Meanderings

It was a nice day at the harbor. Overcast and a bit humid, but temperatures in the mid-seventies. Good walking weather. I prowled around a bit, checked out the landscaping that is going on around the National Aquarium and along Light Street. It's very much a work in progress, but for the first time we've been able to see what its final contours are going to be like. For the past year it has pretty much looked like a construction site, and it still does. By this time next year the construction will be cleaned up, the grounds replanted and the whole harbor area will be looking really good. I can hardly wait for spring.

Took some pictures, but only the flags were worth posting.

Browsed around Barnes & Noble and read one chapter of Charles Mann's 1491, skimming the rest of the book. I'll probably go back and buy it next week. It's a nice popular account summarizing much of the revisionist work done on American Indian populations in the past decade or so. As such it serves as an excellent introduction to the subject for the general reader and I highly recommend it [you can buy it by clicking on one of the Amazon ads at the top of the blog].

Be warned, though, as in most pop works the author tends to emphasize the most startling and dramatic interpretations of limited evidence, some of which are still very controversial, and sometimes the storytelling aspects of his account lead him to assert confidently things that are not generally accepted by more serious scholars [qualifications get in the way of the story line]. Still, it's a pretty good summary, well written, totally involving in places, and I plan to read it as soon as I finish Neal Stephenson's Confusion.

I also noted that Terry Pratchett has a new discworld book out. It's titled "Thud" and looks to be pretty good. I'll be taking a look at it next week.