Dave O’Reilly’s Blog

	Eclipse: The Celestial Phenomenon Which Has Changed the Course of History Author: Duncan G. Steel Rating:
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Duncan Steel’s handsomely produced pocket hardback, illustrated throughout by evocative engravings, illustrations and early photographs, harks back to an era when astronomy was a popular pursuit, and not yet the preserve of computer-laden university departments. It is, essentially, a book of celestial mechanics, using the solar eclipse of August 1999 as a peg from which to hang any number of fascinating astronomical stories: how archaeologists and historians use eclipses to calibrate local calendars; how eclipse cycles can be mapped as woven patterns, revealing their regularity, so that, long before the necessary physical theories were developed, “various individuals of genius, living in societies possessing careful records of past celestial events, were able to interpret those records and deduce the lengths of the years and months to a matter of minutes and seconds”; finally, how findings from eclipses and the occultations of stars by the moon and planets revealed much about the nature of both. There is much of historical, as well as astronomical significance in Duncan Steel’s Eclipse. French astronomer Jules Janssen, for example, in 1870 “was so desperate to get to Algeria to observe an eclipse that he escaped from Paris in a balloon, drifting over the heads of the Prussian troops who had the city under seige”. –Simon Ings

Everything you will ever want to know about eclipses, and a bit more! I thought this book was factually interesting, but a bit dry.

	Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Author: Malcolm Gladwell Rating:
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Blink is about the first two seconds of looking–the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of “thin slices” of behavior. The key is to rely on our “adaptive unconscious”–a 24/7 mental valet–that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us “mind blind,” focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to “the Warren Harding Effect” (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the “dark side of blink,” he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell’s ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. –Barbara Mackoff

This book is about first impressions and “knowing” something before you can really explain why you know that. Ironically enough I got a pretty bad first impression of this book; there was something funny I didn’t really like about it. The book uses examples of how experts in an area such as archaeology can get a bad feeling about something which later turns out to be right. In fact the core hypothesis of this book is almost the exact opposite of the one proposed in the widsom of crowds which says that a group of uneducated people can make a more intelligent decision than even an expert in a particular area.

I suppose the point here is that sometimes groups make better decisions and sometimes it’s the individual experts that will make the best decision. Both of these books, when you are reading them, would have you think that their way of thinking is the only way of thinking, and if you’re not doing it their way, you’re doing it wrong.

I would assert that the best way to know whether or not something is true is to take your time and conduct a series of experiments and build the body of knowledge until a scientific consensus emerges. If you can’t wait that long then at least conduct some well thought out experiments! Hurray for science!

	100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You didn’t know Author: John D. Barrow Rating:
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Mathematics can tell us things about the world that can’t be learned in any other way. This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining little book answers one hundred essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty questions, clarifies the conundrums, and sheds light into dark corners. From winning the lottery, placing bets at the races and escaping from bears, to sports, Shakespeare, Google, game theory, drunks, divorce settlements and dodgy accounting; from chaos to infinity and everything in between, One Hundred Essential Questions of Existence Answered! has all the answers!

This book was lighter than I thought it was going to be, consisting of 100 approximately 2 page essays on mathematical curiosities. There are a few interesting tidbits in it but overall it was a bit light for me.

	The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Author: Ann Druyan Rating:
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“A glorious book . . . A spirited defense of science . . . From the first page to the last, this book is a manifesto for clear thought.” *Los Angeles Times “POWERFUL . . . A stirring defense of informed rationality. . . Rich in surprising information and beautiful writing.” *The Washington Post Book World How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions. Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today’s so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms. “COMPELLING.” *USA Today “A clear vision of what good science means and why it makes a difference. . . . A testimonial to the power of science and a warning of the dangers of unrestrained credulity.” *The Sciences “PASSIONATE.” *San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

Carl Sagan is a bit of a hero of mine, and of the books of his that I’ve read, this is the one that I’ve enjoyed the most. Everyone should read it and then buy five more copies and give them to their friends and family.

	Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives Author: Richard Wiseman Rating:
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This is the second book by Richard Wiseman that I have read in the past while (the other one was did you spot the gorilla?). I must say they’re both very enjoyable reads.

At the very end of this book he presents the results of an experimental dinner party where he asks people to rate how interesting they found some of the facts presented in this book. I think the contents of the list gives a great indication of the type of book this is and what it’s about. So here they are in reverse order:

10. People asked to write down a few words describing a university professor answer more Trivian Pursuit questions correctly than those describing a football hooligan.

9. Women’s personal ads would attract more replies if they were written by a man. The opposite is not true of men’s ads.

8. The mona lisa seems enigmatic because Leonardo da Vinci painted her so that her smile appears more striking when people look at her eyes than her mouth.

7. Women van drivers are more likely than others to take more than ten items through the express lane in a supermarket, break speed limits, and park in restricted areas.

6. Some seemingly ghostly experiences, such as feeling an odd sense of presence, are actually due to low-frequency sound waves produced by the wind blowing across an open window.

5. Words containing the ‘K’ sound - such as duck, quack and Krusty the Colown - are especially likely to make people laugh.

4. People born during the summer are luckier than those born in the winter - temperature differences around the time of birth makes summer-borns more optimistic and open to opportunities.

3. The best way of detecting lies is to listen rather than look - liars say less, give fewer details, and use the word ‘I’ less than people telling the truth.

2. The difference between a genuine and a fake smile is all in the eyes - in a genuine smile, the skin around the eyes crinkles, in a fake smile it remains much flatter.

1. People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog faeces and not washed, than one that has been dry-cleaned but used to belong to a mass murderer.

If you want to find out more (and there’s lots more to find out), buy the book!

	Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures) Author: Stephen Jay Gould Rating:
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Gould’s subject is nothing less than geology’s signal contribution to human thought–the discovery of “deep time,” a history so ancient that we can best comprehend it as metaphor.

In broad terms, this book discusses three other books;

1. Telluris theoria sacra (The sacred theory of the earth) by Thomas Burnet, published between 1680 and 1690
2. Theory of the Earth by James Hutton, published 1795
3. Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell, published 1830

These books straddle the period in time when humanity came to the realisation that the world couldn’t possibly be approximately 6,000 years old which creationist religous doctrine had been teaching.

Gould argues that the history of these three books is often misrepresented as a conflict between religion and science, with Burnet’s book being a statement of religous doctrine and the others being a triumph for scientific discovery. In actuality, these three books represent a struggle between two different interpretations of time; the understanding of time as a cyclic process where each point in history can only be understood as a point in one iteration of an eternally repeating cycle and the understanding of time as an arrow where each point in history can be uniquely identified and placed in chronological order.

He describes how in modern times the idea of time’s arrow is so entrenched in our thinking that we have trouble understanding how people could possibly have thought of history in any other terms, but that does a disservice to the thinkers of earlier times who made valiant efforts to reconcile their religious doctrine with theories about the origin of the world.

This book provides some interesting and well researched historical context for the three books mentioned above which are all clearly significant works even though I have never personally read any of them. The aspect of this book that I enjoyed the most was the understanding it gave me of how people used to conceptualise time, history and our place as human beings in the world, how that was changing even at the time the books above were being written, and how much it has changed since.

Gould makes the point that the understanding of time in terms of cyclic processes repeating eternally or as an arrow progressing through history are both important within different contexts. He also points out that the miscasting of the debate on the age of the earth as a debate between religion and science rather than a shift in understanding of time means that there is a danger that we tend to underplay one of these two conceptual interpretations of time (time’s cycle), which is not a good thing.

	Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution Author: Leonard Shlain Rating:
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As in the bestselling The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain?s provocative new book promises to change the way readers view themselves and where they came from. Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female?s pelvis and the increasing size of infants? heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for the adaptation of the human female to this environmental stress by reconfiguring her hormonal cycles, entraining them with the periodicity of the moon. The results, however, did much more than ensure our existence; they imbued women with the concept of time, and gave them control over sex?a power that males sought to reclaim. And the possibility of achieving immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures that went on to dominate so much of human history. From the nature of courtship to the evolution of language, Shlain?s brilliant and wide-ranging exploration stimulates new thinking about very old matters.

A very interesting book, but the one problem I had with it is that I think he pushes his hypothesis a tiny bit too far in places. It’s quite common in popular science books for the author to try to explain life, the universe and everything in terms of the topic of the book, sometimes even bordering on absurdity. In this case, there is a very small amount of that, but overall I think the book provides an interesting philosophy on the evolution of the relationships between men and women. There are a lot of points made in the book that make a lot of sense, and it’s difficult to refute or validate them without a much deeper understanding of human anthropology.

There’s certainly food for thought in this book…lots of little “factoids” to share with other interested, or not so interested, parties. Anyway, it’s well worth a read.

	Superstrings and the Search for the Theory of Everything Author: F. David Peat Rating:
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“Peat grapples with these amazingly recondite notions and succeeds brilliantly in making them clear.” –Publishers Weekly

This is a great book. Here’s the thing; it was written in 1988. I did physics in college between 1992 and 1999 and this book contains more information about superstring theory than I was taught almost ten years after it was published. It’s a little bit heavy in places, and I would say that you would need more than a casual interest in quantum mechanics/particle physics/superstrings to get through it, but still, it’s a great read. It actually reads a bit like a historical novel….about superstrings!

	How the Mind Works Author: Steven Pinker Rating:
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In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, “No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him.” The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting.

This is a fantastic book about cognitive and evolutionary psychology. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these fields. It provides a great introduction to a large number of topics and an excellent set of references for further reading. At almost 600 pages it’s a fairly substantial undertaking, but well worth sticking with!

	Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial Author: Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst Rating:
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This is a brilliant book for anyone who is interested in really finding out about the effectiveness of alternative ‘treatments’. The book starts with an discussion of the process of clinical trials; used to assess the effectiveness of a treatment. After that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal remedies are examined in detail and a summary of all evidence for and against their effectiveness. At the end of the book is an appendix with 30 other alternative treatments examined and summarised.

Buy this book if you’re in you’re thinking of getting an alternative treatment regardless of whether you are receiving conventional treatment at the same time or not!!! Some alternative treatments can inhibit or interfere with the effectiveness of conventional treatments. Other alternative therapists advise their patients not to take conventional medicine at the same time. It’s always best to inform yourself to the maximum extent of your ability before entrusting yourself to any medical professional; either conventional or alternative.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough!