Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Science & Math (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Avi Loeb

4.5 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life

Arthur Firstenberg

4.8 on Amazon

5 HN comments

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Jenny Odell

4.2 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Turn Left At Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope - and How to Find Them (Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope – and How to Find Them)

Guy Consolmagno

4.7 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Paul Stamets

4.8 on Amazon

5 HN comments

How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

Annie Duke and Penguin Audio

4.4 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to Slow Aging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight

Valter Longo

4.4 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight

Satchin Panda PhD

4.6 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

John McWhorter

4.5 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data

David Spiegelhalter

4.6 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Steven Johnson

4.5 on Amazon

5 HN comments

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (P.S.)

William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

4.6 on Amazon

5 HN comments

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Neil deGrasse Tyson

4.7 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Robin Wall Kimmerer and Tantor Audio

4.8 on Amazon

4 HN comments

Ants: Workers of the World

Eleanor Spicer Rice and Eduard Florin Niga

3.8 on Amazon

4 HN comments

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sorokodonMay 16, 2021

and books, e.g. "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue"

davidwonFeb 27, 2009

I recently read his book, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue", and while it was a little bit unbalanced (he spends far too long dwelling on certain points), I really enjoyed it.

quickthrowmanonMay 21, 2021

Thanks for the heads up, I looked into criticism of this book and I won’t recommend it in the future.

If you happen to see this reply, would ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English’ by McWhorter be a better choice for a pop-sci history of English? r/Linguistics seems to be fine with him.

mannykannotonNov 28, 2015

I like the idea of Globish, though I have to admit both that I have not studied it, and, as a native English speaker, my enthusiasm is somewhat self-serving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_(Nerriere)

John McWhorter's 'magnificent bastard tongue' has many quirks to trip up anyone learning it as an adult, and which could be simplified without making the language unintelligible to those who already speak it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3143472-our-magnificent-...

evincarofautumnonApr 10, 2012

Complexity comes from languages that arise in isolation. Basically, the fewer people speak a language, the less chance its natural complexity will degrade. Invasions and other interlinguistic contact create simplifications, most visibly pidgins and creoles. Check out Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by Ian McWhorter, which shows how English underwent this very process. What we speak today is a hilarious pidgin of Old English and Norman French, which are themselves mashups.

I wonder what will win: practically no new natural languages are being created, so simplification is running amok, but invasions are now rare, and we use computers almost exclusively in our own native tongues. Maybe we end up suffering global economic collapse and reverting to the natural language wars.

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