reading diary
jdupuis | January 3, 2016John Horton Conway is a great mathematician, certainly one of the greatest living mathematicians. Polymathematical in his mathematical interests (game theory, geometry, group theory, topology and more, not to mention the Game of Life), he's also one of the most eccentric, and that's saying a lot in a field where Cedric Villani is prime eccentricity competition.
As one can imagine, the biographer of an oddball character like Conway faces certain ... challenges ... that most biographers don't face. Memory, obstinacy, whimsy, the whole nine yards.
So it pleases me to say that Siobhan Roberts'…
jdupuis | December 8, 2015This latest book in my reviewing adventures continues the recentish trend of books concerned with science during World War II. Michael Hiltzik's Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex follows books such as Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler, Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War and Les Rêveurs lunaires: Quatre génies qui ont changé l’Histoire. A little further back, there's Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War and Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and…
jdupuis | September 10, 2015It's tempting to go a couple of different ways here.
A book that has "Insanely Great" in the title? What could possibly go wrong?
On the other hand....
A kids book about what a jerk Steve Jobs was. What could possibly go wrong?
Steve Jobs: Insanely Great by Jessie Hartland. An illustrated biography of Steve Jobs aimed at a younger audience which gives an honest, unflinching look at his life, warts and all. Maybe not up to the "insanely great" standard, but engaging and enjoyable with a lot of openings for parents and children to talk about how complicated real people are.
What more could you…
jdupuis | August 4, 2015Cédric Villani's Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure has risen to the top of my Best Science Book of 2015 list. It'll be tough for another book to kick it off that summit before the end of the year, that's for sure.
The name Cédric Villani probably sounds a bit familiar to most who follow the science world reasonably closely. That's because he's the spider-pendant wearing, cravat and three-piece suit porting, Fields Medal winning French mathematician who's currently the director of the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris. He's known in math circles for his work on nonlinear Landau…
jdupuis | July 24, 2015Gabriella Coleman's Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous is largely a laudatory history of the Anonymous hacker activist movement with some anthropological and political analysis. Whitney Phillips' This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture on the other hand, is much more geared towards an analytical and philosophical analysis of past and present (and even future) of how online trolling relates to contemporary culture.
Neither book is perfect, and both tend to falter where it comes to how closely…
jdupuis | July 18, 2015Sydney Padua's The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is one of the most flat-out entertaining books I have read in a very long time.
You should buy this book. Your library should buy this book. Buy a copy of this book for all your friends.
What's all the fuss?
TTAoLaB is a graphic novelization of the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, those wacky pioneers of computers and programming. But TTAoLaB isn't really just a novelization of their lives -- really only the first chapter or so pretends at any kind of historical accuracy. What it is is an imagineering of what their…
jdupuis | May 26, 2015I am not trying to deny the transformative nature of the Internet, but rather that we've lived with it long enough to ask tough questions.
...
I've tried to avoid the Manichean view of technology, which assumes either that the Internet will save us or that it is leading us astray, that it is making us stupid or making us smart, that things are black or white. The truth is subtler: technology alone cannot deliver the cultural transformation we have been waiting for; instead, we need to first understand and then address the underlying social and economic forces that shape it. Only then can we…
jdupuis | May 19, 2015A bit unusually for me, I'm reviewing a novel as part of my Reading Diary series. Usually the closest I'll get to a novel is a fictionalized science graphic novel of some sort, kind of like the Survive! series or Lauren Ispsum.
But no, this ain't one of those. It's a good old fashioned novel.
OK, it's a climate change fiction novel that's kind of like an Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell romantic comedy but starring Seth Rogan and Jennifer Lawrence. Set on a community college campus, it has a bit of a feel of The Absent-Minded Professor or even The Nutty Professor for the cli-fi set.
So what have…
jdupuis | May 15, 2015What is digital governance in the first place?
Digital governance is a discipline that focuses on establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy, and standards. A digital governance framework, when effectively designed and implemented, helps to streamline digital development and dampen debates around digital channel “ownership.”
-- From the Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design website.
Universities
Intellectual autonomy and stubbornness of staff
-- From the index, Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, p. 229
Time to take a little medicine! All those…
jdupuis | April 30, 2015This roundup includes reviews of a bunch of recent and not-so-recent reading about Canadian politics, in particular the Harper government and how it controls information. Some of the books are pretty directly related to science policy and some, not so much. These are all worth reading, some kind of overlap while others present fairly unique approaches. All were useful to me in my long term interest and work around Canadian science policy and in understanding the current Canadian Conservative government's anti-science attitudes. All are solid additions to the growing body of work on the…
jdupuis | April 23, 2015There's kind of two theories of the web. The first theory is that it's the best thing ever, the culmination of human civilization, incapable of being anything negative in anyone's lives. Proponents of this theory can't stand it when anyone says anything mean about the web (or usually any technology) in public or especially online.
The other theory is the chicken little theory. According to this theory, the web (and usually any technology) is the reason the world is going to hell in a hand basket. All the bad things in the world are because the web is disrupting science and art and culture.…
jdupuis | April 14, 2015Colin Adams's Zombies & Calculus is one of the coolest, funniest, most creative science books I've read in a very long time.
What's interesting about that statement is that we're not talking a non-fiction book here. We're talking a novel. Yes, a novel. Zombies & Calculus is pure fiction. Fortunately. Now I'm a big fan of the Walking Dead tv show and the comics too (though I'm a bit behind on the trade paperback collections) so I"m quite glad it's fiction. Basically, the premise of this novel is, "What if Rick Grimes had been a university math prof instead of a police officer."
The…
jdupuis | April 5, 2015Imagine a world where two guys, graduates of the University of Guelph, a mid-sized university in southern Ontario, are able to parlay a series of funny and cool whiteboard-style science explanation YouTube videos into a global science communication empire. Without even "forgetting" to give credit to science illustrators in the process.
Don't imagine too hard, because I think we're almost there.
And what is it about Ontario and humourous science communications anyways? Is it something in the water? At least the most recent incarnation seems to be a little clearer on how things should be done.…
jdupuis | December 15, 2014For those that don't know, Elizabeth May is the leader of the Green Party of Canada and one of only two Greens in the Canadian Parliament -- and the only one elected as a Green. As such, you would expect that she would be a strong advocate for democracy and the environment, willing to stand up to the current Conservative government of Stephen Harper and tell it like it is.
In her latest book, Who We Are: Reflections on My Life and Canada, she does just that in an entertaining and inspiring amalgamation of memoir and manifesto.
This is an amazing book, sarcastic and hopeful but still witty and…
jdupuis | September 22, 2014Melissa K. Aho and Erika Bennet's anthology The Machiavellian Librarian: Winning Allies, Combating Budget Cuts, and influencing Stakeholders is pretty good for what it is, in some ways better than I expected. It's a guide for maneuvering office politics and advancing your agenda, big and small, with the stakeholders and influencers that matters in your environment. Sadly, this book fails for what it isn't: a book that tackles the issues and trends where librarians really need to advance our agendas and make ourselves key "thought leaders" and "influencers."
The book is a collection of 25…
jdupuis | September 15, 2014This one's a bit of a head-scratcher.
Richard Evan Schwartz's Really Big Numbers has a great premise. A kids book that takes some fairly advanced mathematical concepts and presents them in a lively, engaging and understandable format. So far, so good.
Schwartz does a commendable job of taking the concepts surrounding Really Big Numbers and explaining them in a fairly comprehensible format, from simple counting to very high numbers, visual representation of big numbers, conceptual representations when there's no more space for dots on the page, an explanation of powers of 10 all the way to…
jdupuis | August 28, 2014"Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked...We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it. We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place."
- James Box
The climate crisis is serious, no doubt about it. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth from nearly a decade ago was a kind of rallying cry for the reality-based community but it appears that we might need another rallying cry as Gore…
jdupuis | August 15, 2014First Second Books has done it again!
They've published another wonderful science-themed graphic novel that belongs on every bookshelf.
(Of course, they publish tons of other non-science themed graphic novels too. One of my particular favourite recent ones in the biography of Andre the Giant. The Zita the Spacegirl series is also wonderful beyond words.)
This time Nick Bertozzi's Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey brings us the history of Ernest Shackleton's crazy epic Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17. And epic is about the understatement of the century in describing this multi-…
jdupuis | May 21, 2014Extremophiles are fun! Basically, they're the biggest, smallest, hardiest and definitely the oddest bunch of beasties to be found anywhere on this planet. The Palumbi father and son team -- one scientist and one writer -- bring us this fun little book on the extremophiles of the sea.
And literally, the book covers all the various sea creatures from the oldest to the smallest, to the ones that live in scalding hot conditions to those that live in the coldest conditions, so cold that the blood of normal creatures would freeze. We see the ones with the craziest migration patterns, the oddest…
jdupuis | April 28, 2014Two recentish entries into the growing field of graphic novel scientific biographies, both very good, both suitable for a wide audience: Darwin: A Graphic Biography by Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr and Mind Afire: The Visions of Tesla by Abigail Samoun and Elizabeth Haidle.
If I had to count one of these a little bit better than the other, I would give that edge to the Byrne & Gurr's Darwin biography. It has a very amusing "Ape-TV" wrap around story conceit where an ape television program tells the life story of that strange human, Charles Darwin. As a result, the story never sags, the main…