It's clearly intended for a very young audience, and the humor is pretty juvenile. I'm trying not to This is a pretty odd book, and I didn't like it.
It's clearly intended for a very young audience, and the humor is pretty juvenile. I'm trying not to judge it harshly just because I'm not in the target audience, but it would have been nice if the cover had made it clear who the intended audience is.
There's just so much filler here, and so much that's wrong in really odd ways, sometimes in ways that make me wonder if the author has any experience with video games. A couple examples:
* page 12: "Space Invaders made the concept of 'high score' popular. Can you imagine a game without a high score nowadays?" Seriously? Can I imagine a game without a high score nowadays? The concept of high score in the Space Invaders sense has been mostly extinct for well over 20 years. Even by 1987 or so, high scores were mostly a vestigial feature that games still had but most players didn't care about. Some games still have scores today in one way or another of course, but yes, there are tons and tons of games, probably the majority of them, without any score at all.
* pages 14-15: the author purports to answer the question of why video games are called video games. This is apparently a mystery because playing video games is not watching a video. "You watch videos on YouTube or TV." It turns out, the author tells us, that video games are called that because they take stored data and translate that into a VIDEO signal, sent to your TV, "that you could play games on."
This is completely absurd. Video just means moving pictures. Video games are called video games because their main distinguishing characteristic is that you play them via video. There's no mystery. ...more
What's strange and fascinating to me about Scientology is not just that it's a scam. It's how over the top evil it is. Beating members, forcing young What's strange and fascinating to me about Scientology is not just that it's a scam. It's how over the top evil it is. Beating members, forcing young children into hard labor, deliberately destroying families and so on.
The one thing I really wish was available is an honest peek inside the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. Depending on how you look at him, he was either a simple con man, a psychotic Satanic dictator with aspirations to take over the world, or just a nut job with some stupid ideas. I really wish I could get some insight into which of these is more accurate, but that is probably hopeless. ...more
I've sometimes wondered why it is you never hear about academics or other intellectuals using the types of memory techniques described in this book. GI've sometimes wondered why it is you never hear about academics or other intellectuals using the types of memory techniques described in this book. Granted, of course, memory is not of most importance, but it still seems like having a wider array of information immediately accessible would be helpful.
Now I think I've realized (partly) why these memory techniques are mostly used only for trivia or meaningless lists. It's because they are all about giving a context that isn't there otherwise. You imagine the items you're supposed to remember in a familiar place and/or associated with an outrageous image, and so on. This way they become more memorable than just isolated numbers or facts or whatever. But for the facts related to a topic you are interested in and work on daily... there is no need for this fake context. They already have a context. ...more
The preface to this book says, "I believe that the reading of part or all of this book would be a good project for the summer vacation before one begiThe preface to this book says, "I believe that the reading of part or all of this book would be a good project for the summer vacation before one begins graduate school in mathematics."
Well, I tried to do this. Unfortunately, for someone with my mindset about mathematics, this is essentially impossible. It's just so much boring stuff to wade through.
However... this book is still really good. An example of what's so good about it: the discussion on nets and filters. This book gives the "right" definition of subnet, compares it to the other possible definitions, explicitly gives the connection between nets and filters... For some reason this information isn't really available in other books. But I have no desire to just sit down and read this book (or a significant portion of it) straight through. ...more
The biggest reason why the topic of this book is interesting to me is something not even mentioned in the book. In the early UFC fights in the 1990s, The biggest reason why the topic of this book is interesting to me is something not even mentioned in the book. In the early UFC fights in the 1990s, Royce Gracie took everyone by surprise. He practiced a style of Jiu Jitsu that placed great emphasis on submission grappling, a component of fighting that the other fighters were largely ignorant of. As a result, he won handily, and American martial artists gradually became aware of the importance of submission grappling.
An obvious question is: why in the heck did American fighters not already know about submission grappling? I believe the story in this book is the answer to this question. Catch wrestling was the style of submission grappling practiced by American fighters in the 19th century. But catch wrestling, as told in this book, gradually devolved from a mostly legitimate sport to a "sport" with fixed matches to a ridiculous spectacle. As a result all the real skill disappeared. It's all just kind of a sad historical accident, really. I could have grown up seeing serious ground fighting on TV; instead it was all a bunch of goofy guys running around bouncing off ropes and whatnot.
You might agree with me that this statement is true:
"It is impossible for a human to run a mile in thirty seconds."
It's so far beyond the ability ofYou might agree with me that this statement is true:
"It is impossible for a human to run a mile in thirty seconds."
It's so far beyond the ability of anyone alive that it seems clear it's impossible. But in some philosophical sense, this is nonsense. There is no physical barrier making it absolutely inconceivable that some mutant will some day run a mile in thirty seconds. In that sense, it's not impossible, it's just so hard that we seriously doubt anyone will ever do it.
The word "impossible" means something different in mathematics. In mathematics, we work with very simple systems that have clearly specified rules. These systems are so simple that we can prove properties about them in a rigorous fashion, such that there is no doubt these properties hold. In particular, we can prove that certain things are impossible. Just as in chess, one could easily demonstrate that a bishop that begins on a black square can never end up on a white square during a chess match played according to the rules.
A problem the ancient Greek mathematicians set out to solve was to trisect an angle, using only the tools of compass and straightedge. This problem was unsolved until the 19th century, when it was demonstrated that it is impossible. The proof that this construction is impossible is not particularly difficult as these things go: it requires just some plane geometry, some trigonometry, and a smidge of so-called modern algebra.
Nevertheless, a baffling number of people throughout the 19th and 20th centuries set out to trisect the angle, and in fact believed they had done so. Dudley documents many attempted trisections here in this very interesting book. Amazingly, many of these trisectors are fully aware that there exists a proof that their goal is impossible, but don't seem to understand the concept of mathematical proof, and continue anyway. Many of them seem to hold mathematicians in contempt for "giving up" on the problem. Meanwhile mathematicians see the trisectors about the same way they'd see people who spend their days deep in thought over a chess board, trying to find a sequence of chess moves to get a bishop from a black square to a white square.
The arrogance of many trisectors is staggering. Then again, the whole enterprise can only be born out of arrogance. How else could someone with barely a high school education who can't follow simple proofs believe that every mathematician in the world is wrong about a simple, elementary fact known for over a century? ...more
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