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Having the inside knowledge to how this book was written, twelve-year process and major revision, I am enjoying the chance to understand how Vancouver was in the early 80s. Seems like everyone who is going to be part of the story gets briefly introduced in the first two chapters, leaving the third for an imagined space where a substituted Gerry can be her early-draft version: a boy experiencing a nuclear devastation.

Picking up where I left off, with renewed vigor as I just found out this novel is an early example of quantumeracy, I am glad to see the sun has moved out of the stuffy beachhouse and onto the airy beach. The lost brooch may not be as important a detail later on in the story, but then could it be Andrew and Minta's wedding? Then again, anything goes in this type of story so let's find that brooch! Nice to see Darwin.

Picking up where I left off, with renewed vigor as I just found out this novel is an early example of quantumeracy, I am glad to see the sun has moved out of the stuffy beachhouse and onto the airy beach. The lost brooch may not be as important a detail later on in the story, but then could it be Andrew and Minta's wedding? Then again, anything goes in this type of story so let's find that brooch! Nice to see Darwin.

Got through the final parts of this engaging short introduction to find and even shorter concluding section. The glossary alone would make excellent crib notes for those lucky enough to have quantum exams, and the Mathematical appendix provides a solid grounding in abstract numbers. Bonus insight into what formula the renown physicist Dirac considers finds amusing - thinking outside of the box even while in his zone.

Glad to see that ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Galileo get included into the fold of quantum theorists, but with a more soberly cautious application of metaphysical concerns. Quantum anything does not mean 'anything goes' and it means social scientists may have to brush up on their physics before making such bold claims as quantumeracy as a field of literacy research. The cat nevertheless is now out of the box!

A short chapter on how quantum physicists beat the smartest guy in the room, none other than Albert Einstein, with thought-exercises. Niels Bohr won hands down on disproving the limitations of quantum's uncertainty principle. In response to this, Einstein forms a supergroup of physicists and strikes back with the ERP paradox to prove quantum is not all that, yet presents entanglement more a whole than a sea of holes.

A very non-scientific Hero makes the claim, "One doth not know/How much an ill word may empoison liking." (Much Ado, III.i) and in this chapter of quantum theory, the reverse is also true! One lovely word, such as Feynman's "virtual," engenders awe: amidst all the problems that seem to disprove the possibility of quantum computing (or quantum anything) there is an underlying belief that it all might actually be true.

Halfway through the window, and it is still difficult to picture who is inside, looking out and vice versa. The only two characters with some sort of narrative permanence are Mrs. Ramsay and James, her son, perhaps as they have another story, one of Grimm's fairy tales, to tie them to a trope. Yet where his father is at any given moment seems a mystery, and what others like Tansley, Briscoe and Carmichael doing here?

I suspect that I will be biting off more than I can digest by reading this novel with a few other books on the to, and to attempt a long weekend of reading each of the three parts may be a few too many mental hurdles to make sense of this literature. Nevertheless, some quantum of irrationality is drawing me to devour it all as quickly as I can. So far as I can tell Virginia wrote it as hurriedly as I plan to read it.

Just over halfway into this fascinating, very short book and the cat has made its appearance! It seems that one of the big issues, or darkening perplexities, of quantum Siri is how to measure, or rather how do physicists know that they are really able to measure. Of all the coherence and decoherence available to the field,mor indeed the entire universe, I seemed to understand the consciousness, or Inceptioning, most.

The "no-math" guide to quantum theory almost immediately squelches by bringing in math-like calculations of vectors and y-rays (enough to make the Bruciest Banner green!) yet sort of fits in with the quantum logic found between 'here' and 'not-here'. Wasn't surprised to read how Polkinghorne admires Dirac's rhetoric-free lectures, but it made me notice how much metaphors were missed in the math interruption.

A pre-kung-fu-Keanu-in-the-Matrix moment, finding out at the end that Toye's very short introduction is really two books (wha...? how?): one that supports "yes we can" and the other claims that there is no way of telling what "yes" (who "we" and why "can") refers to despite obviously being an effective slogan. Perhaps more importantly from a rhetorical analysis perspective, it is more a red pill guide on how to swim.

Rhetoric in the modern age makes a brief stop prior to World War I and then launches into the postmodern mêlée by examining broadcast language used on all sides during the second world war, in addition to typical stances taken by United States presidents. With recent podcasts promoting the idea that Russia defeated twenty times more Nazis than all the Allies combined, it seems like Ong's "secondary orality" is afoot.

Take all the information from the previous chapter and throw it out the window, or at least put on the backburner, as the author approaches rhetorical analysis from poststructuralist and "New Rhetoric" points of view. Quentin Skinner and Kenneth Burke become the modern-day trailblazers, and they establish how the meaning created by the audience become as important as the "implied author" in a very quantum-like study.

The second chapter scaffolds how to rhetor like an ancient Athenian or republican Roman, since the rules have not altered that much during next couple of millennia. Providing a nuts-and -bolts account of the terminology allow Toye to break away from the dead white males and consider how oppressed people have made use of the figurative toolbox to dismantle the "master's house." Fiction rightly belongs in this toolbox.

The history of rhetoric could be neatly summed up by saying a lot of dead white males found ways of getting other people to believe what they want; but each step from Aristotle's Ars through Cicero's work into the dark ages, Renaissance, and revolution right up to Gladstone's technological enhancements, a story of other voices gets told. China's concurrent rhetorical rise and Islamic tradition also deserve attention.

Living in North America in the early part of the 21st century, it seems hard to get the gist of what rhetoric is without a flamewar of anti-Obama images popping up over the Internet - makes sense after eight year of anti-rhetoric Bushism that the hive mind is wary and weary. The historian Toye takes an ahistorical approach, examining today just as much as Aristotle and Hitler, he makes a case for how things get said.

Math professor Polkinghorne has set about an intriguing task: to describe the history and main ideas behind an advanced theory of physics without using any mathematical formulae (apart from the appendix). He starts off by chipping away at classical physics of Newton's Principia, introducing Planck, Rayleigh, Bohr and Compton (among others), but how about the physicists from Ancient Greece up to Newton's era?

Very revealing that the appendices could locate much of Lady Murasaki's narrative in buildings long since altered (or destroyed?) by the millennium between now and then. More solid evidence that she wasn't just making up stories about a young prince peeing on an emperor or ribald jests involving nude? serving women, but there were male historians to corroborate her account. Men had a very different sense of literacy.

Great way to end the diary with a literacy puzzle to solve: was hoping that one of the Minamoto's mentioned at New Year's festivities would have been Hiromasa, and it would have been a nice to sneak him into the last page, if only the lacuna had played the flute instead of the koto. Still a bit of a stretch to fit in characters from 2001's epic Onmiyogi (plus its sequel) but it felt like he was at Biwa, too.

If there was only one paragraph of Murasaki's diary that will survive the centuries to come, it would most likely be the one where she takes a swipe at Sei Shōnagon, as if it were some literary contest between Heian authors. But immediately after clawing out her "ridiculous and superficial" (p. 106) future, Murasaki inflicts the same prying criticism into her own patchwork letters. Hope things with Amida worked out.

As much as she seems ill-at-ease inside the Palace, with the creepy, leering lords and drunken ministers peek through the thin curtains that mark off a lady's private world, life outside the Palace is equally distracting. The one place Murasaki seems to find comfort and solace is in the literary world she makes, able to express her awe at nature's beauty while also assessing the characters of other ladies-in-waiting.

Fascinating in every detail. Lady Murasaki writes of the auspicious birth and its numerous celebrations in a very calculating tone. She shifts from a grand picture of noblewomen in their kimono to a small personality trait for one unfortunate lady, all the while lords and ministers peek over her shoulder and demand quicky poems. With so much to conceal, it is surprising how much innuendo turns up in this translation.

Usually I like to get a bit more into a book before posting updates, or else I'd never make it to the end of a chapter without feeling the urge to write commentary on it, but just wanted to give a shout-out to the "Ying-Yang diviners" mentioned on page nine. Whether or not Abe no Seimei is being evoked here, it is enough proof of Dr. Robinson's claim: "the world is fictional, through and through." Who says she isn't!

I am curiously impressed by how much trouble the editor of this slim collection of diary entries went, not only in translating, but also in providing so much historical background that almost outweighs the written content provided by Lady Murasaki herself. It is almost as if one of the first bloggers happens to be the author of The Tale of Genji, the oldest novels in recorded history. Back to Heian era I go!

She found me, or at least a version of myself that isn't me (not in this world) and yet so much is me: Northern Japan in the early 21st century, the purple pens and attempts to bring other temporal moments into now. It isn't less convincing that the author guessed I would be in graduate school, but it has not yet occurred to me to write about the I authors (unless Lady Murasaki counts as one of them) maybe not now...

A fascinating near conclusion to both Nao and Ruth's narratives, which will doubtlessly keep changing as the reader gets closer to the end. Will Oliver's Schrödingerian cat survive weeks of recovery? Did Jiko know about Haruki #1's Secret Diary, by putting in the box herself? Who was the Jungle Crow? The most satisfying unconclusion is whether Harry's MuMu engine works as he said it does: only works if nobody knows!

A horrible date for Nao could be there beginning of her end, and she has just enough time to reflect on her dad's date while she waits for a bus in Sendai. Ruth's dream helps this recherche du mots perdu as Nao's narration slips off the page and they take the form of a crow for Ruth. A wonderful way to insert herself into the supposedly finished off story, and in a quantum physics moment, change the results.

The level of depravity increases on three fronts: the well-moneyed advertising executives who frequent love hotels, the isolated self-abuse of islanders caught in a storm and the pilots forced to man-up before the Typhoon of Steel (aka the Battle of Okinawa) as reported by Haruki #1's supposedly hidden diary. As his nephew would discover in dot-com happy Sunnydale, even these most dreadful machines have a conscience.

Things get dreadfully serious, hopefully just as the brightness of each character's superpower begins to shine. Nao is nearly raped and subjected to cyberbullying, her father reacts with another attempt at suicide, Ruth loses her patience with her husband, and even the cat seems to have moved on. And yet, the darkest moments have a writer's brilliance, and my guess is that a few lines from Shakespeare signals change.