Books

Because claudine_c asked:

1. Total number of books owned: samantha2074 and I together have somewhere in the neighborhood of 400-500 books in here. About half of them started out as mine, so I'll say 200-250. There have been multiple purges in the past, some of which I regretted later. Note added later: Looking more closely at my bookshelves makes me suspect that this is a gross underestimate, and that there are actually more like 700 or 800 books in this house. Maybe I should do a more accurate count...
2. Last book bought: Heavy Planet, a collection of Hal Clement's Mesklinite stories, including the novels Mission of Gravity (reviewed here earlier) and Star Light. These days books are prime birthday-and-Christmas-list material so I don't technically buy the majority of them for myself.
3. Last book read: Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. It's a well-written and amusing enough dystopian science-fiction Chandler pastiche, though it has a little bit of that Mainstream Author Slumming quality: I get the sense that the genre devices in it are supposed to seem more original than they do. I appreciated that it stays within the bounds of a traditional hardboiled-detective story; the hero doesn't save the world, but he does get his own kind of satisfaction.
4. Five books that mean a lot to me (I think I'm going for formative influence here):
   • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Even acknowledging its structural imperfections and somewhat rushed ending, I still think this is the best novel ever written by an American as well as one of the funniest and saddest, and (while explicitly denying it in the epigraph) it has at its heart a profound moral statement that I still treasure. I first read it in a greatly abridged kids' edition and laughed at the Duke and the Dauphin; I kept coming back to the complete novel later on and the thing just kept revealing more layers. Come to think of it, it's been too long.
   • Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter goes on about artificial intelligence, mathematical logic, art, music and DNA with side trips into poetry and physics, and tries to hook it all together in some metaphoric sense. This weird, rambling, phone-book-sized opus, alternating between dense nonfiction chapters and playful Lewis Carrollesque dialogues (one of them actually is by Lewis Carroll), was probably the single greatest brainbomb I encountered in my early adolescence, and it has a lot to do with who I am today. I have a feeling that it wouldn't impress me quite as much today; I find many of the connections he was trying to make frustratingly vague. But it was just the thing for the time and age that I read it; the thread that really runs through the whole thing is a resounding permission to play with ideas.
   • 5000 B.C. by Raymond Smullyan. This is the only book on this list that I actually have on my bookshelf today! A logician who is also a peculiar sort of semi-rationalist mystic talks about life, death and philosophy. As with Hofstadter, I have my quibbles with some of the things Smullyan says about metaphysics and ethics, and I have no idea whether his take on Taoism, Buddhism and such is at all accurate (I have a feeling that it's at least greatly simplified). But when I'm in one of my fits of crushing moral anxiety, for some reason I find this a profoundly soothing book to read, probably in the same way that some people take comfort in the religious scripture of their choice. I think it's something about the fundamental kindness of Smullyan's worldview. He emphatically rejects the idea that right and wrong are some kind of rigged game played by secret rules.
   • Buy Jupiter and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov. This is one of the countless re-bundlings of some random subset of Asimov's short fiction with jaunty and egotistical introductions by the author, printed in the mid-Seventies. I include it not because it is at all remarkable among such volumes (the contemporaneous Nightfall and Other Stories, which I read later, probably had the better material), but because it's really the book that introduced me to post-Golden Age adult SF. I must have re-read it dozens of times, and in all the stuff I wrote for my friends in high school I was ripping off Asimov's style mostly on the basis of this one book. Finally, the last one I have to mention is a weird one:
   • The Random House Encyclopedia. I spent a gigantic amount of time leafing through this fascinating monster of a book in my late childhood. It's a peculiar undertaking, a single doorstop-sized volume attempting to cover everything in the universe, with much of its page real estate devoted to pictures. There's a shorter alphabetical section in the back, with little squib articles cross-referenced to the colorful, subject-organized main section, which devotes a two-page spread to everything deemed a major subject of human knowledge or endeavor: brief synoptic article running along the top, giant, lavishly captioned color pictures filling the rest. Some of the pictures in the technology pages are a sort of apotheosis of the cutaway diagram, of a very British variety (I think much of it was of British origin). I remember being deeply embarrassed by the naked pictures in the human biology section. I suppose it would be nearly useless as a starting point for real research of any kind, but it felt more sophisticated than kiddie encyclopedias and was definitely a cut above those vapid Time-Life quasi-educational book series. It was a sort of teaser trailer for a lifetime of trying to understand things.
   • Honorable mentions put here because I was limited to five (I do still have a few of these): Cosmos by Carl Sagan, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem, Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder, The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagels, The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman with Richard Leighton and Matthew Sands
5. Next victims (unless they've already done this, or don't feel like it): samantha2074, jwgh, secretive_bus, partiallyclips, sanspoof

Rings, rings and more rings

The Cassini website people went a while without updating the raw image archive, but now there are truckloads of pictures of the rings of Saturn up there, many of them strikingly beautiful. None of them are as close-up as the ones taken during Saturn orbit insertion last summer, when the spacecraft passed directly over the main ring system, but they include some of the best ones taken since then, now that Cassini is in a more inclined orbit for the purpose of observing the rings.

Here's an interesting comparison of the rings' optical brightness and opacity to radio waves (the latter found by listening to signals from Earth through the rings as the spacecraft passes behind them, seen from our perspective).

And here's my favorite recent photo release, the rings seen refracted through Saturn's atmosphere.

Meanwhile, Titan has a mysterious spot.

An audacious claim

These people have a proposed history of the solar system that they claim explains, among other things, the Late Heavy Bombardment just under four billion years ago that produced the dark "seas" on the Moon (and probably other giant impact craters such as the Caloris Basin on Mercury and Hellas Basin on Mars). It involves changes in the orbits of the giant planets causing a storm of rogue planetesimals.

Microbial life may have been first emerging on Earth around this time. It's an open question how it got through; some of the impacts may have been enough to boil the oceans. These days, though, we know that there are living things deep down inside the crust...