Best funny science books according to redditors
We found 485 Reddit comments discussing the best funny science books. We ranked the 38 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 485 Reddit comments discussing the best funny science books. We ranked the 38 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
Fun fact: Thomas Midgley, one of the guys who invented tetraethyl lead, also invented and promoted freon and other CFCs (the stuff that wrecked the ozone layer). Between his two "contributions" to commercial chemistry, he is probably the most environmentally-destructive individual organism ever to have lived.
It could be argued that if you had a time machine and a single bullet, you might do more for humanity by going back and killing Midgely instead of Hitler. It's a shame, because he certainly didn't intend for either of his inventions to do so much damage.
Luckily (in a way), he died before we found out what a disaster TEL and CFCs turned out to be. Not so luckily (but perhaps predictably), he was killed by yet another of his own inventions. Partially paralyzed by polio, he devised a complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys to give him more mobility. He ended up getting tangled in the contraption and was strangled to death by the ropes.
EDIT: Since half a dozen people have suggested Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and something called "vsauce" as the potential source for this fun fact, I'm just going to mention here that I first learned this bit of trivia on QI. I have also read A Short History, but my first exposure to the inventive tragedy that is Thomas Midgley's career was courtesy of Stephen Fry. If you find facts like this fun, I strongly encourage you to watch QI (most of it is on youtube). I also encourage you to read Bill Bryson's book.
The submarine would be fine, but the crew would be in trouble.
PICTURE (recommended)
-----
TEXT
The submarine wouldn’t burst. Submarine hulls are strong enough to withstand 50 to 80 atmospheres of external pressure from water, so they’d have no problem containing 1 atmosphere of internal pressure from air.
The hull would likely be airtight. Although watertight seals don’t necessarily hold back air, the fact that water can’t find a way through the hull under 50 atmospheres of pressure suggests that air won’t escape quickly. There may be a few specialized one-way valves that would let air out, but in all likelihood, the submarine would remain sealed.
The big problem the crew would face would be the obvious one: air.
Nuclear submarines use electricity to extract oxygen from water. In space, there’s no water,^[citation ^needed] so they wouldn’t be able to manufacture more air. They carry enough oxygen in reserve to survive for a few days, at least, but eventually they’d be in trouble.
To stay warm, they could run their reactor, but they’d have to be very careful how much they ran it—because the ocean is colder than space.
Technically, that’s not really true. Everyone knows that space is very cold. The reason spacecraft can overheat is that space isn’t as thermally conductive as water, so heat builds up more quickly in spacecraft than in boats.
But if you’re even more pedantic, it is true. The ocean is colder than space.
Interstellar space is very cold, but space near the Sun—and near Earth—is actually incredibly hot! The reason it doesn’t seem that way is that in space, the definition of “temperature” breaks down a little bit. Space seems cold because it’s so empty. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a collection of particles. In space, individual molecules have a high average kinetic energy, but there are so few of them that they don’t affect you.
When I was a kid, my dad had a machine shop in our basement, and I remember watching him use a metal grinder. Whenever metal touched the grinding wheel, sparks flew everywhere, showering his hands and clothes. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t hurt him—after all, the glowing sparks were several thousand degrees.
I later learned that the reason the sparks didn’t hurt him was that they were tiny; the heat they carried could be absorbed into the body without warming anything more than a tiny patch of skin.
The hot molecules in space are like the sparks in my dad’s machine shop; they might be hot or cold, but they’re so small that touching them doesn’t change your temperature much.^1 Instead, your heating and cooling is dominated by how much heat you produce and how quickly it pours out of you into the void.
Without a warm environment around you radiating heat back to you, you lose heat by radiation much faster than normal. But without air around you to carry heat from your surface, you also don’t lose much heat by convection.^2 For most human-carrying spacecraft, the latter effect is more important; the big problem isn’t staying warm, it’s keeping cool.
A nuclear submarine is clearly able to maintain a livable temperature inside when the outer hull is cooled to 4°C by the ocean. However, if the submarine’s hull needed to hold this temperature while in space, it would lose heat at a rate of about 6 megawatts while in the shadow of the Earth. This is more than the 20 kilowatts supplied by the crew—and the few hundred kilowatts of apricity^3 when in direct sunlight—so they’d need to run the reactor just to stay warm.^4
To get out of orbit, a submarine would need to slow down enough that it hit the atmosphere. Without rockets, it has no way to do this...
Okay—technically, a submarine does have rockets.
Unfortunately, the rockets are pointing the wrong way to give the submarine a push. Rockets are self-propelling, which means they have very little recoil. When a gun fires a bullet, it’s pushing the bullet up to speed. With a rocket, you just light it and let go. Launching missiles won’t propel a submarine forward.
But not launching them could.**
If the ballistic missiles carried by a modern nuclear submarine were taken from their tubes, turned around, and placed in the tubes backward, they could each change the submarine’s speed by about 4 meters per second. A typical de-orbiting maneuver requires in the neighborhood of 100 m/s of delta-v (speed change), which means that the 24 Trident missiles carried by an Ohio-class submarine could be just enough to get it out of orbit. Now, because the submarine has no heat-dissipating ablative tiles, and because it’s not aerodynamically stable at hypersonic velocities, it would inevitably tumble and break up in the air.
If you tucked yourself into the right crevice in the submarine—and were strapped into an acceleration couch—there’s a tiny, tiny, tiny chance that you could survive the rapid deceleration. Then you’d need to jump out of the wreckage with a parachute before it hit the ground.
If you ever try this, and I suggest you don’t, I have one piece of advice that is absolutely critical: Remember to disable the detonators on the missiles.
^1 This is why, even though matches and torches are about the same temperature, you see tough guys in movies extinguish matches by pinching them but never see them do the same with torches.
^2 Or conduction.
^3 This is my single favorite word in the English language. It means the warmth of sunlight in winter.
^4 When they moved into the Sun, the sub’s surface would warm, but they’d still be losing heat faster than they’d be gaining it.
--------
Courtesy of Randal Munroe's What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Are you familiar with Randall Munroe's (the xkcd guy) What If? project? He explores very similar questions and also published a book.
What differentiates your project?
A Short History of Nearly Everything. Essentially, Bryson describes the evolution of man through it's scientific advances. I think it will be a little less militarily focused than you want, but it seems pretty close.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
I'll stick to recommending science communication books (those that don't require a deep background on biological concepts):
---
For books that everyone studying biology ends up reading, my candidate would be Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, by Nelson & Cox but that's a textbook.
There's a lot of great stuff about what would happen if you assembled a periodic table out of real elements, but I recommend a passage from Randall Munroe's 'What If'-- "Periodic Wall", or something like that.
Edit: Unofficial Wordpress Version
Double Edit: The Book Itself
Triple Edit: The What If Blog
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
I haven't quite finished it (it's rather long) but so far it is fantastic.
Bill Bryson is the man. I don't know if he is a "Super Dad" I'm making him out to be, but I hope so. I've only read the one book though..
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
why do i feel this should have been in the what if? book?
Edit: fixed link
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a very good read.
http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life/dp/0393339912/ref=asap_bc
This has a chapter on such studies. Remember that this means you don't sit up, you don't change clothes, you don't wash, you poop in a bowl, etc. Sounds awful to me.
I was going to suggest AShort History of Nearly Everything. It's a book I think everyone should read.
I'd invite you to pick up an amazing read...
https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything-ebook/dp/B000FBFNII/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498844129&sr=8-1&keywords=a+short+history+of+nearly+everything
In it, you will learn that the people who actually do the discovering almost never get the credit.
You might enjoy reading "What if" by Randall Monroe of XKCD
https://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions-ebook/dp/B00IYUYF4A/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1536338961&sr=8-8&keywords=what+if
> What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?
> You could stack the top two rows without too much trouble. The third row would burn you with fire, the fourth would kill you with toxic smoke. The fifth row would do all that stuff plus give you a dose of radiation, while the sixth would explode in a radioactive, poisonous fire. Do not build the seventh row.
-Randall Munroe's, What If?
It really depends on how much you're talking about. Plainly, you're probably going to die if you're close enough, but if you really want an in depth analysis—and just a plain good read/listen—about what will happen I'd recommend either listening to the talk Randall gave that /u/Esmyra mentioned below or getting Randall's book I mentioned, because I couldn't find this one online.
Edit: FOUND IT
Easy one. A Short History of Nearly Everything.
It's largely a history of science. It was amazing finding out how long we've known certain things and how recently we found others. If I get wound up this'll turn into a novel. Just read it.
It's a shortened version of the quote from "A Short History of Nearly Everything" because I couldn't fit the whole thing on the image, but you can read the rest here: http://www.huzheng.org/bookstore/AShortHistoryofNearlyEverything.pdf
Or buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything-ebook/dp/B000FBFNII/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325176212&sr=8-1
I first read about it a couple months ago in a book called "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryerson. https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
It's a great book if you like random trivia and it takes a casual conversation tone to just about everything and provides great insight into stuff we normally just don't think about. He talks a lot about various scientist and has a lot of good stories about how odd many of these people were.
If you are interested, some of the other amusing/interesting bits of info from the book include:
"Best remembered for coining the word Dinosaur, Richard Owen also gave us the modern concept of museums as places the common folk can visit and not just scientists. He was also one of the meanest persons in science history and the only person Darwin ever hated."
"Carl Wilhelm Scheele one of the founders of modern chemistry, had a habit of sniffing and tasting any new element or chemical he discovered including poisonous ones. He was found dead at the age of 43, killed by his last discovery."
"In the early days of pump and hose assisted diving, there was a dreaded phenomena called “the squeeze” where the diver’s entire body would be sucked into the hose and diving helmet, leaving just some bones and flesh in the diving suit. Ouch."
“In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.”
Some of it isn't exactly correct but it is easy and fun to read and you'll definitely learn something:
A Short History of Nearly Everything
If you like this then you'll really like a book by Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, highly recommended. Anything by Bryson, really.
A short history of nearly everything
While it might not change the way he sees the world it'll definitely help him see it more clearly.
If you like xkcd, you might also want to check out his book "What If?"
Not very long, but a very fun read. It's a longform format of the other half of his site: https://what-if.xkcd.com/
http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994
Check out What If? and Thing Explainer.
As /u/dnew just stated:
>http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life/dp/0393339912/ref=asap_bc
>This has a chapter on such studies. Remember that this means you don't sit up, you don't change clothes, you don't wash, you poop in a bowl, etc. Sounds awful to me.
It's not going to be a fun study.
Cellular growth and development in microgravity is very interesting. Given how much the human body changes and/or deteriorates without constant force being applied, one can hazard a guess at how differently a human being might develop if conception and their entire growth cycle occurred sans gravity.
For example, Astronaut Cady Coleman has mentioned that as a white, petite 50 year old woman, she was quite concerned about bone loss during her ISS mission (Expedition 27). Appreciable bone density loss is experienced by most astronauts, and has largely been proven to be in direct relation to impact related exercise. Dr. Coleman followed a strict dietary supplement, exercise and osteoporotic drug treatment regimen partially described in this NIH paper. As a result, she experienced zero bone density loss. However, her bone density distribution changed significantly, creating an architecture that was thicker on the edges and more porous in the interior. I mention race, as African American women experience 16-28% less bone density loss in comparable duration spaceflights.
Vestibular and circulatory systems change, as well, and most long-duration spaceflight astronauts experience significant periods of re-adaptation when returning to Earth.
As far as life-cycle development:
Fluid dynamics is one of most complicated and highly studied aspects of spaceflight. Human bodies are one giant fluid dynamics problem, from intercellular transport to circulatory issues to urinary tract issues. (Fat, red faces on astronauts aren't necessarily because there's no gravity pushing urine to the bottom of the bladder, so they have no idea when they really gotta go, it's also because blood and body fluids require cardiovascular exertion to drive movement).
Red blood cells also become more spherical, and your spine decompresses, painfully forcing you to "grow" up to two inches. Embryos experience some degree of gravitropism, for example, certain amphibians orient themselves to gravity within seconds of fertilization.
Then we get into Seasonal Affective Disorder, and implications of living in a tin-can with zero exposure to natural seasonal changes, and we can move on quickly from there to radiation exposure. For example, rumor has it a female astronaut has exceeded her exposure allowance, 400REM and can no longer fly in space. No recorded increase in cancer incidence, but we have to be careful, just the same.
Honestly, I could happily write about this for the next three days straight and not even begin to address all the issues with human growth, development, and functions in microgravity, but I think you'd get a better read out of the following:
I highly suggest reading The Fundamentals of Space Medicine by Gilles Clement and Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, if you have further interest.
Not directly answering OP's question, but Randall Munroe from xkcd has treated the subject of a "real life periodic table" and its consequences in his What if? book. He also talks about it in a Talk @ Google. I highly recommend to take the time and watch it.
If I might recommend a book, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything sounds like something you'd be interested in.
It's mostly about the origins and stories behind major scientific discoveries and theories that have shaped our view of the world and universe today. He starts at the Big Bang and goes from there. The book is quite accessible to those without formal scientific education (like myself). Bryson dumbs things down just enough so you can understand it while feeling enriched afterwards at the same time. I can definitely say that the book changed me for the better when I read it for the first time back as a teenager. It also has an awesome illustrated edition.
That I exist at all. From A Short History of Nearly Everything:
>If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did - possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond - you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.
> Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower Pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.
If you're looking for a fun, but enriching read, I highly recommend Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". It's tough to put down and you're guaranteed to learn some amazing things.
Similarly, Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" comes to mind, although I haven't read it in some time. Seems fitting for the gaybros since it's about hiking the Appalachian Trail - a dream of mine some day.
If anyone wasn't aware from the artstyle, this is by Randall Munroe, of xckd fame. It's from his new book, "What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions"
Pages 290-295 if anyone wishes to read it.
^^In ^^the ^^UK ^^edition
If you read one scientific/historical laugh-riot this year, make it:
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Same here for me. It took me a long time to get over religion after being born into it, as a Seventh Day Adventist.
Two things helped me. For 5 years I questioned my religion, but I tried very hard not to. I fully believed the line that the devil will try to trick you into denying christ, and I tried very hard to avoid that temptation. The first thing, was when I looked up Seventh Day Adventists on wikipedia, and it listed in the first couple of paragraphs that they are considered to be somewhat of a cult. That simple statement that is probably completely obvious to other people hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew instantly that it was true and it really opened my eyes.
Shortly after that, there was something going on in the local news about Scientologists (I cant remember what), and so I started reading about them to see what they were all about, and it suddenly dawned on me how that religion, as kooky as it sounds, is not really any different to the many other 'legitimate' religions out there that I was really familiar with.
So my faith in 'religion' was rocked, and I couldn't honestly believe in it any more, but I still wanted to believe in God, but after having my eyes opened, it didn't take long for me to realise, that if god did exist, he was either completely useless and couldn't help anyone, or he could help but didn't because he was a cold hearted bastard.
From the time I first started having doubts, to actually realising that I didn't believe god existed, was at least 10 years.
On a side note, although I read this book AFTER I'd already become an atheist, I recommend that everyone reads "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. It not only covers almost every scientific discipline, but explains how we progressed through our understanding of science. He is not a scientist himself, and does a wonderful job of explaining everything in ways anyone could understand. I think I've bought this book at least 15 times, because I keep giving it away.
Here's a link to the book on amazon
When I read A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson it struck me that almost all of the scientists and innovators mentioned in the book came from upper middle class or wealthy families. It appears that having the free time and resources to invest in an interest is a huge requirement to success.
I have come to the conclusion that the first society that figures out that by having a populace that does not have to worry about food, clothing, and shelter while also being provided with the resources to persue their interests, that society is going to blow past the rest of humanity by creating 20 Einsteins.
I'll read damn near anything I can get my hands on, but I prefer fiction.
Some non-fiction books that I'm currently enjoying though are Godel, Escher, Bach and A Short History of Nearly Everything
On the fiction list right now are Foucault's Pendulum and The Broom of the System.
Ah, I love non-fictin as well. Though most of my favorites are more science oriented, there should be a few on here that pique your interest.
If you are interested in such questions, and science generally, I recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book starts off discussing this exact question.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" covers all these topics, and more. It's written in really understandable language as well. I highly recommend it.
I'd recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. This book is great because it covers so many of the most scientifically important events throughout history, rather than just being a layman's introduction to a specific branch of science.
If you're at all interested in statistics and how misleading they can be, check out The Drunkard's Walk.
In Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" he makes a pretty good case that it is actually the exact opposite: that South America was settled by the Polynesians.
Obviously the Polynesians are incredible boaters, but what makes the most sense is that they initially sailed into the wind knowing that if they didn't find whatever it was they were looking for, the trip back home downwind would be much easier.
Related reading: Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
Completely and horrifically unrealistic. This book actually has a chapter on this very topic, discussed on the concept of people bailing out of a crashing plane. Basically, without specialized gear and specialized training, you'd die.
At the altitude and speeds airplanes are flying, it is far too easy for a person to get caught in a spin, spinning you to death before you can properly deploy a chute. The air is thin enough that it can be hard to correct yourself. Also, at the speeds we are dealing with, opening up your mouth could cause your gut to literally rupture. Look at what jets with ejection seats do- they launch you, in a whole, padded, stabilized seat, in the direction of your motion to minimize the acceleration on you, and it is still incredibly dangerous with people frequently breaking bones or not surviving.
It might be helpful if you give us a list of any books you've read that you did enjoy or genres you think you might like.
I have never met a person who didn't love Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but it may not be your thing if you don't like wacked-out sci-fi so some general idea of your interests could help a ton with suggestions.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is a solid non-fiction
Robot Dreams is a great set of sci-fi short stories
Ender's Game gets a ton of hate but is a pretty great sci-fi
On A Pale Horse is an older series that I'd consider fantasy but with sci-fi elements
Where the Red Fern Grows is well loved fiction
A Zoo in My Luggage is non-fic but about animal collecting trips for a zoo and is hilarious.
How come no-one has mentioned A Short History of Nearly Everything yet?
Random selection of some of my favorites to help you expand your horizons:
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a great introduction to scientific skepticism.
Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris is a succinct refutation of Christianity as it's generally practiced in the US employing crystal-clear logic.
Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor by Anthony Everitt is the best biography of one of the most interesting men in history, in my personal opinion.
Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski is a jaw-dropping book on history, journalism, travel, contemporary events, philosophy.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a great tome about... everything. Physics, history, biology, art... Plus he's funny as hell. (Check out his In a Sunburned Country for a side-splitting account of his trip to Australia).
The Annotated Mona Lisa by Carol Strickland is a thorough primer on art history. Get it before going to any major museum (Met, Louvre, Tate Modern, Prado, etc).
Not the Impossible Faith by Richard Carrier is a detailed refutation of the whole 'Christianity could not have survived the early years if it weren't for god's providence' argument.
Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman are six of the easier chapters from his '63 Lectures on Physics delivered at CalTech. If you like it and really want to be mind-fucked with science, his QED is a great book on quantum electrodynamics direct from the master.
Lucy's Legacy by Donald Johanson will give you a really great understanding of our family history (homo, australopithecus, ardipithecus, etc). Equally good are Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade and Mapping Human History by Steve Olson, though I personally enjoyed Before the Dawn slightly more.
Memory and the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel gives you context for all the Bible stories by detailing contemporaneous events from the Levant, Italy, Greece, Egypt, etc.
After the Prophet by Lesley Hazleton is an awesome read if you don't know much about Islam and its early history.
Happy reading!
edit: Also, check out the Reasonable Doubts podcast.
just some of my standard answers.
The Disappearing Spoon- yes, it's chemistry but I found it very interesting.
Abraham Lincoln's DNA- if you have a good background in genetics you might already know many of these stories. Read the table of contents first.
New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers- disease based biology. There is a follow up book if it turns out you like it.
Stiff- more than you wanted to know about dead bodies.
And by the same author but space based... Packing for Mars.
I hope these help... Cheers.
A really nice, much prettier, redrawing of this, by the same illustrator, from the inside of the dust jacket of his new book (it's really good):
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/875328566035019154.jpg
The book: http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994
Did you really imagine it?
From Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly Everything (for geographic reference he is talking about an impact that happened in Manson, Iowa some 74 million years ago and left the biggest crater in the US (you couldn't tell if you went there...nothing to see crater-wise anymore without using special equipment to see underground):
>An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the earth's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvins or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor's path - people, houses, factories, cars - would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.
>One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the earth's surface, where the people of Manson (an impact site of such a collision millions of years ago) had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn't been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it.
>For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light - the brightest ever seen by human eyes - followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a rolling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone In a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look into the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion.
>Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities - the whole of the Midwest, in short - nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish.
>But that's just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the world would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that 1.5 billion people would be dead by the end of first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean "selecting a slow death over a quicker one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished."
>The amount of soot and floating ash from the impact and following fires would blot out the sun, certainly for months, possibly for years, disrupting growing cycles. In 2001, researchers at the California Institute of Technology analyzed helium isotopes from sediments left from the later KT impact and concluded that it affected earth’s climate for about 10,000 years. This was actually used as evidence to support the notion that the extinction of dinosaurs was swift and emphatic - and so it was in geological terms. We can only guess how well, or whether, humanity would cope with such an event.
>And in all likelihood, this would come without warning, out of a clear sky.
EDIT: Added geographic info for context.
EDIT2: It is worth noting that there were no extinctions associated with this impact. As devastating as it was it was still not sufficient to completely end any species' time on the planet. Now consider what the one that put a sharp and definitive end to the dinosaurs must have been like!
These:
How to Read the Solar System: A Guide to the Stars and Planets by Christ North and Paul Abel.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan.
Foundations of Astrophysics by Barbara Ryden and Bradley Peterson.
Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program by Pat Duggins.
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything by Chris Hadfield.
You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station by Chris Hadfield.
Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the Space Transportation System by Dennis Jenkins.
Wings in Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle, 1971-2010 by Chapline, Hale, Lane, and Lula.
No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time by Claus Jensen.
Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences by Andrew Chaikin.
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin.
Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA by Amy Teitel.
Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module by Thomas Kelly.
The Scientific Exploration of Venus by Fredric Taylor.
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.
Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White and Richard Truly.
An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley Carroll and Dale Ostlie.
Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley.
Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Clark.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
Russia in Space by Anatoly Zak.
Rain Of Iron And Ice: The Very Real Threat Of Comet And Asteroid Bombardment by John Lewis.
Mining the Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets by John Lewis.
Asteroid Mining: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John Lewis.
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris.
The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report by Timothy Ferris.
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson.
The Martian by Andy Weir.
Packing for Mars:The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution by Frank White.
Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.
The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne.
Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Oddyssey by Joseph Allen.
International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems by Hopkins, Hopkins, and Isakowitz.
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene.
How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin.
This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows.
The Last Man on the Moon by Eugene Cernan.
Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz.
Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.
The end
http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle/dp/0345409469
http://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adams/dp/0345391802
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is good, but I'm not sure if it's quite what you're looking for.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
I think he is referring to A Short History of Nearly Everything. It is a good book and very readable, like all Bryson's books.
Not sure if they are all in or from there, but I am strongly reminded of Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Species
If you want to read a fictionalized electronics course I would recommend There Are No Electrons. I am almost finished with it after a couple days because I can't seem to put it down! Engrossing, entertaining, and educational. You truly won't be sorry.
(Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with this book. It's just amazing and has made electronics an accessible hobby to me, whereas before it just seemed like black magic)
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I think this fits, but for dogs
https://www.amazon.com/How-Teach-Quantum-Physics-Your/dp/1416572295
You could try picking up a book like A Short History Of Nearly Everything. It is a history book, no more, no less. It does focus quite a bit on science, what its learned, but more importantly how we learn things scientifically. The speed of light for example.
https://www.amazon.com/Will-Cat-Eat-Eyeballs-Questions/dp/039365270X
Don't know if it's what you're asking, but the one in the center is What If? by Randall Munroe
a really good starting book is
A short history of nearly everything
author Bill Bryson (born in Des Moines, Iowa, living in the UK most of his life) discovered he knew next to nothing about how stuff works. How we know things. Not because of a religious upbringing, but just because he was a hardcore linguist and had never studied science subjects. So he did what he does best, research and ask tons of people about everything and then he wrote a book.
And what a book! To quote the first 5 star reviewer in view on amazon: (almost everybody gives it 5 stars)
>" I cannot think of any other single-volume book I have ever read that was as informative, entertaining, and broad in scope as this classic. Not having excelled in science, nor been much interested in it when I was younger, this gem is a massive refresher course on everything I ever learned about science, and then some."
This book is an excellent introduction in every scientific subject you can think of and dozens others you never heard of. After reading it you can select those fields of study that interest you most and find books by scientists in that field that go deeper.
There are many editions of this book, including a fully illustrated one.
Here's an idea I think you'd be good at based on your interests: I'm reading a book now called A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's about how we came to understand the things we know about our planet and our universe. It's absolutely fascinating but it's super long. Condense some of that information down into a format more accessible for high school students. The universe is unfathomably incredible...like pants-wettingly amazing. But high school textbooks are the most boring possible medium ever for conveying that wonder. Turn it into some captivating format that blows kids' minds and makes them fall in love with science. Start a YouTube channel or something.
The way that they are reacting is actually statistically demonstrated by social scientists to be the most effective way for religious parents to influence their wayward children to eventually return to religious practice as they age: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/august-web-only/religion-runs-in-family.html
Also keep in mind the the statistical factor that is most likely to lead to a resuscitation of religious practice for a young adult who has strayed is marriage and children. The younger and less financially and socially stable you are when you have children, the more statistically likely you are to be hooked back into a religious community: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/july-web-only/is-family-decline-behind-religious-decline.html
Just make sure that you don't become a young parent, that you seek out secular communities like the Sunday Assembly etc., and that you do your research on miracles and revelation and philosophy, critical thinking, and science in general
For a serious suggestion that isn't subversive per se but would be good prep material for more subversive stuff, XKCD's What If book is great. It blends science with the absurd in a way that captures the imagination.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
SCIENCE.
A short history of nearly everything
http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/atheism#RecommendedReading
also.. here is my own list of things I've actually personally read and recommend.
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469
http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Christian-Nation-Sam-Harris/dp/0307265773
http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060738170
http://www.amazon.com/Some-Mistakes-Moses-Robert-Ingersoll/dp/0879753617
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapters/dp/0060194979
I love Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Funny, interesting and educating.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
This is super entertaining and interesting. It covers so many topics, that it's almost impossible to get bored with it
A short History of Nearly Everything- http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
>“Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
>It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you
This might be better suited to be asked in /r/books
I would recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything for it's very clear writing and great breadth of science/science history.
"A short history of nearly everything" is a really good book where he tells about everything from the beginning of the universe to where we are now through science.
My reccomendation would be The History of Science. Everything is available on YouTube in decent quality.
As a matter of overview, I would suggest Bill Bryson's a A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's a book, which requires reading, but there's an awesome illustrated version that's a good time. The book is as accessible as they come, and it's entertainingly written.
I would also suggest Cosmos, since you seem to be focused more on space. Both the original and the remake are available on Netflix. The original is my favorite, beucase Carl Sagan, but the remake is also a solid show, and probably more what you're looking for. There's also Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and a Stephen Hawking on the universe series which you might like. Pretty much everything is available on YouTube, just search "<show name>, long, hd".
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
I recommend Why People Believe Weird Things and How to Think About Weird Things to start. Also A Short History of Nearly Everything would be good.
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson explains this very simply and well in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/076790818X
The object would be traveling at such massive speed that you would almost certainly be powerless to do anything about it.
Depending on what it was made out of, but almost any substance would vaporize before IT would actually hit you. In fact, something of the dimensions you state would most likely never make it through the atmosphere.
Even if it somehow did, it would be the resulting explosion that would get you rather than the object itself.
May I suggest the weirdest book ever written on electronics, "There are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings"
It's weird, it's wacky, it's also highly educational and it worked for me.
It's a commonly studied strategy for long-term space voyages, including potential Mars missions. Married couples reduce the likelihood of new romances blossoming between people in very close quarters- preventing loads of potential drama while increasing cooperation. Also, married people tend to trust other married people over single people. There are many others reasons that make it a good plan.
[Source: Packing For Mars by Mary Roach.]
This thread.
I'll see myself out.
I just finished Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Interesting look at how the muslim world sees itself.
Now I'm reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's pretty fun for us Lib Arts peasants.
Handbanna84 has good recommendations.
It's an easy read, but gives a lot of insight into 3rd-world countries. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Then what you do is keep a note of things you want to dig into deeper, and you can start to get more granular with your requests and searches.
EDIT: - Just thought, Malcolm - Blink - this book isn't about religion/cults, but gives an interesting insight into how we think and why we do the (stupid) things we do.
My favorite book about the evolution of sex is Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Tatianas-Sex-Advice-Creation/dp/0805063323
For books, I really appreciate:
OR a similar Biostatistics book. Note the above book is on one of the author's course webpages for free.
You probably need to be more specific... like what you plan to accomplish (robotics, microcontrollers, amatuer radio).
For electronic theory I recommend: There are no electrons: Electronics for earthlings
This is a most excellent book...
From the absolute basics (electrons) to the operation principles of radio waves.
Most of the comments here are viable solutions and are probably the simplest way to explain those powers.
Coming to your character, there are few out there with super powers that make no sense, and this ruins the story arc as their powers aren't properly defined. This ends up with the writer resorting to a deus ex machina when his character is in a bind, and the writer bends the laws of nature to get him out of it.
I suggest you learn a little bit more about electricity. These comments have clearly described how your hero's powers work. But knowing more about the subject will allow you to write better and more creatively.
I know that it can be a hard subject to learn. I suggest reading There are no electrons - Electricity for earthlings by Ken Amdahl. This book is written as a story. You don't need to have any prior knowledge of Electronics or math and this book clearly helps you understand the basics of electricity. You can finish it in a day its pretty small.
https://www.amazon.com/There-Are-Electrons-Electronics-Earthlings/dp/0962781592
Hope this helped. Good luck!
New to /r/EDC, here's my start:
Items 18-24 are always in my pockets (+/- a few extras occassionally)
Very open to suggestions/critiques. I really enjoy seeing all the different EDC collections, from minimalist to zombie apocalypse-ready.
I'm thinking about putting together a car/bug-out bag, but that'll come later.
EDIT: formatting
Any of Bill Bryson's books are very good, but in a similar vein try:
Notes From a Small Island, an account of his time in the UK while traveling the length of the country.
In a Sunburned Country his travels in Austrailia.
Neither Here nor There his travels in Europe.
And though it is not a travel book, my personal favorite by Bryson is a A Short History of Nearly Everything, a history of science along the lines of the the Edmund Burke TV show "Connections" that is how every science textbook should be written. Spring for the Illustrated edition as long as you don't want to carry it everywhere you read, it's too big and heavy to be a good coffee shop read.
Surprised I didn't see this:
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
It's not as academically oriented as I think the OP would like, but it's a great read and surprisingly encompasses a lot. Bryson, if memory serves me, got his name in travel writing and he makes Short History very interesting and a good read.
For instructions on how to build a lava moat, read this.
He's excellent. Just published a book of What If? thats worth the price.
I got mine signed :)
What If by Randal Munroe. assuming that he does not have it already, this book is absolutely perfect. I own a hardcover copy my mum got me and it is one of my prized possessions. I can absolutely guarantee he will love this. https://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994
I'm a physics teacher, and this is one of my favorite books. She might enjoy it.
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_9u9czb74GVC44
the picture is from What If and the question that leads into this is what if you tried to build a periodic table of the elements with each square being a 1x1x1 meter cube of that actual element. so the first 91 pigs would be messing with the first 91 elements. fluorine does not end well.
"Direct friction upon the reentry object is not the main cause of shock-layer heating. It is caused mainly from isentropic heating of the air molecules within the compression wave."
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Real_.28equilibrium.29_gas_model
Also from "What If?" which is an awesome book by Randall Munroe the creator of xkcd http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994
Have you read A Short History Of Nearly Everything? It's an awesome read about, well a short history of nearly everything. From the beginning of time. It's great and Bill Bryson really does a great job of making light of topics that are usually "too dense" for non-science people.
This book had a whole chapter about this guy and his two "contributions" and their eventual ban.
It's a great read. It's basically a history book that details the progress of our scientific discoveries. He also talks about the people behind them, and it turns out that many of our famous scientists and inventors were basically crazy people. Genius and insanity are separated by a very fuzzy line.
An excellent starting point is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Almost universally praised, this history of scientific thought covers... well, nearly everything. The basics, like physics, biology, chemistry, and then stuff like cosmology, evolution, quantum mechanics, environmental science... the list goes on and on.
Very readable, not aimed at technical audience. Highly recommended.
Once you have finished that (and it is a big book), you can then home in on areas of particular interest. For me, it's evolutionary theory, paleoanthropology, quantum mechanics, primatology and so on. If you have particular interests in those areas, please let me know.
And I simply can't leave without recommending my favourite book that combines wonderful history and science. You simply must pick up and read a copy of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Not only will you learn about the history of WWII, the amazing feats of the American government in achieving what they did, but also the science of atomic theory and the beginning of quantum mechanics. This is, quite simply, a wonderful book.
One of my all time favorites is Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, about a climbing season on Mount Everest where a lot of things went wrong.
I also enjoy Mary Roach - she has a great gift of being able to convey information while being really entertaining in the process. Stiff is my favorite of hers, but I also really enjoyed Packing For Mars.
A more aggressive variant is described in The Zombie Autopsies by Steven C. Schlozman.
In his apocalyptic world, the virus is airborne, with a near 100% infection and fatality rate. It is incredibly difficult to protect against, as even hazmat suits are easily compromised. There are methods of staving off the infection, but it's only palliative and you will succumb eventually.
It's kinda tragic because the story is centered on an isolated research lab, and the scientists who work there volunteered knowing that there was a high likelihood they wouldn't survive the ordeal in the long run. The point was to do as much hands-on research as possible before they turned, so they next team would have valuable data to work with.
Semi-Spoiler:
This strain of zombie virus was heavily implied to be an artificially engineered bio-weapon, hence its more devastating effects.
The Zombie Autopsies by Steven Schlozman.
Possibly The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse by Steven C. Schlozman.
I nominate /u/allergictoapples because this is badass as hell and someone needs to wear it.
Also /u/lessons_learnt because im really interested to see how the plot of this book unfolds
A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Yes and yes.
Came here to post this. Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a great way for the layman to become scientifically literate, and it's entertaining. I like all of Krakauer's works, but would particularly recommend Where Men Win Glory for a perspective on the war in Afghanistan as well as a portrait of Pat Tillman, a complicated man.
I've been on a non-fiction kick myself.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is good. Very funny, very informative.
Packing for Mars and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers both by Mary Roach were also fun to read.
I recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me or Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything. If you are looking for something a little more scholarly and drier then I suggest A History of Knowledge by Van Doren. As a world history teacher myself, I loved all of these books.
This is also an excellent book http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
Can't recommend enough. I got the audio book version and the performance is awesome, I can listen to it while doing other stuff and still follow along, which I love in audio books.
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Read "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. Best damn science for laymen book I've ever read.
Try this! One of the best books I’ve ever read.
A Short History of Nearly Everything https://www.amazon.com/dp/076790818X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_pIXACbY3N7CZP
https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
You misunderstand quantum mechanics. I recommend checking to see if your library has a copy of this book, as it provides a pretty good explanation.
I'm fairly sure it is, as it is "A Guide to Self Diagnosis for Hypochondriacs" whereas a serious book would omit the hypochondriacs part.
From Amazon:
>As a hypochondriac, you've had to satisfy your need for self-diagnosis with medical reference materials written for the masses until now. Dedicated entirely to your unique perspective on health, this revolutionary book outlines the world's worst maladies, conveniently organized according to your symptoms (real or imagined). You're going to die of something--why not choose an ailment that's rare and hard to pronounce?
Which makes the OP's description of "scumbag" kind of irritating.
I love the Mental Floss History of the World and Mental Floss History of the United States. Those two may be exactly what you're looking for. Also, check out Sarah Vowell. Assasination Vacation is great. Bill Bryson's work is excellent. A Short History of Nearly Everything is mind-blowing and I've heard great things about At Home which is next on my reading list. :)
I agree read a lot of great non-fiction books.
You can start with the series and related books of this:
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
http://www.amazon.com/Book-General-Ignorance-John-Mitchinson/dp/0307394913#immersive-view_1457311562058
^^ This reminds me of A Short History of Nearly Everything. A good read btw.
I too sometimes worry about dying just when things are getting really good with all the awesome VR stuff that's surely coming. And I'm 50 years old, so I have a valid concern. If I was 21, I'd be feeling pretty good about getting to experience all the really good stuff.
I also somethings feel the "be careful and don't die" thing. In addition to that, I worry about going blind in one or both eyes. That would really suck too!
A short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
It's kind of dated now, but still interesting.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything. Anything by Bill Bryson, really.
Yep. I'm in the middle of A Short History of Nearly Everything, and it's pretty astounding reading about it. I just assumed we had known about it forever.
Even more amazing are the intra-plate quakes. They happen all the time almost everywhere and we have literally no idea what causes them.
used from Amazon for $5, which is what i bought when it was $4
This book is used in college biology classes. Most of it is about invertebrate reproduction, but told in an engaging and funny way. Chock full of ideas for how aliens might do it, I'd think.
https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Tatianas-Sex-Advice-Creation/dp/0805063323
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-The-Theoretical-Minimum/dp/0465062903/ref=pd_sim_14_4?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=1TT0F2A70RBV36TT3D0S Is supposed to be good, as is https://www.amazon.com/How-Teach-Quantum-Physics-Your/dp/1416572295 . Then you can work up to https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/0131118927 and then the gold standard for an introduction to quantum computing is https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-10th-Anniversary/dp/1107002176
Thingy.
Thanks for the contest, Jason. :D
> He also frequently talks about his love of space and his extreme desire to venture out there
There's this book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, that has astronauts talk about how it actually is to be in space, it's filled with stories from engineers, researchers, some history of space flight and a ton of trivia. Your boyfriend might really like it and at $14 you can add other small gifts.
If he's more visual, he might also enjoy Universe by Martin Rees, a visual guide to the Universe - the pages are filled with pictures and interesting facts, everything we know about the Universe, very interesting and stunning to look at. Admittedly more expensive at $35 considering the high quality pictures.
Shameless self promotion coming right up too:
> Walking Dead [...] Comic Con
By any chance, he might like The Walking Dead Boardgame and you could both play together or with friends.
With video games, it all depends on what games he plays. Portal? This Portal 2 Desk Defender is very fun to play with and so is this Wheatley LED Flashlight. I'm not sure what else to suggest from your details, maybe it would give you a few ideas if you checked my SO and mine's website, introduce some details about him and see what gifts come up if they catch your eye.
I hope some things were useful!
Relevant
I've always heard good things about Edgar Rice Burrough's The Land that Time Forgot though I've sadly never read it myself. And, hey, it's free!
As far as science non-fiction, I consider A Short History of Nearly Everything to be absolutely essential since it covers so very much in a tremendously entertaining way. Also, if you are interested in physics but don't have any background in it I recommend any of Michio Kaku's books such as his latest Physics of the Future. He writes in an accessible manner that distills all the things that make the ongoing developments in physics exciting. I credit reading his books many years ago with getting me started in the sciences. Lastly, for learning about the universe, you can never go far wrong with Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It is easy to see from reading it why he is considered one of the greatest of the science popularizers.
Mary Roach! Mary Roach Mary Roach!
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Packing of Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
I can't recommend these highly enough. Mary Roach is the most engaging, funny science writer I've read.
Also [A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman]http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Senses-Diane-Ackerman/dp/0679735666/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1323874194&amp;sr=1-1
Steven Schlozman's The Zombie Autopsies was a good, realistic look at a zombie virus from the POV of doctors if I can remember it correctly. Sorry it's been a while since I read it.
The book is Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland.
If I had to make my own suggestion for a book, it would be How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Each chapter starts off as a conversation between the author and his dog, where the dog has heard some random fact about physics and is trying to exploit it for her own gains(catching squirrels, infinite bacon, etc..). Then the second part of each chapter is a more rigorous(but still easy to follow) mathematical explanation.
Sounds like she's building up a nice solid theoretical framework. Might be time to start introducing her to [this.] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465023312)
Definitely not beautiful, but I recently picked up
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
It sits on my desk at work and is a fun little book to pick up over lunch.
I just looked and in fact it's already out!
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0525537090/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_8ioLDbJQ7TG1D
huehuehue
Seriously, I apologize.
6
The author put out a great book, too.
I love this one.
Sorry that I ask, but after seeing tons of these posts recently, is it this book that pictures are from?
I swore the answer to your question ( similar) was in this book. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_7kyQCbFH0EVZ6
Sorry i don't remember the answer though. Try a library for that book, libraries are free.
I just read the chapter on this in "What If?" (http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1425600998&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=what+if)
Turns out, you don't want to treat elements like Pokemon. Good luck!
I'd recommend you read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's a pretty good survey of natural science and very accessible to the layman. I think I've read it twice and each time come away with that "everything in the universe is awesome" feeling. It's probably my favorite non-fiction overall.
Best general science book: A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.
While it does have its inaccuracies, check out A Short History of Nearly Everything. You'll walk away with a list a mile long of more awesome things you want to read about.
It's more of a general all-about-science book, but Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was years ago that I read it but it has some really interesting sections about geology and biology if I recall correctly.
To know why what you are saying doesn't make sense you need to read a very large amount of physcis books, may i suggest starting at Bill Bryson's a short history of nearly everything then moving on to Stephen Hawking's a short history of time
Even though it's not exclusively about geology, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a fantastic read.
Although it covers everything from the Big Bang to early humans, about 7 of it's 30 chapters are on geologic topics such as paleontology, tectonics, asteroid impacts, ice ages, etc. as well as the history of the development of those fields. It's one of those rare books that is very readable and informative without being too dumbed down.
Bill Brysons "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is a good place to start.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
A Short History of Nearly Everything, A People's History of the United States, Freakonomics, The Botany of Desire, Sun Magazine
If she is interested in science than Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything would be great for a summer read.
There are lots! Try Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos series on Amazon. Both Netflix and Amazon have a huge amount of NOVA documentaries which are usually pretty good.
The movie Particle Fever (Netflix) is a great intro to the work of the LHC at CERN
Look up the BBC Christmas Lectures - there are lots of them. Every xmas famous scientists present a layman overview of a topic to kids at the famous Royal Institution. I grew up watching these and still love them today.
Prof Brian Cox is probably the UKs most recognizable face for bringing physics to the public these days. Europe's version of NDT. He's always a joy to watch and you'll be able to find many talks by him, and programs starring him, just by searching his name on Youtube.
For the history of science, you can't get more fun than Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's wildly entertaining.
Just a word of warning on the layman style documentaries and pop sci books... their very nature makes them have to avoid the math, which is where all of this stuff comes from in the first place. As a result the concepts they share often seem fantastical and speculative and can lead non-scientists to wonder about the veracity of science these days. It's important to remember these things all have a much less dramatic and exciting foundation usually in partial differential equations and other such complex math. If you want to get into that side of things, Leonard Suskind's free online lectures at The Theoretical Minimum are great.
This is also a good read: A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Check out A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's a good start and a humorous read as well.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
If you really don't know any physics I guess I can see how it could be a difficult read. I think you should push through it slowly and try to understand it. That kind of understanding can blow your world up so large it's beyond description. I found it to be leisurely but I've had an interest in physics for at least five years. If you want to learn more about physics after this I recommend Brian Greene.
But if you want to move on to something else that won't make you feel stupid maybe try A Short History of Nearly Everything which tells of the scientists lives as they discovered important things through history. A People's History of the United States, on a different track, gives you American history through the eyes of the common people. Just thought I'd throw that in.
Don't abandon every hard book - we're all guilty of it but pushing your mind through some tough ones is never something you will regret on your deathbed. Know what I mean?
The thing is... Pluto is VERY far away.
>On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway)
Source: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything Got I love this book. Seriously, if you love science but are a layman, read it, if you're very highly specialized as a scientist, read it, if you hated science in high-school then definitely read it.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
I would start off with Stiff and then Bonk. I liked Spook but on amazon it doesn't have as good of reviews as the others so I'd read that one later if you aren't as interested in it. I've yet to read packing for mars but if it's anything like her other books, it's wonderful.
You're doing this wrong. If you approach books as a task for self-edification that you view as a duty, you're going to hate it. Read whatever you want, for entertainment. Read funnystuff. Read thrillers. Read fantasy. Read weird science fiction. Heck, read history, economics, and science.
TL;DR: Read whatever the hell you feel like, and I guarantee you you will feel better about yourself than you would have by forcing yourself through Ulysses or War and Peace.
[Packing for Mars] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393339912/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1497231768&amp;sr=8-1&amp;pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&amp;keywords=packing+for+mars) is a great accessible read on a lot of the practical challenges of getting humans to Mars. I really enjoyed it.
This is from the hilarious Science Made Stupid
http://www.amazon.com/The-Zombie-Autopsies-Notebooks-Apocalypse/dp/0446564656
Our library had it but it was always out. I read it when it was finally my turn. I recommend it.
Try this out for size...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zombie-Autopsies-Secret-Notebooks-Apocalypse/dp/0446564656/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=2978645599&amp;hvbmt=be&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;keywords=the+zombie+autopsies&amp;qid=1557678305&amp;s=gateway&amp;sr=8-1
Its pretty technical, though.
I found How to Teach Physics to your Dog by Chad Orzel to be good. It's framed as a series of dialogues between the author and his talking dog Emmy (hence the title) where Emmy tries to creatively interpret quantum mechanics in her hunt for the neighborhood squirrels and the author has to straighten her out. It's strictly a "science for the interested layman" book though, it doesn't go too deeply into the mathematics. I found the central concept to be annoying at times, but it's usually entertaining and comprehensible, and it covers the history and experiments that led to modern understanding as well.
There's also a sequel that covers relativity.
If you don't want them to google the answer, are you giving them open-ended enough questions? Just make sure they don't learn about Wolfram Alpha :) that thing can even solve complicated integrals
Edit: As a "yes but how" you could try finding some examples from Randall Munroe's "What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_ZcCYxbBM10599
http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1394474740&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=what+if%3F%2C+munroe
Hello, I'm not Craig nice to meet you.
God.
Yes, here is the Amazon link.
Though it was originally (and still is) a (sporadically updated) blog, available here. The book contains quite a few questions that are not on the blog, though, like for example what would if you fired a bullet as dense as a neutron star at the earth.
I personally love this one
https://www.amazon.ca/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ref=nodl_
This is a little big, but What if by Randall Munroe is a pretty good choice. It's by the same guy that makes the XKCD webcomic, and it's hilarious and informative. Nonfiction absurd scenarios and the application of math/science to the weirdest questions. It's not exactly inconspicuous though, and it is a big book.
https://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1394474740&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=what+if%3F%2C+munroe
<Sry no idea how to format links>
I think you might want What If?, a book by Randall Munroe, xkcd extraordinaire. Hilarious answers to scientific questions!
I just picked up this guy's book, it's fantastic. It's always fun to see really random stuff like this explained in semi lay-man terms.
You can read ch. 1 as a free sample on the amazon page of the book.
Randall Munroe of XKCD.com has a book named "What If" that has this EXACT question along with a step by step of what would happen. I would highly suggest it.
Okay then I'll make some recommendations!
If you're into science: [Death by Black Hole] (https://smile.amazon.com/Death-Black-Hole-Cosmic-Quandaries/dp/039335038X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1491764342&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=death+by+black+hole)
If you like classic mysteries: [A Study in Scarlet] (https://smile.amazon.com/Study-Scarlet-Arthur-Conan-Doyle/dp/1514698854/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1491764421&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=a+study+in+scarlet)
If you want something absurd: [What If?] (https://smile.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1491764514&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=what+if)
And here's some things I have been looking to get: [The Republic] (https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0141442433/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&amp;colid=226JO509390Q8&amp;coliid=I2FVTI8SC5VCYS)
and
[The No Bullshit Guide to Math and Physics] (https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0992001005/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&amp;colid=226JO509390Q8&amp;coliid=I1P7W8OMFLADHK)
Hope one of these sparks an idea!
Finished reading Asura: Tale of the Vanquished last week. For anyone interested in anti-hero tales, this is a must-read. Or if you have had questions which you couldn't dare or weren't allowed to ask when reading/hearing/watching Ramayana, this can quench your thirst. I'd love to see a movie adaptation of this book (sigh).
Currently reading What If by Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd. Its one of those not-to-read-just-to-surf kind of books, although very difficult not to categorize it as a serious book. Well, you know xkcd.
[X] Hit physical activity goal
[X] Work 9-5
[X] Read a few chapters of one of the book from the XKCD guy, Randall Munroe
[X] Meet up with some friends at 7
[->] Finish out content pages on revision 1 of a website I'm working on
[X] 3 Meals
[X] Brush 2x Floss 1x
So good, i would read this by him as well
Well there's the sequel of course: Superfreakonomics. And everything by Malcom Gladwell kind of falls into the same genre: The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink... Then there's The Long Tail by Chris Anderson of Wired and Bad Science by The Guardian's Ben Goldacre....
A Short History of Nearly Everything is also absolutely brilliant 'popular science' but not as 'generation now' as the ones above.
That's just top of my head. All of these books are a few years old but still a great read. I'd say they're all typical Redditor reading if that makes sense.
It's not JUST about Geology, but still...
I'm currently reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is really about science and history of science in general. Not very in-depth or technical about any particular subject, but a great read.
A Short History of Nearly Everything & Compass of Pleasure
You might enjoy A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Short History of Nearly Everything is a good read on natural history. Bryson has actually done some solid research for it, but still manages to be conversational.
Go pick up a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything
It contains such gems as the fact that the same person who created CFCs was also responsible for creating leaded gasoline.
I usually recommend going after the soft underbelly and moving up from there...
Other interesting books...:
(abridged) http://books.google.com/books?id=VNgBZR4bxG0C&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Golden+Bough&amp;source=gbs_similarbooks_s&amp;cad=1#v=onepage&amp;q=&amp;f=false
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165 (you'll want to read this too actually).
A Short History of Nearly Everything with the errata as annotations.
Also, The Hitchhiker's Guide series is awesome, so that's on the list, too.
Plenty more recommendations, of course, but those two are my go-to books.
Edit. To continue:
Thanks for storing my reading list.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is also awesome (someone else already responded with Stephen Hawking's book of almost the same name).
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly everything. Really, really fucking awesome.
Have you read Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything? Bill's a writer who pondered the same questions you've been pondering, and set out to learn exactly how he, and all people, came to be, beginning with the start of the universe and running through to the scientific discoveries and pioneers which enabled the modern age. It's a book I'd recommend to anyone, and one I especially think you would relate to, learn from, and enjoy.
Some great history books:
The first and last are not military history but are quite a good and different reads for someone interested in history and facts.
I'm in the middle of Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. He spends a lot of time talking about the people behind important scientific discoveries, and how they all intertwine into our current understanding of the universe. There's a great chapter on nuclear physics which my post is a rough and dirty summary of. :-)
I second the reading idea! Ask your history or science teachers for suggestions of accessible books. I'm going to list some that I found interesting or want to read, and add more as I think of them.
A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Title explains it all. It is very beginner friendly, and has some very entertaining stories. Bryson is very heavy on the history and it's rather long but you should definitely make every effort to finish it.
Lies my teacher told me
The greatest stories never told (This is a whole series, there are books on Presidents, science, and war as well).
There's a series by Edward Rutherfurd that tells history stories that are loosely based on fact. There are books on London and ancient England, Ireland, Russia, and one on New York
I read this book a while ago and loved it- Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk It's about a monk who was imprisoned for 30 years by the Chinese.
The Grapes of Wrath.
Les Misérables. I linked to the unabridged one on purpose. It's SO WORTH IT. One of my favorite books of all time, and there's a lot of French history in it. It's also the first book that made me bawl at the end.
You'll also want the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Federalist Papers.
I'm not sure what you have covered in history, but you'll definitely want to find stuff on all the major wars, slavery, the Bubonic Plague, the French Revolution, & ancient Greek and Roman history.
As for science, find these two if you have any interest in how the brain works (and they're pretty approachable).
Phantoms in the brain
The man who mistook his wife for a hat
Alex and Me The story of a scientist and the incredibly intelligent parrot she studied.
For a background in evolution, you could go with The ancestor's tale
A biography of Marie Curie
The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is a quick and easy read, and very heavy on the adventure. You'll also want to read his other book The Hot Zone about Ebola. Absolutely fascinating, I couldn't put this one down.
The Devil's Teeth About sharks and the scientists who study them. What's not to like?
My favorites... the first two are not even talking about religion, but simply pure science and fascinating.... the second starts off about UFOs but then goes into being critical of religion (while barely... it's sagan after all, it's enough to turn off a non-questioning christian).
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapters/dp/0060194979
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469
Beyond that, all of Malcom Gladwell's stuff is interesting and about science/sociology so it's a great read and a lot of is down to earth and so will pick at the fundamentalist belief some... eg:
http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017922/
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is very good and a bit more up-to-date (it's a book not a TV series), and I speak as someone who has read the book of Cosmos several times.
Brian Green's The Elegant Universe is worth reading, even if you think String Theory is "Not Even Wrong" (Greene is not one of the die-hards).
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Sounds like it will be right up your alley.
I suggest Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. He's a travel writer who wanted to know the same things, so he asked every smart person he could find and distilled it into layman's terms, while maintaining a level of brevity that Sagan often lacked.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0767908171
Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Definitely not the biggest, but very impressive is Robert Evans, amateur astronomer, found a record number (42) of supernovae...with his 10” home telescope...in his backyard.
In Bill Bryson’s book, A Brief History of Nearly Everything, he discribes how incredibly hard this feat actually is. “To understand what a feat this is, imagine a standard dining room table covered in a black tablecloth and someone throwing a handful of salt across it. The scattered grains can be thought of as a galaxy. Now imagine fifteen hundred more tables like the first one — enough to fill a Wal-Mart parking lot, say, or to make a single line two miles long — each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. That grain of salt is the supernova.”
Evans has also been quoted as saying "There's something satisfying, I think, about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed."
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is an extremely readable tour through natural history and scientefic proccess from the very beginning of the planet. Probably my favoruite 'overview' non-fiction book.
If you want to read fiction that will make you more knowledgeable, read anything by Umberto Eco. The research he does on any time period his work is set in is outstanding and it really shows. I finished Prague Cemetery today by him, which is focuses on 19th century conspiracy theories, where every event and character that appears in the book apart from the main character is historically accurate. It's amazing how he blends a fascinating plot with historical accuracy.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a good overview of the history of science. PDF (or MP3 audiobook) available online if you're OK with torrenting copyrighted stuff, but a hard copy wouldn't be a bad investment.
Bill Bryson - A Short History Of Nearly Everything. Freaking fantastic book.
I find that science history and biography gives a good understanding of scientific methods, and when written for the lay-person, doesn't get so bogged down in technical jargon.
Here are a few of my favorites:
(Also check out his biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman)
And here are a few on my to read list:
I hope that helps.
Check out "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. It's right up your alley. It's a history of science and scientific thought. It discussess almost all of the major scientific thought processes and when, how, and who was involved in their discoveries, the rival thoughts at the time, how it changed our world, and also covers scientists lost to time or scientists whose theories were taken by others. It's also really, really entertaining to read. It's like a really entertaining history book but about science and scientific thought. It's pretty dang accurate and specific, but not so precise as to wear you down or confuse you. Really approachable, REALLY informative, and perfect for someone who feels that their science AND history knowledge is lacking.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
[A Short History of Nearly Everything] (https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X) by Bill Bryson. Fun, interesting, and informative.
Going through a similar thing right now, while I'm no where near where I want to be, I've made some good improvements. Best tip I can give you from what I've learned is
Focus on one aspect first.
I've found whenever I start to feel like all these things are wrong with me (I'm not smart, I'm not funny, I'm not attractive), I tend to try and change things immediately. My next day will consist of a completely new minute-by-minute routine, new diet, new attitude, new me. However, the "perfect me" starts to cheat a little here and a little there, "I know it's time to exercise, but another 10 minutes on Reddit won't hurt..." Then in no time at all I'm back to just plain old me. The point is, a lot of change at once can be overwhelming.
If you start to feel that things need to be done right now and you feel like making drastic changes, more often that not, the thrill will quickly pass and you'll be left right where you started. Choose one thing you want to improve first and work on making that a routine.
Think of a stream of water pounding against a rock. It takes time before the rock begins to shape and feel the full force of the water, but it does feel it.
As for the learning to do things, I recently asked /r/suggestmeabook/ for recommendations on a book to increase my general intelligence and these were the recommendations. Currently reading through A Short History of Nearly Everything and loving it.
I know this isn't an all inclusive answer to all your problems, but I hope it helps. :)
TLDR: Focusing on changing too many things at once can be discouraging and leave you worse off than when you started. Read A Short History of Nearly Everything for brain power.
Edit:formatting
Here's 3:
"Your Inner Fish" - Neil Shubin
"Why Geology Matters" - Doug MacDougall
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" - Bill Bryson
I actually see a lot of parallels between your situation and where I found myself at your age. It was 14 or 15 that I really developed an interest in science, because before that I hadn't really been properly exposed before that. Fast forward 6 or 7 years, I'm now a third year university student studying physics and I love it; I'll be applying to PhD programs next fall.
Like you, astronomy (by which I broadly mean astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, etc.) was what really caught my attention. In school, I liked all the sciences and had always been good at math (calculus was by far one of my favorite high school courses because the science can be pretty watered down).
If you're interested in learning more about astrophysics, I would recommend any one of a number of books. The first book on the topic that I read was Simon Singh's Big Bang; I read a couple Brian Greene books, namely The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos; I read Roger Penrose's Cycles of Time, and finally Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Also, I bought a book by Hawking and one by Michio Kaku that, to this day, sit on a shelf at my parents' house unread. I would recommend Singh's book as a nice book that should be at your level, and in fact it was the one recommended to me by some professors who I bugged with questions about the universe when I was around your age. Also, Bryson's book is a good survey look at a lot of different scientific topics, not just astrophysics/cosmology specific; I enjoyed it quite a lot.
As far as reaching out to people, I would recommend trying to connect with some scientists via email. That's what I did, and they were more responsive than I expected (realize that some of the people will simply not respond, probably because your email will get buried in their inbox, not out of any ill-will towards you).
At this point, I'll just stop writing because you've more than likely stopped reading, but if you are still reading this, I'd be more than happy to talk with you about science, what parts interest(ed) me, etc.
I highly recommend science oriented books. Science is no "Maybe, perhaps, whatever", it is clear: facts are true when they are proven as such, and wrong when proven as wrong. There are theories everywhere but no one relies on them before they aren't proven right nowadays.
For a good summary of science, I recommend „A Short History of Nearly Everything". It really is about everything that regards progress in science: From Physics and chemistry, over geology and cosmology to anthropology and evolution. It is a pleasure to read, very well written and researched.
For more detailed, yet very accessible physics and explanations of the universe, there is "Big Bang".
Then there are things that - in my eyes - are beyond anything that TRP touches. Medical conditions which impair your sensory organs or rather the areas of your brain that process those sensations: Complete failure of a brain area, malfunctions in processing, illnesses. Those are very interesting stories and will make you think outside of your box. What would you do if this happened to you? How do people build a life around this? What does it feel and look like inside an affected persons head? Oliver Sacks has written a few books about those conditions/cases. He has a very pleasant and personal style of writing down his stories about the patients or even himself.
Quite analogue to that I recommend the series "Dr. House" if you are interested in that topic.
I can only recall those two from the top of my head. Of course, there are other topics which are interesting as well:
Philosophy (see: Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Platon), ancient poetry (see: Vergil, Homer, Alighieri) [because this indeed is for the most part fictional, you learn a lot about the spirit of the times], psychology, economy, paleontology, anthropology, etc etc.
Also, you shouldn't miss out on reading up about how cars/car engines are built and how they work (there are great animations of this on Youtube), this can come in handy if you want to repair one or get an idea of what features are worth your money. Same goes for computer technologies, household equipment. Basically I recommend to read up on every technical or even economical topic to be up to date.
As well, you can do researches about daily things. The internet is great at getting you those informations. But be sceptical, everyone on the internet can write articles about anything.
Often times it's the things we don't notice that have the most impact: linguistic (the history of bascially all languages is very exciting), where resources come from (nuclear plants - on this topic I found a well researched article/book on reddit regarding
Chernobyl -, coal power stations, wood clearing, purification plants, oil producers, mining, opencast mining, fishing, farming, animal breeding), the many climate zones of the globe and which one you live in, flora and fauna of the globe, the sea and especially the deep sea.
You get the idea. Turn your head around 360° and look under the surface of things. Lift a rock to see what is underneath, there is a lot to discover.
Get A Short Story of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's a science book, not an atheist one. It covers everything from Geology to Cosmology and Genetics and Evolution, it talks about when and how things were discovered and gives a little biography for many scientists. And it's very easy to pick up and read, no big words but still manages to teach. It also talks a bit about religion and atheism in a way that shows that religion is a force that's almost always for ignorance and how science stands for more knowledge and advances society.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1335246110&amp;sr=1-1
It depends on what you're interested in.
Great War for Civilisation is full of fascinating stories from a war correspondent covering the middle east; he interviewed Bin Laden several times before 9/11 among other things. The book is long, but it brings the conflicts to your doorstep and takes you behind the scenes where the media is often restricted from going. Be warned of the size and content though. It is gruesome in most places, and provides a very realistic account of what goes on daily over there.
1776 tells the story of the American revolution, concentrating on the battles and the men who fought them. It is written extremely well. If you have any interest whatsoever in the founding fathers, the characters behind the revolution, or even just a good story, read it and you shouldn't be disappointed.
Short History of Nearly Everything basically takes everything you're interested in that is science related, condenses it all into discrete explanations, and combines the whole to present a great reading experience. It's a bit like doing for science what "A People's History of the United States" did for history. It all feels genuine.
Those are a few I have particularly enjoyed.
A good book that is fun to read and has tons of anecdotes about scientific history is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
In a similar vein, you can ponder the more mind-bending aspects of our Universe with Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time
Other than that you may find some interesting things in the works of Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins (I personally recommend Dawkins's The Selfish Gene)
If you are sick of scientific titles you can also check out Freakonomics or The Worldly Philosphers
These Books are all written for a general audience so they go down pretty easy.
Deciding which major in College can be tricky - I was lucky since I knew exactly what I wanted to study before I left High School, but maybe some ideas in these books will pique your interest. My parents always told me to go to school to study something I love, and not to train for a job. I'm not so sure this advice carries through in "recovering" economy. You may want to factor in the usefulness of your degree post-college (but don't let that be the only thing you consider!).
Good Luck, and enjoy!
Read. Make sure they are good books. If you want a leg-up on your classmates, make sure they cover topics you will be studying next year. Probably the best books for this off the top of my head are Lies My Teacher Told Me and A Short History of Nearly Everything. The first covers American history (including Columbus), the second covers many of the natural sciences.
For someone who is looking at public school as a failing educational tool, these two books will do a wonderful job of explaining topics in a way that will make them interesting and living subjects, not just a useless series of facts to be memorized.
As far as literature goes, try to read some heavy-hitting classics instead of whatever fantasy/Twilight crap someone your age might be reading. Again, try to keep ahead of the curve, both with what you are going to study and what is intellectually beyond what you are going to study. Something with more than 300 pages, if you need a measuring stick. If you really want to go above and beyond, email teachers and ask for book suggestions that AREN'T on the suggested summer reading list.
> A Short History Of Nearly Everything
I have never read this book, but from the book description on Amazon; it does look like it has similar topics.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
I don't know about physics history books, but I really liked A Short History of Nearly Everything when I read it a couple years ago. It doesn't go into the how too much, but it gets behind the scientists and shows them as real humans? Is that kind of what you're looking for?
http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/030788743X
The first time in a long time I have been so sucked in that after finishing int in 3 days, I wanted to go right back to it. Every child of the 80s I have shared it with, especially those who were extra-nerdy, loved this book.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1347860128&amp;sr=1-1
If you want non-fiction, I finished this recently and it is hands down the best non-fiction book I have ever read. History filled with compelling narratives rather than dry dates and facts, Bryson brings the past to life - the story of how Halley convinced Newton to write the Principia even though Newton would rather have been searching for King Solomon's tomb for the dates of Christ's second coming or practicing alchemy is just one example of the wonderful narratives that fill this book.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Although admittedly, I didn't read it, but listened to the audio version as I drove cross country for a few weeks. I think reddit would really dig this.
Edit: If you're going to check out the audio book, listen to the one narrated by Richard Matthews.
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson- Fascinating book about psychology and neuroscience about how psychopathic tendencies are pretty common among us humans. Very readable and entertaining.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson- Incredibly wide-ranging look at the developments of the universe and natural sciences from the big bang to today. It's an informative read but also contains Bryson's usual wit. Not my favorite book by Bryson but you will likely learn a lot and it's a worthwhile read.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
I am confident because this is my field of expertise, and I'll do my best to explain what we know about humans, lions, and other species.
Humans are able to constantly be ready to breed, unlike other animals. Lions go into heat to be ready for breeding. If a female has a cub, she will not cycle. When a new male enters the area, he will often commit infanticide to START the cycling for her. She was in a suspended state - not already cycling.
It appears that in some cases, the presence of the new male will start the cycling even without the infanticide - perhaps as a measure that has evolved over time through natural selection. If the female is ready to mate, then the male might not bother killing her young, and will let those genes of hers pass on. Thus promoting lions that can go into heat with pheromonal stimulation through the vomeronasal organ (your secondary olfactory sense, or jacobson's organ).
Humans do not go into heat. Once they are cycling, there are a few ways to alter the cycle:
FROM
http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/579.full
"In addition to pregnancy loss, other factors that influence the length and regularity of the menstrual cycle include: energy balance (Ellison, 1990), lactation (Howie and McNeilly, 1982), and stress (Wasser and Barash, 1983). The menstrual cycle also changes as a function of age (Treloar et al., 1967). In the largest study to date, the median cycle length was 27.8 days at age 20 years (close to the mean age for the women in the dormitory studies) and the difference between the 10th and 90th percentiles for person–year SD was 6.3 days (Treloar et al., 1967). At 36 years, the age when cycle length variability reaches a minimum, the median cycle length was 26.6 days and the difference between the two percentiles was 3.6 days."
If you've seen the idea that women sync their cycles? Human women? based on bad stats from poor research which didn't take into account this natural variability of human women's cycles.
SO! In conclusion, while you have some anecdotal evidence that sex is causing menses in your ladies - it's not true, and lots of people have studied this to see if it happens because
it happens in other animals which are NOT constant breeders. In mice, there are a few things related to cycling and male scent - the first we call it the 'Bruce Effect'. You can introduce just the scent of a new male mouse in early pregnancy and she will spontaneously abort (to prevent infanticide). The second is the 'Lee Boot Effect' where female mice WILL synchronize their cycles when housed together without a male. and the third is the Whitten effect where you can induce estrus in mice with the scent of a male.
https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php/Mouse_Estrous_Cycle
Now you know so much about humans! and Lions! and Mice! I'm happy to talk more about science if you want, if you're looking to learn more about mating and science, I found This book to be very informative and entertaining.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the book Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creation for this post. Good read if you want to know more about the crazy things animals do for sex!
You might consider checking out this book. It teaches the basics in a very nontraditional way.
All these comments are great, but the absolute beginning is here!
Next read the book suggested by ryzic. If you have the money, id buy the companion kits that Make sells for the book.
After reading those two books and doing all the projects, look into some "project kits." Check out sparkfun, The Evil Genius series of books, or my favorite the Nuts and Volts store.
After three or four "project kits" just find schematics and figure out how to buy all the parts yourself. Really the world is your oyester and with enough struggling you can build anything. Some ideas that always get people excited: a Tesla coil, cell phone jammers, tasers, ultrasonic range finders, a robotic arm, mechanized nerf gun, anything you think is cool and can find a schematic for.
From there you a going to find yourself really interested in microcontrollers. And well.. Thats a different comment lol!
Read Electronics for Earthlings. It's basically like taking an LSD trip and understanding electronics at the end.
Read this, trust me you'll love it and everything about simple electricity will finally make sense...
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog
It's not an article, but rather a book. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel. I'd recommend it if you are wanting to try and understand some of the implications of QM without knowing the arithmetic.
I applaud your initiative and interest in wanting to learn more about QM. The advice I'll offer is based on your "having no physics background" and only pre-calculus math. That's ok, what matters more is the desire and application to learn more. I suggest that you initially stick with popular, layperson, conceptual materials and study them diligently and then keep going onto more in-depth materials.
I cannot in good faith recommend a single book about QM. I am going to offer a variety of materials (books, articles, videos) etc that I am either familiar with myself or others whose opinions I respect have recommended, and that I believe are at an appropriate level for you. From this and the other recommendations you receive, you'll probably find that you'll develop a feel for materials that are best for you. Also, for other book ideas, I highly suggest that you go to a local library and browse through the physics section and you'll probably find some books that appeal most to you.
The ideas below are in no particular order and you can pick and choose as you see fit:
For a preparatory short Scientific American article with some important to understand history and a lookahead to the future read 100 Years of Quantum Mysteries
Several people on reddit have highly recommended this LookingGlassUniverse video series on QM
For an easily accessible popular-level intro book, I've liked and many others have recommended How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel.
I highly recommend a chapter from Sean Carroll's book From Eternity to Here on QM that he makes freely available on his website here. The book is not specifically about QM but this chapter is excellent and Sean Carroll is a clear, witty, and highly respected science communicator. This chapter has good material on the quantum wave function, the Schrödinger equation, and quantum indeterminacy.
Many have recommended the book by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw titled The Quantum Universe. I thought chapters 2 and 3 of this book were very well done but was not as keen on the later chapters. Maybe you could find a copy at a library and see what you think.
There are also some excellent materials online. One series of lecture materials I think is very good is 21st Century Science that is at the University of Oregon website. It's an excellent self-contained series of lectures and does not require math skills. It's includes more than just QM, which I recommend that you include in your study.
A nice article: 10 Quantum Truths About Our Universe
The article What is the Physics of Nothing on the energy of the quantum vacuum or zero-point energy.
Article: How does Quantum Mechanics Allow the Sun to Shine
The following are materials I wouldn't recommend to start with, but they're really good and deserve consideration:
This wouldn't be complete without a reference to the great Richard Feynman's lecture series. Part III is specifically on Quantum Mechanics. This is a classic textbook that has been used in many high schools and colleges over the years. I don't recommend starting with this, but I include it in case it might interest you.
Another reference that I wouldn't start with but feel it's good to include it in this listing is The Quantum Physics Sequence
I like this article by theoretical physicist Matt Strasler: Quantum Fluctuations and Their Energy
If you want a conceptual look at quantum field theory, particle physicist Matthew Buckley has a good article on this that is part of a longer series on particle physics. Knowing about quantum fields is important subject matter.
I'll recommend Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's a relatively easy read but packed with all sorts of interesting bits of history and science.
That's where I first learned of Mary Anning.
>...In 1812, at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, an extraordinary child named Mary Anning--aged eleven, twelve, or thirteen, depending on whose account you read--found a strange fossilized sea monster, seventeen feet long and now known as the icthyosaurus, embedded in the steep and dangerous cliffs along the English Channel.
>
>It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore.) She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls. Though none of these was technically a dinosaur, that wasn't terribly relevant at the time since nobody then knew what a dinosaur was. It was enough to realize that the world had once held creatures strikingly unlike anything we might now find.
>
>It wasn't simply that Anning was good at spotting fossils-though she was unrivalled at that--but that she could extract them with the greatest delicacy and without damage. If you ever have the chance to visit the hall of ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London, I urge you to take it for there is no other way to appreciate the scale and beauty of what this young woman achieved working virtually unaided with the most basic tools in nearly impossible conditions. The plesiosaur alone took her ten years of patient excavation. Although untrained, Anning was also able to provide competent drawings and descriptions for scholars. But even with the advantage of her skills, significant finds were rare and she passed most of her life in poverty.
>
>It would be hard to think of a more overlooked person in the library of paleontology than Mary Anning, but in fact there was one who came painfully close. His name was Gideon Algernon Mantell and he was a country doctor in Sussex.
Reference: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Sure.
If evolution is of interest to you (and if you have interest in the intersection between theology and science), Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller explores both sides of the debate and debunks many common misconceptions about evolution. I first read it in a college biology topics course.
If you like the topic of 'creationist attempts to dispute or disrupt the teaching of evolution in the classroom', Summer of the Gods, about the Scopes Monkey Trial, is a great book (although not explicitly about science).
You may find The Selfish Gene by Dawkins worth a read.
Books by Mary Roach can be fun; I've read Stiff and enjoyed it, and Packing for Mars was pretty good as well.
I have heard good things about The Emperor of All Maladies, though I haven't read it myself.
Our Stolen Future, about contamination of the environment by artificially produced estrogen and estrogen analogs, is dated but interesting.
The Discovery of Insulin by Bliss is a great story about how science happens and how scientific discovery occurs, and it lays out what may be the most important discovery in medical science during the 20th century.
Were those types of books what you were looking for?
One of my favorite non-fiction authors is Mary Roach. She picks a topic and gathers all kinds of detailed and odd information about it, often covering the kinds of details that the genuinely curious find fascinating.
Stiff is about what humans do with the dead remains of other humans, including her visit to the body farms where scientists figure out the cascade of beetles, bugs and grubs invade the remains.
https://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1502060523&amp;sr=8-4&amp;keywords=Mary+Roach
Gulp is all about the human digestive tract
https://www.amazon.com/Gulp-Adventures-Alimentary-Mary-Roach-ebook/dp/B00AN86JZ4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1502060523&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Mary+Roach
Bonk is about sex, including the author convincing her husband to have sex in an MRI for science
https://www.amazon.com/Bonk-Curious-Coupling-Science-Sex-ebook/dp/B003M5IGE2/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1502060523&amp;sr=8-9&amp;keywords=Mary+Roach
Packing for Mars is all about the details of putting people into space
https://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life-ebook/dp/B003YJEXUM/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1502060523&amp;sr=8-5&amp;keywords=Mary+Roach
Basically, I think everything she writes is worth reading if you write fiction.
I think a podcast recently did a story on this. Maybe it was on Science Friday or something, while interviewing Mary Roach?
I'm doing the same thing. At the beginning of my story, the young protagonist from an old earth colony "runs away" from the planet by stowing onto a departing spaceship. Why would he have to run away to have a chance at a life in space if the planet's colonized?
Whenever I explain the premise, everyone's immediately enchanted and captivated. It's immensely compelling. And it's throwaway background for the setting of the book. It would only be mentioned in passing as exposition.
It's probably a sign that I'm writing the wrong book.
The best thing to do is to get in the habit of thinking of things logically. Look at Star Trek? Massive computer cores and printed digital readouts with data tapes. Black stars (the term "black hole" was finalized a year after the episode). Half of everything makes logical if sometimes dated sense for 1967, and the other half became real in the intervening 45 years because it inspired engineers.
So decide if you're doing hard sci-fi (technology-based, hard science), soft sci-fi (person- or situation-based, lesser or no focus on science) or space opera (pew pew lol space adventure!) and work from there. watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read about the NASA moon programs Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo, read about Skylab, and read about the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Know that in Russian that last one's called Экспериментальный полёт «Союз» — «Аполлон»: "Experimental flight Soyuz-Apollo".
Real life will teach you quite a lot about how humans get along, much less aliens. And history can often come alive. I mean, just look what I found in the absolute best book at the library about life in space?
You can also look at various resources. Probably the far more comprehensive (and second-most fun) was Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.
Just give an intriguing premise with a consistent setting and compelling human characters and the rest will fall into place.
These are a little obvious, but if you haven't read them, you're definitely missing out:
Connections by James Burke
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Not really original, but great fun, great stories and exactly what you seem to be looking for.
Randall Munroe covers this in What if?. One of the big factors this wouldn't work is that a lot of people have compromised immune systems that can't just kill off any contagious diseases they are carrying.
For anxiety, I recommend Hope and Help for Your Nerves
I didn't post the Amazon link because there's a summary in that link of the steps (though the book does not portray it as steps)
> Here are Dr Weekes' 4 steps to overcoming anxiety:
> FACING the things you fear (instead of avoiding) – but in the right way, with appropriate help. (Fighting the fear, says Dr Weekes, will only add to your exhaustion and make the problem worse, by triggering more adrenalin.)
> ACCEPTING the symptoms, the fear, the situation. This will begin to reduce the triggering of adrenalin.
> FLOATING above or through the fear – not resisting or fighting.
> LETTING TIME PASS – allowing time for full recovery, because full recovery depends on repeated experiences of being in the situations you fear, and learning that you are ok, you can cope.
> Now, you might be tempted to dismiss this as too simple, or something you have heard before. But Dr Weekes explains each of these steps in a way that you can put into practice.
Mainly though it's more for your social worker so that they would be more tolerant of your present self. (I don't know what they mean by rigid but it sounds like they are trying to rush your recovery.)
Yeah perfectionism can be troublesome. The thing to look out for here is how would you achieve the perfect result? Sometimes you are on the right track and that's where you can do things in short bursts but you lose track of the right track (like the why behind your task) and end up getting distracted.
I'm not sure if you've seen this Simon Sinek TedTalk but at the core of perfect results is not the word perfect but the word results. How you define the ingredients for the word result will determine how prone or less prone you are to distractions because distractability is not a state, it's a rationalization and like all rationalization it can appear or disappear relative to the mindset you establish during that period of doing.
Realistically, even if you are distractable, there is so many happening right now in your thoughts that any short burst of productivity add up in the long term especially when it feels right regardless of how positive or negative you expect the results to be.
It all comes down to flow and bouncing forward. See the perfect results is like a signal. To you, there's a task that "feels right". That sends a signal that you are potentially sprinting towards a perfect result. That's flow. That's bouncing forward. That is the motivation or the clue to the motivation you are seeking.
But the signal gets buried under the noise over time. The worries start to creep in. The right to be ok gets replaced by the right to stay ok.
...but is staying ok really ok? For you, it doesn't seem that way.
And so you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you stay this way then you won't try too hard but you'll also be trying too hard to stay like this. If you don't get better then people might still care about you but then if you don't get better then people might grow tired of caring for you. What a vicious circle.
...but... (yeah I'm using but a lot but we're getting meta here)
Ask yourself: "must" you be in this vicious circle?
To quote Albert Ellis:
>"When you are upset, look for the must."
In this particular reply, ask yourself:
"must" you have an extrinsic motivation?
"must" you worry about trying hard?
"must" you worry that people will stop caring about you?
What are the worst case scenario and then note them down and check back on those worst case scenario "as you are" trying to be better and as you are getting better.
As for failing, do a Google search and you can see random articles listing how many successful people are actually failures. link example
It is because you are a failure that you can accomplish anything. Deep down you already know that. Why would you wait to take action if you don't believe you can take any action once everyone gets angry and fed up with you? Sure, a part of that is because you won't have a choice but a part of that is that you have a choice...but the choice gets rationalized externally when what you should be looking for is emotionally inside you and deep down inside of you, you believe that you can do something provided that everyone gets angry and fed up so why not simulate that inside of your head?
Nothing is preventing you from creating a role where everyone has already gotten angry and fed up with you. Then take that bottom down approach and appreciate every little piece of benefit that gets sent your way even the imperfect ones. Visualize and list down the qualities that your social worker for example may be fed up with concerning you and then if they do something contrary to that, now you visualize and imagine this is how they've gotten to be AFTER they got fed up and angry with you. Negatives don't always lead to negatives.
Sometimes negative thinking is necessary for starting over and then restarting over. That's why I keep using but. For every negative thought you have there is a but that can lead to realistic thinking. It all starts inside of you (even when most days it seems something external gets in the way).
For your passion, I recommend starting with a book or movie about a lost soul who found themselves. If you've seen Kumare it may either uplift you or depress you more but find something similar to this.
You could also try some interesting trivia books like A Short History of Nearly Everything or 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then
If you are into audiobooks, check out autobiographies - those tend to be easy to consume. For now just explore and take your present situation in little by little. The more you are mindful of how you grow from day to day - the more finding your passion and honing it becomes easier. Even meditation when forced can be difficult to receive benefits from but mindfulness of your own existence - that is that precious thing that keeps you going.
> © Bill Bryson, Reprinted with love.
Love me some Bill Bryson.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
I have the perfect non-fiction book for you that is great history AND science/number-y to an insane degree!
&#x200B;
Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." The book is about what we know about our planet/reality and how we came to know it. Fucking fascinating. It can get a little dry in the middle with all the earth-measuring stuff but you might actually like that part.
&#x200B;
You will be instantly drawn in with the beginning astronomy stuff and relative size/scale analogies.
&#x200B;
&#x200B;
&#x200B;
This one
I don't think I ever believed in a god.
Certainly I was there on Sundays and testified to my friends if they asked, I was a pretty decent missionary's kid. I participated when called on, but didn't ever initiate anything religious, just went with the flow.
Going to college was the first big step. Getting out of one bubble, but that got substituted for another containing a Christianity I didn't recognize. I stopped going to church, never liked it, even worse than school ... because I wasn't learning anything. Every sermon, class, lesson I heard over and over. In college, without parents to drag me out of bed, I started appreciating that sweet Sunday morning sleep a lot more instead.
(The singing was fun though)
I started questioning everything about my faith, for 2 years trying to make new information and new personal convictions fit into what I already believed. It became harder and harder to do. At first it was easy, some shifting and everything fit in perfectly. But that wasn't working anymore.
One night, I wanted to let it all go, start from scratch, but too terrified that I would change and wouldn't be the same "good" person I took myself for.
I decided that whatever was true would present itself when approaching it with a clear mind, just practice healthy skepticism, roll every new idea around in my head and see it from every possible angle, I was always good at thinking exercises, decent at deductions, the truth would present itself. I had to trust that.
Years went by and I realized how little religion was a part of my life, how little I cared for it. How little sense it made, especially after being gone for a while and going to a service ... it felt like a cult.
Being a moral person is about making that decision, not something that comes from faith, faith that if you don't do it the destination will be hell...
For a long time it was all I could think about, I took in books, debates, documentaries, anything that stirred the controversy. Now, it's just another (weird) thing on this planet that I get reminded of from time to time.
This is a fun read and gives a good insight into the typical way history unfolds.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
What if?,A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Concepts of Modern Mathematics.
If you're up for an fun, easy read I'd suggest you start with 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson and see when you feel like exploring when you're done. - http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
A short history of nearly everything. Only $11.39!
Well, one of the books I read that really got me started in cosmology and physics is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. I think it is his best book and talks a lot about the fundamentals of our universe. Brian Greene studies string theory and those bits are interesting, but just know that the theory is far from complete or proven. This one is definitely the most physics heavy suggestion.
Another book that I really enjoy is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It is essentially a history of science, and he covers a lot of topics. Many of which I knew almost nothing about when I read it. It puts into perspective how all the things we know came to be.
The next two recommendations are not books, but they still have a lot of great information in them. This first is a Youtube series called Crash Course Astronomy. The host is Phil Plait, one of the programmers involved with the Hubble Space Telescope. There are a lot of videos, so it would keep you busy and learning for a while.
The last recommendation is as close to the upper level undergraduate astronomy courses that I have taken without actually doing any math. It is a bunch of class lectures from Ohio State University that were recorded and released as a podcast about stellar astronomy and planetary astronomy. I found the lecturer's voice a little whiny at first, but I soon got past that because the content was so good. I kid you not, I listened to this ahead of my ASTRO 346 Stellar Astronomy class at my university, and I felt like the class concepts were almost a review.
All of those recommendations require you to do no math, but you only get a glimpse of the concepts that way. If you want to dive in more, you'll need to take a class or read a textbook on your own.
I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions about astronomy as a subject or as a course of study in school :)
A short history of nearly everything.
It's heavy on the science and math but also includes some history and philosophy. What's great about it is it doesn't just tell you the world is 4 billion years old, it tells you how we know that and goes over the evolution of human thought and how we got to where we are today in each subject. It's also easy to read and the audio book version can be finished in a week of just listening to it during your commute.
Telling someone with no philosophy background to try to read 900 pages of Kant is a recipe for frustration.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
Dude, for a newbie, I thought Bill Bryson's "A Short History of nearly Everything" was Awesome.
Of course that's a lot simpler than Godel or Douglas Hofstadter.
Have you read "The Selfish Gene", by Richard Dawkins? Awesome read.
Great Question. I was thinking about my own history. I wish there was a good single Codex, like handing out Bibles. I'd say read books broadly, read well, listen to debate, study the free MOOC courses online like edx.org. Always have a consciousness above what you are listening/reading that takes the mental exercise to evaluate: what works and what flaws there are in things, even ideas you love. I think books on Science history are especially helpful, like Byson's A Short History of nearly Everything or Boortin's The Discoverers
I strongly recommend reading Made in America by Bill Bryson. In theory it is about the history of American English but in practise it is also American history and as with all Bill Bryson books is very funny in addition to being informative. It covers this whole naming situation, including amusing efforts at regulating spelling. The post office did (eventually!) manage to enforce that there couldn't be duplicate names within a state.
A short history of nearly everything is also a rollicking good read.
Read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's not about religion. http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
Bill Bryson has a great book that has a layman's explanation of the high points. http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
Wife and I got married on A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson is a perfect introduction into science. Its very accessible and very interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/076790818X?pc_redir=1405945594&amp;robot_redir=1
Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805063323/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_QbzlDbZBYCQP6
Anything by Mary Roach, for example:
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393348741/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_vdzlDb8KHDG5K
Awesome!
After reading Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, the blue weevil beetle became a part of my internet identity \^j\^
Here is a fun book to introduce you to the sex aspect of evo-devo: Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. It explains human behavior by talking about other forms of life (plants, fungi, bacteria, other animals, and so on). It also has some funny quotes that I really hope are real (one is supposedly Churchill giving sex advice to his sons). My bio teacher lent me it to read in high school.
Seriously though, if two people meet, talk for a few hours, then have sex and aren't interested in trying to date after, they probably wouldn't have worked out anyway if they waited until date 5 to get into bed.
Edit: I wonder if there is interest in an r/OkC book club, Dr. Tatiana would be a good one, and I could use the excuse to buy the kindle edition to re-read it.
Its from this book.
Basically, the author, Kenn Amdahl, creates his own analogy where there are Male Greenies (Electrons), and Female Greenies (Protons). Greenies are these tiny little green dudes that live inside electronics. The male greenies are always looking to go party with the female greenies, and the female greenies are always hosting parties with music blasting, beer, and what not. Voltage is the male greenies' need to party, the current is how many are traveling along the roads (wires, etc.), and resistance is obstacles and conditions of the road.
With this Amdahl is able to create an analogy for most of the properties of electricity without it falling apart like the water analogy. He inter-weaves all this with a fictional story of how one of the little greenies is charged with the task of teaching him the "truth" of how electronics work, a wizard who makes Amdahl teach him electronics so he can repair a time machine, and other interesting pieces. It is a great read.
Check out There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings by Kenn Amdahl
https://www.amazon.com/There-Are-Electrons-Electronics-Earthlings/dp/0962781592
> Doing projects around the house
This isn't math directly, but if learning electricity is on your to-do list, then I'd recommend There Are No Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings. It uses a bunch of analogies to explain electricity and how common electronic appliances and components work layered over top of a funny story that makes it not so dry and a lot more memorable.
By the end, you should know enough to be able to troubleshoot and fix simple electronics in your house including rewiring sockets/appliances, not because you got some guide specifically for rewiring sockets, but because you can reason about it and how it works.
The voltage will always be the same - 110v or 230v at the wall, 5v on the supply to the MicroUSB end. I think what you mean is that you have a charger capable of producing a high current.
This confused me for the longest time - I found searching for pages like this one ( http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/voltage.htm ) helped, but the 'There are no Electrons' was the most useful - http://www.amazon.com/There-Are-Electrons-Electronics-Earthlings/dp/0962781592
For a very basic but thoroughly entertaining introduction: There are no Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings.
Also: Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics.
This is a very accessible book that is both enjoyable and informative
At amazon
Also, it has a chocolate lab on the cover, so it must be good.
The metaphor pretty much breaks down at that point.
There's not anything you can really do to affect the probability at that point. It's just the probability of the system.
However, I'm far from an expert on this. I'd suggest reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and/or Where Does The Weirdness Go? if you're interested.
Could be.
In terms of free your local library probably has almost everything ... great resource to use that a lot of people forget about albeit you have to wait sometimes to get your book. I am currently reading Chad Orzel "How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog" and it is doing a pretty good job of laying everything out for you to understand... makes you want to dig deeper if that makes any sense..
https://www.amazon.com/How-Teach-Quantum-Physics-Your/dp/1416572295
> dog farts
You might enjoy this
"How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog" was good fun
https://www.amazon.com/How-Teach-Quantum-Physics-Your/dp/1416572295
The are probably not capable of higher thinking. But there is a way to teach them quantum physics, so what do I know.
It depends a lot on what you are interested in and how deep you want to go, and it also matters a lot whether you want to learn to do physics, or you just want to learn about physics.
If you want to do physics, there's really no substitute for an actual university. However, if you just want to learn about physics, and follow along as an informed spectator, then there are heaps of resources for free online and it really depends on how deep you want to go.
If you have an interest in quantum physics, but no maths/physics background (and you don't mind paying for a book) then I like to recommend How to Teach Quantum Physics to your Dog. It's a cute and easy to follow book written in the form of a dialogue between a physicist and his dog. I mostly recommend this one because it contains a chapter on how to recognise and avoid quantum nonsense (as opposed to quantum physics), which I think is a very important skill to develop.
If you want to go deeper than pop-sci books and Youtube videos, you will need to learn maths. It's a bit useless for me to recommend anything in particular without knowing what your background knowledge is and what your goals are in learning physics.
How to teach physics to your dog by Chad Orzel was pretty good at explaining, as well as not being incredibly dense. Might not be what you're looking for, but there's no need for any prior knowledge.
Have you considered looking at some self-help books ? This one comes to mind
http://www.amazon.in/Complete-Manual-Things-That-Might/dp/1601060351/ref=sr_1_2
Sorry, couldn't help it. Had to post that :)
Same here!
These are two I've read and suggest. The first is about the history and events surrounding discovery of the elements. The second is just a nice history of various science topics.
Enjoy, and have a nice couple weeks off.
-- C
Read about it in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
I listen to Radio Lab and This American Life a lot while working. Also Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (audio book)
Not really comic related but they keep my brain busy during the more mundane parts of comicking.
It was a thread like this on Reddit where someone recommended this book. Lemme pay it back.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Loved every page of this book.
If it's readable nonfiction in general that you like (as opposed to an economics bent), definitely check out Mary Roach, a science writer. She writes about oddball topics like cadavers in Stiff, sex studies in Bonk, or space travel in Packing for Mars.
GASTON!
Item! Why should I worry?
There is minimum and maximum height for astronauts. You can't be too tall or too short. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact numbers, but the max is higher than 6'. The reasoning is that space suits are incredibly complex and very expensive so they are only made in certain size range (Source: Packing for Mars by Mary Roach).
Spacecraft too are a limiting factor especially since the Space Shuttle is retired and manned space flight relies entirely on the much smaller Soyuz capsule.
You jest, but it turns out that selecting for these missions, along with stuff like selecting for astronauts, is mostly about stuff like how you get along with people. Researchers now believe that mixed gender teams are best precisely because you end up with pair bonding and stabler psychologies.
I strongly recommend the brilliant and readable PACKING FOR MARS which is all about this stuff. She talks to a lot of antarctic scientists.
http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life-ebook/dp/B003YJEXUM/
Read Packing for Mars by Mary Roach for confirmation that, indeed, you would not be able to handle it. ;>) It disavowed me of any notion that I would.
Read this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YJEXUM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&amp;btkr=1
Hmm, I don't have any suggestions in the mythology vein at the moment, but for generally accessible nonfiction, I cannot recommend Mary Roach enough. Stiff and Packing For Mars are probably the best ones to start with.
The creator of xkcd wrote a whole book on "what if" questions: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Someone should get the *president a copy. Oh, yeah... I forgot he can't read... There are illustrations in it.
In other news, you can read Randall's "What If" for ~free if you have a subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
I personally don't have a copy, so if someone could explain how closely this models the system, I'd love you to pieces.
i'm not sure if you wanted a book but this is always a fun and interesting read! and if you're not feeling bookish i also recommend his webcomic!
What I did was I started looking at short story collections. A short story lets you see how an author writes without needing to read an entire book of theirs. I have two favorite short story collection "series".
Dark Beyond the Stars, which is a Sci-fi, space opera collection. There are other Beyond the Stars books as well if you liked the first.
And Samuel Peralta's The Future Chronicles. The Future chronicles typically does some sort of sci-fi, but there are others as well. The great part about The Future Chronicles, is that you get to pick your flavor. In the mood for alternate history? Pick Alt. History 101, in the mood for spaceships and star ships? Pick The Galaxy Chronicles. In the mood for time travel? Pick the Time Travel Chronicles, ect.
Also, The Martian is a fantastic book. As well as xkcd's What if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.
Hello!!!!!!
Happy Pi Day!!!
I totally have something on my wishlist for EXACTLY $3.14 but A) it's an add-on, and B) I just got some! But it was fun to see it, nonetheless. :D
Sciency Thing!
Thanks for the contest!
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe.
This is the author of the popular webcomic XKCD. As the name suggests, incredibly well researched and well thought out answers to ridiculous questions like: What if the earth suddenly stopped spinning? or What would happen if someone pitched a light speed fastball? A really fun read, and you dont have to read it all in one shot.
Some good nonfiction: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
This
and
This
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything-Illustrated/dp/0307885151/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1333214326&amp;sr=1-1
Thanks! A good place to start might be Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
I think I saw this in the book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson (illustrated edition obviously).
As I recall, the little tabs circling the base of the hair closest to the camera are the tails of eyelash mites burrowed into the folicle. Fun times!
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
I loved this book: http://www.amazon.com/Brysons-History-Nearly-Everything-Paperback/dp/B0036WHHS2/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1291147874&amp;sr=1-4
the latest version is now illustrated, but I have not read it to offer an opinion: http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything-Illustrated/dp/0307885151/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1291147753&amp;sr=1-2
Two good introductions to physics and science in general:
Bill Bryson (popular and quite funny): A Short History of Nearly Everything
Brian Cox (slightly more serious, but still a fairly easy read): Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?)
Be sure to read Packing for Mars.
You might like Mary Roach's book - Packing for Mars. She'll give you some great tidbits about the problems in travelling to Mars.
In terms of the furtherst a man made object has travelled, Voyager 2 has a twitter stream that tells you it's current distance in lightyears, along with what system checks it's doing.
Right, I know about terminal velocity, but I don't mean the downward vector. I mean one's lateral speed. Issues of oxygen aside, a jumbo jet moves pretty fast, like close to 500mph, right? So, when you jump out, you're not only going down, but you're also going forwards, very very fast. And, according to this book:
> At 350 mph, the cartilage of the nose deforms and the skin of the face starts to flutter... At faster speeds, this Q force causes deformations that can, as the Aviation Medicine paper gingerly phrases it, 'exceed the strength of tissue.'
Furthermore,
> Cruising speed for a transcontinental jet is between 500 and 600mph. Do not bail out. 'Fatality,' to quote Dan Fulgham, 'is pretty much indicated.' At 400mph, windblast will remove your helmet... At 500 mph, 'ram air' blasts down your windpipe with enough force to rupture various elements of your pulmonary system.
If you pick up that book, it's chapter 13, in case you were wondering.
edit: some formatting
Mary Roach spends a whole chapter talking about astronaut sexual activity in Packing for Mars
Vaguely-related anecdote incoming!
In Packing For Mars, the author notes that only two sizes of urine tube (basically a condom-like device for in-suit urine collection) were made for the Apollo program, 'large' and 'extra large'. one of each was sent with Apollo 13, though it is unknown which crewmember wore which.
If you're interested there is a great book called Packing for Mars, that goes through the history of space travel and includes a good section on astronaut diets and excrement amongst many other things.
http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life/dp/0393339912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1342447493&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=packing+for+mars
http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curious-Science-Life/dp/0393339912
https://www.amazon.com/dp/039365270X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_KfNEDb48FGCRQ
Are you part of the death positive movement? If you are, or interested on it, check this book on the subject...
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
it's currently among the top 10 best sellers of the new york times and it's illustrated by an amazing Mexican artist.
Science Made Stupid is a hilarious science parody book that is pretty age appropriate. Don't know if it's still in print. Most of the contents of the book can be seen here for review.
Science Made Stupid by Tom Weller
It was my favorite book when I was a 8 but had completely forgot the title and author and I just about jumped for joy when I serendipitously spotted the cover at used book store when I was 25.
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is a good one that explains the concepts by less abstract analogies. You might like it: http://www.amazon.com/How-Teach-Relativity-Your-Dog/dp/0465023312
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog
Am pleased.
If you haven't already, buy the book. It has all the best what ifs and a few new ones that are fun, I highly suggest it.
For those of us who don't need no stinkin' limey link: 'Merica!
Blog is down, but preorder button at Amazon is up: http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ref=pd_rhf_ee_p_tnr_2
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Monroe's What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is a fun read. It's not a narrative, but it follows scientific thinking and if very entertaining. Or, Homer Hickam's October Sky is a good narrative.
This book written by the guy from XKCD
Buy him the book "What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions." http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ It's from the author of the xkcd comics which are pretty popular around computer scientists
You need to get him http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994
if only for the question "what would happen if i made a wall of the periodic table with the bricks being made of their parts"
He sounds like a younger version of myself! Technical and adventurous in equal measure. My girlfriend and I tend to organise surprise activities or adventures we can do together as gifts which I love - it doesn't have to be in any way extravegant but having someone put time and thought into something like that it amazing.
You could get something to do with nature and organise a trip or local walk that would suit his natural photography hobby. I love to learn about new things and how stuff works so if he's anything like me, something informative that fits his photography style like a guide to local wildflowers or bug guide. I don't know much about parkour but I do rock climb and a beginners bouldering or climbing session might also be fun and something you can do together.
For a more traditional gift Randall Munroe from the web comic XKCD has a couple of cool books that might be of interest - Thing Explainer and What If. Also the book CODE is a pretty good book for an inquisitive programmer and it isn't tied to any particular language, skillset or programming level.
Check out What If? The author answers that question.
Hi :)
I have been looking for This and This
to add to my collection, but since they are NEW I havent made posts about them here since I didnt think anyone would have them to part with yet
Check out the preview of this book for an answer to what if the earth stopped spinning. TL:DR - the atmosphere, still moving, would create sonic boom winds that would destroy most buildings and people on earth. then there'd be massive firestorms, tsunamis, plant and animal dieoffs, one side of earth would bake in the sun while the other would freeze. Most interesting, the moon would start to fall towards earth, but then its pull would cause the tide to begin to rotate the earth again over time.
http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_lQOUub1E8NEFC
> ....when the creator/owner of /r/xkcd (among others) finally went inactive for six months, allowing a better group of folks to take over.
begin irrelevancy/
I just read the book by the creator of that sub, ["What If?"] (http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions/dp/0544272994/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1420590797&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=what+if+serious+scientific+answers+to+absurd+hypothetical+questions).
It was quite funny, and the stick figures are great!
/end irrelevancy.
Book on chainmail
Dr.Who mug
Christmas Dr.Who ornament
What if? Book
Yesterday actually came really close to hitting the nail on the head. I got up, went for a long run, had coffee with my mom, then wandered around town with my really good (female) friend/housemate. We hung out at the bookstore for a couple hours reading "What If?", ate chinese food, went on a short hike, then picked up cider and came home and played Scrabble while drinking and snacking. Sounds boring but it was just about the best day I've had in recent memory.
The new book by the Xkcd guy. And it's pretty great!
"What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions" by Randall Munroe
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0544272994/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1475239007&amp;sr=8-1&amp;pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&amp;keywords=what+if%3F
I'm telling you there are a great many things that are indeed either illusion or delusional. There are also real phenomena we don't understand, and may never!
My take on all that is, you see it, you admire it--experience awe and wonder, file it away mentally, and press on, because this world (let alone this universe) is chock FULL of things nobody has seen yet, but are discoverable, and plenty of things we can fully document and are repeatable, but can't fully understand (if at all).
We don't have to borrow explanations from a bag of woo-woo to explain anything. If it can't be explained by current knowledge, then we know what it is--a mystery!
If you have the knowledge and capacity to apply scientific method to it, and learn its secrets, and feel so inclined, then by all means go for it! But if you don't, then file it away in things to talk about at cocktail parties, or things to tell the grandkids. or around the campfire.
OTOH, it might VERY WELL be that some things like UFOs and encounters like yours are completely known, but kept secret. Possibly that will change soon, but also possibly not.
I wouldn't want to suggest that all the unknown things will soon be made known. Frankly, there are more things we don't understand than those we do.
I highly recommend a book I read recently called We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe.
Could you elaborate a little bit?
Are we talking about the rate of expansion of the universe? I don't know if we scientifically have enough evidence to confidently answer that question, and answers are at this point not totally verifiable.
Great book on ideas like this.
Give her Bill Bryson's a Short History of Nearly Everything. It's extremely interesting and well written...and mentions evolution in a thought out way that leads to the conclusion that its pretty much the only way it could have logically happened...not in a smug way...in an explanatory way that just describes how the whole thing works so that its not a vague idea that can be readily dismissed.
Also: Pokemon.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Guns Germs and Steel
A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Briefer History of Time
The Magic of Reality
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson who did a lot of books on traveling, which are a hoot to read, as is the above science book.
Breaking away from fiction, I had to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is a book written specifically for this purpose! And the audiobook is excellent.
Posting from my phone so can't make a link, but here's the amazon listing.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Can't suggest it strongly enough, it was literally written for people asking exactly this. Just listen to the forward; the wording is absurdly similar to your post.
I just finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book explains the important scientific discoveries about life, geology, and astronomy; but also the stories of the scientists who came up with these discoveries.
I got the audiobook, and it made my commute seem much shorter. It's a little dry in a few bits (especially the parts about geology), but overall it's a good, entertaining read.
You will notice the absence of A short history of nearly everything, which is a good book, but frankly it didn't speak very much to me. Bryson is almost only interested in geography.
A Short History Of Nearly Everything*
Science & history & personal anecdotes mixed to make for fascinating
Reading.
H2G2
Learn to laugh.
The Giving Tree
Taught me more about being a kind, friendly person that anything else.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Not so much antitheist, but I found it a good place to start in terms of "big history." Some of the language is tempered--it won't be as hard hitting as any Dawkins book--but it does a good job of covering the basics, and gives a general overview of how cumulative scientific knowledge got us where we are now.
I strongly recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything. The guy does excellent job to go through a lot of stuff, including life.
I will drill on the "to develop" part of your question.
Basically, life as it exists now (and including us) had astonishingly "lucky" brakes. Even global disasters were needed to progress thus far. Having in mind that, I think it is very hard to define what would be better (e.g. there were stages when Earth's atmosphere would be deadly for most modern organisms, but life was present even there and probably in huge amount). Maybe some compounds/conditions would be more beneficial to life but in a lab environment. Our planet was far from that.
Another good point is that life's primary goal seems just "to be". Nothing more, nothing less. In this sense all those coincidences were neither "astonishingly", nor "lucky".
I don't have the book to hand to check for the exact quote (and his references) but the excellent pop-sci A Short History of Nearly Everything mentions this in a similar context, but notes that a certain amount of time has to pass to ensure complete dispersal of the atoms in question.
So while it might be true of things some thousand years ago, the probability of this being true for this a maximum of ~3-4 decades is significantly decreased.
Obviously the type of element is going to matter a lot - solids migrate slower than liquids, and much slower than gases, but I'm not even sure how you'd put a proper number on it.
This seems like something of a Fermi Problem to me. It's quite possible that Avogadro wins, and 10^23 * $really_small_probability has in fact happened.
> The original claim is that anyone can be great at anything. It's wishy-washy feel-good bullshit.
keep believing this and you are guaranteed to never be great at anything.
> Just because you paint, doesn't mean you are a great painter.
you think anybody thought jackson pollock would be famous? he threw random paint all over a canvas
> Just because you play guitar, doesn't mean a stadium-full of people will pay to hear you play.
nickelback. creed. limp bizkit. billy ray cyrus.
> You can't get up tomorrow and decide to run 100m faster than Usain Bolt - no matter how hard you try, you'll never get there
have you tried? michael johnson ran every day for 4 hours or more.
> Practice all you want, you'll never play in a Superbowl-winning team
kurt warner was a grocery stocker and busted his ass in the arena football league to get his start
> ever make scientific contributions on a par with Hawking.
read this book. its filled to the brim with scientists who started out of their garage or workshop and did amazing things that changed the world
> The fact that you think the number of notches on your bedpost is in any way the mark of a great man
great men are made by trying, failing, trying, failing, and trying some more, and none of them had the ridiculous attitude that being great at anything for anyone is wishy washy bullshit. if that is really what you believe, then you have guaranteed you will never be great at anything
Bill Bryson has some answers. I found this on reddit from people recommending books. This book is awesome and will help with all questions regarding that and then some http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
Question: does Bill Bryson get credit for having written a book that quite nearly approximates the title of this little screed?
Answer: to my mind, yes. Bryson published said book several years before this bit was made and while he doesn't pretend to be a scientist, he does interview many of the world's leading thinkers and writes lucidly and intelligently and humorously about how a variety of complex concepts can be understood by lay-people.
Edit: oh yeah, here's the link to Bryson's book.
As per http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171 there was a significant decrease in anti-microbial activity of clothes washing with the advent of detergents which clean at cold or warm temperatures. As the author describes (if I remember correctly) at the scale of the germs in the fibers, it would be like an adult human wrapped in cargo nets. You simply need to kill/injure the organisms with heat.
I would also throw in that if she IS interested in our planet and science then Bill Bryson has a lovely book that, while not purely about evolution, is about how science has discovered many many facts about our planet and so in many ways it provides the reader with the scientific history to make sense of things like the age of the earth and the discoveries related to evolution: http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
A Short History of Nearly Everything
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
PM if you are interested.
What about A Short History of Nearly Everything? Or Seal Team Six? Or The Magicians? What about American Gods, Hyperspace and The Grand Design
What I'm saying is 18 is too few. Get cracking.
you should give a Short History of Nearly Everything a read. he goes over in glorious and awed detail every major discipline of science and does his best to tie them all together and show how perspectives have changed through history.
Bryson has the advantage of not being a scientist, so he asked the sort of seemingly stupid questions you're no doubt having trouble with and then he is a really a very engaging writer too. highly recommended.
also, you can take a community college class on Biological Anthropology, or any beginning anthropology class really and they will teach you all about where you came from. this is also highly recommended.
A Short History of Nearly Everything basically what the title says;
Where Men Win Glory about the Afganistan War and Pat Tillman, or really anything by Jon Krakauer (I loved his Everest book and the one on radical Mormon religion);
Newjack by Ted Conover, Conover became a corrections officer at Sing Sing prison and wrote about his experiences,
The Ghost Map about the start of epidemiology and how we started tracking viruses.
All of them are great reads where you also learn.
Another good book that gives a decent overview (Of everything really) is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Also, Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson. Both were really good books.
Indeed. The plate tectonic theory is relatively young (not until the last half century was there even evidence starting to accumulate); but the theory dates back nearly 100 years.
Aerik is just being facetious, but really only those in school within the last 40 years or so would have been introduced to the theory. And when we are, we're taught the concept more as a matter fact, such that it would be obvious to anyone who thought about it for more than 5 minutes; but many experts rejected the notion for a long time.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, has a great chapter, about the scientists who really pushed the idea.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
This story is covered in Bill Bryson's book: http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
I highly recommend you all read it! It is a very informative but fun to read book! READ IT! And lots of other Bryson books are pretty good...
Do you have an aversion to Amazon?
Amazon
$21.00 for a hard cover edition.
You should read the book.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
If you want to just know buzzwords to throw around, spend a bunch of time clicking around on Wikipedia, and watch stuff like Crash Course on YouTube. It's easy to absorb, and you'll learn stuff, even if it's biased, but at least you'll be learning.
If you want to become SMARTER, one of my biggest pieces of advice is to either carry a notebook with you, or find a good note taking app you like on your phone. When someone makes a statement you don't understand, write it down and parse it up.
So for instance, write down "Social Democracy", and write down "The New Deal", and go look them up on simple.wikipedia.com (Put's all of it in simplest language possible), it's a great starting point for learning about any topic, and provides you a jumping board to look more deeply into it.
If you are really curious about starting an education, and you absolutely aren't a reader, some good books to start on are probably:
"Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" by Randall Munroe
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
"Philosophy 101" by Paul Kleinman, in fact the ____ 101 books are all pretty good "starter" books for people that want an overview of a topic they are unfamiliar with.
"The World's Religions" by Huston Smith
"An Incomplete Education" by Judy Jones and Will Wilson
Those are all good jumping off points, but great books that I think everyone should read... "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, "Western Canon" by Harold Bloom, "Education For Freedom" by Robert Hutchins, The Norton Anthology of English Literature; The Major Authors, The Bible.
Read anything you find critically, don't just swallow what someone else says, read into it and find out what their sources were, otherwise you'll find yourself quoting from Howard Zinn verbatim and thinking you're clever and original when you're just an asshole.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us.
I am sure you have heard a thousand things.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is a great read. It covers everything from our solar system/universe to geology. It's written in a easy to understand way and if there are sections that you don't find interesting (I didn't care for the geology section) you can easily skip them.
I'd say, Bill Bryson's A Short History of nearly everything
A Short History of Nearly Everything
From the introduction:
> I grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn't
be, and not really thinking about it at all if I could help it. This, too, became my position for a
long time.
> Then much later-about four or five years ago-I was on a long flight across the Pacific,
staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain
uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever
going to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes
weren't. Didn't have the faintest idea. I didn't know if the oceans were growing more salty
with time or less, and whether ocean salinity levels was something I should be concerned
about or not. ...
> And ocean salinity of course represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance. I didn't
know what a proton was, or a protein, didn't know a quark from a quasar, didn't understand
how geologists could look at a layer of rock on a canyon wall and tell you how old it was,
didn't know anything really. I became gripped by a quiet, unwonted urge to know a little
about these matters and to understand how people figured them out. ...
> So I decided that I would devote a portion of my life-three years, as it now turns out-to
reading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of
outstandingly dumb questions. The idea was to see if it isn't possible to understand and
appreciate-marvel at, enjoy even-the wonder and accomplishments of science at a level that
isn't too technical or demanding, but isn't entirely superficial either. That was my idea and my hope, and that is what the book that follows is intended to be.
The first part of Bill Brysons "A Short History of Nearly Everything" explains this kind of thing:
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X#reader_076790818X
thanks, but i think you're thinking of bill bryson's book. (this is ken wilber's)[http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Everything-Ken-Wilber/dp/1590304500/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1254336354&amp;sr=8-1].
edit: not sure why the link's not working. bill bryson's book is "a short history of nearly everything"; ken wilber's is "a brief history of everything".
Not sure why I'm having such a hard time wrapping my head around this :)
I think I read somewhere (possibly this book) that we're still able to detect some of the very first microwave radiation (?) that was caused by the Big Bang eons ago, and I think that's what's confusing me: this really old "light" that was created shortly after whatever started the observable universe that's been happily traveling along rather quickly, occasionally bumping into stuff like planets and monitoring equipment where it can be observed...
So if the Big Bang happened way over THERE and everything we know including microwave radiation and what ultimately became us had to travel outwards away from that point until we ended up way over HERE a really long time later on (i.e. now), then why does this old microwave radiation only reach us now? Did it take a pit stop somewhere?
If that still doesn't make any sense I really don't blame you! Makes my head spin, lol.
The Axemaker's Gift by James Burke: All about examining of why we are the way we are and how we got here the way we did--it's the evolution of technology starting all the way back when monkeys came down from the trees.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: The science textbook you wish you got in school. Funny, informative, and provides an accessible way to learn about the world around us.
The Republic by Plato: Pretentious, I know, but this was the first philosophy book that ever really opened my mind to different types of thought.
This was money: http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
I had it on audio book and would listen while in traffic.
If you're feeling learn-y.
Bonus: learning to think critically an solve problems is an important skill for any student. Who better to teach us those lessons than the good people at Lego and the Dark Knight himself? LEGO Super Heroes The Batcave 6860 by LEGO http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005VPRF8O/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_gxeXtb04TRGF3
Mischief managed!
It really is lame. It turns out that the world knows so little about the oceans. I'm reading a really good book and the author notes that. There is just no money for oceanic exploration and research, despite how important currents and oceanic biology are to our world! We didn't know about the another major current until a set of hockey gloves washed off a ship's deck a few years ago. Such a shame.
This is an excellent book that covers most major scientific subjects. More than that, it's a great read.
If you're looking for more physics related stuff, this is a pretty easy read and even has a NOVA series that accompanies it.
This book might be the closest thing you can get. It is a great book.
[A Short History of Nearly Everything] (http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X): livro para leigos curto e intrigante sobre as mais diversas áreas do conhecimento científico e casos interessantes sobre personalidades que fizeam a ciência ao longo dos séculos.
Somebody needs to buy him Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" ASAP!
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Unsorted Bookmarks
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html
http://themarblenotebook.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/the-future-2012/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/dining/18melonside.html?_r=2
http://www.businessballs.com/body-language.htm#body-lang..
http://www.rationalresponders.com/mere_christianity_c_s_lewis
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/u1bc2/had_my_first_serious_talk_with_my_dad_about/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/o8w12/my_greatgrandmas_homemade_bread_for_pennies_per/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwwxNwVTnP4
http://www.amazon.com/Beach-Vintage-International-Nevil-Shute/dp/0307473996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1340509595&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=On+The+Beach
http://listverse.com/2012/07/02/10-great-popular-science-books/
http://www.sumolounge.com/
http://www.oddee.com/item_97898.aspx
http://www.iafd.com/results.asp?searchtype=comprehensive&amp;searchstring=kafe
http://www.reddit.com/r/BarefootRunning/comments/v5liw/a_great_lowcostnocost_option_for_minimalist_shoes/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States
http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html
http://voices.yahoo.com/people-food-dogs-846363.html?cat=22
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wq3fz/whats_the_most_ignorant_opinion_youve_ever_seen/c5fgfyr
http://www.ahaparenting.com/parenting-tools/positive-discipline/should-I-spank-my-child
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/zoology/reptiles-amphibians/legless-lizard-vs-snake.htm
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/08/pb-j-yogurt.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader
http://zero-drop.com/?p=1485
http://i.imgur.com/TY5zL.jpeg
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=amb_link_364507502_9?ie=UTF8&amp;bbn=409211011&amp;page=1&amp;rh=n%3A16310101%2Cn%3A!51536011%2Cn%3A409211011%2Cn%3A16321991&amp;pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-4&amp;pf_rd_r=276843EDAC57400B8E84&amp;pf_rd_t=101&amp;pf_rd_p=1387855682&amp;pf_rd_i=51537011
http://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/showthread.php?t=21533
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/09/baked-pasta-with-sausage-and-spinach.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader
http://www.rainymood.com/
http://www.flightradar24.com/
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/09/mushroom-stroganoff.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/09/skinny-chicken-pesto-bake.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/09/score-big-with-this-skinny-game-day-menu.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/fats-full-story/index.html
http://i.imgur.com/FUDKZ.jpg
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/wdyr0/police_officer_sees_a_guy_recording_him_pulling/c5cy3d3
http://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/k8ktr/footsteps/
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_evolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell%27s_views_on_philosophy
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/13pvl1/good_thing_she_is_wearing_a_bra/
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/11/pasta-with-butternut-sauce-spicy.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29
http://www.jhallcomics.com/Pokemon/7449
http://i.imgur.com/jSpEw.png
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11
http://newloren.com/lorenendings/pick_a_year.html
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_of_the_end_of_the_world
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/15ny9x/my_history_teacher_asked_while_in_a_conversation/
http://movieplotholes.com/index.html
http://scepsis.ru/eng/articles/id_5.php
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2013/01/skinny-queso-dip.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29
http://www.16personalities.com/category/featured
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheistic_religions
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2013/01/hot-and-spicy-buffalo-shrimp-dip.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weightwatcherspointsrecipes+%28Gina%27s+Skinny+Recipes%29
http://archive.org/
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=4587986935876&amp;set=vb.112669740122&amp;type=2&amp;theater
http://yourbrainonporn.com/what-if-i-use-porn-without-orgasm
http://i.minus.com/ikfmGW73AeBn0.gif
http://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/12ivf6/bb_guns/
http://www.minisniping.org/
http://www.spaceavalanche.com/
http://www.nohomophobes.com/#!/today/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XORm2QtR-os
http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/05/psychologists-are-least-religious-of.html
http://i.imgur.com/oYGF44t.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fainting_game#Injuries_and_fatalities
http://www.thecowgoddess.com/
http://www.loonwatch.com/2013/04/richard-dawkins-anti-islamanti-muslim-propaganda-exposed-the-facts/
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/04/22/doctors-warn-teens-about-taking-cinnamon-challenge-in-new-report/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/22/us-health-pediatrics-idUSBRE93L03W20130422
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2943-brain-tumour-causes-uncontrollable-paedophilia.html
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/may/17/magic-tumors/
http://www.reddit.com/r/PrisonTalk/comments/1bw9zt/lets_talk_about_pen_pals/
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9i0ul7hnu1rc8dguo1_500.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8Tg7oZQ.gif
http://evolvinghealthscience.blogspot.com/2012/12/why-you-can-all-stop-saying-meat-eating.html?spref=tw
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/to-keep-the-faith-dont-get-analytical.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mTCgIHpQXE
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/05/09/the-biology-of-the-translucent-jewel-caterpillar-the-nudibranch-of-the-forest/
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/04/heritage-apples-john-bunker-maine?slide=10
http://i.imgur.com/lUuc4wI.jpg
http://www.justin.tv/directory/entertainment?lang=en&amp;page=4
http://voices.yahoo.com/canine-catnip-anise-dog-toy-26060.html?cat=53
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homologues_of_the_human_reproductive_system#Counterparts
http://www.nakedworldrecords.com/lpen.htm
http://www.reddit.com/r/dogs/comments/102ozg/im_looking_for_a_durable_washable_dog_bed_for_a/
http://mydeathspace.com/article-list.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata
https://www.google.com/search?q=House%20centipede&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;channel=rcs&amp;um=1&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;hl=en&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=og&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi&amp;ei=ZpyUUfWNOo389gT04oDIDA&amp;biw=1260&amp;bih=686&amp;sei=apyUUZHaE4O29QSxlYDQCQ#imgrc=nGxTrWDWdTHbJM%3A%3BMKl0pYdr7asvzM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252F3.bp.blogspot.com%252F_EFO0ccULTAs%252FS7T5F_q9BWI%252FAAAAAAAAAF4%252F6fH_XdvrAXg%252Fs1600%252Fhousecentipede.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fsuperscientastic.blogspot.com%252F2010%252F04%252Fhorrifying-creatures-from-my-youth.html%3B1280%3B1024
http://www.amazon.com/A-Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X
Personally, I think it's more difficult to not believe in God. I could give several reasons why though my own personal examples, but that'd be a fairly lengthy post.
One of the biggest things to me is looking at the earth, the universe and creation itself. Personally, when I was reading 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson, I found it as a affirmation of my faith. To me, the thought that the creation of the universe, the laws of physics and chemistry and all of our sciences that hold everything together is just a series of random luck seems laughable.
Given your low level of knowledge and your insistence on acting like you do know things, I suggest this introductory book on Physics: We Have No Idea.
Not at all. What has been proven, has been proven. It exists as a base for progress until it is proven otherwise. It is funny that you mention 2+2 because math is axiomatic and can only be proven within a system. Even the most basic math is subject to scrutiny under different circumstances.
Here are a few books you might enjoy:
Hyperspace
A Short History of Nearly Everything
They explore some ideas I think you might like. I'm not an idiot, even though it is clear you think so. I just don't like rational. It is boring.
So it's settled. Humphrey Davy may have pulled a Romney and flip-flopped but that does not excuse the fact that Britain decided to ignore that the word had been changed. Get over yourselves and start pronouncing it THE RIGHT WAY!
On another note... If you don't read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything you are severely missing out on how fucking cool everything is.
If I understand correctly, I found that Bill Bryson had written a decent book. Of course, I may not have understood correctly.
Don't be a prick. Support the author rather than posting plagerised snips from his book.