Books
gregladen | June 16, 2008I very recently reviewed Carl Hiaasen's novels. Among his fiction are two books that are written explicitly for kids. Looking just at Hiaasen's titles it may be hard to pick them out from the pack, so I'm making a special reference to them here. They are called "Hoot" and "Flush." Details follow:
Hoot
Roy Eberhardt is the new kid--again. This time around it's Trace Middle School in humid Coconut Grove, Florida. But it's still the same old routine: table by himself at lunch, no real friends, and thick-headed bullies like Dana Matherson pushing him around. But if it wasn't for Dana…
gregladen | June 16, 2008I have not read this book, but I'm interested in finding out more about it. Has anyone out there had a shot at it?
Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Sather Classical Lectures)
Information from Amazon.com: Review
"Sedley's argument is subtle and expert. . . . The brilliance of this book is that Sedley lets the Greeks talk to us and, surprisingly, we can understand what they're saying."--Nature
Product Description
The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the…
laelaps | June 16, 2008With all that's been going on lately I completely forgot that Ken Miller's new book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (not to be confused with Richard Dawkins' upcoming book, Only a Theory?) came out last week. I probably won't get to it for a long time (I'm still engrossed in Endless Forms Most Beautiful and have to finish In the Shadow of Man), but I am curious if anyone has picked it up yet.
Although I am not disinterested in the new book the is present a glut of books about evolution & creationism has somewhat dampened my enthusiasm for such titles, a…
laelaps | June 16, 2008I was intending to sit down and write about whale limbs yesterday afternoon (homology, hyperphalangy, and other neat stuff), but by the time I was ready to do it I was feeling so restless that I had to get out of the house. My wife and I headed out to catch a showing of The Incredible Hulk (which was actually pretty good), but I was thankfully still primed to write when we returned to the apartment. What I ended up writing just took a different course than I had expected.
As I thought about whale evolution on the way home from the theater I reflected upon the ways different lineages became…
gregladen | June 15, 2008It utterly shocks me every time I make a reference to plastic alligators, Macy's bags with poisonous snakes in them, a guy named Skink or my favorite Bass Lure .... the Double Whammy .... and people look back at me with blank stares. Like, don't you get it? "To be or not to be" jokes or allusions to Sherlock Holmes are always understood. Or at least, people pretend to get them. But does no one read contemporary literature?
It is impossible, actually, to explain Carl Hiaasen's novels to anyone without sounding like a fool. All such attempts, made by anybody, start out with an honest…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
New and Recent Titles:
D'Amato, Peter. The Savage Garden: Cultivating Carnivorous Plants. 1998. Ten Speed Press. Paperback: 314 pages. Price: $24.95 U.S. [Amazon: $16.47]. SUMMARY: An easy to use guide to growing carnivorous…
gregladen | June 12, 2008Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is a children's book for kids in third to fifth grade or, in my opinion, a little younger. Certainly this is an excellent choice, because of the cool illustrations, of a book to read aloud to the pre-literate little ones.
Author Gregory Wenzel does a good job in few words explaining life in the Jurassic, how bones get to become fossils, and something about how they are found. Most of the riveting several hundred words in this 32 page book are about the real stars of the show, the dinosaurs themselves.
Not every single dinosaur in this book is truly giant,…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2008tags: Mean and Lowly Things, herpetology, reptiles, venomous snakes, amphibians, field research, Congo Brazzaville, Kate Jackson, book review
Are you familiar with the aphorism, "Do what you love and the money will follow"? Well, the money part of that equation is probably questionable, but I think you will be convinced that a person who pursues her passions will never live a boring life, especially after you've finished reading Kate Jackson's book, Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 2008). This book tells the…
laelaps | June 11, 2008I spent most of yesterday running between different offices and trying to obtain old academic records so my writing time was cut down dramatically, but I still managed to get some work done in the evening. Most of what I have been doing this week has focused on whales, especially since I've been tracing backwards through the literature to find more about how scientists thought they evolved before things started to change in the 1980's. I've still got plenty more to write about, but I think I have a fair amount of the skeleton of the chapter in place.
(New sections are in bold)
Introduction…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2008[More blog entries about fiction, timetravel, sf, sciencefiction; sf, sciencefiction, tidsresor, litteratur, novell]
Alvin Gavel just graduated from high school. (He's the son of Aard regular Kai who keeps the bilingual Pointless Anecdotes blog.) This young man has to my knowledge grown up entirely in Sweden. But I would be impressed by his recent time travel story even if English had been his first language. Check it out!
Update 12 June: Mr. Gavel informs me that he wrote the story already two years ago. It is the work of a high school freshman. In reply I have told Mr. Gavel that, in my…
laelaps | June 9, 2008Being that I've been working hard on my own book, my thoughts have often turned to the question of "What makes a good book?" As I pace around the track at the park every morning I'm not thinking of what I'm going to write about or what references to pull out. Instead I'm usually thinking about how long each chapter should be, what sort of spacing or font I should use, what images might be useful, and generally how to make the book pleasant to read rather than trying to cram in every last bit of information possible. Some of these questions are too trivial to worry about now, but I know from…
laelaps | June 8, 2008Even though T.H. Huxley proposed that whales had evolved from terrestrial carnivores as late as 1870, the origins of whales was exceedingly problematic until the 1980's. For about a century Basilosaurus, Dorudon, and Protocetus represented the oldest known stage of whale evolution, and the general lack of fossil evidence for the origins of whales and the common ancestor for modern baleen & toothed whales caused some to propose that the living cetaceans had separate origins. All of this makes the recent explosion of information about whale origins all the more exciting.
Like some of the…
laelaps | June 8, 2008Even though I still have less than 100 pages left to go, I thought I would share a few thoughts about Ann Gibbons' recent book The First Human (specifically since Pierce asked for my thoughts on it). I do have a few criticisms, but outside of a few minor points of contention the book is highly enjoyable and serves as a good primer for anyone interested on catching up on some of the major discoveries of fossil hominids in the last two decades.
Prior to a class about African prehistory last fall I had never heard the names Ardipithecus, Orrorin, Sahelanthropus, or Australopithecus anamensis,…
grrlscientist | June 8, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Arora, David. Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi. 1986. Ten Speed Press. Paperback: 959 pages. Price: $39.95 U.S. [Amazon: $26.37]. SUMMARY: A very detailed guide to North American…
neurophilosophy | June 7, 2008Here's another great quote about the brain, from Ian McEwan's novel Saturday:
He's looking down at a portion of [the] brain...with its low hills and enfolded valleys of the sulci, each with a name and imputed function...Just to the left of the midline, running laterally away out of sight under the bone, is the motor strip. So easy to damage, with such terrible, lifelong consequences. How much time he has spent making routes to avoid these areas, like bad neighbourhoods in an American city...For all the recent advances, it's still not known how this well-protected one kilogram or so of cells…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2008I'm not a very frequent theatre-goer, and if I don't like a play, I leave in the intermission. But I have had the good fortune to see some excellent productions through the years, notably of Shakespeare. (It is of course entirely possible to play Shakespeare poorly too, and I've seen it done both by professionals and by amateurs.) I haven't seen all his plays, and I've read only two, but dangle an opportunity to conveniently see more in front of me, and chances are I'll bite.
During my recent Orkney jaunt, I read a fascinating biography of William Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt's best-…
laelaps | June 6, 2008One of the joys of working on this book has been discovering little tidbits of information that have been overlooked. I haven't turned up anything especially earth-shattering, but I have found a few things that overturn some of the "received wisdom" so often repeated in textbooks and technical paper introductions. For example, it is commonly said that the little perissodactyl Hyracotherium got its name because Richard Owen thought it looked like a hyrax when he named it in 1839. This piece of information has been repeated for over 150 years, yet Owen himself took a moment to correct this…
laelaps | June 5, 2008As I've been working on my book on evolution I've been posting updates about my progress (most of those updates can be found here), and I am certainly pleased to note that reactions have generally been positive. I am truly grateful for all the support I've received from readers, fellow bloggers, writers, and friends, the encouragement definitely motivating me to keep working. I have received some critical comments, however, and I feel that one in particular requires a detailed response. Responding to my last update, commenter James wrote;
Brian, what are you thinking? You don't even have an…
laelaps | June 4, 2008Even though I said that I had more pertinent material to read than discourses about the perceived clash of science & Christian theology, I contradicted myself by picking up John Hedley Brooke's Science and Religion last night. As I have become increasingly aware during the course of my reading, the present climate of argument around science & religion carries a tone of conflict and warfare that has been maintained for over 100 years the more. It is fashionable to invoke such imagery, religion slowly crumbling under the weight of science, but a historical perspective reveals…
laelaps | June 4, 2008Given that I have 23 single-spaced pages written for my human evolution chapter (which is about as long as the essay I wrote that was included in The Open Laboratory) I suppose I should be fairly pleased with myself. The truth of the matter is that I am not; I still have to get to major discoveries of fossil hominids post-1920, integrate evidence from primatology, and explain the genetic similarity between our species and living apes. It would be all-too-easy to let the chapter become a book by itself, and the sheer volume of information that needs to fit within a chapter will definitely test…