Friday Five: Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite

This week, Arthur C. Clarke died on Wednesday at the age of 90.  If you know who Arthur C. Clarke is - you’re probably a nerd.  He was the last of the "big three" (Asimov and Heinlien being the other two) science fiction writers of the 20th Century.

What made his writing superior?  The man was a genius.  He came up with the idea of using communications satellites in geostationary orbit as relay stations (the Equatorial geostationary orbit is called the "Clarke Orbit").  He was a RAF Radar Specialist when even the spelling of "RADAR" was Top Secret. 

Arthur C. Clark was a master of the gift of taking technical concepts and making them understandable, let alone entertaining.  This has been a personal challenge of mine - especially this week as I submit my first paper to ASME.  While I’ve yet to hone that gift, others have. 

So, for today’s Friday Five: Five Geek Books You Should Read ASAP

 5. P.J. O’Rourke - Eat The Rich.  You can take Macro or you can save some serious time and just read this book.  I’ve yet to find someone who is as accomplished of a humorist that’s still alive.  In the 1999 book, O’Rourke sets out to answer the question: "Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck?".  He looks at examples of the time: Wall Street, Russia, Tanzania, Albania, etc. and discusses the macroeconomic situation using principles that many of us had to suffer through in Macroeconomics.

4. Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point and Blink:  OK, I know they are two books; but - having read both - they go together pretty well.  The Tipping Point studies why stuff gets popular in today’s world and Blink looks at our ability to size up a situation in less than a second.  To get an idea of how entertaining these books are - check out this video at TED Talks…it explains why there are many different kinds of spaghetti sauce.  Watch it, if only for his geek hair and this Yiddish expression "To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish": anybody who’s ever seen a geek work out a problem knows what I’m talking about.

3. Michael Lewis - Moneyball: Many people think they don’t like "math" - the fact of the matter is, most people have only dealt with arithmetic.  Math is Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics, Game Theory, etc.  The book Moneyball describes how the Oakland As used "Sabermetrics" - a study all sorts of strange baseball statistics to recruit a team on a relative shoe string budget.  Yes, there are baseball geeks.

2. Ben Mezrich -  Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions:  People think that applying math, science, and engineering concepts involves sitting around a computer all day trying to increase efficiency by 0.01%.  Not quite, and this book demonstrates it.  Acting as a team, the MIT students applied a simple card-counting method that only worked when they moved from one Blackjack table to the next and gaming Vegas out of some serious money.  Teamwork and communication is more important than being able to use Excel well for most any geek on the street.

1. - Arthur C. Clarke - Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke: The genius of Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t that he created these strange worlds: the genius is that he played off the strangeness of the world that we live in.  In the short story Beyond Strain he should where actuarial tables and space cargo might meet.  In The Next Tenants we’re offered a glimpse into the lives of termites (it’s more interesting than you think) and the tale of their own Prometheus.  Of course, you probably know him best for his collaborative work with Stanley Kubrick on the Academy Award-winning 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Even non-geeks enjoyed it.

See y’all Monday…Daisy…Daaaaisy.