Author: jkordy

Wow, note to self: never write a book about the internet, the near future, or any kind of technological speculation. You just can’t ever predict what will or won’t happen.

On that note this book from 2001, didn’t age very well. Some of it’s predictions never came true, while other things heralded as the the next big thing have already come and gone.

But those are just unfortunate side-effects of writing about technology. The subject matter is still just as fascinating today as it was 10 years ago, and it seems it still hasn’t been explored and exploited enough, even though scientists have been studying the emergence phenomenon for years.

In science some headway has been made in understanding the self-assembly and self-organization of some biological systems. But in the tech sector, we are only now seriously beginning to use the logic of emergence for things like neural nets, pattern recognition, face tracking and learning networks.

The full title is Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. And the author does a reasonably good, thought not very deep, job on the first two or three points, but it’s the last part where too much speculation makes the book more of a sociological artifact on how people perceived the future of tech 10 years ago, than giving any real insight into software and technology. Thought as I said some of the broader implications of emergence are only now gaining wide adoption and watching little dots on a screen self-assemble without any explicit instructions to do so, is just as amazing today as it was then.

This book has been on my to read list for a while. Guess I should have gotten to it earlier.

Bill Bryson does it again. This book is chock full of interesting tidbits. Just endlessly fascinating and covers a wide range history as usual. There are just so many things in here I’d never heard of, but am now fascinated by, things like Skara Brae, the Crystal Palace, Addison Mizner, Edison’s concrete houses, coade stone.

Even things I knew about I have completely new appreciation for now. Things like the Erie Canal, the Monadnock in Chicago, the salt and pepper on our tables, even rats! This man cannot contain himself. He set out to simply write about the things around his home, but each knew item opens a pandora’s box of history behind it, and I’m glad for it and Bill is there to explain it all.

We go from room to room in a Victorian parsonage in the English countryside and wind up learning about the entire world. Even the introduction where I side with Bill on his guestimate of how many people are buried in the Church graveyard, only to find out that the Church is literally buried in the sheer numbers of people who have lived and died in this little “un-interesting” area of England, instantly captivated me.

The book is sub-titled “A short history…” thought that must be only by Bill’s standards. I’m sure he could have written a multi-volume work, for me it was just long enough at 512 pages.