Kent Haruf’s Plainsong

Kent Haruf’s Plainsong is an aptly named novel: a plain story in plain writing style. My copy contains a dedication by a previous owner: “Enjoy – the words of this novel ring true; always have told the children: ‘Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans!’” – which seems like a fitting description: Plainsong tells of the day-to-day struggle of everymen and -women living in Holt, Colorado, a ficticious town. There is no big conflict and no happy end – just plain life. The name and place and time don’t matter – Holt is a cipher for every Small Town, USA.

Geek love in its noblest form — Carl Zimmer’s Science Ink

You think crocheting mathematical objects is almost too geeky to bear? Then you might want to sit down now!

It all started when Carl Zimmer saw a friend’s tattoo of a DNA molecule and realized he had bumped into the tip of a vast hidden iceberg.

He soon started to collect pictures scientists sent him. It probably helped that he is a rather well-known science writer for papers like the New York Times and magazines such as Discover; if I’d asked people for pictures of their body they’d have sued me for harrassment.

So far Carl has amassed more than 250 tattoos on his blog The Loom. If you ever feel the need to procrastinate, this collection is a great way to spend time.

And it gets even better. Now a selection of his collection got published as a book — Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

In November 2011 Science Ink even made the #2 spot in the Amazon best seller lists for … Beauty and Fashion!

That makes me hope to see a new trend emerging here. I’d prefer to see more DNA tattoos than those ubiquitous tramp stamps.

Science Ink is on my Christmas wishlist. Let’s hope Nicola James reads this …

Florian

We steady ourselves with the past — Lauren Groff: The Monsters of Templeton

Hey, it’s that beast from Learning GNU Emacs, but what is it doing here? I found it’s flipped twin in the background of Lauren Groff‘s webpage. Her designer seems to be inspired by O’Reilly book covers – every single page features an animal I associate with computer programming.

Anyhow, enough of the geeky stuff. Why was I on Groff’s webpage anyway?

“Every era casts cancer in its own image” — latent ancieties driving cancer research

“There are all sorts of questions to ask about science, beyond whether it’s correct or not” wrote Philip Ball in his new weekly column in the Guardian. Maybe! If it is true, the best way to explain it would be by example. In response to the first 100 online comments, Philip Ball specified his aims as

“writing about science as something with its own internal social dynamics, methodological dilemmas, cultural pressures and drivers” *

That still sounds a bit abstract. What are these cultural pressures and drivers?

Obsessive-compulsiveness at its best — Ursus Wehrli’s art of tidying up

How to explain abstract scientific concepts? Ideally in a fun, engaging way with a clear punch-line and message that people find easy to carry home with them.

‘For now failed’ — cheating German ex-minister threatens with comeback

Rapid rise, steepest fall! Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg was German minister of defence until March 2011, when his PhD thesis was proven to be riddled with plagiarism.

Emotions ran high this year in Germany.

Are you up for the fight? An arts critic for science

“It’s always wise to start that discussion by stating that Newton’s laws of motion and Darwinian evolution aren’t merely examples of western hegemony,”

“Anthropomorphism of a disease” — Emperor of All Maladies wins Guardian Book award

The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, just won the Guardian First Book award! First the Pulitzer, now this – not bad at all for a science book.

Sorry, Rocky and Einstein — other people matter!

When I was chubby and overweight as a kid, my friends used to call me ‘the buoy’ because I looked like a floating ball when trying to swim. Things started to change when I began practicing karate at the age of 14. Over the next ten years, I lost my excess fat and finally identified so much with the martial arts that I wrote a book about them. It’s not that I was particular talented, I just kept on practicing, even long after other people –many far more talented than me– had dropped out.

“Our intuition is pretty darn poor” – how statistics saves lives

I just came back from a systems biology conference at the Sanger where I heard a talk by Keith Baggerly, well known as a practitioner of “forensic bioinformatics,” the dark art of using raw data and reported results to reconstruct what the methods must have been.