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Geekspeak: A Guide to Answering the Unanswerable, Making Sense of the Nonsensical, and Solving the Unsolvable
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Author
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Graham Tattersall.
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Publisher
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Harper Perennial
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Format
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paperback
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Product Dimensions
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8
x
5.3
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0.6
inches
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ISBN
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9780061626784
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Pages/Publication Date
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239/2010
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Daedalus Item Code
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21136
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This item is not available.
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Description
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As a species, humans are prone to ruminate, reflect, cogitate, mull over, and philosophize. Why? Maybe to answer the unanswerable: Why are we here? Is there a God? Is there life after death? And how many houseflies would it take to pull a car? British engineer Graham Tattersall, a confirmed geek, here rescues math from the dusty textbook and puts it to use in novel ways, answering such questions as: How big is your vocabulary? How heavy is your house? Do the dead outnumber the living? And what are the best words to use in a personal ad? Along the way, he teaches you more than you might expect about math. "Although whimsical in presentation, this popular-interest math book has the serious goal of encouraging independent thinking about issues in the news that have an underlying mathematical component, such as energy and sea-level rise.... If one wonders whether graveyards will fill up; or if wind power is the panacea to energy problems; or if an accident is statistically significant, Tattersall reminds his readers of the means they latently possess to figure things out for themselves rather than passively accepting experts’ pronouncements."—Booklist
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