In the Void

What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can hear, what you can smell, taste and feel, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Yes, the textbook that I'm reading now starts with a quote from The Matrix.

Sensation and Perception, if you buy the older edition used, comes pretty cheaply (I paid just over 4$ for it). The new edition is way more expensive, in the 150$ to 160$ range.

The older edition is missing new research about the vomeronasal gland (although there is a notation that you can get that information on-line if you have the CD.) I don't, but I'm pretty sure I've gleaned all that info from other sources.

The quote actually makes sense, in that context....

In interest of sparing the flist, I'm posting two reviews together

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John Barry
This is a wonderful book is so many ways, detailing vast amounts of information. It's had tons of reveiws on Amazon, so let me just add my two cents here, and keep it mininal.

Influenza is bloody terrifying. This books sheds light on that in so many ways, starting with the way influenza mutates and following with the tragedy it can leave behind. Particularly gruesome were the accounts of this epidemic's assault on military cantonments, where healthy young men in crowded conditions became the perfect food for the virus. The books tells of thousands of men in hospital there, so many that the few nurses had no time to clean them or even remove the dead.....and the doctors and nurses were dying themselves. The death rates were terrifying, particularly since this particular mutation killed the young and healthy. The hardest hit age group was 25-29.....leaving behind thousands of orphans in the US alone.

Particularly interesting to me was the brief discussion of the psychological aftereffects of this epidemic: In adition to the more-predictable exhaustion, survivors have a much higher rate of Parkinson's and schizophrenia. (It has been established that women who contract influenza in the 2nd (or is it 1st?) trimester of their pregnancy have a much higher chance of having a child with schizophrenia. I read about this in Genome, I believe.) I find it a bit terrifying that you could come out of this illness with your brain chemistry altered. Yeesh!

I will note that the book had one failing for me, that I will call Grandpa Simpsonism. You know that scene where he goes off on "I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the fashion at the time...."? This book does that...a lot. There are endless asides about one person's medical career or another, and the first 166 pages of the book seem to be a paean to the head of Johns Hopkins at the time of the epidemic....who didn't actually do much about the epidemic as he was sick with flu for the bulk of that time. I haz resurch, can I show you it? All of it?. This book could have given me the pertinent information in 1/3 the number of pages. I'm impatient.



Garbage in the Cities by Martin Melosi
This is the other end of the spectrum, where the author gives you statistics, charts, and hard numbers. Yep, right up my alley. This author, who has written more books on this subject, goes through the basic ways municipalities handled garbage, sewage, and rubbish.

A pet peeve of mine is that so many people who write about the past forget to include the trash...or more importantly, the manure and sewage. Street sweeping and garbage collection, which Dickens often reminded us about (think Our Mutual Friend or Bleak House, for instance), are oddly dismissed by many authors who write about the past.

Cities that depended on the horse, however, for transportation and hauling, had two huge issues.
1) Manure in the streets (hence the street sweepers). Tons were removed daily, and in many cities simply dumped downstream or into the ocean.
2) Dead horses. Yep, that's what I said. Statistically, a city horse at the turn of the century had a !2-year lifespan!, (which I find incredibly depressing). In 1910, Manhattan sanitation removed 15,000 dead horses from the streets. By 1915, even with the increased presence of the oh-so-clean automobile, they were still removing 10,000 a year. So depressing.

I will say that this book, despite having some less than happy info in it, provided exactly what I was looking for.


A final note. displacedtexan read Life in a Medieval Castle and The World Without Us for me, and marked the sections I would be interested in, although he says I won't want to read the full books, so no reports on those two. I'll read the bits I need and move on to Crashing Through.

Once again, I've been reading Psychology Today, which is such a fun little magazine sometimes. In the Sept/Oct issue, we have a lovely article called Cult of Clean, available free here online. This is, oddly enough, right up my alley.

If you've read one of my stories (or have beta-read the novel) with Shironne Anjir, you'll recall that she has a related problem. She senses things through her skin at the...molecular level. She's aware of everything that touches her skin (all of her skin, BTW) in a way that others are not. So yes, she's aware of every spot of urine on the floor or everything that gets left on her sheets or clothes during the laundering process. And at this point, I should probably cut for the squeamish... ( Read more... )

Not all the articles in this magazine are a hit with me, but occasionally they get one I just love. Get used to it. ;o)

I just finished Social& Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction by John Monaghan and Peter Just. The title is pretty self explanatory.

If you're looking for a quick overview, this is a pretty good one, touching on the major areas of interest for anthropologists. I don't think I learned a great deal from the book, but it served to codify what I already knew, which is always a handy thing to have done for you. (Especially since one of my characters is a student of Divergent Anthropology.)

A good refresher, it lightly touches on each field. Not an in-depth explanation of anything, if that's what you're after.