Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen is about many things, with running as the main thread that stitches the story together.  While running is the central theme, the interesting parts are the characters, the cultures, and the science.

The book is advertised as the story of a tribe of super-runners in the Copper Canyons of Mexico known as the Tarahumara (or Raramuri, their name for themselves).  This tribe of Native Mexicans are amazing distance runners.  Pregnant women have been known to run double-marathon distances in a day.  Their most popular sport is a game in which runners can cover hundreds of miles chasing a ball.  And if this book were just about the Tarahumara, it would be fascinating enough.  Instead, the author Christopher McDougall takes us on a ride through the modern distance-running world.  Through this journey we meet any number of fascinating people, all on their own, unique paths.  To me this was the heart and soul of the book.  Several outrageous characters stand out; the prize fighter that ran away from civilization, the greatest distance runner of all time, the woman we beats all the women and all the men at any number of 100 mile races, the hippy that sold a shoe company on the idea that cushioned shoes were bad.

A surprising twist in the book was the science.  One of the themes that McDougall (and the runners in the book) revisit over and over is barefoot or minimally-padded running.  McDougall cites numerous, recent scientific studies on the subject, and interviews scientists that study running.  While the anecdotal evidence is fun to read, the scientific weight that McDougall brings to the argue is substantial.  Nike is evil, barefoot running is good, and humans may very well have evolved to be distance runners.  All these points gradually work their way from being opinion to verifiable facts during the course of the book (the evolution story is a little more than I am willing to dive into here).

I found this book fascinating and enjoyable.  I was disappointed when it was over.  I look forward to reading more of this fine author’s work.

Collins is an expert in genetics, holding a PhD in chemistry and an MD, and ran the Human Genome Project.  With this background, and knowledge from a number of professional relationships he has built, a vast tale of personal medicine based on genetics is told.   He manages to tie together large bodies of cited research with human stories.  The author brings real stories of real people impacted by real science: cutting-edge genetic testing and genetic treatments.  These are stories of cancer, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart attacks.  They are stories of sorrow, of hope, and of the controversy and ethics of stem cells, cloning, and genetic testing of fetuses.

I was caught off guard with the advances being made in the various medical fields related to genetics.  This isn’t pie-in-the-sky stuff.  Collins documents a well-know (in medical circles) case of AIDS being cured with a genetically-modified stem cell implant.  He discusses how patients’ lives have been saved with genetic screening, and how patients have avoided painful and unnecessary procedures because of the same screening.  He also discusses a number of cures waiting in the wings, often delayed by an archaic FDA.

Most convincing to me was his line of predictions.  Collins illustrated 10 predictions he made in 2000 about the state of genetic medicine in 2010.  At the time he got laughs, yet all 10 predictions have come true.  He lays out further predictions for the future.  We are looking at a time when major diseases could be cured due to our increased understanding of DNA, and new techniques being developed almost weekly for the modification of our genetic code.

Beyond the stories and the medicine, this book provides a solid layman’s education in DNA and microbiology.  I would recommend it to anyone with a disease (especially cancer), to anyone concerned about their health, or anyone curious about genetics and the future of medicine.

I ultimately quit this book because while I read a lot about science, and was able to cross-check that things in this book were wrong according to what experts in the field wrote, I am not a scientist nor am I a literary scholar. If Mr. Lehrer is misrepresenting, lying, or simply so bad at science writing that he is giving me bad information, how am I to know? Long story short: Mr. Lehrer lost my trust. I read books by good authors, that are often scientists, to learn more about the world. I *trust* that their professional credentials mean that they will provide me with accurate information. I don’t need to unintentionally poison my mind with outright incorrect information.

Luckily .Net 4.0 / Silverlight 4.0 / C# 4.0 comes with the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).  I had previous used the new dynamic pseudo-type that ties into the DLR to call Iron Python.  I figured I would see if I could use this same technique to call into COM. Back in ancient times (circa 1990s) I called into COM all the time from VB and ASP. I knew the libraries were all there to do what I needed to do.

I was not surprised to find I wasn’t the first person down this path, and quickly encountered multiple articles and postings about working with the file system via COM this exact way.  With the knowledge that it was possible I plowed forward.

To access COM from Silverlight one uses the AutomationFactory to instantiate a COM library.  I wanted to use the good ol’ Scripting.FileSystemObject.  In my test case I had a Silverlight app running locally OOB with elevated privileges.  This Silverlight app has a single list box which will display the drive letters once I can get access.  Via COM, the code looks like this:

dynamic fs = AutomationFactory.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");

foreach (dynamic drive in fs.Drives)
{
  filesListBox.Items.Add(drive.DriveLetter);
}

Its really that simple. The dynamic keyword and COM do all the heavy lifting. The most work I had to do was lookup the object model to use in the FSO, as no intellisense is available. The runtime does late binding onto these properties via the DLR. This did a nice end-route around the missing Silverlight IO libraries and provided me with a nice list of drives.

I understand that any television or movie adaptation must change some things from the book.  To me a faithful interpretation is one that keeps the main characters and themes of the book in place.  Neither was done with any integrity here.  The books revolve around a cast of characters that alternately act as the main character in any given book or section of a book.  However, the overarching protagonist for the novels is Sir Richard Burton.  In the novels Burton leads a complex existence.  He is not an easy man to like but we like him all the same.  It becomes easy to overlook his shortcomings when his strengths are so many.  The author, Phillip Jose Farmer, created a believable character in his version of Burton.

Farmer had an ingenious science fiction concept when he reincarnated all of humanity, everyone that had ever lived, along the shores of a giant, planet-sized river.  But the real plot, and underlying theme of the book is so much more interesting.  Riverworld is a story about redemption and control, about religion and science, and about love and loyalty.

In the SyFy Riverworld, Burton is a 2-dimensional villain, wasting the talents of Peter Wingfield in the role.  A new protagonist is invented, with a new cadre of travel companions.  The new characters are likable, if not a little flat.  We don’t see any real character growth over “4 hours” of television (I keep putting the running time in quotations because SyFy inserted a lot of commercials.  I would suspect the running time with normal commercial usage would have been closer to 3 hours).

In the SyFy Riverworld, the plot of the books is twisted into a silly civil war between the aliens controlling the Riverworld.  So many interesting things could have been done with the real conflict from the books, but instead SyFy turns to a vanilla conflict.  They do try to take a stab at something more interesting than a black and white, good versus evil plot, but they never quite get there.

Once I realized that SyFy was once again trashing the characters and underlying plot of a great science fiction story, I decided to try to give the show a chance on its own merits.  Even pretending that I had not read the books didn’t make the movie better.  Plot holes were not adequately explained.  The motivations of characters seemed too generic.   Decent performances were turned in by many of the actors, but they had very poor material to work with.  And the entire time the film suffers from what must have been a very low budget for extras.  For a river that is supposed to hold billions of people, we see very few individuals outside the small cast of 10 or 15 people.

I wouldn’t recommend the movie.  Go get the books and read them.  They really are fantastic.

Companies, of course, exist to make money. That’s often what makes them seem so rapacious. But their primal greed also plants them inevitably in the “reality-based community.” If a firm’s bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate — say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise — then it doesn’t particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won’t stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming. The same applies in reverse, as the folks at Beluga Shipping adroitly realized: If there are serious bucks to be made from the changing climate, then the free market is almost certainly going to jump at it.