The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

2007-03-02 05:20:00
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I picked up a copy of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks recently, and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. It's a compilation of case histories of patients with neurological damage (the title is from a case of a man with visual agnosia). The stories are interesting and occasionally amusing. When I've finished, I may post a summary of whichever story I like best, but they're all quite good, I think.

I've made little progress on Between Silk and Cyanide since I last wrote of it, nor have I begun any other other books.

Regarding Wikipedia: I thought that I might take a look at articles on high schools, since they seem to get vandalised rather a lot, and are generally of low quality. I improved (slightly) Aberdeen High School, but it wasn't very pleasant. Perhaps the worst of it was simply my unfamiliarity with the standard layout for schools and the high school infobox. But even discounting this, it was annoying, since the only news article I could readily find that had useful information about a fire mentioned in the article was subscription-only, and I could by no means change that. It is things like this that reassure me that Wikipedia's mission to provide access to the sum of human knowledge to everyone is important: the idea of locking that information up behind a subscription just seems awful.

I may try to work on some other school articles later. They don't rank very high on my 'things that really need improved' list, but they are relatively easy to improve, due mostly to the poor quality common to so many of them.

As for my mathematical endeavours: I've made little progress into the Handbook of Analysis and its Foundations (HAF), due mostly to other things taking up my time, and it may be pushed further back. I've had Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis recommended to me, so I've picked up a copy of that to give it a look. It begins by developing the reals from the rationals via Dedekind cuts, which is nice, but I haven't read past that yet. I'll have to try to read it while struggling through HAF and also reading Ross's Elementary Analysis: The Theory of Calculus, which is the assigned text for the analysis course I'm taking.

I don't actually like Ross's book very much, but it's reasonably clear and simple. The fact is that I don't like the subject very much, but I am interested in topology, based on what little I know of it, so some knowledge of this is necessary and useful.

That'll do for now. I need to stop before I spend more time writing about my books than reading them.