Content tagged with "science"

Okay, let’s get this out of the way: I didn’t understand 90% of this book. And I don’t think most other people will either. My question is this: can you not understand a book, but still get something out of it? Yes, I think so. To be clear, just because I didn’t understand the entire book, doesn’t…

This book just wasn’t for me. This book is about when famous scientists make mistakes. For example, Darwin misunderstood some critical aspect of heredity. And someone else got the age of the Earth wrong. When this happened, big scientific arguments ensued. Letters were exchanged. Conference…

I really shudder at the thought of what it took to write this book. There’s just so much here. It’s a comprehensive history of science in the 20th century, and even earlier. The basic idea is that the science seek to converge. There’s a movement in the scientific community to get scientific…

Somewhat interesting, but scattered. The author bounces around a lot.

This is the story of the floor of the ocean, and all our attempts to map it. Turns out, we know nothing relatively little about it. The framework of the book is that the author got to travel on the Five Deeps expedition. This was a project of adventurer Victor Vescovo to travel to the deepest points…

This book was written by a physician and medical researcher. I’s a polemic against shady “alternative medicine” practices and health conspiracy theories. To be clear, the author isn’t against more mainstream…alternative stuff – things like chiropractic, essential oils, CBD, etc. What the author is…

Apparently the population of the planet will start to recede very soon. As sexual education and contraception gains hold around the world, birth rates are dropping below the 2.1 required to stabilize the population. This book is fundamentally about demographics, the changes that have brought us to…

This book makes the case that the world is better now on almost every quantifiable dimension than at any other time in its history, and this is because of the decline of religion. Pinker’s main point is that religion is bad and makes the world a worse place, and the improvement in life over the last…

I love Steven Johnson. He’s one of my favorite authors. He writes mainly about the history of science and technology. This book is about the history of how we began to live longer. The average lifespan has gone up so much in the last couple of centuries, and what caused that? Here’s the list:…

Hans Rosling is a legend in statistics and health research. He died a few years ago, but his YouTube videos and TED talks live on. He studied health and living trends around the world, and created a unique way to visualize them. His talks usually involve him pointing at bubbles which move around a…

This is apparently a blog by the science editor for NPR. She took a bunch of blog topics and wrote a book which is a collection of chapters about gross things, like bodily fluids, death, and composition. This is a fun book. It’s breezy and morbidly interesting. Each chapter is self-contained, and I…

This was a wildly entertaining book, because of both the subject matter and the writing style of the author. The book is about military science, but not weapons. It’s about a bunch of the other, decidedly unglamorous things we do to enable humans to fight wars, and how science is trying to make…

The author is a physicist, and he attempts to explain how the world really works, meaning what’s is utterly necessary for humans to survive as a species. For example, he explains why we need ammonia. Because we use it to make fertilizer ever since the Haber-Bosch process was established, and without…

A solid look at how science works, and how the media and the public interpret it. The book can get depressing. Science is not exact. It’s vague, and sometimes not reproducible, and complicated to understand. The media tends to prey on this for headlines and clicks, and the public doesn’t know what…

This is really a coffee table book. I think I got it at Costco, but it’s beautifully bound with a cloth cover. I endeavored to read this, even though it’s not that readable – or even designed/intended to be read at all. I set my timer to one hour, and sat in a chair with nothing but the book….

Vaclav Smil is a scientist and policy analyst. His specialty is looking at societal problems and figuring out how science and policy should intersect to make it better. He taught environmental science at the University of Manitoba. Bill Gates has said several times that Smil is one of his favorite…

This book is undoubtedly interesting, but it’s a bit meandering. The basic idea is that…things , “scale” according to universal laws. Meaning, as something gets bigger, it grows less linearly along different axes, and this is a very predictable phenomenon. For example, an elephant is 10x as big as a…

This is a very famous book. It was written in 1962, then revised twice by the author, and then reissued on its 50th anniversary with a very long foreword . The book describes how science moves forward. According to the author, science exists in “paradigms,” which are ways of thinking about and…

I kind of thought this book was going to be about the scientific principle of gravity, and how we still don’t know what it is. Instead, the book is a long, tedious history of physics. It starts with a discussion about gravity in myth, legend, and religion, including the idea that heaven is “up…