Nullius in Verba

Other than few numeric errors, this book is suprisingly good and advance.
I learned of some recent development in molecular biology and found the details delightful. Except occasionally the Manga distracting and inferring my concentration. I guess that must be a generation thing. People 20 and younger should find this book grasp their attention.

More power to the Manga Guide!

So what will change everything? This a short list of what have been mentioned by all the smart and creative people interviewed in this book-

Green energy replaces oil.

We found alien or alien found us.

Artificial intelligence.

Live to 200 years.

Several people also mentioned transmission of brainwave different from person to person or person to machine, such as the successful experiment in 2008 in which a monkey was able to control a robot arm with brainwave to feed itself bananas. The invention will be very helpful to people with disability.

On the other hand, I found this idea not a very appealing. It is already bad enough that we have to suffer the violent, nasty, foolish language and behavior of some people; I can’t imagine a world that we have to suffer the attack of thought of same sort day in and day out. But I guess that will be very useful to detect which politician is brain death. We now punish people for their bad behavior, I wonder if we do have this brainwave detection technology, we will begin to jail people with bad thought. Afterall, ‘it is the thought that counts!’

For most of the people in this world, their deaths are likely to be mourned by their family and relatives only; otherwise, they fall silently like trees in a wood. But once in a while, there would be a death that is mourned by many strangers, even strangers that are born long after the deaths.  The death of Carl Sagan in 1996 at the age of 62 is one of such losses. I can’t help but wonder what more would he have done and how exciting he would have been to learn all the amazing discoveries in science in the first 10 years of 21st century. But then again, how sad he would have been to see his country involved in prejudices and wars that he had warned us repeatedly in the book ‘The Demon-Haunted World: science as a candle in the dark’.

This is a great book that should be widely read.  Some of his ideas and suggestions in improving science education to students and the society as a whole seem to have been adopted since the publication of this book. But my feeling is that for each of the changes that have been made, there have been three more nonsensical acts/believes sprung up everywhere. Are we doomed to fear even our own shadow despite the progresses in the past 100 years?

The name of the book perfectly describes the obsession of some mathematicians. ‘Primes’ are such a group of special numbers. On surface, it doesn’t look like there is a rule of predicting primes and their distribution, but on the other hand, there appears to be a pattern, a regularity of their appearance among all the infinite numbers. But if we only treat primes simply as an object of obsession of some weird scholars, we would be terribly wrong, because prime numbers are the basis for many encryption systems we are using nowadays.
This book aims to explain the “Riemann hypothesis”, a hypothesis about the distribution of primes, to the general readers who are interested in mathematics. Riemann hypothesis is proposed by a German mathematician Bernhard Riemann in 1859. So far, even after 150 years, mathematicians still cannot refute or confirm it. It is a fascinating story.
In the course of reading the book, I was side-tracked by the mentioning of the ‘sieve of Eratosthenes’.  It is a method developed by an ancient Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, more than 2200 years ago to derive primes. At the first look, I thought the method is quite interesting, but on the second look, I found out it is nothing but remove the multiples one by one from the lowest numbers. Say we want to find out the prime numbers between 1 and 100. All we have to do is to remove all the numbers that contain a lower number (other than 1) as their factor.  For example, we start from 2, and remove all the numbers with 2 as a factor, such as 4, 6, 8, etc, and then we move to 3, and remove all the numbers with 3 as factor, such as 9, 15, 21, etc. After continuing to do so, all the numbers left will be prime numbers.

I thought the name of Eratosthenes sounds familiar. After consulting the wikipedia, I found out he was also famous for accurately measured the earth’s circumference, which is a story I read before. He had been busy indeed. One thing I didn’t realize is that, Wikipedia also mentions that Eratosthenes’ contemporaries gave him a nickname of ‘beta’, from the second letter of the Greek alphabet, because he was considered as the second best in the world in almost any field. I am sure this is meant to be an honor, but something it just doesn’t feel right.

Probably because I have read several biology books recently, suddenly my former interest in Latin language was rekindled. So I began to read Carpe Diem: put a little Latin in our life by Harry Mount.

Only one third through now, but was distracted by an interesting Latin word mentioned in the book,  “Candidus”. People in biology are familiar with a genus of yeasts, called Candida, a group of whitish yeasts. The original meaning in Latin means ‘white’. Therefore, ‘candid’ means ‘pure, unvarnished’. But why ‘candidate’? Interestingly, that is because in ancient Rome, candidates for an election would wear togas covered in white chalk dust to make them stand out in a crowd. This reminds me of my elementary school days when we have to apply white chalk dust on our white sneakers every time after we washed them. The result is that when we later on ran out in our newly washed and white chalk dust covered sneakers, there would usually many white shoe prints on the ground when the dust flew off the shoes. Don’t remember when some administrators finally figure out this is quite a silly thing to ask every school children and their parents to do, and forever put the white chalk dust makers out of business.

On the other hand, it might be interesting now to see the candidates running for public office to put on some white chalk dust covered robe and see how they out smart their opponents. This will be much better than seeing them try to top each other with vicious words and acts.

‘Carpe diem’ means ’seize the day’. According to Wikipedia, it is originally from a phrase in a poem by Horace- “Carpe diem quan minime credula postero” (seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future).

I wonder if naturalists still exist in today’s world, where everything is so specialized that no one can immerse and excel simultaneously in multiple areas especially in a field as vast as biology. Great naturalists, like the renaissance men,  might only exist in a bygone period of human history forever? That surely will be a shame. How much our life will be impoverished without those naturalists that we owe so much to?

This book gives brief but interesting description to famous naturalists from ancient time (Aristotle, no kidding) to the late 19 century, accompanied by beautiful drawings, paintings and other pictures associated with them.  It seems like in order to become a famous naturalist, either you have to be rich, have great determination, or both; and it wouldn’t hurt to live longer either. Among all the naturalists described in this book, somehow, I was especially attracted to Pliny the Elder, who was a Roman natural philosopher lived during AD23-79.  Pliny was an avid reader. According to stories, he read daily from dawn to dusk, and considered any time away from his study as time wasted. He only stopped reading when he was bathing, and he had servants read books to him when he was being dried after a bath. He also had people carried him, rather than walk, when he needed to travel, so that he can continue to read on the road. The way he met his death also fits him well. At age of 79, when he was staying in his house at Naples (reading a book no doubt), the Vesuvius volcano erupted. Either trying to rescue friends over there, or to observe the eruption first-hand, he took a ship across the bay to south of Pompeii. Unfortunately, he came too close to the volcano, and collapsed and died due to the poisonous gases from the volcano.

On June 24, I visited Huntington Library in LA for the second time. Last time, when I went there, the Chinese Garden was still in construction. So I thought I would check it out this time since I have to be at LA for the geology tour. The Chinese garden turns out well-designed and layed out. The only issue is that it looks too new (although it is indeed new), which reminds me an old Chinese saying about this somewhat lamentable situation: 樹小牆新.
The Huntington library is more than a library. It actually has multiple gardens with different themes, and also multiple galleries with different exhibitions. It was founded by, of course, a wealthy family. The gardens and the collections are very beautiful, makes you feel it is not too bad to be rich. But on the second thought, eventually you have to disperse all your wealth, and even if you have something like a Huntington library, you still have to go through all the troubles of hiring people to take care all the gardens and collections. So not being rich, and of course not poor either, has its blessing in a way.
One of the important collections in the Huntington library is the Gutenberg bible printed on vellum in year 1455. It is supposed to be printed by Johann Gutenberg, a person we have learned in our history class at elementary school. The Gutenberg bible is valuable because there are only 11 copies left and only three in the USA. But of course, it is not the first printed book. Way before that, Chinese has been printing all kinds of books on papers, just with a different method.

The long history of books makes me wonder whether it will be ended in our time because of the prevailing of digital books? In ancient (and not so ancient) times, Chinese used to carve texts onto stones to preserve some important words. Today we can still see those texts in various places, including some unwanted “been here” scrawled on walls of famous sightseeing places. It is a much harder work than writing on papers or computers, but it also last longer. If one day, the human being was wiped out and all the computers and electronics eventually broke down, future visitors to the earth will probably wonder how come there is no trace of any great knowledge of the 20th century on earth, because all that left to be seen are texts such as 到此一遊 carved on stones and walls in various places.

This book by Matt Ridley describes interesting stories associated with each pair of chromosomes. I found the so called ‘intelligence’ genes on the chromosome 6 quite surprising and counterintuitive.
“… about half of your IQ was inherited, and less than a fifth was due to the environment you shared with your siblings- the family. The rest came from the womb, the school and outside influences such as peer groups. But even this is misleading. Not only does your IQ change with age, but so does its heritability. (!!!) As you grow up and accumulate experiences, the influence of your genes INCREASES (!!!) …. the hiritability of childhood IQ is about forty-five per cent, whereas in late adolescence it rises to seventy-five percent. As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmnetal influences are not inexorably cumulative. Heritability does not mean immutability.”

This sounds a little bit confusing, but maybe there are some truth to it. For example, children flourish differently even in the same environment. We often thought that is because some adjust better than others in an environment. But in fact, it might be the other way around, some children with certain disposition just click with what an environment can provide. Same for some recent theories in certain diseases that some genes make people prone to the external causes of of a disease.

Since the innate tendency is more important than the environments, so it probably follows that the parents should provide as many environments as possible to a child to see what makes him/her grows instead of making the child to cope and excel in an environment, because if the environment is competible with the innate tendencies the child will flourish to his/her full potential naturally.

Just finished reading “Naming Nature” by Carol Kaesuk Yoon yesterday. It is a book about taxonomy (or scientific classification of everything of the nature). The book is very interesting, funny, and easily accessible to anyone who are interested in the nature. I have learned a lot about the history of taxonomy, its major developments, and the answers to the two important questions “So what?” and “Who care?”.

Interestingly, I also learned why Darwin spent 8 years to study barnacle. Of course, he didn’t know it would have taken him 8 years to finished the study. He thought 10 months were probably quite enough when he started in 1846. More importantly, the author connected the “Barnacle period” with what was to come the groundbreaking evolution therapy later on. It makes perfect sense under the very powerful interpretation from the author.

This is the most recent book of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series by Alexander McCall Smith. I ‘read’ the recorded book of this one, and as usual, it is excellent. And same as before, there is not so much of a ‘detective’ story. It is more of a story about human decency, small agony and goodness that people encountered everyday. Same as before, it is filled with warmth, humor, and interesting but not exaggerated characters. One thing stuck me most; however, is the narrator, Lisette Lecat. Her voice gives life to the story. Somehow, her narrative makes every characters alive, gives each of them a distinct personality. She is the best narrator among all the recorded books I have ever ‘read’. I have watched an HBO movie of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It is an interesting movie rendition of the book; however, I think the recorded book actually gives a more vivid personally than the movie. This shows how powerful is the voice of Lisette Lecat to make the listeners visualize an image.