Posts Tagged ‘science’

Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American” series is getting far-flung. In 1915, the first Best American Short Stories anthology was published. These days, you can get a yearly dose of Best Comics, Best Crime Reporting, Best Medical Writing, Best Short Plays, et cetera. Last year I read The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 and was pleased. This year, I just finished reading The Best American Science Writing 2009.

Like any anthology, this one has its ups and downs. It made for a quick read and a couple of ah-ha moments, but if you miss out on it, you won’t be hopelessly left behind.

Okay, I confess. I know that A User’s Guide to the Universe edged out The Drunkard’s Walk in this poll about which science title I should read next, but in true me fashion I ended up purchasing all four books. And when the package arrived and I scanned the first pages of each, I found it entirely impossible to put Mlodinow’s fantastic surveying romp through probability, chance and statistics down. I read the first 100 pages in one sitting.

This is the kind of book I unqualifyingly recommend to everyone. Most things I read and like have audience segments. I can’t really recommend Dumas to my friend who really loves YA novels; I don’t think David would be into Jane Austen. But this book? Read it, read it, read it.

My personal library’s science section is looking downright pathetic. Unlike other subjects—like modern fiction and history—for which new releases find their way to me effortlessly, my science books just keep staling and aging over there, sadly. And there are far too few of them in general.

Please vote on which recent science release I should read next! You’ll notice a cosmology-physics bent to these titles—that’s because the fields intrigue me, a lot.

At first, it doesn’t seem that September 3, 1859, was out of the ordinary in the northern United States. The New York Times’ “News of the Day” lists quotidian happenings: that the “depredations of the Apache Indians” in Arizona Territory have become “almost uncurable” [sic]; that the city’s churches, closed for the summer, were starting to reopen slowly; that an unfortunate situation with a boiler at a downtown machine shop had left one dead and several flung about.

Between paragraphs about the apprehension of a “mean rascal” who had been fleecing young maidens and a recap of the current attitudes of commodity markets (cotton, molasses, crude turpentine, lime: flat; dry cod-fish, hops and hides: an uptick in demand) was this mention:

“There was another brilliant display of auroral light last night.”

This beautiful photograph of an aurora was taken by ovaratli.

The first thing in my life that I both recall and can put a date to are two vignettes from May of 1980. One is scouring a closet with my mother for a red bandanna to tie around my face, the other is a dim, gray moment-memory of an ashen street scene.
So, I can say [...]

What does Neal Stepenson write about? Anything he damn well wants, and Anathem is his latest long-winded, exploratory romp. Why do I cut him so much slack? Because I see him as a sort of literary performance artist. It doesn’t seem as much like he writes novels as that he is doing something perverse, wonderful and occasionally downright obnoxious.

Dozens of short essays from prominent scientists about what they “know” but cannot, scientifically, “prove,” at least yet. What could have been an energizing look at possibilities by the sharpest minds in science more often comes off as individual posturing, pessimism and promotion of pet ideas, sadly.
There were patterns in the tones of the pieces:
One, [...]