Here is a post from my previous blog, Loner's Highway. I was writing about columnist Heather Mallick's review in the Toronto Star of Olivia Laing's book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. I think this should interest most shy people as well as loners, so I'm repeating it here. What interested … Continue reading Lonely in the City? – Maybe Not
What is your Dunbar number?
Do you know about Dunbar's number? A British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, studied the size of stable social groups and concluded in the 1990s that an individual's preferred number of people is 150. Neolithic farming villages supposedly were that size, the basic operating units of armies since Roman times have been and are that size, and … Continue reading What is your Dunbar number?
Selfie 2 – A review of Selfish
Last week I wrote about all the selfie photographers on the Brooklyn Bridge. Yesterday I was browsing shelves in the library when I came upon something that gave me a bit of a shock - Kim Kardashian's 444 page book Selfish. It's not a book about selfishness, not exactly. There is almost no text. What you … Continue reading Selfie 2 – A review of Selfish
Frogs and the Universe
Did you know that frogs can see much farther than us? Much, much farther. In British physicist David Deutsch's 1997 book Fabric of Reality, he discusses the electric torch (flashlight) experiment, where an experimenter gradually backs away from the torch, the light from it becoming fainter and fainter, then he says: Can light really be spread more … Continue reading Frogs and the Universe
Big Bang Basketball
What started the Big Bang?
The Shyness Guide – free PDF excerpt
Because the Kindle ebook is going to be delayed, I have made up a 77 page PDF (from the 289 pages of the new book) that you can download free. This is not an abridgement, but it is much more than the usual sampling you get on books for sale. Read it and you'll come … Continue reading The Shyness Guide – free PDF excerpt
The Big Bang -fact or fiction?
On my previous blog, Loner's Highway, I had many science posts. A lot of shy people are interested in the sciences too, so I'm going to re-post them here. We'll start at the beginning. Something about the "Big Bang" has always bothered me. For decades we've lived with this idea that billions of years ago … Continue reading The Big Bang -fact or fiction?
Alan Conrad 