Monday, June 30, 2003

If Anyone Has Any Suggestions I'm sure I'll disappoint many of my manly fans, but in the past couple of weeks I've watched two "chick flicks."  Yep, I decided to open myself up to a different type of movie than what I'm usually found watching.  I'm now so in touch with my feminine side, I'll probably sprout breasts.  Here are the two movies I've watched so far:                                         When Harry Met Sally is great because it reminds me of all the time I've spent in New York.  Notting Hill was pretty good because it reminded me of the trip to London earlier this year.  Oh, and they were funny, too.  And romantic, I guess. But now in order to score the Estrogen Trifecta, I'm going to need some help.  Basically, if I were to only watch one more "chick flick" the rest of my entire life (which is not outside the realm of possibility), which one should it be?  Or, less drastically, which movie should I watch that would just totally win me over and convert me into an enthusiast of the genre?  If you know of a movie that you think even the most hardened guy would love, please leave your suggestion in the comments below.  I'll let you know how it all turns out later. 9:31:25 PM     |

A Short History of Nearly Everything No, I'm not going to try and relate the history of everything to you in this post.  Not even close.  But it is what I've been reading over the past several days.  The book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is absolutely facinating if you've ever wondered, as the author puts it, how the universe got started, and if you know the answer to that, how you could have possibly figured it out.  Or other questions and how their answers came to be, like how much does the Earth weigh and what is it made of?  How does anyone know how far away a star is?  How do we know what the inside of an atom is like if we've never seen the inside of one?  How many types of living things are there on Earth and how many have there ever been?  Why can't we live without bacteria and which ones couldn't live without us? Questions like that, and dozens of others, are answered to the best of Bill Bryson's knowledge (or more specifically, the knowledge of others, because he admits in the introduction that the reason he wrote the book is that he didn't know anything about any of this) in a book that makes very difficult questions of science and our basic existence relatively easy to understand.  Bryson writes what is essentially a science book in a way that makes it seem more like a novel, filled with colorful characters, lots of humor, and the occasional cliff-hanger, but no real plot.  Just one really good storyteller trying to tell the reader our story.  The most interesting part of that story is how little we really do know.  Over and over in the book Bryson gets experts to admit that much of science is just a really good guess.  In some ways that is terrifying.   Here are a few things you'll learn if you read this book: The "Big Bang" wasn't really a bang at all, and the term "big bang" was created by a guy who didn't believe any of it. If Earth were just 5% closer to the sun, we wouldn't exist. Aluminum was once considered a precious metal. Every square centimeter of your skin is crawling with about 100,000 bacteria with trillions more living inside of you. If the whole history of Earth were a single 24-hour period, humans only arrive one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight.  Dinosaurs were around an hour before that, but only for a short time. Species tend to last on average about four million years before they go extinct.  Humans have been around about four million years. Speaking of how long humans have been around, here is how he describes the unlikely miracle how you -- and I do mean you -- came to be: "Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years . . . every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result--eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly--in you." I'd never heard of Bill Bryson before picking up this book, though I knew immediately he must be famous to other people because his name is printed on the cover in huge letters compared to the title.  I thought only people like Stephen King and John Grisham got that sort of treatment.  But after nearly finishing the book (just a few more chapters to go), I can easily understand why.  Do yourself a favor and find a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything and find out for yourself what you, me, Bill Bryson, and the whole of human knowledge really know about you, me, Bill Bryson, all the people you know or never knew, and all the microscopic critters that pretty much own us. Related links: Amazon.com's page for A Short History of Nearly Everything New York Times Review Christian Science Monitor Review 2:26:09 PM     |

© Copyright 2005 Alex L. Mauldin.