Books
gregladen | September 16, 2016In the old days, the words "art" and "science" did not mean the same thing they mean today, at least in academia. Today, unfortunately, they have almost come to mean opposites. You can't be doing both at once. Or, at least, that's what people who haven't thought about it much may think.
Art can be used to engage people in science, and science can provide a subject for art, and in various ways, the twain shall meet.
But in Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, Erik Kandel does something both more extreme and more specific than simply joining the two endeavors.…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2016In December of last year I finished a collection of short humorous archaeological essays. It's my sixth book, my first one in Swedish, my first one aimed at the lay reader. Since then I've been waiting for established Swedish publishing houses to pronounce judgement on it. Five of them have now turned it down, none with any very detailed explanation, but most of them in terms suggesting that they think it's competently written but it probably wouldn't sell much.
As a long-time blogger and e-book reader, I am not particularly disheartened by this. After all, this blog has a greater number of…
gregladen | September 7, 2016Amazon FreeTime Unlimited is a subscription service that covers children. I normally avoid subscription services of any kind. But, I have a six year old, and suddenly it made sense.
Huxley is very tech savvy for a newly minted first grader. Last night I was reviewing a new tablet that had multiple operating systems on it. He was building a robot or something and watching me at the same time (I was projecting the tablet’s image on a big screen). I said out loud, but mainly to myself, “How the heck to I change operating systems on this?” Huxley reached over and pointed at a button that did not…
gregladen | September 3, 2016The simplest project in the new book Electronics for Kids: Play with Simple Circuits and Experiment with Electricity! by Øyvind Nydal Dahl is the one where you lean a small light bulb against the two terminals of a nine volt battery in order to make the light bulb turn on.
The first several projects in the book involve making electricity, or using it to make light bulbs shine or to run an electromagnet.
The most complicated projects are the ones where you make interactive games using LED lights and buzzers.
Electronics for Kids: Play with Simple Circuits and Experiment with Electricity!…
gregladen | September 2, 2016I remember watching, decades ago, a short film with Picasso. There was a glass wall that you could not see, and Picasso was standing behind it, dressed like a French Artist and holding painting equipment. He then proceeded to draw lines on the glass. Each line had a particular orientation and shape. He put just a couple of lines on the glass, and in so doing, created a great work of art. If I recall correctly, he made a few of them. Years later, visiting Picasso's home in Paris, I saw a bicycle handlebar thad had been broken and welded roughly back together again. Two pieces of metal, each…
gregladen | August 30, 2016Women and Physics by Laura McCulloch is a concise addition to the IOP Science Concise Physics series.
McCullough is an award winning Professor of Physics at UW Stout, and served for several years as the chair of that university’s Chemistry and Physics Department. Her research focuses on physics education, and gender and science. By both chance and design, I know a lot of people in this area, and I’m pretty sure IOP Science could not have had a better choice in authors for this important book.
How do you make a physicist? Well, you start with a child, and poke at it for 25 year or so until it…
gregladen | August 28, 2016How do you judge a field guide?
Phillipps' Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and Their Ecology: Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, and KalimantanSome field guides you leave on the shelf and rarely look at. Others you may put in the living room to spice up the coffee table, because they make great eye candy, but are otherwise not that useful. Others you take out, and at least have around in case you need them. Others you make sure you are never very far away from because you find yourself looking for them all the time.
And, every once in a while, a field guide comes along that you want to take to…
gregladen | August 27, 2016Wildlife of Southeast Asia by Susan Myers, is a new pocket identification guide covering "wildlife" in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, West Malaysia, and Singapore.
It covers birds, mammals, reptiles, frogs, and invertebrates. Considering that there must be tens of millions of inverts in Southeast Asia, the coverage here is very minimal, just the highlights, just a few pages. This is mainly a bird book, with pretty good coverage of mammals, a bunch of snakes, some of the more important frogs, and some of the more obvious insects, etc.
It is standard field guide size, and uses…
gregladen | August 26, 2016Treecology: 30 Activities and Observations for Exploring the World of Trees and Forests is an excellent new nature activity book for kids of a fairly wide range of ages.
Like a tree, the pattern of the book is pretty straightforward but fractal like; you start off simple but end up pretty much anywhere in the world of ecology. The book begins with the basic definition of a tree, simple tree anatomy, some phylogeny, some tree physiology and biology, but then branches off (pun intended) into things that are related to trees, like things that live on them, eat parts of them, etc. Seeds and…
gregladen | August 24, 2016Michael Mann has a specialty or two. Climate simulation modeling, analysis of proxy data, the study of global teleconnections, Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures over historic time scales, etc. A while back, Mann's research interests and activities converged, I assume by some combination of design and chance (as is often the case in Academia) with a key central question in science. This question is, "What is the pattern of surface warming caused by human effects on the atmosphere, including changes in greenhouse gas concentration and other pollutants?"
Mann and his colleagues…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2016 1972 back-cover blurb
I bought a used copy of Maurice Lévy's Lovecraft ou du fantastique (Paris 1972) at the Fantastika 2016 scifi con, and now I'm picking my way through it with the aid of a dictionary. S.T. Joshi has published an English translation, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (Detroit 1988).
Here's how little of Lévy's literary French I understand without a dictionary. This back-cover blurb is a particularly hairy piece of writing, I should say.
The case of Lovecraft … the thick volume of fantastic literature. A limited case where … should cease: between a neurosis which, while…
gregladen | July 15, 2016You can read this book review, or you can just go HERE and listen to our interview with author Christie Wilcox. I promise you in advance that you will want to read her book!
But, if you want to read the book review, here it is...
Did you ever do anything that hurt, then you had to do it again and you knew it would still hurt, and you didn't like that? Like getting your teeth cleaned, or licking a nine volt battery. OK, maybe you didn't have to lick the nine volt battery, but you get my point.
When I was working in the Ituri Forest, in the Congo, taking a walk in the forest was one of…
gregladen | July 13, 2016Huxley and I like to make Arduino projects. If you know what that means, your geek cred is good. If not, I'll explain briefly.
Arduino is an Italian based project that produces circuit boards that are controllers.
A controller is a small highly specialized computer thingie that can be programmed to have various inputs and outputs. You can connect devices (sensors) to the inputs and other devices (actuators of some kind, or lights or whatever) to the outputs. The programming can be fairly sophisticated. If you hook up enough of the right stuff to an Arduino board (of which there are…
gregladen | July 13, 2016Not yet.
As you know, JK Rowling is the author of the famous Harry Potter series of books (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, etc.), and more recently, of a series of really excellent crime novels (if you've not read them, you need to: The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, and Career of Evil, with a fourth book on the way, I hear).
Intuit's Max Deutsch fed the seven Harry Potter books to a computer and told it to write a new chapter. It did. It came out as gibberish.
However, it isn't just random gibberish. When you read the new text, you can see that the dialog for each character is…
gregladen | July 13, 2016Manga is the Japanese sounding but not used so much in Japan term for a form of cartooning art that has its roots from before World War II but that emerged in its common form during the post war Occupation period. Early used in political cartooning, Manga style drawing is now used for a wide range of expression, and has a place in illustrating a wide range of products, read by Japanese citizens of all sorts and ages. Outside of Japan, Manga is the starting point for the wildly popular Anime style of expression, which of course brings us to...
Pokeman go
But, we are not here to talk about…
gregladen | June 20, 2016The Birdman of Lauderdale is a collection of essays by birdman Clay Christensen.
Clay writes the popular "Birdman of Lauderdale" column for the Saint Paul Park Bugle, and leads birdwatching field trips in the Twin Cities area.
This is a collection of updated and edited essays from that publication, most about bird watching, or the birds themselves. Is it OK to hate cowbirds? What is it like to witness the takeoff of a mob of cranes? How do birdwatchers find birds anyway? What is bird banding all about? These and other burning questions are addressed in engagingly written snippets.
I…
gregladen | June 18, 2016The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy is a great new book by climate scientist Michael Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles.
This book serves many purposes. It includes an overview of the basic science of climate change and human caused global warming. It has a compendium of many of the key science deniers, and a description of the well known taxonomy of science denial ("It's Not Happening!", "OK, It's Happening but It's Natural", "It Will Take Care Of Itself", "It Will Be Good For Us", etc.). The authors discuss the…
gregladen | June 13, 2016Thinker, writer, and independent scholar Shawn Otto has written an important book called “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” (Milkweed Editions, publisher)
Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children.
The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.…
gregladen | May 26, 2016I want to tell you about a great new book that has one forgivable flaw, which I’ll mention at the end. But first, a word from Bizarro Land. This is about the Grand Canyon.
I would think that the Grand Canyon would be the last thing that creationists would point to as proof of a young earth (several thousands of years old). Just go look at the Grand Canyon. One of the top major layers, the Kaibab Formation, is around 300 to 400 feet thick and made mostly of limestone. That would take a long time to form. But wait, there's more. Within the Kaibab limestone there are also different sorts of…
gregladen | May 6, 2016The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, by climate scientist Michael Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles is now available for pre-order. I've not gotten my review copy of it yet, but it looks fantastic.
From the publisher:
The award winning climate scientist Michael E. Mann and the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles have fought at the frontlines of climate denialism for most of their careers. They have witnessed the manipulation of the media by business and political interests and the…