Another way to experience your pregnancy.

I don’t get the Google / YouTube deal. In fact I don’t get the News Corp. / MySpace deal either. Pay a gazillion for something that hasn’t even been close to making a profit – because it’s got lots of viewers. Are we back to the bubble-time habit of paying for “eyeballs”? Size for the sake of size? That is what most commenters seem to focus on: how MS and Yahoo “need to move quickly” while there’s something left to buy out there.

This book can be summarised in a single word: funny.

It was written to be funny (and not much else) and it is funny (and not much else). I mean that in a good way: it is outrageously, hilariously funny and made me laugh out loud, and I enjoyed reading it. How can you not enjoy a book that counts among its characters a transvestite Filipino canoe navigator, a talking fruit bat called Roberto, a cannibal, ninjas, and a whole tribe of shark-hunting ex-cannibals? Where the story includes a cargo cult, plane crashes, and shady doctors on a tropical island?

(Well, you could not enjoy it if it was badly written, but it isn’t.)

Where does a writer get ideas like that? How do you come up with a title like “Island of the Sequined Love Nun”? Christopher Moore must be a seriously disturbed person.

Walking has become hard work, and now has to be limited to short distances and a very slow pace. I’m not at all used to walking slowly, so the latter actually takes some effort and attention. And when I say slow, I mean really really slow: imagine the pace you would keep if you were very reluctant to arrive wherever you’re going, just moving your feet enough to keep up the appearance of walking forward.

This afternoon I walked to the post box to mail a letter, and then to the local clinic to get a repeat prescription renewed. This should normally have taken about 20 minutes, but took me an hour. I think I walked at half my normal pace, on average, but on my way there I forgot myself and sped up for a moment – and paid for it by getting a stitch in the side (at least that’s what I think it was – with a pregnant belly it felt more like a an agonising cramp in the stomach muscles) and having my blood pressure drop through the floor, so I had to sit and wait 20 minutes at the clinic for it to recover.

Then I got home and slept 2 hours out of exhaustion, waking only once to turn to the other side.

No, walking doesn’t work well now. Cycling, however, still works perfectly well for short distances (did yesterday, at least). With hindsight it’s clear that I should have cycled to the clinic instead of walking.

I’ve been cycling throughout the whole pregnancy, both because I always cycled everywhere before I was pregnant, and because I’ve found it more comfortable and/or convenient than any of the alternatives. It’s definitely less tiring than walking and puts less strain on the back. It’s also more comfortable than sitting on a bus – bus seats give me a backache. Above all, it is far more comfortable than taking a taxi, which is what everyone has been suggesting to me (if it costs more, it must be better?). London streets are so uneven and taxis have such strong suspension that a taxi ride here feels like being on a fairground ride or a large trampoline. At the top of each bounce Blump pushes my stomach up to my throat, and at the end of the bounce s/he lands painfully on some internal organs. Not comfy at all. On the bike I can at least see each bump coming and avoid it or compensate for it, but there’s no way to do that in a taxi.

The bike is not really an option for longer distances any more (too tired afterwards) so I’ve been taking the tube for my daytime bookshopping trips etc. The tube has turned out to be a reasonably good alternative, as long as I’m not in a hurry (which I’m not) and can avoid the rush hour (which I can) – a positive surprise, on the whole.

The high rate of Caesarean sections (one in every five births in the UK and in Sweden; one in three in the US) is probably of more interest to me than to you.

One of the reasons for these high numbers is women’s preferences: half of the Caesareans in the UK are elective. Choosing to undergo major surgery rather than to go through a natural process is an odd choice in my opinion. But I guess those women may have greater faith in modern technology than I do, or be more averse to pain and hard work, or put greater value on convenience. Anyway, that’s not why I’m posting – other women’s reasons for elective Caesareans are relatively irrelevant to me because I’m not even considering that option.

What I find more interesting right now is the other half of Caesarean sections, and why they are performed. It appears that doctors’ inexperience is one major contributing factor: junior doctors are more likely to opt for a Caesarean because they do not have sufficient experience in other assisted methods of childbirth

An article in the New Yorker highlights a related reason: the standardization of childbirth. Teaching all obstetricians to perform one standardized procedure well is easier than teaching them the numerous more “manual” alternatives. And Caesarean section is a standardizable procedure – it is a technical process that doesn’t vary much from patient to patient. Using the forceps, on the other hand, is more of a craft – it requires the doctor to develop a “feel” for using the right amount of force, etc.

The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry? If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills. You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.

But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts. You seek reliability.

Whereas before obstetricians learned one technique for a foot dangling out, another for a breech with its arms above its head, yet another for a baby with its head jammed inside the pelvis, all tricky in their own individual ways, now the solution is the same almost regardless of the problem: the C-section. Every obstetrician today is comfortable doing a C-section. The procedure is performed with impressive consistency.

Found via Salon.

A “quant” is one who works in quantitative finance, which is mostly concerned with developing models for analysing financial derivatives.

I had an obvious interest in the book from the moment I read about it, given my closeness (ehm) to the industry and one the firms discussed in the book. And while I was never a quant myself (lacking the requisite PhD in quantum physics) I have worked closely enough with quants to be interested in hearing what an insider might have to say about life as a quant.

Given the numerous 5-star reviews the book got, I was sorely disappointed with it.

The book really does not live up to any of the promises of its title. Firstly, Derman’s life as a quant takes up no more than half the book – the first half is about his life in the world of academic physics (first during his PhD and then his seemingly endless wanderings from one postdoc position to another) and later in Bell Labs. Secondly, and more importantly, the promised “reflections” are nowhere to be found.

This book is a plain and simple auto-biography, written by a brilliant (as far as I can judge) scientist who nevertheless has nothing particularly brilliant to say about his life. Derman simply goes through his life from when he finishes his undergraduate degree, methodically and linearly, almost year by year. This might work if he had led a particularly interesting life, or was able to write very engagingly about the ordinary things in his life, but Derman isn’t that good a writer.

I see this simple chronological approach as a symptom of a bigger problem: Derman has no particular aim with this book, no theme. There are no reflections, no insights, no trends or discussions of how things have changed, no conclusions from important events. He could have written about the birth of financial engineering, or the daily life of a quant, or the differences between academic life and Wall Street… but he doesn’t.

Instead, he spends a lot of time complaining about his career, its hopelessness and aimlessness and loneliness, and how unhappy he was with most of his jobs (especially the one at Bell Labs).

And when Derman isn’t talking about the difficulties of finding a career, he indulges in endless name-dropping, which really got on my nerves. Every colleague whose name readers might recognise is mentioned (especially all the famous physicists), as well as more tenuous connections, including people he met only once for a failed job interview. Or never met at all, for that matter:

We learned database theory from David Shaw, who later founded the investment boutique D.E.Shaw & Co., as well as the first free email service, Juno. At D.E.Shaw, David employed Jeff Bezos, who later left to found Amazon.com.

“Look at me! I once knew someone who later knew Jeff Bezos!”

The amount of ink spent on talking about Important People doesn’t decrease when Derman talks about his life as a quant. He seems to be almost obsessed with Fischer Black. Yes, I know, Black was an important guy, and made important discoveries, but still… Even in chapters where Derman is neither working with Fischer Black, nor hoping to work with Fischer Black, nor talking about how Fischer Black would have done things, he suddenly, out of the blue, makes comments such as this one (“it” being the Risk magazine):

Fischer, too, commented admiringly on it.

I am still wondering why Derman wrote this book.

I guess “My Life as a Quant” may appeal to readers who have followed a very similar career path and recognise all these names. Or perhaps to those who know the physics world but not the quant world – but the book isn’t focused enough to give those readers any real understanding of quantitative finance. Perhaps it can be inspirational for wannabe quants, of whom there is no shortage, I’m sure.

if:book has some interesting thoughts about e-books and

… about the difference between digital text and digital music, and why an ebook device is not, as much as publishers would like it to be, an iPod. This is not an argument over the complexity of literature versus the complexity of music, rather it is a question of interfaces. It seems to me that reading interfaces are much more complicated than listening ones.

… the main argument being that you do not need to interact with a music player while listening, whereas reading devices (paper or electronic)…

are felt and perceived throughout the reading experience. The text, the visual design, and the reader’s movement through them are all in constant interaction.

I’ve tried two e-books / e-readers: the Rocket eBook and the Sony Librie. Eric likes e-books (which is why we have them) – he finds them convenient, especially for books whose paper editions are about as portable (and easy to handle) as a brick, and he likes not having to find space at home for books he’s read once and never intends to read again.

While I thought both readers did an adequate job, neither came close to the experience of reading a “real” book – even disregarding technical issues such as resolution and contrast, which will surely get sorted out soon. (And DRM of course! – which I am less hopeful about.)

Most importantly, the individuality of books disappeared. All books looked and felt more or less the same. And they felt very utilitarian. To me, books are more than the sequence of characters that makes up the text. The information content is only a part of it: the tactile and visual elements are also important. The size and weight, the feel of the paper, the cover design, the typography, all contribute towards the full reading experience.

Perhaps if e-books came with beautiful leather covers… in multiple styles for differing tastes, or for different kinds of books?

Paper books have a feeling of permanence, of existing. They remain in the bookshelf after I’ve finished reading them, and can remind me of the experience of reading them. This, of course, can be both a good thing or a bad thing – not every book I read is worth that kind of permanence; some are not worth the space they take up. E-books on the other hand, while less permanent, are very portable. In the same physical space as you would need for one paper book, you can fit tens or hundreds of e-books.

This aesthetic-physical aspect of books is just nostalgia and habit, of course. If paper books had never existed, and all I knew was online streams of characters, I wouldn’t miss these “extras” that books have.

But even from a practical point of view, I find e-books generally inferior to paper books. No e-book sits as comfortably in my hand as a paper book. Perhaps they would feel better if I could just grab and hold them any which way, without worrying about the relatively fragile screens, or about leaving thumbprints in the middle of the screen.

Current e-books steer the reader towards a one-way reading process. Paper books on the other hand are easy to skim, flip through, browse – basically, easier to explore. I can skip back a few pages while keeping a finger at my current position, and jump back instantly. I can look ahead to see how many pages I’ve got left in the chapter (do I have time to finish it before bedtime?). I can see, without even picking up the book, how far I’ve read and how much I’ve got ahead of me. I can navigate visually: quickly flick through pages until I find the one that has that orange box in the top left, or the one I scribbled on (for travel books and other reference materials). Even with fiction, I remember which part of the page described a particular scene, and find it based on that.

E-books also offer the possibility to manipulate text: search, look up words and add notes. You can do these things with paper books as well, but less conveniently. Cross-referencing and hyperlinks could make e-books a lot more useful, especially for non-fiction – textbooks, instruction manuals, travel guides and other information-dense materials. I’m already happy to read those online because of the extra functionality that provides. But that would require the content itself to be reworked, rather than just pushed into a text file.

I think that is the direction e-books would need to go in order to become interesting: they need to add new capabilities, rather than repackage old ones. And they should probably focus on non-fiction, where these new capabilities would add more value. For fiction, I cannot see that I would switch to e-books any time soon.

Related articles / blog posts / essays I found interesting:
fantasy ebook – What would it take to make the ebook absolutely irresistible?
Booke & eBook – philosophical commentary on connections between reading and consciousness etc.

Footnote: I haven’t “read” any audiobooks. To me they are not really books, and don’t compete with books – they are more akin to radio (except that they’re on-demand) or theatre (but a very limited version). Again, the content of a book may be there, but the presentation is so different that to me it is no longer a book. Books are written and read: I determine the pace; I am not a passive receiver of information.

I spent the afternoon in a bookshop, which is a great way to spend an afternoon. Usually I do this on weekends, of course, and it turned out that weekday visits can involve special considerations: a large and important part of one floor (the SF section) was blocked off because some celebrity author was signing books there. A surprisingly large number of people were queueing for the event, even though it was in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. Don’t these people have any work to do?

A visit to a bookshop almost invariably ends with me buying books. And while I showed commendable restraint this time – if I say so myself – and went home with only 4 new books, this still means that these 4 will soon make their way to the “books to blog about” pile, which is still teeteringly high… A deal, then: for every book I read, I will blog about two. This way, the pile should be gone by the time I’ve read all 4 of the new acquisitions. For extra effect, I’ll start with the biggest one.

And a big one it is indeed. The Stand, complete and uncut edition, 1415 pages.

Story: A virus escapes from a government lab, and wipes out almost all of the US population. The survivors struggle to survive, to find each other and to recreate some sort of order, some sort of civil society.

Unlike most of King’s stories, the horror element in The Stand is quite limited. That is, there is horror enough in the scenes of multitudes dying, but it is all restrained and realistic, not presented as horror scenes. This is one of the reasons why I re-read this book: it is not a horror story dominated by looming monsters or crazed murderers. Most of it is an exploration of psychology and sociology. How might people react when everyone around them dies? Who would survive and how? How would they keep their sanity? To what lowly state would society collapse, and how might it recover from there?

Some people who survive the initial epidemic die soon after, because they are not “cut out” to be survivors. For others, the disaster is a wake-up call, and they pick up their unsuccessful, failing lives and start taking responsibility.

How would you react? What would you do? If you survived, how would you go on?
What would it feel like to be able to take anything, do anything, go anywhere, because there are no controls – but to be totally alone?

Much of the strength of The Stand comes, I think, from its combination of epic scale and close observation. The end of the world as we know it is an immense event, but it is told through small episodes. The book touches upon the lives of many dozens of characters, and even the list of main characters would have to include a good half dozen. A bit disjointed, perhaps, but at the same time I thought it was a great way to really show how all-encompassing the effects of the disaster were / would be. The characters themselves are somewhat predictable and not particularly interesting, but they are more than adequate for illustrating the themes of the book.

This close attention to detail is, in a way, also a shortcoming of the book, because it ties it so closely to the USA around 1980. For a non-American reading it 30 years later, it can be hard to relate to all song lyrics quoted and names mentioned.

The book’s other strength is the pervasive feeling of hope, and courage and goodness. Unlikely friendships form, and unlikely people become heroes. There is evil too, of course – there always is in a Stephen King book, and it’s never subtle. (King doesn’t really “do” subtlety.) In this one, two people personify the opposites of good and evil, and survivors tend to gravitate towards one of them, and of course there is a kind of a fight between the two sides in the end. I found that part of the book less interesting, primarily because it was so predictable and, ultimately, rather unsatisfying. I guess King just didn’t know how to end a book of this kind of epic scale without taking a supernatural element to help. However, the end is, after all, only a small part of the book and doesn’t detract from the rest of it.

Footnote:
I have a special relationship with Stephen King, because he was one of the first authors I read in English (not counting children’s books). I must have been around 12 I guess, and I believe I read a good dozen of them. I can’t even remember where or how I got hold of them… The Stand was the one that made the biggest impression, and I’ve returned to it a few times since then.

As is obvious from the author’s name, this is a novel pretending to be a memoir. Chiyo, a young girl, joins (or rather, is sold to) a geisha house, where she initially works as a maid, later goes through geisha training and apprenticeship, and finally becomes a full geisha.

Plot-wise, the early years get the most attention, and every subsequent year goes past faster and faster – at the beginning of the book Chiyo is 9; by the middle she is 14; by the end she’s an old woman. A lot of attention is paid to her years of painful struggle to be accepted into geisha training, and the rituals and processes of becoming a geisha, yet we hear relatively little about her time as a famous geisha. It feels like the author loses interest, or has a deadline to keep: the second half has less life and energy. The ending is the weakest part; the book just fades out with a very unsatisfying conclusion. Still, most of the plot was exciting enough, and well-enough presented, to keep me interested all the way through.

True to the memoir form, the focus of the book is on that which is small and close – jealousies, everyday events, conversations. The small-scale is presented with beautiful detail, especially of kimonos, hair styles, insides of houses. But the book has almost nothing to say about the wider world outside Chiyo’s immediate day-to-day life, such as Japanese society, the changes to Japan over all this time, or even anything insightful about the geisha tradition. While I got a rough picture of what the life of a geisha entailed, I would have liked to know a lot more.

Interestingly, all those who laud the book’s authenticity and claim that it “perfectly describes Japanese life” or something of that nature, are westerners. All comments by Japanese readers, and Westerners living in Japan, have said that Golden doesn’t know much about what he’s talking about.

So in actual fact the book is more historical romance than history. Unfortunately the romance element is hollow and naive. The characters are simplistic, and each one has a single role to play: the rival is a vicious plotter; the head of the geisha house is ugly and only cares about money; the influential man who becomes attracted to Chiyo is decent yet grumpy. Even Chiyo herself is shallow, and remains childish throughout the book. She is repeatedly described as clever, but doesn’t show it much – she doesn’t try to understand the big picture of what is going on around her, or have any sort of direction in her life. She becomes obsessed with a man she’s seen once, and then somehow keeps that infatuation alive for many years, even though she only meets him a few times a year at most, doesn’t really know him, and there are no signs that he cares about her.

(And why do all of Chiyo’s metaphors involve either trains, sea waves or tree leaves?)

All in all, not a bad book, but not particularly noteworthy either. Definitely not worth all the praise and attention it’s gotten – most of that has got to be due to the exotic setting and the word “geisha” in the title.

I just noticed that it’s suddenly October. And it’s like autumn came overnight. All of September was sunny and warm, around 20°C. Today has been filled with thunderstorms and heavy showers – the kind that make you really happy to be inside. Indoors it got cold enough for me to put on socks (I’ve been barefoot at home since spring) and wear something with sleeves. And sunlight was sufficiently weak that I turned on the lights when having breakfast.

September is a great time of the year, especially when it turns out this nice. Not too hot, not too cold. And it’s a great time to be vegetarian: fruit & veg departments are full of fresh English stuff. Fresh local vegetables (well, not quite local but from within a hundred miles at least) do taste different.

The berry season has not yet ended, so you get strawberries (not as good as Estonian or Swedish ones, but far superior to Belgian or Spanish ones), raspberries, blackberries, redcurrants etc. This is the brief period when strawberries are not sold as just “strawberries” but actually have names – most of which start with E, for some reason: Evie, Elsanta, Everest. And Jubilee.

Same with apples: there are juicy flavourful English apples with interesting names like Early Windsor and Worcester Pearmain, instead of just the standard 4 (Royal Gala, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Granny Smith), all of which are rather boring, and have generally been shipped halfway around the world so even the flavour they might have had is mostly gone.

September is also mushroom season, so it’s occasionally even possible to find chantarelle mushrooms and other such delicacies (even if those do come from Romania and not Sussex).