This book is about coding on the trinket.io platform, which is a Scratch-alike where the blocks are translated into Python library source. That's actually a very nice idea but the site is scheduled to shut down in August. The organization is open sourcing all the code, which is good of them, but likely the idea will wither away, to be replaced with a new similar thing eventually.

It was for the Bagram Ibatoulline illustrations and the historical subject that I checked this book out. The main text is an ABC, with short four line stanzas for every letter, which tell a story of the progress of Queen Elizabeth I during one English summer. Also on each page is some more explanatory text, for older readers. This book is very well-executed, but the poem seemed a little contrived and clumsy. The story of an attempted assassination is based on real events.

I like this better, somehow, than I liked "Visual Games". Like the other book, a lot of the book is not about actual games. There are, for example, some quite good diagrams of Alexandrian Greek water-driven devices in the section called "Enigmas, riddles, games of logic: Enigmas". How they ended up in that section, I do not know as they are ancient engineering and have nothing to do with riddles or logic. There are descriptions of many games and their variants, along with artists' renderings of the game boards.

Maybelle is another in Virginia Lee Burton's list of anthropomorphic vehicles. As with "Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel" the best part of the book is the drawings, for children, of the mechanics of the vehicle. Virginia Lee Burton almost seems like a precursor to David Macaulay with her whimsical yet accurate diagrams.

The autobiography of a cancelled author. Linehan started out as a music writer for the Irish equivalent of the NME, and moved to London and to writing comedy. Some of the comedy was really successful. Then he weighed in on gender ideology and women's rights, and his career was demolished. He is now divorced, has been arrested by British police a few times, lives in Arizona as far as I know, has a Substack, the Glinner Report, and is writing a comedy screenplay, again.

Linehan's framing device is poignant, his reading is charmingly accented, and he can be quite funny. The most visceral observation is his remark about how the Irish pub smoking ban uncovered the smells that the cigarette smoke had hidden, of the urinal cakes, and the smells they were supposed to hide. An unanticipated side-effect. Some of his similes moved me to laughter.

I think, given his character, he would have taken the plunge eventually, but he went over the edge under the influence of powerful painkillers, having just undergone testicle removal surgery (cancer). By the time he was out of the hospital his life had been changed, his fair weather friends were all gone, etc.

The narrative is great, but I do not share his convictions about the significance of comedy and music journalism. I am too much the scientist, I guess.

I think Philip Reeve's world of Mortal Engines books are getting lighter. If this was the original series, the characters would mostly be dead, not forging on like something out of Tintin.

There's a passage near the end that suggests to me that Reeve is getting fed up with the literary establishment.

It is sad that these books are not getting the uptake that they deserve. Still, I can not wait until the next one, which will no doubt contain new discoveries, new battles, and old characters.

This is a good short movie about Squanto. It answers a few of the perplexing questions that Metaxas's book "Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving" raises. It is not really animated, but rather illustrated, with paintings by Michael Donato. Graham Greene's narration is excellent. I think it would be highly recommended for Christian homeschoolers in Massachusetts, but I'm not a Christian homeschooler, and I liked it.

Blockly is really a library of general support for programming in a Scratch-like environment. This book tries to describe some applications or websites that use Blockly, but at 24 pages, that's basically undoable. Best to stick with Scratch 3.0, which uses a fork of Blockly, that way its possible to be specific and stick to one app. At least one of the book's links is dead. It's not really useful.

Squanto's story told from Squanto's viewpoint, with a very Christian message. The story raises more questions than it answers.

Good book to bring you up-to-date with the state of space in 2023. Written by a journalist with a concentration on personalities and limited attention to physics or engineering.

The illustrations are vigorous! Katy, the caboose of the title, is the principal character in the majority of the illustrations. Her eyes, which are windows, show her mood. The locomotive, generally the star of a train book, appears in only a few illustrations, but dominates them all. The locomotive has a quite remarkable nose, which is cylindrical, and eyes which are lamps. The eyes show all, when the locomotive is briskly moving along level ground they are pleased, as the locomotive lunges to the top of a precipitous mountain in the western United States, the locomotive is positively raging. I enjoyed it.

There is one grim aside about squealing pigs in box cars.

This a 24 page manual for the ScratchJr programming environment for young children. Simple and clear, in no way misleading.

A nicely bound and illustrated collection of essays on the Royal Society, with an enthusiastic and as usual somewhat misinformed introduction by Bill Bryson. Here is a partial review of the essays.

1. "At the Beginning: More Things in Heaven and Earth" by James Gleick.
I have read Gleick's brief biography of Isaac Newton. Gleick's work is well known and no book about Isaac Newton can avoid the Royal Society. He was a reasonably good choice for the first essayist, and he writes a brief introduction to the early days of the Society. It is weird to see so many well-known names on the founding document and it substantiates David Wootton's claim in "The Invention of Science" that science was pretty much invented in England. Of course, it helped that the Royal Society was open to foreign members, so that science didn't have to be invented solely by the English. The following passage really resonated with me.

"Their first purpose," said Thomas Spratt, writing his "history" of the Society when it was barely fledged, "was no more, than onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag'd in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age."

This truly is one of the appeals of science, properly pursued. It is one reason why the injection of politics into ostensible "science" books being published these days is so distressing.

2. "Of the Madness of Mad Scientists: Jonathan Swift's Grand Academy" by Margaret Atwood
I nearly skipped show more this essay, because I feel that novelists, with very rare exceptions, are not able to interpret reality at all well. Certainly Atwood's track record on reality is not that good, although her novel writing is, last time I checked. This was just a history of mad scientist portrayals, starting with Jonathan Swift's portrayal of Laputa in "Gulliver's Travels" which can not fail to have been inspired by the Royal Society and going on more or less to the modern day. Nothing deep, and nothing wrong, and as one would expect from Atwood, where it encounters reality, fairly clueless.

It made me nostalgic for that excellent movie of Karel Zeman's "Invention for Destruction", which Atwood probably doesn't know about, but which is a fairly lighthearted example of the mad scientist genre, since the scientist is merely tricked, not evil, and the handsome hero saves the day, and there are balloons and submarines and everything so Vernesque.

3. "Lost in Space: The Spiritual Crisis of Newtonian Cosmology" by Margaret Wertheim
I skipped this one. One must draw a line somewhere.

4. "Atoms of Cognition: Metaphysics in the Royal Society, 1715 - 2010" by Neil Stephenson
This essay was republished in Stephenson's essay collection, "Some Remarks", so I'm already familiar with it. It was fun to re-read it in a nicely bound form with good illustrations, though. It's about metaphysics generally, and specifically about Leibniz's grand metaphysical notions. Leibniz and Newton are both important characters in Neal Stephenson's enormous "Baroque Cycle", and it's hard not to like Leibniz, just from the portrayal of him in those books. One can sympathize with Newton, but can not really cotton to him. The essay is a re-interpretation of Leibniz's ideas as perhaps reborn or restated in modern physics. It's interesting, it's snappy, as Stephenson's writing usually is, and it contains in the text several references of interest.

5. "What's in a Name? Rivalries and the Birth of Modern Science" by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
I once attempted Goldstein's book about Godel, and found it unrewarding. This essay is too long, but more rewarding. It seems to argue that science as it was being invented by the Royal Society, transformed the two pillars of previous understanding of the natural world, observation and logic, into two more aggressive forms of the same thing, experimentation and mathematical analysis (what is now known in college mathematics as "applied math"). I think she's on to something there.

The tension between the mathematicians and the experimentalists is real. When I was young, I could not bear to tinker, I wanted to lay everything out mathematically before I began, out of conviction. That was very inhibiting. As an adult, I have learned to value heuristics rather more.

6. "Charged Atmospheres: Promethean Science and the Royal Society" by Simon Schaffer
This is the only work I have ever read by this author but I have heard much about his most famous book, "Leviathan and the Air Pump", in David Wootton's "The Invention of Science". This small essay seems to be of a piece with the larger work; the author likes to bang on about how social forces influence the scientific ideas that people credit. Of course they do, but apparently the author likes to argue that this observed fact means that social forces determine credibility, and that credibility decides scientific truth. Wootton, in opposition to this view, believes that science is related to reality, and so do I! There was nothing so terribly bad about this essay in itself, it gives dates and actions taken, and there was history, but no science.

7. "A New Age of Flight: Joseph Banks Goes Ballooning" by Richard Holmes
I have already enjoyed two books by Richard Holmes, "Age of Wonder" and "Falling Upward" so I was rather looking forward to this essay about the dawn of the age of ballooning and the somewhat veiled interest that Joseph Banks took in the new technology of aerostation. It was good, but not extra-ordinarily so. I believe that it was written prior to "Falling Upward" or excerpted from that book while it was in progress. There is too much similarity between this essay and an early chapter of "Falling Upward" for anything else to be true. show less

Kind of an autobiography, but in this case an autobiography of a man who was able to predict the outcome of the 2024 election fairly precisely. How does he do it? He looks for indicators that he thinks are not coincidental. The most obvious is voter registration data; if there is a shift in party registration that signals a coming shift in the voting behavior of said voters.

While the author has genuine and realistic concerns about election corruption, that is not really what this book is about. The middle of the book has a section explaining why the author believes that, sans election corruption, Trump would have won the 2020 election. Each point is called "irrefutable", but none are. Each is, rather, an observation about another weird thing that happened that doesn't usually happen in presidential elections.

Of course, I agree with Keshel that US elections have been rendered insecure. Motivated by concerns about election insecurity, I became for a while a poll watcher and then I wrote a few articles about elections for the local online newspaper. "The Silent Death of the Secret Ballot" (https://insidelowell.com/the-silent-death-of-the-secret-ballot/) was the first, "What to Do If You Already Voted, but It Wasn’t You"(https://insidelowell.com/what-to-do-if-you-already-voted-but-it-wasnt-you/) was the next. The first received a lot of motivated scoffing; the second, rather grimly, got the attention of a few non-local residents who had found themselves in the situation show more described after the 2024 election. Finally, I did a post-election analysis after the 2024 results were in, "How Did 5,000 Votes Disappear in Just 4-Years" (https://insidelowell.com/how-did-5000-votes-disappear-in-just-4-years/), and yes, something unprecedented happened between the 2020 and the 2024 elections in Lowell, MA, and it does look rather suspicious. I haven't done any more around election integrity because there is really not much to be done about it in Massachusetts, where insecure election practices are mandated by the Democrat legislature, because these practices favor Democrat candidates.

Is this book useful for someone like me who wants election integrity for the obvious reason that without it democracy becomes a joke and is set aside for violence? Not really, unfortunately. show less

A book that documents the relentless hounding of sex realist women, principally in the UK. Rachel Rooney's hounding tops this author's personal chart, perhaps because they are both poets.

I think that the Adams/Jefferson political and personal relationship was in vogue in the popular imagination about a decade ago. I like the story, because it shows how often the Founders ended up opposing and pretty well loathing each other. That all this dislike and acrimony resulted in only one well known duel seems quite astonishing the more you learn about the many feuds and disagreements among them.

This children's book takes a light, humorous, but historically accurate, view of the long relationship between Adams and Jefferson. The illustrations emphasize their physical dissimilarity. Many illustrations supplement the text quite nicely. The text indicates that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but the accompanying illustration is a two page spread showing Jefferson at a desk, pen in hand, Adams right next to him, pointing and advising a correction, Ben Franklin leaning on Adams's head, looking judicious, and behind and around all this, what must be the rest of the Continental Congress, kvetching. I think it captures the real situation pretty well. The physiognomy of George III seems to be taken from his best known portrait, and is, by that standard, a good likeness. Once Adams and Jefferson got back from Europe and took up positions in Washington's Cabinet they did indeed fall out, and there is an excellent illustration of the two of them conducting an argument at a breakfast table with Washington seated in the middle, staying silent and consuming what show more appears to be a nice plate of waffles with strawberries. In the next page they've stopped talking to each other entirely: in one illustration Adams and Jefferson pass each other on the street without taking any notice of each other, and on the facing page each slings harsh criticisms at the other. This captures the true state of affairs; after Jefferson resigned from his position as Secretary of State, leaving Vice President John Adams briefly victorious, he and his associates began his unofficial campaign for President, and everybody, including John Adams supporters, knew that was what was happening. Just a year or so later, these former friends ran against each other, Jefferson became Vice President, and there began four years of acrimonious conflict between the two which is communicated well by a fun two page spread where Jefferson gives Adams an elbow in the face, practically, on one page, while on the other, the supporters of each do battle in the street, while Adams and Jefferson look down from facing windows. Adams lost the next election, and there's an excellent illustration of him departing the United States capital at the crack of dawn so that he does not have to be present at the Jefferson inauguration. Just two pages are devoted to Jefferson's two terms, but they are pretty efficient, covering the Louisiana Purchase and his mammoth bones acquisition. Two pages are devoted to the actions of both, now in retirement, but warming to each other slowly. Finally, the ice is broken, and they decide to correspond with each other, each well aware that all this correspondence will be pretty well preserved for posterity, and each reminiscing a lot about the days of yore, when they met at the Continental Congress and Jefferson's hair was still red.

The little introduction, quoting some obnoxious remarks made by various presidents about each other is funny, Adams pushing Jefferson in a gardener's wheelbarrow while a local farmer and goat look on bemused is funnier still.

This book does not misrepresent history, it's lively, personal, and humorous in a way that is suitable for children, and it's clear that the illustrator has taken care to research the subject thoroughly. Recommended. show less

A story with a hero: a handsome and accomplished layabout who travels in Europe and gets himself into a situation calling for all sorts of heroism and virtue. He's hot-blooded, cool-headed, courageous, and gallant, and in the end of the book goes into a sort of monastic martial training, awaiting his next adventure in the sequel. The sequel is cleverly titled after the hero's principal adversary in this book, who steals every scene that he is in.

The women in the book are all quite conventional in their separate ways. Princess Flavia is spirited, passionate, beautiful, and noble. Madame de Maubin is also passionate, and indeed has her virtues, but is basically a "fallen woman", with money. Countess Helga is a cheerful cypher. The inn-keeper's daughter is a kind, sexy, flirt. Every woman perfectly formed for her role and station in life.

This book is, among other things, ebullient English propaganda. Like Sherlock Holmes, Rudolf Rassendyl knows that he is the equal of any of the crowned heads of Europe for the simple reason that he is an English gentleman. Why does he take on the challenge of impersonating the king? Mostly because the king has been taken in by a dastardly and unsporting trick and he, Rudolf, is the only hope of his new friends and because he may not shirk the danger, and count himself a man. Why is he superior to the king in character and physiognomy, as Princess Flavia, Colonel Sapt, and Fritz von Tarlhenheim all, in their various ways, mention or notice? show more Well that is just the way it is, and as luck would have it.

This is a book that doesn't really have a proper place in a modern public library. Many themes --- ambition, sexual passion and jealousy, cruelty for its own sake --- are too mature for the children's section while the language is too difficult; duty and honor are understood to have no place in the YA section these days; and many adults will feel that the book is too juvenile for the adult section because their limited grasp of the language of the time in which it was written, and their learned lack of imagination, will cause them to pass over the grimmer and more mature parts of the books without even noticing them. Sigh. show less

A bunch of programmed exercises that illustrate the capabilities of the ScratchJr programming interface pretty nicely. The most complete of the ScratchJr books out there, and also probably the most official.

Small volume by Utah Senator Mike Lee explaining why "court packing" is bad, published in 2023 shortly before the Dobbs decision. The basic argument is that if one political party packs the court when it is in power, as soon as it is out of power the other political party will do the same, and so on and on, and that this will destabilize an already increasingly unstable system of government. Sure, this argument is fairly convincing, but if the first political party to go first has the advantage, then it's not the kind of argument that should stop a political party from going first.

Mike Lee argues that the justices in the Supreme Court are basically doing their job, rather than being partisan, and that is what makes packing the court such a bad decision. I would argue that the justices simply serve as sort of a damper on pure political maneuvering, regardless of their integrity, intelligence, or lack of these qualities, since they were generally appointed in previous administrations. But the conclusion is pretty much the same with either argument: court packing is likely to make our government situation more unstable.

Mike Lee writes in a pleasant, straightforward way. Some parts are about his own experiences: his father was solicitor general for the United States in the '80s, demonstrators showed up outside his family house to intimidate rather feebly when he was a boy, he worked as a law clerk and had tea at Ruth Bader Ginsburg's. The rest of his story is mostly history; show more previous court packing efforts, the very early history of the Supreme Court, a proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit court packing.

This book was clearly written to influence public opinion at a time when the tactic of court packing was being openly discussed by elements in the Biden administration. Unfortunately, it seems not to have received even the most basic of proofreading attention; it is riddled with what are clearly typos. In most cases, it's possible to figure out pretty easily what Mike Lee intended --- sometimes the typo is just a missing space between words --- but in the Conclusion, probably written last, there are some truly inscrutable sentences. show less

This is an actual Egyptian tale adapted from some Middle Kingdom papyrus scroll. It doesn't just tell the story; the illustrations show real passages from the text of the papyrus, with their translations, and are stylistically informed by ancient Egyptian art. There are several pages of well-written discussion and notes in the back of the book about the geography and the history of the tale, as well as about the hieroglyphs.

A guide to drawing Egyptian hieroglyphs by hand. Rather scholarly, in a sense written for the scholar.

This is romance as much as adventure. Sabatini's historical thrillers place an improbable story with an improbable hero against a grimly realistic, but not explicitly described, historical backdrop. Captain Blood is a sharp-dressed man and so debonair.

This is a book written originally by an English gyroscope engineer during or just after WWII. The book came out in a second edition in the 1970s. There are many reasonably well drawn diagrams and quite a number of mathematical formulae. Not an easy book, by any means. It devotes a whole chapter to pendulums, and another whole chapter to assessing the merits and defects of various escapements. My copy was published by Caldwell Industries of Lulling, TX which apparently had a business making engines for hobbyists. This must have been a book reprinted for the use of the serious clock hobbyist or small professional. It is part of a larger series of books, suitable for the horological hobbyist at various stages of development.

Comes with a solid plastic stencil in the back of the one consonant hieroglyphs. Written in a lively fashion. Gives good advice on how to write your name in hieroglyphs.

On the whole this is a good book. Good illustrations, clear, straightforward explanations.

The author and illustrator is an actual Egptologist. The book is a child's ABC, but every illustration is taken from an actual hieroglyph. Below the illustration is a spelling of the word using hieroglyphs. At the back is a list of the single consonant hieroglyphs used to spell the words in the book. The book is attractive, but I feel like a small child might become a bit muddled. There are untouched stencils in the back of my library copy.

This book has nothing to do with games, it's a miscellaneous grab bag of remarks about visual perception. It has some good vocabulary, and maybe even some good ideas for models. Could I make a turbine driven phantascope or even thaumatrope? Just possibly. It was published in the mid '80s but seemed very '70s to me.

Mostly newspaper articles, undated. For excerpts from longer works, Sowell includes the source at the back. There are some new essays, written especially for the book. I believe I thought that there would be more excerpts from longer works, and that is principally why I was interested in this book.

This is an omnibus volume containing both volumes of Starkey's "Monarchy" series with some new end matter, since it came out several years after the second volume of "Monarchy". This book added a last part, covering in several chapters what was just an epilogue in the second volume of "Monarchy". There is a narrative starting with Britain before the Romans and carrying on to some point in the reign of Elizabeth II. All of this is fairly useful if you feel like you ought to know something of the history of England, which you ought, if you're going to make claims about history generally. None of the writing is terribly insightful, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't really care about the British monarchy of today at all, so I tuned out the final bits about Prince Charles (now King) and what he might "mean".

This book tells an historical story, along with its descriptions of the evolution of the ferry building and the boats. A lot of the illustration accompanies the story; there are actual characters in this one. In some of the illustrations the characters, who are fully delineated, inhabit a world of very spare, albeit precise, line drawings, with a lot of empty space, but in others the people and the things get the same amount of detail. Perhaps the drawings with the empty space are the most conjectural? There are still a few purely technical drawings of the kind that occur throughout Tunis's "Colonial Craftsmen". There is an illustration of a fulling mill of a different and most appealing design, which maybe I'll be able to make a model of some day.

The ferry itself is on the Delaware near where the battle of Trenton was fought and the story proper ends with that battle. The end of the ferry is described in the postscript.