My wife knows me too darned well.
She works at Barnes & Noble, where they get advanced reading copies of books. (drool…drool…) As soon as she picked up “The Measure of All Things” by Ken Adler, she knew it was for me.
The book is about two Frenchmen–Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain–who were commissioned to survey a path from Dunkirk to Barcelona as part of the creation and perfection of the metric system. What the author discovered, however, is that Mechain made an error in his calculations and that Delambre covered it up after the former’s death. Juicy AND geeky…can’t wait to read it.