Tag Archives: review

Another book — Do Dice Play God?

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This book is by Ian Stewart. No, not the 3rd baseman who played for the Rockies and the Cubs about 15 years ago, this Ian Stewart is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.

Thus, the book has a British focus, and some of his examples are based in the UK, but that is ok.

The subtitle is the Mathematics of Uncertainty. The title is a play on the statement by Einstein, “God does not play dice with the universe.” While god may or may not play dice, do dice ever play god?

Ian says that there are six ages of uncertainty, and he does not cover them in the order that they were found for various reasons. Chaos theory was discussed out of order from when it was found by humans.

  1. The first age of uncertainty involved gods, prophets, fortune tellers, seers, and the like. They could try to predict the future. They could supposedly explain what was going on in the world.
  2. The second age of uncertainty came about during the scientific advances in the 1500-1700s. This is when Newton’s laws defined how gravity works, and it explained how we could predict where the planets will be in the future. If we could predict the movements of planets, would it be possible to predict everything, including human behavior?
  3. The third age came with greater understanding of mathematics and probability. Gamblers, astronomers, mathematicians, and many others would like to know the odds of a future event happening.
  4. The fourth age came with quantum mechanics, and our understanding of never really knowing the location or the momentum of atomic and subatomic particles. These ideas took off in the early 1900s.
  5. The fifth age is when chaos theory was developed.
  6. The sixth age is our current situation. He said that it is “characterized by the realisation that uncertainty comes in many forms, each being comprehensible to some extent.” (page 10.) Mathematics can help us understand the universe a fair bit, but much of the world and the universe is “still horribly uncertain.” For example, we are better at predicting the weather about 5-7 days out, but predicting the weather 10-14 days out is still a crap shoot. Predicting climate change is different matter.

One thing I found fascinating was an oil droplet experiment that made teeny oil droplets behave like both waves and particles. This made Newtonian sized objects behave more like atomic particles. (See pages 233-235.) I had not heard of this experiment since I left physics back in the 1980s. But, it looks like that has been debunked as of 2018. Oh well.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and I found it interesting. It would probably be best for people who have already had some college-level math or physics.

The book – Imaginary futures: From thinking machines to the global village

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This is another book that was recommended by Alison Macrina of the https://libraryfreedom.org/ project. It was listed in the further reading section of one of her talks.

I thought it would cover artificial intelligence and cybernetics a lot more than it did, but it was more of a book on the politics of the US and Russia, and on the cold war race to develop faster and better computing that supported military applications. I hoped that the final chapter would be a better conclusion to tie things together, but lo, it did not.

Sooooo much of the book covers political theory, especially capitalistic systems vs socialism and communism in particular. One should be familiar with Marshall McCluhan and the book Understanding Media, but I had not read that.

The final chapter gushes over Wired Magazine, as if that presents the final word concerning society and the internet. There were a ton of reference to Wired Magazine, but not many (any?) other periodicals that cover the internet as a social tool. It was like he was cherry picking quotes from Wired Magazine to show a point, and he did not explore other sources that might challenge that point.

The author did talk about the academic gift economy (p. 277 for example) and the way academics share information more freely, but the concepts of open access, and the problems with academic information hidden behind paywalls was not mentioned at all.

It is noteworthy that the book came out in 2007, and it got some things right. It mentioned that YouTube was a growing source of media viewing (p. 285), and it was pretty new in 2006/2007. It only mentioned the word blog once, and it is not in the index. Social media was not really covered or predicted.

Here are some specific things that jumped out at me.

Very soon, when the Net was ubiquitous, everyone would be equal within cyberspace. The rule of the few over the many was only a temporary condition. (p. 275.)

Ummm. What? The internet is not going to make the world an egalitarian place.

Of course, Napster was mentioned.

Anyone who distributed unauthorized copies of copyrighted material over the Net must be punished. Anyone who invented software potentially useful for on-line piracy should be criminalized. The courts and police had to stop consenting adults from sharing information with each other without permission. (p. 281)

Academics have been getting around this problem and issue for decades and decades. There are ways to get copyrighted material (journal articles and other bits of research) from others through email. This was not discussed at all. Napster made it easier for people to share songs with each other, and the music industry did not like that.

Overall, the book was a hard slog, since I was not expecting a book about communism vs the capitalist system. This review in Goodreads hit the nail on the head. “The book provides a lot of historical insight, really interesting, though it’s written in a such boring manner it’s really hard to go through it.”

I do agree with this statement from a different review of the book.

Barbrook has an amusing take on our distorted – if not delusional – relationship with technology, but his underlying point is serious: future visions of technology are used to distract us and also control us, and if we forget these imaginary futures, we are likely to repeat them.

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

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The whole book title is Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor.

This was a real eye opener for me. I grew up in a working class family, and we did have a time when we were quite poor, when my dad was on strike for about a year back in the 1970s, and we did not have much money. Also, my mom and dad divorced, and I was lucky to get scholarships to attend college with my mom being a single parent effectively. She did get income from my dad until I turned 18 I think.

Here is a good review of it. I first heard about the book from a talk about information privacy and AI and libraries by Alison Macrina of the https://libraryfreedom.org/ project. It was listed in the further reading section of her talk.

Anyway, the author, Virginia Eubanks, covers three case studies. The first is in Indiana, the second is in Los Angeles, and the third is in Pittsburgh. Chapter 5, The Digital Poorhouse, does a fine job of summing up the previous chapters. Essentially, the United States does a great job of using technology to track and police poor people. The system criminalizes poverty to keep poor people in that state. The system is designed to be opaque so that people can’t see how it really works.

Chapter 6 addresses ways to dismantle the digital poorhouse. I don’t see her recommendations coming to fruition any time soon. She brings up rhetoric from Martin Luther King, Jr., but technology has its claws so deep into law enforcement and in social support systems all across the country, I don’t think people will listen to the words of MLK, Jr. to dismantle those systems. She presents an Oath of Non-Harm for an Age of Big Data on pages 212-213. It will take a lot of work to convince companies to agree to that Oath. (While Google used to use the phrase — “Don’t be evil,” but that is now a former motto.)

I see it as a collective action problem. Even though she shows that the majority of people use social services as a temporary or full-time poor person, most people don’t see that Big Data has harmed them in any way. They might be convinced that Big Data has harmed some or many people, but it has not hurt them, yet. There needs to be more and better stories that get people to understand that Big Data hurting their neighbors is also hurting them. (People react better to stories than they do to plain old evidence and data, ironically.) That is when the voting public will act to change laws and policies when it comes to Big Data and the monitoring and policing of poor people in computer systems.

This book came out in 2017. It would be interesting to see how systems have changed with the Pandemic in the last three years.

Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel

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Here is another book about mathematics. In this book, the author talks about his absolute love of the beauty of mathematics, and how it explains physical properties, such as features of subatomic particles and in quantum physics. For example, mathematicians postulated the existence of some particles before they were even found based on symmetry in the underlying mathematics.

I was particularly interested in this book, since the author attended college right around the same time I was going to college (he is one year younger), and he experienced the changing world at the same stage that my wife and I did. Even though he is one year younger, he graduated from his high school one year earlier than me at age 16.

In the book, he explains how he was singled out in the mathematics test to attend Moscow State University (or MGU) as a Jewish person. When he went in for his math test, the testers grilled him, and they found a reason to reject his application even though he is brilliant. Moscow State University does not accept people who are even just one quarter Jewish. He ended up going to the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas (also called Kerosinka and officially called the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas) which has a pretty good applied mathematics program. They accept Jewish people. This allowed him to attend some lectures (first by jumping a fence, then getting an ID card) at Moscow State University, even though he wasn’t a student there. (See Chapters 3 and 4.)

In 1989, he received a Harvard Prize Fellowship to attend Harvard for a Semester to learn from some of the best mathematicians in the world. Most of the other recipients had graduate degrees and/or PhDs, while he just had an undergraduate degree from Kerosinka. He worked hard to prove that he belonged there with the fellowship.

He ended up staying in Boston for longer than a semester. He was able to get his PhD in just a year between 1990 and 1991. Below is his dissertation.

Frenkel, E. V. (1991). Affine Kac-Moody algebras at the critical level and quantum Drinfeld-Sokolov reduction.

After he gets his PhD, he works on the Langlands Program. This attempts to be a grand unified theory of mathematics. As noted at Wikipedia — “The Langlands program consists of some very complicated theoretical abstractions, which can be difficult even for specialist mathematicians to grasp.” Frenkel tries to explain some of the math in the program, and I caught some of it, but not very deeply. At the end of the book, he talks about the movie that he worked on, The Rites of Love and Math. The book was published in 2013, while the film came out in 2010, so the film preceded the book.

American Eclipse by David Baron

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While this book came out 6 years ago back in 2017, it is still a good fascinating read as we prepare for the 2023 annular eclipse in October and for the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. It looks like a new edition or version will come out February of 2024.

Much of the book is focused on the July 29, 1878 eclipse eclipse as it happened through Wyoming and Colorado. It was interested to read about how Maria Mitchell and her group observed the eclipse at a residence (Dr. Avery) at 20th St. and Champa. There is a nice drawing of the house on page 131. I drove by the location the other day, and it appears as if the house is no longer there. I spied two office buildings and two parking lots.

It was also interesting to see how involved Thomas Edison was in the event. He was trying to see if his “tasimeter” could be used to measure the heat of the Sun. It never really worked as expected. I also learned that Edison started the journal, Science.

The proposed planet Vulcan was supposedly observed during the eclipse, but it must have been some less bright field stars in the constellation of Cancer. The astronomer, James Craig Watson, from the U of Michigan was sure he spotted the planet, but after claiming his observation, he held on for some time before admitting that he did not see a new planet. Even though he was discredited, there is a medal awarded by the NAS as the James Craig Watson Medal, so his name lives on.

Overall, it was a nice read. It showed how far the US has come in scientific research in the last 155 years, and how the US scientific community was held in low regard by the European establishment at the time. But, the eclipse showed the world that scientists in the United States were getting better and better.

Well, I read another book on college costs – It is Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education

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In the course of finding the previous book, I also had a citation to this new one published this year. I got this one from Interlibrary Loan, since it was not available in Colorado.

Bruce Kimball is in the Department of Education Studies at The Ohio State University. Co-author Sarah M. Iler got her Ph.D. from OSU, and she is currently teaching at Columbus State Community College.

In the preface, they note that several foundations declined to give them grants to support the research, since the foundations thought it should be written by economists, instead of historians of the american education system. They showed them. They were able to get research funding from a variety of sources.

The book essentially covers the years 1869 to the present. That is roughly when colleges began the work of building up an endowment, but the term didn’t become regularized until about 1920. Between 1870 and 1920, a college might consider buildings, equipment, property, trusts, and other financial holdings to be part of an endowment, but those items may or may not be considered endowment today.

The Ivy League schools plus other high prestige private universities (such as the U of Chicago, JHU, MIT) discovered the benefits of the “Free-Money Strategy” as covered in chapter 2. Charles W. Eliot popularized the idea with his annual reports to colleges in the late 1800s to the early 1900s. His father lost a family fortune in the panic of 1857, so that taught Charles the importance of saving money with sound financial strategies.

I skimmed most of the book, since it dealt with the history of how elite colleges developed their endowments with alumni drives, annual fund drives, and ways to influence politicians to give people tax breaks when they donate to colleges. I wanted to read chapters 9 through 11, since they looked at the college cost situation from 1980 to the present. Much of the chapters discussed two theories. One called “cost-disease theory” and another called “revenue-cost theory.” The revenue-cost theory seems to have won the day to explain the spiraling costs of colleges these days.

The conclusion of the book provided a nice overview. I liked the line on pages 274-275 where it was noted that rich universities “are acting like they exist to protect their endowments, instead of the other way around.” (From a law professor, Paul Campos, who stated this in a NY Times article in 2020.) Yes, this does seem to be the case. Colleges work very hard to build up a huge endowment, but to what end. Where should our higher ed spending go? Would a dollar be better spent going to Harvard to add to their 40+ Billion dollar endowment, or would that dollar be better spend helping an HBCU or to a community college scholarship for a first generation college student?

This book has me thinking that if I give to colleges in the future, I should have that money go to less wealthy institutions.

Finished the book, Poison Ivy, by Evan Mandery

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I needed to finish reading this one, since it is due back to the library. As someone who had briefly attended an elite University (endowment of over $10B), who used to work at a place that claims to be elite (Endowment slightly over $1B), currently works at a public school/college/university that aspires to be elite and is leaning that way (endowment of around $300M), this book made lots and lots of sense. The full title of the book is Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us.

I should also note that the author had extensively talked about the work of another author (Sara Goldrick-Rab) in Chapter 17 (pages 227-242) concerning another book that I had read, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream. I read that book about a year ago, but I forgot to blog about it, so this is a good reason to talk about both books at the same time here.

Let me start with the book by Dr. Goldrick-Rab. She wrote about how the state of Wisconsin created a scholarship or grant system to encourage more students from lower-income families to attend college in Wisconsin. Dr. Goldrick-Rab was able to use data from that system and she interviewed about 50 students to see how it impacted them, and to see if it met the goals of the program. In short, I remember reading many of the stories of students and their financial difficulties getting through college. The grants helped some of the students finish their degrees, but it did not help lift as many students out of lower income situations as I would have thought.

Now on to the book that I just finished by Prof. Evan Mandery. He is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice which is in the CUNY system of colleges. He had attended Harvard College and Harvard Law for his undergraduate degree and a Law degree, so he knows the Harvard system. But, he grew up in a middle class family where his dad was a teacher, and he lived in a working class/middle class neighborhood near New York City on Long Island called East Meadow (then Manhasset), NY. See chapter 8.

I felt an affinity for the author, since it seems like he came from a similar background as me, and we both graduated from HS and college in the exact same years, the mid to late 1980s. (How could I not, since he is also has an interest in Gwen Stefani.) But, both of his parents had college degrees from CUNY, while neither of my parents attended college. He was interested in the class distinctions between the kinds of students that Harvard accepts compared to the low- and middle-income students that attend John Jay College. He was able to interview many of those students in his classes. He wanted to know how some of his best students ended up at John Jay instead of at some other elite institutions. The stories of those students make the book a great read.

This book covers more than just the stories of his students; he explains the power system of the elite colleges and why they are filled with mostly rich white students. He interviewed many college administrators and faculty members who had ideas on how to address the power gaps in the system. Some of the power lies with financial donors to colleges, rich families that can pay the full tuition bill, students who play sports dominated by white students (crew, lacrosse, etc.), college admissions staff, companies that publish tests like the SAT and ACT, and administrators who want to keep the status quo.

Part of the status quo problem involves the colleges’ HUGE endowments. While they spend some of their endowments each years, they continue to grow and grow and grow, and their hoarding of wealth is a problem. They don’t use that money to help more of the less privileged kids acclimate to academic life at those elite schools.

Administrators at Harvard and Yale might say that they are just a mirror of society, and that they look the way they do, because America is that way. There is social stratification, and the schools just happen to reflect that problem. He raises the question, what if they have it backwards. “What if America looks the way it does because of Harvard and Yale?” (Page 275.) He then offers a challenge to elite schools to make significant changes in the way they accept and treat students from less privileged backgrounds.

At the very end of the book, he calls on the reader to become an agent of change. As a librarian at the Colorado School of Mines, I try to help all students with their studies regardless of their financial means. I have been working to try to make more content open access, since that makes it easier for people to view and read articles. But, what can I do to change the admission system at Mines? I don’t know. Maybe I should talk to the admissions folk at Mines to get their take on the problem.

It would be easier for me to volunteer my services to help students who are less privileged to understand and navigate the admissions process of more elite schools. I could also help them understand tests like the SAT and how to do better on the math portion of that test. I can think of a lot of ways that I can effect greater change in the unfair system.

Is God a Mathematician? – The book doesn’t answer that question

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I recently read the book, Is God a Mathematician by Mario Livio. I picked it up at the JeffCo Libraries Whale of a Book Sale. I figured the book would not answer the question posed by the title, but I thought it would talk a little bit more about logical proofs for or against an all powerful being. In a way, I am glad that it did not do that. It was mostly on the question, is mathematics invented, or is it discovered?

My favorite chapter was probably chapter 5 on statistics and probability. I learned a little bit more about how games of chance helped influence mathematical thought. They discussed games of chance on pages 138-140, but it was involving dice. I thought that card games influenced mathematical thinkers more when it came to chance and probability of winning various hands of cards. That didn’t seem to come up in the book.

I guess I am on the side of the fence for mathematics being discovered. I think that prime numbers and the number pi exist with or without human involvement. It is just up to us to find them in the world of mathematics. But, math is more than just numbers, it also involves concepts such as functions, and algebraic concepts of unkowns in formulas. There is a lot of math in physical concepts such as waves of light or the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid dynamics. That math would still exist even if we did not find them. Other intelligent life forms would probably also know about pi, prime numbers, the speed of light in a vacuum, E = mc2, and the Navier-Stokes equations.

However, we can invent different ways to communicate the concepts of mathematics, just as calculus can be communicated using different terminology. So, the way to communicate mathematics can be invented.

Anyway, it was a good book. It was not earthshaking, and it did not answer the main question in the title, but it was an interesting read.

Small review of the book Ms. Adventure by Jess Phoenix

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The full title of the book is Ms. Adventure: My Wild Explorations in Science, Lava, and Life.

She really did have some wild explorations. She does a great job of writing stories and weaving in pertinent details. I just wish she didn’t go to the state of Sinaloa in Mexico when she did. She tracked down a lost rock hammer by following a drug cartel vehicle to retrieve the item when it was probably extremely dangerous to do so.

She had some great adventures in Death Valley, at the volcanoes of Hawaii, a submerged volcano in the ocean near Hawaii, in Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador. This review at Amazon does a better job than I am doing right now.

I do wish she would have written more about her run for a House of Representative seat. Maybe she didn’t write about that because that didn’t have much action, and it didn’t work out for her.

I know several people who would enjoy this book, and I can’t recommend it enough if you enjoy travel and adventure books.