I am currently reading Life on the Edge: : The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili. It was recommended to me by an acquaintance who is a biologist, and it’s interesting reading. I had never heard of quantum biology before. I wasn’t aware that Read more…
I just read a book on sanguivores: animals that drink blood for survival. It was so good. I should warn you, this post gets a little disturbing at times. Okay, maybe all the time. Enjoy. Let’s start with the bats. There are three species of bats that live on blood. Read more…
Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People is a history of Judaism through the lens of what DNA research has produced in the last ten years. While Jewish history is worth studying in its own right, ancestral DNA testing has added to the story Read more…
I’m currently reading Morris Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, which was recommended to me by a college professor. It’s not one of those books that I think I’ll fully review, but I had to share this. The early Catholic Church thought of math as evil. To quote St. Augustine, circa Read more…
Once upon a time, physicists put a lot of thought into why physics worked the way it did. Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger: they all wrote about the philosophy of physics. It wasn’t just about what numbers proved, it was about why they proved it, and what could become of that knowledge. Read more…
I finished a great book last night: The Chemistry of Alchemy, by Cathy Cobb, Monty Fetterolf, and Harold Goldwhite. It’s a history of alchemy, but Cobb et al. aren’t historians. They’re chemists. The chapters on history alternate with alchemical experiments the reader can do at home. Obviously there’s no formula for Read more…
Oliver Sacks was one of my favorite science writers. (He died a couple of years ago, sadly.) He was a neurologist, best known for the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He wrote about things we’d learned about the workings of the mind through people who’d suffered Read more…
When you go to a retail shop, especially a chain store, everything you experience is planned from the moment you walk in. Fortune 500 retailers have actually hired people to follow shoppers around and watch what they do. Here’s a few things you don’t think about. — Store temperature. Dressing Read more…
Sleep is weird. We spend about a third of our lives asleep. Gerbils and lions do it 13 hours a day. Elephants average only 3.5 hours. Birds and dolphins only sleep with half their brain at a time, so they can still fly and surface for air. Obviously it’s important, Read more…
This is the first book I’ve read specifically for this blog. Being a milestone, I wanted it to be a good one, a perfect example of how the books I read sound dull at first but are fascinating and involve world-changing events. So I chose a book about the color Read more…