The Shape of Code

My rate of book reading has picked up significantly this year. The following are the really interesting books I read, as is usually the case, most were not published in this year.

I have enjoyed Grayson Perry’s TV programs on the art world, so I bought his book “Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art in its Struggle to Be Understood“. It’s a fun, mischievous look at the art world by somebody working as a traditional artist, in the sense of creating work that they believe means/says something, rather than works that are only considered art because they are displayed in an art gallery.

“The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann” by H. H. Goldstine. This history of computing from the mid-1600s (the time of Blaise Pascal) to the mid-1900s (von Neumann died in 1957) told by a mathematician who was first involved in calculating artillery firing tables during World War II, and then worked with early computers and von Neumann. This book is full of insights that only a technical person could provide and is a joy to read.

I saw a poster advertising a guided tour of the trees in my local park, organized by Trees for Cities. It was a very interesting lunchtime; I had not appreciated how many different trees were growing there, including three different kinds of Oak tree. Trees for Cities run events all over the UK, and abroad. Of course, I had to buy some books to improve my tree recognition skills. I found “Collins tree guide” by O. Johnson and D. More to be the most useful and full of information. Various organizations have created maps of trees in cities around the world. The London Tree Map shows the location and species information for over 880,000 of trees growing on streets (not parks), New York also has a map. For a general analysis of patterns of tree growth, see “How to Read a Tree” by T. Gooley.

“Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter” by I. Mortimer. This book takes the reader through the social, cultural and economic changes that happened in England during the Middle Ages, which the author specifies as the period 1000 to 1600. I knew that many people were surfs, but did not know that slaves accounted for around 10% of the population, dropping to zero percent during this period. Changes, at least for the well-off, included moving from living in longhouses to living in what we would call a house, art works moved from two-dimensional representations to life-like images (e.g., renaissance quality), printing enables an explosion of books, non-poor people travelled more, ate better, and individualism started to take-off.

Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications by N. N. Taleb is a mathematically dense book (while the pdf is in color, I was disappointed that the printed version is black/white; this is the one I read while travelling). This book tells you a lot more than you need to know about the consequences of fat tail distributions. Why might you be interested in the problems of fat tails? Taleb starts by showing how little noise it takes for the comforting assumptions implied by the Normal/Gaussian distribution to fly out the window. The primary comforting assumptions are that the mean and variance of a small sample are representative of the larger population. A world of fat tail distributions is one where the unexpected is to be expected, where a single event can wipe out an organization or industry (banks are said to have lost more in the 2008 financial crisis than they had made in the previous many decades). This book is hard going, and I kept at it to get a feel for the answers to some of the objections to the bad news conveyed. There are a couple of places where I should have been more circumspect in my Evidence-based software engineering book.

I have previously reviewed General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum by Susskind and Cabannes.

“Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II” by John W. Dower describes in harrowing detail the dire circumstances of the population of Japan immediately after World War II and what they had to endure to survive.

For more detailed book reviews, see: Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf with some excellent and insightful long book reviews, and the annual Astral Codex Ten book review contest usually has a few excellent reviews/books.

For those of you who think that civilization is about to collapse, or at least like talking about the possibility, a reading list. At the practical level, I think sword fighting and archery skills are more likely to be useful in the longer term.