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Monthly Archives: January 2015

Back from Mexico Lindo

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At Cabo’s El Arco

At Cabo’s El Arco

We just returned from Cabo San Lucas a few hours ago. It was everything I hoped it would be: I got a good rest just before the rigors of another tax season. For Martine, it was not so good. She was so frightened of getting traveler’s diarrhea that she was overcareful of what she ate and drank. Also, her problems with sleep came down to Mexico as part of her luggage. I tried my best, but some other solution will have to be found for her. I suspect the ultimate solution for her as-yet nameless ailment will be either chiropractic of acupuncture. AMA-style medicine just gets her into trouble with bad prescription drug reactions. Getting her to agree to either will take some doing.

Fortunately, we stayed at a nice resort on Solmar Beach called the Playa Grande Resort & Spa. We ate most of our meals there, making occasional forays into town to have great seafood dishes for which Cabo, as a fishing town, is famous.

No Tequila Shooters for Me, Por Favor!

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If You Can See Me in This Picture, You Need New Glasses!

If You Can See Me in This Picture, You Need New Glasses!

No, I won’t be partying with Sammy Hagar at his Cabo Wabo Nightclub, nor will I be surrounded by lissome bikini beauties unless I drop my wallet. My Cabo San Lucas will be a strange kind of bookworm’s holiday, with a few jaunts to reassure myself that there is indeed an autentico Mexico behind all the alcoholic frippery.

Martine and I will be well away from the Marina bar scene. In fact, I think we will be far enough away from the center of town to require either a bus or taxi. While twenty-somethings are wasting themselves on cheap alcohol, I will be reading books and listening to a program of Jazz and Classical music stored on my Sansa MP3 player. This is how bookworms travel.

Unless I can latch onto a computer in Cabo, I’ll catch up with y’all on Saturday or Sunday. Until then, hasta la vista!

 

Cranking Up the Januarius

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Janus: Looking Forward and Backward

Janus: Looking Forward and Backward

It all started with the new millennium. I saw that I was reading a lot of books but didn’t want to get stuck in a rut; so I started what I called my Januarius system. To explain it, let me refresh your memory from my post of January 26, 2014:

For many years now, I have had a habit during the month of January of reading only those books written by authors I have never read before. Here are some of the discoveries I have made in past years:

2001 – Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
2002 – Lieut Col F M Bailey, Mission to Tashkent
2003 – Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
2004 – William Hazlitt, Essays
2005 – Michael Cunningham, The Hours
2006 – Victor Segalen, René Leys
2007 – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
2008 – Simon Sebag Montefiore, In the Court of the Red Tsar
2009 – Mischa Glenny. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1804-1999
2010 – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (I didn’t want to be the only person in America who hadn’t read this book)
2011 – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
2012 – W G Sebald, Vertigo
2013 – Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

In January 2014, the highlights were Tony Judt’s Postwar and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This month, I am reading Andrey Platonov’s Soul and Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma. (I could tell already that Platonov is going to become one of my favorites.)

I have found that this practice introduces me to more world literature and more women writers. In the latter group, it led me to discover Lydia Davis, Shirley Hazzard, A. S. Byatt, Annie Ernaux, Anita Brookner, and Herta Müller to name just a few. Without being spurred to do it, I find I tend to neglect too many excellent women novelists, poets, and short story writers. I guess it’s those damned chromosomes.

 

 

It’s Not Just About Fundraising

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It’s a Backbone! That’s What It Is!

It’s a Backbone! That’s What It Is!

This evening I hung up on a robocall from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, U.S. Democratic Representative from Florida—presumably in a failed attempt to get me to donate to the Democrats’ circular firing squad. I hang up on her a lot these days.

Before I ever give them a penny again, I have to be convinced the Democrats are something more than a perpetual fundraising machine gone out of control. If they want money, Democrats have to stand for something other than merely not being Republicans. I know that the Tea Party and their Republican fellow travelers are obnoxious in the extreme. But, really, what do the Democrats stand for other than being elected or re-elected?

I want to support politicians that will fight for me—not merely to accumulate funds so that they can buy up scads of TV ad time for next year’s elections, and robocall and e-mail me a few thousand times more in the months to come.

If the Democrats somehow find their backbone, I’ll be glad to give them my support. But the stumblebums of 2014? They can go to hell.

 

 

The Enigma

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Alan Turing on a £10 Banknote (Rejected!)

Alan Turing on a £10 Banknote Design (Rejected!)

No, no such £10 banknote exists. It would have been a nice idea, though. After all, Alan Mathison Turing contributed as much, if not more, to modern life as Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, or Niels Bohr. During the Second World War, the Germans had an encryption machine which generated a code that was thought to be unbreakable. At Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the British ran a decrypting project whose star quickly became Turing. His solution was brilliant: Create a universal computing machine that could not only solve the code, but ultimately any code constructed along logical lines. Such a machine was referred to as a Turing machine. We now call it a computer.

During the middle of the War, Turing’s machine, called Colossus, began breaking the Nazi code, and continued to do so through the war. The trick was not to react in such a way that the Germans knew that the code was cracked. Bletchley Park worked closely with British MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6) to feed selected information carefully to the Russians and to their own allied forces. During the course of the War, the Germans never did find out that they were communicating as much with Sir Winston Churchill as with their forces in the field. It is thought that Turing’s invention saved the lives of millions of men and shortened the war by as much as two years. (It’s not provable, of course, but it’s nice to think so.)

A German Enigma Machine

A German Enigma Machine

Why Alan Turing is not better known is owing to a shameful episode in history. The Cambridge mathematician who was as much of a hero as any allied general in the conflict was a homosexual, and under the laws in Britain, was a criminal. In 1952, he was caught and offered the choice of prison or accepting hormone therapy. He chose the latter, but the result of taking the primitive medicines, he lost his edge as one of the greatest mathematicians in history. In 1956, he committed suicide rather than continue the therapy.

Yesterday, I reviewed The Imitation Game, which tells the story of Turing at Bletchley park. While it simplifies what actually happened, it is in large part true to its subject.

 

 

Films: The Imitation Game

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Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

I knew I would love The Imitation Game even before I saw it. I’ve been working with computers for half a century. Back in the 1960s, they were still often called Turing Machines in honor of the perverse mathematical genius who almost single-handedly invented the first digital computer, code-named Christopher.

Ironically, what brought Turing down were England’s anti-homosexuality laws. Given a choice between prison and a regimen of hormonal drugs to “cure” him, he chose the latter. Within a couple of years, frustrated by the drugs’ effect on his intellect and libido, Turing finally committed suicide in 1956, a scant nine years before I started working on my first computer, a GE 600 series at Dartmouth College, using the world’s first timesharing system and the world’s first higher-order programming language, BASIC.

As you may know, I don’t see too many current films, especially when they are of the self-indulgent “indie” variety. The Imitation Game, on the other hand, is about a man whose way of thinking and feeling is radically different from most of us. And yet he is one of the greatest geniuses of the Twentieth Century, along with Einstein, Von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, and a handful of others.

I liked The Imitation Game so much that I intend the read the biography by Andrew Hodges on which it based, Alan Turing: The Enigma. Enigma was the code name of the cryptography machine the Nazis used during World War Two for all their most top secret communications. Turing and his assistants not only cracked the code, but did it in such a way that the Germans could not know that the code was cracked—so they continued using it throughout the war.

Benedict Cumberbatch was superb as the code-breaker, as was Keira Knightley as his talented assistant.