A busy week to likely be followed by an even busier week – no writing, no new reading, and no schedule to do either. The best I’ve managed is to play Starcraft 2 a little bit (So far, it’s an excellent follow up to the first one), finish season 2 and start season 3 of Mad Men (What can I say, I’ve kept with it. Still slow) and finally skim an article on ebooks by Michael Stackpole.
Oh and this is excellent:
I recently picked up The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow from the library. It came out only a few weeks ago, but I was finally the next name in the queue. As the first author likely gives-away, it’s a book about physics, but, thankfully, it’s not a book of physics – no math, lots of diagrams, nothing especially unreadable.
Much like Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Steven B Carroll, The Grand Design is a popular science primer to the current state of an immensely complex field. When I saw it’s readable, I mean the words form logically one after the other without taxing the dictionary or the ear too badly – conceptually it’s still complex, especially toward the ends.
In the book, they describe the requirements of a modem – namely that it must be elegant, have few arbitrary or adjustable elements, agree with all existing data, and make future predictions. Appraised under the same criteria, The Grand Design does quite well. It is a very elegant book – the hardcover is under 200 pages and each chapter builds upon previous chapters to create a general conceptual understanding of physics.
Contains few or arbitrary values? That doesn’t correspond directly to a book, but I interpret that as meaning that it doesn’t digress too far from a theme. Again, that is true.Refreshingly, The Grand Design takes only a subtle stand ideologically, simply stating that this is where science is (whether you like it or not) and here are the scientific implications that follow. It is not especially philosophical, or overly concerned with morality, or a grand manifesto – it’s just an explanation.
Does the book agree with all existing data? Well, it certainly wants to. I have no qualification to suggest otherwise, and both authors are rather esteemed physicists.
Lastly, does The Grand Design make predictions? It does, of a sort. It predicts that many of the theories described in the book will be fleshed out further than they have been. There is also a running current through the book that human perception will or must or should change along with these new revelations in physics. Again, it is not a moral or social change, but something as simple (and revolutionary) as the change from the Earth being flat, to being round. A flat earth seems absurd now, just as a solitary static universe may seem equally absurd in the future.
One assumes that the book was written to be part of that change Popular science is always such a divisive field, Stephen Hawking at least – utterly lacking the sort of political aspirations others may be accused of , has a strong position for doing good where others have failed. Will the book success, perhaps not, but at least it’s a damn good model.
Pictures from hiking Buck Mountain near Lake George over Labor Day Weekend.
For the first time in – oh – three or four months I managed to finish a short story. That’s seven for the year, all but one currently out on the submissions circuit. I’ve been helped along by a week off from classes (Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah), meaning I’m not likely to get anything else done anytime soon.
Also – and this is the bigger distraction – I’ve finally got a new computer put together, or rather, I will soon. The rest of my parts arrived today and they look a little bit like this:
EVGA E758-A1 Motherboard
Intel Core i7-950
6 – 2gb Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600 RAM chips
EVGA 01G-P3-1158-TR GeForce GTS 250 video card
3 – 750gb hard drives
All inside of an Antec Nine Hundred case.
I hope I’m not jinxing myself for the build tonight, but I’m looking forward to having a computer that can play a few things on something other than lower-than-low settings.
This new distraction also coincides nicely with the end of Season 1 of Mad Men. I’ll admit it grew on me a little bit more over the season. I have no quanitifiable reason why – the characters just become worse and worse people and the plotlines remained anemic – but it kept me watching somehow. I’m undecided about Season 2 – I think I’ll let fate have some time to either drop it into my hands or let me forget all about it.
I’m in Boston for the weekend so I’ll try to have a good yarn to tell coming out of that.
In five hours I’m off to Albany and then tomorrow off to Lake George. More pictures forthcoming.
Mostly I’ve been busy with class this week – two winners and a dismal third string math class. I’m all caught up on classwork for both this week and next week so maybe I’ll write? Probably not.
In lieu of anything productive, I’ve been watching Madmen Season 1. It was suggested to me by a few different people who’ve pegged me correctly before so I finally decided to give it a chance. Also, I worked at an advertizing firm for a year and I tend to like period dramas.
I can see why it won a few Emmy’s over the last few years – it’s the sort of slow, moody drama that always tends to win awards. Reading a few reviews, the majority of the praise fell on the settings, the style, the ambiance. I will admit that it has managed to find a nice balance between a too subtle setting that puts everything off kilter and an overt pistache that makes everything a comic book. That much is completely impressive.
The plot though? Perhaps it is Lost, Rome, or a hundred other more ‘modern’ series and their roller-coaster pacing, but I am always surprised when an episode ends – it doesn’t seem like anything has happened yet – and the episodes are an hour long. I can appreciate a slower, more nuanced drama but the bumps in the first season roll by so smoothly you wonder if you’re not just watching one guy’s routine in a 60′s museum. To throw up one particular example: Don Draper (the lead) receives a call from his mistress that is overheard by his secretary. The ante is upped when later Don leaves mysteriously and Draper’s wife appears to take a family portrait. For a few scenes, the secretary confides in a coworker and then bumbles around entertaining Mrs. Draper until Don returns. Flash forward a few more scenes and the pictures are taken, the wife doesn’t think they came out very well, and the secretary presumably goes back to work. Any great confrontation…nope. Will it play out later? Presumably yes, but six episodes in and even a long lost brother’s arrival failed to command more than a tenth of an episode. Maybe it’s the gloomy lead or the molasses resolution, but I’ve yet to find a plot in this beautiful setting.
I’ve got half a season left to watch. If it picks up I’ll consider #2 otherwise an interesting diversion, but I think I’ll find something else.
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