David E. H. Jones (1938–2017)

I got this for my dad for Christmas, and got to flip through it some before I left for home. It's pretty much a compendium of zany ideas that just might work. Suspending a hippie commune in the sky from a methane balloon constantly refilled by photosynthetic bacteria, extracting sound recordings from paintings or pottery made before Edison was even born, propelling ships by causing tornados to form around them, cleaning babies with electrolysis instead of soap, etc.

Many of the ideas are impossible or wrong (tying knots in magnetic fields by tying knots in the magnet and then unraveling it, for instance), but that's not the point. The author knows perfectly well that the ideas won't work. The enjoyment comes from thinking through why they would or wouldn't work, and learning to think critically and skeptically, without resorting to the opposite extreme of pseudo-skepticism.

Some of the ideas work perfectly well, as outlandish as they seem, and have actually been built. We skeptics need to be careful not to get in the habit of rejecting things just because they seem too good to be true at first glance.

In the same vein, the author is also known for designing perpetual motion machines and exhibiting them. Of course they are not really perpetual motion machines. The trick is in figuring out how they actually work without any visible power source.… (more)

The follow up to "The Inventions of Daedalus". Essentially more of the same. A highly entertaining collection of columns with cartoons first published in the science journals Nature & New Scientist. The polymath author (he seems equally at home in hard physics, chemistry, botany, biology, medicine, the lot) presents a number of half-baked ideas for new products, inventions & processes, with the scientific rationale for their feasibility. My favourite is the personal nuclear powered pogo stick! Of course he is English, no other culture treasures its eccentrics like they do.

If you enjoy this book have a look at www.halfbakery.com "A communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users and spanning many topics.".… (more)