Good Stuff This Month (April 2009)

I have decided that my monthly posts will not be reviews of each magazine I read, but rather will highlight what I really liked and is possibly worth your time:

Fortune (April 27, 2009)

Great stuff as usual, including:

1. A funny little piece on a company called “Green Grass at Last.” What they do is as brilliant as it is lazy. Banks hire them to go to foreclosed houses with awful brown lawns . . . and spray paint the brown grass, green.

2. A nice interview with Mike Lazaridis, the founder of the company that builds Blackberries. A good nugget: “ Don’t believe what they sayt about entrepreneurs being huge risk-takers. The successful ones don’t like taking risks. But it often doesn’t look that way, because you don’t see the amount of planning and research and analysis they undertake to make a decision, an investment, or entry into an industry.”

3. A trio of articles both terrifying and inspiring, about electric cars, and how Warren Buffett is betting on an obscure Chinese electric car company. Ditto Charlie Munger. And the article on the chances of the U.S. being anything but an embarrassing also-ran in the world of electric cars – truly frightening.

Inc. (April 2009)

Good, inspiring, educational, enjoyable. As usual. One representative highlight: Norm Brodsky’s article “My First Year,” about how his messenger business was almost destroyed by a transit strike that wound up giving him an opportunity to grow in a way he never imagined possible. His salvation – listening to his customers’ needs. As an aside, I’ll mention that Norm is the co-author of “The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up,” with Bo Burlingham. A book I loved so much that I’m thinking of starting a website where regular guys like us as come together to thank their favorite authors.

Scientific American (May 2009)

Lots of great stuff, including:

1. A short note about a study that suggests that people who carry the long version of the gene for the serotonin transporter protein – notice positive things more than negative things.

2. A nice essay by Michael Shermer, who publishes Skeptic, talking about oddly irrational creationists such as the one who told him to ‘not confuse him with those loony American creationists, who think the Earth is only 6,000 years old.’ (This guy worked it out on his own and concluded that the Earth is about 100,000 years old. ) A great quote from a born-again evangelical Christian who wrote The Language of God and formerly ran the Human Genome Project: “Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed decapitated ARE’s (ancient repetitive elements, of DNA) are in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable.”

3. “The Planetary Air Leak,” by David Catling and Kevin Zahnle. A fascinating and scary look at how fragile our atmosphere is, how it has changed over billions of years, and how much of it was are likely to lose in the coming billion years, regardless of human activity.

4. “What Makes Us Human,” by Katherine Pollard. A fascinating article, written by a biostatistician who discovered that there may be far fewer genes that are unique to humans, and that gave us big advantages. Such as HAR1, which may lead to cerebral cortex folding; FOXP2, which facilitates mouth control to allow speech; ASPM, which drives brain size; LCT, which “permits digestion of milk sugar in adulthood, allowing people to make milk from domesticated animals a dietary staple;” and HAR2, which looks to be key in the development of wrist and thumb dexterity that allow sufficient dexterity to make tools.

5. “How to Steal Secrets without a Network,” by Wayt Gibbs. A creepy look into the world of information thieves who steal secrets by looking through a telescope to see images reflected off your eyeballs, or “listen” with computers to the actual sounds made by computer printers. Way cool.

6. “Powering Nanorobots,” by Thomas Mallouk and Ayusman Sen. An exciting article about one of my favorite subjects. I had never heard of catalytic engines before today and now that I understand their principle, I am duly impressed. The concept of using Brownian motion to create Brownian ratchets is simultaneously brilliant and lazy. Molecules (in liquid form) are never truly still but rather they move randomly. A scientist in Edinburgh is building a tiny machine that allows random Brownian motion to nudge something along a tiny monorail – but in one direction only. Thus, possibly avoiding the need for a tiny self-powered motor.

Asimov’s Science Fiction (June 2009)

Easily my favorite subscription. Every month it arrives and I dive in to find a collection of wonderful short stories. I keep careful track of my favorites, grading each of them, and anytime I need a new book to read I look over the list of authors and go find their books. This month’s best included:

“Cold Testing,” by Robert Brown. A very good story of a robot yearning to feel human emotions. A-

“Going Deep,” by James Patrick Kelly. A touching story of travelers on a deep space voyage, who go in and out of extended periods of deep cold sleep. B+

Analog Science Fiction and Fact (June 2009)

After many years of reading Asimov’s, I succumbed to one of the ubiquitous advertisements hawking back issues of Analog, their sister publication. When the issues arrived I was delighted to find out that I was wrong. Analog isn’t just (or even mostly) essays about science fact. Rather, it is 90% the same great science fiction short stories, and one “real” science essay. This month’s best included:

“But it Does Move,” by Harry Turtledove. This story (actually, a novelette) blew my mind. It was a historical recreation of Galileo’s final days, at the hands of the all-powerful Church, being interrogated by Cardinal Sigismondo Gioioso of Vienna. Easily one of the most moving and chilling stories I’ve ever read. The title of the story comes from the rumor that after “admitting” that, as the center of the universe, the Earth does not move, Galileo said under his breath, "But it does move.” A

“Chain,” by Stephen Burns. Great story about emerging robot consciousness.

“The Cold Star Sky,” by Craig DeLancy. A very good story about humans saving a bunch of arrogant aliens.

“Attack of the Grub Eaters,” by Richard Lovett. Very good, clever story done entirely in the form of modern-day computer users posting comments to an online discussion forum. What starts off as a request for help with moles turns into something deathly serious. A-

IFR (April 2009)

I can’t imagine anyone in the world subscribing unless they are an instrument-rated pilot, other than perhaps an extreme Angelina Jolie fan who learns that she is one, and subscribes in the hope that if they ever meet, they can have something in common.

Good this month:

“A New Pop-Up Trick,” by Kent Nicholson. I cut this out and have it on my bulletin board. A great discussion of how to file a VFR (visual flight rules) flight plan and later turn it into an IFR (instrument) flight plan when the weather turns south. Which happens quite often.

“Forgetting to Cancel,” by Joe Shelton. Making mistakes while flying is a bad idea. Making them while flying in instrument conditions (such as with zero visibility, inside a cloud, at night, 300 feet from the ground) can be deadly. That is one reason that a large chunk of us in the aviation community are fanatical about admitting then analyzing our and others’ mistakes – both individual mistakes and those that reveal patterns about possible systemic weaknesses. In aviation, NASA plays the role of the independent third party that collects anonymous data, through its “Aviation Safety Reporting System.” The way it works is simple. Anytime a pilot or controller makes a mistake of any kind, he/she is encouraged to file an anonymous report with this NASA program, disclosing all details about what happened, how, and why. If the pilot is later busted, certain penalties are reduced or eliminated if they filed a NASA form immediately when the incident happened. The net result is a huge database describing thousands of incidents, from every angle. Many of us in the aviation community believe that if the medical community would adopt a similar system, it could save tens of thousands of lives per year very quickly. I’m happy to write/talk more about this if anyone is interested. Oh, and this article was about the embarrassment of forgeting to cancel one's IFR fllight plan. If you land at a tower airport they close it for you but lots of small airport have no tower and if they don't have a GCO for remote radio you have to remember to call by phone. Otherwise, the airspace closes to other instrument traffic and eventually they begin search and rescue operations. Most of us have done it -- once. A great tip from the author -- if you are flying to a non-tower field, before you take off, call yourself and leave yourself a voicemail saying, "don't forget to close your flight plan."

Fast Company (April and May 2009)

The May issue was hollow, but two items in April were noteworthy:

1. A short piece on “Y Combinator,” which trains early-stage tech startups for a semester. They pick 15-20 groups to fund at once and require them to move to Cambridge or Silicon Valley for three months.

2. Chip and Dan Heath’s piece called “Sell Handcuffs,” about how and why your customers want you to restrain them, through commitment devices. These two are outstanding and I'm itching to contract with them at some point to be consultants. They're that good.

A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz

This book caused me to miss a flight. Literally. I was reading it on the subway and missed my transfer point and by the time I backtracked and got to the airport, it was too late. Everything worked out nicely, however, as this gave me an extra hour to read before the next flight departed.

There was much to love about this book. The story was, at times, compelling and sometimes riveting. There were many laugh-out-loud moments. Many wonderful turns of phrase. And much philosophizing on the nature of humanity and relationships between fathers and sons. It was beautifully written.

That said, I find myself disagreeing with most of the raving reviews at Amazon.com. On the whole, I give it three stars because (1) the characters were uniformly unlikeable; (2) it didn't make me think; (3) the story was ridiculously unbelievable; and (4) I don't think I learned much of anything.

I can handle crazy plots, where unlikely things happen to people. What I can't handle is a narrator who, at ten years old, spends all day thinking extremely deep complex sophisticated thoughts, but is an abject failure at school and goes on to be an utter zero in every way – except in that he maintains a brilliant and sophisticated inner dialogue about his feelings, and his frustration at the vapidity of the general public.

Ditto the father character who was a ragingly selfish and lazy misanthrope but somehow managed to think endless deep thoughts and write a gorgeous account of his life. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed that the “writing style” of father and son were nearly identical – something that kept me all too aware that this was fiction and kept me from ever getting fully drawn into their world as with a novel such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

The 3-star reviews at Amazon do a fine job of summing up my frustrations so I’ll just share a few of the lines and interludes that I really did like a whole bunch, and are apropos of the book’s style:

“So, he’s not insane?” my father asked.

“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. He’s crazy as a coconut. But open!”

“We’re not violent people,” my father said. “This whole thing is a mystery to us.”

“No man’s life is a mystery. Believe me, there is order and structure in the most ostensibly chaotic skull. There seem to be two major events in Terry’s life that have shaped him more than any others. The first I would not have believed had I not unwavering faith in his honesty.” The doctor leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, “Did he really spend the first four years of his life sharing a bedroom with a comatose boy?”

My parents looked at each other with a start.

“Was that wrong?” my mother asked. “We didn’t have any room,” my father said, annoyed. “Where were we supposed to put Martin? In the shed?”

***

“I shook my head, stood up, and walked out of the pub. I heard her calling my name, but I didn’t turn around. Outside, I broke into tears. What a hassle! Now I’d have to become rich and successful just so she could regret dumping me. That’s another thing to do in this short, busy life. Christ. They’re adding up.”

***

“Shockingly, almost all my reforms were agreed upon. Criminals would be allowed the option of going into the army instead of being locked up; cash rebates would be offered to those who could demonstrate self-awareness, and the stultified and fearful would be taxed higher . . . every healthy person would have to look after at least one sick person until he died or got better; we would pick people indiscriminately to be prime minister for a day; all drugs would be legalized for one generation to see what happened. Even my most controversial idea was taken up: rearing any child in a religious belief, freezing the child’s mind when it is most vulnerable, would be treated as child abuse. I said all this and people said, ‘OK, we’ll see what we can do.’ It was unbelievable!”

***
“Eddie, that disgusting bastard! That oily, rancid, horny bandit! I felt guilty for my failure to protect that poor girl, but if someone you’ve known since childhood is so determined to commit a crime he’s willing to kick you in the throat, what can you do? Anyway, it was too late now. That field had made away with the girl and left me stranded in the middle of nowhere. And where the hell was I, anyway, other than the exact place where all the heat in Thailand gathered for a meeting?”

In the end, I think that what frustrated me most about this book was that the first 100 pages were fantastic and I had great expectations that were not met. And what did transpire was occasionally spectacular, but in the end unfulfilling.

This having been Toltz’s first book, I am hopeful that his second will be even better, and I will read it for sure.