publicness
kbonham | February 21, 2012A little over 300 years ago, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a dry goods seller from Delft in Holland, learned to grind glass into lenses and fashion the best microscopes the world had ever seen. In those days, the idea of being a "scientist" as a profession was ludicrous. Natural philosophy was pastime for nobility or at least those with considerable disposable income. Leeuwenhoek was a successful business man, and in his spare time, he pointed his lenses at pond water (among other things). As Paul de Kruif recounted in his brilliant book Microbe Hunters:
[Leeuwenhoek] peeped into a fantastic sub-…
kbonham | January 13, 2012"Reading" books on my iPod is usually great. I can download them from audible, and while I'm tending to the daily monotony that comprises much of labwork (tissue culture, prepping protein samples, running back and forth between centrifuges), I can just pop in my earbuds and keep my brain engaged with something interesting. But never have I so regretted listening to rather than reading a book as I did with Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.
Not because he's a bad narrator - in fact he does better than many authors reading their own work (though he has the first audio typo I think I've ever heard…