Category: books

The Trouble with Physics (review: dnf)

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

I learned a lot from this book. But at this point, I have neither the time nor the brainpower to finish it off. The half that I read is quite good, though, so I’ll share a bit from that. The title of Lee Smolin‘s book foretells much: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next.
Smolin starts off with a an overview of science—what it is and ought to be, the greatest remaining puzzles in physics, what it means to truly solve them, the nature and power of theory, and a history of the major advances in physics since around the Renaissance. Smolin does a great job here. He really takes his time, assumes little, and has a clever way with analogies. Next comes the early development of string theory in the 70s and 80s, its rapid progress in the following decades, and current stagnation. Which brought to the part where he starts talking about branes and M-theory and super-symmetry and… I realized I would never make it. I would need a bit more focus and fewer compelling distractions tapping their foot impatiently in my To-Read queue.

Anyway, here’s a good riff from Smolin on the human side of science:

It seems to me more and more that career decisions hinge on character. Some people will happily jump on the next big thing, give it all they’ve got, and in this way make important contributions to fast-moving fields. Others just don’t have the temperament to do this. Some people need to think through everything very carefully, and this takes time, as they get easily confused. It’s not hard to feel superior to such people, until you remember that Einstein was one of them. In my experience, the truly shocking new ideas and innovations tend to come from such people. Still others—and I belong to this third group—just have to go their own way, and will flee fields for no better reason than that it offends them that people are joining in because it feels good to be on the winning side… Luckily for science, the contributions of the whole range of types are needed. Those who do good science, I’ve come to think, do so because they choose problems that are suited to them.

I’m pretty sure I’ll come back to this book maybe a couples months down the road. See also my post from last September with some stringy links.

The Starfish & the Spider (review: 3/5)

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The Starfish & the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is another book along the lines of Wikinomics. This book has the typical anecdotes punctuated with bullet points that you’ll see in other business books. It’s breezy and well-paced. It covers the principles of decentralization (e.g. “when attached, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized,” or “it’s easy to mistake starfish for spiders,” and “an open system doesn’t have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system.”), and their implications for the business world. While this one isn’t nearly as tedious as Wikinomics, it’s also not as wide-ranging or historical. In this case, I think that’s a good thing.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

A brief interview with Alex Ross. He’s got a new book on the way this fall, which I predict that I will enjoy immensely.

What I want to do is to provide an intelligent introduction to this fabulous, labyrinthine world: not just the music itself, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky onward, but the entire cultural and social tumult around it: the Rite of Spring riot, the interaction of composers and jazz people in the twenties, the entanglement of composers in totalitarian regimes, the weird intersections of post-WWII avant-garde composers and Cold War politics, the origins of minimalism in the alternative philosophies of the West Coast. It’s not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century told through music.

Interaction of Color (review: 4.5/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

The Yale University Press recently reprinted an expanded version of Josef Albers‘ classic book Interaction of Color. Unlike many books about color, this one eschews most discussion of optics and wavelengths and the physics of light. It’s not about theory and systems.
Instead, this one is meant to be a very hands-on book—experiment and observation. Each small chapter is dedicated to a particular color concept, a sort of visual consciousness-raising, if you will. Though it only takes an hour or two to read the book and ponder the examples, actually following through with the projects takes hours and hours of cutting out paper samples and ceaselessly arranging and rearranging.

To offer one tiny quibble, the layout of the text
really threw me for a loop.
The sentences are arranged in such a way
that they don’t continue to the true margin
on the side of the page,
neither making a justified block of text
or a comfortable right-ragged edge.
I’m not sure of the reasoning
for this decision.
But it really made the whole thing harder to read.

That aside, it’s a fantastic book.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Due out next month is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, written by Robert Murphy. I think Murphy is pretty sharp. I liked his market-anarchist speculation/philosophizing in Chaos Theory. And he also wrote a study guide for Murray Rothbard’s 1400-page economics treatise Man, Economy, and State. I’m looking forward to this latest one—it could pair nicely with Economics for Real People for a sort of friendly intro to libertarianism. Save the Block and Hoppe for later.

The Surrogates (review: 4/5)

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

There are a couple little perks that made me like this book right off the bat. The Surrogates is set in Atlanta. It was written by a local named Robert Venditti, and it’s published in nearby Marietta over at Top Shelf Productions. Cool. AND it’s a really cool story. I haven’t seen a lot of sci-fi comics, but this one makes up for the absence.
The Surrogates is set about 50 years from now. Technology has advanced such that humans can stay home safe and sound, while remotely controlling their electronic replacements, their surrogates, to take care of work… and play. Some folks don’t like it. So there’s some terrorism, some politics, and a good bit of gumshoe detective work. Luckily, Venditti’s writing doesn’t dwell too much on the heavyhanded dystopian riff, and the best meditative moments come out naturally in the characters’ conversations and interactions. Mixed between the chapters are Watchmen-like interludes, “primary documents” that help to flesh out the story, including sales brochures, editorials, news articles, and television transcripts.

I love Brett Weldele’s artwork in this book. Besides the sensitive work the the lettering, speech bubbles, and very spare sound effects, the coloring is especially good. It reminded me a bit of Dean Motter’s book, Batman: Nine Lives, with its restrained palette. One great set of panels show a crime scene inside a major industry lab. The lights have been tampered with, so the lab is drawn in a wash of a dark blue and grey, except for flashlight glare as the investigation goes on. A couple dozen panels later, the lights have gotten fixed, and the wash turns to a warm yellow. It’s a simple, but very cool effect. I read it all the way through the first time I started it. I predict that will happen again and again.

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A Tom Swifty is a kind of wordplay that plays a pun on the content of the quoted sentence. They’re delightfully awful. E.g.”‘You have the right to remain silent,’ said Tom arrestingly.” They came originally from the Tom Swift series of books, whose writers tried to avoid repetition of the word “said” without any decoration, so they kept looking for adverbial additions. Here are a couple lists of Tom Swifties and an essay in appreciation of the books.

When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It (review: 3.5/5)

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Reading Ben Yagoda‘s latest book is like having a good friend analyze every word that comes out of your mouth. But it’s not a book about Grammar Rules and Policies. I was relieved to find this sentence in the first dozen pages: “Ultimately, the issue of correctness just isn’t very interesting.”
When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech for Better and/or Worse is more of a progress report on our English language. Each chapter covers a part of speech: Adjective, Adverb, Article, Conjunction, Interjection, Noun, Preposition, Pronoun, Verb. Yagoda spends an enjoyable 30 pages on just a, an, and the. I think of it as sort of reverse dissection, where the language becomes more alive as you pick at it.

Yagoda is not a real stickler for rules, per se, but certainly has a strong sense of taste. More than that, he shows a real appreciation for how we actually use our words. He pulls from a number of resources: famous authors, The New Yorker (particularly the Harold Ross era), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Bible, sports television, a variety of dictionaries & style guides both old and new, popular music, advertising, film, etc. I love the variety of research material. One chapter begins, “Any unified theory of interjections—the words that, all by themselves, express reactions or emotions or serve other purposes in discourse—would have to start, like much else, with The Simpsons.”

Some miscellaneous trivia I enjoyed:

  • The “&” symbol comes from the ligature of letters e and t in the Latin word “et” (“and”). That’s not a huge surprise. But as recently as the 1800s, & was also the 27th letter of the alphabet!

    • When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself], ‘and’.” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.”

  • The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer coined at least 55 –age words, such as “agreeage, kissage, and weirdage.” Who knew there was one source for all that appendagage?
  • Quoting some good advice from C.S. Lewis: “Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—they should diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise).”
  • The word ye comes from a misprinting of the word ?æe. The þ character is called thorn, and used for th sounds. Back in the day, when printers typically didn’t always have the sorts for every symbol, “it was usually replaced by putting the letters t and h together, but sometimes y was used because it was felt to look similar.”

Great book. I’ve really had fantastic luck with my recent readings.

I Went to a Bookbinding Workshop!

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This past weekend I went to a leatherbound bookbinding workshop. I spent 4 hours learning from the wise and affable Berwyn Hung of Praxium Press, which is just outside of Atlanta. Berwyn does workshops for a bunch of other book forms, as well as teaching letterpress and boxmaking. I’m absolutely going back as soon as I can fit it in. Here’s a look at my finished product. It’s about 6 inches on either side, bound in pigskin:
photo of the pigskin cover of my book

Here’s a glimpse of the nifty blue endpapers:

photo looking down the spine of my book, with pretty blue endpapers

So yeah, I had a blast. You can see the full documentary of the workshop process in my Flickr photo set.