Taivo Lints Blog

Partial homepage content update

Taivo Lints — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:43:00 +0200

I made some content changes on my webpage http://taivo.net. The main changes were: making the site English only (was both English and Estonian before), totally rewriting the "Who am I" section, adding a section "Scientific Interests", and removing sections "PhD Topic" and "Works III".

My plan has been to do a more thorough update of the site, but it hasn't been my top priority so far and has thus been on hold. But now I felt that I should quickly update at least some of it, so that's what I did -- a quick partial update of the most important content that will hopefully be followed in the near future by updating the rest of the site, too.

Book: Crucial Conversations

Taivo Lints — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:26:00 +0200

A book by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, from 2002, about how to keep up constructive dialogue in difficult situations.

A short and somewhat fragmentary summary:

Crucial conversations are those where the stakes are high, opinions are different, and emotions run strong. Such conflict situations trigger our natural fight-or-flight response (releasing adrenaline, increasing blood supply of the muscles and thus decreasing blood supply of the brain) which makes it difficult to keep calm and to keep up the level of mental activity that is necessary in complex communication situations. To keep the dialogue constructive in spite of this interference, we should learn and practice a set of supportive skills.

Focus on what you really want, honestly, for yourself, for others, and for the relations. Think about how you should behave to best reach these goals. Now, is your current behavior consistent with your true goals, or maybe your motives have quietly shifted into defending yourself or trying to win at any cost? If you have managed to keep, or to bring back, your focus on your real goals, then is this also clearly understandable to the communication partners, or maybe your behavior tells a different story? Learn to notice when the conversation turns crucial. Learn to monitor the behavior of yourself and others, and, most importantly, the level of safety in each participant. When somebody feels unsafe, they will either start fighting for themselves or close up, which both stop the constructive dialogue. To maintain the safety, make sure that you all have some common (possibly higher level) goal in mind and that you honestly work toward that goal, and also keep up mutual respect, no matter how different the opinions and personalities. If the other participants do not engage in constructive dialogue, do NOT blame them -- it is your responsibility to try to create an atmosphere where they will become more and more open and constructive.

Separate facts from interpretations. Find out and discuss explicitly how the participants interpret their observations about the issue under discussion. Be ready to change your interpretations in the light of the new information and ideas you get from others. Find alternative solutions that everybody agrees on, even to those problems that initially seem to have only two mutually exclusive ones. Honestly apologize for your mistakes, but do not apologize for your honest standpoints. Fully explain why you have the opinions and standpoints that you have, but never try to force them upon others -- forcing tends to automatically create counterreactions, even if your ideas are indeed the best (but never assume that they are before finding out the others' viewpoints as well). Beware: if your belief in your ideas is very strong, you might not even notice that others get the feeling that you are forcing those ideas upon them -- pay close attention to your tone of voice, posture, talkativeness, aggressiveness. Calm down and give others enough time to explain their views, too.

If there is a decision to be made, make sure that everybody understands the process through which it will be made, and that decisionmaking is a separate process from the dialogue (which is the process of finding out and discussing the information and viewpoints that the participants have).

In the book these ideas are, obviously, presented in a more systematic and detailed way, and there are more of them than listed here.

The only thing that slightly bothered me about this book was the feeling that it could have easily been condensed down to half of its size -- some of the ideas were getting a bit repetitive and diluted. On the one hand, repetition with variations is surely helpful for better understanding, but on the other a concise presentation might maybe make it easier to imprint the information into the memory.

But overall I found this book very educative and would recommend it to almost everybody, because we all have crucial conversations on a daily basis -- with our families and friends, with our coworkers, bosses, clients, opponents, and so on.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071401946

Note: The version that I read was not the English original, but a translation into Estonian, named "Otsustavad kõnelused": http://www.raamatuklubi.aripaev.ee/Book.aspx?ID=7d0ffb84-00ed-47eb-b392-a5fb4be3a42a

Book: Transcend

Taivo Lints — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:38:00 +0200

A book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, from 2009, about keeping a good health and extending your expected lifetime.

Modern healthcare is becoming more and more infused and boosted by the information technology, or, in some sense, it IS becoming an information technology itself by moving from the phase of trial-and-error to the phase of data- and simulation-based design of interventions. Ray and Terry believe that this will lead the healthcare to follow the same kind of exponential growth as various areas of IT have enjoyed, which in turn will lead to radically more efficient health maintenance and healing methods already within a few next decades (new efficient drugs, RNA interference, gene addition, pluripotent stem cell based therapies, later also medical nanobots). Their idea is that during the next few decades you could look at your life as being either behind or in front of a moving frontier of extreme longevity -- if you keep yourself in good enough health until the next level of healthcare arrives in around 10-15 years, then your health and expected lifetime will be boosted enough by the new methods of that level to reach the yet another level of healthcare arriving in the 2030-ies, where it will be boosted again, and so on. This book is intended to help you cross the "Bridge One".

Regardless of whether Ray's and Terry's predictions turn out to be correct or not, the book "Transcend" is packed with useful information about living a healthier life. The suggestions are so numerous and detailed that it is difficult to summarize them here, but, broadly speaking, the main topics are:

Assessing your state frequently and thoroughly enough -- self-assessments, medical examinations, lab tests -- and using this information to adjust your lifestyle, eating, etc.
Keeping the stress under control.
Paying attention to what and how much you eat.
Taking appropriate supplements.
Exercising regularly: aerobical, strength, and stretching.
Minimizing toxin contact / intake.

All these are explained with plenty of details and guidelines, based on the very latest scientific knowledge they had at hand. The latter means, however, that not all the suggestions are based on long-term human experiments, and they do acknowledge themselves that some viewpoints might change in time and that some of their suggestions, especially with regard to supplements, are considerably different from the common FDA approved ones. But they do promise to keep interested readers up to date with latest developments and research results via an electronic newsletter (that anybody can subscribe to at http://www.kurzweilai.net/).

A possible conflict of interests can be found in the fact that Ray and Terry also have a supplement-selling business where you can buy the supplements they suggest in the book, but knowing a bit about Ray's background I would rather assume that their idea was not to make a lot of money by suggesting the supplements, but he just wanted to have a reliable source of those at hand, both for himself and for the people they are advising (I haven't bought anything from there so far, though, in case you're wondering).

All in all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in maintaining a good health AND who does not freak out when seeing occasional complex-sounding words and phrases like gamma-tocopherol, prostaglandin-E3 or single photon emission computed tomography, AND who has enough education and critical mind to understand that not all suggestions can be taken as the ultimate truth, but just as interpretations of the current state of scientific knowledge.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1605299561
and at Ray's and Terry's site: http://www.rayandterry.com/TRANSCEND/

Book: Creative Recording 1, Effects and Processing (2nd edition)

Taivo Lints — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:36:00 +0200

A book by Paul White, from 2003. Gives a good introductory practically oriented overview of:

the mixing console,
patching and patchbays,
equalizers,
enhancers,
compressors,
limiters,
gates and noise reduction,
panning and positioning,
digital delay effects,
reverberation,
multi-effects,
MIDI (very briefly),
software plug-in basics,
production effects,
and surround sound concepts.

Note that the emphasis is on effects and processing, so topics like microphones are NOT covered in that particular book (which is only part 1 of a series).

The target audience of the book is beginners and intermediates, but the reader is treated with full respect and at no point did I get a feeling of the content being dumbed down too much (obviously, the book doesn't cover every possible aspect of the topics, but this is fully understandable). It might even be that those readers who have no technical background might find the content not be the best match with their baseline and taste, but, correspondingly, the more enjoyable it is to the technically inclined audience. I definitely found the book to be very educative for me.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1860744567

Book: Go It Alone!

Taivo Lints — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:36:00 +0300

A book by Bruce Judson, from 2004, freely available on the web ( http://www.brucejudson.com ), that talks about how to start small companies that are not necessarily small in revenues.

When talking and thinking about start-ups (especially in high-tech) it is quite common to assume that large venture capital investments into the company and fast increase in the number of employees are very positive indicators of company's success. However, this book describes an inverted alternative:

The business is started with a minimal investment, and the founder or founders retain full ownership and control of the enterprise.
The business is run entirely by a small number of people, generally from one to six.
The founder does not set out to create a small business. He or she is working from the premise that the business has unlimited revenue potential.

The third point is what distinguishes this approach the most from the common abundant solo entrepreneurs and tiny companies -- in modern world a company that is small by employee count can nevertheless be large by market share (in its specific niche) and cash flow. The main method of achieving it is extreme outsourcing (not to be confused with offshoring) where the majority of company's business activities are conducted externally. This allows the entrepreneur to concentrate on those key areas s/he can do best (and enjoys most) while all the rest is handled cost efficiently by various service providers, preferably using customizable off-the-shelf solutions instead of special orders.

Over time I have skimmed quite a few writings about creating (tech) start-ups (for example, I keep an eye on Paul Graham's essays http://paulgraham.com/articles.html that, at least from the perspective of a computer programmer, are quite a fun reading), but so far it is the "Go It Alone!" that seems to have had the strongest effect on lowering my psychological threshold of starting a company.

The book is available at http://www.brucejudson.com .

Book: Ennast leida, ennast hoida

Taivo Lints — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:47:00 +0200

A book in Estonian, from 2008, which is mostly a translated collection of four English books by Jackson J. Adam: The Secrets of Abundant Health (1995), The Secrets of Abundant Wealth (1996), The Secrets of Abundant Love (1996), and The Secrets of Abundant Happiness (1998).

The book provides a collection of sound advice which can hardly be called "secrets" anymore nowadays thanks to the proliferation of personal development and self-help literature and audio, but given how low is the number of people actually following such advice it doesn't hurt to have yet another book on it. What makes "Ennast leida, ennast hoida" different from a typical self-help book is its way of presentation -- the advice is packed into fictional but quite realistic-sounding narratives -- which makes it an easy read and also helps with the impact factor (think of fairy tales as a good example of memorable educational narratives). The pattern used in each section is the following: a young man is in distress, an old Chinese guy shows up, talks a bit and gives the young man a list of ten names with phone numbers, and goes away. The young man then visits those people, each of whom describes how they met with the Chinese guy years ago and what was the main advice they got out of the encounters with the old man and with the ten other people that were on the list they got from the Chinese guy.

There are a few dubious explanations on how and why some of the "secrets" work (some of those even explicitly corrected by the Estonian translator), but the main points are good and valuable. The "secrets" of health listed are the power of thinking and imagination, breathing, healthy eating, laughing, resting, posture, living environment, faith, and love; the "secrets" of love are the power of thought, respect, giving, friendship, touching, freedom, communication, faithfulness, desire, and trust; the "secrets" of happiness are mentality and attitudes, bodily factors (physical exercise, anchoring, posture, food, etc.), embracing every moment, the power of imagination and positive affirmation, goals, humor, forgiveness, giving, relationships, and faith; the "secrets" of wealth are the power of unconscious beliefs, strong desires, clarity of wishes and goals, detailed plans, domain-specific knowledge, willpower and persistence, control of expenditures, honesty, faith, and charity.

All in all, it is a good collection of useful advice. While it would be a very good idea to get the deeper knowledge about each point from other sources, this book serves as a handy reference list for occasional quick memory refresh.

More info about "Ennast leida, ennast hoida":
http://www.rahvaraamat.ee/?id=62&no=R110192

and the originals by Adam J. Jackson:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061044245/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722536909/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722539436/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722536895/

(umm, some of the third-party prices at Amazon are, to put it mildly, CRAZY, though)

Book: Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taivo Lints — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:39:00 +0300

A book originally from 2007, about the importance of events that have very low probability of occurrence but very large impact if they do occur, and how to live so as to avoid being too seriously hit by the negative versions of such events (at least in the domains where it is possible), and how to benefit from the positive ones.

The discussed topics also include:

the widespread misuse of Gaussian distributions in areas where they do not apply;
confirmation bias (people tend to pick only the facts that support their theories);
scalability of professions (to serve more clients, the shoemaker needs to spend more time making shoes, but a writer writes a book once and prints / sells copies without additional effort when demand increases, but then again the writer has much larger risk of the product being not wanted by anybody);
empirical skepticism (systematic doubt plus preferring experiential knowledge to theorizing);
asymmetry of confirmations (i.e., one confirmatory example should not increase your confidence in the general correctness of a theory very much, but one counterexample does decrease the confidence in the correctness of a theory a lot);
falsifiability (instead of looking for confirmations, try to find cases that would prove your theory wrong);
narrative fallacy (our tendency to create stories that connect and explain events, even if those events might not be causally connected in reality);
how happiness depends on the frequency and size of positive or negative events, and how this dependence can reduce our eagerness to live so as to take advantage of rare but very large positive events;
the problem of silent evidence (we mostly hear only from / of those people / objects that have succeeded / survived, and draw incorrect conclusions due to this bias in our data set);
the problem that (mathematical) statistics is researched and taught mostly based on game problems that have strictly defined rules and known bounded outcome sets, but real problems do not have such constraints and require different approaches;
the expert problem (while in some disciplines there exist true experts, in others there are only people whose position as "expert" is not justified due to their lack of abilities to really explain or predict things);
how understanding fractals and power laws can help to reduce unpleasant surprises by rare powerful events, but still does not give us precise predictive instruments;
and much more.

So, in general, "Black Swan" is a great book filled with important, interesting and useful ideas. However, there were two problems that somewhat decreased my satisfaction with it. Firstly, the tone of writing tends to be occasionally quite arrogant. For me the frequent outright bashing and ridiculing is a warning sign of a person who has not reached the level of mental maturity of balance and goodwill (note that by immaturity I do NOT mean playfulness which I value a lot, but being inconsiderate and egoistic; also, I know that such type of ridiculing is widely popular and entertaining for many people, and we even have a special word for it in Estonian - ärapanemine - that I do not know how to translate, but still I consider such behavior unpleasant). Secondly, while most of the main ideas in the book I easily and eagerly agree with, some of the examples were in my opinion either not applicable in given context or even contrary to the main ideas, and sometimes so much so that I felt it necessary to double and triple check my thinking ("the author cannot possibly make such mistakes?!"), but to no avail. Apart from the possibility of me misunderstanding something, I had a hypothesis that the arrogant tone and occasional inconsistencies are intentional, so as to really engage readers' minds and make them think, but unfortunately it is more likely that they are not.

All in all, I quite highly recommend this book, but only to people who think and analyze what they read instead of just "downloading" everything to their unquestioning brains.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400063515/

P.S. Thanks to Jan Dyre who gave this book to me!

P.P.S. If anybody organizes a discussion about this book (or, more generally, about the ideas it contains), I would be very happy to participate!

Books: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained

Taivo Lints — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:05:00 +0300

Science fiction books by Peter F. Hamilton, originally from 2004 and 2005. Or, actually, it is one story (occasionally referred to as The Commonwealth Saga) split up into two physical books just to keep things manageable, because the total page count for the paperback edition is around 2400.

As the Publishers Weekly has put it, the book is an "intelligent space opera". If you're looking for science fiction novels that have considerable philosophical depth and explore the essence of the Universe beyond imaginable to an ordinary people, then you might find the Commonwealth Saga not particularly attractive. What it does offer, instead, is an enthralling story of a time period in 24th century when the future existence of human (and some other) societies is put in jeopardy. There is no single main character but many persons whose stories get intertwined at some point or another. In addition, the area of space involved is huge: the Intersolar Commonwealth consists of hundreds of planets interlinked with wormholes. Nevertheless, Hamilton somehow succeeds in creating quite a coherent reading experience, and the grandiosity of the world and the plot is smartly conveyed through personal stories of people whose personalities and ways of thinking are easily understandable to a 21st century reader.

For me, these books were so captivating that it was hard to stop reading and put them down in the evening. I even intentionally delayed starting with the second book because I wanted to get some other things done as well and it would have been very difficult to allocate enough time for other tasks when immersed in such a "space opera" (by the way, in case you're wondering, I do NOT watch soap operas from TV; the "intellingent" in front of "space opera" is exactly ment to draw attention to the fact that it is not a soap opera in space).

So, in conclusion, I highly recommend these books.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345479211/ and http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345461673/ .

Book: Read Japanese Today

Taivo Lints — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:50:00 +0300

A book by Len Walsh, originally from 1969, for people interested in starting to learn to read Japanese. It is a nice little book that almost in a story-like fashion explains and builds up around 300 of the most common kanji characters. For example, it starts with the pictograph for sun, and shows how it evolved into the kanji character for sun. Then "tree" is treated in a similar fashion, "roots" (or "origin") is derived from "tree", and then the characters of sun and roots are put together to form a compound "origin-of-the-sun", which is the name of Japan in Japanese, pronounced NIPPON or NIHON.

For sure, you should not expect to be able to read Japanese texts after finishing this book, as it covers only 300 kanji out of the thousands, and hardly any kana at all. But what it covers, it covers in a very pleasant and captivating way. For me, the book was a real pleasure to read, and I would recommend it to everybody who is interested in starting to understand written Japanese, and in why the characters look they way they do.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804804966

2008 Eurotrip gallery

Taivo Lints — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:22:00 +0300

New photo gallery with pics from my April 2008 trip in some European countries: http://taivo.net/galleries/euro08

Book: The Difference by Scott E. Page

Taivo Lints — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:22:00 +0200

A book from 2007, about the positive and negative sides of diversity in human groups. The main focus is on the diversity of perspectives and heuristics, NOT identity diversity like race or gender.

The central point of the book is "The Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem" that applies to problem solving by groups. Roughly, it says that given the problem is difficult and the problem solvers are not stupid and no solution except the global optimum is a local optimum simultaneously for every individual in the group and both the initial problem solver population and the selected group are large enough, a randomly selected collection of problem solvers should outperform a collection of the best individual problem solvers. In the model that Page gives, the diversity always trumps ability, given those four conditions hold, but the book also describes how various human factors may make the theorem not work in some cases.

There's also "The Diversity Prediction Theorem": Given a crowd of predictive models, the Collective Error = Average Individual Error – Prediction Diversity. Here a group of randomly selected predictors does not necessarily predict more accurately than a group of the best predictors.

The discussions in the book are well supported with mathematical / computer models (though details are left to referenced papers, keeping the text easy to read), and while it is in general pro-diversity, it is NOT slogan'ishly pro-identity-diversity, but instead specifies what kind of diversity is good in which situations, and what are the accompanying costs that may sometimes cancel out the benefits.

For me, the book was quite an interesting read.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691128383 and at Princeton University Press: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8353.html

Book: Life on the Edge

Taivo Lints — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:45:00 +0200

A book originally from 1998, updated in 2001, about microorganisms that live in extreme environments.

The topics include:

The main things an (Earth) organism needs (energy, liquid water, etc.).
An overview of Earth's extreme inabited environments (hot springs, cold places, deep seas, deep terrestrial subsurface, deserts, very salty waters, places of extreme pH, oil).
The main molecular mechanisms to cope with stressful (extreme) conditions.
Practical usage of knowledge derived from extremophiles in biotechnology and medicine.
Relevance of extremophile studies to the hypotheses of what is the correct (real) family tree of life.
Gaia hypothesis.
Possibility of, and search for, the life elsewhere in the Universe.

It is an easy & pleasant to read popular science book that still retains some of the harder scientific contents (especially the most relevant parts of molecular biochemistry), which I think is a good approach (um, after reading comments at Amazon, I would rephrase that as "easy & pleasant for scientifically minded persons who have already encountered a few biochemistry texts earlier in their life" :D ). The author Michael Gross, though currently a full time science writer, has been an active scientist in the field of extremophilic microbiology.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0738204455/

2007 photo galleries

Taivo Lints — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:14:00 +0200

New photo galleries with pics from 2007 are now available at my homepage: http://taivo.net/photogalleries_eng.html

Book: Molvania

Taivo Lints — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:50:00 +0200

A fake travel guide, from 2003.

I picked it up in a bookstore in Stansted airport, London, in 2005. It was 5 a.m., and I had been up since the previous morning, but this book still managed to make me laugh, so there wasn't much hesitation left about whether to buy it or not.

"...Despite being one of the smallest countries in Europe, the Republic of Molvania has much to offer the discerning tourist. Panoramic scenery, magnificent neoclassical architecture and centuries of devotion to fine culture are, admittedly, all in short supply. But the intrepid traveler will still find plenty to enjoy within this unique, landlocked nation state -- from the capital Lutenblag, with its delightful gas-powered tram network, to the heavily forested Postenwalj Mountains in the south, where visitors can share a glass of locally brewed zeerstum (garlic brandy)..."

"...Dzrebo was first discovered in AD 6 by the Roman centurion Callus who, while leading an expedition through the region, became bogged on the flat, swampy plains. After several fruitless weeks attempting to extricate himself from the mosquito-plagued, leech-infested, stagnant wetlands, Callus is said to have declared 'this would make an ideal place for a village'. Whilst historians have subsequently conjectured that he may have been speaking sarcastically, his comments were soon acted upon and a small town sprang up..."

"...After the war Molvania found itself under Soviet control and endured many years of hardship and authoritarian rule. The turning point came in 1982 when the famous Lutenblag Wall collapsed, not due so much to democratic reform, but just shoddy construction..."

If you appreciate irony, creative humor and a good laugh, then this travel guide is highly recommended. For the rest of the crowd it is not recommended, as they might be offended (see those 1 star comments in Amazon).

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1843542323/

Book: Musimathics, Vol 1, by Gareth Loy

Taivo Lints — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:31:00 +0200

A book, published in 2006, about the mathematical and physical foundations of music. It covers musical representation, scales, tuning, intonation, physical basis of sound, geometrical basis of sound, psychophysical basis of sound, introduction to acoustics, vibrating systems, composition and methodology (including a glimpse of less usual approaches like using artificial neural nets).

In general, I really like this kind of book about sound and music that has a solid scientific background. Unfortunately in this specific book the background is not as solid as I was hoping. While reading it, especially the physics section, I quite often had problems like: "Er... am I not getting it or what? No, wait, it can't be like that. Damn, it must be wrong in the book!" And sure enough, there ARE errors in abundance. For a list of errors known to Gareth Loy himself, see: http://www.musimathics.com/Errata.html

The other problem was that occasionally the book was not written very clearly and / or captivatingly for me... (plus the feeling that in order to explain those concepts to somebody with a humanities background (who are clearly included in the target audience), the explanations should be significantly different). Though that was not a major problem for me: I still read through the whole book and got a lot of information out of it.

In conclusion, as much as I would have liked to, I cannot suggest this book as a very good one on this topic. There are other books available about the basis of sound and music, and I suspect some of those may have a more solid science and better explanations in them, but I haven't read any others, so I can't say for sure. Also, there's some hope that Musimathics itself will be revised in future editions.

More info at the book's homepage: http://www.musimathics.com/

and at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262122820/

Book: SAS Survival Handbook by John Lofty Wiseman

Taivo Lints — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:45:00 +0200

An updated 2004 year version of the book originally published in 1986.

It's a 576 page book filled with practical information about "how to survive in the wild, in any climate, on land or at sea". Topics include: the will to live; survival kit; knives; acquiring water and food (including how to test unknown plants for edibility, and how to catch animals, birds, fish without proper equipment); car and plane accidents; survival strategies in polar regions, mountains, seashores, islands, arid regions and tropical regions; campcraft; navigation and weather signs; traveling on foot and on rafts; first aid and medical treatment; survival at sea; rescue operation basics (for the one being rescued, not for the one conducting the operation); strategies for surviving in natural and man-made disasters.

Highly recommended for everybody, especially for travelers.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060578793/

Book: Life at the Extremes by Frances Ashcroft

Taivo Lints — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:39:00 +0200

A book originally from 2000.

Gives a good overview about what happens to physiological processes of humans in high altitudes, deep oceans (or other pressurized locations), hot and cold climates, outer space, and during physical exercise. Occasionally there are also a few notes about other animals, plus a whole chapter about extremophile lifeforms (mostly microorganisms), but all in all it's still a book about humans.

The book is very readable and aimed for the general public, but fortunately it still retains enough scientific information to be interesting for more serious readers as well (though unfortunately there seem to be a few factual mistakes, too; see the PubMed review). In general I liked it.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520234200/

and at PubMed Central: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1119655

Book: Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology

Taivo Lints — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:23:00 +0200

A book by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. Goodwin, originally from year 2000.

The cover gives an impression that the book is a discussion about what life is, but this is not the case. Instead, it is a good and relatively easy to read overview of a large number of tools and approaches that are often referred to as complexity science. There are deterministic chaos, emergence, criticality, self-organization, patterns in excitable media, entropy, Ising model, information theory, renormalization, self-similarity, sand-pile model, metabolic networks, genetic networks, cell differentiation, reaction-diffusion systems, biological clocks, neural nets, phase transitions, ant colonies, nest building in social insects, biodiversity, ecological stability, viral quasispecies, catalytic chemical networks, evolution and extinction, stock market fluctuations, urban growth, traffic models, etc.

As the page count is around 300, the book obviously doesn't go into great details of every concept, neither does it always have all terminology explained, neither is there a coherent overarching story. Thus I don't know if it would be a good reading for somebody who has never heard most of the presented ideas before, but for me it is a good collection of notes that can be used for sparking inspiration and for quickly remembering the key concepts, the details of which should then be looked up from other sources. So, in general I like it.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465019285/

and if you have access to Wiley InterScience, then: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/97519452/

Book: Emergence: From Chaos to Order by John H. Holland

Taivo Lints — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:07:00 +0300

A book from 1998. It is apparently written with the goal to explain the concept of emergence to a broader audience, but I'm not so sure if the broader audience would actually like it...

While trying to make clear what emergence is, the book touches on the following subjects: model building (especially in computers), board games, game theory, machine learning, agent-based modeling, metaphors and innovation. For understanding and studying the essence of emergence, John Holland proposes a concept constrained generating procedures, explained by him as follows: "The models that result are dynamic, hence procedures; the mechanisms that underpin the model generate the dynamic behavior; and the allowed interactions between the mechanisms constrain the possibilities, in the way that the rules of a game constrain the possible board configurations."

I found the book somewhat interesting, but not particularly attractive.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0192862111

Estonian sunset

Taivo Lints — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:37:00 +0300

(click on pic to see full size)

A digital painting I made recently. It is supposed to show how nice are Estonian (or Nordic, in general) sunsets and how good a place it is for a scientist to sit in fresh air and think about the research without being disturbed by anybody, but still having a wireless internet connection (almost all of Estonia is covered).

If you wonder why the heck I would make such a picture, it was actually for an Estonian computer drawing contest "Draw me a scientist". As I'm not very good at drawing people (yes, I know, I should practice), I decided to minimize the "scientist" part on the picture. Probably not a very good idea from the competition viewpoint -- I didn't get any prize :) But I enjoyed the painting process anyway. Maybe I'll remove the scientist and laptop from the pic, when I have some time for it.

Tools: ArtRage 2.2 Free, Wacom Graphire4 A6, and my almighty self-assembled PC.