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Weekend Reads - 171020

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Is Star Trek warping real science? Speaking of Star Trek where are all the aliens? Have they slept in? Maybe they need a watch.

Also this week some strategies on how to read bigger books, read more, and remember more of what you've read.

All very good articles to read this weekend with your favourite beverage.

Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, working with Milan Ćirković of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia and Montenegro, recently offered a new way to link the Fermi Paradox—the odd fact that we’ve never heard from an alien civilization—with matters of computation.

Ultimately, Star Trek presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, it continues to serve as an inspiration for young people to pursue their own dreams of exploration, leading them to rewarding careers in science, technology and engineering. On the other hand, most of the science of Star Trek simply doesn’t make sense: it’s at best a wild extrapolation of what we know, but more often it’s a jumble of technobabble and pure fancy.

Stephen King's IT is a big book. Something like 440,000 words. That's like 75% the length of Atlas Shrugged(561,000 words) or War and Peace (587,000 words). When you’ve read IT, you’ve read almost all of a couple books famous for being ridiculously long.

With the new movie coming out, you might be unsure of your ability to finish IT in time to see the movie and balk at how they left out this and that. Or, you might have some other big-ass book on your nightstand that you'll never finish. I can help you. Follow these steps to read a long book in a short period of time

Warren Buffett is undoubtedly considered one of the greatest investors of all times.

What is  Buffett’s very best investment,  responsible for literally billions of dollars in profits over the years? It was a book. That’s right, a book.

If you consider reading to be fundamental, you're better off sticking to traditional paper books instead of pixelated pages. [Whats your opinion? Do you agree with this article or not?]

It’s hard to trace back the exact origins of the watch bezel’s incorporation into watch functionality, but it likely started around the 1950s (the same decade in which the GMT watch was born). The idea was pretty brilliant in its simplicity: all watches have bezels, so why not use them for something other than simply to surround a watch dial?

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