Category Archives: Books

Ad Astra Per Aspera

Nonfiction or fiction plot, space rules at the cinema this month. For those who may have missed it, the movie Hidden Figures dethroned Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as the Number One film at the box office this past weekend.

Hidden Figures tells the story of a group of African-American female mathematicians working at the NASA facility in Virginia in the mid-20th century, and how they used their skills as human computers to calculate trajectories for launches, landings and other things you need to do to get to and from space. It’s based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly. The film is set in the years right up to and including the early Project Mercury missions that put the first American astronauts into suborbital and orbital flight.

The film is set in the years right up to and including the early Project Mercury missions that put the first American astronauts into suborbital and orbital flight. The late John Glenn is portrayed in the movie, as are his fellow Mercury astronauts.

Hidden Figures focuses on three women who had to battle not only sexism — but racism as well — in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s. Mathematics wizard Katherine Johnson, engineer Mary Jackson and computing supervisor Dorothy Vaughn were all integral members of NASA back then, and their stories have been largely overlooked. For that reason, go see this movie. It’s an inspiring story brought to life by wonderful actresses that gives long overdue credit where credit is due. And if the film piques your interest about that era, there’s more to learn.

IBM, which has a bit pf product placement in the film, weighs in with an inventive augmented reality app called Outthink Hidden for Android and iOS. The app, developed with the T Brand Studio arm of The New York Times, lets users activate text, photos and video content about the women depicted in the movie. This is done by tracking down AR markers within ad units on nytimes.com, via ads in select print editions of The New York Times, and at 150 geofenced locations throughout the U.S. The app also celebrates diversity in STEM education.

If you want background reading on the black female computers of the NASA facility in Virginia, the Smithsonian, New York magazine and Popular Mechanics have all done stories in the past few months. For the story of women working for NASA out west at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, check out The Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, by Nathalia Holt. That book was also published last year.

As it did with Matt Damon’s The Martian movie in 2015, NASA fully supported Hidden Figures and has rolled out educational pages on its site for those who want to know more about this particular chapter of the agency’s history. Check out the Hidden Figures to Modern Figures section of the NASA site. You can also find the agency’s coverage when Katherine Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

And continuing its visible progress in diversity issues, NASA also announced new crew members for the International Space Station last week. In 2018, Dr. Jeanette Epps will become the first black American astronaut to serve a term aboard the station.
Congratulations, Dr. Epps!

Tweet Relief

While Bletchley Park— the home of the World War II British codebreakers — is a thriving museum these days, the site  was once perilously close to collapsing into the forgotten past. Thanks to her persistent blogging efforts and a robust Twitter campaign to raise awareness, the educator and author  Dr. Sue Black, (OBE) brought attention to Bletchley Park’s plight and helped get the funding needed to preserve this important part of computer history.

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While visiting New York City this week, Dr. Black was kind enough to drop by the Pop Tech Jam microphone and chat about her recent book with Stevyn  Colgan, Saving Bletchley Park: How #SocialMedia Saved the Home of the WWII Codebreakers. (You can listen to the episode here.) The book’s chapters weave together 1940s wartime history showing just how important Bletchley’s work was in stopping the Nazis, with Dr. Black’s memories of discovering the crumbling facility in 2003 and the race to save the place before it was too late.

Bletchley Park was also an important milestone for women in technology. Thousands of women were employed there in all kinds of jobs during the war — and some even cracked codes right alongside the men. For those wanting a little more background on the topic (and a working copy of the Adobe Flash plug-in), check out The Women of Station X video created by the British Computer Society‘s women’s networking group, BCSWomen.

Dr. Black, (who is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and a Senior Research Associate at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge) also shared her experiences with #techmums, a group she founded to help women help themselves through technology.

So, if you like codebreaking, military history, World War II, computer history or want to know more than what was on screen in The Imitation Game or The Bletchley Circle, check out Saving Bletchley Park. And compared to recent times, it’s also a Twitter story with a happy ending. We love those!

Some Pop With Your Tech Jam

The holidays are on the way, and if you need a fun little gift for the music nerd/English Lit major on your gift list, check out Pop Sonnets: Shakespearean Spins on Your Favorite Songs by Erik Didriksen. To get a taste of the crafty pop-songs-recast-as-Elizabethan-sonnets flavor of the collection, check out the Pop Sonnets Tumblr and Twitter feed. Pop Sonnets is published by Quirk Books, the same company that has released (among other things), such geekworthy volumes as Ian Doescher’s Star Wars trilogy in iambic pentameter and The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by Sam Maggs.

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PTJ 158: No, the “Apple Pencil” is Not a Joke

In this special double-sized episode, we look at this week’s Apple product announcement and feature a bountiful late summer harvest of tech news.

512CyThiA2L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Also on the show, are technobabble, jargon and buzzwords ruining our ability to write clearly — and get the point across with our colleagues? Author Phil Simon joins us to discuss the general state of professional  correspondence in this high-tech world of ours. Phil’s latest book, Message Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It, is out now and here’s its trailer:

Message Not Received – Book Trailer from Phil Simon on Vimeo.

Book Marks

Ebooks have grabbed quite a few eyeballs with their lower prices, wide selection and ability to  be read on a tablet, reader or computer with a minimum of fuss. While ebooks do have their conveniences, some people are still pondering how to make margin notes or underline their favorite passages in the text, which can come in handy for study or book club reference. But scribbling digitally in your ebooks is rather easy on most of the major platforms.

Take the Amazon Kindle, for example. Whether you’re using a Kindle e-ink or Fire tablet, (or even the apps Amazon makes available to read Kindle books on Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone), you can annotate your ebooks. You typically just need to press and hold the word or passage until it highlights or you get an option to make a note within the text.

The notes and highlights you make in your Kindle books are also stored in your account on Amazon’s website — just log in to see them. If you choose, you can make your notes public so other Kindle users can see them on Amazon’s site. Although it can do so anonymously, Amazon’s site also keeps a public list of the most popular highlights from books, if you want to see what other people found noteworthy.

Barnes & Noble’s NOOK e-readers and apps have a similar tap-to-highlight passages and make notes. (You can share your favorite passages on social media if you want to brag on your literary taste.) Kobo, which has a line of e-readers and jumped into welcome users of Sony’s now-defunct Reader hardware also lets you mark up your ebooks.

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Got Google Play books, say, on your Android phone or tablet? You can take notes and highlight text there, too. Apple’s iBooks app for its iOS devices and OS X Mavericks Macs adds colorful highlight colors and notes with a tap or click. On the book’s Contents page, you can see all your musings throughout the text listed all in once place  for easy reference. Like the Kindle, your annotations sync up between all the iBooks devices you use.

While notes and highlighted passages in electronic books may lack the smudged immediacy or mental scorch-marks from the burst of late-night energy, they do have one major advantage — thanks to search and sync, they’re a lot easier to find within your books. And you also won’t wake up from a cram session with yellow Hi-Liter smeared all over your face.

These Are The Books You’re Looking For

Angry Birds, which was first released as a game for iOS in December 2009, has grown into a ubiquitous franchise that has flung itself across pretty much every major gaming platform out there. In addition to t-shirts and plush toys, the game has inspired a number of books from National Geographic. The latest one is called National Geographic Angry Birds Furious Forces!: The Physics at Play in the World’s Most Popular Game by Rhett Allain, who happens to be a physics professor and a blogger for Wired.com.

bunbooksAs the title suggests, this very colorful book uses the action in the game to explain concepts like projectile motion, terminal velocity and oscillating mass. This isn’t an in-depth textbook, mind you, but a very basic introduction to physics and physical science that uses familiar characters and knowledge of the gameplay to illustrate its points.

Angry Birds Furious Forces is less than $15. It’s small and square and uses a lively graphic design and plenty of Angry Birds illustrations to keep readers flipping through the pages. Beyond books, the Angry Birds game has branched out from its original version and has several specialty editions, including a Star Wars-themed title.

Star Wars itself has become an entranced part of popular culture in the past 36 years and has now inspired one Dr. Ian Doescher, Ph.D, to retell the tale in iambic pentameter. The $15 book William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope was released this week from Quirk Books. The book’s trailer can give you a taste of the action.

If you’d like more of a sample, check out Episode 54, featuring special guest Francis Mateo. Mr. Mateo, just finished playing the part of King Ferdinand in the Shakespeare Forum’s production of Love’s Labor’s Lost; he also published a poetry collection, Ubre Ubre, this spring. Thanks for joining us this week, Francis!

Happy American Independence Day — yes, may this Fourth be with you, too. Go watch some Star Wars and play a few of the new levels in Angry Birds this weekend!

Revisiting Amazing Grace

When following up on a recent online flap about women’s contributions to technology, I came across an image of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper atop a Boing Boing blog post. It all made me remember I had a biography of Grace Hopper in my reading queue (otherwise known as that pile of books by the couch) that I’d been meaning to get to. As Internet flaps go, this one turned out to be quite inspiring.

The book is Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt W. Beyer. It came out in paperback earlier this year from MIT Press and can be found online and in bookstores for less than $17. The book explores Grace Hopper’s life and how she fit into the pioneering days of computing in the United States. Her work is said to have laid the foundation for the programming profession.

The book lightly touches on her early days as a mathematics student — and later professor at Vassar College after she completed her doctorate at Yale University — but kicks in when World War II is in full swing and Hopper joins the Navy to do her part. Hopper was one of many female mathematicians who joined the war effort; the film Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II covers the women programmers working for the Army and it’s available on Netflix. (And let’s not forget the actress Hedy Lamarr’s work in spread spectrum technology — the subject of the 2011 book, Hedy’s Folly, that also generated a nice NPR story.)

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age covers her early days coding and calculating high-level math problems for the military on a 9,000-pound computer. After the war ended, she went to do even more for the infant industry, including writing compilers, working on the UNIVAC computer and developing the COBOL programming language.

While the book notes her accomplishments and sticks mostly with primary sources and documentation, it’s more history than biography. It drills down into how these early calculating machines functioned, whether or not Grace Hopper was involved directly or not — but does discuss that little story about a certain moth.

For those interested in the evolution of modern computing, Beyer’s book is an educational read. While it may skimp on an abundance of personal details concerning its human subject, it distills the Hopperian philosophy to “maintain a youthful creative outlet by constantly broadening one’s knowledge base,” as this sort of thing lets you approach problems from different angles. It’s a good lesson to learn. (Her famous quote “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission,” is also a good one to remember for certain situations when you just really need to get something done.)

If you’re looking for a more personal biography, try Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea by Kathleen Broome Williams and published by the Naval Institute Press. It’s less overall techie history, and more focused on the actual life of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. A short biographical bit on 60 Minutes in 1983 shows her in action as well.

Grace Hopper passed on in 1992, but she and her work live on in many forms (yes, nerds, including t-shirts). This year, the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference is being held October 3-6 in Baltimore. And if you have 10 minutes, be sure to check out her appearance on David Letterman’s show back in the 1980s. It’s a hoot.