Books
laelaps | May 10, 2008I'll be away at the AMNH for most of the day today, but here are a few general "housekeeping" notes until I get back;
A very special edition of The Boneyard (#20) will be coming up next week. (See this post for the full details.) I haven't received any submissions yet, but just keep in mind that everything has to be in by 12 PM Eastern time on May 17 to be eligible.
I'm very pleased to announce that Beatrice, a female cat my wife and I fostered on-and-off for about a year, has finally been adopted. We've still got Huxley right now, and even though he was sick for a few days he has fully…
cmooney | May 8, 2008Look, folks. It's this simple. Carl Zimmer is one of our very best science writers. If not the absolute best bar none.
So if you like reading about science, go buy his newest, Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life.
And don't wait--the book is just out, and if you buy now you drive up the Amazon.com numbers, which every writer loves....
grrlscientist | May 7, 2008tags: Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City, nature, field guide, NYC, Leslie Day, Mark Klingler, book review
What do you think of when you heard the words, "New York City"? Money? Skyscrapers? Broadway plays? Restaurants? Millions of people living in tiny apartments? Fire hydrants spurting water on hot muggy days? Rotting garbage on the sidewalks? How about birds: do any of you think of birds and other wildlife? Most people don't. Many people, especially visitors, are unaware of the wealth of green spaces and parks in NYC, along with their resident and migratory wildlife. However…
pharyngula | May 7, 2008Hey! Carl Zimmer is giving away free copies of his brand new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) — all you have to do is ask a good question in a comment to stand a chance of winning one.
I don't need to enter; my copy is sitting on my desk right now, begging me to read it. I keep barking back at it that I want to, but I've got 3 exams to give in the next week, and there is no time right now. And then it reproaches me with those big gentle puppy-dog eyes and weeps sloppy proteoglycan tears and threatens to adhere permanently to my shower tiles. It's…
grrlscientist | May 4, 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 bird and natural history books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Hölldobler, Bert and Edward O. Wilson. The Ants. 1990. Belknap/Harvard University Press. Hardbound: 732 pages. Price: $108.50 U.S. [Amazon: $86.60]. SUMMARY: This title was the winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction…
pharyngula | May 1, 2008I must urge you to steal buy this book: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). The description makes it sound perfect.
Laboratory work is the essence of chemistry, and measurement is the essence of laboratory work. A hands-on introduction to real chemistry requires real equipment and real chemicals, and real, quantitative experiments. No existing chemistry set provides anything more than a bare start on those essentials, so the obvious answer is to build your own chemistry set and use it to do real chemistry.
Everything you need is…
neurophilosophy | April 29, 2008My exams begin on Friday, so things are going to be pretty quite around here until around mid-May. I will post various bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, here are some interesting links that I've found recently:
In the New York Times Magazine, Gary Marcus discusses the possibility of memory chips - future generations of neural implants which use algorithms inspired by Google to augment the retrieval of information.
The author of the above article is interviewed by Carl Zimmer on bloggingheadsTV. Marcus is a professor of psychology at NYU, and the author of a…
laelaps | April 29, 2008Today I've got a human osteology exam, so while I'm trying to make sure I know all my processes, foramina, and sutures things are going to be a bit light here. Still, I've got a few items of interest to unload here before trying to cram more of White's Human Osteology into my brain;
The next edition of the Boneyard is coming up this Saturday and will appear at Familiarity Breeds Content. Get your submissions in to me or Nick soon! Two weeks after that the carnival will be back here with a special edition where participants will have a chance to win some paleontology books from my own…
grrlscientist | April 27, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history 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 bird and natural history books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase.
FEATURED TITLE:
Chiappe, Luis M. Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds. 2007. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hardbound: 263 pages. Price: $74.50 U.S. [Amazon: $60.40]. SUMMARY: An up-to-date review of Mesozoic bird evolution.
New and Recent…
laelaps | April 26, 2008Today I spent the majority of my time at "Ag Day," an annual campus-wide festival at Cook Campus. I'm generally not very interested in most of the activities and events, but I did walk away with a few more used books;
Through the Eyes of the Gods
The God Delusion
Did Man Get Here by Evolution or Creation?
Papers on Animal Population Genetics
The Nature Reader
Life, Laughter, & the Pursuit of Snow Leopards
The Boilerplate Rhino
And now, since I can't think of very much to write, here's a little Ben Folds;
pharyngula | April 26, 2008John Lynch has a list of so-called pretentious books — books that are often listed as unread. Wilkins has followed up with his own. It's a curious list, though; the only ones I'd definitely call pretentious are anything by Rand, and maybe the books by Hawthorne (an author I find unpleasantly bad).
I think we already did this list last fall, however.
jlynch | April 25, 2008Via BikeMonkey I see that DrugMonkey had a "106 Books of Pretension" meme going last October. Namely, "the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users." So here we go - what I’ve read is in italics, what I never finished is struck through:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns,…
jlynch | April 25, 2008The Telegraph has a list up of the top fifty "best cult books," a category they describe as:
the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.
Below the fold are the top 50. I’ve indicated those (19) I’ve read with italics.…
laelaps | April 25, 2008I was able to get a few more pages out yesterday, although (say it with me now) not as many as I would have liked. I'm continuing to hammer away at the human evolution chapter as I feel that it's the most important, although if I'm not careful it could turn into a book by itself. I may hit a wall at some point, however, as I'm far more interested in early human evolution (i.e. australopithecines) than in recent prehistoric humans, and I don't want that bias to hinder the relevance of the chapter. (New sections are in bold).
Introduction
Huxley's rejoinder to Wilberforce at Oxford - Darrow…
laelaps | April 23, 2008This past January I was somewhat shocked to discover that one of my posts had been voted into the 2nd edition of The Open Laboratory, a collection of 50 of the best science posts published in 2007 by writers from all over the science blogosphere. Now you can purchase the book via amazon.com, although the best place to get it is still lulu.com. Why? Because proceeds from the lulu.com sales will go towards ScienceOnline'09 (the official site to be launching soon), an event that I hope to be attending next January.
Also, don't forget that you can start nominating excellent posts for the next…
laelaps | April 23, 2008Yesterday I managed to tack a few paragraphs on to the end of the human evolution chapter, bringing the page count so far up to 10, although some of this will ultimately be cut. I wanted to write more last night, but by the time I walked home from class and ate dinner it was 9:30 and I was feeling a little sleepy-eyed. Adrian Desmond's book The Ape's Reflexion has given me a lot of food for thought, however, especially the absurdity of the question "What makes us human?" as if it were a plea to find something (anything) that would divide us from the rest of nature. (New concepts are in bold)…
clock | April 22, 2008The second science blogging anthology, the Open Laboratory 2007 is now up for sale on Amazon.com. As the profits will go towards the organization of ScienceOnline'09, it is the best if you guide your readers to buy it directly from Lulu.com. However, it would be really nice if some of the readers wrote reviews on the Amazon.com page.
Also, do not forget to keep submitting new entries for the OpenLab'08.
laelaps | April 20, 2008I was able to get another five pages done today, although (as always) I'm not entirely satisfied with them. There are so many juicy details and excellent narratives that it's difficult to get them all in, and it is sometimes difficult to discuss a topic that I know something about but also will require the use of my library for. Rather than run to look up everything at once, I decided to just keep writing and put up the basic framework of what I want to say, and I'll go back to fill in the details a bit later (which will also give me an opportunity to trim the fat a bit). At the moment,…
grrlscientist | April 20, 2008tags: Flights Against the Sunset, short stories, memoir, birding, bird watching, Kenn Kaufman, book review
When Kenn Kaufman was sixteen, he left home in pursuit of a dream; to see more species of birds in the United States in one calendar year than had ever been seen before. Instead of preventing him from trying to achieve this dream as most people would have done, his parents allowed him to go with their blessing. Now, as an adult, a famous birder and field guide who travels the world, we find Kaufman in a nursing facility in Wichita, Kansas, visiting his seriously ill mother after having…
laelaps | April 19, 2008No angry creationists gathered outside my door with torches & pitchforks last night, and I presume that the first-night impact of Expelled (at least in my area) was not as great as the producers of the film might have hoped. We won't know for sure, though, until the box office results are in on Monday.
The above was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, of course, and I really don't care about Ben Stein's creationist diatribe today. This morning I stopped by the local library book sale where I picked up a copy of Richard Leakey's Origins, the pop-paleo junk food Tyrannosaur, and (a book…