BookStalking

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.

I liked this one. But then, I’ve always been a sucker for idealistic over-the-top pessimistic policy wonk fiction. The main character, Cassandra Devine, modestly proposes on her blog that baby boomers be given hefty tax incentives to “gracefully transition” at age 65. Intended as an outrageous proposal to spur debate about the awesome bankruptcy of social security, and the concommital pressures placed on Generation Whatever, Cassandra finds herself swept up in political debate at the highest levels.

I couldn’t help envisioning a friend of mine in Cassandra’s place. I have no recollection of what she is described as (No wait, I do recall that is is blonde and beautiful) but I picture her instead as my buddy LK, also a young and impossibly competent member of our military spin forces. I’ll have to see what she thinks of the book, as she knows what it is like to have generals and senators bat for you.

This is the first of Buckley’s books that I have read, though I did see and enjoy “Thank you for smoking.”  I haven’t done too much research into the premise of the book, because while enjoy a good delving into the world of governmental accounting as much as anyone, I must confess a certain fearfulness at what I might find. It is all too easy to envision the 30% payroll tax hike on under 30′s enacted. But rather than assaulting the gated communities of the wealthy boomers, I expect that the actual members of my generation would shrug and say “Whatever.”

This is a collection of short fiction by David Drake. Perhaps it was just me, but I found some of them more accessible than others.  I had a hard time following nearly all of the “bug” style stories that featured any sort of monster creatures. I just couldn’t picture them.