Archive for the ‘books’ Category
Atlas of Remote Islands
October 18th, 2010
Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands perfectly merges the experiences of reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities and poring over an atlas at age eight. I really can’t imagine recommending a book more highly.
She also wrote an ode to blackletter typography called Fraktur Mon Amour which leads me to wonder if she’s single.
Barnes & Noble Just Lost a Customer
October 18th, 2010
Lucky for them I’ll forget about this in a week.
12 Byzantine Rulers
October 13th, 2010
If you think listening to a 7-hour series of podcasts about Byzantine history sounds like a great idea, (1) we should probably be friends and (2) you’ll almost certainly enjoy Lars Brownworth’s 12 Byzantine Rulers.
It’s surprisingly fascinating stuff. The Byzantines are strangely easy to overlook, but they spent a millennium debating theology, appreciating Aeschylus, engaged in atrocious internecine conflict, maintaining a Mediterranean-wide economy and almost single-handedly holding back the tide of Arab conquest while the rest of Europe was struggling to retain literacy. Makes for good listening.
On a related note, I’m really enjoying Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome, which covers a similar time period but concentrates on the former Western empire’s perspective. It’s also a bit more concerned with the details of slower-moving social and economic trends than with individual derry-do, which Brownworth’s podcasts very entertainingly emphasize.
Infinite Jest had me hoping for a discussion of Byzantine erotica, but no such luck.
In the Land of Invented Languages
October 12th, 2010
Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages offers an overview of the history of artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.). I’m pretty sure that anyone who likes my blog would enjoy it. *cough* Julia.
The Original Gilgamesh
October 1st, 2010
The Epic of Gilgamesh, as read aloud in the original Akkadian by Antoine Cavigneaux.
For more voices from the beginning of the world, see also part of the epilogue of the Codex Hammurabi and an incantation to ward off rabies. And there’s a lot more. Thanks, Cambridge!
It seems that there’s some scholarly debate over the specifics of cadence and pronunciation, but based on what we know this is about as good as it gets.
(via Open Culture)
books, history, language, old dead white guys | No Comments »
A Mathematician’s Apology
August 11th, 2010
I finally read A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy’s classic defense of a lifetime dedicated to the study of pure (“impractical”) mathematics. It’s a remarkably sad book, in which Hardy, near the end of his life, famously describes mathematics as a “young man’s pursuit”1 in which the elderly have little to contribute. However, it also contains some really well-composed thoughts:
A man who is always asking, “Is what I do worth while?” and “Am I the right person to do it?” will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve.
The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. … It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind — we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.
1 The usual formulation of Hardy’s rule is that, “if a mathematician’s going to do any significant work, it’ll be done before they’re thirty.” This is true so long as we ignore the later work of Archimedes, Cauchy, Descartes, Euler, Fermat, Frege, Gauss, Hilbert, Newton, Peano, Poincare, Russell, von Neumann, Weierstrass, and most recently Andrew Wiles. I would guess that Hardy’s opinion on the matter was influenced by his relationship with the mathematical prodigy Ramanujan, who died at 33.
Nerd Problems
July 28th, 2010
While conversing with an attractive lady, our chess-playing protagonist finds himself in the following situation:
He sat leaning on his cane and thinking that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there, and simultaneously he tried to remember what exactly he had just been talking about.
- Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense
books, chess, games | No Comments »
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
July 20th, 2010
The sixth and final volume of everyone’s favorite nerdy graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim was released today. As you can see, it’s awesome. Buy buy buy.
Veganomicon
July 7th, 2010
I finally caved and purchased a copy of the Veganomicon. I think I may actually like this cookbook more than Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home, which is saying something.
Today was pineapple-cashew-quinoa stir-fry. Delicious. Someone less lazy than myself posted the recipe, complete with pictures. You should go make it.
