100 notable books from the NY Times

Too many to post them all in here.

So go and check them out there.

Evolution

Here is my new Xmas present:

Evolution, by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu (Auteur), Patrick Gries (Auteur), Jean-Pierre Gasc (Préface). I was in a library in Liege and saw it cover, a snake skeleton, and had a look inside. It contains a huge amount of beautiful photos of different vertebrates skeletons, shot in black and white against a dark background. Just wonderful. It’s 50EUR, but what the hell…

Not Alway Free market is the way to go…

At least, that’s what the German government, publishers, retailers and consumers altogether say, defending a system threatened by the opening of discounting on german-language books in Switzerland. Until now, the price of a german book would have been the same whether you bought it in the shop down the road, online or… well I can’t think of an alternative, but you get the idea.

This helped small sellers, and small publishers, to keep at bay big chains, fostering a wider, and arguably better, market.

What can I say? Good luck to the Germans. I will alway cheer on anybody who’s pro-books.

New Books

Carl Zimmer let us know that he’s just finished editing the concise edition of “The Descent of Man” by Charles Darwin. So, I went off to amazon to buy a copy together with “Fish with fingers, Whales with legs”, and… “Pearls Before Swine: Blts Taste So Darn Good”…

Here’s the proof:

Open Orders

Order Date: 8 Sep 2007 Order #: 202-4890542-7183528 Recipient: Luca A. Fenu

Items not yet dispatched: Delivery estimate: 28 Nov 2007 – 30 Nov 2007 1 of: The Descent of Man Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L. 1 of: Pearls Before Swine: Blts Taste So Darn Good Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L. 1 of: At the Water’s Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs… Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L.

The only prob is that I’ll have to wait to get the others too, since Amazon does make you pay for delivery (differently from Play.com, where I usually buy my stuff). So the stuff will not come through before end of November!!!

The best science book of my year

I just finished this book, and I must say that I loved it. The sheer breadth and depth of arguments treated in the book is mindboggling. The authors cover from the birth of the universe, through that of our planet, to Evolution, our role in the cosmos (or lack thereof) and our best survival strategy in a universe which, if not downright evil, is at least very uninterested to our existence.

Mind opening in so many levels, it really is the very first ’science’ novel.

I was a bit skeptic about the alternating structure at first, one chapter of novel followed by an explanatory chapter of science. Yet it does pick up and work wonderfully, giving you a light and varied yet interesting read. 10+!!!

(ps: I am looking forward to read the next one, now.

Narrativium rules!

I loved Good Omens, from Gaiman and Pratchett. The Discworld I could not bear, Pratchett’s humour needs to be tempered by someone else hand, otherwise it’s just too much.

RTight now I am reading “The Science of Discworld”, and I’m too lazy to translate from Italian what I posted in a private forum: here it is. The final part is about Stardust, the gaiman-inspired movie which is getting very good reviews from both critics and audience.

Proprio ora sto leggendo “The science of Discworld”, che e’ parte racconto fantasy, con i maghi della Unseen University che creano x accidente il ‘nostro’ universo e ne osservano gli eventi, parte divulgazione con articoli di Ian Stewart e Jack Cohen (e Pratchett ovviamente) che trattano degli stessi argomenti in maniera leggera e molto originale. Son a meta’ del primo e me lo sto godendo davvero, non vedo l’ora di attaccare il secondo e il terzo che ho comprato insieme.

riguardo Stardust, ecco un altro paio di reviews:

Da un sito amatoriale.

Dal sito di Sci-Fi Channel

NY Times

sembra OK.

su IMDB si e’ beccato un gran bel 8.3.

here’s the trailer:

(whenever youtube wakes up)

A Bug’s Death

Olivia Judson, evolutionary biologist at the university of Oxford and author of the wonderful Dr Tatiana Sex Advice to All Creation book, proposes to infect the malaria-carying mosquitoes with a killer gene, to estinguish the species within twenty generations or so.

After one night spent listening to two mosquitoes flying round my ears, I’m with Dr Tatiana. Who’s with us?

I apologize

for not posting more.

I’m back from conferencing round Europe, but work is heavy, and free-time at home is spent mostly setting up pieces of furniture and stuff. The little left is for my lady. And sometimes to sleep before the next day.

I’m reading a nice book (The Swarm) during commute time, when I am not trying to catch up with my PK studies and such. It’s about the sea inhabitants (whales, jellyfishes, even worms and bacteria) rioting and getting rid of humans. It reads heavy and documentary, at times, and characters are a tad stereotypical, but what the hell, it’s a good read. Although after three hunded pages still we have no clue on what is going on and the plot is getting stuck. We know some alien intelligence lurks in the darkness at the bottom of the oceans, but we are not even hinted about their nature or the scope of their actions. It gets kind of boring after a while. Science Fiction fans want to understand the alien, most of all. Not to watch it while it smashes to pieces human civilisation.

Interesting stuff though, especially in the technical bits. I didn’t know there was so much methane in the oceans, or that there were plans to extract it (how naive am I?). Nor about the complex ecosystems living off it.

Galaxy Dust

The stars like dust was one of Asimov’s (worst) novel in the future history going from the robot’s civilisations (I, Robot – The Naked Sun…) and the Foundation Cycle. In fact the Galactic Empire Cycle did suck, exception made for Pebble in The Sky (Paria dei Cieli), who told the story of a twentieth century man time-dislocated to this far-future where the galactic Empire is in full swing but planet Earth is barren with radioactive zones and only few survivors live in it as Pariahs.

But even Asimov could not imagine a dust made of… galaxies!!! The two big ones merging in front are quite known, although the name escapes me at the moment. Something like Tadpole’s Galaxies.

- update: the one above being an artist rendering, and a crap one at that, I am posting below a real picture taken by Hubble:

click on it to get the full resolution: JPEG – 4.48 MB(2476 x 1669 pixels)

read more | digg story

42

I’ve listened to the whole of BBC’s Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, yesterday.

thenm, I went to look for it on the wikipedia. Well, not exactly like this but I ended up on the wikipedia page related to number 42.

quite a lot of unsuspected info, indeed. Makes you think that may be Adams had some insight after all.

t is a composite number; its factorization makes it the second sphenic number and also the second of the form {2.3.r}. As with all sphenic numbers of this form the aliquot sum is abundant by 12. 42 is also the second sphenic number to be bracketed by twin primes; 30 also rests between two primes. 42 has a 14 member aliquot sequence 42, 54, 66, 78, 90, 144, 259, 45, 33, 15, 9, 4, 3, 1, 0 and is itself part of the aliquot sequence commencing with the first sphenic number 30. Further, 42 is the 10th member of the 3-aliquot tree.

42 is the product of the first three terms of Sylvester’s sequence; like the first four such numbers it is also a primary pseudoperfect number.

It is the sum of the totient function for the first eleven integers.

It is the third 15-gonal number.

It is a Catalan number.

It is a pronic number.

It is the twenty-eighth square-free integer.

It is the reciprocal of a Bernoulli number. It is conjectured to be the “third moment of the Riemann zeta function“. That means that when

is expanded as in powers of log(T), the leading coefficient—that of the 9th-degree term—is 42.

It is a meandric number and an open meandric number.

42 is a perfect score on the USA Math Olympiad (USAMO) and International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

In base 10, this number is a Harshad number and a self number, while it is a repdigit in base 4 (as 222).

The eight digits of pi beginning from 242,422 places after the decimal point are 42424242.

The first digit (4) taken to the power of the second digit (2) is equal to the second digit (2) taken to the power of the first digit (4): 4² = 2⁴ = 16. It follows clearly that 24 exhibits the same characteristic, and in fact 24 is the only other two-digit non-repdigit number that does. (All two-digit repdigit numbers exhibit this characteristic.)

In Science

• The atomic number of molybdenum. The element following molybdenum with atomic number 43 (technetium) has no stable isotopes.
• The number of teeth wolves and dogs (canines) have.
• 42° is the critical angle of refraction by water – it is the angle between a rainbow and the antisolar point.
• The light leaving a rainbow is spread over a wide angle, with a maximum intensity around 42°
• The number of minutes it would take a theoretical “gravity train” to travel to any point on earth.
• In one Grand Unified Theory, the Georgi-Glashow model, the inverse of the coupling constant is approximately 42.
• 10! (10 factorial) seconds is exactly 42 days.
• On page 7-10 of Volume 1 of “The Feynmann Lectures on Physics” is a marginal figure that illustrates the strength ratio of gravitation attraction and electrical repulsion between two electrons as 1/4.17 x 10^42. The denominator is also written out by hand as a long, snaking 4,170,… followed by 39 more zeros. Feymann mentions the unified field theory, the similarity of the inverse square laws, the disparity of the relative strengths, and asks “Where could such a large number come from? … it involves something deep in nature.”

[edit] Astronomy

• Messier object M42, a magnitude 5.0 diffuse nebula in the constellation Orion, also known as the Orion Nebula
• The New General Catalogue object NGC 42, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pegasus
• The Saros number of the solar eclipse series which began on 1577 BC April 28 and ended on 297 BC June 5. The duration of Saros series 42 was 1280.1 years, and it contained 72 solar eclipses.
• The Saros number of the lunar eclipse series which began on 1293 BC January 24 and ended on 59 April 15. The duration of Saros series 42 was 1352.2 years, and it contained 76 lunar eclipses.
• Gliese 42 is a magnitude 7.17 K3 V orange dwarf nearby star (14.5 pc) in Sculptor, also known as HD 5133, CD-31°325, G269-049, GCTP 177.00, and LHS 1163.
• Ross 42 is a magnitude 11.52 dM4 e red dwarf nearby star (14.1 pc) in Orion, also known as Gliese 206, G097-047, and GCTP 1259.00.
• The planet Uranus‘ north and south poles face the sun 42 years before switching, (example) the north pole experiences 42 years of summer and 42 years of winter and vice versa.
• The moon Io hurtles around its orbit once every 42 hours at a distance of 420,000 kilometers or so from the center of Jupiter.
• In January 2005, Asteroid 2001 DA42 was given the name Asteroid Douglasadams, named for the author Douglas Adams that popularized the number 42 and died in 2001. With even his initials in the provisional designation, Brian G. Marsden, the director of the Minor Planet Center and the secretary for the naming committee, said, “This was sort of made for him, wasn’t it?”

[edit] In Religion

• The number of generations (names) in the Gospel of Matthew’s version of the Genealogy of Jesus. The forty-two generations divide neatly into three parts.

• The number of months the Beast will hold dominion over the Earth (Revelation 13:5).

• The number (in the Babylonian Talmud, compiled 375 AD to 499 AD) of the “Forty-Two Lettered Name” ascribed to God. Rab (or Rabhs), a 3rd century source in the Talmud stated “The Forty-Two Lettered Name is entrusted only to him who is pious, meek, middle-aged, free from bad temper, sober, and not insistent on his rights”. [Source: Talmud Kidduschin 71a, Translated by Rabbi Dr. I. Epstein]. Maimonides felt that the original Talmudic Forty-Two Lettered Name was perhaps composed of several combined divine names [Maimonides "Moreh"]. The apparently unpronouncable Tetragrammaton provides the backdrop from the Twelve-Lettered Name and the Forty-Two Lettered Name of the Talmud.

• In the ancient Chinese text the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, chapter 42 is an explanation of the universe.

• The number of men of Beth-azmaveth in the census of men of Israel upon return from exile (Ezra 2:24).

• The number of Jewish captive exiles who returned from Babylon is 42,360. This figure appears in two identical verses: Ezra 2:64 and Nehemiah 7:66. The number 360 is the number of days in the Jewish year, which further isolates the number 42,000. Perhaps the number 42,360 is both literal and symbolic similtaneously.

• God sends bears to maul 42 of the youths who mock Elisha for his baldness (2 Kings 2:23).

• There are 42 principles of Ma’at, the Ancient Egyptian personification of physical and moral law, order, and truth.

• The number of lines on each page of the Gutenberg Bible, the first and oldest surviving book printed with movable type.^{[citation needed]}

• 42 is the number with which God creates the Universe in Kabalistic tradition.

• In the Kabbalah, the system of cosmology explained the significance of the various divine names and added other divine names. The most significant name is that of the En Sof (also known as “Ein Sof“, “Infinite” or “Endless”), who is above the Sefirot (sometimes spelled “Sephirot“). The Forty-Two-Lettered Name contains four combined names which are spelled in Hebrew letters (spelled in letters = 42 letters), which is the name of Azilut (or “Atziluth” “Animation”). While there are obvious links between the Forty-Two Lettered Name of the Babylonian Talmud (see further up this page) and the Kabbalah’s Forty-Two Lettered Name, they are probably not identical due to the Kabbalah’s emphasis on numbers. The Kabbalah also contains a Forty-Five Lettered Name and a Seventy-Two Lettered Name.