John Allen Paulos’s Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I’ve been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read. Unfortunately, I […]
Category: Science Books
Science Blogs: What Are They Good For?
Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees. You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I’m going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no […]
Biographers (and Physicists) Are Pigs
I’m deep in book revisions at the moment, which largely accounts for the relative blog silence. This is expected to continue for a while yet, broken by the occasional post when something comes up that is irritating enough to push me to write about it. Such as, well, now. In the chapter on the Copenhagen […]
Science Festivals, Science Books, and Science Funding
The World Science Festival happened while I was at DAMOP (I missed getting to talk to Bill Phillips, because he left shortly after his talk to go to NYC), and by all reports it was a success– they claim 120,000 attendees on their web site, and sold more tickets than expected for several events, and […]
The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
If you’re reading this shortly after it’s posted, you may notice ads for this book popping up in the sidebar and on top of the page. This is probably not entirely a happy coincidence– I was offered a review copy in email from the author and his publisher, and I suspect that they had ScienceBlogs […]
Here’s An Experiment For You…
Via Swans On Tea, I see that Comedy Central has put up the video of George Johnson’s appearance on the Colbert Report. Or, I should say, they claim to have put it up– their video player didn’t work worth a damn on my computer. I saw this on the day-late rerun, and it was hilarious. […]
Storm World by Chris Mooney
I’m a Bad Blogger. I got a free review copy of this book last summer, and it’s taken me nine months to getting around to reviewing it. I started it as soon as I got it, but it seemd like it would be tempting fate to take it to St. John on vacation, and then […]
More Books of the Year
I don’t really want to turn this blog completely over to bitching about the poor representation of science in “Year’s Best” lists of books, but it’s that time of year when every media outlet puts out their lists of favorite books, so it’s hard not to talk about it. Today’s list is from the Washington […]
Notable Science of the Recent Past
In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn’t released their “Ten Best Books” list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there’s nothing on it that wasn’t also on the Notable Books […]
Science Is Not Notable
Scott Eric Kaufman draws my attention to the fact that the New York Times has posted its Notable Books for 2007 list. The list is divided into “Fiction & Poetry” and “Non-Fiction,” and Scott correctly notes that the “Fiction & Poetry” books all have terrible blurbs, but I’d like to point out a much larger […]