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Comments: 145 +- Book Reviews: The Geek Atlas on Monday July 20 2009, @01:01PM
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samzenpus
on Monday July 20 2009, @01:01PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
from the read-all-about-it dept.
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science
brothke writes "A recent search on Amazon for travel guides returned over 30,000 results. Most of these are standard travel guides to popular tourist destinations which advise the reader to go to the typical tourist sites. The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive is a radically different travel guide. Rather than recommending the usual trite destinations, which are often glorified souvenir stores, the book takes the reader to places that make science real and exciting, and hopefully those who exit such places are more knowledgeable than when they went in." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.
| The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive | |
| author | John Graham-Cumming |
| pages | 542 |
| publisher | O'Reilly Media |
| rating | 10/10 |
| reviewer | Ben Rothke |
| ISBN | 978-0596523206 |
| summary | A fascinating and enjoyable read |
Irrespective of its travel content, The Geek Atlas is a unique and fascinating read for the information and overview of its wide range of topics. If there is a fault in the book, it is with its title. When people see Geek Atlas, they might think that this is a book that takes the reader to boring and obscure places, which is the exact opposite of its intent.
Author John Graham-Cumming writes that you won't find tedious, third-rate museums, or a tacky plaque stuck to a wall stating that "Professor X slept here." Every place he recommends is meant to have real scientific, mathematical, or technological interest.
Each of the books 128 chapters is separated into 3 parts: a general introduction to the place with an emphasis on its scientific, mathematical or technological significance; a related technical subject covered in greater detail, and practical visiting information. So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.
Graham-Cumming notes that a disappointing trend with science museums today is a tendency to emphasize the wow factor without really explaining the underlying science. He notes the following 3 attributes of such museums: a short name ending with an exclamation mark, a logo featuring pastel colors or a cuddle cartoon mascot, or an IMAX theater.
Why does the book specifically have 128 places listed? See chapter 58, for the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, UK. Graham-Cumming notes that your average travel guide would have listed perhaps 100 or 125 places. 128 is a round binary number (10000000). Of course, those who are binary obsessed might wonder why this book is not titled 10000000 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.
The 128 places listed are for the most part divided equally between sites in Europe and the USA, with a few in the Far East and Russia. A complete listing of the sites is mapped on the books web site. Africa for some reason seems to be left out and perhaps a follow-up volume will fill that void. Of course, one could argue that Africa has had a minimal contribution to the world of science, mathematics and technology. Nigeria for example is famous for its 419 advance-fee fraud, but not its overabundance of contributors to physics.
For the US locations, there are locations for 25 states, with California being the biggest with 7 suggested places to visit. With that, it is surprising that the book lists the HP Garage, given that it is not open to the public and only serves as a shack to be photographed. Other places such as the US Navy Submarine Force Museum and MIT Museum are indeed more visit worthy.
The tours of some of the sites, like the HP Garage will take less than an hour or so (chapter 42 — Bunhill Fields Cemetery, London, UK), while others one can spend a half or full-day at the site.
While The Geek Atlas is touted as a travel guide, it is much more than that. Its 128 chapters are a wide-ranging overview of science and mathematics. Topics run the gamut from physics and pharmacology to transistors and optics. In fact, the book would make a superb syllabus for an introduction to science course. The plethora of subject covered, combined with its easy to read and absorbing style makes it a fantastic book for both those that are scientifically challenged, yet curious, and those that have a keen interest in the sciences.
The Geek Atlas is a fascinating and enjoyable read; in fact, it I found it hard to put down. Lets hope the author is working on a sequel with the next 256 additional places where science and technology come alive.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Author John Graham-Cumming writes that you won't find tedious, third-rate museums, or a tacky plaque stuck to a wall stating that "Professor X slept here." Every place he recommends is meant to have real scientific, mathematical, or technological interest.
Each of the books 128 chapters is separated into 3 parts: a general introduction to the place with an emphasis on its scientific, mathematical or technological significance; a related technical subject covered in greater detail, and practical visiting information. So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.
Graham-Cumming notes that a disappointing trend with science museums today is a tendency to emphasize the wow factor without really explaining the underlying science. He notes the following 3 attributes of such museums: a short name ending with an exclamation mark, a logo featuring pastel colors or a cuddle cartoon mascot, or an IMAX theater.
Why does the book specifically have 128 places listed? See chapter 58, for the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, UK. Graham-Cumming notes that your average travel guide would have listed perhaps 100 or 125 places. 128 is a round binary number (10000000). Of course, those who are binary obsessed might wonder why this book is not titled 10000000 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.
The 128 places listed are for the most part divided equally between sites in Europe and the USA, with a few in the Far East and Russia. A complete listing of the sites is mapped on the books web site. Africa for some reason seems to be left out and perhaps a follow-up volume will fill that void. Of course, one could argue that Africa has had a minimal contribution to the world of science, mathematics and technology. Nigeria for example is famous for its 419 advance-fee fraud, but not its overabundance of contributors to physics.
For the US locations, there are locations for 25 states, with California being the biggest with 7 suggested places to visit. With that, it is surprising that the book lists the HP Garage, given that it is not open to the public and only serves as a shack to be photographed. Other places such as the US Navy Submarine Force Museum and MIT Museum are indeed more visit worthy.
The tours of some of the sites, like the HP Garage will take less than an hour or so (chapter 42 — Bunhill Fields Cemetery, London, UK), while others one can spend a half or full-day at the site.
While The Geek Atlas is touted as a travel guide, it is much more than that. Its 128 chapters are a wide-ranging overview of science and mathematics. Topics run the gamut from physics and pharmacology to transistors and optics. In fact, the book would make a superb syllabus for an introduction to science course. The plethora of subject covered, combined with its easy to read and absorbing style makes it a fantastic book for both those that are scientifically challenged, yet curious, and those that have a keen interest in the sciences.
The Geek Atlas is a fascinating and enjoyable read; in fact, it I found it hard to put down. Lets hope the author is working on a sequel with the next 256 additional places where science and technology come alive.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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great, but... (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously, though, the best way to see a country is with a native girl at your side. Is there a book about how to hook up while traveling? That would be really useful.
[insert obligatory joke about slashdotters needing a similar book for use while at home]
Re: (Score:2)
Is there a book about how to hook up while traveling? That would be really useful.
That would be something like this [slyguide.com]?
The 2nd edition will use an unsigned byte counter (Score:5, Funny)
Offering 256 cool places to visit.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Great idea (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope the Kennedy Space Center is, especially considering today's date. They have a Saturn V rocket (or did when I visited in the eighties), as well as an Apollo capsule, moon rocks, all sorts of incredibly interesting stuff. I never realized how HUGE that rocket was!
Oh yeah, they fire off space shuttles there, too. Those are simply AMAZING. If you're up close (meaning a couple of miles away) the ground shakes. It's louder than a Pink Floyd concert.
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For high-energy physics enthusiasts on the other side of the country, Cornell University also gives guided tours of their accelerator (actually a synchrotron). Did this a few years ago and it was wicked cool.
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While we are making suggestions:
The Mirror Lab at The University of Arizona is absolutely amazing. I'm not sure if they do public tours or not (they gave us a tour for a graduate recruitment site visit), but it is definitely worth checking out if you are into astronomy/optics/engineering. When we were there, they were working on two 8.4 meter off-axis parabolic mirrors for a multiple mirror telescope. It's absolutely incredible how precise they can grind these mirrors down to when they are 8.4 meters in dia
Other "sightseeing" book (Score:5, Informative)
The book is fantastic! Even the route you take to commute to work every day will suddenly become a sightseeing trip.
Highly recommended for geeks and others who still posses a spark of curiosity.
The problem is... (Score:4, Insightful)
...you have a limited definition of 'beautiful'.
For instance, the Large Hadron Collider. [google.com] It is, in fact, beautiful. Beautiful in execution, beautiful physics, beautiful. And falls neatly outside your context.
If this book being recommended can bring that sense of beauty to power sub stations and the like, then I think it's a good idea.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, okay, if "Artists" at a hypothetical gathering say so, I guess I'll stop trying to find beauty in things they don't approve of.
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Most artists today aren't very interested in "the beautiful" (which is a concern of the decorative.) And they might well find the Large Hadron Collider compelling in its own way, albeit in the context of a critical reflection on the relationships between science, knowledge and culture.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
While I always try to keep conversations civil, but I'm sorry, your message about "art and artists" is just, well, stupid.
Just to make a point: are bridges part of infrastructure? Yes! (answering myself to simplify it for idiots)
What about Millau Viaduct [wikipedia.org]? Doesn't it look fantastic?! Isn't it beautiful?! Is it worth seeing?!
Geeklings (Score:3, Interesting)
For young and budding geeks, wired lists 100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer [wired.com]. I guess they weren't obsessed with rounding up to a power of 2. Come to think of it, it's been a long time since I wrote code that worried about optimizing usage of memory/disk space to such numbers.
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For young and budding geeks, wired lists 100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer. I guess they weren't obsessed with rounding up to a power of 2
Dunno, maybe there are only 4 geeky places to take your kids?
Museums or real science (Score:3, Interesting)
How does a tourist get to experience real science getting done? I went to Los Alamos and went to a few museums there. I felt talked down to at best, and at worst propagandized. All this while many of the countries top minds are doing amazing research just thousands of feet away.
No, the only way to really see science is to have a personal connection with the investigators involved. Get a tour of their labs, sit in on a talk by a visiting professor, go to a poster session. I don't see how this book will help with any of that.
how national lab open houses? (Score:2)
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What i find really interesting is how you point is proven in the ch
Henry Ford & Greenfield Village (Score:2)
If you want to tour places, stop by the poorly named "Henry Ford Museum". It has little to do with Mr Ford. It's actually a history museum that simply collected artifacts from the industrial revolution. You'll see various pieces of machinery from the 18 and 1900's along with cars, train, planes, sewing machines, t
I go on geek vacations (Score:4, Interesting)
For example in April 2008 I went to central New Mexico to catch three main sites: the Trinity bomb site (open only two Saturdays a year because its inside a military base), the Socorro large radio telecope array (the staple of almost many scifi movies), and Roswell. Along the way I hit the Almogorov Space Museum (sadly declining), and the Albquerque Atomic and Ballooning museums. Los Alamos is also not far away.
My next goal is to catch one of the seven remaining shuttle launches. I better get organized because they end soon.
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And I am the exact opposite. I've been in the IT industry (not coding, but routing/switching/WAN/LAN/Security) since the early 90s. When I go on vacation, I want to get as far a way from anything tech-related as I can.
I already spend enough of my life doing IT/technology related things, why would I want to do more of it on my vacation?
Obviously, to each their own, but I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the need for this book.
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I have a job that I love and identify with, but when I travel and during my leisure time, etc., I still feel it is important to explore other aspects of life. Overspecialization is really a kind of inhibition based on fear of the unknown and the different, and it leads to a kind of diminishment of the self. I still think it is wiser to cultivate all aspects of yourself - the aesthetic, the athletic, the emotional, as well as the intellectual - and to explore facets of the world the do not resemble that of y
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If you truly love something, you'd likely not want to do anything *but* that activity
Only if you suffer from monomania. The rest of us are capable of enjoying more than one thing, and like taking a break from some things we enjoy to focus on the others for a while.
The trouble with tribbles (Score:3, Funny)
Some of my friends think I am crazy to do this rather than to go vacationing for pure pleasure and relaxation.
Kirk: Scotty, you're confined to quarters.
Scotty: Thatnks, Captain! It'll give me a chance to catch up on my technical journals!
Re:I go on geek vacations (Score:4, Funny)
the Socorro large radio telecope array (the staple of almost many scifi movies)
Actually, it's only been in nearly some scifi movies.
Parent
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Apparently Bill Gates had a screaming row with Paul Allen after Allen bunked off with two workmates for 24 hours so they could get down to watch the first shuttle launch.
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Some of my friends think I am crazy to do this rather than to go vacationing for pure pleasure and relaxation.
How could anyone not find Socorro pleasant and relaxing? What is tense and stressful about a way cool machine run by way cool people in the way cool desert?
On the other hand, trinity, now that is a PITA, as I recall they want to do all kinds of crazy security screening, annoying scheduling, etc. If it were not for knowing the history of what happened, it would be right up there in excitement with visiting an IRS office.
However, its geology geeks that really have all the fun... White Sands, Carlsbad Cavern
Me too (Score:3, Interesting)
Same here. After several tries at more conventional vacations that turned out to be boring (Architecture? meh. Nature? If you've seen one tree, you've seen them all. Mountains? pfft), I've given my geek impulses free rein the last few years, and it's wonderful.
I just finished a two-week trip to the UK, where I visited several old mines, a few car and aircraft museums, the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum (thanks to Neal Stephenson) [1] and Bletchley Park.
1: an absolute treat, well worth travelling to the middle
LIGO, and the CREHST (Score:3, Informative)
If you happen to find yourself in the desert of Eastern WA, I can wholeheartedly recommend Richland's CREHST exhibition on the Hanford site, and the Western branch of the LIGO gravitational interferometer out on the Hanford reservation itself. It's not often you get to stand on a scientific instrument two miles across!
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You couldn't get me to within twenty miles of Hanford. I'm no fan of cancer, and that place is as radioactive as Chernobyl.
Subtitled: (Score:3, Funny)
128 Places Where You Have Zero Chance of Getting Laid
Re: (Score:2)
As opposed to?...
Possibly 128 museums to visit (Score:2)
Hey! (Score:3, Insightful)
So while you may not be able to make it to the Escher Museum (chapter 29) in The Hague, Netherlands; the information on how M.C. Escher used impossible shapes in which the chapter describes is a fascinating read on its own.
That's only 15km from my house! It's quite easy to reach!
Anyway, I notice a rather strong focus on English-speaking countries. Why only five sites in Germany? Why is the Boerhave Museum in Leiden (in the Netherlands) missing (with its fascinating exhibit of the first-ever helium liquification system)?
And why is the Atomium in Brussels there? Talk about a crummy museum...
One Canadian site? What? (Score:2)
Perhaps I am too much of a fan boy for my own country, but one Canadian site? And it's Baddeck?
Am I the only dinosaur-loving geek wondering why Drumheller isn't on the list?
The only paleontology-loving geek wondering at the omission of the Burgess Shale?
The only astronomy-loving geek wondering the exclusion of DRAO?
The only communications-loving geek perplexed at leaving out Signal Hill?
And these are only the ones right off the top of my head! Imagine what a little detailed research would uncover!
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There are over 200 countries in the world, and the book only covers 128 places to go and see. Be happy your country made it onto that list :-)
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Perhaps I am too much of a fan boy for my own country, but one Canadian site? And it's Baddeck?
The only communications-loving geek perplexed at leaving out Signal Hill?
Yeah, that's an unforgivable omission.
For those who are unaware, this was the site of the first trans-atlantic wireless transmission.
Think about that.
Africa left out (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, one could argue that Africa has had a minimal contribution to the world of science, mathematics and technology.
Ancient Egypt? Mathematics, astronomy, engineering? Definitely a significant contribution to the world of science.
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Africa was left out because it is not exactly a safe or easy place to visit, especially for a pasty nerd. There are notable exceptions. The Pyramids make for a very geeky place to visit if your into architecture, language or history but the mainstream tourists have drowned that our. Just don't fly into Cairo if you can avoid it, makes the traffic of Mumbai look organised.
If you like Archite
The secret's out (Score:2)
Akihabara (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
My morning logon fortune was: "I read National Geographic for the same reason as Playboy -- to see places I'm never going to go." :)
COSI in Columbus Ohio (Score:2)
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I feel it would be more effective to write this guide on geek places at normal-people destinations, as some of us cannot gather interest at home to visit a museum about computers. On the other hand, if said museum were in the Carribean, most of us would have little problem convincing a signficant other.
Sounds like you want
http://www.insightcruises.com/ [insightcruises.com]
(I have no connection to them, other than wanting to go...)
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Yeah, way to REALLY blow away any hope for future scientific achievement coming out of America, man...
(not saying you're WRONG, just saying... yuck)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, what a sad post.
There are hundreds of thousands of applied science jobs that do allow you to get out of a cube and get your hands dirty. Two personal examples:
My father just retired after being a chemical engineer for 15 years (his second career). During this he spent most of his time in a laboratory or in the field working with manufacturers of physical goods to design processes that would yield good results with the chemicals they were using, or suggesting better alternatives. This often involved
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hogwash!
Not everyone gets to sit at an observatory looking for some celestial wonder. Most live in Excel spreadsheets and databases.
Indeed - including most astronomers. Experimental design is not boring just because it has evolved to include digital cameras and computer networks and a remote operations paradigm.
Kids need some reality
Encouraging a bit of hopeful imagination about their futures is dramatically more realistic than your fatalistic world view. As regards science in particular, your premis