Books
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2012Sweden's traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people's minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into prehistory, and so they don't respect the country's cities much, these generally being much later in origin.
Stockholm is a case in point. Today's urban area is neatly bisected by the boundary between Uppland and Södermanland provinces. Two years ago myself and other Stockholmers got half of our High Medieval itches scratched by a fine archaeological guide book covering Södermanland. Now Johan…
gregladen | June 20, 2012Music of the Birds by Lang Elliott is a classic book and CD combo well over 10 years old, that provided bird lovers with a chance to learn to identify and appreciate the songs of numerous species. Over the last decade or so many other CD-based bird song offerings have become available. More recently, Lang teamed up with Marie Read to produce an iBook (iAuthored) version of Music of the Birds which takes advantage of the iAuthored iBook format in many ways. This is my first review of an iAuthored book, and obviously the first one on this blog, so I want to use the opportunity to discuss what…
gregladen | June 20, 2012The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood by David Montgomery is new book on the Noachian flood. It is by a real life geologist and is not a creationist book. Might be a good gift for your annoying creationist relative.
Here is a write-up from the publisher:
In Tibet, geologist David R. Montgomery heard a local story about a great flood that bore a striking similarity to Noah’s Flood. Intrigued, Montgomery began investigating the world’s flood stories and—drawing from historic works by theologians, natural philosophers, and scientists—discovered the counterintuitive role…
pharyngula | June 12, 2012The Best Science Writing Online 2012 can be read online right now — but don't you want to order your very own precious hard copy, too?
sa smith | June 6, 2012One of my favorite books of all time-- 'The Martian Chronicles'.
It doesnt matter how many times I read it... The same stories, the same lines cause me to sob uncontrollably, from awe of humanitys potential, from mourning humanitys lost potential, from thinking about the great things we have achieved, from thinking about The End and how we will End It All...
Ray Bradbury has died.
*sigh*
One of my favorite lines, from anything, book/movie/song, anything:
“Garrett?” called Stendahl softly. Garrett silenced himself. “Garrett,” said Stendahl, “do you know why I’ve done this to you? Because you…
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2012Sigh. Another crappy publishing deal. This firm wants me to write a 500-word encyclopaedia entry and assign copyright entirely to them, with the right to re-edit in the future. And what do they offer in return?
A £30 book coupon and access to a paywall website.
I just can't see why I would find this offer at all attractive. I don't need the book coupon or the key to that paywall. (Indeed, the paywall thing is simply like getting a copy of a book you contribute to, only much cheaper for them.) It wouldn't improve my CV noticeably to publish 500 words under this firm's imprint or under the…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2012
The Swedish Skeptics have received the 2012 Harry Martinson Memorial Prize from his birth municipality Olofström and the Harry Martinson Society. Martinson, a Nobel laureate, was a poet and prose writer who is particularly well known for his book-length science fiction epic poem Aniara. As chairman of the Swedish Skeptics I was invited down to Blekinge province where I spent Friday looking at archaelogy and doing some metal detecting with my colleague Mikael Henriksson from the County Museum -- and on Saturday morning I delivered an acceptance speech and a talk (in Swedish) on Martinson's…
gregladen | May 4, 2012Here in Minnesota, and in surrounding states, there is some real tension between Native and Immigrant communities. The poorest, most drug-ridden, down trodden and repressed communities here are often Native, and conveniently these communities tend to be (but not always are) located far away from urban areas or other places with a lot of white eyes. Health in Native communities is of major concern to the usual institutions and people that are concerned with such things.
Indians make White people nervous. White people are either worried that the Indian has kooties, or are criminals or…
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2012I listened to BBC Click about the future of publishing and had the idea to look at a couple of parameters in my reading habits: where I get the idea to read each book-length text, how I get hold of them and what form they take. Here's about the past year, April 2011 through March 2012 (38 books).
Inspiration
45% Author I like
32% Recommendation from friend / family
13% Chance discovery
5% Publicist pitch
5% Work demands
Access
34% Gift (all but two from Super Dear Reader Birger)
16% Library
10% Download (2 public domain, 1 creative commons, 1 pirated)
8% Workplace
8% Review copy
5% On-line…
gregladen | April 16, 2012Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Otto has won the prestigious Minnesota Book Award. The award is very well deserved.
Here's my writeup of the book, and here's a radio interview with the author that we did a couple of months back.
Shawn's book is a critically important analysis of science policy, its potentials and failings, in a world of denialism and politics. As you know, Shawn has been involved with Science Debate (see the big badge on the sidebar?) and the Science Pledge. I'm pleased to announce that in the political campaign that I was recently…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2012Aard super-regular Birger Johansson very kindly sent me a bunch of supernatural detective novels by Mike Carey, the Felix Castor series. I'm on the second one now (from 2006) and enjoying it a lot. The stories are a bit too long and meandering for my taste, but I love Carey's dry wit and fine grasp of the language. I'm pretty sure he's studied Raymond Chandler carefully. Have a look at these bits as a sample:
"Meanwhile, three miles away at the Scrubs, Saint Michael's church was invaded by some entity so powerful that just being close to it poisoned the minds and souls of everyone in the…
gregladen | April 2, 2012On Sunday, I interviewed Maggie Koerth-Baker, the author of Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us. The interview was live on radio, but you can listen to it here as a podcast.
Maggie is the science editor at Boing Boing, a journalist, and has had an interest in energy and the related science and engineering for some time. Her book is an overview, historical account, and detailed description of the energy systems that we use in the United States, outlining the flow of watts, CO2 emissions, methods of making more watts, what we use it all for, and more…
pharyngula | March 29, 2012What do you do on airplanes? I usually devour a book or two, usually something popcorny and light, sometimes something I need to get read for work. On my trip home from Washington DC, I lucked out: I was handed a book the day I took off, and it turned out to be a damned good read.
Jason Rosenhouse is my co-blogger at Scienceblogs — he's a mathematician, but he's also neck-deep in the evolution/creationism wars. He was in town for the Reason Rally (wait: from the description, he left before my talk. Cancel the review, gotta pan him instead…nah, I guess I'll forgive him this one time), and he…
gregladen | March 23, 2012
If you are a birder and you are going on Spring Break (from the US), don't forget that there are birds where you are going. And, probably, there are bird books that cover your destination.
One of the really cool things about North American birding is that when you do go down to tye Yucatan, Caribbean, or Central America you'll see birds that are migratory and familiar, but in their other home (but just on their way back). They'll be surprised to see you!
I just got a copy of Birds of Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire, though I've got no personal travel plans for Aruba and environs at the moment…
gregladen | March 20, 2012Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow (signed by the author!) and I'm reading it with great interest, even though I'm totally swamped with other things. Damn you Rachel Maddow for writing such an engaging book!
I'm just starting it but wanted to share a couple of observations.
The nature of war in (well, 'by') America--and the nature of the military and government's relationship to it--evolved over time from the days of the Founding Fathers to the end of the Viet Nam era, as described in Rachel Maddow's new book, in very interesting ways. In particular, Maddow…
gregladen | March 19, 2012And they are! Just yesterday I was hanging around with a bunch off atheists and they were all pretty angry. They were even getting angry with each other. I could hear "get off my lawn" as a more or less constant droning sound in the background.
People who are not atheists, or who may be indifferent to religion but never thought about it much, might want to know what this is all about. One way to do this is to read a book that just came out, literally about five minutes ago, for the Kindle. This book is by my friend Greta Christina, and it is called Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Thing…
sastyk | February 27, 2012I admit it, I'm a generalist in a world of specialists, and I always have been. Looking back on my career history, for example, I see the way I attempted to make the academic model of specialization adapt to my own taste for generalism - my doctoral project was a little bit insane, integrating demography, history, textual analysis and half a dozen other disciplines across a 250 year timeline - just the sort of thing advisers hate to see. The polite word was "ambitious" but "nuts" is probably more accurate. As you can probably guess from the title of this blog (for those who haven't read…
gregladen | February 25, 2012In September, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and soon after Jews living in ghettos in Poland's cities were identified, sequestered, rounded up, shipped off to work camps or concentration camps, and exterminated as part of what we know of today as the Holocaust. Several Jews managed to avoid being arrested by pretending to be something else, and some of those stories have been written up as histories or biographies.
One such story is that of Sabina S. Zimering. Sabina lives in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities today, and her grand daughter was in Amanda's class a few years ago. Sabina…
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2012The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities is over 250 years old and consists almost entirely of professors of the humanities and social sciences. But don't let that fool you into thinking that it's a sleepy organisation. For one thing, the Academy is a signatory of the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. And so the venerable paper journal I edit, Fornvännen, is one of the first and most successful Open Access journals in the Swedish humanities. Increasingly, the Academy is also putting out the paper books it publishes as Open…
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2012
As a schoolboy I read the first original play performed publically written in Swedish, Urban Hiärne's Rosimunda (1665). Me and my friend Tor loved the absurd spelling, the odd changes that had occurred in the sense of many words and some of the comical one-liners. Recently I learned that about the same time Hiärne also wrote the first novel in Swedish, Stratonice (1666-68). Rosimunda deals with bloody intrigue at the Italian court of the conquering 6th century Lombard king Alboin. Stratonice is instead a pastoral romance set in the age of Alexander the Great. It is strongly derivative of…