Arctangential

I just finished reading Adding a Dimension by Isaac Asimov. I know I haven’t been doing these miniature book reviews, but I enjoyed this book so much, I felt like I had to share it with you all (both).

The book contains 17 essays on various topics in science: math, physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. They’re all aimed at a very much non-scientist audience, and in fact the only negative thing I could say about the book is that the sections on the sciences in which I am educated (math, physics and astronomy for those keeping score at home) were a little bit of a re-hash to me, although I did learn something from each essay. I especially enjoyed the chemistry essay in which he dissects the chemical name para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde, giving both the details of the chemical meaning along with the etymology of each segment. For example, the “benz” part means that it’s a benzene ring, having 6 carbon molecules arranged in a hexagon, and the name comes originally from a Javanese phrase, “luban javi”, meaning a certain kind of tree from which could be harvested a resin from which benzoic acid was first isolated. I learned more about the underlying concepts behind organic chemistry naming from this essay than I ever did from my college courses.

In another essay he mentions that one would be able to fit more television stations in the broadcast range if you were to transmit them using visible light instead of radio waves. He suggests using lasers for this, and admits that a flaw in his plan is the difficulty is directing said light inside of buildings. He suggests long plastic tubes with mirrors, but I think he was mostly joking by that point. What’s amazing is that he actually predicted the optical data networks of today, for the same reasons that we use them today. He just didn’t know about fiber optics or digital coding back then. Which leads to the only other bad thing about the book; and that is that it was written in 1969, and so much of the science is dated to some degree. I imagine that’s why these non-fiction books of his are so rare these days.

I’ll leave you with a passage from the book:

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People often say that computers are “all ones and zeroes”. While factually correct, I’ve never been sure what kind of impression that leaves in the mind of those who are not too familiar with the technical details of computer internals. I’m going to try here to explain in a little bit more detail what exactly we mean when we say “ones and zeroes”. To begin with, let me simplify my language a little bit and from here on in I will use the term “digital” to mean “containing ones and zeroes”.

Very nearly everything in and around your computer is digital. That is to say, they represent information as sequences of things that can be either on or off, with no other possible states. Imagine bits like pieces from Reversi, with the black side being “on” (think of it as being filled in) and the white side being “off”. If you arrange those pieces in a row, then you would have a reasonable facsimile of the storage system of your computer. Of course, in order to equal the data in, say, your iPod shuffle, you would need 125 million Reversi sets which would cost you over a billion dollars, so it’s good that real computers use a more efficient storage mechanism.

So, what does your computer do with all of these bits? At a very basic level, it uses them to represent different numbers using the base-2 or binary numbering system. A lot of people get confused by the idea of binary numbers, so let’s go over that quickly. We’re all familiar with base-10 numbers, so let’s start there. When you see the number “2183″, you know that the “1″ represents the number of 100s, the “8″ represents the number of tens and the “3″ represents the number of ones, meaning that “2183″ represents a number equal to the sum of:

(2 * 1000) + (1 * 100) + (8 * 10) + (3 * 1).

What you will see here is that the numbers we’re multiplying by are increasing powers of 10. 1000 is 10 cubed, 100 is 10 squared, 10 is ten to the first power and any number raised to the 0th power is always one. The same pattern applies to binary numbers; for example, the number 10101 in binary is equal to:

(1 * (2^4)) + (0 * (2^3)) + (1 * (2^2)) + (0 * (2^1)) + (1 * (2^0)).

If we remove anything multiplied by zero and calculate the powers of two, we get:

(1 * 16) + (1 * 4) + (1 * 1).

Which is just equal to 21. This is the system that allows your computer to represent any number using only “ones and zeroes”. And just like a 3 digit decimal number allows us to represent any number between 0 and 9999 (which is 10^4 – 1), a 3 bit binary number allows us to represent any number between 0 and 2^4 – 1, or 15. So the difference between a “32 bit” computer and a “64 bit” computer is that the 32 bit computer can only handle numbers as big as roughly 4 million at one time, whereas a 64 bit computer can handle numbers as big as roughly 10 septillion (that’s a 1 with 19 zeroes after it).

I’ll talk more later on about how this kind of representation is used by various parts of your computer to store data and perform calculations.

It’s about time for another book status post. I’m only 200 pages shy of my goal for August, which is a lot closer than I’ve been at this time of the month for a while. I might actually make my goal of 120 books this year! Crazy. Here’s the stats:

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I finished Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series a while ago, and I’ve been meaning to write about it since then. As I may have mentioned before, this series was originally planned to be 20 books long and to be followed by 2 other series, each of 20 more books. As I also may have mentioned before, the interesting thing about the series is that it doesn’t follow the same group of characters through their adventures over time, but rather each book covers a similar time line, following different characters through vastly different stories and geographies. The characters from different books meet one another from time to time, and it’s these interactions that really make the series incredible to me.

See, in your standard epic tale, the heroes travel around a landscape, encountering enemies and allies, discovering wonderful new cities and cultures and having, as my father always puts it, Many Exciting Adventures. The thing is, the enemies, allies, cities and cultures that they interact with are generally pretty one-dimensional. You have the idyllic elven wood-city (or two), you have the dashing adventurer, you have the evil monks, the haunted dwarven mine, the desert planet, the jolly but politically clever king and the corrupt vizier. Now I’m not saying that it’s bad to use these archetypes, as they’re important storytelling tools, but they are very common tropes in the genre and what Hugh Cook has done with them here is really brilliant.

Let’s take an example. There’s a warlord who shows up in a number of the books named “Watashi” which we are told is the word for blood and death in his native language. He’s generally referred to as a fearsome warrior, and not much else is said about him, but the reader (and the main characters) tend to fill in his backstory with what it is that they know of the genre, and the books never disabuse you (or them) or their preconceptions. However, one of the later books has this Watashi guy as the main character, and through his story we learn that he’s actually kind of a wimp, having “earned” his fearful name in a bet. He aspires to be a great warlord but by and large he fails.

This kind of secondary backstory isn’t just limited to the people in the story. There’s an important city on the main continent, and it’s visited numerous times in the various books. Each group that visits this city sees an entirely different aspect of it, but in each individual book, this disparity is never pointed out or even mentioned. Each group sees the city as they expect to see it, and we as the reader go along with them. One book, however, is largely set in this city, and in that book we get the true view of the city: a large metropolis, made up of many varied neighborhoods and districts.

So what we have here is a collection of books that explores the backstories and histories of basically every important player in the world, all while telling 10 different exciting adventure stories, full of fighting, intrigue, sex and slug-eating. The body of work represents a staggering detailed and varied world of enormous scope, and after reading all 10 books, it really feels like a real place to me. To think that there were originally to be 60 of these books, and twice as many just to cover the time period I do know about, is breathtaking, and it’s a little bit sad to think that the series will never be finished.