Since it’s clear from previous posts that readers here love their books, I have a question for the science folks. Any favorites? I budget reading time for two a year. Just finishing up The Quantum Labyrinth about Wheeler and Feynman’s work. Already shopping for the next.
This is an old one and probably technically outdated, but I was fascinated by it.
“Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe”, Ward & Brownlee (2003).
It’s a great mix of unusual biology and astrophysics that they call astrobiology.
@TommyJay–
“This is an old one and …” Hold my beer…
“Thirty Years that Shook Physics” George Gamov, 1966. Its a history of the development of quantum physics. Even if old, it gave me some much needed brush-up (many years beyond a classroom) and catch-up to try to understand
what’s happening now. I’m still trying to understand, the “trying” outpacing the “understanding”.
Cute as a button so the drake equation is unoperative
Another Mike,
I think I read that one (Gamow) a couple or few years after it was written. Very influential for me.
Mike Plaiss:
“Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World” by Amir Alexander
Mike Plaiss:
Over the last 30 years these were the three science books which changed how I viewed the world:
* John Horgan, “The End of Science” (1996)
Horgan argues scientists have plucked the low-hanging fruits of discovery and science has already reached the stage of diminishing returns.
* Bjorn Lomborg, “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (2001)
Everything I knew was wrong regarding the eco-apocalypse! Lomborg is still doing good work.
* Ray Kurzweill, “The Singularity is Near” (2005)
Kurzweill argues, with surprising persuasion, that the nature of the universe and humanity is exponentially growing complexity and intelligence.
Hang on to your hats because it’s about to get interesting…
It’s amazing a baby beaver not around other beavers still has the instinct to build dams. No Trannie beaver learning to become a squirrel or a dog
Rupert Murdoch could have stepped in but chose not to.
@RepJeffries and I are demanding that he do what he should have done a long time ago:
Order Tucker Carlson and other hosts on Fox News to stop spreading the Big Lie.
So much for the marketplace of ideas. Forcing people to do or not do this, that, or the other is big with these people.
“Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World” by Amir Alexander
Rufus:
I’ll have to check that out. You can take the boy out of calculus class, but you can’t take the calculus out of the boy.
I remain in awe of Newton and Leibniz for calculus and its infinitesimals.
Strictly speaking, infinitesimals involved a certain amount of handwaving and lost favor, then were replaced by more rigorous proofs involving “limits.”
However, in the 60s mathematician Abraham Robinson found a way to rehabilitate infinitesimals and created “Nonstandard Analysis.” There is even a calculus textbook based on Robinson’s infinitesimals, supposedly more intuitive than the usual delta-epsilon limit stuff. (I can believe that.)
I’m ten pages into my first French classic novel, Pauline Réage’s “Histoire d’O.” I was scouring Audilble.com for French novels in French and ran across it. I read the translation when I was in high school and it rather left an impression, so it seemed likely to hold my attention this time as well.
It’s not too hard. It’s denser than I remember. I have to look up a lot of words, the nested clauses still get me and the author uses turns of phrases I don’t know. But I’m getting there.
“Pauline Réage” is a pseudonym. There was much speculation about who she was or even if she was a woman, but before she died in 1998, she disclosed her birth name, Anne Desclos.
Some say she fought in the French Resistance. She was high up in French literary circles of her time.
huxley on March 2, 2023 at 7:52 pm,
My first PC had an 8086 and 8087 math coprocessor so I could attempt to compute many of the things I learned in calculus and ODE and PDE courses. Closed form analytic solutions are nice but very limited in scope.
Before that, I had a solid state physics course at UCSD taught by a prof., Walter Kohn. Throughout that course, he would tend to insert material on how one might actually go about solving or approximately computing some of the material we were covering. Not long after that, he left that campus and got a more research oriented job in the Santa Barbara area.
Many years later, I was surprised to learn that Walter Kohn had won the Nobel prize in chemistry. I sent him an email about how he was the modern version of Ernest Rutherford who marveled at his rapid transformation from physicist to chemist. He sent me a nice reply. I don’t know much about his work, but I believe that his computational work really advanced the chemist’s understanding of molecular interactions.
Skip on March 2, 2023 at 3:10 pm:
Well, beavers build dams with sticks, of course, but dogs play with sticks, and the squirrels in the tree outside my window are happily running up and down branches, otherwise known as “pre-sticks”.
And all three groups have a great deal of stick-to-it-tiveness in what they do. 🙂
TommyJay:
I remember when math coprocessors were cool! Likewise your computations. How were you programming your math problems?
Also, sorry if I forgot, but what do you do for a living?
Thanks for all the recommendations. All sound interesting and will go on my reading list, which grows and grows.
Can’t believe that Gamow wrote a book about a subject that interests me greatly and I wasn’t aware of it. He’s great. If you have a youngster showing STEM proclivities get them a copy of “One Two Three…Infinity” it could change their life – that kind of book.
huxley,
Forgot to check back.
Fortran in various versions in the early days. I went through a variety of less common languages until I settled on ANSI C. Had to write various math functionality that wasn’t included therein. The big pain was complex math. Eventually almost everything I did required it.
Then of course, C++ with the standard math lib., which was really nice. The object oriented paradigm with the mess of classes was my undoing. A variety of things cropped up in my life, not the least of which was I was becoming an older dog struggling with the new tricks.
Physics prof. Bailed out early. Now a retired amateur investor.
“complex math” = complex analysis with imaginary number system. To be unambiguous.
@ TommyJay – did you ever have this t-shirt, popular with the computer geeks of my college days”
“FORTRAN jock – I speak in GOTOs”
TommyJay:
Thanks. Fascinating. I doubt I’ll get to analysis in this lifetime.
Ah, C. When men were men and a pointer was a pointer — simple, direct and dangerous.
Dangerous. Ha.
No, never used a GOTO. I was trained jn structured programming from the start. And you can do that in ANSI C with discipline.
But dealing with complex numbers systems was a real pain without something like Fortran back when. I think APL did, but that was hideous. Most of my colllegues defaulted to Matlab in later years. Wimps.
Re: Matlab
TommyJay:
UNM’s one legitimate claim to fame!
Mosler. Cleve Mosler.
The professor who put Matlab together to give UNM students access to the Fortran math libraries without writing Fortran.
But capital-f, he had a degree from CalTech, a Ph.d from Stanford and he worked at JPL before he came to UNM.
When I took the coursera class on machine learning (by Andrew Ng), we used Matlab a bit. It was a bit too hard for me to solve easily while working (and playing Dad, Husband, plus some computer games), so I got help solving many of the problems and “doing” Matlab rather than really using it.
Today a lot more data scientists & engineers are using R, but there are also a whole lot more of them; not sure of ratios.
cohere.ai has more intro stuff for the LLMs which are going to be the big new thing – and change business more than the internet.
All jobs where humans are using computers are at risk of automation or semi-automation using ai.Bots to do whatever the humans were doing on the computer. Reports, summaries, graphs, analysis, art, text, memos, emails, marketing – probabilistic analysis of alternative decision options.
Physical robots are a bit behind, and far more expensive than, software ai Bots.
But for evolution of humanity, best book to read is:
The Goodness Paradox, by Richard Wrangham.
How humans are both the least reactively violent, but also the most efficient proactively violent species.
see https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/did-capital-punishment-create-morality
“Did Capital Punishment Create Morality?
A new book argues that violence—specifically, the killing of alpha males—laid the foundation for virtue.”
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Since it’s clear from previous posts that readers here love their books, I have a question for the science folks. Any favorites? I budget reading time for two a year. Just finishing up The Quantum Labyrinth about Wheeler and Feynman’s work. Already shopping for the next.
This is an old one and probably technically outdated, but I was fascinated by it.
“Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe”, Ward & Brownlee (2003).
It’s a great mix of unusual biology and astrophysics that they call astrobiology.
@TommyJay–
“This is an old one and …” Hold my beer…
“Thirty Years that Shook Physics” George Gamov, 1966. Its a history of the development of quantum physics. Even if old, it gave me some much needed brush-up (many years beyond a classroom) and catch-up to try to understand
what’s happening now. I’m still trying to understand, the “trying” outpacing the “understanding”.
Cute as a button so the drake equation is unoperative
Another Mike,
I think I read that one (Gamow) a couple or few years after it was written. Very influential for me.
Mike Plaiss:
“Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World” by Amir Alexander
Mike Plaiss:
Over the last 30 years these were the three science books which changed how I viewed the world:
* John Horgan, “The End of Science” (1996)
Horgan argues scientists have plucked the low-hanging fruits of discovery and science has already reached the stage of diminishing returns.
* Bjorn Lomborg, “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (2001)
Everything I knew was wrong regarding the eco-apocalypse! Lomborg is still doing good work.
* Ray Kurzweill, “The Singularity is Near” (2005)
Kurzweill argues, with surprising persuasion, that the nature of the universe and humanity is exponentially growing complexity and intelligence.
Hang on to your hats because it’s about to get interesting…
It’s amazing a baby beaver not around other beavers still has the instinct to build dams. No Trannie beaver learning to become a squirrel or a dog
Chuck Schumer:
Rupert Murdoch could have stepped in but chose not to.
@RepJeffries and I are demanding that he do what he should have done a long time ago:
Order Tucker Carlson and other hosts on Fox News to stop spreading the Big Lie.
So much for the marketplace of ideas. Forcing people to do or not do this, that, or the other is big with these people.
“Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World” by Amir Alexander
Rufus:
I’ll have to check that out. You can take the boy out of calculus class, but you can’t take the calculus out of the boy.
I remain in awe of Newton and Leibniz for calculus and its infinitesimals.
Strictly speaking, infinitesimals involved a certain amount of handwaving and lost favor, then were replaced by more rigorous proofs involving “limits.”
However, in the 60s mathematician Abraham Robinson found a way to rehabilitate infinitesimals and created “Nonstandard Analysis.” There is even a calculus textbook based on Robinson’s infinitesimals, supposedly more intuitive than the usual delta-epsilon limit stuff. (I can believe that.)
–“Infinitesimals”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Infinitesimals-1368274
–“Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_Calculus:_An_Infinitesimal_Approach
I’m ten pages into my first French classic novel, Pauline Réage’s “Histoire d’O.” I was scouring Audilble.com for French novels in French and ran across it. I read the translation when I was in high school and it rather left an impression, so it seemed likely to hold my attention this time as well.
It’s not too hard. It’s denser than I remember. I have to look up a lot of words, the nested clauses still get me and the author uses turns of phrases I don’t know. But I’m getting there.
“Pauline Réage” is a pseudonym. There was much speculation about who she was or even if she was a woman, but before she died in 1998, she disclosed her birth name, Anne Desclos.
Some say she fought in the French Resistance. She was high up in French literary circles of her time.
huxley on March 2, 2023 at 7:52 pm,
My first PC had an 8086 and 8087 math coprocessor so I could attempt to compute many of the things I learned in calculus and ODE and PDE courses. Closed form analytic solutions are nice but very limited in scope.
Before that, I had a solid state physics course at UCSD taught by a prof., Walter Kohn. Throughout that course, he would tend to insert material on how one might actually go about solving or approximately computing some of the material we were covering. Not long after that, he left that campus and got a more research oriented job in the Santa Barbara area.
Many years later, I was surprised to learn that Walter Kohn had won the Nobel prize in chemistry. I sent him an email about how he was the modern version of Ernest Rutherford who marveled at his rapid transformation from physicist to chemist. He sent me a nice reply. I don’t know much about his work, but I believe that his computational work really advanced the chemist’s understanding of molecular interactions.
Skip on March 2, 2023 at 3:10 pm:
Well, beavers build dams with sticks, of course, but dogs play with sticks, and the squirrels in the tree outside my window are happily running up and down branches, otherwise known as “pre-sticks”.
And all three groups have a great deal of stick-to-it-tiveness in what they do. 🙂
TommyJay:
I remember when math coprocessors were cool! Likewise your computations. How were you programming your math problems?
Also, sorry if I forgot, but what do you do for a living?
Thanks for all the recommendations. All sound interesting and will go on my reading list, which grows and grows.
Can’t believe that Gamow wrote a book about a subject that interests me greatly and I wasn’t aware of it. He’s great. If you have a youngster showing STEM proclivities get them a copy of “One Two Three…Infinity” it could change their life – that kind of book.
huxley,
Forgot to check back.
Fortran in various versions in the early days. I went through a variety of less common languages until I settled on ANSI C. Had to write various math functionality that wasn’t included therein. The big pain was complex math. Eventually almost everything I did required it.
Then of course, C++ with the standard math lib., which was really nice. The object oriented paradigm with the mess of classes was my undoing. A variety of things cropped up in my life, not the least of which was I was becoming an older dog struggling with the new tricks.
Physics prof. Bailed out early. Now a retired amateur investor.
“complex math” = complex analysis with imaginary number system. To be unambiguous.
@ TommyJay – did you ever have this t-shirt, popular with the computer geeks of my college days”
“FORTRAN jock – I speak in GOTOs”
TommyJay:
Thanks. Fascinating. I doubt I’ll get to analysis in this lifetime.
Ah, C. When men were men and a pointer was a pointer — simple, direct and dangerous.
Dangerous. Ha.
No, never used a GOTO. I was trained jn structured programming from the start. And you can do that in ANSI C with discipline.
But dealing with complex numbers systems was a real pain without something like Fortran back when. I think APL did, but that was hideous. Most of my colllegues defaulted to Matlab in later years. Wimps.
Re: Matlab
TommyJay:
UNM’s one legitimate claim to fame!
Mosler. Cleve Mosler.
The professor who put Matlab together to give UNM students access to the Fortran math libraries without writing Fortran.
But capital-f, he had a degree from CalTech, a Ph.d from Stanford and he worked at JPL before he came to UNM.
When I took the coursera class on machine learning (by Andrew Ng), we used Matlab a bit. It was a bit too hard for me to solve easily while working (and playing Dad, Husband, plus some computer games), so I got help solving many of the problems and “doing” Matlab rather than really using it.
Today a lot more data scientists & engineers are using R, but there are also a whole lot more of them; not sure of ratios.
cohere.ai has more intro stuff for the LLMs which are going to be the big new thing – and change business more than the internet.
All jobs where humans are using computers are at risk of automation or semi-automation using ai.Bots to do whatever the humans were doing on the computer. Reports, summaries, graphs, analysis, art, text, memos, emails, marketing – probabilistic analysis of alternative decision options.
Physical robots are a bit behind, and far more expensive than, software ai Bots.
But for evolution of humanity, best book to read is:
The Goodness Paradox, by Richard Wrangham.
How humans are both the least reactively violent, but also the most efficient proactively violent species.
see https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/did-capital-punishment-create-morality
“Did Capital Punishment Create Morality?
A new book argues that violence—specifically, the killing of alpha males—laid the foundation for virtue.”