The Geography of Cooking

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How come the instant ramen noodles in Costa Rica are so much better than in Canada? Have they added some Latin spice to the old Chinese stand-by? Or maybe it’s the corn.

Of course, as a rule, Costa Rica is not the place to go if I you want to get good Chinese, Moroccan, or Ukrainian food. Certainly there should be some excellent Costa Rican food, perhaps some decent Cuban, Mexican, or Brazilian, if we do some digging. We’ve done most of our own cooking and not checked out many restaurants so far, but I’ll bet there are some regional gems — if not in our small town, then a bus ride away in San Jose. But we shouldn’t expect much beyond that.

It’s the mixed blessing of coming from a very multi-cultural country to a fairly mono-cultural one. If you were to map culinary traditions on a map of the world, you’d see most countries have one dominant flavour, with perhaps a few odd pockets of nearby traditions (Chinese restaurants in Japan, Chilean in Panama), and then you’d see a place like Winnipeg or New York and virtually every flavour in the world would meet there. So to leave a city like that for a place with few immigrants is to find authenticity, but lose variety.

Even after returning from Asia, I found I could still get good Thai, good (authentic, not Americanized) Chinese, good Korean, and good Japanese food. And of course I’ve enjoyed Salvadorean cooking since before I left. But since we’re not living in a country of immigrants anymore, we’re limited to what we can cook ourselves, and the local cuisine.

That’s not a complaint. When I was in China I embraced Chinese cooking (plus a favourite Korean restaurant, and I occasionally made the trip downtown for Japanese). Here we are trying to embrace Costa Rican cooking. It’s not that we’ll be sick of it after six months. Every culinary tradition includes a fair bit of variety within it. But I’m sure we’ll grow to miss certain things before we get back.

Becoming a Real Writer: Getting Paid for Copywriting

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It’s not as easy nowadays as walking into a newspaper office and impressing the editor-in-chief with your spunk. The newspaper and magazine industries have both been in decline for years, a decline that was certainly exacerbated by the financial crisis in 2008, but can trace its roots to the increasing number of people getting their news online, and a certain amount of uncertainty about how to make money this way, and pay their writers at the same time.

If, like me, you don’t have a degree in journalism, or some kind of related education, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get one of these traditional writing jobs, at least right off. Actually, the odds are against recent graduates of those programs, as well. There just aren’t enough staff jobs to go around. But that still leaves freelancing.

Freelancing involves getting paid by the assignment. In fact, many of this work won’t be assigned at all, but written in advance and then pitched to potential buyers. There’s plenty of unpaid work for a skilled writer, but if you’ve been doing this for a few years, and think the copy you produce is of a consistently-high quality, maybe it’s time you got paid for it.

Having said that, if you’re just starting out, you need to take anything that will pay the bills. Don’t sit there starving because you refuse to let your work be published anywhere other than National Geographic (which would probably be about the pinnacle with respect to my writing interests).

There’s a lot of work out there producing ad copy or basic content for informational or business sites. For example, a banking web site may want to hire a publicity team, which will in turn require copywriters, to create a series of articles on the different types of accounts they offer. Informational/instructional sites may want a tremendous volume and variety of material, on everything from cooking tips to financial advice to homework help.

You need two things: pre-existing areas of expertise (or at least solid research skills), and technical writing ability. If they want their copy to be AP style, you need to be able to produce copy in accordance with that style guide. If they want Chicago, that’s what you have to come up with. But when applying to these kinds of jobs, this is where you really take stock of everything else you know, and start using that non-writing experience to get your foot in the door.

Have you ever worked in finance, education, accounting, engineering, with animals, in construction? It’s possible that someone out there wants someone who can write copy on any of these subjects, or many, many more. My science and education backgrounds have both gotten me gigs in the past; more recently, my experience as an investor has gotten me a gig writing about  finance.

It’s all very romantic to say you’re throwing it all away to be a writer, but in reality, nothing should be thrown away. Everything you’ve ever done, including non-writing jobs and training, may be something you can leverage for a particular job. The next time, I can just say I have experience writing about finance, and provide some samples. But this time, I had to draw on knowledge from the non-writing areas of my life.

This is good general career advice. You never know what past job or volunteer experience you can use to help sell yourself for a particular position. A varied CV is a job-seekers best weapon.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Electricity

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This is a story about how Rereko, a fairly ordinary high school student from the advanced world of Electopia, gets sent to Earth for remedial courses in the science of electricity. Her society expects absolutely everyone to know a little something about how electricity behaves, and its more important applications. Since she’s a little bit slow in this subject, a tutour from our own, more primitive planet, may be just her speed. A Tokyo graduate student in electrical engineering, Hikaru, seems like the perfect fit.

Like the other books in this series, The Manga Guide to Electricity aims to break down potentially difficult subject matter into bite-sized, comic book chunks, all wrapped up in an engaging story. While the target audience is individuals interested in the subject matter rather than manga fans only after a fun read, the story provides a natural vehicle for the book to give lots of real-life examples of the subject in question, an endless litany of answers to the unasked question: why does this stuff matter, anyway? As usual, the book features a tutour and a (sometimes reluctant) student.

The dialogue-based format is not only an effective way of unpacking concepts, but also makes it easy to build up a book-length political argument simultaneously: that this information is important and worthwhile even for an average citizen. Plato made Socratic dialogue famous in his philosophical treatises, Galileo appropriated it for the use of scientific education, and Ohmsha and No Starch Press did both of them one better by adding pretty pictures. You almost can’t go wrong.

The focus of this book is on applications. It’s at least as much about basic electrical engineering as it is about electrostatics and electrodynamics. The abstract concepts of electric forces and fields are not really touched on. Point charges don’t come into it. Instead, we jump directly into circuits, explicitly using the analogy of electricity as flowing water: voltage is pressure; current is rate of flow. This is a very useful picture, although there are times it could have been used to greater effect.

The only weakness in this book, from my perspective, is failing to take a little more time to fully flesh out some of the basics. Voltage, current, and resistance are all explained very well. The reader is not simply given a definition, but aided in visualizing the real physical meaning of the concepts. However, the relationship between them is not as well explained. The current is equal to the voltage over the resistance. Why does a higher voltage result in a higher currrent? It’s analogous to increasing the water pressure, forcing it through even faster. Why does an increased resistance lower the current? It’s analogous to constraining or restricting the path, slowing each individual drop of water down.

This and a few other concepts were not sufficiently spelled out, though the formula was introduced. On the other hand, a tremendous number of applications were discussed, although many of them were only roughly sketched out: transformers, generators, semiconductors, diodes, and transistors of many kinds. These thumbnail sketches were appropriately short, and a writer with less of an engineering background may even have left some of them out, but a writer with a pure physics background probably would have spent a little more time on some of the basic concepts, and this is my own background, so I admit my bias.

Still, a solid overview of the topic. I really like the practical, real-life examples that are a hallmark of this series. The very first chapter started by looking at the labels on kitchen appliances, and this was a brilliant way of introducing the topic. And I was quite surprised, I didn’t expect to learn something new in this book, but actually a good chunk of the material was unfamiliar territory for me. I didn’t know that much about the basic physical operations of diodes, transistors, or some of the other types of electrical technologies discussed. It makes me want to learn more about electrical engineering. After all, who isn’t crazy about all the electronic gadgets that make our modern world go round?

(No Starch Press, 2009)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2011) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Physics

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Having read and enjoyed nearly all of the entries in the Manga Guide series by Ohmsha/No Starch Press, I’ve been going back to read those ones I missed the first time around. The Manga Guide to Physics is pretty much what it sounds like, covering what most people think of when they hear the word physics: mechanics, which is the physics of motion, force, and energy. Other areas of physics, like electricity, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, are left to future titles.

The book covers its material in four chapters: Law of Action and Reaction, Force and Motion, Momentum, and Energy. The subject matter is explained via a series of private tutoring sessions between the two main characters, high school students Megumi and Ryota. In the prologue, Megumi, an all-star athlete, has a bad day, losing a tennis match to her arch-rival while she is distracted by thoughts of her poor test performance in physics class. She enlists Ryota, the star science student of the school, to get her back on track academically. It may even turn out that a better understanding of physics could improve her game.

The storyline is simple but good, and the tennis angle provides a good vehicle for illustrating and applying physical concepts. Many people think physics is just a series of formulae, but a mathematical formula is just one way of expressing the behaviour of, and relationships between, objects in the physical world. Visual and graphical representations are also very effective ways of conveying concepts in physics, and The Manga Guide to Physics expertly applies these approaches.

Although the author, Professor Nitta of Tokyo Gakugei University, does not shy away from the relevant equations, even including some (completely optional) calculus-based sections, this book’s focus is firmly centred on conceptual understanding rather than calculation. Typical of this series, the main ideas are introduced via the story, which is illustrated in graphic novel form, while deeper explanations are left to a few pages of text at the end of each chapter. However, while some of the other books in the series include end of chapter practice questions (Manga Guides to Calculus, Molecular Biology, and Statistics, for example), the text-heavy pages in Physics are reserved for derivations and more complicated calculations.

This book does an excellent job of explaining these concepts, however, and showing where the equations come from, even if it doesn’t provide the reader with practice using those equations. Unusually, Nitta starts out with forces, specifically, Newton’s Third Law, discussing details of motion (velocity, acceleration, displacement) later. This approach works well, because it allows the first chapter to be qualitative, rather than jumping straight into the math.

He only touches briefly on force diagrams, but gets the main idea of action-reaction pairs across via thought experiments and Socratic questioning. The use of both equations and different types of motion graphs in the next chapter are explained well through examples in the main body, and would be well-paired with a more traditional textbook’s practice questions. Momentum and energy are also well done, explained first qualitatively, then with numbers.

The Manga Guide to Physics has the potential to be a great resource for the independently-minded student, and its non-traditional topic sequence is an effective alternative to the usual way of doing things. The series’ book on calculus also takes an uncommon, but much superior approach to its topic that I found most helpful in refreshing my memory, and this alternative approach to the physics may also be just the ticket for some students. Sound pedagogy, a fun story, and the natural pairing of a visual medium with a visual topic make for another home run from this consistently strong series.

(No Starch Press, 2009)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2011) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Freelancer.com: Where Dreams Go to Die

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Freelancer.com is a place where tele-commuting freelancers look for work and people looking to get odd jobs done look for cheap labour. It’s sort of the Internet equivalent of a bunch of illegal immigrants hanging around the hardware store waiting for someone who thinks minimum wage isn’t minimum enough.

What kind of work? Anything that can be done remotely: data entry, web design, programming, and ridiculously crappy writing jobs. $100 for 400 150-page articles? Seriously? Who’s going to write an article (even a short one) for twenty-five cents? You can’t even use a pay phone for that (where I’m from it’s 50 cents a call now).

But never mind that, the problem with freelancer.com isn’t the low paying jobs; these might actually be a great opportunity for self-employed Indians or Chinese with decent English and a low cost of living. What depressed me today when cruising freelancer.com was the amazing number of cheating students. I quote:

Project Description:
my project proposal is,I want a literature review of word limit 20,000.
my topic is :what is the role of contraceptives in prevention of unwanted pregnancy among adolescents in sub saharan africa.case studay uganda.

QUESTION
What are the factors affecting the use of contraceptives in prevention of unwanted pregnancy among adolescents in sub Saharan Africa?
[project details cut for length]

. . . i would like some one i will work with step by step with frequent communication.i will also require the the first introduction in 2weeks after agreeing.

thank you

The project was listed as “master’s dissertation”. Yeah. Someone may actually get a master’s degree based on the work some desperate freelancer does for them. Someone with atrocious spelling and grammar. Generally, for humanities degrees, the entirety of one’s grade comes from research reports and essays (just as, for science degrees, the entirety of one’s grade comes from tests and lab work).

If you’re sub-contracting that, there’s nothing left. That’s the totality of the skills you’re supposed to be developing. To have a degree in the humanities and not be able to do research or write a paper is like having a degree in physics and not being able to solve problems, perform experiments, or analyze data. Just what can you do, exactly?

Of course this is anecdotal. Fortunately, there have been studies, so we can get a sense of how widespread the problem is: MBA Students Cheat More Than Other Grad Students, Study Finds. Don’t get too smug, non-business majors. Very few groups come off well in that study.

There’s a great story I read last year from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which puts a more human face on this phenomenon: The Shadow Scholar. I tend to sympathize with the ghostwriter a lot more than his clients. “If I don’t write their term paper, someone else will” is not such a compelling defense, but in fact, he offers no defense. He just tells his story.

Though he writes school assignments for money, the students are the cheaters, not him. Unlike, say, a drug dealer, who actually causes the damaging behaviour he profits from, I’m fairly certain the Shadow Scholar does not get anyone addicted to cheating. And I can imagine how much it must suck to depend on clients for work you can barely stand, let alone respect. I’m reminded of the protagonist in Robert Silverberg’s excellent novel, Dying Inside.

The chronicle article is worth a read. The final line is brilliantly depressing.

Book Review: Feynman

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And now for something completely different. I was intrigued and delighted when I stumbled across this rather quirky project from First Second Books the other day. It’s a fresh new biography of the famous Feynman: bongo-playing, girl-chasing, and Nobel-winning; physics god of generations of undergrads, as much for his barroom stories as for the ubiquitous diagrams that bear his name.

This isn’t the first Feynman bio, and it likely won’t be the last. James Gleick’s Genius set the gold standard, cutting through legend upon legend – Feynman picking locks in Los Alamos; Feynman spending a summer sabbatical learning molecular biology and immediately making a discovery about DNA; Feynman the Nobelist rubbing elbows with royalty and flubbing the etiquette – and getting at the real character-forming events in-between.

More recently, physicist and author Lawrence Kraus, feeling there was too little said about Richard Feynman’s significant work in fundamental physics, focused on tracing the development of the scientist’s major professional work in The Quantum Man. Before his death, the enormously popular Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? collected many of Feynman’s essays, lectures, and well-practiced anecdotes (as told to his friend Ralph Leighton); a few of these greatest hits plus many new ones were later published post-humously in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. And there are many, many more.

As far as I know, however, Ottaviani and Myrick’s simply-titled new book is the very first one to chronicle the man’s life graphically. And it’s gorgeous. Just look at the brilliant cover.

The clean illustrative style seems a perfect fit for Feynman’s light-hearted approach to life, while still being detailed enough to convey subtle facial expressions and body language. Throughout, the man on the page is recognizably, uniquely Feynman, the graphical and textual elements complement each other so beautifully it is like watching the man on video.

But credit also must be given to Ottaviani for weaving scores of otherwise unrelated stories into a portrait of a truly original life. The major source materials for this book are the famous Surely You’re Joking and its follow-up, but these are self-contained recollections, lectures, and musings. Drawing out and tying together the biographical bits and pieces of these much longer stories, and capturing the flavour of each one while quoting only a tiny bit of it requires an inspired touch. Making full use of the visual medium, Ottaviani and Myrick manage to give us all the punchlines in a fraction of the space, meanwhile creating a sense of continuity that is absent in the original, non-chronological story collections on which they draw.

I really like this book. It fills a gap in the Feynman corpus that I didn’t realize was there. It’s not that we need a briefer or more readable version of Feynman and Leighton’s eminently successful books. With Feynman we have something wholly new, a different perspective and focus make this a worthwhile read even for those of us who’ve heard these stories before. Librarians with librarian degrees may want to look into adding this title to their collections. That the first edition of what is essentially a graphic novel is in a beautiful hard cover form was another unexpected bonus to me, as this item has a place of honour on my shelf.

(First Second, 2011)

Article first published as Graphic Novel Review: Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick on Blogcritics.

Becoming a Real Writer: Getting Published

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Step one is getting published. Technically, I guess you might argue step one is, say, learning the alphabet, but I’m assuming basic literacy and, ideally, solid spelling/grammar. Spellcheck aside, it’s worth learning the basics well enough to write a clean first draft manually. Therefore, step one is getting published, because it’s hard to judge your own work if you’re the only one reading it.

Note that by published, I mean, published by someone else. I don’t mean paid work, but I also don’t mean self-publishing on a blog. In other words, your work should be going through at least one editor who will hold you to a certain standard. Whatever your level of expertise, find a publication that you think you might be able to contribute to, and either query or just start sending in submissions, depending on their own publishing guidelines.

I started out with my university newspaper. Because writers graduate every year, typically you’ll see a general meeting which is open to everyone. Try to figure out which department or departments might be a good fit for the stuff you like to write, and start contributing. Even better, maybe your high school has a paper, but it’s likely to be published less frequently. Other options are school literary magazines, yearbook (more about photography and graphic design than writing, but still a possible in for something later), and newsletters.

If you’re not in school, start searching online. There are an amazing number of places looking for volunteer writers. Only a couple years into my school newspaper career I stumbled across an online review magazine, and sent in an audition review of a movie I had recently enjoyed. Two years of feature writing had honed my skills enough to get me on board, and they started sending me review material. Although this wasn’t a paying job, I was getting free product, which seemed pretty cool to me (school newspapers may receive freebies, too, actually).

Diversify if you can. Having a wide array of experiences makes it easier to customize your résumé to that job you really want. Any time a place you write for gives you a chance to do something you haven’t done before, breaking news coverage, writing for a different section, interviewing or profiling someone, that very piece may be the writing sample you pull up later to prove you can get a job requiring that skill.

But you can’t start building a portfolio of samples until you have someone to a) give you the assignment, and b) publish it. So get in somewhere, and write just for the fun of it.

Oh, and while you’re at your first writing job, there’s something else you should be doing: get better. Look at the writers, magazines, newpspapers, or whatever that you like, and strive to write something just as compelling. When inspiration comes, and you find you’re writing something a little over the top, just go with it, and edit afterwards.

Experiment with style, humour, and subject matter. Eventually you may write a piece and say to yourself, “Wow, that could have been published in [prestigious publicatilon]”, and it will be one of your go-to writing samples for later job applications.

Book Review: One of Our Thursdays is Missing

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This is the sixth installment in Fforde’s Thursday Next series, and if, like me, you haven’t read any of the previous books, you’ll probably be hella confused. The series’ titular heroine (wait, can I write that?) is a no-nonsense detective in a world of nonsense. Using the fantastic technology of Fforde’s parallel universe, she travels into the Bookworld, a sort of distillation of the collective consciousness, where plots both new and classical are acted out for the sake of anyone currently reading the book in question.

Since Next travels and works within the worlds of famous literary works, you can imagine there is plenty of opportunity for parody, punning, and tongue-in-cheek references of all kinds.

This much I knew going in. What I didn’t realize is that the “real world” of Thursday Next, outside of the Bookworld where she works alongside the Jurisfiction policing service, is also an elaborately imagined parallel universe from our own, sharing much of our literary canon (with occasional tweaks), but with a very different history and modern political organization. Randomly enough, the Crimean War continues into the 1980s, Wales is an independent republic (and the UK as a political entity does not exist), and both neanderthals and humanoid robots are commonplace sights. Quite apart from her adventures in the Bookworld, Thursday lives in interesting times.

What I also was surprised to find is that this latest book doesn’t feature Thursday Next, it features the “written” Thursday Next. I.e., a fictional version of the Next of the previous books, who popped into existence in the Bookworld when the real Thursday Next’s adventures were ghostwritten into a marginally popular book series of its own. This seemed rather meta to me, and took me awhile to figure out. Especially because I didn’t realize at first that the original Thursday Next wasn’t also fictional in the context of Fforde’s universe, and that the books haven’t been self-referential since the beginning of the series, i.e., the world of Fforde’s novels including the existence of his very own novels, in an infinite regress.

All this is a point in favour of not choosing this novel as your introduction to the series. But if you have read the previous books, you may wonder, how does this one stand up? Even though I can’t speak to that directly, I’ve read both of Fforde’s Nursery Crime novels (a third is upcoming), which are a spin-off from the Thursday Next series, and I devoured each in a day or two. Both proved satisfying crime stories with a streak of wicked humour. A world that includes serial killer gingerbread men and an alcoholic Humpty Dumpty does require a suspension of disbelief, but the absurdity never overpowered the whodunit narrative.

In One of Our Thursdays is Missing, however, I had some difficulty keeping track of what was going on, and as a result never really got hooked the way I was with these previous novels. The clever literary references are still there, of course. Thursday finds herself on the trail of a missing cabbie named Gatsby. “I didn’t know the Great Gatsby drove a cab,” she says. “No, not him, his brother. The mediocre Gatsby.” But the convolutions of the Bookworld, not to mention Fforde’s very weird “real world”, gave me too much to keep track of to be able to follow the mystery at the same time.

It seemed like the world-building took over and the plot took a backseat. Since everything was equally unusual/suspicious, I couldn’t follow the logic of what Thursday was thinking or doing, or the trail she was following, and as a result it felt less like figuring out the solution of a puzzle along with the hero than simply being told in narrative that the puzzle had been solved. And really, it’s a bit of a disappointment to read a Thursday Next book that turns out not to star Thursday Next. Though the written Thursday Next is sympathetic enough, she’s a bit too passive for a starring role.

I still love the concept of this series, but I’m sorry that this particular book wasn’t a little easier for me to get into. It’s not bad, by any means; it certainly wasn’t a slog to finish, it just wasn’t a stand-out for me.

(Viking, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2011) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Costa Rica

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Well, here we are in Costa Rica. I’m officially freelancing full-time, and my services are always available. More importantly, my fiancée and our two pups also survived the trip. It wasn’t easy for our little man, but he’s a trooper, and the longest flight was only five hours.

(Photo by V.)

Plodding Publicist

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For the second time in a few months, I’ve had the same one-sided conversation with the same publicist from the same publishing house. One of the review publications to which I contribute received a press release asking for reviews, I volunteered to take a look, he proceeded to ignore the e-mail from my editor, the e-mail from me with my mailing address, the follow-up e-mail asking if he was still planning on sending it.

In both cases, the books are niche titles, an odd little non-fiction, and a translation from a foreign author that is not known here. These are the kinds of books that struggle to get enough exposure, and being one of eclectic interests, I try to do my part. Both times, the same series of e-mails from me to him. And never a response. Not one.

Now you know why you’ve never heard of these books. What a slacker.