[ExI] books

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 12:07 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> *The HBO miniseries Chernobyl is what they are viewing this week as we
> sit indoors *


I guess there is no better time than right now to watch good TV and read
good books. I liked the HBO miniseries until it said if the uranium core
melted through the concrete floor and reached the groundwater it would
cause a 4 megaton explosion. In a worse case scenario the explosion would
be equal to about 4 tons of TNT not 4 MILLION tons. And it said Chernobyl
gave up as much radiation every hour as Hiroshima did and that's misleading
at best, the two things are hard to compare. Nearly all the radiation
deaths at Hiroshima were caused not by fallout but by high speed neutrons
in the split second after the blast, and that was not a factor at
Chernobyl. It was a large enough tragedy as it is and there is no need to
exaggerate. The best book on Chernobyl I've read is "Midnight At Chernobyl"
by Adam Higginbotham.

I'm  currently halfway through "Everybody Lies" by Seth Davidowitz and so
far I like it. Other books I've recently read and liked are:

"Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin
"Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" by John McWhorter
"American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
"Algorithms To Live By" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
"The Strangest Man" by Graham Farmelo
"The Universe Speaks in Numbers" by Graham Farmelo
"No Shadow Of a Doubt" by Daniel Kennefick
"Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" by Lee Smolin
"Something Deeply Hidden" by Sean Carroll"
"Until the End Of Time" by Brian Greene
"The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene"
"Shattered Sword" by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully

John K Clark
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