Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2014

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Robert Hughes, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History

As the subtitle suggests, a bit of a grab-bag of Hughes talking about Rome, or Rome-related, subjects, seemingly as they caught his attention. Thus the chapter on ancient Rome contains a mix of recitals of the legends, archaeological findings, the military history of the Punic Wars (including a description of the corvus filled with what I recognize as school-boy enthusiasm), the rise of the Caesars — and then he gets to the art, especially the architecture, of the Augustan age, and takes off, before wandering back into political history (Diocletian--Constantine--Julian). The reader should, in other words, be prepared for a ramble.

Hughes is, unsurprisingly, at his best when talking about art. There is he knowledgeable, clear, sympathetic to a wide range of art but definitely unafraid of rendering judgment. If he doesn't always persuade (I remain completely immune to the charms of Baroque painting and sculpture), he definitely does his best to catalyze an appreciative reaction to the art in his reader, and one can hardly ask more of a critic

He's at his second best in the "personal" parts, conveying his impressions of Rome as he first found it in the early 1960s, and as he left it in the 2000s, to the detriment of the latter. (He's self-aware enough to reflect that some of that is the difference between being a young and an old man.) His ventures into the political and religious history of Rome are not as good — he has nothing new to say — but not bad.

Overall: no masterpiece, but always at least pleasant, and often informative and energizing.

R. A. Scotti, Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter's

Mind candy: engaging-enough popular history, by a very-obviously Catholic writer. (My own first reaction to St. Peter's, on seeing it again for the first time as a grown-up, was that Luther had a point; my second and more charitable reaction was that there was an awesome space beneath the idolatrous and servile rubbish.)

Pacific Rim

Mind candy. While I like giant robots battling giant monsters, and I appreciate playing with elements of the epic (the warrior sulking in his tent; the catalog of ships), I'd have liked it better if the plot made more sense.

Sara Poole, Poisoner and The Borgia Betrayal

Mind candy: decent historical thrillers, though implausibly proto-feminist, philo-Semitic and proto-Enlightenment for the period.

Patrizia Castiglione, Massimo Falcioni, Annick Lesne and Angelo Vulpiani, Chaos and Coarse Graining in Statistical Mechanics

A good modern tour of key issues in what might be called the "Boltzmannian" tradition of work on the foundations of statistical mechanics, emphasizing the importance of understanding what happens in single, very large mechanical assemblages. Both "single" and "very large" here are important, and important by way of contrasts.

The emphasis on the dynamics of single assemblages contrasts with approaches (descending from Gibbs and from Jaynes) emphasizing "ensembles", or probability distributions over assemblages. (Ensembles are still used here, but as ways of simplifying calculations, not fundamental objects.) The entropy one wants to show (usually) grows over time is the Boltzmann entropy of the macrostate, not the Gibbs or Shannon entropy of the ensemble. (Thus studies of the dynamics of ensembles are, pace, e.g., Mackey, irrelevant to this question, whatever their other merits.) One wants to know that a typical microscopic trajectory will (usually) move the assemblage from a low-entropy (low-volume) macrostate to a high-volume