Suffice to say that Lincoln and Pierce both felt strongly about preserving the Union, but had entirely different ways of going about it. We've talked about that before, though, so I won't prattle on about it, and INSTEAD I'll prattle on about this:

After having been reading [edited for spoilers] books for the last bit of a while now, I finally got to turn back to my pile of mathy-sciencey books that have been piling up, and have been heftily enjoying Roger Penrose's Road to Reality. There are a lot of books about physics and math out there that are for the general audience, and a lot more for specialists, but finding something that is accessible to somebody in between, say a diligent amateur, is a bit tricky. I am by no means finished with the thousand odd pages yet, but so far I am incredibly excited about it. When I was in grad school, between family, two teaching jobs, and this very comic, I didn't have time to poke into all of the corners of mathematics and mathematical physics that I was curious about, and working my way through the specialty texts in those fields by myself in snippets of stolen spare time is a slooooowwww business (I'm looking at you, Hyperbolic Manifolds and Discrete Groups), so finally having a book like this, that constantly slakes curiosity in a way that still has some serious mathematical oomph behind it, is decidedly nifty. Check it out!

The new Feynman graphic biography also came out this week - more on which next Tuesday!

- Count Dolby von Luckner