Wisdom from the 42nd Page

The Last Lecture

On the forty-second page of “The Last Lecture” authors Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow, wrote (emphasis & hyperlink added):

I couldn't tell them that I'd been waiting all my life for this call. All I could say was, "Yes, of course!" I wrote the entry. And I included a photo of my student Caitlin Kelleher wearing a virtual reality headset.

No editor ever questioned what I wrote, but I assume that's the World Book way. They pick an expert and trust that the expert won't abuse the privilege.

I have not bought the latest set of World Books. In fact, having been selected to be an author in the World Book, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias. But sometimes when I'm in a library with the kids, I still can't resist looking under "V" ("Virtual Reality" by yours truly) and letting them have a look. Their dad made it.

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(Hyperion, April 2008. Hardcover, 206 pages. ISBN: 1401323251; EAN: 9781401323257.)

Sarah

This is the book we wanted to feature today:

But... our local library system does not have the book. No bookstore within a 100-mile radius has it in stock. It's even backordered on Amazon.com.

So... we'll have to give you, our loyal readers, a rain check for now.

More information about “Sarah: How a Small Town Mom Turned Alaskas Political Establishment on Its Ear” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(Epicenter Press, April 2008. Hardcover, 159 pages. ISBN: 0979047080; EAN: 9780979047084.)

Hopes and Dreams

Tonight being an historic occasion, we think it fitting to turn to the forty-second page of “Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama” where author Steve Dougherty wrote (emphasis added):

the whole class to break up in laughter. Before the day was out, a red-haired girl asked if she could touch his hair, and a boy asked him if his father was a cannibal.

"The novelty of having me in class quickly wore off for the other kids," Obama would later write. His fellow students, mostly the privileged children of well-off families who lived in houses far grander than the two-bedroom apartment Obama shared with his mother's parents, weren't overtly cruel. They didn't beat him up or mock him. They simply lost interest in the black kid who played soccer, badminton, and chess—games he'd learned from his Indonesian stepfather while living in Jakarta with his mother for four years before returning to Hawaii without her—but who couldn't throw a football or ride a skateboard.

As the months passed, he managed to make a few friends and "to toss a wobbly football around," but mostly he withdrew into a routine of going home after school, reading comics, watching TV, and listening to the radio. "I felt safe," he wrote; "it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation."

Obama's mother, Ann Dunham (with his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and half sister Maya Soetoro), insisted that he supplement his schooling by taking U.S. correspondence courses during the four years he lived in Indonesia. Ann woke him at 4:00 a.m. every morning to instruct him for three hours before he left for school and she went to her job at the American embassay. After Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. (right) spent the Christmas holidays with his then 10-year-old son in Hawaii, where Obama was living with his white grandparents, father and son never met again.

He was shocked out of it a few months after school began when his grandparents on his mother's side ("Gramps" and "Toot," short for tutu, the Hawaiian word

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(Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, July 2008. Paperback, 160 pages. ISBN: 1579127908; EAN: 9781579127909.)

Gymnastics

On the forty-second page of “Gymnastics (Sport Psychology Library)” authors Karen Cogan & Peter Vidmar wrote (emphasis added):

10. Use imagery logs. Whenever you learn new skills, you can best monitor your pgoress by having a written record. So determine how you will use imagery and keep tabs on what you do, how much you do, and when you do it. This way you can look back and see your progress. You might set it up like Chart 1.

Chart 1: Imagery Log
Date	Time	Describe Imagery	Practice Time	Success
4/28	1:30 p.m.	Practiced 10 double flyaway dismounts off bars with perfect landings; used internal & kinesthetic imagery	5 minutes	A little trouble feeling landings; stuck 3 in workout
4/30	9:00 p.m.	Practiced 3 beam routines in prep for meet tomorrow	10 minutes	Able to imagine layout pass with solid landings!

Try Exercises 6–1, 6–2, 6–3, and 6–4 to help you develop your imagery skills.

6–1: Vivid Imagery

Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Picture yourself walking into the gym when no one is there. Look at the layout of the equipment. Notice the colors of the mats and other equipment. Listen to the sounds in the gym, such as the buzz of the lights, the "squish" of the mats as you walk across them, your own breathing. Take a deep breath and notice the smell of the metal on the equipment, plastic on the mats, or chalk in the chalk bins. Touch the bars and feel the leather beneath your fingers. Step onto the floor exercise area and feel the slight spring as you walk on the floor. Now open your eyes.

How vivid were the images you created? If you need to make them more vivid, try imaging in color, hearing sounds and smelling the chalk and mats.

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(Fitness Information Technology, September 1999. Paperback, 196 pages. ISBN: 1885693176; EAN: 9781885693174.)

Relearning to See

On the forty-second page of “Relearning to See: Improve Your Eyesight--Naturally!” author Thomas R. Quackenbush wrote (emphasis added):

under primitive conditions have just as good eyesight as the men.

When man learned how to communicate his thoughts to others by means of written and printed forms, there came some undeniably new demands upon the eye. ... affecting at first only a few people, but gradually including more and more, until now, in the more advanced countries, the great mass of the population is subjected to their influence. A few hundred years ago even princes were not taught to read and write. Now we compel everyone to go to school, whether he wishes to or not, even the babies being sent to kindergarten. A generation or so ago books were scarce and expensive. Today, be means of libraries of all sorts, stationary and traveling, they have been brought within the reach of practically everyone. The modern newspaper, with its endless columns of badly printed reading matter, was made possible only be the discovery of the art of manufacturing paper from wood, which is a thing of yesterday. The tallow candle has been but lately displaced by the various forms of artificial lighting, which tempt most of us to prolong our vocations and avocations into hours when primitive man was forced to rest, and within the last couple of decades has come the moving picture to complete the supposedly destructive process.

Was it reasonable to expect that Nature should have provided for all these developments, and produced an organ that could respond to the new demands? It is the accepted belief of ophthalmology today that she could not and did not^a and that, while the processes of civilization depend upon the sense of sight more than upon any other, the visual organ is but imperfectly fitted for its tasks.

There are a great number of facts which seem to justify this conclusion. ...

For the prevailing method of vision care, by means of compensating lenses, very little was ever claimed except that these contrivances neutralized the effects of the various conditions for which they were prescribed, as a crutch enables a lame man to walk. It has also been believed that they sometimes checked the progress of these conditions; but every ophthalmologist now knows that their usefulness for this purpose, if any, is very limited. In the case of myopia^b (shortsight), Dr. Sidler-Huguenin of Zurich, in a striking paper recently published,^c expresses the opinion that glasses and all methods now at our command are "of but little avail" in preventing either the progress of the error of refraction, or the development of the very serious complications with which it is often associated. These conclusions are based on the study

1. The unnatural strain of accommodating the eyes to close work (for which they were not intended) leads to myopia in a large proportion of growing children.—Rosenau: Preventitive Medicine and Hygiene, third edition.

   The compulsion of late as well as an error of evolution has brought it about that the unaided eye must persistently struggle against the astonishing difficulties and errors inevitable in its structure, function and circumstance.—Gould: The Cause, Nature and Consequence of Eyestrain, Pop Sci Monthly, Dec., 1905.

   With the invention of writing and then with the invention of the printing press a new element was introduced, and one evidently not provided for by the process of evolution. The human eye which had been evolved for distant vision is being forced to perform a new part, one for which it had not been evolved, and for which it is poorly adapted. The difficult is being daily augmented—Scott: The Sacrifice of the Eyes of School Children, Pop Sci Monthly, Oct., 1907.

2. From the Greek myein, to close, and ops, the eye: literally a condition in which the subject closes the eye, or blinks.

3. Archiv L. Augenh, vol. lxxix, 1915, translated in Arch. Ophth. vol. xlv, No. 6, Nov., 1916.

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(North Atlantic Books, January 2000. Paperback, 521 pages. ISBN: 1556433417; EAN: 9781556433412.)

What a Party!

Since the Democrat National Convention is going on this week in Denver it seems appropriate to look at the forty-second page of “What a Party!: My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals” where former DNC-national party chairman Terry McAuliffe wrote (emphasis added):

Just as Jack had instilled his passion for politics in me, Richard inspired Dorothy. She decided to move to Washington her junior year in the hope of working on the issues she cared so passionately about. Once she transferred to Catholic University in Washington, we started dating, though with my heavy travel schedule it was hard to find time to spend together. One weekend in October 1983 we took a trip to Cape Cod. I had bought a condo in Dennisport, Massachusetts, with my brother Tom, and I wanted to inspect my purchase. No sooner had Dorothy and I arrived than the phone rang. It was Tip O'Neill, the Speaker of the House. Somehow he had gotten wind that I was on the cape.

"Hello, Mr. Speaker!" I said, surprised as can be.

Dorothy shot me a knowing look.

"Terry, why don't you come golfing with me tomorrow?" Tip asked in that great old Boston accent of his.

"Okay, Mr. Speaker," I said. "Terrific.... Dorothy, I've got to go golfing with the Speaker tomorrow," I announced, hanging up the phone.

The next morning I got up early, took the car, and met Tip at Eastward Ho! in Chatham, leaving Dorothy in the condo. She had grown up around politics, and as long as I've known her she has always understood that my work was going to suck up a lot of my time.

Would I go golfing with Tip O'Neill? Of course I would! Tip was not only the biggest figure in the Democratic Party at that time, a legendary force in Congress, he was also a great storyteller and always fun to be around. Plus, he was Irish.

Everything out of Tip's mouth was Irish jokes or Irish stories, and I couldn't have been having any more fun if I'd been sitting in Limerick drinking Guinness with a bar full of leprechauns. Tip told me about the time he put together a good fund-raiser for Jack kennedy and, late in the evening, the two men ducked into the men's room together.

"How did we do?" Kennedy asked him.

"About twenty grand, ten in cash, ten in checks," Tip told him.

"You keep the checks, I'll take the cash," Kennedy said.

That was sure a different era. (Definitely pre-McCain-Feingold!) Even if you had already heard Tip's stories or jokes, it didn't matter—the way he told them, they were still a riot. Tip had that big, white shock of hair and the big, bulbous W. C. Fields nose. He was like a walking caricature lifted straight from a political cartoon, but the thing about him was he never forgot who he was. He hated pretentiousness and taking on airs. He talked to

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(Thomas Dunne Books, January 2007. Hardcover, 406 pages. ISBN: 0312357877; EAN: 9780312357870.)

Driving Democracy

On the forty-second page of “Driving Democracy: Do Power-Sharing Institutions Work?” author Pippa Norris wrote (emphasis added):

commonly greater under PR party lists compared with majoritarian electoral systems.²³ But is it legitimate to generalize from the experience of women to the representation of ethnic minorities? In fact, there are many reasons why this strategy may prove seriously flawed. After reviewing the literature, Bird concludes that substantial differences exist in the reasons underlying the underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities.²⁴ In particular, concentrated ethnic communities are clustered geographically within certain areas, allowing territorial groups to make local gains in particular minority constituencies within majoritarian electoral systems, even in heterogeneous plural societies; for example, African-American representatives are elected to Congress in minority-majority districts in New York City, Detrois, and Los Angeles.²⁵ By contrast, the male-to-female ratio in the population is usually fairly uniformly distributed across different electoral constituencies. Htun also points out that positive action strategies often differe substantially in the opportunities they provide for women and ethnic minorities.²⁶ Statutory gender quotas mandating the minimal proportion of women that parties adop as legislative candidates are common in many established democracies, for example, although none of these nation-states have adopted similar quota laws to compensate for the underrepresentation of ethnic minority candidates. By contrast, reserved seats in parliment are used for ethnic, racial, national, linguistic, or religious communities in more than two dozen countries, including guaranteeing the inclusion of specified minorities in legislatures through the creation of separate electoral rolls, the allocation of special electoral districts, or provisions for direct appointment to the legislature.²⁷ Most countries adopting these mechanisms have majoritarian electoral systems which are unable to guarantee adequate minority representation through other means. For all these reasons, direct comparisons of women and ethnic minority representation are a flawed research strategy, and alternative approaches are needed to explore the cross-national evidence on a more systematic basis.

Cross-Sectional Large-N Comparisons

Another common large-N approach within the quantitative tradition has sought to classify political institutions in many countries worldwide, developing typologies of electoral systems, public sector bureaucracies, patterns of interest group politics, party systems, or presidential and parliamentary executives, and then comparing how far the contemporary performance of democracy varies systematically by institutional types. Ever since Aristotle, analytical typologies have always been a vital part of comparative politics, with recent attempts to classify membership of each type using the logic of fuzzy sets.²⁸ By selecting a larger range of cases using a random sample of countries, or the universe of independent nation-states worldwide, the cross-sectional comparative strategy overcomes many of the potential problems of selection bias which limit case-study approaches, but it also raises important methodological questions. The next chapter discusses the challenge of establishing appropriate operational

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(Cambridge University Press, August 2008. Paperback, 320 pages. ISBN: 0521694809; EAN: 9780521694803.)

Black Holes and Time Warps

On the forty-second page of “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy” renowned physicist Kip S. Thorne wrote (emphasis added):

As the ship descends, your crew make a photographic record of the changes in the appearance of the sky around the starship. Most remarkable is the change in the hole's black disk below the ship: Gradually it grows larger. You expect it to stop growing when it has covered the entire sky below you like a giant black floor, leaving the sky overhead as clear as on Earth. But no; the black disk keeps right on growing, swinging up around the sides of your starship to cover everything except a bright, circular opening overhead, an opening through which you see the external Universe (Figure P.4). It is as though you had entered a cave and were plunging deeper and deeper, watching the cave's bright mouth grow smaller and smaller in the distance.

In growing panic, you appeal to DAWN for help: "Did Kares miscalculate our trajectory? Have we plunged through the horizon? Are we doomed?!"

P.4  The starship hovering above the black-hole horizon, and the trajectories along which light travels to it from distance galaxies (the light rays). The hole's gravity deflects the light rays downward ("gravitational lens effect"), causing humans on the starship to see all the light concentrated in a bright, circular spot overhead.

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(W. W. Norton & Company, January 1995. Paperback, 619 pages. ISBN: 0393312763; EAN: 9780393312768.)

Firestorm at Peshtigo

On the forty-second page of “Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History” authors Denise Gess & William Lutz, wrote (emphasis added):

of his heroes, the journalist Horace Greeley, who lectured on "Self-Made Men" in Green Bay. He penned a rousing article about the upcoming Republican convention that was to be held in Marinette in mid-October at which Marinette's own Honorable Isaac Stephenson would be elected to Congress; and he wrotes a passionate, stirring please for the value of education, calling it "one of the fundamental necessities of life." He was pleased to print his friend Tommy Hay's announcement that he planned to move his jewelry shop from the west side of Peshtigo to the east side. Noyes reviewed the touring exhibition "Old Babylon," he praised the newly organized brass band in Menominee, and he advocated the appropriation of $100,000 to be spent on improving and enlarging the Peshtigo Harbor settlement.

In Chicago rain fell on September 16, but it was only a sprinkle, fleeting and unremarkable. The only place unaffected by the persistent dry spell was the city of Milwaukee, which had enjoyed a driving rain on September 11 and still another downpour with lightning, thunder, and hail on September 18. Unlike the rest of the region Milwaukee, situated on the banks of Lake Michigan, was wrapped in a spray of consistent moisture. Then, on Wednesday, September 20, Franklin Tilton made special note of the conditions around Green Bay. In the Advocate he wrote that the "morning smoke was more dense than at any other time before, the air is suffocating and is filled with flakes of ashes. On the Bay the streamers have to navigate by compass, and blow their fog horns, the shores being invisible."

Fortunately, Green Bay was surrounded on three sides by the Fox and East Rivers, and the city had an excellent fire department, which had been organized in 1858. The Germania Fire Company was equipped with the Steamer Amoskeg and twelve hundred feet of hose; Wide Awake No. 2 was headquarters on Adams Street, and

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(Owl Books, June 2003. Paperback, 304 pages. ISBN: 0805072934; EAN: 9780805072938.)

All the Way Home

On the forty-second page of “All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House” author David Giffels wrote (emphasis added):

As we stepped back up into the basement's formal hallway, the hardwood floorboards shifted and crunched disconcertingly underfoot. In some places, holes had rotted through. I was worried it would give way, but since we were in the basement, I figured we couldn't fall far. The baseboards there had long hollow gouges and in some stretches had rotted away completely. The stairs were carpeted in a black runner with a baroque floral pattern, lush and gorgeous except that it disintegrated into burlap by the time it reached the bottom.

The end of the basement on the other side of this hallway, opposite the billiards room, was unfinished and looked as if it had been abandoned for a century. The gas burner was an old-time washing machine rested, rusting, on a concrete stanchion. In the adjacent coal room was a huge green coal furnace with an antique label that said Iron Fireman. The current furnace, a boiler, was filthy and disintegrating, dominating the center of the room, one side completely rusted away, with various-size pipes running from it, their junctions corroded, their lengths decorated with bandages of distressed duct tape and tightly knotted rags. There was a black iron contraption in the corner, as fancy as it was substantial. It looked like an ornamental nineteenth-century locomotive cookstove. I asked; the real estate lady said it was the water heater. It hissed.

When we left the billiards room and ascended the formal staircase back to the first floor, a certain reality pushed its way through the sensory overload and solidified, a reality that could best be expressed by the fact that we were leaving the billiards room and ascending the formal staircase back to the first floor.

A billiards room.

At the top of the stairs, we went through a wide door that took us into the kitchen, from the opposite end we had entered before. I paused to get my bearings, but before I had a chance, we went through another door into an arched brick alcove that opened into the outdoors. Our guide said we could go out back and see the reflecting pond. We stepped down into the rear driveway. These stairs, like the front steps, were broken and treacherous. It seemed there was no

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(William Morrow, June 2008. Hardcover, 320 pages. ISBN: 0061362867; EAN: 9780061362866.)