David Dobbs: Reef Madness : Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”
David Dobbs and Richard Ober: The Northern Forest
What's wrong with the land-use debate in the Great North Woods (and elsewhere).
Brian Greene, editor: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 (The Best American Series)
Contains my NY Times Magazine story on the decline of the autopsy
Gina Kolata, Editor: The Best American Science Writing 2007 (Best American Science Writing)
Contains my NY Times Magazine story on an experimental brain surgery for depression.
David Dobbs: The Great Gulf: Fishermen, Scientists, and the Struggle to Revive the World's Greatest Fishery
An epistemological argument disguised as a fish fight.
A few that rolled away with the tide ...
PsychCentral not impressed with Outliers
Look Who's in the Operating Room
From the Deutches Museum, tractors as core culture
And from Boing Boing, a Studley tool chest. And I was all excited to get my little canvas toolbag yesterday.
-
Technorati Tags:
Malcolm Gladwell, Medtronics, Deutsches Museum, Wildlife
For those in or near NYC, a notable event: Fear researcher Joseph LeDoux, whom I profiled a while back in Scientific American Mind, will lecture about fear -- and then, fearlessly, play with his R&R band, 'The Amygdaloids.' (The amygdala is the brain's fear center.)
I can't make it, much to my chagrin, but having met LeDoux -- who is highly enjoyable company and has done Nobel-Prize-level work defining fear's neuralogical pathways -- I know this will be a highly fascinating, fun, and funny evening.
at the NY Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
(250 Greenwich St @ Barclay), 40th floor
Map & directions
More info (including registration, recommended) at the NYAS announcement.
Joe LeDoux speaks and plays live with his band, The Amygdaloids!November 11, 2008
7:00 - 8:30 pmIn the world today it can often seem like there is much to fear, making it more important than ever that we understand how that fear makes us feel. Renowned NYU neuroscience researcher Joseph LeDoux presents his latest research about the mysteries of emotions and the workings of the brain, with a particular focus on how the brain reacts to fear.
To demonstrate some different points about the brain and emotion, LeDoux will then also play live with his band, The Amygdaloids. The groups is made up of scientists and musicians, including environmental biologist Tyler Volk, to perform songs about love and life inspired by the lab. You can hear samples of their music on our Facebook page in the music area.
LeDoux is a University Professor and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, and a member of the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology at NYU. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion and memory. Read the recent article on LeDoux's work from Scientific American.
Reception and book signing to follow.
I'm brave, I'll call this one early: Go here for some wonderful photos of our next president.
© Callie Shell/Aurora for Time
A couple months ago I became a subscriber to Very Short List, an email list that sends you just ONE web link a day, 5 days a week, as a way of clueing you in to something that is both good and overlooked: Might be a movie, a web site, a blog, a book.
I've now become a (modestly) paid "advisor" to a new VSL email sub-offering, VSL Science, a science-only version of the same daily email. The Shirky talk on Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus in my previous post is today's VSL Science offering, and it was something I managed to stumble over and offer up in my advisor role. It's a fun list to get, so you might want to subscribe (free) and see if you like it. In any case, from time to time I'll include a VSL Science or other VSL posting here, just as I post other items of note I bump into around the web.
Tags: VeryShort List
Walter Benjamin is a very interesting writer, with a wild range of work (music, Marx, hashish, much much more), a highly distinctive style and one of those early-20th-century European lives that seems impossibly full of intense cultural force and historical fate; his memoir of his youth, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, is particularly affecting, and painful indeed in light of his mysterious end -- he died at the Spanish-French border trying to escape from the Nazis, possibly from suicide, possibly murdered by Stalinist agents.
courtesy Harvard University Press
A fascinating man, a wonderful writer -- and to judge from his tips for writing, a person of stupendously rigorous habit. I stumbled across these at Marginal Revolution. I put my favorites in bold and a few comments in brackets. Use with caution.
I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.
II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
[In his great Vietnam book Dispatches, Michael Herr says a friend gave him this advice in this form: "Don't piss it all away at cocktail parties." Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, wrote that one of his all-time low points was reading some freshly completed but not-yet-published short stories out loud to a crowd of socialites, one of whom later (by his account) moved in on him and broke up his marriage.]
III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process. [!!!]
IX. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.
X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
XII. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/08/walter-benjamin.htmlTags: WalterBenjamin, writing, advice