Books
clock | July 8, 2007Unfortunately, I will still be out of town for this, but if you are in the area on July 12th, you should go to Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh (it is in Ridgewood Shopping Center, 3522 Wade Ave.) at 7pm and meet my SciBling Chris Mooney. He is touring the country reading from his new book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming (website).
Last year, when he was touring with the "Republican War On Science" we had a grand time at his reading/signing and afterwards we, of course, had Miller Lite (at least he had, I chose something a little more beer-like). So, mark…
neurophilosophy | July 8, 2007
The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, began in 1881 as a weekly column in a San Francisco paper, and was published as a book in 1911.
BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2007
Lately I have come to think of books as computer devices, combining the functions of screen and backup medium. All texts these days are written and type-set on computers, so the paper thingy has long been a secondary manifestation of the text. People like publisher Jason Epstein and book blogger the Grumpy Old Bookman have predicted that we will soon have our books made on demand at any store that may today have a machine for making photographic prints. The texts will reside on the net, on our USB memory sticks or on our handheld computers/cell phones. The paper output/backup-storage device…
aardvarchaeology | July 7, 2007Antony Moore's novel The Swap is set in southern England in 2006 and revolves around a school reunion of people born in 1970. It's a murder mystery and a love story, a humorous tale about being startled out of complacency and boredom by unexpected events, about letting go of your past and moving on. It's quite engrossing but should carry a prominent warning sticker: This Book Has an Infuriatingly Open Ending.
Moore, Antony. 2007. The Swap. London: Harvill Secker. 278 pp. ISBN 978-1-8465-5070-6.
neurophilosophy | July 4, 2007 Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is arguably the greatest novelist of all time. He cast a long shadow over world literature, and subsequently influenced many great writers, from Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, to Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jack Kerouac.
Dostoyevsky had a profound insight into the human condition. He was much more than a novelist: he was also a psychologist and a philosopher. In his novels, Dostoyevsky explored subjects such as free will, the existence of God, and good and evil. The characters in his novels are most often portrayed as living…
clock | July 2, 2007Books: "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge.
It's 2025 - What happened to science, politics and journalism? Well, you know I'd be intrigued. After all, a person whose taste in science fiction I trust (my brother) told me to read this and particularly to read it just before my interview with PLoS. So, of course I did (I know, it's been two months, I am slow, but I get there in the end).
'Rainbows End' is a novel-length expansion of the short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" which he finished in August 2001 and first published in "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge". The novel was written…
cmooney | June 30, 2007UPDATE JUNE 30: So. I've finished reading The Assault on Reason. I must say, it's not what I expected. My ultimate takeaway feeling is that this is a very powerful book, whatever flaws it may have. But that's getting close to giving away my review, which I'm still in the process of writing....so in the meantime, let's carry on the great dialogue we have going in the comments. I'll do so by making the following additional points:
* In response to Mark Powell: I know you think Gore is making too much of the concept of "reason"--but it's clear that in using this term, Gore doesn't simply mean a…
clock | June 28, 2007My copy of the book just arrived in the mail. This answers my question of what to read in SF (at least until Harry Potter VII comes out...).
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2007Panos Karnezis's new novel The Birthday Party is a re-imagination of the life of Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate. The book is structured around the events of a single day and night towards the end of the tycoon's life, though the bulk of the text is made up of deftly interleaved backstory. The storytelling method is straight-forward on the verge of simplistic, with an omniscient narrator. Being used to far more murky and intricate approaches, I found myself wondering if some passages were in fact intended as naïvistic parody. The only metafictional twist I've detected is that one of…
aardvarchaeology | June 24, 2007Daryl Gregory's short fiction is quite remarkable. For the two past years, he's managed to top both the Hartwell & Kramer and the Dozois Year's Best anthologies with "Second Person, Present Tense" and "Damascus". I don't want to spoil anyone's fun by saying too much about the stories: just that they are science fiction stories about neuropsychology. One about the neurological basis of selfhood, the other about the neurological basis of religious epiphany. Gregory is a materialist and a skeptic, my kind of guy, and he's also a fine stylist with great psychological insight.
Check out the…
pharyngula | June 19, 2007Give the Countess a happy word — she's had her first novel accepted for publication. She's going to have to let me have a copy to review.
It's in the erotic romance genre, which suggests there will be lots of tentacles, mucus-slick chitin, and numerous eyes, so I'm sure I'll be the perfect audience for it. Oh, wait — maybe not? What else could it be about?
pharyngula | June 8, 2007Behe has written a very bad book, so poorly supported that I don't want to waste a lot of time taking apart every sentence, but I did want to say a few words about chapter 9, where he takes on evo-devo. I waited a bit because I knew that Sean Carroll was writing a review of the book for Science, and I expected he'd go gunning for chapter 9, too—but no, he didn't. I guess he felt as I do, that since Behe's fatally flawed premise was exposed in the first few chapters, there was little point to addressing his incompetent nit-picks later in the book. After all, when the construction crew has…
clock | June 7, 2007When I was a kid I swallowed science-fiction by the crates. And I was too young to be very discerning of quality - I liked everything. Good taste developed later, with age. But even at that tender age, there was one book that was so bad that not only did I realized it was bad, it really, really irked me. It was The Ayes of Texas (check the Amazon readers' reviews!), a stupid 1982 Texas-secessionist fairy-tale in which a rich (and of course brilliant and smooth with ladies) conservative Texan, by throwing millions of dollars at scientists, gets all sorts of new gizmos and gadgets which he…
pharyngula | June 7, 2007The various ID blogs are all atwitter over the new textbook the Discovery Institute is going to be peddling, Explore Evolution. I've seen a copy, but I'm not going to give an extensive review just yet. I will say that it's taking a slightly different tack to avoid the court challenges. It does not mention gods anywhere, of course, but it goes further: it doesn't mention Intelligent Design, either. The book is entirely about finding fault with evolution, under the pretext of presenting the position of evolutionary biology (sort of) together with a critique. The biology part is shallow, useless…
aardvarchaeology | June 5, 2007David Nessle is a Swedish comic artist, author, editor, translator, sf fan and blogger. His blog is without any serious competition the wittiest one I've encountered in the Swedish language, and I read it religiously. Recent themes of his blogging have been a Saami version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", an ongoing tiff among Swedish poets, amateurish 60s comics, small-town Swedish food packaging, what to do with all one's books, his collection of plastic action figures and classic dinosaur artist Zdenek Burian. Go read!
pharyngula | June 5, 2007Let me add a quick addendum to the previous post. People aren't appreciating yet how hard-core a designist Behe actually is; one comment mentions that "apparently God is directly responsible for the creation of drug-resistant malaria."
No. The Designer, who must have godlike powers, specifically created malaria itself. The drug resistance is the one thing that evolved.
Here's something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts. C-Eve's children died in…
pharyngula | June 5, 2007I peeked.
I was reading Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, and I was several chapters into it. All he seemed to be saying was that evolution has limits, limits, limits, and those limits are so restrictive that you can't get from there to here, and he was repeating it over and over, in this tediously chipper narrative voice. Behe insisted that he accepted common descent, though, and acknowledged all this evidence that, for instance, chimpanzees and humans are related by common descent, while saying that it was impossible for them to have evolved naturally from one to the other. So…