Recent Posts - page 120

  • Saturday

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    What an interesting novel! I have just finished Ian McEwan’s Saturday (on audiobook), a slow and powerful exploration of 24 hours in the life of an English neurosurgeon. But it’s full of flashbacks, so the reader gets much more than… Read More ›

  • A Cry for Self-Help

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    As a mystery combined with a satire on newage human-potential groups, Jaqueline Girdner’s A Cry for Self-Help is occasionally amusing. But there are too many nearly indistinguishable characters, far too many stereotypes, and almost no plot. Don’t bother reading it.

  • More dim sum at Chau Chow

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    In my post of May 9, I had promised to review the new branch of Chau Chow that recently opened in Dorchester. But then, alas, my blog went on hiatus, so you’ve seen no review from me. Here, at last,… Read More ›

  • 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 ›

  • When you've forgotten the combination to your lock…

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    As we all know, combination locks should really be called permutation locks. Actually, that isn’t quite right. Duplicates are allowed, so you aren’t really taking permutations of 40 numbers. But that isn’t the subject of this post. The point is… 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 ›

  • Vacationing in Lexington, Newton, and Quincy

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    If you’re not going anywhere for vacation, how about being a tourist at home? That’s what Barbara and I did this year as a consequence of having unfortunate summer calendars: we ended up having a total of one week’s vacation… 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 ›

  • Unaccustomed excitement at the Museum

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    Part of our at-home mini-vacation (more on that later) was an all-too-rare visit to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, all-too-rare since we’re members and ought to be taking more advantage of that opportunity. Anyway, we wanted to see the Americans… Read More ›

  • This year we decided to cut back on the number of topics

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    Less is definitely more. In the first summer of the Crimson Summer Academy (2004) we attempted to explore two different (but related) topics in our Quantitative Reasoning (QR) course for rising sophomores: Visual Representations of Data and Models of Voting…. Read More ›

  • Ruth Rendell: Thirteen Steps Down

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    “The doyenne of the crime writing world” is Mystery Ink’s description of Ruth Rendell. I’ve long been a fan of her fiction, not only her traditional detective series featuring Inspector Wexford but also her psychological crime novels. By this point… 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 ›

  • Why .999… really does equal 1

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    Do read the fascinating (but long) post in Polymathematics about why .999… really does equal 1.

  • 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 ›

  • World's best version of Life

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    Check out the world’s best version of Conway’s Game of Life.

  • 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 ›