Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[Cyclops]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Emmm... I hope you don't take House as a source of serious medical information... I only watched one episode, but in it he operated someone to take away his memory.

I watch it because i like House's cantakerous character and the chemistry between him and his interns. But you need to watch more episodes, past season 1

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by Cyclops

I watch it because i like House's cantakerous character and the chemistry between him and his interns. But you need to watch more episodes, past season 1

Well, maybe I should tell you the rest of the episode so that you understand why I will never watch House again.

Do you know why this guy needed his memory removed? Because he was in love with a co-worker who was engaged to his brother, which caused him to have a heart attack every time she entered the room. I won't even comment on the medical part, but the only solution House can come up with is a memorectomy. You see, if the guy's memory is wiped out, he won't remember he's in love with the girl, and everything will be peachy.

And what is the guy's reaction? Throw the damn electrodes at House's face and storm out to request a transfer to another unit, or move to another town, or just elope with the girl, right? Well no! He just says: "Uh, OK Doc, whatever you think best". I must say that if real firefighters have the intellect of this guy (yeah, he's a firefighter), it's a miracle houses don't burn to the ground before they find which end of the water hose to connect.

I don't have a problem with non-realistic situations, if they're done well and with humor. But, although there is humor in House, I got the distinct feeling I was supposed to take this whole "medical" situation seriously. Maybe it's just because my father used to be a surgeon, but that was a wee bit too much for me, I'm afraid. And as for humor, Scrubs was much better at that in my opinion.

But wait, that's not all! After the guy's memory has been surgically removed (brilliant procedure, Dr House! Oh no, not at all, just doing my job, you know), it turns out the whole thing was a hallucination, and the girl was NOT engaged to his brother after all! To which news he reacts by saying "Uh, what am I gonna do now, doctor?". And the doctor (not House, the woman, don't know her name) replies with a bright smile: "Oh, that's all right, you just have to start over!". End of episode, cut to the credits.

I rest my case.

[kennyc]

Just started Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

Excellent, excellent, excellent out of five stars I give it ten!
Twice as good as any other book.

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-.../dp/0767908171

[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Just started Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

Excellent, excellent, excellent out of five stars I give it ten!
Twice as good as any other book.
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I can also recommend The Mother Tounge by Bryson. A fascinating history and explanation of the English language and how it got where it is.

[FlorenceArt]

Still reading History of Beauty by Umberto Eco, but I keep getting sidetracked, in a good way. Right now I am reading a fascinating Wikipedia article about Beatus of Liébana, because I was surprised and intrigued by one of the illustrations in the book. I am reading the French version of this article.

I can't believe I used to live without the Internet

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Still reading History of Beauty by Umberto Eco, but I keep getting sidetracked, in a good way. Right now I am reading a fascinating Wikipedia article about Beatus of Liébana, because I was surprised and intrigued by one of the illustrations in the book. I am reading the French version of this article.

I can't believe I used to live without the Internet

And here is the map of the world at the beginning of Beatus' Apocalypse. It puzzled me for a while before I realized that it is oriented with the East on top.

[SeaBookGuy]

Originally Posted by Cyclops

Sounds interesting! I find forensics fascinating-I quite like watching House too, even tho I dont understand all the mnedical terms!

Dead Men Do Tell Tales is an e-book from the public library -- I wouldn't have known about it, but since getting an e-reader recently I scour the new e-acquisitions regularly (compulsively?).

[MickeyC]

Just finished the latest Lee Child novel, Worth Dying For and it was much better than his previous book. This one actually had an ending and didn't just stop.

BTW, on very glaring error although it doesn't affect or even detract from the story. Let me know if anybody else spots it.

Next The Greatest Show in Earth by Richard Dawkins

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Just started Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

Excellent, excellent, excellent out of five stars I give it ten!
Twice as good as any other book.

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-.../dp/0767908171

I was planning on reading At Home by Bryson after I have finished with Fall of Giants, but I think I might read A Short History first. I love style, Notes from a Small Island was very recognisable for me as a foreigner who has lived in the UK for a while. I gave my Bryson pbooks to my sister but she hasn't started reading them, she's reading The Vampire Academy series now.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

I just finished "Side Jobs" by Jim Butcher (waaaa I want the next one to come out now!!!) and have started "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis, which I picked up in hardcover at the library. I love books on economics, and this one came highly recommended. In a nutshell it's a book about the 08 economic collapse.

Did you notice that the intro run into the stories? I had to fix that mess so it was a lot easier to read.

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Did you notice that the intro run into the stories? I had to fix that mess so it was a lot easier to read.

Yeah, the only way to tell was the first letter of the beginning of each story was bolded.

I'm a little over halfway through "The Big Short" and am totally loving it.

[FlorenceArt]

Just started The Opposing Shore (Le rivage des Syrtes) by Julien Gracq. The style is a bit oldfashioned, it was published in 1951, maybe that was before the Nouveau Roman? Anyway, I was a bit dubious at first but it looks interesting. I finished the first chapter.

I wonder if I'm reading too many books at the same time. According to Librarything, I am currently reading 5 books, inclusing Seneca (yes, I am still reading it!).

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Just started Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

Excellent, excellent, excellent out of five stars I give it ten!
Twice as good as any other book.

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-.../dp/0767908171

I just love stuff like this (from chapter 2):

...
And how far is that exactly? It's almost beyond imagining. Space, you see, is just enormous—just enormous. Let's imagine, for purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won't go terribly far—just to the edge of our own solar system—but we need to get a fix on how big a place space is and what a small part of it we occupy.
Now the bad news, I'm afraid, is that we won't be home for supper. Even at the speed of light, it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But of course we can't travel at anything like that speed. We'll have to go at the speed of a spaceship, and these are rather more lumbering. The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are now flying away from us at about thirty-five thousand miles an hour.
The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a “gravity assist” technique in which the craft were successively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of “crack the whip.” Even so, it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto. The good news is that if we wait until January 2006 (which is when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is tentatively scheduled to depart for Pluto) we can take advantage of favorable Jovian positioning, plus some advances in technology, and get there in only a decade or so—though getting home again will take rather longer, I'm afraid. At all events, it's going to be a long trip.
Now the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it—the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus—fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system were remotely drawn to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.
Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.
So the solar system is really quite enormous. By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sun—our dear, warm, skin-tanning, life-giving Sun—has shrunk to the size of a pinhead. It is little more than a bright star. In such a lonely void you can begin to understand how even the most significant objects—Pluto's moon, for example—have escaped attention. In this respect, Pluto has hardly been alone. Until the Voyager expeditions, Neptune was thought to have two moons; Voyager found six more. When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons. The total now is “at least ninety,” about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years.
The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large we don't actually know what is in our own solar system.
Now the other thing you will notice as we speed past Pluto is that we are speeding past Pluto. If you check your itinerary, you will see that this is a trip to the edge of our solar system, and I'm afraid we're not there yet. Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts, but the system doesn't end there. In fact, it isn't even close to ending there. We won't get to the solar system's edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won't reach the Oort cloud for another—I'm so sorry about this—ten thousand years.

....

This was written before Pluto was demoted btw...

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I just love stuff like this (from chapter 2):

...
And how far is that exactly? It's almost beyond imagining. Space, you see, is just enormous—just enormous. Let's imagine, for purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won't go terribly far—just to the edge of our own solar system—but we need to get a fix on how big a place space is and what a small part of it we occupy.
Now the bad news, I'm afraid, is that we won't be home for supper. Even at the speed of light, it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But of course we can't travel at anything like that speed. We'll have to go at the speed of a spaceship, and these are rather more lumbering. The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are now flying away from us at about thirty-five thousand miles an hour.
The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a “gravity assist” technique in which the craft were successively flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of “crack the whip.” Even so, it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto. The good news is that if we wait until January 2006 (which is when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is tentatively scheduled to depart for Pluto) we can take advantage of favorable Jovian positioning, plus some advances in technology, and get there in only a decade or so—though getting home again will take rather longer, I'm afraid. At all events, it's going to be a long trip.
Now the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it—the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus—fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system were remotely drawn to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.
Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.
So the solar system is really quite enormous. By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sun—our dear, warm, skin-tanning, life-giving Sun—has shrunk to the size of a pinhead. It is little more than a bright star. In such a lonely void you can begin to understand how even the most significant objects—Pluto's moon, for example—have escaped attention. In this respect, Pluto has hardly been alone. Until the Voyager expeditions, Neptune was thought to have two moons; Voyager found six more. When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons. The total now is “at least ninety,” about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years.
The point to remember, of course, is that when considering the universe at large we don't actually know what is in our own solar system.
Now the other thing you will notice as we speed past Pluto is that we are speeding past Pluto. If you check your itinerary, you will see that this is a trip to the edge of our solar system, and I'm afraid we're not there yet. Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts, but the system doesn't end there. In fact, it isn't even close to ending there. We won't get to the solar system's edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won't reach the Oort cloud for another—I'm so sorry about this—ten thousand years.

....

This was written before Pluto was demoted btw...

That sure puts things in perspective!

We can't depend on alien technology for space travel either. They may be able to build ships capable of exceeding light speed that are able to navigate safely through the dangers of a hostile universe, but if they crash upon arrival in Roswell, what good are they?

Their cloaking technology is a bust, also. It keeps them from being seem by journalists and scientists, but they still haven't found a way to hide their presence from farmers in Kansas.

[kennyc]

And what about traveling across the universe to create crop circles!