Skip to main content

Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? – Mick O’Hare (Ed.) ****

I have to be honest, I started reading this book in a negative frame of mind. It’s yet another book of collections of answers to puzzling, and often slightly strange, science questions, a type of book that is highly enjoyable, so why the negativity? In part it’s the same feeling I had many moons ago when the original Star Wars movie first came out – I didn’t want to like it because it was so hyped. This book was splashed all over the bookshops at Christmas 2006 as a great gift, and that immediately put up the defence antennae. Was this because it was dumbed down, or just over-marketed? No – luckily I was wrong. It’s a collection from the Last Word section of New Scientist magazine, and works wonderfully well. The questions are interesting, the answers a mix of the erudite and amusing, and only occasionally stray into dull pedantry.
The format is a question posed by a reader followed by one or more (sometimes two or three) answers from other readers, with the occasional remark from the editor to clarify what was being said. Sometimes, often the best bits, one of the multiple replies will take a rather different and witty line. The title question of the book has to be one of the least interesting, but amongst my favourites were those on double yolks, breathing Leonardo da Vinci’s breath, and the dangers of firing guns into the air. I also have to mention one about cars’ steering tending to centre itself, not so much because the subject was fascinating as I was surprised to see a question from someone I knew (not, as you might imagine from the science community, but a novelist).
Having dismissed my original negative outlook I do have one small gripe – Last Word has never published anything I’ve sent in (so is clearly lacking discernment). I do still feel slighted on two points. First they ignored a brilliant question. If we say something is black in colour when it doesn’t reflect any colours of light, what colour is something that’s shiny black? This is, if I say so myself, a question that is deeper than it first seems. Secondly, and more interesting in this context, was an answer I sent to a question that makes it into the book. The reader’s question asks how it is possible for both Grolsch lager (which claims to have better flavour because it’s matured in the bottle) and Budweiser (which claims to have better flavour because it’s rushed from bottling to consumption) to be correct in their claims. The published answers concentrate on the brewing process and the chemical reactions underlying it. My answer was: “In The Last Word (29 October) Mick McCarthy asked for a scientific answer to the question of which tastes better, Budweiser or Grolsch. No doubt he will receive plenty of deeply thought out technical responses, but surely the answer ought to be ‘You should get out more!’ Anyone who really needs to ask New Scientist which of two lagers is better, is long overdue a little outing to the pub.” -which I still feel beats anything that was published (though to be fair to editor Mick O’Hare, we did have a little discussion of the problem, he didn’t just ignore me).
Overall, then, one of the better additions to the “fun science Q&A” genre, and well worth reading.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more