The shelf life of books

Part of the problem with graduating as a History/English double-major is that you've had years to get used to stuff in print staying passably fresh.  Like the sour cream in the 'fridge that should be primordial soup by now, but still passes the sniff test.  Written history and literature may be reinterpreted, and every great once in a while new extant material is discovered.  But the words really don't change.

Yet, although my college education has served me reasonably well in the past quarter-century, the above is one mental bad habit I haven't been able to ditch.  But this past week brought it home forcefully that I was, to a certain extent, spoiled for four years.

For reasons I can't now recall, the leftover (read: oddball) bookshelf that ended up in our bedroom was mostly stocked with programming-related books.  But then I needed to move them to paint the baseboard and walls, which forced me to take a hard look at a collection that would have been better triaged before the big move in 2011.

Some things are timeless--at least as timeless as they can be in I/T.  Give up my copies of Kernigan and Ritchie's C Primer or Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language?  Not on your tin-type.  Alas, the years have not been so kind to other tomes, covering (among other things):

• Visual Basic 6
• C# 2010
• Adobe Flex 4
• Java I/O (circa 2000)
• Java Servlets (circa J2EE 1.1?)
• Microsoft Visual InterDev 6
• T-SQL querying for SQL Server 2005
• Java2 Certification prep.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 
• Two Java books I remember buying when I started my I/T career (1999)

In fairness, Dennis still does enough work in classic ASP that my 2001-vintage reference is still relevant to his work.  But otherwise, owch.  What in the noodley name of The Flying Spaghetti Monster was I even thinking when I packed some of these?

Maybe, in a perfect world, Sally Annes would happily collect these books to send to programmers behind the Iron Curtain who were still working on Windows 95.  Scratch that--a perfect world would not include the Soviet Union.  Okay, maybe those programmers are really Portlandia hipsters coding IE5/Netscape apps. ironically.  Or something.

But the harsh reality is that these language versions will--unlike even bad fiction--return to vogue, except possibly for 2038 remediation work, and I'm not about to guard them for the next 20 years to save the world from Unixmageddon.  (Sorry, civilisation.)

Now I just have to bring myself to dispose of them responsibly.  Being the kind of bibliophile who's still outraged over the Library of Alexandria, I'm not sure I can consign them to the wood stove this winter.  (Besides, that VB6 book is like, five inches thick.)  Pity we're not into vermicomposting--we'd be set for bedding for quite some time.  Not to mention that we'd have the nerdiest worms in the province.

Whimsical chagrin

A reminder from Dennis reading aloud to me while I was washing dishes after he made dinner tonight:

"From a drop of water," said the writer, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.  So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.  Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.  Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Welcome to computer debugging, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.  Only in place of that drop of water substitute "It doesn't work!" and you'd be perfectly at home in the 21st century.

Spicing the truth

Over the past weekend, I finished Jack Turner's Spice: The History of a Temptation.   It's alternately hilarious and horrifying.  And, while he belabours his point a bit, it's hard to blame the author:  There's just So Much Stuff to write about in a tale that circumnavigates the globe and spans millennia.  You'll never look at your spice rack--particularly the pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and clove jars--the same way ever again.

The repeated theme is how the notion of spice has, through the centuries, become conflated with the exotic, sensual, piquant, and even the erotic.  Yet after swooping back and forth in Turner's historical panopoly, it to me seems a shorthand for what human beings do in the face of ignorance.

European merchants (and their suppliers) who traded in spices had a vested interest in keeping the Orient--from whence the spice originated--mysterious, dangerous, and glamourous.  Just like marketing today, it goosed the price--in that day, enough to justify spices' multi-year journey* by ship and pack-animal.

But a generation after Marco Polo's relatively tame account of his trip the Far East, folks still gave their credence to the dragons and mountains of gold invented by the pseudonymous Sir John de Mandeville, who, at best, was reporting second-hand.  (Notable exception:  Christopher Columbus, whose own annotated copy of The Travels of Marco Polo still exists.)

It's no secret that the human mind, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  But the real mystery--to my mind, at least--is how our species prefers to pad that gap with the most phantastical stuffing available.  Occam's Razor is no match for the UNIX Beard of conspiracy theories, escapist fantasies, doomsday porn, organisational solopsism...or whatever pathology the "explanations" serve.

- - - - -

* The distances traveled would doubtless have dulled the taste, justifying the larger quantities that are sometimes observed in medieval recipes.  And, incidentally, putting the lie to the often-repeated myth that spices served to mask the foulness of rotting food.

"Future history" is not prescriptive

I'm probably more prone than most people to be overly-inspired by the latest book I've read.  Sometimes not even the latest.  Sherlock Holmes has taken over a slice of my brain, possibly to lodge there for the rest of my life.  Yet I've never been able to understand what kind of book makes a person cross over from wanting to model themselves after a character to wanting to model the world after the book.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (for instance) are well-plotted, peopled by amazingly fleshed-out characters, chock-full of idealism, heroism, empathy, tear-jerking partings, laugh-out-loud funny dialogue, lyrical...all to a breathtaking backdrop straight out of Western European race-memory.  (Carl Jung ate this stuff for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack, yo.)  Yet the closest the books have come to being brought to life as a form of government is the Society for Creative Anachronism.  And even that's not based on a hereditary monarchy spawned by cross-species mating (e.g. elves and mortals).

Maybe, when I have less pressing things to do with my synapses, I'll get around to reading Ayn Rand's works.  That'll happen sometime shortly after earning my PhD in Underwater Basket-weaving, given my current level of enthusiasm.

Robert Heinlein--the secondary light of today's libertarianism--is another matter.  The man knew how to pace a story, and could write snappy dialogue like nobody's business.  Wanting the fuller background of a delightful snippet quoted in the otherwise leaden prose of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, I put Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon on my Christmas wish-list...and the Book Fairy was gracious enough to comply.

Until this point, I was mainly familiar with a couple of short stories and his calling-card, Stranger in a Strange Land.  In the latter, the prime antagonist is the Fosterite Church--a cult that made the most lurid reporting on Scientology seem halfway sane.  No surprise there, I guess--Ayn Rand's contempt for religion was as profound as it is ignored by her modern posse  (looking at you, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI).

But after that similarity, I was shocked to find an almost 180-degree divergence between the Queen and King of Libertarian Fiction.  Rand's world is clearly divided into heroic industrialists, evil government bureaucracies (because you never, EVER find evil bureaucracies in business!) and the "moocher" proles.  (That latter would be us, by the bye.) 

The Man Who Sold the Moon is actually a collection of short stories in a fictional time-line that leads up to the title piece.   Self-made business mogul D.D. Harriman (who receives the most screen-time) is certainly cast from the mold of the heroic, visionary industrialist.  Thus far, Ayn Rand would have approved.   Except that the BigBads aren't the  satraps of government agencies.  Oh, no.

[Spoiler Alert]

• "Life-line" -  Insurance companies
• "Let There Be Light" - Energy companies
• "Blowups Happen" -  Energy companies (again)
• "The Man Who Sold the Moon" - A mostly unimaginative cabal of business tycoons
• "Requiem" - Greedy heirs

I suppose that if you wanted to stretch it enough, you could turn "The Roads Must Roll" into an anti-union screed.  Except that you'd be lying to yourself.  The vast majority of the workers are hard-working, diligent, and occasionally capable of heroic self-sacrifice.  Treason from within--based on self-serving delusions--is the culprit.

[End Spoiler  Alert]

If anything, government in Heinlein's "future history" is a tool to be used, and the public something to be manipulated--although those aren't always fool-proof.  Otherwise, they are just immovable obstacles to be avoided, rather than destroyed head-on.

And--whoa, Nellie--did I just see something like Open Source being proposed all the way back in May of 1939???

But one of the most un-Randian, and delicious, passages comes early (almost like the proverbial warning shot over the bow) in "Life-line," from the mouth of an anonymous judge :

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest.  This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law.  Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back for their private benefit."

Bazinga.

 Pity nothing's changed since this was penned over 75 years ago (April 1939).

Don't get me wrong--I'm not a huge Heinlein fan, although I am looking forward to what looks like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" played out in a spaceship (Orphans of the Sky).  And The Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes highly recommended from a couple of people.  I've lost much of my taste for fiction, but I'm fairly sure I won't regret giving these a go.

In the meantime, I'm wryly amused at finding yet another "prophet"'s handiwork thoroughly cherry-picked by his/her acolytes. 

Another thought on knowing what business you're in

Being a rather passionate book-lover and a programmer besides, eReaders are pretty much a perfect storm of two different branches of nerdery. Coming from that viewpoint, I couldn't help but think that David Carnoy's "Fully Equipped" column in last week's CNet was missing the point--and a very large one at that.

When you buy a book, you take home a bundle of dead tree and (hopefully) plant-derived ink and that's the end of that. No account number to track what items are at your fingertips or lent out. No remembering what page of each book you're on. No built-in dictionary. And if you lose it (or some dastardly soon-to-be-ex-friend doesn't bother to return it), too bad for you.

An eReader--at least one tied to a brand-name book vendor--is a bit more lingering. Or should be. For all the previous reasons as well as the fact that corrections and/or updates and/or addendum can be pushed to it. It's not like the editors at Doubleday microchip your paperback bodice-ripper to tone down the breathy dialog/narrative whenever federal CO2 emissions standards are tightened.

I think the problem is that two different products are being sold under the same heading. To the detriment of the electronic product's value proposition. Sure, I have my problems with the extremely haphazard quality of eBooks (and even the unsuitability of the format for some). But as a programmer I do realize that it's an apples-to-pumpkins kind of comparison. Mainly because I know that storage in the cloud is not free--even simple database table associations between people and books. Nor is 99.9+% uptime. Nor are device software updates.

Now, I'm not saying that retail shelf space, shipping, offloading overstock, staffing, etc. come at a discount, either. For all I know, the costs may come out even--though I rather doubt it. What I'm saying is that the vendors are doing a dreckish job of justifying the price differential to the consumer. No, that won't be an easy campaign--too much of anything delivered over the internet is liable to be considered "free." But that's a campaign that should have been planned well before any of the gadgets ever hit the market. Currently, the perception of what an eBook should be priced is based on a perception of cost that's not entirely accurate. By all rights, "cost" should not have entered the picture. Instead, the instant and ubiquitous access and the ongoing curation of the experience (not to mention one's ever-expanding library) should have been what was sold. Not words and pictures.

Frivolous Friday, 12.03.2010: Book review

A week or so ago, I finished Daniel Ariely's Predictably Irrational. It is easily the best read I've had since snarfing Cognitive Surplus in August. Partly because they both fly in the face of conventional wisdom that says that human beings live and work to optimize their take from the world--locking out others if necessary.

But while Shirky's book is useful for understanding how to foster innate motivation and generosity in people, Arielly's work tackles the route to happiness from a different cardinal direction. He does this by breaking down the effects (both good and bad) of "free," the power of comparisons--real and illusionary--in decision-making, the pull of sunk costs (i.e. "ownership"), the conflation of price and value, etc. It's not long before the illustrations of how we fritter (or gamble) away our time, money and opportunities becomes downright dismaying. And, although the honesty is commendable, it's more dismaying still when the anecdotes Arielly uses are from his own experience--at a time when he, intellectually, should have known better. (The fact that many experiments were carried out on unsuspecting MIT students, who are supposed to be pretty sharp, only rubs salt into the already-stinging pride...)

But ignorance is bliss, it also comes with a high price tag. When the folks on our lovely jewel of a planet come to their senses and elect me Supreme Benevolent Dictator for Life, this will be mandatory high school curriculum, which I don't say about much, except for memorizing the formula for computing compound interest. And knowing how to use apostrophes (for those languages that have them). And understanding logical fallacies. Oh, and not making stuff up about history or the constitution of your country, darnitalready!

Anyhoo, since my ascension to absolute power seems to be slow in coming, I'll only say that I don't have enough thumbs to give this book the props it deserves. Go--pester the library for it if they don't already have it. Trust me.

The "Green Acres" paradox

Based on recommendations of a couple A-list types, I snagged a copy of Lisa Gansky's The Mesh and am about halfway through it. I'm already sick of her raving about ZipCar, but expect to polish off the book anyway. Despite the fact that it doesn't apply to software development except to emphasize Web 2.0 and mobile apps as one of the underpinnings of mesh business development.

(Aside: It's a little weird reading about BP's oil spill in an actual book--particularly given how I'd just finished Crossing the Chasm, which--even in my "updated" edition--mentioned the Twin Towers as if they still stood.)

Trust me when I say that I'd like to believe that all Gansky's premises are true. Particularly the one about how the Great Recession has adjusted people's value systems to prefer part-ownership (or renting) well-made things to full ownership of their shoddier, inhumanely- and unsustainably-made counterparts. But--with all due disrespect to the ethical fecklessness of the average American consumer--my cats have longer-term memories. Seriously.

That being said, one point in favor of Gansky's arguments is the increasing density of urban areas. When done right, it's certainly a "greener" way of living than offered by the 'burbs. But that brings us to what I hereby dub "The 'Green Acres'* Paradox," by which I mean that "the dream" is still to carve out a slice of real estate that we can call "ours." Where we can remain blissfully ignorant of our neighbors' dreckish taste in music, their domestic woes, or even their pet ownership status. As my prof. for American History I and II in college put it, "There is no freedom like the freedom from the vices of one's neighbors." (Preach it, brother!)

Yet, somehow, just down the road (not even half-a-holler, y'all), there's supposed to be a full grocery store.

And a gas station.

And a WalMart.

And a Starbucks.

And a Gap.

And four bars on the 4G phone.

And this amazing little hole-in-the-wall Thai/Halal/Tapas/Tepanyaki/Dim Sum place.

And...you get the idea.

And what I take away from this is that the companies that best reconcile the paradox will win as big as they want to win. Not necessarily for the "right" reasons of sustainability and distaste for materialism. But because, as a culture, we're pastmasters at saying one thing and doing another.

P.S.: If anyone out there invents a technology to neutralize the hystrionics of a spectacularly undisciplined beagle, call me.

- - - - -
* Exerpt from the "Green Acres" Theme Song

Oliver Douglas: Green acres is the place to be:
Farm living is the life for me!
Land spreading out,
so far and wide.
Keep Manhattan,
just give me that countryside.

Lisa Douglas: New York
is where I'd rather stay:
I get allergic smelling hay.
I just adore a penthouse view.
Darling, I love you,
but give me Park Avenue.

Frivolous Friday, 08.20.2010: Recommended Reading

I'll probably write more on this from a more serious angle of angle after I polish them off, but in the meantime, I heartily recommend the memoirs of General/President Ulysses S. Grant for reasons that have little to do with software development:

• At West Point, Grant excelled at few things, but mathematics was one of them. (Booyah for America's second Nerd-in-Chief!)
• His writing, thanks to his own talents (with presumably a bit of polishing from a contemporary whose name might seem familiar because it's Mark Twain) is cogent, clear-eyed, modest, respectful of history where record and recollection diverge, and actually laugh-out-loud funny at times.
• The recollections and opinions are pretty much guaranteed to creep you the heck out with either their prescience. Ditto the head-banging frustration of realizing how closely history can repeat itself (e.g. the way the first-hand description of San Francisco during the Gold Rush years presages the dot-com boom and collapse.)
  
• The work, originally published in the 1880s, is out of copyright and should be available for a price ranging from free to chump-change.
• It should whet your appetite for more. Seriously--the Civil War isn't quite so done-to-death as World War II, but its paths are well-worn enough that I tend to shy away from it, given the choice. After this, I actually might break down and hitch a ride on the Team of Rivals bandwagon.
• (This was endearing to me, anyway: Grant more or less concedes that, when it came to finer details, he pretty much needed a keeper. Just like I sometimes do.)
  

Granted, this isn't exactly pulp fiction we're talking about here--meaning the kind of brain-twinkie you snarf down during re-run season. And it's not unbiased: Despite a certain gentility, Grant makes no bones about his views. Plus, he also tends to gloss over certain...shall we say..."complicating" details, such as his wife coming from a slave-owning family, not to mention his skirmishes against the bottle. For all that, you simply can't go wrong with this peek through History's keyhole.

Wanted: Netflix for books

I marched through the remainder of The Anatomy of Buzz yesterday. It was worth the eyeball-time, but I doubt I'll ever read it again. In such cases, a cross between Netflix and a less sleazy rent-to-own business model would be perfect: If I like it enough to want a copy permanently, I can buy it; if not, back it goes into the pool for someone else to try.

At present, that idea amounts to wishful thinking on my part. It seems (judging from the blogs of Clay Shirky and Seth Godin) that the publishing industry is resisting the full implications of digital distribution--and doing it about as well as the recording and motion picture industries.

Ultimately, I think that publishers--including self-publishers--will largely bypass the retailers, at best turning them (more obviously) into marketing fronts. But in the meantime, the distribution mechanisms (full-fledged computers, tablets, smartphones and e-readers) are in their Wild West, VHS vs. BetaMax phase. Unfortunately, such profusion of options pretty much guarantees more evolutionary dead-ends than usual.

But in the fallout, perhaps there will be room for the equivalent of secondhand bookstores (minus, alas, the heady perfume of old paper), catering to esoteric formats and out-of-print content. I love secondhand bookstores, so I can't resist that bit of wishful thinking.