Sneaky History of Science book
Oct. 28th, 2008 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dickensI just finished The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. Pretty good, but not quite what I expected.
Based on the title and dust jacket I thought it would be a comparison between the randomness of reality and our brain's attempts to impose patterns on it. (Chaos vs. Cognition if you will). In fact, it is about the history of the science of probability (with a bit of what I expected thrown in toward the end). There were good bits, like the quote from a contemporary of Jakob and Johan Bernoulli that their arguments in published letters sounded more like 'horse thieves' than scholars.
Oddly, the term "Drunkard's Walk" appears in only the last paragraph of the prologue and not again until the next to last chapter.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
smferris pointed out that the title probably changed at a point too close to publication to do anything but tack the phrase in.
Based on the title and dust jacket I thought it would be a comparison between the randomness of reality and our brain's attempts to impose patterns on it. (Chaos vs. Cognition if you will). In fact, it is about the history of the science of probability (with a bit of what I expected thrown in toward the end). There were good bits, like the quote from a contemporary of Jakob and Johan Bernoulli that their arguments in published letters sounded more like 'horse thieves' than scholars.
Oddly, the term "Drunkard's Walk" appears in only the last paragraph of the prologue and not again until the next to last chapter.
smferris pointed out that the title probably changed at a point too close to publication to do anything but tack the phrase in.
