Salon.com > Mark Wallace

The science of invention

Thu, 29 Jun 2000 19:30:00 +0000

"This is your day," says Zion Bar-El, beaming like a proud father from the podium of the Waterford Room at the Sheraton Tara Hotel in Nashua, N.H. His audience of about two dozen scientists, educators and engineers, clad in casual-Friday wear, strain to make out his words over the drone of liturgical chanting emanating from somewhere nearby. Out in the hall, an endless procession of New Hampshire Knights of Columbus in full regalia -- bearing pennants and wrapped in sashes -- is making its way to the Sheraton's Grand Ballroom for a weekend of fraternal high jinks.

Bar-El, chief executive of Ideation International, rambles on, introducing chief technology officers, professors and a handful of journalists from Japan. He is apologetic about gathering his audience in this out-of-the-way New England burg, and promises that "next year will be Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Hawaii, one of those." None of the places he names seems any more fitting a venue in which to discuss a revolutionary new science, but to the tenacious little group at the Sheraton, that's exactly the point. They've descended on Nashua for the weekend -- about 100 of them, all told -- to confer on a discipline whose basic tenets include the notion that the best ideas are often to be found in the least likely of places.

The art of Don E. Knuth

Thu, 16 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Donald Ervin Knuth is trying to explain what has delayed work on Volume 4 of his magnum opus. "I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take," he says.

Coming from someone who's been writing one book on and off for the past quarter-century, this seems a bit of an understatement. But when you consider that most of Knuth's work has been devoted to just that -- figuring out how much time things like computer programs take -- and the statement takes on new (and slightly disingenuous) meanings.

"I'm getting toward being able to take up Volume 4 full time," Knuth says. "I'm writing little snippets. I wrote a sentence just the other day."

"Volume 4," of course, refers to the long-awaited next installment of Knuth's masterwork, "The Art of Computer Programming." Less a set of instruction manuals than a kind of analytic philosophy of programming, the books -- which first appeared in the 1960s -- lay out principles both broad and specific to guide computer programmers toward greater efficiency. So comprehensive are the texts that the Jargon File of hacker slang offers a definition of the word "Knuth": "Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms," and goes on to recommend a safe response to any question for which you don't have a ready answer: "I think you can find that in Knuth."

Falun Gong

Wed, 08 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Everybody's doing it, from Beijing to Brooklyn and beyond. It has more adherents -- 100 million, if its founder is to be believed -- than the Chinese Communist Party. And though it promises happiness and fulfillment, its popularity has led to its condemnation as a doomsday cult and made it the target of a massive government crackdown.

Falun Gong is a quasi-religious "cultivation system" introduced seven and a half years ago by Li Hongzhi, the 47-year-old son of two doctors from a remote city in northeastern China. Since making his teachings public, Master Li, as he bills himself, has seen his following grow into what could now be the fifth-largest organized religion in the world. Even if the Chinese government estimate of a mere 2 million "practitioners" is more accurate, Falun Gong, in less than a decade, has managed to outstrip rival start-up Scientology by more than two to one.

What accounts for such widespread appeal? Most of Li's followers come to his teachings through two books, "Zhuan Falun" ("Rotating the Law Wheel"), and "China Falun Gong" -- tracts that set established religious tradition on its ear by dispensing with concerns of reincarnation and the afterlife and promising salvation to individuals while they're still walking this earth (a journey, by the way, that Li promises to prolong).

Counter-evolutionary

Thu, 19 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Why the state of Kansas is not more often recognized as a seat of 20th century American literature is a mystery to me. From Langston Hughes to Truman Capote to William Burroughs, authors have long found in its windswept towns and uncluttered reaches the perfect backdrop against which to conjure remarkable characters.

The most recent fiction to emerge from the rich soil of the Sunflower State (but by no means the least eyebrow-raising), though, takes the form not of a novel but of Kansas's new science education guidelines. These were recently rewritten by a group of conservative theorists who apparently have a bone to pick with another great writer, Charles Darwin.

That virtually all mention of evolution has been excised from the Kansas testing standards must have Darwin spinning in his grave (provided he has not yet entered the fossil record on which he based his theories). Indeed, some readers will be startled to learn that the evolution debate has never really been conclusively settled. A return to its key books -- as well as to one seldom referred to in this context -- is therefore in order.

Crackpot authorities

Tue, 17 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The reader will pardon me for beginning this essay with a book that discusses a "society of bladders" and blames war, bad marriages and totalitarianism on "lack of genital gratification in masses of people." But it seems a fit place to begin. Psych majors may recognize the phrases as those of "sex-economist" Wilhelm Reich, one of the foremost of the theoreticians I would here dub the crackpot authorities. They can be found in Reich's autobiographical treatise, "The Function of the Orgasm," without which any survey of crackpot authority literature would be incomplete. But we will leave the bladders for now, although -- as any good crackpot authority would put it -- there will be more to say about them later.

"Reich was a brilliant psychoanalyst," my own former analyst told me, "but he did go into a psychosis later in his life." Substitute any discipline for "psychoanalyst" in the preceding sentence, and you have a fair description of the philosophers and scientists whose praises I hope to sing here. Brilliant theorists all, the crackpot authorities apply wide-ranging intellects to fascinating postulates that are, if sometimes out of left field, at least plausible enough to merit discussion. And though there is something a bit south-of-sane in the works on my personal summer reading list, most of them impart valuable insights -- leavened, as well, with more than a few laughs.