Book Review: The Making of the Fittest

Author: Sean B. Carroll
Title: The Making of the Fittest
Publication Info: Tantor Media (2007), Edition: Unabridged, Audio CD
ISBN: 1400103150

Summary/Review:

This book is a primer on how natural selection works.  Carroll approaches this topic from a mathematical perspective through statistics and probability, but does so in layperson’s terms (which means I can just barely understand it – hah!).  The book uses examples such as Antarctic icefish for whom natural selection has chosen genes that give them enlarged hearts, blood without red blood cells, and a natural antifreeze.

Mutation is a key idea, with Carroll stressing that mutations despite their bad PR can be beneficial and points out that in fact we are all mutants.  While mutation is blind, natural selection is not.  Natural selection acts cumulatively.  Carroll also takes on the people who deny evolution by natural selection, refreshingly pointing out that it’s not just religious conservatives with examples of Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko who persecuted proponents of Medelian genetics and chiropractic practitioners who denied germ theory.

This is a good practical summary of the fascinating key ideas of biology.

Recommended books: On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Rating: ***

RadioLab Listening Party @ MOS

Last night I attend a special even at the Museum of Science, a listening party for the public radio show RadioLab.  For the uninitiated, RadioLab is a show produced by WNYC in New York that ask questions and tell stories centered on an idea, usually related to science.  If you like This American Life, I’d say RadioLab is even better than This American Life.  If you don’t like This American Life, well RadioLab is still better than This American Life.  If you want to find out for sure you can listen to episodes on the website, download podcasts, or tune into WBUR or WGBH to listen on the radio.

The show is hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the former of which was on hand last night to greet the chic geeks who gathered together in the museum’s planetarium.  Because that’s how cool this event was, it took place in the planetarium!  Appropriately the episode Space played while the stars danced on the dome above our heads.  At appropriate times photos and images appeared on the planetarium appropriate to the story.  But not too much.  This was time to sit back, reflect on the stars, and ponder the curiosities of space.  I admit there were times I felt weepy, especially about the Challenger disaster.  I also think that it would be cool to get a copy of the Voyager Golden Record.

After the show, Abumrad took questions mainly dealing with the unique sound of RadioLab where voices, music, and sound effects are layered and repeated.  The audience thinks these effects are cool and enhance learning although Abumrad admitted that a lot of people find it annoying.  Then there was a reception in the Blue Wing with chocolate fondue which was so good I went back several times.  I also took a gander at the beautiful & disturbing Manufactured Landscapes exhibit of photographs byEdward Burtynsky.

It was a good night.  It’s great to live in a town with museums, culture, intelligence and events and people that bring them all together.

RetroPost: Happy Π Day

Today we’re celebrating a holiday I learned about two years ago.  It is the only holiday dedicated to a number, the number Π.

As my friend Steve posted on Twitter:

Today’s 3/14 and seriously, I don’t see what’s so hard about finding the end of pie. Just OM NOM NOM and you’re there.

I made sure to commemorate the day with a slice of key lime pie at Doyle’s cafe.

Make sure to listen to this Only a Game broadcast of a Pi recitation contest at Harvard University.  I haven’t been able to find any mention of this event reoccuring this year.

Happy Π  Day, to 3.141 and all!

Book Review: Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson

In my childhood, I enjoyed National Geographic specials about a slight English woman who would sit in the Tanzanian forest by the Gombe River and observe chimpanzees.  In college I read one of her books, Through a Window: My Thirty Years With the Chimpanzees of Gombe and became even more deeply enamored with the woman and her works.  When Jane Goodall received an honorary degree from the College of William & Mary on Charter Day in 1993, my roommate Hal joked that they would need security to keep me from swooping in from the rafters and abducting her.  Thus it was natural for me to read the comprehensive biography Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man (2006) by Dale Peterson.

Peterson relies on a wealth of source material including interviews with Goodall, her family, colleagues and researchers; a huge volume of Goodall’s correspondence; and Goodall’s voluminous notes and published writings.  From early childhood, Jane Goodall seemed to be fated to her future work by observing farm animals, starting science clubs with her friends, and studying the behavior of her many family pets.  At times, the detail of Goodall’s childhood seems a bit too much.  I swear there’s an entire chapter that just lists the names of young men who fancied the teenage Jane.

The strength of this biography is the portion of Jane’s life from the late-1950′s to the mid-1970′s.  Starting with her affiliation with Louis Leakey anthropological & archaeological works in Africa, Jane set off on a new bold path with her quiet observation of the chimpanzees of Gombe, recognizing the chimps as individuals, and building up a detailed record of behavior over time. Her methods were considered unscientific by some, yet at the same time she recieved pressure from her sponsors at National Geographic to make her writing less scientific (National Geographic doesn’t come off well in this book due to a often tempestuous relationship with Goodall and the Gombe Stream reserve.)  Goodall’s family life is fascinating as well, including her mother Vanne and sister Judy who both accompanied Jane to Gombe at times, her two husbands – photographer Hugo and Tanzanian politician Derek, and son Grub who grew up at the research station.  Most of the biography is related in a strict chronological manner although there are some artistic details such as a chapter where the regime changes among Gombe’s alpha male chimpanzees are intertwined with the changes of administration from National Geographic support to a more independent Jane Goodall Institute.

For the excess of detail in the early part of the book, the last portion of the book from the mid-1970′s to the present feels rushed.  The death of Goodall’s second husband seems to be just a few paragraphs tacked onto a chapter about Idi Amin’s invasion of Tanzania and inexplicably long passages about the family dogs.  Thirty years of Goodall’s life – during a period when she became a traveling activist for both wild and captive chimpanzees – seems to be nothing more than a list of awards, appearances, and accomplishments.  I like this book because I love Jane Goodall for her remarkable accomplishments as a scientist, teacher and educator, but Peterson’s writing can be plodding and uneven at times.  I’ve added Goodall’s own book Reason For Hope; A Spiritual Journey to my reading list for 2009 to learn even more.

In the meantime, check out The Jane Goodall Institute website for lots of neat resources.

Jane Goodall : the woman who redefined man by Dale Peterson.
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006.

Christmas Eve

It’s Christmas Eve.  As you wrap (or unwrap) gifts, sip eggnog, and/or get ready for Midnight Mass, you’ll want to start off by clicking the youtube link below:

Then you’ll want to click this youtube link, and replay it in a loop for about 3-4 hours.

If you need more music, check out these podcasts.  I guarantee that there is good holiday themed stuff  here that you’ll never here on that Light Rock station that’s playing holiday music 24/7:

• Vintage Radio Shows: Bing Crosby – Christmas Show for the Navy
• NPR “All Songs Considered”: Holiday Music
• WFMU “Antique Phonograph Music Program”

For a more sobering  Christmas Eve viewing experience, watch this vintage propaganda film “Christmas Under Fire” about Christmas in England during the Blitz:

Via Crooked Timber.

Finally, for even more uplifting memories, celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 8′s Journey to the Moon.

Happy Christmas to all!

Book Review: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet by Neil Degrasse Tyson

The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet by Neil Degrasse Tyson is a Library Thing Early Reviewers advance copy book and a very enjoyable one at that.  Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, writes of the former ninth planet Pluto and it’s special appeal to Americans.  He credits this partially to the fact that it was the only “planet” in our solar system discovered by an a American (Clyde Tombaugh) , as well as cultural relics like the Disney animated dog Pluto named in the same year the planet was discovered.

Americans took recent demotion of Pluto by the International Astronomic Union in August 2006.  Tyson explains in clever and lively detail the reasons behind the demotion and better yet, the ways today’s astrophysicist classify heavenly bodies.  Tyson doesn’t see value in the traditional teaching of planets as something to be counted from one to nine and memorized with mnemonic devices.  Instead he prefers to classify things that share similar characteristics into broader groups as a better way of understanding the dynamics of the solar system.  The five groupings are:

1. Small round & rocky planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth & Mars.
2. The asteroid belt made up of smaller, rocky bodies, the largest being Ceres (once upon a time considered a planet).
3. The large gas giants of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
4. The Kuiper belt – small, icy bodies of which Pluto is king.
5. The distant Oort cloud of comets.

Under Tyson’s direction the Haden Planeterium reopened in 2000 with the Solar System arranged in these groups rather than the simplistic nine-planet model.  This became controversial after a 2001 New York Times article documented the “omission” of Pluto from the planets.  As a result, Tyson received lots of hate mail and some interesting correspondence from children.

This book works well not just because it’s educational, but also because it’s funny.  Tyson himself writes in a humorous, engaging style.  The book is chock full of illustrations including many editorial cartoons about the demotion of Pluto and the aforementioned letters and drawings sent to Tyson.

I highly recommend checking out this book if you have any interest in science and astronomy.  It’s a quick read, I pretty much read it in one sitting, but I learned a lot.

The Pluto Files by Neil Degrasse Tyson. W.W. Norton & Co. (2009), Hardcover, 224 pages

Book Review: Trawler by Redmond O’Hanlon

Trawler (2003) by Redmond O’Hanlon is one of those books where a novice goes on board a commercial fishing boat to see how hard life is for the trawlermen and finds it hard in ways one never imagined.  No big surprise there, but what O’Hanlon does in this book is write almost entirely in dialogue rather than description.  This means that O’Hanlon either brought on board a recording device or has a photographic memory for conversation.  Either way it’s remarkable considering that O’Hanlon spends much of the journey seasick, sleep-deprived, and unable to stay on his feet as the trawler Norlantean heads into a Force 12 hurricane.

Much of O’Hanlon’s conversation is with Luke the marine biologist conducting field studies on board the trawler.  But there is also the captain Jason, revered by his crew, and cast of tough fishermen, sometimes tight-lipped and sometimes revelatory in an almost hallucinatory way.  The discussion varies from oceanography to ichthyology, superstition and religion, masculinity to mortality, and sometimes just plain crudity.  O’Hanlon seems to make a pest of himself and gets a good bit of jibing in return.

This book not quite what I’d imagined it would be but it’s a good, solid book.

Here are some better reviews than mine:

• The Independent
• The Guardian

Author O’Hanlon, Redmond, 1947-
Title Trawler / Redmond O’Hanlon.
Publication Info. New York : Vintage Books, 2006..
Edition 1st Vintage Departures ed.
Description 339 p., [8] p. of plates : ill., map ; 21 cm.

Book Review: Where’s my jetpack? : a guide to the amazing science fiction future that never arrived by Daniel H. Wilson

We live in the 21st-Century, that magical century heralded in the past century as The Future, yet The Future has been somewhat disappointing. Where’s my jetpack? : a guide to the amazing science fiction future that never arrived (2007) by Daniel H. Wilson recounts all the great inventions promised to an eager public by science fiction, comic books, World’s Fairs, and documentaries that seemingly have never come to pass.  Wilson goes through several of these fantastic devices and describes what advances have actually been made and tells how several of them actually exist.  Albeit in less than fantastic guises or far to expensive/exclusive for the general populace.  Here are some of my favorites:

• The jetpack, which works, just not for very long due to fuel limitations.
• The zeppelin which once sailed elegantly through the sky until the Hindenberg disaster, but may be making a return.
• Teleportation which is possible with particles if not with human beings.
• Underwater hotels: one exists but it’s not very luxurious.  More luxurious hotels are in the works.
• Anti-Sleeping pills are available under the brand name Provigil (I’m tempted to get a prescription).
• The Space Elevator is theoretically possible and Wilson suggests we submit our plans to the Spaceward Foundation and win a prize (Hey, there’s a space elevator blog too!).
• And a Moon Colony?  It’s in the works!

This is a fun little book with a good mix of science and humor that will appeal to anyone’s inner geek.

Author Wilson, Daniel H. (Daniel Howard), 1978-
Title Where’s my jetpack? : a guide to the amazing science fiction future that never arrived / Daniel H. Wilson ; illustrated by Richard Horne.
Publication Info. New York : Bloomsbury USA : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, c2007.
Edition 1st U.S. ed.
Description 192 p. : ill. ; 20 cm.

Book Review: “Solomon’s Gold” by Neal Stephenson (Book 6 of the Baroque Cycle)

Volume III of the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, The System of the World (2004), begins with Book Six “Solomon’s Gold.”  This book picks up where the very first book, Quicksilver, left off with Daniel Waterhouse returning to England.  Waterhouse immediately finds himself in the midst of intrigue including attempted assasinations by an Infernal Device, counterfeit coinage, and various missions for Leibniz, Duchess Sophia, and Isaac Newton.  All around him rumors swirl about Queen Anne’s succesor.  Will it be the Hanovers supported by the Whigs or the Jacobite restoration of the Stuarts?

While this is primarily Daniel Waterhouse’s story, the book ends with a cliffhanger as Jack Shaftoe, aka Jack the Coiner, attempts an audacious (and comical) heist at the Tower of London.  I like how Daniel Waterhouse comes into his own in this book.  He’s still plagued by doubts but shows resourcefulness and leadership.  In an interesting reflection on fear he wonders if everyone else is as afraid as him. This novel also really uses London as a character with Waterhouse visiting the various historic (and not-so-historic) haunts of the city.  The London map in the flyleaf is a vital part of this book and I enjoyed following Daniel around town.

Previously:

• Book 1: Quicksilver
• Book 2: King of the Vagabonds
• Book 3: Odalisque
• Book 4: Bonanza
• Book 5: The Juncto

Author Stephenson, Neal.
Title The system of the world / Neal Stephenson.
Publication Info. New York : William Morrow, c2004.
Edition 1st ed.
Description xv, 892 p. ; 25 cm.

Book Review: A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

A Crack in the Edge of the World (2005) by Simon Winchester tells the story of the Great Earthquake of San Francisco in 1906 (and much, much more) in a way only Winchester could tell it.  Winchester has become one of my favorite writers simply because he writes about science, history, and travel in an engaging manner.  He also has the James Burke-like talent of making connections among seemingly disparate things.  For example, in the early chapters of this book he connects the website of Wapakoneta, OH and  geologist Tuzo Wilson as well as making California’s Mt.  Diablo a symbol for pretty much everything to come in this book.

According to Winchester, 1906 was a year of seismic activity worldwide, the California earthquake just one of many events.  Before we learn about the earthquake though, Winchester takes us deep into the geologic past.  Winchester then takes a tour across the North American Plate starting in Iceland.  As he travels the continent, Winchester visits the sites of numerous seismic events including such unlikely intraplate locations as Charleston, SC and New Madrid, MO. Finally arriving in California, Winchester takes us to Parkfield a hub of seismic activity and earthquake study.

Winchester prefaces the story of the 1906 quake with a fairly detailed, yet lively, history of San Franciso itself which rises from a wild west boomtown to the greatest city on the west coast.  Finally, he relates the story of the quake itself, filled with first person stories of the people who experienced it.  This includes some celebrities like operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, psychologist William James, writer Jack London, and four-year old Ansel Adams who broke his nose as a result of the earthquake.  Amateur photography also captured the human perspective on the quakes and the ensuing fires.

Winchester also documents the human response to the earthquake.  Scientist throughout the world use rudimentary devices to track the seismic activity (many of them in Jesuit institutions).  Insurance companies tried to weasle out of paying their claims much to national disapproval, even in Congress.  Long-term aftershocks of the earthquake include the rise of Los Angeles as the dominant western city due to its relatively more stable location.  Winchester also theorizes that the belief in the earthquake as divine retribution sparked the rise in Pentecostal churches that still affects public discourse today.  Another unfortunate aftereffect is the use of Angel Island to detain potential immigrants from China, many trying to claim relation to Chinese-Americans already living in the city because all the records were destroyed in the fires.

In an epilogue, Winchester continues his travels to Alaska where the famous pipeline traverses a fault and is susceptible to the viscious earthquakes of the state.  The effects of Alaskan earthquakes can be seen all the way in Yellowstone Park, itself sitting on a volcanic caldera which could blow with disasterous results for the Western States.  Winchester ties this up with the hubris of people building on land prone to seismic activity.

Since I’m commuting with my son and no longer have time to read on the subway, I got this as an audiobook to listen to while performing mundane tasks at work.  It’s narrated by Winchester himself in his charming, academic English accent.  He also amusingly immitates the various accents of the historical figures he’s quoting, such as Caruso’s Italian.  I enjoyed listening to this lively historical and geological work and reccomend it highly.  I’ve previously read Winchester’s Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, The Professor and the Madman, The Meaning of Everything, and The Map That Changed the World.  You can read my reviews of these books at LibraryThing.

Author Winchester, Simon.
Title A crack in the edge of the world [sound recording] : America and the great California earthquake of 1906 / Simon Winchester.
Publication Info. North Kingstown, RI : Sound Library/BBC Audiobooks America, p2005.
Description 10 sound discs (ca. 12 hrs. 36 min.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.