jameswharris

What Are The Best Sites For Reading Science Book Reviews?

Generally, when I discover a great science book, it’s through accident, rather than intent, and usually it’s a couple years after it originally appeared. Popular science books seldom become beach reads that everyone talks about. Maybe I should say never, because I can’t name one. Even though our culture is massively tech driven, science isn’t popular like football or superhero movies. It’s a darn shame that science books don’t get the press that Kim Kardashian does! What I’d like is a handful of science book review sites to read weekly, and when a book gets praised on many of them, I’d know what to read right away.

Quite often I’ll visit one of my two favorite bookstores and check out the science book section and see many new science books that look appealing, but I’m afraid to buy them without knowing more. Over the years I’ve bought several science or science history books that I later discovered were not very well received. What I need to do is read reviews before I go shopping, so I’ll know something about the new science books.

Since Google is our best friend, I started with a search on: science book reviews.

At the top of the search results is book reviews at Science Magazine. Ah, an obvious choice! But before I could get too excited, I was quickly reminded that Science is rather parsimonious with its words. You have to be a subscriber to read the full text reviews. However, they do give yearly listings of book reviews with links to Amazon, where I can read the customer reviews. Here’s the list for 2013. Overall, I’d stay it’s not worth the visit though, especially since many of the book are expensive academic books I’d never buy, like The World in the Model by Mary S. Morgan, which does sounds great though. Although I did spot a couple books I’m going to keep my eye out to find.

What Did The Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking by Daryn Lehoux.

Faking It – Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop by Mia Fineman

Second in the Google returns is The Guardian: Science Book Reviews. Now these popular science books are more my speed. Right off the bat it reviews two books I want to read. However, it’s not exactly what I’m looking for either. The Guardian provides a rather hodgepodge look at science books. What I’d really like is a site that covers each week’s new published science/math books, pretty much like Entertainment Weekly does for movies, television, music and books. Here’s one book reviewed at The Guardian I’ll buy when it comes out in America 8/1/13.

Farewell To Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth by Jim Baggot.

Over at American Scientist, they have a Book Review Links page that attempts to do what I’m doing here, find science book review sites. There I found Download The Universe: The Science Ebook Review. This is a very cool site about science ebooks, both free and priced. I liked this site so much that I subscribed to their RSS feed in Outlook.

Another great site is Edge.org, and their Library page. It’s not really a book review site. Title links go to Amazon, but author links go to pages about the writers, and since Edge.org focuses on interviews, this often leads to book discussions.

I did stumble upon ForeWord Reviews Science Section. One book it reviewed that intrigued me was Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences. But it’s priced out of my reach, and is probably outside my intellectual grasp. But it sure does sound fascinating. I bought The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates by Howard Bloom because of their review. I’ve always wondered why a universe ruled by the 2nd law of thermodynamics could create such complex systems.

A book I spotted at my favorite bookstore, Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science In Medieval Europe by John Freely was very enticing, but I went home empty-handed to read the reviews first. The reviews at Amazon were overall positive, but one made me worry. It claimed the narrative was more like an annotated bibliography. The review at Physics Today was a lot more encouraging. However Nicole Archambeau, the reviewer, claimed she wouldn’t assign it as a textbook, but preferred The History of Science: From Augustine to Galileo. But at Amazon, one of the two reviewers called that book mediocre. But over at the the Wall Street Journal, Laura J. Synder didn’t fuss over Before Galileo much, but did mention a few subjects it covered that made it appealing again. I always find books that make a case that the dark ages weren’t completely dark to be a reason to get on my To-Be-Read pile. But if you follow my links and read the reviews, Before Galilio is a good example of why you don’t just grab an interesting title off the shelf and buy it. I think I’ll wait to see how the Kindle edition will be priced.

Science News has a Bookshelf section on their web with reviews of many books I saw at the bookstore yesterday. They are short reviews, and not good enough to effect a buying decision, but they do list a lot of books worthy of researching to see if they are worth buying. You’d think just looking at Amazon’s New & Notable > Science and Math section would list all the good science and math books that are coming out, but often I see books at the bookstore that aren’t listed there. And, Amazon annoyingly lists books I don’t think belong in the science and math section. However, the Amazon list is one of the most inclusive of all the sources I’ve cited. It makes me wish I could read and digest a science/math book a day, because they offer at least 365 of my-interest-worthy science and math books a year, out of the 1,031,471 that Amazon claim to have for sale.

On average I read about 52 books a year, or one a week. At best, I read one science/math book a month. So you see my problem? If I’ve only got time for 12 books a year, I want to make sure they are the best ones to read. Which brings me back to why I wrote this blog. How do you find the best books on any topic published each year? Normally, you have to wait until next year when all the reviewers pick their favorites. But if you don’t want to wait, then you’ve got to find sites like I mentioned here to figure things out on your own. I always get a kick out of picking books when they come out and then later discovered that many reviewers considered them the best of the year.

JWH – 7/3/13

Is The Daily Newspaper Dying?

I often find myself lamenting the passing of institutions I assumed would always be permanent fixtures in my life.

My parents, who grew up during the heyday of radio, long before television, lived in a world of two daily newspapers, The Miami Herald in the morning, and The Miami News in the evening. I was even a paperboy for the News back in 1965, but it died a long time ago. During my life I saw many cities close their afternoon papers. Now, all over the country, morning papers are hurting, and some are even disappearing. I’m wondering if morning papers are going the way of the buggy whip.

My wife and I quit getting the newspaper years ago. We kept subscribing for years because it was a lifelong habit, but seldom read it. But we finally realized that most often our daily issues went directly to the recycle bin, and so we stopped taking The Commercial Appeal. I see fewer people bringing the paper to work, and I assume there are college kids at the university where I worked that never got into the habit of reading the paper with breakfast.

This is sad. Months ago I bought an issue of The New York Times to read the old fashion way, but I couldn’t. I love reading The New York Times online, but I no longer had the patience to read a printed paper, which involves a lot of flipping, folding, jumping from section to section, and getting ink on my fingers. My old eyes find it painful to read the paper’s small print. Susan and I aren’t alone in giving up on our hometown paper, there’s even a web site, Newspaper Death Watch, devoted to the passing of this very old tradition. Should we all go back to subscribing to save this fading technology? Are there things newspaper publishers could do to revitalize their product?

I read books and listen to music on electronic devices, so why don’t I read my local paper on my iPad? On the new miniseries Under the Dome, a newspaper reporter talks to an older woman who tells her she doesn’t take the paper, but gets her news from the Internet like everyone else. Ouch.

We have to think about why people were so devoted to newspapers in the past. For many pre-Internet citizens, reading the paper was the only form of reading they did. The paper offered news, gossip, social media, advertisements, job want ads, for sale listings, sports scores, stock and bond quotes, cartoons, horoscopes, movies times, recipes, letters to the editor, wedding announcements, photos, etc. Newspapers packed a lot of entertainment value. And from this list we can see the answer to why papers are losing subscribers. The Internet provides the same content, but faster, better, cheaper, and it’s highly customized. In fact, smartphones, pulling content from the Internet, provides people exactly what they got from newspapers and more, but in a much handier delivery and reading system. Progress marches on. It’s cruel, but so it goes.

Newspapers were a delivery system for communication and content – pretty much a printed internet. I feel sad that all those reporters, editors, linotype operators, pressmen, truckers, delivery people have lost their jobs, but I hope they got jobs at new Internet businesses. I’d hate to think that local people lost their jobs to out-of-town companies.

Long before the Internet, many reporters had moved to TV, and we have far more TV stations with news programs than we ever had papers. So what I’m lamenting isn’t a lack of reporting, but the system in which the news was reported. If you’re interested, you might find the Newspaper Death Watch interesting to read, it’s subtitle is “Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism.”

To be honest, I’ve never been happy with television journalism, so I wonder if there isn’t something potentially better than the printed newspaper and local TV news show? More and more papers are working with paywalls to create online newspapers, that include print, photos, sound and video. The New York Times is excellent, except for their pricing, but if everyone subscribed to it, where would we get local, state and regional news? Can local news sites make a go of providing news that can compete with TV and national web sites? Is it possible to make hometown news site?

Anyone can collect their favorite links to a bunch of sites and recreate much of the content people used to get from their local newspaper. Can a newspaper publisher, with their editors, reporters, and staff create a central site that essentially recreates the old features of a newspaper? How many people would give up their favorite news, weather, TV listing, movie listing, Craigslist apps to use a centralized service? Has the App-ization of the world killed off a general purpose tool like the newspaper? Probably.

I shouldn’t mourn the victims of progress, but I do, even though my buying habits are killing what I miss. I recently bought my local paper for nostalgia’s sake. I didn’t like it. I was like that baby on the YouTube video trying to use a magazine after playing with an iPad. It just didn’t feel right. I guess I’m dumb. I keep buying vinyl records, even though they’re a pain in-the-ass to play. And I still buy books even though my eyes love my Kindle. And I keep writing crying-in-my-beer blog posts about the old ways disappearing. When will I learn?

JWH – 6/30/13

This is Colossal

Colossal: Art & Visual Ingenuity is a web site that visually amazes. And although it has 275,000 likes on Facebook, I’ve only recently discovered http://thisiscolossal.com. I wish I had a talent to be artistic. I think of artists are people whose profession is to create beauty, and I love to look at beauty.

I thought I’d show some of the artwork that amazed me recently at Colossal. My tastes resonate with about one out of ten posts, so visit the site to see more variety of artwork. Especially since my tastes are so narrow. One easy way to keep up with Colossal is to subscribe to their weekly email newsletter. If I was rich I’d travel the world just to look at all this art in person.

Harold Ross developed a technique of lighting night scenes with a LED flashlight. Read about the details at his blog.

One of the things I love about Colossal is they provide videos about how artists work. Here is one about Amy Casey.

Some art doesn’t even look like what people think about as art, as in this video Hyperdrive.

Some art, like this installation by tomás saraceno, allows for people to become part of the canvas.

This photograph, of a single image, by Bela Borosdi requires a video to really appreciate. Who would imagine creating such a work?

I love super-realistic artists like omar ortiz. What kind of skill, power of concentration, and patience does it take to create such works?

Some art moves, so other than being there, we need video to show it off. In Cloud Light by Anthony Howe.

Elizabeth Patterson produces paintings that distort my sense of reality.

Lisa Park’s work is science fictional.

Sometimes art isn’t created but caught in life with a photograph, as Rakesh JV does at this face painting festival.

Sometimes art is being at the right place at the right time. This video is by Mike Olbinski.

Some artists work on a very big scale, such as JT Singh, who calls himself an urban graphic explorer.

Here JT Singh is giving a TED talk.

Here Singh captures Vietnam.

Here Brusspup uses science to create art.

Some artists like Jon Smith can find beauty in making something and then breaking it.

Gil Bruvel makes metal blow in the wind.

This is just a very small taste of what’s at Colossal. If you love art, if you love to indulge our eyes in beautiful visuals, if you love creativity, if you love to be amazed at the infinite powers of human invention, then look at this site daily.

If I had the time I’d save these images and videos and make a slide show for my big screen TV. I already save images I like to a folder that my computer uses for wallpaper backgrounds.

JWH – 6/29/13

Reality is Not About Us–Philosophy in a Photograph

Sometimes I get very philosophically excited by a picture, but I find it very hard to put my reaction to it into words. The whole picture is equal to a thousand words kind of thing, but for me, some pictures could generate a hundred thousand words, or even millions.

Here’s a photo I found and sent to several of my friends. It’s a dragonfly covered in dew. Philosophically, I’m fascinated by the idea this reality wasn’t meant just for humans, and reality is experienced by an infinity of minds perceiving it in infinite ways. This is one of the many reasons why I don’t believe in God. God is too small of a concept to encompass all of reality. God is too anthropomorphic, to human self-centered, to be a meaningful hypothesis when you study all of reality. The reason why I embrace science is because science is a better tool for understanding the truth about reality, even though I know that even science is too puny to do the job completely. Science just handles big numbers far better than theology.

Our human senses are so limited when it comes to looking at reality. For example, look at this second photograph of the same image, taken from the photographer’s web site. This is from Martin Amm Photography, and is color corrected differently. The first picture had been color saturated to make it more intense.

Now don’t get the idea that the second photograph is the way the dragonfly really looked at the moment the camera snapped the picture. First off everyone sees things differently, and everyone’s monitor color calibrates differently. But even back in the reality from which the photo was taken the photographer saw the dragonfly differently from what he photographed, and the birds nearby waiting to eat the dragonfly saw it differently too. And the insects on the same branch saw the dragonfly completely different too. There is one huge reality, but all the beings in it see it differently, in an infinite number of ways.

To begin to understand how complex seeing is, and I mean beyond just the tiny window of visual light that humans use, we have to study the electromagnet spectrum. On a recent PBS NOVA, “Earth From Space” they had a scientist report that if the electromagnet spectrum was measured from New York to Los Angeles, then the part the human eye sees with would be the size of a dime.

Size matters. Our view of reality is distorted by our size and the size of our senses. When humans invented the concept of God, our awareness of reality was much smaller, and we pictured God as being the biggest thing we could imagine. All our cherished concepts, God, heaven, hell, love, hate, justice, good, evil are measured by human scale senses. As human minds progressed beyond theology into philosophy and then into science, we saw the reality around us expand further and further. At one time God was the biggest thing we could imagine, and then science gave us the universe, an object whose size is beyond our best imaginations to fathom, but it can be measured.

I use the word “reality” to label everything rather than the word “universe” because scientists are now speculating that our universe might only be one of an infinite number of universes. When I say “reality” I mean the whole she-bang, and not just the big bang. When I say the word “God” isn’t a big enough concept to convey reality I’m not just being an atheist, but I’m making a philosophical statement about numbers, size and reality.

Humans generate ideas constantly, but most of our concepts don’t hold up against reality. Take the concept of heaven. Many people believe when they die they will go somewhere else, somewhere beyond reality. Where is heaven? How big is it? How far do we have to go to get there? How many people are there? How many animals? What about plants and insects? What about intelligent beings from other worlds? Does the dragonfly above deserve everlasting life too? Reality is huge, but how big must heaven be? If everything in this reality gets to live again, how big must heaven be?

By one estimate, over 107 billion people have lived on Earth, and that doesn’t count Neanderthals and earlier forms of hominids. Is heaven and hell crowded now with all those people? What about their favorite pets? What about all the billions to come? Just how big is heaven? Heaven is described in The Book of Revelation and even given with measurements. Depending on we interpret the ancient measure, heaven could a large shopping mall about the size of Australia. Did you know the Bible describes heaven as a building, and living in heaven would be indoors?

See what I mean when I say our concepts about reality are too puny to be realistic. People who study Zen Buddhism are taught to look at reality without using all their bullshit concepts. If they say something stupid they are caned about the head and shoulders. If we had a Zen master walking behind us all day, we’d get whacked in the head constantly. We’re always bullshitting ourselves.

It’s very hard to use words precisely. We have so many bogus words. We have too many words that distort our view of reality because of their anthropomorphism. I find it helpful to stare at photographs and try to forget the words. Or just stare at reality and try not to explain what I’m seeing. But that’s a failure too. You see, we do have a sixth sense, one that the dragonfly doesn’t have, and that’s language. We see with words. Learning to use the correct words, without distorted concepts, is a way to focus our inner sight on reality. We can see reality, in our limited fashion, but we must wash the bullshit off our eyes first.

Does this begin to show you why I got excited by seeing the photograph of the dragonfly? I’ve written about a thousand words now. Tomorrow I could write a different thousand words on meditating on the same photograph.

JWH – 6/27/13

Visual Inspiration

Usually I am excited by words and concepts. I am a lifelong bookworm, so I’m obsessed with black marks on white backgrounds. Living in my head is my constant way of life, thinking wordy thoughts, even to the point of neglecting the colorful details of the external world around me. But during the day I’m often startled by something visual that inspires me. I love looking at the trees outside my window, which sets just above my computer monitor that I am typing at now. I have two windows, the one looking into the internet and the other out onto the world. The world is full of color, but because of my neglect of noticing it, I’m all the more moved by art. And maybe, I prefer seeing reality though art rather than viewing reality directly.

I love catching something visually fascinating as I drive to work each day – the structure of a church steeple, the outline of tree branches against the sky, the way shadows and glare affect my sight. I wish I could turn what I see into art. I wish I was the kind of guy that hiked in nature and captured it artistically. Because I spend so much time indoors, most of my visual stimulation comes from the computer screen or the television.

Every once in a while I see art that blows my mind, and generates a flood of thoughts. The other day I found this computer animation that set my neurons on fire.

Be sure and play this in full screen mode at the highest resolution your computer can handle. I’ve watched it many times now and it just gets better and better. This visuals makes me think of mathematics and musical harmony. This video is like seeing music. This video is like seeing mathematics as if math wasn’t an abstraction of nature. “Oscillate” was created by Daniel Sierra for his MFA Computer Art thesis, and you can see more about this work here.

What I find so inspiring about “Oscillate” is that it’s a visual abstraction that makes me see science. All paintings, no matter how realistic, are an abstraction, in the same way that words and concepts are an abstraction about reality. Art mimics the world. “Oscillate” mimics abstract thoughts. Daniel Sierra imagined seeing animated sine waves much like how classical Greeks imagined mathematics, but instead of putting his thoughts into words, he created a computer animation.

On one hand this video is like abstract art, it doesn’t look like the real world. But I see it as a realistic painting of an actual abstraction in the real world.

JWH – 6/26/13