What happened to those memories?

For a while I've been thinking about what the types of books I tended to read at certain points in my life.  While I think I have a pretty good handle on the types of things I've been reading for the past five years, as I head backwards my ability to recall the types of things I was reading really falls of.  It gets particularly iffy when I think back to my late elementary school years.

I think the problem that I have with my elementary school years is that the few books that I do remember reading were likely a little abnormal.  By the end of grade six, for instance, I remember having read the Michael Crichton books Jurassic Park and Sphere.

But I don't think I was only reading mass market thrillers.  At some point after grade four and before junior high I read a number of Hardy Boys books, as well as some Farley Mowat (and for the American side of the spectrum Johnny Tremain).  And of course there also Lois Lowery's classic dystopian tale The Giver.

At some point, maybe around the time I was reading Jurassic Park, I recall a kid at a science camp being asked what he was reading.  I still remember feeling a little juvenile and inferior when he responded with "The new John Grisham."  It also seemed a somewhat pretentious response, but that mostly came from the delivery.

Not that I think it had anything to do with fellow camper's comment, but at some point around the end of elementary school and the beginning of junior high I started reading John Grisham novels.  But when was this and how does it fit into the timeline?  And why can't I fit this into my personal reading trajectory.

Maybe what shocks me the most is that I know that from late elementary school through to the end of high school I was doing quite a bit of recreational reading - unfortunately I can't seem remember pull too many of the titles on demand (though I do think I am pretty good at knowing whether or not I've read a book if it is presented to me).  Maybe the problem is that reading choices were really quite haphazard and that my development as a reader wasn't quite as linear as I might like to imagine it being.    It's probably this lack of linearity and coherence that makes it hard to recall.  Reading choices didn't flow from any particular prompt or necessarily lead to further reading in an area.

I should probably just accept that idiosyncratic choices were nothing more than that, and that it doesn't really matter that I didn't work my way though categories of works in any particular way.  Maybe I should just consider myself lucky that  was able to sample widely and didn't prematurely limit my tastes by labelling myself a fan or aficionado of a particular genre (an affliction I am still stuck with today).

Does the romance novel have a non-fiction equivalent?

Romance novels are everywhere in North America.  New or used, they are easy to come by.  Obviously they are filling some kind of demand.

But let's say you want something that's accessible, cheap, and easy to read that's also non-fiction what are the options?

My first thought is that the newspaper might be the non-fiction counterpart of the romance novel, but I am not entirely satisfied with that comparison.  Maybe magazines?

In the end magazines and newspapers both have the problem that their articles are much shorter than a romance novel, and I guess I am looking for something that is about as long (a very arbitrary requirement I know).

Is it possible that the romance novel just doesn't have a non-fiction analog?  Is such a thing needed?  Could we create something to fill this void?

A Few Quick Notes 559

-When I woke up yesterday it was close to -13 or -14.  By the time I went to bed last night the temperature was hovering around 0.  Today we reached a high of 11.  You may not be surprised to learn that the snow we received on Friday is now gone.

-This evening I borrowed a bread cookbook from my local public library.  Of course, I didn't even remember to consult this cookbook before beginning this evening's bread baking exercise (I ended up just going for a pumpkin/molasses/whole wheat/multigrain improvisation).

I may not be good a following recipes, but at least I am getting much better at making just one loaf of bread at a time.

-Listening to actors talk about acting is the worst, it's probably even worse than listening to pop musicians talk about what their music is about.

-Thanks to some inside info from my father about the relationship between meat consumption and kidney stone formation I have recently drastically reduced my consumption of meat.  So far I have been surprised how easy this has been to do, and how cheap.  If I learn to make it to foods more nutritious than rice it might even be healthy!

-Check out the hot plane puns the Judiciary Committe made in the title of its 2006 report on the Air Marshal's dress code.

Oliver Sacks agrees (or is it the other way around?)

For the past few days I have been haphazardly picking at Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (a book I first started reading in 2003).

Last night, while reading the section on Tourette's Syndrome I was struck by his discussion of a concept that seemed to parallel something I posted about a few days ago - our inclination to overlook concepts/ideas that aren't appropriately named.  Of course, Sacks's take on concepts without names, or johnny-come-lately re-remembered names, is a little more elegant than mine.

The day after seeing Ray, it seemed to me that I noticed three Touretters in the street in downtown New York.  I was confounded, for Tourette's syndrome was said to be excessively rare.  It had an incidence, I had read, of one in a million, yet I had apparently seen three examples in an hour.  I was thrown into a turmoil of bewilderment and wonder: was it possible that had been overlooking this all the time, either not seeing such patients or vaguely dismissing them as 'nervous', 'cracked', 'twitchy'?  Was it possible that everyone had been overlooking them?  Was it possible that Tourette's was not a rarity, but rather common - a thousand times more common, say, than previously supposed?  

Sacks also includes a nice footnote with another example of such an instance.

A very similar situation happened with muscular dystrophy, which was never seen until Duchenne described it in the 1850s.  By 1860, after his original description, many hundreds of cases had been recognised and described, so much so that Charcot said: "How come that a disease so common, so widespread, and so recognisable at a glance - a disease which has doubtless always existed - how come it is only recognised now?  Why did we need M. Duchenne to open our eyes?"

I can't help but wonder how many unnamed concepts are floating about whose naming would be of great use in my day to day life?

A Bunny Watson moment

This past weekend Jeannette took it upon herself to watch the three Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies.  Though I am not a fan of these movies, I did end up catching a few minutes here and there.

After watching the movies Jeannette and I were both quite taken with the similarities between the Lord of the Rings story and the Harry Potter story/books.

Of course, this discussion reminded me of the Radiolab piece from a few years ago about Wagner's Ring Cycle. While this piece is mostly about the Ring Cycle, they do discuss some of the similarities between Wagner's work and Tolkien's.



[Embedded audio]

This piece, like most of Radiolab's output, is easy to access and informative.

In the vein of the Durham Report quotes

I am in the process of skimming through a book, The Least Examined Branch: The Role of Legislatures in the Constitutional State, on the roles of legislatures in constitutional democracies when I came across the following passage in the forward:

This distinction between judicial and legislative roles is not therefore between principle and policy, because both institutions can and should act in principled ways. It is rather between ruling narrowly and legislating broadly, whether the rulings are a matter of principle or policy. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the difference between how courts and legislatures are typically designed to work and how they work best in supporting a constitutional democracy. Legislatures most often make egregious mistakes when they try to rule on single, high-visibility cases for politically expedient purposes. Courts correspondingly most often make egregious mistakes when they rule in ways that go far beyond what can be confidently inferred from the merits of the actual case or cases at hand.

I think that this is probably a pretty good way of thinking about the respective roles of legislatures and the judiciary. I am a little embarrassed that I hadn't explicitly thought about such distinctions before now.

Edit: The more I think about it the more I realize that this perspective is a little ahistorical, at least in the Canadian/Westminister tradition. Private Bills, for quite a while, were a major component of the legislature's work. And I can't help but think that issues relating to the setting of precedents are reasonably somewhat relevant to the rulings passed down by the judiciary.

Maybe my early excitement was a bit hasty.

Name two American presidents whose children have written Washington based mysteries?

If you said Roosevelt and Truman you would have been correct.

Margaret Truman, the daughter of Harry S Truman, wrote quite a number of books about murder in and around Washington. It seems that her first mystery was even turned into the classic Wesley Snipes file Murder at 1600.

Elliott Roosevelt, one of FDR's children, wrote mysteries in which a fictionalized version of his mother serves as the 'detective.' Oh, and at least one of these is set in the White House.

And y'all thought that the children of presidents never amounted to much of anything.

It's hard to believe that this is real

I am not even entirely sure what to make of this, but it is definitely impressive.



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I am curious how many more libraries will adopt similar storage and retrieval systems? Also, I am curious to know how much it cost to implement such a system.

Reading and stuff

Yesterday, as part of my preparations for my upcoming comprehensive exam, I went to the library and borrowed a few books. The book that I have started to read is Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., apparently the popular edition of the work.

Though I had heard of Kuhn and his famous paradigms before yesterday, I really didn't know much about Kuhn or his work (not that I know all that much now).

Anyway, the first thing that I learned about Kuhn is that he was trained as a physicist. Given that I have only encountered his work in the context of the social sciences this surprised me. I guess that as the book was classified in the Qs I should have had a hint as to the nature of the author's subject and training.

On a related note, I also didn't really know that Kuhn's focus is largely hard science/s (i.e. physics and optics and whatnot). That his work is so frequently discussed in the social sciences seems to have been something of a coincidence, rather than Kuhn's goal when writing the book (though this is not to suggest that he didn't think about the social sciences in the development of his ideas). The following paragraph from the Wiki article on the book seems to sum things up nicely:

In 1987, Kuhn's work was reported to be the twentieth-century book most frequently cited in the period 1976-83 in the Arts and the Humanities and the Times Literary Supplement labeled it one of "The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War." The book's basic concepts have been adopted and co-opted by a variety of fields and disciplines beyond those encompassing the history and philosophy of science.

Anyway, all of this was just to say that I am enjoying the book so far. In some ways it reminds me of reading Orwell or Huxley as a teenager.

I guess I should probably get back to work.

Score
Cameron 56
Neil 0

Parade of Books

A few weeks ago I noticed that the Dalhousie Libraries were going to be hosting a video contest with an e-reader as the grand prize. Not surprisingly, to enter the contest one had to create and submit a video "telling us why you love the Dal Libraries."

At first I didn't think that this would be the contest for me, mainly because I couldn't think of a good way of approaching the topic. Eventually I settled on some kind of stop-motion/time-lapse content. Of course, that isn't really enough of an idea to build a video so I had to think about it for a few more days.

I eventually decided to go with a stop-motion thing that would then convey a message about the library.

Anyway, I decided to give it a shot this afternoon and this is what I came up with.



[Embedded video]

Definitely not the best stop-motion work, but considering that no planning went into the shooting of this video I think it turned out relatively well.

They are planning on releasing the results in early March. If I hear back from the contest administrators I will be sure to let you know by what margin I lost.

Score
Cameron 39
Neil 0

Be an early adopter

I often wonder who would want to be an early adopter when they could just as easily be a late adapter and save yourself the hassle of not dealing with the product in its developmental phase.

I think I have finally found something that is worth taking the plunge. Amy Sedaris's new channel on YouTube, which is hardly a day old, might just be worth it, even though I surely will have to deal with all of the changes and updates and people who said they too were there at the beginning and that they have always been into it (when everyone knows they only got into when it got big). Anyway, maybe one or two of you might consider becoming early adopters if you like what you see below.



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For those of you who are curious, these videos seem to be have made in support of Sedaris's new book: Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People. While I am not sure how many of the crafts in the books are crafts are crafts I might consider making, I can confirm that book is pretty funny (if you like the type of humour that is on display in the above video).

Canadian Political Science connection or where that library book came from

A few months ago, when I started to prepare for my comprehensive exams, I checked a number of books out from the library. Over the course of the past few months I have been slowly making my way through these books. Relatively early on the the process I noticed that one of the books, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence by Donald Creighton, had a signature on the front end paper.

At first I didn't really pay much attention to the signature as I assumed that it had been placed there by one of the book's borrowers at some point in the past 70 years. Then, a few months ago, for some reason or another I gave the signature another look.

Much to my surprise I found that the signature resembled the name of one of the significant figures in Canadian political science: R. MacGregor Dawson.



That his signature appear in a Dalhousie Library book didn't make much sense to me at first. Fortunately, a quick search shed some light on the situation. Amazingly, it seems that not only was Dawson born in Nova Scotia, but he received his BA and MA from Dalhousie and also had his first teaching gig at the university. The book was published by a prominent University of Toronto scholar at about the time Dawson arrived in Toronto.

I presume that upon his death in 1958 Dawson's books, or a portion of them, were donated to the Dalhousie libraries and have then been in circulation since then. Sadly, the bibliographic record for this book does not seem to note its provenance or provide me a way of finding out if there are other books from the same source (which there likely are).

Why I am mentioning any of this is that I just find it neat to think that because of the signature inside the front cover of this book I am able observe a connection (even if it only one individual owning the other's book) between two prominent early 20th century Canadian writers. It is also kind of neat to think that at some point Dawson was likely hunched over the same book I am now hunched over. I wonder if he was as displeased with the writing style as I am?

A Few Quick Notes 466

-We are in the midst of another pretty nice fall day in Halifax.

-Last night Nick, Rebecca's brother, and his girlfriend came into town and were at our apartment for a portion of the evening. This dovetailed nicely with my relatively intense week. Their presence gave me an excuse to take a break from work and relax. That being said, I think I may have found ways to relax had that not been here, though I may not have convinced myself that having a few beers was a worthwhile endeavour.

-We managed to lose our ultimate game on Wednesday by a wide margin. The irony being that the team to which we lost on Wednesday is the team against which we won our final game of the summer season, a win which made us pool B champions.

Actually, tonight is the night of summer Ultimate league party at which we will be presented with our prize for winning pool B. At this point I don't think any of us know what this might be, though I can't imagine that it will be too impressive.

-On Thursday night, after a week of intense reading, I finally finished John Porter's classic The Vertical Mosaic. I will have the pleasure of discussing this book in a classroom setting on Monday.

-I am just finishing my most recent round of laundry. Nothing quite like two loads of laundry to really kick off a Saturday afternoon.

Coincidence?

This morning I received an email notification from Amazon.ca indicating that they were now offering free shipping on orders exceeding $25.00 in value.

Just a few minutes ago I received an email from Chapters/Indigo indicating that they would now be offering free shipping on orders exceeding $25.00 in value.

Similar announcements are also on the main pages of both sites.

As these two emails came from distinct businesses I presume that these two emails are unrelated?

What I find most impressive about this is how long it took for this relatively low free-shipping limit to make its way from the US to Canada. I know that when I left New York in 2003 Barnes and Noble were even going so far as to offer free same day delivery in Manhattan on purchases over $25.00, and now, almost seven years later, we only have some of the services that have long been available in the US.

Times change

Is it just me, or would this passage from Donald Creighton's The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence likely not be written in the same way today: "Immediate these migrants had to come to terms with the new continent. From it they had to wrest a living; and since they were Europeans and not Indians, a living meant not merely the food to sustain life but the amenities of West-European civilization which alone could make it tolerable."

Really?

The message on the sign outside our neighbourhood church.

How does a book/movie in which a woman seems to find Buddhism (or some form of non-christian spirituality) end up being the reference for a sign on a christian church?

Just...groan.

In case you aren't familiar with the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon, here is the movie trailer.



[Embedded video].

In case you are curious, even though I have been known to fall for movies with romance and personal growth as themes, this movie just doesn't entice me at all.

A Few Quick Notes 424

-While this morning was beautiful (clear and warm), things have taken a slight turn for this worse this afternoon. The sky is now overcast and the winds have picked up. All of a sudden the thunder and lightning that have been forecast for this evening seem much more reasonable than they seemed earlier today.

-Just as a point of comparison on the changes in conditions of the weather in Halifax, here is a photo that I took early this afternoon.



This photo was taken just after 4:00 PM, the switch to a grayer sky is quite obvious.



-It seems that today is election day in the UK. It was about a week after the last election that I left Keele after my year as an exchange student in the UK. After the last election the Blair government retained its relatively significant majority. According to recent reports the present election isn't expected to produce such a clear result. The Globe and Mail is providing live coverage, as is my favourite newspaper, The Guardian. Hopefully I will be able to follow (at least intermittently) the coverage of the election results tonight.

-In April 2008 I posted a few videos on my YouTube account of the riots/violent celebrations that occurred after the first round success of the Montreal Canadians. Not only did these immediately become some of my most popular content, but I also ended up licensing them to the TV show Most Shocking. Anyway, after almost two years of YouTube obscurity these videos seem to be generating renewed interest with the current playoff success of the Montreal Canadians. I guess I should make it clear that 'renewed interest' only means that they are now sometimes receiving upwards of 30 views a day (I guess they are still relatively obscure as far as YouTube videos are concerned).

If you are interested, this is the most viewed of the set of videos.



[Embedded Video]

-Since I started working on this post it has started to rain intermittently. Tonight should be fun.

-This afternoon I finally motivated myself to move my old filing cabinet and place the new one.



Unfortunately I have not yet been sufficiently motivated to start filling the new filing cabinet. Also, hopefully within a few weeks the pots on top of the filing cabinets will be filled with plants.

-Yesterday I had the good fortune to pick up and start reading a book of essays by John Stuart Mill. Though it is not my habit, in this case I started reading the introduction. The introduction, at least the part I have read, describes aspects of Mill's intellectual development and charts his thinking on certain topics. One of the aspects of Mill's life (which seems to generally well known) that I found most impressive was that Mill's father, in association with the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, developed a program of education for Mill that was intended to create a perfect utilitarian. Perhaps not surprisingly after such a regimented upbringing Mill eventually moved away from some of these ideas and even went so far as to actively criticize Bentham's utilitarian positions. I am really looking forward to reading the rest of the introduction as well as a few of the essays.

-I had an ultrasound yesterday afternoon. It seems that I still have at least a few big stones, though I will likely only get the formal confirmation of this in a few weeks. That this is the case wasn't surprising in the least.

A Few Quick Notes 421

-Though I worried we might have some precipitation yesterday it seems that we seemed escaped unscathed. Unfortunately, we weren't quite so luck today. Not only has it been overcast all day, there have also been a number of periods of rain/precipitation.

-On Saturday Neil and Rebecca noticed that there were protestors walking around Cornwallis park. On Sunday I saw quite a number of protestors in the same location.

At the time we couldn't quite figure out why there were so many protestors. Eventually it became clear that much of this activity was likely related to G8 meetings that were scheduled to take place nearby.



Early this afternoon Neil and I tried to head to Pier 21 to see if we could see the protestors in person, but we wimped out once we saw how far we would have to walk through the rain to see them.

-Last night I had the misfortune of encountering a rather unpleasant bathroom fail.

As I was walking into the bathroom at the library I happened to pass an exiting janitor just as I encountered a rather overpowering stench. The janitor was trying to tell me something about someone "doing the South Park episode." Just as he said "it's not too bad now" I caught a glimpse of the middle urinal and noticed that someone had defecated in it. Classy (almost as classy as me telling the internet about it).

-Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to one of my profs about arranging a meeting about my upcoming comprehensive exams. While we were talking we somehow ended up on the topic of political biography. She highly recommended a multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson by Robert Caro. Anyway, I am hoping to have something of a dent in at least the first volume by the time of my meeting in about two weeks' time.

-Yesterday I noticed that my banana plant, which has been growing quite rapidly of late, has sprouted a new pup.



This time I am going to try to leave the pup alone until it is actually large enough to transplant (instead of just killing it by transplanting it too early).



-We are hoping to get some Settlers in tonight. Should be fun.

A Few Quick Notes 417

-We have some really beautiful weather recently. While today wasn't as warm as it has been, it was certainly still a very beautiful day.

-I am now 4/20, which might be restated as 1/5, in this year's Roll Up the Rim to Win contest. So it seems that I am actually doing much better than expected. I would have to drop to 4/36 to be where one would expect to be, and then below that to be doing worse than average. So maybe this year hasn't been quite as much of a wash as I was thinking it would be.

-I am not sure quite what it is, but our post Underlining Fail seems to be quite frequently hit with spam comments. Though we have more of these in recent months than we have ever had before, this one post seems to attract the majority of them. I am always somewhat teased when I see that we new comment only to find out that we have once again been spammed.

-For the past two nights I have had my sleep disrupted by what I presume is a mouse in the wall between the two bedrooms in our apartment. The ruckus was so loud last night that both Rebecca and I were basically unable to sleep for more than an hour at around 4:00 AM. The worst part of all of this is that it almost sounded as though the little guys were chewing/tugging on some of the wiring in the wall.

Tonight I reported the problem to the superintendent's husband, who indicated that he would call an exterminator tomorrow (or throw down a few glue traps if he had them). Both Rebecca and I are really hoping that we end up with the exterminator rather than glue traps (which won't be anywhere close to the problem).

-We are down to our final few bottles of Club Soda. Apparently 56 liters of Club Soda doesn't last all that long.

-Today I had my last class for the term. I still have a few things to take care of before my 'summer' starts. Of course, it being summer means that instead of classes to attend each day I will have reading to attend to. Should be fun.

-One of my department's senior professors retired last Summer, though is only now being thrown out of his office. To prepare for the move he is getting rid of many of his books. I was able to pick up a few that should be relevant to my thesis research, as well as a few that relate to personal interests. The most noteworthy of my picks, at least from the standpoint of my place of birth, was Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary by Richard Gwyn (I am presently part way through Gwyn's biography of Macdonald). Oh, I also picked up a copy of Creighton's biography of Macdonald (and to think that just yesterday I had a conversation with a friend in which I claimed to be better at reducing my acquisition tendencies than I had been in the past).

Book review published

I have some news to share that is only really news until the end of the day, so I figure now is a good time. The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) has a number of publications, one of which is their official bulletin, CMS Notes. Last year, the editor of the book reviews asked me to review a book.

Just before Christmas I finished by review and submitted it. I was told it was likely to be published in the February issue of CMS Notes. I can tell you now that it was. For those interested, the current issue is available on their website. I'll leave my comments about the book to the review.

Blog-off Score

Neil: 9

Cameron: 63