21: Letters from New Orleans, Rob Walker

I read most of these on the web before, but I couldn't readily find the full text on the web anymore, and I wanted to re-read an essay about the song St. James Infirmary, so I bought it from an amazon reseller.

There are many amusing bits, delivered in a sometimes dry and sometimes bemused or even bewildered tone:

I got the impression that the Hot Eight [a jazz combo] might be an unruly bunch in general, one reason being that we saw them a couple of times and there were never eight of them—only six or seven showed up at a time.

and describing his first carnival parade:

[...] meaning the crowds are modest in size and mellow in temperament. Still, they want beads. At first I hadn't thought the whole bead thing would be that interesting. But it's impossible—when the beads start flying off the floats, and everyone around you is hollering for and catching them—it's impossible not to want to catch some beads yourself. You get swept up in it. And you holler and you rake in beads, and you lean over to catch strands that would have tumbled into the hands of a child and you pretend not to realize what you've just done.

[...]

Tourists. They were starting to get belligerent. COME ON MAN GIVE ME SOME BEADS. BEADS! BEADS! COME ON! BEADS! I NEED BEADS!

Hilarious.

The book has deep, thoughtful, philosophical, and, frankly, somewhat boring bits, but they're easily glossed. And the essay on St. James Infirmary is interesting.

20: Science & Music, Sir James Jeans

A basic scientific introduction to music. I'd had it lying around for a while, and I picked it up because Melissa recently read some book about music and was spouting random factoids at work. The woman has a far greater influence on my reading habits than is healthy. I hope she doesn't develop an obsession with Michael Crighton or some such nonsense.

Anyway: mostly stuff I'd read before, but a few new things. The chapters on Harmony and Discord were slow going at times (o! the scales of those crazy Greeks), but the ones on accoustics and reverberation were surprisingly pleasant. Most interesting it was to learn that substances like plaster and tile absorb higher frequency sounds much better than lower frequency ones. In a tiled or plastered room, lower sounds will echo around the room for longer periods of time than higher notes. (The larger the room, the longer they bounce around, of course, since they encounter fewer absorbing surfaces per unit distance travelled.) In Jeans's own words:

A bass or tenor voice will resound in all its richness, since its harmonics are only filtered out to a slight degree, but the same is not true for a sproano, hence the peculiary male pleasure of singing in the bathroom.

19: Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, Nick Hornby

Kepler's had a 30% sale thanksgiving weekend and I went nuts. Luckily, I stayed up till 5:30 Sunday morning to read the first purchase (not because it was so good, which it was, but because my circardian schedule is severely fucked up). Still, the backlog has grown significantly. (Have you noticed, dear imaginary reader, that I have not kept track of Books Bought anymore? Yes, that's because the kinds of numbers required to express their quantity require recursive tricks like Knuth's arrow notation.)

I loved The Polysyllabic Spree, and this is more of the same: book review columns Nick Hornby wrote for McSweeney's Believer magazine. (Perhaps I should subscribe?) Hilarious and edifying. Like, um, Schoolhouse Rock. Or something. Anyway: the reviews are short and whet the appetite: my amazan wishlist grew significantly.

18: The Definitive Book of Body Language, Allan & Barbara Pease

What a piece of fluff. Some interesting bits and pieces, but too many unreferenced claims. A lot of it reads like laymen playing with the ideas of Darwinism and evolution. Ugh.

There's an extensive bibliography (hilariously titled "References") at the back of the book, but its entries are not linked to the main text by end notes, so what's the point?

17: Tolkien: A Biography, Michael White

(Previously Critical Lives: J.R.R. Tolkien.)

It was on sale at Kepler's. Yeah. Pretty good. Made me want to write fairy tales and pick up Old English again.

16: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Matt Ridley

Yeah! Good stuff! Melissa recommended this.

Cute things I learned:

• Bdelloid rotifers and tardigrades can survive years in a dried state.
  
• Muller's ratchet: the genome of an asexually reproducing population accumulates defects in a non-reversible manner.
  
• Thomas Ray's Tierra: an early 1990's computer simulation (without an artificial fitness function).
  
• Histocompatibility: having the same alleles of a particular set of genes (the major histocompatibility complex or MHC). The genes are expressed in most tissue as antigens to which the immune system may make antigens. The immune system of the host will, of course, not do so. Transplant operations are trivial (well...) for histocompatible tissue. The cool bit is that plants use a form of histocompatibility to prevent inbreeding. Pollen histocompatible with the female plant causes zygotes to fail to grow or die soon after germination. Bitchin'!
  
• Some bamboos flower once every 121 years—at the same time the world over!
  
• Bilharzia (Schistosomiasis): caused by one of five species of Platyhelminthes Trematoda. Trematoda are just crazy. From wikipedia:

  Trematodes have a complex life cycle, often involving several hosts. The eggs pass from the host with the feces. When the eggs reach water, they hatch into free-swimming forms called miracidia. The miracidia penetrate a snail or other molluscan host to become sporocysts. The cells inside the sporocysts typically divide by mitosis to form rediae. Rediae, in turn, give rise to free-swimming cercariae, which escape from the mollusk into water. Using enzymes to burrow through exposed skin, cercariae penetrate another host (often an arthropod) and then encyst as metacercariae. When this host is eaten by the definitive host, the metacercariae excyst and develop and the life cycle repeats

  
  
• Tragedy of the Commons: conflict of resources between individual interests and the common good. Term first used by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population. The commons were communal land owned for grazing. The individual benefits from letting its flock graze as much as it wishes. The community benefits from everybody holding back their flock a bit, to prevent over-grazing.
  
• Chlamydomonas: I've forgotten why these were interesting.
  
• Cholesterol is a precursor for both testosterone and cortisol. I once knew this.
  
• Steroid hormones (like testosterone and cortisol) lower the immune system's efficiency. (Can cause and effect be reversed?) This is why men are more susceptible to infectious diseases.
  

I will need to re-read at some point, because there's lots of interesting stuff that merits further digging. There was the crazy organism with 13 ordered sexes, for instance. Brilliant!