Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich A terrifyingly topical book at this point in time. As Russian soldiers are again bringing death and destruction to a neighbour we read Alexievich’s poignant interviews with the injured, the grieving and the ones who escaped physically unharmed from […]
Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks by Chad Orzel I love the pun in the title. I have a bit of mixed feelings about this book. I find the topic fascinating, but maybe that is also why there wasn’t very much information […]
“During the demolition of a factory, a shocking discovery is made: a mummified corpse encased in a carapace of hardened dust – phosphate rock – surrounded by ten objects that provide tantalising clues as to its identity…” That’s the backstory to Phosphate rocks, but the story is really just an […]
The story of the chemical fascination of a young boy growing up in London in the 1930s in a large Jewish family flickers in and out between biography and a history of chemistry itself. As a precocious child, Oliver Sachs, under the guidance of the title’s Uncle Tungsten, a lightbulb […]
For more than a decade now I’ve been weighing myself every few days. Here are 10 years of data. I cannot say I like that trend! It seems like I’m gaining weight at a rate about 0.4 kg per year. Ok, the trendline lies. Rather the weight seems to have […]
How many citations does it take to win a Nobel Prize? It’s a stupid question, I know, because Nobel prizes in the sciences, unlike the literature prize, are not given as a lifetime achievement award. Theoretically, it’s enough to have one really bright idea, and then not do much else. […]
Not only have we been sitting indoors for the last months because of the coronavirus, it has also been unusually dry. We haven’t seen any proper rain in Warsaw for over a month. Meteorologists are warning that we already see water levels that we usually have in the middle of […]
Moscow, 1937 by Karl SchlögelMy rating: 5 of 5 stars The original title, Terror und Traum (Terror and Dream), really summarises the book perfectly. Schlögel paints a wide tapestry over Moscow and the Soviet Union at a time when it had emerged from the civil war and the future looked […]
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane My rating: 4 of 5 stars A very entertaining introduction to what artificial intelligence does and what it doesn’t. Full of hilarious examples of AI […]
We had a discussion the other day at work about Arthur Eddington, of solar eclipse fame. It started with a tweet from @landetannien about proofs in science. The point of the tweet being that she’s frustrated with people insisting that science needs to prove things. That reminded me of a […]
