books

It's been a while since I did one of these "what I'm listening to" posts. Since the last one, a bunch of things have changed: I've gotten deeply into climate work for volunteerism (so podcast skew really…

2hrs and 50 minutes. When I looked at my phone yesterday, that's how much time it said I had left in the audio book of All We Can Save , a remarkable collection of essays and poetry on the climate crisis and solutions.…

Over the holidays I finally got around to reading/listening to The Sixth Extinction . It was quite good, but the language was at a density level where I found listening to the audio book to be a lot easier than reading…

I'm going to open with, this book is flat out amazing. In school, or even through popular science journalism, we learn a bit about some key points of geologic time. But these are snap shots, Dinosaurs, Ice Ages, even…

"I'm stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I'm dead. I'm in a Hab designed to last 31 days. If the Oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks…

Early in January I found out that the SyFy channel has a new TV series coming this year, called The Expanse. It's a story that takes place 200 years in the future. Humanity has colonized Mars, which has become…

While I am excited to read this myself, I had a moment where I got even more excited about the idea of my daughter discovering this book down the road.

There is a pretty interesting look at the CEO of Barnes & Noble this week in the NY Times. It shows how much of a David and Goliath fight B&N is in for, with 1% of the valuation of Amazon who they are trying to…

If you have a website, or have any creative input into a website, this is a book that is a must read. When people come to your website, they are looking for something. And the number one lesson is don't make them think,…

Great post at American Scientist about how Freakonomics has gone off the rails . In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong…

Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was based on the idea that in the future overall societal events, like the rise and fall of governments, could be modeled mathematically. Folks at the New England Complex Systems…

"It's a book about the periodic table of elements" got me an odd look from my wife, when asked what I was reading on my kindle. Yes, I'm a geek. But this isn't the dry kind of chemistry book that you might…

I really love my Kindle, and I'm happy I bought it. I haven't completely given up on real books though. One of the reasons why is evident below: This is not a new book, it's a year and a half old. The Kindle price is…

A couple weeks ago I went to a lecture by the author of Moby Duck, Donovan Hohn. I was interested in this because of a story that I remember reading a few years ago. The story was about a flotilla of 1000 ghost rubber…

I broke down and bought myself a Kindle this past week. I will say that I am definitely in like with the device, but not really in love with it yet. The major reason for that is because in the kindle I can see so much…

Ed de Bono has published a number of interesting books on using what we seem to understand about the brain to force ourselves to be more creative and get out of ruts. Some of his training was included in a leadership…

I never thought I'd find another popular book about science that played on the same level as A Short History of Nearly Everything , but The 4% Universe seems to be on par. I'm only 3 chapters in, but the story is told in…

I've been on a bit of a non fiction kick of late, but been a little slow about getting reviews up. A month or so ago I finished Drive: The Surprising Truth of What Motivates Us , which I quite enjoyed. The book,…

Clay Shirky is one of those authors that I just can't get enough of. After seeing a talk of his on TED a few years ago I got his first book, Here Comes Everybody , and loved it. When I found out he had another book out,…

Dear Publishers, I really do expect that your ebook pricing is going to be at least 50% lower than you list price for your print book. O'Reilly's 20% lower model just doesn't do it for me, and the fact that I can buy the…

I just finished Wil Wheaton's Memories of the Future Volume 1, and hope that Wil get's writting fast to get Vol 2 out there. This book is just too damn fun. The book is an episode by episode look at Star Trek The Next…

I just finished listening to the audio book of the Omnivore's Dilemma, which was great, but I'll get to that after a brief digression. I've been listening to a decent number of audio books over the past few years, but…

I've been listening to Bill Bryson's " A Short History of Nearly Everything " for the last couple of weeks, and this book is amazing. Bill Bryson, most known for various humorous travel books, turned his eyes…

The beginning of my summer of popular non-fiction was started with Blink , on audio, that I finished a few weeks ago. Blink is about the way we make a lot of decisions at an unconscious level, some times for good, some…

For my grad school class this semester we are using the book Lucene in Action , as we are doing projects in and around search engines. I did a quick search on getting this book, and found that if I ordered directly from…

The latest book on my audio book list, is The Salmon of Doubt, by Douglas Adams. I'm about 1/2 way through after listening to it mostly on the plane back and forth to Madison this past weekend. While I've always been a…

On the way back from Austin, I strolled into the airport bookstore to get a bottle of water, and do my quick check to see if they actually carried any science magazines (the answer was no, per usual, though there were 12…