Books
clock | April 19, 2010The New York Times Reader: Science & Technology by Holly Stocking is now out:
Science writing poses specific challenges: Science writers must engage their audiences while also explaining unfamiliar scientific concepts and processes. Further, they must illuminate arcane research methods while at the same time cope with scientific ignorance and uncertainty. Stocking's volume not only tackles these challenges, but also includes extraordinary breadth in story selection, from prize-winning narratives, profiles and explanatory pieces to accounts of scientific meetings and new discoveries, Q…
grrlscientist | April 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 and behavior books 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 "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
jdupuis | April 16, 2010If you love sword & sorcery books and stories (and who doesn't!), SF Signal has one of their Mind Meld features in which they ask a bunch of writers and editors to name their favourites of the genre.
Here's a taste:
Lou Anders
"Ill met in Lankhmar" tops any list. How could it not? Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser defined sword & sorcery for me as a child, and I'm thrilled that, having just started rereading their adventures they are thus far holding up. Michael Moorcock's "Stormbringer" is tied or a close second. I haven't read that since I was 15 but the Moorcock I have read hasn't dated.…
gregladen | April 14, 2010Randall Hyde's book is now out in it's second edition.
Your computer has little dohickies in it that know how to read and respond to commands that are, in turn, stored in (and read from) other dohickies.
These instructions are collectively known as "machine language." If you do an programming at all, you probably know this. A form of this very low level language that is designed to be somewhat more readable by humans is known as Assembly Language.
Higher level languages allow programmers to avoid messy details like the kind of hardware their program may run on, and higher level…
cagapakis | April 12, 2010I got a lot of interesting responses to my post about DIYbio and how modeling innovation in biotech on computer hacker culture may lead to a science that is less "democratized" than what is being proposed. My friend Adam pointed me to Jaron Lanier's work criticizing the "open" and "free" culture movements online as both unfair and leading to cultural stagnation. While I don't agree with all of Lanier's arguments about the prospects of an open digital culture, he makes a lot of really important points that resonate with my feelings about the future of science based on the open online model, in…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2010One of H.P. Lovecraft's least successful horror stories is "Medusa's Coil", a 1930 collaboration with Zealia Bishop. The story builds to one of the hideous final denouements that Lovecraft liked to end his stories with.
Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me--that horror which he must have learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.
It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside--the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful…
laelaps | April 9, 2010
Now that the details about Australopithecus sediba have been published, I am faced with an important question - how am I going to fit the new hominin into Written in Stone?
When I started composing Written in Stone I was determined to make it as up-to-date as possible. This was not only out of a concern for accuracy, but also stemmed from a desire to present the public with some discoveries that they may not have heard about before. Given that new paleontological papers are being published every week, however, I have often been faced with the question of how to incorporate interesting new…
mikethemadbiologist | April 8, 2010I was going to call this review "Naked Came the Economist", but ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism by Yves Smith of Naked Capitalist is too well written. ECONNED can be divided in two major sections. The first part deals with the flawed economic assumptions that led to the collapse of Big Shitpile and other economic fun times. The second part provides a natural history of what happened, while, at the same time, relating it to the flawed economic assumptions. To deal with the last part first, it's a very good description, although those…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Back when I was in grad school, and paper copies of journals were delivered to the lab by a happy mailman riding a brontosaurus, I used to play a little game when the new copy of Physical Review Letters arrived: I would flip through the papers in the high energy and nuclear physics sections, and see if I could find one where the author list included at least one surname for every letter of the alphabet. There wasn't one every week, but it wasn't that hard (particularly with large numbers of physicists from China, where family names beginning with "X" are more common).
Every so often, somebody…
laelaps | April 6, 2010
A few weeks ago, during the last part of the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series, I briefly mentioned the idea of creating a series of mini-documentaries which would help promote my forthcoming book Written in Stone. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, but I have a bit of a problem. I have never created a short film before (well, outside of TV class in high school), and I am asking for a bit of advice from those who are more experienced with video projects.
At the moment I have two primary questions. The first is, what sort of digital video recorder should I buy? I…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My piles 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 and behavior books 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 "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
laelaps | March 31, 2010The latest edition of the open-access paleontology journal Palaeontologia Electronica was recently published, and I am happy to say that it contains my review of The Paleobiological Revolution. If you are interested in the history of science and how paleontology has changed during the past four decades, definitely check it out.
With any luck, I will be able to publish a few more contributions to the technical literature this year. I have one paper in press, another which is presently inching through the review process, a piece I just started writing up about an enormous example of…
stoat | March 30, 2010I haven't been nice to Hobbes for a bit, so:
When God speaketh to man, it must be either immediately or by mediation of another man, to whom He had formerly spoken by Himself immediately. How God speaketh to a man immediately may be understood by those well enough to whom He hath so spoken; but how the same should be understood by another is hard, if not impossible, to know. For if a man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it.
There. Isn't that wonderful…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2010Here's a paraphrase from memory of an instruction sheet that came with the main Swedish encyclopaedia back in the 90s. I treat all new books this way to keep their spines from cracking. And they just can't have enough of me.
1. Put book on table, spine down. Fold down left cover, smoothen inner edge, fold down right cover, smoothen inner edge.
2. Fold down 15-20 pages to the left, flatten firmly with finger along inner edge.
3. Fold down 15-20 pages to the right, flatten firmly with finger along inner edge.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 until the book is spread out flat in front of you and open at the…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2010tags: freedom of speech, freedom of publishing, Philip Pullman, books, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, streaming video
Philip Pullman responds to the jackasses and crybabies of the world with regards to their whiny complaints about the title of his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. His answer succinctly addresses the larger issue of freedom of publishing/presses/speech. My response? AMEN!
Philip Pullman, addressing an audience at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, on 28 March 2010, was asked about whether his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the…
grrlscientist | March 28, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My piles of books are 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 and behavior books 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 "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
laelaps | March 26, 2010
The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book?
Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will undoubtedly be in competition with numerous other science titles for the chance of being reviewed in the few publications which still review science books at all. Book tours, too, have become nearly extinct, and as a virtually unknown science writer I don't expect many (any?) people to show up at their…
laelaps | March 22, 2010
Last Friday I posted an open-thread in an attempt to gauge what readers might be getting from the "So you want to write a pop-sci book" series (Parts 1, 2, and 3), and I was quite pleased by the response. I was glad to hear so many of you have found it useful (or intend to go back to it when you get your own book projects in order). There were also a few questions about the book-writing process, and I will answer them here.
Most of the questions were asked by Stan, and I'll go through them one at a time.
"How did you solve the balance between themes that you personally found interesting,…
clock | March 22, 2010My SciBling Rebecca Skloot will be here in the Triangle for a couple of days this week promoting her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I'll be out of town for most of this (off to Boston in a couple of hours), but you should come to one or more of these events if you can:
Monday night 3/22, 7:30 pm she'll be at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh just off the Wade Ave exit on I-40:
Tuesday 3/23, noon, she'll be Frank Stasio's guest on The State of Things at WUNC-FM 91.5
Tuesday 3/23, 3 pm, she'll be the keynote speaker of a mini-symposium on African American issues in science, medicine, and…
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2010One of the things Newbury Street has lacked is a used book store. Now it has one: Raven Used Books. This could be really bad as it's about four minutes away. Unlike most Boston area used book stores, Raven Used Books' business model isn't to sell really expensive rare books and then stock the rest of the shelves with crap. They actually have lots of books you want to read at very low prices, along with books that you either can't order online or would be really expensive to do so (it seems they focus on buying leftovers from college and independent bookstores, not buying by the pound…