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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Fate of the Earth
I went through this period of being interested in the Foundations of Mathematics, and read several books on the subject. If you haven't come across one, they are full of Greek letters and odd-looking formulas. You tend to get the first major revelation round about a quarter of the way through; after a lot of preliminary character development, there is a fanfare of trumpets, and you find out that x + y = y + x, or something like that. I hear a few people at the back scoffing that they knew that already. Yes, but are you quite certain it has to be that way? Why are you so sure?I was reminded of this when I read Jonathan Schell. In 200 carefully reasoned pages, he explains why it's not a good idea to use nuclear weapons to destroy all life on Earth. In fact, he comes to the conclusion that it's just about the worst idea anyone's ever thought of, and should not be considered under any circumstances whatsoever.
OK, it's always the same people. You knew that too, did you? You're quite sure? Not even to prevent a political system you really hate from being generally adopted? Not even to prevent that system being enforced against the wishes of a large part of the world's population? Not even as a threat, which you probably wouldn't carry out, in order to prevent that from happening?
Right. I see. Well, maybe you should read his book then, shouldn't you?
