(Have to wait until August 4, sadly…)

Thanks to his recent suicide¹, I’ve discovered David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest is really really fun to read, challenging as it is – I’ve barely made it through 300 pages on four boredom-rich Christmas days, but was richly rewarded for the effort. There is a positively Pynchonesque feel to the book – though Pynchon’s mathematics/engineering nerd-extravaganzas here are replaced by mind-bogglingly intricate descriptions² of life at a junior tennis academy, experimental film, Québécois seperatism and various types of drug abuse. Getting lost in these descriptions is exactly my kind of entertainment, and the book always roller-coasters between deeply desperate and depressing situations and a kind of complicated hilarity that I just love – for example, I just made my way through a 20-page description of Eschaton, a kind of live-action DEFCON played with tennis balls symbolizing nuclear warheads, which devolves from strategy game to teenage free-for-all slapstick brawl when the players start ignoring the rules after a “the map is not the territory”-type dispute. I hope the rest of DFW’s work is as good so that it’ll fill the waiting time until the next Pynchon novel is done.

¹ Sorry. But I swear the book inspires you to write this kind of sentence.

² Have I mentioned the 388 (sometimes multi-page) endnotes^a on topics as diverse as peculiarities of Boston AA group meeting practices, applications of the mean-value theorem or a fictional post-Windows Microsoft operating system named “Pink”?

As a result of an oversupply of holidays (two weeks of university between the start of the semester and Easter?), I have developed an increased interest in cooking. While reception of the products has been mixed (Why do so few people seem to appreciate the beauty of packaging food into slimy balls?), I have found cooking a much better source of light conversation than my usual pastimes. One recent instance yielded a recommendation of this book, which, at long last, brings us to the actual meat of this post: British home cookery legend Delia Smith apparently wrote a similarly titled book, How to Cheat at Cooking, which caused a lot of controversy over its use of ingredients like tinned mince meat or frozen mashed potatoes. The Guardian put the recipes to the test, and the result is hilarious.

It’s worth a read just for the quotes, and I felt a distinctive note of Fawlty Towers in this paragraph:

In the kitchen, maestro Zilli and the chef at his restaurant Zilli Fish, Pasquale Amico, are swearing over a new and controversial recipe book. Actually, only Aldo is swearing. Pasquale is just getting on with it, albeit bearing a look of slightly pained incomprehension.

It only gets better:

“It’s a crime against aubergines. They’re such beautiful vegetables, and to see them treated like this. It’s appalling.”

(via molekularkueche)

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is, not very surprisingly, a history of the shipping container. While a shipping container itself is just a rectangular steel box, the changes it has wrought in the world economy are spectacular. Marc Levinson details the many changes, which range from the economic effects of changing freight rates to the utterly different demands that traditional shipping and container shipping place on ports. Living in today’s world, it is surprising to read the accounts of how international shipping worked in pre-container days, with the loading and unloading absorbing almost half the cost of a transatlantic voyage before containerization.

Longshoremen were prosperous and had a strong union, which held a tight grip on the loading business, bordering on the absurd:

One formal rule provided that, once assigned to a job at a particular hatch of a particular ship, a worker would do only that specific job until the ship sailed; if loading was complete at one hatch but not at another, an idle worker from the first hatch could not be shifted to help out at the second. An important “hip pocket” rule, codified nowhere but enforced by the gang foreman as required, provided that a trucker delivering palletized cargo to a pier would have to remove each item from the pallet and place it on the dock. Longshoremen would then replace the items on the pallet for lowering into the hold, where other longshoremen would break down the pallet once more and stow each individual item – all at a cost so high that shippers knew not to send pallets to begin with.

Still, the history of the shipping container was by no means a straight success story – the book recounts a long and fitful history, because container shipping alone was not enough to realize the full potential – politics and infrastructure had to adapt, standards had to be set, shippers had to learn how to optimize their cargo. The book also makes clear that we have not yet reached the end of its development:

Where vessel size had once been limited by the locks in the Panama Canal, containerships had grown so large that twenty-first century naval architects were contrained by the Straits of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. If a containership ever reaches Malacca-Max, the maximum size for a vessel able to pass through the straits, it will be a quarter mile long and 190 feet wide, with its bottom some 65 feet below the water line. If it should sink, it will take nearly $1 billion of cargo with it. Its capacity will be 18,000 TEUs or 9,000 standard 40 foot containers, enough to fill a 68-mile line of trucks when it arrives in port.

(Topical link: the Panama Canal expansion project just got under way, in a bid to redefine Panama-Max to be larger than Malacca-Max.)

Marc Levinson does a commendable job collecting and presenting a huge amount of facts and exploring the wide-ranging changes wrought by containerization. Even if his description of Malcom McLean sometimes seems to border on hero worship, the later context makes it entirely clear that a single genius was not enough to change the world (and that he was fallible, to boot). Though “The Box” is rich in data and has a large bibliography, Levinson’s style is far from boring or overly scholarly. Recommended to anyone with an interest in economic history, especially for its illustration of how seemingly mundane developments can have profound influence on the ways of the world.

“The Scientist As Rebel” is a collection of essays by Freeman Dyson, most of which originated as book reviews in the New York Review of Books. As noted in the preface, however, this doesn’t make them unsuitable if you’re not interested in the books concerned:

One of the pleasures of writing for the New York Review is the fact that it publishes long reviews. The reviewer is asked to write about four thousand words, which means that the review can be an essay reflecting on the subject matter rather than a simple appraisal of a book.

This means that the review of Michael Crichton’s thriller Prey can contain a discussion of the dangers of nanotechnology, engage Bill Joy’s famous article and contemplate what we can learn about nanotech regulation from the development of the international bioweapons regime. A review of a book describing the advent of particle accelerators not only summarizes the race to split the atom, but also manages to discuss epistemology and the development of the theorist-experimentalist split in physics.

Most of the substance is on the history of science, with a particular focus on 20th century physics. A major sub-thread is dedicated to ethical and personal issues in science, as exemplified by the development of nuclear weapons and the lives of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. However, the subject matter fades into the background for the sheer quality of Dyson’s writing. Throughout the book, he displays a level of erudition that is hard to describe – he quotes poetry, injects personal anecdotes from his education under G.H. Hardy or his work with Richard Feynman and expresses his sadness at the fact that today’s Cambridge fellows can not be expected to speak classical Greek any more.

The picture of Freeman Dyson that emerges is that of the classical “gentleman scientist”, who doesn’t disdain other areas of human endeavour, but spends time contemplating art, philosophy and religion, even though his profession was to be a research physicist. Given the title of the book, Dyson’s quite conservative attitudes – his open acceptance of religion, for example, and his opposition to unlimited capitalism – may come as a surprise, but the preface already clarifies his stance:

Benjamin Franklin combined better than anyone else the qualities of a great scientist and a great rebel. [..] For most of his long life he was a loyal subject of the British King. [..] Franklin became a rebel only when he judged the time to be ripe and the costs to be acceptable. As a rebel he remained a conservative, aiming not to destroy, but to preserve as much as possible of the established order of society. [..] The rebellion that Franklin embodied was a thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred.

The first chapter then recounts various ways in which science actually served as a rebellion against social constraints, ranging from Arab astronomers to the HUAAC opposition of the 1950s.

Overall, one of the best books I’ve read in recent times, highly recommended!

PS: Hopefully, the first of many book reviews. I love the “Reading List” posts on Fourmilog, and find that writing book reviews is a great way to re-digest a book I have finished a little while ago. So far, I have mostly been disdained by my inability to do justice to the books I read, but I figure this won’t improve unless I keep trying, so here we go.

Ha, gotta love Internet leaks. The Harry Potter Überspoiler, a single image guaranteed to ruin the suspense of 795 eagerly awaited pages. Don’t complain that I didn’t warn you. Via, I’m loth to admit, Slashdot.

Lecture-free time is upon us, and so I am suddenly left with surprising amounts of disposable time. Of course, I’ve got plenty of work to do, but for now the lack of compelling reasons to get up early has resulted in a kind of inverted sleep pattern where I stay up until 5 AM to work on the lab protocols I don’t need to finish anytime soon and then sleep it off until the early afternoon.

Joy is provided by Against the Day with its inexhaustible supply of interconnected story lines, science allusions and Pynchonesque weirdness. 500 pages done, almost 600 to go. I can’t believe I found double refraction boring when it came up in my optics course, after this book I need to get myself a piece of Iceland spar. Also, I got myself The Economist’s Christmas double issue, which contains a rather interesting article linking postmodernism and modern marketing. Untypically, the article is even available online for free. I guess I finally need to read the Dialectic of Enlightenment, now that I can qualify it as a business expense.

Also new on the reading list, by way of lovely presents: Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, which promises to be what What the Bleep Do We Know definitely wasn’t, and a really nice illustrated edition of A Short History of Just About Everything.

It’s going to be a busy holiday season, I presume.

Update 2006-12-28: I’ve heard Pynchon criticised as basically “Gibson with too many words”. Guess what William Gibson is reading right now? :)