Reviews

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt Parker

gmc043's review against another edition

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funny informative reflective fast-paced

5.0

There absolutely needs to be more books like this. And more people reading them!

dsollick's review against another edition

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funny reflective fast-paced

4.5

elmcreyn's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

4.0

thisisthelion's review against another edition

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3.0

No sé apenas de matemáticas y todavía me dura el trauma del instituto, pero este libro me interesó desde el momento en que me topé con él por ahí. Es una recopilación de errores matemáticos en diversos campos en el mundo real, desde una señal de tráfico geométricamente incorrecta hasta errores en construcciones de puentes (los que acaban destruidos o errores de resonancia como el del Puente del Milenio de Londres) pasando por errores informáticos como un nuevo bug del año 2000 para el año 2038. Las explicaciones son sencillas de entender porque están explicadas para que las entiendan los legos en la materia, aunque es cierto que a veces me hubiera gustado saber algo más de conceptos matemáticos para comprender mejor alguna explicación.

Como es una colección de errores de todo tipo, el libro se puede leer sin seguir el orden, ya que tampoco hay un hilo conductor más allá de que todo son errores. Al leer la causa de ciertos fallos, apetece informarse más sobre el tema, pero para ello habrá que buscar otras fuentes. Esa es la mejor virtual del libro, que hace que quieras buscar más información.

El principal defecto es que, al contar tanto anécdotas de todo tipo, es fácil olvidarse de muchas de ellas.

charlotteh142's review

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funny informative lighthearted medium-paced

4.0

jmm's review against another edition

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4.0

An entertaining account of Math errors in science and engineering of the recent decades. And puns... so many puns...

highspeed's review against another edition

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funny informative lighthearted fast-paced

3.75

peter_longhurst's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

4.0

amelia_lim's review against another edition

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4.0

Unlike what the book title stated, while stories like The Null problem, the fact that Matt was annoyed by the incorrect geometry of the football street signs to the extent that he started a petition, bug fixing with a bureaucracy patch, and (I love this one) a programming error of a game makes Gandhi the most nuke-happy leader are really hilarious, most errors ended up as tragedy.

I like that Matt explained the idea of the Swiss Cheese model or Hot Cheese model (new version of Swiss Cheese), it's a view of accident management.
It acknowledges that people will inevitably make mistakes a certain percentage of the time. The pragmatic approach is to acknowledge this and build a system robust enough to filter mistakes out before they become disasters. When a disaster occurs, it is a system-wide failure and it may not be fair to find a single human to take the blame.
A patient died from drug overdose. Instinctively, the nurse who set up the pump which infuse drug into the patient is put to blamed. The CHI+MED (Computer-Human Interaction for Medical Devices) did a good job at handling this case.
It's not a good system simply to remove everyone who admits to making a mistake, thus leaving behind a team who 'do not make errors' and have no experience of error management.
First of all, there's a lot that can be learned from in terms of how drug-dose orders are describe, how medical instrument (like the pump) can have built-in checks to know what drug is being administered and do a finial check on the rate. A calculator app has also been developed since then and blocked over 30 common medical calculation errors.

I was raised in this kind of school environment where in general, students get punished without further investigating when they make mistakes. For example we got caned for calculating 1 + 5 wrongly. So my brain has formed this "HUMAN CANNOT MAKE MISTAKE" mindset. The Swiss Cheese way of viewing mistakes certainly had an impact on me. Rather asking "Who?" and blaming a person next time when something goes wrong, I will take a look at the whole system and analyse every aspect that could cause things go wrong, then try to solve them.

wifeslife's review against another edition

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funny informative inspiring lighthearted

4.5