Ironichles

Gordo1951> Nigel, did you see that email in my inbox just now?
Nigel> No sir not yet I just arrived, anything special?
Gordo1951> Not sure, it seems to refer to our trade agreement with Nigeria
Nigel> I did not know we had one?
Gordo1951> Officially we don't but of course you have to keep your options open
Nigel> I see sir.
Gordo1951> Anyway, this email indicates that we're eligible for large deposit of 12 million US dollars. Hang on let me show you.
Nigel> I have no recollection of such a transaction pending.
Gordo1951> The email starts like this: I am Mr.David Mark. an Auditor of a BANK OF THE NORTH INTERNATIONAL,ABUJA. Do we know this Mr. Mark?
Nigel> Never heard of him. Should I get MI-6 to look into this?
Gordo1951> No leave them out for now. I'm sure I can handle this one.
Nigel> If you say so sir.
Gordo1951> Listen to this, this is quite interesting: Some years ago, an American Mining consultant/contractor with the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, made a numbered time (fixed) deposit valued $12M.USD (TWELVE MILLION US DOLLARS) in an account. On maturity, The bank sent a routine notification to his forwarding address but got no reply.
Nigel> *nods*
Gordo1951> Look even the Americans are involved!! Ah here's the important bit: After a month, The bank sent another reminder and finally his contract employers, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation wrote to inform the bank that he died without MAKING A WILL, and all attempts by the American Embassy to trace his next of kin was fruitless.
Nigel> Do you suspect the Americans know something we don't sir?
Gordo1951> Of course they do, they're always after a 'quick buck' as they say.
Nigel> Sir I do believe it makes sense to have MI-6 look into this.
Gordo1951> Nonsense! And it's only a small amount anyway. Now this is where it gets interesting the email goes on like this: No one will ever come forward to claim it, and according to Nigerian Banking policy, after some years, the money will revert to the ownership of the Nigerian Government if the account owner is certified dead. This is the situation, and my proposal is that I am looking for a foreigner who will stand in as the next of kin to beneficiary, and OPEN a Bank Account abroad to facilitate the transfer of this money.
Nigel> I'll have special branch look into Nigeria's policies on these matters.
Gordo1951> Good thinking Nigel! But we will have to settle this fast before the Americans get further involved.
Nigel> Right sir, any specific instructions in the email?
Gordo1951> It says here that we need to send them a UK bank account and a valid postal address. Can we use the treasury's petty cash account for this one you think?
Nigel> I'm sure they won't have an objection. It's a small amount anyway, they probably won't even notice.
Gordo1951> Great. I think you can safely use Downing Street as the postal address. Let me forward the email so you can read the instructions.
Nigel> Very good sir I'll keep you posted.
Gordo1951> Let's keep this between the two of us for now.

Soms vraag ik me af wat Wim Kan of Toon Hermans zouden denken van het cabaret werk van Youp van't Hek. Zouden ze het mooi gevonden hebben? Zouden ze het begrijpen? Mijn eigen cabaret ervaring begint aan het einde van het Wim Kan tijdperk. Alles was toen 'netjes' en woordspelingen bouwen was toen nog een vak. Nou ben ik niet tachtig en dat netjes vond ik altijd al een beetje te keurig, maar de woordspelingen en goed gebouwde grappig kan ik nog steeds waarderen. Youp doet dat nog steeds al is hij niet echt 'netjes'. Nou verbaasd me dat niets want een genre is constant in beweging en vooral de kunst zit vaak aan of over het randje. Van Youp kan ik dan ook nog vaak genieten.

Maar het is wel 'trappen', een term die ik twee jaar geleden oppik toen ik een Nederlands artikel las over de huidige cabaret kultuur. Nou begrijp ik ook wel wat daar lekker aan is. Met een paar honderd mensen in een zaal luisteren naar een man of vrouw die alles zegt wat je zelf niet durft te denken. Maar waar is de humor daarin? Het woord 'trappen' staat heel dicht bij het woord 'hard' en wat Youp niet durft dat doet Hans Teeuwen wel. Hoe hard is hard trappen? Wat denkt bijvoorbeeld Youp van het optreden van Hans?

I'm tired of Lost. And I've never even seen it. Why? Suppose we took one of the best mystery novel ever written by perhaps the best mystery writer who ever lived and we distributed a free copy over 15 million people. Let's call it an experiment. For example, we took the novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie and we handed it out for free to millions of people. We also challenged them to solve the mystery and blog about it. What would be the changes that there wouldn't be someone who solved the puzzle? I think it's safe to say someone would figure it out. Or in the words of Abraham Lincoln: you can fool some people some of the time but you can't fool everyone all of the time.

How about TV show Lost? Nobody has apparently figured out what's going on in that show at least according to the producers and they have denied any proposed explanation provided by viewers. Is that even possible? Maybe there's something else going on. If nobody can figure out what the solution to the Lost puzzle is, then either we haven't been given all the info needed (hard to believe after so many episodes) or ......

Or there is no solution, and by design. As in: it doesn't matter that there is no solution. What if you wanted to write a show or franchise that could be used to create a new show if the first one ran its course? Let's call it a MoneyMaker to stay in Hollywood jargon. You would create a mystery nobody could solve and move on to the next show that references some of the same strange events, for example the show Flash Forward, which will soon start up right when Lost is nearing its end. In the preview/pilot of the new show Flash Forward we found out that the population of the entire planet has blacked out for a while. Chaos ensues and the main characters are wondering what happened to them. Sound familiar? We're even shown crashed planes and other subtle references to the show Lost. Maybe we might see an episode of Lost that would fit neatly into the mold of Flash Forward where we're told that everybody on the plane blacked out for a while?

My question is, what's next after Flash Forward?

If humans had evolved from herd animals, then ...

1. There would be more baristas than customers at StarBucks
2. The movie would be called The Lion Coordinator
3. Military budgets would come out of insurance
4. A watering hole would still be a watering hole
5. The 60s would have been followed by part II
6. NASA would have launched the International Space Commune
7. Police stations would always be built on the outskirts of town
8. Penis size still counts
9. No more orphanages
10. Work would still be a four letter word

Finally! The case isa zolved, as Inspector Clouseau would have said. After messing up a batch of rising dough, throwing a hissed fit when my oven broke down, I finally managed to make a Dutch Vlaai. What is such a beast you might ask. A vlaai is a southern Dutch version of a fruit filled pie made from fluffy dough. It usually comes in an over sized pie pan and is fairly thin. Vlaais are not overly sweet and are meant to bring out the flavors of fruits and other fillings. There aren't many good English versions of the recipe so here is my adaptation of a Dutch recipe I found on a Dutch site dedicated to the art of making vlaais. While making the pie I kept careful track of all the stages for easy replication complete with picture guide. Although that's mainly for myself because my memory is virtually non existent and I would completely forget how I made the damn pie in the first place. Here's what you need for the crust and cover:

• 400 gram flour
• a pinch of salt
• 40 gram fresh yeast (I used the fine grained dry version and for this you might want to halve the amount otherwise it goes over-the-top-fluffy)
• 30 gram butter. I use lactose free margerine.
• 4 spoons olive oil
• 200 cl (centiliter) milk, which is about (0.8 cups)
• 4 spoons brown sugar (white also works)
• 2 egg yolks

I've actually doubled the amounts from the original recipe for two reasons. First of all I've noticed that most of the time crust recipes are horrible wrong and give you a tiny amount of dough to work with. Since a vlaai is larger than an American pie I've doubled it. The amount you end up with will be more than plenty to make the crust and the top rasterized layer for a large pie, let's say 10 inches in diameter or more. I've also doubled it because the measurements don't need to be that precise and you will more likely end up with a good batch of dough.

This recipe is for an Apricot vlaai, which in my mind is the most typical one and the most bestest version. For the filling you will need:

• 2 cans of apricots (3 cans will most likely also work if you like a well filled pie or if you go for the large version)
• 1 jar of apricot preserve
• 1 canister of plain breadcrumbs (use about half a cup)

And here we go.

• Warm the milk but don't boil it and add the yeast. The yeast will immediately start to activate which you will notice because of a nice baking smell. If you've accidentally boiled the milk then just let it cool down for a bit. I actually used Lactaid milk for my vlaai.
• Put the salt in a large bowl and sift the flour over it. Yeah you can also just add it if you use the supermarket flour. It's usually very fine grained already.
• Make a small dent in the flour and add the butter, sugar, olive oil and egg yolks. I usually melt the butter a bit otherwise it won't really mix. But don't heat it or it will burn.
• Add the yeast and milk mixture.
• Carefully kneed the mass to a smooth and flexible dough. Use a mixer to start with but user your hands for the final parts where it becomes one big piece of dough. The dough should be elastic and not stick to your fingers. Add a bit more flour if it sticks too much. If the mass won't combine then you may not have enough milk.
• Put the bowl with dough away in a warm place to rise for about 30 minutes. I usually cover the bowl with a damp towel but a loosely tied plastic bag works as well.
• After the dough has risen, kneed it a little bit more to get some flexibility back into the mass. Roll it out in a circle and cover your pie or tart pan with a thin layer. The dough will rise even more in the oven so your crust layer can be quite thin. 
• Use a fork and pinch the layer of dough in a few bands.
• Add the apricot halves and cover the entire surface of the pie.
• Take a glass and add the apricot preserves with some breadcrumbs. Depending on how thick you want your crust you add more breadcrumbs. Then pour or spoon the mixture on top of the layer of apricot halves.
• With the leftover dough roll out another thin circle and use a sharp knife to cut out thin bands. Cover the top of the pie with these strips in a raster pattern. If your dough has been prepared properly you should find that cutting it is very easy.
• Take one egg and beat it in a glass or cup. Use a baker's brush to cover the top in a thin shiny layer. This will make the pie nicely brown and shiny.

Stick the pie in a preheated oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. After much toiling and expenditure of energy, you will, if all goes well, end up with something that looks something like the image on the right. For a full set of photos showing ingredients and baking process see the photo series on Flickr.

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For more information on the historical background of the vlaai I present the Wikipedia entry:

Vlaai is a pie or tart consisting of a pastry and filling. Originally Vlaai was created in Weert, Limburg and is therefore also known as Weertervlaai. It is a typical product from the southern regions of the Netherlands, but nowadays generally available all through the country and in parts of Belgium and Germany near to the border of the Netherlands. It is available in many different varieties of fruit fillings (cherry, apricot, plum, gooseberry, apple with raisins), a crumbled butter and sugar mix ("kruimelvlaai") and a cooked rice and custard porridge ("rijstevlaai").

An immersive tale taking place at the end of an old empire, an old city and an old sect. Around the final years of the 19th century in a thriving Istanbul, we meet police investigator Kamil Pasha who is asked to recover the lost 'Proof of God' by an old friend. Through tunnels and turrets, alleyways and ancient market places, we are drawn into a plot that takes place amongst a cast of vividly drawn characters. It is the description of the people and places that makes this book rather good. I must confess that the reveal of the nature of the Proof of God was not a let-down and one of the more well thought out religious historical plot devices. It sounded rather credible. The narrative flows well and as a reader you're easily swept away from your reading chair into the atmosphere of a crumbling empire. As far as atmosphere goes it can easily take on any of Jack Finney's work.

Some of the narrative felt a bit chaotic though. Frequent use of perspective and context switches made this book rather difficult to get through. A fair amount of the main characters, even though they were vividly drawn, felt similar in many ways. The fact that the protagonist's name is an anagram of one of the leading characters did not help and I frequently could not figure out who was speaking.

In that sense the narrative lost itself in the massive amount of immersion and the main thread of the story was frequently lost. Was this a novel about a lost relic? About cultural changes in the east at the end of the 19th century? Was it about women's rights in an era known for suppression?

Recently, as in the last 10 years or so, I've been slightly obsessed with the Victorian era. It's not often you find something that provides a glimpse into this ancient world. Not so ancient as it turns out since there are still people alive who walked the earth when Queen Victoria did so similarly. It is a rare treat though to find on the intertubes a voice recording of one of my favorite authors: Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle. Listen along with me as the old author talks about developing Sherlock and his later obsession with the supernatural:

Sometimes, depending on the building, I can suffer from intense acrophobia. Acrophobia is not the same as Vertigo, it is more a sensation or impression of size and proportion than it is about  dizziness. In fact I've never experienced dizziness. Quite the opposite, I become clearly aware of my surroundings. Acrophobia is considered the official fear of heights Phobia. However, some people who suffer from this will also experience the phenomenon when standing in or close to a large building. I experience this all the time, mostly as a religious experience. Let me explain.

My personal opinion on the main function of the brain is to act as a filter or protection device. Think of it as a mental safety helmet. The real world is not just a dangerous place, it's also an awesome place. Awesome as in it inspires awe. So much so that I think you need something in between to be able to cope with it. Hence the brain. People who have autism or other problems in the brain where they appear to be unable to take in signals from the outside might have the reality filter damaged. Acrophobia I believe is also such a phenomenon.

The first time I experienced acrophobia was in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. It was already difficult walking through the large doors but it was literally pacifying to enter into the open area below the dome. I think eventually I either crawled to the side or very slowly shuffled there clutching anything I could hang on to. All I remember is that I got the hell out of there as fast as possible, which was excruciatingly slow. When standing in such a large space, you become aware of your own minuteness. The sensation I have, when experiencing acrophobia, is that I could be yanked from the ground any second and hurtled into endless space. I want to flail my arms or go fetal even though I'm standing firmly on the ground. If a large building such as a cathedral can invoke a strong emotional response, then it is safe to assume that this works to some degree for most people. In essence, something of a grand scale like a massive hollow structure devoted to a deity has to penetrate through the protective filters inside the brain.

Most religions have adopted grand scale church architecture for as long as people have been able to raise the roof another few feet higher than the one before. Call it clever marketing, but maybe one that is unintentionally accurate. I'm not a very religious person but every time I experience acrophobia I wonder what might be out there. If there is such a thing, then it is larger and far beyond anything we can comprehend with our little brains.

P.S. The photo above is not St. Pauls, it's the Notre Dame in Paris, a church I have yet to dare enter.

In an official Papal communication, the holy highness has declared that yes indeed the fragments of bone downstairs in the Vatican somewhere are indeed the last remains of the apostle Paul. How can he be so sure? Well because he used science of course. As in:

"Tiny fragments of bone" in the sarcophagus were subjected to carbon dating, showing they "belong to someone who lived in the first or second century," the pope said in a homily carried on Italian television.

"This seems to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the Apostle St. Paul," Benedict said in Sunday's announcement.

This was just posted on the CNN website so you know it's all true and the Pope really said that. I really hope the Pope has a spin doctor. For such subjects as evolution science doesn't really work. It's just a theory. But when it comes to proving some dust somewhere is really the genuine article science is the better than faith apparently. I wonder how many bone fragments are in the deep Roman burial grounds below Vatican city that would carbon date roughly around the same time. No of course not, that sounds totally ridiculous. I think I'm finally going to carbon date my parents' couch to prove that it really was a piece of the Trojan Horse.

It is remarkable how soon we forget where our literary examples come from. People growing up in the 80s might remember the movie Gremlins, a story inspired by the tale of small green creatures that demolished machinery during World War II. Gremlins as we know them today were invented by Roald Dahl, the same person who wrote Willy Wonka. Open up any modern book and you will see derivatives of older works, something that should not be surprising. What is surprising is when people start to claim that the modern incarnations are the originals and that those that came before had it all wrong. Some of you might be familiar with Harry Potter and there are some that have even read the Artemis Fowl series. However, there are apparently few people who have read the direct predecessor to these books: The Once and Future King by Terence H. White.

Both Potter and Fowl are part of a literary genre called Bildungsromans. It's the kind of novel in which a small child grows up through trials and tribulations to ultimately become a great person of famous deeds. T. H. White in my view has written the ultimate Bildungsroman. The reason I prefer these books as opposed to let's say Potter (don't get me wrong I've read them all and loved them) is twofold:

First of all The Once and Future King has better corroborative detail, the art of deciding what things and events to use that help build the main character. You could think of corroborative detail as the hairs in a cat's fur. Mess up the direction of the hairs and you will surely piss off the cat. Pet the hairs in the right direction and you'll have your cat purr. It's the same with the details in a novel. Humans have perfect intuition when the hairs in a novel don't all point in the right direction. We just know. In my view Terrence White got it right in his books about the life of King Arthur. Even though the imaginary world of Potter is vivid and well drawn, it uses some long established tropes and that gives the books a bit of superficial sheen. Castles are large and majestic, hovels are small and run-down. In White's rendition nothing is traditional. Even the descriptions of castles and knights is unusual but highly appropriate, emotionally moving and not to mention: quite often hilarious. In the Disney version of this book the artists understood what White meant when he described the castle in which Arthur grows up. It is both solid, decrepit, sad, amusing and mysterious. This in comparison to the boring and unimaginative version we see in the recent 'Adventures of Merlin', in which the art director and designers couldn't think further than a large building that has towers.

Another difference between the original and the inspiration is how the characters are treated. White's main character is believable in the sense that he does things that are typical of a little boy. In both Potter and Fowl the little boys do the things we think we wished they would do in a perfect setting. In White's book the young boy's journey is to find out how to live in a hostile world and how to become a responsible adult. As he journeys he also finds out what an amazing world it really is. In Potter and Fowl the protagonists are on their way to become superhumans. The last point I believe is one of the reasons why The Once and Future King isn't very popular anymore. We have plenty of entertainment where normal human beings and the struggles of life are obsolete.

Literary progress is made by taking existing material and re-casting it in a new light. Sometimes when this happens new ideas are added and the original is improved. I'm sure I'm missing some great strides forward in modern children's literature but I surely can't see it right now. As I was preparing for this post I found the following ironic note in the Wikipedia biographical page for Terence H. White: J. K. Rowling has said that T. H. White's writing strongly influenced the Harry Potter books; several critics have compared Rowling's character Albus Dumbledore to White's absent-minded Merlyn, and Rowling herself has described White's Wart as "Harry's spiritual ancestor."

It's been quite a while in the making and I've been following the development of this game for a while since the first gameplay trailers came out. The game Heavy Rain appears to have solved a number of problems in creating fluent motion control while still keeping the player in the narrative. In the segment below from 2008 the action revolves around a fight but it should be clear from the video that this approach can also work for other situations.

Minimal guidance is provided through small hint icons on the screen, everything else is controlled through a game controller. Massive amounts of motion capture went into sequences likes this, at least that's what I gather from the interviews and developer notes. It looks like they've found a nice blending mechanism that is fluid and doesn't break up when the user does something out of the range of the motion library provided. The result is quite stunning if this is actual gameplay. Click on the image below to see some early footage. More recent gameplay from the 2009 E3 convention can be found all over YouTube and the internet. This is a game I'll be following over the next few months until it's release.

In a previous post I got very excited about the prospects of new and very interesting story devices used in the upcoming game BioShock 2. The use of a moral guide sitting on your virtual shoulder throughout the game appealed to me as a good approach specifically for immersive games. It appears however that the makers haven't figured that part out yet. In a behind the-scenes featurette, the team expands on level design and weapon capabilities and barely hints to the story telling potential they have. From executive producer Allyssa Finley we could get the impression that the sequel is a typical: let's do all the cool stuff we didn't do in the first one. Probably a recipe to sell lots of boxes, but probably not enough to make the sequel the ground breaking game the first one was.  Of course I could be wrong, it's too early to tell, but see for yourself in the mini documentary on the making of BioShock 2:

For the first time I've read a book I completely misinterpreted. Or maybe that's the whole point of the short novel The Stranger by Albert Camus. Even now I still don't really know what to think of it. Sure, I've read the Wikipedia entry and the introduction, the foreword, the analysis, companion, etc, but it still doesn't quite sit well with me. It's a good book. In fact it's a superb book and the Nobel Prize for literature that Camus received for his work is more than deserved. But it still doesn't sit quite well with me, and that, I'm convinced, is the entire point.

The short story describes a number of strange events in the otherwise boring life of the main character who we only know as Meursault. It becomes rapidly clear that this personage has a rather peculiar view on life. It's not that he's manic depressive. He can't even be labeled depressed at all, but somehow this man goes through life empty with his only interest the sensory stimuli provided by the beach, the sea and his mistress. Then again he is not a pure hedonist. It is these odd internal conflicts which I believe makes readers quite uncomfortable reading the story. Of course all of this is to prove a point.

At first I believed that the pivotal point in the book revolved around Meursault apparently killing a man without any reason at all other than that the sun was in his eyes. For a while this event appears to represent the theme of absurdity which Camus tried to instill in the novel. Only after reading the later parts a few times did I realize that the responses to the crime of those around Meursault were what constituted the real absurdity. Meursault is questioned about his motives by the representatives of the law but they are more concerned with the fact he did not show the expected emotions at his mother's funeral as they seem to be with the odd murder. All the secondary characters are trying to make sense of the world while the protagonist takes life an sich.

As a reader you feel yourself stepping away from all those characters around the protagonist who are trying to either tell him how he should feel or who are trying to obtain some form of confession or meaning. It is the view of the main character of the events in the later part of the book that makes this such a fantastic story. It is as if you're in a slight psychological earthquake in which you find yourself re-orienting after the tremors stop. In that sense the absurdity of life that Camus first and foremost tried to convey is very well presented and represented. So much so that at some point the irrationality of the crime Meursault commits fades into the background.

After playing BioShock I felt that we had finally made some careful strides into interactive narrative that had some real story components. I've had lots of discussions on what exactly what 'story' means in games and what it meant especially for BioShock but I think most people agree that the game was a huge step into the right direction. It has been bothering me as to exactly what those story elements were that were so different from anything else we've seen. Especially since the game is essentially a shooter much like the rest of the genre.

I think that certain subtle design choices in the game contributed to the story effect that is lacking in other games. The game is basically a branching narrative with three choices and three outcomes: good, neutral and evil. So from that perspective the game is even less interactive since a lot of other games provide much more branching and richness. The important factor, the ingredient that made it different I believe was the emotional connection that was created between two types of characters you encountered throughout the game: the little sisters and the big daddies. These two characters are the stereotypical small innocent child and large lumbering brute. In the game they have a symbiotic relationship, they help each other out and your task is to navigate them throughout the levels. The little sisters additionally provide you with a moral choice: harvest them for their power or keep them alive so that they might help you later on. 

A lot of interesting plot twists happen in BioShock and some are quite well done and somewhat original: the person helping you turns out to be the bad guy. Again, looking back the big story parts were the little children running around helped by the dumb protective brutes. In BioShock 2 they seemed to have figured out that this was the most important part of the game that conveyed story and they appeared to have exploited it rather well in the sequel. You now play one of the dumb brutes who helps a little sister through the dangerous world of Rapture. A clever decision since now you have a constant moral and much more human feedback channel sitting on your shoulder. I mean 'more human' as opposed to the unreachable narrator that contacts you on your radio every now and then. It looks like the designers have played on this new concept rather well and pose various obstacles and problems along the way that play on an emotional level raher than a resource maximization level. This might finally break the game away from the first person shooter genre even though most of your interaction plays out in shooting and killing.

Personally I'm looking forward to playing this game. I am really curious if this installment takes yet another step in the right direction. Regardless, the artwork and music appears to be top-notch again, which is enough reason for me to be excited.

The octopus is a very curious creature. Very early on in evolution this animal figured out how to survive and thrive and physically adapt. It was so successful that it hasn't even changed much for thousands of years. However, It is also stuck in a local maximum. The octopus is very evolved but it's stuck, it's adaptation has reached a point where it would have to devolve first in order to progress. That phenomenon is called a local maximum. You could say it's max-ed out its evolutionary options. An octopus has remarkable eyes, very different from the rest of the animal kingdom. But because of it's shape it's also stuck with that design. An octopus' eye doesn't have an iris like we know it for example, instead it has a hole the shape of a horizontal rectangle that filters light. It works very well but it can't be improved upon.

There's something interesting about the local maximum in evolution. I've often wondered if the same principle applies to knowledge as well. Way back when the ancient Greeks started to define the foundation of philosophy they made certain assumptions and chose different paths of investigation. Perhaps those choices have resulted in us being in a local maximum of intellectual development. We know a lot and we can surely know a lot more, but perhaps because of our intellectual choices in the past, we will never be in a position to know everything. More accurately: maybe we have made it impossible to ever have an accurate and complete picture of reality.

All of this hinges on one important assumption, which is that with our choices we shape reality. If that were not the case then the chances of being able to access all knowledge is almost 100%. Given enough time we would be able to search and re-search all knowledge to find the gaps and fill them. Only if we change the shape of reality (maybe ever so slightly) do we create a situation where we cut ourselves off from parts of knowledge. More and more evidence in physics suggests that this is indeed happening. At the sub-atomic level, particles behave in amazingly strange ways and some of the observed behavior can only be explained if we assume that our observation of the particles influences their behavior. In modern physics we went from Das Ding an sich, to: Das Ding nimmer an sich.

Finally I brought myself to finish the lauded short novel 'The Mystery of the Yellow Room' by Gaston Leroux. It is hailed as one of the most original works of mystery fiction written and has been named as one of the pioneers of the locked room genre. We are introduced to the young journalist Joseph Rouletabille who throws himself into the investigation of a mysterious murder at Chateau du Glandier. A murder that takes place in a room that has been locked from the inside with no possible means of escape. Right away we are introduced to one of the many plot holes in the novel. There is no murder. Miss Stangerson who is the target of the attack and who is discovered with a bump on her head in the room after she screams murder, isn't actually killed. In fact she is assaulted no less than three times in various forms and by the end of the novel she has gone quite insane but is still alive. Not once in the novel is poor Miss Stangerson properly interviewed and asked what happened. Furthermore she seems to never actually say anything anywhere in the novel. As the most prominent piece of evidence she is blatantly ignored, something even the most mysoginistic Victorian didn't do.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room was first published as a novel in 1908, 40 years after Wilkie Collins published his mystery: The Moontone. I'm comparing Leroux's work to that of Collins because even though Collins was clearly experimenting with the genre, he had a much firmer grasp than Leroux ever did. Leroux breaks one of the most important rules in the mystery business: you have to give the reader all the information that is available to the detective before the reveal. In the case of the Yellow Room we are given everything we need to know, which is a large amount of information, after the explanation of the plot. Even though the mechanism by which the 'murder' is committed appears to be very mature and innovating, it relies on so many assumptions and improbable events that it loses much of it's entertainment value when it is finally revealed.

It took me three weeks to finish this book. Most of that was spent trying to figure out who all the characters in the novel are and where they are at various times (the novel includes maps and diagrams that don't help). For someone who wrote the very human The Phantom of the Opera, the Yellow Room one has very few real people in it. Not only does the over enthusiastic detective not feel very human, he's not even remotely likable. Unlike Sherlock Holmes who was quite the unpleasant character who fascinates readers to this day.

Not so long ago on the timeline of human development, give or take 500 years, we went through a remarkable transformation as to the way we perceive the permanence of knowledge. Up to that point knowledge was heavily guarded and well protected in thickly bound books. The middle ages did not produce much but they did re-instate the importance of the written word. Before that we were using papyrus which does not hold together very well and could very well be the most flammable substance on the planet.

The moment the printing press was discovered we also changed our perspective on the importance of durable knowledge. I'm not talking about the fragility of knowledge, but rather providing future generations with a record of what we know today. We moved from single, valuable and well designed tomes to flimsy but widespread works of print. Our assumption became: the more we have of it the higher the chance one or two copies will survive throughout the ages. If we take early works of print as an example then we might be in for a surprise. Out of the hundreds of printed books on the Gutenberg press, only a few remain.

A very long time ago, in a land known today as Egypt, 'primitive' people knew something we have forgotten. If you want to ensure that your knowledge is preserved for all time you write it on gold. Gold doesn't rust, it is not sensitive to elements in the air or water. As such it literally preserves forever. The custom of writing on gold was maintained for a long time up until 500 BC as we know from the Pyrgi Tablets. We changed to more fragile forms of knowledge storage when we found out that when the layman could read our words we could influence them. For that we needed widely disseminated but unfortunately fragile knowledge.

We must not value our knowledge much to trust it to contemporary paper and magnetic disks. Ironically CDROMs do not last as long as books and wear out in about 50 years. Why do we think that our collective body of knowledge can be preserved for the next 500 years without investing in durable storage? Will future generations wonder why they have detailed records of ancient rulers why they can't find a single thread of evidence on the existence of Obama?

Several people become violently ill in a short span of time, randomly scattered throughout New York City. It marks the beginning of a feverish hunt to track down the cause and causers of a bio-engineered virus ready to be deployed. CDC representative Alice Austen blows the whistle on what had been labeled unusual natural causes of death. In rapid succession the novel bounces around both New York and Iraq, trailblazing after an unknown force set to release a deadly amount of viruses into the Big Apple.

Most of the novel thrives on installing a strong sense of paranoia in the reader, and does so successfully. If the information provided in the book is accurate, then the details in the novel are to be taken as mostly true and viable, generating an even stronger sense of paranoia. Some of the parts of the book read more like a documentary than a work of fiction. It is very understandable if the author got caught up in the facts behind the fiction and to a large extend the background information does help to raise tension. However, the background information sometimes detracts from the assumed purpose of the book, which is to be a high paced thriller.

One thing that suffers in this novel is a sense of character development. Even though the victims are rendered very realistically and their suffering comes across as quite genuine, the main characters remain full of undeveloped potential. Not much information is provided for the main character of Alice Austen and those bits and pieces that are given are more hinted at than fully developed. Even if the book had been much longer, it would have provided yet more human depth to the paranoia than is already the case.

It is remarkable that Richard Preston can keep up the high pace of publication output while at the same time doing thorough research on the background of his novels. Sometimes the content feels a bit like a Michael Crichton novel, with the difference that Preston goes into much more technical detail and does not dumb down the wording. In other novels, notably those that were written in collaboration with Lincoln Child, the science takes more of a backseat and atmosphere comes to the foot light. It would be quite interesting to see what would happen if Richard Preston applied the same kind of research depth to the Pendergast series.

Hector is a young Jesuit priest who becomes entangled in plot to destroy the school where he works and a race to uncover the meaning of a mysterious real-life book called the Voynich manuscript. During his off hours as a teacher at a Jesuit school in Spain, Hector teams up with two internet friends to track down clues hidden in tunnels and shadows that might help to decode a book which might be a hoax or might contain the secrets revealed by God him/herself.

Just finished an early review copy of this book called The Book of God and Physics by Enrique Joven, or I maybe should rather say Dr. Joven, and I'm completely confused. I'm not sure if I read a novel, a series of essays on the mitigation between creationists vs darwinists, a history textbook on astronomy or a scientific essay on the meaning of the Voynich manuscript. To finish this off the author tells us many times throughout the book that all the research was done with Google and Wikipedia. And exhale. Except that instead of telling us this at the end, we find it in the introduction. The introduction does not do the book much service. It sets up certain expectations and confusions as to what is going to follow. From the introduction and the comparisons to other works of the same genre, the author appears to want to show kids that anyone with a computer can unlock history's mysteries. A worthy goal to be honest, but the message gets diluted in between all the other imporant goals.

For the first time in reading a novel did I see an author directly compare his book to other people's works. Dr. Joven creates a direct parallel to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and later on uses the same foxhunt pattern to chase down an all important document. By doing so, the author invites the readers to keep comparing this book to the one by Dan Brown. Further on the author does something similar by comparing the sleuthing of Hector to that undertaken by the main character in the television show House MD. Even though the author's intentions are clearly very admirable, they result in setting up an arrogant tone with these comparisons. Throughout the book various puzzles are introduced that unlock the next step to finding more information that can help decode the Voynich manuscript. Some of the puzzles are quite clever and entertaining, some of them require a PhD in math and feel like another way in which the author places himself above the reader. This is too bad because the tone of the protagonist Hector has towards his students feels very real and genuine, not to mention endearing.

The sense that we're reading a book in which the author lists his favorite scientific conundrums and historical events is heightened by passages and paragraphs that stand alone and do not appear to have anything to do with the rest of the novel. For instance on page 173 the author elaborates in detail on a concept called Plank's Wall that does not seem to relate to anything else in the story. It is an interesting piece of knowledge but feels like an unused Chekov's Gun: we're told something that appears important but isn't used in the rest of the puzzle or the book.

In truth I must say that I enjoyed the book. Mainly because it is clear that the author has great potential. As such this book is pretty good for a first novel. I'm curious to see what the next installment will be because there are strong hints at the end towards a sequel.

It's been fascinating me for years now, one of the last remaining true mysteries of medieval times: the Voynich Manuscript. This singular book, now stored in the rare book collection at Yale, contains more than 200 pages of unintelligible writings and drawings. Many cryptographer have broken their brains over the volume and none has been able to decipher its contents. Many theories exist as to what the writing means and what the images depict but so far we still don't have a clue. Roughly speaking this book is about 400 years old and written in a period when we had just discovered movable type and with it the printing press. Nothing in the manuscript is printed however and all of the 200 pages are hand drawn and hand written. Producing this book must have taken years of intense labour.

As to what the book says I have my own ideas, none of which are based on cryptology. My own train of thought started with the question: what is its purpose? First of all let's look closely at the one element in the book we can work with: the drawings, those things we can the most easily decipher because they do not appear to be encoded. Throughout the book are depicted either female nudes in odd shaped cylinders or green pools, astronomical charts or fantastical plants and flowers. I would like to focus on the imagery of plants because there is something striking to the forms chosen. I've included an image taken from the full scanned version as made available by Yale showing a typical page. Most of the page is covered by a drawing of a plant of sorts and around the lower portion can be seen some text grouped around the illustration.

What we see here is a plant does not exist. Some scholars have argued that certain depictions of plants resemble species found in the Americas, but those theories have been largely refuted. A clear indication that the plant shown here is utter fantasy can be seen from the way in which the roots of the plants are drawn: in clearly geometrical shapes. To my knowledge there does not exist a plant that has square roots (no pun intended) In this fact I believe we can glean the meaning of the contents of the book.

Before I go into the analysis I would like to add a couple of what I think are important details regarding the context in which the book was produced. In those days books were extremely valuable. It took a lot of effort and costly materials to produce a single tome. However, here we have a 200+ page construction that must have represented quite a fortune and did not have any apparent use for someone who could not read it. Since we can not directly map the text to any known written language, we are either dealing with a work that was never meant to be read or a book which contents is literally meaningless except to the person who wrote it. This brings me to two possible theories as to the purpose and meaning of the book:

1) The small cramped writing style in a complicated flourish, combined with drawings that are quite: insane, we can conclude that this book was written by perhaps a monk who was quite literally insane. It is important to mention that the drawings do not conform to people suffering from visual side effects of migraines. Those headache inspired drawings revolve around repetitive geometrical patterns that are usually not well integrated with the rest of the composition and contents. Another element supporting the insanity conclusion comes from the fact that even though each image is fantastical and bizarre, the extrapolation each time appears to start with a regular plant that then slowly turns into something grotesque. A pattern often seen in drawings by the mentally disturbed, where an inner logical projected onto something real is twisted into something out of proportion.

In the time the book was created, monks meticulously copied book after book by hand. They often did this under extreme solitary conditions, in badly ventilated rooms surrounded using dangerous materials such as mercury and lead. It is plausible that one of these monks slowly stole each page of vellum from the incoming supply over long periods of time and poured out his mental anguish onto the animal skin. To what purpose the monk created the work only he or she ever knew.

2) The second theory is more grounded in human needs and greeds. If the book was not produced by an unstable monk who wrote the work over a long period of time, then the other alternative is that it was produced on purpose as is. Some suggest the book was created as a hoax to torment and tease the court alchemists of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary. Such hoaxes have been known to happen but usually in the form of a one line puzzle or page long encrypted riddle. Considering the effort and cost of the Voynich Manuscript I think we can assume that this was not the case.

However, the book may have served another purpose. Right around the time the book was produced we were in the rapidly spreading turmoil of church vs science. Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo were all knee deep in trying to devise new natural laws and at the same time save their skin from the stake. Slowly the church lost the battle over witchcraft and it became more and more difficult to prove who was a witch and who wasn't. The church not only needed a guide or manual but proof that witchcraft actually existed. What better way to do this than by producing a large work of facts nobody could read? The book had to appear real and therefor the writing conforms to the structure of the written language, which is reason it obeys Zipfz's Law. At the same time the lettering is very fanciful and could be interpreted as having been inspired by elves and other such chimerical figures. The same goes for the pictures depicted in the book. All the plants appear to be based on true plant life but they have something extra, something fanciful, something only a witch would understand and use. Furthermore it could be argued that the book can serve two similar purposes. If the world leaned towards science (alchemy) it could be used to prove witches existed, if on the other hand the believes leaned towards witchcraft, then the book could be said to contain the ways to produce gold and support the new sciences (alchemy). Either way the church or the owner was safe and had a secret weapon that would work both ways.

Whatever the purpose of the book, one thing is clear: if it has not been decoded after all these years by the most brilliant cryptography minds in history, then chances are it's not supposed to be decoded. Maybe because it was never meant to be something containing a real language. As with all works in print and on paper you have to ask yourself the question: what did the author want to communicate, what is its purpose?