Books
grrlscientist | March 7, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2010Weatherwise, last weekend was thawing and misty and overcast, so I didn't feel like doing much outdoors. I finished reading Daryl Gregory's new novel (didn't do much for me) and started Douglas Adams's fifth Hitch-hiker book. When it appeared in 1992 I didn't bother with it since it seemed too much like flogging an aging franchise, but 11-y-o Junior recently asked me to buy it for him and then he recommended it. So far it seems mildly entertaining.
Had friends over for games: Settlers of Catan and Qwirkle. I was lucky enough to trade my old 80s Junta game for that Settlers box last week. I…
grrlscientist | February 28, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
laelaps | February 26, 2010Today is my 27th birthday. To celebrate Tracey and I were planning on visiting Philadelphia's Mutter Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences, but given the deep accumulation of snow we thought better of going into the city. I can still celebrate by sharing something with you, though. Presented below is the cover of my forthcoming book Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature.
And, in related news, I am dusting off the old "Best of Laelaps" anthology project. It is tentatively-titled Giant Killer Lungfish From Hell and Other Tales From Deep Time, and it will…
scientificactivist | February 23, 2010This year's version of the science blogging anthology, The Open Laboratory 2009, is out and available from Lulu publishing. You can order it in paperback format or as an electronic download. Three cheers to editor Scicurious and series editor Bora Zivkovik for their great work in making this happen!
For more, check out Scicurious' announcement and the earlier unveiling of the posts included in this year's anthology. You can see my contribution here.
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2010
The Open Lab 2009 science blogging anthology has been published and is available as a paperback book and a PDF file. There's a piece of Aard in there among many fine contributions. Tell me what you think and what e-reader you're using if you buy the PDF!
clock | February 23, 2010Yes, the day has finally arrived! The anthology is now up for sale!
Just go ahead right now and click on this link right here, then click on the "Add To Cart" button and one copy (or more!) of this amazing book will be yours!
SciCurious did a fantastic job as this year's editor - and it shows. You'll see when you get your copy. Really.
Also, huge props to Blake and his LaTeX and generally tech-savviness for putting the book together so it looks really good (and is actually loaded on the site!).
Cover art was done by Glendon Mellow who used the cover design by Dave Ng.
The list of judges is so…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
sastyk | February 16, 2010My happy-happy-joy-joy of the day. Apparently Independence Days needs a second print run, only 3 months after its release! Yay!
So just in case you are wondering why the heck you'd want to store food, and wanted to start from the beginning, well, there will be no shortage of copies.
stoat | February 16, 2010Wolf Hall is a now-immensely-well-known tale of a slice of Henry VIII's reign; a period I know little about: we skimped it at school and it gets throroughly mythologised anyway. The chief hero is Cromwell (not Oliver) who is portrayed (correctly,as I understand it) as a brilliant administrator and generally competent chap; as to whether he was really nice underneath, I neither know nor care.
What is chiefly interesting is the playing out of certain grand themes in the period. It was part of the development of civilisation, really, a time when people, under pressure of necessity, realised that…
laelaps | February 16, 2010
Contingency has been on my mind quite often these days. What would life look like today if the ancestors of the first land-dwelling vertebrates had two legs instead of four? How would non-avian dinosaurs continue to have evolved if they had not been wiped out 65 million years ago? What if, like many other prehistoric apes, our own ancestors fell into extinction during the Pliocene? Any one of these events would have changed the history of life on earth, and even though there are not answers to these questions they still remind me of how historical quirks can have major effects.
Though it has…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2010The somewhat elusive central thesis of M.C. Jenkins's new book Vampire Forensics is that original European vampire folklore was based upon misinterpretation of the slow decay that occurs when you bury a body deep. Particularly so during epidemics, when upon discovery an unusually well-preserved corpse might be made into a scapegoat to explain why people were dying. Disregarding the whole Bela Lugosi cape-and-accent thing, a vampire was originally a restless corpse that drained the health of the living -- not necessarily by actually sucking their blood.
The book is mistitled: its long opening…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
drorzel | February 13, 2010Since I'm at Boskone, talking and listening to people talking about science fiction and fantasy literature, it seems appropriate to do a quickie post listing notworthy genre stuff I've read recently. There isn't that much of it, as I've been doing a lot of non-fiction reading, and also slightly preoccupied with book promotion. Still, I've been reading a few things while putting SteelyKid to bed, and might as well comment on them here:
The Alchemist's Apprentice, The Alchemist's Pursuit, and The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan. Duncan occupies a literary position similar to that of the late…
mikethemadbiologist | February 12, 2010There's been some recent discussion about what eBooks will mean for publishing (ScienceBlogling Chad Orzel has a good roundup). As it often is, my take on this is 'follow the money.'
Maybe my reading habits are skewed*--or more accurately, my book acquisition habits are skewed--but about eighty percent of the books I read I check out from the library (it's lower for fiction, nearly 100 percent for non-fiction). I don't think most books, especially non-fiction, where it's really hard to judge from reviews if a book is any good, are worth the full hardcover price (or even a twenty to thirty…
laelaps | February 12, 2010I love anatomy. With a little bit of background knowledge it becomes easy to see the similarities and disparities between any two organisms you wish to compare, and it is always exciting to see how the bones of my arms correspond to the flippers of a whale, the forelegs of a horse, the wings of a bird, and so on.
In order to highlight the resemblances between our skeleton and other vertebrates, though, illustrators have sometimes created some rather odd diagrams. While searching for grist for my writing mill I happened upon this one in the Boys' Airplane Book which purports to show the "…
drorzel | February 10, 2010The never-ending discussion of whether the Web can or should replace books has shifted into the corners of blogdom that I follow again, with Kevin Drum arguing for more books, Henry Farrell arguing for shorter books, and Jim Henley agreeing with Henry, and expanding it to fiction. They're all at least partly right-- more shorter books would be a good thing.
I do want to pick up on one thing Kevin said, though. He writes:
This is, I grant, a purely personal reaction, but one of my occasional frustrations with the blogosphere is a sense that people sometimes think they can understand complex…
cagapakis | February 10, 2010"The history of any given technology is extraordinarily complex."
--Rob Carlson, Biology is Technology.
Analyzing the history of a technology requires a complex look at the social, economic, and political context in which it emerged, and the reciprocal influences that the developing technology exerts on these factors. Predicting what the future of a technology will be like, how it will affect the economy and understanding the potential risks and payoffs is much much harder. Rob Carlson's new book, Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of…
pharyngula | February 9, 2010People keep asking me for books on evolution for their kids, and I have to keep telling them that there is a major gap in the library. We have lots of great books for adults, but most of the books for the younger set reduce evolution to stamp collecting: catalogs of dinosaurs, for instance. I just got a copy of a book that is one small step in filling that gap, titled Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Daniel Loxton. It's beautifully illustrated, and the organization of the book focuses on concepts (and misconceptions!) of evolution, explaining them…
laelaps | February 9, 2010
Shrimp is fancy food for anyone's dinner table. Boiled, baked, grilled, poached... the culinary possibilities are almost endless, and the low price of shrimp at grocers and superstores makes it easy for us to keep on eating. Yet this abundance of shrimp obscures the true costs of the competing industries that keep supermarkets and restaurants supplied, and those stories are at the center of Jack and Anne Rudloe's new book Shrimp: The Endless Quest for Pink Gold.
To be honest, I almost shelved this book without finishing it. After an interesting autobiographical introduction about what it is…