Books
gregladen | December 4, 2012Lego Technic is a Lego based technology that includes a combination of totally new kinds of Lego pieces and fancy technology that lets you build some amazing things. You can get kits that range in cost and sophistication from the LEGO 8514 Technic Power Roboriders a sort of motorcycle for robots that costs tens of dollars to a Motorized Bulldozer that will set you back nearly $700. Actually, I think there may be Techno kits that cost way over $1000.
The modified Lego pieces include the techno "brick" which comes in many forms that have holes in them through which specially shaped parts can…
gregladen | December 3, 2012I might be exaggerating slightly about the ready availability of the materials...
Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves by George Church and Ed Regis looks like a futurist tome on what could happen when technology finally catches up with human imagination and everything changes. Except it isn't. Most futurists are people with some knowledge of technology, a fertile imagination, and a publicist. Regenesis is by a scientist (working with a writer) who is busy making a different future and who has been involved in every stage of development of the technology under…
gregladen | December 1, 2012I'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 I started to track and absorb the literature on the issue. Back then, there were a few researchers who felt that some animals, possibly including humans, had built in navigation equipment, possibly using magnetics. Some of those researchers oversimplified their models and took the…
gregladen | November 30, 2012Huxley'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 ends can't ever be closed into a continuous loop because we don't have enough pieces of track. Or maybe we do. We keep trying different configurations but it never works. It also may be the case that while Huxley, Amanda and I make great Train Engineers once the tracks are set up…
gregladen | November 29, 2012Let'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 Permian, if contrasted with modern day, would form a very stark contrast while the Triassic would be at least somewhat more recognizable.
But of course the Triassic was in many ways distinct, different, and fascinating. Dinosaurs arose during the Triassic. The Triassic is…
gregladen | November 28, 2012You 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. It occurred to me today that I never produced a formal review of one of Don's other books that I really enjoyed: Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet. The reason for my skipping that review is that I had a radio interview with Don during which we discussed the topic as some length.…
gregladen | November 28, 2012Are 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 swamp to look at birds and stuff is both better exercise and cheaper than playing slot machines for nine hours straight? Or have you been birding in a casual way for a while, using your Uncle Ned's old binoculars and a tattered and torn Peterson you found on the sale table at the library, and want to…
gregladen | November 27, 2012There 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 can do is probably to
consciously want to improve yourself and to go and learn stuff pertaining to that. And, to do that, knowledge is important bus so is approach, perhaps methodology is a good word.
There really are three or four aspects to being a better birder that could be viewed very…
gregladen | November 26, 2012When 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, Phil Hockey, Warwick Tarboton and Peter Ryan. You will know Sinclair from his South of the Saraha bird guide.
All three books cover about the same species, as far as I can tell (just under 1,000) and have a similar range of illustration and information. They all have overview…
gregladen | November 25, 2012Super 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 installed environment. You just download it and run it, more or less (instructions provided). When installed, it looks like this:
The upper left box allows you to chose categories of property and methods sets, such as motion, looks, sensing, etc. The list-like…
gregladen | November 24, 2012My 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 to deal with. I want a series of numbers to be treated in a certain way, or a set of formulas to generate a database. The most non-linear I tend to get is multidimensional arrays, and that's still linear.
Python is potentially, and in practice, very different, and is essentially used as an…
gregladen | November 21, 2012The 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 I was assigned by my advisor a set of literature to absorb and comment on. The mix of published and soon to be published papers included a series of papers written by Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk. These represented a fight over the interpretation of early…
gregladen | November 21, 2012
Santa wants you to have this book!
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 stories to tell. The essays are selected from a much larger group of submissions, the works are carefully edited, and organized into general categories. The Minnesota connection itself is great for Minnesotans, but…
gregladen | November 20, 2012Born 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.
Meredith starts out with an examination of the Taung fossil, its discoverer, anatomy, and associated controversy. As you probably know, Taung was brought light by anatomist Raymond Dart, and had its initial impact on human evolutionary studies in the 1920s when the British Piltdown…
gregladen | November 20, 2012Just 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 is revised enough to want to get it even if you have the first edition. Second, if you are not familiar with the book, it may be a bit different than you expect. It is not a book about the science IN Tolkein's books as much as it is a scientifically oriented investigation of…
gregladen | November 19, 2012A 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 heartbeat or pulse. Look a little closer still, and you may be inclined suddenly to reel back or to close your eyes. The man sprawled at such an odd angle beside the injured [man] has his face pressed against a gaping tear in [his] throat. He is drinking blood fresh from the wound..."…
gregladen | 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 making a ping pong table that will allow only YOU to win to matter how good your opponent may be.
Obviously, I'm talking about The Big Book of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects, which is just now available, just in time for Christmas.
Pro gift giving tip: Bundle this book with a…
gregladen | November 16, 2012Just 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 and Aquariums is ...
f"The new generation of zoo babies will reset the standard for devastating cuteness.
From the creators of the smash hit ZooBorns series of books, ZooBorns The Next Generation features full-color photos and fascinating facts on exotic baby animals from every corner of the world. Filled with…
gregladen | November 14, 2012How 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 One of the greatest hucksters of the age, depending on whom you ask. In his new book...
Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even…
gregladen | November 13, 2012The 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 big honcho of the Royal Mint. Where they make the money.
In that second job, Newton had several interesting problems to deal with, which were in some ways more complex than how planets keep orbiting around stars and apples keep falling from trees. He needed to secure the coinage of the land against…