A Modest Construct

¶ A History of Western Philosophy

A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell: Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Year: 1946/1967; Pages: 895

Bertrand Russell is known for two things, depending upon the tradition from which you approach him: he’s an early and ardent atheist (perhaps the grandfather of the recent “New Atheist” movement popularized by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett), as made clear in Why I Am Not a Christian. Much less controversially, his contributions as a mathematician and logician (for which see his and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica) were perhaps the most important to formal Logic since the early Greeks.

§7038 · May 8, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, history, nonfiction, philosophy, reviews

¶ Linux Command-Line Compressors Compared

A long time ago, I ran a comparison of various command-line compressors in Linux. Recently, intrigued by the rise of parallel computing and the emergence of multi-processor versions of old *nix favorites like gzip and bzip2, I thought I’d give the benchmark another go.

§7042 · May 3, 2011 · 2 comments · Tags: benchmarks, Linux, software, technology

¶ Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter: Publisher: Gotham; Year: 2008; Pages: 256

One of the benefits of being an armchair linguist is that I have absolutely no qualms about veering from, say, Baugh and Cable’s A History of the English Language or the nominally rebellious but practically canonical works of David Crystal to less academic but infinitely more pleasurable works of dedicated amateurs like Bill Bryson. Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue falls into the latter category (though McWhorter sometimes resembles Crystal in tone), not only because McWhorter is a sort of nuovo-linguist, the sort who would wear sneakers before tweed jackets, but also because this particular book was intended to be a shorter and more information introduction to McWhorter’s sphere… essentially a 250-page brochure for modern linguistics.

§7027 · April 30, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, etymology, history, linguistics, nonfiction, reviews

¶ The Diamond Age

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson: Publisher: Bantam Spectra; Year: 1995/2000; Pages: 499

Neal Stephenson novels are always a treat. It would be inaccurate to say they are formulaic, as each one is uniquely and wildly creative; however, they tend to share some characteristics, for better or worse. Last year I read Snow Crash, and prior to that I read his Cryptonomicon, and can’t help but notice, as others have, that though Stephenson expends considerable energy setting up a complicated plot and a tremendous, realistic world in which it occurs, his plot climaxes are so short and unexpected that one isn’t quite sure if it happened or not.

§7016 · April 18, 2011 · 8 comments · Tags: Book Reviews, books, cyberpunk, fiction, nanotechnology, reviews, science fiction

¶ The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics

The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios: Publisher: Gotham; Year: 2010; Pages: 336

Quantum physics (or mechanics) has become something of a metonym for impossibly-abstruse concepts; it’s a new-millennium update to the classic “brain surgery” and “rocket science”. I own a t-shirt with a pithy joke about Schrödinger’s cat, and when people are unfortunate enough to ask and I tell them about undefined states and the collapse of probabilistic wave functions, I often get glassy stares in return.

But don’t let me fool you: I know, on a high level, about Schrödinger’s cat, and I remember my Pauli Exclusion Principle from high school chemistry, and I’ve read enough Scientific American to have gotten short primers on some of the fundamentals, but my real understanding of quantum mechanics is like a half-rotted shack in the forest, while Kakalios’ knowledge might be a large McMansion in a new suburb; the real geniuses at the forefront of the field would be palatial estates with Robin Leach narrating.

§7013 · March 27, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, nonfiction, reviews, science