July 1, 1999

LIBRARY / BOOKS ON TECHNOLOGY

Technological Pioneering, Past and Present


WHO GIVES A GIGABYTE?
By Gary Stix and Miriam Lacob
(John Wiley & Sons, 1999; $24.95).

The 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.



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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




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