Books: Now you can order Open Lab 2007

A great collection of blog articles about science has hit the virtual newsstands!

In a few weeks, look for it in a bookstores, Right now, you can order it through on-demand publisher Lulu, which gives the publishers (PLOS one) a greater share of the profits.

There was a wiral-bound pre-press version at the conference so that people could look over the assembled articles. It's quite substantial.

Definitely put ordering one on your to-do list. And sharpen your pencils to write one of the best science articles of 2008, for next year's edition.

Books for science bloggers

As my small contribution to the Science Blogging Conference, I'm donating four science books to be given to attending bloggers. They are

• Talk Talk Talk: Decoding the Mysteries of Speech by Jay Ingram


• If Life is a Game, These are the Rules by Cherie Carter-Scott


• Monkey Girl by Edward Humes


• Microcosmos by Brendan Broll

They all have BookCrossing IDs, so that their recipients can see them on the Monado bookshelf and track them on the BookCrossing web site.

All recipients are welcome to pass along any books that they are finished with.

Books read in the last year

The list of books that I read in 2007 is up at my personal blog.

Currently reading: N-Space by Larry Niven

I might have read this book in 2003, but I don't remember all the pieces in it, so either didn't read it yet, I skipped around because I had read most of the fiction already, or it's time to read it again.

This book contains contains short stories and essays by Larry Niven:

• "What Can You Say about Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?"--the chilling result of meeting someone who's 'a walking intelligence test'
  
• "The Fourth Profession," one of my favourites. A bartender gets talking to an alien... and learns that there is no repeat business when you trade between the stars. The implications are, again, chilling, yet the story is charming.
  
• An essay about "Building The Mote in God's Eye"
  
• "The Return of William Proxmire," a short story featuring Robert A. Heinlein
  
• An exerpt from World of Ptavvs
  
• "Bordered in Black," a warning about what we might find when we explore other worlds
  
• "Convergent Series," a short-short story and mathematical joke.
  
• "All the Myriad Ways": the psychological effects of infinite alternate universes
  
• An exerpt from A Gift from Earth, set on Niven's world Plateau
  
• "For a Foggy Night" from Niven's collection All the Myriad Wsys is one of my favourites. What if fog were a probability blur?
  
• "The Meddler"--hardboiled detective meets alien
  
• "Passerby": a rammer realizes that no one else would have bothered...
  
• "Down in Flames," Niven's alternate history of Known Space
  
• An exerpt from Ringworld: Louis Wu is mistaken for a Builder
  
• An essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", about Superman's sex life
  
• "Inconstant Moon," a love story and astronomy puzzle
  
• "Cloak of Anarchy," the nasty side of real anarchy
  
• An exerpt from Protector, the novel
  
• "The Hole Man," about the first manned expedition to Mars and what was found there
  
• "Night on Mispec Moor," a modern zombie story
  
• "Flare Time" describes a colony on a world with many ecosystems and frequent solar flares
  
• "The Locusts" postulates a developmental effect of population density or esrthbound psychology
  
• some unpublished backstory from The Mote in God's Eye
  
• "Brenda," a story set on a colony world that occasionally repels genetically altered invaders and that has limited interstellar trade
  
• "The Tale of the Jinni and the Sisters," a new Arabian fairy tale
  
• "Madness Has Its Place," a missing tale from Known Space, in which old fogeys secretly prepare to save the world
  
• "Niven's Laws," a collection of Larry Niven's observations (and occasionally those of his wife, Marilyn)
  
• "The Kiteman": either an exerpt from The Integral Trees or The Smoke Ring or a new short story from the same setting
  
• "The Alien in Our Midst"--why we might be able to understand extraterrestrial aliens.
  
• "Space," describing a weekend of brainstorming about planning to colonize other planets

N-Space goes with Playgrounds of the Mind and, I suppose, Scatterbrain.

Far from the Madding Gerund

Language Log's book is out. Look for Far from the Madding Gerund by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum.

Science v. Religion? ID and the Problem of Evolution: Zero stars

Steve Fuller's book Science v. Religion? ID and the Problem of Evolution is thoroughly discredited in a review by Prof. Norman Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick:

Fuller... is a professor of sociology of science at the University of Warwick (UK), whose career has been built on a lofty and careless disdain for science itself. The book under review... is a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological, a book that will find approving readers only amongst hard-core ID enthusiasts hungry for agreement but indifferent to the quality of evidence offered in support of their position....

I want to consider Fuller���s very extensive discussion of ���complexity��� and ���randomness.��� ... Fuller... shows no awareness of the actual mathematical literature (even though much of it is accessible, at the basic level, to anyone with minimal mathematical skill). Instead, he seems content to take ID-theorist William Dembski as his guide. He attributes to Dembski a maxim to the effect that it is ���impossible��� to design a true random-number generator because it is ultimately possible to ���infer��� the algorithm that lies behind it (p. 61). But this grossly misunderstands a basic principle of complexity theory, the insight that in general it is not possible to devise an effective method for distinguishing a random from a non-random stream of data.

Indeed, it is easily possible for virtually anyone to devise a simple way of generating such a data stream (making it highly ���compressible��� or non-random), which will, for all practical purposes, defeat any human attempt to say whether it is or isn���t random or how ���compressible��� it really is. ...in the context of I.D. ���theory,��� the effect is to refute the na��ve notion that design by an intelligent agent is always discernible....

Fuller has done little to come to terms with Dembski���s most trenchant critics, actual experts in complexity and information theory, such as Mark Perakh and Jeffrey Shallit, the latter of whom has justifiably damned Dembski���s work as ���pseudo-mathematics.��� (Read more.)

(Hat tip to Pharyngula)

Canadians boil over on new copyright laws

The Conservatives' proposed new copyright laws have provoked a strong negative reaction from concerned Canadians.

Critics have said the proposed legislation will mirror the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and take a hard line against the copying of digital materials, making illegal acts such as the television time shifting enabled by digital video recorders, file-sharing of music and video files, and copying files to DVDs or MP3 players.

Michael Geist, the Canada research chair of internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, has led the charge against the bill and has accused Prentice of caving in to lobbying from U.S. entertainment companies, who are seeking to curtail digital copying in all its forms. He has also accused the minister of ignoring the wishes of regular Canadians and for not including the public in his consultations.

Golden Compass preview

This is a link to the first five minutes of The Golden Compass movie and other video clips from the movie.

Cookbook author James Barber dies

James Barber, an engineer turned cook and cookbook author, has died suddenly at age 84. He was sitting at the table waiting for soup to simmer. You probably couldn't ask for a nicer way to go. (There's an article here at the Toronto Globe & Mail.)

James Barber served in the Royal Air Force and discovered cooking in wartime France, skulking among the farms of Normandy. After the war he moved to Canada and worked as a consulting engineer. When he was laid up for a while, he re-discovered cooking and wrote his first cookbook, Ginger Tea Makes Friends.


His approach was simple and direct: find something that looks good, take it home, and cook it. Touch it a little.

He illustrated his books with his own cartoons, creating in his first three books a two-page format for each recipe. On the left was a narrative about the dish, how or where he found it, possible variations, and so on. On the right was an illustrated story of how to make the dish, usually decorated with a cat asking you to save a little for it. Here's a book review of James Barbers first three books:


He was interviewed by Peter Gzowski on CBC Radio's Morningside, where he cooked for Peter. Eventually he had a television show called the Urban Peasant, broadcast from Vancouver. He brought in some groceries, limped around the set, cooked quickly and easily, and improvised when things went wrong. You can catch a glimpse of James at his Web site, The Urban Hub. There's a biography here.

I know that his relaxed attitude to food has helped some of my friends go from panic and paralysis in the kitchen to ease and enjoyment.

Quotes from James Barber:

"Cooking is like sex -- you do the best you can with what you've got"

The two-page spread in documentation is a good format for conveying information in discrete topics. So is supplying both text and illustration to reach people who learn better by reading and those who learn better from diagrams.

Author Jane Rule has died

Jane Rule, a writer of excellent novels, has died at age 76. Here's a link to a good obituary by Philip Marchand, the books columnist for the Toronto Star.

"She was the first Canadian woman writer to write about being gay as if it was part of the normal life," Toronto novelist Susan Swan said last night from her Toronto home.

"There was no self-consciousness about it. There didn't seem to be any need for her to wave a political flag. This female character as a lesbian ��� you picked that up by reading the story. You weren't reading the story to find out what it was like to be a lesbian."

Her novels:

Rule's first novel, Desert of the Heart, a love story involving two women in Reno, Nev., was published in 1964, and made into a movie, Desert Hearts, in 1986. Her debut novel was followed by This Is Not For You (1970), Against the Season (1971) and perhaps her best-known work, The Young in One Another's Arms (1977), a tale of residents in a Vancouver boarding house who recreate family bonds while living and working together on Galiano Island. In all, she authored a dozen books, including three short story collections.

In later years, Rule was famous for the swimming pool she built on her Galiano Island property, which open to neighbourhood children under her watchful eye.

Other books by Jane Rule include Outlander, Lesbian Images, Theme for Diverse Instruments, After the Fire, Memory Board, Hot-eyed Moderate (essays), Inland Passage, Contract with the World.

Detained at Customs recounts her testimony at the Little Sister's Bookshop trial:

���Whether I were testifying at this trial or not, my name would come up over and over again as that woman whose books are seized at the border, and I have no defence against it. And I bitterly resent the attempt to marginalize, trivialize and even criminalize what I have to say because I happen to be a lesbian, I happen to be a novelist, I happen to have bookstores and publishers who are dedicated to producing my work.���

"Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms" by Thomas L. Hankins

One of the beta readers on Edward Tufte's discussion group recommended this article: "Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms: A Particular History of Graphs" by Thomas L. Hankins. Here is one of its illustrations:


Charles Joseph Minard's carte figurative of traffic on the major railroad lines of Europe. (From Marc Desportes and Antoine Picon, De l'espace au territoire: L'am��nagement en France XVIeXXe si��cles [Paris: Presses de l'��cole Nationale des Ponts et Chauss��es, 1997], page 87.) Collection ��cole Nationale des Ponts et Chauss��es.

Bad book of Irish Slang

Lexicographer Grant Barrett has pointed out that Daniel Cassidy, author of How the Irish invented slang, is a Humdinger of a bad Irish scholar. Judging by Grant's detailed review, Daniel uses creationist (or crackpot) tactics: misrepresent, jump to conclusions, fail to look for evidence, and whine about how everyone's against him:

I challenged Cassidy to present all of his evidence. I told him that I���m the descendant of three strains of Irish, four strains of empiricist, and the son of a bluster-catcher, and I said he was going to have to do better than trot out the same-old ���they���re all against me!��� argument of every perpetual motion inventor.

Read Grant's article for a decisive repudiation of what amounts to a collection of folk etymologies.

Tracing slang back to Ireland

David Cassidy got curious about the words and phrases used in his working-class Irish family. He found them in other families in the neighborhood, of course. And he got curious enough to look for them, phonetically, in a Gaelic dictionary. He found them!

Mysterious phrases like, "Say Uncle!" begin to make sense when you learn that "anacal!" means "mercy!"

Cassidy wrote a book about his discoveries, called How the Irish Invented Slang.

Oliver Sacks and music

I've read Oliver Sacks' A Leg to Stand On. He injured the nerves of his leg and it seemed not to belong to him any more. Music helped him to bring it back -- until he moved his leg, it seemed impossible ever to move it.

Now he has written a book, called Musicophilia, on music and its relation to mind. I'm hoping to get a copy soon.

Book: At the Water's Edge by Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer explains the evolutionary pressures of different ways of life in different ecologies in tracing the probable path of whales to the ocean, using the magnificent series of transitional fossils found in the 80s and 90s. Along the way he explains why whales and seals use their flippers differently, why fish can lose their eyes but octopodes don't, how many lineages of fish have lungs for use out in the open seas, and why the baleen whales developed from toothed whales. He also follows a whole series of transitional fish to four-legged creatures. He shows us how one change in the timing of an embryo's development can change a whole group of characteristics in the adult. And he makes it seem simple!


Incidentally, in describing two great macroevolutionary events, Carl Zimmer delineates some of the real controversies that have been going on in evolution: Did baleen whales descend separately from archaeocetes or did they develop from the toothed whales? Did lungs develop from swim bladders, as earlier scientists assumed, or was it the other way around? Is five digits a standard pattern or a mere byproduct of developmental patterns?

Richard Dawkins interview with Avi Lewis

Richard Dawkins passed through Toronto recently and recorded an interview with Avi Lewis, discussing Dawkins' book The God Delusion.

New book: Microcosmos by Brandon Broll

This new book from Firefly Books is a beauty. It is modest in size but has more than 300 pages of luscious photomicrographs of everything from protozoans and pollen grains to nerve cells and carbon nanotubules. Brandon Broll edited it, which I suppose means selected the pictures. They are all from the Science Photo Library of London. It's a late birthday present from my stepdaughter the scientist.

Books: How a Scientist Changed the Way we Think

This book came out in 2006: Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think edited by Alan Grafen & Mark Ridley. It contains two dozen essays on how Dawkins' thinking, especially his book The Selfish Gene, enlightens, challenges, and changes lives. Some of the writers describe how Dawkins' writing led them to choose their life's work. Others describe the enlightenment of Dawkins emphasis on how evolution maximizes current reproduction without regard for the future good of the species. Still others comment on his note of controversy or his writing style. The first essay, while about biology and breeding strategies, notes that he was studied in literature classes for his use of metaphor.

Amazon's editorial review says,

"A remarkably common reaction among the 25 authors in this volume is the comment that the book changed their lives by altering either their career paths or their thinking about evolution."

You might want to read some of the readers' reviews (amazon.ca, amazon.com).

Wikipedia lists the essays in this book.

Another neurosurgeon weighs in

What is it with neurosurgeons? First it was Michael Egnor, supporting Intelligent Design by Supernatural Being(s) with his argument from Egnorance ("I, Michael Egnor, neurosurgeon, can't understand it -- therefore Goddidit!". Now it's Aaron Filler with a new "theory." The result is published with in a book that's getting glowing reviews. I quote from the editorial review:

...the author explores--and some would say resolves--a 200-year-long controversy surrounding the origin of species. Drawing on such diverse antecedents as history, myth, and religion (including Egyptian myth, Christian iconography, and the Hindu Veda), as well as modern developments in biology and genetics, the author bravely questions and rejects the reigning scientific orthodoxy and shows how humans and apes may have had a common upright ancestor--an "upright ape"--that walked on two legs much as we do now. He makes the bold and compelling argument that, at least from the point of view of posture, apes evolved from humans.

Based on the most rigorous modern science--and its deep and mysterious connection to the worlds of myth, religion, and archetype--Dr. Filler's theories force a total reassessment of some of the central aspects of our interpretation of human origins.

Let's hope that the review is somewhat inaccurate. It's thought-provoking, but where's the evidence? Quoting Goethe and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire does not a theory make. I'd have to read the book to see if there's any factual basis - if the "new theory" is just the stunning revelation that hominid evolution is a tree with many branches, not a procession to glorious us, that's fine. It is also quite possible that bipedalism preceded the chimpanzee-human split -- though not as likely.

Books: James D. Watson's second novel

Once again, James D. Watson has written a historical novel with himself cast as the hero. It's reviewed on Thus Spake Zuska. In it, he continues the fable of "Rosy" Franklin, casting an extremely bright and competent scientist as clueless and obstreperous.