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.