A good science writer must combine the dry precision of a mathematician with the relaxed storytelling of grandpa. Error too much on the side of the mathematician and you produce an unmotivated collection of facts that is about as fun to read as a 1960s computer punch card. Error too much on the side of grandpa and you leave your reader stealthily checking his watch and wandering when you will return from yet another sidetrack on the merits of the seat cushion textiles used in pre-1973 Chevys and get back to your main point.

In his Wisdom of the Hive, Seeley struck this balance perfectly, balancing a brilliant overview of all that is known on the foraging behaviors and allocation of workers in honeybee colonies with informative discussions on the methods and motivations behind the seminal experiments.

In “Honeybee Democracy” however, Seeley errors a bit too much on the side of grandpa. The first eight chapters of this book are bloated with anthropomorphic speculation on the inner lives of bees, gushing commentary on the brilliance and diligence of Seeley’s colleagues, and various anecdotes unrelated to his experiments. The admittedly interesting results and experiments on how honeybees select their new hive locations could easily have been summarized in a magazine article but instead are spread thinly over 200 pages of stealthy watch-checking and anxious squirming.

That said, the last two sections shine. Chapter 9 covers a lucid analogy between honeybee home selection and the neuroscience of primate decision-making. The underlying message is clear: replace bees with neurons and the mathematical principles behind the two systems are tantalizingly similar. Though I mentioned it in my review on Wisdom of the Hive, I echo: neuroscientists and entomologists would do wise to start throwing parties together. The computational problems faced by social insects and neural networks are often very similar and if Nature is as clever as we credit her for, then she has likely recycled her best evolutionary solutions.

Chapter 10 concludes the book with an insightful overview of lessons on effective group decision-making that Seeley has borrowed from his bee friends. While I usually find these extrapolations to human behavior cringeworthy (for the last time Deepak Chopra, special relativity and quantum mechanics do not imply that all viewpoints are equally valid and all of the Earth’s creatures are connected by a magical consciousness field), Seeley’s suggestions are well-motivated by his studies of bees and genuinely helpful for human groups. He advises that groups [1] be composed of individuals with mutual respect and shared interests (to unify goals and enable discussion), [2] led by a leader who acts as mediator rather than driver of discussion (to avoid Bush administration-like kowtowing), [3] initially seek diverse proposals independently generated by group members (to ensure that all potentially useful ideas are laid on the table), [4] aggregate group knowledge through debate (to enable each group member to make an informed and ideally independent decision), and [5] to anonymously survey the group opinion often (to effectively identify contentious decisions and accelerate convergence once a clear winning proposal begins to emerge). I found the most interesting feature of honeybee home selection to be that bees “advertising” a new home site do not directly recruit the support of their fellow bees; instead they recruit their independent assessment. That is, recruited bees play the role of skeptic, examine the candidate home site for themselves, and perform an assessment that is independent of the initial enthusiasm conveyed by the original advertising bee. Seeley is (rightfully) emphatic in his discussion of lessons [3]-[5] that a certain level of independence among the members of a group is essential to effective decision-making.

Seeley also includes a very brief but fascinating review on the concept of “signal ritualization” in the context of bee behavior (I first encountered this concept in the work of theoretical biologists Maturana and Varela). The idea is that evolution may sometimes seize upon an incidental action and modify it to produce an intentional signal over time. The example Seeley offers is the “buzz-run signal.” In order to prepare for flight, a bee must rub its wings together. Thus, wing buzzing is a natural indicator of impending bee flight. Yet bees have even learned to buzz their wings without flying in order to encourage other bees to prepare for a group takeoff. In other words, buzzing has been “ritualized” from an incidental predictor of flight in the buzzing bee to a signal encouraging flight in nearby bees.

Two questions I have for any entomologists that happen to stumble across this review. One, in light of Seeley’s suggestion that honeybee colonies have responses resembling metabolism and immune responses, I am curious whether colonies also exhibit behaviors analogous to aging and learning? Two, Seeley mentions that the number of dance circuits in a waggle run reflects the quality of the advertised home site, but have any studies probed whether rate and duration of waggle runs serve as separate channels of information?

In conclusion, if you are considering reading this book, I suggest replacing the first eight chapters with Wisdom of the Hive and then reading the last two chapters of “Honeybee Democracy” for their fascinating connections to neuroscience and human group decision-making.

View all my Goodreads reviews

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Wisdom of the Hive by Thomas Seeley
2. Book Review: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
3. Book Review: Elements of Information Theory by Thomas Cover and

My Goodreads Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Clearly Braun is not familiar with the recipe for modern pop science texts. Where are the extrapolations from statistically insignificant correlations to bold sermons launching the next consumer craze? Why have they been replaced with tempered, conservative statements accurately reflecting the uncertainty of the scientific process and our current state of knowledge?

Genre-bending accuracy aside, Buzz is a handy user manual for the human body and the two drugs you almost certainly abuse it with – caffeine and alcohol. Braun employs an entertaining, Magic School Bus-style strategy of conveying the science from the point of view of our molecular stars as they journey through your poor unsuspecting body. If you maintain a healthy information diet (or frequently [ab]use either substance), you are unlikely to find many stunning surprises in the discussion of behavioral consequences (Egads! Alcohol disrupts learning and proper sleep and caffeine improves cognitive speed on mundane tasks and is a mild diuretic?!), but the basic science behind their commercial production and effects on the human body offer a few fascinating tidbits:

1) Alcohols are actually a quite large family of molecules. The one you are most well-acquainted with and commonly refer to as “alcohol” is ethanol. However its not the only member of the family capable of getting you drunk. Methanol, just a carbon atom away from ethanol, can also induce intoxication. The reason you do not see methanol on the shelf at your liquor store, however, is that a methanol hangover comes with a slightly less appealing side effect than a mere hangover – permanent blindness. Methanol is broken down into formaldehyde by an enzyme that is found in your retina… and formaldehyde is not something you want your eyeball getting cozy with.

2) That most of the table wine you find weights in at 12% alcohol content is no coincidence; its a necessary condition of the production process. Ethanol is typically produced by the gasping breaths of suffocating yeast cells, and in a 12% ethanol bath, ethanol can no longer diffuse across the yeast cell wall, inducing the drowning cell to shut down.

3) Caffeine, contrary to popular belief, is not exactly brain fuel. It works by blocking the activity of adenosine, an inhibitory neurotransmitter that seems to build up in the body throughout the day. Thus caffeine works by “turnING off the brake” rather than “hitting the accelerator.” This is important because it makes it nigh impossible to overdose on caffeine. On the other hand, this means that if you are a lifeless drone devoid of passion, caffeine cannot rescue you.

One question I leave for researchers of caffeine is: does there exist a biochemical means by which caffeine might make us think or remember that we are/were much smarter under its guidance than we really are/were? Many claim to be granted creative superpowers by caffeine but current research has not been able to support these claims. Perhaps caffeine only increases our beliefs about our cognitive abilities and not our abilities per se.

View all my Goodreads reviews

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor
2. Book Review: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
3. Book Review: Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais

Book Review
Never have I read a book that communicates the process and logic of scientific discovery so well. Like erotic literature for the scientist, Wisdom of the Hive not only conveys what entomologists know about bee colonies but the graphic details of they found out. Seeley prefaces every discussion of experimental data with the precise thought process that led him or colleagues to perform the experiments as well as a clear overview of all methods used. He follows each discussion with scandalously honest assessments of what can and cannot be concluded from the results. He even has the grit to discuss competing hypotheses (i.e. views he does not hold), past and present misconceptions in his field (i.e. times he and others were wrong), unresolved problems (i.e. stuff he hasn’t figured out), and suggestions for future experiments to resolve these problems (i.e. ideas he has not yet had time to pursue and that could be taken up by others). Perhaps most importantly, Seeley has the discipline to not blow his scientific load early and lead discussions with experimental results and conclusions. Instead, he carefully walked me through the historical results and thought process that lead to a particular question, considered possible routes to resolve this question, and only then revealed that: “Oh by the way, I’ve performed this experiment and here are the results and how I interpret them.” In other words, Seeley never answered a question I didn’t have; he takes careful steps to ensure that I was practically begging for the answer when he presented it. The only danger in going into such detail is that Seeley has to spend the first four chapters and eighty pages introducing the reader to bee physiology, experimental methods in entomology, and the broad topics covered in the ensuing discussions of experiments. I was sipping from these initial pages like a forager bee from a 2.5 mol/L sugar solution feeder after a week-long thunderstorm, but those not sharing my enthusiasm should take note – the book really shines from Chapter 5 onward.

Despite the focus on experiments, Seeley also paints a coherent theoretical picture over all by emphasizing abstract principles of information flow within a hive. Thus, despite the dozens of experiments mentioned and the dazzling complexity of the beehive, I feel confident that I could take up a summer internship in a beehive and never break decorum. He also includes a summary at the end of each chapter to highlight the most important experimental results and open questions. Every field needs a Seeley – someone to provide a comprehensive and even-handed review of methods, past experimental efforts, current agreed upon and disputed hypotheses and models, open questions, and suggestions for future research directions and experiments.

This masterful work can be read as a comprehensive review of information flow in bee colonies, a how-to guide for designing and carrying out experiments, or a near-perfect example of scientific writing for a general audience.

What I Learned
Despite several endeavors into the complexity and chaos literature, I’ve never encountered a better treatise on how global organization emerges from local interactions. Bee colonies elegantly optimize the allocation of labor and collection of resources to satisfy current and projected needs even though colony resource levels and needs are neither known to any single bee nor readily available in a centralized signal. Instead, individual forager bees integrate information about their colony’s needs with the profitability of resources they have discovered, and if the resource is judged important by that bee, the bees performs a “waggle dance” to recruit other bees to join him in foraging from his discovered source. The details of the waggle dance indicate the location of the resource while the duration of the dance is a measure of how important the bee thinks his discovery is to the colony. Since other bees sample dances unbiased, longer dances result in more bees recruited. No Department of Labor or managerial staff – just individual, information-processing, dancing bees. Foragers can also regulate their personal foraging vigor to increase or decrease resource collection as well. (Why not go all out all the time? Its not energetically efficient to do so, and energy seems to be a constraining resource in bee colonies. There is no bee McDonalds or manufacturer of bee Oreos.) The emerging picture is this: if you want to design a complex and powerful organization in which individual members possess as little information on the actions and goals of the organization as possible, the US government a bee colony would be an excellent model.

How do foragers determine their colonies’ needs? Again through local mechanisms – the search time for a processor bee to unload their delivery (in the cases of nectar, pollen, and water) and personal level of protein (in the case of pollen). Short unload time for nectar? Clearly not enough nectar is being collected. Dance a waggle dance to recruit more foragers. Long unload time for nectar? Clearly the processors need to ante up. Dance a tremble dance to recruit more processors. Sustained success of nectar foraging? Clearly the black locust trees are in full bloom. Perform a shaking signal to recruit more foragers. Surplus of protein in the diet for a pollen forager? Clearly the colony has plenty of pollen. Cease pollen foraging and go check out the waggle dance floor to see what the colony really needs.

These mechanisms also introduce the distinction between cues and signals. A signal is produced explicitly to communicate information, while a cue is a byproduct that may act to communicate information. Search times and protein in the diet are both cues while waggle and tremble dances are signals. Why would bees use cues? One reason is that they are easier to evolve. A cue requires only the evolution of a recognition mechanism for an exiting observable instead of the co-evolution of signal production and recognition. There are also cases in which signals would be difficult and expensive, such as employing a bee to survey the colony’s entire resource stores and broadcasting his findings. Why then do bees also use signals? For some information, there does not exist a cue. A returning forager loaded with nectar may be adorned with the scent of flowers which provide some information about his collection source, but the direction of these flowers is not encoded in him in any way. Thus, to recruit more foragers to a profitable source, an explicit signal (the waggle dance) is required.

Colonies also exhibit the influence of resource requirement variability on collection mechanisms and the differences when that variability is supply-driven vs. demand-driven. Because nectar and pollen availability are highly variable, bee colonies do not send all foragers to optimal collection sites but instead distribute them among non-optimal sites as well. This provides for the continual monitoring of resource sites and robustness against rapid shifts in supply. Also, since the variabilities in need for nectar and pollen are supply-driven, bees maintain stores of these resources in their hives. The variability in need for water, on the other hand, is demand-driven, and bees do not store water but merely collect it when needed.

Colonies are also capable of integrating external and internal signals to make decisions. High nectar availability (external) and nearly full combs (internal)? Clearly the colony is running out of space for honey storage. Build more combs. (By the way, how do processors detect comb fullness? Though results were not conclusive at the time of this book’s writing, probably long search times for empty comb.)

Colonies also employ combinations of mechanisms acting on various timescales to regulate their function. Pollen foraging is regulated both by the collection rate per forager (short) and the total number of pollen foragers (long). Why two mechanisms? The former is faster to adjust but provides less dynamic range, while the latter is slower to adjust but provides more dynamic range. The result is a rapid and robust combination of mechanisms allowing colonies to match pollen collection rate to pollen demand and supply.

The above also highlights evolution’s ingenious reuse of biological design principles: the use of search times in nectar, water, and pollen collection to indicate balance between colony demand and supply and the use of dances for communication (waggle and tremble) of resource needs and locations.

In closing, the above language I use is not accidental but is meant to suggest analogy with another system whose investigators might benefit from considering the design principles of bee colonies and the experimental techniques and theoretical concepts of its researchers. That system is the human brain. For those who listen carefully, discussions of global organization implemented by local interactions, the dual use of cues and signals, the essential role of variability, the integration of external and internal signals, the interaction of mechanisms acting on various timescales, the distributed storage of information, the use of excitatory and inhibitory feedback, and the elegant reuse of mechanisms should sound eerily familiar.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley
2. Book Review: Elements of Information Theory by Thomas Cover and
3. Book Review: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

By far the best of the solid state textbooks I’ve found. Whereas Kittel hops from model to model with little explanation, Ashcroft devotes entire chapters to the merits and failings of the free electron gas, periodic potentials, mean field theory, and so on. In a field that can seem as arbitrary as the dating preferences of teenage girls, such clarifications are crucial.

Still, Ashcroft does assume a grasp of graduate-level quantum mechanics at times. There’s fame, fortune, and wild and sexy physicist parties waiting for he or she who writes a great solid state text accessible to undergrads.

View all my reviews >>

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Course of Theoretical Physics (Vol Classical Mechanics
2. Book Review: The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
3. Book Review: Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles by Eisberg & Resnick

Those who follow the pack waste days wrinkling their foreheads at the long, winding, historical path through quantum mechanics that David Griffiths leads his unsuspecting followers on. Those who know better skip the foreplay and face the glorious intellectual burden that are the axioms of quantum mechanics in just the second chapter of Shankar.

Shankar’s introductory chapter on the mathematics of quantum theory is the best out there. It was my saving grace after getting bogged down in a quantum information book for which I went in unprepared. If you too have lept into papers or books only to be baffled by the mysterious dances of Dirac brackets and quantum operators, let Shankar be your guide.

Shankar is also great for the independent learner. He embeds problems within the text so if you’re reading on your own, you can feel as though you’re engaged in the development of the theory (but don’t kid yourself, you’re not that smart).

I don’t see why this book isn’t far more popular. It’s not only clear enough for undergrads (and, more specifically, clearer than Griffiths historical tour), but it covers many of the topics you’d want to see in any introductory grad level course too.

View all my reviews >>

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Course of Theoretical Physics (Vol Classical Mechanics
2. Book Review: Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles by Eisberg & Resnick
3. Book Review: Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin

Trying to teach undergrads general relativity is about as easy as teaching a puppy… general relativity. Hartle strikes a pretty good balance with this book, offering 30-page chapters with *gasp* only a half-dozen equations that focus on conveying high-level concepts as well as chapters fully devoted to tensors, covariant derivatives, and all the mathematical weapons one needs to predict the large-scale structure of the universe. Hartle also provides plenty of worked examples, which are really useful for understanding how to go about GR calculations (which are a new beast for most undergrads unfamiliar with tensor algebra).

When your subject matter includes black holes, wormholes, and space travel, it would be difficult not to make up examples that make a young physicist wriggle with glee, but Hartle does do an especially good job of providing engaging problems (e.g. about space pirates patrolling black hole horizons).

However, I too often felt like a child touring a farm and being hushed and rushed past the slaughterhouse; there always seemed to be something more complicated going on behind the scenes that Hartle wasn’t telling me about. The book moved very (too?) slowly at first but halfway through the book, I felt like I had skipped a few sections. This uneasy feeling is perhaps expected on a first voyage through interstellar spacetime, but I’m eager for a less-nauseating return trip, during which I can spend more time appreciating the view.

View all my reviews >>

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin
2. Book Review: Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
3. Book Review: Chaos by James Gleick

This book has a nasty habit of mistaking naming for explaining, but it served the purpose of introducing an egghead physicist/mathematician to the messy biological world of neuroscience. If nothing else, its convincing evidence that neuroscience needs theorists.

If (Amount of jargon) > (Space in a human brain),
then FindTheorists.

View all my reviews >>

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
2. Book Review: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
3. Book Review: What is Life? by Erwin Schroedinger

Reading this book was a bit like listening to my grandpa rant about LBJ’s foreign policy decisions – he’s probably right, but without the background to appreciate his frustrations, all I can do is listen and squirm awkwardly in my chair.

Batchelor’s book is a polemic against the modern transformation of Buddhism into something as dogmatic and unquestioning as Western religions. He points out that Buddhism is a personal practice of continual awareness and questioning, not a set of beliefs, commitments, or rituals. His insights into Buddhist practices were thought-provoking but being a man of science (and therefore atheist, culturally bankrupt, anti-humanities of course), I didn’t have the religious or historical background to appreciate many of his complaints about the disfigurement of Buddhism.

This short book is meant to be read slowly. Each chapter offers ideas worth taking the time to reflect upon and some also suggest particular meditations. Unfortunately, I was borrowing this from a friend at university and had to power through it in two evenings before leaving for the summer.

I likely won’t return to this book again though, because my interests in Buddhism are related to cultivating continual awareness, not in defending it against a deplorable watering down for the masses.

View all my reviews >>

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
2. Book Review: Buzz – The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine by Stephen Braun
3. Book Review: The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsche

I dove into this book excited to learn how the minds of great scientists churn but instead was reminded of the great danger that accompanies reading old science texts – lengthy discussions of crackpot theories (i.e. phrenology) and passionate defenses of well-accepted ideas (i.e. not all mental activity is conscious). Taken as a survey of late 19th/early 20th century thinking on creativity and thought, the book reveals how stubbornly we humans cling to the mech warrior hypothesis of behavior – that every nugget of our activity stems from the conscious control of a homunculus nested in his HQ and peering out of our eyes like little windows on a spaceship. Many psychologists and philosophers quoted by Hadamard actually deny the existence of nontrivial unconscious processing in creative thought. If this doesn’t shock or disgust you and you find yourself sympathizing with this notion, go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Even so, this short book is worth a skim – the survey questions in the appendix alone are worth the price of admission. Hadamard used these questions to drill all his scientist/mathematician buddies on how they think, imagine, and work. The list is even more than a set of questions though – its a set of suggestions. If you’re as narrow-minded and habituated as I am, you’ll likely discover entirely new ways to approach problem-solving and find yourself exclaiming, “People think like that?!” I highly recommend reading the survey before the book itself, as this will get you thinking ahead of time about how you think and offer more context for understanding and possibly assimilating the habits of Hadamard’s buddies.

The writing (or at least the translation) is also pretty amateurish. Parts of this book read like the dinner table reports of a 4th grader telling his mommy and daddy what all his friends did in class today… except instead of eating boogers and tricking Suzy into thinking she was adopted, Hadamard’s friends invent special relativity, bifurcation theory, and cybernetics.

If you can tolerate or skip the many faults of this early thought experiment on thought, however, you’re sure to not only learn something about the great minds of the late 19th/early 20th century, but your own feeble brain as well.

Book Notes (Warning: not guaranteed to be interpretable to outside eyes):

• Invention is combination followed by selection.
  • Selection is the more difficult step.
  • The selection process seems highly emotional. Understanding the emotional character of selection would teach us much about invention.
• Two benefits of incubation:
  1. reset (replenishment of mental resources)
  2. restart (retract assumptions and avoid mental ruts)
• The incubation paradigm changes the role of the scientist to that of a mental farmer – toil hard in the fields of conscious effort (and failure), then later reap the benefits brought on by subconscious processing.
• Ways mathematical minds may differ:
  • accessibility of thought/depth in unconscious (logical vs. intuitive thinking)
  • narrowness of thought (logical vs. scattered)
  • different auxiliary representations (geometric, verbal, auditory, etc)
• Two kinds of invention:
  1. Set goal, seek means
  2. Discover means, seek application (more common in mathematics)
• I wonder how many grand ideas remain just out of reach in the antechambers of the minds of geniuses, perhaps consciously acknowledged but under-appreciated by them, perhaps tacitly assumed, or perhaps subconscious and nebulous.
• The scientist whose aesthetic sense (passion) draws him to discoveries with profound implications is what we call a genius.

View all my reviews >>

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Principles of Mathematical Analysis (‘Baby Rudin’) by Walter Rudin
2. Book Review: Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
3. Book Review: Watership Down by Richard Adams

When reality is only perceived through multiple layers of filters, what is truth?

When memories are readable, writable, and editable, what is an individual?

When superintelligences are capable of predicting the vast majority of our decisions, what is free will?

When biochemistry and emotional states are hackable (and therefore suppressible), what is discipline?

When every human has the option to plug in to their own custom virtual world, what is humanity?

If these questions sound like philosophical mumbo-jumbo, you may want to treat your mind to the whiz-bang, action-packed books of Michael Crichton, Dan Brown, and other less thoughtful authors.

If these questions consistently keep you and your geeky friends in heated discussion until 3am, then prepare to be seduced by John Wright and the deepest and most thorough picture of a transhumanist future ever scribbled.

By the way, don’t expect to have any of these questions answered. At best, you’ll come away with a deeper concern (and perhaps excitement) for the future of humanity.

Some of these questions even play with your sense of what is to be human today. For instance, plenty of psychological research is revealing just how fallible and influenceable our memories are. If our sense of personal identity relies on our memories of what we assume is the “true reality” of the past, what does it mean when these memories are so sensitive?

Warning: The first hundred pages or so are tough. Wright drops you in the middle of a world of sensory filters and altered memories and it’s not clear what’s real and what’s not. Treat this confusion as part of the experience of living in a future of hacked realities and keep reading.

View all my reviews >>

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Spacetime Physics by Edwin Taylor and John Wheeler
2. Book Review: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
3. Book Review: The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field by Jacques Hadamard