yesh omrim

Cryptorebel without a cause

When Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother came out last year, various geeky and liberal bloggers I respect lauded it as A Very Important Book That Today’s Young People Ought To Read. I finally read it and my general reaction was: this is A Very Important Book? WTF?

Obligatory non-spoilery plot summary: Marcus a.k.a. “w1n5t0n” is a high-school student with a gift for hacking, in both the “doing stuff with computers” sense and the “evading security systems” sense. In the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, he is detained without warrant, interrogated about his nonexistent terrorist connections, and finally released with an “we’ve got our eye on you, boy” warning. He vows REVENGE. Hijinks ensue.

I should be a sucker for a novel with this kind of setup, so why did it so thoroughly turn me off? Let me count the ways:

1. Marcus is a geek wish-fulfillment fantasy. He sneaks through his school’s high-tech security screens! He passes out DVDs containing a hardened Linux distribution to his friends and classmates, who accept them eagerly! Hundreds of people who only know him over a carefully anonymized network acclaim him as his leader, even as he humbly denies being in control of anything! He shows a teacher who’s a true patriot by quoting the Declaration of Independence!¹ As his first part-time job, while still a high-school student, he implements a cryptographic protocol! Girls want to have sex with him! I realize that the main character of a thriller novel is usually larger than life, but this goes far for my taste; Marcus is so perfect that there’s no room in the novel for him to demonstrate personal growth.² And why should he? He was right about everything on the first page and equally right on the last.
2. The book is stuffed with infodumps about computer technology, the glorious Sixties, and other things that the author clearly thinks You Should Know, but which do nothing to advance the plot or reveal the character. It’s almost as bad as the sex scenes in a Gor novel. Here, I’ll prove it: I randomly open the book to pages 258–259. On page 267,³ the third paragraph begins “It’s unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition…” and goes on for a whole page.
3. Given the undercurrent of the author hectoring the next generation about what they should care about, the book’s flirtation with youth-worship—at one point Marcus’s movement adopts the slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 25”—is just… odd. And as regime-threatening movements go, Marcus’s network is curiously homogenous. They’re young. They’re geeky enough to ruin a perfectly good video-game console to run Linux on it. They seem to have the same taste in music and recreation (two critical points in the plot involve a rock concert and a LARP, respectively). Most of the main characters are white or East Asian; the role of racism in the government’s suppression of civil liberties is barely mentioned.
4. Most people willing to risk arrest and long-term detention for exercising their civil rights are not just trying to exercise their civil rights, but trying to use those civil rights to accomplish something.⁴ Paul Robert Cohen appealed to the Supreme Court for the right to display “Fuck the Draft” on his jacket; while the legal system only cared about the first word, Cohen cared about the entire sentence. By contrast, in Little Brother, the movement’s enthusiasm for civil liberties is completely disconnected from any larger political program. Marcus and his friends want to “take it [the country] back”, but for what do they want to do with the country once they have it? End the war in Iraq? Liberalize the immigration laws? Repeal the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that have discouraged high-tech startups from floating initial public offerings? I have no idea.

The Israeli author Amos Oz once said that when he has a question to which he knows the answer, he writes an essay; when he has a question to which he doesn’t know the answer, he writes a novel. I’ve enjoyed Doctorow’s previous work—both fiction and non—but Little Brother is a novel that should have been an essay.

¹ Had I been teaching that class, I would have pointed out that John Adams had signed the Declaration of Independence as a delegate from Massachusetts and then, twenty-two years later, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts.

² Losing his virginity doesn’t count.

³ OK, a Gor novel would have the sex scene within five pages of any random selection, not ten, but then again, the Gor novels are printed in smaller type.

⁴ Cf. Stanley Fish’s remark, in There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too, that the only speech that can be completely free is speech that nobody cares about listening to.

Short reviews of long books

I read a couple of books recently that are so thick and comprehensive that a proper review of each would be, well, thick and comprehensive. In the interest of saying something about them before October, I will dare to review them improperly.

A Splendid Exchange: Watching my seven-year-old and four-year-old trade Pokémon cards, I remember Adam Smith’s remark about “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange”. This book traces the history of that propensity (and of attempts to regulate it) in the Western world and everyone who traded with it, and even dips into the prehistory; it starts with commerce in obsidian arrowheads and copper ore, and ends with the riots disrupting Seattle’s World Trade Organization talks.

1491: You learned about the American Indians in school, right? Mumblety-mumble thousand years ago, their ancestors all came over the “land bridge” from Siberia to North America, right? And there they lived as nomadic hunters and gatherers surrounded by pristine wilderness, right? And so at the time Columbus arrived, the New World was thinly populated, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I will resist the temptation to elaborate by restating my reviews even more succinctly: Good books. Read. Grunt.

U-S+Eh!

Happy Canada Day to my Canadian readers. (Do I have more than one?)

Please continue to set a good example for the rest of the continent.

Warming up for “can Superman beat up the Hulk?”

The Seven-Year-Old asked me if an AT-TE walker is bigger than an Oliphaunt.

Irony as a second language

I’m sure that all of us, regardless of our political views on other matters, can come together and agree that it would be good if more American residents would learn to speak English.

Also, that it would be good if more American politicians would learn to spell it.

See, this is what happens when you outsource your banner printing to China.

η: In the interest of bipartisanship, I present this. Thanks, introverte!

The museum of institutional egotism

During my brief stay at yeshiva in Israel, we toured some of the archeological sites near Tiberias, and our guide pointed out a number of details about the Roman civil engineering from two thousand years ago. A tour guide who appreciates technology, I thought. Cool!

A few months ago, I read about the tunnel of Eupalinos, an aqueduct dug through a mountain on the Greek island of Samos by two teams starting at opposite sides. The tunnel is an impressive work of engineering when you consider that during the sixth century BCE, when it was dug, its surveyors had no magnetic compasses, nothing resembling modern surveying instruments, and possibly not even much geometry—Euclid’s Elements was written two centuries later. And yet, the two excavation teams intercepted each other in the middle of the mountain, just as Eupalinos had planned. Wow, I thought. If I could ever do a Geek’s Tour of Europe, that tunnel would be one of my stops.

So, when I heard someone had published The Geek Atlas, the first thing I did was look at the map to see if the tunnel of Eupalinos was on the list. To my surprise, it was not; in fact, not a single marker lay in Greece. The only place mentioned in Italy is the Tempio Voltiano, a museum dedicated to Alessandro Volta; nothing about classical Roman engineering here. The Neolithic excavations at Çatalhöyük are also off the list, but surely I am not the only nerd who trembles at the image of a nine-thousand-year-old city.

Perplexed, I shuffled the map to see what was in this atlas, and came across a marker near Boston. What local landmark did the author consider worth including among his 128 selections? The MIT Museum.

Oh, for the love of God and Jerome Weisner, I thought, you have got to be kidding.

My wife and I went to the MIT Museum in January, using our alumni status to get free admission, and we cannot in good conscience advise anyone to pay their own money to get in there. There are a few exhibits related to current research at the Institute, some kinetic sculptures that somebody presumably considers “art”, and a lot about our alma mater’s storied history. If you’re an MIT dean who wants to schlep naches from your department’s work being on exhibit to the public, or a rich and elderly alum looking to stoke your nostalgia for “Tech”, maybe you’ll like that kind of thing. Everyone else can give it a pass.

If you’re a geek visiting Boston and looking for something touristy, I can recommend the Museum of Science, especially if you have kids. There’s also the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Or, heck, you can just walk into MIT itself, wander the halls, and look for posters describing current research. And if you’re looking for something elsewhere in the world… I have no idea.

If anyone out there has come across a real geek atlas, please let me know. In the meantime, I’m saving my pennies for a trip to Samos and Çatalhöyük.

Femme-inism

Narratives of transsexuality aimed at a general audience, both in print and online, are a genre unto themselves, and one of the conventions of the genre is the tone, directed at cissexual (i.e. non-trans) readers, of “please understand me, because if you understand me, then you couldn’t possibly condemn me”. The refreshing thing about Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl is that it breaks that frame, and tells us “please understand yourselves, because if you understand the prejudices that our culture has taught you, then you can learn to respect me”.

For example, consider the issue of “passing”, which consumes a lot of the literature devoted to transsexuality. (I have to include something I myself blogged five years ago in this indictment.) Serano points out that the language of “passing” puts the focus on the trans person, who either succeeds or fails at “passing” as his or her self-identified gender. But it ignores the role of other people who pass judgement (ahem) on the people they encounter, and who stigmatize anyone whose gender presentation they consider deviant. (Gender-noncomformant cissexuals sometimes run afoul of this stigma¹, but we don’t usually describe their experience as a failure to “pass”.) Taking for granted that everyone else will acknowledge your self-identified gender—assuming that if someone does misidentify your gender, then your peers will agree that the problem is with them, not you—is one aspect of what Serano calls “cissexual privilege”.

With insights like this, Serano attacks the received wisdom of many communities: not just mainstream “straight” society and media, but also the medical establishment, the “queer studies” world (Foucault and his intellectual descendants), lesbian and queer communities, and the feminist world.

With regard to feminism, she has critiques of the “feminism is all about the specialness of women, by which of course we mean women who have been raised as girls” faction of the movement (no surprise there), the “let’s measure feminist progress by how many women are becoming doctors and lawyers” faction, and the “let’s deconstruct the gender binary and live androgynously ever after” faction. But she comes not to undermine feminism, but to improve it.

Serano’s model of sexism, I humbly suggest, is worth adding to the Feminism 101 curriculum. She distinguishes between traditional sexism, the belief that masculinity is superior to femininity, and oppositional sexism, the belief that men should be masculine and women should be feminine. A woman (i.e., someone universally regarded as female—let’s bracket the trans issues for a minute) who takes on a stereotypically female role benefits from oppositional sexism, but is harmed by traditional sexism. A woman who goes into stereotypically male endeavors benefits from traditional sexism (e.g., higher pay and prestige) but is harmed by oppositional sexism. A “manly man” benefits from both, and an effeminate man is harmed by both. This tension explains why trans women encounter extreme reactions and trans men are barely noticed by mainstream society, but it also explains a lot of other things about the way sexism operates in society, even among cis heterosexual men and women. (For instance, Serano observes that the modern feminist movement has done a lot to fight oppositional sexism but not so much to fight traditional sexism, and suggests that this is why many straight, cissexual, femme women will say “I’m not a feminist” even as they enjoy many of the rights that feminists have won for them.)

Which is why this is a book that everyone should read, regardless of their gender, how masculine or feminine they are, their attitude towards transsexuality, or their attitude towards feminism itself.

¹ If I recall correctly, one of the very first Dykes To Watch Out For strips was about how a butch dyke should respond to a woman who rebukes her for being in “the ladies’ room”.

Unbound

A well-designed computer language, such as Lisp, strives to give its users “the illusion of infinite memory”: the programmer can allocate as many objects as he or she wants, and the language implementation is responsible for cleaning them up. As long as an object can be reached by the code that is running—as long as it is still useful, still capable of affecting the state of the world—then it remains “live”, and the garbage collector will pass it by.

Not so, alas, for human beings.

Rest in peace, Eric Naggum. You, who were passionate about denouncing the falsehoods that are commonplace in the geek world, are now in the World of Truth.

A debugging tip for weak-minded programmers (like me)

So if you have some script¹ that was created with the time-honored “copy, paste, edit” method of abstraction, and it’s not doing what you expect, and you’re just tearing your hair out because the part that you edited is perfectly clear and works just fine when you try it from the command line all by itself, and you’re not really sure what one of the parts that you copied and pasted is doing but since all these other scripts use the same code surely there’s nothing wrong with it… you may want to consider the possibility that there’s some relationship between the code that you don’t understand and the output that you don’t expect.

There’s some cutting-edge engineering wisdom that I acquired through bitter and embarrassing experience. I’ll probably reacquire it next week.

¹ If a one-liner² in a Makefile can be dignified with the term “script”.

² If five lines of shell code joined with backslashes can be dignified with the term “one-liner”.

How do you say “Arrr!” in Ladino?

Edward Kritzler’s Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is a mediocre book about a fascinating topic.

The topic is the Jews and conversos (Jews who converted, generally under duress, to Catholicism) who, despite official bans, joined the Spanish conquest of the New World and who, when the Inquisition caught up with their relatives, helped other European powers pillage the Spanish. (“Jewish Privateers of the Caribbean” would be a more accurate title, albeit less marketable.) When the Church’s interest in the conversos outweighed their usefulness to Spain, they assisted the Portuguese; when Spain and Portugal united and the Inquisition swept the Portuguese colonies, they teamed up with the Dutch (some fled to New Amsterdam) and the English. (According to Kritzler, the British conquest of Jamaica was assisted by the Jewish community there; Columbus’s heirs, the owners of the island, had protected them from the Inquisition, and when it looked like that protection was about to run out, they invited Cromwell to invade.)

The most interesting figure in the book is Rabbi Samuel Palache, who served the Sultan of Morocco as a privateer and served Amsterdam’s Jewish community as the president of Neveh Shalom, the first non-clandestine synagogue in Holland, founded in 1612. (By 1620, the Neveh Shalom congregation had split into three factions. Some things never change.)

Alas, this book could have used a better editor. The narrative seems to jerk from one colony or European state to another, from one decade to another, cramming in details at the expense of narrative flow. The overall effect is like listening to a garrulous older relative fill you in on some seamy family history; it can be entertaining to listen to, but the next day you can’t remember if Uncle Murray was a bagman for the mob and Uncle Moishe ran guns for the Irgun, or vice versa.

Furthermore, the book could have used a better historian. A great deal of the evidence Kritzler provides regarding Jewish activity in the Caribbean comes from the files of the Inquisition itself. Maybe the Inquisition’s informants were absolutely correct when the talked about secret Jews conspiring with their foreign co-religionists to undermine the rule of Spain in the Americas; they certainly had motive, means, and opportunity. Then again, as recent history reminds us, a confession extracted under torture reveals more about what the torturing regime wants to be true than about what actually happened. A more careful writer would have not only collected all the claims made about Jews in the Caribbean but also weighed the credibility of each source, and made it clear which of the most lurid claims were actually corroborated.

This topic really deserves a better book, or even two or three better books. Perhaps Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean would be of higher journalistic quality if the author were not using it to tout his other enterprises. Within the book, he claims to have identified the location of THE LOST GOLD MINE OF COLUMBUS, and on the Web page, he seems more interested in promoting himself as a tour guide ($1250/week, plus expenses) than as an author. Well, as Rabbi Palache may have told his mother at one point, it’s a living.