If you enjoy science-y sci-fi (as do I) you simply must read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. My favorite quote from this trilogy: “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist.”
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Also Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica. His book started me out on my plan to work in Antarctica for a few seasons…
I agree, which is why the novels I’m reading right now are “meh”. It’s very hard to find good sci-fi literature these days. I tend to read mostly nonfiction, science fiction, some literary fiction, and my guilty pleasure when I just need to turn my brain off is dystopian young adult and/or zombie novels. 
I would go further and say that it’s hard to find good literature, period. Most of my reading nowadays is history and classic literature. I sometimes read The Economist to get a gestalt of what the world is thinking about current events.
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
“The woman with a worm in her brain: and other true stories of infectious disease” by Pamela Nagami. Ok my obsession with creepy medical conditions includes many episodes of “monsters within me” and now, thanks to Dr. Nagami I can no longer order salads when eating out…you’ll have to read the book to find out why…
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I recently finished reading 2666 by Roberto Bolano. Took me awhile to get into it, but the ending was worth it!
Hi. I am from Montreal, so I know what you mean about having to be indoors and reading a lot. We just experienced snow, then freezing rain, and now extremely cold temperatures. But it is a beautiful white Christmas! I just finished The Passage Trilogy by Justin Cronin. The last book was The City of Mirrors. I loved them! If you like The Stand by Stephen King, you would probably like this trilogy. I am now reading The Fireman by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son). The jury is still out on it…
Manchester is one of my favorite authors.
others by Manchester I enjoyed:
American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880 - 1964
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War.
He intersperses accounts of various campaigns with his own combat experience on Okinawa (he suffered a head wound there) Brings into focus just what a debt we owe the “Greatest Generation”
Lately I’ve been reading about where all this technology we all use came from.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
The Chip : How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T.R, Reid
Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age by Michael Riordan
I never thought of it this way but the phone system of mid 20th century was the biggest most complex machine man had built to that point. Bell Labs invented the transistor, which built on basic research in quantum mechanics, to improve the phone system. The development of the transistor in turn launched the information age. Now we’ve all got smart phones, internet and TuD.
US spending on basic research is way down, many politicians seem to think it’s a waste of time because they see no immediate befit. They should read these books.
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It’s also very interesting to read about NASA, miniaturization, and the development of computer languages like FORTRAN. Not only is US spending on basic research down, there is a growing notion that private spending on science is somehow superior to public spending on science. I think the post-WWII boom might suggest otherwise, especially the technology (and subsequent economic growth) that came out of NASA and the telecom boom.
As an added piece of info about Bell Labs and their associated service providers, much of that funding was actually from the US government: for many years, the telephone companies received both subsidies and direct payments due to their work being considered necessary for critical infrastructure. IT’s also why there were traditional “monopolies” granted to various phone companies in local and regional areas. It was definitely a “public-private” model of innovation, but it’s important to remember that the basic capital to build the telecommunications networks in this country, and the capital that funded the transistor and other innovations, was mostly tax-provided. Especially when considering tax incentives, local and state laws to protect telecom profits, and etc. Interesting stuff!
Patrick Rothfuss’ amazing Name of the Wind, Wise Man’s Fear, and Slow Regard of Silent Things. Those are great fantasy (love magic and magic theory).
I just started Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson; until last year, I thought his most serious book was either Steelheart or possibly Rithmatist; I didn’t know he had “real” fantasy as well. (I highly recommend his Stormlight Archives)
Chemisty: The Central Science by Brown, LeMay and Bursten.
Biology by Jane B. Reece
Looking for more good sci-fi and fantasy (for my very limited free time. Finals are coming!). If you have recommendations I’d love to hear them!
Check out Neal Stephenson and China Mieville if you’re looking for interesting sci-fi reads. In particular, China Mieville writes both “fantasy” and sci-fi novels (as well as some that defy categorization), and he in particular loves the “magic theory” I think you’re referring to.
Also, the two novels I mentioned higher up the thread (Anathem and Embassytown) are the two best sci-fi novels I’ve ready by anyone.
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Stockholders demand immediate return on investment, basic research does not fit into this model.
Free markets are a wonderful thing but they’re not the answer to every problem, contrary to what many ideologues seem to think.
You won’t get any argument from me on that point! I actually think far more science funding should be provided by the public (then again, I’m a publicly-funded scientist, so I have an iron in this fire), even of the applied sort.
Incidentally, I’ve been re-reading the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons. Among the many topics covered in that particular sci-fi series, he hits on the motivation behind scientific research (or intellectual evolution, as he might term it). It’s important to remember that what is researched, and what is done with research results has a lot to do with where the funding came from: generally speaking, publicly funding research tends to, I believe, benefit the public to a greater extent than private funding.
I think we will see more renewed enthusiasm for public funding of all sorts of things if we can rewrite the script and narrative (and in many cases reality) that public spending in this country is spent so wastefully. Prove to people that there’s something to show for it at something approaching reasonable costs and thei mentality and discussion will change. Americans have had enough $400 toilet seats and $300 hammers though and are fed up… and younger generations haven’t had opportunity to see any grand example of a triumph of public spending such as a man walking on the moon… so they tend to be pretty wary and skeptical
The moonshot is a good example of how public investment can kick start new technologies. Microchips were needed for navigation and other purposes. NASA was willing to pay exorbitant amounts to buy chips because it was the only way to do the navigation within the weight limits they were working under. This plus military spending on chips got the business going so that the economies of scale kicked in and the chips became cheap enough for consumer applications.
Even so consumer industries were slow to adopt them due to a lack of imagination.
At the time lots of people complained about the money spent on the space program, arguing that the money would have been better spent solving more immediate problems here on earth. In hindsight it’s easy to see they were wrong, but the payback took decades to manifest.
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I haven’t heard of those authors. Thank you for the recommendations; I’ll definitely look for those books (though perhaps not until winter break).
They have! They just haven’t realized it. Most of the major breakthroughs in science have been recent, and most of them have been the result of publicly funded science:
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The “Green Revolution” is the single-greatest scientific advancement in human history, in the sense that we can feed orders of magnitude more people today than we could a generation ago–there are drawbacks, of course, but that’s more about the implementation than the basic science (plant breeding, genetics, fertilizer biochemistry, plant symbiosis, plant pathology)
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The Large Hadron Collider experiments in physics, and other super-collider experiments, are pushing the bounds of what we know about the Universe, and these are some of the most expensive, publicly-funded experiments in the history of mankind
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The Internet, this forum, your email, your phone, your tablet, your remote control…all of these manifestations of electronic technology developed directly from NASA (and US military) research into miniaturization of electronic components and communication and geopositioning protocols. All publicly funded (primarily by the US). The fact that you can turn on your smartphone and know to within 2 meters your absolute position in relation to the topography of the Earth is… outstandingly a big deal which we take for granted.
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Insulin, which you use an analogue of every day, was developed at a public research university (University of Toronto) on the public dime (Canadian dime, anyways). And most new drugs are discovered in research labs that are funded through the NIH, the NSF, or other countries’ equivalent public funding agencies. That particular technology is then moved through a “transfer” office into the private domain, for better or for worse, where drug trials are conducted on private money. But if not for the basic research done in the first place, you wouldn’t have the drugs and tech that you rely on.
It’s not so much that there aren’t any good examples, it’s just that people either: a) aren’t paying very close attention to the advancements that are happening; or b) don’t value those advancements in a rational, economic manner. A great example of this is diabetes medications: those of us in this forum put a great value on advances in treatment of all types of diabetes. But ask an average American about the value of Invokana, or Tresiba, or a CGM, or whatever. They’re likely to say “what are you talking about? I thought diabetics had to quit drinking pop and take insulin.” 90% of Americans don’t give diabetes a second thought, even though every advancement in diabetes treatment is likely to significantly lower the cost of medical care to the American public (because so many people have some kind of diabetes and because treatment of complications is so ridiculously expensive).
Humans, and especially our particular brand of modern American, are really not good at judging long-term and social value of economic activity that doesn’t have immediate, personal payoff. And very little basic science funding has immediate, personal payoff. After all, the moon-landing itself was the results of centuries of basic science research and decades of dedicated public funding and effort on a scale never seen before outside the context of war.
And about those moon landings–
Impressive as they were, many people have complained that the money would have been better spent here on earth. And that’s not hindsight, either; those complaints were being actively voiced before, during, and after the early manned space programs. Don’t forget that many of the space “firsts” coincided with the Vietnam war, and there were large numbers of people protesting that they were a waste of money There are always going to be those with contrary priorities, under any circumstances, no matter what.
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Absolutely. And whose to say who is right, in those regards? I greatly appreciate the massive economic knock-on effects from that publicly funded patriotic spectacle we call the moon landing. In some ways, it was a massive waste of money, since it didn’t accomplish a practical purpose (not even a scientific one). However, to me the amount of scientific and technological “spin-off” from those missions has made it entirely worthwhile and then some.