Books
gregladen | November 25, 2015I mention a couple of kids books in my overviews on Fossil and Evolution Books and Books about Climate Change. Here are a few excellent science and computer programming (aka coding) books for kids.
Geology book for kids
The Incredible Plate Tectonics Comic: The Adventures of Geo, Vol. 1 is a good stab at making a comic that teaches some science.
We follow the adventures of Geo and his robotic dog, Rocky as the visit the ancient supercontinent of Pangea. This journey is pursuant to Geo's upcoming test in his geology class.
What is the center of the Earth made out of? How do volcanoes work?…
gregladen | November 25, 2015Over the last several months, a lot of great books on fossils and evolution (as in paleontology) have come out. I've selected the best for your consideration. These are great gifts for your favorite science-loving nephew, life science teaching cousin, or local school library. Actually, you might like some of these yourself.
Let's start off with a kid's book: Grandmother Fish: a child's first book of Evolution by Jonathan Tweet.
From the blurb:
Grandmother Fish is the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers. While listening to the story, the child mimics the motions and sounds of our…
gregladen | November 25, 2015It is time to update the list of recommended books on climate change and global warming. I assume that with the holidays coming, you will want to give some people some science books, and climate change related books should be near the top of the list for you. I'm doing a separate post on evolution related books, and another on bird and nature books, as well.
I'm going to keep this short and focus on a small number of books. To get on this list the book has to be good and current, with two notable exceptions (see below).
Global Warming Books For Kids
Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!: A…
gregladen | November 19, 2015In 1817, Karl August Weinhold had a go at a real-life Frankenstein's monster -- only in his version he uses a cat. The German scooped out the brain and spinal cord of a recently dead cat. He then pured a molten mixture of zinc and silver into the skull and spinal cavity. He was attempting to make the two metals work like an electric pile, or battery, inside the unfortunate cate, replacing the electrical of the nerves. Weinhold reported that the cat was revived momentarily by the currents and stood up and stretched in a rather robotic fashion!
It's Alive!!!!
Weinhold's reanimated cat was…
gregladen | November 17, 2015Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Joe Romm is just out, and is the most up to date examination of climate change science, the effects of climate change on humans, policy related problems, and energy-related solutions. Everyone should read this book, and if you teach earth system sciences you should consider using this book as a guide in your teaching, or in some cases, assigning it in class. The book is written to be read by general audiences, so it would work well in a high school or college setting.
As Romm points out, climate change will have more of an impact on humans,…
gregladen | November 13, 2015Years ago I proposed a theory (not anywhere in print, just in seminars and talks) that went roughly like this. Humans hunt. Dogs hunt. Prey animals get hunted. Each species (or set of species) has a number of characteristics such as the ability to stalk, track, kill, run away, form herds, etc. Now imagine a landscape with humans, wolves, and game animals all carrying out these behaviors, facilitated with various physical traits. Then, go back to the drawing board and redesign the system.
The hunting abilities of humans and dogs, the tendency of game animals to herd up or take other…
pharyngula | October 17, 2015We need more of these, and here's another: Great Adaptations: A Fantastical Collection of Science Poems. It contains short rhyming summaries of scientists' work on adaptations, all nicely illustrated.
Here's one from Sarah Hrdy's work on empathy and cooperation.
Doesn't that make you want to run out and buy it right now? How much would you pay? $5? $10? $25?
Well, you can't. Instead, you have to go to this website and download it for free.
Writing the book was a labor of love, so I hope you love it too! Lastly, because our objective is to get as many people reading and learning about…
gregladen | September 15, 2015Climate Change: Discover How It Impacts Spaceship Earth (Build It Yourself) covers many concepts in earth science, from paleontology to climate systems to how to make a battery out of apple (how can a kid's science activity not include the apple battery!). This book represents an interesting concept, because it involves kids in mostly easy to do at home projects, covers numerous scientific concepts, and takes the importance of global climate change as a given. There is a good amount of history of research, though the book does not cover a lot of the most current scientists and their key work…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2015Reading a good book, Charles' Nicholl's The Reckoning. The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992, 2nd expanded ed. 2002), about the 16th century playwright. It's a bit overloaded with asides and covers far more characters and factions than anyone can keep track of without extensive note-taking. But quite intriguing withal. I find it fascinating how rich and detailed the written sources for this era are.
"Christopher Marlowe ... is remembered as a poet, 'the Muse's darling', and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy …
It is not a pretty view of the…
gregladen | September 2, 2015Jonathan Marks' new book is called "Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution"
I've got to tell you that when I first saw the title of this book, the letters played in my head a bit. Tails of the Ex-Apes. That would be funny because apes don't have tails. Or Tales of the Exapes. Pronounced as you wish. Perhaps in an Aztec accent.
Anyway...
Jon Marks is a colleague and a friend from way back. He is a biological anthropologist who has engaged in critical study of central biological themes, such as genetics, and he's said a few things about race. He wears black, often does…
pharyngula | August 3, 2015
I'm a bit shell-shocked today -- man, that was a long drive yesterday -- and I stumbled into work today thinking this might be a really good day to bag it early and take a nap. And then I found something in my mailbox that perked me right up.
As a little background, I'll summarize my talk in St Louis. I pointed out that there was more to evolution than natural selection. Natural selection answers the question of adaptedness -- how do organisms get so good at what they do -- but there's another important question, about diversity and variation -- why do organisms do so many things in so many…
gregladen | July 7, 2015A Guest Review by John Abraham
Wow! I just put down the best science fiction book I’ve read in a long time, and certainly the best Star Wars book I’ve ever read. Just like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones have made fantasy stories hip, the rebooted Star Wars franchise is making science fiction cool again for audiences of all ages.
The new book, which goes on sale today (July 7th), is called Star Wars: Dark Disciple (written by Christie Golden). It is part of a new series of stories that are part of the Star Wars canon and it involves nearly all of the characters we’ve come to cherish…
gregladen | July 6, 2015I think most people who have read Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Dreger feel at some point a bit annoyed at the title, and especially, at the way the book is marketed by the publisher. You could take Galileo and his finger entirely out of the book and you would still have the same book.
Alice Dreger's book is about the relationship between social ethics, activism vis-a-vis science, and the science itself. It is about academic freedom and intellectual honesty, but again, not a history of as the reference to an old dead white guy in the title might suggest. Dreger's book is not a…
gregladen | July 4, 2015I love field guides. One should own a lot of field guides, not just to things you might go out in the field to see and identified, but just to browse through.
David Ebert, Sarah Fowler and Marc Dando have produced A Pocket Guide to Sharks of the World It is put out by Princeton, which does excellent guides (this is part of their Pocket Guide series).
From the Princeton site, about the authors:
David A. Ebert is the program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center and a research faculty member at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Sarah Fowler cofounded the UK Shark Trust and the…
gregladen | July 2, 2015Unbranded is the story of four guys and a small herd of mustangs who traveled three thousand miles across the American west. From author Ben Masters web site:
Ben Masters is the “mastermind” of Unbranded. In 2010, he and two friends completed a 2,000-mile ride along the Continental Divide. They were broke at the time and adopted some $125 mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management to supplement their string of quarter horses. They were surprised to find the mustangs outperformed the domestic horses. Intrigued, Masters looked into the wild horse controversy and found a sad and complex…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2015The final third of Stephen Jarvis’s upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick continues in the same rather kaleidoscopic fashion as before. The asides and Chinese boxes are innumerable. We never do get an important female character. The frame story is never developed much. In fact, the book only really has Robert Seymour the artist and Charles Dickens the writer, plus innumerable minor characters, and an agenda.
Jarvis's main points with the novel are that a) Seymour deserves credit as co-creator of Pickwick's first two or three chapters, b) Dickens deserves blame for dissembling and not sharing…
gregladen | April 30, 2015Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming by Michael Mann and Lee Kump is everyperson’s guide to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The IPCC issues a periodic set of reports on the state of global climate change, and has been doing so for almost two decades. It is a massive undertaking and few have the time or training to read though and absorb it, yet it is very important that every citizen understands the reports’ implications. Why? Because human caused climate change has emerged as the number one existential issue of the day, and individuals,…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2015In the second novel-length third of Stephen Jarvis's hefty Death and Mr Pickwick, artist and caricaturist Robert Seymour starts in earnest to put ideas together for the Pickwick Papers. Yes, that's right: here (as maybe in reality) it is the illustrator who comes up with the concept for the book, but being dyslexic and proud he doesn't want to write it himself. Narrative pictures with brief “letterpress” text added by someone else afterwards is an established form at the time. Charles Dickens finally makes his entrance on the novel's stage, first as as “Chatham Charlie”, then under his pen…
aardvarchaeology | April 6, 2015Update 10 April: It pays to report problems like the one described below to Google's customer support. Seven weeks ago I discovered the problem. One week ago I reported it. Today the problem was suddenly gone, probably because Google updated the two ebooks involved and pushed new versions of the files to my phone.
I usually shop around for a good price when I buy e-books, and lately Google's bookstore has received my custom. It's not a very high-profile store – you see, this isn't the well-known Google Books, where they offer scanned paper books in your browser. This is something called,…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2015In Roald Dahl's last book, Matilda (1988), we are invited to laugh at the main character's parents. They hate books, love TV, dress tastelessly and subsist on microwave TV dinners. Yet only when I saw the musical at the Cambridge Theatre in London this past Tuesday, where the mother additionally practices competition ballroom dancing and both parents speak in a broad Cockney accent, did I realise what the whole thing is actually about.
It's an opportunity for us middle-class bookworms to laugh at a tasteless working-class family who's come into a bit of money (through the husband's fraudulent…