All in all, I expect it to be a worthy upgrade to the iPad 2. It will therefore be an extremely worthy successor to the first-gen iPad I happen to own.

But I’m just having trouble getting excited about it. I took possession of my iPad a little less than two years ago. Anyone reading this will remember what that time was like: it was a magical new product creating an entirely new market category. Several times, I said “It’s the best $500 I’ve ever spent”. And I meant it. I still do.

But that was two years ago. Times change. One year ago, my beloved iPad was made obsolete by the iPad 2. I didn’t see a need to upgrade because my iPad still ran fine and was still supported by the OS updates. Sure it wasn’t as fast as the iPad 2 (obviously), but it wasn’t slow by any means. So I kept the first-gen iPad and I was happy with it.

But that was a year ago. Times change. I bought the newest iPhone a few months ago. Man, that thing positively screams. And it has its own retina display, so it’s absolutely gorgeous to stare at. I use it constantly. In fact, I use it so much that I rarely pick my iPad up anymore.

While we’re watching TV and I want to look up an actor on IMDB? Before, I’d turn to my iPad…but now the iPhone is already in my hand. So I just use that. When I used to check Twitter on my iPad? Now I use my phone. Instapaper? iPhone. Google Reader? iPhone.

Yesterday, I was feeling guilty about not using the iPad very much so I decided to check Twitter on it: I was slightly shocked to see that the cached tweets were all from 22 days ago. It just does not get a lot of use.

And when I do use it? It seems astoundingly slow. I’m not sure if this is because I’m comparing it to the 4S (which, as I said, screams) or because the latest OS updates were written with the faster iPad 2 in mind and they didn’t give much thought to performance on the older models. It’s probably some combination of both.

One thing I do know is that apps have started crashing on it. A lot. My best guess is that it’s a memory thing: apps which were tested on the iPad 2 (which has double the RAM of its older brother) can’t handle it when malloc says “No!”.

This past week, Apple announced a new version of iBooks (featuring snazzy textbook support) and a new app called iTunes U. Both crash enough that they aren’t really usable. I assume they work flawlessly on the iPad 2.

But these are big flagship apps from Apple! They had a media event in NYC to announce them to the world! I read live blogs about them, fercryinoutloud! They shouldn’t crash on hardware made by Apple when Apple says the hardware is supported.

You’d think that all of this would have me champing at the bit for the iPad 3 just like I was for the iPhone 4S. But it just isn’t so.

Because $500 is a lot of money and two years isn’t a very long time. Something that cost $500 should still be really good two years later2. And this just isn’t.

Ultimately, two years later, Apple’s support of their first iPad is not a very good recommendation for spending another $500. Apple will need to offer a really compelling argument to make that seem worthwhile, especially without a reality distortion field to help out this year.

Otherwise, I’ll just wait for the iPad 4.3

So this is it. Below is some spoil-filled text. Look at it with care.

There. What do you think about that?

Claude Shannon. Charles Babbage. Ada Lovelace. Alan Turing1.

These are our new Newtons. They opened the door to the modern world that we are even now beginning to step out into. And James Gleick will introduce you to all of them as he tries to do for the science of information what he did in his fantastic book about chaos theory: introduce the interested layman to the world of bits, bytes, signal, and noise the same way that he showed us all how strange attractors work back in 1988.

It’s hard for me to judge how well he did since I actually know a [very] little about information theory (as opposed to knowing nothing at all about chaos theory that Gleick didn’t teach me). So a lot of the book was a bit of a boring re-tread for me. Of course, there were also things that were new to me in my far-less-than-academic understanding of information theory: Maxwell’s Demon was possibly my favorite of the “new things”.

So while I think he did a great job with “A History” and “A Theory”, I couldn’t help but feel that “A Flood” was given short shrift; since dealing with this flood is arguably one of the primary first-world problems that would be affecting his readers (I read this book on a Kindle overflowing with other un-read books, for example. And it’s getting worse). Sure, he talked about how many petabytes of data move across the Internet every day, and he mentioned twitter and filtering and such. But it was all a very “evening news” sort of treatment.

I don’t think there was anything new or useful for the sort of person who would be likely to pick up the book in the first place. There certainly wasn’t anything that will resonate with anyone in a decade. This section of the book has a very short shelf life.

I guess my ultimate feeling is that the book should have merely been “A History, A Theory”. It would’ve gotten another star from me in that case. As it stands though, I came away feeling that the last few chapters were just rushed fluff where Gleick didn’t really have anything to say. Those chapters stood in stark contrast to the rest of the book, of course, but they couldn’t help but bring the whole thing down.

Somehow, I was under the impression that this book was about the creation of Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX. So imagine my surprise when I started reading it and the author kept talking about some company called “Data General” which I’d never heard of before. (An interesting data point: the Wikipedia article on the computer developed in this book, the Data General Eclipse MV/8000, is a good order of magnitude shorter than the one on the VAX. But Data General survived as an independent company for a good year longer than DEC. I’m not sure what to make of this.)

So this book went smashing my expectations right from the start: it was about a computer I’d never heard of before made by a company I’d never heard of before and it was still fully engrossing. It turns out that this isn’t really the story of a specific computer made at a specific company by a specific team; instead, it’s the story of a Any Given Team of Computer Guys working to build Any Given Project. That they were working on crafting a CPU out of multiple wire-wrapped boards (which is just weird) is almost incidental.

It’s incidental because the technical aspects of the story seem to merely add charm. “He turned back to plug a logic analyzer into Gollum.” connects paragraphs to each other, but the real meat of the book is in describing the characters and personalities of each of the team members (particularly the main personality, Tom West who died earlier this year) and how each of them coped with the demanding schedules that such projects tend to demand.

This book is a fascinating bit of history (I’ve never knowingly used a computer without a microprocessor). It’s an engaging and engrossing look at what it means to build a high-tech product these days (the beards are a little shorter these days, but everything else sounds about right). It’s a good read. They don’t hand Pulitzers out to just anyone, after all.

Ultimately, any dissatisfaction I find in this book comes from my own biases. I’m a software guy and I find it much easier to relate to people working on software projects. So I probably tend to prefer something like Zachary Pascal’s Showstopper! which is the same sort of project history for Microsoft’s Windows NT.

However, I can’t help but compare this to a book I read last year, The Race for a New Game Machine by David Shippy. This newer book was simply awful. My holding it up to The Soul of a New Machine really serves to show just how good Soul is.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this book. It’s pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: A popular history of the screwdriver and (somewhat necessarily) the screw.

Unfortunately, as important as the screw is to our modern civilization, there’s not been a lot of academic work around it. So the majority of the book’s prose is the author’s descriptions of his visiting museums and libraries to try to find out as much as he can about the the history of this little marvel of the simple machines.

The best way to say it might be that this book reads like a travel book recounting the adventures of a traveling historian. It’s a short, easy read and it passes the time wonderfully on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not a deep literary work or a serious piece of nonfiction. But, it never claimed to be so I certainly won’t hold that against it.

We hung up and I started playing a playlist of Final Fantasy music. I was curious about a particular track, so I asked my phone about it. It told me that it was “Holding My Thoughts In My Heart“.

Since it was raining, I didn’t want to have to lug the trashcan around to the front of the house once I got home. If it probably wasn’t going to rain tomorrow, I could just put it off until the morning. So I asked the phone if it was going to rain. The phone told me that it probably won’t rain tomorrow, so I asked it to remind me about it when I go to bed tonight. That way, I can get up early to make sure I don’t miss the trash collectors.

I did all these things on my way home and I never had to take my eyes off the road.

On Sunday, my mom and I used FaceTime to talk to my cousin who lives out-of-state. We got a tour of her new house and got to say hello to my grandmother who was visiting. It was nice.

While riding [in the passenger seat, don't worry!] to meet Bran somewhere, I used Find My Friends to keep up to date on where we were in relation to each other. I could plot each of us on the map and see when we’d meet up. I was able to tell that I’d get there first by a few minutes.

I am living in an Apple commercial and it is fantastic.

People love this book. According to Wikipedia, the New York Post credited it as “the best novel by an American writer published in the 20th century.” — however, a citation is needed. Citations or not, a trip around the Internet quickly shows that this book is very highly regarded.

So when I ended up thinking that it’s merely okay-to-good (or, in the parlance of our times, “Three Stars”), I have to wonder what went wrong. Am I even dumber than I thought and I just didn’t get it? Were my expectations too high going into it? Or is it something else altogether?

My best theory is that this book is the product of its times. Published in the 1960s, it’s a book about the Cold War and arms races. It’s a book about the fears of the world ending from a single cataclysmic mistake involving a super-weapon. It’s a book, as near as I can tell, about counter-cultural religious experimentation on the leading edge of…whatever happened in the 60s and 70s. Honestly, I’m sort of grateful to have missed it.

But with all of that wrapped up in these pages, it turns out that the book doesn’t really have anything to say to someone like me who was born in the early 80s. I’m not terribly concerned about a nuclear war between the United States and Russia (though I’m frightfully concerned about states like Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea). The religious experimentation of my peers ends up as “None for me, thanks.” more often-than-not these days. So, whatever thoughts or emotions Vonnegut’s original audience had when reading this just don’t get transmitted to me.

I don’t think it’s terribly special as a work of literature either. The writing style is very short and choppy. It’s all short,simple sentences building up to short, simple paragraphs. (An aside: This sounds like roughly the same criticism I leveled against Feed, but it’s not. Feed was just written incredibly poorly whereas Vonnegut knew what he was doing and was simply writing well in a particular style. I don’t know how to explain the differences, but they’re readily apparent when reading either.) This didn’t make the book bad in any sense; but it also didn’t help to make it interesting.

It was almost written from the perspective of someone who was a bit stoned — which, again, didn’t necessarily appeal to me since I’m not from the 1960s.

It’s not a bad little book. It’s short and easy to read. It’s relatively important in the world of American literature for some reason. From a distance, it’s got some interesting plot hooks. But it ends up ultimately being merely good instead of great and it never stops feeling like it should have been better than it actually is. Kind of a shame.

I recently found myself considering the phrase “Screw you!”1. It’s an elegant construction: concise, yet emphatic. Worthy of some admiration if only for the emotions and meaning it packs into two small words.

And then I tried to diagram it.

And then I found that it’s actually far more interesting than it first appears.

“Screw” is obviously the verb of the predicate. At first glance, it appears to be in the imperative mood so the subject of this sentence must be an implied “(You)”. That leaves the final “you” of the sentence which must be the direct object. Thus, we have a basic subject-verb-object sentence. Done.

Except…that’s a little weird, isn’t it? English doesn’t tend to use “you” as the direct object of an imperative sentence with an implied subject. It’s always “Help yourself.”, “Calm yourself.”, or “Know yourself.”. The alternatives (“Help you.”, “Calm you.”, “Know you.”) are just strange.

It seems perfectly grammatical, of course. “You” is a delightfully versatile pronoun. “You saw the teacher.” (Subject!), “It’s you!” (Predicate nominative!), “The teacher saw you.” (Direct object!), “The teacher brought you the assignment.” (Indirect object!). And so on. “You” isn’t like “he” or “she” which take different forms (“him”, “her”) as they move around in the sentence. So using “you” as the direct object seems as reasonable as using “him”. And “Screw him!” is fine (like “Help him!” or even “Calm him.”2).

And yet, at some point, English decided that “you” just doesn’t work here. I’m not sure why.3 Perhaps someone decided that having the word “you” on both sides of the verb looked silly. But, at some point, English picked up the reflexive pronouns and we have to live with them.

And so, “Screw you!” cannot be an imperative since such a thing would require a reflexive “yourself” to match the implied subject. So it must be something else.

My guess? It’s the tail end of a sentence that goes something like “May all the powers of the universe work together to screw you!” That is, it seems to be an actual curse4.

Fortunately, if our intent requires an actual imperative command, we can manage it with just a little rearranging. “Go screw yourself!” works nicely. Together, these forms give us some options when we need to express just the right sentiment. Do we want to curse someone with an epic universe-sized screw? Or do we want to encourage them to enact a somewhat more personal screwing upon their own person? We can make a choice and add a little subtlety to our invectives.

And then there’s “Screw him!”. Without the reflexive hint, this could go either way. As a command, the subject would still be “You”; so a reflexive object is not required. But, this sentence would also fit into our curse construction from above. So where we gain subtle distinctions in the second-person case, we overload the meaning of the third-person case.5

English. It gives and it takes away.

Screw it.

I’m a fan of the English language. I’m not an expert, certainly. This review itself will show that I don’t have a deft hand with a pen (or keyboard, as it were) and sometimes it takes a few tries to get the denser works of the masters through my skull. Yet, despite my own mastery of the language, I have a love for well-chosen phrases and the amusing word-play.

Throughout my life, I’ve moved from being a strict prescriptivist to being a more forgiving descriptivist more times than I can count. I suppose that sort of thing was the inevitable result of coming up in a strict conservative private primary and secondary school (among other things, we studied sentence diagramming every year from at least 3rd grade through 12th grade) while being raised by unashamedly Southern [American] parents.

From that context, this is an incredibly engrossing book. As it details the evolution of modern Standard English, it also tells the story of the war between those who simply sought to describe English-as-it-is and those who sought to legislate the language they though everyone should be speaking. Since I’ve been fighting this war in my head for most of my life [NOTE: I'm now a firm descriptivist and hope to stay that way, if only because I enjoy ending sentences with prepositions.], the whole thing is fairly fascinating.

Most of the book is devoted to the lives, ideas, and writings of those who worked to compile the great dictionaries of our tongue; but some of the text discusses the development of the language itself. This is where it seems to fall down a bit. For example, the author spends a good deal of time discussing English infinitives and the splitting (or not) of such constructions.

At one point, he discusses how Old English had its infinitives wrapped up in a single word (like Latin or French) and eventually migrated to the to- form that we know today. He writes, “Historical linguists know where the two-word infinitive came from, but the overwhelming majority of speakers have never thought about the question, and probably wouldn’t care if the answer were offered.” And, based on that assumption, he doesn’t offer the answer. So I had to do the research myself, which is surprisingly difficult for someone who doesn’t actually know the terminology or science of linguistics. (As near as I can sort out, Old English did have a gerund form that used a “to” prefix. Eventually, this migrated to be the infinitive form and we found a new suffix to create gerunds. Or something like that.)

Which is to say, my chief complaint about this book of pop-linguistics is that it spends a little too much time on the “pop” and not enough on the “linguistics”. It’s a small complaint, perhaps. But! If you’re interested enough in language to pick up this book in the first place, you’re probably interested enough to want to know a little more detail about the historical developments it purports to talk about.

Let me sum up: I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would (and I was expecting to like it from the moment I found out it existed). I wish it were a little meatier, but that’s a small complaint and this book is well worth reading and sharing.

The third book in a trilogy, this is the conclusion of a series which started with one of the better sci-fi books I’ve ever read. So it’s got a tough act to follow. I suppose the task for Vortex was made easier by the trilogy’s middle-child (Axis) being more pedestrian fare. But since I recently read them all one after the other (re-reading the first two in anticipation of the newly arrived third), I think I can see the entire thing as a single work. But, at least at first, I’ll try to talk about Vortex as a thing-unto-itself — as much as I can, anyway, since it really doesn’t stand alone.

One thing I really appreciate about this book is that it brings back a framing story similar to the first one. It’s told as a series of vignettes jumping from the “present” to a far distant future. In doing so, it unravels the story slowly and carefully until it all comes together at the end. Wilson did something very similar in Spin (though the time periods involved were much shorter and the same characters appeared throughout) and I appreciated seeing it again. Axis used a far more conventional linear narrative and I felt that it was more boring because of it. In Vortex, it really strengthens the story and provides a real impetus to keep reading chapter after chapter: a huge win.

Much like he did in Spin, Wilson really captures the essence of his big idea here. He does a great job of communicating the weight of the world in this book: from the abjectly terrifying limbic democracy of Vox to the more slightly more down-to-earth reality of an impending global warming crisis to the fantastic romanticism of a ring of worlds. Vortex makes all of this, even the most imaginary, seem real — and this is worth celebrating.

The story itself doesn’t quite match up to the majesty of the constructed world. And I think, with hindsight, that this is even noticeable in Spin. But it’s more forgivable (and forgettable) there because the story in the first one is smaller: it’s the story of a few people struggling to make sense of incomprehensible events. Instead, continuing a trend begun in Axis, Vortex tries to tell the story of the entire universe. That there are smaller people at the center of the story actually doing things seems almost to be an unfortunate consequence of the fact that it’s hard to write stories about a non-sentient universe.; but I get the feeling that Wilson would have preferred it if the characters hadn’t actually been necessary. By far, the most interesting entity in the story isn’t actually a character. The Hypotheticals were clearly meant to steal the show. But, by doing so, it makes a lot of the action and characterization seem half-hearted at best. And yet, it’s still pretty good.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining. It’s not that the story is bad (it’s certainly not). It’s just that it’s not as good as the larger ideas of the story suggest they should be. It may be instructive to compare Vortex with Niven’s Ringworld, a book where the story largely takes a backseat to the larger ideas of technology. In contrast, Wilson never actually falls into that trap. While his story may be lesser than his ideas, the story is clearly important.

Which I think is all there is to say about the book by itself. It’s very good and I’d recommend reading it, but in order to do that, you should read the first two. And I can recommend those as well. So really, my recommendation is: read the series. Have fun.

Speaking of the series, what do I have to say about it now that it’s concluded? Ultimately, it’s extremely strong start in Spin almost inevitably led to a small bit of disappointment as we found that it was simply impossible for it to conclude as fantastically as it began. As I implied in my Axis review (though I guess I didn’t say it outright), it’s no criticism to say “This book isn’t as good as Spin.” I think that we will look back on Spin as genre-defining. It’s not many authors who can write multiple genre-defining books and it’s no fault of Wilson that he didn’t pull it off with his books after Spin. But, as I said, the disappointment is only “a bit”.

In large part, the disappointment stems from myself. At the end of Spin, I wanted so badly to know the story behind the Hypotheticals: where they came from, what they were doing, and what their business with humanity was. In the end, though, it turns out that the mystery at the end of Spin was at least half the charm. By hinting at the big answers in Axis and fully developing them in Vortex, Wilson performs the equivalent of a magician pulling back the curtain and showing us that there were really two ladies in that sawed-in-half box the entire time. What was magical becomes merely a trick.

It’s not quite the same thing, of course. And it definitely differs in degrees: the “disappointment” of the Vortex conclusion is far less than what stems from learning a magician’s trick. And it’s almost entirely internal and my own fault. After reading Spin I held multiple contradictory ideas about the Hypotheticals: they were mindless automatons, they were intelligent and anthropomorphic automatons, they were gods. All at the same time. And this was all fuel for my imagination.

But clearly, they can’t all be true. Wilson had to pick one (and he picked sensibly). But, if only by virtue of being logically consistent, his pick ended up being far less amazing than what had been fostering in my head over the years since I first read Spin. Perhaps it would have been best to leave the mystery intact.

As for mystery, the end itself reminds me of nothing so much as the true end of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Unfortunately, the Spin series lacked the long narrative buildup necessary to make such an ending satisfying (and, indeed, many readers found King’s ending incredibly unsatisfying). It seemed tacked on an unnecessary and I’m not entirely sure what the author was trying to say with it. My best guess is that Wilson was backed into a corner by the fact that the eventual heat death of the universe precludes long-term happy endings. So he tried to cheat, and I don’t think it ended up being successful.

Ultimately, that’s a nitpick, though. It’s a few pages out of hundreds. The longer work itself stands up; and though the trilogy doesn’t live up to the promise of its first book, it’s still first-rate sci-fi all the way through. Highly recommended all around.