BookStalking

From the jacket, D. Berlinski has taught both math and philosophy at the university level. Which makes my head hurt, because the logic errors that accumulate like autumn leaves crackle underfoot as he wades blithely forward.

His brand of wit seems to encompass primarily snippy ad-hominem attacks, designed to irritate rather than debate. 

The part that dumbfounded me was this line, on page 45 of my copy (ISBN 978-0-307-39626-6):

“And the question that I am asking is not whether he [the Deity] exists, but whether science has shown that he does not.” I may not recall much from logic class, but I do dimly remember that one cannot prove a negative.  I hope someone can explain to me such nuance that I may have missed, because it seems like such a glaring error to have made in hopes of rhetorical flourish.

I looked up his background, and it seems he is associated with with an Intelligent Design group, which is consistent with what he advances in the book. Many of the same arguments he makes against monolithic “Science” could be applied to his work for them.

I was unimpressed by the book because of the mean-spirited ambience that pervades it. I should think that if he is this rude in person, as he portrays himself in this book, then I might find him rather unpleasant.

Also, would someone be so kind as to point out how the description on page 55 of the scientific method is flawed? Am I missing something, or is he really taking issue with the method itself? Baffling.

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I heard about this book when the blog Get Rich Slowly interviewed the author and he said “Don’t buy my book. Email me, and and I’ll send you a digital copy.” (He now has a link to a direct download.) I decided to take him up on his offer.

On “Authenticity”

Many of the comments that have been made about his project have focused on his status a privileged white male, and the concurrent advantages that granted him over others. Most conclude that this “proves nothing.” I believe this is true, but I think they miss the point of the book, and by extension the project. (I also doubt that many have read it, as I don’t see references to the text very often.)

If this young man had taken a backpacking trip through Mongolia, or just down the Appalachian Trail, and wrote of the experiences he’d had, and the people from different backgrounds he’d met; would he be met with such vitriol? I think this book should be taken in the same manner. An adventure story, meant to be inspiring and incidentally educational. 

On the text

I read the book in an evening. It’s a quick read, and not very complex. Shepard is not writing prose for the ages, instead, it seems that the words were spilled out on paper as he told himself his story. It’s a conversational, informal narrative.  I imagine that it would be the same phrasing he would use if he were talking to you. 

This would be a good choice as an alternate selection for a high school reading class. The tone is engaging, the writing is not complex while the theme is, and the author is approachable to a young audience. The fact that Shepard seems to be responding to comments and criticism directly would also make this a good experience for a young reader.

I would have liked to seen more thought put into the ending. Shepard ends the year, having met his goals and even exceeded them to return home to ailing parents. He briefly mentioned how he would put the skills and tips he’d learned into practice in this situation, but it seems like there should be more. Most of the criticism about his “project” has centered on how he didn’t have many of the disadvantages that a “real” poor person would have. If he was / is facing the prospect of caring for two very sick dependents, then that could be a firm rebuttal. But it is not mentioned again.

On the story

I was struck by how closely his experience in the homeless shelter mirrored my own in basic training in the Army. Most of the events he describes have direct counterparts in the military, from meeting people with dramatically different backgrounds, to sleeping in an open room with too many feet and snorers, to “wall-less stalls.”  I wonder how different, if at all, his story would have been had he signed up for the military.

I think he glosses over some of the troubles and tribulations he must have had. I kept waiting for setbacks, for crises, for things to go wrong. But the narrative flows along in a relatively placid style up out of the shelter and into the world of the working poor. I believe this was a stylistic choice, in order to emphasize his message of possibility and hope for a better tomorrow. But I think it would have been a better dramatic choice to highlight some difficulties more. For instance, the medical aspects of his broken toe or scalp wound from his fight would have been good choices for this. I hope that if he chooses to write more on this subject, that he returns and deals with this elephant in the room.

The Sum Up:

A decent story, if a bit naive. His interview comments and website indicate that this is not the work of libertarian fantasy that it has been sometimes described as. A fast read, and a good discussion counterpoint to Nickel and Dimed, which is all it wanted to be.

I’ve always been a fan of polymaths. I find it inspiring to read about people who leap from field to field, excelling in each. Franklin, Leonardo… and now Thomas Young.

This book chronicles the life of Thomas Young, who began the work on deciphering the Rosetta Stone, wrote on the particle/wave nature of light, pioneered research on the nature of the eye, and specified what came to be known as “Young’s Modulus of elasticty”, a way to calculate compression or extension of materials under stress. Because he didn’t want his patients (he was also a doctor) to know how diverse his interests were, he did much of his early research anonymously.

The author shares my interest in these types of people. He has written previous books on Albert Einstein, Michael Ventris, and Rabindranath Tagore. He say in the preface that it is tough, as a biographer, to write about someone with such a wide range of interests and expertise. How can one person begin to scratch the surface on so many topics?

Robinson attempts to solve this dilemma by providing a relatively light and non-exhaustive treatment of each of Young’s major works, an introduction rather than a full biography, as he puts it. The book is arranged in a loose chronological order, and each chapter focuses on a particular subject. This makes the narrative somewhat harder to follow, as there is some unavoidable jumping around in time, but does make it easier to present needed background information to explain the context of his work. 

Each section alone could provide the basis for its own book, and Robinson knows it. the 1855 biography of Young by G. Peacock is almost 500 pages, with no diagrams or illustrations.  Robinson’s book is significantly shorter, and repeated claims to be providing only the barest elements of Young’s life.

I found this book to be an interesting, though not particularly engaging read. This may be more a fault of my own than the authors, because I prefer works with a stronger narrative, and he chose not to use such a structure in this book. The book made me want to find out more about the somewhat unknown Thomas Young, and in that regard can be regarded as a success. I shall also attempt to track down Robinson’s book on R. Tagore, and see how that is.

The Sum-up: Easy to read in short sections, hard to read all at once. Episodic treatment of a possibly epic life.

I picked up The Breakthrough Imperative: How the Best Managers Get Outstanding Results as an advance reader at my bookstore. It should be coming out in March. There were some printing errors, but that happens with all readers, I think.

I have recently been on a business kick, something that the person I was a few years ago would have been slightly incredulous about. My work at a small startup led me to take the “Entrepreneurship” class I am in now, which has led me to consider reading books like this, which previously I would have shunned. But the essence of life is change, or so I hear.

My overall impression is that this book is not for me. It is not for anyone I know. Though the blurb on the back says “essential guide for team leaders in any setting”, the book is really aimed at general managers in large organizations, ideally with a manufacturing or production focus. As someone interested in small, beginning businesses, I found little applicable to my situation.

That is not necessarily a fault of the authors, though. Their focus is on large, conventional business and how to do more of the same, but a little cheaper and maybe a little better. They propose 4 “laws”, that if followed, will presumably allow you to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

The first law is “Costs and prices always decline”, which irks me. If I may engage in baseless stereotyping, business advice books always do this, and this is a perfect example. This is a statement that bothers my logical brain. It is basically Moore’s law extended out perpetually. It isn’t sustainable. Acting as if resources were infinite will only get you so far, and rules like this only exacerbate the problem. What they MEAN is that costs and prices will decline as long as the energy to do so is present. That is a caveat that is not mentioned.

Most of the book’s advice can be summed up as “Be number one. If you can’t be number one, try to be bought by them.”  The goal is to dive down the “experience curve” as fast as possible, so your costs and prices will be lower than everyone else, and you will get  more market share. How do you do this? Be number one!

I did find some good advice in the later sections. A frank appraisal of the average tenure of a CEO leads them to propose “Points of arrival” and “departure.” A 3 year plan, beginning with the current situation and expected outcomes and the end of the timeline, is something that I think many managers would find helpful.  The idea of “experience curves” could be fleshed out into its own work, with more details on how they interact with decision making processes.

The Sum-up: This book was not for me, but I think that it may be applicable to high-level managers looking for a formal book to give them arguments to make decisions they already wanted to make.

Small Business Management: an Entrepreneurial Emphasis, by Longenecker, Moore, Petty, Palich

This is the textbook for the ENTR 335 class. I am somewhat disappointed by it because I was hoping for something a little more detailed, but this book seems to focus more on relentless boosterism and extolling the glories of owning or starting your own business. I was taking that part as a given, and wanted more gritty details. The appendixes offer that, but they are a brief part of the book.
I haven’t yet had a chance to go through the cd yet, or the video courses that the publisher offers on their site (http://www.intelecom.org) so I don’t know whether they “add value” to the text. The book is organized with a lot of textblocks, sidebars, simple graphics, and anecdotal stories. It is bright and colorful, and there are no heavy blocks of text.

Is it worth buying? Well, it’s a required text. More on that later.

The Sum Up: This book wishes really badly that it was on the web. It wants to be new media so badly.

Microsoft Office 2007: Second Custom Edition: cs101 introduction to computer applications, by various authors

This text is a collection of chapters and sections from other textbooks on MS Office, published specifically for the University. I was supremely unimpressed by this book, but perhaps that is because I am not the target audience for the book. The book is a collection of descriptions of tasks, interspersed with small vignettes of why you’d like to do those tasks.
Like most computer application books, it is boring and ill-suited to the task. This is the kind of thing that small videos and tutorial programs are so superior to text that I expect this to be a soon-to-be extinct market.
I purchased the last version of the book, not because it was required, but because it was bundled with software that was. If I had been able to skip the book, I would have.

The Sum Up: boring, ignorable, and ultimately useless.

Textbooks are big racket these days. They are large, pretty books, with a small audience, that often is forced to purchase them. The used market is often artificially constrained. This is not a recipe for low prices. I am looking forward to the developments by the Wikimedia project for developing open source textbooks.
Advances in art history, french, and algebra are progressing slowly enough, I dare say, that new editions of text books aren’t required every year. Establishing a stable corpus of academic literature will be the culmination of a dream attempted by Diderot so many years ago, and I think it is attainable quite soon. Subjects that DO have substantial changes year to year will only benefit from online distribution.
I predict that in less than 10 years, E-textbooks will become common. It will be a superior model, and with luck, it won’t be locked up in horrible DRM or “Bundles” or subscriptions. Free and open textbooks will be a good thing for students.

The current model doesn’t serve students very well, and I doubt that publishers actually make much money off them. The sooner professors adopt an open-source model for text books, the better for academia.

I suppose to avoid any potential libel suits, I should qualify that and say that he is not necessarily a liar; but he is a convicted misrepresenter.

This is the small tidbit describing why he was convicted of Contempt of Court, since his easy, simple diet book was essentially none of the above. I hope he tries to appeal it, as that would only be good for America.

Maybe he could try to pull a James Frey, and say that actually, the books are fiction. Maybe that would save him.

As the holiday season grows  closer, it is important to provide the truth to consumers.

My science fiction reading has woefully left me unprepared for the future. There is no elegant colony on the moon. There is no myriad of alien races to interact with. I have yet to jack in.

As far as I am concerned, the future has hit, and it is now. And it is weird.

I just listened to a Tuvan throat singer, presumably from siberia, sing “House of the Rising Sun.” And then I watched one of the groups videos. You have to be deeply high to make that kind of stuff. High on Globalization and the future.

And so I look back and say “Scifi authors, you just weren’t weird enough! Rudy Rucker, you’ve got to TRY HARDER.”

An interesting, but only mildly so, account of an attempt by a school board to put Intelligent Design on the science curriculum. 

We’ve gone live today. Let’s see what starts to trickle in.