Strange Fact Research Articles

Some Comments on Early Arab "Wonders and Marvels" Literature

This study discusses copious early Arab literature of "wonders and marvels". The authors of such books found their materials in the Muslim religion, in the ancient Arab heritage and in strange facts about other cultures. The study examines the themes addressed by these works, including magic, fantasy, strange customs, curiosities, humor, the absurd, mockery, nightly chats, puzzles, riddles, rebuke, satire, defamation, battles, animals, angels, demons, etc. Composers of "wonders and marvels" books chose rhyming names for their works in order to attract the reader. The study found that the popularity of such books was due to the fact that certain phenomena and customs were perceived as incomprehensible by Arabs, who therefore sought transcendental or supernatural explanations, giving free rein to their imagination. Some books of this genre were apt to arouse fear in the reader and the oft-repeated stories in them were eventually believed by many and became means for realizing Arabs' desires and dreams. The study found that at first such books were perceived with scorn, as collections of superstitions and myths, and were therefore popular mainly among the lower classes. Because the genre did not attract the interest of the more educated, its scholarly study was neglected for a long time.

Between-ing: Collaborative Writing and the Unfoldings of Relational Space

In conversation with Claire Parnet, Deleuze is quoted as saying, “(w)e were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us.” Deleuze’s concept of “between-the-two” has been used by “Gale and Wyatt,” as a leitmotif for the collaborative writing with which they have engaged “between the two” and also in collaboration with others. The persistence and longevity of this usage has led to the possibility that an “image of thought” has been brought to life which is constitutive of the “us” rather than the “betweened.” In this, have “Gale and Wyatt” continued to swim in the calm, unquestioning, and welcoming waters of qualitative inquiry? Have they, in so doing, avoided those eddies, swirls, rip currents, and deep, dark waters of post qualitative inquiry that might be working to pull them out into the turbulent seas of free and wild concept making where, in becoming, their writing might move away from the applications and representations of simply human-centric thought and action and be of a more immanent doing? In this article, “Gale and Wyatt” address their alertness to the doing of this image of thought. They ask, does their collaborative writing rest more on the “two” of them, the people doing the writing, than on the “between” that talks more the materiality of relational space(s) unfolding amid them? In this article, they affirmatively critique this possibility. They ask: Between the two? How does this betweening work? What does this betweening do? Only two?

"HURDLES IN APPROACHING SCIENCE AND IN SOLVING CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT ISSUES"

"Showing complicate issues in science, like the strange facts and realities pertaining to the quantum world, this paper explains why it is so difficult to understand and to solve those complicate issues. This paper also stresses the important fact, that in order to understand these strange realities pertaining to the quantum phenomena but also in order to solve other complicate problems of science such as the climate change issues, one should give up the traditional way of thinking of the science and should also renounce the false idea of the rationalism, stating that the entire reality can be known and understood by using scientific reasoning."

Sincov’s and other functional equations and negative interest rates

Investigating the future value F(K, s, t) of a capital K invested between dates s and t, the “natural” condition F(K,s,t)ge K has lost its naturality because of the strange fact of negative interest rates. This leads to the task of describing the possible solutions of the multiplicative Sincov equation f(s,u)=f(s,t)f(t,u) for sle tle u where f(s,t)=0 may happen. In this paper we solve this task and discuss connections to the theory of investments.

Las tumbas de los reyes visigodos: un problema histórico.

It is a strange fact that we know nothing about the tombs of the Visigothic kings in Hispania during their presence in the Peninsula for more than two centuries. No contemporary chronicler or historian mentions them and there is no archaeological evidence for any pantheon, royal tomb or sarcophagus. An explanation for this could lie in the peculiar nature of the Visigothic monarchy which was nonhereditary and, because of its submission to the iron rule of the Church, was also obliged to practice and publically express its humilitas in its forms of burial. There was no royal pantheon because it was not a monarchy that was tied to the people.

Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare by Regina Mara Schwartz

Religion & Literature 202 ing archana verba known only to St. Paul—in the words he invents for Christ himself in the C-text (20.435-38). But, in the end, Davis’s book is an energizing addition to the study of Piers Plowman even when one disagrees with it in detail. Her central idea of God reaching into his creation because it was and is the natural thing to do responds to a glow in the poem that many of us struggle to define. Daniel M. Murtaugh Florida Atlantic University Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare Regina Mara Schwartz Oxford University Press, 2016. xi + 141 pp. $29.95 hardcover. Wisdom is seldom the measure of a work of scholarship, but one must invoke that measure here because—in addition to being a first-rate work of synthetic scholarship on the topic of justice and love in Shakespearean tragedy—Regina Schwartz’s Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare is a wise book. Arising from a common experience of the inhumanity of the medical profession as she tried to attain humane care for her mother, Schwartz’s book confronts the strange fact that the “love tradition” is missing from our conception of medical ethics. What she discovers is that the love tradition has been lost, not only to the medical community, but also to the elite intellectual community. What, according to Schwartz, is the love tradition, and how does it inform Shakespearean tragedy? We neglect that tradition, she says, because of other influential conceptions of justice, especially a conception of distributive, proportional justice, whether in the Aristotelian, Kantian or Rawlsian forms of liberal political thought. Schwartz points out in chapter 1, “The Experience of Love,” that we miss much when we limit ourselves to such forms: The public sphere is not only a creation of legal and economic ties, nor is it solely devoted to reining in unruly competitiveness. It is also a community formed by bonds of care and such bonds dissolve motives for selfishness, conflict and war. (14) Those “bonds of care” arise from love. In chapter 2, “The Law of Love,” she traces the love tradition to both Judaism and Christianity. She invokes Jesus’s citation of Deuteronomy 6:5 in Matthew 22:36-40, the double love of God and neighbor Paul then explains in Romans 13:9-10: “‘Love does no wrong to the neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law’” (20). She does not worry about the differences between Jewish hesed and Christian BOOK REVIEWS 203 agape or caritas, instead detailing three topics: what love is, to whom it should be shown, and why it is a command. What is love? “[T]o love is to give to the stranger, that is, to recognize and to answer the needs of the stranger because you were once a stranger and your vulnerability teaches love for the vulnerable” (21). What is a neighbor? Your “fellow human…from the poor to the stranger, from one who offends unknowingly to one who engages with naïve trust in unfair transactions, from the speechless to the blind”; the neighbor is the vulnerable one (22). Why is love a command? Because we are responsible for one another. “What the fellow claims is not his right, his freedom to possess his goods or pursue his ends without interference; what he claims is my responsibility to care for him” (24). Love must give to those in need. What does this have to do with Shakespeare? Quite a bit, Schwartz argues. She takes up “The Power of Love” in chapter 3 and reads King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. King Lear’s opening scene parodies all forms of justice that involve measure. It reinstates justice as love by revealing love to be the play’s ultimate good in the reunion of Lear and Cordelia: “The play re-orients the audience to the supreme value Lear discovers, of authentic love—not self-serving flattery, but self-giving love” (48). Love’s power arises in this bleakest of plays since our pity for the extremity of their suffering is due to our admiration for the unquestionable goodness of their love. Chapter 3’s examination of Romeo and Juliet confirms...

Museum—School of Alienation

Peter Sloterdijk’s witty and acerbic text is directed against the museum and in particular the national museum of the nineteenth century, which he sees as essentially xenological—concerned with the study of that which is foreign and alien. Introducing his theme, Sloterdijk imagines a scenario in which “the world looks like a film in which the soundtrack that gives it sense has been turned off, so that nothing remains but an impenetrable and attention-grabbing swarm of facts, which seem to be permeated by a preposterous claim on Being.” It is this swarm that finds its way into the museum, which is where we control and deal with strange facts and objects. This is the collection and neutralization point for the ugly unfamiliar, the unassimilated, the dissimilar, and the dead. The Hegel-inspired museal historicism of the nineteenth century achieves, according to Sloterdijk, a noteworthy symbiosis of observation and violence. Locating the mechanism of the museum in the broader cultural and social context, Sloterdijk concludes his polemic by comparing museums with cemeteries, mortuaries, garbage dumps, mausolea, mental institutions, prisons, and brothels.

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

Animating Energy: Stop-Motion Animation and Energy Tracking Representations

Energy is a topic that is often treated as an accounting process—a number that students are asked to calculate, but that is not particularly meaningful in itself. When we try to ascribe meaning to this number (“an ability to do work,” for example), we are met with caveats and hedges. As Feynman1 notes when lecturing on the conservation of energy, it “is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.” These calculations allow us to infer more meaningful quantities: how fast an object will move, how far it will travel, how compressed it will become, or how hot it will feel. But energy itself, particularly in introductory physics, rarely gives insights into physical problems.

On Your 21st Birthday

Any time there is a surface there is a surface and ever y time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence . . .-Gertrude SteinIremember it waS a Sunday-a louSy, oVercaSt aFternoon with that diStinctly Melbourne light: the refraction of steel, a planed metallic glint to the sky, which cast it almost white. Almost. It would not rain; it would merely threaten to rain. Such were late spring afternoons in this southeastern corner of Australia: thin and hard and heavy on the skin. Today, it is also Sunday. Ten years later and the sky is the same, a shroud pulled taut over the city, and I walk beside the Yarra against the stream of runners, bikers and vagabonds. The river is slow and wide today, and I move off the path to contemplate the strange fact that the current f lows away from the sea, reaching back for the mountains. A slender boat skims past, muscular young arms moving in sharp arcs, forced on by a girl with a megaphone. Happy Birthday! she spruiks-see how I translate her muffled bark. But even with a mega- phone you couldn't hear her.You would be 31 years old. The river is tangled with willow branches and crushed soda bottles, and the rowers disappear around a bend.On that faraway Sunday, in our Richmond home, the streaked wide windows opened onto wind chimes, cobwebs and the courtyard garden bristling with mela- leuca and salmon-pink geraniums. Inside, the dining table was set with an Indian cotton cloth upon which three golden candles burned with small, steady flames: one for each daughter. On the table lay dishes of roast vegetables, home-baked bread, olives and hummus-a plate, too, of just-out-of-the-oven salmon, our moth- er's most prized offering.You were late, and I remember that I expected that. So did the rest of the fam- ily; so did our mother, although she had shoved that expectation way down deep, that place where the whale lives whose belly trapped Jonah for three days and three nights. (We all have an ocean inside ourselves, and sometimes we float and some- times we drown and sometimes a great fish swallows us whole and won't let us go, and won't let us go.)There were three of us: me, you, and Rebecca-she was the sister with the face a plaster mold of determined cheerfulness that released anger through tiny invisible slits at the side; when you sat next to her your skin caught the sudden arctic blasts. Rebecca hated you with a long, fluid ribbon of hate like she always did these things, with style and silence. I was not able to hate you; I still lack her strength.Rebecca wore lipstick, a thick magenta line-warmth without blood. Not like the red you used on weeknights, when you disappeared into the city and in the morning when it was still dark the taxi man would dump you on the doorstep (or maybe he placed you carefully, glad you were not his daughter) and ring the door- bell: once for waking, once more for urgency. He would mutter as Dad paid him, then fall into his taxi and disappear into Victoria Street. I tried to never be there. I was asleep, or at a friend's house, perhaps out running the 5-a.m. streets, all the while counting 1,2 in, 1, 2, 3, out as Jimmy Barnes and Michael Hutchence sang Mary into my headset: We're gonna have a good time tonight. Just the right speed for running like I needed to, that song. Back where I tried to never be, Dad chanted vegemite legs, vegemite legs as he lifted you up and your legs dragged on the carpet and he wept you up the stairs and shut the door.No he didn't. I just made that up. He spoke that only one time, in a whisper, when he thought he was alone in the kitchen, me quietly at his back, tying the laces on my running shoes and eyes on the back door. Those words of his, they whistled across the kitchen tiles then smashed into the sink; broke all the dishes stacked there because nobody had been home for three days, and I hadn't got to cleaning them yet. Didn't need to clean them, after you made him scream so quiet like that, vegemite legs, I just threw those plates away. …

On the Origin and Invariance of the Genetic Assignments as Elementary Semiotic Controls: A Basic Hypothesis

In this paper we hope to place the two basic facts of life, constant active self – maintenance and self – reproduction, into a fresh light. The basic idea is considering the genetic assignments as a „biological invariant of motion”, the latter forming a hierarchically produced, „self - constructing”, regressive time inversion symmetry restoration, a closed semantic real – time upbuilding loop. It is, actually, the predetermined future of the biological system. It is this, in fact, what gives birth to the above strange fact of determined self – maintenance and, as its derived consequence, „self” – reproduction, as the symmery attained. It is carried out in a mediated, „weak” self – reference loop, as a natural prerequisite for the invariance of the genetic code as a „biological invariant of motion”. Being an involved and dubious case, as it is usual, we mainly concentrate on its origin. We suppose a special type of quantum measurement as the original assignation mechanism, with a usual concomitant time inversion symmetry breaking. Symmetry restoring, in fact, is a semiotic control process of the genetic code, the process tentatively conceived to be the living (biological) state of matter.

“And Thence from Jerusalems Ruins”: Romantic Prophecy and the End(s) of History

AbstractSeveral comprehensive and influential studies of Romanticism in the 1950s, 60s and 70s paid special attention to the role of prophecy as an aesthetic and psychological framework for reading the major Romantic poets – Keats, Byron and Coleridge but especially Wordsworth, Shelley and Blake. One of the goals of this paper is to suggest that this interest, perhaps now seen as somewhat dated, is not so much past as sublated in several more contemporary studies. As recent work illustrates, prophecy remains a vital phenomenon for reading Romanticism, though realizing its full potential means imagining the concept anew. Once rethought, prophecy offers a productive focus for reconsidering the interrelation of major topics in Romanticism including the imagination, representation, subjectivity, performativity and history – all of which are touched on below. This topic is particularly important today when prevailing attitudes toward the future seem divided between either a fascination with the non‐future of apocalyptic annihilation – whether natural or supernatural – or the perpetuation of history's “end” in neoliberal capitalism, an opposition Fredric Jameson expresses as the strange fact that today “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (199). The hope here is that a review of Romantic prophecy may inspire more varied and creative responses to contemporary thought about what is and is not possible for art and history. What follows is a kind of biography of the philosophical life of prophecy that takes account of how the concept is serially revised as it is assimilated by different literary‐critical movements from approximately the 1950s to the present day. This is not to say that there is a simply linear development in the thinking of the phenomenon; rather, and most interestingly, different notions of prophecy overlap with each other, producing a palimpsest indicating multiple, simultaneous levels of significance. Nor is this paper a comprehensive catalogue of critical work on Romantic prophecy – this would require much more time. Rather, it attempts to sketch out some of the most important and interesting directions scholarship on this topic has taken over the past few decades.

Sneaking Through the Backdoor -- Reflections on Public Interest in International Investment Arbitration

We are becoming more and more familiar with a simple but seemingly convincible narrative of international investment law: It is powerful – it bestows non-State actors with international rights that bite, it provides for rather effective mechanisms of international adjudication and enforcement – but it neglects the public interest.1 Whether or not this is a laudable pattern is much disputed and for the sake of this contribution I will leave it at that.2 The oddity that international investment arbitration as well as Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs)3 do not pay much attention to public interest concerns remains noteworthy nonetheless. As Gus van Harten4 has argued so forcefully, international investment arbitration exhibits most traits which characterize public law adjudication – above all, judicial control of the exercise of public authority and (public law) remedies for the abuse of such authority in the form of effectively enforceable damages.5 Hence, a public law (adjudication) system that does not pay much attention to public interest appears a strange fact. However, a widespread consensus does seem to exist that this is actually a fact.6 As the title suggests, I want to challenge that. My conclusion from the analysis of selected investment arbitration case law will be the following: While on the surface, investment tribunals reject or even refuse to consider public law issues on the merits, those arguments reappear where it actually counts – on the level of compensation and damages. Tribunals do not grant much prominence to public interest considerations and arguments when discussing and measuring the amount of damages; in fact they hardly even mention them. Nevertheless, I will argue that by setting extremely high standards or otherwise considerably lowering the amount of damages or compensation, the arbitrators implicitly take strong account of the public interest at hand. …

VISITING THE VIRTUOSO IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN: THE CASE OF JUAN DE ESPINA

VISITING THE VIRTUOSO IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN: THE CASE OF JUAN DE ESPINA

Strange facts about the marginal distributions of processes based on the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process

The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process is particularly useful for modeling stochastic processes in financial applications. Furthermore, functions of such a process can be used to model random volatility of other processes, resulting in more flexible models for financial risk variables. The distribution of such a financial risk variable is of particular interest in value-at-risk analysis. As we know, the far quantiles of the distribution function provide information on the level of capital reserves required to accommodate extreme stress situations. This paper presents an approximation for the distribution function that works surprisingly well, even for the far tails of the distribution of levels as small as 10.7. While theoretically unjustified and strange, it may still be very useful in practice.

The (little known) contribution of Brentano for humanistic psychotherapies

This text is proposed to discuss, between those who are linked to phenomenology, the strange fact of that, in contrast of what happens to Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, few of them seem to recognize the important contribution of Franz Brentano for humanistic psychotherapies. Although he was not a psychologist, Brentano was dedicated to psychology and, as a precursor of phenomenology, he was a pioneer of fundamental questions that, currently, cross the epistemological and philosophical bases of phenomenological and humanistic approaches in psychotherapy. Thus, the text discusses his theory of intentionality, the Act-Psychology and the Philosophy of the Present as meaningful contributions to the practice of humanis- tic psychotherapies.

Darwin’s changing views on evolution: from centres of origin and teleology to vicariance and incomplete lineage sorting

AbstractIt is a strange fact that in many ways the first edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is closer to modern neodarwinism than the sixth and last edition. Sometimes this is attributed to a decline in the quality of the argument, but the opposite interpretation is given here. It is suggested that Darwin’s early work on evolution is naïve and based on the two creationist principles of centre of origin and teleology (panselectionism). This fusion later became the ‘modern synthesis’. However, after the first edition of the Origin, Darwin developed a non‐teleological synthesis that integrated natural selection with what he called ‘laws of growth’– phylogenetic/morphogenetic trends or tendencies. Discussion of Darwin’s later, more sophisticated model of evolution has been suppressed in the teleological modern synthesis, but similar ideas are re‐emerging in current work on molecular phylogenetics and biogeography. This indicates that the ancestor of a group can be diverse in its morphology and its ecology, that this diversity can be inherited, and that groups usually originate over a broad region and not at a single point.

‘Why genomes in pieces?’ revisited: Sucking lice do their own thing in mtDNA circle game

About 30 yr ago, an organizational nightmare emerged in the budding field of genomics. Several independent groups discovered that the genetic information encoding genes was not arranged in a continuous linear format of adjacent nucleotides. To everyone's surprise, the coding information for proteins was interrupted by noncoding sequences that were removed from initial RNA transcripts before translation continued the job of the central dogma: information transfer from DNA to RNA to protein. Walter Gilbert made sense of all of this (Gilbert 1978) when, in a few hundred words, he coined the terms intron and exon, predicted that the protein coding content of genomes would comprise only a fraction of the total DNA, triggered the “introns-early” versus “introns-late” debate, and set the seed for the notion that RNA was the early form genetic material. The field of genomics survived this chaos and now relishes these confusing disruptions, where our understanding of how the world works is turned on its head by some odd fact. In hindsight, there often seems to be an appealing reason for why a genome would engage in something so illogical. Gilbert suggested that introns facilitate higher rates of per-gene recombination, promoting diversity and permitting faster evolutionary change (Gilbert 1978). Some of the biggest questions in genomics today are focusing on phenomena that we might never have imagined only a generation ago: epigenetic modification of expression and transmission, microRNAs and RNA interference, arms of sex chromosomes and autosomes jumping ship and going over to the other side, among others. One might think that all strange facts of genome organization and expression should have been discovered by now, but even in the heavily scrutinized world of mitochondrial genomics, fascinating novelties are still emerging. The study by Shao et al. (2009) in this issue, reports an almost comical departure from the standard single-circle mitochondrial genome organization found in most animals. It appears that sucking lice associated with humans—and not other lice—have evolved a multiple minichromosome organization for mtDNA that begs the question: Why genomes in pieces? This same question has been asked before in the context of mtDNA organization (Landweber 2007), but animals were not the topic of concern. Departures from the “standard” single-circle mtDNA organization have been observed in protists, such as Diplonema, where genes (and notably parts of genes) are fragmented across many minicircles (Marande and Burger 2007). In the Kinetoplastida (a group including Trypanosomes), mitochondrial genes are distributed among thousands of catenated circles in a network of mini- and maxicircles (for review, see Lukes et al. 2002). Across all of eukaryotic biodiversity, the “standard” single-circle mtDNA may in fact not be the standard, but in animals it is indeed the norm that highlights Shao et al.'s intriguing exception.

Review: Politics of Englishness

Only fifteen years ago I published an essay called The Sense of Identity of the Indigenous British' which was among the first to draw attention to the confusion of Englishness with Britishness among the English. I noted the abundance of books on national identities (Irish, Scottish, and Welsh certainly) other than Englishness. I pointed to subject catalogues of major libraries as bibliographic proof. And I offered as explanation for this strange fact that historically the main political business of the English governing class since 1707 had been holding the United Kingdom together; therefore to develop a state cult of English nationalism, even as the time when everyone else was beating the drum (notably 1793, 1845 an 1919), would have been counter­ productive. I even praised the old gentlemanly Tories, as distinct from the new arriviste Thatcherites, for being historically aware that it was a United Kingdom and not England writ-large. Not for them Thatcher's famous and spontaneous invention of a country called 'Here-in-England-oh-sorry-I meanScotland'.

Getting Over the Denial of Aging

The of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies. By Muriel R. Gillick. Harvard University Press, 2006. 341 pages. Hardcover, $25.95. There's an old vaudeville joke that goes Denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt. It's no joke to say that books denouncing will always be timely, and none is more timely that Muriel Gillick's The of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies. Like Freud, she wants to disabuse us of our magical thinking about old and put in its place the reality principle. She's got her work cut out for her. Let's start with a depressing statistic. Each year, sales of antiaging nostrums break new records--more than six billion dollars last year--a strange fact when you realize that, in terms of scientific efficacy, there is no such thing as antiaging medicine. It gets worse. Today there are more doctors in the United States who are members of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine than there are board-certified geriatricians, while training of new geriatricians lags far behind the need. Health care professionals are poorly prepared for the age boom soon to be upon us--a precarious situation at a time when more than eight thousand baby boomers are turning sixty each day. For these reasons, Gillick's book could not appear at a better time. We should send a copy to every member of Congress, as well as to all those doctors peddling bogus antiaging remedies. Readers need her message more than ever, but, alas, they seem unlikely to hear it at all as they rush to pick up prescriptions for human growth hormone, antioxidants, or other dangerous fantasies that Gillick decries. Hey, it's a six billion dollar a year business and growing fast! It's enough to make one give up on the idea of autonomy (or the marketplace?) in the pursuit of health. The facts about so-called antiaging medicine are clear enough. No interventions have ever been shown to slow or reverse the biological process of aging. None. Or perhaps there's one exception: caloric restriction--that is, eating less. This drastic approach has long been proven to work with every lower organism on which it has been tried. But it means eating a lot less if you want to live longer: say eighteen hundred calories a day for the average person. Experiments with primates are now underway, but their long lifespan means the jury is still out. Yet even before our current epidemic of obesity, caloric restriction was never popular with Americans. Other remedies for aging will hit your pocketbook and perhaps damage your health with side effects (cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.), but they will fail to do what their promoters promise. Still, the quest goes on, as Ponce de Leon would have understood. Indeed, even many serious biologists believe that, before long, basic biological research may yield clues to slow the process of aging. Whether such innovations could or should take place is not Muriel Gillick's concern, nor is it the focus of this review. Gillick writes as an experienced practitioner of geriatric medicine, and she's at her best in chapters focused on that topic. But she also wants to offer advice to her fellow aging baby boomers: ... if baby boomers are to have a good old age, we will need to stop squandering resources on tests and treatments that offer little or no benefit (p. 12). Her main message appears at the beginning of the book. If we want a good old age, we need to start early--hence preventive medicine and health promotion are the way to go. But it's not easy to travel that road. Gillick believes we're spending our health care resources on all the wrong things--such as attacking uncommon and incurable conditions--while we ignore prosaic problems, like falls and social isolation, that are damaging but within our power to fix. By the time we join the ranks of the worried well, boomers who believe in autonomy will be demanding more and more screening tests. …