What'cha Reading?

[Tellenbach]

Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal

This guy claims he's the successor of Edgar Cayce and that there's a spirit being who yells in his ear what everyone's health condition is.

Padre Pio and Edgar Cayce, those famous mystical healers of the 20th century, were the only two mediums in recent history who accessed the level of compassion that Spirit demands of me. Their work as compassionate healers was in some ways similar to mine. However, our strengths and gifts are unique to each of us.

Some of the theories presented:

Alzheimers is caused by mercury poisoning.
There is no such thing as autoimmune disease; it's a viral infection that hasn't been discovered.
Lyme Disease is not caused by a bacterium; it's a virus.
Many intestinal diseases like IBS, Crohns, and gastritis are caused by ammonia permeability and is easily treated with celery juice.

Fascinating ideas, but completely unscientific. He says it'll take medical science 20 to 30 years to discover these facts.

[senza tema]

Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (2009).

This is the story of a paper pushing bureaucrat ... and it's a lot, lot more interesting than it sounds. Jean-Baptiste Colbert was Louis XIV's de facto prime minister and helped him to build the first proto-modern state intelligence system ever from the ground up, while outmaneuvering political rivals, making shady business deals, putting together the architecture of the first "modern" absolutist state ... and the best library in all of Europe. All in all, it's an astonishingly good book and a short read for a scholarly monograph at 167 pages (not counting endnotes). Highly recommended.

[Tellenbach]

Neuro Tribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. An absolutely rivetting read so far. The first chapter discusses several notable Aspies: Henry Cavendish and Paul Dirac.

An excerpt:

"Newton was correct that the attraction between the spheres was very slight (just one part in 10 compared to Earth's gravity), but he underestimated what a man like Cavendish could pull off through sheer dogged persistence. First he built a stand-alone shed in his backyard to isolate the delicate oscillations of the mechanism from stray drafts and vibrations. Then he sealed the apparatus itself in a mahogany box and rigged up a system of pulleys so he could set the pendulum going without touching it. To calculate the forces acting on the spheres, he installed telescopes at both ends of the box, focusing them on vernier scales inside the chamber that enabled him to calculate the wire's torque to within 0.01 inch."

"But the figure he came up with was so close to the actual density of the Earth that no researcher could best it for another hundred years. As a side benefit, his experiment indirectly provided the first estimate of the gravitational constant, known among physicists as 'Big G', which also turned out to be astonishingly accurate. Cavendish's experiment is now recognized as the inaugural moment of modern physics, laying the groundwork for centuries of breakthroughs to come, including Einstein's theories of relativity."

[Hawthorne]

Man and His Symbols by that one popular guy.

Only one more week of mild recreational reading guilt.

[fetus]

A memoir about a boy who struggles with severe Tourette's and OCD throughout his youth. The actual man didn't write the book...he kind of oversaw it and confirmed its accuracy. Nonetheless, it's quite riveting.

[joealienprince]

I was reading the doors of perception by Aldous Huxley, but my friend who I borrowed it from asked for it back so he could use it to argue with his dad smh

I really want to continue reading it, but like also I'm a slow ass reader so it kinda made sense that he wanted it back already ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Tellenbach]

'Dear Mr. You' by Mary-Louise Parker, yep....She wrote a book after Weeds. It's a book of letters to men in her life. I think she's an xNFP. There are a handful of funny or interesting letters (like the time she castrated a goat), but most aren't all that interesting.

[Noll]

At night, I read The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg aloud to my girlfriend, as it helps her sleep. I've read it before, truly one of my favorite books. Besides that, I have finally gained the courage to take on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Even when holding it, one can sense what a masterpiece it is. Highly enjoying it so far.

[five sounds]

Resource packet for the assessment of pediatric traumatic brain injury and online resources for developmentally inappropriate oral fixations.

Of course all these odd cases fall into my hands with three weeks of school left...

[Forever]

At night, I read The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg aloud to my girlfriend, as it helps her sleep. I've read it before, truly one of my favorite books. Besides that, I have finally gained the courage to take on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Even when holding it, one can sense what a masterpiece it is. Highly enjoying it so far.

Haha when it helped her sleep I was thinking how much the opposite it would be to you. But I could see both ways.