Book Review: The Universe In A Nutshell

I picked The Universe in a Nutshell an audiobook and listened to it during my commute. It's Hawking's more accessible overview of astrophysics and it's history.

It's a fun and accessible read for those that have an interest in the subject matter, but aren't well versed on it (or have let their knowledge atrophy). I don't think I'd recommend it as an audiobook for commutes though. For one, it's not exactly concentration-free. Secondly, he refers to the occasional diagram which of course you can't see.

There are a couple sections of the book where he talks about thought-trends in the scientific community and how often they fall by the wayside for the next big thing. For a field with a storied history, you'd think they'd learn that their history indicates that each idea has a high probability of not being "the final theory". Kind of reminded me of our own obsession with whatever the current 'big thing' is (microtransactions, facebook, etc).

Fantastic Distraction

I showed the twins (aged 5) Fantastic Contraption, and they LOVED it. Tom especially so. I was surprised how many levels they made it through without any help from dad.

I feel far better about letting them spend three straight hours playing with this than I do about a 30 minute span on the infernal webkinz site.

[On a related note, I can't beleive how quickly the kids pick up computer navigation skills. The other day Tom told his mom in the car, "when we get home, I'm going to look on the computer for some crafts to do because it's a rainy day.". Alisa asked him how to do that and he replied, singing like the Yahoo jingle, "GOO-GLE!". She then asked him what that was, and he answered "you type w-w-w-DOT-COM-DOT-GOOGLE, and then type in the box what you want to find. I'm going to type 'kids crafts'". Holy crap. Probably time I have a talk with them about what not to type into a browser, etc.]