Antilibraries

I’m not an “aspiring software craftsman”, at least not at the moment — so why does this book seem so interesting? It’s the first part of the title that caught me eye, the idea of “apprenticeship patterns”. I’m intrigued by the notion that there may be well-defined steps you can follow to increase your learning and chances of career success…

In this book, Hoover and Oshineye “have cataloged dozens of behavior patterns to help you perfect essential aspects of your craft.” They start by defining software craftsmanship “as a community of practice that encompasses values such as a growth mindset, the need to adapt and change, being pragmatic instead of dogmatic, and the belief that we should share what we know instead of hoarding that knowledge.” Then, throughout the course of the book, they “outline a number of techniques, or patterns, which can help you maintain a level of structure to your learning, while also helping you avoid sticking points that can often derail us.”

The title is a play on the term “software patterns”, which describes common design patterns used in software development. But I like the idea of applying “patterns” to other areas of human activity like learning and creativity. Christopher Alexander talks about patterns as applied to the design of urban space and structure, and I’ve long thought it would be fun to try applying similar ideas to human behavior.

A lot of the material in here probably isn’t immediately useful to me, insofar as it’s geared specifically toward learning software — but I’m betting the more generalizable parts will make this worth the read. One reviewer notes: “It's not a stretch to look at these patterns and find that you could apply them to *any* sort of new learning. Granted, most of the commentary on each pattern is software-related, but most transcend that narrow niche.”

There seem to be many topics covered here — unleashing enthusiasm, developing concrete skills, confronting ignorance, finding mentors, constructing your own curriculum, practicing, and creating feedback loops for your learning — that aren’t software-specific at all, which is great. This book may not be relevant for everyone, but I think for areas driven by creativity, problem solving, rigor, design — “crafts”, loosely defined — there’s sure to be some helpful information here!

The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (by Manuel Lima)

This book, by Manuel Lima of the “Visual Complexity” website fame, “examines the more than eight hundred year history of the tree diagram, from its roots in the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monasteries to its current resurgence as an elegant means of visualization.” He describes how trees have been “used to trace genealogies, chronologies, taxonomies, and belief systems of all types…” Douglas Rushkoff calls it “The most important analysis of visualization since Tufte” — which is high praise indeed!

I saw Manuel Lima give a talk at Hyperakt (a Brooklyn design studio) about this book a while back. He talked about the ideas embedded in the book and the research that led to it, and it was awesome to hear about the project firsthand. He’s a thoughtful guy with a lot of great insights about data visualization generally, and the structure and representation of knowledge as demonstrated in this book project.

I love the structure of this book — basically it’s divided into section corresponding to the different logical schemata by which knowledge is visualized — different shapes of “trees”: figurative, vertical, horizontal, multidirectional, radial, and hyperbolic trees; rectangle, voronoi, and circular treemaps; sunbursts and icicle trees. It’s a fascinating taxonomy and really interesting learning about the historical bases of these various approaches and how they both reflect and shape how we perceive the structure of knowledge.

I’ve tried to think in a similar way — coming up with a sort of creative taxonomy — about potential ways to classify and elaborate on various types of nonlinear narrative. But whereas I have but brainstormed a bit, Lima has done a remarkable amount of research, combing through libraries and archives, old books and prints, to find the trove of great examples he includes here.

Well, there are few helpful reviews of this one. But I have another book by Turchi — Maps of the Imagination: Writer as Cartographer — which I’ve flipped through just enough to have some idea of the author’s style. This book, as with Writer as Cartographer, seems to have a creative, whimsical flair, drawing on diverse inspirations and areas of study to explore what the act of writing is like; of what strange wonders the job and journey of the writer consists.

“Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip-side, puzzle-solving. As he teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling, he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians.” In this exploration, he “reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process.”

There’s material about patterns, treasure hunting, labyrinths, magic and poetry, games and puzzles and difficulty. It’s rather hard to categorize, but seems quite playful and wide-ranging in its spirit of curiosity (and multidimensional love of writing).

“Turchi invites us to think about books as mysteries unfolding in time, giving us clues that we piece together.” Not only is it “a labyrinth of reflection”, it also contains interactive elements — “actual puzzles scattered throughout” the text.

He’s among our “foremost thinkers on the art of writing”, and the book is both fun to read and useful for aspiring writers: “a brilliant book on writing craft, providing the reader with a new way to think about composing fiction.” Sounds good to me!

Subtitle: A Holistic Vision for Our Time. This is quite a short book, one of those books that proposes a simple yet powerful framework or way of looking at and thinking about the world. In this case: systems!

I like systems. They form important, flexible and rich scaffolding for many areas, often investing simple ideas with great meaning and explanatory power. In this book, Laszlo takes the view that understanding the meaning behind the complex formulas of science is more important than ever, and he attempts to explain the systems view of the world as the paradigm of the latest scientific developments.

Systems thinking “leads to a new world view, integrating the sciences of nature and man. It is a world view for our times, explaining some some of our most cherished successes and some of our most distressing problems, and showing ways to resume progress toward new achievements.” Laszlo has contributed greatly to this field of study, and in this book — just a hundred pages long, apparently! — he succinctly summarizes its ideas, postulating a four-part “systems view of nature”. As he describes them, systems are: wholes with irreducible properties; self-maintaining in changing environments; self-creating in response to self-creativity in other systems; and finally they are “coordinating interfaces in nature’s holarchy.”

I don’t know exactly what the above-summarized four points mean in practical terms; the book is apparently rather philosophical and abstract, rather than super specific and pragmatic in how to work with systems. But still, it seems to provide quite an interesting perspective, and a great introduction to concepts like consilience, unity, organization, connection, and universality. One reviewer exclaims that Laszlo’s ideas open “…a world of holism, growth and new paths to a more peaceful world!”

First, what a striking cover: a monochromatic blend of blues, overlaid with stark and simple white text. I haven’t previewed the text itself and don’t have much to comment on concretely — but I love the design.

Second, the title is wonderful, seems at once abstract and specific, evocative in a poetic way. It calls to mind science fiction and libraries and repositories and emergent behavior and object oriented ontology and more.

The book is a “rapturous paean to discoveries and archives, gorgeously illustrated.” It explores the “archival manuscripts” of many great American writers — showcasing the physicality of their work amidst other elements woven into the text. These materials are: “links, discoveries, chance encounters, the visual and acoustic shocks of rooting around amid physical archives.  These are the telepathies the bibliomaniacal poet relishes.”

Doesn’t this sound great? The intersection of the word and the object, ideas and poetics made tangible, the storehouses of memory, legacy, that which endures. It’s a kind of response or counterpart to digital scholarship, affirming the roots of knowledge and learning and creativity in physical existence… With its “ode to the insights, connections, and discoveries available to those who dig through archives the old-fashioned way” this book reminds me of Nicholson Baker’s “The Size of Thoughts”.

Howe considers “such odds and ends as drafts of poems on envelope scraps by Emily Dickinson; first-draft lines of "Paterson" that William Carlos Williams scrawled on pages of prescription pads; handwritten notes Noah Webster made in connection with his 1828 "Dictionary"; and manuscript books that Jonathan Edwards fashioned from discarded semi-circular pieces of silk paper his wife and daughters had used for making fans.”

The one reviewer quotes the concluding paragraph; I’ll do likewise as it’s lovely: “Poetry has no proof nor plan nor evidence by decree or in any other way. From somewhere in the twilight realm of sound a spirit of belief flares up at the point where meaning stops and the unreality of what seems most real floods over us. The inward ardor I feel while working in research libraries is intuitive. Its a sense of self-identification and trust, or the granting of grace in an ordinary room, in a secular time.”

This is “a classic work on the spread of new ideas” — describing the process by which innovation spreads, through early adopters on outward. And it covers an awful lot of material! Everything from how innovations arise to how they get distributed to how they emerge from organizations and end up having an impact. It looks quite well-structured and thorough; academic yet accessible. It’s somewhat technical, but also a bit of a sociological and historical survey.

It’s described as a foundational work in “change management literature” — whatever that is, exactly! — and though apparently it’s heavier on underlying abstractions than practical application processes, that’s kind of my jam so no worries there. He does give principles and “generalizations” to guide the process of building things so it seems quite useful even if not focused on implementation.

One person calls it “a guide for entrepreneurs” — and even provides a chapter by chapter “tour guide” for prospective readers. (Absurdly thorough Amazon reviewers: you’ll always occupy a special place in my heart!) Another person writes, “The book is not a how-to guide, but rather an unbiased view of innovations. By examining the unintended consequences of innovations, Rogers cautions leaders to exercise prudence when pushing others to change.”

The book is “comprehensive, ranging from the elements of diffusion and the history of diffusion research to generators of innovation, change agents, and the consequences of innovations.” The whole thing looks interesting, but some sections, like the one about diffusion networks, seem particularly fascinating and crucial to understand. This is one of those books that, the more I read about it, the more I want to dig in!

This book “argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge.” It’s actually quite short, around a hundred pages, with just three chapters. It’s focused on Polanyi’s idea of tacit knowledge, “which consists of things we know without being able to say how we know them.”

It’s about how we draw from “a vast arsenal of assumptions about how the world works” as well as the discoveries made by our predecessors; and “…it validates what thinkers, artists, designers, writers, poets, musicians, and scientists (albeit too few of these) consistently admit: we cannot account as to the origin of the initial idea or notion that launches our investigations.” These ideas seem to have a lot of currency in pedagogical theory, and a wide-reaching power.

The Tacit Dimension is based on a series of lectures Polanyi delivered at Yale in the early ‘60s, and is a “deeply philosophical book, full of penetrating ideas, particularly about the knowledge of the world and the world of knowledge…” One thing I didn’t know: Polanyi actually become well-known as an innovative scientist before he rose to prominence in philosophy and the social sciences. It seems he tasked himself with no less than understanding the world and the workings of knowledge; he was a polymath, of “limitless curiosity”, who draws on deep understanding of many fields to probe the depths of human knowledge and understanding. Impressive dude!

I actually have another, longer book by Polanyi — Personal Knowledge — which I picked up at a used bookstore in Seattle, and still haven’t yet cracked open. But apparently this is a much more condensed and accessible book; perhaps I should pick up this one to read first!

I really enjoyed Steiner’s My Unwritten Books; he writes eloquently and eruditely about a dizzying array of topics. And I loved Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot, which actually references this book by Steiner, which also is all about translation. I have a feeling this will be dense with academic and cultural references, and a somewhat challenging read…but it looks fascinating and well worth taking the time to decode.

It’s a seminal investigation of the “phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages.” Upon its appearance in the mid ‘70s, the book “created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory.”

The book is deep and insightful…going “through the history, theory and justification of translation” over the course of six sections. from the very roots of translation in speech, to the “seemingly counterintuitive diversity of languages” to a language’s sounds and expressive purpose, to the history of translation and its “triumphs and failures” and more. The final chapter, “Topologies of Culture”, sounds particularly intriguing.

It’s worth noting that Steiner is a crazy learned dude, and speaks several languages fluently — English, French, and German at a native level. So his ideas are rooted in both deep scholarship and personal experience, which seems like an ideal combination for writing a book about translation.

The included bibliography of “material which the student of translation will find of particular use” looks insanely thorough and useful; I’m always awed by these kinds of lists, in some ways so specific yet encompassing so much knowledge that I know I’ll never be able to absorb and comprehend. It’s a nice feeling — humbling yet inspiring!

I’ll keep this short because I really don’t know much about this book, besides the fact that it’s an epic prose poem-novel. It’s a couple hundred pages long, written at the turn of the 19th century, a classic of German literature. The book is “a novel of stirring lyricism, philosophical sublimity, and enduring influence.”

The plot: a Greek hermit recounts his life’s phases. But the real power seems to be in the language. Hyperion “has been celebrated for its musicality, the power of its cadences and tones to express a constant oscillation between extremes of grief and joy.” He’s apparently one of the most significant German poets ever.

According to one reviewer — oh wait, I mean, according to Friedrich Nietzsche:  “In the euphonious movement of its prose, in the sublimity and beauty of the figures that appear in it, Hyperion makes an impression upon me similar to the beat of the waves of the troubled sea. Indeed, this prose is music, soft melting sounds interrupted by painful dissonances, finally expiring in dark, uncanny dirges.” I mean…that’s some high praise, right?

By the way, this is a very nice edition from Archipelago Books; I love their deckle-edged, square-format books. In fact, in general I love seeing how small press publishers create consistent and meticulously designed series of books! In some ways is may seem superficial — to what degree, ultimately, does the design of a text change its meaning and import? — but I think it’s an incredibly important element and often the deciding factor for whether I’ll pick a book up off the shelf, grow intrigued, and add it to my “look up later” list…or skim over it without a second thought.

I have Alexander’s The Pattern Language; I’ve only read the first forty pages or so (of that thousand-plus page book…so barely the introduction) but enough to know I like the way he thinks. He takes a broad multidisciplinary approach on architecture and urban design, and in fact his four volume series The Nature of Order is an even more mammoth item in my Antilibrary.

He proposes a “theory of architecture, building, and planning which has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being.” Apparently this is quite a perspective-altering work; his main idea “applies to almost every aspect of life” — the theme of discovering simple solutions to organize our complex world clearly extends well beyond architecture. One person said some of these ideas “inspired Object Oriented Programming” and apparently the idea of software “design patterns” stems from this work — if that’s true it’s an impressive achievement indeed.

This book is actually the predecessor to The Pattern Language; it’s “first in a series of books which describe an entirely new attitude to architecture and planning.” This book also talks a lot about the idea of patterns — of events and of space, of life and of languages — but in a more introductory theoretical way, it seems, while The Pattern Language itself is more of a practical guide through the specific design “patterns” he envisions based on these ideas. (There’s a third book in this series, The Oregon Experiment, that shows how these ideas/patterns apply to a specific architectural project.)

“Patterns”, at the core of his proposal, are ways to “solve a specific problem, by bringing two conflicting forces into balance.” One example of this would be the focal point created by the orientation of windows and furniture in a room. It seems to be all about making sense of complexity, decomposing complicated structures and relationships to clarify the relationships of their parts. It’s poetic in both ideas and language; in parts it can be somewhat imprecise, but perhaps inescapably so.

Final note: Alexander proposes an interesting alternative way of reading it; apparently you can go through and read the italicized sections for an abbreviated overview. I haven’t really seen that explicitly multi-layered structure before but it seems like it could be useful!

Saw this one at a used bookstore in Seattle…probably should have picked it up, but I’m accumulating books at a rapid enough rate that I like to at least take some time to research them first before the impulse buy (at least some of the time!) Anyway, this looks to be critically lauded and super interesting…

This book at least in part concerns the “psychology of urban designs”. Lynch attempts to answer questions like “What does the city’s form actually mean to the people who live there?” and “What can the city planner do to make the city’s image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller?” by examining the idea of “imageability”.

I like this term: “imageability”. I’m not yet entirely sure what that term means, but it’s got an interesting resonance. From what I gather, he explores the idea of mental maps as “composite images” of the city that reveal new dimensions of a place, hidden aspects of its character and constitution. There’s also a focus on the idea of “legibility”, which reminds me of the Ribbonfarm exploration of the term. Here, the “legibility” of the city means “the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern.”

This is a short book — “a readable, tautly organized, authoritative volume…” Side note: I love it when books are clear and lucid and well-organized and don’t balloon to fill space unnecessarily.

Lynch talks about how city design is a “temporal art”; how cities are rich, deep in imagery and experience. This book considers the elements that form our cities and our perceptions of them; how the fragments accumulate into holistic experiences; how we shape and apprehend cities. He describes urban space as “a composition of nodes, landmarks, paths, edges and districts” that combine to determine our perception of urban space.

A lot of this forms some of the foundational ideas behind wayfinding! In fact I randomly happened to do a bit of research recently on wayfinding, and came across this book numerous times as reference. This seems really interesting in how it articulates the ways in which we relate to and organize space. It sits at the intersection of architecture and urbanism, aesthetics and design, sociology and psychology.

One reviewer emphasizes how this is a perspective-altering read: “Reading Kevin Lynch is like getting a new pair of glasses. Nothing has actually changed in your surroundings, but you see things differently.”

This is an “unprecedented history of simulating the real and the impossible” that “distills the story of how gamers first decided fictional battles with boards and dice, and how they moved from simulating wars to simulating people.”

The story starts in the 1960s, with the rise of “wargaming clubs”, followed by the evolution of the “medieval fantasy genre”; here we’re treated to descriptions of the types of creatures/characters, economics, and equipment of such games. Peterson then includes chapters about the rules and systems of these games, and the characters, roles, and immersion instrumental to the gameplay. He moves on into the “dawn of role-playing” in the '70s, which seems fascinating, before concluding with an epilogue entitled “Role-Playing and Reality”” that hints at the influence these sorts of games had on video games and virtual worlds.

The book’s subtitle is: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games — but upon closer look this book seems to be almost entirely about a pretty specific time and genre: 1960s–‘70s; RPGs of the Dungeons and Dragons flavor. I can't fault the book for this constraint, as it looks utterly fascinating in its niche way, but part of me wishes there was a bit more on the longer, more complex historical influences and greater varieties of games, simulations, and role-playing (e.g. earlier influences like perhaps improvisational comedy and theater, and later threads like "Second Life"-type virtual reality worlds). Maybe some of that stuff is in here and just not surfaced in the TOC. But the focus is probably actually good; this kind of thing does require a certain obsession.

Playing at the World is longer than I would have thought on first looking at it — it’s over 700 pages. Even the table of contents is super detailed — this is like an epic history of the sort one might expect to find about some big topic like The Civil War. My immediate reaction is: thorough and thoroughly impressive! Apparently this is the product of extremely meticulous research and exhaustive detail, comprehensive and fascinating to a “deliciously nerdy” degree. The author serves as “methodical archaeologist”, putting together “an inexhaustible treasure trove of information and insights.”

It’s more complex than just the origin story of any specific game; it’s also a work of historiography and cultural critique. And perhaps most interesting (at least to me) — it does also seem to use the more specific phenomenon of the ascension of role-playing games as a lens through which to explore some interesting shifts towards more immersive, interactive experiences of fictional worlds.

Regarded as one of the major novels of the 20th century, a postmodern epic, nearly 800 pages long…and the only Pynchon book I've read is The Crying of Lot 49 — his shortest novel! I'm not sure I'm adequately prepared for this one, which promises to be a whole different ball of yarn.

Its first sentence: "A screaming comes across the sky." This is printed alone on the back cover of at least one edition, so I'm inferring it's a famous opener; from this and other hints I glean some whispers of the book's themes and topics: language, chaos, the tangles of existence.

One one-star review calls it “a trudge through sludge”. Another decries it as “Awful. Tiresome, circuitous, tedious, pointless, chaotic, without plot or storyline narrated with all the enthusiasm of a funeral director giving school tours of a crematorium.”

Of course it's also a modern classic, “sprawling, encyclopedic…penetrating…an intellectual tour de force.” The book “uses beautiful prose to induce an altered state of consciousness, a buzz.”

One reader provides a list of tips designed to help acclimate dauned readers to the text; another tells us that “reviews of this book are basically pointless.” The book is “supposed to be either a brilliant, compendious, funny, tragic novel about war, modernity and history or a stupid, slack, paranoid rant by a burnt-out (probable) druggy.” So yeah, it's divisive, but I'm inclined to trust those who swear it's well worth the effort.

I don't even care what the plot is, although I just read the synopsis and it sounds delightfully manic and fucked up. I basically just want to read it because it sounds weird and challenging and hilarious and jam-packed with dense absurdities and thrilling feats of writing.

I glimpsed this title in a bookstore and didn't get a chance to look through it but noted it for a later search, and it seems pretty new and lacking in reviews so I'm mostly going off my trusty Table of Contents & preview perusal! This is, apparently, “the first text to develop an entire new philosophy based upon networks.” Networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous and influential in how we experience the world, and this text “presents us with a new image of thought for our hyperconnected age.”

Vitale is a Professor of Media Studies at Pratt (holler, Brooklyn!) and he seems to have quite the interesting background: a residence at the Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems Science, a couple years training to be a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, “extensive field research on the relations between the philosophy of networks and Buddhist philosophy” — sounds like the kind of guy I'd want to attend my next Idea Exchange!

Anyway, given his background I'm not surprised that this work seems to be excitingly interdisciplinary and full of cool material. It is “solidly grounded in the latest science, but it is also a powerful work of speculative philosophy. It gives us both a vision of what we are, and intimations of what we might become.” Cool, right?

The book is divided into two parts, the first of which comprises chapters like: Living in a Networked Age; Building on the Science and Mathematics of Networks; Complexity, Emergence, and Robustness; Network Dynamics; Networkological Description; Network Economies; and Evolving Robustness. It begins with with definitions, exploration, implications…models for networks, elements of networks, and their undergirding dynamics and philosophies.

Wouldn't you know it — lots of stuff about networks! However there's also a very intriguing “Part Two” called “Networkologies: A Manifesto”, apparently organized in a series of “nodes”, the list of which is so interesting that I'll just reproduce it here in its entirety:

access, science, mathematics, image of thought, process, complexity, emergence, relation, fractality, holography, spacetime, immanence, principles, experience, realities, (un)limits, semiotics, mediology, machinology, value, symbolic economies, robustness, practics, metaleptics, sync, understanding, evolution, meta-evolution, hyper-evolution, thinking, critique, deconstruction, reconstruction, post-foundation, refraction, diagram, difference, distributedness, histriography, psychology, panpsychism, liberation, commons, oppression, economics, political economy, politics, transviduality, post-anarchism, pantheism, theophanic post-theology, erotics, praxis, aesthetics, nothing, philosophy, meta-philosophy, history of philosophy, beginning, dream

So, due to the limitations of Look Inside…I can't actually see what form this second half takes! It intrigues me, but I'll have to actually pick up the book to explore further…

I'm impressed with the aim of describing a sort of networked worldview; this book appears to take our connected world as premise, and from there explore its surprising layers of complexity, machinations, rules, behaviors, and rhythms. In some sense, its concern (and aspiration) involves illuminating how we make sense of everything! No doubt a Sisyphean task, endless, impossible — but always worth a try.

The Situationist International was a diverse underground ensemble, an arts/culture/philosophy movement in the '60s that left an influential legacy in many arenas. Precursor to many important social movements (e.g. Occupy Wall Street), the SI “continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world.”

The many members of the SI blended art, life, community, creativity, space, spontaneity, and futurism; my impression of their work is that it's largely about creating room for engagement — about reconsidering our interactions with the world, deepening and strengthening our activities and relationships, while at the same time embracing the absurd.

This book, an exploration of “radical aesthetic potentiality”, relates the historical influence of the SI movement and provides “a marvellous guide to the micro-society of the Situationists” and their “adventures in philosophy, art, architecture, literature and cinema…”

Chapter titles include: Street Ethnography, The Torrent of History, Extreme Aesthetics, A Provisional Micro-Society, and Permanent Play. These seem like really interesting topics! I'm vaguely familiar with some of the ideas and writings of Guy Debord and the SI (most notably psychogeography and the idea of the derivé) but I don't know much about the history and systems of belief and practice they manifested. I look forward to learning more about how this work informs our “contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life.”

One thing I found interesting is a reviewer's comment that the book's “primary proposal is that although we live in serious times we should still have fun with time. We should treat history as a user’s manual.” I like how this implies active lessons — that this book is not just history but guide, imploring us to consider how we can learn from and apply these ideas.

I’ve read and loved Papert’s book Mindstorms, and I’ve owned and ogled Minsky’s Society of Mind for about a year without getting around to reading it. When I saw that these two academic giants had written a book together, I couldn’t help but take a closer look, even if this particular subject matter looks way over my head. (Also, I love the cover! Sometimes that really helps solidify a book’s appeal, you know?)

This goes into such fascinating topics as neural networks, computer learning, logic, topology, and pattern recognition. The index is filled with names I do not recognize and mathematical terminology the language of which I do not speak. The actual preview is limited to a few pages of the prologue; I haven’t even looked at the table of contents to start to better appreciate the overall structure and thrust of the book. Such shortcomings, such random and fickle tides of algorithmic preview make it difficult to complete my task!

Anyway: this is “the first systematic study of parallelism in computation” and is apparently a “classical work on threshold automata networks”. I’ll take it on faith that that’s a legitimate genre. Suffice it to say it’s an important book in AI research — from what I gather, it played a large role in articulating some of the potential and some of the limitations of the kind of computational intelligence potentially arising from neural networks.

I don’t understand what exactly computational geometry is, but hey, I read things like “the history of the perceptron demonstrates the complexity of analyzing neural networks” and I find that intriguing, so I put the book on my list. I’m not the first one this book has confused, though. Apparently it’s been the source of some confusion and debate, some popular misconceptions and strange vectors in driving AI research. Anyway, there are a lot of things I can imagine reading about in a book called “Perceptrons”; with some books, probably including this one, I think it’s more fun to leave them imagined.

To start off, a note on Vaclav Smil: this guy is Bill Gates’ favorite author, and seems to be something of a polymathic genius; he’s written a huge number of books, very many of which look fascinating, only one of which I own (not this one), and (as yet) none of which I have read. I’m not sure why he’s not more famous than he is…but in a word, dude is legit!

This book takes on questions of material production and consumption, sustainability, recycling and resource flows, population and economic growth, and more. To put it simply: this is about the stuff that stuff is made of! It draws on many disciplines: history, geology, manufacturing, economics, material science. Oh and also “environmental studies, energy analysis, mineral geology, and industrial organization.”

It “considers the principal materials used throughout history, from wood and stone, through to metals, alloys, plastics and silicon”, examining their production, applications, costs and environmental impact, and implications for the future.

This is another book with an annoyingly abridged preview, unfortunately cutting off nearly the entire table of contents. (Gosh darn it!) Ironic, actually, in this case, because the preview of the text itself is fairly extensive. But no matter; it’s slim, just a couple hundred pages — shorter than I was expecting, maybe because the cover screams “textbook” — not that it isn’t scholarly!

Smil “finds music in statistics” and displays virtuosic “fact-based reasoning” in this “fascinating and thorough analysis”. He’s not afraid to wield data, and the book is comprehensive and technical enough that in parts in can be hard to digest. But he’s a clear and engaging writer, and getting through this book is an “exhilarating experience.”