Tag Archives: Pocket guide

Nuclear Power: a very short introduction – Maxwell Irvine ***

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The ‘very short introduction’ series from OUP is decidedly variable in its content. Some are really readable pocket popular science books. This one isn’t. However I would say it is an absolutely essential little book for anyone who wants to get the facts straight in a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

In effect it’s a fact book on nuclear. And being a collection of facts it isn’t always incredibly readable (not helped by the industry’s delight in acronyms). The pages on different reactor types in various countries, for example, provide little more than a long, detailed list. Yet it’s all valuable  information. The way, for example, in the UK pretty well every reactor is a prototype, so we never got the benefits of scale that France did from mass production.

The book is modern enough to cover the 2011 Japan tsunami disaster and its impact on the power plants, though doesn’t mention the painful knee-jerk political reaction in countries like Germany. It is clear and factual on costs (remarkably similar to coal/oil when everything is factored in, though longer term hence the investment problems), on risk and on the world’s need to have conventional nuclear to keep us going until fusion comes online (which it explains very well).With the best will in the world, that isn’t going to be until the 2050s at the earliest. It doesn’t dismiss renewables, but highlights the way they just aren’t and can’t be enough to get us into cleaner energy soon enough.

Overall then, in terms of value of content, this is probably a five star book, but I can only give it three stars because it’s not much of a read.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

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It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point.

Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have.

The other real problem is that this is a book that really should have been updated. It was written in 2003 and though all but the last few pages are spot on in terms of content, clearly things have moved on in the last few years. We are introduced to something called the Sony Dream Robot, clearly the predecessor of Asimo – but in the predictions of one Hans Morovec that basic menial humanoid robots would be common by 2010, we see the classic divide between academic and real world. It just doesn’t make economic sense. And remarkable though Asimo was, it was extremely expensive to build and still has major limitations.

However, limitations aside, the book was brilliant at getting across the basics of AI and managing to pack a huge amount of information into this pocket-sized volume. It’s by no means all about robotics, with large chunks of the philosophy and nature of cognition, and the different mechanisms and approaches proposed for AI. I was briefly in charge of the AI group at British Airways and I thought the book represented well the  hope, occasional value but general lack of usefulness of AI, which contrasted well with similar books on chaos theory which dwell on their applications without pointing out that they are largely unfulfilled.

There were some old friends here like Alan Turing and the Turing test, and John Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ where someone appears to pass the Turing test by communicating in written Chinese using a large set of rules without ever being able to speak Chinese, demonstrating that the ability to mimic this kind of mental process isn’t the same as the process itself. You will get your mind in the occasional twist, but there’s a lot of meat in this text for such a small book.

Overall, then, very worthwhile as an introduction to AI, provided you aren’t too disappointed by the out of date nature of the last few pages – and like the best of these books, fun along the way.

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Review by Brian Clegg

*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…

The Scientific revolution: a very short introduction – Lawrence M. Principe ****

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It’s easy for a very short guide to a subject to become a collection of information without narrative or style. Luckily Lawrence Principe’s entry in the OUP pocket guide series is the very reverse. It is elegantly written and fascinating to read.

Along the way you may well have your illusions about the history of science shattered. Nothing much happened in science between the Greeks and the renaissance? Wrong. They thought the Earth was flat in Columbus’s day? Wrong. Galileo’s trial was all about science versus the church? Wrong. What comes across most strongly – and it’s why I’ve always found medieval science absolutely fascinating – is that you have to see the world with a different mindset. It’s not that they were all illogical and stupid back then, merely that they started from different first principles and built logically but incorrectly on these.

This little book gives an excellent feeling for where our scientific ideas came from, how the approach to science was shaped by the universities and religion of the day, and how we need to have much less of a knee-jerk reaction to the way they got things wrong with astrology and natural magic and other similar silly sounding topics.

I’ve read a lot of these very short introductions to review them both here and elsewhere, and I’d say this is definitely one of my favourites. Not only is there is a surprising amount of thought provoking and very readable content, it is an absolute essential to understand where our modern approach to science has come from. Read it now.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Science in Seconds – Hazel Muir ***

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I don’t know why it is, but publishers seem to love books that give you a whole host of bite-sized information on a subject. I can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a dinosaur as far as book styles go, because this is the kind of thing that the internet does so well. Books are better for narrative flow – no one wants to read 80,000 words from a web page – but if you just want a bite-sized intro to a subject, then the web is your oyster.

With that in mind, I really have nothing against Hazel Muir’s Science in Seconds. It is a well written collection of very short articles on all sorts of aspects of science. They are so short they tend to be more statement of facts than interesting stories, but they do the job well enough, with passable illustrations in a strange almost square pocket-sized shape. But I am stretched to see the point of it.

There are a couple of small moans. Inevitably when trying to cover all of science, some good bits will be missed out and others questioned – it’s the case with any ‘best of’ list. Interesting though hard drives, flash memory and optical storage are, I really don’t think they qualify to rank alongside the big bang, quantum theory and evolution. And if I’m going to be picky, there were a couple of small errors. The explanation of a how a plane’s wing generates lift is wrong in ascribing it primarily to the Bernoulli effect, and a piece on the planets tell us there are 8 in the text, but show 9 in the diagram – but mostly the content is absolutely fine, concise and factful. It’s just I keep coming back to ‘What’s the point’?

The press release tells us it is a ‘compact and portable format – a handy reference, ideal for students’. But would a student really buy this as a reference? It has far too little detail to help with a science course. And anyone with a smartphone can access much more detailed references at the touch of a button in an even better ‘compact and portable’ format. I feel like a real grouch here. Just call me Oscar. I genuinely think that Muir has done an excellent job. But to what end?

For those who like a bit of publishing speculation, it’s interesting that when I searched for the book on Amazon, this book came up – what appears to be exactly the same book, but written by a different author. What happened there, then?

 

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Review by Brian Clegg

Risk: a very short introduction – Baruch Fischhoff & John Kadvany ***

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I have to confess to a personal interest in the subject of one of OUP’s pocket ‘a very short introduction’ guides. My first job was in Operational Research, which is very much about optimising decision making, and this book is strongly focussed on the difficulties of decisions where risk is involved. Not all difficult decisions do involve risk – for example anything comparing apples and oranges. I might be deciding between two products, one of which is very stylish and the other very practical. The comparison is not easy, but there’s not really risk attached. But this book is all about those decisions where we have to factor in risk – how to insure cars, for example, and the decision whether to try to keep a very premature birth alive are discussed early on.

The reason I confessed the interest is that I find this stuff fascinating, but I suspect this may be to some extent my inner geek coming out, and to the general reader it might be less interesting. The book contains is an effective analysis of making risk decisions, risk perception and communication and the interaction between risk, culture and society. There’s perhaps not as much that’s practical as you might expect, but I think that is fairly inevitable in this format. The book certainly gives a clear overview to the way theory has developed to help understand and manage a risk component to decision making.

I suppose my biggest disappointment with the book is that it isn’t really about risk, it’s purely about risk-based decision making, and particularly that it is only concerned with negative risk. I make this distinction because I think there is a lot to be said about risk in a positive sense. By positive risk, I don’t mean the kind of thing where someone risks their life trying to hop up Everest without oxygen – that’s just stupid showing off. What I mean is the kind of risk involved in creativity.

Every time someone is creative there is an element of risk. Whether it’s a new work of art or the product of business creativity – perhaps bringing a new product to market or a new way of working – there is risk involved, which still needs to be analyzed and considered. But this is good risk – there can be no creativity without it. Arguably it’s this type of risk that stops life from being bland. Yet this aspect of risk doesn’t come across at all in the book because it is so focussed on the assessment of negative risk and its impact on decisions.

What it does, it does well. But it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Numbers: a very short introduction – Peter M. Higgins ***

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Part of the massive ‘a very short introduction’ range of pocket books, this book sets you straight immediately if you thought it was going to be about mathematics – no, it’s about number, which is quite a different thing. This is both true and not true, which really sets the pattern for the whole little book. Number is a quite distinct concept from maths, yet in discussing number, Peter Higgins inevitably brings in quite a lot of mathematics.

The mixed feel continues with the presentation. The writing style is light and accessible for what can be quite an indigestible topic, but bits of the book are better than other in this respect. I wanted to keep reading, but I found myself feeling a strong urge to skip bits that seemed to be getting bogged down.

After an introduction to what numbers are we’re plunged into prime numbers in some detail. From here we go on to the various labels mathematicians have for numbers, from perfect to deficient – this is faintly interesting, but it does generate an urge to ask ‘Yes, but why does it matter?’ We go on to the likes of cryptography and the use of large primes to perform encryption/decryption, the various fractions, infinity and more. (Yes, you can have more than infinity, and you know what I mean anyway).

There seemed a couple of strange omissions. I think we could have done with significantly more on the philosophy of number – just what numbers are, why human beings use them, whether they have a real existence outside of mathematics etc. I was also surprised by the near-absence of set theory – it comes into the infinity chapter, but there is none of the use of set theory to establish the basics of number and operations, which seemed odd. I’d have expected it up front.

In the end it’s a book that falls between two stools. It isn’t consistently readable enough to be good popular science, but it isn’t detailed enough to be a textbook. I’m not really sure what it’s for. But it’s certainly not a bad addition to the series – and ‘number’ certainly deserves its place there.

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Review by Jo Reed

The Little Book of Medical Breakthroughs – Naomi Craft ***

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Naomi Craft’s small book is a handy reference guide to the development of medicine over the years. She takes us through some of the most significant advances in chronological order, with each entry being one or two pages long, and also covering the main people behind the discoveries and breakthroughs, the time of the breakthroughs, and the places the advances originated.

We have big theoretical breakthroughs in science, which advanced our general understanding of how to practice medicine, like the outcome of Mendel’s experiments on peas and Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. We look at the emergence of operational techniques, like key hole surgery and tele-surgery (where the doctor and patient can be separated by thousands of miles). We have small practical advances, like the idea that hand washing can prevent the spread of disease. And we look at ideas that have changed the culture within which medicine is done – evidence-based medicine (including randomised-controlled trials) is covered, for instance, with this now being seen as just as important as the authority of individual doctors.

There are some interesting facts along the way. It is said, for instance, that the Roman philosopher Seneca used to read books through a bowl filled with water, using it as a primitive lens. And there are quite a few unpleasant medical practices covered – one of these, which isn’t the worst example in the book, is doctors drinking their patients’ urine to measure the sweetness of it. They were testing for what we now know as diabetes.

There is enough context and surrounding information in each short article for the book not to feel too much like a dictionary and, as everything is in chorological order, it is something you could read to get a general feel for the history of medicine. Being the kind of book that it is, there’s nothing to get too excited about – but it does the job it aims to do well.

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Review by Matt Chorley

Introducing Evolution: a graphic guide – Dylan Evans & Howard Selina ***

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It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point.

It is easy for the reader to get a little confused about which book to go for here as you can also choose Introducing Evolutionary Psychology and Introducing Darwin, the latter of which has significant overlaps with the current book. Of the two, I’d say this was probably the better choice for getting the basics of evolution – although both feature Darwin’s life and work, this covers the science better and makes better use of the illustrated ‘Introducing’ format.

The text flows nicely and the book works well as an introduction to the subject. It isn’t limited to the pure consideration of evolution by natural selection but also takes in the implications and the difficulties – so, for example, you will find quite a bit on altruism, which at first sight seems at odds with the concept of natural selection. I would have liked to see more on speciation, which is one of the areas of evolution that is less clear (even most creationists accept variations within species this way), and I was very surprised not to find a reference to evo devo (evolutionary development) in a book that is a lot more modern than the Darwin title.

The images are always important in one of these books and many of them here work well, though I found the ape-headed human used as a guide was a joke that became tired rather quickly. Overall a solid addition to the series though not an outstanding one.

*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…

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Review by Brian Clegg

Planets: a very short introduction – David A. Rothery ***

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Like any other pocket summary, David Rothery’s Planets – a very short introduction is limited by the format. The book never goes into excessive detail, but it is surprisingly comprehensive and though sometimes quite dry, it is readable throughout.

To give a feel for the way the author brings a little life into what could be a dull collection of facts, consider this extract: visualize a pock-marked potato scaled up to any size between tens of metres and a few hundred kilometres, and you should have a serviceable mental image of a typical asteroid… Generally, rotation is at right angles to their length, so they rotate like sausages twirled on a cocktail stick.

Rothery takes an appropriately balanced view on the demotion of Pluto to a minor planet. He leads us on a quite detailed tour of each of the planets and their moons, throwing in some bonus material on asteroids, comets and exoplanets.

This kind of pocket guide is never going to set the world in fire, but it does an excellent job of introducing the planets within the limitation of the format. It would be great for a young astronomer or for anyone who just wants to know quite a lot more about the Sun’s satellites.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Genius – a very short introduction – Andrew Robinson ***

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One of OUP’s pocket series ‘a very short introduction’ (books with a cover design that says ‘dull’), this title takes on the thorny topic of genius. It’s hard to say whether or not this subject is science at all. There is certainly some science in the book – when looking at studies of the way the brain works and the nature of intelligence – but the concept of ‘genius’ itself is such a fuzzy one that is probably more a media label than anything meaningful.

Apart from anything else, as Andrew Robinson makes clear, we can’t agree on what genius is, nor on who is a genius. There are a few exceptions – few people could argue about Newton or Einstein – but in many other cases the validity of the claim is open to question. What I found fascinating was that Robinson says that in some cases genius is disputed – for example Picasso – while in others it’s undisputed – for example Mozart. I was surprised that Picasso is questioned while at the same time (I know I’m in a minority) I really don’t see what the fuss is about Mozart, whose music seems mostly trivial to me. As another example of the subjectivity of this label, Robinson constantly refers to Virginia Woolf as a genius. What? Is he serious? More celebrity than genius I would have said.

The more I read this book, the more I thought that this thing being labelled genius is an entirely different concept between (say) science, art & music. However, for some reason this difference doesn’t come though in the text until very late in the book, and when Robinson does cover it, what he says is not very satisfactory. He never explores the thesis, for example, that art only has a value that is set by fashion – genius in art is inevitably going to be subjective – while science can have an objective assessment of value that makes it much easier to pinpoint genius (even if the collective nature of scientific work makes it harder to assign this genius to an individual).

All in all it’s a good little book in that makes you think about the nature of genius – but an irritating topic, because in the end it’s a subject that is so arbitrary. A work of genius? Probably not.

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Review by Brian Clegg