Harry Potter

No, I haven't gone to see it yet, although I can't wait.

The reason for this blog entry is to point to two brilliant analyses of the book series (not this particular film, although book 6 is where you begin to see what has been going on all along). Both are thick with spoilers for anyone who has not read the entire series, so the links and comments go below the fold.

These articles are not, by the way, the sort of fawning nonsense you see in the popular press. Muggle Children, consider yourself warned.

• Matt on Harry Potter and the Tremendous [Screw Up] pointing out the obvious - every bad thing that happens is Dumbledore's fault
• Penny on Harry Potter and the Fascist Ubermensch on class as portrayed in the books

I think the second article goes a bit overboard by taking the control of the Muggle PM as more than a conceit needed to explain how this entire world - and its wars - can remain invisible, but the books do take a rather deterministic view of the world.

The only thing missing from the second article seems to be any notice that the Goblins can be seen as a particularly racist caricature of hook-nosed Jewish Bankers. Or maybe it was in there, but was just left unsaid.

Where I disagree with the second analysis (and agree with the first) is that the books are not about a Chosen One, a "christ figure" come to save the wizarding world, even if he gets Resurrected to finish the job. That is the way it is cast when you start in book 1, and the way you might read it superficially, but the reality is that it takes collaboration among many individuals - each with their own special skills and weaknesses - to win the final fight.

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Bunnies Made of Cheese?

Today is Approximately Pi Day (3.14) as well as Einstein's 130th birthday (and also, according to Google's promotion of Mars in 3D, Giovanni Schiaparelli's birthday) ... so what better way to celebrate than with yesterday's announcement that Chad Orzel's book about teaching quantum physics to his dog Emmy is on its way under the title "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog".

Click here for full size view of lame cover art.

It is scheduled to ship just before Christmas. This link to the Amazon order info was on Chad's web page, and is the place to go to request that they publish it for Kindle.

What is disappointing is the first level of marketing: the title and cover.

It is hard for me to figure out why they chose that title, or even the dog used on the cover. I mean, why isn't "quantum physics" in the title? And even Emmy's blog photo might make for a better cover if it showed her thinking about the overlap integral between bunnies and cheese (such as an appropriately labeled graph of the s and p solution with just "probability" on the vertical axis) than what they have in the cover mockup. If bunnies aren't appropriate for some marketing reason, they could pick something else (treats and dog food, steak and cheese) or just have a quantum/classical duality question in her thought bubble. Too late to change the title, but you need to get quantum on the cover.

Chad, these ideas are free to you to use ...

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BBC Big Read

I was reminded of this when Profgrrrrl recently posted her version of a top 100 book list from an old meme. I blogged my annotated list back in July of last year. She credited the BBC, but her list and mine came from the National Endowment of the Arts. The NEA selected books for the NEA Big Read, a national community reading program, so these are books they consider both important and suitable for a city-wide reading project. In contrast, the BBC list resulted from voting by listeners following their Big Read series in 2003, which makes comparing the lists rather interesting.

I'm going to use the same rules I followed for the other list:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
3) Place an asterisk * by those you intend to read/finish someday.
4) put a trailing "++" after the books you LOVE.
5) Put a dagger † where you've seen the movie but not read the book.

Like Swans on Tea (who added #5 for the other list), in many cases I've seen the movie (usually an old b/w version that is really faithful to the book) enough times to be as literate about it as those who read the book.

The BBC Top 100 can be found here, if you want your own "clean" list. If you follow the side links, you can see their full list, which goes all the way to number 200. My annotated list is below the fold.

I see my earlier guess, that I've read a lot more of these, was wrong. I'm still around a quarter of them. (I was fooled by the top half of the list, with all of the Potter books. There are quite a few in the second 50 that I have never even heard of.)

1. † The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. † Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams +
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee ++
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. † The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller ++
12. † Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. † Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. † Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. † Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. † Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. † The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck +
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll ++
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. † Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. † Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. *† The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. † The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. * Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. † A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. † Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. † Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. * Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. † The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

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Book Titles

There is nothing quite like a good title. That was proved by "Baboon book makes award shortlist" in the BBC news feed today. The book in question, "Baboon Metaphysics", appears even more irresistible than the news story.

So I can't resist making an early nomination for next year: "Bunnies Made of Cheese: Quantum Physics for Dogs" by Chad Orzel, due out in the fall, although the latest draft table of contents suggests that the final title will lack that potentially Diagram Prize-winning first clause. But I suppose that is par for the course in a field where textbook titles are as creative as "Physics".

But who knows, just "Quantum Physics for Dogs" might be enough, and should certainly be enough to get Chad on the Colbert Show to get a bump for his book sales.

For a sample of Chad's work, check out slides from a recent talk drawn from the book, or the many blog entries on the general subject of explaining physics to his dog, Emmy, some of which were the genesis for the book.

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John Updike

Among the other things to do, such as grade papers and blog about "retention of knowledge" (prompted by Dean Dad) and physics education (prompted by the gatekeeping article by Chad, and others he links to, as well some engineering education videos that an unrelated comment by Alice Pawley led me to), is the need to comment on today's news.

John Updike died today.

And I was somewhere between shocked and dismayed when Katie Couric said something to the effect that most Americans will think of "Witches of Eastwick" when they hear his name. Not me. To me, there is only "Rabbit, Run". (And his many essays in the New Yorker, which will undoubtedly have quite a tribute in the near future.) Rabbit is, indeed, finally At Rest.

It isn't quite like that book changed my life or made me a writer, far from it, but it has spoken to me in many different ways over the past decades. I'll explain.

I first read "Rabbit, Run" in high school, long after it had been published. It was a great story, with a voyeuristic look at the 'cool' life of a rather irresponsible fellow going through a post-high-school early life crisis. It was, like other books assigned in the best class I remember from high school, radically different from anything assigned in any of my previous lit classes. What interested me then was the look at the underside of the Protestant middle class, as that BBC article puts it.

I picked up "Rabbit Redux" in paperback, about a year after it was originally published in hard cover. I was in college at the time. (I can be pretty sure about when I bought it because the bookmark is a punched card loading the APL library.) I didn't like it, and stopped part way through out of boredom.

This did not stop me from buying "Rabbit is Rich" (again in paperback) when it came out a decade later. For some reason, I decided I should attack the trilogy from the start, since it had been so long since I read "Rabbit, Run".

I was stunned. Viewed from adulthood, now older than Rabbit was at the time, "Rabbit, Run" was a completely different book. Completely different. Part of it was my age, and a longer view at the era Rabbit had lived in, but part of it was that I now actually knew Rabbit! I'll leave it at that. That was an eye opener. I then enjoyed "Rabbit Redux", which I now see I could not appreciate because I had nothing to connect with in the book back when I was in college. It was easy to connect to the Rabbit of 1960, not long out of high school, but not so easy for the one approaching middle age.

There was no looking back, then, but in some ways I dreaded reading "Rabbit at Rest". Someone I knew was facing what we would all face - and what my friend faced, may God rest his soul, some years later. I imagine that, today, all of those books will carry additional meaning that I could not appreciate back when I first (or second) read them.

Maybe I'll read them all this summer.

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The Big Read

This meme concerns the NEA Top 100 book list, via Swans on Tea and Faraday's Cage, from Abbi.

There is also a BBC Top 100 list that I might do, since I might have read more of those. They list the Harry Potter books separately, as they should. This list double counts, since Hamlet is part of the works of Shakespeare.

The rules
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
3) Place an asterisk * by those you intend to read/finish someday.
4) Mark in a different color the books you LOVE. [not done]

Updated: I put a trailing "++" after the ones I really love.]

PLUS Like Swans on Tea, I put a dagger † where I've seen the movie without ever bothering to read the book, often because I've seen the movie enough to be as literate about it as those who read the book.

Wow, I've read almost one quarter of them! (Mostly not for school.)

1 † Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 † The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ++
6 The Bible [And I never intend to read the begotcha books]
7 † Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 † Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ++
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 † Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 † The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 † Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck +
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ++
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 † Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 † The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 † Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 † Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 ? The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 † Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 † A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 † A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 * Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 *† Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 † Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 † Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker +
73 † The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 † The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 † Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 * The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle +
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ++
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 † The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 † Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 † Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments:

†† Yes, I have watched a lot of old movies. I've seen more than one version of some of these.

I think I was the only person in my circle who did not read #12 in HS.

I read #24 in fourteen days flat, the library loan period, including all of the essays at the back of the Norton Critical Edition. I've read parts of some of these in the original foreign language.

But where the heck is Rabbit Run? or Heart of Darkness? [Oops. Found it and fixed it.] Not to mention Physics by Halliday and Resnick? How can you read the Bible and not read the 2nd edition "blue bible"? Its opening is at least as enchanting as that of David Copperfield. I mean, how can "Chapter 1: I Am Born" compare to "Chapter 1: Measurement"? The latter features the failure of the first transatlantic cable because the company building it had ignored the careful new experimental measurements made by its hired engineering consultant, William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin). That story, along with Lord Kelvin's view that "when you can measure what you are speaking about,and express it in numbers, you know something about it", is a great way to kick off a fine piece of technical literature.

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Newton's Principia

The Smithsonian magazine had a little blurb about the Principia in "This Month in History" for July 2007. It is the 320th anniversary of the invention of my student's favorite two classes: calculus and calc-based physics.

Made me think, gee, its seems like almost twenty years ago.

Actually, it was 20 years ago that I got a chance to read the original book.

You see, I'm so old that I remember when MTV had music videos. I remember when the "Washington meeting" of the APS, the April meeting attended by everyone except condensed matter physicists, was always held in Washington, DC. (Now it appears in more centrally-located cultural centers, such as Jacksonville, FL.) So much for being able to see a major Picasso exhibit on a lunch break. But I digress.

On a whim, I wandered over to the Library of Congress during a gap in talks I thought would be interesting. I knew that 1987 was the 300th anniversary of the book, and wondered if I could see one of the originals. It turns out that the answer was "yes". What a great experience, a connection to the origins of physics.

My most striking impression was that the pages of the book did not look that old. I have paperback books that look older. (The same was true of the Gutenberg Bible on display in the lobby.) That really made me appreciate the value of rag paper over the wood pulp we use today. We are quite correct to worry about whether digital media can be read 100 years from now, but it can't be as bad as many of our books.

Most libraries have a facsimile copy of the book (on pulp paper, so it already looks 320 years old) and/or a copy of the Cotes translation. It is worth reading to see how clearly Newton presented the main ideas of physics, and how convoluted his geometrical proofs of the calculus were. In particular, pay attention to how he invented the "vis insita" to give a name to the force Aristotle said was needed to keep things moving. His method of removing Aristotelian thinking was to define it as distinct from an "impressed force". Worth thinking about when we deal with all of those counterintuitive ideas about motion that our students bring to the classroom.

Modern textbooks take different approaches to this conceptual problem. Newton offers one that is not used much today.

PS - My understanding is that physicists don't drink enough at the hotel bar to make us desirable guests for conferences in the big Washington hotels.

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Textbook adoption for Physics

Started at the request of "Mike" in the comments section on PG's blog.

My biggest problem with textbooks is that they have become bloated and unreadable. Bloat makes them unreasonably expensive, and tight adoption cycles (down from a dozen years in the 60's to every 3 years now) effectively increase that expense. Bloat, driven by editorial additions rather than writing the text de novo, contributes to (un)readability as the book loses the single voice it had when originally written.

My model right now is the Hewitt's book for basic (conceptual) physical science. It is way too cutesy for my taste, but college students will read it for knowledge and enjoy doing it. It may be written somewhere around a 9th grade language level, but that keeps linguistic sophistication from getting in the way of the many difficulty ideas being presented. The focus is on the new vocabulary and concepts. Best of all, it is properly organized pedagogically.

I wish there was a calc-based book that had that approach.

There are, finally, some new books out there and I am adopting one of those. Its virtues are that it is short(er) and sweet. That also makes it cheap (although only on a relative scale) and light enough to carry, but I like that the words are chosen carefully and that the book does not obscure the main narrative with lots of cute color pictures.

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