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Doc Kinne

kinnerc@bookrastinating.com

Joined 1 year, 3 months ago

Reading is life. I understand aliens more than I understand a human being over the age of 20 that cannot read. Post graduate reading level in the 7th grade. Love it!

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Doc Kinne's books

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Why people believe weird things : pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time 5 stars

A Glass of Water in the Desert!

5 stars

So, I'm finally done with Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things." It was, truth to tell, a tour-de-force.

The book prefaces with his experiences on Donahue and Oprah (face it, if you host a daytime TV talk show, you're part of the problem). He then goes into what skepticism is, the difference between scence and psudoscience, and then concludes Part One with a list of falilices that lead us to believe incorrect things.

Part Two deals with psudoscience and superstitions, focusing on the paranormal (ghosts, psychics, religion), near death experiences, aliens, and ancient and modern witch crazes. All of Part 2 works out well.

Part Three tears creationism and "creationist-science" a new one.

Part Four - probably the slowest part of the book, at least for me - concentrates on history and psudohistory, using Holocaust revision as an excellent example of psudohistory. He goes through why it's psudohistory and …

The Friendly Orange Glow (2017) 4 stars

At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even …

An Amazing History That Never Mattered...

4 stars

The book is good and complete. However, in the end, it is probably the saddest computer book I've ever read.

It is amazing what the PLATO system started - both in software and culture - in almost all ways at least several years before anyone else. But no one ever heard about it. It's ideas never got out, never got noticed by the mainstream.

We all tend to believe that inventors are singular people. How would the world be different without Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? PLATO show us that the world probably wouldn't be different. We would just have different names attached to the things we already largely know.

Still an amazing history.

Very Nice Heavily Photographed History

4 stars

Fish has a nice writing style. The book is very heavily laden with photographs, which in this context is a very big plus! Finally, the book is recent enough that Fish was able to touch on the "Gamer's Gate" and gender issues within the gaming culture; the first book I've seen that has been able to do that.

Recommended!

The Google Story (2005) 1 star

The Google Story is a book by David Vise and Mark Malseed that takes an …

A "Rah! Rah! History" of Google

1 star

I rarely give out 1-star reviews. Talk about a rollercoaster over the last couple of days!

The book's introduction was an insipid and fawning beginning of the history of the company. I moved to the 1st chapter hoping that it would even out.

It didn't.

I stopped reading. :(

Androids (Paperback, 2022, No Starch Press, Incorporated) 5 stars

In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software but couldn't get …

One of the Best Computer History Books Written

5 stars

I can count the number of 5-star reviews I've given on one hand. I've not enjoyed a computer history book this much since "Defying Gravity: The Making of the Newton" nearly 30 years ago.

Haase is a sparkling writer who has made the footnote into an educational and comedic art form.

Read this. Now!

A Grounded Book on a High Flying Subject

4 stars

It's amazing what you forget in 40 years, I guess, even with a book that was an important part of my childhood. In the end, it was a new book to me.

What I loved about it was Fuller's actual journalism. He didn't sensationalize. He reported. He did give opinions at times, yes, but they were clearly labeled as such. There are things he disagreed with in the course of his investigation (the USAF position), and I thought he took the possibility of UFOs being alien craft, in the end, too lightly, but all in all this was a more grounded book on the subject than any I've read or looked at this century.

Dated, but recommended.