Wordwork|play

NOD: The Archimedes Codex

Newtonian science was sober-minded; Archimedes' science was not. Archimedes was famous for hoaxes, enigmas, and circuitous routes. These were not some external features of his writings; they characterized his scientific personality. Science is not--mathematics is not--dry and impersonal. It is where one's imagination is allowed to roam freely.

NOD: The Archimedes Codex

This selection is purely incidental to the subject of the book, but given my recent interest in the letter, this caught my attention. The letter is something you will see me going back to from time to time. I somehow feel we're really losing something in switching from letters to e-mails.

E-mails are short on ritual. There is no walk to the mailbox, no looking at the stamp, no slicing the envelope, no guessing the handwriting. They just pop up unbidden on your computer screen while you are engrossed in your daily business. Some of them, like little electronic terrorists, can blow your mind and change your life.

NOD: The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist

My review of Something About the Blues should be submitted sometime tonight and published within a couple of days.

I am already well into the next, utterly fascinating, book--The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist.

Here's a NOD from its preface (I keep reading, lately, about the crusaders, in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War; The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In; Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics; and now here):

In April 1204, Christian soldiers on a mission to liberate Jerusalem stopped short of their goal and sacked Constantinople, the richest city in Europe. . . . . The looted city had many more books than people. It was the first time Constantinople had fallen in the 874 years since Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome founded it in AD 330. . . . [T]he city held the literary treasures of the ancient world as its inheritance. Among the treasures were treatises by the greatest mathematician of the ancient world and one of the greatest thinkers who had ever lived. He approximated the value of pi, he developed the theory of centers of gravity, and he made steps toward the development of the calculus 1,800 years before Newton and Leibniz. His name was Archimedes.