1 comments about Revenge of Killer Sudoku 2: 150 Killer Sudoku puzzles.

1. I have all of Djape's Killer books. Check his website [...] for his daily puzzle creations. Since discovering the killer Sudoku variant, I have abandoned the traditional "vanilla" Sudoku. The killers are far more interesting, challenging, rewarding ... and addicting. And Djape publishes the best killer puzzles IMHO.

2 comments about The New York Times Will Shortz's Funniest Crossword Puzzles Volume 2: From the Pages of The New York Times.

1. 30 Jan 2007
   
   Without imagination and an "attic" full of trivia information, this volume would be overwhelming.



2. I was expecting the usual Sunday puzzles by Will Shortz, but these are more like daily puzzles that you would get on Monday or Tuesday in the New York Times. Still fun though, and has large squares in the grids.

No comments about The New York Times Sunday Crossword Omnibus, Volume 2 (NY Times).

5 comments about Sharks in the Desert.

1. This book is a fun read if you are someone who is familiar with Las Vegas. The book indeed delivers on what the subtitle, "..The Founding Fathers and Current Kings of Las Vegas" states. Each chapter is more or less devoted to discussing a specific person and the impact they had on setting the stage for the evolution of Las Vegas. I imagine those of you who have never been infatuated with Las Vegas will want to pass on this one.
   
   Based on some of the anecdotes, it seems amazing that some of the Vegas hotels are still open today. The mobsters and the so called "straight laced" owners who ran (or still run) the hotels come off as either extremely brilliant or totally incompetent. It is no wonder that most of the Strip hotels have all been swallowed up by one or two companies. The author also seems to question if some hotels are completely honest when it comes to gaming.
   
   The problem I had with the book was perhaps I was expecting something more chronological and dramatic. Instead, the book is like a compilation of old newpaper columns that are all put together in one place(of course, maybe that is not a surprise since the author is a newspaper reporter). Much like other books of that nature, the reading becomes almost repetitive and seems easier to take over a long haul rather than a week or two of reading cover to cover. Also note that there are a few typos and errors that make it seem like someone did a spellcheck with a computer rather than really proofreading it.
   
   If you can stick with this type of book, you will probably enjoy it. Now this is the first book about Las Vegas I have read so I can not compare it to anything but I've got to believe there is probably something a bit more compelling.



2. This book gives you the real story behind the Vegas gaming legends. Nobody does justice to this topic like John L. Smith. His research is impeccable.



3. This is a book that appeals to no one. If you're not already familiar with Vegas history, it is not a good place to start. And if you already know something about Vegas, it will not teach you anything new.
   
   In theory, the structure of this book seems like a good idea -- devote a chapter each on the movers and shakers who built Las Vegas. The problem is that they all influenced each other, so separating them results in an arbitrary, fragmented, sometimes difficult-to-follow, narrative. Even the chapters themselves tend to jump back and forth in time and place. Structurally, the book just doesn't work.
   
   Then there's the problem of sketchy information. Smith doesn't go into great detail explaining the why's and how's of events, leaving the reader with a great longing to know more about the individual characters of these men and what makes them tick. If you're looking for some good dish on Vegas -- which is what the snappy title promises -- there are better choices.
   
   Compounding the reader's frustration are the numerous typos, spelling, and grammatical errors. Smith either had no editor or edited this himself. It feels like a first draft in serious need of a major rewrite and fact checking. It's difficult to believe Smith makes a living as a journalist. He must have a good editor at the Review/Journal.



4. I love Las Vegas; I am fascinated by the procession of hotels - each more interesting than its neighbor, in at least some way. Las Vegas absolutely feeds the human needs for release and occasional excess. This book traces the excesses of the people who built the city. The writer, John L. Smith, is one of the most widely read reporters on the Las Vegas scene, and that actually sets up one of my two biggest complaints. First, writing a book is not the same as a newspaper column or a magazine article. Smith's style is as if he was writing a series on countless newspaper columns. The writing is too glib, it's too vernacular, and just too "hip" and tries too had to be "tough" and "street wise." Smith really needed an editor to make this a well written book.
   
   My second complaint is the format. This is a history written through the stories of people who came to Las Vegas and built the city. I would much rather have seen a history of each hotel, in proper chronological order. The problem with the approach Smith takes is that people moved in and out of the city, jumped ownership of hotels and corporations, and in many cases, ended up at the bottom of a river. It is a highly fragmented story that in the end, does a poor job of creating a narrative of the city.
   
   All that said, there is still much to learn from the book. Perhaps it will just be a jumping off point for further study. I learned volumes from the book, in spite of the shortcomings. It is worth a read, but the episodic approach may frustrate you. If you know Las Vegas fairly well, you can create the necessary context; if you are not familiar with the city, you may have trouble constructing a useful portrait..



5. Everything you ever wanted to know about Vegas -- from the Mafia days to the current town. Well written and puts you there!!

1 comments about Engage the Brain: Games, Math, Grades 6-8 (Engage the Brain).

1. ...basically a collection of games to make learning math fundamentals more entertaining and engaging...and though creative and entertaining the games are basically all competitive...I don't like that at all...kids behind the curve find themselves to be "losers" -- a not very entertaining prospect and hardly a good way to inspire effort...I also suspect "losers" could find themselves the butt of jokes -- facilitating learning is not worth the risk of damaging self-esteem...I allowed it an extra star because in the right circumstances -- e.g. a gifted math class where competition might be enjoyable -- the is a worthy resource.

5 comments about Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games.

1. Martin Gardner's 30 years of Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American magazine are some of the most fun and interesting reading I've enjoyed. I searched out back issues in the high school library, had my own subscription, and collected as many of the books as I could find. When I was looking for one of the books I didn't have and found this complete collection, I immediately ordered it. There are very few authors in any field who are as clear in their writing and as enthusiastic in their delivery as he is. The content is easily worth the full 5 stars.
   
   But the reason I dropped the rating to 4 for this particular edition is its sometimes haphazard quality of image scans. In the worst cases, the color or shading in the original figures is now black-and-white and of such high contrast that important distinctions are mostly or completely lost. For example, the reversi piece colors in figure 29 of "New Mathematical Diversions" are indistinguishable as are the four-color map areas (of all things!) in figure 43. Many figures show moire patterns from rescanning the original halftones. Yet other figures have been reproduced with much greater care, even in color. Some pages with landscape layout have been rotated for easier reading but others have not. In a few cases, the black-and-white photographs in my books have been replaced with much better color photos. Some books are missing a back cover scan.
   
   The oddest example though, and somehow in keeping with the topic, is figure 109 in "Fractal Music". In my copy of the book, this is a reproduction of Magritte's "The Two Mysteries" and the caption says so. In this edition, it is a redrawn version and the caption now says it is "a caricature" of the Magritte work. At least 4 of the books appear to be affected by poor images and at least 6 of them appear to be fine.
   
   Despite these problems, it's very handy to have the complete set of books in one place. But I'll be keeping the 4 books with the bad scans until a new edition fixes them.



2. Those of us old enough to remember Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American should buy this CD at least for old times sake. All the favourite characters like Dr Matrix and his daughter are there and it brings back many happy memories of trying to work out some of the problems Martin posed



3. It's always a pleasure to read anything by Martin Gardner. By getting his works on disk, I can have them on my laptop - much easier than books. The only reason I give this collection 4 instead of 5 stars is that I would have liked the books to be in a more searchable format than PDFs - a minor complaint.



4. Millions of people around the world have had their interest in mathematics lit, kindled or fed by the writings of Martin Gardner. His regular column "Mathematical Recreations" appeared in "Scientific American" for over a quarter of a century and those articles were readable, entertaining and highly educational.
   This CD-ROM is a collection of all his articles organized according to the book in which they appeared. The books are:
   
   *) Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions
   *) The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions
   *) New Mathematical Diversions
   *) The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions
   *) Martin Gardner's 6th Book of Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American
   *) Mathematical Carnival
   *) Mathematical Magic Show
   *) Mathematical Circus
   *) The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix
   *) Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements
   *) Knotted Doughnuts and Other Mathematical Bewilderments
   *) Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers . . . And the Return of Dr. Matrix
   *) Fractal Music, Hypercards and More . . .
   *) The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications
   
   The opening page displays icons of all of the books and clicking on any icon switches the display to a split screen where the left section contains the table of contents and the right contains the text of the book. Clicking on any entry in the TOC takes you to that article. The collection is searchable, so if you have only a dim recollection of an article you read years ago, you will still be able to find it.
   Martin Gardner is a very humble man, arguing that his skill in mathematical exposition is due to the fact that he does not know very much mathematics. He claims that this forced him to research his subject thoroughly before he began writing the article. I find this the only questionable position that he has ever taken; in my opinion the man is a mathematical genius.



5. 
   Martin Gardner has written very entertaining and engaging books about an incredibly wide variety of mathematical worlds and puzzles, and in the process made complex mathematical ideas come to life. This CD features 15 of his books in pdf form. The pdf files consist of page scans, which makes the pdf scroll a little slowly, but that isn't much of a problem.
   
   I highly recommend this to anybody interested in recreational mathematics.

5 comments about Crochet with Style: Fun-to-Make Sweaters for All Seasons.

1. I have suffered from PAS (Pattern Aquicision Syndrom) for many years,but this is the best pattern book I have found in years. I have finished one sweater and am now making a vest and I am shopping for linen to make slacks to match. I am happy, happy, happy.



2. My rating is not about saying that this book doesn't show the designer to be incredibly skilled and inventive. It does. But on receiving the book I found that, for me, none of the designs grab me and I found them all way too conservative for my tastes, which I admit, run to the wild and wacky.



3. Though the styles are a bit dated, this book is a well-designed introduction to making functional garments in crochet. If you're interested in moving from making flat pieces to clothing, this is a good introductory book.



4. Always looking for books and patterns that have projects that don't look "homemade" . This book has several of those, but also not as many as I would have thought given other reviews.... I will probably use only one or two from the entire book.... was a little disappointed...so like I said it's okay... I would recommend other books more....see my other reviews on the subject



5. As crochet books goes this one is "middle-of-the-road" for me. The only item I would probably make is the cover sweater. Nothing too different than what the magazines are showing.

5 comments about Geekspeak: How Life + Mathematics = Happiness.

1. This is a rather fun book that attempts to help people use their brains to think out of the box and solve about 25 rather off-beat problems such as how big your vocabulary is (hint: sample some pages of a good dictionary) or many elephants have been killed to make piano keys.
   
   The book is chatty and in many ways quite funny, but a more serious book that has more problems is "Guesstimation" that really covers about 100 different estimation problems (e.g., how many are airborne over the US at a given momemnt) by forcing you to lay out your assumptions and allowing one problem to build upon another.
   
   This is woth a read but I would start with Guesstimation (which has an appendix with about 100 unsolved problems),
   
   Geekspeak" is a rather light attempt to bring critical thinking skills to the unwashed masses. It encourages the reader to think about things that are normally taken for granted and come up with the math to solve the problem. Numerous, and sometimes humorous, absurd questions are posed and solved, usually in 5 or 6 pages per chapter, with a one page "Practical Application" example (like how many elephants were killed in Victorian times to make all of those ivory piano keys - no spoilers from me, but it is a lot of elephants!).
   
   The author, Dr. Graham Tattersall, has an interesting writing style and has interjected a lot of humor into the text. This makes the book somewhat of a less serious work, geared more to teens rather than adults. There is some gratuitous profanity (the "F Bomb") in the first chapter ("Scrabbling For Words") and the somewhat morbid chapter on the space required to bury the dead ("Hidden Death") that makes this book not appropriate for the very young.



2. I'm very much a geek, and love mathematics and looking through the world with the mathematician's/scientist's geeky lens. I had high hopes for this book, and it didn't really deliver.
   
   I was hoping for higher level of geekdom - this is a sort of tenth-grade level of geekdom. However, that still puts it at a higher level than most people, and so I suppose that's where the book had to settle, otherwise it would have a much more limited audience. However, "Brief History of Time" didn't shy away from being more advanced, and I think this book could have handled it.
   
   Basically, this books take everyday normal sorts of occurrences/things and attempts to go into some mathematical detail about it, and show how even some potentially very difficult mathematics can be done in the head through approximation, some informed guesswork, and rounding off along the way. Not to get specific answers accurate to four or five significant digits, but to get approximate answers that are maybe within the engineer's allowable 10% plus or minus.
   
   He uses a bunch of interesting examples (How many dumpsters could you fill with a year's worth of American trash? How much land is needed to bury the dead each year? How many piano tuners are there in Boston?) and along the way enlightens on such things as how a company might decide how many of a certain profession a certain city might really need (and thus, if Boston already has a enough piano tuners, they'll send their piano tuner elsewhere), some lessons in probability and emotions (such as that people will play the lottery thinking they'll win, but won't fly, thinking there will be a disaster, even though the chances of winning the lottery are far less than dying in an airplane accident), and also hits some basic physics, from mechanical Newtonian motion to fluid dynamics, and statistics.
   
   It's good at what it does, but seriously, any high schooler who's taken physics and mathematics will already be able to do the stuff in here, and the examples given are interesting, but not particularly geeky.
   
   I also think the writing is not quite up to par - it's not bad writing, but it's in a folksy conversational style that sometimes comes across as condescending and arrogant.
   
   Given the name - GEEKSPEAK - I expected a lot more GEEK from it.
   
   Maybe it's just me, though.
   
   I think John Allen Paulos does a much better job of explaining these kinds of things in his books Innumeracy, Beyond Numeracy, and so on. I recommend the reader to those books instead.



3. This book is perfect for three purposes:
   1) You have ADHD and want short mathematical topics to read on a plane.
   2) You like to be the center of attention at parties by making oddball remarks about arcane computational facts.
   3) You have to prepare for an interview at Microsoft where they ask you those "impossible" questions requiring creative quantitative estimation skills.
   
   It's actually an ok read, but only in small doses. A more interesting popular math book from cover to cover might be "How to Lie with Statistics"



4. I was especially drawn to this book because of its subtitle -- "How Life + Mathematics = Happiness". As a self-proclaimed geek, I felt certain that the author joined me precisely in the way that I am enthusiastic about mathematics -- its beauty and depth, and its unreasonable and surprising efficacy in modeling our physical universe, especially those moments in which it opens a way to an even deeper appreciation of the universe we are in. But that is not the aspect of mathematics that Professor Tattersall highlights. For him, the capacity to obtain a quantifiable handle on the world makes the world less anxiety provoking. I appreciate his thesis -- which I believe could have been restated a few more times to drive his point home -- that an ability to make reasonable quantifiable estimates is a tonic against being overly swayed by "experts" of all stripes in all disciplines.
   
   Dr. Tattersall manages to wring quantifiable results from problems that might initially seem intractable, and his methods are not hard to follow. What is obvious to this reader is that he has ready access to certain constants that those of us who don't think about these kinds of problems don't bother to remember. He makes a case for remembering some of them because they open the way to appreciating how many man-hours it might take to power a light bulb or what a good invention the internal combustion engine actually is. His discussion about the energy obtainable from a wind turbine seems particularly valuable in an election year in which alternative energy is an increasingly scrutinized topic.
   
   Still, once I got the gist of his approach, I labored to complete the book and probably would not have finished it if I didn't have an obligation to review it. My conclusion is this: Quantitative information is sometimes overrated. Spending one's time responding to a compulsion to estimate the number of grains of sand in a nearby beach bucket might really serve to _avoid_ attending to something more important (like why your girlfriend left you out there on the deck all alone in the first place). Those examples that felt tied to larger political or social concerns felt most worthy of my attention. The other examples, like deducing the number of piano tuners in Boston, served to demonstrate his method, but tested my patience.
   
   So, in summary, I was a little disappointed. Maybe it's just because I'm more of a nerd than a geek, so I'll have to wait for someone to write "Nerdword" instead of "Geekspeak".



5. Mathematics pervades the fabric of our life in ways we don't realize, and we have mathematical tools which can help us solve seemingly intractable problems. This thesis is amply illustrated in Geekspeak, and the author is an expert guide to how math can be applied to make our lives more interesting and fulfilling. It's not long and the explanations of solutions, while rigorous, are easy to follow. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the way the world works, who enjoys numerical puzzles, or would just like to expand his mental horizons. Highly recommended.

2 comments about Conan Official Strategy Guide (Bradygames Official Strategy Guides) (Bradygames Official Strategy Guides).

1. For those who like game guides, this one is pretty good. The maps are easy to read and everything is marked with icons (slave girls, etc.) so it's easy to find and know what's coming up so you don't miss anything. Has a nice extra section with Conan lore and information for the uber fan.



2. Game is tough, but that is what we like, Right?... Constant action, (Gore), and wicked annimation!

No comments about Madden NFL 09 Limited Edition Bundle: Prima Official Game Guide.