science books
jdupuis | December 1, 2009A pretty good list from the Times, who've been a bit spotty with their lists the last few years.
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn by Louisa Gilder
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson
The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by…
jdupuis | November 29, 2009One of the most interesting lists every year is The Globe and Mail's Globe 100, and this year is no exception. There's relevant stuff all over the spectrum, from biography to history to graphic novels to popular science to the environment.
In the print version, the categories are pretty basic: Canadian fiction, international fiction, poetry, non-fiction, graphica. Online, the categories are, well, a little more granular, and we'll get to that train wreck after the list.
Here goes:
Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
Tar…
jdupuis | November 24, 2009Obviously, Strategy+Business is not going to be core science books, but I've always included social media, technology and innovation books in my very broad definition of science books. There are a couple of categories that have some very fine books on recommendation.
Technology
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg
Marketing
Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive…
jdupuis | November 23, 2009Unfortunately, LJ's Best Books 2009: 31 Titles, Plus Best Genres & How-To doesn't have a dedicated science section but there are a few good recommendations nevertheless.
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmello
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding Across America by James McCommons
Mannahatta: A Natural…
jdupuis | November 16, 2009Sort of related to my ongoing series of Best Science Books 2009 lists, here's a nice list of the top 5 social media books I found on Mashable, via Tara Hunt. They're all 2009 books, after all.
The list is from Steve Cunningham who interestingly frames the five books in terms of the lessons we should take away from them.
You Need to Build Trust: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
Turn the Bullhorn Around: The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt
Learn the Pillars…
jdupuis | November 9, 2009As graphic novels go, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth is every bit as good as Maus or Watchmen, if not quite as game-changing. The only other things out there that I can think of that are similar are Chester Brown's Louis Riel or Ho Che Anderson's King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
That's high praise and it's well deserved.
So what's Logicomix all about? The core is the story of Bertrand Russell's and his work -- the search for the foundations of mathematics, the most basic kind of truth: logic. His search takes us through the history of mathematics and philosophy in…
jdupuis | November 6, 2009Amazon has come out with their Editor's Picks for 2009. There are three categories that have books that are relevant to us here.
Science
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species by Sean B. Carroll
Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions by Susan R. Barry
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo
Every Patient Tells a Story by…
jdupuis | November 4, 2009Every year for the past 3 or 4 years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best books" lists that appear in various media outlets and highlighting the science books that are mentioned. From the beginning it's been a pretty popular service so I'm happy to continue it.
For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation.
This year, the first list is from Publisher's…
jdupuis | October 23, 2009TVOntario has produced a very fine documentary based on the life of geometer Donald Coxeter, who lived in Toronto and worked at the University of Toronto for many years. It's called The Man Who Saved Geometry and is based on the book by Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry.
Two York profs are interviewed in the documentary, Asia Ivic Weiss and Walter Whiteley.
I reviewed Roberts' book a few years ago, here, where you can read about my own minor role in the Coxeter story.
jdupuis | October 7, 2009Here Comes Science by the alt-rock band The Might be Giants is a delightful CD/DVD set of kids music and video about...Science! The set comes with both a CD with all the music and a DVD with all the videos wrapped into a show with animated, light-hearted commentary and introduction by the two Giants, John Linnell and John Flansburgh.
Here's a list of the tunes, so you can get an idea of the breadth of topics covered. TMBG has a channel on YouTube where you can find many of the videos.
Science Is Real
Meet the Elements
I Am a Paleontologist w/Danny Weinkauf
The Bloodmobile
Electric Car w/…
jdupuis | September 28, 2009Those of you with long memories may recall that I was on the jury for the 2009 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
Well, the names of the winners have just been released:
Adult: The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
Young Adult: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
You can check out the shortlists and recommended reading lists here.
The two winning books are both amazing examples of fantastic fiction, both well worth reading. The rest of the shortlists and recommended reading lists are also worth checking out. Congratulations!
I would also like to say at this point that being on…
jdupuis | September 8, 2009An interesting article from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Preserving Records of the Past, Today by James W. Cortada. In concerns the difficulty that scholars of the history of computing have in finding primary materials to work with, mostly in the form of documents.
Scholars examining the history of information technology run into many practical, nuts-and-bolts problems more frequently than historians in other fields that
have existed for considerable periods of time, such as diplomatic and political national history. Problems with the history of information…
jdupuis | August 31, 2009"The past can survive only if it can beat out the future" (p. 142)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Laurence Lessig is a great and important book, one that should be read by anyone interested in the future of the Internet, culture and expression.
This book is a plea and an argument for a business model for culture and creativity, one in which supporters of the arts are willing to pay creators directly for their output. I'm not convinced. I'm also not not convinced.
Like the best non-fiction, this book engages you in an argument. I literally found myself…
jdupuis | July 29, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from November 7, 2007. It generated quite a few interesting comments, so you might want to check back at the original post. My feeling on a lot of these points has shifted a bit with time, so I'll probably revisit the topic in the fall.
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This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, as we (at York and as a profession) start to move in a coordinated way to making ebooks an important part of our collections. What's the…
jdupuis | July 21, 2009My traditional summer blogging break is fast approaching. It's the time of year when I take a 4-6 week break away from it all and recharge my blogging batteries. It's something I've done for years and it really works for me.
One of the things I do during my break is try and read a lot of books. I mostly read fiction during the break, but this year I'm going to mix in a science auto/biography and a social media/new technology book. The trick is, I'm going to let you all choose which ones.
Below I have a couple of polls where you can vote on which book you want me to read. All the books…
jdupuis | June 29, 2009Simon Owens interviews Scott Rosenberg over at Bloggasm.
Lately, there has been no shortage of journalists that have announced- usually as a form of link bait -- the "death of blogging" as social news and microblogging continue to grow in market share, but Rosenberg's book is a tribute to the medium's still-immense power as we approach the end of the decade. He noted that long before Twitter existed there were bloggers that were writing Twitter-like posts, so the launch of the microblogging site merely carved out a niche for those kinds of bloggers, leaving the traditional blogging platform…
jdupuis | June 26, 2009Digital Natives will move markets and transform industries, education, and global politics. the changes they bring about as they move into the workforce could have an immendsely positive effect on the world we live in. By and large, the digital revolution has already made this world a better place. And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways -- if we let them. (p. 7)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser is a fine and useful book. Every page is brimming with facts and analysis…
jdupuis | June 24, 2009A thought experiment.
It all started with this Ray Bradbury quote in the New York Times:
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
I've bolded the chunk that has resonated most strongly around the Internet, especially Twitter where it was widely tweeted and retweeted.
The tweeter that most piqued my interest was…
jdupuis | June 22, 2009Yesterday was Father's Day, of course, always a fun occasion for us dads. I'm generally not a huge fan of fake holidays but I usually find a way to make peace with them if they're all about presents for me.
In any case, I thought I'd share my take for this year as I think at least some of the items I received have a broader interest. It's also worth noting that in my family we usually take an attitude of enlightened self-interest for fake holiday gift giving -- in other words, the giver is allowed to give something they themselves would be interested in. We've come to calling that practice…
jdupuis | June 13, 2009It's been quite a long time since I did one of these posts, but as the summer reading season approaches I thought I'd highlight a few interesting items that are coming out soon.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amazon.ca)
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far…