science news
Jan. 20th, 2007 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabThe torn-out pages from magazines are not overwhelming, but the pile is big enough that I might as well feed y'all the scraps, so I can recycle some paper. Let me note that Discover's format changes during 2006 have made it annoyingly difficult to determine what issue one is looking at.
From the December 2006 issue of Discover: the essential all-time reading list, the 25 greatest science books ever written, at least in their opinion:
1 and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
3. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton
4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei
5. On The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus
6. Physics by Aristotle
7. On The Fabric of the Human Body byAndreas Vesalius
8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein
9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
10. One Two Three... Infinity by George Gamow
11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson
12. What is life? by Erwin Shrödinger
13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan
14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson
15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg
16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Takes by Oliver Sacks
19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
20. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman
21. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al.
22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey
23. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews
24. Micrographia by Robert Hooke
25. Gaia by James Lovelock
Honorable Mentions:
1. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
2. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
3. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
4. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
5. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
6. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
7. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
8. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
My apologies for not putting all the titles in italics, but I think you can all figure out that the titles are the words before the word "by" and the author(s) are the names after the word "by." Right?
The last page of that same issue is "20 Things You Didn't Know About Rats" including the facts that rats don't have gallbladders or tonsils. Also, rats do not sweat. They regulate their temperature by constricting or expanding blood vessels in their tails.
For some reason I've saved the 2 September 2006 issue of Science News, open to an article about new treatments for tuberculosis, but I have no idea of why.
9 December 2006 issue of Science News: the tube-lipped nectar bat, a small bat from the Andes, can stick its tongue out one and a half times its body length, the most of any mammal, and exceeded only by the chameleons, who can stick theirs out the most of any vertebrate.
Most of the rest of the pile seems to be articles about heart failure for my other blog, and book reviews for me to jot down titles to look for in the library. So I won't bore you with those.
We went to a Navy Band (not Marine Band) concert tonight; they were, of course, excellent. They had a vocalist, who was also the announcer, who sang a very nice tenor and an excellent bass - quite a range. Featured a clarinet soloist on one piece. The lights on stage went out during the middle of one number, and they had to stop until the lights flickeringly came back on. All in all, if part of the point of the concert was to prove that Balto. County school district needs to allocate some money to renovating Randallstown High, they succeeded in that point admirably: besides the wonky electrical system in the auditorium, there was totally inadequate handicapped access; as we were leaving, one lady's wheel chair fell completely over when she went over the curb (no ramp; luckily, no injuries, either), which was exacerbated by the inadequate lighting in the parking lot and the broad cracks in the pavement of the parking lot. (Does it surprise anyone to hear that Randallstown High is about 90% black, and that the "whiter" schools in the county are in better shape? One would think that in a county with this high a black population that there wouldn't be quite so obvious inequalities, but there you are.)
From the December 2006 issue of Discover: the essential all-time reading list, the 25 greatest science books ever written, at least in their opinion:
1 and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
3. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy by Isaac Newton
4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei
5. On The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus
6. Physics by Aristotle
7. On The Fabric of the Human Body byAndreas Vesalius
8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein
9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
10. One Two Three... Infinity by George Gamow
11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson
12. What is life? by Erwin Shrödinger
13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan
14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson
15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg
16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Takes by Oliver Sacks
19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
20. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman
21. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al.
22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey
23. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews
24. Micrographia by Robert Hooke
25. Gaia by James Lovelock
Honorable Mentions:
1. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
2. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
3. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
4. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
5. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
6. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
7. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
8. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
My apologies for not putting all the titles in italics, but I think you can all figure out that the titles are the words before the word "by" and the author(s) are the names after the word "by." Right?
The last page of that same issue is "20 Things You Didn't Know About Rats" including the facts that rats don't have gallbladders or tonsils. Also, rats do not sweat. They regulate their temperature by constricting or expanding blood vessels in their tails.
For some reason I've saved the 2 September 2006 issue of Science News, open to an article about new treatments for tuberculosis, but I have no idea of why.
9 December 2006 issue of Science News: the tube-lipped nectar bat, a small bat from the Andes, can stick its tongue out one and a half times its body length, the most of any mammal, and exceeded only by the chameleons, who can stick theirs out the most of any vertebrate.
Most of the rest of the pile seems to be articles about heart failure for my other blog, and book reviews for me to jot down titles to look for in the library. So I won't bore you with those.
We went to a Navy Band (not Marine Band) concert tonight; they were, of course, excellent. They had a vocalist, who was also the announcer, who sang a very nice tenor and an excellent bass - quite a range. Featured a clarinet soloist on one piece. The lights on stage went out during the middle of one number, and they had to stop until the lights flickeringly came back on. All in all, if part of the point of the concert was to prove that Balto. County school district needs to allocate some money to renovating Randallstown High, they succeeded in that point admirably: besides the wonky electrical system in the auditorium, there was totally inadequate handicapped access; as we were leaving, one lady's wheel chair fell completely over when she went over the curb (no ramp; luckily, no injuries, either), which was exacerbated by the inadequate lighting in the parking lot and the broad cracks in the pavement of the parking lot. (Does it surprise anyone to hear that Randallstown High is about 90% black, and that the "whiter" schools in the county are in better shape? One would think that in a county with this high a black population that there wouldn't be quite so obvious inequalities, but there you are.)
