Books
gregladen | April 29, 2009As long as we are on the subject (this week) of field guides, I thought I'd go ahead and suggest what guides you might take if you happen to be planning a trip to Central, East or southern Africa1
But since we are doing Africa, we need to do mammals as well as birds. But let's start with the birds.
The standard bird guide for southern Africa is Newman's Birds of Southern Africa and there was a time years ago that this was actually the best book for East and Central Africa as well, owing to a lack of other available field guides. Today, East Africa is well covered by the sometimes hard to…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009Leave it to Vaughn Bell to find this stuff: emotional maps of different cities. Got to get a hold of this -- and as Vaughn explains, you and I can, with free download. (But leave the author some $. It's the right thing to do.)
Nold came up with the idea of fusing a GSR machine, a skin conductance monitor that measures arousal, and a GPS machine, to allow stress to be mapped to particular places. He then gets people to walk round and creates maps detailing high arousal areas of cities.
The biomapping website has some of the fantastic maps from the project.
His book, called Emotional…
gregladen | April 27, 2009You'll notice that I'm reviewing bird books. (Don't worry, not all will be US based.) Please feel free to chime in with your suggestions and comments.
The ultimate bird book for North America has always been two books: both Peterson's field guides, one for the East, one for the West. Now, the new Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (Peterson Field Guide Series) combines the two. I do not own a copy, and therefore can not review it for you. (Note: I don't normally review books that publishers are unwilling to send me, and Houghton Mifflin has not been a good partner lately…
gregladen | April 27, 2009This is a repost of an earlier review.
Bill Thompson's Young Birder's Guide The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of North America (Peterson Field Guides) is a book that I highly recommend for kids around seven to 14 years of age. (The publishers suggest a narrower age range but I respectfully disagree.)
This is a new offering written by Bill Thompson III and published by the same people who give us the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds and many other fine titles. The book includes excellent illustrations by Julie Zickefoose.
A birder since childhood, Thompson says he would have loved a…
grrlscientist | April 26, 2009tags: 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…
gregladen | April 25, 2009OK, not so new, but still relevant. The following is a repost of a review of this book.
New Smithsonian Field Guide Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd is a newcomer to the bird field guide scene. This guide offers a new combination of features that may make it the best choice as the primary guide for a small number of birders, and as an excellent second (or third) guide for most birdwatchers. Given the guide's qualities and price (it is not expensive) if you are a North American birder (anywhere in the region) this is a must-have for your collection,…
ddobbs | April 23, 2009In Predicting the determined self-castrator Vaughn Bell links and looks at
a surprising study looking at psychological attributes that predict which castration enthusiasts who will actually go on to remove their own testicles, in contrast to those who just fantasise about it.
That's as far as I got; I couldn't summon the strength to read further, but maybe you can.
Those interested will definitely want to check out the essay with which David Foster Wallace opened his essay collection Consider the Lobster "Big Red Son" opens
The American Academy All emergency medicine confirms it: each year…
clock | April 23, 2009I loved Mary Roach's 'Stiff' when it first came out, so I was excited to see that Sheril started a book club reading the third book, Bonk, by the same author. My copy just arrived, so I will be participating as much as I can find the time.
Some of my SciBlings have already read and reviewed the book, e.g., SciCurious, or have the book and intend to read it, like Brian and Dr.Joan.
Sheril introduces the book here and begins the club, strangely with Chapter 5, here. Join in.
laelaps | April 21, 2009I rarely ever go to a place like Barnes and Noble to buy books, but a few months ago I had a gift card that burning a hole in my pocket. The question was what to buy. As always I browsed through the science section and didn't see much of interest. Most of the titles available were about subjects I was already familiar with or didn't strike my fancy.
I was just about to head home when I spotted Mary Roach's book SPOOK. It wasn't typical reading fare for me, but I remembered hearing good things about it. When I got home I started in on it and could not put it down. I even read the whole thing…
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2009As often mentioned here, I am no fan of post-modernist hyper-relativism. This is the idea that scientific truth is impossible and that all our ideas about the world are "socially constructed", that is, that people negotiate agreements about what the world is like and thus determine what is real. Being a realist, I am convinced that there is a single real world out there, and that though not infallible, science is finding out a lot of true information about it. (Just as I am able to find out in a non-socially-constructed way whether there is any milk in the fridge.)
On the other hand, I am a…
aardvarchaeology | April 20, 2009Neal Stephenson's 90s science fiction novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are unforgettable, but his 2003-2004 suite of historical novels failed to pull me in. So when I learned that his 2008 effort Anathem is a science fiction story, I was very happy.
This is a 900-page brick of a book, told in the first person by a young man wise beyond his years. The first third of the book is Harry Potter meets Hesse's Glass Bead Game: we are in a co-ed convent where science monks do science-monkish things inside high walls that cut them off from the general public. Then we leave the convent and have…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2009tags: 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…
pharyngula | April 18, 2009The horror…if you're at all squeamish, you may not want to read this article by an editor at a textbook publisher on how public school textbooks are made. If you're curious about why Texas has such an absurd weight in the world of textbooks, though, it will explain all.
It's a system that needs to be fixed. The article has some interesting suggestions, too, although the plan — more modularity and flexibility in curriculum materials, and a move away from reliance the massive all-in-one tome — also has potential for abuse. (I'm picturing the creationists producing little, slim 'supplemental'…
grrlscientist | April 15, 2009
I receive a fair number of books to review each month, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds by Olivia Gentile (Bloomsbury USA; 2009). Review copy.
Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009). Review copy.
Shark by Dean Crawford (Reaktion Books; 2008). Review…
laelaps | April 13, 2009I really admire folks like those at the NCSE who keep up with the latest schemes of creationists. Not only is their service valuable to protecting science in the United States, but I just don't think I could match their endurance when it comes to listening to creationist nonsense. Creationism is just so dull! Not only is there an unsatisfying blanket explanation for everything ("Because God said so.") but creationists make a business out of repeating themselves. If you have read one tract you have generally read them all.
Young earth creationism in its present manifestation hatched during the…
jlynch | April 13, 2009Janet has some extensive thoughts about the shenanigans over at Amazon.com. Do wander over and have a read. Suffice it to say, I agree with her and will be withholding any business until all of this has been cleared up to my satisfaction.
bioephemera | April 12, 2009
Zombie Stomper by Iron Fist, via Haute Macabre
Yup - Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is the project the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is doing next. While my review of P&P&Z was pretty positive, I'm not sure I can in good conscience encourage this trend.
Also, note that while P&P&Z has surged to the top of the bestseller list, the New Yorker was not as charitable in its review as I was. Perhaps these shoes by Iron Fist might serve as a litmus test for whether you are likely to enjoy P&P&Z. Tongue-in-cheek fun or thoroughly foul? You be the judge!
sciencewoman | April 10, 2009ScienceWoman notes: Last week I gave away a couple of books to readers who enthusiastically promised to review the books. The books were mailed on Friday and I've already gotten the first review back. Talk about enthusiasm! Here's a review from Courtney of Courtney's Blog.
What Are You Optimistic About is one of Edge.org's "celebration of the ideas of the third culture" (for further information, read C.P. Snow's classic, The Two Cultures). There is an introduction by the famed scientist/philosopher Dennett, who says, "It can't all be true, but we need to test them."
Fig. 1. Courtney's…
laelaps | April 9, 2009
When I first happened upon Sean B. Carroll's new book, Remarkable Creatures my first thought was "Damn! He beat me to it!" For over a year I have been preparing my own pop-sci book about paleontology, evolution, and the history of science, and as I skimmed through Remarkable Creatures I saw that Carroll had already covered a number of the same subjects. I would have been interested in Carroll's book regardless of my own project, but given my goal I knew I had to read it.
Fortunately for me Remarkable Creatures is not as similar to my own project as I had first thought. Instead it is a…
ddobbs | April 8, 2009The 10,000-year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Evolution, of which I've so far read about 1000 words -- but I just got it. Appears to be The Beak of the Finch (faster than expected evolutionary changes) in humans, but with this delicious addtion: the idea that culture can drive evolution, so that the line between "nature" (biology) and "nurture" (culture) finally vanishes. We'll see.
Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures, which got pre-empted (for work reasons) by the above-named Explosion. Looks quite juicy.
The Dangerous River, R.M. Patterson's account of his time exploring the…