Month: August 2006

Dennis Lehane

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Do you want to meet Dennis Lehane, the well-known author of eight novels, including Mystic River (made into a 2003 movie directed by Clint Eastwood) and Gone Baby Gone (made into an soon-to-be-released movie directed by Ben Affleck)? Aside from… Read More ›

Cold Moon

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Just finished reading Jeffery Deaver’s Cold Moon. Like the rest of his Lincoln Rhyme series, this novel is full of surprise turns. At many points, just when you’re finally sure that you understand what’s going on, there’s some new twist… Read More ›

I Heart Huckabees

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What a strange movie! I definitely enjoyed the unconventional film I Heart Huckabees, but it’s more than merely unconventional. I can’t do better than to quote a few sentences from Roger Ebert’s review: …the moment a movie is over, everybody… Read More ›

Hackers and Painters

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You should definitely read Paul Graham’s highly opinionated book, the one with the unlikely title of Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. But the first thing you have to know, if you’re not a computer geek, is… Read More ›

Spellbound

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Just finished watching Spellbound —the 2002 documentary, not the 1945 Alfred Hitchcock classic. (I do highly recommend the Hitchcock film, but that’s not the subject of this post.) What’s so interesting about the national spelling bee, anyway? Yes, that’s what… Read More ›

TWiki

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This was the last day of this year’s session of the Crimson Summer Academy, which has been the subject of various posts earlier in this blog. As always, it was an excellent session. As always, there were some glitches. But… Read More ›

More From Polymath

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In yesterday’s post, I recommended an article in the Polymathematics blog. That entire blog is well worth reading. For example, consider a discussion of whether 0^0 should be 0 (because zero to any power is 1) or 1 (because anything… Read More ›

Cell phones: good or bad?

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It sounds like a silly question: “Are cell phones good or bad?” Clearly they’re good in emergencies, but bad when they ring in the classroom. Clearly they’re good when you’re on a bus and have to call to say you’ll… Read More ›

S is for Silence

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Let’s see. This must be the 19th book in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. So it must be also be the 19th that I’ve read, since of course I’ve read them all in order — mostly because they’ve been published that… Read More ›

McCall Smith in Germany

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In several previous posts, I have written about the first five novels in Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana series, featuring Precious Ramotswe, as well as the first novel in his Edinburgh series, featuring Isabel Dalhousie. Now I’ve read all three in… Read More ›

McCall Smith in Botswana

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In a much earlier post, I discussed Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the first in a series of mystery novels taking place in Botswana. In the intervening months I have subsequently read the next four in the… Read More ›

Jasper Fforde

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I have recently read Jasper Fforde’s first three Thursday Next novels: The Eyre Affair (2002), Lost in a Good Book (2003), and The Well of Lost Plots (Feb. 2004). Where do I begin in describing this offbeat series? One reader… Read More ›

Mathematical Gangsta Rap

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Filled with in-jokes about cryptology and computational complexity, Mathematical Gangsta Rap is an amusing combination of high culture and low culture. But you’ll have to make your own decision about which is which.