jdupuis | December 8, 2009A few nice items from the Canadian book industry magazine, Quill & Quire:
Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin
Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds by Trevor Herriot
Slow Death by Robber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, with Sarah Dopp
jdupuis | December 7, 2009A nice selection from the Financial Times, spread across a few categories.
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by PW Singer
Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristram Stuart
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean Carroll
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
Seasons of Life: The Biological Rhythms That Living Things Need to Thrive and Survive by Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman…
jdupuis | December 7, 2009Thanks to SciBling Ed Brayton for bringing to my attention Fergie's blistering duet with Mick Jagger on The Stones' Gimme Shelter. U2 is the back up band. The Youtube is here. Mick Jagger also sings. Fergie, for those that don't know, is the singer for the Black Eyed Peas
Jagger and Fergie are both great, but U2 somehow misses the propulsive menace of the original.
And frankly, Fergie seems to be wasted performing the brand of bubblegum pop hip hop that BEP do. She has a great rock voice and tons of charisma and presence. But I guess the obscene fame and riches are hard to give up.
As…
jdupuis | December 4, 2009Announced today:
Dear Readers,
It is our great pleasure to bring you news of an exciting new partnership, starting today, between ScienceBlogs and National Geographic.
ScienceBlogs and National Geographic have at their cores the same ultimate mission: to cultivate widespread interest in science and the natural world. Starting today, we will work together to advance this common mission through new content, applications, and initiatives. We will bring acclaimed voices from National Geographic into our rich discussion on ScienceBlogs, and National Geographic will invite their worldwide audience…
jdupuis | December 4, 2009Please forgive the ScienceBlogs nepotism this time around, but by far the most amusing thing I've seen on the Internet the last few weeks is SciBling Chad Orzel's video of the Bohr-Einstein Debates. With puppets, of course.
Anyways, let's let Chad explain:
Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than twice the threshold for a puppet show.
So…
jdupuis | December 2, 2009Boing Boing has some very cool scitech suggestions in their annual gift guide for non-fiction books.
If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay: How to Know if Your Child's Injury or Illness Is Really an Emergency by Lara Zibners
The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer
Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
The Math Book: From…
jdupuis | December 1, 2009A pretty good list from the Times, who've been a bit spotty with their lists the last few years.
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson
The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by…
jdupuis | November 30, 2009Welcome to the latest feature here at Confessions of a Science Librarian -- Music Mondays! My plan is to have a vaguely music-related post here most Mondays, somewhat in the vein of my Friday Fun posts, but probably not quite as regular. I'll probably mix in short CD reviews, odd bits I've found on the web, the occasional "Five Songs I Love" feature with who knows what else I think of.
And speaking of odd bits...
Rob Halford, Metal God, Judas Priest front man, solo act with a couple of really great albums under his belt, has a new Christmas CD coming out called Wintersongs
Let's hear what…
jdupuis | November 30, 2009...present of public and academic libraries?
What got me thinking along these lines most recently was the recent Clay Shirky blog post,Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. It's a pretty good post that puts a particular kind of physical retail into the context of current online retail and media shift realities.
In the first section of the post, Shirky basically outlines the trouble that physical bookstores are in, caught between the rock of the competition of online/big box store and the hard place of the coming media singularity.
Like record stores and video rental places,…
jdupuis | November 29, 2009One of the most interesting lists every year is The Globe and Mail's Globe 100, and this year is no exception. There's relevant stuff all over the spectrum, from biography to history to graphic novels to popular science to the environment.
In the print version, the categories are pretty basic: Canadian fiction, international fiction, poetry, non-fiction, graphica. Online, the categories are, well, a little more granular, and we'll get to that train wreck after the list.
Here goes:
Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
Tar…
jdupuis | November 28, 2009From the most recent issue of Locus magazine, November 2009, talking about his most recent novel Makers:
The people in Makers experience a world in which technology giveth and taketh away. They live through the fallacy of the record and movie industries: the idea that technology will go just far enough to help them and then stop. That's totally not what happens. technology joes that far and them keeps on going. It's a cycle of booms and busts. There are some lovely things about when you're riding the wave and some scary things.
The Information Revolution is not bloodless. There's plenty…
jdupuis | November 27, 2009Actually, not jackass, but asshole, but this is a family blog, at least as far as post titles are concerned.
In any case, Scott Berkun's Asshole driven development post on practices in the software industry from a couple of years ago is so true that it almost passes from being funny to being sad. Yes, in my previous career, I was a software developer in the insurance industry and while I had a couple of great bosses (you know who you are!), there were a couple who were...
Well, read on:
Asshole Driven development (ADD) - Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole…
jdupuis | November 24, 2009Obviously, Strategy+Business is not going to be core science books, but I've always included social media, technology and innovation books in my very broad definition of science books. There are a couple of categories that have some very fine books on recommendation.
Technology
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg
Marketing
Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in…
jdupuis | November 23, 2009Unfortunately, LJ's Best Books 2009: 31 Titles, Plus Best Genres & How-To doesn't have a dedicated science section but there are a few good recommendations nevertheless.
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmello
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding Across America by James McCommons
Mannahatta: A Natural…
jdupuis | November 20, 2009I like to cook. I have a few standard, signature dishes where I more or less freestyle every time I make them -- beef stew, chili, quesadillas, pasta sauce.
I also like to try new things. For example, I'll probably be making Tyler Hamilton's lamb shank Irish stew this weekend. So yeah, the first time I make something I usually follow the recipe pretty closely; and I find a lot of my recipes on the web.
But, at the same time I also own a fair number of cookbooks which I do like to use for their recipes and, more importantly, for a bit of immersion into a style or a philosophy or a…
jdupuis | November 18, 2009Or, Twitter & blogs as ways of knowing, Part 2.
A month or so ago, I poked a little gentle fun at social media extremists, basically exploring the idea that engaging online is the be-all and end-all of the library profession versus the idea that much of what we do online is peripheral to the main thrust of what librarianship is all about. To a certain degree, I guess I was setting up a couple of straw people just for the purpose of knocking them down but at the time it seemed like contrasting those extremes was a useful way of looking at the issue.
Of course, I don't believe either…
jdupuis | November 16, 2009Sort of related to my ongoing series of Best Science Books 2009 lists, here's a nice list of the top 5 social media books I found on Mashable, via Tara Hunt. They're all 2009 books, after all.
The list is from Steve Cunningham who interestingly frames the five books in terms of the lessons we should take away from them.
You Need to Build Trust: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
Turn the Bullhorn Around: The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt
Learn the Pillars…
jdupuis | November 13, 2009Ok, I know this one stretches any reasonable definition of the word "fun."
But in my defense, I think a few good cringes is a great way to celebrate Friday the 13th.
Over on Slashfood, one of my favourite foodie blogs, there's a couple of recent posts on 10 Dirty Little Restaurant Secrets and 10 More Dirty Restaurant Tricks, basically focusing on the disgusting and revolting shortcuts that restaurants take to save a little time and, mostly, money.
A couple of my "favourites" from the second post, based on reader comments to the first post:
10. Reusing Leftovers
70s waitress said: "When I…
jdupuis | November 12, 2009As usual, some interesting stuff from the December 2009 issue of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine (v3i2).
Capturing young womens' imagination: Welcome to the Wii generation of Nerd Girls by various
Revolutions and Remembrances: Engineering as a bond for diverse groups by Marimuthu, R.
Women to Watch: Putting Students First: Furse finds the fun in teaching by Prives, L.
Changing the tide of forecasts by Wax, H.
Bringing water to the world: Rural Bangladesh Tackling Clean Water Challenges by Taylor, M.
An eye for detail: Chen Focuses on Optic Nerve Regeneration by Prives, L.
jdupuis | November 11, 2009I don't usually talk about local York stuff here, but I'd like to make an exception for the event we had last week (Tuesday, November 3rd) here at my library, The Steacie Science & Engineering Library.
The event is called YorkWrites and it's sponsored jointly by the Libraries and the Bookstore. Essentially, it's a big party in the library, with food, drink, music and speeches. In the past it was held at the Scott Library, the humanities & socials sciences library, but for 2009 we thought it would be nice to try a science and engineering focus.
What's it about:
YORKwrites is an…