Reading is sexy XXXII

{image: The sorceress (1911) by John William Waterhouse (Rome 1849-London 1917) via Guarda chi legge}
7. Ingenious Pursuits by Lisa Jardine Following reading Jardine's biographies of both Christopher Wren (accidental architect/astronomer/anatomist/mathematician/occasional surgeon/man about town) and Robert Hooke (engineer/architect/microscopist/inventor/surveyor/secretary to the royal society/astronomer/botanist/unfortunate self-medicator and coffee enthusiast) I read her story of the birth of modern science. It is a well written, clear concise and beautifully-illustrated book detailing astronomy, microcopy, anatomy, the early pursuit of clockworks to solve the longitude problem, the collection of exotic specimens and wunderkammer, the birth of the peer-review with an epilogue on the discovery of DNA's double-helix. Disclaimer: Now, if you're like me, you are ill-equipped to read about the earliest discoveries of William Harvey about blood circulation and worse - those who tried to verify his claims through vivisection. I did enjoy learning more about a variety of scientists and enthusiastic supporters. I will also re-iterate my one frustration: scientists sometimes make loosy historians of science, because they can lack context or create hagiographies, conversely, my issue with this fascinating 'anthropology of scientists' created by Jardine is the lack of scientific context. Yes, I am interested in reading about Hooke and Christiaan Huygens battling it out over their respective attempts to claim priority for spring watches, however, insufficient technical detail is provided here to allow the reader to form an informed opinion on the issue! When Hooke claims priority over Newton for the inverse-square law form for the force of gravity, can this be substantiated? Was Oldenburg a spy? She points out that Newton himself erroneously dismissed astronomer-royal Flamsteed's ideas about periodicity in comet orbits by saying they follow straight line at a time that Hooke and Wren were discussing inverse-square laws for gravity, but she does not go that (to a physicist) obvious next step, to discuss who knew what when!

Also, I ♥ Edmond Halley. He should be the next topic of any scientific biography! Without Halley, all these prickly scientists would have not functioned. Not only was he a sea captain/astronomer/geophysicist/adventurer/gentleman and discoverer of the periodicity of his comet. He was the one who managed to pry data away from Flamsteed and the Principia Mathematica away from Newton! Poor man was repaid for many of his efforts on behalf of the Royal Society with 50 copies of Willoughby*'s A History of Fishes.

Also, the minimal sketches of a few interesting female astronomers left me wanting to read more.

8. One Letter Words - a Dictionary by Craig Conley Somehow, I became someone who reads dictionaries. The idea behind this one is intriguing (well, to me at least), and the definitions are illustrated with quotations from literature (some, sadly repeated). As the author points out, most people respond by saying there are only two or three one-letter words (the obvious ones: 'a', 'I' and maybe 'O'). However, if you put a little thought into it, you remember there are a large number of vitamins, musical notes, base pairs in our genetic sequence, personality types, Roman numerals and other things which are labelled with single letters. Then, of course, there are shapes (A-frame, f stop, j stroke, T-shirt, and so forth). Each and every letter can be used to signify a piece of type or a key for that letter. There are also numbers (c is the speed of light, e is the base of natural logorithms, h is Planck's constant, i is the square root of -1, k can be Boltzmann's constant - though sensible people use a subscript 'B'). He also includes commonly used scientific symbols - and here is where he goes wrong! Because the only real justification for such a dictionary could be some sort of completeness -otherwise, why segregate the words based on length? And yet, here, off the top of my head are single letter word definitions he has omitted: a for acceleration, B for magnetic field (and yet he does include H for magnetic field!) or b for bottom quark - formerly known as beauty, C for capacitance or c for charm quark, d for displacement or down quark or D for Deuterium (which is particularly annoying because he repeatedly uses a literary quotation which erroneoulsy calls heavy water H2O2, which is wrong, rather than D2O), E for energy or Young's modulus, f for frequency, g for gluon, h for height, I for the identity matrix (and yet he defines several other matrices!?!), j for i (hahah! it's true though, we often use j to signify the square root of negative one to distinguish it from I for current), k for 1000 (and yet, he has it for 1024 in computer science) particularly for money (he does get the more colloquial G), L for luminosity or angular momemntum, m for meter (how can anyone miss the meter?) or mass, N for Newton, O for Orthonormal group, P for power, q for electric charge or Q for question (!), R for resistance, S for Siemens or s for strange quark, T for Tritium or Tesla or Tertiary (and yet he has K for Cretaceous!) or t for top quark - formerly known as truth, U for internal energy or potential energy or the up quark, v for velocity, W for work, x for Planet X or even The X files (as he certainly includes other proper nouns), y for the Bessel function, Z for the Z vector boson. It should NOT be this easy for me to brainstorm missing items from any "Dictionary". Apart from that, serious complaint** (and the fact that he clear knows no mathematics and thinks that 'e is the base of the natural logarith' and 'e is Euler's constant' are two distinct definitions), I did enjoy reading the book, and recommend it for your washroom.

9. Like I give a frock: Fashion Forecasts and Meaningless Misguidance by Michi Girl (Michi is the pen-name imaginary friend of Chloe Quigley and Daniel Pollock). Illustrated by Kat Macleod. This was a highly enjoyable, beautifully illustrated book, with no more intellectual pretention than Go Fug Yourself, but as wickedly funny. If the lovely layered, collaged, multimedia illustrations weren't reason enough, the questionaire regardining whether it is acceptable to wear fishnets to work, or definitions like "fashion vermin: noun. a once-cute animal that has become far too popular for its own good" ("Oh, deer, there are currently over 1.5 million web pages that feature a reference to a deer brooch"), and the petition to put an end to badly dressed pets make it worth its price.

Next up will be:
10. Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte, because some of us are obsessed with text and images as a means of conveying information - we may be scientists but our bookshelves are stuffed with the folios of da Vinci and the complete works of Blake. (See, not only Reynardin finds Type (the bookstore) dangerous.)


{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI}

*To my knowledge, no relation.
** Now before any of you say, "But, you're a scientist!" consider this:
1) most of these definitions I learned in High School
2) tell me honestly that you have not seen a single one of these before? Surely, if nothing else, you've seen the phrase 'Q & A' or 'm' for meter (or metre if you're British).
3) My Dictionary of Physics cost about $10 and is readily available in any University booksore. Likewise, my Dictionary of Earth Science.
4) Last, but not least, consider, wikipedia, where, with 10 minutes effort one could fill in dozens of missing definitions.

Reading is Sexy XXXI

(image via the wit of the staircase archive)
4. The State of Constraint - New Work by Oulipo, by Paul Fournel, Harry Mathews, Jacques Jouet, Hervé Le Tellier, Ian Monk, Jacques Roubaud, Olivier Salon, Marcel Bénabou, Lynn Crawford, Frédéric Forte, Michelle Grangaud, François Caradec, Anne F. Garréta Oulipo is a name derived from Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle; it's a school of literature devoted to employing mathematics and science to develop new literary structures. It's not as deadly as that may sound. Think of the joy of reading Lewis Carroll, whose work could not have existed in the absence of mathematics. One of my favorite authors, Douglas R. Hofstadter argues in Le Ton Beau de Marot (a book, by the way, which is actually written in English) that constraints can inspire creativity. In it, Hofstader discusses (amongst many other things) Georges Perec's La disparition, a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". The pieces in this anthology include similar word games, stories with binary structures (the literary equivalent of a choose-your-own adventure book), variations on themes, works based on the structure of classical music forms, "shattered" limericks, folk songs written by selecting four words from ninety Tom Waits songs, univocalism written with a single vowel, and so forth. Some have the same effect as reading puzzles or mind games, and some have more literary merit above and beyond the structure of the medium.

5. The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford - Ten Poets Pick Ten More And So On I haven't the patience to list all the poets. It seems I simply forget to read poetry. I have some on my shelves, but I don't seek it out. I never understood why my fellow students in schools would complain that poetry was obscure in meaning; I always found the meaning transparent, though perhaps less so with the most contemporary work. Also, taking a poem apart to see how it works, was something which appealed to the reductionist scientific mind (in a way I did not find with the dissection of the novel*). The conceit of this volume is that the publishers begin with five (allegedly) familiar poets and a poem, then request that the poet choose a second poem of their own and a third by another poet. Then repeat, so they gathered a series of chains of poems. I confess, I had only heard of the Canadians (Michael Ondaatje and Lisa Robertson). I do like the poems about something (as opposed to nothing), with the unexpected but apt image, and unsurprisingly, the magical realism of a penguin made of cheese.

6. The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa The interesting thing about this novel is the clear challenge Vargas Llosa has set himself, with his titular anti-hero the bad girl. How do you make your readers care for a woman who is not nice? Patricia Highsmith does this in her Ripley novels by making anti-hero Ripley the narrator - pure adrenaline gets you caught up in his schemes. In The Bad Girl, our narrator is Peruvian Richardo, who starts his life in 1950s Miraflores as a young adolescent, obsessed with Lily, the glamorous Chilean girl, who repeatedly refuses to be his girlfriend, and turns out not to be Chilean at all. It is merely a means for a poor girl to fit in, despite being different, by lying to disguise her differences as something exotic. Bookish Ricardo's only goal in life is to life in Paris, which is where he next meets the bad girl, through his Peruvian friend Paúl, cook and revolutionary. Now, the Bad Girl is Comrade Arlette, who using a free Cuban scholarship to see the world. Cuba wants to train youth to bring revolution to Peru - the bad girl just wants to see the world. Ricardo courts her again, but not wanting to hurt Paúl, does not help her avoid going to Cuba. So, motivated always to find riches and comfort, she finds herself a French diplomat to marry and gets herself back to Paris. Ricardo has set himself up as a translator and interpreter for UNESCO, by the time he meets the bad girl again, now a sophisticated French diplomat's wife. She deigns to have an affair with him, before moving onward and upward with her world-traveling social climbing, through the horsey-set in England, to yakuza Japan. Our likable narrator is frankly, a bit of a sap. The bad girl repeatedly abuses him, lies to him, berates him, but he remains obsessed. You care about Ricardito because of the way he behaves and the full friendships he has with a series of people in different eras of his life. The history of Peru is woven into the background of the novel. Vargas Llosa slowly builds the reader's interest in the bad girl - she is, if nothing else, true to herself, strong in the face of adversity (which she cannot help but seek out) and ultimately a product of injustices in socially and racially stratified society.

7. Ingenious Pursuits by Lisa Jardine Once again Jardine mines the (non-existent) scientific revolution; here making the case that science is culture. Beautifully illustrated, though the illustrations could do with some proper documentation. What the historian and the scientist find important in the history of science are not always the same thing.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX}

*In Grade 9, I lost all respect for Miss F., English teacher, who thought it apposite to point out that when Atticus Finch shoots the mad dog in To Kill A Mockingbird, that 'dog' spelt backwards is 'God'. Just because it's true, doesn't make it worth observing.