Wallen (without making a stop anywhere, sadly), and visit a coffee shop to sample their selection of pot brownies, pot bonbons, pot muffins, pot milkshakes, and pot. So all in all, it was a really awesome trip. Two and a half days, though, is time to do no more than scratch the surface; the city is amazing and huge, and there were about twenty other things I would have liked to have done. Another time.

Amsterdam is not nearly as seedy as everyone makes it out to be, particularly the red light district. Yes, true, there are real, live prostitutes lining the streets, but there are also real, live tourists filling every nook and cranny as well. There are flashy lights and loud music and people absolutely everywhere. The first couple of times I felt someone's hand in my pocket I got pretty excited, but the thrird time it happened I realized it was merely one of Amsterdam's famous pickpockets plying his noble trade. Thank god I had nothing worth stealing. Though most people will tell you to worry about muggers and whatnot, the street cleaners in Amsterdam are definitely the scariest thing about the city. I saw them eat at least three people.

In the end, it was a great time. The museums were cheap and incredible. The pot also was not to be sneezed at. I had a joint and a brownie, and finally got good and properly stoned for the first, and probably last, time in my life. I think there are pictures of it somewhere; I definitely remember bright flashes of light. The best part was that the pre-rolled joints come in little factory sealed packages. Factory sealed pot. Beautiful.

Ein Kommentar

We read a short fable by Kafka today in the German literature course I'm kind of taking here in Münster. It seemed really good to me, so feast your eyes upon both the original, a translation by my own hand, and some comments we made about it.

Ein Kommentar
Es war sehr früh am Morgen, die Straβen rein und leer, ich ging zum Bahnhof. Als ich eine Turmuhr mit meiner verglich, sah ich, daβŸ es schon viel später war, als ich geglaubt hatte, ich muβŸte mich sehr beeilen, der Schrecken über diese Entdeckung lieβŸ mich im Weg unsicher werden, ich kannte mich in dieser Stadt noch nicht sehr gut aus, glücklicherweise war ein Schutzmann in der Nähe, ich lief zu ihm und fragte ihn atemlos nach dem Weg. Er lächelte und sagte: "Von mir willst du den Weg erfahren?" "Ja," sagte ich, "da ich ihn selbst nicht finden kann." "Gib's auf, gib's auf" sagte er und wandte sich mit einem groβŸen Schwunge ab, so wie Leute, die mit ihrem Lachen allein sein wollen.

And here follows my attempt at a translation:

A Commentary
It was very early in the morning, the street clean and vacant, I was going to the train station. When I compared the clock in a tower with my own, I saw that it was much later than I had thought, I needed to make great haste, the shock of this discovery left me unsure of my way, I did not yet know this city well, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He laughed and said: "You want to learn the way from me?" "Yes," I said, "for I cannot find it myself." "Give it up, give it up" he said and turned away with a great swing, as people do who wish to be alone with their laughter.

This was a great story for me, first because it's short enough for me to get my head around in German, and second because it's very interesting. I was surprised by how quickly problems arose in translating it; there are always certain elements of language that can't be conveniently rendered in another tongue, but the fact that I saw instances of that in a piece this short was unexpected. There are two places in this story where my translation fails to capture the subtext of the original.

The first, and less problematic of the two, is the part which reads "luckily there was a policeman nearby." The word Kafka uses, "Schutzmann," is definitely referring to a police officer, but its literal meaning is more along the lines of "man who protects," the implication being that he is both a representative of the authority of the state, but also has a more allegorical function, which I'll mention below.

The second problematic passage is the 'answer' the policeman gives when he is asked about the way: "Von mir willst du den Weg erfahren?" The important point here is that, in the original, the policeman addresses the narrator with 'du' rather that 'Sie.' In German, there are two ways to say 'you' to someone, one of which is formal and used for speaking to most people you meet, and the other is informal and used only for speaking to friends, peers, and children. Unless the policeman and the narrator are very well acquainted, he is being very rude and patronizing by implying that the narrator is like a child.

Now for deeper meaning: in our class, we read this as a parable pointing out the futility of looking to the state/church authority for guidance. Consider: we have the character of the narrator walking through an empty city who raises his head to a clock tower, just as a man will look to heaven for guidance. Instead of a traditional god, however, the narrator's eyes meet with a symbol of earthly authority. Comparing his clock with the one in the tower and finding that they don't match, he naturally assumes his is incorrect. The picture we have is that of a man who seeks to work within the system, where the system is the church or the bureaucracy, which are equivalent in Kafka's eyes.

The problem for the narrator comes when he finds that he does not know how to find his way through the city; he is an alien there. Going to the obvious figure in search of help leads nowhere- the policeman either doesn't know or isn't telling. The narrator asking for the "way" is an obvious metaphor for finding the way in a religious sense, and Kafka again equates religion and bureaucracy by posed such a loaded question not to a priest but to a police officer. The narrator naturally receives no enlightenment from the officer, and you could read the name "protection man" as being an implication that his function is to 'protect' the narrator from the discovery of the empty void behind the facade of authority. We're left with the image of the narrator running through empty, meaningless streets looking for a way that does not exist.

Of course, it's easy for me to interpret it that way, since I hate bureaucracies too. We should all just stop paying taxes and live in a demand -driven econo-government. Yeah. Anyhow, I thought it was a pretty well-crafted little story, and hopefully you at least enjoyed reading Kafka, if not my comments.

Globetrotter Grady in Münster

As you may know, since I was telling everyone I knew and randomly met on the street, I'm in Münster, Germany right now. I've tried not to put too many entries in this blog about what's going on in my life, because there are already a million of those and my life's no more interesting than the next guy's, but dammit all if I'm not going to bore you for a bit.

Germany is pretty amazing. Our group flew in to Düsseldorf and immediately drove to Köln, where we spent two days. Wasting no time, we found a Biergarten the first night and proceeded to test the claim that German beer is stronger than American beer. I can't remember what we eventually decided. It does taste a helluva lot better, though.

We saw the Kölner Dom the next day, which is something like the second largest cathedral in Europe (and, by extension, the world). You can't really describe it; standing at the bottom of this huge gothic building you and try to look up and see the top, but your head won't bend back far enough. It's just amazing. Oh, and a couple of people and I walked to the top of one of the towers. That was a sight.

From there we went on to several other very scenic and historic locations, and eventually ended up here in Münster, where we're now taking classes during the day and bumming around the rest of the time. Here's a list of the things that have really jumped out at me about Germany:

• All the houses have these awesome shades that work kind of like a rolltop desk. There's a solid metal sheet that rolls down over the outside of the window, but it's made of slats, so you can still let in a little light if you want to. If you don't want to, though, it's like being in a submarine. You could sleep through anything.
• On the subject of windowshades, the windows themselves are really neat. They don't slide up and down like in the US; rather, they swing open. But in addition to that, you can turn the window handle a different way, and then the window tilts in from the top if you just want to crack it. They've got those on everything from my family's modern house to the stodgy old school we're using for classes.
• A lot of the lights fade on, rather than just clicking on. I am a huge fan.
• Most stores use prices like 10€, 2,50€, and so on. I have not seen a single item that costs 4,99€. Honestly, American businesses, who do you think you're fooling?
• The people here in Münster drive much more aggresively than most places I've lived (granted I'm a small town southern boy), but despite that, and despite the proliferation of bicycles, I've seen all of two accidents anywhere in the close to a month that I've been here.
• Also regarding traffic, the stoplights signal an impending green light as well as an impending red. It's great, as it gives everyone time to shift gears and get moving.
• Münster is also, as it turns out, the bicycle capital of Germany. Everyone here bikes, and it's the most bike friendly city I've ever been in. Not only are there bike lanes on the sidewalk next to all major roads, there are also bike traffic lights. Sweet.
• Castles!!
• Beer, chocolate, and ice cream - they really are much better. Especially the beer.
• Book publishers here give everything down the cheesiest sci-fi a very nice treatment- no hokey covers and cheap paper; even paperbacks always have a tastefully laid out cover and are well bound. They also make fantastic editions of 'classic' literature; you can get many famous books as a hardback with no gaudy advertisements or soundbites from 'reviews.' All such books from a particular publisher will be matched, so they look great lined up next to each other. Oh, the simple things.

So yes. Overall I'm quite enamored with Germany. Don't get me wrong, it's no utopia, but I'm constantly struck by how many simple, obvious things they do here that are virtually unknown in the states. It's a great place. You should visit.

Blood and gore

Right now I'm at Duke, being a dork and doing math during the summer. The whole end of the semester, beginning of the summer period has been pretty non-stop, and it's not going to ease up any. When this is over, I'll have one day at home before leaving for Germany and six weeks of 'study' abroad. But, before I left W&M, my friend and I didn't have anything better to do one evening, so I made her watch Titus with me. (The movie, not the play. Although I have no doubt that watching a book would be quite gripping, if you're in to that sort of thing.)

The play Titus Andronicus was written by Shakespeare, but in recent years, Julie Taymor directed a big screen adaptation of it, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. The critics weren't too fond of it; in fact, it turns out that the critics aren't too fond of the original play, either. It's apparently viewed as the closest Shakespeare ever got to hack work, written to do nothing but please the crowd. As you might expect, it's got tons of blood. All kinds of body parts get cut off, people get baked into pastries... it's great. Sadly, most people today look at the horrific violence of the play and dismiss it as Shakespeare's shallowest work, making the claim that it's the lowest type of dramatic work: that degenerate play written merely to please the audience and make money.

That's something I'm not going to try to refute, because I'm not an English major, but people who hold this view of Titus Andronicus are, I think, missing the larger point. Every play Shakespeare wrote was intended merely to please the audience and make money; they were, after all, his job. The fact that he happened to be supremely gifted in writing plays with deep and powerful themes was just history's luck. Titus Andronicus may not be Shakespeare's most 'literary' work, but that doesn't mean that it's wholly without merit. As with all his plays, there's quite a lot to recommend it besides the bloody plot, from memorable, well-developed characters to the witty dialogue.

I have a hard time understanding Shakespeare purists; people who insist on re-enacting his plays in Elizabethean garb are, I think, forgetting that his plays are entertainment in the same way that Hollywood films are entertainment. They are not holy writ, and they are meant to dazzle, shock, and surprise.

In the case of Titus Andronicus, I think that the generally negative feeling towards it that I have seen among critics is misplaced. When you get down to brass tacks, the direction is fantastic, the reinterpretation of the setting is quirky and interesting, and every single actor across the board has an outstanding grasp of the material. Two thumbs up.

And all of that aside, Aaron gets the best line in any play ever: "Villian, I have done thy mother."

Complete text of Titus Andronicus, courtesy of Project Gutenberg

Star Wars: The Next One

Episode III is reviewed at Bigfanboy.com. Verdict? Better than the first two, still not great.

This is actually heartening news. If Lucas is able to continue this linear improvement, then the 4th, 5th, and 6th movies should be pretty amazing. Oh, wait.

I can't make fun, though. I already know I'm going to shell out my seven bucks and see it in the theatre as soon as it comes out.

By the way

One site that I've been linking to quite frequently is Wikipedia, and I'd just like to point out what an amazing place it is. If you haven't checked it out yet, you ought to. The idea is that it's an encyclopedia, but absolutely anyone can get on there and edit an article, or create a new article. In spite of the sincere efforts of some people determined to wreck the experience, the whole thing works incredibly well. Just go here and start reading, it's crazy what you run across.

Also, a day or two ago I mentioned Technorati, which is a pretty neat site. The idea there is to keep track of blogs and rate which are the most influential by counting the number of other pages that link to any given blog. It's the same idea as citation analysis to determine the influence of a scientific paper, or Google's PageRank thing, but for blogs. A site like Gizmodo is way up on the list because all kinds of people read it and then link back to it, whereas my poor site is at the bottom of the pile. Will you be my friend?

Merit-based economies and Schoenberg

A few days ago I mentioned reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and said it was good and fun and all, but not outstanding. Well, it's been turning over in my mind, and the more I think about it the more appealing I find his whole idea of a merit-based economy. I've got no idea if this is something that other people have written about previously or what, but Doctorow sets his story in a society that no longer uses money; science has advanced to the point where all the necessities of life are essentially free for the taking. A person's 'worth,' in this society, is determined by the amount of respect others have for them. Read about it here.

What got me thinking about this was Arnold Schoeberg, whom we've been studying in my music history class. Schoenberg was the first composer to develop any kind of coherent system for writing atonal music. Now, the phrase 'systemetized atonal music' is kind of misleading, because it makes it sound like such music would have an audible, coherent structure, which isn't the case. Schoenberg spent some time before he developed his system, called serialism, writing atonal music without any particular blueprint. His suite Pierrot Lunaire is probably the most famous example of this. His efforts to devise a system for writing atonal music that didn't rely on an external text for structure ultimately led to his creation of serialism.

Serialism, or the twelve-tone system, was a method that allowed Schoeberg to compose pieces that were completely atonal, yet still afforded the composer a framework in which to organize a work. Serialistic compositions are masterpieces of mathematical precision, rife with clever juxtapositions and inversion of lines, and absolutely unintelligible when listened to. In order to understand a twelve-tone piece on even the most basic level, you have to sit down with the score and analyze it. In fact, there's really not much of a point in listening to the piece in the first place, because it's not going to help you understand what's going on, and you certainly won't enjoy it.

Schoenberg's earlier atonal pieces frequently sound like a group of instruments playing more or less random notes in no particular rhythm. His later serialistic pieces, which are possessed of an incredibly stringent, erudite structure, also sound like a group of instruments playing random notes in no particular rhythm. Interestingly, you can play one piece from each period of Schoenberg's career to a trained musician or composer, and nine times out of ten they won't be able to tell if the piece is serialistic or not.

The point is that Schoeberg created a system by which all the humanity could be removed from the process of writing 'music;' but the end result was not really art, rather, it was nothing more than intellectual masturbation. Schoenberg claimed his music was a natural extension of the development of music, and so wrote his first serialistic piece, a piano suite, based on traditional classical forms. What to him was a way of fitting his work in with the great masterpieces of the past to me seems like an attempt to legitimize something that can barely be called music.

But, what thinking about Doctorow's book got me to realize is that, although my opinion about Schoenberg is shared by a schockingly large number of people, it's not the whole story. Clearly not everyone feels this way, since we still at least study Schoenberg, and the crucial factor for the man himself would have been if enough people considered his work meritorious for him to continue doing it. It doesn't matter so much that I happen to think his music is crap; there are people who find it richly rewarding, and on the basis of their opinion his work has some merit. So, moral of the story is that Daniel learned to be more open-minded.

It strikes me as kind of funny that even today, artists and scientists, the people who move society forward, are following something like this merit based system; few of them are well-paid, but they continue to do their work because they're inspired to do so and because of the respect it earns them among their peers. Maybe one day the rest of us will catch up.

I think I lost my point halfway through the rant about Schoenberg. Sorry. Only one more final, thank god.

Wastin' away...

Saucy has an article on making a good margarita- not the frozen kind, but the real honest to god cocktail. I actually agree with all the points he makes, and I'm a pretentious stuffy liquor snob, so check it out and learn how to get away from the syrupy sweet concoctions that Ruby Tuesday's has been feeding you all these years.

Hey Look

The Modern Word has an interview with the guy who's translating Umberto Eco's new novel. AND the New Yorker has the whole damn first chapter! I'm excited.

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. He's also an extremely good writer. The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, and Baudolino have all been penned by his hand. If you want to read one of his books, Baudolino would probably be a good place to start because it's funny and easy to understand (on one level) while retaining the depth and subtlety of his other novels.

Not everyone likes Eco, and some accuse him, perhaps rightly so, of intellectual grandstanding. It's hard to argue that Foucault's Pendulum doesn't fall into this trap. Despite this, however, his books are extrememly interesting and rewarding reads. Plus, you just feel so damn proud of yourself for finishing one.

110,000 V Taser Canon

I'ma put one of these bad boys on the roof of my dorm. That'll keep those damn construction workers from starting up their noisy machinery at 8am.

Linked from Gizmodo

Down and Out

Just finished reading Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (Doctorow is a co-editor of Boing Boing, which Technorati has consistently rated as the most popular blog on the internet for some time.) Thought it was pretty decent, fun to read, well-imagined. It's a sci-fi story set in the fairly impending future, but definitely not a space-opera type deal. It's just a story about a guy who lives and works at Disney World, and about his life getting crapped up, and him trying to redeem himself. The story was good, definintely worth the time. Don't know that I'd pay money for it, but fortunately, you don't have to.

Howl's Moving Castle

You should check out this trailer for a movie called Howl's Moving Castle. True, it's all anime-ish, but good lord! I'd put up with just about anything for those visuals. The movie is apparently based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones, who writes clever, fun fantasy for the young adult crowd. The guy directing the movie is the same guy who did Spirited Away, which won a best animated film award from any number of groups, including the Academy, and was a really imaginative, wonderfully drawn movie. The fact that Disney is brining in some big names to dub Howl in English could be good or bad, but either way this new film looks very promising. The only problem is that I'll be in Germany when it comes out, along with Batman Begins and Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Doch schade.

Psychonauts redux

Looks like Psychonauts turned out about as the demo indicated: solid but not particularly innovative gameplay coupled with spot on, top-notch art direction, voice acting, and writing. Now I can eagerly anticipate the inevitable price drop later this year...

Guero

Beck's released a new album titled 'Guero' which is quite excellent. Very similar in style to Odelay, with a bit more emphasis on electronics and hip-hop influece. Or so it sounds to me, but I know not so much about these things.

Psychonauts

Psychonauts is a new game from Tim Schafer, the guy who designed Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. If you've not heard of either of those, they're widely considered adventure game classics. I've only played Grim Fandango myself, but I can say that it's definitely worth hunting for a copy. The game had absolutely amazing art direction, voice acting, music, and writing. It's one of those rare video games that will stick in your memory for years to come, not so much for its gameplay, which is really just the vehicle for transporting the actual content, but for its unique character.

Both of those games were developed when Schafer worked at LucasArts (back in the days when it didn't routinely butcher its flagship license), but he has since moved on to found his own company, Double Fine Productions. Psychonauts is their first game, and the first game that Schafer has worked on (to my knowledge) since leaving LucasArts. Its development has been somewhat protracted and rocky, but after being dropped by their initial publisher only to be picked up by Majesco, they are set to finally release the game on the 19th (for PC and Xbox, with PS2 theoretically coming 'soon'). Double Fine recently released a demo of Psychonauts to the public, which includes what looks to be the introductory training area of the game. I took the time out of my busy schedule of homework, homework, and more homework to play through it, and now you get to hear what I thought. Exciting, no?

The first thing you notice is that the fantastic art direction of Grim Fandango is still present in spades, along with the voice acting. What little of the writing I saw was promising. While the humor was forced at times, it was certainly entertaining, and the script quickly establishes the relationships between the major characters, not falling into the trap of a too lengthy exposition, which can quickly kill a video game. I was also very appreciative of the fact that what is essentially the tutorial section of the game is pretty well integrated into the narrative- many games have tutorials that are very jarring, forced, "Now click the left mouse button on the flashing box" affairs that are never any fun. Pyschonauts throws you right into a very simple level that presents you with a series of obstacles that are easy enough to figure out one by one, all while a psychotic drill sergeant is screaming imprecations and occasional instructions at you. It worked well. Technically, the game looks nice enough, with many of the new whiz-bang effects that we've come to expect, but when compared to Half-Life 2 or the like it doesn't stand out in this respect. This game will succeed graphically purely through art direction, as far as I'm concerned.

Overall, the game that this demo indicates could go either way. The section represented here is certainly a good start, but it's of course very difficult to draw any hard and fast conclusions from the brief opening sections of any game. As compared to other current games, Psychonauts most notable features were unquestionably its art direction, character design, and so on. The gameplay itself was solid but not outstanding, and certainly runs the risk of falling into the common action/adventure/platformer mold, but again, it's very hard to tell from such an early segment. In any case, it's likely that the story and art will be what carry the game.

While I sat here writing this, it occurred to me that Psychonauts was one of maybe four game in the past year that I've been actively interested in playing. (Along with Paper Mario 2, Half-Life 2, and World of Warcraft.) Though I have next to no time to actually play games anymore, I do try to keep up with the industry, and despite all the impressive steps that have been taken as far as graphical capability goes, there have just not been that many interesting games released in a while. Maybe I'm just not paying enough attention and missed a slew of amazing titles, but you can be sure that I'm really holding my breath for Psychonauts, particularly since I may actually have time to enjoy it this summer. It has the potential to be one of the first genuinely fun games to come my way in quite a while.

P.S.
The American Society of Magazine Editors has posted their picks for the year's best magazines.

Prince Ombra

Okay, I need to tell you something: I'm a huge dork. That's my justification for spending a couple of weeks reading a kind of cheesy, kind of fantasy book about a kid who heroically fights off the One Great Evil of the cosmos. What prompted me to pick up an obscure fantasy book from the early 80s? Read on, friend. Read on.

The first mention I heard of this book was in an article on Bookslut, which is the internet's premier librarian pornography website. Really. Anyhow, one of their contributors wrote an article on Speculative Fiction (which is apparently the new catch-all genre title that eliminates the problem of where to file stuff like the Book of the New Sun. Is it fantasy? Is it science fiction? Oh god, I can't tell!!) They particularly recommended a book titled Prince Ombra, written in 1982 by Roderick MacLeish, who appears to be the poster boy for obscure authors. I had just finished reading Stoppard's play The Invention of Love, which is excellent but difficult to get your head around, like most of his work, and was in the mood for something a little easier to read. Incredibly, the college library actually had a copy of Prince Ombra, so I was off!

After finishing the book, I can say this: it was interesting, but not so much that I would go through it again. The basic premise is the idea of the recurring hero (all the great legends of the past, Arthur, Gilgamesh, Susano, etc., are about different incarnations of the one eternal hero), and this time the hero has recurred in the person of a small boy with a crippled leg. The book is interesting in that, while it ostensibly takes its cue from such epic legends of the past, the story related here is very personal and anything but epic.

The article at Bookslut, and also the comments about the book on Amazon, praise the book particularly for its strong, believable characterizations and its well-developed setting. In fact, this is where I view the book as failing. It's true that there's strong sense of setting and that the characters behave realistically, but the way in which they're depicted is so blunt and clumsy that it kills any sense of believability. Where other authors will define a character by their actions and interactions, MacLeish just comes right out and says it. "Bob was a happy guy, but he was haunted by the death of his mother so many years ago..." Which wouldn't be so bad occasionally, but this is essentially the only way we get any characterization at all in the novel. Although in a sense it's necessary, since most of the characters are being influenced by an evil force at some point in the story, so the opportunity for demonstrating their true nature through action is somewhat limited. But anyhow.

The heavy-handed treatment of characters in the novel reflects a larger problem of the book: the writing overall can be fairly uneven. There are places where MacLeish is able to evoke a mood or scene beautifully, and there are other places where the prose is completely flat. Although the book is not for children and deals with fairly mature themes, there are places where he seems to be addressing an audience of younger people.

The book strikes me as the kind of thing that one might read and enjoy as a young adult, and carry fond memories of it into later life. Despite its undeniable charm and some particularly strong writing in places, the novel as a whole is more interesting than entertaining, and I found myself having to forgive it too much.

Things that should not change

Healthy eating is a good thing that we need to see more in America, and seeing healthier messages in the media is undoubtedly going to contribute to a change for the better. But there are certain lines that just should not be crossed.

Cookie Monster is named 'Cookie Monster' because he likes cookies. Not cucumbers, carrots, or chick peas. Cookies. It's in his bloody name. When Cookie Monster starts telling you that cookies are no good, well... It just makes you want to kill all those damn terrorists who are screwing up our beautiful homeland even more.

Newfangledness

Check out the page's fancy new design. Well, not so fancy, but still. I spent a lot of time this weekend working with CSS and HTML instead of doing homework, and the end results are a couple of swanky new doodads. Actually just two new doodads, really, but they're pretty cool. Try resizing your browser window. Notice how the page will dynamically resize itself to fit? Isn't that awesome? The other spiffy new thing is the oversize letter that begins each post now. Notice that they aren't graphic files, those are actually just regular text, which means that they resize themselves appropriately if you make your default font size bigger or smaller (hit Ctrl-'+' or Ctrl-'-' in Firefox). Impressive, no? The only other things that are different are just small cosmetic tweaks.

The page resizing bit I did on my own, but for the oversize letters I am indebted to Eric Meyer's excellent site css/edge. And of course the basic page design is the Scribe template created by Todd Dominey, which I've tweaked to make it cooler. Yeah.

And now that I've had my two cups of French roast, it's time to try and decipher some German.

Update: 'Drop caps' is apparently the 'correct' name for the big letters. As if anyone cared about being correct. Also, they don't look right in IE because, SURPRISE, it doesn't follow the W3C stylesheet specs. So if you're using IE, don't be a fool. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click 'Get Firefox.'

I've been had

As it turns out, hiding in my room all day didn't work at all. I never even got around to hiding before I'd been hit, and hit hard. At bloody 7:40 in the morning, someone tries to call me not once, not twice, but three times. The third time I finally rolled out of bed and answered it. As you might expect, I'm not the most coherent person in the world right after I've been woken up, so bear that in mind. The conversation went roughly like this:

"Whaaa...?"

"Mr. Grady, this is Officer Smith with the police. We were investigating a noise complaint in the attic of your building yesterday, and when we went up there to look around we found some homemade alcohol and what appeared to be a still. Your name came up when we asked around about this, and we need you to come in for questioning."

Now, I don't want to admit anything here I might regret later, so let's just say that this accusation scared the crap out of me.

"I... uh... I have a class at 11...."
"I think this takes precedence over that."
"Okay...."
"Mr. Grady, are you also aware that today is April Fool's Day?"
".......shit."

Absolutely scared the crap out of me. So while I can neither confirm nor deny the reports of a still being formerly located in the attic, I can happily say that there is not one there currently.

Here's hoping you had a much quieter awakening.

The Best Prank Ever

The 1st of April is always a bad day for me. The problem is that I'm an extremely gullible person, a trait which I prefer to call trusting. But however you name it, the fact remains that, if you think of the most ridiculous, asinine thing that your friends have ever convinced you was true, then I have been tricked into believing something at least twice as ludicrous. I am also a coward, which is why April Fool's day sees me hiding in my room trying to avoid other people. However, rather than spend all this time unproductively, I figured the least I could do was bring you the story of the best prank that I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes. And the best part of the story of the best prank is that, incredibly, it didn't happen to me. No, don't stop reading! It's still a funny story, I promise...

So when I was in high school, we had an assistant vice principal of discipline, and his name was Mr. Masters. Mr. Masters looked just like Mario. From the Nintendo games. Short, pudgy, moustache, everything except the stylish red cap. Mr. Masters also had no sense of humor about this fact at all; mention Mario around him, even in good fun, and you would be immediately threatened with suspension, or even expulsion. God forbid they force us to not go to school. Anyhow.

Our school was made up of several building, and on what was probably the front of the building that contained the cafeteria, in big letters way up on the side, it said "Oak Ridge High School," 'cause that was the name of the school. And it had the school logo beside it.

One day, everyone shows up for school. Today, though, instead of saying "Oak Ridge High School," the side of the cafeteria proudly displays "Mario High School."

Turns out that a couple of guys had climbed to the top of the building the night before, rappelled down the side, and rearranged the letters (they built their own "M") to more appropriately represent the management. Within two hours, everyone at school knew who was responsible, including the administration. But they could never prove it, the perpetrators were never actually caught, and their names were immortalized for the rest of the year.

Don't believe that this actually happened? In your face, sucka:

Complicated math

Claim:

Pf: By definition

Complete Calvin & Hobbes

Some clever person finally decided to release a collection of all the Calvin & Hobbes comics ever published. Speaking as someone who could, at one point, recite any one of those comics by heart, this is pretty exciting.

Calvin & Hobbes still stands as the finest syndicated comic ever produced, on the web or off it. Sometimes laugh out loud funny, sometimes whimsical, always creative, it's wonderful to see it getting the sort of tribute it deserves.

Soon to come!!!

• A big chart of booze. What comes from where and how it gets made.
• One of those things you see where it calculates the motion of planets from gravity. Definitely a work in progress, written in Mathematica.
• H.P. Lovecraft annoys me to no end, and I'm going to bitch about it. But not tonight.

UPDATE: Turns out I might have been lying about all of that. Eventually, perhaps, but I probably won't have time to fiddle with any of that stuff until the summer.

Yay for innovation

So that comment below about the semester going pretty well was a load of crap. This semester has been ridiculous, nonstop work. In fact, I should be working now, but instead I'm slacking off to bring you these wholly unelucidating comments.

Here, here, and this big old list all talk about Will Wright's latest game, called Spore. It's pretty crazy, and I'm gonna talk at you about it for a bit.

May I first just say how relieved I am to see that Wright has actually been working on something other than the damn Sims for the past little while.

May I next say that Wright has hit upon a problem that has been looming on the horizon for video games for some time. The next few generations of video cards and console systems are going to bring us to a point where we can render in realtime what are essentially photorealistic scenes. It takes only a cursory glance at the technology available today, however, to see that, while these environments might have ludicrously high resolutions and brilliant lighting effects, they will not look convincingly real because they will not behave in the manner in which we know the world works. They will not look convincingly realistic because no matter how many polygons or light sources or bump maps we add, we have not spent enough time developing the rules for how these worlds should move, and they will consequently always appear artificial.

By way of example, take the first two movies in the Alien series. In the first movie, suspense was created largely through atmosphere, and the fact that you only rarely saw the alien itself only added to the effect. By contrast, in the sequel, Aliens, we see the creatures much more frequently, and they are, at least to my mind, noticeably more frightening. Cameron pulled this off not by making the alien suit more detailed, but rather by spending months with the actors developing a convincingly scary way for the aliens to move. The costumes in Aliens are actually much simpler and toned down from the costume from the first movie; what makes them scary in the sequel is that they do not move like humans.

Game developers have yet to take Cameron's lesson to heart. It does not matter if you have a perfectly rendered character; if they move like a blind drunk then the player will not be drawn into the world. At this point in time, it is the development of realistic physics and realistic character animation that should be paramount. The clarity of the picture makes no difference without these fundamental building blocks.

This actually is not the specific problem that Wright was addressing, although it is related. Wright pointed out that, as video technology develops, the cost of creating suitable content goes up exponentially. Creating a modern first person shooter requires a veritable army of artists and animators to paint the world, despite the fact that the gameplay is not fundamentally different that Doom's. Wright points out that the relative value to gamers does not increase as the amount of work that goes into the game increases; in the words of someone else, "A game whose characters have 20,000 frames of animation isn't twice as good as a game whose characters have only 10,000 frames." As time goes on and graphics processors continue to become more and more powerful, the cost of producing even simple games will skyrocket, with no certain commensurate increase in quality. Wright's solution to this problem is ingenious, and you should check out the above articles.

I think I'm about finished with my semi-drunken ramblings. Hope you have an excellent evening.

A time-honored tradition

So what's new? The semester is looking relatively up, thank God. Classes aren't too bad (so far), work is only one day a week, and ballroom is ridiculous but fun. We're about two weeks into it and I have yet to buy a book for Probability, which, to my great surprise, hasn't turned out to be much of a problem. My roommate and I found a wardrobe lying around the other day, so we put in our room and effectively doubled our closet space. That was nice.

But once the thrill of jacking cheap, college owned furniture wears off, what's a poor student to do in the in-between times, and more importantly on the weekends? The answer could be many things, but we all know what happens in practice. One gets drunk on cheap beer.

That is what I'd like to discuss for a few moments.

As a freshman, I did as all freshmen do and drank whatever kind of alcohol I could lay my trembling, overawed paws on. Around here, that means Natty Light or Milwaukee's Best, fondly referred to as Beast. These are the beers of choice for the Greeks on campus because you can buy a case with the change you find in between your couch cushions. I'm sure your imagination or personal experience (you drunkard) can provide a more vivid description of their taste than any words of mine.

Of course, you never really enjoy Natty Light, but you drink it anyhow, because that's pretty much the only thing you can get on a regular basis. Until you hit the big 21. That's what happened to me a few months ago, and the results have been astounding. It turns out that when you can buy all your booze yourself, and if you're willing to drop pretty much all your money on it, you can get some excellent stuff. And so, in the spirit (yuk yuk) of imbibing tasty drinks for a change, let me share with you the recipe for what has come to be my favorite cocktail.

2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. cointreau
1/2 oz. lime juice

Shake or stir it all up with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

It's not going to be any good unless you use good gin and actual cointreau, not triple sec. But if you do spring for those ingredients, this thing is fantastic. It tastes tart and fruity, and if you're like me and enjoy your sugar, you can use Rose's lime juice to make it a bit sweet as well. This thing would be called a Blue Train, but the blue in that title comes from the food coloring you're supposed to add but never do because it's too much of a hassle. Instead, this variation is known as the Semi-Opaque Off-Green Train. It tastes better than it sounds.

I think I'm about done. In closing, partake, if you will, of a few interesting links:

This here is unbelievable. It's a little thing about the size of cigarette lighter. You put it on a desk or whatever, and it projects an image of a computer keyboard on the flat surface in front of it. You then proceed to type using said projected image. Pish posh, you say? Such a thing could never work reliably, you say? One man begs to differ.

Have you heard of the Evil Overlord List? It's been around for quite a while, I just happened to be thinking about it today. If you've seen at least one movie in the past decade, you'll think it's hilarious.

This blog is right up my alley.

A 4-year project

So I've been reinstalled in my chateau at scenic W&M, bought most of my books, and now await only the beginning of classes. Joy.

Since I'm back early for job training, I have yet to actually see anyone. Instead, I've been hanging out with my parents for the day, and sitting around my room bored. So I figured I'd blather about what's been occupying my thoughts recently. But first, some background.

About four, maybe five years ago, I picked up this book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, written by a very sharp guy named Douglas Hofstadter. About a week ago I finished reading it. Now, before you laugh, let me explain the reason it took so long. You see, Hofstadter goes to great lengths to make his book accessible, but when you're a high school kid trying to read about propositional calculus, well, it can be pretty dry. So I ended up setting the book down to read something else for a while, and then just never picked it back up until a couple of months ago. Turns out, stuff like that is a lot easier to understand after you've spent two years taking classes that cover the same material. Go figure. So I burned through the rest of it, and let me just say, that book is the most interesting work of information synthesis I've ever seen. If you've got the determination to trundle through the boring parts, it's really worth your time.

Hofstadter talks about subjects ranging from molecular biology to music in his book, but he himself is a mathematician, and the most detailed and interesting parts of his book were the parts dealing with an important mathematical result of the last century called the Incompleteness Theorem. It was proven by Kurt Gödel, a contemporary of Einstein, and it’s the deepest and most interesting result of math I have ever learned. Here's my attempt at an explanation of what it is and why it's important: First off, I’m betting that a few people out there aren’t as huge math dorks as I am, so here’s a quick rundown of some stuff. In theoretical math, there’s a set of symbols that mathematicians use to talk about things. For example, there’s a symbol that means “There exists such a number,” and there’s one that means “For every number,” and so on and so forth. A string of these symbols is known as a string (and that’s the easiest thing you’ll ever learn about math), but of course if you just randomly throw some symbols together, the string might end up meaning something like “8 + For every number or 27.” In other words, just putting symbols together does not mean that the resulting string will have any meaning. Strings that do make sense are called statements of number theory. That’s point one: strings are strings of number-theory symbols, and statements are strings that are grammatically correct, so to speak. An example of a statement might be, “For every number a, there exists a number b such that b = a + 1,” which is an important theorem when you’re talking about natural numbers. Now, theorems are simply statements that can be proven true, and they’re what theoretical mathematicians are generally trying to discover. So the hierarchy goes: Strings > Statements > Theorms

The Incompleteness Theorem deals with statements, so I’d like to quickly tell you a few more things about those. Here's the important part: if it is possible to prove a statement true or false, then that statement is known as a decidable statement of number theory (and it’s also a theorem if it can be proven true). If it is not possible to do this, then the statement is called undecidable. Next, step back and think about the number theory system as a whole. If it is the case that every statement of number theory is decidable, then the system is called complete. Otherwise, the system is incomplete, which would mean that there is at least one well-formed, meaningful statement of number theory which is impossible to prove true or false. If you think about it for a minute, you can see that even just trying to figure out if a given statement is decidable is not necessarily going to be easy or straightforward. Consider something like this: “There exist two prime numbers such that their product is divisible by their sum.” You can try to find such a pair just by guessing, of course, but there are an infinite number of primes, and you could never exhaust all the possibilities just by guessing and checking. It certainly could be the case that there is some other clever way of approaching the problem to prove the statement true or false, but as you can see, this would be no simple thing.

Prior to this century, it was sort of tacitly assumed by most mathematicians that number theory was a complete system and that every well-formed statement was either true or false and could be proven so. This does make intuitive sense; after all, number theory is a completely theoretical construct that obeys clear, unambiguous laws that we have defined. It's entirely reasonable to assume that, if we were clever enough, we could prove the theoremhood or falsity of every statement. But, in case the name "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem" hasn't set off any warning lights for you yet, it turns out that this is not the situation.

When mathematicians prove theorems, they do so by starting with another proven theorem, or with an axiom, and then use the rules of logic and other theorems or axioms to arrive at a new result. When people talk about 'number theory,' they're usually referring to the whole system, theorems and objects and all. The Incompleteness Theorem is different from most other theorems of number theory because of this: theorems generally say something about the properties of a certain mathematical object, as in "Two odd numbers add to an even number," "The order of any cyclic group is prime," and so on. This is not true of the Incompleteness Theorem. It states a property about the number theory system itself. What I mean is that, instead of saying something about how prime numbers work, or giving a property of a field, or something like that, the Incompleteness Theorem actually says something about the kinds of theorems that can be proven in the number theory system, and what is says is this:

Any formal axiomatic system is incomplete.

That's paraphrased, of course, since the original's in German and involves a lot of notation I can't even begin to understand, but the gist of it is right there. Number theory contains well-formed statements that can not ever be proven true or false. It's impossible to do so. Gödel managed to prove this by actually constructing such a statement. I'm not going to try to explain the details of how he did it, since I don't understand them myself very well and this is already really long. However, in a nutshell, what he did was formulate the Epimenides paradox as a statement of number theory ("This sentence is false"). This is not as easy as it seems; the crucial point of the Epimenides paradox is that the English language has very powerful self-referential capabilities, and so when he says "This sentence" we know that he means the one we are currently reading. For a long time it was not at all clear that number theory had the same capability. Gödel's genius lies in finding a way to essentially duplicate this construction within the constraints of number theory. And in doing so he created a statement which cannot be true or false, because to be either would imply it is not.

Of course, it is feasible to either adopt this statement as an axiom or reject it as a falsity and work from there, but the Gödel construction can immediately produce an equivalent statement in the new system, so trying to "patch" the hole in number theory is a fruitless exercise. What's particularly interesting about the situation is that this construction does not work on extremely simple systems. As parts of logic problems or exercises, it's very common to see systems that use a relatively small number of symbols that can be manipulated by simple rules, and such simple systems are in fact complete. They are not, however, interesting, and cannot prove any useful theorems about mathematical objects. In fact, it's been found that as soon as a formal system reaches a level of complexity that would allow it to prove useful and interesting statements, it becomes subject to the Gödel construction; it seems that having the ability to be self-referential is an essential part of such systems.

So now that I've spent God knows how long explaining this obscure bit of theoretical math, let me try to explain why it's struck me so deeply. The Incompleteness Theorem stands, in my mind, as a kind of counterpart to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg discovered that, no matter how clever we are about it, it will not ever, ever, ever in a trillion years be possible for us to precisely measure things down on an atomic level. There's always going to be a bit of uncertainty in any measurements we make, which means that the physical world we live in will always remain a basically unpredictable and wonderfully surprising place. And it turns out that the same sort of thing is true in math. Even in a system which exists only abstractly and can be divorced from any real or practical basis, even in a system that has been entirely defined by our minds and operates strictly according to our rules, its behavior is not entirely predictable. Despite the rigidity of its definition, such a system still holds surprises, and we can never achieve perfect knowledge of it, just as we can never achieve perfect knowledge of the physical world.

The Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates that no matter how far our civilization advances, there will always be holes in our understanding. As long as our race continues to think, there will be things to discover.