Category Archives: Books

The Divine Code of Life

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According to the back flap on his book, Dr. Kazuo Murakami is “one of the top geneticists in the world and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, one of Japan’s leading research universities.”

In The Divine Code of Life, he makes his case for the idea that how we think can activate good dormant genes and switch off negative ones. Here are a few factoids that got some high-liter:

  • “For any one child, there are seventy trillion possible combinations of genes.”
  • “As far as we can tell, only about 5 to 10 percent of our genes are actually working; what the rest are doing remains unknown.”
  • “All living things use the same genetic code.”
  • “Imagine that you could collect all the DNA from the world’s population of six billion people. It would weigh only as much as a single grain of rice.”
  • “The information contained in our genes, if printed in book form, would amount to three thousand volumes each a thousand pages long.”

I can’t say that this was a fun read, but I like the idea that we can have some control over something as… basic? … as our genes. I suspect this is where some of the really big medical breakthroughs will happen. Are happening.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

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Last week I read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. I’ve been sorting out my thoughts about the book but I’m not there yet. I think it’s going to take a while. But I want to get something down here while the story (and my impressions) are still fresh in my mind. So, this will be one of those stream-of-consciousness posts (not a real review of the book).

GMJ&TSC is fiction. It is the story (a story) about the life and death of Jesus and his twin brother Christ (hardly a spoiler since it’s the title).

I found the style of the book very different from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The book read very quickly. The chapters are very short with little or no character development.

To me it felt as though Pullman was trying to condense the stories most Christians grew up with to the bare “facts” (The Childhood of Jesus, Jesus Scandalises the Scribes, The Death of John, etc). Now that I think about it, each chapter read like a Cliffs Note.

Here’s how Pullman describes the book on the back of the dust cover:

“The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”

TRUTH and HISTORY –and the relationship between the two– is a common theme throughout GMJ&TSC:

“If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.” (pg 99)

Deeply “religious” people are often offended when someone takes liberties with their story. (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Dutch cartoonist’s depiction of Mohammed, etc) And if you happen to believe that every word of the King James Bible is literally true and an exact account of the life and death of Jesus, you probably won’t find this book a good read.

If on the other hand, you aren’t ready to stop thinking about such things, you might. I know that I did. Here are some questions it raised for me:

  • If you wanted to start a religion that would last thousands of years, how would you go about it?
  • How would Jesus feel about the religion that is based on his life and death?
  • Could Christianity have taken hold if Jesus had lived at any other time or place?
  • If the story of Jesus’ life/death –as we have known it for 2,000 years– was shown to be inaccurate, would it be better to know the truth, or to allow Christianity to continue to be based on events that never happened?

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Buddha’s Brain

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Amazon: “Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, a neuropsychologist and a neurologist and both practicing Buddhists, show us just how the brain programs us to experience the world a certain way by combining information from the external world with information held in neural pathways within the brain. These pathways operate in the background of our awareness, influencing our conscious mental activity.”

This book was a bit of a struggle for me so the following notes are intended for my own reference and make little sense outside the context of the book.

The self is like someone running behind a parade that is already well under way, continually calling out: “See what I created!” (pg 212)

In the brain, every manifestation of self is impermanent. The self is continually constructed, deconstructed, and constructed again. (pg 212)

We experience “now” not as a thin sliver of time in which each snapshot of experience appears sharply and ends abruptly, but as a moving interval roughly 1-3 seconds long that blurs and fades at each end. (pg 213)

At any moment, the parts of the self that are present depend on many factors, including genetic heritage, personal history, temperament, and situations. In particular, self depends on a lot of feeling tone of experience. When the feeling tone is neutral, the self tends to fade into the background. But as soon as something distinctly pleasant or unpleasant appears, the self quickly mobilizes. The self organizes around strong desires. Which comes first: Do “I” form a desire? Or does desire from and “I?” (pg 213)

The self has no inherent, unconditional, absolute existence apart from the network of causes it arises from, in, and as. (pg 213)

The self is truly a fictional character. (pg 214)

Scott Adams: Religion as road maps

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“Religions are like different maps whose routes all lead to the collective good of society. Some maps take their followers over rugged terrain. Other maps have easier paths. Some of the travelers of each route will be assigned the job of being the protectors and interpreters of the map. They will teach the young to respect it and be suspicious of other maps.

“Okay,” I said, “but who made the maps in the first place?”

“The maps were made by the people who went first and didn’t die. The maps that survive are the ones that work,” he said.

At last, he had presented a target for me to attack. “Are you saying that all the religions work? What about all the people who have been killed in religious wars?”

“You can’t judge the value of a thing by looking only at costs. In many countries, more people die from hospital errors than religious wars, but no one accuses hospitals of being evil. Religious people are happier, they live longer, have fewer accidents, and stay out of trouble compared to nonreligious people. From society’s viewpoint, religion works.”

— From God’s Debris by Scott Adams

Once A Spy, by Keith Thompson

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“(This) darkly satirical thriller, features an unlikely, if endearing, father-son spy duo: retired appliance salesman Drummond Clark, who at age 64 suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and Charlie Clark, a down-on-his-luck gambler who owes $23,000 to Russian loan sharks. Soon after Charlie rescues Drummond from the Brooklyn streets, where he’d been wandering, the older man’s house blows up and the two barely escape with their lives. Clark and son begin an adrenaline-fueled cross-country flight in which they must evade ruthless CIA assassins long enough to understand why they’re being targeted. During rare moments of lucidity, Drummond hotwires a car and effortlessly kills multiple assailants, suggesting to Charlie he was once much more than just a washing machine salesman. Poignant themes of love and redemption underpin an action-packed story line that includes exotic locales, high-tech gadgetry, and international intrigue.”

A good read. Might even make a good movie. Recommended.

Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information

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I confess the title of this book hooked me. I saw an interview with Oxford professor Vlatko Vedral and was intrigued by the idea that everything (me and the universe) can be reduced to bits of information. (Wikipedia)

But I can’t say I enjoyed (or understood) most of the book. I suspect he knows his stuff but just isn’t very good at explaining it to non-phyicists. Better reads: Quantum Enigma; Biocentrism.

Philip Pullman on censorship and free speech

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Philip Pullman is the author of His Dark Materials, the book I just finished reading. His latest book is titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Pullman, addressing an audience at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, was asked about whether his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was offensive. Here’s his reply:

“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.”

His Dark Materials

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Just finished Northern Lights, the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. As we used to say back in the sixties, “Heavy.”

I’ve caught parts of The Golden Compass (the book’s North American title) on cable and wanted to see how the movie compared to the novel. Very well, it turns out. I’m eager to get on to Books 2 and 3.

I enjoyed most of the Harry Potter books –and it’s probably unfair to compare the two– but Pullman challenges readers in a way that Ms. Rowling never did.

Definitely on the short list for the next church bonfire.

UPDATE: Finished the third book today and I’m a little numb. I read somewhere that Pullman wrote the book for “young adults.” I’m not sure what that means… teenagers? Younger? Whatever, I wish I had read the book in my teens, although I’m not sure how much I would have understood. Maybe that’s the point.

I thought it was a terrific story. Life and Death; Sin and Redemption; Good and Evil; Witches and Angles. And a less-than-attractive view of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Easy to see why they weren’t keen on a sequel to The Golden Compass.

If you learned everything you needed to know in Sunday School, you can skip this book but I found the book to be very spiritual and mostly uplifting. A couple of quotes:

“I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn’t.” pg 954

“We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.” pg 854

“If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could do it as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water that way instead of this.”

Cryptonomicon: Wisdom teeth

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I don’t know when I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon for the first time. My first post here was back in 2003. I linked to a horrifying (to me) passage that deserves an encore.

Wisdom. A few years ago, when Randy became tired of the ceaseless pressure in his lower jaw, he went out onto the north-central Californian oral-surgery market looking for someone to extract wisdom teeth. His health plan covered this, so price was not an obstacle. His dentist took one of those big cinemascopic wraparound X-rays of his entire lower head, the kind where they pack your mouth with half a roll of high-speed film and then clamp your head in a jig and the X-ray machine revolves around you spraying radiation through a slit, as the entire staff of the dentist’s office hits the deck behind a lead wall, resulting in a printed image that is a none-too-appetizing distortion of his jaw into a single flat plane. Looking at it, Randy eschewed cruder analogies like “head of a man run over several times by steamroller while lying flat on his back” and tried to think of it as a mapping transformation—just one more in mankind’s long history of ill-advisedly trying to represent three-D stuff on a flat plane. The corners of this coordinate plane were anchored by the wisdom teeth themselves, which even to the dentally unsophisticated Randy looked just a little disturbing in that each one was about the size of his thumb (though maybe this was just a distortion in the coordinate transform—like the famously swollen Greenland of Mercator) and they were pretty far away from any other teeth, which (logically) would seem to put them in parts of his body not normally considered to be within a dentist’s purview, and they were at the wrong angle—not just a little crooked, but verging on upside down and backwards. At first he just chalked all of this up to the Greenland phenomenon. With his Jaw-map in hand, he hit the streets of Three Siblings-land looking for an oral surgeon. It was already beginning to work on him psychologically. Those were some big-ass teeth! Brought into being by the workings of relict DNA strands from the hunter- gatherer epoch. Designed for reducing tree bark and mammoth gristle to easily digestible paste. Now these boulders of living enamel were horrifyingly adrift in a gracile cro-magnon head that simply did not have room for them. Think of the sheer extra weight he had been carrying around. Think of the use that priceless head-real-estate could have been put to. When they were gone, what would fill up the four giant molar—shaped voids in his melon? It was moot until he could find someone to get rid of them. But one oral surgeon after another turned him down. They would put the X-ray up on their light boxes, stare into it and blanch. Maybe it was just the pale light coining out of the light-boxes but Randy could have sworn they were blanching. Disingenuously—as if wisdom teeth normally grew someplace completely different—they all pointed out that the wisdom teeth were buried deep, deep, deep in Randy’s head. The lowers were so fir back in his jaw that removing them would practically break the jawbone in twain structurally; from there, one fuse move would send a surgical-steel demolition pick into his middle ear. The uppers were so deep in his skull that the roots were twined around the parts of his brain responsible for perceiving the color blue (on one side) and being able to suspend one’s disbelief in bad movies (on the other) and between these teeth and actual air, light and saliva lay many strata of skin, meat, cartilage, major nerve-cables, brain-feeding arteries, bulging caches of lymph nodes, girders and trusses of bone, rich marrow that was working just fine thank you, a few glands whose functions were unsettlingly poorly understood, and many of the other things that made Randy Randy, all of them definitely filing into the category of sleeping dogs.

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