Tag Archives: Books

Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota

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I’ve become very interested in Minnesota history, and by interested I mean annoyed in many cases. The first thing white Minnesotans did was to exploit the Indians. The second thing they did was to throw the Indians out, move them to reservations, kill them, and otherwise treat them very poorly. Meanwhile, they got going on the process of cutting down 90 percent of the trees in the state. Even New York State, where I grew up, did not have such wanton destruction of the forests, and Whitie had two hundred more years to do it there. They also killed off most of the wolves. Oh, and both wolves and Indians had actual monetary bounties on them. Both Indians and Wolves were killed for bounty in times recent enough that the average old Minnesotan white person may have had a parent or grandparent involved in that business.

I’m also very interested in Sherlock Holmes. My interest is partly because they are fun stories, but it goes deeper than that. I’m interested in semiotics, and the Holmes stories have been investigated and discussed in that context. I’m interested in race and racism, and the Holmes stories are a window int the inter-ethnic attitudes of colonial period England. I’m interested in South Africa, and these stories overlap in time with major events related to the British and South Africa, including the largest and most intense war ever fought by Britain to date. And so on.

So, how do these things relate? Well …
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To Jeffers with Jaf: A trip across time, space, and culture.

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There is a swath across the map of Minnesota that runs northwest to southeast across the state, separating the major biomes of the eastern two thirds of the country, and for complicated reasons. North, it is colder, south warmer. Much of the moister in the region, especially in the summer, comes from the Gulf of Mexico, directly to the south, whence air masses move north and swerve east. So, there is a west to east gradient of increased rainfall, and a south to north gradient of decreased rainfall. However, the cooler conditions to the north mean that what rain does fall counts for more, as there is less evaporation. There are other factors. Ultimately, the complex interaction between continental westerly, southerly gulf air masses with their storms, moisture gradients, and temperature gradients means that to the west of a certain line prairie (grasslands) is more likely to thrive, while woodland and forest should predominate to the east. And, north of a certain line, evergreen forest is more likely to thrive than deciduous. The exact mix of trees that thrive in each area depends on historical contingency, so each interglacial can have a different dominant species. In the present era, we see white pine in the north and oak with hickory in the south, but that changes even as we speak and various species grow back to replace the wanton, out of control lumbering of the 19th and early 20th century.
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Evolutionary Biology Geeks: Three must read books for you!

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Can you imagine Stephen Jay Gould recast as a tall and lanky Jesuit priest who has an interest in evolution? Can you imagine someone actually attempting the famous experiment of getting a large number of chimpanzees at keyboards to see if you can get any Shakespeare? Eventually? (The experiment is enhanced with the use of carefully dispensed M&M’s.) Did you ever wonder, if a chimpanzee did make the switch to human levels of intelligence (by training, drugs, surgery, whatever) what kind of scotch if would prefer?

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What bird field guides do you really need?

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There are several characteristics that make up a field guide. It should be “pocket size” (and birders have huge pockets, so this may not be as much of a restriction as it sounds). It should cover the geographical region in which you are watching the birds, although in some remote areas of the world you may not have this luxury. During my years working in Zaire, we had only a Southern African bird guide, and made due. And the book should be of the right kind and level for your needs.

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The Latest Ravirn Book, SpellCrash, Materializes Today: Meet the Author Tonight

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WebMage is an interesting book if you are a computer geek. For one thing, the title of the book uses CamelCase. For another thing, the main characters are a hacker and his laptop. But since this is also a fantasy book, the main character is also a non-human (but you wouldn’t’ know to look at him) who is one of the best code hackers among his kind (which happens to include many of the Greek mythical figures you’ve heard of) and his laptop is a shape-shifting familiar, who changes between a laptop and an imp-like daemon thingie who is explicitly programmed to be snarky, like a modern human hacker might program his or her system event sounds but smarter.
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Kelly McCullough, Author, at Har Mar on Tuesday

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Kelly McCullough, author of the Raverin series (starting with WebMage of fantasy/science fiction and dealing with artificial intelligence, magical computer technology, and mythology) will be making a local appearance here in the Twin Cities. Those of you who have followed the Twin Cities Creation Science Fair story already know the place: Har Mar Shopping Center. Or, to be more exact, at the Barnes and Noble at Har Mar.

The Har Mar visit will coincide with the release of McCullough’s latest book.

Day: May 25th (Tuesday)
Time: 7:00 PM

See you there! (I’m going to try very hard to make it)

Later in the year, Kelly will be visiting WisCon in Madison, Uncle Hugo’s in Minneapolis, and CONvergence (where I will also be making an appearance or two). Check Kelly’s site for details.

Summer Reading List

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Julia is going overseas for most of the summer, and she is putting together her reading list. I’m sure she’ll put together a fine list. But we live in a culture in which we are compelled to suggest to high school students what they might want to read, especially in preparation for college. I’ve looked at a couple of those lists, and they are dismal. Some seem to be lists of works that are especially long, challenging of language, in many cases unpublishable in the modern market, out of date, and boring. I mean, really, Moby Dick? Watch the movie, dude, the book is a bear.
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Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum: A review.

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Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum tries to make several different points. The central framework of the book, on which all the arguments are hung, is that science has a status, a place, in American culture, politics, and economy, and that this status has changed over time. Mooney and Kirshenbaum make the claim that science rose to an increasingly higher status than it had ever previously enjoyed through a series of events and transformations during the early and middle part of the 20th century, and subsequently, suffered a series of political and cultural defeats so that today real science holds a precarious position in the public view. The outcome of this reduced status is that important policy decisions that require an understanding of and appreciation for, and most importantly a certain level of trust in science are contaminated by right wing generated pseudoscience and politically motivated denialism.
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Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

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Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People is the book that the recently published article in Seed Magazine, which was in turn recently banned in an Illinois school is mainly about. Here is the Publishers Weekly overview of the book:

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