Science
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First Light, Richard Preston (ISBN 9780679449690, Random House)
I came across a reference to this book while reading The Hot Zone, also from Richard Preston. I wrote another post about The Hot Zone earlier on this blog. Although The Hot Zone is a bit on the sensational side it was definitely well written so I decided to read First Light as well especially…
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Chasing Venus, Andrea Wulf (ISBN 978-009953832-5, Windmill Books)
This book came out in 2012 when there was another transit of Venus approaching and describes the attempts in the eighteenth century to measure the transit of Venus to determine the size of the solar system. I read this book in a Dutch translation at the end of 2014 the first time and recently read…
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No Ordinary Genius. The Illustrated Richard Feynman, Christopher Sykes (ISBN 978-039331393-2, W. W. Norton)
I came across a reference to this book in another book I read about Feynman and it ended up on my list. I bought it last year and then decided end of 2022 to start reading it while I was also reading The Discoverers to add a bit of light reading in the mix. Christopher…
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Poetic Linnaeus
‘Poets are born, not made. I was not born a poet, but a botanist instead, so I offer the fruit of the little harvest which God has vouchsafed me.‘― Carolus Linnaeus
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Preserve your health
‘Strive to preserve your health, and in this you will the better succeed in proportion as you keep clear of the physicians, for their drugs are a kind of alchemy concerning which there are no fewer books than there are medicines.‘― Leonardo da Vinci
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Wisdom
In 2002 the American biologist Chandler Robbins discovered a ringed Albatross on the Midway islands. The ring had number Z333 and it turned out to be a bird he had ringed himself half a century before in 1956. At the time of ringing the Albatross was at least 5 years old, making the bird older…
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Working with dates and times in python
Having finished all the most urgent tasks at work and having started the year end vacation I decided to pick up my python learning on Datacamp again. I followed the course on working with dates and types in python which is part of their python programmer track. It was a nice introduction to the datetime…
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Understanding the Universe. An introduction to physics and astrophysics, James B. Seaborn (ISBN 978-146126868-0, Springer)
James Seaborn has been teaching an introductory course for many years and this book is the translation into book form of that course. The book is intended for non science majors and teaches physics with an emphasis on topics and applications in astrophysics. I was curious to learn how that approach would work. The result…
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Command And Control, Eric Schlosser (ISBN 9780141037912, Penguin)
Command and Control is written by Eric Schlosser. I read his bestseller fastfood nation long ago and liked it a lot so when this book came out in 2014 I bought it and read it. It was a scary read at the time and this year while we were on holiday this summer I decided…
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