A public service announcement for Terry Pratchett fiends...

Terry Pratchett's next (young adult) novel featuring the Nac Mac Feegle is being published this fall. Wintersmith. I'll be on the lookout for it. :)

If you haven't read the Nac Mac Feegle books, you should. Ach, crivens! Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky are the first two in the series.

They feature Tiffany Aching, the hag (in training) of the Chalk Downs of Discworld, and the Nac Mac Feegle, blue pictsies...who may have been thrown out of Faerie for (a) fighting, (b) drinking and (c) stealing. Or they rebelled against "the Quin" and left of their own accord. One of their (many) battle cries is "Nae King, nae Quin; we willna be fooled again!" In any event, accounts differ. :) Of course, the drinking, stealing and fighting are all true.

"Would you like a heid full of heid, ya scunner?"

And the witches (including Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax) usually make an appearance.

(no subject)

I'm reading a new book -- The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow. I got it through my local library. I LOVE my library.

A paragraph in the preface made me laugh...

"Ancient philosophers, beginning with Zeno, were challenged by the paradoxes of infinities on many fronts, but what about philosophers today? What sort of problems do they worry about? We wil give some examples of live issues on the interface between science and philosophy that are concerned with whether it is possible to perform an infinite number of tasks in a finite time. Could a real computer perform a super-task. What would happen if it did. Of course, this simple question, in the hands of philosophers needs some clarification: like what exactly is meant by 'possible', by 'tasks', by 'infinite', by 'number', by 'finite', and, by no means least, by 'time'."

Yeah, I know people like that. ;)

I'm actually still surprised that I -- a militant non-mathemetician -- am reading books connected to the higher maths. What is up with that?