I suppose this is what they call a blog. Except that blogs
are supposed to be updated more often than this is.
Amazon UK lie about their prices.
I'm sure they aren't exactly doing it deliberately, but
it's an easy problem to spot, I've pointed it out to them
already, and I can't imagine how it could be very difficult to fix.
Here's what happens, as best I can understand it. Whenever
they have a book that's available "Used and New" (i.e., from
one of their "Marketplace" sellers), they pick a preferred seller
in some mysterious way. Then, in your wishlist, instead of
presenting you with either the price you'd pay to buy the
book from Amazon UK or the lowest price you could
get from a Marketplace seller, they present the price being
asked by their preferred seller. Except that sometimes
instead of doing that they present a much lower price
that isn't available from anyone. (Perhaps it's the
most recent new price, when the book is only available
used.)
You can see several instances in an inelegantly annotated
montage of screenshots
(642x670, 121k). The left-hand side is the start of my (enormous)
Amazon UK wishlist; I didn't choose it to show the problem
particularly badly. The right-hand side shows the relevant bits
of the product pages for books whose prices are false. Notice
that this amounts to fully half the products shown, and that
in one case the real price is nearly twice the price shown on
the wishlist.
This is stupid and misleading and quite without excuse.
And -- gosh, what a coincidence -- it almost always has the
effect of making books appear cheaper than they really are.
(Because if you buy from a Marketplace seller, you pay more
in postage and packaging.) It would be better for the prices
not to be shown in the wishlist at all. Better still for
them to fix their stupid broken lying system, of course.
(Note to the generous:
my Amazon wishlist is not really a wishlist, although there's
nothing there I wouldn't be glad to have for free. In the unlikely
event that someone reading this is moved to buy me books, asking me
for suggestions is likely to be more reliable than picking from
my wishlist.)
So, not very surprisingly, I didn't get nearly as many books
reviewed as I'd undertaken to. In lieu of proper reviews, here's
a list of the books on my "to be reviewed" pile, which got reset
when we moved house in early September. If I'd done them all,
it would have brought the total to 50, which (1) is still less
than 52 and (2) in any case includes a few I've read or finished
since the new year. Ah well, a man's reach should exceed his grasp
and all that.
The books are in no particular order. Paragraph divisions are
arbitrary and intended only to break up the big block of text.
Links are almost all to isbn.nu and unverified.
Good Omens by
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Probably the funniest book
ever written about Armageddon.
·
Dialogues and Natural History
of Religion by David Hume. Very fine indeed, but you already
knew that if you have any interest at all in this sort of thing.
·
Mr Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History"
by H G Wells. Mr Belloc chiefly objected to what Wells had to
say about evolution, and I found little book is depressing reading
because it shows how little the arguments and tactics of
creationists and quasi-creationists have changed in 80 years.
·
The man who ate everything
and
It must've been something
I ate,
by Jeffrey Steingarten. A collection of columns about
eating and cooking. Much more entertaining than that sounds.
·
Amo, amas, amat ... and all
that, by Harry Mount. Undertakes to teach the previously
ignorant reader enough Latin to read monumental inscriptions
and make some sense of Latin poetry. I suspect the real market
is people who have some half-fond half-recollections of Latin
from their school days. Quite witty, but sometimes too self-consciously
so. Probably not really able to do what it undertakes to do.
·
On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins.
An attempt to describe how the brain works, based on the idea that
basically the whole cortex is doing much the same thing and that we
have a reasonable idea of what that thing is. Hawkins claims it won't
be long before (using his ideas, natch) we have genuinely intelligent
machines. Probably grievously overoptimistic, but I expect there's
something to his ideas.
·
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.
This time it's Ragnarök, near enough, rather than Armageddon,
and the tone is distinctly different. A jolly good novel.
·
Animals in Translation,
by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Temple Grandin is a
(by all accounts successful and insightful) expert on animal
behaviour, who is autistic and claims that her insight into
animal behaviour derives from similarities between the minds
of autistic people and those of animals. There's a lot of
speculation in the book, of the form "Animals have property X;
I know this because I'm autistic and I think I have property X
and animals are just like autistic people", which I mostly
found annoying; but she's a famous expert on animal behaviour
and I'm not, so quite likely I'm just wrong.
Beowulf, translated
by Seamus Heaney. Good stuff. I don't know the first thing
about Old English poetry and can't comment on how the translation
measures up to the original, except that Heaney kindly provides
both for the first 29 lines. The translation appears to be less
concise (and I'd guess therefore less powerful) than the original,
but I suspect poetry almost always grows in translation.
·
Karl Marx, by Francis Wheen.
An absolutely excellent biography so far as I can tell, but
I know next to nothing about Marx beyond what I read here.
As someone else remarked about another book -- regrettably
I've forgotten who and what book -- almost all biographies
are about twice as long as they should be; this one is only
about 1.5 times too long.
·
Spin, by Robert Charles
Wilson. Fairly generic science fiction. Good of its kind.
I didn't much care for the ending.
·
Weighing the Soul, by
Len Fisher. A chatty tour of some relatively obscure corners
of the history of science. Fisher focuses on what you might
call "weird and wonderful ideas", some better than others.
The book (or rather its main part; there are notes and suchlike)
ends rather oddly with a few woolly paragraphs about how
there are plenty of questions that will always be "the province
of philosophy and religion", and there's "very strong evidence
for the existence of a world beyond our direct experience"
which may or may not have anything to do with the other worlds
some religions have envisaged.
·
Convention, by David Lewis.
A rather technical philosophical analysis of an everyday topic:
what's the right way to think about things like driving on the
left (or, as it may be, the right), speaking a particular language,
and so on? Lewis's answer, in a nutshell: a convention is a
solution to a coordination problem that works because everyone
knows it's adopted and suits everyone. Seems reasonable enough
to me, but I haven't thought about it deeply enough for my
opinion to be worth much.
·
Far from the Madding Gerund,
by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. A selection from
Language Log,
a weblog written by a few professional linguists. Much
more entertaining than that probably sounds if you aren't
a professional linguist.
The Demon-Haunted World,
by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. A nice book about science, skepticism,
UFO craziness, and the like. (It seems to be regarded in some
circles as The Best Book Ever Written, which it clearly isn't.)
·
The God Delusion,
by Richard Dawkins. Widely criticized for not taking sufficient
account of the sophisticated beliefs of sophisticated liberal
theologians or the intricate ideas of mediaeval scholastics.
This misses the point; this is a determinedly middlebrow book,
aimed at ordinary but open-minded believers (and, obviously,
at angry skeptics wanting confirmation of what they already
think); most not-very-reflective religious belief is almost
as silly as Dawkins says it is. If you want a sophisticated
analysis of sophisticated theism, go and read
Mackie
(or any one of the various other books along similar lines
by Sobel, Everitt, etc.) instead. Dawkins is offering a sort
of atheistic equivalent of the apologetic works of C S Lewis
or Lee Strobel. I rather enjoyed it, but I suspect that anyone
reading this is likely to get more out of Mackie.
·
The Re-enchantment of Nature,
by Alister McGrath. Rather wretched, I'm afraid. McGrath wants to
defend Christianity against the charge that it's opposed to
concern about the natural world -- fair enough, I think -- and
furthermore to claim that Christianity actually offers uniquely
rich resources to fuel such concern, and that we should all be
Christians because then we'd see natural things like stars and
take them to mean that God's in his heaven and all's right with
the world, and that would feel nice, so it must be right. Well,
OK, I'm caricaturing a little, but not nearly as much as you
might hope. There are some bizarre attacks on Richard Dawkins
where McGrath (so far as I can tell) just makes up something
he wants Dawkins to have said so that he can say how ridiculous
it is; for instance, he goes on and on about how science never
"proves" things, putting the word "prove" in quotation marks
again and again and claiming he's disagreeing with Dawkins,
but he doesn't offer any evidence that Dawkins thinks otherwise
and in fact I'm pretty sure he doesn't.
·
The Truth (with Jokes),
by Al Franken. A savage but funny shredding of the Republican
fraud machine. Exactly like all the other savage but funny
shreddings of the Republican fraud machine.
·
White Light, by Rudy Rucker.
The back cover says: Albert Einstein! Georg Cantor! Franz Kafka!
Dunald Duck! The Secrets of the Universe Revealed!, and that's
about right. If you combine hallucinogens with set theory and a taste
for science fiction, this is the kind of thing you get.
Unequal Childhoods,
by Annette Lareau. Lareau and her team studied a smallish number
of American children of various sexes, colours, and economic
statuses, in considerable depth. They found that economic status
makes much more difference to the lives of children than the
other factors, and in some potentially unexpected ways. Most
notably, they found systematic differences in child-rearing
strategies according to wealth. Very interesting reading.
The sample size was (inevitably) rather small and there's
a strong interpretive component, so her conclusions aren't
quite as robust as one might like.
·
Feynman's Tips on Physics,
by Richard Feynman, Michael Gottlieb, and Ralph Leighton.
When Feynman was giving the famous "Lectures on Physics" he
held a few problem-solving sessions. This book is a reconstruction
of those sessions, together with a lecture on rotating bodies that
was omitted from the Lectures. It gives some insight
into how Feynman attacked elementary problems in physics; it
would of course be more interesting to know more about how he
attacked terrifyingly hard ones.
AI for Game Developers,
by David Bourg and Glenn Seemann. I have no idea how well
this book matches the practical needs of game developers,
never having been one. It covers a fairly wide selection of
topics shallowly.
·
The Plot, by Will Eisner.
Tells the story of the
Protocols
of the Elders of Zion in the form that used to be called
a "comic book" (but it is, of course, not funny) and is now
commonly called a "graphic novel" (but it isn't fictional,
alas). I was a bit underwhelmed; I don't think this is a very
suitable format for telling this story, and somehow there seems
something wrong about a history of one of the most infamous
chapters in the history of racism that consistently draws
the "bad guys" as looking unappealing.
·
Advanced Unix Programming,
by Marc Rochkind. I'm not sure the word "Advanced" in the title
is really merited. This is a thorough and workmanlike text about
the fundamentals of the Unix programming interface: files, terminals,
processes, IPC, and so on. It does its job very well.
·
The Stanford GraphBase,
by Donald Knuth. A set of literate programs for working with
graphs, together with some sample graphs constructed in interesting
ways. There's lots of good stuff here, but I think the book would
have been vastly improved by the addition of another 50-100 pages
of discussion not interleaved with the code. The code itself is
typical Knuth: elegant but quirky and rather old-fashioned.
·
The Society of Mind,
by Marvin Minsky. A theory of mind, sort of, cut into one-page
chunks. There are too many places where Minsky has to say
"Then
a miracle occurs", but intelligence is a hard
problem and (despite Jeff Hawkins) we're still a long way
from a solution to it two decades later.
Today Emma and Heather and I took part in a big choral event for charity, yclept
The Big Sing.
It was a lot of fun. Something like 600 people got together in
Great St Mary's church to sing Fauré's Requiem and Rutter's
Belshazzar's Feast
Gloria. (Note to composers: a setting of the Gloria may not be
a total success if it leaves the singers and audience expecting
it to be followed by "After they had praised their strange gods,
the idols and the devils...".) Plus a couple of settings of the
Ave Maria written for, or in memory of, Lydia Smallwood.
There are some tricky rhythms in the Gloria.
Fortunately, an earlier user of my copy had helpfully
written in some counting to help get it right:
(That isn't an exact reproduction; I had to hand the
copy back and unfortunately didn't think to write down
the details. But the real thing was at least as wrong
as that.)
