Hacker News Books

Longitude is a good book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080271529X

If you're curious about the history of this topic, Dava Sobel's Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is well worth reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

If anyone is interested in this I highly recommend Longitude by Dava Sobel. It's about the creation of modern timekeepers by a carpenter with no training at all in watchmaking. Brilliant guy who created something which truly changed the world.

The grasshopper escapement was invented by John Harrison, who built the first clocks that could keep time at sea. These were used to calculate Longitude. There's a nice short biography called Longitude that covers his story.

The author of Longitude gave some good examples of the human cost of the Longitude problem: a ship running aground and sinking, or sailors dying from scurvy because they traveled too far in the wrong direction. So an economic and military problem, and also one felt directly by anybody at sea.

Beat me to it...

I just finished Longitude and it was a great read! Harrison is an interesting character since he really spent his whole life working on the same problem of keeping time at sea. A whole lot of perseverance.

The origins of precise clocks is because ships needed to calculate how far they had travelled in terms of longitude (eastwast/westward. How far you've travel north/south is easy to calculate by how high the sun goes).

The British crown established an award for whoever could come up with a precise clock of this reason, it's a fascinating story, I recommend the book "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" by Dava Sobel.

For some of the folks here that are interested in nav, its history, human factors and the development of accurate lat long navigation, the following two books are gems:

Longitude by Dava Sobel
And
Fate is the Hunter by Ernest Gann.

In case anyone is interested in the history of watchmaking, etc. there's a great book titled Longitude: https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-...

An accurate marine chronometer was necessary for reliable navigation in order to calculate one's longitude. It turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem that was ultimately solved by John Harrison, who invented the Grasshopper escapement, which the Grasshopper Clock uses.

I think some of us will find Harrison to be very relatable -- more hacker than scientist and never satisfied with his work. He kept coming out with new and improved versions even after he won the Royal Society's prize, IIRC.

Favorites that I read in 2018:

* Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep)

* Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude)

* Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the...)

* Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted)

* Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs)

PSA: if you use an e-reader or like audiobooks, check out Libby: https://meet.libbyapp.com/

I'm not affiliated with them. Nice app for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks from your local library.

No. Galileo feared for his life more than once during decades of persecution. He was lucky to avoid torture. Read Heilbron's biography, or even just Wikipedia.

This notion that Galileo insulting the pope was some sort of rhyme and reason for his persecution is wrong. It's commonly accepted that Galileo had no intention of insulting the pope, and the pope didn't take it as an insult (Heilbron goes into much detail) . There is some minor evidence involving the rumour that someone suggested to the pope that it looked bad, but this is not at all the central reason for his persecution.

Did you get this from the Dava Sobel book? It's takes an awful license with history. Her Longitude book is the same, it's just wrong in so many aspects while presenting itself as accurate.

A solution to an accurate measurement of longitude for shipping was one of the biggest scientific problems of the time and involved some of the brightest minds in the world working over decades and centuries.

After losing almost 2,000 sailors and 4 Navy ships in an accident attributed to poor navigation, the British government offered the Longitude Prize - which was worth millions of dollars in todays money.

From Gallileo and his method of timekeeping by tracking the moons of Jupiter, through to John Harrison and his invention of the chronometer - which ended up winning most of the Longitude Prize - the effort that went into finding a solution had many side effects for science and the solution opened up the world to better navigation and the eventual colonization.

The entire story is chronicled in the book 'Longitude'[0], which was a best seller in 1998. It is well worth a read. Wikipedia is also a good starting point for finding out more.[1]

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-P...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude

Jungle Soldier - story of Freddie Spencer Chapman (like Lawrence of Arabia, but even better story)

Left to Tell - Immaculée Ilibagiza's life, story of survival of the Rwandan Genocide and a tale of how to live on after such tragedy and how to forgive the unforgiveable.

Longitude - essentially a biography of John Harrison, the man who solved the longitude problem (and probably thereby made the success of the British Empire)

X, Y & Z - a brilliant biography of all the French, English and Polish codebreakers of WW2

Agent Zigzag - the story of the man who betrayed everyone and could possibly have killed Hitler if he was allowed

William Pitt the Younger (Robin Reilly) - possibly one of the most difficult periods in British History saw one of the best British Prime Ministers to date

Kukuczka - the story of how he became one of the world's most impressive climbers despite communist oppression

The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History - a highly interesting book that brings the necessary documents to the table to help understand a topic that is often treated in a very facile way

Ivan III and the Unification of Russia - a great book for understanding the basis on which Russia was built

Xenophon's Anabasis - what a load of fun. How to lead a failed army back home and gorge on mad honey

Single Page link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6354

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance - Henry Petroski (Knopf, 1989)

Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean - David Gelernter (Oxford University Press, 1991)

A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, 2002)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979)

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham (O'Reilly, 2004)

The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman (Basic Books, 1988; paperback reprint, 2002)

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder (Little, Brown, 1981)

The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing - David Kahn (Macmillan, 1967; revised edition, Scribner, 1996)

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time - Dava Sobel (Walker, 1995)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1986)