Mstation Book Reviews
pre Dec 04 reviews are here

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21st Century House AI for Games Developers AI: a modern approach Ableton Live Tr Acoustics and Psychacoustics Adicolor Ajax Ajax: Pragmatic Ajax Akutagawa Algorithms Ambient Findability Art of Computer Programming Asterisk: telephony Babylon's Burning Backup and Recovery (yes you!) Bad Monkeys Banana Yoshimoto, Amrita Baseball Hacks Bob Dylan Bohemia visited? Bollywood Bryson's Shakespeare Building PC's Building the Perfect PC C in a Nutshell CSS: the missing manual Carl Hiaasen Case Study Houses Clash, The Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga Computer Security Conscience of a Liberal Corbijn's U2 Country House Cubicle Toys DJ Handbook DJ biz handbook Data Crunching Debian System Desert Island Music Design Patterns Devices of the Soul Diary of John Evelyn Digital Art - Digipop Digital Audio Digital Photography Pocket Guide Dog Murder and the Geek Dumas, Women's War Ebay Hacks Electronic Brains Ellis Lunar Everyman Extreme PC's Final Cut Pro Firefox Hacks Firefox and Thunderbird Food book! Freakonomics Future of Tech Game Console Hacking: Game Design Complete Games: Developing Racing Games Garageband 2 Geek Chic Gibson, Pattern Recognition Gibson, Spook Country Goggle Story Google Advertising Google Apps Graffitti Woman Hacker Manifesto Hacking Vim Heroin Diaries Icky Food Iggy Pop In the Mood for Food Interface-Oriented Design J.D.Bernal JPod Jane's Addiction Jane's Addiction paperback Japanese for Travellers Java History Javascript Jazz Kiki Strike LA: Heart of Darkness Le Dossier Letters to a young mathematician Linux Multimedia Hacks Linux Networks Linux Quick Fix Notebook Linux Troubleshooting Linux, Moving to and a Guide to Mac Music Mac OS X Powerhound Mac OS X Tiger Mac OS X for Unix Geeks Madonna Make - the magazine Make 3 Make vol. 02 Make: the book Makers Malice Box Masters of Doom Mind Performance Hacks Molesworth Motion Blur Music Business Guide Music Writing 2005 My New Mac Mystics Myths of Innovation NYC Rock Network Security Hacks New Media Art New RSS system and Feeds Nicholas Fouquet Ninachka: the making of an Englishwoman No Place to Hide Nureyev O'Reilly Animals Open Sources 2.0 Opus Dei PGP and GPG PHP in a Nutshell PSP Hacks Parallel Worlds Pardon My French Penrose, Road to Reality Philip K. Dick Podcasting Hacks Podcasting Pocket Guide Point and Click Linux Powerful Times Python Cookbook QuickTime for Java Quicksilver RSS and Atom Feeds Raymond Chandler Record Label Marketing Reformation Rendezvous in Venice Retro Gaming Hacks Revolution in the Valley Rimbaud: Wyatt Mason Rock Me Amadeus Rule of Four Rules of Life Running Mac OS X Tiger Sci-Fi Moviescapes Secret Life of Trees Silence on the Wire Skateboard Art Smartphone Hacks Sonic Youth Soros - the age of anti-Bush Sound Mixing Sound Recording Sound Recording Practice Sound System Engineering Sound and Recording Spa Spam not Steal this Computer Surferboy Symbian series 60 Dev Textmate The Cult of Mac Through the Children's Gate Tokyo Tom Wolfe - Charlotte Simmons Transmission Ubuntu Ubuntu Hacks VJ Art VOIP Hacks Velvet Underground Wallpaper travel, Berlin, Dubai, LA Watching the English Weather Makers Web Design in a Nutshell Web Mapping Website Cookbook Website Optimization Wireless Hacking Projects Write Great Code Wrong About Japan h4ckert33n! iPod Cult iPod Shuffle iPod and iTunes Manual von Arnim, Solitary Summer

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 Spa 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. [] permanent link Penrose, Road to Reality Review of The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe Laura Conrad Roger 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: You must physically be able to see and turn the pages from a recumbant or semi-recumbant position. "The Road to Reality", at 1000+ pages and about 4 pounds, makes this difficult but not impossible. The writing needs to be modular enough that you can imbibe some satisfactory idea in the time between getting into bed and turning out the light to go to sleep. It is conceivable that the kind of browsing that Penrose recommends would turn up some sections that would work like this, but I found that trying to read the first few chapters straight through didn't do this for me. Understanding the work must not involve extensive use of paper and pencil to work out problems, indexes, references to other books, and other study methods more appropriate to sitting at a desk. I have not attempted to work the exercises. But I found that almost all the writing in this book was dense enough to require reference to other parts of the book, often separated by many pages or chapters and findable only by using the index. This book is being marketed by Knopf as being aimed at the popular science market, presumably the people who read Scientific American and Steven Hawking. I found it much harder reading than those books. For a great deal of my life I've been an enthusiastic consumer of the literature of popular science. In elementary school, I read and reread the book about the solar system by Patrick Moore. In high school I devoured the books about cosmology, stellar evolution, and quantum physics by George Gamov and Fred Hoyle. I was led by the picture of what physicists do I derived from these books to make one of the major mistakes of my life and major in physics in college. One book that allowed me to survive my four years as a physics major was "The Feynman Lectures in Physics" by Feynman, Leighton and Sands. This was not marketed as popular science writing, but Penrose is claiming to write on something like the level of this book, which is a heavily edited version of the lectures Richard Feynman gave to a freshman physics class at CalTech. I did in fact read the Feynman lectures in bed as an undergraduate, although I also did the reading at a desk with index and comparisons to my textbook and working out problems with pencil and paper. Since I was finding Penrose's writing much harder than I remembered Feynman's, I decided to compare them on the same topic. Here's the first mention of the term "partial derivative" from the index of both books. In Feynman, it's in chapter 14, "Work and Potential Energy (conclusion)": We find that the force is: $F=-\Delta U/\Delta x$ Of course this is not exact. What we really want is the limit as $\Delta x$ gets smaller and smaller, because it is only exactly right in the limit ofinfinitesimal $\Delta x$. This we recognize as the derivative of $U$ with respect to $x$, and we would be inclined, therefore to write $-\mathrm{dU}/\mathrm{dx}$. But $U$ depends on $x$, $y$, and $z$, 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 $x$ varies, and $y$, and $z$ do not vary. Instead of a $d$ they simply make a "backwards 6", or $\partial$. (A $\partial$ should have been used in the beginning of calculus because we always want to cancel that $d$, but we never want to cancel a $\partial$!) So they write $\partial U/\partial x$, and furthermore, in moments of duress, if they want to be very careful, they put a line beside it with a little $\mathrm{yz}$ at the bottom ( $\partial U/\partial x{|}_{\mathrm{yx}}$), which means "Take the derivative of $U$ with respect to $x$, keeping $y$ and $z$ 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 $y$ and $z$. However, always use a $\partial$ instead of a $d$ 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 $x$. 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 $f$ be [sic] differentiable, as a function of the pair of variables $(x,y)$, it is certainly necessary that if we consider $f(x,y)$ in its capacity as a function of only the one variable $x$, where $y$ is held to some constant value, then this function must be smooth (at least $C^1$), as a function of $x$, in the sense of functions of a single variable (see §6.3); moreover, if we consider $f(x,y)$ as a function of just the one variable $y$, where it is $x$ that is now to be held constant, then it must be smooth ( $C^1$) as a function of $y$. However, this is far from sufficient. There are many functions $f(x,y)$ which are separately smooth in $x$ and in $y$, but for which would be quite unreasonable to call smooth in the $\mathrm{pair}(x,y)$. A sufficient additional requirement for smoothness is that the derivatives with respect to $x$ and $y$ separately are each continuous functions of the pair $(x,y)$. Similar statements ... would hold if we consider functions of more than two variables. We use the 'partial derivative' symbol $\partial$ to denote differentiation with respect to one variable, holding the other(s) fixed. The partial derivatives of $f(x,y)$ with respect to $x$ and with respect to $y$, respectively, are written $\frac{\partial f}{/}\partial x$ and $\frac{\partial f}{/}\partial y$ (As an example, we note that if $f(x,y)=x^2+{\mathrm{xy}}^2+y^3$, then $\partial f/\partial x=2x+y^2$ and $\partial f/\partial y=2\mathrm{xy}+3y^2$.) If these quantities exist and are continuous, then we say that $\Phi$ is a ( $C^1-$) smooth function on the surface. Note that this appears on page 183-4, the definitions of $C^n$ 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. [] permanent link O'Reilly Animals 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. [] permanent link Gibson, Pattern Recognition 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 ..." [] permanent link Electronic Brains 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. [] permanent link AI: a modern approach 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. [] permanent link

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