my mind on books

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— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) August 25, 2012

The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates by Howard Bloom (Prometheus, 2012)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

God’s war crimes, Aristotle’s sneaky tricks, Galileo’s creationism, Newton’s intelligent design, entropy’s errors, Einstein’s pajamas, John Conway’s game of loneliness, Information Theory’s blind spot, Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you’re about to see.

In The God Problem you’ll take a scientific expedition into the secret heart of a cosmos you’ve never seen. An electrifyingly inventive cosmos. An obsessive-compulsive cosmos. A driven, ambitious cosmos. A cosmos of colossal shocks. A cosmos of screaming, stunning surprise. A cosmos that’s the biggest invention engine–the biggest breakthrough maker, the biggest creator–of all time.

See also: Review by Giulio Prisco at KurzweilAI.net, Author’s website

Being, Humanity, and Understanding by G.E.R. Lloyd (Oxford University Press, USA, 2012)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

G. E. R. Lloyd explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics: being, or what there is; humanity–what makes a human being a human; and understanding, both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues by different individuals and collectivities in both ancient and modern times. Lloyd juxtaposes the evidence available from ethnography and from the study of ancient societies, both to describe that diversity and to investigate the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, even paradoxical, to the point where they have often been described as irrational or frankly unintelligible. Many implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements, where again we may seem to be faced with an impossible task in attempting to arrive at a fair-minded evaluation. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we happen to belong? To what extent and in what circumstances is it possible to challenge the basic concepts of such systems? Being, Humanity, and Understanding examines these questions cross-culturally and seeks to draw out the implications for the revisability of some of our habitual assumptions concerning such topics as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.

Google Books preview:

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— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) August 23, 2012

Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep by David K. Randall (W.W. Norton & Co. 2012)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 28 Sep)

One of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month for August 2012

Book description from the publisher:

An engrossing examination of the science behind the little-known world of sleep.

Like many of us, journalist David K. Randall never gave sleep much thought. That is, until he began sleepwalking. One midnight crash into a hallway wall sent him on an investigation into the strange science of sleep.

In Dreamland, Randall explores the research that is investigating those dark hours that make up nearly a third of our lives. Taking readers from military battlefields to children’s bedrooms, Dreamland shows that sleep isn’t as simple as it seems. Why did the results of one sleep study change the bookmakers’ odds for certain Monday Night Football games? Do women sleep differently than men? And if you happen to kill someone while you are sleepwalking, does that count as murder?

This book is a tour of the often odd, sometimes disturbing, and always fascinating things that go on in the peculiar world of sleep. You’ll never look at your pillow the same way again.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s website