Transcript.

I finished reading The Friar and The Cipher in less than a week, but it’s taken me quite some time to write the review of it. I was interested in the book because I love cryptography and everything on the dust jacket of the book indicated that it was roughly half about the Voynich manuscript. The Voynich manuscript is one of the most interesting puzzles in cryptography and linguistics. It’s a 240 page book written in the early 15th century, and its contents remain a complete mystery. The script is not latin, arabic, or any other recognizable alphabet, but the arrangement and frequency of the characters appear to have many of the same characteristics of natural languages. Deciphering it would almost certainly become a world-wide story regardless of what it actually says.

However, having read the book, saying that The Friar and The Cipher is about the Voynich manuscript feels extremely misleading. Most of the book is about Roger Bacon, whom the authors believe is the author of the Voynich manuscript, and the history of science and the Catholic church. Although the book is extremely readable, chapter after chapter about Roger Bacon, Thomas Acquinas, and the early debate between science and religion was not what I expected. Luckily, I find those topics interesting as well. In fact, I’ve read quite a bit about the debate regarding the interplay of science and religion. If I didn’t have that background, I would have felt rather cheated.

Frankly, this book didn’t satisfy my desire to learn more about the Voynich manuscript, and I would only recommend it as a book about the Voynich manuscript because of the dearth of material covering that mystery. Still, you might be better served by picking randomly from the further reading list on its Wikipedia page.

photo credit: Lawrence OP

The authors don’t present material as unbiased journalists; they emphatically present their opinions that Roger Bacon has yet to receive proper recognition for his work and that Bacon is the most likely author of the Voynich manuscript. As a result, the book reads as rather one-sided. They lay much of the blame for this on the Catholic church, which may be justified, but they also seem willing to take shots at Christianity in general. They take the position that science and religion are completely incompatible as if there weren’t even a debate about it. They also make broad statements about “the church” as if they are fact even though they directly contradict other authors without even mentioning the other interpretation. (For examples, read the Amazon reviews. I won’t repeat their examples here.)

Books that purport to explore a mystery should at least attempt to be unbiased. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already familiar with both cryptography and the debate between science and religion. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about those topics with knowledgeable folks, then you will find it hard to discern between fact and opinion while reading The Friar and The Cipher. Still, the book was not irredeemably bad. I did learn a little bit more about church history, and it’s sparked my interest in reading more unbiased accounts of that time period. Besides, it was a quick read. There probably aren’t that many people who would be interested in The Friar and The Cipher, but it’s interesting if you consider yourself to fit that category.

In The Plex focuses more on “how Google thinks and works” than on “how Google shapes our live.” To that end it is a better book about the business of technology than a book describing the impact of Google on our culture. I was a little surprised by this because The Perfect Thing is the best single description of the cultural impact of a piece of technology that I’ve ever read. However, Levy’s decision to focus on Google’s business impact probably gives the book more shelf-life (Yeah, I’m not apologizing for that pun.) since Google’s impact on our culture is still being played out. Google introduced many of the fundamental ideas about cloud computing to the average person, and society definitely hasn’t fully grasped the implications of “the cloud” in our society. Still, the early history of Google and their process for building and managing a technology company are well-documented in the book, and this will prove valuable for many years to come.

The book consists of seven parts, with a prologue and an epilogue. The first four parts are outstanding, classic Steven Levy work. Google’s unreal, rapid growth; its famous hiring practices; and its lavish employee benefits are all well-cataloged here. Levy does an amazing job conveying tons of information in an extremely short space here. I enjoyed Levy’s choice to organize this material topically as opposed to chronologically. So many things were happening so quickly with Google, that describing them in the order they happened would have utterly overwhelmed the reader.

The last three parts of the book are where he starts to lose me. Levy sort of gives Google a bit of a pass on some rather important mistakes that they’ve made. Part Five covers everything from YouTube and Android to all the random other things that Google does, but it feels slanted towards “successes” rather than mistakes, which are briefly described in the epilogue. Part Six covers Google’s ventures in China, but it also feels a bit pro-Google. What part of “Don’t be Evil” includes actively supporting the Chinese government? Part Seven focuses on the impact Google has had on the government and the various lawsuits that have become major national news (e.g. Book Search). These also seem rather slanted to me. For example, many of the Googlers who went to work for the White House or other branches of the government complained that they weren’t able to work at Google speed while they were there. This implies that Google is somehow impressively fast, when the reality is that a cadre of Molasses manufacturing executives could switch to government work and discover whole new levels of sluggish bureaucracy.

Those last three parts weren’t so much inaccurately puffing up the accomplishments of Google as much as they were simply not quite telling the whole story. Levy minimizes many of the “negatives.” Google’s Buzz snafu was relegated to a couple of pages in the epilogue. Google’s WiFi data collection as a part of their street view project is similarly lacking in coverage. Levy should have investigated these incidents thoroughly. How does a company as important at Google make mistakes like these? A book with the subtitle “how Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives” should provide more detailed answers.

The only pro-Google aspect of the last three parts that was missing or incomplete was the China hacking incident. Although this was covered from the Google perspective, it was a major incident for other technology companies and more importantly for the U.S. Government. The incident forces several questions implied by the information technology revolution like: How should we respond to international hacking incidents? What is the role of the U.S. Government in protecting companies that have been hacked by foreign governments? And what is the legal process for adjudicating international hacking incidents? These are critical questions that were first brought to the national conversation by the Google hacking incident. We don’t have answers to them, but they aren’t even adequately described as important in the book.

Steven Levy is one of my favorite technical authors, and I’ve read many of his books. I just recently finished Insanely Great, and I previously read both Crypto and The Perfect Thing. If I were ranking them, I would probably have to place this book at the end of that list, which is more to say that his other books were fantastic and this one was merely good.

Steve Jobs died this week, and my interest in the book changed. I’m not sure when I started it, but it must have been sometime Thursday evening. I finished it this past Saturday.

The book is a wonderful combination of both its title and its subtitle. The title comes from Steve Jobs’s desire to one-up the development of the Apple Lisa, which was just a ‘great’ computer. Steve wanted the Macintosh to be ‘insanely great’ and much of the book focuses on Steve Jobs’s influence on the development of computers at Apple. The subtitle of the book is “The Life and Times of the Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything,” and the remainder of the book focuses on illuminating just how important the Macintosh was to computing.

The ‘title’ part of this book is easier to believe than the ‘subtitle’ part. Steve Jobs clearly had a profound influence on the development of the Macintosh. Many of the quotes from those who were interviewed for the book point to Jobs as the largest individual influence on the development of the Macintosh. It’s worth noting that this book was originally published in 1994, prior to Steve Jobs’s return to Apple as CEO. Thus, it wasn’t possible for Levy to be influenced by Jobs’s success in turning Apple around.

It’s difficult to evaluate the ‘subtitle’ part of the book because history doesn’t always allow us to identify exactly why something happened. It’s certainly true that everything changed, but it’s not certain that the Macintosh was the reason for that change. If the Macintosh had never been developed, the desktop metaphor and the mouse could still have become the dominant paradigm for computing. The Macintosh was the first commercially-available personal computer that used these devices, and it also demonstrated them to be successful.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to prove that these concepts would have failed without the Macintosh to popularize them. As Insanely Great mentions, both of the desktop metaphor and the mouse were originally developed elsewhere in the computing industry. Obviously, these concepts were a big part of the success of personal computers. Historians are simply left to assign credit where credit is due. Levy clearly places the lion’s share of that credit on the Macintosh.

Levy includes quite a bit of material from his numerous interviews with many of the people who were involved with the development of the Macintosh. These are quite fascinating, and they definitely provide some insight into the thought process that went into the creation of the Mac.

Levy also includes some of his own personal observations of computing. In fact, the last official chapter of the book details some of his own problems using a Macintosh to write the book itself. These anecdotes range from interesting insights to rather bland, subjective commentary. I sort of wished that Levy kept the focus on the Mac and the people who developed it. Still, if an author is going to provide an opinion, I would prefer that they do so directly rather than try to embed it into the rest of the story.

Overall, I would recommend Insanely Great to anyone interested in the early history of the personal computer. Although, I thought Crypto was definitively better and The Perfect Thing was somewhat better, Insanely Great is still a extremely well-written, easy to read, and enjoyable. Lastly, for anyone else waiting for Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, this is a quick read that may alleviate some of the wait.

The Tipping Point is a book that investigates the causes of radical change. Gladwell is interested in the rapid, dramatic change that is exhibited by epidemics, and he uses the science of epidemiology to interpret what he calls a social epidemic. The Wikipedia article on the book breaks down how an understanding of epidemiology can be applied to social concepts so well that I’m not going to rehash these concepts here. Instead, I’ll just urge you to go there and read the article.

Gladwell’s books have been successful in no small part due to the fascinating examples and stories packed within them, and The Tipping Point is no exception. In fact, one concern I had with Outliers was that the stories were so compelling that they covered up the fact that his overall theme wasn’t particularly well-defined. This doesn’t show nearly as much in The Tipping Point, which probably is the best of any of his books at combining a clear central thesis with compelling examples and illustrations.

My major concern with The Tipping Point is that it introduces the social epidemic as if were science on par with actual epidemiology. It’s not. The Tipping Point was not a peer-reviewed book, and matching a pattern to previously gathered data sets isn’t exactly the scientific method. Establishing a causal relationship is more difficult than that.

This lack of scientific rigor doesn’t mean that the book isn’t entertaining or compelling. It also doesn’t mean that the book won’t make you think a little differently about the world. All it means is that Gladwell’s conception of The Tipping Point hasn’t gone through the rigors of scientific validation. (If you’re interested in some examples of the problems this causes, then I would again refer you to Wikipedia.)

All in all, the book was entertaining, and I would recommend it. However, I wouldn’t treat it as if it were anything other than compelling journalism mixed with masterful storytelling. In fact, it makes me want to re-read Blink. It may suffer from some of the same problems, and I didn’t seem to mention them in my review of it.

Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz is about a Princeton University admissions officer named Portia Nathan. She begins the novel with complete faith that her role as an admissions office is critical to the success and prestige of Princeton University. Her work is demanding, perhaps brutally so, but she is clearly passionate about it. She also begins the novel in an idealized domestic relationship with a Princeton English professor, but it becomes clear early in the book that they have lost whatever passion they may have had for each other.

Portia’s romances are the main plot of the book, but they are a bit ham-fisted and read more like a soap opera than, well, some soap operas. In fact, the product description for the book uses the following phrase to describe it:

Admissions. Admission. Aren’t there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides…It’s what we let in, but it’s also what we let out.

Pretty cheesy, right? Ask anyone who knows me and you’ll find that I’m a big fan of puns, but this kind of wordplay fails to interest even me. Portia has a secret that gets “let out” over the course of the book, but I don’t have to tell you about it because it will be rather easy to guess once you start reading the book. The characters are interesting and the scenes are engaging, but the plot just doesn’t work when viewed holistically. It reads like the novel equivalent of taking a great commercial series and turning it into a complete television show.

Despite the somewhat clumsy love story, Admission does have an extremely engaging sub-plot surrounding the admissions process itself. Obviously, I am heavily biased as to whether or not this sub-plot is truly “engaging.” I’m a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at NCSU, and I’ve spent quite a lot of my life in some part of academia or another. It isn’t hard to convince me about the importance of education, and I’ve always been fascinated with attempts to measure learning, achievement, or accomplishment. Still, any one of the millions of people who have applied to college tacitly understands the idiosyncrasies, inaccuracies, and theater of this process. Although some reviews might say that the book “includes too many wooden monologues explaining in detail how [the admissions] process works,” I don’t think I’m alone in my interest for this part of the book.

Anyone who has applied to college (or has a child planning to do so) has almost certainly wondered about the admissions officers. Will someone actually read this? What are they really looking for? What will they think about my transcript, that award I won, or my extra-curricular activities? What will they think about me? For the somewhat introspective among us, applying to college can be even more brutal than the process Portia goes through to make her decisions in the book. Clichés are never more true for anyone than they are for high school senior applying to college. They are full of potential. They have their whole lives in front of them. They can be anything they want to be. Their future rests on what happens to that application.

College applicants are subject to the ultimate “fear of missing out” because of the ponderous implications of the admissions decision. The fear of missing out (FOMO, for short) has recently been described as “a crucial key to understanding social software” because:

Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on. You’re home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. And, like gym memberships, adding Bergman movies to your Netflix queue and piling up unread copies of the New Yorker, watching these feeds gives you a sense that you’re participating, not missing out, even when you are.

FOMO is also crucial to understanding college admissions for basically the same reasons. What college graduate hasn’t wondered whether or not their life would have been “better” if only they went to a “better” college? Applicants fear missing out on some unknowable future. Admissions officers fear missing out on potential future prestige for their university if they aren’t able to accurately identify the best students. Admission explores FOMO from both sides throughout the book. Each chapter of the book begins with an admissions essay excerpt from one of the students that Portia is reviewing. The essays are humorous, serious, deep, and emotional. They may be the best part of the book because they so palpably convey the fear (and vulnerability) inherent on both sides of the process. I often found myself starting a new chapter simply because I wanted to read the lead-in essay.

Unfortunately, much like the love story, the admissions process subplot has a somewhat predictable climax involving Portia’s decision on a particular application. It’s not as inevitable as the ending for the love story, but Portia’s character seems to telegraph her decision a bit. Regardless, it’s a fascinating problem, and I’m not sure what I would have done in her position.

Despite my concerns with the plot, I would recommend this novel to anyone interested in exploring college admissions or anyone interested in exploring the broader impact of important decisions on young adults. The book has been out long enough that you should be able to find a used copy online without having to shell out much cash. It’s a fun, quick read, but I wouldn’t recommend buying a new copy.

They probably should have found some music to go with this theme. I’m starting to think it’s a critical component of these Rube Goldberg videos. Don’t forget to check out their detailed ‘making of’ description.

If only he’d managed to include some instructions for everyone that posts complete junk on Facebook as their status updates…

Although they are billing this video as a lib dub, it’s really closer to a Rube Goldberg contraption built using lip syncing humans as the ‘steps’ designed to convey the message: “Grand Rapids isn’t dying.” I’m starting to become rather fascinated with the mixture of these complex, single-shot videos and musical timing. It’s clearly similar to OK Go’s video, which I wrote about before. I hope we see more of these. In case you’re interested in supporting their efforts, you can either visit their Facebook page or check out their swag on Cafe Press.

This year, the the two Rube Goldberg teams from the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers combined forces. The result of their collaboration was not only a win at the University level (Nationals went to the University of Wisconsin-Stout), but also a world record. The best post about the machine is on Geek.com:

It only took 3,500 hours of work to build “The Time Machine,” a 244-step Rube Goldberg machine created by 17 Purdue University students. Though the team didn’t have the number of steps in mind while building it, the students happily discovered after it was built that it beat the former world record of Rube Goldberg experiments by 14 steps, landing it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Here are two videos of the machine. The first has commentary and a wide-angle perspective of the whole machine. The second has closeup shots of all the transfers and transitions.