Tarkblog

In following viv’s tradition of blogging about books she has recently read, I thought I would offer my takes:

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A Passion For Mathematics - Clifford A Pickover. Lately I’ve been into books that dive into some kind of mathematical topic and explore it. Not necessarily books full of equations, but books that focus on some kind of interesting mathematical concept and discuss its history and how it has been important in the world.

Unfortunately, this book didn’t do it for me. The book is more of a compendium of lots of short facts, tidbits, and trivia questions about mathematical concepts. It’s kind of a puzzle/quiz book, and kind of a fact book. And it just didn’t keep me interested for long. Here’s a sample question:

A surgeon in a dimply lit operating room removes five pulsating hearts from five patients. She places the hearts back in the bodies at random. What are the chances that only four hearts are returned to their correct bodies?

ANS: 0. If four hearts were returned correctly, then all 5 must have been.

Or:

It was once conjectored that 313 * (x^3 + y^3) = z^3 has no positive integer solution; however, it was discovered that the smallest counterexample has numbers with more than 1,000 digits

After the first few pages, this book got uninteresting. It’s currently in my amazon.com seller account.

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The Bible of Options Strategies - Guy Cohen.

That’s really what this book is; it’s a concrete listing of various strategies of options trading. However, it really doesn’t offer anything more than what could be found on the internet. It doesn’t offer any type of investment advice, just mathematical concepts into what the various strategies are and how you can use them. Thumbs down.

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Spinning Disney’s World: Memories of a Magic Kingdom Press Agent by Charles Ridgway

This is a book by a longtime Disney employee, who works most of his career as a press agent in Disneyland, Disneyworld, and for two overseas parks. He is an old kocher who worked with Walt many years ago, and has a lot of good stories to tell abotu the development of the parks over the years.

The stories in the book are really interesting and overall I rate the book as a good read. However, the editing is a bit lacking, in my opinion. The book is very stream-of-consciousness like, and the stories jump from one topic to another to another pretty fast. Like he is recalling a story and diverts 16 different ways throughout it. The book is organized into chapters, but I cannot find any thing that distinguishes the chapters. But what can you do: he’s a pretty old guy now so I’ll cut him some slack. Overall, I recommend the book to anyone who has an interest in this sort of thing (not that anyone reading this does)

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Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics by Bruce Schumm

This book was okay. I’ve been interested in a more in depth look at particle physics lately, so I explored this book. I didn’t make it through, but I think the topic is just too complicated for what I want to think about right now in life. Bottom line: I wouldn’t read it unless you want to know the difference between a muon and a gluon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.