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Comments · 185
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Doomsday Book (sf novel)A common misspelling - I'm sure a lot of people hitting my review of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book (a decent sf novel) are actually looking for the Domesday Book!
I wonder if that was the idea in Willis' choice of title?
Danny.
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Re:So, um, is it good?I think the review makes it clear I think the volume is good: "fascinating", "accessible",
But some of my reviews are definitely more substantial than others, 'tis true. You might like to check out what I think is the shortest. The average review length is only 400 words, though that's been climbing slowly.
Danny.
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A bit on bytesI just noticed that kwertii lists 9-bit bytes as a "radically different concept", an example of what Soviet computer architects might have considered. Worth mentioning that the 8-bit byte was not always something you could take for granted. I can't think of any production machines, but I seem to recall that Knuth's specification of his famous MIX machine (an imaginary computer he invented for teaching purposes) doesn't require that bytes be implemented as 8-bit values. In fact, a programmer is not even supposed to assume that a byte is a string of bits!
Before IBM introduced the byte concept back in the 60s, all computers used "word-level" addressing. That meant that data path width and the addressable unit of data had to be the same thing. Made it hard to write portable software. By divorcing the addressing scheme from the data path width, IBM was able to design computers where differences in word size were a matter of efficiency, not compatibility.
There was nothing to force manufacturers to use 8-bit bytes. (Unless, of course, they were trying to rip off IBMs instruction set. A few did, but competing head-to-head with Big Blue that way usually didn't work out.) On the one hand, the standard data terminal of the time used a 7-bit character set. On the other hand, you can make a case for a 12-bit byte. But IBM used an 8-bit byte, and in those days, what IBM did tended to become a standard.
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the state and capitalismHistorically, capitalism has been inseparable from the state. Indeed the growth of capitalism has gone hand in hand with the creation of modern nation-states. For background on this, I heartily recommend Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism .
Danny.
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Yevgeny Zamyatin!One of my favourite Russian sf authors is Yevgeny Zamyatin.
And Stanislaw Lem, while Polish rather than Russian, has always been popular in Russia.
Danny.
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Yevgeny Zamyatin!One of my favourite Russian sf authors is Yevgeny Zamyatin.
And Stanislaw Lem, while Polish rather than Russian, has always been popular in Russia.
Danny.
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Hal's Legacy - bookHal's Legacy is a nice book on how well Clarke predicted the future of computer science in 2001.
Danny.
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book on "extreme" bacteriaA good book on bacteria in extreme environments is John Postgate's The Outer Reaches of Life (review).
Danny.
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Guns, Germs & Steel tie in
If I recall correctly from Guns, Germs & Steel, Australia was the extinction ground of a few types of animal because by the time Humans spread to the continent, they were advanced enough to kill things pretty expertly but hadn't yet gotten to agriculture or domestication.
Maybe this is just returning the favor...
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Re:Le Guin rules!I haven't read The Other Wind yet, but I thought even Tehanu had moved a long way from Taoism. In fact I thought it had some elements that were almost Christian. But see my review for the explanation of that, saves me rewriting it here.
Danny.
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I've never had the courageI've never worked up the courage to review The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed or The Earthsea Trilogy. For me that would be like reviewing Lord of the Rings. But I'm a great Le Guin fan - I own more books by her than any other writer - and I've written reviews of half a dozen of her other books.
Danny.
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content, content, contentMy book review site is now getting up around 4000 visitors (10 000 page views) a day. But I've been adding new content to that for nearly ten years now, and I spend many hours a week writing reviews (and even more reading books).
If you can afford it you can short-cut that process - you can buy some good content or convince friends, family, and strangers to provide it. And if the long-term approach to building up a profile is too slow, you could alwas buy come advertising (all I've ever spent was $20 as an experiment). Just make sure you put the content up before you do the advertising!
Danny.
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my review (I wasn't that impressed)You might like to check out my review of Beyond Contact . I wasn't that impressed - I thought it was rather awkwardly put together.
Danny.
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Think UnixIt's a cool book. If you want to know more about it, check out Lasser's web site, or read my own book review.
Danny.
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science of flight bookA nice popular work on flight is Hank Teneke's The Simple Science of Flight . One thing I particularly liked about this is that it treats birds (and insects) alongside aircraft.
Danny.
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% of visitors from GoogleHere's a graph of the number of visitors to my book review site coming from Google over the last 18 months or so:
200002: 1628: 1.70%
200004: 1116: 0.92%
200005: 3583: 3.21%
200006: 3184: 5.05%
200007: 3347: 5.83%
200008: 5085: 6.89%
200009: 6216: 5.29%
200010: 9341: 7.06%
200011: 7786: 6.18%
200012: 7345: 7.44%
200101: 8985: 8.08%
200102: 8422: 7.45%
200103: 9685: 7.60%
200104: 11588: 8.56%
200105: 12983: 9.02%
200106: 11740: 10.85%
200107: 11917: 13.23%
200108: 15378: 14.06%
The percentages need to be multipled by about 2.5 to get fractions of external referers - ie in August 2001 about 35% of my traffic came from www.google.com. (Also, these figures don't include google.yahoo.com or google.co.uk or the other sites using Google.)
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Re:Drop the paralyzing posturingYeah, right, this attack was carried out by a combination of the governments of Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan, along with the PLO... That's as bizarre as saying the attack was actually aimed at Poland, and not at the United States. You do know that Iran and Iraq fought a long and bloody war? That they don't speak Arabic in Afghanistan? That the democratically elected (yes) government of Iran is locked in a struggle with social and religious conservatives, trying to reform the country?
The depressing thing is that much US foreign policy seems almost as ignorant.
Danny
[I have written 600 book reviews] -
Islamic fundamentalism"Islamic fundamentalism" is an incredibly badly misused term. There is no single "Islamic fundamentalism" any more than there is a single "Christian fundamentalism" - there are an incredibly diverse range of movements and people that describe themselves as fundamentalist, and making sweeping generalisations about them (or, heaven help us, trying to declare war on them as if they were some kind of unified entity) makes no sense.
Interesting reading:
Meanwhile, in Australia they are already stoning school buses with Islamic kids on them... (I have a rant about this on my home page.)Danny
[I have written 600 book reviews] -
Islamic fundamentalism"Islamic fundamentalism" is an incredibly badly misused term. There is no single "Islamic fundamentalism" any more than there is a single "Christian fundamentalism" - there are an incredibly diverse range of movements and people that describe themselves as fundamentalist, and making sweeping generalisations about them (or, heaven help us, trying to declare war on them as if they were some kind of unified entity) makes no sense.
Interesting reading:
Meanwhile, in Australia they are already stoning school buses with Islamic kids on them... (I have a rant about this on my home page.)Danny
[I have written 600 book reviews] -
Islamic fundamentalism"Islamic fundamentalism" is an incredibly badly misused term. There is no single "Islamic fundamentalism" any more than there is a single "Christian fundamentalism" - there are an incredibly diverse range of movements and people that describe themselves as fundamentalist, and making sweeping generalisations about them (or, heaven help us, trying to declare war on them as if they were some kind of unified entity) makes no sense.
Interesting reading:
Meanwhile, in Australia they are already stoning school buses with Islamic kids on them... (I have a rant about this on my home page.)Danny
[I have written 600 book reviews] -
good stuff, but somewhat overhypedSee my review of the first Harry Potter novel.
Danny.
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Tolkien on Beowulf & Fr. Christmas
In addition to his wonderful fiction, Tolkien was a linguist and an expert on Anglo-Saxon languages. A collection of his lectures, aptly entitled The Monsters and the Critics, reviewed here includes one "On Translating Beowulf."
And no collection of Tolkiena would be complete without Letters from Father Christmas, a collection of letters Tolkien wrote to his kids over the years beginning in the 1930s. They were painstakingly illustrated, down to the North Pole postage stamps. You can see his style develop over the years, from straightforward tales of mishaps at the North Pole, often including a clumsy polar bear, to escalating wars between armies of trolls and dwarves. -
background neurobiologyFor a good introduction to human developmental
biology - necessary if one wants to talk sensibly
about various things damaging children's brains! -
I recommend the book Early Intelligence . That only
really covers early childhood ("the first five years"), but it gets harder to cause
developmental damage after that, so...
Danny. -
I reviewed volumes 1 to 3Here's my brief review of The Art of Computer Programming .
Danny.
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brief review of A Fire Upon the DeepI wrote a very brief review of A Fire Upon the Deep . (My older reviews were a lot shorter than my more recent ones.)
Danny.
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brief review of A Fire Upon the DeepI wrote a very brief review of A Fire Upon the Deep . (My older reviews were a lot shorter than my more recent ones.)
Danny.
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ephemeral and lastingOf the computing books I've reviewed, some are now totally useless, while others will probably still be valuable in another century.
Danny.
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ephemeral and lastingOf the computing books I've reviewed, some are now totally useless, while others will probably still be valuable in another century.
Danny.
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ephemeral and lastingOf the computing books I've reviewed, some are now totally useless, while others will probably still be valuable in another century.
Danny.
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another Sterling review - Holy FireI briefly reviewed Holy Fire , one of my favourite Sterling novels.
Danny.
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more recent book on Unix philosophyFor a more recent book on Unix philosophy, try Jon Lasser's Think Unix
Danny.
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Re:Spoilers in the review...A bit late for the Slashdot story, but I've added a "mild spoilers" warning to the version on my own site. And I made some other minor changes following comments here and my email.
When one's read a novel so often, it's easy not to think about people reading it for the first time!
Danny.
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Chinese language(s)I highly recommend S Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China to anyone interested in language in China.
Danny.
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another reviewI have written another review of Digital Copyright .
Danny.
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Iain M Banks reviewsI've reviewed some of Iain M Banks' science fiction. But I must try some of his non sf sometime!
Danny.
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review of Programming PythonI wrote a brief review of Programming Python (1st edition). A nice book.
Danny.
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A review of "Beyond Contact"You might like to read my review of McConnell's book Beyond Contact .
Danny.
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fantasy serialisationA lot of recent fantasy seems to be effectively serialised, albeit it at the granularity of the book - Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is just the biggest and highest profile example.
I think I'd actually prefer a novel that was serialised more in the manner of Dickens, because it will avoid the long wait between volumes, which can be as much as two years with a high quality work like George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
Anyway, I enjoyed Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, so I'll definitely give this a look. (I might even change my mind about not reviewing e-books...
Danny.
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fantasy serialisationA lot of recent fantasy seems to be effectively serialised, albeit it at the granularity of the book - Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is just the biggest and highest profile example.
I think I'd actually prefer a novel that was serialised more in the manner of Dickens, because it will avoid the long wait between volumes, which can be as much as two years with a high quality work like George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
Anyway, I enjoyed Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, so I'll definitely give this a look. (I might even change my mind about not reviewing e-books...
Danny.
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Re:Death to the current geographical political sys
Iceland had a similar system in the middle ages. Citizens were able to choose their chieftain (gothar). Gothar were able to vote in the council, and could transfer their authority as they wished. Citizens were able to choose the gothar they were allied to with few obligations. For more on Medieval Iceland, see David Friedman's writings. His article Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: a Historical Case is a little dense (as a journal article) but readable. You can also check out some usenet responses he wrote at http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Libertarian/My_Posts/Ic
e land_Anarch_FAQ1_reply.html. Also, Danny Yee has a review of the book Medieval Iceland.P. E. de Puydt suggested a similar system of government in the 1800s, which he called "panarchy". De Puydt envisioned a system of non-physical political divisions which people could "emigrate" between without changing physical location. De Puydt was suggesting a blueprint for the government of Belgium. You can read his tract "Panarchy" online (also here. You can read introductions by contemporary authors here and here. Roderick Long of the Free Nation Foundation wrote a piece on Virtual Cantons influenced by panarchy and the Swiss government.
In case you're wondering, I would love such a system! I wish I could vote for Mr. Boucher.
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why this, but not the Rome Statute?The US has consistently opposed the creation of an international court to try war crimes (the International Criminal Court), or worked to have it as weak as possible. (Geoffrey Robertson describes this in his book Crimes Against Humanity
Danny.
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word of mouth, UsenetSome "canonical tomes" are canonical within narrow disciplines, while others have much broader appeal - some are specialised textbooks while others are popularisations. I suspect these become known in different ways, but word of mouth must surely be important in both. One problem with canonicaltomes.org is that without any way to judge the background or competence of the people providing information about the books it will be hard to evaluate it - I think Gravitation is a great volume, but it's not going to be a useful intro to general relativity for the non-mathematical reader.
Another approach is posting to Usenet - when I was after a book on meteorology, I posted to sci.geo.meteorology (explaining my background and what I was looking for) and three different people from different universities recommended Wallace and Hobbs' Atmospheric Science , which turned out to be just what I was after.
Danny.
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alternative volcanism theoryI used to be a firm believer that the major extinctions were caused by impacts. Then I read Vincent Courtillot's Evolutionary Catastrohes and now I'm not so sure. That book makes the case for volcanism as the explanation of the seven major extinctions.
Danny.
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Re:Learn from chaos theory!Certainly chaos theory may be applicable to development and genetics, but it's not a magic wand. Also, the systems involved may not be deterministic enough for chaos theory to be applicable (people like Lewontin would argue for a significant role for randomness).
Danny.
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Re:Learn from chaos theory!Certainly chaos theory may be applicable to development and genetics, but it's not a magic wand. Also, the systems involved may not be deterministic enough for chaos theory to be applicable (people like Lewontin would argue for a significant role for randomness).
Danny.
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Re:IP ain't fact, it be fictionHmmmm... The Bible is hardly Western - it's distinctively West Asian. And I don't think either the original writers or those who produced the King James translation have that much in common with modern free software developers.
Danny.
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other quotesThe New Solar System (Cambridge Uni Press 1999) has a chapter on Pluto, Triton (Neptune's satellite), and Charon (Pluto's satellite). Some quotes:
The similarities between Triton and Pluto are too close to ignore: they have comparable sizes, bulk densities, surface compositions, temperatures, and heliocentric distances (at least when Pluto is near perihelion).
.However they came to be, we suspect that Triton and Pluto have something of a shared past. On the basis of their physical similarities and their proximity to the Kuiper belt, Trion and the Pluto-Charon binary are ever-more frequently being regarded as very large members of the Kuiper belt. Pluto's status as a planet is thus challenged. However, because it was found as a result of a search for a new planet, and because it has been called one for almost 70 years, Pluto will probably retain the traditional designation for the indefinite future - at least in the minds of most of us.
Danny.
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Re:A bit of a quandary...It's actually quite interesting that the fundamentalists get so worked up about evolutionary biology, but rarely if ever attempt to have the biblical Tower of Babel story taught in school language classes, instead of standard historical linguistics.
Pennock discusses this a little in his book Tower of Babel .
Danny.
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God's EquationAnother ok book on Einstein is Azel's God's Equation . (Though the equation in that is the Einsten field equation E=8piT, not E=mc^2.)
Danny.
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a reviewCan be found here.
Danny.