h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Clive, you will love that book. I bought it a few months ago.

I did find myself shaking my head when the author expressed amazement at the creationists in debate who simply wouldn't listen to his arguments or ignored him when he clearly refuted theirs.

As a scientist, he has spent his life following the rules of debate, he argues logically and from the evidence, then expects the other side to do the same. He doesn't get that they are not engaged in any debate and they're not talking to him.

They're speaking to the hundreds of millions of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the creationist industry. It's one of those golden geese that keep laying the golden eggs no matter how many darts you kill it with.

The creationist authors don't have to believe their own drivel (I don't think that they do) they only have keep telling what sells and laugh all the way to the bank.

I, like sho, haven't read Black Mischief but Vile Bodies is great.
Read and enjoy Psychocandy.

I can't possibly resist *two* positive comments- I'll start Monday on the way to work!

Regarding the Earth Story book, it was a series tie-in. I don't know if it's still available. Like I said, I got my copy some years ago.

I've just finished The Pirate's Daughter.

It's set in Jamaica in the 40s through to the 70s and follows the ups and downs of one family, in particular their interraction with Hollywood stars (Errol Flynn figures big in the book) and other famous residents including a thinly-disguised Ian Fleming.

It's very good. The writing captures the fell of the country, the attitudes and the speech patterns of all the different people in the book.

Well worth a read, IMHO.

Now I'm back on the trash - All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An Eye, by Christopher Brookmyre.

RF

You were right, I'm on chapter 3 of "Inner Fish" and loving it.

So I thought I'd share this:

PZ Myers in his blog Pharyngula this book meme of popular science books.

I've stared the one I own or have read.

But I think this will double up as my reading list for the next few years...



Micrographia, Robert Hooke

*The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin*

Never at Rest, Richard Westfall

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman

Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney

The Devil's Doctor, Philip Ball

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye

Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman

1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow

*The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene*

Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer

Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore

Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes

Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne

*A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking*

Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz

Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman

The Code Book, Simon Singh

The Elements of Murder, John Emsley

Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer

Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson

Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman

Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine

A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre

The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss

*E=mc2, David Bodanis*

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife

*Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman*

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin

Warped Passages, Lisa Randall

Apollo's Fire, Michael Sims

*Flatland, Edward Abbott*

Fermat's Last Theorem, Amir Aczel

Stiff, Mary Roach

Astroturf, M.G. Lord

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi

Longitude, Dava Sobel

The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg

The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle

The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio

Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay

This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin

The Executioner's Current, Richard Moran

*Krakatoa, Simon Winchester*

Pythagorus' Trousers, Margaret Wertheim

*Neuromancer, William Gibson*

The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios

The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel

Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik

Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps, Peter Galison

*The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan*

The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins

The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker

An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears

Consilience, E.O. Wilson

Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould

Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel

The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas

Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris

Storm World, Chris Mooney

The Carbon Age, Eric Roston

The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn

From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

Chaos, James Gleick

Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos

The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky

Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais

Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski

Basin and Range, John McPhee

Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner

Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, Olivia Judson

Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll

Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Carl Zimmer

Genome, Matt Ridley

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

It Ain't Necessarily So, Richard Lewontin

On Growth and Form, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran

*The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins*

The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd

The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson

The Great Devonian Controversy, Martin Rudwick

*The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks*

The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould

The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, Richard Lewontin

Time, Love, Memory, Jonathan Weiner

Voyaging and The Power of Place, Janet Browne

Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Ang

*Atom, Piers Bizony*

*Into The Silent Land, Paul Broks*

*Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin*

*How to Fossilise your Hamster, Mick O'Hare*

*The Earth: An intimate History, Richard Fortey*

*Journeys From The Centre of The Earth, Iain Stewart*

*The Birth of Time, John Gribbin*

*In Search of The Edge of Time, John Gribbin*

*In Search of The Big Bang, John Gribbin,*

*In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, John Gribbin,*

*Schrodinger's Kittens, John Gribbin,*

I'm reading Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another inherited book. I don't think I'll keep it, but it's good. Having lost both in-laws to cancer, it brings home how different things are and how primitive early cancer treatment was.

I rough counted 107 books on that list. I have read twenty of them. Now I need to get to a desert island and get to the rest.

thanks, Clive

One good turn deserves another.

It took me three tries over twenty five years to get through Godel, Escher, Bach. It still mostly goes over my head.

My favorite book by Douglas Hofstadter is Le Ton beau de Marot. It's ostensibly about the art of translation but is really about cognition. Any machine can produce a word for word transcription, only a real artist can get the sense of what the original writer envisioned and then reproduce it in another language.

Read it alongside some Steven Pinker to get a most delightful synthesomething-or-other, I can't think of the word.

Pinker is on my authors I should probably read list.

I thought Time's Arrow was very good and it is the most thoughtful of M Amis' books. You've made me want to re-read A Brief history of Time, Clive ; I read it when I was sixteen, didn't really understand it and I can hardly remember it. The rest of your list is pretty much an unknown to me. Good to see Richard Feynman on it; his The Meaning of it All is well worth a read (well, anything of his is well worth a read)

Psychocandy, you got me thinking about Waugh and I realised that I hadn't read any of his books this year. I'm now about two-thirds of the way through 'A Handful of Dust' and it is a pleasure to read.

The 'popular science' section at our Waterstones is a shelf. On the end of the stack. The small local bookshop which was run out of town after they appeared had a small antechamber full of popular science books. *sigh* 'Tis a shame.

I've not checked availability on Amazon for these but I suspect they will be getting the vast majority of my custom in the next few years as I plough my way through that lot.

I was rather gratified to see that bookd I bought and read were on the list (absolute zero, Krakatoa - which came up before in the discussion I..er...initiated on geology - and E=mc2) So knowing how much I enjoyed those I'm thinking these'll be a few choice gems in an amongst this lot as well...

Clive, I've just been *really* naughty and bought Flatland (I've not read it for years - there is an animated short based on it with Martin Sheen as Square)

Had to use my husband's card details... Well, he's registered and it was a faff to do it mesen

I'd actually just re-read "A Handful of Dust" recently, van-smeiter. Good stuff.

Currently reading "Watchmen", partly inspired by another thread and partly because we're going to wind up seeing the film when it's released.

Then it's on to "Vile Bodies".

I run away from Gödel, Escher, Bach every year. Eventually I'll get it done and dusted but, oh my, it makes my brain hurt!

Currently near the end of Tintenherz and it's fantastic. I can't say enough good things about it.

I'm also reading Three to Get Deadly by Janet Evanovich. For no particular reason.

I didn't find Gödel, Escher, Bach too hard, but then Gödel's incompleteness theorem took up several weeks in one of my third year university maths modules.

Currently reading Big Bang by Simon Singh, which presumably gets on to the Big Bang Theory at some point, but so far has gone through scientists' views of the universe from the ancient Greeks to the renaissance. Interestingly he pretty much defends those who clung to the Earth-centred model because before Kepler's work the sun-centred one was far less accurate at predicting the positions of the planets.

Also Flashman and the Mountain of Light. More ill behaviour, cowardice and downright caddishness from our "hero". If you're wondering what the Mountain of Light is, you'll probably know it better as the Koh-i-Noor: A730801

Just finished the most excellent Tintenherz and am about to begin Monsieur Pamplemousse Hits the Headlines

Reading Clarissa Oakes, about number 14 in Patrick O'Brian's Aunrey/Maturin series. Bugger, there's only about 3 left!