D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths

My first book on Greek Myth. I did not know Heracles lived happily ever after among the gods and that it was Paris who with the help of Apollo slayed Achilles. Interesting tales.

GAIA: A New Look at Life on Earth

James Lovelock puts forth an intriguing, fresh perspective on life on Earth as a hypothesis, which he calls "Gaia". According to the Gaia hypothesis, "the physical and chemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself" which is in contrast with the orthodox point of view that "life adapted to the planetary conditions as it and they evolved their separate ways".

Lovelock's quest began when he was visiting the Jet Propulsion Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology as a scientific consultant. He attempted to think of a general characteristic of all forms of life so that the process for detection of extraterrestrial life could be made more definitive. His initial thought was to look for "entropy reduction". Later he developed the idea that a planet harboring life must have a cybernetic feedback mechanism of a planetary scale in action and some form of homeostasis would be maintaining the suitable circumstances for life even through abrupt environmental changes. In other words, the planet itself would act like a gargantuan organism.

First he argues about how life on Earth participates in maintaining (even against that punishing second law of thermodynamics) the improbable distribution of gases in the atmosphere. He says, "the atmosphere is not merely a biological product, but more probably a biological construction: not living, but like a cat's fur, a bird's feathers, or the paper of a wasp's nest, an extension of a living system designed to maintain a chosen environment." Then he goes on arguing about how the life on Earth keeps the salinity of sea water in check.

He points out that as Gaia is like a living organism, it produces wastes like we, humans do and thus pollution is not something that exclusively humans are capable of causing, a considerable amount of poisonous chemicals are released from natural sources.

Except for some repetitiousness at the end, his writing style is lucid, precise, and delightful.

Words:

1. Biosphere: The part of the earth and its atmosphere in which living organisms exist or that is capable of supporting life
2. Wraith: An apparition of a living person that appears as a portent just before that person's death; The ghost of a dead person; Something shadowy and insubstantial
3. Throes: A severe pang or spasm of pain, as in childbirth
4. Pent-up: Not given expression; repressed
5. Surmise: To infer (something) without sufficiently conclusive evidence; To make a guess or conjecture
6. Aeon: 1000 million years
7. Albedo (whiteness): The proportion of sunlight reflected to space by a planet
8. Detritus: Disintegrated or eroded matter; Accumulated material: debris
9. status quo: The existing condition or state of affairs
10. Equable: Unvarying; steady; Free from extremes; Not easily disturbed: serene
11. Garner: To gather and store in or as if in a granary; To amass: acquire
12. Turpitude: Depravity: baseness; A base act
13. Shibboleth: A word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another; A word or phrase identified with a particular group or cause: a catchword; A commonplace saying or idea; A custom or practice that betrays one as an outsider
14. Pittance: A meager monetary allowance, wage, or remuneration; A very small amount
15. Immaculate: Impeccably clean: spotless; Free from stain or blemish: pure; Free from fault or error; Having no markings
16. Conflagration: A large destructive fire
17. Prescient: Of or relating to prescience (Knowledge of actions or events before they occur: foresight); Possessing prescience
18. Intention tremor: With this the unfortunate sufferer who tries to pick up a pencil overreaches his target, over-compensates and swings too far the other way, oscillating back and forth in the frustrating failure to achieve a simple aim
19. Stodgy: Dull, unimaginative, and commonplace; Prim or pompous: stuffy; Indigestible and starchy: heavy (~ food); Solidly built: stocky
20. per se: Of, in, or by itself or oneself: intrinsically; With respect to its inherent nature ("this statement is interesting per se")
21. Hypothermia: Abnormally low body temperature
22. in situ: In the original or natural place or site ("carcinoma in situ")
23. Blinkered: Subjective and limited, as in viewpoint or perception
24. Troposphere, Stratosphere, Ionosphere, and Exosphere: Layers of the atmosphere in increasing order of height from the ground
25. Ruminant: Any of various hoofed, even-toed, usually horned mammals of the suborder Ruminantia, such as cattle, sheep, goats, deer, and giraffes, characteristically having a stomach divided into four compartments and chewing a cud consisting of regurgitated, partially digested food
26. Supernumeraries: One that is in excess of the regular, necessary, or usual number
27. Vermin: Various small animals or insects, such as rats or cockroaches, that are destructive, annoying, or injurious to health
28. Husbandry: The act or practice of cultivating crops and breeding and raising livestock: agriculture; The application of scientific principles to agriculture, especially to animal breeding; Careful management or conservation of resources: economy
29. Perilous: Full of or involving peril (exposure to risk or harm): dangerous
30. Pejorism: The theory that the world is deteriorating or growing worse
31. Stoical: Seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by pleasure or pain: impassive
32. Depredation: A predatory attack: a raid; Damage or loss: ravage
33. Nihilistic: Of or relating to nihilism (An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence; A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated)
34. Impunity: Exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm

Excerpts:

• "The Second Law states unequivocally that the entropy of an open
  system must increase. Since we are all open systems, this means that
  all of us are doomed to die. Yet it is so often ignored or deliberately
  forgotten that the unending death-roll of all creatures, including
  ourselves, is the essential complement to the unceasing renewal of
  life. The death sentence of the Second Law applies only to identities,
  and could be rephrased: 'Mortality is the price of identity.' The family
  lives longer than its members, the tribe longer still, and homo sapiens
  as a species has existed for several million years. Gaia, the sum of the
  biota and those parts of the environment coming under its influence,
  is probably three and a half aeons old. This is a most remarkable yet
  quite legal avoidance of the Second Law. In the end, the sun will
  overheat and all life on Earth will cease, but that may not happen
  before another aeon has passed. Compared with the lifetime of
  our species, let alone that of an individual human being, this time
  span is no tragic brief spell, but offers almost an infinity of opportunities
  to terrestrial life."
• "Our uncertainties about the future of our planet and the consequences
  of pollution stem largely from our ignorance of planetary
  control systems. If Gaia does indeed exist, then there are associations
  of species which co-operate to perform some essential regulatory
  functions. The thyroid gland is present in all mammals and most
  vertebrates. It harvests the meagre supplies of iodine from the internal
  bodily environment and converts them into iodine-bearing hormones
  which regulate our metabolism and without which we
  cannot live. [As indicated in chapter 6,] certain large marine algae,
  laminaria, may perform a similar function to the thyroid gland but on
  a planetary scale."
• "The very concept of pollution is anthropocentric and it may even
  be irrelevant in the Gaian context. Many so-called pollutants are
  naturally present and it becomes exceedingly difficult to know at
  what level the appellation 'pollutant' may be justified. Carbon monoxide,
  for example, which is poisonous to us and to most large
  mammals, is a product of incomplete combustion, a toxic agent from
  exhaust gases of cars, coke or coal-burning stoves, and cigarettes; a
  pollutant put into otherwise clean fresh air by man, you might think.
  However, if the air is analysed we find that carbon monoxide gas is
  to be found everywhere. It comes from the oxidation of methane gas
  in the atmosphere itself and as much as 1,000 million tons of it are so
  produced each year. It is thus an indirect but natural vegetable
  product and is also found in the swim-bladders of many sea creatures.
  The syphonophores, for example, are loaded with this gas in concentrations
  which would speedily kill us off if present in our own atmosphere
  at similar levels."
• "One of the most characteristic properties of all living
  organisms, from the smallest to the largest, is their capacity to develop,
  operate, and maintain systems which set a goal and then strive
  to achieve it through the cybernetic process of trial and error. The
  discovery of such a system, operating on a global scale and having as
  its goal the establishment and maintenance of optimum physical and chemical conditions for life, would surely provide us with convincing
  evidence of Gaia's existence."
• "At the end of the last
  century Boltzman made an elegant redefinition of entropy as a
  measure of the probability of a molecular distribution. It may seem
  at first obscure, but it leads directly to what we seek. It implies that
  wherever we find a highly improbable molecular assembly it is
  probably life or one of its products, and if we find such a distribution
  to be global in extent then perhaps we are seeing something of Gaia,
  the largest living creature on Earth."
• "If we can imagine a planet made of nothing but the component
  parts of watches, we may reasonably assume that in the fullness of
  time—perhaps 1,000 million years—gravitational forces and the restless
  motion of the wind would assemble at least one working watch.
  Life on Earth probably started in a similar manner. The countless
  number and variety of random encounters between individual molecular
  components of life may have eventually resulted in a chance
  association of parts which together could perform a life-like task,
  such as gathering sunlight and using its energy to contrive some
  further action which would otherwise have been impossible or forbidden
  by the laws of physics. (The ancient Greek myth of Prometheus
  stealing fire from heaven and the biblical story of Adam and
  Eve tasting the forbidden fruit may have far deeper roots in our
  ancestral history than we realize.) Later, as more of these primitive
  assembly-forms appeared, some successfully combined and from
  their union more complex assemblies emerged with new properties
  and powers, and united in their turn, the product of fruitful associations
  being always a more potent assembly of working parts, until
  eventually there came into being a complex entity with the properties
  of life itself: the first micro-organism and one capable of using
  sunlight and the molecules of the environment to produce its own
  duplicate.
  The odds against such a sequence of encounters leading to the first
  living entity are enormous. On the other hand, the number of random
  encounters between the component molecules of the Earth's
  primeval substance must have been incalculable. Life was thus an
  almost utterly improbable event with almost infinite opportunities of
  happening. So it did."
  

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Considered to be the best work of Agatha Christie (AC). I wanted to get a taste of AC and thus read the book. It presented with a nice surprise at the end.

Physics of the future

An interesting book by Michio Kaku about the possibilities of science and technology by 2100.

Today's movies

1. Enemy at the gates (2001)
2. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) - "gross"
   

Today's movies

1. The Counterfeit Traitor (1962)
   

Today's movies

1. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Today's movies

1. The Game (1997)
2. Eastern Promises (2007)
   

Today's movies

1. Sleeping beauty (1959)
2. Lolita (1962)
   

Today's movies

1. Say anything . . . (1989)
   

I Want to be a Mathematician

Autobiography of Paul R. Halmos. Anecdotal in nature, uncannily engaging for an autobiography. Glimpses of many towering figures (John Von Neuman or Paul Erdos for example) in mathematics whose names I was vaguely familiar with, leaves me with an impression that perhaps I know them a little better now. The tone is humble, honest, and inspiring.

Today's Movies...

1. Horrible Bosses (2011)
2. The Secret of NIMPH (1982)
3. Saw (2004)
4. Braveheart (1995); umpteenth time
   

How to write mathematics

A compilation of essays by mathematicians about how they think mathematics should be written as textbook, monograph, research article, etc. Paul R. Halmos's essay is the most delightful one to read.

Today's Movies...

1. Alice in Wonderland (1951)
   

Today's Movies...

1. Cars 2 (2011)
   
2. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
   
3. Whisper of the Heart (1995)