Rating: 7.8/10. Understanding Semiconductors: A Technical Guide for Non-Technical People by Corey Richard Fairly short book, about 200 pages, that covers the design and manufacturing of semiconductors, chips, and electronics. It is written at a high level and is not very technical, good to have some understanding of the trade-offs between different technology choices and…
Category: Natural Sciences
The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about a recent expedition to explore a lost city in the jungles of Honduras. In 2015, a group of explorers and archaeologists discovered ancient ruins that were previously unknown to Europeans and had been abandoned for around 500 years; this book describes how this place was discovered, the expeditions to first study…
The Tree by Colin Tudge
Rating: 8.0/10. The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge Book about biology of trees and forests, containing scientific details of their evolution, lifecycle, and classification. Compared to “The Hidden Life of Trees,” this one is more scientific and denser, but is still written…
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
Rating: 8.1/10. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben Book about forests and trees, made up of about 30 short chapters, it was originally written in German; each chapter describes some aspects of trees and it’s written in plain and non-technical language….
Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil
Rating: 7.8/10. Book examining many aspects of life throughout history, with a focus on energy use. Energy may be considered a kind of universal currency that determines the quality of life across very different periods, from prehistoric societies to agriculture, the industrial revolution, and today. As civilization has advanced, we’ve gotten better at harnessing new…
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars by Michael E. Mann
Rating: 7.6/10. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Michael E. Mann A memoir by a climate scientist about the politics of climate change and the efforts of climate change denialists to sway public opinion on the subject. Initially there were some legitimate scientific debate about whether global warming…
Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
Rating: 9.1/10. Who are the Native Americans, and how did they get here? This book explores the prehistory of Native Americans through archeological and genetic evidence (and occasionally with linguistic evidence and oral histories as well). The question of the origin of the natives was first explored through the investigation of burial mounds by Jefferson…
Firmament by Simon Clark
Rating: 7.7/10. Firmament: The Hidden Science of Weather, Climate Change and the Air That Surrounds Us by Simon Clark Book by a popular YouTuber who recently finished his PhD in atmospheric science, explaining his field to a general audience. Each of the nine chapters covers a different topic: the people who discovered it, and the…
Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
Rating: 7.8/10. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene Book survey of the neuroscience of reading, written by a prominent researcher. Our brains did not evolve to read, yet we can learn to read by “recycling” parts of our visual system to recognize letters and words instead of objects….
How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene
Rating: 8.1/10. How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now by Stanislas Dehaene Book by neuroscience researcher about human learning. A lot of cognition is taken for granted until we try to train AI to do it, then it becomes apparent how difficult it actually is. AI still has a long…
The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
Rating: 7.7/10. Book by physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that touches on a lot of disparate topics in artificial intelligence, computability theory, consciousness, and advanced quantum physics. This book reads like a guided tour for an intelligent but non-specialist audience. The overall thesis is not revealed until the last chapter, where all the different threads…
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about animal cognition and methods to probe them. Recently, we are starting to learn that many animals are more intelligent than we thought, because the methodology to test their intelligence in the past was flawed. Instead of giving them artificial, one-size-fits-all tests, we should take into account each species’ individual “Umwelt” —…