(cross posted from daily Kos, where this diary is a Friday morning feature)
Rereading
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. This 1,000 page book is the FIRST volume of three. And I’m reading it AGAIN. SO, I must like it, right? Newton, Leibniz, vagabonds, sex, history, politics, more sex, science…….great stuff.
If you haven’t read Stephenson before, I recommend starting with Cryptonomicon which actually takes place much later, but is a good introduction.
More Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality edited by Glenn Ellenbogen. Readings from the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity. A spoof of psychology journals. If you have ever had to read scholarly psychology articles, you should find this hilarious. Even if you haven’t, you might.
Just started
Forecasting presidential elections by Steven Rosenstone. Although it’s 25 years old, it comes highly recommended by Andrew Gelman, who runs Statistical modeling, causal modeling, and social science, one of my favorite blogs. If Andrew likes it, it’s going to be good.
In the middle of
A world without time: The forgotten legacy of Godel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau. I love this sort of book, and Yourgrau explains things well, although his writing is odd….not unclear, but sort of….I dunno what the word is. He writes like an incredibly learned 8 year old….that isn’t right, that’s insulting. Each sentence is fine, but the paragraphs are oddly joined…..I still recommend it.
the last man who knew everything by Andrew Robinson. All about Thomas Young, who was a physician, a physicist, and a philologist (and that’s just the ph s!). Young proved that light had to be a wave, he deciphered hieroglyphics, he ran a medical practice, and formulated the 3 color theory of color perception. He was also an expert engineer, and contributed about a dozen articles to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
(I was reading this and have lost it…..I hope to find it in some pile somewhere)
The discoveries by Alan Lightman. The greatest breakthroughs in 20th century science, with the original papers. Frankly, I find Lightman’s explanations wonderful….clear, concise etc. The original papers….well, I can’t understand them.
The singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil thinks that really really powerful computers will usher in utopia. He’s been right before.
Just finished
Out of the labyrinth: Setting mathematics free by Robert and Ellen Kaplan. The Kaplans run The Math Circle, which is, IMHO, a stunningly good way to teach math. This book is good, but not stunningly so. If you are interested in education or math, or, especially, math education, this is worthwhile. It will help if you know some math yourself. To whet your appetite, they get 5 year olds talking about the nature of infinity.
I will be writing a diary about this as part of the Ed/Up series, on 3/24 (on dailyKos)
