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MannyRayner

Manny Rayner's book reviews

I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.

Currently reading

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
Richard Dawkins
R in Action
Robert Kabacoff
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
Douglas R. Hofstadter
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Harold McGee
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Simon Evnine
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Christopher M. Bishop
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
Richard C. Tolman
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Julia Herschensohn, Martha Young-Scholten
The Klingon Dictionary - Marc Okrand I briefly owned a copy of this book, but managed to give it to the teenage son of a colleague before the compulsion had had time to establish itself. This no doubt saved me at least 100 hours of pointless study, which I'm intending to devote to improving my grasp of irregular Quenya verbs.

I didn't think Klingon was as good as Tolkien's languages - it somehow lacked depth. But the list of handy phrases was fun. Looking around quickly just now on the Web, I was reminded of the ever-useful Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam ("Today is a good day to die"), and the dangerously insulting Hab SoSlI' Quch ("Your mother has a smooth forehead"). You can find pronunciation guides here, though I would take them with a pinch of salt - sounds to me like the speaker has a strong Earth accent.