Sprache

For the last five years, I have kept up a constant and generally futile battle to get the children to speak German at home. Roswitha made a really lovely sign to hang at our table - "Sag es auf Deutsch!" (Say it in German!) - and the rule was that the family spoke German at breakfast and dinner. But the battle was, as I say, futile. We were never willing to punish English with sufficient severity to convince the children that German was worth the trouble, and at any rate they would generally just not speak rather than switch languages. I wasn't too terribly worried, though, because we went through the same struggle in reverse while raising our oldest two in Germany, and within a couple of months in America they had switched entirely to flawless English.

The real secret, I think, is constant exposure. When we previously lived in Germany, I never spoke German with the children. They knew I understood it, so they would never say a word in English to me, but I simply spoke English to them all the time. And Rose and I always spoke English together - I didn't actually speak any German at all until we'd been together for a few years, so we have always been more comfortable speaking English together in any case. When my parents came to visit or we made a trip to America, it was clear that it was working; as soon as they encountered people who didn't do what they wanted when it was demanded in German, the kids would switch it up and make their requirements known in beautiful, unaccented American English.

We obeyed roughly the same rule during our five years in America, with the exception that I would speak a lot more German with the kids, mostly because speaking German at home was how I was trying to keep in practice. But as I said, the kids were not enthusiastic participants.

Now, though, Elijah, the middlest of our three children, is sitting on the couch with his cousin, teaching him to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in perfectly beautiful German. Considering that he's been speaking German again for all of two days (we spent the first nine days, remember, in the bubble of quarantine), his ability is incredible. He's making lots of grammatical mistakes, especially confusing the gender of nouns and conjugating irregular verbs incorrectly, and he's missing a few words - teleport, goal, climb - but his cousin is infinitely patient and in the time I've been typing this I've heard Elijah use all three of those words correctly. He'll be indistinguishable from any other native speaker within a couple of months.

It makes me so happy to see my children growing up bilingual. I was such a poor student, in such a bad educational system, and had such awful teachers, that I literally never realized that I had a knack for languages and a passion for learning them until I started learning Japanese as a young adult. I'm really jealous of them for getting a second language right out of the gate. And, of course, since they are now going to be getting their educations in Germany, they'll have the opportunity to pick up another two languages before heading off to college.

Of course, I am very aware of the danger of projecting my own passions onto my children. I'm not going to be some super pushy Polyglot Papa, forcing the children to their language lessons every day and making sure their Latin is up to snuff. It's entirely possible their passions are going to be electronic music and football, and if that's the case I'll dig deep and find a way to love them anyway. But whether they come to love languages as I do or not, they'll always have the gift of being conversant in two languages and comfortable in two worlds. I think that's pretty special.

Freedom

Freedom

Yesterday afternoon, after nine days in quarantine, we finally got the call from the local health office: our negative Covid tests had been processed, and we were officially free to leave our apartment. Quarantine here is strict - there is no provision for any activity outside your residence, period. No walks, no drives, nothing.

We immediately arranged a play date with our niece and nephew at a neighborhood playground. For the first time since March, I got to watch my children play with other children. Such a simple thing, children playing with children, the most normal thing in the world. But of course for half a year the closest thing to playing with friends that our children could experience was a surreal mockery of the real thing. Sitting in a chair ten feet away while a friend jumped on a trampoline, sitting on the deck while a friend played in the yard. Now they were running around, climbing, digging in the playground sand, laughing and jumping and doing what children are meant to do. This was the moment that made me think all the insanity and stress of the last two months have been totally worth it; my children get to have something like a normal childhood again.

To be honest, the adjustment to living in a part of the world where Covid-19 isn't a huge danger is going to be very difficult for me. I have an invitation in my calendar for a meeting next week; a training session in a conference room with six people I've never met. I'm totally terrified. 

I know for a fact that there's no real reason to be worried; with extensive testing (I can't find local positivity rates yet, but Germany has a nationwide positivity rate below 1%), there have only been 12 confirmed cases of Covid in the county of more than 100,000 residents that we live in in the last 14 days. The county-wide rate is 0.84 daily cases per 100,000 residents, compared to about 17 in the Benton-Franklin County area we left. Context is important here, too; the current rate here is the result of a significant rise that is likely to prompt official action, and the rate back in Washington is the result of a reduction by half over the last month that seems likely to prompt folks to relax even more.

I assemble these numbers, as I have nearly every day for the last half year, so that I can do my best to make rational decisions about risk. But it's really hard to make rational decisions; when I was still in Washington, it seemed obvious that the rational thing was to hunker down, avoid social contacts, and so that's what we did, and it was a constant struggle not to feel like I was crazy for doing what the science said would keep me, my loved ones, and my community safe. Now the rational thing is clearly to be cautious, but to go to work in person when necessary, shop in stores, visit friends and family. But after six months of living in a much more seriously impacted community, now I can see that it's going to be a struggle not to feel like I'm crazy for not being hyper-vigilant and avoiding social contacts at all costs.

One new experience today that I'd completely forgotten about; quiet. Rose has taken the kids to the park again, and I am sitting at home, entirely by myself. This may very well be the first time I've worked for an entire uninterrupted hour since February, and it's utterly glorious.

The multiverse and improbable outcomes

I've been occupying my mind the last couple of weeks by going deep on a few ideas of a philosophical nature, mostly inspired by my recent reading of Neil Stephenson's Anathem. If you like books that make you think thoughts and also take you on wild sci-fi adventures, read Anathem. I'm sending the paperback on a tour of as many friends as I can get to read it and buying myself a hardcover copy that I can read a few more times and annotate. It's that good.

So here's a thought that's been bothering me about the multiverse theory. To summarize it very succinctly, the multiverse theory holds that, every time a random quantum-mechanical probability is resolved (for example, an unstable atom decays or does not), new universes are spawned to reflect each possible outcome. So in one universe an atom splits and in another it doesn't. With the incomprehensible number of quantum events taking place throughout the universe at any given moment, the number of universes that this idea would give rise to is vast on a scale beyond my ability to even attempt to convey it.

So here's the idea that's been sending my brain in circles: What if there is some very common quantum-mechanical effect that, for example, has a 90% chance to cause the entire universe to explode in fire during any given second. So after every second, there are nine universes in which everything has been annihilated and one in which it has not. Then after another second, that survivor universe has spawned another ten outcomes, nine of which are on fire. And so on and so on for trillions of years. What if ten copies of humanity are being spawned every second, and the version writing this post, and the version reading this post, are the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, the tiny surviving remnant of a vast apocalypse?

This is basically the anthropic principle raised to the highest possible degree - what if the universe we inhabit at any given moment is, in fact, one of only a very tiny fraction that's managed to survive as long as it has, and the only reason that we perceive the universe as being a stable and constant phenomenon is that all the versions of the universe that have demonstrated its inherent instability resulted in all observers being instantly destroyed?

Priorities

Via Jon Rosenberg:

Enjoy your guns, gun owners. I hope they make you happy in a way that breathing, smiling six-year old children cannot.

Addendum

Rose just sat with Josie and drew a few pictures.

Rose draws a sun, Josie says "Sonne!"

Rose draws a star, Josie says "Stern!"

Rose draws a crescent moon. Josie says "Banane!"

From the mouths of babes

This evening, I was reattaching a toilet paper holder that has come off of its mount, and Josie came in looking at me with wide eyes. "Papa, doing?"

I'm constantly amazed at the things that Josie can say. Bilingual children start speaking more slowly than children raised with a single mother language on average, but Josie's development in German seems to be just about typical, and her English is already getting pretty good, too.

Some of my favorite things that she says:

- In addition to "moo", "oink oink", and other animal sounds, she's learned to moan "braaaaaains" when I ask her what zombies say.

- She's obsessed with running fast, and she always announces "'Phine, nell!" ('Phine, fast!) before she takes off.

- Whenever I put her socks on, I get one crooked and she complains "nein, Papa, falsch. So 'rum." (no, Papa, wrong. This way around.)

- When I tell her I love her, she's started saying "vuv yuu" back to me. It melts my heart.

On big numbers

I have a real issue with the way numbers associated with macroeconomics are reported in the news. Ezra Klein writes that the American Federal Reserve is planning to perform quantitative easing to the tune of $600 billion.

The reason this sort of thing bugs me is that the number is essentially meaningless, because it is beyond comprehension. Your average person (or even your average above average person) is going to look at that number, and their brain is going to gloss it as "a metric Jesusload of money."

What I would much rather see is values like this in per-capita terms, and broken down over time: $600 billion is roughly $1,900 per American citizen. Spread out over seven months (the Fed plans to inject the money into the economy by purchasing treasuries between now and June), that's $271 a month per person in additional money entering the economy.

Isn't it a bit easier to comprehend the Fed's action and its possible impact when it's put like that?

By the way: I am hopefully going to be posting around here occasionally again. The birth of the Loaf massively reduced the time I could invest in the Umlaut, and my massive fondness for Starcraft 2 has basically eaten what free time I have left, but when the muse strikes I shall scurry over here to share my thoughts with whatever readers I may still have.

The year in books #22, #23 & #24

It's a three-fer special today at the American Umlaut! Woot! Despite the absence of my words here at the ol' Umlaut, I have not stopped reading books, but I've found myself with less and time to write about them here. The birth of the Loaf, the release of Starcraft 2, and a renewed passion for playing the piano have all left me... well, I wanted to say "with less free time," but of course, I have plenty of free time and am simply choosing to spend it with my daughter, my game and my instrument. I find, though, that it remains very important to me to get my thoughts about the books I read down somewhere. I especially like writing about books I've loved - telling a friend about a book that has fascinated or moved me feels a bit like introducing two friends and watching to see how they hit it off. I love letting you all know what I've enjoyed, and I really love all the times I've heard from my readers that they've looked at something I recommended here and enjoyed it.

So let's get to it. The first book to be discussed today is Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent, a Discworld novel describing the adventures of Rincewind and his fellow Unseen University wizards as they explore EcksEcksEcksEcks, the titular last continent, which bears a striking resemblance to Earth's Australia. I have shared my thoughts on the Discworld books generally in my previous post about The Hogfather, so this review can be short and sweet: This is the only Discworld novel I've ever found less than fabulous. The humor felt quite forced in places, and the fact that I'm not terribly familiar Australian culture or the stereotypes the English associate with Australians left me never sure if a particular characteristic of the continent in the novel was a Discworld-specific funny thing or was supposed to be, in some way, making fun of Australia. If you're a big Discworld fan, then I suppose you're going to read this one in any case, but if you're not, I wouldn't recommend this as an introduction to the world or to Terry Pratchett's writing, which has otherwise never failed to impress me.


Books two and three in today's Review Spectacular are Dan Simmons's Hyperion and it's sequel, The Fall of Hyperion. Hyperion came out in 1989 and won the 1990 Hugo award for best novel, and when The Fall of Hyperion came out the next year it got a Hugo nomination and won the Locus. The reason that I am writing about the two books together rather than as separate pieces is that they are essentially a single novel in two volumes. Based loosely on The Canterbury Tales, Hyperion follows five pilgrims (a private detective, the former governor of a colony planet, a priest of a religion worshiping life, a catholic priest, and a great warrior) as they make a pilgrimage to the site of the legendary and deadly Shrike creature, taking turns telling the tale that has led them to make the pilgrimage. As their stories are more or less completely independent of each other, the book is less a novel than a collection of novellas, which together serve to paint a coherent picture of the far-future universe in which they are set, tied together with interstitial bits detailing the pilgrimage itself. The Fall of Hyperion is much more traditionally novel-like in its structure, continuing the story from the point of the pilgrims' arrival at the Shrike temple.

If you like science fiction, you must read these books. Even if sci-fi isn't your cup of tea, I suspect there is a great deal to appeal to the mere appreciator of fine literature. They reach heights of artistry and depths of philosophical thought that you rarely find in literature of any kind, and they do it while telling a captivating, epic story. Revealing any more of the story would ruin the fun of letting the books reveal it themselves, so just take my word for it: these are good books!

The year in books #21: The Silent War

I hadn't planned to read this novel, but discovered it at my in-laws' place and thought it looked interesting. Ben Bova's name is legendary in the sci-fi world, and so far The Kinsman Saga is the only work of his I've read. At least, I thought so - as I got a few chapters into the book, I realized that I had, in fact, read it once before, but had almost entirely forgotten the story.

The Silent War tells a tale of corporate war over the question of who will rule the almost limitless resources of the asteroid belt. It contains all of the elements of an excellent sci-fi thriller: it's action-packed; persons are beaten, exploded, perforated and otherwise caused to become partly or entirely nonfunctional. It is thrilling; there are alliances, betrayals, secret schemes. It is wonderfully paced and an entertaining read. (Related question, am I the only one who finds the term "page turner" silly? All books are page-turners. That's how books work. Saying a book kept you turning pages until the end is like saying a movie kept your eyes open until it was over.) The only part of the book I found uninteresting was the short story that, split in two, serves as opening and closing act for the novel proper. I suspect I'm missing the backstory necessary to get what was going on there; this is the third book in a trilogy, and I haven't read the other two, though that didn't make the rest of the novel any harder to understand.

Throughout my reading of this book, the one thing that bothered me was the same thing that bugged me about The Kinsman Saga: Reading the book is fun, but there's nothing particularly memorable about it. It's absolutely clear that Bova has mastered the craft of writing entertaining novels, but I feel like a novel - especially a science fiction novel - should aspire to more than being simply entertaining. The power and beauty of sci-fi is the practically limitless ideas its conceits allow an author to explore, but there's nothing surprising or particularly thought provoking in The Silent War. The concept of a future in which corporate actors are more powerful and important than state actors - one of the main themes of the book - is about as speculative in a 21st century novel as the concept of a future in which people carry Internet-connected devices in their pockets.

My very strong suspicion is that I'm reading the wrong Ben Bova books. A lot of authors who produce dozens of books over decades of work seem to produce much less truly original thought in their later books, even as their craft improves (see Piers Anthony: Macroscope is packed with brilliant ideas and dissolves into almost unreadable psychobabble about two-thirds through. The Xanth books, in contrast, are totally readable but hadn't produced an original idea in ten volumes or so when I finally gave up on them). I suspect that Bova wouldn't be so well known if all his novels were the sort of popcorn space thriller represented by The Silent War and the Kinsman Saga books.

My final verdict is that this is an excellent book for a sci-fi fan's day at the beach or intercontinental flight. If you're looking for something with psychological or speculative depth, however, you'll find this one lacking. If any of you happen to be familiar with Ben Bova and have a book suggestion for me, please drop by the comments section!

The year in books #20: Windup Girl

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am catching up with my backlog of books to review here. I think that actually getting through fifty books this year is entirely impossible, as I've only read twenty-five so far, and most of them were prior to the arrival of the world's cutest poop factory in my life. Today, though, I awoke at five o'clock, so I'll take the chance to jot down my thoughts on the fourth Hugo-nominated novel I read this year.

The Windup Girl is, alone among this year's Hugo nominees (with the possible exception of Wake, which I've been assured I'll be receiving in celebration of my birthday today), actually a science fiction novel. The Hugos are officially awarded for science fiction and fantasy, and there are sub-genres such as the sort of social fiction represented by The City & The City that fall under the broader category of speculative fiction which I am happy to see embraced by the awards. But I grew up reading Heinlein and Niven and Asimov, and nothing warms my heart like excellent, well constructed sci-fi. With The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (possibly the least-pronounceable author in the genre) has produced exactly that.

It behooves my to provide my definition of sci-fi - even within its own fandom, the genre's boundaries are subject to intense debate. I consider science fiction, as I believe I mentioned in another recent post, to be fiction that concerns itself with the human meaning of technological change or scientific discovery, or uses the conceit of a future or alien culture to explore the human experience from a novel perspective. Ringworld, which explores not only the Ringworld itself, but the impact of technologies as diverse as instant teleportation and direct stimulation of the brain's pleasure centers, is an excellent example of the former. Star Trek's technology is essentially magical and arbitrary, but the series are among the best science fiction of the second category, using the unique setting of a future populated by hundreds of alien races to produce allegories of modernity.

The Windup Girl is excellent science fiction of both types. It portrays a world in which the oil has run out and the energy economy has become focused instead on the efficient production, storage and transmission of kinetic energy for industry and transportation (largely in the form of genetically-engineered mastodons used to crank up nanotechnological springs with capacities in the gigajoules, which I find absolutely brilliant). In parallel to the collapse of the oil-driven industrial world, diseases engineered by warring food cartels (whose products are, of course, immune) have wiped out much of the world's food supply and left even the companies themselves scrambling to find new genes to keep their harvests a step ahead of the next mutation.

Enter Anderson Lake, a "Calorie Man" working for AgriGen, sent to Thailand in search of both genetic diversity and inroads into a nation that has kept itself independent of the food mega-corporations. And enter Emiko, member of the first generation of New Japanese, genetically engineered "windup girls" created by childless Japan to replenish their aging labor force, left behind to be exploited or destroyed in Bangkok by an owner who planned to buy the newest model upon his return. The two meet as Thailand is plunging into rebellion, and their fates, and those of the many other brilliantly realized characters that populate this novel, hang in the balance.

As you can see, The Windup Girl packs a lot of novel ideas into a few hundred pages, and it explores them in a way that is compelling and interesting, and reduces the thundering pace of the story not a single iota. This is the first book I've read in months that I found myself completely lost in, in love with the world it takes place in and the characters that populate it, and excited by the ideas within it. As if it weren't enough to pack a novel with interesting characters, a driving plot and a fascinating premise, Bacigalupi also paints the entire thing onto the backdrop of Thai history and culture with a remarkable realism.

The Windup Girl has the goods. It has four or five novels worth of the goods. And yet it's being sold for the same price as books of normal conceptual density; a bargain of which you should avail yourself at your next opportunity.

I had forgotten, until I started writing this, just how much of an impact this book had on me. I retract my previous vote for The City & The City (which is nonetheless excellent) - The Windup Girl is the speculative fiction novel of the year.

The year in books #19: The City & The City

It is not at all unusual for a novel to be as much about its own setting as about the characters within it, and because of the genre's focus on exploring novel concepts, the science fiction genre is particularly rife with books in which the planet, nation or city in which they take place is not the background but the entire point. Some classic examples include Herbert's Dune, Niven's Ringworld and Varley's Titan, which are also some of my all-time favorite novels. It amused me to realize that, of the six novels nominated for this year's Hugo award, three of them are of this type, each of them taking place in a city that is itself one of the most important characters in the book. In Palimpsest, the city that lends the book its title is both the motivating force behind, and the setting of, the great majority of the action. Steampunk Seattle is the setting of Boneshaker, as well as the only thing in the novel with an interesting personality. And my nineteenth book of the year, China Miéville's The City & The City, takes place in the sister cities of Besžel and Ul Qoma, brilliantly rendered and utterly believable invented cultures which provide a fascinating backdrop to a murder mystery that is, if not as brilliantly constructed as the setting it is solved in, certainly interesting enough to keep the pages eagerly turning.

Like Palimpsest, the discovery of Besžel's and Ul Qoma's nature is one of the great delights of the novel, and I'll not ruin it by delving too deeply into the book's premise. What I will say is that that premise seems, on the face of it, laughably ridiculous. What Miéville does with remarkable mastery is to present that premise in such a natural, fluid and consistent way that the reader is able to utterly suspend disbelief, and to craft a very entertaining story on the basis of that premise.

Most important to me, The City & The City goes a step beyond crafting a clever world and an entertaining story. Miéville has things to say, and he says them well. Things about the nature of the Other, of the malleability of human perception, about the nature of culture, about divisions between rich and poor, even about peace in the Middle East (I cannot be the first reader to see the novel's setting as an allegory of Palestine, can I?). The reason I am drawn to science fiction is its exploration of the human meaning of new ideas. The City & The City is not properly science fiction, but it does the same work using different tools. If science fiction is a study of the social impact of technology, then The City & The City might be best described as social fiction, exploring the social impact of societies themselves.

I can definitely recommend this one to you - barring a remarkable performance by Wake, the only Hugo-nominated novel I haven't read yet, The City & The City is my favorite to win the prize. It's only about a micron ahead of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, though, which I'll likely review next so that I can explain why I want the prize to go to Miéville.

The year in books #18: Boneshaker

The second Hugo nominee I read this year was Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. I was hugely excited to read this book, a steampunk alternate history of mid-19th century Seattle containing zombies and airships - a Hugo-nominated novel built entirely of awesome. How could you go wrong?

As it turns out, Boneshaker manages the remarkable feat of turning a premise that had me gripped by the story before I'd even opened the book into one of the least interesting stories I've read in years. The world itself is wonderfully constructed, with a backstory that riffs delightfully on Seattle's fascinating history and explains in a tolerably plausible way why the city is now a walled-in, zombie-infested hellhole ruled by a mad scientist. Unfortunately, by the time the book actually begins, all of the interesting things seem to have long since taken place.

The tale at the center of Boneshaker is of a mother attempting to rescue her teenage son from the above-mentioned hellhole, assisted by a series of bland characters whose behavior seems driven much more by the needs of the narrative than by their own motivations. The zombies spend the vast majority of the tale lurking threateningly in the background, then prove themselves utterly uninteresting when they do get the chance to chew on the occasional character or provide one of the better-armed side characters with a chance to get splashily violent.

The story itself is also horribly unreasonable. I am willing for the sake of a story to accept any premise, no matter how unrealistic or unreasonable, but the events that flow from that premise must do so naturally. In Boneshaker, the zombies are relatively limited in number (I think the number quoted somewhere was 6,000), can be killed by bullets, and are unable to climb. The humans are armed not only with guns but with an EMP-like device that knocks the zombies senseless for a brief time. And in all the years that Seattle has been infested by these horribly dangerous creatures, no one ever thought to either (a) sit a few guys on the rooftops with rifles to take potshots at them or (b) lure a few hundred zombies at a time into a swarm, stun them, then kill them in great numbers while they lay twitching? Also, as I mentioned above, none of the characters' behavior seems consistent with what we are told about their circumstances. The Seattlites' anger toward the mad scientist who 'rules' is rooted in the fact that... he does things for them so that they are always indebted to him? And they're so horribly angry about this that they're ready to stage an almost instantly successful rebellion, but for some reason restrain themselves until the rebellion becomes useful for the purposes of the novel that they find themselves in. And... and... and...

I was horribly disappointed by Boneshaker and am frankly confused as to how it made it to the Hugo short list. I feel like it was nominated on the strength of its premise rather than on the actual story it contains, which utterly fails to compel.

The year in books #17: The Little Prince

I somehow managed to make it through more than twenty-seven years of life without ever reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic novella The Little Prince. I finally sat down with Rose's copy a few weeks ago and was astounded that I'd been missing out on such a gem for so long. The tale follows the titular diminutive royalty as he sets forth from the tiny asteroid where he makes his home, finally ending up on Earth, where he encounters the narrator, an aviator stranded in the desert following a crash landing. En route, the prince experiences a series of morally-edifying encounters in the style of Gulliver's Travels with the inhabitants of other asteroids: the king who is careful to give only commands that were going to be followed anyhow; the businessman who wants to establish ownership of the stars so that he can use them to buy more stars; the drunk who drinks to forget the shame of his drunkenness. On Earth, his conversations with the narrator are both thought-provoking and wonderfully sweet.

Ostensibly, The Little Prince is a children's book, and I can absolutely imagine a small child loving it, but a great deal of the story deals with philosophical concepts like the nature of property, the meaning of life, the definition of love, that make the story worth a read for adults, as well.

Something that amused me terribly when I started reading The Little Prince (in fact, seeing the cover was what did it) was that I immediately recognized it as the basis for a cartoon I watched as a small child. All I could remember of the series was that it featured a boy who lived on an asteroid and traveled about with his bird-like companion by catching shooting stars in a butterfly net. And that I had an episode on cassette tape at one point; my father, wanting to nap for half an hour and then go to work, told me to wake him up when the episode was done. I, being a thoughtful boy who wanted to let his daddy sleep, pressed rewind at the end of every scene and watched it a second time. Daddy was not pleased. In any case, now that I knew where the cartoon came from, I was very quickly able to track it down on YouTube for a quick blast of nostalgia. Unfortunately, like most cartoons from my childhood, it doesn't hold up well.

Top Secret America

The Washington Post is running an amazing series on the explosion in clandestine information gathering that has taken place since 9/11 in the United States. I've only had a chance to scan a few of the articles and graphics they've put together (I'm at work), but this is a massive undertaking that's so far occupied a team of reporters for two years, and what I've seen of the reporting is very impressive work.

The year in books #16: Palimpsest

As a sub-quest for this year's 50 Book Challenge, I have undertaken to read all of the novels nominated for this year's Hugo Award. The Hugo is the most prestigious award for science fiction, created in 1955 to fill a glaring hole created by what was most likely a copy-editing error in Alfred Nobel's will (he clearly meant to write "for advances in science fiction"). During the ten (dear lord) years that I spent attending university, I had so little money and time to spend reading books of my choosing that I've felt detached from the world of sci-fi, and picking up the six best-received novels of the last year felt like a good way to get back into the genre I love so much.

The first of this year's nominees to hit my bedside table was Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest, which immediately and then repeatedly blew my mind. Holy crap can the woman write! Palimpsest's hauntingly evokative prose is so gorgeous that I repeatedly found myself reading passages three and four times just to savor the language. Writing so powerful could easily lift a mediocre story into the realm of readability, but the fairytale that Valente weaves is itself an incredible piece of work.

I find myself at this point, as so often when reviewing good stories, deeply reluctant to spoil the fun of discovering the world in which this book takes place, because so much of the fun of such a novel is in the "ah hah!" moments that punctuate it. Let me reveal as little as possible: Palimpsest is about four people from all around the world (one, to my delight, from Kyoto) who stumble into the secret of the cryptic, magical city from which the book derives its name. The four are a locksmith, a train enthusiast, a book printer and a beekeeper, and the exploration of their personalities and the manner in which they experience and influence the city of Palimpsest is as fascinating as the city itself.

Palimpsest shares with a great many novels I've read the hook of the unknown; as you read such books, it is your curiosity about the world that provides suspense, and the revelation of aspects of the world that provide the pleasure of the reading experience. A great many such books are disappointing for various reasons: often, the reveal is unbelievable or not compelling, or the story is driven so much by its world and so little by its characters that it simply ceases to be interesting once the mysteries have been exposed. In Palimpsest, though, the reader is drawn in as through an onion, with each layer exposing another, the mysteries explained in rapid, believable and satisfying succession, but always leaving the reader primed for more.

I have only one complaint about this book, and it's so minor and nitpicky that I'm slightly ashamed for even calling your attention to it. One of the characters, as I mentioned above, comes from Kyoto, and visits Ginkakuji, commenting on the appearance of the silver coating the pavilion's walls. Unfortunately, Ginkakuji rather famously has no silver on its walls; its name ("Silver Pavilion") comes from the fact that its builder intended to have it coated in silver when he planned it, but that plan was never carried out. The occasional such error is unavoidable and completely forgivable, and I mention it only because I can't think of a single other thing to decry in the book's pages, but having visited Ginkakuji any number of times, I found myself jerked quite entirely out of the story for a few moments by the error.

Anyway, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. Go read it. Seriously. It's good.

The year in books #15: Der Richter und sein Henker

The first book I read during my absence was Der Richter und sein Henker (available in English as The Judge and His Hangman or together with Suspicion in the recently-published Inspector Bärlach Mysteries), by the highly regarded Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I read it at the recommendation of my wife, who read it in Gymnasium (high school for the college-bound) and remembered it fondly.

The story is of the final case of Commissioner Bärlach, who is investigating the murder of his best officer, found shot in his car. The case is to be Bärlach's last because he is suffering from an ailment of the stomach which is never explicitly named but is clearly meant to be a terminal cancer.

This book is a bit difficult for me to render a verdict on. I am not terribly familiar with murder mysteries, and the book is written in a very literary German that, combined with my new fatherhood, caused me to need more than two weeks to get through its mere 118 pages. I honestly didn't enjoy reading the book terribly, but upon finishing it, I had to admit that it was a very compact and cleverly-written story. I suspect that, had I brought it along on a vacation, or at least not begun reading it the day of my first child's birth, and simply read through it in a single sitting, I would have rather liked it. It takes sixty pages to figure out what the real point of the story is; when those sixty pages take a week to get through, that feels like a tortuously slow pace, but if I'd chugged through them in an hour, the same opening might have felt like a simple introduction to the characters.

Six weeks after having read this book, I can at least say that the plot and characters have stuck quite firmly in my mind, which to me is a valuable trait in any story. Beyond that, I'm afraid the circumstances of my reading have left me unable to render a clear verdict for or against reading Der Richter und sein Henker.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

The Umlaut is back!

I've spent the last two months gradually growing into the realization that I am now the father of the beautiful little creature pictured above. Being a father has left me with very little time for anything else, but I'm making an effort now to reintroduce the component parts of my life. The American Umlaut will thus resume its irregular broadcast schedule beginning immediately. Like everything else in my life, the Umlaut will be losing timeshare to poopy diapers and Giggly Snuggle Time, but if you point your browser in this direction from time to time, there will be entertaining morsels to be found here.

Things to look forward to in the next few weeks: Four new book reviews, thrilling tales of fatherhood, cute baby pictures, and an account of my installation of a LinuxMCE-based media center. Don't touch that dial!

I am Papa

It was a very long, very happy day. Welcome to the world, my little loaf.

A matter of perspective - part II

This is part II of a series of posts I am writing about perspective. As I mentioned in my previous post, the subject captured my imagination for several weeks, and I've decided to share my learning process here. I hope you enjoy it!

Step 3: Doodling

Whenever I get the itch to grok something new, I end up covering endless napkins and filling my little pocket-sized notebooks with doodles. I'm a visual thinker, and so to understand anything complicated, I have to either see a picture of it or, even better, draw one myself. When I finally came up with a picture that seemed like a reasonable model of perspective, it looked something like this:


In the picture, d is the distance between the observer and the object, s is the size of the object, and θ is our measurement of perceived size: the arc that the object fills in our field of vision. Of course, this simplifies the problem quite a lot; it ignores the fact that parts of the circle are closer to the eye than the line we've chosen for s (I'll write about the consequences of this later), and it pretends that all of this is taking place in two-dimensional space. As a starting point, though, I think it's a good doodle.

Our question now is, what happens if we start changing the values of our variables? If our hypothesis is right, then multiplying d and s by the same number should leave θ unchanged (in our Moon/Sun example, the number would be about 400). The problem is, all of the tricks I know with triangles only work with right triangles. Fortunately, you can turn any triangle into two right triangles by cutting it in half. And this is an isosceles triangle, which means both of the resulting right triangles will be identical; they will be mirror images of each other. That means that (a) anything we deduce about one half of the triangle will be the same in the other half and (b) toilets flushed in the two halves will spin in opposite directions. Scientific fact.

Now the triangle's gotten a bit too small, though; let's doodle it again, only a bit bigger.


Technically, θ and s should be θ/2 and s/2, since they're halves of our original triangle, but let's just call them θ and s for now, and we'll remember that they'll need to be doubled later to get the values for the original triangle.

Getting back to our question, we're curious to figure out what happens to θ if we change d and s by multiplying or dividing them both by some number. Let's change d first; we'll divide it by two:


If our hypothesis is right, then to get the object represented by our new triangle to have the same apparent size of our original one, we should have to make it exactly half as large. s with d/2 should be exactly half what it is with d. We could use trigonometry to work this out (that was actually my first approach), but there is a more intuitive way that becomes obvious if you draw the triangles on top of each other:


As you can see the original (blue) triangle is exactly half as wide as the new (orange) triangle when it reaches the new triangle's base. And if you think about it, this is obviously the case; the two triangles have identically wide bases, which means the hypotenuse (the diagonal line) has to travel the same distance from the tip of the triangle to the base in both triangles. Since the old triangle is twice as tall as the new one, the old triangle's hypotenuse will move from right to left at exactly half the speed of the new triangle's hypotenuse.

And so, as represented by the second object I've drawn in the picture above, we can see that an object that is exactly twice as far away from an observer and is exactly twice as large must have the same perceived size. And through logical reasoning, we've proven that that will be true for any set of objects with an equal size/distance ratio.

Technically, we've proven our hypothesis. Yay for us! But I still had lots of questions at this point. What actually happens to θ when we double the size of an object? You'd think it would double, but if you consider the case of a flat object that takes up 100 degrees of your field of view, that would result in the new object needing 200 degrees - it would have to curve around you!

And so, in part III we'll begin exploring some of the interesting wrinkles that turned up when I was working out the math up to this point. I have to warn you, though, that it might take a while to get out, as I could literally become a father at any moment. I hope you're enjoying the series so far, and I'd love to hear from you in the comments if anything I've explained is unclear or if you have any questions.

A matter of perspective - part I

Image by Luc Viatour.

A very long time ago, I read an argument that the peculiar nature of solar eclipses might be seen as a proof of God's existence. The argument went as follows: the dramatic effect of a full solar eclipse is the result of the Moon appearing to be almost precisely as large as the Sun from the surface of the Earth. This is incredibly improbable, and wouldn't work if the sizes of the bodies involved, or their distances from each other, were even just a smidge different. The argument continues that, because this phenomenon is very improbable and also very beautiful, it must have been designed by an all-powerful being who created and rules the whole universe and has also found the time to be very picky about who I have sex with and the shape of my food's feet.

The alert reader will have noticed that I find the eclipse->God logic somewhat less than compelling (though rather superior to the "no, really, I read it in a really old book" line of reasoning), but the math associated with the perceived sizes of the two bodies really fascinated me. The fact that particularly stuck, and that has been floating around in my head for years, was that the Moon and Sun seem to be the same size from here because the ratio of the distances was nearly identical to the ratio of their sizes. A few weeks ago, though, it occurred to me that, though I'd memorized the fact, I really didn't understand why it should be the case.

As is so often the case, once my brain had noticed this hole in its understanding of the world, it wouldn't leave me alone until I had filled it. It started harassing me at the most inopportune times: waking me up at midnight, compelling me to doodle on paper stolen from waitresses at restaurants, boring my poor wife with musings on trigonometry at the dinner table. Over the course of a few weeks, though, I was able to summon up enough of my high school geometry to grok the basics of why perspective works the way it does, and I thought it might be fun to share my learning process with all of you here.

Thus, over the next few days, I will be uploading posts that explain my learning process. Putting this together has been a really silly amount of work for what will probably end up being three or four posts at most, but forcing myself to describe and illustrate my logic has given me a much better understanding of it, too, so it was definitely worth it. I hope some of you enjoy reading this series as much as I've enjoyed preparing it for you!

Step 1: Checking my numbers

The brain is a marvelous thing, capable of storing vast quantities of data. Unfortunately it tends to use pretty lossy compression algorithms, so before I went off on a wild goose chase, attempting to prove a "fact" that I'd misremembered from years before, I thought it wise to do a bit of research to confirm that the ratios of the Moon's and Sun's sizes and distances really are about equal. A bit of google-fu gives us the following numbers:

Distance to the Moon: ~384,000 km
Distance to the Sun: ~150,000,000 km
Diameter of the Moon: ~3470 km
Diameter of the Sun: ~1,390,000 km

So the ratio of the Sun's size to the Moon's size is ~401:1, and the ratio of the distances to the two bodies is ~390:1. That's close enough that it's plausible to assume that my memory is right, especially since the Moon actually wobbles a bit in its orbit (which means that some eclipses don't completely obscure the Sun, when the Moon is a bit further away than usual). Let's accept the rule as a working hypothesis and then try to prove it; hopefully proving it true will help us understand why it's true.

Step 2: Formulating our hypothesis

Before we can start testing whether our hypothesis is right, it would be helpful to define it more formally. That makes it easier to check whether we've proven or disproven it later. I came up with this: Consider objects a and b. We'll call their sizes S_a and S_b, and their distances from an observer D_a and D_b. Our hypothesis is that the observed sizes of the two objects will be the same if S_a / S_b = D_a / D_b. If S_a / S_b > D_a / D_b, then a will seem larger than b, and if S_a / S_{b <} D_a / D_b, then a will seem smaller than b.

I hope that's fairly understandable. In Part II, we'll use awesome doodles and the power of trigonometry to test our hypothesis. See you then!