Reading

Here are my best reads in English during 2013. It was a really good year for quality, though I didn't read very much: 41 books, twelve of which were e-books. The latter number was boosted by the Humble E-Book Bundle that I bought at Junior's recommendation (sadly no longer up for sale). Find me at Goodreads! Pirate Cinema. Cory Doctorow 2012. A fun, engaging and optimistic piece of polemic fiction, slightly preachy in parts, about the social and artistic consequences of intellectual property law. Old Man's War. John Scalzi 2005. Energetic co-ed military sf. Stiff. The Curious Lives of Human…

Here are my best reads in English during 2012. I read 50 books this year, six of which were e-books. I flirted with LibraryThing for a while, but lately I've found that Goodreads is more the kind of leisure reading database/community that I enjoy. Find me there. Packing for Mars. Mary Roach 2011. Delving into space exploration history to get a perspective on the gritty realities of a future human-staffed Mars mission. (Let's first do sample return.) My Early Life. Winston Churchill 1930. Scion of power spends his youth trying to get involved in war and trains as a cavalry officer as one of…

Speaking as someone with kids who pretty much are Alligators All Around and Wild Things most of the time, I'm going to miss him. Thanks, Maurice, for the books that fed my childhood and now the childhood of all the kids I love!

Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information that's really important. I've mentioned this before, but I don't think I've done a science version. I've been doing more reading of journal articles lately than I have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar…

Reading isn't just a monkish pursuit: Matthew Battles on "The Shallows" » Nieman Journalism Lab More on Carr's ideas from "The Shallows" BoraZ interviews Eric Roston and gets some good ideas about journalism and reporting, past, present and future. The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk. Or why my move to London is a good work idea. Razib says what can't be said too often: Your genes are just the odds Also worth many reminders: Healthcare: U.S. spends more, but gets less, from the Well Not again with the sekrit Renaissance brain anatomy! But yes: again.  I want to see this…

  Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet Lehrer â who, unlike me, has read Shirky's book â finds that Shirky overplays his case, and that in his enthusiasm for networked contributions and collaborations he discounts both consumption and many offline interactions. He Lehrer mounts a convincing argument, and you really…

  Don DeLillo's Players, as marked up by David Foster Wallace.Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. I just sat down to air a complaint about reading on the iPad when I discovered that Sue Halpern had done much of my work for me: For all its supposed interactivity, the iPad is a surprisingly static machine, especially for reading. ... One of the guilty pleasures of an actual, ink-on-paper book is the possibility of marking it upâunderlining salient passages, making notes in the margins, dog-earing a page. While itâs true that some electronic book platforms for…

Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org   Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do! Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question. It seems that everywhere I look nowadays, Iâm seeing images of, or reading descriptions of, the brain in some shape or form. Buchman links (at the post's bottom, as is now the practice at NCore) to several good reads and sites, including Neuroculture.org, which has some lovely stuff, and â curse those…

MIT's Science Fiction Society has a truly inspiring review of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. Worth taking a quick look at.

Some kids more readily recognize Ronald McDonald than the President of the United States of America. Sad, right? Check out this exchange, from the 2004 movie Super Size Me: Morgan Spurlock: [to kids] I'm gonna show you some pictures and I want you to tell me who they are. Children: OK. Morgan Spurlock: [Showing a picture of George Washington] Who's that? Child: George Washington? Morgan Spurlock: Good. Who was he? Children: He was the 4th president. He freed the slaves. He could never tell a lie. Morgan Spurlock: [Shows picture that you can't see] Who's that? Child: George W. Bush? Morgan…

Traveling. But here's what I'm reading during train, plane, and bus rides -- and over meals:   Gravity-defying ramps take illusion prize. This contest always produces fascinating stuff. This time, the ball rolls up. Video here.  Vaughan Bell ponders cortisol, dopamine, neuroplasticity, and other things that set off his bullshit detector. Riff launched from a post from Neuroskeptic on cortisol and childcare scare stories, equally read-worthy. Dan Vorhaus does a wonderful round-up of reactions and implications stemming from the news that genetic testing is coming to Walgreens. Best blog-…

from The Everett Collection, via Vanity Fair Notables I didn't get to. Blog posts, MSM stories, and tweets living together. Fron the genomics front NOVA | Ghost in Your Genes | PBS streams some of the Skip Gates program I mentioned in my post last week on the Genomes, Environments, and Traits conference. What can you learn from a whole genome sequence? : Genetic Future ponders just the Lancet/Quake genome Heritable, yes, which gene...another issue Razib drills down. He argues elsewhere that The origins of morality do not matter | AP IMPACT: Testing curbs some genetic diseases -…

I don't have the attention span to write this article. In the course of penning this introductory paragraph, I've taken umpteen email breaks, gotten distracted by several Wikipedia wormholes, and taken an hour's time out to watch Frontline documentary clips on YouTube. It has taken me, in toto, seven days to write a five-paragraph article about my generation's decreasing attention span. At least the irony isn't lost on me. A social researcher tracking my movements across the web might discover that, in the words of University College of London professor and director of CIBER (the Centre…

And it could, if done right. Even those of us who read really fast max out at around 600 words per minute. This is a result of what is known as saccadic eye movement. When we read, only a very small part of the retina, known as the fovea, is used, so as we read a line of text (and it doesn't matter if you're reading left to right, right to left, or top to bottom), your eye makes small jerks, saccades, to read the new text (if you have a video camera handy, record yourself reading this post. Nekkid. Your eyes will jerk several times per line). The problem I have with Kindle (and other…

The sky before Katrina struck, from Rense.com Correction: I been snookered. As alert reader Alex Witze pointed out, these photos were taken by stormchaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas in 2002 and 2004, and have passed around the net in other guises ever since. For more amazing storm photos, go to Hollingshead's site, extremeinstability.com. He has some doozies. You may be shocked but not surprised to hear that Insurance Company Dropped Customers With HIV. We knew this, but The World Needs More Vegetarians. Robert Kaplan ponders the challenge that is Man Versus Afghanistan. I…

BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.   Slate's Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women. The Bay State's AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not. Jeff Jarvis…

The Science of Reading is the Harvard library's nice new site about reading. Lots of great old texts and some history of reading science. BBC News - Man assaulted female police officer with penis. The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen       Indiana Jones & the Ants - The New York Review of Books In her review of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson's first novel, Anthill, in the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Margaret Atwood encourages anyone interested in ants to "take a look at the daring eco-…

I grew up in the days of the SNES and the Sega Megadrive. Even then, furious debates would rage about the harm (or lack thereof) that video games would inflict on growing children. A few decades later, little has changed. The debate still rages, fuelled more by the wisdom of repugnance than by data. With little regard for any actual evidence, pundits like Baroness Susan Greenfield, former Director of the Royal Institution, claim that video games negatively "rewire" our brains, infantilising us, depriving us of our very identities and even instigating the financial crisis. Of course, the fact…

TheTimes Online had a poll on one of their blogs last month, asking their readers if science in their free time is a 'guy-thing'? Who is reading their blog? So I thought I'd also write a poll asking something similar. The poll (below the jump) was written quickly, but with the intention of gathering as much data as possible from answers to that one question (If you check their poll and mine, you'll find the data I am collecting is somewhat different from theirs). I am going to let the poll run for one month and will summarize the answers at the end. I admit that I am as curious as you are…

I was thrilled this morning to learn that this humble, erratic blog was named one of Top 30 Science Blogs by Eureka, the new monthly science magazine recently launched by the Times of London. I find myself among some most admirable company, including giants, longtime favorites of my own, and a few blogs new-to-me-but-presumably-really-good-anyway. Given my history of ambivalence about blogging, my sporadic rhythm, my not-best-practice of ranging far and wide, and my generally low traffic, I find this recognition a surprise, but a happy one. I feel a bit like I've been upgraded (possible…