Tomorrow is the day!
Amazon tells me that they will deliver Thomas L Friedman's new book to me tomorrow. I ordered Hot, Flat, and Crowded back when the title was still Red, White, and Green. Can it possibly be as good as The World Is Flat? I can't wait to find out.
Thomas L Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America (2008) 438 pages.
My friend Les mentioned a book in an email this morning, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (2000) by Robert Park. I immediately asked for a free sample for my Kindle and got to reading.
It's terrific. Park, who is the former head of the Physics Department at the University of Maryland, runs the Washington office of the American Physical Society. His job, in part, is to see to it that congress doesn't pass any legislation repealing the laws of thermodynamics, something they attempted to do in April of 1989. (They were unsuccessful.)
His wit is delightful. He sums up the first of those laws of thermodynamics thus: you never get something for nothing. In other words, you can't win. The second law: you can't even break even.
The book is about 18 years old now, but as you know, the laws of science tend not to change and the capacity of people to believe the impossible tends to grow, and thus the book remains relevant.
Thanks, Les.
Everybody has an engineer on his Christmas List and I have the perfect book for this sometimes hard-to-shop-for guy (or girl.) It’s called The Evolution of Useful Things (1992) and it’s by my favorite engineer, Henry Petroski.
Useful Things is about inventions and patents and how everyday artifacts, from forks and pins to paperclips and zippers, came to be as they are.
Other Petroski books that are favorites of mine are The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990) and To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985.)
I happened on a web site this morning that you have to see. You still won't believe it, but you have to see it.
It's called Modular Origami.