A Good Reading Year

This has been a difficult year for me physically (more about that another time), but I'm having a great year reading. I've been on a tear lately, thanks to my local library and my oldest daughter.

My dog is pretty smart. He knows Saturdays are different from any other day of the week. He follows me around the house, tail wagging, from the moment we get up. He comes running if I make a move towards my car keys on the table in the mud room: "Are you going out? In the car? Will you take me with you?" I leave him behind if conditions are too hot or cold to leave him unattended in the car, but on mild days I'm happy to take him with me. We go to the bank, the post office, the barber shop, Dunkin Donuts, or the town library. It amazes me to see how often I'll find something good.

I started this recent tear with "Going Clear" by Lawrence Wright. It's the history of Scientology, from L. Ron Hubbard's World War II record through to the present day. I didn't know the details before. I found them educational and amusing.

I enjoyed it so much that I picked up Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Towers". It's the riveting story of al Qaeda from Sayyid Qutb in the prisons of Egypt to the crashing of planes into the World Trade Center on 2001-Sep-11. The references to Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who investigated the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and interrogated captured al Qaeda, led me to "The Black Banners". This is a wonderfully written, but ultimately sad and frustrating book. You know how it ends. You can see how it might have been possible to connect the dots beforehand if the right people had been privy to certain facts, perhaps preventing disaster. Ali Soufan presents evidence for something that I suspected was true: harsh interrogation methods don't work. Zero Dark Thirty would lead us to believe that waterboarding turned up the information that led to Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, but all the actionable intelligence the U.S. got from captured al Qaeda came from Ali and traditional interrogation methods.

After all this serious stuff I was ready for some fun. I heard Gillian Flynn on NPR's "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" on the way to the library one day. She was so smart and funny when talking about her book "Gone Girl" that I had to read it. One of the panelists said "After reading this book, I think you're one of those people who could murder someone and get away with it."

I agree.

The writing device was unusual. The book opens with a young husband and wife on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary. They argue before the man leaves for work. When he comes home, he finds the front door open, the cat sitting on stoop, the house torn up, and his wife gone. What happened to her? Chapters alternate from the husband's point of view in the present to the wife's voice in flashback. Things get nuttier with each turn of the page. It was most entertaining!

My oldest daughter recommended Ellen Ullman's "By Blood". It's set in San Francisco in the 1970s. An academic who's struggling to finish a project decides to rent an office in a seedy part of town. He finds out that it's next door to a psychiatrist's office. He starts listening in on a young woman's weekly session and finds himself identifying closely with her. He becomes secretly involved in her thread. Terrific writing!

Wait, there's more. My oldest daughter also suggested that I take a look at a piece of non-fiction by Cheryl Strayed: "Wild". It's the true story of a 22-year-old woman who loses her not-even-fifty single mother to cancer in 1995. Her family and marriage fall apart over the next four years. When she hits rock bottom she decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. Think Appalachian Trail on the West Coast, except at 10,000 feet along the peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It made me wish I was a hiker. I thought the author was incredibly brave to be so forthright and honest.

Amazon should just garnish my wages. I love the instant gratification of Kindle. When I finished "Wild" I couldn't wait to get back to the library. I downloaded Colum McCann's "Transatlantic". I'm only a little way into it, but it's a series of stories that all center on Ireland. The writing is wonderful.

All this is on top of the books on the technical pile. I picked up "Learn You A Haskell For Great Good!" to try and grok functional programming. And I have another Coursera course coming up in a month.

It's like bailing the ocean with a plastic bucket. I can't take it all in fast enough.

Einstein - His Life And Universe

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson's biography "Einstein - His Life and Universe." I didn't think I'd ever have to read another Einstein biography after "Subtle Is The Lord" by Abraham Pais.

Abraham Pais was a also physicist, a younger protege of Einstein's at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. He knew Einstein personally; he was versed in the details of his work; he was uniquely qualified to write an intimate biography. His book is remarkable for its level of detail. Book publishers claim that adding a single equation, even one as "simple" and well known to the general public as , would reduce the readership by half.

If that's true, and knowing how rapidly converges to zero, then I must have been the only person on earth who ever bought and read Pais' work. Not only did he have plenty of equations, they included generalized tensors with sub-scripts and super-scripts proudly waving. I'm neither a mathematician nor a physicists, but I've taken a course that included generalized tensors. The presence of metric tensors didn't scare me away or detract from my enjoyment.

As much as I liked "Subtle", I think Isaacson's book was more fun and accessible. He made Einstein seem less like an intellectual, unapproachable deity and more like a real human being. I could appreciate him expressing his frustration towards the folks at Zurich Polytechnic for dithering about a job offer by saying on page 176: "The dear Zurich folks can kiss my..."

Einstein was a man of great humor. He was quite a hit with the ladies - divorced once, married twice, and amorous with a few more. He loved music, especially Mozart for his violin. He was detached from people, yet he had friendships that lasted his entire life.

Walter Isaacson is a terrific writer. I enjoyed this book very much. It makes me want to grad his Steve Jobs biography as soon as possible.

The First Law

No, this isn't a posting about thermodynamics. I've been on a fantasy reading streak in 2011. It started when I went to my local library one Saturday morning and saw a copy of George R. R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" on the shelf. I don't subscribe to HBO, so I've never seen the series. I'd heard enough about it to kindle a spark of book lust in my heart. When I went back to work, I found out that some friends were already deeply into it. Buy.com was selling a four-book boxed set for cheap. Soon I was off and running.

"Game of Thrones" was great fun to read - think "Lord of the Rings" with lots of sex and violence. The characters are memorable. The plot lines are tangled and convoluted. There are bogeymen still waiting behind the wall to jump out and scare all of us in future books. I was very happy when the fifth book, "A Dance with Dragons", came out just as I was finishing the fourth book. The first book was published in 1996. Long-suffering fans had to wait six whole years between the fourth and fifth books; my wait was as long as finishing the last page of "A Feast For Crows" and then downloading the newly-minted book onto my Kindle.

But I found that there were problems with the series.

Each book is a daunting task - they average 800-1000 pages each. That means a lot of characters to keep track of, a lot of balls for the juggler to keep in the air, and a lot of filler material. There were times when some of my favorite characters (Jon Snow and his sister Arya) got short shrift, while others that I cared about less dominated the story line.

Repetition has been with us since Homer's Iliad : it's wasn't enough for Odysseus to go sailing; he had to do it on the "wine-dark sea". Homer knew that repetition would help lengthen the story and make it easier for the poet to memorize all those lines. George Martin knows it, too. It's always "Myrrish lace" and "Valyrian steel".

There's more than a passing nod to J.R.R. Tolkien and his "Lord of the Rings" - still the greatest fantasy work I've read. Tolkien made up maps, history, languages, and whole alphabets to flesh out his stories. You're a true fan if you've read his "Silmarillion", the detailed pre-history to the trilogy. He's famous for stopping the story to tell you about people, places, and events that seem to be well-known to all his characters, but you haven't a clue. George R. R. Martin - are those initials real or an affectation? - takes this to another level. He's obviously a Grateful Dead fan: "Too much of everything is just enough".

Most of all, there were several times when I thought Mr. Martin could have used an editor. The books would have benefited from having a detached, objective adviser to tighten things up. I felt like the odd numbered books were all excellent. The even numbered books dragged a bit by comparison. There's a lot of set-up material that pays off eventually, but it's a long time coming.

Joe Abercrombie obviously had an editor when he wrote his "First Law" trilogy: "The Blade Itself", "Before They Are Hanged", and "The Last Argument Of Kings". The books are more manageable in size - 500-800 pages - but the characters are equally vivid as Mr. Martin's. I had some trouble getting started with the first book, because I had some distractions that kept me from focusing. But once it grabbed me I was hooked.

The thing that I liked best about Joe Abercrombie's writing is that he takes timeless elements and gives them a twist. There are standbys like a small group that journeys to a remote location in search of a precious artifact. The group faces dangers that alter characters for better or worse, that bind or split them apart. There's conflict and war and long odds to be overcome. But there's always a perturbation that sets his take apart. For example, there's a wizard named Bayaz who may appear to be Gandalf-like at first, but there's deep, dark water underneath.

I've finished my non-technical backlog. It's time to jump back on my technical stack. I received John K. Kruschke's "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis". I'll be writing about it as soon as I manage to make some headway.

Clocks and Roulette Wheels

I've studied a fair amount of math during my education. Engineers were required to take four math classes: two semesters of calculus, differential and integral; multivariate calculus; ordinary differential equations. A fifth course in partial differential equations was recommended but optional. The engineering courses reinforced and built on this base. The prevailing wisdom was that the engineering department taught the same stuff as the math department, but better. I guess we all liked it better when the engineering department presented the material because it came with a context that fixed the ideas in your head.

I took all those and kept going. I decided to sign up for complex variables and linear algebra, just because I liked math. There were also two grad classes that presented integral transforms, calculus of variations, differential geometry, and generalized tensors. The numerical methods that I studied followed the same track: linear algebra for solving large systems of equations and eigenvalues; numerical integration; evaluation of special functions.

I never took a formal course in statistics or probability. The last two graduate classes that I took were in the statistics department: analysis of variance and design of experiments. I was glad to have taken them, but it certainly didn't turn me into a statistician.

I recount all this because it's finally occurred to me that I've missed out on something important. When faced with quantum mechanics and the loss of determinism, Einstein said the God did not play dice. I can't claim to know the gaming habits of God, but I can say that probability and statistics imbue everything around us. They're stand-ins for ignorance, an expression of what we don't know or are uncertain about.

Classical physicists, like Newton, Laplace and Einstein, viewed the universe as a clockwork. Anything could be predicted, given enough information. This is ironic in light of the great service that Laplace rendered to Bayes' theorem by putting it on such a firm mathematical footing. Quantum mechanics killed this idea in the small; non-linearity did the deed in the large. It's all a roulette wheel. Does that mean the universe is really a big casino?

I became aware of two schools of thought in statistics: frequentists and Bayesians. I read hints about the food fight that has been going on between the camps for two centuries, but I didn't understand exactly what it was about - until I read "The Theory That Would Not Die" by Bertsch MyGrayne. The writing style was a bit repetitive, but the story was wonderful.

There were two bits that I especially liked. The first was a quote from Jerry Cornfield to his two daughters as he lay dying: "You spend your whole life practicing your humor for the times when you really need it."

The second was from a section about Jimmie Savage and Dennis Lindley. As the amount of data increases, subjectivists move into agreement, the way scientists come to a consensus as evidence accumulates: "That's the way science is done."

I recently saw "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R and BUGS" by John Kruschke on Amazon. I was intrigued. I knew Bayes and R; what was this BUGS thing about? But now I know, thanks to "The Theory That Would Not Die": it stands for Bayesian Inference Using Gibbs Sampling. There's even an open source project that implements it as a framework. I hope to check it out in the coming months.

I'm planning to add a few items to my must-read list. Probability will be on the list. So will Kruschke's book.

"The Big Short"

I've taken advantage of my local library to do a fair bit of reading on the cheap lately. I'm interested in the details of how our most recent financial debacle happened. Any book that sheds light on the subject is on my list.

"The Big Short" by Michael Lewis fits the bill perfectly. It's the true story of a cadre of individuals who saw what was going on, well before anyone else did, when the conventional wisdom said they were fools. They put their money where their mouths were, too. They bet millions on shorting the mortgage market, knowing that the rate of default didn't have to reach historic proportions for the bet to pay off. It took great courage, because they were either betting with their own money or that of investors. They were certain that the crash would come, but they couldn't predict when. They didn't know if their funds or courage would run out before the payoff would arrive.

Michael Lewis knows something about the terrain. He worked for an investment bank back in the 80s. He wasn't a great success as a financial adviser, but it did start him on the writer's path with "Liar's Poker". How fortunate for the rest of us!

It's a great read, very entertaining. I recommend it highly.

There was a lot of negative discussion about short selling when the market came down and Lehman Brothers failed. CEOs hate short sellers. They complain about their company being hurt by rumors and whispers, implying that the short sellers are merely manipulating the market for their own benefit.

There might be some truth to this, especially for naked short sellers who don't have to risk their own money. But people who put up their own money and take a real risk are providing an alternative information source to the market. If short action is lively, perhaps there's something to it. It's the sobering other side to the happy talk pumped out by CEOs and the sellers of their stock.

With congressional testimony going on, it's especially timely to answer a few questions about how this happened to us:

1. Was this a "perfect storm" of circumstances that no one could have foreseen?
2. Were the financial instruments so inherently complex that they couldn't be understood by anyone?
3. What did CEOs know, and when did they know it?
4. Was it merely the latest example of an Enron-style theft?

All four contributed, but I think the fourth option is one that will win the day.

The news from the New York Times today says that Goldman Sachs was offsetting losses in the mortgage market with their own short action. They can't claim perfect storm or too complex or not knowing what was going on.

There are lots of great sources for reading about what happened. "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb spells out the dangers of over-reliance on lovely mathematical models and normal distributions. (Note to self: There's a second edition available.) Mark Chu-Carroll's "Good Math, Bad Math" blog has a fine entry on the matter.

What will we do about this? There's legislation being crafted right now that claims to reform our banking system. This will be Chris Dodd's last hurrah, but I fear that it won't be at all effective. There will be too many amendments to water it down. Lobbyists from the banking industry will lend their "expertise" to craft the laws. Senators and representatives on both sides of the aisle have taken too much money from banks and financial services firms to be objective anymore.

I've maintained all along that the biggest mistake was repealing Glass-Steagall and replacing it with Gramm-Leach-Bliley. That was done on Bill Clinton's watch, with Goldman Sachs principals Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers running things. Goldman Sachs is embedded far too deeply into our government today. I know I'll be watching the hearings very closely.

In the meantime, I recommend that you go out and read "The Big Short".

"City Of Thieves"

A friend in my swimming group recommended "City of Thieves" by David Benioff. It's set in Leningrad during the Nazi siege. How cheery!

I was surprised to find that it was the best work of 'fiction' that I've read in a very long time.

I put fiction in quotes because it was difficult to separate truth from fiction. The prologue describes the author's visit to his Russian grandparents, who have retired to Florida. The grandfather has never spoken about his experiences during the war, but the trip inspired a weekend with a tape recorder. After three straight days of stories, the author says he'll need another session to fill in the details. "You're a writer, David - make it up!" says the grandfather.

And so the book begins.

It's a wonderful page turner that I couldn't put down. The language was so vivid, the weaving of details so artful, that after I finished it I had to re-read the last chapters to take it in again.

I expected horror given the setting and time period. Horrible things did happen, and the author didn't shy away from them.

But it was the humor and human connections between characters that took me by surprise. The characters were wonderful.

I'm recommending this book to everyone I know. I read a lot of technical and non-fiction stuff these days. It felt good to enjoy a work like this so much.

Coders At Work

I finished reading Peter Seibel's Coders At Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming yesterday. I thought it was terrific and would recommend it highly to anyone who writes code for a living. It's an impressive follow-up to his Practical Common Lisp.

Peter drew his inspiration from the Paris Review Writers At Work. Great creativity is required to recognize an idea that's good in one context and reuse it in another.

The roster of interviewees is impressive, especially after having read the book. I only knew a minority when I opened the book. Only Knuth and Ken Thompson were long-familiar names. I knew of JWZ by hearsay. I have a copy of Peter Norvig's "AI: A Modern Approach", it's been over my head forever.

Donald Knuth is the biggest name; Peter holds him back for the last chapter. He seemed to me to be from another planet. I've written about my love of LaTeX; this is the man who spent ten years of his life coming up with TeX. I especially liked this bit on page 598:

With TeX I was interacting with hundreds of years of human history and I didn't want to throw out all of the things that book designers have learned over the centuries and start anew and say, "Well, forget that guys; you now, we're going to be logical now."

The more I learn about Peter Norvig, the more impressed I am. The people who are exposed to his genius at Google are fortunate indeed.

Guy Steele didn't disappoint. He's brilliant, but he can't help working the fact that he went to MIT into the very first answer he gives. My informal survey tells me that this is true of each and every MIT graduate I've ever known personally - except for one. (My friend is one of the most brilliant, most accomplished people I know, but I didn't hear that his Ph.D. came from MIT until after I'd known him for a long time, until I heard it from a mutual friend.) Thank you for another data point, Guy.

Some of these folks are younger than I am, but most are my contemporaries. All are far more accomplished as programmers and computer scientists than I am. They were doing their best work in this field when I was a mechanical engineer. I'm doing my best to try and catch up, but I still have a very long way to go. I envy them their accomplishments.

It seems to me that Peter Seibel struck a very nice balance between scripting his questions and letting the conversation lead him. There was a thread of common questions that ran through all the interviews (e.g., "How do you debug?", "Do you read code?", "Do you consider yourself a scientist, engineer, craftsman, or artist?", "How much math is needed to be a good programmer?"), but each interviewee contributed special insights that would have been hard to anticipate.

The book brought home two things to me: how much computing has changed since these people were in their heydays and how much wonderful stuff is being lost to time. I haven't read "The Art of Computer Programming". I feel like I should, but I'm not sure that it'll provide a payoff for all that effort in the corporate enterprise computing world in which I earn my living today. Those with the talent and good fortune to be working for Google and firms that value deep knowledge are a minority.

Every one of the individuals interviewed by Peter Seibel is a giant in the field. Is that so because they did their best work early in the history of computer science? If 2% of people are wired to be programmers, and there are 6.67 billion people on earth, that means there are about 133,400,000 potential writers of C#, Java, Cobol, Lisp, or what have you. Will we find giants to compare to the early ones?

I've read that Shakespeare and Babe Ruth stood out in their fields because there were comparatively fewer contemporaries who were their equals. Now that we have everyone blogging on the Internet and full-time professional athletes it's harder to stand out.

Programming is often compared to building buildings or manufacturing widgets or god knows what else. Like these other productive activities, it's often outsourced by American firms to be done by individuals in parts of the world that will do it for far less than their domestic counterparts. Will the next generation of great achievers come from their ranks? Will Peter Seibel have to travel further afield to hear about their exploits?

I enjoyed the book very much and recommend it highly.