The Complete Idiot's Guide to Etiquette

I just finished reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to Etiquette by Mary Mitchell. I'm something of a slob when it comes to eating. Which was never a problem until recently. In the past my parents, aunts and other doting relatives took my unbridled enthusiasm at the dinner table to be an acknowledgement of their culinary skills. However after becoming a corporate slave my clients and colleagues were less wont to look upon kindly at my take-no-prisoners attitude to dining. Thus the book.

The book dilly dallies a bit about the usual riff-raff of how etiquette is meant to show respect, kindness etc etc., before it jumps straight into the dining etiqutte section - or in this case, steps lightly into the dining etiquette section, gracefully raising her dress a little above her ankle.

Some random samplings from the book:

-Before you sit down at your table, introduce yourself to any dining companions you don’t know and say hello to those you do.If you simply sit down, you risk having to shout your name across the centerpiece to people who, if they can hear you, won’t remember what you said.

-Tilt the soup plate away from you to get the last bit of soup.

-The toast originated during the Middle Ages, when people put a piece of scorched bread into a tankard of beer or wine because they thought it improved the flavor of the drink.

-If you’re the one being toasted, just listen quietly to the toast and then say a quick thank-you. Don’t even put your hand on your glass, much less drink.

At one point in the narrative the author says that she knows ordinarily sensible people who turn buffet meals into the siege of the Bastille as they seem to think the food will be taken away before they get some or that others will take all of the food, leaving them to starve. Which is strange, because I don't remember us ever getting introduced.

India's contribution to modern science

I usually steer away from the flavor of the month science related books that throw up some or the other interesting discovery – only to have them contradicted in next month’s release (Michael Hanlon has an interesting take on this subject and blogger Sandy blows the lid off certain such ‘studies’ in her blog).

There are however some books that are a welcome break from this trend, if not for the durability of their scientific rigor at least for their ability to realize, that they do not, in fact, have all the answers. These are the books that question entrenched mindsets but do so with the politeness, carefulness and smartness of someone who knows the bounds of his or her own knowledge. Dick Teresi’s Lost Discoveries is just such a book.

Through this book the author tries to single handedly restore to the many (often faceless) Indian, Mayan, Chinese, Arab and Babylonian scientists the credit that rightfully belonged to them but which, through the caprices of fate and the avarice of men, had eluded them over the ages. It is a lofty ambition; while I’ll let readers decide whether or not he is successful in this endeavor, his research brings to light some (that were to me) unknown and intriguing facts about the science that existed in our own country.

Here is a sampling:
#Two hundred years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center.

#Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together

#The Sanskrit-speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one.

#The Indians of the fifth century A.D. somehow calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in nineteenth-century England were convinced it was 100 million years. (The modern estimate is 4.6 billion years.)

#Indians between 800 and 500 B.C. had their own version of the Pythagorean theorem as well as a procedure for obtaining the square root of 2 correct to five decimal places.

#Indian mathematical innovations had a profound effect on neighboring cultures. Trigonometry and analemma (a system of ways to reduce problems in three dimensions to a plane), for instance, greatly influenced Islamic astronomy and its heirs in western Europe.

#Aryabhata conceptualized the orbits of the planets as ellipses, a thousand years before Kepler reluctantly (he originally preferred circles) came to the same conclusion.

#Indian theorists posited that atoms combine to form aggregates, which then make up all manifestations of physical matter. The Jainist atom came in two opposing kinds—"snighda, positive or soft, and ruksha, negative or rough"—which combined, an idea foreshadowing the modern idea of ionic bonding.

Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya can be found here: http://rapidshare.com/files/68983411/120501003.rar
Or for those of you who do not like to feel ‘ethically impugned’ here: Amazon.com