Humble Pi by Matt Parker

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was getting ready to give this book 3 stars at the beginning but as I went on I realized that some of these math mental hurdles are driving the covid spread. For starters, many Governors, even 11 months in seem fundamentally unaware of how exponential growth works which is the underlying prediction threat of covid growth. Additionally, most people have very little familiarity with even the basics of how statistics work, useful in understanding all types of science research, for example in vaccine trials. Another example is the Swiss cheese engineering strategy which is also necessary to implement to avoid covid spread but many people and even state governments seem unaware of this.

This book is interesting both for people that do not understand math and for those that do. Those that understand math are usually unaware of how deeply clueless others are but since they make systems for people who do not understand- or at a minimum are fallible humans- humans are likely to screw everything up, possibly with fatal results. It's also a pretty entertaining book as the author genuinely seems to enjoy math and resultant foibles.

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“I love the example of someone who starts work at 8 a.m. and by 12 p.m. they need to have cleaned floors eight to twelve of a building. Setting about cleaning one floor per hour would leave a whole floor still untouched come noon.” 

“There is always the chance that something else is influencing the data, causing the link. Between 1993 and 2008 the police in Germany were searching for the mysterious ‘phantom of Heilbronn’, a woman who had been linked to forty crimes, including six murders; her DNA had been found at all the crime scenes. Tens of thousands of police hours were spent looking for Germany’s ‘most dangerous woman’ and there was a €300,000 bounty on her head. It turns out she was a woman who worked in the factory that made the cotton swabs used to collect DNA evidence.” 

At Home by Bill Bryson

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was interesting and entertaining but wanders way off topic in every chapter. It's supposed to be an explanation of the wheres and whys of domestic things say, a room just for sleeping, or a dining table. The bulk of each chapter is just interesting history and sometimes really only trivia of the era. Towards the end, he doesn't even make a pretense at explaining domestic things anymore and simply titles a chapter on Darwin's revelation of evolution "The Attic." I couldn't find any connection.

Also, it wouldn't let me flee my other current read Moby Dick, as the lighting section of the book spent a fair bit of time describing spermaceti and a later chapter explained how the novel Moby Dick itself was a product of the scientifically descriptive era in which it was written.

There are so many interesting gems though. Here's a favorite quote:
“Over the course of his life, Harvard had acquired books at the rate of about twelve a year. Jefferson, over the course of his life, bought books at the rate of about twelve a month, accumulating a thousand every decade on average. Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived…”

Another gem [[[spoiler alert!!!]]] is that the buttons on the back of the sleeve of a jacket are useless and always have been!



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Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this for a seminar I took in law school that challenged us to read nonfiction books on a number of social and ethical topics. I loved the physical book, that true to the author's word, you could bring right into the shower with you, and I loved his message that we need to aim higher in our environmental goals. Rather than reducing waste or recycling products (downcycling he called it) we need to be creating products that produce no waste or produce consumable waste as nature does.

It just got a bit boring in the technical details. Eventually, I donated the book, and I wonder sometimes what happened to it. Did it make it to the next reader perfectly intact as the book doesn't degrade, or if it did ironically end up in a landfill to never ever break down?

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