Books

An interesting popular geology and paleontology book. Long, but it has a lot of great ideas, I recommend reading it.

Like every good late Baby Boomer, I watched many episodes of the Tee Vee show M*A*S*H. But I hadn’t read the book.

Everybody who’s had kids knows that they love trains. I’ve visited the Colorado Railroad Museum and the Forney Transportation Museum several times because of kids. Both museums have a variety of steam locomotives. The Forney has a partially restored Union Pacific Big Boy.

I ended up wanting to know how locomotives worked, and why they look the way they do. Unfortunately, the emphasis at museums is always on how cool steam locomotives are, or the “gee whiz” factor. None of the museum gift shop books seemed to have this sort of content, tending more towards the stamp collecting aspects (4-8-8-4!).

My lovely wife gave me a book, How Steam Locomotives Really Work by P. W. B. Semmens and A. J. Goldfinch as a present.

This is a 60-year-old reconstruction of an Oviraptor, from Discovering Dinosaurs, by Glenn O Blough, pictures by Gustav Schrotter, copyright 1960 by Glenn O. Blough. Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 60-8020, Weekly Reader Paperback Book Club edition published by arrangements with McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY.

Have you ever read the Narnia books, or have you only read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?

If so, you really ought to read Laura E. Weymouth’s The Light Between Worlds.

Here’s a video (youtube of course) review of both Starship Troopers the movie, and Starship Troopers the book.

It’s long, but worth it.

There’s at least two things that one might conflate under the “Daily Coding Problem” rubric:

• An email list
• A book

They’re related, as the book is a byproduct of the success of the email list. Both are deficient, but for different reasons

The first workable proposal for a space program is apparently Wernher von Braun’s Project Mars. Project Mars is a work of fiction, but it lays out a space program that could probably take humans to Mars with the technology of 1955.

Project Mars didn’t see print until 2006, although it’s technical appendix was published as The Mars Project. in 1953.

This is the book that led me to a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering: