I love to read, and I especially love to read nonfiction books that help me understand how the world works.  So, I’m going to be providing reviews of some of the books that I’ve been reading lately, and let you in on why I like (or don’t like) them and what I’m learning.
Recently I picked up a copy of The Perfect Swarm by Len Fisher, Ph.D., which focuses on the science of complexity in everyday life  Dr. Fisher has also written books on game theory in real life (Rock, Paper, Scissors) …

The Lego Star Wars series is just cool – they’ve made kits for the Death Star and the Millenium Falcon.  Plus, they have video games (that my daughter really loves!…).  But, the video below is absolutely awesome, retelling the Star Wars trilogy (Episodes IV, V, and VI) in about two minutes with what appears to be the most incredible Lego Star Wars set ever!

Facebook viewers can watch it here…

Stephen Wolfram recently gave a talk about his efforts to understand the universe around us through computation.  He’s the CEO and founder of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica, and author of A New Kind of Science.  Wolfram recently launches his computational knowledge engine, Wolfram|Alpha (I wrote a post about its launch some time back…). 
Here’s the video of his talk, given at a recent TED conference…

Watch and learn!

Just in case you didn’t have enough geeky devices to help you with gaming strategies, here’s a glove that allows you to play rock-paper-scissors against a computerized opponent.
Also called ro-sham-bo (the phonetic French expression of “rock-paper-scissors”), there are some people who take this WAY too seriously.  There are actually roshambo tournaments, and it even has been expanded to include five symbols (as seen in the 2008 “The Lizard-Spock Expansion” episode of The Big Bang Theory).
One can apply game theory to figure out the optimal winning strategy to rock-paper-scissors.  In order to …

Last week, Nancy Atkinson posted on Universe Today that astronomers are now understanding why they’ve missed 90% of the observable galaxies, and, with new tools, are now able to see them.
Here’s a paragraph from Atkinson’s article:
“Astronomers have long known that many surveys of distant galaxies miss 90% of their targets, but they didn’t know why. Now, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. This was found with an extremely deep survey using two of the four …

Back in January, I posted the announcement of Apple’s iPad tablet computer.  I’m personally really excited about it – don’t know if we’ll get one right away (it took us a couple of years before Stephanie and I both got our iPhones – which we love…).
However, this post is about the irony of Newsweek Magazine’s Senior Editor Daniel Lyons writing, within the course of two months, articles which seem to be covering their bets on whether the iPad will be a success or a failure.
The first article is titled “Why …

With the start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season upon us, MSNBC.com has an article about how the game of baseball has come to value statistics more and more over the years.
The trend toward utilizing relevant statistics started in the 1970’s with Bill James’ Baseball Abstract, and came to more widely accepted practice after Billy Beane, as General Manager of the Oakland A’s, used these statistical values to build a playoff team on the cheap.  Beane’s efforts, and how they’ve changed the landscape of modern baseball, was documented by author …

Element 112 has an official name – Copernicium – named after the 16th-century Polish scientist Nicholas Copernicus, who first theorized that the Earth revolved around the Sun.  Copernicium’s periodic element symbol is Cn.
While the name was announced some time back, it became official only recently.
Wonder how this would look in the periodic table of periodic tables?…
Read the Los Angeles Times article about Copernicium and the other most recently named elements here…

In a previous post, I mentioned that the Large Hadron Collider was starting their official research program, seeking to smash protons together in the 17-mile tunnel at energies of 7 trillion electron-volts (7 TeV).
Well, they did it!  The record was officially achieved today, breaking its previous record.
You can read more about the events at CERN here…

Discover Magazine has a really good article about some of today’s scientists that are trying to overthrow the conventional wisdom and find a more complete and accurate model for our universe.
Isaac Newton presented his theory of universal gravitation in 1687, and Albert Einstein overthrew that explanation with his theory of general relativity in 1915.  However, the efforts since Einstein, which include combinations of quantum mechanics and superstring theory, has left most of the scientific world wanting.
There is no doubt that quantum mechanics can predict much of the universe’s probabilistic weirdness.  However, string …