Perszyk+

I finished two books recently.  The first was The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.  I started reading this one right around the time of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday.  It took me a while to read, n ot because I wasn’t interested in it, but rather because I must have thought it was educational.  Reading stuff for school has always put me to sleep, especially on the metro.   I feel like I now have a better understanding of what evolution is all about.  Everybody seems to have a vague idea of evolution, but few people actually understand the arguments about how it works.  If they did, there wouldn’t be so much fuss about it.  The Blind Watchmaker was well suited for my ease of understanding because of it’s many computer and technology references and analogies.  If you want to play with one of the examples from the book check out the biomorph computer program. When you first run it the biomorphs are all 1 pixel and hard to see. Keep clicking and they’ll grow bigger.

The second book that I finished was The Golden Compass (Northern Lights) by Phillip Pullman.  I read The Golden Compass in about 1/5 of the time it took me to read The Blind Watchmaker. With all of the talking daemons and bears I was reminded of the Redwall series, so this book was easy for me to enjoy.  Easier still with all of the physics and fantasy science.  I haven’t seen the associated movie but it will be interesting to see how they toned the book down, which I am sure they did.  I’ve got the other two book in the His Dark Material trilogy and I’ll give a better review once I’ve read them all.