Arctangential

I haven’t done a book status post for a while, and since I’m snowed in this morning, I figured I might as well. I was also holding off making this post until I finished Michael Moorcock’s The Vengeance of Rome, the last in a 4-book series called “Between the Wars”. I’ve been waiting to read these books for something like 15 years; I bought the first two books, Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage from the remainder table of the Border’s in Framingham, MA when I was in high school. I waited something like 3 more years until I was able to find a copy of the third book, Jerusalem Commands, which I thought at the time was the past book. It turns out, of course, that there was a fourth book, and Moorcock didn’t finish it until last year.

I could write pages and pages about these books. They’re like nothing I’ve ever read before and I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with a concise description for them. They follow the life of a man born on January 1st, 1900. His name is always unclear; we meet him as Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, or Pyat, but he changes his name on a regular basis as it most benefits him. The books follow his life from the age of 18 (at the end of WWI) to the age of 36 (at the beginning of WWII). He travels all over the western world, starting in the Ukraine, moving all over Europe and then on to the USA, then to northern Africa and then back to Europe. He works as a movie star, invents a laser beam to fight the reds in the siege of Odessa, ends up as a sex slave to a mad hermaphrodite in the Sahara, works to build Mussolini an air force and even dresses up like a woman to be Hitler’s dominatrix.

Part of the joy of these books is Pyat’s complete self-involvement and inability to see the reality of any person other than himself. He lies almost constantly through the books; he invents not only new names, but entirely new personas for himself as they’re needed. He pretends to be a count, to be a Colonel in various armies and to be a member of almost every major political faction in the world. While doing this, however, he is unable to recognize when anyone else is ever lying, taking everything said to him at face value. Even though the books are written in his voice and we see his world through his own warped vision, it is entirely clear to the reader when people are tricking him and he never, ever catches on.

Anyways, I’ll stop there. Here’s my stats:

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While driving around yesterday, looking at houses, we came across a neighborhood where, in at least two different places, multiple streets came together all at once. Five or six at a time, they didn’t meet in simple geometrical patterns, but instead would all flow into great oceans of cracked asphalt, like dendrites entering the body of a neuron. There were no lane markings, no signs, no islands. I left me flabbergasted in a way that I don’t commonly experience.

As a gamer and a computer programmer, I generally find that I’m good at puzzle solving and at imposing order on disorderly situations. But this wasn’t a puzzle to me; it was a complete breakdown of my expectations for how roads fundamentally work. It was like as if the road suddenly went straight up the side of a building; I had no idea what to do. I knew which road I wanted to leave on, but I simply couldn’t figure out how to get there; did I drive straight across? Did I go around the edge? Was there some serpentine path that would be best? I felt like if I did the wrong thing, some SUV would come barreling in from another street and t-bone me into next Tuesday.

I think the essential thing here is that driving is dangerous, and to protect ourselves, we regiment it as much as possible. There are very few places that I drive where lanes aren’t clearly demarcated, turning orders aren’t well-defined and all you have to worry about it not rear-ending the guy in front of you and taking your turns at the right time. Once all of that was taken away from me, even though I was the only moving car in sight, I was paralyzed. I think it’s similar to the confusion people feel when moving from a right-side-of-the-road country to a left-side-of-the-road country, or vice versa.

I understand there are people who drive around in fields and other unmarked area all the time and they don’t have any problems, but that’s not me. Those folks are probably the ones who are always burning through a light just after it turns red anyways. I hate those guys.

In other news of yesterday, I accidentally bought two christian rock CDs in uncorrelated events.

How do you suppose nuns use the toilet? I wonder if they hike up their whole habit, or if there’s some kind of subtle zipper system they can open up. Maybe they just take the whole thing off.

I wonder what kind of underwear nuns wear.

The Cloak Company

It’s been a long time since I posted anything. I’ve been writing a short story and somehow the urge to write also blogs hasn’t really been coming into me. For now, here’s a book update:

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Right now, I am straight-up, 100%, eating turkey spam.

I got email today from one Enid Vasostomy. The subject line was “Prescribed for psychoactive use” and the message body was “mixed worry able only, marry tooth lower its plate.”, along with a link to a website. The website was not for prescription medication but actually some kind of weird porn thing, so I won’t provide the link. I just enjoy sometimes having some truly absurd spam slip through my filters.

For those curious, “vasostomy” is a medical procedure. Like the similarly-named vasectomy, it involves the vas deferens, but instead of cutting it, a hole is made into it. I don’t know under what circumstances this would be advisable, but I don’t think I want one any time soon. I hope Enid’s is doing well.

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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