Okay I spotted this book while rough-shelving on my circ shift - finding books with cool and enticing titles - an occupational hazard yes? Dung Beetle Ecology edited by Ilkka Hanski and Yves Cambefort was published by Prinseton U. Press 20 years ago. I guess it caught my eye because, clenching my insufficiently gloved hands walking to work this AM (it was a mitten morning - should have checked) I was thinking about my post winter, ready to almost overflow composters and how I better really deal with them this spring. So the benefites of rot are high on my radar today.
Just a quick glance at the preface tells me Dung Beetles are good parents - building nests like birds and nurturing their young - some birds and Dung Beetles produce only one offspring per breeding season. So clearly they have to take good care of them, invest in college funds, the best summer camps, get braces on their teeth...dung beetles as helicopter parents - who knew?*
Yes I am going to check it out - not exactly lunch time reading but still more interesting than Dan Brown.
*some of the facts in this paragraph are from the preface some from my overly colourful imagination
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Showing posts with label more interesting than Dan Brown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label more interesting than Dan Brown. Show all posts
Friday, March 18, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Time for another book
Who knew the periodic table could be so fascinating? The Disappearing Spoon is a romp of colourful characters, interesting adventures, and very well explained science.
Full title: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean Please don't recall our copy - I have it in the Chemistry display.
Full title: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean Please don't recall our copy - I have it in the Chemistry display.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Book 3
The Archimedes Codex: revealing the secrets of the world's greatest palimpsest by Reviel Netz and William Noel.
When you work in a library, stumbling across fascinating books is a bit of an occupational hazard. I have been reading this one during my lunch breaks for a while. It's part of our Popular Science Collection.
"At 2pm on October 29th, 1998, at Christie’s auction house in New York, a very special old book was sold to an anonymous collector for $2,000,000. This collector deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in order to conserve it, image it, and study it. The book is special because it contains seven treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Two of these treatises, The Stomachion and The Method exist nowhere else in the world."
So part of it reads like the script for an action thriller - who is this anonymous collector? Part of it takes you back to the scholarship of Archimedes - ancient communications - I just read a lovely bit about how scrolls of papyrus which were made in Egypt, shipped to Syracuse and Archimedes carefully wrote down his findings in the form of a letter to Eratosthenes in Alexandria. - so that scroll made it's way back to Egypt. That we know about it is mere happenstance and it provides a great example of how remarkable the codex find is in itself. Medieval repurposing the original treatises into a prayer book and the late 20th century imaging technology to read the original manuscript and how it all comes together - a true story that makes Dan Brown's fictional concoctions pale in comparison without any of Brown's gratuitous sex and violence.
When you work in a library, stumbling across fascinating books is a bit of an occupational hazard. I have been reading this one during my lunch breaks for a while. It's part of our Popular Science Collection.
"At 2pm on October 29th, 1998, at Christie’s auction house in New York, a very special old book was sold to an anonymous collector for $2,000,000. This collector deposited the manuscript at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in order to conserve it, image it, and study it. The book is special because it contains seven treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Two of these treatises, The Stomachion and The Method exist nowhere else in the world."
So part of it reads like the script for an action thriller - who is this anonymous collector? Part of it takes you back to the scholarship of Archimedes - ancient communications - I just read a lovely bit about how scrolls of papyrus which were made in Egypt, shipped to Syracuse and Archimedes carefully wrote down his findings in the form of a letter to Eratosthenes in Alexandria. - so that scroll made it's way back to Egypt. That we know about it is mere happenstance and it provides a great example of how remarkable the codex find is in itself. Medieval repurposing the original treatises into a prayer book and the late 20th century imaging technology to read the original manuscript and how it all comes together - a true story that makes Dan Brown's fictional concoctions pale in comparison without any of Brown's gratuitous sex and violence.
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