From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Early in my experience with Unix-like systems I discovered fortune. This program would occasionally provide me with a clever passage attributed -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" "Who is this Stanislaw Lem fellow and what is a Cyberiad," I wondered. And then, because it was the mid-90s and search engines didn't exist yet, I did nothing.

A few years later, I started collecting quotes to add to my random signature program. A great many of them came from fortune, since it gave me a quip every time I logged in or out. The first Cyberiad quote that made it on the list was [The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical.] They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way. Different modes of nonexistence, a fantastic puzzle for a philosophy minor like me. I wanted to find and read this book.

There are a few books and authors I keep in the back of my mind for eventual purchase. It gives me direction when I find myself in a bookstore: check the D section of Classics for The Vicomte de Bragelonne, check the A section of Sci-Fi for the HHGTTG radio series scripts, check the L section of Sci-Fi for Stanisław Lem… You would think it wouldn't be too hard to find a book by "the most widely read science fiction writer in the world," yet ten years went by without finding one of his books between Le Guin and Lewis. I was even a beta tester for Google Books on Android tablets, but couldn't buy an electronic Cyberiad. (It's available now, though.) Tantalizingly, Google ran a fantastic narrative doodle based on The Cyberiad. I finally found a copy when I chanced to stop in to Red Letter Books in Boulder, enticed by a book about mangoes on the shelf out front. "Before I buy this, I need to see if they happen to have any Lem." Sure enough, my Quixotic quest found its goal, wedged in a dense shelf of mass market paperbacks.

The Cyberiad is a book of short stories about machines who build machines. The central character is Trurl, a constructor. He and his good friend Klapaucius the constructor build all manner of robots and devices, often on commission from rulers of distant worlds. Unlike the science fiction school led by Asimov, the engineering details of the machines and their scientific mechanism of action are of little importance. The stories are not about the machines but about the philosophical considerations and allegorical implications of such a device in a world not entirely dissimilar from ours. The first story, How The World Was Saved concerns a machine that can create anything starting with N. After creating concrete and abstract nouns, they ask the machine to do Nothing, whereby it starts to eliminate the universe.

Originally written in Polish, the book has a lot of rhymes and wordplay with sciency terms which works surprisingly well in translation (to English, at least.) The sidebar to the right has a poem produced by Trurl's Electronic Bard. Lem has a great facility for technical naming in a way that's fun rather than dry: The second, newer trail was opened up by the Imperium Myrapoclean, whose turboservoslaves carved a tunnel six billion miles in length through the heart of the Great Glossaurontus itself.

What I like best about The Cyberiad is how it resonates with my experience as a constructor of sorts. The book was written in 1967, when hardware was still the king of technology, before we realized that software eats the world. Yet the story Trurl's Machine and other passages describe the foibles of building, debugging, and otherwise producing a computer program better than any software-focused essay I've read. Throughout the book, Trurl displays the three cardinal virtues of the programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. If more tales were added to the Cyberiad today, perhaps the constructors would be programs which write other programs.

All makers and builders and coders and creators would do well to read The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age. This hypermedia book report claims the book inspired Will Wright to create SimCity; what might it do for you? Acquire it in cybernetic digital form or via a musty-bookstore-quest for a well-loved copy not so overpriced as these.

I'm not sure how much coverage U.S. commercial media is giving to the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but the BBC and NPR both devoted significant time to retrospectives on his impact on Russian society and Western awareness of Soviet atrocities. The phrase "Russian author" carries a certain expectation of greatness like "French chef" and "Italian fashion designer." Solzhenitsyn may be the golden exemplar of that category for the Soviet era.

The only Solzhenitsyn work I've read is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. As a 16-year-old, my literary preferences tended to the grand and fantastic, authors like Tolkien and Poe. Ivan Denisovich was a very different sort of story, one intensely personal and practical. Solzhenitsyn wrote so well that I was thoroughly engrossed in the matter of a prisoner's spoon for page upon page. I remember sitting in the back of the dark multi-purpose room during Midsummer Night's Dream rehearsal, reading the challenges of a gulag prisoner by the light of the sound booth. Along with Bartleby, the Scrivener, Ivan Denisovich opened my sensibilities to the personal existential story. Thanks, Pfoots.

"My life is not so much an open book as a coffee table book you glance at that happens to be open to a particularly bizarre page."

Listening to the BBC via Colorado Public Radio tonight, I heard an interview with the author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't.

I've known for a long time that the BBC is a dependable source of proper English, polite but persistent interviewers, quality investigative reporting, and cricket scores like "one hundred and eighty-seven not out." But I never expected to hear the word "asshole" several times in five minutes on the Beeb.

It's not one of the Carlin seven, but anybody who used the word on national TV in the U.S. would be in hot water. I credit Sutton with the cleverness of using "asshole" in the title of the book, thereby creating a context in which it can be used non-obscenely. They can't very well censor the title of the book; nobody would know what they were talking about.

I suppose it's similar to encoding illegal programs as prime numbers which can be legally discussed on the Internet.

When making a purchase at Borders bookstore, customers typically receive a coupon good for a limited period of time roughly a week ahead. This is an interesting practice, encouraging repeat purchases while discouraging multiple-item purchases. It plays on the American belief that it's not how much you spend, but how much you save. Sales and discounts can induce people to spend money in the belief that they're being frugal by saving 25%, not realizing they would save 100% if they didn't go to the store.

I'm quite aware that it would be fiscally irresponsible to buy a book every week just because I've got a four day window in which it would be 20% off. (Ignore for the fact that I have a few dozen books that I want to read which are already in my possession and don't really need to keep buying more.) However, I've been pretty pleased by resent results. To wit:

I bought O'Reilly's Ruby Cookbook last weekend, which had a 30% off sticker on the cover. I liked this for several reasons. First, Ruby seems like an interesting and useful language, full of things like regular expressions, closures, easy filesystem access, and runtime modification of framework classes. Second, O'Reilly's animal covers and solid writing style makes their purchase release collector endorphins in geeks. Third, computer books are expensive, and 30% equates to $15; not a bad bargain. I then received a "20% off one item when you spend $10 or more" coupon, good for this weekend.

Since my birthday was in the middle of the week, this weekend counts too. Since I had a 20% off coupon, I figured I'd go find another birthday present. I didn't really need anything, but I figured a percentage discount on a big item would be suitable as a present. I'd seen Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series at Barnes and Noble, but Borders' computer focus is on "get stuff done" technology than theory, so no imposing intellectual texts for me. I figured the best place to look for big ticket items would be the boxed set cabinet, where I found a number of intriguing items. There was a complete Red Dwarf boxed set for $250, but I think I saw most of the episodes on TV and couldn't really justify $200 for the privelage of watching them again. But then I espied a complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-DVD boxed set. The set is also available 2 DVDs at a time for $40 a pop, so the base sticker price of $199 is the efficient way to acquire such absurdity. 20% off puts it at $160, just $10 per DVD. I think a DVD of Flying Circus provides $10 worth of entertainment, and it seems unlikely that I'd be able to find the whole series used for much less, so I had an employee unlock the cabinet and took my selection to the counter.

I set the boxed set on the counter, produced my coupon, and handed over my Borders Rewards keychain. The item rang up at $79.99. The cashier looked at the screen, looked at the box (price tag face up), looked up and said "I can't beleive it's priced like that. Oh, coupon I guess." I declined to point out the numbers on the price tag, proferred my debit card, signed the thermal receipt, and wished her a good day.

I'm ordinarily a big fan of independent locally-owned bookstores, but I haven't patronized them much lately. Boulder Bookstore's computing selection is frankly pretty lame. The Tattered Cover has lots of good stuff, but I don't think I've been downtown or to Cherry Creek since... I bought a Mac Mini in March. Borders and Barnes and Noble, on the other hand, both have branches within walking distance of my office and my apartment. And really, how can you beat paying $80 for an item which would cost $320 if acquired piecemeal?

So... anybody want to have a Monty Python Party? Or a discussion about the relative merits of (Monty) Python, (Jack) Ruby, and Perl (S. Buck)?

Smegging grrfurgenama. I just typed a long post and then, instead of hitting the Done button, remembered a note I was going to add to my previous post and selected it to edit, which replaced my text without asking me if I wanted to save. That is so not a feature. Let's see how much I can reproduce.

A few days ago I finished reading The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain. The book's thesis is that literacy, and especially alphabetic literacy, hypertrophies the left brain's masculine hunter-killer traits and values of abstract serial linear thought at the expense of the right brain's gatherer-nurturer traits and values of concrete holistic gestalt thought. As alphabetic literacy enters a culture, the society is rocked with violence, religious intolerance, destruction of images, suppression of women, and the overthrow of concrete polytheist goddesses with abstract monotheistic gods. This is seen in the Hebrews, Greeks at the time of Aristotle, Orthodox vs. Gnostic Christianity, the Reformation, the Marxist revolutions of Russia, China, and Southeast Asia, Sunni vs. Shi'ite Islam, and modern Islamic fundamentalism like the Taliban. On the flip side, in the agrarian period before the appearance of writing, most cultures' central deity was a powerful Earth mother, represented by copious images, whose lesser consort/child died and was reborn every year. Men and women both worshiped goddesses, and society was fairly egalitarian (this remains the case in many hunter/gatherer cultures today). Major thinkers who spoke rather than wrote (Laozi, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Mohamed) tended to have fairly tolerant and pro-female attitudes. And these values as well as images tended to appear in cultures where alphabetic literacy was not widespread (including those cultures who passed from literacy to illiteracy, those near to violent literate cultures, and those who have yet to attain literacy). Furthermore, as photography and electromagnetism (with all its feminine metaphors) appeared in the forms of photography, movies, television, and computers, the West's laws, attitudes, and culture has shifted from excessive yang to a fairly balanced state. In a nutshell, a culture's communication media, perhaps more so than its content, determines the values, actions, and trends of society. For some more data, see my CWA post (about two thirds of the way down).

The book is written for the general public, so it lacks the flurry of citations found in scholarly works. It is far from New Age pseudo science, though; Shlain's bibliography spans 9 pages and ranges from Augustine and Virgil to Will Durant and Bertrand Russell. His data is the "generally accepted" story; exploration of various views of, say, ancient archaeological data is not in his scope. The events Shlain describes are large-scale and very complex, and doubtless arise from many factors and can be explained in many ways (which he acknowledges); his goal is to provide a unifying theory linking the counterpunctual rise and fall of the written word, masculine values, images, and feminine values. As a brain surgeon, Shlain's division of traits, values, and modes of thought rests on sound neurological data (and he acknowledges that the hemispheric split is more metaphorically accurate than physically accurate).

The book is excellently written, using both left hemispheric literalism and right hemispheric metaphor. Shlain doesn't claim to have proved anything, but rather to have demonstrated a correlation, from which the reader is to draw conclusions. His argument is cogent and well-documented, unlike many writers on male/female cultural interplay. He only once "falls" into "rhetorical" "damning" "quotation" marks. His language flows well and is graced by many words he has selected in the hopes that they don't fall out of the lexicon. The paradigmatic and specific ideas expressed in the book lead me to recommend it to almost everyone, from literalistic Protestants to open-minded Pagans to feminists who rail against cultural images. I can't think of many of my friends who wouldn't enjoy the book, and even fewer who would not benefit from reading it. I have found its modern perspective on yin/yang quite helpful in examining my own tendencies, beliefs, and development. (In the past, I've been big on literal interpretation, against photography and GUIs, and down on lots of right-hemispheric modes of perception. In recent years, I haven't read as much, I've watched more movies, and have adopted a more benign view of many Christians.)

I think I'll be able to use a bunch of what I've learned from this book in my review of Origins of the Modern Mind. I'm impressed by my memory abilities in rewriting this entry after writing it once and not reading it.

Edit 2/15/2009: In the intervening years, I've become less enamored with Leonard Shlain's work. He tries a little too hard to cram the entirety of human history into some simple ideas of the brain. His books and presentations are very enjoyable and informative, but they need a heavy dose of salt. He points out a lot of connections between elements of the zeitgeist that are worth chewing on, but I think the story he tells about their unification is a little simplistic. I still think The Albphabet vs. the Goddess is a book worth reading, but readers interested in the subject should read widely; there are a lot of cognitive scientists with interesting theories who also write well "at the Scientific American level" as Prof. Paulson would say.