Books
clock | January 10, 2007Just a quick note on the current state of the anthology:
40 41 formatted files have arrived so far, six are on their way today, and four three more people have yet to respond (I may have to tap into the "reserve" posts if I do not hear from these four three today). The cover is done. The title is chosen. The PDF file is in the process of beeing built and looking pretty already.
I am writing the Preface right now. It has been suggested to me to utilize/cannibalize material from these two old posts for the Preface. Both are too long, but have some interesting stuff in them, so I will see…
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2007One of my blog entries from last spring has made it into a science blogging anthology (a "blook") edited by fellow Sber Coturnix! It'll soon be published as a paperback through Lulu.com. The chosen piece is about the Field-Archaeological Paradox, that is, the curious fact that it is far easier in Sweden to fund expensive excavations at poorly preserved and uninformative sites than at really cool ones.
[More blog entries about blogging, publishing, lulu; blogga, förlagsbranschen, lulu.]
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2007
The premier Swedish dark fantasy quarterly, Minotauren, where yours truly has been a columnist for the past year, is going into an extended hiatus. A fat triple issue to cover 2006 will be distributed in the near future, and then it's goodbye for a while. Subscribers will be compensated. The triple issue will feature pieces about or by Clark Ashton Smith, Leigh Brackett, Arthur Machen and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, among others.
[More blog entries about horror, fantasy, books; skräck, fantasy, böcker.]
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2007
"With a bit of luck, random sequences of letters and figures may form intelligible words and phrases. The most well-known formulation of this fact is the image of the monkeys and typewriters: if you let monkeys hammer for ever on typewriters, then they will eventually write every possible sequence of the typewriters' characters, including every book that has ever been, or will ever be, written. Let us disregard the risk that the monkeys may tire before they have typed for ever; also, let us leave questions of typewriter wear, paper supply and banana prices out of consideration."
In 1999 I…
pharyngula | January 4, 2007Here's some happy news for all you warriors against creationism: Mark Isaak's Counter-Creationism Handbook(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that wonderfully indispensable and entirely portable version of the Index to Creationist Claims, can now be purchased in paperback for less than $15. It was previously only available in a rather pricey but but extremely well bound edition. Next time you attend a talk by Ken Ham or Duane Gish or any of the common-as-dirt wandering creationists (or Kent Hovind, once they let him out of jail*), you'll want a copy of this with you—teach them to fear the power of well-…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2007I usually divide my evenings between the computer and a book, interspersed with the occasional fondle-raid on my wife. Here are a few recommended reads from the past year.
How and Why Lisa's Dad Got to Be Famous. Michael Allen 2006. Charming short novel about the insanity that is reality TV. Reviewed here.
Year's Best SF 11. Ed. Hartwell & Cramer 2006. Excellent science fiction short stories. I particularly liked the contributions by Langford, Gregory, Robson, MacLeod, Rucker, Jarpe, Sterling, McAuley, Chiang, Morton, Reynolds, Haldeman. Reviewed here.
Voices. Ursula K. LeGuin 2006. A…
clock | January 1, 2007Update: Deadline for submissions is January 2nd at noon EST.
Wow! I posted the call for suggestions on Friday night, it is a weekend and a holiday, the traffic is down to a half, yet I got so many suggestions already, both in the comments and via e-mail! I am also very happy to see how many people are suggesting not just their own but other people's posts. This is going to be heckuva job for me! All science bloggers are my friends and I will have to dissappoint so many of them in the end. I wish I could collect 500 posts instead of just 50.
As I stated in the original post, I am looking…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2007
Back in September, R.U. Sirius's podcast turned me on to an intriguing new book. It's named The Visionary State, a big, thick and pretty coffee-table book, with text by Erik Davis and countless jaw-droppingly beautiful photographs by Michael Rauner.
Formally speaking, the book is a piece of topographical history, treating of California from the time of the first Catholic missions in the late 18th century until the last couple of years. Places are visited, described and depicted, stories and anecdotes are heaped one upon another, the names of countless people and organisations form a blur.…
clock | December 26, 2006Here is the background information and here is the growing list of nominations.
I am still looking for a poem, a post about women and/or minorities in science, something from chemistry, geology and/or ecology (not environment/conservation), and a post about stereotypes of scientists in the society (e.g., movies, TV).
I have realized that having an online poll and asking people to evaluate 100+ posts will be too unwieldy, so instead I asked several of my friends, including a couple of SciBlings, several science bloggers not affiliated with Seed, a non-science blogger and a non-blogging…
pharyngula | December 16, 2006Most books that teach the basics of evolutionary biology are fairly genteel in their treatment of creationism—they don't endorse it, of course, but they either ignore it, or more frequently now, they segregate off a chapter to deal with the major claims. There are also whole books dedicated to combating creationist myths, of course, but they're not usually the kind of book you pick up to get a tutorial in basic biology. In my hands I have an example of a book that does both, using the errors of creationism heavily to help explain and contrast the principles of evolutionary biology—it's…
pharyngula | December 16, 2006One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it's a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What that typically means is that you get a book that is eminently useful, but isn't the kind of thing you'd pick up to read for fun, and then we hand it to our undergraduate students, who may be in our class for only the vaguest of reasons, and tell them they must read it. Finally, of course, at the end…
pharyngula | December 15, 2006Several of us here on scienceblogs have recently discussed the stereotypes of women who read science fiction. Syaffolee puts an interesting twist on it: what about men who read romance novels? She's reporting on an article that says almost a quarter of the readers are men.
Nobody seems to be speculating on whether guys who read bodice-rippers are cuter than average.
There is an interesting idea there about the genre ghetto. I've read a few, years ago, and didn't care for them much…and now I judge the whole genre by a fuzzy memory of a non-representative sample. Are there great authors I'm…
clock | December 8, 2006Douglas Erwin reviews "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll.
Wallace Arthur talks about his favourite books.
clock | December 7, 2006Amanda just reviewed Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma and also recently wrote a post on the same topic while under the influence of the book. I agree with her 100%, so go and read both posts.
I have read the book a couple of months ago and never found time to write a review of my own. I also remember that I finished the book on a Thursday afternoon - an important piece of information as it is on Thursday afternoons that there is a Farmers' Market here in Southern Village, barely a block from me. The first thing I did when I closed the book was to walk up to the Farmers' Market…
pharyngula | December 5, 2006The Atheist Ethicist has written a book: A Better Place: Essays on Desire Utilitarianism.
When I was young I decided to try to leave the world better than it would have been if I had never lived. To do this, I had to know what 'A Better Place' actually was. Thus, I spent 12 years in college studying moral philosophy. This book contains a set of essays describing pieces of the answers I think I found. I argue that we cannot reliably find those answers in scripture, in subjective sentiment, or in evolved dispositions. In fact, those who look in these places for answers often leave the world…
pharyngula | December 4, 2006Any parents out there? I bet you know the children's book, Goodnight Moon. I read it a few million times myself, with each kid as they came up through those preschool years, and I can still remember each page and how the little ones had to repeat each goodnight. Lance Mannion finds the strangest summary of the book, though—it's a dark nihilist tract that portrays the inevitability of death.
Whoa. Heavy, man.
The other obsessive touchstone of my children's early years was Pat the Bunny, where each page had a different texture glued on — a piece of sandpaper, a feather, some soft fluff — and…
pharyngula | November 30, 2006I got a request from Hillary Rettig: those gift-giving holidays (you know, Cephalopodmas and some other religion-tainted days) are coming up, and as we are all pale, text-focused people here, she thought the Pharynguloid hive mind would be the perfect place to gather recommendations for books to infect young brains with the imaginative side of science. So, please, post your recommendations for juvenile science fiction right here. Everything from the classics to the very latest stuff is welcome.
pharyngula | November 30, 2006Wait…what about us grown-ups? What is the best science fiction novel you've read recently?
I'm seeing lots of recommendations for Orson Scott Card, but I have to admit that I've long lost any affection I might have had for his work. Did you know he has a new book? It looks like full-blown reactionary tripe.
pharyngula | November 30, 2006Let's drop the "fiction" from the requirements: what are the best science books out there in the bookstores? I should update my updated book list for evolutionists again, so give me some good leads.
clock | November 28, 2006I wish that, many many years ago when I was becoming a biologist, that I could have read this wonderful little book - On Becoming a Biologist by John Janovy! What a little gem!
On the surface, or by looking at the Table of Contents, this slim volume appears to be just yet another in a long line of books giving advice to people who are interested about joining the profession. And sure, it does contain important information about getting accepted into a program, choosing one's project, teaching, research, publishing, getting funded, giving talks etc. But it is also much more than that. The…