lurkinggherkin

Ye gods, haven't posted since Christmas.

My life this year has been an incessant stream of courseworks and assignments plus I'm working part-time as well. A bit overloaded if the truth be known. I'm looking forward to the end of these courses now so I can move on to something new. What that something new will be is still taking shape.

Once my remaining coursework and exam are out of the way in a few weeks time I'll come back and post something more.

In the meantime, watch this if you haven't already - it's simply beautiful:



Laters.

It's only natural that you'll disappoint us in some way, because you're only human.  But don't disappoint us too much.  That's all I ask.

From rufas

Book Meme

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST

So, I'm in the dining room right now. I'm presuming this means a paper book rather than an e-book.

The closest book I could find was "Fun With Maths: Prepare for Key Stage 1". This unfortunately had only 32 pages.

Next, I headed for the adjacent kitchen. Nigella Lawson's "Feast" lay therein. Page 56 has only a picture of some food, no sentences.

Moving on to the living room - Joe Haldemann's "Forever War" is the closest. Page 56 is at the end of a chapter and only has 4 sentences. Doh!

A little further into the room lies Ken Stroud's "Further Engineering Mathematics" and Joel Sklar's "Principles of Web Design". Equidistant from my starting point. I flip a coin. Stroud wins.

I'm thinking that by 'sentence' we mean something with words in rather than steps in the solution of an equation. By this criteria the 5th sentence is:

"1 real and two complex roots (conjugate pair)"

...but I finally weigh 100kg, roughly the same weight as when I got married 9 years ago.

(100kg = 15st 9lbs)

Next target: 95kg by Christmas!

"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions." (O.W. Holmes, Sr. 1858)

Holmes would, I think, have agreed that this book is a provider of such mind-stretching ideas. Here you'll find an excellent discussion of some of the more radical new ideas from the model-building camp of theoretical physics. Taking ideas of higher dimensions and branes borrowed from string theory, Prof. Randall and co-researchers have produced interesting models of physics in which the extra dimensions of string theory are shown to not all necessarily be miniscule curled-up planck-scale regions beyond experimental probing. She demonstrates possibilities for larger additional dimensions the existence of which might be experimentally verified when the Large Hadron Collider swings into action, and alternative possibilities to supersymmetry for unification of the forces of nature.

There's not very much cosmology in this book. It mainly concentrates on spatial geometry, particle physics, quantum field theory and the (possible) relationships between them. Of course the obligatory explanations of relativity, quantum mechanics and the standard model of fundamental particles and forces, all de rigueur for any pop science tract, comprise the first half of the book.

Don't be fooled by the reassuring commentary by newspaper reviewers on the cover about how this book is 'remarkably clear'. No journalist wants to admit that they can't make head nor tail of a 'pop' science book. Though Randall steers clear of mathematics there are many abstract concepts in this book that are not at all easy to grasp, especially the idea of non-spatial symmetries and symmetry breaking. 'Remarkably clear' is a very relative term here - in that, given the inherent difficulty in explaining these subjects to the uninitiated, yes, she's done a great job; but that doesn't mean it's easy-going or accessible. In fact I would have preferred more mathematics to give a structure to hang the conceptual understanding on and give it shape - without the maths there are parts of the book that come across as a formless mass of phrases like 'inter-brane communication of symmetry breaking' - OK, I have a grasp of the ideas of symmetry and broken symmetries and branes but I can't see how or why symmetry breaking can or needs to be 'communicated' - I sort of imagined it was something that happened spontaneously, as in the well-known theoretical physics phrase 'spontaneous symmetry breaking'. But when you bring maths into a book you are always faced with the question 'Where do I start? How much do my audience know already?' so I can understand her reasons for avoiding mathematical descriptions.

I liked her sections on the Standard Model which go into more detail than Brian Greene's books. I think this book was tougher going than his books 'The Elegant Universe' or 'The Fabric of the Cosmos'. This is partly because Greene, I think, is slightly more adept at the use of analogies, and partly because Randall goes into more depth because this book is more specific in its focus than his works.

Lisa Randall has actually made a very brave move in publishing this work, because her conjectures might be disproved or at least thrown into doubt by the results of LHC experiments (whereas - contrary to what some people on the interweb seem to believe - string theory as a general concept will neither be proved nor disproved because the LHC doesn't probe anywhere near the energy scales needed to do so conclusively). More power to her elbow for doing so.

Copied from xmalx:

* Post 3 things you've done that you believe nobody else on your F-list has done.
* If anybody responds with "I've done that," add another thing.
* Encourage your friends to paste this into their own journal to list the unique things they've done.

I've seen things you people....wouldn't believe.

1) Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
2) I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
3) All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...

Sorry. Even if it's a bit of a stretch to call it three things, I thought an hommage to Roy Batty was better than anything I could contrive about myself.

...or maybe a virus? Whatever it is, I had a hangover-type thing today.

Which is most unfair. OK, so I went to a party last night. But thanks to some antibiotics I'm taking for yet another dental infection (courtesy of a broken tooth this time and a dental service that doesn't seem to understand the concept of early intervention) - I wasn't able to touch a drop of alchohol. All I had to drink was lashings and lashings of ginger beer. Maybe ginger beer and antibiotics don't mix.

I still think it's my brain saying 'You went to a party last night, therefore based on past experience you have a hangover. Take that!'

Then again maybe it's codeine withdrawal after three days of being a Solpadeine junkie.

I frickin' hate toothache.

At around about 5:00 this morning the Earth finished another complete orbit around the Sun since I drew my first breath.

Spent a lovely afternoon at the Preston Steam Rally on Sunday.

As ever, I was perturbed by the annually decreasing level of basic literacy skills amongst the sign-writers of the food stalls. It seems that it is now the norm rather than the exception for signs to contain spelling errors. I'm sympathetic towards genuine dyslexics but when someone writes 'DIET COCK' on a sign advertising drink prices and then repeats exactly the same error on another sign in the same venue, I can't see that this could be claimed as a case of dyslexia - it's too systematic. They've just failed (despite, one presumes, repeated visual exposure to its presence on cans of drink they are handling) to learn the correct spelling of the word 'Coke', or the way the 'e' modifies the sound of the preceding vowel.

I just can't understand how on earth, as they traced the word 'COCK' with their marker pen, how on earth it didn't ring any alarm bells?!

(I don't think it was a joke either.)

I was going to rant a bit about how many important, iconic works are missing from this list including a total lack of anything about mathematics, philosophy or the natural sciences and then it occurred to me that actually this is just the contents of someone's bookshelf that they posted.  Also I notice an awful lot of books that have been made into films or tv series' in this list.

OK, here goes:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible. (not all of it word for word but a fair amount
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (Repeatedly!)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

Score = 28

Amongst the many omissions I was particularly disappointed that the Kama Sutra and The Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred didn't make an appearance.