The secret lie of plants

Now, usually, I would never pick up a book titled "The Secret life of plants", but it was recommended to me by a friend and fellow bibliophile.

"The secret life of plants - A fascinating account of the physical, emotional, and spiritual relations between plants and man."  - Sounds interesting, doesn't it? It even has the Oxford style of comma placement that I support. I imagined a portal into a mind blowing universe of plants that I had no ken of until now; Well-reasoned theories backed by immaculate experiments unequivocally laying the ground for the next step in human-flora interaction. Instead I found a book riddled with inaccuracies and wishful thinking. Homeopathy has devised better biased experiments to further their cause. This is just an incompetent attempt.

Ben Goldacre's "Bad science" is a book I regularly recommend as required reading for anyone who wants to survive in this world intellectually. Although the primary target of Bad Science was homeopathy, TSLOP can compete for the top spot just as well.

The first hint (if getting kicked in the brain can be considered a hint) was right up there on page 7 when an experiment was unverifiable in the presence of a third party. The experiment was supposed to demonstrate activity in a plant against stimulus as measured by a galvanometer. The plants, however, produced no measurements whatsoever. Instead of accepting this as a failure of the experiment, the incident is used to forward an even more absurd theory - plants can go into faint in the presence of danger; In this case the danger being the observing physiologist who would experiment on plants.

Another example of such erroneous reasoning is displayed when the plant did show some activity on the galvanometer without any overt stimulus. Now this activity is attributed to the experimenter eating a cup of yogurt as it contains micro organisms. Fallacious argumentation is still acceptable as long as it is consistently fallacious.

Such examples abound in the book that fly against the most basic principles of empirical reasoning and scientific experimentation.

This is not to dismiss the entire concept of plant physiology. JC Bose has done some fine work in the area and other scientists continue to further his research.

This book, however, instead of furthering the cause, in fact harms the entire community of scientists in the field by unnecessarily aggrandizing the impact of the experiments and a religious route of argumentation that twists its way through the valleys of inaccuracies , and the hills of improbability to arrive at the fictional destination of the unprovable hypothesis. This much belabored metaphor is of much higher quality than the contents of TSLOP, which i abandoned at page 47.

P.S: the cover art is infantile.

Never let me go - Kazuo Ishiguro

The primary reason I picked up "Never let me go" was because of KI's earlier work that I enjoyed - "Remains of the day". ROTD had an unique style of first person narration that hinted at, rather than explain the actions and emotions of Stevens, a reticent butler. There was also an undercurrent of melancholy humour - largely because of the absurdly stiff Victorian sensibilities of Stevens - to ROTD which was what I hoped to find again in "Never let me go".

"Social Sci-Fi" seems to be an apt categorisation of Never let me go. Based around a science-fiction'y idea of clones for organ harvesting (no, this isn't a spoiler), the book mostly focuses on the personal lives of the clones as move from their public school type environs into adulthood to complete their duties.

Since I've been reading this on the kindle and was closely monitoring the completion percentage, even at the four-fiths mark, the central idea remains a backdrop for the host of interpersonal issues that take centre stage.

As with his other works, the author excels at creating a sense stifling stillness across time and space. This, coupled with a sparseness of characters seems to be the author's signature style. Unlike ROTD's narrator though, here,  Kathy - the central character, is deeply self-aware and never misses an opportunity to analyse her and other people's behaviour. However - this is the garden variety of analysis and not the Doesteyevkian style of extended neurotic dark introspection.

Now that I have completed it, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. All we are allowed is a myopic glimpse into the progression of society almost all of this through one particularly dialogue exchange. So - why have it at all? There are enough afflictions in the world that could have served just as well without having to bring in the science fiction angle.

I still enjoyed the uncomplicated gentle prose of Kazuo Ishiguro, but am struggling to describe the sense of tangible "nullness" in which the characters live. It's as if the author took all the ingredients for a fiery curry and still somehow managed to produce a bland meat and stew. It's a technical achievement, but I'm left asking - What's the point?

Shadow Complex

A new game was long overdue last weekend, so I went and downloaded the much touted Shadow Complex.  This was rated as the best XBLA game of ALL TIME by IGN  It's  a relatively small download of 800 odd MB, but it will absolutely blow you away with what it packs in those bytes.

Let me start by stating unequivocally, that i really enjoyed this game. Played through in a couple of days, and given that these days i tend to chuck anything sub-par, that's a huge plus for this game.

I'm usually far too excited with a new game to pay attention to the opening credits, but i did notice that this was powered by the Unreal Engine. Which is a good thing, because the unreal engine has its focus solidly on movement and accuracy as opposed to realistic backdrops (remember how quick Unreal tournament was ? )

The game is a 2.5 D side scroller, which means that your character moves only in 2 dimensions but the world is rendered in 3D. One weird aspect of this is that you can shoot in 3D, but the controls do not allow for aiming in 3D leading to thumb crunching guess work in such situations. At one point, instead of lobbing my precious grenades and rockets at the massive 60 foot monster machine, i ended up blowing away foot soldiers because of the auto-aim in 3D

But mostly, it works well, and adds depth in the massacre when working with the unlimited ammo gun. Yep - the gun is unlimited ammo. I'm kind of ambivalent about this - one one hand, it enables a very satisfying romp through the scenes with the trigger pressed down, but on the other it takes away from the challenge.

Speaking of which, I set the difficulty to my usual (Max - 1), which proved to be far too easy once the upgrades started kicking in. So - if that's your usual setting, crank it up to max difficulty. You'll soon get used to it.

The game has 2 options for play - "Campaign" and "Proving Grounds". DO NOT start the tutorial. Read that again - DO NOT start the tutorial. Jump straight into the campaign mode. The campaign mode has an excellent staged, contextual learning system built in. Going through the tutorials reveals all the upgrades and takes away from the satisfaction of mastering the abilities on the fly. You can come back to the "Proving Grounds" to complete the challenges and try to beat your own score.

The campaign mode follows the story of Jason Fleming, and his girlfriend who go hiking and discover the ... well.. "Shadow Complex". The plot line is acceptable if a little cliched, but the acting and cut scenes are hilariously overacted and scripted. They would have been "camp" funny if the characters didn't take themselves so seriously. There's an inexplicable Jason's Dad angle which i don't quite get. Maybe it's a setup for the sequel. Simply put - find bad guy, which is everyone except yourself, and kill them. Some classics don't need to be improved upon.

I've come around to the firm belief that everything is more fun with a projectable grappling hook. It worked for Just Cause, and it worked wickedly well for Earthworm Jim. Shadow Complex is no exception. It's particularly satisfying to pull away the shield from an enemy using the hook.

The game manages to balance the main story line and the scavenging aspect fairly well. I cannot be usually bothered to scrounge around for every little bob-end for an infinitesimal upgrade to my already formidable powers. Shadow complex excels at this by

a) Making the discovery of upgrades particularly satisfying as they are hidden away well, and its not a matter of a marathon trek across deserted scapes. You actually have to think a little bit. It all becomes easier with the hook.

and

b) Making the upgrades worthwhile. It's not another doohickey to make my gun shine with a ruby attachment. Most of the upgrades simply but usefully increase the amount of ammo i can carry, hence increase the number of people i can kill without re-loading. That's EXACTLY what i want from an upgrade.

Something that completely baffles me, though, is why in the world did they not stick to the usual control mechanism for shooters - left joystick for aim, right trigger for shooting. It's know to work. Why muck around. Now we end up with my already overloaded right hand to do aim + shoot with RT , and shoot deadlier stuff with the RB. All while I'm standing still and my left hand hanging limp on that side, while the right hand is in advanced stages of carpal tunnel syndrome.

My absolute favourite part is the gameplay. It's incredible how many big name titles get this wrong. It's even in the name G A M E - P L A Y, for f**k's sake. All the visual imagery and pimple detail in high res is useless if the game isn't playable. Shadow complex is a great example of gameplay done right. The movement is quick, without any loading screens. Most situations have multiple solutions - each of them equally satisfying. At one point I even managed to beat the game bypassing a crucial step simply through ingenuity. This isn't about my massively reticulated brain, but the fact that the game allows you to do stuff that even the designers had not anticipated. Its speaks volumes of the game engine more than anything else.

To wrap it up - great game play, stock plot line, hacky dialogue, fantastic upgrade system and some innovative weapons (The creative possibilities of the foam gun are practically limitless), and no loading screens!

I finished the main story line in a couple of evenings amounting to about 14 hours of serious gameplay. This included about 60% of item discovery. About five minutes into the game I had forgotten that this is a 800 Meg download and not a DVD.

9/10 

Clearing out the 'ol beside stack

It's been a while since i got a new batch of books, which means that my bedside stack has accumulated a mix of new and old books that i ended up re-reading. Looking at this stack made me realize that nowadays i don't end up completing every book that i start. This sort of bloody-mindedness used to be a source of pride for me, but not anymore. It's just worth not worth the time and effort to plough through unreadable garbage.

Books are no more on a golden pedestal. Like with every other form of media - TV, Movies, Games, I've started applying the principle of cutting losses.