Books
aardvarchaeology | October 18, 2007I've just signed another one of Sage Publications' ridiculous publishing agreements, prompting Aard's first re-run of an entry from my old blog. Here's something from 29 September 2006.
I agreed to a really crappy business deal today.
For a long time, academic journals from commercial publishers have grown in number and become more and more expensive. Individual scholars can no longer afford subscribing to them at all, and most research libraries have to prioritise strictly when choosing which ones to take. There is a successful resistance movement against these tendencies, Open Access…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2007
My part-time employer, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, has been publishing books for over two centuries and rents a huge storage space for books in central Stockholm. Most of the stock isn't moving very fast. In fact, a lot of it hasn't moved at all since Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.
Storage is expensive. The Academy now feels that a lot of the funds devoted to storing these old books would be better used in, for instance, scanning the books and putting them on-line for free.
On Saturday 27 October, the Academy's book store is opened to the public, and most of the books will be…
laelaps | October 12, 2007Progress on my chosen books for this past week has been a little bit slow; I had a very busy weekend and a presentation on the paleoecology of Laetoli, Tanzania at ~3.5 mya (which will soon become a post), so I haven't been able to read as much as I would like this past week. Still, I'm about halfway through the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and hopefully I'll finish it over the weekend (I think I can polish off 300 pages before Monday). I'm also about halfway through Molnar's treatment of the huge varanid reptile Megalania prisca (Dragons in the Dust), although I probably won't get to finish it…
neurophilosophy | October 12, 2007Just published by University of Chicago Press is A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World. The book contains seminal Nature papers published over the last 100 years, each of which is accompanied by commentary from a leading scientist in the field.
Included in the book are the 1953 paper in which James Watson and Francis Crick reported the structure of DNA and 1980 paper in which Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus report homeotic mutations in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
Some of the book's content has been made available online for…
pharyngula | October 11, 2007If you'd like a less intemperate and bloodcurdling review of The Spiritual Brain than mine, here's one from a professor of religion.
He doesn't seem to like it much, either.
neurophilosophy | October 10, 2007
Vaughan has found a fascinating article about the many references to neurological syndromes in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
On the right is one of Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations for the book. It accompanies the following passage:
"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); "now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!" (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). "Oh, my poor…
grrlscientist | October 8, 2007tags: books, blog carnival
The 7 October 2007 Books Carnival is now available. I am pleased to say that they included two submissions from me, so be sure to go there and let them know how much you appreciate their hard work of putting this together for all of us to enjoy by reading the links they've collected!
pharyngula | October 4, 2007Wilkins has submitted to some silly book meme, and anything John does I have to do better.
The ones in bold I've read, we're supposed to italicize the ones we've partially read. I haven't italicized any, because if it's a book I pick up and despise and put back down again, I want to forget I even tried.
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…
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2007I'm thinking maybe it isn't worth the effort to keep the Good Books and Good Albums lists going in the left-hand column. Better to put that effort into writing more blog entries about books and albums? Dear Reader, if you're a regular and would miss the lists, please say so in a comment.
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2007
Over at David Nessle's, his witty readers are discussing translations -- more particularly, bad translations. I collect crap translations from English to Swedish, so I decided to offer some to you, Dear Reader. To make this palatable to non-Swedish-speakers, I'll add a second step to explain what the Swedish mistranslation means literally in each case.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Main character drives around on a rainy night looking for a place called Cornflower. Meeting someone, he asks for directions, but the other guy just drives off and our hero yells an insult after him.
"Excuse…
pharyngula | October 2, 2007I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the effort. It's just about completely unreadable.
The writing is aggravating. It is constantly broken up with strings of quotes — 3, 4, 5, or 6 at a time — that are just plopped out there to speak for themselves, and often the authors don't even bother to address the points brought up in the quotes. It's…
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2007
Giovanni Aldini's electrical experiments on executed criminals in Bologna, from Essai theorique et experimental sur le galvanisme, published in 1804. (Image from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.)
The experiments of Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) provided Mary Shelley with some of the inspiration for her classic gothic novel Frankenstein.
Aldini was the nephew of Luigi Galvani, who, in the 1700s, made a major contribution to the understanding of nerve function. In 1798, Aldini became a professor of physics at the University of Bologna,…
grrlscientist | October 1, 2007tags: blog carnivals, Writers block, writing
The latest edition of the Writer's Block carnival is now available for your reading pleasure. Even though there's plenty there to read, I think I've cornered their market for book reviews .. go check it out to see what they've got to read!
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007
Below are a few quotes from this interview with theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, whose new book, A Many-colored Glass, is about to be published.
On science, religion and Richard Dawkins:
I think it's only a small fraction of people who think that [science and religion are at odds]. Perhaps they have louder voices than the others.
I think Richard Dawkins is doing a lot of damage. I disagree very strongly with the way he's going about it. I don't deny his right to be an atheist, but I think he does a great deal of harm when he publicly says that in order to be a scientist, you have to…
clock | September 26, 2007
Now that the registration for the Science Blogging Conference is open, it is time to remind you that the new edition of the Science Blogging Anthology, "Open Laboratory 2007", is in the works and is accepting your suggestions.
Although the entire process, from the initial idea all the way to having a real book printed and up for sale, took only about a month, the Open Laboratory 2006 was a great success. This year, we have much more time so we hope we will do an even better job of it.
More than 100 entries have come in so far (see under the fold) and we are looking for more. I have read…
omnibrain | September 25, 2007
From the official website:
Hypochondriacs have long had to satisfy their needs for self-diagnosis with medical reference materials written for the masses, but this revolutionary book is dedicated entirely to the hypochondriac's unique perspective on health. The world's worst maladies, conveniently organized by symptom (real or imagined), will ignite even the mildest hypochondriac's fantasy life. We're all going to die of something--why not choose an ailment that's rare and hard to pronounce?
Features:
* Profiles of over 300 deadly diseases
* Organized by symptom for ease of self-…
scientificactivist | September 25, 2007Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt: 2007, 400 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
At 2:09 am on September 13, 2007, Hurricane Humberto made landfall just east of Galveston, Texas--still the site of the deadliest natural disaster in US history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. With maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, though, Hurricane Humberto was just a Category 1 storm (the weakest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). While it was the first hurricane to make landfall in the US since the record-breaking and devastating 2005 hurricane…
grrlscientist | September 24, 2007tags: blog carnivals, books, book reviews
The Books Carnival is now available for you to enjoy. This blog carnival is filled with essays about books and reading as well as lots of book reviews. You can't say that you can't think of a decent book to read after you've read through this blog carnival! Interestingly, this is a bilingual carnival (Spanish), too.
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2007...in the of ideas--one war I'll gladly get behind. If you want to see the original poster and you're in the Boston area, you can at the Boston Public Library at Copley Square:
clock | September 17, 2007A dear reader checked out my amazon wish-list and sent me Dr.Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, a book I wanted for a long time. Thank you!