Just finished "The Complete Robot" and started "The Caves of Steel", both by Isaac Asimov. Will probably read all the Foundation-related books once again now.

(Thanks to SekeRob who's been dropping Hari Seldon quotes and hints all over the forum recently, which made me dig out these books )

thanks

Leonardo's To-Do List


Here's something you can't do every day: How about you and I slip into Leonardo da Vinci's head for moment? Deep in. Thanks to historian Toby Lester, we can
In a book soon to be published,

Lester says Leonardo used to travel with a small notebook hanging from his belt, and "whenever something caught his eye," he would make a note, or begin "sketching furiously."
"It is useful," Leonardo wrote, to "constantly observe, note, and consider." But when you are Leonardo, what sorts of things are buzzing around in your head? Well, Toby Lester describes what is essentially a "To Do" list buried in one of those notebooks, a bunch of things Leonardo planned to do one week, or month, in the early 1490's.
I know what my To Do list would look like, and it would look nothing, not even remotely like this one.
Here's what was on his mind, stuff he wanted to do. This is a direct translation, with my amendments in brackets:

An excellent book to read in keeping with our scientific goals.




Publisher’s synopsis: A critically important and startling look at the harmful effects of overusing antibiotics, from the field’s leading expert.

Tracing one scientist’s journey toward understanding the crucial importance of the microbiome, this revolutionary book will take readers to the forefront of trail-blazing research while revealing the damage that overuse of antibiotics is doing to our health: contributing to the rise of obesity, asthma, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now, this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances -- antibiotics -- threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences. Taking us into both the lab and deep into the fields where these troubling effects can be witnessed firsthand, Blaser not only provides cutting edge evidence for the adverse effects of antibiotics, he tells us what we can do to avoid even more catastrophic health problems in the future.