Thursday, December 16, 2010

Barabasi on Everything

If you're the kind of person who's intrigued by mathematical things, but for the life of you couldn't cope with a simple equation that has mathematical symbols in it, this is a book for you: Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, by Albert-Lazslo Barabasi. Not only does he show how microscopic cells and Facebook are exactly the same, along with lots of other things; he also shows how different scientists discovered the similarities, mostly over the past decade, even if the book starts off with an 18th century mathematician. There are no Israelis-Palestinians-diplomats-or-terrorists anywhere in the book, though there are a surprising number of Hungarians of many nationalities.

I warmly recommend if it's snowing outside and you'd prefer to stay warm.

3 comments:

RK said...

During the summertime, do you coldly recommend things? :-)

peterthehungarian said...

Those funny Hungarian names...
Laszlo and not Lazslo...

Silke said...

OT
but since the post about Lanzmann is too way back, I put it here:

Timothy Snyder currently promotes his book "Bloodlands", he is a student and admirer of Tony Judt and I can't pin it down, but his take gives me misgivings.
Maybe it's only that he seems to have an agenda and with historians I like to know what that agenda is i.e. I prefer historians which have a discernible standpoint and tell their story from there on looking about them as honestly as possible. His viewpoint however seems elusive to me unless it is the claim to be totally objective which IMHO smacks of hubris. (i.e. when somebody destroyed a Byzantine mosaic I have to read John Julius Norwich's opinion of him with a grain of salt)


The Holocaust We Don’t See: Lanzmann’s Shoah Revisited
Timothy Snyder

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/dec/15/holocaust-we-dont-see-lanzmanns-shoah-revisited/