Customer Reviews

How Long Is a Piece of String?

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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I received this book for Christmas 2003, by the 26th I only had 40 pages left. If you are looking for a book to improve your mathematical ability, this is not for you. If you like to think and wonder why things are the way they are, then this is the book for you. I found myself reading one section after another, chapter after chapter. From the reasons why pyramid schemes are destined to fail, what is the best way to pack boxes of belongings when moving house, when do you take the money and leave 'Who wants to be a Millionaire' and many more fascinating and thought provoking ideas and concepts. I liked the book so much, I bought the previous book 'Why do buses come in threes?' the same day I finished this one - and I have already read one third of that one and it is not even New Year yet. This book would make the perfect gift for anyone who likes to think! So if you think they think, I think you should get it!

The sequel to another book by the same authors, Why do buses come in threes?, this book is not quite as strong as its predecessor, but it still has plenty of interest.

The first chapter discusses the calendar and how it came about, including why there are seven days in a week, how those days got their names and why there are twelve months in a year, though it omits to mention how those months got their names. The second chapter is devoted to conmen, illustrating some of the tricks they use to deprive people of their money. Sadly, there will always be plenty of gullible people around who are eager to part with their money if they delude themselves that they are going to get rich quickly. The third chapter is about what makes a hit single. I expected that this would provide an analysis of the way charts are compiled, but it's actually an analysis of musical patterns, though the authors acknowledge that formulaic music id dull.

Other chapters describe how to pack things as tightly as possible, how to make decisions that give the best chance of success, whether it is quicker to use the stairs or wait for a lift, weather forecasting (in my experience, this is much better than it was twenty or thirty years ago), epidemics, taximeters, meeting partners, detecting fraud, sporting underdogs, bad karaoke singers, proving things beyond doubt and spin doctors. There's also the chapter that gives the book its title, in which the authors explain that measuring string isn't always as easy as it may seem.

As with the previous book, this one is great fun but I noticed that political voting wasn't featured in either book. I know that whole books have been written on the subject but it would have been nice to see a chapter here, especially as Brits have to cope with different voting systems for parliamentary and European elections.

Overall, this is a hugely entertaining book worthy of five stars, but if you haven't got the first book and you only want one, buy that first. It won't surprise me if, having read it, you decide to buy this one anyway.

I bought this book on a whim, not knowing whether it would be as good as some people say, or if it would bore me to death. I'm glad I bought it! I'm a college student, and I must say that this is a very interesting book to read. This book has opened my eyes to so many things I have not noticed before! Why do guys avoid using urinals next to each other? What are pyramid scams and how did they bankrupt a country? And many more questions... The book is written in a humorous and down to earth style, and the best thing is that the mathematics of it are very easy to understand. This is a book you will definitely enjoy! You should also check out "Why Do Buses Come In Threes?", which is a prequel to this book.

If you have a couple of hours to spare and are intrigued by apparently simple problems that turn out to be more complex than they seem, then Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham's book How Long Is A Piece Of String? would be an engaging way to fill the time. This is a carefully constructed book, with each of its sixteen chapters occupying about ten pages. There is just enough space to introduce an idea, pose a couple of questions and then deliver suitable solutions. The style is a little polemical, since there is not much space for the reader to investigate. But overall the material is well thought out and offers one or two surprising ideas.

Each chapter poses a question. How Long Is a Piece Of String, Am I Being Taken For A Ride, What Makes A Hit Single, Is It A Fake are just a few examples. In Am I Being Taken For A Ride the authors explain the logic of the taxi fare. It's ironic that as the chapters go by they themselves have something of the air of a driver eyeing the customer in the back with an associated, "And another thing..."

The authors consider chance in game shows alongside how soon a drunk will fall into the ditch. Their analysis of how predictable sporting contests might be might itself also explain why I gave up watching tennis decades ago. They examine fractals and make a tree and then conclude that numbers quite often start with one. You may find this last revelation surprising. I did.

All right, it's populist stuff, but there is enough mathematics to keep the specialist interested for a couple of hours. The book is strangely but usefully illustrated and some of its explanations are extremely well presented. It's undoubtedly a worthwhile read. Oh, and How Long Is A Piece OF String? Well, as Richard Feynman famously answered, it depends on the length of your ruler.

The thrust of this book was exactly the same as that of "Innumeracy" (i.e., you can use simple mathematics to resolve a lot of things that you might not heretofore have been able to work out). The only problem was that the examples here were not quite as interesting as those in the Paulos book. Some of the examples, in fact, were identical.

This book was just as easy to read as the aforementioned book, and it can be finished in about 3 hours. It's one of those reads that you can follow and understand the reasoning, but it's not clear that you could work out from first principles. That's the last (minor) criticism of the book: We could have done with an example or two at the end of each chapter for the reader to work out (although that might have vitiated the aim of making an easy to read book).

This is a follow-up to the earlier, excellent, "Why Do Buses Come In Threes?". While the earlier book focused on those annoying little mysteries of life, this asks a set of different questions, many related to tough decisions such as how conmen get rich, or "should I phone a friend?"

The answers, like before, lead us through a gentle, humorous exploration of mathematics and its relevance to everyday life. Along the way we explore (among others) geometric progression (why all pyramid schemes eventually fail), the geometry of stacking, fractals, chaos theory, the mathematics behind taxi meters, and various uses and abuses of statistics, both to detect and commit fraud.

The two messages of this book are that mathematics is important, and that it's fun. It's in the same vein as the work of Martin Gardener, but with a British slant.

To aid casual readers or those who've previously found the subject forbidding the maths is kept at a fairly simple level. Most of the time the concepts are communicated in words and simple graphs, but key equations are included and explained for completeness. The text is easy to read and the illustrations clear and amusing. Although aimed at those new to the enjoyment of maths, it's also a good memory jogger for those with a bit more background.

I thoroughly recommend this book, and also the authors' earlier volume.

"How Long Is A Piece Of String?" is a book about the mathematics that underlies everyday life. Written by the authors of "Why Do Buses Come In Threes?", it's a quick, interesting read.

In chapter 12 - "Is It A Fake? Number tests that can detect the fraudsters" - the authors provide this nugget of information:

"Everyone knows that typographical errors (called typos by those in the trade) are sometimes difficult to spot, so a printer might ask two proofreaders to read through independently to look for errors.

Suppose the first reader finds E1 errors and the second finds a different number, E2. They now compare their results, and discover that some of the errors, a number S, were the same ones. How many errors might they expect there to be in total?

There is a way of making a good estimate, known as the Lincoln Index. This says that the total number of errors in the manuscript will be roughly:

Expected Errors = (E1 * E2) / S

For example, suppose the first reader found fifteen errors and the second twelve, and that ten of the errors were found by both. The Linoln Index predicts (15 x 12) / 10 = 18 errors in total. Of these only seventeen have been found so far - ten found by both readers plus five more that only the first reader found and two more than the second found."

It occurs to me that this could be an interesting experiment in bug estimation.

Have two testers spend some time trying to find all the bugs in a piece of code, keeping the list of bugs found hidden from each other. Then use the Lincoln Index formula to estimate how many have yet to be found.

I'll have to look for an opportunity to try this and see how well it works in the real world.