Spatial Computing (Essential Knowledge) - Shashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold ***

A part of the increasingly interesting MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, the topic of this book may at first glance be puzzling - but it's about something many of us use every day - information technology that makes use of spatial information, such as the GPS sat nav system.

One oddity of this series is that it is very inconsistent in the level the books are pitched at. Some are way too technical for the general reader. This one, though, is a straightforward descriptive text with very limited technical detail. There's nothing here that is likely to baffle someone from outside the field and lots of information on where the various technologies have come from (including John Snow's famous map-based identification of the source of a Victorian London cholera outbreak), the basics of how they work and where they are likely to go from here.

If you actually have a need to know this stuff, it's an ideal primer. My only real concern about the book is that I'm not sure I did need to know - it felt a bit too much like doing homework. In their preface, the authors say 'How could a technology used by billions of people around the world not have an accessible guide to describe it to a broad audience?' I think, for me, the answer is 'Because it's not very interesting.' I love using this stuff, but I didn't find reading about it particularly inspiring.

That's not to say that the book won't be useful, whether you've been set an assignment on remote sensing, positioning systems or geographic information systems or you work in a field that makes use of such technology - but as a daily user of GPS, I've already got the basics and I really didn't need to detail.

For those with an interest in the field but limited knowledge, though, it's an excellent, pocket-sized introduction.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

Search This Blog