All that snow last night? Melted by the time I got up.
Finally finished The Baroque Cycle, all three thousand-page volumes of it. It lives up to its name, with a plotline full of ornate and elaborate encrustations. Very broadly speaking, it's a fictionalized history of the Scientific Revolution in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy. Newton, Liebnitz, Hooke, and Wren. The first steam engine and the first computer. But that's just the main plotline.
In the process, there's a fairly exhaustive tour of European history. We see the beheading of Charles I, the restoration of Charles II, the flight of James II, the invasion of William of Orange, and the death of Anne. We see the magnificence and insanity of Versailles under the Sun King, Louis XIV. We find out where the modern banking and monetary system came from. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Don't get me wrong, it can be pretty tedious reading if you don't have a head for this sort of thing. There's a lot of names and places to keep straight, and a cast of characters so large they have their own appendix at the end. But if you can get past that, it's pretty fascinating stuff. I know there's at least a few of you own there who'd be up to it.
On a related note, I realized tonight that I may have completely forgotten basic calculus. How do you integrate, again?
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This is the personal weblog of Matthew Beermann. Expect it to be filled with whatever half-completed thoughts keep me from sleep on any given night.
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1 comment:
I forgot calculus a few years ago. I sat down to do Statistics 380 homework with Rusty, and realized that I was severely struggling to integrate even basic polynomials. Then I bought his spare TI-89, and the rest of the class was just fine.
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