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Anyone writing a book that has anything to do with Alan Turing (such as my book The Annotated Turing ) benefits from having at the outset a valuable and ultimately indispensable resource: Andrew Hodges' extraordinary biography Alan Turing: The Enigma published in Great Britain and the United States in 1983. This biography is a model of its kind: very well researched, beautifully written, accurately informative about the mathematics, and quite moving. My book The Annotated Turing is certainly not another biography of Turing, but rather an extended discussion of his 1936 paper that introduced the concepts of computability and the Turing Machine. However, in Chapters 4 through 11, I attempt to interweave biographical information about Turing with my presentation and discussion of the first 22 pages of Turing's paper. (It was one of the very fun challenges of writing these chapters to make chronological connections between Turing's post-1936 life and various sections of the paper without overstrained Read More...
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A friend mentioned John L. Casti's The Cambridge Quintet: A Work of Scientific Speculation (Perseus Books, 1998) to me recently because Alan Turing plays a major role in this fictional dialogue concerning machine intelligence. The premise is this: In 1949, C.P. Snow wants to advise the British government on the possibilities and potentials of machine intelligence, so he hosts a dinner party at his home in Cambridge with four guests to discuss the issues: Turing, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and physicist Edwin Schrödinger. Over seven chapters corresponding to the courses of the dinner (sherry, soup, fish, meat, salad, dessert, and cigars and brandy), Casti narrates this imagined conversation. The result is an entertaining introduction to some of the philosophical concepts associated with artificial intelligence and human consciousness. The philosophical dialogue is a time-honored genre, although traditionally it's populated by character types (such as in Read More...
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In 1999, as I was finishing work on my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software , I had ideas for four "spin-off" books. I prepared single-page descriptions of each of these book ideas and showed them to my agent. Her favorite and my favorite was a book that I called Follow the Data . I decided I didn't want to try to get a book contract for Follow the Data right away. I wanted to try writing at least some of it free from the pressures of contracts and deadlines to see how it went. (I had done the same thing with Code : I wrote the first 10 chapters of Code before I showed it to anybody .) The title of Follow the Data came from the famous line "Follow the money" that screenwriter William Goldman wrote for the film version of All the President's Men . My idea was to explain different types of analog and digital storage and communications by showing how the data is transformed in various ways and then transmitted or stored. (For example, vocal cords vibrate sound in Read More...
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Jeff Gomez, the Print is Dead author and blogger, has now declared that the Kindle is dead . Mr. Gomez believes that for Kindle 2.0 to be successfully, Amazon must unlock some of the hidden features (such as a Minesweeper game) and add some more features. Otherwise, why pay $400 to read a book? And therein lies the central paradox of ebook readers like the Kindle: The more features an ebook reader accumulates, the less suitable it is for actually reading books. What are the prerequisites for reading a book? A good chair and light, of course (those are the technological requirements) but most important are time , a quiet mind , and minimal distractions . If you read a paragraph of the book and feel a need to look up something in IMDB — and believe me, I've been there — you might want to actually turn off the biggest assemblage of hyperlinked distractions you own. The Kindle can already access Wikipedia. Why shouldn't it access the whole Internet? And why can't you get your Read More...
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In 1882 German mathematician Ferdinand Lindemann proved that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — the number we know and love as π — is, as was long suspected, not the solution to any algebraic equation. It is, instead, transcendental. This proof provided an insight into a problem that mathematicians (professional and amateur) had struggled with for over 2,000 years: the problem of squaring the circle . Given a circle, construct a square of equal area using the standard geometric tools of a compass and straightedge. A similar problem is called the rectification of the circle , which requires constructing a straight line equal to the circumference of the circle. It turns out that constructing geometric objects with a compass and straightedge is equivalent to solving certain algebraic equations. The rectification of the circle requires constructing a line of length 2π; squaring the circle requires constructing a line of length √π. Lengths involving transcendental Read More...
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Famous physicists and mathematicians sometimes receive letters, essays, and even entire treatises from people who have no formal education in these fields, but who nonetheless believe that they have unique insights into the great unsolved problems of our time. The technical term for a person who sends such a package is "crank," and if the recipients of crank letters pause just a few seconds before dropping the masterpiece into the trash, it is because everyone knows the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 – 1920). Ramanujan, born in Tamil Nadu, India, was largely self-taught in mathematics. While working as a clerk in Madras, he did mathematics on his own — much of it very unusual and some of it hovering on that fine line that surrounds genius. He sent his stuff to three professors at Cambridge University, but only G. H. Hardy (1877 – 1947) recognized the brilliance of Ramanujan's work. Hardy arranged for Ramanujan to come to England, where he lived and worked until Read More...
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En la actualidad vemos como proveedores de servicios y fabricantes de productos tratan de lograr que los mismos sean simples de entender, simples de usar, esta tarea no es para nada simple y no quiere decir que los productos o servicios que se ofrezcan deban carecer de funciones o características, si tomamos como ejemplo al iPod el cual es el referente en lo que a simplicidad hablamos, podemos ver que de por sí es un aparato complejo, cargado de características, pero a sus vez no solo es simple de usar sino que también transmite la sensación de simplicidad. Últimamente muchos escriben sobre el concepto de simplicidad, de todo ellos John Maeda se destaca y en su libro The Rules of Simplicity nos proporciona reglas las cuales nos guían en los conceptos que conforman la simplicidad y algunos consejos para aplicarlos en nuestro trabajo diario. The Rules of Simplicity está traducido a muchos idiomas, incluido el español, se puede conseguir en Amazon o en cualquier librería de primera línea, Read More...
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Deirdre and I "transitioned" to upstate New York on Monday — moving ourselves and the two cats and a bunch of stuff from our tiny New York City apartment to our little house in the Catskills, where we'll be spending December and quite likely a significant chunk of January. The uncertainty of our return back to the city mostly involves my current work-in-progress, The Annotated Turing . I do not want to transition back to the city before submitting the final chapters to my publisher. I'm basically stranded here in the snowy mountains until it's done. Among the stuff I needed to move up here were books that I'm using for research for The Annotated Turing — everything from the obvious (Andrew Hodges's biography, the four volumes of the Collected Works of A.M. Turing , Jean van Heijenoort's extraordinary anthology From Frege to Gödel ) to the more obscure ( Machine Man and Other Writings by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Bertrand Russell and Trinity by G.H. Hardy, and The Love that Read More...
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Have you heard? In a breakthrough technology, the new Amazon Kindle allows human beings for the first time in the history of civilization to actually read books . No longer will we stare in befuddlement at those complex structures of paper, cardboard, and glue, wondering in despair how we can possibly use a device that contains no buttons, no batteries, no backlighting.... But seriously folks. The part that got me perked up was the $9.99 price for downloading books. Just within the past two days I've experienced serious sticker shock on Amazon.com checking out this $234 two-volume compendium and this 304-page but $235 monograph and I sure was hoping I could get a bit of a price break. Alas, these two books have not yet been Kindle-ized, and I'm not sure when they're scheduled for the process. A year? Five years? Never? But here's my question: Say I purchase and download a book now, and then, say, 28 years from now, I get a strange urge to re-read the book. Do I just pull out my old Kindle Read More...
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Roman Polanski's film of Ira Levin's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby was the first of Polanski's movies that he adapted from another source. Rather than engaging in the customary practice of drastically changing the novel, Polanski stuck unusually close to it, keeping all the major characters, huge chunks of dialogue, and even the images of Rosemary's dreams. At one point in the novel, Rosemary's husband Guy comes home and says "I got the shirt that was in The New Yorker ," and Polanski asked Ira Levin exactly which issue of The New Yorker that was because he wanted to get the exact shirt for his film. Ira Levin's novel — about mother-to-be Rosemary Woodhouse who fears that her neighbors are witches who are plotting to take her baby to use in their rituals — is an intricate mix of hints and red herrings, an exquisite psychological thriller with not an ounce of fat, and I suspect Polanski feared that he might break something if he changed too much. The strategy worked, for Polanski's Read More...
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In the late 60's and early 70's, Norman Mailer was a regular on TV talk shows like The Tonight Show , The *** Cavett Show , and Firing Line , where he and Bill Buckley seemed to intensify each other's stutters. I never really liked Mailer's public persona — brash, swaggering, misogynist — and I could never imagine him actually writing, and taking the time to polish sentences. I am certain that the first Mailer book I read was The Armies of the Night (1968), his famous "History as a Novel; the Novel as History." (The paperback was published December 1968, and my copy says "Third printing," so I probably bought it in 1969.) The Armies of the Night is about the October 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, in which a character named Norman Mailer — like Caesar, Mailer wrote of himself in the third person — takes center stage. All right, let us look into his mind. It has been burned out by the gouts of bourbon he has taken into himself the night before (in fact, one Read More...
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One of the blogs I read regularly is Jeff Gomez's Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age . He recently wrote a book identically entitled; it'll be published next month and I've pre-ordered it from Amazon. I am perfectly aware that I can start reading excerpts from the book online, but I'd rather not. I want a broad, lengthy, coherent argument about why I should be rejoicing about the transition from printed books to electronic books, and I'm trusting that Jeff Gomez's book in its entirety will give me precisely that. Traditionally, that's what books are good at. Books excel at delivering a sustained argument that can't be handled adequately in 1,000 or 5,000 or even 10,000 words. I want the 100,000-word version with the depth and detailed analysis possible only in a book. I'm looking forward to Jeff Gomez's book so much because I sometimes find his blog entries somewhat baffling. I always expect there to be another paragraph or two that provides a bit more clarification. One of the benefits Read More...
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It's no use, he sees her He starts to shake and cough Just like the old man in That book by Nabokov — Sting, "Don't Stand So Close to Me" (1980) The music magazine Blender recently cited Sting as the worst lyricist ever (MSNBC story here ), in part for the atrocious lyric quoted above. At the time the song first came out, much was made of Sting's ridiculous pronunciation of Vladimir Nabokov's last name, which should properly be accented on the second syllable. "That book" is obviously Nabokov's classic 1955 novel Lolita but few people have noticed another gross error in Sting's lyrics: The "old man" — the narrator of the novel who adopts the pseudonym Humbert Humbert — is hardly old! In May 1947, when Humbert Humbert first meets Dolores Haze, he is 36 or 37 and she is 12. He dies at the age of 42, and she dies at the age of 17. This is not a matter of "inside knowledge" or reading between the lines. Nabokov is extremely precise in the chronology of the novel, and only Read More...
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Congratulations to Jeff Atwood on the publication of his first book . Jeff seems to have found the book-writing process to be hard work with few rewards. (And this is a "tips" book with three co-authors!) What he says about book-writing is mostly true, but I'd like to add a few clarifications. Declining Book Readership People are probably reading and writing more than ever, but a lot of this reading and writing is online. Consequently, book reading has suffered. Is book reading too circumscribed for the modern sensibility? Once your finish one page, you have to start in on the next. Otherwise, you're no longer reading the book. What fascist made up these rules? Reading online is much more flexible. Hyperlinking actually encourages bouncing around from page to page, from topic to topic, from site to site. You're not done until you stagger bleary-eyed from the screen. Distractions can be deadly for book reading, yet the modern world is a monument to distractions! You can't multitask while Read More...
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In Philip Roth's novella The Ghost Writer (1979), American novelist Nathan Zuckerman tells us a story that took place on December 9 and 10, 1956, when he was 23 years old. Four of his short stories had recently been published in literary magazines, and he has been invited to the home of E. I. Lonoff (then in his 50s and just five years before his death), the author who Zuckerman most reveres. Zuckerman has brought some baggage to Lonoff's quiet house in the Berkshire's. He has recently drawn on some unsavory aspects of his own family history to write his most ambitious story yet. But it's a story his father believes should not be published, for it will simply reinforce all the anti-Semitic stereotypes held by the Gentiles. His father even brings to the story to Judge Leopold Wapter (who functions as a kind of secular Rabbi to the Zuckermans) who asks Nathan in a letter "Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or Read More...
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