brainwagon

Today’s book recommendation is Brad Graham and Kathy McGowan’s Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot. Brad and Kathy are the authors of a book which was highly recommended to me, Atomic Zombie’s Bicycle Builder’s Bonanza. I’m not all that interested in building strange bicycles, but robots, hey, that seems like more up my alley. I’ve got […]

After reading some of the material on 43folders.com, I decided to order, read and apply some of the lessons in the book. It’s good! I’ll have some more comments later, but some good additional pointers are here. Try reading them to see the flavor of Allen’s approach, and to see if it might be helpful […]

Inspired by Dave Slusher’s mention of Robert Rodriguez and his Ten Minute Film School, I decided to get a bunch of books on the subject of low budget guerilla film making. To get the total up high enough to get free shipping from Amazon, I purchased Rebel Without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez How to […]

I must admit, I’ve been a slacker. I haven’t read Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture, and since you can actually get free copies of the book off the web, there really is no excuse. Indeed, today I decided to download the audiobook version to my iPod before I hit the treadmill to exercise. The audiobook […]

Thorp’s book, The Mathematics of Gambling, is apparently available online with permission of the author. Thorp is of course the author of the classic book Beat the Dealer, to which an entire generation of card counters owe their heritage.

I’m a bit of a baseball fan, and I’m also fascinated by gambling and probability. It’s rare that I find a book which talks about both, so I was somewhat pleased to see Ken Ross’ A Mathematician at the Ballpark on the shelf at my local Borders. What was even more surprising was the fact […]

I received an interesting phone call from my friend Phil last week. I hadn’t heard much from Phil, but he called me in the middle of a ferry ride to San Francisco to tell me that he was reading a book called Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and that he was sure that I’d enjoy it. […]

This weeks whim book purchase was Amazon.com: Books: Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Apparently MIT has a long history of blackjack players, and this book details a particular team which aggressively used card counting, team play, shuffle tracking and other aggressive techniques to […]

When I was probably eight or ten years old, I remember going to the Book Vault, our local bookstore and seeing Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World. I remember asking my mom to buy it for me, but somehow I forgot about it, even though I thought it was a really cool book. Well, […]

I stopped by Barnes & Noble on the way home the other day, and was bemused by a couple of books, including this one on the construction of robots to play sumo. Since I am considering a small robotics project, I thought this book might be good, and after a brief reading, it appears to […]

I just picked up a copy of a new book on Cascading Style sheets by Eric Meyer. He’s a wizard of all things having to do with style sheets, and rather than just describe the syntax and options (which are easy to get from htmlhelp.org) he presents style sheet wizardry in the form of thirteen […]

Recently I’ve become rather interested in the topic of the design and printing of books. It seems that many modern books are incredibly poorly designed and typeset, despite the existence of excellent tools that should make book production simpler. The problem is that while software has been created to reduce the tedium, it has not […]

As part of my experiments with telescope making, I’ve been exposed through the efforts of some of my friends to the world of metalworking. i did some minimal metalwork (fabrication of some aluminum bearings and C channel using Paul Zurakowski’s lathe and mill) for my “Australia scope”, and that gave me the bug to learn […]

One of the most important and interesting question that science can ask is whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe. The recent book Rare Earth by Brownlee and Ward hypothesizes that multicellular life is quite rare in the universe, so rare in fact that it is likely that we are the only intelligent […]