The book I'm reading now is Davy Fosty Wally's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which is a logic-heavy look at the history of the mathematical concept of infinity, starting with the Greeks through Cantor until the present day. I've only read about half of the foreward, but being the sort of who enjoys this type of nonfiction I'm enjoying it, and it's renewed the love affair with DFW that was cut so cruelly short by my hatred of Infinite Jest (though I remain very,very fond of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men).

This book isn't for everyone. On the BCR staff alone, PClem wouldn't touch it, Jaimee wouldn't like it, and Ezra would either really dig it or else feed it to his dogs -- but Tom would probably enjoy it well enough, and when I was in college I took courses in symbolic logic for fun, so I'm down with it.

Since I haven't read the book, obviously I can't talk much about it, but I thought he had something perceptive to say about flying, the fear of, and the principle of induction:

For instance, we know that in a certain number of cases every year cars suddenly veer across the centerline into oncoming traffic and crash head-on into people who were driving along not expecting to get kiilled; and thus we also know, on some level, that whatever confidence lets us drive on two-way roads is not 100% rationally justified by the laws of statistical probability. And yet 'rational justification' might not apply here. It might be more the fact that, if you cannot believe your car won't suddenly get crashed into out of nowhere, you just can't drive, and thus your need/desire to drive fuctions as a kind of justification of your confidence (footnote 8).

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footnote 8: A compelling parallel here is the fact that most of us fly despite knowing that a definite percentage of commercial airliners crash every year...Plus it involves etitquette, since commercial air travel is public and a kind of group confidence comes into play. This is why turning to inform your seatmate of the precise statistical probability of your plane crashing is not false but cruel: you are messing with the delicate psychological infrastructure of her justification for flying.

Depending on mood/time, it might strike you are interesting that people who cannot summon this strange faith in principles that cannot be rationally justified, and so cannot fly, are commonly referred to as having an 'irrational fear' of flying. [emphasis mine]

I should have a lot of interesting things to think about on my flight back to Greensboro on Monday.