Category Archives: Non-Fiction

LJ Reviews Roundup, Again

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Here we are again. I reviewed Sean Carroll’s The Particle at the End of the Universe, and my write-up can be seen here.

I took a look at The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible (hooray Oxford comma) by Lance Fortnow (whom I keep wanting to call Lance Fortran — computer science in-joke). This appears to be his first book, but it’s a good one, about an esoteric question in mathematics/computer science with wide-ranging applications – if it’s ever solved. My review is quoted (though not in full) here.

Book Review: Wonderful Life with the Elements

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One of the publicists at No Starch Press alerted me to this recent title, knowing my enthusiasm for the excellent Manga Guide science text series, whose English editions they publish. I was expecting this latest made-in-Japan outing to be similarly quirky, and it did not disappoint.

Would it have ever occurred to you to visualize the noble gases as afro-sporting Japanese men? It hadn’t crossed my mind, but after reading this book of comic-strip style element characters, now I can’t summon up xenon or helium without a full, puffy top. Halogens like chlorine, meanwhile, have a cueball look, while other chemical groups share anything from punk rock spikes to buzz-cuts.

On the other hand, each unique element is also dressed up in anything from an apron to a lab coat to a business suit — or even a simple pair of white underwear — depending on their most common uses. The basic idea of the book is to put the elements in a real-life context of where we’re most likely to encounter them, their important properties, and their uses and threats to people individually or society in general.

A slim read at 200 pages, just over half of this space is given over to brief descriptions of each element in a standardized format. A brief paragraph illuminates a few of the more significant facts of each type of atom, perhaps a bit of its history or important uses. Some other basic data (density, atomic mass, etc.) and an epigram also accompany each profile (radium is the element that “bit the hand that fed it”, no doubt a reference to Marie and Pierre Curie who discovered it, then perished from radiation poisoning), but the centerpiece is always the anthropomorphic sketch.

Other parts of the text include brief sections on the most expensive commercially available elements, elements necessary to human health, and an argument for rare element conservation as part of an ecologically-sustainable future. But the book is never text-heavy, and can be read from start to finish in just a few hours.

The central conceit is cute; an original approach to connecting the reader with abstract yet critical components of our world. It doesn’t make memorizing the periodic table a breeze (what could and who would?), but it has resulted in some patterns sticking in my head better than before. The fold-out poster-sized table is a nice bonus, though educators might be careful of how they use it, or images from the book itself, both of which sometimes contain some cartoonish male nudity (the Japanese simply aren’t as uptight about that stuff as us).

All in all, it makes for a fun little coffee-table book for either the chemically-minded or the simply curious.

(No Starch Press, 2012)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

LJ Reviews Roundup

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My first three Library Journal reviews have run, and are partially or completely available online. Parts of my review of X and the City can be found here.

My full review of Benoit Mandelbrot’s memoir, The Fractalist, is quoted on the Barnes and Noble page for the book here.

My review of the coffee table book, Spectrums, gets the lead in a recent Xpress Reviews post at the Library Journal online.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra

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Vectors, matrices, and eigenvalues, oh my! The Manga Guide series’ triumphant return to the fertile and abstract realms of mathematics is, to this reader, most welcome and not a little overdue. This is not to say that previous forays into the physical-, life-, and computer sciences were at all unsuccessful. But even on their worst day, these real-world subjects are not nearly so difficult to penetrate as, say, set theory or integral calculus. And this is coming from a card-carrying math geek.

The wonderful and beautiful thing about this series is in its ability to come at complex and foreign topics from a sideways angle. I’m still amazed at the unusual points of reference the book authors find to bring the reader into some notoriously difficult topics – explaining onto and one-to-one functions in terms of restaurant orders, for example. The highly visual nature of the comic medium also serves as an anchor in what might otherwise be a text-heavy topic.

The manga scenario wrapped around all this math draws on a number of classic tropes, and not only from the realm of manga. Reiji is working hard as the newest student in his university karate club, a membership he paid for by agreeing to tutour his sensei’s sister in linear algebra. He’s the proverbial 98-pound weakling with a good heart, and it’s as good a reason as any to have two young people flirt and talk about matrix multiplication.

Of eight chapters, the first six are laid out as groundwork before the “real” linear algebra topics in the last two. The fundamentals in chapter two include reiviews of (or introductions to) set theory, some basic mathematical logic, and functional relationships. Following this are two chapters covering matrices, and two more on vectors (in a matrix interpretation). Only then are we able to tackle the true topics of the book title, linear transformations, eigenvectors, and eigenvalues.

It may sound like a hodgepodge, but it’s not. Each chapter builds carefully on the previous one. No calculus and only some basic algebra, trigonometry, and co-ordinate geometry are needed before reading this book. But the topics are tough for a newbie. This is university-level mathematics and requires a lot of practice problems before it will sink in for most readers.

The example problems in the text are great, but there are only a few. As with all books in the series, The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra is best utilized in conjunction with a thick textbook, chock-full of additional practice exercises. Much like earning a black belt, the road to mathematical mastery requires many hours of practice and perhaps more than a few forehead smacks on nearby slabs of wood.

(No Starch Press, 2012)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

LJ Ahoy

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My first Library Journal review has now been published, though it was written some time ago. It’s indexed online but viewable only in the print edition or the subscriber database. In case you were wondering, I reviewed the math text, X and the City, from Princeton’s academic press. The verdict? You’ll have to track down my review to find out.

Book Review: The Hidden Reality

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Physicist Brian Greene’s latest popular science publication, The Hidden Reality, is a departure from his previous works in that domain. Subtitled Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, it sure sounds like something the deep-thinking writer of The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos would write. But while his first two books serve as excellent primers on modern physics and modern cosmology, respectively, Greene isn’t interested in rehashing all that here.

Don’t get me wrong. For anyone looking to get a firm conceptual grasp on the deep physical laws which (apparently) govern the reality we live in, those titles are exactly where I’ll steer you. But there’s an untapped audience more interested in some of the implications of today’s cutting-edge physics than the details of the theories themselves.

To wit: parallel universes. The concept has spawned sub-genres in both science fiction and fantasy (alternate history and urban fantasy being perhaps the most prominent examples). More broadly speaking, most genre fiction imagines worlds perhaps highly disparate or only slightly tweaked from the one we know so intimately.

What makes The Hidden Reality a little more accessible than its written antecedents is its survey nature. Each chapter discusses a different theoretical multiverse, each implied by a different physical theory.

Our own three-dimensions of space and one of time might in fact be something akin to spots growing on the soap bubbles of a higher-dimensional brane, as described in string theory. We might exist in a virtual world, simulated on one of many computers in the “real” universe. We might find countless, infinitesimally-different versions of ourselves living in different quantum realities, endlessly splitting.

Greene wisely introduces the requisite scientific background only as needed, rather than spending the first third or half of the book slowly building up the edifices of quantum physics, general relativity, and inflationary cosmology.

It’s intriguing to imagine that one or several of these versions of a multiverse may actually exist, in some cases may be discoverable, and, depending on how they come about, may describe very different arrays of parallel realities. The idea of another version of you that is allergic to shrimp is interesting enough, but the concept of different universes with different fundamental constants, different origins and destinies, is fascinating in a different way.

I probably wouldn’t recommend this title to the decidedly casual reader. This is still Brian Greene, technically accurate, cogently argued, but intellectually demanding. But anyone with at least a passing interest in the real science behind other worlds should find The Hidden Reality illuminating.

(Vintage, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: Physics of the Future

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Michio Kaku is a physicist and science popularizer, taking a page each from the books of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and fellow string theorist, Brian Greene. He’s written several popular science books on the wacky and wonderful words of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory. His last book, however, Physics of the Impossible, was a departure from branes and n-dimensional space. He used fictional technologies like teleportation, time travel, and Star Trek’s phasers as jumping off points for the known physics of today.

That book turned into a Science Channel program of the same name, and the approach was successful enough that he’s done something similar this time around. In Physics of the Future, however, there is a clear, unifying theme. Though he still offers somewhat of a grab bag of physics, drawing on all different areas based on what’s interesting right now, it’s all geared towards answering one question: what are the next hundred years going to look like?

Kaku looks at basically every technology or technological field that is a) integral to our lives, and b) likely to undergo serious changes in the next few generations. There’s a chapter on the future of computing, a separate one on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, medicine, energy, and space travel. Each chapter has an introduction, a vision of the near future (until 2030), mid-century (2030-2070), and the far future (2070-2100).

The last two chapters, the future of wealth and the future of humanity, are less about any specific technology than the specific changes to our economic, social, and legal systems as a result of these technological changes. The end of wealth, for example, is about our transition to a more and more information-based economy throughout the world, and how we will need a new economic system with the end of scarcity (though he points out certain things will remain scarce, primarily knowledge workers whose labour can’t be automated).

The text is very readable, any number of sections could be essentially lifted from the book and used as feature articles in Popular Science or Discover. For all I know, selected excerpts have indeed seen magazine stands. Kaku is careful not to get bogged down too much in the science behind these technologies. The book’s audience are technology geeks, futurists — most of us, in fact, of the digital age. It’s for the curious layperson, not just the educated layperson. No physics education required

Speaking as someone who has some education in physics, this is nevertheless refreshing. Kaku could have screwed things up by doing too much — trying to give a detailed grounding in the physics when the book is really about how the technology will affect our lives. Having spoken to three hundred scientists at the leading edge of their fields, I’ve no doubt he took enough notes for a dozen technical volumes. But he resists the temptation to ramble, considering societal consequences in broad strokes while avoiding technical trivia.

And that’s the beauty of this book. It’s deep in insights but not bogged down in details. The result is a fast read that you’ll continue thinking about long after you’ve finished the book. Time will tell which predictions hit the mark. But it gives all of us something to look forward to, whether we expect to experience Kaku’s epilogic “day in the life in 2100” or not.

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Biochemistry

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I was looking forward to No Starch Press’ latest Manga Guide release for months before it actually came out. I quite enjoyed The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology, and thought this would make for an excellent companion piece. Obviously I wasn’t the first person to think so, the author of that previous book, Masaharu Takemura, must have felt the same or he wouldn’t have agreed to write this one as well.

Biochemistry and molecular biology are like solid state physics and physical chemistry or, if you like, psychology and sociology. Both disciplines find themselves interested in many of the same phenomena, but consider slightly different aspects of each one.

Molecular biology is interested in how the body works as a system on the sub-cellular level. The basic processes of life are considered with respect to how they manage to maintain all the functions of a cell. Biochemistry is interested in all the chemical behaviour involved in life, which ultimately is responsible for all those same cellular functions.

Both books discuss many of the same ideas, therefore, but there’s virtually no overlap in content. In Molecular Biology, enzymes were considered as helpers in chemical processes. In Biochemistry, more time was spent on the specific reactions they catalyzed, and the actual chemical structures of reactants and products. Both books discuss the way DNA information is read and translated into specific proteins, but biochemistry goes into the chemical detail of DNA, RNA, and the amino acids that make up a protein and determine its folding.

The storyline is cute: Kumi is a teenage girl constantly worried about her weight. She decides to study biochemistry so she has a better understanding of her metabolism and its relationship to weight gain. This is not just an entertaining framing device; Takemura is intentionally using a non-traditional approach to the topic, introducing major chemical characters into the narrative in an organic way as they become relevant to particular chemical processes.

Proteins, fats (lipids), and carbohydrates (saccharides or sugars) are each discussed in different chapters. The chapter on carbs isn’t really just about carbs, it’s about how sugars are used to create ATP which in turn provides energy for the cell (amongst many other things). The chapter on proteins isn’t just about the Atkins diet, it’s also about how enzymes are created and how they function as biological catalysts.

This isn’t the first Manga Guide to take a non-traditional approach to a topic. Calculus took a much more intuitive, less mechanical approach to derivatives and integrals, though not a less rigourous one. Universe followed a historical sequence in discussing the heavens, steadily overturning pre-conceptions as contradictions were discovered. And all of the books in this series have emphasized real-life examples and applications, whatever the topic. The chemical reactions discussed in the book are used to explain everything from the ripening of fruit to the springiness of mochi-style rice.

And it works. There are a number of topics in science that are frequently taught a certain way because it makes it easier to organize a textbook, or faster to “cover” in class, even though it’s not the most efficient approach to actual learning. I appreciate this series’ willingness to eschew traditional learning sequences in favour of intuition, learning in context, and developing ideas organically from previous knowledge. Another enjoyable entry to the series.

(No Starch Press, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog