Elementary, my dear Watson

Anthony Horowitz has written a new Sherlock Holmes novel. It’s called the House of Silk.

Now what’s special about this book is that it’s the first after-Conan-Doyle era to be officially endorsed by the conan-doyle estate.

Obviously, it’s not actually possible to write exactly like Doyle, so I’m going to give a half-review-type-thing about how well Horowitz impersonates Doyle.

I’m used to Horowitz writing books like Alex Rider and the power of 5. There’s one main difference between those books and the original Sherlock Holmes books, and that’s the style. The alex rider books are written for children, whereas the Sherlock Holmes books are aimed at much older audiences. Now, Horowitz has written some books that are aimed at older audiences, but I haven’t read them. So to me, even before I began the book, I was interested to see how that writing style would translate over. The simple conclusion was, it didn’t.

Horowitz has imitated, almost to perfection, the style of Conan-Doyle.

At the very beginning of the book, the scene is set; Holmes is dead, Watson is old now, and has had “Two marriages, three children, seven grandchildren, a successful career in medicine and the Order of Merit”. However, this is not enough for him,and he wishes to tell the readers of his books another story.This story, however, is scandalous, it can only be read 100 years after publishing.

And right away, the reader is caught up in the action. He too is transported back to 221B Baker street, where Holmes and Watson are just beginning another of their many amiable conversations when a distressed client bursts in. Holmes then promptly manages to figure out the entire biography of this person just from one cursory glance.

And this brings me on to one of the most endearing parts of any Sherlock Holmes book: The deductions. Now, I’ve always felt that Conan-Doyle was an absolute mastermind for these. He trod the fine line between the deductions being boring or ridiculous with ease and as a result, left everyone gasping with Holmes’ intellect. I was a bit apprehensive that Horowitz wouldn’t be able to match that, but he does, to the same glossed perfection as his predecessor. The logic remains infallible, the deductions incredible yet simple.

You’ll notice I haven’t talked much about the plot. That’s because I haven’t finished reading it. But what I have read so far is incredible. I’ll talk about this more when I’ve finished the book 🙂

If I didn’t know who the author of the book was, I would honestly have guessed that it was Conan-Doyle. Horowitz has successfully captured the spirit of one of the greatest series of all time, and I couldn’t think of a beter way to respect it.

“So, all of the elements are there: the data, the data, the data. Nothing of consequence overlooked. And yet can Horowitz, like Holmes, make from these drops of water the possibilities of an Atlantic or a Niagara? Can he astonish us? Can he thrill us? Are there “the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis” that we yearn for? Emphatically, yes.”-The Guardian

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Freakonomics part 2

So I finished reading freakonomics yesterday and I thought I might write about what I thought of it.

Basically, it’s about how there’s a hidden side to most trends and how looking at the data associated with these trends helps us to predict with resonable certainty what will happen next in the trend. It talks about things like the living situations of crack dealers, how your name affects how well you do in life and how the Ku Klux Klan are like real estate agents.

Now, I’m not going to talk about the conclusions they draw from this so much as I am going to talk about the underlying philosophy behind it.

Basically, all the data you read about in freakonomics comes from natural experiments in that they were not conducted for economic analysis, but rather inadvertently produce data that can be used. My favorite example of this was when they talked about algorithms which helped determine whether teachers were cheating when it came to marking children’s tests.The data from this came from the chicago public school system, which produced this data when they themselves were checking for the same thing.

I find it really interesting to see how these things that are meant to accomplish an entirely different thing end up having their produce being analysed in order to better arm ourselves against other rising trends.

It makes me wonder whether there was a way to produce an algorithm that could get data from a specific source, realize the context of that data and then conduct the appropriate analysis of the data and then feed it to a central source. This could either be local (used by, say, one specific police station) or global (a worldwide compendium of trends and how to dissect them). This would be incredibly beneficial to everyone, since not only would it allow us to stop current trends, it would allow us to identify new trends and either nip them in the bud or manipulate them, change their individual tenets to suit us.

Hey, this has given me an idea. I think I’ll start work on a java project that gets something inputted into it, crunches the numbers and then stores this trend for further use so that new sequences inputted can be cracked slightly faster. It’ll be slightly difficult, but hopefully, I’ll get there.

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Setting the scene

So I just finished reading ‘A Prison Diary’ by Jeffery Archer. Basically, it’s a diary (who would have guessed!) that Jeffery Archer wrote when he was sentenced to a 4 year sentence in jail for perjury( which incidentally, he didn’t commit). It’s a great book, and I strongly suggest you read it, but I didn’t really want to talk about that today. I wanted to talk about something else today, and that was his writing style.

Holy crap, the man can write.

Just take a look at this, it’s on the blurb of the book and it just about says everything you need to know about the book:

DAY 5 MONDAY 23 JULY 2001 5.53AM ‘The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I’ve been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. There is a child of seventeen in the cell below me who has been charged with shoplifting – his first offence, not even convicted – and he is being locked up for eighteen and a half hours, unable to speak to anyone. This is Great Britain in the twenty-first century, not Turkey, not Nigeria, not Kosovo, but Britain.’

As you can see, he is good. Very, very good. So I though it might be interesting to try and emulate his style, but to try and describe a rather different situation. So here we go:

THURSDAY 1 MARCH 2012 9.45PM: The moonlight filters through the curtains, breaking the calm of an otherwise pitch black night sky. I’ve been sitting on my bed for almost an hour now, doing various things on my computer. The silence of the room is broken only by the soft clicks of my fingers on the keyboard and the occasional tapping of my fingers to some foreign rhythm on my mattress. I shift occasionally, dissatisfied with the feeling of the mattress on my legs. The laptop screen casts a pallid glow on my face, giving it the appearance of some supernatural being. I stare at the screen, evaluating my work so far and nod, satisfied. I type a few final words, cast another glance over it, and with a feeling of quiet finality, I hit ENTER. I stare at the screen until the loading bar fills up and lie back in relief as my blog post goes public

So I’ve just read over that and I’m pretty happy with it. I mean, I don’t set the scene with the same amount of mastery as Archer, but I think that it’s a good start.

Oh, and just so you know, this couldn’t be more different from how I’m actually blogging. I’m not that dark loner, right now I’m sitting at a table eating dinner while blogging in a relatively well lit atmosphere and the moon is nowhere in sight.

Well that’s about it. Tell me if you think I succeeded with emulating Archer’s style 😀

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freakonomics

So today I borrowed a book called freakonomics, and it’s pretty cool. I’ve just started reading it, but I found it pretty interesting.

Once I’ve read the entire book, I’ll make a post about what I learnt/felt, but since I’ve just started, I thought I might talk about something a bit different.

Freakonomics is basically about how we as humans have these patterns of behavior which are kind of programmed inside us, and how these patterns can be exploited to predict how we react to certain situations. I’ve ben interested in this subject for some time now, and I think the book explores this concept quite well.

I’ve just finished reading about American Standardized tests. Basically, there was this policy that said that if public school students didn’t do well in their standardized tests, the government wouldn’t dedicate as many resources to the school.Naturally, this incentivized some teachers to help their students in the tests, which ensured that they would do better.

The book basically talks about how if many students get consecutive hard questions right, there is a greater chance of the students having had aid during the test. It basically uses this complicated algorithm which searches for these strings and then decides how likely it is for help to have been given.

It’s really interesting to see how these seemingly random results can be put in some order so that they can be analysed.

That’s about it for this post, I’ll make another post when I’ve finished the book 😀

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319 days remaiing

A trilogy in 5 parts

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.

That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

-Douglas Adams

You know, I’ve read a lot of books which in some way involve people flying. But few of these books actually explain how to achieve this flight, and fewer still have reasons as insane as this. In fact, none of them except this is as insane.

For those of you who haven’t read this before, it comes from the book Life, the universe and everything. It’s the 4th book in The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy trilogy (don’t ask).

This series, by Douglas Adams, is the consumate science fiction/comedy series. Ok, maybe the science isn’t as logical as say, an Asimov story (at one point, we are introduced to the hooloovoo, a super-intelligent shade of blue), but for some reason, it just works.

I absolutely love this series. The characters, who range from a manically depressed robot to an old, forgetful, philosophical man who just so happens to be the ruler of the universe, are all completely insane, but interact with each other in such a zany matter that you have no choice other than to love them. The settings generally make no sense whatsoever (a large part of the second book is set in a restaurant in which you witness the end of the universe), the plot generally hovers somewhere between slightly ridiculous and making no sense whatsoever, and people go into alternate realities alarmingly frequently.

Oh, and 6 x 9 = 42.

The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy will probably never be remembered as great literature, but it is the kind of book that inspires a cult following, that makes people all around the world celebrate International Towel Day, and that has made people view the world differently ever since Arthur Dent first lay in front of a bulldozer.

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