Friday, April 23, 2004

More on Morris, Star Trek junk


Making my way through the Morris convergence book. Must admit I skimmed the whole chapter on the origin of life. Biochemistry makes my eyes glaze over. Much more interesting was the chapter on earth and the conditions on earth that make life possible (size not too big and not too small, not too much of an axis, not too far and not too close to the sun, just the right-sized moon, Jupiter just where you need it). Morris seems to think that the correct combination of all the factors necessary for life is pretty rare, so earth may be a "cosmic fluke". I'm not entirely convinced, but I'll keep my mind open at least through the rest of the book. I guess my doubt arises because I'm not sure that some type of life can't exist in conditions that we think are fatal. Unfortunately I don't feel I have the expertise to make a judgement.

I will admit, however, that before going back to Morris I read Star Trek TOS: The Brave and the Bold. How's that for a trashy title. Sometimes I feel almost as embarrased reading a Trek paperback on the subway as I would if I had a bodice-ripper (especially since they fulfill the same escapist function!). Then again, the convergence book has a picture of a small human on an empty, flat beach, and since the title is Life's Solution, people must guess I'm reading a self-help/spiritual book. And that's even more embarassing!

Anyway, Keith deCandido's latest is actually not too bad as Trek books go, but nowhere near the level of Diane Duane or the Reeves-Stevenses. The story is hokey, about four superpowerful boxes from a civilization 90K years ago (why am I even summarizing this?), and there's a little too much strained humor about Spock, but I enjoyed seeing Matt Decker's character developed. Hmph, and it's only part 1 of 2, so I get to read The Brave and the Bold Book Two as soon my library hold comes through!
Adding Commentability

OK, I've used "Comment This!" free script so that people can comment on my blog, since what's a blog without comments? Hope it works! If it does, I'll paypal the guy more than the $2 he asks for. Love the internet.
The Page 23 Exercise:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Well, the first book I grabbed, page 23 was the end of a chapter summarizing an opera, so there was no fifth sentence. OK, I've grabbed The Robot Novels by Isaac Asimov:

"Unexpectedly, he found R. Daneel still behind him."

Hmm. Still awaiting revelation. Maybe it's one of those Buddhist things?

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Otherland, Tad Williams and Jared Diamond on farming

Well, daughter's still sleeping so I'll take this 15 minutes or so to catch up. Just got a notice that the second part of the Otherland triology is ready for me at the library. City of Golden Shadow, the first part, was all about an extremely detailed virtual reality built in the near future by a group of rich, secretive people. It was long and meandering, and had too many passages that didn't add anything new to the story. There's only so much I can take of Renie being desposdent and about Paul feeling confused as to where he was (yes, Paul's an amnesiac thrown into the virtual realities, but still, I got the point early on).

So why keep reading it? Well, the characters are not bad, the journeys through the various virtual realities can be quite interesting (a club for sadists, Meso America not conquered by the Spaniards, a chess-board land, Egyptian gods come of life), and I want to know why this group is building this extremely expensive virtual reality (apparently it's not just for fun, there's something that may be an alien or something otherwordly involved too).

One of the main characters is a Bushman named !Xabbu, whose dream is to recreate (virtually) the life of his people, which has been pretty much wiped out. He speaks quite evocatively of the hunting-gathering life and the bonds within and among tribes, and interestingly enough I read an article by Jared Diamond yesterday about the disastrous mistake humans made in turning to farming (I thought I first read it on edge.org but couldn't find it so I've linked to another site).

Diamond first lays out evidence that hunter-gatherers (h-g) were taller, less subject to disease, had better nutrition, had more leisure time, and in general were better off, than farmers. So why turn to farming? Population pressures - you can support more people on the same land by farming than by h-g'ing. In essence, you give up quality (of life) for quantity. Another interesting point he makes is that farming makes "class" possible; in h-g there are no resources that one can grab and keep for oneself, but in farming land becomes a resource that can be owned, and crops can be appropriated by the elites.

Friday, April 16, 2004

Feel pressure to actually blog after reading so many, and talking so much about, other people's blogs...

Before I go on to the next book, just want to go back to 1968 for a mo. Read an interesting comment in Slate/Salon/some blog I was reading that mentions the imagery of current Iraq events on TV. Like we saw bloody images on TV during Vietnam, bloody images of Iraq are being transmitted on TV, but on Al Jazeera. Imagine the effect on the viewers. While we, in the US, really don't see all that much gruesome stuff (or maybe it's just me because I don't have much time to watch TV).

Anyway, am now reading Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, by Simon Conway Morris., prof of Evolutionary Paleobiology at Cambridge. His main theme is that despite the dizzying variety of possibilities that we think evolution has to choose from, in actuality there are only a few workable paths that it can take. His evidence, from what I gather after 24 pages, is the fact of convergence on the same forms or the same functionalities from diverse beginnings. I find Morris hard to read, his point slipping past me and forcing me to backtrack a few paragraphs and re-read. Is it me or is it the writing style?

It's always interesting to see how "hard" science can lead to different philosophies. More on Morris's rant against what he sees is the materialism inherent in other views of evolution later.