1-10 Recap

What I’m watching: Movies: Dead Snow

 

            Well, I’m off to a slow start. But that’s what I expected, being a slow reader after all. Now that I’ve done ten books (actually, eleven with two Ten Little Indians), I just wanted to do a little retrospective of my time during the past ten posts and write about some things happening outside of what books I read. I plan to make these little recaps after every ten books.

Part of the decision came from my realization that just writing down the name of a television show or videogame doesn’t indicate how much time I gave to it. Movie titles, on the other hand, are explanation enough. Each one stands alone and has a set amount of time for it. So, I figure I can use this as an opportunity to discuss any TV or gaming (or movies, too – it’s my blog!) that I gloss over in my regular posts. I also want to keep a total of how many books are staying versus going.

 

Wedding: Well, I got 15 more months until the big day. Since I started my blog, Olivia and I finished asking all 14 members of our wedding party to confirm that they want to stand up with us. All yeses. That makes me glad. We have a church we want, but we still need a reception venue. We’ve searched plenty of places, but they are either too small or too expensive. We still have a few ideas to check into. We got our engagement photos half-taken. Olivia and I had a weekend of seriously considering moving up the wedding by a year.

 

TV: I watched the entire series of Cadfael. I love that show! There are only 13 episodes, but each one is 75 minutes long. My favorite character, apart from Cadfael, got replaced after the first season, which sucked, and then the replacement got replaced for the last season. Olivia and I barreled through the first two seasons of Downton Abbey. Another amazing British show. Mr. Bates and Anna were immediately my favorite characters. I’ll admit, I really liked Lavinia and part of me preferred her to Mary. Mary lost some major points with me after turning down Matthew while the entail was being questioned. Off and on I would join Olivia as she marathoned all of the Office. I watched all of Twin Peaks season 2. I was disappointed with the show’s end. I’ve heard the movie sucks ass, but I was still going to watch it until I heard that it’s a prequel. Dammit, I just want some closure! I watched the first two seasons of Once Upon a Time. That show’s pretty cool. I don’t really like the actor playing Emma Swan. She always has a grimacey frown on her face, no matter what’s happening.

I hope I made my point. Olivia and I watched the first two series (that means seasons in British) of Misfits. The first series is amazing and was hard to put down. It’s very funny and very thrilling. Series two was really awesome as well. However, we started watching the beginning of series three, but there were so many changes (worst of all, our favorite character left the show) that we weren’t enjoying it at all. So we stopped and haven’t gone back.

 

Movies: I never got around to that Tarantino marathon. Damn. I still mean to do that.

 

Videogames: I started and beat the Uncharted trilogy, God of War 3, Far Cry 3, Bioshock: Infinite, and the Injustice: Gods Among Us story mode during my blog. Uncharted was amazing, and the third game was epic all the way through. So many awesome set pieces, such as the sinking ship, the plane falling apart in the sky, the train convoy from 2…all three games were super fun. The first Bioshock is still my favorite story, and I think Bioshock 2 is my favorite gameplay, what with the dual-wielding plasmid and weapon. And the drill. There was not enough Songbird in Infinite. It was still a good game. I tried picking it up later to try 1999 mode, but I got my ass handed to me pretty much as soon as the fighting started. I started Dead Space 3, but I hit a wall of being scared once the necromorphs jumped up in difficulty. After finishing Twin Peaks, I picked up where I left off in Deadly Premonition (because I guess that’s the next best thing to a sequel I’m going to see). I created new characters in both Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Olivia and I started a band in Rock Band, The Mistake. We collected all the Star Coins in Mario.

 

Running Total: 3 Staying, 8 Going.

10. Geekspeak

Book: Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness

Author: Dr. Graham Tattersall

Number of pages: 239

What I’m watching: TV: The Office, The Mindy Project, Downton Abbey, Black Adder, Cadfael Movies: The King’s Speech, Much Ado About Nothing (2013), Back to the Future, Robots, Tomb Raider, How to Train Your Dragon, Wayne’s World, The Wrong Trousers

What I’m playing: The New Super Bros, Far Cry 3, Rock Band, Skyrim, Crysis

 

            For whatever reason, I just kept putting off this post. Maybe I wasn’t sure how I felt after reading my next book, Geekspeak.

Well, first off, I picked this book up and a sale of donated books. Turns out this copy is an “UNCORRECTED PROOF: NOT FOR SALE” (front cover). Too late, I already paid for it. What’s more: “Reviewers are reminded that changes may be made in this proof copy before books are printed. If any material from the book is to be quoted in a review, the quotation should be checked against the final bound book” (back cover).¹ Fuck that, this blog is about reading the books I have on my bookshelves. I’m not going out and buying a second copy to add to my shelf. The idea of my blog is to subtract from my shelves. The back cover claims that “Geekspeak does for problem-solving what Freakonomics did for economics.” I remember thinking Freakonomics was awesome, so I had strong hopes for liking this book.

            It starts off pretty good. Dr. Tattersall talks about how big people’s vocabularies are. He suggests using random sampling of dictionary pages to figure out about how many words you know. He mentions a study done in Britain (he’s British) analyzing recorded conversations which revealed that the top three words spoken by women were “she, her, [and] said” and the most frequent words said by men were “fucking, er, [and] the” (6; 7).

That feeds into some certain assumptions about the genders. Gossipy women and stupid men. Hell, “er” isn’t even a fucking word!² I feel like “er” is a more British filler syllable. I remember Harry Potter saying it in Book 4, but I feel like Americans are more apt to say “uh” or something close to the schwa sound(of course, I’m pulling this er vs. uh stuff out of my ass). Still, I find that study intriguing.

He also graphed out the frequencies of different word-lengths of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a way to identify her unique vocabulary. This is the kind of random crap I like. I had the idea of counting up the spoken words per minute of Gilmore Girls and comparing it to other TV shows, because the joke is that they talk so much faster on that show than real life or other shows.

I wanted to do a statistical analysis to see if there’s any significant difference. I guess that means I speak Geek.

            Then he does stuff like explaining horsepower, estimating how heavy a house is, and using math to explain “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (except since he’s British, he uses the Queen, not Ren McCormack). Sometimes I like what he’s writing about, but as I’m reading, I’m growing more and more bored with Geekspeak. I don’t really care how much a house weighs.

            So, the book’s basic structure is Dr. Tattersall puts forward a question, a little anecdote or pop culture reference to lead into the answer, and then he answers the question using a mathematic formula and plugging in estimated numbers. He’ll mention Captain Kirk or Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (my second favorite book I’ve ever read), but leaves it behind to talk about math that sometimes doesn’t really connect back to it.

A chapter will start off cool, but end up as a rough guess to a useless fact.

            Instead of quoting an entire chapter, this is me imitating a chapter:

            How busy is rush hour?

            According to Doc Brown, in 2015, “we don’t need roads.” But for now, I have to stick to my highway commute to and from work. When I’m stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, how many people am I looking at driving opposite me on the other side? To figure this out, I need to know how many cars I see and how many people are in each car. We can use the formula

People = Length of lane X lanes X cars per lane X people per car

On a straight, flat stretch of road, I’d say I can see about a quarter-mile clearly. One mile is 5,280 ft. Divide that by four to get how much I can see. Let’s just make it 1,000 ft. A car is about 12 ft long. To account for the space in between each car, I’ll just round up to one car per 20 ft of road. So, I’m seeing 50 cars down one lane. But where my car is sitting I-94 has three lanes. That makes it 150 cars. How many people are in each car? I don’t need to run around each vehicle and do a census Frogger-style. I can just get a look at a sample of 10 cars and apply those results to the whole population of rush hour traffic. My result turned out as 9 cars with only one person. One car had a driver and a passenger. That makes an average of 1.1 people per car. Multiply that by the number of cars and I now can reasonably guess that I am looking at 165 people across the cement divider.

 

           The worst part is that so many of the numbers end up being arbitrary. Discussing clouds, Dr. Tattersall writes “a true Geek will have a go at working it out, but will also recognize that the estimate could easily be ten times too big or ten times too small. Cloud thickness ranges from hundreds to thousands of feet; for simplicity, let’s go for a 1,000-foot (1/5 mile) thick, 1 mile long and 1 mile wide cumulus cloud” (226). The same thing goes for pretty much all of his facts. He’ll give a range, sometimes differing by millions, and pick a simple number in the middle. It leaves me wondering, how factual are his facts?

            But then again, I’ve found myself bringing up some of these random and useless facts in conversations.³ Sometimes I really enjoy Dr. Tattersall’s topic, like which  personality descriptors are used most in personal ads. On the other hand, I don’t give a shit about how much a bus weighs.

At one point, he’s pondering how large an angel’s wings would need to be to work (one of the interesting ones), and he writes “estimating the weight of a soul is beyond the scope of this book” (149). Lucky for me, soon I’ll be reading Spook for my blog, which I’m pretty sure works at answering that very question!

He figures out whether or not there are more people alive than the total of all people who have ever lived. What?! How is that even a question? Apparently, all lot of people have been saying that. How could there be more people alive today than the total number of past lives of humanity spanning the entire history of the world? That idea sounds unbelievably ridiculous to me. And yet, the doctor describes an enormous population explosion over the past few centuries and how technological advances allow more food production than ever before. In the end, he estimates the number of all the past dead to be four times the number of all the current living. That still seems to be too small a difference to me.

After finishing reading, the problem with deciding the fate of Geekspeak is that the book switches every chapter between being cool as ice and boring as shit. Since the book is about math, I tallied up all the ones I liked. I liked 42.3% of the topics.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Going. Was it worth a read-through? Yes. Do I plan on ever reading it again? No.

 

Notes

1. Did I just break that rule by using that quote?

2. Damn, how many times have I said “fuck” so far? Or “the,” for that matter?

3. Such as 20 mph farts.

 

Works Cited

Tattersall, Graham. Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness [uncorrected

          proof]. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print.