Rating: 4/5 Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2008). The Lightness of Being is the type of content you might expect in a first-year honours physics class—maybe even second-year. It attempts to summarize where things are at in regards to quantum...
One thing about editing is that music can be very distracting, especially music with any sort of lyric. So, when I’m editing I do so generally in silence (or purely instrumental music if it’s a lighter text). I love it, then, when I get to the design and layout stage because I can listen to anything I want. Three CDs...
Rating: 4/5 Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error (New York: Ecco, 2010). This is a book I read sometime last year but just never got around to reviewing. As the title suggests, it’s a book about fallibility. It’s a relatively lengthy book, but the writing style is clear and engaging, and the...
One genre I enjoy for the most part is anime. I’m not hard core or anything, and there’s plenty I don’t like, but there’s quite a bit that I do. My recent Netflix binge has only stoked this even more as I suddenly have access to so many shows I couldn’t access before. The purpose of this post is to mention my three...
Rating: 4/5 Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work (New York: Basic Books, 1998). Have you ever wondered how a computer actually works? How is it that a wafer of silicon no wider than your thumbnail can do all the things that computers do? How can a device that at it’s most...
Rating: 4/5 Keith Devlin, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern; A Tale of How Mathematics is Really Done (New York: Basic Books, 2008). One of the intriguing things about studying history is hindsight. As a music historian, I was fascinated by the...
Rating: 4/5 Oliver Sacks, Musicophila: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008). I received this book as a gift on my birthday back in 2008, but at the time I was studying for my comprehensive exams so I was somewhat over saturated (understatement!) with music readings. I’m sorry, Blais, but I’m...
Rating: 4/5 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (W. W. Norton, 1997). Well now I know. After 6 months, I’m still not recovered from grad school. After reading some “art for art’s sake” books, I thought I’d try Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book on my to-read list for some time. After 100-odd pages, I finally had to give...
Rating: 4/5 Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space (Ace/Berkeley Pub., 2000). ———, Redemption Ark (Gollancz, c.2002). ———, Absolution Gap (Gollancz, 2003). I recently finished the Revelation Space trilogy by Alistair Reynolds. The other books are Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. I have to say, I really enjoyed the...
Rating: 4/5 Alastair Reynolds, The Prefect (Gollancz, 2008). Well I’m on a bit of an Alastair Reynolds kick at the moment. Like music, when I find something I like, I tend to try to listen to/read everything that person did to get the whole picture. Sometimes I am disappointed and stay focused on a few specific works,...