Let’s get the controversial-ish material out of the way first, with Worlds at War:

Worlds at War tells the story of the clash between the West (Western Europe) and the East (the Middle East) over the course of the last 2500 years. It takes a very broad overview of history, stopping at critical moments to show (largely) how the big monotheistic religions have dominated nations and caused them to start wars within and with each other over the course of their existence. Surprisingly, Judaism doesn’t show up that much until the 1800′s on – as someone who’s grown up thinking that the big religions implicitly would have a fairly equal ownership over human events, it really isn’t the case. Christianity takes hold of the West early on and very paradoxically, it looks like science and rational thought only becomes prevalent there due to religious scholars looking to explain the universe in pursuit of God more thoroughly (a good example of this is Kepler). Similarly, Islam takes hold of the East and when its hold loosens, technological progress quickens. The thesis of Worlds at War is pretty simple then: clinging to religion dogmatically ruins the rights and lives of the individuals that have to live in those societies and although ditching them leads to a very foreign feeling world, it is the quickest way to peace in an ever-changing world. The book ends somewhat ominously, however, as it’s not clear as to whether we in the West are willing to do this – for example, the recent controversy around the whole “mosque at Ground Zero” thing. However you may feel about it being “insensitive” there’s something here in America called freedom of religion, and it means that anyone of any religion can go build whatever their temple is called wherever the hell they want it. Similarly, we have the possibly-more-complex problem of whether the East is willing to accept this – without a history of having to fight for freedom and learn it themselves, the answer may be “no”. But at the same time, I often get the impression that in the West, a lot of people have forgotten what that means, so while our two worlds may be at war, they may not be that far apart.

With that said, let’s get a bit less emotional and away from the hot events of today. Scipio Africanus: Greater than Napoleon takes a look at a legendary Roman general who you likely have never heard of.

This book covers the exploits of its titular character, the Roman general Scipio Africanus. The book is a bit older (from 1926) and definitely feels a bit dated – it has a bit of the “war is glorious” feel going to it and is a little bit on the dry side compared to the other books we normally look at here. However, the material is generally pretty solid – it makes a firm case for Scipio Africanus as being a pretty badass general. He won every battle that he ever led and did so against superior enemies, defeating no less than Hannibal Barca (legendary commander who decisively won the Battle of Cannae) in the final battle at Zama. The final chapter in particular is pretty interesting: the main story is told, and now the author diverts to a discussion on what it means to be “the best general ever”. As the book’s subtitle lets us know, he dispatches Napoleon pretty early on in the discussion, and while you may not agree with his final verdict (as of this writing, I do agree with Hart’s that Scipio is first with Hannibal as a close second), the criteria for the “biggest badass of history” makes for very interesting discussions at the least. He’s clearly thought it though and is pretty convincing on the whole.

Let’s fast-forward from the Punic Wars (Scipio’s time) to the fall of the Roman Republic, where our next two books come into play. Here, we’ve got both Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic and Caesar’s Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar’s Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome.

Both books cover the fall of the Roman Republic, but in different ways: Rubicon covers the social aspects, that is, who the main players are and all the drama that goes down, while Caesar’s Legion covers the military aspects, specifically with Julius Caesar. Both books are amazing and for me were the best out of all the books covered today (with Worlds at War being a close third place). While also an older book, Caesar’s Legion does something right that I have complained about for almost every history book: maps. It gives you maps for everywhere where anything of importance occurs in the book. This is pretty hard for a book like Worlds at War to do, since it covers such a huge geographical span, but Caesar’s Legion covers almost as big a region and does a magnificent job of making sure that if the reader cares, finding out where all the critical events occur isn’t too difficult. As a war book, it’s fairly neutral – it covers the exploits of Julius Caesar’s Tenth Legion, which pretty much saw all the big battles during the fall of the Roman Republic and a few afterwards. It covers the problems that military leaders run into that the layperson (and especially people of our time) don’t immediately think of – how soldiers are paid and how they’re recruited, as well as the more obvious things such as tactics and troop types (e.g., cavalry, infantry). It’s an easy read and is highly informative.

Rubicon is a bit of a deeper book but I feel has the greater payoff, being the best book of the lot. For me, it actually was also a bit of a depressing book, as it lays out in gory detail how freedom fell in Rome. It also doesn’t hold back – it tells us what the Romans considered “freedom” to be and how its a bit different than our conception of freedom. Long story short – it’s closer to what we call “freedom of opportunity”, where anyone technically could rise up from the lower classes based on merit and be rich/famous/powerful but in reality the odds of this happening are vanishingly low. It also lays out the ideologies of the various key players, how they get subjugated once Caesar shows up, and how they cope with the contradictions of living under a dictator while proclaiming to be for freedom. It also shows how a once-free society can transition to that of a dictatorship/monarchy – slowly kick out all the pro-freedom people, reward all the pro-dictatorship people, and if the mood is right (a bit arbitrary admittedly) it will stick. It’s a bit depressing, but if a dictatorship is the “will of the people”, then what can you do?

Our next two books require us to fast-forward once again. Here we’ve got a book I read actually a long time ago but never properly reviewed, and a new one to complement it: The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History, and Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization.

Both books take a look at the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of the Eastern Roman Empire (a.k.a. the Byzantine Empire). The first book largely focuses on the fall of the Western Roman Empire and makes the case that it was preventable – that if the Emperor Justinian would have simply granted more religious and cultural freedom to the neighboring “barbarian” tribes, then they wouldn’t have become angry and invaded (in fact, they would have become citizens and defended it from other intruders). The latter book largely focuses on the Byzantine Empire but makes the contrasting case – that Roman culture was so dogmatic and so xenophobic that there’s no way that either Justinian would have accepted foreign religions/cultures or the Roman people would have accepted it. For the first book, this argument is the crux of the book. For the second book, it isn’t – it’s just a short chapter on Justinian, and it largely focuses on how the very survival of the Byzantine Empire allowed it to preserve critical historical works that the Western Roman Empire loses during its gradual downfall. Both books are interesting, but I believe that the latter book makes a stronger case and that for me, the Byzantine Empire is just a bit more interesting than the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

With all the Roman history out of the way, let’s fast-forward again to 1066, when the ever-so-critical Battle of Hastings was fought. In this battle, the Normans scored a decisive victory over the Anglo-Saxons and forever changed British history – and world history along with it. However, despite being such an important battle, lots of questions loom over the battle, mostly lots of “who knew what, when” and “why did person X make this decision” kind of questions. The appropriately titled The Enigma of Hastings seeks to address these questions, letting us know all the answers that are currently available and what prevents us from knowing more about them.

While not as interesting as Scipio Africanus, this book is still great for those interested in the particulars of the Hastings battle. While it eventually brings the reader up to speed on the battle, it really assumes you already know about it. For that, I’d recommend the amazing episode of Hardcore History entitled The What-Ifs of 1066, which does a wonderful job of conveying both the particulars of the battle and all the little places where any variation in how things actually turned out would have large repercussions on history as we know it today. As such, while The Enigma of Hastings is great for expert audiences, it goes into what it likely too much depth for the average reader – most will be more than satisfied with the much-more-accessible The What-Ifs of 1066 (which is also a fraction of the price).

Finally, let’s wrap up our summer reading tour with a look more on the Eastern side of things, with Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

Genghis Khan seeks to dispel the negative preconceptions about the Mongolian people through newly discovered information (largely discovered by accident, interestingly enough). It runs through the dramatic lives of primarily Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, and their very different leadership styles.  It gives a great insight into how the people of the Steppe plains live, and how their culture was so very different from our own. It’s a great book, especially for those of us from the West, who are completely unfamiliar with how a huge chunk of the East operates. Note this is different from the “East” that Worlds at War discusses, which is the Middle East, and what we traditionally know to be “the East”, namely China. There’s a bit of overlap, as Kublai’s exploits lead him to dominate China and forever change their history – interestingly, there’s another one of those critical turning points in history here surrounding the Kamikaze. Regardless, the story is well-told and a great read.

So for those needing some interesting history books to read, there’s nearly a dozen that cover a good range of history and are all pretty interesting reads. I may be a bit “historied out” for now, but it was certainly worth it – the world is still a bit of a shaky place, but with all this new historical knowledge under my belt, it’s for very different reasons. We will definitely have to return to some of these topics in greater detail at a later point as well, as all of these books provoke a number of deep and interesting discussions.

The God Delusion strikes right at the ultimately uncomfortable nature of religion (especially when none or more than one are involved). It largely focuses on the battle between science and religion, where scientists tell us that they can co-exist with religion and whenever we have yet to discover the explanation for phenomena, religious people attribute it to God and fiercely defend it. Dawkins shows us how both are wrong, how science is fundamentally incompatible with religion, unless you are willing to greatly cheapen the definition of God, and how the religious are consistently proven wrong about phenomena that they believe is performed by God but in fact is not.

Dawkins gets a lot of heat for being abrasive as far as religion goes, but he at least knows why. He’s willing to defy the “don’t talk about religion because it makes everyone uncomfortable” rule as far as he needs to in order to get his point across, and in The God Delusion, he is very careful to reiterate that he’s not trying to be a dick, just trying to get you to understand the facts. He realizes that hearing stories about the supernatural for your entire life conditions you to accept them or at the very least, tolerate other people talking about it. What he wants the reader to understand, however, is to (1) realize that the stories are actually pretty weird and (2) we can do better than religion, namely through science. Most atheists usually understand (2) pretty easily but as I’ve been brought up around these stories, (1) was not obvious to me until I read this book.

A good chunk of the book also talks about religion from an evolutionary perspective, which is Dawkins’ specialty. It looks at potential origins for religion and the dangers that have historically risen from using religion to blindly label people – specifically labeling those with the same religion as friends and those with a different religion (or no religion) as enemies. It’s all done in a compelling manner and like the rest of the book, Dawkins cushions the heavier blows to try not to hurt the reader’s feelings.

It covers some material and general ideas from The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene, but does so at a high level, so this works as a good starting-off book for those yet to read Dawkins’ books as well as those well-versed in Dawkins’ style. It doesn’t quite promote the same level of awe as The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene but is definitely a compelling work that’s accessible and meaningful, and I’d certainly recommend giving it a read.

This book is not for everyone. If you saw the title of the book and weren’t instantly intrigued, then the book probably isn’t for you. It follows the exploits of the author, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, as he eventually gains interest in building a chess computer that can defeat the World Chess Champion. For the uninitiated, this was seen as a monumental task and many people simply assumed that a computer could never play chess better than the masters. There’s a bit of hubris involved in the reasoning behind this, and it tends to boil down to “it could play chess ok, but lacks the ‘soul’ or ‘humanity’ to really play chess at the highest levels”. With the joy of hindsight, we can now see that this was similar to the Titanic, with people saying “this boat cannot sink” before the maiden voyage.

So quite a bit of time had been spent by groups worldwide trying to build a chess computer with this goal ultimately in mind, but a lot of them could play chess OK (and no better). The book covers the three big projects on chess computer development at Carnegie Mellon University and IBM that Hsu was involved in: ChipTest, Deep Thought, and Deep Blue. If you’re not an electrical engineer or computer engineer, some of the finer points on the hardware will be lost on you (which is why the book is not for all), but most will be able to appreciate to some extent the drive that formed in Hsu over the 12 years of his struggle to be the best.

(Deep Blue, photo taken at the Computer History Museum)

The book actually has a very sad ending, which I never saw coming. As the Titanic reference pointed out, you likely know going into this story that by the end, Deep Blue will defeat Garry Kasparov, the World Chess Champion. But the sad ending comes on, strangely enough, right when Deep Blue wins. This win comes in the 1997 rematch, and in the 1996 match, Kasparov wins without too much trouble. In the 1996 match, everyone is happy for Kasparov and cheers him on as something akin to the “protector of humanity from the machines”, and in the book it is explicitly said that he felt quite a pressure to be this protector. The victory is seen as a triumph of man, so when the 1997 rematch occurs and Deep Blue wins, nobody is really happy for the Deep Blue team. His three-man team has put in 30 combined years of their lives into this project and it is seen as a failure for humanity, while all along Hsu and Company have been trying to tell people that this really is not a failure. In their eyes, this is the “triumph of man as a toolmaker over man as a performer” (the quote might not be exactly correct but is pretty close). Furthermore, Kasparov’s completely unsportsmanlike behavior during the rematch and the drama he caused afterwards makes the ending even more sad. He accuses the team of cheating, of making moves that the computer wouldn’t have made, and demands to see Deep Blue’s logs during the match (which is equivalent to reading its mind since he would then know all the moves it was going to make). I’m sure if accusations like those were leveled at him he would have simply stormed off instead of being surprisingly mature as the Deep Blue team was.

(Kasparov v. Deep Blue, photo taken at the Computer History Museum)

This brings us to another interesting point about the book. In some sections, adversarial characters sometimes act exceedingly irrationally, and Hsu spends a lot of time slowing down these moments to try to help us understand why (for example) Kasparov would do some of these outlandish things. He says it’s still not acceptable, but repeatedly tries to at least give a well-reasoned explanation of his adversaries’ disrespectful actions. This allows the book to stay personal and told through his viewpoint but removes a lot of the bias that you could otherwise see in it.

It ends on another sad note after that, to make things even more depressing. With their goal completed, the team disbands and go their separate ways, to do things completely unrelated to chess (not the sad part). However, Deep Blue is taken out of commission, as the resulting media firestorm by Kasparov convinces IBM that spending more money on chess computers is no longer necessary (two reasons here: one, they already beat him, and two, Kasparov’s demands were too extravagant for IBM to be able to afford both him and the chess computer project, causing them to abandon both). A much slower version of Deep Blue is left online for IBM employees to play with (not sure if it’s still up anymore) but is a shadow of the true Deep Blue.

Kasparov goes on to say that surely he could not lose again, and Hsu leaves IBM and takes the rights to Deep Blue with him, seemingly with a rematch in mind. Kasparov backs down, drama ensues, and Hsu eventually becomes disinterested with chess computers. Kasparov then says that he definitely won’t lose to a computer now, but was unable to defeat Deep Junior and X3D Fritz in 2003 (they tied in both occasions). Hsu claims that Deep Junior and X3D Fritz were far inferior to Deep Blue, as Deep Blue had a number of critical advances over Deep Junior and X3D Fritz despite being much older (if you want the technical details of why, go buy the book). I buy the arguments made, and it’s a shame that the best chess computer we even had doesn’t exist anymore. I can see why, however, and why there’s not much interest in resurrecting the project – again, read the book for details I’ve skipped on here – and it’s one of those “sad but true” kind of things.

As I said in the beginning, I couldn’t put it down even though I knew the ending going in, which for me, makes this book a keeper. If you’re into computers or chess, put down whatever you’re doing and go get Behind Deep Blue. It’s that good.

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design

This book takes us on a whirlwind tour of natural selection and evolution, including what it can do, what it can’t do, a number of truly amazing examples of adaptations that have shown up, and how we think they work. The two examples that really stood out for me as being particularly amazing are echolocation (which I’ve obviously heard of but there’s a lot of wonderful subtleties) and my current favorite, electrolocation (think the same as echolocation but performed by many sea creatures using electricity as a sensing mechanism instead of sound).

The entire book is written in a very compelling way and addresses lots of obvious questions (and many not so obvious ones as well). It’s actually a very interesting counterpart to George C. Williams’ Adaptation and Natural Selection. They both cover evolution but are aimed at very different audiences. The Blind Watchmaker has the benefit of being a more recent and up-to-date book, having many more detailed examples to fall on to make the extremely solid case for natural selection, and is aimed at the lay-person (me and likely you as well). Conversely, Adaptation and Natural Selection is a classic text aimed at experts or soon-to-be experts in the field, so it’s a great choice for anthropologists.

It’s also fairly surprising for me to have stumbled upon the latter book in the first place, since I’m a computer scientist and not an anthropologist, but I took a graduate seminar in anthropology and the topic specifically arose of how Adaptation and Natural Selection applies today. The consensus on that question turned out to be that since a lot of old topics / battles that were fought when this book came out have returned, the book is still relevant and useful. Since it is aimed at anthropologists, it is heavy on technical terms and assumes you know them all when you show up, so if you’re not an anthropologist, have read books on evolution / natural selection and just want me, and don’t mind keeping Google at the ready, I’d say to pick it up.

The examples are cool, but for the everyday person, The Blind Watchmaker is a lot more readable and you’ll get a lot more out of it since Dawkins does an amazing job of keeping the topics and examples varied and informative. Furthermore, Adaptation really assumes that you buy evolution before you start reading the book and focuses on a very different argument, the existence of individual-level adaptations and arguments for group-level adaptations (which he opposes in a convincing manner). This is nice but again, likely should be read after The Blind Watchmaker or The Selfish Gene. Either way, you should definitely pick The Blind Watchmaker up, as the case Dawkins makes is solid, describes evolution in a very accessible manner, and covers the various divisions in thought in that community in a good amount of detail.

• Cassandra Explained: This session was jam-packed full of people and talked about how Cassandra is laid out as well as upcoming features. Interesting features that may be coming to Cassandra include vector clocks instead of timestamps (currently of the ‘long’ data type), possibly ditching SuperColumns (the consensus was that they’re very powerful but too confusing to developers), and including “sloppy quorums” (maybe more on this in a later post).

• Glue: This session had a lot less people but was focused on the role of middleware in today’s database systems. A lot of talk went on about systems that use multiple databases concurrently (e.g., MySQL and Cassandra together) and the problems that can come up. Apparently the popular solution for problems like this is involves sticking datastore requests in a message queue (ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ immediately come to mind). Definitely not a solution that I had in mind (nor anyone else that I talked to who that wasn’t in the session) but gives interesting food for thought.
• Graph DBs: This session had a lot of people as well but I felt was a missed opportunity. It stayed very high-level the entire time and didn’t tell me any useful implementation info like Cassandra had. The primary questions that I ask about a new NoSQL datastore are typically of the form “How do I run it?”, “What is the replication model?”, and “What’s the relationship between nodes in the system?”, but unfortunately, none of these questions were answered. The talk started off nicely, with talk about high-level concepts, but devolved into things that were way to specific and not helpful to me as an actual developer.
• The Babbage Machine: This was actually really cool. We heard a talk about the history involved and got to see it in action, which was really cool. After that, I wandered around the museum a bit and saw a picture of Garry Kasparov v. Deep Blue that was pretty close to this one:

Since I love chess and computers, I can understand just a small amount of the anguish / stress that Garry Kasparov is in during his epic battle with Deep Blue (of course I far from understand what’s actually going on in his head). However, it still made for a cool exhibit to see the whole history of chess and computers.

• Limitations and Alternatives to MapReduce: This was actually a really small group, and just chatted about when to use MapReduce and what other technologies are appropriate. This was nice as well but could have been a bit more technical.

All in all, it was good times, and fun was had by all. I would have loved to caught Chris Anderson’s talk on going “beyond the cloud”, as the general consensus was that it was great, but seeing the Babbage Machine and wandering through the museum was totally worth it. I picked up some sweet books as well, so check back later for reviews on those.

Let’s start off with the first book I read, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. As is the case in both books, American Sphinx isn’t a biography as much as an analysis of a few pivotal points in Jefferson’s life that changed or exposed his true beliefs on key subjects. It reveals a man fighting against government involvement in any part of people’s lives, and the tough position this put him in as the head of government in 1800. He comes off as a person who just believes that people should intrinsically do the right thing without being told, explicitly endorsing the Native American communal lifestyle as the ultimate ideal. While this sounds interesting to start off with, Jefferson tends to flip-flop around a bit, making him hard to pin down. He’s a bit of a drama queen, and historians debate whether he’s a hypocrite or self-deluded. This tends to happen when his ideals meet up with reality and he chooses reality but speaks for his ideals.

The example most people are familiar with is how Jefferson could have talked big about freedom for all but own lots of slaves, and on this point (and I believe all points) Ellis asserts that Jefferson was self-deluded. He saw himself as a father figure to his slaves and honestly thought he provided them with good lives so in his mind there was no contradiction. Of course this doesn’t make it ok or acceptable, but it does explain how Jefferson was able to reconcile the issue with himself. In the younger stages of his life, he tries to get anti-slavery legislation passed, hoping that he can phase it out of the whole country by the year 1800, but as it fails, he loses hope in the process and defers it to the next generation.

This attitude follows Jefferson around in a few different areas of his life. He starts off as being fundamentally opposed to political parties, but finds himself at the head of the Anti-Federalist party despite his desires to simply stay home and work on his fields. His fundamental belief that the American Revolution was about freeing the people from government domination drives him to lead a party opposed to his (this being a stronger force than his dislike for political parties). Becoming President, however, turns the tables on his opinions of the media, originally seen as the voice of the people but now in his mind degraded to sensationalist garbage (especially since all the garbage they were raking up was directed at him). Jefferson becomes hurt and depressed by the continuous disrespect the media throws his way, and becomes increasingly despondent about the future of the nation that has so quickly lost all decency in his eyes.

Of course, there’s a lot more going on (especially Jefferson’s black and white, right and wrong mentality), but that’s a chunk of what stuck for me. With the first book out of the way, let’s move on to the second book, His Excellency: George Washington.

This book is a very interesting follow-up to the Jefferson book, as it starts slightly before the Jefferson book and finishes up slightly beforehand. Despite having lots of time overlap, it takes Washington’s point of view and is largely distinct from Jefferson’s. While Jefferson was all for keeping government out of the lives of the people, Washington is of a different approach: the British way of governing the colonies was fine, but the problem was that it was the British governing Americans instead of Americans governing Americans. As such, Washington is for a strong federal government that can collect taxes and all that stuff (making his party the Federalists, for a strong federal government).

The book follows Washington’s exploits serving in the British colonial force and losing a number of battles in service there and during the American Revolution, but winning all of the critical battles. Ellis makes it clear here that this part of his life was extremely influential on his time in politics, and seeing how his troops needed a strong leader and how the lack of taxes left his army constantly starving and barefoot makes it eminently clear why he’s a Federalist. It’s also interesting to see how Ellis compares Washington to Fabius Maximus and Cincinnatus, two Roman dictators who were given supreme power to fix specific problems (e.g., to lead the American Revolution and later to be President), and it’s quite an apt comparison.

But while Jefferson is a drama queen, Washington has some pride and loyalty problems going on (also argued to be his great strengths). Washington tolerates dissent within closed quarters and meetings, but if those people then speak out against him publicly, he takes it pretty personally and tends to sever all connections with them. An interesting case of this is Jefferson himself, who often disagreed with Washington (expected since they were polar opposites politically) but got himself into quite a bit of trouble by speaking out to Madison about it and secretly strengthening the Anti-Federalists against Washington. From Jefferson’s point of view, this wasn’t a contradiction, because Jefferson thought he was doing what was best for the country: speaking his mind and thus doing his job, and helping the cause that he thought really represented the Revoluton, the Anti-Federalists. But from Washington’s point of view, he saw it as Jefferson breaching the understood rules of conduct to make a political power play. This particular scene is played out very nicely in the book, and it’s clear that Washington saw Jefferson as a real friend until this happens, at which point Washington realizes that Jefferson will do whatever it takes to try to save the country in his way (of course it’s more complicated than this).

Washington also has an interesting excuse for the slave dilemma he’s in: he’s also for freedom for all but owns hundreds of slaves. But his problems with freeing them are numerous, and deeply grounded more in realism than idealism. Washington has spent his entire life moving from economic mediocrity to actually being quite wealthy (in comparison, Jefferson lived and died in constant debt) and wanted to avoid freeing his slaves and then going poor as a result or placing the same conditions on his heirs. Furthermore, he didn’t technically own his wife’s slaves, so he couldn’t free those, and finally, he didn’t want to break up slave families, and since a good chunk of his slaves married his wife’s slaves, this presented a bit of a problem. Realizing that he needed to do something for the sake of posterity, he undertakes a long scheme to gain financial independence with the stipulation that if he dies before he can achieve it, his slaves are to be freed upon his death (more or less), which is what happens. It’s pretty interesting to see how the debate for Washington really isn’t about ideals: like Jefferson, he considers himself to be a benevolent master, and in his case, most of his slaves are too old or simply not able to work, so he considers the life he’s given them to be better than what they’d have to deal with on their own (again, not saying it’s ok, just describing what’s going on in his head).

Fairly early on both Jefferson and Washington realize that they’re doing something pretty important and need to put on a good face about it for the sake of posterity, so it’s often fairly hard to find out what they’re really thinking. Both books, however, do a superb job at breaking through this and shows the critical events that shaped both men’s lives. Ellis also masterfully shows that both men were just that, men. They’re definitely fairly complex characters and hard to pin down, but these books do a great job of bringing the reader into Jefferson’s and Washington’s minds to see their point of view. Both books are highly recommended, so go check them out!

H.P. Lovecraft built the stage on which most of the last century’s horror fiction was performed. As doomed as any of his protagonists, he put a worldview into words that has spread to infect the world. You need to read him – he’s where the darkness starts. – Neil Gaiman

That Gaiman quote pretty much sums up Lovecraft’s impact and tells us a little bit about his works. Lovecraft tends to follow a fairly predictable formula in his works, which goes something like this:

1. Protagonist is a rational person who thinks spiritual things are silly
2. Protagonist is volunteered to investigate the bizarre happenings of a town and help the inhabitants overcome their irrational fears
3. Protagonist learns that there is indeed something spooky going on
4. Protagonist sees a glimpse of the true horrifying nature of reality, driving him insane

There is some variation in this formula (e.g., if he kills himself after step 4 or not), but this is pretty much it. And I find it especially interesting that such a simple formula works repeatedly. But let’s start off by that phrase I slipped into step 4, “the true horrifying nature of reality”. In Lovecraft’s world (commonly referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos), the Earth and all its inhabitants are insignificant in the grand scheme of things (similar to nihilism) and furthermore, that life is worthless. This worldview has been called “cosmicism”, and stresses the worthlessness of life, making it somehow even more depressing than nihilism. In the Lovecraft universe, vast cosmic entities are abound, and even seeing them causes insanity. They tend to be sleeping until awakened by cultists, with the intention of either destroying the time-space continuum or enslaving all sentient life (typically the first option though).

The Cthulhu Mythos is dominated by a number of these Elder Gods (later authors break it down further, but we won’t get into that here). They are very infrequently mentioned, as knowledge of them is strictly forbidden except to cultists, who know to hide the knowledge appropriately. However, there are three Elder Gods that stand out for me:

• Cthulhu: The one everybody knows about. He has arguably the best short story, The Call of Cthulhu, and definitely the most famous story as far as Lovecraft goes. Story-wise, he’s pretty similar to the other Elder Gods not on the list, and is the epitome of Lovecraft’s style. Worshipped by cultists across the world, he lays asleep until he can regain enough power to awaken and bring darkness to the world.
• Azathoth: The creator god. He creates the universe but the sheer power that creation requires puts him to sleep. When he awakens, he will perform the opposite act: destroying the universe. He can’t be fought or defeated, but his awakening can be delayed.
• Nyarlathotep: Kinda similar to Loki from Norse mythology. He’s a trickster god, and is notable for not being asleep like the other Elder Gods. He takes on many forms and generally is just trying to keep from being bored until Azathoth awakens and destroys time-space. His best appearance is definitely The Haunter in the Dark.

If you’re into horror, the book to get is the Necronomicon, which has all of Lovecraft’s best stories (except for Nyarlathotep, which is extremely short but enjoyable), but if you’re a casual reader, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories will certainly suffice. Most of Lovecraft’s works are excellent, but I don’t particularly care for the longer stories (anything over 30 pages). The horrifying mood tends to go up and down like a rollercoaster and at 30 pages or less, it works great, but in the roughly 100 pages that The Dream Quest for Unknown Kadath takes up, it just ends up being boring. This is a bit of a sad fate since Unknown Kadath is the most colorful and other-worldly of Lovecraft’s stories, but it just feels like a focus on that instead of the protagonist, who is essentially along for the ride (the opposite of most Lovecraft stories). The Lovecraft formula is still preserved, more or less, but just stretched out too far to be enjoyable.

What I find particularly interesting about the Cthulhu Mythos is how effectively it’s been translated into other mediums. The video game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth for the original X-Box perfectly portrays the cosmicism that is Lovecraft’s works, taking on another well-known Lovecraft story, The Shadow over Innsmouth. (I hear the PC version is a bit buggy, so don’t pick it up if that’s still the case)

It’s like an FPS but with way more stealth, which makes sense since you take on the role of a totally ordinary guy, not a space marine with super power armor etc. etc. etc.. As a totally ordinary guy, the gameplay is kinda shitty. He doesn’t get a weapon of any kind until more than halfway through the game (and can’t punch or hit in any way until then), and he can’t fall that far without hurting his legs (which you then have to patch up). Two or three bullets tends to take you down, and there’s no auto-healing, which current generation games have spoiled us with. There’s lots of puzzles and you will be required to use your brain, so I can’t recommend the game to people who just want a bland FPS. If you want the exact opposite, however, this is the game for you (although it’s almost a decade old now).

If you’re looking for something a bit more recent than the X-Box game, you will likely come across this treasure that has sucked up a fair amount of time for me lately, a board game called Arkham Horror.

Arkham Horror is a co-op board game in which all players attempt to prevent an Ancient One (an Elder God) from awakening and destroying time-space itself. It’s best played with four players and definitely captures the essence of Lovecraft’s works. Despite being a game that takes 2-4 hours, the game is fairly unpredictable, and even as you get close to what you think will be a victory, it can quickly turn around and go the other way. Expansion sets exist that add other smaller towns you can travel to or mix it up by replacing the base components of the game with new ones (e.g., if you relied on guns and weapons for combat in the base set, some expansions remove them entirely, making for a very different game). Regardless, each of the seven expansions (will be eight soon) tends to focus on a single Ancient One: one focuses on Nyarlathotep, one on Cthulhu, one on Yog-Sothoth, and so on.

A particularly interesting facet of this game is that you can play it by yourself, which is exactly what I needed (since competitive games fail to work with one player). The hostile creatures and Ancient One all act deterministically, so there’s no secrets as to what they’re doing at a given turn. With that in mind, I wanted a way to save data on the games I play and mess around with it in the future. This post describes the results of that effort.

Finally, another great medium that the Cthulhu Mythos has been adapted to is short videos on the interwebs. They don’t follow any of the established stories and are only a few minutes long each, but put a nice humorous blend on the Mythos and are instant classics for those who’ve read Lovecraft and love it. Enjoy!

Elder Sign:

The Necronomicon:

They now say that for “quick and dirty” one-off jobs you should use MapReduce due to the fast data movement but in all other cases you should use Vertica. Dean and Ghemawat responded by saying that all the faults DeWitt and Stonebraker accused MapReduce of having are really faults of Hadoop’s MapReduce implementation and not MapReduce as an algorithm (that is, Google MapReduce doesn’t suffer from these problems). Specifically, DeWitt and Stonebraker’s MapReduce numbers turned out to be really slow because they stored the data as strings and parsing the data out was extremely expensive (often more expensive than the actual computation involved). To remedy this problem the data can simply be stored as Protocol Buffers, which DeWitt and Stonebraker were unable to do since Hadoop MapReduce doesn’t support it (although Google MapReduce was). There is an open ticket for this feature in Hadoop MapReduce but it appears to be orphaned long ago. If we actually get this feature in it will make the comparison extremely interesting.

The second half of my talk covered two recent papers on virtual machine migration, which is really handy if you need to reboot the physical machine for upgrades and maintenance or migrate the virtual machines for load balancing or power management, but as far as my research goes, none of those really help me out. Sysadmins will love these features, but the rest of us are really more concerned with reacting to VM failures and not so much to proactive VM failures.

Either way, I uploaded the slides as usual for your enjoyment. Hope you find them useful!

This book, The Rasputin File, summarizes and gives insight into Rasputin through a file that was put together after his death, only recently recovered. Although the File is named “Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime. Investigative Section”, the file specifically pertains to finding out the true influence the semi-literate peasant Rasputin had on those around him. For those not familiar with Rasputin, he was essentially an advisor to the tsar and tsarina who was suspected of pulling their strings and manipulating the government to his will. He also is famous for the myths surrounding his death. This book aims to shed light on both of these questions, using the newly recovered evidence in the File.

The author, Edvard Radzinsky, truly writes a unique book here. As the best-selling author of The Last Tsar, he has pretty much devoted his life to this small but extremely important period of time, and as such is the definitive author for this work. He is basically playing a detective who riffs through the evidence the File puts forth. The File is a compilation of interrogations with almost everyone who knew Rasputin at any time in his life, Radzinsky takes this and turns it into Rasputin’s biography. Yet he doesn’t take the File verbatim as true, and cross-references many other sources to find out who was lying when and how to resolve it (if possible).

The reason the book is unique is its greatest strength and greatest weakness: its grammar. The grammar is surprisingly informal, so as a result, the book is plagued by run-on sentences. Sentences often start with ‘and’, which makes it initially come off as being very sloppy or something you would expect from taking the original Russian and throwing it into Google Translate; it’s writing that definitely is ok as English, but gives a very non-native feel to it. Yet this weakness is it’s greatest strength. The incredibly informality of the sentences makes it feel as if the author is actually talking to you directly, which provides a powerful sense of atmosphere. But that’s not why you’re reading this: you’re interested in the two big questions surrounding Rasputin that I mentioned earlier, so let’s get to the good stuff.

The first question deals with understanding how much influence Rasputin had over those around him. Rasputin’s “magnetic personality” didn’t give him total influence over the royal family, but was pretty close and is much greater than you would be inclined to think. He enters the picture as a healer for the tsar’s son, who was constantly sick. The story goes that Rasputin showed up, looked at the child, told him everything would be fine, and all of a sudden the child was feeling better. The tsar and tsarina are pretty much sold on him after this point and he begins to infrequently advise them on matters (although the frequency does grow over time). He immediately stands out as an odd character due to his associations with the Khlysty, a Christian cult whose main teaching was that the way to remove sin was through sin. He isn’t really accepted at the royal court since he’s a peasant with these weird religious views, but since they’re all Christian it’s all good (it certainly wouldn’t have gone good if he was a Jew due to the growing anti-Semitism of the time).

So with the doctrine of “removing sin through sin” he becomes a healer for those around him and starts gaining a small family. It is suggested that he was sleeping with the tsarina herself, but the truth behind that doesn’t really show up (it heavily leans towards ‘Yes, he was’, however). The idea was basically that he would take the sinful and through sin, would remove their sin and put it in him. This idea would expand as his influence over the tsarina grew and he was able to influence politics greatly, so he would frequently find people at his house needing some favor. As he deemed them “sinful” for what it was they were willing to do to get it, he thus saw himself as their savior since he could rid them of their sin. He thus would take a “down payment” from them (typically money, and if they were female, sex also) and take it every night until he got them the favor they were asking for. At that point, they got what they wanted and he was able to remove some sin from their soul, thus accomplishing his goal as well.

But after a while Rasputin realizes that the sinful simply keep coming back to him and asking for more favors. Thus he becomes deeply depressed that he isn’t really helping them since they just go and sin again and come back to him. This marks the midpoint of the story and is where Rasputin starts drinking. He goes from no drinking at all because he knows he’s a bad drunk to being constantly drunk every day except when he has to go visit the tsar and tsarina. A little after this point, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated and World War I begins. This pulls away the tsar off to deal with the war and leaving the tsarina virtually in charge of stately matters. Since she relies on Rasputin and one other close friend, Anna Vyrubova, the three of them informally become a “shadow cabinet” and run the country. Yet Rasputin’s nature constantly draws him into the media and the populace quickly suspects that he is really running the show. But Radzinsky boils it down to this: On all things where the tsarina had no opinion, Rasputin dominated, and when she had an opinion, Rasputin reinforced it (and couldn’t change her mind on it). The book puts these situations as equally probable, so Rasputin effectively has control of half of Russia (not bad at all for a lowly peasant during the times of kings and queens!). The book gives the evidence and lays out the drama much better than I, but that will at least serve to answer one of our two questions and pique your interest in this book.

I will effectively do the same with the second question: how did Rasputin die? The myth of it goes like this: Prince Felix Yusupov invites Rasputin to his palace and poisons his wine and pastries. Rasputin continues to talk with Felix and is completely unaffected by the poison, so Felix returns with a pistol and shoots him at nearly point blank range. Rasputin loses his pulse and Felix and Co. assume he’s dead. They thus celebrate but after a while Rasputin gets up and runs for the door. He gets out to the snowy backyard to try to make a run for it but he ends up being shot twice (once in the back, once in the head). Now they notice that he has a pulse so they tie him up and throw him in a lake to finish off the job.

Radzinsky does an excellent job of taking the extremely unreliable evidence from Felix and Co. with the new evidence from the File and piecing together a much more realistic (but less amazing) story. What appears to be the case is that the poison they used on the wine was too diluted so it had no effect on him, he didn’t eat the poisoned pastries (he avoided pastries like the plague), and so Felix shot him. Felix hit him in a non-vital location (Felix had no training with guns so he was an extremely poor shooter) and since Rasputin passed out, they assumed he was dead and went to celebrate. Only hours later when Rasputin awoke and found that he was shot did Felix and Co. decide to finish the job. The rest then occurs as was in the myth with some minor changes to the particulars.

Yet it really is the particulars that make the Rasputin story so exciting, and I am butchering the book by not being able to transport that here. Hopefully I have given you some of the intrigue behind the book and motivated you to at least look into it, because seeing the man behind the scenes try to save the world through these very odd methods and how that gets rationalized (and how Radzinsky masterfully portrays it) really makes this book a must-read. It portrays the time as truly a telenovella, with everyone involved in drama with someone else and everyone needing Rasputin for something. Some people want to eliminate Rasputin, some want to save him, others want to replace him, and it goes on and on. But in the end only Felix was able to pull it off, and only at the specific point in time when he did (police surveillance was too tight on Rasputin beforehand). And with the fall of Rasputin came the fall of the tsar and tsarina, and with that, our world changed forever.

• Running an AppScale deployment: Largely the same as before, using appscale-run-instances.
• Uploading additional AppEngine applications to an AppScale deployment: This is the same as usual, but as it shows here, the 1.4 release will allow you to upload folders in addition to .tar.gz files, using appscale-upload-app. The load balancer will also allow logged-in users to upload applications as well in AppScale 1.4.
• Querying your AppScale deployment: Now shows information on the roles associated with each box (e.g., now you can see which box is running the load balancer, which is hosting your app, and so on), using appscale-describe-instances. The status page on the load balancer is also shown, which shows a lot of the same information but looks a little nicer in HTML.
• Terminating your deployment: Same as before, using appscale-terminate-instances.

We also test out the Guestbook sample application and a new one, images-api-in-action, which is a simple demonstration of the Python Images API. Next time we’ll do a sneak peak of some other features that will appear in AppScale 1.4, so stay tuned!