Cool Spin

Bill Gasarch has often repeated the whine of many a professor who state "I can't believe they don't require topic X to graduate" where X happens to be the subject of their research. Whether this be AI or algorithms or compiler technology (the professors in question are computer science professors), these professors feel their subject is indispensible knowledge which a good computer science student can not do without.

This topic can be generalized to all sorts of things, from knowledge of how financial markets work (how do stock options work? what does it mean for something to vest?) to the machinations of politics to the ever-changing interconnected world of the Internet.

For me, the one topic I feel everyone should know about (because I wish I knew more about it) is cars. Most of us (alas, not Senor Gasarch) drive cars, either out of pleasure or some necessity. I know, I know. There's a small movement of people who have decided that cars are a waste of time, and with judicious planning, one can use a combination of bike and public transportation to get you where you want.

I'm a creature of habit, so I can't say I'm willing to change my lifestyle now and adopt this new mode of transportation. But I'm also a car neophyte, so I'm not about to be a used-car guy who fixes his own car. Indeed, I think every company should have a resident mechanic either part-time or full-time (depending on who it is) that fixes car as part of the benefits of the company. They would offset those crooked mechanics who prey on the naivete of customers who will pay anything to get a car fixed.

Which returns me to my current story.

My car has this temperature gauge thing on the left. Normally, I don't notice it. Normally, it has a pointer that points just a little short of halfway, as if I had 1/3 tank full of gas all the time.

Lately, the temperature gauge has been acting up. That is, in the last week. That worried me. Years ago, I was driving on 193, and steam burst out of my car. The car was making gurgling noises. It had, I was later to learn, overheated.

One mechanic wanted to do expensive repairs, on the order of a thousand dollars or more. You know this kind of mechanic. You can live with a little ding, but he wants to redo everything. Rather than repair the damage or find someway to make it manageable, if not perfect, he wants you to spend lots of money replacing it with something new. This is akin to getting a new computer because your power cord is a bit frayed. Buy a new power cord.

Though there are crooked people in every profession, it seems mechanics are known to fit in the category of those who can be crooked and you have no idea. I often imagine that city governments should be involved. You can ask some representative to help you out and diagnose what's wrong with the car, and then take it to a mechanic and see what he says. If it's completely out of line, the city can sue the mechanic.

Fear of bad servicing would root out incompetence and scamming.

To be honest, though, that's not a great solution. It simply puts the decision in someone else's hand. Instead, several things should happen. First, cars should be better at self-diagnosing. I should be able to hook my computer to my car, and it should tell me all sorts of things. Mileage is a little low. Battery power. Whatever.

Second, car manufacturers should learn how to put mechanics out of business. I know it seems awful to put a class of workers out of business, but we all want to run our lives as effortlessly as possible. I don't want to have to go to the store for my computer twice a year. I want something utterly reliable. This makes me happy. Companies should be seeking ways to make our lives more worry-free.

But since that's fantasy, and I have to deal with reality, and I have to deal with ignorance, then I have to deal with this issue.

So, bright and early (for me), Saturday morning, I drive my car to the dealer. This is some 20 miles away. As usual, the car started to heat up very quickly. Within five minutes, the needle edged over "H" (meaning "HOT") and I was concerned it might overheat, except, so far, it hadn't. I can only trust that wonderful Japanese engineers have found a way to keep vital parts modestly cool even in such stressful situations.

The woman (Vietnamese, judging by her name) asked if I had put coolant in the car. Coolant, eh? I've vaguely heard of that. What am I supposed to do with this "coolant" thing?

Like I said, I know little about cars. The basic knowledge I know is, replace the oil frequently. While it may seem expensive (say forty bucks), it's merely two tanks of gas (well, back when gas was two bucks a gallon), and you only do it twice a year. You pump gas far more often than that.

But coolant. That's something I've never added to my car, and therefore something I never knew ran out. Besides, I just drop one K on my car for routine maintenance (and tires, which jacked the price way up, as well as other expensive repairs). Couldn't they have checked the coolant too?

I didn't think it was the coolant, because, well, I don't know why. The guy I talked on the phone had thought it was a thermostat problem. But then he probably thought I was only half an idiot, and would have checked the coolant on my own.

But you see, this is just the basic kind of knowledge that people should know. Driver's license tests should test not just knowledge of driving, but basic knowledge of cars, because driving a car is only part of the story. Make everyone know how to replace a tire on a car. Yes, even women. If the equipment is too difficult for frail women to do, that's wrong. Everyone should be able to do it. Just these basic skills would make people far less idiotic with the tool, outside the computer, that they depend on most.

Due to my last experience at the dealer, which left me there for hours and hours and hours, I decided to bring a book. Foolishy, I did not bring my laptop, which would have kept me entertained as well.

What book did I bring? I had wanted to read a science fiction book after re-reading Ender's Game for maybe the fourth time since I first read it, nearly fifteen years ago. As usual, I figured the best way to pick up a new book was to see which book had won either the Hugo or Nebula award.

That book turned out to be Spin by one Robert Charles Wilson. I had never heard of him before, but then I don't keep up with the latest in SF, and besides, like any field, there are always new authors cropping up.

Books are fascinating in an intriguing way. I watch movies. These days, I watch lots of them. I'll probably see some thirty films in a year at a theater. To a critic, who will watch five to ten movies a week (or more) and thus two to three hundred (or more!) films a year, thirty seems paltry. But it's more than most people watch, and it's an eclectic brew. I'd rather watch Half Nelson than the sequel to Pirates of the Carribean (though to be fair, I have seen the sequel, and not Half Nelson).

As many movies that come out, and as talented as filmmakers are, there are a gazillion more books that come out. Because films are so expensive to make, they require a collaborative effort, and so it's difficult to make films that are completely the vision of one person. Thus, studios and producers weigh in on their vision of what a film should be.

Films have so much more in it. Forget about special effects even. There's musicians, and fundamentally, actors.

On the other hand, writers craft words, and while they may have the service of a good editor, they do most of the writing themselves.

Now you'd think that this would be a confining medium. Words. Some people say words can't capture the awe of, say, the moon eclipsing the Sun in 2001: A Space Odyssey with strains of Strauss (Richard, not Johann) above it, but you'd be surprised.

Let's contrast Spin with, say, Ender's Game. Card has often been accused of being less than literary. When it comes to the pantheon of great writers, Card's name is unlikely to be there. Card doesn't fret. He's a man who respects the likes of Asimov, who also was never accused of being highly literary, and Asimov did quite all right as an author, thank you very much.

I'm not saying Wilson is up there either, but he does what he does incredible well.

I'm only about a quarter way through the story, which chronicles the events of Earth in the near future. The main characters are Jason and his sister Diane, who are both considered bright individuals, geniuses even, and Tyler, the son of the "maid" for the wealthy Lawton family of whom Jason and Diane are the fraternal twins of father E.D.

Wilson is fantastic with hooks, many that end chapters. The opening hook is fantastic: Everyone falls, and we all land somewhere.

Throughout the story, of which I won't reveal many more details, he'll end sections with sentences that awe, like mini cliff-hangers, that television writers often aspire to before commerical breaks.

The imagery of his language is vivid, with phrase like: The near leg of the Arch gleamed like a burnished red nail pinning sky to sea. Let's consider this one sentence that occurs only a page or two into the book. "Gleamed", "burnished" are two verbs that aren't in the lexicon of the average person, though perhaps part and parcel of skilled wordsmiths. They're the kind of verbs you want to use when writing, but resort to something more mundane, more ordinary, because the brain cells refuse to relinquish something more eloquent.

Then, he refers to a "red nail pinning sky to sea" as if the sky and sea were two disparate entities threatening to fly apart, if not for this nail.

It's time like this when I despair as a blogger. I can't begin to come up with phrasing or metaphors like this. But it's also times like this that I delight in reading such phrasing.

But beyond his florid imagery, Wilson tells a mature story. For as engrossing as Card's writing is, his ability to relate mature relationships is lacking. Ender, Valentine, and Peter verge to cartoonish proportions. Ender is good, but doubting of his goodness. Peter is evil, though he has something of a heart underneath, and Val is sweet and trusting, but knows the kind of person Peter is. Even in his many books in the Ender series, Card doesn't come close to the kind of observances Wilson makes with Tyler's longing for Diane, for their troubled relation with their wealthy parents, for the nuanced yet muted descriptions of daily ritual as Jason prepares coffee at the family's summer house.

Wilson also does his best Tarantino. Tarantino hardly invented non-linear story telling. The idea is plenty old. But he made it hip, fashionable (unlike the adjectives I've used to describe it), even as it confused viewers who wondered "didn't Travolta just die?".

The storyline criss-crosses several timelines, mostly set in the "present", then recalling details in the past in a semi-chronological way, yet, foretelling events, still in the past, to whet our appetites.

For example, suppose I tell you about an event, twenty years ago, and in the meanwhile, hint of some stuff just five years ago. You can follow the story as I tell it to you in historical chronology, but I want you to be intrigued by something that will happen in the future (future, relative to where I am in my story), thought that future is in the past.

Science fiction has often been strong on ideas, but weak in characterizations. People with a great sense of what the future is like are often full of neat ideas, but when it comes to describing people, they seem false, in some way, or inadequate, at least compared to their breathern of fiction writers that must rely more on characterization and literary devices to get attention.

Card's characters are seen in broad strokes: the conflicted genius. Good versus evil. Smart versus stupid. In Card's world, there are geniuses, and there are idiots who don't recognize genius. In Wilson's world, the geniuses and the ordinary hang out together, and they don't dwell on their differences, but deal with what they share in common.

So I knew that I might be stuck at the dealership for hours, and rather than spend the time wondering what to do, I figured I could read. Reading is something I think I ought to do more often, rather than surfing the Internet, finding sites and articles recommended by reddit.

And as much as I despise going to get my car repaired, because it invariably takes far longer than I want to, this time it gave me an opportunity to make headway in a book. Although I'm only a quarter into Spin, it's quickly becoming one of the better books I've read in a while.

And for some reason, no movie, as of late, has been able to match the sense I get while reading the words of this book.