My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

While I’ve been reading a fair bit over the last fortnight, I haven’t completed very much in the period.

I’m part way through:

• Trunk Music by Michael Connelly (Audible audiobook)
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (Ebook on my iPod)
• Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol I by Edward Gibbon (Ebook on my iPod)

I confess that I’m reading Gibbon’s massive treatise on the iPod just to prove that it can be done, and how well the iPod Touch/iPhone works as an ebook reading platform, something I’m growing increasingly to believe. Even Gibbon’s extensive footnotes work pretty well thanks to intelligent formatting by Gutenberg (from where I sourced the book).

On the down-side, Lexcycle, who produce the Stanza ebook software I had been using to read books on my iPod, dropped the ball. They released a new version incorporating a dictionary lookup feature which manages to interfere with the comfort of reading (the feature pops up if your finger dwells a fraction of a second too long on the screen when you are turning pages). They have promised to fix it, but in the meantime I’m using the almost-as-good eReader from Palm.

Friend of the Devil  by Peter Robinson.

Ebook on my iPod Touch.

I grew up in what is now West Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. Robinson was born not far away from where I was born, and only a year before me. His series of novels about Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks are all set in this part of the world, so many of the places he writes about are quite familiar to me from my childhood. This, of course, adds to the interest I have in this series.

But even if you don’t know this area of the world, DCI Banks is an engaging and multi-layered character with a complex private life, and the cases he encounters are full of interest and mystery. In this novel, the 17th in the series, a young woman is raped and murdered in the town of Eastvale; and in what seems a completely different case, a woman quadriplegic is found murdered in her wheelchair at the top of a set of cliffs facing over the North Sea. How these two cases – one handled by Banks, one by his colleague and ex-lover Annie Cabot – are related only becomes clear as the book progresses. A really intriguing read, and the ending was not at all obvious for almost all of the book.

Various Blogs

Here are some links to a few of the blogs I read regularly:

Coding Horror  by Jeff Atwood

This is always must-read stuff for me. Jeff Atwood talks intelligently and interestingly about the craft of programming, and continually introduces me to new thoughts, and links to things I ought to know or to think about.

I, Cringely  by Robert X. Cringely

Cringely wrote one of the best, and funniest, books about the early days of the computer industry which I have ever read: Accidental Empires (or, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date)

He writes regularly and very intelligently about technology. While he’s occasionally a bit too self-important and self-congratulatory for my taste, he’s never less than thought-provoking and well-informed.

Whimsley  by Tom Slee

This British-born Canadian doesn’t blog anywhere never enough so far as I am concerned. He writes very clever and amusing stuff, sometimes at great length, about the digital economy. For example, he dedicated dozens of well-thought-out posts to demolishing the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson; and he has written amusingly about the hidden flaws in the way that Google and Amazon work.

I hope Slee keeps on blogging, because I want to keep on reading his stuff.

Journal  by Sam Pepys

This guy blogs just about every day, and it’s all full of his rich life in London, all the stupidities and corruption of the politicians and bureaucrats that he has to work with, about all the women he bonks (he’s a very naughty man!), his long-suffering wife, and the renovations he’s having done to his house. Just lately, he’s been rather worried about the spread of a dangerous infectious disease in the city, seemingly on the rise every day. And about the progress of the current war with the Dutch, of course.

Fascinating reading. Oh, did I mention that this guy is writing in the 1660s?

The Infernal Engine

(First published in October 1995)

It came to me only recently that spell-checkers are the invention of the Devil.

No, seriously.

Well, an invention if not of the cloven-hoofed gentleman, then certainly of someone or thing whose intent is the Destruction of All We Hold Dear.

It was General Jack D. Ripper, I think, who informed us that fluoridation of drinking water was all a dirty commie plot to Pollute Our Precious Bodily Fluids. These days, with the end of the Cold War, I would hesitate to point the finger in the same direction, but I ask you, have you ever heard of a Russian spell-checker? You bet your sweet babushka you haven’t.

I came to this revelation only recently, I must admit. But it all came clear to me when I was reading an article in “The Age” newspaper, on the concerns that parents have about the apparent decline in their children’s reading and writing skills. The article reported (unidentified) teachers as claiming that it was no longer necessary to teach children how to spell. “After all,” they went on, “there’s always the spell-checker”.

That was bad enough, but then I went on to read that the “whole-learning” approach depended on children learning to read, not by spelling out the sounds, but by learning to recognise the whole word in context, using “picture queues” and other non-verbal evidence.

Picture queues? Putting aside images of portraits lined up to get into a gallery, I puzzled over this for a long time, until I realised that what was meant were “picture cues”, that is, hints from illustrations. The article, I realised with a sense of impending dread, had been spell-checked!

“Queues” is a perfectly good word, of course. It would have passed the spell-checker easily. But it was the wrong word, and entirely the wrong meaning in the context of the sentence. A queue is something long and boring, the epitome of inaction. A cue, on the other hand, as in a billiard cue, is something which prompts something else into action.

A perfect example, in other words, of why spelling is important, and why spell-checkers are the invention of the Devil, or of someone who admires him.

Later in the same edition of the newspaper, in an article discussing ethics, we see “principle” used incorrectly instead of “principal”, greatly confusing the sense.

No newspaper in Australia now employs a proof-reader. The profession of proof-reader is going the same way as that of gas-lighter. Archaic, unnecessary, old-fashioned. Yet its loss will leave us all in the dark.

The problem with spell-checkers, of course, is that they don’t check spelling. They merely have a long list of combinations of letters which are known to be valid English words; and the best they can do is to report that a certain combination is not in its list. This entirely negative check does pick up some mis-typings of course, otherwise no-one would use spell-checkers. But as any Scrabble player knows, there are some very weird combinations of letters which are perfectly valid English words. Worse still, people can add their own words to the list in the spell-checker, if they find the checker regularly picking them up and questioning them. Ah, blessed relief: no more annoying “Ignore, Change, Add?” messages from the spell-checker. But the result is, that over time, the list of accepted spelling combinations in the checker gets longer and longer, and fewer and fewer mis-spellings are actually identified.

Spell-checkers would still have their uses even so, but because of sheer laziness, or for short-sighted economic reasons in the case of the newspapers, no-one who has run a spell-checker over an article feels any impulse or duty to read it to pick up any other errors, let alone to check for sense and coherence. The result is that the quality of journalism (never very high) is plunging rapidly. One frequently these days comes across sentences or phrases in published material which simply do not make sense, or which are so badly mangled that one has to give up in disgust. So no example is set to young people of good writing, and so the standards of literacy continue to drop into the abyss.

A friend of mine recently tried to convince me that within five years keyboards will be a thing of the past: all computer input will be through voice-recognition.

“But what about words which sound the same, but have different spelling?”.

“Oh, artificial intelligence will sort all that out,” he said airily. “Besides, we have spell-checkers.”

The trouble with artificial intelligence, of course, is that mostly it is artificial stupidity: dumbness repeated over and over again a million times to achieve a result. Like trying out a million possible moves in a game of chess. Like checking every word against a vast list of possibilities.
But the worst thing of all about spell-checkers is that I reckon they are going to halt the process of spelling reform. Lord knows, the English language is full of odd and non-phonetical spellings: that’s probably why we need spell-checkers in the first place. Laugh, cough, bough, though. Night and fright. Photograph.

Without the invention of the spell-checker, there was at least some hope that over a period of time English spelling would become more rational: the Americans have at least made a start on it. But if my spell-checker, based on an Australian dictionary, rejects “center” in favour of “centre”, “color” in favour of “colour”, and refuses to play along if I attempt “nite” or “foto”, what hope is there for spelling reform? We are all going to be locked into late 20th Century spellings of the particular country we base our dictionaries on. The process of slow shiftings in spelling will just stop.

Similarly, old, obscure or esoteric words will drop from use because the spell-checker won’t let them through – try using a great word like “logodaedaly”, for example, and have the Microsoft Word nanny peremptorily interrupt you and tell you to correct that word it has underlined in red for you, you naughty person!

To close, I can’t do better than to quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, written long before spell-checkers, but presaging their invention:

Lexicographer, n.

A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods… Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its resoration to favor – whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary”…

Ignore, Change, Add?

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Conviction by Richard North Patterson.

Hardcover (library book).

I have enjoyed all of the R.N.Patterson novels I have read so far, and I’m impressed by his ability to tackle major, controversial, issues head on while working them into a narrative of character and plot.

Conviction wasn’t quite up to the standard of some of his other books like Protect and Defend or Exile, but it was quite enjoyable nontheless. This one tackles the issue of capital punishment, through the efforts of the protagonist, Terri Paget, a middle-aged female lawyer, to prevent the execution of a black man convicted of a disgusting sexual crime which led to the death of a young girl. At first we have no other indication than that this man is guilty, which makes Terri’s efforts seem idealistic but possibly misguided. Her mission is complicated by the reaction of her own daughter, who was herself sexually abused as a child. But eventually our view of the condemned man starts to shift as Terri begins to realise that he is mentally retarded, and then to discover evidence that he is quite probably innocent of the crime.

The author’s target is the byzantine legal system which has grown up around capital punishment in the United States, and the AEDPA statute which comes close to dictating that even strong new evidence of innocence must be disregarded once the original conviction has been confirmed.

I suppose that I didn’t quite enjoy this book as much as Patterson’s earlier works because the didactic strain has become a little too marked (the same thing happened to Wilkie Collins’ later novels).

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.

Paperback (library book).

It says something about how out of touch I have become with modern science fiction (considering that I was Chairman of the 43rd World Science Fiction Convention) that I had never heard of Connie Willis, multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner, until a few weeks ago. I think I stumbled upon a review of one of her books on the Audible site.

Anyway, based on what I could pick up about Willis from Wikipedia, I decided to give one of her books a try. To Say Nothing of the Dog (or How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last) was a lot of fun, but ultimately a bit frustrating. Four-fifths of the book is written in an amusing style deliberately cast in the mould of Jerome K. Jerome (the first half of this book’s title is taken from the subtitle to Three Men in a Boat) or P.G.Wodehouse, as the time-travelling protagonist is sent back to Victorian England to try to fix a temporal ‘incongruity’ which may change the entire course of history. The plot, which involves late Victorian romances, mysterious butlers, Oxford dons and a lot of messing about in boats, is too complicated to summarise here, but is very entertaining.

Where it starts to fall down is towards the end, when the complexities of the time-travel plot and the pseudo-scientific justification starts to overwhelm the fun, and the key object (the Bishop’s Bird Stump) which has driven the plot for most of the length of the book is eventually trivialised so much that you wonder why anyone bothered.

Still, I liked it, and I’ll look for other Connie Willis novels.

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

E-Book, read on my iPod Touch

I read this because it was free from Gutenberg (all of Burroughs’ work is now in the public domain), and because I hadn’t read it since I was about 12.

Well, it was fun to read when I was 12, but that’s about only age to read it, I think.

This is very much in the mode of Boy’s Own Magazine, with sterling American heroes despatching villainous Germans and getting lost at sea in a captured World War I U-Boat until they discover by accident a lost continent where ape-men live alongside dinosaurs (almost plagiarizing Conan Doyle’s Lost World). The romance between the rock-jawed hero and the sole female on board the U-Boat is laugh-out-loud stuff for any adult reader today.

End in Tears by Ruth Rendell.

E-Book, read on my iPod Touch

This is part of Rendell’s series based on her detective Chief Inspector Wexford.

Wexford featured in Rendell’s first published novel in 1964. It’s interesting that Rendell has obviously retained a fondness for Wexford as a character despite writing simply scores of other novels, many of which explore psychological territory far distant from these tales of a rural policeman. Given that Wexford must have been working as a policeman for well beyond 45 years now, I’m wondering if his continued failure to retire isn’t starting to strain credibility a little…!

Never mind, Wexford is still a great and well-rounded character, and this novel, published in 2005, is no disappointment, as it works through the circumstances surrounding the murder of a young woman for a reason which does not become apparent until the very end of the book. The issues of childlessness and surrogate motherhood are explored through various twists of the plot, and through the decision of Wexford’s own daughter to act as a surrogate mother, a decision which seems close to splitting apart his family.

Very enjoyable, and again, no trouble at all to read on the iPod screen.

——-

I’m also listening to the audiobook version of Trunk Music by Michael Connelly as I walk or drive, but I have really only just started it. I’ll talk about it next time.

Our present world has been shaped by many historical accidents which have become entrenched in boundaries which now make little sense.

In 1494, Pope Alexander VI settled an argument between the great exploring nations of Spain and Portugal by ruling a line down the middle of the Atlantic. All newly discovered lands to the west of this line would be owned by Spain, those to the east of this line could be owned by Portugal. The native inhabitants of these places, of course, were not to get much say in this.

At this time, two years after the return of Columbus, very little of what we now know as the Americas had been discovered; the Pope was not to know that a large part of the landmass of South America bulged well to the east of the line he had drawn. But the Portugese quickly discovered that fact and colonised what is now Brazil.

So it is that today the people of Brazil speak Portugese, while all the rest of South America speaks Spanish. It is hard to imagine that situation ever changing.

Another example is the modern city of York in the north of England. Its winding streets, and even the property lines dividing modern-day houses and shops, are shaped by historical decisions going back to the days when it was occupied by the Vikings or even earlier. Unless there is wholesale buying up and clearance of those properties, those boundaries may last for another thousand years.

And yet another example is the remnants of old empires, such as the British Empire. I am old enough to remember school atlases and globes with all of the countries belonging to the British Empire shown in red – the ‘Empire on which the sun never sets’.

The British Empire is, of course, now long gone, though in the shape of the Commonwealth – meant to be a loose, voluntary association of states – it still has some present day form. Australia, where I live, was part of the Empire and is now part of the Commonwealth.

But this relict of the past still has enormous influence in one area of modern life – copyright and publishing. Here the boundaries seem set as eternally as those of the language zones of South America or the property boundaries of York.

When an author sells a book to a publisher, he or she signs a contract assigning the publisher copyright – literally, the right to copy the work. Though that right is generally as broad as the publisher can get away with, it is spelled out to cover particular geographic areas of the world. And this is where those relict boundaries are still in place – the British Empire still lives!

I’m certainly speaking generally, and I know there are exceptions, but as a consumer the way I understand it is that a British or Commonwealth publisher has the right to copy and sell a book anywhere within the old Empire’s boundaries. An American publisher will be able to sell a book almost anywhere except within those boundaries. Between them, they divide up the English-language speaking world rather in the same way as the Pope divided up the world between the Spanish and the Portugese.

But in today’s ‘flattened‘ world of the Internet, these boundaries no longer make any sense, and in fact result in many very silly situations.

Here’s an example.

Let’s take Michael Connelly’s first novel about Harry Bosch, “Black Echo”. The UK publisher of the paperback is Orion Publishing Group, the hardback Headline Book Publishing.

The US paperback publisher is Grand Central Publishing, the hardback Little, Brown and Company.

So, living in Australia, I can only get to buy one of the UK editions, unless I use the Internet to buy a US edition from Amazon. This is frowned on by the British publishing companies, and by the Australian authorities in charge of intellectual property, but it’s not actually forbidden. If the UK edition is out of print, then the Australian authorities do allow me to ask my bookseller to import the US edition, thanks to some recent relaxations due to our consumer affairs authority.

There’s also an audiobook version, available from Audible.

But wait!! Can I buy the audiobook? No, because apparently it’s based on the US edition, and can’t be sold to me, who lives in the old British Empire. Is there a British audiobook edition available online? Not that I can find. Does this mean that I can buy the only audiobook edition available to me? Not on your life. I’m in the British Empire and so I get to buy – nothing.

Ditto with the e-book edition. There’s no UK version of this, but I am forbidden to buy the e-book from sources such as Books on Board or Fictionwise.

Now, in whose interests is this silly situation? No-one’s interest.

I am not wanting to do something illegal. I want to make a perfectly legal purchase of an item on the Internet. I want to give a publisher (and hence the author) my actual cash. Can I get the e-book any other way? No. So the old relict boundaries are preventing me from giving the author my money. What the…?

And this, of course, is only one example, in the book publishing world. Don’t get me started on other examples, such as the nonsense of DVD region coding (whose brilliant idea was it to put Hong Kong and China into two different DVD regions?).

These kinds of restrictions, as pointed out in this article, just create incentives to find ways around them, almost certainly ending up meaning that the original creator gets nothing.

If the world is flat, if this is the era of globalisation, these boundaries have to be broken up, history or not.