Black and White and Read All Over

I just finished reading Writing for Comics with Peter David, by Peter David of course. A friend got this book for a project, and thought I might like reading it. I must say that was a good assumption.

I’ve read quite a bit of David’s novel work, seen some of his TV work, but not so much of his comics work. The man is a prolific writer and story teller. I mean he has Hulk, Spiderman, and Wolverine under his comic writing belt, besides others. Safe to say he has enough experience to write a book like this. That experience and David’s engaging writing style come through.

There are tons of books and courses out there for people that want to write novels. There are even resources for writing plays or screenplays, but few cater to the media of comics or graphic novels. David takes a pretty good, broad approach to the subject. He provides easy to understand examples of the current trend of comics to present more like film on paper, and how the media is more visual and less language than it was 30 years ago. He shows differences between comics and novels or screenplays. He breaks down basic plot and conflict styles into their simplest forms. It’s just an excellent resource for anyone who has good stories to tell and feels drawn to the medium. Pardon the pun. Though I wouldn’t dream of starting out in an endeavor like this myself, it gives me a better understanding of the peculiar difficulties of the art style. I think it’s a worthwhile read for anyone that enjoys comics or good literature in general. And it’s a definite tool an aspiring comic writer should consider for their reference library.

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Doing It Our Way

I’ve been so busy I actually finished reading A Social History of American Technology by Ruth Schwartz Cowan over a week ago. It’s taken me this long to have the time and the motivation to actually write a review of the book. I’ve actually been attempting to finish the book for some time. This was another one of those books I had to get for a class in college that I wanted to actually read all of later.

Essentially the book covers the growth and change of technology in the US due to its particular social and environmental conditions. It actually does a good job of covering the subject matter in an entertaining and informative matter. I enjoyed it, but those of the engineering bent can have peculiar taste in books like this. The earlier parts of the book are more thorough. Due to the rapid advance of technologies in the past half century, the latter part of the book covers a narrower group of technologies. This is understandable, and I dare say the book would have been too long had it covered much more. For what’s there though it provides a really good perspective on how American technology deviated from technologies originally developed in Europe and how technology altered American society in return.

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The Face of Hundreds

Well I finally finished reading The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands. I tell you what that took me a long time. The thing is over 700 pages long and I swear it’s like 8pt font. I read it in 3 goes. I broke those up with fiction books in between. It helped to take a bit of a break from the flood of information.

Well I’m not exactly sure what to say here. This was a darned good book. It’s well written. It covers an extremely important person in American history. And I really liked it. The reason I don’t know what to say is that the book just covers so much. Franklin lived a long time and did more in his life than most people could imagine. This is one of the people that helped make the US the country it is today. And some of the things the thought of and helped institute are very modern ideas even by today’s standards. So if you like history and good writing then you should pick this one up and give it a read.

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To Err is Human, Just not Desired

For my Industrial Engineering System Design, which is mercifully coming to a close, I had to buy two books. The first and most expensive I already reviewed. The second much less expensive book was Set Phasers on Stun: & Other True Tales of Design, Technology, & Human Error by Steven M. Casey. Yeah it’s a long name. This book is a collection of 20 stories told by Casey. He uses them to demonstrate disastrous interactions between humans and design choices. Each story offers a different example of how easily a seeming innocuous design choice can cause reactions and outcomes that are completely unintended. The book is well written and Casey makes the stories entertaining without being too long. It’s a good reads for any engineer, and most people that would like to understand why testing and iteration of designs are so important. Throwing technology at a problem doesn’t work unless the technology is used judiciously with the user in mind. It makes a good case for why Industrial Engineering is important.

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The Design of Designing

This semester I’ve been taking Industrial Engineering 201: System Design. In the class we are divided into groups. Each group is given a design project for someplace on or near campus. Our group was given the project to improve Freshman Move-in day. We narrowed the cope of the project to the High rise dorms, and have been working on the project ever since. All along we have been studying how to manage a design project to develop the best solution in the time and in the constraints provided. The book we have been using to facilitate this is Product Design and Development by Karl Ulrich, Steven Eppinger, Steven Eppinger. If you want a taste of the cost of engineering textbooks follow the link. Since we are in the final parts of the project, we have finished with the book, hence the review.

Basically the book does a pretty good job at what it is supposed to do. It helps direct you down the path of product design and development. You start at finding a need, defining the need and constraints, and moving on from there. The book works best in an environment where an instructor fills in some info and provides additions reasoning and points of view. You can read it on your own, but you really need a project to get the most out of it. When we finish with the other book I’ll post a review of it. Now we have to finish the project report, and maybe they will implement it next year.

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Building a Corpus Callosum

As some of you know or have guessed I have a nearly unrelenting want to collect and read books. I know I want to read far more books than I will ever be able to. Of course that also goes for movies, television series, plays, music, art, classes, and various other things. I find myself torn between all of these and the needs for daily activities of life. That means that I am also loath to get rid of books. Periodically I will go through and throw away a lot of stuff that I don’t need, but books always seem to escape the trash can or the giveaway bin. So I have slowly gathered a collection of books from classes and such. The Civilized Engineer by Samuel C. Florman is a prime example of that. Anyone who knows engineers knows how long we can ramble on the subject, and how emotional we can get. Feel free not to follow the link if you have no interest in an engineer’s rant.

I had to buy TCE for a Mechanical Engineering class. It was one of those books that had designated readings for it, but I never really got into it or read many of the passages. It was just that at the time I was preoccupied with taking 17-19 hours of engineering curricula a semester. However, I kept the book, because I did like some of what I read. I hoped beyond hope that I might actually take time to read it one day. In fact I foolishly purchased a previous book that Florman had written entitled The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. That book is on my list for reading later. In fact an Architect friend of mine saw it on my bookshelf and was rather taken aback at the name. He seemed to think it smacked of oxymoron. It’s a common view point that is mirrored on both sides of the Engineering (Useful Arts) and Liberal Arts divide. And it seems that the current educational culture and environment are set up to reinforce that divide rather than attempt to bridge it.

In fact that’s what this book is primarily about. Florman has a bachelor’s degree and civil engineer’s degree from Dartmouth plus a M.A. in English literature from Columbia University. He laments the divide between the two areas of study. Primarily the book traces the origins of the divide back to the change from engineers being the larger than life, classically trained Eiffels and Roeblings through the development of the land grant schools whose charter was to teach the sons of mechanics and farmers to be engineers. The book posits that this shift from upper class, classically educated engineers to lower class engineers of rather poor backgrounds, maintained the class distinction of the time. This was also reinforced by the classical Greek notion that thinking was a much nobler and more favored task than mere doing. My understanding is that in the end the Greeks transferred much of their doing and building responsibilities to their slaves, under this notion. An interesting thought considering the plebian view some maintain of engineers. Then you have the other professions that look down on one of the few professions that still only requires a 4 year degree. I too have felt the downcast gaze as I passed under the upturned noses of these “true” professionals and “high thinkers.” But I digress.

Florman is one of the individuals from the profession that trumpets the changing of the engineering curriculum and training to include more of the liberal arts that have slowly been squeezed from it. I read as he told of his life and saw parallels to my own. We both became swept up in the wonder and joy of learning of machines, designing, and improving the world around us. The elation at problem solving and increased control and understanding of the world around us can be truly intoxicating. That’s hard for some people to understand. I don’t think I quite lost touch with other interests as badly as many. I have known engineering students and others in programs like computer science that saw no need for classes not related directly to the degree they were seeking to attain. I always felt that showed narrowness of view, but for some it allows them to focus an intensity that few can achieve. As I got farther into the program I noticed that my interests and tastes were expanding. I became dissatisfied with the limitations of the required curriculum and set out to supplement it with large numbers of classes I didn’t have to take but wanted to.

As the book continued I realized that I had begun a journey that he advocates, but that I hadn’t completely intended. Florman advocates a percentage of engineers seek additional more liberal education. Some engineers prefer focusing on the technical, but some need to expand their education and abilities in order to move up the management ladder, serve as interfaces with less technical public, and provide a much needed technically proficient part in government. The expanded education is a difficult thing. All of the time for a 4 year degree is taken up by the current curriculum. Any expanded education will require more time and money. It’s difficult to justify to a student without seeing any certain future monetary benefits.

Florman, like most people, thinks highly of his profession, and I admit I do as well. Of course I am slightly biased. Non-engineers might not find the book that compelling, but reading it might inspire a little more understanding of what they see as the dull and drudging engineer. He puts a lot of interesting things in the air in ways I hadn’t thought of them. I’m going to have to ponder them and decide if it’s time I got off my duff and chased some things of which my conservative nature has previously steered me clear.

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First and Foremost

Whew, I’ve been busy, busy, busy with work and class and house. I’ve been finished with His Excellency for several days, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to write the review of the Joseph J. Ellis book. The first book I read by Ellis was Founding Bothers that I reviewed over a year ago. That one was a Pulitzer Prize winner. After reading this one I bought American Sphinx, a National book Award winner itself. As you can tell Ellis knows his stuff about this era of American history, and has a knack for turning it into a good book. I’ll ramble on about the book after the link.

This book has been sitting on my ever growing pile of “To Be Read” books for a while. A friend of mine actually managed to read it before me and write his own review. I’ve been interested in history for along time, and right now I seem to be in a US history phase. I might switch to Europe or Asia later.

Washington is interesting as a historic figure because his influence is so great and yet knowledge of the man himself is so limited. He falls into that category of People that are known for centuries by one name that everyone recognizes as this singular individual. Someone would ask me what I was reading and I would replay, “A biography of Washington.” They knew immediately who I was talking about. There are a limited number of people with that much staying power.

Ellis has this knack in books of turning historical figures into people. There have been trends with History’s greats first of building them up to near godhood and then tearing them down to nothingness. Ellis admits this in the book. He takes a different tack. He tries to reconstruct the person and the motivations and experience that lead them to the points and decisions on which most of history focuses. What you end up with is a previously enigmatic persona that dissolves in the light of realistic human wants and needs. It discards the common view of the inherent “goodness or rightness” of some of these individuals to show how very fallible and self motivated people could do such great things. In my view it’s infinitely better than the mythos that normally surrounds the founding of this country.

So don’t read this book if you like all the divine goodness talk about the Founding Fathers. Do read it if you want to see history as closer to real life. And do read it if you really want to see how amazing and necessary Washington was to the birth of this country. For a long time people forgot that half the beauty a portrait are the cracks, flakes, and other distress marks.

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Could you repeat that?

Well lookie there I’m actually typing this on Sunday. I can’t believe it. I’m finally getting around to reviewing those two books I read. This post will be about the Deborah Tannen book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. I’ll ramble on about it on the other end of the link, to help keep the front page cleaner.

I sought out this book after reading The War Against Boys. It was referenced a few times and I decided to get it and see what it said for myself. I’ll say now that I’m glad I did.

Basically the book covers differences in communication structure and dynamics between sexes. It includes both verbal and body language communication. The differences are similar to watching two groups from very different cultures try to negotiate a contract. They have different ideas of how the negotiation is supposed to proceed, but the methods may not be compatible. It leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation. Tannen points to examples of this difference in style in conversations between sexes. However, I would say that the style differences can occur between any two people, but the most common and dramatic differences do occur across sexes.

Really the book reads pretty fast, and holds your attention quite well. It’s divided into sections that are only a couple of pages long. That makes it easy to pick up the book and read at short breaks in the day. I would recommend this book to most people. It sheds a lot of light on being able to notice different conversational styles, and thwart escalating misunderstandings. In fact two days after reading the book I saw a couple having a conversation in the store that epitomized some of the conversation styles covered in the book. I think it would also be an asset to anyone writing fiction and seeking to make more realistic text.

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