Newsletter, UIT's Science & Energy books, December 2010

This is a funny book, written in the earthy and irreverent language of the terraces. But it has a serious subtext – about climate change. It's a series of conversations between Joe, a Burnley lad who is football mad, and Professor Igor who's obsessed with climate change. Joe thinks that worrying about climate change is a waste of time. Igor can't understand why 22 grown men would put on shorts and run around after a ball. Igor agrees to spend a season with Joe going to every Burnley game, and in return Joe and his family listen to the Professor rattle on about climate policy.

The book examines why preventing climate change is so difficult, and asks whether it is more a social and political problem than a technological one. Will we have to change our lifestyle? Is new legislation addressing climate change likely to work, or would it be so unpopular with the public that politicians will backtrack? How will industry be affected?

Notes at the back of the book summarize all the serious climate-change material so the reader can look up the important messages in the book without having to stand on the terraces.

Ordering

The book is available in the USA and Canada from The Book Depository although it hasn't yet been published officially in the US.

News

• Inspired by Climate Change for Football Fans, the British Embassy in Budapest organised a unique football match involving climate scientists and sports champions on 10 October at 10 o'clock in Budapest:
  http://ukinhungary.fco.gov.uk/en/news/?view=News&id=23002201

5-Nov-2010: for the second year running, Sustainable Energy is number 2 in The Bookseller's ranking of green books for the past year. It is number 8 in the The Bookseller's "bestselling of all time" green list.

Articles and videos

• California Institute of Technology's (Caltech's) Summer issue of Engineering and Science has an 8-page article by David MacKay, based on his book, and including some new diagrams specific to the USA:
  http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXXIII3/2010_Summer_MacKay.pdf
• There's a new video of David MacKay on The Independent's website:
  http://withouthotair.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-energy-future.html New Energy Future

Bill Gates and SEWTHA

• At this year's TED Conference, Bill Gates spoke about the huge problems of addressing climate change, and referred to and recommended SEWTHA:
  http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
• Subsequently, Bill Gates donated a large number of SEWTHA books for the use of TED staff: The book Bill Gates sent me
  http://libs-spot.blogspot.com/2010/08/book-bill-gates-sent-me_22.html

Appointments, Awards and Honours

• 7-Oct-2010 Included at no. 18 in The Times's Eureka 100 list of people that matter in science.
• 1-Oct-2010 is the first anniversary of David's appointment as Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (“DECC”). Some of his recent work has been on DECC's 2050 calculator tool which lets you explore different energy and emissions scenarios:
  http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk
  which incorporates the information from the book, plus more besides.
• 2010 – elected Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. Autumn 2009 – elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics

Translations

• The Japanese translation of Sustainable Energy is being published this month by Sangyo Tosho in Tokyo. The photo on the left shows David MacKay with the Japanese translator, Prof Katsunori Muraoka.
• Volunteers are working on making translations of the HTML version of the book on David MacKay's site http://www.withouthotair.com Also, publishers from other countries are interested in translating the book into Italian, German, Portuguese, and Russian, though we don't yet have a timescale for publication.
• We have set up mailing lists for people working on translations, so they can coordinate their work:
  http://lists.uit.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sewtha-translators
  The above is a general list for translators irrespective of target language. We'll set up language-specific lists as required.

E-books

• Sustainable Energy is available in Kindle format from Amazon.
• The book is of course still free to download as PDF, in full, for personal non-commercial use, from http://www.withouthotair.com

OpenStreetMap
by Jochen Topf and
Frederik Ramm, with
Steve Chilton.

Typesetting Mathematics
with LaTeX
by Herbert Voss

Practical TCP/IP
by Niall Mansfield

Alternative DNS Servers
by JP Mens

The Joy of X
by Niall Mansfield

The Exim SMTP
Mail Server
Second edition
by Philip Hazel