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Friday 15 February 2008

Book: Life on the Edge

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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/

Saturday 9 February 2008

2007 photo galleries

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

Monday 28 January 2008

Book: Molvania

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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/

Sunday 16 December 2007

Book: Musimathics, Vol 1, by Gareth Loy

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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/

Sunday 2 December 2007

Book: SAS Survival Handbook by John Lofty Wiseman

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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

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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

Monday 19 November 2007

Book: Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology

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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/

Tuesday 23 October 2007

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

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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

Sunday 14 October 2007

Estonian sunset

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(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.

Sunday 23 September 2007

Book: Fundamentals of Computational Swarm Intelligence by Andries P. Engelbrecht

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A book from 2006, with a slightly misleading title. Actually it is only about Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization, plus introduction to optimization and Evolutionary Computation in the first parts of the book. But as of PSO and ACO, it is a very clearly written and thorough review work -- there are 667 references.

The few more general sections occasionally seemed to me somewhat less substantial. For example the comparison of Particle Swarm Optimization vs. Evolutionary Computation quite strongly tries to separate them, while for me it seems that although it is very practical to have these different approaches, many of their underlying principles are overlapping quite heavily, if suitably interpreted (e.g. the trajectory of an individual in PSO should be compared to a trajectory of a generational family chain of parent-child successions in EC, and an explicit test should be done about whether such rules of EC could be found so that the trajectories would be similar to PSO, or vice versa. I haven't checked it, but at least reading the book didn't convince me that the check would fail.).

I would recommend the book to people who are seriously interested in Particle Swarm Optimization or Ant Colony Optimization. Those having a more general interest in swarm intelligence might find the book a bit limited in breadth, but flipping through it might be useful nevertheless.

More info at book's homepage: http://si.cs.up.ac.za/

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