Alex's Adventures in Numberland

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Jack Kelly
Tags: readings

I’ve got a bit of a weakness for pop-maths books: the first make keeps giving them to me, and I keep reading them. At their most rigorous, they’ll have a sketch of a proof sketch and the rest of it is more about the mathematicians or intuitive understanding of the results. The latest book I’ve read in this vein is Alex Bellos’ Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, and it’s a decent one. Not great, but decent. (Normally I prefer to link to the author’s site, but in this case I’m getting warnings of malware coming from a .ru site, so it’s just an Amazon link.)

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The Curse of the Traveller

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Jack Kelly
Tags: windeward_bound, miscellaneous

The idea of this post is something that I’ve felt for a while, but I’m moved to write about it because of darien_gap’s excellent Reddit comment that gave it a name:

… have you ever heard of The Curse of the Traveler?

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this: The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for a place not that’s perfect (we all know there’s no Shangri-La), but just for a place that’s “just right for you.” But the curse is that the odds of finding “just right” get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can’t travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you’ve seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

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Mandela: A Biography

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Jack Kelly
Tags: readings

Biographies are one of my favourite types of book. There’s obviously a bit of a selection bias here, but I always enjoy reading about people who have managed incredible things. (Nobody would seriously publish a biography of Ted the Office Worker.) Most recently, I read Martin Meredith’s Mandela: A Biography, but I have only just had a chance to write about it.

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