Eugene Gallagher

A strong case for Bayes

Revisado: 03-08-24

Good intro to Bayesian statistics but the descriptions of equations and graphs were distracting. I bought the book for those.

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An outline of a von Neumann biography, but not one

Revisado: 11-04-23

This is an odd book. It is as if Labatut compiled an extensive set of memoirs about a number of characters working on artificial intelligence and other computer-related areas and then compiled them into a book with narration with foreign accents. Most of the book is about John von Neumann. Using sometimes scathing mementos from his wife, daughter, colleagues, and a few sympathetic friends, Labatut moves chronologically through von Neumann's life from being a childhood prodigy to a mute temrinal patient who'd lost his mental abilities. The book is full of anecdotes, but doesn't get into many of the details of von Neumann's life and work at all. For that I far preferred Ananyo Bhattacharya's 2021 biography "The Man from the Future." For example, one learns from memoirs from his wife that Morgenstern was a hideous person and from Morgenstern that von Neumann was a demanding co-author. I'd already known from 'American Prometheus' that the Los Alamos nickname for von Neumann was 'The Martian' because of his otherworldly mathematical abilities. Other than being told that game theory gave rise to Mutually Assured Destruction and the mini-max theorem, which Labatut fails to describe but is useful in ecology and economics, there's nothing there about the magesterial work or any descriptions of how it was used. For example, von Neumann's book left a small chink open, allowing Jonathan Nash ("A beautiful mind") to write a short paper filling that tiny gap which won him a Nobel prize. As I've mentioned, almost all of the narration is by readers with strong foreign accents of unknown origin. I don't know the origin. I asked an Albanian colleague if she recognized the foreign accent, and she said it sounded like a native English speaker putting on a foreign accent. The book concludes with a lengthy section about a computer vs. Go competition. I'd have ended it with von Neumann, but I guess the message is that von Neumann's goal of a computer that thinks was finally acheived by the Go-playing computer. I can't recommend this book.

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Not Lehane's best

Revisado: 07-13-23

I was disappointed in the book and audio. As a former resident of Southie, I could picture all of the places. Sometimes Lehane changed names for some unknown reason. For example, why not call the key location at the T station by its real name, the JFK UMass station. Of course, one of the main characters is modeled on Whitey Bulger. I'd be interested to know whether the Southie protestors really spit on Teddy Kennedy. I just found a web interview of Lehane and he said the spitting was anecdotal. There is a lot of violence from beginning to end. It all became a bit dreary.

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A tremendous book and audio book

Revisado: 07-13-23

As a Boston resident, I found this book to be one of the most moving that I've read/heard in the last several years. Dr. Jim O'Connell is an unforgettable character and his work so admirably documented by Tracy Kidder is simply amazing. The book is moving and sad and filled with poignant scenes. I will never look at homeless people, especially the rough sleepers in the same way.

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A somewhat disappointing book

Revisado: 06-10-22

I was expecting more of a scholarly book, especially on climate change and world food supply, but this book fell far short of expectations. For example, there is a real story to be told about the difficulty of supplying the needed amounts of rare earth metals to build wind turbines and car batteries, but Smil glosses over the subject in a couple of pages. Helen Scales in "The Brilliant Abyss" discusses the conflict between mining rare earth metals and drastically affecting the biodiversity of large areas of the deep sea. Smil goes to great lengths describing his superior mathematical reasoning skills but then inappropriately uses 3 significant figures to describe the highly uncertain cost in diesel to harvest shellfish, "The highest energy cost is for crustaceans (shrimps and lobster) caught by destructive bottom trawls in Europe, with maxima up to 17.3 L/lg of catch." Come on, 17.3?? and where is the documentation for this claim and its measure of uncertainty? There are few measures of uncertainty on Smil's rates. Smil argues that when it comes to climate change and world food supply, he is neither an optimist or pessimest, he's a scientist. But, scientists provide citations for their claims and provide measures of uncertainty for their rates.

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Superb ecology and biography

Revisado: 06-01-22

Rhodes' book is superb on both the ecology and story of the remarkable E. O. Wilson's life. He does as much as one can do with MacArthur & Wilson's Theory of Island Biogeography without using graphs, including a detailed description of how Wilson and his doctoral student Simberloff tested the theory with Florida islands. The book reminded me a bit of Isaacson's 'Code Breaker' when detailing with some of the academic nastiness in the Harvard battles between Watson, Gould, Lewontin and Wilson and the vicious attach on Wilson over Sociobiology. It would have been nice to have had some mention of the peer review process in the dessimination of Wilson's work. Rhodes makes it appear that Wilson wrote out his ideas in longhand, had them transcribed by his long-time secretary, and then they appeared unaltered in top journals and books. Perhaps it was that easy for him. A good part of Isaacson's Code Breaker was devoted to the peer review process and the rush to publication in top journals. That important element of science is missing from Rhodes' book, other than a brief section on the battle over Sociobiology in 'The New York Review of Books'.

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Philbrick's history with a personal touch

Revisado: 03-27-22

Like Philbrick, I'm a fan of Steinbeck's 'Travels with Charley.' Philbrick refers to Steinbeck's travel book often in retracing the trips of George Washington to visit every state in the Union accompanied by his wife Melissa and his Nova Scoatian duck-tolling retriever Droa. Philbrick debunks many of the 'Wasington slept here' myths and confirms others, often meeting with local historians. He discusses Washington's deplorable record on slavery in almost every chapter, especially Washington's Javertian pursuit of Martha's escaped slave Ona Judge. Philbrick notes that Washington in 1784, his first year back at Mount Vernon from the war, paid 122 shillings to several "Negroes" for 9 of their teeth. These presumably healthy teeth, purchased at a third of the accepted price, were pulled and used by a tooth surgeon who removed Washington's rotted teeth to be replaced by the purchased teeth in the fresh sockets. The procedure didn't work, and Philbrick notes that Washington's dentures may have also used teeth of enslaved workers. Philbrick tells good stories especially of Hamilton versus Jefferson and the spy ring at Setauket Long Island, of course visited by Washington. While obviously favoring Hamilton in his descriptions, Philbrick notes that Hamilton was also a slave owner at the time of his death.

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As a benthic ecologist, I loved this book.

Revisado: 02-16-22

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book, but I thought it was great, and I'm recommending it for my oceanography class for their pleasurable reading. I'm an oceanographer and benthic ecologist and have worked with tides my entire career. I learned a lot. I even ordered a copy of the book, which has yet to arrive, for copies of the diagrams described in the audible book. I especially liked the descriprtions of Corophium ecology in the Bay of Fundy early in the book, although Corophium isn't a shrimp but an amphipod. I didn't know that it overwinters deep within the sediments, and I've got some journal articles on interlibrary loan to read more. I could have done without some of the sections about surfing and more about the science of tides. The author, Jonathon White, traveled around the world viewing tides and interviewing oceanographers for the book, one of them was an old classmate of mine. I learned that the amphidromic points in the ocean around which tides revolved is named after a Greek dance around newborns. I didn't know that, nor does Wikipedia. White answered many of the questions I had about tides and posed new questions for me to resolve. There is one question I've had that I was hoping he'd resolve: "Why are the winter lower low spring tides in Puget Sound always at night?" When his diagrams arrive, I'll get that figured out.

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A litany of gruesome ways to die

Revisado: 02-05-22

I enjoyed the book, especially the sections on the climate change that led to the 7-yr famine begun in 1315. There was a somewhat brief description of the medieval warm period which led up to the start of the 14th century. Things were great then: abundant crops, relatively abundant food, new warmer areas to be colonized. Starting about the turn of the century, things began going badly. The book provides the facts behind Mel Gibson's Braveheart. William Wallace at 6'5" to 7' would have been better played by Liam Neeson. Starting with William Wallace's 'traitor's death,' Rosen describes a long litany of ways that members of all classes of society and their domestic animals died, each seemingly more gruesome than the last. The most awful for the majority of people was starvation due to crop failure from intense rains which washed away crops and soil followed by drought. Most of the focus of the book is on Scots-English politics, with some on the Welsh and a little about France and the Holy Roman Empire (German states). There is passing reference to the 1840s Irish potato famine and the Chinese famines which rivaled or exceeded the 14th century famine in the misery they caused. This is a grim book for a grim period of history.

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After a slow start, it's great

Revisado: 01-29-22

I'm an oceanographer, so I was preadapted to like this book. After a very slow start, which perhaps dealt the the author's own research at Scripps, the book was excellent. I wanted more. I particularly liked the sections about John Murray, who could be a character from a Simon Winchester biography. Murray, a Scot, was on Challenger and spent his life editing the dozens of volumes of Challenger Reports. Murray coined the terms oceanographer and oceanography. I would have liked to hear more about the non-geological findings of Challenger. For example, the animals dredged up by Challenger from the abyss not only disproved Forbes azoic theory but documented very high diversity. Dick Fleming (UW) did an excellent job in Sverdrup, Johnson & Fleming's (1942, p 805-809) 'The Oceans,' describing Challenger's faunal data from the deep sea. Seventy years after Challanger, Murray's reports were still the best available. Challenger discovered not only life but relatively high deep-sea diversity. The Challneger collected 26 sediment-dwelling (benthic) individuals at 6250 meters and found 10 species. Hessler & Sanders (1967) & Sanders (1968) 'rediscovered' high diversity in the deep sea 90 years after Challenger, documenting much higher diversity than Challenger. With better samples, the diversity is now known to be comparable to rain forests. Macdougall introduces some of the major problems facing the oceans today, which is important. The narration was excellent.

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