Chikuru

In my Dec. 14 entry, I speculated that Lyn and I had bought each other the same book for Christmas. When my friend Mike read the entry, he figured out which book I meant. He had bought it for his wife as well.

Turns out I was wrong. I bought The Tales of Beedle the Bard for her, whereas she bought Ender in Exile for me. I found this really cool for two reasons: 1) We don't have to send one of the books back. 2) Hey, there's a new book in the Ender's Game series!

At book club we discussed Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. Fifteen people attended. I think that's a record for our book club. Kudos to Jerry for recommending such an accessible book and thanks to Judy for hosting. The consensus was that the book is a good review if you've taken classes in philosophy, but that it is confusing as an introduction to the subject. Also, that most of the jokes are old, but that the book is still entertaining.

On the subject of jokes, Judy mentioned a person she once knew who wowed her with his seemingly supernatural ability to produce a relevant joke whenever the situation invited it. When she learned that this was the result of great effort and research on his part, she was disappointed. It meant he wasn't magically in tune with the universe. My reaction was, "That's like being disappointed to learn that Van Cliburn had to practice to play the piano as well as he did." But I guess I see her point. Also, her friend shows that if we want to be great joke tellers but aren't, that we are without excuse. It's not because we simply lack the gift, it's because we're too lazy to put in the required effort.

I finally finished reading Omnivore's Dilemma. It took a long time because it is a little overwritten but mainly because it kept getting interrupted by more compelling books.

In the final chapter, the author describes a meal in which all of the dishes were obtained by foraging. It included a pig he had personally shot, some morels he had personally collected, some cherries he had picked, and some bread made with yeast he had literally pulled out of the air (using milk and whole wheat flour as bait). Considering how long it took to collect all the ingredients, this was slow food at its slowest.

I find the idea of making bread using local yeast intriguing. The trick, according to the author, is to keep trying until you get an infection of milk and wheat flour that doesn't smell bad.

I wonder if you could make yogurt that way.

Yesterday, I borrowed a copy of Plato and a Platypus walk into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes from fraeuleinchen. Today I finished it.

I liked it, could you guess?

Many of the jokes I'd already heard. In fact, I'd heard two of them on this weekend's A Prairie Home Companion's annual joke show (not the best show of the year, but still fun). But the jokes are just a vehicle--the book is really about philosophy and authors Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein do a great job of presenting a short and easily digested summary of the subject from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in philosophy. If nothing else, it's a good review. It even includes a glossary giving pithy and essentially correct definitions of a bunch of useful terms including ding an sich, noumenal, phenomenal, and Kant's supreme categorical imperative, to name a few. For example:

koan: In Zen Buddhism, a riddle designed to shock us into sudden enlightenment. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" seems to do the trick; "What is the sound of two hands clapping?" does not. See also satori.

Here are the chapter titles, to whet your appetite:

1. Metaphysics
2. Logic
3. Epistemology
4. Ethics
5. Philosophy of Religion
6. Existentialism
7. Philosophy of Language
8. Social and Political Philosophy
9. Relativity
10. Meta-Philosophy
    

And here is another sample (including one of the jokes I heard on APHC this morning):

Hundreds of jokes hinge on confusing analytic a priori statements with synthetic a posteriori statements:

There's a surefire way to live to a ripe old age--eat a meatball a day for a hundred years.

The joke lies in giving an analytic, a priori "solution" to a problem that asks for a synthetic, a posteriori solution.

Hmmm. It loses something in the retelling and I know what you're thinking--nothing kills a joke like explaining it. And yet somehow the book works. Check it out.

Here's another cool idea from Omnivore's Dilemma--how they deal with cow manure at Polyface Farms.

In the winter, the cows spend a lot of time in the barn and a generate a lot of manure. To deal with this, the owner periodically puts down a layer of hay (if I remember correctly), wood chips, and corn. The result is a growing stack of active compost that reaches a height of about three feet by the end of winter. This means that the cows' floor is continually rising. But that's not all it's doing, it's also generating heat to keep the cows warm. (Anyone who has worked with compost knows that it's a good source of heat.)

In the spring, in order to turn the compost, the owners lets a bunch of pigs into the stalls. The pigs dig in up to their eyeballs looking for kernels of fermented corn and in the process mix up the compost which the owner ultimately spreads on his fields to feed the grass that is the cows' main food source.

One of my favorite ideas from Omnivore's Dilemma is that of the Eggmobile, a chicken coop that gets moved every few days.

Farmer Joel Salatin is an extreme example of a practitioner of sustainable farming. In order to optimally use his pasture land, he moves the cow's pastureland every few days. He uses an easy-to-move electric fence to keep the cows where they belong. Three or four days after the cows have grazed (but not overgrazed) an area and moved on, he moves in the chickens. The chickens eat not only the grass (which the cows have clipped to just the right height for them) but also the fly larvae in the cow dung. If the chickens move in too soon, the dung isn't dry enough (which offends the chickens' delicate sensibilities) and the larvae aren't plump enough. If the chickens move in too late, the larvae have turned into flies and have flown away. Also, if the chickens stay too long, they put too much nitrogen into the soil via their own poop. It's a delicate balance.

The drawback of Salatin's approach is that it takes a lot of effort on his part and on the part of his two interns (and occasional journalist). I can't help but wonder whether any farmers are using his approach, but using machines to move around the various pens and coops instead of relying on human labor.

I've been reading and enjoying The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. The book is longer than it should be but is full of interesting information about how food works in this country. The first, long chapter is about corn. Apparently a large percentage of everything we eat ultimately comes from corn. Our most popular sweetener in this country is high fructose corn syrup. Pigs, cows, and chickens are largely made out of corn even though these animals (cows especially) weren't designed for eating corn. And there is a host of other things with long, chemically names that are made out of corn.

There is a lot not to like about our system of turning corn into overweight Americans, but I couldn't help but be impressed at how efficient we have become at turning corn into so many different things.

I'm only halfway through the book. The main point I've taken from it so far is that we put way too much energy (much of which comes from foreign oil) into producing every calorie of food that we eat. It's made me fantasize about growing a few vegetables in the side yard.

But why stop at vegetables? I wonder what my neighbors would think about chickens living next door to them. Or maybe goats. Goats might actually be quieter.

I finished the book Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl last night. There were two selections for this month's book club and the other one looked much more interesting. I only checked this one out in case the other didn't become available in time. But then I ended up really enjoying it. Ruth Reichl, then food critic for the New York Times, is very good at describing food. She gets into food the way that Steve Almond, author of Candy Freak, gets into candy.

In order to learn how restaurants treat regular customers, she liked to disguise herself, which she did very well. In New York, the NY Times critic is all powerful and is treated, literally, in one case, better than royalty. That is unless she isn't recognized, in which case she might have to huddle next to a cold window and be all but ignored. One of the best parts of the book is seeing snooty restaurants get their comeuppance.

I highly recommend the book. It was a quick and easy read that took me into a world I couldn't afford to visit myself.

I found the second story, "Understanding", in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Live and Others even more compelling than the first. It reminded me of Flowers for Algernon in that it tells the story in the first person of someone getting smarter and smarter. I was impressed with Chiang's ability to portray a hyper-intelligent person. And here's the best part: wherever you think the story is heading, that's not where it goes. I liked the ending. I won't say any more than that.

At nickjong's recommendation, I picked up a copy of Stories of Your Live and Others by Ted Chiang.

The first story is called "Tower of Babylon". I had trouble with the tower in the story. It was made out of brick (long before the invention of reinforced concrete) and was so long that if it were laid down, "it would be two days' journey to walk from one end to the other." It was so skinny that from a distance it formed "a line as thin as a strand of flax."

This offended the engineer in me. There is no way such a structure would be stable and there is no way the bottom of the structure would be strong enough not to be crushed under the tower's weight.

I like my fiction to be feasible.

All of this unrealism stopped bothering me when the protagonist in the story climbed up the tower to higher than the level of the moon. You might think this should bother me more because it is even more unrealistic but in fact it allowed me to reinterpret the story. I now see it as a story made up by someone a few thousand years BC who didn't know from civil engineering and who was using the story to present his pet theory of how the world was put together.

I have only read one and a half stories from the book so far, but I'm guessing that I will be recommending it.

Another highlight from Wednesday: In the evening they had a limbo contest, as Caribbean resorts and cruises are wont to do. I won first place, but not without a good fight from a four-foot-tall, nine-year-old girl. (It was mostly adults in the competition, but most were weeded out in the first few rounds.) The prize: an award with a plastic cruise ship on it and 50 points for the red team. Right now, the red team is handily beating the blue and white teams and I can take credit for about 1 percent of their points.

I plan to leave the award behind so they can reuse it on the next cruise. I've been reading The World Without Us (which I recommend) and it's made me extra conscious about the excess of shaped plastic in our world.

This evening I attended a book group to discuss the book The World Without Us. Less than half of us had read the book, hoping we'd be able to check it out from our local libraries but not getting the chance. The book was too popular and the wait was too long. It did sound pretty interesting based on the comments of those who had read it. I showed up to book club right at seven, hoping to get a chance to skim through the book before serious discussion began at 7:30, but no one even brought a copy of the book. Those who had read it had already returned it.

If you're interested exploring a thought experiment (backed up with research) on the idea of what would happen if all of the people in the world suddenly disappeared (if, for example, they were all harvested by aliens for some evil experiment or cosmic smörgåsbord), then check out this web site.

I recently realized I haven't read enough Bertrand Russell, one of Lyn's favorite philosophers. So this afternoon I picked from the shelf Unpopular Essays: 14 Adventures in Argument by 1950's Nobel Prize Winner. I jumped to an essay near the end, "Ideas that have harmed mankind." I was hoping for an explicit enumeration of the ideas but was instead treated to a rambling essay. With a little effort, I could figure out what specific ideas he had in mind, but instead I'll just pull out one of the more fun quotes:

In America, everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

I recently finished reading Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. At over 900 pages, this is good novel in which to lose yourself (and to find yourself in an Australian prison, the slums of Bombay, a small Indian village, a war in Afghanistan, and the Indian mafia). In my opinion the novel (especially the first half) merits being called literature (as opposed to something to be read and then forgotten).

The story is evidently largely autobiographical. The blurb about the author on the back of the book is a fairly accurate summary of the story of the main character.

One of the reasons I liked the book and recommend it is that it planted me firmly in a world I previously knew almost nothing about.

Today I finished the final Harry Potter book and saw the Simpsons movie. I recommend both. I am now up to date with pop culture. And Lyn no longer has to worry about giving anything away.

From work, I brought home Fluid Transients in Systems and Fluid Transients in Pipeline Systems. On the way home, I picked up True Women, this month's book club selection. I imagined having an evening of reading, alternating between work-related reading and reading for pleasure, but instead spent the evening in one-on-one conversations with friends and family.

Last night I finally finished Book 6.  M, that means it's ready for lending. Tonight--on to Book 7.

Less blogging. More reading.

Bye!

Kelly Suggests

The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon
The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney

Dave suggests:

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling

Marvin suggests

Jennifer Michael Hecht, e.g., The Happiness Myth
The Archer's Tale, by Bernard Cornwell

Judy suggests

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire, Food theme)

Jennifer suggests

Theme months.
True Crime. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.
Memoirs. The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls

Loel suggests

Around the Bloc, by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Lina suggests

Thud, by Terry Pratchett
The Stupidest Angel, by Christopher Moore

Chris suggests

Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett (Christmas theme)

Susan suggests

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Keisha says it's awful)
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See
Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky
The Burglar on the Prowl, by Lawrence Block (Series theme)

Sandy suggests

Garlic and Sapphires, by Ruth Reichl (food theme)
Ice Bound, by Dr. Jerri Nielsen
The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum (Christmas theme? Political theme?)

Marjean suggests

True Women, by Janice Woods Windle
Lamb: the Gospel according to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore (Christmas theme?)

Lyn suggests

Bridge of Birds : A Novel of an Ancient China that Never Was, by Barry Hughart
Ella Minnow Pea : A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable, by Mark Dunn

Lauren suggests

The Cat Who Came for Christmas, by Cleveland Amory
A Fine and Pleasant Misery, by Patrick McManus (short stories)
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, by A. J. Jacobs
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, by Atul Gawande
One for the Money, by Janet Evanovitch (Series theme)
Orchid Fever, by Eric Hansen
Let My People Go Surfing, by Yvon Chouinard
Idyll Banter, by Chris Bohjalian

Jerry suggests

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam, by Yahiya Emerick
Roger Zelazny, Stephen King, Piers Anthony, Michael Crichton
Book & a Movie: Jurassic Park, Tombstone, or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

And the winners are...

1. August: True Women, by Janice Woods Windle
2. September: Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (unanimous acceptance)
3. October: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
4. November: Series theme: Pick any book in a series.
   
5. December: Christmas theme: Pick any of the aforementioned Christmas-themed books or one of your own.
   
6. January: Food theme: Pick any of the aforementioned food-themed books or one of your own.

This morning, raaga123, fraeuleinchen, and I went to the grand opening of the Spicewood Springs branch of the Austin Public Library. They made a bigger deal out of it than we'd expected, with a live band and too many long-winded speakers including two mayors pro-tem. (What happened to Will Wynn? I thought he was still our mayor pro real. Have I been that out of it?)

There was even a long prayer, blessing the school. That struck me as weird--getting a little too close to mixing up church and state, I thought. During the prayer (and it was a long one) I looked out at the audience to see how many heathen we had attending the ceremony. About half it looked like.

It's a nice, new library with a good collection of computers, DVDs, books on CD, and even a fair number of books on paper.

I only wish they were open on Sundays. That's when I would be most likely to visit now that I work weekdays. Saturdays might work, but Sundays have always seemed more bookish to me.

This evening I hosted the ANK Book Club.  This month's book: Pretty Birds by Scott Simon, whom I saw speak at last year's Texas Book Festival.  I liked the book, but I'm not sure how many of the others did.  I didn't come right out and ask them.  I'd been meaning to research the civil war in Yugoslavia ahead of time, but didn't manage it.  Here's an article on the siege, that looks pretty good.

One of Simon's central themes is the idea that the Bosnians were very similar to Americans.  The atrocities described happened to people very much like us, not strangers with inscrutable customs who are probably at war through some fault of their own.  At one point, one of his characters says,

All this bleeding and dying--we don't come by it naturally.  What's natural for us is a cigarette in one hand, an espresso in the other.  A beer on the cafe table, some leftist rags at our elbow, and the whole afternoon to argue about captivating inconsequentialities.  Michael Jordan.  The Princess of Wales.  Madonna.

Simon has a way with words that I enjoyed.  The following is from page 91, which gives a scene where the family parrot is starving to death:

Irena had accepted the sight and smell of dead friends, relatives, and strangers.  But Pretty Bird had always been the one in their lives whose fantastically incongruous bleats, burrs, bells, and whistles had reminded them that the world could sometimes be added up in different ways.

And on pages 101-102:

Irena had seen the bodies of friends, family, and strangers over the past few months. But she had not seen a body pass bloodlessly from life to death in a breath. The same blood and bones, the same teeth and hair, added up to life in one instant and death in the next.

Perhaps it's the mathematician in me who likes metaphors that involve addition.