stoutfellow

I finished with A Rhetoric of Irony a couple of days ago. I'm not sure how much of it I assimilated. Part of the problem is that I'm not all that familiar with 20th-century mainstream literature, and a major part of the book, discussing "unstable irony", focused on that period - authors such as Beckett, Brecht, and the like, none of whom I've ever read. (The earlier sections, focusing on "stable" ironists such as Swift, Fielding, and Austen, were quite interesting.) My new "bus book" is The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900. I haven't gotten very far yet, but I've already had a fair bit of food for thought. I knew that various standard statistical techniques, such as the method of least squares and the normal distribution, had originated in the analysis of errors in astronomical observation by, among others, Gauss, and assumed that statistics had developed in more or less a straight line from there. Not so; the word "statistics" is related to the word "state", and the field arose among the social sciences. It was only later that the techniques I mentioned were assimilated into statistics. Interesting stuff...

My subscription to Scientific American, which has run continuously since 1978, is due to expire in October, and I have decided to let it lapse. I'm kind of sad about that, but the magazine has deteriorated badly, it seems to me. I remember when it took a certain amount of concentration to work through one of their articles; now, most of what appears seems glossy and superficial. I rely more on American Scientist and online science-news sites these days.

Ben appears to have learned how to rest his head on my knee while I'm standing up. No, I don't know how he did it, exactly - sort of a sideways tilt - but he definitely did. Strange animal...