books

I finished reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel this afternoon. It is a wonderful book.
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I finished reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and am most of the way through Eat the Rich and The Best American Science Writing 2001. I made another trip to the bookstore this week and picked up Lennon Remembers, A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, and the latest copy of Scientific American.
Cod was truly an excellent book; I highly recommend it. It’s incredible to learn how much of our lives have been shaped by a fish. Mark Kurlansky is a tremendous author and I can’t wait to read Salt: A World History.

P.J. O’Rourke is a genius. One of the books I’m reading right now is Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics. A quick summary of the stock market, according to O’Rourke:

“In a bull market we have an idea that stock is only being bought. … In a crash we think stock is only being sold. The wealth of the nation has been converted into T-bills or Franklin Mint commemorative plates. But every share of stock that sells has a buyer. There are no stocks sitting empty with OPEN HOUSE ON SUNDAY signs out front. At the end of the worst possible day for stocks, the market contains the same number of shares it started with. The market is not a different size, we just like it less. And this isn’t some fuzzy hormonal mood we’re in. Out feelings can be measured precisely, in dollars.
In fact, when we own any ‘financial instrument’ (as people in the money business call anything worth money), what we basically own is an opinion. When the British pound loses value, the number of pence in a pound doesn’t change. We just don’t feel the same way about pounds anymore; we’re nuts about Euros now. It always takes the same number of pigs to make 1,000 pork belly futures, but next year’s bacon suddenly smells bad to us. One share of common stock continues to represent the same percentage of a corporation’s assets, and the corporation is probably not growing or shrinking very fast, but our love for that corporation can swell or pop overnight.
We have an opinion. That opinion is a price. And since prices are constantly changing, our opinion is always about to be wrong. Think of the stock market as an endless Gallup poll with 207 billion things that people can’t make up their minds about.”

A few nights ago I finally finished reading Just Six Numbers : The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe by Martin J. Rees. I liked it. It was a good read. The author explains pretty much everything you need to know to understand the science of cosmology as it exists today. It was full of fascinating stuff if you’re interested in black holes, dark matter, superstring theory, and the “Big Bang” concept. In the end, though, it seems like most scientists today are going to a helluva lotta trouble to determine the size /age of the universe. Wouldn’t it be easier to just accept infinity? That’s what I kept asking myself while I was reading this book. If space and time are infinite - and I just don’t understand how they couldn’t be! - wouldn’t almost all of the problems these guys have with particle physics disappear? Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for finding answers and truth and meaning in the universe, but it seems like even if you get to a point where you can say, “Ah-ha! Here is the Big Bang and how it worked!” you are still going to have someone ask, “Well, what was there before that?” (I know I will. Does that make me dense?)

We humans are spending billions of dollars - not millions, billions - on research to determine the size and age of the universe.

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During the Revolution, the American ability to produce food was the one advantage of the Continental Army. The British Army might have been better trained and more experienced, and it was certainly better dressed and equipped. But the Americans were better fed. They were also better paid, and, thanks to Boston rum, they drank better.

One of the Christmas gifts I received this year was a $100 gift certificate to Waldenbooks / Brentano’s book stores. This is sort of like giving a breifcase full of smack to an addict. I spent the better part of the morning today at the Brentano’s in the Century City Mall salivating over the thousands of books I want to consume.

I spotted Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and was reminded of another book by the same author that I have wanted to read for some time now. It didn’t take me long to find Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, and I gorged myself on this fabulous book this afternoon. It’s a wonderful treatise on the fish and its impact on our daily lives, and if you get a chance to read it you won’t be disappointed.

I’m also currently reading Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus by Thomas Cahill on the advice of my father. I’m only about a fifth of the way into it, but I’m enjoying it immensely. (I don’t know why I didn’t take more history classes in college!)

Here’s a list of the other items I bought today:

• Longitude : The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
• Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension by Michio Kaku
• The Best American Science Writing 2001 edited by Timothy Ferris
• Eat the Rich by P. J. O’Rourke
• the February 2002 issue of Harper’s Magazine
• the March 2002 issue of Discover Magazine
• the March 2002 issue of Wired Magazine

If you like Davezilla’s Manly Tips for Bachelor Living, you’ll probably enjoy The Bachelor Home Companion : A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig, by P.J. O’Rourke.

The Simon & Schuster web page for Ernest Hemingway is interesting, if commercial. There is an option to join a ‘fiction’ mailing list, and plenty of links to purchasing the author’s books. I’m linking it mainly because it has a very user-friendly design.

Update: At some point they completely changed the site and now it is horrible.

The airlines need to play an especially ruthless game of chicken with their customers since a seat on Flight 3206 from Miami to Chicago, unlike a washing machine, becomes worthless if it isn’t sold in time. So as every flight gets nearer, the airline is willing to accept less and less at the very time some of its passengers are willing to pay more and more. The infuriating rules about Saturday night stayovers and so on are a crude alternative to administering truth serum and asking, “So how much are you really willing to pay?”

This is an excerpt from Consuming Gets Complicated, a link I discovered on the consistently excellent blog Follow Me Here …. The essay makes a reference to how capitalism equates to a game of chicken between the consumer and the seller. A wealth of information on this type of situation, and how often it occurs in everyday life, can be found by reading Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone. It’s really a fascinating book and I highly recommend it.

In a comment on the previous post, Sc0tt asked where he could find a copy of Chris’ thesis. I’m sorry to say that it’s not currently publicly available. You can ask Chris if he’ll send you one, I suppose. If you’re seriously interested in that sort of thing, though, I highly recommend reading Bones, by Douglas Ubelaker or Dead Men Do Tell Tales, by William R. Maples and Michael Browning. Both are non-fiction books on forensic anthropology and will tell you all the gory details about the science. If you like to watch The New Detectives on The Discovery Channel or Forensic Investigators on TLC, I promise that you’ll thoroughly enjoy reading these.

Steve Martin was on the Today Show this morning plugging his new movie, Novocaine. It looks like it will be pretty good. (This is his second role as a dentist, of course.) I forgot to mention that I read his book, ShopGirl, earlier this year and thought it was wonderful. The book is somewhere between a very long short story and a very short novel. It’s not a comedy, but it’s not exactly a love story, either. I usually judge books by how they make me feel when I’m done reading. When I got to the end of ShopGirl, I wasn’t sad or happy or disappointed; there wasn’t any overwhelming emotion, actually. There was just a sort of contented feeling, as if I had finished a good meal. It wasn’t delicious or terrible, but I was sated for a little while. I liked it very much.

An essay on For Whom the Bell Tolls by Nathan Kotas
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“No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody [...] chance,” an essay on To Have and Have Not by David Gagne.
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An essay on The Old Man and the Sea by Nathan Kotas.
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An essay on To Have and Have Not by David Gagne
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