Books
laelaps | September 5, 2008For those of you in the New York City area, paleo artist Ray Troll and paleobotanist Kirk Johnson will be presenting a lecture on their wonderful book Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway (see my review here, pick it up here) on October 21 at the AMNH. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, and I'm going to make sure that I catch this one.
laelaps | September 3, 2008It was slow going, but I was able to write the first three pages of the new iteration of the dinosaur/birds chapter. (It is called, for good reason, "Footprints (and Feathers) in the Sands of Time." At least for now, anyway.) Although it contains some of the same points as my previous attempt, I have added a lot of new material. The mythological introduction is a little circuitous, but I think it works.
I had planned on working on a number of other, smaller projects over the next few months, but I think I am going to primarily concentrate on getting my proposal for this book together. I'll…
laelaps | September 3, 2008I have been meaning to post this quote for quite a while now, for no other reason than I found it amusing. It is from R.M. Ballantyne's novel The Gorilla Hunters;
"And in the first place-"
"O Ralph, I entreat you," interrupted Peterkin, "do not begin with a 'first place.' When men begin a discourse with that, however many intermediate places they may have to roam about and enlarge on, they never have a place of any kind to terminate in, but go skimming along with a couple of dozen 'lastlies,' like a stone thrown over the surface of a pond, which, after the first two or three big and promising…
laelaps | September 2, 2008It is amazing what a little perspective can do. For most of August I was hard at work on the chapter on whales, ignoring nearly every other section. This allowed me to focus on what I wanted for one of the most important chapters of the book, but now that I have gone back to some of my earlier writing I have to admit I am horrified. When I opened up the chapter on the evolution of birds I could not believe what I was reading. How could I have written such drivel?
I started to edit the first part of the bird chapter, but no matter what I did I could not see a way to turn what I had already…
grrlscientist | September 1, 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 bird pals, 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 books that are (or will…
gregladen | September 1, 2008 Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming I've been putting off posting my review of this book until just the right moment. Perhaps that moment is now, with the juxtaposition of a serious storm ... hurricane Gustav ... arriving in the vicinity of New Orleans and the opening day of the Republican National Convention, since both charismatic hurricanes and not so charismatic politicians play such a large role in the book at hand.
Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, by Chris Mooney, is a well written, informative, captivating,…
laelaps | September 1, 2008When do you think that the following passage was first published?
John Doe guesses that evolution is true, but he rather wishes it were not. ... John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be discarded before long.
Those of you who saw the list of the new items I picked up yesterday probably guessed correctly; that the quote came from the 1925 popular book Evolution for John Doe by Henshaw Ward. Although written in 1925 it still (unfortunately) relevant, particularly when newspapers that…
laelaps | August 31, 2008I have spent most of today finishing up Jane Davidson's A History of Paleontology Illustration (a review of which I intend on will writing up shortly), but I took a quick break to blow a few bucks at the Cranbury Bookworm. Here's what I came home with;
Evolution for John Doe - Henshaw Ward (1925)
African Exodus - Christopher Stringer & Robin McKie (1996)
Piltdown - Frank Spencer (1990)
Annie's Box - Randal Keynes (2001)
Life - Richard Fortey (1997)
I'm not letting myself start any of them until I have written the review of Davidson's book, however, and by that time I might put some more…
laelaps | August 30, 2008
My wife and I reading while dinner cooks on the fire. Taken at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware this past May.
So much work to do, so little time. The summer whizzed by at a rate faster than I expected, and now I'm just two days away from the start of the fall semester. (As my wife commented the other day, I'm continuing my education in spite of the university's best efforts.)
There has been a lot to keep me busy. Outside of working on my book, I have been putting the finishing touches on a proposal for a paper about Edward Tyson's 1699 dissection of a chimpanzee (although, if accepted,…
pharyngula | August 28, 2008Jennifer Oullette has put together a pop-sci book meme (and John Lynch has joined in). It's the usual thing, a long list of books and you're supposed to highlight the ones you've read, this time with the theme being that they're all about science somehow. I detect a physics bias in Ms. Oullette's choices, however, despite the excellent beginning — and it's to that I ascribe my poor performance. That and some weird choices: since when is Neuromancer pop-sci? Stephenson's Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon or Snowcrash would be better choices if we're going to throw fiction in the mix, or Sterling'…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2008
A few weeks ago, Kai gave me an interesting book on a subject of which I am almost entirely ignorant: recent military history. Auf den Spuren des "Elbe-Kommandos" Rammjäger by Dietrich Alsdorf (2001) deals with an episode toward the end of the Second World War, the so-called "Sonderkommando Elbe".
Things were grim in the Third Reich in the spring of 1945. Germany had effectively lost control of her own airspace, allowing Allied bomber fleets to operate with murderous efficiency far into Eastern Europe. The Germans had ample numbers of fighter planes and pilots, but hardly any aeroplane fuel…
skookumchick | August 28, 2008I've taken some of the last week to try to practice what Boice calls "actively waiting" in preparation for writing on a project I've been avoiding. See the project plan here and a discussion about "actively waiting" here. Some of my thoughts on this exercise from the last week are below the fold.
Full disclosure: I didn't manage to do the 10 minutes every day, but I think I did it more days than I didn't do it. I think.
I found it pretty tough to just sit with my notes "in the moment." I kept worrying that I was "doing it wrong" -- did I have the right notes? Should I open up the old…
clock | August 27, 2008Interesting post (based on one of my favourite books which may warrant a re-reading after many years - Adler's "How to Read a Book" but adapted to online reading) How to Read by Brian Clark:
We know that people don't read well online. They ruthlessly scan for interesting chunks of information rather than digesting the whole, and they want to be entertained in the process. This is the reality that online publishers deal with, so we disguise our nuggets of wisdom with friendly formatting and clever analogies.
But that doesn't mean you should read that way.
If you've been publishing online for…
ddobbs | August 27, 2008Walter Benjamin is a very interesting writer, with a wild range of work (music, Marx, hashish, much much more), a highly distinctive style and one of those early-20th-century European lives that seems impossibly full of intense cultural force and historical fate; his memoir of his youth, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, is particularly affecting, and painful indeed in light of his mysterious end -- he died at the Spanish-French border trying to escape from the Nazis, possibly from suicide, possibly murdered by Stalinist agents.
courtesy Harvard University Press
A fascinating man, a wonderful…
laelaps | August 27, 2008
The famous fold-out plate that accompanied Pre-Adamite Man. Not the "dividing line" between ancient life and modern humans formed by the glaciers.
There is more to understanding the history of science than memorizing the dates when seminal books were published or knowing the names of the founders of particular disciplines. Science must be understood in context, and given the present public arguments about evolution it can be profitable to look back and see how science was being popularized circa 1859. While there were some books by scientists that were accessible to the public, many non-…
laelaps | August 27, 2008The last time the 100 book meme came around I decided to step out of the vein and create a list of 100 books that I liked or have had a significant influence on me. Most of the them were non-fiction books about science, and I was glad to see the Jennifer has created a list of 75 popular science books to share.
As with the last survey, though, I've read almost nothing on this new list. I've read On the Origin of Species, The Demon-Haunted World, and Wonderful Life, but that's it.
As with the last meme, I'm considering going through my library and making a list of my favorite 75 popular science…
jlynch | August 26, 2008Via Cocktail Party Physics, a list of popular science books. Rules are simple: Bold those you've read in full, asterisk those you intend to read, add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list (I'll try and do that next weekend, class prep allowing), and link back to Jennifer (who has never read Origin, horror!). Here we go:
Micrographia, Robert Hooke
The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin - oh, so many times
Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
The Devil's Doctor, Philip Ball…
laelaps | August 26, 2008
From Garfield Minus Garfield
I did it. The whale chapter has been put on the editorial chopping block three times, and I'm going to move on to other things for a while before coming back for the final cut. I'm particularly vexed by the last section of the chapter, which focuses on the evolution of cetacean intelligence due to sociality. The topic is contentious, and being that I'm not an expert on cetacean neuroanatomy or cognition I want to tread carefully. I've asked for professional help so I can make sure what I have written is accurate, but even so I still have mixed feelings about…
laelaps | August 24, 2008It's funny how editing is such a different process from the construction of a chapter. When I began writing the chapter on whales the more pages I could add, the better. When my wife asked me about my progress I would say "I wrote [x] more pages today." Now that I'm editing I usually reply "I pared it down by another page or two."
At present I've gone through the whale chapter twice and it is 29 pages long, but I'm going to go through it one more time. At that point I'm going to give it a rest and work on another chapter, as taking a step back and working on something else might help me come…
grrlscientist | August 24, 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 bird pals, 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 books that are (or will…