Books shelved under “Science”

I confess I was sceptical about this one, despite the PhD author. A student lent this to me, though, and in addition to generally trying to keep an open mind, I like to take an interest in what students are reading. So while I probably wouldn’t have picked up The Superhuman Mind on my own, I gave it a try—and it was all right. The rhetoric was not as hyperbolic as I feared, and the…

As I recently noted on Twitter, there is an uncomfortable amount of talk about inserting stuff into bodily orifices that shouldn’t be inserted there. This is not a book for the faint of heart.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex is the third book in the #bangingbookclub, run by Hannah Witton, Leena Norms, and Lucy Moon. Check out the Twitter feed to see what everyone else is saying about Bonk and the…

After a long spate of young adult novels, and in particular the very harrowing Asking for It, I needed a palate-cleanser. How much further can we get than a book about the expedition to define the metre?

I take the metre for granted. It’s just there. I was aware, vaguely, of the various ways in which it has been defined, and I knew that the metric system came out of the French Revolution.…

So let’s say you’re unsure on this whole evolution thing. You’ve got questions. But, for one reason or another, science never stuck with you in school. Maybe your classes (or teachers, sigh) were a bit on the boring side—lots of memorization and dull textbooks, and no explosions, no episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy on VHS on the bulky 27" CRT television wheeled out from the A/V cabinet (ahhh, those were the days). Or…

The universe is big. Mindbogglingly big. Our minds have trouble conceiving of the vastness of the universe, on either scales of time and space, or their unified presentation as spacetime. And the moment we think we might possibly be able to get used to this idea, it becomes apparent that the very foundations of our universe are small. So small, so tiny, that the energy required to probe these depths is nearly as impressively vast…

I don’t really need to review this, do I?

Randall Munroe is the much-beloved writer and illustrator of the much-beloved webcomic xkcd. He puts his physics and robotics background to good use creating humorous situations based on science, mathematics, and nerd culture. He has since branched out with What If?, a weekly blog in which Munroe answers over-the-top questions by following the facts to whatever consequences they might lead.

This is the book…

So, there are monkeys in South America and in Africa. How did they get there? That’s essentially what Alan de Queiroz wants to answer in The Monkey’s Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life, albeit in a roundabout way.

If you’re a creationist, especially a young-Earth creationist, you don’t have to worry too much about this. The answer is “God did it!” (Or possibly, “God did it, praise Jesus!” if you are…

I first heard about this book when Daniel Levitin appeared on a Spark episode to talk about organization. I recommend you follow the link and listen to the interview; his examples are pretty much straight from the book, so it should give you a good idea of whether or not to read this. I mentioned the book to my friend Rebecca, because it seemed like she would be interested in it. Lo and behold, she…

No matter how you slice it, the way we do science now is very different from the way we did science a few centuries ago, or even a single century ago. Or even a couple of decades ago. Just as the concept of science, itself a fairly recent term, has changed dramatically over the centuries, so too has the scientific method and the infrastructure through which we do science. Richard Holmes elects to analyze…

I want to start this review by inviting you to read my review of A Short History of Nearly Everything, so you can understand my feelings about science going into this book.

If that’s tl;dr, then allow me to reiterate the main thrust of the review: science is fucking awesome. Got it?

Margaret Wertheim would agree with me, but in Pythagoras’ Trousers she explores how the general absence of women from mainstream scientific…

This book is the dead tree equivalent of a BuzzFeed post. Its title could be “I Got 99 Cognitive Biases But a Psychology Degree Ain’t One.” Or maybe not.

Rolf Dobelli enumerates 99 thinking errors, or cognitive biases, in The Art of Thinking Clearly, dispensing as he does tips for leading a more rational, less error-prone life. Anyone who has done even the least amount of reading in this subject will recognize many of…

I’ve always held that the Sun is out to get us. Oh, sure, it plays the role of life-giver, showering the Earth in energy and heat necessary for life. Yet too much time in the Sun leaves us open to cancer. And in a little under five billion years, the Sun, in its senescence, will expand to engulf our planet. Before that happens, however, its expansion will have already scorched the surface and rendered the…

To paraphrase Mr T, I pity the fool who doesn’t see the beauty of mathematics inherent in the world around us. As a teacher, I feel rather complicit at times in robbing children of the joy of mathematics. The systemic, industrial tone of education does not often lend itself well to the investigation and discovery that should be the cornerstone of maths; I find this particularly true in the UK, where standardized tests and levels…

I came across this book while browsing the science section in Waterstones, because that’s where they hide all the good mathematics books as well, and I was looking for an appropriate math book to give to a fellow math friend for her birthday. (I opted for Ian Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures.) Having read Dava Sobel’s explication of John Harrison and the marine chronometer in Longitude, I snapped this up without a second…

I was never promised a flying car.

What I mean to say is that my generation was never the generation of flying cars. We grew up knowing better. It’s been seventy years since we started breaking open atomic nuclei to harness their incredible capacity for destruction and creation, and we are still sucking fossilized plants from the bowels of the Earth and lighting it on fire as fuel. My parents grew up watching men go…

Certain things just make Canadian public broadcasting awesome, and the Massey Lectures are one shining example. For one week, since 1961, with a few exceptions, CBC radio has broadcast annual lectures on a topic from philosophy or culture by notable figures. These lectures now get published in book format. Douglas Coupland’s most recent novel, Player One, is an adaptation of the lectures he gave in 2010. Now Neil Turok, a noted physicist and current…

I kind of want to cut this book in half, praise the first part, and stick the second part in some corner to gather dust. Not that the second part is bad, mind you; the entire book is well-written and obviously the product of someone who knows their field. There’s just a lot of it. Thinking, Fast and Slow is kind of like a guest who shows up to your party and then dazzles everyone…

I love physics. I love that we know so much about physics, and that we still have so much left to learn! I love reading about how far we have come from Ptolemaic ideas of geocentricity to mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation itself. And don’t get me started about the Large Hadron Collider: 7 TeV? Really? Up to 14 TeV in the next few years? Various atrocious self-help books claim they’ll help you unlock…

Editor's note: Since I read this back in 2012, Wade has gone on to write more openly racist and eugenical books. For what it’s worth, I don’t think his views are so overtly on display in Before the Dawn. Nevertheless, as a result of his more recent writing, I do not recommend reading this book or any of Wade’s books. This review is preserved for posterity.

There is a conciliatory tactic in the trenches…

Rocks. They’re old.

Thank you for reading my review.

OK, I guess I’ll go into slightly more detail. In his phenomenal A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson devotes slightly less than a page to William Smith and the first geological map of Britain. This is likely a result of Bryson (or his editors) striving in vain to meet that promise of being “short”. Bryson promises us a more “comprehensive” account in The…