SARS-CoV-2: The Vaccine

I did a science. Back on 11 March, I told you about the virus that now is ubiquitous in our modern consciousness. We had the genome of the Virus sequenced as soon as January and I was already speculating that the vaccine would be faster than any vaccine ever in history because of it.

The interesting thing I didn’t expect is for someone to go from matching a viral protein in the B-cells and T-cells. I never expected we could develop a vaccine that is purely the Messenger RNA (mRNA). Why I’m not clear how you could get such a vaccine into the cellular production machinery, it’s clear if you can, that you can have your own body’s cells produce the protein markers that your immonolocal system can match. Of course, the other potential issue is, if you do have one of your cells producing this viral protein then what’s to stop your immune system from targeting it?

Dr. Joe Hanson explains how one SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was created.

2020 has indeed been quite an unexpected year. When I first created Project Kronosphere, back in 1999, I set it in 2010, which was still a ways off. When we started to approach 2010, I moved it to 2020. Now that it’s 2020, I’m kind of happy I didn’t set it then. There is no way I could have predicted the life-changing events of this year. But, I was able to predict the expedited vaccine development, which makes me quite happy and hopeful. And Project Kronosphere is now set in 2030 and features a 67 year old Professor Rebecca Priestley. And though I have some screenplays in the Project Kronosphere Universe, I am about to start its novelization…

Project Kronosphere was always intended to be an education drama, and like the Professor, I hope you have learned something from this post here. Make good science, my friends!

The Hourlings Podcast, Episode 2: World Building

This episode of the Hourlings Podcast was one I could only contribute to in indirectly. We have a new YouTube channel, Channel 137—which I hope you will follow—and you may be wondering where the 137 comes from.

As an author, as well as a Physicist and Scientist, I have an affinity for the wonders of the physical world—and so does host Martin Wilsey. The number 137, or more specifically it’s approximate reciprocal, 0.007 297 352 569 3(11), which is about , is important to Physicists. It represents the Fine Structure Constant, ⍺, a ratio between the square of the Fundamental Charge and Planck’s Constant, the Speed of Light, and the Permittivity of Free Space:

The derivation of Alpha
This is the most common formula for calculating Alpha.

Originally, it was a was of defining the distance between spectral lines but has been found in many other physical properties. It’s quite a number!

Which is why we will be ending each meeting with a note about how it was so finely structured!

Another Finely Structured meeting, if I do say so myself.

Hope you enjoy the episode despite my lack of tales of intelligent octopuses and planetary colonists suffering technological attrition. Oh, well.

I’ll be back next week though so keep writing and hope to see you there!

Jeffrey’s Jammin Birthday Bash

Join me to find out how I like my new job, the exciting plans I have for the upcoming year, and so I can give a personal thanks for your personal friendship!

Please note, the official start time is 20:00 because I want to make sure not to start it before I finish my first full day of work at the new job. If I finish sooner, I will open the room earlier. This is, after all, an exciting time for me. My first new job in 18 years, and the first of four steps on the route to make me a better man, and much, much happier!

This event is opened to everyone who claims to know me! All of my software colleagues, all of my fellow authors, fellow science readers, fellow Doctor Who fans, fellow cosplayers, fellow Electric Car drivers and enthusiasts, all of my Equal Rights Amendment sisters and brothers in arms, all of my National Popular Vote Interstate Compact supporters, all of my avid gaming friends, all of my friends abroad except those in Europe—have your kip, mates—all of my fellow Toastmasters, all of my fellow aviators, all of my fellow musicians, tous mes amis qui parle français oder Deutsch или по-русский o italiano, my acting friends and my friends who eschew meat!

The only thing I ask is you be respectful, kind, and know that I hope you all consider any friend of mine a potential friend of yours!

There is a password to this event. It’s not hard to guess if you know me but if you want to know, and you are reading this on from Twitter, message me, on Tumblr, message me, on LinkedIn, again, message me, or join me via the Facebook event. Or, just comment on this blog, with your email address, and I will mail it to you.

See you all next Wednesday!

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18 Years and thanks for all the Fleets

Today I tendered my official resignation with the Naval Research Laboratory. I worked at the Laboratory for 18 years, under three Presidents and many Congresses. In that time, I pushed for at work EV Charging in the FAST Act, I started the NRL EV Group (link accessible within NRL), I sang with Polly and the Saccharides (no link available), and I even gave some Toastmasters speeches (NRL Link).

I very much enjoyed my time there and really am sad to go but I have been having so many problems paying for #CO2Fre and its maintenance that I have no choice but to accept a new job in the private sector. My only other solace—besides finally getting to write code again—is that I can finally use a part of my McGill degree that I’ve not been able to exercise beyond writing fiction.

Thus, it’s not so much an end, but a new beginning. And who knows what the future may bring! After all, I would like to return to Federal Service on day and accrue at least two more years to get my FERS to 1.1%. The only thing for sure is I’m a lot less available as a coder now.

Tesla OS 2020.16.2.1

Finally!

TeslaFi had been spamming me with news about TeslaOS 2020.16 for a while and I’ve been itching to see what, after giving us the amazing stop at a stop sign in the last minor update.

Turns out, not much. I am mostly unimpressed by Tesla with this update, though nonetheless very appreciative. Autoformatting a DashCam drive—I wonder if it supports 2TB yet—and a better layout for Easter Eggs are, after all, improvements, even if the Easter Eggs aren’t really hidden gems anymore.

The coolest new feature, though, is the new SuperCharger filter, allowing the driver to only see Version 3 stations and filter out all the slower ones. I love the fact that I have free, lifetime SuperCharging, and one of these days, I’m gonna cross the continents with that perk.

Overall, I’m not disappointed despite being underwhelmed. And one rumor is that this, or a soon to be released version will add V2G to the Tesla. I can’t wait until that rolls out as the Tesla Battery Pack may make for a new, mobile Powerwall. Mind you, even if #CO2Fre could do V2G, my house isn’t equipped for it anyway. So, even if it doesn’t have V2G, it’s still a cool update!

Tesla OS 2020.16.2.1
Tesla OS 2020.16.2.1 adds a new toy box interface, a SuperCharger filter, and auto-formatting of DashCam media. © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

Gentle reader, if you have been keeping up with me since 11 February of this year, you know that I have been posting once a day since then. As such, today marks a hundred days of a hundred daily posting. Through that, I’ve shared with you exciting electric car news, updated to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, my struggles to get the Equal Rights Amendment to be our Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, written about my many works of fiction, and the many books of nonfiction I voraciously read to be a better scientist. I’ve shared with you my cosplay adventures, and my love of Doctor Who, my love of games, and a bit of my speaking in tongues as well as delivering speeches and singing to my heart’s content. I’ve talked about international travel and how I love to fly there in my own plane, discussed my acting and my dietary needs. And most of all I’ve told you I’m an excellent coder who is always keen for new work. Thanks for riding with me as we cruise upon the cloud to another one hundred posts!

The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos

For once, I made good progress on this book and though I could have finished it Friday, I did finish it Saturday with one day to spare. I started it after finishing The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. This book was twelve hours long I needed to hammer it all last week while I was dealing with constant Job Recruiter Cold Calls.

In any case, Leonard Mlodinow‘s book was more of a personal journey rather than a hard science book. Which is to say, it does have a history of scientific discovery and a brief story of human evolution, but none of the details were particulary new to me and so, for the most part, I read it for the assides with his father and how he related his personal journey of discovery to his conversations with his father.

After all, how many stories have I read describing Evolution? Of course, humanity advanced to where we are through our inquisitive nature. However, I was unfamiliar with Göbekli Tepe temple and that story that started us on the journey to urban life was interesting. I was bothered by Mlodinow’s assumption that Chinese and Mayan scripts being derived from cuneiform. I don’t know why he could assume that writing developed independently, which seems to be the case for these scripts.

From there we investigate the Greek golden age of discovery and early science. It’s always interesting how the ancients were sometimes kind of correct, often very wrong, and sometimes on the right path. Then, we have the fascinating story of the 150 years that overthrew that millennium old superstition from Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

I was fascinated how Antoine Lavoisier was actually quite charitable yet lost his head to La Terreur. Then, to add insult to injury, when, in the turn of the Twentieth Century they erected a statue to him with the wrong head. Also fascinating was how despite his near perfect predictions Dmitri Mendeleev, with, among others, the exception of Praseodymium and Neodymium being lumped into Didymium as an element. The main reason for these errors was that Mendeleev sorted by Atomic Weight, not Atomic Number.

Of course, another story about Darwin didn’t add much to my knowledge and was something I could have done without. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek‘s story, on the other hand, including being a member of the Royal Society in absentia was really interesting. But then, I’ve also read about Max Planck and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger extensively, so there was absolutely nothing new in the section on Quantum Physics. I do with there had been more about Richard Feynman, though.

However, the most touching part of the book is when Mlodinow discusses the last days of his dear father. The fact that he dedicated the book to him was very endearing, and all the stories in Poland were touching and very enjoyable. Even more for his father’s experience as a Jew under the Nazis.

The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos

Overall, not a terrible book, if a bit unoriginal. Next up, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Until we meet again my fellow sapiosexuals! Shalom!

Lessons in Biology with the Daleks

My good friend Gordon Rutter has started a new series of Doctor Who oriented Science Videos. Learn about Diversity and Variation in the evolution of the Daleks. Yes, I did say Evolution of the Daleks because they may be psychopathic killers of all that’s different but there is variation in the species—or at least fashion in its preference of casing, but let’s not pick nits, shall we?

Gordon give a great little overview of the basic ideas of individual differences, and how that relates to speciation. Have a watch and enjoy some science presented by the DAL-EKS!

YOU WILL O-BEY! YOU WILL O-BEY! WATCH IT!

Okay, I better get back in the TARDIS before these guys EX-TER-MIN-ATE ME!

The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis

I started this book the day I finished A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, and again it’s another book finished just in time. I can’t keep this up, though, as the next one is pretty long, I’m worried I wont finish it in time. Especially since I have an interview today and starting a new job will severely cut back on my reading time, especially if the commute is shorter.

In any event. this was a fascinating book that ties in well with our current SARS-CoV-2 epidemic. The book gives a weaving of biographies between the world-famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, and the little-remembered recipient of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch.

The story of Koch is an interesting one. He’s a medical doctor who came out of nowhere to revolutionize the scientific method and usher in the age of the microbe. While most Americans know who Charles and the late David Koch are, Robert Koch is no relation and should not be seen in the same light, though ironically, as the chemist Louis Pasteur was Robert Koch’s greatest rival, it’s somewhat ironic the American Kochs of Dutch ancestry also got their start as chemists.

What’s most astounding, though, is how much hubris Koch built up and his animosity toward Pasteur. Was it pure one upmanship, or something deeper? It’s clear Koch resented the French given his upbringing in Prussia and the Franco-Prussian War. I can only speculate that had something to do with it.

It’s a pity because, after all, they were both adherents to germ theory. They both had their detractors in the Anti-Vaccine League and the groups opposed to animal cruelty. Even Florence Nightingale was allied against him and all of science. It’s a pity even today people have trouble understanding vaccines train the body so something worse doesn’t befall them because the body is prepared. They didn’t understand immunology then, or herd immunity, but today, what’s the excuse?

One other sad fact is, it seems, Tuberculin is the perfect vaccine against Consumption. It is, after all, the same basic substance that Pasteur and company used for his Anthrax and Rabies vaccines. There’s no reason Tuberculin shouldn’t have worked unless, Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a bacterium which defeats the immune system? Is it more like AIDS in that respect? Still, his trying to profit from it made the fact it didn’t work all the more disgraceful.

If one disgrace wasn’t bad enough, when Koch doubled down on the bovine tuberculosis not being the same as the human form, he only dug himself into a hole further. Surely, as he and his lab investigated Bacillus anthracis, they knew the same bacteria could have different forms throughout its productive cycle. Why couldn’t he see that the different shapes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in cattle was the same as the form in humans and thus was a vector for transmission?

The book also gives the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, MD. How the two are connected in a pantomime of try-fail in trying to meet Koch only to write a scathing piece about the failed cure Tuberculin. Beyond that, the two had very little to do with each other and thus the book really stretched its mandate when it included Doyle with Koch.

Nonetheless, It was fascinating reading about Doyle and his caring for Touie while still maintaining another woman in the wings, always under chaperone. One wonders how Touie got Consumption but as it was common back then I don’t think its connection to the main theme of the book is sustained. Still, kind of interesting how Doyle prepared for Touie’s demise in the most pragmatically masculine way. I don’t know if I approve even with the maternal and sibling supervision.

It’s also interesting that Doyle gave up the rights to the first Sherlock Holmes story. And yet, he hated Holmes so much he had to kill him off after the second series of serials in The Strand. Also interesting that he only wrote four novels and that one was inspired as a competition between Doyle and Oscar Wylde. It’s wonderful, though, we got both and The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Hound of the Baskervilles for that bet.

It’s sad, though, that Doyle was so into spiritualism. And it’s also a pity that despite his belief in the Cottingley Fairies, the author never once mentions Harry Houdini‘s attempts to debunk the rampant fraud of the day.

One thing that was great to see was how William Gillette inspired Doyle to resurrect Holmes and give us more tales from 221B Baker Street. And it’s amazing how Gillette’s role gave us the deerstalker hat now so iconic and the “Elementary, dear Watson”, even though that never appears in Doyle’s writing. Gillette was indeed a fascinating man and it’s a pity he only rarely appeared in moving pictures. He did leave a fascinating legacy. Near where I grew up, in East Haddam, Connecticut, rests the castle that Gillette built. I’ve been there many times and it’s quite fun to see in person.

One last point I’d like to make is how cool it is that Koch’s colleagues and their families invented Agar Plates and Petri Dishes to grow bacteria. And, most of all, Koch was a microscopist in the tradition of Sir Frankie Crisp and was a pioneer of Microphotography. Even Sherlock Holmes, as conceived by Doyle, was a microscopist.

The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis
The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis

Thank you all for reading. It took me forever to compile this from my notes but I’m excited to begin The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos. Until next time my sapiosexual friends.

And so it begins! The 2020–2021 Science Book Club Poll

As promised, I took the seventy-nine—yes, seventy-nine, as my good friend Nick Harding pointed out, one of the fifty that I nominated on Friday was already scheduled for our June discussion so I eliminated it from the poll and the tallies. Anyway, I set up the poll Friday but didn’t want to put it out until today to make sure I had the right instructions ready.

This year, the poll is a little different again from last year, time for the annual Science Book Club poll. Last year, you got one twelfth of a point, about an 8.3% boost in your score for each meeting you attended in the last year.

This year, to simplify things, I decided to simply give a 50% bonus to anyone who attended at least four (non-fiction science) meetings in the last year, and 100% bonus if you attended all twelve. I can verify this because I require everyone to list their name on Meetup so I can correlate the records. Further, if you’ve not logged into the meetup site in the last year, you will get a 50% diminishment of voting power. Also, if you overuse the max or minimum “veto” scores (currently set to a maximum of ten), then you also suffer a 50% reduction. Finally, if you’re not even a member of the Science Book Club, I will allow you to vote but you will be biased to 10% of normal.

Thus, if you, like one member currently, attended at least four meetings but voted for more than ten books the the maximum or minimum (veto) rank, you would end up with a 75% bias, meaning your votes count for 75% as normal.

The reason I added the penalty for too many “veto” votes is because this year we have a seven point system. The seven point system goes from one to seven with the following relations. If someone doesn’t vote for a given book, it’s score is assumed neutral.

RatingMeaningPoints
1Veto-4
2Super-Dislike-2
3Dislike-1
4Neutral0
5Like+1
6Super-Like+2
7Veto-Override+4
Ranking of Votes in the 2020 Science Book Club Poll

Beyond that, pollsing is pretty much the same as last year, albeit with more choices and more options. As of this writing we have five votes but I hope to have many more by the time the poll closes on or just before 14 June.

The polls can be found at the Science Book Club 2020–2021 Poll. I hope you will join me in voting enthusiastically, my fellow sapiosexuals!

50 Science Books I’d like to read

Last year, when we were setting the schedule for the Bowie Bevy of Brainy Books, I went through my Audible back catalog and by my calculations, there are 209 titles in my library that I’ve yet to listen to. Some of these are scheduled in my upcoming meetup events but most are gathering dust as I am busy with the official book club list of titles.

Now that it’s time to chose the 2020–2021 Science Book Club. Although I run that meetup and have run it for longer than the founder Megan Thaler, which still amazes me, I always allow a democratic decision on the series of books we read, always scheduling the top 10–12 to form the cycle for the following 11–13 months, with December reserved for our retro cycle books.

I should explain, the Science Book Club has been running since 2009 and has a tremendous back catalog, and although I didn’t attend every meeting, I have attended every one since I began running it in the Summer of 2013. As such, I have a general rule that we can’t do any book we’ve done before in the group as part of the main eleven month year. Also, I require that books be published within the last ten years. I am a little lenient on this in terms of allowing books technically eleven years old given that I’m planning for books into 2021 but allow books from 2010, but no earlier. But official, the rule is no repeats, no fiction, and no books older than ten years. If a book fails any of those tests, it goes into the December book bin, were I allow anything goes!

After winnowing out all the older books, the Great Courses and Fiction books in my back catalog, I was left with fifty books the Science Book Club has never discussed and are at most ten years old. The are as follows:

  • [Medicine] The Case Against Sugar (Gary Taubes, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
  • [Sociology] God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (Penn Jillette, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Neurology] The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Sam Kean, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/416
  • [Neurology] The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (V. S. Ramachandran, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
  • [Mathematics] Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data (Charles Wheelan, 2013)📖🕮💻💿🏢/302
  • [Chemistry] The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (Denise Kiernan, 2013)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Medicine] Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them (Jennifer Wright, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • [Neurology] Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Ecology] Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Bill McKibben, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • [Sociology] Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love (Amir Levine, Rachel Heller, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Chemistry] The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Kate Moore, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/496
  • [Biology] American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise (Joe Drape, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Technology] Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Astronomy] The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Richard Panek, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/297
  • [Physics] The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (Thomas Levenson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Biology] The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/288
  • [Genetics] A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Physics] The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth (Michio Kaku, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Technology] Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Neurology] Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (Annie Duke, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/288
  • [Mathematics] The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies (Jason Fagone, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
  • [Medicine] Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (Florence Williams, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Technology] Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (Paul Scharre, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/448
  • [Chemistry] Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder – A Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science (James Mahaffey, 2017)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/464
  • [Medicine] Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (Paul A. Offit, MD, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/288
  • [Medicine] Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (Giulia Enders, 2015)📖💻💿🏢/271
  • [Biology] American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (Nate Blakeslee, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Biology] Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Biology] The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History (Thor Hanson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Mathematics] Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Medicine] First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Bee Wilson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Medicine] Are u ok?: A Guide to Caring for Your Mental Health (Kati Morton LMFT, 2018)🕮💻💿FALSE/256
  • [Medicine] Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (Thomas Hager, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Physics] The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter (Paul Steinhardt, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Medicine] The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine (Thomas Morris, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Sociology] Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free (Wednesday Martin PhD, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Mathematics] Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (Sabine Hossenfelder, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Neurology] The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (Dan Ariely, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/334
  • [Medicine] Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (David Quammen, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/592
  • [Economics] Money: The Unauthorized Biography (Felix Martin, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • [Physics] The Science of Interstellar (Kip Thorne, 2014)📖💻💿🏢/336
  • [Ecology] The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Young Readers Edition (Michael Pollan, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • [Mathematics] Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (Stephen Budiansky, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/416
  • [Evolution] Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
  • [Medicine] Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Serhii Plokhy, 2018)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/432
  • [Physics] The Order of Time (Carlo Rovelli, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Sociology] The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Mark Forsyth, 2012)📖💻💿FALSE/304
  • [Technology] The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Donald A. Norman, 2013)📖💻💿🏢/368
  • [Medicine] Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes (Nathan H. Lents, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • [Ecology] My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (Mary Roach, 2013)📖💻💿🏢/160

I should explain here the shorthand I use to indicate the formats supported by each book. Unicode has icons for each of the formats as follows:

  • 📖: Paperback
  • 🕮: Hard Cover (Note, this Unicode Glyph doesn’t appear on all platforms)
  • 💻: eBook, such as Kindle
  • 💿: Audiobook, as in Audible
  • 🏢: The book is in the Library (this glyph, when present, contains a link to its entry in the Fairfax County Public Library card catalog)

The long and short of that is, to enter fifty new books into the nomination queue is a very tedious affair and took me so many hours yesterday, I forgot to post my note about TeslaOS 2020.20.5 on Thursday.

For the record, my fifty entries were appended to the end of the existing seventeen moniations already made or carried forward from the last poll. We are, therefore, in addition to the above, also considering the following books:

  • [Physics] Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality (Anil Ananthaswamy, 2018)🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Genetics] Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (George M. Church, Ed Regis, 2012)📖🕮💻🏢/304
  • [Genetics] Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize (Sean B. Carroll, 2013)📖🕮💻🏢/592
  • [Biology] The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Andrea Wulf, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/496
  • [Evolution] From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Daniel C. Dennett, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/496
  • [Technology] Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Biology] The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species (Carlos Magdalena, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • [Sociology] Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Ecology] The Uninhabitable Earth, Life after Warming (David Wallace-Wells, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Astronomy] The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake (Steven Novella, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/512
  • [Health] How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Michael Pollan, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/480
  • [Geology] Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History (Lewis Dartnell, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
  • [Geology] The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (Peter Brannen, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/322
  • [Ecology] The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (David George Haskell, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/268
  • [Ecology] The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (David George Haskell, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
  • [Biology] Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live (Rob Dunn, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/323
  • [Genetics] The Gene: An Intimate History (Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/608

Thus, over the weekend, assuming no more last-minute nominations, I will be create a poll with sixty-seven entries, asking my members to rank them on a five-point system and then use those star rankings and member attendance history to calculate the top 10–12 books and then generate our schedule through the summer of 2021—with the exception of December.

As for the December, 2020 meeting, nineteen books from my back catalog didn’t satisfy my ten year or repeat criterion, and so I added them to the three books carried over from last December’s poll. The first three books are the ones carried over, the rest are from my back catalog.

  • Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (Martin Gorst, 2001)📖🕮💻🏢/352
  • How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • (Fiction) The Witness Paradox: A Time Traveler Anthology (Martin Wilsey, TR Dillon, Jeffrey C. Jacobs, 2018)📖🕮💻FALSE/246
  • iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way (Steve Wozniak, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/313
  • How the Mind Works (Steven Pinker, 1998)📖🕮💻💿🏢/660
  • Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2004)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • Fear Of Physics: A Guide For The Perplexed (Lawrence M. Krauss, 1993)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/224
  • The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild (Lawrence Anthony, Graham Spence, 2009)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
  • Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic (Esther Perel, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America (Steven Johnson, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
  • Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (Michio Kaku, 2004)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/428
  • The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (Amy Stewart, 2004)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
  • The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Richard P. Feynman, 1999)📖🕮💻💿🏢/270
  • Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Mary Roach, 2003)📖🕮💻💿🏢/303
  • Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Mary Roach, 2005)📖🕮💻💿🏢/311
  • Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (John McWhorter, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/230
  • Apollo: The Race to the Moon (Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox, 1989)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/506
  • Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 2002)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
  • Song for the Blue Ocean (Carl Safina, 1998)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/458
  • Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (Carl Sagan, 1997)📖🕮💻💿🏢/244
  • The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Carl Sagan, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/457

So much reading, so little time! Can’t wait to hear what y’all want to read, my sapiosexual friends!

UPDATE 2020-04-10 21:30: I do encourage my Science Readers to retrieve all the information above, such the full title, all authors and their full names, what formats the books are in, a link to the library listing, the publication year and the page count, and post all this to the Meetup Message Board. I do this because I get an email notification every time someone posts there. It’s hard to get to, to be sure, but when I send the email reminding folks to nominate things, I do provide a direct link to the Message Board discussion.

It’s therefore sad that most of my members used the new Meetup Discussion list instead. I get no notifications of any kind when people post here so I was shocked to see, when I posted a link to this article, that in fact a lot of my members posted sketchy book information to that list. A few of the nominations were in the list, but fourteen were new, as far as I could tell.

Of course, not wanting to ignore my member’s wishes, I spent a few more hours today trying to add all their nominations to the list. There are now eighty nominations, thirteen more added.

  • [Medicine] The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Bill Bryson, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
  • [Technology] The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/432
  • [Medicine] The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (Nessa Carey, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
  • [Evolution] Lamarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present (Peter Ward, 2018)🕮💻🏢/288
  • [Biology] Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Jim Al-Khalili, 2017)🕮💻💿FALSE/240
  • [Physics] The World According to Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2020)🕮💻💿FALSE/336
  • [Physics] Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/239
  • [Technology] What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries―and Reveal How Today’s Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World (Jim Al-Khalili, 2018)📖💻💿FALSE/240
  • [Technology] The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance (Jim Al-Khalili, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
  • [Medicine] Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (Jim Al-Khalili, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
  • [Technology] An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer What’s Next? (Mark Stevenson, 2011)📖🕮💻🏢/384
  • [Technology] We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World (Mark Stevenson, 2018)📖🕮💻FALSE/304
  • [Physics] Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Max Tegmark, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/432

In addition to these thirteen, one more nomination was added to the December list because it’s a book we discussed in the group before.

  • The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Brian Greene, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384

Exhausted but still sapiosexual.