the corner office

For a while I was writing short reviews of books I'd read. Then I stopped reading as much for various reasons, and I stopped writing about the reduced reading I was doing. I won't dig up draft reviews from 3 years ago, since then suffice it to say that I've not read a lot, but did get through the Harry Potter books in 2009/2010 and a few others on the side and a boat load of probability textbooks.

Nonetheless, here goes, again.

The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics, by Steven E. Landsburg

The title + subtitle says it all, really. Landsburg is a mathematician-turned-economist and the best way to describe the book is that he pokes human nature with a stick. And then pokes and pokes and pokes and pokes it again. At some point he says something along the lines of 'people are generally irrational, inconsistent and wrong about things, but that's usually not a problem because being wrong doesn't cost us much.' He meanders through various topics (too many to go into here), but it's neither preachy, nor polemic, yet uncompromisingly rational.

The Code Book, by Simon Singh

A history of cryptography, with fairly accessible introduction to many of the concepts. Not as engrossing as Fermat's Last Theorem (see next), and probably flat-out boring for most people. I didn't enjoy the ending: it devolves into a discussion about the issues and ethics surrounding unbreakable cryptography. Just not as engrossing as the rest of the book, which is a nonetheless a good read.

Fermat's Last Theorem, by Simon Singh

You can watch the original BBC documentary of the same name on YouTube, but the companion book just fleshes it all out (and includes much, much more on the history). What history is that? A long time ago a brilliant mathematician scribbles down a fairly simple theorem in the margins of a book and writes 'I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.' The note is discovered after his death, and for centuries, a proof eludes the world's best mathematicians. Eventually a soft-spoken mathematician fulfils a childhood dream and finds a proof, after devoting seven years of his life to the task, working in secret. The story leaves you humbled, and Singh's telling of it is engaging and sensitive. Excellent book.

Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, by Nick Lane

Biology isn't my strong point. The book was interesting but there was plenty I didn't understand. What I enjoyed most about the book was just how miraculous and wonderful our very existence and evolution has been. What I enjoyed least was that the subject matter provides a constant and uncomfortable reminder of just how frail and flimsy and breakable we are, as organisms.

Do you think, like me, that the world would be better place if there were less phone hacking news, more brylcreem, and more TV with obscure people doing obscure things while being tastefully filmed from behind a studio pot plant? If so, then this is for you.

I would just like to say that I thought Case Histories was an excellent series and I hope they do a second run. Edinburgh looks like an amazing place.

Imagine you have two options:

• Option A: take two thousand pounds from taxpayers and give an out-of-work family a 3-bedroom home in a central London suburb for a month.

• Option B: say 'sod the family', take the two thousand quid and save the lives of 1000 starving Somalians instead.

I'm not a Christian but I think it would be very hard to take a self-professed Christian's views seriously if they said their "God of Love" favoured option A. Ever.

Which is why I think the Archbishop of Canterbury is a first-rate hypocrite.

You can argue about the merits and demerits of the welfare state all you like, but you cannot argue that is based on some form of superior morality. The poorest and neediest of Britons are usually still immensely better off than the majority of human beings on this planet. If you're in the business of caring about humanity (as opposed to being the business of caring about Britons, as politicians are), then what makes Britons more special than anyone else?

So much for Williams' 'deserving versus undeserving poor' moralising, too. Why does he think it's ok to be 'deserving' based on which side of an imaginary line on a map a person was born on?

And yet again, gentle reader, that is not a rhetorical question.

Some grumbling about the arrival of privately-funded celebrity-academic-studded New College for the Humanities. I think it sounds a bit gimmicky, but beyond that, I have no opinion on whether it's a good idea or not, any more than I have an opinion on whether some dude opening a business or starting up a charity down the road is a good idea or not. And it's nobody's business, frankly. Some people want to do something, other people are willing to give them money to do it. Good luck to them. It'll either succeed or fail. No guns are being held to anyone's heads, so what's the big deal?

If anything, every person going to NCH is a person not taking a place at a state-funded university, meaning that some other lucky bugger gets an education, too. If education is so good for the country, why aren't people celebrating the arrival of an institution that's going to educate more people?

That isn't a rhetorical question, either.

The poor smurfs. I remember when they were all about teh gay because there were only male smurfs (except for Smurfette of course), and then they were all about teh Satan because Papa Smurf was taking the place of God, and who knows what else.

Now it's racism and anti-semitism. Maybe the dude's right, although perhaps the smurfs are just the smurfs, and the real problem is that people be hatin' on them 'cause they iz blue.

(Fwiw, I did see a copy of Tintin in a bookshop a few months ago with a red wrapper saying something along the lines of 'this book depicts some ethnic groups based on colonial attitudes from a different time, may cause offense'. When you're not the one being offended you might think it's political correctness gone mad, but I can imagine for a lot of people some depictions from popular fiction aren't so innocuous at all).

Mom and Dad are chillaxing upstairs and trying to wake up on bank holiday morning, junior has gone downstairs to play. Suddenly, crash, bang, thump.

"Leooo"

"Yeeeees?"

"What're you doing down there?"

"Nothiiiing"

Marmite banned in Denmark. What is the world coming to &c &c.

As a matter of principle I think it shouldn't matter if Marmite was laced with crack cocaine and strychnine - as long as people know what's inside and choose to buy it anyway, who cares?

That is not a rhetorical question.

... is not a real word. I have corrected my previous post and apologise for what I know is a terrible drop in standards.

If you want to know who the footballer is who got jiggy with the Imogen lady then go to any news web site and look for the example text they'll undoubtedly be quoting then go to twitter and bang some of the text into the 'search' box and off you go, you've just witnessed someone being in contempt of court.

Strength in numbers. I noticed some twitterererer who was happily blabbing who it was, saying 'they can't sue all of us' and I thought 'yeah dude, the wealthy footballer doesn't need to sue all of you, he just needs to sue one of you. Are you feeling lucky?'

This reminds me of a joke I remember hearing as a kid. Soldiers never worry about the bullet with their name on it. They worry about the one addressed to 'To Whom It May Concern.'

I don't think that has much to with the issue at hand, but I've always enjoyed the joke.

I digress. I think this superinjunction business isn't as cut and dried as the indignant media or the self-righteous twitterati would like to make it. I think if you agree that people have some right to privacy then you need to be careful when you start huffing and puffing about superinjunctions. If you say 'privacy yes' then you agree there's a line, and you're just getting worked up over where to draw it. Now I think you can have some serious discussions about that line, and people will have different opinions, but I think a lot of the people getting extremely self-righteous over where an arbitrary and conceptual line is being drawn are just full of shit.

What's more, the fact that it's the rich and famous in the UK who get these things means the papers have had a field daying playing class war. Doesn't help the issue, much.

Aaaanway, I found out who it was because I was curious. Apparently the dude's all famous and stuff but I'd never heard of him before. My life never felt incomplete because of it.