This morning a friend came up to me and said “I really liked that article you linked to the other day, though I can’t remember what it was about.”
He said something else that made me think which one he might have meant. “Was it that article that says we don’t remember what we read online as well as what we read on paper?”
“Yeah! That was it!”
I was culling out books, mostly obsolete technical books, and I remembered that I have an extra copy of Feller’s classic probability text. It’s volume 1, second edition. If you’re a student and would like the book, please send me an email with your mailing address.
Update: The book was claimed 11 minutes after this post was published.
The subtitle of That Hideous Strength is “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups.” C. S. Lewis explains in the preface why the book begins with mundane scenes even though he calls it a fairy tale.
If you ask why—intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels—I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters, and petty kings with which a fairy-tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories.
The second chapter of Out of the Silent Planet opens by describing a room as “a strange mixture of luxury and squalor.” It gives examples such as the room as having fine armchairs but no carpets or curtains, strewn with debris. The room has “empty champagne-bottles” and “teacups a quarter full of tea and cigarette-ends.” The room belongs to a scientist and an investor who have the resources to live in beauty and comfort, but instead have a few luxurious items in a pigsty. The scene is a metaphor for science and business detached from humane uses, one of the themes of the book.
Many people have drawn Venn diagrams to locate machine learning and related ideas in the intellectual landscape. Drew Conway’s diagram may have been the first. It has at least been frequently referenced.
By this classification, Hector Cuesta’s new book Practical Data Analysis is located toward the “hacking skills” corner of the diagram. No single book can cover everything, and this one emphasizes practical software knowledge more than mathematical theory or details of a particular problem domain.
The biggest strength of the book may be that it brings together in one place information on tools that are used together but whose documentation is scattered. The book is great source for sample code. The source code is available on GitHub, though it’s more understandable in the context of the book.
Much of the book uses Python and related modules and tools including:
It also uses D3.js (with JSON, CSS, HTML, …), MongoDB (with MapReduce, Mongo Shell, PyMongo, …), and miscellaneous other tools and APIs.
There’s a lot of material here in 360 pages, making it a useful reference.
I’ve enjoyed reading The New York Times Book of Physics and Astronomy, ISBN 1402793200, a collection of 129 articles written between 1888 and 2012. Its been much more interesting than its mathematical predecessor. I’m not objective — I have more to learn from a book on physics and astronomy than a book on math — but I think other readers might also find this new book more interesting.
I was surprised by the articles on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. New York Times reporter William Lawrence was allowed to go on the mission over Nagasaki. He was not on the plane that dropped the bomb, but was in one of the other B-29 Superfortresses that were part of the mission. Lawrence’s story was published September 9, 1945, exactly one month later. Lawrence was also allowed to tour the ruins of Hiroshima. His article on the experience was published September 5, 1945. I was surprised how candid these articles were and how quickly they were published. Apparently military secrecy evaporated rapidly once WWII was over.
Another thing that surprised me was that some stories were newsworthy more recently than I would have thought. I suppose I underestimated how long it took to work out the consequences of a major discovery. I think we’re also biased to think that whatever we learned as children must have been known for generations, even though the dust may have only settled shortly before we were born.
When I was in grad school, my advisor asked me to study his out-of-print book, Hilbert Space Methods in Partial Differential Equations. I believe I had a photocopy of a photocopy; I don’t recall ever seeing the original book. I pored over that stack of copies line by line while preparing for my qualifying exams.
Then this evening I was browsing a used book store and was shocked to find a copy of the book, a Dover reprint (ISBN 0486474437).
It was an odd feeling to find what was once a precious and mysterious book available for $5.99 as part of a rag-tag assortment of mostly elementary/popular used math books.
There’s a new book out in the series that began with The Math Book. The latest in the series is The Drug Book: From Arsenic to Xanax, 250 Milestones in the History of Drugs (ISBN 1402782640).
Like all the books in the series, The Drug Book is a collection of alternating one-page articles and full page color photographs, arranged chronologically. These books make great coffee table books because they’re colorful and easy to dip in and out of. The other books in the series are The Space Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book.
The book’s definition of “drug” is a little broad. In addition to medicines, it also includes related chemicals such as recreational drugs and poisons. It also includes articles on drug-related reference works and legislation.
I ran across a copy of 21st Century C (ISBN 1491903899) this afternoon. I hadn’t heard of the book, but the title was intriguing. I wrote more C in the 20th century than the 21st, so my ideas regarding C (sans ++) are out of date. (I’ve written a fair amount of C++ this century, but I have only written C under duress and with difficulty.)
I’ve only skimmed through the book so far, but one thing I like about it is that the first 100 pages are devoted to tools, not the C language per se. There’s a lot more to using any language than the language itself, and I find it harder to learn about tools than languages. It’s hard to know what tools to learn, and what features of those tools to learn first.
I wish more authors followed this philosophy:
The approach I have taken here is to try to move always from the particular to the general, following through the steps of the abstraction process until the abstract concept emerges naturally. … at the finish it would be quite appropriate for the reader to feel that (s)he had just arrived at the subject, rather than reached the end of the story.
From the preface here (ISBN 0486450260).
When books start at the most abstract point, I feel like saying to the author “Thank you for the answer, but what was the question?”
