The Book Building

Stephen Jay Gould in Simpsons' form Just asking. I had a whole explanation about what brought me to wonder about this, but you don't really care, so I'll skip it. Between three and eight of you would've found the back-story interesting. No matter, the other 27 wouldn't have. Cutting to the chase then: the Scienceblogs readers and other bloggers, especially of course the dominant strain of evolution/Darwin folks, must have some opinions. A gifted author, a popularizer, a baseball fan, a Simpsons guest, an evolutionary biologist, a good friend of one of my doctoral committee members, a…
Taking a cue from Dave's recent meme-games and my own reading of the weekend book review section of the paper, I'm inspired to wonder how many answers can fit the following blanks: "The period between the end of _______ and the end of ______ is one of the most important in American history and, these days, one of the most neglected." This sentence was part of a review of Daniel Walker Howe's What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. The review was by Jonathan Yardley; recently, Jill Lepore had a fascinating essay centering on the same book in The New Yorker. Popular…
In turn, incidentally, I've written a guest post for Oronte Churm. It's here, and it's about a short story I use in my engineering ethics class by the brilliant Chinese author Gao Xingjian, called "The Accident." In it, I touch on certainty, and although I don't know that this was intentionally placed there, I notice this quote at the top of Churm's page: The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. --Erich Fromm I think dealing with that idea is part of the same conversation, in some way, that Wyatt Galusky brought up last week on mystery and "the remainder" -- that space…
Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy Professor at Duke, argues so. John Dupre, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter, isn't buying it. I'm not either, ever averse to such reductionisms.* Here is Dupre's review of Rosenberg's Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2006), from American Scientist on-line. For your benefit, these are the first few paragraphs of the review: Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and…
The Michael Pollan interview I did for The Believer is at long last on booksehelves at fine retailers near you. For those not familiar with that publication, it was recently nominated for two National Magazine Awards, was last year nominated for a few, and will next year be nominatd for some. It's run out of San Fransisco, a monthly cultural and literary periodical edited by the writers Heidi Julavits, Ed Park, and Vendela Vida. Although called "The Believer," it has no religious bent. They've been gracious enough to publish two prior interviews of mine as well (on Darwin, on Sex and…
I'm usually solicited to review new work in giant squid-graphic design crossover studies. It gets tiring, and I try to slough them off to my better graduate students, but such is the life of a giant squid-graphic designer crossover expert. With "Animals of the Ocean, In Particular The Giant Squid" -- the third Volume, this one's No. 164 of 307 in the Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance Series -- I've had the misfortune of yet another run-in with that cagey Doris Haggis-on-Whey. I'm not the first. The secret: it's not exactly true.Readers of this site will recall our previous…
The Morning News is a fantastic literary and cultural site, chock full of writer-type work, interviews, artwork, commentary, and the like. (We link to them on the lower left of this page. G' head, take a look. I'll wait.) They also run an excellent daily set of news links, almsot always with something unusual and intriguing. (Today, e.g., they give a link to a story on the size of New York condoms.) Anyway, they've just announced one of their notably fascinating projects, the third annual Tournament of Books. A bevy of high-profile judges, side commentary on the challenges from astute…
Chris Van Allsburg, "Just a Dream" (over consumption) So as the truth experiment continues to do its thing, I'm getting ready to give two talks on sustainability and climate science concepts to an audience of visual arts students here at UBC. Specifically, these university students are exploring the techniques and expressive values of drawing and printmaking, so I thought I would colour these talks with a few examples of the art that I'm probably most familiar with - that being kid's books. As well, I'll be working generally with these students on a project, that aims to produce some type…
MOVING DAYTHELMA AND LOUISETHE PEACH TREE A couple of photos have really caught my eye lately. You know, the sort that would seem a bit surreal, or perhaps the word "unlikely" in this day and age of progress is better. Anyway, they reminded me a lot of a great book I have called "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" by Chris Van Allsburg. Chris is a noted children's book author, and you're probably more aware of him than you would realize. His wonderful books are essentially responsible for a number of films you've probably seen (or haven't seen), including the The Polar Express, Jumanji,…
Faith D'Aluisio and Peter Menzel have a newish book out which is just wonderful from a food perspective. Essentially, they've traveled the world to meet "average" families and report on their dietary habits. Apart from being thematically intriguing from a journalistic point of view, it's also quite awesome from a visual perspective. Basically, Peter has taken photos of the families with their weekly food totals. This one is a representative from the US, and here are some others (below the fold). A whole ton of other pictures can be found here. United States of AmericaChinaEnglandMali…
Nominee #1: Karl Iagnemma Nominee #2: Chris Ware Well, it was great to finally meet Ben (and Janet, John, John, and Steve) a couple weeks ago, when there was a PSA/HSS/4S conference in Vancouver. Ben and I had a chance to talk about science, writing, academia, the election, life, unicorns, the usual sorts of things, and during which, Ben set me on track with the idea of forming the World's Fair Advisory Board. Anyway, I'd like to nominate Chris Ware, because I think it would be wonderful to play with someone who can elicit so much from the combination of calculated imagery and sparce text…
Yesterday, I was playing with my kids and having fun with the Find Lowly Worm game that seems to be a rite of passage when looking through a Richard Scarry picture book. Anyway, in our edition of "What Do People Do All Day?" I was amused by a substantial 4 page spread about coal as a source of energy (titled Digging coal to make electricity work for us). I guess it got me thinking that wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a similar children's book produced that can have the same degree of cultural prevalence, but also includes graphics looking at energy alternatives like wind, solar, wave,…
Says Slate.com: "Boston artist Rosamond Purcell repurposes the old, the burnt, and the mangled." They (Slate) have a slide show about/from Purcell's new book, Bookworm. Check it out here. Go ahead. I'll wait. No worries. Waiting...waiting...waiting... Okay, now you're back. The first caption notes: Over the years, Boston artist Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered…
Adam Gopnik writes in the Oct. 23rd New Yorker about Darwin's writing period after the Beagle and before Origins (which is to say, roughly through the 1840s and into the later 1850s). His essay is more or less an appreciation for Darwin's literary skill, that skill being that he could present his points in Origins in just the right way. Such a task was not trivial. With Gopnik's appreciation - which, I don't know entirely why Adam Gopnik, who generally writes about other stuff (you know, like France and stuff) is writing this, but be that as it may - you get a nice feel for the importance…
I saw two more reviews of Dawkins' new and widely discussed The God Delusion recently. Both were critical about the book. Both had points that I thought were very well made. One review is by Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books. The other is by Marilynne Robinson, in the November 2006 Harper's (not on-line). (Interesting to the Scienceblogs community itself is my completely different interpretation of Eagleton's review than PZ's.) Eagleton starts by saying this: Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have…
The World's Fair's popularity has skyrocketed over the past few months, and all the more so in the post-Puzzle Fantastica Era. (Data: We have readers almost every single day now. Sometimes even more. Recent problems at the Sb server may have been our fault. Point made.) We've been brought by these circumstances to issues of governance, and we are now taking recommendations for members of our forthcoming Advisory Board. First up: Karl Iagnemma. Some might argue that Dave and I wish we were Karl Iagnemma. I might argue that. Dave might not. Dave is Dave. But I'm of diffracted identity,…
Called: "Dale Peck Reviews Einstein's Latest." I'm serious. This is a failed piece. Failed because it's too obscure, although it was fun to do. But it requires too much from the audience, and who really cares and wants to do all that work? You have to know that Dale Peck is the lit-crit bad boy, famous for trashing every single piece of fiction written in the last decade. Even though that's not entirely true, and even though, somehow, for reasons that escape me, he actually is a good writer -- that is, he writes decent fiction himself -- the guy simply loathes all manner of…
Let's consider this a post-script to Dave's recent and well-received Children's Book forum, though one that stretches the boundary of a "science" posting (and calls into question my placement of it under "culture wars"). But I did post a comment at Tara's contribution to the Children's book post at Aetiology (here), though never got around to doing so here. So Encyclopedia Brown is back and more political than you might remember, with Encyclopedia Brown And the Mysterious Presidency of George W. Bush. This is sort of an advertisement I've gotten myself into, but the material's worth it.…
(previous Stuff I've Been Reading) Books Read:"The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup" by Various (finished) "The Educated Imagination" by Northrop Frye (finished) "A Man Without a Country" by Kurt Vonnegut (finished) "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris (finished) "thinking with type" by Ellen Lupton (lovingly looked through) "Now One Foot, Now the Other" by Tomie dePaola (finished, children's book) Books Bought:"Making Things Public - Atmospheres of Democracy" by Bruno Latour, et al. "Stolen Harvest" by Vandana Shiva (started) "Vermeer in Bosnia" by Lawrence Weschler So here I am…
Ode to "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" (1950). The "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" was Vonnegut's first published story, appearing in Collier's. That was while he was working at GE in public relations, and after he was a chemistry major, an anthropology grad, a Dresden fire-bombing survivor, and a Cat's Cradle writer (though not publisher, yet). Now, about the Barnhouse story. I first read it in the very best short story collection I've ever had, First Fiction, which is an "anthology of the first published stories by famous writers." (Apparently you can get it for a dollar at ABE.…