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June 27, 2010
Musings on the iPad
We have a couple ipads around work - bought to see if and how they might be generally useful. I borrowed one over a weekend, mostly to see if it could be a replacement for Dawnise's Windows notebook, which she goes out of her way (i.e. into the office) not to use.
Continue reading "Musings on the iPad"
Posted by dberger at 3:25 PM
June 12, 2010
Bitter Angels
I forget why I picked up Bitter Angels, but I started it just before leaving for WWDC, and polished it off on the trip.
I mostly agree with the Amazon aggregate of 3.5 stars - it had some great ideas and some interesting characters and locales, but just never really grabbed me.
Far from the worst SF I've read, but not something I'd read again, or seek out sequels to.
Posted by dberger at 7:50 PM
June 5, 2010
Innumeracy
After reading an article by John Allen Paulos taking BP to task of their inability (or unwillingness) to do middle-school geometry, I put Innumeracy in my library hold queue.
It arrived the other day, and weighing in at only a hundred and eighty pages, it was a pretty quick read.
While I completely agree with the cover quote, from Douglas Hofstadter that "Our society would be unimaginably different if the average person truly understood the ideas in this marvelous and important little book" I can't say that the existence of the book had any real chance to change society, given it's tendency toward innumeracy.
If you've taken probability and statistics, or discrete mathematics, you've almost certainly been exposed to the ideas in the book. And you've almost equally certainly failed - as most of us do - to correctly apply those lessons to day-to-day life.
Worth reading, but difficult to proselytize.
Posted by dberger at 1:41 PM