dappled shade

Information is Beautiful

Stumbled across Information is Beautiful this morning, and have spent the last half hour amazed at the sheer beauty of otherwise boring and depressing information.

Found it via Patrick.net, which is one of my weekend morning destinations. I started reading the site because it was a contrarian view on housing prices (back when the accepted wisdom was that housing prices ALWAYS go up and only fools hesitate). I still read it for it's slightly more cynical take on what's going on, but also for the community that has grown up around it. It's a mix of liberals, conservatives and libertarians — the comments can be pretty funny. (Incidentally, some of the articles and posts he links to are great, and some are bordering on the paranoid.)

Bring Back the Muppets

If you could bring back a canceled tv series, which would you choose?
Submitted by The Good Girl Gone Blog.

I'd bring back The Muppet Show (not the Disney version of the Muppets). I've been watching them on Netflix, and they're just endlessly entertaining. Plus, a modern version would feature celebrities I recognize (as The Muppets were just a little too early for me to know who the guest stars were).

Alzheimer's Spread

The BBC reported on a study in mice linking a prion to Alzheimer's disease. 

Prions are malformed proteins that can spread through the brain and cause neurological diseases; they're most famously linked to Mad Cow Disease. While there's no sign that Alzheimer's is contagious, when the malformed tau protein is injected into healthy brain tissue it spreads to other parts of the brain, and helps explain how the disease progresses.

The tau protein is a benign, common protein. The malformed version, though, creates a deadly neurological disease. This fascinates me partially because biology is just interesting. But also because one protein out of thousands malfunctions, and it destroys memory, personality and eventually life in the organism it belongs to.

Photos from Italy

Walt and I got back from Italy last week, and he's pulled together some of the photos from our trip.

The photo above is Vernazza, the town we stayed in when we were in Cinque Terre (all of the trip was great, but Cinque Terre was my favorite).

A great way to celebrate 5 years of marriage :-)

Overheard...

...at the gym: "O my God! My balls, dude! My balls!!"

Too Many History Books

The good news is that I can remember the book I'm reading right now - the Aeneid (which I feel a nerd about whenever I tell anyone I'm reading it). The bad news is that I can't remember what book I read directly before this. I put it down to reading way, way too many history books in a row; they've all just blurred into one continuous book.

I did take a break for awhile, though, to read Macbeth. My problem with Macbeth this time around is that the entire argument that he is a tyrant seems to be based on a few murders. Having just read a lot of Italian Renaissance history, and before that The Hellenistic Age, it's not really impressive until the body count reaches 20 or 30 (and, for preference, contains multiple family members).

I look forward to getting back to novels where the body count tends to be slim, internal dialogues long, and character development deep. I've been eyeing Jane Eyre for awhile now...

Review: The Hellenistic Age

I recently read a 200-page history of the Hellenistic Age, the 500 years between Alexander the Great and the Roman conquest in the Mediterranean. After Alexander died, his empire fell to fragments, with the claimants squabbling over the remains. This book chronicled that period. And, frankly, I'm surprised they could move for all the bodies.

Building on the heroic traditions inherited from Alexander and before, the claimants had no hesitation whatsoever about murdering anyone even remotely inconvenient. 

It made for occasionally gripping reading, but mostly it was a matter of keeping track of a large number of names in too few pages.

While I conscientiously re-read whole sections of the book, I gave up entirely during the section on Egypt. All the women seemed to be called Cleopatra, and all royalty was expected to marry brothers, sisters and, in one case, a mother, which significantly complicated what was going on when.

I've been reading more history books recently, though, and structure is clearly a problem. The options seem to be to either present a lot of information and let the reader grab hold of whatever they can, or focus on just a few key moments or people and leave large gaps.

While I can't exactly recommend this book, it does a conscientious job of covering all the major events and people from the period, and makes for occasionally gripping reading.

Review: Twelfth Night

I will say this for the Canterbury Tales, it makes Shakespeare much easier.

After finishing Chaucer's tales, I didn't want to drop back into easy modern prose, so decided to read a Shakespeare play that was new to me. Reading the Canterbury Tales first definitely helps. While Shakespeare is modern English, he uses some of the same sentence structures and vocabulary that seem so odd to us now. As a result, I fairly tore through Twelfth Night.

I have to admit that I came away from the play without a strong feeling about it one way or the other. I would guess, though, that it's much more enjoyable watching it rather than reading it; the characters would be much more humorous and modern interpretations could have fun with it.

The play itself is full of very confused people, who seem to be so bewildered by disguises and social shifts that they'll cling to any conclusion. It reminds me most of a game in which the pieces are interchangeable, though some of them have to be matched up in the end. The fun is to see how many different permutations they can run through first.

I have to wonder how much this play is about Shakespeare mocking courtly love and its forms, and how much he was just having a good time.

It's Called Irony

About 8 years ago, my parents gave me an old tent that they no longer needed. I dutifully carried the tent with me on moves from San Diego to Berkeley to Burlingame, never once using it. Before our latest epic move down the stairs, Walt and I made a real effort to donate, throw away or, in extreme cases, burn anything we didn't use. There's only so much stuff I'm willing to carry around with me.

On the basis that we hadn't used it ever, we returned the tent to my parents. My father was very insistent that I should keep it on the basis that a tent was useful and we might want to go camping sometime. I was firm that we hadn't used it for 8 years and it wasn't going through one more move with us. I left the tent with my parents.

Two days later, my sister-in-law sent out an email asking if we'd all like to go camping to celebrate my brother-in-law's birthday

I checked; the tent had already gone. My parents don't like stuff hanging around their home either.

Book Review: Canterbury Tales

In college, I read the Canterbury Tales in the original middle English. I loved reading them, so I kept the book with the intent of picking it up again. The only problem was that the book weighed about 20 pounds, so it was no light matter to read the book during my commute, and eventually I had to give up.

This went on for some time, and then I recently discovered a small (i.e. 1000+ pages) paperback version with all the helpful glosses and vocabulary help. I was delighted, purchased the book and dove right in.

It accompanied me on my morning commute for quite some time because, well, it's a difficult read. The sentences weave much more freely than in modern English, verbs and nouns don't have their accustomed place, and the spelling is a matter of sound and not convention. Combined with that, some of the vocabulary is long gone. It does make it great value for the money, though; I was probably only spending pennies for each hour of entertainment.

The only real downside was that it began to affect my English. I first noticed that this affect could occur in junior high school when I read a book composed entirely of run-on sentences (it was pretty painful, actually). My writing took a sharp turn, and commas began to replace periods. This was much worse, though; run-on sentences are nothing compared to middle-English influences. The only thing to be said is that at least they're easy to edit out.

I can't say I'd exactly recommend this book, but it is much more fun in the original version. It's just also a lot more work.