About Thoughts of a TechnoGeek: This is where I'll post my thoughts, interesting articles, or anything else I want to. If you don't like it, don't read it. David L Brenner my email Subscribe Links
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Thu, 01 Apr 2004
I just finished a book by Brian Greene called The Fabric of The Cosmos. It is an explanation for the the layman about the current thinking about the nature of space and time, and whether they actually exist. The author wrote a book several years ago called The Elegant Universe which explained string theory. That book was readable, but it made my head hurt in places. This book is much more accessible. It starts off with a history of our understanding of space (and time) pointing out where things were missing, and how they were filled in. The book starts out with an example from Newtonian physics. Take a bucket filled with water and suspend it on a rope. If you rotate the rope, the bucket will start to spin. As the rope (and bucket) gain speed, the water in the bucket will take on a concave shape as the water begins to rotate. Why does the water take on that shape? The next question would be, if you performed the same experiment in deep space, sufficiently far from a gravitational field (other than the bucket of course) would the water behave the same? I found the book to be much more understandable than his previous work. I think that he realized that the material needed to be presented in a different manner to be understandable to people that don't have the physics and math background. He makes references to the other work when more detailed explanation may be desired. If you have an interest in understanding the way the Universe works and what it is made of, I highly recommend this for assisting in that lofty goal. Blog frenzyAs you can tell, I've finally gotten over this lull in posting to this site. I can't guarantee how long this will last, but I will be making more of an effort to post the interesting articles I find. I'll also try to keep things more "techie" instead of the political flavor that I had for a while. I'm sure that I will still be posting articles about politics periodically, but I'm not going to make that the entire content of the blog.
A guy at work recommended this book. It is a history of the telegraph and its parallels to the Internet. There was a lot of information that I was aware of from my data comm classes in college. The new part was the perspective of comparing the growth and societal impacts with the 90s and the Internet bubble. The ingenuity of the Victorian's is amazing. They had data compression algorithms (e.g. Morse code, code books, etc) to cut down on transmission times and charges. There were business models to eliminate certain types of transmissions. There were even "chat rooms" for the operators. All of these things are mimicked or were reinvented for today's environment. It is an easy read and accessible to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject. |