Here's a few books I read recently that you might enjoy:
On Immunity by Eula Biss. She explains the history of vaccination.
Why children who don't get vaccinated can even affect those who are vaccinated?
She's a very good writer. I wish I could write as nicely as she writes.
Should We Eat Meat? by Vaclav Smil.
It's provocative, the way he does the title as though he's passing the responsibility to the reader.
Well, we know it's pretty hard for people to give up meat.
There are books that touch on this topic that don't have numbers in them, but, you know, this is Smil, you are gonna get the numbers.
You might even get a few sentences in between the numbers.
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff.
Being able to understand what you're looking at, and being willing to say, "Hey, where did that come from? Is that accurate?"
It's a quick read. It's got a lot of good examples in it.
It's a trip to the past even though the basic points it makes are still valid today.
What If? by Randall Munroe. It's a very clever way of getting you to think about very scientific things going on.
This idea of when you see a glass half empty, do you mean "empty," as in, "perfect vacuum?"
And, you know, all of a sudden there was a glass sitting there, where you put the water on the top and the vacuum on the bottom, or the vacuum on the top and the water on the bottom.
This is clever. Those are the kind of questions that somebody with a good mind who's trying to figure out if they really understand —that's a kind of question you should ask yourself.
Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh.
She's pretty creative and humorous about making fun of herself and revealing her inner thoughts.
There was one thing about the dog, where—this is one that I told Melinda to read —where the dog's getting confused where they're moving, and so she's trying to simulate what the dog's thinking.
And her dog—maybe it's true—it's one of the most inept, impossible dogs to ever take care of.
And finally, The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins.
In science, we're all kids.
I mean, a good scientist is somebody who's redeveloped the chain of reasoning of why we know what we know from scratch many times, just to see where there's holes or alternate possibilities.
It can never hurt to reread these things and think through what you're learning.
We can observe way more stuff than you'd imagine, and we've made more sense out of the stuff we can observe than you can imagine.
So, quite a range there in terms of fun to learn, fun to know about.
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