Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe Watcher

by Martin Gardner

Hardcover, 1996

Status

Available

Call number

081 Gar

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Prometheus Books (1996), 260 pages

Description

At a time when popular knowledge of basic science has sunk to a new low and books promoting angels, parapsychology, and bizarre forms of medicine and healing outnumber skeptical books by more than a thousand to one, Americans need a voice of sanity. Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic introduces readers to mind-wrenching probability paradoxes, recent attacks on the Big Bang Theory, and Marianne Williamson's success promoting The Course of Miracles, which is said to have been channeled by Jesus. Other columns address E-prime, a language that omits all forms of the verb "to be"; Norman Vincent Peale's beliefs in the paranormal; repressed memory therapy; science blunders by famous writers; the influence of Transcendental Meditation on the career of Doug Henning; a critique of "Klingon" and other artificial languages; and much more.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Devil_llama

When Gardner speaks, you can be sure that you aren’t going to hear pseudoscientific nonsense vomited into the great black abyss of popular culture; instead, you are going to get a solid defense of critical thinking and the scientific method, ranging from astronomy and mathematics to literature

and music. There are some weaknesses in some of these compilations, but the strong links are holding up well in spite of axiomatic expectations. In this particular compilation, the weak links were mostly book reviews he’d written in the 1990s, many of which were probably very interesting at the time, but are much less interesting now.

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LibraryThing member ritaer

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