micro

“Indoctrinating children in proper environmental thought was a hallmark of the green movement.” M. Crichton, micro, p. ix

I believe I read most of Michael Crichton‘s novels and this posthumous version (completed by Richard Preston) is not very different in its style and pattern from the previous ones. micro delivers an efficient fast-paced techno-thriller that filled most of one afternoon when convalescing at home.  In that respect, it fills its intended role. I however feel this is one of the weakest novels in that the technological and scientific background is very poor. (The best Crichton’s novels are in my opinion The Andromeda Strain and Airframe. One of the last novels, State of Fear, carries a very anti-environmentalist and climatoskeptic  message similar to the above quote.)

“Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world (…) represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and we cannot predict its behavior. “ M. Crichton, micro, p. x

Indeed, the plot of micro is based on the assumption that there exists a technology that can miniaturise living and non-living objects to 1/100^th of their original size without any short-term impact. I remember watching as a child Fantastic Voyage, where a miniaturised submarine goes inside a blood vessel to remove a tumor, and I sat in front of a neighbour’s TV, mesmerised by the idea more than by the (weak) plot. This was in the laste 60′s. I also remember a sci’fi’ book I read when a pre-teen, with a great cover, called The Forgotten Planet: nothing truly memorable, apart from the cover, but hey this was a 1954 book. Now, micro does not use a deeper theory to justify this miniaturisation and the remainder of the plot is just as weak: I cannot imagine  1/100^th humans surviving more than a few minutes in a rain forest environment! The place is crawling with insects, all way faster and far more deadly than tiny humans with a pocket knife, but the heroes conveniently meet only one dangerous insect at a time, loosing only at most one member of the group each time (sorry for the spoiler!). (In fact, the earlier Prey was much better at involving nanotechnologies. ) The grad students are very charicaturesque as well, providing biological infodump at times when they should be frozen solid with fright. Provided they had not been eaten already. The final resolution of the thriller is just… grotesque! So wait until you are sick or recovering from being sick before embarking upon this micro and no so fantastic trip!

the cartoon introduction to statistics

A few weeks ago, I received a copy of The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics by Grady Klein and Alan Dabney, send by their publisher, Farrar, Staus and Giroux from New York City.  (Never heard of this publisher previously, but I must admit the aggregation of those three names sounds great!) As this was an unpublished version of the book, to appear in July 2013, I first assumed my copy was a draft version, with black and white drawings using limited precision graphics.. However, when checking the already published Cartoon Introduction to Economics, I realised this was the style of Grady Klein (as reflected below).

Thus, I have to assume this is how The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics will look like  when published in July… I am quite perplexed by the whole project. First, I do not see how a newcomer to the field can learn better from a cartoon with an average four sentences per page than from a regular introductory textbook. Cartoons introduce an element of fun into the explanation, with jokes and (irrelevant) side stories, but they are also distracting as readers are not always in  a position to know what matters and what does not. Second, as the drawings are done in a rough style, I find this increases the potential for confusion. For instance, the above cover reproduces an example linking the histogram of a sample of averages and the normal distribution. If a reader has never heard of histograms, I do not see how he or she could gather how they are constructed in practice. The width of the bags is related to the number of persons in each bag (50 random Americans) in the story, while it should be related to the inverse of the square root of this number in the theory.  Similarly, I find the explanation about confidence intervals lacking: when trying to reassure the readers about the fact that any given random sample from a population might be misleading, the authors state that “in the long run most cans [of worms] have averages in the clump under the hump [of the normal pdf]“. This is not reassuring at all: when using confidence intervals based on 10 or on 10⁵ normal observations, the corresponding 95% confidence intervals on their mean both have 95% chances to contain the true mean. The long run aspect refers to the repeated use of those intervals. (I am not even mentioning the classical fallacy of stating that “we are 99.7% confident that the population average is somewhere between -1.73 and -0.27″…)

In conclusion, I remember buying an illustrated entry to Marx’ Das Kapital when I started economics in graduate school (as a minor). This gave me a very quick idea of the purpose of the book. However, I read through the whole book to understand (or try to understand) Marx’ analysis of the economy. And the introduction did not help much in this regard. In the present setting, we are dealing with statistics, not economics, not philosophy. Having read a cartoon about the average length of worms within a can of worms is not going to help much in understanding the Central Limit Theorem and the subsequent derivation of confidence intervals. The validation of statistical methods is done through mathematics, which provides a formal language cartoons cannot reproduce.

wild [guest post]

My daughter, who brought me this book, wrote the following about it: Wild is a book whose title might hint at more than it truly contains. This book is the story of a young woman hiking along the PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail, a very long hiking path in America. This young woman will quickly realize that she is not trained enough for this kind of adventure, but far from turning back she keeps going toward the aim she set herself. She meets many people on they way, either walking on the road or living in towns where she receives packages of supply she sent herself. This book is original in that it is not written by an expert hiker and hence it allows us to discover with the author how to manage the PCT. At the end of the novel we are almost surprised that she succeeded thanks to a large amount of luck. Wild is a realistic novel that makes us eager to embark on the journey! To have this adventure. It shows us a really wild side of today’s world, away from electronics, news, and today’s materialistic culture. How to cope with loneliness, hunger, dirt, cold, fear, injury, bad guys, orienteering … A book that details minutely every day at first and then accelerates toward the end. This is a very long journey, as one becomes aware at the beginning, but as the days go by, it seems less and less hard, which is probably an effect intended by the author, but it seems rather frustrating to me. I am rather lost with all these characters that come and go, it’s hard to remember them when they reappear in the narrative. For once, the heroine does not find an easy way through difficulties, which is what makes it a more realistic novel. Despite a too large number of uninteresting details about her life before the PCT, this book made me discover this trail and drove me to hope to hike it one day…

wild

My daughter brought me this book at the hospital and I read it over the final day of my stay there. (She had ordered and read it out of a review in Elle…) As I first supposed it was about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (or PCT), I was quite eager to hear about the beauty of the mountains and the challenges of the long distance trail. However, wild is much more about the psychological problems and the troubled childhood of the author, Cheryl Strayed (a self-chosen post-divorce name), the trek being undertaken as a cathartic therapy to overcome her mother’s death and to fight the ensuing self-destructive tendencies… The most amazing thing in this autobiography is that the author managed to survive a trek of this magnitude, given that she had no preparation and no training and that she had to face heat, lack of water, cold, snow, wild animals, wilder men, and this with hardly any money. She starts in the Mojave desert with a backpack weighting half her weight (soon called the Monster) and is lucky enough to avoid dehydration, snake bites, wrong trails, falls, hypothermia, &tc. Great for her and thanks to the fellow hikers who helped her building some experience, but I cannot feel much of a connection with the author. In short, she often sounds like a complete idiot, e.g. starving most of the trail only to spend the few dollars she sent herself at each postal relay in junk food and sodas. I actually wonder at the level of authenticity of this unpreparedness: I find it very hard to believe she had never considered the weight of her back before leaving when this is one of the first things you read in any book about hiking. When considering she had planned a complex delivery of supplies all along the trail, apparently missing none of them. The character of Cheryl Strayed is not as annoying as the “hero” of Into the Wild, but I do not buy the whole story. Great cover, by the way!

A blight of mages

This Blight of Mages is the fifth book by Karen Miller in the “Kingmaker, Kingbreaker” series. (I realise I only reviewed The Prodigal Mage, having no memory whatsoever of the fourth volume, The Reluctant Mage… Either I did not read it or it was truly below my reviewing standards!) While I much preferred The Gospeaker tirlogy for its more involved plot and more imaginative universe, the first two books in the series were enjoyable enough, if light. This one is actually a prequel that explains a lot of the background in the earlier [in print] or later [in time] novels, as the central characters, Barl and Morgan, reappear as legendary figures in those. However, I had forgotten so much about those books that it took me quite a while (and a spoiler on the backcover!) to realise this was the case! Nonetheless, the book reads on its own (as it should, being a prequel!), as demonstrated by my son reading through in a few days. It also suffers from the same defects as the remaining books in the series, namely that the action is very slow, the dialogues are very heavy and repetitive, and the plot is even more predictable than earlier! Without being much of a spoiler (but be warned nonetheless!), given the front and back covers, and even more the contents of the earlier/later novels if you managed to recall their plots to some extent, Barl and Morgan are going to meet and wreck havoc on the local society and on the nature of Doranean magic by attempting prohibited experiments, Barl realising her “mistake” at the end and trying to atone for it, while Morgan turns mad and unstoppable. Several reviewers criticised Miller’s style for being full of clichés and I fear that, for this volume, it is particularly the case… The dialogues are utterly predictable, the characters are mostly caricaturesque, and the unfolding of the story is rather clear from the first dozen pages, except for the last part maybe. (Oh, and by the way, the cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the story!) I am thus quite surprised at the book being ranked highest in the series on Amazon. (Even with one reader being clearly happy at this book being single and not the beginning of another duology!)  And people raving at the author’s “incredible fantasist writing skills”… Conclusion: Not recommended. Even for hardcore fantasy aficionados.