Reviews for Protecting the Homeland The President's Proposal for Reorganizing Our Homeland Security Infr...

The average rating for Protecting the Homeland The President's Proposal for Reorganizing Our Homeland Security Infr... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-31 00:00:00 Mark Pumel As I read through this book, I found my rating steadily dropping, dropping, dropping. It's a good premise, but here are the problems I have, in the order I ran across them, and in order of increasing severity. But I'll go ahead and give you the punchline: a lot of the "science" in the book is false. 1. Sometimes, the topic of the chapter doesn't really have anything to do with the character allegedly being covered. For instance, in the chapter on Dr Doom, the main discussion is about exoskeletons. Certainly a cool topic, but not something Dr Doom is known for. There are other villains who would be better suited to this discussion. Even worse, in the chapter on Venom, the authors spend their time discussing wearable technology instead of symbiosis, a truly inexcusable choice since (a) wearable clothing is far less interesting than symbiosis, and (b) it totally misses the point of Venom. Anyway, I think some of these chapters were written first, then spiced up via discussion of a popular villain--whether it fit or not. 2. There are significant minor errors throughout, like referring to Cyclops as "Scott Connors," or reference to the "Noble Peace Prize." I know this is minor, but it also reveals a serious lack of proofreading and/or knowledge. (Strangely enough, these are errors both about comic books AND about science--what exactly is it that suits these authors to this book?) 3. My biggest complaint is with the science itself. First, it's all really shallow--Wikipedia-level stuff. Not exactly bracing analysis, and not particularly well explained. Worse, it's full of inaccuracies. I'm not a scientist, but I'm frequently picking out things that are misleading, or are sort-of-but-not-quite correct. This wouldn't be a problem if the author's mentioned something like "this is a slight simplification," but it's never really clear that they realize this. By the time I read the chapter on infinity, though, which is something I really do know something about, it's clear that the author's don't REALLY understand the topic they're writing about. Here are some specific errors, from this chapter: *They refer to the set of natural numbers as "aleph-null." This is, again, sort of correct. Aleph-Null is a measure of size, so we can say that the set has size aleph-null (or, more technically, has cardinality aleph-null.) But aleph-null isn't the name of a set. This is probably most like confusing the number "2" with the adjective "second." These two items are linked somehow, but they're also different in significant ways. *They present the proof that the rational numbers are the same cardinality as the natural numbers, but insist that repetition of representations (like 1/2 = 2/4 = 3/6 = ...) isn't important, when it definitely is (but not insurmountably--the statement they make is true.) They then carefully clarify that we have to use 0 as well, but don't mention negative numbers at all! It's obviously way more clear that inserting one additional number (0) is much less significant than inputting the infinitely-many forgotten negative numbers. I can only surmise that the authors just don't use negative numbers? (Their correct definition of the rational numbers does include negatives, so I don't know why they skipped them without mention.) *Then everything hits the fan. Cantor's diagonalization argument is an incredibly beautiful, but very tricky, proof. So you're certainly excused from getting tripped up by it. But you're NOT excused from writing a book and totally getting it wrong. First, the authors blatantly don't know the difference between real and irrational numbers, making almost everything they say nonsense. There are a lot of other minor problems with this proof, but there's not getting around this big one: you can't present a proof of about a mathematical object if you don't even know what the object is. This is completely inexcusable. *The authors also say that the size of the real numbers is "aleph-one." Not only is this not true--it's fascinatingly not true! This statement is actually independent of the other usual mathematical axioms, meaning that it's neither True nor False, except by adding some assumptions about it's truth-hood. THIS IS REALLY WEIRD AND COOL! And totally overlooked by our authors. *Ignoring the fact that the author's don't understand math very well, the conclusions they draw are also incorrect and, interestingly, thousands of years old. I quote: "in a moment of extreme hubris, the authors express in a formal statement we call Weinberg's corollary: infinite work cannot be completed in finite time." [Notice that they don't mean the technical physics definition of "work" here, they just mean you can't do infinitely many things.] Of course, anyone familiar with the history of math or physics will recognize the (ancient Greek) Zeno's paradox lurking here. This is the same assumption Zeno makes, leading to the conclusion "Motion is impossible." Since I'm typing this review, I know motion IS possible, so Weinberg's corollary is demonstrably false. Again, Zeno's paradox is subtle and certainly takes some thinking. But falling into a mental trap which is millennia old is a bit inexcusable. And not noticing it is even more inexcusable! My college Freshmen write papers critiquing exactly this line of reasoning, and explaining why you CAN do infinitely many things in a finite amount of time, so this isn't exactly research-level stuff. So: I had smelled enough suspicious fish while reading the other chapters. So when I read a chapter where I actually knew the background material and found it totally full of misstatements and errors, I feel safe in assuming that the rest of the chapters aren't any better. The "science" here is probably the kind of stuff you'd read on Facebook--at best, simplified, at worst, wrong. And it's not even clear that the errors come from trying to write for a certain audience. I would feel very confident in betting money that the authors didn't really understand the stuff they were writing about, which is inexcusable. For that reason, what can I give the book but a 1/5?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-28 00:00:00 Sharon Carpenter The Science of Supervillains by Lois H. Gresh & Robert Weinberg was just as much fun as The Science of Superheroes which I read earlier this year. This volume discusses the possibility (or impossibility) of the various powers and abilities that supervillains from comic lore possess. They cover such classic villains as Poison Ivy, Lex Luthor, Doc Ock, and Magneto to name just a few. One of the more fascinating sections examined a comic titled "Crisis on Infinite Earths" where infinite realities, galaxies, and universes were destroyed. Gresh determined that within these infinite galaxies and universes would be still more infinite galaxies which would take infinite power and infinite time to destroy...which is impossible. (If you're a huge science nerd then this is the kind of stuff that makes your brain hum with happiness.) Included at the back of the book was an excellent notes section as well as a Q&A with various comic writers and reviewers. The only con I could see was that it was quite a bit shorter than its predecessor which bummed me out as I enjoyed it so much. (In fact, I'm ordering another book by Gresh about the computers of Star Trek which I'm super pumped to read.) Well researched, well written, and well executed...can't ask for more than that! 10/10