science books
jdupuis | August 16, 2010I actually read the freely downloadable version of Cory Doctorow's novel Makers on my Kobo ereader, even though I did buy the hardcover when it came out last year. Mostly, I wanted to check out the experience of reading a long text on my reader. Overall, the Kobo reading experience was terrific, not much different from reading a paper book. I tried it on both long inter-city bus rides and my regular commute as well as just sitting around the house. The Kobo is pretty bare bones, as these readers go, but it was good enough to consume fairly simple text. The Makers text was in epub format…
jdupuis | August 10, 2010Now that's an attention-getter!
It comes from Ted Chiang's Big Idea post on John Scalzi's blog Whatever. It's a promotional piece for Chiang's latest book, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which is about artificial intelligence.
For those of you that haven't heard of him, Chiang is one of the real breakout science fiction writers of the last two decades or so; his stories have consistently won both awards and the highest praise from reviewers and critics. This is his longest work to date. (His first collection is Stories of Your Life and Others, which has many of his most famous…
jdupuis | June 17, 2010This list is usually the very, very last of the best books lists of the year. It's a good list, but since it's UK-based there are a number of books that we probably won't be seeing on North American shores for another year or so. I'll probably get around to updating my 2009 summary list later this week or next week.
We Need To Talk About Kelvin: What everyday things tell us about the universe by Marcus Chown
Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne
In Search of the Multiverse by John Gribbin
Everyday Practice of Science…
drorzel | June 4, 2010Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the shared heritage of Western civilization, so most of it is pretty predictable. I was surprised by one thing in their list of commonly assigned books this year, though:
What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses),…
jdupuis | May 31, 2010For your reading and collection development pleasure:
137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller
"The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers."--New Scientist Is there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers--including 137, which describes the…
jdupuis | May 11, 2010I have a few conferences coming up and I thought I'd share my schedule just in case any of you out there in sciencelibrarianblogland will also be attending.
I'll list them in order, along with whatever I'll be presenting.
BookCamp Toronto, May 15, Toronto
9:30: eBooks in Education and Academia -- the glacial revolution
John Dupuis (York University)
Evan Leibovitch (York University)
Description: Despite growing public acceptance of eBooks, two areas in which they could offer the most benefit -- education and academia -- are far behind the eBook mainstream. This session will discuss issues…
jdupuis | May 5, 2010It's been quite a long while since I've done one of these. Here are some recently noticed books that look interesting from either a collection development or a professional development point of view.
Fans, Friends And Followers: Building An Audience And A Creative Career In The Digital Age by Scott Kirsner
An essential guide for filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, and other creative types. "Fans, Friends & Followers" explores the strategies for cultivating an online fan base that can support your creative career, enabling you to do the work you want to do and make a living at it.…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Via Twitter, Michael Barton is looking for some good books about physics. I was Twitter-less for a few days around the period of his request, and this is a more-than-140-characters topic if ever there was one, so I'm turning it into a blog post.
The reason for the request is that he's going to be working as an intern at the Einstein exhibit when it visits Portland, which makes this a little tricky, as relativity is not an area I've read a lot of popular books in (yet-- that's changing). That will make this a little more sparse than it might be in some other fields.
There's also an essential…
jdupuis | March 30, 2010The second Book Camp TO is coming up in about 6 weeks or so: Saturday, May 15, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
Last year's edition was terrific and I'm really looking forward to another great conference.
What's it about?
What: BookCampTO is a free unconference about the future of books, reading, writing and publishing. Ebooks have arrived, and with them great changes are afoot. BoomCampTO 2010 will focus on what happens next, how this big shift to digital is changing different parts of the book business, and how we are adapting. Our focus is not so much on ebooks as everything else.
When:…
drorzel | March 22, 2010I gave a talk today for a group of local home-school students and parents, on the essential elements of quantum physics. The idea was to give them a sense of what sets quantum mechanics apart from other theories of physics, and why it's a weird and wonderful thing.
The title is, of course, a reference to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and the second slide was an embedded version of the Chapter 3 reading. I set the talk up to build toward the double-slit experiment with electrons, using the video of the experiment made by Hitachi. Here's the talk on SlideShare:
What Every Dog Should Know…
jdupuis | March 22, 2010For the last little while I've been compiling lists from various media sources giving their choices for the best books of 2009. Some of the lists have been from general media sources, in which case I've just extracted the science-related books. From science publications, I've included most or all of the mentioned titles.
What I'm doing in this post is collating all the books I've mentioned in all those lists and compiling a sort of master list of all the books mentioned three or more times. There were twelve of them and they are listed below.
Some notes/caveats:
These aren't in any way…
jdupuis | March 11, 2010A big list of 35 titles in various categories: Astronomy, Biography, Biology, Climatology, Environmental Science, Evolution, Geology, Health Sciences, History of Science, Mathematics, Natural History, Neurology, Oceanography, Paleontology, Physics, Psychology, Science, Technology, Zoology.
This particular list that Library Journal does every year is one that I always use for collection development. I'll order pretty well all the books that we don't already have. It's also heartening that a good chunk of the books that we do have were checked out when I checked the other day.
BTW, I may get…
jdupuis | February 17, 2010I've always been a huge vampire fan -- I watched my first Dracula movie when I was about 8-10 years old, on TV, one of the vintage Hammer films with Christopher Lee. I read the original novel when I was a teenager and was a fan of the Marvel comic versions as well. Since then, I've read a zillion vampire novels, read more comics and watched a ton of vampire movies and TV series -- Dark Shadows, Buffy and more. My favourite Dracula will always be Lee though I've also appreciated Lugosi, Louis Jordan and especially Jack Palance. The more romantic versions by Gary Oldman or Frank Langella…
jdupuis | February 5, 2010Continuing my strange obsession with lists of books...
Locus Magazine is the bible of the sffh business -- both in print and online. Every year they poll their reviewers and various other industry people and come up with a pretty extensive recommended reading list for the year. Their categories include: sf novels, fantasy novels, YA books, first novels, collections, original anthologies, reprint anthologies, best of year anthologies, non-fiction, art books, novellas, novelettes and short stories.
I'm obviously not going to reprint all their lists here -- just the sf novel one to give you a…
drorzel | January 28, 2010I've toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It's geeky fun, but not especially quantitative.
Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data!
OK, "calibration data" is probably too strong a description. "Calibration anecdote" is more accurate.
Yesterday when I went into work a little after 10, a comment somebody made sent me to the actual Amazon page for the book, where I saw a little note next to the price information saying "Only 5 left (more are coming)-- order…
jdupuis | January 27, 2010Oddly and interestingly, Amazon.ca has a different list that the US parent.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity & Hope by William Kamkwamba
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Green Metropolis by David Owen
Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin
Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis by Alanna Mitchell
This is one of the last lists I'll do for 2009 --…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Via SFSignal's daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors:
YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY.
I don't lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what's best. It's my job to tell the damn story and produce enough raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right.
Read it. It's good, and very true.
"Yeah, but that's…
jdupuis | January 26, 2010I thought I'd combine a couple lists that only have a couple of relevant items.
January Magazine
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman
The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants by Wolfgang Stuppy
Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim
Planet Ape by Desmond Morris with Steve Parker
National Book Critics Circle
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic…
jdupuis | January 20, 2010The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association has released it's list of 2009 Notable Books.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
jdupuis | January 19, 2010A pretty extensive list from The London Times, across multiple categories: science, stocking stuffers, biography, graphic novels and nature.
Mad Science: 100 Amazing Experiments From The History Of Science by Reto Schneider
How To Make A Tornado: The Strange And Wonderful Things That Happen When Scientists Break Free by The New Scientist
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik
Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery Of Our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor by Neil Shubin
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard…