Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

“Even more readable, even more important, than his excellent Sapiens”, says the quote on its back cover (by Kazuo Ishiguro, no less). Is it really so?

I have to admit that yes, it is. With chapters titles such as A Brief History of Lawns, Gap the Mind and Why Bankers are Different from Vampires, this book reads like a crime thriller. Well, the history of humankind is a crime thriller, but there have been only a few good storytellers. Harari is one of them.

On a more personal note, Homo Deus gives me a fair few ideas for my (hopefully near) future classes.

Suppose you were given a choice between the following two vacation packages:

Stone Age package: On day one we will hike for ten hours in a pristine forest, setting camp for the night in a clearing by a river. On day two we will canoe down the river for ten hours, camping on the shores of a small lake. On day three we will learn from the native people how to fish in the lake and how to find mushrooms in the nearby woods.

Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms.

Which package would you choose?

And how about this (published in 2015):

Power will definitely not shift back to ordinary voters if Britain leaves the EU nor if Trump takes over the White House.

The task: rephrase the above sentence from the 2025 perspective, using both simple past and past perfect.

Some other predictions haven’t come true — yet. So far we didn’t see artificial intelligence meaningfully replacing doctors, lawyers and flight dispatchers, although there has been a surge in ChatGPT-generated fake research papers and job applications. What we do see at work is much more powerful natural stupidity. It doesn’t mean we are safe.

Free live music and stuff in Las Palmas, February 2025

That’s what we’ve seen this month:

• 18 January — 5 March: Nikola Tesla. El genio de la electricidad moderna @ Parque de San Telmo, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
  The first exhibition in Spain to bear the official seal of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

  

• 5 February: Intervención arqueológica en el Solar Norte de la Catedral de Canarias, Plaza de Santa Ana
  A guided tour organised by Cabildo de Gran Canaria.

  

• 12 February: Infante/Lemes/Colina Trio @ Palacete Rodríguez Quegles, Calle Benito Pérez Galdós, 4
  Javier Colina (double bass, accordion), Javier Infante (guitar) and Alexis Lemes (timple). The programme included material from the trio’s debut album Guiguan.

  

• 15 February: «Agüita fresca: Entre salsa y boleros» @ Auditorio José Antonio Ramos, Parque Doramas
  All-star band featuring Magdalena Padilla (vocals), Yuniel Rascón (guitar, tres), Fofi Lusson (bass) and Totó Noriega (percussion). Still, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed. “Between salsa and boleros”, I didn’t hear a single salsa. Sure, Bésame mucho, Guantanamera and Quizás, quizás, quizás are all perennial classics... that were played, covered and re-covered ad nauseam. Look, there are thousands of fantastic and equally catchy Latin songs, why not trying something new. Agüita fresca? I’d say agua estancada.

  

• 11 February — 16 March: «Macaronesia 1975—2025» @ Casa de Colón, Calle Colón, 1
  The last 50 years of Macaronesian history in 146 photos. Organised by FEDAC and Memoria digital de Lanzarote.

  

• 20 February: «Pasión y ritmo» @ Plaza del Pilar Nuevo
  Now, that was one helluva concert! La Banda Sinfónica Municipal de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria went big-band mode with standards such as At the Mambo Inn, Hot House and Soul Bossa Nova. Conductor: Juan Roda Sapiña. The line-up and full programme are available here.

  

And that was it for February.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

I wish I read Sapiens before I did The Dawn of Everything, for the latter book refers to and criticises the Yuval’s work. So every now and then I was catching myself agreeing with Graeber and Wengrow’s critique and musing if I would read Sapiens with different eyes, say, ten years ago. Of course I would.

The book is very well written — you can’t take that away from Harari.

There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up.

Closer to our times, the book grows less interesting (for me) and more erratic. It looks as if the author was in a hurry to finish it. This is what Harari writes about the end of Soviet Union (which happened not in 1989 but in 1991):

The Soviet collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful, despite the eruption of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses.
Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of World War Two, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership — or like the French in Algeria.

And a bit later:

Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war. For most polities, there is no plausible scenario leading to full-scale conflict within one year.

The book was originally published in Hebrew in 2011; this English translation appeared in 2014. There was no way for the author to know what’s coming for Crimea, but he should have been aware of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria.

La realidad no es lo que parece

by Carlo Rovelli
translated by Juan Manuel Salmerón Arjona

At 260+ pages, this is the longest book by Rovelli I’ve read (the other two are Siete Breves Lecciones de Fisica and El orden del tiempo) and the least satisfactory one. Maybe it is translation (the other two were translated by Francisco J. Ramos Mena), maybe repetitiveness, or maybe the contrast between well-explained and left-pretty-much-unexplained. For instance: Rovelli says, half-jokingly, that a theory is not credible if its equations don’t fit on a T-shirt. Fair enough. I like that. Then he puts the equations of loop quantum gravity theory on an image of a T-shirt (Fig. 7.7) without explaining anything about these equations. Not fair at all, and not even funny. In fact, Reality (2014) precedes The Order of Time (2017) and I have an impression that in the latter book Rovelli was able to address the shortcomings of the former.

Still, Reality is a fascinating read. I might not care that much about spin foam but I loved the historical bits, especially those on Dirac, Matvei Bronstein, and Rovelli’s recurring theme, Democritus.

The Martian

a film by Ridley Scott

How come I never watched this film until yesterday? Well, it’s not exactly true: I caught its less-than-convincing happy end some years ago on the telly and wasn’t impressed. Now that I saw The Martian in its entirety, I have to confess I quite enjoyed it. It’s got a sense of humour. It’s got ABBA, David Bowie and Donna Summer. And The Green Morning moment: “Hey there”. Hell, I even liked Matt Damon’s (ABBA, David Bowie and Donna Summer-hating) Mark Watney — he’s not as much Robinson Crusoe as Cyrus Smith. Science is cool. Be like Mark, and they’ll name a new potato species after you [see Martine (!) et al. (2016) Solanum watneyi, a new bush tomato species from the Northern Territory, Australia named for Mark Watney of the book and film “The Martian”. PhytoKeys 61, 1—13].

I doubt I’ll be using Watney’s life hacks any time soon, except for this one:

“If you can’t fix it with duct tape, then you ain’t using enough duct tape.”

Wait, that’s from a different movie.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

What a book! Apart from anthropology and archaeology (the authors’ respective field expertise), it deals with, or at least touches upon, ecology, economics, ethnology, history, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology — in short, most of the social sciences and beyond. Or, as the authors modestly put it, “everything”. You don’t have to agree with everything they say to admire their work. The point is not agreeing but questioning the accepted, or any other, narrative.

Speaking of which: I really liked the way the (sub)chapters are named, for example,

How the conventional narrative of human history is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull

In which we ask: would you rather fish, or gather acorns?

In which we go in search of the real origins of bureaucracy, and find them on what appears to be a surprisingly small scale

and so on. An inexhaustible source of quotes about — well, you’ve got it.

On academia and democracy:

Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else. Obviously, it’s partly just the desire to preserve the credit for having ‘invented’ democracy for something called ‘the West’. Part of the explanation might also lie in the fact that academia itself is organized in an extremely hierarchical fashion, and most scholars therefore have little or no experience of making democratic decisions themselves, and find it hard to imagine anyone else doing so as a result.

On self-awareness:

Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic.

On freedom:

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a selfconscious aversion to being told what to do.

Live music and stuff in Santander and Las Palmas, December 2022

This is what I’ve seen in the last month of 2022:

• 1 December: Víctor Antón Group @ Rvbicón, Calle del Sol, 4, Santander
  A modern jazz quartet featuring Naíma Acuña (drums), Víctor Antón (guitar), Javier Moreno (double bass) and Juan Sebastián Vázquez (piano), presenting their brand new album Centennial Light. Watch the full concert here.

  

• 3 December: Live de Objetos y Cassettes @ Eureka Santander, Calle San Simón, 8
  Sarah Rasines used cassettes and mechanical objects in her live electronic music show. It lasted about 15 minutes, which was about as long as I was prepared to listen to it.

  

• 4 December: Jazz Jam @ Rvbicón
  The base band of Nadir Ibarra (tenor sax), Rafa Santana (piano), Toño Gutiérrez (bass) and Marcial García (drums), plus students of the Conservatorio Ataulfo Argenta and the usual suspects Manuel Cavero (double bass), Adela San Miguel (drums), Rodri Irizábal (drums), Manuel San Emeterio (guitar), Pancho Arredondo (trumpet, vocals), Carlos Pizarro (guitar) and others.
• 7 December: The New World Band @ Rvbicón
  A different line-up compared to that of 25 May, featuring Sean Clapis (guitar), Darío Guibert (double bass), Daniel Juárez (tenor sax) and Marc Pinyol (drums). Watch the full concert here.

  

• 11 December: La Mala Hierba @ Rvbicón
  With Gema Martínez (vocals) and Nico Rodríguez (guitar); this happened to be the last concert I saw in Rvbicón this year. Watch the full concert here.

  

Back to Las Palmas, I was lucky to attend all eight — well, seven and a half — concerts from the cycle «Jazz entre muros» at Museo Castillo de Mata (Calle Domingo Guerra del Río, 147):

• 21 December, 20:00: Javier Infante and Jose Alberto Medina
  Say no more.
• 21 December, 21:00: Pablo Queu
  Energetic jazz-funk band featuring Alberto Díaz (trombone), Emilio Diena (drums), Ruyman Franco (bass guitar), Claudio Marrero (tenor sax) and Pablo Quintana Guillén (guitar).



• 22 December, 20:00: Chano Gil Quartett
  Chano Gil (trumpet, flugelhorn), Yul Ballesteros (guitar), Paco Perera (double bass) and Javier Montero (drums).
• 22 December, 21:00: Trijazzic
  Luis Merino (guitar), Esther Suárez (vocals), Miriam Fleitas (vocals), José Carlos Cejudo (bass guitar) and Juan Pérez (drums).



• 29 December, 20:00: Alba Serrano and Cristóbal Montesdeoca
  Alba Serrano (vocals) and Cristóbal Montesdeoca (piano) performed songs from their new, mostly Lusophone, album Viagem.
• 29 December, 21:00: Alba Gil Aceytuno «Aguayro»
  It started to rain during the first song; luckily, the concert was not interrupted. With Alba Gil Aceytuno (sax, flute, keys, vocals), Alberto Díaz (trombone), José Carlos Cejudo (bass guitar), Luis Merino (guitar) and Juan Pérez (drums).



• 30 December, 20:00: Takeo Takahashi
  Would you believe it, by 19:45 it was full so I had to wait another half an hour till somebody left and they allowed me to enter. As a result, I only heard the last three songs. Kervin Barreto (trumpet, percussion), José Carlos Cejudo (bass guitar), Octavio Hernández (guitar), Santiago “Chago” Miranda (guitar) and Takeo Takahashi (drums, guitar), with a special guest Patricia Legardon (vocals).
• 30 December, 21:00: Bjazz «EnCanto de Mujer»
  With Sara Brito (flute), Samantha de León (double bass), Judith Martín González (trumpet), Amelia Gutiérrez (drums), Moneiba Hidalgo (vocals) and Sun-Young Park (piano), performing standards by Nina Simone, Consuelo Velázquez, Aretha Franklin and others.

In the same Castillo de Mata one can see the exhibition «Ars Botanica, simbólica naturaleza», a tribute to David Bramwell (1942—2022), director of Jardín Botánico Canario Viera y Clavijo between 1974 and 2012. The exhibition features works by Fernando Álamo, Juan Pedro Ayala, Kōno Bairei, Marisa Culatto, Marta Chirino, Pepe Dámaso, César Manrique, Néstor de la Torre, Nellie Roberts and various illustrators of 18^th and 19^th centuries. Until 18 March 2023.

Happy New Year, everybody.

Islas Canarias: Nacidas del Fuego

a film by Pablo Tejeda

This documentary opens this year’s Santander Film Festival.

El verano de su vida

by Thomas von Steinaecker and Barbara Yelin
translated by Itziar Hernández Rodilla

Weightlessness. The speed of light. Multiple worlds.

With chapter names like these, you’d expect El verano de su vida (original title Der Sommer ihres Lebens) to be some sort of sci-fi comic. It isn’t though. As her Earth life comes to an end, Gerda mentally travels in time, to that summer of her life (note The Dark Side of the Moon poster on p. 41) and beyond.

All your life You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Did she miss her moment?

El orden del tiempo

by Carlo Rovelli
translated by Francisco J. Ramos Mena

I remember how excited I was, when I first read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, to learn about light cones. Then I forgot almost all about them, apart from that there is a place outside of a light cone called “elsewhere”. Now, reading this book, I had a happy reencounter with light cones. This time, what surprised me most was the illustration showing that the orientation of the cones could even be like this:

The Order of Time is a bit longer than Seven Brief Lessons but still quite short and almost as easy to read. I cannot say I’m convinced by everything Rovelli says, but that’s the reality — and, for me, the beauty — of science. The way he explains some of his ideas, like the one that the world is not a collection of things but of events, is sheer poetry.

La differenza fra cose e eventi è che le cose permangono nel tempo. Gli eventi hanno durata limitata. Un prototipo di una «cosa» è un sasso: possiamo chiederci dove sarà domani. Mentre un bacio è un «evento». Non ha senso chiedersi dove sia andato il bacio domani. Il mondo è fatto di reti di baci, non di sassi.

⧖ ⧗ ⧖

La diferencia entre cosas y eventos es que las cosas permanecen en el tiempo. Los eventos, en cambio, tienen una duración limitada. Un prototipo de «cosa» es una piedra: podemos preguntarnos dónde estará mañana. Mientras que un beso es un «evento»: no tiene sentido preguntarse adónde habrá ido el beso mañana. El mundo está hecho de redes de besos, no de piedras.

(Translated by Francisco J. Ramos Mena)

⧗ ⧖ ⧗

The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event”. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

(Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell)

⧖ ⧗ ⧖

The book is written to intrigue you. Or, at least, this seems to be its main purpose. I’d say The Order of Time is more concerned with history and philosophy of time rather than (hard) physics or math of time. For more in-depth (but still accessible) treatment of physical aspects of time, you’ll need to look, er, elsewhere. I recommend The Arrow of Time by Coveney and Highfield as well as the aforementioned Hawking’s classic.

For those who prefer listening, there is an audiobook read by the man who played Hawking in Hawking, the one Benedict Cumberbatch.

Siete Breves Lecciones de Fisica

by Carlo Rovelli
translated by Francisco J. Ramos Mena

It’s the story of my life. I first saw this book in the library, at the new books stand by the entrance. Even browsed through it, thinking that I might fancy to read it. Then went to another floor briefly. Sure enough, when I came back, it was gone.

I never saw it again at the new books stand (well, that was a couple of years ago, so it’s not new anymore) and I forgot the name of the author. So, one day I waded into the physics section and... found it. Now that I know the name, I can tell you: it was next to other books by Rovelli.

I could have swallowed it in one evening but I somehow managed to prolong the pleasure for almost a week. Even if you hated physics in school — especially if you hated physics in school — I promise, you’ll enjoy this book. And if you are still in school: the same. Till now, I had no clue who Rovelli the scientist is — one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory, of which he talks in Grains of space, that’s who, but this fact is almost tangential to the way Rovelli tells the story. To write about complex stuff in such an easy language is a gift, and the author is not afraid to use it. According to Wikipedia, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics was translated into 42 languages, which makes it the most translated Italian book after Pinocchio. I read it in Spanish. I suppose the original is as a joy to read.

La teoría más hermosa (The most beautiful of theories) Los cuantos (The quanta) La arquitectura del cosmos (The architecture of the cosmos) Partículas (Particles) Granos de espacio (Grains of space) La probabilidad, el tiempo y el calor de los agujeros negros (Probability, time and the heat of black holes) Nosotros (Ourselves)

There Once Was An Island: Te Henua e Nnoho

a film by Briar March

Shall we stay or shall we go? To leave for a better life or to stay and preserve the unique culture? The question is eternal, the problem is universal. In the case of Takuu Atoll, to stay may not be an option: rising sea level threatens its very existence.

The 2010 documentary was shot during two visits to the atoll, in 2006 and 2008. Back then the population of 400 lived on Nukutoa, the only inhabited island of the atoll. According to Wikipedia, “in 2019 the estimated resident population was 150”.

The scenes of the flood are perhaps the most poignant in the whole film. The houses and the village school are destroyed. At the same time, you see the children happily swimming and even jumping to the ocean from the coconut palms. Takuu ain’t no paradise, but probably the next best thing to it, and about being lost too. Scott Smithers, one of the scientists who visited the atoll in 2008, said that he has no problem living there. For how long though?

Las Mujeres Mueven Montañas

by Pepita Sandwich

To get to the ship, Jeanne Baret had to disguise herself as a man. Annie Smith Peck caused scandal by her hiking attire. Van Buren sisters were even arrested a few times for wearing trousers. In their lifetime, neither Baret nor Mary Anning were ever credited for their discoveries.

Women adventurers, explorers, scientists. Most of them, underappreciated, ignored, forgotten. Now this wonderful comic book by Pepita Sandwich (Josefina Guarracino) brings their stories to life.

• Jeanne Baret (1740—1807), a French botanist, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe;
• Annie Londonderry (1870—1947), the first woman to bicycle around the world;
• Mary Anning (1799—1847), an English palaeontologist, discoverer of ichthyosaur and Plesiosaurus;
• Annie Smith Peck (1850—1935), a record-setting mountaineer;
• Josephine Peary (1863—1955), an American Arctic explorer;
• Augusta (1884—1959) and Adeline (1889—1949) Van Buren, American transcontinental motorcyclists;
• Freya Stark (1893—1993), a British explorer and writer;
• Ynés Mexía (1870—1938), a Mexican-American botanist;
• Ángeles Alvariño (1916—2005), a Spanish oceanographer and marine biologist;
• Eva Dickson (1905—1938), a Swedish explorer, rally driver and aviator; the first woman to cross the Sahara desert by car;
• Rosaly Lopes (born 1957), a Brazilian planetary geologist and volcanologist, a 2006 Guinness record holder as the discoverer of the most active volcanoes anywhere;
• Junko Tabei (1939—2016), the first woman to summit Mount Everest and the first woman to ascend the Seven Summits;
• Barbara Hillary (1931—2019), the first African-American woman to reach the North and South poles;
• Valentina Tereshkova (born 1937), the first woman in space.

Manual ultravioleta: Feminismo para mirar el mundo

by Clara Serra

There is no such thing as gender violence. There is domestic violence.
Neither male chauvinism nor feminism. The world needs humanism.
Women have greater emotional intelligence.
Inclusive language is redundant/ungrammatical/ridiculous.
We have equal rights now. Why do we still need feminism?

We hear or read nonsense like this on a daily basis. In her book, Clara Serra does an excellent job debunking common myths (or, rather, flagrant lies) and doubts about feminism patiently, in an accessible language and with watertight logic. Ah, if only voters cared for logic. Or read books, for that matter.

Quite unlike the books I reviewed here last month, viz. Mala mujer and El Placer, this one has no illustrations at all, save the cover art. But what a treasure it is!

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

by Oliver Sacks

After re-reading, earlier this year, Sacks’ brilliant Musicophilia, I finally got to this book. Considered by now a classic (at least, the 2015 paperback edition appears in “Picador Classic” series, so it must be one), it’s a fabulous read. Although the book was first published not that long ago, in 1985, I find the language noticeably dated, while the words such as defective, hysteria, idiot, moron, retardate, retarded, simple, with or without quotation marks, just make me cringe.

Like Musicophilia, The Man Who... is a collection of case studies which are more like short stories that could be enjoyed in any order. For me, A Passage to India is the most poignant and most beautiful chapter in the book.

The Twins deals with two autistic savants who spend their days playing a strange game of exchanging six-digit numbers.

I already had a hunch — and now I confirmed it. All the numbers, the six-figure numbers, which the twins had exchanged were primes — i.e., numbers that could be evenly divided by no other whole number than itself or one. Had they somehow seen or possessed such a book as mine — or were they, in some unimaginable way, themselves ‘seeing’ primes, in somewhat the same way as they had ‘seen’ 111-ness, or triple 37-ness? Certainly they could not be calculating them — they could calculate nothing.

I returned to the ward the next day, carrying the precious book of primes with me. I again found them closeted in their numerical communion, but this time, without saying anything, I quietly joined them. They were taken aback at first, but when I made no interruption, they resumed their ‘game’ of six-figure primes. After a few minutes I decided to join in, and ventured a number, an eight-figure prime. They both turned towards me, then suddenly became still, with a look of intense concentration and perhaps wonder on their faces. There was a long pause — the longest I had ever known them to make, it must have lasted a half-minute or more — and then suddenly, simultaneously, they both broke into smiles.

They had, after some unimaginable internal process of testing, suddenly seen my own eight-digit number as a prime — and this was manifestly a great joy, a double joy, to them; first because I had introduced a delightful new plaything, a prime of an order they had never previously encountered; and, secondly, because it was evident that I had seen what they were doing, that I liked it, that I admired it, and that I could join in myself.

They drew apart slightly, making room for me, a new number playmate, a third in their world. Then John, who always took the lead, thought for a very long time — it must have been at least five minutes, though I dared not move, and scarcely breathed — and brought out a nine-figure number; and after a similar time his twin, Michael, responded with a similar one. And then I, in my turn, after a surreptitious look in my book, added my own rather dishonest contribution, a ten-figure prime I found in my book.

Le clitoris

a film by Lori Malépart-Traversy

At just over three minutes, Le clitoris is a gem of an animation that is both informative and fun. I’d say it should be a part of sex-ed curriculum from primary level up. Also, many grown-ups will benefit from watching it. The protagonist is so cute. How not to love it? Yet it have had some powerful enemies, such as Sigmund Freud, who wrote that

Elimination of clitoral sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity, since it is immature and masculine in its nature.

What a pathetic quack — alas, just one of many who tried to “discredit, dismiss and delete” the clitoris. Mostly men, who can’t tolerate women having an organ dedicated to pure pleasure. Of women.

Speaking of pleasure: naturally, you cannot please everybody. One of the comments (from a man, of course) goes: “A longer, more in-depth version would be awesome”. Seriously?

If your French is a bit rusty, or non-existent (like mine), fear not: it has English subtitles. There is a Spanish-dubbed version as well.

The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero

by Robert Kaplan

I just finished re-reading, with many long breaks, this book. The first time I read it was on my 2006—2007 New Year holidays in Stockholm and Helsinki. This time I enjoyed it more.

Zero, nought, nil, null, zilch, cipher... So many names for something that isn’t there. We take zero for granted, but it wasn’t always the case. The ancient Greeks had no word for it — or maybe they did? Odysseus introduced himself to Polyphemus as Outis (Οὖτις), “Nobody”; three thousand years later, Prince Dakkar followed his example by adopting the pseudonym Nemo.

Kaplan brings together mathematics, physics, history, philosophy and literature in a marvellously poetic way. Just listen:

So long ago in Greece, when Socrates was young and Parmenides old, the latter laid down a challenge we have sought ever since to pick up. All you can think, he said, is: ‘Being is’. You cannot think non-being, nothing, the void. Using negation, he told us we cannot use negation. All we can think is ‘Being is’. We cannot think motion, change, difference, past or future, here and there, you and me, since each requires thinking ‘not’. We can only think: ‘Being is’. How easy to trivialize Parmenides by teaching him to suck eggs: you cannot outlaw negation and proceed to use it. But Parmenides was a poet, and you miss the music if you point out to a poet that his love isn’t really a red red rose. Parmenides wanted us to stop talking and listen. Like the background hum from the Big Bang, Being pervades. It fills and is the world.

Two millennia later Leibniz heard what he said and recognized with joy the fullness of things. There were no gaps, there was no void, the small became smaller but never nothing. Just as the numbers were choked to bursting with numbers, the world they described was so silted up with beings that it was a continuous whole, a garden whose every leaf was again a garden.

“A Natural History” of the subtitle is a bit of a misnomer though.

Claudius Ptolemy (2^nd century AD) used the modified omicron, ō as “Hellenistic zero”.

The Hindu–Arabic numeral system, complete with zero, reached Europe by the 11^th century.

In Mandarin Chinese, 〇 (Pinyin: líng 🔊) is a word for number zero.

More photos related to numbers and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

La ridícula idea de no volver a verte

by Rosa Montero

This is the first book by Rosa Montero I ever read. It took me a while.

That’s how it starts:

Como no he tenido hijos, lo más importante que me ha sucedido en la vida son mis muertos, y con ello me refiero a la muerte de mis seres queridos. ¿Te parece lúgubre, quizá incluso morboso? Yo no lo veo así, antes al contrario: me resulta algo tan lógico, tan natural, tan cierto. Sólo en los nacimientos y en las muertes se sale uno del tiempo; la Tierra detiene su rotación y las trivialidades en las que malgastamos las horas caen sobre el suelo como polvo de purpurina. Cuando un niño nace o una persona muere, el presente se parte por la mitad y te deja atisbar por un instante la grieta de lo verdadero: monumental, ardiente e impasible.

Although it is written in easy enough Spanish, it is no easy reading. (As far as I know, there’s no English translation yet.) Montero chose to deal with her personal tragedy, the death of Pablo Lizcano, in a beautiful and creative way. And she succeeded to convert the mourning into — I hesitate to say “a masterpiece”, but a literary gem nonetheless.

But why Marie Skłodowska Curie? I am not sure. Of course, there are parallels — as there must be. Perhaps not too many though. Montero is fascinated with coincidences, as I am^*. Along the way, she comes up with some interesting albeit sweeping generalisations which, as generalisations go, sound pretty accurate. In any case, I am grateful to the author for her choice. I don’t usually read biographies (this book isn’t one) and knew surprisingly little about Marie Curie.

So... was/is Mme Curie “a splendid role model and a feminist icon” or a “token woman”? Rosa Montero sees right through Marie’s unsmiling exterior and reveals a beautiful human being, a true friend, a passionate lover... To do that, however, she had to go (and take the reader with her) through Marie’s diary, and I was not comfortable with that. Diaries are not meant to be exposed to the outside world.

I read most of The ridiculous idea... feeling that Montero focuses a lot on Marie and (her loss of) Pierre but not that much on Pablo, who is the reason of her research and the book itself. Turns out, I was not the only one wondering about that. It gets explained in the end — to be precise, in the chapter called Escondido en el centro del silencio. The author’s self-censorship is understandable and must be respected. Still, the few paragraphs which actually speak about Pablo are among the most beautiful parts of the book.

*	I am not a fan of hashtags and honestly can’t see any point in placing them (e.g. #HacerLoQueSeDebe or #HonrarALosPadres) in the paper book, but here you are. To make them a bit more useful, Montero even provided the Index of Hashtags (p. 211), in place of, er, just index. And which hashtag do you think is the most popular? #Coincidencias!

Sex at Dawn

by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá

I found it ridiculous that quite a number of academics took an issue with Sex at Dawn’s methodology and conclusions as if it were a standard peer-reviewed scientific publication. (In retrospect, it might be a good thing that the book was rejected by Oxford University Press. Their books are expensive for no good reason but the name.) Likewise, some readers felt offended by the authors being biased as if there is any unbiased popular science literature. If the authors’ (not so thinly) veiled political agenda is “make love, not war” and sex-positive feminism, I’m happy that so many people actually bought and read this book. Now, that we’ve got a pussy-grabbing bigot as the soon-to-be Leader of the Free World, this book is probably more important than six years ago.

Also, it’s a jolly good read.

Theorists supporting genital echo theory have noted that swellings like those of chimpanzees and bonobos would interfere with locomotion in a bipedal primate, so when our distant ancestors began walking upright, they reason that some of the female’s fertility signaling moved from the rear office, as it were, to the front showroom. In a bit of historical ping-pong, the dictates of fashion have moved the swelling back and forth over the centuries with high heels, Victorian bustles, and other derrière enhancements. Though Darwin proved to be a very loving husband and father, these pros and cons of marriage suggest he very seriously considered opting for the companionship of a dog instead. Maybe matriarchal societies are so difficult for Western male anthropologists to recognize because they expect a culture where men are suffering under the high heels of women — a reverse reflection of the long-standing male oppression of women in Western cultures. Instead, observing a society where most of the men are lounging about relaxed and happy, they conclude they’ve found yet another patriarchy, thereby missing the point entirely.

Mapping Applied Linguistics: A Guide for Students and Practitioners

by Christopher J. Hall, Patrick H. Smith and Rachel Wicaksono

Finally, I finished this book. Not the easiest reading, especially if you have it on Kindle and try to go through it on the beach, as I did. But gratifying. I did not expect to go much past the introduction — yes I do read introductions. And this is what caught my attention (together with a 3-D representation of human forkhead-box protein 2 shown above):

All communities and cultures have deeply held beliefs about the nature of language and languages, which applied linguists ignore at their peril. But research in linguistics and allied fields allows us to bring new perspectives on the practical problems facing language users, which we must also be aware of if we are not to be led astray by tempting, but misleading, courses of belief and practice. Sometimes the most level path or the straightest-looking route doesn’t lead to new territory, but ultimately sends us round in circles or soon dries up altogether. <...> We’ll also continually bear in mind that most language users (the clients of applied linguistics), hold them to be self-evident; and, furthermore, that the beliefs of users can have profound effects on language uses. Finally, we’ll remember that all those who work professionally with language, including linguists, will succumb to the lure of these attractive avenues of belief . . . even if they do lead nowhere except to fewer spirited discussions at family holidays, the dinner table, the pub or the coffee house.

And here is the author’s top ten ‘dead ends’:

1. People think in language
2. Children are taught their first language(s)
3. Written language is superior to spoken language
4. Some groups of people don’t use their language properly
5. Some people speak their language without an accent
6. The way groups use their language reflects their intelligence
7. People with two languages are confused
8. Languages get contaminated by influence from other languages
9. A nation has, or should have, one language
10. Languages exist independently of users and uses

The fact that many of my colleagues (teachers!) indeed hold many of these beliefs is enough to convince me that I should go on, if only for the sake of being able to destroy their arguments in the pub or the coffee house. Moreover, this book made me realise that I am an applied linguist too. Beginner level, but still.