The Fear Index

Others have queued up to praise The Fear Index, which has been published about eighteen months now, and I’m not going to dissent from that view here. It weaves an engrossing dark thriller around (slight spoiler alert) a real event in 2010 – the flash crash – which wiped out 9% of the value of the Dow Jones Index in a few minutes, mostly through algorithm-based high frequency trading. (The chart below from Forbes shows the value of the index and the volume of trades during the crash). There is a long official US report, and a less compelling piece of futures work on high-frequency trading by the UK Government’s Foresight department. (The best account I have read is by Donald MacKenzie in the London Review of Books).

Robert Harris started his career as a journalist and a non-fiction author, and these skills don’t desert him. I started mine as a financial journalist, and still follow the area, but didn’t spot a clanging note. I had managed to guess the villain ahead of the reveal (small spoiler alert) but then you need only to read a small part of the singularity literature to realise that advanced machine intelligence aspires to a condition of godliness. All the same, the twist at the end was still a surprise.

If I have a criticism, there were places where it was overwritten, especially in the first half. The entire retelling of the Hardy/Ramanujan taxi story, for example, was ponderous, but perhaps when you have been as successful as Robert Harris editors are less attentive, or perhaps they were publishing at speed because of the topicality of the flash crash. I also was unpersuaded by Hoffman’s decision to plunge alone into the low-rent hotel in pursuit of his tormentor. Shades of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter’s house: good for driving the story along, less good for its credibility.

On the other hand, there are moments when you hear an author’s voice coming through his characters. I enjoyed the moment particularly when the hedge fund investors, taken for their expensive lunch after the presentation of the new investment fund, are bitching about high marginal tax rates. Hoffman, the other-worldly genius who has written the software, and cares little for money, comments to himself,

“I was remembering now why I didn’t like the rich: their self-pity. Persecution was the common ground of their conversation, like sport or the weather was for anyone else.”

Unbound, rebound

I’m fussy about my notebooks. Small enough for a coat pocket, big enough for diagrams as well as notes, plain not lined. I also write in fountain pen quite often, so the paper has to be heavy enough for ink (not true of the ubiquitous moleskine).

So when I found myself short of something to write in while in Brecon recently, I was intrigued to come across a line of notebooks called Rebound Books. I’d not seen them elsewhere. They had covers of actual published books, and some pages from the actual book interleaved with new blank pages, made from surprisingly good quality reclaimed paper.

It turns out that they’re made by the Brecon branch of an international charity, L’Arche, which creates communities for people with learning disabilities, helping them by providing meaningful work. For the charity, the rebound books are a way of re-using books which had no secondhand resale value, and which would otherwise end up in landfill (I drafted this post in a Rebound notebook made from a Romanian language guide to a monastery). The project won first prize earlier this year at the Hay Festival’s Dragons’ Den event.

From a user’s perspective there’s something quite stimulating about turning a page and finding an illustration or a fragment of a story on it. The idea probably doesn’t scale that well, but I’d have thought that the charity will want to spread the idea from Brecon to their other communities. And maybe other social enterprises might want to franchise the idea.

You can have a look online. They also do mail order.

The pictures in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Yellow jackets

Publishers mostly believe – probably rightly – that their brands make little difference to book buying habits, because readers are more interested in authors. But this isn’t always true. There are moments when publishers break these surly bonds: one thinks of Penguin, especially in the days of their colour-coded jackets, of Picador in the ’70s, of Calder and Boyars. Design always has something to do with it.

I was thinking of this because I noticed some science fiction and fantasy reissues – in the distinctive Gollancz yellow – to mark the 50th anniversary of Gollancz. (They seem to have been out for a few months but I noticed them only because of the ‘serendipity search function’ of a bookshop window.)

I read more science fiction when I was young than I now care to remember, much of it from the library, and the Gollancz yellow jackets did for a title exactly what good branding is supposed to do; they acted as assurance in a market where quality was variable. A yellow Gollancz science fiction title was invariably worth reading.

The list of the Gollancz 50 reissues can be found here. I’ve written here about Pavane by Keith Roberts, one of the 50.

The pictures in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

 

All about the bike

The first weekend of the Tour de France is a good moment to review It’s All About The Bike, and from what I’d heard about it before I read it I’d expected it to be more about components. This isn’t a complaint. Robert Penn’s book is about his journey to build his perfect bike – frame, wheels, groupset, handlebars, even to the saddle – and along the way he meets a lot of people who are among the best at making such things.

But as he goes he tells us a lot about the history of the bicycle, its explosion as a social phenomenon in the late 19th century, and the way it has developed since. And it’s also – intriguingly – a history of innovation, as Penn traces the way in which the problems of the early designs are overcome to produce the modern bicycle, which remains the most efficient way we have discovered to turn energy into movement.

One of the biggest early problems was the design – before gears were invented, the pedals were attached directly to the front wheel, so the only way to get more distance for each turn of the pedals was to increase the size of the wheel. Hence the ‘ordinary’ or the ‘penny-farthing’, described by Penn as “a technological cul-de-sac”. He quotes Mark Twain’s account of his cycling lesson on the ordinary (“you don’t get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire”). Accidents were so common on dreadful roads that it gave us a hatful of new expressions, including “to come a cropper”. One of the unsung heroes of cycling’s history, James Starley (of whom more shortly) nonetheless managed to ride the hundred miles from London to Coventry on an ordinary in a single day.

Once the ordinary gave way to the ‘safety bicycle’, with its familiar diamond shaped frame, records began to tumble. By the 1890s, a good racing bike weighed in at 10kg, even if decent gears took another thirty years to arrive. Some of the feats of the riders were breathtaking:  in 1899 Charles Murphy, paced by a train, rode a mile in under a minute on planks laid between the tracks.

As for Starley, he was a self-taught mechanic who had a gift for invention. He was the son of an agricultural labourer who left home for London at 15, then moved to Coventry where he set up a sewing machine company before turning his attention to bicycles in the late 1860s. He invented both the tensile spoked wheel and the differential gear as he wrestled with the limitations of early bicycle design.

His nephew John Kemp Starley continued the family tradition. His Rover Safety bicycle, first manufactured in 1885, is now recognised as the first modern bicycle. Starley had set out “to design the lightest, strongest, cheapest, most rigid, most compact and ergonomically most efficient shape the bicycle frame could be”. In doing so, he transformed the bicycle market. He floated the business and built the largest cycle works in Coventry, then the centre of the world’s cycle industry. It later became the Rover car company, though he didn’t live to see it. He died suddenly at the age of 46; 20,000 people attended his funeral and every cycle firm in the city closed for the day as a mark of respect.

The sections of the book about assembling the dream bicycle have some fine moments as well, whether it’s listening to the frame-builder Brian Rourke talking about setting up the frame, or being given some industrial gloves at Continental in Germany to take his set of tyres out of the oven. The passage in which Penn describes the California wheel builder ‘Gravy’ Gravenites build his wheels has a quiet poetry to it.

All of this is given credibility by Penn’s own history as a round-the-world cyclist. He knows what he’s writing about, and has had the scares, some mentioned here, to prove it. And like all good cycling books, the minute I finished it I wanted to go out on my bike. So I did.

The bat in the castle

I’m going to Prague soon, so I’ve been doing some research. One thing I stumbled on was an entertaining review of Václav Havel‘s memoir of his time as President of the fledgling republic. Two quick extracts, one reflective, one largely metaphorical. The first is about the different between politics and drama, no matter how dramatic politics sometimes is:

As a playwright, he understood the theatrical nature of politics. All politicians must have “an elementary dramatic instinct”, he writes. But a major theme in this book is how often this desire for structure and order is thwarted by events, dear boy, events. Whereas drama gives meaning and structure to existence, “Politics is more of a strange, never-ending process with no clear turning points and no unambiguous and immediately recognisable outcomes.”

He found the Presidential Castle full of concealed wires and microphones when he arrived. But one theme cropped up again and again in his memos:

One repeated request appears to symbolise the continued presence of the former regime: “In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?”

The bat and the vacuum cleaner. You could make it up, but it seems he didn’t have to.

Wealth and happiness

Near the end of Hammer and Tickle, which I blogged about a while back, there’s a fine modern Russian political joke:

Vladimir Putin wants people to be rich and happy. (List of people attached here).

The picture is from the Topcultured blog, and is used here with thanks.

Taking the pain away

I’ve just read Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut’s book about the firebombing of Dresden, which he experienced as an American prisoner of war held in the city. It’s written elliptically, perhaps by way of answering the question of how to write about one of the great war crimes of the Second World War.

The story is told through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a man who sees time differently from the rest of us, seeing history as a series of parallel moments rather than a linear progression. The book leaves open the question of whether this is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. (And in Chapter 1, before we get to Billy’s (deliberately) fragmented narrative, Vonnegut – or at least an authorial voice – says that he has written and thrown away five thousand pages in trying to tell the story. The book was published in 1969: it’s as if he was waiting for sufficient innovation in narrative form to be able to write it. So it goes.)

Anyway, this is a long preamble to a wonderful passage in which Billy, who sees time differently, watches a film of a bombing raid backwards:

“It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

“American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewman. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

“The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of their planes. The containers were neatly stored in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewman and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

The picture at the top of this post comes from the blog Through A Vintage Lens, and is used with thanks,

When England lose

After England’s World Cup débacle it seems a good moment to be reading Why England Lose, by the journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski. It turns out that there are only three factors which explain international footballing success:

• Size of population
• National income
• Experience of playing internationals

In general, England have outperformed those factors, a bit; but in terms of overall results there’s no quick way of changing the odds. (Population and national income changes slowly; international experience increases, but so does that of other countries). Well, almost no quick way; it seems it is possible to amplify experience by hiring in know-how, which is why there is a thriving international market in coaches with experience of managing sides in the Champions’ League.

That at least, was the theory of England’s hiring foreign coaches in the last decade. The book – which seems to have been updated for its recent paperback publiction – is  enthusiastic about Capello’s record, but at least offers the caveat that his England defeats have come against ‘big teams’; England has always managed to do well against the ‘minnows’.

So perhaps ‘know-how’ needs to be understood more broadly, and here the wider differences in expertise between England and its bigger competitors was noted this week by Paul Hayward:

Spain, the European champions, have 750 Grade A Uefa-trained coaches, compared to under 150 in England. All those English tutors instruct fully-grown men while in Spain 640 of the 750 teach five-year-olds and up. A Spanish cultural revolution 15 years ago has transformed the national team.

Can England win it again? It turns out that home advantage is worth ⅔ of goal per game, which is why South Korea reached the semi-finals in 2002, Sweden reached the final of the World Cup in 1958 and and six countries – Uruguay, Italy, England, West Germany and Argentina and France – have won the competition at home, in eighteen World Cups.

I took the picture at the top of the post. It’s is published here under a Creative Commons licence.

The worst foreign secretary?

I happened to walk down the street in Westminster where Edward Grey once lived – the man who was British Foreign Secretary before the Great War. There’s a case to be made that he was the worst of Britain’s Foreign Secretaries, and the case was argued by David Owen, once a Labour Foreign Secretary, in a recent review of a book co-written by a former Conservative counterpart, Douglas Hurd.

Grey was responsible for creating the alliance with France which led to Britain entering the Great War, and talks continued from 1906 until war broke out in 1914. Although he told both the prime minister of the day, Henry Campbell-Bannerman and the king of the talks, the cabinet was not informed for five years (when the Agadir crisis broke out), nor did he inform Parliament.

As Lloyd George observed, he also made a more profound mistake: “He did not tell the Germans plainly that Britain would go to war if they invaded Belgium.”

Hurd is relatively kind to Grey: he was not a devious man by nature, and Hurd sees him as being caught up is the diplomatic systems of the time.

Owen, on the other hand, is withering:

The first world war destroyed the flower of our youth and the strength of our nation for no long-term gain. Had Britain conserved its power, both militarily and diplomatically, we would have been able to bring that war to an end much earlier through negotiation, and in doing so profoundly influence the shape of Europe, with every likelihood of avoiding the second world war.

As failures go, it seems fairly catastrophic to me.

The seven wonders of Communism

My son has been reading the good bits of Ben Lewis’ book Hammer and Tickle to me – the history of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc told through their jokes. Actually, it’s full of good bits. Here’s a couple that catch the flavour of the book.

Everyone knows about the seven wonders of the world, but what about the seven wonders of Communism?

1. Under Communism there’s no unemployment.
2. Although there’s no unemployment, only half the population has to work.
3. Although only half the population works, the Five-Year Plans are always fulfilled.
4. Although the Five-Year Plans are always fulfilled, there’s never anything to buy.
5. Although there’s never anything to buy, everyone is happy and contented.
6. Although everyone is happy and contented, there are frequent demonstrations.
7. Although there are frequent demonstrations, the government is always re-elected with 99.9% of the vote.

Obviously, the jokes from Stalin’s Terror are the darkest – and cleverest. This may be my favourite joke in the book, at least from the ones I’ve had shared with me:

A clerk hears laughing behind the door of a courtroom. He open the door. At the other end of the room, the judge is sitting on the podium convulsed with laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’, asks the clerk.

‘I just heard the funniest joke of my life’, says the judge.

‘Tell it to me’.

‘I can’t', says the judge.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I just sentenced someone to five years hard labour for doing that.’

Lewis says that an eighth of the people in the gulag were there for ‘telling anecdotes’, a figure that he finds small but I thought sizeable enough. The joke about the notorious White Sea canal project, built by prison labour, goes as follows:

Who built the White Sea canal?

The right bank was dug by those who told jokes…

And the left bank?

By those who listened.

The point of punishing joke-tellers was to demonstrate that the state would tolerate not the smallest or most casual expression of dissent, as Roy Medvedev tells Lewis. There’s a joke about that as well:

What is the difference between Stalin and Roosevelt?

Roosevelt collects the jokes that people tell about him, and Stalin collects the people that tell jokes about him.