Archive for January, 2009

Literate Scientists and Their Books

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

OpenTask plans to publish the extended and edited version of this blog as a book:

Literate Scientists and Their Books: An Independent Guide to Understanding Reality (ISBN: 978-1906717520)

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Social Sciences as Sorcery

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

I bought this book (as used, it seems no longer available in print) after reading Fashionable Nonsense which refers to it. Highly recommended to anyone starting to write on non-technical subjects to avoid inventing new jargon and repeat obvious as well as to anyone trying to get a (self-)education in social sciences like me and be suspicious to excessive verbiage. I like his formula V = A / K - 1, where V is the amount of produced verbiage, A is the amount of ambition and K is the amount of knowledge on the subject and related disciplines.

Social Sciences as Sorcery

I don’t have its cover jacket with me today but I’ll take a picture of it later and put here.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

Blog Anniversary

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

Yesterday it had been one year since I wrote the first blog post here:

The Nonlinear Universe: Chaos, Emergence, Life

Since then I wrote reviews about more than 35 books and I plan at least to double them this year.

In 2008 my book collection expanded a bit. I bought about 66 books on Amazon US, 40 books on Amazon UK, 6 books on Amazon Canada and several dozens of books in local bookshops so there is much to review here :-)

I wish a Happy New Year to all voracious readers in the World!

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -