Books
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2009The 2008 Open Laboratory anthology collecting last year's best science blogging is now available on paper and for download. I'm not featured this year, but I was one of the judges, and I can tell you there's some great stuff in there. Jennifer Rohn of Mind the Gap put it all together. Buy one for your mom!
clock | March 5, 2009
I know you have all been trembling in anticipation! But the day has finally arrived - the third science blogging anthology, The Open Lab 2008, is now up for sale!
This year's guest editor, Jennifer Rohn, did a fantastic job of putting together the best anthology ever! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Jennifer is a pro, so she assembled a team:
Richard Grant was the assistant editor (yes, the posts were really, professionally edited this year, and thus much improved in the process).
Maria Brumm did the technical part, the typesetting, starting out with the template designed last year by…
laelaps | March 2, 2009[Last night New Brunswick was buried under several inches of snow, shutting down the university and giving me the day off. I have been using my free time to get some reading done and work on a few projects but I did not want to neglect this blog. Here are the first several pages of the chapter on human evolution from Life's Splendid Riddle, the book in-progress I have so often mentioned here. I still do not have an agent and am unsure whether this book will ever make it to shelves, but I could not resist sharing this sample with you. Enjoy.]
Not long after the earth had been given form, when…
laelaps | March 1, 2009
I don't quite know what to make of Richard Fortey's latest book Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret life of the Natural History Museum. When I opened my copy to the first chapter I was expecting something like Douglas Preston's written tour of the American Museum of Natural History, Dinosaurs in the Attic, but Fortey's book turned out to be something entirely different.
I enjoyed Preston's book because it used a motley collection of artifacts, both on display and behind closed doors, to tell stories about the AMNH and the people who worked there. It was not comprehensive or even representative,…
sciencewoman | March 1, 2009Nothing to do with my age this time, just a quick note to say that I can now add 1 to my count on the BBC book lists. Two very enjoyable evenings were spent in the delightful society of Miss Elizabeth Bennett and company.
grrlscientist | March 1, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
laelaps | February 27, 2009Many thanks to everyone who wished me a happy 26th birthday yesterday. I was surprised by the number of people who did, in fact, and I was glad to receive the kind greetings of so many friends.
Special thanks are due Amanda, as well, who sent me a shiny new copy of Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1. It came in the mail just as I was headed out the door and I was deeply tempted to call in sick from work so I could start reading it. Thank you, Amanda; I cannot wait to dive into it!
My "big gift", though, was a comparative skull set (fish, frog, lizard, pigeon, rabbit) from the Bone Room that…
laelaps | February 25, 2009So there I was, vainly searching Amazon.com to see if a subscription to this blog is available on Kindle (it appears not), when I was hit between the eyes by something unexpected.
A few of you may recall that a few months ago I wrote a lukewarm review of Jerry Coyne's new book Why Evolution Is True. It is not a bad book, and it actually is a good primer if you do not know very much about evolution, but there were a number of errors in it that I felt could have easily been avoided with a little more research.
How is this relevant to my opening statement? In searching for "Laelaps" on Amazon.…
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2009
Now and then I blog about abandoned tree houses. But of course, real large houses are even more fascinating in their extended boundary state between dwelling and archaeological site (as I wrote about in January '06).
I recently read a new book (in Swedish) about abandoned houses: Svenska ödehus, finely written by Sven Olov Karlsson and illustrated with exquisite photographs by Philip Pereira dos Reis. Every abandoned house has its story, and the two have sought them out. Highly recommended! Order it here.
sciencewoman | February 22, 2009 BBC Book Meme
As seen everywhere.
BBC Book List
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (I'll bold those I've read and italicize those of which I only read part.)
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
My list is below the fold.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty…
laelaps | February 22, 2009
It would be fair to say that, until a week ago, I knew virtually nothing about J.B.S. Haldane. I knew he was a British biologist who helped form the subdiscipline of population genetics, but that was about it. Then, unexpectedly, Oxford University Press sent me a copy of What I Require From Life: Writings on Science and Life From J.B.S. Haldane.
What I Require From Life is neither an autobiography nor a comprehensive compilation of Haldane's writings. Instead it is a motley collection of Haldane's short essays written for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker (1937-1950) and pieces he…
cmooney | February 19, 2009Man, Copernicus has been kicking my butt. All the star tables, geometry, etc were turning me in to a pumpkin. So I pulled down a secondary source--Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution--and night became day. I honestly think one of the reasons that Kuhn's later and more famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had such a dramatic impact is that the author wrote and expounded so clearly.
I don't know what I was expecting from Copernicus, but Kuhn's book (so far) helpfully explains the relationship between the highly technical and the broad and general in the Copernican Revolution. As…
cmooney | February 18, 2009I've been thrilled at the comments I'm getting in response to my posts on Nicholaus Copernicus. See for example here. So I've thought of a plan to invite blog readers to join me throughout the next several months as I push through a large number of other texts like De revolutionibus.
For the remainder of this week, the primary reading will be Copernicus. (I still have a ways to go to finish.) Secondary readings will be Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read and Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution.
After that, here's the schedule I'm working from, and will strive to keep to--with Amazon…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2009Looking for a good book? Here are my best reads in English of 2008.
Will in the World. How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt 2004. The great man in his historical context.
Casino Royale. Ian Fleming 1953. Finely written about the greatest secret agent of them all.
The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy. Avram Davidson 1975. Riveting supernatural detective stories in alternate-history Balkans.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Michael Chabon 2007. Yiddish noir detective novel in an alternate-history Alaska.
The Spook's Apprentice. Joseph Delaney 2004. Young-adult rural fantasy.…
cmooney | February 17, 2009
[Copernicus: Yet Another Pluto Hater?!?]
In my last post, I talked about the "radically strange" in Copernicus; today, let's go on to catalogue the "strangely modern" aspects of the work:
Strangely modern: The idea that the heavens are immense compared to the puny little Earth. Copernicus put it this way:
I also say that the sun remains forever immobile and that whatever apparent movement belongs to it can be verified of the mobility of the Earth; that the magnitude of the world is such that, although the distance from the sun to the Earth in relation to whatsoever planetary sphere you…
cmooney | February 16, 2009
In my last post I remarked on how "radically strange--and yet strangely modern" I expected the 1543 work that kicked off the "scientific revolution" to be. Now that I've read the first two books of De Revolutionibus, I can say, boy was I right.
This is the first of several posts about my experience of reading Nicholaus Copernicus in the original (er, translation). So first, let me point out the things I found "radically strange" about the work, with the "strangely modern" to come in the next post:
Radically strange: Instructions for how to build an astrolabe. Vast tables of star locations,…
cmooney | February 14, 2009
Sane people right now are celebrating Valentine's Day.
I am holed up trying to read Nicholas Copernicus's On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium). Having been an official student of the history of science for two weeks now, and not feeling particularly satisfied with my progress, I've decided it is far past time for me to cast aside Ptolemaic and Aristotelian things, and enter the modern world.
I'll have plenty more to say about the experience of reading Copernicus once I've gotten somewhere. And after Copernicus, it's Galileo. But for now, here's an…
ddobbs | February 12, 2009Despite the rain on my window, it's a fine day indeed, with many wonderful celebrations of Darwin's 200th ringing throughout the blogoshere.
Most of these, naturally, focus on Darwin's theory of evolution and its many implications and reverberations. I much admire that theory. But what I find most fascinating about Darwin is not his theory of evolution but his method of empiricism. For as vital as was Darwin's theory of evolution was, his impact on how we view ourselves is rivaled by his impact on how we view and do science.
This and many other perverse oddities struck me when I was…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2009tags: blogosphere, meme, science books meme
Here is a meme that I was tagged with recently by the good peeps at Science on Tap. The author writes;
Imagine: YOU are asked to assign a half-dozen-or-so books as required reading for ALL science majors at a college as part of their 4-year degree; NOT technical or text books, but other works, old or new, touching upon the nature of science, philosophy, thought, or methodology in a way that a practicing scientist might gain from.
Post your list, and forward the meme to a half-dozen-or-so other science-oriented bloggers of your choosing.
As you…