BookBlog

On intelligence, stupidity, and music

This weekend I read three very different books on the human mind and brain.

Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence poses a speculative theory about how the neocortex works. Hawkins asserts that the distinctive aspect of human intelligence is that it allows us to make predictions. Based on a few strands of previous research, some insight, and aggressive reverse engineering, Hawkins proposes a neural architecture that enables humans to generalize patterns from raw sensation, allowing us to predict the next notes of a familiar song and to extend knowledge with analogies.

The hypothesis about how the neocortex works is interesting. The way that it proposes the generation of predictions by a combination of top-down and bottom up feedback is clever. The observation that sense-making requires a dimension of time -- not just music, but touch and sight -- is insightful. Unlike the evolutionary hypothesis of say, Terrence Deacon on the origins of symbolic thinking, Hawken's algorithm is testable. However, Hawkins' understanding of intelligence leaves out some crucial factors. Hawkins is interested in the mind as disconnected from emotions and desires. He believes that computers that have predictive intelligence without ambition, lust or greed will have the good of human intelligence, without the flaws introduced by the passions.

This dualistic vision ignores the insights of Antonio Damasio, a neurologist whose theory of intelligence embraces the emotions. Damasio observes patients with injuries to emotional processing, and finds that they lack the senses of fear and anticipation that enable people to make functional decisions. A lack of normal empathy prevents someone from getting along with other people. A computer that implemented predictive learning without emotions might be some combination of sociopathic and unwise. A computer that implemented learning without boredom and forgetting might not even be optimally effective at synthesis.

Hawkins focuses on the connections between neocortex and senses, but ignores the connections between neocortex and emotional parts of the brain. The neuroscience bits of Deacon's book explain how in humans, the connections between the limbic system and the neocortex became intertwined as humans evolved. There's a biological basis to Damasio's observation that emotions are part of intelligence.

Where Hawkins focuses on human intelligence as a superb prediction engine, Gary Marcus focuses on the flaws and glitches in human smarts in areas such as decision-making, language, pleasure-seeking, and mental illness. In Kluge, the Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Marcus counters against evolutionary and anti-evolutionary arguments that the human mind reflects the best of possible worlds. Instead, the mind is a hodgepodge awkwardly cobbled together.

We don't do a good job of making decisions about financial risk, or resisting temptation, because of our biological tendency to maximize short-term gain. Here, Markus shares a bias with Hawkins, that reason would result in better outcomes. But if you eliminated the motivations of hope, greed and fear, a rational being might not take the risks that drive good as well as bad aspects of human society.

Marcus points out the ambiguities in human language as a sign of the awkward results of evolution assembling a speech system from older parts. Here, what Marcus sees as a bug, Hawkins might see as a feature or at least a side effect. Ambiguity in language is a result of the generalizing, pattern-matching engine that drives human intelligence. The same design that makes it hard for us to remember details makes it possible for us to recognize and create new patterns.

Marcus' book is flawed because he compares workings of the human brain with a straw man that has perfect reason. The interesting thing is not how the human mind is perfect, or how it breaks, but why it works the way it does, and how the way things break shows the way things work most of the time.

This is the focus of Oliver Sachs' Musicophilia. Where Hawkins and Marcus are theorists, Sachs is an anecdotalist. He tells story after story of individuals who gained heightened musical abilities, or diminished musical abilities, due to changes in the brain. The stories themselves are fascinating but have little theory to explain why most humans are attracted to music, or to explain the aspects of the brain that govern parts of musical appreciation and skill.

Reading Musicophilia alongside Hawkins, it makes sense that music plays on the human mind's attraction to structure and mild surprise. The recent advances in therapies depending on neuroplasticitity are also nicely explained with a theory of how the neocortex is designed for continuous learning. The stories of how memory of musical performance and sequence is retained in patients who can't store new memories can be explained by a theory that old memories and learned processes are storied differently than new stuff.

Summary recommendations, for Peterme.

* I liked On Intelligence. Some reviewers give Hawkins grief because he brings very little evidence of the neurological or biohistorical basis of his speculations. He was frustrated by the lack of academic support for the kind of science he wanted to do as a younger man; and so he thumbs his nose at the establishment and its puny traditions of supporting arguments. Nevertheless, his argument is testable, so evidence will win in the end. The bigger weakness is his discounting of the role of emotion in intelligence.
* I didn't like Kluge. I thought it was much weaker than Marcus' earlier books, which had a stronger grounding in scientific detail, melding infant development, evolutionary developmental biology, and computer modeling. In his earlier books, Marcus built interesting arguments about brain development from rich evidence. This book has some interesting anecdotes, but is mostly a polemic against some common fallacies. The fact that the straw men are common doesn't make debunking them more interesting; the book reads like he is arguing against poorly educated undergrads.
* I liked Musicophilia, despite its limitations. The book consists of anecdote after anecdote, without much connecting theory; but the stories are interesting, and it's an entree onto some hopefully more robust studies on music, mind, and neuroplasticity.

The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

There is a fascinating book that I don't think has been written yet, on the social history of statistics. This book isn't it.

The Lady Tasting Tea by David Salsburg is entertaining for a geeky value of entertaining, but it doesn't live up to its subtitle. The book is a set of biographical sketches of the people who pioneered statistical techniques such as analysis of variance, significance tests, sampling methods. It mentions a few sentences on the impact of stats on experimental design, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other scientific topics, but doesn't go into any depth on the impact on scientific practices or discoveries.

The anecdotes about the careers of the pioneering statisticians raise interesting questions about the relationship between statistics and modern industry. The book's heroes work in agriculture, measuring yield and pesticides; industrial process control, monitoring the production of beer and cotton. They also contributed to social policy, working out theory and politics of eugenics; measuring economic activity for the new deal.

It's interesting reading these stories in the context of the debacle of modern industrial food production. Controlling the variations in batches of Guinness led to the bland hegemeny of Budweiser; the study of yields in England led to the pesticide and fertilizer treadmill, soil decline, and big dead zones in the ocean. Chester Bliss' pesticide experiments showed that at any dose of pesticides, some bugs survived. In the short run, his calculations led to effective doses; in the long run, to pesticide-resistant bugs. Incremental progress and quality control that seemed so rational and positive turned out to have counterproductive results.

It's interesting that the heroes of Salsburg's book are so obscure compared to the scientists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers of the last two centuries. Statistics appears as the servant to science and politics and industry. In the 20th century there's an aspect of Tom Lehrer's apolitical rocket scientist Werner von Braun -- "once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down."

The story I'd really like to read would be a comprehensive social history of statistics -- the relationship between statistics and the evolution of modern society and industry. There are some interesting-looking books about Eighteen Century public health and the emergence of statistical thinking in the 19th century. How did the trends continue into the 20th century? A number of Salsburg's subjects created departments of statistics in the mid-20th century, presumably to meet a growing need. It would be interesting to see a graph of where those students went to work in industry and government. Was the answer just "everywhere"? Or is the adoption of statistical methods uneven, and does this tell any interesting stories?

Summary: Salsburg's book adds some interesting biographical spice to names and terms that many people know only from menu items in math programs. But don't expect in-depth history.

Water in California: The Great Thirst and Battling the Inland Sea

The Country in the City tells the story how Bay Area residents organized to preserve open space. It is an inspiring and encouraging tale. The evidence of success is visible on any clear day. The culture and organizing practices that kept the hills green is active today, as Bay Area towns organize to combat greenhouse gas emissions.

The story of California water by contrast, is an ongoing tale of human folly. Battling the Inland Sea, by Robert Kelley, focuses on the efforts to deal with chronic flooding in the Sacramento / SanJoaquin delta. The Great Thirst is a magisterial overview of water use and water wars in California.

Robert Kelley wasn't just a bystander to the ironies of water history, but an actor. In the the 50s, he served as an expert witness, marshaling the history of the century of failed efforts to control flooding in the delta. The earlier efforts, he concluded, were doomed to fail because they lacked a comprehensive perspective of the delta water system. Estimates of the volume of seasonal floods were off by factors of hundreds. Piecemeal flood control efforts were next to useless.

Kelley puts the history of delta flood control in the perspective of the history of California political culture. In the 1800s, politics was polarized between Democrats, who distrusted central authority and formal education, and believed in local control, and Whigs, who believed in the enlightened rule of an educated elite. The local-control approach to flood control was a disaster. Landowners on either side of a river mounted futile arms races to build levees on their side of the river and sabotage the levee on the other side.

During the civil war era, Southerners broke with the Whig party, and the remnants formed the Republicans, but the traits of political culture remained. The centralizing, technocratic, elitist impulse held sway in the early 20th century and enabled larger, more centralized projects. Kelley seemingly sympathizes with the Whig point of view. With the massive, California State Water Project in the 50s and 60s, Kelley is confident that they finally got it right (I have the 1989 edition from the library, I don't know if he's more appropriately pessimistic in the 1998 version)

But they didn't. The vast quantities of water siphoned from the delta has left the ecosystem on the verge of collapse. A judge's recent order limiting water export from the Delta to protect the endangered Delta Smelt has thrown the system into disarray. A recent special legislative session to deal with the water issues ended without agreement.

Reading the 150 year history of the Inland Sea in the context of current events is sobering enough. The Great Thirst surveys California's water follies with a panoramic perspective of California's massive water works. The draining of the Sacramento Delta to irrigate farms and supplement Southern California's water supply is parallel to Los Angeles' taking of Owens River water, and San Francisco's appropriation of Tuolumne river water with the Hetch Hetchy dam.

In recent decades the hubris of the great waterworks has been tempered by values of conservation and environmental protection. The LA area has learned conservation lessons -- its population has grown over the last 20 years, but water consumption has barely increased Scientists have realized that surface water and groundwater supplies are connected, and groundwater recharge is seen as a major source of storage.

Systematic problems remain. Farmers get subsidized water at 1/100th of the cost paid in the city, and farmers consuming 80% of the state's water. Pesticides, industrial pollutants, and urban runoff pollute groundwater and streams. There are periodic droughts. Meanwhile, global warming threatens to cut water supply by 50% or more.

Like Kelley, Hundley puts the history of water in the context of political culture. Hundley's analysis is proportionate to the book's broader scope.

Hundley contrasts the system of California's early Spanish rulers -- central authority dividing water proportionately, in times of need, for the common good -- with the American system. The American system has been cobbled together from a hodge podge of legal principles, including riparian (water control to the landowner of the banks of the river), appropriator (whoever claims the water first), and homesteader (a principle of Reclamation law, honored more in the breach than the observance, which allocated water only to small independent farmers). None of these principles recognizes compromise and common good; and a result has been endless court battles in the attempt to win a zero sum game.

While "The City in the Country" left readers with the feeling that concerted organizing can make a big difference in the environmental health of a region. The books on water history leave the reader with the feeling that our civilization is not unlikely to head down the path of ancient Mesopotamia, where irrigation led slowly toward environmental and political demise.

Infrastructure: A field guide to systems on the verge of change

Have you ever wondered what all of those gizmos were in the local power station? Wondered how water treatment works? The benefits and drawbacks of different styles of bridges? Brian Hayes, whose day job is a senior writer at American Scientist, didn't just wonder. He took pictures over a 15 year period, found out how things worked, and explained it to the rest of us in Infrastructure, The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape. As a science writer, Hayes avoids "coffee table book" syndrome, where beautiful pictures are matched with superficial text. He figures out how the system works and explains it. The pictures are fabulous, and would be even better if they were complemented by some diagrams with labels -- it wasn't always easy to figure out which bit of circuitry or process gear was which (the picture below is a set of air-blast switches with porcelain insulators at the Ravenswood power plan in Queens).

The hardback first edition was titled: "A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape." Hayes describes the artifacts of the industrial landscape like nature guides describe birds and mountains. While describing the artifacts and systems, Hayes also strives to explain why the industrial landscape is obscure to many of us. From Hayes' point of view a major reason for the obscurity of industrial objects in plain sight is that industrial infrastructure has an image problem. There is a great divide between the green/populist image of "Dark Satanic Mills" and the reality of the engineered systems that our society depends on, which have a pragmatic intricacy, elegance and beauty of their own. Hayes sees a self-reinforcing gulf between the negative stereotype of the industrial landscape, and the paranoid and secretive attitude of some industrial organizations. Hayes therefore describes the industrial systems as they are, without much critique, in the hope of increasing appreciation and understanding.

Still, Hayes notices the smokestack-scrubbing, emissions-reducing, landscape-restoring, material recycling, and other environmental innovations that have modified industrial systems in recent decades. These were put into place because of valid criticism of the destruction wrought by industry. Mining companies that behead mountains in West Virginia and oil refineries that create cancer alley in the Houston area may be secretive because they don't want to share information about the harm they cause.

Seeing the big picture of industrial systems also felt like looking at a crystal on the verge of phase change. Oil processing, roads and bridges for gas-fueled cars and trucks, centralized energy power plants and big power grids; factory farms; massive waste creation and disposal systems -- all of these depend on the last century's abundance of cheap energy, and much of it is going to change, hopefully without civilization collapsing. Renewable, decentralized energy generation, electrified transport, sustainable agriculture, cradle to cradle no-waste manufacturing or bust. I'm wanting to read "Infrastructure" as annotated by Natural Capitalism and the Journal of Industrial Ecology, showing the opportunities to reduce wasted material and energy throughout the industrial ecosystem. I hope that this book appears 50 years from now like a tour guide to Colonial Williamsburg, with descriptions of blacksmithing, barrel-making, candle-dipping, quill pen cutting, tub laundry, and other antique technologies.

Against Biomimicry

The thesis of Cats Paws and Catapults is an argument against naive biomimicry. There is a fashionable and romantic belief that natural design is "better" than manmade technology, and human technologists should therefore borrow designs from nature.

The clearest counterarguments Steven Vogel brings are about locomotion by air and water. The attempt to use birds as a model for human flight set inventors off in the wrong direction. Birds are smaller than people, and so the characteristics of their flight technology is different. Larger entities need to go faster to stay aloft. Propellers and jets are superior to flapping wings for heavy humans; lighter birds don't need the speed. Similarly, marine creatures are smaller than ships. Waves pose a significant barrier for smaller, lighter swimmers, so most marine locomotion happens beneath the surface of the water. Characteristics change yet again at smaller sizes; some insects like water striders are just the right size to take advantage of surface tension.

"Cat's Paws" compares and contrasts human technology with natural technology in a range of domains: structure, shape, materials, locomotion, using lots of examples from the worlds of biology and artifact. Vogel explains the physical principles, benefits and tradeoffs for the different design approaches, using words to describe the basic math. The material would be even more fun and memorable with animated calculators that showed the changing properties of flight, structural support, and so on, allowing participants to see the impact of changing values. I wonder if this simulation exists somewhere.

The argument is made with a light hand, and the bulk of the book consists of delightful comparisons and contrasts between very different ways of solving design problems. When it comes to biomimicry, Vogel argues the most effective examples involve borrowing some aspects of a natural design, such as a dolphin's streamlined shape inspiring aerodynamic vehicles, a beetle's jaws inspiring chainsaw teeth, and the adhesive characteristics of burr inspiring velcro. The models are adapted from nature to the specific design problem and materials needed for the human requirement.

The critique of naive biomimicry focuses largely on the operating characteristics of the technologies: how they solve the presenting design problems of structure and motion. In doing so, Vogel misses a few key points about how and why human designers might want to emulate nature.

Vogel explains that human technology is able to leverage much higher temperatures and temperature ranges than natural technologies. The book, published in 1997, takes for granted the enormous amounts of seemingly cheap fossil fuel energy that allows humans to run our blast furnaces and jet engines. Sample throwaway quote: "One must remember that, their image makers notwithstanding, utility companies are in the business to sell, not save power." (California fixed this in 1982, when the state Public Utilities Commission came up with the decoupling idea that would allow utility profits to grow while sales declined.)

Another topic that the book doesn't address at all is waste. Human production processes have tended to create vast quantities of frequently harmful waste; smog, nonbiodegradable plastics, heavy metals in rivers, fertilizer-created dead zones in oceans. Natural processes tend to consume byproducts instead of creating waste, perhaps because they evolved at slower scale in the context of ecosystems, and perhaps because of accidents of chemistry. Birds digest fruit pulp and excrete the seeds that grow another plant. Animals at the end of their life become food for vultures, larvae, and bacteria.

To date, human industrial technologies have been hugely wasteful of energy and materials. Our culture needs more sustainable processes, not because it sounds romantic but because the current solutions won't last. Vogel's insight that natural models are best adapted, not borrowed, can be seen in industrial parks that use the byproducts of one manufacturing process as the feedstocks for another, and the use of microbes to detoxify industrial waste.

There are other areas where science and technology have gone beyond the information available to Vogel when he wrote the book a decade ago. Human artifacts are assembled or processed, while natural artifacts are grown. The growth process consists of an development process that creates the organism, and the ongoing chemical processes that sustain the organism; both sets of processes governed by genetic programs. Human products are often assembled at the macroscopic level, while biological products are assembled at the molecular and cellular levels. It would be interesting now, and probably even more interesting ten or twenty years from now, to read a version of the book taking into account insights and progress in the areas of gene-driven development and nanotechnology.

How doctors make mistakes

Recently read two books by physicians with different angles on the same topic: how doctors make mistakes. Jerome Groopman is an oncologist who writes in how Doctors Think about the prejudices, biases, and cognitive errors that result in missed diagnoses. Doctors make mistakes when they dislike their patients, when they like patients to much, when they fail to listen to patients enough; when they see the common and miss the unusual, when they are in love with their own expertise. Groopman focuses on the personal and interpersonal, the nuances the doctor-patient relationship and the thought processes in the doctor's mind.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon who focuses in Better on system problems and process solutions; methods for mass immunization, saving the lives of wounded soldiers, combatting hospital infection, and extending the lives of cystic fibrosis patients. The two doctors advocate different paths to improvement; Gawande encourages increased measurement, system improvement, and standardization; Groopman encourages personal reflection and better communication with patients, and is distrustful (with evidence) of computer-aided protocols that lead doctors to override their better judgment.

While the two physicians have different takes on how to reduce mistakes, they seem both to be a part of an underlying shift in how doctors respond to mistakes. A desire to maintain authority and prevent liability discouraged doctors from acknowledging mistakes. The newer mindset sees that analyzing mistakes with a focus on learning rather than blame can help prevent more errors.

Both doctors criticize the impact of "managed care" on the quality of medicine. Groopman writes about how doctors are encouraged to rush, eliminating doctor-patient relationships, and how drug company perks affect doctors' judgement. Gawande describes how insurance-company protocols are designed to reduce reimbursement rather than to improve care. Incentives in the US health care system for quality, cost, and accountability are not complementary. We keep paying more and get better technology but not on the whole better care.

Animal Architects

Why do caterpillars hang from trees? They bungee jump from a silk thread in order to flee a hungry bird or other threat. They can crawl back up the thread or descend to the ground. How do beavers build their dams and lodges? With great variety and flexibility, never the same way twice, depending on the weather, landscape, population, and other factors. Animal Architects discusses insect silk, beaver dams, birds nests, bee hives, and other examples of animal building. The stories are fascinating in themselves, and the thesis is tells a larger story. The authors use numerous examples, from stereotyped wasp nests, to the highly flexible building strategies of beavers, to build taxonomies of mapping, from stimulus-response to concept-building, and social intelligence, from isolation to multi-dimensional decision-making. The picture of animal intelligence is much richer and more nuanced than the "stimulus-response" behaviorist school.

There is a strong perceived dichotomy between "intelligence" and "instinct". It can be seen in today's article Washington Post article about a recent scientific study showing that humans pleasure centers are stimulated by acts of generosity and kindness. The article quotes neuroscientists and philosophers suggesting that these scientific studies take moral judgements outside of the realm of morality and into the domain of physical determinism. "Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard neuroscientist and philosopher, said multiple experiments suggest that morality arises from basic brain activities. Morality, he said, is not a brain function elevated above our baser impulses. Greene said it is not "handed down" by philosophers and clergy, but "handed up," an outgrowth of the brain's basic propensities." But the expression of morality - like other aspects of human behavior -- intertwines instincts, emotions, culture, and reason. The interesting thing isn't nature or nurture, it's the fascinating combinations.

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

How did experimentation become accepted as a primary way of doing science? Leviathan and the Airpump,the history of science classic by Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer, looks at the historical transition in Restoration England, when the culture of experiment was just being invented. The book chronicles the dispute between Robert Boyle of the Royal Society, pioneers of experimental science, and Thomas Hobbes, whose work in political philosophy has been remembered, and whose work on mechanical philosophy, short on experiment and long on reasoned "proof", has been largely forgotten.

It is an interesting question. Why, with the ability to demonstrate whether a scientific statement can be supported by facts, would someone choose to avoid experiment? Hobbes argues a few key points. Facts in the real world are messy. Boyle's pump leaked, no two pumps were alike to permit replication; and there were other problems that led the results of experiments to be much more ambiguous than they appear in textbooks. Most important, Hobbes objected to the lack of causal logic. In geometry, Hobbes' canonical form of natural philosophy, reasoned statements proceed methodically from axioms to incontrovertable conclusions. In purely empirical science, relationships between observation and conclusion are more ambiguous.

By contrasting Hobbes and Boyle, I wonder whether the authors stack the deck to maximise the contrast. Even within his peer group of experimentalists, Boyle was notoriously reticent to theorize. There are other pioneering experimentalists (Galileo, Huygens) who did more math; and whose process interleaved experimentation and mathematical theory. It seems as though Hobbes might have fewer problems with, say, Huygens' work on pendulums.

The insight I found most interesting is the way the book shows how arguments in defense of alternative scientific methods were not only about how to prove knowledge, but about how to organize society. Both sides were anxious about maintaining civil order in the aftermath of the English civil war, and promoted their respective methods as processes for reaching agreement peaceably. Hobbes' focused on creating geometric-style proofs that are so airtight that dispute is impossible. Boyle focused on removing philosophic discourse from the contentious topics of politics and religion, and allowing free argument on agreed facts.

One frustrating aspect of the book arises from its methodological refusal to be ahistorical. Responding to the tradition, in the history of science, of reading history from the perspective of known winners, and solved problems, the authors take the opposite approach, and try to present the world of 17th century natural philosophy without any more information than contemporaries had; the reader is left with the same puzzlement about "anomalous suspension", cohering disks of marble, and other puzzles that did not get solved in the time frame under consideration. What's more, the authors are deliberately anti-concerned with the scientific outcome.

I understand why the authors chose not to step out of the frame of 17th century knowledge and understanding; but I'd understand the content better with some additional glosses and appendices about the conclusions of later scientific work. Apparently, this book, Robert Boyle's Experiments in Pneumatics. written in the 50s by James Conant, actually explains the science, and used copies are on the market.

The book belongs to school in the history of science that focuses on the sociology of science. I've heard three Bruno Latour references in the last week and need to pick up the thread there. The extreme side of the argument claims that there is nothing but sociology; but that takes us to Bush political appointees censoring global warming and forbidding the national park service to estimate the age of the Grand Canyon. It is useful to bracket science in order to understand its social context, but dangerous to assert that all knowledge is opinion and belief.

The Root of the Wild Madder

AP Correspondent Brian Murphy fell in love with Persian carpets, and followed the trail of carpets from present-day Iran and Afghanistan back through pre-historic times, in The Root of Wild Madder. The book tells a more human and nuanced story of those parts of the world than one gets by reading the political news these days.

A People's History of Science

A People's History of Science assembles lots of juicy anecdotes about the untold contributions of ordinary people to science and technology. Non-european navigators taught geography to Europen explorers -- often as kidnapped hostages. Rice production in North Carolina was derived from the techniques of African slaves who were transported for their knowledge of rice culture. The canonical achievements of the scientific revolutions's great chemists and astronomers included the contributions of un-named artisans and instrument-makers: Boyle and Brahe were as much managers and administrators as they were researchers; while the members of their labs are barely known. Major achievements in mechanical and chemical engineering had contributions from informally educated miners and brewers, Innovators including Leeuwehoek, John Harrison who invented the clock that enabled measurement of longitude, and William Smith who mapped the strata of the geological history needed to fight for credit because of their non-aristocratic social origin.

The author's ideological point of view enables him to tell a history that would otherwise be invisible. The belief that much human knowlege has derived from the activities of working people, and that the bias of elites has obscured these contributions, enables him to assemble and organize these disparate stories into a collection. Creating a supported narrative fosters further questioning of conventional wisdom about the origins of science.

In other ways, though, Connor's story obscures some other interesting historical questions. Conner tells the stories of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a naturalist at the time of the French Revolution whose writing about nature focused on ecological interrelationships, including phenomena such as mimicry and symbiosis. These ideas were not incorporated into biology until centuries later. Bernardin also believed in an extreme teleologism. For example, volcanoes are designed to purify the world's water, while earthquakes are intended to purify the atmosphere. He was briefly prominent during the revolutionary period, and was excluded from the scientific establishment afterwards, for reasons combining politics and science. The interesting question is about the relationship between the validated and non-validated beliefs of early scientific figures. Isaac Newton's practice included validated physics and invalidated alchemy; while Bernardin's practice included validated ecosystem concepts and invalidated teleology. What is a good way to teach about these historical figures who investigated the unknowns of their time, and were sometimes right and sometimes wrong?

Similarly, Conner writes about Mesmer, the proponent of theories of "animal magnetism", whose ideas were popularized by Nicolas Bergasse, an influential figure in the French Revolution who advocated against the dominance of the Academy. Bergasse led a social and political movement, combining healing through animal magnetism with radical social activism. The Academy thoroughly rejected "animal magnetism" as science. Conner argues that prejudice against the political views of the Mesmerists kept the academicians from uncovering the mind-body insights revealed by the hypnotic trances and spontaneous remissions experienced by the mesmerized. Conner asks a lot of the empirically minded, to patiently seek the evidence of mind-body interconnection amidst obvious evidence of charlatanism and quackery mixed with revolutionary politics. It seems easier for contemporary scientists to learn from the calm and non-evangelical masters of Tibetan Buddhism than it would have been for the committee including Ben Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier to learn from the proponents of mesmerism.

Conner's interpretation of the scientific revolution, my favorite chapter in the book, draws from the work of Edgar Zilsel, a Marxist historian of science who fled Nazi Germany in 1938, and committed suicide in 1944. His work went into disrepute in the McCarthy era, and he wasn't alive to complete and defend his work. Citing Zilsel, Conner shows how canonical scientific works like Gilbert's De Magnete drew directly from the knowledge of "blacksmiths, miners, sailors and instrument makers". Conner cites a variety of historians to argue that the high science of thermodynamics learned more from the practical inventors perfecting the steam engine than vice versa. This argument inverts conventional wisdom about the trajectory from pure research to applied, practical innovation. The "chicken and egg" arguments about scientific theory and technology reveal systematic biases driven by economic and social prejudice, and shows how the absurdities of the European caste system retarded the development of socience. But these arguments also obscure interesting questions about the interrelationships between engineering and science.

Elizabeth Eisenstein's great work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, documents the influence of printing on the transmission of scientific and technical knowledge. Practical manuals for artisans were popular applications of early printing. The availability of technical documentation helped break down the power of guild secrecy and increase the pace of innovation. Evidently, reading and writing must have spread among artisans in order to transmit this technical knowledge.

Conner quotes Robert Boyle and other aristocratic figures who overcame their revulsion and reluctance to actually talk with vulgar tradesman. But the contrast between the Latin-learned aristocrats and uncultured brewers and bakers, barber-surgeons and traders is probably too stark, given the spread of vernacular technical literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The interesting topic -- perhaps covered by other history -- is the interrelationship between scientific theory and engineering practice in the 18th and 19th centuries. Solid studies on this topic would require not only a social filter to recapture the economic and social relationships, but understanding of the engineering and science itself. Looks like the book that investigates this topic is Science and Technology in World History.

In summary, I liked the book because of the way it gathers stories that are not told often enough. The ideology that prompts the storytelling helps to get the story told, but also obscures other parts of the story.

Affective Computing doesn't feel right

Currently reading Affective Computing by Rosalind Picard of MIT. The book envisions computers that are trained to detect and express emotions, and thereby become better servants of people. I think the premise is badly misguided, but interestingly so.

One core flaw is that I don't think you can have the features of emotions without the bugs. Emotions are integral to the pleasure and pain-seeking circuits of an organism. When well-tuned, they help the organism survive and thrive. When off-balance, you get addiction and depression.

The author envisions affective computing as a personal technology. But this doesn't map to way emotions are build into the social nature of the human species. The circuits used for love and loyalty also run betrayal and tribal hatred. Given the frequency of divorce and war, it seems unlikely that we'd be able to do a better job invoking social emotions in machines.

Crashing the Gate

My favorite thing about Crashing the Gate, the book by two leading liberal bloggers, is its indictment of the Democratic political consultant class. They make their money from percentage of political advertising, whether or not they win, which is quite a racket. They have a stranglehold on the dispensation of Democratic campaign funds. According to the book, they are the main proponents of the strategyof blandness: voters will vote for Democratic politicians if we don't understand what they say; and of pandering to swing voters with non-issues like flag-burning.

Critics say the story isn't new; but Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong get the story out to a broader audience than the policy wonks who have known this all along.

What I didn't like as much about the book was how Kos and Jerome talk about online organizing. Mostly, they talk about how the internet is a new source of funding -- and imply that they can be the next generation of political consultants who will gatekeep the collection and use of campaign funds. They give some lip service to online organizing and activism. But they don't tell the interesting stories about how the internet can help assemble core groups, extend the reach of online organizing to the physical world, and use online education to put pressure on candidates and lawmakers.

What I liked least was the book's indictment of liberal special interest groups. Kos and Armstrong encourage groups to drop their interests in the environment, women's rights, and other issues, and to instead work on together to elect liberal candidates. I agree with the authors that bipartisan tactics are sometimes short-sighted -- for example, womens' groups support for individually pro-choice republicans is risky against the big picture of the republican party's anti-abortion strategy.

Also, the focus on building an alliance of traditional liberal groups misses opportunities to be more aggressive and build a different majority. For example: Kos and Armstrong would rather environmentalists to take a lower profile, and subsume their call against global warming for a larger progressive agenda (whatever that is). Instead, environmentalists ought to cast a larger shadow, connecting the cause to economic growth; to business interests investing in bringing clean energy mainstream; to the national security benefit of energy independence; to religious people who believe in eath stewardship. This isn't at all about "compromise", it's about building a larger majority by being assertive about core principles, and reaching out to those who might belive same things for different reasons.

I think that Kos and Armstrong's electoral focus blinds them to the more complicated relationship between issue activism and campaigning. The activities during legislative sessions and campaigns are related but different. You do issue activism when the legislature is in session and you want the politicians to listen to you on a speciific topic. And then you do electoral campaigns favoring your broader goals.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and recommend it. It provides a powerful indictment of the structures that make democrats lose; and offers a bunch of good ideas for how Democrats could do better.

Coast of Dreams

Coast of Dreams, a survey of California history since 1990 is full of nuggets that explain the origins of Californian artifacts.

Where did the massive demonstrations in LA against the immigration bill come from? The tactics, from flagwaving, to the student walkouts, to the massive gatherings and the slogans, are repeats of the tactics used to protest proposition 187, the 1994 law that took health care and education services from undocumented immigrants, and was later ruled unconstitutional.

Where did Trader Joe's come from? The founder's original target market was Pasadena PhD students who had sophisticated tastes in food and poverty-level budgets.

What's the economic base of San Diego? It used to be defense contracting, and now is more biotech and telecom.

Why does Silicon Valley have a string of surprisingly lively main streets in its string of suburban towns? It's actually not uncommon in California, where new urbanist ideas have revived walkable town centers all over the state.

What happened after the LA riots in 1992? High profile redevelopment efforts by Peter Ueberroth and representatives of the oligarchy flopped. Economic revitalization came from an unexpected direction; toy and textile businesses, founded by immigrants who colonized the underutilized downtown buildings.

Why are there green hills in Marin? Because land conservancies have been buying up open space when there would otherwise be expensive housing.

Coast of Dreams tells the history of things that seem too unnatural to have a history; one interesting chapter compares and contrasts the beach culture of Santa Barbara with the golf culture of Palm Springs.

Is it a good book?

If you've been following California news closely for the last 15 years, Coast of Dreams might come across as a non-book. It is a collection of stories that one might assemble from reading the paper and watching how the stories develop over the years. The footnotes section is full of citations from the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee.

The book does have a loose theme. The economic hard times prompted by the end of the cold war, which caused some skeptics to forecast the end of the California Dream, was followed by a revival led by immigrant business, entertainment and tech. The book has nothing vaguely near the the depth of Common Ground the brilliant J. Anthony Lukas 1986 social history of the Boston busing crisis, which traced the history of the ethnic groups and social institutions in Boston through to their painful collisions in the 70s.

As a newcomer to California, I found Cost of Dreams fascinating. The author, Kevin Starr, was the state librarian and author of a series on California history, and the book contains a smattering of everything Californian, ranging from religion, to real estate development, to surfing history.

The best part of the book is the author's sprawling knowledge of California visual art, literature, food and sports. The book contains thumbnail portraits of artist Richard Diebenkorn, landscape architect Nancy Goslee Power, novelist James Ellroy, and many other cultural figures. There's a little gem of a section that wonders why LA's novelists are so noir, while its poets and architects are cheerful.

Starr has a cheerful, culturally omnivorous esthetic that seems like an LA sensibility that's different from the glossy cynicism of movie execs and plastic surgery ads. It would be really fun if the book were hypertext, with links to the people, places and pictures, and maybe an annotated google map.

Sometimes Starr's cultural history is overinterpreted; for example, the growth of mexican-american art festivals is seen as a sign of racial detente in Los Angeles, which is surely a good thing, but not the same as a reduction in violence among Blacks, Latinos and Koreans.

This isn't the book for a profound examination of causes. Starr writes about the disasters of fire and landslides that affect Southern California; The Control of Nature by John McPhee explains how patterns of fire suppression and building make the pattern inevitable.

Starr documents the brutal costs of the drug war in urban central Los Angeles and the rural Central Valley; but he doesn't pause to consider alternatives. He refers to the growing economic inequality, but nothing about its causes.

Starr writes about the transformation in American food habits instigated by Alice Waters in Berkeley; Ruth Reichl's memoir, Tender at the Bone tells the juicy details.

In summary, Coast of Dreams is an enjoyable introduction to contemporary California, but it's far from the last word.

Unpacking the bookshelf: after mass marketing

When the internet was becoming commercial, I researched and wrote a multi-client study for the paper industry on the future of paper. In order to understand the consumer economy that drove the advertising support for newspapers and magazines, I researched the history of mass advertising, mass marketing and consumer culture to understand the old system that seemed on the verge of splintering.

Since then, the market for physical goods hasn't changed as much as the dotcom era promised. But the market for text, music, video and software is changing rapidly. The web20ish cascade of user-generated content is as dramatic and more fun than one might have imagined, despite the bad laws that incumbent industries are trying to use to hold back time.

The scary collapse of the newspaper ad market is happening as predicted, along with a very scary decline of democracy.

I didn't think that electronic displays would be cheap enough for books until around now. That market still hasn't gone anywhere. The relationship between pixels and paper has gotten very strange, with books being used by bloggers, mostly as excuses for book tours.

Unpacking the bookshelf on environment and industrial ecology

And worrying that global warming might be too far along to reverse. Long before Jared Diamond's Collapse, I read A Green History of the World: Environment and the Collapse of Civilizations. It talks about how human-catalyzed soil degradation led to the progressive decline of the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations.

Phantoms in the Brain

What I liked about Phantoms in the Brain. The science. Neurologist VS Ramachandran investigates strange conditions including the phantom limbs of amputees, the delusional competencies of paralyzed stroke victims, and the religious epiphanies of epileptics. These oddities yield revelations about the workings of the brain and mind.

The sensations of phantom limbs, it turns out, are generated when the brain's perceptual circuitry for a missing limb is colonized by brain cells intended for another body part. By understanding the mechanism of phantom sensation, Ramachandran figured out clever ways of retraining the brain to eliminate pain or accept the absense of the limb.

What I didn't like: the last section of the book, a philosophical analysis of the attributes of consciousness. The connection to experimental science is much weaker in this section. It seemed as though there could be any number of ways to segment consciousness into N logical components, and these segmentations would be equivalently untestable.

What I appreciated: the book discussed the religious epiphanies experienced by some people with epilepsy. But it refrained from drawing conclusions about the validity of these experiences. It is welcome to see a scientist refrain from ascientific conclusions for or against religious belief. But Ramachandran commits a different and related solecism elsewhere in the book.

What I liked least: Quoting Indian scripture, Ramachandran uses the various bugs and gaps in the neurological system to argue that the experience of self and consciousness is an illusion. This argument is fallacious. Take as an analogy a software system that composed of multiple subsystems, each of which needs to work properly for the software to run. There may be some anomalies that occur with strange and unexpected input. But these facts do not somehow prove that the software does not work as intended under normal conditions. Similarly, the vision system is built from multiple components, and it is possible to fake out the system with optical illusions, but these facts don't mean that vision is an illusion. The author is welcome to his beliefs, but they are not supported by his science.

Wired Magazine

The December Wired had an interesting-looking cover story, and a few article referrals in the queue, so I took it on the plane. Summary: despite some good articles, a reminder of why I don't read Wired anymore.

Wired had one superb piece by Gary Wolf about an emergency warning system in Portland, Oregon, where 911 alerts are fed back to schools, hospitals, and building managers, and community members can feed back into the system. This is a working model of decentralization and openness, ready to be adopted around the country.

There were a few other good bits sprinkled around the magazine, including a graphical one page summary of government spending to keep data secret.

But the bulk of the magazine was written on autopilot. The cover story about alternatives to oil was euphoric and shallow. The claims of providers, from ethanol to oil shale to hydrogen, were repeated uncritically, summarized in a table showing the plentiful riches that await slightly higher energy prices. No mention of the critique that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it generates, and hydrogen is interesting as an energy storage medium, not a fuel.

The alternative energy story in the Economist (the other bit of airplane reading) was much better in the level of detail and critical thinking. A regular diet of blogs like The Oil Drum and the Ergosphere provide an infinitely richer picture about the opportunities and risks of post-oil energy technologies.

One effusive story about homeland security vendors was downright creepy. An ex-athlete with government connections raises venture financing with the purpose of buying out a homeland security vendor -- any vendor - and selling the product to the government. Reminds me a bit about this story that broke last week in the Washington Post. It would be a fine idea to take down the names in the article and watch to see if any of the players are bankrupt or indicted in the next few years.

And the articles about media -- movies, games, video, music read like product placement. It's Entertainment Tonight with a focus on special effects. The esthetic is anti-O'Reillly -- the audience is a consumer not a producer. The section on personal DVR knocks Linux versions as being "too hard" -- true, linux dvrs aren't consumer products yet, but the Wired editors are making that decision for the readers, assuming assuming their readers don't include hackers anymore. There's not so much critical thinking about the role of broadband and copyright policy on creative innovation, except for Xeni Jardin's interview of Steven Soderberg, where the movie director fantasizes about mashups he can't legally make.

I can't remember when I stopped reading Wired Magazine. At its best, it was a heady brew of technoeuphoria, exploration of new ideas sparked by new technology, tasty tech and media tips, and gizmo ad porn.

Wired does publish some excellent work. These days, the good articles already make their way to the link inbox via blogging. External links are a better way to find those good articles than separating the glossy ad pages. The tips about gadgets and games and tech stuff can all be found sooner by blog.

This isn't about the net killing magazines. It's about the need to have a better product. If the issue had five or ten strong articles instead of two or three, Wired would have a regular reader.

Two Lives

I just read Two Lives, Vikram Seth's holocaust memoir of the life of his great-aunt Henny and great-uncle Shanti. My favorite parts of the book are the stories set in pre-war Germany -- Shanti's early struggles as an immigrant dental student, his incorporation into the lively social circle of his landlady and her daughters, with picnics, alpine vacations, and Christmas dinners; with tension provided by the unstated romantic polygon among Lola, Henny, Henny's presumed fiance Hans, and Shanti. From a stash of letters discovered in an attic, Seth pieces together a post-war epistolary detective story of loyalty and betrayal when Henny reconnects with old friends and finds out how they treated her mother and sister during the war. I also enjoyed the bits of first-person narrative that show Seth's relationship to his aunt and uncle when he stayed with them as university student (the auto-biographical bits also seemed like they were excepts of an unwritten memoir).

Is there any difference between a holocaust memoir written by an Indian great-nephew rather than a Jewish one? After learning about the fate of his great-aunt's family, Seth makes a pilgrimage to Yad Vashem, finds their names on a transport list, and is overwhelmed; after reading the inventory forms recording the confiscation of household radios and silverware; and the inventory logistics of the trains to Auschwitz, he becomes viscerally repelled by the German language. So far, his emotional reactions are those of a late but true entrant to this strange extended family.

Seth isn't infected by the "never forget" anxiety to document the story before the protagonists all die; Seth's research is his the usual obsessive investigation into the background of his stories rather than the ideological fetishism of the memory project. The story of Seth's trip to Israel also includes a cameo Friday night dinner with a Jewish family, in which he brings a beautiful Indian-Muslim architect friend; on the way back they get briefly lost in east Jerusalem; the cameo creates an opportunity for a little lecture that is one part "can't-we-get-along" humanism and one-part post-colonial propaganda.

The story, as a whole, illustrates Seth's love for his relatives whose quiet virtues are kindness, determination and stoicism. Since Seth is great-nephew, he is not sucked into the emotional void, poisoned bickering, and persistent background fear that might come with closer relation. The displaced lives of Shanti and Henny read against the themes of exile and cosmopolitanism that animated Seth's much earlier Golden Gate, where the vectors of displacement include homosexuality, breakup, and the transient culture of San Francisco's adoptive families. The theme of a multi-ethnic assimilated culture split by violence is kin to the hindu/muslim theme in suitable boy and Indian history.

The bit that I liked least was the ending, where Uncle Shanti, in failing physical and mental health, starts treating his family badly. It is true that living through the daily physical and emotional pain of an isolated, sick elderly man is agonizing and tedius; Seth forces the reader to live through too much of it. What's worse, this section still reads as personal, and not yet resolved. Seth is still mad at his uncle for turning mean at the very end of his life; Seth's anger belongs in journals and family conversation, not for a public audience.

In the book, Seth agonizes out loud about whether it is to publish his aunt's private letters, and decides that it was the right thing to do; this decision is right, at least literarily. But his decision to air his anger at the irrational actions of his uncle seems literarily as well as ethically askew.

Other bits which could have been cut from the book include a rambling political essay and some family stories set in India before Shanti leaves for Europe. The mostly-interpolated stories of Lola and Elly's last months were written for Seth's readers who have not read N holocaust memoirs, history books, and films. The stories worth reading showed distinctive lives, not dehumanized deaths. DVDs these days have "outtake" sections -- it would be interesting to publish novels using that convention, putting the outtakes on the web, and only include the core story on paper.

The Great Influenza

After reading John Barry's nonfiction epic about the great Mississippi flood of 1927, I picked up his other grand, retrospectively timely history of the 1918 influenza epidemic.

With the threat of bird flu raising the spectre of a repeat of 1918, The Great Influenza has lessons for today.

• leadership makes a difference. During the plague, communication, supplies, and basic nursing services made a big difference in the number of survivors.
• corruption kills. In Philadelphia and New York, the Tammany controlled political machines replaced competent public health administrators with unqualified cronies. When the epidemic hits, no amount of preparation will keep resources from being overwhelmed, but incompetence makes a bad situation worse.
• quarantine helps. While nothing could stop the infection, slowing the spread of infection through quarantine helped. In Wilson's America, where military readiness counted for everything, troop transport took precedence over quarantine. At the same time, there is no evidence supporting the Bush adminstration's proposal to use troops to enforce quarantine. The problem wasn't the lack of ability to enforce quarantine, it was the lack of will to declare quarantine.
• communication is key. The World War 1 practices of propaganda and censorship created pseudo-news to "boost morale". The propaganda hampered useful communication and encouraged an atmosphere of terror.

Like Rising Tide, The Great Influenza interweaves the story of the response to a great disaster with the rise of emerging science and technology of disaster prevention and response. In Rising Tide the threads came together with tragic irony -- the great engineering works to control the Mississippi ended up making the disaster more severe. In the Great Influenza, the race for a cure failed. While the epidemic was raging, scientists did not find the real cause or the cure for the flu. Scientists did find the cause of the secondary bacterial infection that killed many victims, but did not isolate the virus until years after the plague. Instead, the epidemic flamed out. In the places hit by the flu, the virus flared for 4-6 weeks, and quickly exhausted the fuel of non-immune humans.

Also, it wasn't until later that scientists discovered the reason that the 1918 epidemic was so deadly to young, healthy people. The 1918 virus triggered an extreme immune response that was more severe in the young and healthy than the old and week.

Part of the drama of Rising Tide was the conflict between the 19th century heroic engineers. The Great Influenza focuses even more strongly on the personalities of the pioneering scientists, at the expense of strong exposition of the science itself.

Also, the Great Influenza is marred by overwriting and lack of editing. Barry repeats "it was only influenza" to dramatizes the way the destructiveness of the familiar sickness was at first underestimated. The phrase is repeated over and over again across chapters, becoming overwrought and grating. One anecdote about striking miners forced into boxcars in the Arizona desert is told three different times.

As a result of these weaknesses, the book is short of brilliant, but it is well worth reading for the history and potential relevance to today's risks.

Tim Bray recommends Vikram Seth's latest

Tim Bray writes "Seth is one of only two or three authors whose new works I buy on sight, without waiting to read reviews."

ok, I was coveting this in a bookstore digression last weekend. Time to buy (or take out from the library).

"Vikram Seth’s great virtue is clarity; I’m not sure any writer of English has ever inscribed so many words with so few barriers to understanding them. The apparently-effortless flow of narrative is I’m sure the result of relentless rewriting, it’s like listening to Rostropovich, two thousand hours of practice make two hours of performance sound easy."

Yes... plenty of books read like they are written too quickly and under-edited. I read Neil Gaiman'sAmerican Gods last week -- which would have been a better book if it was written about 10x slower. It will be interesting to see if Anansi Boys -- written over a decade later, when Gaiman is presumably much wealthier -- takes advantage of the time and power to rewrite, or cedes to the arrogance of fame and edits less.

Neal Stephenson had a bad experience with editing once many years ago (there's an essay of his with the story posted online somewhere), and concluded that editing is bad for his muse; and his recent, sprawling Baroque Cycle hides a brilliant work that is a fraction of the length of the published series.

The Control of Nature

Rising Tide talks about the consequences of a disastrous engineering decision to control the Mississippi by means of levees alone, ignoring spillways and reservoirs to take overflow. The flood control contributed to the severity of the 1927 Great Flood. But John Barry's book doesn't cover the broader consequences of Mississippi flood control.

The Control of Nature, a 1990 book by by John McPhee, tells part of that story. McPhee writes about the massive project to prevent the Mississippi from jumping over to the Atchafalaya River, which has a steeper and shorter path to the sea. In the process, he describes how flood control prevents the replenishment of soil. Without the floods, the land sinks, and coastal wetlands are lost to the sea.

The Atchafalaya story is one of three stories in McPhee's book about efforts to control nature. In Hiemaey, Iceland, residents pumped cold seawater on a volcanic lava flow, and diverted enough of the flow to save their town.

In the third story, McPhee writes about the efforts Los Angeles County to prevent the San Gabriel mountains from sliding into the valley. The County builds debris dams to catch the overflow, and carts it away. Some of the debris is ground and taken to the beaches, since the interruption of the mountain's erosion prevents the natural replenishment of beach sand.

There is a recurring cycle of fire on the dry, steep, rocky mountainsides, followed by debris slides. The current fires in the San Gabriel foothills will likely be followed by debris slides that destroy houses in the foothills.

Many residents are newcomers who don't remember the debris slide five or ten years ago, and don't know about the risk. But even geologists at California State Politechnic University and county workers who clean up after debris slides live in the foothills. The risk of a catastrophe in two or five or ten years is not enough to scare them away from the clean air and quiet of the mountainside canyons.

McPhee's zoom-out geologic time perspective lends a philosophical air to these stories, although he does not turn explicitly to philosophy, psychology, or politics. In all of these cases, nature is going to win out in geologic time. The Mississippi River is going to keep jumping beds, as it has every few thousand years. The volcanos are going to keep erupting and building mountains. And the San Gabriel Mountains are going to keep on rising, and keep on eroding into fans in the valley.

Through some combination of intelligence, persistence, hubris, and psychological blindness to risks, humans keep building defenses, and rebuilding.

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927

I found this superb work of history from the song. Aaron Neville's lament about the 1927 flood became a radio refrain following the New Orleans flood (and led to more diverse New Orleans music over at WWOZ). The song was written by Randy Newman, and the lyrics allude to the history that John Barry tells about human causes and social consequences of natural disaster.

"The river has busted through clear down to Plaquemines"

The Plaquemines Parish flooding in 1927 was manmade. A clique of bankers decided to protect New Orleans from flooding by breaking the levee south of New Orleans and inundate St. Bernard and Plaquemines parish, home to muskrat trappers and bootleggers. The city leaders promised to reimburse the people they flooded out, but they didn't. They manipulated the laws and courts so people reporting damages had no recourse. In the aftermath, disgust with Louisiana's traditional elite helped bring Huey Long to power.

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The president say, ''Little fat man isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor farmer's land."

The "little fat man" is Herbert Hoover, an engineer-turned-politico whose leadership of flood relief logistics helped win Hoover the presidency. Coolidge never did tour the flooded region, but the condescension toward the poorest flood victims was historically accurate.

In Mississippi, local aristocrats refused to allow black people to be evacuated since they feared that their source of labor would never return. Instead, the black residents lived for months on top of the 8-foot-wide levee, trapped between the river and the flood. Men were forced to work without pay on levy repair and cleanup. After the floodwaters drained, many black people did leave for Chicago and other northern towns; the flood was one of the causes of the great African-American migration.

Hoover promised black leaders that he'd redistribute land to poor sharecroppers if elected, but he lied. Barry presents the evidence and the timeline of the betrayal, and argues that disillusion with these broken promises helped shift black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party.

The flood itself was made more severe by the flood control system, which used levees to contain the river, but left out spillways and reservoirs to divert floodwaters. Barry tells the story of the hubristic 19th century engineers who designed the system, and the bureaucratic incompetence and infighting that led to the system's poor design. However, Barry doesn't go as far as The Control of Nature, by John McPhee, and other books about the unintended consequences of the Mississippi levees.

Rising Tide is a masterful work of history that combines dramatic stories of heroism, villainy, conflict and suspense with social, political, and economic context. The book's stories portray how the historical characters are shaped by their circumstances, and how their choices affect the course of history.

One imperfection is the author's attraction to the heroic myths of 19th century self-made men and deep south aristocrats. Barry is a former football coach, and admires competitive, commanding masculine power. He typically admires his heroes' height and physical strength, and is suprised when a character is short or not physically fit. Barry does not worship power uncritically. He holds his "great men" to an ethical standard; he honors LeRoy Percy's opposition to the Klan, and criticizes LeRoy and his son Will for putting greed ahead of humanitarian rescue. In his admiration of machismo, Barry misses some of the ways that Southern aristocracy and engineering hubris contributed to their own failures.

Innovation and its discontents

How and why is the US patent system so broken? News stories about dubious patents generate grumbling, annoyance, frustration, and perplexity.

An exceptionally good book, Innovation and Its Discontents explains what's wrong with the patent system and how to fix it. Written by two economics professors at Harvard, Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner, the book is short, clear, well-argued, and wears its erudition lightly.

Things haven't always been this bad. But in the 1980s and 1990s, two separate reforms -- of the patent courts and the patent office -- combined for a pernicious result. Bad patents became much easier to get, and harder to overturn.

In 1982, the patent appeals court system was consolidated from 12 regional courts, which had vastly uneven standards, to one centralized court. The reform halted the practice of "forum-shopping", whereby patent-owners rushed to accuse infringers in patent-friendly courts, while challengers rushed to seek hearing in patent-friendly courts.

The practices of this centralized court made it much easier to sue for patent infringement and win. The percentage of patents upheld increased from 62% to 90% in the few years after the central court started.

A few years later, in the mid-90s, the Patent Office changed from a tax-supported agency, whose mission was to ensure that patents are valid, to a fee-for-service agency, whose mission was to quickly issue patents to those who apply. The fees from the Patent office are siphoned into the general federal budget, while the office can't keep qualified staff. 55% of patent examiners have less than two years of experience.

The result is that bad patents sneak through without good scrutiny. The average patent claim is reviewed for only 16-20 hours, which is half the time spent in the European Union. In the time available, patent examiners look for information that is easiest for them to find -- other patents in patent databases. They don't have the time or experience to look for other sources -- like existing software and academic research -- that prove that the "invention" is obvious, or not new.

Meanwhile, the patent review process is mostly closed -- there isn't a good way for third parties to share relevant information about prior art until after the patent is granted. Once the patent is granted, the legal system presumes that a patent is valid, and stacks the deck against attempts to overturn a patent.

A reform in 1999 was intended to create a "reexamination process", but the process was watered down so badly that it is almost never used. The only kind of evidence that a challenger can present is other patents (not pre-existing software, evidence of historical business practices, or academic papers). The challenger doesn't have the opportunity to explain the evidence. If a challenger applies for a patent re-examination and loses, they lose the right to sue later.

As a result, a lot of bad patents get issued, and they are very hard to protest or overturn. Technology companies use patents to gain license fees from competitors, who will settle rather than go to court, even if the patent is bad, because an infringement allegation is too costly and risky to defend. Large competitors create cross-license patent libraries that maintain the advantage of the leaders, and freeze out smaller players.

So how can the system be improved? Jaffe and Lerner recommend a tiered approval and review process, where patents can be issued quickly, but there are several stages where challengers and third parties can submit prior art and try to prove that the patent is obvious or not new. They also recommend reduced use of juries, who lack expertise to evaluate the information.

The book has interesting observations about the failure of patent reform efforts in the 90s. Talk show celebrities including Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy used the issue to grandstand against Japan, who were competing against US manufacturers. Patent lawyers, who gain from the current system, were well-organized. At the time, the technology industry was not well-organized, and there was little public interest in patent reform.

Thanks to Doug Barnes for recommending the book, which joins my short list of favorite non-fiction. It takes a puzzling and potentially abstruse subject, and explains it clearly. It uses stories and well-chosen research data to make its points. And it shows a potential exit for the tangled mess of the US patent system.

Patent reform is in the works again in Congress. The book is very helpful context for the debate.

When to worry

For a book club this weekend, I read The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. The book is set in an alternate version of 1940s America, where Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt for the presidency on the platform of keeping the US out of WWII. The Lindbergh presidency sympathizes with Germany and Japan, and takes the US down a suspicious path of isolating Jews.

The book combines effective, memoir-style fiction about the role of fear in growing up, with a rather clunky and self-indulgent political thriller. The effective parts of the book to me were the anecdotes of about scary experiences made more terrifying by imagination. A kid is trapped by a stuck bathroom door; the basement haunted by feral cats and ghosts; a neighbor's father is found dead from cancer or suicide.

The political plot takes instances of discrimination that really happened to other groups -- being kept out of hotels (African-Americans); kids being taken far away for education and assimilation (Native Americans); families being relocated (Japanese) -- and applies them to Jews. The plot plays effectively on the Jewish fear of persecution. It works -- it's scary. But it also feels manipulative, like a Holocaust theme park ride.

There was one aspect of the political plot that was thought-provoking and effective. In the novel, the programs taking urban Jewish kids to summer camps on farms and moving urban families out to rural communities are presented as sunny and patriotic. It's hard to tell if the anti-semitic rhetoric, Nazi alliances, and building of a capo-style structure of Jewish adminstration of the transfer programs is truly as creepy as it looks, or whether Jews worried about the trends are having paranoid fantasies fueled by their ghetto life, as the adminstration insists.

In contemporary politics, one of the tough questions is figuring out when and how much to worry. The religious right's rhetoric damning Democrats as being "against people of faith" is worrisome. The support for this message by the Republican leadership is more worrisome.

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees. Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."

The issue itself -- changing the Senate's rules for confirming judges -- is basic procedural politics. The political slant -- casting one party for God, and one party against God -- is really disturbing. It's reassuring to watch conservatives who aren't buying it

Barack Obama: Dreams from my Father

The US is a nation of immigrants and migrants who re-invent themselves in their adopted home; and the children of immigrants who seek authenticity in forgotten ethnic traditions. Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama's autobiography written after graduation from Havard Law School, is part of a genre of American writing in search of roots. In Dreams from my Father, Obama goes searching for community and family, finds both, and find them to be different than he expected.

Barack Obama grew up in a mixed and peripatetic family. His mother's family had migrated to Hawaii from Kansas. His father was an African exchange student at the University of Hawaii. When Obama was two, his father left for Harvard, and returned only once for a brief visit eight years later. Growing up, Obama spent several years in Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, then was raised by his grandparents while his mother did graduate research overseas.

Search for community

As a young adult, Obama set off in search of community and purpose, with the great role models of the civil rights movement. To his great credit, he succeeds and finds these things.

The glory days of the civil rights movement were long gone when Obama gets an organizing job in a poor neighborhood on Chicago's South Side plagued by crumbling public housing, disappearing manufacturing jobs, and rising crime. Obama deciphers the limits of their starting position. The group's founder is a Jewish man who is not fully trusted by the community. Its initial allies are the the Catholic Churches, which have an uneasy relationship with their new African-American parishioners. Chicago has just elected Harold Washington, its first Black major who is worshipped as a cult figure, but whose patronage is delivering limited benefits to the communities that elected him.

At the same time that Obama deciphers the political landscape, he makes personal connections. He becomes close with the three middle-aged African-American women who are core to the organization, and develops a friendship with an eccentric, pot-smoking Catholic organizer who wears a clerical collar and a "deacon" t-shirt. He looks out for Kyle, the teenage son of a volunteer who is in danger of getting into trouble. One of the most moving bits in the book where Obama tells the group he is headed off to Harvard Law school, and promises his friends in the neighborhood that he'll be back.

The mix of idealism, political perceptiveness and personal connection are the origins of Obama's political career.

The Limits of "Organizing"

After a series of ignominious defeats, the persistence, skill and empathy of Obama's group begins to pay off. They organize cleanup for the housing project, job training for the neighborhood, mentoring for school kids.

To this reader, though, the section reveals the strength and the limits of the "organizer" model, in which a stranger rides into town, lives in a community, and encourages the locals to demand their rights. The "organizer" helps the powerless to organize and demand their rights from the powerful. This model may be idea for those in abject need, but it underestimates the power that local people have.

Obama visits the scraggly remains of the neighborhood's main retail district trying to get a job training center into a local storefront. I couldn't help but think that the neighborhood needs a traditional chamber of commerce approach to tally up the areas assets, and bring businesses. Walgreens is probably in the neighborhod now. (Later in the book, Obama's African stepbrother Roy starts an import business with the intention of bringing in unemployed relatives; that entrepreneurial attitude sees unused resources as opportunity).

Following a public forum where the neighborhood people demand basic maintenance for public housing project, the bureacrats explain that the Housing Authority budget -- set from Washington -- allows for asbestos removal, or basic repairs, but not both. Washington DC is much too far away to smell overflowing toilets.

Those of you who have done more organizing that I have can tell me if I'm full of nonsense, or whether there's a need for a model that is more empowered and entrepreneurial than the traditional democratic model of "demanding your rights", yet more community-spirited than the traditional republican model of every man for himself and rewards to the deserving wealthy.

Search for family and identity

Obama's search for community in Chicago is linked to a personal search for family and identity, which culminates in the last third of the book.

Feeling out of place in high school, Obama gravitates toward the black kids and works to embrace an African-American culture that matches others' expectations of his appearance, but is different from his upringing and background.

Obama admits and honestly scrutinizes his own ambivalence about ethnic authenticity. At prep school, he teases a friend from LA about taking on a "bad-assed nigger pose" and the friend retorts "a pose? speak for yourself". In college Obama deliberately hangs out with the campus radical crowd to assert his racial credentials (his words); the present narrator acknowledges the shallowness of the college identity politics. In Chicago, the narrator confesses a fear that if he told his friends about his mixed-race, Hawaiian background they wouldn't like him -- but he tells him and they adopt him anyway.

While Obama relentlessly catalogs the ambiguities and subtleties of African-American identity, there are a few places where he doesn't acknowledge quite enough. When Obama started the organizing job, one of the initial challenges was the resentment of the three middle-aged women who'd been running the show, who were annoyed that the boss had brought in a young, good-looking, tall guy to take charge (in the grand tradition of non-profits, where diligent women do the work, and men take the title and the credit.) Obama has his own intelligence, discipline, charm and empathy to credit his success, but he doesn't fully acknowledge the benefits of the middle class outlook and male privilege that code him as "in charge" and "going places."

A trip to Kenya before law school is an opportunity for discovery and healing. Obama grew up with an idealized vision of his father, which both intimidated and inspired him. As he gets to know his African family, he finds out that his father's life was more complex and less perfect than the idealized image.

It turns out that Obama's father had a wife and children in Africa before coming to Hawaii. Barack Senior met yet a third woman at Harvard, who moved to Africa and raised several more children in the extended Obama family. Barack senior is smart and ambitious, and initially successful. But he runs afoul of the Kenyan dictatorship in his arrogance and naivete, loses his job and is blacklisted. Uneployed and broke, he turns to alcohol and delusions of grandeur, while his children raise themselves. He is rehabilitated later by a new regime, but the damage he has done to his family leaves ongoing bitterness after his death.

In Kenya, Barack Junior finds a family that is loving, close, and welcoming but beset with problems -- feuds, alcoholism, poverty. The affectionate welcome also seems like a down payment against future financial success. The climax of the trip to Kenya is a tale by his grandmother about his grandfather. Also an ambiguous figure, Hossein Onyango is a capable servant to white rulers and a prosperous farmer; he is also imperious and cruel to his wives and children.

The stories that Obama hears on his trip make things more complicated, not simpler. The stories provide context for the personality flaws, passions, that which are more meaningful, more admirable, and more forgivable, than a shallow but false idealized image.

From Many, One

Which is the theme of the book. Obama's ideals -- community organizing, close family -- turn out to be less simple and more ambiguous than expected. As an adult, Obama learns to turn those complexities into compassionate synthesis rather than scornful disillusion.

The synthesis what drove Obama's moving speech at the DNC last summer.

If there is a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief -- that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper-- that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.

E Pluribus Unum. From many one.

Apparently, Obama has signed a new book deal to cover his time as a state senator. I look forward to reading about the lessons he learned at in the legislative sausage factory. Hopefully his career will continue to combine astute success and genuine empathy; and in the unavoidable ambiguities of power, will stay on the right side of forgivable.