On his Freedom to Tinker blog, Ed asked readers to send in the “five science and technology books you would have every student read.”  The lists are coming in, but unfortunately for Ed people love to see themselves write as much as they like to hear themselves speak.  Why else would there be blogs?

Now Ed has to figure out how to tally the votes.  The problem is that some people can’t just give a list of five books.  Some have to have ties for second place.  Some refer to other peoples’ lists.  Some give more or fewer than five books.  Because of this it’s not possible to just tally up the votes from the lists and determine the most popular.  Ed has to work harder at it, and maybe do some interpretation.

I ran into a similar problem when a group of friends did a blind champagne taste test.  They were told to rate the bottles, in four categories, from 1 to 5.  Lets ignore the problem of illegible handwriting towards the ends of the ballots.  Some people rated bottles twice.  Some people rated on a scale of 1 to 10.  Some people rated different categories on different scales.  Some just wrote “I like this one.” 

We never could determine the real winner, only make a guess at it.  Tott’s beat out Mumm’s by a tiny amount, and did it at ¼ the price.  But the purpose of this post was for the book lists, so go read them.