What are you reading?

[Peterkin]

Just started The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. My Kindle can't hold a charge anymore, so I'm restricted to bedtime reading when it can stay plugged in. (Not in a hurry to replace, since i prefer paper books anyway.)

[Cognizant]

On 4/30/2022 at 5:07 PM, Qilin said:

Haha I know what you mean! Was so confused, but the book is pretty intimidating in terms of size…

I’m currently reading Daring Greatly by Brené Brown and Walden by H.D. Thoreau. Both very very good reads so far!

Oooomg... It seems like I'll read a short summary just to understand who is who and what's going on) and maybe I won't read it at all cause so much needs to be done about my various projects...
By the way now I'm re-reading Hobbit. When I was a child nothing confused me there at all except a slight feeling of something heavy and sad... I have this feeling for all Tolkien's books though I truly enjoy this author. 
But now it seems even meanly for me that Gandalf to delude Bilbo to take part in the adventure... cause everything should be voluntarily in this life, I'm strongly against any kind of manipulation. Though it's very hard not to manipulate at all and not to be manipulated, but... the time has come for me to overthink all the previous values, "cools", "adventures", "excitements" -were they really so good, needed and useful?..

Edited May 3, 2022 by Cognizant

[Externet]

Had to happen some day... reading not from a book, but "online" (whatever 'online' means).  Found interesting enough to share, many subjects of all flavors to choose :

---> https://www.lowtechmagazine.com

[rufus mosley]

Rules for the Direction of the Mind and The Geometry - Descartes

Complete Plays of Shakespeare (This is the BBC video edition with subtitles, so I can watch the plays and read the text. I'm about 2/3 of the way through)

Foundations of Arithmetic - Frege

How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler

10 Philosophical Mistakes - Adler

Analytical Art - Viete

Genetics and the Origin of Species - Dobzansky (I'm also reading all of the supporting documents found in the bibliography)

Elements - Euclid (just browsing but may commit to rereading this)

Introduction to Arithmetic - Nicomachus (same situation as per Euclid)

Chapter 37 IDEA (from the Syntopicon in the Brittanica set of Great Books of the Western World)

Some other stuff...

 

[Lorentz Jr]

Books about the deterioration of scientific principles and other issues in modern physics, in order of increasing difficulty:

Jim Baggott, Farewell to Reality
Lee Smolin, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong
Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost In Math
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics

Edited December 2, 2022 by Lorentz Jr

[zapatos]

Pride and Prejudice

[TheVat]

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami.  (started it, then dropped it, about fifteen years ago, finally came back and really got into it this time)

1 hour ago, Lorentz Jr said:

Books about the deterioration of scientific principles and other issues in modern physics, in order of increasing difficulty:

Jim Baggott, Farewell to Reality
Lee Smolin, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong
Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost In Math
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics

I've read Smolin's Time Reborn with great interest.  Do the titles you list make good companion reads to that?  

[Lorentz Jr]

32 minutes ago, TheVat said:

I've read Smolin's Time Reborn with great interest.

Can you summarize that one? It seems like a narrow topic for a whole book. I lost interest halfway through the preface.

Quote

Do the titles you list make good companion reads to that?

FTR introduces the whole circus of non-scientific and/or non-realist physics for non-physicists.
EUR is a less skeptical introduction to modern physics at about the same level as FTR.
NEW focuses on string theory and is very critical. Woit also has a blog with the same name.
LIM is similar to NEW, with a focus on the tendency toward wild theoretical speculation in the absence of new experimental data.
TTWP covers all of the above, and I found the speculative section toward the end especially fascinating, but the middle section gets very technical about string theory.

Edited December 2, 2022 by Lorentz Jr

[Peterkin]

T.C. Boyle The Women

50 pages in, I'm becoming alienated. Seems he was a right bastard, the great Frank Lloyd Wright. Might put aside and give it another chance when I'm in a benevolent mood.

[Lorentz Jr]

2 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Seems he was a right bastard, the great Frank Lloyd Wright.

Well, he did invent the flat horizontal surface. So, .... 🤔

[TheVat]

3 hours ago, Lorentz Jr said:

Can you summarize that one? It seems like a narrow topic for a whole book. I lost interest halfway through the preface.

 

I tend to agree, re Time Reborn, on the questionable need for a full length book.  In fact, I skipped the large first part of the book which is a review of the history of physics, and dipped into the second part, which explains why he believes earlier theories are somewhat wrong.

I.e. the need he sees to reestablish time as fundamental (and probably space as non-fundamental)(contra Einstein).   Smolin's idea, shape dynamics, is how to do that.  I confess I haven't followed up in the decade since he wrote it on reactions from peers.  

I suspect TTWP might cover a fair portion of what I read in TR.

[exchemist]

Just finished Heinrich Böll's "What's to Become of the Boy", a reminiscence of his time growing up in Cologne at the time of the Nazis. I found a copy when reorganising some books after redecorating. My wife must have bought it.

I also found a 1938 French translation of Three Men in a Boat, with original illustrations, which was the book she read in her teens that first made her an Anglophile - so she once told me. So I've started reading that.... a lot of passé simple, which is quite unfamiliar to me, and vocabulary I don't know but am trying to guess, to avoid stopping to get out the dictionary. We'll see how far I get. So far I've learnt that the French for Housemaid's Knee is épanchement de synovie.  That should come in handy......... It's just the sort of useless thing I find I tend to remember, just as I remember the French for combine harvester and the Dutch for horseradish.

Edited December 2, 2022 by exchemist

[TheVat]

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

also found a 1938 French translation of Three Men in a Boat, with original illustrations, which was the book she read in her teens that first made her an Anglophile

A dire rien du chien.  Would be fun to reread - I recall it seemed surprisingly fresh for something written in the late 1800s, and that the dog was fictional.  

Regarding what we retain of foreign languages, I'm sometimes amused/puzzled by what comes back to me from high school German. (French I seem to remember more consistently, probably due to Francophone friends and then speaking quite a bit with my daughter).  Es tut mir leid, ich habe meinen Kopf an die Decke geschlagen!  I could swear that was a line of dialog in one lesson but now wonder if the memory can be trusted.

[Peterkin]

20 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Would be fun to reread - I recall it seemed surprisingly fresh for something written in the late 1800s, and that the dog was fictional.  

I loved the dog. I tried reading the scene with the picnic basket aloud to friend once and could not get my voice under control.

I just had the most vivid flashback to a German lesson that I did not attend. My mother was in elementary school and they had to translate from their reader. The chubby little girl stood up and declaimed "ich bin eine fette henne" instead of "ich haben eine fette henne". Guess what she was nicknamed the rest of her time in that school? Nope. The language mistress immediately put her foot down and told the class what terrible fate awaited them if she learned that they were teasing that child. There were pockets of civilization, even back in the 1930's. 

 

[geordief]

50 minutes ago, TheVat said:

rien

 

50 minutes ago, TheVat said:

A dire rien du chien

Is that the title? Doesn't come up in a search.

Who is the author?

(The title reminds me of a film I saw in the 80s."My Life as a Dog" but there is no connection.)

I also picked up an old(17th century) French book,"Fables" by La Fontaine. Hard work .It is his translation of Aesop's tales.He was a gas character and a slave who become a free man(a bit like Jeeves with Bertie Wooster)

Edited December 3, 2022 by geordief

[Lorentz Jr]

1 hour ago, geordief said:

Is that the title? Doesn't come up in a search.

Sans parler du chien
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Connie Willis

[TheVat]

12 hours ago, geordief said:

 

Is that the title? Doesn't come up in a search.

Who is the author?

(The title reminds me of a film I saw in the 80s."My Life as a Dog" but there is no connection.)

I also picked up an old(17th century) French book,"Fables" by La Fontaine. Hard work .It is his translation of Aesop's tales.He was a gas character and a slave who become a free man(a bit like Jeeves with Bertie Wooster)

It was the subtitle of the book, Three Men in a Boat, that exchemist was telling us about finding the French edition.  It means To Say Nothing of the Dog.  Three men, and Jerome added one fictitious dog.  And yes, it's also a separate title for a Connie Willis novel, which naturally references the Jerome book.  A funny time travel story, and one where a character journeys back to the precise year of the river journey detailed in 3MiaB.

[lucy brighton]

I'm currently reading a short compilation of free sources on the ecological concept - Climax Community. A climax community is an ecological term used to denote an ecosystem or community of plants, animals, and other living organisms that has achieved equilibrium or become stable. Quite an interesting read.

 

Apart from that, I'm also reading The Buddha and the Borderline by Kiera Van Gelder. The book provides a peek into the mysterious and debilitating condition, an unblinking portrayal of one woman's fight against the emotional devastation of borderline personality disorder. Excellent read - highly recommend.

[SamMcKo]

On 12/2/2022 at 9:06 PM, TheVat said:

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami.  (started it, then dropped it, about fifteen years ago, finally came back and really got into it this time)

Nice one. Have you tried Afterdark or Wind-up Bird. Strong contenders for Murakami's best book imo.

[other_world]

I am currently reading "Permanent Record" written by Edward Snowden and "Solaris" written by Stanislaw Lem. 

[geordief]

I have just come across the name of Karl Pearson  and am interested because he is said to have been influential on Einstein.

His book ,The Grammar of Science, seemingly written at the end of the 19th century is a window into  intellectual thinking then ( I have barely begun it)

https://www.google.ie/books/edition/The_Grammar_of_Science/k1c_AQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

 

I am extremely put off by his "devout racism"  however(which I have not encountered so far in the book and may not feature)

 

Is anyone familiar with him at all?

 

I think he was pretty well considered as a scientist and ,so far has quite a bit of opinion regarding the value of teaching science and especially the scientific method which he thought should  be inculcated throughout society although I suspect he may have been  thinking of  the  "better classes".

 

https://www.historyofdatascience.com/karl-pearson-creator-of-correlation/

Edited March 21, 2023 by geordief

[studiot]

I suggest you have a large shovel of salty skepticism when you read about Pearson and his work.

Both the man and his work were coloured by extremely his extremely polarised views of the sunjects he applied his mathsmetics to.

He was an able mathematician and a leading developer of statistics in the abtract world, although he was rather overtaken by Fisher (who has a pseudonym - Student)
But I think him less than expert in the subjects he dabbled his purist maths in. Particularly what we now call anthropology and biology.

I doubt any real influence on Einstein, whose mind and social inclinations were from an entirely different stable.

Interesting he was, like Eddington, a of Quaker stock, although I think not a Quaker himself.

I say be careful of what you read because for instance here is some rubbish, dated 2021 from Michigan Technical University, advertising their Masters in Statistics.

The "top ten statisticians of all time", in which they include Pearson.

https://onlinedegrees.mtu.edu/news/top-10-famous-statisticians

I ) They claim Florence Nightingale as an American !

2)  They omit Thomas Bayes completely.

Some better links are to the BBC DVD about the relation between Eddington and Einstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_and_Eddington

and a more accurate historical link about the relation between Pearson and other statisticians and world events.

https://errorstatistics.com/2018/11/30/where-are-fisher-neyman-pearson-in-1919-opening-of-excursion-3/

[Moontanman]

I recently reread "The Deep Hot Biosphere" by Gold... not sure it holds up very well to modern theories. 

[Peterkin]

I'm rereading Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words - and it's even more chilling than the first time. No way am I revisiting Headhunter!

[geordief]

On 3/21/2023 at 8:16 PM, studiot said:

I suggest you have a large shovel of salty skepticism when you read about Pearson and his work.

Both the man and his work were coloured by extremely his extremely polarised views of the sunjects he applied his mathsmetics to.

He was an able mathematician and a leading developer of statistics in the abtract world, although he was rather overtaken by Fisher (who has a pseudonym - Student)
But I think him less than expert in the subjects he dabbled his purist maths in. Particularly what we now call anthropology and biology.

I doubt any real influence on Einstein, whose mind and social inclinations were from an entirely different stable.

Interesting he was, like Eddington, a of Quaker stock, although I think not a Quaker himself.

I say be careful of what you read because for instance here is some rubbish, dated 2021 from Michigan Technical University, advertising their Masters in Statistics.

The "top ten statisticians of all time", in which they include Pearson.

https://onlinedegrees.mtu.edu/news/top-10-famous-statisticians

I ) They claim Florence Nightingale as an American !

2)  They omit Thomas Bayes completely.

Some better links are to the BBC DVD about the relation between Eddington and Einstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_and_Eddington

and a more accurate historical link about the relation between Pearson and other statisticians and world events.

https://errorstatistics.com/2018/11/30/where-are-fisher-neyman-pearson-in-1919-opening-of-excursion-3/

Thanks 

I read like a sloth but will try to read a good section of that book as the period seems very interesting.

 

Something that I definitely find interesting  is Hanif Kureishi 's Twitter feed.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Hanifkureishi

He has spent the last 3 months minus the use of his limbs after an accident  in Rome ,but still able to communicate with his writing(without the use of a pen)