Memorial Day

We had a fine celebration – we’d put a bunch of energy into cleaning J’s house, but the only thing that mattered was that I’d mowed the lawn, since I don’t think anyone else even went inside. First, I went to the cemetery with flowers for my step-dad, his first wife, and the other two people to whom I annually give flowers, then I helped J get things set up while he started the grilling. Our guests were D&S and DG, and eventually AA for a few minutes. Both of the women had rehearsals to get to, and in both cases their groups were doing their publicity photos today too! (S does K-pop dance, and AA is going to be in a musical about Johnny Cash). We ate and sat around and talked – it was much sunnier than the forecast – then the women went off to do their things and the men went off to play Magic, and I got to relax and read for the rest of the evening.

Book completed

Contact, by Carl Sagan. From J’s book club; we saw the movie just a few months ago, so it’s still quite fresh in my mind. I quite liked the book, although the story was rather quietly told. I’m especially interested in the differences between the book and the movie, which I’ll tell without spoilers for the movie. Ellie’s social world was moderately different, but that makes sense given that movies need to have many fewer characters for us to learn over the span of a couple of hours. The eventual strange adventure is similar in some ways but different in one very important way that makes the book far better. Then, at the end, the book and movie have different ways of proving that everything was real. I thought the movie’s way, which was much simpler, was also far more realistic. In the book, the big discovery is that in a sense, circles are embedded within the math for circles – which is cool, but for the average person, it would be very hard to understand why it’s more cool and important than, say, the repeating pattern you’d find when zooming into the Mandelbrot Set fractal – if, in fact, it is. I’m certain that it would be very hard to build a future social movement based on the fact that mathematicians believe something extraordinary is true. So – it’s a fine book, I recommend it, and it’s also fine to read the book if you’ve already seen the movie.