Books
gregladen | November 18, 2008Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon by Richard Greenberg is the exploration of one of the more interesting planetary bodies of our solar system ... Europa, a moon of Jupiter, as well as one of the more interesting episodes in the politics of science.
Europa is the sixth moon of Jupiter, and is almost the size of our Moon. But get this: Europa has a thin Oxygen atmosphere, and is covered with water. This makes it a very likely place for life to evolve.
Being so far from the sun, and having a very thin atmosphere (and some other considerations) means that Europa…
gregladen | November 17, 2008Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, by Jennifer Ouellette, is an exploration of popular culture, including literature, movies, TV shows, and so on. Ouellette demonstrates a well studied knowledge of these areas of human endeavor, and she is an excellent writer. This means that when you have explored these aspects of day to day life, you will at the end have a reasonably good understanding...
... of quantum physics.
Well, not really, though this is how Black Bodies is often described. In reality, Jennifer, in these re-worked and updated entries from her regular…
sciencewoman | November 17, 2008Open Lab 2008 is a printed anthology of the best science blogging of the year. We're now only two weeks from the deadline (December 1) for nominating posts for inclusion in this year's anthology. The fifty best posts, plus one poem and one cartoon, will be chosen by a panel of judges, and the winners will be printed in a book published by Lulu.com. That's right, time spent frittered away on blogging could earn you the right to (truthfully) say "I'm a published author." As usual, Bora's got all the details.
Open Lab is now in it's third year, and the last two years had wonderful writing about…
grrlscientist | November 16, 2008tags: 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…
sporte | November 14, 2008Masha Gessen was faced with a terrifying choice: cut off her breasts, and possibly save herself from cancer, or use them to feed her child.
It was late at night when I walked back to my empty dorm room at the conference. Shivering, I stood on the narrow bed, quickly shut the windows, tore the blankets off the other bed, and wrapped myself up, trying to get warm. Too cold to sleep, I picked up my copy of Masha Gessen's "Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene," expecting boredom to lull me into unconsiousness…
clock | November 12, 2008Yes, we can!
My SciBling Ed Yong has collected some of his best posts from the last year and published them as a book. Yes, I already bought a copy for myself. And you should, too - just order it here.
Ed says:
I started Not Exactly Rocket Science as a way of reaching out to people with no specialist knowledge and only a passing interest in science. The book is meant to help draw in people who don't really read blogs so if you have any friends who are interested in science, why not tell them about it or buy them a copy in time for Christmas?
Carl Zimmer wrote a blurb:
"Few blogs make a…
laelaps | November 12, 2008
One day, back when I was blogging via Wordpress, I stumbled across another science blog called Not Exactly Rocket Science. I was very impressed by what was posted there, and it is no surprise that ScienceBlogs eventually snapped up Ed to write here.
Ed has earned a reputation as one of the best science bloggers out there, and now you can purchase a collected volume of some of his best work. Announced yesterday, Not Exactly Rocket Science contains about 80 of Ed's well-crafted pieces. I definitely encourage you to pick up a copy.
Now the question is, "When are we going to see the bound…
grrlscientist | November 9, 2008tags: 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. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists…
laelaps | November 8, 2008I have spoken before of my fondness for book digitization projects, but there are still some improvements to be made. Many of the titles presently available via resources like Google Books are relatively low-quality and look no better than photocopies, but with the basic move towards digitization in place, there have been some movement towards enhancing the quality of rare, old books.
Archive.org, for instance, has a number of titles available as high quality pdfs I had been unable to find on Google Books. Without it I would never have been able to see Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man without…
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2008I've taken out a couple of extremely laddish books from the library to read for fun. Seeing constant mentions of ninjas and pirates on the web, I became curious about the historical reality of these matters. So I've started on Stephen Turnbull's Warriors of Medieval Japan (2005) and I've got David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag (1995) lined up next. Here's a fine passage from Turnbull:
"... even though the Age of Warring States was a time when samurai warfare went through its biggest revolution in history under the influence of strategy and technology from both Europe and China, it was also…
pharyngula | November 3, 2008I have a little metric for rationality that I exercise now and then: when I visit a bookstore, I compare the sizes of the religion/new age sections to the size of the science section…if I can find it. Typically, there's at least a 10:1 disparity in the amount of shelf space dedicated, and it's often much worse — there have been a few bookstores where, when I ask to find the science books, the clerk will point me to a small shelf labeled "Pets/Nature". Bleh.
Anyway, I got a good question on Saturday at Guelph, which also mentioned this cluelessness by too many bookstores. Could we compile a…
clock | November 3, 2008Jennifer Rohn's first lab lit novel, 'Experimental Heart' is now available for sale! It is described as "A literary thriller/romance set in the London research scene, 'Experimental Heart' is a thought-provoking, page-turning lab adventure that exposes the hidden world of modern scientists":
During his many long nights in the lab, scientist Andy O'Hara has plenty of time to wonder about the mysterious and beautiful Gina, first glimpsed in a lit window across the courtyard. He doesn't realize she is consumed by her vaccine research, concerned about her biotech company's financial problems, and…
grrlscientist | November 2, 2008tags: 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 wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that 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 published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird…
clock | October 30, 2008The Great Limbaugh Con by Charles M. Kelly, published in 1994, is even more current and up-to-date than it was then. And it is not really about Limbaugh himself - he serves only as a starting point. There are many Limbaughs out there now who parrot the same stuff and what he pioneered in the early 1990s is now a big industry for the Right.
Furthermore, some of the right-wing rhetoric that Rush invented is now not just a standard GOP advertising lingo, but also deeply ingrained in the nation's psyche and will take a lot of effort to neutralize. The book describes, for instance, exactly how…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2008tags: 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 wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that 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 published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird…
grrlscientist | October 19, 2008tags: 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 wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that 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 published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird…
laelaps | October 15, 2008When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, he largely avoided the issue of human evolution. The implication that our species had evolved was there, and many were concerned with our connection to "lower" animals, but Darwin did not provide his opponents any extra ammunition in this area. In 1871, however, Darwin's two-volume The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was printed, and this was a somewhat belated contribution to debates already stirred by T.H. Huxley's 1863 pamphlet Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature and Charles…
laelaps | October 13, 2008Earlier today PZ wrote a brief review of Jerry Coyne's upcoming book Why Evolution is True. I'm not particularly interested in reading it, I doubt it's going to have much information I haven't seen before, but I decided to look into it all the same. (To tell you the truth, I feel that my book, when finished, is going to be much better than most books about evolution presently on the market. But that's just me being arrogant.)
Now part of marketing a book about evolution is making it seem new and original. There is a long list of popular books on evolution that have been published over the…
pharyngula | October 13, 2008I hope Jerry Coyne will forgive me that my frequent thought as I was reading his new book, Why Evolution Is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was, "Wow, this sure is easier to read than that other book." That other book, of course, is Coyne and Orr's comprehensive text on Speciation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is a technical and detailed survey of the subject in the title, and that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to anyone who wasn't at least a graduate student in biology. We all have our impressions colored by prior expectations, you know, and Jerry Coyne is that high-powered ecology and…