dunno how many of you read books these days....

Like the title states, I'm not sure how many people still read books on the regular.

However, if you do, perhaps you'll enjoy some of my favorites that I just got through in the last two weeks.

Stiff: The curious case of human cadavers.
this book goes through EVERYTHING about donating your body to science. all the different uses your different organs, limbs, and whole bodies can do to save lives and improve surgeries. It's written by someone who has an unbelievably insatiable curiousity about what happens to all the people that chose not to be buried, but used post mortem to help society.

Shes funny, and respectful.

Some of the chapters titles are :
*The cadaver that joined the army, the sticky ethics of bullets and bombs.
*A Head is a terrible thing to waste: practicing surgery on the dead
*Crimes of Anatomy: Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection
*Dead Man Driving: Human Crash test doubles: and the ghastly but necessary science of impact tolerance...

theres only 300 pages, its quick and easy. and unbelievably FASCINATING, im totally donating my body to science.

___________________________

The other one is The THIRD chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond. Its' about the scientific struggle to reclassify homo sapiens into the class PAN, like pan-pan and pan paniscus, which are your bonobo and chimpanzee..

Most of you have never heard of the Bonobo, but they are more closely related to us than chimps are. We can use their blood for transfusions, and their organs for transplants without fear of rejection. They are 98.9% the same as us, as opposed to chimps which are around 97.1%.

Whats the major difference? They have less hair on their arms and faces. they stand up right about 20% more than your average chimp.... aaaaand they fuck their brains out instead of getting in fights.

They fuck ALLLLL the time. male male, male female, female female, orgies. . . They do this istead of fighting and killing each other like chimps do.

At any rate. It goes through the evolution of our species. And the argument of a reclassifcation of ourselves and what that means.

I'm a huge bio nerd so i found this book AWESOME... but i know it won't appeal to most.

it even goes in to speculate how we may change over time given our current trends of reduced labor, and increasing technology.

Most of you would much prefer the other one.

I watched a video clip today on Susan Savage-Rumbaugh and her work with the Bonobo (particularly Kanzi), it was neat to watch him light a fire with a lighter and then roast marshmallows over it.

Books, hmm, lesee... Just started The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome. Just finished Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy and Napoleon's Wars: An International History, 1803-1815. Sometime before that was A Brief History of the Human Race

All great reads, but the best I've read in the past year has been Africa: A Biography of the Continent. Incredibly readable tome that makes accessible subjects like early tectonic plate formation, human biological and social evolution, slavery, European colonial history etc, and even how freaking amazing camels are despite the fact that they would probably have been long extinct without our domestication.

Other than that, no, I don't read much...

ive read most of the chuck planuik inventroy for the mst part that is all ivee ready recently

Oh, dammit, and I can't believe I forgot the one before Napoleon that I really couldn't put down, The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg. If you really want to see how completely fucked up people can make things, early 20th century Europe is a great place.

Hmm, I'm noticing that my books have even more dead people than Harley's first, and significantly fewer tri-sexual monkeys than her second...

Somehow I'm feeling that that speaks more poorly of me than it does her.

lol, i read choke, and of course fight club... (chuck) the ending to the movie isnt the same as the book. both very strange entertainment venues.

good to know some one has heard of bonobos, most people stare at me like im nuts.

and yay people read. my co-horts make fun of me endlessly for reading so much

yeah... i was sittin in the bathtub the other night, candles everywhere, bath salts, vivaldi in the background... .... and i also had a glass of scotch, a blunt, and i was reading the line " flies lay their eggs on the bodys points of entry, the eyes, mouth, open wounds, and genetalia... Unlike the older and larger haciendas (maggots); the smaller haciendas cannot eat through the flesh, and to me they look like squirming grains of rice embedded into translucent sloughing flesh"

(the authors description of her trip to nashvilles forensics research center where they lay bodies out to rot to find out what chemicals are produced when to approximate times of death)

and i realized i was a bit different...

I love to read, it's probably one of my favorite pastimes. I can't think of the title now off the top of my head but I just finished a psychology text about the relative uselessness of adolescence. I'll have to go find it in my room and give you the title, it was quite interesting, definitely worth reading.

harleyquinn wrote:

lol, i read choke, and of course fight club... (chuck) the ending to the movie isnt the same as the book. both very strange entertainment venues.

good to know some one has heard of bonobos, most people stare at me like im nuts.

and yay people read. my co-horts make fun of me endlessly for reading so much

i like lullaby fight club rant and survior i want to read pygmy but i havent been able to pay for a signd copy from his website darn.

Another really good one is; The Elegant Universe, by Briane Greene. Its about string theory, how it developed, and the quest to meld together the two super sciences, quantum and general relativity. <3 astronomy. I thought I wanted to be a physics major until i saw I had to take a class called the analysis of quantum differentials... I like to think of myself as not retarded... but alas I am no math genius either... so I've stuck to epigenetics


fascinating book, its pretty easy to understand even if you don't look into this stuff much.

An even better book for people just starting to research the area, is actually stephen hawking... he's dryly funny, and explains things better than green does. And theres pictures

harleyquinn wrote:

Its about string theory, how it developed, and the quest to meld together the two super sciences, quantum and general relativity.

...

its pretty easy to understand even if you don't look into this stuff much.

Nope, I'm just not going to believe that both of those two statements are true...

Hawking rules. Loved reading his Brief History of Time back in the early 90's, even if it did take me six months to read it.

he now has "A Briefer History of Time" its pretty awesome.

Ugh what are these rolling papers with text you speak of?

Mr.Kilo wrote:

Ugh what are these rolling papers with text you speak of?

you wouldnt wanna smoke that shit....


funny enough, ya know those blank pages at the end of bibles? that are thin as tissue paper??? yeah.... when i was 14 i used one of those..


ooowwwww.... LOL

Just when I thought I'd heard it all. Bible blunts ftw. :study:

i read all the time. picked up dawkins latest book the greatest show on earth, like all of his books, on evolution, and 4 books by ian mcdonald...whom i've never read, but just scanning one, i figured it was pretty good stuff...and i've got a thing for trade paperbacks so...

just finished a small book the river out of eden, by dawkins which i'd recommend, a book on kruschev which didn't do much for me, and and a book on stalin which was interesting. and the latest 40k book...of course. it's my literary junkfood.

if you liked brief history of time and elegant universe you'll f'ing love bill bryson-a short history of nearly everything, it's fun and smart at the same time.

im so happy my fellow clan mates read, i had no idea.

ive heard of that book, i went looking for it a couple weeks ago, and couldnt find it at barnes n noble, so instead i got "your inner fish" a book about evolution. i only got half way thru it and lost it somewhere

ill have to renew my search for a short history of nearly everything

thank you sir for the recommendation.

stalin is a very interesting person... very strange person

and speaking of strange people and biograpbies...

pick up a caligula book, now that was a warped person

and btw, richard dawkins PWNS

i first fell in love with the man when i saw a you tube video of him pwning this stupid girl who was like "so what if you're wrong?" obviously just trying to push his buttons, and he replied so smooth and collected it was awesome.

"That's an educational disgrace"

well. i can really recommend the ian mcdonald books too. i finally got some time to read a bit yesterday. i keep a book in the car to read when i eat, and brasyl is great. i'm reading desolation road at home, same author, and it's pretty sweet too. i get really happy when i find an author i haven't read before.

steven jay gould the scientist (steven gould is a different person that writes sci-fi) is a must read too, harder (for me) to read than dawkins, but my interests are purely evolutionary biology, which he's a master at explaining..i suck at math and he does use a little (not much...i just really suck).

Dawkins sometimes get pretty deep into an area i don't care about, although i can't deny a vicarious pleasure when he pimp slaps irreducible complexity and other silly thoughts.

i know all about stephen jay gould, hes one of my heros, i read "hens teeth and horses toes" a while back and never stopped reading his stuff since.

i wanted to get duel masters in evolutionary sciences and neural plasticity/neuro-anatomy/neuro-chemistry wasnt sure yet... .... but its proving difficult to get the finances together to get just one of them....

dawkins can be hard to follow during lectures hes not fully prepared for, he kind of loses where he is sometimes, but his books have always captivated me.

harley-i wouldn't worry about getting the latest dawkins book first thing... read a few pages and i think you'll agree...reads like a childrens book. i think he dumbsized it overmuch for the masses, but really settled on lowest common denominator. it's friendly at least, but i'll pick douglas adams any day if i want a happy feeling. on the other hand, i can wholeheartedly recommend the ian macdonald guy...i guess i bought 5 books at the same time, only one left and they've all been different and great. only other book i've been reading ...backup exec 12.5 admins guide...it was a thriller. can't wait for the sequel. or a study that conclusively proves too much of this stuff makes you sterile. either or.

hey, just saw this post.

i havent been online in like forever

i keep coming to game when no one else is online...

and yeah, i agree, dawkins was trying to reach out to the general public with the book the greatest show on earth.

however his book the extended phenotype was pretty decent.

i got a weird book called a genie in your genes...

its about epigentics...kind of

i am holding back my review of that book until the end. its written by a doctor, but he is very into new agey science. very much divulging how you think and how you feel effects your genes and the overall chemistry in your body... mond body connection kind of stuff. im not really into that kind if thing, ive always scoffed at it. but i will give it a chance seeing as they do seem to know what they are talking about when it comes to how the dna coding is constantly changing and how/why.

anyways, ill be posting on this link alot as i go through my like..... 28 books ive got