Today, I briefly emerged from my little academic cocoon and stepped outside. I was shocked to discover that the snow had all melted, the lakes were all thawed out, there were birds in the air, and the sun was shining — I think I somehow missed the appearance of spring. Don’t worry, I’m buckling back to work in my oubliette now, but it was a bit of a surprise.

But that’s not what I wanted to mention. It was another surprising bit of weirdness. The reason I was dragged out of the dungeon of academe was to run an errand, and I was at Wal-Mart (don’t ask)…and while I was there, bored and awaiting the mistress’s orders, I was browsing their book section. It’s also been a long, long time since I plumbed that paragon of mass-market genrefication, the warehouse shopping version of a bookstore, and I discovered a new (to me) development.

First, there was something entirely expected: wall-to-wall romance novels, with their pink covers and naked-chested manly men flexing their pectorals. That’s a regular fixture in these places. I even read some, several years ago, and as formula fiction goes, they weren’t my cup of tea, but they weren’t that bad. There are well-honed conventions there, but some of the better authors do manage to sneak a little imagination into the filigree.

No, the real surprise was the second most popular genre that was everywhere on those book shelves: vampire novels. It’s as if Laurell Hamilton and Anne Rice have recently had an unholy tryst and have spawned a scampering horde of little horror-romance novelists who have all skittered off and scrawled out series after series of stories about vampiresses, vampire huntresses, vampire princesses, vampire trailer park queens, and vampire lovers. They all seemed to be by female authors and feature female protagonists, too; some of the covers also blurred into similarity with the romance novels, except that the muscular-breasted Fabio on the cover was also sporting fangs.

I can’t judge the contents, and maybe they’re all wonderfully creative and entertaining, although I suspect Sturgeon’s Law will still apply. I’m just a little baffled about where this sudden surge in one narrow genre has come from.

Hey! Carl Zimmer is giving away free copies of his brand new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)} — all you have to do is ask a good question in a comment to stand a chance of winning one.

I don’t need to enter; my copy is sitting on my desk right now, begging me to read it. I keep barking back at it that I want to, but I’ve got 3 exams to give in the next week, and there is no time right now. And then it reproaches me with those big gentle puppy-dog eyes and weeps sloppy proteoglycan tears and threatens to adhere permanently to my shower tiles. It’s persistent and ubiquitous, so everyone better read it soon.

John Lynch has a list of so-called pretentious books — books that are often listed as unread. Wilkins has followed up with his own. It’s a curious list, though; the only ones I’d definitely call pretentious are anything by Rand, and maybe the books by Hawthorne (an author I find unpleasantly bad).

I think we already did this list last fall, however.

My colleague Nic McPhee (with a couple of other people) is an author of a new book, A Field Guide to Genetic Programming — I think I’m going to have to read it.

Genetic programming (GP) is a systematic, domain-independent method for getting computers to solve problems automatically starting from a high-level statement of what needs to be done. Using ideas from natural evolution, GP starts from an ooze of random computer programs, and progressively refines them through processes of mutation and sexual recombination, until high-fitness solutions emerge. All this without the user having to know or specify the form or structure of solutions in advance. GP has generated a plethora of human-competitive results and applications, including novel scientific discoveries and patentable inventions.

See? It sounds cool!

He had a good long run, and although I think his later books were awful and the flaws of his earlier ones were colored over by my own youth, there’s no denying he was an influential science fiction writer. Arthur C. Clarke died today in Sri Lanka.

Long time readers here, and fans of Creek Running North, the best-written blog on the internets, will remember Zeke…and if you don’t, you’ve been missing out. And now you can get a whole book of nothing but concentrated Zeke, which sounds like Dog Heaven to me.

I received a fascinating pdf of a book from the author of the Cape Cod History page — it’s by Bergen Evans, was published in 1946, and is titled The Natural History of Nonsense. As far as I’ve read yet, it’s a wonderful example of rational thinking, and makes one wonder why this kind of writing isn’t more representative of American popular literature.

Here’s a short sample from the chapter titled “Adam’s Navel,” which is about the curious history of the omphalos theory, and it also gets into some of the mixed signals our country was sending about race and intelligence.

This ingenious theory, that the real “use or office” of
Adam’s navel was to tempt men into the sin of being sensible, was
revived in 1857 by Philip Henry Gosse, the naturalist, as an
analogy to prove that while the fossils which the paleontologists
had discovered seemed to imply organic evolution, God might
have so arranged them at the Creation in older to damn nineteenth-century skeptics. Gosse had a few followers among the Plymouth
Brethren, but most men greeted his suggestion with shouts of
derision. It was inconceivable that God would have baited a trap
for anything so respectable as the Royal Society. And anyway,
they said, Adam’s navel was as dead as a doornail.

But they were wrong. Although it was no longer a fashionable topic among the learned, it must have continued as a
subject for speculation among millions. For in 1944 it suddenly
raised its head in no less august surroundings than the Congress of
the United States, when a subcommittee of the House Military
Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of Representative
Durham of North Carolina, opposed the distribution of The Races of Mankind to our soldiers on the ground
(among other reasons) that in one of its illustrations “Adam and
Eve are depicted with navels.”

The Honorable Gentlemen’s motives for raising this particular objection can only be surmised. Perhaps they were
uncertain of orthography and of the scope of their duties and in
consequence assumed that Navel Affairs came under their
jurisdiction; but the chances are that they were just laying down a
smoke screen, for the pamphlet in question, a thirty-page booklet
prepared by two Columbia professors, contained information that
almost any politician would feel it his duty to conceal. It stated that
the concept of race is based largely on prejudice, that most of us
are of mixed blood, and that nonphysical racial characteristics are
probably the product of environment. And, most horrible of all, it
chose to illustrate this last assertion from tests given by the United
States Army in World War I which indicated that the average
intelligence of Negroes from some Northern states was higher than
the average intelligence of whites from some Southern states.

The OCR on this scan is very well done, and it’s only a 1.2M download despite being the whole book — let’s try not to bring the guy’s server to its knees, though.

I don’t think so. Virgil Griffith pulled out the top ten books read by students at various universities (it turns out Facebook collects that data for you), and then tried to correlate that with the average SAT/ACT score of each university. The result is a mess. You might be able to say that schools with low admission standards are more likely to have students who read the Bible and Fahrenheight 451, while the universities with the higher academic reputation are more likely to have students reading Lolita and Ayn Rand, but the overall distribution is more suggestive of chance — there is large, diverse pool of books read by university students, and facebook is plucking out a nearly random subset.

The display leaves a lot to be desired, too. What does the size of the lozenges mean? Standard deviation? I’d need to see something about the actual numbers for each book, too — how many universities have The Grapes of Wrath in their top ten, and how many students is the sample based on? A small college with only a few students on Facebook is a situation that is readily skewed.

I’m only mentioning this to torment you all, so you can stare at this chart trying to make sense of it as long as I did.