4 comments about Time Series Analysis: Forecasting & Control (3rd Edition).

1. This book shows the basic developments, and also allow users to get deeper in time series theory. In this revised edition, some discutions about ARMA models, models choice, and calibration of parameters are done. This book is of special interest for hydrologic engineers working in forecasting, planning, an modelling of water resources.



2. Box-Jenkins is THE definitive, foundational text in time series analysis. Mastery of this volume requires extensive graduate level understanding of mathematical statistics. While difficult even for intermediate statistical practitioners, this text is necessary for any professional who examines time series data and well worth the considerable effort to acquire mastery.



3. In the early 1970s I was working on practical forecasting methods to apply to the U.S. Army supply depot workloads. Exponential smoothing was the commonly used "automatic" technique (once smoothing constants have been determined) that had great advantages over the informal methods used by the Army. Then someone told me that Box-Jenkins techniques were more general and powerful. I got a copy of the first edition published in 1970 and found that I could read and understand it even though I had little statistical training. I had a bachelors degree in mathematics. I got to appreciate the book even more when I took a short course from George Box, George Tiao and David Pack based on the book. I began to grasp some of the key ideas of stationary and nonstationary time series and learned about model selection, diagnostic checking and estimation. This started my interest in becoming a statistician and gave me the practical side of time series analysis first. I later specialized in it and got a Ph.D. in statistics.

   Gwilym Jenkins died many years prior to this edition and Box's colleague Greogory Reinsel took on the task of helping to revise and update it.

   It retains its original flavor. It is an applied book with many practical and illustrative examples. It concentrates on the three stages of time series analysis: modeling building, selection, estimation and diagnostic checking and how to iterate the process toward a good solution. The ARIMA time series models are what are considered. The theory of stationary and nonstationary time series is introduced to motivate interpretation of autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation in the model identification phase. Operator notation is introduced and used throughout the book to simplify equations. For me it helped simplify things and illuminate some concepts. But many readers found it difficult and confusing. the book is very systematic and practical. Many of the examples are real examples from Box's work in the chemical industry and his consulting during his career at the University of Wisconsin and also the consulting experience of Gwilym Jenkins in England.

   The publishers and some amazon reviewers say that this edition is a major revision. The second edition published in 1976 was criticized for being essentially a reprint of the first. Although there is a new chapter 12 on intervention analysis and outlier detection it mainly is an expansion of ideas already discussed in the first edition. Theoretical results are kept aside in appendices as in previous editions.

   This is not an up-to-date text on the theory of time series. It deals strictly with the time domain approach and does not include recent advances including nonlinear and bilinear models, models with non-Gaussian innovations and bootstrap or other resampling methods.

   To get a balanced approach that includes the theory for frequency and time domain approaches the book by Shumway, the latest edition of the Brockwell and Davis text and the latest edition of Fuller's text are appropriate. For a graduate course I taught at UC Santa Barbara in 1981 I used the first edition of Fuller's book. Anderson provides a thorough account of the time domain theory. Excellent texts that specialize in the frequency domain approach are Bloomfield's second edition and the two volume book by Priestley. Brillinger's text is also worthwhile for those interested in spectral theory (frequency domain statistics).

   Although there are many things that is text does not cover, it remains the classical text on a rich class of time domain methods that are still very practical. This is a text I bought for reference even though I still have the first edition.




4. In the early 1970s I was working on practical forecasting methods to apply to the U.S. Army supply depot workloads. Exponential smoothing was the commonly used "automatic" technique (once smoothing constants have been determined) that had great advantages over the informal methods used by the Army. Then someone told me that Box-Jenkins techniques were more general and powerful. I got a copy of the first edition published in 1970 and found that I could read and understand it even though I had little statistical training. I had a bachelors degree in mathematics. I got to appreciate the book even more when I took a short course from George Box, George Tiao and David Pack based on the book. I began to grasp some of the key ideas of stationary and nonstationary time series and learned about model selection, diagnostic checking and estimation. This started my interest in becoming a statistician and gave me the practical side of time series analysis first. I later specialized in it and got a Ph.D. in statistics.
   Gwilym Jenkins died many years prior to this edition and Box's colleague Greogory Reinsel took on the task of helping to revise and update it.
   
   It retains its original flavor. It is an applied book with many practical and illustrative examples. It concentrates on the three stages of time series analysis: modeling building, selection, estimation and diagnostic checking and how to iterate the process toward a good solution. The ARIMA time series models are what are considered. The theory of stationary and nonstationary time series is introduced to motivate interpretation of autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation in the model identification phase. Operator notation is introduced and used throughout the book to simplify equations. For me it helped simplify things and illuminate some concepts. But many readers found it difficult and confusing. the book is very systematic and practical. Many of the examples are real examples from Box's work in the chemical industry and his consulting during his career at the University of Wisconsin and also the consulting experience of Gwilym Jenkins in England.
   
   The publishers and some amazon reviewers say that this edition is a major revision. The second edition published in 1976 was criticized for being essentially a reprint of the first. Although there is a new chapter 12 on intervention analysis and outlier detection it mainly is an expansion of ideas already discussed in the first edition. Theoretical results are kept aside in appendices as in previous editions.
   
   This is not an up-to-date text on the theory of time series. It deals strictly with the time domain approach and does not include recent advances including nonlinear and bilinear models, models with non-Gaussian innovations and bootstrap or other resampling methods.
   
   To get a balanced approach that includes the theory for frequency and time domain approaches the book by Shumway, the latest edition of the Brockwell and Davis text and the latest edition of Fuller's text are appropriate. For a graduate course I taught at UC Santa Barbara in 1981 I used the first edition of Fuller's book. Anderson provides a thorough account of the time domain theory. Excellent texts that specialize in the frequency domain approach are Bloomfield's second edition and the two volume book by Priestley. Brillinger's text is also worthwhile for those interested in spectral theory (frequency domain statistics).
   
   Although there are many things that is text does not cover, it remains the classical text on a rich class of time domain methods that are still very practical. This is a text I bought for reference even though I still have the first edition.

No comments about Chronotypes: The Construction of Time.

2 comments about Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon: The Calendar in Mesoamerican Civilization.

1. Vincent Malmstrom has written a wonderfully entertaining book stuffed full of facts on the Mesoamerican systems of calendrical accounting. I had no idea the history of their calendars went so far back, nor that they were so widely used by such a great number of civilizations. His theories fill in where the facts leave off, as most studies on ancient cultures must, and the facts support his hypotheses. Malmstrom's theories on the origin of the calendar are quite different in some aspects than those of scholars before him -- one major difference is that he does not believe the Olmec developed the calendar. I don't want to ruin any surprises for a reader -- and there are some for those who accept the commonly supported theories of the Olmec as the "father" of all subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations -- so I will stop with just one more comment: If you have any interest in Mesoamerica or the cultures of the Zoque, Olmec, Zapotec, Maya, Mixtec, Toltec or Aztec, GET THIS BOOK!



2. The author never jumps to conclusions, but slowly, gathering the clues to lay out a history of the Mayan calendar. It is up to you to decide whether his logic is correct, I could not find any flaws. As the book goes you pick up plenty of astronomical, geographical and historical facts. Very engaging.
   The book has gone out of print, but is now posted in a digital format on the author's website. Still it is sad that it did not get wider attention.

5 comments about A Sideways Look at Time.

1. As with most things that we read, our reception to a work is governed in advance by the attitude we take toward it. If I pick up a novel by John Grisham I don't expect to find a long treatise about the philosophy of law; if I pick up Ronald Dworkin, I don't expect to be told a good story. Neither should I really expect Dworkin to be a storyteller; if I expect a good story from him, I don't really have the right to be disappointed when he doesn't deliver.
   
   Griffths is not really a theorist or a philosopher: she's a writer. Granted, the distinction nowdays between philosophers and (literary) writers is blurred, but the point is that there's no reason to expect Griffths to give us something in the way of a well-reasoned and argued thesis. This is for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that "A Sideways Look at Time" is not meant to be an academic treatise. Sure it's got a bibliography and an index, which you wouldn't find in most novels, but to say that Griffths is arguing a 'thesis' is, I think, inaccurate. Sure she has a fundamental point she wants to get across, but it's nothing like a 'thesis' in any strict sense of the word. Griffths is more like a novelist, essayist, or critic.
   
   On the other hand, Griffths' style is a direct result of her feminism, for which she has been criticized by many reviews on Amazon. Whatever one might think about feminism, as with anything else, a proper understanding of it would seem to be necessary before rejecting it out of hand.
   
   As I granted before, Griffths is not a theorist. She seems to show no real or deep interest in feminist theory, particularly in such cases that are obviously related to her own viewpoint such as the 'women's time' of Julia Kristeva (who is not mentioned in Griffths' book), the 'wild zone' of Elaine Showalter, or, what is even closer to Griffths herself, the writings of Helene Cixous. Her bibliography lists some dubious sources, but Griffths' work has close affinities with many of these kinds of writers.
   
   For one, feminist theory makes a very clear distinction between terms like "feminine", "female", "woman", and even "feminism" and "gynocentrism". Feminist theory (unless you're got severe pathological issues like Valerie Solanas) is not about 'male-bashing'. If people like Griffths are critical of "masculine logic" or "patriarchal systems", this has less to do with the physical domination of (biological) women by men than with a certain way of looking at various aspects of language, thought, and behavior. For better or worse, feminist theorists (at least a lot of them) are standing on the shoulders of the work done by Derrida whose critique of "logocentrism" has been appropriated by feminists as "phallologocentrism". This is, I think, a ridiculous word, but essentially the point is that the "patriarchal system" is less about physical or political domination by men (i.e., it's not just a matter of electing a woman president), but the way in which we use language and in the way we think. The rigorous logical form of academic essays, for example, where one's thoughts are controlled by being manipulated into a particular form (introduction, thesis statement, supporting paragraph #1, etc) is a "masculine" use of language. This is more obviously true of things like Aristotelian categorical logic or modern symbolic logic. "Masculine" language is a language of control and domination in the sense that "control" is a generally masculine trait. A "feminine" practice of writing (a la Cixous) is one that resists trying to 'control' language. "Feminine" writing is not necessarily about women, and neither is it necessarily about bashing men: it's about a certain way or style of writing. Read someone like Rachel Blau DuPlessis or perhaps Collette (or Griffths for that matter) and you'll see an example of a "feminine" style of writing. Now, most feminist theorists would probably say that Griffths is not the best feminine writer, but what I'm trying to get at is that her style is part of her point, and if you're going to praise her point while denigrating her style, it's not apparent to me that you really understood her point in the first place. The repetition, the lack of usual logical form, and so on, are deliberate attempts to let "language speak" instead of the author "speaking language".
   
   (Incidentally, I should say that I've been describing SOME aspects of feminist theory. There are a lot of women writers and feminists who think this is all silly (Ruth Barcan Marcus and Martha Nussbaum come first to mind), but they have taken the time to take postmodern feminism seriously enough to have intelligent reasons for disliking it other than the fact it's "outmoded male-bashing".)
   
   That being said, I don't want to make it sound as if I'm trying to say this is the greatest thing ever written. But I think Griffths effectively does what she set out to do: i.e., to make her readers re-think certain ideas and preconceptions about time that are essentially constraining for men and women alike, because time is not, really, a masculine or feminine matter but a quintessentially human one. A more philosophically fruitful way to think about Griffths and the formal aspects of her work (e.g., her style) in relation to her point about time is actually not so much as a feminist work, but rather as one that has interesting affinities to the philosopher Henri Bergson and his conceptions of mathematical and real time (duration or duree).



2. At the first instance let me issue a warning : You are bound to get caught in the tornado : `A Sideways Look at Time'. Any page will get you hooked.
   
   The new literary genre invented by Jay Griffiths is splendid, wide-ranging and illuminating. Shapeless concerns are articulated spontaneously and you will get fascinated with your new outlook in life. Sift through this compendious book for strands of gold.
   
   The author may be self-indulgent but her arguments are irresistible and provocative.
   
   Analyze and enjoy the following nuggets of wisdom from her book :
   
   1) It is not that time passes, but ourselves. Time is always there... as long as there is life to use it.
   2) Time has immediacy and radiance. It is a sensual perception and not a notation.
   3) Time is not inert. We live with the past and present altogether. The past lives in the present spiritual values.
   4) We live forwards but we understand backwards.
   5) Have just a few hours everyday that are inviolate.
   6) Children live in the heart of the ocean of time itself, in an everlasting Now. A child's eternal present is present-absorbed, present-spontaneous and present-elastic. Children have a dogged, delicious disrespect for punctuality.
   7) Speed is deceptive and alluring, cruel, adrenaline-pounding and fascistic. Language too is driven faster and faster. Markets become super/hyper markets. Words are pressed from text to hypertext, not to supersede but to hypersede themselves.
   8) In prostitution alone, the phrase `Time is money' is almost true.
   9) The earth is sacred. It is not for violation, exploitation or negotiation. It is to be cared for, to be conserved.
   10) With industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and biotechnology, time is reduced to a sequence of numbers without the vibrancy of natural seasons. Divorcing time and nature makes an artifice of Time and artifact of Nature.
   11) Particularity is lost on the Information Super Highway. Being a virtual everywhere is an actual nowhere. It is a Teflon place, wiped clean of muddy, earthly reality. Every act in virtual time is final, finite and finished. No human act is.
   12) Computinglish, the type of language dominant today -overweighing command structures and undervaluing language's playful, seductive and gainsaying subtleties, its ambiguities and nuances, disagreements and disobediences.
   13) The word `Will' is not innocent. What will be is not in the lap of some-God-of-the-future, but is an act of will, an act of power, the will of today. When the will is infinite in its grasp, the only possible result is tragedy. Will must be tempered with respect. This will could be a present, an act of care and generosity.
   14) In this age of `rights', there should surely be Time Rights, fighting any attempts at the metaphysical enslavery of people's time, arguing for a humane clock, for an integrity of time and respect for the dignity of the individual's hours.
   15) Trees do not just last passively over time, they create time by creating breathable air. They are oxygenating lungs of the Earth, vital to the ecosystem and home to millions of species. Time is different in a treescape.
   16) India has its `vessel above time', always full to overflowing, a notion of eternity transcending any temporality.
   17) The mythic moment is where the profane present meets a sacred eternity.
   
   Delve deeply into the following chunks of messages which embrace Dharma, Poetry and Philosophy.
   
   TIME
   
   This fantastic book is a broadside against all the misuses of time. It is a manifesto for time to be seen extraordinary, strange, and sensual. Scientists today use femtoseconds, a millionth of a billionth of second. Time has been increasingly divided and subdivided. Everything is timed. Quality time is quantitative, counted and accounted. The fullness of time is over emptied of its grace and generosity. In femtoseconds and cesium atoms, modernity's time is divided but not distinguished.
   
   Chronos and Kairos were different Gods for time's different aspects. Chronos was the God of absolute time, linear, chronological and quantifiable. Kairos was the god of timing, of opportunity, of choice and mischance, the auspicious and the not-so-auspicious. If you sleep because the clock tells you it is way past your bed time, it is chronological time. If you sleep because you are tired, that is kairological time. Kairological time is the spirit of the particular moment. It is a concept, time enlivened and various, time elastic and fertile.
   
   
   WOMEN
   
   If man has seven ages, women in contemporary Western society has only one. One young one. One fixed one. Time must be stayed, for women, like plastic - with plastic. HRT, cosmetic industry, and the cosmetic surgery all help towards this goal.
   
   Female faces are plasticized into facile facsimile face-lifts. The face's whole meaning is a page to write your character on; the whole purpose of having a face is to show emotion in motion - the mobility at the heart of expressiveness. Obstetricians speed up labor with vacuum extraction or caesarian section. In its wise etymology, what does obstetrics mean? `To be present', to `stand at'. Not to speed up labor but to be present at it. Not to force a woman but to stand by her.
   
   PROGRESS
   
   Progress is only an idea, a mental construct, but it is treated as if it had the status of concrete fact, as if the march of progress had a sort of absolute inevitability and preordained certainty. Progressing into the future appeals because it claims an optimistic mobility while the whole idea of sustainability can be characterized as stasis.
   
   Progress is a specific idea; western, money-oriented, and technologically biased. But it pretends to a universality, so that all peoples must be made to define and embrace progress in exactly the same way. Progress is two-faced; it has a lovely smile for the powerful and a cruel sneer for the poor and underprivileged.
   
   Jay's holistic view of time resolves the modern dilemma - a meaningless existence and the Subtle Trap of Counterfeit Meaning. The Search For Meaning is vital precisely because without it, you fall prey to the lure of "counterfeit" meanings. If you make no effort to discover the meaning of your individual life, you thereby play host to an existential vacuum at the very core of your being. Thank the author Jay Griffiths and read her magnum opus with wonder and reverence. You will find the real meaning of your life. You can hear the language speaks instead of the author.



3. I found this book on a lark, exploring the dreary and predictable college composition readers and handbooks presented on the temporary display tables and shelves of the College Composition and Communication Conference in Chicago this past March. My eye was caught not by the cover or the graphics, both of which seem unfortunately sophomoric--a parking meter, for goodness' sake--but by an epigraph by poet Gary Snyder that appears at the bottom of the cover: "An exercise indeed in Dharma, Poetry, and Philosophy."
   
   Caught up in the no-time of academia and all of its poses and posturings, and rummaging through the publishers' offerings in a kind of post-modern numbness and frenetic despair to fill up the hour before we could herd ourselves to the next session, I picked up this book and started randomly reading. I was hooked immediately. The prose had integrity. Every spot I landed on seemed wet with thought. I DO need a book on time, I thought, and so I scarfed it up for $5 on the last day of the conference, when they strike the displays and the booksellers cast off their offerings so they can fly home unburdened by their wares.
   
   The book has since not disappointed me.
   
   I have taken my time (NPI) reading this. Author Jay Griffiths delights in her sideways thinking, pausing to think about time in deliciously new ways and imagining how we have imagined time in different eras, different historic moments, different cultures. Linear time boxes us in with some powerful assumptions and constructs that we are too often unaware of or resist considering. We need to consider time so as to understand what we are doing in time and what time is doing to us.
   
   At times (NPI) this book seems an eclectic natural history, reminiscent of Annie Dillard or Diane Ackerman. Perhaps the witty hybrid of these writers. Griffiths is extraordinarily play in her carnival-like juggling of concepts and phrases and language. At times she ascends to hilarious spates of alliteration. At times she unravels a string of puns, mostly poking fun of patriarchal concepts and sacred Western ideologies. She's riding a jet ski through the history and philosophy of time, and most of the leaps and dives and cavortings are pregnant with thought, delightful, and at times deliriously funny.
   
   This is an odd book, a wonderfully eclectic book, one to carry with you and read at odd pick-up times when you need a shot of fun and thought. At the airport. On the bus. While eating lunch.
   
   This book, and Griffiths' musings, will reward you. You will find yourself reading passages out loud and marveling at her cleverness and her invitations to shift your awareness of what we too often take, well, for granted.



4. Jay Griffiths does some good work in places pointing out some less obvious results of and evidence for the quickening/ cheapening of our culture, but her text is fairly rambling (sometimes in a good way, but generally not, with points being made over and over with little further elucidation) and there's irrational male-bashing pretty frequently. The book is mostly a catalog of the differences in concepts of time, ownership, history, etc. between western and non-western cultures, and it gets stretched thin in most places.
   My main objection, however, is her constant science-bashing. After the first few chapters, you'd think that Newton was responsible for all of the suffering and exploitation in the world; she demonizes the process and results of science, calling atomic clocks and the like "silly" - but I'm sure that she wouldn't turn up her nose at a GPS receiver or computer! It's obvious that she doesn't understand science at all, but instead takes an outsider's critique of concepts and processes that she has only the vaguest conception of. (OK, one example: she quotes the 'ridiculous' speed of computers as being some high number of "gigaflops per second." 7 gigaflops is 7 billion floating point operations per second [FLoating point OPerations per Second], so gigaflops per second is a ridiculous and nonsensical unit.)



5. "An exercise indeed in Dharma, poetry and philosophy." - Gary Snyder
   
   "This is smart, edgy work, from an original and exciting mind. Jay Griffiths' voice is a light beam in the fog of twenty-first century debate." - Barry Lopez
   
   "A fascinating, highly original meditation on time." - Fritjof Capra
   
   "Jay Griffiths has produced nothing short of an original opening of the human mind, a study of what makes us tick. Her book touches nature and language and us with an enlightening spirit, and it demonstrates that we have been in the thrall of a concept of our own invention, one that we have barely acknowledged, much less understood. Her book is cleverness in the service of genius." Citation on winning the Barnes and Noble "Discover" award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA, 2003
   
   "Like the seminal socialist, feminist and ecological works, Pip Pip articulates what thousands have felt but no-one has been able to put into words. Suddenly, shapeless concerns are brought into focus. Outrage takes the place of confusion, fascination displaces complacency. Cheeky, intelligent, always gripping, Pip Pip re-introduces us to a dimension we've utterly neglected. It will be the opening salvo in a new battle over the human spirit." - George Monbiot, activist, author and columnist for The Guardian
   
   "A mine of ideas, of anecdotes, connections, angles" - Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality
   
   "A truly brilliant and wonderful book, beautifully written. This is one of the best books I've read in years." - Vandana Shiva, author of Monocultures of the Mind
   
   "A wonderful, delightfully humourous polemic against everything that's wrong with the way we deal with time today" - The Independent, Books of the Year
   
   "An irresistibly provocative and political analysis of time... Her wittily enthusiastic thesis is that time has too long been used as a tool to power: as a manifesto, it could cause a revolution." - Iain Finlayson, The Times, Books of the Year
   
   "A whirl of a book. Any page will get you hooked." - New Scientist
   
   "A compulsively readable book cleverly combining influences as diverse as Otis Redding, Beltane and Australian aboriginals; Griffiths does for time what Robert M Pirsig did for truth-obsessed philosophy in 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. It's also a sexual, playful, intensely female book. ... Passionately written and cogently argued, it's a book you should make time to read." - Pete May, Time Out

5 comments about Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time.

1. This book gets off to a somewhat slow start, but is definitely worth the read. The connections in history and the physical adventures of scientists and technologists in the 19th Century are fascinating.



2. The twentieth century is dead, and in this essay we view the remains. This is not, of course, to say that that century's influence is gone. Far from it, and that is why we view the remains. How they got that way is the cautionary tale embedded in this brief survey of some of the chief intellectual monuments of the twentieth century. New historical research shows that virtually no discipline has remained immune to the "natural" mathematics developed at the turn of the century in order to cope with the supposed "paradoxes" generated by set theory-not economics, not physics, not biology: apparently no area of inquiry has escaped being made part of the "natural" mathematics project. This mathematics asserts that mathematical formulations are inherently anomalous; the evidence of this is that they generate paradoxes. Therefore, the idea that mathematics is an aspect of human perception, must be made a part of mathematical formulations even though it plays no internally consistent role in any "natural" mathematical formulation.
   
   The role of "natural" mathematics in the disciplines has gone unremarked for the very reason it was influential in the first place. Whether the researcher was the physicist Albert Einstein, the economist Piero Sraffa, the logician Kurt G?del, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the biologist Motoo Kimura, scientists in non-mathematics disciplines felt they were unable to express their ideas mathematically. This is the chief revelation of the new historical research, and a remarkable and unexpected (given the exalted reputations of these figures) unifying feature of twentieth-century intellectual history. These thinkers had to search for appropriate mathematical terms in the latest mathematics of their day. They were unprepared to cope with the idea that flaws in the mathematics lodged errors in their theories. The current reexamination of the mathematics of the disciplines-which will turn out to be the chief intellectual enterprise of the early twenty-first century-began with the revelation of the faulty approach taken to set theory by some of the chief proponents of "natural" mathematics.
   
   It should be noted that this unification of twentieth-century ideas on the basis of the "natural" mathematics they share, was not the unification sought by twentieth-century thinkers themselves. It has gone pretty much unremarked that twentieth-century thinkers sought to unify the disciplines on the basis of relativity. It has gone unremarked largely because the project was abandoned when physics developed terms of art so recherch? that the data and concepts of other disciplines could not be matched to them. The approach was swiftly abandoned, and suppressed out of embarrassment. As we shall see, bringing Einstein's work into alignment with "natural" mathematics-something which has not been possible until now-allows us to begin asking the kinds of questions which will in the end reveal precisely and in detail, the influence of "natural" mathematics with which we still live and in which we still express our scientific ideas.
   
   With the appearance of the general relativity theory, it became increasingly difficult for other disciplines to "map" their own terms of art to those of relativity in an internally consistent fashion. But we know now that it was attempted very high up in the western intellectual hierarchy, as Galbraith has shown in his work on Keynes. Ernst Mayr, at one time the doyen of evolutionary studies, claimed during the 1950s that evolution could be seen as a genetic theory of relativity. However, in his later writings that concept went the way of the dinosaur and today he is a figure of fun; no one bothers to investigate what he meant by the term, which is rather too bad, since it may turn out to be one of the few interesting ideas he ever had. Today, of course, we say that it's impossible: there are no quarks in biology, no leptons in economics and certainly no charm in mathematics. You can't get, logically, from any concept in any of those disciplines, to any concept of the Standard Model. We smile at the naivet? of Keynes for even attempting what until very recently we considered quite impossible.
   
   Keynes did not have a very good grasp of relativity, or, seen through the lens of Sraffa's Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities (1960), even a very good grasp of economics. But it is not altogether fanciful to see internally consistent links between the relativistic world and the biological or economic worlds. After all, light is one of the postulates of relativity, as it is in biology, and humanity is part of biology, and economics the study of one aspect of humanity.
   
   Links like that, however, didn't arouse the competitive instincts of early twentieth-century intellectuals. What did arouse them was the idea that Einstein's special relativistic argument had wound up at the top of the heap of argumentation. His rhetorical strategy is what proved so seductive. We are starting to take that apart now in the twenty-first century, as I shall show and as Andrea Cerroni has shown. However, at the time of its appearance (although Einstein was frustrated at how long it took to gain recognition even after the publication of the 1905 papers), what impressed intellectuals was the special relativistic argument qua argument-above all, the relativistic "event," what today we would call a spacetime point. To them it was a matter simply of ignoring the subject matter-the materials-of the argument, and just looking at the argument as an internally consistent structure. It was gorgeous-it had no flaws. What was even more impressive was that it required Einstein himself to point out the limitations of special relativity. If you could come to terms with his argument, then you could configure the terms of your own discipline so that they mapped to relativity in an internally consistent way. Then you would have a relativity theory of economics, or biology-or even mathematics!
   
   It must be noted that we are still enamored of the explanatory power of the Standard Model, despite its having turned into something like a Christmas tree. For this reason, historians of ideas pay little attention to the idea that the fundamental ideas of relativity are simply shared by the other disciplines. We are still in an early stage of the examination of the influence of "natural" mathematics. The apparently bad experience of earlier attempts to unify the disciplines, along with disciplinary hubris, still makes us leery of revisiting the settled questions of the various disciplines. And there is nothing wrong with respecting the boundaries these disciplines have set up for themselves. In fact, it allows us to take the chief current ideas of different disciplines one by one, examining them on their own terms in light of the latest mathematical historical research. This examination begins to reveal their shared ideas, and the overarching concerns of twentieth-century thinking. In the course of this examination, we shall see that we have begun to free ourselves of many received ideas.
   
   One of the most important goals of the discussion which follows, is to briefly introduce specialists to major monuments outside their disciplines and to provide reasons for specialists to familiarize themselves with these works which, initially, may seem to be remote from their concerns. Why should a chemist read Sraffa, or an economist read Kimura? Hopefully, the linkage of these writers through "natural" mathematics, will provide, above all, the stimulus for specialists to reexamine ideas in their own fields which they take too much for granted.
   
   Piero Sraffa's Economics of "Natural" Mathematics
   
   Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities is still the most advanced work of economics and one of the chief artifacts of the twentieth century. How does this famous work relate to relativity? We know now that Sraffa read books by Whitehead, Einstein and discussions of quantum mechanics. By the time he came to these works, "natural" mathematics was well under way. The "paradoxes" were so well accepted that their origins-the exploration of which is the means by which Alejandro Garciadiego reveals their flaws-had been buried. What we don't know is the extent to which Sraffa went beyond a general understanding of the terms he read and was able to use them in their own context as terms of art. By the time he started working, had he imbibed enough "natural" mathematics through other means that what he read merely confirmed him in his procedures and terms? It appears, by the way, that Wittgenstein never read a word of Einstein-at least I have seen no documentation of it, although there are comments on relativity in his remarks on the foundations of mathematics and other places.
   
   Sraffa was not, I think, sufficiently aware of the polemical program of "natural" mathematics to be on his guard against it, and so he did not set himself the task of looking into its terms. Nevertheless, he may have sensed that something was amiss, and may have simply been trying to express his misgivings using the received terms of art of economics. Examining Production as a form of protest may, in the end, make a lesser but more useful figure of Sraffa. That certainly seems the way we are beginning to examine twentieth-century mathematics itself. It is an approach which allows works which, otherwise, are strangers to each other, to "talk" to each other.
   
   Sraffa, of course, tried his hand at unifying economics and physics, without much success. He regarded relativity as standing for the proposition "that for every effect there must be sufficient cause, that the causes are identical with their effects, and that there can be nothing in the effect which was not in the causes: in our case, there can be no product for which there has not been an equivalent cost, and all costs...must be necessary to produce it." These commonplaces were, of course, a serious misreading and later a misapplication of relativity, further compounded by an even later putative rejection of the misreading. But if, as appears to be the case, the mature works of both Einstein and Sraffa are linked by their common expression in "natural" mathematics, then we must undertake an evaluation which has not previously been possible. We can consider the following statement by Sraffa to be his formulation of a spacetime point:
   
   [F]or circulating capital, at the same moment that its value passes into the product, in most cases, also the material substance which is the bearer of that value, either passes into the product (raw material) or anyway passes out of the process of production (e.g. fuel). On the other hand, for fixed capital, the transfer of value from, e.g., the machine to the product, appears as a purely abstract process, which takes place without any corresponding transfer of material substance: that value is passed is undoubted, for the machine decreases in value while the product increases, but the machine remains complete in all its parts, with its efficiency unimpaired for the time being, and ready to resume operation in the next year. In order to see how this abstract process takes place an abstract point of view is inevitable.
   
   What is the geometrical expression of this statement? By way of contrast to his previous statement, this statement introduces a term of art, the term "abstract," by means of which it seems that all the other terms in the statement become terms of art as well. Consider, for example, that we cannot understand the word "capital" as used here, as having any of the meanings we previously associated with it, but instead, only the one Sraffa gives it in his argument. Since this opens up the possibility that that argument is the "natural" mathematical argument, we can in turn subject it to questions relating it to relativity as another expression of "natural" mathematics:
   
   1. What are Sraffa's assumptions here about light? about biological theory (considering Production deals with agricultural production)?
   2. What is the economic "event" here, regarding that as a spacetime point?
   3. Does the approach here reflect the "natural" mathematics as of the 1942, when it was written, or the developments of physics of the same period? We think of the "developments" of "natural" mathematics as ridiculous, rather like the "development" of phrenology. However, its practitioners were-and are-busily scribbling away. Did Sraffa "keep up" with this nonsense and "incorporate" it?
   4. What are Sraffa's mathematical assumptions in this statement? Are they entirely Euclidean, or Euclidean at all? Remember that Einstein adopts strict Euclidean ideas as the assumptions of special relativity, along with the constancy of the speed of light.
   5. Does the train experiment in Relativity map logically to the Production "event"?
   
   We shall have occasion to give Einstein's formulation of a spacetime point as this same train experiment, and open up the possibility of setting Einstein's and Sraffa's statements side by side as expressions of one idea, or different aspects of one question. In this latter statement of Sraffa, what "paradox" is he trying to express, what "paradox" is he trying to avoid?
   
   Kurt G?del's Insufficient Examination of "Natural" Mathematics
   
   It is clear now that Garciadiego's book on the set-theoretical "paradoxes" is a dagger pointed straight at the heart of G?del's theorem. Above all, this devastating book demolishes not only Jules Richard's paradox, but also, the rest of the book shows that the various paradoxes which so entranced Bertrand Russell and his contemporaries, weren't paradoxes at all-they weren't anything at all, they were nonsense, letters pulled out of a bag. For example, he shows that the famous "paradox" of Cesare Burali-Forti simply does not exist. In the context of an attempt to prove the Trichotomy Law, Burali-Forti tried "to prove by reductio ad absurdum that the hypothesis [involved in his own argument] was false and this method required supposing the hypothesis true and arriving at a contradiction. The employment of the hypothesis, as an initial premise, generated the inconsistency. But once the hypothesis is seen to imply a contradiction it is thereby proved to be false." It is disconcerting to reflect that these two items are already sufficient to dislodge much of twentieth-century mathematics. It is doubly disconcerting to note that G?del approvingly cites Richard's paradox in his 1931 paper. G?del accepted the false but widely held tradition that Richard argued that truth in number theory cannot be defined in number theory. It turns out that what is undefined in Richard's argument (as he himself pointed out) is the number crucial to making the argument. However, G?del added to Richard's argument the idea that provability in number theory can be defined in number theory, and came up with mistaken result that if the provable formulae are all true, then there must be some true but unprovable formulae. G?del depends, for an internally consistent distinction between truth and provability, on the idea that there is some logical content to Richard's "paradox." Because that "paradox" has no logical content, we are left not with an argument, but instead with a question: what is G?del's argument? This change in attitude toward G?del's theorems, is one of the first revolutions wrought by the historical inquiry into "natural" mathematics-but it is not the last. Above all, as we shall see it allows us to link G?del's ideas in an internally consistent way, to those of other twentieth-century thinkers, the goal of our present inquiry.
   
   And special relativity? In fact, we know very little about G?del's study of relativity through the years, apart from his rather uninteresting later relativistic studies, and Solomon Feferman in his editorial notes to G?del's Works is quite dismissive of some of G?del's restatements of relativistic ideas-in fact, he is rather dismissive of some of G?del's restatements of G?del's own ideas. When did G?del first read the 1905 papers, or did he ever read them? There were discussions of relativity in the Vienna Circle, but he seems to have shied away from them; physics, he evidently felt, was clearly Einstein's domain-he could never be Number One there. What exactly did he read by Einstein? What was his first reaction on hearing of special, or general, relativity? We just don't know. On this crucial subject, there is very little documentation for the cases of many important twentieth-century intellectuals (except, perhaps, Duchamp, who freely confessed that much of what he learned about science he gathered from conversation-apparently he never read a word by Einstein).
   
   This leads us to ask the same sorts of questions about G?del's paper as we do about Sraffa's book. Is there an assumption about light in that paper? This seems a very odd question, even an inappropriate one, to ask about a mathematical argument. However, G?del provokes it with this remarkable statement in his paper: "Numbers cannot in fact be put into a spatial order"-this is the infamous footnote 8. What does he mean by a fact? by space? What are the Euclidean assumptions, if any, of the paper? What, in special relativistic terms, is a G?delian event? Is G?del's theorem an argument at all, and if so, is it, not a metamathematical argument or even a piece of formal logic, but in fact a straightforward physical theory? Is the paper nothing more than a retelling of Einstein's train experiment?
   
   Motoo Kimura's Search for a "Natural" Mathematics
   
   It may well turn out, based on an improved understanding of "natural" mathematics, that it was not Einstein who developed the special relativity theory, but instead, Mendel and Darwin, because the rhetoric of geometry-the "natural" geometry-in both Mendel's paper and Darwin's Origin is what we now recognize as demonstrably similar to the geometry Einstein sets forward in the train experiment in Relativity. Only an understanding of "natural" mathematics makes this linkage possible. Just as Einstein sets it forward to articulate the physical event, so Mendel and Darwin use it to articulate the biological event. It is in biology, of course, that we are most justified in asking for an internally consistent discussion of light. Do Darwin and Mendel, and later Motoo Kimura, have light as an assumption in their arguments, and what is that assumption? Are their assumptions Euclidean? Or better yet, if Einstein were to posit a relativistic biological event, how would he express it? Or is he expressing it? Is selection the relativistic event?
   These are not questions necessarily restricted to special relativity. This is because Kimura is a statistician. His increasingly sophisticated use of statistical concepts led him to a mathematical apparatus which, in The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, looks remarkably similar to the mathematical apparatus of, say, Richard Feynman's QED. The modern discipline of statistics grows out of "natural" mathematics. Are the similarities internally consistent? Is Kimura's random drift-responsible, in his view, for most mutation, rather than selection pressure-an exception to selection, or is it an exception to relativity? What is his biological event: substitution? mutation? selection? something else? Is the neutral theory a biological theory, or a physical theory? This latter question arises in considering a comment drawn from Kimura by a critic. In response, Kimura says: "Just as synonyms are not `noise' in language, it is not proper to regard the substitution of neutral alleles simply as noise or loss of genetic information....It seems to me to be more appropriate to say that strictly neutral alleles are absolutely noiseless." These metaphors are physical ideas. Of what?
   
   The basis for unfolding the context of the terms of art of these different disciplines, is the understanding that they emerge from a shared "natural" mathematics. Neither Kimura nor Sraffa came to their disciplines from mathematics, and they felt they needed a mathematical expression for their ideas. Kimura learned French rather late just so he could read Gustave Mal?cot-who pioneered the use of "natural" mathematics in biology-and Sraffa went, like Diogenes, through mathematician after mathematician searching for the mathematical expression of his ideas. We still need to clarify the doctrinal influence on Sraffa of two "natural" mathematicians-Frank Ramsey and Abram Besicovitch-as opposed to the technical assistance they gave him. At any rate, Ramsey spent much of his brief career exploiting a quixotic and quite baseless assumption of difference between types of "paradoxes"-which were not paradoxes. Did he put Sraffa in the picture on the problems with the set-theoretic "paradoxes?" Almost certainly, no. Was Sraffa in a position to ask about them? No. Did Ramsey himself bother to find out about them? No.
   
   Historical research is revealing the difficulties in the chief ideas of "natural" mathematics. For example, L.E.J. Brouwer promulgated what he called an "infinite ordinal number." Supposedly this notion had been ratified by Georg Cantor's well-ordering of the ordinal numbers. But it turns out that Cantor never did so, never claimed he had done so, and never used the term "infinite ordinal number." As Garciadiego says: "[G. G.] Berry maintained that Cantor had virtually proved the existence of the well-ordering of the ordinal numbers by showing that ordinals of the second class are well-ordered....but Cantor simply indicated that `we shall show that the transfinite cardinal numbers can be arranged according to their magnitude, and, in this order, [they] form, like the finite numbers, a `well-ordered aggregate' in an extended sense of the words.'" Nevertheless, Brouwer's term worked its way into the discourses of ?mile Borel (the mentor of Mal?cot), Andrei Kolmogorov, Haskell Curry and John von Neumann, and is, regrettably, at the heart of contemporary probability and computational theory; computer science is replete with "natural" mathematics-what false results is it thereby giving us? It is likely that we can put most twentieth-century disciplines in the form of Richard's "paradox," see how they partook of "natural" mathematics, and reveal their flaws. Now that we are more familiar with the idea that the project of the twentieth century-regardless of discipline-is "natural" mathematics, it is probably best to approach any idea in a twentieth-century discipline with two questions: what "paradox" is it trying to avoid? what "paradox" is it trying to express?
   
   It should not be surprising if biology turns out to be a branch of physics. Most of Gregor Mendel's published papers are in meteorology. Charles Darwin began as a physicist seeking to describe reality and that concern is recurrent. He first sought to do so in the context of cosmology and geology and only later turned to biology, as we see when he presents his physical ideas in a book no one reads anymore, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842). For Darwin, the identity of physics and biology is due to the progressivism of reality. Nature-encompassing all the disciplines-is the continuum of that progressivism; paradox supposedly flowed from the tension between perfection as an assumption and progressivism as a conclusion. Both Mendel and Darwin seem to have turned to biology because it offered more, and more internally continuous, physical data than cosmology or geology. Of all twentieth-century researchers, it appears to be Kimura who took his discipline closest to relativity. Is that true? Both Darwin and Kimura set their work in the context of physics. Darwin says "that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Kimura's gloss on this passage is to remind us that although mutational "random processes are slow and insignificant for our ephemeral existence, in the span of geological times, they become colossal." Indeed, perhaps a clue to understanding Sraffa's use of "natural" mathematics, can be found in this comment on Marx by David Riazanoff, the editor of his notebooks: "If in 1881-82 [Marx] lost his ability for intensive, independent intellectual creation, he nevertheless never lost the ability for research. Sometimes, in reconsidering these Notebooks, the question arises: Why did he...expend so much labor as he spent as late as the year 1881, on one basic book on geology, summarizing it chapter by chapter." What was G?del's or Sraffa's theory of geology? We in turn hunt among concepts such as "fixed law," "gravity," "random" and "geological times" for the necessary internal links between geology, physics and biology...but perhaps these words have fallen apart and we cannot use them anymore. It appears, in any event, that if physics was the monarch of twentieth-century science, during the nineteenth century, the resort was to geology to test all theories. Perhaps we don't understand twentieth-century thinkers very well because they're not twentieth-century thinkers: they're nineteenth-century thinkers.
   
   Another idea is also beginning to take shape: there are no "paradoxes," at least as far as we know. Researchers, it seems to me, have resisted looking into the set-theoretical paradoxes because it leads us further and further back in time and so implicates more and more important ideas. If the set-theoretic "paradoxes" are not paradoxes, are the earlier paradoxes (for example, the liar paradox) really paradoxes? And more importantly, to what extent are the earlier mathematical expressions in the various disciplines, simply projects to "avoid" or "solve" these paradoxes, which in turn may not be paradoxes at all? To what extent is the history of objective discourse, a falsely based "natural" mathematics having no logical object? To what extent can we say to everything we currently consider to be internally consistent: what is your argument?
   
   And relativity? In taking even a retrospective glance at the works of only three twentieth-century figures in relation to relativity, we are free to put ourselves very far in the future, at a time when an internal inconsistency has been found in relativity itself and that theory is an historical artifact. Then the three look to be, not attempting to map their work to relativity, but rather, using the inherited concepts of their respective disciplines to critique relativity, looking for an internal inconsistency which actually lies in the "natural" mathematics Einstein shares with them. Consider this passage from Lawson's accurate translation of Einstein's Relativity:
   
   Are two events (e.g. the two strokes of lightning A and B) which are simultaneous with reference to the railway embankment also simultaneous relatively to the train? We shall show directly that the answer must be in the negative. When we say that the lightning strokes A and B are simultaneous with respect to be embankment, we mean: the rays of light emitted at the places A and B, where the lightning occurs, meet each other at the mid-point M of the length AB of the embankment. But the events A and B also correspond to positions A and B on the train. Let M1 be the mid-point of the distance AB on the traveling train. Just when the flashes (as judged from the embankment) of lightning occur, this point M1 naturally coincides with the point M but it moves...with the velocity...of the train.
   
   This passage is by now so familiar that we think there can be nothing new to be seen in it. But there is: it is the term, "naturally coincides." This term ("f?llt zwar...zusammen" in the original German) leaps out at us because we are looking at it with twenty-first century eyes, not twentieth-century eyes; indeed, perhaps the most difficult cultural task now before us is simply to realize that we are not living in the twentieth century.
   
   "Natural" coincidence is otherwise known as a spacetime point. Einstein has already spent twenty-odd pages of this very brief book laying out the assumptions which underlie the train experiment. He is very careful about being consistent with them, and he is a devoted and very strict Euclidean; he wished never to deviate from Euclid, a stance which reminds us that Sraffa wished never to deviate from Marx. But Einstein was not, it appears, quite careful enough. We know that he is assuming, along with Euclid, that the definition of the coincidence of two points is a point. However, we have never gotten (and never get, in any of Einstein's writings) a definition of a "natural" coincidence of two points. This alone prevents us from going on and this argument, which defined the twentieth century, abruptly ends.
   We also have a problem if we try to resolve the issue ourselves. If we simply drop the term "naturally" we run into a situation in which Einstein has told us to assume two Cartesian coordinate systems, but now leaves us with one, since, following from the definition of the coincidence of two points, if two parallel coordinate systems coincide at one point, they coincide at all points and are one coordinate system, not two. We have been led to a contradiction.
   
   A spacetime point is no longer a physical fact, it is an outmoded doctrine. This is the first occasion we have to note a logical mistake in Einstein's fundamental ideas. As it happens, we know how he came to make it. As pointed out recently, Einstein was enormously impressed by Poincar?'s Science and Hypothesis (1902). Alarmingly, we have very recently been told that Sraffa "studied intensively" this same book. That's not a good sign; indeed, it makes us wonder if Sraffa's idea of the "abstract" is the same as Einstein's view of the "natural." What they were totally unprepared for was the "natural" mathematical point of view Poincar? was trying so hard to sell them. As Garciadiego points out, Poincar? used the book to set out "numerous inconsistencies arising from set theory....Poincar? was hunting for `paradoxes' because he was trying to discredit both Cantor's theory of sets and Russell's logicism." But there were no paradoxes.
   The young Einstein faced both a well-developed mathematical debate and a polemic. He had no idea of this. Note that at no time did Einstein ever question the status of the set theory, or other paradoxes, or the historical approach developed to deal with them (neither did Kimura or Sraffa). Instead, he felt comfortable expressing the relativity of simultaneity through "natural" mathematics without ever examining it, with disturbing consequences for his theory. In Poincar? he read and accepted the idea that "the mind has a direct intuition of this power ["proof by recurrence" or "mathematical induction"], and experiment can only be for [the mind] an opportunity of using it, and thereby of becoming conscious of it." In geometry "we are brought to [the concept of space] solely by studying the laws by which...[muscular] sensations succeed one another." These ideas were developed in order to deal with paradoxes which did not exist. Thus, they had no object-they related to absolutely nothing. Poincar? is such an unreliable guide that we have to look very skeptically at the work of anyone who was influenced by him. This idea of "succession" was vital if the "standstill" to which the "paradoxes" had brought mathematics, was to be overcome. As we shall see, this logically empty notion was applied with damaging results.
   
   We now understand, however, why we never find "natural" coincidence among Einstein's postulates or definitions or among his conclusions: those are not its job. Its job is to float free of all context-depending on shared prejudices or simple uninquisitive ignorance in order to stay afloat-serving as a facilitator of arguments which cannot be carried out logically. Thus, we see exactly why the term occurs where it does in the relativity of simultaneity: it "allows" one point to "succeed" another, in conformity with the demands of "natural" mathematics. For the first time, we see Einstein-not as our contemporary-but rather, as a figure out of the past. He is hobbled by that by which we distinguish all figures out of the fact: by the infirmity of his intellectual appartus. Where is "natural" coincidence in G?del? in Sraffa? in Kumura?



3. I am in complete agreement with several other reviewers that the book is overly long and redundant. It should have been edited to at least half its size. The last chapter is totally unnecessary. This is a shame because the basic material provides a unique perspective on the history of Relativity that is convincing and illuminating. I don't find fault with the technical level as some other reviewers and I believe the connections between Einstein's and Poincare's work is well made.



4. The goal of this book is to provide the context for a momentous shift in physics; the change from Newtonian conceptions of absolute time to the modern theories of relativity/spacetime. For Galison, the key seems to be the shift from an abstract notion of absolute time to an operationally defined definition of time based on signalling between clocks. This change is part of the enormous change from classical physics to modern physics that occured following the turn of the past century. Galison's aim is to show the broad connections between this event and a series of parallel phenomena in contemporary science, technology, and even politics. Galison concentrates on 2 key figures; the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, and his younger and even greater contemporary Albert Einstein. Galison shows very well that issues of time, defintions of universal and local time, and methods of assessing time were broadly important in the late 19th century. The expansion of European empires, the huge increase in international maritime trade, and the development of dense railway networks required more accurate standardization of time and correlation of times at different parts of the globe and within different countries. These practical issues brought questions about defining time and debates over methods of defining time to the fore. Much of this debate required attention to setting conventions for time measurement. At the same time, major issues of physics and philosophy had started to undermine the historic view of absolute time. Galison shows that both Einstein and Poincare were quite deeply embedded in these practical issues. Poincare as a major figure in French science dealt directly with many of these issues on both a national and international scale. Einstein, through his work in the Swiss patent office directly encountered many of the emerging technologies related to time measurement. Both were interested not only in physics related to time but also to philosophical speculation related to time. Einstein would ultimately push physics across the threshold of a truly relativistic account of time though Poincare came very close. While some of this book is redundant, Galison certainly presents a convincing case for the interconnection between the physics of Einstein and Poincare, and the other time related concerns of this period.
   While Galison doesn't address this issue specifically, his account is relevant to the famous account of scientific change developed by Thomas Kuhn. It is hard to see the decisive paradigm shift described by Kuhn in Galison's account. Indeed, much of this account seems to vindicate the conclusion of the historian of physics Kragh (Quantum Generations) who sees late 19th century physics as quite dynamic and considerable continuity between the physics of the late 19th century and what came after.



5. Galison has written a very uneven story. It begins with a long, confusing 50 page introduction that assumes a considerable knowledge of the theory of relativity from the reader. This is followed by an often boring, pedantic 150 pages describing late-19th century efforts to synchronize clocks. The connection to relativity is described and justified, but not enough for the length of this section. The level of scientific and historical knowledge alternates between mid-level technical to detailed historical esoterica; e.g., Galison discusses the "Dreyfus affair" as if the reader would know all about it. The final 100 pages consist of a dense discussion of the philosophical and historical implications of Poincare's and Einstein's different choices concerning their approaches to relativity.
   
   This book will be of interest to readers very involved in the history of science. The measurement of longitude is better described by Dava Sobel. Galison does a terrible job with relativity: his discussions on the subject tend to be confusing rather than enlightening. Unless you are particularly interested in the failings of Henri Poincare, or a detailed discussion of the overlap of synchronize timekeeping and the theory of relativity, skip this book.

1 comments about Eternity and Time's Flow (S U N Y Series in Philosophy).

1. Robert C. neville explores the metaphysical foundations of modern scientific concepts in a tradition that goes back to the great writings of continental philosopy such as Hegel, Husserl and Bergson. But, being an American in the end of the twentieth century, Neville uses the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the metaphysical concepts of the ontology of Martin Heidegger, together with contemporary quantum physics theory and the big-bang theory, to give us an holistic account of the concept of time as examined through the context of Eternity, that is complimentary to Christianity thought, Buddhizm and Zen. No other book that I have read deals with such a deep philosophical question concerning time in such a broad context. You can never tell if neville is more faitefull to modern science, continental philosophy, religion or eastern thought. Neville is a modern theologian, a briliant scholar, that does not forget modern science, and treat it with due respect, like he treats continental philosophy and metaphysics. Although he deals with religion, metaphysics, moral philosophy, philosophy of science, physics and zen philosophy, Neville never fails the temptation to write in a popular way or in indoctrinical voice. He truly take the imposible task to write a complete metaphysic of time and Eternity, in the same context that Hegel judged Descartes, Spinoza, Liebnitz, Lock, Berckly and Hume to have their own metaphysics. Because Neville's book borrows from three main systems, that is from Bergson, Whitehead and Heidegger, and synthesise them together in order to find the answear to the question of time as this concept is used in physics, western culture, Budhism, Judaism and Christianity, it is not too exaggerated to claim that it is an original thought that have its place as one of western culture keystones - but still, only intellectualy, since this book is very rarly known in philosophical circles and university departments. The only flaw of this book is the trust that Neville feels (to my mind) towards the western modern sciences of astronomy, chemistry, physics and astrophysics. It seems to me that in bringing science into philosophy Neville have made this book a waste in a hundred years from now: it will be old instead of immortal. As science change, it will make this book redundant. For now, this book have a superb analysis of self-will and self-responsibility, that is based on its excellent understanding of the meaning of time (and subjective time) as related to the concept of Eternity.

3 comments about Applied Bayesian Forecasting and Time Series Analysis (Chapman & Hall Texts in Statistical Science).

1. Pole et al.'s small primer on bayesian time series analysis is a good first step for an outsider to the area. The book is split into two parts. The first gives a favourable treatment of bayesian analysis. The second half of the book is an extended tutorial to accompany the canned program and data set included with the text.

   The program itself is easy to use, although in talking with people who have worked through the book, they seem to have gone on to write their own code rather than rely on the program, BATS.




2. This is a hands-on introduction to bayesian forecasting and dinamic models. After a brief overview on theory, it leads you to some fully developed examples. The second part of the book simply develop some examples on the BATS program supplied with the book. They clearly feature the main capabilities of the program. The main drawback is that all the book is focused on that program, so BF and DM are glossed over. So, a reading to the theory focused book "bayesian forecasting and dinamic models" from Harrison is mandatory for a deeper dive into this issue.



3. This is the second text authored by West and Harrison on the Bayesian approach to time series. I have read and reviewed both of them. The other text by these authors provides a rigorous development of time series analysis using Bayesian methods. While that text is very good at helping the reader understand the theory and the whys and hows of implementing it, this text is very much a book that shows applications and how the Bayesian time series approach is used to produce forecasts based on this methodology. The authors are expert researchers on this topic and aside from these two books texts on Bayesian approaches to time series are not easy to find.

5 comments about Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time.

1. I never realized that Daylight Saving Time (DST) had such a controversial and turbulent history. I believe that the author has done an excellent job in detailing DST's evolution, often in excruciating detail, right up to the current, yet still fluctuating, situation. The writing is clear and engaging making the book very easy to read. The book also contains many caricatures that were published over the years clearly expressing people's views on this most contentious issue. I highly recommended this book to anyone, especially those interested in recent history. The fact that this subject has recently made the news makes this book very timely.



2. Prerau has done a fine job chronicling the history of DST. Every reader is certain to find something here he didn't know (Example: Having been overseas 1973-75, I was completely unaware that the U.S. had ever experienced a period of year-round DST!) I'd prefer he had spent more time exploring the available evidence of DST's "advantages" and "disadvantages," which he comes to rather late in the book.
   
   New legislation in 2005 will extend the period of Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. considerably, so this topic is "timely" in more ways than one. Whether you love or hate DST, this book provides a useful foundation of history and fact as the controversy bubbles on.



3. I grew up hearing as an explanation for Daylight Saving Time that it was "good for the farmers." It turns out that this is a widespread misconception, and it also turns out not to be true: farmers have in fact historically opposed the adoption or expansion of DST because of the inconveniences it imposes on them. Another childhood illusion put to bed, if decades late.
   
   Since 1986 the U.S. has observed DST from the first Sunday of April to the last Sunday of October. Beginning in 2007, DST is to be expanded by three weeks (in accordance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005). It will now begin on the second Sunday of March and extend until the first Sunday of November. Given this change I figured it was high time for me to find out what Daylight Saving Time is all about.
   
   I review below David Prerau's Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. It's the first of two DST-related books that have been weighing down my TBR shelves. Both books were published in 2005--the idea of exploring DST apparently being very much in the air in the first years of the new millennium.
   
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   Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1784, when he was serving as the American minister to France, that Parisians conserve energy--in the form of candle wax and tallow--by changing their habits, rising with the sun rather than sleeping in with their shutters closed against the daylight. The idea never caught on, and it is at any rate impractical as it would depend on the alteration of individual habits on a large scale for it to have any chance of working for a community. Over a hundred years later, in 1905, a certain William Willett devised an alternative plan for increasing the number of usable daylight hours during England's summer months. His plan, what we now call Daylight Saving Time, called for setting the nation's clocks forward in the spring (he initially imagined the time being changed in 20-minute increments on each of four successive Sundays) and back in the fall, thus not relying on people to alter their sleep patterns on an individual basis. His idea didn't catch on either, at least not immediately. In his book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time author David Prerau, who has coauthored government reports on the effects of DST, traces the complex history of DST from Willett's tireless campaigning on behalf of its adoption to the modern era. Prerau also provides a chapter on the two artificial adjustments to natural sun time that men adopted prior to the introduction of DST. (Mean solar time was adopted starting in the late 18th century. It differs from apparent solar time in that the length of a day is a constant throughout the year rather than depending on the amount of daylight in any given day, which varies throughout the year. The second artificial adjustment was standard time, adopted in the late 19th century, which is when a single mean time is recognized over a large area.)
   
   The history of DST has been, as Prerau's subtitle asserts, a highly contentious one, the case for and against its adoption taken up over the years by a variety of special interest groups--the railroads, theater operators, purveyors of sporting goods, golfers and farmers and concerned parents and religious purists. Political cartoonist jumped to portray its inconveniences. Presidents and prime ministers came to recognize its merits as an economizing measure. And scientists and astronomers were divided on the question of implementing it. The editors of the scientific journal Nature, for example, ridiculed DST early on by equating the time change with the artificial elevation of thermometer readings in the winter:
   
   "'It would be more reasonable to change the readings of a thermometer at a particular season than to alter the time shown on the clock, which is another scientific instrument.' They wondered if perhaps another bill would be proposed 'to increase the readings of thermometers by ten degrees during the winter months, so that 32∘F shall be 42∘F. One temperature can be called another just as easily as 2 A.M. can be expressed as 3 A.M.; but the change of name in neither case causes a change of condition.'"
   
   It's surprising just how many people have had an axe to grind one way or another on the DST issue.
   
   The implementation of DST was neither a quick affair nor a straightforward one. Initially adopted in the U.S. during World War I, for example, it was repealed in 1919, retained in pockets of the country between the Wars, adopted again and expanded during Wold War II, and repealed again by Truman after the War. It remained in use by local option in the decades following, and wasn't adopted as national law until 1966. Even now its implementation is not entirely regular, as certain states and territories have opted not to observe DST. In short, the history of Daylight Saving Time is a confusing mess. Transforming the complex story of its adoption in the U.S. and England and elsewhere in the world into a readable narrative is a great accomplishment.
   
   Prerau's book is packed with information, some of which certainly surprised me. I'd had no idea, for example, that it was standard as late as the 19th century for communities to determine their time locally, so that the time from town to town would vary by minutes depending on how the communities were situated from one another longitudinally.
   
   "As long as travel and communications were relatively slow, it didn't much matter that, for instance, in the United States when it was 12:00 noon in Chicago it was 12:31 in Pittsburgh, 12:24 in Cleveland, 12:17 in Toledo, 12:13 in Cincinnati, 12:09 in Louisville, 12:07 in Indianapolis, 11:50 in St. Louis, 11:48 in Dubuque, 11:39 in St. Paul, and 11:27 in Omaha. The relaxed pace of travel, the lack of instant communications, the inherent inaccuracy of contemporary clocks, and the less frantic pace of life all made minor time variations unimportant."
   
   What a strange world our great-grandparents inhabited.
   
   Prerau sometimes errs on the side of including too many details in his book, but for the most part the story he tells is fascinating, and the book well written. Seize the Daylight is a nice example of a type of book that I particularly enjoy, one that is as informative as it is interesting to read, one that sheds light on a convention or invention that quietly informs our daily lives but which few of us bother to investigate on our own. Seize the Daylight definitely rewards the reading.
   
   Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)



4. This book really opened my eyes to the story of "Daylight Saving Time".
   It was a fast read and I recommend it to anyone who is involved in DST.
   :)
   
   Highly recommended.



5. Everybody talks about Daylight Savings Time. This book tells an interesting story about it and timekeeping.

4 comments about Time and the Soul.

1. There were times when I had to just put this book down and breathe because of the truth in its pages. Needleman gets to the heart of "time and the soul." It is a short book and can be read quickly, but one reading will not suffice. An incredibly honest book.



2. Needleman's ideas, while simply stated, need to be pondered and re-read. This book is amazing. You may want to remove the jacket cover - I think it cheapens the book, and you'll notice the "...and how to get it back" portion of the title is nowhere else to be found. Obviously a marketing technique for the lowest common denominator. Needleman's rejection of time management techniques seems to prove to me that the tabloidesque cover was not his idea.



3. If you try to understand this book with your head, you will be torn into a million pieces. It is amazingly difficult to explain what this book is about... you should just know that if you read it, at some point something very strange happens to you... this something is very disturbing, but it is also very sweet. Take a chance and read it!



4. Time and the Soul is not just a book, it is a deep meditation experience. Dr. Needleman is a wise, authentic guide calling us back to our lost Self, and suggesting practical ways to remember who we really are. I keep this book close by and when my spiritual quest feels a bit dry, I return here and find my inspiration renewed. This is the book I most often share with friends and family who are fellow seekers. Today, I am ordering five more copies.

2 comments about My Own Right Time: An Exploration of Clockwork Design.

1. This is the story of a quest to build a perfect clock (he does come pretty close). It offers a rare glimpse into the private process of creative design.



2. Philip Woodward takes the reader through both his thinking process and his mechanical trials to design and build the perfect clock.

   A must read for every horologist. Writen lije a novel, but containing the information of a first r5ate textbook on horological science.