Hung Truong: The Blog!

The Victorian Internet – Book Review

A book that I read recently, Connected, made reference to another book called The Victorian Internet. I checked it out of the library and ended up reading it pretty quickly. Despite the name, the Victorian Internet is not a sci-fi alternate history novel. It’s about the history of the internet before the internet: the telegraph.

Much of the book is centered around how the telegraph came to exist. It describes the setup of optical telegraph systems where numerous towers were constructed to the laying of thousands of miles of electrical cable, some across the ocean. This part of the book was mostly a bore to me. While it’s nice to know that there was a long process to standardize codes and international regulations, etc, it just isn’t that salient to me. I do, however, appreciate the author’s acknowledgment that there was a lot of bad poetry written about the telegraph. Example:

‘Tis done! The angry sea consents,

The nations stand no more apart;

With clasped hands the continents,

Feel the throbbing of each other’s hearts.

Speed, speed the cable, let it run,

A loving girdle round the earth,

Till all the nations neath the sun

Shall be as brothers of one hearth.

The book actually got interesting once it started explaining how people reacted to the telegraph. Maybe it’s a symptom of having gone to a school where sociological and technological problems merge… The name of the book implies that the telegraph had a similar effect in the 1800s that the internet did in the late 1900s. While I was reading I took note of a few things that the author described about the telegraph network that seemed very applicable today.

Regarding newspapers, “James Gordon Bennett was one of many who assumed that the telegraph would actually put newspapers out of business.” Funny to think that the extinction of newspapers was predicted more than 100 years ago, and extended to lay the blame on the internet. In a way, newspapers really do seem like they are going extinct. Maybe it’s that the internet is finishing the job, as a natural extension of the telegraph.

Another chapter describes love by telegraph. There’s a story of a couple who were married while 650 miles apart, one in Arizona and the other in California. Thanks, telegraph! There was also the story of the telegraph operators who were good chums together. Only once they met in real life did they realize that they were of opposite sex, and got married soon afterwards! Sorry, World of Warcraft, but telegraph did it first!

One of the most entertaining descriptions was of a company that “employed thousands of operators … leading to widespread concern that too much power was concentrated in the hands of one company. [It] handled 80 percent of the country’s message traffic and was making a huge profit.” Sound like Google? It was actually Western Union, which seems like it’s being used more for Nigerian scams than legitimate business. Though I guess Google sends plenty of Nigerian spam as well…

There are other examples of the internet echoing things that happened a century before it on the telegraph network. I’ll leave it to as an exercise to the reader to actually read the book. The takeaway from reading this book seems to be that the interactions that happen with humans and new enabling technologies were recorded long before the internet. History repeats itself, and if we want to know what will happen next with the internet, we might want to see what happened to the telegraph.

Harry Connick Jr. – Your Songs

I’m a pretty big fan of Harry Connick Jr. I listen to his Christmas album year-round. And look at the picture above! He’s totally man-crush material. So it is with a heavy heart that I have to give his latest album, “Your Songs,” a bad review.

HC Jr. is best when he’s singing jazz standards, or songs that have been creatively arranged as jazz standards, like his Christmas songs and his really cool album, “Songs I Heard,” which consists of a bunch of songs from kid’s movies. I really like Songs I Heard because it takes familiar songs and transforms them into something unique that Connick can work with.

Your Songs pretty much seems like a cash-in album. Harry C basically loaded a bunch of popular songs into this album so that people would buy it. “Oh, it has ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ on it! It even has a Beatles song!” The problem with the album, and I’m not sure how the producers didn’t catch this very early in the process, is that the arrangements are so dull that Harry sounds like he’s in pain throughout the album. The arrangements don’t fit his singing style because they’re popular songs, and Harry Connick Jr. is not a pop singer. The thing that bothers me most is that this is a completely safe album. There were no risks taken in the vanilla arrangements. So what we get is a really sub-standard pop album from a really good jazz vocalist.

These may be my songs, but Harry: you can keep them!

(Yeah, so what if my only reason for writing this review was the cheesy last line? I’ve done worse on this blog!)

New A-Team Movie in 2010!

There was recently a trailer released for the new A-Team movie coming out this year:

While the movie looks like it might be good, I have a few concerns.

• Mr. T is not in it
• It looks like people actually get shot in the movie
• Mr. T is not in it

My first concern is that since Mr. T is still huge and in charge these days, why not just have him play B.A. Baracus! I pity the fool who has to play Mr. T’s part while not actually being Mr. T. I bet he even has a last name with more than one character!

My second concern is that people will get shot in this movie. In the TV show, no one ever got shot. They were shot at, but no bullets ever entered anyone. Actually, I think there may have been an episode where a person was shot, but I don’t think it was ever fatal.

I hope that they at least make Mr. T (or the dude who’s playing him) afraid of flying. It looks like it from the scene in the plane in the trailer. It’s kind of hard to tell, but I bet he drank some drugged milk or something.

Oh, and Liam Neeson as Hannibal seems kind of wrong, but maybe he can pull it off.

Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else – Book Review

It looks like I’m continuing my long list of book reviews on my blog. Here’s a review of Linked by Albert-László Barabási (yes, I copy-pasta’ed that).

Linked is the story of the birth of graph theory and how early network models evolved to how we understand them today. Barabasi does a really good job of inserting character and context into the early scientists that formed the early ideas about networks. For example, he introduces Euler with a story about how he gave his nephew some lessons and worked on calculations that would some day lead to the discovery of Neptune. Oh, and he died that day, never to see the fruits of his labor. This kind of narrative is what I found lacking in Connected, and the kind I also noticed in Six Degrees. Go Barabasi!

That isn’t to say that Barabasi isn’t the king of all prose. One bugaboo I kept running into while reading linked was that Barabasi seems to have a certain idiosyncrasy in his writing. To be blunt, he starts too many sentences with the word “indeed.” I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but in some paragraphs he uses “indeed” twice! I think the max number on a page was three. I have taken the liberty of documenting one of these pages:

Please note that this doesn’t mean I don’t like the book or Barabasi’s writing. Indeed, I just complemented his writing earlier in this review. I just think his editor needs to help him with a larger vocabulary.

Besides that pet peeve, I thought the book was really well written and interesting. It had my attention up to Barabasi’s discovery of scale-free networks and the near-ubiquity of them in other systems. The book started getting a bit slow around the 13th chapter when the subjects were biology and business. I’m not sure if I was just scale-free fatigued or what.

I feel the book was not balanced enough. The beginning, which consisted of a lot of history, was much more interesting than the explanations of how scale-free networks seemed to pop up everywhere. While it is a key takeaway that many of these observed properties of networks seem to be universal, it also isn’t as interesting as evolving a model of network analysis. I guess this isn’t really a fault of the author though. Also, this book was published in 2002, before many of the popular social network websites became super popular. I just looked up Barabasi on Amazon and it appears he has a book due out this year. Sweet!

I think that I can safely say that I enjoyed Duncan Watts’ book more than Linked. But it also isn’t a fair comparison because I read Watts’ book first and much of the content of both authors overlaps, so I may have felt that reading Linked was redundant. Linked came before Six Degrees, so maybe a lot of Six Degrees’ success has to do with Barabasi’s book. Either way, both books were good. I’m glad I read both of them. Now that I discovered the existence of a second Barabasi book, I can look forward to reading it in April.

The Last Lecture – Book Review

I grabbed the audio version of The Last Lecture onto my iPhone a while back for a long car trip, but in typical Hung Truong fashion I didn’t take advantage of my over-preparedness. Recently I’ve been riding the bus a lot, and I recently took a series of long flights, so I had a chance to listen to the whole book over a span of a few weeks.

Randy Pausch’s story is pretty interesting. He was a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – not the most survivable. His diagnosis gave him 3-6 months, and for his “Last Lecture” he showed people how to live their childhood dreams. The video really caught on! I watched it quite a while ago and it really is incredibly inspiring. You can see it here.

The Last Lecture: The Book, goes into further detail on things that Pausch touched upon during the lecture. It’s a more thought-out version that makes sense as a book, since a four or five-hour lecture might be a bit rough on the audience. Randy’s main points are that if you try hard enough, you can get what you want. Persistence pays off. Enabling others to succeed is often more rewarding than serving yourself. Throughout his life, Randy got to do all sorts of stuff that he dreamed about since he was a kid.

Maybe it’s a product of having a one-sided view of Randy’s life, but it seems like this dude is a total saint! He even jokes about it in the book. I personally think that he probably was a really awesome person who deserved everything that he worked for. While it really is sad that he died, he crammed in a bunch of cool stuff in his life! To his credit, he says in his book that the thing that bothered him the most was that his kids wouldn’t be able to grow up with him as a presence. It’s really wonderful that some people can be so selfless, even when they have a very limited time limit.

I think we all need a reminder sometimes that our time is limited. In some cases, it can be extremely short. One thing that I have struggled with, given the reminders I have had that life is short, is that I really get antsy when I don’t feel like I’m moving forward. I can appreciate that patience is a virtue, but I also think that being proactive is one of the best things a person can do for him/herself.

I often think of my lifespan as a progress bar (think a file transfer dialog box or something) that is always moving towards 100%. But you can’t see how close you are to 100% (unless you’re Randy). So how much of my life would I like to spend unhappy? 1%? That’s more than a year, if you assume <100 year lifespan. Oh, I guess I’m not really reviewing this book anymore, am I? One thing I noticed about the audiobook version is that it’s not Randy reading the book to you. This makes sense since I’m sure Randy would have rather spent the studio time doing stuff with his family. But it’s also kind of weird listening to this dude who isn’t Randy talk about all of his awesome life experiences. Maybe they could’ve just recorded all the possible syllables Randy could make, then piece them into words and sentences? Nah. Anyway, The Last Lecture is a really nice companion to the actual last lecture. It puts things into perspective. I personally strive to make the most out of every day. I hope I have a lot of quality time left doing the things I love. But if I don’t, at least people will know I made the most of it!