Related products

As I’ve noted before, the Amazon recommendation engine frequently suggests rather surprising related purchases. Today I got this trio of books suggested:

The book that triggered these? The Buckley-class Destroyer Escorts. Possibly reading naval literature is a sign of decreasing mental faculties which may cause your partner to leave you, in which case you are reduced to public speaking as a source of income. Or something.

Who cares about categories anyway?

I’ve often wondered about the way books in the Amazon web shop get categorised, and this latest set of recommended reading suggests they have a very liberal attitude to contents.

Up to new tricks

You may remember the publisher BetaScript who generates thousands of “books”, by simply printing out Wikipedia articles. I had quite forgotten about them when I got an invitation phrased like this:

Dear Prof. kai,
I am Koushina Tulloo from Lambert Academic Publishing. Your work « title » from University would be of interest to an international audience [I should jolly well hope so, since I presented it at an international conference], and that is why I am writing to you.
We know it is not conventional for a publisher to pro-actively reach out to authors, but we are not a conventional publisher.
Here is what it means for you:
- free of charge publishing
- simplified and fast publishing process
- worldwide sales of your work
- no commitments - you and only you remain the copyright holder of your work
- access to eco-friendly Print-on-Demand technology
We are looking for authors in the field you have researched and your work has caught our interest. We are interested to publish it as a printed book.
Let me know how this sounds to you and I can get back to you with a detailed brochure.
signature block with a glamour picture of the dashing Koushina Tulloo

Now, this of course sounds fishier than salmon-filled tuna with garum sauce and anchovy sprinkles, so time to google “Lambert Academic Publishing”, and…ahahahah! does Google deliver. A quite long article by Joseph Stromberg in Slate not only confirms that Lambert Academic Publishing is a racket of the Who’s Who variety, trying to get you to buy lots of copies of your own book to give away, but, lo and behold!, it is in fact a sister company of the aforementioned BetaScript, and a dozen other scam companies, all owned by OmniScriptum. (And quite possibly Ms Tulloo has borrowed her pretty face from somebody else.) In passing it also explained the mystery of the weird cover of the Betascript book I had ran into before – the cover template only has so many clip art pictures as options for cover picture and apparently a container ship was the closest thing to a destroyer escort that could be found.

Well, I guess my [and my half-dozen co-authors’] three-page short paper will not end up being published as a proper book with ISBN number and all, though it would have been a bit funny of course. Since this seemed to appeal to Stromberg as well, I wonder how much of OmniScriptum’s catalogue is driven by authors who think they have seen through it all, but participate anyway as an ironic lark?

Useful maps

Jon Griffiths is not a very prolific blogger, but he has made a nifty Google map of locations Biggles visited during WW I.

Getting around to it

Chaos and fractals were hot stuff in the 1980s and I spent quite a bit of time on the subject—at one point Cliff Pickover, a thoroughly nice person, sent me a large package of material by mail. So, one of the first courses I signed up for as a grad student was Chaotic Dynamical Systems. In the event, I had to drop the course, along with several other maths courses—my work was to be in other areas and the textbook ended up on my shelf for unread books.

The other day I decided to pick it up again and see what I’d missed out on. One thing was clear: I might have been able to do the exercises when I was a first-year student, but by now most of my calculus was just hazy memories. And indeed, in contrast with most of my other literature on the subject, this was a book about proper maths, rather than computer graphics, and spent most of its space on proving various theorems about seemingly simple functions, but which exhibited chaotic behaviour. Still, even if my understanding is patchy these days, I’ve been going through the book, picking up concepts and ideas.

In the book was still the receipt from when I bought it and as I was reading on the train home the other day I listened with half an ear to the two girls sitting next to me talking about their studies. The one just next to me turned out to be a first-year student at my alma mater and the continued conversation revealed she had been born just a couple of days after I bought the book I was finally reading. It’s so hard to keep up.

Rule 34

Bookshelves, be they sparse wooden frames, stern steel cabinets on rollers, trendy String shelves, or carved floor-to-ceiling giants of tropical hardwood, are all promises of excitement and knowledge. The more of them, the better. Even though they are off to a side, my bookcases are still the mental centre of my sitting-room, creating at least a little nook where one can hide from noise and commotion. I tend them, sort them when new books arrive and occasionally grudgingly cull books that are just too awful to keep.

It heartens me that others feel the same about their bookshelves and care enough to have created a site for Bookshelf porn.

Knowledge online

A well-thumbed copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has long stood in a prominent place on my book shelf. Now it seems it will also have a prominent place in my web bookmarks: it’s going online.

H/t Ny Teknik.

Går det så går det

Looking at Trumpeter’s USS England I decided that a Buckley class destroyer escort would be a nice thing to build to improve my ship modelling skills. References are of course needed for a good build, so I did a search on Amazon and lo and behold, there was even a book specifically on USS England. But…the cover picture? And what does the star “High quality content by Wikipedia articles!” mean?

A search unearthed this investigation by Chris Rand. Apparently what’s going on is that some guys hit on a brilliant idea: Write a script that downloads a Wikipedia article, follows the links to some pre-determined depth, concatenates all the gathered material and calls it a book. Repeat for all articles in Wikipedia. Print on demand and charge an outrageous sum = profit! There are already thousands of “books” under the imprints of Alphascript and Betascript being distributed through Amazon and other web shops to unwary shoppers happy to find a book on the obscure subject they were investigating.

Beware! Beware!

Drama!

Our last day in Britain. The morning we would spend going through book stores on and off Charing Cross Street. As it is one of the first, we started with Motorbooks. We found it only due to me looking in the right direction at the right time—it has moved from S:t Martin's Court to Cecil Court, the next street over. In fact all the nice niche bookstores on S:t Martin's Court have moved or disappeared and the streetlet now consists of an unbroken length of pubs. One of the bookstores on Charing Cross Road proper had a lament in its window, explaining how rising costs forced bookstores out of business, and indeed, several of my old favourites had disappeared, replaced by shops for traditional Chinese medicine and the ilk. I was much saddened. Still, Motorbooks was in good shape, even though the fantastic basement stairwell covered with graffiti, stickers, and business cards from every air line, military aircraft unit and private plane owner that had ever passed Motorbooks, was gone. I bought some books I thought I'd manage to carry and looked longingly at some others, which I'll simply have to order later on.

Then we continued to Foyles. They were still in good shape and some more books were added to the collection. Then it was time to head back and pick up our bags. Pull the cart with our bags to Victoria, carry it down into the underground. Honeybuns is getting a bit jittery about our time schedule, I'm more like: “No worries, we should make it with minutes to spare.” She does not look calmed.
When we arrive at King's Cross the PA system blares: “This is an emergency, proceed to the exits immediately!” Oops, well, we were in a hurry anyway. The station pours out hundreds of people onto the street. We push ourselves towards the entrance to S:t Pancras, just as we see it being closed up as well. Is it more than just the underground station being closed? I accost one of the guards by the gate: “Pardon me, is the rail station closed as well?” “Yes, yes, don't you see, all the electricity is gone, nothing is running, everything is closed. Please move out of the way.” Clearly not all of the electricity is gone, as the escalators had been running and other signs of electrical activity are obvious, but of course you would have to have backup systems for those. Now what are we going to do? We'll miss our train and all connections, who should be approached to sort this out?

People milling around.

After milling around a bit we sit on the steps outside the station and consider our plight. After a while it strikes me that there doesn't seem to be all that many other forlorn people milling around, maybe Londoners know what to do under these circumstances, but where do all the other tourists that should be on our train go?
Honeybuns peers curiously at some people that go up the steps, is there a pub up there, maybe we could at least have lunch? We lug our cart and ourselves up the steps and Blimey! there's another entrance to S:t Pancras and the station is obviously in full operation! We rush in, carry the cart down the stairs and come running into the Eurostar terminal as we hear: “Final call for the 14:34 to Brussels, proceed to checkin immediately!” I bang our tickets on the desk and we are checked in. We even have time to pick up some sandwiches and drink on the way to the train, which pulls away soon after we've sat down.
I love the active and curious mind of Honeybuns more than ever, as my breathing calms down. I also check some news sites with the web browser in my mobile, but there seems to be nothing about the emergency, maybe it's a fairly common occurence and nothing to write home about.
Our connection in Brussels is smooth and then we get to Cologne, where we have a couple of hours' wait. Time for dinner. We find a sushi bar, operated by some Vietnamese, and get some quite good sushi (yes, vegetarian too). They do however not accept credit cards. A Colognial sitting on the stool next to us offers to pay the difference for us, but Honeybuns runs away to a cash machine and gets some Euros.

Finally our train arrives and we pile into our sleeper. It is Czech too, but of a subtly different design than the one on the way down. We sleep the sleep of the exhausted, and enjoy breakfast next morning while travelling through Denmark. Again we have a layover in Copenhagen, which I spend writing a few postcards, and then we suddenly run into an old colleague of mine, who's also going back to Stockholm. No direct connection this time, we have get to Malmö first where we change to X2000. I make a point of travelling forwards and not reading on the way up. I avoid motion sickness this time.

Then, just a short tube-trip home. As I walk through the park on the way home, I see that the new playground has been opened and is full of children with their parents, playing in the early summer evening.

Sheesh!

In the book I'm currently reading the author expounds on her tendency to become ill while travelling: “…and I ask you—I beg of you!—who gets sunburned in Stockholm?”

Well, I do. Quite regularly every summer, even though I try to stay out of the sun. Did she think we all live underground and never go out?

Analysis of Evolutionary Analysis

Biology is a hot subject. There's already a fourth edition out of Freeman and Herron's Evolutionary Analysis, but such is life that I tend to get books faster than I read them, so I only recently got around to reading the book I bought a couple of years ago.

We know that currently existing organisms, plants, bacteria, fungi, animals, etc, are descendants of earlier, different, organisms. This book gives an introduction to how we know this to be the case. This ranges from what features are naturally selected in plants of the same species growing in different environments, to the “deep homologies” that tie together bacteria and kangaroos in the same tangled tree of life.

So how do we know? Sometimes you observe, which may imply that you sit in a hideout from sunrise to sundown for weeks and watch a flock of birds nesting to check if any of them nip out of the nest for a bit of nookie with the neighbour and then work the statistics on the results of those liaisons, to see if reality matches your theory of mate selection.

Or you do experiments, formulate a hypothesis of how a certain feature benefits the organism and then try to manipulate that feature for a group of individuals to see what happens. Superglue turns out to be useful in many of these experiments. (My unhappy experiences with superglue make me even more impressed with scientists who can use it properly.)

Other work involves searching through gene databases and using various mathematical means to determine at some level of probability how genes have been duplicated, modified, deleted (and how we can tell that that is what has happened) over time to result in organisms greatly different from their ancestors.

The book lays this out in an easily accessible manner, not without humour—merely reading the first chapter using the case of HIV to explain evolutionary thinking and put it in context managed to clarify a number of things to me. The exercises and suggestions for further reading in each chapter show ways in which to go beyond the material that has been presented in the chapter proper. One reason it took me so long to read the book was that I tried to work through at least some of the exercises. Often I felt handicapped by my high school biology crash course not having gone into detail on exactly how DNA is copied during mitosis, why crossover takes place and how transcription proceeds in detail. Surely I'm not so old it wouldn't have been known at the time?

An important thing which struck me was the way in which the scientific method was presented, many of the exercises were concerned with the proper way of phrasing a research hypothesis, how to design an experiment to test that hypothesis, and how to analyse the results of the experiment. This is an undergraduate text book. When I was an engineering undergrad the idea of hypothesis generation and testing was quite alien, rather the sentiment tended to be: “if it works, you're home”. When I went into graduate studies and teaching I tried to amend this as best I could, given my own barely adequate studies in the subject. I remember one time giving an exam question: “Explain how to design a formal experiment to test X.” and a (fourth-year!) student looking confused and asking “How can an experiment be formal, experimenting means just trying random stuff, right?”.

I do not know to what extent things have improved since then.

Happy Darwin Day!

To celebrate the anniversary I have started reading Evolutionary Analysis. Expect a report in the fullness of time.

Button, button

August Strindberg coined the term knappologi (“buttonology”) for the purportedly scientific systematisation of trivial matters. Now, there really are people who are intensely interested in buttons, as I realised when I came across Neville Poulson's seven-volume work Buttons of the Indian army.

Looking a bit further brought up the web page of the British Button Society. I don't often agree with Strindberg and here, too, I am feeling very pleased to have found the buttonologists and that they are doing fine.