Get the letters right

I'm still enjoying my Kindle, (and Quantum is very good by the way), but I do wish they had taken more trouble over converting the text. All Greek letters seem to have been scanned as images and come out the wrong size. In a book concerning wavelengths (λ) and wave functions (ψ) this is annoying.

In which I join the electronic age

I bought a Kindle (model 4) a bit before Christmas, and I'd like to record some impressions before it becomes too normal.

The size and weight are very good. I find it fits in the hand nicely and is comfortable to hold (and how do they get that slightly matt texture on the back?). Getting started was very easy once I got the key for my WiFi hub sorted out. In doing this, I found the on-screen keyboard to be quite hard going, but then you don't buy this to do a lot of typing, do you?

The famous e-ink screen delivers pretty well. I found it easy to read and the font is crisper than I expected. The screen is 800x600, which isn't much these days, but given its scale that is plenty. Since the power consumption of displaying a page is zero (changing page takes some tiny amount of energy) the battery life is really long between charges. I've only just recharged after its initial tankful, and I could have waited for longer.

I do find a tiny awkwardness about using the buttons to change page. Hard to say what is wrong, but I have had a few misfires and the page jumping when I didn't expect it. But a very minor point.

So what have I been reading? Well a couple of free ebooks to start with. My first was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (and what would he have made of it?). I have now stumped up for some modest purchases and am, for example, 59% through Salt by Mark Kurlansky. It's an interesting read, which I'd recommend. It is also longer than I thought - it's a minor flaw that you can't really tell the length of an ebook, though you do form a rough idea from how quickly the percentage on the progress bar changes. So far, that's the only place that I think I miss the physicality of a book. The other area where the paper version might score is in illustrations. Salt has some, so I've been able to test this out. The Kindle allows you to zoom in on pictures, and flips the picture round if necessary to make the best use of the screen. The results are fair, I'd say. Some pictures have not been scanned at a very high resolution, and any that include a lot of mid-tone look a bit murky, as the screen only runs from light grey to dark grey. But then you don't buy this to look at pictures either.

I also have Quantum still to read, as it was dead cheap on Amazon a few days ago. The pricing does puzzle me somewhat. I reckon publishers are still a bit wary and in some cases seem to be discouraging buyers of e-books by making them a bit more expensive than paper. I think if the pricing is right, they can sell more books (i.e. it's not a zero sum game).

The Diet Delusion

I recently finished Gary Taubes' excellent book The Diet Delusion. The first thing to note is that the title misleads, as the book is only partly about diets and is most certainly not a diet book. (It's no doubt an attempt by the publishers to cash in on The God Delusion, but there's no resemblance to Richard Dawkins that I could see). In the US, the book's title was Good Calories, Bad Calories, which gets much closer to its subject. And--unusually for an American book--the cover is better.

TDD argues that much of what we accept as true about diet and disease is actually little more than a set of plausible assertions that were accepted about 30-40 years ago, but that may in fact be totally untrue. Saturated fat may not actually be bad for you. Excessive carbohydrate might be the culprit instead. Eating fat does not make you fat. Excess calories do not necessarily make you fat. Exercise is not normally an aid to weight loss, and often has the opposite effect, as it boosts appetite. Refined carbohydrates make you gain weight by raising insulin levels, which then stores the food as fat. The nub of it may be that, unfortunately, we still have the same design spec as our Palaeolithic forebears, and they just weren't set up to cope with sugar and starch rather than meat, nuts, and berries.

If you want a more extensive summary, see the ten-point conclusion quoted in the review on David Colquhoun's website, where I first heard about TDD.

One of the book's best features is the absence, not only of diet advice, but also of any dogmatic conclusion. Books that put forward a challenging set of ideas can turn shrill and whiny, but that never happens here. Taubes wisely stays above the fray, instead giving us a detailed and well researched history of how our views about what we should eat developed over the last century or so, and how our health may or may not have been influenced by this. One over-arching conclusion is that pinning down cause and effect in such matters is enormously difficult, expensive, and lengthy.

Taubes' narrative shows how many conclusions reached between about 1930 and 1960 were overturned by a number of well-intentioned but forceful individuals who "knew they were right" even when studies failed to back them up. They also didn't read German much: German and Austrian medicine in the 30s had sorted out fat metabolism and diet to a surprising extent, but who was going to turn to these sources in the late 40s?.

This is one of the best factual books I've read in a long while, perhaps comparing with Richard Rhodes history of the Atomic Bomb. I can't say the sorry tale of poor policy-making surprises me. My (admittedly short) experience working in the civil service gave me plenty of examples of policy based on not-very-much. It would also be interesting to hear how UK policies on diet and health fell in behind the USA's lead.

Time to go and eat something fatty, I think.

Bookmarks

I've just purchased some big bookcases to replace various small ones that I've acquired over the years. So last night I had some anoraky fun sorting out my books. Quite a few contained abandoned bookmarks. I've never been one for using proper bookmarks, usually just grabbing any handy piece of paper, so these form a kind of demented summary of my last 20 years. In no particular order:

• Receipt for OPTIKA, 22 Stall St, Bath on 17 August 1996. Looks like I had an eye test, though I have no memory of this.
• Receipt for Napier University library, recording the borrowing of Mathematics in Western culture on 05 January 2005.
• Slip of paper torn from a A4 sheet. The header has Chapter 5 The Holos Worksheet.
• Cheap day return, Edinburgh to Dalmeny, 11 September 2004.
• Credit card receipt for Edinburgh-Glasgow monthly ticket, 30 October 2006. £250! No wonder I left that job.
  
• Receipt from Ipswich and Norwich Co-op for compost, 12 April 2003. I was served by Lynn.
• Wrapper from Terry's Waifa. Best before APR97.
• Two genuine bookmarks from Word Power books. Recent.
  
• Ditto, much creased, from Waterstones, circa 1997.
• Ditto, from John Smith and Sons, Glasgow, early 90s.
  
• Punched Fortran card. Rescued from Glasgow University Physics Dept, circa 1990.
• Ticket for the Courtauld Gallery, bearing a detail from Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.
• Seagate Pound. A fake pound note produced as a drinks voucher for a company bash. By means of Photoshop, our company secretary's head was substituted for the queen's, and didn't she look the part. Late 90s.
• Room card from Spread Eagle Hotel, Thame. Probably 1998.
• Business card/bookmark from Tin Can Mailman, Arcata, CA. I bought from them via abebooks. December 2001.
• Nice bookmark, bought in Paris, reproducing drawing by Gustave Moreau. I wondered where that had got to.
  

Weasels, painting, walking

I'm currently enjoying The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which manages to get some reasonably serious musings on our globalised world and why people work in it. I was thinking about Alain de B's photo essay on tuna fish and the interconnectedness of our world while drinking weasel coffee at work. Myself and two colleagues chipped in to buy it. So, in short, small Vietnamese mammals vomitted so that some statisticians in Midlothian could muck about and avoid finishing that analysis plan.

I actually bought the book for quite another reason, as I know the painter profiled in it. It seems a fair write up, and it's good to see an intelligent commentary on painting.

And rather oddly I know somebody else who has a book out. Step forward Craig, whose book The Weekend Fix is being published by Sandstone Press. It's based on his hillwalking experiences. I don't figure by name apparently, but I may be some kind of presiding spirit.

Teaching the Professor

I think most of us have books that we turn to for some dependable entertainment, no matter how many times we've read them. One of mine bears the unlikely title of More Humorous Tales From 'Blackwood'. Blackwoods was a well-known magazine, that was published in Edinburgh between 1817 and 1980. Known colloquially as Maga, it flourished particularly in the era when the British Empire was still a political fact. I bought the book in a second hand book shop in York for 50p in (I think) 1978, and learned an enormous amount from it.

Despite being a fairly precocious ten-year-old reader, I did find it heavy going in places. Some of the lighter pieces went down easily enough (building a house in Barbados; tales of 'My Uncle' -- an eccentric inventor), but despite the humorous theme, some others defeated me. Take Two-Blocked, from 1953, a bewilderingly dull (to my 10 year old self) account of a naval exercise. Returning to the book years later, I realised that it was by Geoffrey Willans (author of Molesworth), and was a rather well-written piece that had a lot to say about post-war Britain trying to thrash out a new relationship with America (the exercise was a joint RN-USN one). Indeed many of the tales (and they are Tales, please note) speak, more or less directly, about the war and about Britain's transition to ex-empire.

Over the years, the collection has stayed fresh, with some over-familiar friends dying away, and previously ignored tales gaining new life. Teaching the Professor is one such. This seemingly slight account of a drive across north Africa in 1943 is one of my favorites. The narrator of the story and the Professor of the title are army officers who need to be in Cairo, but are in Algiers. They make the journey in a thirty-cwt truck, which they christen 'Pinafore'. The Professor really was a professor before the war, and is ferociously erudite, but has trouble with things like making tea, and coping with those who do not match his own high levels of ability. To alleviate the boredom of a fortnight's drive, they agree that whichever of them is not driving should educate the other. It's easy for the Prof., who holds forth about classical history, art, and literature, and can even use the territory of Carthage as an illustration when they pass through it. The narrator has more trouble thinking of a theme, until he discovers that the Professor cannot ride, and so instructs him on hunting, horses, managing hounds and other buccolic English pursuits as they traverse battlefields and amphitheatres.

Over the years, I have often wondered who the Professor really was. Only today did it occur to me to search for him on the internet. Within a minute, I had discovered that he was Enoch Powell. Teaching the Professor was written by Michael Strachan, whose obituary is here.

Ballardian

I heard about the death of J.G. Ballard when my radio alarm came on this morning. As it wasn't a school day, I lay for a while and drifted in and out of sleep, not really sure what had happened. I think he might have liked that.

Mental

I'm enjoying Matter at the moment. Banksie has revisited ship naming, of which he is a master. I particularly liked the Ned-speak Pure Big Mad Boat Man.

Good read

I'm currently enjoying Black Swans, by Nassem Nicholas Taleb. He caters to a number of my prejudices, which is always pleasing. He writes entertainingly too. And he's probably right, despite being a bit too rude about statisticians.

How it was done

As an occasional military history anorak, I was delighted to discover Brent Nosworthy's book on Napoleonic battle tactics. A lot of accounts of battles are useless because they leave you no wiser about how things were achieved. Mr Nosworthy fills this gap with a wealth of information about, say, the Prussian thinking on attacking infantry squares post-1806.

And I discovered that Henry Shrapnel invented the shrapnel shell. How could I not now this?

Most people start with the letters

I've just bought a Tusitala Stevenson. It had been sitting in the window of the second hand bookshop down the road for a couple of weeks. I've been curious about some of RLS's more obscure works for some time, so it seemed a good omen. I find myself briefly in another world. "Most people start with the letters" says the book shop man rather cryptically. I must look blank, because he explains that the volumes of letters are the most awkward to find, therefore if you care about getting a uniform edition, it's best to acquire them first, then look for matching versions of the more commonly found volumes. Of course. I don't like to mention that I am no bibliophile and only want to read them.

Ridley can remember it for you

I was reflecting recently on my never actually liking any books by Philip K. Dick very much. He is tremendously popular, and this in itself is a disincentive (I'm a contrary soul). Let's see, I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, of course, and The Man in the High Castle. Both books that are better talked about than read, and whose contents I can barely recall - never a sign of high quality fiction. But after reading another glowing account of the man's oeuvre, I got Valis out of the library to see if I could settle the matter. Don't try this at home, folks. It's unreadable. No doubt some will claim that the confusing jumble of philosophical ramblings is a touching and witty account of a descent into mental illness (or something), but I don't buy it. It's drug-addled tosh, and I think we all know it. Dick's reputation has been falsely raised by the successful films that some of his books have become. But face it people, Bladerunner works because Ridley Scott took a promising idea and realised it more fully than PKD ever could have.

Better now, thank you

I've not been in the best of spirits over the last few weeks, so it's a pleasure to record a very enjoyable Glasgow Fair weekend. This is mainly because I managed to get out for a decent walk yesterday, after several weekends of rotten weather. I think I'm basically like a dog: in need of regular walking to stay in top condition.

My day trip was to the Lui group again, to do the big chap himself and Beinn a' Chleibh behind. Despite forgetting my camera, and wearing new boots (scope for very sore feet), it was a very satisfying trip. The walk from Cononish is very quiet - does everybody do these hills from Glen Lochy now? What a great view they're missing. Anyway, I have the famous corrie to myself and only hook up with other walkers on the summit. Beinn a' Chleibh -which looks like a playing field from the top of Lui - is then an easy walk. There's an interlude of that easy companionship you get on hilltops. It's clear and all the summits are out. Over to the north, Ben Nevis sez hi. I sunbathe on a rocky slab for a bit before turning for home.

I felt fine after this exertion, but I must have been more tired than I realised. I spent this morning in bed, cautiously stretching muscles and reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I'd randomly picked off the shelf a few nights ago. It's a book I hadn't really got before, but it comes up much better the second time round, and perhaps finishing it in a sitting helps. No illicit substances (tea?) were involved.

Read recently

Some recent reading:

• Roger persuaded me to read Climbers by the simple expedient of giving me a copy. This is often the only way of getting me to read something, as I am contrary in my ways and tend to ignore things that are recommended to me. I liked this description:

"...in the mid-to-late seventies, when it was still possible to be good across the board at 'adventure' sports. Distinctions weren't so clear-cut then: less committment was necessary. (Now only Boy Scouts and army officers are left between the zones of obsession, high and dry, trudging along under a burden of manly, cheerful ineptitude like maroons who haven't yet seen the ship sail off without them.)"

• Finished Frances Donaldson's biography of P. G. Wodehouse yesterday - an impulse buy in a local second hand shop. He was a very odd writer. Never has so great a skill with words been exercised over such trivial material. This is probably why (whisper it!) I have never actually liked his books that much. Maybe I should keep trying.

• Another biography, of Norbert Weiner - I'm still working on this one. He's a fitting subject for re-examination, but the authors (two journalists) don't do him any favours by pulling out all the tired cliches of their profession.

2 billion dollar's worth

I recently finished Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and never has an 880 page hardback seemed so compulsive. It was an impulse lift from the popular science section of Edinburgh's Central Library. However, rather than putting it down again because it was (in every sense) too heavy, I recognised it as a work Roger had pressed on me some time ago, and thought it was worth a punt. It was.

Richard Rhodes has done vast amounts of research, and takes a long run-up to the subject. We are eased in shortly after 1900, and given a deft introduction to a rapidly changing field, peopled, it seems, by a cast of brilliance. I'm familiar with a lot of the physics and the characters though my degree, but I still learned a lot about this era. It's well written too. The better sections read like a novel, and as in a good novel, some well-placed anecdotes enliven the book and stick in the mind. What about Fermi running along the corridor of his lab so that he can measure some short lived isotope? Or Otto Frisch coming close to a critical assembly by leaning over his workbench, thereby reflecting the neutrons with his body? Or a younger Frisch working out fission with his aunt (Lise Meitner) on a Christmas skiing trip?

And it all cost 2 billion dollars.

Good reading

I've had a very good run of reading recently--as sometimes happens--seeming to have a magic touch both with library books and items trawled from second hand shops. I've just finished (if you can be said to finish such a work) The White Goddess, Robert Graves's original, lengthy, passionate and sometimes just downright barmy musings on the origins and interconnections of myth and poetry. It's difficult to come up with a pithy summary of such a large book, so maybe I won't try. I can see why professional Celtic scholars dismissed it, and why lots of new age type people would hug it to their bosoms. Let's just say it's worth reading, if only for the richness of anecdote and the Byzantine footnotes (the belief that barnacle geese grew from barnacles is a nice example).

All this and John Updike too. I have been put off for a long time, but final read Seek My Face recently. A fantastic bit of writing, and all the more interesting for being about post-war American painters (albeit slightly in disguise). The Zack character really being Jackson Pollock gives rise to the lovely line: "When did Zack start dripping?".