‘The Selfish Gene’ and ‘Y: The Descent of Men’

[brokenhut]

I’ve just finished making my way through a pair of popular science biology books: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men, both of which were pretty good.

Comments

[brokenhut]

It's weird though, cos no one ever thinks that medicine is easy. But it could be fairly easily argued, I think, that medicine is applied biology; like physics is maths in the real world!

I think another reason is that there's almost always something to get your head around - some analogy or mental image, no matter how loose. Try doing that with quantum physics and see how far you get!

I suppose that also comes back to your argument, cos the cool stuff is within the mental grasp of the layman, even if it has to be simplified a bit. I'm trying to reduce the technical nature of my CS posts at the moment to see if I can get something I'm happier with. I know what I want - I want to think that someone with no computer science knowledge could read a post of mine and think "that's cool, that's useful". And maybe next time they see something completely unrelated to what I was talking about think "I wonder if this can be solved with X too?".

Whether I will ever reach that point is another matter, but I hope to keep trying. Look out in the near future for posts on information theory, hash functions and data structures among others. I also take requests! :)

[h2_the_foodie]

Well, right enough I did think 'hey that's cool' when i read about your travelling bin men. And had been kinda thinking about it since, in the context of decent bus routes.

So i've been a little bit inspired.

I seem to recall reading some time ago that you automatically lose a large percentage of your readers if you put equations on the page. I think that I tend to fall into the lost readers group when your posts contain equations or code.