Kindled

I heartily recommend the Kindle to one and all. The books are inexpensive. The reader is easy to use and quite convenient. And best of all, it facilitates impulse-buying in a big way. I've had some trouble sleeping over the weekend and more than once found myself browing the on-line store very late at night, just seeing what looked good. Plenty, but I held the line at buying a book on the history of particle accelerators and colliders, a subject (nuclear physics in general) that I have no small amount of interest in.

The book proved to be insufficiently meaty for me - a book on particle accelerators that never even mentions the existence of synchrotron radiation is too light for me (there's a reason the Stanford Linear Accelerator is linear, but you won't learn that reason from this book). The book also mentions superstring theory (which I am famously dubious of) and the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model without really explaining why the results of runs at the Large Hadron Collider might be relevant to them, pro or con. (I also hoped there would be some mention of the GZK Limit and cosmic rays and the notion of Doubly-Special Relativity, but I can't really hold the absence of them from the book since they really don't have anything to do with colliders per se.)

In the end, it felt like it started out as a rebuttal of the notion that the Large Hadron Collider might produce quantum black holes or odd quark-antiquark bound pairs called "strangelets" that some theorize could end up destroying the Earth, and the rest of the book was written to flesh out the chapters that weren't about quantum black holes or strangelets.

But that isn't the Kindle's fault, by any means, and it still wasn't a bad book. It beat lying in the dark and trying not to think about the ominous and steady advance in my lymphoma symptoms. It's a good thing chemo starts up again next week, because I'm definitely going downhill again.