Rosio Pavoris a blog

This book took far longer to finish than it should have. This is in large part due to the silly conclusion Penrose tries to reach, which just makes my brain bleed.
The thesis of the book is simply this:

Consciousness is not deterministic, therefore the brain works by the grace of God through quantum.

It starts promisingly enough, with an explanation of Turing machines, computability, and the Turing test. Having explained these concepts, Penrose then tries to argue that the brain is, in fact, not a deterministic Turing machine.
Central to this claim seem to be the Chinese Room experiment and similar thought experiments (which I’ll grant can be difficult to grasp properly), and various minor things like “flashes of insight” (which clearly can’t be explained deterministically!) and whatnot.

Fortunately, he quickly abandons this line of reasoning and starts talking about mathematics and quantum physics for a few hundred pages. I’m not sure why he does this, since neither has any relevance to the subject at hand, but I’m not complaining.
He tries to return to the brain in the final chapters, but he just makes an ass of himself in the process.

Penrose doesn’t understand psychology, physiology, fetal development, evolution or natural selection (at some points coming perilously close to endorsing ID), the (often counter-intuitive) capabilities of actual computers, or cognitive science, but he tries to venture into each of these fields to make his point and fails spectacularly.
His whole point is essentially a giant, infuriatingly dense argument from incredulity and personal pride (the human brain can’t be a deterministic Turing machine, that would make it too common!), and his attempts to involve quantum physics are more reminiscent of Deepak fucking Chopra than of a theoretical physicist of Penrose’s stature.

Now, does this make The Emperor’s New Mind a bad book? Well, yes. Let me rephrase.
Does this mean The Emperor’s New Mind isn’t worth reading? Absolutely not.

Like I said, most of the book is just seemingly irrelevant stuff about mathematics and quantum physics, and it really is quite interesting. It’s worth keeping in mind that Penrose isn’t just some random woo artist, but an accomplished mathematician and actually a rather competent theoretical physicist.
He talks about Turing, fractals (including the Mandelbrot set), Penrose tilings, the history of physics, and plenty of fascinating concepts in theoretical physics ranging from well-known to rather obscure. If you’re willing to gloss over his forays into cognitive science and AI, and maybe skip the last chapter entirely, it’s actually a very good read.

As far as philosophy of the mind goes, though, I’d just leave that to people like Daniel Dennett.

I read too quickly. The Nothing That Is, by Robert Kaplan, is about the history of zero.

Most of the book is, obviously, about the concept of zero in mathematics. It starts with the Sumerians, who came up with the concept, and then goes back and forth between the Greeks and the Indians, to figure out who came up with the symbol for it, and at which point it went from a type of punctuation to an actual number.
He pauses briefly on the Mayans and their psychopathic obsessions regarding zero and its significance in their calendar, and then moves on to Western Europe. It took a ridiculous amount of time for zero to be accepted as an actual number, apparently.

Like Barrow’s Book of Infinity, Kaplan has to talk about religion and theology a lot because of the nature of the subject matter, but unlike Barrow, he manages to remain neutral about it; not the faux neutrality that affords theology the same kind of credibility reality-based philosophies deserve, but actual neutrality, examining where the march of zero was slowed down because of it, and where it was accelerated.

Near the end, he tries to move away from mathematics and into physics, but it doesn’t really work. He tries to crowbar the concept into a number of places where it doesn’t belong, and is quickly reduced to weak philosophising.
There’s a chapter on the psychological implications of zero that’s really just painful to read as well.

Still, those are only a small part of the book, and the vast majority of it is extremely interesting and very well-written. Somewhere along the way he manages to talk about every mathematical concept twelve years of education tried to address, and explain it in a way that made considerably more sense than anything our teachers ever tried to tell us.

If you’re at all interested in history or mathematics (but aren’t an expert mathematician, probably), you’ll enjoy this book. Buy it.

I just finished Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. Together with Six Easy Pieces, it’s a much abridged version of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, by, of course, Richard Feynman.
I finished Six Easy Pieces weeks ago, but since it and the sequel add up to less than a third of a typical book, size-wise (about 140 pages each), I decided to review them together. I just got side-tracked for a bit.

Six Easy Pieces is actually the exact same book as The Character of Physical Law (which I reviewed earlier), just with the chapters moved around a bit and some bits reworded.
It’s much more recent than Character, but I thought it was a bit less coherent. Still, quite good.

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces takes most of the concepts introduced in Six Easy Pieces a step further, and introduces some relevant equations.

The first chapter introduces vectors as if it’s some super-advanced new concept (which it may well have been at the time, though I would hope that anyone who’s gone through highschool now would know what they are), and talks about how they apply to Newton.
The second returns to the various symmetries in physical laws, and delves deeper into what they mean. It also talks more in-depth about the various laws of conservation (momentum, energy, angular momentum, charge, baryons, and leptons).
The final four chapters are about special relativity and what it means, exactly. He gets a few jabs at philosophers in on the side, because he wouldn’t be Feynman if he didn’t.

While it does require some background in mathematics, it’s actually pretty easy to follow. It may be a bit too advanced for the casual reader, but anyone with an interest in physics should be able to pick it up quite readily.

At various points he hints at the limitations of the various theories and areas where our knowledge is still very much on shaky ground, or missing altogether. Given that these lectures were given in the 1960s, I’d be very interested in seeing another book, perhaps, that revisits the not-so-easy pieces and tells us what progress has been made.

Either way, they’re very interesting, and make for a surprisingly light read, given the subject matter. As a layperson, it’s kind of hard to know which bits, if any, are completely outdated, and the mathematics can be hard to follow, but it’s still very much worth reading. I certainly learned a few things.
(I never really understood the equivalence principle as well as I wanted to. Now I do.)

I managed to finish a book before buying new ones!
The Infinite Book, by John D. Barrow, tries to explain the concept of infinity in several fields, and talks about how it has historically been regarded.

The first half of the book deals with infinity in mathematics. It starts with the obvious — Zeno’s paradoxes — and works its way through the history of mathematics all the way up to Georg Cantor and his infinite sets (א is a neat symbol), taking care to introduce complicated concepts in a way anyone could understand.

The second half deals with infinity in physics: infinite density, temperature, &c. in singularities, the infinity of space and time, and the infinity of the multiverse. It touches on things like the Big Bang (obviously), whether or not the universe will continue to expand forever, time travel, &c.
All of it is at least moderately interesting, though it does get repetitive.

The final chapter tries to philosophise a bit about what life would be like if we could live forever, in a stoner stream-of-consciousness kind of way. Barrow may be a good mathematician and theoretical physicist (though if he is, the scope of this book didn’t exactly allow him to show it off), but he’s no great philosopher.

But other than that, it was a pretty decent book. It made for easy reading, but it doesn’t treat readers like idiots, which is a hard balance to find. I certainly learned a few things.

One thing that did bother me, though: he touches on theology rather more than I thought was needed (though some mention is obviously going to be necessary, given the subject matter and the historical context), and he seemed to be extremely careful not to comment on its inanities.
Dunno. Maybe I’m more sensitive to that sort of thing than most. Still, since Barrow apparently won the Templeton Prize in 2006, I don’t think it’s just in my head.

One thing that did amuse me, though: at one point, he points out how advances in science and a deeper understanding of the world around us meant that the concept of God retreated further and further over the course of history, being confined to things science could not yet explain, time and time again.
The punchline? John D. Barrow is a deist.

Anyway. If you’re willing to ignore all that, it really isn’t a bad book. I’ll probably buy more of his books at some point, at least.

I just finished A Briefer History of Time, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. It’s a 2005 revisit of the famous A Brief History of Time. In it, Hawking briefly explains things like black holes, quantum physics, string theory, and the origin of the universe, in terms anyone could understand. And I do mean anyone.
I can understand how a book written in 1988 could need an update, but I’m not entirely sure why it needed to be made more accessible. Over 9 million people bought the first book, so clearly the public thought it was accessible enough.

I never read the original (I’ve been meaning to forever, but I just never got around to it); as such, I’m not sure exactly how simplistic it presented things, but I really hope it wasn’t nearly as bad as this one. I’ve never been a big fan of the lie-to-children approach to education past middle school, and that’s exactly the approach the book takes.
Yes, relativity and quantum physics are difficult subjects, and small steps are required to explain them to laypersons, but ye gods, there is such a thing as too much.

Having said that, it’s a great introductory book to physics for children in 7th or 8th grade, but I was really disappointed by the fact that Hawking doesn’t even hint at some of the controversies that made him infamous, such as the black hole information paradox.
Still, even as an adult, if it’s been a few decades since you’ve had Physics, and you’ve forgotten all about Einstein, and you want to relearn but aren’t willing to think at all, it should be a pretty good read. I’d still recommend the original, though.

I (mostly) finished Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions, which, as I said, is an O’Reilly book. Surprisingly, it’s about regular expressions.
(It may seem odd to review an O’Reilly book, since they’re usually basically textbooks, and not something you’d want to read for fun, but I really enjoyed this one.)

Regular expressions (or regexes), first of all, are versatile expressions you can use to find a certain pattern in a text. You could, for example, specify that you’re looking for a word that starts with a capital Q and has three vowels after it, or scan a text for instances for the word “penis”. Naturally, most tools using regular expressions will also allow you to manipulate said text in flexible ways.
I knew what regular expressions were before I started reading, and I kind of knew what the syntax looked like but not really. I kind of worried this book would be aimed at people who already pretty much knew what they were doing, but it’s actually a great beginner’s guide as well.

The first two chapters describe the basics of the general syntax: which characters are special, what character classes are, how alternation works, &c. It explains everything with clear examples, and has occasional tests for the reader (with the answers provided on the next page).
The tool of choice in the first chapter is egrep, because it’s sufficient to explain the basics. In the second chapter, he uses Perl, and demonstrates some ways in which the regex syntax differs from egrep.

The third chapter talks about even more languages, including PHP, Java, .NET, Tcl, and so on. It has comprehensive lists of metacharacters and how they differ for each flavor of regular expression. The first two chapters were written as a story, but this is clearly more of a reference work.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters talk about these regular expressions are actually dealt with. The first three chapters deal entirely with syntax, which will allow you to write regexes that work, but the next three focus on the engines, which lets you write regexes that work efficiently and elegantly, which, of course, is quite important when you’re dealing with something that can use such a huge amount of system resources.

The final four chapters deal with regexes in the context of popular programming languages; specifically, Perl, Java, .NET, and PHP.

All in all, this seems to be a really good book. Both complete nubies and more experienced users will find this useful, and regular expressions really are an incredibly useful tool.
While it’s true that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, in this case, until you have the hammer, you don’t even realise how many nails there are. I’m surprised I actually managed to get anything done without regular expressions before.

Incidentally, this book inspired me to write this WordPress plugin as well. I wrote it when I was halfway into chapter 2, to give you an idea of how quickly you can pick up something that looks so complicated at first glance.

I finished The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman the other night. It’s pretty short (about 170 pages), being just a collection of seven lectures by Feynman on (surprisingly) the character of physical law.
The only other thing I’ve read by Feynman was The Meaning of It All, which is also a collection of lectures. I wonder if he wrote “proper” books.

Either way, it’s a very interesting read. These lectures took place in 1965, and no doubt some fundamental advances have been made since then (if you want to call string theory an advance, all of that only started in the late ’60s), but it’s general enough that it’s still a relevant and fascinating work.

Feynman talks about a number of things, starting, in the first lecture, with the law of gravitation as an example, going over Kepler, Brahe, Newton, and eventually Einstein, to demonstrate how the law was derived and refined further and further.

In the second lecture, he talks about the relationship between mathematics and physics, noting that physics is a very mathematical field, but that there are some important difference between doing physics and doing mathematics. In mathematics, you derive tons of conclusions from a fixed set of axioms, and in physics, we have a vast amount of conclusions, but nothing to unify it to come up with the central model from which they flow. In Feynman’s own words, we’re doing physics in the way the Babylonians did mathematics, rather than in the way the Greeks did it.

The next few lectures describe some interesting properties which seem to hold across the various laws of physics, including various principles of conservation, various types of symmetry (which, as he explains, is vital to being to derive new laws, through inconsistencies in known ones), and the principle of causality and the arrow of time.

In the sixth lecture, he gets into the basics of quantum mechanics. Probability and uncertainty, the way light (and electrons) behaves variously like particles or like waves (he goes into some detail regarding the double-slit experiment, which I think I’ll go into in a future post; every single popular science work on physics written in the past seventy or so years has explained it, but it’s an interesting and important experiment), &c.

And in the final lecture, he explains how physicists usually go about finding new laws, and more importantly, how he himself does it. It’s worth remembering that Feynman was perhaps the most influential physicist of the second half of the 20th century (and by second half, I mean part of the first half as well).

To sum up, The Character of Physical Law is a fascinating read, even if it shouldn’t really tell you anything new. If anyone but Feynman had written it, it would’ve sucked, but he makes it work.
Also, he spelled “connection” “connexion”, which made me happy.

Next up is Six Easy Pieces, also by Feynman. Apparently it’s supposed to cover much of the same ground, and it certainly seems to have the same preface by Paul Davies, but it looks a bit more advanced.

I finished Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow last night. It’s a much more philosophical book, more like The God Delusion than The Blind Watchmaker.
In it, Dawkins talks about the importance of science, and the depth understanding of science and the scientific method adds or can add to everyone’s life. One of the first people he quotes is Richard Feynman, and this is a very famous quote I’ve repeated often enough, but I think it’s important enough to reproduce in full.

I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty.
There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

(It’s also at the start of this interview with Feynman, in a slightly longer version.)
Dawkins then goes on to say there is poetry in science, and if only more people, particularly artists, understood this, we would have a lot fewer people writing about mystery and religion and whatnot, and a lot more about the actual natural wonders around us.
This is a point that people like Carl Sagan have made before him, and that I kind of tried to make myself in this post.

He warns against abuses of science, either through bad poetry (as has often been the case with Gould, he points out) or through poor understanding of how chance works.
He talks about the nature of light and spectroscopy for a bit (the literal unweaving of the rainbow, pioneered by Newton).
He talks about how important proper understanding of statistics is in law, including in regular jury members. For the science junkies among us, he also talks about genes in this context.
He spends a chapter explaining why “psychics” and conmen are so successful, and how a proper background in science can put these people out of a job.
He spends another chapter talking about how we perceive the world, unweaving it through our senses, and then reweaving it in our brain. He also talks about how the evolution of the human brain is a fascinating topic, both for its speed and for its apparently unneccessariness, but he then poses a few good hypotheses as to why this might have happened.

The overall message, though, is that science is both incredibly important and incredibly beautiful. This is a very important message indeed.
If you’re just expecting the same type of collection of zoological trivia that you found in The Blind Watchmaker or Climbing Mount Improbably, you may be a bit disappointed; this does not change the fact that Unweaving the Rainbow is a very important and well-written book a lot more people should be reading.
Buy it. Give it to someone. Then buy another copy.

Next up is one of the Richard Feynman books I bought. Probably The Character of Physical Law. I’m never going to get around to reading Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, at this rate.

I finished Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable, and I must say, it’s a very enjoyable book.

The central theme of the book is how evolution achieves heights of complexity by very gradually climbing up from simplicity. He never actually mentions the term “fitness landscapes“, but he takes the analogy there quite often.
Along the way, he also debunks some common creationist myths, including the “irreducible complexity” of the eye.

While this may sound pretty straightforward, and thus boring, to anyone who already understands these things, it’s still very much worth reading for the truckloads of trivia he includes.
He talks about the webs of spiders, the hives of bees, the mounds of termites, the wings of insects and birds and gliding squirrels and bats and fish, the eyes of spiders and insects and mammals and fish and molluscs, the shells of snails and shellfish, the construction of arthropods, the reproductive habits of fig wasps and figs, and many, many more things, and all in a way that’s easily understandable, often even to children. If you liked the National Geographic channel before every other show became a Quest for Noah’s Ark, you’ll enjoy these stories.

And the whole thing is very well-illustrated, both with drawings (mostly by his wife, Lalla Ward) and with inset glossy pictures. It’s a pity even the inset was in black-and-white, but perhaps that’s just because I have the pauper college student edition of the book. The lack of color didn’t really detract from the experience, anyway.

The biomorphs from The Blind Watchmaker make another cameo, and have been expanded to be able to deal with new issues, including rotational symmetry, and new versions of the program specifically simulate arthromorphs and mollusc shells.
It’s all very fascinating, and doesn’t even suffer from quaintness too much, since the book was written in 1996. Still a bit, though.

So yes. A very good book that’s very much worth reading. It’s not as painfully important a book as The Selfish Gene or even The Blind Watchmaker, but a good companion to them. I look forward to passing many of the stories in it on to my children.
I showed my mom some of the pictures (after a discussion about figs), and it convinced her to read A Devil’s Chaplain, because that’s the only Dawkins I have in Dutch (“Kapelaan van de Duivel”).

Next in line is Unweaving the Rainbow, also by Dawkins.

I finally finished Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. It only took me, what, a month and a half? This wasn’t because it’s boring or difficult to read, though—it’s because so many of his digressions spark hours of research (if you can call reading random Wikipedia articles “research”) and various blog posts, as well. Because his style really is rather meandering, but rarely in an uninteresting way.

The general topic of the book is “evolution”, but Dennett isn’t an evolutionary biologist, or a zoologist, like Dawkins. He’s a philosopher, and that’s very obvious in some chapters, both in the good way (for example, he devotes a chapter to the origin of the mind and consciousness, in the process tearing to shreds Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, which made me happy; Penrose’s explanation always struck me as “I don’t understand it, therefore God quantum physics is responsible”) and in the bad (chapter 14, which deals with “meaning”, was pretty much entirely irrelevant philosophical masturbation; bonus points for using the word “schmorse” seriously, though).

It has its bad parts. The bits on the origins of morality, for example, seemed to me to be a few dozen pages too long while still managing to miss most of the point; which is a pity, because I suspect they were the reason he started the book in the first place. And in the final chapter, he seems to have an entirely too charitable view of religion, bordering on the ridiculous (though Dennett is, of course, an atheist himself).

On the whole, though, it’s a very good book, well worth reading, both for laypeoples and people with a background in biology (or any of the countless fields it touches on).

Next up is Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable. It seems to have a lot of pictures.

I finished Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker today.
It isn’t nearly as interesting as The Selfish Gene, obviously, but it isn’t supposed to be. It’s a simple recap of the theory of evolution as it stands today (or rather, as it stood then, in 1986), with some neat digressions, but on the whole, nothing particularly revolutionary.
Here’s something I didn’t know: somewhere between The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins lost his grasp on grammar and coherent argumentation.
I’m not saying it’s the worst I’ve seen, but ye gods. He’s a bad writer and, what’s more, a terrible statistician. Not that this last thing particularly matters, since he reaches the right conclusions anyway, but it’s really kind of sad, especially compared to The Selfish Gene, which was brilliant. He also leaves himself open to quote mining far too often, which is reasonably odd considering how tight his arguments were in both The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion (his first and ninth/last books, respectively; The Blind Watchmaker was his third).
Not a terrible book, really, but it could benefit from a proofreading and the addition of several hundred commas. Still, it’s worth reading for the third chapter, which gets quaint about computers in a remarkably informed way, even if you aren’t particularly interested in biology.

I also bought and read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which, I’m sorry to say, sucks ass. I admit I didn’t get all the way through it, so maybe he turns the entire thing around in the final ten or so pages, but seriously, it’s pretty awful.
Obviously it’s about WW2 and Dresden and “the human condition” and it involves time travel in a pretty bland way. I’m sure that dead-pan fatalism was able to pass for profundity at some point, but a writer held in as high a regard as Vonnegut should really know better. There’s nothing particularly clever about using “So it goes” as a catchphrase ever other paragraph, no matter how brilliant it may have seemed while drunk at 5 AM.
Yes, a debt is owed to the book for putting Dresden in the spotlight and pointing out some things about the Second World War, but on the whole, it really isn’t worth reading at this point. Possibly I’m just biased against this sort of stories about the banalities of life. I hated Joseph Heller’s Closing Time as well, and he’s ten times the writer Vonnegut will ever be.
Yeah. Not worth reading. I’m sorry, Skaði, I know you like Vonnegut, but just… no. The main thing it’s got going for it is that it’s short.

I finished The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins last night. As expected, it’s a pretty important book. I didn’t actually learn anything new, but I’ve been saying most of what’s in the book for a while now, and I’m not actually the target demographic.

The target demographic is the fence-sitters, the religious moderates, and such atheists as are not antitheist, and I’m sure the book will open the eyes of at least a few of them.
Dawkins’s arguments are carefully thought out, as usual, and he pulls fewer punches than he did in his documentary The Root of All Evil? (the name of which was a move by the producers he didn’t agree with), which I’m sure I linked to a while ago but which Google Video pulled almost as long ago.

He goes into some detail regarding various specific problems with religion, and elaborates on general problems with irrationalism, but is also careful to point out the value of the Bible (and various other “holy” texts) as a culturally influential document which is worth studying in school, just like the Roman and Greek mythologies.

I won’t go into the details. He mentions Skatje‘s dad and his blog (more specifically this post) in a footnote, which is cool. He didn’t mention me at all, but I’m sure he’ll rectify that in the second edition.

Anyway, buy this book and read it and pass it on to people you know. The fate of the world may depend on it, even if it isn’t as persuasive as it could’ve been because Dawkins is a fundamentally nice person.

(On a mostly unrelated note, thinking about The Root of All Evil? obviously got me thinking about Ted Haggard again, which in turn brought to mind this song. MP3 plays in the background automatically, so NSFW if your work computar has speakers~)

So, I just finished The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (at last, eh?), and I must say it lives up to its reputation.
I read the 30th-anniversary edition, which has the added chapter from the second edition and some annotation.

In it, Dawkins argues that the basic unit of evolution is the gene, and that pretty much everything can be explained from the point of view of the reproduction of genes, in a “a chicken is the egg’s way of making another egg”, only with replicators (genes, in this case) and vehicles (organisms). At this point this isn’t a revolutionary concept anymore to anyone, which tells you something about how influential this book has been.
He also elaborates on how genes aren’t necessarily the only replicators, and talks about memetics in that light for a bit. It’s easy to forget Dawkins is the one who formally came up with the concept of memes, though he just intended it as a side note.

In the last chapter, which was added in the second edition in the ’80s, he convincingly argues for extending the concept of phenotype to include effects outside of the organism’s body itself. Like, if a snail’s shell is considered to be phenotypic, why shouldn’t a caddisfly‘s larva’s cases, or a beaver’s dam?
At times this chapter feels like just a plug for The Extended Phenotype, but it’s obviously very relevant and interesting.

Obviously I don’t do it justice. Dawkins is nowadays mostly known for his atheism, I guess, but his contributions to evolutionary biology and popular science aren’t to be underestimated. It’s a very interesting book pretty much anyone should read. There are some jabs at religion in the notes, but they aren’t the subject of the book.
I’m reading The God Delusion (which Skatje gave me for my birthday) now~

So, instead of going to BIS, I spent some time reading Thud!. It’s pretty interesting.
I mean, it’s Terry Pratchett, so obviously it’s going to be pretty good, but it’s actually a great deal more serious than I remember his previous stuff being. It’s a Watch novel in the main Discworld series.
It’s funny, obviously, but it deals with relevant and depressing themes. Mostly religious extremism, actually, with most of it (so far) centering around the anniversary of some great battle between dwarfs and trolls causing tensions, and a dwarf leader (a deep-downer; it actually took me a bit to realise that’s essentially literally “fundamentalist”) being assassinated, possibly to escalate things into a real religious war, by either other dwarf fundamentalists or trolls.
It’s pretty interesting, and bleak. The dwarfs so far seem to be both Christian fundamentalists and Muslim, in this. Their women have always been indistinguishable from the men, but apparently now they’re uncomfortable with the entire concept of being able to tell a woman is a woman.
Racial discrimination is also an issue, but I guess it usually is, in Watch novels. Against vampires, this time.
Oh, and it also makes fun of The Da Vinci Code, in passing.
Curious to see how this turns out, actually.

In terms of other classes, they were pretty meh.
First there was the Lassi test thing at 9 AM, which was a waste of time. Even if the test itself would be valuable (which it isn’t, in my case; it was essentially a survey type thing about study habits and attitude), there was no fucking point to making us come in an hour early for it, since it was online anyway.

Then there was Computer Systems, which is the class that ended up spending a total of seven hours explaining the very basics of base-2 and base-16 arithmetic. We actually got into Assembly today, and did a tiny bit of programmin’, so that was kind of not entirely a waste of time, though obviously most of the class didn’t have a clue how things worked.
And of course, we once again used their own predefined classes or functions or commands or whatever it’s actually called in Assembly, so we still didn’t get a decent idea of how stuff is supposed to work.

Then the Accounting thing during which I read, like I said, and finally Maatschappelijke en Ethische Vorming, which I’m not even going to translate anymore.
Nature versus nurture, the influence of culture on personality, &c. All dumbed down a lot, obviously. The teacher guy (not going to call him a professor, because he really isn’t) is probably a racist, turns out, though he might just be very ethnocentric.
Either way, he’s still a nice guy who deserves a better group of students than he got, and I’m not just saying this because he showed us a video after which we were allowed to leave forty minutes early.

And during all of that, I’ve been listening to Questionnaire (that’s actually a direct link, which I realise a sucky thing to do; website is here), which is a great song, though I really, really need more Rutles music.
Neil Innes needs to be a lot more famous than he is.