Review: Strange Beauty

Amazon

From Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics, by George Johnson:


He is sometimes called the Mendeleev of the twentieth century, for what he provided was no less than a periodic table of the subatomic particles."

Strange Beauty is both a book about particle physics and a biography of a scientist. It suffers from the weaknesses of its two subjects. Particle physics is a mind-numbingly complex field that few understand, and even they are mostly bluffing. And the scientist examined here is not an easy person to like -- brilliant, arrogant, competitive, sarcastic and insecure. Think "The Big Bang Theory's" Sheldon Cooper without any innocent charm.

After the jump, my review and excerpts.

Review: The Art of Fielding

Amazon

From The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach:


To want to be perfect. To want everything to be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he'd ever craved since he'd been born. Maybe it wasn't even baseball that he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen."

The Art of Fielding is a book about baseball. But that's like saying Moby Dick is a book about fishing. The two books have a lot in common.

After the jump, my review.

Late Autumn in the Steger Garden (2011)

From Flowers

More photos after the jump.

Another Look At Single-Member Districts

Bill McCalpin's "Rumorcheck.org" asks the question, "What would happen if Richardson had single member districts?" and comes up with the same answer that "The Wheel" came up with when that question was examined after the last city election in May.

• Rumorcheck.org: "What would happen if Richardson had single member districts?"
  
  
• The Wheel: "Analysis of the Votes for Richardson City Council"
  
• The Wheel: "Are Richardson's Voting Districts in Need of Change?"
  

Spoiler alert: the answer is that single member districts probably wouldn't have much effect on election results.

Bad News for the RHS Panthers

Panthers? Huh? If you're thinking, "Doesn't he mean RHS Eagles?" the answer is no, I mean Panthers. But you're excused if you read "RHS" and automatically thought "Richardson High School." That's understandable. It would have been even more understandable if I had left off "Panthers" altogether, as one local blogger did.

After the jump, the latest example of the old adage, "Don't believe everything you read."