Unknown Quantity

Author: John Derbyshire
Year: 2006
Genre: Science history

I like math. I was a math minor in college, and would have double-majored if I could have taken math classes on my junior year abroad. In high school I was really good at math, but when I took honors math classes in college I was just good enough to hang on for the ride. I realized that, as much as I enjoyed learning about group theory, complex analysis, and the search for really big prime numbers, I wasn't good enough to do it professionally. Sadly, if you don't live in that world full-time, it's astonishingly difficult to keep up with it at all, and so I let my math lapse after graduation.

Unknown Quantity is a rare exception: a book about math and math history made accessible to the interested layperson. And Derbyshire doesn't just write about math; he writes about algebra, possibly the most abstract and conceptually challenging branch of theoretical mathematics. By covering the history of algebra over the last 6000 years or so, the book follows how emerging awareness of numbers in ancient Babylonia led to the Greeks, the Renaissance, and the algebra that most people remember (or don't) from high school. Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries, algebra took a sharp turn to the abstract, but Derbyshire makes clear connections to show how it evolved from more representational problems. He challenged me, but he never lost me entirely.

The Penelopiad

Author: Margaret Atwood
Year: 2005
Genre: Literary fiction / Mythology

Margaret Atwood retells the story of the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view, interspersed with commentary from the twelve maids that Odysseus kills after his return to Ithaca. These days, there seems to be a trend of new fiction based on classic literature (see Finn and March), and Penelope is an obvious character to pick up, especially for someone like Margaret Atwood.

The book did have its interesting parts. I liked the look at Penelope's early days as a sheltered princess in Sparta, ugly-duckling cousin to the slutty Helen. It's easy to forget that those mythological royal families had more intermarriage than the 19th century crowns of Europe, and that characters who are generally considered to symbolize different aspects of femininity are also people who would have known each other. In fact, I'd say in general that Atwood succeeds when she reconsiders mythological characters as people, rather than symbols.

Unfortunately, though, through most of the book, she uses the characters of the Odyssey as symbols that suit her own agenda. Her treatment of the maids is the most glaring example: in Homer's version, it's true that they are needlessly slaughtered by Odysseus and Telemachus, but there's not much more to say about them. Atwood inflates them into figures of more importance by saying it over and over, albeit in different literary forms: there's free-verse poetry, folk music, courtroom drama, and even a sea shanty. The introduction notes that "the maids form a chanting and singing Chorus," but this isn't the sort of chorus you'll find in Aeschylus; rather than commenting on the action of the main story, they have their own story to tell. And to repeat. In the end, I didn't feel sorry for them anymore, just guilty and defensive on behalf of men for the mistreatment of women throughout the history of the world.

Quicksilver

Author: Neal Stephenson
Year: 2004
Genre: Historical fiction

Stephenson claims to be a science fiction writer, but I have to disagree. Like Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver is not science fiction so much as historical fiction about scientists. Maybe he calls it science fiction because his audience is the same; SF or no, Quicksilver can unquestionably be shelved under "zany fun for geeks."

What a tangle of subplots: there's the Puritan in Restoration England, the early history of the Royal Society, 17th-century financial intrigue a la A Conspiracy of Paper, Louis XIV court intrigue that's not too far removed from Mel Brooks, and two pirate stories. Half the fun is keeping all that in your head.

I'll see if I can still remember it when I get around to reading Book Two.

Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding

Author: Georgia M. Green
Year: 1996
Genre: Linguistics

It's pretty clear that the meaning of words is conventional. I use the word computer to refer to this thing that I'm typing on because when I write that word to you, you know what I mean. The first time I realized this important fact about language, it seemed like the end of the discussion because it explains so much. On the contrary, though - it's just the beginning.

Pragmatics is the field of linguistic inquiry that explores how language is used to construct meaning between individuals. This can mean the flexibility in the meaning of individual words: we know what computer means, but when I talk about the New York Times, do I mean:

• a copy of the newspaper (I bought the Times today)
• the information contained in it (I can get the Times online)
• the paper's editorial board (The Times says the Democrats are right)
• the business that publishes the paper (The Times owns the Boston Globe)
• or what?

Mostly, I judge from the context of the conversation and from what I know of you to determine what you're probably trying to express. This sort of conversational mind-reading guessing game is going on all the time; it's what allows us to express nonverbal ideas in a verbal medium, and to produce infinitely many thoughts with a finite number of words.

Pragmatics also deals with the ways people use language to achieve social goals, from a simple request to an attempt to persuade or change someone's mind. The assumptions we make about other people's prior knowledge are pragmatic, as are the form and function of politeness.

Georgia Green's book explores all this and more. It's a rewarding read for anyone who is interested in the hidden details of language and the assumptions behind its use, as long as they're not put off by a modicum of technical language or too cool to read textbooks for fun. (I'm clearly not.)

The Linguistics Wars

Author: Randy Allen Harris
Year: 1993
Genre: Linguistics

I came to this book hoping that Harris would be the Stephen Jay Gould of linguistics: someone who understands the field well, and can explain major ideas in their historical context. Upon reading, though, The Linguistics Wars strikes me more as an academic Homicide: an intimate portrait showing that science is a dirty business done by real, flawed human beings.

Our story begins with Noam Chomsky as a rising star of linguistics and philosophy in the 1950s, and then focuses primarily on the well-established Chomsky c. 1970 and his conflict with a group of former students who broke off to follow a research program called "generative semantics." While the substance of generative semantics and its differences from Chomsky's "interpretive semantics" program do receive some attention, Harris spends far more time on the personal antipathy between Chomsky and the generative semanticists, most notably George Lakoff. I was left with an impression that, whatever the respective merits of the generative and interpretive theories may have been, the actual unfolding of the debate had more to do with personality than with science.

Not that there's anything wrong with that -- necessarily. An early stage of the debate, it seems, was scientifically productive. The dislike that grew between the two camps did inspire its share of nasty ad hominem and polemic, but also caught linguists by their competitive instinct, resulting in some of the field's most original and influential research. With time, though, scientific debate gave way to personal sniping, and eventually, the generative program fizzled and the "wars" faded away.

The moral of the story is that scientific "progress" is largely a product of the culture that the scientists inhabit. (Maybe the comparison of Harris to Gould is not so far wrong, then; see my review of The Mismeasure of Man.) In the case of Chomsky et al. vs. Lakoff et al., that means the culture of research in modern theoretical syntax; and as Harris points out, it's not inaccurate to say that Chomsky, the ultimate victor in the Linguistics Wars, had founded that culture. In a larger sense, though, it also means the culture of the United States in the 1960s and '70s. While Chomsky was (and remains) an outspoken political ultra-liberal, Chomsky-the-academic is deadly serious and strictly authoritarian. (Perhaps he inspired the discussion in Lakoff's Moral Politics of people who are both politically progressive and academically conservative.) Harris contrasts this with a picture of the generative semanticists as academic hippies, bringing the "sex-drugs-rock & roll" counterculture and its collectivist ethos to their way of doing linguistics. Their hypotheses were grand and their failures public; they promised a map of the human mind that, in the end, they could not deliver.

The Message in the Bottle

Author: Walker Percy
Year: 1975
Genre: Philosophy

When I started reading this book, about six weeks ago, I was really excited. The introductory essay, "The Delta Factor," is written in an engaging style (Percy was primarily a novelist) and draws together provocative questions on modern alienation, the nature of consciousness, the scientific method, the relevance of religion in the technological age, and the fundamental philosophy of language. At its root, he says, a lot of these questions lead back to our complete lack of understanding of the relationship between a word and what that word means, and a Martian coming to Earth to investigate that connection (Percy's metaphor for "non-psychologist" or "novelist") would find no satisfactory answers from philosophy, behaviorist psychology, structural semiotics, or cognitive science. The essay itself is such a wide-ranging, skeptical, incisive feat of language geekery that I felt it was the sort of thing I myself might write, if I were better read in philosophy. The essay awakened my own inquisitive spark.

Unfortunately, the further I read, the more Percy lost me. The book is a collection of essays about the philosophy of language that he wrote over a twenty-year period, so it's bound to be uneven. It also documents his thoughts over a span of years (roughly 1955-1975) during which tremendous changes (not to say "advances") took place in cognitive linguistics, so some of the complaints about the inadequacy of theory that he made in Essay A were no longer valid when he wrote Essay B, not to mention now that another thirty years have passed. Percy was clearly frustrated with the failure of behaviorism to explain language; well, I was frustrated to read his response to behaviorist theories of language now that they have been thoroughly discredited.

Another serious problem with the book - and perhaps Percy's editor is to blame - is that the essays are arranged from most accessible to most technical. The pieces toward the beginning deal with alienation, metaphor, and Percy's way of realizing his Christian belief through his own writing, all interesting topics addressed with curiosity and clarity. Later in the book, though, it's all behaviorist psychology, structural semiotics, and technical philosophy of language. In parts, you have to know the differences between signs and symbols, or between the Vienna school and the Scholastics, to make any sense of it. As a result, I started spending longer and longer times away from the book - hence the six weeks.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is the same kind of nerd that I am; and then, I would only advise them to read the first half.

The Golden Ratio

Author: Mario Livio
Year: 2002
Genre: Science / Math

Before I read this book, I'd heard about a lot of the astonishing mathematical properties of Φ, as well as the Golden Ratio's aesthetic appeal. What struck me reading Livio's book is not the math itself (as interesting as that was; I haven't studied math seriously in many years). No, what really caught my attention was the number of times that Φ has been cited as the basis for great works of art, that turned out to be pure B.S. Consider the following:

• Φ is not the ratio of the height of the Parthenon to its width.
• Φ has no role in the design of the Pyramids.
• While Da Vinci did illustrate a mathematical book on Φ (The Divine Proportion by Luca Pacioli), he did not use it as a guide to composing the Mona Lisa or anything else.
• Mozart and Mondrian didn't use it, either.

So, The Golden Ratio succeeds as a debunker's compendium. Livio makes the history of Golden Ratio fanaticism seem like so much Da Vinci Code-style overblown hokum. (All the more ironic that Dan Brown's praise for The Golden Ratio is given pride of place on the front cover.)

After that, the best part of the book for me was the end, where Livio digresses into fractal geometry and the enduring philosophical conundrum of why mathematics (a purely abstract human invention) mirrors the physical universe so precisely. These fundamental questions are more interesting to me than any laundry list of Φ trivia.

Pink Ribbons, Inc.

Author: Samantha King
Year: 2006
Genre: Cultural studies

The topic of cancer "awareness" has particular personal significance to me: in the spring of 2004, when you couldn't leave your house without seeing a bright yellow Lance Armstrong bracelet, I was undergoing chemotherapy treatments for Hodgkin's lymphoma. (I'm now two and a half years in remission with no sign of recurrence.) The bracelets were problematic for me; I never identified with their upbeat message, was always skeptical of what "awareness" these bracelets represented, and wondered about the active role of a corporation like Nike in such a supposedly altruistic endeavor. When the title Pink Ribbons, Inc. caught my eye in the bookstore, I picked up the book, hoping for a little solidarity in my skepticism.

King's book offered more than solidarity: her feminist critique of corporate breast-cancer philanthropy confirmed much of what I had always cynically suspected. She describes corporations that divide up the breast-cancer market while politicians fight over the breast-cancer vote; marketing campaigns for pink blenders and teddy bears that cost far more than they contribute to research, while at the same time treating women as less than fully adult (nobody makes prostate-cancer Matchbox cars); and the broader issues of environmental carcinogens and health insurance for poor women going unaddressed. Perhaps most important, King deconstructs the image of the ideal "survivor" depicted in all the literature, the beneficiary of all our "awareness". She is white, middle-aged, middle-income; a wife, mother, and nurturer; generally self-sufficient (i.e. insured) and concerned with caring for others. She is emphatically not a "welfare queen," and supporting her cause is supposed to transcend any political affiliation.

In fact, the shadow of welfare reform looms in the background throughout Pink Ribbons, Inc. As King points out, every president since Ronald Reagan has actively encouraged corporations to take a larger role in the public concerns of the country, supposedly freeing individuals from the oppressive influence of a paternalistic welfare state. In reality, corporations are designed above all to make a profit. If they are to do right by their shareholders, they must find a way to make their philanthropic initiatives support their profit-making function. Their solution is the sophisticated variety of cause-related marketing that associates Avon with breast cancer, The Gap with AIDS, and Hot Topic with public-school arts. As a result, activists are silenced or co-opted by corporations, significant but controversial issues (like socialized medicine) are ignored, and real engagement and citizenship are replaced with shopping.

The Mismeasure of Man

Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Year: 1981
Genre: Science

After the last book I read on standardized testing, I came to this book assuming that the arguments against IQ would be more or less the same as the arguments against the MCAS. Standardized testing in general is problematic, I thought; it tends to be culturally biased and limiting, and when it's used as the sole (or primary) measure of intellectual competence, it invariably gives a one-sided view of the test-taker, conflating true mental ability with mere test-taking savvy. From this perspective, what does it matter if the test is administered by psychologists or by schoolteachers?

Instead, Gould's history of mental testing, from 19th-century craniometry to the eve of The Bell Curve (I believe he addresses The Bell Curve explicitly in a later edition), left me with an appreciation for just how progressive the MCAS is. While it may be narrow-minded and unfair, at least it was established with the goal of raising the performance of the weakest students to meet a universal minimum standard. It's meant to measure learning and achievement in a given subject area, not native mental ability. IQ, on the other hand, has historically been viewed (in Gould's words) as an innate, general, cognitive ability - something that underlies all an individual's intellectual accomplishment, and that cannot be increased by more or better instruction. Just the opposite: low IQ scores have been used to justify everything from segregated professional and vocational educational tracks, to racial discrimination and forced sterilization. Whatever its actual result, MCAS's intent is to help all students learn; IQ has overwhelmingly singled out low-performing children to receive even lower-quality education.

In my review of Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, I mentioned that I was reading "another book that deals with similar themes." The Mismeasure of Man is that book. The two biologists engage different but related themes: while Wilson writes about the place he envisions for scientists in the study of culture, Gould addresses the influence of a cultural environment on the practice of science. The interpretation of IQ scores as measuring a single general intelligence, and their use (like that of craniology before them) to rank human beings in order of innate intellectual capability, was the product of an age whose experts ranked all life according to the "great chain of being," culminating with whites over blacks and men over women. Although test results allowed numerous potential interpretations, scientists' prejudices led them to the one that seemed "obvious" at the time. Gould doesn't mention them explicitly, but one could view the theories of multiple intelligences and "learning differences" as the "inevitable" views of a more pluralistic generation. Despite our best attempts at impartiality, cultural norms and preconceptions drive our interpretations; the data themselves are just numbers.

Consilience

Author:Edward O. Wilson
Year:1998
Genre:Science

I didn't get to finish this book because I moved from one town to another, and I had to return it to the library, and it was overdue anyway. But I'm reading another book now that deals with some similar themes, and I wanted to get this down before I start to lose it. I promise to go back and read the last thirty pages.

Consilience is the more or less personal manifesto of Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, who believes that all the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities should be united in one great chain of human endeavor. As a scientist, he holds science-centric views - he's especially unkind to the social sciences, which he considers a castle built on sand - but he does make some interesting points about how much the different fields of knowledge have to learn from one another. After all, the social sciences and humanities are basically elaborations on human nature, and what is human nature but a product of genes and environment?

The unifying thread here is epigenetic characteristics, the inherited traits that influence human learning and behavior. They are not rote instincts, like the bees' dances that do not change over generations, but exist on the boundary between genes and culture. The language-learning instinct, for instance, is an epigenetic characteristic, but the particular language that each individual learns is dependent on their cultural environment. Other examples that Wilson provides are the incest taboo (in spite of Freud, he says, this is not purely cultural) and fear of snakes. The point is that while human beings are diverse, the diversity is not limitless, and exists within boundaries that are more or less prescribed by our biology.

The great challenge, then, is to use the varied tools of neuroscience, anthropology, criticism, art, and philosophy to explore the boundary regions. Rather than being taboo areas that academics shy away from, they should be (Wilson says) the most active areas of study. Furthermore, as a natural scientist, he holds that all of these researchers should take their cues from empirical evidence of how the mind/brain works.

As a linguist, I find this idea appealing (and more or less inevitable). Linguistics is just such an interdisciplinary field as what Wilson is proposing. After all, language is a key component (perhaps the defining component) of human nature, and its students include cognitive neuroscientists, anthropologists, literary theorists, philosophers, and everyone in between.

Wilson himself is an interesting figure these days. With the likes of Richard Dawkins having such a loud voice in the science vs. religion debate, Wilson recalls his upbringing as a born-again evangelical and subsequent scientific training and "conversion" to humanistic deism. While he himself is not a science-bashing religious freak (he does take specific objection to the Intelligent Design movement), he does have respect and understanding for people of faith. As he outlines in his chapter on the relationship between epigenetics and ethics, he sees some benefit in scientists' and theologians' listening to one another. (This perspective has got him on the cover of this month's Seed Magazine.)

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Author:David Foster Wallace
Year:1999
Genre:Short Fiction

Most of these stories are brainy and quite dense. (Wallace himself describes them as "belletristic," and I had to figure out the meaning of the word before I could go on.

Did you get it yet? Comes from belles lettres. See what I mean?)

The most interesting story to me was "Octet." It's published as a failed attempt at a series of eight "pop quizzes" about human relationships. The quizzes are an increasingly complex series of impossible situations where the characters are using one another in some blatantly selfish but more or less abstracted way.

What happens is, the author can't manage to complete the series. Several of the pop quizzes don't work, he has to rewrite one of them (both 6 and 6A are included in the series), and you end up with a series of three-plus-one-rewrite of the intended eight. To resolve this, he adds a ninth pop quiz: You are a fiction writer who is trying to publish a series of eight pop quizzes ...

Pop Quiz 9 is a ridiculous attempt to salvage a failed piece of writing, so Wallace acknowledges how ridiculous it is. His acknowledgement is a cheap metafictional trick, so he acknowledges his own cheapness. In fact, the ninth story can be read as an (extremely verbose) apology for its own existence whatsoever - a fact which Wallace freely admits. The strange thing is that on a certain level it works: through his cheap trickery and desperate postmodern-lite artifice, Wallace is using his audience in the same way as his other pop-quiz characters are using their friends and families. It's a delicious paradox: if "Octet" is a failure, then that sneaks it in through the back door of success; but if it succeeds, then the ninth story makes no sense, and the whole thing is a failure.

In all the stories, Wallace loves/hates this kind of navel-gazing. Here are some more things he repeatedly analyzes/dissects/loves to hate/hates to love:

• Psychotherapy
• Pretentious psychobabble
• Horrible people who speak deep truths in a horrible fashion
• Vivid childhood memories
• False, fabricated childhood memories
• People using their difficult childhood as an excuse for their failure to be fully adult
• Sex

I would probably read something else by him.