Books
gregladen | August 26, 2010I've become very interested in Minnesota history, and by interested I mean annoyed in many cases. The first thing white Minnesotans did was to exploit the Indians. The second thing they did was to throw the Indians out, move them to reservations, kill them, and otherwise treat them very poorly. Meanwhile, they got going on the process of cutting down 90 percent of the trees in the state. Even New York State, where I grew up, did not have such wanton destruction of the forests, and Whitie had two hundred more years to do it there. They also killed off most of the wolves. Oh, and both…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2010For everybody who's in a Lovecraftian mood after that podcast, here's a ghoulish news item. Reports Emma Persson Hennig in Sydsvenskan, and I translate:
Staffanstorp municipality. A woman placing flowers on a grave at Brågarp churchyard suddenly sunk into it when the earth collapsed. One of her legs sunk into the grave and she could not get it free unaided. The accident happened at 17:30, Wednesday evening. As an evening service was being prepared, there were several witnesses. They called for help and the woman was freed.
[...]
The recent heavy raining is believed to be the cause of the…
gregladen | August 17, 2010There is a swath across the map of Minnesota that runs northwest to southeast across the state, separating the major biomes of the eastern two thirds of the country, and for complicated reasons. North, it is colder, south warmer. Much of the moister in the region, especially in the summer, comes from the Gulf of Mexico, directly to the south, whence air masses move north and swerve east. So, there is a west to east gradient of increased rainfall, and a south to north gradient of decreased rainfall. However, the cooler conditions to the north mean that what rain does fall counts for more,…
aardvarchaeology | August 16, 2010When was the last time you read H.P. Lovecraft's 1921 story "The Outsider"? Have you ever? Let me tell you, it's a rare dark pleasure.
Written when Lovecraft was 31, the story is one of the high points of his early work when the influences of Poe and Dunsany were still strongly in evidence. It is made particularly interesting by the autobiographical sub-text under the overt horrific surface. Lovecraft was a lonely child, brought up by elderly relatives and reading voraciously in his grandfather's library of 18th and early-19th century books. After years of solitary introspection, he then…
drorzel | August 14, 2010Tongues of Serpents is the nth book in the Temeraire series started with His Majesty's Dragon (in the US, anyway), and another "Meh" review from me. In this case, this is probably less to do with the book itself than with the fact that I am not really in the target demographic for this book.
The series, for those who aren't familiar with it is basically Patrick O'Brian crossed with Pern: our chief protagonist is William Laurence, a sailor in the Biritsh Navy in the Napoleonic Wars who captures a dragon's egg, and inadvertently becomes the human captain of Temeraire, a Chinese Celestial dragon…
drorzel | August 14, 2010I don't believe the actual book is out yet, but you can get an electronic Advance Reading copy of the Nth Miles Vorkosigan book, Cryoburn already. Kate picked up a copy, and while she hasn't gotten around to it yet, I read it this week while putting SteelyKid to bed.
The book is another "Lord Auditor Vorkosigan" story, with Miles on a mission to Kibou-Dani, a half-terraformed planet with a positive fetish for cryopreservation. A quirk in local laws gives the "cryocorps" that preserve millions of frozen citizens the right to proxy vote for their clients, and control of their property, so they…
gregladen | August 9, 2010... and sundry related topics.
If you use a Kindle to read these mostly older and thus free-ish books, please add your favorites in the comments.
Africania, history, and other early works
Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Burton: First footsteps in East Africa
How: People of Africa
Kingsley: Travels in West Africa
Shipman: To the Heart of the Nile
Early science and natural philosophy
Brues and Melander: Key to the families of North American insects: an introduction to the ...
Darwin: On the Origin of Species, first edition
Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle or a Naturalist's Voyage Round the World…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2010As the slow-motion destruction of our nation's infrastructure continues due to deficits über alles hysteria, we find this very depressing article from Camden, NJ about the proposed eradication of its public library system:
Camden is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.
At an emotional but sparsely attended meeting of the library board Thursday, its president, Martin McKernan, said the city's three libraries cannot stay open past…
drorzel | August 6, 2010In comments to yesterday's post about my favorite Many-Worlds story, a couple of people mention "All the Myriad Ways," a Larry Niven short story. I don't think I've ever actually read the story, but it gets brought up all the time, so I'm familiar with the concept. It's an angle on Many-Worlds that I don't like, and has something in common with the central conceit of Inception, which is also not high on my list of literary tropes, though my reaction isn't anywhere near as negative as Scott's.
If you're not familiar with it, here's the summary from Wikipedia:
A police detective, pondering a…
gregladen | August 4, 2010Did 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. The other was as th 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 counterfeit, and in particular, to end the career of one particular counterfeiter, William Chaloner.
This…
gregladen | August 2, 2010Why does the wind blow, and why does it blow the way it does?
When I teach human evolution, I feel compelled to bring in climate change. When I do that, I find it very unsatisfying to mention climate change as a thing that simply happened. I need to also discuss how climate itself works, both now (in the present era) and generally speaking. That can be hard. There are so many variables that matter, and that if you leave out will come back and bite you later when you suddenly need them to explain something. Anyway, when addressing climate and how it works, it is very difficult to not…
drorzel | August 1, 2010The voting for the 2010 Hugo Awards closed last night. I sent in my ballot yesterday, but I'm trying to limit my computer time this weekend, so I didn't post about it until today.
The following lists are my votes, with miscellaneous commentary. The Hugos use a complicated vote-counting scheme, including a "No Award" option to distinguish between works you wouldn't mind seeing win, even if they're not your first choice, and works you consider so bad you would rather see them cancel the award than win.
Best Novel
The City and the City by China Mieville
Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson…
gregladen | July 28, 2010
The Triassic is old. This book is new. That is a hard to beat combination.
Let'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,…
gregladen | July 27, 2010Can you imagine Stephen Jay Gould recast as a tall and lanky Jesuit priest who has an interest in evolution? Can you imagine someone actually attempting the famous experiment of getting a large number of chimpanzees at keyboards to see if you can get any Shakespeare? Eventually? (The experiment is enhanced with the use of carefully dispensed M&M's.) Did you ever wonder, if a chimpanzee did make the switch to human levels of intelligence (by training, drugs, surgery, whatever) what kind of scotch if would prefer?
Normand de Ratour is the main character of three novels written by my…
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2010
I got the Aldiko e-book reader for my Android phone the other day - for free over the net. It came with two apparently random free books in epub format: H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Sun Tzu's Art of War. And whenever I like I can get more books for free over the net from within the e-reader: either old ones whose copyright has expired, or newly written ones with a Creative Commons licence. Austen, Doyle, Lovecraft, Twain, you name it! I can also buy copyrighted e-books and put them on my phone. The cost works out to about the same as if I mail-order a used paperback from the UK, the…
gregladen | July 23, 2010There are several characteristics that make up a field guide. It should be "pocket size" (and birders have huge pockets, so this may not be as much of a restriction as it sounds). It should cover the geographical region in which you are watching the birds, although in some remote areas of the world you may not have this luxury. During my years working in Zaire, we had only a Southern African bird guide, and made due. And the book should be of the right kind and level for your needs.
By level, I mean beginner or advanced. Sadly, most bird book publishers assume that there is a gene for…
gregladen | July 22, 2010Remember Evolutionary Psychology? The theory?
It's over.
I think I've told the story elsewhere of having been at the birth of Evolutionary Psychology, down in room 14A in the Peabody Museum. If not, remind me some time and I'll tell it.
Evolutionary Psychology is a particular theory of how the mind works, how evolution has shaped that mind in certain predictable and testable ways, bla di bla di bla and so on and so forth. And, although there is something in there ... something in that theory ... that is useful, it is mostly not really very close to what happens when humans behave. Or…
jdupuis | July 22, 2010A great article in last Friday's Globe and Mail, Will the last bookstore please turn out the lights?
The main thrust of the article is that while there's a lot of doom and gloom in the industry, there's also some hope and, more importantly, some innovation.
One source of Bleumer's optimism is the "ferocious" level of reading she sees going on among young people. Those ferocious readers will be the regular book buyers of the future. What stores need to do, she insists, is not only focus on old-fashioned face-to-face customer service, but also remain flexible enough to adapt to whatever comes…
grrlscientist | July 18, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…