Digital, all fifteen pounds of it.

Getting a good workout today doing the new books.  The Digital Atlas of Traditional Agricultural Practices and Food Processing - in three weighty volumes has arrived on my desk.  Digital???  Ya, that was what I thought too.  But, as a book binder, I can say it is my kinda digital.  Like when I look out at a blue sky and the weather person announces it is cloudy - my kinda cloudy.  They are beautiful books, pages and pages of photographs on how it's done around the world.  A perfect reference in a digital world in need of manual override.

New books

On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors: Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, Web Search, and Other Situations when Close is Close Enough.  This, believe it or not has reached a second edition.  I would have thought one was enough.  It is by Mark S. Manse and I can say with surety, I don't much care about the horseshoes and the web searches, but I am darn well as close to a hand grenade as I ever hope to be - many many miles.

New Books

Doing the new books again.  Most times I find something that amuses my odd sense of humour. Today I find something that makes me growl.  Masterminding Nature: the breeding of animals, 1750- 2010.  Masterminding nature?  Rather like two squatting toddlers holding up their mud pies claiming to have fed the world all their lives.

Quantum chess covers

New book time again.  Well, okay, it happens every week, but I have been away for some months in another city and living another life, so I am new back to the pleasures of this one.  New books.  And this time quantum mechanics.  Mrs. Google tells me that quantum mechanics is:  the mathematical description of the motion and interaction of subatomic particles, incorporating the concepts of quantization of energy, wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and the correspondence principle.  Or as I like to say, the interaction of tiny things.  So, as I process books and I come across two in my pile that both have chess pieces on their covers and the word 'quantum' in the title.  I look again. Because I love these tiny quinky dinks.  

I look closer and I find that in book number two, the bigger book, with red chess pieces, has four authors, all of whom have a first name starting with G: Giampiero, Giuseppe, Gennaro, and George.  But I am unimpressed.  I write stories for kids.  I know there is supposed to be three things. But this is only two matching things, chess pieces, quantum, and... what?  The four G's is suspicious though.  There must be more.  Then it hits me, one is published by MIT in Cambridge Mass and the other is published by Cambridge University Press.  Quinky dink mechanics: the interconnectedness of tiny things.

Quantum Algorithms via Linear Algebra

Advanced Concepts in Quantum Mechanics

New Books

Fall brings in the new books again and this week I have a student perennial:  Microwave-Assisted Sample Preparation for Trace Element Determination (Science QD 139.T7M45 2014):  Pizza.