(Part 2) Top products from r/science

Other books that I found really useful, informative, motivating and accessible in high school include Feynman's QED -- a really cool introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics that I read my senior year -- and Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. I think somebody mentioned it already.

Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty is a really good discussion on the history of math. Also quite accessible. I read it my freshman year of college.

More tangential books that I've enjoyed include The Drunkard's Walk and Chances Are. They cover similar ground, though, and I like the latter better.

There's also some pretty good fiction that gives you the flavor of some of the mindbending concepts that can arise from physics. Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars is a good "juvenile" book that takes a step into the Twin's Paradox. Time dilation pops up in Larry Niven's A World Out of Time as well. For solar system level astrophysics, Niven's The Integral Trees postulates a really cool alternative to planets.

I read most the fiction around the time I was in high school, with the exception of Time for the Stars. Ironically, it's the only one that I can guarantee doesn't have "adult themes." I don't know what sort of restraints your parents put on your reading, though. They're all good books.

The other thing, other than books I mean, you can do is find a mentor or club in your area that could help put you on your way. An astronomy club would be a good idea, but there may also be physics or chemistry styled mentors in your area. They're likely to act out of a local university or research center (I live in Huntsville, Alabama, where Marshall Spaceflight Center is located. I know they have outreach/mentoring programs).

Oh, and I know I'm going on, one last thing that I found really useful and fun was my involvement in summer programs. In my case, the big one was Mississippi Governor's School, a three week summer program. It was an awakening from a social standpoint. (Ten years later, a large proportion of my friends either attended it or I know via some connection to it, still.) And it had an astrophysics class, which was awesome. I know other states have programs like it (assuming you're in the US), and MGS at least is easier to get into than commonly believed. People think a counselor's recommendation is required, but it's not and you get two opportunities to attend, between sophmore and junior and junior and senior years. It's unlikely you're in MS, of course, but other places have similar programs.

Good luck with things and keep us posted. :)

Read a book.

No, I'm not kidding. The internet is a powerful thing, but it is not a good medium for scientific publication. The internet is unfiltered (mostly), unabridged, uncensored, and loud. These attributes make the internet a great place to share groundbreaking ideas, but groundbreaking is not good science. Groundbreaking is the start of good science, but so much editing and reviewing goes on in the scientific process that you can't really transition from primary research directly to layperson. Taking primary research and trying to make it immediately relevant to current events simply does not work - take the anti-vaccination crowd and climategate scandal for instance.

Just get a textbook. Textbooks are, most of the time, the polished end-product of huge amounts of scientific research. Its usually safe to say that a big publication like Campbell and Reece has been nitpicked to hell and back. Every reference that the book makes has been read and analyzed thirty times by people in many disciplines. Its always going to be a little behind on the times, but frankly thats a good thing. Get an edition that is a little older and you won't have to pay the exorbitant prices that college kids pay.

If you're really interested in learning a bit of biology then I suggest two textbooks: Campbell and Reece 8th edition and Evolutionary Analysis. Campbell is a great reference for basic stuff (beautiful book, too, great shelf sitter) and a good evolutionary analysis book is indispensable. I don't remember who said it, but there is a quote often repeated in bio classrooms that goes along the lines of @Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution@. That textbook is a little more math/stats heavy than some, so your comp sci background should come in handy.

The great majority of people (reddit is especially bad at this, lots of self-righteous atheists) who try to apply the theory of evolution don't have a firm grasp on how it works. If you're going to understand one part of biology, that would be it.

Physics and chemistry suffer less than biology at the hands of the popular media, because a great majority of the groundbreaking stuff that physicists come up with is either theoretical or heavily grounded in hard data. Its easy to draw erroneous conclusions from data on penguin breeding patterns, but its a little harder to mis-read the LHC. Especially since you can't read it and you have to take someones word (figuratively) at what it is saying.

Personally I ignore popsci articles that try and say things like @humans now proven to have evolved mastodon teeth spear things!@, but I don't mind reading up on perhaps new species discoveries or pretty pictures of new nebulae.

tl;dr: Read a book. Be a skeptic. Don't believe what anybody says just because they say it.

edit: quotes are apparantly @ now. shrug

Your picture of Pre-European Native American Life is not as bad as that Pocahontas DVD, but it is still way off. For a good look at what it was actually like in the New World pre-European, see the book 1491 by Charles Mann. This has been generally well recommended on /r/AskHistorians and /r/askscience.

For example, they made extensive use of fire to convert dense forests to less dense forests, open woodlands, or grasslands which lead to huge population increases in the kind of herbivores they liked to hunt, and made it much easier to hunt them. They did not just passively live at the mercy of Nature.

Well, first of all, I first heard about the Bloop from a friend who was interested in cryptozoology in 2004. I first ran into the recordings themselves (of the Bloop, Julia, Train, and Slowdown) in 2006. If you read New Scientist, you can find similar reports from the same period as the CNN article. It shows up in pulpy fiction as a neat unsolved phenomenon as early as 2004 and 2005. It got written up by other web sites like this one well before.

But setting all this aside: You're really telling me that the NOAA is in cahoots with Paramount? Come on.

I'd really recommend Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. The entire purpose of the book is to explain relativity and quantum physics to laymen. Has some really good explanations and great "scenarios" that can help describe the physics.

Fair enough. Didn't know that this was where you were coming from.

No, I haven't read Barrow. But pretty much any popularization of physics recently seems to make this very point. From Brian Greene to Lee Smolin seems to make this point.

I think we were both missing what the other was saying. I agree with your point on why, apologies for the bluntness. I didn't fully see your Devil's Advocate position until now. So I guess we agree to agree?

Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces are both great introductory books that explore the fascinating essentials of Physics. Feynman is a lucid and captivating science teacher.

These reality branches can add together, or even cancel out. This effects the probability of certain events occurring, which can be tested by repeating experiments.

I would try to explain it further, but I am sure I'll mess it up. I recommend QED, which is surprisingly easy to read.

If you like Feynman, you might try the Feynman Lectures on Physics, which is a 3-book set covering everything from mechanics to QM to E&M to fluid dynamics. It definitely has that Feynman charm to it. It won't give you the math overview, though, but you're probably better off just picking that up as you go if you've already had calc. If you go much further you'll eventually want linear algebra, though.

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Not-So-Easy-Pieces-Relativity-Space-Time/dp/0465023932/ref=sr_1_1

A nobel physics prize winner describes how relativity works using high-school geometry. If you know the Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2 for right triangles), then you can learn why time runs at different speeds.

It's really an amazing piece of work.

(Six Easy Pieces is also good, but doesn't cover relativity)

• How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff is a quick and fun read that will sharpen your ability to identify fraudulent claims.
  
  
• My favorite stats book for people who are not math-geeks is Statistical Methods for Psychology by David Howell
  
  
• The particular technique used in the paper is somewhat beyond beginner level. A third good book to read might be Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models by Andrew Gelman

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).

If you find people's reactions to the Monty Hall problem fascinating, you should check out The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.

I'm in the process of reading it now, and the author mentions this very encounter between vos Savant and the PhDs.
It's a fun, freakonomics-type read with some good anecdotes.

The author of that article recently released another book called The Believing Brain which covers agenticity, among other things, in great detail. I'm in the process of listening to the audio version and I recommend it.


Also, here's a link to a video where he covers an outline of what's covered in the book.

I recently bought Six Easy Pieces and Six No-So-Easy Pieces and both are fantastic.

Have you read 1491 and 1493?

A lot of good stuff on the latest archaelogical findings and theories. There is new evidence that Amazonian Indians weren't all hunter gatherers, that they actual practiced a tree based agriculture and left behind mounds and other physical evidence of some kind of civilization.

Charles Mann, the author, is just summing up and/or popularizing current trends in archaelogical thought, but I learned some stunning things that went against what is taught in the schools.

Send him "The Beak of the Finch" (http://www.amazon.com/Beak-Finch-Story-Evolution-Time/dp/067973337X) It's very insightful and based on data from an experiment. It's also a very good and easy read.

>Somebody better come up with a marketable, sustainable, acceptable food source.

Well, you can start by reading this book.

a University intro to BIO textbook would be helpful.

amazon link


*edit: thats the book they use at my UNI, its pretty simple.

If you're looking for a very simple intro, try Isaac Asimov's Understanding Physics.

If you want something more in-depth and you're comfortable learning some math as well, try Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

No, not really. First of all the Big Bang was not an explosion of light and heat that we could "see" (unlike, say, a supernova) but a rapid expansion of space. That's all space, including the bit we're riding along on. Space is expanding everywhere - so everywhere we look, galaxies are rushing away from us. It's really hard to wrap one's mind around; try to think of a bunch of magic marker dots on a balloon you're blowing up. What direction would an ant on one of those dots look to find the origin of the expansion?

As far as the time travel idea, a crude analogy might be to suggest that when you look at the sun - the light from which is eight minutes old - you aren't traveling backwards in time; it just took a few minutes for the sunlight to reach you. Likewise when we see the light from far away stars, it just took a really really fucking long time to get here, so we're seeing light as it was emitted aeons ago.

We can detect cosmic microwave background radiation, which is pretty interesting stuff. It's also relevant here because it's uniformly distributed everywhere we look. Where is its origin if it's uniformly distributed?

[edit] I highly recommend you read Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos for starters.

Although some of his research is being questioned by other anthropologists, Richard Wrangham has a whole book devoted to this, and is a very interesting read.

If that question interests you you'd probably enjoy Godel, Escher, Bach

An interesting al though controversial book is Race Evolution and Behavior by Rushton.

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Evolution-Behavior-History-Perspective/dp/0965683613

The Bell Curve is probably a good one to read too.

For another side you might want to read Gould's Mismeasure of Man.

http://www.amazon.com/Mismeasure-Man-Stephen-Jay-Gould/dp/0393314251/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269821208&sr=1-1

The Swarm has started!

A good book and worth a read if it hasn't been read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Swarm-Novel-Frank-Schatzing/dp/0060859806

Michael Pollan, in Defense of Food, makes the argument that you should never buy any food item that makes a health claim. The foods that are actually healthy like Bananas, and beans rarely if ever make such claims while processed foods with little value often do.

All the other books people are mentioning are light fare: Read this - http://www.amazon.com/The-Feynman-Lectures-Physics-Volume/dp/0201021153

It will take you from zero science knowledge to a lot. The explanations and teaching methods are excellent.

tl;dr - The title gives it away, but eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Basically, nutritionists don't know much about nutrition, they get bogged down thinking about vitamins and micro-nutrition, not macro-nutrition. That's why every 5 years eggs go from good-for-you to bad-for-you and back again.

Supplements don't do anything, because the vitamins usually work together, and if you don't have it's partners, it won't work much.

Processed foods and refined foods are horrible, they lack nutrient combos. The nutrients they add in may be lacking the undiscovered ones that allow them to work.

Don't eat packaged food with ingredients you don't know (chemicals and preservatives)

The most important parts are on page 11 & 12

(forgive my summary, I just browsed the article, I am summing up this and parts of his great book In Defense of Food)

EDIT: "Nutritionists" in this instance does not mean those unregulated people who call themselves nutritionists. I was referring to all nutrition scientists, including food scientists, dietitians, and nutritionists.

EDIT 2: Also, I'm not trying to make claims here people, just trying to sum up the article/book. I understand my comments are blanket statements, but that is what "TL;DR" is for.

A good book that expands on this is The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

It has been noted that voluntary immigrants (whites, asians) do far better than most involuntry immigrants (most african americans, native americans).

> It would be a huge shock if it didn't apply to diets.

It doesn't apply to diets(Atkins, Keto) and it has been know for a while.

It isn't a huge shock because we are a processing machine - a wet computer. We are not a simple energy in/energy out system. We treat calories differently depending on their source (carb, fat, protein). It might be a shock to those from the 50's/60's "nutrition scientists" that set us on the calories in = calories out path. They didn't listen to their studies.

Carbs converted to glucose kick off an insulin response which triggers your body to store energy into fat immediately without regard for where that energy is needed.

I highly recommend reading Phantoms in the Brain by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, where he discusses this topic and qualia's physiological basis.

Shortly before he died, Feynman gave a series of lectures called QED at UCLA for the lay audience. In that lecture (available at Amazon QED ), he outlines some basic ideas that make quantum mechanics a lot less mysterious. As he is laying out his lecture, he says 4 things:

A) Light is a particle called a photon. No wave-paticle duality - it's a particle.
B) An electron travels from point to point.
C) A photon travels from point to point.
D) An electron has a finite probability to absorb and emit a photon.

With the exception of radioactivity and gravity, the last 3 rules build you a universe. He explains that the waviness we observe at the quantum level is merely a probability function being displayed in real space. He illustrates several common phenomena in terms of the 3 rules. He even explains the double-slit weirdness.

The reason he mattered was he was one of 3 men who won the Nobel for solving the normalization problem in QED. He knew his topic cold and he could explain it really, really well for the rest of us.

If you're at all interested in quantum weirdness, read his book - it clarifies a lot of ideas. I'm not the sharpest knife so I had te read it several times before I felt I had a handle on most of what he was saying. It's a small book covering big ideas.

Evolution can happen quickly (not saying it has in this case... just that it can). Pickup http://www.amazon.com/The-Beak-Finch-Story-Evolution/dp/067973337X for an interesting read about fast observable evolution.

Amazon link to the printed studies and other of his works.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=John+Ogobu&x=10&y=22

http://www.amazon.com/Black-American-Students-Affluent-Suburb/dp/080584516X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289444666&sr=8-1-spell

Black American Students in An Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education)

http://www.amazon.com/Minority-Education-Caste-Cross-Cultural-Perspective/dp/0125242506/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289444666&sr=8-2-spell

Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (A Carnegie Council on Children Monograph)

http://www.amazon.com/Next-Generation-Ethnography-Neighbourhood-anthropology/dp/0127855890/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289444666&sr=8-3-spell

Next Generation: Ethnography of Education in an Urban Neighbourhood (Studies in anthropology)

You may be interested in The Mismeasure of Man. I've only just begun the book so I'm not in a position to say whether it's compelling, but it purports to demolish the idea of IQ.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature!

Very interesting book, starts out a bit slow by talking about the sexual habits of various animal species but eventually comes together as they are then compared to those of humans.

Consider reading The Mismeasure of Man by Steven Jay Gould.

It is a good intro to questions like What is Intelligece? What is IQ? How has IQ testing been abused in the past? [This last has some tragically hilarious examples].

Campbell. This has everything you need to know about basic biology and some decent parts about some advanced stuff.

Phantoms in the Brain is a great book by Ramachandran concerning what we can learn about how the brain works by studying brain damage and diseases.

The flip side of that is that insulin tells your body to refuse to remove energy from fat cells, and eating a carbohydrate-heavy diet dramatically increases your insulin levels. Thus, people can run a caloric deficit and not lose significant weight, but simultaneously experience starvation at the cellular level if their diet is too carb-heavy.

EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, because it's factually accurate. Sources: Good Calories, Bad Calories; Why We Get Fat; Wheat Belly. There are more, but these are some of the best, fully-sourced books about the subject.

The Swarm .. a doomsday scenario novel .. a fun read .. if you're into that kind of stuff

http://www.amazon.com/Swarm-Novel-Frank-Schatzing/dp/0060859806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278665246&sr=8-1-spell

Actually, we have. This biological anthropologist makes the case that humans have evolved to specifically to eat cooked food, which thus reduces the gut size needed to process raw food, thus allowing more mass expenditure to go to the brain. A very interesting read. He also talks about the origin of the sexual division of labor to cooking.

Thus the "vestigial organ" we've lost is the more extensive intestinal gut system of our primate ancestors.

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334189058&sr=8-1

Which is why you ought to read this book. It's a classic, but that doesn't stop people from practically using it as an operating manual.

"The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley.

John Ogbu?

http://www.amazon.com/Black-American-Students-Affluent-Suburb/dp/080584516X

I think those points fall under Richard Wrangham's big idea. He released a book on it. http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Richard Feynman's "Strange Theory of Light and Matter" explains why. It's all about probabilities.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas F. Hofstadter. The section on Ant Fugue blew my mind away.

assuming a widespread disease epidemic (or similar event on a massive scale), it probably wouldn't take more than a generation or two for much of the most important (medicine, science, technology, mechanics, agriculture, etc) types of knowledge to disappear.

i mention it a lot these days, but check out 1491, as current research shows similar events on such a massive scale to lead to the immediate and, to an extent, irreversible decline of american native societies.

anyway, this is a huge hypothetical anyway.

the biggest hurdles, in my opinion, will be continued operation of power supplies, water treatment and sewage, food production, and production of medical supplies. in the near term, everything else ceases to matter as much.

You're absolutely right that Reginault is wrong. I first came across this probability brain teaser in The Drunkard's Walk. I could not wrap my head around it after reading it, and so finally I wrote a little program in Python to brute force its way through 10,000 iterations of this game and report the results of sticking with one's gut and then always switching. I ran it over and over, because the results initially shocked me -- even though the book had tried to convince me of what I saw on my computer's screen.

You should always switch. For some reason, after I saw it with my own two eyes, I began to be able to reason through the problem and grasp it intellectually. (That's probably an issue for another book!)

The same way everyone above a certain age takes for granted that we experience optical illusions, we have to realize that we also experience things that could perhaps be called cognitive illusions. Our brains are built a certain way, and we have to work very hard in some cases to go against our brain's gut.

Religious thought has been eliminated from the UK, perhaps by people like mark204, who made a new account just to post that unuseful trolling.

Also, JSavage37 didn't even bother to quote from the book he referred you to. That is lazy, not helpful.

Frankly, the guardian article was sensationalistic. However, it addresses the difference between epigenetics and Lamarckianism.

I didn't see your article as promoting Creationsim, and I doubt the other posters even read the article. But the title attacking evolution will invite a knee-jerk downvote here in /r/science.

And this is why he's wrong:

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0060556579/ref=tmm_pap_title_0