Book Review: Feed- M.T. Anderson

This is the second young adult fiction book recommended by John Green, excluding his own novels, that I have read, and I have been displeased by both.  In fairness, the video link above led me to expect something different than what the book actually turned out to be.  So, to clarify if you don't watch the above video, some context.  Last summer I made it through my YouTube Watch Later Playlist before I went to my Advanced Placement Summer Institute for Chemistry down in Kentucky where I was away from my wife and family in the middle of nowhere KY for a week.  During the day I was in class and in the evenings I had dinner in a hotel room and watched YouTube videos.  I decided to attempt to watch through the backlog of nearly 800 videos on the blog brothers channel.  It was fun to watch many of the early videos but I only made it through about November of their first year.  At that time, John had written his first two and was working on the draft of the third, so about that same time I listened to them (in fact that week I listened to Looking for Alaska).  In the video above John refers to Hank's desire to have Wikipedia in his brain.  John and several commenters referred to the book here.

So to the book.  Feed is basically about having the Internet, and especially the advertising and mindless entertainment portions of, it wired into our brains.  The technology to do this is called the feed.  Most people have it and enjoy it because of its convenience, but there are some who hold out due to skepticism.  Although the skeptical mindset turns out to be correct, it is those who were skeptical who suffer in the end.  The novel is set in the future and is a science fiction dystopian novel.  I know I swore off of dystopian novels after reading Hunger Games and Brave New World, but I had forgotten that this was not just sci-fi, but also dystopian.  

Without spoilers, the main female character, Violet meets the narrator Titus at a party on Earth's Moon.  While at the party someone disrupts theirs, and others', feeds with something akin to disconnection via a software virus.  Through this attack, as well as Violet having received her feed implant later in life and a cheaper model she has trouble recovering from the feed.  Furthermore, the medical costs are too high for her widowed, eccentric father.  Of course, already in our real-world digital age we are seeing the start of a filter bubble and customized advertising, but this book took it one step further.  In her attempts to mess with and confuse the feed she shops for all sorts of eccentric things, but buys very little.  When it comes time to pay her medical bills an option outside of insurance and self-paying is to get a corporate sponsor.  But she burned her bridges with them by maintaining no brand loyalty.  The story unfolds predictably from there with a little bit of teenage angst thrown into the mix.  The end morality is to be distrusting of corporations and governments, but mostly it is a warning against consumerism.
One minor complaint too is that to show the dumbing down of society a lot of odd slang and cussing is used, at times it is distracting because it is so inane, but I do understand the point of it.  I was reminded of this while looking for the book image above, which links to an excerpt from early in the book.

Being dystopian, the novel has a distasteful end, but I think my main complaint is something that I already stated.  The feed causes problems, but in the end those with the feed only have minor problem and those without the feed, or who were reluctant to adopt it because they were skeptical, end up suffering the most when all is said and done.

Book Review: The Wheel of Time: A Memory of Light- Robert Jordan

First off there will be no spoilers.  Secondly, I've talked to many people about the series, but I feel obligated to start there, and this will probably not go quickly.  If you'd like to jump to the review of the final book, scroll down to the next image.
In high school I read a lot of sci-fi (mostly Star Wars novels though to be completely honest).  Anyway, I had read bits of fantasy as a child and felt that I would like to read more, but didn't know what to read.  Obviously, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were at the top of my list, but after that I didn't know where to go.  Everyone I talked to recommended Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  Unfortunately, I didn't have any local bookstores, never received them as Christmas gifts, and my library didn't have them in print or on audio.  Jump forward to college and I remember Crossroads of Twilight coming out and decided that I should again try to find the series.  However, by that point I was pretty addicted to audiobooks and read books very rarely, due to school work.  A year later, and about the time college was finishing up and the prequel, A New Spring, came out.  I started to read it while working security, but lost that job and then got married, so I put the book aside for a couple of months.  Then, I found it on audio at a new library.  I quickly listened to it and enjoyed it and decided to continue the series.  However, to anyone out there who hasn't read the series: DO NOT START WITH THE PREQUEL.  It ruins some of the novels and sets up several characters as a main characters even though their parts in the actual series start out small and build up on purpose.  Anyway, I managed to find books 1-5 on CD and listen to them all over the next year.  I didn't know it at the time, but book 9 was the first to have an audiobook released on CD, the others had been all cassette.  TOR and Macmillian Audio were slowly working on re-releasing books 1-8 on CD.  So I had to listen to 6 on cassette while moving and commuting to work in a car that had no cassette player.  I literally had a cassette boombox running on batteries for my 45 minute commute.  Anyway, once I started teaching in 2005, I had trouble finishing the book before it was due at the library and no longer lived near that library.  Also, around this time book 11 was released.
Jump forward a few years and I found myself searching the library catalog again to see if they were available and if 12 had come out.  It hadn't so I found myself searching the internet for an upload when I stumbled across Brandon Sanderson's eulogy for Robert Jordan.  I was heartbroken, but at the same time releved to learn that he was going to be finishing the series.  Unlike many dedicated fans, I did not have to go through the panic of wondering if the series would come to a close because I was almost 6 months late hearing about the news.  At that point I set out to finish the series, by restarting it.  I listened to the Prequel through Book 11 just inf time for Book 12 to come out.  I was also listening to it on MP3 by this point, and lost my first MP3 player while going to be a groomsman in my best friend's wedding somewhere just in the new stuff in Book 6 that I hadn't got to.  I quickly replaced my MP3 player to hear the end of Book 6, Lord of Chaos, which is still one of my favorite books and probably my favorite ending.  About a year and a half later I stayed a weekend with my best friend, his wife, and their infant son and saw the books on the shelf in the bedroom I would be staying in.  I held my thoughts for about an hour before I asked them which of them was into the series, and she said that she was and was trying to get him to read it.  We then had a very enjoyable conversation about it, and for the first time I was able to ask the question I had always had, which I will get to in a little bit.  My family also came up to join me that weekend and we had a great time together, but after that my wife picked out a lot of books that she wanted to read from our friend's collection, amongst them was The Wheel of Time.  She also was instantly hooked on the series and read it in less than 6 months.  While my best friend's wife and him ended up reading the series together.  I also remember waiting in agony for book 13 because it was the first time since my book 6-7 audiobook difficulties that I actually had to wait for one to come out.  Then I went through the same process as book 14, A Memory of Light was delayed at least twice.  Now I've finally read it and been able to finish the series, my wife is currently in the process of reading it, and our friends are in book 11 or 12 together after about 2 years.   Lastly, before moving on to the review, I managed to convince a student to read the series this year (and let him borrow my copies of what I had) because of some of what I'll say in my review below.  Prior to that I had found one student as an 8th grader who was reading book 4 and had made it through book 5 by the end of his sophomore year.  The student I convinced to read the series, is a whole-hearted convert and read books 1-12 from Thanksgiving to Memorial day and convinced at least two other students to pick up the series.

For those of you that jumped ahead, welcome back, though I'm not going to jump into an immediate review of the book before I say that I like about the series as a whole, scroll down one more paragraph is you are not interested.  The series has been amazing, right from the prologue of the first book The Eye of the World. All of the books start out the same:

"The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the third age by some, an Age yet to come, an age long pass, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning."

And the cycle hooks you in.  Jordan is long winded, but he describes a fantastical world that is very easy to get immersed in.  Furthermore, and without giving anything away let it suffice that it is important, he is able to write about the way people think and the weird way dreams work in a seamless way.  Dreams are random and chaotic, and yet they all make sense in their randomness.  The question I asked my best friend's wife, the first time I was able to ask a female about the series was, "I've always been amazed at the way he writes about the randomness and chaos of dreams and also how people think.  Not only the way that people think, but also the way different people think differently.  He even writes the way women think differently than the way men think, and I think it is how they think," and then I turned to her and ask, "Is it?  Do women really think differently and in the way he describes it?"  And she confirmed yes and that she had noticed that as well and wondered the same about men, although she had discussed the books with several other male and female friends who had read the books.  Lastly, in general review of the series, I have listened to all of them and only read a few chapters of the prequel on my own.  I don't think listening to a book takes away from it, and with good readers it often adds to it.  Kate Reading and Michael Kramer are the Wheel of Time to me, in the same way that Jim Dale is the world of Harry Potter to me- NOT the movies [Dobby still sounds wrong to me] [[A quick side rant about Jim Dale, he won two Grammys for his voice work in Harry Potter, as well as many other audiobook only awards]].  Kate is one of the few female readers that I have loved and Michael is very good as well.  And although it was probably oversight, it added to the world that not only different people had complete cultures and dialects, but the readers pronounced a few names and places differently enough that it seemed to add to the richness of the language.

And now, for A Memory of Light.  This book was bound to be epic and the be nothing but the Last Battle at Tarmon Gai'don.  Rand battles Shai'tan himself finally.  The book was slow and action-packed at the same time.  There were still new characters introduced.  In the way of his writing, mostly 3rd person limited, some mysteries were explained, but not outright.  There are still some complexities of the world that are not neatly wrapped up.  However, the book left me wanting nothing, except for (like Harry Potter, although more-so) a longer epilogue to explain some more things.  The series wrapped up nicely and the book was worth the wait, but it is not my favorite- that is a close race between 11-13 and 6.  To anyone looking to read good fantasy this series will suck you in and will be worth it.  Books 7-10 can move slow at times, and there are dry spells in the series, but the end is always explosive, and the final book does the same for the series.  After reading it 1.5 times it will be a long time before I read it again, but I hope to pick it up and take the journey once again with my friends because there are neither beginning or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time.

As a final note, the next epic fantasy series that I plan on tackling is A Song of Fire and Ice, but a decision that I came to while longing for the Harry Potter and Wheel of Time series to finish is that I'll wait until a release date for the actual final book is decided and then I'll start book 1.  It may take a decade or two more, but at least I won't have to wait impatiently like the dedicated fans.  Also, I do not intend to watch the HBO series until I read the book, so no spoilers from either!

Book Review: Brave New World

So it has been forever since I've written anything in the blog and it has been just about as long since I have finished this book.  I listened to it back in October and it was really good.  The science was certainly limited and dated, but still it made for good science fiction reading.  It is one of those classics you are supposed to read, but I never had.  After H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley is one of the founders of the English dystopian novel genera.  In general, I am pretty fed up with the dystopian novel, so few offer anything new to the scene and there are only two possible resolutions- everyone breaks free or everyone accepts their dreary fate.  Maybe I'm simplifying it too much or maybe I'm just cynical, but I think dystopian has been overdone.  And I might as well get it off my chest, I read the Hunger Games Trilogy last summer and did not like it, furthermore, I did not think that the movie added anything to the book and I was disappointed at the wardrobe of Katniss Everdeen.  Anyway, I digress.  Despite having lost patience with dystopian novels this one was different.  Partly because it was so foundational in the genera that it didn't have to outdo the others in how wretched society had become or what form that depravity took.  Like many dystopian societies this one was perfect by design, but imperfect in reality.  The main character, Bernard is a psychologist who teaches people in the society through sleep-teaching, and has become discontent with life because he is slightly different from others in his caste and he recognizes how life is essentially pre-programmed.  Without spoiling the plot he learns that some people, Native Americans (called savages in the book), have existed outside of their society successfully, and this causes him to withdrawal.  And the end was truly shocking in a way that I have only been shocked once before as far as I can recall- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I'll have to talk about that book another time, but the only thing I will say right now is that if you are only familiar with it through pop culture references, especially cartoon references, then unfortunately some of the book has been ruined for you, but the main twist in the novel is still waiting for you to pick it up and read it.  Anyway, I've been all over the place in this review, but I'll leave you with this- read the classics, they at not all great, but there are great ones out there and they are classics for a reason.

Book Review: The Immortal Game: A History of Chess,or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War,Art,Science and the Human Brain- David Shenk

     This was a great book that I waited way too long to listen to because I was afraid it would be dull or hard to follow.  As an audiobook it was difficult to follow the notation he used as he described a match between Adolf Anderson and Lionel Kieseritzky known as The Immortal Game.  I did however take a moment to read the Wikipedia article about it and watch a quick YouTube animation of the game.  The game is an amazing one as Anderson (white) sacrifices a bishop, both rooks, and a queen to establish check with a bishop and two knights while almost the whole game looking like he was down.  The author interwove their match within the text of the book, which leads to my biggest complaint with the book- it is not in chronological order which made it more difficult for me to follow.  However, he mostly arranged it by topic.
     He started with a history of the game itself including its predecessors from China and India, but essentially the game has been around in its modern form for 1500 years.  Furthermore, it was always meant as a symbolic game, but Islam forced the pieces to be symbolic as well since pictorial representations were seen as idols.
    The game has severed not only military and strategy purposes though, it also has assisted researchers in computers and artificial intelligence, brain research and psychology, the arts and humanities, and been a staple of much of human history.  The author, maybe at times, puts too much importance on chess and its actual influenced versus its simultaneous presence to actual events, but I think he tried very hard to be fair and balanced and to point out that although the presence of chess may have been influential it certainly was not the sole instrument.
     The author also happens to be a 5th or 6th generation descendant of a famous Chess Master and became interested in the game in adulthood as well as how to learn the game.  For me, he reinforced my interest in learning the game and how to best teach it to others.  He also finished by looking at some efforts in New York City and elsewhere that attempt to use chess as an instructional tool for at-risk youth and the benefits it has bestowed.  Chess can be all-consuming or it can be fun and social; either way it can teach useful cross-over skills and benefit those who learn to play this complex game of simple pieces.

Book Review: Imaginary Girls- Nova Ren Suma

     I finished this book at the end of last week and I have been slow to write about it because it was just weird.  Don't get me wrong the book hooked me and I wanted to know the solution to the mystery and what was going to happen next- it was just weird in the process.
     The book revolves around a girl, Chloe, who finds a classmate's (London's) dead body floating in a boat on a lake.  This discovery disturbs her enough that she moves away from her hometown where she lives with her barely adult and somewhat irresponsible sister, Ruby, and go live with her father.  Ruby then invites her back to their hometown a few summers later so that everything can be "just like it was before".
I am fine with fantasy or magic coming into play in a book as long as it is used consistently, but usually it is nice to somehow be told early on that this is the norm for the world the book is set in- although that was part of the mystery I suppose.
     One last part I feel obligated to comment upon.  My wife, an English teacher, believes a book should have a moral or some deeper meaning beyond just entertainment and that good morality should be a part of the book.  Mostly this revolves around the notion of evil being punished in the end or there at least being consequences to bad action.  That is only ind of here.  I don't know whether the author intended a deeper meaning or for the main character to have a naïve view of her sister and their relationship, but otherwise the consequences for Ruby's actions are minimal.
     I'm reminded of when I read A Wrinkle in Time last school year and was thoroughly unimpressed and my wife pointed out to me that there are some books that are so well geared towards youth that adults truly cannot enjoy them.  I say that because I can imagine if I had given myself the chance I would have enjoyed that book and this one if only I was younger.  The idea of these kinds of travels [Wrinkle] or fantasies [Imaginary Girls] would have hooked me when I was younger, but now I just have a hard time believing in them.  And not it the "it must be real sense" or I can't enjoy fantasy either, because I enjoyed Harry Potter, I loved the start, but hated the end of the Inheritance Cycle, and my favorite series (right now, although I long to read the series A Song of Fire and Ice) is the fantasy series Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.  The book was enjoyable and engaging, just weird.

Book Review: A Universe from Nothing- Lawrence M. Krauss

     I first heard of Lawrence M. Krauss when he kicked off the "Physics of..."/"Science of..." book idea.  His contribution was Star Trek and I'm not a big Trekkie, at the time I had only seen 1.5 movies and only a few minutes of reruns way to late at night.  I didn't realize he was a serious physicists until I stumbled across his wonderful book Atom, which imagines life from the perspective of a single atom.  He's done a few other books as well, but I've had trouble finding audio versions until this one.

     This book was a really short one (4 discs, about 5 hours) to listen to and was the third book I listened to over Labor Day weekend while repainting the upstairs of my house.  The introduction is great covering the last 100 years of cosmology and physics with an emphasis on the development of the Big Bang Theory.  He told lots of stories that I was very familiar with, but a few I had never heard before.  For example, I was unaware that it was a female astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who first carefully calculated the period of Cepheid variable stars and proposed using them as standard candles to measure the distances to stars, which then helped Edwin Hubble support/prove that the Great Andromeda Spiral Nebula was actually a galaxy outside of our own Milky Way.  With that, our realization of the size of our Universe jumped from a few thousand light years across to at least millions.

     From there he explained the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) and how it had been predicted by the Big Bang Theory and then was later found, on accident, and has since been studied in detail.  From there he began to focus on more modern efforts to explain origins and the focus of the book revolves around the discovery that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate [discovered in 1998 and winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics].  Specifically he showed how the evidence points to the Universe being formed from nothing.  He gets into theories that debate whether nothing is more stable or less stable than something.  He talks about the future evolution of the cosmos to where space will be expanding faster than the speed of light [no this doesn't violate Einstein's relativity] and so eventually we'll be so far spread out from all the other galaxies and spreading faster than their light can reach us and so they'll start to wink out and eventually it will appear that our galaxy is the only one [the idea we disproved about 100 years ago].

     He uses this evidence to suggest that we study the cosmos now because we can and someday in the very, very distance future civilization won't have that luxury.  Krauss also uses it as an attack on religion that nothing was needed for something to come about.  He gets philosophical and suggests that if our universe was created by a Creator what created the Creator [Prime Mover/First Cause argument].  From there the book closes with an afterword by Richard Dawkins, which was more harsh and anti-religious than Krauss himself.  Dawkins even goes as far as to suggest that this book could be the physics version of Darwin's On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, which is overly ambitious for this work that includes too many anecdotal stories and theories that are admittedly constrained by at worst a lack of evidence or at best in need of more support from data.  The first half of the book is great, from there it gets into theory and philosophy.   I learned from it, but I don't know that I understand all of the author's arguments or that the data fully supports his theories- parts were probably too complex for a casual listen on audiobook.

Unintentional Physics Lesson- 2012-09-06

     Today a student walked into class and told me that they had a physics related debate all day that they wanted to settle.  Usually this means that I need to just answer a physics related question or misconception.  This time, however, was different because the debate came out of left-field, almost literally.
     The debate was about one student's claim regarding his own athleticism.  As they originally put the claim he said that he could throw a baseball 30 meters in under 1 second.  I wanted to clarify the distance because I didn't think that the baseline was measured in an even metric number, so after confirming that distance down a baseline was 90 feet which converts to 27.432 meters I said let's test it.  So we got a measuring tape, a trundle wheel, stopwatches, and a digital camera and headed to the gym to test it.  We chose the gym because of weather and because I wanted a more consistent background for the camera, as well as the confined space which has the ability to contain students who have trouble staying focused.
     So we measure 90 ft on the diagonal of the basketball court and then he started warming up.  I used the that time to explain to the timers what their job was and where to stand so that they'd be out of the way of the filming as I was up in the bleachers trying to catch the toss on my camera.
Here's the first take, without being slowed down:

The pitch leaves his hand between 6.28-6.31 and the camera does not track the ball well, but it appears that the catcher has the ball between 7.17-7.32.  This puts the pitch between 0.86 s and 1.04 s.  Taking the mean or median the claim is true, but the video is hard to follow and we had other data collected and no way to accurately review the film while testing.

   The frame rate of the video is 30 frames/second so the next data point was to try to slow the video down.

It is hard to count the individual frames, but it appears that the ball travels in 28 frames +/- 3 frames.  This gives a time of 0.83-1.03 s.  Again mean and median would support the claim.  However, my camera does have a better option that I switched to.

   The camera has a "Sports Mode" that takes a burst of up to 30 shots at a frame rate of about 13 frames/sec with the trade-off of low-quality images.  Those images are in the slideshow that follows [click on the icon in the bottom right corner and then click on the album title on the new image to go to a larger version of this slideshow].


Again, counting together in class we came up with 12 frames +/- 2 per pitch.  Again giving us values that are borderline low but with included uncertainty the claim could be true or false (0.77-1.08).

     Of course, we had the stopwatches with us also and recorded all of that data, although the recorder did not include who each time came from or which pitch was which.  That data is in the table that follows, and all seems to indicate that the pitch is faster than 1 second, but if we factor in the students' reaction times these values again fall within a narrow border around 1 second.

     This leads us to two options.  The first one is unsatisfactory, but to concede that the student can pitch faster because the data tends to indicate the low side of 1 second rather than the high side and would average out to be less than 1 second.  Or, we can attempt to find a better way to measure the speed of the ball, which allows us to extend the activity and debate a little longer and come to a more firm and decisive conclusion.

     A radar gun would be nice, but we don't have access to one.  Another option is to use motion sensors, but again we're limited by access as well as the ability of the devices to detect such a small object.  The final option is to film the release of the ball up close and instead attempt to determine the speed of the ball and from there calculate the travel time.  To this end we are setting up a contrasting background and a well lit area for filming this and will attempt to film it and then analyze the video.

   Considering we were going to go over a homework assignment and then the students were going to do seat work today this was a much more entertaining and informative lesson and the debate continues as will the discussion here.

Note: This reminded me of an article from the author of the online comic xkcd in his new section "What If" about throwing a baseball at nearly the speed of light.  Reading that article became homework for physics students after we did this impromptu lab.  You can read the article here.