The Elegant Universe (B. Greene)

What would you read on a week’s long vacation to Maui? You know, sunshine, palms, sand and an inviting ocean? Well, your truly chose (amongs others) The Elegant Universe, a pop-science book by one of the more outstanding string theorists.
Boring? Certainly not. I am a physicist by trade, and I always had a hard time finding the patience to deal with string theory. At some point I knew I would have to do it, and this one was as good an attempt to learn as any other.
String theory is famous for two main reasons:1. It has a successful explanation as to why we experience two sets of forces (gravity on one end and all other elementary forces on the other one) in one single reality2. A very weird view of the world, in which there are infinitesimal dimensions that are curled up, just so that some esoteric mathematical property of spaces beyond a certain dimension holds.
It all sounded too much like the desire to form the universe after the model of the theory. In particular, the extra dimensions seemed to complicate things too much for my pleasure, especially because no observable was associated with these extra dimensions, only mathematical properties.
Then, thinking again, I realized that quantum mechanics must have sounded pretty crazy in the day, too; and there is not the slightest doubt that QM is the best theory in the world when it comes to measurements. The same is true for relativity, another crazy idea in the day.
Who should read The Elegant Universe? It is a very scientific book, trying to explain cover to cover how things work, who is involved in string theory, and how all this edifice came into being. You will sorely miss the prickly debate and the juicy commentary that many other science books offer. This one explains one and only one thing: who came up with string theory, why, and how.
Even if you noticed that’s actually three things, you won’t get much more satisfaction from this book than that. I remember reading a great many attempts to popularize special relativity, even watching Peter Ustinov’s documentary, and getting more confused than before I watched.
Then, one day in the library in Aachen, I discovered the original 1905 ‘Annalen der Physik’ where Einstein published the original theory. All of a sudden everything was clear, and I found that all the attempts to clarify were muddying the waters ever since.
You see, before Einstein came, the laws governing special relativity were all there. What Einstein brought to the equation in this case was simply an overarching explanation that rationalized all the strangeness.
String theory, it seems, needs to find its Einstein. It is a beautiful theory, but it doesn’t really explain much – at least reading this book. One day, if we are lucky and this theory holds, someone will come and explain just why things are supposed to be this way. And that person will make string theory obsolete by simply explaining it in terms outside of it.
Until then, everyone should probably know something about it. This is as good a book as any one.

Angels & Demons (D. Brown)

How would you like the subtitle: “Robert Langdon’s first adventure?”
After reading “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, I realized how hard it would be for Dan Brown to repeat the success of The Da Vinci Code. Indeed, Angels & Demons does not reach the same levels of depth as the predecessor, and falls back on a great many trappings of Brown’s work.
We have the struggle between science and religion, who becomes a stand-in for the debate between technology and politics in the early Brown novels. We have the beautiful but frigid heroine that meets the hunky but geeky hero at the beginning of the tribulations. We have a plot full of twists and turns, and a grand finale in which rationality wins.
Surely, Angels and Demons is a step up from Brown’s early novels. Unfortunately, though, since he writes the background history all by himself, it’s not coherent and compelling. Again, we are made to run through a novel with no reason, chasing after the solution of a case that will leave us without as much as excitement.
I wish Dan Brown good luck finding another ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’. Once he finds another compelling background story he can narrate to, he will have another hit of the magnitude of The Da Vinci Code.

Deception Point (D. Brown)

Probably the first of the very successful set of novels written by Dan Brown, Deception Point opens with a series of themes that will be recurrent throughout Brown’s work. We find the hero and heroine couple to be, meeting at the beginning of the book and forging an unlikely alliance. The hero will be someone that has sworn not to fall in love again; he will be handsome but learned, desired but humble. The heroine will be stunning but too smart to deal with commoners.
The father figure shows up very prominently. In this case, that’s not the heroine’s actual father, who doesn’t ever behave father-like in the whole novel. Instead, it’s the heroine’s boss. This is a prelude to more similar figures throughout the series, and implicates that an almost Oedipal relationship with older men is what prevents the heroine from binding to one of the multitude of men seeking her.
Twists are another recurring item. In Dan Brown’s work, the plot twists like a snake recoiling in a captor’s hand. What seemed good becomes evil, and who seemed friend becomes foe. This need for twists in the plot line gives Brown’s novels a level of ambiguity they share with a lot of thrillers: since you are never sure about the goodness of a character, morality becomes very ambiguous.
Research is another one of Brown’s naturals. When he talks about scientific or technical matters, he sounds very convincing. Despite this, to the expert all his stories have severe logical flaws that render them virtually indistinguishable from Hollywood movies, whose written memento these books seem to be.
Deception Point is a story about a meteorite used to justify the existence of NASA. It is about a close presidential race, in which the incumbent is honest but losing, the opponent cunning but dishonest. And finally it is about a spy and an oceanographer who fall in love despite being both very much the classical Brown misanthropes.
In the end, Deception Point fails on many levels. The premise of the story, a fake meteorite, is too unbelievable to be true. Despite the admonition that all technology in the book is real, placing a meteorite under and ice shelf seems too much a complication to be acceptable.
As a novel, Deception Point is too unevenly paced. Descriptive elements will be inserted in high-paced sections, and where a slowing of the pace would allow for a credible description of the characters, Brown rushes as if hit by an evil editor seeking to cut the end in half.
As a thriller, Deception Point is too predictable. While there are a great many actors in the drama, the premise of the hidden meteorite points directly towards the ultimate culprit. Even if you wouldn’t want to believe his (or her, I don’t want to spoil your fun!) guilt, you are still faced with the realization there are only two other characters that can be at fault.
If you have read all books by Dan Brown, read this for comparison. If you haven’t but intend to read them all, then start a chronological progression. If you are just curious about Dan Brown, read The Da Vinci Code – an almost perfect zenith of his writing, spoiled only by the realization that it’s going to be quite impossible for him to reach the same levels.

The Da Vinci Code (D. Brown)

Imagine the disappointment that I felt when I bought ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ and found out that ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (TDVC) was a mere novelization of the former!
I thought Dan Brown had outdone himself, collecting information as U. Eco had done for ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’. As a matter of fact, TDVC read like what Foucault’s Pendulum would have wanted to be. Where the latter lacked in a compelling reason to exist and was essentially a manifesto of rationalism (BORING!), the former looked into the exact same historic thread, revealing the same masterful connections in a bright shining light.
TDVC is a novel of deeply historic concern. Based on actual research, the author follows a hero and his heroine on a quest for the Holy Grail. As usual in Brown’s books they meet just for the purpose and didn’t know each other prior to the story’s beginning, which is set in the Louvre.
From the Louvre, the plot ripples all over France, reminding me of the later novels of the Mr. Ripley series. In the end, we find out that Jesus Christ had a family, that they fled Palestine for France, settled there, and created a lineage that goes on to this day.
Now, the historic facts behind this plot line are all taken from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is written as a documentary book. The embellishments in the plot are typical Dan Brown: a heroine in distress, an erudite and good-looking hero, a conspiracy that tangentially involves our new-formed couple, but sucks them into a vortex of danger, death and disillusion.
If you had analyzed things, you would have come up with exactly this scenario. Mr. Brown’s evolution as a writer goes from the seriously overwritten Deception Point to the streamlined Digital Fortress; from there to Angels and Demons, where religion is discovered as a new and compelling theme. In all these books, though, plot lines are tactical and not strategic. There is a certain lack of thematic uniformity (read: message) that makes all those books interesting reads, but not compelling ones.
Thematic continuity is certainly the dominant character of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. On the other hand, the strict documentary nature of the book relegates is to the realm of non-fiction readers. And the story is just to compelling to be put on the same shelf as the latest self-help tome or the newest business theory.
Combined in TDVC, historic fact and formulaic novelization combine into a killler package. TDVC has both the romantic interest that binds the female readership as well as a reason to keep you interested in the story. Well done – but very, very hard to repeat.

Digital Fortress (D. Brown)

Digital Fortress is a fast-paced thriller with a strong technological background and an odd location in National Security circles.
Before Dan Brown moved to religion as a topic, security and espionage were his main themes. Both Digital Fortress and the earlier Deception Point deal with the interaction between espionage and politics, bringing the delicate balance between good and evil to attention.
Dan Brown loves twists. The plots of his novels are the conventional spy novels, in which a good pair/couple deals with a series of ambiguous and powerful characters. Readers are required to think that these powerful characters are on the good or the evil side depending on the torque of the plot’s twists at the moment.
Digital Fortress is about a secure encryption algorithm and the need to have a trap door into any such algorithm. There is one historic fact behind this story line: the FBI demanded that any encryption algorithm have a secured trap door, such that nobody could encrypt anything that the FBI couldn’t read.
Unfortunately both for the book and the FBI, that’s a little bit like asking to create a lock that can always be opened by a master key, but that is supposed to be secure: the good guys will use it, exposing themselves to the bad guys that stole the master key; the bad guys aren’t going to be as stupid as using an encryption mechanism that is easily decoded.
As a result, the technical part of the novel is deeply flawed and not too interesting. The plot, though, is acceptable in its fatal twists and turns. The characters are sometimes believable – allthough Dan Brown would be well-advised to research the ‘eternal father figure’ in his books. Is it something that he came up with, or is it the brainchild of an editor?
In any case, Digital Fortress ends up being a little formulaic. I am glad Mr. Brown found a much more compelling environment in the Catholic Church.

Riding in Marin

Moving to the City did one big thing for me: it gave me a social life.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? What kind of difference could that be? And yet, I find that people up here are more approachable than down there, especially when it comes to cycling.

I will ride on my own, and all of a sudden someone else will be by my side and chat. At first I thought of it as an isolated event, but then I realized it happens pretty much all the time: if someone is riding at close to your pace and doesn’t have anything else to do, (usually) he (and rarely she) will chat.

Garmin ForeRunner 201

I just ordered a ForeRunner unit to replace my Polar HRM. It is supposed to arrive tomorrow, and I am all excited. I always thought that GPS is the way to go for cycling, because it doesn’t require modifications to the bike, is more precise, and it gives you a better indication of location.

For a while I was toying with the idea of using my Zaurus SL-5500 as a bike computer. I have a GPS receiver, and it would have been great to write the software that goes with it. It would indeed have been quite easy to do, since the connectivity with the GPS unit is a problem already solved and there is no problem with decyphering the output.

Alpine Loop (via Mt. Tam)

Again, another ride that is worth doing. Especially under the circumstances.

I was riding out around 10a on Memorial Day. A very warm and nice day, with a lot of people around. A nasty and annoying guy had placed himself right in front of me, and resisted all attempts to pass him in the crowd by either pushing me to the side or accelerating to get in front of me and then falling behind because he had lost all energy.

Point Reyes Express Try 1

So it was time to try it out. Point Reyes Express is the North Bay equivalent of the Spectrum ride, and I just felt I had to try it out.

The route is fairly simple, but much harder than Spectrum. Basically you can join either from the city (leaving at about 8:00a from the bridge) or in San Anselmo at the Coffee Roasters. The group is much more friendly than at Spectrum, but the guys are better equipped for the much longer and much tougher ride.

Rodeo Beach

You can actually turn left after getting all the way down from Conzelman road. Right gets you back – either up Conzelman, or through the tunnel back to the bridge.

This time I went for left and ended up on Rodeo Beach. It was an interesting mix of surfers, families and mountain bikers trying to conquer the hills heading towards Mt. Tam. I didn’t stay for long, but it made me curious.