Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 70
February 22, 2018
February 20, 2018
The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict
The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva is the beleaguered and mistreated protagonist in this novel. [Spoiler alert!] The author has imagined a life for her of neglect and emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her famous physicist husband. In the book she is the one who discovers or founds the theory of Special Relativity while Albert takes the credit. The story line is engaging and based on some credible research, but according to sources such as Wikipedia and the author’s own postscript, there is little or no direct evidence of Albert Einstein being the abusive and selfish person portrayed in the book. Rather the book is more of a metaphor for how women were marginalized by men, especially in science, not only then, but to this day. No doubt that has largely been true in general, but it doesn’t mean it happened in Einstein’s case. Reading it, I felt the author was trying to make a modern-day women’s empowerment statement rather than an accurate historical account. This gave the story a rather creepy “let’s speak ill of the dead” feeling. I would say the story is one-sided, seeing things only from Mileva’s view, except it really is no-sided since there is little or no evidence Mileva felt in any way abused or overlooked in her contribution to science. For all we know she was happy to leave the world of physics and become a devoted mother and hausfrau. The book is well-written enough to have allowed me to keep reading to the end, but it took on more of a feeling of a rant rather than an attempt to entertain. Had it not been a book club selection, I would probably not have finished it.
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February 15, 2018
Our Ignorant Newsies – Winter Olympics Edition
Watch any local newscast and you’ll hear or read at least a dozen errors in English, but usually the national news is more professional. Usually. Tonight, however, I had the displeasure of listening to Alpine skiing commentator Bode Miller and some other NBC sports guy.
Sports guy: “This is his first time at the Olympics. He’s in unchartered territory.” (should be uncharted).
Miller: “He’s being really laxadaisical.” (should be lackadaisical or lax, but not both combined)
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February 11, 2018
The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This superb thriller has been called a “twisty mystery.” That is perhaps a pretty good description, but it’s not really a murder mystery … or is it? The main character, Lo, a travel magazine writer, is on a promotional cruise to see the northern lights off the Norway coast. She hears a splash in the middle of the night, what she thinks is a body being thrown overboard from the cabin next door, Cabin 10. But is it a murder or an artifact of her drunken state? There was a young woman in that cabin but she seems to have disappeared.
I think of this as more of a thriller than a mystery, although the plot is mysterious enough. There are no police and there is no body. The suspense comes from trying to determine whether Lo is delusional, whom she can trust, and what dark doings are going on aboard, if any. Is this a psychological thriller about a disturbed woman’s mental state or a tale of avarice and killing? I’m not telling.
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February 10, 2018
Nextdoor and Sex Discrimination
I am a victim of sex discrimination. I participate in my neighborhood Nextdoor.com group. For the most part it has been useful. Recently they introduced a feature known as interest groups. One such group was called Book Lovers, which sounded like a rather conventional category of people interested in participating in a book club. One woman posted that she was holding an organizing meeting to form such a book club and asked people to sign up if they were interested. I read a lot and enjoy the one book club I’m in so I emailed her. I got a response from her that she had received a lot more interest than she had anticipated and they would be forming four separate clubs. She said she’d be back in touch with me.
A week later she emailed me and said that I was the only man who had expressed interest and the women had voted to exclude me. I found this disturbing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not outraged or going to sue or anything like that. The organizer said no one wanted to discuss the same kinds of books I read (fiction and non-fiction). I read a wide variety of books and I had sent her a link to my Goodreads reviews which show that variety. I find it hard to believe that not one of these groups would be reading any of the books I enjoy. I asked her what kinds of books the groups would be reading. She never replied. I’ve been in a mixed male/female book club in the past and everyone got along just fine. I actually don’t want to belong to a book club that reads nothing but romances or women’s empowerment issues, so perhaps one or two of those newly formed clubs would not be suitable for me, but all four? In the end, the inverse of the Groucho Marx rule applies: I wouldn’t belong to any club that wouldn’t have someone like me for a member, so it’s probably all for the best. If I’m not wanted for any reason, I don’t want to force my way in. It’s not a glass ceiling I feel compelled to break. It’s supposed to be for fun and that doesn’t sound fun.
But the really disturbing thing about this is that my exclusion was based simply on my sex, without a single one of the anonymous voters knowing me. This is indicative of what’s happening in politics and all aspects of modern life in America, it sees – people don’t want to associate with anyone who doesn’t share their own beliefs and preferences. It may not be as bad as the slavery in the deep south of yesteryear, but the general attitude more and more now is if that person is different from me, they’re bad. It’s called bigotry.
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February 7, 2018
Running Again!
Today I ran at Rancho San Antonio from the horse trailer lot through the farm up the creek side of the Wildcat Loop to the fork for the lower Wildcat Loop and back, a total of about 4.5 miles. This is something of a milestone for me. It’s the longest run I’ve done since the Rock n Roll 10k I shouldn’t have done (but did) and since my surgery. I feel like I’m finally getting back to normal. It was a beautiful 70 degree day there, by the way.
I’ll back up. On 8/27/17 I signed up for the San Jose Rock n Roll 10K scheduled for Oct. 7. My son was running the half marathon and I saw it as a great father-son event. I’d been running well and thought I was in good shape for it. 10K was a distance I could handle. On Sept. 5 I was running at a nice slow jog and felt a sudden stab like a knife in my left upper Achilles tendon/lower calf. In any event, I couldn’t run. I limped back to my car. I couldn’t run for the next month. Two days after the injury I had a biopsy for something unrelated. It came back positive. The doctor prescribed Cipro (an antibiotic) for the biopsy, apparently unaware that a black box warning for that drug warned that Cipro can cause increased risk for Achilles tendinitis or rupture, especially in men over 65 who are physically active and have blood type O. I am all of the above. Sure enough, I got excruciating tendinitis in the right tendon two days later despite no physical activity. That lasted about 10 days, until the drug left my system. My left tendon, meanwhile, still hurt badly from the injury. Needless to say, I couldn’t run. I couldn’t even walk farther than from my easy chair to the bathroom. My doctor ordered me not to run the 10K. My entry fees were non-refundable, but the race was a month away, so I thought maybe I could walk it by then. The day before the race I picked up my race packet and had no trouble walking two miles, the longest I’d walked since the biopsy.
I did the race. I tried to walk it at first, but the crowd was so dense around me that I had to jog lightly to avoid collisions with people around me. I felt good and both tendons weren’t hurting so I couldn’t resist the urge to keep jogging. After about a third of the race I realized I’d made a mistake. My injured left tendon began to hurt pretty bad, so I started walking. It continued to get worse. After another third or so I was limping badly. I broke into a halting limp/jog just so I could get back to my car sooner. Somehow I finished first in my age group (70+). Everyone else must have crawled it. Anyway, my injury was exacerbated and I could barely walk for a month, much less run. By mid November I was just getting able to jog short distances again, although my tendon still hurt and I was out of shape. I did maybe two or three short runs.
On November 21 I had “minor” cancer surgery which turned out to be not so minor. Don’t worry, I’m not dying or anything. If you really want the grisly details you can search this blog and find them. It did require me not to run for a month. So my conditioning got even worse. When I did resume running weeks later, I couldn’t run more than a mile without becoming completely winded. There were other unpleasant side effects from my treatment, too, which limited my ability to run. Slowly over the last six weeks or so I have resumed running. It hasn’t been fun, but I knew that if I didn’t force myself to get back in shape, it never would be. I’m still a long way from where I want to be, and my left Achilles still hurts some, but today was the first day since Sept. 5 that I actually enjoyed running like I used to. I swear I’m not going to do any more races and not going to try to run fast. My goal now is just to avoid injury so I can continue to run regularly and appreciate the beautiful country and gorgeous weather we have here.
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February 2, 2018
Delphi – In vs. array vs. Pos
I have a hobby of solving ciphers. I also solve and create crosswords. I have several tools I’ve written using the Delphi programming language to assist me in these hobbies. It recently occurred to me that there may be faster ways of doing certain functions I need, such as character counts. So I decided to test three methods of determining whether a given character is contained in a word, phrase, or collection of text characters. For purposes of my test, I decided to test whether a given character is a lower case letter in the English alphabet (a through z). I tested a loop containing five characters a,z,m,n, and 7 which I designated as ch1 through ch5;
The first method is to use Delphi’s reserved word ‘in’. This is a set function. To use this you must first create the comparison set. So define alph as the set [a]+[b]+[c], etc. Note that these elements are not ordered. In is a boolean function, so the statement ch1 in alph will return a true or false.
The second method is to use an array. Define the array as an array of characters with an index from 1 to 26 (or 0 to 25 if you prefer). Use the statement for i2 := 1 to 26 do if alph2[i2]>ch1 then break else if alph2[i2]=ch1 then …; You don’t want the loop to keep searching after it has found the character, so that is the reason for the first if clause. I tested the method both ways, using that if clause and not using it.
The last method is the string function Pos. This returns the position of a character or substring in another string, or if, it is not there, a 0. To use it define the comparison string S1 as ‘abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz’ and the statement Pos(ch1,S1)>0 will return a true or false.
I ran a loop of 100,000 iterations testing each of the five characters using each of the methods. The first method was the fastest at 15 microseconds. The array with the first if clause was next at 16 microsecond. Third was the array method without the first if clause at 31 microseconds, and last was the Pos method at 78 seconds. Although the set method is the fastest, it has a big drawback. It doesn’t tell you where in the set the character appears. Sets in general are also limited to types byte or character. The array method is almost as fast and has neither of these limitations. It is not as powerful, however, as the Pos method because that method can test not just characters but substrings of any length, such as whole words and it identifies where it occurs if it’s there. This is probably the most often needed of the three. All three methods can be useful, but they are best suited to different purposes.
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January 30, 2018
Texting is an insult
Recently a friend started a Facebook thread about whether using punctuation, namely, a period, is proper or insulting in a text. Here’s an article about it: Article
Here’s what I posted as a comment to the thread:
I solved this long ago: I don’t text. I used to have texting blocked on my phone so others couldn’t text me, either, but too many web accounts require texting as a second form of security that I had to relent. However, I still consider a text an insult, an indication that someone doesn’t think I’m worth writing to in full, proper sentences. It’s tantamount to someone calling me on the phone and when I answer telling me not to answer so he can just leave a message on my voice mail and not have to talk to me.
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Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This mishmash of science fiction, horror, and thriller is set in post-WWII, sometimes in Detroit, sometimes in Iowa or Africa. Phillip and his rock band, The Danes, are conscripted to help the military identify and perhaps neutralize some strange musical sound that disables all weapons. They travel to the Namib desert to find its source. Further description of the plot would be pointless because that’s what the plot is. The author tried and failed to conjure up suspense and prickles up the spine. I don’t know who or what recommended this book to me, but if I could remember, I would discount all their further recommendations.
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January 26, 2018
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Ng has written with insight and compassion about teenage angst (and lust), about the artist’s unconventional world view and lifestyle, but most importantly about the nature of motherhood. The plot revolves largely around issues of adoption, surrogate mothering, child abandonment, and how parents can be blind about their own children due to their bias (which we call love). I thought the trial story line handled these issues in a fair and balanced way. Even so, I can’t say I found the plot very compelling. There were several times I considered giving up on it out of boredom; I’m glad I didn’t, though. It was more plodding than plotting, but if you stick with it, it gives you food for thought.
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