Category Archives: Books

Darwin Day, Innumeracy, and Irreligiosity(?)

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on February 14, 2008 – 3:24 pm
Filed under Books, Politics, Sci/Tech

This past Tuesday (12th) saw the coming and going of Darwin Day – the celebration honouring the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809. Nothing particularly extravagant or noteworthy occurred this year, but the astute among you may notice that this means it will be his 200th ‘birthday’ next year, nicely coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. This has got me wondering what publicly funded celebrations will be held to celebrate this rather monumental event; whether or not I may go and join in any festivities; and if there will be controversy surrounding any events due to the beliefs of certain movements.

To cut a long story short, I have now pencilled-in a trip to Shrewsbury for the weekend following next year’s anniversary as not only is Shrewsbury Darwin’s birth place, but it’s also the location of an annual, month-long celebration of his life and work, and also where my father currently lives. Two birds, one stone, and all that jazz.

On a slightly different note, all this talk of hard science is making me want to mention the book I’m currently reading: John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. Initially sceptical that it would be written for the maths-newcomer, I became impressed as Paulos describes with gusto the common – and frankly dangerous – pitfalls that everyone faces when living in an innumerate country. Encouraging his readers to view the world in a more quantitative way, I found myself grasping for paper and pencil a few times as he succinctly describes potential consequences of innumeracy:

  • Inaccurate reporting of news stories and insufficient scepticism in assessing these stories
  • Financial mismanagement and accumulation of consumer debt, specifically related to misunderstanding of compound interest
  • Loss of money on gambling, in particular caused by belief in the gambler’s fallacy
  • Belief in pseudoscience: “Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.“
  • Poor assessment of risk, for example, refusing to fly by aeroplane (a relatively safe form of transport) while taking unnecessary risks in a car (where an accident is more likely)

It’s a book I definitely recommend for both the innumerate and the mathematically proficient. The former will learn a lot and hopefully gain a renewed sense of wanting to brush up on those GCSE maths skills, while the latter will get introduced to some interesting topics – a couple of which I covered in my previous post on mathematical ‘paradoxes’.

Off on another slightly related tangent, I recently came across an interesting article Prof. Paulos wrote for ABC News: 12 Irreligious Questions to the Candidates (via kottke):

Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?

Ah to hell with it, have another tenuously-linked topic… The above book (Innumeracy) has renewed my interest in performing mental math and better thinking – a personal development subject I first started working on about 12 months ago with the help of the Mentat Wiki – an interesting website from the author of Mind Performance Hacks. Providing you with new memory ’systems’, you can use these to perform some useful (and not-so-useful) memory feats and improve your maths, all without the use of a calculator or other aid.

Yeah, that’s right baby: squaring and cubing large numbers… in my head! Hell yeah, that’s how I roll!

And seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, have some VD cards you can send to your ‘loved’ one. Perfect. (Bitter? Me?  No.)

Intelligence by Osmosis – What Do I Want to Know?

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on January 16, 2008 – 10:11 pm
Filed under Books

I’m a big fan of Clueless About Wine, (the now seemingly defunct) 365 Cheeses, and Get Rich Slowly – websites where the author has a go at being both student and teacher by writing on a subject that interests them in order to learn more about it. They’ve inspired me: what can I do that I can write about while also learning from the experience? What do I want to know?

When you really think about that question it’s actually not as easy to answer as it first seems. Like most things, as soon as you scrape the surface it becomes more complex and confusing than you thought. Of course there’s a lot I want to know, but what do I want to know that I can learn on my own, is interesting enough to become a viable long-term/permanent fixture of my life, and – more importantly – what can I make the most use of right now and in the future?

Then the signs came.

First was Scott H Young on Lifehack claiming that “it only takes reading 10-20 books on a subject until you know more on that topic than most of the population. Read 200-300 books on a subject and you’re an expert.” Next came a BBC article quoting a governmental study where “half of men aged 16-24 haven’t read a single book in the past 12 months with some claiming to have never read a book in their life.”

Let’s put these astonishing yet dubious statistics aside for now – after all, it’s not the stats that are important here: it’s the thinking behind them. And what is that? That reading gives you information and we should all be doing it. Sounds fair enough to me.

Through reading you are helping yourself communicate with every single person you come across, every single day: by reading new words in context you expand your vocabulary; by being ‘well read’ in many diverse topics you can engage more people in interesting conversation; having read ‘classic’ works you can understand what people mean when they reference them, quote them, or compare them to contemporary topics; you can, for once, answer that perennial modern question – Was the book really better than the film?; the list goes on. Let’s face it: absolutely nothing bad can come from reading a book – give or take a handful of paper-cuts in your entire life – so reading is a completely net-positive activity: for the logicians out there, this should surely be enough.

So by now I’m sure you’ve guessed it: I want to read more and write about it, right? Well, sort of. Above all I plan on changing my current reading habits: I have decided to try my hand at Intelligence by Osmosis.

Huh, what?

It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Honest. It’s just a sound-bite/buzz-word I concocted to make myself sound special when all I’ve done is make a decision to read more books written by intellectuals, whoever they may be. Generally I mean people who are well renowned in their field, rather than pretentious buggers who should know better.

I plan on reading a lot more non-fiction (or philosophical fiction) in order to learn more about specific topics, rather than spend the majority of my reading-time devouring novels – as is the norm for me. Why ‘osmosis‘? Well you see, I’m not going to read textbooks with the sole purpose of learning facts – I don’t want to actively seek knowledge; mainly because I don’t think that’ll be fun. Instead I plan to read more ‘pop-non-fiction‘: books authored by experts; on their topic of expertise; written in an engaging, interesting, and intelligent style, hopefully leading me to learn about these topics in a more enjoyable and passive manner. Hence Intelligence by Osmosis. Get it? Clever, huh? Oh OK, forget it!

The usual suspects of ‘popular science’ will be here: Noam Chomsky for linguistics, Steven Pinker and Edward Bernays for psychology, Sacks in neuroscience, Sachs in Economics (and Friedman, natch), Dawkins for Evolutionary Biology, and – of course – Hawking, Dyson, and even possibly Feynman, in theoretical physics. You get the idea.

Reading list to come soon. If you have any suggestions please, please, PLEASE let me know them – it’s not an easy list to come up with. Design, architecture, mediaevalism… anything… let me know.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – A Personal View

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on December 27, 2007 – 4:30 pm
Filed under Books

“What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.”

Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceAnd thus begins Robert Pirsig’s magnum opus, the ever-quotable Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM).

To me, ZMM is three books in one: Pirsig’s philosophical musings (on his Weltanschauung of Quality as a relationship between classical and romantic philosophies); a haunting account of a man trying to find himself whilst being tormented by his former self (Phædrus – all but lost after years of ’shock therapy’); and finally a touching (and ultimately tragic) account of a father and son undertaking a cross-country journey of self-discovery.

The first of these – Pirsig’s so-called chautauqua – is the philosophical part of this book and the reason why it is said to be “the most widely read philosophy book, ever”. It discusses Quality as a new way of looking at the world, a theory of reality where instead of viewing the world (and life itself) as object and subject, it is viewed in terms of its Quality.

This may sound complicated but it’s really not. Pirsig himself says Quality is undefinable; that it “cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual constructions. It is the ‘knife-edge’ of experience, known to all.” As Plato said: “What distinguishes good and bad writing?” It’s Quality and you already know what ‘it‘ is.

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”

I find the discussion of Quality as a philosophical view interesting, but feel the presentation could be improved upon. In the first half of the book all of the above ’stories’ are in harmony; sharing page space and complementing each other. However, as I ventured into the second half of ZMM the density of Pirsig’s philosophising took me by surprise and it took me a good few chapters to become re-immersed into the book.

If you’re expecting a novel, be wary – it sometimes feels like a full on philosophy text and you need to be prepared for it. If you are, you will find the chautauqua both absorbing and extremely thought-provoking; if not, you may find yourself wanting to put the book down.

“It’s paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest.”

The last of these ‘books’ – the one in which Pirsig and his son, Chris, journey together across America to discover both themselves and new places – is a powerful story that anyone can associate with, be they a traveller or not. The often tumultuous relationship between them is always held together by their love and a shared mental state bubbling beneath the surface.

However, for those ‘in the know’ this part of the story has a tragic twist: five years after the book’s publication, outside the San Francisco ‘Zen Centre’, Chris was murdered. That morning he had bought a plane ticket to visit, and had sent a letter to, his father in England – a letter received just days after his funeral stating “I never thought I would ever live to see my 23rd birthday.” It was to be his birthday two weeks later.

“Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.”

Recommended for all and sundry. 4.5 / 5