Reading at -52° C: January 28, 2004

It's -39° C (= -38° F) tonight; with the wind chill factored in, it's -52° C (= -61.6° F). Good night to curl up at home with a good book.

(True Winnipeggers take a sort of secret, perverse pride in the cold winter weather they can put up with. We love to tell southerners how cold it is here and watch them freak out. In fact, several years ago after a particularly long winter cold snap that produced similar temperatures, they actually printed up T-shirts: "Coldest winter since the last ice age". I wish I had bought one...)

I just finished reading (well, O.K., skimming for the good parts) the biography by Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend. I had already read the biography by her daughter, Maria Riva, and I find myself fascinated by her life.

I'm almost finished a book by Duncan J. Watts: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (my exploits as a Friendsterwhore have led to me to do some more reading on the science of networks and the whole six-degrees-of-separation phenomenon). This is an excellent book, highly recommended to the layman who wants an easy-to-understand explanation of the field.

And I've just started another book: Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-László Barabási. It also appears to be a very approachable, engagingly-written book on the subject of networks.

By the way, there actually is a fun little Web site called the Oracle of Bacon, which calculates the degrees of separation of any two movie stars (assuming that they are connected by one degree if they were both in the same film). So, how far apart are Marlene Dietrich and Kevin Bacon? You might be surprised: it's only two degrees!

1. Marlene Dietrich was in Marlene (1984) with Maximilian Schell
2. Maximilian Schell was in Telling Lies in America (1997) with Kevin Bacon