more nerd please
I recently read The Kings of New York, by Michael Weinreb which is a book about a top highschool chess team from New York City.

It chronicles a year in the life of the Edward R. Murrow chess team. The interest in this story is that the team is a dynasty of sorts, winning multiple national titles over the past decade, despite the fact that Murrow is a public school. The students on the team are from vastly different backgrounds, quite often from immigrant parents who are struggling to make a stable life for themselves in the US.

About halfway through the book Reen asked how I was enjoying it. I said it was fine, but that there was too much stuff about how Murrow was a unique school and the backstory of each student player and the inner working of the NYC public school system and the politics of disadvantaged youth etc. etc.

I wanted more chess. He writes that the kid traps a grandmaster level player with a surprise move. That sounds cool, why not show the details in the book? A few graphics of the positions and some annotation on the crucial moves maybe. There's precious little of this in the book. Almost none in fact. And so I told Reen that the book was fine but it was all human interest stuff. It didn't have enough chess.

Reen reminded me that not having a lot of chess would be considered a bonus by a large majority of the readers. I conceded the point and we both marveled at what a nerd I am.

This was all well and good. Until...I borrowed the audio version of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to listen to on my drive to PA for Thanksgiving. The book is standard thriller fare, a la Clancy or Grisham. The plot centers on both the codebreaking of WWII and data encryption in modern day computers. But where Clancy is beloved for his detail in describing the weapons and military machinery, Cryptonomicon is renowned for it's detail in describing the mathematics of the codebreaking and encryption schemes.

The book is on many a nerdy must-read list and so I was looking forward to 'reading' it during the drive. What I had overlooked however is that the audio book I had was abridged. Instead of simply omitting portions, there was a voiceover narration used to describe the plot points of what was being skipped. So while I greatly enjoyed the conceit that the main character befriended Alan Turing at Princeton, when the story continued on to their code breaking effort for the Allies, the details were completely omitted. The voice over would explain: "meanwhile, back at Bletchley Park, the team had a major breakthrough with the German naval cryptographic codes..."

AHHH!! The details of that breakthrough are exactly what I'm listening to this book for and they gloss right over it. And it was the same thing with the modern day digital encryption stuff. Just a passing mention from the narrator and then back to John awkwardly trying to express his feelings for Amy. Curses. To be honest, without these bits of nerdery to keep my interest, they story itself was quite poor and I didn't listen to the final 2 tapes to even see how it ended.

Again I was foiled by an effort to make something more broadly appealing than it ought to have been. I suppose it's my own fault for not seeing that this version was abridged. I'll know better next time.

Final nerd item, but this one is a test. Feed the hungry and improve your vocabulary all at once!

Free Rice. My score hovered around 40 for the most part and I maxed out at 42. I even have the screen-cap to prove it. I got the next word shown correct too. Yay me! Leave a comment with your score.



p.s. if the quiz was spelling the words instead of knowing their meaning my score would be about 23 I think.