[Book Reviews] Two for science

[thewronghands]

I have read two fabulous books about science recently, one about Cascadian geology, forestry, and public policy, the other about how and where science was advancing during Europe's Dark Ages. I enthusiastically recommend both of these.

Comments

[wordsofastory]

The House of Wisdom sounds really good! I'll have to add it to my to-read list.

I recently read Paper by Mark Kurlansky, and he mentions the same idea - that the printing press was not well-suited to Arabic - but he didn't go into much detail either, alas.

[thewronghands]

Yeah, it seems like a lot of languages have accent or critical marks that convey meaning, and omitting them is challenging... Irish has this with the fadas, and French has several. I wonder why French didn't present such challenges to the typesetter. Is it just that Arabic is inherently cursive, with different letter widths? But surely that can't be worse than the width difference between an M or W and an i or l!

[wordsofastory]

He does say: Europeans had the right alphabet-only twenty-six fairly simple characters. A complete set of type with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and various signs came to about 100 pieces of type, but I don't know how many you'd need for Arabic. He also says that Arabic calligraphy might have had such a high prestige that it prevented printing from getting started early on. But mostly he doesn't talk too much about why it didn't become popular, which is too bad!

[larksdream]

the Companions of the Verified Tables (nerdiest science posse name ever!)

So much <3.

[thewronghands]

Yeah, that was possibly my favorite part of the whole book, heh.

[teferi]

I am buying The House of Wisdom right now. Thanks for telling me about it!

[thewronghands]

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

[wire_mother]

Calling Dixie Lee Ray "kind of baffling" is about the best description I can imagine.

[thewronghands]

Were you paying any attention to politics here at the time, or were you not of an age to care/lived elsewhere? I was like four, so I didn't care yet, it's history that I remember but I was not attentive to the political details, heh.

[wire_mother]

I was young, but politics was a regular topic of discussion in our house and I was old enough to understand for the most part what was being said. At the time of the eruption, we lived in Tacoma, and had been in WA since 1974. Mainly, I remember the disaster of nuclear power here, which she pushed strongly, and her other anti-environmental stances.