24 Dec 2005

Read a new translation of Dante's Inferno (2003-2005; Birk and Sanders).  See my review at Amazon.com.  They published all three volumes of the Devine Comedy.   It is a slang/surfer/contemporary translation with illustrations set in modern times.    The translation is not bad:  anything that makes the text more inviting to younger generations is a good thing.  The illustrations are a strange lot:  The settings and background details are very witty and ingenious (Inferno is set in Los Angeles;  Purgatorio in New York; and Paradiso in San Francisco), but the renderings are in the style of junior high school doodler.   He really has difficulty drawing the human figure.  Very annoying.  The pictures could have been great if done by a real artist.    

What really put me off the book, though, is the fact that the authors did not translate from the original Italian, instead, then just read several existing English translations and paraphrased them!    When I discovered that, my enthusiasm for the book fell through the floor.  To make it worse:  they don't really publish that fact:  Although the book is careful to avoid saying "a new translation" it sure doesn't make it clear that the authors re-worded other translations.  Worse, they don't give credit to the translators that they are relying on!

27 Nov 2005

Read a book about aspirin.   It was originally discovered because it naturally occurred in the bark of the Willow tree.  Bayer lost the trademark "aspirin" in 1920 in the USA, but still has that trademark in many other countries.

29 Sept 2005

Read Will In The World (2004, S. Greenblatt) a biography of Shakespeare.  Gone is the possibility that other authors penned many of his works.  Plenty of documents survived, and are being steadily unearthed by scholars (wills, lawsuits, contracts, birth records, etc) to demonstrate that he did it all.  Oddly, not a single confirmed instance of his handwriting has been found.

Shakespeare is yet another example of a very successful husband who treated his wife and family miserably: He lived in London while his wife and 3 children lived in Stratford.

The Upstart Crow is the name of a bookstore in San Diego.  The name comes from a letter from a rival of Shakespeare's: he calls Shakespeare an upstart crow.

As great as his works are, I don’t think it is accurate to cover all the great themes of fiction.   Sure, Romeo and Juliet, and maybe Othello, are fundamental plots, but I don’t think Shakespeare’s plays include the following:

• Man and woman fall in love, overcome obstacles, live happily ever after (in Sh’s plays, the married couples usually hate or mistreat each other)
• Two men, of different temperaments, are thrown together to face a challenge, successfully complete the challenge, and grow to be best friends.
• Vice-ridden character experiences a life-altering event, and turns virtuous and redeems his past misdeeds through self-sacrifice.
• Virtuous, hard-working youth starts life in oppressed circumstances and, through a combination of pluck and thrift, becomes wealthy, yet never forgets his roots.
• Everyday man is encounters a terrible injustice and resolves to fight against insurmountable odds.  Early setbacks make him question his resolve, but his efforts inspire others to join him, and together they vanquish the foe.  Truth and justice prevail.
• Protagonist is rushing through life, obsessed with wealth and fame;  traumatic event makes him realize the importance of family, nature, and simple pleasures.  He changes his attitude and seizes the day.
• Eccentric, but virtuous, youth is ridiculed by peers;  finds sympathetic mentor who teaches youth to believe in himself; youth finds courage to face up to oppressors, and gains their grudging respect.

Shakespeare certainly had plenty of sources:   Don Quixote, The Odyssey, The Iliad, Canterbury Tales, the Bible.    Andrew Lloyd Weber used the Bible.

This book makes an interesting point about Shakespeare:   his greatest plays are those in which Shakespeare deliberately avoids explaining the motivation of the protagonist (Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear) thus forcing the audience to speculate why the main characters are behaving the way they do .. the author calls it "strategic opacity".   By refusing to provide a clear, comforting explanation of the motive, he achieves a real emotional punch.

Most of Shakespeare's plays are derived from pre-existing works:  only a few are original, including The Tempest.

November 5th is Guy Fawkes day in UK:   Celebrating the uncovering of a plot by catholic anti-crown group to kill the king (and his family and parliament) by exploding gunpowder underneath the Parliament on opening day.  The plot and gunpowder were discovered and everyone survived.

A fragment of a poem by J. Donne (addressing the sun) who is most famous for "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls":

Shine here tous,
And thou are everywhere,
This bed thy center is, these
Walls thy sphere.

8 Aug 2005

Read Battle Cry of Freedom (author?) and re-read The American Heritage History of the Civil War.   Great books, but I wonder if the next generation will just watch the Ken Burns documentary?

The civil war makes our current national politics look tame.  Think our current partisan bickering is bad?  It pales in comparison to the 1850-1860 fights, especially over whether slavery would be permitted in new states like Kansas.

My primary goal in reading the books was to discover the cause of the war.  After reading the books, I am convinced that slavery was the primary cause, even though some modern textbooks emphasize economic reasons.   The war started because the South seceded;  the South seceded because they knew that within a few years, the North would have a majority in congress and would outlaw slavery;  the North wanted to outlaw slavery because they thought it was wrong.

Uncle Tom’s cabin (H. Beecher Stowe) was published a few years before the war and stirred sentiment.

Slave imports into the USA were banned in 1808, long before the war.  Russia abolished serfdom in 1861.   England never really had any slavery, and in fact actively tried to stop the slave trade all during the 1800’s.

Although Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is justifiably famous, his 2nd inaugural speech also contains a gem:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove; and that He gives to both north and south this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? ....

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish, a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations

The North did not need the South:  The North had a vigorous, prosperous economy, and lots of cropland.
The book cites scholars that studied letters written by North soldiers, and concludes that most soldiers were fighting because they loved the USA, thought a split nation would be weaker, and thought secession was illegal.

Many N. abolitionists kept rather quiet in the first two years of the war because they knew that some northerners favored slavery, and the abolitionists didn’t want to do anything to split the North.

The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t come until January, 1963, and it only freed slaves in Southern states (in Lincoln’s defense, only congress or a Const amendment could free northern slaves).

The north took a very altruistic step near the end of the war:    The N and South had prisoner exchanges for the first couple of years.  Then the South started capturing blacks soldiers, and refused to exchange them (they were either executed, or returned to their former owners).   Nobly, the North refused to participate in the prisoner exchanges if the Blacks were not included.  As a consequence, the POW camp populations exploded, most notably Andersonville prison in the South, where many Northern prisoners died.   In essence, the North sacrificed many of their soldier’s lives, to protest the poor treatment of Black POWs.

A pithy observation about the Civil War:  Before the war people said “The United States are ..” , after the war they said “The United States is …”.

Why did the south lose?  Many resource-poor sides have won (North Vietnam, the US in the revolutionary war, etc).   The most commonly cited reasons are"

1. The N had far more resources (manpower, firepower, etc)
2. Internal divisions within the South (state vs state; rich vs poor)
3. Poor leadership

 Cause (1) is not compelling because the S was fighting a simple defensive war with excellent internal lines of communication.   Cause 2  seems most likely:  they never really had a cohesive government.  The southern states were very loosely allied and had many internal disputes:  Their alliance was about as strong as the current European union, with the shared Euro.

The North fought very hard, even though they had superior materiel and wealth.  Many, many northerners willingly sacrificed their lives.  They had nothing to gain:  They didn’t need the south.  

One  ulterior motive of the North was to gain control of the huge amount of land to the west of the Mississippi:  land that obviously would be extremely valuable in the decades to come, and which may go to the South if the South prevailed in the civil war.

The book has an interesting discussion of the science of history:  One of the most commonly asked questions in history is “did A cause B”?   One way to determine the answer is to ask the questions:

• Could it be that B caused A?
• If A never happened, could B still happen?
• If A happened, is it possible that the opposite of B could happen also?

14 Mar 2005

Read Remarkable Trees of the World (2002, Thomas Parkenham).   A tree-huggers delight.  The author photographed and described 60 amazing trees from around the world.   The book is a sequel to his Meetings With Remarkable Trees (1996) which featured 60 trees from U.K. and Ireland.    His photographs are excellent, and the small story that accompanies each tree is cute and corny.

Mostly I like the book because I like trees.  Here are some of the trees in his book from the USA:

• Coastal Redwoods - (Humbolt Park Jedadiah Smith park .. latter is better; farther north is better).
• Sequioa Gigantica – (mariposa grove in Yosemite;  Seq and Kings canyon parks)
• Thuja Plicata – (Quinalt lake; Kalalach;  both west of Olympic park;  Nolan Valley)
• Juniperus Occidentalis  - (Tioga pass)
• Oaks in Joshua tree park (quercus Chrysolepsis)
• Monterrey Cyprus
• Pinus Longaeva (Bristlecone pine) – White mountains “methusalas walk”
• Joshua tree
• Sitka Spruce (Vancouver Island; Carmanah valley)
• Douglas Fir (Lake Quinalt)
• Oregan Maple (Acer Macrophyllum)
• Western Hemlock (Tsuga Heterophylla) Lake Quinalt

18 Feb 2005

Read The Prize (1991, Daniel Yergin) an outstanding book about the history of oil, focusing on how oil has influenced recent world history since about 1870.  If you didn’t think the two Iraq wars were about oil, this book will persuade you otherwise.   Oil played a huge role in WW I, WW II, and the division of the Ottoman empire into Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iraq.  The book was critically acclaimed, and turned into a PBS documentary.

I looked into PGP:  it is still being used, though I don’t hear much about it.  PGP uses Diffie-Hellman (DH) public key encryption, not the famous RSA algorithm.   DH is not quite as nice as RSA (the encrypted msg is twice as large as the cleartext) but it works fine.  PGP solves the “double size” problem by using DH to encrypt a key (for a standard private-key encryption algorithm like DES or AES), then sending the private AES key with DH, then the recipient uses the private AES key to decrypt the (large) AES-encrypted message.

DH, like all public key algorithms, is based on the “trap door” principle that requires a transformation that is fast in one direction but slow in the other (inverse) direction.  DH uses exponentiation/logarithm.  Computing c = a**b is fast; computing b = log  (base a) c is slow.

If A and B want to communicate, they pick public numbers p and g:  p is a large prime; and g is a generator such that g**1, g**2, … g**(p-1) (mod p) yields all values 1, 2, … p-1.  A and B pick private numbers  a and b respectively, and publish g**a and g**b (mod p).  These latter values are their public keys.  To communicate, A computes (g**b)**a; and B computes (g**a)**b, so they both have a shared private key g**(a*b), which is used to send the message.   If p is large enough, attackers cannot compute a or b or g**(a*b) from g**a or g**b.    Breaking the DH requires solving the logarithm by brute force, which is very slow.

For B to send a message M to A (A does not know about B or B’s public key) B picks random number k;  then using A’s public key AK=g**a(mod p) B computes x = (g**k)(mod p) and y = M * (A**k) (mod p ).  B sends both x and y to A.   A decrypts with:   M = x**(-a) * y (mod p)  because X**(-a)* y = g**(-a*k)*(A**k) * M = (A**-k) * (A**k) * M= M.   But this has the “double size” drawback: the encrypted message is twice as large as M.

The above encryption approach is not a true “public key” because it only works for point-to-point communication between A and B … it cannot be used like RSA for signed  messages that could only come from one source.   To use DH as a true public key requires some extra work:  ?? TBS.

8 Jan 2005

Read an article that said scientists finally finished sequencing the human genome.  There were two competing teams of scientists:  One team was a private company (Celera?) and the other was federally funded.  Quite a philosophical differences:  the private company was interested in making a profit from the info, and the federal team was more interested in publishing the results for all to see for free.

Some things I don’t understand:

What individuals did the DNA come from?
Everyone has two copies of each gene (one from mom, one from dad) … does the sequencing capture one or both?
A gene may have 1,2,3.. up to 20 different values (alleles) … but the genome of an individual only has 1 or 2 of those.  How do they find all the alleles.

The lead of the private effort is a brilliant, egocentric individual (name?) who, in secret, used his own DNA as one of the 8 samples they processed.  So he ensured he would go down in history as one of the original sequences.

Read Genome by Matt Ridley.  He goes over the nature vs nurture debate (he says nature is predominant).  He addresses one of my pet peeves:  the way the media blurs the difference between correlation and causation.  For example:  Running and longevity;  homosexual kids and overprotective mothers; global warming and CO2; diet and health.  On the radio, almost weekly, I hear some popular science report about “people who eat more whole wheat have fewer heart attacks”.  Well, that could mean that eating whole wheat causes a healthier heart.  But the far more likely explanation is that people who eat whole wheat are concerned with their health, and take many steps to ensure their health (exercise, diet, low-stress life, ..) and the other behaviors are what is causing the healthy heart.      The ones that really bother me are the ones where cause and effect could be reversed:  E.g. a report that says “people who exercise are more relaxed” could mean that exercise causes one to be more relaxed.  But another explanation is that relaxed people are innately more interested in exercising.