God's Debris

Thank reader mblumber for this review of Scott Adams's God's Debris, newly republished in hardcover after starting out life a few years ago as an e-book. For those who've never seen Adam's serious side, this is an interesting introduction. God's Debris author Scott Adams pages 128 publisher Andrew McMeel, Publishers rating 9 reviewer mblumber ISBN 0740721909 summary An existential thought experiment in the form of a dialogue.

I like reading books that make me think, but not in the same way that I think when I'm at work or doing homework. When reading for pleasure, I want something that at first glance is so strange it's absurd, but at closer examination makes a tremendous amount of sense. That depth is the essence of Scott Adams' God's Debris, A Thought Experiment.

Adams is not known for writing super-intelligent commentaries on life, at least ones without a punchline or visual gag. Creator of Dilbert, his writing to this point has focused upon the world of cubicles and shifting organizational charts where engineers and management ('induhviduals' as he often calls them) square off in battles where the engineers are right and management is wrong. Very straightforward, enjoyable reading, but nothing compared to his latest work.

God's Debris was first published in May of 1999 as an e-book. It is sold by Digital Owl and can be purchased as bits for $4.95 or in hardcover wherever books are sold. The story focuses on both the physical laws of nature (relativity, gravity, the origin of the universe) and the psychology behind religion. The story is told by a fairly educated narrator talking to an unseen second character who seems to hold a deep understanding of the universe. As I read more, I found my own questions being raised by the narrator, and addressed by the other character. This arrangement makes for a very strange read, but the unusual format enhances the overall reading experience.

This book second guesses everything one learns in school, and comes close to succeeding. I cannot think of a single statement in the book that can be proven incorrect. To a college-educated reader like me, some of the assertions may seem totally ridiculous -- the problem is that they make just as much sense as Einstein's relativistic physics. In the introduction to the book, Adams observes the fact that ' ... the simplest explanation usually sounds right and is far more convincing than any complicated explanation could hope to be.'

The protagonist makes some very peculiar assertions throughout; My favorite is a statement he makes about the true nature of gravity, specifically that it is fueled by probability. The idea his advances is that all matter is constantly switching in and out of existence, and that is how objects move. The reason that matter appears to be attracted to other matter is that, according to the rules of probability, each piece of matter will inherently appear closer to massive objects the next time it comes back into existence. If you didn't understand that, and you'd like to, then you should read the book.

If you are a religious person, I can assure that this book will be disturbing. Although not told from an atheist point of view, the protagonist rejects the traditional view of religion. There are references to religious beliefs as 'delusions' only intended to allow the less-enlightened to live in relative peace in a world which has little. Taken as a whole, the views expressed can best be summarized ala Jesse Ventura, that 'organized religion is a crutch for the weak-minded.'

I'm purposely avoiding going into detail about the contents of the book. This is not only because a small piece doesn't make sense by itself, but also because most of the fun is in the discovery. Reading this book, you feel as if you are the first and only person to truly understand the world. I wouldn't want to spoil that for you. It's only 132 pages, broken up into very short chapters, and it can be read on your lunch break. I highly recommend it.

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Comments

my $55 copy

[Teach]

Several months ago I paid for and downloaded the DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook version of "God's Debris". I paid $5 for it.

I also downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the book, which was good. However, I didn't like the reader at all. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as .PGMs. Then I booted into Linux (I'd had to be in Windows to run the reader) and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up. Overall, this took me about five hours.

Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted .OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version; I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.

If I assume that a professional "image -> OCR text -> corrected text" conversion specialist gets paid $10/hour, then the five hours it took me incurred about $50 in labor cost, bringing the total price to around $55. Not as cheap as the dead-tree version (<$15), but easier to grab quotes from. And of course I now have some valuable skills which I could use to help out Project Gutenberg.

I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now just to read the book again.

And I'm glad that there's now a paper version so that most other people can obtain a less legally-encumbered version without having to do the grunt work I did.

Scott Adams and E-Publishing

[Ironwolf]

When Scott Adams first published God's Debris as an e-book, I refused to buy it because of the platform-biased and fair use-restricted nature of his chosen distribution technology. And I told him so. The conversation turned into a fairly in-depth conversation on the nature of e-publishing and software piracy. The results are on my web site as an e-mail exchange between us that he gave permission for me to post.

At least one person who has written me about the exchange felt that I gave up. I didn't really give up-- in fact I hadn't intended it to become a drawn out argument in the first place. But by the end I felt I had reached the point of diminishing returns-- it was clear that Scott didn't want to be convinced. I decided that the real argument would be won in the court of public opinion-- which was why I felt it important to end on a (superficially) conciliatory note and get him to give me permission to publish the discussion. If I had taken the last word, I think it unlikely he would have let me post our exchange.

To be fair, Scott made two points that bear further consideration:

1) E-books are not identical to executable software.

2) If free file sharing is ubiquitous, people will steal when it's easier than buying.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but briefly I would respond to both points by saying that non-executable media such as books, movies, photographs, and music need to have a new distribution infrastructure put in place where buying is actually easier than stealing, and quite cheap for the end user. I believe the future of electronic distribution will lie not in increasingly Draconian legal and technical barriers that fight against the paying customer, but in the ubiquitous availability of micropayments that make enjoying creative content painless and subject to the Free Market. I believe Scott would point out that that system isn't here yet.

In another unpublished conversation, Scott credits e-publishing in this matter with enabling him to land his print-based book deal. He's happy with the outcome.