Books

Book review queue

Posted on by John

I’ve got a backlog of books to review. I may not write more about all of them here so I’ll at least mention them briefly.

Packt Publishing sent me copies of Python 3 Web Development Beginners Guide and Python Testing Cookbook. The former may not be what you expect from the title. It focuses on self-contained development with minimal dependencies. It’s not a book on popular Python web development frameworks like Django.

I have a couple books I need to review for the MAA. The first is Validated Numerics: A Short Introduction to Rigorous Computations (ISBN 0691147817). This one is less general than title implies. It’s a book about interval arithmetic and frankly it’s dry as dust so far.

The second MAA book is The History and Development of Nomography (ISBN 1456479628). Nomography is the lost art of graphical computing. A great deal of ingenuity and artistry went into producing graphics that allowed users to solve equations without numerical computation. For beautiful examples, see Dead Reckonings, Ron Doerfler’s website.

Eric Sink has a new book in press Version Control by Example (ISBN 0983507902). I enjoyed reading through one of the early drafts. I haven’t yet read the final version though I plan to soon. This book shows how to use distributed version control, comparing several popular systems. It does more than tell you which buttons to push or APIs to call; it shows how to solve problems that come up in day-to-day software development.

The final book on my review list is The Physics Book by Cliff Pickover (ISBN 1402778619). This book is the physics analog of The Math Book that Pickover published a couple years ago. I look forward to reading this one based on my enjoyment of The Math Book.

Related posts

Sage Beginner’s Guide

Posted on by John

I like books. Given a choice, I’d much rather read a book than online documentation. Typically a book speaks with one voice and has been more carefully edited. Unfortunately, it can be hard to find books on specialized software. That’s why I was glad to hear there’s a book on Sage, a project that integrates many Python libraries for mathematical computing into a single context.

Craig Finch’s book Sage Beginner’s Guide provides an easy-to-read overview of Sage. The book is filled with examples. In fact, every topic is introduced by an example. Explanations follow the examples in sections entitled “What just happened?”. Follow-up exercises are provided to solidify the material after the example and explanation.

Someone could begin using Sage without knowing Python. They could think of Sage as an open source Mathematica-like application. But one of the strengths of Sage is that its underlying language is Python. And the Sage Beginner’s Guide has two chapters devoted to the Python language, one basic and one advanced.

Finch’s book is primarily focused on Sage as a whole, not the Python components it integrates. However, it does point out the component libraries that provide certain functionality when either the constituent library conflicts with Sage or can be used to refine Sage functionality.

Sage can be challenging to install. It is not yet directly supported on Windows; the recommended way to use Sage on Windows is to download a Linux virtual machine with Sage installed. I was able to install Sage on Ubuntu but not yet on OS X. However, you can try out Sage without installing it by using Sage online notebooks.

I don’t have as much experience with Sage as with some of its components. As far as I can tell, it’s easy to take your experience from component libraries—say NumPy—and bring it over to Sage. It would be harder to take functionality you discovered while using Sage and use it outside of Sage since, though that is to be expected since part of the value Sage adds is smoothing over the peculiarities of each component library.

Manga guides to physics and the universe

Posted on by John

I recently received review copies of the Manga Guides to physics and the universe. These made a better impression than the relativity guide that I reviewed earlier. The guide to physics has been out for a while. The guide to the universe comes out June 24.

The Manga Guide to Physics basically covers force, momentum, and energy. The pace is leisurely. There’s not much back story; it cuts to the chase fairly quickly.This guide will not prepare you to solve physics problems, but it does give you a good overview of the basics.

(These books are not entirely manga; all three books I’ve seen in the series have several pages of more traditional textbook content.)

The Manga Guide to the Universe gives a tour of cosmology from the geocentric view to current theories. It contains some very recent material, such as references to the WMAP project.

This book is more rushed than the physics guide. That’s to be expected considering its ambitious scope. It devotes a fairly large amount of space to the back story and this contributes to the book being rushed.

I mentioned in my review of The Manga Guide to Relativity that although Americans associate cartoons with children, that book was not written for children. The physics guide, however, would be appropriate for a wide range of readers. Young readers may not fully appreciate the content, but they would not find anything offensive.

The Manga Guide to the Universe is inoffensive with one exception. There are a couple provocative frames in the prologue that will keep the book off some school library shelves.

Manga Guide to Relativity

Posted on by John

A few days ago I got a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity (ISBN 1593272723). This is an English translation of a book first published in Japanese a couple years ago.

I assume the intended audience, at least for the original Japanese edition, is familiar with manga and wants to learn about relativity. I came from the opposite perspective, more familiar with relativity than manga, so I paid more attention to the background than the foreground. My experience was more like reading The Relativity Guide to Manga.

I expected The Manga Guide to Relativity to be something like The Cartoon Guide to Genetics. However, the former has much less scientific content than the latter. A fair amount of the relativity book is background story, and the substantial parts are repetitive. As I recall, the genetics book was much more dense with information, though presented humorously.

Some parents and teachers will buy The Manga Guide to Relativity to introduce children to science in an entertaining genre. These folks may be surprised to discover the sexual undertones in the book. Americans typically equate comics with children, but the book was originally written for a Japanese audience that does not have the same view.

Curious, exciting, and slightly disturbing

Posted on by John

This weekend I’ve been wrapping up unfinished projects. One of those projects was reading Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid (ISBN 0810984652).

The book is exactly what you might expect from the title: a quirky little book about squid. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but that’s my fault. I just wasn’t as interested in reading a quirky little book about squid as I thought I would when the publisher offered me a copy. Squid are bizarre creatures, and some other time I might enjoy reading more about them.

The title is terrific. I probably wouldn’t have given the book a second thought if it had been entitled, for example, Teuthology. And the title isn’t just sensational; squid really are curious, possibly exciting, and at least slightly disturbing.

Suspicious definitions

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I’ve long been suspicious of speeches that revolve around idiosyncratic definitions. I was pleased to find this evening that C. S. Lewis shared this suspicion.

But when we leave the dictionaries we must view all definitions with grave distrust. … The fact that they define it at all is itself a ground for skepticism. Unless we are writing a dictionary, or a text-book of some technical subject, we define our words only because we are in some measure departing from their real current sense. Otherwise there would be no purpose in doing so. This is especially true of negative definitions. Statements that honour, or freedom, or humour, or wealth, ‘does not mean’ this or that are proof that it was beginning to mean, or even had long meant, precisely this or that. … We do not warn pupils that coalbox does not mean a hippopotamus.

…  A certain type of writer begins `The essence of poetry is’ or `All vulgarity may be defined as’, and then produces a definition which no one ever though of since the world began, which conforms to no one’s actual usage, and which he himself will probably have forgotten by the end of the month.

From Studies in Words (ISBN 0521398312)

Marshall McLuhan reading technique

Posted on by John

From Douglas Copeland’s book on Marshall McLuhan:

Marshall … didn’t have the patience to work through a book that didn’t interest him from the start. He even developed a technique to suit his impatience: whenever he picked up a new book, he would turn to page 69, and if that page didn’t interest him, he wouldn’t read the book.

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!

Related post: Reading as inclination leads

Not enchanted with "Enchantment"

Posted on by John

I’ve read a fair number of business books, but I stopped reading them when they all started to sound alike. I have limited time for reading and so I want to read books that “blow my hair back” as Will Hunting would say.

I made an exception to my abstinence from business books when Guy Kawasaki’s publisher offered me a review copy of his new book Enchantment. The book confirmed my decision to lay off the business literature. I was surprised how much of it I’d already read elsewhere before it arrived. Much of it is a compilation of ideas and stories that were popular on the web last year. Enchantment isn’t a bad book, it just isn’t very original.

This made me think of Robert Ghrist‘s quip about new books:

Reading anything less than 50 years old is like drinking new wine: permissible once or twice a year and usually followed by regret and a headache.

I can’t imagine that Enchantment would stand such a test of time. Hardly anyone will be reading it a couple years from now, much less 50 years from now.

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Augustine, Leibowitz, and evolution

Posted on by John

The following paragraph is from the science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:

A fourth century bishop and philosopher. He [Saint Augustine] suggested that in the beginning God created all things in their germinal causes, including the physiology of man, and that the germinal causes inseminate, as it were, the formless matter—which then gradually evolved into the more complex shapes, and eventually Man. Has this hypothesis been considered?

A Canticle for Leibowitz is set centuries after a nuclear holocaust. The war was immediately followed by the “Simplification.” Survivors rejected all advanced technology and hunted down everyone who was even literate. At this point in the book, a sort of Renaissance is taking place. The question above is addressed to a scientist who is explaining some of the (re)discoveries taking place. The scientist’s response was

“I’m afraid it has not, but I shall look it up,” he said, in a tone that indicated he would not.

Was the reference to Augustine simply made up for the novel, or is there something in Augustine’s writings that the author is alluding to? If so, does anyone know what in particular he may be referring to? Is such a proto-Darwinian reading of Augustine fair?

How the term "scientist" came to be

Posted on by John

For most of history, scientists have been called natural philosophers. You might expect that scientist gradually and imperceptibly replaced natural philosopher over time. Surprisingly, it’s possible pinpoint exactly when and where the term scientist was born.

It was June 24, 1835 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in attendance. (He had previously written about the scientific method.) Coleridge declared that although he was a true philosopher, the term philosopher should not be applied to the association’s members. William Whewell responded by coining the word scientist on the spot. He suggested

by analogy with artist, we may form scientist.

Since those who practice art are called artists, those who practice science should be called scientists.

This story is comes from the prologue of Laura Snyder’s new book The Philosophical Breakfast Club (ISBN 0767930487). The subtitle is “Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World.” William Whewell was one of these four friends. The others were John Herschel, Richard Jones, and Charles Babbage.

Update 1: Will Fitzgerald created the following Google Books ngram that suggests that scientist was used occasionally before 1835 and would take another 30 years to start being widely used in books. Click on the image to visit the original ngram.

So it is with many innovations: the person credited with the innovation may not have been entirely original or immediately successful. Still, perhaps Whewell’s public confrontation with Coleridge gave scientist a push on the road to acceptance.

Update 2: Pat Ballew fills in more of the story on his blog including editorial opposition to the term scientist. Pat brings more famous people into the story, including H. L. Mencken, Michael Faraday, and William Cullen Bryant.

Update 3: Here’s an excerpt from The Philosophical Breakfast Club.

More 19th century science