The Language God Talks

Herman Wouk wrote the best historical novels ever about World War II: The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. They are exciting and gripping stories, yet factual and complete. Highly recommended. These two books were also made into two minseries, available on DVD.

It turns out that while writing those books Herman Wouk had several conversations with one of my heroes: Richard Feynman. I didn't know that before, but learned it from a new nonfiction book that Herman Wouk just published: The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion. The title of the book comes from Wouk's first meeting with Feynman: "...[Feynman] said as we were parting, 'Do you know calculus?' I admitted that I didn't. 'You had better learn it,' he said. 'It's the language God talks.' "

Wouk and Feynman were contemporaries, both born in New York City—Wouk in 1915 and Feynman in 1918. Both of their families were Jewish, and from the same city in Russia. Yet they did not meet until mid-life. The Language God Talks is dedicated: "To the memory of our fathers, Abraham Isaac Wouk and Melville Feynman, who emigrated from Minsk and gave us our lives in America."

Feynman turned his back on religion at about age ten. Wouk embraced religion in his 20s. The book is a "debate" that Wouk has with his good friend Feynman about science and religion. Feynman must have made quite an impression on Herman Wouk, because Feynman has been dead for 22 years, and Wouk is still debating with him.

Feyman once said in an interview: "The stage is too big for the drama." Meaning: the universe is too big a stage for human drama to be anything special. Wouk wrote The Language God Talks to dispute this statement.

Wouk never did learn calculus (although he tried), and he quotes a Jewish microbiologist who is also a Torah scholar as describing calculus as "His [God's] other language" (my emphasis). Wouk ends the debate with the word teiku (the question stands), and these words: "...forgive me, friend Nobel genius, you're as ignorant of religion as I am of calculus."

Even though Herman Wouk may be ignorant of calculus, The Language God Talks contains a good overview of science. For religion and the "struggle for good and evil" (Feynman's words for the human drama), Mr. Wouk draws on his World War II novels with their underlying theme of the Holocaust. How could a good and gracious God allow the Germans, an advanced people, to do such evil?

Herman Wouk's answer was in War and Remembrance, in a sermon by his character Aaron Jastrow in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The title of the sermon is "Heroes of the Iliad," but Jastrow (and Wouk) find the answer not in the Iliad but in the Book of Job. The sermon is reprinted and explained in The Language God Talks.

One additional interesting connection that I learned from The Language God Talks is that another person whom Herman Wouk talked to when he was writing his World War II novels was Dr. Raul Hilberg, a professor of political science at UVM from 1955 to 1991. I had not heard of Dr. Hilberg, but according to Wikipedia, he was "widely considered to be the world's preeminent Holocaust scholar." Mr. Wouk visited Dr. Hilberg at UVM and spoke at his retirement party in 1991. Dr. Hilberg lived in Williston until his death in 2007.

You can read the first few pages of The Language God Talks here:

Is God a mathematician?

Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a science fiction novel about viruses. It's both deep and funny, the ironic humor starting with a main character named Hiro Protagonist.

A discussion of the title: Hiro: " 'This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?' Juanita shrugs. 'What's the difference?' " (p. 200)

Themes include computer viruses, biological viruses and viral ideas, all interconnected from ancient Sumerian mythology to a futuristic virtual reality called the Metaverse. Language is a key theme, beginning with the Biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) and continuing to the modern concepts of DNA (the language of biology) and the binary language of digital computers.

The book is also full of thrilling action and unforgettable characters, such as Y.T. (Yours Truly), a 15-year old girl with a high-tech skateboard and Attitude.

Neal Stephenson is both an entertaining author and a deep thinker. Over on my work blog, I have mentioned another book by Neal Stephenson that is about a near future world where nanotechnology is ubiquitous: The Diamond Age. His magnum opus is Cryptonomicon, which I have also read, but not yet blogged about. All highly recommended.

Snow Crash was published in 1992, before the Internet and World Wide Web became widely popular. (The first popular web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993.) Note that Neal Stephenson is apparently a friend of Jaron Lanier, whom I wrote about last month: You Are Not a Gadget (see the Update).

Emily's Graduation

Emily graduated from Middlebury College on Sunday, May 23, 2010. It was a beautiful day! The flags on the building are from the countries with students in the graduating class:

Emily graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in biology and a minor in religion. Congratulations, Emily! Well done!

Emily and some of her friends:













Each graduate was given a replica of Gamaliel Painter's cane. Mr. Painter helped found Middlebury College and he left his estate and his cane to the college when he died in 1819. Painter Hall is named after him.

The commencement speakers were Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The student speaker was Peter Baumann. Click here for the news release about the graduation. Click here for the Commencement Address Archive.

That evening some of Emily's friends and their families came to our house for a cookout:

Emily's Baccalaureate

The day before Emily's graduation was baccalaureate and a few other activities. Click here for President Liebowitz's baccalaureate address (interesting info about the graduating class and the history of Middlebury College).

Here is the family in front of Mead Memorial Chapel after baccalaureate:

Emily's senior thesis was based on work done in Dr. Grace Spatafora's lab. Emily showed us where she spent a lot of time this past year:

That evening Dr. Spatafora had a reception at her home for the students in her lab this year. Below is Emily with three of her four lab mates and Dr. Spatafora:

You Are Not a Gadget

The book You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier is a fascinating counterpoint to some earlier posts on this blog.

Jaron Lanier is a technologist, one of the pioneers of virtual reality, who has come to question where our current technology is taking us. He asks the following basic, related, philosophical questions:

1. Are humans special?
2. What is the proper relationship between the individual and the group?

Jaron Lanier argues that humans are special, and that our current technology is problematic because it emphasizes the group to the exclusion of the individual.

This is the opposite of Stephen Wolfram: "...there is nothing fundamentally special about us [humans]." (A New Kind of Science, p. 844) It is the opposite of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (movie due out Sept. 1, 2010). I think Jaron Lanier's position is the opposite of most technologists. For a few examples, see any of my earlier blog posts with the label "reality" (and follow the links). I briefly mentioned Jaron Lanier in my first post on the reality question.

Jaron Lanier argues that our current path of technological design (e.g., Web 2.0) is leading us into a "new religion" (p. 32) that he calls cybernetic totalism where humans are slaves of technology instead of the other way around. He believes "that cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business." (p. 119) And especially bad for human creativity.

In contrast to cybernetic totalism, Mr. Lanier posits humanism and "an idea of progress that is centered on enriching the depth of communication instead of the acquisition of powers." (p. 179)

This book is not just about computers. Here are a few of the other interesting topics woven into this book:

• music
• advertising
• economics and money
• evolutionary biology
• language
• how the sense of smell is different from vision and hearing
• cephalopods

In the case of cephalopods (octopuses, squids and cuttlefishes), he is fascinated with how they communicate by morphing, something that humans can't do.

For more information about You Are Not a Gadget, see:

Jaron Lanier's web site about the book
Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World, a talk by Jaron Lanier at Zócalo Public Square at about the time the book was published in January 2010 (the talk is 54 minutes, followed by 18 minutes of questions and answers)

You Are Not a Gadget was published in 2010. Reviews:

Wall Street Journal 1/12/10 (Instapundit)
New York Times 1/14/10
Washington Post 1/14/10

UPDATE 6/04/10: In the Acknowledgements, Jaron Lanier writes "Superspecial thanks to early readers of the manuscript," one of whom was Neal Stephenson. I write about Neal Stephenson in this post: Snow Crash.

Emily's Thesis Presentation

Emily presented her senior thesis today at Middlebury College: "Investigating the effects of the gcrR gene product on Streptococcus mutans biofilm architecture." Mom and I attended, along with about 40 other people. Emily did a great job! She even had her own cheering section (her lab partners) who stood up at the end with signs that spelled out E-M-I-L-Y and included this:

Here is a 5,000X scanning electron microscope photo of some of those Streptococcus mutans that Emily cultured:

Streptococcus mutans is a bacteria involved in tooth decay. Individual colonies on your teeth grow into a biofilm. Emily's research looked at a gene involved in the formation of the biofilm. I'll leave further explanation to Emily in the comments if she wishes. Emily's advisor is Dr. Grace Spatafora, who has done considerable research on S. mutans.

Click here for this spring's list of senior thesis presentation titles in the biology department at Middlebury College (7 MB .doc file).

Congratulations, Emily! Well done! Good luck with the remaining parts of your senior thesis.

April Snow Storm

We are having a rare late spring snow storm. Here is our back deck this morning. There is 12 inches of snow on the ground, and it is still snowing lightly. It is wet, heavy snow. The temperature is 31 degrees F.

Two other late spring snow storms stand out in my memory.

One snowstorm was April 16-17, 1983, and I camped out in it. Here is the entry from my hiking journal: "Sterling Mtn., G alone, overnight. On snowshoes. Up LT. Stayed at GMC lean-to. 16" snow overnight. Down lift line. After mountain closed for skiing."

The other snowstorm was in May, on Mother's Day Weekend, sometime in the 1990s. We were in Ottawa visiting friends that weekend. While I didn't camp out in this snowstorm, one of my co-workers did. We drove home from Ottawa on Sunday through a very snowy northern New York. I later found out that one of my co-workers who lives in that part of northern New York was on a Boy Scout camporee that weekend just across the border in southern Quebec. When she woke up Sunday morning in her tent, she wondered why it was so quiet. It was because everything was covered in snow!

UPDATE 5/10/10: Nancy and I were in Maine for a long weekend, so we missed it, but there was snow on the ground at our house for Mother's Day (yesterday)! When we got home this afternoon, there was just a trace of snow in the shadows. It was completely gone within an hour. Our neighbor said there was snow on the ground for about 24 hours, from late Saturday afternoon to late Sunday afternoon. No significant accumulation, just enough to make the ground white. There was no snow where we were in Maine (Orono). Just a cold rain.

Talk at Middlebury College

I had the pleasure of speaking to the Student Investment Committee at Middlebury College on April 14. I gave a talk titled the 5 C's of Credit, but I also talked about Yankee Farm Credit, the Farm Credit System, GSEs, mathematical risk models and employment opportunities in Farm Credit. The talk was at the invitation of Dr. Scott Pardee, the faculty advisor of the SIC. And it all happened because of Congcong.

Last Christmas Congcong was telling me about a paper that she had written for an economics class. The paper was about how over-reliance on mathematical models had contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. That is a topic that interests me. Indeed, I had blogged about it last September, and I had mentioned one of Congcong's references in this post (the article by Felix Salmon in Wired Magazine).

Well, one thing led to another. I contacted Congcong's professor (Dr. Pardee) out of curiosity, and it eventually led to an invitation to give this talk. There were about 25 students at the talk. Before the talk, we went out to dinner at Fire & Ice. There were two professors (Dr. Pardee and Dr. Steve Pecsok) and I think nine students at dinner, plus me. The entire evening was a lot of fun. Thank you, Congcong! (And thank you, Dr. Pardee.)

The photo is an apple tree in full bloom in front of Painter Hall, a few hours before my talk.

Meteorologists vs. Climatologists

A reasonably balanced New York Times article:

Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming

Greece's Financial Problems

Click here for an interesting discussion of Greece's financial problems.

Reminds me of the lyrics in the "Fear the Boom and Bust" rap video in the post below. Hayek: "Then all that we're left with is debt."

Also reminds me of the book that Laura read in one of her classes last year: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, by Edward Chancellor. I referred to this book in my talk at Yankee Farm Credit's annual meetings a year ago. That book was written in 2000, long before our current economic problems, but maybe that theme isn't worn out yet!

Individuals, financial institutions and countries should all beware of excessive leverage.

Fear the Boom and Bust

A super rap video about the famous economists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich A. Hayek:



Or click here.

It is amusing that the video has Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the drawer of the hotel bedside stand where one usually finds a Gideon Bible. The video does not mention any of Hayek's writings, but a good place to start is The Road to Serfdom. It's a good read.

Interestingly, Keynes never won the Nobel prize for economics. Hayek won it in 1974.

Here's a blog post about the making of the video: The Story Behind the Hayek-Keynes Rap Video.

UPDATE 2/18/10: The Hayek-Keynes rap video has been viewed more than 777,000 times on YouTube. Related items: 1) Read the lyrics, download the song and find links to more info on Keynes and Hayek. 2) Instapundit interviews economist Russ Roberts, who created the video. 3) The Road to Serfdom is selling briskly.

UPDATE 2/21/10: This was so good, that I put it on my work blog, too: Keynes vs. Hayek - The Rap Version.

The Oldest College Building

Painter Hall at Middlebury College...

...is the "oldest extant college building in Vermont":

It was built in 1800 and Froze to Death.