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IT Readings For Us All

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Here I am again, sitting on my back porch, relaxing and enjoying a crisp autumn noon -- this is my favorite season of the year. I'm preparing for a 10-day trip and that means I had to stop by the local bookstore to pick up some provisions.

In addition to reading a couple of books I received as presents last week, I'll be exploring a layman's introduction to quantum science, especially the recent developments in quantum computing.

Before you dismiss this article as the rantings of a techie geek, know that I'm no scientist, and it was easily calculus that kept me off the dean's list in school. However, if a science or math book is written in plain language (and big letters), I'll can usually follow along without too many missed trails.

The two books I picked up are The Feynman Processor by Gerard J. Milburn, ISBN 0-7382-0173-1, and Who's Afraid of Schrodinger's Cat? by Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar, ISBN 0-688-16107-3.

I was actually wandering around the bookstore looking for another book about online privacy or digital security...nothing jumped out at me. So I was intrigued by an explanation of quantum computing that I read in Simon Singh's book, "The Code Book," which I mentioned in a recent ITinfo article.

I rooted through the physics shelves, and these two books literally called out to me. The back of Milburn's book describes the text as "a first-class job in explaining in nontechnical terms the 'weirdness' of quantum mechanics." The word weirdness is a good description of what I read in Singh's explanation of how quantum computers work -- multiple simultaneous states, et al. Weird stuff. But interesting.

I got thinking on the way back from the bookstore, that I should encourage IT folks to share their knowledge in broader areas than just instructional technology. Participants in a recent train the trainer seminar are sharing a set of Howard Gardner books in a round robin sort of way. While thousands of us can't easily distribute books to one another, we can create an online reference forum.

I have a new bulletin board created on the ITrain site for us to share our recent reading experiences, both useful and less so.

It will take a few hours to get this organized, so look for it staring tomorrow.

I'll post reviews of the books I just bought when I return from my travels. In the meantime, if you've read a good book that you'd recommend to other IT folks, tell us about it. Leave a message on the reading discussion board.

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http://itrain.org/itinfo/2000/it001030.html
updated October 30, 2000