Browsing the web while waiting for the shops to open for my mandatory morning yoghurt fix, when I stumbled upon this:
The apes are about to take over the world! It’s payback time:
Enough already, where’s my yoghurt?
Meme propagated through Thingology.
After reading the really great “The Fabric of the Cosmos” I’m ready for some real numbers. So on to “The Road to Reality” by Roger Penrose.
It’s not easy reading, but if someone like me, who at least has some training in mathematics, can’t follow the arguments, I would think he’s missed his target audience. Or maybe that’s a bit arrogant. So far, it’s still fine, and I’m up to the complex numbers. Sometimes I look ahead in the book and get all excited by the notion that soon I might be able to learn what “Minkowskian geometry” means and what the hell “spin” refers to. I hope I won’t be disappointed!
I’ve never read any of Penrose’s work. I’m aware some of it’s controversial, especially his theories of consciousness, but if I become put off by it, I’ll move onto something else. For now, I’m enjoying the ride!
Hyperbolic plane as portrayed by Escher, one of the many subjects touched upon by Penrose’s book
I’m slightly ashamed, but I seem to be hooked on the TV show Numb3rs. A sign is that I bought the second season on DVD yesterday.
My curiosity was aroused while listening to NPR’s Science Friday, where they spoke about the book “The Numbers Behind Numb3rs: Solving Crime with Mathematics”.
Even though I seem to be hooked, I have some problems with the show. One is the flaunting of pretty women, a transparent ploy to appeal to a male audience, and the other is the sometimes almost magical math. Still, it’s nice to see a show that at least has the sentiment that mathematics can be useful and fascinating.
“In the study, … , nematode worms were exposed to 88,000 chemicals in turn and mianserin extended lifespan by almost a third.”
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7106007.stm)
My advice: invest in mianserin now! I’m not sure whether to feel sorry or envious for the 87999 other worms who got to live a shorter life in the Fred Hutchinson Worm Torture Center.
Anyway, looks like good news for nematode worms.
I’m deep into “The Fabric of the Cosmos” by Brian Green. He’s the author of “The Elegant Universe”, which I haven’t read but had my eye on for ages.
I’m loving it! It serves up new revelations every other page, explaining things I’ve heard mention in Science Fiction (Higgs fields, for instance) but could never place.
The book goes into Einsteins relativity theory, the weirdness that is Quantum Mechanics, and I’m sure it will turn to String Theory soon, Greene’s own expertise after all.
The author presents all this highly technical stuff in an exciting, thriller-like way. I became completely absorbed by it. The weirdness of the double-slit experiments finally hit me. I never knew the interference pattern also shows up when you emit single electrons, one at a time.
I’m gonna try it out at rollerbasketball practice today, see if the defense can stop an attack where the ball is both on the left and right flank simultaneously. Photon detectors are not permitted according to basketball rules, so they’ll have a hard time forcing us to choose a flank!
Already a while ago I finished entering all my books into Librarything, just haven’t blogged about this amazing feat yet.
That includes all my comic books which comprises about half my library.
I haven’t just entered all books I own, but also some books I’ve read but don’t own (anymore). There’s more I’ve read, I’m sure, and when I come across such a book, I’ll enter it here.
They’ve greatly improved their support for Dutch books since the last time I wrote about this site, making entering my Dutch books really easy.
Check out my author gallery, with pictures of all my heroes (and anti-heroes of course, not all writers are great).
Why did I go to all this effort? I just love seeing what I’ve read in such a neat overview. And I’m crazy about tagging my books.
Now might not be a great time to join though. They’ve been having some problems lately, but they’re working on it! Come back later if it’s not working for you at the moment!
Been reading the New Scientist magazine this past month, instead of my newspaper.
That means I now more or less have to rely on my colleagues to keep me abreast of the latest in the daily goings-on in the world of politics, but am more up to date with scientific issues. A lot of it is abacadabra to me, but I love it when I get it.
The science fiction author Jon Courtenay Grimwood actually put me up to it when he thanked the magazine in the acknowledgements of End of the World Blues. Thought I’d give it a try.
Saturday! Just spent an hour on the couch in the sun-filled living room engrossed in Charles Stross’s Iron Sunrise, the sequel to Singularity Sky. Absolutely loving it! Geek writing to the max! Idea overload. I get the same kind of feeling, reading it, as I got when I first read Neuromancer, ages ago. Now that’s some recommendation, I’d say.
Can’t wait to move on the Stross’s other books.
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