Rented 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962) over the weekend. It is a movie about WWI focusing on an alliance formed between the British and native Arabs against their common enemy the Turks. It won lots of Oscars, and I've wondered whether it had any influence on Frank Herbert's science fiction classic 'Dune' (1965).

It was decent but not completely spectacular. The Arabs are treated neither as villains nor saints, but as a complex people, held back from advancement by their own warring tribal factions. The movie does have a certain racist overtone in the way T.E. Lawrence, with his blond hair and blue eyes, is treated as a sort of white messiah figure, at times morally superior to the Arabs who he is attempting to unite. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this movie was a major inspiration for Herbert's 'Dune' with Paul Atreides as a European messiah come to harness the Arabic Fremen to overcome the evil German like Harkonens.

I also finally finished 'Cryptonomicon' (1999) by Neal Stephenson. It is technically not science fiction but it is a book that would appeal to a science fiction audience. It took me a month to finish this book, which is a bit unusual for me, even with the 1100 page length. Like 'Lawrence of Arabia', 'Cryptonomicon' is about a World War, only in this case it is WWII. The action is split between four characters: three in WWII, and one in the present. In World War II we have mathematical genius Lawrence Waterhouse working on cracking Axis message codes, American Marine Bobby Shaftoe fighting the Japanese and Germans with guns and grenades, and Japanese engineer and soldier Goto Dengo (sp?) facing the devastation of the Japanese army and the wrath of his superiors. In the present, Randy Waterhouse, grandson of the mathematical genius from WII, is a computer guru working for a startup corporation that is setting up a international data safe haven in a small country in the Pacific Rim.

Part of the reason it took me so long to finish 'Cryptonomicon' is that there was very little sense of plot uniting the characters until the last two hundred pages or so. The characters are easy to like, and the author's focus on the importance of cryptography in winning WWII is very interesting. I admire the author's nerve for putting so math into the book, and his skill as an author for making me see the importance that the math plays in his character's lives. There is also a gem involving eating Captain Crunch cereal, and a smattering of amusingly frank discussion of male sexuality. I may read it again at some point just so I can spot where he starts setting up the elements in the ending.



BACK IN THE REAL WORLD I am annoyed because two deals I had set up fell through at the last minute, and now I will have to work very very hard to get what I think my clients deserve. If they had settled I would have made my clients say 75% happy with 'E' expenditure of effort on my part. Now, because the other side wouldn't settle, I'm going to have to expend '8E' effort to try my best to get 100% of what my clients wanted. See the difficulty? I have to work eight times as hard for a chance at getting my client 25% more result and at a risk of getting my client 0% result. This pisses me off royally.