My Weekend in Books

It's been a long time since I've taken the time to sit down and absorb some good books, and my "to read" pile was getting pretty out of hand, so I spent most of this weekend catching up. And I read some wonderful things! Some quick summaries:

1. "Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallway.
I heard about this book through eavesdropping on my boss. Her office is across the hall from mine and she was on the phone with someone, telling them about the book. I went to the university website right away and requested it from the library. The book is basically a how-to book for tennis players, but is more about the psychology of the game than the actual tactics. As such, it is widely applicable in other areas. The thing that my boss said that made me go out and order it right away, is that even though it is a sports book, it is being assigned in Dental Hygiene classrooms (oh, btw, for those that don't know, I work in the Dental Hygiene department at Eastern) to help first-year students build confidence, focus, and visualization skills. Sounded like just the thing I needed for my kayaking! I am about half-way through the book and it is wonderful. Gallway talks about how we need to learn to trust our bodies and not second-guess ourselves so much. He also talks about the disconnect between our mental "self" and our physical "self". The mental self likes to take charge of the physical, but often the physical self performs better without the mental interference. The book is really about learning to calm yourself and get that kind of focus that can only come from having a clear mind. I really recommend this book for anyone trying to learn, well, anything. I will let you know if it improves my kayaking :).

2. "The Invention of Air" by Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson is one of my very favorite writers. He is the author of "Mind Wide Open" and "The Ghost Map" and "Everything Bad is Good for You", all of which I love. "The Invention of Air" is his newest. In it, he tells the story of Joseph Priestly, a contemporary of founding fathers Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and the man who discovered carbonation, among other things. He was the first to discover that air is a collection of gasses and not just blank nothingness. He then worked tirelessly to discern the different gasses. As a child he had put a spider in a closed jar and noticed that after a time, the spider died. He supposed there was something about the air in the jar that became polluted after awhile. Later in life, he tried the same experiment with a plant and was shocked to discover that the plant never died. This is how he discovered that plants create air. It's a fascinating book. I am about half-way through.

3. "God Laughs and Prays" by David James Duncan
Finally, here's a book I actually finished! DJD is one of my very very favorite authors in the whole entire wide world amen. He wrote "The Brothers K" which is, without a doubt, the best work of fiction ever penned. This book, however, is not fiction. It's a collection of essays about religion, the religious right (particularly under the Bush Administration), and nature/fishing/rivers. I have dabbled in all these areas myself, so I found the book fascinating. There are too many great parts to mention, but I will say that his ideas about organized religion are astounding and refreshing. He talks about a back-to-basics approach focused on love, peace, respect, openness, and forgiveness--directly following Jesus' example, rather than following the example of Jesus' less-than-godly followers, preachers, and apologists. DJD is not Christian himself. He is widely read in the great Wisdom literature of the world and sees the good and bad in all of those. His prose makes me laugh and cry. Seriously, read this book :).

4. "How Soccer Explains the World" by Franklin Foer
This book expounds on theories of globalization, using the international soccer phenomenon as an example. Foer took an 8-month sabbatical from a reporting job and traveled to all the major soccer stadiums across the globe, meeting fans, players, owners, mob bosses, and many others along the way. The original theory of globalization that was popularized in the early nineties is that the world would become more and more homogenized as it became more interconnected, until finally we would just have one single global culture. This hasn't happened. Foer explores why this is and why, in some cases, the opposite has happened, with people going back to the old tribal rivalries and divisions. It's good so far; I will let you know how it turns out.

5. "The First Word" by Christine Kenneally
My sister Jaima called me on Sunday morning and told me I had to go out ("right now!") and get this book. She stumbled upon it at Hastings on Saturday and has been unable to put it down since. I of course obliged. I've only read the first couple chapters, but I am loving it so far. Kenneally is a linguist and she is writing about the evolution of language, or how we got all the way from grunting to Shakespeare and the OED. She is an excellent writer. I have been very interested in language ever since I read Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way." This book traces that arc even farther and wider by talking about all languages and going back to the very origins. Very exciting.

I have a couple other books still waiting in the wings, but, really--how many books can one girl handle at once? Still, I should try to get them in before I start grad school in two weeks :).

Making the Masses Useful

You know those word verification thingys that everyone hates? They show up on websites where you can leave comments or on sites where you can purchase event tickets. A lot of times it’s nonsense words like inquive or jublut or sisupfix. The technical term for these things is “captcha” which is short for (and I’m not making this up) "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." They serve several purposes, but are primarily to ensure that a living, breathing human is behind the comment or purchase, not a computer or automated spamming system. With captchas, a company can’t go online and buy all the Dave Matthews Band tickets for annual shows at the Gorge and then resell them at higher prices, because the captchas slow them down. But sometimes, you’ll notice, the captchas aren’t nonsense words at all; they are real words that are just difficult to read. In those cases, it’s not a captcha, it’s a reCaptcha.

reCaptchas are the brainchild Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh He invented captchas in 2000, but was willing to admit that, while they served their security purpose, they also seemed a huge waste of time for most people. So in 2007, he had another great idea. He teamed up with the Open Content Alliance, an organization out of San Francisco that aims to scan all public domain printed material into one giant, free, online library. They mainly scan older books that have outlived their copyright protections. As you can imagine, it’s a bit of a grueling process to scan all the pages into the system. The process is made harder by the fact than in many old books the type is small, smeared, faded or otherwise difficult to read. If the computer can’t make sense of a word, then it is flagged to be checked individually by a staff member, which slows down the whole process. So von Ahn came up with a brilliant way to speed up the process. When a word is flagged as unreadable, it is sent out to a captcha system, to be used on the web as a verification tool. In a regular old captcha (still in use by some sites), a random nonsense word comes up on the screen for verification. With a reCaptcha, two words come up. The first is a control word that the computer already knows. The second is one it can’t decipher. Once several people have typed in the word the same way, that spelling is taken as correct and is sent back to the Open Content Alliance where it is placed back in it’s proper place within the digitized manuscript. The system’s accuracy rate of 99.1 percent is about the same as professional human transcribers. It’s a brilliant use of manpower, with each person on the web contributing a tiny amount of their time.

One of the Open Content Alliance’s latest projects was to digitize the entire catalogue of the New York Times. It is estimated that over 400 million people helped with this project, whether or not they knew they were helping. That is about 6% of the world's population!

More on reCaptchas here.

Grand Canyon

My family is considering taking an epic trip to the Grand Canyon next spring. An uncle came up with the idea (thanks Jim!) and now it has taken hold. I saw the Canyon about seven years ago, but would love to go back to the area. I love the American Southwest.

So, it's pretty cool that today is the 90th anniversary of Grand Canyon National Park. It was on this day in 1919 that President Woodrow Wilson signed a law setting the canyon aside as a National Park.

How Are You Doing Today?

I recently stumbled upon the How Are You Doing Project and I’m hooked. The project is brand new, just begun this month by Laura Mayer. It’s an audio art project that attempts “to recognize both the beauty in the everyday and the importance in taking the time to ask one another about our lives.” It works like this: There’s an 800 number you can call and leave messages answering the simple question, “How are you doing today?” Calls are recorded, edited (to add music and remove any identifying information left by the callers) and posted to the website. I listened to some of the posts today and it is amazing. Whether the caller is telling a long story about something they’ve been through recently, or just quickly saying they are doing fine, there is a strange but positive feeling that comes from listening to these anonymous people share little slices of their lives. As the website says, it’s “an exercise in everyday empathy.”

I really tried to get some samples to put on the blog, but it doesn't look like that's possible, so you will have to go to the website to listen. Which I really recommend.

The number is here: 1-800-737-6045. Call and let the world know how you are doing.

Literary Shenanigans

I love anything that borders on the ridiculous. Powell’s Books in Portland (well known as one of the best book stores in the country) is sponsoring some stimulating new bookish tomfoolery. Introducing the fifth annual Tournament of Books, beginning this year on March 9th. This is from the website:

We used to drink more than we do now. There’s no reason for it really except that we’re older and we go to bed earlier. We have reduced our number of waking nighttime hours, and as a result we are drinking less these days.

We mention this because the Tournament of Books is one of those concepts that only could have been conceived and subsequently executed by people who used to drink a lot but now drink considerably less. In the absence of too much alcohol, it never would have occurred to us that we should take 16 of the most celebrated and highly touted novels of the year, seed them in a March Madness-type bracket, conscript them into a “Battle Royale of Literary Excellence,” and, in honor of David Sedaris’s brother, present the author of the winning book a live rooster. And if we hadn’t eventually reduced our pint consumption, we never would have found the energy, desire, and increased number of waking daytime hours to actually do it. This will be our fifth year at this and if you ask the previous champions—David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Cormac McCarthy, and Junot Díaz—we believe they would tell you the Rooster is a badge they wear proudly on their highly decorated chests, somewhere between the ones for orienteering and basketry.

No author asks to have his work pitted against the work of another, but that is what all awards do, in effect. The Nobel Prize is an Olympiad of words. The Man Booker is the Premier League Championship of Letters. Everyone knows that, behind the scenes, the National Book Award is both arbitrary and brutal, sort of like Keeping Up With the Kardashians meets Ultimate Fighting. The Tournament of Books is every bit as arbitrary, but we have simply lifted the curtain so the reader can actually see the caged octagon in which the books meet, barefoot and snarling.

The list of books in this year’s tournament are here.
Additional information and printable bracket sheets are here.

Art Most Wanted

I recently came across a very interesting art/sociology project that was begun in 1994 by two Russian-born artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. The artists surveyed people across America to find out what their art preferences were. Questions on the survey were along the lines of “What color do you like to see in a painting?” and “Do you prefer indoor scenes or outdoor scenes?” There were over 1000 responses. The artists then attempted to create a painting based on the preferences from the survey. Here is the result:


Americans preferred idyllic outdoor scenes with wild animals (not pets). They prefer family groups rather than individuals and they like blues and greens to be used throughout. You will notice that George Washington is present as well. This is because survey respondents overwhelmingly stated that if a famous person was including in the painting, they preferred it be a historical figure, not a contemporary.

Komar and Melamid then replicated the study in other countries around the globe. Results were generally very similar, which was a surprising finding. Here are a few of the Most Wanted paintings from other countries:


Denmark's Most Wanted


France's Most Wanted

If you are wondering about what the respondents disliked about art, Komar and Melamid created paintings to illustrate those results as well. Here are a few of the least wanted paintings:

America's Least Wanted


Denmark's Least Wanted


France's Least Wanted

The full set of paintings from the project can be viewed here.
Survey results from each country are here.

About Traveling

I’ve been thinking a lot about traveling lately, in preparation for my upcoming adventure. I’ve now been on four overseas trips—not a record by any means, but most people I meet seem to think that’s a lot (people of my own generation, a little less so). Each trip is a learning experience of course, regarding the area’s customs, landscape, history, and general feeling. But I also seem to learn a little more about travel itself with each new adventure. So here are some things I’ve learned about traveling, some new rules I have come to follow.

Full disclosure: most of these were discovered in cahoots (love that word!) with my co-adventurers Jaima and Gordon.

1. Always know how to say “thank you” wherever you are, even if it is the only word you know. This will earn you smiles from the locals (priceless!) and brighten your day, too.

2. It’s okay to eat dinner in your room every now and then. We had some wonderful restaurant meals in Japan, but some of our favorite food memories from the trip are the dinner sets we bought at the local 7-11 and took home to the guesthouse to eat. This kind of meal is just as ‘authentic’ as something you would buy at a fancy restaurant or from street vendor. It saves money, time, and energy too.

3. Upon arriving at your far-flung destination, I have found it is well worth the money to splurge on a taxi to the hotel rather than brave the local transit system. There is plenty of time to explore your transit options later when you are rested from the flight and more alert. You will feel a lot better about the new place if you don’t spend your first full hour there lugging your suitcase up and down flights of subway stairs and then around several city blocks searching for your hotel.

4. Go to the tourist office. I know, I know. You are protesting, “but that’s so tourist-y!” It is touristy. But the people who work in the tourist office really know what they are talking about. They know the city better than you do, better than your friend does, better than the guidebook does. They can tell you the best ways to get around, the best sights to see. Plus, they will give you free city maps and transit maps. It’s one moment of touristyness (not a word) that you won’t regret.

What about you, dear mysterious readers? What are your own travel dos and don’ts?