Recent Reading:
Quantum by Manjit Kumar, published by Icon Books
This book is as much about a small group of highly talented scientists as the theories they developed, but it is above all a history of the debate over the meaning of that theory - quantum mechanics. In order to tell the story Manjit Kumar skilfully blends pen portraits of the people involved with an explanation of the theory as it developed and the debate it engendered.
The underlying reason for the debate, whose main protagonists were Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, was simple: is there a 'quantum' world, a hidden reality, or is there only an abstract quantum reality? Einstein took the former view, Bohr the latter, and the argument over the question raged throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
The discussion was very sophisticated, but at stake was a vital question for physicists. Is it possible to construct a model of reality where everything occurs because of a definite cause rather than merely being able to specify the probability of an event occurring. Einstein believed it was possible to construct such a model, and that the fact that quantum theory was unable to do so indicated to him that it was not a complete theory.
The question was not resolved until long after the deaths of its the two main advocates, but if you want to know what the answer was, I suggest you read the book, it's well worth it! Recommended.
Tried by War by James M. McPherson, published by Penguin Books
There are many books about the American Civil War, but James McPherson's 'Tried by War' is the only one I know about Lincoln's role as commander in chief. The gap Mr McPherson fills is important, because Lincoln was the one who effectively defined what the powers granted to the commander in chief in broad outline by the constitution really meant in practice.
Lincoln's search for generals capable of winning the war is well known. (It wasn't until I played the USA in Paradox's computer game 'Victoria II' that I really appreciated the problems he had.) One the interesting things that comes out of this book is the way the self-taught Lincoln, who systematically read the military textbooks of the day to educate himself in military affairs, was able to zero in on the importance of destroying the enemy armies. Most of his early generals were fixated on taking territory - especially Richmond.
One of the consequences of this was that while Lincoln saw Lee's forays into Union territory as an opportunity to cut the Army of Northern Virginia off, envelope it, and destroy it, his generals merely saw it as an opportunity to march in the opposite direction - towards Richmond. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of the fact that in a civil war you know the enemy personally, especially in the higher echelons, who you trained with, and you therefore seek ways to win the war without fighting bloody battles. Unfortunately, such an attitude, while it may be laudable, doesn't win wars.
Mr McPherson has written one of the most readable books on any aspect of the Civil War that I have come across, and I can thoroughly recommend it.
The Essential Guide to HTML 5 by Jeanine Meyer, published by FriendsofEd (Apress)
I really can't recommend buying this book. It seems to have been written mainly for people with a very short attention span, and therefore skips on explaining why you do things in a specific way. The chosen way of displaying program listings, while it might have be useful for annotating each line, makes it impossible to look at the program flow, or consider the over all design. The one correct idea - that of incremental program development - becomes merely a vehicle for large spaced out repetitive chunks of code which probably extend the size of the book by as much as 20%.
The code itself, is, how shall I put it, somewhat less than optimal, and not conducive to creating good coding habits by those learning from the book. For instance, in the dice game example, the code for drawing a dot on the dice is repeated in a 'cut and paste' style every time a dot is drawn, instead of being gathered into a function and called each time it is needed.
I shudder to think about what sort of web site someone who learned from this book would put together. Fortunately, perhaps, they are not likely to learn enough from the book to make a web site work.
A triumph of enthusiasm over pedagogy. Definitely not recommended!
More Recent Reading
|
