Books
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2010I had two pages in the May issue of Forskning & Framsteg (Sweden's equivalent av Scientific American) about recent books on the Scandinavian Bronze Age. I was happy to publish there, but not very happy with the rushed chop job the contribution went through without my involvement before it was sent to the printers. So, below the fold is an uncut review in Swedish of the following books:
Det 10. nordiske bronsealdersymposium. Trondheim 5.-8. okt. 2006. Red. Terje Brattli, Trondheim 2009.
Changing landscapes and persistent places. An exploration of the Bjäre peninsula. Jenny Nord. Lund…
clock | July 6, 2010If you picked up The Poisoner's Handbook (amazon.com) looking for a fool-proof recipe, I hope you have read the book through and realized at the end that such a thing does not exist: you'll get busted. If they could figure it all out back in 1930s, can you imagine how much easier they can figure out a case of poisoning today, with modern sensitive techniques? And if you have read the book through, I hope you found it as fascinating as I did. Perhaps you should use your fascination with poisons to do good instead, perhaps become a forensic toxicologist?
My SciBling Deborah Blum (blog, Twitter…
clock | July 5, 2010About a month ago, I told you about the book-reading event where Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) read from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com). I read the book immediately after, but never wrote a review of my own. My event review already contained some of my thoughts about the topic, but I feel I need to say more, if nothing else in order to use this blog to alert more people about it and to tell everyone "Read This Book".
What I wrote last month,
"I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but…
ddobbs | July 1, 2010Â
You just never know what'll catch fire. Then again, maybe I should have figured "Ozzy Osbourne" and "genome" would have. In any case, Ozzy simply buried every other contender this past month, racking up 7 times as many hits as any other entry ever did in one month -- and accounting for two-thirds of June's unique pageviews altogether. The power of Stumbleupon. A fifth of those readers went on to other pages. So maybe something good came of it.
Without further ado, here are Neuron Culture's Top 5 from June.
Ozzy Osbourne. Now genomics is getting somewhere. Geneticists hope to figure out how…
grrlscientist | June 27, 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 | June 26, 2010tags: Best Church of God Vs. An Atheist, religion, cults, faith, funny, humor, comedy, social commentary, Greg Epstein, books, streaming video
A silly video about a bunch of wackaloon religious wingnuts and an atheist humanist discussing religion and how god forces people to live moral and decent lives. (The video is silly, but the protest signs are rather amusing).
The Best Church of God takes on heretical "humanist" Greg Epstein, famed author of the controversial book, "Good Without God."-- edited by Aemilia Scott
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2010Jan Zalasiewicz is a geologist active at the University of Leicester. His 2008 book The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? is an interesting read even though the title does not correspond very well to the contents. Zalasiewicz does answer the question about what legacy humans will leave in the rocks. But on their own, these answers would only provide material for a magazine article. The bulk of the book is instead an introduction to geology which allows the neophyte to understand what will happen to the remains of today's world as millions of years pass.
Having no…
laelaps | June 25, 2010
Even though I sometimes feel quite anxious about the publication of Written in Stone, the positive comments the manuscript has received so far have helped to relieve my apprehension. Professional reviews will not show up for another few months, of course, but during the process of composing the book - from pitching to my agent to asking my wife to read the completed copyedit-ready draft - I am glad to say that the early responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Nevertheless, when the time came to ask scientists and science writers for blurbs, my nervousness spiked again. These are people…
ddobbs | June 25, 2010Every time I read David Foster Wallace, I think, that's just classic David Foster Wallace. Which is to say it's completely unexpected, novel, different from the way almost anyone else thinks, including David Foster Wallace the last time I read him.
This is a fun review in the NY Review of Books of a book about Wallace I think I now must get.
I like the title. That's Wallace: Smarter than you think. And even smarter than you think or remember Wallace is from last time you read him.
Smarter than You Think
"What I would love to do is a profile of one of you guys who's doin' a profile of me,"…
ddobbs | June 23, 2010I'm 'posed to be writing, really writing (insert argument over what's really writing in comments), but hit so many juicy bits in my morning read today I wanted to share. Here's my eclectic mix for the day:
A great rompy scary post from @susanorlean on how her book bounced around many publishers and editors.
Keith Kloor at Collide-a-scape has a round-up of stories on the "credibility of climate experts" report
"memory performance boosted while walking"  Beautiful. Perhaps why walking oft solves writing probs.  via @mariapage:
"Theory Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" From @kerin at…
clock | June 22, 2010Now this is big: ScienceBlogs Welcomes the World's Top Scientific Institutions to Our Network:
We here at ScienceBlogs are pleased to announce that beginning today, we will be helping to spark the next generation of research communications by introducing new blogs to our network from the world's top scientific institutions. The initial list includes: CERN, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), SETI Institute, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The first two of those are already live - check out the Weizmann Wave and Brookhaven Bits & Bytes. Go and say…
grrlscientist | June 20, 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 "…
ddobbs | June 19, 2010Â
Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet Lehrer â who, unlike me, has read Shirky's book â finds that Shirky overplays his case, and that in his enthusiasm for networked contributions and collaborations he discounts both consumption and many offline interactions.
He Lehrer mounts a convincing argument, and you really…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2010
One of the most beloved novels in the Swedish language is Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking story Röde Orm (1941), transl. Red Orm / The Long Ships (1943). And one of the most beloved scenes in the novel are the Yuletide celebrations at the court of King Harold Bluetooth at Jelling in Jutland toward the end of the 10th century. It's got the lines "There's thyme in it, said Toki in a cracked voice" and "He's done pissing now", and a duel that ends in a man's severed head landing in a tub of mead. (You can see why Bengtsson is one of my favourite writers.)
I recently complained about Skalk running…
ddobbs | June 14, 2010
A still from Visconti's The Leopard, via NYRB
This is not new, but seems to me overlooked (and underlinked) in the blogosphere: The New York Review of Books â a long, longtime favorite of mine â has a blog stable that offers a nice variety of goodies. The current line-up gives a sense of the range: a piece on Mexican art by Alma Guillermoprieto; Sue Halpern's beef about the iPad, which I elaborated on earlier; pieces on the Vatican, Iraq, and Pakistan; and a leisurely travel post on Palermo that begins, "Everything in Palerno is slow except the traffic, which is as confusing as a…
grrlscientist | June 13, 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 "…
gregladen | June 10, 2010Advancing the Science of Climate Change is a publication of the National Academy of Sciences (National Academies Press) which sports this description:
The compelling case that climate change is occurring and is caused in large part by human activities is based on a strong, credible body of evidence, says Advancing the Science of Climate Change, one of the new books in the America's Climate Choices series. While noting that there is always more to learn and that the scientific process is never "closed," the book emphasizes that multiple lines of evidence support scientific understanding of…
ddobbs | June 10, 2010Â
Don DeLillo's Players, as marked up by David Foster Wallace.Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
I just sat down to air a complaint about reading on the iPad when I discovered that Sue Halpern had done much of my work for me:
For all its supposed interactivity, the iPad is a surprisingly static machine, especially for reading. ... One of the guilty pleasures of an actual, ink-on-paper book is the possibility of marking it upâunderlining salient passages, making notes in the margins, dog-earing a page. While itâs true that some electronic book platforms for…
ddobbs | June 9, 2010
Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org
Â
Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do!
Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question.
It seems that everywhere I look nowadays, Iâm seeing images of, or reading descriptions of, the brain in some shape or form.
Buchman links (at the post's bottom, as is now the practice at NCore) to several good reads and sites, including Neuroculture.org, which has some lovely stuff, and â curse those…
clock | June 8, 2010 Joanne Manaster of Joanne Loves Science has just announced a science book reading contest for young readers (and movie-makers): Kids Read Science and Teens Read Science. Watch the introductory video:
Check out the contest instructions for details:
The contest is simple--just do what I do quite often. Read a non-fiction science book and make a video! Oh, you have to be a kid or teen. Just making that clear. Age 8-12 can enter Kids Read Science and ages 13-18 can join Teens Read Science. We will be thrilled to see you all be creative and articulate. Tell us what you learned in less than five…