The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene

Brian Greene is seriously good at explaining things. Wow. And he's so generous to his reader. He's forever saying things like, "You're probably wondering how how this point I'm making here can be reconciled with the idea I introduced 4 pages ago." And I'm never wondering about that - I just can't keep the ideas in my head that long. But it is so nice to be treated as if I'm that smart. My husband, who is a physicist and no slouch himself, calls Brian Greene "the rock star physicist." I've got to find a way to see him speak in person.

This book is about what makes up space-time. I found the material more difficult that his previous book, The Elegant Universe, especially the middle section where he talks about whether time really exists or not. But the difficulty is worth it, because the ideas (and as I said, the explanations) are so fascinating. He talks about theoretical models for time machines, the prospects for actual time travel, what a "moment" really means.

As an added bonus, check out this fascinating Scientific American article: Was Einstein Wrong? A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity. Readable and surprising, it talks about how quantum non-locality undermines all of special relativity by allowing distant simultaneous events.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Brian Greene
2004
Available from Amazon

Pachelbel Rant

Sorry I've been gone so long. We think we might be moving soon, and I've been occupied with planning for that.

So here's a fun one before I get back to the real thing. A comedian named Rob Paravonian talks about the plague of Pachelbel's Canon in D.

Available from YouTube
Also, check out his website at robprocks.com

The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud - Harry Markopoulos

This is the memo that Harry Markopoulos wrote to the SEC in 2005 about why he thought Bernie Madoff was a fraud. He first contact the SEC in 1999, and this memo is an attempt to get thngs moving because 6 years of talking wouldn't. If we knighted people in the US, we would knight Harry Markopoulos.

Technical but riveting reading.

Available from the WSJOnline

Partly Cloudy Patriot - Sarah Vowell

Funny. Even better if you’ve heard Sarah Vowell on This American Life, so you can imagine the essays in her funny, little-girl voice. I especially like the essay about ridiculous comparisons to Rosa Parks (and not just because she quotes one of my favorite shows, Sports Night).

The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Sarah Vowell
2002
Available from Amazon

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread - Don Robertson

I don't read much fiction, but when I read well-crafted fiction I find it so astounding. How on earth do people think it up, and create the style and the mood and the characters?

This book is well-crafted and really fun to read. A nine-year-old boy goes on a quest on the day of a huge industrial disaster in Cleveland, OH. It's set in 1944 and written in 1965, but feels modern and fresh. Now I have to go find Don Robertson's other books.

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
Don Robertson
1965
Available from Amazon

Hippocrates' Shadow - David H. Newman

A book by an emergency room physician about the secrets doctors keep from patients and themselves, and how those secrets affect patient care.

Here's one secret: what doctors do doesn't work. CPR, for instance, saves 1-5% of the people it is performed on. 95-99% of them die. Even if it is performed on people whom it is medically appropriate for (that is, the healthy dead), it only saves 30% of them.

Here's another secret: even when a treatment does something, it doesn't do what the patient thinks. For instance, patients go to the doctor with a sore throat, they get a strep test and are treated with antibiotics. The patient thinks the antibiotics will help their throat heal, but in fact antibiotics reduce a 7-day course of illness by just 16 hours. Doctors are actually giving antibiotics to prevent a rare complication of strep throat, rheumatic fever, and and an even rarer complication of that, heart damage. But we need to treat a million people with strep throat with antibiotics to prevent one case of heart damage, and of the million people we treat, 2,000 will have life-threatening reactions to the antibiotics, and 200 will die.

This book is well worth reading, but skip the last chapter. In it he tries to apply Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Godel's incompleteness theorem to the practice of medicine. And they don't apply, and they don't make sense, and he just comes off as anti-science. Which is strange, given that in the rest of his book he is strongly in favor of science, of using scientific evidence, and of discussing it with patients. Actually, I fairly often find this with non-fiction books. Everything goes well till the last chapter, and then, in an attempt to sum up and place in a larger context, the author over-reaches and things go all fuzzy. But apart from the last chapter, I loved this book and thought it was really valuable to have read.

Hippocrates' Shadow: Secrets from the House of Medicine
David H. Newman
2008
Available from Amazon

When You Are Engulfed in Flames - David Sedaris

Very funny. The essay about smoking alone is worth the price of admission; while reading it, Coke came out my nose. I love his discussions of cultural differences, between the US and France, where he lives, and Japan, where he visists. He talks about watching parents with a toddler on a train in Japan. The child wanted to look out the window, so the father took off his shoes, the mother placed a cloth on the train seat, and the child stood in his sock feet on the cloth. Then, before their stop, the father put the child's father put his shoes back on, and the mother folded up the cloth and wiped off the window where the child had smudged it with his fingers. I think of myself as pretty good at cleaning up after my children in public, but I have nothing on this. Maybe I should start. Or maybe it would just make me look like a complete freak here in the US.

I didn’t enjoy David Seadris’s last book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, (too oblique and depressing) but I loved this one. So don’t stay away just because of a previous bad experience. This one is good.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris
2008
Available from Amazon