Color Under Ground: The Mineral Picture Book by Lee Boltin, John S. White, Jr., and: Images from Life by George Kirkpatrick (review)

368 Books to consult a book written from the inside. Computers and Thought, for example, was published at about the same time as Singh’s book. Edited by Feigenbaum and Feldman, it contains essays by Turing, Minsky, Simon and Newell, and many others whose work Singh quotes. It is not less readable, even for the layman, for being well-informed, precise and unemotional. (It should be remembered, of course, that much has happened in this rapidly moving field since 1965.) The problem is evidently not whether a popular work on the information sciences is desirable or even possible-the answer would clearly be affirmative -but, who could write it? The table of contents of Singh’s book reads like a university curriculum. What is lacking is that sense of relative importance in the parts that results from in-depth experience. In the chapter on digital computers, for example, binary arithmetic and twos-complement arithmetic are dealt with at some length at the beginning: programming is afforded a brief and wholly inadequate treatment at the end. Yet there can be no question that programming is, for the layman, by far the most important issue in computing. In the last analysis, and in spite of his considerable erudition, Singh lacks insight and is no more able to cope with those philosophical problems ofthe nature of awareness and thought raised by the computer than any less informed layman. And he covers up with romance and metaphor. which clings like peanut butter. ‘Since computers do not need to “know” what numbers are . . . they perform their calculations without being aware of what they are doing. Thus they are quite literally like water and wind in Omar Khayyam’s stanza, willy nilly flowing and blowing but neither knowing why, nor whence nor wither‘~-like a magic carpet, perhaps‘? Computers and Society. Richard W. Hamming. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1972. $4.50. Reviewed by : Michael Thompson:k .It is not foreordained that computers shall make the world ti hideous place to live in’ we are assured by the author who believes ‘the evil or good does not rest in the computer. it rests with the user’. I concur with this, with the reservation that it is the goodness of the users that worries me. However, Hamming does not present us with suggestions as to how evil users may be controlled, indeed he does not discuss misuse at any length. The whole book is designed to inform the reader on the subject of computers so that, presumably, the reader himself will be able to come to conclusions as to how he should act when faced by machines and their consequences. The little-reader-up-against-IBM may feel the book provides him with very little armament, indeed he may even feel that Mr. IBM might have written the book himself. The power of the great computer corporation is not discussed and, whereas one knows that the products of IBM are very good for IBM, one might expect the author to question whether they are necessarily good for others. On the credit side, I have no hesitation in recommending the book as a simple introduction to computers and their uses. In particular, the author has a flair for presenting abstract ideas easily. Computers are tools to aid our minds and it is essential to stress the abstract features of the subject matter. So in dealing with applications, the author groups them around central ideas such as modelling, feedback, stability, randomness and optimization. This is one way of avoiding the tendency that a chapter on, say, medical computing, should be made to justify itself by showing that worthwhile applications have been or will be made to medicine. Besides being possibly biased, such a chapter would contain descriptions of techniques that rapidly will become outdated by technological advance. Instead, if the reader is helped to understand the relationship of the computer towards decision making and information retrieval and to know what analogue to digital conversion is, then such knowledge will be relevant in many areas of application and will probably remain relevant for some years to come. Information Theory. J. F. Young. Butterworth, London, 1971. 168 pp., illus. f3.00. This...