Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

I recently finished The Botany of Desire, by science writer Michael Pollan, who’s perhaps more famous recently for his food writing, in which he coins the mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” His basic premise — that plants and humans are intertwined in a mutually domesticating relationship — is interesting, but what really makes the book great is his writing style.

The book is divided into four sections, each devoted to a plant whose history is intriguingly intertwined with that of humanity, paired with a human desire symbolized by our relationship with that plant: the apple/sweetness, the tulip/beauty, marijuana/intoxication, the potato/control. But within this fairly tight framework, the prose meanders into many realms — journalistic interviews, historical data, personal opinion, amusing anecdotes. He brings flavor to the book by writing about plants he’s grown himself and visiting both places that have historical significance to the larger story of the plant and places where the plant is grown now. It’s a pastiche of opinion, speculation, expert testimony, storytelling, historical perspective, and more, all while staying true to the theme of each chapter and the broader themes of the whole book.

This book is a lot of fun to read because it’s clear that Pollan is having a lot of fun writing it — despite its wide-ranging scope, there’s no information he presents that he doesn’t seem fascinated by. Reading Pollan’s work is like hanging out with that cool friend who knows a lot of random stuff about whatever happens to come up — and I’ll probably be picking up his other books at my next visit to my local independent bookstore, in the hopes of spending more time in the company of this engaging writer.

The first book of this year’s holiday haul that I’ve finished is Tim Ferriss’s Four-Hour Workweek. And — though it featured the “stop spending time on dumb stuff” tips I’d been reading it for, it’s definitely a little condescending and prescriptive.

Yes, he’s certainly right that most people spend far more time in meetings, “doing email”, or micromanaging than they need to; yes, much of what people do in offices they could do from home or from Buenos Aires (though he omits any reference to jobs that do need to be done in a particular physical location); and yeah, it’s probably true that most business owners have a few clients/customers they’d be better off dumping (but, “long-forgotten Italian economist”? Last I checked, Pareto was still sneaking into introductory undergraduate econ courses). And his main point — selling a lot of your time in the hopes of someday enjoying a pleasant retirement is dumb — is well taken. Heck, I don’t need to be convinced that spending 8-6 wasting time in an office is no way to live; that’s why I quit my job to freelance for less money.

But, he’s presenting the specific recipe that helped him to live his dreams as though it’s the recipe for everyone to live their own dream. It’s not — it’s the recipe for living Tim Ferriss’s dream. Don’t tell me that reading nonfiction (special exception: “Recommending this book might seem hypocritical, but it’s not”) is a waste of valuable time; at least at this stage of my life, I’d rather study philosophy or politics than tango or German. He acknowledges that standard office jobs provide desirable socialization, but doesn’t suggest how you could build a strong social network as a world traveler who doesn’t spend more than a few months anywhere. His assumptions are that everyone would prefer traveling to building a home, everyone can find fulfillment in leaving their existing friends for short-term friendships, everyone would rather do things than think about things; and this simply isn’t true.

Well, at least I applaud his cleverness in marketing/selling his book to a broader audience (myself included) than it’s really useful for.

Anyone developing any kind of web app with Rails should definitely pick up a copy of Rails Recipes. Even for a relatively simple app, I consistently find myself saying “I wonder if that book has anything I can adapt to do this task” and then it has, not something I can adapt, but something that is exactly right for the task at hand.

It’s really a lot like Rails in general — once you’re working in it, it’s so obvious that of course not every developer should have to reinvent the wheel for every part of an application when nearly every web app has these same parts. I’m a little bothered, though, that it seems so innovative — duh, there should be a framework that makes it easy to develop the stuff that everyone is developing, and duh, just like I don’t have to figure out how to make bread by trial and error, I shouldn’t have to figure out how to code an AJAX preview by trial and error. I guess I need to get better at training myself to think DRYly, so this kind of process will seem as natural as it should.

Even leaving aside the tacky-at-best practice of referring to people with a strong thinking preference as “Vulcans”, something’s a little off with David Brooks’s review of Al Gore’s new book. Most notably, this phrasing struck my attention (emphasis mine):

As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This sentence doesn’t sound like something only a graduate student could come up with; in fact, it sounds like the sort of reasonable yet straightforward analysis tht you might find in an intelligent high schooler’s paper. Curious, I did a little Wikipedia-ing; as if we needed confirmation that Brooks should know better, he has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Chicago! I’d assume that even in 1983 they don’t hand out such degrees to students who can’t write clear sentences about simple historical trends. So Brooks is presumably aware that the “graduate school” epithet is a little silly here. Throw in descriptions of Gore’s prose as “pomposity” that the reader needs to “steel yourself for”, and it’s clear that Brooks is taking a deliberately exaggerated version of the position that Gore is too intellectual to represent the American people — and in the New York Times, a publication popular primarily with educated liberals. My interpretation of “graduate school” in particular is that he’s trying to play up Gore’s supposed over-intellectuality for a mostly college-educated audience; they wouldn’t be intimidated by a more realistic description, since it would sound close to their own backgrounds. I wonder what makes Brooks think alienating (literally, with the Vulcan reference in the article’s title) Gore from NYT readers is so important, and if it’s working.

Meanwhile, over in Slate, William Saletan, whose straightforwardly factual presentations I usually admire, ends up saying something a little weird when talking about the new no-period Pill:

The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won’t shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They’ll do it to satisfy others. On menstrual-suppression Web sites, you can find testimonies from women who hate their periods for making them too moody for their boyfriends or too tired to go to the office. Their menses are getting in the way of their men.

The boyfriend comment I can understand, but if I can’t go to work or can’t work effectively because of low energy from blood loss, not to mention crippling pain, that’s far from my “menses getting in the way of [my] men”. That’s another example of how menstruation’s side effects can be a more than minor obstacle to the “emancipation” that comes from being able to perform at your best in any job or activity, regardless of whether men are involved.

At first I was a little daunted by the 700+ page bulk of Gödel, Escher, Bach; but a background in theoretical computer science/formal linguistics plus an almost embarrassingly strong fondness for meta-commentary are enabling me to breeze through it. I’m always a sucker for texts that cleverly clothe the same idea in parallel expressive metaphors, which is the extremely well-executed premise of this book.

Plus, it’s often laugh-out-loud funny in an obscurely intellectual way:

[in the context of a dialogue in which the dual meaning of "tonic" as something you drink and the first note of a musical scale] That stuff is renowned for its thirst quenching powers. Why, in some places people very nearly go crazy over it. At the turn of the century in Vienna, the Schönberg food factory stopped making tonic, and started making cereal instead. You can’t imagine the uproar that caused.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the “verb-at-the-end”, about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping.

I recently finished two books by pop science writer Steven Johnson — Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good for You. He’s a good writer to the point where I start suspecting his arguments — something so glibly and smoothly articulated can’t possibly be fully accurate, can it? — but overall, I found the books interesting and informative. Mind Wide Open is essentially a survey of some neuroscientific research as it applies to regular everyday feelings, like the way we’re wired to remember scary things more precisely or the way our moods depend more on the mood immediately preceding them than on actual events.

Everything Bad is Good for You, though, is the one with its own substantive argument — and the one that stuck with me. Johnson argues, quite convincingly, that modern “pop culture” — video games, TV, the internet — is more intellectually challenging than equivalent entertainment of a few decades ago, and stimulates our brains to interesting kinds of problem-solving, thus raising the intellectual capability (in some realms) of the average person. I breezed through the first half of the book, mostly because it was essentially preaching to the choir — I was born in 1985, I’ve played Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto and seen The Brady Bunch and Arrested Development, and I can tell which are more sophisticated and challenging! I perked up when he mentioned reality TV, which I don’t watch; he echoed some of the “emotional intelligence” themes brought up in his earlier book, and suggested that reality TV is interesting and challenging because it requires you to read emotions and social situations. Similarly, he describes the ways in which popular TV of today requires you to discover and follow much more complex social networks than popular TV of thirty years ago; this echoed the argument I’ve seen (I don’t recall the source) that social tools like Facebook are a positive extension of human evolution, since one of the major things that distinguished us from our less successful ancestors was our ability to process and remember a large number and kind of social relationships. This idea stuck with me as I started watching Weeds (”Showtime: the slightly more ridiculous network”?) — I don’t think the show is very good, but I feel compelled to continue watching in order to continue to build up a model of the bizarre social network it depicts.

I never got very far with Gravity’s Rainbow last fall, but I think that was in large part because it’s too bulky to toss in my purse when I go to work — this year, I started reading while riding/waiting for the T, and apparently I spend a fair amount of time doing that, as I’ve finished two books recently with very little time spent reading in non T-related settings:

The Other End of the Leash, Patricia McConnell

This was a Christmas present from my parents; the author is an animal behaviorist who addresses human misconceptions about canines from a perspective that is part hard science, part personal experience. She contrasts canine and primate behavior: e.g., primates love hugging, while canines find it kind of weird; loud primates get high social status, while canines don’t really respect loudness; etc. I was pleased to take some of this information to my dog job, where I practiced not looking dogs in the eye in order to appear non-threatening. (Successful.)

The Mind’s I, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

This was a Christmas present from my favorite philosopher of science; it’s a collection of stories, essays, etc. that are primarily thought experiments on the nature of “selfdom” or “mind” (including, e.g., the paper in which Turing proposes the Turing test, some science fiction about robots and putting minds in new bodies, Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” counter to Turing’s arguments), each followed by “reflections” by the editors. I read my first Richard Dawking in this book, and found his analysis of living organisms as “survival machines” for genes compellingly reductionist (I always have a weakness for reductionist arguments). The editors advocate a more-or-less materialist view of the mind, including some fairly convincing arguments against mind-brain dualism; essentially, their position (counter to the position of some of the essayists) is that consciousness comes from a system behaving in the way that a brain behaves. And also, I suppose, minds are tricky, tricky things that no one really understands, but they’re probably just made of neurons and not some amaterial “soul”.