Popular science book recs

[Bad Craziness]

TechGnosis



shows how the development of modern technology was accompanied by matching developments in popular magical thinking

[sobieski]

this book was pretty good at talking about the “green” revolution and the history of ecology during the 20th century

[sobieski]

‘from mathematics to the technologies of life and death’

[scramble]

an insightful history/philosophy/sociology of science (which is what most books itt seem to be). sample:

Mediating between the world of mathematics and the reality of the physical world, measuring necessarily involves a leap between objects and numbers, whose equivalence is made possible only by an oversight. The many oaths that the [medieval trading officials] and sellers swore in front of buyers served to trigger customers’ fleeting assurance that the translation from the world of ideas to the world of matter took place accurately.

So it is less measuring or measurement standards than their presiding authorities that constructed sameness. After all, in the Middle Ages the word auctoritas referred to someone who knew and reiterated preexistent solutions. An authority was the person who erased the distance between an original and any of its subsequent reiterations […] Medieval standards carried auctoritas because they themselves were constantly remade, thus becoming instrumental in and homogeneous to the authoritative process they triggered.

[scramble]

TechGnosis



shows how the development of modern technology was accompanied by matching developments in popular magical thinking

looks great, thanks

[mynamerocks]

[Pokemon Blue]

i wish I could quote post all the times I've recommended behave on this board but the search is gaslighting me

anyway it's behave. it's the material from Sapolsky's 25 lectures at stanford on human behaviour and neuroscience and biochemistry and game theory etc etc. he deliberately tries to avoid categorical thinking and writes in very readabale colloquial way. Highly recommended if you're interested in politics or criminal reform.

Ooh, I’ll check this out. I’ve read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and MonkeyLuv by Sapolsky and really liked them both.

[concerning]

this book was pretty good at talking about the “green” revolution and the history of ecology during the 20th century

not a science book but 1491 by the same author is amazing.

[woozy ducks]

[viachicago]

this book has some of my favorite passages of all time

“The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.

If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.”

“A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes--in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled and come apart, how far and rapidly continents travel, how quickly mountains rise and how quickly they disintegrate and disappear.

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.
”

“It has been Anita’s style as a geologist to begin with an outcrop and address herself to history from there—to begin with what she can touch, and then to reason her way back through time as far as she can go. A river conglomerate, as tangible rock, unarguably presents the river. The river speaks of higher ground. The volume of sediment that the river has carried can imply a range of mountains. To find Precambrian jaspers in the beds of younger rivers means that the Precambrian, the so-called basement rock, was lifted to form the mountains. These are sensible inferences drawn cleanly through an absence of alternatives. To go back in this way, retrospectively, from scene to shifting scene, is to go down the rock column, groping toward the beginning of the world. There is firm ground some of the way. Eventually, there comes a point where inference will shade into conjecture. In recesses even more remote, conjecture may usurp the original franchise of God.”

[sordid affair]

wonderful thread

[blurst of times]

thanks for the recs all. i've been meaning to read that octopus book for a long time. octopuses are so cool

i'll co-sign on 1491 being good

[CelticFC#1]

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