The meaning of a word

The word "China" means two different things, related but distinct:

Definition 1. A large country in East Asia. It was founded in 1949 and the capital is Beijing. In this sense, 'China' is short for 'People's Republic of China'. You can also use this word for now-defunct countries. In 1900, for example, 'China' referred to a large country in East Asia which was ruled by Manchus from their capital in Beijing (or Peking).

Definition 2. A civilization centered in East Asia. Despite a high level of diversity and large regional differences, it is considered a fairly coherent entity. It is distinct from Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese culture, although it has influenced them a great deal. It is much, much older than the People's Republic of China.

The two definitions above are distinct. I propose that if you use the word 'China' (or 'Chinese') in a sentence, it should be easy to discern whether you mean definition 1 (the country) or definition 2 (the civilization). If it's a weird amalgamation of the two, there is an excellent probability that you are using language to obfuscate and muddle. Shame on you.

You might argue that one could say something similar for every country in the world. (France the entity headed by Nicholas Sarkozy vs. France the culture, and so on.) You would be right.

But China is a particularly important case. As Martin Jacques said in the one bit of wisdom in his TED talk otherwise filled with dubious assertions, China isn't a nation-state; it's a civilization-state. It can be thought of as something akin to Europe, if we had an odd parallel Europe where the centuries-old political trend was toward unified empires, and there was a single language so dominant that all the other languages were reduced in people's minds to the status of 'dialects'.

But that's definition 2 above. There's also definition 1, where 'China' refers to a country that's just one country in the world out of 200. There are plenty of ways the two definitions do not overlap perfectly, and as a result you see both innocently sloppy thinking and deliberate obfuscation based on the fact we've got one word with two meanings.

For example, take the idea that China has 5000 years of history, while American history started in 1776. It sure sounds like China's got a long head start on the USA from those numbers, but they're derived entirely from the obfuscatory power of muddled language. If we're talking about countries (definition 1), the PRC was only founded in 1949, so the USA is actually a great deal older. If we're talking about civilizations (definition 2), there was no civilization that started in 1776. It's not as if Thomas Jefferson was some sort of legendary culture hero who invented the Roman alphabet as he scratched out the words We hold these truths to be self-evident which was the earliest recorded Western writing. [1]

But that's just sloppy thinking, really. People use this sort of semantic vagueness to deliberately muddle issues as well. Let's think about the distinction between definition 1 and 2 in this sentence: 'Taiwan is Chinese'.

If we go by definition 1, that means 'Taiwan is a part of the People's Republic of China'. Which, despite what Beijing would wish, is obviously not true.

But if we go by definition 2, we get 'Taiwan is a part of Chinese civilization'. You could argue about that, but simply on its own merits I don't have a huge objection to it. Taiwan has plenty of native-born Taiwanese who consider themselves Chinese. (And the vast majority would be horrified if Taiwan suddenly became part of the PRC tomorrow. They don't think China = PRC.) [2]

If you think of China as a civilization akin to Europe, you'd have to agree that if the EU was a country and (say) Ireland was not part of the EU, it would still be culturally European.

But we live in a universe where people who wish Taiwan was ruled by Beijing have no qualms about telling Westerners 'Of course Taiwanese are Chinese! Taiwan is a province of China and the Taiwanese people identify as Chinese!' and thinking up terms like 'Chinese Taipei'. They are well aware that when the vast majority of human beings hear 'China' or 'Chinese', they think of that large country in East Asia, whose capital is Beijing.

In other words, they're playing with language, preying on the fact that to most Westerners 'China' means only one thing: "The People's Republic of China". I don't like it. It grates uncomfortably against my brain. I want people to stop doing it.

That's the context for why, until advocates for Taiwan's absorption into the PRC stop playing with words, I will never be entirely comfortable hearing about how Taiwan's culture is Chinese.

[1] Which doesn't even get into the fact that you only get 5,000 years of Chinese history if you count about 1,800 years of tradition and legends that predate the earliest surviving Chinese written records, which stretches the word 'history' rather far for my comfort.

[2] Even so 'Taiwan is culturally Chinese' is still an imperfect assertion, as Taiwan's got aborigines who are not culturally Chinese.

Of Jokes, Chimpanzees, and Teleprompters

A while ago I thought about writing a satirical little piece about a guy during the George W. Bush administration who misunderstood jokes about Bush being some sort of monkey or chimpanzee. He was very confused. After all, Laura Bush appeared to be human, and Bush's two daughters sure looked fully human, and human-chimp crossbreeds are biologically impossible. So George W. Bush wasn't the biological father of his two children!

Why was the national media not asking questions? Why hadn't liberal bloggers picked up on this? Why did nobody care?

It never occurred to anybody to explain to him outright that Bush being a chimp was a joke. Democrats played along with it (huh huh, yeah, he's a chimp) and Republicans dismissed it as Bush-bashing. No one ever told the poor guy that he wasn't supposed to take it literally.

And that's what I feel has happened to a huge segment of the Republican party over this "Obama needs a teleprompter to speak" meme.

Okay, it's not an exact comparison. Obama really does use a teleprompter, just like a huge number of other national politicians and other public figures.

But some people in the GOP seem to have accepted it as a given that Obama is reliant on a teleprompter in ways that George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, et al. were not. They've dug up precisely as much evidence for this as Democrats did for the assertion that George W. Bush was a chimp (none, because you're not supposed to think it's literally true). But politicians have actually woven it into their stump speeches and use it as a rhetorical cudgel against him.

This may not be such a great tactic for the Republicans, since they're as teleprompter-dependent as Democrats. Recent clips of Mitt Romney speaking without a teleprompter suggest that maybe this really isn't the line of attack against Obama that Republicans ought to be making.

The notion that politicians can't speak coherently without a bevy of speechwriters and a teleprompter has a long history in American political humor. I was familiar with it long before anyone outside of Illinois knew who Barack Obama was. It's not a new thing. This particular attribute got applied a lot to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In both cases it was just one aspect of a more comprehensive insult: 'This guy doesn't have the brainpower to be president, which would be obvious if he didn't surround himself with advisors and prepared speeches'.

With Obama, though, when the teleprompter thing came about during the 2008 campaign it seemed a reaction to the uncomfortable fact that (a) Obama was much more eloquent on the stump than George W. Bush or John McCain, and (b) this eloquence was a big force behind the enthusiasm of his supporters. If you joke that Obama's only eloquent because of his teleprompter, he's not so intimidating any more. That's just basic human psychology.

I mean, you could ask the for evidence that Obama is uniquely dependent on the teleprompter. You could also ask Democrats for DNA evidence proving Dubya's simian origins. But that would just be kind of dumb.

Somebody fill me in here. What am I missing? Is there actually evidence that Obama is uniquely dependent on his teleprompter? Do Republicans actually have a smarter strategy here than I'm giving them credit for ?

(No comments that boil down to 'Republicans are dumb', please. I've already seen speculation that the teleprompter thing is basically playing to white racists who like to think that the dark-skinned guy can only say eloquent words which have been fed to him. But I'd like to see if I can sort out the meaning of the teleprompter thing while also assuming the best of people. Can it be done?)

One, Two, Three, Many

I have a theory about a hypothetical guy named Bob. Bob represents a substantial proportion of the population. Bob has no sense of numbers.

It's not so much that Bob is bad at math. Rather, he has no mental framework to handle numbers beyond the ones he deals with every day. Bob sort of knows that a billion is more than a million and a trillion is more than a billion, because he learned it in 8th grade. But he has no idea of how much more. As far as Bob is concerned, all those ' -illion' words are interchangeable and mean 'a really big number, like ten thousand or something'.

Bob's problem isn't a lack of knowledge; it's a lack of any appreciation of scale. You can correct him, you can explain the difference between a million and a trillion countless times, and it won't matter. Bob thinks you're just being pedantic. He's mentally filing you with people who correct him on 'your' vs. 'you're'.

Bob's not a particularly religious person; he doesn't go in for young-Earth creationism. He knows the world is ten million years old, or ten trillion years old, or something like that. He even heard somewhere that cavemen and dinosaurs didn't actually live at the same time. But his mental image of Dinosaur Times still includes woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers as members of the ecosystem. Okay, a more scientifically-minded person might get all pedantic and nitpick that picture, but Bob's no paleontologist, okay? He has his own life to live, his own worries to worry about.

A couple of years ago, a story circulated about a survey that asked Americans whether the government was spending too much, too little, or just the right amount on foreign aid. Definitely too much, said Americans. How much should the government be spending, the survey asked. About five percent, said Americans. The punch line is that the actual amount the government spends on foreign aid is far, far less than five percent. This survey was generally spun to mean that Americans know far too little about how their government allocates money.

I wouldn't argue with that, except that Bob and like-minded people formed a substantial portion of the survey respondents. Bob doesn't know the difference between 5%, and 0.5%, and 0.05%. Well, okay, on one level he knows the difference, because he managed to pass eighth-grade math all those long years ago.

But he doesn't really know the difference. He wasn't having a flashback to eighth-grade math when he took the survey. He was talking about government. Not math. They're different things. He was reaching for an expression to mean 'a small amount of', and he came up with 'five percent'. Now you're going to tell him he picked the wrong expression? You nitpicky pedantic twit.

I don't know if Bob's lack of familiarity with scale is innate, or if better math education at a critical point (long before college) could have helped him.

But years of reading Internet comments from a wide swath of humanity has convinced me that Bob represents a fairly sizable proportion of the population. They're out there, and simply correcting them isn't going to solve the underlying issue.

Monkey: A Journey to the West

Monkey: A Journey to the West

Originally by Wu Cheng'en

Retold by David Kherdian

Published in 2005

Published by Shambhala

ISBN: 1-59030-258-3

Journey to the West is one of the central books in the East Asian literary canon. If you're an educated East Asian the book has almost certainly left some kind of impact on your brain. Even if you've never read a version of it, you probably know of key episodes in the story. Even in the unlikely event you're not familiar with the plot, you certainly know of other works of fiction that were strongly influenced by it.

You can't be a consumer of media in East Asia and remain untouched by Journey to the West (or other central works of East Asian literature, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Dream of the Red Chamber), any more than you can be a media consumer in the Anglosphere and be wholly untouched by Shakespeare or the more important Greek myths.

Journey to the West is an episodic adventure story heavily influenced by Buddhist and Daoist philosophy and sensibilities. The Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang has the task of venturing to India (a fantastical, made-up India) to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. Although Xuanzang is the nominal protagonist, the story is really about his sidekick, the powerful supersimian Monkey. Monkey is the focus of the narrative, Monkey is the truly memorable character, and Monkey is the name by which the book is better known outside of China.

In David Kherdian's abridged retelling, the focus is squarely on Monkey. The first half of Kherdian's retelling is devoted to Monkey's origin story. The narrative describes Monkey's establishment as Monkey King, his spiritual training, and how he acquires great powers and powerful weapons. Finally, at roughly the book's halfway point, Xuanzang (called Tripitaka here) shows up and the Journey properly begins.

(Don't turn up your nose at the thought of reading an abridged version. A completely faithful Journey to the West would be immensely long, and what's been cut is apparently more episodic adventures, not intellectual or spiritual complexity. If you want to read the whole thing, there are two very well-regarded complete English translations; one is three volumes long, the other four volumes.)

As always when I read premodern fantastical literature, my mind tries to apply the logical rigor found in modern genre fantasy. I ask myself questions like, if two combatants are locked in a deadly duel and one of them magically grows himself to a height of 10,000 feet, is that really such an overwhelming advantage? I can think of lots of tactical reasons why being that tall would be a major disadvantage in battle. And seeing how battles between strong supernatural beings in this universe generally play themselves out as duels between shapeshifters, I wonder what would happen if one of the combatants got creative and transformed himself into a horror not found in nature or legend but something uniquely shaped to trap and kill whatever form his opponent happened to be in at that moment.

This is the same kind of thinking that also makes you wonder why it was so damn impossible for Achilles' mother to make her kid's heel invulnerable, too.

At one point we meet Laozi, the legendary old Daoist said to have written the Dao De Jing. He's running an alchemist's lab up in Heaven, full of bubbling cauldrons and various potions and concoctions. Suddenly it dawned on me: according to Journey to the West, the famed old philosopher and central figure of Daoism is actually a celestial mad scientist.

There's a lot of other memorable imagery in Kherdian's book, and I feel not only has my Asian cultural literacy been bolstered, but I also might one day seek out one of the unabridged versions.

My advice to the GOP

I feel as if I should have some sort of opinion about Rush Limbaugh, or our society's reactions to him. So here goes.

People say Rush is a political commentator, but he's primarily an entertainer. I don't mean that to be necessarily negative. We're deep in the Information Age now, the number of possible distractions available for any given person at any given moment is so high that it might as well be infinite, and so the ability to make people want to pay attention to you is a useful skill that society should value.

Rush is a good entertainer. He's a comedian. Based on what I've heard of him, he's got a great voice for radio, knows how to tell a joke, and has a natural gift for comic timing.

There. Now I'm done complimenting him.

I've never regularly listened to Rush, so the following can be filed in the vast category of Internet ramblings known as 'complaining about media you don't actually watch or listen to'. So be it.

I suspect the recent dust-up that cost Rush a good deal of advertising money took him by surprise because Rush believes the universe exists in order to supply him with material. As this way of thinking goes, if a certain Georgetown University student hadn't wanted Rush to say outrageous things about her, then she shouldn't have existed in the same reality as him. From Rush's point of view, his comments coming back to bite him are just as surprising as if he was sitting at home, mocking a movie on TV, and the characters in the movie turned and started mocking him. And then persuaded his sponsors to withdraw their support.

I can't be shocked or offended by anything he says anymore. He passed the moral point of no return back in October. After Obama pledged to send 100 American troops to Uganda to fight the murderous, regionally destabilizing thugs of the infamous Lord's Resistance Army, Rush decided to frame the issue as Obama sending American troops abroad to 'kill Christians'.

Of course you can criticize Obama over this. I can think of plenty of ways to make the case that Obama shouldn't be sending US troops to central Africa at all. But none of them involve framing the issue in quite the morally and intellectually repugnant way that Rush did.

(Not to Godwinize this post, but I wonder if it has occurred to Rush that back in 1941 a Democratic president sent not one hundred, but hundreds of thousands if not millions of troops overseas to fight people who were nominally Christians.)

It's true that a few days later he did (sort of) back down and lamely explain that he would have to 'do more research' on the issue. Really now? That's bad enough if you see him as an ordinary comedian. It's much, much worse if you take him as a political and cultural commentator with serious things to say.

I didn't like Rush before, but as far as I'm concerned his LRA comments pushed him past the point of no return. Nothing he says now is capable of offending me. He could call on all Americans to tithe 10% of their income to the Ku Klux Klan. Or accuse President Obama of eating grandmothers. Or he could call on all Americans to eat grandmothers. I wouldn't care. I'm beyond being shocked. I'm done.

What does offend me is the pretense that Rush (and people like him) are remotely serious public figures who should be treated like they have serious things to say. Now we've got three GOP Presidential contenders who are afraid to say anything stronger about Rush than maybe he shouldn't use such intemperate language.

It's said that these politicians are terrified of insulting Rush's 20 million loyal listeners -- the vast majority of whom, by the way, almost certainly don't exist.

In the unlikely event that any Republican leaders happen to be reading this, I have some advice. You're making a very, very bad strategic mistake.

Here's why.

I remember the Tea Party. It seemed to me that the core of Tea Party beliefs were that (a) the government was too powerful, (b) taxes were too high, and (c) personal liberties were being infringed on. I'm not a libertarian myself and I didn't think much of the core Tea Party beliefs, but I recognize that they were based on a very strong strain in American political discourse which has deep roots and didn't exactly spring into being from nowhere in 2009. There was a real opportunity for them to find common ground with those who culturally identified as liberal. Those pundits last fall who found commonalities between Tea Party rhetoric and Occupy Wall Street rhetoric had a real point.

But what actually happened was that the Tea Partiers got stereotyped as reactionary racist loons. And the Tea Partiers let it happen.

Sure, there were some people in the media who selectively quoted the looniest anti-Obama crap they could find and used it to make generalizations about the whole movement.

But even in a movement as nebulous and lacking in formal structure as the Tea Party, there should have been a couple of respected figures within the movement who had the power to make their voices heard, who could have distanced themselves from the wackier side of the rhetoric. That could have made a real difference in public perception.

But if it ever happened, I never heard it. It got lost in the noise.

I'm still nursing the conspiracy theory that this was a deliberate tactical move by some master strategist. If the American mainstream thinks your movement is a bunch of racist hillbillies, then that creates the impression that elitist snobs are looking down on you. Promoting the feeling of being victimized and put upon is a great way to build group cohesion.

Except that it marginalized the Tea Party brand and made it anathema to a huge swath of America.

So my advice to Republican leaders is this: denounce Rush, then put him behind you and move on. He doesn't deserve better.

Failing to do so will be a very big mistake. Rush is loud. He may not have many regular listeners but media outlets love replaying the outrageous things he says.

Every time a swing voter is reminded of the contraception debate, she'll think of Rush. Every socially conservative Catholic priest on TV talking about birth control will remind viewers of Rush. Independents across the country will look at the conservative talking heads on TV offering support to the GOP candidate and they'll picture Rush. They won't be able to help it.

You really don't want that to happen.

My First Official Election 2012 Rant

First, let me just come out and say it: against all expectations, Barack Obama has turned out to be the most boring President since George Herbert Walker Bush.

That's not necessarily a compliment, nor is it a criticism. And it's partly a function of the modern news media. When you compare what Obama has actually done and how he governs with the ridiculous heroic image his more fervent supporters once had of him, he seems rather... dull.

The same goes if you compare the real Obama with the hyperbole that you hear from his more preposterous professional haters on TV and the Internet. He just can't live up to the image of an atheist elitist snob who wants to impose Sharia law in an effort to transform America into a European socialist state. Maybe nobody could.

And so now a large portion of the people who voted for Obama in '08 are disappointed, and peeved at him, and ready to sit 2012 out.

After all, what's the worst that can happen? President Romney?

In the general election, it'll turn out that Romney's chief advantage is he's perceived as a stereotypical politician. It's hard to loathe Romney, because he's not substantial enough to loathe. He says objectionable things, but that's because these things are what he thinks Republican primary voters want to hear, so the fault really lies with those primary voters, not with Romney himself.

A Romney Administration won't break the country. President Romney will be an excellent foil for the political left, but he won't actually destroy everything they hold dear. (A win-win situation!) Even among Romney haters, the sense is that our country has had worse guys in office, and it came through battered but basically OK.

In other words, the threat of a President Romney won't be enough to get left-leaning voters out of the house to vote for Obama in large numbers on Election Day. This is why, for all of Romney's essential doofiness that often comes across loud and clear on TV, he's still got a good chance of beating Obama.

And what do I, personally, think? I'll dutifully go and vote for Obama, but the idea of a Romney presidency doesn't exactly keep me up at night quivering with fear. I don't like Romney, but our country really has had worse presidents, and has recovered.

And that brings me, of course, to Rick Santorum.

Unless something extraordinary happens, such a major third-party challenger, I do not believe Santorum is capable of defeating Obama. Remember all those lefty voters who couldn't be bothered to vote for Obama against Romney? If Santorum wins the GOP nomination, they'll be tearing open their checkbooks and writing checks to Obama's reelection campaign, their fingers shaking with abject terror. And they will go home at night and pray to God to help Obama win and to stop Santorum. That includes most of the religious Catholics I've known back in the States.

So it sounds simple. If you want Obama to have at least a semblance of a fight on his hands this November, root for Romney. If you want Obama to have an easy reelection, root for Santorum (or Gingrich, whom Obama would also squash). Right?

Also, you've got the view, articulated most recently by John Helleman in New York magazine, that if the GOP runs Romney and loses, the crazies are likely to take over the party and nominate someone truly unacceptable in 2016. But if Santorum runs and loses, the GOP may well return to sanity.

What that would mean for the GOP would differ wildly depending on which of the two current front-runners, along with the coalition that elevated him to the nomination, is blamed for the debacle. “If Romney is the nominee and he loses in November, I think we’ll see a resurgence of the charismatic populist right,” says Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah and author of a biography of Barry Goldwater. “Not only will [the grassroots wing] say that Romney led Republicans down the road to defeat, but that the whole type of conservatism he represents is doomed.”

Goldberg points out that this is what happened in 1976, when the party stuck with Ford over Reagan, was beaten by Carter, and went on to embrace the Gipper’s brand of movement conservatism four years later. So who does Goldberg think might be ascendant in the aftermath of a Romney licking? “Sarah Palin,” he replies. “She’s an outsider, she has no Washington or Wall Street baggage, she’s electric—and she’s waiting, because if Romney doesn’t win, she will be welcomed in.”

But if it’s Santorum who is the standard-bearer and then he suffers an epic loss, a different analogy will be apt: Goldwater in 1964. (And, given the degree of the challenges Santorum would face in attracting female voters, epic it might well be.) As Kearns Goodwin points out, the rejection of the Arizona senator’s ideology and policies led the GOP to turn back in 1968 to Nixon, “a much more moderate figure, despite the incredible corruption of his time in office.” For Republicans after 2012, a similar repudiation of the populist, culture-warrior coalition that is fueling Santorum’s surge would open the door to the many talented party leaders—Daniels, Christie, Bush, Ryan, Bobby Jindal—waiting in the wings for 2016, each offering the possibility of refashioning the GOP into a serious and forward-thinking enterprise.

Only the most mindless of ideologues reject the truism that America would be best served by the presence of two credible governing parties instead of the situation that currently obtains. A Santorum nomination would be seen by many liberals as a scary and retrograde proposition. And no doubt it would make for a wild ride, with enough talk of Satan, abortifacients, and sweater vests to drive any sane man bonkers. But in the long run, it might do a world of good, compelling Republicans to return to their senses—and forge ahead into the 21st century. Which is why all people of common sense and goodwill might consider, in the days ahead, adopting a slogan that may strike them as odd, perverse, or even demented: Go, Rick, go.

That makes a lot of sense. It's logical.

But I can't put my heart behind it. I'm not feeling it.

Part of it is that I have a hard time believing future hypothetical scenarios, especially those worked out by confident experts. The future hasn't been written. We don't know what game-changing unexpected events will happen. Analyses of what a political party is likely to do years down the road in scenario A as opposed to scenario B can be useful food for thought, but perhaps should not be used as the basis of decision-making. Plans and predictions have a tendency to come undone.

And what's more, on a purely visceral, emotional level, I don't want the GOP to nominate Santorum.

I don't want to run the risk of him winning. I don't believe he can beat Obama in a 2-way race, but throw in a third-party candidate who might divert votes from Obama, or some other game-changing event I can't anticipate, and anything can happen.

But more fundamentally, I don't want the media narratives between now and November 2 to be about Santorum's pet issues. I know there are people who say that we need to have a serious national conversation about gay marriage, about church and state, about abortion, about feminism, etc. And I agree. We do.

But we won't if Santorum wins the nomination.

Once you put things into the language of political discourse, you're no longer having a serious conversation. You're just sniping at each other's strawmen. You're talking in the language of emotion rather than rationality. You're making yourselves out to be victims solely for the purpose of making the people you want on your side feel embattled and belittled and defensive. I hate that.

Romney's pet issues aren't really culture war issues. They don't come pre-loaded with emotional resonance for people. Having a Romney-centered general election campaign won't result in millions of dollars being poured into unnecessarily tearing apart American social fabric.

Moreover, if Santorum wins the nomination, everything he says until the nomination is going to get reported around the world with the weight and gravitas of a major-party nominee for President. Yes, every national politician in the United States has said some, irresponsible, crazy stuff, and maybe I am getting a skewed view of Santorum's vocal utterances because the media tends to focus on the more objectionable things he says. But the thought of the news media around the world running Santorum's talking points with the implied weight of half the American electorate behind it makes my skin crawl.

But then, maybe it doesn't matter if the GOP nominates Romney or Santorum. Maybe, to appease the base, Romney would need to pick a Santorum-like VP, if not Santorum himself. Which would result in just as unpleasant a general election. In which case, all I can do is watch from my perch outside the USA, enjoy the wild ride, and remember to send in my absentee ballot for Obama.

Green Mars

Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Published in 1994

Published by Bantam Books

ISBN: 0-553-57239-3

Green Mars is the middle book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

Green Mars begins around the turn of the 22nd century. Mars has been settled for several decades. Terraforming projects are incrementally inching the planet's atmosphere (and, increasingly, its developing biosphere) towards a more Earthlike new normal. New settlers are arriving and more Martian natives are being born. Meanwhile, Earth is a mess, dominated by a dozen or so 'metanationals', mergers of 21st-century-style multinationals and nation-states. These same metanationals are in charge of exploiting the natural resources of Mars.

The surviving members of the First Hundred -- the first permanent settlers on Mars and the trilogy's main protagonists -- have mostly taken up the cause of a Free Mars, sovereign and independent of Terran metanationals' meddling. This is not, of course, to say that they agree with each other, or that there aren't deep philosophical disagreements that threaten to tear the cause of Martian independence apart.

Green Mars is about the Martian people's decades-long march towards revolution.

It's been a long time since I read the first entry in the trilogy, Red Mars. (I don't even remember what year I read it in -- I think it was 2008 or 2009.) It was probably a mistake to let my knowledge of the characters and backstory to lie dormant for such a long time, especially as when I began Green Mars I wasn't sure where to turn online to refresh my memory without inadvertently spoiling myself.

If you are the kind of reader who must always have a good grasp of who each character is, what they are talking about, and what the past events they are obliquely referring to are, then you'd better read these three books in order, and (unless you have a good memory for details) without significant breaks in between. These books are vast, they are full of details, and nothing is ever forgotten. And Green Mars offers the casual reader no help at all. There's no helpful list of dramatis personae, and no introductory passage from the Encyclopaedia of Mars about the early years of Martian history, full of exposition to catch the reader up.

On the other hand, if I were the sort of reader who always had to feel cognizant and in control, then I never would have gotten through Lau Siew Mei's Playing Madame Mao. I cheerfully got myself slowly back up to speed by quietly assimilating the references to what had gone before -- all of which, of course, seemed to assume the reader was already familiar with the events of Red Mars.

Working my way through my stack of Kim Stanley Robinsons was practically a New Year's resolution for me. Robinson is a brilliant author, wields very well-thought-out concepts, and his books make me feel smarter. But I'll never call one of his books a 'page-turner'. It's clear throughout Green Mars that the installment will end with the people of Mars throwing off the yoke of their colonial oppressors, in an extraordinarily messy revolution that will require another 700-page novel to pick up the pieces. And Robinson sure takes his time getting there.

Green Mars's sizable pagecount is devoted largely to two things. One is politics, and I just ate that up. I love a realistic depiction of political struggle when it's written as an exploration of human nature, and not for the author to advance some stupid agenda of his own.

The other thing he writes about at great length is Mars, and this is where I found the book a bit of a struggle. And I feel bad about that. It's not like I can complain. I'm not going to write in an Amazon review, Robinson's book about Mars, Green Mars, is pretty good except for the parts where he writes about Mars.

But one of Robinson's main goals in this trilogy -- in Red Mars, in Green Mars, and I expect in Blue Mars too -- is to make the reader feel the natural beauty of the Martian landscape. And he sets out to accomplish this through text. Lavish textual descriptions, filled with geological terminology. And to be honest, they left me rather cold. They are what make the books a long slog for me.

I don't want to harp too much on the dryness of the 'Martian beauty' sections. They're obviously a central part of Robinson's vision. And he always gets back around to human beings and their psychologies and the march of history, which I enjoy reading about far more. My problem might just be that my brain's not wired to easily picture a visual image based on a text description. If I'm to appreciate something's visual beauty, I have to actually see it.

And on that note, go look at this high-resolution picture of Victoria Crater taken from Cape Verde by the Opportunity rover.

Other Paths of Education

There's been talk in the USA for years of making four years of college education as ubiquitous and expected as four years of high school education. I'm for education as much as anyone, but I'm very unconvinced that four years at a standard American college or university is what every American needs.

It's not that I think there is necessarily anything wrong with what universities offer and it's certainly not about politics. (I should point out that my dad's a tenured professor in the social sciences at a state-run university.)

And I certainly don't think the problem is that some students are smarter and some students are naturally stupider, and this is a natural truth that some people are afraid to utter because of 'political correctness'. I don't believe human intelligence can be represented along a single scale. I think different people probably have different natural aptitudes.

I don't believe this because it fits into some ideology I have. I believe it because it fits the way I perceive human beings operating.

I remember that I've always been very good at taking standardized tests, for example. What they don't tell you in school is that your success in adult life is not necessarily determined by how well you do on standardized tests.

In short, I fully agree with and endorse the ideas put forth by Sir Ken Robinson in his 2010 TED Talk.

I suppose what I'd like to see in the USA is a greatly expanded system of vocational education, for students who have no interest in going on to a traditional university. We need people who know how stuff works. We need people who can figure stuff out. And we need a system that encourages people to master skills which are useful to society, and to leverage these skills to take charge of their own lives.

And -- and this is important -- I would wave my magic wand and change society so that there wouldn't be any sense that people who had vocational training and now work in the skilled labor force are less talented or less lucky than people who went to university. Anybody who can open up and fix a machine or expertly repair leaky pipes is officially far more capable than I am in at least one area of human endeavor, and there is no reason to suppose they are less well-informed about the world or have less of a mind than I do. That's just dumb.

In short, I don't just want to see better options for people who don't do well on their SATs. I want to see these additional paths to a good career to be a serious possibility even for people who did well on all their standardized tests and could get into a good university if they wanted to. Where's the logic in considering vocational training to be second-best? I don't see it.

So that's how I'd like to change American culture.

So is there a way to express vaguely similar sentiments but within a framework of pure assholery? Yes, there is.

Read this report on Rick Santorum's comments on Obama wanting to send all American kids to college.

"Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands," Santorum began. "Some people have incredible gifts and want to work out there making things."

Then he went after the president's call for making college easier for Americans to attend.

President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," Santorum said as the crowd howled with laughter and applause. "There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor."

Then read this bit on how and why his supporters agree that college isn't for everybody. A couple of them say things that sort of echo my concerns up above, but it turns into this:

“They try and disguise it with, you know, ‘equal opportunity’…” Stephen Clement began.

“It’s communism,” Murrow said, cutting him off. “The professors are all teaching the kids…”

“Where does the social engineering stop?” Clement jumped back in, fired up. “Does it stop after we send everybody to college, or does it stop after we set their curriculum and said, ‘these are the things you’re allowed to study?’ Does it become the Soviet Union?”

Thank you, American political discourse. Not just for redefining the word 'communist' to mean 'generic thing I don't like', which will render us without a sufficiently descriptive vocabulary if actual Communists ever become a force in American politics.

But also, thank you for taking something I actually believe and embedding it within a context I disapprove of. It's a test of my intellectual integrity to see if I still believe something after it's been thoroughly incorporated into a framework I don't agree with.

And guess what? I still believe we ought to support alternative paths of education, and not snobbishly look down on people just because they didn't go to a traditional college.

Who cares how Santorum tries to frame the issue.

Playing Madame Mao

Playing Madame Mao

by Lau Siew Mei

Published in 2000

Published by Brandl & Schlesinger

ISBN: 1-876040-18-1

Chiang Ching was Chairman Mao's fourth and final wife. She made her name early in life as an actress. She became politically powerful during the late 1960s, becoming one of the instigators of the Cultural Revolution, and as Mao became old and senile Chiang Ching's power grew. After Mao died, Chiang Ching and her followers were forced out of the government. She was thrown into prison, and eventually committed suicide in 1991. (The novel does not spell her name using Pinyin, and I have followed its lead.)

Chiang Ching is a Singaporean actress, the heroine of Lau Siew Mei's Playing Madame Mao. Not only does she portray the Chinese leader on the stage, but as the hallucinogenic, phantasmagoric novel progresses, her life increasingly becomes conflated with her character's. Similarly, 1980s Singapore becomes identified with 1970s China. Her husband falls into political trouble for his writings, and she may have contributed to his troubles through her own activities (if we can trust the literal truth of certain passages).

The Singapore of Lau Siew Mei's Chiang Ching is ruled by a repressive government, whose enforcers are known as Red Guards, and which is led by a tyrant known only as the Chairman. (For those not familiar with Singaporean nomenclature, as far as I can tell the phrase 'Red Guards' is not normally used in reference to that country's police, and Lee Kuan Yew's title is never rendered as 'Chairman'.)

Adding to Chiang Ching's (the Singaporean actress, not the Chinese leader, not that the distinction remains so sharp within the novel) subjective confusion, the rules of reality are broached, as Chiang Ching dallies with the Emperor of the universe that lies beyond the mirrors, whose denizens are increasingly infiltrating real-life Singapore.

I felt as if the novel was operating on two levels simultaneously, one grounded in literal reality and one flying high in the realms of fantasy. And there's nothing wrong with that. But while I can appreciate the satirical intent behind conflating Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore and Mao's China, the fantastical elements left me bemused and unsure how to interpret what was supposed to be happening.

The novel ends by offering us a way to rationalize all of the preceding flights of fancy. Whether you accept that explanation of what has gone before is, of course, up to you.

How the Other Half Thinks: Adventures in Mathematical Reasoning

How the Other Half Thinks: Adventures in Mathematical Reasoning

by Sherman Stein

Published in 2001

Published by McGraw-Hill

ISBN: 0-07-140798-7

Last year I read and reviewed John D. Barrow's excellent 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know. Barrow's book introduced the general public to 100 math problems and general applications which he related in an engaging and interesting manner.

Sherman Stein's book belongs to the same general genre. Writing for a layman with no specialized training, Stein introduces a handful of problems that mathematicians have tackled through the years, and methodically and step by step he takes the reader through the logic inherent in solving the problem, or proving the proposition.

Barrow's book was divided into 100 sections, each looking at a different aspect of mathematics. In contrast, Stein deals with just eight. In each section, he poses a question, then guides the reader through the logic used by mathematicians to explore it. I deliberately use the word 'explore' rather than 'solve'. Correct answers are almost an afterthought -- the process is the thing.

This book is about logical thinking more than math -- not to imply there's a line where math ends and logic begins! The reader isn't assumed to have any mathematical knowledge beyond how an equation works, how an average is calculated, or what pi is.

In the very first chapter, Stein gives us what appears to be a difficult problem. Imagine you drop a needle onto a floor, and the floor has a pattern of parallel lines which are evenly spaced apart. What is the probability the needle will cross one of the parallel lines? As you can probably guess, that depends on the relationship between the length of the needle and the distance between the lines. (This is known among mathematicians as the Buffon's Needle problem.)

Next, he makes it really interesting.

What happens if we keep the length of the needle and the distance between the lines constant, but we bend the needle? Bend it into a right angle, bend it into a W, bend it into a rectangle, it doesn't matter. How much less likely is it that the needle crosses a line?

The answer -- it doesn't affect the probability at all! -- is counter-intuitive (at least, it was for me), but it is impeccably proven, and proven in a way that doesn't even use what we would consider math.

The remainder of the book covers topics such as infinity (containing the famous old question of whether one infinite set can be larger than another), streaks (concerning the tendency of random processes such as a coin flip to yield surprisingly long streaks if given enough time), and letter strings (in which the strings are ingeniously visualized in two dimensions as road maps).

The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind

by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Translated by Lucia Graves

Published in 2001

Published by Penguin

ISBN: 0-14-303490-1

Daniel is a bookseller's son living in late 1940s Barcelona. He comes into possession of a novel called The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julian Carax. Daniel develops a years-long obsession with Carax, a long-disappeared fellow Barcelona native, and he tries to piece together what he can of Carax's life story. Is the presumably now middle-aged Carax still alive? Reports differ. Has Carax written anything else? Yes, several novels, and every known copy has gone missing. What does the malevolent and thuggish local police inspector who antagonizes Daniel and threatens his friends have to do with Carax? And who is the mysterious scarred man who stalks Daniel and intends to make sure every last Carax novel is burned to ashes?

Several of this novel's many effusive blurbs compare it to an Umberto Eco work. I can see the resemblance. This is a big, complex book whose plot doubles back recursively; there's a lot going on here, and plenty of characters to keep straight. This onion has a lot of layers.

Fortunately, this one is both a highbrow literary work and a real page-turner. The author knows how to milk every drop of suspense out of having his characters creep around dusty, abandoned mansions at night.

I have only a very basic level of knowledge about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath in Barcelona, which forms the all-pervasive backdrop to the novel. I know it to be a deep, complex, emotionally loaded subject which I happen to be largely ignorant of (despite having read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia several years ago). The Shadow of the Wind doesn't require its readers to be particularly knowledgeable about 20th-century Spain, but having at least a passing familiarity with the times would be helpful. If anything, this is one of those novels that inspire you to learn more about the historical period in question.

Reading the OED

Reading the OED

by Ammon Shea

Published in 2008

Published by Perigee

ISBN: 978-0-399-53505-5

When he set out to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a year, start to finish, Ammon Shea faced a certain set of problems. The task gave him headaches, and he needed to get a new prescription for his eyeglasses. And there was the matter of finding a suitable place for his reading outside of the house, as he tried out libraries and secluded outdoor spots. But none of these difficulties turned out to be impossible to overcome, and Shea was serious about his love of dictionaries and the English language.

Reading the OED is a wonderful celebration of the love of books -- and the love of words -- taken to the furthest extreme it's possible to reach in our contemporary culture. Shea fills most of the pages of his book with the words that particularly struck his fancy, accompanied by his own witty commentary.

For example, just in the As, we have agathokakological, 'made up of both good and evil' (Shea writes, 'You don't have to use it in casual conversation; sometimes it's enough to merely know a word exists in order to enjoy it'); all-overish, 'feeling an undefined sense of unwell that extends to the whole body' (Shea writes that 'It is rare that we are presented with a word simultaneously so vague and so useful'); anonymuncule, 'an anonymous, small-time writer' (Shea proclaims this word 'delightful'); and aspectabund, a word not used since 1708 and meaning 'having an expressive face'. (Shea comments, 'As a word it is almost entirely forgotten, and perhaps soon, as cosmetic procedures continue to work their magic, the very notion of having an expressive face will be forgotten as well.')

An interview with Ammon Shea in which he discusses the book can be found here.