I consider myself relatively well-informed when it comes to contemporary topics in politics and world affairs; this is especially true in topics of science, which tend to interest me. It becomes difficult to keep all the relevant facts organized, however, especially as the amount of knowledge necessary to cope with the news has grown. Space [...]
Call me a sucker, but I can’t seem to stay away from popular science books. When they’re good, they’re excellent (Outliers; the often-cited A Short History of Nearly Everything); when they’re bad, they can run the gamut from underwhelming (Physics of the Impossible) to “pretty damn bad” (Electric Universe). I’m pleased to note, before getting [...]
My brother’s been reading mental_floss and its associated books for several years. Condensed Knowledge is, to the extent of my knowledge, the first of their [adjective] Knowledge compendia, essentially giant books of trivia. After having my appetite whetted by A.J. Jacobs (who, though is a contributor to mental_floss, does not have any material in this [...]
At some point, my preconceptions of this book got crossed with another—likely Tyson’s Death by Black Hole, currently queued—and I expected it to be a collection of loosely-related physics articles. In fact, it is a chronology of anecdotes about important inventions or discoveries and the physical principles that underlie them. One rhetorical tack that Ouellette [...]
On the heels of a somewhat disappointing science book in this meme, I felt I’d be pretty safe with this one. Written in ’88, it’s a bit dated for a cosmology/astrophysics tome, but it’s landmark enough (cosmology for the layman? what a concept!) to merit it’s expansion in 1998. Sadly, my library only had the [...]
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