
Mstation Book Reviews
pre Dec 04 reviews are here
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Mon, 04 Jul 2005
Allison Arieff, Bryan Burkhardt, Spa, Taschen Do males go to spas? I don't know. In every photo you ever see there's usually a pretty female reclining in some sort of liquid with, maybe, cucumbers covering her eyes. I'm quite curious about this. Maybe the blokes are banished to a beer shed or something ... or maybe the next town. The way they're depicted, they're a sort of opposite to, say, a rugby tour of New Zealand or one of those faraway fishing places or anywhere for grownups with "camp" in the name. Anyway, this is a big beautiful book about spas around the world. It is primarily pictorial but there are descriptions for each of the eighty-three spas that are featured. They are in all parts of the world -- Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Caribbean, Europe, North America, South Pacific, and Mexico and South America. As you make your way through you will discover the mention of one celebrity male -- Robert De Niro in connection with Shambhala at Parrot Quay. The object of course, for the humans involved, is beautification and purification, and so some pains have been gone to with all these places to make them attractive and soothing and generally good for the old bien-etre. And all of that makes for some pretty pictures. If you are actually in the market to go to such a place then this book might be an excellent place to go to sort out the contenders.
Review of The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the UniverseLaura ConradRoger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, Knopf Roger Penrose states in the preface of this book, "The purpose of this book is to convey to the reader some feeling for what is surely one of the most important and exciting voyages of discovery that humanity has embarked upon." He then procedes to justify his inclusion of mathematical formulas, but to advise the reader, "Do not be afraid to skip equations (I do this frequently myself) and, if you wish, whole chapters or parts of chapters, when they begin to gget a mite too turgid!" He also says, "My hope is that the extensive cross-referencing may suficiently illuminate unfamiliar notions, so it should be possible to track down needed concepts and notation by turning back to earlier unread sections for clarification." The first thing you may notice about this description of how to read the book is that it isn't much like bedtime reading. For a book to be good bedtime reading, it needs to meet several conditions:
We find that the force is: Of course this is not exact. What we really want is the limit as gets smaller and smaller, because it is only exactly right in the limit ofinfinitesimal . This we recognize as the derivative of with respect to , and we would be inclined, therefore to write . But depends on , , and , and the mathematicians have invented a different symbol to remind us to be very careful when we are differentiating such a function, so as to remember that we are considering that only varies, and , and do not vary. Instead of a they simply make a "backwards 6", or . (A should have been used in the beginning of calculus because we always want to cancel that , but we never want to cancel a !) So they write , and furthermore, in moments of duress, if they want to be very careful, they put a line beside it with a little at the bottom ( ), which means "Take the derivative of with respect to , keeping and constant." Most often we leave out the remark about what is kept constant because it is usually evident from the context, so we usually do not use the line with the and . However, always use a instead of a as a warning that it is a derivative with some other variables kept constant. This is called a partial derivative; it is a derivative in which we vary only .And in Penrose, it's in Chapter 10, "Surfaces": I have not yet explained what 'differentiability' is to mean for a function of more than one variable. Although intuitively clear, the precise definition is a little too technical for me to go into thoroughly here. Some clarifying comments are nevertheless appropriate. First of all, for be [sic] differentiable, as a function of the pair of variables , it is certainly necessary that if we consider in its capacity as a function of only the one variable , where is held to some constant value, then this function must be smooth (at least ), as a function of , in the sense of functions of a single variable (see §6.3); moreover, if we consider as a function of just the one variable , where it is that is now to be held constant, then it must be smooth ( ) as a function of . However, this is far from sufficient. There are many functions which are separately smooth in and in , but for which would be quite unreasonable to call smooth in the . A sufficient additional requirement for smoothness is that the derivatives with respect to and separately are each continuous functions of the pair . Similar statements ... would hold if we consider functions of more than two variables. We use the 'partial derivative' symbol to denote differentiation with respect to one variable, holding the other(s) fixed. The partial derivatives of with respect to and with respect to , respectively, are written and (As an example, we note that if , then and .) If these quantities exist and are continuous, then we say that is a ( ) smooth function on the surface.Note that this appears on page 183-4, the definitions of smoothness are on page 110. You can find this from the index. My guess is that if you don't already have some idea of why you want to know what a partial derivative is, you won't make it through either quote very easily. But I think you'd have a lot better chance of figuring out what it is from the Feynman explanation. I was hoping when I read about the Penrose book that it would be as interesting and well-written as I had found the Feynman book, but have the stuff that's been done in the forty years since the Feynman book was written. It does indeed have some of that stuff, but I think the reader will have to be very determined indeed to get to it. I don't see any chance at all of someone who isn't already excited about modern physics becoming so by reading this book. File translated from TEX by TTM, version 3.68. On 30 Jun 2005, 18:07.
various, A Pocket Guide to O'Reilly Animals, O'Reilly (free) This is a nice little free guide to the animals used on O'Reilly covers, complete with an explanation by Tim O'Reilly about how the series came to be. Each animal has a page with an illustration and information about it including its degree of endangerment. At the bottom of the pages, there are discreet little ads about the books that have that animal on its cover. It's in the pocket book format, and should be available from larger stores.
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, Penguin This is newish in paperback but has been out for a while in hardback. Also, the publisher is different in the USA I think. Our copy came from the UK. William Gibson first surfaced in a big way with 1984's Neuromancer, with big thoughts and concepts with punk sensibilities. Since then there really haven't been ideas with the scope of Neuromancer's (the Net!) but more an examination, usually in a near dystopian future, of some way in which things aren't working too well. In this novel we're right in an undefined present (Putin is the only head of state mentioned) and we scoot around between NYC, London, Tokyo, and Moscow while on a mission. The mission involves cult video footage, spys and demi-gangsters, and a cool and very likeable female protaginist. The flow is nice and the descriptions, just as in other Gibson books, occasionally inspired. Characters are getting more fully developed these days and aren't just attitude on a stick or plot handholds. I like the quote from one of the characters towards the end "I think it's all actually about the money for him." He grimaces. "Ultimately I find that that was the whole problem, with most of the dot-com people ..."
Mike Hally, Electronic Brains: stories from the dawn of the computer age, www.granta.com This was originally a radio series broadcast by the BBC and this book is an enlargement of the script into a series of stories that cover the USA, UK, Russia, and Australia. As we go through there is a quest to see who was first. It's not just about the machines though. There is a fair bit of context as well to give us a greater feel for what was happening and we make our way around the world following the realpolitik of the World Wars and the Cold War and the personalities who range from inspired dreamer to cut throat business people -- as it ever was. One of the interesting things is the juxtaposition of the clueless of that time with the globalists of today: if you miss out on a technology boat, it hardly matters because of the movement of bits between various parts of the world. If your homegrown companies are all taken over by a foreign behemoth, who should worry? Yes, well, we don't deal with the Alfred E. Newmans (Mad magazine!) of the world further except to say ... oh, you know, what Will Robinson's robot said. So anyway, there is a fair balance of the clueless and the cluefull in the book and it all makes very entertaining reading. The only thing I found annoying was the dismissal of Turing as being too aiery-faery (not a quote from the book) to be of relevance to these wrench-whirlers. Perhaps he wasn't a direct influence on the mechanical work but his thoughts and dreams of intelligent machines almost certainly were, even if indirectly. Another thing I get tired of is the constant reference these days to his sexuality. Is this the tabloid mind at work? What possible relevance does it have? Some people will say "well, he committed suicide because of it, and thus a great career was brought short". Except that he left no evidence of his state of mind, only a portion of apple soaked in cyanide.
Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall Summer vacation/holidays coming up and we're reviewing a textbook? It is indeed, and a very widely used one at that. But never fear, when texts aren't read under the dumbed-down hammer of continuous assessment, they can actually be fun. I've had a habit for a while of scanning the shelves in computer sections looking for a good, fairly all-purpose book, that acted as an introduction but also took you on a fair journey through what has been done and what is happening now. This book does those things and is also written in a way that is engaging. The book first looks at the question of what AI is and then goes on to problem solving and knowledge and reasoning, planning, uncertainty or fuzziness, learning and perception. Leaving aside philosophical questions about any of this (which will bring everything to a grinding halt but questions of "right" and "wrong" do have to be addressed at some stage), this is as good a guide as there is. One appealling thing about this area of study is that it hasn't all been done yet. There has been a huge amount of work done but the early breakthroughs that were expected have not come so, in addition to the fine tuning of improved academic hypothesis in existing areas there's also the possibility of great logical leaps being rewarded. |