What was your overall impression, Hil? I was surprised by how sensible I found it-- I went in ready to point and mock, but came out with the feeling that he'd taken a relatively balanced and honest approach, and now I'm not sure if that was because it was balanced, or because it was well written and had lots of maths.

Next up: either I Capture the Castle or an annotated edition of Ring Lardner Jr. stories. (Now there is a book whose time came and went!)

Casting my vote for I Capture the Castle. Loved it. Might be time to reread, in fact.

What was your overall impression, Hil? I was surprised by how sensible I found it-- I went in ready to point and mock, but came out with the feeling that he'd taken a relatively balanced and honest approach, and now I'm not sure if that was because it was balanced, or because it was well written and had lots of maths.

I did find if fairly balanced, but I found myself wanting to ask, "Yes, but...?" a whole lot. I bought it after I'd gone to see the author speak (he was speaking at a science bookstore near my university, and I went with a bunch of other people from the math department), and his talk didn't convince me much, but I found his argument in the book interesting.

I just finished listening to Chocky.

I'd read this a long time ago when I was little, so remembered the basic outline.

What stood out to me as an adult was the supreme reasonabless of some of the adults. Not only does his father indulge the strange story, he believes it. Sure, we need conflict, so ma freaks a bit, and there are bad humans, but still. The kid is honest with his parents, and that's rewarded before things go south.

Hil, did you find the maths to be basically sound? I liked him for being open about the fact that other people could use the same theory to get to different numbers, but having never encountered the central Bayesian thing before, and not being having much of the maths background, I didn't feel competent to evaluate that, let alone his use of it.

I just finished listening to Chocky.

ita, is that the story in which there's some sort of alien entity that connects with a boy, who maybe used to draw? And he becomes more mathy and able to do things he wasn't able to do before that entity talked to him, and maybe draws strange places?

Because I remember a TV show with that name, from when I was a kid. I mean, I only now even tried to guess how to spell its name in English, which I just copied from your post. I never knew there was a book.

That is the very one, Nilly. I like John Wyndham -- as a teen in the UK it was pretty impossible to avoid his TV adaptations, so I have a hard time remembering what I've read and what I've seen.

Hil, did you find the maths to be basically sound? I liked him for being open about the fact that other people could use the same theory to get to different numbers, but having never encountered the central Bayesian thing before, and not being having much of the maths background, I didn't feel competent to evaluate that, let alone his use of it.

Pretty much, yeah. Some of the numbers he was putting into it seemed a bit pulled out of thin air, but the actual theory and equations seemed sound. (I'm not a statistician, so the last time I saw this stuff was a first-semester undergrad stats class a couple years ago, so I don't really know most of it that well.)

Some of the numbers he was putting into it seemed a bit pulled out of thin air, but the actual theory and equations seemed sound.

Yeah, I thought some things seemed to have little or no grounding, but I can sort of understand how that happens, given the topic. And at least you've had a stats class.

I have to say, though, that I wasn't entirely convinced by his use of faith to top up his number to the answer he wanted to get. I'm not really sure that maths is the best way to go about explaining human emotions-- they're hard enough to pin down in fuzzy words, so trying to get them to behave according to mathematical laws seems like a bit of a wild goose chase.

Sweet! My co-worker just gave me a copy of the new illustrated edition of The Elements of Style! It's really nicely bound and the illustrations are beautiful and strange. Very cool.