Sign in with Facebook
Brian’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Brian’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Brian Clegg’s Followers (3,250)
288 books
|
83 friends
1,758 books
|
182 friends
966 books
|
192 friends
471 books
|
2,582 friends
505 books
|
306 friends
297 books
|
734 friends
360 books
|
237 friends
485 books
|
34 friends
More friends…
Brian Clegg
Goodreads Author
Born
in Rochdale, The United Kingdom
Website
Twitter
Genre
Member Since
August 2011
URL
https://www.goodreads.com/brianclegg
More books by Brian Clegg…
Did Eliza do little?
When I first worked professionally with computers, programming Dec-10s in the 1970s, we had two particularly popular pieces of non-business software. One was a multiplayer Star Trek game, and the other was a version of ELIZA. This was a proto-chatbot, dating back to the mid-1960s.
Although the code of ELIZA was relatively simple and restricted, in part because of the open question approach of Roger
Read more of this blog post »
Brian’s Recent Updates
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book it was amazing
|
|
|
This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to ...more |
|
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book really liked it
|
|
| It can be difficult to come up with a new and different way to look at basic science - but Trisha Muro manages this by using the applications of a whole list of satellites and probes to illustrate basics of physics. This could have got messy, but Mur ...more | |
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book liked it
|
|
| Having recently re-read a classic in Neuromancer, a friend asked if I'd come across Macroscope (which I hadn't). Dating back to 1969, it's very much a period piece. It reinforces my view of Piers Anthony as capable of coming up with interesting and d ...more | |
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book it was ok
|
|
|
It's a truism that we now live in a 'me' world, where many people have a toxic inward-looking attitude that is all about self-fulfilment and 'my truth' rather rather than worrying to much about facts, reality and making things happen. Climate books co ...more |
|
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book it was amazing
|
|
| I recently reviewed a Lovejoy omnibus, bemoaning the fact that in a world of boilerplate crime novels we rarely get books like those that are genuinely different. Thanks to the AI detective Lock in this series, Jo Callaghan is a shining example of th ...more | |
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book really liked it
|
|
| Inspired by rediscovering the old Lovejoy TV series from the 1980s it seemed a good time to revisit the original novels. Sad to say, Jonathan Gash’s books are almost all out of print, which is a shame. I started with this omnibus of his books: The Fi ...more | |
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book it was amazing
|
|
| Of all the big name IT people, none is revered in quite the same way as Steve Jobs was by Apple fans. But it's easy to forget that for a formative period in his career, Jobs was pushed out of Apple, starting NeXT, a startup to produce high power work ...more | |
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book really liked it
|
|
| In the fourth of his inter-war Rachel Savernake mysteries, Martin Edwards doesn’t disappoint - he continues the series well, though the book doesn’t have quite the same drive as some of the earlier novels. We’re back with the mysterious, rich Rachel, ...more | |
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book it was amazing
|
|
| The science behind climate change has been well covered, including in Bill McGuire's own Hothouse Earth, but I've not before seen a book that doesn't just use model predictions, but looks back at what we know about the state of the climate in differe ...more | |
|
Brian Clegg
rated a book it was amazing
|
|
| This is the latest book in what’s already the most meta series of detective stories ever - and Anthony Horowitz cranks the meta-ness up to a new level. The initial conceit is that the series is not fiction, but rather Horowitz working with a former p ...more | |
“Newton’s law of gravitation. That’s all you need (with a spot of calculus to crunch the numbers) to work out how the Earth will orbit the Sun or how an apple will fall if you let it go at a certain height. The only trouble is that Newton had no idea how this gravity thing worked. His model was simply: ‘There is an attraction between bits of stuff, and let’s not bother about why.”
― Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe
― Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe
“Famously, Einstein said that his ‘happiest thought’ occurred here: ‘I was sitting in a chair in the Patent Office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled.’ By thinking of someone falling, for example in a plummeting lift, Einstein had realised that it was impossible to distinguish acceleration and the pull of gravity. And working through the mathematical implications of this made it clear that gravity was an effect that could be produced by a distortion of space and time.”
― Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe
― Gravitational Waves: How Einstein's spacetime ripples reveal the secrets of the universe
“The year 1992 should have been remembered as the 700th anniversary of the death of a man who changed the world. Yet the occasion passed without note. Few know of the remarkable achievements of someone who, more than any other, can be said to have invented science.”
― Roger Bacon: The First Scientist
― Roger Bacon: The First Scientist
Topics Mentioning This Author
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
The Seasonal Read...:
Fall Challenge 2012: Completed Tasks - DO NOT DELETE ANY POSTS IN THIS TOPIC
|
2291 | 757 | Dec 28, 2012 03:29PM | |
|
The Seasonal Read...:
Fall Challenge 2015: Completed Tasks (DO NOT DELETE POSTS)
|
3254 | 608 | Nov 30, 2015 09:01PM | |
| The History Book ...: DAVE K'S 50 BOOKS READ IN 2016 | 113 | 105 | Dec 28, 2016 11:10AM | |
|
Cozy Mysteries :
Title and Author game, Round 3
|
13653 | 562 | Apr 03, 2017 09:53AM | |
|
The History Book ...:
*
FILM HISTORY - PART ONE
|
621 | 493 | Jan 24, 2019 05:01AM | |
|
Cozy Mysteries :
Title and Author game, Round 5
|
7285 | 331 | May 14, 2020 09:14PM | |
| The History Book ...: MEDIEVAL SCIENCE | 46 | 287 | Nov 25, 2021 02:21AM | |
| Goodreads Librari...: Clean up XV | 953 | 942 | Aug 24, 2023 02:50PM | |
| Book Nook Cafe: Deborah's 100 Book Challenge - 2023 | 383 | 55 | Jan 07, 2024 06:30AM |
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 328137 members
— last activity 1 minute ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
