How Many Licks? – Aaron Santos ****

Author Aaron Santos takes on the rarely considered but entertaining job of solving Fermi problems: making back-of-an-envelope estimates of numbers that range from the trivial, like the number of licks need to reach the centre of the lolly in the title of the book, to questions like ‘How many babies are born every day?’ The full title is ‘How many licks, or how to estimate damn near anything.’

I thought this might prove a bit samey after a while – there are 69 problems in all, ending in estimating which uses more silicon in the USA, computer chips or silicone implants (I know silicone isn’t the same as silicon, but it does contain it). In fact, each time I wanted to turn on and get to the next one.

The more enthusiastic may want to try to work out some of these as they go along. I was happy to take Santos’ word for it and just enjoy the ride. I do occasionally do this sort of thing for real, but I didn’t particularly want to do so for the problems cited here.

If there’s any complaint it was a slight inconsistency in deciding whether or not to make the assumption that ‘the United States of America’ and ‘the world’ are the same thing (this is, if assumed, not a great piece of estimating on the author’s part). So, for instance, when answering ‘How much deforestation would result each year if people chopped down their (Christmas) trees from a forest rather than getting an artificial tree or getting one from a tree farm?’ the question appears to apply to the whole world, but Santos bases his estimate of ‘How many people get real Christmas trees each year?’ on a percentage of the US population.

That apart, it was fun all the way. The book appears to have been professionally published, though it does rather have the feel of a self-published volume – it’s a little flimsy and unusual in the layout – but seems to have been properly edited and the illustrations and formulae are neatly done.

All in all an enjoyable gift book, or some light reading if you like the idea of playing around with estimating… or just want to be surprised how relatively easy it is estimate some surprisingly obscure numbers.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Search This Blog