Books
pharyngula | August 23, 2007I must have been sleeping, because I hadn't noticed that this came out: Janet Browne, the author of a most excellent two-volume biography of Darwin, has a new book titled Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography. That one is going right to the top of my Amazon wishlist.
Michael Barton has a review.
pharyngula | August 21, 2007
I've been informed by Greta Christina that I've been beaten to the punch: the best title ever is already taken.
Happiness Is a Squishy Cephalopod(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
It's so true, and I'm going to have to pick up a copy of that one.
pharyngula | August 17, 2007
I just finished Sean B. Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo the other day, and I must confess: I was initially a bit disappointed. It has a few weaknesses. For one, I didn't learn anything new from it; I had already read just about everything mentioned in the book in the original papers. It also takes a very conservative view of evolutionary theory, and doesn't mention any of the more radical ideas that you find bubbling up on just about every page of Mary Jane West-Eberhard's big book. One chapter, the tenth, really didn't fit in well with the rest—the whole…
purepedantry | August 16, 2007The New Yorker has an exquisite article by Adam Gopnik on science fiction writer, Phillip K. Dick. Gopnik doesn't pull punches; Dick was in many ways bat-shit crazy. He also had a genius for understanding that the future would likely be just as wrong -- in the way that people in 60s tended to define wrong -- as the present. This sense of stability in human nature made his books ironic and deeply satirical.
Money quote:
Dick's admirers identify his subjects as..."reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation." Later, as he became crazier, he did see questions in vast cosmological…
neurophilosophy | August 9, 2007
I've just received a copy of Best of the Brain from Scientific American, courtesy of the publishers, Dana Press.
Best of the Brain is fantastic a collection of essays from SciAm and SciAm Mind, by leading neuroscientists, such as Antonio Damasio and Eric Kandel, and top science writers like Carl Zimmer.
The essays provide a fantastic summary of current thinking and research in a wide variety of areas, from addiction, mental illness and consciousness to brain-computer interfaces and neuromorphic microchips.
The book will be published in the U. K. on 20th August. The full contents, and…
aardvarchaeology | August 8, 2007
Dear Reader,
Would you like to read about werewolf communes?
The beasties live quietly in southern California
Doing dirty work for the drugs trade
Sharing pack mentality, each with a queen bitch
Riding their vans to the desert's edge, changing
Into quadruped form and running long nights
Through the sagebrush, panting and exhilarated
Would you like to read about werewolf communes?
Could you chew and digest, Dear Reader,
Could you stomach three hundred pages
Of free verse narrative?
So finely done that you will often forget
That this is no ordinary novel
Page-turner poetry
Fit for loud…
sheril | August 8, 2007When I had the opportunity to review Danica McKellar's new book Math Doesn't Suck, I was excited on two levels. First and foremost, it's aimed at getting girls interested in math. I've always been flummoxed as to why the subject is such a male dominated field and curious to find out how Danica would take it on. Second, there's a more personal issue of having been nicknamed Winnie Cooper since elementary school because most everyone seemed to think we look an awful lot alike. (You can judge after the jump). And now it turns out we do indeed have something very real in common aside from…
pharyngula | August 7, 2007It's that time of the summer again, when classes loom all too near, and enthusiastic students start asking for the reading ahead of time so that they can both find the books from a cheaper source than our bookstore and get a jump on the material. So to handle all those requests at once, here is a list of my fall term classes:
If you're an incoming freshman biology major, you'll be taking Biology 1111, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development (FunGenEvoDevo, for short), either in the fall or the spring term. This course is primarily a qualitative introduction to the basic…
aardvarchaeology | August 3, 2007As an archaeologist you get a funny perspective on time -- occupational hazard. For years I've been musing about what traces our era will leave to last into the far future. I've been thinking about six-lane highways with their cuttings through hills and their earthen banks across depressions. In my mind's eye I've seen my housing area as a pasture, sheep grazing across gridded grass-covered rectangular mounds of building debris.
Journalist Alan Weisman didn't stop at musing about all this. He went out and talked to a bewildering number of people around the world about it. The result is a fine…
clock | July 30, 2007Now that I have finished reading HP7, I finally let myself go around and see what others are writing. Here is some of the best I found so far, to be read only if you have finished the book (or do not care for spoilers).
There is a paper that looks at sociopolitical aspects of the books.
And there is tons on the internets, e.g., this enormous comment thread on Pandagon, which touches on everything from quality of writing, through gender issues, to politics.
And there is a bunch about science of Harry Potter
And the greatest spoiler-full spoof of the seventh book, scene by scene. Hillarious.
omnibrain | July 29, 2007Here's another interesting book from the "Review copies of books Steve gets in the mail from publication companies, like Prometheus Books, that love bloggers" series If you've read this book please let us know what you think in the comments section.
Todays book is The (Fabulous) Fibonacci Numbers.
Book Description:
The most ubiquitous, and perhaps the most intriguing, number pattern in mathematics is the Fibonacci sequence. In this simple pattern beginning with two ones, each succeeding number is the sum of the two numbers immediately preceding it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ad infinitum).…
neurophilosophy | July 29, 2007 This week's New Yorker contains an article by Oliver Sacks about a condition called musicophilia, in which one feels sudden urges to listen to, or play, music follwing brain injury:
In 1994, when Tony Cicoria was forty-two, and a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon, he was struck by lightning. He had an out-of-body experience. "I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, 'Oh shit, I'm dead.' ...Then--slam! I was back." Soon after, he consulted a neurologist--he was feeling sluggish and having some difficulties with his memory. He had a thorough neurological exam, and nothing seemed…
omnibrain | July 28, 2007Here begins another new series at Omni Brain. This one is called, Review copies of books Steve gets in the mail from publication companies, like Prometheus Books, that love bloggers, Long enough title for you?
I actually don't have time to read anywhere near all of these books so I'm going to give you the Amazon shtick ;) These books really do look interesting and are definitely worth checking out! If you've read them please let us know what you think in the comments section.
Our first book is... Science and Ethics: Can Science Help Us Make Wise Moral Judgments?
Book Description:
In a…
pharyngula | July 26, 2007A few years ago, everyone was in a tizzy over the discovery of Flores Man, curious hominin remains found on an Indonesian island that had a number of astonishing features: they were relatively recent, less than 20,000 years old; they were not modern humans, but of unsettled affinity, with some even arguing that they were like australopithecines; and just as weird, they were tiny, a people only about 3 feet tall with a cranial capacity comparable to a chimpanzee's. This was sensational. Then on top of that, add more controversy with some people claiming that the investigators had it all wrong…
clock | July 26, 2007Tara of Aetiology, after reviewing Danica McKellar's book "Math Doesn't Suck", posted an exclusive blog interview with Danica, which you can (and should) read here.
clock | July 26, 2007It is certainly possible. Compared to some people I know, I am definitely not. I have read each of the books once (more than halfway through the 7th - so do not give me spoilers yet!) and I have seen each of the movies once. I enjoy them, but do nothing on top of it: no speculations, no obsessions, no additional activity.
pharyngula | July 25, 2007Feeling pragmatic? Is your focus entirely practical, on what works and what will get the job done? Are you one of those fighters for evolutionary biology who waves away all the theory and the abstractions and the strange experimental manipulations, and thinks the best argument for evolution is the fact that it works and is important? This book, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by David Mindell, does make you sit down and learn a little history and philosophy to start off, but the focus throughout is on the application of evolution to the real world. It…
voltagegate | July 25, 2007Critique of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows below the fold. Spoilers ahead.
I think it's important to get one thing straight right off the bat: I am a fan of the Harry Potter series. I think Rowling is a great storyteller, and I have enjoyed the series so far. I think she has seriously dropped the ball with her last book, and cheated her fans out of an equally engaging novel as well as a satisfying conclusion for the characters they have loved and followed for 10 years now.
Overall, I think Rowling is tired of writing about the gang. Her strengths - quaint descriptions and character…
voltagegate | July 25, 2007
After hosting TB last week, I had been planning a bit of a break to spend time with family and get lost in the mountains for a bit (while secretly waiting in line last Saturday at midnight for the new Harry Potter - review pending).
We had a chance to sift through some flea markets and I found a wonderful set of small, illustrated books on nature published by the National Audubon Society and a book on fossil collecting in PA, both put out back in the 1960's. I thought I would share some of the finer illustrations below the fold.
The fossil collecting book has some really great ones, like the…
clock | July 24, 2007One more book is off my amazon.com wish list, thanks to one of my readers - Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Thank you so much! It is going straight up to the top of my "to read" stack, as soon as I finish Harry Potter.