Jetta was bullied

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Recently, a story was reported on Fox News that a young lady named Jetta was bullied in school after she had donated her lovely long hair for use for kids with cancer.

The photos that are supplied of young Jetta show a really pretty child of about seven or eight, with beautiful long hair, a photograph of the same young lady having her hair cut, and the after photos, showing her looking very reproachful.

The story is that her classmates (or schoolmates) taunted her for having a boy's haircut.  It all depends, of course, on what the words were that were actually used, but, on the face of it, this sort of bullying (and I agree that it certainly is bullying) is hardly terribly painful.  The biggest crime here seems to be that Fox News chose to make a fuss about the whole thing.

OK, we are in a time where bullying is deplored generally, and publicly.  But it seems more that Fox News is trying to get some attention by featuring this very sweet young lady than that it is trying to focus on bullying in schools.

Is all bullying equally bad?  I don't think all bullying is equally bad, just as I don't think all crimes are equally bad.  Kids are often mean to each other, because they envy whatever the other kid has, and try to be hurtful in retaliation.  Are we ever going to eradicate bullying?  Is the situation going to be helped by parental intervention?

The principal of the school concerned remarked that nobody was ever hurt by a few harsh words, and I believe this is the sanest response he or she could have made.  My goodness; vilifying a bunch of kids for taunting a girl about a short haircut probably falls close to zero in the scale of all bullying.  If anyone wants to pursue a zero tolerance policy for schoolyard bullying, they're going to be seriously disappointed.

Physical bullying must absolutely stop.  But bullying of the sort such as "your haircut is stupid" is stupid, but it is even more stupid to be prosecuting it.  On the other hand, bullying a child because its parents have an alternate lifestyle, or because it is from a minority race, or because it has some birth defect is deplorable, and needs to be looked into.

In the present case, I think an enormous part of the problem is that the utter charm of the young lady concerned is almost impossible to resist!  She is not only pretty, but has a lovely smile, so she makes a wonderfully tempting poster child for bullying generally.  But I think she would be better served by being counseled to turn the other cheek, as the saying goes, than to make any bigger a fuss over the incident than has already been made.

Arch

This and That

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Whoa!

The wife and I were just fooling around, trying to stuff up the gaps around the windows in our bedroom, and I came down to check on my blog, and One Hundred and Three people had been viewing the blog!!!  I am totally not accustomed to all this attention.

Only 5 people had read the most recent post; obviously some of them have been reading older posts, and there's no way to tell who read what, when.  (I mean, if I kept track of the count of viewers of all the posts daily, I could deduce this information, but I don't have that degree of interest in the data!)

By the way, do please take a look at our companion blog about Archie's Archives, the radio show.  There is an enormous amount of information, aimed at people just getting started in listening to classical music.  (Please don't listen to the podcasts; I hate the sound of my own voice, and I assume you will, too.)

The latest post was on sets of variations, and Passacaglias.  And there are pictures.

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Does the financial resources of a family impinge on the safety of their pets?

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When I looked on FaceBook recently, someone had posted a picture of a sweet little doggie that had been found (read: caught) in a certain neighborhood.  “Please share,” the post pleaded; “This little lady is very scared here, and is probably missing her home very much!”

I don’t doubt it.  The cute little dog looked distinctly anxious.  Some pet owners are sufficiently affluent to be able to afford a dog tag with the name and number of the owners.  The range of resources that could be brought to bear on keeping a pet safe is enormous.

As most of my readers will know, it is possible to insert a passive RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification tag, which is a tiny microchip that responds to a sensor with a code.  It does not need any extra power; the power of the reader, or sensor, is all it needs to broadcast back its ID.  To use this technology —which currently costs around $10 or less— a citizen must (1) be able to afford the gadget, (2) have access to a veterinary surgeon (or Vet) who is willing to insert the device safely, and to be able to afford his or her services, (3) be aware of the very existence of this sort of thing, by reading this Blog, or from similar educational sources, and lastly (4) care enough about their pet to do it.

It is difficult to tell why a pet ends up on the street.  It is usually any one of: the home is not secure; the owner is too busy and distracted to keep track of the pet; the pet is such a nuisance that it is often banished to an area from which it is easy to escape; the pet has been thrown out of the family car, having become too much of a burden on the responsibilities of the family.  Of course, the pet could wriggle out of its collar and make a run for it; pets often (or invariably) do not know what is good for them.

The RFID, if a pet has it, is only good if the pet is picked up by the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), also known as the Animal Shelter, or some similar institution which has the means of actually reading whether an RFID is present, in which case of course they can locate the owner of record.  The pet could have met with any number of horrible fates instead of this most fortunate one.

Obviously, I don’t believe that poverty is a culpable crime; it is the crime of society itself that poverty exists.  Bear in mind that poverty in America is extreme only in comparison to other developed countries.  There is extreme poverty in Third World countries that is fueled by the needs of American Capital, compared to which the homeless in the US live like kings.  But, the fact remains: even the poor should be allowed the satisfaction of owning a pet, provided the safety of the pet is supported by things that are easy to do.

In many localities, implanting an RFID, or obtaining a collar with an ordinary printed name-tag, is either free or subsidized.  (This doesn’t help owners who don’t know about them; that’s an educational problem.)  This is something which should be easy and inexpensive to remedy, but certain types of fiscal conservatives do not look upon this sort of initiative with favor.  To pass a Federal Law that enables every locality to offer free or subsidized RFID on demand, it has to pass the test whether the government can afford to give every single pet in the US, numbering in the millions, obviously, one of those devices.  Then, can it afford the bureaucracy that will be needed to get the plan working (which, Fiscal Conservatives suspect, involves putting countless undeserving imbeciles on the Federal payroll, and enabling a large number of unemployed to enter the ranks of the employed, and running the risk of countless numbers of Democrat votes that did not exist before)?

Helping keep pets safe is obviously a business fraught with unintended political consequences, and probably left alone, at least by a Republican Congress.  But seriously, the number of conservatives whose reasoning follows this cynical path are probably very few.  But they are in charge of the GOP machine.

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Politix Today

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You know, I have been thinking.  I don't think it's easy to divide Americans into liberals and conservative anymore.  This is because the list of articles of faith of the Tea Party is so (1) extensive, and (2) so extreme, that many conservatives probably have trouble subscribing to them.  On the other hand, that List is inducing increasingly more Articles of Faith on the liberal side, some of which are (2) almost as extreme as those on the other side, especially pertaining to how evil all conservatives are.

In the short term, I suppose, we have to deal with one thing at a time, as it becomes necessary to foil various ploys that the sinister strategists among the conservatives dream up.  Conservatives are not, however, all of the same stripe.  There are several kinds of conservatives, and we need to be aware of this.

Conservative politicians are some of those who arouse the most suspicion in me.  They often spout lies and disinformation which must be countered strongly with accurate information and analysis, and if absolutely necessary, counter-propaganda, though that seems a rather extreme thing to do.  But other conservative politicians are probably very unhappy with how things are developing; it has been my theory for a long time that there is a sector within the ranks of the conservatives that is deeply embarrassed by the lies of some of the conservative politicians.  If conservatives plan to be in control for any length of time, they must see that they have to put forward more substantial ideas than simply manufactured lies, and pandering to business interests.

Conservative businessmen are of two kinds.  Some of them can only see that their resources are being eroded by high taxes.  (But we know that most of the taxes go towards unbelievably high salaries for congressmen, and towards the Pentagon and its dreams of glory.)  Others only see that the Government is mishandling its financial resources (which, of course, came from taxes, in the first place).  Businessmen of all kinds are deeply offended by others mishandling money.

A very important sector among conservatives, especially reasonable ones who are strongly religious, is that they feel that liberals seem to be getting Government to do the charity on their behalf, whereas these conservatives would rather have control over their own charitable endeavors.  This is a completely reasonable attitude, except that it seems to us liberals that the government —when it functions as it ought— has the potential to be far more organized and effective than private organizations.  Let's not forget that private organizations have been on record as squandering a far larger percentage of their resources on remuneration of high-level officers than we have been accustomed to expecting.  But of course, conservative businessmen are perfectly ok with big salaries for the high-ups in any organization (except a liberal President, of course).

So that is quite a major division of opinion between liberals and conservatives: conservatives want to do their own "charity" (which of course we liberals consider rights of the poor), whereas we liberals would like it to be organized in such a way that people of small means can get the assistance in a systematic way.  Of course there is corruption, which we liberals think is inevitable, whereas conservatives cannot tolerate it.

Lots of individual conservatives are idealists, and innocent, and tend to regard clever-dick liberals as sly cynics.  A lot of liberals are clever people.  But generally speaking, very few liberals are as willing to manipulate the truth as the conservative media.  Conservative media and conservative money together have taken the responsibility to be the arm of the Conservative movement that spreads deceit and out-and-out lies, all in —to them— a good cause.

Conservatives have been, some of them, thinking very long term, over the past several decades.  How can they get in power, and stay in power, so that they make taxes lower, the military stronger, take away government services, erode the strength of Music and the Arts, NPR, PBS, and all things that really represented the high aspirations of those classy conservatives of a bygone era, to which the conservative billionaires of today can never aspire?  Culture, for this latest crop of moneybags, is a hot dog in the reserved seats of a ball park.  I suppose someone has to support baseball.  But I just have no respect for the uneducated rich, who are willing to sacrifice public support for the arts and public education in order to lower taxes, and further stretch out the difference between the standard of living of the very affluent and the very poor.  All this gerrymandering, all this maneuvering to get conservatives into the Supreme Court, all this frantic legislation to give political power to corporations; for what?  To systemically ensure that liberals are kept out of government.

Liberals, too, are guilty of some things.  Some of this rhetoric about enslaving animals for food must be reserved for small, special-interest groups.

[To be continued]

The Basic Idea of Lossy Compression

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Since around 1980, when the Internet followed closely on the heels of personal computers, we live in a world in which music and images are sent back and forth in highly compressed form.

How is a text file stored?

A text file basically consists of characters.  Long ago, the computer folks got together and decided that each character on a typewriter would be represented by a number.  Here are a few of them:

“A”=65,	“B”=66,	“C”=67,	“D”=68,	“E”=69,	“F”=70,	“G”=71,	“H”=72,
“I”=73,	“J”=74,	“K”=75,	“L”=76,	“M”=77,	“N”=78,	“O”=79,	“P”=80,
		... and	so	on ...			“X”=88,
“Y”=89,	“Z”=90,

Which is all the capital letters.  After this come a few odd things, namely "[", "\" and so on.  Presently, we come to the lower-case letters:

“a”=97,	“b”=”98”,	...				...	“x”=120,
“y”=121,	“z”=122,	“{“=123,	“|”=124,	...

and so on; you get the idea.  The entire correspondence can be found here.  So if you made a text file that contained the single word zab, it would contain essentially the numbers 122, 97, 98, appropriately organized so that there is absolutely no mistaking it for 1269798, so don't worry.  Modern text files are actually word-processor files, so they contain, in addition, italics information, boldface information, etc, etc, so they're bigger.  (They also contain a lot of information of interest mainly to Microsoft Corporation, which adds to their size a tiny bit, e.g. This file was created in Word; aren't we awesome?)

Lossless Compression

Even text files can be made smaller by studying them carefully.  This is what happens when you use something like WinZip to compress your file.  Such utilities use tricks to represent the most common letter in your text by very short codes, the next most common letter using a slightly longer code, and so on.  Working backwards, your file can be expanded to be exactly the way it was.  This sort of thing is called lossless compression,  because the document can be reconstructed exactly at the receiving end.  This procedure, called encoding, depends on creating very compact lists of numbers to represent lists of number that are not so compact.

Make no mistake: the procedure is highly complex, and consists of multiple methods, each of which makes the resulting file smaller and smaller.

GIF Files

Compuserve, a computer company, invented a method for compressing certain types of pictures using a lossless compression; this method is still widely used today.  The compressed files have the extension "gif".  Here's essentially how it's done.

(1) A picture is first processed so that it has only 128 colors.  Many pictures look okay when the number of colors is reduced; for instance a chart, or diagram will probably only contain 5 or 6 colors to begin with.  The colors are numbered 0, 1, 2, and so on, to 127.  This is called the palette for the picture.  (It's a great feature that each picture's palette is individualized.  But still, the restriction of the number of colors is a sacrifice.)

(2) Next, the picture is divided into little 8x8 pixel blocks, and each block is encoded individually.  The color number is assigned to each of the 64 pixels.  Now it boils down to compressing these 64 numbers as much as possible.  Suppose the rectangle of numbers looks like this:

11122233
11223333
12233232
12333343
13344434
...
and so on.

(3) At this point, a clever trick called run-length encoding is used.  The numbers are stretched out in a single long line, starting at the top left, and going in a diagonal pattern.  I'm not sure, but it could look something like this:

 Following the arrows, you get the number list:
1,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,1,2,2,2,2,1,2,3,3,3,3,...
As you can see, this method of scanning the picture optimizes the likelihood of long strings of repeated colors.  Such a list of numbers would be encoded something like:

1(6),2(3),1,2(4),1,3(4)

and so on.  This means: "six 1's, followed by three 2's, followed by a single 1, then four 2's ..."

 There is obviously great potential to get a very small file indeed, if there are large stretches all of a single color.  If you ever had to store a GIF file of mostly white with a few black dots, you would have found it miniscule!

Lossy Compression of a list of numbers

In "lossy" compression (which means there is some loss; a typical computer type term...) the picture is approximated.  It is such a good approximation that nobody really minds.

First, let's see how a single row of 16 numbers can be approximated.  (Remember, this is a very rough explanation for laymen.)

Let's illustrate with a strip from a black-and-white photo.  The actual method is 2-dimensional, and not 1-dimensional, but the principles are very similar.  Suppose the strip of image resulted in

1

3

5

8

11

15

19

24

30

36

43

51

59

68

77

87

Remember, these number are supposed to represent colors, which usually vary smoothly in a photograph, for instance.  Since these are single numbers, rather than triples, they represent a grayscale image.  (Each pixel of a color image is represented by three numbers.  But you can easily imagine that a color picture can be split into three grayscale pictures.  If I show you how a grayscale image can be stored lossily, you can easily see how the full color picture is stored.)  Just to get a feel for what these sixteen numbers might mean, here is a chart, where each number is represented by the height of a bar, instead of a pixel:

Now, each number is actually stored as bits; that is, a number consisting of a row of zeroes and ones only.  Just keep this in mind.

First, we store the average of the entire list of numbers, which is ... 34, to the nearest integer.  So we put that in as our first number, in storing the “picture”.

34.

Now, we subtract 34 from each number, which gives us a new list:

-33, -31, -29, -26, -23, -19, -15, -10, -4, 2, 9, 17, 25, 34, 43, 53.

Let’s average the left 8 numbers, and the right 8 numbers:  we get -23 (roughly), and 23 (roughly).  We store these, as well.  So now, we have:

34, -23, 23.

Now, we subtract a -23 from the first 8 numbers, and 23 from the second 8 numbers.  We get 16 much smaller numbers:

-10, -8, -6, -3, 0, 4, 8, 13, -26, -20, -13, -5, 3, 12, 21, 31

We average the numbers in groups of 4:  we get (roughly) -7, 6, -16, and 17.  We store these, too:

34, -23, 23, -7, 6, -16, and 17.

We subtract -7 from the first four numbers, 6 from the next four, and so on.  We end up with even smaller numbers than before:

-3, -1, 1, 4, -6, -2, 2, 7, -10, -4, 3, 11, -14, -5, 4, 14

At this stage, we can simply stop.  If we restore the entire list of 16 numbers, pretending that the list contained all zeros at this stage, you know we're only going to be off by, well, 14, at the most!  We could do another step, and be off by 7 at the most.

The fun part would be to compare the "picture" we assemble using these numbers with the original list.

Start with all zeros, and add -7 to the first four, 6 to the next four, -16 to the next four, and 17 to the last four, we get
-7, -7, -7, -7,  6, 6, 6, 6, -16, -16, -16, -16, -16, 17, 17, 17, 17.

Now we add -23 to the first 8, and 23 to the last eight:
-30, -30, -30, -30, -17, -17, -17, -17, 7, 7, 7, 7, 40, 40, 40, 40,

Finally we add 34 to every number:
4, 4, 4, 4, 17, 17, 17, 17, 41, 41, 41, 41, 74, 74, 74, 74

Compare with the original file:
1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 15, 19, 24, 30, 36, 43, 51, 59, 68, 77, 87

As you can see, it is horrible!  I was feeling pretty depressed, thinking that this was a terrible example to show you, but this file of 16 numbers is just too small for any lossy compression to be illustrated.  I started again with 32 numbers, got an average, got two averages, got four averages, and got 8 averages, and threw out everything after that.  (In other words, I pretended that after I took the last 8 averages, that I was left with all zeroes.)

Here is a graph of the original file (in blue), and the compressed file (in red).  As you can see, the compressed data tends to look blocky, just as you've noticed JPEG files do.

Finally, I explain why this procedure results in even greater space savings than you might imagine.

Suppose the color intensity of the original picture varies from a pixel that's pure black (0) to one that is pure white (255).  All the pixels must have values between these two extremes.  The average, too, must lie between these two numbers.  These sorts of numbers take 8 bits (of zeros and oness) to express in binary.

But, usually, the average is about 128.  If a picture is such that the average value of its pixels is about 128, it will compress well, otherwise it will compress poorly.

Once you subtract the average out, the remaining list of numbers must be typically between -128 and 127, which can be represented by 8 bits, again.

Once the second set of averages are subtracted out, the numbers will lie between -64 and 64, which only need 7 bits!  The next set of averages will lie between -32 and 32, which can be represented by 6 bits!  Once you get to the point where you think that the itty bitty leftovers don't need to be stored, you don't use any additional space at all.

If your picture had 32 pixels, uncompressed, you would need 32×8 = 256 bits to store it.

Compressed using this primitive method described above, the first average is 8 bits, the next two averages are 7+7=14 bits;
the next four averages are 6+6+6+6=24 bits, and the next eight averages are 5+5+5+5+5+5+5+5=40 bits.  So the whole package would only take up 126 bits.  Additionally, it is possible to cheat by only storing those averages approximately!  It is done using binary digits, but it is comparable to storing highly-rounded versions of the averages, which take even less space.  It is done cautiously, based on how the eye perceives the image, and whether a minor misrepresentation of an average color of a block, or sub-block, makes a big difference to the appearance of the image.

With larger files, the savings are enormously greater; with photographs, if they vary smoothly across the picture, the savings will be great, but if there is a lot of detail, you just can't throw out the last remaining residues.  More and more averages need to be retained, which all contribute to the size of the file.

The actual method, though basically similar to what was shown above, uses sines and cosines and trigonometry to make the calculations easier.  This article in Wikipedia might make more sense, now that you have read this introduction.  Even if you just look at some of the pictures, you could get a handle on how it's done, completely disregarding the mathematics.

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Is it imperative to raise more money than the Republicans?

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Certain elements of the Democratic Party, and Liberals generally, have bought into the belief that elections can only be won, and GOP propaganda can only be countered, by engaging in an expensive media war.

Of course, nobody really knows, since for more than a decade we haven't looked at any alternatives.  Move On, and various machines that have been set up to work on behalf of liberals, are constantly asking people on their mailing lists to "Chip in a few dollars" to do thus and so.  It's a media campaign in North Carolina, or a media campaign in California.

One can't help but wonder where all this money actually ends up.  In the hands of the GOP, right?  Because most owners of the media are conservatives.  Unless I'm very much mistaken, the offices and the media owners of even liberal media are actually owned by conservatives.  In any case, media companies are hungry for cash (as are we all, I suppose) and tend to encourage this trend to buy media time and resources to fight propaganda battles electronically.

The public, it appears, is getting less and less intelligent, and more and more gullible, and it seems to take a lot of money to persuade anyone of facts that are self-evident.  Fox news has only to hint that there's something wrong with Barack Obama, such as that he has something absolutely improbable, such as epileptic fits, and the Liberal Media immediately goes into a panic overdrive to persuade everyone that it is not so.

Good government has to be deserved.  If all our neighbors insist on being idiots, insist on getting inferior services, insist that, for instance, dietary information on food products are not needed, that music is not needed in schools, that we don't need clean air, and that we don't need clean water, that we only need a lot of energy at any cost, and that only dirty energy such as gasoline and coal is any use, and that we don't need to protect endangered species like fish, wildlife and whales, then there's little we can do.  It is a theorem that stupidity can only increase!  It's a form of entropy.

But there's actually reason to believe that a lot of people actually do want clean energy, they do want inexpensive health care, they do want safe job, and information at the grocery store, and honest government.  They're just tired of arguing with illogical conservatives!  They're just waiting for Election Day.

Getting people to the polls is most definitely a priority.  Forget the media campaigns.  It is important for people who stand for the things that we stand for to reveal themselves.  It isn't important, in my humble opinion, to raise a lot of money for massive media campaigns.  Let's just say no to fundraising.

My Book List

(These days, everyone seems to start with “So,” so here goes.)

So, people are nominating each other furiously to publish their ten most favorite books.  The phrasing seems to be different in each case; sometimes it is the ten books that stayed with them the most; sometimes it is the ten books to which they return most often, othertimes it’s something else.  Perhaps for some people, picking ten books out of all those you’ve read is easy.  But that’s like picking ten of your favorite people.  Like picking ten people to thank if you win the Academy Awards.  It’s silly; you just can’t do it!  I certainly couldn’t.

I read like a fury until the age of, oh, forty, I’d say.  Then I started writing, and began to read my own stuff—writing, I mean— which sounds silly, but, well, that’s what I do.

Some of the books I’ve read, I’d much rather nobody knew about.  Other books I’ve read won’t mean much to anyone unless they’re in my field, or share my interests.  Yet other books I’ve read just don’t bear reading today, simply because we don’t talk like that anymore, and the stuff is obnoxious.  I just picked up one of them the other day, and some passages were appalling, for how badly they were written, or how ignorant the author comes across as being.  Let’s face it: I read a lot of crap.

It’s that fact, more than anything, that makes me determined to join the hordes of those who want to air their dirty reading laundry.  But I have to editorialize and comment on many of the books.

G. A. Henty: The Cat of Bubastes

This has to stand for about seven books by Henty that I read, including the gruesome “With Cortez in Mexico,” which began my political awakening.

Arthur Conan-Doyle: A Study in Scarlet

There’s not much to say about this, but it stands for nearly fifteen books I read as a teenager, after my Dad laid a Sherlock Holmes treasury on me.  Great style.

Leslie Charteris: The Lady or the Tiger

See what I mean?  Again, this one must stand for a ton of Saint books I read.

Louisa May Alcott: Little Men

(I read “Little Women” too, but off the record.)  I loved this book, and my writing was influenced greatly by Ms. Alcott’s style, which, I know, tends to the sentimental.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: Son of Tarzan

One of the most romantic books, especially for a sixteen-year-old, who doesn’t know much about anything.

Gertrude Norman: Letters of Composers

This is an anthology, and is probably one of the books that influenced me most.

C. P. Snow: Variety of Men

It would have been more impressive if I had said Two Cultures, but I started that one when I was, like, seventeen, and quickly put it down, and read this one instead.

Herbert Goldstein: Classical Mechanics

I wasn’t sure whether textbooks were allowed on this list, but I see a few in other people’s lists, so why not?  This is a brilliant book, and I love this gentleman dearly (through his books.  I have never met him).

Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Long Winter

I read these a lot later in life than most people, but I only learned of them when I was an adult.  Describes the Pioneer experience to the rest of us.

Laura Adams: Seeds of Fire

Laura Adams is a pseudonym of Karin Kallmaker.

Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey: Lucy, The beginnings of Humankind

I can’t believe people have forgotten all about this book.

Terry Pratchett: Wyrd Sisters

You’ll never know what humor can be unless you give this one a try.

I think I’ve gone a couple over.  I’ve also left out a ton of books by Marion Zimmer Bradley, starting with Darkover, and ending with Avalon, and the tragically neglected Firebrand.  I have also read almost everything Anne McCaffrey has written, as well as Arthur C. Clarke, James P. Hogan, and numerous science fiction writers.  And I’ve left out the crazy books by Douglas Adams: the Hitchhiker set and Dirk Gently, as well as books by Agatha Christie, J. R. R. Tolkien, and David Eddings, especially the Belgariad series of the latter.  I’ve also left out the lovely novels by Jessica Duchen: Rites of Spring, and Muriel Barbary: The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  But I’m more concerned with conveying the variety of books I have read, than in listing the ones most folks are likely to recognize.

Oops, forgot Harry Potter!  Also forgot Susan Haley's Buffalo Jump, and Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, which Susan brought to my attention.  This is going to be bad; I'm going to be screwing around with this list every time I remember another book.

Guess what: I also forgot ... wait ... I've forgotten.

[Added later:
If any of you are Anne of Green Gables fans, yes, I have read the books, and I love them :)  I first read them just a few years ago, at an age when I was a lot more difficult to bowl over!

Piers Anthony wrote a number of series, and I have read several of them.  Unfortunately, they're not easy to get into.

I have read the Hardy Boys books, and I must say that I agree with my wife that they (the Hardy boys) were fatheads.  Nancy Drew was a lot more likeable.

Few of you could possibly remember a series about a village priest in Italy, and the communist mayor of the town: Don Camillo, and Peppone.  These characters were created by Giovanni Guareschi, and serialized in a magazine, and published only posthumously as novels.

A couple of books by Morris West got read by me, as did a number of James Bond books, a couple of books by Alistair McLean (Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare), but I prefer books without too much mayhem in them.  Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code comes close to my tolerance level.

A book that impressed me deeply was Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible, well worth reading by anyone who wants to demythologize their understanding of so-called Biblical times.

The Physics and Chemistry of Life, an anthology by Scientific American, which the famous journal kept hidden from my eyes for more than 20 years, is an amazing tour of the mechanics of the life processes.  Anyone with a little basic chemistry can understand it.  It is now available online from Cengage.

Feynman, Leighton and Sands's The Feynman Lectures on Physics was actually an enjoyable read, and taught me a lot of mathematics.  Feynman had the same power to explain as Leonard Bernstein, using beautiful, conversational language.  (It was actually a transcript of spoken lectures.)

I loved reading my daughter's copies of Tamora Pierce's stories, especially the Alanna books, and the Keladry books!

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