As the author makes clear, this is one for the fans - amongst which I count myself. I can still remember in the late 80s, workmates enthusing about the BBC SF sitcom  Red Dwarf . As a result, I first encountered it in series 3, where it really found its feet, but later revisited the whole show from the delightfully titled first episode, The End . There are broadly two types of content in Tom Salinsky's slim book - a history of the making of the series and the episode guide. The history part - an overall section, followed by a piece on the making of each series - would appeal to anyone with an interest in TV, and particularly TV science fiction. By contrast, the episode guide is very much for people like me - it's geeky detail, such as circumstances when Rimmer appears more solid than he should be, anachronistic mentions and lack of in-series consistency.  Salinsky gives each show a rating - for an enthusiast he's quite harsh on episodes that others might regard as perfectly...

There's something odd about this chunky book on probability - the title doesn't mention the P word at all. This is because David Spiegelhalter (Professor Sir David to give him his full title) has what some mathematicians would consider a controversial viewpoint. As he puts it 'all probabilities are judgements expressing personal uncertainty.' He strongly (and convincingly) argues that while the mathematical approach to probability is about concrete, factual values, outside of the 'natural' probabilities behind quantum effects, almost all real world probability is a subjective experience, better described by more subjective terms like uncertainty, chance and luck. A classic way to distinguish between those taking the frequentist approach to probability and the Bayesian approach is their attitude to what the probability is of a fair coin coming up heads or tails after the coin has been tossed but before we have looked at it. The frequentist would say it's def...

Ben Orlin loves math and cannot draw. He is the author of several bestselling books: Math with Bad Drawings (2018), the calculus storybook Change is the Only Constant (2019) and the infamously large Math Games with Bad Drawings (2022). He has taught every level of mathematics from 6th grade to undergraduate, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and Popular Science. His latest book is Math for English Majors . Why math(s)? My first passion is how people think. (Before I was a math major, I was a psych major!) So I view math, and especially math education, as a magnificent case study in applied psychology. How do we braid together intuition and logic? How do we move from concrete details to abstract truths? What makes us build identities as 'a math person' or 'not a math person'? Every student I've ever taught had their own irreducible, irreproducible way of thinking about math. Nothing excites me more than learning how students think. Why...

There is no doubt that serendipity is a delightful word - and equally no doubt that its meaning of making accidental positive discoveries is an apt one for science. It's quite fun to hear about unexpected finds, whether it's the famous ones like penicillin or perhaps less well known discoveries from PTFE to saccharin (neither of which are considered here). It is, however, a rather delicate concept - not suited to a heavy duty approach, which is arguably what Telmo Pievani gives it in this slim (but surprisingly long feeling) book. A non-fiction writer is always faced with the temptation to give far more detail on a topic that interests them than necessarily engages their readers. Here, Pievani goes to town on the origins of the word 'serendipity'. It is, indeed vaguely interesting that it came from an old tale about the 'Three Princes of Serendip', but the level of detail we're given on the ancient Persian set of stories this originates from verges on the e...

Ben Orlin makes the interesting observation that the majority of people give up on understanding maths at some point, from fractions or algebra all the way through to tensors. At that stage they either give up entirely or operate the maths mechanically without understanding what they are doing. In this light-hearted take, Orlin does a great job of taking on mathematical processes a step at a time, in part making parallels with the structure of language. Many popular maths books shy away from the actual mathematical representations, going instead for verbal approximations. Orlin doesn't do this, but makes use of those linguistic similes and different ways of looking at the processes involved to help understanding. He also includes self-admittedly awful (but entertaining) drawings and stories from his experience as a long-time maths teacher. To make those parallels, Orlin refers to numbers as nouns, operations as verbs (though he points out that there are some flaws in this simile) a...

Pedro Domingos (@pmddomingos) is a renowned AI researcher, tech industry insider, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Hs most recent book is 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire . Why AI?  AI is the defining technology of our time. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, is not kidding when he says that AI could be bigger than fire or the wheel. Using and governing AI is going to be a central part of our lives, jobs, politics and culture from now on. Why this book? Every one of us needs to understand AI and the issues surrounding it. Not at the level of an expert, but enough to figure out what we can do with it, what we want from it, and how to get there. And after writing a non-fiction book and talking to people from all walks of life about it, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to communicate what AI really is is by writing a story that illustrates it. Also, so much in the tech world today, from the AI hype and fear to the pol...

This is a UFO book with a difference. Unlike so many others, it wasn’t written by a ufologist or sceptic with a particular axe to grind, but by a professional historian whose personal interest in the subject only goes back a few years. While I’ve read numerous books and articles about ufology over the last 30-plus years, this is the first time I’ve encountered such an in-depth account by an ‘outsider’. This in itself makes the book noteworthy – as does Eghigian’s studiously impartial approach, presenting developments in chronological order with virtually no analysis or commentary of his own. That’s quite a novelty in this field – but also, as I’ll explain at the end, something of a weakness. The first two-thirds of the book deals with what I think of as the ‘standard history’ of ufology, covering the same basic highlights that you might find in any account of the subject’s evolution and scope prior to the 1970s. From the first major ‘phantom airship’ scares of the late 19th century, th...