I watched a lot of TV when I was growing up, and some shows made a strong impression on me. “Twin Peaks” stands out among them – I can still hum the theme song, and I can see the eerie photo of Laura Palmer that lingered behind the ending credits. The show had a unique blend of off-kilter comedy and claustrophobic unease that still colors my taste in TV.

I was excited to read that, true to Laura’s promise in the Black Lodge, David Lynch and Mark Frost are continuing the series later this year. While I wait for the new series, I read Frost’s recently published book The Secret History of Twin Peaks. It was just as spooky as the original series.

History fleshes out some of the underlying mythos of “Twin Peaks”, answering a few questions from the show (Who was BOB? Why did owls feature so often in the show?) but raising a lot of others. Presumably, the book is meant as an entrée into the coming series, to stir up interest in new story lines, which the book seems to hint at.

History takes the form of a dossier, written and hand-bound by a mysterious author, about the history of the Twin Peaks area, going back to shortly after the American revolution and seemingly running up to the end of the show.

It opens with a letter from a familiar FBI agent, instructing another agent to evaluate the dossier’s contents and determine its author. Throughout the dossier, the investigating agent inserts marginalia, confirming or questioning remarks and assertions by the author, all of which gives the writing a crisp, matter-of-fact tone that contrasts with the mystical and murky events in the story.

This is actually the first non-science book I’ve read in a while, and the story was so engaging, I gulped it down in a weekend. So, highly recommended reading for fans of the show or lovers of supernatural thrillers. Along with your reading, be sure to give yourself the present of a cup of hot, black coffee.

I was probably first introduced to Marcus Aurelius by Hannibal Lector:

So as the last book that I’ll get to during the break, I read the classic Meditations and finished it during the AAS conference.

I’m conflicted about this book. There were parts I enjoyed and found inspiring, but other parts I found confusing and repetitive.

The book presses a message of self-assurance and poise: “Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.” As someone who struggles with self-doubt, _Meditations_ provided potent language and powerful imagery to help tame my anxieties, and reading it was like standing in a cold, bracing wind.

At the same time, the book repeated the same ideas over and over again, often using very similar wording. If you come to this book expecting a cogent philosophical treatise, as I did initially, then this repetition is puzzling. As I read the book, though, I also did some background reading and discovered the book was written as a diary by Marcus Aurelius. In this case, it makes sense to me that he repeated the same admonitions – he was trying to instill them in his own mind.

There are lots of references to philosophers and ancient cities, which I also found confusing. Instead of buying this bare bones edition of _Meditations_, it might help to have an annotated version that can provide historical context.

Although some aspects of the Stoic philosophy described in the book were stirring — “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.” and “Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.” — I found unconvincing the numerous assertions that “everything that happens, happens justly”, that nature is implicitly ordered and fair to be. The admonitions to remain true to one’s nature didn’t give me a lot of insight because Aurelius never says how to determine one’s true nature.

So I came away from _Meditations_ with mixed feelings. Its philosophy of equanimitous withdrawal from the world reminded me of an empty marble temple: resilient against the eons but austere and sterile.

Just finished Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise, only a few years after it was published.

I enjoyed most of the book, especially the philosophical discussion behind it: observations of the world inherently involve uncertainty, so predictions based on those observations must incorporate those uncertainties. But as more data pour in, we should be humble enough to revise our models and predictions.

As a whole, the book was easy to follow and didn’t get too technical, giving simple, worked examples of how to apply Bayes’s Theorem, for example, to evaluate the probability that a positive result on a mammogram actually means a woman has breast cancer.

For my money, the chapters on baseball and chess were the best. I learned that in the 1997 rematch between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, Deep Blue pushed a pawn on the 44th move, apparently baffling Kasparov. Silver suggests Kasparov “concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence” and lost his nerve, resigning the next game even though it could have been played to a draw. Turns out the move may have been a last-ditch, random choice by Deep Blue.

The book falls a bit short in other chapters, though. Prof. Michael Mann, famous climate scientist at Penn State, had some pretty strong criticism for the climate change chapter. I found the concluding chapter a little platitudinous, without a lot of the interesting technical discussion in previous chapters.

Still, a really engaging read and, like me, hopefully readers come away with a strengthened commitment to scientific skepticism.