The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System by David Baker
and Todd Ratcliff. Harvard University Press, 2010 From icy
volcanoes on Neptune to Eiffel Tower–size lightning bolts on
Saturn, the wildest sights in our corner of the universe.
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles
Seife. Viking, 2010 Math can be dangerous in the wrong hands,
argues journalist Charles Seife. The art of using bad math to
prove bogus arguments is what he terms “proofiness,” and it is a
common tactic of politicians, lawyers, advertisers and
scientists. Otherwise intelligent people fall victim to
proofiness for many reasons. One is that we humans excel at
pattern recognition and tend to want to link effects to
causes—even when links do not exist—which is why we struggle to
accept random events, as Seife explains below. “Our minds revolt
at the idea of randomness. Even when a set of data or an image
is entirely chaotic, even when there’s no underlying order to be
found, we still try to construct a framework, a