Software Musings

I walked out of a cafe about half an hour ago after lunch, climbed into my car and turned on the radio. On CBC radio 2 the opera from the New York Metropolitan Opera House is broadcast on Saturday afternoons and on radio 1 a programme entitled “Definitely Not The Opera” runs in parallel. My radio was tuned to radio 1 and I was pitched into the middle of an interview with an artist from Winnipeg.

He said that he had been thinking about frozen rivers (it’s that time of the year when I begin to wonder whether there is any other sort but the dynamiting of the Rideau River outside our house did begin today—the harbinger of Spring) and how the ice was just frozen water. The river had effectively been stopped (frozen?) in time. He said that books contained ideas frozen in time and he had therefore constructed a work of art combining the two. I missed the part of the interview where the art work was described but it presumably included books on the Assiniboine River.

That statement about books containing ideas frozen in time jarred with me. Many, many years ago I read a book (by Anthony Hopkins?) on music that described Sonata Form. He likened the form to walking through a house that you don’t know but are thinking of buying. You enter the hall and get a first impression. You then tour the rest of the house and end up back in the hall. You see the hall again (the recapitulation) but because you now know the rest of the house you see it in a different way. In a sonata you hear the theme again during the recapitulation but, because of the journey you’ve made in the meantime, it means more to you: the notes are the same (more-or-less) but the context is different.

Surely books are the same: their ideas are not frozen because ideas have to be interpreted. At the moment I’m rereading Gerald Priestland’s autobiography, “Something Understood” which I last read at least 15 years ago and Dimitri Gutas’ “Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society” which I last read about 6 months ago.

In each case, the ideas I read during this recapitulation are new, not because the words have changed, but because I have been through other rooms and can now see these books in a new light. The words are the same but the context is different.

And it’s not just the ideas that the books contain. Sometimes I pick up a book from my shelves and find the unmistakable signs that, at some time in the past, I dropped it in the bath (I spend hours lying in the bath reading and sometimes books suffer). That too is part of the context that I bring to the next reading.

At the risk of being accused (by one particular colleague whom I won’t name) of being a relativist, the idea that books are ideas frozen in time really seems indefensible.

I was thinking about linguistic inertia—the way in which the world moves on and the language doesn’t. My grandson today was shewing me his “steam roller” which was clearly actually a “diesel roller”. And I flew this afternoon in the “cockpit” of my aircraft. I suspect that very few of us have ever been to a cock fight and even those who have would not have recognised the term’s path, through maritime terminology, to an aircraft.

Anyway, the word that was interesting me was “newspaper”. There is a local newspaper in Ottawa called the Ottawa Citizen and it can be found at http://www.ottawacitizen.com/. We were rung the other day by someone offering to print the web pages and deliver the resulting paper copy to our door each day, a sort of printed Kindle I suppose. I thought that this was a quaint idea—in principle one could, I suppose, offer to print almost any web pages and deliver them on paper. I think that the person offering the service was still tied up with the “paper” part of “newspaper”.

Imagine my surprise then, on coming home from work last week to find two large volumes sitting on the door step. These contained paper printouts of telephone numbers and had been distributed by a company called Bell. Actually, even had I felt it useful to have a list of people’s contact numbers on paper, this one wouldn’t have been the one I needed. It contained no one’s cellular telephone number and no one’s Skype user name. In fact, as far as I could see, it contained only telephone landline numbers, perhaps the least useful contact information for people. What was really strange was that it associated the landline number with the name of a person as though it were a cellular telephone number or Skype name. Telephone landlines, of course, are not associated with people, rather with houses or offices. But I should not be critical, it was a nice thought. Someone at Bell, obviously confused by the linguistic inertia in the phrase “Telephone Book”, felt that it would be useful to print out this list as a “book” and deliver it to me personally. I’m sure that the cellular telephone numbers and Skype identities will appear in the next issue.

Lying abed this morning I finished reading Ivar Ekeland’s book “The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny” and, while brushing my teeth, alighted on Leah Price’s review of William Sherman’s book “Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England” in the 9th October 2008 edition of the London Review of Books.

I have written before about sometimes being present at the crossroads of the universe when two ideas arrive from different directions, coalesce and drive off together up the hill. Let me try to explain my surprise this time.

Ekeland’s book is really two books. Both are good and well worth reading and, by buying “The Best of All Possible Worlds” (C$14.00 when I bought my copy just before Christmas) you get the two bound into one volume. The first book is a fascinating exploration of the least-action principle from Pierre Louis Maupertuis, a chap of whom I had never heard but who was, apparently, the origin of Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss, to Poincaré. This book requires no mathematical maturity from the reader and the couple of theorems needed for the argument (including a geometric argument for the existence of a second (non-maximal) diameter of a convex closed curve) are relegated to appendices. It also raises the concept of playing billiards on non-rectangular tables. I have always thought billiards and snooker fairly boring to play and extremely boring to watch but the idea of having different (but convex) table shapes would certainly make them more interesting. Imagine snooker competitions where the competitors didn’t know the (irregular but convex) shape of the table until the start of the match.

Ekeland’s second book deals with human behaviour. He writes in the final chapter “There is a general feeling that science has given us longer and better lives, but has not taught us how to live them.” The last two or three chapters should be compulsory reading for all politicians and university administrators.

Science seems to raise more questions than it provides answers, but human beings are in quest of certainties, and if science will not provide them, then others will—religions and ideologies. And indeed, the first half of the last century was the era of ideologies, which ended with the bloody clash of fascism and communism, while the second half has seen religions emerge as the main actors, and may yet lead us to another conflagration between the Abrahamic creeds…

I find a confusion in this part of the book between science and technology (I don’t, for example, think that there was much science beyond Newton’s Laws of Motion involved in getting men to the moon) but this does not detract from Ekeland’s cri de coeur for sanity and rationality in our thinking. We are in the classical games theory dilemma of needing everyone to act rationally for the good of all. Ekeland believes that the application of mathematics and logic to human and well as scientific problems could, indeed, result in the “best of all possible worlds” in the sense that Voltaire mocked.

The two parts of Ekeland’s book are bound together by that phrase and play on the word “best”: in the first part in its scientific sense selecting our universe from all of those available in the multiverse and in the second part in its societal sense. This is, of course, the very confusion between what “Dr Pangloss” was really saying and what Voltaire was (deliberately?) confusing.

So, where does the article from the London Review of Books come in? The book being reviewed deals with the things that people wrote in the margins of books. Apparently 17th century marginalia now adds to, rather than detracts from, the value of old books. However, the part that interested me was

Even after the invention of printing, aids like tables of contents and indexes were added by hand by individuals. Readers would interleave blank pages, rearrange sections, and could even combine sections from different volumes. The printed page was seen as merely a starting place…

If this was so in the 16th century, how much more should it be the case now. With more and more books becoming available in soft copy (pdf) and with really useful tools like pdftk capable of splitting and recombining pdf files in all sorts of ways (as it says in the pdftk documentation “If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring and X-Ray-glasses”), we are free to build precisely the books we need. If I had a soft copy of Ekeland’s book, I could split it into two and combine the first part with some sections from Voltaire’s Candide (perhaps the world’s most tedious book in its entirety but OK in chunks) and thereby build a new, personalised book. I could then take the second part of Ekeland’s book and combine it, perhaps, with some of Grayling’s essays to build another new book personalised for me.

As an author, I would actually feel quite comfortable about people doing this with my books. I wonder about other authors.