I spent the last week+ Kipling. I've now Kipled. I had read some of his poetry -- my dad quotes "They do not preach that their god will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose" enough that I couldn't avoid that. I read "If...." after learning it was the source of the title of my favorite movie. Never his prose, though. And what a pleasant surprise! These were all pretty fun reads.

First, the cons: these works are 100% colonialist in perspective, nor are they lacking in casual racism. It wasn't the overwhelming focus in the way that I had feared, though. For his time, he seems like he was actually genuinely interested in other cultures, and could even show respect for them under the right conditions. The understanding of Buddhism he demonstrates in Kim, for instance, goes well beyond what a thoughtless bigot would ever have bothered with. But these definitely shouldn't be read without the willingness to interrogate Kipling's biases.

Kim was a really delightful story, a proper ripping yarn, with a cast of brightly realized characters in a brightly realized world. It somehow managed to combine a bildungsroman with a spy novel with an exploration of Buddhist spirituality in a way I certainly wasn't expecting. Of all these, this one will stick with me the longest, I think.

Jungle Book was fun, I guess? One of those weird things were modern mythology has completely overwhelmed the source material.

Captains Courageous was an easy sell, as I'm always a sucker for a nautical story with far too much technical detail. I didn't entirely buy how quickly the main character, the spoiled brat of a railroad tycoon, adapts to his new situation as a working hand on cod fishing boat. The moral message of the sanctity of work was a bit heavy handed as well. It didn't shy away from some of the horrors of life at sea, at least, which seemed refreshingly honest.

I had seen the movie of The Man Who Would Be King, and it turns out it was a pretty direct adaptation of a fairly short story. I should watch it again, now.

The last two weeks have been Gabriel García Márquez weeks for me.

One Hundred Years of Solitude:
This follows seven generations of a family, from the founding of a remote village through civil war and capitalist exploitation through to its final destruction. Solitude is definitely a theme, but not as major of one as I had expected. I found the fairy-tale-esque presentation made it a bit hard to engage with. The content was fun and interesting, but most of it was only the barest of outlines. That allowed a lot more stuff could happen, certainly, and no doubt that sense of floating untethered over history was intentional. I just didn't entirely enjoy the experience. That said, though, if I ever found a town, I might have to call it Macondo.

Love in the Time of Cholera:
This was very different in style, with far fewer characters, allowing them to be explored in depth. The underlying plot of someone nursing a hopeless love for half a century is kind of meh. (And as seen while doing my normal post-read Wikipedia research, of course this was Ted from How I Met Your Mother's favorite book. Of fucking course it was.) Luckily the characters and setting are interesting enough to make up for that. It even managed to stick the landing, which is impressive given the premise.

Cholera was not actually a very prominent aspect of the book, for the record.

I started this one on a whim, deciding to follow the French revolutionary theme from Les Mis a bit farther. I'm glad I did! The only other Dickens I've read is Oliver Twist, which I really didn't like much at all. This was much more nuanced and interesting. It was also a lot more sympathetic to the motivation behind the revolution of 1789 than I expected coming from an 19th century British author.

No deep introspective analysis on this one, I'm afraid. I cried at the end, that was enough.

Sometime around third grade, I was first introduced to pi and the basic circle equations for circumference, area and volume. I could see how the circumference could be measured, to check the equation, but area left me stumped. I wondered about filling a cylinder to a specific depth with water or clay, and using the volume divided by the known height to calculate the area. This seemed like a terribly sloppy method to me even then, but it was the best I could think of. I asked a teacher how we knew the area of a circle, and I was more or less brushed off with a non-answer. The teacher didn't know! So that question joined the throng at the back of my mind, waiting for more information.

(I'm not sure why I didn't ask my dad, who certainly would have known. Kids are weird.)

The answer finally came almost a decade later when I got to calculus in senior year. Integration over an area! It was a beautiful revelation. So clean and elegant, and always a bit of a wonder to see the depth of the abstraction being used, from limits to derivatives to definite integrals, yet in the end my old friend π * r² pops out. Glorious... yet I was disappointed that my teacher hadn't known, back in third grade. Not that I expected them to be able or willing to walk a 9 year old through calculus, but they should have at least been able to say, "It can be shown using this thing called calculus, which you'll learn about in high school." That's not too much to ask.

Now, two decades after that, I'm reading a lot of pre-modern mathematics for the book I'm working on. As I noted in a post here awhile back, I found it very interesting that Euclid didn't include any equations for the quantitative area or volume of circles, cylinders and spheres, just ratios between them. A cone is 1/3 the volume of a cylinder that just contains it, etc. Which made perfect sense, as calculus was still a long way in the future. Except when I was reading Leonardo of Pisa (better known as the son of Bonacci, AKA filius Bonacci, AKA Fibonacci), something caught my eye. In a problem he plainly states that the area of a circle is 1/2 * radius * circumference. Which, if you convert c to being 2 * pi * r, comes out as π * r²! How could he have known that, so long before Leibniz and Newton?

It turns out, for some problems anyway, the ancient Greeks beat calculus by 2,000 years. And somehow I had gone 40 years without knowing this! Archimedes had solved the area of a circle, using the method of exhaustion. This looks an awful lot like an epsilon-delta limit proof, but done using geometry instead of algebra. He postulates that the area of the circle is equal to that of a triangle with a base the length of the circle's circumference, and a height equal to the circle's radius. He is them able to show, through a series of contradictions, that the circle's area cannot be either greater or less than the area of this triangle. The error of a polygon fit inside/outside the circle can get arbitrarily small, and thus can always get smaller than the error of the triangle if it isn't actually the correct size. Yet those polygons can't actually be bigger/smaller than the triangle, if you do the math. The only option left if for them to be equal to each other, and thus the triangle is the correct area! It's a lovely proof, particularly for how clever it is at avoiding the explicit use of any mention of infinity.

So it turns out my high school annoyance at my grade school teacher was still incomplete. Calculus can give the answer, and it's definitely a superior tool, but it turns out the area of a circle is knowable using nothing more than geometry. I wonder how my uneasy-at-times relationship to mathematics would have changed, had I been shown Archimedes' proof back in 1986.

Two main takeaways here: This is a fabulous book, and it is not what you think it is.

I'd heard of The Jungle plenty. Hell, I think it was covered in my AP US history class in high school. About unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, right? Some guy falls in a vat of hot grease, only his skeleton is found but they still ship out the batch of lard for human consumption, right? That stuff is all in there, sure, but it's completely incidental. The Jungle is about the immigrant experience, socialism and class consciousness.

The story follows Jurgis Rudkus as he immigrates from Lithuania, finds a job in the meatpacking industry, gets married, and generally tries to get by. The abysmal working conditions and exploitative systems they live in prevent them from ever having more than a tenuous existence, however. Disease and accidents slowly winnow down the family while all he can do is try to work harder, always harder, but never enough. It is a classic depiction of capital only paying the bare replacement value for the labor it is consuming, not to get all Marxist about it. Broken by these defeats, Jurgis skips town, rides the rails, and through some halfway lucky breaks ends up a smooth, hard-living criminal working for the political bosses of Chicago. It is only after he falls out of this position as well that his eyes open to the promise of socialism, and the wave that is poised to sweep the country clean.

So, yeah, that is not what I was expecting. I see this confusion goes way back. Upton Sinclair himself said, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." That was a fun surprise, but the real treat was the writing style. For once, listening at 2x speed was a positive boon, as every single sentence should be heard as spoken by a fast-talking reporter holding a notebook with a PRESS tag in his fedora. The language is smooth, clever, and gut-wrenching. It would make an excellent pairing with Grapes of Wrath.

Vanity Fair: A more or less fun regency era story with some clunky lessons bolted on to make it more acceptable. The good people don't exactly thrive and the bad(ish) people do pretty well for most of it, so I didn't find it a convincing morality play. But the story itself was fine, with some decent characters.

Having finished that, the obvious next step was to go to its namesake, Pilgrim's Progress. Which is... weird. Super allegorical, which I knew going in, but the allegories aren't very consistent? It starts by setting up the journey the main character is on as the process of becoming Christian and finding salvation, but then later the characters are openly talking about being Christian as a thing external to the journey. And along the way, someone dies a martyr's death, but angels come and take them straight to heaven, even though they were only halfway to heaven in terms of the journey? Eventually it is revealed that the main character's name is Christian, and later we find out that his wife's name is Chritiana, yet in the first book she is against his pilgrimage and stays at home with the kids. So was her name something else during that period, and only got changed for Pilgrim's Progress 2: The Next Generation? I'm not the target audience for this kind of literature, I realize, but it still doesn't seem to much to ask Bunyan to think through the meta-narrative.

So, eh. I wouldn't recommend either of them very strongly, but I wouldn't say stay away either.

I'm a sucker for 19th century British literature, and this was no exception. It was, simply, charming. Set in a dreamlike rural Wessex, where the characters treat a trip to Bath as if going abroad to learn of the strange customs of the natives, I naturally found myself picturing all of them as hobbits. Since Hardy never explicitly stated their species, to the best of my recollection, I feel safe in this interpretation.

The ending did get a bit more melodramatic than I was expecting. I would have been fine with the narrative staying more consistently mellow. I also suspect that Boldwood's obsession wasn't intended to come across as quite so creepy and manipulative as it did, but we're all defenseless against the critical eye of the future.

Overall, a very enjoyable listen. I did have to drop down to 2x playback speed, as the narrator was doing some very good -- but very thick -- accent work for some of the characters.

I've always felt bad for the intelligent waterbound species that must dot the universe. All those intelligences that had the bad luck to evolve where it is inherently hostile to basically all forms of technology. No way to use fire, an environment corrosive for most forms of metal, so conductive that any form of electrical usage would be seriously tricky. What a trap to be born into. It's the kind of thing I worry about sometimes.

But the other day, I realized something wonderful: hydraulics would work better for them! Their hydraulics would be more like pneumatics are for us: cheap and easy to set up, because the working fluid can vent to the atmosphere. No need for return lines! Except hydraulics are much safer and more powerful than pneumatics. They can handle much higher pressures, and because water/oil doesn't compress, the systems don't store (much) energy when pressurized. Air is a spring, in contrast, and a pressurized pneumatics system has a whole lot of energy coiled up in it. The pressure doesn't immediately drop to zero when they have a leak, it keeps on blasting out in ways that tend to make the problem even worse. Hydraulics pressure vessels crack and make a big mess, pneumatic pressure vessels explode.

Water-bound aliens would have the best of both worlds. The power and safety of hydraulics with the ease and cheapness of pneumatics. I'm not sure how they would get to that level of technology in the first place, of course, but I still felt a genuine sense of relief when I realized this. At least something is better for them!

(Another book excerpt. It's possibly a bit too long, but Bacon is just so quotable!)

In 1620, Francis Bacon published a bold challenge to the world to start over again on scientific investigations in his Nova Organum. The title was a reference to Aristotle’s Organon, the name given to his works covering logic and syllogism, including the Posterior Analytics. In his updated version, Bacon explicitly called for this old approach to be replaced by a natural science based on empirical observations and induction. This wasn’t the first time someone had advocated for a science based on experimentation, but it was by far the most influential. It came at exactly the right time, as the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo were starting to diffuse through Europe. The old Aristotelian approaches were looking increasingly stale. Bacon saw stagnation in the intellectual world around him, and he wasn’t subtle in condemning it.

“For if you look closely at the wide range of books which are the boast of the arts and sciences, you will frequently find innumerable repetitions of the same thing, different in manner of treatment but anticipated in content, so that things which at first glance seem to be numerous are found on examination to be few. One must also speak plainly about usefulness, and say that the wisdom which we have drawn in particular from the Greeks seems to be a kind of childish stage of science, and to have the child’s characteristic of being all too ready to talk, but too weak and immature to produce anything. For it is fertile in controversies and feeble in results.”

Yet this wasn’t inevitable, Bacon argued, because other areas of human activity had been making significant improvements. The contrast he saw between them was stark.

“In the mechanical arts we see the opposite situation. They grow and improve every day as if they breathed some vital breeze. In their first authors they usually appear crude, clumsy almost, and ungainly, but later they acquire new powers and a kind of elegance, to the point that men’s desires and ambitions change and fail more swiftly than these arts reach their peak of perfection. By contrast, philosophy and the intellectual science are, like statues, admired and venerated but not improved.”

Relying on syllogistic thinking was at the core of this stalemate. If you only reason with syllogisms -- deductively, that is -- then you can never discover anything new. You’re stuck endlessly drawing conclusions from the same set of assumptions. This was the era in which the medieval scholastics started to be openly mocked for their obsession with seemingly pointless questions. Bacon didn’t quite accuse them of asking how many angels could dance on the head of a pen¹, but that satire does date to the time when the Nova Organon was being written.

“[...] in ordinary logic almost all effort is concentrated on the syllogism. The logicians seem scarcely to have thought about induction. They pass it by with barely a mention, and hurry on to their formulae for disputation. But we reject proof by syllogism, because it operates in confusion and lets nature slip out of our hands.”

Bacon called for science to start over again from scratch, this time building in inductive ways. He thought that was the only way to stay firmly rooted in the truths of nature. Any other approach would inevitably end up mired in philosophical arguments, without any way of knowing who was right.

“For we regard induction as the form of demonstration which respects the senses, stays close to nature, fosters results and is almost involved in them itself. And so the order of demonstration also is completely reversed. For the way the thing has normally been done until now is to leap immediately from sense and particulars to the most general propositions, as to fixed poles around which disputations may revolve; then to derive everything else from them by means of intermediate propositions; which is certainly a short route, but dangerously steep, inaccessible to nature and inherently prone to disputations. By contrast, by our method, axioms are gradually elicited step by step, so that we reach the most general axioms only at the very end; and the most general axioms come out not as notional, but as well defined, and such as nature acknowledges as truly known to her, and which live in the heart of things.”

Unlike most influential works, you don’t have to squint to tease out the specific arguments that later grew in the retelling². Bacon comes right out and argues for inductive reasoning in explicit terms. It's suspiciously modern in places, like a particularly clumsy forgery. The central thesis of the book really is that if we start using inductive methods like experimentation, we can develop forms of science that will give us unprecedented control over the natural world. He even lays out some guidelines for publishing results that sounds a lot like the methodology section of any journal article published today.

“[...] in any new experiment of any subtlety, we should append the actual method used in the experiment, so that men may have the opportunity to judge whether the information it produced is reliable or deceptive, and also to encourage men to apply themselves to look for more accurate methods (if there are any).”

In order to replace the old way of doing things, he outlines a new methodology for doing science in the second half of the book. This part hasn’t aged as well, being the first in a long line of prescriptions for how science should be done that have little to no influence on the actual practice of science. He thought the best approach was to first write a comprehensive natural history of the world, listing everything known about it. With that foundation, he argued, it would then be merely the work of a few years to work out all of science³. The Nova Organon itself was only intended to be the prologue to this ultimate natural history. It ends with Bacon making a preliminary list of topics that will have to be covered. The whole thing is ironically very Aristotelian in nature, taking a concept and breaking it down into a long list of arbitrary distinctions given fancy names. Like a Moses of the Scientific Revolution, Bacon was able to foresee the path ahead and lead the world to it, but was ultimately unable to enter the promised land himself.

The second half still has some interesting moments, however, such as when he lists all the types and sources of heat that he can think of as an example of this new process. These include “flaming meteors”, “air shut up underground in some caverns, especially in the winter”, “quicklime sprinkled with water”, and “animals, especially internally, where they are constantly hot, though in insects the heat is not perceptible to the touch because they are so small”. It is tempting to chuckle at the random contents of the list⁴, but grappling with a highly subjective sensation like heat was legitimately challenging for early science. Bacon later describes a primitive thermometer⁵ in an attempt to make the categorization more objective. He even makes a surprisingly strong argument for heat being a form of motion instead of a separate substance.

Above all, he had the intuition that natural philosophy could remake the world by providing new tools and ways of harnessing nature. “[...] in our progress we shall walk the boundaries of the world.” This was described more fantastically in another book of his, The New Atlantis. Here he drew his inspiration not from Aristotle, but from Plato, particularly his Critias and its description of Atlantis. Bacon’s utopia was an island called “Bensalem” located somewhere in the north Pacific, as yet unknown to European explorers. There the reader finds an enlightened nation, ruled by philosopher-scientists straight out of The Republic. The heart of the land is “Solomon’s House”, home of the greatest savants. To the modern eye it is immediately recognizable as a research institute. By following inductive procedures, these wise philosophers have advanced science far beyond any other country. Many of the inventions of Solomon’s House, like the ability to project images and sounds long distances, “boats for going under water”, and “carriages without horses” sound, in retrospect, quite prescient.

Admirably, his commitment to experimental science wasn’t limited to theorizing in books, despite being frequently distracted by his political career. At 65 he had the idea to see if snow could be used to preserve meat. In the process of procuring a dead bird and stuffing it with snow, he contracted the pneumonia which killed him a few days later. Surely that’s an honorable death for anyone who wanted us to “perceive, as if awakening from a deep sleep, what is the difference between the opinions and fictions of mind and a true and practical philosophy, and just what it is to consult nature herself about nature.”

His influence proved absolutely enormous. Even though science didn’t end up using many of his proposed methods, the ideal of the natural philosopher he invented inspired generations. The Royal Society of Newton, Locke and Boyle was explicitly founded in imitation of Solomon’s House. A century later, the revolutionary government of France ordered his works to be reprinted, as part of their tragically doomed commitment to the ideals of the age of reason. It is not the goal of this book to make arguments regarding the “great man” theory of history, so it won’t be claimed here that the development of science would have been drastically different had he not existed -- but in our timeline, at least, he was essential.

[1] The original phrasing “needle’s point” was a pun on “needless points”.
[2] Hence the number of quotes in this section -- and the ones above are all from the first few pages!
[3] Those with a background in artificial intelligence might be reminded of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference where the field was born. The attendees were blithely confident of creating a machine with general human-level intelligence within 10 years, 20 at most. It turns out that predicting the difficulty of a research goal before doing any of the research is really hard.
[4] Which I’m guilty of doing myself, obviously.
[5] Along the lines of a barometer, using water.