There will be no new postings to LibraryLink until the New Year. In the meantime, the BloggingGrouch offers a sincere expression of gratitude for the attentions of our readers in the year now passing, and a wish that the final Winter Holidays may be happy and peaceful ones for us all. I have a big program of jobs around the house and a slate of resolutions that would, if observed, constitute a renovatio vitae, but will probably settle for a lot less on both counts.
Until next time, next year.
Remember in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, how the Wedding Guest gets buttonholed and then wrapped up in the Old Guy’s story. The geezer croaks “there was a ship…” and that’s it. He’s done for. Nothing like a sea story, except maybe a fish story. Which takes us to a new book: Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put a Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. It’s got everything to make the heart go pitter-pat: a big subject (whales, subjects don’t come any bigger), money, gummint, a trial, or better that Anglo-American art form, a courtroom drama, big egos on display in sharp cross examination and eloquent riposte, and adumbrations of possible relevance to our own concerns. That’s not bad for a work of serious scholarship. Here’s the skinny. Back in Noo Yawk, a little after the War of 1812, a change in regulations required the inspection of fish oils by city officials, to prevent adulteration and other naughty acts. The whale oil people baulked, saying whales are not fish, so they can’t be the source of the “fish oils” conceived of in the statutes. Oh yes they are, oh no they’re not, back and forth, and all leading to America’ s favorite form of indoor blood sport, a trial. Naturally, both sides called in ‘experts’ who testified on the basis of their experience and expertise. It’s easy to be wry about this stuff, but actually, a good deal was at stake. The review in Nature points out that we tend to think that Linnaeus had pretty much cleaned up taxonomy, and set the classificatory house in order. But, a lot was still unclear. At issue also was whether and how science could contribute to the adjudication of matters of law… something we still tussle with. The taxonomically geekier will enjoy watching the champions for each side debate the question of exactly how we assign critters to this or that place on the tree of life. That, too, is something Biology is still dealing with. We already issued the Ten Books for this Holiday season, but there’s always room in the stocking for one more, right?
Oily
Bruce Alberts will assume the position of Editor in chief for Science beginning in March, 2008, succeeding Donald Kennedy. Alberts is familiar to many in the life sciences from his work with the major textbook The Molecular Biology of the Cell. He also held the office of President of the National Academy of Sciences from 1993 until 2005.
The director of the Rockefeller University Press and the editors of the Journal of Cell Biology and the Journal of Experimental Medicine have published an editorial “Show me the data” in the JCB, recounting their efforts to analyze Impact Factor (IF) data relating to their publications, and to those of other journals publishing in the same field. The authors say, in effect, that the numbers don’t add up. They also express their frustration and disappointment. Since the IF is a very big deal in some places at least, and since some serious decisions have been based on that data, a report of this nature is reason for concern. People resentful or suspicious of the decisions relying on IF information were sometimes dismissed as sore losers or cranks, who couldn’t accept what were termed the objective and quantifiable facts of IF analysis. Now, maybe not so much. We shall see what we shall see.
Pen-based computing systems, or pen computers or things that look like that seem to come and go. There is a market it seems for some kind of gadget that would be a “uniwriter”…let you write things on paper or some other surface and then have the gizmo store what you did, let you edit the work, and do all the word-processing stuff you can’t do on a piece of paper. There are some products on the market now, but the Big Boy that’s going to come in and take all the marbles hasn’t shown up yet. Technology Review studies another entrant, and it seems pretty nifty. One drawback is the need to write on special paper, which you can buy in pads, or which can be printed on certain commercially available printers. The paper has a grid pattern that the writing stylus needs to see in order to make it all work. Livescribe is the company.Pen
The BG has been musing about what to post at this time of year. People are distracted. The news from outside, never really “good”, is a lot worse this year as we find ourselves dragged into the quadrennial Romper Room known as the Presidential election. So, the only really good, safe, useful topic is ta..da..Books! So, here we go:
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,by Oliver Sacks, 367pp, Knopf, 1400040817. Everbody’s favorite clinical nerurologist tells more absorbing and amazing stories, and some of them are real eye-poppers, especially the one about the man struck by lightning, who apparently recovered and then found himself taken over by an obsession with the piano and I mean taken over.
Got a budding scientist on your hands? Got a sullen, surly, too-big-for-his(her)-britches but rather smart teen or pre-teen? Well, the folks at Science published a list of 17 good books on scientific topics any one of which might just jump-start a interest, or at least keep the little baggage quiet for a couple of hours. Nature has a big list also
Science Books
Nature
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. Harper 978-0060186395 A lot of things have to go just right in order for us to read. Wolf is a neuropsychologist who tells what can go wrong, and how the whole thing works, maybe. We take a lot of things for granted, and we couldn’t get through the day without doing so, but still, it’s a good idea to pause and think about some of that stuff, and what our lives would be like if we couldn’t read.
Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. Daniel S. Greenberg.viii + 324 pp. University of Chicago Press, 2007. $25 Greenberg is an experienced science reporter and this is an important topic, especially when you hear: “why can’t we run this place like a business?”
EINSTEIN by Walter Isaacson Simon And Schuster, Inc. / April, 2007 a new life of, well, you know.
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30. How the 20th sounded, or better, how the composers living then made it sound. This is one of the NYTimes Best of 2007 titles, if that means anything to you.
THE LONG EMBRACE Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved By Judith Freeman, Pantheon Books. 353 pages. $25.95. Chandler was the Dean of California PI Noir, founding a genre that expanded from books onto radio, stage, screen and TV,and in the process creating an iconic character, Phillip Marlowe. Judith Freeman tracked him and his wife Cissy, through all 30 of their houses and apartments in LA, so if anybody knows about Raymond Chandler, she does.
The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America Allan M. Brandt. Basic Books; 704 pages; $36.You either have or haven’t been a smoker. Either way, this book may help us all.
Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande Metropolitan Books, 273 pp., $24. Dr. Gawande writes for the The New Yorker, when he’s not operating on somebody. His previous book Complications; a surgeon’s notes on an imperfect science was well received and translated into German and Spanish, so far. He also spoke here in Gtown at a symposium sponsored by our Institute for the Medical Humanities.
OK, that makes ten. You should be able to find something there for yourself or for some bookish type on your list. I may be back with more, or maybe not. So toddle on up to your bookstore and strike a blow against prime time, politicians and Sunday Night Football. If I don’t see you, have a Merry and a Happy.
On Nov. 3O, we blogged about why the British literary establishment is so sniffy about Science Fiction. Today there’s more from the Mother Country’s scribes on the matter of the condescending attitude SciFi writers must endure from their writing counterparts. It part, it’s a reprise of what was said earlier, but this piece is interesting for two reasons. First, it gives some more examples of the pariah status of SciFi writers and of how mightily the writers strive to avoid being described as such. For example, Salmon Rushdie’s first book was considered a very good candidate for a British SciFi of the Year award, until the publishers pulled it, out of fear that winning the tinsel prize would kill Rushdie as a writer, period. Second, there are some good stories and a tip about the existence of a new history of the genre, both of which are worth hearing. Item: Werner von Braun had copies of ASTOUNDING magazine smuggled into Peenemunde or wherever he was working on rockets. Item: Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook, published by Macmillan. There is more in the piece than what I’ve said, but that should be enough to tempt the temptable.
SciFi in Blighty
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is planning to allow more liberal access to those papers appearing in its journals which describe genome sequences. Those papers will be issued under a Creative Commons license. This broader policy will allow non-commercial publishers, however defined, to copy, share, distribute, and adapt the material as long as the intended uses are non-commercial, and if proper attribution has been assured.
License
We note the passing of American novelist, essayist and all-around dame des lettres Eilzabeth Hardwick, in New York City, at the age of 91. She was one of the group that founded in 1962 the New York Review of Books , out of conviction that that intelligent and articulate reviewing of new books was an important responsibility, and that, in her judgment at least, it had sunk to low estate. She was a prolific author in her own right, with a clear and forceful style. One good way to honor her memory would be to get some of her books and read them.
Hardwick
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) as added another open access journal to its inventory. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases launced its first issue in October. Things seem to be moving merrily along for PLoS, with a varied stable of high quality publications. You can examine the newcomer at:
PLoS NTD