Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Ego -- Index card #1 -- What's the point of striving? -- Goals for August 30, 1990 -- Truth and ego -- My father's book collection -- The fleeting exhilaration of big honors -- World Cup football and life -- The Copernican Principle and my job -- Fame and pinging -- Kids -- Why are sleeping babies so hard to wake? -- Adults' and children's visceral feelings -- Children and sailors -- France and England, men and women -- A day in the life of Emma at Oxford -- Safe biking with Jacob -- Chewing on guns, germs, and steel -- How to bring back your childhood -- Jacob and my beard -- Aging and Death -- The horror of middle age -- The chief preoccupation of adult life -- Writing and aging -- Why women live longer than men -- Life after death -- The diversity of old age -- The dual of age -- Graceful aging -- Carpe diem is just the first step -- Aging and accidents -- How full is my bowl of ice cream? -- Sex -- A girl is beautiful to me -- Cross-country skiing and sex -- Male and female sex drive -- To a loved one in Europe -- Looking at babies and looking at women -- Food and sex drives -- Cats playing with string -- Bodies attract -- At the Gauguin exhibit -- Living with Others -- One thing you can count on -- Lifelines nexus -- The Palo Alto bike trapper strikes again -- Tourism and tolerance -- The hostility of a new environment -- Lovers and strangers -- What do my friends think of her? -- 100-50 or 50-100? -- Chutzpah in our back garden -- Too cold? Too hot? -- Living with a geek -- The Meaning of Life -- Intelligence and survival -- Suicide in the future -- Is there anything worth talking about? -- The meaning of life -- The meaningfulness of meaninglessness -- Pretending there's a meaning (or not) -- Hard work and immortality -- Politics and Society -- Girl friends and girlfriends -- Class and clothes.

Voting in a population of millions -- Bribes and legal fees -- The Jetsons -- Honors and prizes -- Compulsory voting -- Mobile phone instruction manual -- Tall trees as an explanation of capitalism -- Cold War Nukes -- St. Louis and Sverdlovsk -- Expected time to holocaust -- What's wrong with extinction? -- Seatbelts, handguns, cigarettes, nukes -- Leaders are followers, too -- Political exhaustion -- AIDS and nuclear war -- Nuclear weapons and nuclear power -- SDI and contraception -- Education -- Continuous assessment -- The literary bias in education -- In praise of easy learning -- Good test takers -- How Oxford gets it backwards -- Bits of information in an Oxford degree -- Quality vs. quantity in British academia -- Is private schooling immoral? -- Clinton and Blair at Balliol -- Britain -- Electrocution in British bathrooms -- A conspiracy of comma splices -- British pronunciation of American names -- Baseball and cricket -- Towels in Japan, kickstands in England -- American and British: the advanced quiz -- Famous Oxford -- More time Catholic or Protestant? -- Kublai Khan and the age of Oxford -- Famous People -- Who was John Stuart Mill kidding? -- B. F. Skinner -- Antonio Salieri and old furniture -- Noam Chomsky -- Greg Sheehan, Bill Gates, and Napoleon -- Shoeless Joe Jackson -- Piet Hein's grooks -- Jesus Christ's curriculum vitae -- The hedgehog, the fox, and Beethoven -- Thomas Edison the physician -- Strang, Knuth, and Lax -- Optimizing Your Life -- Marriage vow -- The paradox of effort -- A watched to-do list never boils -- Zenogrook -- Probabilistic analysis of my commute -- Not touch typing -- Why life is exhausting -- Oubliette -- Advice for the young -- Bondage is easier than discipline -- Workaholic -- The advantages of an optimal life -- Physics, psychology, and Petter Bjørstad -- The Life of the Professor.

Academic distractions -- Zooming in, zooming out -- My office at MIT -- Academics vs. politics -- Shredder -- The diameter of intellectual space -- Ten themes of how I do research -- Music -- One of my greatest wishes -- Invention or discovery? -- Music vs. speech -- Randomness in art -- 1D, 2D, 3D musical instruments -- Pure and applied music -- The future of the cinema -- Words -- Common denominator -- Unspellable and unpronounceable -- Stock market meltdown -- Which animals are also verbs? -- An irregular singular -- Stet -- Trefethen record adjectives number -- Wizards and Wallahs in Windows -- Caution: race horses -- Centripetal like I -- Paste in the taste -- Writing and Literature -- Good and bad writing -- On being edited -- Literary allusions instead of analysis -- Novels make life worth living -- Mathematical abstraction vs. literary art -- Authorship as fixed point iteration -- Men who scribble and men who mutter -- A mathematical model of good writing -- One more for Strunk & White -- The advantages of obscurity in writing -- The appearance of inconsistency -- Memory -- I can't distinguish a book from a movie -- Looking glass memories -- My brain is not nearly full -- Lifelong memories of baby teeth -- Fox hunt -- A spoonerism in Spooner's house -- A multiplicity of mnemonics -- Misperceptions -- Am I awake or dreaming? -- Alcohol and marijuana, hawks and dogs -- My clock has a foreign accent -- Rubber gloves illusion -- Y and Z on a German typewriter -- Putting caps on pens -- Coffee pots and prejudice -- Car accidents and the tails of distributions -- Is this a man or a woman? -- Knowledge and Truth -- Where astonishing things come from -- In defense of jargon -- On the value of philosophy -- The better part of validity -- Discussion, opinion, and truth -- The itch to enumerate -- Oft thought, but e'er so well expressed?.

Final causes and instability -- How can so many things be so important? -- Calibrating a colleague -- An optical illusion -- Philosophical rigor and molecular physics -- Will the sun rise tomorrow? -- Analogies -- Morality and swimming pools -- Antonymy, dissonance, nonsense, humor -- Nature vs. nurture of societies -- How analogies work -- Meaning, communication, fitness, survival -- Evaporation and the brain drain -- Trickles, streams, and floods of money -- Why is a bus like a microwave oven? -- Good language and good wine -- An analogy should be imperfect -- Purple monkey dishwasher -- Bad Logic -- Where babies come from -- Why don't Americans wear seatbelts? -- Bad logic in a good cause I -- Bad logic in a good cause II -- Math prerequisites for public office -- Achieving world peace -- No need to wear a bike helmet -- The last bug -- A theorem of E. O. Wilson -- Do needles inject drugs? -- Non-monotonic logic on British Rail -- God and Religion -- There is no God -- But is He useful? -- An explanation of haloes -- Resolution of Pascal's wager -- Bluejays, gargoyles, and creationism -- God as a scientist, or farmer -- Belief in God -- Irreligious intolerance -- Ontological grook -- Existence of God -- existence of secretaries -- Might God be a woman? -- Religion as carbon monoxide -- Jesus Christ and the gold standard -- Good and Evil -- Evil -- The evil of murder, the beauty of woman -- Moral imperative as infinite regress -- Reward in heaven -- Morals cannot rule on little things -- Subway ethics -- Can an adult sin? -- Responsibility decays with distance -- Wickedness and destruction -- Tugging on an asteroid -- 300,000 graduates a year -- Science -- The future is determined -- Sensitivity to initial conditions -- Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny -- A principle of good science -- Fractal structure of scientific revolutions.

Hubris and meta-hubris -- Genuine data -- My father's definition of a boat -- Large and small parameters -- Stars and Planets -- Stars and constellations -- Planetarium illusion -- Constellations in the coffee shop -- Extraterrestrial life and the speed of light -- The fluid earth -- How far is Perth from Boston? -- Life on planets of other suns -- Millennium fireworks -- The other moon illusion -- Mathematics -- Why are numbers so important? -- The sparseness of mathematical concepts -- What numerical analysis is about -- Knowing what we're talking about -- Money and numbers, apples and oranges -- Digits of π as a function of time -- Mathematical Engineering -- The spectrum from pure to applied -- Discrete and continuous -- Two unsolved problems of mathematics -- The obscurity of numerical analysis -- Unsolved problem of numerical analysis -- Rigor in 20th century mathematics -- Marx and mathematics -- How to think unrigorously -- What does it mean to solve a problem? -- Mathematics and fracture mechanics -- Big Numbers -- Annihilating 50 million people -- Explaining my position in humanity -- Ten billion -- Beyond Roman numerals -- Music and megabytes -- One way to put together 1044 pieces -- Molecules and floating point numbers -- The speed of light is an integer -- Four bugs on a rectangle -- Mathematics and Science in Everyday Life -- Ill-conditioning in Leicester Square -- Why do lights reflect as streaks in a river? -- Human particles in spatial equilibrium -- Crockery, cutlery, and conductivity -- 50 watt vs. 100 watt light bulbs -- The Sisyphyus function -- Splines of iron -- Marital Doppler -- Multimedia encounter at Rhodes Hall -- Pitcairn Island: a paradise for Muslims -- Why did we buy an oboe but rent a cello? -- Why more women than men have AIDS -- The mathematics of spinsterhood -- Inventions -- Improved rules of Scrabble.

Fibonacci currency.