jdupuis | September 19, 2014Yes, I cook. Yes, I use recipe blogs. Yes, I might alter the recipes I see based on what I have on hand or what various personal and familial preferences come into play.
In fact, I love recipe blogs, I really really do. Simply Recipes is probably my favourite.
The reality, of course, is that a lot of what you see in the comment sections of those recipe posts is just plain crazy. Sometimes it seems like people want to take a chocolate cake recipe and twist it into meatloaf via making a pina colada. Now there's nothing wrong with chocolate cake, meatloaf (in fact, I'd love to find a good…
jdupuis | September 16, 2014It's been quite a long while since I've done a "books I'd like to read" post, that's for sure. This fall seems to be have a particularly exciting list of books so I thought I'd pull some of them together (as well as some older books) here for all our enjoyment. These are all books I don't own yet, so they are not part of my towering to-read list. Yet.
I'm on sabbatical this academic year so I am trying to read and review books more diligently, aiming for about one per week. Maybe some of these will appear reviewed on the blog in the not too distant future.
Enjoy!
WTF, Evolution?!: A…
jdupuis | September 15, 2014This one's a bit of a head-scratcher.
Richard Evan Schwartz's Really Big Numbers has a great premise. A kids book that takes some fairly advanced mathematical concepts and presents them in a lively, engaging and understandable format. So far, so good.
Schwartz does a commendable job of taking the concepts surrounding Really Big Numbers and explaining them in a fairly comprehensible format, from simple counting to very high numbers, visual representation of big numbers, conceptual representations when there's no more space for dots on the page, an explanation of powers of 10 all the way to…
jdupuis | September 12, 2014Music critics. Got to love them. Just the right mixture of disdain, hipster arrogance and snobbery to set the teeth on edge. Ooooh, love that band no one has ever heard of. Hate that band that "sold out" and became famous. They were so much more authentic when they were poor and no one heard and enjoyed their music. Ask U2.
Vice's music critics have a new list out, The 123 Worst Musicians of All Time, which hits the hipster music critic disdain nail right on the head. Amongst them they come up with a list of the 123 worst musicians of all time, which amongst them leaves them with basically…
jdupuis | September 10, 2014A Creative Commons Guide to Sharing Your Science
Why do some academic publishers think they should charge extra for more liberal licenses (CC BY)?
The opportunity cost of my open access was 35 hours + $690 (UPDATED)
The future of open access and library publishing
Sick of Impact Factors
Making a spectacle of scientific research
Open for Business – Why In the Library with the Lead Pipe is Moving to CC-BY Licensing
The tone goes up on the open front
No Need To Only Send Your Best Work To Science Magazine
Why I am a product manager at PLOS: Linking up value across the research process
Are…
jdupuis | September 5, 2014This amusing book, Kanani K. M. Lee and Adam Wallenta's The Incredible Plate Tectonics Comic: The Adventures of Geo, Vol. 1, is brought to us by the same people as the Survive! Inside the Human Body graphic novel series. As a result it has many of the same strengths but it also suffered from some of the weaknesses that the Survive! series was able to avoid.
The strengths are easy to see: engaging and diverse characters, clear and clean artwork, lively narration and great attention to scientific detail outside the main narrative. The weaknesses of the Plate Techtonics version which should…
jdupuis | September 4, 2014I have a son who's currently a physics undergrad, just starting in third year. And another son who's starting first year philosophy. As you can imagine, I may occasionally pass along a link or two to them pointing to stuff on the web I think they might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other undergrad students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog.
Since I'm a science librarian, the items I've chosen are mostly geared towards science undergrads (hence, the title of the series…
jdupuis | September 4, 2014Yes, it has become a trilogy. The two Twitter rants I recapped here sparked more angst and anguish in me, prompting me to write a third rant.
As it became ready for Twitter publication and approached 800 words, it also became clear that this particular rant was fast outgrowing what I could reasonably expect people to follow on Twitter, easily over 40 tweets worth of text. As many epic fantasy series can attest, these things can get out the control of the author quite easily. At least I'm not pulling a GRRM and taking 6 or more years in between installments!
I did sent out a tweet last…
jdupuis | September 2, 2014One of the highlights of the year for me is the Lane Anderson Award shortlist announcement.
From their website here and here:
The Lane Anderson designation honours the maiden names of Robert Fitzhenry's mother, Margaret Lane, and his wife, Hilda Anderson Fitzhenry. The Fitzhenry Family Foundation is a privately directed Canadian foundation established in 1987 by Canadian publisher Robert I. Fitzhenry (1918-2008).
The Lane Anderson Award will be administered by Christopher Alam, a partner at the law firm of Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP.
The annual Lane Anderson Award will honour two jury-…
jdupuis | August 29, 2014Twitter is a great place to rant and rave sometimes. You can feel free to let loose and say what you're thinking without necessarily feeling that you need to have completely well-formed ideas. The enforced brevity can sometimes also be a plus, as it forces you to distill what you want to say to the bare minimum. It it possible to string together longer thoughts across multiple tweets but it becomes a bit awkward to read.
I let loose a couple of Open Access related rants over the last few days and I thought I'd share them here, slightly cleaned up to make them more readable. Both are fairly…
jdupuis | August 28, 2014"Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked...We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it. We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place."
- James Box
The climate crisis is serious, no doubt about it. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth from nearly a decade ago was a kind of rallying cry for the reality-based community but it appears that we might need another rallying cry as Gore…
jdupuis | August 26, 20147 Things Librarians Are Tired of Hearing
Library without books debuts at Florida’s newest college
How Streaming Media Could Threaten the Mission of Libraries
Books: Important Symbol or Annoying Physical Reality?
Ice Ice Baby: Are Librarian Stereotypes Freezing Us out of Instruction?
UNBSJ students protest for study space: Say the new library is too noisy
How Libraries Can Survive In The Digital Age
What does an unsuccessful academic library look like?
Editorial: Evolving libraries still need people
The future of libraries is in good hands
Schism in the Stacks: Is the University Library As We…
jdupuis | August 18, 2014To continue the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science theme, I present the text of a recent open letter I signed to the AAAS concerning their new journal Science Advances.
Thanks to Jonathan Tennant for spearheading this effort. You can read more about the rationale behind writing the letter and the process involved at Jon's blog here. As well, he's listing the other places where the letter is being disseminated.
Dear AAAS,
This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, Science Advances. In addition to the welcome diversification in…
jdupuis | August 15, 2014First Second Books has done it again!
They've published another wonderful science-themed graphic novel that belongs on every bookshelf.
(Of course, they publish tons of other non-science themed graphic novels too. One of my particular favourite recent ones in the biography of Andre the Giant. The Zita the Spacegirl series is also wonderful beyond words.)
This time Nick Bertozzi's Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey brings us the history of Ernest Shackleton's crazy epic Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17. And epic is about the understatement of the century in describing this multi-…
jdupuis | August 15, 2014From the "So Funny it Hurts" file...
This one combines the recent spying cases between Canada and China with the equally "humourous" ongoing Canadian War on Science.
Chinese cyber spies disappointed by Canada’s complete lack of scientific research
BEIJING - Chinese state-sponsored hackers were disappointed after hacking into Canadian government and business research archives and discovering they contained little to no valuable information.
“Wow, how on Earth is this country more developed than we are?” said Chinese Ministry of State Security intelligence analyst Lao Xi Ming from the smoke…
jdupuis | August 13, 2014Sorry about that, but posts and articles about climate change fiction seem especially prone to bad puns...
In any case, climate change fiction (or "cli-fi" to use the rather ugly short form) is fiction -- either speculative or realistic -- that takes as it's basis the fact that the earth's climate is changing and jumps off from there.
It's actually been around for quite a long time in various guises, even before it became obvious that anthropogenic global warming was an issue, with JG Ballard's The Wind from Nowhere and The Drowned World being perhaps the earliest modern examples. Not…
jdupuis | August 8, 2014Ah, News Biscuit. You've nailed this one. What's next? Homeopathic dishwasher detergent?
In any case, enjoy a taste but make sure you read the whole thing. It's very funny!
McAfee unveils first homeopathic antivirus software
“Our customers are increasingly demanding Anti-Virus software that has no discernible effect on the performance of their laptops and other devices” commented McAfee spokesman Mike Townes. “By providing downloads or media containing only the “memory” of the most aggressive malware, we are able to satisfy that need at a cost marginally below that of traditional methods”.…
jdupuis | August 8, 2014Only rarely in my life as a reviewer do I get books that seem to be absolutely perfectly suited for me. This is certainly the case with Charles L. Adler's Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction, a book that combines my love for science and my love for science fiction.
The premise is an ingenious one, one that's probably not anywhere near exploited enough in the popular science literature: use science fiction and fantasy stories as a way of elucidating science. Sure, it's been done to death in all those "The Science of X" books where X is some movie or…
jdupuis | August 6, 2014It seems that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just announced the new publisher of it's flagship family of Science journals:
AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner today announced the appointment of Kent Anderson, a past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SPP), to serve as Publisher of the Science family of journals.
Anderson, who in 2011 received the SPP's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, will assume the role of Science Publisher as of 3 November.
Currently, he is the CEO and Publisher of STRIATUS/The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery in Needham…
jdupuis | August 1, 2014In a recent post on his Whatever blog, science fiction writer John Scalzi makes some very fine points related to the ongoing controversy surrounding the way Amazon treats various publishers and how this affects authors.
He makes great points throughout the post and with a little tweaking we can very easily apply his remarks to libraries and publishers.
Here's my tweaked version:
I really really really wish publishers would stop pretending that anything they do is for the benefit of libraries. They do not. They do it for their own benefit, and then find a way to spin it to libraries, with the…