WHO GIVES A GIGABYTE?
By Gary Stix and Miriam Lacob
(John Wiley & Sons, 1999; $24.95).
he subtitle of ""Who Gives a
Gigabyte?"" is ""A Survival
Guide for the Technologically
Perplexed,"" but readers are liable to
be more perplexed about just what
the book is about.
Given the title, one might expect
the book to plant itself firmly in the
realm of the digital. And it does
devote a lot of space to explaining
just what ""digital"" means and guiding the reader through the world of
computers. But just as much space is
devoted to the describing things like
lasers, genetic engineering and strategies for a cleaner environment.
The chapters read like Scientific
American articles, which isn't surprising; Stix is an editor at that
magazine, and Ms. Lacob an occasional writer there.
The classic raison d'être for a book
like this, indeed for all science writing, is the Enlightenment ideal of an
informed citizenry. But, the authors
argue, this book isn't all ""eat your
spinach"" -- it can be enjoyable to
bump the brain out of summer vacation mode.
All that's hard to argue with. But
one might argue with the authors'
choices for the ""machines and processes that may most affect our lives
today and beyond the dawn of the
new millennium."" For example, the
book does not spend time on transportation or weaponry, and while it
addresses many types of medical
technology, it does little with something as relevant to public policy as
reproductive technology.
The authors' approach works better for the physical sciences. The
first three chapters are an excellent
introduction to computer hardware
and software and telecommunications, and the chapters on lasers and
material science are both meaty and
generally easy to follow. Their explanations sometimes don't take the
reader all the way to real understanding, however, stopping short before enough information has been
given.
In explaining how a computer does
simple computations, for example,
the book says multiplication is just
repeated addition. That seems fine,
but the statement ""division is the
subtraction process done over and
over"" doesn't quite cover the bases,
never saying how the computer figures out what to subtract.
Once genetics shows up, the authors seem to be trying to distill a
couple of college courses' worth of
concepts into a few pages. Any reader who needs the box explaining how
a cell works isn't going to have a
chance of mastering the polymerase
chain reaction. The chapters on the
environment, on energy and pollution issues, are more successful.
Although the book offers some
handy glossaries and time lines,
there are no Web links to steer readers to more information because the
authors thought such links would become outdated too quickly. But surely such links would have stayed fresh
as long as some of the authors' predictions for hot technologies.
Even at its most helpful, ""Who
Gives a Gigabyte?"" isn't for the technological neophyte. Its intended audience seems to be the kind of person
who reads Scientific American:
someone who is perhaps not very
knowledgeable about the topic under
discussion but is by no means a
stranger to science and technology.
KAREN FREEMAN