fabulous book

Will check it out, thanks.

Another interesting one, especially for the machining connoisseur:

-- john, KE5FX

He has worked by Conde Nast, so he can presumably dumb down his output to conform to American tastes.

He's written a few other books which have been well received. One of his books was a New York Times best seller.

An endorsement from John Larkin isn't exactly a compelling reason to buy a book, but this one could be okay.

Shakespeare. Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse were also British, and none of them wrote incohrent blather.

Popular science writing is entertainment. If you seriously want to learn about science, you read rigorous text-books.

You can be entertaining and still accurately convey to your readers the gist of what is going on. British science writing for newspapers isn't great because most of the reporters don't know enough about science. Dutch science writer do better, and the crew that write for New Scientist do just as well, and have been doing well since they first started publishing back in 1956. I've only been a subscriber since the 1980s, though I did read it from time to time before then.

And they faked the result. The heap of parts they presented to be assembled into guns at random was a whole lot more uniform than the bulk of their output.

The did get better, and measuring what they had actually made and sorting it into compatible sets of parts wasn't all that time consuming, but it wasn't what they had promised to deliver.

The guy is an excellent writer and has done an amazing amount of fascinating research. Please don't read it.

Those are my three favorite authors, although Shakespeare should be acted, not read.

That's why I picked them out.

Tell that to the Royal Shakespeare Company who present to large audiences every year. I've never been in an audience who had any trouble picking up on it. I was on their subscription list for most of the time I lived in England, and got to see most of their productions.

The only person here who is delusional is you.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Shakespeare made me move from New Orleans to San Francisco.

Of course the word "fabulous" implies that it is about fables, rather than documented history. If John Larkin doesn't know enough about words to avoid the picking the wrong one, can we trust his book recommendations?

"Reliable book" would be a better recommendation for something that concentrated on the process of making things that were precisely what there were intended to be.

It appears you not as aware of the meaning of "fabulous" as he is.

From:

I had a fabulous time. The weather has been fabulous.

That is the first meaning. You snipped the next one, which is the fundamental meaning from which the first meaning is derived.

fabulous beasts

: told about in a story

a fabulous [=mythical] creature

fabulously rich a fabulously successful executive

Sloman is just here to be hostile. He interprets things in the least imaginative possible way so he can sneer. What a sad weird person.

That is not the mind-set for designing electronics.

That was the first half of the Britannica definition. Ehsir snipped the other half, which precedes his use of the word by about a century - Britannica isn't an etymological dictionary and doesn't go into that. <snip>

John Larkin want to be flattered - he regards anyubody who doesn't bother to flatter him as hostile.

It takes some imagination to envisage a book that is purportedly about precision measurement as being about fables. There are certainly some fables in the business, like the US legend that they were the first to make guns with freely interchangeable parts. Eli Whitney flat-out lied to congress.

As if John Larkin knew what was involved in designing electronics, as opposed to tinkering with a circuit until you get a version which works well enough for you to sell. His own mind-set can be deduced from his unwillingness to discuss how his own circuits might be improved.

He want to be told that they are perfect, and that no improvement of any sort is remotely possible. This is rarely true, but only a few improvements are cost-effective. Design is mostly devoted to making something cheaper, or making something go a bit faster (because the customer needs that) or replacing a part that you can't get any more.

When defining words, imagination is not an asset. Understanding suffers when a multiplicity of definitions is truncated to one.

Just as the phrase 'interprets things' is intended to dismiss a verbatim quote from a dictionary... but hides any real understanding from the reader.

John Larkin defines the word 'fatuous' for us again.

Imagination is always an asset. Look at things from different angles.

It won't hurt you. Try it.

Flyguy has loads of imagination. Present him with a statement,and he imagines that means something rather different which suites him better.

Climate change denialist use their imagination to reinterpret scientific facts in a way that they think justifies their continuing to make money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel.

Proponents of intelligent design use their imagination to reinterpret other scientific facts in equally fatuous ways.

It makes them look stupid, and if we took then seriously it would do a lot of damage.

Imagination is a useful tool, but you really shouldn't rely on it on it's own. Undisciplined flights of fancy really can hurt you if you take them too seriously.

When you're on trial for someone else's felonies, remember (as the prosecution witness takes the stand) that his imagination is always an asset.

That is absolutely true. He ranted about a post I made a few days ago, which was not negative in any way! I guess he sees the world through angry colored glasses.