My Story of Civilization

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i.

A few days ago, I finished reading The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, the final entry in their 11-volume Story of Civilization series. It took me just shy of a quarter century to get through the books. Combined, they are the best history books I have ever read.

It was through Isaac Asimov’s autobiography that I first discovered Will Durant, sometime in 1995. In In Memory Yet Green, Asimov wrote about how in the summer of 1945 he was about to leave the house for a meeting with his draft board:

I was reading a copy of Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ, the third volume of his history of civilization and Gertrude was ironing some clothes. The radio stopped its regular programming for an emergency bulletin: The United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Asimov added a footnote to this passage about Durant’s series:

I read each volume as it came out. After I had read the first one and heard he was planning a multivolume history–five volumes was the original plan–I felt worried. I knew he was in his forties and I carefully noted in my diary that I hoped he would live long enough to complete the set. He did.

(I’ve had similar worries about Robert A. Caro, hoping he will live long enough to finish the final volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson.)

I read the books slightly out of order:

I was certain I’d read Our Oriental Heritage first, and was surprised to see it second on the list. I dug into some old diaries to affirm my memory, and sure enough, I was right–sort of. On May 4, 1999, I wrote:

Finished Fact and Fancy this morning and started right in on Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of his “Story of Civilization.” The book is 440,000 words long… it will take me about 21 days to finish the book…

So why is Life of Greece first on the list? It turns out, I never finished that initial attempt to read Our Oriental Heritage and I don’t count a book on my list if I don’t finish it. I didn’t finish it because shortly after I started it, I began taking flying lessons and I set most of my reading aside for a time to focus on flying airplanes.

As I read the last lines of Napoleon, I tried and failed to remember when and how I first obtained the books. Back to the diary I went, and found that I bought my first Durant books on April 10, 1999:

Late in the afternoon I drove over to the Iliad Bookshop where I bought 3 used volumes of Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization” series for just under $20. The volumes I got were The Life of Greece (Vol II); The Age of Faith (Vol IV); and The Renaissance (Vol VII)

When did I get Our Oriental Heritage? It had to have been before May 4, 1999. Some more digging and, much to my surprise, I found the following on April 19, 1999:

Grandpa called tonight–he said he had a surprise for me–and then proceeded to tell me he picked up Vols, I, III, and VI of Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” series for me at a used bookshop in Nyack.

Between May 4, 1999 and the day I finished the final volume of the series, 9,063 days elapsed, or 24 years, 9 months and 28 days. The series tops off around 13,000 pages, which puts it somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million words. That’s a lot of reading. In fact, it turns out there were years in which the total amount I read was less than 13,000 pages, as the chart below indicates (the red dashed line shows 13,000 pages).

I never read more than two of the volumes in a single year, reading one in 2000, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2019. I read two volumes in 2020, 2022 and 2024. Of the 11 volumes, I’ve read two of them twice: The Life of Greece and Caesar and Christ.

ii.

As Asimov mentioned, the Durants’ original plan was for five books. The scope increased with each successive volume until their tenth, Rousseau and Revolution, published in 1967, in which they concluded with the following envoi:

This is the concluding volume of that Story of Civilization to which we devoted ourselves in 1929, and which has been the daily chore and solace of our lives ever since[Ellipsis] We shall not sin at such length again; but if we manage to elude the Reaper for another year or two we hope to offer a summarizing essay on “The Lessons of History”.

True to their word, they did write The Lessons of History, published in 1968 (which I read in 2019, and of which I have a signed copy). Then Rousseau and Revolution won the Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, and I imagine that, coupled with what must have seemed like boredom to the globe-trotting Durants, decided them to head back to the typewriter for one more volume, The Age of Napoleon, published in 1975.

I can’t read a magnum opus like this without wanting to know more about the people who spent a lifetime working on such a project. This happened to me when I read Dumas Malone’s 6-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson; I followed it up with a biography of Dumas Malone, Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson by William C. Hyland, Jr. And when I finished everything that Robert A. Caro has written thus far, I followed it up with his book Working .

It was, therefore, natural for me to read Will & Ariel Durant’s A Dual Autobiography several years ago. Not only was it an interesting read, but it gave fascinating insights into how such a massive effort was made in times long before computing. Ariel Durant described some of the research process:

It took me some time to realize how important a role was played in a book by the organization of the material, and how the same contents less wisely arranged might have led to repetition, confusion, and failure. ==The mere organization (as distinct from gathering) of the material was the most back-breaking part of the total operation==. Will undertook the initial part. As he explained it to me, he divided the book into chapters, generally following geographical order (Near East, India, China, Japan), and within each region, mediating between chronological sequence and topical unity (economics, government, religion, language, literature, philosophy, etc.). Then he marked with a Roman numeral each of the approximately thirty thousand slips that had been gathered for Volume I, according to the chapter to which it belonged…

[Will Durant] prepared and typed, for each chapter in turn, an outline consisting of several hundred headings, consecutively numbered with Arabic numerals. Then he presented to the family and his other aides the slips that he had assigned to Chapter I, together with the chapter outline; and our task was to read each slip and to number it according to the heading under which we judged it belonged. We estimate an average chapter of Story used some fifteen hundred slips, or about thirty thousand per volume; our attic rooms are bulging with the boxes of used slips.

Of those “slips” that Ariel Durant describes, she has said the following:

Usually we read about five hundred volumes for each of our books. I don’t mean to say that we read these books aloud to each other, but we do read them at approximately the same time, discuss them, and make notes. The hundreds of cards in this file are some of the notes relating to Volume 10.

And that is only a part. We have a thousand notes in the typewritten form in galley sheets. Every note we take from our readings includes the name of the book, the author, and the page from which it was taken. The scissored slips are placed exactly where they belong in the detailed outline of our chapter.

This seems a remarkably similar precursor to Ryan Holiday’s notecard system, which just goes to show that history is constantly repeating itself, one of the many lessons that is made clear by the Story of Civilization.

The Durants began researching the books in 1929 and they finally finished in 1975–a forty-six year span of enormous work. That they were able to do this project at all is due to another book Will Durant wrote before The Story of Civilization. He wrote The Story of Philosophy in the 1920s and it was bestseller that helped put him and Simon & Schuster on the map, and allowed the Durants the financial freedom to pursue their research for Story around the world.

iii.

Any history of the scope that the Durants present will be marred with errors and omissions. Like any diligent, self-aware researchers, the Durants acknowledgedf these imperfections. In writing about prehistoric India in Our Oriental Heritage, he said:

Recent researches have marred this comforting picture–as future researches will change the perspective of these pages.

About half of Our Oriental Heritage was dedicated to the history of Indian, Japanese, and Chinese civilizations. I wished for more. I read somewhere that the Durants had planned editions on North and South American native civilizations as well, but the existing scope exceeded the time that life and energy provided them. In my imagination, I wonder at the volumes they might have produced on Aztec or Mayan civilization, or the native cultures and civilizations that predated European arrival into the new world. These Durant-authored volumes are left to my imagination.

They wrote about what most interested them and it was a fortunate coincidence that many of their interested and mine overlapped. I forgive their errors and omissions as the result of an enormous amount of work and research performed not my an army but by two mortal adults and a handful of helpers. I have to feel this way. In my own work, I recognize the scope of the work I do (writing code, managing projects) inevitably leaves gaps, bugs, and room for improvement.

iv.

What makes these books the best histories I’ve ever read? I think it is a combination of three things: scope, continuity, and the writing.

From the beginning, Durant attempted to write an “integral” history. As he wrote in the preface to the first volume:

I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections–economic history, political history, religious history, the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, the history of music, the history of art–does injustice to the unity of human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as lineally, synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation’s culture, institutions, adventures and ways.

Fortune prepared me for this method. I attended a humanities magnet high school in Los Angeles in which our core classes were constructed in a similarly integral way, with courses on philosophy, literature, social institutions, and art history, tied together against a similar backdrop in time. The scope of Durants volumes is vast and varied and because of it, I learned more about subjects that I never imagined I’d be interested in, and yet found them all fascinating. Despite the length of the volumes, there wasn’t a dull moment. And the integral method made clear the contemporaneousness of the history, science, art, music, religion, philosophy. Each discipline feeds each other in an intricate web that isn’t always obvious in longitudinal sections.

The volumes also provided continuity in a way that I had not previously experienced reading or studying history. It is a continuity that creeps up on your as you make your way through the pages. We begin with the shadowy prehistoric times without individuals, but rather individual remains of anonymous ancestors in the days before civilization and by the end of the 11th volume, we are dealing with detailed biographies of historic figures (Napoleon, Tallyrand, Thomas Jefferson) who are not many generations removed from ourselves. And yet, after the first 100 introductory pages of the first volume, there was never a sudden jump, never a rapid leap forward in time. Things moved smoothly from past-to-present. That continuity provided a unique insight into human history for me. It was as if I watched as people in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur tapped their successive generation shoulder, and that generation tapped the next and soon we were in Egypt, and Babylonia, and so on down to Louis XVI and Samuel Johnson. This continuity gave me a perspective of history that I hadn’t had before, and I’m not sure such a perspective is possible without the scope the Durants achieved in these volumes. There is a kinship that forms with those dead thousands of years, as when an ancient Sumerian tablet reads, “the city, where the tumult of man is.”

Continuity highlights repetition. Consider Edmund Burke writing on democracy in the ancient world, and in the modern:

Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities.

Finally, there is the writing, the voice, the erudite guide that carries you through thousands of years of human triumph and misery. Durant has an elegant, old-world style in which his premises come at the end of a paragraph rather than the beginning, often with witty charm, as when he writes of the toilers of Babylonia:

Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in the thick grass, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods, posed placidly for the artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men. Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle. [Emphasis mine.]

That voice sets the tone of the entire series. The Durants come across as true companions, and I think Durant knew this. In the last words of the penultimate volume in the series, Durant wrote:

We thank the reader who has been with us these many years for part or all of the long journey. We have ever been mindful of his presence. Now we take our leave and bid him farewell.

I was overcome by a strange set of emotions upon finishing the final volume. Here I’d walked with Roman emperors and Japanese peasants. I’d seen battles fought in the desert, and averted by the random passing of the moon across the face of the sun. I’d spent hours with the greatest thinkers, artists, creators, and inventors. I’d lived thousands of lifetimes in the pages of these books, and now they were all over. It was a bittersweet conclusion. I was reminded of a verse (quoted in Rousseau and Revolution) by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. In the margins, I jotted: “An apt epitaph to the Durants’ adventure.”

Lo, I have reached my goal! The stirring thought
Thrills through my spirit. Thine all powerful arm,
My Lord, my God, alone hath guided me
By more than one dark grave, ere I might reach
That distant goal! Thou, Lord, hast healed me still,
Hast shed fresh courage o’re my sinking heart,
Which held with death its near companionship;
And if I gazed on terrors, their dark shapes
Soon disappeared, for thou protectedst me!
Swiftly they vanished.–Savior, I have sung
Thy covenant of Mercy. I have trod
My fearful path! My hope has been in Thee!

In the end, the Durants’ volumes reinforced a truth my mother told me when I was five or six years old: books can take you anywhere.

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The Year of the Long Book

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2024 is turning out to be the Year of the Long Book, for me at least. I generally set myself a goal of 100 books a year, but that arbitrary. Some books are barely 100 pages, while others are over 1,000 pages. The goal of 100 books loomed large in my head for a time, but more and more, I’m less concerned with how many books I read than enjoying the book I do manage to finish, and learning all I can from them

I was thinking about this because this morning, Goodreads reminded me that I was 6 book “behind schedule.” I wondered about that. Why was I behind schedule? It turns out that the books I’ve read so far this year have been longer books.

What is a long book? Regular readers are aware that I have been keeping a list of all of the books I’ve finished reading since 1996. In the decades that I’ve kept my list, I’ve had to deal with fact that some years I read more books than others. This is true even when it seems I spend the same amount of time reading year-to-year. To that end, I’ve developed a measurement that I call “BEq,” or “book equivalent.” Over the 28-years of my list, the average length of a book I’ve read is 410 pages. I set 1.0 BEq equal to 410 pages. If I read s 300 page book, that is 300/410, or 0.73 BEq. If I read a 950 page book that is 950/410 = 2.32 BEq. I consider a “short” book to be 1 standard deviation below the average, or 0.46 BEq. I consider a long book to be 1 standard deviations above the average, or 1.57 BEq.

Here is a chart showing the average BEq by year. Darker bars are years in which the average BEq is greater than 1.0:

Chart of BEq over time from 1996 to 2024

So far, this year, the average BEq is 1.26. That is still my defined BEq for a long book of 1.57, but it is the second highest average BEq I’ve had in 28 years. (For the average BEq for a year to be over 1.57, it means I would have need to have read much longer books.)

What are these long book that I’ve been reading this year? At the time of this writing, I’ve finished 11 books. Of those 11 books, about a third are “long” books by my definition:

These four books along total 8.17 BEq, or an average of 2.04 BEq: that is, the equivalent of reading 2 books for every one book I read.

In addition, I am currently making my way through 3 long books. (I don’t count books in-progress on my list. I have to finish a book before it goes on the list;) These are:

All of these books are well over my defined length for a long book. Combined, they average 2.33 BEq. And this trend doesn’t look like it is stopping any time soon. The last of these book, Rousseau and Revolution is the penultimate book in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization series. Up next on my list is the final book, The Age of Napoleon, which, at 872 pages, is 2.13 BEq. If you factor all these in for 2024, then my average BEq for the year is 1.49 — very close to the 1.57 BEq mark for long books. So far, then, 2024 is the year of the long book.

There is something about long books that I find irresistible. Maybe it is because I choose these books carefully, and more often than night, they are great reads and I never want them to end. The fact that they are long means I can savor them for a longer period of time. And ultimately, savoring one book is more important to me than reading 50 of them.

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R.I.P. Charles Osgood

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I read with sadness this afternoon about the passing of the great Charles Osgood. I’m sure many people knew him from the two-plus decades he hosted the Sunday Morning program on CBS. But I recall him most fondly from his “Osgood Files” radio spots. During 8 years of commutes between Studio City and Santa Monica, California and back, the one bright spot was when Charles Osgood’s voice came on the radio on KNX-1070 with his Osgood Files. I loved the stories, I loved the occasional whimsy and rhymes. He could make me smile even in the worst gridlock.

Indeed, it was one particular Osgood file episode that inspired what ultimately became my first professional story sale. I was driving north through Topagna Canyon after work one day (which means this would have been late 1994 or early 1995), when the Osgood Files came on the radio. I can’t remember what the particular radio essay was about, but Osgood concluded the essay by reciting Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” It was my first encounter with that poem, and I found that as much as I liked the poem, the sentiment bothered me a bit. Fast forward to 2007 when I made my first professional story sale to Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine show, a story titled, “When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer,” in which I told my version of the story.

I haven’t been much of a TV watch, but every now and then, I’d catch Osgood on Sunday Morning and always enjoyed him as a host. I enjoyed his memoir, See You On the Radio, which I read back in 2018. I’ve missed his voice over the last few years, and was sad to see that he has now passed away.

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My Best Reads of 2023

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I read 101 books in 2023. I also read around 300 feature articles in magazines. What follows is my top 10 best book reads of 2023 and some of my favorite articles of 2023. For those interested in more details of my overall reading for 2023, see the section that follow this which summarizes my reading for 2023.

My Favorite Books for 2023

1. Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb

I have to admit that I didn’t know who Robert Gottlieb was at the start of 2023, although I’ve read several of the books he has edited. Then, in July, I came across a documentary called Turn Every Page about the relationship between Robert A. Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb. It was a great documentary, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb. I’ve read all of Caro’s books (indeed, I’ve recently acquired a personalized signed copy of his short book, Working) and I’m always fascinated by people who make a single subject their life’s work (see also: Will Durant and Dumas Malone). After watching the documentary, I searched for books by Gottlieb and discovered he’d written a memoir, Avid Reader: A Life.

Not since reading Isaac Asimov’s 3-volume autobiography have I come across such a detailed inside look at the book publishing world. It was a delightful, fascinating read that spoke to me on many levels. I think of myself as an avid reader, but I am lazy in comparison to Gottlieb. I didn’t want the book to end, and when it finally ended, I did something I’ve done only one other time in the 28 years I’ve been keeping my reading list: I immediately started the book over and read it a second time. And you know what, it was even better on the second go-around. It was, hands down, my favorite read of 2023.

2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Years ago, Kelly and I went to a local performance of Les Mis. I don’t remember much about it, but the book, Les Miserables, has always intrigued me for its size and popularity. I decided to give it a try in the spring. I found that almost from the first page, I couldn’t put the book down. It had a bit of everything, and it was fascinating. I loved the non-sequitur essays in the book and the rhythm of the language (I read the Julie Rose translation).

Later in the summer, when we were in Paris, I wanted to seek out the places in the novel, but we were there for only a short time, and I was a little sad that the city no longer looked way it was pictured in Hugo’s novel.

I estimate that I’ve read something in the neighborhood of 550 novels in my life (a little over 500 since 1996) and when I finished Les Miserables it instantly jumped to the top stop of best novels I’ve ever read.

It was also the longest book I read in 2023 but, as it turns out, only the 5th longest book I’ve read overall, beaten out by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer (1,616 pages), Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows (1,423 pages), Executive Orders by Tom Clancy (1,358 pages), and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York **by Robert A. Caro (1,345 pages).

3/4. Stella Maris and The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

I read The Passenger for our book club, and I really liked it. I just had to read the follow-on book, Stella Maris, which I enjoyed even better. It is one of those rare novels that could be done as a play. These were the second and third Cormac McCarthy books I’ve read and so far, I’ve thought all of his books were excellent.

5. Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments by Joe Posnanski

I had been looking forward to Why We Love Baseball ever since Joe Posnanski announced it. Recall that my favorite book of 2021 was Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100. I was not disappointed. Joe writes so passionately about baseball. He is a modern-day Red Smith. There is a reason why I love Joe Posnanski’s writing.

6. Doom Guy: Life In First Person by John Romero

I was never really a Doom player, but I’ve been a software developer my entire life and it was fascinating to read about someone who grew up with computers in a manner similar to me, beginning with machines like a Commodore Vic-20 and copying code out of computer magazines. Doom Guy was a honest, fascinating read.

7. Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart

Toward the end of each year, I tend to read Hollywood memoirs. They are a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Making It So by Patrick Stewart was one of these. This was a book that made me want to be an actor after reading it, always a good sign because it conveys its message so well.

8. The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Really smart people fascinate me. I read a fascinating biography of John von Neumann back in 2022, The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya. So when I saw that there was a novel based on von Neumann’s life, The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut, I had to read it, and it was a fun, fantastic read.

Favorite articles of 2023

Early in 2023, I wrote a script that sends me an email each evening with a random article from the variety of print magazines I get in the mail. Here is an example email from last night.

I try to read a feature article every day of the year, and here are a few of the more than 300 that I read in 2023 that really stood out.

  • Baseball and Time by Joe Posnanski — JoeBlogs (3/23)
  • Down the River Roosevelt by Larry Rohter — Smithsonian (4/23)
  • Judy Blume Goes All the Way by Amy Weiss-Meyer — Atlantic (4/23)
  • A Love Letter to Riverside by David Danelski — UCR Magazine (Spring 2023)
  • Why People Hate Open Offices (Psychology) by George Musser — Scientific American (4/23)
  • How Baseball Saved Itself by Mark Leibovich — Atlantic (7-8/23)
  • Postscript: Robert Gottlieb by David Remnick — New Yorker (6/26/2023)
  • “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks — Atlantic (9/23)
  • “17,517,490 Memories, Missing”[AliasDelimiter] by Megan Greenwall — Wired (9/23)
  • Inside the Revolution at OpenAI by Ross Andersen — Atlantic (9/23)
  • The Ones We Sent Away by Jennifer Senior — Atlantic (9/23)
  • Dreams of My Father by Karl Ove Knausgaard — Harpers (9/23)
  • The Golden Fleece by Joe Kloc — Harper’s (10/23)
  • A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft by James Somers — New Yorker (11/20/23)
  • Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built by Joshua Rothman — New Yorker (11/20/23)
  • The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI by Charles Duhigg — New Yorker (12/1/23)

Summary of my 2023 reading

I read 101 books in 2023, once again hitting my Goodreads goal of 100 books. I read my 1,300th book since 1996 in 2023 and ending the year with a total of 1,330 books since 1996. About a third of the books I read were fiction, the remaining two-thirds non-fiction. I’ve recently been working on a two-level taxonomy for my reading, and here’s how it breaks down at the high level for 2023:

Within each of these top-level categories are about a dozen sub-categories, so that, for instance, the Literature and Fiction category breaks down as follows for 2023:

The next biggest subject area I read in 2023 was science and technology, the breakdown of which looks as follows:

Overall, here is the breakdown for the types of books I read in 2023:

My goal for 2024 is another 100 books and 300 articles, and so far, I am well on my way. Here are my best reads from previous years:

Star Trek: Context

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Recently, I mentioned delving into the Star Trek Lit-Verse. My first foray, in that regard, was a book by Greg Cox called Captain to Captain. I enjoyed the book–it was just what I hoped I would find. But I came away feeling under-prepared. There were things happening in the book that I knew nothing about. There was, for instance, an early reference to an accident that Captain Christopher Pike had, and that Spock had commandeered the Enterprise to take him somewhere–an affair that was very hush-hush. I figured that this was from some part of the lit-verse that I was not yet familiar with.

And yet, a sneaking suspicion told me that maybe I didn’t know enough Star Trek lore from the televised series to have the necessary context. I decided that context would be necessary to increase the enjoyment of the books that I read. So I decided to watch every episode of every Star Trek series, along with every movie, in broadcast order. Typically, the way I’d organize such a project would be to create a spreadsheet listing out all of the episodes and working through them methodically. But a quick look at just how many episodes there are made this seem like a daunting task.

We are, however, in the midst of something of a paradigm shift in technology. Generative AI is beginning to catching with some of what we see in the computers in Star Trek episodes. With that in mind, I asked ChatGPT to create the spreadsheet for me. ChatGPT tried, but still has some limitations in that regard. It did the next best thing, however. It wrote a Python script to scrape Wikipedia and create the spreadsheet I wanted. After a little tweaking, I had my spreadsheet which lists the Series, Season, Episode Number, Title, Writer, and Original Air Date. I sorted the spreadsheet by Original Air Date and I added a columns for watch date and rating. I set a goal of watching one episode a day and I watched Season 1, Episode 1 of Star Trek, TOS on December 2. I thought it was pretty bad, but I got through it.

At a rate of one episode per day, I’ll finish this journey on May 27, 2026.

I’ve been doing pretty good so far, usually watching one episode per day, sometimes squeezing in more than one. I’d never seen most episodes in TOS before, so they are mostly new to me. I starts slowly to me, and the overly dramatic acting takes more getting used to than the state of the art special effects. The first really good episode was “The Enemy Within” written by Richard Matheson. Most have been average.

And then, on Saturday, I watched episodes 11 & 12, “The Menagerie, Parts I & II.” I don’t know much about Star Trek history from a fandom perspective, but I’d venture a guess that this is where the series really began to take off. The two-part episode was excellent, a cut above everything that came before it. Moreover, it provided the very context that I was missing when I read Captain to Captain.

I’ve seen a majority of The Next Generation episodes before now. And I’ve seen all of Enterprise and Picard. Otherwise, these episodes are mostly new to me. I’m making brief notes on each episode as I was them. For instance, I noted that in the first episode, “The Man Trap” dealt with a kind of shapeshifter, much as the final season of Picard did as well. Having the context of that very first episode, I suspect that it was no coincidence in Picard. I noted that Episode 8, “Miri” was “Lord of the Flies in space.” For “The Menagerie” I simply noted, “Excellent episode. Real emotion, esp. in the 2nd part, and from the character that shows the least emotion.”

In some episodes, I note plot holes that seem obvious. In “The Enemy WIthin,” for instance, once the crew learned that Kirk had been “split” in the transporter and there an evil Kirk roaming the ship, why didn’t they immediately set about using a challenge/response phrase to verify which Kirk they were talking to? Why didn’t they send a shuttle to rescue Sulu and the others from the freezing cold when the transporters weren’t working?

Mostly, I’m enjoying the backstory hat the series has provided. It has already come in handy and added new context to a book like Captain to Captain. I look forward to more.

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A Journey Through the Star Trek Lit-Verse

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Over Thanksgiving I read Patrick Stewart’s new memoir, Making It So, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Reading it put me in mind of Star Trek, even though Stewart’s time on the show and the films make up a relatively small portion of the book. I know little Star Trek lore beyond what most casual viewers of the show know. Indeed, I’ve never seen most episodes of the original series. The series with which I am most familiar is The Next Generation, and even there I have large gaps in my viewing. Deep Space Nine, and Voyagers are unknown to me. I have seen and enjoyed the newer films, but I understand that there are supposed to take place on an alternate timeline.

And thus begins the complications of the last few days. Arriving back from a long holiday weekend in New York, and needing a break from the long run of nonfiction I’ve been reading lately (18 out of the last 20 books), I was looking for something fun and entertaining to read and it occurred to me: what about a Star Trek novel?

I can hear those of your with much greater Star Trek knowledge than I possess laughing. It is one thing to want to read a Star Trek novel. It is something else entirely to figure out where to begin. Within 20 minutes of searching, I discovered the Star Trek “Lit-verse” and it is as vast as Gene Roddenberry’s galaxy. In a situation like this, the easiest thing for me is to begin at the beginning. But I couldn’t even find a list of all of the Star Trek novels in publication order. The Wikipedia page that lists Star Trek novels is huge, and contains multiple, overlapping lists. A single sub-list (“numbered novels”) contains 97 entries between 1979-2002.

More searching led me to The Trek Collective which had a Trek-Lit Reading Order Flow Chart, the complexity of which reminded me of a diagram one might find in Engineering on the Enterprise. While impressive in its detail and complexity, it made it no clearer where to start. The Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Guide broke things down by series, but it still didn’t answer the simple question, “Where should I start?” It did offer a useful piece of advice, however:

My goal here was to include every link possible and leave the continuity problems up to the reader to resolve. If you don’t want a book in your personal continuity, then just ignore it. Don’t become so invested in continuity that you forget to enjoy the stories themselves.

Ultimately, I opted for three books from different series to start with, mostly by hunt-and-peck method:

I began reading Captain to Captain yesterday and, so far, it has been a lot of fun. Just the kind of fun that I was looking for.

I asked ChatGPT the following just after I started reading Captain to Captain: “I want to start reading some novels in the Star Trek universe, but there are so many of them I don’t even know where to begin. Can you suggest a pathway through these novels that makes sense?” ChatGPT responded with the following list to start with:

The Original Series

  • Spock’s World by Diane Duane
  • The Entropy Effect by Vonda N. McIntyre

The Next Generation

  • Q-Squared by Peter David
  • Imzadi by Peter David

Deep Space Nine

  • The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack
  • A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson

Voyager

  • Full Circle by Kirsten Beyer

Enterprise

  • The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin

Crossover Novels

  • Federation by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

New Frontier series by Peter David

“Discovery” and “Picard” novels

Obviously, I’m still figuring out which direction to go here. If anyone has advice or suggestions as to how to tackle this thorny problem, or if anyone knows of a list that guides one through a good selection of the novels and stories in the Star Trek universe, I’d be grateful if you shared your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

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Tinkering

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I have an idyllic notion of life on a farm: waking up before the sun to milk cows, sow crops, mend fences, and a hundred other chores. It’s a nice dream, but there are two reasons I know it is nothing more. For one thing, there are many reports, like Daniel Immerwahr’s “Beyond the Myth of Rural America” in a recent issue of The New Yorker, that wipe away the fog of nostalgia from rural life. For another, more practical reason, I think about how much tinkering I do in our house, and can only imagine how that would be magnified on a farm.

We bought this house four and a half years ago with the idea that there were a few things we wanted to do once we had it. First, there was the shed that we wanted to put in the backyard to give us some extra storage space. We got that taken care of pretty early. On the other hand, the French doors we1 wanted to put between my office and the living room have been hanging fire ever since we had the idea to put them in.

Our house was originally built in the 1950s, but has since been completely gutted and rebuilt from the inside out. It has an open floor plan, and it had fairly new appliances when we moved it. And yet, there has still be a lot of tinkering. We’ve had to replace three-fifths of the kitchen appliances: new microwave, new dishwasher, and new disposal. I tried fixing the disposal myself when it would only hum, and it seemed I managed to fix it, only to discover later that I’d cracked the casing and water had been leaking from the disposal into a basin under the sink. We were lucky to discover this before the basin overflowed.

We have good-sized storage room downstairs that contains the furnace and water heater, and from the day we moved in, that storage room has been so full-to-the-brim that was impossible to go into the room without first taking stuff out. For years, I’d wanted to clear out that room and move stuff into the attic. But we had attic boards in the attic. Recently, while Kelly was in Europe, I put in a dozen or so attic boards and then spent a weekend purging the storage room, and moving stuff up into the attic. And not in any haphazard way, but I created a nice little aisle up there and sketched out a map of where things were located. When the job was done I needed a day just to recover from the soreness.

I put in nice metal shelving on both sides of the storage room and we now have a usable walk-in pantry on one side, and place to store tools and other miscellany on the other side, and there is plenty of space to move about.

We’ve made small replacements in every bathroom in the house, from flappers to flush values to fill levers so that in any given bathroom, we have a toilet of Theseus.

I’ve added more and more bookshelves to my office, replacing older, smaller ones with larger ones so that no wall is left out. I’ve replaced countless lightbulbs, and smoke detector batteries, the latter almost exclusively during the middle of the night.

Our refrigerator stopped refrigerating recently and so I cleaned out the coils and removed the accumulated dust. Grateful for the spa day, our refrigerator started refrigerating once again.

After the gas company shut off the gas to make some repairs to the gas meters on our street, our furnace failed to start up after the gas was turned back on. It was 22 years old and after some deliberation, we decided to replace it and the air conditioner (also 22 years old) with new models. This was a relief, albeit an expensive one. I knew from the day we bought the house we were going to eventually need to replace the HVAC system, it was just a matter of when.

At present there are five–make that, six light bulbs that need replacing and I’ve just been too busy tinkering with other things to replace them. There is a tented-in area on our deck, but the tent and frame were damaged in a wind storm and I haven’t had a chance to replace and repair them, respectively.

For a year now, I’ve been tinkering with our Kia, which doesn’t want to start on cold weather days. I’ve ruled out just about everything, even paying to have a perfectly good battery replaced just to prove that it wasn’t the culprit (it wasn’t). The car will always start, but sometimes, I have to press the start button 20 times before it decides to light up. Once started, the car runs fine and starts fine for the rest of the day. It never happens when the weather is above 50 degrees, and it is intermittent when it is below 50. This morning, when the temperature was 39, the car started right up. The dealer can never reproduce the problem, but I am determined to find the root cause.

Our other car, which turned 20 years old this year, needed a new starter and some other work as well. It now runs fine, thanks to some tinkering.

Some of this tinkering is spread out, separated by months of smooth sailing. Others come in waves. We had issues with the old car, refrigerator, water heater and furnace all in the span of about one month.

In his monthly One Man’s Meat column for Harper’s December 1941 issue2, E.B. White details about 200 chores he has to do around his farm in Maine. I suspect that a White essay on a getting a root canal could make it seem like a joy, but when I consider the list of things, it is an awful lot of tinkering, and makes the tinkering we’ve done around the house these last four-and-a-half-years look like warm-up exercises. My farming daydreams will remain just that–daydreams. They are among my favorite daydreams and I wouldn’t tinker with them in the least.

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  1. When I say “we” I mean “I.” ↩
  2. May require a subscription. ↩

Ever Since (Stephen Jay) Gould

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My grandfather was a regular reader of Natural History magazine during its heyday. I recall the magazine sitting around the table beside his chair. I would occasionally skim through it. I must have come across Stephen Jay Gould’s column, “This View of Life” at some point, but I can’t remember when. Besides, at time, I his columns were beyond my abilities. Even now, those columns push me to my limits.

I say this because this year, I have finally gotten around to reading Gould’s books of essays that collect most of the 300 columns he wrote for Natural History. Unlike my usual practice, I’m not going through the collections in order of appearance, but instead, somewhat haphazardly. In order of my reading this year, I’ve made my way through the following volumes:

During this year, I also managed to read Gould’s A Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History and The Mismeasure of Man.

If my research is correct, there are two more books of Natural History essays that I have yet to read: The Lying Stones of Marrakech and I Have Landed. I’m doubtful I’ll get through these two remaining books before the year is out because I have quite a few books in line ahead of them. But you never know.

I came to essays primarily through Isaac Asimov’s science essay column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and I have written how at the time those essays taught me almost everything I know about science. Gould’s essays are much more challenging reads than Asimov’s essays were, but in some ways, the essays are more rewarding, and have introduced me to and instructed me in areas and methods of science with which I’d had little familiarity.

Over the years I’ve developed a fondness for the science essay that places it in my personal pantheon of favorites as high–if not slightly higher–in ranking as the personal essay. One of the strengths of both Asimov’s and Gould’s essays is that they are personal in some regard. I imagine writing a future post that focuses on the history and value of the science essays, especially long-term essay columnists like Asimov and Gould and Martin Gardner, as well as their predecessors like Willie Ley and R.S. Richardson. In such an essay, I might wonder about the disappearance of regular science essays columns and explore that path in the same way Gould explores evolutionary dead-ends.

But here I wanted to talk about Gould’s essays and the impact they’ve had on me already. When I started reading them, back in May, I went in with the notion that they would be similar to Asimov’s given their popularity. In actual fact, the essays are nothing alike. In his wonderful editorial, “The Mosaic and the Plate Glass” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Oct. 1980), the Good Doctor expounds on his theory of writing. Mosaic writing is complex, layered, multifaceted writing; plate glass is clear and shows directly through to the point. He couldn’t have provided a better analogy for comparing Gould’s writing to his own, for when I began reading Ever Since Darwin, I recognized almost at once that this was mosaic writing to Asimov’s plate glass.

As I do with most books these day, I began with the audiobook edition of Ever Since Darwin, but I found the subject matter and the complexity of the writing to be enough of a challenge that I knew the audiobook editions alone wouldn’t be good enough. I needed the physical books to help follow along with Gould’s arguments. This is not so much a criticism of Gould’s writing as it my ability to understand the subject matter. Indeed, I found that I enjoyed Gould’s style of science writing more than I did Asimov’s. Asimov was a great explainer. He didn’t write down to the reader, but he often simplified concepts–a good thing for the lay reader.

Gould on the other hands wrote those essays for other professionals and expected that readers of the column would rise to the challenge. These essays are a challenge for me, but I enjoy that challenge, I enjoy puzzling my way through Gould’s arguments to make sure that I understand them. I come away from each one a better-equipped thinker.

I ordered copies of the Gould collections I didn’t already have in hardcopy. That is to say, all of them except Dinosaur in a Haystack, which I picked up in college when it first came out, and which has been sitting on my shelf unread ever since–until this year. I found most of them easily enough, but a few were out of print and I had to locate them from secondhand bookshops online. I was mildly annoyed by this, until fortune stepped in, as it so often has, in my book-buying activity. One place had used copies of The Lying Stones of Marrakech and Leonardo’s Mountain Clams and the Diet of Worms and I ordered both. When they arrived I put them in their proper places on the shelf until I was ready to read them. As I mentioned, I haven’t yet read The Lying Stones of Marrakech, but one day, when I was pulling Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams… off the shelf, I noticed a sticker on The Lying Stones of Marrakech that read “SIGNED.” I flipped open the book and saw this:

My signed copy of The Lying Stones of Marrakech.

The Lying Stones of Marrakech is the penultimate book in the series of essays and was published on April 11, 2000. Gould died in May 2002, which means the book must have been signed by Gould sometime in that 2-year span. It is a joy to have a signed Gould book in my collection.

Gould’s essays have had a notable effect on me. For thing, I’ve learned more about natural history than I ever knew before. The books have opened my eyes to the natural world around me. The range of subjects covered by the books is vast, although nearly always related to some aspect of evolution. They seems to cover everything, from how camouflage evolved in the natural world, to why no one will likely ever hit .400 in the major leagues again.

Recently, for instance, I was out a morning walk. We have a lot of deer in the park woods in our area and seeing them munching along the bike path is a common site in the mornings and evenings. On this particular fall morning, the foliage was riotous, the bike path was covered in leaves, as was the floor of the woods that surrounded me on both sides as I walked.

The path where deer seemed to materialize out of the foliage.

I would not have noticed the young deer to my left had it not raised its head. I caught the motion from the corner of my eye and when I looked there was the young deer standing among a background of similarly colored shrubs and leaves. Experience told me that if I saw one deer, there were likely others around, so I stopped and stood still and peered into the woods. At first, all I saw was a tangle of limbs and leaves that was almost too much to take in. But then as I watched, several deer emerged from that tangle in way that I can only describe as similar to the way the image in those stereograms from the 1980s emerged once you learned how to focus past them. One moment, I was looking at empty woods, the next it seemed full of deer.

If Asimov’s essays formed a foundation on the scientific method and way that science works (his essays were often steeped in the history of science), then Gould’s by comparison have been a graduate courses in the same subjects. Gould’s essays teach not only scientific method and logical thinking, but they challenge with edge cases, give examples of long-accepted arguments that are filled with fallacies, and breakdown the complexities of real science into its component parts. The history he delves into is often the history of science as a self-correcting process.

Like many writers and scientists, Gould’s theories are sometimes seen as controversial. His theory of punctuated equilibrium raised eyebrows, and as I have been working my way through Gould’s essays, I’ve also been sure to read his critics–something his essays helped reinforce. I finally got around to reading Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. And I recently read Daniel C. Dennett’s memoir I’ve Been Thinking and his book Consciousness, Explained both of which have some criticism of Gould and his theories. I take these criticisms seriously, and I don’t yet understand all of theories well enough to make a good judgement as to where I fall. What I can say is that Gould’s essays are among the most intellectually challenging I have come across, and what a joy the experience of reading them has been.

Indeed, I may have to read them again to full grasp the underlying theories Gould writes about. But I look forward to this task with enthusiasm. I am working my way toward reading another Gould book that has been sitting on my shelf unread for 21 years now: his magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. At 1,400 pages, it is a massive tome, and not without controversy and criticism, with some critics calling the book unreadable. I take this statement with a grain of salt. Gould’s essays are difficult but there is a beauty in that challenge, and I can see how any writing that isn’t spoon-fed to a reader can be characterized as “unreadable.” Gould often writes about how he goes to original sources as much as possible for many reasons, a good lesson in critical thinking, and one that I want to embrace by reading and judging The Structure of Evolutionary Theory on my own.

But that may be a project for 2024 and beyond.

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Coming Attractions

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It has been quiet here for too long. I can’t believe it has been over a month and a half since I last posted here. Remember when I was posting just about every day? What happened? For one thing, things have gotten increasingly busy for me. Our kids are getting older, and they are engaged in countless activities that only the most careful tracking on our calendar can keep up with. There are a constant stream of drop-offs and pick-ups. There is homework to help with. (I had to drudge up geometric proofs from the basement of my memory recently.) And of course, there is the day job that seems to keep me increasingly busy.

All of these are excuses, of course, but at the end of the day, I often find myself mentally drained, a situation that makes writing difficult. Even so, I miss writing here, and I’ve been looking for ways to get back into it. I keep telling myself that I’ll start up again in 2024, but that is one of those clever delaying tactics that reminds me of my teenager’s response to requests: “I’ll do it a little later.” Why wait? Why not get started now?

And so here I am, providing a brief update, but also a ray of hope. I have a vague plan at the moment. The idea is to get back to posting at least once a week here. Start small. If the past provides a roadmap in this regard, once I get started, I find that that the act of writing encourages more writing. For now, I’m keeping things simple and aiming for a post a week. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll write about first, but I have been keeping a list of ideas and so I may work off that.

In any case, for those who have stuck around, despite my long recent absence, I appreciate you, and you can look forward to new writing very soon.

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The Sperm Whale in the Room

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It started with the September 11, 2023 issue of The New Yorker. The issue contained a fascinating feature by Elizabeth Kolbert titled, “Can We Talk to Whales?” The article followed several researchers affiliated with CETA (Cetacean Translation Initiative) in their quest to see if humans and whales could communicate. What made it all the more fascinating was the use of large language models like ChatGPT.

The researchers were not exactly using ChatGPT to try to speak to sperm whales. Rather, they were attempting to use a similar concept in developing a language model based on sperm whale songs. ChatGPT works by creating a neural net trained on millions (if not billions) of pages of human-written text (and code) available on the Internet. Then, given an input, the language model puts together an answer based upon the a range of likely next word in a phrase, building up responses. At this point, my own understand is that most experts don’t believe that ChatGPT has any comprehension of the words it is putting together.

For the CETI project, efforts are being made at recording vast amounts of sperm whale song. When enough of a corpus has been gathered, a large language model will be trained on these recordings. Then, much like ChatGPT, if a whale song is provided as input, the LLM will provide a whale song in response. What I find most fascinating about this is that we won’t necessarily know what the input or response mean, or if they are significant in any way, but it will be interesting to see how the whales respond.

Clearly, I enjoyed the article. It was one of those articles that I wished was even longer. (Fortunately, it was a particularly good issue of the magazine for science articles. There was another great article in that issue, “The Transformative, Alarming Power of Gene Editing” by Dana Goodyear.)

The next day, several new magazines arrived in the mail. When a new magazine arrives, I enter the feature articles into a text file I keep. Each evening, I have script that sends me an email with a randomly-selected feature article to read the next day (two articles on Friday and Saturday evenings). I was entering the list of articles fro the October 2023 Scientific American into my text file, when I came across an article by Lois Parshley titled, “Talking with Animals” and on the cover page to the article was a picture of a sperm whale and a caption that read, “The Project Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) is using machine learning to try to understand the vocalizations of sperm whales.” What a coincidence, I thought, having just read Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece on the same subject in The New Yorker.

I moved on to the other magazine that arrived that day, the October issue of WIRED. I was eager for this issue because there was a story about Open AI by Steven Levy, and I always enjoy his writing. But as I was entering the features in to my text file, I came across this one, listed in the contents as “How to Chat with the Whales” by Camille Bromley. (Inside the magazine, the article was called “Calls of the Wild.”) Once again, the article was about, at least in part, project CETI and using AI to communicate with whales.

One time is random. Twice is a coincidence. Three articles about talking with whales using AI–that seems like a pattern to me. I can’t recall the last time so specific a subject was featured in three different magazines so close together. I have yet to read the articles in Scientific American or WIRED (my daily random article generator hasn’t selected them yet), but I am looking forward to them.

I thought that was the end of it.

And then I was skimming the New York Times early in the morning, as I am wont to do, and came across an article by Sonia Shah, “The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?” While this article was more broad and philosophical, it once again discussed CETI and ChatGPT and using language models to decipher whale.

Finally, in an effort to give my brain a rest, I kept my reading fairly light over the weekend, and I watched the Disney+ series Ahsoka. And you know what was in that series?

Star whales.

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Why I Love Joe Posnanski’s Writing

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I

Each morning, rain or shine, I go out for a walk. The time of my walk more or less follows sunrise throughout the year, with me getting out shortly after the first light appears in the east, but before the sun peeks above the horizon. My walk takes me through the park behind our house, and about a mile-and-half later, to a nearby 7-Eleven. The total walk is about 2-1/2 miles and takes me about 40 minutes on average.

I usually listen to a book while I walk. I see the same people out, wave, and occasionally stop to chat with someone. The mornings are quiet. Depending on the time of year, I see different local fauna. Lots of deer this time of year. And the bats are finally out, scooping up mouthfuls of mosquitoes and other insects as they dive and weave about the treetops.

II

Walking home from school yesterday with the Littlest Miss, with waves of hit visibly rising from the sidewalk, she said to me, “Is ‘cool’ a pun?”

“I guess it could be, depending on the context,” I said, “but it is really a word with two completely different meanings.” So is “bat.”

I haven’t watched a baseball game all season, my mild protest against what I feel is the sacrilege of allowing a clock into the game in an attempt to speed things up. I miss watching baseball games, but I don’t realize I miss them unless there is something that forces memories of how great the game is into my head. I’m sure that I will come around. I’ve changed my mind on many things over the years. I used to think I could never listen to an audiobook, for instance. I’m sure I’ll see that a pitch clock is good for the game, but I am a baseball purist, who still believes that the designated hitter rule was a mistake.

I do miss baseball, but until my morning walk this morning, I’d forgotten just how much.

III

On most days, over the course of my 40 minute morning walk, I am quiet. I listen to my book and walk, and watch what is happening around me, allowing myself to wake up. Once in a while, something in the book I’m listening to might make me smile, or even chuckle. When this happens, I always look to see if anyone is around. I imagine it must look pretty amusing to see someone laughing to themselves while they walk.

This morning was different.

I was listening to Joe Posnanski’s new book, Why We Love Baseball. I became a die-hard Joe Posnanski fan after reading his book The Baseball 100 in the fall of 2021. It was my favorite book of 2021. So I’ve been really looking forward to this new book. I started reading it yesterday and continued when I headed out for my walk this morning.

You can tell, from Posnanski’s enthusiasm for the game, that the game is magic to him, and that alone reminded me how the game is magic to me as well. But Posnanski’s writing, his storytelling, is also magic. His writing controls your emotions. On the outbound walk, listening to stories of why we love baseball, I found myself on the verge of tears several times. (There may have been one or two that managed to escape and find their way to the pavement.)

Scattered throughout the book are “5 moments” of various types, sidebars to the the 50 moments Posnanski goes through in detail. On my return walk, one these sidebars was titled “5 meltdown.” Listening to these stories made the first half of my walk home more a stagger. I was not chuckling. I was laughing. Out loud. I had to move off the bike path and wipe tears from my eyes several times. If someone saw me walking on the bike path this morning, they may very well have thought I’d lost it.

IV

Tears. Laughter. Smiles. Thrills. Humor. Surprise. This is why I love baseball. Joe Posnanski has reminded me of this, and I am grateful. More than that, Joe has done what many great writers struggle to do. He brought all of these emotions out in me with his words. While I was walking. In public. For other people to see.

And sometime this weekend, I’m finally going to set aside 2-1/2 hours (down from just over 3 hours from last year) to watch a ballgame.

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Mental Walks and Marathons

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On a recent morning, I surpassed my previous Wordle win streak with my 63rd consecutive win.

My recent Wordle streak of 63 games.

Wordle is part of my morning metal warm-up routine. When I wake up, usually between 5 and 6 am depending on the time of year, the first thing I do is tackle the day’s puzzles: the New York Times mini crossword, which I try to solve as fast as I can. (My personal record is 35 seconds), then Wordle, and more recently, the daily Connections puzzle. I think of these exercises as a good way to wake up my brain, in the same way that my morning walk helps to wake up my body. Moreover, with all that is being written about “second brains” (including some of my own writing about Evernote and Obsidian), I find myself wanting exercise my “first” brain more and more while I still can.

In centuries past, memorization was a primary mental exercise. Time and technology has eroded this–the whole purpose of a “second brain” is to store stuff outside your head. For a long time, I was skeptical of the usefulness of rote memorization. What purpose does it serve to memorize the state capitals for instance? In my personal and professional life, I’ve never needed to pull a state capital out of my memory. And yet, I’ve become convinced that there is value in memorization as a simple function of mental exercise. Clive Thompson recently wrote about this in the context of memorizing poems.

As it happens, the two biggest workouts I give my brain each day are split between my avocation and vocation. I think of the former as a form of mental walks and the latter as mental marathons.

Mental walks

Reading and writing is my avocation. I see the activities as mental versions of walks. I can take shorts walks or long walks, and I frequently walk multiple times in the day. The same is true with my reading. I get through about 100 books a year, which is about a book every 3 days. In doing this, I try more and more to maintain a diverse mix of subjects in my reading. I’ve illustrated this for the 69 books I’ve read so far this year in the word cloud below. The words are taken from my descriptions of the subjects of the books that I read that I keep in a spreadsheet.

Word cloud of subjects for the books I've read so far in 2023.
Word cloud of subjects for the books I’ve read so far in 2023.

In addition to books, I try to read a feature article each day from the magazines that I subscribe to. To take some of the decision fatigue out of my day, I’ve written a script that emails me a random article title from the list of current magazines I have. That adds a little bit mystery to the day as well.

I can read for hours on end without feeling tired. I can also sit down and read an article for fifteen minutes and feel refreshed. It is my mental version of taking a walk.

Mental marathons

In my day job, I lead software projects. In doing this work, I find intellectual challenges in managing projects, in working on the design and architecture of the software, and also, in diving into the various types of code (.net, SQL, Groovy, JavaScript, Wolfram Language, to name a few). Then there is the challenge of problem-solving. I’ve written before of long days spent writing code, and coming out of this “code coma” at the end of the day, feeling mentally exhausted. For me, this type of the work is the equivalent of a mental marathon. I can rarely sustain this beyond a day, and if I try to do the same thing the following day, things start to go downhill quickly.

If I could have a superpower…

When the kids ask, “If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” I know they are thinking about things like flying, or turning invisible, or being able to teleport anywhere in the world. But for years now, my answer has been the same: “I wish I could have John von Neumann’s mind.” I’m always impressed by incredibly intelligent people. I wish that I had a superpower like that. In some ways, it is like wishing to be a great baseball player or soccer star, with all of the native skill that comes with the role. Mental walks and marathon are how I train for a goal that I will probably never achieve, but that I keep striving for.

It is hard to objectively judge the result of this these walks and marathons. But there are some things that I have noticed over the years that may be a result of these workout. Most noticeable, to me, is an ability to draw connections between the various things that I have read over the years. If I am talking about a book or article with someone, it almost always reminds me of some other book or article I’ve read, with some connective tissue, however tenuous, between them. This wasn’t always the case. It seems to me that at some point in my reading, I hit a “critical mass” after which these connections started becoming more frequent and obvious. I can’t say precisely when this was, but I think it was sometime in the early 2010s, after I’d been maintaining my reading list for 15 years or so–probably around the time I read my 500th book since 1996.

I’ve felt results in my day job as well. It seems to me that my ability to see more quickly into the underlying cause of some problem, or to see creative solutions where I may not have seen them in the past. What is hard to say is if this is due to the mental workouts, or to experience gathered over decades of working with computers and software.

Meanwhile, my Wordle streak continues.

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