Books

Cartoon guide to the uninteresting

Posted on by John

If you’re not interested in a subject, do cartoons make it more palatable?

My guess is that cartoons may help keep your attention if you’re moderately interested in a subject. If you’re fascinated by something, cartoons get in the way. And if you’re not interested at all, cartoons don’t help. The cartoons may help in the sweet spot in between.

No Starch Press has given me review copies of several of their Manga Guide books. The first three were guides to the universe, physics, and relativity. I’ve reviewed these here and here. Recently they sent a copy of the newest book in the series, The Manga Guide to Biochemistry.

I’m much more interested in physics than biology, so I thought this would be a good test: Would a manga book make it more interesting to read about something I’m not very interested in studying? Apparently not. It didn’t seem that the entertaining format created much of an on-ramp to unfamiliar material.

It seemed like the information density of the book was erratic. Material I was familiar with was discussed in light dialog, then came a slab of chemical equations. Reading the book felt like having a casual conversation with a lawyer who periodically interrupts and asks you to read a contract.

Someone more interested in biochemistry would probably enjoy the book. Please understand that the title of this post refers to the fact that I find biochemistry uninteresting, not the book. If I had to study a biochemistry book, the Manga Guide to Biochemistry might be my first choice. At times I’ve found biochemistry interesting in small doses, describing a specific problem. But it would be nearly impossible for me to read a book on it cover to cover.

O’Reilly’s “Head First” series is similar to the Manga guide series, though the former has more content and less entertainment. I enjoyed the first Head First book I read, Head First HTML with XHTML & CSS. Maybe I enjoyed it because the subject matter was in the sweet spot, a topic I was moderately interested in. The cartoons and humor helped me stick with a dry subject.

When I tried another Head First book, I was hoping for more that same push to keep going through tedious content. The books clearly had the same template though with different content. What was interesting the first time was annoying the second time, like hearing someone tell a joke you just heard. So at least for me, the Head First gimmick lost some of its effectiveness after the first book.

Firsthand knowledge

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From C. S. Lewis:

It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but it usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This quote comes from the essay On the Reading of Old Books, part of the collection God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Lewis says here that it is easier to read Plato or St. Paul, for example, than to read books about Plato or St. Paul.  Lewis says that the fear of reading great authors

… springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentators.

This does not only apply to literature. I see the same theme in math. Sometimes early math papers are easier to read because they are more concrete. When I was a postdoc at Vanderbilt I asked Richard Arenstorf about a theorem attributed to him in a book I was reading. He scoffed that he didn’t recognize it. He had done his work in a relatively concrete setting and did not approve of the fancy window dressing the author had placed around his theorem. I sat in on a few lectures by Arenstorf and found them amazingly clear.

The same theme appears in software development. Sometimes you can dive to the bottom of an abstraction hierarchy and find that things are simpler there than you would have supposed. The intervening layers obscure the substance of the program, making its core seem unduly mysterious. Like a mediocre mind commenting on the work of a great mind, developers who build layers of software around core functionality intend to make things easier but may do the opposite.

Related posts

You ought to give the kid a chance

Posted on by John

Martin Gardner (1914 – 2010) was best known for his articles on recreational mathematics, especially his column in Scientific American which he wrote from 1956 to 1981. Once Gardner wrote a letter of recommendation for a young man applying to graduate school at Harvard.

I don’t know a lot about mathematics, but this kid invented two of the best card tricks of the last ten years. You ought to give him a chance.

The kid was Persi Diaconis. At the time, Diaconis, like Gardner, was something of a mathematical outsider, someone with more creativity than credentials. Diaconis went on to become a mathematics professor at Harvard and won two MacArthur genius awards. He is now a professor at Stanford.

Source: Magical Mathematics (ISBN 0691151644)

Moby Dick and the tautochrone

Posted on by John

The tautochrone is a curve such that a ball rolling down the curve takes the same amount of time to reach the bottom, no matter where along the curve it starts. (The name comes from the Greek tauto for same and chrono for time.) It doesn’t sound like such a curve should be possible because balls starting further up the curve have longer to travel. However, balls starting higher also have more potential energy, and so they travel further but faster. See the video below for a demonstration.

[The video is entitled “brachistochrone race” rather than “tautochrone race.” The brachistochrone problem is to find the curve of fastest descent. But its solution is the same curve as the tautochrone. So different problems, same solution.]

I first heard of the tautochrone as a differential equation problem to find its equation. But someone could run into it in an American literature class.

Clifford Pickover’s new book The Physics Book has a chapter on the tautochrone. (In this book, “chapters” are only two pages: one page of prose and one full-page illustration.) Pickover points out a passage in Moby Dick that discusses a bowl called a try-pot that is shaped like a tautochrone in the radial direction.

[The try-pot] is a place also for profound mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.

The Art of R Programming

Posted on by John

Here are my first impressions of The Art of R Programming (ISBN 1593273843). I haven’t had time to read it thoroughly, and I doubt I will any time soon. Rather than sitting on it, I wanted to get something out quickly. I may say more about the book later.

The book’s author, Norman Matloff, began his career as a statistics professor and later moved into computer science. That may explain why his book seems to be more programmer-friendly than other books I’ve seen on R.

My impression is that few people actually sit down and learn R the way they’d learn, say, Java. Most learn R in the context of learning statistics. Here’s a statistical chore, and here’s a snippet of R to carry it out. Books on R tend to follow that pattern, organized more by statistical task than by language feature. That serves statisticians well, but it’s daunting to outsiders.

Matloff’s book is organized more like a typical programming book and may be more accessible to a programmer needing to learn R. He explains some things that might require no explanation if you were learning R in the context of a statistics class.

The last four chapters would be interesting even for an experienced R programmer:

  • Debugging
  • Performance enhancement: memory and speed
  • Interfacing R to other languages
  • Parallel R

No one would be surprised to see the same chapters in a Java textbook if you replaced “R” with “Java” in the titles. But these topics are not typical in a book on R. They wouldn’t come up in a statistics class because they don’t provide any statistical functionality per se. As long as you don’t make mistakes, don’t care how long your code takes to run, and don’t need to interact with anything else, these chapters are unnecessary. But of course these chapters are quite necessary in practice.

As I mentioned up front, I haven’t read the book carefully. So I’m going out on a limb a little here, but I think this may be the book I’d recommend for someone wanting to learn R, especially for someone with more experience in programming than statistics.

Related post: R: The Good Parts

Sed one-liners

Posted on by John

A few weeks ago I reviewed Peteris Krumins’ book Awk One-Liners Explained. This post looks at his sequel, Sed One-Liners Explained.

The format of both books is the same: one-line scripts followed by detailed commentary. However, the sed book takes more effort to read because the content is more subtle. The awk book covers the most basic features of awk, but the sed book goes into the more advanced features of sed.

Sed One-Liners Explained provides clear explanations of features I found hard to understand from reading the sed documentation. If you want to learn sed in depth, this is a great book. But you may not want to learn sed in depth; the oldest and simplest parts of sed offer the greatest return on time invested. Since the book is organized by task — line numbering, selective printing, etc — rather than by language feature, the advanced and basic features are mingled.

On the other hand, there are two appendices  organized by language feature. Depending on your learning style, you may want to read the appendices first or jump into the examples and refer to the appendices only as needed.

For a sample of the book, see the table of contents, preface, and first chapter here.

Related links

Thomas Hardy and Harry Potter

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Emily Willingham mentioned on Twitter that the names of the Harry Potter characters Dumbledore and Hagrid come from Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Both appear in this passage:

One grievous failing of Elizabeth’s was her occasional pretty and picturesque use of dialect words …

… in time it came to pass that for “fay” she said “succeed”; that she no longer spoke of “dumbledores” but of “humble bees”; no longer said of young men and women that they “walked together,” but that they were “engaged”; that she grew to talk of “greggles” as “wild hyacinths”; that when she had not slept she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she had been “hag-rid,” but that she had “suffered from indigestion.”

Apparently dumbledore is a dialect variation on bumblebee and hagrid is a variation on haggard. I don’t know whether this is actually where Rowling drew her character names but it seems plausible.

Awk one-liners

Posted on by John

Peteris Krumins has written a fine little book Awk One-Liners Explained. It’s just 58 pages, and it’s an easy read.

As I commented here, I typically try to master the languages I use. But for some languages, like awk and sed, it makes sense to learn just a small, powerful subset. (The larger a language is, the harder it can be to just learn part of it because the features intertwine.) Krumins’ book would be good for someone looking to learn just a little awk rather than wanting to explore every dark corner of the language.

Awk One-Liners Explained is exactly what title would lead you to expect. It has 70 awk one-liners along with a commentary on each. Some of the one-liners solve common specific problems, such as converting between Windows and Unix line endings. Most of the one-liners are solutions to general types of problems rather than code anyone is likely to run verbatim. For example, one of the one-liners is

Change “scarlet” or “ruby” or “puce” to “red.”

I doubt anybody has ever had to solve that exact problem, but it’s not hard to imagine wanting to do something similar.

Because the book is entirely about one-line programs, it doesn’t cover how to write complex programs in awk. That’s perfect for me. If something takes more than one line of awk, I probably don’t want to use awk. I use awk for quick file filtering. If a task requires writing several lines of code, I’d use Python.

You can get an idea of the style of the book by reading the author’s blog post Famous Awk One-Liners Explained, Part I: File Spacing, Numbering and Calculations.

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If you’d like to learn the basics sed and awk by receiving one tip per day, you can follow @SedAwkTip on Twitter.

Odd little bookshops

Posted on by John

From Tristan Gylberd:

The smaller, the odder, the more out of the way, and the more specialized, the better. That is my philosophy on bookshops. Come to think of it, that is my philosophy on everything else too — it makes for a very interesting life unconstrained by the smothering expectations of the tyranny of fashion or popularity.

Related post: Small, local, old, and particular