Christmas Wishes

 

The Winter Solstice has been marked in the Northern Hemisphere throughout human history, and certainly before. The feast celebrates the return of the Light, the victory over the darkness.

 Whatever tradition  guides your celebrations, I wish you all possible comfort and joy. My the Light that shines in each of us vanquish fear and give you hope.

Update to Mathematics in the News

I've added an update to Mathematics in the News.

Bridges around Edmonton: Rivers and Rails

 

     Alan Vanterpool. Rivers & Rails (2014) A survey of bridges on the former Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific Railways, as well as the CPR’s High Level Bridge, and couple of road bridges within the city. The selection criterion was “Edmonton and district”, with a bit of stretch on the “district” part.
     Basically, a catalogue raisonnée, with a diagram, statistics, and dates for each bridge, and whatever other data (location maps, photographs, news reports, etc) that Vanterpool was able to find. The photographs are generally too small, and at best adequately printed. The information seems to be as complete as Vanterpool could make it, with records of personal visits to some of the sites. The deeply-cut river valleys of the prairies required large bridges, which extended the technology of the time to its limits. Several were for a short time the longest and/or highest in the world. In short, they were pioneering efforts at spanning large valleys. A general essay introducing the book could have stressed this and other aspects of the history of bridge-building in western Canada.
     Occasional Paper No. 1 of the Edmonton & District Historical Society. Worth having as data. **½

Banks Solves a Cold Case

 

Peter Robinson. In A Dry Season (1999) Banks’s career is in bad shape, his marriage has just about fallen apart. Supt Riddle gives him the job of solving a very cold case when an imaginative boy seeking the Talisman finds a skeleton in the remains of a village long submerged under water but revealed when the reservoir dries up. Banks is assigned DS Annie Cabbot to assist him. The skeleton dates from the second World War, and bears signs of violence. Discovering the killer depends on the usual combination of carefully sifted and collated data, a couple of lucky breaks, and the imaginative empathic insight that Banks relies on to give him the necessary feel of the relationship between victim and killer.
     The book is structured as a parallel narrative: one of the participants in those long-ago events has written a memoir-novel, which provides us, and eventually Banks and Cabbot, with part of the solution. The usual niggling details lead to the rest, justice is done, and some of the damage is healed.
     An interesting experiment, this structure works reasonably well. I found the wartime story more than readable. I recall a few details of the last year of the war in Austria, and much more than a few details of post-war England, where we lived and visited between 1945 and 1954. That made Robinson’s evocation of war-time England more than a little engaging.
     A well done novel, recommended. ***