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.

OK, I just finished The Time-Traveler's Wife. I didn't love it. It suffered some from first-novel-itis, but mostly I just didn't get what the point of it was. Am I a lameass who has no heart? I found myself more interested in poking at the science than engaged in the love story.

It's last minute Christmas shopping time. I am looking for books for a 70-year-old and an 82-year-old woman. The former seems to read some fairly fluffy things, plus things like the Left Behind series and the Milford books. The latter reads romances. Both would probably be offended if the books had too much of teh sex. Well, the 82-year-old might be okay with the throbbing member type of sex, but not the more explicit sex. Any ideas?

I can definitely recommend Nora Roberts for the 82-y.o.--she's not too explicit, and writes very well. For the 70-y.o., have you thought about autobiographies? I remember ten years ago getting the Barbara Bush one for my grandmother who had similar tastes.