stop. start. stutter.

I'm going to be at Lunacon this weekend (say hi if you're there!), so this week's Books About Cool Topics comes early. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: Sociolinguistics
The book: Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages by Nancy Bonvillain

This is way, way more textbooky than I've been trying to keep these -- I've been aiming more for a popular-science approach, whereas this is, in fact, a leftover from my days as a Linguistics major. (Er. My few days as LING major. Undergrad took me eleven semesters, four colleges, and thirteen majors. It's a long story.)

But for all that this is clearly a textbook, and clearly aimed at the textbook market, and makes some assumptions about your knowledge base going into it, and has the sticker-shock price that college texts often carry -- it's still a fabulous book about the intersection between language and culture. It's about semantics, and bilingualism, and cultural register, and class-structure as revealed in language, and cultural presupposition, and a whole host of cool things about what how we speak tells us about who we are (and what others see).

It's English-centric, and more than that, American-centric, but the principles are extendable. While it might not be a good introduction to the discipline of linguistics as a whole, you should be able to get by with some work on Wikipedia if you run into a concept that you're not familiar with, and the neat bits are worth it.

It's Friday: time for Books About Cool Topics. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: Quantum computing
The book: Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd

What is quantum computing? It's a computer built to take advantage of fundamental principles of quanta, using the idea that quantum particles can be used to store data and perform operations on those data. Which means that any book about quantum computing must explain not only computer science, but also quantum physics. And quantum physics is the new rocket science, in the sense of being the discipline that everyone thinks nobody understands. Fortunately, Lloyd seems to delight in the fact that even the quantum physicists don't understand quantum physics. He knows what he's talking about, clearly loves his topic, and has a sly sense of humor that often has me looking at the page and going "...did he just make a joke there? Yeah, he just made a joke there."

If you ask ten quantum physicists to explain quantum physics, you'll get twenty-five different answers, all of which contradict each other, and one really confused cat. But Lloyd does a really good job of explaining hard-to-explain pieces. This is a topic I wasn't expecting to understand as well as I understood this book, honestly; I've mentioned my problems with math, which meant that I often just gave up on my science education and have had to self-teach since then, which means that I've got some curious gaps. But Lloyd's one of those people who loves his discipline like nobody's business, loves the problems he's working on, and is willing to do a lot to make sure you think they're just as cool as he does -- which is my main criterion for a book on science, which you might have already guessed -- and on the whole, he manages wonderfully.

I did not expect to walk out of this book having had so many a-ha! moments about quantum physics as I did, and if I were at MIT, I'd audit Lloyd's classes just to have the privilege of hearing his theories directly.

A Proof, In One Image.

Friday brings us Books About Cool Topics. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: The NYC restaurant scene
The book: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

This is a little less academic than the previous two; I figured it was time for something lighter! This is Bourdain's memoir about life in the NYC restaurant scene, and it's great. Fascinating in places, disturbing in others, hysterical in yet others. If you're the type of person who can't stand thinking where your food comes from and what might have happened to it before it hits the table, you'll probably want to give this one a pass, but if you're down with the concept that we all eat a little dirt, this is a great book. It covers what goes on in the kitchen of restaurants, what drugs your chef has likely done this afternoon, the economics and basics of running a restaurant, how to deal with suppliers, and what not to order in the restaurant. (And why!)

Bourdain's got a light, deft prose style, but he doesn't hold back, either. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson (may he rest in peace, with booze and loose women). This is a great look into the food service industry, both good things and bad, and it's entertaining even as it's educational.

It's Friday, so it's time for this week's Books About Cool Topics installment. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The Topic: Religious history: specifically, the Council of Nicaea
The Book: When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome by Richard Rubenstein

The Council of Nicea -- which is actually the First Council of Nicaea; there were others, but this is the one people most often mean -- is the point at which Christianity truly started to be shaped and codified. Before Nicaea, there were a bunch of different ways of looking at God and Jesus and the meaning of both, and individual churches taught and believed the version that they thought was most appealing. Rubenstein brings us through the argument (which actually displays surprising similarity to an Internet flamewar, although slightly more bloody-minded) providing just the right level of detail, and -- as is very rare for a book on religion -- without giving away which side of the debate he comes down on.

More than that, though, Nicaea was the story of Arius and Athanasius, the two main voices on both sides of the Christological debate, and Rubenstein gives us an excellent look at both men, their histories, their backgrounds, and their motivations, reconstructing very vibrant pictures of the two men from what's available to us today. This is a really good history book, well-researched and eminently readable, and very approachable for the layperson.

If it's not cloudy out there right now where you are -- and if you're not reading this from the other hemisphere, of course -- go outside and look up for the lunar eclipse. (I'm writing this post ahead of time and scheduling it so I don't forget either, so I don't know what the weather's going to be. *laugh*)

We live in Baltimore -- and, more specifically, on Baltimore's West Side, which is undergoing what is probably called "economic revitalization", but which really equates to "lots of goddamn traffic, roads torn up everywhere, and constant construction noise". A while back, fed up by construction starting at 6AM (on weekends, even) I bemoaned to my friends: Doesn't Baltimore have a noise ordinance?

Turns out they do. But you have to speak calculus to understand it.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

It's better than the Medevac helicopters, at least; the construction noise is generally rhythmic. But, you know, I'd kind of like the parking spaces in front of our building back sometime this century. Not to mention how they keep turning off our building's water. (Accidentally or by design.)

Today's timesuck: breveCreatures, an iterative artificial evolution simulation screensaver. Basically, you get a bunch of blocks connected together (in often non-Euclidean fashion, heh) and the object is to have it move as far from the origin point as possible; the blocks move at all points of join/articulation, and the locomotion either moves the piece as a whole or makes it work against itself, based on how it's constructed.

That's not the cool part. The cool part is: Every "generation" (25 iterations), the design evolves by taking the most "successful" designs of the previous generation and "breeding" them together, introducing random mutation, and continues to see which one is successful and which ones aren't. It remembers the state, so when you turn off the screensaver, it goes back to where it was in the process when you turn it back on.

The early generations are the ones that have the most drastic changes, whereas by a certain point you just want to restart it and give yourself something new to look at, but: Go, little creatures, go! Have little block sex and build the next generation for my amusement!

Today, I bring you dessert.

Okay, okay, not literally. (I would, though. I like cooking for people.) But every now and then we decide to have a dinner party, or I get called upon to provide for someone else's dinner party, and this is what I usually make for dessert. It's simple, it's easy, and it tastes like you spent way more time on it than you actually did.

You need:

16oz. bag of white chocolate chips
1 pint (16oz) of heavy cream (whipping cream)
Raspberries
3 boxes of miniature phyllo-dough shells (usually in the frozen-foods aisle)

1. Melt the white chocolate -- and yes, they really mean it about the double boiler; white chocolate does not melt well in the microwave.

2. Put the heavy cream into a bowl, and using an electric mixer, beat it until the cream is thickened enough that it will form stiff peaks when you pull the beaters out of the cream, but not so thick as to start forming lumps.

3. Pour the melted white chocolate into a separate bowl, and -- with the electric mixer on lowest speed -- pour the stiffened cream into it, slowly and gradually. Keep beating until thoroughly mixed.

4. Spoon a tablespoonful into each of the phyllo-dough shells, carefully patting the mousse into the shell so that it fills all available nooks and crannies. Top with a single raspberry. (You'll probably have more mousse than available shells; the rest can go into shot glasses.)

Refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving. Try not to eat too many at one sitting.

Comic by xkcd

The last 48h or so of Wikipedia searches

5150 (Involuntary psychiatric hold)
Thrust stage
BOFH
Niall of the Nine Hostages
Human Y-Chromosome DNA haplogroups
List of Y-DNA single nucleotide polymorphisms
Haplogroup R1b
Haplogroup
Population genetics
Hallsatt culture
Celt
Old High German
Alemannic German
High German languages
Alamanni
Old High German
Classical antiquity
Germanic peoples
Getae
Fall of Rome
Dark Ages
History of Europe
Sigmaringen district
Herdwangen-Schönach
Black Forest
List of the Child Ballads
The Real World
The Fause Knight Upon The Road
Peace Corps
Reality television
Thomas the Rhymer
Colitis
Nielsen ratings
Child Ballad
TheGreatHatsby
Donburi
Roti
Steganography
Halliburton
Library
Prisoner's Dilemma
Street layout of Seattle
Four-minute mile
Phreaker
DEF CON
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
Eric Gorden Corley
Hacker (computer security)
List of most common surnames
Community card poker
Computer crime
Black hat
0-day
Texas hold 'em
Blue box (phreaking)
Risk (game)
Kaiser roll

I really need to just set up a service for writers: "email me with what you need to know; I will choke Google and Wikipedia until I get an answer for you."