A Very Big House In The Country

I came across the existence of Longleat Safari Park in England. It’s one of those drive-through safari parks. What's weird about it is that it's on the grounds of a historic stately mansion. Of course, you have to wonder how that happens: A safari park isn't really what you associate with British aristocracy. Okay, you might imagine a rich British person with a private collection of exotic animals, but that's not what this is. Picture a huge and luxurious Victorian house in the English countryside; then imagine the camera shifts a little to the side and you see a middle-class family in their sedan watching the monkeys converge on the car looking for handouts, and the family is going from delight to a slight panic as more and more monkeys show up.

And yet, this cultural juxtaposition isn't that unusual. I remember going to an amusement park called Alton Towers, which is also on the grounds of an old estate. It seemed a little weird; I mean, I realize they need to put the theme parks and Safari parks somewhere in England, and they also have historic Manor houses. And since there's not much room, they could be side by side. But you'd think the historic Manors would want nothing to do with the entertainment of the common people. You know, build a tasteful wall between them. At the very least, don't name the park after the house.

But apparently, running a massive luxurious house is all fine and dandy when it's the nineteenth century and you have tenant farmers paying rent, and you're not paying any taxes, and there aren't many factories to outbid you for your workers. But in more modern times, these big houses became unaffordable even for the wealthy, and many were torn down or sold off. Others had to find new sources of income, and that's how a few of them came to have attractions for the masses on their grounds. Even at Alton Towers, the amusement park wasn't enough to make ends meet: the interiors of the house were sold off, and only the stone shell of the building remains. 

Anyway, part of the reason for my interest in this concept is that I just read Pride and Prejudice, which mostly takes place in such homes. One of the odd aspects of the setting is that the heroine’s family, the Bennetts, are on the poor side of rich. They may lose their house and their income, and probably end up in a Dickens novel. So you have to keep reminding yourself throughout the book that even though their cohorts look down on them, they're still much better off than most in that era. 

But now that I've seen the fate of such houses, I can't help but wonder what became of (spoiler alert) Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy's descendants. By now Mr. Darcy's estate at Pemberly is either gone, or maybe  home to Europe's third largest water park. 

Yes, I know, it's actually a good thing that these houses are no longer focused on a wealthy few. And this is a win for society: the welfare state and market forces combining to deliver a deserving comeuppance to an exploitative system. 

Maybe it's my English blood, but it still feels sad to see an end as undignified as Pemberly Splash Xtreme (Liz Darcy VII, proprietor.)

Taking Back Thursday

Like a lot of wannabe intellectuals, I’ve tried reading Ulysses by James Joyce. And like a lot of those wannabe intellectuals - particularly where the accent is on the 'wannabe' - I didn’t get very far. It’s not hard to read, it’s just that there is a lot of it, and it feels like being in a room where someone is telling jokes, and you’re the only one who isn’t getting them.

I know some people today still find it enjoyable and funny, so it can be understood. It was just going over my head. So I searched the web to try get what I was missing. I wanted to at least know if it was worth continuing, or hopefully find a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the humour in it. I found notes on the first chapter, and it went on endlessly about Catholic references. That surprised me — not that it was Catholic; I know many can laugh at themselves — but rather that it was so specific. Ulysses has more than a cult following; I’ve seen it top lists of the greatest books ever written. Surely its entire audience is more than just the Venn Diagram overlap of “Highly-Observant Catholics,” and, “Looking for Catholicism Humour.” That doesn't seem like enough people to propel a book to classic status.

So I’ve continued searching for ideas on how to enjoy the book. Most say it’s not about those religious references or about the parallels to the Odyssey, but about the manipulation of language and the celebration of common people surviving their daily struggles. There are many readers who will attest to how personally enjoyable they found the book, but there’s no real consensus on how to get something out of it: Some say it’s best as part of a class, some say you should just sit back and enjoy it without worrying about symbolism, some say you need a companion book to appreciate it. But the things people do agree about it are that it’s not really necessary to read the whole thing in order, and the first three chapters are kind of a drag. So I may yet try again.

In other old book news, I recently came across an odd title of a book: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. Given that it was written in 1908 — and thus even older than Ulysses — the title stood out as kind of avant garde. Also, I’m a fan of the “Thursday Next” books by Jasper Fforde, so perhaps I have a weird fascination with Thursday-related literature. I also noticed that, by coincidence, it had just passed into the public domain last year, so I downloaded it and gave early twentieth-century literature another chance.

To my surprise, I really enjoyed it. It’s the comic story of police efforts to infiltrate an anarchist organization. It has various flavours of satire, farce and surrealism, and delivers humour that feels relevant. It goes a bit off the rails at the end, as it tries to be more profound than it really should be. But I liked the rest enough to forgive it.

What made me think back to my aborted attempt at Ulysses is that it seems the difference is all in the subject matter of political and sociological philosophy. That’s more in my area of interest and background knowledge. So in contrast to Ulysses, I felt like I was in on the joke. It also has a lasting relevance: While the book’s big organization of nefarious rebels are termed, “anarchists,” really, you can insert your favourite ideology of revolutionaries who are too intellectual for their own good. And arguably, the book's age makes it more palatable: we’re insulated from the hot-button issues of the day, so it’s easier to view the concepts in the abstract. And, weird fact I discovered: Apparently there are references to The Man Who Was Thursday in the video game, Deus Ex. I must have missed those. But that weird juxtaposition helps prove the continued relevance.

(Yes, I just argued for the relevance of a 116-year-old book by mentioning its place in a 24-year-old video game. Yeah, that's the world we live in.)

Conversely, I can definitely imagine someone reading The Man Who Was Thursday and reacting the way I did to Ulysses. In the opening chapters, as the characters whip proclamations on the nature of art and human society back and forth, I can see many readers zoning out. But the point is, you may have to search to find something relevant to you, but you may yet find it in an unexpected place. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to hunt down a copy of Frederick Pohl’s Turn Left at Thursday.

Feel Good Ink

My parents asked me if I had bought the new book Fire and Fury. I had not, nor had they. It seems that we had each independently come to the same conclusion: it's a waste of money to buy the book, as you can just watch the news for a few days and they will read out the best parts to you.

Of course, you don't even need to do that much; the book can be summed up easily: Trump is an idiot. And you had probably already come to that conclusion. So I'm not sure why people are buying the book; you'll be reading anecdotes you've already heard, telling you something you already know. And apparently, it's now been leaked onto Wikileaks. I guess that site is trying to hurt the book sales as revenge for attacking their guy. And they're doing it by spreading a book that makes their guy look bad. Remember when the world sorta made sense?

An interesting aspect of the news around the book is a joke from cartoonist Ben Ward, who tweets as @pixelatedboat. He decided to spoof the bizarre anecdotes leaking out of the book by creating his own totally-exaggerated fake anecdote that was supposedly from the book. In his excerpt, it was alleged that Trump was very displeased that the TV in the White House does not have "The Gorilla Channel." This despite there never having been a gorilla channel. To placate him, aides created a fake Gorilla Channel by editing together Gorilla documentaries and feeding them on a loop to Trump's TV.

Of course, as many people are finding these days, it's pretty much impossible to ridicule through exaggeration. After all, making a fake cable channel is only a little beyond what we've heard White House employees do to placate their boss. I noticed that in one online discussion people were trying to assure themselves that the passage was fake, and the final convincing argument was not the content, but the fact that the author had put periods outside the quotes, which goes against standard editing practices.

What I found interesting is that Netflix tweeted a plea to stop asking them for the Gorilla Channel. By the same principle mentioned above, I have no idea if they are joking. But imagine if they aren't: here we all are making fun of Trump for wanting this channel that is quite silly and doesn't even exist. And yet, it turns out that given the chance, lots of people want the same thing.

And that's something that worries me in all this. Much as I don't like Trump, I worry that when we ridicule him, we let the rest of society off the hook. After all, the troubling aspect of his story is not the fact that he exists, but the fact that he has been allowed to take this much power. And to address that problem, we have to concern ourselves with the competence of our whole society, not just Trump. Reading about his exploits of stupidity makes us feel superior, but it allows us to avoid the need we all have to look at our inner Trump.

I'm Walkin' Here

I saw this graphic being passed around on Facebook:

I was wondering who actually said this, so I looked it up. Most graphics attribute it to author Albert Camus. Now first of all, I invite you to think over the implication of a Camus quote being associated with Winnie The Pooh. This is a guy whose most famous novel is about an unemotional man being tried for murder. I figured that somehow this graphic was put together by someone who didn't know the origin of the quote. Certainly it was by someone who didn't know the application of modern copyright laws. Winnie The Pooh is a Disney property, and you don't want to tangle with their lawyers.

But after you've come to terms with existentialist Pooh, then you can try to come to terms with this: I found many other graphics on the web that attribute the quote to Camus, but are just as cutesy.

Of course, all these graphics have one thing in common: they are graphics of quotes on the Internet, therefore they are inaccurate. I looked it up, and although it is cannot be proven diffinitively, he probably never said it.

Please people, if you're going to pass around inspirational images of Camus quotes, at least use something he actually said:

Blog Features Giants

There's a new movie out called The BFG, based on the book by Roald Dahl. So apparently Dahl is going to be the kid's version of Philip K. Dick, with Hollywood grinding-out every one of his books eventually.

Of course, there's a problem here. The book came out in 1982, so for someone my age, it would have appealed to slightly younger people. So when I hear "BFG," I think of the weapon of that name from the Doom video game. It came out when I was in my second year of University, close to its target demographic, so I'm sure I'm not the only one. Just the association with a violent video game is an unfortunate thing, even before you consider what the word between, "Big" and "Gun" is.

The hilarious part is, you know someone at the studio did research on this, studying just what percentage of the population associated the three letters with each media property. I guess it makes sense: it's a fight between Generation X and the Millennials, and the latter wins on both numbers and likelihood to go to movies.

But here's something I never thought of before: I can understand wanting to put "friendly" in the title, since that's not how giants are usually portrayed. But "big" though? "Big giant" is redundant, since giants are, by definition, big. So it should just be "The FG," or, "The Friendly Giant." Well, Mr. British author and American director, that's a concept we in Canada pioneered, and we didn't even need any CGI to do it.

And Them Good Ole Boys Were Drinking Butterbeer And Pumpkin Juice

Hey, remember a few months ago when they auctioned off the original lyrics of "American Pie," complete with all Don McLean's original notes and annotations? That was supposed to answer all our questions about the meanings in the song. But so far, we haven't heard anything. I'm hoping whoever won the auction isn't just going to be a jerk about it and sit on the answers forever.

I was wondering this, because the situation with that song is in sharp contrast to works being created today. Just this past week, we saw headlines that JK Rowling was further explaining the Harry Potter story, in this case detailing Snape’s motivation.

Some people dislike this sort of thing, thinking that it takes away from the stories if we're going to find out after-the-fact that Dumbledore is gay, or Hermione should have married Harry or Sirius Black is lactose intolerant. But it seems to me that this fleshing-out of the background is just an inevitable part of the modern world. In a world where Rowling has almost six million Twitter followers, it's inevitable that she's occasionally going to pull back the curtain. I'm sure Tolkien often livened up dinner parties by dropping hints about his inspiration for Lord of the Rings characters. Difference is, there was no one there to report it to a wider audience.

So we probably all have to learn not to make a big deal every time an author gives us behind-the-scenes info. Certainly, we shouldn't keep turning it into a news story. Can you imagine what it would have been like if Twitter existed when "American Pie" came out? @realDonMclean would be inundated with questions about the song. Some 4chan’ers would threaten to kidnap his dog unless he confirmed that the Jester represents Bob Dylan.  It'd be a mess, and might have even lead to popular music getting dumbed down over the next twenty years.

And, further confirming my theory that you can find any combination of two geeky things on the Internet, here is the Harry Potter story, from Voldemort's perspective, to the tune of "American Pie."

Profiles In Verbage

The last time I walked into Chapters/Indigo/whatever, this was the display that greeted me just inside the entrance:

Yes, they have books from each of the party leaders.  I'm sure the manager is currently trying to figure out why there are fewer people in the store suddenly.  The Mulcair book is on the left, why didn't they put the Harper book on the right?  And what can we deduce from the fact that it's the only one with a sale sticker?

Seriously though, I should point out that the Trudeau and Mulcair books are by them, while it is merely a book about Stephen Harper.  Has Harper written a book yet?  I mean a political book, not his book about hockey.  I've tried searching for a book by him, but typing "Harper" into the search field just swamps me with offers on Go Set A Watchman.

I'm surprised Harper doesn't have his own book, because lots of politicians (ghost) write books.  I guess you can see why, since it's a nice way to get your name out there and look like you're smart too.  And I'm assuming someone is buying these books, since publishers are willing to print them.  I'm guessing they're mostly writing to the converted though: I can't imagine anyone seeing this display and buying one of each, then going off to read them and use it as the basis for their decision. If you're that willing to read, you surely already have your mind made up.

Betting On The Stacks

Doing Christmas shopping in Chapters, I learned a lot. For one thing, I can't believe how much manga and graphic novels have grown.  I remember being amazed that it had its own shelf, and now it has its own section.

But I also found these piles of books. You sometimes see the latest much-anticipated book arranged like this. I figure the height of the stack gives us an indication of how the book is selling. And they complexity of the design shows how much free time the site employees have.

I remember how there were huge arrangements of the Steve Jobs biography for a while, which I figure means that they ordered far too many in the hype following his death. So what do we know based on these piles?

Justin Trudeau should be worried that his book sales are well behind those of conservative icon Conrad Black.

The Leafs' book isn't doing too well. It's way behind the Gordie Howe book. Though it is beating the latest Young-Adult fantasy on the other side of it.

And the leading author? No, not Stephen King, it's Amy Poehler.

Justice For My Inner Eight-Year Old

Glen A. Larson died this week.  If you're in your forties, that name may seem slightly familiar, especially if you picture it on a TV screen prefaced by "executive producer."  But once again, the media is confused as to why to memorialise him.  I've seen different stories refer to him as "creator of Magnum P.I.," "creator of Knight Rider" or "creator of Battlestar Galactica."  But none of them seemed to put those credits together with B.J. and the Bear, The Fall Guy, Buck Rogers and The Six-Million Dollar Man and remember him as the king of Eighties action shows. 

(As an aside, did you know that he put a lot of references to his Mormon faith in Battlestar Galactica?)

Combine that with the recent death of R.A. Montgomery, publisher of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and we've had a couple of instances of short shrift given to people who had a hand in the entertainment of my childhood.  Both the Eighties and geekery are getting much more respect than they ever have before, so you'd think the media would use this to give a fond bit of nostalgia. 

Instead, I'm just going to have to add them to my ongoing series of people who deserved better obituaries than the media gave them.  Now I call on all of you Gen-X'ers out there to hum the Knight Rider theme, as you go to the web page of your choice.

Bragging About Length

I figured I should eventually back up this blog, in case, you know, Google goes bankrupt or something.  So I've cut and pasted all the entries into a word processor file.  Of course, I was also curious as to how much I've written altogether.

The answer is: 354 pages, single spaced. Or in words, 193,632.  Or to put it in terms more people can understand, that's somewhere between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Or, close to the length of Johnathon Franzen's The Corrections.  I should get around to reading that; maybe it won't feel so intimidating now.

Or, it's around a third of Infinite Jest or War and Peace. Or it's the Bible almost to the end of Judges.  So that's pretty good for a little over two-and-a-half years of part-time writing.  But still, don't expect my Great Canadian Novel soon, unless I go in to NaNoWriMo.

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about."

Here's the latest in my apparently continuing series of people who deserved better obituaries than one paragraph in the entertainment section.  It was in this morning's paper that author Daniel Keyes died.

Keyes is best known for the novel Flowers for Algernon, the story of a mentally challenged man who undergoes experimental surgery to improve his intelligence.  You could describe it - as the newspaper did - by repeatedly mentioning that it's often used in high school English classes and then leave it at that without further insight. But I'd just like to add that it's a brilliant examination of how intellect shapes human interaction, and so often ends up holding us apart.

Warning: Labels

This week there was a proposal from American university students to have content warning labels on books used in school assignments. We all had a good laugh at it. Can you imagine, warnings that literature might give you feelings. Nanny state, political correctness etc.

But is it really asking too much that a sexual assault victim get fair warning that there's a rape scene in a book? Here's an article about the original action from the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper. It's really not the Orwellian threat everyone is making it out to be. Nobody's asking for anything to be banned or censored.  All they're asking for is warning.


What this has revealed is that PTSD still isn't taken seriously. It seems that our society has a cycle when it comes to dealing with a new mental illness:

• the sufferers make their case about getting a little consideration to better cope with their illness. 
• Everyone else treats their illness as equivalent to the ordinary emotions everyone copes with.
• the concerns are dismissed along with some insults and questioning of the victims' courage.

Today, PTSD survivors are just going through the same routine we've already been through with depression. Most people have moved beyond telling the depressed to just suck it up. But we're still okay with accusing trauma survivors trying to avoid flashbacks of hiding from reality.

A couple of caveats: I can understand professors fear of this policy.  Universities have done a poor job of creating power structures that balance the rights of students and faculty, and professors already live in fear that a particularly determined student could make life hell for them with complaints.  This policy offers another avenue for that possibility, so I'm betting professors will err on the side of too many warnings. But as I say, that's a pre-existing flaw in the university structure.

Secondly, yes, students and their organizations will likely abuse the system by claiming triggers on virtually everything they find offensive or just objectionable. But I wouldn't reject a policy just because it means administrators will have to keep saying no to every demanding activist group.

Panic! In The Winter

Remember readers? I don't mean people who read, I mean those books we were given for English class in elementary school. They were filled with a selection of what I now realize were really short stories.

One time, around grade seven or eight, we did a brief unit on science fiction, using the four or five stories in our reader's sci-fi chapter. I loved science fiction, but that was a little awkward to me. Most of my English teachers thought Stephen King was the epitome of science fiction. And the selection of SF stories in the readers was never good. It's hard to write science fiction in such a short form, and the editors of the reader were constrained by the need to keep it accessible to young people who may not be familiar with the tropes of the genre. And in our case, there's the further constraint of finding Canadian short science fiction.

In one story, I don't really remember anything about it, except one line.  It was a throw-away reference to the fact that there were very few wooden items in the home of the protagonist, because they were sacrificed in "the panic winter of '96." (I may be wrong on the year, but it was some time in what was then the future, but is now the past.) That line bugged me for a variety of reasons that I couldn't articulate at the time. But I'll try now.

First of all, it seems to be a betrayal of sci-fi principles. Contrary to non-fans, SF isn't really techno-utopian, and indeed, is open to the possibilities of science and technology not overcoming challenges, or even being the challenge that does us in. But envisioning humanity being sent into disaster by bad weather? That just seemed silly and unrealistic, like a non-SF writer accustomed to historical fiction would resort to.

But worse, the line is just so damn Canadian. It's been observed that Canadian literature is centred around (some would say constrained by) the idea of survival against the elements. This seemed to be the most grievous example possible. Even in a science fiction story set in the future, they found a way to fit survival in as a theme.

Of course, about ten years later, there was the ice storm in Quebec that crippled the power supply for days in the dead of winter, and forcing millions to find improvised ways of getting heat.

Then I was just walking through Victoria Park here in Kitchener. With the weather warming up, crews are getting to the work of cleaning up the damage from this year's ice storm. Seeing the trees that have been removed or cut back, I'm only now realizing the extent of the damage. So, although I have not been pushed to burning my furniture for warmth, I guess a severe winter storm can have a lasting impact on even our modern world.  My apologies to you, Canadian science fiction author I don't remember the name of.

Books To Get Excited Over

On the Internet, you can find lots of lists of Top 100 books, or books everyone should read.  At Modern Library, they have provided a list, and also made a list based on reader's votes:

Their board of authors' list has the usual suspects, but the top ten of the readers' list shows a great example of what produces passion among readers:

• 4 Ayn Rand books
• 3 L. Ron Hubbard books
• 2 books that are commonly assigned in high school
• The Lord of the Rings.

So that's what literati stuff the ballot-box for.  I have to admit (at risk of losing my nerd card) I've never read The Lord of the Rings.  But I probably should, as it's the only book in the top ten without religious/philosophical connections, and that the readers weren't forced to read.

The Self-Help Section At The End Of The Universe

Like any long-time geek, I was quite disappointed that this book was not filled with facts that would help me travel the galaxy:

Frozen In Time

When I recently had problems with my Internet connection, I got out my copy of The Internet For Dummies. Why would I, a computer professional, own such a book? Because I bought it in university when I first started hearing about this "Internet" thing the computer science students were talking about.

Here's the cover

Here's the 1993 copyright

 

11 pages on Archie, 10 pages on Gopher

...and 6 pages on the World Wide Web

Consider Cthulhu

Today I found out about a web site called, "I Write Like."  It will analyse a sample of text and determine which author your writing style is most like.  Needless to say, that was an hour of productivity out the window.  I put my most recent blog posts in, and these are the authors it chose:

• I Still Think Digital Watches Are A Pretty Neat Idea - David Foster Wallace  
• Advanced Tweetology - David Foster Wallace  
• Well York U Too - H. P. Lovecraft  
• It Won't Work - HP Lovecraft
• One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is - David Foster Wallace
• Politics From the Fifth Dimension - David Foster Wallace

...thus giving me the third time in recent weeks that I've name dropped David Foster Wallace.  That may sound pretentious, but I deserve it dammit; I read all of Infinite Jest, even the endnotes, so I deserve some post-modern literary swagger.  And just to see if my writing style has changed in the year-and-a-half that I've written this blog, I tried one of my earliest posts, and the author gave me was Dan Brown. So then I tried some other sites:

• Wired - Cory Doctorow
• The Onion - Dan Brown
• Stereogum - David Foster Wallace

So Dan Brown is really taking a beating in this post.  I also compared news sites, each of them on a report of today's shutdown resolution:

• BBC - William Shakespeare
• CBC - David Foster Wallace
• CNN - William Shakespeare
• Fox News - Mario Puzo

Speaking of authors I've name dropped recently, this all started with a post on John Scalzi's blog in which he asked fans what authors he has a similar style to.  Someone fed a sample of one of his book Old Man's War into I Write Like, and the result was James Fenimore Cooper.  I put the blog post itself in, and it chose H.P. Lovecraft.

And finally, I put the first page of David Foster Wallace's essay, Consider the Lobster in for analysis, and the author chosen was, again, H.P. Lovecraft.

Virtual Reality: Definitely Maybe

I've noticed that in recent years, authors have become more willing to portray the near future.  It used to be that science-fiction authors would prefer to focus on the more distant future because it was more interesting and there was less chance of being proven wrong.  And non-science-fiction writers would avoid the near future because ewwwww, genre fiction! 

But now they're more open to it. Mainstream writers aren't afraid of sci-fi any more, and the Science-Fiction genre itself has become more open-minded. All this has lead to a greater chance of seeing predictions from books coming true in your lifetime.  For instance, a few weeks ago I made a reference to the "sponsored years" concept from Infinite Jest.  That hasn't happened (yet) but the novel also mentions a business that streams TV and movies, and delivers recordings by mail.  That's pretty much Netflix.

Recently, I've been reading Ready Player One, an unapologetic celebration of geek-culture of the 1980's.  The story centres around a virtual-reality world called OASIS.  That's hardly unique in the sci-fi world; global online virtual reality worlds are today's green bug-eyed alien with a ray gun.  But this is a book released last year that expects us to believe such a thing could start up right now.

That got me thinking: could it happen?  After all, Virtual Reality is, to the information age, what electric cars were to the industrial age: something that seems to be permanently just around the corner.  But now it seems the rise of electric cars is just a matter of waiting for the slow march of battery technology and gas prices.  So maybe there's hope for VR too.

The book indicates that the system required three breakthroughs: 

1. Big computers behind the scenes to handle millions of people interacting with one another (in today's online games, like World of Warcraft, you don't get to meet all the millions of people playing, just the few thousand that are connected to the same server as you.)  Well that innovation just seems like a matter of time as computer technology progresses.
2. Cheap, lightweight virtual reality glasses.  And oh look, someone is already doing that.
3. Haptic feedback gloves.  (Haptic means touch, see; it's a glove that makes it feel like you're touching virtual objects.)  I'm assuming they mean something more sophisticated than the old Nintendo Power Glove.

So there you go: most of it is doable, but it all comes down to the gloves.  Hopefully not everyone in technology is working on apps or social networks (or batteries.)

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About The Future, #7

J K Rowling, Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer and Stieg Larsson all become household names – as authors!

Cracking the Maclean's Code

How is life like a Dan Brown novel?  There are many ways: a lot of it is hard to believe, it goes by more quickly than you realise, the characters act in inconsistent ways.  But I can add a new one: A little knowledge helps you know what is real and what isn't.

I'm probably like a lot of people in that I read The Da Vinci Code when it was a big deal, and then later read the previous book in the series, Angels and Demons.  I'm sure I'm also like a lot of people in that I found the predecessor had similar entertainment value, yet it actually made both books seem disappointing by revealing how formulaic they both were.  Surely Brown knows there are some women who were not orphaned and raised by a male relative who instilled her with a love of science.

But for me there was an extra disappointment: The Da Vinci Code revolved around art, history and other subjects in which I'm no expert.  But a lot of Angels and Demons was concerned with physics, a subject I am familiar with after taking half a degree in it.  Once I saw how fast-and-loose Brown handled physics, it revealed to me just how far he bends facts.  No, I'm not one of those people who thought The Da Vinci Code was based on reality, but a great deal of its appeal comes from the fact that it seems tantalisingly possible.  But if Brown's long-range conspiracies are as real as antimatter production and hypersonic aircraft, then I'll just go back to straight-up science fiction, which is about equally believable, thank you very much.

I find the same thing works with the news media.  Like any thinking person, I'm never sure how much of the media's sensationalism should be believed.  But every now and then they report a sensationalist story about a topic I know well, and I have my answer.  This week's Maclean's was a great example, with a cover story about the Higgs Boson.  It features the couldn't-be-more-misleading headline "This Changes Everything" (as I mentioned in an earlier post, the new findings really just boringly confirm what most physicists already believed.)  It also implies that the discovery opens the door for "teleportation, phasers, alternate dimensions". 

My half a physics degree may not have ever helped me get a job, but it did let me know that this cover story was so ridiculous it would lose them their journalists' licences, if only such a thing existed.  So now I know I can disregard lots of other things I've read on their covers, just over the last few months:

• We'll soon be eating lettuce with built-in dressing
• The Hunger Games is a symptom of widespread rage among young people
• Canada will never have a cold winter again
• The one-third of women that earn more than their husbands are causing major societal upheaval
• RIM's downfall is all Balsillie and Lazaridis's fault
• Bill Gates knows how to fix public education
• The Bloc Quebecois has been good for Canada
• Newt Gingrich could be president.

Okay, I don't think I needed any physics education to see through that last one.