ABBOTT AWAITS (CHRIS BACHELDER) AND GEOCENTRIC SYSTEM

 Afterward, his parents had joint custody, so Abbott moved between their residences every two weeks. These transfers occurred on Sundays, in late afternoon or early evening. And there was, as in some convoluted geocentric model of the heavens, motion within motion: His mother, with whom Abbott lived half the time, moved six times in the eight years of the custodial arrangement. One consequence of this Ptolemaic childhood was that Abbott at a young age became preoccupied with luggage

 

This is one of the sharpest comparison we´ve posted here. The geocentric model, according the Ptolomeo´s one, was adding, as the text says, motion within motion to justify its validity. Epycicles and deferents got complicated the schedule but they managed to put the Earth at the centre. Likewise, these parents, with their changes and moves, kept on orbiting around their child. This is a lovely and funny book about fatherhood, and we can read things like these: Husbands are useless ( I admit that I couldn´t disagree more) or something about the institution of marriage: That´s one of the things that marriaged people do, devastate a sanctuary to agitate their loved one

THE VANISHING HALF (BRIT BENNET) AND THE DIVISION OF THE EGG

 But they never returned again. Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg

If this blog were a catalogue of sensible and suitable uses of Science in Literature, this post would be a good example. The metaphor in it, is not the subtlest in the world, but it works pretty well and it fits perfectly to what it wants to show, because the división of the ovule is really mysterious and, on the other hand, is what leads to embryonic growth

The usual reader of this blog may notice that Biology is not my specialty so, I make the most of the situation to speak about this strange novel where we are told, for example, about the phenomenon of the black people which have pale skin and they can impersonate for white people. This such a good material for a novel was also used by Philip Roth in The Human Stain

TOURISTS OF THE IDEAL (IGNACIO VIDAL-FOLCH) AND THE TAMARIND

 The tree on which you are set is called here rain tree . They give it this name because it collects the dew on its flowers and when it dawns and closes them to protect itself from the sun, it pours the water on the one below…if you fall asleep, it wakes you up with a great shower!

Tamarind, sampaloc… this tree has plenty of names. Trees, like birds, can be named in a great variety of ways, according to the place. Linneo´s intervention was very timely to bring order.

Althought the main use of tamarind is to offer shadow for the cattle and it can be comestible, it is best knowm for this hidraulic show described in the text. It is also famous its Majestic top, like the Dragon tree.

May this post serve to recommend the novel  which is good, but even better are the diaries by the same author, Illusion is what matters. In this book, every new post appears wiht a number, 19564 for instance, which means the number of days the writer has lived. It was difficult for me to understand it, but I liked it

ANY SON (EDUARDO HALFON) AND THE BOILED TOAD FABLE

 He told us tha if you put a toad in a boling water pan, the toad Will jump quickly out of the pan for salving itself. But if you put the toad in lukewarm water and you increase Little by Little the temperatura, the toad Will not noticed the gradual rise and it Will died eventually boiled.I am sure that nobody understood the fable and the teacher was writting on the blackboard the First Law of Themodynamics (∆u = q − w) next to the drawinf of a smiling toad

From my point of view, this fable would work pretty well to illustrate the risks of climate change. The average increase in temperature on the planet is so gradual, using a human life as scale, that we do barely notice it. But we might be like the toad which is being heated up little by little. When the old teacher keeps on writing down a formula, his students no longer pay attention to him. It´s something very well-known by teachers and science communicators. In fact, in popular science books, there is a premise of avoiding formulas and working with metaphores and fables. It´s  even said that some editors have quantified ( with a formula!) the number of readers that  would be lost if there were a specific number of formulas on a page.

ANDREW´S BRAIN (E. L. DOCTOROW) AND THE GALVANI EXPERIMENTS

 Andrew was given the lesson plan in biology. It was simple enough and he used the occasion of the frog dissection, and a reprise of Galvani, the leg of a dead frog touched with a metal probetwitching as if still alive, to gradually direct the class to some Elementary facts of brain science. And the more he wandered off the lesson plan, the more they loved it, girls and boys, the inseparable lovers among them. One of the students jumped up on the stage of the study hall and held his fist to his mouth, microphonelike: “Here it´s dorsal, there it´s ventral, this here´s rostral, you nothin´but mental…”

On late 18th century, Galvani applied an electric charge to a frog which he was stuffing and the frog´s leg convulsed. This was the beginning og galvanism, which with te time was alpplied to bigger animals in public demonstrations and even with deaths by hanging. The influence on the later Frankenstein is very obvious

Although lately Volta proved Galvani was wrong by inventing batteries, Galvani´s work was crucial to te development of the study of nervous system, brain and nerve impulse

A REAL BORE ( SANTIAGO LORENZO) AND THE FACTORIAL FUNCTION

 I became intrigued about how he had managed to get in. He told me. He had seen that the door could be opened with the keyboard system that  I´d mentioned earlier when I reminded my arrival to Pacomio´s house, the one that worked dialing a four number code. The possible combinations were hundreds of them. However, they could be significantly shorten. All the buttons were filthy. Except the 3, the 5, the 8 and the 9 one, which were the ones that the real dwellers used to press to get in. Those ones, by the use, were shiny. The four tell-tale keys narrowed down the options to twenty-four attempts. The door opened at the fifteenth one.

Factorial function is a pretty math tool known from long time ago. It is symbolised by the exlclamation point and it indicates the number of combinationsin which you can order n objects (n!). You can calculate it by multiplying all the whole numbers from 1 to the number. For instance, for 4 would be 4!=4x3x2x1=24. Well done, Santiago Lorenzo, the choices were of 25 attempts. And I want also ti congratulate you for this novel that has made have a good time