Skip to main content

The Geek Guide to Life - Colin Stuart and Mun Keat Looi ***

There's no reason at all why good popular science should be heavy and loaded with leading edge theory. I've a lot of time for fun and/or practical science facts type books, which The Geek Guide to Life promises to be - the subtitle tells us its about 'science's solutions to life's little problems' with examples such as 'how to boil the perfect egg' and 'how to rock at rock, paper, scissors.'

 The text by Colin Stuart and Mun Keat Looi does a solid job of covering a whole range of questions in two or four page spreads. Sometimes the titles of the articles overreach themselves - for example, there is one headed 'How to cure an hangover' which half way through, in response to 'But, I hear you cry, how do I get rid of my hangover?' remarks 'Sadly, science doesn't have a clear answer to that question.' Inevitably, that headline feels a bit overblown at this point. 

 I was less enthusiastic about the illustrations - for no obvious reason other than the word 'geek' in the title of the book, the illustrator decided to provide us with highly pixellated illustrations as if they were being rendered in a 1980s video game. This probably seemed a good idea at the time... but makes for pretty poor graphics. Sometimes also there seemed to be limited coordination between the text and graphics. So, for instance, in a section labelled 'What's the best way to commute to work' the graphic is a bar chart showing relatively happiness of various commute times compared with a 1 to 15 minute travel time. There are several interesting features. People seem happier with a 31-45 minute commute that 16-30 minutes - and by far the best are working from home (not surprising) and a 3 hour or more commute (more surprising). None of this is referenced in the text, which just said the contradictory 'the longer someone's commute, the lower their level of life satisfaction.' Similarly in the 'How to Kick Ass at Monopoly' article, the text refers to the UK square names, while the illustration of the board shows the US names.

 Having said that, I found the section on games (how to do better at the likes of Monopoly and Rock, Paper, Scissors) was probably the most fun part of the book. One of the problems of the more serious parts is that the short article approach is not always capable of providing effective guidance. So, if we look at 'how to save money at the supermarket' it's all about avoiding impulse buys and not buying stuff you don't need right now. The trouble is, if this is your sole tactic and you buy a product regularly with a long shelf life that is sometimes a lot cheaper than at other times, you will spend far more than if you buy extra when it is on sale.

 Overall, there's no doubt the book is fun, but it does feel more than a little shallow. To be honest, I would rather Stuart and Looi had been allowed to write twice as much text and we lost the graphics. Nevertheless there were some genuine take home points here - and I expect to win at Monopoly next time I play, or I will be asking for my money back.
Hardback:  
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 Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...
Post a Comment
Read more