Re: The Sociopath Next Door

We are often told in writing that no one sees themselves as the villain. You should set your antagonist at cross-purposes with the protoganist to create conflict. Each sees themselves as good people, but they cannot both win. According to The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout, there are people who just don’t think the […]

Re: Cosmic Jackpot

A good book you might wish you had read before tackling “The House Beyond Your Sky,” is Cosmic Jackpot. In clear, entertaining arguments, Paul Davies works his way through the various flavors of theories attempting to explain the “Goldilocks” problem. That is, there are a small set of critical constants that have to be within […]

Re: Our Cosmic Origins

The second cosmology book recommended in Spin is Our Cosmic Origins, by Armand Delsemme. A slender book, it gives a good summary of the origins of the Solar System, but skims over a lot of explanation. Understanding and accepting it is largely dependant on reading other books. Being a cometologist, he goes into fascinating detail […]

Re: The Life and Death of Planet Earth

One of the books recommended at the end of Spin, The Life and Death of Planet Earth, by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, shows you what the Spin protects the Earth from. The book has an interesting structure, telling the creation and history of our world by mirroring it in the future.

Re: Programming the Universe

The one Big Idea I learned from Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd, is that random input, processed through rules, creates structured output. Information is encoded in the attributes (the location, velocity, etc of every particle) of physical objects, and the laws of physics operate on them like programming instructions. So for the universe, we […]

Re: The View From the Center of the Universe

In The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams attempt to create a new mythos, that is, a story that explains our world, based on science. Actually, I think they did a better job of explaining what they are trying to say in their various interviews than in the […]

Re: The Universe in a Single Atom

Much has been made of the Dalai Lama’s stance that if science can disprove any tenets of Buddhism, then they would accept it, since Buddhism is an experiential and experimental religion. The Universe in a Single Atom, by the Dalai Lama, accepts modern physics and cosmology, hopes the combination of monks and scientists will expand […]

Re: A Geography of Oysters

Some people have loved oysters since childhood. Some would never touch them. Some discover them as adults, and then can’t get enough of them. That last group describes me. The first time I ate an oyster on the half shell, I had the usual fears. It would be slimy. It would sicken me. It was […]

My 2007 Reading List

I plan to read the Nebula ballot, mostly out of a sense of obligation, but I’ve already read the one I was most interested in. I’m more excited about reading through my own list.

Reading by listening

One way I like to read is by using my computer as the world’s most expensive radio, and listening to podcasts. A lot of podcasts are ways to listen to radio programs on your own time, and Chapter a Day has been around practically since the start of radio. Like it says, they pick out […]