Not Digging the Dinos

I enjoy a good dinosaur book as much as any former nine-year old, but was honestly disappointed with two new dino books this year.
How to Build a Dinosaur by well-known paleontologist Jack Horner, was the first.  The author’s name caught my eye immediately and the “Extinction doesn’t have to be forever” subtitle paired with a [...]

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Every Living Thing (Rob Dunn)

“Life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, crashes through barriers… Life finds a way.”
When Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park) said those words, he was foreshadowing the disastrous end of a human-designed biological theme park.  But he would have been just as accurate describing [...]

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The Pluto Files (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Seventy-nine years ago today in Flagstaff, Arizona, young Clyde Tombaugh noticed a dot move on successive photographic plates. It was Pluto shifting against a background of fixed stars. For the next three-quarters of century, Pluto was the oddball ninth planet known to every school kid in the world, but too dim for nearly [...]

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Lincoln and Darwin Dual Bicentennial

A remarkable coincidence will be observed next week.  Two men who made enormous impacts on the world were born on the same day two hundred years ago: February 12, 1809.  Abraham Lincoln, arguably the greatest American president, was born in Kentucky the same day that Charles Darwin, one of the giants in the history science, [...]

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Circumference (Nicholas Nicastro)

When I first learned about Eratosthenes from some long-forgotten astronomy book in my youth, roughly age 10, I fell in love with the name: Air-uh-TOSS-the-knees. I’ve always enjoyed pronouncing long words and names like that. Once I had the name down pat, it wasn’t too difficult to attach meaning to it. And [...]

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Tree: A Life Story (David Suzuki & Wayne Grady)

Evergreens help make much of the Pacific Northwest one of the most beautiful places on earth. Pines, cedars, and Douglas-fir line the horizon almost everywhere I go, and I’m lucky enough to see a few out any window of my house. But trees are more than ornaments. They are environments unto themselves. [...]

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First Scientific American (Joyce Chaplin)

I was telling you last time how much enjoy reading about Benjamin Franklin. Now permit me to mention the umpteenth biography I’ve read about him. Franklin had at least five successful careers: writer, businessman, scientist, civic leader, international statesman. Biographers could probably write book length accounts on each of them as if they were [...]

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This is Your Brain on Music (Daniel Levitin)

Musicians are constantly toying with us. They roll a melody up and down a musical rollercoaster. They take us on unexpected sidetracks. They bounce themes from one instrument to another like kids playing hackey sack. And sometimes they smuggle other tunes (themes or motifs) into their melodies to knock us off our guard. Somehow we [...]

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The Anatomist (Bill Hayes)

The Anatomist [LibraryThing / WorldCat] was an interesting plunge into one subject (anatomy) and three lives (the author of Gray’s Anatomy, the illustrator of that same book, and the author of this book). It was not the book I expected when I opened it, but it was nevertheless a very enjoyable read.
What began as [...]

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