Read You Tweed
pontiff | April 23, 2010What prefix do you use for 1027? If Austin Sendak has his way, it will be hella (also Time article here.) The diameter of the observable universe is about one hellameter. As a fellow member of the club "people from Yreka, CA who do physics," I strongly support Austin's idea. Indeed it now tops my list of proposed prefix changes, a list that includes "tiny-" for 10-5 and my former front runner for 1027 "bronto-."
But the real question is what do we call 10x when we don't know x? I suggest the prefix "huh". Examples: "My answer of about 5 huh-people wasn't good enough to land me a job at…
pontiff | February 12, 2010In the New York Times today there is an interesting article about Helene Hegemann whose debut novel, "Axolotl Roadkill," drew wide praise. You know this story: turns out that the book contains plagiarized passages (plagiarism: check, sales rising: check.) What I find fascinating about the story, however, is not this rehash of a tried and true marketing tactic, but Ms. Hegemann's defense of herself, summarized in this quote:
"There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.
Why do I love this…
pontiff | December 16, 2009Lately I feel like my reading material has gotten stuck in a rut. The feel is that everything I'm reading is a rehash of something I've read before. Okay, maybe it is just that the rain has returned to Seattle :) Since I'm a subscriber to the belief that books that show you something outside of your current view of the world are the most important, a challenge to all two of remaining readers of this blog: what should I be reading that is most likely to be of such high information content? Recommendations? (For comparison, I think my library is available on librarything. Fiction, non-…
pontiff | November 18, 2009Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a…
pontiff | November 13, 2009Friday the 13th is, apparently, a day of must read articles. This time it's Steven Pinker's review of Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. Readers who have taken linear algebra will be amused:
He provides misleading definitions of "homology," "saggital plane" and "power law" and quotes an expert speaking about an "igon value" (that's eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert…
pontiff | November 13, 2009This interview with Cormac McCarthy by the Wall Street Journal is well worth reading (Coincidentally(?) I just started rereading the Border Trilogy.)
This amused me
[CM:] Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.
simply because I can attest that yes, indeed, this is what he does! And, well, because my time at the Santa Fe Institute followed a similar pattern :)
On the other hand here is a more ominous reason why I enjoyed (my too brief) time at SFI:
WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?
CM: If…
pontiff | October 8, 2009The Nobel prize in Politics Literature has been awarded to Herta Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."
pontiff | August 4, 2009Well there goes a chunk of my time. A new Pynchon novel is out: Inherent Vice. According to this New York Times review it's much more like Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 than Gravity's Rainbow. I'm sure there will be much teeth gnashing among the literati, but personally, I'm a huge fan of Vineland
I've previously mused that a reason that Vineland gets poor reviews is (a) "Gravity's Rainbow" is pretty epic and has a subject with which current readers can approach without dislodging their own beliefs too much, and (b) literature professors don't like being told the sixties failed.…
pontiff | February 2, 2009Compare and contrast.
That first one has some good book review snark:
T. C. Boyle's dreary new novel, "The Women," isn't a rewrite of Clare Boothe Luce's wicked 1936 play "The Women." It's a rewrite of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright that somehow manages to turn the gripping, operatic saga of America's premier architect and the women in his life into a tedious, predictable melodrama.
Ouch. Followed by a discussion of the backwards in time narrative technique:
Unfortunately for the reader, this inorganic, needlessly complex architecture -- of the sort that Wright would utterly disdain in a…
pontiff | January 22, 2009Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I'm an idiot, please tell me why!
Having, in the past chapter (hopefully) convinced us that…
pontiff | December 30, 2008Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I'm reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields…
pontiff | December 29, 2008So I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers: The Story of Success the other day, as I'm sure many of you will be doing on your next trip to the airport (where stands of Gladwell's hardcover book, marked down thirty percent, block your every exit through the already cramped airport bookstores.) Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. Well "entertaining" in that "holy shit dude you are pedantic" sort of way. Note that I really do…
pontiff | December 9, 2008A while back I added my library to librarything.com. In adding this books I tagged my books with various keywords. As you can imagine there were a lot tagged as "physics." Indeed when I entered the books there were only a few people who had a comparable number of physics tags, among them a user called lasermazer. Recently I checked in, and damnit, there is now a library that has a lot more physics tags books:
Yes that is the Thomas Jefferson! A cool feature of library thing are "legacy libraries" where you can compare your overlap with other historic libraries. But wait. Thomas…
pontiff | December 4, 2008Robert Ebert: Win Ben Stein's Mind.
Peter R. Saulson: Review of "Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture" by Alan Sokal
Skewers of "Expelled" from the first:
This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of…
pontiff | December 4, 2008Via Michael Nielsen's friendfeed, I am led to ACM Classic Books Series. If you've got ACM subscription access, some of the book are even in electronic form. Cool. I love the introduction to "The Computer and the Brain" by John von Neumann:
Since I am neither a neurologist nor a psychiatrist, but a mathematician, the work that follows requires some explanation and justification. It is an approach toward the understanding of the nervous system from the mathematician's point of view. However, this statement must immediately be qualified in both of its essential parts.
I feel like I need to…
pontiff | June 13, 2008Writing grants and teaching, not to mention trying to get some actual research done, has taken up a considerable amount of my time this quarter. I mean, sheesh, I've barely had any time to read! This has, of course, made me grumpy. So when the publisher of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow offered me a review copy of the book, I was very happy. I mean, I love probability and I love, um, well....you know :)
First of all, let me say that Mlodinow's book is preaching to the converted! A large portion of his book is devoted to showing how randomness…
pontiff | March 18, 2008Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author, predictor of the future, and inspirer of at least one little kid from rural Northern California, is dead at age 90.
Although I learned to cringe at some of Clarke's writing as I grew older, I have very distinct and fond memories of reading "Childhood's End" and "Rendezvous with Rama." (Like all such memories, I dread rereading these for fear of losing my even now foggy recollections of the joy these books brought me.)
And then, of course, there are Clarke's Three Laws:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he…
pontiff | March 16, 2008Seeker by Jack McDevitt, Newton's Wake: A Space Opera by Ken MacLeod, and Eater by Gregory Benford. Seems I am on a science fiction kick. That must be a sign that I'm looking for new ideas to work on.
Seeker by Jack McDevitt. Science fiction with an archeology/mystery bent. Lost civilizations, mysterious artifacts, make for an enjoyable quick read. A good book to read in one sitting.
Newton's Wake: A Space Opera by Ken MacLeod. A post-singularity novel. So post singularity that the artificial intellgences that went through the singularity have gone away. Started good, but by the…
pontiff | January 2, 2008Books conquered during the holiday resting season: "Learning the World" by Ken MacLeod, "The Crack in Space" by Philip K. Dick, and "Washington Wines and Wineries: The Essential Guide" by Paul Gregutt.
Learning the World by Ken MacLeod. A first contact novel. Or rather, a pre-first contact novel. Enjoyable, but I was left wishing that the characters were more fleshed out. Also [SEMI SPOILER ALERT] notable for its use of the increasingly common "universitas ex machina." You know what I mean: "universitas ex machina" is where parallel universes/the multiverse are used as a nice escape…
pontiff | December 2, 2007Books off the queue and lodge securely somewhere behind my eyes: "A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy and "A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation" by Richard Bookstaber
A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy (with a foreword by C.P. Snow)
I was really looking forward to reading this classic, since mathematicians certainly have a lot to apologize for. Sadly Hardy instead writes a fairly depressing defense of mathematics from a fairly dogmatic view of the subject. Of course, he has every right to this view (unlike me, who barely…