What science books ought a bookstore stock?

I have a little metric for rationality that I exercise now and then: when I visit a bookstore, I compare the sizes of the religion/new age sections to the size of the science section…if I can find it. Typically, there’s at least a 10:1 disparity in the amount of shelf space dedicated, and it’s often much worse — there have been a few bookstores where, when I ask to find the science books, the clerk will point me to a small shelf labeled “Pets/Nature”. Bleh.

Anyway, I got a good question on Saturday at Guelph, which also mentioned this cluelessness by too many bookstores. Could we compile a list of excellent science books, that is, books that should appeal to the lay public, have some chance of commercial success, and that we think do a good job of presenting an interesting and accurate view of science? I suspect there are a few people here who read books, and might have some opinions here — how about expressing them in the comments?

What I’d like to accumulate is actually a couple of lists. If you went to the religion section of the local Barnes & Noble, you’d be quite surprised if the Christian bible were absent — similarly, I’d like a list of the essential books a good bookstore ought to carry, the ones that are perennially useful and popular. This would be handy for confronting an owner and asking him why he has so many obvious omissions.

Another list would be of commercially viable popular science books. These would be books that present good science, but ought also to be popular among readers. Bookstore owners want to make money, so doing a little pre-screening for them and helping them to make an informed decision would be productive and helpful, and maybe they’d actually listen if we showed a list like that.

So here’s the deal: nominate some books. For each one, say whether it is essential or popular. It might also be useful to assign a broad category (math, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, psychology, for instance) to each. I’ll compile them later this month and put together some simple pdfs that you can download and use at your local bookstore to try and encourage some upgrading of the stock.

Actually, I do own Expelled

It’s true. While I was in Guelph, a sneaky-looking fellow handed me a disc, and told me it was just for me — and that it included the lie-correcting subtitles.

I appreciate it. I still haven’t bothered to watch it, but someday, maybe while I’m dying of some gruesome disease, I’ll want some horrible external pain to distract me, and then I’ll play it. Or maybe I’ll show it as a test of machismo — how long can I bear the stupidity before growling and mauling the machine into silence?

A harrowing tale

The hateful Reverend Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church was a heck of a father. Some of his kids have escaped the hellish prison of WBC, and one, Nathan Phelps, has written about his upbringing. Religion was a tool of oppression, something to instill fear and allow an angry father to control his family, and to justify violence against them.

Nathan Phelps is now an atheist, and says that he “agrees with prominent atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins, who has said that religion can be ‘real child abuse.'”

(via erv)

What’s wrong with William Ayers?

William Ayers was a young radical in the 1960s — this is admitted, accepted, and not in question at all. Now William Ayers is a respected academic, somebody who is no longer advocating violence, who is a crusader for social justice and urban educational reform within the system, and that sounds like it ought to be an interesting and worthy story. So why is the Republican party trying to brand him as a terrorist? He’s a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago!

The latest sad twist is that he was invited to speak at a student research conference, and the craven University of Nebraska-Lincoln canceled the event under pressure from donors and politicians. The governor of the state called the invitation an “embarrassment” and said “Ayers is a well-known radical who should never have been invited to the University of Nebraska”; representatives and senators chimed in with similar sentiments; a regent called it “bad judgment”; donors to the university threatened to withhold further contributions. This is insane. Ayers hasn’t committed a crime, and he’s not a danger to society — this is a fellow who clearly has a deep commitment to improving society (perhaps, to Republican eyes, that is his crime).

Has anybody thought to look at what Bill Ayers actually promotes? He has a website, and it’s trivial to look up what he’s advocating. For instance, here is a description of his book, Teaching Toward Feedom:

In Teaching toward Freedom, William Ayers illuminates the hope as well as the conflict that characterizes the craft of education: how it can be used in authoritarian ways at the service of the state, the church, or a restrictive existing social order-or, as he envisions it, as a way for students to become more fully human, more engaged, more participatory, more free. Using examples from his own classroom experiences as well as from popular culture, film, and novels, Ayers redraws the lines concerning how we teach, why we teach, and the surprising things we uncover when we allow students to become visible, vocal authors of their own lives and stories. This lucid and inspiring book will help teachers at every level to realize that ideal.

Why, that sounds admirable. So why are these lunatics shrieking for his head, and condemning Barack Obama for simply attending meetings as a community organizer at the same time as Bill Ayers?

It’s obvious. The right-wing hate machine, desperate for a way to smear a candidate who has an unimpeachable history as an advocate for social justice, strained to find some dangerous association, and the worst they could come up with is a gentle, writerly academic who let the passions of his youth lead him into violent and illegal actions 40 years ago — actions that he considers just. They ignore his history ever since — apparently, there is no redemption unless you embrace Jesus and Republican intolerance, ala Chuck Colson — and they pretend that his words now simply don’t matter. They stir up the mob to hatred, and the mob calls in threats of violence against an educator, and UNL simply surrenders in cowardice.

Bill Ayers is a reason to vote against Republican demagoguery tomorrow.

PZ Myers finally watches a certain DVD!

You may all recall that a certain bad movie was released in mid-April…a movie which I have not yet seen, but which is now available on DVD. I was just at the local gas station/grocery store/video store, and there it was, available right there on the shelf. I considered it for a few minutes, and then, since I was paying for gas anyway, I tossed it on the counter and brought it home. Yeah, I know, I wasted $2.12, but it’s about time I got it over with.

I’m about to sit down and watch it. I figure one way I can recoup my investment is by live-blogging it.

[Read more…]

The Mason’s Apprentice

My latest Seed column slipped quietly onto the interwebs last week — it’s an overview of how the glues that hold multicellular organisms together first evolved in single celled creatures, represented today by the choanoflagellates.

Just as a teaser, the next print edition that should be coming out soon will continue the focus on enlightening organisms of remarkable simplicity with a description of the results of the Trichoplax genome. Get it! You will also be rewarded with a great issue focusing on science policy.

The dumbification of Spore

As anyone who has followed computer games at all lately knows, Spore is the recently released computer game from Maxis that was initially touted as a kind of partial simulation of evolution. Unfortunately, It wasn’t a very good simulation of much of anything, and as a game it has only been a partial success, with some parts being quite entertaining and others deserving a resounding “meh”. (Disclaimer: I have the game, but haven’t bothered to install it yet; I’ve let Skatje play it for me, and I’ve read the reviews, and suffered a noticeable loss of enthusiasm from that exposure.)

Now there is a revealing inside view of the Spore development process, with some tantalizing hints of some really great stuff that was implemented in early versions of the game, that never made it to release. Here’s the problem: the developers divided into two competing/complementary teams with radically different goals, a “cute team” and a “science team”. Guess who won?

This was Spore’s central problem: Could the game be both scientifically accurate and fun? The prototyping teams were becoming lost in their scientific interests. Chaim Gingold, a team member who started as an intern and went on to help design the game’s content creation tools, recalls a summer spent playing with pattern language and cellular automata: “It was just about being engaged with the universe as a set of systems, and being able to build toys that manifested our fascination with these systems and our love for them.” But from within this explosion of experimental enthusiasm came an unexpected warning voice. Spore’s resident uber-geek and artificial intelligence expert Chris Hecker was having strong misgivings about how appealing all this hard science would be to the wider world. “I was the founding member of the ‘cute’ team,” he says with pride. “Ocean [Quigley, Spore’s art director] and Will were really the founding members of the ‘science’ team. Ocean would make the cell game look exactly like a petri dish with all these to-scale animals and Will would say, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen!’ and some of us were thinking, ‘I’m not sure about that.'”

(That, by the way, is from the Seed magazine article on the game. You’ve probably already seen it since you all subscribe, right?)

This is the annoying mantra of far too many people, from Barbie to Chris Hecker: “science is hard”. Yes, it is…and that’s what makes it fun! Games are also hard, if they’re any good — you often have to master difficult moves, arcane strategy, work fast or plan far ahead, or solve tricky puzzles, and that’s why we choose to play them, that’s the appeal. What I was looking for in Spore was for someone to take a look with a gamer’s eyes at the process of science and extract from it the puzzle-solving essence and make it approachable and entertaining; instead, they seem to have given up on the science and instead created animated plush dolls for amusement’s sake.

It’s a real shame. There is a little hope in an unlikely suggestion:

I hope that Maxis announces that it intends to rectify this odd deviation from their plan through expansion packs, including a complete overhaul of the Cell Stage and Creature Stage, at minimum. The forced linear progression of the game and forced evolution should also be removed from the Cell and Creature Stages, as it is not faithful to the freedom of the advertised product. (Evolution to a better brain should be optional, at least in the Creature Stage, as it was in the earlier videos.) I do not believe that we have a right to demand it be free, as the development costs of this game are already astronomical. This may have not been as much of a problem if they hadn’t been spending the past few years removing content.

Somebody at Maxis should have encouraged everyone to embrace the science. It could have been great. I don’t know why they didn’t, but I suspect that a bean counter somewhere noted that it never hurts to underestimate the intelligence of the buying public…and decided to embrace the lowest common denominator instead of aspiring to greatness.