This is the juiciest literary-backstabbing story since the whole Oxford poetry professorship doo-dah.
April 15: the LRB Blog quotes a TLS diary story on an Amazon reviewer variously nicknamed 'Historian' and 'orlando-birkbeck'. This reviewer has written a spate of glowing reviews of Orlando Figes' books about Russian history, and has rubbished similar books by other authors, plus one that beat a book of Figes' to a prize.
April 17: It was Figes' missus!
April 23: Figes 'fesses!
Friday, April 23, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Bursts and Brsts
Albert Laszlo Barabasi, one of the leading lights of network theory and research, has a new popular book out soon. It's called 'Bursts'. One of the blurb quotes on the webpage says that it looks at networks in time, in contrast to his earlier 'Linked', which looked at them in space. Sounds a bit like the Tipping Point, or possibly Phil Ball's Critical Mass. (I've read none of the books mentioned in this paragraph.)
To promote the book/allow readers to 'be part of a unique experiment', Barabasi has set up a game type thing at brsts.com. (Anyone else more inclined to read that as 'breasts' than 'bursts'? Oh.)
After registering, you can adopt a word of the text. You do this by perusing an online copy of the book where words that are taken are in orange and words that aren't are in green. You pick a green word, and then that word, along with every other word that's taken thus far, is revealed to you. I went to the chapter titled 'Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws', as the title reflects my current and past interests, and clicked on 'Technica'. Lucky old me.
You can get points by inviting your friends to sign up, or by guessing concealed words. This last is staggeringly easy, at least for words where some other known words are nearby, as the game gives you an anagram of the word in question.
If you get lots of points, you might get a free book. The current leader has 50,000 points, 40,000 more than second place, and has guessed early 8,000 words. I have 318, and am unlikely to rack up many more, so I guess I'll either be buying a copy, or trying to blag a review copy from somewhere.
To promote the book/allow readers to 'be part of a unique experiment', Barabasi has set up a game type thing at brsts.com. (Anyone else more inclined to read that as 'breasts' than 'bursts'? Oh.)
After registering, you can adopt a word of the text. You do this by perusing an online copy of the book where words that are taken are in orange and words that aren't are in green. You pick a green word, and then that word, along with every other word that's taken thus far, is revealed to you. I went to the chapter titled 'Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws', as the title reflects my current and past interests, and clicked on 'Technica'. Lucky old me.
You can get points by inviting your friends to sign up, or by guessing concealed words. This last is staggeringly easy, at least for words where some other known words are nearby, as the game gives you an anagram of the word in question.
If you get lots of points, you might get a free book. The current leader has 50,000 points, 40,000 more than second place, and has guessed early 8,000 words. I have 318, and am unlikely to rack up many more, so I guess I'll either be buying a copy, or trying to blag a review copy from somewhere.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Margaret Atwood writes about Twitter
This lovely blog post at the NYRB is well worth a read.
P.s. I've only read a couple of Atwood's books, most recently Oryx and Crake. I thought her dystopia reflected the skills of someone sharp on culture and politics - life reduced to junk food, shopping malls and porn - but less so on the science. An engineered turbo-Ebola that wipes out humanity? Yawn. Not only a yawn, but an evolutionarily implausible yawn, because how virulent a bug is, and how easy it is spread, change and interact in complex ways. There are reasons that Ebola is rare and colds are common.
The parasite in David Cronenberg's Shivers, that makes it's carriers super-horny is probably closer to real life - think of all the crazy effects that parasites have on behaviour, like making an ant climb a blade of grass so it'll get eaten by a sheep. See Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex.
Oryx and Crake also contains what must be the dullest computer game ever imagined, Extinctathon, which involves naming extinct species, if I remember correctly. The idea that teenage boys would get into this seemed highly implausible.
Anyway, all that was just to flesh out the link to the blog post. O&C is also well worth a read, as is Atwood's review of E. O. Wilson's Anthill, also in the NYRB.
P.s. I've only read a couple of Atwood's books, most recently Oryx and Crake. I thought her dystopia reflected the skills of someone sharp on culture and politics - life reduced to junk food, shopping malls and porn - but less so on the science. An engineered turbo-Ebola that wipes out humanity? Yawn. Not only a yawn, but an evolutionarily implausible yawn, because how virulent a bug is, and how easy it is spread, change and interact in complex ways. There are reasons that Ebola is rare and colds are common.
The parasite in David Cronenberg's Shivers, that makes it's carriers super-horny is probably closer to real life - think of all the crazy effects that parasites have on behaviour, like making an ant climb a blade of grass so it'll get eaten by a sheep. See Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex.
Oryx and Crake also contains what must be the dullest computer game ever imagined, Extinctathon, which involves naming extinct species, if I remember correctly. The idea that teenage boys would get into this seemed highly implausible.
Anyway, all that was just to flesh out the link to the blog post. O&C is also well worth a read, as is Atwood's review of E. O. Wilson's Anthill, also in the NYRB.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Some much-needed good publicity...
...for my alma mater, the University of East Anglia. OK, there's all that climate email stuff, but check out this Levi's promo. (Of interest only to UEA alums and lovers of brutalist architecture.)
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
E. O. Wilson's 'Trailhead'
In the 25 January edition of the New Yorker, there's a short story by the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson. Written in limpid, crystalline prose, it tells of a young man's erotic awakening at the hands of his French-horn teacher.
Just kidding. It's about ants.
First impressions weren't promising. This is from the very first paragraph.
and it made me think I was in for a piece of science-writing-by-any-other-name, groaning under the weight of exposition, with the odd clunky attempt at a literary flourish (that 'knight's armour' metaphor). And adverbs ('fully'?). I hate adverbs.
But I was wrong. It's actually rather good. It does feel under-edited (perhaps because the humanities types at the New Yorker lose their nerve when confronted with biology) and over-pedagogical, as Wilson tries to cram in every ant fact and concept he can (and as he probably knows more about ants than any person that's ever lived, that's quite a lot of information).
But as the story, of the fall of a doomed and besieged ant colony, gathers pace, it's gripping.
What I liked best was that I at first thought my emotional reaction was anthropomorphic, in that I was empathizing with the ants (in an accompanying Q&A the interviewer says the story is "the Iliad told from the point of view of ants").
But then I thought the effect was actually anti-anthropomorphic, and that the powerful thing is that the ants' blindness, both literally and to any sense of meaning and destiny in their lives, brings home nature/evolution/the universe's massive indifference about whether any living thing survives or flourishes.
It was also cute to see Wilson slip in a quick ride on his current hobby-horse, which is that we should take a more group-centric view of insect sociality than many of his colleagues allow. There are a few strategic mentions of the 'superorganism'.
The interview reveals that the story is an extract from Wilson's forthcoming novel Anthill, which mixes the ant's-eye view with a human narrative (involving a French-horn teacher, for all I know).
That'll be interesting to see - although the description on the website isn't doing the book any favours ('Astonishing, inspirational, even magical: a naturalist’s novel about an Alabama boy who heroically tries to save a sacred forest').
But what I really want, in my ideal world, is for someone to make a movie of the book's ant sections. Showing always beats out telling in depictions of the living world.
On the evidence of 'Trailhead', this movie would barely be fiction, so the brilliant folk at the BBC Natural History Unit could do it. Or they'd be ideal for Guillermo del Toro. How about this for an example of something that's all too rare in science and nature writing - the perverse.
Get to it, Guillermo.
Just kidding. It's about ants.
First impressions weren't promising. This is from the very first paragraph.
While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue that quickly rots away, ants are encased in an external skeleton; their soft tissues shrivel into dry threads and lumps, but their exoskeletons remain, a knight’s armor fully intact long after the knight is gone.
and it made me think I was in for a piece of science-writing-by-any-other-name, groaning under the weight of exposition, with the odd clunky attempt at a literary flourish (that 'knight's armour' metaphor). And adverbs ('fully'?). I hate adverbs.
But I was wrong. It's actually rather good. It does feel under-edited (perhaps because the humanities types at the New Yorker lose their nerve when confronted with biology) and over-pedagogical, as Wilson tries to cram in every ant fact and concept he can (and as he probably knows more about ants than any person that's ever lived, that's quite a lot of information).
But as the story, of the fall of a doomed and besieged ant colony, gathers pace, it's gripping.
What I liked best was that I at first thought my emotional reaction was anthropomorphic, in that I was empathizing with the ants (in an accompanying Q&A the interviewer says the story is "the Iliad told from the point of view of ants").
But then I thought the effect was actually anti-anthropomorphic, and that the powerful thing is that the ants' blindness, both literally and to any sense of meaning and destiny in their lives, brings home nature/evolution/the universe's massive indifference about whether any living thing survives or flourishes.
It was also cute to see Wilson slip in a quick ride on his current hobby-horse, which is that we should take a more group-centric view of insect sociality than many of his colleagues allow. There are a few strategic mentions of the 'superorganism'.
The interview reveals that the story is an extract from Wilson's forthcoming novel Anthill, which mixes the ant's-eye view with a human narrative (involving a French-horn teacher, for all I know).
That'll be interesting to see - although the description on the website isn't doing the book any favours ('Astonishing, inspirational, even magical: a naturalist’s novel about an Alabama boy who heroically tries to save a sacred forest').
But what I really want, in my ideal world, is for someone to make a movie of the book's ant sections. Showing always beats out telling in depictions of the living world.
On the evidence of 'Trailhead', this movie would barely be fiction, so the brilliant folk at the BBC Natural History Unit could do it. Or they'd be ideal for Guillermo del Toro. How about this for an example of something that's all too rare in science and nature writing - the perverse.
Within a week, the constant licking of the royal corpse in the Trailhead Colony began to break it into pieces.
Get to it, Guillermo.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Climate-neutral ecology conferences
There's a piece in the latest TREE on how to have a carbon-neutral conference. The reference list also shows that emissions caused by conferences are an issue that several people have thought about. Sample title: Are international medical conferences an outdated luxury the planet can’t afford? Yes.
None of this is exactly new. And while local food, paper plates and so on are all better than nothing, I still think the answer is fewer meetings, not offsetting. "Most importantly," write Oliver Bossdorf and co, "[meetings] provide ample opportunities for networking." Well, so does the web, and you can do that at home.
None of this is exactly new. And while local food, paper plates and so on are all better than nothing, I still think the answer is fewer meetings, not offsetting. "Most importantly," write Oliver Bossdorf and co, "[meetings] provide ample opportunities for networking." Well, so does the web, and you can do that at home.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Rod Page's predictions for 2010
Rod Page at Glasgow is one of the most interesting and provocative thinkers/workers on biodiversity informatics - that is, how biological information is used online.
His many efforts include iSpecies, a zero-budget alternative to the over-budget, behind-schedule (according to this Science article, which is behind a paywall) Encyclopedia of Life.
His predictions for 2010 are worth a ponder.
His many efforts include iSpecies, a zero-budget alternative to the over-budget, behind-schedule (according to this Science article, which is behind a paywall) Encyclopedia of Life.
His predictions for 2010 are worth a ponder.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
The past of the future
Slate has an entertaining piece on Omni magazine, which makes me wish it was still publishing. I'd put up with the occasional article on UFOs to read the equivalent of William Gibson coining 'cyberspace' in 1983.
The story of Omni's decline is also worth a read. The mag's website now apparently points to Penthouse, a more enduring brainchild of Bob Guccione (although Bob Jrnow owns once owned Discover).
I've never opened a copy (Of Omni, not Penthouse. Well, not of Penthouse either, actually.) but apparently it dealt in predictions of robot gardeners and moon bases. This made me think of my much-loved and recently rediscovered Usborne Book of the Future, which, published in 1979, beat Omni into print by two years.
The UBotF offered insightful analysis of future trends in transport, medicine and agriculture. Most importantly for an 8-year-old boy, it also has a picture of two spaceships blasting the crap out of each other on the cover.
A Google search suggests it has a substantial online following - not surprising, as Usborne books were a kind of precursor to the internet for geeky 70s boys. It also suggests that my hardback might be worth a bob or two.
At the end of each chapter, there's a timeline describing what will happen. We're now in 2001-2050. Some predictions weren't too great - space mirrors providing night lighting by 2000 - but others are coming along - brain impants to help stroke victims. And others were a weird mixture of bang on and cutely off. Here's one from the Future Cities chapter for 1991-2000
Happy 2010.
The story of Omni's decline is also worth a read. The mag's website now apparently points to Penthouse, a more enduring brainchild of Bob Guccione (although Bob Jr
I've never opened a copy (Of Omni, not Penthouse. Well, not of Penthouse either, actually.) but apparently it dealt in predictions of robot gardeners and moon bases. This made me think of my much-loved and recently rediscovered Usborne Book of the Future, which, published in 1979, beat Omni into print by two years.
The UBotF offered insightful analysis of future trends in transport, medicine and agriculture. Most importantly for an 8-year-old boy, it also has a picture of two spaceships blasting the crap out of each other on the cover.
A Google search suggests it has a substantial online following - not surprising, as Usborne books were a kind of precursor to the internet for geeky 70s boys. It also suggests that my hardback might be worth a bob or two.
At the end of each chapter, there's a timeline describing what will happen. We're now in 2001-2050. Some predictions weren't too great - space mirrors providing night lighting by 2000 - but others are coming along - brain impants to help stroke victims. And others were a weird mixture of bang on and cutely off. Here's one from the Future Cities chapter for 1991-2000
First deliveries of electronic mail. Hand written letters are electronically copied, sent via a satellite-link to their destination, where the incoming message is printed out.
Happy 2010.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
See my face
I've recently started working on a book about reputation. More news on that to follow.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to Adam Smallman at Dow Jones Investment Banker on that topic, relating to the financial sector. The video is up now on WSJ.com. Don't blink twice!
A few weeks ago, I spoke to Adam Smallman at Dow Jones Investment Banker on that topic, relating to the financial sector. The video is up now on WSJ.com. Don't blink twice!
Monday, October 12, 2009
The fine line between clever and stupid
This advert is on display at many London Underground stations. It's for an energy drink that has never passed my lips, but which I believe is aimed at people who find Red Bull intimidatingly classy.
Let's move beyond the thought that it was someone's job to come up with that combination of words, other people's to approve it, and however much they all got paid is scant compensation for spending your waking hours doing that sort of thing. (Look - the arms holding it have got tattoos! Edgy!)
Instead, let's just enjoy the unintentional parallels with metabolic scaling. Although I'd obviously have been happier had it said 'Relative energy consumption is a function of size'.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Wikiecology
When I saw the graph on the front of today's technology Guardian, in an article about the slowing growth of Wikipedia (it's not in the online version), I thought: "That looks like a logistic growth curve. Perhaps the sum total of knowledge represents a resource that is being exhausted, causing the encyclopedia's growth to slow".
When I got to the end of the article, I discovered that the researcher behind the work being discussed, Ed Chi of PARC, had a similar thought.
But the article also says that the slowdown is caused by a shift in power towards 'deletionist' editors - it's getting harder to get stuff onto Wikipedia. Which suggests that the correct model might not be a sort of density-dependent, resource-limited population (we're running out of stuff to create wikipedia entries about), but perhaps something more top-down, like a predator-prey system (the editor population is keeping the contributor population in check).
I've no idea, but it's a question entirely suitable to the tools of ecological analysis. Someone should get onto it.
When I got to the end of the article, I discovered that the researcher behind the work being discussed, Ed Chi of PARC, had a similar thought.
"In my experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies – where there's some sort of resource constraint that results in this model." The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. "As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power."
But the article also says that the slowdown is caused by a shift in power towards 'deletionist' editors - it's getting harder to get stuff onto Wikipedia. Which suggests that the correct model might not be a sort of density-dependent, resource-limited population (we're running out of stuff to create wikipedia entries about), but perhaps something more top-down, like a predator-prey system (the editor population is keeping the contributor population in check).
I've no idea, but it's a question entirely suitable to the tools of ecological analysis. Someone should get onto it.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Alilo, alilo, alilo
Some of the songs sang by Georgian choirs (not to be confused with Gregorian chant) predate the arrival of Christianity in the country. Or so I’ve read; I’d believe you if you told me they predate the big bang, so bottomless does the music sound.
One of the most spectacular gigs I’ve been to was the Rustavi Choir in London a few years ago. So when I was in the Sounds of the Universe shop in Soho a little while ago, I snapped up the 'Polyphonic Voices of Georgia' cd on Soul Jazz Records' new Word Audio Foundation imprint. (You can also hear Georgian singing on Soul Jazz's 'Faith' comp, which twiddles the dial on a world of religious music.)
The WAF cd, sung by the Anchiskhati Choir (me neither), is all religious songs, which means it misses out on the rougher-edged folk tradition - some of the harmonies are sweet and almost western. But it's still lovely. And, being Soul Jazz, they've made an effort - you get funky postcards, proper sleeve notes, and the cd comes in a cool but slightly-annoyingly-larger-than-usual plastic box - a bit like those cases that cassettes sometimes came in. Along with the monochrome cover photo, this gives the impression that the recording is in fact some academic ethnomusicology project from the 60s.
(if you like this sort of thing, Corsican and Sardinian male voice choirs sound similar to my ear.)
One of the most spectacular gigs I’ve been to was the Rustavi Choir in London a few years ago. So when I was in the Sounds of the Universe shop in Soho a little while ago, I snapped up the 'Polyphonic Voices of Georgia' cd on Soul Jazz Records' new Word Audio Foundation imprint. (You can also hear Georgian singing on Soul Jazz's 'Faith' comp, which twiddles the dial on a world of religious music.)
The WAF cd, sung by the Anchiskhati Choir (me neither), is all religious songs, which means it misses out on the rougher-edged folk tradition - some of the harmonies are sweet and almost western. But it's still lovely. And, being Soul Jazz, they've made an effort - you get funky postcards, proper sleeve notes, and the cd comes in a cool but slightly-annoyingly-larger-than-usual plastic box - a bit like those cases that cassettes sometimes came in. Along with the monochrome cover photo, this gives the impression that the recording is in fact some academic ethnomusicology project from the 60s.
(if you like this sort of thing, Corsican and Sardinian male voice choirs sound similar to my ear.)
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Before the carbon rush
The Economist's Natasha Loder has a post on her blog worth reading about the speculators getting preemptively involved in carbon forest credits in Papua New Guinea. A former Australian horse trader and cock-fighting impresario, it seems, is going around the place "signing up landowners for big carbon trading deals in advance of negotiations to trade forest carbon as offsets between countries".
There's something Conradian about this story; the old one of white folks going into the jungle to try and get rich, making up the rules as they go along. Is this how carbon trading is going to work?
Although not just white folks, apparently. Natasha is commenting on a story by the AP's Ilya Gridneff. I can't find the original elsewhere online (it's reproduced on her post), but a google reveals he's all over this kind of stuff in PNG. Sample first par: "A nephew of Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Michael Somare is accused of pressuring remote villagers to sign away their land for carbon deals despite there being no carbon trade laws in place."
There's something Conradian about this story; the old one of white folks going into the jungle to try and get rich, making up the rules as they go along. Is this how carbon trading is going to work?
Although not just white folks, apparently. Natasha is commenting on a story by the AP's Ilya Gridneff. I can't find the original elsewhere online (it's reproduced on her post), but a google reveals he's all over this kind of stuff in PNG. Sample first par: "A nephew of Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Michael Somare is accused of pressuring remote villagers to sign away their land for carbon deals despite there being no carbon trade laws in place."
Friday, June 26, 2009
Thoughts on hearing the 7 o'clock news
A long time ago, BBC Radio 1 broadcast a documentary about Kraftwerk. The thing I remember most clearly from it was a story about how, when they heard 'Billie Jean', the band was thrown into crisis, believing that the song was such a leap forward that there was nowhere for them left to go.
Much later, I saw a clip of Jackson performing the same song at the Motown 25th Anniversay concert, and thought 'Well, pop music should have given up at that point, because nothing is ever going to top that.'
This morning, there were no tracks from 'Off the Wall' in the clips played on the Today programme (not big MJ fans, I guess), so we put the cd on. Anyone who doesn't like this record doesn't like happiness. Let us single out for praise 'Rock With You': that rare thing, a brilliant mid-tempo pop song, totally sophisticated and totally disco at the same time. You can imagine Smokey Robinson or Ella Fitzgerald singing it, and that's the company he deserves to be remembered alongside.
Much later, I saw a clip of Jackson performing the same song at the Motown 25th Anniversay concert, and thought 'Well, pop music should have given up at that point, because nothing is ever going to top that.'
This morning, there were no tracks from 'Off the Wall' in the clips played on the Today programme (not big MJ fans, I guess), so we put the cd on. Anyone who doesn't like this record doesn't like happiness. Let us single out for praise 'Rock With You': that rare thing, a brilliant mid-tempo pop song, totally sophisticated and totally disco at the same time. You can imagine Smokey Robinson or Ella Fitzgerald singing it, and that's the company he deserves to be remembered alongside.
Friday, June 19, 2009
I give in
OK, so I've no desire to read anyone else's tweets, but I've been thinking that it's a good medium for saying 'hey, check this paper out', which is often all I want to do. So I've set up a feed, and put that last post on it. I think it's called @gentraso. We'll see if it's as colossal a waste of time as I've always believed.
9 July update. That really was a very graceless post, wasn't it? On poking around twitter, I can see that there's a some interesting stuff, and I can see how it's potentially addictive. I've still not signed up to follow anyone yet, though (though I may). And I'm still not sure where all the time for this stuff comes from.
9 July update. That really was a very graceless post, wasn't it? On poking around twitter, I can see that there's a some interesting stuff, and I can see how it's potentially addictive. I've still not signed up to follow anyone yet, though (though I may). And I'm still not sure where all the time for this stuff comes from.
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