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cahnLast post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)
Re: What the term Holy Roman Empire actually meant
Date: 2022-12-16 11:59 am (UTC)Lol, so I have a story for this one! I was 2, so I don't remember this myself, but I've since been told that the news kept showing the explosion over and over again, and that I, being 2 and having no idea what was going on, sat in front of the television clapping and cheering at each explosion, yelling, "Again! Again!"
...Once I got old enough to be told this story, I was like, "Oh, no!" But I understand why, when I was 2, I just thought it was like fireworks. Much like AW got on FW's good side for liking cannons as a toddler: it doesn't mean he's going to be a brave soldier someday and Fritz isn't, just that one is scared of loud noises and one thinks they're fun and doesn't know yet to connect them with his imminent death. (Which is the hard part of being a soldier, ffs, FW.)
There were probably things before that, but that was the one that I remember being a Big Deal, partially because there was a schoolteacher on it so it had been hyped up at school.)
Yeah, we got this in school a few years later for the same reason. I actually remember a detailed explanation of the O-ring problem in 5th grade, but that would have been in 1993, several years later.
Challenger
Date: 2022-12-16 09:17 pm (UTC)It's so weird to think of the O-ring problem being history now, but of course it is. I think I was too old to get it in school, but I read about it in Feynman's memoirs at probably around the same time. (And it's in one of my kids' pop-science/math books.)
Re: Challenger
Date: 2022-12-16 09:23 pm (UTC)Feynman's memoirs
Worth reading? I do voraciously consume memoirs of a certain kind.
Re: Challenger
Date: 2022-12-16 10:13 pm (UTC)Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is a classic and I'm honestly sort of shocked you haven't read it yet. It's told as a series of vignettes spanning his life up to that point. It's really quite a lot of fun and the vignettes are extremely entertaining, especially the first half or so. I think you would love it actually, he's exactly the kind of character you would vibe with in a book, he's so interested and enthusiastic about the things he loves, and so absolutely unwilling to entertain any kind of crap, and he trolls basically everybody. Even my kids thought his college stories about MIT were super fun. I do remember him being kind of a jerk to women at times, so I should warn you about that. I remember the address "Cargo Cult Science" at the end of the book having a huge effect on me (I was quite young when I read this -- 9? 10?)
What Do You Care What Other People Think? is less zany fun and more serious. Part of the book is more stories, but even those are more serious (I think this is the one where he talks about his first wife's death). The second half or so is where he talks about the Challenger hearings. As a kid I liked the first volume better, because zany stories, but I suspect if I read them over again as a middle-aged adult who has Feelings about Science that the second volume might be more rewarding.
Re: Challenger
Date: 2022-12-17 10:42 am (UTC)I'm honestly sort of shocked you haven't read it yet.
I only started to like memoirs about 5 years ago! Before that, it was a genre I actively avoided.
Re: Challenger
Date: 2022-12-18 10:52 pm (UTC)Re: Challenger
Date: 2022-12-20 01:04 pm (UTC)One thing to keep in mind is just how isolated a tech geek I was. It was me in a small town, at an unacademic high school, in an unintellectual family. I had to find everything on my own. And shortly after starting college, for reasons with which you are familiar, I developed a physics aversion and avoided all mention of physics (and more or less science, too) for a good decade.
I only got back into science in the early 2010s thanks to picking up a book on genetic algorithms that was on the shelves in the office at my first tech job, reading the first few pages, and realizing I needed to learn how *genetics* worked, and then somewhat later, picking up the popular science book T-Rex and the Crater of Doom, which was a great book that I still reread and recommend to people. At that point, it had been long enough since my signal failure to become a physicist that I could emotionally stand to be reminded of science again.
Re: Challenger
Date: 2022-12-23 06:40 pm (UTC)I actually read it because my piano teacher liked books a lot, and had a copy (and I always read her books while my sister was taking her lesson). (She wasn't particularly into science, though it may have been for her oldest son, who was a few years older than I was and had more geeky interests than she did -- I remember at one point he tried to get me to read Roger Zelazny, which I was really too young for at the time.) And I feel like in my generation I've heard this story from several other people, who also just happened to pick it up because it was a best-seller at the time, and were captivated by it even at a young age because he's so appealing to the geek mindset. But I can see how it would have been much harder to find on one's own or by serendipity a few years later, once the buzz had died down.
Re: Challenger
Date: 2022-12-23 06:52 pm (UTC)Maybe! Because I certainly knew who Feynman *was*, but I had never heard of this book! When I was in middle school and high school, the book that would have been easy to pick by osmosis was A Brief History of Time.
I finished it today, and...I liked it. I didn't love it. It was a little too episodic for my tastes, I would have preferred more of a connected narrative. I will check out his other book that you said you might like better these days.