Holiday reading recap

Just before the break I (along with some Twitter friends) blogged my holiday reading list. Here's how I did.

Non-fiction

I stayed bang on track here.

I finished Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, which I thought was astounding. I particularly enjoyed the way Lane shows us the process of science - the areas where things aren't settled, the places with scientists disagree, the ways that personalities can conflict with credibility. He sketches out both theories and the people who devised them. The last para of my GoodReads review:

With the idiotic debates that continue to be pursued around evolution and 'intelligent design', I think it is crucial that society understands that 'gaps' in the evidence, and disagreements among scientists, do not weaken the case for evolution (which should, really, not have to be made). Lane does an elegant and enjoyable job of laying out the current state of research, focused on topics he cares about and finds intriguing, and even though I'm going to have to read the book again in order to fully understand it, I am truly grateful to him for doing so.

I also read Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E=mc2? - large chunks of it on Pakiri beach. Cox and Forshaw are on a mission to make the reader not just recognise but understand the equation:

If Marcus Chown is magical cellulite cream, this is physics bootcamp - no corners cut, no let's-take-it-easy-today-shall-we. Cox and Forshaw don't just want to explain this equation - they want you to understand it, to understand its power (predictive and descriptive) and understand how, despite being just a diminutive collection of letters and symbols, it underpins nearly a century of contemporary science, and captures some of the most fundamental characteristics of the universe.

I feel like the target market for this book - a person who gave up on maths in fourth form, and stumbled through sixth form physics before escaping the next year to classics class, my natural home. Cox and Forshaw are punctilious in their care for the mathematically challenged, to the point where even I wished they'd quit apologising for bringing the maths in to it - because for once, I was following it.

Somewhere between non-fiction and fiction, while at home I picked up a copy of James Herriott's The Lord God Made Them All. I read bajillions of his books when I was a young teenager on a dairy farm, and this was a rather lovely exercise in nostalgia:

Herriot's world is one where every person has a redeeming feature, and every day has a lesson that can be extracted from it. He manages this without preaching though, and his observations are utterly engaging. As an adult, the sameyness of the stories takes some of their shine off, but I also had a new appreciation for the theme of how his profession changed markedly during his career - where all the arcane knowledge drummed into him at university about diseases of the horse and mixing medicines from glass bottles etched with Latin phrases had to be replaced with post-war drugs and the shift of focus to domestic pets. Herriot, thankfully, is one of those people who is intrigued and delighted by change, not threatened and resentful.

Fiction

My prediction: "A buck three way - the first three books of Anthony Powell's Dance to the music of time in one chubby edition, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl."

I read the first book of Powell's 12-book series, 230 pages in which minutiae is minutely observed. Give me Evelyn Waugh any day.

Blood Meridian is wrenching - so visceral you almost have to read it through your fingers. If I had of read this first, I would probably never have dared to embark on The Border Trilogy (which I adore). Amazing, but utterly relentless.

I didn't make it to Bacigalupi, because ...

YA

... I went a bit nuts here. I also didn't make it into the final book in Patrick Ness's 'Chaos Walking' trilogy. Instead, I read:

Frances Hardinge's Fly by Night, a dense rich Christmas cake of a book, not original in its coming of age theme, but, as with The Lost Conspiracy, a lovingly constructed setting.

Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's Dash & Lily's Book of Dares - a very professional, pretty engaging, rather irritating teenage-misfits-in-New-York story.

Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead - I blogged Jolisa Gracewood's interview with Healey last year, and was really impressed by this book, in the tradition of Margaret Mahy's supernatural teenage books, and Maurice Gee's halfmen of O.

Essays

50% here. I made it through E.B. White's One Man's Meat but not Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs. I put the White anthology down a few times, but it worried away at the edge of my mind and I ended up finishing it. I don't know if this was the right place to start reading White's essays; perhaps his New York essays, rather than his small farm in Maine essays, would have been a better launchpad. But this collection does add up to more than the sum of its parts - deep concerns and steady affections run beneath the small daily happenings.

Instapaper

I was blessed with an iPad for Christmas, and I put it to good use with dozens, if not hundreds, of saved articles using Instapaper from my own and friends' accounts. I'll round up some of the highlights here over the next week.

Holiday reading list

For the past few weeks I've been mentally tending to my Christmas holiday reading pile, adding and removing and debating over books. Here's where I'm at now:

Non-fiction

I'm still working my way through the 2010 Royal Society science book shortlist. I'm currently reading (and loving) Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution:

Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it's more engaging if it's seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemistry without giving in to some sort of randy anthropomorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges, repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules really want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little gentle flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there.

From that shortlist, I also have Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E=mc2? on loan from the library to take away with me.

Essays

Having recently been bowled over by this 1969 interview with E.B. White, I've collected a copy of One Man's Meat, a 1944 collection of his essays, written on his farm in Maine.

And left-over from last Christmas: Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs.

Fiction

A buck three way - the first three books of Anthony Powell's Dance to the music of time in one chubby edition, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl.

Young Adults

The last book in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men has finally arrived in paperback, so I could finally satisfy my obsessive-compulsive need to have a copy that matched my first two books in the series. In an act of great sacrifice, I lent my brand-new copy to a friend who I recently put on to the series. I'll be collecting it back on my travels.

Chance

I'm housesitting for an avid reader during my holiday, so all the good intentions above may be swept away by the call of their bookshelf.

Dazzled

Just as I get started on the Royal Society's science book shortlist, the winner is announced: Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution.

I'm currently half-way through James Hannam's God's Philosophers, in which he tries to correct the general conception of the Middle Ages as a period where science was devalued, if not persecuted, by the Church, and position the period instead as a time of development of classical thinking and preparation for the glorious 1500s. It's an absorbing read, if a little too colloquial for my taste; but certainly an amazing insight into the minds of people whose entire thought processes were radically different from our post-Enlightenment positions.

The Guardian has reviewed all the books on the shortlist - why not start on those before you hit the books?

James Hannam - God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

Nick Lane - Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

Frederick Grinnell - Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic

Marcus Chown - We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What everyday things tell us about the universe

Henry Pollack - A World Without Ice

Brian Cox, Jeff Forshaw - Why Does E=mc2?

I heart science

Sometimes my lunchtime tab line-up is so good, I just have to share it. Today's theme: science literacy, and pictorial trickery.

Over the past 18 months or so, I've put a lot of reading hours into trying to improve my science understanding. I'm not necessarily trying to understand scientific concepts or formula, although there's been a bit of that happening along the way. What I'm trying to understand is how science happens - the process, the history, the culture, the philosophy.

The way I learn is through narrative. Often I'll start with a piece of historical fiction (say Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy) move on to a history of science from that period, and then delve into individual scientists (for example, James Gleick's Newton bio, and Lisa Jardine on Robert Hooke).

One of my favourite parts of this progression is reading reviews of science books; Freeman Dyson's collected reviews have been a revelation in this respect. And now I can add - from today's line-up - Margaret Atwood's review of Edward Wilson's Anthill, the first novel by this 'grand old man of ants'. I think a good review gives you ideas for how you might read a book: this review certainly achieves that objective.

Given my interest in catching myself in the science I missed (or ignored) at school, this article by Alice Bell on science literacy made me feel a little shabby. I'm doing my best, but what if I'm turning myself into one of those dreaded a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing people ("I don't know much about science, but I know what I believe")?

This interview with Craig Venter (whose company sequenced the gene faster and more cheaply than the government-sponsored Human Genome Project) gives me a little faith though. According to Venter, we've both learned enormous amounts, and hardly anything at all, from sequencing the genome. And I think I understand enough about the ethos of science to feel this is okay - even good.

So, on to pictorial trickery. There's been a rash of astronomy-porn on the web recently, and like many, I'm curious about whether the universe really looks as pretty as it does in photos. In his explanation of how astrophotography works, Ray Villard makes an analogy I really enjoyed:

Many celestial pictures look garish because the universe is, well, garish. Hot gaseous clouds of hydrogen, helium, and oxygen glow with the same intense color saturation you would see on nighttime stroll down the Las Vegas strip.

The best astrophotography is comparable to Ansel Adams’ nature pictures. Adams worked to extract the maximum information and quality from his photographs. This required many hours in the darkroom for Adams to reconstruct an image that reproduced the broad tonal range and contrast that our eye perceives on a sunny day.

And just 'cos I'm on the theme of astronomy and pretty pictures - Ethan Spiegel on where metor showers come from. It's stellar.

While you're at it

I recently re-read Peter Doherty's A Beginner's Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize. While I still find the book over-long and over-written (although there is some terrific stuff in there about the business of being a research scientist) the thing that really struck me was how good the list of recommended reading is.

When I get to the end of a book that has piqued my interest, by an author who I've come to trust, I want them to tell me what they found helpful and interesting when they were doing their research. Not just a bibliography, but recommendations of where I should go next.

Reading Doherty's book put me on to James Gleick's bio of Feynman, James Watson's simultaneously wonderful and infuriating The Double Helix and a terrific book about the 1918-19 flu epidemic by John M Barry that I plan to re-read as soon as I get some breathing space. It also reminded me that Brenda Maddox's biography of Rosalind Franklin is still languishing on my to-read list.

Fifty pages into Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A short book about Darwin, Lincoln and modern life I flipped to the bibliography. And was delighted.

In one of the Darwin chapters of the book, Gopnik writes about the pressures Darwin was under as he finally sat down to write* On the Origin of Species

All the pleasures and pressures of the past decade acted on him: the pleasure of explanation in simple terms, the pressure of not being understood; the pleasure of having accumulated abundant examples, the pressure of succumbing to overabundant illustration; the pleasure of having a clear argument to make, the pressure of having to make it clear; the pleasure of pushing at last to make a summary of an argument, the crucial pressure of having Alfred Wallace, polite and deferential but, after all, also in possession of the same theory, waiting.

Of course, this is the same situation that faced Gopnik (and any other writer who's got to that stage where they sit down, photocopies and books amassed around them, and try to face down the blank screen). His 'bibliographic note' summarises this beautifully: 'The Darwin literature is merely immeasurable; the Lincoln literature is infinite. When you are already up to your armpits in it, you realise you have hardly dipped a toe.'

Gopnik provides two pages each of recommended reading on Darwin and Lincoln - not a list of books, but a brief summary of his research journey, of what he read, and what he learnt, and what he believes we will find useful and engaging. It's not just a bibliography, it's a deeply personalised recommendation, and I love it.


*From another great book about Darwin that I read earlier this year - Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, a fictionalised biography by Deborah Heiligman for teenage readers, which focuses on the Darwin's marriage and the pressures Charles felt about the conflict between his development of a theory of natural selection and Emma's Christian faith - I learnt that Darwin wrote in a big chair in his study, on a board placed across the chair's arms, a picture I find entrancing.

Closure

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Eric Gill plaque of Ernest Rutherford that Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitza commissioned for the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge University in the early 1930s.

My blog post was a retelling of Chapter 7 in Mark Oliphant's Rutherford: Recollections of the Cambridge Days , which told the story of the controversy that surrounded Gill's portrait of Rutherford, after members of the faculty decided that the nose was too "Jewish".

I noted at the time that while I could find images of Gill's second work (a scraffito of a crocodile - Kapitsa's nickname for Rutherford) online, there were none available for the Rutherford plaque, making me wonder if it had disappeared.

A friend took up the cause, spoke to another friend, who spoke to another friend, who went out with a camera - the end of product of which being that I can now very happily present the following:







With thanks to Anthony Fox for the photographs, and Nat Torkington for the connections.

Ada Lovelace Day - three scientists

March 24th is Ada Lovelace Day - "an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science".

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), the daughter of Lord Byron and a prominent figure in English society, has over the past few decades become known colloquially as the 'first computer programmer', by virtue of a group of notes she wrote on Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the last of which included an algorithm for the computation of Bernoulli numbers.

I have to admit, I read a biography of Lovelace earlier this year which brought down my uninformed, but very high, opinion of her. In fact, I found her kind of irritating (I know, I know, I'm an awful person).

So for Ada Lovelace day, I'm going to pull out three women who I've greatly enjoyed learning about this year, and recommend a couple of books if you're interested in finding out more yourself.

Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)

German-born astronomer who worked alongside her brother William in England, first as an assistant and increasingly in her own right. She identified numerous comets and celestial bodies, and worked on several important astronomical catalogues. The Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal in 1828 for her work on a catalogue of nebulae; the next woman to be presented with this award was Vera Rubin in 1996.

Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science is a fantastic book and contains a very good chapter on the Herschels' work; Michael Lemoick's The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos expands nicely on this.

Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Polish-born physicist whose painstaking work in France lead to the identification of radium and polonium, the coining of the word 'radioactivity' (and articulation of what that meant), and contributed to the use of radiation in medical therapies.

Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, and the first person to be awarded two Nobels (despite the committee's prevarications).

Barbara Goldsmith's Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie is an interesting and well-written introduction to Curie's life and work.

Lise Meitner (1878-1968)

Austrian-born physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear fission, initially at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin and later - as one of the numerous scientists who were forced to flee Germany with the rise of Nazism - in Sweden.

Despite working closely with Otto Hahn and others on the development of the theory and experimental proof of nuclear fission, she did not share in Hahn's 1944 Nobel Prize for this work.

I'm in search of a good bio on Meitner at the moment - suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE: Since posting this, I've had several recommendations for Ruth Lewin Sime's Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics.

Science & Art

As I've noted (ad nauseam), I've been doing a lot of reading around 17-18th century science, stemming from Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. While CP Snow might have argued that a chasm exists between the worlds of science and art, Holmes showed that in the Romantic period, the two were often intertwined.



A show currently being staged at the Mori Museum, floridly titled Medicine and Art: Imagining the Future for Art and Love, brings together 150 medical artifacts from the Wellcome Collection (including the heart-catcher above) with historical Japanese art, and contemporary international art. There's a great review by Regine Debatty (who spoke brilliantly last week at Webstock about her increasing exhaustion with interactive art) on the we make money not art site.




Art/science is quite a common and interesting internet meme. There was a flurry last year around Luke Jerram's glass sculptures of viruses (as well as being lovely objects, he was making a comment on the way visual renderings of viruses, in danger! danger! colours, increases the occasional medical scare-mongering carried out through the media).




Last month, it was Nikki Graziano, who layers mathematical graphs and equations over landscape photographs. Around the same time, Jonathan Jones blogged about astronomy as an art of seeing.

I can't think of a big art/science show in New Zealand in the years that I've been an active gallery visitor. I've seen contemporary art inspired by mathematical or scientific concepts, and historical art made for scientific purposes. I reckon there's an an opportunity here for a gallery or museum to do a lavish, insightful show with an awesome public programme: my experience of Kiwi Foo Camp this year reinforced my feeling that New Zealand has some gifted and passionate science communicators.

This week's crush

I just ordered* The New Kings of Non-Fiction, edited by Ira Glass. Published last year, it only just surfaced for me via Scott Berkun.**

Based on my boundless admiration for Glass's radio work, I'm pre-emptively declaring the book this week's crush.

Glass's radio programmes can slide from hilarious to heartbreaking in the space of five minutes, and always leave me wanting more. Like some of my other intellectual crushes, he's an extraordinary storyteller. His Transom Manifesto is one of the most valuable things I've made the time to read in the past year. It might be about building radio programmes, but you can apply his ideas to almost any kind of situation when you want to make something stick to your audience.

One of the points that stood out for me was this:

It's helpful to build into the way you think about stories the notion that lots of ideas aren't going to pan out. Our show's acquisitions budget, even at very beginning when we were still struggling for every dollar, was set up to commission a fourth more stories than we'd ever run, with the assumption we'll be killing lots of ideas.

Killing ideas is so, so hard. Editing out the great, gory, glorious quotations you've salted your essays with can feel like you're carving away at your own flesh. But god - imagine if public galleries worked up 20 shows a year, and then went forward with just the 15, or 10, or 5, best. And that that was okay with everyone - because they were the best. Wouldn't that be great?


* I say 'I', I may mean someone-else-who's-very-kind
** Who gave it a 3/5 rating, but who also loves the Best American series the way I do, so I'm not going to mind if TNKONF doesn't scale the heights I'm hoping it will.

My heart starts missing a beat

First up, and consistent with my love of pop science - National Geographic's Best Science Images of 2008

String vibrations

A failed "sandwich" of polymers

Not to be out-done on the art front: research has shown that infants respond to high-contrast images. Publisher Templar is releasing a book of monochromatic artworks for babies, including images by Hirst, Malevich and Riley. See the slideshow on the Guardian website.

Duck (1994) by Patrick Caulfield and Together (1993) by Josef Albers

Now it comes in 'pretty' too

I have endless admiration for the way the scientific community has gone all out to build awareness of its work and the issues it feels the public should know and care about.

Often this has been through a mutually beneficial relationship with the media. Many years ago I went to the talkfest that launched the New Zealand Humanities Council, and the only thing I remember from that day was Russell Brown saying that the arts and humanities could do a lot worse than to look to the example of the scientists when it came to building useful relationships with the media. Take for example the Royal Society of NZ's collaborations with Radio New Zealand and the Science Media Centre, a web service connecting journalists with scientific spokespeople. Otago Uni even has a masters degree in science communication.

Some of my favourite science communicators include Luca Turin and Atul Gawande, and I've blogged before about my love for these annual science writing anthologies.

Over the weekend I found a new intellectual crush: particle physicist Dr Brian Cox. As a member of the team working on the Large Hadron Collider, which goes live in a matter of days, he's been all over the media, including this interview with Kim Hill on Saturday. He's an immensely talented communicator, and I have to say, it doesn't hurt that he is also very easy on the eye.

Antimatter rap

It's been a while since the my last pop-science related post, so here for your Friday viewing pleasure: physicists rapping about the soon to be switched on Large Hadron Collider. The LHC will bang particles together at extraordinary speed in order to help physicists figure out some important questions about matter and antimatter ("matter's evil twin").

via Ian Sample at the Guardian

hell yeah

For me, science is like art. I don't know much about it, but I know what I like - and that includes reading stuff by people who do (and who make it accessible). Every year I buy this series and this series, and I currently have a big old intellectual crush on this guy.

Bogus science gets me hot under the collar. For this reason, I'm really looking forward to reading Ben Goldacre's review of homeopathy research today.

Side column: Even noticed how science has the best words? Quantam theory. Half-life. Heavy water. 'Noggin' and 'sonic hedgehog' are both morphogens (morphogens!) critical to the proper development of the human embryo. I could go on ...

Put that art history degree to good use

As reported in the Guardian, historical paintings of sunsets are being analysed in the hopes of providing information about climate change:

The team, at the National Observatory of Athens, is using the works of old masters to work out the amount of natural pollution spewed into the skies by eruptions such as Mount Krakatoa in 1883. ...

The team found 181 artists who had painted sunsets between 1500 and 1900. The 554 pictures included works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Hogarth. They used a computer to work out the relative amounts of red and green in each picture, along the horizon. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. The researchers found most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the three years following a documented eruption. There were 54 of these "volcanic sunset" pictures.

Prof Zerefos's team is now talking to the Tate in London about repeating the study with 40 paintings from the 20th century, to see whether artists have captured the effects of pollution on sunsets since the industrial revolution.

Want to prep yourself for taking part in the follow-up follow up study? Try David Adam's online sunset painting course.

Image: David Adams, East Coast Romance, acrylic on masonite. Image from davidadamsonline.com