Special Circumstances

Axis of Evil

A gem of geek humor stolen from a post on Ernie's 3D Pancakes:

From "Shape Fitting with Outliers" by Sariel Har-Peled and Yusu Wang, SIAM J. Computing 33(2): 269–285, 2004.

DEFINITION 3.2. A set of hyperplanes I is a δ-sheaf if there exists a vertical segment s of length δ such that all the hyperplanes in I stab s, The vertical segment s is the axis of I. [Footnote: We will refer to it as the axis of evil when appropriate.]

So what does the axis of evil look like?

This shows a δ-sheaf in RxR with pq as the axis of evil.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

Nothing like a good space opera fix.

A broth of a book - not particularly bright, but great fun to be with, the life and soul of the party. Rather a Brian Blessed sort of book.

Iain M. Banks

Bora Horza Gobuchul hates machines. Not all machines, just the sentient kind and only for what they represent. He likes the fallibility, the irrational nature and most importantly the social inequalities of the more flawed biological species in the galaxy. He lives in a utopian society, called the Culture, where self-expression and good taste have replaced commerce and industry, but Horza stands against everything that the Culture represents. He considers them fruity, hypocritical and completely dependent on annoyingly superior sentient machines called Minds.

The Idirans, on the other hand, conquer the species they considered inferior and subjugate them into their righteous religious empire. Following their Faith, the immortal Idirans continue to fight and expand until this philosophy brings them in furious contact with the Culture who engage them in war on a matter of principle.

Horza makes his choice. He decides use his Changer status (he is a kind of changeling) to work with the Idirans. His assignment is to capture a Culture Mind that is trapped on a neutral planet which is off-limits to both parties. Nothing, of course, goes as planned ...

Consider Phlebas is the first of the Culture books, and you actually learn a lot about the Culture from it. You can learn it from an antagonistic standpoint too - the main character Horza hates the Culture. That was me trying not to make it boring for the reader. By writing from the point of view of someone who was fighting against it, I made it more interesting for me and, I hope, the reader as well.

Iain M. Banks

The Culture is a posthuman utopian society that forms the basis for one the best space opera series around. The books are never actually about the utopian part of society. The plots concentrate on the dystopian penumbra of the Culture: the department of Special Circumstances and its interactions with the other less utopian societies in the galaxy.

It is not as slick as some of the later Culture books like "Use of Weapons". But you can clearly see incipient ideas for the remaining novels in this book -- for instance the plot of "Player of Games" is prefigured in one part of this book. If you've read a few Culture novels and are wondering if this book is worth tracking down -- it is.

For an exegesis of the title of this book: "Consider Phlebas", taken from the poem "The Wastelands" by T.S. Eliot, read my discussion of another novel by Iain M. Banks called "Look to Windward".

I took the quotes shown here by Iain M. Banks from an interview with the author at the Culture Shock web site which is an excellent resource on the writings of Iain Banks (with the M. and without).

%T Consider Phlebas
%A Iain M. Banks
%I Orbit
%D 1987
%G ISBN: 1857231384 (pb)
%P 471
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/12/14

The Man who knew Infinity: a life of the genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

You might think: what would a science writer living in Baltimore know about how to present the life of a South Indian mathematical genius who traveled to England from India in the early 1900s.

You might think: how would anyone understand the psyche and the drives behind a person who was born into a demon-haunted late 19th century and was so enamoured with mathematics that he left to go to a completely alien place where even the food was not palatable.

You might think: perhaps this biography of Ramanujan will ignore his own story to concentrate on the more accessible lives of the famous Cambridge mathematicians like Hardy.

You might think: how can anyone make us understand why Ramanujan eventually died at an early age succumbing to tuberculosis; remaining a vegetarian in war-torn England even when he was consumed by malnutrition.

Well, think again.

This book is a tour-de-force in science writing. It is amazingly detailed in every aspect and Kanigel could not have done a better job if he was channeling Ramanujan himself. Kanigel is obviously fond of Ramanujan having spent so much time documenting his life, but he also has the necessary external point of view in many places which makes you thankful that this is not a mere hagiographic survey.

The math is dumbed down a bit as is necessary for a mass market book like this. However, the explanations of Ramanujan's math exploits are usually done well. At least interesting stories are not eliminated altogether because the math was be too hard to explain.

Here is one (non-mathematical) story from the book:

Even the prevalence of body odours among the English mystified him -- until, the story goes, one day he was enlightened about it at a tea party. A woman was complaining that the problem with the working classes was that they failed to bathe enough, sometimes not even once a week. Seeing disgust writ large on Ramanujan's face, she moved to reassure him that the Englishmen he met were sure to bathe daily. "You mean," he asked, "you bathe only once a day?"

%T The Man who knew Infinity
%T :a life of the genius Ramanujan
%A Robert Kanigel
%I Washington Square Press
%D 1991
%G ISBN: 0671750615
%P 438
%K mathematics, biography

Review written: 1999/08/04

The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Geoffrey Pullum

This is a collection of 23 essays written by Geoff Pullum which originally appeared in the `TOPIC ... COMMENT' column in the journal `Natural Language and Linguistic Theory'. Pullum's columns ran in NLLT for six years. If you have ever read a paper on linguistics (published after 1950) then this book is required reading.

Pullum's essays are organized into four broad sections:

• `Fashions and Tendencies' which contains essays about the practice of linguistics, for example in "Formal Linguistics meets the Boojum" he parodies the strange retreat from formalisms in formal linguistics.
• `Publication and Damnation' consists of essays about the day to day work of working linguists who spend their days "Stalking the perfect journal".
• `Unscientific Behaviour' catalogs among other topics how the subject of whether natural language is contained within the set of context-free languages was explored by linguists (in "Footloose and Context-Free") and how certain myths about language have a life of their own (in the eponymous "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax").
• Finally, `Linguistic Fantasies' contains a loosely connected set of essays including a list of science fiction books about linguistics (in "Some lists of things about books") and a fascinating fictional(?) tale of how one linguistics book was written (in "The incident of the node vortex problem").

The subtitle of the book promises "Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language" and it delivers. You can find current writings by Geoff Pullum on similar topics appearing on the language log.

%T The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
%T :And Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language
%A Geoffrey K. Pullum
%I The University of Chicago Press
%D 1991
%G ISBN: 0226685330 (hc)
%G ISBN: 0226685349 (pb)
%P 236
%K science, linguistics

Review written: 1999/08/02

The Fall of a Sparrow by Salim Ali

Salim Ali is the most famous ornithologist in India. He has won almost every science award in India and quite a few from outside the country as well. He won the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize in 1975 for seminal contributions to natural history. His "Book of Indian Birds" is perhaps still the best resource for birdwatchers in the Indian subcontinent.

This book is his autobiography along with a few essays where he expounds on the marvels of birdwatching. I am used to reading only biographies of scientists, so it is a strange experience to listen to Salim Ali's exploits in the first person. I was amazed at how interesting this book was to me, since I have never been interested in ornithology. Apart from the science, this book intersects with an interesting part of Indian history as well. From his birth in 1914 to his career as a professional birdwatcher in the post-colonial 1950s. His memoirs move from Bombay (Dhobi Talao!) to Burma, from Germany to Hyderabad, from Afghanistan to the Himalayas and from Central India to motorcycling in Europe.

Here is an excerpt:

In my later days it has somehow been generally taken for granted that because I like birds I am bound to be revolted by the thought of anyone killing a bird, leave alone thinking of killing a bird myself. This assumption is far from correct, and it sometimes puts me in embarassing situations. It is true that I despise purposeless killing, and regard it as an act of vandalism deserving the severest condemnation. By my love of birds is not of the sentimental variety. It is essentially aesthetic and scientific, and in some cases may even be pragmatic. For a scientific approach to bird study it is often necessary to sacrifice a few. I do not enjoy the killing, and sometimes even suffer a prick of conscience...

%T The Fall of a Sparrow
%A Salim Ali
%I Oxford University Press
%D 1985
%G ISBN: 0195621271
%P 265
%K science, ornithology

Review written: 1999/08/04

The Forge of God by Greg Bear

Greg Bear takes the stereotypical `Invasion from outer space' theme and treats it with a novel hard-sf point of view. It has several original thoughts about such an invasion, but there isn't enough story there to justify the length of the book. It reads more like a prequel to another book (this is the first book in a trilogy). Some of the interesting technologies used in the plot include Von-Neumann style self-replicating robots as well as some interesting (borrowed) ideas about a generative formal grammar for speciation, similar to the quasi-species model of Manfred Eigen (the original paper was published in Naturwissenschaften. 1971. Vol.58. P. 465).

This is the kind of book that might be interesting to you if you've ever wondered if a high-brow version of "Independence Day" was possible. Since this is a novel, you should expect more logic than a summer offering from Hollywood, but don't expect much more than some light summer reading.

The plot meanders along at a pace that is too measured for this kind of novel. Too many characters are introduced with the hope that the magnitude of the events can be portrayed through them, but this attempt fails. However, interesting things keep happening long after you think that the rest of the book is going to be predictable.

Some of the same game-theoretic themes about the rationale for genocide at a planetary scale are explored in somewhat greater detail in "The Killing Star" by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski and the Beserker series of novels by Fred Saberhagen.

%T The Forge of God
%A Greg Bear
%I Tor Books
%D 1987
%G ISBN: 0312930216 (hc)
%G ISBN: 0812524330 (pb)
%P 474
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/07/10

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks

A cosmic dust cloud called the Encroachment threatens all life on Earth while two factions fight to control what might be the only escape route. At the same time the data corpus and virtual reality environment called the Crypt is threatened by an unknown force called the chaos (the so-called Fearsome Engine of the title).

Banks' bizarre vision of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biological engineering takes a bit getting used to. To compound the difficulty, one of the main characters who talks in the first person entirely uses a pseudo-phonetic script throughout the book. An example is given below.

They reckin u can c the c from thi veri hiest hites of thi habitabil castle, but tho I seen this screend I nevir seen it wif ma own Is.

However, once you meet Banks half-way, the ride through this novel is an well worth it. Highly recommended if you are already an Iain M. Banks fan. If this is your first Iain M. Banks novel, then drop it and pick up "Use of Weapons" or "Consider Phlebas" before this one.

Banks has an interesting take on the intersection of a virtual reality environment with the base-reality. He makes the real-time in the Crypt to be much faster than the real-time in the outside world so a month inside the Crypt corresponds to a few minutes in the base reality, which is the exact reverse in other books, like for example, "Permutation City" by Greg Egan.

For the Iain M. Banks regulars, in a way similar to "Against a Dark Background", this novel this is not a Culture novel but unlike that book this is not a space adventure novel. Although it might perhaps represent an incipient Culture called the Diaspora.

%T Feersum Endjinn
%A Iain M. Banks
%I Bantam Books
%D 1994
%G ISBN: 0553374591
%P 279
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/08/04