I love turtles. Love 'em. Not sure why. I suspect it has something to do with their approachability. In the water, they are amazing secretive creatures, you can't get close to them. On land, even a clumsy kid like me could pick them up with ease. I couldn't outrun anybody, but I could outrun a turtle. I caught them as often as I could as a kid. I still do. I'm embarrassing to take golfing. I sprint from water hazard to water hazard checking to see if I can get a hold of anything. Catching one on the fairway is awesome. Then I get to pick them up and carry them back to the water. My wife tells me that this is bad golf etiquette or something. Turtles are, quite frankly, the best part of golf. When you have something that brings you great joy, it's easy for your kids to pick up on it and you end up 'passing on' that love of it. I hope everyone has something that makes them smile so much that it rubs off on your kids. Whether it's baseball or cars or golf or books or something simple like turtles. Even if your kids don't end up with your particular passion, at least they know that in the world of grownups, there is still great joy and wonder. With joy and wonder, we can conquer the world.
Books I finished this week:
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Quantify! A Crash Course in Smart Thinking - Goran Grimwall
Short History is awesome. Just awesome. It is what it says it is. It goes over chemistry and physics and astronomy and geology and biology. All of it is in an amazingly readable form. You go from the big bang to the formation of earth to the formation of life to modern humans. From quarks to atoms to chemistry to the size and composition of the cosmos. I can't recommend this book enough. I'm so enamored by some of the topics that I'm scanning the bibliography to learn more about them. I'm such a nerd.
Quantify! isn't very good. It's covers some good concepts but they are either covered so simply that you don't really get anything out of them or he falters and has to pull out an equation. The subject material is different from Short History, but the gap in the two authors abilities to really explain their subject matter is stark. I hate to not recommend a book, I love books, but something better must be out there if you want to understand mathematics in the world around you. I'll do some searching and see what I can find.
Dad, at 61(can you believe he's that old??) still stops for turtles. Remember the red truck turtle smash up? Now you know where it began.
ReplyDeleteTo elaborate: When I was 15 my dad and I stopped to 'help' a painted turtle across a gravel road. We could stop in time to see the turtle but the guy 5 minutes later couldn't stop in time to keep from rear ending our truck. It's the only time I've ever witnessed an accident while holding a reptile. Many thousand dollars in damage and the other guys truck was totaled. The turtle made it safely to the creek on the other side of the road. It was awkward explaining to the police that the turtle had already crawled away by the time they got there. Lack of evidence.
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