Reading, listening and comics

I have recently created an Audible account which I absolutely love. It turns the drive to and from work into a pleasant experience and I often use it when working out. It also means that I have rattled through more than the usual amount of books this year. Many of these books have come from reading round the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series. Yea, it's odd to think that a set of comics are interesting enough to get me to read the novels from which they draw their characters. So far I have read or am reading:

• All the Sherlock Holmes novels - loved them.
• Orlando (Virginia Woolf) - weird but interesting.
• Raffles: Amateur Cracksman (E. W. Hornung) - good fun.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau (H. G. Wells) - dark and thought provoking.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne) - terribly dated.
• Moonchild (Aleister Crowley) - good so far.
• Gulliver's Travels (Jonathon Swift) - awesome.

I realise I am missing some of the main character's novels, but I'd already read Dracula, some of the Alan Quartermain novels, Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde, the Time Traveller, War of the Worlds and enough of H.P. Lovecraft to follow a lot of the subtle jokes and shifts in writing style.

In general reading, my recommendations are as follows:

The Yellow Birds - Kevin Powers

Frighteningly well written it also has a very powerful story. I was gripped from the very first sentence. I may have to re-think my top 10 :)

The Martian - Andy Weir

A story of the survival of an astronaut stranded on Mars. A well told story filled with humour and wit - a super easy read.

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

The first of a set of fantasy books following the life of a very gifted boy and his search for magic. It is superbly well told, the world and the characters are incredibly rich.

Solaris - Stanislaw Lem

A sci fi classic and rightly so - a very thought provoking look at how different an alien life form could be compared to the usual human-centric creatures we see in other novels.

Comics and graphic novels

I'd never really thought of comics as something I would want to read - I don't think the idea of super heroes really appeals to me. Then I discovered that a lot of comic book writers felt the same and I decided to give V for Vendetta a read. It's probably one of the best things I've read in a long time, my quotes file has grown fat on just this one graphic novel. I also discovered Alan Moore, which has been a real source of joy.

The art work in V is pretty dated, but the story is so amazing that I went to my local store and asked for a recommendation for more of Alan Moore's work. I was pointed to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as his master work. It's truly amazing, the story is a weaving of many works of literature into an alternate history of our world. There are so many wonderful places where the plots of two or more novels join seamlessly that you just stare at the page in wonder. The artwork by Kevin O'Neil is everything that V was missing. I genuinely haven't enjoyed reading something this much in a long long time. It also turns out that Alan Moore is a fan of H.P. Lovecraft and there are a few novels using that mythos - Neonomicon (the art work by Jacen Burrows is masterful) and Nemo Heart of Ice, which is an off shoot of the League with Kevin O'Neil, also outstanding.

So, if you have never read a graphic novel, I would heartily recommend giving them a try. Also worthy of mention are Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series and, if you want a gritty anti-hero I highly recommend The Punisher.

What is wrong with us?

Language and literature

As a species we've pretty much mastered language and we are way ahead of our nearest rivals. For example, frogs know about 3 words, dolphins on the other hand are known to associate themselves with names and have a wide vocabulary. Impressive huh? Yea sure, until we roll out some of our poetry - Ozymandias written nearly 200 years ago; or our literature, take 800 pages of War and Peace to the face dolphins, written nearly 150 years ago.

So, we've totally nailed language, we excel in literature and poetry. We are so far ahead of our nearest rivals we could wait 500 years and still not have a dolphin best seller, or could we? We have all of this amazing literature and poetry, things people can use to better their mind, contemplate alternate worlds, discover new thoughts. How are we using it? Well, in the top 20 best selling books on Amazon, the top 3 are diet / cookery books, with another 4 dotted about. There are 2 books with instructions on how to pass your driving test and Dan Brown has a place in there. Jesus people! You have all the works of literature to choose from and Dan Brown can sell books!

So, we have all this amazing literature, but we aren't using it, what about science?

Technology

I'm not even going to compare our advances in technology to those of animals, it would just be embarrassing. We have television! What do we do with it? Well... there's erm EastEnders and Coronations Street, obviously. There was a show on last night called "I love my country" and another one where a puppet asks celebrities questions. I'm pretty sure John Logie Baird would be relieved to know his invention was being used for a higher purpose.

There's also the internet - that's a marvel of technology! Yup, it's currently being used for spam, porn and keeping people up to date on our bowl movements.

There's always proper science, that's the home of true intellectual endeavour. Well, physics is stuck with string theory, which is the first major theory to have the benefit of being untestable. Genetics is a total mess with back pedalling on a grand scale. The decline effect is rampant. However, the scientific community is more dogmatic and narrow minded than ever. Much in the way they were when that fool Copernicus started mouthing off about his heliocentric model of the universe.

We've reached our zenith

As a wise man once said, "any species that has words in it's language for sexual asphyxiation isn't built to last". I, for one, say we accept and enjoy the slide down to our nadir and graciously welcome our new dolphin overlords when they make the transition to land.

You know what's fun?

Playing games that are fun to play... I am currently playing the exceptionally highly reviewed Bioshock Infinite. It has lots of good features:

• Probably the best companion ever - she gives you cash, health and ammo
• The world is beautifully realised and engrossing
• The story is gripping and you care about the characters
• Travelling by rails on a hand held hook is awesome

Surely all these excellent points warrant the high ratings? Well, they would if this was a film, but it's not, it's a game, so it needs one more feature - gameplay.

To me, this is where Bioshock Infinite really lets itself down - it's just not that much fun to play. The shooter itself is fundamentally broken, here's what I think.

Battles

So, we've got a big dude with a massive gun - you do extra damage when you shoot him in the back. Ok, so, I have a gun and an ability to freeze this guy in place - strategy sorted.
This will work great if I have plenty of space, and I do. However, I am shot by lots of other NPC's, I don't die, but I am at low health now - maybe my strategy is wrong? Ah well,
there's some health over there, so all's well that ends well. I'll try a different strategy next time.

So next time, I take cover, grab a rocket launcher and shoot from a distance. I kill the machine gun dude, but am flanked and loose a lot of health. Hmm, not an ideal strategy either,
still, I don't die and there's a fair amount of health lying around, so onwards and upwards.

Next up is a guy who takes extra damage to the chest and does lots of damage at close range. I keep him at a distance using my vigors and shoot him in the chest. I take a lot of damage,
but I don't die and there's lots of health around... By this time, I am starting to see a pattern forming. So next time, I just stand my ground and shoot - I take a lot of damage,
but I don't die and there's lots of health around. Man, this kinda sucks, I wonder if the game is more advanced than I'm giving it credit for? So I take to the sky rails and use them to keep mobile.
Same deal... sadness descends.

Weapons

The weapons are largely functional, you shoot up close with the shotgun for maximum damage, the sniper rifle for long range and in between you have the machine gun. There's the RPG for splash damage, but not a single weapon that's fun to use. Nothing that makes you laugh and and smile when you first use it... Remember the gravity gun from Half Life 2, yeah you do! Or the first time in Dishonoured when you blinked onto a walker and cut the driver's throat? Getting the chainsaw in Doom2? The line-gun in Deadspace? Things that were fun to use and play with? I have never practised combat in a single player game the way I did in Dishonoured, but it was just so much fun, there were so many things to try out and play.

Also, you can only carry 2 weapons at once in Bioshock Infinite, which is a nice nod to realism in a game where you can shoot electricity from your hands. This would be fine, if there seemed to be a game play reason associated with it. So far, I've not come across a scenario where the RPG and a machine gun weren't sufficient.

Linearity

I've just finished playing Tomb Raider - which was awesome fun and very linear. My problem with Bioshock is that it seems to suggest an open world to explore, so it jars when I come to a door I can't open or a ledge I can't jump off. It's also the linearity of the combat. I've read reviews raving about how you can set an opponent on fire and then push them at others, or you can trap them in place and shoot them. My issue is that you have to do one of those combinations and it doesn't seem to matter which. Neither option is enough fun to overcome the lack of inventiveness in the options.

Other games

Now Dishonoured allowed you the freedom to kill in many different ways, it even offered you the option of not killing. You could play with the game mechanics and have loads of fun without following the linear plot. Take a look at this and tell me it doesn't look fun Dishonoured. Now I know they are different games, but they both need to be fun to be worthy of such high reviews.

Grinding my gears

What's bothering me

I keep seeing lots of random people in the entertainment industry speaking on behalf of science. They mock anything other than the standard scientific view as proposed by celebrity scientists without any real understanding of what they are talking about. I'm not just talking about Heather Mills talking about the dangers of eating meat, or Roger Moore claiming foie gras causes Alzheimer's disease.

Take this quote from Ricky Gervais:

"Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn't know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn't get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn't hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition."

All very true and correct as a principle, but it is hopelessly naive as a statement of fact. The scientific method is, of course, the best way we have of acquiring new knowledge and verifying existing theories. However, it is implemented by people and therein lies the rub. If you have made your career based on proposition X, how likely are you to be impartial when examining opposing proposition Y? Really? Is there any evidence to back my claim up?

"String theory now has such a dominant position in the academy that it is practically career suicide for young theoretical physicists not to join the field."

Lee Smolin - The Trouble With Physics.

"A study by the University of Edinburgh examined more than 4,600 scientific research papers published between 1990 and 2007 and found a steady decline in studies in which the findings contradicted scientific hypotheses.
Papers reporting null or negative findings are in principle as useful as positive ones, but they attract fewer readers and citations, so scientific journals tend to reject them.."

http://phys.org/news/2011-09-pressure-positive-results-science-threat.html

There are way too many factors that can distort the accuracy of information coming from the "body of science" to discuss here. However, imagine having to go to your boss and tell him that the work you have done in the last 2 weeks has lead nowhere. 2 weeks of work down the drain - would that be a happy day for you? Now imagine that you are heading up the Human Genome Project.
You have promised a golden era of bio-tech and unparalleled return on investment for your billions of pounds funding... Are you going to go with "For better or for worse, we've found out that it's more complex than we initially thought. Designer babies and the cure for cancer are going to have to wait a bit longer. So in conclusion, there are waaaaay fewer genes than we thought. Remember epi-genetics? Well that's coming back in a big way, so lets all embrace that new body of knowledge"?

"Britain's biggest drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, is facing fraud charges in the United States for allegedly concealing information that its leading antidepressant caused suicidal behaviour among children and teenagers during clinical trials."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/jun/03/mentalhealth.medicineandhealth

Why does it bother me?

Because the scientific method is the way forward, however, it is impossible to be sure that you have analysed all of the data correctly when you simply don't have all the data.
Ben Goldacre has made a career (and a valid contribution to science) of exposing this.
Yet, I continue to see people mock the views of others because of their dogmatic belief that anything the scientific community says must be true.

We need to move back to the old scientific standard of having an open and enquiring mind. A balanced view of all sides of the argument is the route to making up your own mind. Not choosing a science super hero on the basis of their personality and mindlessly vomiting their words into the ears of anyone who tickles your unscientific gag reflex.

If you read Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man. If you read about the mind, read Hofstader, Penrose AND Sheldrake. Learning is fun! It's much more fun if you figure out the answer for yourself.

I have always liked this quote from Pierre-Simon Laplace, when asked by Napoleon where in his scientific thinking was the role for a creator, he replied "I had no need of that hypothesis".
It represents to me a beautiful neutrality, without a hint of the dogma I oppose in the current scientific zeitgeist.

Finally

And if you are going to mock religion, be careful! It's like playing pool against your kid - if you win, it's the slow hand clap of 'well played, you have better eye hand co-ordination than someone who still gets dressed by his mum'; if you lose, the mockery is, rightly so, endless.

I watched a comedian I follow on twitter make a comment about the death of Christ not being a big deal for God because he could always have more kids... Really? The basic premiss of this attack was 'you are stupid because your beliefs have no logical basis, I am superior to you because I am a logical man of science'. Who believes that people who lose a twin shouldn't be upset because they have a spare? On behalf of those of us who were atheists before Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris told you it was cool - please stop talking.