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|  | | About the Size of It
About the Size of It is a serious, but seriously funny book about measuring things.
Readers will find out why an old Wellington boot is as important an instrument of spacial awareness as was ever invented; why the size of a space shuttle’s fuel tanks has more to do with the proportions of a horse’s rump than rocket science; and why how tired your ox gets, how much water it takes to drown you, and how much you can hold in one hand while doing something else are all essential principles that explain how man has balanced and judged his world since the dawn of time.
In part a case for the continued use of traditional British measures, this book also celebrates the richness and commonality of systems from around the world, and how they were formed by the one guiding principle of measurement no one ever mentions: that most of us have better things to think about.
Excerpt from About The Size Of It
Shoe sizes, vegetables, and little things
I’ve talked a lot about shoes and boots so far, and how they relate to the width of your hands and the thickness of your thumbs. If you’re sick to the back teeth of them by now you can skip this bit and go onto the next section, because I want to talk a bit more about shoe-sizes and how they work, and, along the way, about cereal crops, and turnips, and how you measure things smaller than your thumb.
You are a shoemaker. Well, maybe you’re not, but let’s imagine that you are. You’ve got a big she | |  | | How to Live Dangerously
A book about how we all ought to stop worrying and start living
Why is it that we worry so much when we are living longer, safer, wealthier lives than ever before? Why do we keep our children indoors, and deny them the freedom that we had when we were growing up. Why are phobias and obsessive disorders on the increase? How to Live Dangerously explains how the world has changed while our brains remain much as they were in the Stone Age, and how the pressures of the modern world and the power of the media trick us into believing that we and our families are under threat.
The book starts off from some of the more unusual fears and obsessions of our |
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Virus X
by Frank Ryan
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 Where do viruses, such as Ebola and HIV, come from and why they are so aggressive? This book changed tenets of evolutionary virology, developing the concepts of aggressive symbiosis and plague culling, which explain much of the horror of plague virus |
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Darwin's Blind Spot
by Frank Ryan
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 The symbiotic pattern of evolution is everywhere and allows us a very different and fascinating window into the way symbiotic viruses work, since all viruses are symbiotic, including those involved in our human reproduction. |
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