Brown Motion

The internet is a wonderful thing.  So is curiosity.  Put two and three together and sometimes you get more than six. I stumbled upon a lot of interesting people and facts simply reading about a subject online.  Only to later discover that I could actually land a book about that subject at the local library. So it was I discovered a Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos (pronounced Air Dash).  Someone who learned about negative numbers at age three, did not ever cook in his lifetime or learn how to tie his shoes till age 11, he was an odd specimen that graced this earth. I recently read a biography about Erdos titled, 'The man who loved only numbers' by Paul Hoffman.  Born to a set of Jewish math teachers, Paul lived the life of a monk in the pursuit of mathematical truth. After reading the book I am still trying to decipher what I had just read and how this amazing mind was able to see what others could not see.  Similar mind bending ideas came to lo...

It was a couple weeks of parallel processing.  As in consuming some new literary finds at the local libraries.  Here are the titles and synopses in no particular order - Eight Flavors - untold story of American Cuisine - by Sarah Lohman - a fun read if you like it spicy and hot.  Well not literally.  But Sarah does a good job of narrating the history of some of the most common spices on the American dining table and also explains through use of experiments the human ability to distinguish what the palate likes and does not.   Black Pepper is the most popular of spices in American cuisine today and held its own for couple hundred years.  Sriracha is gaining popularity in the last couple decades made right here in sunny California.  Another sauce Korean Gochujang is a 'hot' contender. Calculating the Cosmos - by Ian Stewart - a British math professor who explains a bunch of complex physics and math using language that is enjoyably easy.  For...