And for my Good Readers, here’s the new reviews and articles for this month. The ARJ2 ones are new additions to the top of A Reader’s Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, and the ART ones to A Reader’s Treasury.
1.) ARJ2:
The Journal of Thoreau -- Volume 1, 1837 to 1847 by Henry David Thoreau
In his Journal of February 22, 1841 Thoreau wrote, “We must be at the helm at least once a day; we must feel the tiller-rope in our hands, and know that if we sail, we steer.” I read his journal each night before going to sleep and felt that at least once during the day I was sailing and steering.
For more reasons why you might wish to read Thoreau’s journal, read the review:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/tjr01rvw.htm
2.) ART:
The Illusion of Technique
by William Barrett
Barrett wrote this book as a result of his reading side-by-side the books of two authors, one American, one Russian. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom
and Dignity.
To find out how this all worked out, read the review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/
tiotart.htm
3.) ART:
Better Eyesight Without Glasses by W. H. Bates
Dr. Bates made a big flap in the eyeglass business, claiming to have a process that allowed people to throw away their glasses by doing certain exercises and claiming that eyeglasses were like crutches and like those used by lame people, could be discarded upon correction of the problem. Made a lot of sense to me.
I did the exercises and they seemed to work. I had days of perfect vision without glasses, but I was also using hard contact lens at the time, and it may have been due to the effect of lens-shaping from the contact lens.
Read the Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/bewgart.htm
4.) ART:
Recursive Techniques in Programming by D. W. Barron
This book is for software programmers and other human beings who must deal with self-reflexive actions in their work and lives.
For example: To solve the problem of computing the factorial of 3, all we have to do is to multiply 3 times the factorial of 2 which can be calculated by multiplying 2 times the factorial of 1. If you have recursive functions available, the simple solution is F(n) = n*F(n-1), and this will work for all positive values of the integer n. How are we to understand this?
[page 11] . . . if the whole program is represented by a single function, how is one to achieve any sort of repetition? The answer is, by using recursion; recursion is to functional programs what repetition is to command programs. For example, evaluating factorial (3) according to a recursive definition involves calculating factorial (2) which in turn involves calculating factorial (1), so that the repeated invoking of the definition achieves the desired repetition.
Fine. Made very little sense to me at first. I was raised programming with Do Loops where I would repeat the desired instructions n times. But in recursive programming, the looping is implied and thus not visible to the programmer. Plus you need to have a stack to store the intermediate results during the implied looping. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, when I went to the Foxboro Company, their Fortran compiler had recursion as an option, so I had to learn how to use that as a technique. It was quite a stretch for me, but came in handy many times. This book came into my library as a result of my need to learn to apply recursive programming techniques and to understand them.
Read the Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/rtipart.htm
5.) ART:
Our Own Metaphor by Mary Catherine Bateson
This book is her report on a conference called by MC’s father Gregory Bateson in the summer of 1968 to address this question:
"Are the problems created by man's pursuit of his conscious purposes — problems
that now threaten to destroy both the web of meaning in human life and the
ecological web of meaning in human life and the ecological web of this planet —
actually within the competence of man to solve?"
The answers were as complex and interesting as the participants and my review of their answers can be found at::
http://www.doyletics.com/art/oomart.htm
6.) ART:
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sometimes the shortest books are the easiest to review; this was an exception. The book consists of her sonnets and they did not respond easily to the call, “Review This!” But, hey, I wrote one anyway.
Read it at:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/sftpart.htm