ChapterZero

Not that the two are related…

I rediscovered an excellent book yesterday, Janich’s Vector Analysis, which despite the title, is not about curl, div, grad, and all that Instead, it covers manifolds and differential forms in what seems to be a straightforward and readable manner. I had picked it up a couple of years earlier, but found the first chapter was above my head. On this second reading, it seems just at my level. Definitely a book I’d recommend to anyone trying to learn manifolds and differential forms. Now I need to stop collecting books.

On to the fast food. I just finished reading Chew On This today; the thought occurred to me as I was closing the book, that fast food eating habits are prime candidates for inclusion in the high school health curriculum. When I was in high school, the incursion of fast food companies into our high school cafeteria was just beginning, and the options– e.g. chicken baskets, which I ate just about every day– offered by the school itself weren’t very healthy. It’s disturbing to compare this to some of the assertions the book made: that becoming obese at a young age trains your body to remain obese (as a specific statistic, 90% of teenagers obese at the age of 13 while be obese in their midthirties), that type II diabetes, which used to be called adult onset diabetes because it was rarely seen in children, is now common place among teenagers, etc. Definitely, facts like these should have been made available to my friends and me in high school, when we were in the process of taking more control over the foods we eat.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Travel reading (7/21/2007)
• Winter Reading (12/4/2006)
• A daring dietary proposition (9/8/2008)