Books
gregladen | May 4, 2017I've been enjoying Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar: A Guided Tour of the Solar System by Bonnie Buratti.
Burratti is a planetary astronomer at NASA's JPL, and is the head of the Comets, Asteroids and Satellites Group. She was a key player in the Voyager program, and in the research done with the Cassini-Huygens, and New Horizons space ships.
Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar: A Guided Tour of the Solar System is a personal exploration of what it is like to personally (via robots) explore our solar system, and at the same time, a systematic accounting of the solar system. The story is…
gregladen | May 2, 2017Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by NdGT is now available.
What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.
But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.
While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or…
gregladen | April 8, 2017The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, supported by Education Minnesota, ran the 29th annual Minnesota Book Awards ceremony tonight, and Amanda and I were graciously invited by author Shawn Otto and State Auditor and Gubernatorial Hopeful Rebecca Otto to join them at their table. Shawn's wildly popular, and extremely, increasingly relevant book The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It was up for the award in General Nonfiction.
There was a great deal of suspense, as Shawn's category was the very last one of several, and there were several other…
gregladen | April 6, 2017Have a look at the list of books, below.
Would you like a subset, or all, of these books, in electronic format, for very cheap? There is a way to do that. Note: This is time sensitive, the offer running for just about two weeks and it started yesterday.
I've reviewed several of these books on this blog, and have recommended them. I'm going through Python Crash Course right now, and we've found the various kids programming books to be helpful, for instance. I've not looked at the grey hat or black hat books, but I'm sure they are fine.
The publisher, No Starch Press, has created one of…
gregladen | April 5, 2017There are about four hundred species of birds we call "raptors" of which most are falcons, hawks, eagles, owls, and so forth. I believe there are about 40 in what is considered the United States (from a person, not a bird, perspective) and many of them are found across much of the US, with the usual breaks across the Rockies, and a certain amount of north-south geography, and varying degrees of migration.
A typical page
There are 69 species of raptors, many overlapping with those in the US, in Mexico (which is part of North America, from a human perspective) and Central America.…
gregladen | March 24, 2017The Neotropical Companion by John Kricher came out years ago, in the late 80s if I recall correctly. I've got a copy of it around somewhere.
I loved that book because it did a great job integrating all the things in one place: animals, plants, habitats, evolution, etc. Even though I was working in the paleotropics at the time, I found it informative.
Then, more recently, I got a revised version of the same book. I've got it around somewhere. It is from the 1990s, I think. Great book, same idea as the first one, but with more in it, and a somewhat larger format. This dates to after my…
gregladen | March 19, 2017
Monarchs and Milkweed: A Migrating Butterfly, a Poisonous Plant, and Their Remarkable Story of Coevolution by Anurag Agrawal is a fantastic, readable, scientifically rich, detailed monograph about – you guessed it – the monarch butterfly and the milkweed plant.
The monarch butterfly begins a springtime northward migration by flying a good ways north, where females lay eggs and die. Then the eggs hatch, the caterpillars feed and metamorphose, and the newly minted butterflies then fly further north, and this cycle happens again. This happens a few times. The southward migration is different.…
gregladen | March 15, 2017Rob Honeycutt is famous for his many contributions, at Skeptical Science, in the comment threats on my blog, and elsewhere, in defense of climate science, where that defense is largely against the deniers of science and damagers of civilization. (He is also the guy who makes these famous messenger bags) He deserves a lot of credit for all the work he has done in this area.
Over the years, Honeycutt has developed a number of dialogs related to most, possibly all, areas of human caused global warming and climate change. Along with these dialogs, he has also developed some very helpful…
gregladen | March 9, 2017Just got my copy of Birds of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East: A Photographic Guide by Frédéric Jiguet and Aurélien Audevard.
This is the first and only field-ready photographic bird guide that covers every species in Europe. There are 2,200 photos covering 860 species. The West Asian and North African coverage is of all of the species there that have occurred in Europe, so think of this primarily as a European guide.
The entry for the Mute Swan.
I hasten to add and emphasize. These are not your grandaddy's photographs. Many photographic guides have pretty nice looking…
gregladen | March 7, 2017Book note:
There are two books you may want to check out because, for the moment (Tuesday, March 7th is the moment), they are deeply discounted at Amazon:
Kindle version for two bucks: The End of Nature
Kindle version for three bucks: The First Americans
I also want to note that Shawn Otto's book, "The War on Science," is now available as an audio book: The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It.
gregladen | February 28, 2017Karen Stollznow has edited this book: Would You Believe It?: Mysterious Tales From People You'd Least Expect, and you will find my chapter on page 112.
This is a great idea for a book. Suppose Susan Blackmore told you she had an out of body experience? Or that Don Prothero had an alien abduction story for you? Or that I claimed I had once hunted down and captured a ghost? Would you believe it??? Indeed.
You would probably be skeptical if any of the 30+ established skeptics who authored chapters in this book told you that they had a paranormal, psychic, or otherwise impossible experience…
gregladen | February 6, 2017Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and not very useful, not knowledge that we could use to reduce the risks from such events.
This is no longer true. The last several decades has seen climate science add more climatic data because of decades of careful instrumental data collection happening, but also, earlier decades have been added to…
gregladen | February 4, 2017Rosa Parks wasn't just some kid who decided to defy white authority and relinquish her seat on the bus.
For one thing, she was a bit older than a kid. For another, she carried out this defiant act as part of a larger strategy to cause necessary and urgent change in the rules of society.
When the 106th Congress awarded Parks a medal honoring her activism, they called her the "the mother of the freedom movement." Never mind that today, one member of the Republican party, which again controls Congress, thinks it is "Time for another Kent State ... One bullet stops a lot of thuggery." We…
gregladen | February 1, 2017Your objective is to learn Python programming. Everybody has to learn Python.
You are looking for a book that will make that easier for you. One possibility, one that I'll recommend for most people in this situation, is Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming.
To cut to the chase, there are two reasons I recommend this book. First, the specific programming projects used in the book are a good match for most people, because they are bare bones (but highly developed) exemplars that are fairly adaptable and together cover a wide range of applications and…
gregladen | January 27, 2017Asking for a friend...
But seriously, this is a real question. For example, several years ago, Herbert Weinstein tossed his wife out the window of their Manhattan apartment, after killing her, following an argument. He was well known to be a non violent person, and there was really no good reason for him to murder his wife this way. But, it turns out, his prefrontal cortical region was compromised by a very large cyst. Weinstein was one of the first in recent decades to use an insanity style defense connected to neuro-imaging or other neurobiology showing a demonstrable, physical, brain…
gregladen | January 25, 2017Last October I reviewed Scratch Programming Playground, by Al Sweigart.
You will recall that Scratch is a programming language that uses drag and drop elements to construct a program.
Individual objecgts, including "sprites" that can move around on the screen, as well as static graphic elements, sounds, etc. get their own code, and this code can be set up to start under various conditions, such as when something touches something, or the user hits a certain key, etc.
This allows for the development of very simple but fun programs, and vey complicated ones as well.
Scratch is normally…
gregladen | January 20, 2017This is not a time to be distracted, to turn away from politics, to eschew activism. In fact, if you are an American Citizen, you have to look back at your life and recognize that you screwed up, in two ways. First, whatever time you spent agitating and activating and acting out, turns out, was not enough. You needed to spend something like 10% more time on that. Second, whatever decisions you made as to exactly what sort of activism you would do on a given day were likely flawed. Instead of yammering about Bernie after the primary you should have been going after Trump. At the beginning of…
gregladen | January 14, 2017Ah yes, I remember it well.
"Hammurabi, Hammurabi, I beg to report to you,
In Year 1, 0 people have starved.
101 people came to the city
The population is now 124
We harvested 4.5 bushels per acre
We planted 998 acres of wheat
But rats at 300 bushels of wheat
You now have a surplus of 1443 bushels of wheat
How many acres do yo uwish to feed to the people?
How many acres do you wish to plant with seed?
Oh, and you have died of Cholera!"
Or, this one:
Remember?
I went to a special high school, in an era when individuals and high schools alike did not have computers, but we did. Since we were a…
gregladen | January 12, 2017A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos
This is a concept that has always fascinated me, ever since reading some stuff about the Periodic Table of Elements. Check it out:
Over the last forty years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it - and life as we can imagine it - would be impossible. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and galaxies, and back through cosmic history to the birth of the cosmos.…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2017 The Detective: Jonathan L. Howard's second book about Johannes Cabal, the necromancer.
Here are my best reads in English during 2016. My total was 42 books and 13 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads!
Dear Reader, what were your best reads of the year?
The Detective. (Johannes Cabal #2.) Jonathan L. Howard 2010. Sardonically funny Ruritanian detective story.
Bully for Brontosaurus. Stephen Jay Gould 1991. Essays on natural history.
Ready Player One. Ernest Cline 2011. Wonderful adventure story for anyone who played video games in the 1980s.
Murder at the Vicarage. Agatha Christie…