Rosio Pavoris

This took a while to finish. In part because I’m reading too many books at once, but also because it’s so depressing I had to put it down a few times.
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, published in 1962, is single-handedly responsible for revitalising the environmental movement around the world. I wanted to read it just for historical context, but the message is so powerful and important that it’s still a very important book.

The book is mainly concerned with indiscriminate pesticides (biocides) such as DDT and various chlorinated hydrocarbons. The book is, of course, famous for inspiring a movement that would very quickly get most of these banned, and it’s very obvious why.
She describes the various projects in the ’50s and ’60s that used these biocides, and how they have a tendency to not just affect the insects or plants targetted, but also, through a process of bioaccumulation in which the pesticides get stored in the bodies of animals in greater and greater doses as they travel up the food chain (that is, a single insect may contain X amount of DDT; a bird that eats twenty of those insects would contain 20X, and because it passes from the system only very slowly, it will remain there while that bird keeps eating insects, or while it is eaten itself), with the result that in the end, applications of these biocides end up killing enormous numbers of larger animals; several projects she described have been successful in wiping out all birds, squirrels, and fish in the (generally very large) treated areas, while not affecting the target insects very much at all, except by removing its natural predators, which, of course, is rather counterproductive.
And of course it’s not just dangerous to birds and the like. She documents a number of cases of human casualties; hardly surprising, given the toxicity of the products involving. Even if death doesn’t occur, permanent brain damage is far more common than it should be, in people handling or just being casually exposed to these supposedly safe products.
And even forgetting the immediate toxicity, there are long-term effects to be considered. Many of the products she talks about (including DDT) are powerful carcinogens. And speaking of long-term effects, insects, with their short generation times, are, of course, going to build up a resistance (and already have), so people will only keep using more and more dangerous pesticides.

She ends the book with alternative approaches to insect control, mostly through introducing natural predators of the insects involved. This has the advantage of being much cheaper and species-specific, and there’s no danger of developing resistance. Or, of course, poisoning your cat.

It’s all very, very depressing to read. If nothing else, it destroyed the myth that “if it’s bad for you, the government wouldn’t allow it!”. Fortunately, Carson’s book made a difference and got all of the products she discusses essentially banned; DDT was banned in the US in 1972, and in most of the rest of the world over the next few decades. Dieldrin, aldrin, endrin, chlordane, heptachlor, and its ilk soon followed.
Regulations on biocides and pest control became stricter and more sane, and most of the projects Carson describes would now be immediately dismissed as retardedly reckless.

Still, it’s alarming how many assholes are out to reverse the DDT ban. The meme that a DDT ban caused thousands/millions/billions of preventable deaths due to malaria is still out there, and for some inexplicable reason gaining support, even though it’s complete nonsense.
It’s important to remember that these people, regardless of their motivation (be it Kool-Aid-flavored ignorance or outright malice (well, greed; same thing)), are very directly working to kill your children.
This is only barely hyperbolic.

(If Rachel Carson and the things she cares about interest you, Deltoid is a very interesting blog that often deals with DDT nutjobs.)

I finished this one a while ago, but I guess I never got around to reviewing it. What is Life? is, of course, a famous work by Erwin Schrödinger, of cat fame.
In it, he argues that chromosomes behave according to physical laws classical physics can’t really approach, since classical physical laws are statistical, and only hold for large numbers of molecules, while a chromosome is in essence just one very large molecule. He speculates that DNA is, in fact, a large aperiodic crystal, and muses about the ways in which it could encode hereditary information.

And yes, it’s all speculation. This was written in 1944, well before the actual structure of DNA became known, and, indeed, long before much of anything was known about genetics. It still speaks about DNA as being the carrier of heredity in the hypothetical, even.
What is Life? was a visionary work, and its influence is undeniable. Even today, it can still inspire people because of the intense sense of curiosity it conveys (Schrödinger was, after all, a theoretical physicist first, but he didn’t let that stop him from delving into this alien field of biology).
As a source of accurate information, though, it’s much more likely to misguide than to educate, at this point, so it really isn’t a book uninformed laypeople should be reading. Still, if you know a bit about genetics and molecular biology, it’s a very interesting read for its historic value.

This edition also contains Mind and Matter, an essay I didn’t bother reading since I figured it would make me angry (especially since Roger Penrose wrote the introduction), and Autobiographical Sketches, in which Schrödinger talks about his life.
This is particularly interesting, since Schrödinger was, after all, a scientist during the World Wars (which is always an interesting topic; just look at Richard Feynman). Moreover, he was Austrian, so he spent much of his time on the side we never really hear first-hand accounts from. It’s nice to hear someone talk about this without the off-hand demonisation we’ve become so used to.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, could have been a reasonably interesting book, if only it hadn’t been written by a moron.
It purports to present a general overview of the state of our knowledge of the world around us, but it… doesn’t.

Bryson just jumped into a few specific fields, but it’s painfully obvious he doesn’t have a science background, and he doesn’t have any way to tell unimportant details and junk science from the real stuff. The former wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but the latter is absolutely fatal.
I’m not sure if Bryson thought he could do this because he was motivated by a genuine thirst for knowledge, or if he was just assuming that anything a scientist could do, he should be able to understand fully with ease (that is, this refusal to believe that some people are just smarter than others, which is characteristic of many, many stupid people), but somewhere along the way I think he realised he just didn’t understand what he was talking about, so he turned to human interest stories and sensationalistic catastrophism.

Don’t get me wrong—I like reading about people. Most works on popular science do tend to overlook scientists are human too, and just ignore the combination of situations that led up to important discoveries. In his eagerness to provide this “novel” view of things, though, Bryson is far too willing to just pull things out of his ass.

Still, that doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as his aforementioned catastrophism.
Maybe he felt the general public kicks on fear. Maybe he was right. Either way, after the first section, the entire book just collapses into a pile of FUD: asteroids are going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, Yellowstone is going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, disease is going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, we almost never existed thousands of times over, &c.
All of it is empty bullshit designed to grab people’s attention without having to bother with facts.

Because obviously, facts aren’t his strong point. He perpetuates some embarrassingly obvious myths (like the medieval flowing glass one, and one particularly painful creationist quotemine), and gets some easily-checked facts spectacularly wrong (including the definition of hominid, and a particularly bad one where he called the Spanish flu the worst epidemic in recorded history).
His chapter on climatology seems to be designed to feed global warming denialism, and the bit on human evolution seems designed to bolster supporters of special creation (or, at the very least, multiregionalists).

Even if you’re willing to put up with that, it’s painfully obvious that Bryson just doesn’t understand how science works.
Fully half of the book is devoted to “failings of science” (unafraid to invent some along the way), emphasising how little we know and how often we’ve “changed our minds”. We could use some books to point out limitations in our current knowledge, but Bryson seems to be attacking the very idea of scientific knowledge itself, again simply to get attention.
It’s more than pathetic: it’s harmful.

Bill Bryson probably did more harm to the cause of science with this one book than a thousand earnest creationists ever could.
The fact that it was so popular and got such good reviews indicates just how insidious its effects will turn out to be.

Bryson deserves as many public ridiculings as there are atoms in the period at the end of this sentence: over nine thousand.

(I’m not even tagging this as anything science-related.)

Imagining Numbers (Particularly the Square Root of Minus Fifteen), by Barry Mazur, is about the history and mathematics of imaginary numbers, and how mathematical imagination lines up with the more classic, “poetic” imagination.
That’s quite an ambitious undertaking, and I don’t think the book quite lives up to it.

Maybe I just have a really idiosyncratic way of looking at poetry, but most of the poems he brings into play don’t seem very interesting to me at all, and his interpretations of them strike me as too personal to be of much use in this general kind of topic. I could be wrong.

Either way, the bit I bought the book for was, of course, the history of mathematics, and the mathematics itself.
It’s possible there just isn’t a lot of history to imaginary numbers, but I was disappointed to find he only talks about a handful of European mathematicians, and never even mentions similar concepts in other civilisations. Maybe there just aren’t any.
The mathematics themselves are kind of all over the place, too. It’s like Mazur either couldn’t decide between an entry-level book and a “proper” work on mathematics, or he just got tired of explaining things somewhere along the way. He devotes most of a chapter to very tediously explaining the associative and distributive properties of addition and multiplication, and later on just breezes past important concepts with a simple “Here is an exercise for you”.

The various exercises throughout the book are pretty interesting and fun to do, though, but it does mean it’s hard to read it between classes and on the train and whatnot, which I tend to do.
Still, figuring out what equals (and what that means), while not particularly hard, is the type of mathematics I haven’t been able to do in a long time, and it’s a nice change of pace.

So, on the whole, I thought Imagining Numbers was a pretty good book, though I doubt most people would enjoy it much. It’s not as good as some other popular science type mathematics books I’ve read, but still.
I do think it could have been much better if it had been twice as long, though. It’s about 230 pages (not including notes), and it feels kind of superficial and rushed in places.

Innumeracy, by John Allen Paulos, is about (surprisingly) innumeracy, or mathematical illiteracy. Distinct from the more pathological dyscalcia, it instead implies something closer to functional analphabetism: an inability to grasp simple mathematical concepts, not because one isn’t smart enough or the concepts are too arcane, but simply because whatever mathematical skills the person once might have had have eroded from lack of use.

Most of the book deals with simple probability and how misunderstanding it is both quite harmful (both to individuals and to society as a whole) and extremely widespread.
The problem, as Paulos sees it, is that it’s harder and harder to get away with being (functionally) illiterate, but society almost encourages innumeracy, with a lot of people seeing no shame in declaring they’re “not a math person” (even taking some perverse pride in it, sometimes), in part because so many people see mathematics as dry and boring, and not a good avenue for creativity. Much of the blame falls on shitty education, of course (and it’s getting worse).

It’s a great little book. Despite the very serious subject, Paulos manages to keep a light-hearted tone, and manages to be pretty engaging and funny. He clearly loves mathematics, and manages to convey this love to the reader quite readily.
There are a lot of small math problems interspersed throughout the book, and even though I didn’t have any problems with it (and nobody should, really), I can clearly imagine the average person just not getting it at all. And that, of course, is why everyone should probably read this.

The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene, is a guide to physics in general and superstring theory in specific.

Greene starts out by explaining, in simple terms, the basic ideas behind the theories of relativity and quantum physics, and how they’re increasingly coming into conflict.
Relativity dealing with massive things moving quickly, and quantum physics dealing with tiny things, the theories have managed to coexist for a while, but the discovery of singularities like black holes, which are both massive and tiny, need something to tie it all together without actually getting infinities anywhere (be it infinitely small sizes, or infinite densities or temperatures, or what).
Clearly, string theory is the solution, and the second half of the book is devoted to explaining why this is the case.

Keeping in mind that string theory hasn’t made any predictions yet that can be tested with current technology other than ones that can be explained by other, older theories as well (which Greene openly acknowledges), he makes a pretty good case.
Without going into the underlying mathematics, he manages to explain how the various particles and forces we observe (including gravity and the as yet undetected graviton) flow naturally from string theory, and how it seems to accomodate supersymmetry, which is just pretty, and how the theory is really too elegant not to be true (which, I’ll grant, isn’t a valid argument on its own).

It’s a very interesting book, both for the physics (even if you dislike string theory, the bit about relativity and quantum physics is good enough in its own right) and for the history lessons. The way string physicists approach mathematics is, of course, obnoxious, but even that isn’t too bothersome.
Definitely worth reading, even—or especially—for those with no background in physics whatsoever.

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris, is about humans, from the perspective of a zoologist.
I mostly read it because my mom loves the guy, but I’d been meaning to read it because I’d been told he touches on the neotenous ape hypothesis too. (Turns out he doesn’t say anything new.)

While the zoologist perspective is refreshing even now, forty years after it came out, most of the actual information in it is either very obvious (to anyone with half a brain) or very outdated.
The fact that a lot of religious people were apparently outraged by it, though I really doubt most were because “it places man in nature”. The sections on sex and sexuality were often just gratuitous (and if I noticed, you know it has to be bad), and a much more likely source of outrage.

It really is quite outdated, though, and likely to give inexperienced or casual readers completely wrong ideas about a number of things, including some basic facts of evolution.
My copy was a new edition released in 1994, and the preface made it clear Morris thought everything he wrote still applied perfectly, and wasn’t in need of updating, even though his editor had asked him to, so I’m not inclined to cut him much slack on that account. The Naked Ape just isn’t a very good book.

The Double Helix, by James Watson, is an account of Watson and Crick’s part in the discovery of the structure of DNA, and of the people involved.

A lot of people have called this a brilliant work of non-fiction, and an important step in de-mystifying science for the general public, but to me it mostly demonstrated that James Watson is a arrogant, prejudiced asshole and a condescending sexist, who has a ridiculously poor understanding of his own field, but managed to ride the coat-tails of his betters (almost all of the work had already been done long before Watson turned his attention to it, and he still had to depend on the insights of Crick, Donohue, Franklin, and others to get there in the end) and convince himself that he’s the center of the universe in the process.

It was written fifteen years after the fact, so even it’s factual accuracy isn’t something I’d put too much faith in. If it’s supposed to give people an idea of how “creative science really happens” (as one of the cover endorsements suggests), it’s no wonder most people are distrustful of scientists.

The same book written by Francis Crick (or Maurice Wilkins, or Rosalind Franklin, or anyone besides Watson) would’ve been infinitely more interesting.

Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is widely considered to be one of the great three heralds of New Atheism (along with Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Harris’ The End of Faith), but I don’t think it really fits the pattern.

Like the title says, it really is about religion as a natural phenomenon, and primarily an attempt to understand what motivates religions and religious people, and where they came from, not a polemic against religion in se.

Like Dennett’s other books, Breaking the Spell suffers somewhat from prolix verbosity, but not to the extent that it becomes unreadable.

He takes rather too much time trying to convince any religious readers that he only means to take an objective look at the history of religion, and that this shouldn’t be construed as an attack &c. &c.
This gets old after a few dozen pages of it. Still, if it convinces even one religious person to keep reading, I suppose it’s worth it.
To his credit, though, Dennett doesn’t hide his atheism (though he never really discusses his reasons for it, instead just referring people to his most famous book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), and he’s a lot less ambivalent about dismissing creationism as bullshit and creationists as wrong.

After all of that, though, he finally starts at the beginning, with folk religions and the various ways human brains work that encouraged their development. While some of the conclusions he tried to reach seem a bit unlikely to me, he offered some perspectives I hadn’t really considered before.
From there, he moves on to the development of organised religions, and the way they shape themselves, and are shaped by their followers, drawing on Dawkins’ meme theory.

An important point he makes (not a revolutionary one by any means, but one people tend to forget quickly nonetheless) is that belief in [Gg]od isn’t as relevant as belief in belief in [Gg]od, and that we may be fighting the wrong battle.

The final chapter is devoted to thinking about where we go from here, and if religion still has value in a modern society.

What Dennett tends to miss when discussing the various positive sociological benefits to religion (many of which I don’t think have applied in centuries; it doesn’t help that he tends to avoid the obvious negative ones) is that whether or not religion is good for society, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether it’s true, and truth (and reason &c.) are too important to disregard as casually as he does.
No doubt he realises this, and is just trying to avoid scaring off the religious, but still. He seems to be too willing to sacrifice intellectual integrity because the alternative would be a bother.

Besides some shaky conclusions he reached, there were also some (minor) factual errors, most pathetically obviously that atheists are represented in the US prison population in the same degree as they are in the US population at large. In fact, atheists comprise just .2% of the prison population, compared to anywhere between 5% and 10% atheists in the general population.

Still, on the whole, Breaking the Spell is a very good book, and definitely worth reading.
It’s much more careful (and in some ways, thorough) than The God Delusion, but it really isn’t the same kind of book at all, despite what so many people seem to want to claim, and it’s definitely worth your time.

Godot never shows up.

It’s such a short book I’m almost tempted not to count it towards my goal of 50, but I’m going to anyway. Pile is shrinking.
Any review I could write would be as long as the play itself, though, so I’ll skip that.

Anyway, that’s what I did today, mostly.
I also watched Idiocracy, which is a surprisingly good movie. Ten-minute clip follows.

It feels like this book took too long to finish. It’s only 161 pages, but when I was reading it it felt like it dragged on forever, though I guess it only took a few hours altogether.
It’s not even because it wasn’t interesting. The writing style is just very dry (or perhaps just old-fashioned) and it takes a bit to get into the right mindset.

In Praise of Idleness is a collection of fifteen short essays by Bertrand Russell, purportedly on the topic of idleness. In them, Russell explains his vision of society, essentially. He talks about what he sees as fundamental dysfunctions in the way the world works, and how to fix it.
He talks about economics, politics, history, education, mortality, &c.

All of these essays were written during the Interbellum, at a time when many people in Britain were apparently defending Fascism as a viable way of doing things, so he spends some space to explaining what he sees as the problems with that (and Communism) as well.
While they’re all very interesting as far as understanding the mindset of people between the two World Wars goes, most of them are of very limited use today. Much of what he says is immediately obvious to anyone today, and some of his predictions have just fallen flat entirely.

Russell is a socialist as well (and he’s very careful to distinguish that from Communism, as it should be), but his vision of socialism suffers greatly from the biases of his time. Almost none of his Case of Socialism can reasonably be said to still be relevant today, except to provide a convenient straw man to its opponents.

Still, the whole thing is a pretty interesting read, for historical context if nothing else, and I’d recommend it. Only knowledge of the past can help us avoid repeating it.

This book took far longer to finish than it should have. This is in large part due to the silly conclusion Penrose tries to reach, which just makes my brain bleed.
The thesis of the book is simply this:

Consciousness is not deterministic, therefore the brain works by the grace of God through quantum.

It starts promisingly enough, with an explanation of Turing machines, computability, and the Turing test. Having explained these concepts, Penrose then tries to argue that the brain is, in fact, not a deterministic Turing machine.
Central to this claim seem to be the Chinese Room experiment and similar thought experiments (which I’ll grant can be difficult to grasp properly), and various minor things like “flashes of insight” (which clearly can’t be explained deterministically!) and whatnot.

Fortunately, he quickly abandons this line of reasoning and starts talking about mathematics and quantum physics for a few hundred pages. I’m not sure why he does this, since neither has any relevance to the subject at hand, but I’m not complaining.
He tries to return to the brain in the final chapters, but he just makes an ass of himself in the process.

Penrose doesn’t understand psychology, physiology, fetal development, evolution or natural selection (at some points coming perilously close to endorsing ID), the (often counter-intuitive) capabilities of actual computers, or cognitive science, but he tries to venture into each of these fields to make his point and fails spectacularly.
His whole point is essentially a giant, infuriatingly dense argument from incredulity and personal pride (the human brain can’t be a deterministic Turing machine, that would make it too common!), and his attempts to involve quantum physics are more reminiscent of Deepak fucking Chopra than of a theoretical physicist of Penrose’s stature.

Now, does this make The Emperor’s New Mind a bad book? Well, yes. Let me rephrase.
Does this mean The Emperor’s New Mind isn’t worth reading? Absolutely not.

Like I said, most of the book is just seemingly irrelevant stuff about mathematics and quantum physics, and it really is quite interesting. It’s worth keeping in mind that Penrose isn’t just some random woo artist, but an accomplished mathematician and actually a rather competent theoretical physicist.
He talks about Turing, fractals (including the Mandelbrot set), Penrose tilings, the history of physics, and plenty of fascinating concepts in theoretical physics ranging from well-known to rather obscure. If you’re willing to gloss over his forays into cognitive science and AI, and maybe skip the last chapter entirely, it’s actually a very good read.

As far as philosophy of the mind goes, though, I’d just leave that to people like Daniel Dennett.

I read too quickly. The Nothing That Is, by Robert Kaplan, is about the history of zero.

Most of the book is, obviously, about the concept of zero in mathematics. It starts with the Sumerians, who came up with the concept, and then goes back and forth between the Greeks and the Indians, to figure out who came up with the symbol for it, and at which point it went from a type of punctuation to an actual number.
He pauses briefly on the Mayans and their psychopathic obsessions regarding zero and its significance in their calendar, and then moves on to Western Europe. It took a ridiculous amount of time for zero to be accepted as an actual number, apparently.

Like Barrow’s Book of Infinity, Kaplan has to talk about religion and theology a lot because of the nature of the subject matter, but unlike Barrow, he manages to remain neutral about it; not the faux neutrality that affords theology the same kind of credibility reality-based philosophies deserve, but actual neutrality, examining where the march of zero was slowed down because of it, and where it was accelerated.

Near the end, he tries to move away from mathematics and into physics, but it doesn’t really work. He tries to crowbar the concept into a number of places where it doesn’t belong, and is quickly reduced to weak philosophising.
There’s a chapter on the psychological implications of zero that’s really just painful to read as well.

Still, those are only a small part of the book, and the vast majority of it is extremely interesting and very well-written. Somewhere along the way he manages to talk about every mathematical concept twelve years of education tried to address, and explain it in a way that made considerably more sense than anything our teachers ever tried to tell us.

If you’re at all interested in history or mathematics (but aren’t an expert mathematician, probably), you’ll enjoy this book. Buy it.

I just finished Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. Together with Six Easy Pieces, it’s a much abridged version of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, by, of course, Richard Feynman.
I finished Six Easy Pieces weeks ago, but since it and the sequel add up to less than a third of a typical book, size-wise (about 140 pages each), I decided to review them together. I just got side-tracked for a bit.

Six Easy Pieces is actually the exact same book as The Character of Physical Law (which I reviewed earlier), just with the chapters moved around a bit and some bits reworded.
It’s much more recent than Character, but I thought it was a bit less coherent. Still, quite good.

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces takes most of the concepts introduced in Six Easy Pieces a step further, and introduces some relevant equations.

The first chapter introduces vectors as if it’s some super-advanced new concept (which it may well have been at the time, though I would hope that anyone who’s gone through highschool now would know what they are), and talks about how they apply to Newton.
The second returns to the various symmetries in physical laws, and delves deeper into what they mean. It also talks more in-depth about the various laws of conservation (momentum, energy, angular momentum, charge, baryons, and leptons).
The final four chapters are about special relativity and what it means, exactly. He gets a few jabs at philosophers in on the side, because he wouldn’t be Feynman if he didn’t.

While it does require some background in mathematics, it’s actually pretty easy to follow. It may be a bit too advanced for the casual reader, but anyone with an interest in physics should be able to pick it up quite readily.

At various points he hints at the limitations of the various theories and areas where our knowledge is still very much on shaky ground, or missing altogether. Given that these lectures were given in the 1960s, I’d be very interested in seeing another book, perhaps, that revisits the not-so-easy pieces and tells us what progress has been made.

Either way, they’re very interesting, and make for a surprisingly light read, given the subject matter. As a layperson, it’s kind of hard to know which bits, if any, are completely outdated, and the mathematics can be hard to follow, but it’s still very much worth reading. I certainly learned a few things.
(I never really understood the equivalence principle as well as I wanted to. Now I do.)

I managed to finish a book before buying new ones!
The Infinite Book, by John D. Barrow, tries to explain the concept of infinity in several fields, and talks about how it has historically been regarded.

The first half of the book deals with infinity in mathematics. It starts with the obvious — Zeno’s paradoxes — and works its way through the history of mathematics all the way up to Georg Cantor and his infinite sets (א is a neat symbol), taking care to introduce complicated concepts in a way anyone could understand.

The second half deals with infinity in physics: infinite density, temperature, &c. in singularities, the infinity of space and time, and the infinity of the multiverse. It touches on things like the Big Bang (obviously), whether or not the universe will continue to expand forever, time travel, &c.
All of it is at least moderately interesting, though it does get repetitive.

The final chapter tries to philosophise a bit about what life would be like if we could live forever, in a stoner stream-of-consciousness kind of way. Barrow may be a good mathematician and theoretical physicist (though if he is, the scope of this book didn’t exactly allow him to show it off), but he’s no great philosopher.

But other than that, it was a pretty decent book. It made for easy reading, but it doesn’t treat readers like idiots, which is a hard balance to find. I certainly learned a few things.

One thing that did bother me, though: he touches on theology rather more than I thought was needed (though some mention is obviously going to be necessary, given the subject matter and the historical context), and he seemed to be extremely careful not to comment on its inanities.
Dunno. Maybe I’m more sensitive to that sort of thing than most. Still, since Barrow apparently won the Templeton Prize in 2006, I don’t think it’s just in my head.

One thing that did amuse me, though: at one point, he points out how advances in science and a deeper understanding of the world around us meant that the concept of God retreated further and further over the course of history, being confined to things science could not yet explain, time and time again.
The punchline? John D. Barrow is a deist.

Anyway. If you’re willing to ignore all that, it really isn’t a bad book. I’ll probably buy more of his books at some point, at least.

I just finished A Briefer History of Time, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. It’s a 2005 revisit of the famous A Brief History of Time. In it, Hawking briefly explains things like black holes, quantum physics, string theory, and the origin of the universe, in terms anyone could understand. And I do mean anyone.
I can understand how a book written in 1988 could need an update, but I’m not entirely sure why it needed to be made more accessible. Over 9 million people bought the first book, so clearly the public thought it was accessible enough.

I never read the original (I’ve been meaning to forever, but I just never got around to it); as such, I’m not sure exactly how simplistic it presented things, but I really hope it wasn’t nearly as bad as this one. I’ve never been a big fan of the lie-to-children approach to education past middle school, and that’s exactly the approach the book takes.
Yes, relativity and quantum physics are difficult subjects, and small steps are required to explain them to laypersons, but ye gods, there is such a thing as too much.

Having said that, it’s a great introductory book to physics for children in 7th or 8th grade, but I was really disappointed by the fact that Hawking doesn’t even hint at some of the controversies that made him infamous, such as the black hole information paradox.
Still, even as an adult, if it’s been a few decades since you’ve had Physics, and you’ve forgotten all about Einstein, and you want to relearn but aren’t willing to think at all, it should be a pretty good read. I’d still recommend the original, though.

I (mostly) finished Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions, which, as I said, is an O’Reilly book. Surprisingly, it’s about regular expressions.
(It may seem odd to review an O’Reilly book, since they’re usually basically textbooks, and not something you’d want to read for fun, but I really enjoyed this one.)

Regular expressions (or regexes), first of all, are versatile expressions you can use to find a certain pattern in a text. You could, for example, specify that you’re looking for a word that starts with a capital Q and has three vowels after it, or scan a text for instances for the word “penis”. Naturally, most tools using regular expressions will also allow you to manipulate said text in flexible ways.
I knew what regular expressions were before I started reading, and I kind of knew what the syntax looked like but not really. I kind of worried this book would be aimed at people who already pretty much knew what they were doing, but it’s actually a great beginner’s guide as well.

The first two chapters describe the basics of the general syntax: which characters are special, what character classes are, how alternation works, &c. It explains everything with clear examples, and has occasional tests for the reader (with the answers provided on the next page).
The tool of choice in the first chapter is egrep, because it’s sufficient to explain the basics. In the second chapter, he uses Perl, and demonstrates some ways in which the regex syntax differs from egrep.

The third chapter talks about even more languages, including PHP, Java, .NET, Tcl, and so on. It has comprehensive lists of metacharacters and how they differ for each flavor of regular expression. The first two chapters were written as a story, but this is clearly more of a reference work.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters talk about these regular expressions are actually dealt with. The first three chapters deal entirely with syntax, which will allow you to write regexes that work, but the next three focus on the engines, which lets you write regexes that work efficiently and elegantly, which, of course, is quite important when you’re dealing with something that can use such a huge amount of system resources.

The final four chapters deal with regexes in the context of popular programming languages; specifically, Perl, Java, .NET, and PHP.

All in all, this seems to be a really good book. Both complete nubies and more experienced users will find this useful, and regular expressions really are an incredibly useful tool.
While it’s true that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, in this case, until you have the hammer, you don’t even realise how many nails there are. I’m surprised I actually managed to get anything done without regular expressions before.

Incidentally, this book inspired me to write this WordPress plugin as well. I wrote it when I was halfway into chapter 2, to give you an idea of how quickly you can pick up something that looks so complicated at first glance.

I finished The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman the other night. It’s pretty short (about 170 pages), being just a collection of seven lectures by Feynman on (surprisingly) the character of physical law.
The only other thing I’ve read by Feynman was The Meaning of It All, which is also a collection of lectures. I wonder if he wrote “proper” books.

Either way, it’s a very interesting read. These lectures took place in 1965, and no doubt some fundamental advances have been made since then (if you want to call string theory an advance, all of that only started in the late ’60s), but it’s general enough that it’s still a relevant and fascinating work.

Feynman talks about a number of things, starting, in the first lecture, with the law of gravitation as an example, going over Kepler, Brahe, Newton, and eventually Einstein, to demonstrate how the law was derived and refined further and further.

In the second lecture, he talks about the relationship between mathematics and physics, noting that physics is a very mathematical field, but that there are some important difference between doing physics and doing mathematics. In mathematics, you derive tons of conclusions from a fixed set of axioms, and in physics, we have a vast amount of conclusions, but nothing to unify it to come up with the central model from which they flow. In Feynman’s own words, we’re doing physics in the way the Babylonians did mathematics, rather than in the way the Greeks did it.

The next few lectures describe some interesting properties which seem to hold across the various laws of physics, including various principles of conservation, various types of symmetry (which, as he explains, is vital to being to derive new laws, through inconsistencies in known ones), and the principle of causality and the arrow of time.

In the sixth lecture, he gets into the basics of quantum mechanics. Probability and uncertainty, the way light (and electrons) behaves variously like particles or like waves (he goes into some detail regarding the double-slit experiment, which I think I’ll go into in a future post; every single popular science work on physics written in the past seventy or so years has explained it, but it’s an interesting and important experiment), &c.

And in the final lecture, he explains how physicists usually go about finding new laws, and more importantly, how he himself does it. It’s worth remembering that Feynman was perhaps the most influential physicist of the second half of the 20th century (and by second half, I mean part of the first half as well).

To sum up, The Character of Physical Law is a fascinating read, even if it shouldn’t really tell you anything new. If anyone but Feynman had written it, it would’ve sucked, but he makes it work.
Also, he spelled “connection” “connexion”, which made me happy.

Next up is Six Easy Pieces, also by Feynman. Apparently it’s supposed to cover much of the same ground, and it certainly seems to have the same preface by Paul Davies, but it looks a bit more advanced.

I finished Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow last night. It’s a much more philosophical book, more like The God Delusion than The Blind Watchmaker.
In it, Dawkins talks about the importance of science, and the depth understanding of science and the scientific method adds or can add to everyone’s life. One of the first people he quotes is Richard Feynman, and this is a very famous quote I’ve repeated often enough, but I think it’s important enough to reproduce in full.

I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty.
There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

(It’s also at the start of this interview with Feynman, in a slightly longer version.)
Dawkins then goes on to say there is poetry in science, and if only more people, particularly artists, understood this, we would have a lot fewer people writing about mystery and religion and whatnot, and a lot more about the actual natural wonders around us.
This is a point that people like Carl Sagan have made before him, and that I kind of tried to make myself in this post.

He warns against abuses of science, either through bad poetry (as has often been the case with Gould, he points out) or through poor understanding of how chance works.
He talks about the nature of light and spectroscopy for a bit (the literal unweaving of the rainbow, pioneered by Newton).
He talks about how important proper understanding of statistics is in law, including in regular jury members. For the science junkies among us, he also talks about genes in this context.
He spends a chapter explaining why “psychics” and conmen are so successful, and how a proper background in science can put these people out of a job.
He spends another chapter talking about how we perceive the world, unweaving it through our senses, and then reweaving it in our brain. He also talks about how the evolution of the human brain is a fascinating topic, both for its speed and for its apparently unneccessariness, but he then poses a few good hypotheses as to why this might have happened.

The overall message, though, is that science is both incredibly important and incredibly beautiful. This is a very important message indeed.
If you’re just expecting the same type of collection of zoological trivia that you found in The Blind Watchmaker or Climbing Mount Improbably, you may be a bit disappointed; this does not change the fact that Unweaving the Rainbow is a very important and well-written book a lot more people should be reading.
Buy it. Give it to someone. Then buy another copy.

Next up is one of the Richard Feynman books I bought. Probably The Character of Physical Law. I’m never going to get around to reading Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, at this rate.

I finished Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable, and I must say, it’s a very enjoyable book.

The central theme of the book is how evolution achieves heights of complexity by very gradually climbing up from simplicity. He never actually mentions the term “fitness landscapes“, but he takes the analogy there quite often.
Along the way, he also debunks some common creationist myths, including the “irreducible complexity” of the eye.

While this may sound pretty straightforward, and thus boring, to anyone who already understands these things, it’s still very much worth reading for the truckloads of trivia he includes.
He talks about the webs of spiders, the hives of bees, the mounds of termites, the wings of insects and birds and gliding squirrels and bats and fish, the eyes of spiders and insects and mammals and fish and molluscs, the shells of snails and shellfish, the construction of arthropods, the reproductive habits of fig wasps and figs, and many, many more things, and all in a way that’s easily understandable, often even to children. If you liked the National Geographic channel before every other show became a Quest for Noah’s Ark, you’ll enjoy these stories.

And the whole thing is very well-illustrated, both with drawings (mostly by his wife, Lalla Ward) and with inset glossy pictures. It’s a pity even the inset was in black-and-white, but perhaps that’s just because I have the pauper college student edition of the book. The lack of color didn’t really detract from the experience, anyway.

The biomorphs from The Blind Watchmaker make another cameo, and have been expanded to be able to deal with new issues, including rotational symmetry, and new versions of the program specifically simulate arthromorphs and mollusc shells.
It’s all very fascinating, and doesn’t even suffer from quaintness too much, since the book was written in 1996. Still a bit, though.

So yes. A very good book that’s very much worth reading. It’s not as painfully important a book as The Selfish Gene or even The Blind Watchmaker, but a good companion to them. I look forward to passing many of the stories in it on to my children.
I showed my mom some of the pictures (after a discussion about figs), and it convinced her to read A Devil’s Chaplain, because that’s the only Dawkins I have in Dutch (”Kapelaan van de Duivel”).

Next in line is Unweaving the Rainbow, also by Dawkins.