📚 Currently reading about sea life in Oceanarium, our 4-year-old’s favorite book. You can learn fun and interesting things this way.
For example, it is clear that peacock mantis shrimps are neither peacocks nor mantises, but did you know they weren’t even shrimps? They are, however, mantis shrimps. Not confusing at all!
Finished reading: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 📚
My wife was first to notice it was was not the type of book I usually read — which is to say fairly obscure 50-year-old works of non-fiction. This one is a brand novel that won the Booker prize last year, and I am not at all embarrassed to say that is was the prize that led me to it — M John Harrison of Light, and several other of my favorites being on the jury and deeming The Seven Moons… a worthy contender.
And you know what, it is! I absolutely see why Harrison, he of baroque prose and unintelligible place names on planets far, far away, chose the book, some parts of which are as inscrutable as the denser sections of Viriconium. Only, it’s not a fantasy world on another planet, it is 1980s Sri Lanka, and the things people do to each other are more horrifying than anything Harrison could have come up with for the mere fact of things like that actually having occurred, and the world not caring much, back then or now.
Ultimately, Karunatilaka pulled two great tricks, one tactical the other strategic. The tactical one was to write a novel in second-person singular that actually works. The strategic was to persuade the world that a fantasy murder mystery featuring ghosts, demons, ghouls, and a host of other supernatural and real-world monsters was not yet another piece of genre fiction. Feats worthy of a Booker prize, indeed.
The idea that the act of forgetting binds together both perpetrators and victims in the common pursuit of survival is at once deeply humanistic and at the same time deeply unsatisfying to moralists who prefer heroes who win out and villains who receive a timely come-uppance. But such endings made little sense to people in places such as Czechoslovakia, for whom learning to live with injustice and defeat was a geographical requirement.
And to the list he goes…
Microsoft is changing our household’s recipe game: no more bad photocopies or thick books on the counter when you can snap a photo and convert it to Word (and, when I have time, Markdown) in the Office365 app. This one is for a delicious saffron-almond cake, from The Flavor Thesaurus. ⏲️
Cool resource alert: Improving Your Statistical Inferences by Daniël Lakens has the best introduction to p values I’ve seen on the free web. Frank Harrel’s Biostatistics for Biomedical Research has been available for a while, but only suitable for advanced readers.
Finished reading: In Defense of Civilization by Michael RJ Bonner 📚
Michael Bonner is the anti-Harari: the history he writes about is narrower in scope and more precise, the present more grounded in reality, the future less bright — unless we work hard for it. He will not be speaking at Davos.
Finished reading: The Formula by Albert-László Barabási 📚
The perfect self-help book for your nerd scientist friend who wants to succeed in academia; broadly applicable to other areas of human endeavor, such as competitive hot-dog eating, crocheting, and investment banking.
Finished reading: Empty Space by M. John Harrison 📚
The third and final installment of M. John Harrison’s Light series. As before, I was left wondering, between the baroque prose and the twisting parallel plots, what on Earth I had just read. But figuring it out is nine tenths of the fun!
Currently reading: The Formula by Albert-László Barabási 📚 which starts off as self-help dreck, but soon switches gears and reassures me that I haven’t made a horrible mistake buying it. The formula for success is mostly randomness, but it’s worth dwelling on the parts that aren’t pure chance.
Finished reading: Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand 📚
Funny that a book about our entire planet would present the best case for localism outside of Nassim Taleb’s work — I must try to replicate his situational awareness survey in a separate post (select questions: Where is North? What are the 5 most common native birds where you live? Which ones are migratory? How far down do you need to drill to get to water? etc.) The case for why nuclear energy may be preferable to renewables is also strong.
It does, however, endorse some decidedly un-talebian techniques like transgenic crops and glyphosate pesticides. As with any speculative nonfiction, x% will be trash, and as time passes more and more will be revealed as such.