Halloween Post II

Here's scary post II.

I picked up Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo from the public library as an audiobook to help stave off the godawful boredom I feel when I'm on long runs. Except what I forgot is that godawful boredom is not best staved off by a godawful book. It really bothers me that DeLillo is thought of as such a brilliant author. I know this isn't his best work, but honestly, it's appalling and listening to it almost put me off running, because it's hard to run with a little voice in your head screaming "Shut up!" every 30 seconds.

I've tried to make my peace with him before, given that people I respect seem to find him important in some way that I've never been able to understand, because it's always such a struggle to get through anything he writes. His characters are written entirely unsympathetically, or at least in such a way that I can't muster up even a scrap of emotional investment in them. I hear people say he's witty and insightful nonetheless, but why?

The experience I obtained from Cosmopolis, running aside, could probably have been equally obtained by parking myself in the kitchen (stone cold sober) at a party between the hours of 2am and 5am, with a small handful of stoned misogynists with enormous egos, asking them earnestly how they really feel about international currency markets, world music, automobiles, sex, haircuts, and green tea ice cream.

Halloween Post I

In honour of Halloween, I'm going to write about two scary things, which are coincidentally, the two books that I have most recently finished. The first one is this book by Virginia Valian, a psychologist at Hunter College, about the question of why there are so few women in prestigious positions. In particular, it uses the idea of a schema (like a stereotype, but with fewer negative connotations) and a whole lot of research studies on the subject to explore various reasons why women might be held back in various areas.

This book should really be read by anyone interested in feminism, and should be read to anyone who doesn't think that sexism is still a factor in today's ever so enlightened society. Schemas affect the way in which we treat people and the way in which we evaluate them. Small yet continual pieces of negative reinforcement and negative evaluations result in a huge disadvantage for many women for whom their gender schema and the schema for their profession clash. (As a totally random example: university professor.) But here's the thing: almost all of this bias is unconscious and unintended.

People think that sexism isn't a problem anymore because we have laws against discrimination, and nobody would get taken seriously if they said, "Don't promote her because she's a woman." But we do take seriously statements such as, "Don't promote her because she lacks leadership ability." That's a real reason not to promote someone and doesn't sound sexist in the least. But it's not so simple, when you look at the research. Valian quotes a lot of studies in which our pre-existing schemas cause an evaluation bias. For instance, in a study in which identical resumes were sent out, some with male names attached, others with female names, people tended to rate the resumes with male names more highly. But if bias exists there, why are we so sure that our everyday evaluations are so impartial, and that we live in a meritocracy unblemished by prejudice?

There is so much more to this book than I could possibly touch on here, but it's amazing and eerie. At least, the section on academia was spookily accurate (see, this is a Halloween review) with respect to my own experiences. One of the anecdotes Valian uses, about an academic talk, to illustrate that unconscious judgments about who in the audience is likely to have a worthwhile comment, was almost identical to an experience I'd had a few weeks earlier and remarked on. (This is a case of a woman's comment being brushed off, while other comments made by men were taken seriously. In my case, what made it stand out was the fact that one of my male colleagues made the almost identical comment later in the talk and got an extremely different response.)

Anyway, the book is amazing, and is both scientific and readable. The situation outlined is an awfully depressing one if you're a woman in a position like mine, but isn't it better to know what you might be up against?

Is it just me, or is it hot in here?

People don't like change. But without it, Brian Fagan demonstrates in his conveniently forgotten "The Long Summer: How Climate Change Civilization" that you wouldn't be sitting at a computer reading this right now. In fact you might still well be sitting around a fire chipping stone tools cursing that you have to go out into the snow tomorrow to kill a mammoth. Again. Using science and sociology, Fagan points out in his third best seller that the earth has been getting warmer for the past 5,000 years and it isn't because of all the coal China is burning. In fact, the earth has been variously an iceball and a tropical swamp without any help from us. Quite the opposite. In this convincing and entertaining read, we learn that human development and domination of the earth has only been possible due to the natural changes in climate over our recent evolution. Without the natural warming of the earth we wouldn't have left Africa, collected crops and animals in the Middle East, and then spread out across the globe. For those of you who can't get enough of Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse) this work seals the deal on how fate, and not necessarily our large craniums, has put us on the top of the food chain. This work is pre-global warming hype and should be on the list of anyone who's gone to the trouble of turning off the lights or buying a hybrid. It challenges what the media and scientists are saying and provides a solid position for anyone wanting to make their own informed decision on where we fit in a warming planet, and just how much it may have helped us along.

Stephenson, the father of Cyberpunk

Oh Lord, I have committed the cardinal sin of bloggers. I have left my blog for months without posting squat! Forgive me, for I have been adulterously posting on other blogs (work ones, no less!).

But now, I have returned to thee, O blog of my heart. I present...Snow Crash! This classic sci fi novel was written in 1992, but reads as if it had been written tomorrow. Stephenson has an incredible, Orwellian gift for accurately describing the future of technology. He covers nanotechnology, biotechnology, computer viruses, and the metaverse (he coined the word) with startling plausibility, and somehow manages to roll this all seamelessly into a smart, sexy cyberpunk story that rolls along at breakneck speed. His social commentary is somehow as spot on as his technological augury; you'll cry rather than laugh when you read about an america patchworked with corporate-franchise city states, and the hilariously commercialized jails.

But all this is merely the bones of a great story. I was totally sold already, but became a Stephenson junkie when he somehow managed to roll in a layer of Sumerian history and linguistics. The story hinges on Chomsky's idea of deep grammar, and goes one step further to imply what might happen when that deep grammer were accessed after language imprinting had occurred.

I think that this book is what sparked my deep interest in linguistics (I first read it several years ago) and Stephenson is obviously drawing on ideas about bicameral brain theory and deep grammar, with some biblical and protohistoric language theory thrown in. His scope, and his mastery of divergent disciplines, is amazing.

In short, Stephenson writes as if he knew the inside of my head. Every word in this book was fascinating, and the story never flagged. He is a true futurist, and I think that instead of Gibson, we should be touting Stephenson as the father of cyberpunk (he's much more readable). Audrey, you have to read this book. I will come and make you sorry if you don't.

Life (but not the universe or everything)

I think this is the book on paleontology that Bill Bryson would have written if Bill Bryson was a paleontologist (and that's a good thing, in my opinion).

Fortey's book, as the subtitle tells you, is a natural history of the first four billion years on earth. He starts with the earliest single-celled organisms, and ends with the appearance of human civilisation, and in a nice twist, spends roughly a proportionate number of pages on each era. Since this implies that at least 2/3 of the book gets devoted to trilobites, prokaryotes, and creatures with about the charisma of slime molds (such as slime molds themselves), you might think it would get pretty boring pretty quickly. But Fortey manages to strike a great balance between amusing anecdotes about scientists (including himself) and actually telling you about the creatures involved. Too much of the former, and it would seem frivolous; too much of the latter, and you might as well just read a textbook. By the time you get to dinosaurs, you've really got a sense of just how late in the game they turned up. It goes without saying that humans barely make an appearance.

Basically, the writing is very entertaining without coming across as condescending, and it makes the whole thing extremely readable for non-scientists. Three cheers for fossils!

Not Enough Algebra!

Well, I was hoping to have posted something in May, but for some reason, just never managed it. Well, maybe it had something to do with moving, but I think it was also just that I didn't end up reading anything I really wanted to review. Ok, I did read Middlemarch, but I couldn't think of any way to review it that didn't come across as a 2nd year English essay, so I didn't.

And I admit, I'm only reviewing The Algebraist to admit that I only picked this up because I liked the title, math girl that I am, and was subsequently saddened by the significant lack of algebra in the book (or even a character who actually was an algebraist). But I guess you can't have everything, so I won't complain too much about false advertising.

So instead of a math-influenced sci-fi novel, I got space opera, and fairly entertaining space opera, all told. Though sometimes I suspect that if Banks turned in excerpts of his books to a highschool English, he'd get put on some sort of "To Watch" list, because he writes torture and general sadism amazingly well. Way, way too well. But as a science fiction novel, it felt to me more like having someone take me by the shoulders and shake me a lot, while yelling, "Fuck! Fucking crazy aliens!" in my face. (Seriously, the characters in his book say "fuck" an awful lot. Do they still say that in the future? Anyway.) Here's a sample of the general over-the-top-ness of it all:

`What', Fassin heard a nearby Dweller say, quite quietly but distinctly through the pandemonium, `the fuck is that?'

(Another dark Mercatorial ship, another silver Dreadnought, ripped to shreds and blossoming in nuclear fire respectively. Another pair of Dreadnoughts shaking in the first beam-fall of the violet ray flicking from on high.)

And on the screen opposite, looking downwards into the wide bowl of the storm's dead heart, a huge darkly red-glowing globe was rising from the sump gases of the storm floor, dragging a great flute of gas after it like some absurdly steady fireball. It was kilometres across and striated, banded like a miniature gas-giant, so that for one crazed instant Fassin thought he was watching the palace of the Hierchon Ormilla floating smoothly upwards into the fray.

And so on. So was it fun to read? Sure. But not without a lot of moments of "okay, enough already", and really just not enough math.

Shakespeare made shit up

Well, duh. But really, he made up an astounding number of words and phrases! He lived in a time where language was flexing to accomodate the influences of merging dialects, and the populace had no expectation of a set syntax or vocabulary. Simply, the average audience member was prepared for verbal innovation due to the incredible linguistic commingling underway in 17thC london.

But Chaucer...now Chaucer had it good. He could choose between clawed and clew, ached and oke, climbed and clomb, and he variously used hi, hem and her to denote they, them and their. The English of the time had not yet settled into even a simple set of plurals, and gender was still applied slipshod across the land according to local dialect. Chaucer, a relatively cosmopolitan man, simply chose his verbiage according to scanning expediency. Lucky sod.

But all this is leading to my minor obsession; the greater and lesser vowel shifts that swept across the english language and changed vowel pronunciation forever. For example, the Domesday book is pronounced doomsday not because of some apocolyptic association with the census, but because "Dome" (for domestic census) was actually pronounced "doom" back in the day. Why did we lower the vowel sound? Nobody knows, and it happened to all vowels across the board. I'm fascinated by this, and if I have one complaint about Bill Bryson's fantastic book, "Mother Tongue", it's just that it can't unravel this particular knot for me. i guess i'll keep reading.

Eureka, Archimedes!

Ok, so this isn't actually a book review, but it's about a book, so it still counts. I seem to be celebrating having finished with my first round of marking by watching a documentary about the history of mathematics, but if I didn't love this stuff I wouldn't do it for a living. I'm watching Nova: Infinite Secrets, which is about a lost Archimedes manuscript in which he appears to have been working with infinities. In particular, he appears to have developed techniques very similar to those of integral calculus, almost 2000 years before its credited invention by Newton and Leibniz. Integral calculus is central to applied mathematics and engineering - so it's not just fun, kids, it's science!

The documentary is about the Archimedes Palimpsest, which is a manuscript by Archimedes which had since been cleaned off and reused as a prayer book, with the original text only barely visible. It talks about how the palimpsest was rediscovered by historians and is being restored and redeciphered by scholars from various fields. It's an incredibly difficult process, since it involves an attempt to read a text (already very old) which has since been overwritten and has had to weather plenty of abuse.

The bonus in the documentary for me is that one of the scholars involved is a Stanford Classics prof (a historian of ancient mathematics), whose seminar in Plato's Philosophy of Math was one of the main things which kicked me into history and philosophy of mathematics in the first place. The comments he gave me on what became the second chapter of my dissertation were very, very useful. He's interviewed in the documentary about the significance of the mathematical work in the palimpsest, and gives a very articulate and accessible account.

Highly recommended, and of both historical and mathematical interest! (Who better for a classicist and a logician jointly to celebrate than Archimedes?)

"Kurt is Up in Heaven Now"

I am sad this morning, because Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday, at the age of 84. I would write a review of one of his books, or write about what kind of person he was, but so many much more talented writers than I am have already done so.

So here is the theme of Slaughterhouse Five, summarised by the New York Times Book Review:

Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.

And as for the title of this post, it's from something he said here, which also does a better job of showing what kind of person he was than whatever I might write about him. RIP.

So it goes.

American Born Chinese: Your Very Own War Against The Decepticons

"It's easy to become anything you wish...so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul."

An herbalist's wife tells a nine year old Chinese boy this, when he tells her he wants to be a Transformer when he grows up. Jin Wang is the American-Born Chinese of the title, and he wants to be a transformer. Especially when he moves to a new school and realises he's the only Chinese person in his class.

The Monkey King doesn't like who he is either. He doesn't want to be a monkey. He wants to be a god. Jin Wang's story is familiar because a lot of us lived it. The Monkey King story is taken from one of the most famous novels of classical Chinese literature, called Journey to the West. (The abridged translation I read was just called Monkey, and is highly recommended.)

Danny likes who he is, more or less. But he really hates who his cousin is, since his cousin is an amalgamation of the most appalling Chinese stereotypes you can think of, and named nothing less than Chin-Kee. Chin-Kee visits Danny every year, and follows him to school, making his life a living hell, so that Danny ends up transferring schools after each annual visit.

These stories are all thematically unified, but Gene Luen Yang goes a step further to unify the three plots as well, and does so in a very satisfying manner. This book is incredibly insightful and a great read. The main message about not turning your back on your cultural identity is clear without being preachy, particularly because it paints a very sympathetic picture of just how difficult it is to sort out your identity as an ABC (or a CBC in this country). The characters' choices, even the bad ones, are very understandable attempts to cope with the fact that so much of your conception of who you are, particularly when you're young, comes from the way in which other people see you. So what do you do when anybody who looks at you can tell that you're not Caucasian, but everyone around you is? What if you don't want to be their Chin-Kee-esque stereotype of a Chinese person?

Read this book. Then you can find out how Jin works out how to become the person he wants to be (without forfeiting his soul).

Black Swan Green, or, why it sucks to be thirteen

The back of Black Swan Green has an excerpt from a Publisher's Weekly review which says that this novel "captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy and brings to mind adventures shared by Huck and Tom." I don't think this reviewer and I read the same book. Don't get me wrong - I agree that the book was a great read. But it sure wasn't about capturing the pleasure of adolescence. It was about the fact that being thirteen is a matter of navigating a dynamic and deeply complex caste system which nobody will explain to you (and asking about it would ensure you a place smack at the bottom). There's no floating down any rivers on any bloody rafts. There's getting teased, being ostracised, and desperately, desperately, hoping that whatever just came out of your mouth was not the Wrong Thing. I am, to this day, convinced that the best way to navigate your way through this system without internalising it (and then perpetuating it) is to have a best friend with whom you can make up your own elaborate rules which are at least transparent to you.

The sheer awkwardness of these years is captured rather nicely by the narrator's general confusion about how to go from meeting a girl somewhere and speaking to her, to having a girlfriend you can snog. Because you couldn't ask anyone how that works, right? And certainly there's no handbook. He concludes that either everybody knows all about it, but nobody's telling, or nobody knows anything at all, and it's all an elaborate hoax. I am fairly sure I had the same thought myself, but having less native self-confidence, I was convinced that there was some great secret I was missing out on. Now, at twice that age, the elaborate hoax theory is gaining some ground. But I digress.

The story itself is fairly mundane, but that's not the point. The point is that Mitchell writes a great coming-of-age story which you're supposed to read as an adult who can look back at their own coming-of-age time, and think about the characters, "My God. I knew you. I hated you, you bastard." And then realise that you can look back on it and know how absurd the whole thing really was.

But let me tell you - if this is what it's like to be a thirteen year old boy, it's not half as complicated as it is to be a thirteen year old girl.

Twilight

Twilight is the best book I have read in years. I absolutely loved loved loved it, and even better, it has a sequel that's just as good. Stephenie Meyer has written a gripping vampire romance that catches 18 year old Bella on the cusp of adulthood. Bella moves from sunny Phoenix, where she lived with her mom, to the perpetually rainy town of Forks, WA. On the surface, it's just another teen vampire romance; girl goes to new school, meets uncannily pale boy and strange family, falls in love, gets into mortal peril, and is rescued by vampire using his supernatural powers. But oh, it's so much more than that.

Something about the writing in this book just grabbed me and sucked me in emotionally. It helps that Bella is cool, but not too cool; her actions and reactions are absolutely believable, and her incredulity when faced with Edward's nature is perfectly balanced by her I-dont-care-I-love-you teen attitude. This is a book that never even strays into discussing the physical side of teen love, but nevertheless gives you goosebumps as you read about Edward and Bella's first (and supremely dangerous) touch and kiss. The dismal, overcast atmosphere of Forks and environs comes through loud and clear, and it picks up the bittersweet, haunting tone of the writing.

The entire 500 plus pages keeps you trembling on the precipice of first love; I really felt like it was me falling in love for the first time, and that's such an amazing feeling. Somewhere just past the midpoint, Twilight switches its focus from romance to thriller/adventure, and this is where the time spent on developing the characters really pays off. The hunt at the end is certainly well written and executed, but it's impact is made far greater because of the supremely involving (and semi-tragic) love story.

Definitely, absolutely read this book. I could not put it down (even when Rob begged, badgered, and eventually got mad) and when I had binge read its sequel, New Moon, I went out and bought both books and started reading them again. Go NOW and reserve it at the library.

Emmy Noether

This post has a lot less boob than the previous post. I suppose Hilary Duff is doing her part to make young girls dumber and more superficial. I wish Emmy Noether (1882-1935) were around to make young girls smarter and more mathematical. I've been reading various mathematical biographies of Noether, since in a lot of ways, she's the intellectual successor of Dedekind, who is the other Richard in my life, being the star figure of my PhD dissertation.

Since this is at least nominally a womens' day themed post, and not only an excuse for me to talk publically about how great I think Noether is, I might mention that the biographies I chose to read were the ones written by mathematicians, or at least, where the mathematical work was discussed by the mathematicians. Van der Waerden's obituary is particularly touching, and does a great job of highlighting interesting aspects of her research. He was one of her students at Gottingen. The main reason I picked mathematicians' writing about her to read is that they at least talk about the importance and algebraic character of her actual work, instead of her physical appearance.

It seems to be the standard for mathematical histories to make a point of how distinctly unfeminine Noether was. Even Hermann Weyl, a mathematician himself, says things like this:

She was heavy of build and loud of voice, and it was often not easy for one to get the floor in competition with her. [...] No one could contend that the Graces had stood by her cradle; but if we in Gottingen often chaffingly referred to her as "der Noether" (with the masculine article), it was done with a respectful recognition of her power as a creative thinker who seemed to have broken through the barrier of sex.

But to what extent did Noether really break through that barrier? In recognition by her colleagues, true. But in obtaining a university position? Not really. She had only a Privatdozent's position in Gottingen, and that was because Hilbert and Klein argued so vehemently for it. The story goes that Hilbert's retort when told that it was ridiculous that a woman be accorded that position, since it meant membership in the University Senate was, "Gentlemen, the Senate is not a bathhouse, so I do not see why a woman cannot enter it!" We love you, Hilbert.

But still, there always seems to be as much attention paid, if not more, to what her qualifications are as a woman, than her qualifications as one of the most important figures in algebra in the 20th century. That is - I don't understand why Noether is a great woman mathematician, and not just a great mathematician. It's not as though she wouldn't be great by those standards as well. Why the extra adjective, people? When asked if Noether was a great woman mathematician, Landau apparently replied, "I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear." You go over there and stand with Larry Summers, Landau. I'll be over here reading about abstract algebra and not fixing my makeup.

Hangin' with Hilary Du(h)ff (actually a rant)

C'mon little girls, Hilary Duff is here (courtesy of Scholastic Books) to teach you all about being a ho! Although the book talks the talk about how smart/hardworking/morally upstanding Hilary is, it wrecks the whole thing by splashing pix of a scantily clad Hilary on almost every page. And O MY GOD this book is PINK!! There's a whole lot o' pinkness going on here girls, and if you want to be just like Hilary (which is the subtext of this whole book) then you should get your mom to drive you to the mall right now so that you can buy some pink belly tops and chaps (oops, that was Christina Aguilera).

Now, I wouldn't be so adamantly opposed to this book if it were published and marketed as the drivel that it is. However, the publisher is Scholastic. Hmmm...Scholastic...makes you think of education, right? Learning, freedom to make choices and be who you want, freedom from stereotypes of hot pink big breasted prepubescent skankiness...hmm. Not quite what we have here, folks. Score one for false advertising.

And worst, the way most little girls will access this book is through School Book Fairs. that's right, some dipshit elementary school librarian is going to sell out her school to Scholastic so that she can get a few extra bucks for *real* books for her library. Let's analyse this transaction. Teacher invites the devil (Scholastic) into school...parents give kids money because after all, the books are from *scholastic*, and must promote learning...little girls buy ho-in-training manuals so that they can become an army of skanks...teacher gets maybe $100 dollars from fair, which will purchase maybe 10 books, max...kids refuse to read good literature because they are happy with the trash taht they bought. Who benefits here? That's right! The Devil! The moral? I hate biographies. If I have to suffer, so do you.

note: picture from amazon is not quite as per our cover. Our cover has more boob.

Theme Suggestion: IWD

Apparently today is International Womens' Day (http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp). I'm going to simultaneously suggest that we occasionally adopt some kind of reviewing theme, and that the first one be this.

No real time limit, but we can use this post to pick something to blog about related to the theme and have that be our next post. I'm going to pick the biography of Emmy Noether that I've been reading, since she's one of my favourite mathematicians, and I'm planning on starting to do some work on her at some point. Maybe I can post about her this weekend, if I finish my marking in time.

Hal Clement!

Since I took this quiz, and am apparently Hal Clement...

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I thought I'd better read one of his books. So I read Mission of Gravity.

And oddly enough, this really was exactly the kind of science fiction book I would write if I wrote science fiction. The plot and characters weren't all that compelling, but the ideas were nifty. Basically, he built the whole book around a planet he'd come up with whose gravity worked in a strange and non-standard way. And the plot just involved these aliens traveling to retrieve something. Basically, problem-solving due to the harsh conditions. It was all really just an excuse to mess around with physics equations and figure out what a world satisfying those equations would look like.

Anyway, it reminded me that these years in academia have only ruined my ability to write creatively, and also that at heart I'm really just a big math nerd. Are the results of this quiz as revealing about you?

I'm a Baaaaad librarian

So today i had a Celebrate Chinese New Year program that was extra celebratory. We had a fairly civilized storytime, but then (o stupid me) I ended with a craft involving glitter. Several kinds of glitter, in almost unlimited quantities. The kids painted a chinese character (love, prosperity, etc) onto stiff paper with watery glue, then shook glitter over the picture on top of a pan to make a glitter character.

This all went very well until we had a shortage of pans. What, no pan? No problem! This here carpet will do just dandy, thanks. So that's why this afternoon the Head of Children's Services (that's me) was on my hands and knees with a dustbuster that I had to bring from home, vacuuming up glitter because it was being tracked all over the city complex. Yep, that's why I get paid the big bucks. But secretly, it was worth it to see the look on the city clerks' faces when they came in for their meeting immediately after our program, and had to dodge mountains of leftover glitter and gluey children. HA!

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The title of this book was so good, I just used it as my caption. The Omnivore's Dilemma is by Michael Pollan, a Berkeley prof who tends to write books about the intersections of social structrues and biology. In this book, he takes a look at how food is produced for the fast food market, the organic agribusiness industry, and the sustainable eating community. His final chapter follows his quest to hunt and forage for his very own meal.

An interesting read, Pollan includes the usual horror stories about the disgusting treatment of animals in feedlots and industrial chicken houses, and he chronicles the terrible environmental (and epidemiological) effects that these processes are having on our world. He also explores the lesser known ubiquity of corn in our processed and mass market food, and explains some of the economic and digestive pitfalls of relying so heavily on one food source for calories.

The most interesting part of this book is Pollan's exploration of the organic industry. And yes, it is an industry. Granted it started with some fucking dirty California hippies selling mustard greens and spring mix by the side of the road; but success will make a whore of anyone, and those same hippies are now presiding over businesses that have grown large enough to demand ethical compromises such as forcing land, long-distance food distribution chains, etc. It turns out that organic food, when trucked from florida to Vancouver, is really not so environmentally friendly after all. Also, the regulations that that the US (and Canadian) government imposes on the food industry are meant to encourage large companies and big business, where the bottom line is key. Needless to say, this does not encourage farmers to live by the spirit, rather than the letter, of organic regs. Organic, yes. Sustainable, no.

I was also very interested in the discussion about sustainable food chains. Buy locally, without shipping food vast distances. Stay away from monoculture crops. The featured farm (in Virginia, dammit) rotated crops and animals across fields to allow animals to live as natural a life as possible, while making the most of their fertilizing, pesticidal, and aerating capacities. When necessary, a small input of chemical fertilizer or nutrients was added, but only in order to reduce the overall external input into a mostly closed system. It sounded like a beautifully balanced system; definitely worth a read.

It actually impressed me so much that I have signed our house up for organics delivery from a local company that buys locally when possible. I may also plant things this summer that will be nice to eat rather than nice to look at. After reading this book, I could care less about organic content; it's the sustainability of supporting a local food chain that i'm after. I strongly believe that one day we will not be able to truck food thousands of miles; in the meantime, we would be smart to support and protect local farming practices. One day we'll need them.

Cats and Numbers!

Maryn! Are you listening to me? If the Port Moody Kids Library is not currently featuring this book as the greatest kids' math book EVER, it has to start doing so.

Seriously, this book is the most adorable little thing I have read in ages, and uses a cute story about a puzzled cat (and justifiably so) to explain some of the basic concepts of infinite set theory. I am so filled with nerd love for it right now that I can hardly speak. (Or that's because of the germs ravaging my lungs, but nevermind.) This could clearly be, for some future set theorist, the tipping point into higher mathematics that Rocky's Boots was for me in logic. (I honestly never knew I was learning to build logic gates from computer science - I just wanted to make the raccoon do a nifty dance.)

The story is actually a standard metaphor from set theory, called Hilbert's Hotel, in which there are infinitely many guests (in this case, the Numbers), and more show up who need rooms of their own. But if all the rooms are full, how can you let in more guests? It helps when your hotel is infinite! In mathier terms, the story shows how you can establish a one-to-one correspondence between different infinite sets, showing that (by set-theoretic standards), they're the same size (cardinality). And it shows this by little stories about how the guests have to change rooms when new ones show up, and they have to do all sorts of clever things to make sure everyone gets a room.

Also, Mr. Hilbert, who runs the hotel in this story, is drawn to look like one of my favourite pictures of David Hilbert, the mathematician, and basically, it's all-around wonderfulness and math love.

Not much else to do...

Well. Here I am more or less immobilised by what the doctor tells me is bronchitis and a fever, though at least a lower fever than I had this weekend. But with the magic of my little laptop and a nest of blankets on the couch, I can at least try to wake up my brain with this, so I can work up to posting some notes for my (sigh) classes, which I'll probably have to miss tomorrow (due to being more or less unable to walk more than 10 feet without my abused lungs protesting, much less deliver gripping lectures on set theory and truth tables.)

But I digress.

The Harmony Silk Factory is a good book, though not a spectacular one. It tells the story of Johnny Lim, possibly any or all of: a communist, murderer, and Japanese collaborator during the war. You get three different pictures of him from his son, his wife, and his British friend, all of whom are naturally too involved in the story to be reliable narrators, but by combining the three, an interesting story definitely emerges. I thought I might mark this book as memorable, though, because it's one of the first pieces of Malaysian literature I've ever read, besides the picture books I loved as a child and am assured are safely in storage.

But oddly enough, it seems to be one of the only pieces of Malaysian literature out there in the mainstream. Am I wrong? Why are there all these countries with so few books to read to represent them?