3 Awesome Things I Learned About Planets

Astronomy is one of my favorite nerdy things. I suppose I can blame my dad for this overwhelming interest. You see, he’s an aeronautical engineer and has been involved in missions that involved the Hubble Telescope and the International Space Station. He’s actually walked around inside parts of the Space Station that are in orbit now and has a mission flag that was flown on a shuttle. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s cool as hell!

So naturally, How I Killed Pluto, is right up my alley. My inherited interest in space gave me a good background on much of what Brown talks about, but there were a few fun facts that I learned about our planets. Here are my favorite three (so far) -

1. We used to have 11 of them in our solar system. While we cry over the loss of little planet number nine, we’ve previously lost quite a few more. For 40 years our solar system consisted of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Ceres, Pallas and Juno. When the definition of planet was narrowed, Ceres, Pallas and Juno were collectively demoted to asteroids. Apparently our generation isn’t alone in mourning a planet.

2. Our days of the weeks are named after our planets. Of course this was hundreds of years ago when the Sun and the Moon were planets. What’s that you say? We have no planet named Thurs? Well, you’d be correct! Mythology translated our planets into interesting names –

Sunday – the Sun. Pretty straightforward.

Monday – the Moon. Again, saw it coming.

Tuesday – Mars. Ah, it gets exciting. Mars is the Roman god of war. The Germanic God of war is Tiw, and it is for him we named Tuesday.

Wednesday – Mercury. Famous for being the winged-shoe messenger of the gods, one of his lesser known duties was serving as carrier of the dead. Or maybe still messenger. I suppose the gods have to deliver bad news too. Anyway, his Germanic Grim Reaper cousin is Woden, who gives us Wednesday.

Thursday – Jupiter. Jupiter is king of the gods, Thor is Norse king of the gods. Ta-da. Thursday.

Friday – Venus. Even though I think Venus, the Roman goddess of love, sounds more romantic, this day is named for her Norse counterpart Frigga.

Saturday – Saturn. Of course!

3. Our planets inspire names for the elements. I kind of guessed it with Plutonium, Uranium, Mercury, and so on. But Cerium and Palladium can thank the planets for their names as well. Fun random fact for parties.

I’m sure there’s many more delightful tidbits to be discovered, but I’ll let you find those for yourself when you pick up How I Killed Pluto.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

     "George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."

     "What's wrong with it?"

     "I don't know."

     "Well, then."

     "I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."

     "What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"

     "You know very well what he'd want." His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

"It's just that the nursery is different now than it was."

     "All right, let's have a look."

     They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.

     Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.

     "Well," said George Hadley.

     They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing's too good for our children," George had said.

     The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

     George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

     "Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong."

     "Wait a moment, you'll see," said his wife.

     Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley's upturned, sweating face.

     "Filthy creatures," he heard his wife say.

     "The vultures."

     "You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they're on their way to the water hole. They've just been eating," said Lydia. "I don't know what."

     "Some animal." George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. "A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe."

    "Are you sure?" His wife sounded peculiarly tense.

     "No, it's a little late to be sure," be said, amused. "Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what's left."

     "Did you hear that scream?" she asked.

4 Things To Expect From Incognito

I just closed the final pages of Incognito. Again, beacuse I wanted to give this book a second reading to really nail down my feelings about it. Here's my thoughts -

 

1. The language was delightful. Eagleman uses alliteration poetically and knows how to coin a phrase. Just delightful.

2. I like footnotes actually at the foot of the page. I like to glance down and have the option to read them. I usually don't but I like having the option. Flipping to the back of the book each time I saw an asterisk got tiring.

3. With my psychology background, I was a little bored (I took a big nerdy interest in psychopharmacology early on). This was definitely meant for people who are not in the field or not really interested in the field. If you are said people, you'll be quite intrigued.

4. The ending was a little abrupt. I like reading a good old-fashioned hardback for many reasons, but a big one is momentum. When I'm just clicking arrows to finish a book (say, on my Kindle) I'm not mentally prepared to savor the ending. The same scenario occured here. The appendix, bibliography, etc., was about 40 pages long, so I felt like the book ended in the middle. Sad day.

Thank You For The Light by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mrs. Hanson was a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty, who sold corsets and girdles, travelling out of Chicago. For many years her territory had swung around through Toledo, Lima, Springfield, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, and her transfer to the Iowa-Kansas-Missouri district was a promotion, for her firm was more strongly entrenched west of the Ohio.

Eastward, she had known her clientele chattily and had often been offered a drink or a cigarette in the buyer’s office after business was concluded. But she soon found that in her new district things were different. Not only was she never asked if she would like to smoke but several times her own inquiry as to whether anyone would mind was answered half apologetically with “It’s not that I mind, but it has a bad influence on the employees.”

“Oh, of course, I understand.”

Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

The last week of her first trip on the new circuit found her in Kansas City. It was mid-August and she felt somewhat lonely among all her new contacts, so she was delighted to find at the outer desk of one firm a woman she had known in Chicago. She sat down before having herself announced and in the course of the conversation found out a little about the man she was going to see.

“Will he mind if I smoke?”

“What? My God, yes!” her friend said. “He’s given money to support the law against it.”

“Oh. Well, I’m grateful for the advice—more than grateful.”

The Professor and The Madman by Simon Winchester

Book: The Professor and the Madman

Author: Simon Winchester

 

Why I Read It: I was researching the origin of words for a class and I came across this story of how the Oxford English Dictionary was created.

First Line: In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.

 

First Impression: Murder, insanity and the making of the OED? I am definitely on board!

Last Impression: Wow. This was amazing. Much more story than history, which I was not expecting, but loved it from start to finish. Also, the dictionary entries at the beginning of each chapter were fun.

Ratings

Overall – 4 Heart Skipped A Beat

Characters – 4 The characterization of these two men is touching; figures from the past are usually brought alive from the pages of history with broad strokes, here they are detailed in their thoughts and actions, and tinted in a deferential light.

Story – 3 The story is equal parts history lesson and character study of the two men behind the first edition of the OED. The story is interesting, but it is not what drives the reader on.

Narration – 4 While most might find the subject a bit dull, Winchester clearly does not and his curiousity to discover the past is tangible on the pages. His description of dictionary history is tainted with wonder, and the reader can't help but share the awe at such a feat. His word choice, perhaps more noticable in a book about words, is careful and decisive. Each and every word used feels purposeful.

Read Again? I most certainly will read this book again. It was a fun piece of history that I have already had the craving to revisit.

Tell Others to Read? Depends upon the person. This book walks that line between creative nonfiction and historical fiction, so if the reader likes books in either of those genres, then yes.

Excerpt: And sometime in the early 1880s one copy, at least, left inside a book or slipped between the pages of a learned journal, found its way to one of two large cells on the top floor of Block 2 of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Crowthorne, Berkshire. It was read, voraciously, by William Minor, a man for whom books, with which one of his two cells was lined from floor to ceiling, had become a second life.
     Doctor Minor had been an inmate at Broadmoor for the previous eight years. He was deluded, true; but he was a sensitive and intelligent man, a graduate of Yale, and well read and curious. He was, understandably, preternaturally anxious to have something useful to do, something that might occupy the weeks and months and decades that stretched without limit -- "Until Her Majesty's Pleasure Be Known" -- before him.
     This invitation from a Dr. James Murray of Mill Hill, Middlesex, N.W., it seemed, promised an opportunity for intellectual stimulus -- and perhaps even a measure of personal redemption -- that was far better than any he could otherwise imagine. He would write, immediately.