It's Always More Complicated

The Great Barrier Reef lovingly recreated in a giant piece of crochet? :

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef came about by accident. Wertheim read about a discovery by a mathematician called Daina Taimina: that you could model hyperbolic space using crochet, simply by increasing the number of stitches in each row until the fabric warps. Mathematicians had previously struggled to demonstrate hyperbolic surfaces, despite the fact that they appear throughout the natural world - in lettuce leaves, for example.

Wertheim was so inspired that she picked up a crochet hook for the first time in 20 years, and encouraged her sister to do the same. It was Christine, a lecturer in feminism and popular culture at the California Institute of the Arts, who noticed how all the pieces of crochet accumulating on the sisters' coffee table looked like coral. Wertheim recalls her sister saying: "We could crochet a coral reef."

When it was first discovered more than 60 years ago, Asperger's syndrome was thought to be a male-only condition. But now that more and more girls are being diagnosed with it, why do we hear so little about them. I'm just a bit bothered by this:

[W]omen with autism often struggle at work because they lack what is often taken for granted in women - the intuitive ability to understand where people are coming from and how to manage situations. Because of subtle sex differences, we tend to "expect" more of women in the workplace in terms of smoothing things over, of saying the right thing; and whereas we would excuse a man who lacked these abilities, we are subliminally a lot less forgiving of a woman who has similar shortcomings.

Also on expectations of wymmyn and in particular their bodies: Why has Fern Britton's decision to have a gastric band fitted caused such a huge fuss? Kira Cochrane on how high-profile women's bodies became public property

From today's Guardian Review:

A very nice piece by Annie Proulx debunking the myth of the Old West and the frontier.

Review of Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather: interesting, but I'm dubious about the constant invocation of Padel's status as a poet. 'Only a poetic imagination could have...', As a poet Padel is emotionally explicit...': does this follow?

Another review of Sybille Bedford's Quicksands.

Simon Baron-Cohen reviews Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behaviour - though he seems to be claiming it also does the reverse:

Her second big focus is a new theory of autism. She argues that the autistic mind is closer to the animal mind than it is to the typical human mind when it comes to perception of detail. This last thesis will be most controversial, but it opens up a whole new way of understanding autism.

A review of the book on Christine Evert and Martina Navratilova (as mentioned in article cited earlier this week).

And a tempting review of the paperback edition of Michael Wood's The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles, a work that featured for quite a while on my Amazon reclist but seems to have dropped off.