Get Yourself Checked

This week may sound a little depressing, but we're all about cancer.  We're reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies.  The book is called the biography of cancer, so one could safely assume that it's not the most uplifting book you've probably ever read in your life.

And while I usually reserve Tuesdays for something fun or something informative, recent events in my life have left me to use this day to make it a little more informative and public service announcement....ish.

Get regular screenings for cancer.  If you're a woman you should be getting mamograms, if you're a man, get regular check ups for testicular and prostate cancer.  Make sure you're telling your doctor about unusual symptoms that you have.

If your arm shakes uncontrolably one day, you might be tired.  If it does it on a lot of different days, it might be a sign of something bigger.  Unusual vison problems?  Something else you should clue your doctor in about.

I'm not telling you to be paranoid (and I am also not a doctor so please do not take any of this as law.  These are all just friendly suggestions that are probably a good idea), but regular check ups and yearly physicals aren't something to be blown off.  They can help doctors discover things you may not have known about otherwise.  Get that pap smear that you hate.  It turns out it may just help prevent cervical cancer.

Review Me Twice - A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

We always like to be brutally honest with our reviews here on Review Me Twice so here it is: I didn't finish the book.  Which is really telling unto itself because I think this is now a grand total of two books that I haven't finished in time on this blog, and the first one I had already read, I was just rereading to refresh me memory.

It's not that this book was bad or wasn't informative or even interesting.  It's just that it's not interesting enough to keep me interested.  It seemed like everything else was more interesting: My FFX game, my TV show, other books.  Things that don't usually distract me were constantly distracting me.  I just couldn't seem to buckle down and finish this one on time.

So it's definitely not one to read in a pinch.  A very meandering read, meant to be put down and picked back up and inturrupted, but definitely finished.  Just at its own pace.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

Our book this week is a biography about John Forbes Nash Jr.  I don't want to get into it too much, because, well, the idea is that you'll go read the biography and learn more about him.

However, whenever I read a biography, I personally at least like to have a little information about the person that I'm about to read about.  Kind of like a preview, or a warning.  It's like knowing what I'm going to be getting myself into.

Nash was a brilliant mathematician, and he showed his intelligence at a
young age.  He was only 22 when he got his PhD at Princeton, a dissertation on Game Theory that, eventually, won him a Nobel prize.  He did revolutionary work on manifold also, along with Game theory.

Eventually, Nash fell descended into extreme schizophrenia.  For years he succumbed to the mental illness, wandering the halls of Princeton Mathematics department.  It wasn't until the early 90s that he began to recover from his delusions, he says because of the environment that he was in as opposed to a regiment of drugs (which he had stopped taking).

It was in 1994 that he received the Nobel prize for his work on Game Theory.  It was a big deal not just because he was being recognized for his work, but because he had made such an amazing recovery out of the depths of fully onset schizophrenia.

Author Bio - Sylvia Nasar

Sylvia Nasar is our author this week, a journalist born in Germany, but whose family immigrated to the US in the 1950s.  She also lived in Turkey for awhile before going to school at Antioch College in Ohio and then getting her Masters at NYU.

In the 1980s, she joined Fortune magazine as a staff writer.  During the 1990s, she was also an economic correspondent for the New York Times.  She became a  John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University, but it has since filed a lawsuit saying that the university has misdirected the funds from the endowment that are supposed to pay her salary.

She is the author of A Beautiful Mind, the biography on the Nobel Prize winning mathematician, John Nash. In 2001, a movie was made based on her novel starring Russell Crowe.  The book was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1998.

Review Me Twice - What If? by Randall Munroe

Alex picked the book this week but in all honesty, I probably would have picked it up sooner rather than later.  It's been flying off the shelves at my job and has had tantalizing pictures luring me into its pages.

This book is, in the truest sense of the word, a coffee table book.  You can stick it on your coffee table or a side table and people can pick it up and read snippets of it, and then put it back down.  It's fun and it's funny and it's informative and it's a conversation piece all in one.  Considering it's a book about stick figure web comics and science, that's REALLY hard to do.

But Munroe keeps you interested and engaged and amused and not to mention makes you a little smarter by the end of the day.  Everyone should go out and buy this book.  That's right, I said BUY it.  I mean, ok, you should read it to, but go buy yourself a copy.  You'll be really happy you did.

"Too Much Time on Their Hands"

You've heard this phrase before, or maybe even used it yourself, to refer to a project that is seemingly useless and time-consuming. I hate this phrase.

One of my hobbies is cross-stitching. It is an impractical thing to do. I spend hours and hours fiddling with a little needle and tangly thread to make images out of little colored Xs. What a waste of time, right?

You could say the same thing of any work of fiction every written (though satires might get a pass for being not-really-fiction-because-they're-actually-ABOUT-real-things-but-only-in-a-roundabout-way), every work of art ever created... if you take away the "useless" and "impractical" things that were only created because "someone had too much time on their hands," you have a really boring world that belongs in some sort of horrible dystopia in one of those novels that would no longer exist.

So yes, a lot of weird, silly, impractical things exist in the world. Sometimes people spend hours, days, weeks, years, decades creating these things. And while you may not see their value, there is someone who does, even if it's sometimes only the person who created it.

What does this have to do with this week? Well, the same kind of people who would use that phrase would probably think that Randall Munroe "thought too hard" about these hypothetical questions. But even if there were no practical value to his thought processes and answers (but there totally is, because I learned a lot from this book) it's entertaining. He enjoys writing it, I enjoy reading it... there's at least two people in the world who got something out of it. And I say that's enough of a reason to do anything.

Even making little Xs in fabric for hours and hours.

Favorite xkcd Comic

Since we're reading What If? this week, authored by Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, what better favorite for the week than to share our favorite from his strip?

It just makes me giggle every time, because an argument about the word literally and its usage is completely something I'd get into.  (My vendetta is actually the phrase "same difference."  If it's the same, it can't be different.)  I just like the poignant, 'IT DOESN'T MATTER' message going on.  Even the ghost is over it.

from

I love a good graph-based joke. I also love cats. This is the perfect comic for me. Because of this comic, which I read years before I got my cat Gimli, I often greet him with "You're a kitty!" A mark of great writing (regardless of medium) is that it sticks with you in everyday life, and this really did.