Books

I don't read much in Swedish. On a whim I decided to check what recent Swedish books I've read and liked outside work. Turns out they're all popular history. Alla rekommenderas varmt för den som delar mina intressen! Kring Hammarby sjö. 1. Tiden före Hammarbyleden. Hans Björkman 2016. Local history. No, I'm from Borås. Ola Wong 2005. Eventful family history in China and among German-speaking Romanians, Banater Schwaben. (Yes, the title is in English.) Svenskarna och deras fäder - de senaste 11 000 åren. Bojs & Sjölund 2016. On DNA and the post-glacial peopling of Scandinavia. Det svenska…

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There are close to just under 900 species of bird in Australia, and The Australian Bird Guide by Peter Menkhorst, Danny Rogers, Rohan Clarke, Jeff Davies, Peter Marsack, and Kim Franklin covers just over 900 of them. Where do the extras come from? Sea birds in the nearby oceans, I think. This is an excellent bird book that all Australian birders simply need to have. Holiday season is just around the corner. Get one of these for your favoriate Australian! This is not exactly a pocket guide. It is more of a car guide, and you better have a big glove box. The 6.8 x 9.7 inch format is hefty…

It wasn't a mammoth, it was a mastodon. But it was still a big hairy elephant featured at the climax-end of the main exhibit hall in the New York State museum. And it was an exhibit to end all exhibits. The New York State Museum, during its heyday, was world class, and the hall of evolution, which seemed old enough to have involved Darwin himself as a consultant, featured the reconstructed skeleton as well as a fur-covered version, of the creature discovered in a kettle only a few miles away. That exhibit, along with a dozen other spectacular exhibits that to my knowledge have not been…

In Tooth and Claw, Season 2 Episode 2 of Doctor Who 2.0, we see the formation of The Torchwood Institute and the banishing of The Doctor (and Rose) from the United Kingdom. Fat lot that does. Anyway, we also see Queen Victoria make mention of the multiple attempts at her assassination. I suppose it is understandable that some eight or nine (nine if you count the werewolf) attempts were made on her life. She was a women in charge of men in the most patriarchal culture ever (the White West generally, not just UK). They also said "Lock her up!" All the time, and there was a never ending…

Bill Nye's Everything All at Once: How to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity, and solve any problem on Kindle is available for 2.99. Everyone has an inner nerd just waiting to be awakened by the right passion. In Everything All at Once, Bill Nye will help you find yours. With his call to arms, he wants you to examine every detail of the most difficult problems that look unsolvable--that is, until you find the solution. Bill shows you how to develop critical thinking skills and create change, using his "everything all at once" approach that leaves no stone unturned. Whether…

I love the The Mathematics Calendar 2018. Math Calendar sample days It has an equation or other statement about math for every day, often linked to that day (like, the January 13th entry is "the sixth prime number"). Some entries are little mat quizzes for you to fugue out. Some are funny jokes, like the entry for Thanksgiving (any guesses as to what that might be? Hint: It is a formula.) The level of difficulty of understanding the reference or solving the problem ranges from suitable for a smart 7 year old (Huxley has figured some out) up through college level. Also, the picture that…

CheMystery authored by C. Al Preece is a graphic superhero novel, drawn by Josh Reynolds, that teaches -- wait for it -- Chemistry! A radiation accident transforms two youngsters into superheros, and simultaneously creates an evil villain for them to fight. The graphic novel covers that story and is indurated with frequent cleverly placed molecule size chemistry lessons. Teachers need to know that this book complies with Next Gen science standards and is very classroom friendly. Indeed, author Preece is a chemistry and physical science teacher (and a trained chemist). It is a great read, an…

Telling people that they are doing statistics wrong is a cottage industry that I usually want nothing to do with, for various reasons including the fact that the naysayers are often blindly repeating stuff they heard but do not understand. But, Alex Reinhart, in Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide, does not do that, and this is a book that is worth reading for anyone who either generates or needs to interpret statistics. Most of the 10 chapters that address specific technical problems with statistics, where they are misused or misinterpreted, are very helpful in guiding a…

Wildlife of Ecuador: A Photographic Field Guide to Birds, Mammals, Reptiles, and Amphibians by naturalist Andrés Vásquez Noboa, witih photography byablo Cervantes Daza, covers mainland Ecuador (but by "mainland" we also mean ocean mammals). Focusing only on non-piscine verts, you will need to go elsewhere for your inverts and plants and such. But you get the point. This book covers most of what you are looking for when you are out in the wild looking for animals. This is not a comprehensive guide, but covers the most frequently seen animals, totaling to 350 distributed across over 400…

Before discussing What Happened by Hillary Clinton, the nature of the political conversation demands that I preface this review with some context. First, about me. I supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election because I did not want Donald Trump to be president. During the primary, which was not the 2016 election, I seriously had a hard time deciding between the various candidates (Clinton and Sanders). On an issue by issue basis, I preferred Sanders' position over Clinton. However, on the issues about which I have an informed view (climate change and energy related, and…

It has been a long time since I've written any machine or assembler code, and it is a rare day that I hand construct a logic circuit using transistors. But it is comforting to know that these skills and the knowledge associated with them still reside in some form or another in the world of microprocessors. The Manga Guides published by No Starch Press and written by a wide range of authors manga-based graphic novels on diverse topics in science, math, statistics, and technology. I've reviewed several here (see this post for a partial list of some of the other guides). And the newest entry…

I usually write my annual back to school post earlier than this, but I was distracted by various events. There are three themes here. 1) You are a science teacher and I have some stuff for you. 2) You have a student in a school and you want to support the school's science teacher. 3) You have a student-offspring or elsewise and are looking for a cool back to school gift. First, for themes 1 and 2, a mixture of traditional back to school blog posts and some items that may be useful and happen to be on sale at the moment so now's your chance. My For Teachers Page has posts providing some…

You know of Pat Shipman at the very least because of her recent and, dare I say, highly controversial and excellent book The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. If you've not read it, do so. But, in the mean time, another book she wrote in the same area, The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human, is now available on Kindle for two bucks. Why do humans all over the world take in and nurture other animals? This behavior might seem maladaptive—after all, every mouthful given to another species is one that you cannot eat—but in this…

Anthill: A Novel Winner of the 2010 Heartland Prize, Anthill follows the thrilling adventures of a modern-day Huck Finn, enthralled with the "strange, beautiful, and elegant" world of his native Nokobee County. But as developers begin to threaten the endangered marshlands around which he lives, the book’s hero decides to take decisive action. Edward O. Wilson—the world’s greatest living biologist—elegantly balances glimpses of science with the gripping saga of a boy determined to save the world from its most savage ecological predator: man himself. I bring this up now because the Kindle…

Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution explores the explorations of Wallace, Huxley, Darwin and Hooker. You don't see this in one book, and it is all very important and, for the moment, cheap at twice the price. I've never read The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World but I hear it is popular among cat lovers. Bonus book: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War is about what was going on in the Bush White House that ultimately lead, as the title indicates, to the Great Land War in Asia…

I've mentioned at various times in the past The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett. This is not a new book, but it is an excellent scholarly and accessible accounting of the situation with respect to emerging diseases at the time of its publication in 1995. One of the most interesting stories covered here is the reaction in the US to the Swine Flu, during the Ford administration. I was reminded of this when we had our tiny outbreak of Ebola. I'm sure you've been following the whole anti-vax thing over the years. I believe that the anti-vax…

Over the years, the field guide and the coffee table book have merged, and we now have coffee table-ish books (but serious books) that include a species description of every critter in a certain clade. In the case of Horses of the World by Élise Rousseau (Author), Yann Le Bris (Illustrator), Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator), while every living species of horse is in fact covered, the book is a comprehensive guide to breeds of horses. Of which there are 570. A horse is horse, of course, but but is a donkey or an ass? What about zebras? Horse people are very picky about what they call a…

The 75th World Science Fiction Convention took place in Helsinki and seems to have had the second-highest attendance ever: more than 7000 people in the Messukeskus convention centre, 2000 of whom had (like myself) never attended a WorldCon before. There were 250 programme items only on the Friday between 10 am and 10 pm, so there is no way that I'll be able to tell you everything that went on. (Check out the programme here.) Instead I'll tell you the bits I enjoyed the most, plus some observations. The WorldCon crowd was incredibly diverse even if you disregarded the cosplayers. Men and women…

Let's start with CheMystery. This is a fun graphic novel mystery book by C.A. Preece and Josh Reynolds. Two cousins experience an incident that would make a physicist cry, but that works in a chemistry book because they now have the ability to observe and change matter. So this is a superhero book, designed to teach chemistry. The story is great, the science is great, and the pedagogy is well suited for kids and adults that like graphic novels. Preece is the chem teacher (high school) and Reynolds is the artist. This is written for grades 7 through 10 (ages 8-12) but some younger kids…