OK, 9 days to read this before watching the movie. Plus I have to read that robot book or my wife will no longer renew it (long story). Would be easy but I do have a job you know…

It is a thousand large format pages long and contains every single Sherlock Holmes story written by Conan Doyle. For a backburner read I think I’m blasting through it pretty fast!

To (mis-)quote one of the characters in the novel “my time is not infinite”. But ultimately, it’s not really about the size of the novel. Wallace’s sense of humour isn’t really compatible with mine. And the funniest part that I’ve read so far was just a rewrite of an old Urban Myth.

Life’s too short.

Xenakis. Composer. Architect. Civil engineer. And most unusual of all – an artist with some knowledge of mathematics and who was able to use a pocket computer (in the late eighties) to run cellular automata and use these to generate compositions. It didn’t stop there, he also used group theory, statistics, elementary set theory and a little physics to compose his works. They vary from what sounds like little more than synthesised random noise to bizarrely beautiful choral works.

Anyway, I thought I’d find out a little more about the man. When you listen to the music the first question you ask is “what terrible thing happened to him?” He was a revolutionary fighter in Greece, half of his face severely damaged in combat he was eventually forced to leave the country because of a death sentence hanging over his head, and he eventually made his home among the French avant-garde.

His opinions are interesting. Despite his bizarre composition techniques he’s under no illusion that mathematical structure automatically imples good music and he’s even able to give quite rational justifications for his use of randomisation methods. (He was not, like John Cage, trying to give up control of his music.)

I was only disappointed by him in the last few pages when he revealed that water in the southern hemisphere goes down the plughole the opposite way to water in the northern hemisphere. How someone with an engineering training could fall for such an implausible urban myth is beyond me. I’ll try to forget I read that!

George Spencer-Brown is mildly infamous in mathematical circles for his system of logic presented here. It looks like a work of crackpot mathematics, something that the web abounds with. But despite the nearly inscrutable language he uses (stylistically it owes more to the Tao Te Ching than to conventional mathematics texts) he introduces a pretty sound logical system. In fact, when you get past the obscurantism it’s fairly conventional. He discusses something remarkably like boolean algebra, he then moves onto something like propositional calculus, he shows that the boolean algebra provides a model for the calculus and that the calculus is sound and complete. (I haven’t checked the proofs fully but they’re not way off in crackpot land.)

The final chapter of the main part of the book is interesting. He starts talking about ‘imaginary’ values in his logic. But really it’s nothing that fancy – he’s just building circuits using his constructions as logic gates. I even implemented his ‘counter’ circuit as a computer program to verify that it does in fact work (with a little qualification).

But…despite the mystical trappings there’s nothing profound here. It’s ordinary logic wrapped up in obfuscated language. Even the imaginary values are nothing more than time dependent streams of logical values and the fact that you can use his system to perform computations, say, will be no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the universality of the NOR gate.

But what I haven’t mentioned is that despite the fact that this book is really just logic in a new notation it really is a fun notation and it’s kinda fun to doodle with. So if you’re mathematically inclined, and you come across this book, don’t hesitate to grab it.

This book is a work of Science Fiction. But the publishers have decided they want to market it to a different audience, so there’s little clue to its true genre on the cover.

Anyway, it’s a great read.

There’s a tiny bit of crossover with some of the levels of reality in Michell’s, Cloud Atlas.

Keys provides good evidence that a catastrophic world event, a volcanic eruption in the area of Krakatoa, took place around 535 AD and that it had a significant impact on many cultures.

Keys argues that this event was a trigger that shaped the modern world and even argues that the formation of Kashmir or the modern outlines of the borders between South and Central American countries were determined by these events. Even without considering the details this is a suspect claim. Does it even mean anything to claim that this event was the cause of such things? Can you make meaningful claims about causality that span 1500 years of tumultuous human activity?

BTW I also recommend Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded.

For three weeks this was the audiobook that accompanied me to and from work. It turned something like 20 hours of tedium into an enjoyable experience. But it’s not great literature. It’s extremely derivative of Tolkien. Exactly as in Middle Earth we have Humans, Dwarves, Elves and Orcs (though the name ‘Orc’ has been slightly corrupted into ‘Urgal’), with all of the characteristics you’d expect of each (Elves are good at magic, Dwarves live underground, Orcs are smelly.) Why have the races of fantasy been cast into stone so that nobody dares creating something new?

Sometimes there’s an incredible lack of subtlety. I felt like I was being repeatedly whacked with a brick with the ‘unknown’ identity of Eragon’s brother wrapped around it. (And the story shares a certain familial structre with Star Wars.) But this is ‘young adult’ fiction and maybe the current crop of ‘young adults’ are less intelligent than I imagine :-)