Some reading combining culture and science

One of the funnier book descriptions I’ve come across:

From Cambridge University Press. I like the gratuitious bit about the “long period of stagnation through the Middle Ages.”

Usually, I come upon humanists who pretend to be scientists, or scientists who pretend to be journalists, or scientists who pretend to be humanists of a more grandiose sort (i.e., gurus) … not scientists who adopt this sort of workmanlike – dare I say, paint-by-number – humanistic idiom. “This strangely neglected topic,” writes the historian Lucky Jim in his sad-sack article on medieval shipbuilding; this is an exemplar of the idiom I mean. I don’t imagine that precipitation is a neglected topic, though I can guess why not all of this material was previously gathered into one book.

There are various book series by Reaktion that do the “natural-‘kind’-as-cultural-artifact” thing rather well. This is not exactly the sort of book that Precipitation is. Precipitation is more scientific.

Speaking of offbeat humanistic treatments of the sciences, today I learned that the great documentarian Errol Morris has written a book about Thomas Kuhn, who once threw an ashtray at him. According to Tim Maudlin, the book has considerable merit. (The other book that Maudlin reviews looks good, too.)

Karin is reading and getting a kick out of the first “Bridgerton” book, which is not my cup of trash, though I can respect it. I certainly do admire the titles in that series. “The Duke and I.” “The Viscount Who Loved Me.” “An Offer from a Gentleman.” Etc., etc.

Clarkson’s farm

A weekend of bone-tiredness. Karin is rather laid up, and I’ve been shouldering some extra burdens which have made my usual chores more difficult. This afternoon, it took an hour and a half instead of the customary hour to mow one of the fields; this was due to the length and dampness of the grass (the rain has wreaked havoc on the mowing schedule). After I returned inside I drank four bottles of water. Samuel wanted to sleep in my arms. Karin was too tired to start watching a new crime series with me, so I put on the first thing that looked interesting: a documentary series called Clarkson’s Farm. I’d never heard of Jeremy Clarkson, but in Britain he’s famous. He kept me thinking of the Kingsley Amis title “One Fat Englishman.” Clarkson is only sixty-one but looks seventy-five because he’s smoked so many cigarettes. In this show he has bought a farm in the Cottswolds, and after years of paying someone else to do his work, he’s decided to do it himself, even though he knows nothing about farming. He buys a huge, fancy Lamborghini tractor instead of a sensible second-hand tractor; it doesn’t fit into his barn. Then he discovers that a lot of farming consists of climbing up to and down from the cab of his very tall tractor. He tills the soil inefficiently. He wears rough-looking farmers’ clothes. Real farmers are summoned to advise him; as often as not, they’ve dressed as if to work in an office. I am not a gentleman farmer, but on a much smaller scale I can relate to all of this.