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Book Review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

If there’s ever a book that you can say is pure geek indulgence, it’s Cryptonomicon. No other book I’ve seen takes the abstract concepts of topics as varied as UNIX, cryptography and normalising preferences between siblings for Grandma’s inheritance through a distribution on a cartesian plane formed in a parking lot. You can tell this isn’t your daddy’s war novel.

Stephenson weaves together two stories, interlinked through blood – in the 1930s, Lawrence Waterhouse, a borderline-Autistic mathematician encounters Alan Turing shortly before World War II is due to break out; Bobby Shaftoe is a U.S. Marine stationed in Asia, retreating from Shanghai ahead of the march of the Japanese through China, while Goto Dengo is Bobby’s counterpart of sorts on the Japanese side, a soldier who dares to think of self-preservation ahead of the Emperor’s wishes.

In the late 90s, Randy Waterhouse is being dragged into a business venture by his friend and former business partner Avi; he ends up working with Amy and her father Douglas Macarthur Shaftoe, son of Bobby. They employ the services of one Goto Engineering, which, yes, is presided over by Goto Dengo himself. All this has the backdrop of the mysterious Societas Eroditorum in the background, with a seemingly ageless preacher by the unlikely name of Enoch Root playing a part in both timelines.

This is all not even mentioning the central push of this novel, which is so loaded with technical details it’ll make your head spin: the Cryptonomicon is all about cryptography, encoding messages for secure transmission. It has actual technical details, an algorithm and even an actual Perl script for encoding and decoding a method of encryption specifically invented for this book. There’s even an appendix dedicated to explaining the method for the audience that didn’t catch on through the novel. I mean, damn!

Although some of the technical aspects can be a bit overbearing in the middle of a novel, and the different voices of the narrators are occasionally jarring – albeit pleasingly distinct – this stands on its own as a thriller without the technical background.

The technical details are more easily understood if you come from a software background, but nevertheless I would suspect this would add greatly to the realism, at least for all those that know precious little about both the code-breaking efforts in WWII and the workings of today’s technology.

Rarely does Stephenson use these elements gratuitously. His writing is dense and yet spare, descriptive without being prescriptive – you can easily imagine these people in your head, but the descriptions aren’t overly specific or belaboured.  In some ways, perhaps that does truly identify it as a geek novel: it says enough to get the salient points across, but without being needlessly wordy about it.

Cryptonomicon suffers a little from the same issue many a novel that uses historical characters in its narrative, namely that had the fictional characters actually be interacting with the non-fictional ones in the ways described, the non-fictional novel should be equally if more significant than the ones the actual characters deliver.

Ripping and engaging yarn, hard to put down. ★★★★

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Internal Realism

Alva Noe on the tricky issue of umpiring (in this case, for baseball):

External Realism does a good job accounting for the fact that we all recognize that there are “bad calls” and the fact that dispute and controversy seem to be an ever-present part of the game. Because there are real facts of the matter about what happened, it makes good sense that we reckon umpires can be wrong. In comparison, Internal Anti-Realism seems helpless to make sense of this. If what an umpire says goes, then how can we even take seriously the idea that an umpire might be wrong?

But Internal Anti-Realism gets something right, too. Baseball facts are not physics.

What interests us is whether players succeed or fail, whether they achieve or get lucky. The judgment that a ball is a strike is, really, the judgment that a pitcher delivered a a pitch that the batter ought to have hit. This is not so much a judgment about where the pitch was located, as it is a judgment about whether the pitcher or the batter deserves credit.

It’s a short enough argument that I could almost post the whole thing here, but the point rings true for the controversy over the Umpire Decision Review System (and Hawkeye and Hotspot and so on) in cricket: namely, that these are all “External Realist” approaches, taking us away from the game and interpreting its rules in an overly legalistic point of view. LBW decisions should be about when the batter isn’t offering a shot at a ball that could in other circumstances hit the wicket – not whether the ball, continuing in projected virtual space, would have brushed the leg stump by a millimetre and possibly disturbed a bail sufficient to be counted as a wicket.

These things are taken entirely too seriously, and the pressure on the umpires is getting to the point where they’re going to give up and ask for robotic replacements. The article continues:

Last season Armando Galarraga was an out away from pitching a rare perfect game, a game in which he allowed no opposing runner to reach base. A “bad call” at first base by umpire James Joyce robbed him of his deserved glory. Joyce admitted this after the game and, in a wildly unprecedented move, he apologized to Galarraga. The latter accepted the apology with grace and humility and is reported to have said: “Nobody’s perfect.”

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Battleship: the Movie

They’re really, seriously making “Battleship: The Movie“. And you thought comic book movies were bad?

(On the other hand, Funny or Die has a great “What other movies could they make?” post, which happens to include Clue(do):

When your family is more prolific than the Kennedys’ and more secretive than the Knights Templar, reunions can be a tedious affair. Especially when the mysterious, estranged patriarch is discovered dead before dinner can be served. Now in two days the Von Clu family must try to find a killer without murdering each other first. (Will be a quirky reboot of the storied Clue franchise)

Starring Bill Murray as Colonel Mustard, Meryl Streep as Ms. White, Angelica Houston as Mrs. Peacock, Luke Wilson as Rev. Green, Christina Ricci as Miss Scarlett and Jason Schwartzman as Professor Plum. Written and directed by Wes Anderson. That joke is an elevator pitch worth $25 million right there.

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Vale, Steve Jobs

I was at work, browsing idly on my iPhone when I stumbled upon the news, linked to a short news blast from the AP. This wasn’t fake: it was a statement by Apple, and the language was solemn.

Man oh man, the shock froze me for a minute. As though I was searching for a clue, somewhere in there, that this wasn’t real. But it was, and the Apple homepage spoke volumes in its simplicity, their tribute as minimal as could be, befitting the man.

The amount of coverage Jobs’ passing has received is off the chart. I thought that perhaps this matched the level of Michael Jackson’s passing, but the sordid circumstances surrounding that doesn’t hold a candle to what I’ve seen in the media today. It may well be the technology focused echo chamber I live in, but it certainly felt like everyone was talking about it.

At lunch, outside the Apple store in Sydney, three bouquets lay on the pavement. Five minutes later, another had joined them. Astonishing.

it would seem a day for reflecting on Jobs and his way of thinking, and the most intimate view you could have of his thoughts and philosophy seems to have come from his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address (available on Youtube):

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Perhaps the most eloquently put epitaph for Steve Jobs today comes from Barack Obama:

Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last.  Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world. The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.

Vale, Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011.

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Climate Change and the End of Australia

Jeff Goodell, for Rolling Stone: Climate Change and the End of Australia:

 As the Big Dry dragged on, rainfall declined in the southern part of the country, where most of the people live and the majority of the food is grown, fueling the risk of catastrophic bush fires. The reasons for this change in rainfall patterns are complex, but many climate scientists believe that the Big Dry was driven by subtle shifts in the structure of Australia’s atmosphere caused by the dramatic buildup of carbon pollution. “The storm track, which brings rain-bearing weather to Australia, has shifted a few degrees south,” says Karoly, the University of Melbourne scientist. “Rain that had fallen on southwestern and southeastern Australia now falls on the ocean.” Global warming, in other words, shifted the continent’s vital rainfall out to sea.

For farmers in southeastern Australia, the minute shift in atmospheric conditions was devastating.

Nothing you don’t already know if you live in Australia, but seeing it all condensed into this article for foreign consumption makes it all the more relevant.

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Clark is Offline

These days, when you lose someone you care for, the digital world keeps their footprints:

My Gmail is a priceless hoard of us making plans, telling inside jokes, calling each other “snoodle” and “bubbies.” I type his name into the search field and enter a world of the unscripted dialogue that filled our 9-to-5 existence. I become immersed in the coziness of our union. In hundreds of chats automatically saved to my account, we express our love for each other readily and naturally in our own private speech. This is a history of our relationship that we didn’t intend to write, one that runs parallel to the one authored by his uncontainable illness.

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Movie Review: Horrible Bosses

Horrible Bosses: Jason Bateman, Jason Sudekis, Jennifer Anniston, Kevin Spacey, and Colin Farrell – and that’s only the part of the cast you’re likely to recognise just by name. Nimble and adept, modern and unflinching with enough to keep the laughs going, this comedy provides some light relief without compromising or requiring you to switch your brain off. ★★★

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Windows 8 Developer Preview

I’ve been an Apple user since 2006, but I’ve been a Windows user since 1993 – the sheer gravity of Microsoft Windows on the computing landscape is inescapable, and it’s given me a certain amount of perspective: you can’t be ideological about what you use to get your work done[ref]Or at least, it doesn’t help. YMMV.[/ref].

Last week, Microsoft introduced the upcoming Windows 8 at its BUILD conference to an audience of developers. In many ways, it’s almost the direct opposite of what Apple would do – introduce to devs and market to devs the biggest change in the user interface since Windows 95, instead of a consumer-friendly presentation. The key here is that Microsoft needs developers on board much more than they need the consumers – for all the hype Apple gets, it’s still only around 10% of the computing market, and the overwhelming weight of Microsoft in the corporate environment will give Windows inertia for years.

Windows 8 does something totally different, though: it pivots Microsoft’s market towards the consumer. This is a user interface that takes Windows Phone 7 and turns it up to 11 – everything is big fonted, with broad splashes of colour and blocks as the “icons” of applications, all geared towards touch. The traditional desktop-and-window application model that defines the name “Windows” is relegated to a “Classic”-style compatibility mode.

Microsoft is pitching this as the unifying OS, bringing tablets and desktops together, but what we’ve seen thus far of the OS suggests tablets and touchable screens are the way of the future as far as Microsoft is concerned, and the old-school of peripheral-based computing is a legacy to be supported.

To Microsoft’s credit though, that legacy is supported – as evidenced by the free public release of the developer preview build. You can go download it here, install away on any device[ref]Min requirements: 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB HDD, DX9 Graphics – but it runs on virtual machines – I’m using VirtualBox[/ref] you so chose (with the obvious caveat emptor about being pre-release software), and have a play with it. That’s something you’d never see from Apple, and it goes to show – in my mind – the extent to which Microsoft is trying to get developers and cutting-edge users on board before this thing goes “live”.

Windows 8 is a complete rethink of how Windows works, and it will polarise. No longer are you opening programs from shortcuts to live in confined windows alongside other programs – you “tap” a “tile”, launching the program full screen. You do actions with swipes and taps, programs interact through “contracts”, and the idea of multitasking takes a bit of a back seat. Even IE 10 in “Metro” mode goes down the Apple route – no third-party plugins supported. This spells the end for Flash as we know it, if Windows too plunges the knife into Adobe’s back.

This is all not to say that touch is the only way to go – after all, this is a unifying effort. Windows offers the cop-out of Desktop mode, instantly familiar but also instantly dated in comparison to Metro-based apps. The desktop view is not designed for touch, so it’ll be interesting to see how this integrates into the wider Windows environment.

I’ve played around with the dev build in a virtual machine, and it really intrigues me as to where Microsoft is going with this. Metro really is a bottom-up rethink – it would be easier to get most people to understand the pivot from Windows to Mac than Windows 7 to Windows 8. Microsoft is taking that risk, willing to see the experiment through to ensure that a unified approach is being used for the OS. It’s admirable that there’s no desire to fracture the OS, but sometimes its unclear which will be the lead element of the design – for instance, Metro’s control panel doesn’t have half the options and offers the kick out to Desktop mode Control Panel to grant you full control.

All in all, I like it – it’s refreshing to see a fresh approach from Microsoft, and in taking the big & bold aspects of Windows Phone 7 to the full desktop scale, Microsoft has brought innovation back to the field. While Windows 8 currently feels built-for-touch, I’m sure Microsoft will refine this to make it more palatable to non-touch users prior to release. The Metro UI forces a total rethink on the developer, and some will thrive while others falter. This goes doubly so for software framework providers – Flash and Java appear to have their days numbered in the new format, and Microsoft are obviously pushing hard to enforce some control over their environment.

What does this mean for enterprise? I would suspect many IT managers are looking at Windows 8 with a lot of dread. Windows 7 tweaked the taskbar, but fundamentally you could follow the idea of programs and program management through from Windows 3.1. Windows 8 asks you to change your paradigm entirely, and those custom built VB6 programs from the guys you had spare after the Y2K bug was fixed are finally going to bite the bullet in terms of seamless experience. This is going to be a hard transition, and some users will be alienated along the way – I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft releasing a “professional” edition for non-touch devices where the traditional desktop remains the primary focus.

Finally, what does it mean for Apple? Simple: They’ve got a fight on their hands.

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Julia, resign

Julia, resign:

At the same time you were blind to Rudd’s achievements, most importantly his tactical response to the global financial crisis mark I. It was fast, intelligent and successful. Few believe you can perform to his level for GFC II.

Neither the voters, according to the pollsters, nor the frightened people sitting behind you in the Reps. They know the party is doomed but are paralysed. They don’t have the guts to admit to a huge error of judgment and demand you leave.

That’s why you must resign. You started this fiasco. Only you can end it. That’s the only way to have a fighting chance. Not only in the next election but in the dramatic months between then and now.

Never, ever did I think I would find something in The Australian that I could point to as rational thought. Have a look at this chart of polling:

If Rudd had lost his way, Gillard is up the proverbial creek without a paddle and sinking fast.