Kendall Giles

If you are interested in quality, intelligent entertainment, then you might want to check out the series Numb3rs, available on DVD or by individual episode download.

The series depicts an FBI agent who is helped by his mathematics whiz brother in solving crimes - kind of like CSI with equations rather than microscopes. But don't let the equations scare you off - the conflict caused by the two different methods of problem solving, characterized by the FBI agent brother and the mathematics brother, along with the various crimes and bad guys, actually provides for exciting drama.

As an example, in the pilot episode a serial rapist/killer is loose in Los Angeles. The FBI agent has a map of the city showing the locations of the crimes, but is otherwise stumped on how to track the killer and predict where the killer will strike next. The mathematician studies the pattern of the crime locations and, rather than try to predict the location of the next crime, he estimates the location of where the killer lives. The analogy is that of a garden water sprinkler - it is difficult to predict where the next water droplet will land, but if you study the pattern of the drops of water, you can estimate where the water sprinkler must be located.

Note that the math used in the episodes is real, and if you are interested in finding more about the different techniques used in the various episodes, then you might want to take a look at the book The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics.

If you've ever wanted to combine staying healthy with literature, then you might want to consider walking, biking, swimming, or rowing to Rivendell.

Here's the idea: Karen Fonstad (sadly, when writing up this post, I saw that Karen died in 2005 due to complications from breast cancer) reverse-engineered the route Frodo and Company took on their way to Rivendell in her book The Atlas of Middle-Earth. For example: leaving Bag End, heading west through the gate into a lane, following the lane for a bit, then following the hedgerows south is about a 3 mile trip.

In her Rivendell mileage chart, Karen notes the cumulative miles, miles between each milepost, and the description of each milepost location. So if you are just starting out and log 3 miles on today's run, then you would make a note in your notebook your mileage run for the day and the cumulative miles you have run. That way you can compare your progress against the progress of the Company as they (and you) head to Rivendell.

All this may sound a bit geeky, but it does work---I have started the journey, though extensive, non-fitness travel has kept me away from too much "Hobbit-walking", as my wife calls it. Nevertheless, yesterday I jogged 2.25 miles, which brings my cumulative total to 36.84 miles. On the Rivendell journey, this puts me just beyond that incident with the Black Rider, but before they meet up with the Elves on the Road.

As a final note: in case you are not familiar with Rivendell, Hobbits, or J.R.R. Tolkien, get thee to Amazon and buy the books, or at least the movies. Getting back into shape can wait until you finish - one has to have priorities.

Human's have it pretty good. Unlike, say, the koala, which only has to consider which eucalyptus tree to climb in order to have yet another meal of eucalyptus leaves, humans are omnivores, able to make a meal from a variety of plants, animals, and fungi. This has, in part, allowed humans to live in all parts of the world - from the humid tropics of the jungle, to the dry, sandy deserts of the middle east, to the cold, unforgiving quiet of the frozen tundra.

But this ease of making a meal, no matter what the environment, has turned what was once a survival advantage for our species, when humans first struggled to spread across the globe tens of thousands of years ago, into a bit of a disadvantage in an industrialized world over-populated with people and, ironically, with too much of the wrong kind of food. Overpopulation and the need to feed so many mouths has led to the industrialization of food production, transforming small family farms into large monocultures of genetically-modified cornfields and acre-sized metal sheds of captive, steroid and antibiotic-injected cows. We might have once thought this scaling up of food production to be a good thing, but is it?

But why stop asking questions there? Just where does that McDonald's meal come from, really? Why does the U.S. grow so much corn? Why do the factory farms plant thousands of acres of corn, and only corn? And with so much corn, why does the government subsidize the factory farms to grow more of it? Is "corn-fed beef" a delicacy, or a perorative? How is Whole Foods, at the same time, different from and just like the modern factory farm? Why might Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, represent the best farm in the U.S.?

Why indeed. And you might be surprised at the answers to each of the above questions.

So if you have ever wondered about the food you unpackage from its plastic shrink wrap and plop into the microwave, if you have ever considered the moral hazard of eating meat - or corn, and if you have ever wanted to gather wild mushrooms, then you might want to read The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan.

With an admirable investigative tenacity and a gift for telling a good story, Michael details how our food is grown, produced, cooked, and eaten by examining the life story behind four meals - one bought from a fast food chain, one made from items bought in an organic store, one made from foods grown and raised on a sustainable farm, and one made from foods foraged from the wild. In reading about Michael's adventures, you will discover what it takes to get the food on your table to your table, and you will likely never think about corn the same again.

Modern humans have lost the connection to the land and the food it provides. Overweight, overpopulated, and increasingly unhealthy, Michael's look into what we eat and how it was made is perhaps the just desserts.

Just yesterday I paid $4.09/gallon for 87 octane gas in Baltimore. Many people, lured into buying bloated, inefficient cars, trucks, and SUVs made and marketed by Detroit, are now feeling similar pains in the wallet. An ABC news story suggests that gas may soon cost $7/gallon.

But it is not just the high price of gas that is causing concern. All across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people are losing their homes to foreclosure or are unable to sell their homes, and the crown jewels of the U.S. are being bought up by unsavory foreign governments taking advantage of the weak dollar.

Everyone wants to just throw their hands into the air, but if you have wondered why these events are happening, then you might consider reading The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris.

This book won't help you get out of debt, sell your house, or improve the degrading quality of the education system. But what it will do is put the current economic crisis into context, give insight into how economic and personal spending practices contributed to the problem, and help us understand what can be done to improve our national situation. It will also help you realize why and how the much heralded Alan Greenspan and his Chicago economics theories may have actually led to our current economic downward spiral, as did the lack of critical thinking skills by the millions of Americans who tried to buy houses when they could not afford to, assisted by greedy banks, other lenders, and Wall Street. It will also show how the follies of the current Presidential administration led to the decline of American economic standing in the world, with potentially dire implications for us all going forward.

There are no quick fixes for the current situation we voted and spent ourselves into, but this book at least paints a plausible explanation for why we are here. Where we go from here depends in large part on the resilience and fortitude of the American peoples, and this book at least helps show a reality clearly the result of causes and effects rather than from forces outside our control.