Bookish Thoughts

Mary Roach is a delight. Her books are often filed under pop-science, though I think they have more of a historical lean than a scientific one. She picks a topic and then delves into all the interesting little nooks and crannies, resulting in books that are equal parts hilarious and informative. I read Bonk (about the study of human sexuality) ages ago. (Actually, it was the book I was reading when I moved from Colorado to Virginia). Picking up Stiff reminded me that I need to track down the rest of her books. Stiff is about the historical use of human cadavers. They've mostly been used in medicine, everything from organ transplants to labs for student surgeons to strange, traditional treatments. But there have been other uses as well, particularly in the auto industry and the military as we search for ways to make dangerous things safer. There are also chapters about cannibalism (mostly urban legends, from what I gathered) and the disposal of human bodies. For the most part...

The best way to get a feel for whether or not you'd like Randall Munroe's  What If  book is to check out the  blog  that it's based on. Given that the blog is available for free and most of the book is a reproduction of the blog, it may be a little silly to buy the book. But I enjoyed reading it. It makes an excellent coffee table book, something people can pick up and flip through and learn something new and interesting. The book also organizes the questions so that some of them build on each other quite naturally, which adds a little something extra that isn't available in the blog. But mostly I enjoyed reading the book because, frankly, I prefer books. I spend all day at work staring at a computer screen. When I'm at home relaxing, I'd rather not be looking at a back-lit screen. It's hard on my eyes. It confines me to my office (okay, I could read on the tablet, but then I'm worrying about battery life). So even though that blog has been available...

I got really excited about this book from the second I heard about it. Big Data is everywhere these days, and it's something I've been working on, adjacently or directly, for years. The data I'm working with now isn't included in the scope of Christian Rudder's work, which focuses on applications in the fields of sociology and psychology. But there was a time when I almost broke into this world. There are even some projects he talks about in this book that I was involved in or hearing really cool talks about. Alas, I never quite broke into it in the way I wanted to. I've remained interested in this field, though. We're experiencing what will be the beginning of an absolute golden age for sociology and psychology. Data is available in unprecedented amounts and ways. It's not only that you can finally look at the behaviors of literally millions of people, but free from a lab those behaviors are far more natural than in any hitherto performed...

The Boy Genius and the Mogul tells the story of the invention of television. This is one of those inventions where you can't really point to one person. It's not like the lightbulb and Thomas Edison or the cotton gin and Eli Whitney. Television was something that a lot of people were working towards at the same time, a race to create this new technology that everyone expected and could tell was very near. It was also at the time when science shifted from lone men with a lot of money and leisure time inventing things on their own to massive, well-funded research divisions under the umbrella of technology companies. So there isn't really one person who can take credit for the invention of television. But there are a handful of key people, and one in particular whose ideas, at least, were a few years ahead of everyone else. The book focuses in on Phil Farnsworth (namesake for the professor in Futurama ), a young genius who worked tirelessly to get a television i...

Mike Brown's book about about his contributions to our discovery and understanding of the Kuiper Belt is less a pop science book than a history of science. And it might not even be a history book so much as a partial memoir. The science is almost nonexistent, and what little there is is simplified to the point that a third grader could understand it. Though that's probably on purpose, as that's also the reading level at which newspapers are written. Brown's technical achievements are presented in tandem with his courtship and marriage and the birth of his first daughter. While this does detract from the actual science involved, it also makes the book a bit more accessible for the general public. Brown's just a regular guy who happens to have made several discoveries that fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe. And that's helpful when it comes to getting his point across. The book itself is an extended argument for why Pluto sho...

It's been a while since I read a non-fiction book. I sort of go through phases where I read them a little more often. But as this blog clearly documents, it's been at least 2 and a half years (probably more) since I last picked one up. It really just depends on something actually catching my attention. And when I started to see references to Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender it definitely caught my attention. This book is essentially an extended literature review. Fine looks at countless studies the claim to get at the differences between men and women and makes quick work eviscerating all of the supposedly proven biological differences. She talks about how soon in life we are bombarded with gendered information, really from the moment we're born. Or even before. She points out the over-reliance on correlation used to imply causation For example, testosterone levels in the womb are thought to be responsible for fundamental differences in male and femal...

Lauren Redniss'  Radioactive  is a light biography of Marie Curie, focusing on her love life and scientific discoveries. When I say light, I mean that this book took me about three hours to read, total. It's more of a display book than anything else, with really cool art and nearly self-contained stories on each page. You could easily flip open to any page in this book and start reading without missing too much. Here are a few examples of pages from the book, which are really cool to look at: The science isn't very detailed. The author chooses to give a very basic overview of the concepts of radioactivity, nuclear fission, and half-lives. But that didn't really bother me, in part because I just liked looking at the art and in part because I already have a decent understanding of most of the science. Redniss intersperses the story of Marie Curie with a history of her work through science. She touches on some of the "miracle-cure" radium-based pr...