Books
pharyngula | December 10, 2007The Fall semester is winding down — this is the last week of classes — so it's time to start thinking about the Spring term.
Ugh. I don't want to. This term has been driving me sufficiently insane as it is.
But anyway, if you're a student thinking about all the money you'll have to be spending on textbooks, here's a list of what you'll need to get if you're taking my courses. Feel free to order them from some other source than the university bookstore. I don't get a penny from the U bookstore, but I have to confess, the links below do tie into affiliate programs that give me a few pennies in…
laelaps | December 10, 2007There is certainly a glut of books out there about why people reject science, embrace superstition/pseudoscience, or both, and I've read a few of them over the past month or so (The Mismeasure of Man, Discarded Science, Science Talk, and Why People Believe Weird Things are the ones I read) to see if I could get a better handle on things like belief in witchcraft, UFOs, and Holocaust denial. Unfortunately, many of the books were disappointing, being good sources for basic information but either fizzling out or generally lacking in any sort of style or conclusion, and I'm sorry to say that…
clock | December 9, 2007This weekend, with 70 degrees F in Chapel Hill, it would have bin a sin to remain indoors. So I didn't. But in the end, at twilight today, my daughter and I went to see Golden Compass, the movie whose first-weekend box-office earnings I wanted to boost.
I made sure not to read any reviews of the movie beforehand. I am, unlike most people who already wrote about it, one of those people who has never read the Pullman books on which the movie is based. Thus, like the majority of the target audience, I was a Pullman "virgin" and I wanted to watch it just like anyone else going out to see a…
gregladen | December 8, 2007I don't know about you, but I always wait until the last minute to get obligatory holiday gifts. And then I hate going to anything like a mall or shopping center. Praise be to Amazon.com and UPS.
His Dark Materials (trilogy)
From the publsiher, on book I:
When Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon decide to spy on a presentation her uncle, the commanding Lord Asriel, is making to the elders of Jordan College they have no idea that they will become witnesses to an attempted murder--and even less that they are taking the first steps in a journey that will lead them into danger and adventure…
cmooney | December 7, 2007I don't know precisely what was said yet, but multiple folks have emailed me to let me know that my latest just came up on Science Friday, in the context of a discussion of science books of the year. And indeed, Storm World is already listed on the Science Friday website for today's show.
Please post if anyone heard the show and knows what was said...I'll link audio once it's available.
Other science books of 2007 that came up included "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker, "Einstein, His Life and Universe" by Walter Isaacson, and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes.
gregladen | December 7, 2007There was a time, not so long ago, when you could "Google" the terms "Greg Laden" and "Idiot" and get, well, besides the several thousand hits about me being an idiot and stuff, an Amazon.com page for "The Idiot's Guide to Human Prehistory by Greg Laden"
This is a book I never wrote. But the publishers wanted me to. However, there were complications. The first complication was that I found out (from an excellent source) that the owner of the company had "a problem" with evolution, and I came to believe it was likely that certain things would be changed prior to publication. In…
aardvarchaeology | December 7, 2007This 88-page booklet by Åsa Virdi Kroik is named "You'd rather lose your head than turn in your drum". The title refers to shamanic drums among the Saami. The book is based on an MA thesis in the history of religion defended at the University of Stockholm in 2006. Reading it, I soon realised that it can't simply be evaluated from a scholarly point of view: this is at heart also an ethno-political tract. I'll comment on the political aspects first and then on the scholarly ones.
For the non-Scandy reader, I should explain that the Saami are a sub-Arctic indigenous minority in Norway, Sweden,…
gregladen | December 6, 2007Brian Larnder, bless his soul, has written an overview (maybe a book review) of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement
From Brian:
... the concept of eugenics found a very welcome home among the christian faithful of the day from the late 19th Century through the first few decades of the 20th Century. The American Eugenics society sponsored an annual contest for the best eugenics sermon of the year and apparently many clergymen participated, readily supplying biblical quotations to make the case for eugenics.
AHA! I say! (see)
Go and read Brian's post! He…
laelaps | December 4, 2007
It's always a good day when a new book arrives at the door, but I've been a little worried lately as a number of books that were shipped weeks ago hadn't turned up. With only one or two exceptions they all came today (pictured above beneath the Christmas tree), and four of them are review copies that I'll be writing about soon. Being that I'm in the middle of Michael Novacek's newest book Terra it might take me a little while to get to some of the heftier titles in the stack, but here's what came and what you can expect to be featured here soon;
Wolf Empire: An Intimate Portrait of a…
grrlscientist | December 3, 2007tags: books, blog carnivals
The 2 December issue of the Books Carnival is now available for you to enjoy. This carnival looks like it is filled with press releases, however, I think the press releases will be obvious to you after a few seconds of browsing. The book reviews written by real people are also fairly obvious (including a few of mine!) so be sure to look for those as well.
clock | December 2, 2007Chris Clarke is writing a book on Joshua trees. This requires money and Chris does not have enough. I know I want to read the book when it comes out. This is what blog-friends are for: donate now.
neurophilosophy | November 30, 2007
This brain map comes from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man (1912), by the obscure mystical philosopher Alesha Sivartha, who is sometimes referred to as a "grandfather of the new-age movement".
The map is of particular interest, as it approaches modern neurology but still retains a few elements of phrenology, and is therefore a transition between the two. (Click on the image for a larger version.)
It is based on the experiments of the pioneering Scottish neurologist David Ferrier, who functionally mapped the sensory and motor cortices by lesion studies and…
clock | November 30, 2007Reed has assembled more than 30 judges and provided a secret online place for them to start working today on the difficult job of choosing the 50 best posts, one poem and one cartoon for the 2007 Open Laboratory science blogging anthology. You have only 20 days left to submit your own or your favourite bloggers' antries.
grrlscientist | November 27, 2007I was browsing the NYTimes list of the 100 notable books of 2007 and was surprised to note that only one science book is included on that list! This is even more amazing when you realize that Natalie Angier, who wrote The Canon (a book that I reviewed but didn't like), was not even included in the list and she is a science writer for the Times!
Of course, it is difficult to know what is truly "notable" but I will assume that it can be used interchangeably with "best". That said, there are some other lists of the best 100 books of 2007, such as Amazon, and they include science books, so what…
pharyngula | November 27, 2007The NY Times has published a list of the 100 most notable books of the year. I'm feeling inadequate because, while I read a lot of books, not one of them happened to be on this particular list. I'm thinking that I'd better rush out and get one that is on the list, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard, because that looks like it might be awfully handy at this point.
Of course, I've got an excuse. Most of the books I've read are science books, and as Chad notes, not one science book made the cut. I guess science was just un-notable and uninteresting this year. Or perhaps…
laelaps | November 27, 2007Note: I originally wrote this post in a bit of frustration, and so I've drawn a line through much of the latter half that has more to do with science education and not the list. I still find it a bit strange than not one science book made it to the list when there were, in my opinion, some "notable" science books out this year, but some of my reaction to this was more of a rant than anything else. I'm not saying that there should be X number of science books on the list, but it's hard to believe that in a list of 50 books (being that half the list was fiction) not one science book was picked…
laelaps | November 24, 2007
Today in 1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published (and immediately sold out). While Darwin published many other books during his life (including the very popular The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms With Observations of Their Habits), On the Origin of Species is by far the most famous and influential, and it is my own shame that my only copy is a small pocket version of it (although I do own 2nd edition copies of The Descent of Man and The Variation of…
clock | November 24, 2007Or, Happy Evolution Day! It's time for a party!
It is easy to look up blog coverage - if you search for "Origin of Species" you mostly get good stuff, if you search for "Origin of the Species" you get creationist clap-trap as they cannot even copy and paste correctly (hence they are better known these days as cdesign proponentsists).
Pondering Pikaia and The Beagle Project Blog were first out of the gate this morning with wonderful posts.
Here is a recent book review of the Origin by someone who knows some biology and another one by someone who does not - both are quite nice and eye-opening.…
clock | November 24, 2007Call me traditional, but I love books. I have about 5000 of them. If I see a long blog post or a scientific paper or an article that is longer than a page or two, I print it out and read it in hardcopy. I see why an e-Book is a good idea, though, and one day I am sure to have one for particular purposes (e.g., for travel, or for copying and pasting short quotes into my blog-posts as needed, or for sharing books with others), but not until I am the master of exactly what is on it and what I want to do with it - and apparently that time is far off. It may be even going backwards. Just see…
clock | November 23, 2007Well, I certainly like it very much when a reader checks out my Amazon wish list and picks out a present for me. I like presents!
But this morning I got a LARGE package, full of books from the Wish List, a variety and quantity sufficient to keep me excitedly reading for quite a while:
Quantico by Greg Bear
An Inconvenient Truth DVD by Al Gore
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh.
The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior by David Allen Sibley.
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon…