I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy is well known for his portrayal of Spock on Star Trek television series and films. As a Vulcan, Spock is of a long-lived species, and his appearance in the 2009 reboot film and its 2013 sequel (Into Darkness) makes him a link between the new adventures and their predecessors. The actor passed away last year (2015).

I Am Spock is Nimoy’s memoir relating to his career as an actor and a director. Of course, Spock and Star Trek play an important role in that career, though Nimoy does not limit his reminiscence to the franchise.

Throughout the book, Nimoy imagines conversations with Spock. As an actor in a series where writers and directors change, he saw himself as a protector of the character (and suggested that other actors take similar attitudes to such characters). This made him passionate about a character known for being dispassionate. At the same time, he had the reasonable fear of being type casted and being unable to get other parts.

Fortunately, Nimoy was able to move on to other things after the three seasons of the original Star Trek series. On series television, he played Paris on Mission Impossible. He also had guest roles on a number of other shows. He also worked on the stage. One gets the impression for the book that Nimoy had relatively few interruptions in his career after bringing Spock to life, though not always with the steady paycheck that comes from being on a series.

Nimoy became interested in directing and tried his hand directing a few episodes of television shows. He got his chance to direct a feature film with Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. This was a success and he was offered the helm of the next film, The Voyage Home. He also had a great success as director of Three Men and a Baby.

As a Trek fan, I’m obviously interested in that part of his career. Even so, I found it almost a relief to break from that and read about Nimoy’s other projects. Though he does not present himself as religious, he seemed particularly to relish projects that provided a connection to his Jewish heritage. Even the distinctive Vulcan salute was taken by Nimoy from a temple ceremony he observed as a child.

The book was published in 1995, so it covers the period up to the sixth Star Trek film, The Undiscovered Country, and his appearance on two episodes of The Next Generation. He gave no hint of imagining that he would reprise the role of Spock 14 years later.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Fic by Anne Jamison

The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron

Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Spock. New York: Hachette, 1995.

The Computers of Star Trek by Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg

Star Trek fans, I’m one of them, have praised the show for the way it has anticipated technology. It used to be quite the thing to compare a flip phone to the Trek communicator.

However, have you ever watched a rerun of the show and seen something that now seems quaint, even ridiculous, especially when it comes to computers? Back in 1999, Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg published observations like this, along with a few kudos for the shows, in The Computers of Star Trek.

The book covers episodes from the original series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine, Voyager and the films through Insurrection. While all the series, even the more recent prequel series Enterprise, depict a technologically advance future, none are focused on technology. They are more focused on telling stories that deal with the social issues in the periods in which they were made.

Gresh and Weinberg note this: Trek computers are mainly supersized versions of the computers of the time the show is made. In some ways, the Federation computers in the show are throwbacks to 1970s and earlier era mainframes, even though smaller, networked computers were becoming the dominant model when the revival series started in the late 1980s. This continued even as the Internet emerged and became part of the popular culture.

Of course the producers of the show aren’t especially interested in how computers actually work; they want to make an entertaining TV show and sometimes explore what is going on the society around them through the lens of a fictional future. Trek is interesting in this regard because it shows the attitudes of people about computers over time. In TOS computers are regarded with skepticism: computers break down, Spock is a hacker who takes over the ship, artificial intelligences take over planets but get fried by the illogic of emotions. By the time of TNG, computers are ubiquitous and acceptable—everyone uses them—but the threat of the Borg show concerns that computers might take over our lives and cause us to be depersonalized, destroying our individual identities.

An almost 20 year old book can’t help to be out of date, and the authors inevitably miss on some predictions. For instance, in their criticism of Trek’s take on medicine (not very advanced at all except when it is practically magic), the mention Army research into smart shirts that will monitor wearers for vital signs and injuries. It was a tee shirt with sewn in sensors that could be made for $30 (in 1998 dollars). Though we now have a lot of wearable technology, hospitals, soldiers and health nuts aren’t making use of cheap tees that keep track of their status moment by moment.

I don’t bring this up to knock the authors’ predictions. It’s hard to predict the future, especially by projecting from the current state of the art. Trek writers arguably haven’t tried very hard, but the show really isn’t about technology anyway.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Gresh, Lois, & Robert Weinberg. The Computers of Star Trek. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Hedwig Kiesler was a headstrong Austrian girl with visions of becoming a Hollywood star. She was so determined that she dropped out of school to star working at a Berlin film studio, and by 16 she was acting professionally. She eventually achieved Hollywood stardom as Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr had another, lesser known life, as an inventor. She, along with avant-garde composer George Antheil, invented a technology that makes much of modern communication possible. Richard Rhodes focuses on this part of Lamarr’s life in Hedy’s Folly.

The woman known for her beauty was interested in technology from youth. She enjoyed walking with her father, a banker, who explained how things worked. Her first marriage was to munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. Though she was mostly a trophy to be shown off to his friends, she paid close attention as he and the people he entertained discussed weapons and other technology. When she moved to Hollywood, she sat up a little shop in her home and took up inventing as a hobby.

When Lamarr learned of the sinking by U-boats that were intended to carry children from Britain to safer locations in Canada, she put her head to the idea of improved torpedoes to combat the underwater threat. The torpedo would be remote controlled. To avoid attempts to jam the signal, the torpedo receiver and controller transmitter would can radio frequencies rapidly in a synchronized manner.  She enlisted the assistance of Antheil, who had experience trying to control and synchronize multiple player pianos, to work out a practical implementation of the concept.

The idea was received well by the National Inventors Council, apparently even receiving the endorsement of automotive engineer Charles Kettering. The Navy did not think the idea was practical, but it did by the patent that was awarded to the Hollywood pair in 1941. Eventually, the frequency-hopping technology invented by Lamarr was developed by the U.S. military for many communication applications.

Spread spectrum, a somewhat broader category of radio communication of which frequency-hopping was the original type, was unveiled from the military secrecy in 1976 with the publication of a textbook on the subject by Robert C. Dixon. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved fairly quickly to make room in the radio spectrum for applications of spread spectrum. These were mostly junk frequencies that had been set aside for non-communication uses. Because it broadcast on multiple frequencies, spread spectrum is less likely to be disrupted by interference by other transmissions, like a microwave (Lamarr invented frequency hopping to avoid jamming). Another important aspect of the FCC rule was that these frequencies could be used without a license.

This technology is widely used today. Wi-fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and RFID all use spread spectrum communication. It is the basis of the wireless communication between computers that has shaped the way we live, work, and behave in coffeehouses.

Lamarr and Antheil didn’t receive much recognition for their groundbreaking invention until after it started making its way into American households and pockets. In 1997, Lamarr (and posthumously Antheil) received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award when she was 82 years old. By then she had retired to a very private life in Florida, where she live until January 2000.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Rhodes, Richard. Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

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Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson

The universe has grown a lot in the last century, at least in the estimation of astronomers. A series of observations, discoveries, and estimations have led from a view that the entirety of the universe is a smallish Milky Way galaxy to the present view in which many galaxies, and large clusters of galaxies, occupy a space that is billions of miles across.

One of the early, and still much used, discoveries that made measuring the universe possible was the period-luminosity relationship of a set of variable stars called Cepheids. Variable stars change in brightness over times. Cepheids change in brightness with a regular pattern. The length of that pattern, or period, is related to the average brightness of the star. Brightness and distance are hard to measure; the star appears brighter or dimmer based on how near or far away it is. Measuring the period of a Cepheid lets us know its brightness, and comparing that to its apparent brightness lets us know how far away it is (using a relationship called the inverse square law).

The Cepheid period-luminosity relationship was discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She was not recognized as a professional astronomer by the  academic leaders of Harvard University, where she worked, even though she had academic credentials and publications that put her on par with many who had doctorates in the field.

She was a woman and she was a computer. Before the invention of modern electronic computers, computers were people who managed data and performed calculations. Little is known about how Leavitt felt about the sexual discrimination that was common at the time, and she seemed to be contented with her life. Even so, if she had been a man, her accomplishments would very likely have earned her a plum appointment.

George Johnson’s book about this accomplished woman, Miss Leavitt’s Stars, is not a book about discrimination. It is a brief biography of a little-known astronomer who laid the groundwork for our understanding of the size of the universe.

Leavitt, who died relatively young, left a legacy in the science built on her work. Some of that appears in the work of famous Missourian Edwin Hubble, namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, used Leavitt’s period-luminosity law to estimate the distance to Andromeda, and determine that it must be separate galaxy and not a cloud in the Milky Way. Astronomy has advanced a lot in the last 90 years, but astronomers continue to use Leavitt’s work to estimate distances in space when they can find Cepheids.

Johnson’s book is short. This is partly because Levitt didn’t leave much of a paper trail outside of her professional writing. It is about equal parts popular science and biography. I enjoyed it, yet I can imagine it being within the grasp of a high school student. It may be a good book for a budding astronomer or physicists. Unfortunately, there may not much more that we can learn about Leavitt, but her story is an introduction to Hubble, Einstein, and others who did important work relevant to astronomy.

Johnson, George. Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe.  New York: Atlas, 2005.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

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Water getting more expensive
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The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron

At the end of sixth grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Lumsden, gave out “unusual awards.”  I was awarded “Best Observer.”    It is one of the signs that I am a highly sensitive person, and it is one of the happier memories related to my trait.

Research psychologist Elaine N. Aron describes highly sensitive people, or HSPs, in her book The Highly Sensitive Person.  HSPs, which make up about 15 to 20 percent of the population, are people with more responsive nervous system, who notice smaller stimuli and react more strongly to stimuli.

Aron is careful to distinguish the physiological trait of high sensitivity from inhibition, introversion, and shyness.  Okay, HSPs are often, or appear to be, introverted and shy.  Aron reframes HSP behavior as a response to overstimulation.  Everyone has an optimal level of arousal, and because HSPs are aroused more by smaller stimuli, which are abundant and can even include our own emotional responses to experiences, they are more easily aroused more than is optimum for them.  Everyone withdraws (is shy) when faced with too much arousal, and everyone needs time to quietly process (introversion).

Let me give you an example from my own life.  When I was a young child, I was very emotional.  I was easily overwhelmed, to the point of losing self-control, by my own emotions and the experiences that triggered them.  When I was in fifth grade, I found a model for managing it: Mr. Spock of Star Trek.  He was person (or Vulcan or half-Vulcan) with intense emotions that used various practices of logical thinking, meditation, art and study to discipline himself and control his own behavior.  Yes, at that age it meant repressing my emotions and withdrawing from others to some degree.  I gained a sense of self-control and space to think.  It was a little patch of high ground above the flood.  As a kid on the verge of puberty, it was precious to me.

That challenge hasn’t diminished as an adult.  How can I enjoy the sensory and emotional richness I can experience without being carried away by it?  How can I take notice of the little things that make me pause without getting jumpy?  How can I pursue the challenging and meaningful work that attracts me without being exhausted by distractions and the social demands organizations?  These are questions all HSPs must answer.

Aron doesn’t always give a simple answer, but she does show readers how to find the answers for themselves.  Relationships and work present all manner of highly arousing situations that can drain an HSP.  Aron provides information on how to approach these challenges in ways that acknowledge your trait of high sensitivity, with its weakness and the many strengths that can be brought to bear on the problem.

These problems can be exacerbated for HSPs who had rough childhoods, which is all too common.  (I’m fortunate that I had accepting and tolerant parents.  I suspect there are several HSPs scattered in my extended family, which fits with high sensitivity generally being inherited.)  Therapy can be very helpful for HSPs who need to deal with these issues.  Aron provides recommendations on what kind of therapies may be most useful to HSPs.

I suspect most of the readers of this book will be HSPs.  If you’re not an HSP, you probably know one.  If you think your spouse, close friend, or employee is an HSP, it may be worthwhile to read this book.  HSPs have a lot of strengths they would happily bring to your relationship or business if they are given the opportunity and a little quiet space in which to thrive.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Quiet by Susan Cain

Aron, Elaine N.  The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.  1996.  New York: Broadway, 1998.

Keenan is on Google Plus.

Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

Mo Gawdat, an executive and software engineer at Google, has been curious about happiness for years. When his son died suddenly, he took inspiration from the happy young man he lost to get his thought together on the subject and produce Solve for Happy.

To Gawdat, happiness isn’t something we gain, it’s something we lose or bury. Happiness his how we would normally feel, what he calls our “default state,” but we let all manner of thoughts make us unhappy.

What buries our native happiness? It’s the suffering we experience when the events of our life do not meet expectations. Gawdat illustrates this in his book with a balance with the events on one side and expectations on the other.

Donte be quick to blame unhappiness on the events of life. Gawdat points the finger at expectations.

Our expectations are often out of touch with reality. We suffer under misperceptions, illusions, blind spots and lies we tell ourselves. Gawdat identifies 13 such issues and challenges them. As long as you cling to beliefs and biases that lead to false expectations, you’ll suffer.

Experiencing the greatest joy involves embracing the truth. Gawdat describes five things he believes to be true that lead to joy.

I’m reminded of The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. Dr. Peck calls for a devotion to truth. Like Gawdat, Peck believed that every life has some pain, but a lot of additional, unnecessary pain is caused when we refuse to deal with reality.

I think there is a lot to be said for Gawdat’s overall concept. I can see in myself and others a lot of pain and disappointment that has its roots in false expectations, refusal to deal with reality and the avoidance of the hard (but rewarding) work of living and growing as a person. I don’t agree with every detail of Gawdat’s book, but don’t think you have to in order to gain useful insights from it.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Self Love by Robert H. Schuller

Gawdat, Mo. Solve for Happy: Engineering Your Path to Joy. New York: North Star Way, 2017.

New & Interesting Stuff Oct. 22, 2012

Anything is possible if a person believes

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New & Interesting Stuff Oct. 16, 2012

Pauline Letters

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

It can be tough to be an engineer. You live in a world in which everything falls apart in spite of your best efforts. Constraints abound, not the least of which is that even the most enduring materials last only so long. If economics is the dismal science, engineering is the dismal art.

If the technical aspects of rust, more broadly corrosion, do not impress most readers, the economic aspects of it might. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) estimated in 2011 that it spent $21 billion annually dealing with corrosion. One might guess that corrosion is costing us at least as much in our civil infrastructure, private businesses and homes.

Of course, corrosion isn’t a sexy subject. To make its awareness videos on corrosion more appealing, the DOD recruited LeVar Burton, known for his roles in Roots and Star Trek: The Next Generation, to host. Journalist Jonathan Waldman attempts to hook his readers by starting his book, Rust, with a story of an American icon, the Statue of Liberty.

When the Statue of Liberty was built, her makers unintentionally created something like a giant battery. While this current worked well to preserve the copper shell of the statue, atoms of the iron framework began to shuffle away, leading to serious corrosion. By the 1980s, the problem was serious enough to inspire a major renovation effort.

Waldman approaches the problem of corrosion through stories. In the Statue of Liberty we see that is something historically overlooked by engineers and actively ignored by administrators who can pass the problem on to a successor. Similarly, the military resisted Congress’ push to make it more responsive to the issues. Since then, the DOD has integrated corrosion concern into the way it does business, but civilian agencies are mostly dragging their heels.

Only a few of the stories come from government. Waldman also looks at the issue from the perspective of the aluminum can industry and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline—his recounting of a pigging of the pipeline surprisingly conveys some of the sense of drama that the people who undertake the effort must feel. He also dips into the early history of corrosion prevention in the work of chemist Sir Humphrey Davy for the British Navy and Harry Brearley, a discoverer and popularizer of stainless steel.

Waldman’s book is not a textbook on corrosion by any means; it is written for a popular audience. He does try to present how serious an issue it is—especially how costly it is. Fortunately, reasonable solutions to some of our most pressing rust problems are within reach if we have the will to do something about it.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Waldman, Jonathan. Rust: The Longest War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

500 Books Reviewed on Keenan's Book Reviews

500 Books Reviewed on Keenan’s Book Reviews

I’ve posted reviews of 500 books on this blog. Here are links to the 50 most recent posts. Further down are links to more reviews.

First Time Reviews

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara A. Oakley

Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Become a Better You by Joel Osteen

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

 

Bigger than Life by Marilyn Cannaday

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

The Boom by Russell Gold

Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

 

The Computers of Star Trek by Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg

Contents Under Pressure by Sylvia F. Munson

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Feeding the Fire by Mark E. Eberhart

 

The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman

Get Your Sh*t Together by Sarah Knight

The Girls of Atomic City by Denis Kiernan

God’s Equation by Amir Aczel

Good Naked by Joni B. Cole

Happiness is a Choice by Barry Neil Kaufman

 

Haunted Jefferson City by Janice Tremeear

The Instinct to Heal by David Servan-Schreiber

It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel

The Johnstown Flood by David McCollough

Late Bloomers by Rich Karlgaard

Learn Python 3 the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw

Lift by Daniel Kunitz

 

Living Low Carb by Johnny Bowden

Lost Connections by Hari Johnson

Loving in Flow by Susan K. Perry

Making the American Body by Jonathan Black

The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions by Andrew Hacker

 

Metering for America by Alfred Leif

Mr. America by Mark Adams

Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking by Robert H. Schuller

Pascal’s Wager by James A. Connor

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith

 

Range by David Epstein

The Revenge of Analog by David Sax

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

 

Stat-Spotting by Joel Best

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Unimaginable by Jeremiah H. Johnston

Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It by Gary Taubes

Write Naked by Jennifer Probst

You are a Badass Every Day by Jen Sincero

 

Additional and Expanded Reviews

Atomic Habits by James Clear

The Introvert’s Way by Sophia Dembling

 

Continuation of list of 500 books reviewed

First 25 Reviews

Reviews 26-50

Reviews 51-75

Reviews 76-100

Reviews 101-150

Reviews 151-200

Reviews 201-250

Reviews 250-300

Reviews 301-350

Reviews 351-400

Reviews 401-450