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2008-07-31 2040: I saw something interesting today, a sign of the times, perhaps: Two large trucks with escorts for their oversized loads—wind turbine blades. Each truck had two of these; they looked to be 20 or 30 meters long. Where they came from, and where they were going, I wouldn't know; but they were taking the exit off of the interstate within a kilometer or two of my house in New Albany, Indiana. They were heading east. (I imagine they were stopping for a rest break; it was mid-day.)

2008-07-25 2200: Much of what I will post here will be about books I've been reading. With this post, I will get caught up on some of the more interesting books I've read in the last year or so.

• The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowlings. I finally got around to reading volumes 2 through 7 last fall. (I read the first one in the summer of 2001.) Absolutely marvelous: heartwarming, wholesome, inventive, and with a wonderfully charming sense of humor. The last volume is terrific; I regretted missing out on the excitement when it was first released.
• Last summer, I read the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. This is the series published by Scholastic Press that many people say is better than Potter. I won't go that far, but it is often very effective, with deeply endearing characters.
• One more fantasy novel to report on: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. The premise is that it is set in the early 19th century, in England, but in a world with real magic. However, magic has fallen into disuse, and the educated have begun to doubt it even exists. The titular characters try, with frightening results, to revive the art of magic. I am afraid to say I found this long and not particularly enjoyable. But there are some wonderful bits in the novel. My favorite is when Mr. Norrell is seen browsing a book: A Plaine Discovery of the Revelation of St John by John Napier. Napier was the inventor of logarithms, but he was well-known in his time as the author of the book just mentioned—which proved that the Pope is the antichrist and that the world would end in 1786. That is, he was the Hal Lindsey or Tim LaHaye of the early 17th century. I'm always careful to mention this fact in my math courses, when it's time to introduce logarithms.
• Forrest and Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Of the ten or so books on intelligent design I've read, this is undoubtedly the best. The authors give a convincing summary as to why intelligent design is not scientific, and they detail who is behind the intelligent design movement, what their real political and cultural agenda is, and who is funding them.
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. This was a fascinating and convincing account of what is known about human evolution and prehistory, written by a New York Times science reporter.
• Gerald Weissmann, Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkment. I thought this would be a good, righteous rant in defense of science, but what it proved to be was an interesting collection of essays about medicine, partly autobiographical, by a research physician. This book prompted me to read a couple of other books on medicine, including the brief history of medicine by Roy Porter, Blood and Guts, and a forty-year-old book for high school students on Louis Pasteur that I impulse-bought in Powell's Books in Portland.
• One interesting little book I read was the Sherwin Nuland biography Maimonides. A nice account of the life of the medieval Jewish philosopher, with particular detail on his career as a physician.
• Last summer I read Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great. Lacerating and often interesting, but sometimes Hitchen's wit fails him; it often reads like the theater critic's harsh reviews of children's Christmas pageants as imagined by David Sedaris in Holidays on Ice. I also read Sam Harris, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The first book is an interesting look at religion from a philosophical point of view. The author differs from the other "new atheism" writers in that he seems to take the paranormal and Eastern philosophy seriously (he advocates a scientific approach to meditation). The latter title, where he engages his evangelical Christian critics, is lapidary and necessary. Recently, I read a little book by John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. I thought this would be interesting in that the author is a liberal theologian. I can't say I found the book terribly convincing. But he did make a good case that the new atheism authors are reacting to conceptions of God and religion that have long since been abandoned by serious theologians. One particularly good point he makes is that the new atheism writers make much of the barbarisms of the Torah and the Former Prophets, but never mention the Latter Prophets and their much more modern ethical and moral teachings.
• Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods. A nice account of the conflict between monotheism and polytheism, culminating in a sympathetic portrait of the Roman emperor Julian the Appostate. Kirsch relates a fascinating historical what-if: Julian gave the Jews permission to rebuild their Temple, but various problems and his death prevented this from happening.
• Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus. An interesting, gently written discussion of the difficulty of reconstructing the original texts of the New Testament, explaining the religious and political agendas of the ancient writers and copyists.
• A novel I highly recommend: Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. During the Second World War, two million Jews found refuge in Sitka, Alaska, which has become a large, Yiddish-speaking city. This is the premise of the novel, a detective story involving the murder of the son of a prominent rabbi (who is also the leader of an underworld family). Imaginative and tremendously well-written.
• More religion: I read Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, by David Klinghoffer. He details the disturbing fact that Jesus fulfilled none of the prophecies expected of the Messiah; the prophecies that the Gospel writers mention are garbled, taken out of context or force-fitted to Jesus. This is a very uncomfortable book if you are reading from a Christian perspective. But the author explains that the core of Jewish morality and ethics spread to much of the world because the Jews rejected Jesus and the Christians therefore took their new faith to the non-Jewish world.
• Another book I found disturbing: Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, The Bible Unearthed. These archaeologists describe what is known about the origins of Israel and the Bible from archeology and the internal evidence of the Bible itself. Their position, which is between that of the "maximalists" (who believe the Bible is largely accurate) and the "minimalists" (who believe the Bible is almost wholly fiction, written in the Persian or Greek periods as a nationalistic propaganda piece). What is disturbing is that they make a good case that much of the Bible (the Deuteronomistic History, that is, Deuteronomy and the Former Prophets) was written at the time of King Josiah, as a propaganda piece for his project to (1) unify Israel and Judah, and (2) impose a centralized, monotheistic worship of YHWH on Israel/Judah. (It is assumed that these books were compiled from earlier traditions or writings, but edited heavily. E.g., the only king who is presented without faults is King Josiah.) Finkelstein and Silberman say that the archaelogical evidence is strong that Israel/Judah was polytheistic until the 7th century B.C.E. This book prompted me to buy a copy of a book I had read from the library years ago: Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Elliott Friedman. This is always referred to as the best introduction to the Documentary Hypothesis (the general framework accepted by most scholars for the authorship of the Torah), and it is indeed an excellent book. More recently, I read How the Bible Became a Book by William M. Schniedewind, which discusses some of the same issues but with the object of determining when the scriptures acquired their authority and became sacred. All of these writers take the point of view that the Bible was written mainly in the 8th through 6th centuries B.C.E. (in contrast to the minimalists mentioned above).
• An interesting book on religion I read this summer: The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, by Christine Wicker. She explains why conservative evangelicals are a much smaller percentage of the population than the 25% figure commonly given, she details why the Southern Baptists (the largest evangelical denomination) and evangelical Christianity in general are static in membership and are rapidly losing young people; and she describes what some in the evangelical movement are doing to try to turn this around.
• Finally, I'll mention a book on the history of science that I found enjoyable: The Fellowship: Gilbert, Bacon, Harvey, Wren, Newton, and the Story of a Scientific Revolution, by John Gribbin. He describes the cultural and historical circumstances of the founders of the Royal Society, who founded western science by first stating and then applying the scientific method of experimentation and observation. Gribbin gently makes a good case that Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley deserve more credit, along with Isaac Newton, as the three most important founders of modern physics and science. Early in the book, Gribbin gives a biographical sketch of Galileo and his conflict with the Church, to explain why the scientific revolution did not progress in Italy beyond Galileo but could only progress in Protestant England.