David vs Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, rating: 7/10

You will find detractors for Malcolm Gladwell, but I find that he does write well and on interesting topics.

In this particular book, I learned a few things.
 
Being disagreeable can be an indicator of success. But you don't tend to be disagreeable unless you've had some hardships in life. (You could be disagreeable because you are a spoiled brat though.)

The other thing is roughly about police state and the legitimacy of authority. When the police state has no legitimacy, you would get rioting and resistance. Gladwell spends a couple chapters on this related to Northern Ireland.

There were a few other more points made, which though I had never really thought about them, they do seem rather more obvious:

Chasing Ice (2013) rating: 8/10

About climate change. A photographer captures time lapse of glaciers retreating in Iceland, Greenland and Alaska. In a rush? Skip to about the one hour mark for some spectacular calving.

But what to do? Conserve energy. Encourage a carbon tax.

Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, rating: 7/10

The most valuable part of the book is the description of elements of improving creativity.

Having a more dominant right hemisphere of the brain is one thing that might not be altered (does a lefty automatically have an advantage here?). Being in a good mood could also be difficult to contrive.

But working in a blue room is condition which could be effected. So is having an environment encouraging lack of inhibition, yet allowing criticism of others, and featuring interaction with experts in various other fields. Just pretending oneself not to be an expert in a field is an interesting trick (prevents rejecting ideas out of hand).

Meanwhile the reader is treated to the secrets of the creative successes of Pixar, 3M and even Shakespeare.

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August 2012: It appears Lehrer made up Bob Dylan quotes in the book.  I wonder why he would do that.  To spice it up, I guess.  How did he think it would get away with it?

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins

My favorite (warning: spoiler) passage:

Shooting the messenger is one of humanity's sillier foibles, and it underlies a good slice of the opposition to evolution that I mentioned... 'Teach children that they are animals, and they'll behave like animals.' Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality, that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false. It is quite astonishing how many people cannot grasp this simple point of logic. The fallacy is so common it even has a name, the argumentum ad consequentiam - X is true (or false) because of how much I like (or dislike) its consequences.

I would add in the case of the hypothesis of God (a name for religion), the life after death or 'Heaven' is the consequence that people so want to be true that they ignore all other contrary information including evidence for evolution.

I've learned a few things from this book despite having some knowledge about evolution already:

1. Evolution has been observed to happen in experiments conducted on bacteria and animals. That bacteria has been observed to evolve should be expected. Bacteria grow very quickly and have new generations over a short period of time. But animals generally reproduce more slowly. In experiments, lizards were brought from one island to another, and guppies from one stream to another. Both animals were observed to evolve to better adapt to the environment even over the relatively few generations compared to those observed in bacteria.
   
2. In embryology, how do cells which are dividing specialize into different parts of the body? The answer is simple, they don't divide evenly. One daughter cell gets certain parts of the mother cell and the other daughter cells gets other parts. How does this relate to evolution? It shows how the DNA recipe is used to determine ultimate shape and function of an animal's body. I.e. relating to genetics and passing of characteristics from one generation to another.
3. How continental drift works is by creation of rock generally in the middle of oceans and consumption of rocks usually at the other side of the continent. (Actually, I knew this, but forgot some details.) This relates to evolution by explaining why South America and Africa have similar fossils because they were once attached.
   
4. Using radioactive decay of several different isotopes, scientists determined the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. (I knew that scientists had determined this, but didn't remember how.) This relates to refuting creationist belief that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
5. There is substantial fossil evidence linking humans to apes, but fossils are not required to prove that evolution happens (see item #1).
   

But while this book is written to preach to the choir, I would like to think that a relatively open minded non-dogmatic moderate religious person could open this book and be somewhat persuaded. I could be wrong about that, but to my religious friends I propose my usual experiment, read the book and see if you found the needle moved in any way towards belief of evolution.