The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by JupiterPluvius:

What happened to Theophylact could never happen here; too many people in the jury pool speak Spanish.

Yes. It works if nobody speaks Spanish, or if several people speak Spanish. What doesn't work is when one person who believes s/he speaks Spanish holds up deliberations by nitpicking the official translations, with nobody else on the jury able to evaluate whether or not the critiques are accurate.

And with Spanish, there's an awful lot of international variation in vocabulary. You don't want to get the kind of situation that would have, as its equivalent in English, "That store detective is a liar! He said that the woman had a jumper in her bag, but the only clothes she had in there were sweaters!"

Had I understood Spanish, I would have been excluded from the jury because I might have responded to the actual testimony rather than the official translation.

I think it's actually more a case of "Had you claimed to understand Spanish, you would have been excluded from the jury because you might have fouled up the deliberations by arguing that the translator was 'wrong', whether or not that was in fact the case."

Dunning-Kruger effect and all--since the court system has no capacity to evaluate whether people's claims of language fluency are accurate or inaccurate, it's easier to sort for the group of people who admit their ignorance.

Sylvia@51: They're accurate insofar as they are an observation of what Tony has read (or remembers reading).

My observations differ.

Now, I'm just an unfrozen cavewoman novelist, but I think the scientific mind needs to do better than "I haven't seen X, therefore X does not exist." Yes?

Also, NEEDS MOAR SCIENCE BOOK SUGGESTIONS (and less discussion of the truly horrible Psychic!Austen series of books that I can only assume Tor publishes as a cash cow, or because the author saved the Doherty family from a burning building, or as part of some kind of international spy ring in which sekrit messages are sent through the pages of these dreadful pseudo-books).

I nag because I care. See, it's fun to complain about how horrible the NYTBR is, but we could probably put together a list of 100 Notable Science Books of 2007 if we put our collective minds to it. And that would be not only fun, but actually useful to others.

Yay, albatross@22! I'm surprised more people aren't taking up the gauntlet here.

paul@12, I politely suggest you're mistaken. The poems of Marianne Moore, the novels of Rebecca Goldstein, new novels by scientists like Janna Fisher and Alan Lightman... David Leavitt's highly-publicized new novel about Hardy and Ramanujan...the much-pushed first novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl...there's a lot out there you haven't noticed.

The novel I've just finished has a marine biologist as its protagonist, and there are a lot of vignettes from the life of rotifers in it!

I'm not a scientist: the last science courses I took were the two required "science for non-scientist" lectures in college (though those were taught by Stephen Jay Gould and Nobelist William Lipscomb, so they were pretty heady stuff!) But I love to read about science nonetheless.

More of my science "Notable Books of 2007":

Making Up the Mind by Chris Frith;

The Accidental Mind by David Linden;

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf;

A New Human by Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee (a fascinating first-hand account of the exacavation of H. florensis, the "Hobbit" anthropoid fossils).

Come on, I know other people here read Notable Science Books in 2007! Gimme, gimme!

Well, let's do it here!

My favorite science book of 2007 was Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth.

It's an engagingly written account of their years of work with wild baboon populations, exploring the baboons' cognitive and social patterns with a variety of experiments drawing on the traditions and protocols of the differing academic fields through which they came to primatology: Cheney started in biology, Seyfarth in psychology.

A great read all around.

I think that Dumbledore's unrequited love for Grindelwald is in the text. I seriously don't know anyone who didn't reach that conclusion after reading Deathly Hallows.

Now, I hadn't wondered about whether Dumbledore was gay or bisexual or bicurious or whatever--he could have been a Lytton Strachey or a John Maynard Keynes, either way, on the basis of the text.

But the romantic love was absolutely implied in the text. Especially in the text "written by Elphias Doge".

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