Donna Strickland: Amazing Physicist, Amazing Canadian, Amazing Woman

Canadians, and women, have revelled in the accomplishment of the self-effacing Donna Strickland, who recently won the Nobel Prize for Physics. She is only the third woman to win the Physics prize in over a century and only the fifth Canadian ever.

Bravo Strickland!

Shame on University of Waterloo!

In the 21 years Strickland has worked there, the university has not seen fit to promote this Nobel-calibre physicist to full professor. Hmm. Could it be because she's female?

Information Sparkles with McCall's Infographics

Tommy McCall makes information come alive. He doesn't just present existing information - his graphics deliver new insights. He illustrates how you can take data and turn it into information, and then make it visually captivating and thought-provoking.  His immense creativity gets to the nub of what's important and figures out a way to convey that - succinctly and powerfully.

His recent brief TED talk shows some wonderful examples of his own and other infographics through history, including some perspective on Florence Nightingale's use of infographics to animate her argument about military deaths from poor care. Watch McCall here.

I wrote about Tommy in my blog  once before, when I first met him on a bus on the way to TED, and I've been following his wonderful work ever since. You will be fascinating delving into the trove of great graphics in his portfolio here. Bravo Tommy.

The October List

There are several fiction authors, including Jeffrey Deaver, that I turn to when I want an engaging plot but don't care about elegant prose, nuanced characters, or deep philosophical insight.  I don't usually write reviews of books by these authors - they're simply too light-weight.

I'm making an exception in reviewing The October List, because of its cunning construction. The story unfolds completely backwards. Not in a series of flashbacks, but completely backwards. Each chapter occurs before the previous one. There were many plot twists to keep me interested and guessing, and I couldn't help but be fascinated by the technique.

I won't tell you any more of the story, but it's a cute book to read.

More book reviews here.

The Heirs

Rupert Falkes is a British orphan who arrives virtually penniless in the US. He's  immensely successful and married to an upper-crust wife. This is the top 1%, if not the .1%.

Falkes has just died and is mourned by his wife and five sons, each highly successful in diverse fields. Wait a minute. Maybe that's 7 sons. A letter lands like a bomb, claiming he had two other sons and setting off all kinds of family dynamics. Did he father two other sons, or didn't he?

The novel circles around this question like water swirling at the drain in the bathtub, converging on the answer. Along the way, we're treated to a series of short stories about the lives of the Falkes family.  Each of these narratives moves the big story forward step by step, engaging you in the complex family dynamics and providing tantalizing clues about the big question - did Falkes father two other sons or not.

This novel is beautifully written, and totally absorbing. I highly recommend it.

For other book reviews, click here.

Problems and Solutions

Just because there's a problem it doesn't mean there's a solution.  Just because there's no perfect solution it doesn't mean there isn't a problem. 

Unknown source

A Gentleman in Moscow

This book should be titled A Gentle Man in Moscow. Count Rostov is the gentleman in the title, and he's also a gentle man. An elegant man. A cultured man. A graceful and gracious man. A man you wish you had known.

Born to the Russian aristocracy, Rostov is living in luxury in a suite at Moscow's opulent Metropole Hotel when he is sentenced to house arrest there for writing an unacceptable poem.

From luxury suite to cramped garret, the adaptable Rostov accepts his fate with equanimity. He's always been a student of people and their interactions - shrewdly designing table placements for his grandmother's dinner parties at a young age. As his physical horizons shrink, his interest in people does not. His taste is catholic. The constants are his closest friends who work in the hotel - seamstress, barber, bartender, chef, maître d. Outsiders drift in and out of the hotel, and the story, exposing what is happening in this tumultuous period in Russian history - Soviet aparatchik, Russian dissident, actress, American journalist. Rostov befriends them all, but especially the young inquisitive girl Nina, who reveals the inner secrets of the hotel with her magical passkey. She opens not only the secrets of the hotel, but ultimately opens up his life.

Throughout all this, Rostov retains the manners and grace of his privileged youth, treats everyone with respect and deploys tact and not a little manipulation to address thorny issues and nasty people. Throughout his gradual decline in material circumstances, he retains his dignity, his sense of humour and his wit.

I didn't remember Amor Towles' name until friend Judith pointed out he'd also written Rules of Civility, a book I rhapsodically reviewed here. In that review,  I said the book felt like a chiffon scarf floating artlessly on my neck. My prevailing image for A Gentleman in Moscow is an autumn leaf gently wafting downwards, gracefully floating back and forth in the wind, but always heading down. Beauty in decline. And just like Rules of Civility, I felt the urge to reread A Gentleman in Moscow as soon as I'd finished it. I guess I really like Amor Towles' writing. I highly recommend this book.

For a list of more book reviews, click here.

Sunstein's Colorado Experiment

A Harvard lawyer, Sunstein is also deeply steeped in behavioural economics and has applied those theories to law and politics. In a delightful talk at Rotman, both instructive and entertaining, Sustein described some of his latest research studies that put a theoretical foundation to the understanding of the growing political polarization in the US.

Sunstein started by laying out the results of a 'Colorado experiment'. Here's how it went. Boulder is a left-leaning community in Colorado while Colorado Springs is right-leaning. Groups were pulled together from these two separate communities to talk about climate change, affirmative action and same sex marriage. Their views on these topics were measured before the discussion. In private, many people tended to be uncertain and tentative about their opinions. Then Boulder people had a short discussion about this topics with other Boulder people while the Colorado Springs people talked to others from Colorado Springs. After these discussions with like-minded people, they become more confident, more unified and more extreme. As Sunstein said, this was not all that surprising, but it was useful to verify the process of people being influenced by others in a group experimentally rather than relying on intuition.

Sunstein went on to describe the effects of mixed and homogeneous composition of judicial panels. A laborious analysis of the decisions of three-person judiciary panels, comparing homogeneous (as to who was the President when they were appointed) and mixed (people appointed by different presidents of different parties) panels showed a rather surprising result. The best predictor of their decisions was not their own political leaning but the leaning of the others on the panel.

He gave many examples of people's resistance to new data, when they have firm opinions already. Add to that the fact that most Americans get their news from Facebook, which filters news to suit their tastes - this generates more clicks and more opportunity to sell advertising. He showed us a quote from an earlier FB statement of how their NewsFeed works:

Our success is getting people the stories that matter to them most. If you look through thousands of stories every day and choose the 100 that were most important to you, which would they be? The answer would be your News Feed. It is subjective, personal and unique - and defines the spirit we hope to achieve.

It's easy to see how this approach would solidify extreme positions and lead to polarization. Facebook is now making moves to modify how News Feed works, under considerable public pressure. Sunstein made a strong point that we shouldn't be algorithmed into being extreme, which the original Facebook algorithm certainly did. He got a good laugh when he said we needed to made algorithm a verb, but we needed a shorter word. Unfortunately algored wouldn't really work.

Sunstein was discussing topics from his latest book #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. I'm looking forward to reading the book and hearing more about his research, because I'm sure I haven't done justice to what he talked about. 

After the talk I made a suggestion to Sunstein. The New York Times often runs a section entitled What the Conservative Media  that it might be interesting to see the relative click rate on The New York Times' section called What the Conservative Media are Saying (or some such title). Compared to the laborious research on the judiciary panels, this would provide simple quantitative results. I know what I'd be betting. But Sunstein was scrupulous in not claiming positions for which he didn't yet have experimental verification. His book should be a good read.

This Movie Could Make You Weep

Ben Rhodes, Samantha Powers, John Kerry, and Barak Obama

The Final Year delivers an overview of the final year of Obama's second term, and how he and his team carried on foreign policy. As well as Obama himself, the story focuses on three people nearest the President: the passionate, idealistic, committed Samantha Power, Ambassador to the United Nations, the experienced and dedicated John Kerry, Secretary of State, and blunt-spoken behind-the-scenes Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications.

The segments cover activities in Syria, Laos, Viet Nam, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Cuba and the UN, dramatizing the scope of US concerns around the world. We see Kerry's dogged persistence in seeking a deal in Iran. We see Obama interacting with young people wherever he goes. We see Power barely holding back the tears when meeting mother of the  girls kidnapped by Boko Haram.  We see Rhodes mind-morphing with Obama to craft drafts of his speeches.

It's heart-wrenching to compare the high ideals and global empathy of this cast of characters with the venality and self-interest of the current US president. Power's women's party to celebrate Clinton's expected victory deflates like a sad balloon. Rhodes, the wordsmith, cannot find words to express his desolation on the night Trump is elected.

The movie ends with the ultimate irony:  The Times They Are a Changin', once a chant of hope and progress, is a dirge for the death of principled US diplomacy. Or if you feel hopeful, it's just a blip in human progress.

I highly recommend* this movie, but take a tissue. It'll make you cry.

* The movie gets a low rating on rottentomatoes. I can only believe the ratings were stacked by Trump supporters. It's a great movie.

Making Pencils

Manufacturing pencils must be a dying industry.

New York Times memorializes it with a  beautiful photo essay of the processes involved. It's worth a look.

The Vietnam War

If you have a chance to watch Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's 17 1/2 hour documentary about the folly of the Vietnam War, take it. I never thought I would watch that much footage about Vietnam, but my husband and I were riveted as we binge-watched the entire series. It was incredible to see the hubris, the ineptitude, the political self-interest and sheer lunacy of the war unfold in one vast sweep. We were educated, horrified and moved.

Ten years in the making, boiled down from interviews with hundreds of people - both Americans and Vietnamese - 24,000 photos, and 1500 videos. Through a feat of phenomenal editing, the series flowed smoothly, weaving together political machinations in Washington, battle scenes,  deftly chosen music from the era, and interviews with combatants, advisors, diplomats, protestors,  journalists and family from all four factions (Americans, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and North Vietnamese.  Sometimes documentaries can be too clinical, and you don't even glimpse the human side. Others swamp you with mawkish individual stories without giving a sense of the big picture. This film was perfectly balanced between the two approaches, and they all blended harmoniously. It was a tour de force.

Vietnam was an ignominious war from the beginning, and this was highlighted in the ignoble flights of helicopters rescuing marines from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. The end would not have been so shabby if it weren't for the obduracy of the ambassador who refused to accept the inevitable fall of Saigon and prepare for it. And so the end came as the war had begun and proceeded.

I thought the film would end with the pathos of the Vietnam memorial with the strains of Bridge over Troubled Water playing in the background. But it went on to show American vets reconciling with Vietnam vets back in Vietnam, this time with Let It Be as background. It's hard to hold on to that feeling of hope, as we watch the American political scene. Did you know that Nixon influenced the 1968 election by doing a back-room deal to get the Vietnamese to refuse to attend the Paris peace talks until after the election, promising they'd do better with Nixon as president? Plus ça change. . .