Notes
It's early in 2023 and I have a new reading device! I left a Kindle on the train from Quebec City to Montreal and in spite of notifying VIA Rail pretty promptly, no luck on gettin it back. The new reader is a Kobo Clara E2 and is excellent for reading library books, which is mostly what I do. Every bit a good as several year old Kindle Paperwhite. If you're in the market check it out.
I've got three books I'm flipping between. All good. Two related. Kinda.
Completed
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Currently Reading
Science Fiction
Well, I guess you call it that. Benjamin Labaut's book of shorts, When We Cease to Understand the World contains fiction and the fiction revolves around science, but there are no spaceships or other worlds or as yet unknown technologies. The characters are scientists or mathematicians struggling to describe phenomen a which have not been described or understood before. The characters are real. The stories are not. Likewise the unintended consequences are real. Translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Science Fact
Latitude has always been easier to determine than longitude. Where we are relative to the axis on which the Earth spins has accessible clues in the heavens, since the axis moves relative to the stars very slowly. Dava Sobel's Longitude tells the story of John Harrison, who made the first clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to determine longitude (which can be determined by knowing the difference in local time and the time of any point of known longitude, such as the port of departure). Harrison won an 20,000 pounds for developing a method of determining longitude, but only after decades of struggle, not only with building clocks of sufficient accuracy and seaworthiness (and small size), but with resistance from the scientific establishment. Harrison was not only untrained in scientific disciplines, he wasn't even trained as a clockmaker. The panel determining the award was loaded with the most highly trained scientiest, mostly astronomers, including some who sought the prize for themselves. Not exactly an unbiased bunch.
Gandhi
Gandhi's autobiography has the full title of An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth and proceeds chronologically with recollections of his life. I found it a bit of a slow start, but he's about to leave for England to study and it is gripping. His perspective is like no other, even from an early age. I do wonder how closely his memories track what happened. We all build our memories into a cohesive story that makes sense to us now, but I fear we simplify those distant memories and what we remember as our thoughts at the time, or only a subset of those thoughts that fit with the narrative we've built of our life. But taking that as it is, it's still fascinating to read Gandhi's understanding of how he became the Gandhi who we need to understand if we have any hope of making this world something better than it has been so far.
Started
Nothing new...
In Conclusion...
Or at least interim thoughts. All are worth reading. Sobel's backlog should provide some excellent reading for the future. Still not sure what I'll think of the auto-bio, but pretty sure at this point that I'll finish it.