Project: Prototype Illustration Books

Having successfully completed several process/art books for my assessment in spring (here), I decided to follow-up two of those books with more complete ones. One book was a collection of watercolour and ink location sketches, and since my assessment I completed several more sketches that I wanted to add to the set. The other was a collection of my life drawing sketches, but only covered the period of concern for my assessment, and not wanting to leave my earlier life drawings stranded, I felt that incorporating the bulk of them into one book would be desirable.

In addition there were a number of issues with my previous books that I wanted to correct. For one the stitching was poorly done as I was very new to the process, in a rush to get them done at that point, and using a much too fine string (although I didn't know it at the time). The end result was that the books were loosely bound and would unsatisfactorily slide around in the hand. The books felt always on the verge of falling apart. The other problems included slight page alignment errors (front and back printing) and the vertical misalignment of a few pages in the figure drawing book. New books then would correct these errors, bringing forth more complete and less error-filled revisions.

Little did I know what difficulties I would encounter on the way...

On Reading More and Reading Better

Throughout 2017 and continuing through 2018 I have attempted to drastically increase the quantity of reading that I do. For both years I have kept in mind a general goal of completing 52 books in one year - one book per week. This is a common challenge as any Internet search will quickly reveal. The reasons for wanting to undertake such a challenge are numerous: as a means to expand one's vocabulary, improve one's writing through familiarization of different styles and techniques, to increase one's knowledge and understanding, and as a way of improving organization and scheduling skills. That last one is important; despite the vast amount of time that is doubtless consumed in reading this much, the argument is generally made that it can be safely taken away from all the time that we generally waste in a day: the idle Internet browsing, the Netflix binge-watching, playing games or fiddling with apps. While I believe I've benefited from significantly expanding my reading, I have mixed feelings about the project.

Thoughts On: Homo Deus

Historian Yuval Noah Harari’s second book, Homo Deus, offers a historical narrative that is used to frame speculation for the future of humanity. I have yet to read his first book, Sapiens, so I don’t know how much ground is perhaps repeated here, but much of the book does involve a brisk covering of human historical developments. Of particular interest to me are the trends that Harari sees as having unfolded over the twentieth century and what he views as the emerging worldview in the twenty-first.

Mind Children: A Terrifying Future and Our Present Roadmap

Written in 1988, Hans Moravec's Mind Children is an at times breathless exultation of the march of cybernetics and an exhortation of techno-humanism. Thirty years on from its publication, it does not appear as a curious detour in thinking or terribly outdated in its claims. Instead its values seem to have encroached further into the culture, taking deeper root within the echelons of power in Silicon Valley and disseminating themselves through the technology used by millions of consumers. We find ourselves living in the future so predicted, part of the transition phase toward species-wide extinction. After a prolonged dark age, artificial intelligence has produced startling breakthroughs and is now being deployed in the service of mindless capitalism, threatening to eliminate whole sectors of human work while virtual worlds grasp for ever-more-accurate replications of reality to reassure us of falsehoods as we do next to nothing to solve our looming ecological crisis. Mind Children remains an instructive introduction to the destructive thinking that underlies much of the development and investment unfolding today.

Thoughts On: Understanding Media

Having read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan I have to admit to finding it both dated and still ahead of its time in many ways. McLuhan asserts that each new media influences and eventually changes the culture, and that these effects are not only not understood, but not even documented.

A Year's Reading: 2017

I fell into reading a fair amount early this year and that put me on the track to wanting to continue and finish the year strong, with a good amount of reading under my belt. When I consider the handful of books I ordinarily pick my way through over the course of a year it is evident that I am not a prolific reader. In fact it would be difficult to say that I do much reading at all. Even so, the number of books that I want to read, that I tell myself I will read one day, only continues to grow in number.

A Geometric Offering: GEB-EGB Trip-let

Having come to the end (finally!) of the voluminous tome that is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, I decided to try my hand at reproducing the GEB-EGB trip-let that forms the cover image (at least on the copy of the book that I was reading). This self-imposed exercise came as a welcome change of pace from the mathematical-typographical exercises that Hofstadter presents (punishes?) his readers with. Hofstadter describes the cover image thus:

Cover: A "GEB" and an "EGB" trip-let suspended in space, casting their symbolic shadows on three planes that meet at the corner of a room. ("Trip-let" is the name which I have given to blocks shaped in such a way that their shadows in three orthogonal directions are three different letters. The trip-let idea came to me in a flash one evening as I was trying to think how best to symbolize the unity of Gödel, Escher, and Bach by somehow fusing their names in a striking design. The two trip-lets shown on the cover were designed and made by me, using mainly a band saw, with an end mill for the holes; they are redwood, and are just under 4 inches on a side.)

GEB-EGB trip-let as depicted on the cover of my copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach

Don't Ignore The Origin of the Species

If you haven't read Charles Darwin's seminal work then that is really something you need to correct. Perhaps you think that you know all about evolution and natural selection and see little value in going back to such an old book that must surely be outdated by now. Or perhaps you feel intimidated by the science of evolution, see it as encroaching too much on your worldview or simply dealing with ideas beyond the prowess of your feeble intellect. Both such positions are indefensible. Some 158 years on from its initial publication, Darwin's Origin remains essential reading for those who aspire to understand the world around them. It is accessible to any educated person regardless of one's lack of technical knowledge in biology, geology, taxonomy, etc. But you don't have to see reading Origin as a chore, something to be endured so that you can maintain your small modicum of credibility among the intelligentsia. Rather, reading Origin should be seen as a delight, akin to watching a new season of Planet Earth as narrated by David Attenborough.

The Optimistic Dystopia of Brave New World

Reading Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World I was struck by how utopian his dystopia is. Huxley does not present a world that is obviously wrong from the inside, since the inhabitants suffer from the same corruption that plagues their society. It is only from the perspective of an outsider, or someone imperfectly adjusted to the system, that one can see just how out-of-sync the society is with human nature. This makes for an interesting angle and a welcome contrast from other dystopian fiction where the systemic problems are apparent to all yet the characters feel powerless to do anything about it. However, from the perspective of a prediction of the future, Brave New World comes across as overly optimistic. It should be noted however that Brave New World takes place so far in the future (around the seventh century A.F. - After Ford, Henry Ford that is) that any assignments of optimistic or pessimistic are in truth entirely useless. All is speculation, beyond that there is little we can say.

From Relativity to Rambling Thoughts

What follows are my own train of thoughts spurred on from reading Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. I use these ideas as jumping off points into the highly speculative which is not covered in the book.

In his book, Einstein explains how the special theory of relativity comes about after taking seriously two positions about the nature of reality and following both of them through to their logical conclusions. These are the constancy of the speed of light in vacuo and that of relativity: the idea that there is no preferred reference body of uniform motion in the universe, such that the physical laws are independent of such motion.

Thoughts On: Ringworld

The general story of Ringworld is one of exploration and discovery. A group of explorers venture out of known space to visit a vast artificial megastructure in space made by an advanced civilization. They crash land on the structure - the Ringworld - and seek out civilization as a means to get them off it and back to their own civilization. The Ringworld is a location that seems ripe for discovery - the foundation material is super strong and blocks 40% of neutrinos, for civilization itself to exist on it cheap transmutation must be available - the ability to generate one type of element from another - and yet these questions are never really explored. Aside from the Ringworld, the science fictional world itself is rife with things for the reader to discover - stepping discs, slide walks, booster spice, aliens called Puppeteers, aliens called Kzin, hyperdrive travel, the hull material of a General Products ship, Slaver stasis fields - the list goes on. Yet as with the Ringworld none of these exist for the sake of discovery or exploration, rather they serve simply for the sake of variety or to advance the plot. Ringworld is far from hard science fiction, and even frames itself as a fantasy at one point in a sort of knowing gesture.

Issues with Ringworld

Having recently completed re-reading Larry Niven's Ringworld I felt compelled to list a number of issues I found with the text. They follow:

In chapter 2 "And his motley crew", the sentence "In a gravitational pull of 9.98 meters/second his stance was unconsciously natural." Firstly, the "pull" exerted by gravity is an acceleration, not a velocity, so the units should be those of acceleration (or force if we wish to include Louis' mass), so it should read "meters/second-squared." Second, the value 9.98 is perplexing. On the surface of the earth, standard gravity results in an acceleration of 9.81 meters/second-squared, not 9.98, so either Earth's gravity has inexplicably increased from our time to the time that Ringworld occurs, or the gravitational pull at which Louis' stance is natural is not that of Earth's gravity, but rather slightly higher, why though remains a mystery....

Thoughts On: Time Reborn

In Time Reborn, Lee Smolin lays out his case for a conception of the universe that is time-bound, where time is not an emergent property of the universe but is instead more fundamental and therefore drives the growth of the universe.

Smolin spends most of the book using simple-to-understand language and clear examples that are easy for the layperson to follow. The pace here can be at times too slow, and the repetition a little grating. Near the end of the book he introduces the reader to some more challenging concepts such as quantum graphity, which by comparison seem to be dealt with far too briefly for the reader to fully understand. On reflection this material is adequately paced, but by the time it is reached the reader has been lulled into a slower pace and so must ratchet up his attention accordingly. The material would be better served by having the pace build more gradually rather than the somewhat abrupt transition from a metaphorical walk to a jog.

The Antiquated Future of Rama

Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama is considered a key example of hard science fiction. However, as a realistic vision of the future, it is notably lacking. Set in the year 2130, read forty years after its publication, its future feels archaic. Clarke's future is one dominated by white Anglo-Saxon men, neo-Judeo-Christian undertones, and an uncanny sense that the future resembles the past more than the present.

Book Title Generator

Looking around bookstores and libraries I get probably more amusement than most out of the terribly clichéd and outright cheesy titles so often bestowed to books sitting comfortably in the best-seller racks or among the ranks of genre fiction. In the cases of plodding fantasy epics and conspiracy-laced spy-thrillers, the pattern is so blatant that it could be created by the most rudimentary algorithm. So rudimentary in fact that I decided I would just write it for my own amusement. A fair warning, some of these titles get awfully close to titles of already published books, which only goes to illustrate how close this algorithm is to the true one used by publishers and creatively bankrupt authors the world over. Enjoy :)

Thriller Title Here

Clicking the above generates the title of an exciting new thriller that could have been written by Robert Ludlum, Dan Brown, or Dean Koontz.

Fantasy Title Here

Clicking the above generates the title of an epic fantasy novel in a series of never-ending novels that could have flowed from the pen of George R. R. Martin or Robert Jordan.