beowabbit

The rest of our trip to the Cape was great. On our way back, we spent a few hours at the Edward Gorey House, which was great. It’s a fascinating place celebrating a fascinatingly weird person. (He let raccoons live in one of his rooms for quite a while, for instance. Whether that was because he didn’t want to inconvenience them or because he just couldn’t be bothered to do anything about them, I didn’t quite gather. Either one seems entirely plausible.)

I finished Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries, by Molly Caldwell Crosby. As I wrote earlier, it was fascinating, and I think the novelistic style that rubbed me a bit the wrong way towards the beginning ended up working for me (especially when I read the notes at the end and realized that a lot of the suspiciously detailed descriptions were in fact properly sourced). Very highly recommended for anybody who likes historical nonfiction, medical nonfiction, or both. Looking forward to reading (and perhaps watching) Awakenings at some point. (Crosby says she was inspired to write Asleep in part because after reading Awakenings she wanted to learn more about the epidemic, and couldn’t find anything else written since the 30s or so.)

Got an unexpected impromptu dinner date with

plumtreeblossom this evening. I was kept late at work, and she had her class schedule change unexpectedly, which meant we were both in Cambridge and free at around 7:30. So we met in Central Square for dinner. We first tried Mary Chung’s, but they’re closed on Tuesdays, so we ended up having a delicious Indian meal at Shalimar. Yay!

Oh, and it was very cloudy here all day, so no chance of seeing the transit of Venus around sunset EDT. (The new userpic is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite.) But as I was walking home from the T station the clouds had cleared a bit, and I got to see the International Space Station pass overhead.

PS — Huge thanks to

surrealestate and DD for inviting us to join them and Julian on the Cape!

Current Mood: happy

I enjoy reading these when other people post them, but have never gotten around to posting one myself. Anyway, some recent books I’ve read:

Deep Future, by Curt Stager
Stager is a paleoclimatologist, and this is his attempt to apply what he knows about climate change at long timescales in the past to the future, and human impact on climate. It’s a fascinating perspective, and I would definitely recommend this book. As an example of taking the long view, Stager points out that thousands or tens of thousands of years into the future, after (even in a worst-case scenario) we’ve exhausted the fossil fuels and the climate is slowly cooling, our distant descendants are likely to be inconvenienced as shipping through the Arctic becomes harder, and farming becomes harder in Siberia and maybe on the margins of Antarctica.
I heard about this book from Stager’s appearance on On Point (which you can listen to online). He’s also got a weekly nature series of his own (with very short episodes), called Natural Selections; they’re typically about a particular animal or plant.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel describing the author’s childhood during and after the Iranian Revolution. It’s been made into a movie, and there’s a sequel (book) about Satrapi’s life as an émigrée in the West that I look forward to reading. Fascinating and a very quick read. (I’ve had this book for a long time, but just got around to reading it. Thanks to cathijosephine for finding it on my shelf and giving me the little nudge.
Sex on the Moon, by Ben Mezrich
This is the fascinating and fictionworthy true story of a NASA intern, Thad Roberts, who stole some lunar samples and tried to sell them. (He also ended up with a little bit of ALH 84001 by accident.) This suffers from a little bit of the “I must throw in lots of adjectives and adverbs to make my prose as vivid as possible” phenomenon that some authors of novelistic nonfiction sometimes fall prey to, but not so much as to be distracting, and the book is very well constructed, and it’s a fascinating story. Definitely recommended reading for anybody considering a career as a would-be criminal genius¹ — or a career at NASA, or both. :-) The book clearly depends a lot on Mezrich’s interviews with Roberts himself (although he also interviewed plenty of other people), and almost certainly paints Roberts more sympathetically because of it, but it was a gripping (and fairly quick) read.
There were a few technical errors, but very minor ones, and the accuracy of the book about the things I know something about makes me feel pretty confident in the quality of the research. (Definitely a step above typical newspaper science journalism, for instance.)

Had a particularly lovely evening with my honeywuzzle tonight. We heard Brahms’ German Requiem at the Hatch Shell, during which we saw the space shuttle and space station pass overhead (thanks to

golux_org for confirming that that’s what it was), checked out the very interesting Liberty Hotel (a converted Victorian jail), and had a lovely time on the porch talking about politics, education, science, culture, and childhood (as one does). Life is good. And we get to snuggle with Chickenfinger tonight! Yay for neurotic kitties!

Having a wonderful time in DC with

plumtreeblossom — and

bcat1 and

spacechicken for much of the time! Yesterday we all went to the zoo, and then to Meskerem Ethiopian restaurant. Today we had brunch with

bcat1 and

spacechicken before they took off for Raleigh, and then

plumtreeblossom and I wandered down the Mall and spent a couple nifty hours in the National Air and Space museum (which has the Apollo 11 CSM, the Friendship 7, and the Gemini capsule from the mission with the first US spacewalk, among lots of other impressive stuff). Then we headed for Dupont Circle, but decided to check out Chinatown on the way and ended up at a Burmese restaurant for dinner. (Neither of us had had Burmese food before. It’s yummy!) Then we went to Dupont Circle and had a lovely time wandering around. We ended up at Afterwords, a cafe connected to a bookstore, for very inexpensive and yummy dessert and coffee. The bookstore was neat, too.

Pictures will follow; we got some great ones at the zoo, and I think some of the ones from the Mall and the Air and Space museum came out well, although I haven’t had a chance to look at them. (I also owe y’all some pictures from Topsfield Fair.)

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Another former LJer, now mostly on Facebook

Entries tagged with space

Miscellany

Book log

Lovely evening

Capsule DC update

Profile

August 2016

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit