Books: September Science & Math Feature

Back-to-school time can be the catalyst for learning, even if you're not actually in school. Whether it's history, philosophy, or science, your local library is bound to carry something that interests you. Here are a few science books that I thought merited reviews:

The Numbers Game



The fracas over health care in the U.S. naturally lends itself to statistics. Supporters and opponents point to per-capita costs, millions of uninsured, and other numbers everyday in their arguments. After reading "The Numbers Game" (originally published in the UK as "The Tiger That Isn't"), you'll probably view these stats with a bit more skepticism.

Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, the people behind the popular BBC radio show "More or Less," lead the reader through all the ways that statistics can be skewed, misinterpreted, or just plain botched. Using a variety of examples (including a lively discussion of the UK's health system), "The Numbers Game" helps to reveal just how uncertain most of these hard numbers are. It's not a diatribe against statisticians and census workers, though, but merely a guide for performing sanity checks on all the probabilities and percentages that get thrown our way by the pundits and talking heads.

Death from the Skies!



Reading "Death from the Skies!" is like taking an extended wikiwander through the human extinction pages of Wikipedia. If you ever wondered how a freak coronal mass ejection or rogue black hole could annihilate civilization as we know it, this is your book.

Astronomer Philip Plait (of Bad Astronomy fame) has a talent for describing things on enormous scales (a gamma ray burst that irradiates the entire planet, for instance). Helpfully, though, he also gives you the relative chances of spaceborne disasters - most are incredibly unlikely in the short term. In a bit of serendipity, the only disaster that might actually occur in our lifetimes (an impact from a comet or asteroid) is the one we can prevent. So next time someone proposes to cut NASA funding or derides private space exploration, think about the possible Armageddon lurking out there in the void...

13 Things That Don't Make Sense



The fun part about science is how much that we haven't figured out, all the things we can't explain. No one knows what dark matter or dark energy is, and no one knows how to create life from nonliving components. Heck, scientists can't even agree what life is.

"13 Things That Don't Make Sense," by Michael Brooks, is a good summmation of all of these mysteries and more, along with the latest research that's being done to crack them. I was familiar with some of the cosmological mysteries, but the story of the mimivirus and the Viking Lander were new to me. I think the book sort of ends on a weak note (the final chapter deals with the niggling persistence of pseudoscience like homeopathy), but it's a decent read nonetheless.