Alice the Tree.

I got Dead Famous: Isaac Newton and his Apple from the library this weekend and finished it in about two hours. These books are excellent, a kids version of the Beginners guides. There are loads of things in it which I didn't know about Newton. There are plenty more in this series. The ones on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots are excellent but they are all un-put-downable. I am waiting for the one on Joan-Of-Arc. The books realise that Kids like the gory bits. My wife who taught Infants children, tells me that one group of children were particularly taken with the gory details of the preservation of Egyptian Mummies. I think I remember her telling me about them also particularly "enjoying" hanging, Drawing and Quartering. I hope that gives you an idea of how gory these books actually are. Anyway, I like to think of myself as having a scientific mind but the book on Newton gave the clearest view of Gravitation I have ever seen. We seem to have conveniently ignored his more outlandish ideas which bordered on Witchcraft. The understanding of the world starts with Magic and works its way towards science. Anything which cannot be satisfactorily explained must lie within the realm of "magic". Scientific method could be thought off as the shifting and expansion of the window of truth over reality. I like to think, however, that some of the reality may never be totally explainable.

The book made be begin to think about trying to read my calculus book again. I did calculus at School but my degree did not require it so I forgot it all. I can remember roughly how to differentiate a standard xy formula but sines, cosines and tangents are a mystery. I have just found a very good site here. Am I sad? Most of management these days think that IT is a matter of addition and subtraction - they don't even get as far as powers. In reality most real world situations require an element of Calculus. I don't mean literally though I did once use Standard Deviation in a WIP system and although the guys using the system said they were never really aware of what Standard deviation was in their tracking, the figure I provided on the report seemed to "mean something" in terms of the efficiency of the system.