Books

Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds by science writer John Pickrell is coming out in December. As you know I've written a lot about the bird-dinosaur thing (most recently, this: "Honey I Shrunk the Dinosaurs") so of course this sounded very interesting to me. In a way, Pickrell's book is a missing link, in that he writes a lot about the history of paleontology associated with the discovery, undiscovery, and rediscovery of the early bird record and the dinosaur link. Birds have rewritten dinosaurs. Not all dinosaurs are directly related to birds, but a large number of them…
I've read Marilyn Johnson's forthcoming book Lives in Ruins. Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble. It's a collection of lively and enthusiastic portraits of contemporary archaeologists in their professional environment. Some may find the tone a bit too enthusiastic, pantingly so in parts, but that's a matter of taste. Archaeologists should arguably be thankful to have a friend like Marilyn Johnson. Still, she's an outside observer of our tribe, and she approaches us from a very particular direction. Take her introductory statement that “Field school … usually takes place in a…
The library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters is (one of?) Scandinavia's biggest research library (ies) for archaeology, the history of art and allied disciplines. Since it's co-located with the archives of the National Heritage Board in the East Stable next to the Swedish History Museum, it's an amazing place to do research. And it just got even better. Librarian Annika Eriksson tells me they have been working on this for quite some time, and now they've got it up and running. The library's assortment of commercial digital resources – notably hundreds of paywalled research journals –…
I've been reading a 1974 edition of Sigfrid Steinberg's 1955 classic Five Hundred Years Of Printing. Overall I've found it interesting and instructive, with a fine touch of sarcastic humour. But I came across a few paragraphs on the value of universal literacy that are so alien to me that I almost had to rub my eyes. Compulsory and free education on the elementary-school level was achieved, at least on paper, in most civilized countries in the course of the nineteenth century … At the same time … there is the basic question of the purpose of educating the masses. What use is the knowledge of…
So, you accept the science of climate change and global warming as legit. But you often encounter people, at family gatherings, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, at social events, etc. who don't. Do you keep your mouth shut when someone says something clearly wrong that brings the science into question illegitimately? If you do, and others are listening, then one voice, a denialist voice, is influencing people. Probably better to say something. The problems is that the denialist schtick involves having a lot of different arguments, with absolutely no regard as to legimacy, against the…
JW, protagonist, is a flawed hero. He is not exactly an anti-hero because he is not a bad guy, though one does become annoyed at where he places his values. As his character unfolds in the first several chapters of Shawn Otto's novel, Sins of Our Fathers, we like him, we are worried about him, we wonder what he is thinking, we sit on the edge of our proverbial seats as he takes risk after risk and we are sitting thusly because we learn that he does not have a rational concept of risk. We learn that his inner confusion about life arises from two main sources: the dramatic difference between…
In a previous life (of mine) my father-in-law, an evolutionary biologist, kept an oil painting of a fish on the wall of the living room. At every chance he would point out, to visitors or to anyone else if there were no visitors, that he kept a portrait of his distant ancestor hanging in a prominent location, pointing to the oil painting. It was funny even the third or fourth time. It isn't really true, of course, that this was his ancestor. It was a bass, more recently evolved to its present form than humans, I suspect. But it is true that the last common ancestor of humans and fish was a…
Sweden doesn't have much of a written record for the Viking Period. We have most of the rune stones but hardly any of the sagas. And thus among Swedish Viking scholars it is not uncommon to be rather poorly read, like I am, in the eddas, the sagas and the other written sources of the period. The Viking Period is pretty much prehistoric archaeology to us. Still, even in Sweden you can't study the period without picking up a few fragments of the written lore. And in my reading, one of the best passages I've come across is this description of Viga-Glum's reaction to trespassing neighbours from…
This post has gone out of date. Go HERE to see a current list of excellent books on climate change.
Back in 2012 we had a look at the first novel written in Swedish, 1666/68's Stratonice by Urban Hiärne (1641-1724). He went on to become a high-ranking doctor, founded a hydrotherapeutic spa resort, was instrumental in putting an end to the Swedish witch hunts and fathered 26 children by his three wives. But before all this, at the suggestion of professor Olof Rudbeckius Sr., he also found time to write the first original play performed in Swedish: Rosimunda. This was student theatre, with a cast of young noblemen, put on to entertain the 11-y-o future king Carolus XI at Uppsala Castle on 15…
I put Tove Jansson's Moomin character the Muddler, Sw. Rådd-djuret, into a presentation. It's about multivariate statistics for archaeologists, and I accompany the picture with the following quotation.How could you forget about the Muddler when you launched the ship, Sniff said accusingly. Did he ever get his button collection back into order? Oh yes, many times, said Moominpappa. He came up with new button systems all the time. Sorted them according to colour or size or shape or material, or according to how much he liked them. Amazing, Sniff said dreamily. --- Tove Jansson 1968, The…
Since late ’09 my main research project has concerned the Bronze Age in the four Swedish provinces surrounding Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren. I've looked at the landscape situation of the era's deposition sites, which is pretty much where you find bronze objects. Yesterday I finished the first draft of the book (except the descriptive gazetteer, into which I still need to stick a few bits). And so here it is (300 kB PDF file)! The title is:In the Landscape and Between Worlds. Bronze Age Deposition Sites Around Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren in Sweden. I would be very grateful for comments,…
Testing behemoth ETS announced a re-revised SAT for 2015, trying to stay one step ahead of its rival and the legions of teenagers who game standardized tests. Suggesting the vocabulary section was intended as "a proxy test for wide reading," Chad Orzel says memorizing obscure words is "dumb and pointless, but probably takes less time than getting a large vocabulary the 'right' way." Indeed, in the contemporary college prep atmosphere of clubs, sports, musical instruments, and hours of homework, who has time to read anyway? Even English students are likely to stick to SparkNotes (whose…
Only one of these books was given a title with the word "nudge" in it by people with a frame of reference similar to mine. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Thaler & Sunstein 2008. Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! Gary L. Hardcastle et al. 2006. Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who's Already There. Leonard Sweet 2010. A Gentle Nudge in the Right Direction. Joss Conlon 2012. Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism. Cass R. Sunstein 2014. Delivering the Neural Nudge. Roger Parry 2014.
Here are my best reads in English during 2013. It was a really good year for quality, though I didn't read very much: 41 books, twelve of which were e-books. The latter number was boosted by the Humble E-Book Bundle that I bought at Junior's recommendation (sadly no longer up for sale). Find me at Goodreads! Pirate Cinema. Cory Doctorow 2012. A fun, engaging and optimistic piece of polemic fiction, slightly preachy in parts, about the social and artistic consequences of intellectual property law. Old Man's War. John Scalzi 2005. Energetic co-ed military sf. Stiff. The Curious Lives of Human…
Somebody tipped over a bag full of a white powdery substance. Most of what fell out splayed across the dirty wooden table, but about a cup poured onto the dirt floor of the open-air Baraza at our research site in a remote part of the Congo’s Ituri Forest. Embarrassed about tipping onto the ground more of this valuable substance than most people living within 50 kilometers would ever see in one day, the tipper started to push loose dirt onto the powder to cover it up. But the spill had been noticed by two children lounging nearby; in what seemed like a fraction of a second, the boys were face…
I don't understand how this happens. You've got a good academic position. You're bringing in reasonable amounts of grant money. You're publishing in Nature Genetics and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. And you don't even understand the basic concepts in your field of study. For instance, here's a press release titled "Cause of genetic disorder found in 'dark matter' of DNA". For the first time, scientists have used new technology which analyses the whole genome to find the cause of a genetic disease in what was previously referred to as "junk DNA". Pancreatic agenesis results in…
This movie was already spoiled for me because I read the book many years ago.  But the movie can't help but spoil itself.  It's a great film and one of the best adaptations of a novel to ever appear onscreen, but if you really know nothing about Ender's Game, and can read at a 9th grade level, honestly go read the book first.  If you have time. The problem is that by the time of Ender's "final exam," it's hard to imagine anyone in the audience sympathizing with Ender's shock that he hasn't really been playing a video game; he and his tween friends have been controlling actual spaceships…
You probably already know about Michael Mann's book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines." The ongoing assault on climate science in the United States has never been more aggressive, more blatant, or more widely publicized than in the case of the Hockey Stick graph -- a clear and compelling visual presentation of scientific data, put together by MichaelE. Mann and his colleagues, demonstrating that global temperatures have risen in conjunction with the increase in industrialization and the use of fossil fuels. Here was an easy-to-understand graph that, in…
I just finished "Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook" (Second Edition) by Shantanu Tushar and Sarath Lakshman. This is a beginner's guide to using shell scripting (bash) on linux. Usually, a "cookbook" is set up more like a series of projects organized around a set of themes, and is usually less introductory than this book. "Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook" might be better titled "Introduction to Linux Shell Scripting" because it is more like a tutorial and a how too book than like a cookbook. Nonetheless, it is an excellent tutorial that includes over 100 "recipes" that address a diversity of…