MISQUOTING JESUS

Ehrman, Bart. D

Call no: 225.486 EHR

When I borrowed this book, I thought it'd be another religious mumbo jumbo extolling the virtues of God no matter what others say.

I was delightfully pleased (and consequently educated) about this whole thing called the Bible and particularly The New Testament. Jesus has been misquoted through this sure bad habit of his of not putting things down. If only he had a blog then all this interpretation would not have been put into existence

Basically, so Bart says, Christians were an uneducated lot. The falungong of yesteryear. But Jesus came from the Judaic tradition where text is so very important. So his apostles were asked to spread the message. Most of the apostles were basically uneducated and dictated to scribes, who except for the Alexandrians (Alexander being a centre of learning at the time) could hardly write. (!!!). Bart cites instances of how some Egyptian scribes were practising to write their own names. So lotsa mistakes. And then there were the interpretations. So Mark and Luke borrowed mainly from the records of Matthew. Luke particularly liked his Jesus soft and changed scenarios and added things to make the guy a softee... then there were others who were against other schools of thought about Jesus as the son of God, either in spiritual form, or as a part of God manifested as a human. And so on.

Won't go into the details. Read it for yourself. It's enlightening and makes you wonder about the Bible, and people who swear by it. For what are they swearing? Surely, not the word of God, but by the words of people with their varied religious interpretations.

Bart himself used to be a conservative christian,but after writing this book, he himself begins to wonder. A great point for textual analysts. What a wonderful branch of study.

" the scribes... changed scripture the way we all change scripture, every time we read it. For they, like we, were trying to understand what the authors wrote while also trying to see how the words of the authors' texts might have significance for them, and how they might help them make sense of their own situations and their own lives".

Highly recommended. I can see why it's a New York Times Bestseller.

The Evolution of Useful Things

The evolution of useful things / Henry Petroski

Another Petroski book. Note the title, evolution, things. Do things evolve? According to Petroski, yes. He draws the parallel of Darwinian theory of evolution to man made objects... his vehicle object is the paper clip.

Things evolve because of failure of form, so he debunks the theory or the dictum, form follows function. There was a need to hold paper together. They used the pin. But the failure of the pin to do a satisfactory job (eg make holes in paper, makes holes in fngers, etc) that pushed inventors to modify it into a paper clip. But the clip is far from satisfactory and it evolves. Of course, I would say that it may evolve itself out of existence when our society become more and more paperless.

Petroski also details the example of Raymond Loewy, the first Industrial Designer, to illustrate his argument that form also follows fashion. Gestetner I think was the early duplicating press used in office. It also used to trip secretaries over. Loewy designed a new form. Must check out Loewy - but he goes into the streamlined look.

I liked some of Petroskis examples. Like with the creation of canning as a food preservation, there was a need to create the can opener - which continually evolves (due to complaints of environmental hazards) into the pull top cans that we have today. But still the can/can opener is far from perfect.

Good read, although it got a bit tedious as the examples build upon the same old argument... form evolve from failure to function. .. which if I think about it, is another way of saying form follows function. .. and where does that lead Petroski?

Origami

4 books rather interesting, a bit different from the usual frog and crane

Polyhedron origami for beginners / Miyuki Kawamura.
Rather interesting constructions using modules. Good explanations and illustrations

Origami monsters & mythical beings / Jay Ansill
Rather complicated although imaginative. Some of the illustrations skip steps.

Modern origami / James Minoru Sakoda

The least interesting of the four. No colour illustrations and fairly boring. But good instructions on how to start with the bases. By modern the author means the style of folding which emphasized the beauty of the straight line and geometric forms. As contrast with older forms as done by Akira Yoshizawa who seek beauty in rounder edges. The author has interesting terms. Eg:
Hikari-Ori (shining light folding) using foil surface, and low relief geometric figures
the eight point star
cross pleating.
This book is rather academic but provides very interesting history of origami.

The art of origami : an illustrated guide to Japanese paperfolding, with over 30 classic designs / Rick Beech

This is the best. Has good explanations, the steps work, tells you latest things, although doesnt show you how to do some of the innovations by Robert Lang.

Some rather interesting points to note:

All origami steps evolve from base folds:
Kite base
Blintz base - derived from Yiddish word for thin pancake containing cheese. The name was taken by Gershon Legman and other 1950s folders to refer to the act of folding all four corners to the centre.
Fish base - from kite base
Waterbomb base
Preliminary base
Bird base - from preliminary base
Frog base - from preliminary base

Some models:
the sampan
the butterfly - there is a Japanese master Akira Yoshizawa who folded numerous different species with many variations
the elephant. There is a group of young Japanese enthusiasts who call themselves the Tantedan and specialize in fairly complex folds. The elephant was designed by a member called Nobuyoshi Enomoto

The Lost Life of Eva Braun

Angela Lambert
Call no. 943.086 LAM

I don't really know why I borrowed this book . Maybe the cover said something to me. It had a photo of Hitler (standing) and Eva seated and she had a nice, clean, clear of evil look about her. So I thought this might be an interesting take on the Eva Braun. The mistress. The one who accompanied Hitler in death.

I don't mind reading the book, but I really objected to the author weaving in her own family into Eva's story. It's kind of like a biographic bandwagon... it's like saying, Eva lived during this time (and oh, by the way, so did my grandma, who also happened to be German and who lived nearly in the same city, etc.) I don't care two hoots about the author's grandma, especially when it came in small mozaic moments. I particularly took objection to the author inserted photos of her grandparents in among the photo pages of Hitler and Eva.

This diluted the authorship and credibility of the book. For eg: when Geli committed suicide (the author did mention that there were rumours about Himmler murdering Geli, but she brushed that aside with nothing else than her subjective hands, as she has done with countless other counter facts) she wrote: "The event triggered a huge scandal and a feeding frenzy in the newspaper.... The news would certainly have reached my mother in Hamburg. Ditha (author's mother) was twenty by then and given her love of gossip and interest in the paccadilloes of great men, she must have speculated about the truth behind the denials. Was it possible the Fuhrer had murdered his own niece? " Frankly, I didn't care what Ditha thought. Especially if Ditha's life was only going to be mentioned as a sub-plot or used as a punction mark to link speculation and fact.

This made me wonder more about Eva Braun, but it convinced me that I was not going to find out about Eva Braun via Ditha or by continuing to read Angela Lambert's book.

Pushing the Limits

Sub title: New Adventures in Engineering

620 PET

Henry Petroski

I had to return Petroski's other book The Book on the Bookshelf because it was due and since I couldn't continue reading it, I borrowed the next one available. I was looking forward to this but the first chapter Art in Iron and Steel talked about the first steel bridge, IronBridge with mini detours to painting and photography. I crossed that chapter. Then, the next one is about Bridges in America. Ya, ok, the man likes bridges. But then there were 12 other chapters on bridges 120 pages. After a while I've crossed over. I turned to contents. The next lot is about And Other Things. 11 chapters. And then, that's it; the book concludes. Hmmm. Just reading about Dorton Arena - but my enthusiasm has been curbed. This book was published in 2004. He may not have missed other marvels that push the limits too. I'll read to the end before pronouncing judgement.

The Search

Subtitle: how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture

John BATTELLE call no. 306.406 BAT

I wanted to read the Google story especially about their business model and found this book instead. It, the author says, is not about the business end of searching, but the act of searching and how that has been transformed by google.

The author is a founder of Wired magazine so he may know what he is talking about. Still reading.

29 June 2007
Turned out to be a pretty good book afterall. I tend to forget the early days of the internet when there was no such thing as a search button. Now it's one of the necessities of life. And this is what the book is about... how Search for information has become part and parcel of our lives, and how it will or may dictate how we live our lives. Google's business model is paid Search.... us searchers don't pay of course, but advertisers do. And although it maintains that its Search results are independent of advertisement, one has to suspect. And its algorithm has the ability to have a very long tail, remembering things you look for and linking to other areas. This is itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Let me explain:

Battelle talks about Search and Immortality - through a track of clickstreams (roughly translated into a person's search history) - the information from one person's search can lead to another, thus building leaf upon leaf into a giant, subject-specific database. Already this is kinda happening with Mozilla's history page. Imagine the time saved if you could go through the search history of someone else before you who had searched the web for a similar subject.

Google and other competitors have only touched about 6% of the information out there in the web. The future is scary but tempting.

Battelle has a website. http://battellemedia.com/

A bit of trivia: Google's Page Rank algorithm, the very basis of its search tool is a patent held by Stanford University because Larry Page and Brin were grad students working the algorithm in the dorm rooms of Stanford. They license Page Rank till 2011.

Another bit of information is with all these clickstreams building up giant databases, wouldn't it be a good idea to start archiving material, lest they disappear? Google's cache is good for the moment, but how wonderful it would be if missing pages could be found in a site like Internet Archive? For who know? This might be the final source of information - as the web spreads wider and deeper will the information be more temporal?

The Book on the Booshelf

Henry PETROSKI, call no. 022.409 PET

I picked up this book because I was in the computer section and someone shelved it by mistake. But Petroski I liked because I read his previous books The Evolution of Useful Things

This book however is not about books but about bookshelves and how they came to be. He suggests that the development of books and bookshelves were concurrent. Which seems a rather obvious thing, but then have we ever thought of life without bookshelves? Have we ever thought a about bookshevles at all?

I'm reading this slowly and concurrently with Search. More on this later

Continued:
I took a break reading this book because I had too many books to read and had to return it when it was due. In the meantime I read Petroski's other book about Engineering Marvels which is more or less about bridges. (see other review)

Then I returned to this and can say this much. The man loves bridges. Even a book shelf is like a bridge. He even says it: "... designing a solid-looking bookshelf is essentially no different from that of designing a bridge". (p 81, 1999. Vintage Books. NY)

So.. I wondered how far is he going to go with bookshelf. Incredibly far. He talked about the evolution of manuscripts (a codex is a flat form of manuscript as opposed to scrolls as in papyrus). Once condices developed, the need for shelves began. At first books could be stored in chests and most advisable since these were precious things, encased in leather bindings and embedded with precious jewels etc. The kind of things you see in Epics. From there, books were read on lecterns, and then as more books were produced storage grew to be a big problem.

Interesting facts too that books up to the late 19th century were not bound at booksellers. One could buy manuscripts and have them bounded separately. Hence the profession of book binding.

The book goes far, from shelves to libraries, to stacks, to design of stacks, movable shelves. I must say a few of the chapters towards the end lost me as I have not seen some of these libraries or stacking systems.

A worthwhile book to read and keep, on the bookshelf.

Definitely makes me look at Ikea's billy bookcases from a different perspective from now on.

Book of Lost Books

Stuart KELLY, Viking 2005

It's a nice title but unfortunately pretty hard to read. The concept of great books that were SAID to have been written. He wrote of an example, can't remember of some ancient Greek tragedian who was supposed to have created such monumental works that even Pericles was moved to tears. Then it was lost in time. When examples of his work were finally uncovered in the late 19th century, they had paled in comparison to mod. lit. Pretty lame stuff. The author concludes that sometimes lost books are better lost.

Other than the concept, the author is rather eurocentric, or as some of the reviewers said, western classical in inclination.

He sited Confucius and some Mencius on 2 pages. And another 2 page on Ibn Battuta.

Maybe too many great works had been lost in Asia. No thanks to book burning monarchs.

Surprisingly, this book is filed under FICTION

ps: I gave up reading this after a while because I discovered the next book more interesting