stop. start. stutter.

I'm going to be at Lunacon this weekend (say hi if you're there!), so this week's Books About Cool Topics comes early. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: Sociolinguistics
The book: Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages by Nancy Bonvillain

This is way, way more textbooky than I've been trying to keep these -- I've been aiming more for a popular-science approach, whereas this is, in fact, a leftover from my days as a Linguistics major. (Er. My few days as LING major. Undergrad took me eleven semesters, four colleges, and thirteen majors. It's a long story.)

But for all that this is clearly a textbook, and clearly aimed at the textbook market, and makes some assumptions about your knowledge base going into it, and has the sticker-shock price that college texts often carry -- it's still a fabulous book about the intersection between language and culture. It's about semantics, and bilingualism, and cultural register, and class-structure as revealed in language, and cultural presupposition, and a whole host of cool things about what how we speak tells us about who we are (and what others see).

It's English-centric, and more than that, American-centric, but the principles are extendable. While it might not be a good introduction to the discipline of linguistics as a whole, you should be able to get by with some work on Wikipedia if you run into a concept that you're not familiar with, and the neat bits are worth it.

It's Friday: time for Books About Cool Topics. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: Quantum computing
The book: Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd

What is quantum computing? It's a computer built to take advantage of fundamental principles of quanta, using the idea that quantum particles can be used to store data and perform operations on those data. Which means that any book about quantum computing must explain not only computer science, but also quantum physics. And quantum physics is the new rocket science, in the sense of being the discipline that everyone thinks nobody understands. Fortunately, Lloyd seems to delight in the fact that even the quantum physicists don't understand quantum physics. He knows what he's talking about, clearly loves his topic, and has a sly sense of humor that often has me looking at the page and going "...did he just make a joke there? Yeah, he just made a joke there."

If you ask ten quantum physicists to explain quantum physics, you'll get twenty-five different answers, all of which contradict each other, and one really confused cat. But Lloyd does a really good job of explaining hard-to-explain pieces. This is a topic I wasn't expecting to understand as well as I understood this book, honestly; I've mentioned my problems with math, which meant that I often just gave up on my science education and have had to self-teach since then, which means that I've got some curious gaps. But Lloyd's one of those people who loves his discipline like nobody's business, loves the problems he's working on, and is willing to do a lot to make sure you think they're just as cool as he does -- which is my main criterion for a book on science, which you might have already guessed -- and on the whole, he manages wonderfully.

I did not expect to walk out of this book having had so many a-ha! moments about quantum physics as I did, and if I were at MIT, I'd audit Lloyd's classes just to have the privilege of hearing his theories directly.

Friday brings us Books About Cool Topics. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: The NYC restaurant scene
The book: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

This is a little less academic than the previous two; I figured it was time for something lighter! This is Bourdain's memoir about life in the NYC restaurant scene, and it's great. Fascinating in places, disturbing in others, hysterical in yet others. If you're the type of person who can't stand thinking where your food comes from and what might have happened to it before it hits the table, you'll probably want to give this one a pass, but if you're down with the concept that we all eat a little dirt, this is a great book. It covers what goes on in the kitchen of restaurants, what drugs your chef has likely done this afternoon, the economics and basics of running a restaurant, how to deal with suppliers, and what not to order in the restaurant. (And why!)

Bourdain's got a light, deft prose style, but he doesn't hold back, either. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson (may he rest in peace, with booze and loose women). This is a great look into the food service industry, both good things and bad, and it's entertaining even as it's educational.

It's Friday, so it's time for this week's Books About Cool Topics installment. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The Topic: Religious history: specifically, the Council of Nicaea
The Book: When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome by Richard Rubenstein

The Council of Nicea -- which is actually the First Council of Nicaea; there were others, but this is the one people most often mean -- is the point at which Christianity truly started to be shaped and codified. Before Nicaea, there were a bunch of different ways of looking at God and Jesus and the meaning of both, and individual churches taught and believed the version that they thought was most appealing. Rubenstein brings us through the argument (which actually displays surprising similarity to an Internet flamewar, although slightly more bloody-minded) providing just the right level of detail, and -- as is very rare for a book on religion -- without giving away which side of the debate he comes down on.

More than that, though, Nicaea was the story of Arius and Athanasius, the two main voices on both sides of the Christological debate, and Rubenstein gives us an excellent look at both men, their histories, their backgrounds, and their motivations, reconstructing very vibrant pictures of the two men from what's available to us today. This is a really good history book, well-researched and eminently readable, and very approachable for the layperson.

(Those of you reading this via RSS might have gotten it earlier in the week -- mix-up with the post scheduling, which I am trying out in hopes it will make me, you know, post more regularly if I write them ahead of time all at once....)

So I'm enjoying my "log everything into GoodReads account" project (except when I'm not, but, well) -- but I'm only logging in new books (or books I reread since I started keeping track). So let's do books about cool topics that you don't learn about in high school. (Or at least, that I didn't learn about in my high school; your mileage may vary.) And to force myself to get into patterns and habits, I shall do them on Fridays.

Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.

Today: The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time by Keith Devlin.

I am one of those great tragedies; I am a lover of math (I can't call myself a mathematician) who suffers from medium-to-severe dyscalculia, which went undiagnosed the entire time I was in public education. (I thought everyone had trouble telling 42 and 24 apart. Or plus and minus. And don't get me started on phone numbers. Or division. Or greater than/less than.) I love math; I just can't do it without tears and swearing. (Concepts, fine. Abstracts, fine. Ideas, fine. Actual problems? I will shoot myself.)

This book tackles the seven Millennium Prize Problems, each of which carries a million-dollar bounty for a "solution". (Scare quotes are because some of the "problems" aren't so much equations to be solved as "dude, this works, but we don't know why it works.") Devlin does a great job of explaining what the problem is for all but the last two, which honestly can't be explained to a layperson (at least not without interpretive dance), but the best part of the book is the background grounding he provides for the mathematical leaps-of-glee he's about to get into.

I've had people try to Explain Math Shit to me before, and they have about a seventy percent chance of causing me to have a screaming nuclear meltdown, because they do it in the wrong way. But Devlin's good at it -- informative without being patronizing or condescending, the way so many specialists can be when they're talking about their specialty to a layperson. Devlin's not interested in proving that he knows what he's talking about; he wants you to see why Hey, Math Is Fucking Cool. And, you know, since math is fucking cool, it's a win/win situation.