Books this year: a book diary

This is a remarkable collection of (sometimes very) short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, mostly translated by Anthony Kerrigan. You know all those thoughts you think or heard others think in movies like Adaptation, The Matrix, or Waking Life? Thoughts about the ontology of the future, the nature of chance, parallel universes and quantum mechanics, monkeys with typewriters or everything being in the digits of Pi, self-reference and the distinction between reality and fiction, the need for rules and generalization versus the strange and subtle elegance of having a name for everything like Chinese characters? Borges had them too, a long time ago. And he had them in a beautiful, Marquezian way.

This is a collection of mathematical tidbits that David Wells found throughout his life as a mathematics lover and teacher. I have a penchant for thoroughly reading bathroom reader material like this because I find it to be so enjoyable. This love of trivia is probably not a good thing and compares to other mindless activities I loathe such as sudoku. It has proven to make me an incredible Cranium player though. The following are some things worth commenting on

“The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. Much of the fascination of statistics lies embedded in our gut feeling — and never trust a gut feeling — that abstract measures summarising large tables of data must express something more real and fundamental than the data themselves. (Much professional training in statistics involves a conscious effort to counteract this gut feeling.)” -Steven Jay Gould

This is utter rubbish. If anything, professional statistical training consists of the exact opposite. We are reminded again and again that there is something under the data, and that this is in fact the correct (and useful) way to think about things. I’ve seen this in a number of modeling texts, and these reminders are there because sometimes you have the opposite gut feeling and forget to think in terms of true parameters. There’s also nothing wrong with trusting your gut. It certainly doesn’t constitute a proof, but neither has Gould proved that Platonism is in error.

Also mentioned is the universality of river-crossing problems. These seem to me to be too complex to have arisen independently in all the places they did (Gaelic, Danish, Russian, Italian, Romanian, and Black American folklore). And did you know that Aristotle knew of only one people who used a base other than ten and offered lots of explanations for why it might be popular to use ten?

I leave you with the following passage: ‘During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukranian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.

Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The skeptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. “All right,” he said, “calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot.” Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.

Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader.’

I decided to buy this book after watching a compelling lecture by Wolf online. Wolf says that she had a conversation with a Jewish mentor of hers who repeatedly made the comment “They did this in Germany” while watching news reports here in America. While she initially wrote it off, her friend eventually forced her to listen which started Wolf on a research campaign to discover more of the similarities between what is happening in our country today and what had happened in Italy, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and other democracies that were closed down in the past.

The book is organized around 10 things that Wolf says form a blueprint which is invariably followed by those who are trying to shut down an existing democracy. If you wish to see these 10 steps, I refer you to the Wikipedia article. I think it’s pretty undeniable that all 10 steps are fascist in nature and are happening here today. If you aren’t convinced, or could just use a little disillusioning, in particular of the myth that It Can’t Happen Here, this might be a good book to read. If you happen to be in the unlikely position of already being convinced and having people who will listen nearby, it’s nice to have some ammunition.

This is volume 1 of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. It covers Egypt, Sumeria, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, the Hebrews, India and some other stuff in pre-modern times. It also covers China and Japan up to the modern age. The first 100 pages or so is a nice anthropological summary about how civilization comes to be. Durant is a relativist, and this comes out in these first few pages, as he inevitably starts talking about how every tribe had it’s own traditions and beliefs and how just about every variation had at one time or another been tried.

One thing that draws me to the series is its synthetic style. Despite its age, this is almost certainly the newest history of this scope (11 volumes) which focuses on all the many aspects of culture, and is written in a storytelling style. The other thing is that I tend to agree with just about every observation Durant makes. Despite our differences, he is a really good writer and tends to draw sound conclusions.

I learned a lot from this book. I learned that of all the ancient cultures, I like the Indians the best. I also learned that Egypt was really awesome. Anyone who really likes history should definitely check it out.

I was looking around Librivox one day and discovered this on there. Since I had the impression that Dostoevsky is very good and I hadn’t yet read anything by him, I decided that this would be a good book to get. Now, this is described as the world’s first existentialist novel. What precisely that means, or even what this book is about, I have yet to figure out. I’m told a lot of really smart people say that it means something (although sometimes people don’t say what they thought it means and sometimes even these opinions are invented, such as Nietzsche’s “cried truth from the blood” statement), so I’ll leave that option open. All in all, it read like a bunch of pointless rambling and I think I’ll just assume that Dostoevsky’s other works are more substantive.

I was introduced to Alasdair MacIntyre when Ken showed me a MacIntyre quote he had seen. The quote, which is the absolute last thing said in After Virtue, is a bit too long to post here, but the gist is that we are already living in the dark ages, and that we need to construct new forms of community to save our moral and intellectual life. “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.”

The book is 278 pages of high-brow moral philosophy. There’s an awful lot of stuff in the book, and MacIntyre takes a highly synthetic and historical approach. An example is looking at the social context of emotivism and seeing that “emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.” This to my mind is a much better way of addressing the root of the issue than conducting the kind of dry, analytical philosophy (often in the name of objectivity) that is so often conducted today. He of course uses analytical argument when it helps, but this is mainly a book about what virtue used to mean and has come to mean (if anything).

Here’s the run down. MacIntyre posits that the moral language we use has fallen into a state of disorder, and that the prevalent doctrine of emotivism has made all evaluative (and in particular moral) argument rationally interminable. Every emotivist has inherited language the use of which presupposes a kind of objective meaning which is rendered meaningless by emotivism.

The Enlightment project of justifying morality is dealt a coup de grâce by Enten-Eller (similar to the Hilbert program being dealt a coup de grâce by Gödel) Kirkegaardian choice is no more able to replace reason than Kantian reason was able to replace Diderot’s and Hume’s desire and passions as new philosophical underpinnings for the old, inherited ethics. The three competing philosophies each assert the failure of the other two so magnificently that it is realized that all three of them are failures. However, what we should remember (most people don’t) is that, just like Hilbert’s program, the failure of the Enlightenment project was inevitable.

MacIntyre contends that the moral problems of our age are a consequence of the failure of the Enlightenment project, which in turn was doomed to failure because it was a misapplication of logical ideas to the inherited language and morals of classical theism – in particular the Aristotelian tradition.

MacIntyre contends that the most powerful proponents of the modern and premodern interpretations are Nietzsche and Aristotle, respectively. The central thesis which gives power to the Nietzschean position is that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail. The Aristotelian tradition, and in particular the Aristotelian teleology, were rejected in no small part because of the triumph of the modern thesis that questions regarding the description of man’s telos are essentially unsettlable. Thus, the removal of the conception of the good life for man and the attempt to formulate the inherited ethics without regard for the proper functional definition of man, stripped from the premises of any argument the machinery which could get them to reach the desired conclusions. MacIntyre contends that either we must side with Nietzsche, who brilliantly takes down the Enlightenment project, or we can consider that the project could have never taken place without the rejection of Aristotelian virtue, and that perhaps that rejection should also have never taken place.

Aristotle’s account of the virtues is taken to be not an independent account, but rather an inheritance of the concept of virtue as it was understood going back to heroic society (remember that whole synthetic historical thing?)

MacIntyre then spends a few chapters talking about what he thinks this all means for us, culminating with the quote that Ken showed me.

It’s a pretty good one, and I suppose for a modern reader a lot of it will hinge upon your comfort level with the historical approach (i.e. your ability to accept the proposition that we should cultivate and reawaken tradition).

You know the saying, “It doesn’t take an Ostrogoth?” Well this time it did. The stage is set when Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius is imprisoned by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. While there, Boethius wrote this account of human happiness.

There is an argument against the existence of God which supposes that God’s existence implies that men should not suffer bad fortune they do not deserve. In The Consolation, we are asked to admit that the conclusion of this implication (that life is not always fair) is true. Rather than denying the existence of God, Boethius uses the ancient motif of Fotune’s Wheel to argue that there is, in fact, an independence between fortune and happiness, and also between fortune and desert. Skipping to the conclusion: True Happiness, the Supreme Good, and God are the same. Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will coexist.

Unfortunately for us, we now know that true knowledge is essentially incomplete, and that any argument of this form is claiming to establish by proof what it has actually implicitly assumed. The belief that all truth is accessible would be consolation indeed. However, putting away the strange conceit that the world is amenable to formal argument is comforting in its own right. Like many observations, there’s an “of course” feeling once it sinks in. I like to describe this as “natural” in the Chinese sense of the word. The world is round… Of course. It’s so natural! The world is not reducible… Of course. It’s so natural!

This is one of those books I’m sure most people have read at some point in their childhood, but through the peculiarity of my youth, I either never read or have forgotten. I find it difficult to say much about the book, as it is fairly irreducible.

In addition to the book’s popularity, there also seems to me to be a mystique surrounding it. I must report, however that I join the ranks of the few who reject the persistent search for hidden meaning in the nonsense that is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is not to say I am unappreciative of the nonsense–in fact, I quite like it. The mathematical points I have seen some people claim to see, such as representation of numbers in different bases, seem to me very far fetched. I tend to catch this sort of thing in books with some delight, perhaps even when it isn’t there, but I’m not seeing it here. If there really is deeply hidden meaning of this type in the book, I contend that Carroll must be a freak like me who somehow takes joy in making jokes so subtle, serious, convoluted, or specialized as to expect them to be incomprehensible to others, even in their telling. If this is the case, Carroll probably would be upset if someone found something like this out.

If I didn’t give a synopsis, you probably know what happens anyway via film and/or cultural osmosis. I will say that the popular film adaptations I have seen do it a great deal of justice in the plot. To my mind, this kind of thing is a great relief from more difficult reading, which is primarily why I listened to it.

This was a pretty dry and unexciting primary source. A number of such sources detail the travels of an individual or group over a certain length of time. As you probably know, this book tells of the travels of Erik the Red and others, notably Leif Ericson, who went to a place called Vinland or Wineland (Most people like to say this is Newfoundland), and Thorfinn Karlsefni. In this saga, Leif is said to be the discoverer of mainland America. However, another important Icelandic saga, the Saga of the Greenlanders, puts Bjarni Herjolfsson as the discoverer. Interestingly enough, old Erik had a penchant for killing people, so much so that it got him exiled (at least virtually exiled) from two different places. Had it not been for this fact, your 3rd grader would probably never have to learn to resent Columbus in favor of Leif. (You did realize this is why they teach Columbus in 2nd grade, didn’t you?)

Another aspect of the story is the growing Christianization of the region during this period. An example of this is that Erik the Red himself persisted as an adherent to the old Norse religion, while Leif and his wife became Christians, and the church they erect in this saga is said to be the first Christian church in North America. Iceland had already legislatively adopted Christianity in 1000 AD.

This one probably isn’t going to be on the top of my recommended reading list, unless you just want to impress people at parties.

I saw this book browsing the Librivox catalog and thought it seemed interesting. During the time, I was trying to think of ways to ensure that I fully utilized my non-work hours as I now have a regular work schedule, and that’s exactly what this book is about. Bennett urges readers to think of their evenings as the real part of their day and to devote part of them to more than just unbridled leisure. In his day, this was playing cards, smoking a pipe, etc. Now, I think the equivalent is probably plopping yourself down on the couch and watching T.V.

Recently, Ken directed my attention to a great article from the Onion which describes one man’s attempt to avoid too much emphasis on his work. That article probably summarizes nicely why I wanted to read this book. I would say this book didn’t do much to convince me to be the audio-bookophile I am now, but it was certainly my initiation.