Tag Archives: pencils

Two books that I read some or most of

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I read most of this book, Wayfinding: The science and mystery of how humans navigate the world. It came out in 2019, and I started reading it at some point during COVID. I lost interest in the middle of the book, since it started talking about “Dreamtime cartography,” dreaming tracks, and dream songlines from aboriginal cultures in Australia. Then, in the last couple of days, I found the last two or three chapters to be more interesting as the author discusses impacts on global warming, impact of technology like GPS on our wayfinding skills, and a good concluding chapter as an epilogue. I did like the chapters on the wayfinding of cultures in the SE Pacific Islanders and in Northern Canadian native North-Americans. She also did a good job of explaining how the brain worked on wayfinding.

The other book that I will probably never finish is the Pencil: A history of design and circumstance. I had read another book by Henry Petroski, but I just could not get through this one. I do like reading about the history of the pencil, but this was sort of boring. I made it to page 95 out of 434 pages.

Read most of these, but not completely

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Here are some books that I did not quite read 100%.

Eat, poop, die: How animals make our world was interesting, but I could not quite make it past page 110. I learned that collecting whale poop is really difficult. A short description is it “reveals how ecosystems are sculpted and sustained by animals eating, pooping, and dying-and how these fundamental functions could help save us from climate catastrophe.”

I thumbed my way through most of Engineering, design, and construction of portable Newtonian telescopes by Albert Highe, but I did not read it deeply. The author appeared to have some physical disabilities, and that limited him to making telescopes that had less weight for each part of his telescopes. Some of the designs that he covered were well thought out. He made two telescopes of 16 and 20 inches, and they were very light weight. He also covered some different designs that could be used for telescopes in the smaller 8 to 12 inch categories. All of those telescopes used struts of some sort. I got the book because someone in Cloudy Nights wanted to see the engineering data in a mini-CD that was in the back of the book.

I own the book The Pencil: A history of design and circumstance. I’ve got the 1989/1990 hardback version. I had read one of his other books on the Evolution of useful things, so I knew what I was getting myself into. He loves delving into detail and minutiae. In this one, I am stuck at page 86, so we will see if I ever dig deeper in this 434 page tome.

Years ago, I found this book, The Pencil perfect: The untold story of a cultural icon by Caroline Weaver, to be a little more engaging.