I’ve just been reading a book titled The Symmetries of Things by John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss.

It has really superb illustrations of the many different kinds of symmetries, as well as some designs offered as exercises.  (The exercises are always important in mathematics.  It’s never enough to say things like ‘sure, that makes sense,’ or ‘yeah, I follow you.’  You have to learn how to do it yourself or you don’t really get it, and as things move along further, you will quickly lose yourself in the dust.)

Meantime, if you’re not interested in the mathematics of the subject or the exercises, the pictures are still fascinating.

I don’t know how far I’m going to get, or how fast (how slowly, more likely), but the journey itself is enjoyable — and I will never look at a brick wall (or anything else with a pattern or symmetry: a frieze, wallpaper, sports balls, furniture,  tilings, cobblestones, etc. etc.) the same way again.  The brick wall that bounds my deck, in the simple pattern known as a ‘running bond,’ is notated as 2*22….

I just looked down at my kitchen floor this morning and, with my now symmetry-conscious eyes, I  discovered that it has a repeating pattern with no symmetries: it’s a wonder!  (In this case, “wonder” is a technical term for a repeating pattern with no mirror or rotational symmetries or rotational mappings.  Its notational symbol is, unsurprisingly, o.)

I urge both my readers to find a copy of this book and look at it.  Warning: it’s expensive, with all that glossy paper and those many, many illustrations. Worth looking at, though. So, if you wish only to browse through it, find a copy in a library or a bookstore that you can look at. Then, if you’re as fascinated as I am — and you may well be, since the book is amazingly accessible, especially in the first few chapters — you can always buy a copy for yourself. It’s worth whatever investment of time and mind you care to make.

Whenever I get into that regrettable behind-the-8-ball state of imbalance between blogging and life, I fall back to what are relatively small items to blog about.  They’re the only ones, under those circumstances, I can get my head around quickly enough to write a short piece, establish any links, and get it posted, in between everything else I’m busy with.

Herewith:

A good friend came by last night for a little supper and conversation, and he said he’d downloaded Google’s Chrome browser.

This morning, I did too and found a link to a very interesting online book written by the Google Chrome team titled 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.

Whether you’re using Google Chrome or not, it’s worth a look at this book for both my readers.  Tech-oriented readers can see how a complex idea is presented simply without talking down to the audience.  Non-techies can learn a lot about the internet we deal with daily.

Enjoy!

I’ll definitely suggest Gino Segre’s Faust in Copenhagen, which is the story of how quantum physics came to be, through several key conferences and meetings in Copenhagen put together by Niels Bohr.  The younger members of the group (later major physics heavyweights) put on a skit at the end of each one to entertain (and spoof) the elders (at the time the leaders in the field) and, in the central conference described here, they base the skit on Goethe’s Faust, a play whose text was relatively well known to all the participants.

Gino Segre is a physicist himself.  He is not trying to teach physics in this book, but the history of science at a fascinating time, and he does it well.  It’s a riveting narrative, and a relatively little-known story with an international cast of characters.

I also highly recommend the collected stories of Cordwainer Smith, the book titled The Rediscovery of Man. Not only is this the complete collection of Cordwainer Smith’s stories, it has an excellent introduction to his life and his fiction. Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym of the East Asian scholar and professor Paul Linebarger, an expert in and teacher of East Asian studies and related subjects to many of our leading diplomats for many years. In fact, in Barbara Tuchman‘s book Stilwell and the American Experience in China, Paul Linebarger is represented in the bibliography.  He was born in China of US parents and was a godson to Sun Yat-Sen. His family moved to France and Germany while he was still a child so that he grew up speaking several languages; his writing shows his remarkable knowledge of many languages and cultures. This is only one of the reasons I like him so much: he has such a wide view of the world and its people and their cultures.  We need a wider view of each other on this planet, I firmly believe.  And he can write superbly good stories, in a unique voice.  In addition to these stories, he has a hugely entertaining novel, Norstrilia, well worth finding and reading.  Once you read him, you will never forget him.

A quick search reveals that abebooks.com has a wide selection of copies of all the books mentioned here..  And of course a worldcat.org search may reveal copies in libraries near you, free for the borrowing.

Do you remember when we used to watch some of our favorite shows on TV, we’d see the end credit for Stephen J. Cannell Productions?

It showed a guy sitting at a typewriter, typing fast.  Then he’d pull the paper up out of the machine, and it would float into a big “C” in the air, and the caption would read: Stephen J. Cannell Productions.

This end credit appeared on a great many of my favorite shows over many years. To get an idea of how many hugely popular and well-written shows, and which ones, look on Cannell’s web site, here.   Wow.  The whole site is worth looking at to get a picture of Cannell’s continuing attainments. And there’s a recent interview with him in Success magazine, here. I was astonished, reading that interview, to learn he was dyslexic — like another great writer, Agatha Christie, as the article pointed out.

Somewhere in the early 90’s, I learned, the networks geared up their own production studios, rather than buying from outside studios, and thus the networks — the buyers —  put themselves into competition with the sellers like Cannell’s studio. About that time, Cannell said in the interview, he saw the writing on the wall and stopped trying to produce shows. Thus, we haven’t seen his production company end credit at all for some time.

He started as a writer, was a writer all through his career, and ended as a writer, publishing mystery/suspense books.  He had seen early on that the only way to maintain some control over how what you wrote was used was to become your own production company; when that no longer was viable he got out. But he never stopped writing.  And he never stopped teaching and helping other writers.

After his recent death, the show Castle, on which he had occasionally appeared as himself, used his end credit one more time. This time when he pulled the paper up, the caption below the picture said “Colleague. Mentor. Friend.”  This time the paper, instead of forming the letter C, floated slowly down, then out of frame completely.  As the Cannell productions fanfare music reached its end, the next card came up, saying, “We’ll Miss You, Pal.”  You can view these last end credits here.

I’ll miss him too, even though I knew him only as a viewer and a fan of his work.  He wrote and produced great shows, entertaining me and millions of other for decades. I loved that clever end credit, too.  Thank you, Castle people, for that elegant tribute.

Ah, the wonders of modern technology!  There is such a thing nowadays as video chat, and I can use video chat over the internet to visit with friends or have business-related conferences.  A friend in Florida and I sit down, at agreed-upon times, to have a cup of coffee with each other, without either of us having to travel to do it.  Soon, she will move to the Rocky Mountains, and we will still be able to chat.  The physical location of each of us, once we are set up to use video chat with each other, doesn’t affect our ability to do so.

A nearby friend and I have lunch together monthly, barring bad weather or other unforeseen circumstances, but in between we can confer as necessary via video chat.  For us, it has always been relatively easy, as we both have Macs, and we have merely to connect using iChat and our Macs’ built-in cameras and microphones.

Friends who have PCs, especially those without built-in cameras, have more to do,  getting chat ID, internet video camera, microphone, and software set up, it seems, but once they do, video chatting becomes easy.

I find it best to set up a time in advance, using email, to make sure the person I want to chat with will be available and that the time is convenient for both, and if there’s an agenda, formal or interpersonal, it’s a good idea to let them know what it is in that email. You wouldn’t just drop in to someone’s house without calling first, would you?  As a Determined Hermit, I hope not.

Video chat has made a big difference to me so far this winter.  Today will see the second editorial conference I’ve had in two weeks with someone who works at home.  (For business offices with firewalls around their computer systems, there are commercially available videoconferencing arrangements, different from the kind of home-based video chatting I’m talking about.)

In an age when gasoline can only get more expensive and scarce, and travel pollution can only make global warming worse, you and I can stay at home and use our internet connection to visit each other.  It’s better than just a voice phone call.  Maybe nothing will replace being in the same room with someone else, but if that’s not possible, this may be the next best thing.

Richard Davies of abebooks.com presents a list of 35 titles, as cover shots plus linked titles, with fascinating facts about each one.  While I don’t buy collectible anything — I buy my books to read and re-read them — I find it fascinating to see how the other 5% lives.  Read all about it here.

In addition to listing the group’s top ten reasons, nicely laid out and convincingly argued, Carswell gives a list of the top 25 books (shown by cover shot and linked title) the group came up with that, among them, remained unread.  Read all about it here.

I don’t feel the need to worry about clutter myself, having cleared out and recycled some time ago, but as I looked at the book, I noticed something interesting: the book went through its de-cluttering guidelines room by room, dining room, master bedroom, garage, etc. While a general floor plan of my house would certainly list such rooms, I had repurposed each room (I live alone, like a good detemined hermit, which simplifies these things) into a room whose function had meaning to me and to my own life, not to some possible future inhabitants of more traditional mindset.

So: that’s not the dining room; that’s my library, the walls lined with filled bookshelves below and artworks above.  Yes, there’s a dining table with its chairs in there, a Danish style I had bought for my mother, but I don’t eat there, so it’s now my simple but elegant library table, where I spread out large reference books like the atlases or fat dictionaries, or open up several at once to compare what they say, as well as make notes or use my laptop when that’s the best way.  I’ve also hooked the low-hanging chandelier up as high as possible to get it out of the way (I’m tall).

And: previous owners converted an all-too-apparent laundry room, facing on to the living room, to a card and game room.  It had its own folding wooden doors, and they paneled the walls to match, very nice, and set up one wall filled with lovely wooden shelves.  In this room, once, card games held smoky sway most nights.  When I got the smoke stench out of the house after moving in (thanks to a tip from a friend: leave out bowls of vinegar for several days, then change them, until the smell is gone, a week or two instead of forever) I turned it into a study and office. Once it was my telecommuting headquarters, lit by skylights and filled with my computer equipment, now in recycled retirement. Again, the built-in shelves hold books, with room against the other walls for a desk and an actual library table rescued from a library remodeling, a great place for my current project, whatever it happens to be.

Also, the master bedroom is my art studio.  Yes, there’s a studio couch against one short wall, but the whole long wall on one side is all bookshelves, floor to ceiling, while the other side has my terrific iMac, printer, and other equipment that I use for my own writing, email, artwork, photos, and much more.  And near the sliding glass doors that look out to the patio sits my drafting desk, currently holding the pastels I’m using to create a portrait of my cat, Kasha.

Sure, there’s an en-suite dressing room, bath, and closet — all that has to be somewhere — but the dressing room’s two sinks are also handy for artwork cleanup and as a water source for watercolor painting and other media.  Also, my cat Sasha always has some water there — why should he have to go into the kitchen, at the other end of the house, to get fresh water?

Across the hall from the studio is what probably would be labeled by someone else the guest bedroom.  To me, it’s the music room, because the piano lives there, on the one solid wall that’s not an outer wall.  There’s also a large convertible sofa that unfolds to a queen-size bed (fairly comfortably, as these things go).  And the washer and dryer now live in an alcove off the music room, as does what I think of as McGee’s Closet, a storage area for seldom-used but sometimes wanted art and sewing resources.

Pretty much the only room that has kept its ostensible floor-plan purpose is the kitchen.  I love to cook and bake, and over the years I have lived here, I have put down a new floor, and put in new countertops.  I chose an all-but-black Zodiaq surface in a color called Abyss to complement and anchor everything.  I’ve cleaned out the kitchen drawers (more recently than I care to admit) leaving in them only kitchen tools I actively use for cooking and baking.  Shelves in the garage hold (no, not books!  I wouldn’t mistreat good books that way, and wouldn’t keep any other kind!) auxiliary kitchen storage of tools, devices and appliances I don’t use very often but do use now and then, and which I don’t want cluttering up the active areas of countertop and workspace in the kitchen.

So there you have it, my non-traditional room layout that baffles the advice about bedrooms and other standard rooms in clutter-clearing books.  As I was showing a friend around, she stopped and said to me, “You actually use all the rooms you have!”  I thought: yes, not only am I paying for them, but I like the spaces I have, so why not use them as suits me best?

I’ve had this book for decades and have read it many times, but not recently.  So I’m coming to it relatively fresh; while I know the basic outline of it, and am aware “whodunit,” I’m enjoying as though for the first time all the lovely layers of wonderful things, not least the author’s light hand with true erudition and wit.  It’s a lovely scary funny terrifyingly suspenseful beautifully subtle occasionally punny completely serious glorious wicked superb concotion of a novel, with an absolutely thundering nail-biter ending, one of the best ever written. It’s an elegant masterful work of fiction, not just a great mystery novel; it’s so much more than merely a “whodunit.”

The book was written in 1937, and it’s set then; the Duchess of Horton is giving one of her brilliant house parties, this time featuring the production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, by some of the guests, with the rest as audience. The cast and audience are a large group of distinguished personages, from the Lord Chancellor of England (a longtime friend of the Duke and Duchess) through scholars, friends, acquaintances, and many more, all meeting for the event at the Duke’s palatial estate, Scamnum Court. The performance promises to be a distinguished one — one that is interrupted by a shot  behind a curtain… and Inspector Appleby of Scotland Yard is called in. For story, characters, wit, pace, and compelling action this novel has never been equalled, in my opinion.

What a book! Stunning, wonderful, great… truly a classic.

Michael Innes wrote many mystery novels featuring Inspector Appleby, all excellent, and all very different from each other in setting and plot — no ‘formula’ here.   Other Innes novels stand alone or follow the adventures of Charles Honeybath, portrait-painter.

Michael Innes is the pseudonym of J.I.M. Stewart; details of his life and work may be found

here.

It’s an article by Nicholson Baker in the August 3 2009 issue of The New Yorker titled A New Page: can the Kindle really improve on the book?

It’s an article well worth reading, not only to learn what Baker’s experience of the Kindle2 was, but what others think too, and much else about ebooks and ebook readers (whether hand-held dedicated devices, like the Kindles and the Sonys and others, or like other types of more general devices like the iPod Touch, iPhone, Palm organizer and others).

Just one of Baker’s points:

There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace.

You can see videos of the Eucalyptus app in action on the web here.  Just sit and let the video play…

The Eucalyptus app draws on the volumes offered by the Gutenberg Project, which is at home here.

Note to the budget-minded (or iPod-impoverished, depending on your point of view): you can also download books directly from the Project Gutenberg site onto your desktop or laptop computer, and read them on those devices. It’s not handheld — which is what Baker’s article is about –  but it’s a free download (plus any contribution you care to make; see below) and you already have the necessary equipment if you are reading this post.

Should you find yourself interested in the Gutenberg Project, donations of volunteer time as proofreaders (details here; no special experience or training is required, just read the FAQ and register, then do as much or little as you can — a page a day, perhaps?) or of money, even a little, as you download titles, to keep the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation going.

The Foundation is a section 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization which attempts to preserve literary and other intellectual works and make them available free or at the lowest possible cost to people everywhere.

So, book and ebook lovers — OK, OK, ebibliophiles, excuuuuse me — if you want to read those books as ebooks, or if you need a place to make a few more charitable donations to help out your tax picture, or just want to help the project, now you know how to do it.