On my drive home from work today, I decided I needed to change my life. I'm really bored. Like back-in-high-school bored. And so I fill up my time with a lot of things, like going to the gym (which is actually good, because it's healthy and because it exhausts me so that I don't remember that I'm so bored). And then I started thinking about how much fun I had last year with NaNoWriMo, and how much I'm looking forward to it this year, too. And I thought, maybe if I spent more time writing, I'd be less bored. Which got me thinking that I need to change my life.
As maybe weird (or maybe not) as this sounds, I think the first place to start is with my diet. I love to exercise, but I wouldn't have to do quite so much of it if I ate just a little better. Which, of course, to me, means I should first focus on eating up all of the stuff I shouldn't be eating that's sitting around the house. Or I should just be eating up all of the random stuff in general so that I can start this program with a clean slate. Which is how I ended up eating mystery soup for dinner.
A few months ago, when I was feeling totally overwhelmed by the amount of random food being provided by my CSA, I chopped it up, mixed it with some olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbs, and roasted it. Then I froze it, figuring at some point in the future I'd want soup (by my calculation vegetables in liquid equals soup). I did date the bag (from May). So tonight, I dumped that bag of roasted veggies into a pot with some frozen broth (I'm not sure you can freeze broth, but I did, and we'll see if I'm still alive tomorrow), tracked down my immersion blender, blended the shit out of it, and called it dinner. (This sort of activity might be why my husband hesitates to leave me home by myself).
So then, here are some other random things going on. So my company is giving away a free super bowl commercial, and all the employees get to vote on the top 20 finalists. I realize I just did a very bad job of describing the contest, but whatever, you'll have to deal. The point is, I'm super excited about the finalist I voted for, Goldie Blox, because they make engineering toys for girls, and I really think I should have been an engineer if anybody had ever told me that there was some other math-based career path than teaching. But I'm old, and I have two non-math related degrees, and a bunch of student loans, and going back to school sounds like the worst thing possible to me right now, so I'm just going to bitch about missing out in some other alternative universe future. But I don't want that to happen to your girls so check this out. (By "this" I mean the link I posted above.)
So then, my coworker shared with me this thing she bought to sit on that makes her chair so much more comfortable, so I have to have one. And while I was Amazoning (yes, that's a verb), I figured I should do some white elephant shopping. Last year I totally scored big time and received a Black Santa Pornament. It is awesome. So I thought I'd regift it and get him a girl. You know, so he wouldn't be lonely. But the only one I could find on Amazon looked like this, and I didn't want to spend $20 on her. Because I have standards, people. So then I did some more internet searching and discovered that there's an insane amount of this sort of stuff that you can't order directly from the manufacturer. Instead, like the perv I've apparently become, I have to go to some other third party to buy my girly pornament.
So then I thought, what else would make an awesome white elephant gift? Tactical Bacon, that's what! But I didn't want to spend more than $20 on that, so I started looking at some cheaper options. And I found Zombie Apocalypse Survival Kit in a Sardine Can, Canned Unicorn Meat (that you apparently can't actually eat, although based on the Harry Potter premise that unicorns are more or less sacred, you probably shouldn't even think of owning their meat), and Zombie Jerky, that you can apparently eat, but maybe wouldn't want to.
So now I have too many white elephant options. And I haven't technically been invited to a white elephant party. Oh boy. This might be why I need to change my life.
Showing posts with label Math is. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Math is. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Monday, July 16, 2012
Cutting for Stone by Abraham VergheseMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Okay, I'm just going to start off with a minor rant: 4 stars is "I really liked it" and 5 stars is "it was amazing." I don't know about you, but in my world, "I loved it" should really go between the two. So, I'm giving this book a 4.5, but it gets rounded to 5 because that's how math works.
Does it annoy anyone else when a review declares the conclusion of a story "predictable"? I feel like every time I read Jodi Picoult, I find the conclusion predictable in that hindsight is always 20/20 sort of way. Books either end in, of course he got the girl, or of course he didn't sorts of ways, and when you read a lot all endings become predictable, but that's not really the reason for reading, in my opinion.
So what I'm getting at is, this is a very, very good book, but it is mildly predictable in that sort of way that books can be predictable when you read a lot of them. Which is not to say that the story is particularly predictable. I'm telling you all of this because I'm a little frustrated with the ending because the story didn't end the way I wanted it to. But when I thought about it, the way I wanted the story to end would have been predictable in the feel-good sort of way. And I've noticed a trend with authors lately (or maybe just in the books I've read lately) that the conclusions are not always feel-good. They're not always feel-bad, either, they're just more real life-ish.
I'm going to give up now because clearly I shouldn't write book reviews when I'm taking cold medicine, but I finished the book before I got the cold, so I can tell you with confidence that I really, really liked the book, and you should read it.
View all my reviews
Friday, June 22, 2012
Analyzing the Data
It should come to no surprise to you that I love data.
I just received a heart rate monitor/GPS watch for my birthday that is AWESOME!
I can track how far I've run, what my fastest mile is, what my average heart rate is, how many calories I've burned, and probably other stuff I don't know about yet!
Today, for the first time, I wore my heart rate monitor while doing my Insanity workout. I burned 167 calories in 37 minutes. This is very sad, but I'm going to give Insanity the benefit of the doubt and guess that my caloric burn is so low because it was a recovery workout. However, when I log this info into Sparkpeople, it predicts that I've burnt (vt?) 269 calories! I realize there are a vast array of differences between my heart rate monitor and the algorithm in the website, but this is a difference of 102 calories (or, in other words, Sparkpeople thinks I burned 61% more calories than I really did). Ugh.
When I'm in Oregon in July, I'm going to a clinic that a friend goes to to have a VO2 test done to determine my optimal fat-calorie burning zone. In the mean time, I've identified the following four areas of my diet that need work:
I just received a heart rate monitor/GPS watch for my birthday that is AWESOME!
I can track how far I've run, what my fastest mile is, what my average heart rate is, how many calories I've burned, and probably other stuff I don't know about yet!
Today, for the first time, I wore my heart rate monitor while doing my Insanity workout. I burned 167 calories in 37 minutes. This is very sad, but I'm going to give Insanity the benefit of the doubt and guess that my caloric burn is so low because it was a recovery workout. However, when I log this info into Sparkpeople, it predicts that I've burnt (vt?) 269 calories! I realize there are a vast array of differences between my heart rate monitor and the algorithm in the website, but this is a difference of 102 calories (or, in other words, Sparkpeople thinks I burned 61% more calories than I really did). Ugh.
When I'm in Oregon in July, I'm going to a clinic that a friend goes to to have a VO2 test done to determine my optimal fat-calorie burning zone. In the mean time, I've identified the following four areas of my diet that need work:
- Consume fewer beverages that have calories. As much as I hate this, I'm going to have to cut out juice and just eat real fruit. I've decided that on days that I've run more than 10 miles, I'm allowed a glass of orange juice (because it just tastes so good!) and a bottle of vitamin water (because it really seems to help with recovery). The jury's still out on whether or not hot chocolate counts as a beverage with calories. I know I drink it, but milk is actually digested as a solid. I am also allowing myself one cup of tea a day because when I tried to give up tea, it made me really sad. The conundrum is, I have open bottles of both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages in my refrigerator. Should I consume these and just not replace them, or should I toss them to more quickly align with my diet? I hate wasting food, but I also want to lose weight. (I would like to point out right here that I know I'm not fat. I'm just outside the weight limit of my wardrobe and I'd like that to change.)
- Consume more fiber. Hopefully a lot of this will be managed by cutting out juice and eating real fruit. I've also discovered that I really like raw veggies dipped in ranch (although ranch isn't exactly diet-friendly). I'm going to see if I can find a DIY recipe for ranch that uses Greek yogurt or something. I still don't really like to eat salads, but there's a soup/sandwich/salad place right across the street. Is it worth the money every day to buy a salad? (One of the big problems with salads for me is that it takes so freakin' long to make a good one, and it's impossible to use up all of the ingredients at the same time, so you nearly always have something random in your fridge that's just about to go bad.) Also, when I lived with The Vegetarian (now The Vegan), she'd cook up a whole pot of veggies, and we'd eat them all week. I should get on that.
- Burn more calories. I'm running a marathon in October, and I've yet to actually get serious about my training. Somehow, I'm failing to make a consistent exercising schedule. I have a schedule, and I keep updating it as I learn what is not working, but I have yet to discover what will work.
- Eat more protein. This is questionable. According to Sparkpeople, I only consume enough protein about half of the time. (This is actually the pro argument for allowing hot chocolate.) How much protein a person needs is a frequently debated health topic. Americans tend to overindulge in protein because we're such big meat-eaters. I am, in fact, the worst vegetarian in the world, but I don't actually eat a lot of meat (this is probably more due to the fact that Captain America gets home around 10pm and cooking dinner for one person is just a waste of time). I do drink milk, eat yogurt and cheese, eat mushrooms and avocados, and eat eggs. I'm going to try to add one hard boiled egg a day to my diet and see what happens. I know that when I don't eat enough protein, I don't have as much energy, but I have yet to figure out what "enough" actually is. I guess I'm going to need more data points!
Friday, January 13, 2012
So I paid off my credit cards...sort of
Because you have nothing better to do than keep up on my life, as you may recall, one of my resolutions for 2012 was to pay off my credit cards. And today, I've accomplished that. Sort of. I paid off the entire balance my credit card company thinks I owe. I just happen to think I owe an additional $232.92. I've double and triple-checked my math and compared it to my statements and everything, and I can't figure out the problem.
The way I see it, though, is if Chase doesn't think I owe them anything else, then my credit card is paid.
So I'm on to my next financial goal of depositing $5K into my IRA.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
July's resolutions
Sort of unrelated to my resolutions, I've also discovered that lately, I've had a lot more fun thinking about my reading lists rather than actually reading anything on them. I know, I don't actually have to read the stuff in the order it was put on the list, but I'm a bit of a control freak about that. I'm sure if I had a psychiatrist, they'd say that maybe I'm substituting this rather pointless bit of control for something that is currently out of my control (or at least feels that way) like, oh, I don't know, maybe my career. And now I've just charged myself $175.
Anyway, on to what I've actually been doing. In July, I both exercised and flossed 19 times. I have yet to have Sister demonstrate her 30-second flossing routine, but I would love to have that skill set. Is this the first month where I've exercised more than I've read? I read 15 times in July, which is actually less than half the month (see paragraph 2 above). I did my arts and crafts stuff 10 times, which I consider a pretty good success rate, and I worked on my novel a whopping 3 times.
A word on writing a novel. It's hard. I have a bunch of ideas flying around, but no real purpose for these fragments of story lines, and I can't figure out where I want my characters to end up. And many of my ideas don't work together, so they're their own story. So I have about 8 terrible books started. At least they're started, right?
Before I decided to 86 the stretching, I actually got it in twice. So, based on my fancy math skills, which I don't actually care to explain, my overall success rate for July was 38%. Not fantastic. Although my suspicion is (notice how after 7 months of doing this I finally have a suspicion as to how it works?) that it will be hard to be anywhere above 50% because all of these things take time. And I do currently have a job. And a husband. And friends. And laundry. And all sorts of other things to do, like get caught up on True Blood. So, if 50% is the goal, and I got 38%, I've actually had a 76% success rate at meeting the goal of 50%. See, that is some pretty fancy math!
Monday, June 27, 2011
On the question of God
I recently had a conversation with an old boyfriend of mine (not the crazy one), who is now also happily married, and it got me thinking about God. I know it sounds weird, but while there were a number of reasons why this relationship didn't work out, his belief in God and my lack thereof was, in my opinion, the main one.
He was an active Christian, and while I describe myself as a Christian, I don't really do anything about it. I celebrate Christmas and Easter, and I guess I believe God exists, but I don't feel anything about it. And isn't that what faith is? Feeling and believing something you can't prove?
I believe in other things I can't see, like gravity (although I suppose that's provable), and love. I know I feel love towards my husband, my family, and my friends. I feel patriotism towards my country and servicemen. I will confess, I'm on the fence about pi. And this might be where my issue with God comes from.
When I was little, and we went to Church, I always thought it was an act. I really thought that all of these people in a room, listening to a sermon were pretending they felt the presence of God just like I was. Even in college, where I met a ton of Christians, I really thought that most of them were pretending, which I totally didn't understand, because I was past the point in pretending to feel something I didn't. I also don't feel a spiritual presence when I'm in nature, and I don't feel my chi when I do yoga. And I really don't consider myself an un-feeling person.
Now that I'm an adult, it doesn't make sense to me that a bunch of adults would pretend to believe in God. I mean, I think we're sort of past the social stigma that if you don't go to Church you're a bad person. So why would they all go, if they didn't believe?
But here's why I can't believe in pi. It just doesn't make sense to me that the circumference of a circle is it's diameter multiplied by 3.14. I understand that it works every time, but why are mathematicians, who work in such an exacting field, content with an answer that contains an unending, non-repeating decimal? And if there's a God, why would He create such a ridiculous math equation? If I were a god, and I were working on geometry, I'd come up with a better answer.
But now we're back to where we started, because so much of religion and faith is about seeking answers. I don't know if there's a god, and I don't know what he was thinking when he came up with pi, but I certainly know that I don't feel his presence, which I sometimes think is a shame, because Christians seem so happy to believe.
He was an active Christian, and while I describe myself as a Christian, I don't really do anything about it. I celebrate Christmas and Easter, and I guess I believe God exists, but I don't feel anything about it. And isn't that what faith is? Feeling and believing something you can't prove?
I believe in other things I can't see, like gravity (although I suppose that's provable), and love. I know I feel love towards my husband, my family, and my friends. I feel patriotism towards my country and servicemen. I will confess, I'm on the fence about pi. And this might be where my issue with God comes from.
When I was little, and we went to Church, I always thought it was an act. I really thought that all of these people in a room, listening to a sermon were pretending they felt the presence of God just like I was. Even in college, where I met a ton of Christians, I really thought that most of them were pretending, which I totally didn't understand, because I was past the point in pretending to feel something I didn't. I also don't feel a spiritual presence when I'm in nature, and I don't feel my chi when I do yoga. And I really don't consider myself an un-feeling person.
Now that I'm an adult, it doesn't make sense to me that a bunch of adults would pretend to believe in God. I mean, I think we're sort of past the social stigma that if you don't go to Church you're a bad person. So why would they all go, if they didn't believe?
But here's why I can't believe in pi. It just doesn't make sense to me that the circumference of a circle is it's diameter multiplied by 3.14. I understand that it works every time, but why are mathematicians, who work in such an exacting field, content with an answer that contains an unending, non-repeating decimal? And if there's a God, why would He create such a ridiculous math equation? If I were a god, and I were working on geometry, I'd come up with a better answer.
But now we're back to where we started, because so much of religion and faith is about seeking answers. I don't know if there's a god, and I don't know what he was thinking when he came up with pi, but I certainly know that I don't feel his presence, which I sometimes think is a shame, because Christians seem so happy to believe.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Science is...
This is another one of those posts I started a million years ago before my job hijacked my life. Sigh.
Fun? Funny? Amusing? More interesting than you'd think if you only had a public school education.
I just finished reading The Science of Harry Potter by Roger Highfield. I know I've blogged about this book in the past, but I still have more to say. Growing up with a librarian for a mom, I always forget that I'm actually allowed to write in my own books if I want to. Which proves to be helpful if I want to take notes. (Somehow, I had no issue writing in my college textbooks, but this was after I was prompted by my English professor, who pointed out that I bought the books to succeed in his class, and if highlighting or whatever helped, what was the problem. They were my books.)
Anyway, there's a chapter called The Greatest Wizard, and it's all about the Muggle brain. A subsection called ...and Stop the Movement That Shows the Passing of Time discusses how sometimes when you look at a clock you think that the second hand has stopped moving. This section discusses how the brain can stretch time because of "the way it edits reality." What happens is that when you move your eyes to focus on something (in this case, a clock), what should happen is that the new object appears blurry (duh, we've just moved our eyes, so we haven't been looking at it), but then everything would appear blurry every time we moved our eyes, and that's generally not the case. What happens is that our brains actually cut off our vision while our eyes are moving. But then, to prevent us from being totally confused by this, it adds back on the time taken to move our eyes. This actually makes "the image appear earlier than it actually did." The section goes on to discuss various experiments that prove this, but I was just fascinated by what our brains do so that every time we shift our gaze everything doesn't appear blurry.
OMG. In another chapter, There Be Dragons. Really, a subsection, The Basilisk, talks about how evidence of an ancestor of the basilisk was found in the Faiyum Depression in Egypt. Fossils of Gigantophis were found in areas of what are now Egypt and Libya. This snake had vertebra that are larger than an anaconda's vertebra. Unfortunately, (or I suppose fortunately), it seems that this snake did not have the venomous bite of the snake in the Chamber of Secrets, based on they types of venom snakes have today.
In the same chapter, this one sentence amused me: Celts believed that the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, an amazing structure consisting of around 40,000 geometrically shaped basalt columns, was the work of one of Hagrid's relatives.
Chapter 13: The Philosopher's Stone
I'm just going to quote this paragraph.
Thanks to the intervention of Harry and his school chums, however, the Dark Lord does not succeed, joining a long line of individuals, from Chinese rulers to Holy Roman emperors, and many more besides, who have tried,and failed, in the age-old quest to find the elusive stone. The "philosopher" in question was a natural philosopher, the designation used for a scientist before the latter term was coined in the 1840s by William Whewell, a polymath who was a fellow of the Royal Society in London. (Because the term "philosopher" sounds somewhat dull and worthy, the publisher of the American edition of the first Harry Potter book changed its title to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, when in fact, it should have been Harry Potter and the Scientist's Stone.
There's a big long section in this chapter on Hermetism that I'm going to try to sum up, but what was interesting to me was that Nicolas Flamel was a real person, and I quote "'Among the many effects of the Harry Potter phenomenon has been the introduction of a fabled character from the history of chemistry to millions of readers who otherwise would probably have never heard of him,' comments Lawrence Primcipe of Johns Hopkins University, and expert on alchemy." I had no idea that there even were fabled characters in chemistry. Back to Hermetism and Nicolas Flamel, Hermetiscism is some sort of semi-religious and quasi-magical set of ideas that forms the basis of alchemy. Flamel had this book that instructed him on how to turn elements into silver or gold using red or white philosopher's stones. He traveled around a bit and wrote a couple of books on the subject. However, his story does not seem to check out. (Go figure) Flamel and his wife did exist, but it's unlikely that they actually performed any alchemy. However, their work influenced other alchemists like Robert Boyle and sir Isaac Newton. That's still a legacy to me.
However the chapter does state: "Thanks to the transmutations of cosmic alchemy we are all, in effect, made of stardust. Now that is magic."
And did you know that there's a rare disease called Werner's Syndrome in which people appear to age in adolescence, and usually die before the age of 50? That's interesting and disturbing.
The next chapter, Belief, Superstition and Magic, was also very interesting to me. Apparently, our "common sense" that is hard-wired into our brains is actually "common sense for living on the African savanna," and not so much common-sense-for-modern-urban-life. Somehow, though, I think I'll survive a lot longer in modern life than on the African savanna. For one thing, I don't like being dirty.
However, this helps explain our tendency to anthropomorphize. "In the face of persuasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we perceive, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can." Basically, this is why we get spooked at night. If we're out somewhere and something in the dark might be a mugger or an overflowing garbage bin, it's in our best interest to assume it's a mugger because if we're right, our flight-or-fight instincts will help, and if we're wrong, we just have a little laugh about how silly we are.
Does anybody else remember imaginary numbers? I loved imaginary numbers. I loved that the same group of people who came up with something as tedious and mundane as geometric proofs could also come up with something as strange as the square root of a non-positive real number. (I realize I'm probably mixing mathematical fields, but whatever. It all counted the same way on your transcripts.) And was anybody else ever bothered by pi? I always thought, why would you divide the circumference of a circle by the diameter and come up with something as random as 3.14159... and think that it's the right answer, even though it works every time? I mean, why wouldn't you have tried that seven or eight times, and thought, this is a random number, and tried something else? And then, it really pissed me off that because of this stupid pi, there was no such thing as a "perfect" circle. You can totally draw a perfect circle with a compass. I don't see why it's not perfect simply because when you divide it's circumference by it's diameter it comes up to some number that has a never-ending decimal.
But I have been validated!
A century ago, it was thought that the power of mathematics was limitless. Mathematicians, notably David Hilbert, had believed that every question could be resolved and shown to be true or false. That dream died on November 17, 1930 when a journal called the Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physik received a twenty-five page paper written by Kurt Godel, a logician working in Vienna who was the first to demonstrate that certain mathematical statements can neither be proved or disproved. In effect, Godel showed the inevitability of finding in arithmetic logical paradoxes that are the equivalent of the statement "This statement is unprovable." In other words, if it is provable, it is false, and mathematics is therefore inconsistent. And if it's unprovable,then it is true and mathematics is incomplete.
I realize that this doesn't specifically say, pi might be wrong, but it also doesn't say, pi is absolutely right.
Finally, the book concludes that while science is really cool, even if history were to rerun differently, we'd still eventually develop the same scientific models and theories.
If Newton had not, as Wordsworth put it, voyaged through strange seas of thought alone, someone else would have. If Marie Curie had not lived, we still would have discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. But if J. K. Rowling had not been born, we would never have known about Harry Potter. That is why Master Potter means so much to me. Science may be special but Harry, as a work of art, is more so. Harry Potter is unique.
Doesn't that just make your eyes well up that you are not the only one who is so moved by art? As a mild digression, there was a contest to win the Beedle the Bard book way back when there were only 6...it was put on by Amazon, and the winner was a girl who wrote a poem about what she was doing in school each year a Harry Potter book came out, and she ended by saying what a great adventure it was and how she had learned all of these things about growing up and friendships and dragons and such, but the best part was, and I'm paraphrasing, growing up with Harry, mostly I learned to read. Yup, I'll confess, I cried. Okay. I just found the poem. Here it is:
Rhiannon D., age 16, Australia
When I was six, he was eleven
I learnt how to be brave.
When I was seven, he was twelve
I learnt to misbehave.
When I was eight, he was thirteen
He taught me how to cry.
When I was nine, he was fourteen
He showed me how to try.
When I was twelve, and he fifteen
He taught me to forgive.
When we were fourteen and sixteen
I learnt what it was to live.
When we were fifteen and seventeen
He showed me he could bleed.
But growing up with Harry taught me, mostly, how to read.
Anyway, for those readers of mine who are still with me in this long post, and who aren't looking for their hanky right now, I've got more! You can read Rhiannon's blog about the experience here.
So back to the book about which I'm actually supposed to be blogging. If you skip past the references section, you come to the glossary, which in itself is amusing.
For instance, it explains the spell, densaugeo, which Malfoy uses to make Hermione's teeth grow very fast. There is a gene that controls tooth growth, and Stanley Cohen administered an extract of this gene to newborn mice and caused their teeth to grow prematurely, but the best part is that in his lecture he called it "precocious tooth eruption." Somewhat surprisingly to me, when you google that, you get around 200 results. That's not a whole lot considering it's google, but still, 200 instances of that phrasing!
I am a little confused about the entry on entropy. I always thought, in a nutshell, entropy stated that in the end, everything will be at rest. As in, when the sun goes out and we no longer have that to power the earth, eventually, all molecules will stop moving and everything will come to rest. Of course, we'll be dead by then so it won't matter to us. However, this book describes entropy as "a quantity which determines a system's capacity to evolve irreversibly in time...loosely speaking, we may also think of entropy as measuring the degree of randomness or disorder in a system."
Moving on to things that are less confusing and way more interesting, there's a field of biology called evolutionary developmental biology that is apparently nicknamed evo devo. How silly is that?
In discussing dreamless sleep, Shakespeare is quoted, sort of: "To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation?"
And the last thing I'm going to say about this book is regarding Harry's scar. I think as a kid, you learn that if you pick at that scab on your knee or elbow, it will leave a scar, but I never thought to wonder why. Why doesn't your skin just grow back normally? After all, you shed tons of skin cells everyday and they seem to grow back normally. And apparently, scarring doesn't occur in tissue damage before birth. I'm not entirely sure how tissue gets damaged before birth, but I think they've discovered ways to do surgeries on fetuses, so that would be one possibility. I'm going to see if I can translate this long paragraph into something shorter without destroying the science behind it. When you have a wound proteins migrate into the wound site in an abnormal patterns, which cause disorganized fiber growth, which causes the valleys and ridges that make scarring less smooth than regular skin.
In conclusion, I'd say this book is very interesting, but because it's about science in general and not a particular field, some parts are going to be more or less interesting than others, depending on your predilections. However, I clearly enjoyed this book, and because I'm a kind and generous person, I'll send you my copy if you'd like to read it. The deal is, though, that when you're done you have to pass it on to someone else.
Fun? Funny? Amusing? More interesting than you'd think if you only had a public school education.
I just finished reading The Science of Harry Potter by Roger Highfield. I know I've blogged about this book in the past, but I still have more to say. Growing up with a librarian for a mom, I always forget that I'm actually allowed to write in my own books if I want to. Which proves to be helpful if I want to take notes. (Somehow, I had no issue writing in my college textbooks, but this was after I was prompted by my English professor, who pointed out that I bought the books to succeed in his class, and if highlighting or whatever helped, what was the problem. They were my books.)
Anyway, there's a chapter called The Greatest Wizard, and it's all about the Muggle brain. A subsection called ...and Stop the Movement That Shows the Passing of Time discusses how sometimes when you look at a clock you think that the second hand has stopped moving. This section discusses how the brain can stretch time because of "the way it edits reality." What happens is that when you move your eyes to focus on something (in this case, a clock), what should happen is that the new object appears blurry (duh, we've just moved our eyes, so we haven't been looking at it), but then everything would appear blurry every time we moved our eyes, and that's generally not the case. What happens is that our brains actually cut off our vision while our eyes are moving. But then, to prevent us from being totally confused by this, it adds back on the time taken to move our eyes. This actually makes "the image appear earlier than it actually did." The section goes on to discuss various experiments that prove this, but I was just fascinated by what our brains do so that every time we shift our gaze everything doesn't appear blurry.
OMG. In another chapter, There Be Dragons. Really, a subsection, The Basilisk, talks about how evidence of an ancestor of the basilisk was found in the Faiyum Depression in Egypt. Fossils of Gigantophis were found in areas of what are now Egypt and Libya. This snake had vertebra that are larger than an anaconda's vertebra. Unfortunately, (or I suppose fortunately), it seems that this snake did not have the venomous bite of the snake in the Chamber of Secrets, based on they types of venom snakes have today.
In the same chapter, this one sentence amused me: Celts believed that the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, an amazing structure consisting of around 40,000 geometrically shaped basalt columns, was the work of one of Hagrid's relatives.
Chapter 13: The Philosopher's Stone
I'm just going to quote this paragraph.
Thanks to the intervention of Harry and his school chums, however, the Dark Lord does not succeed, joining a long line of individuals, from Chinese rulers to Holy Roman emperors, and many more besides, who have tried,and failed, in the age-old quest to find the elusive stone. The "philosopher" in question was a natural philosopher, the designation used for a scientist before the latter term was coined in the 1840s by William Whewell, a polymath who was a fellow of the Royal Society in London. (Because the term "philosopher" sounds somewhat dull and worthy, the publisher of the American edition of the first Harry Potter book changed its title to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, when in fact, it should have been Harry Potter and the Scientist's Stone.
There's a big long section in this chapter on Hermetism that I'm going to try to sum up, but what was interesting to me was that Nicolas Flamel was a real person, and I quote "'Among the many effects of the Harry Potter phenomenon has been the introduction of a fabled character from the history of chemistry to millions of readers who otherwise would probably have never heard of him,' comments Lawrence Primcipe of Johns Hopkins University, and expert on alchemy." I had no idea that there even were fabled characters in chemistry. Back to Hermetism and Nicolas Flamel, Hermetiscism is some sort of semi-religious and quasi-magical set of ideas that forms the basis of alchemy. Flamel had this book that instructed him on how to turn elements into silver or gold using red or white philosopher's stones. He traveled around a bit and wrote a couple of books on the subject. However, his story does not seem to check out. (Go figure) Flamel and his wife did exist, but it's unlikely that they actually performed any alchemy. However, their work influenced other alchemists like Robert Boyle and sir Isaac Newton. That's still a legacy to me.
However the chapter does state: "Thanks to the transmutations of cosmic alchemy we are all, in effect, made of stardust. Now that is magic."
And did you know that there's a rare disease called Werner's Syndrome in which people appear to age in adolescence, and usually die before the age of 50? That's interesting and disturbing.
The next chapter, Belief, Superstition and Magic, was also very interesting to me. Apparently, our "common sense" that is hard-wired into our brains is actually "common sense for living on the African savanna," and not so much common-sense-for-modern-urban-life. Somehow, though, I think I'll survive a lot longer in modern life than on the African savanna. For one thing, I don't like being dirty.
However, this helps explain our tendency to anthropomorphize. "In the face of persuasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we perceive, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can." Basically, this is why we get spooked at night. If we're out somewhere and something in the dark might be a mugger or an overflowing garbage bin, it's in our best interest to assume it's a mugger because if we're right, our flight-or-fight instincts will help, and if we're wrong, we just have a little laugh about how silly we are.
Does anybody else remember imaginary numbers? I loved imaginary numbers. I loved that the same group of people who came up with something as tedious and mundane as geometric proofs could also come up with something as strange as the square root of a non-positive real number. (I realize I'm probably mixing mathematical fields, but whatever. It all counted the same way on your transcripts.) And was anybody else ever bothered by pi? I always thought, why would you divide the circumference of a circle by the diameter and come up with something as random as 3.14159... and think that it's the right answer, even though it works every time? I mean, why wouldn't you have tried that seven or eight times, and thought, this is a random number, and tried something else? And then, it really pissed me off that because of this stupid pi, there was no such thing as a "perfect" circle. You can totally draw a perfect circle with a compass. I don't see why it's not perfect simply because when you divide it's circumference by it's diameter it comes up to some number that has a never-ending decimal.
But I have been validated!
A century ago, it was thought that the power of mathematics was limitless. Mathematicians, notably David Hilbert, had believed that every question could be resolved and shown to be true or false. That dream died on November 17, 1930 when a journal called the Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physik received a twenty-five page paper written by Kurt Godel, a logician working in Vienna who was the first to demonstrate that certain mathematical statements can neither be proved or disproved. In effect, Godel showed the inevitability of finding in arithmetic logical paradoxes that are the equivalent of the statement "This statement is unprovable." In other words, if it is provable, it is false, and mathematics is therefore inconsistent. And if it's unprovable,then it is true and mathematics is incomplete.
I realize that this doesn't specifically say, pi might be wrong, but it also doesn't say, pi is absolutely right.
Finally, the book concludes that while science is really cool, even if history were to rerun differently, we'd still eventually develop the same scientific models and theories.
If Newton had not, as Wordsworth put it, voyaged through strange seas of thought alone, someone else would have. If Marie Curie had not lived, we still would have discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. But if J. K. Rowling had not been born, we would never have known about Harry Potter. That is why Master Potter means so much to me. Science may be special but Harry, as a work of art, is more so. Harry Potter is unique.
Doesn't that just make your eyes well up that you are not the only one who is so moved by art? As a mild digression, there was a contest to win the Beedle the Bard book way back when there were only 6...it was put on by Amazon, and the winner was a girl who wrote a poem about what she was doing in school each year a Harry Potter book came out, and she ended by saying what a great adventure it was and how she had learned all of these things about growing up and friendships and dragons and such, but the best part was, and I'm paraphrasing, growing up with Harry, mostly I learned to read. Yup, I'll confess, I cried. Okay. I just found the poem. Here it is:
Rhiannon D., age 16, Australia
When I was six, he was eleven
I learnt how to be brave.
When I was seven, he was twelve
I learnt to misbehave.
When I was eight, he was thirteen
He taught me how to cry.
When I was nine, he was fourteen
He showed me how to try.
When I was twelve, and he fifteen
He taught me to forgive.
When we were fourteen and sixteen
I learnt what it was to live.
When we were fifteen and seventeen
He showed me he could bleed.
But growing up with Harry taught me, mostly, how to read.
Anyway, for those readers of mine who are still with me in this long post, and who aren't looking for their hanky right now, I've got more! You can read Rhiannon's blog about the experience here.
So back to the book about which I'm actually supposed to be blogging. If you skip past the references section, you come to the glossary, which in itself is amusing.
For instance, it explains the spell, densaugeo, which Malfoy uses to make Hermione's teeth grow very fast. There is a gene that controls tooth growth, and Stanley Cohen administered an extract of this gene to newborn mice and caused their teeth to grow prematurely, but the best part is that in his lecture he called it "precocious tooth eruption." Somewhat surprisingly to me, when you google that, you get around 200 results. That's not a whole lot considering it's google, but still, 200 instances of that phrasing!
I am a little confused about the entry on entropy. I always thought, in a nutshell, entropy stated that in the end, everything will be at rest. As in, when the sun goes out and we no longer have that to power the earth, eventually, all molecules will stop moving and everything will come to rest. Of course, we'll be dead by then so it won't matter to us. However, this book describes entropy as "a quantity which determines a system's capacity to evolve irreversibly in time...loosely speaking, we may also think of entropy as measuring the degree of randomness or disorder in a system."
Moving on to things that are less confusing and way more interesting, there's a field of biology called evolutionary developmental biology that is apparently nicknamed evo devo. How silly is that?
In discussing dreamless sleep, Shakespeare is quoted, sort of: "To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation?"
And the last thing I'm going to say about this book is regarding Harry's scar. I think as a kid, you learn that if you pick at that scab on your knee or elbow, it will leave a scar, but I never thought to wonder why. Why doesn't your skin just grow back normally? After all, you shed tons of skin cells everyday and they seem to grow back normally. And apparently, scarring doesn't occur in tissue damage before birth. I'm not entirely sure how tissue gets damaged before birth, but I think they've discovered ways to do surgeries on fetuses, so that would be one possibility. I'm going to see if I can translate this long paragraph into something shorter without destroying the science behind it. When you have a wound proteins migrate into the wound site in an abnormal patterns, which cause disorganized fiber growth, which causes the valleys and ridges that make scarring less smooth than regular skin.
In conclusion, I'd say this book is very interesting, but because it's about science in general and not a particular field, some parts are going to be more or less interesting than others, depending on your predilections. However, I clearly enjoyed this book, and because I'm a kind and generous person, I'll send you my copy if you'd like to read it. The deal is, though, that when you're done you have to pass it on to someone else.
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