Books: The Russian Donation

I enjoyed The Russian Donation largely because it was different from a lot of mystery novels I have read. To begin with, it is written by a German author for a German audience, and of course set in Germany (in the 1990′s). So it depicts life in Germany matter-of-factly, not like a book written for Americans and set in a foreign country to try to make it more interesting.

It could be termed a medical mystery, as the main character is a doctor, attending physician at a teaching hospital, and most of the characters and action are related in some way to the hospital. But the issues turn out to have a lot more to do with the business side of the hospital than the medical side.

It should be no surprise to most people, considering rising healthcare costs and the various efforts made to contain them, that healthcare is a business and decisions are made as much by business administrators as by doctors. But it’s interesting to see a physician’s point of view as he goes about his daily (and sometimes nightly) duties. (Author Christoph Spielberg is himself a practicing physician, so he knows what he’s writing about.)

Early in the novel, narrator Dr. Hoffmann, having just filled out a death certificate (for the patient whose death is surrounded by the mystery Dr. Hoffmann goes about trying to unravel), comments that “I had no idea that at that moment I was almost signing my own death certificate.” I kept waiting for someone to try to murder him. But for a book described by some reviews as a thriller, The Russian Donation struck me as surprisingly undramatic. I don’t say this as a criticism – in some ways it is a welcome change from thrillers where the tension is constantly at a fever pitch.

The cover says this is “Dr. Hoffmann’s first case.” That was one reason I picked it out (among new books at our library). It’s always nice to start a series at the beginning. I don’t know how soon the English translation of another of Spielberg’s Dr. Hoffmann books will appear, but I’ll keep out an eye for it.

Turning science fiction into science

I read recently about a number of scientific advances in 2012 that would once have been possible only in science fiction. None of them seem especially surprising, considering previous scientific advances I already knew about.

Today, however, I was surprised to read a discussion of the pros and cons of bringing an extinct species back to life. I knew that cloning techniques had continued to develop since it first made big news. But I wasn’t aware that there was serious work on recovering DNA from extinct species for the purpose of creating live animals.

Mending made easy

For eight years I lived without a sewing machine. I had bought one used, a long time ago, back when I got my first full-time job and my first car and my first rented room. I had never-ending problems with the tension, even after getting it supposedly repaired at a shop that specialized (among other things) in fixing sewing machines. After I had children, I had no time to sew my own clothes, and I used the machine only for mending. It was such a pain to use that some mending jobs seemed easier to do by hand. When we moved from Michigan to Illinois eight years ago, I gave the thing away.

But some mending is not easier to do by hand, and the pile of unmended clothes grew. I looked, sometimes, at the sewing machines sold at Walmart, and wondered if a new machine might work better than that old one. But I remembered the man at the sewing machine repair shop telling me I had a good machine, made out of metal instead of plastic. The newer, plastic machines, he said, gave a lot more trouble. That was easy to believe, considering what I hear people say about newer models of so many other products.

The pile of mending got so big that I had been thinking, recently, of taking it to someone who does sewing to make some extra money. Somehow we never settled on a time for me to get the stuff to her, though – we both have busy schedules. Then a few weeks ago, at the Boy Scout Christmas campout, one of the Scout mothers was there with her sewing machine, sewing patches and badges on boys’ uniforms. It looked like it worked well, and I asked her about it. She was very happy with it, and explained that the electronics took care of the tension, and pretty much everything else.

Books: Frameshift

A reader review of one of Robert Sawyer’s other novels commented that Frameshift is probably his best book so far. Having read it now, I am inclined to agree. The main characters are well-developed, believable, and make you care about them. The science fiction scenarios are also believable – so much so that I’m not sure exactly where the science ends and the science fiction starts.

The scientific focus in Frameshift is on genetics. Pierre Tardivel is a geneticist, doing research to discover the function of “junk DNA.” His concern with genetics is more than professional, however, as he learns as a young man that his biological father has Huntington’s disease, and that there is a 50% chance he also has the defective gene that will end his life early – and cause serious problems even sooner.

(One kind of mutation that Tardivel studies is a frameshift, hence the title. A frameshift is “a mutation that occurs when one or two nucleotides are added or deleted, with the result that every codon beyond the point of insertion or deletion is read incorrectly during translation.” Pierre’s wife apparently has a frameshift mutation which results in her being able to read minds (if the other person is in close proximity to her). Her telepathic power plays a significant role in the plot, but it is not central.)

In many ways, the book is as much about ethics as it is about genetics. Is it a good thing to get genetic testing that tells what conditions you are likely to develop – or pass on to your children?  Is it right for an insurance company to be able to deny coverage based on the results of genetic testing? How should society treat people who are “defective” in one way or another? What are the appropriate limits of experimentation regarding human genetics?

At the time Sawyer wrote the book, the issue of insurance companies denying coverage based on genetic testing was – I am guessing – a contentious issue. (I don’t remember now whether I was aware of debates over the issue at the time.) But since then, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act has gone into effect, providing (as best as I understand it) the protection that Tardivel argues for in Sawyer’s novel.

Sawyer also devotes a significant chunk of the novel to efforts to find and prosecute Nazi war criminals – men who callously and cruelly destroyed the lives of those they considered inferior – often based on attributes that are genetically determined, whether or not the Nazis knew or cared about the role of genetics. How well that major subplot fits into the novel as a whole I’m not sure, but as usual I learned something from reading about it.

Ultimately, though, the book is even more about people than it is about science or ethics, which is why I liked it so much. In some of Sawyer’s books, I found the science fascinating but not the people, as though the characters were just there to enable Sawyer to convey his ideas. In Frameshift, I really cared what happened to the people (well, at least the good guys), and for me that’s what makes a really good book.

Books: The Neanderthal Parallax

Having previously enjoyed Robert Sawyer’s WWW trilogy, I tackled his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy over the past two weeks. Like Sawyer’s other science fiction, these novels are based on real science, however speculative some of it may be. As in the WWW trilogy, one of these areas of speculation is the origin of consciousness.

In the WWW trilogy, the theory that is explored posits a relatively recent origin of consciousness, less than three millennia ago. In this trilogy, it is set about 40,000 years ago, and is thought to be the result of a collapse and subsequent reestablishment of the earth’s magnetic field. Along with consciousness and therefore conscious choices came the first split between parallel universes.

As chance would have it (this being based on quantum theory), in our universe, it was our ancestors who developed consciousness. In the parallel universe, it was those we call Neanderthals. Our own ancestors, in that universe, failed to develop consciousness and subsequently died our, presumably (according to Neanderthal scientists) due to lower intelligence, our cranial capacity not allowing for as large a brain.

Books: Same Time, Same Station

I ended up reading this book about the early history of television because I had been reading a book about teaching Sunday School. I know that seems like an unlikely jump, but there was a logical connection. Honest!

(The book I was reading about teaching Sunday School recommended, more or less in passing, that if you use puppets, not to have them talk about God. I emailed the author to ask why. Her response – that puppets are not real so they can’t have a relationship with God – did not entirely satisfy me, so I found an internet forum about puppets and found someone who seemed to use puppets in Christian ministry. I joined the forum so I could contact him by email, and asked him about this. He not only saw nothing wrong with having puppets talk about God, he told me that the word marionette comes from the name Mary because early Christians used puppets to teach. Wanting to learn more about that history, I looked for books in the library catalog about marionettes. One was about Howdy Doody, a show I’ve heard about but never seen. I wondered if I could find a DVD I could borrow with episodes from Howdy Doody. My search didn’t turn up much in the way of DVDs, but it did list Same Time, Same Station, a book about the early decades of television.)

The topic  of the book was interesting, but just barely enough to motivate me to finish reading the book. Despite what the flyleaf says about “Baughman’s engagingly written account,” I found it far from engaging. The flyleaf also reveals that Baughman is a historian and a professor; perhaps he wrote this with students of Journalism and Mass Communication in mind.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book with so many endnotes. They take up over 25% of the book! That means, of course, the that text is chock-full of quotes, historical details, and other data that may be of interest to the historian but probably not to the average reader. Often I thought Baughman could easily make his point with a single quote. But he piled one on top of another. I wondered if he was trying to use every possible historical citation, and if so why.

I did learn some interesting facts about the early history of TV, however. Having grown up in the 60′s and 70′s, I took the division of stations into VHF and UHF for granted. I had no idea why I watched NBC on UHF and CBS on VHF. (The third network, ABC, had no local station, and only came in very fuzzily on one VHF station and one UHF station – and then only on a good day.)

IQ and the Flynn Effect

Unlike a lot of people, I’ve always enjoyed taking IQ tests. Earlier this year, salaried employees in the department where I worked had to take a series of tests that were supposed to measure one’s leadership potential. Some of them dealt with experience and ambition in relation to leadership, and one test measured abstract reasoning. We were told not to worry about this last test, that it was only one piece of the larger picture. But for me, that test was the best part of the whole process.

I’ve never wanted to get into management, so I have naturally not sought out the kind of experiences the other tests were asking about. What leadership positions I’ve been in have usually come sort of by default – because I was the only one willing to do it, or because I seemed the “obvious” choice (president of math league in high school because I got the highest scores, and Bible study leader at church because I am the pastor’s wife).

The kind of abstract reasoning and pattern recognition used in a certain kind of IQ test, however, is something I’m good at and I enjoy doing it. Partly I enjoy it because I know I do it well, but it’s also the kind of puzzle I enjoy solving. I think the test I took (a long time ago) that was supposed to measure aptitude for computer programming was of this nature. I not only did very well on it, but I enjoyed taking it so much that I figured I would enjoy computer programming also.

I always assumed, growing up, that such tests measured some actual trait labeled intelligence. That’s what the people who made and administered the tests thought, of course, and I suppose most other people did also, until psychologists began to recognize that intelligence was really made up of a number of broad abilities.

I remember learning about the idea of multiple intelligences, a number of years ago, when I was looking for resources for teaching Sunday School. On the one hand, it makes sense to recognize that different people learn best in different ways, which seem to be at least somewhat related to this idea of multiple intelligences. On the other hand, it seems to be stretching the word intelligence to the point that it doesn’t mean very much, to use it for abilities that do not deal with reasoning.

No doubt society has often inappropriately treated people with high abilities at abstract reasoning as superior to those with other kinds of abilities, and it is good to recognize the value of those other kinds of abilities. But it should be possible to correct that tendency without divorcing the word intelligence from its traditional meaning related to reasoning ability.

All that was somewhat in my mind as I started reading an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. James Flynn discusses the fact that IQ scores have steadily risen over the decades, and asks Are We Really Getting Smarter? I had not realized that scores were, in fact, increasing, because the tests periodically are updated and re-standardized, so the scores appear to remain constant. Someone who scored well on a test today would have scored even better on one of the older tests. But someone who scored well several decades ago would not score nearly as well now.

Flynn was the one who initially drew attention to this trend, though it was the authors of The Bell Curve who coined the term Flynn Effect, in recognition of the work done by Flynn to document it. A number of different explanations have been offered, but Flynn’s own explanation, in the WSJ article, is that modern education has trained people do perform better at abstract reasoning activities.

If IQ tests really measured something innate, then people who lived a hundred years ago should have performed just as well. (Better nutrition and protection from infectious diseases have been offered as explanations for the increases, and they may account for part of it, but improvement in those areas does not seem to follow the same pattern of gradual, linear progression seen in IQ scores over several decades.) People in a less technological society did not have all the knowledge we do, but they should have had similar aptitude.

Language and cultural references are sometimes given as explanations for certain subgroups of society not performing as well, but the non-verbal problems that use only geometric shapes should eliminate that issue. Yet as Flynn points out, people who have not gone through modern education would have difficulty understanding what in the world such questions were about.

We are trained at such a young age to recognize abstract patterns, finding similarities in unrelated objects (similar shape or color, for instance), that it is hard (for me, anyway) to imagine lacking that kind of recognition. But it makes sense what Flynn says: if success in life is based on ability to hunt animals, or make furniture or clothing, the idea that the moon and a cantaloupe have something in common (because they are both round) may sound like nonsense.

Of course, in a technologically advanced society, abstract reasoning is an important ability in many jobs. But it’s good to be reminded that IQ is a useful measure only to the extent that what it measures is useful.

Back to school

I’ve always liked the beginning of fall and a new school year. Refreshingly cool weather, a fresh new start with new classes, new subjects, new things to learn, and new goals to reach for.

Except for an online course I took a few years ago, it’s been a long time since I went back to the school in the fall – except for the “back-to-school” nights at my sons’ schools, which have a whole different feel for a parent than a student. I’ve always found things to learn, but generally not in the intense fashion that I associate with going “back to school.”

I’m back on a college campus this fall, but not as a student. Last week I started a new job, on the staff of Black Hawk College. I’m thrilled at the opportunity to be part of the learning environment, and I appreciate the community college’s commitment to making learning accessible to many people who for one reason or another face significant if not insurmountable barriers to becoming a student at a traditional four-year college.

Why blogs are better than Facebook

For years I have had a circle of virtual friends. We “met” at worldmagblog, later renamed World Community. We gathered daily, or as often as time or interest allowed, to discuss news, issues, events in our personal lives, faith, and anything else that we chose to talk about.

Some of us got in touch with each other directly through email. We sent cards (real ones, mailed from one person to the next for a genuine non-virtual signature) to someone getting married. Some of us have even met in person, when travel plans included a stop near where someone else from the blog lived. Gifts have been given. Many prayers have been sent up for each other.

It was a constantly shifting community, with new people joining and others drifting away. But it was tight enough that when one regular didn’t show up for quite a while, someone else became concerned enough to find out where she lived to make sure she was OK. It didn’t take the place of our in-person relationships, but when there were joys or griefs in our lives, it was one place we went to share our happiness and receive the comfort of knowing others cared.

I put all this in the past tense, because this past week, World Magazine informed our community that they were no longer going to host our daily gatherings. Their new site has a policy of comments by subscribers only, and no open threads (i.e. commenting is expected to be relevant to a particular news story). They suggested social media such as Facebook for the purposes we had used their open threads for.

Books: The Righteous Mind

As I often do at the library, I was browsing titles without having anything in particular I was looking for. I had looked over the shelves of new fiction, and moved on to the non-fiction – usually not a source of a lot of exciting reading, but you never know…

Nothing interesting under computer programming (my younger son wants to learn programming so we’re making it a joint project) – all the books dealt with platforms that don’t interest me (such as programming for smart phones). Nothing interesting under health or cooking (topics that interest me but new books rarely present any really new ideas).

Then I saw The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. In a presidential election year, with the country apparently so strongly divided over what candidates or courses of action will best address the moral and economic issues facing us, what could be more compelling reading?