Bradshaw, Gillian - The Sand-Reckoner

This, oddly enough, may be the Bradshaw that I fell in love with most quickly. It took me a while to warm to Island of Ghosts, largely because it was the first Bradshaw I'd read, and while I liked The Beacon at Alexandria, it didn't make me grin as immediately as this one.

Er, mostly that's because the two weren't on math.

The Sand-Reckoner is on Archimedes. Unlike the first two Bradshaws I've read, it's not in first-person, largely because Archimedes' first-person POV would probably be completely incomprehensible to most people. While he's the focus of the story, the book is also on his reluctant slave Marcus, along with his city's ongoing war with Rome and possibly Carthage.

And because I am a giant dork, my favorite part of the book wasn't Marcus, who is a wonderful character, but the math and the wonder of it, the sheer geekery of remembering bits and pieces of high school geometry and calculus, double cones, hyperbolae and parabolae. The sheer brilliance of Archimedes is astounding, and the best part is that Bradshaw isn't making it up. Obviously, Archimedes' personality may not be historically accurate, but it's just so cool reading about him trying to figure out pi as a way to cope with grief (and actually naming it "pi"), and how he doesn't think his inventions are marvellous and wonderful, simply common-sense.

I never thought I would gravitate toward Bradshaw's books because of how she portrays intellectual interests, but that's turned out to be a big draw for both this book and The Beacon at Alexandria. It's strangely exciting reading about people studying things they love, and even though they're things I may not love or understand, the sheer joy in scholarship and knowledge is infectious.

I miss school now. And I feel bad that I was never wonderful at math -- I always understood enough to do it, but I never had that beautiful, instinctual grasp of the workings behind it that Archimedes did. But then, that's what made the book such a joy to read.

I keep thinking of this as a very Yoon-ish book, given the math and the music.

Sometimes, I'd feel like people were overly awed by Archimedes, and then I would think on what he was actually doing and how ahead of the times he was, and I would completely understand why Marcus says that even if Archimedes were his enemy, he would never kill him because it would be such an irreparable loss to human understanding.

My very favorite part of the book was Archimedes grieving over his father's death. He sits and scribbles on the floor to try and figure out the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, and when his mother finally talks to him, he says something like: This number is infinite! It goes on forever, no matter how much I narrow it down. And maybe, since there's some part of our minds that understand and grasp an infinite number, maybe there's some part of us that's infinite as well.

Links:
rilina's review

Knitting and cooking and crafty geekery

I haven't blogged about knitting for a while, largely because it took a while to finish some projects that weren't particularly teaching me anything new anymore.

(I also haven't blogged about cooking for a while, but that is because of the move and the lack of kitchen. Rest assured (or tremble in fear!), as soon as I get my kitchen set up and enough disposable income saved up, there shall be experimentations in bread making, pizza making, souffle making, pad thai making, scallion pancake making, and other such completely reckless endeavors, given my general lack of experience.)

This is mostly sparked by a day spent camping out in the Tower Records bookstore reading Knitting Rules! by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (aka, the Yarn Harlot). I don't agree with everything in the book, naturally, but it was so full of knit geek joy that it was quite inspiring.

I liked the book very much, largely because it seems to belong to my own small camp of the crafty ethos. Aka, the one in which I seem to be congenitally incapable of using a pattern or a recipe without futzing around with it in some way, in which I am perpetually trying to look for shortcuts to avoid the things I dislike doing, in which I tend to assemble equipment from scraps instead of going out and buying something.

I tend to learn via experimentation; any time I read up on everything before doing something, I freeze in fear of doing something wrong and end up doing nothing at all. I very much admire people who read everything and figure out all the tricks and tips.

( Knitting project blather )

My favorite part of Knitting Rules! may have been how to classify TV/movie watching:

- Things with subtitles = simple garter stitch or ribbing, no shaping necessary
- Things with complex plots = relatively easy projects that don't require much tracking
- Things you can just listen to = sock and whatnot
- Things that you don't really want to watch but are on anyway = lace and fair isle!

Sadly, that's exactly how I decide what to watch sometimes. Sometimes anime gets vetoed because I want to work on my [insert project here].

Anyhow, the book got me thinking about the type of knitter I am (I was mentally arguing with Pearl-McPhee about circulars vs. DPNs).

( What kind of knitter I am )

What type of knitter are you?

(no subject)

Eeeeeeee!!!!!!! ranith has a post on mahjong and Saiyuki!!!!!!!

I am so excited! Also, this means I don't have to fumble through my manga and try and figure out how Japanese mahjong differs from how I play!

And... mahjong! I love mahjong ^_^.

Also, ha, I'm so glad Sanzo is west and Goku is east. It makes me feel vindicated -- I like the idea of a reincarnation in which not-Sanzo, not-Gojyo and not-Hakkai meet every week to play mahjong but they can never find a permanent person to be the fourth guy (because Goku is under a mountain)! I had Goku being the West seat, so the West seat was always empty for the guys until they finally stopped playing togther.

I also sort of wish that the mahjong game in the series had Sanzo to Goku's left, because that would have meant Goku was winning directly off Sanzo's discards all the time (very symbolic!), but oh well.