So I snuck into the local Borders today and power-napped on a crate of Harry Potter books. That's right, folks. I know who dies in this book. Skip on to the next entry if you don't want to know. It was ( spoiler )! Shocking stuff!

So if Dumbledore dies, can I eat Fawkes? It's not like he'll have a place to go.

Okay, so the new Harry Potter book came out today, and the Winter Solstice will be held July 16. July seems a bit late for the Winter Solstice, but that's what I saw while skimming my friends list.

In other news, I wandered around Fremont today and saw a copy of Glynda-Lee Hoffmann's book, The Secret Dowry of Eve: Woman's Role in the Development of Consciousness. Glynda-Lee feels that, however fuzzy the Bible might be on topics like dinosaurs and evolution, it is quite clear on psychology and neurophysiology, and armed with her secret decoder ring, she sets out to prove that Genesis is actually a pro-woman story and not, as the words themselves suggest, a justification for sexism. What this looks like from my point of view is another person writing a book that says, "Hey, it's okay to be a member of [insert name of group that doesn't get the respect it deserves], and we know this because some external story has validated us." That's totally the wrong way to go about trying to make people feel better. I'd like to see a book that says, "Hey, it's okay to be a member of [insert name of group that doesn't get the respect it deserves]." I mean, I don't need any sort of external validation. I don't. Do I?

I went back and read the 2010 novel again. It doesn't make that much sense, but it's less insane than the movie. Actually, I think the movie ripped off that Jurassic Park novel, but with less of that phoney pseudo-chaos theory bunk. I'd like it said here and now that I'm not a Michael Crichton fan. I didn't like Sphere, I didn't like Congo, and I didn't like Dance Hall of the Dead. Plus, I don't believe in the science behind most of what he wrote. I think he made it up. If you want science, you should check out Dr. E. E. "Doc" Smith. That's a guy who knows his science. Also, it's not well-organized. I found Congo to be very confusing. Oh, yeah. I'm talking about Michael Crichton now, not E. E. "Doc" Smith. Crichton can't write to save his life, and he doesn't get science at all. Plus, he looks a lot like an eraser that's been chewed on.

Anyhow, read 2010. Don't watch the movie, and don't read Jurassic Park. It's not well-written. You can take my word for it.

First, although Walter Cronkite has left LiveJournal, he's still a force of evil in the world. Mike Wallace, who is a tireless crusader against Cronkite and his gang, was arrested on some crazy charge. I mean, he's 86 years old and the police arrested him for attacking them with "aikido and t'ai qi [sic] and some funky voodoo shit." Come on! Aikido is used primarily after you are attacked. "t'ai qi" is totally mispelled, and even people who are gullable enough to think that there is a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda know that Mike Wallace does hermetic magic, not voodoo. This is obviously something cooked up by Walter and his boys to frame Mike. Fortunately, somebody at the police station noticed this and let him free.

Second, I don't want you to think that I'm anti-celebrity. I'm really not. True, I hate Walter Cronkite and Jessica Simpson, but I've got reasons for that. They are bad people, and they will probably stay that way. On the other hand, I just love Wil Wheaton. Sure, he had some rough years as a child celebrity. While he was playing Adric in Doctor Who, he set fire to a hotel just to see what would happen. After his character was killed off, he locked himself in a room for six months and wrote out what would eventually become Enron's business plan. During a party in M.C. Hammer's apartment, he slept with Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Betty White, Joan Baez, and Alan Greenspan. He was arrested going through airport security with 2.7 metric tons of heroin in his shoes. "Nobody, and I do mean nobody, needs size 473 shoes," said the TSA employee who busted him. He went to rehab, got out, came back, got out, came back, and finally got all of the rehab therapists addicted. In fact, he pretty much single-handedly destroyed the Betty Ford Clinic for the Treatment of Twizzler Addiction.

However, all that is behind him. He's reformed. In fact, he's living a monastic life right now. He's such a cool guy that millions of people read the Brother Wheaton Mysteries. I've read a couple. He's a Benedictine monk who has seen the error of his old ways and now runs a herb garden and uses his forensic skills to solve crimes. He's a little bit skeptical, but very faithful. You should check them out.

It seems that Walter Cronkite's arm has grown long. I spent most of yesterday with the police. They picked me up in the morning, left me in a cell until the late afternoon, questioned me for a few minutes, and then took me home. The cops said that this was the first they had heard about the murders of Robert MacNeil and Tom Lehrer, and they wanted to know how a "likkle kittycat" would have heard about them. When they came to pick me up, I yelled about how much of an outrage it was. "Believe me," the cop said as he tried to cuff my paws, "this is more of an outrage for us than for you." I wouldn't have guessed it from looking at these officers, but the loss of these two great entertainers must have hit them pretty hard. When they questioned me, one kept his head in his hands the whole time. He kept repeating, "This can't be happening. This can't be happening."

I did get to read a book while I was locked up, though. I was really surprised by what a good writer Ricky Martin is. Xenocide is a good read, and it raises a lot of tough issues. The first tough issue it raises is plagiarism. I'm pretty sure that the characters of Ender, Val, and Peter Wiggin originally come from the novel Ender's Game, by Willard Scott. It got kind of confusing after that, since Martin assumes we have read his earlier stories and doesn't bother to give us much backstory. Still, there was a lot of talking and thinking and pigs and high adventure. The real problem I have with it was when Ender and Peter sang "Living la Vida Loca." That was just a cheap way to get an extra song on the Xenocide soundtrack.

More on the campaign against Walter Cronkite soon...

As you may or may not know, I'm very interested in natural history. I've been reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle off and on for about a month now, and I finished it last night. I can't imagine how cool it would have been to be in Darwin's place. ( Continued )

I stayed up all night reading The Matrix: Computations, by the Watchkowskii Brothers (Golub and Van Loan, aka Click and Clack). I heard that a lot of people thought the second movie was too slow and had "too many words". I can only assume that people who said that went home and washed their minds out with Laura Croft: Tomb Raider, something by Long Dong Silver, or maybe a round or two of golf on the PC. Obviousy, I'm not a part of that crowd. I liked The Hours, even, so I hope you understand what I mean when I say that The Matrix: Computations was all words and almost no action.

With nearly 700 pages, I expected there to be some good gun battles or car chases or fist fights. I expected to read something about how the Matrix started or have a young Oracle steal a few scenes. After about 500 pages, I have to admit that my expectations dropped. I would have been happy to have read some dialogue. What were the Watachowski Brothers thinking? If you don't believe me, here is a sample. I randomly pulled it from page 449.

These connections to the symmetric eigenproblem allow us to adapt the mathematical and algorithmic developments of the previous sections to the singular value problem. Good references for this section include Lawson and Hanson (1974) and Stewart and Sun (1990).

See, this is just talking down to the reader. If you make a clever reference, and I don't think they did, you don't tell the reader "I just made a clever reference. Go look it up right now so you can appreciate how smart and erugated we are." This happens on pretty much every page, and then every so often they have a page or three of references for that section!

You have to trust me when I say it gets worse. It's even lacking the philosophy that The Matrix is known for. Sure, they talk about "efficiency" and "communications cost" and "theory", but it's just not up to the usual Watchedpotski level. Plus, the last 60 pages
are nothing but shameless name dropping. I guess they thought that people like Aki Bjork (singer), Jim Demmel (inventor of a kind of drill and other useful tools) , and John Wilkinson (inventor of polynomials) would lend some of their cool to the story, but it was too little, too late.

I can't believe this came from Johns Hopkins Press. They are reputable publishers, and I can't imagine that they would want a stinker like this with their name on it. I'm also angry at the SIAM Review. I'm part Siamese, and I think running the academic journal for the breed carries a pretty heavy responsibility. Shame on you, SIAM Journal!

All things considered, this is a book that I won't even sit on. I'll probably still try other Wachkerenski books, movies, and food products, though.

It's amazing how much power a good writer can have. For example, I was sitting on my copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I've heard a lot of Joyce scholars say that they like some of his other works, like Dubliners, better than Wake, but I just don't see why. Maybe it's because I've got the Dover thrift edition of Dubliners, or maybe it's because I don't have a Ph.D. in literature, but I think Wake is by far the better book. I may not use the same metric for quality literature as some bearded professor in an Eiffel tower, but I say Wake is much cooler for two reasons:

1. it's big enough that I don't have to curl up really small to sit on it
   
2. it's taller, so I get a better view and look more impressive
   

It's not just the quantity of the writing that puts it above Dubliners. The quality of the writing is superior. Sitting on Dubliners was about like sitting on the kitchen floor, but from the second my butt hits the cover of Wake, I feel confused. That's the power of a great writer.