Garth Sundem

I hated it and certain parts or what I would consider missing parts pissed me off. "for men" or "male" should have been added to the title. I think it's ironic that our April tag is strong women and this book was the opposite to that. It was SOOO male focused.

I work in tech. I'm routinely the only women in the meeting and am one of 5 women on my 40 person team. The company I'm a vendor for only has 25% women and my company is even worse. I deal with being a woman living in a man's world and show more have always considered myself a geek. Additionally, after having the chauvinism and challenges of living in this world as part of my daily life, the last thing I want to do is deal with it in a book I'm reading in my free time. I almost stopped reading it but I'm so OCD about finishing books that I've started.

Beyond the fact that there is no rhyme or reason for the order that the random facts, trivia, and opinions are presented in the book. He passed off things as fact when really it was just his opinion. I felt like this was more of a book to present things that he thought was cool. What does making maple syrup have to do with being a geek?!? Back to the male-centric aspect of the book... if you are going to talk about Boy Scout merit badges, levels and things that they do, then why not also provide the same information about Girl Scouts?!? I was in Girl Scouts and was definitely considered a geek for it, but I didn't care. Also, he provided a list of cartoon characters he thought was hot (all women of course) and gave guys tips on how to pick up women.. these tips are easily transferable to both genders to help with socializing with others and not just picking up women.

I think the first 'chapter' that really started my annoyance with this book is the 'Ten Sports Requiring Almost No Physical Exertion'.. it is the first one that made me realize that most of what this guy is saying is his opinion and after that I started taking the rest of the 'facts' with a grain of salt. On his list of 'Ten Sports...' he listed several sports like, NASCAR, Yachting, and Cricket that I know for a fact require physical exertion. There is absolute nothing that backs up his assertion that they don't. His reasoning made me feel like he is just ignorant in a lot of things and states his opinion as fact.

I feel like with a lot of his chapters he tries to be funny and the book is on humor shelves and lists but I think his jokes just fall flat. I thought he was more ignorant and insulting than he was funny. show less

Very disappointing. Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life purports to offer geeks the mathematical tools necessary to adapt to interaction with actual human beings, rather than keyboards. For example, the geek is offered the chance to calculate B (sub win), a dimensionless number predicting whether he should let his boss beat him a golf; E (sub mbarrassed), for whether the geek should let his girlfriend meet his embarrassing family; and L (sub oony) which is supposed to tell show more the geek if he should see a therapist. The fallacies should be obvious: what kind of geek knows how to play golf, much less is good enough to have a chance of beating his boss? What kind of geek has a girlfriend, realizes his family is embarrassing, and is less embarrassing than his family in the first place? What kind of geek is likely to go to a therapist under any circumstances? We’re the ones that are normal, after all.


The equations for romantic relationships are especially ludicrous; for example S (sub cih), the odds that a geek has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a date with a particular lady, is purportedly calculated by a simple cubic equation, with none of the catastrophe theory, endless series, discontinuous functions, and infinitely complex fractal geometry that any geek with the slightest knowledge of the subject knows is necessary for successful computation of success with the opposite sex.


The book includes a calculator embedded in the cover, but it’s an insulting four-function-plus square root version; no logs, trig functions, exponentials, etc. It’s almost as if the author was trying to make fun of geeks rather than help them out. Spend your money on another video game instead. show less

Do you know those couple of pages near the beginning of most magazines -- the pages that present the short, entertaining and/or newsy snippets that you gobble up before moving on to the feature articles? Brain Candy by Garth Sundem is like 200 of those pages -- a collection of hundreds of puzzles, games, research-study snippets, and miscellaneous quotations and trivia.

It’s fun, and my only quibbles concern the layout. It’s often difficult to tell if a snippet ends or is continued (e.g. show more after a sidebar or page break). And while there’s an Answers section and a References section (pointing interested readers to the original sources, usually a magazine or journal article) at the back, they’re only cross-referenced to the main text by snippet title, not page number. It was a mess to find anything until I resorted to using three bookmarks.

The book is definitely candy -- fun, curious, and more sensational-headline than explanatory-substance. But it’s Mensa-quality candy, and it’s as clever as the best shorts from three of my favorite magazines: Games, Mental Floss, and New Scientist.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less

This is an entertaining way to educate yourself and exercise your brain at the same time. Not only are there tidbits about the history of brain science, but also puzzles, brain teasers, personality tests, random definitions of random phobias, and more.

Yeah, there’s really not much more to the book than that.

The Response
I picked up the ARC for this at San Diego ComicCon because it looked like something that was way totally different than what I normally read, and yet it looked like so much show more fun. And then I knew I would get a kick out of this book from the point in the introduction when the author said, “… but before you take the blogosphere like a winged monkey…” Not only did this give me a flavour of what was to come, I think it shows that he gets who his main audience will probably be.

So, the book starts off with a bit of history on brain science – and information on some of the first neuro-surgeries, going back to around 3500 BC. And I don’t even know how to describe how this is organized, because basically every little topic is about 250 words long, and some of them are related to the others around it, but others just seem a little out of place.

Anyway, there are puzzles interspersed in the book! Mazes, brain teasers, patterns to recognize, all sorts of things to make your brain think – and those were a lot of fun to figure out. And there was some handwriting analysis (even Jane Austen’s handwriting was involved).

And then of course there are random facts about everything. For example, did you know that Parkinson’s disease is due to dopamine neurons in the midbrain dying? Or the fact that, statistically speaking, jocks get better grades in school than nerds? Apparently it’s because of grooming habits, not just because of looks or study habits. Go figure, eh?

This book, entertaining as it was, felt about 50 pages too long. Yes there was a lot of interesting stuff, but… the format got a little old a little quickly. Actually, if I didn’t read it straight through, it probably wouldn’t have felt like it was getting old. So perhaps I just should’ve read a couple of sections, put it aside for a while, then come back to it. (I am, however, trying to actually get the TBR quite a bit smaller before the end of the year, and being in the middle of a whole bunch of books at the same time would not, sadly, help with that.)

The Bottom Line
Entertaining and informative in one? Is that possible? Apparently, yes. People who like trivia about random subjects would enjoy this book, though I would recommend spreading out the reading and not going through the whole book at once. show less