Read Books This will provide a list of the books I've read with a brief review. Users are blocked, contact me for access. I welcome discussions, but I'm tired of spam.

This book is mostly a study of three cases of vision disorders. The book explores the effects of the degenerative disease in terms of brain function and vision loss, and the coping strategies of the people suffering the loss. One of the studies follows a person who actually feels he benefited from his vision loss.

I had hoped it would explore the neuroscience side of the issues more. The details are still interesting, although the studies seemed to get long and repetitive. The final chapter of the book does discuss the neuroscience more.

Generally, I didn’t think this book was as good as some of his previous works. This isn’t one I’d recommend to the average person.

The book discusses the acceleration of man’s culture, society, and technology. He explores many aspects of these, their relation to history and trends for the future. He tends to back up his ideas with a lot of data. He addresses many problems current society faces and extrapolates his philosophies for their future prospects.

He breaks his ideas into six forces that forge society: animal learning, externalized learning, social connections, knowledge platforms, scientific problem-solving, and global diffusion.

Too much of the book was devoted to setup. The first part of the book is long and tedious. The majority of the book is interesting and provides good food for thought.

Although the ideas seemed well researched, I felt he was overly optimistic and even dismissive of many ideas. For instance, he dismisses global warming with the statement “If the current trend in public opinion holds [we] will soon take steps to reduce emissions.” I several topics he seem either naive or to have a poor understanding of the issue.

Even with the shortcomings, the book was interesting and presents some interesting ideas.

Mark Changizi is proposing a new origin of vision and how we see. It moves the emphasis from food to socializing. He proposes that vision provides us with six super powers: telepathy, x-ray vision, future vision, and spirit reading. Cool, huh? Ok, they are really a bit more mundane than that, especially since we use them on a regular basis.

In more ordinary terms, we have telepathy from our ability to read each other. Our color vision has its greatest response range around the areas of our skin involving blood flow. We can tell the oxygenation levels and blood volume by subtle changes in skin color. These changes correspond to health and basic brain activity.

We have x-ray vision by virtue of our binocular vision. When we have a leafy environment close to us, our brain combines two images from our eyes and is able to remove the leaves from our view. He argues that animals from leavy environments are more likely to have forward-facing eyes, and that animals larger than the size of leaves and grasses are also more likely to have forward-facing eyes.

In a similar vein he explains future vision and spirit reading. In all cases, you understand why this ability is special, and why it is also ordinary. He backs his theory up well with data and interesting trivial.

He also uses his theory to explain a variety of visual illusions. These are primarily related to our future vision. He makes very good arguments and demonstrates a number of different classes of illusion.

The book is fascinating and a very good read for anyone interested in vision, physiology, or psychology.

Laurence Krauss is a theoretical physicist doing work in cosmology and teaching at the Arizona State University. He is doing research into the nature of General Relativity, dark matter, and nuclear physics. In this book, he discusses the beginning and end of the universe, bringing to light the current theories as to why there is anything, why the physical laws are as they are, and what will come of it all.

He does a good job of discussing complex physics in terms that anyone can understand. The book goes into details about how empty space has energy and its consequences, touching on string theory, extra dimensions. Dr. Krauss walks us through his argument on why nothing is unstable, so there must be something. Its enough to warp the mind!

The book is entertaining and enlightening. You will walk away with a better understanding of our universe, even if it doesn’t have practical applications.