I'm already missing Phil Lesh.

I'm very sad to hear that Phil Lesh passed away.

I'll be listening to Box of Rain a lot for a while now. That song has always brought tears to my eyes, but I know it will bring a lot more emotion now.

I've been making this mistake for 40+ years!

It's incredibly embarassing that, for essentially my entire adult life, I thought that Stanislaw Ulam and Stanislaw Lem were one and the same person.

And every so often I would read an article about one of them, and think to myself: "how amazing that guy was! look how many different things he did! look how much output he had! how did he find the time!"

Most recently, there was an article about Lem in the New Yorker last spring, and an article about Ulam in the New Yorker this fall. That was, finally, close enough together that something clicked in my brain, and I looked them up properly.

I mean, each of them, separately, truly was amazing

But now at least I'm no longer harboring the impression that Stanislaw was simultaneously working on the Manhattan Project while living in the Lviv Ghetto.

Well, I guess he was, in a way, but it was two different Stanislaws.

Embarassing, indeed. But I'm set straight now.

Is Earth Exceptional?: a very short review

Earlier this month I found myself reading Is Earth Exceptional? by Livio and Szostak.

This is a popular science book (that is, not a textbook) which gives a status report on two related scientific efforts:

1. How did life on Earth begin?
2. Is there life anywhere else in the universe besides Earth?

Attempting to answer these questions involves both chemistry and astrophysics, and so it is reasonable that the book is co-written by an astrophysicist and a chemist.

Some 45 years ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I remember taking an introductory course, I think it was called something like "Moons and Planets", which talked a bit about both of these topics. I don't remember very much about the course, but I definitely remembered learning about the Miller-Urey experiment, which was of course a highlight of the course given that the work had been done at the UofC. Whatever course it was I took, it was very similar to this course that is currently taught, so it's interesting to see that the University is sustaining their efforts to keep their students aware of this very interesting area of pure science.

It was fun to return to this area and get a feel for how much things have progressed in the 70+ years since Miller-Urey.

For a book on pure science, Is Earth Exceptional? is quite entertaining and strikes a good balance between scientific accuracy and approachability to the layman. You will read a fair number of passages such as:

Similarly, activated nucleotides dissolved in water will not polymerize, but if that solution freezes, as might happen during a winter cold snap, polymerization starts to happen because the nucleotides become concentrated in the thin liquid zones between the growing water-ice crystals. Wet-dry cycles can also lead to the formation of peptides. In one interesting process, alpha-hydroxy acids, when dried down, spontaneously react with each other to form polymers known as polyesters. Amino acids can then attack these ester linkages, becoming incorporated into a mixed polymer of amino acids and hydroxy acids.

This is, approximately, about as deep and about as shallow as any other arbitrary passage in the entire book. Which seems pretty reasonable to me. If you're comfortable reading material like this, you'll probably like Is Earth Exceptional? a lot and find it fascinating! If the above turned you off instantly, well, then, now you know.

UPDATE: Forgot to initially mention that if you like this stuff, don't miss the Dave Eggers piece in WaPo: The Searchers:

But at the moment, much of the work at JPL is devoted to finding and examining exoplanets, and there is an urgency to the work that is palpable. In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when.

Unusual Want Ad

We were wandering through the back pages of one of our local neighborhood publications, and we spotted a quite unusual help wanted ad.

Not the sort of ad you see every day.

Labyrinth: a very short review

I happened to take a vacation to France, and I was looking for a book to take on the trip. I ended up picking several books, and then the first of those books that I actually started reading was Labyrinth by Kate Mosse.

Mosse's book is 500 pages of summer vacation escapist fun.

And it fit quite nicely into my vacation beause it's set in southern France; more specifically it's set in the region of Occitania. Although my particular trip was to the regions of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, these are all adjacent regions and so it's close enough to be enjoyably topical to my trip.

Also, the book uses a simple but effective technique of telling two related stories, one set in 12th century Occitania and the other set in current-day Occitania. And since my trip was full of Bryan Goes Walking Around in Modern Towns Which Have Well-Preserved Medieval Old Town Areas, the book was really a good match.

There's not a lot more to say about Labyrinth. It's romantic historic fiction, with lots of lords and ladies and roughly realistic historical depictions. So I enjoyed it and it made my own wanderings considerably more fun.

Plus I learned a few things, such as what Languedoc means as a place name, and such not. Which was fun too!

Labyrinth is apparently the first book in a trilogy. I'm not sure I actually enjoyed it that much, but who knows?

Bummer that AnandTech shut down

I didn't visit AnandTech very often, but when I did, I found high-quality carefully written material. It seemed to have sustained that high quality information for a good long time, which is rare these days.

Editor Ryan Smith sums up the three decades.

I love the 1998 picture of Anand Lal Shimpi reviewing a motherboard!

Smith makes a good point about the challenge of finding high quality technical material nowadays:

A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content – and while we’re no longer going to be able to fulfill that role, the need for quality, in-depth reporting has not changed. If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.

Among the Thugs: a very short review

Nearly 50 years ago, in 1977, a young American writer named Bill Buford found himself in graduate school at King's College, Cambridge, studying English.

Within barely 18 months, Buford and a fellow student had successfully re-launched the university's 100-year-old student literary magazine, Granta. Only a few years later it was already thriving, and Buford's writing and editing career was taking off. He would later become an editor at the New Yorker and find enormous success.

In 1977, however, Buford was still young, in his late 20's, and for whatever reason he became interested in the world beyond the library. As he tells the story, he had a startling and confusing encounter while taking the train home to Cambridge from Wales:

The train was a football special, and it had been taken over by supporters. [...]

I changed trains four times; three were taken over by supportes. One was torn apart: the seats had been ripped out, and the bar, which had been closed beforehand, was broken up, its metal shutter door split into pieces and drink handed out to anyone who walked past. I did not know what was more surprising, the destructiveness, which was gratuitious and relentless, or that, with so many police, no one seemed able to stop it: it just went on.

Buford realizes that he has much to learn, but more relevantly and surprisingly, he realizes that he has much that he actually wants to learn.

I thought I'd go on my own. I didn't know that it wasn't done, that lads went with lads or that lads went with dads, but there was so much I didn't know -- which was the point. I wanted to find out what I didn't know; I wanted to meet one of "them" and didn't know any other way to go about it.

He tries, and tries again. He attends match after match, choosing teams and locations almost at random. He goes up to fan after fan, supporter after supporter, and tries to get them to talk about what is happening. Time after time they refuse him and shun him. Yet he is stubborn, and doesn't give up.

while I couldn't say that I had developed a rapport with any one of "them" yet, I did find that I was developing a taste for the game. I had figured out how to stand on the terraces and watch the play on the pitch -- an achievement of sorts. In fact I was also starting to enjoy the conditions of the terraces themselves. This, I admit, surprised me. This, it would seem, was neither natural nor logical. It was, I see now on reflection, not unlike alcohol or tobacco: disgusting, at first; pleasurable, with effort; addictive, over time. And perhaps, in the end, a little self-destroying.

More than a little, as we are soon to find out: much, much more than a little self-destroying.

The paperback edition of Among the Thugs has a black-and-white picture of young Bill Buford on the cover, presumably from his days with the lads. His head is shaved and his heavy-lidded eyes stare you down; a lit cigarette rests in the corner of his mouth.

It's an amazing picture; it's hard to look away from it.

It's certainly not the picture you'd expect to see of a graduate student at Cambridge University.

After Buford sets the stage, the rest of Among the Thugs has a definite structure, as Buford jumps around between three different sorts of segments:

1. He gives some historical background, covering well-known events such as: Burnden Park, 1946; Ibrox Park, 1971; Heysel Stadium, 1985; Hillsborough Stadium 1989; and others, some of them 100+ years ago.
   
   In these segments, in addition to the historical background, he appears to be trying to connect the dots, sometimes more successfully than others.
   
   
2. He tells stories of events that he, personally, witnessed, including: Juventus v Manchester United, 1984, in Turin; several Manchester United matches in London in the mid 1980's, at Tottenham, at Chelsea, at West Ham; and finally a detailed report of the 1990 England v Holland World Cup match in Cagliari, Sardinia.
   
   Buford notes that he went to dozens of football matches while researching and writing the book, but he chooses to tell just a handful of stories.
   
   However, he tells them extremely well. By "well", I mean that he relates what happened vividly and chooses events that explain the things that he is trying to explain. He goes into extensive detail; there is a thorough narrative. But more importantly, he is honest. By "honest," I mean that Buford includes his own thoughts and his personal feelings, and also I mean that he doesn't shy away from admitting his own culpability in what happened.
   
   
3. Interspersed amidst these various sections, Buford also includes some more abstract observations about mobs, about crowd mentality, about identity politics, about desensitization of violence. In these segments he includes his own thoughts as well as surveying those writers who have tried to discuss these topics in the past.

The vivid descriptions of Buford's own first hand experiences "among the thugs" are far and away the most powerful parts of the book. I don't want to reproduce them here, however; if you want to know more you should go read the book yourself.

In the end, these parts of the book are the "what", not the "why".

The observations that Buford makes as a result of these experiences, while they cannot fully explain the why, are certainly the most important parts of Among the Thugs, and are the reason that it's still worth reading, forty years later. English football hooligans have certain essential elements that are somehow universal in humans. Lynch mobs occur everywhere; xenophobia seems almost omnipresent in human behavior.

Buford is interested in what people get out of it. For one thing, he finds, there is a sense of belonging, of joining a club, of finding a community:

"For most lads," Mark was saying, "this is all they've got." He nodded, as we were walking out of the door, towards a cluster of supporters whose common feature was, I must admit, a look of incredible and possibly even unique stupidity.

"During the week," Mark continued, "they're nobody, aren't they? But then, when they come to the match, that all changes. They feel like Mr. Big."

[...]

"It was us against them, and we had no idea what was going to happen. There were so many different feelings. Fear, anger, excitement. I've never felt anything like it. We all felt it and everyone of us now knows that we have been through something important -- something solid. After an experience like that, we're not going to split up. We'll never split up. We'll be mates for life.

"I will never forget these blokes. I will never forget Sammy. For as long as I live, I will be grateful that I could say I knew him."

[...]

Mark was still explaining. "You see, what it does is this: it gives violence a purpose. It makes us somebody. Because we're not doing it for ourselves. We're doing it for something greater -- for us. The violence is for the lads."

At one point, Buford meets up with some of the leaders of the National Front, trying to understand their connection with the football hooligans:

I am sure that Ian Anderson was right when he said that the football stadium was his ideal recruiting ground, but he would also have known that it provided a special kind of member, one already experienced, if not trained, in how to become part of a crowd, sometimes a violent one, even if it was not politically directed. And he would also have known that the crowd is a revolutionary party's most powerful weapon. On paper, it would have seemed so straightforward, and so many of the National Front's activities -- its discos, its marches, its propaganda -- were designed to create the crowd among its members and then make it political. But it isn't straightforward, and in the end the young, well-dressed executives of the National Front were not very good at their task -- they were there to lead, but few were following. But, although incompetent, they were not ignorant. The understood something about the workings of the crowd; they respected it. They knew that its potential -- its rare, raw, uncontrollable power -- was in all of us, even if it was so persistently elusive.

One of the things that Buford is most fascinated by is the topic of how a group of individuals stop acting as individuals, and become instead a mob. And, having done so, how they somehow seem to stop thinking, and just start doing, and then soon they are doing the unthinkable.

I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought: there is only one -- the present in its absoluteness.

Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures. There on the streets of Fulham, I felt, as the group passed over its metaphorical cliff, that I had literally become weightless. I had abandoned gravity, was greater than it. I felt myself to be hovering above muyself, capable of perceiving everything in slow motion and overwhelming detail. I realized later that I was on a druggy high, in a state of adrenaline euphoria. And for the first time I am able to understand the words they use to describe it. That crowd violence was their drug.

Buford's conclusion is, finally, that we have met the enemy and he is us.

It is not the case that the violence is either a deviation or a continuation, but that it is both deviation and continuation. It is not: either ... or ... . But: both ... and ... and ... and ... .

I believe in the modern behavioral models of our conduct, and much of this book has set out to prove their validity: that the crowd is in all of us. It isn't an instinct or a need -- being in a crowd isn't necessary to our being complete human beings -- but, for most of us, the crowd holds out certain essential attractions. It is, like an appetite, something in which dark satisfactions can be found.

Among the Thugs is truly bleak. But it is simultaneously truly important, for Buford has looked deeply into the darkness and come away with the knowledge that it is important, and ever-present. To know this is to know that you have to always be aware of the possibility, and be ever alert.