Book Log – The Known World

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The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Stacey gave me this one Christmas or birthday; It was an NPR recommendation. It is one of those books that sit on the To Be Read shelf, looking somewhat appealing, but always overshadowed by a flashier title next to it.

But I made a decision to attack those piles of attractive-but-somehow-second-choice books on my shelf, and this was the second one from that list (The Time Traveler being the first).

It’s a very good book, if a book about the institution of slavery can be said to be “good”. It delves into the lesser known quirks of the time, such as free blacks living amongst slaves, and, in fact, owning slaves. If a paper is all that stands between a black man and slavery, what happens when the paper is eaten?

As interesting (and unsettling) as the topic was, the real shining point was the storytelling technique. There was a smooth jumping back and forth in time, often pausing in the middle of a paragraph in the “present” and telling the full fate of a character in a sentence or two. It reminded me of “Run, Lola, Run”, when we would often see a series of snapshots showing the fate of someone Lola bumped into.

The characters are complex and nuanced, and there are a lot of them, all deftly painted.

It’s not my typical sort of book, but I’m glad I read it, possibly because of that.

School All Year Round

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I think about schools a lot. I do it even more now that I’m involved in schooling again, vicariously.

I mostly think about alternate systems of education, the other ways to skin this cat. Lately, I’m more and more enamored with the idea of a year-round school where there are four quarters, and students can pick 3 to attend, choosing when the Big Break will be winter, summer, spring, or fall.

I did a search on it:

From http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-3/year.htm:

Year-round education (YRE) is a concept which reorganizes the school year to provide more continuous learning by spacing the long summer vacation into shorter, more frequent vacations throughout the year (Johnson, 2000). Year-round schools may be on a single-track or multi-track schedule. A single-track schedule generally calls for an instructional year of 180 days, with short breaks (or intersessions) interspersed throughout the school year. A multi-track schedule staggers the instructional and vacation/intersession periods of each track throughout the entire year, so that some students are receiving instruction while others are on vacation.

For example, in a single-track 45/15 design, the year is divided into four nine-week terms separated by three-week vacations or intersessions. All students and teachers attend school for nine weeks (45 days), then are on a three-week vacation (15 days). This sequence is repeated four times each year. Alternatively, in a multi-track 45/15 design, students are normally divided into four groups. During a 12-week period, all students receive nine weeks of instruction and three weeks of vacation, but only three of the four groups are in school at one time, while the fourth group is on vacation. When the vacation group returns, another group leaves for a three-week vacation.

Thus, in the multi-track configuration, the enrollment in existing schools can be increased by one-third, or, alternatively, current class size can be reduced (Minnesota, 1999). Moreover, money which would otherwise have been spent on construction of new schools may be utilized to pay additional salary to teachers who elect to extend their contract on the multi-track year-round schedule. Therefore, the annual income of these teachers can conceivably be increased by one-third, and the effective supply of teachers can be increased by one-third (Liebman, 1959). Although each schedule has unique benefits and challenges for the teaching staff, neither schedule implies that the teacher will be working the entire year.

I like the idea of multi-track system. Whether you break it up by quarters or three week breaks out of 12, it opens possibilities. You can decrease class size by 33%. Teachers either get paid more, or more teachers are hired, or a mix. Since there is a dearth of good teachers, you get the opportunity to use the teachers you have more.

The effect on the economy would be interesting as well: It would, to an extent, load balance things like vacation crowds (the lines at Disney will equalize throughout the year, assuming the whole country switched over) and “summer jobs”.

Something to think about.

Book Log – Time Traveler

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Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality by Dr. Ronald L. Mallett with Bruce Henderson

terracinque got me this a couple years back, charging me with reading it and letting her know if it was any good.

Well, it’s okay.

The book itself is fine, tells a sort of interesting true-life tale of the young black man, Ronald Mallett, who loses his father, and as a result aspires to become a scientist so that he can invent a time machine like he read about in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

In the end, he has come up with a model that would possibly allow time travel. The book ends with him searching for funding to do the experiments that would lead to the device, around 2006-2007. The concept is neat from the narrative possibilities: using lasers, you create a circle of light which according to the math, at sufficient power, creates “closed timelike lines” which would be a key to time travel.

The ramifications provide an interesting basis for a time travel story, and in fact, is pretty much the basis for independent film “Primer”.

– You can’t travel further back in time than when the time machine is first turned on.
– You only enter in and out of the machine… the machine is not TARDIS like, in that if it’s in a lab, you enter and exit there, not, say, in Ancient Egypt.
– The old grandfather paradoxes can still be in play, unless rectified by the infinitely splitting universes theory.
– It also solves the moving galaxy issue, where if you’re in a Delorean time machine and you go back to 1955, wouldn’t you end up at the point in space where the Earth was at that time, many thousands of miles away in space? In this way, the time machine is rooted to the Earth, giving fixed reference point for safe travel, like an infinite slinky.

You can imagine turning on the machine, and instantly hundreds or thousands of people from the future walking out.

With this all in mind, I was of course disappointed that the book ends without any experimental progress.

So, of course I take a trip over to Wikipedia to see where he’s gotten to. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t gotten anywhere, and furthermore, some very severe objections have been raised to his theory. There’s a bunch of math stuff, but the kicker is that “even if Mallett’s choice of spacetime were correct, the energy required to twist spacetime sufficiently would be huge, and that with lasers of the type in use today the ring would have to be much larger in circumference than the observable universe.”1

So. It wouldn’t fit in a Delorean.

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1 Wikipedia article on Ronald Mallett

Book Log – Juliet, Naked

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Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

I’m a little more self-aware than usual writing this, because this book is about a reclusive singer who contacts someone who posted a review of his work online.

So, Nick, if you’re reading this, thanks. You’re awesome. I’ve loved everything you’ve ever written, except Fever Pitch which I couldn’t get through, because it was like you were writing another language. I especially miss your Believer column.

I liked this one a lot. It hasn’t replaced About a Boy or How to Be Good or High Fidelity, in my rankings but it’s still great.

I have to tell you, I got mixed up. I thought this was one of your entries in the Young Adult category (and honestly, Slam shows me you know how to do that genre really well, at least, from the perspective of someone who isn’t in that demographic), but got confused when it was about middle-aged people. That seemed bold, risky. But then, I guess, I was just mistaken. It’s just a regular book.

A really good regular book, I mean.

Maybe you could figure out how to write that Young Adult book that’s about a bunch of middle aged people. Might be an interesting challenge. Think about it.

Or maybe you could just re-brand this one. It’s got “naked” in the title, so it’ll at least pique their interest.

Book Log – Tom Stoppard Plays: 5

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Tom Stoppard Plays: 5 by Tom Stoppard

A collection including Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night & Day, Indian Ink, and, one of my top 5 favorite plays, Hapgood.

Seriously, why hasn’t anyone done Hapgood around here? Stacey looks at me pitifully when I’ve asked her that repeatedly over the 13 years I’ve known her. She just doesn’t think it would sell, or something. Ha! Tom Stoppard! Spies! Intrigue! Humor! Strong female lead!

I saw a production at Northwestern that was perfect. I guess I’m just asking for trouble wanting to see it again.

Anyway, the other plays in here are good, too.