Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Impractical knowledge is still knowledge!

How To by Randall Monroe

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I need to stop having expectations for books.  I thought this was going to be more like his book What If? which had strange situations and then gave a scientific method of answering the question.  This is taking a theoretically normal problem, but then solving it (still scientifically) in the weirdest and most impractical way possible.     (The version I have is an ARC, and I’m reading it on my phone, so things don’t always line up correctly. Which isn’t great, but hey, I didn’t […]

cbr12bingo – How To!

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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Randall Munroe, the engineer/author/cartoonist extraordinaire (most importantly- the creator of the excellent webcomic xkcd) is at it again with How To. He takes all sorts of simple questions and expands, explodes, and/or completely blows up the possible answers into a cacophony of hard science and absolute absurdity. Say you want to throw something really far- he starts out with an anecdote about George Washington hucking (technical term) a silver dollar across a river, which turns into a breakdown of how far silver dollars could be […]

If you don’t love science yet, Sam Kean will win you over

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Drama, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean

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CBR12 BINGO: Gateway Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, and his books don’t get any better than The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. I’ve previously reviewed The Disappearing Spoon and Caesar’s Last Breath for CBR, but I decided to re-read The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons because it’s a perfect “gateway” book into both Kean’s work and popular science. Plus, I’ve had a hankering lately to read some brain stuff. The title refers to a pair of doctors who tended to King Henri II of France after […]

The title of the book tells you everything you need with this one. (CBR12 Bingo)

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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I laughed out loud when I saw the How To square on this year’s bingo card – days before a friend had given me Randall Munroe’s latest  How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems when I had lamented my inability lately to sink into reading anything. Her answer to that problem (and it is a good answer) was something intended to be read in small pieces and not all at once, and something that is both humorous and full of interesting information. Checks […]

A science heavy debunking of contemporary gender essentialism.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine

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I tried to read this book near the beginning of quarantine, in hard copy, and my poor overloaded brain just couldn’t handle it. If I had read this in audio, a format my brain can handle for serious subjects, I probably would have rated it much higher, and gotten through it much faster (and I’ll be honest, retained more than 10% of it). So take this review with a grain of salt. (P.S. I just googled that phrase, and it evolved from something Pliny the […]

Advanced Bird Nerdery

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg by Tim Birkhead

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With the exception, perhaps, of the most dedicated vegan, all of us have cracked open an egg at some point in our lives: to scramble for breakfast, to make an egg drop soup, or, for those more reckless in our diet, to whip up a rich creme brûlée. Yet how many of us have ever paused to wonder about the complex mechanisms that go into the creation of the egg itself? A 19th-century abolitionist named Thomas Wentworth Higginson once said, “If required on pain of death […]



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