Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Travel interferes with weblogging. But airport bookstores are getting better. Picked Alistair MacLeod's Island (going) and Stephen Budiansky's Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II(returning) at SLC. Island has tight, lucid, sometimes breathtaking stories on hard work in a harsh and beautiful land, family ties, the waning of a proud, possessive culture, animal companions, snow and ice, the Western Isles uprooted to the New World. Battle of Wits is very readable, but detailed enough on machines and methods to avoid the fluffiness of much "general reader" books on technical subjects. It's fitting that two of the main characters are Turing in England and Kullback in the US: logic and computation joining forces with information theory and statistical inference. 7:11:55 PM