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[skygiants]

Last year I went home and I told my two closest friends from high school that I'd made a resolution that one in every five books I read was going to be nonfiction.

"One in FIVE?" said English Major Friend. "Wow, that's a lot. Good luck!"
"One in FIVE?" said Biology Major Friend. "Isn't that number kind of . . . ridiculously small? Um. Well. Good luck!"

Biology Major Friend also helpfully gave me recommendations; Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmman: Adventures of a Curious Character was one of them. Richard Feynman, for the record, is physicist who worked on the Manhattan Porject and later won the Nobel Prize in physics for helping to develop quantum electrodynamic theory. One would imagine his autobiography would be reasonably serious business. One would be pretty much entirely wrong. If I were to make a pie chart of this book, it would be divided up something like this:

40%: Feynman wanders around gleefully trolling people ("so there was nothing to do at Los Alamos when we weren't working on the bomb, and I was super bored, so I taught myself how to crack safes and then broke into everyone's top-secret documents about the project and left annoying notes so they would think there was a leak! LOL!")
20%: Feynman solves ridiculously complex science/math problems and is like, oh, yeah, so you see that was pretty basic. Pure dumb luck! ("so then I reduced an abacus-seller to tears by how fast I could do cube roots. LOL!")
20%: Feynman decides to take up a new skill and promptly becomes semi-professional at it ("so I went to a nude-drawing class for kicks, and I ended up selling paintings under a pseudonym and having a private exhibition! LOL!")
10%: Feynman gets indignant about intellectual integrity and people not teaching science right ("so I was teaching at this university in Brazil and they asked me to give a speech about my experience, and I got up there and went 'UR DOIN IT WRONG.' LOL!")
10%: Feynman is a dirty old man who hangs out in topless bars (Becca: "Nooooooooooo don't hit on the undergraduates, Feynman! Oh too late. >.<")

Overall, an entertaining read, although occasionally I had to hide my head in shame at all the offhand discussions of science and math that I had to read five times over to make head or tail of while Feynman was like "LOL OBVIOUS".

However, there was one chapter - utterly unrelated to science or math - that made me cringe; that's the chapter where Feynman is like "So I kept buying food and drinks for girls in bars in Mexico! And none of them ended up sleeping with me! THAT IS SO UNFAIR, being a gentleman so does not pay out." I mean, in a way, I am kind of grateful for that chapter, because now if anyone ever asks me why I'm uncomfortable with guys paying for my food and drink and flat-out refuse to accept it . . . that's it. That's it right there.

Comments

[cursor-mundi.livejournal.com]

Richard Feynman! I read his book when I was fairly young, and before we went to visit Los Alamos, so it was really fun to see all the buildings and whatnot. Also, my family is made of engineers, chemists, biologists, et al., and I was clearly edging towards English even then, so I think it was a desperate attempt to keep me with the herd.

You've got a point about the pettiness of his approach, too. I didn't notice it as a kid, and my cousins were practical jokers too--minus the "I am doing this to prove how smart I am!" element--who thought that learning new skills to pull a prank was the height of genius; they were older, though, and never got mean or skeezy like Feynman does.

[skygiants]

I actually think the trick that struck me as the pettiest was the one where he noticed the waitresses were always busy . . . so he put the tip in an upside-down glass of water so they couldn't get it without spilling. That was just kind of a jerk move.

On the other hand, I totally cracked up at the door thing and the safecracking thing. I grant you full LOLs for that one, Feynman!

(My cousins - whom I love - aren't practical jokers, but they do have that same tendency to dive on the holes in your argument and pick it apart ad nauseum just for the lols, so that felt familiar to me too. *laughs*)

[cursor-mundi.livejournal.com]

Yes, stuff like that is just plain mean.

I TOTALLY LEARNED HOW TO PICK LOCKS BECAUSE OF THAT. We, um, did not have any safes available, so I played with locks. Never got any good at it, though, because frequently lack of lock picking skillz = damaged lock. And now it's been yeeeeaarrs, and I would never be able to do it again.

(My cousins did most of their pranking in the context of University of California college dorms, so getting out of hand was never really an option. And I am proud to report that they never pulled fire alarms at 3 am. As for argument picking, that's normal dinner table conversation for us, sooooo...)

[skygiants]

Hah, well, also you do not have the excuse of having been trapped at Los Alamos with nothing to do besides physics and lockpicking! You kind of have to wonder how all the other physicists passed their time - endless games of tic-tac-toe?