It is funny and easy read, yet covers a lot of ground. Also brings to the fore the eccentric characters of Science community in a sincere manner

Excellent popular science intro to, well, nearly everything.

Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, fast and slow

Absolute recommendation. Is changing my perspective on myself and the world with every chapter.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is an awesome book.

https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/07...

It's a little dated (the first edition came out in 2004!) but to be honest, if you're interested in a "human-focused" intro and how the concepts fit together, things haven't really changed that much.

Plug for the wonderfully entertaining A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, which he wrote just to answer this question and fill in the gaps that education misses.

It is literally what it says in the title. He's a travel writer so has a very narrative and readable style. Wow just thinking about it now makes me amazed at what he achieved in that book.

A short history of nearly everything, by Bill Bryson.

It also highlights that this is been going on and areas bulge constantly.

I read it at ~18 and can easily draw a direct line between it and going into research, but I wish I had read it a few years earlier and became interested in science sooner. Maybe I would've actually done my homework in high school.

Although he did write that one as well! A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bought, but yet not read :
My Struggle: Book 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard

A Briefer History of Time - Stephen Hawking

Edge.org, in its annual question to prominent scientists and 'thought leaders', asked them "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?" My favorite ones so far include the many offshoots of natural selection and evolution, plus all of the stuff about the brain.

I recently finished The Cold War: A New History, a great primer to how we got to the geopolitical situation we are in now (at least the major western/eastern powers), and A Short History of Nearly Everything, which was an awesome birds-eye view of modern science. ★★★★☆ to both.

My next book is going to be about AI; let me know if you have any recommendations. (I'm not sure I'm ready for GEB.)

[0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0062230174/

It's a cursory overview of all of history (title) from the dawn of time to the evolution of humans. It seems to be only slightly dated in some information, but really interesting to learn how the knowledge we assume is true today came to fruition over time.

Before that,

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben R. Rich)

Such an awesome book about not only the engineering feats achieved by Lockheed Martin during the Cold War Era, but the incredible ability to keep developments secret from the mostly everyone. If you want to know more about the purpose of Area51, check it out.

Then I listened to Leonard Mlodinow's "The Upright Thinkers"; Oh god. Euclid's Window by Mlodinow was absolutely fantastic, and it was narrated by the slightly pompous-sounding -- but fitting -- Robert Blumenfield. Leonard had a somewhat slow, drawling voice, and he often stumbled over words. This was pretty disappointing because he seems like such a smart dude. He just shouldn't narrate his own books :)

The issue is that there are simply not enough trained scientists to study all that can be studied.

Perhaps there is hope for us all once the robots take our jobs:-)

Purple Cow - Seth Godin, made me think about standing out.

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries, really changed the way I think about... Well, nearly everything that costs effort.

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins, good theory about why God most probably doesn't exist.

The magic of reality - Richard Dawkins, great story about evolution, religion, etc.

A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson, brilliant book. Perfect summary of our scientific advancements during the last centuries. He made me think about possible natural disasters.

You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their subject. “Oh, yes,” Ellis told me, “the meetings can get very lively at times.”

I asked him for an example of controversy.

“Well, here’s one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen,” he said, smiling lightly, and opened a hefty reference work containing illustrations of mosses whose most notable characteristic to the uninstructed eye was their uncanny similarity one to another. “That,” he said, tapping a moss, “used to be one genus, Drepanocladus. Now it’s been reorganized into three: Drepanocladus, Wamstorfia, and Hamatacoulis.”

“And did that lead to blows?” I asked perhaps a touch hopefully.

“Well, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering of collections
and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a bit of, you know, grumbling.”

- Factfulness by Hans Rosling

- The War on Science by Shawn Otto

- Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

- The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan

- The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier

Fiction:

- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

- The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson

- The Magicians by Lev Grossman

The non-fiction books were all incredible and highly recommended. I especially appreciate The War on Science as it is highly relevant in today's polarized and emotional political climate.

The fiction books were good, for the most part. However, The Magicians might be the worst book I have ever read, not limited to fiction or fantasy. For more on that, ask.

I managed to read significantly more books this year due to joining an at-work book club, which has been very nice.

In all seriousness though, just take a nap and realize that in the grand scheme of things what you're working on is probably not that important. I always recall one particular chapter in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" where he outlined the fact that the human race somehow survived something like 7 extinction periods. That always puts things in perspective for me.

Just be happy.

Sapiens is about known history and analysis of the human struggle so far.

Homo Deus moves onward into unseen territory. Talking about the future always implies speculation. Even if it is just 1 minute ahead.

And people who enjoyed Sapiens should definitely give Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" a try.

- Lost and Founder - the founder of Moz shares his advice and experience from building a 40M/year company. I found the things he says about building a startup extremely insightful and practically useful. Reading it feels like having a dinner with a friend who shares with you the things he has learned in a very honest, down to earth way. Highly recommend it.

- Rationality from AI to Zombies - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality. (recently they've released an an audio version by the way).

- "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and "Our Mathematical Universe" - two general popular science books I'm enjoying a lot. Haven't finished reading them yet, but so far they're brilliant(and very easy to understand, authors do an amazing job explaining complicated things in a simple, accessible way).

- Hacking Growth - an AMAZING book on "growth hacking". It provides a framework for marketing a startup, gives a ton of practical advice and specific tactics. It breaks down step by step how startups and big tech companies grow their products. Most of the books I've read on the subject were bullshit, but this one is absolutely fantastic, can't recommend it enough.

Other great books I should mention: This Idea is Brilliant, Actionable Gamification, The Design of Everyday Things, The Master Algorithm (great overview of machine learning techniqes), Springfield Confidential (fun behind the scenes from one of the writers on Simpsons), Homo Deus(from the author of Sapiens).

If you haven't read A Walk in the Woods, or In a Sunburned Country by him, I highly recommend those as well.

"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely — make that miraculously — fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you."

That said, the calculation is exactly as meaningful as the Drake Equation: you can plug in wild variations in equally "probable" values for the several steps in the equation, yielding staggeringly divergent end results, all of which mean precisely fuck-all, because nearly every number is little better than a wild-assed guess.

It's an interesting thing to think about, certainly, and a great way to remind yourself how stupendously fortunate you are to have been given the incredible, inestimably valuable gift of being, but in the end, it's naught more than sophistry dolled up in an equation that passes muster as well as a 16-year old kid using an fake ID saying he's 35.

One of the best arguments that there is no God is exactly that beauty and complexity. It's only complex in a certain type of way, an evolutionary type of way.

No animal has jet boots, or fusion power, or laser beam eyes, or the billions of really useful, but impossible/really, really hard to evolve features. There's no design. There's no plan. There's only evolution baby!

You'll have to make do with some generalizations though, trying to go into the detail of every single thing is probably beyond what can be read in a single human's life time now.

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is pretty good start, or Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, which is a book about how science makes nature even more beautiful by explaining it, not less.

To drive home the point of just how much I loved this book, I went on to learn French just so I could read it in the original print.

Make sure it's the full, unabridged edition (1200 or 1400 pages), though!

(Just to throw in a nonfiction title as well, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a great gift for scientifically-inclined minds (esp younger ones) looking for a first foray into the world of nonfiction, wittily-written and well-narrated.)

How about another example: Bill Bryson. He's a brilliant writer and I really like all of his books. Except for A Short History of Nearly Everything. That's mostly a regurgitation of other popular science writers; it is a good read, but if you are fond of the genre, you'll spot his sources and it kind of ruins the effect.

Compare those with J.E. Gordon on structures and materials, John Clark's Ignition (which is a collection of amusing anecdotes and settling scores, I admit; the closest in my field is M.A. Padlipsky), Peter Ward (Gorgon), or Mark McMenamin (The Garden of Ediacara, some thumbs up).

If you want to know the story behind some event, journalists are admirably well suited to tell it. If you want to know about some field, they really aren't. In a world full of books, reading a journalist writing about phlebotomy or biochemistry is probably not all that useful.

I'm definitely in agreement about your Dijkstra amnesia effect.

I remember reading in 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' that Pluto was the first and only planet discovered in the USA, all the rest having been discovered in Europe.

I don't know if that had any implications for the reactions to IAU decision to demote Pluto to a dwarf planet, but it's easy to imagine how it would have been an even bigger deal if the other planets had been discovered by, for eg., Russia back in the day.

I just finished Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. That was an intense book! If you like deep sea adventure or anything U-boat, it's a worthy read.

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076...

It's by far the most entertaining, enjoyable, and well written science text I've ever read/listened to. You can download it on iTunes -- go with the unabridged. I listened to the abridged one first and liked it so much I downloaded and listened to the unabridged one... twice. And then proceeded to listen to four of his other non-science books.

Get on the Bill Bryson train. You won't be disappointed.

Cavendish's torsion idea was the key, and it made it possible to dramatically reduce the masses required. The value derived from his experiments is within 1% of the modern value (rather amazingly.)

Cavendish was a very interesting character. Actually, most people who did science in the 18th century seem to have been eccentrics, come to think of it.

Science from a new perspective is excellent, but it's also such an interesting window on the many people who have struggled against really difficult problems to move humanity forward.

Also, make sure you go play Bioshock (the first one) for a sobering counterpoint on Randian thought. Atlas Shrugged is awesome, until you remember that you can't trust any group of people to maintain their rational behavior in the face of personal gains. Great story, and it'll drag you back from Randroid town (it did me, anyway). Either way, the kid in me would still love to have dinner in Galt's Gulch.

If you'd like to read eye-opening fiction, I heartily recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. It's an incredible exploration of what it is to be free and how modern societies evolve at the expense of their citizens' personal liberties. One of the most thought-provoking pieces of fiction I've ever read, and lots of fun character-wise as well. (Incidentally, Heinlein was a fan of Ayn Rand, so if you liked Atlas Shrugged, you may find this even more interesting.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Also perhaps Bill Bryon's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" for an entertaining broad view of a variety of scientific areas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Every...

The best news stations (in my opinion) report without respect to personal belief. In that regard I respect the BBC for reporting news and not adding personal opinions, beliefs, or motives to it.

When it comes to espousing on things such as climate change I (personally) expect that I'll have to do a fair amount of research on the matter to form an opinion.

I recently read "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. It was wonderful. In it he talks about how precarious a knife human existence sits on. The lack of ice ages in recent eras seems to be an outlier, and one of the biggest effects of climate change might be to knock us right into one. It was something I had not known and it was presented with detailed evidence as to why that may be the case. I'm not sure news organizations can or should offer these perspectives as they will either be presented in a manner which leaves a fair amount of details missing or in a manner which impedes upon the presentation of other news.

Finance/statistics :
The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Math/science history :
Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Physics:
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar

Lit:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Philosophy:
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Any of the upanishads but probably Kena Upanishad, Isha Upanishad, or Prashna Upanishad at first (selected for (relative) ease in readership by yours truly)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (for a gentle introduction into Eastern thought)

I'm missing countless others but this is what I have right now. Thanks for the prompt and happy reading! :)

'Elegant universe' is a little denser. It's about as accessible as string theory gets, and that's surprisingly accessible. It also surveys a lot of scientific knowledge. For example, it has a very intuitive explanation of how knowing about the constant speed of light (Einstein) makes time travel possible. Also, it explains open questions that string theory is trying to solve, which are the big, TOE questions in physics currently.

Hard to beat Hawkins though. He heavily influenced and inspired these guys, an proved that hard science is interesting for everyone. Goodbye Professor. You will be missed.

Bill Bryson normally writes travel books, so the way this book is written is not your standard science approach. This book in particular is very entertaining since the topic is out of the authors comfort zone.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is actually my favourite book to read while travelling, funnily enough.

In fact the whole book is about this, it explains all the important scientific breakthroughs from the past and how we've gotten to them.

I've listened to probably more than 20 in the last two years ranging from the Count of Monte Cristo to all of Malcom Gladwell's work to Investing for Dummies. It's a great way to make the most out of your commute because if you're like me, you probably don't have time to read all of those in your free time anyway.

You can pick up an iTrip (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/itripauto) for about $60 at Target to use with your iPhone and audiobooks usually range from about $10 to $30.

As a start, I highly recommend Bill Byrson's unabridged A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I've listened to four times now (and counting!).

Read Bill Bryson's book "a short history of nearly everything" for an example of the style I wish my maths classes had been taught in. It's a survey of science book, but mostly focuses on the human interaction behind the discoveries & theories, and makes fascinating reading because of it. We need to teach maths (and all hard technical subjects) closer to this approach.

* 'Better' by Atul Gawande (also his 'Complications' and of course 'The Checklist Manifesto')

* 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

Fiction:

* 'Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders' by Neil Gaiman

* 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss

Graphic novels ("comics"):

* 'Watchmen' by Alan Moore

* 'Promethea' by Alan Moore (actually I'm halfway through this, and loving every bit of it)

Special mentions:

* 'How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big' by Scott Adams - I only gave this a 4-star rating on Goodreads when I finished it, but I'm finding that I'm usefully applying more and more of the things I learnt from this book as the months go by.

* 'Yoga Benefits Are in Breathing Less' by Artour Rakhimov - to be considered more of an article, taught me useful stuff about O2/CO2 balance in the body, their respective effects, and hence ultimately the effects of different rates of breathing.

By contrast, language, which leverages the imagination, can be even more effective at revealing how insignificant we are:

"...stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire [4.5 Billion year] history of the Earth. On this scale...the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, 'and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.' " (from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything)

Another example of language illustrating an abstract concept better than visual/graphic design: If you filmed or animated the following thought-experiment, would it render it any more effective?

"Imagine people's height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America's median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall."

First half of the book changed my life, and second half is merely good. I wrote a full review [0], and eight years later, that first half has become one of my favorite reads ever.

[0]: http://www.spaceponies.com/review-of-a-short-history-of-near...

In the 1940’s, the paleontologist von Koenigswald was searching for early human remains on Java and decided to enlist the help of the locals in his search by offering them “ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with.” Unfortunately for von Koenigswald (and for his findings), he discovered too late that the locals “had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.”

From http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/when-youre-...

(The story is from the book A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is one of the best books I've ever read. The amazing thing about the book is that it is in fact a short history of nearly everything.)

Combine the difficulty of getting incentives right with the inherent problems of Government and a dangerous mix results. For example, every time a subsidy is created, a special-interest group sprouts up dedicated to preserving the subsidy in perpetuity, long after it has outlived its utility.

Writing a Go Compiler

No One Cares about Crazy People

I Heard You Paint Houses

UNIX: A History and a Memoir

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

How Asia Works

The Dream Machine

Black Earth

The Fabric of Reality

Behave (tried twice, maybe third times a charm?)

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Genius: The Life and Science Richard Feynman

Super Thinking

Man's Search for Meaning

The Cooking Gene

The Vital Question: Why is Life The Way it Is (re-read)

The Case Against Sugar

The 15 Decisive Battles of the World

The History of the Peloponnesian War

The Beginning of Infinity

The Book of Why

Taken together, these books cover just about everything there is to know about the sciences, about human history, human nature and how to understand and communicate effectively with other people. Only one other book besides these needs to be studied/read: The Bible.

I can only speak for myself. I have pirated many softwares and books to see if I find value in it. If I do, I pay for it later. For instance, I recently pirated a book (A Short History of Nearly Everything) and I loved it so much, I bought two copies the same week and gave them out as gifts to people who I am sure never heard of that book or the author and who doesn't like reading books on their computer. I will admit that I pirated "Things" for mac and now that I find myself using it everyday, I paid for a legal key (after using it for few months).

Obviously not everyone does it, but this is how I justify my pirating habit (I am not proud of the fact that I do it).

I think some people don't like pirate bay because they glorify doing what they do instead of trying to spread the ideology or message of pirating.

The other challenge of deep humanities like philosophy is that college students simply don't have enough life experience to see value in what it provides. As a 40yr old adult (yesterday) I now understand the value, but no longer have the time for learning it all.

Do I wish I had double majored in college? No, simply because my own Computer Science degree was already way to much to complete in four years and I was eager to go build something. Now that I'm an adult and dad and have no time to read, I really wish I knew those things.

Mixed bag. In the end there's far more to learn than you can in a single lifetime.

* Born a Crime by Noah Trevor

* Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

* Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Alexievich, Svetlana

* Ex-Formation by Hara, Kenya (best book I read this year)

* A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson, Bill

* Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human
Decisions by Brian Christian (applying algorithm theory to daily life)

* Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Voss Chris (meh)

* Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Knapp Jake (meh)

* All the Light We Cannot See by Doerr Anthony (loved it)

* The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro Kazuo (loved it)

That gives you another perspective--one that shows the possibility of life outside earth is pretty small.

But I wonder if there is some probability that can take both of these factors into consideration.

These are some of the books I've given an "A" over the last few years, roughly grouped by genre:

Nonfiction:

- A Short History of Nearly Everything

- Fabric of the Cosmos

- Dataclysm

- The Righteous Mind

- Merchants of Doubt

- Dead Wake

- Man's Search for Meaning

- Evicted

- The New Jim Crow

- Night

Sci-fi:

- We

- The Sirens of Titan

- Hyperion

- Stories of Your Life

- Frankenstein

- The Day of the Triffids

- Childhood's End

Fantasy:

- The Stormlight Archives

- The First Law Trilogy

- The Lord of the Rings

Literature:

- The Stranger

- Dubliners

- Things I've Learned from Dying

- The Things They Carried

- Cloud Atlas

- Stoner

- Pillars of the Earth

Maybe there's something to this. But I have to wonder if certain discoveries really do require a genius, and not just someone who is good. That is, is a genius more than just the sum of his lessers?

What pops into mind is special and general relativity. In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a physicist says that special relativity was an idea whose time had come. If Einstein hadn't discovered and published it, someone else would have. But he followed that up with if Einstein hadn't come up with general relativity, we'd still be waiting for it.

Going back to Newton, calculus was a multiple, but as far as I know, his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation are not.

Otherwise, if anyone is looking for other recommendations for summer reading:

- Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky

- When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom

- The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

For all we know we are helping to perpetuate this thaw rather than slip back into another ice age. Maybe human generated global warming would have had to be implemented anyway to save the species. There's just so much we don't know.