A reader writes in to share her own thoughts about expressive reading:

Thanks for writing this post. you have no idea how relevant to
my life it is. (Almost as relevant as the concept of "book addict.") I
just thought of this as something that I did, didn't realize it was a
phenomenon that could have a name and everything.

I'm interested in gender theory, and I'm known for reading books with
provocative titles in public places. Things like The Male Body or The
Lecherous Professor or Intimacy or Rent Boy Confessions or what have you.
All my friends make fun of me for this. I have had many interactions with
strangers, based on my reading material.

I was once reading A Defence of Masochism in a coffee bar in London, and
a young businessman passing by the window caught the title and his head
snapped back to look again. Although he had been in a hurry, he came
inside the cafe and asked me about the book. And after about five minutes
of fairly intellectual discussion of the difference between sadism and
masochism, he tried to hire me as a dominatrix. (I declined, but I found
the conversation interesting.)

Given that I'm so often reading these eye-popping things, I found it
strange that a few weeks ago I was reading a totally innocuous book on
the subway - Jane Smiley's A Year at the Races - and not one but two
people commented on it and asked me questions about it. One of them was a
really cute Danish tourist, too.

It's a truth obvious to all students of chemistry and mathematics (not to mention most people in general), but one that hit me as particularly tragic today while I was sitting in on a crystallography lecture: not all permutations of n objects can be obtained solely by rotation of the objects.

This is a complicated way of saying (and since I'm a complicated person, I don't feel bad saying it that way) the following (note: not necessarily the least complicated way of say "it"):

Pretend that you have an equilateral triangle in front of you that can rotate only about its center, and that each vertex of the triangle is colored either (R)ed, (Y)ellow, or (G)reen. An old school teacher (perhaps one from first grade or perhaps earlier), long since senile decides to test you, now at the age of anywhere between (presumably) 14 to ninety-something on your colors, and demands that you read the colors in clockwise fashion only. Thus, a diligent and ever-faithful student, you proceed, reading "Red, Yellow, Green." Your teacher rotates the triangle so that the vertices are in the same spot, and asks you to repeat the exercise, and you (depending on how many times your teacher rotates the triangle) read "Green, Red, Yellow." Quite senile, your teacher repeats this a number of times, and you find yourself repeating the same colors in only three orders, namely (in the abbreviations above):

R, Y, G
Y, G, R
G, R, Y

What strikes me as somewhat tragic is that this isn't the number of permutations out there for the three colors. A brief calculation shows that there are indeed, six possible permuations of the three colors (namely, three choices for the first position, and then two choices for the second, and leaving but one for the final spot). Conspicuously missing from the list is:

Y, R, G
R, G, Y
G, Y, R

I suppose I should feel rather silly for writing about something as obvious as this -- and in retrospect, believe me, I do -- especially since it's been revealed to me multiple times (many of them "the hard way") but this, in essence, is the problem that was occuring with the particular protein this person was attempting to crystallize, and it seems particularly tragic that this is the final and seemingly trivial problem (as it turns out, it's really far from trivial to solve -- or so the talk made it seem) in the procedure for solving the protein structure. The best-laid plans, I suppose.

Large food corporations are responsible for a lot of our eating. As much as I like to rhapsodize about "fresh" eggs, and lashings of cream, this isn't what's happening across the country. Therefore, I like trying out the new products these companies put out occasionally. Even among processed foods, people deserve a decent product.

With that in mind, I picked up Nestle's new "Sugar Free" Baby Ruth candy bar over the weekend. Obviously, the bar is a creature of the Atkins craze - a serious point against it. But how does it taste, and does it make sense to buy?

Well, first, even though FDA has required the label to say so, I just want to reiterate that there's nothing low calorie or low fat about the bar. A normal Baby Ruth, weighing in at roughly 60 grams, provides 280 calories and 12 grams of fat. The sheer numbers on the sugar free bar are indeed smaller (140 calories, 8 grams of fat), but that's because the bar itself is smaller - a mere 36.8 grams. One wonders if Nestle (and its consumers) wouldn't be better off just making their normal bar a little smaller, and leaving it at that. I should also note that you pay a lot more for the privilege of eating Nestle's sugar free offering - I noticed a premium of about 40 cents over the larger sugar-filled Baby Ruth, but it might differ elsewhere. I suspect the price difference isn't purely marketing - the artificial sweetener Nestle uses, sucralose (brand name Splenda) is much more expensive than even good sugar.

As for taste, it tastes exactly how you would imagine sugar free chocolate might taste, but with an unexpected (label warned) threat of laxative effect - flat, insipid, slightly sickly - with a few nuts strewn within. It certainly doesn't taste of chocolate. As people who read my writing realize, I can't imagine the mentality that drives people to eat this horrible thing regularly. Eat one square of real chocolate and give the rest away - buy an apple - drop a spare few blueberries into a pot of full fat yogurt - anything but this.

I sometimes wonder whether I'm being unfair to this kind of product. The bar tastes kind of sweet, after all, and there are some nuts in there, and the brown stuff covering the filling does kind of look like chocolate, even if it doesn't taste anything like it. And anyway, the chocolate of the normal Baby Ruth doesn't taste like chocolate either. Am I just sneering at something people want to eat? Well, yes, but I think my sneer is deserved. If even one person reads this and decides to put aside the sugar free Baby Ruth and do something else instead, I'll be glad. We don't all need to suddenly become yoeman farmers - but if we can put the person who invented this candy out of a job, then we'll have done something good anyway.

There have been several Supreme Court Justices who were Solicitors General (like Thurgood Marshall, Robert Jackson, William H Taft, &c.) and several others who were skilled Supreme Court advocates of another stripe (like Ruth Bader Ginsburg) before their time on the bench. But has there ever been a Supreme Court Justice who came back to argue cases in front of the high court after a period of time on the bench? It seems unlikely in the modern era, but I could imagine it happening in earlier day (perhaps Charles Evans Hughes, between Justiceships?). Perhaps there's a methodical way to search for the answer to this question, though I certainly can't think of it. Any leads welcome.


UPDATE: Not just Hughes but also Justices Curtis, Fortas, Byrnes, Goldberg, and Campbell all argued in front of the Court after sitting on it-- Curtis, Hughes and Campbell many times. (Justice Curtis, the first justice to do so argued 50-something cases as well as defending President Johnson during his impeachment.) See, NOTE: Supreme Court Justices: Arguing Before the Court After Resigning from the Bench, 84 Geo. L.J. 2473.

I kept out of the incidental walking debate when it was just between Waddling Thunder and Phoebe Maltz (WT, PM, WT, PM) but now PG has gotten into the fray to argue that walking from place to place is inefficent and therefore Contrary To The American Way.

First of all, I find some of her claims odd as a factual matter-- PG suggests that walking a mile to work (which we stipulate to be 20 minutes) is not time-efficient. Compared to what? According to the most easily googled data 20 minutes is an above-average time to travel to work in Muncie or Kalamazoo but not in New York, New Haven, Ann Arbor or even Tupelo. [See also the part of PG's post where she suggests that spending a total of an hour commuting daily would be a "radical change" that might slaughter our economic well-being: tell that to the average commuter in Atlanta, Chicago, or Riverside.]

More to the point: PG argues that in a day and age when there was a limit to how much we could be working, we might as well spend our free time walking. But now that the internet has enabled us to be engaged in productive work 24-7, the argument goes, all that time spent strolling around? Sheer frivolity!

This sounds a bit like those exercises I did in grade school trying to prove that there wasn't enough time in the year to go to school once one spent 8 hours a day sleeping 1 hour a day eating, three months on summer vacation, 2 days a week on weekends, etc. The whole point of incidental walking is that it's walking that doesn't eat up dramatic amounts of time in your schedule but rather is incidental to your other activities.

The program does not include running laps around your building before going to school, nor buying your eggs individually from the grocery store and running them home one at a time. Yes, an hour spent swimming in the early morning or panting away on a stationary exercise contraption will give you a better workout than hiking to and fro picking up groceries, library books, coffee, snowballs, but the whole point is that to do the former you need at least a free hour in your daily routine, whereas incidental walking cobbles itself together out of free fragments of travel time, incidental to all of the errands you have to run anyway.

This isn't to slight serious exercise-- lifting weights, swinging swords, swimming laps, whatever is one's fancy-- just to point out that PG's criticism of incidental walking as "inefficient" misses the mark entirely, by missing that which makes it "incidental", and therefore much more efficient.