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 2020โ€“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 10โ€“12 to form the cycle for the following 11โ€“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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/384
  • [Sociology] God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (Penn Jillette, 2011)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/416
  • [Neurology] The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (V. S. Ramachandran, 2011)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/384
  • [Mathematics] Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data (Charles Wheelan, 2013)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/302
  • [Chemistry] The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (Denise Kiernan, 2013)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/400
  • [Medicine] Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them (Jennifer Wright, 2017)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/336
  • [Neurology] Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom, 2014)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • [Ecology] Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Bill McKibben, 2010)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/272
  • [Sociology] Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love (Amir Levine, Rachel Heller, 2010)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/304
  • [Chemistry] The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of Americaโ€™s Shining Women (Kate Moore, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/496
  • [Biology] American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise (Joe Drape, 2016)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/304
  • [Technology] Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/400
  • [Astronomy] The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Richard Panek, 2011)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/297
  • [Physics] The Hunt for Vulcan: โ€ฆAnd How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (Thomas Levenson, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/256
  • [Biology] The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben, 2016)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/288
  • [Genetics] A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/304
  • [Physics] The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth (Michio Kaku, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/368
  • [Technology] Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/368
  • [Neurology] Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (Annie Duke, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/464
  • [Medicine] Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (Florence Williams, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • [Technology] Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (Paul Scharre, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/448
  • [Chemistry] Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder – A Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science (James Mahaffey, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/464
  • [Medicine] Pandoraโ€™s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (Paul A. Offit, MD, 2017)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/288
  • [Medicine] Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (Giulia Enders, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/271
  • [Biology] American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (Nate Blakeslee, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/320
  • [Biology] Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, 2016)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • [Biology] The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History (Thor Hanson, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/304
  • [Mathematics] Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • [Medicine] First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Bee Wilson, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • [Medicine] Are u ok?: A Guide to Caring for Your Mental Health (Kati Morton LMFT, 2018)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/256
  • [Medicine] Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (Thomas Hager, 2019)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/320
  • [Physics] The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter (Paul Steinhardt, 2019)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/400
  • [Medicine] The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine (Thomas Morris, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/320
  • [Mathematics] Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (Sabine Hossenfelder, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/304
  • [Neurology] The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (Dan Ariely, 2010)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/334
  • [Medicine] Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (David Quammen, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/592
  • [Economics] Money: The Unauthorized Biography (Felix Martin, 2014)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/336
  • [Physics] The Science of Interstellar (Kip Thorne, 2014)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/336
  • [Ecology] The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Young Readers Edition (Michael Pollan, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/400
  • [Mathematics] Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (Stephen Budiansky, 2016)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/416
  • [Evolution] Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/464
  • [Medicine] Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Serhii Plokhy, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/432
  • [Physics] The Order of Time (Carlo Rovelli, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/256
  • [Sociology] The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Mark Forsyth, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/304
  • [Technology] The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Donald A. Norman, 2013)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/368
  • [Medicine] Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes (Nathan H. Lents, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/256
  • [Ecology] My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (Mary Roach, 2013)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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:

  • ๐Ÿ“–: Paperback
  • ๐Ÿ•ฎ: Hard Cover (Note, this Unicode Glyph doesn’t appear on all platforms)
  • ๐Ÿ’ป: eBook, such as Kindle
  • ๐Ÿ’ฟ: Audiobook, as in Audible
  • ๐Ÿข: 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)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/304
  • [Genetics] Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (George M. Church, Ed Regis, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿข/304
  • [Genetics] Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize (Sean B. Carroll, 2013)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿข/592
  • [Biology] The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldtโ€™s New World (Andrea Wulf, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/496
  • [Evolution] From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Daniel C. Dennett, 2017)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/496
  • [Technology] Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • [Biology] The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species (Carlos Magdalena, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/272
  • [Sociology] Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths, 2016)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/368
  • [Ecology] The Uninhabitable Earth, Life after Warming (David Wallace-Wells, 2019)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/480
  • [Geology] Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History (Lewis Dartnell, 2019)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/320
  • [Geology] The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (Peter Brannen, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/322
  • [Ecology] The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (David George Haskell, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/268
  • [Ecology] The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (David George Haskell, 2017)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/304
  • [Biology] Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live (Rob Dunn, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/323
  • [Genetics] The Gene: An Intimate History (Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2016)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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 10โ€“12 books and then generate our schedule through the summer of 2021โ€”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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿข/352
  • How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • (Fiction) The Witness Paradox: A Time Traveler Anthology (Martin Wilsey, TR Dillon, Jeffrey C. Jacobs, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ปFALSE/246
  • iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way (Steve Wozniak, 2006)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/313
  • How the Mind Works (Steven Pinker, 1998)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/660
  • Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2004)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/336
  • Fear Of Physics: A Guide For The Perplexed (Lawrence M. Krauss, 1993)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/224
  • The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild (Lawrence Anthony, Graham Spence, 2009)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/384
  • Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic (Esther Perel, 2006)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/272
  • The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America (Steven Johnson, 2008)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/272
  • Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, 2006)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/336
  • Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (Michio Kaku, 2004)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/428
  • The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (Amy Stewart, 2004)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/256
  • The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Richard P. Feynman, 1999)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/270
  • Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Mary Roach, 2003)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/303
  • Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Mary Roach, 2005)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/311
  • Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (John McWhorter, 2008)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/230
  • Apollo: The Race to the Moon (Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox, 1989)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/506
  • Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 2002)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/400
  • Song for the Blue Ocean (Carl Safina, 1998)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/458
  • Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (Carl Sagan, 1997)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/244
  • The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Carl Sagan, 2008)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/464
  • [Technology] The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/432
  • [Medicine] The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (Nessa Carey, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/352
  • [Evolution] Lamarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present (Peter Ward, 2018)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿข/288
  • [Biology] Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Jim Al-Khalili, 2017)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/240
  • [Physics] The World According to Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2020)๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/336
  • [Physics] Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2012)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/239
  • [Technology] What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveriesโ€•and Reveal How Todayโ€™s Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World (Jim Al-Khalili, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟFALSE/240
  • [Technology] The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance (Jim Al-Khalili, 2011)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/336
  • [Medicine] Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (Jim Al-Khalili, 2015)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/368
  • [Technology] An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer What’s Next? (Mark Stevenson, 2011)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿข/384
  • [Technology] We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World (Mark Stevenson, 2018)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ปFALSE/304
  • [Physics] Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Max Tegmark, 2014)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/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)๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ•ฎ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ’ฟ๐Ÿข/384

Exhausted but still sapiosexual.

I Am Irate

Google ate me email

From about 2020-03-23T14:30:00Z (10:30 am, Monday) to about 2020-03-23T23:30:00Z (7:30 pm, Monday), Google was redirecting all my email and either bouncing it or deleting it.

I Am Irate
Too angry for words!

Let me repeat, google deleted or bounced my email for Nine Hours, as a part of the setup of my setup for a paid Google Apps account. The setup for these accounts are a bit weird. They require you to create a new google entity with your own company URL. Fortunately, I have multiple domains I own and maintain, including this one, TimeHorse.com.

I probably should have used my writing group domain, RestonWriters.org. After all, the whole reason I wanted to get a paid Google account is because Meetup was moving to Online-Only meetings, following the outbreak of SARS-COV-2, and I needed a tool that allowed for video conferencing.

Skype was a non-starter. For one thing, it’s great for person-to-person communications, but for group chats, it has this annoying habit of muting everyone except the current speaker and you have to wait until that speaker stops to get a word in edgewise. My understanding is WhatsApp has the same problem.

Meetup actually suggested using Google Hangouts or Zoom. I happen to like Zoom. I use it for my regular NPVIC Grassroots strategy meetings and for Toastmasters and it’s always worked great. Zoom does support up to a hundred participants, both free and Pro. The only problem is, each of those Zoom sessions are either limited to the free forty-minute block or are using an up-to-24-hour Zoom Pro Account. Since most of my Meetups are at least an hour, breaking meeting up into forty-minute chunks would be tedious. And, at $14.99 a month, the professional account is well out of my price range.

Just before the first week of Virtual meetings began, my writing colleagues and I, including Elizabeth Hayes, who runs The Hourlings, tested both free Zoom and Google Hangout. Despite being limited to ten people, we decided on Google Hangout and I mapped it to our official Virtual Meeting URL.

Ten people worked fine for Reston Writers and for the Saturday Morning Review. The Saturday Morning Review actually worked out quite well because Meetup, despite suggesting we move to a virtual platform, still won’t let you delete the venue from your event and mark it as virtual, which, when editing events can cause some confusion. But when the Library cancelled all our events, I just deleted them all from the Meetup Calendar, and recreated them with no Venue and just announced them as occurring in Cyberspace.

Stay with me folks, I’m getting to the emailโ€ฆ

As Sunday approached, I new ten participants wouldn’t be enough. Google Hangout would be fine for Bewie Bevy of Brainy Books and Saturday Morning Review, and likely The Science Book Club, as they all usually have fewer than ten participants for each meeting. The Hourlings, on the other hand, often had twelve, and sometimes as many as sixteen!

I new Zoom was $14.99 a month, but I read that Google App accounts could up the number of participants to twenty-five. Unfortunately my 2TB Google Drive account didn’t qualify. I had to get a Google Apps account.

And that’s where my troubles began.

At first, I could only sign up for the $12 per month account, even though I’d read it could be had for $6. Since the setup has a fortnight trial period, I didn’t worry about the financial discrepancy. I set up the account with my business email address for TimeHorse, LLC. I associated it with with that email, it connected to my Gandi Registrar, and my account was ready to go. I created a Google Hangout and assigned it to the Virtual Meeting URL, hoping it would allow twenty-five. The plan was to use it with the Hourlings to verify that fact.

It failed! We still could only get ten people into the meetup despite it being a paid account.

Unfortunately, since Monday I’ve been on Weather and Safety Leave from work because my Telework agreement was revoked, but that’s a story for another day as this post is long as it is! However, it did allow me to speak to Google and they suggested I try Google Meet. Meet was included with all Google App paid accounts, and it would allow for up to a hundred people and could be as long as I needed. Also, I could downgrade to the $6 per month account and I would still be able to use it. I thus downgraded.

We tried it with Reston Writers Review and it worked wonderfully. We had up to twelve connections simultaneously! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

At around 10:30 am, that Monday, after chatting with Google, I was examining my Google Apps account more closely. It was telling me I had one last step I needed to complete: integrate me email with Gmail.

Stop
Stop, do not pass Go. You’re done!

That’s when my troubles began. You see, what this innocuous, turn-key step says it does is it says it sets up GMail for your company. What it actually does is obliterate all the MX Records (email routing information) of your DNS (Internet routing information) Zone File (routing configuration file) on Gandi and replace it with MX Records that point to Google. The setup wizard doesn’t actually tell you this and I’m totally oblivious.

At current writing, I have 188 forwarded email addresses set up on Gandi with their MX Servers. One of those is my business email, the one Google took over and is my Google Apps login. That’s the email google set up as the official email address used in GMail. Once the GMail setup goes through and I send an email from the GMail interface to my personal email address on the timehorse.com domain.

It never arrives. All day long, I watch my email and, strangely, nothing arrives after 10:30 in the morning. I refresh and refresh, and it’s still nothing. Where have all my emails gone?

It’s not until I’m setting up for Reston Writers that I decide to contact Google about this. I’m crazy-busy setting up the Google Meet, opening up the pieces we’d be reviewing on my computer, and, simultaneously, chatting with Google, trying to figure out why I’m not receiving any email.

Eventually, Google Tech Support starts talking about MX Records and a chill runs down my spine. As you probably gathered by now, I am well versed in DNS records and Zone File manipulation. I even have a Python script which updates my DNS A Record when the IP Address for this server changes.

With trepidation, I logged into my Gandi account and saw the damage. Google had modified my Zone file and added a bunch of strange new MX Records pointing to Google. They had nuked all my Gandi Email forward since they’d redirected all email traffic to google. As google only had one account registered on the domain, timehorse.com, namely my business email address, every other email address I possessed was either being deleted or bounced by google!

Fortunately, Gandi’s Email Forwarding page provides a warning when the Zone file doesn’t point to their email server, listing the correct MX Record settings to use Gandi as the mail hosting server. I quickly commented out the Google MX Records and pasted in the Gandi MX Records around 7:30 pm, in the middle of my Reston Writers meeting.

Needless to say, I was miffed that I could not give my full attention to my writers during our weekly writing gettogether. But it’s good I finally did figure out the disastrous actions committed by Google after only nine hours, and not a day or more.

I may never know what was contained in those nine hours of lost emails. I suppose there is one blessing, though. I get too much email already and still have dozens of unread messages I’m desperately trying to catch up on. One Covidapolis, novel-length email after another from every business under the sun. STFU companies, you’re all doing the same thing and I don’t like reading the same message again, and again, and again! You have a plan, that’s all I need to know!

Maybe Google was doing me a favor?

In the end, I was able to solve the problem because I got skills and I’m available for hire!