Doug's Sounding Board

I just finished this book that mo game me for my birthday. I haven’t been reading it all that time, just for the last week. It;s a very fast read about Dean Karnazes and what led him to running ultr-long distances (more than 100 miles at a go). This is such an enterrtaining book! His […]

The Revenge of the Sith novel I think it the longest of the novelization at just over 400 pages. It’s alsot he one that strays from the movie the most I think. I like reading the novelizations because you generally find out what had to be cut from the script. In this case it looks […]

I just finished reading The Holographic Universe because it sounded like it had some neat ideas in it. Overall it did indeed have some interesting ideas, but the support of those ideas throguh much of hte book was very weak. The basic premise is that there is a theory in physics that explains everything as […]

That was a really good book. I like how it followed linearly in time like it was a biography and the turk was a living thing. I also enjoyed the parallels between the turk and modern chess playing machines. You don’t even have to know or like chess to enjoy this book.

I just started reading The Turk by Tom Standage about the 18th century chess playing machine. While I’m not far into it yet, the review of automata at the time is fascinating. I had no idea such interesting devices were created, like a flute playing statue that really did the playing!