Books
Category archives for Books
Nature’s Compass: The Mystery of Animal Navigation
Posted by Greg Laden on December 1, 2012 
I’ve been interested in Animal Navigation for years. I’ve always been interested in things like orientation and maps and so on, but it was when I started working with the Efe Pygmies in the mid 1980s, and noticed that there were some interesting things about how they found their way around in the rainforest, that…
Taking Lego to the Max
Posted by Greg Laden on November 30, 2012 
Huxley’s Aunt and Uncle have given him, as Christmas and Birthday presents, various kits to make Imaginarium style train setups. Imaginarium is like Brio and Thomas the Tank Engine, but generally available as a Toys R Us Brand. He has enough cool bits and pieces to make a kind of double figure eight layout, but…
The Great Transition: Triassic Life on Land
Posted by Greg Laden on November 29, 2012 
Let’s see … The Triassic is about here: (You can also look it up in this PDF file supplied by the USGS. It is situated between two major extinction events, and is especially interesting because it is during this period that modern day ecological systems and major animal groups took a recognizable form. The preceding…
Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs
Posted by Greg Laden on November 28, 2012 
You all know Don Prothero. He is an active member of the Skeptics and Science Blogging community. He is the author of several books, one of which you are totally supposed to own and if you don’t it’s kinda lame: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, which I review along with some…
National Geo’s Birding Essentials
Posted by Greg Laden on November 28, 2012 Are you interested in birding but don’t really know much about it? Did you just put a feeder outside and noticed that birds are interesting, or did you finally get around to stopping at that wildlife refuge you drive by every week on the way to the casino and realize that walking down to the…
How to be a better birder
Posted by Greg Laden on November 27, 2012 There are several things you need to do to be a better birder. Some of these things can be handled by just tossing money after the problem. Better binoculars, more books, that sort of thing. If you use those tools well they will improve your abilities as a birder. But the most important thing you…
Update Your Southern African Bird Guide Collection
Posted by Greg Laden on November 26, 2012 When traveling and working in South Africa, I’ve always used Newman’s guide to the birds of Southern Africa, and more recently, I found the Sasol guide to be helpful as well. (I discuss both briefly here.) Now, I’ve got on my desk a copy of Princeton’s Birds of Southern Africa: Fourth Edition by Ian Sinclair,…
Scratch: A kids programming environment that is easy and works!
Posted by Greg Laden on November 25, 2012 Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games is a book designed for the youngest kids who can read comics and basic text who want to learn to program. The prgramming environment, Scratch, will be familiar to those who have experimented with Logo and Squeak. Especially Squeak. Scratch is a very easily…
Is Python The New Basic? (“Python For Kids”)
Posted by Greg Laden on November 24, 2012 My first computer language was PL/1, but soon after I learned, among other languages, Basic, and I really liked Basic and I still do. Basic is linear, and I think in linear constructs when I do any kind of computer program. This is probably, in part, because user interfaces are the last thing I want…
A Book about Taung and “the Hobbit”
Posted by Greg Laden on November 21, 2012 
The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution is by a scientist Dean Falk, who has contributed significantly to the study of evolution of the human brain, and who has been directly involved in some of the more interesting controversies in human evolution. Back when I was a graduate student…
Godless Gift Idea!
Posted by Greg Laden on November 21, 2012 Atheist Voices of Minnesota (which comes in a print version and a Kindle version) is a collection of individual journeys to atheism. All the authors are Minnesotan (natural born, former, or immigrant to the North Star State). While some of the authors are professional writers or high profile bloggers, most are regular people with interesting…
Born in Africa
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2012 Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life by Martin Meredith examines the history of human evolution studies, focusing on Africa, and provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict between different researchers, different points of view, and sometimes, different evidence. It is a good read.
Just In Time for The Hobbit: The Science of Middle Earth
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2012 Just a quick note, review to come later. Henry Gee has produced a Second Edition of his book The Science of Middle-Earth: Explaining The Science Behind The Greatest Fantasy Epic Ever Told!, which will be released on December 14th as a Kindle eBook. There are two things to know about this. First, the Second Edition…
You come from Cannibals
Posted by Greg Laden on November 19, 2012 A man “lies crumpled on the sand … Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even to check…
DIY drinking tips, personal jet pack, custom fit earbuds, and a pocket theremin
Posted by Greg Laden on November 17, 2012 … the perfect gaming chair, converting a Roomba into a security robot, removing a stripped screw with a rubber band, making a radio out of spare parts from your junk drawer, building your own lie detector machine, making a Steampunk Laptop, using the back of your monitor as a desktop, tricking out your bike, and…
The New Zoo Borns Is Out!
Posted by Greg Laden on November 16, 2012 
Just in time for Christmas. The problem with cute baby animals born in the zoo is that they grow up. The upside of this process is that you need a NEW Zoo Born every so often, and the new one is out. ZooBorns The Next Generation: Newer, Cuter, More Exotic Animals from the World’s Zoos…
Kurzweil: How to create a mind
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2012 How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is Ray Kurzweil’s latest book. You may know of him as the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil is a “futurist” and has a reputation as being one of the greatest thinkers of our age, as well as being…
Newton and the Counterfeiter
Posted by Greg Laden on November 13, 2012 The other side of the coin(age): Newton and the Counterfeiter Did you know that Isaac Newton had two jobs? One, you know about: To figure out all that physics and math stuff so we could live for a while in a Newtonian world (later to be replaced by an Einsteinian world). The other was as…
The Disappearance of the Rainforest of the Sea
Posted by Greg Laden on November 12, 2012 Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea by Kennedy Warne has been out for about a year, but if you’ve not seen it you may want to have a look at it. Warne, editor of New Zealand Geographic magazine, is a naturalist who writes about the embattled mangrove swamps,…
Across Atlantic Ice: Clovis Origins
Posted by Greg Laden on November 11, 2012 I want to talk about the book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. It was written by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, both highly respected archaeologists. The point they make in the book is very simple: An important archaeological culture known as the “Clovis” is actually a European culture that traveled east…
Climate change book for young readers
Posted by Greg Laden on November 8, 2012 What are Global Warming and Climate Change?: Answers for Young Readers is a fairly unique book, as far as I know. It explains climate change, contextualized global warming, discusses causes and consequences and directly addresses the politics of climate change and global warming. The official book description: “Global warming is one of the most talked…
Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments (book review)
Posted by Greg Laden on November 7, 2012 One of the more popular books I’ve ever reviewed here, judging by the number of people who read the review, was this one on home chemistry. Now, let’s see if we can meet or beat the physical sciences with this new title: Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (DIY Science). Robert…
Wonderful Life with the Elements
Posted by Greg Laden on November 6, 2012 Have ever really thought about the elements? Have you ever really asked questions about them? If you are some kind of scientist or science geek, you probably know a lot about them, and that could even be a disadvantage for you, in a sense. For instance, if you learned early on that elements were formed…
Is there still room on the shelf for an almanac?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 5, 2012 When I was a kid, I loved the almanac. I don’t remember where they came from, but every couple of years a new one would appear in the house, and as soon as I got my hands on it, it moved into my room and anybody who wanted to look stuff up in it after…
Zombie Tits …
Posted by Greg Laden on November 5, 2012 … Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals… I remember when the story of the blood shooting lizard of the American Southwest was first figured out. The native people of the area had always spoken of the ability of a particular lizard to spew a stream of blood from its eyes. This would be done to…
Birds of Central Asia (Princeton Field Guide)
Posted by Greg Laden on November 4, 2012 Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan … they all have birds, it turns out. Until now there has never been a field guid to the birds of this regino. Raffael Aye, Manuel Schweizer, and Tobias Roth have written one, and it is called, fittingly, Birds of Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan. It…
What size camera aperture can read a license plate from Earth orbit?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 3, 2012 Answer: About 20 meters. Th Hubble Space Telescope’s aperture is 2.4 meters. So, you really can’t do it at the present time. This is one of a large, seemingly inestimable number of practical need-to-know and esoteric questions addressed in Lawrence Weinstein’s book Guesstimation 2.0: Solving Today’s Problems on the Back of a Napkin, a followup…
Cotingas and Manakins: Amazing birds, amazing bird book
Posted by Greg Laden on November 2, 2012 Five families of birds make up the group that could be referred to as the Cotingas and Manakins, which in turn include species with such colorful names as “Pale-bellied Tyrant-Manakin,” “Bare-necked Fruitcrow,” “Peruvian Plantcutter,” and “White-browed Purpletuft.” And certainly, you’ve heard of the Andean Cock-of-theRock. These birds and their relatives are THE famous colorful amazing…
Rising Sea Levels: Cause and Impact
Posted by Greg Laden on November 1, 2012 Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact is a new book by Hunt Janin and Scott Mandia. Janin is a writer of non fiction and scholarly books, and Mandia is a professor of physics and a science communicator who specializes in climate-related issues. To me, sea level is one of the most interesting…
The Aviator: Science Fiction of the Post Global Warming World
Posted by Greg Laden on October 17, 2012 The Aviator is a new book that gives you a world of post-global warming climate and interesting developments in transportation technology and artificial intelligence. It is written by New Zealand based writer Gareth Renowden. The Aviator explores a post-apocalypse world where the apocalypse is not nuclear war or a large object hitting the earth, or…
, which is now available for the 
