3.4.13
Articles:
"How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy" - The Atlantic Monthly. Kathleen McAuliffe profiles Jaroslav Flegr who for years suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?
"What Data Can't Do" - The New York Times. David Brooks explores why data mining won't solve all of our problems. "This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others. As the Yale professor Edward Tufte has said, 'The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.'”
Books:
When I read Madeleine L'Engle's, A Wrinkle in Time, I was roughly the same age as Meg, the protagonist. L’Engle transported me out of my quotidian Midwestern kid world through the wormhole of her imagination. I wanted nothing more than to be a heroine, traveling, tessseracting, through time and space, to save my father. What I didn’t know at the time was how pioneering L’Engle was. Among the first women to write science fiction, she persevered in the face of 26 publisher’s rejections. In A Circle of Quiet, the first of her Crosswicks journals, she explores themes of work-life balance that remain powerfully resonant. “Every so often I need out—away from all these people I love most in the world—in order to regain a sense of proportion. My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings… [there] I move slowly into a kind of peace that is indeed marvelous, ‘annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade.’”