reading Stephen Hawking

The great mathematician/physicist/cosmologist died today, after a long and successful career marred only by his long-standing illness.

My own experience with his work comes mostly from his popularized science book A Brief History of Time, which I picked up and read in mass-market pb before I even knew it was supposed to be one of the great unread bestsellers of our time, a claim resurfacing in his obituary and even in this tribute to the book.

Why should it be unread? It seemed to me a lucid and comprehensible explanation of some extremely abstract concepts, an admirable work of its kind. (I also saw the movie adaptation of the book and, much later, the bio-pic about the author.)

I also read two of the other great supposedly unread bestsellers of that period, The Name of the Rose (a novel I found so captivating I carried it around with me for days, including during breaks at work, and as at the time I was working in the monastery-like precincts of a neo-Gothic 1910s university library, the setting was appropriate) and, of course, The Silmarillion. The one I didn't read was The Satanic Verses.

A tribute, then, to the range and lucidity of the mind of Stephen Hawking.

driving by protest

I happened to be heading out along a local major street to do errands when I drove by Homestead High School (alma mater of Jobs and Wozniak) just as the nation-wide gun-violence protest walkout was going on. A huge crowd of students, many carrying signs, were congested on to the sidewalk area in front of the school.

From the opposite side of the road, I stuck my arm out the open window and gave them a thumbs up. I didn't know what else to do. Any words of encouragement I might have shouted would have been too distracting for me in traffic and probably unintelligible to them, who were making a lot of noise themselves anyway. Years ago I would have flashed a peace sign, the all-purpose symbol of agreeability and conciliation in my generation, but I was afraid today's students wouldn't know what it meant or found it ambiguous.

I did hear some brief cheers from the crowd; might have been in response to my signal, I don't know.