Today, I give you the usual list.

If you like to trade books, try BookMooch.

What are you reading?  is crossposted to Daily Kos

The usual list:

Just finished:
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.  I’d read this before, it’s one of my favorite Discworld novels.  Outstanding.

The Indian Clerk – by David Leavitt.

Last week:
  Absolutely wonderful.  A novel, a history, a math book.  A primer on sexual mores in the era of WWI in Britain.  A love story (several).  And a dual biography of two fascinating people: GH Hardy and Ramanujan.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

A little about Hardy and Ramanujan.  Hardy was the quintessential eccentric English don at Trinity.  Although the few photos that exist show a normal looking, even handsome man, he was so convinced of his hideousness that he had no mirrors in his house.  A militant atheist, he refused to set foot in a church.  A brilliant mathematician.  Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematical genius.  In contrast to Hardy, he was also a mystic, who thought a goddess wrote math formulas on his tongue while he slept.

Continuing with
John Adams by David McCullough.

Last week:
An excellent book about a fascinating man.  The more I read about this era, the more I am impressed by the fathers, but the less I understand the Jefferson cult.  I like Adams more. 
I continue to be impressed with this book and with Adams

Additionally: I haven’t made much progress on this one this week.  Adams is now in England.  He’s getting a frosty reception.

How Mathematicians Think by William Byers.

Last week:
Fascinating ideas about ambiguity, paradox, and math.
Really quite an amazing work, and relatively accessible.  I recommend it to anyone interested in math.

Additionally

Some of the later chapters get into some less accessible math, but I think they can be skipped around, without losing too much. 

Causality by Judea Pearl.  Fascinating but deep.

Intro to Probability Theory by Hoel, Port, and Stone.  A good text.

The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani.  An in-depth look at a wide range of statistical techniques.  Beautifully produced.

Put down without finishing:

Find Me
by Carol O’Connell
Last week:
This is another in the Mallory series.  Unlike many series, you could start in the middle.  I am about 50 pages into it, and it looks very good.  This is a mystery…. Mallory, the heroine, is a former homeless child who was adopted by a policeman; now grown, she is brilliant, beautiful, and as cold as ice.  The first volumes of the series were great, in the middle it got too mystical for me, but O’Connell seems back on her game.  There are 8 books in the series so far
list of Mallory books

(that link is great for those of us who like series!)

Additionally: I give up.  O’Connell is frustrating – her characters are wonderfully drawn, her plots are decent, but her writing just annoys me…. she leaves out critical stuff to increase suspense, but then tells us what her characters are feeling when it’s obvious from how they are acting.  I can’t deal with the mix.

(Bumped because I just woke up and……..YAY! – promoted by buhdydharma )

Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He is sharing the Nobel Peace prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” The complete text committee’s announcement is available.

Here is one reason Why Al Gore deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the 20th century peace was something to be achieved after the horrifying bloodletting of world war began. In the 21st century, although the world faces a new era of turmoil, peace ultimately must be about identifying and resolving the sources of conflict before battles break out. That’s why no one deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than Al Gore.

Congratulations Mr. Vice President!

Now about 2008…

Just read a diary over at Daily Kos by rico — turns out that Mychal Bell (of the Jena 6) has been jailed again.

From the link (and it’s a short article so I am quoting its entirety – hope that is all right):

JENA, La. (AP) – A Louisiana teen at the center of a civil rights controversy is back in jail.

The father of Mychael Bell says a judge in Jena (JEE’-nuh), Louisiana, has revoked Bell’s probation because of an old drug charge that had never been tried.

Bell and five other black teenagers had been accused of beating a white classmate. He was originally charged with attempted murder and then convicted of battery. An appeals court threw out the conviction, saying the case should have been brought in juvenile court.

Bell was released last month after thousands demonstrated in Jena to protest the severity of the charges against the teens.

Bell’s father says his son was detained after going to juvenile court for what was expected to be another routine hearing.

And Mychal needs to go to JAIL for this?  After he had already served so many months?  Something about this whole thing just plain stinks.

Ok, let’s see.  Be a mercenary and murder all kinds of folks, women, children, in Iraq?  No problem, no jail.  Head a telecommunications corporation and spy on Americans?  Hey, we’ll make sure you are retroactively protected!  Leak information about a covert CIA agent, risking our own national security?  Oh no problemo, a Presidential pardon awaits!

Equal protection under the law has become a joke.

Mychal Bell goes with his father to a routine hearing in juvenile court.  And now he is in jail.  Let’s look at a worst case scenario.  Let’s say he has broken probation.  Let’s say he has had problems with crime.

Let’s look at the picture here.  A white student pulls a gun on black students, they wrestle the gun away from him — the black students are arrested.  The white student doesn’t even get a slap on the wrist.

This is not about whether Mychal Bell is a saint or a sinner.  He is an American citizen and he is not getting the same treatment by our justice system as either a white person his age or the powerful folks in this country whose damage to America and to folks around the world would warrant they be put away for life.

Why is he in jail?  He reported to the juvenile court.  Is he a danger to someone?  For an old drug charge that was never tried?  There is something wrong here.

We have folks committing crimes against humanity, and I engage in no hyperbole when I write that, who are not only unpunished but allowed to retain power.

And we have a young man who is in jail, and for what?  For what?

I will keep Mychal and his family in my thoughts and in my heart.  I am worried about them for more than just this story.  They are now in the midst of a media circus, they are targeted by racist organizations, and their humanity is being subsumed amid this very worthy cause.  I sure hope they have friends in the community that will help them weather all this madness, keep them from the worst of the media attention, keep Mychal from becoming a poster child for injustice instead of what he really is — a human being, like anyone else, no saint, no villain, just human.

I can’t believe they put him back in jail.  And as rico says, I hope we will not wait for the bloggers of color to shoulder the entire burden of helping Mychal and the cause of social justice.

I hated water skiing with Uncle Ralph.  He was Aunt Alida’s second husband and they lived in a ranch house perched on the edge of a quarry lake.

What’s a quarry lake?  Basically a pit filled with water.  The house was kind of a normal house on top of a steep driveway as you got near the edge of the crater.  The downstairs was a game room with a Pool Table and a genuine One Armed Bandit that paid out real money and was totally illegal as Uncle Ralph would proudly boast.

And a rack of water skis and pile of life vests and a changing room and laundry so you could wash your bathing suit before you got home.

When you stepped on the patio what immediately attracted your attention were the pike and walleye heads nailed to the trees while you clunked down the steep terraces toward the dock.

It was a funny kind of lake.  Three feet deep for about thirty feet out.  Then a watery plunge.  The dock was set up so you could step off the side and play around or dive straight into hell.

As a two ski skier I was sneered at as worthless and weak- real men (and women) slalom.  Uncle Ralph delighted in throwing me at rocks and docks and generally jerking me around.  He was a mean boat driver, I’m not kidding.  Last time my dad skied he skied with Ralph and dad could slalom and went down hard.

Still, it had its good points.  After you had suffered enough you could climb up and play pool with cousins you didn’t know and can’t remember; and later, when Uncle Ralph had driven everyone into a cliff, he’d give you a cup of quarters and let you play slots ’til you lost them all.  Then it would be about dinner time.

If you brought your own money you could play nickle, dime, quarter with Uncle Ralph and all the other older relatives on the big felt pool table.  It was an odd night I didn’t walk away $4 or $5 dollars richer, but they were my relatives and I didn’t see them that often and I am a very good poker player.