10. Geekspeak

Book: Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness

Author: Dr. Graham Tattersall

Number of pages: 239

What I’m watching: TV: The Office, The Mindy Project, Downton Abbey, Black Adder, Cadfael Movies: The King’s Speech, Much Ado About Nothing (2013), Back to the Future, Robots, Tomb Raider, How to Train Your Dragon, Wayne’s World, The Wrong Trousers

What I’m playing: The New Super Bros, Far Cry 3, Rock Band, Skyrim, Crysis

 

            For whatever reason, I just kept putting off this post. Maybe I wasn’t sure how I felt after reading my next book, Geekspeak.

Well, first off, I picked this book up and a sale of donated books. Turns out this copy is an “UNCORRECTED PROOF: NOT FOR SALE” (front cover). Too late, I already paid for it. What’s more: “Reviewers are reminded that changes may be made in this proof copy before books are printed. If any material from the book is to be quoted in a review, the quotation should be checked against the final bound book” (back cover).¹ Fuck that, this blog is about reading the books I have on my bookshelves. I’m not going out and buying a second copy to add to my shelf. The idea of my blog is to subtract from my shelves. The back cover claims that “Geekspeak does for problem-solving what Freakonomics did for economics.” I remember thinking Freakonomics was awesome, so I had strong hopes for liking this book.

            It starts off pretty good. Dr. Tattersall talks about how big people’s vocabularies are. He suggests using random sampling of dictionary pages to figure out about how many words you know. He mentions a study done in Britain (he’s British) analyzing recorded conversations which revealed that the top three words spoken by women were “she, her, [and] said” and the most frequent words said by men were “fucking, er, [and] the” (6; 7).

That feeds into some certain assumptions about the genders. Gossipy women and stupid men. Hell, “er” isn’t even a fucking word!² I feel like “er” is a more British filler syllable. I remember Harry Potter saying it in Book 4, but I feel like Americans are more apt to say “uh” or something close to the schwa sound(of course, I’m pulling this er vs. uh stuff out of my ass). Still, I find that study intriguing.

He also graphed out the frequencies of different word-lengths of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a way to identify her unique vocabulary. This is the kind of random crap I like. I had the idea of counting up the spoken words per minute of Gilmore Girls and comparing it to other TV shows, because the joke is that they talk so much faster on that show than real life or other shows.

I wanted to do a statistical analysis to see if there’s any significant difference. I guess that means I speak Geek.

            Then he does stuff like explaining horsepower, estimating how heavy a house is, and using math to explain “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (except since he’s British, he uses the Queen, not Ren McCormack). Sometimes I like what he’s writing about, but as I’m reading, I’m growing more and more bored with Geekspeak. I don’t really care how much a house weighs.

            So, the book’s basic structure is Dr. Tattersall puts forward a question, a little anecdote or pop culture reference to lead into the answer, and then he answers the question using a mathematic formula and plugging in estimated numbers. He’ll mention Captain Kirk or Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (my second favorite book I’ve ever read), but leaves it behind to talk about math that sometimes doesn’t really connect back to it.

A chapter will start off cool, but end up as a rough guess to a useless fact.

            Instead of quoting an entire chapter, this is me imitating a chapter:

            How busy is rush hour?

            According to Doc Brown, in 2015, “we don’t need roads.” But for now, I have to stick to my highway commute to and from work. When I’m stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, how many people am I looking at driving opposite me on the other side? To figure this out, I need to know how many cars I see and how many people are in each car. We can use the formula

People = Length of lane X lanes X cars per lane X people per car

On a straight, flat stretch of road, I’d say I can see about a quarter-mile clearly. One mile is 5,280 ft. Divide that by four to get how much I can see. Let’s just make it 1,000 ft. A car is about 12 ft long. To account for the space in between each car, I’ll just round up to one car per 20 ft of road. So, I’m seeing 50 cars down one lane. But where my car is sitting I-94 has three lanes. That makes it 150 cars. How many people are in each car? I don’t need to run around each vehicle and do a census Frogger-style. I can just get a look at a sample of 10 cars and apply those results to the whole population of rush hour traffic. My result turned out as 9 cars with only one person. One car had a driver and a passenger. That makes an average of 1.1 people per car. Multiply that by the number of cars and I now can reasonably guess that I am looking at 165 people across the cement divider.

 

           The worst part is that so many of the numbers end up being arbitrary. Discussing clouds, Dr. Tattersall writes “a true Geek will have a go at working it out, but will also recognize that the estimate could easily be ten times too big or ten times too small. Cloud thickness ranges from hundreds to thousands of feet; for simplicity, let’s go for a 1,000-foot (1/5 mile) thick, 1 mile long and 1 mile wide cumulus cloud” (226). The same thing goes for pretty much all of his facts. He’ll give a range, sometimes differing by millions, and pick a simple number in the middle. It leaves me wondering, how factual are his facts?

            But then again, I’ve found myself bringing up some of these random and useless facts in conversations.³ Sometimes I really enjoy Dr. Tattersall’s topic, like which  personality descriptors are used most in personal ads. On the other hand, I don’t give a shit about how much a bus weighs.

At one point, he’s pondering how large an angel’s wings would need to be to work (one of the interesting ones), and he writes “estimating the weight of a soul is beyond the scope of this book” (149). Lucky for me, soon I’ll be reading Spook for my blog, which I’m pretty sure works at answering that very question!

He figures out whether or not there are more people alive than the total of all people who have ever lived. What?! How is that even a question? Apparently, all lot of people have been saying that. How could there be more people alive today than the total number of past lives of humanity spanning the entire history of the world? That idea sounds unbelievably ridiculous to me. And yet, the doctor describes an enormous population explosion over the past few centuries and how technological advances allow more food production than ever before. In the end, he estimates the number of all the past dead to be four times the number of all the current living. That still seems to be too small a difference to me.

After finishing reading, the problem with deciding the fate of Geekspeak is that the book switches every chapter between being cool as ice and boring as shit. Since the book is about math, I tallied up all the ones I liked. I liked 42.3% of the topics.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Going. Was it worth a read-through? Yes. Do I plan on ever reading it again? No.

 

Notes

1. Did I just break that rule by using that quote?

2. Damn, how many times have I said “fuck” so far? Or “the,” for that matter?

3. Such as 20 mph farts.

 

Works Cited

Tattersall, Graham. Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness [uncorrected

          proof]. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print.