Month: December 2016

Books Read in 2016

On 30 Dec 2016

So in the end, I finished 45 books in 2016:

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer
The Planet Mappers by E. Everett Evans
Adventures in Academic Cartography by Mark Monmonier
Arguably: Selected Essays by Christopher Hitchens
My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir by Chris Offutt
Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner
Persona by Genevieve Valentine
China at the Center: Ricci and Verbiest World Maps edited by Natasha Reichle
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Snakes of the Southeast (revised edition) by Whit Gibbons and Mike Dorcas
Wings of Sorrow and Bone by Beth Cato
Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler
Company Town by Madeline Ashby
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
The Usual Path to Publication edited by Shannon Page
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente
Ventriloquism by Catherynne M. Valente
Necessity by Jo Walton
Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
Not So Much, Said the Cat by Michael Swanwick
Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
The Man Who Made Models by R. A. Lafferty
Shoot the Moon by Nicolas Dupont-Bloch
Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente
Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling
Updraft by Fran Wilde
The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs by David Hone
Invisible Planets edited by Ken Liu
Bridging Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan
The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe
Treasures from the Map Room edited by Debbie Hall
The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain

(Links are to my reviews.)

I like to track what and how much I read. It amuses me to crunch the numbers, but most of you will be bored stiff by what follows.

The Glass Universe

By Jonathan Crowe

On 29 Dec 2016

In Astronomy & Space, Book Reviews

On December 25 the American astronomer Vera Rubin, whose discovery that galaxies were rotating too fast given the mass of their constituent stars provided evidence for the theory of dark matter, died at the age of 88. Her obituaries note the challenges Rubin faced as a pioneering woman in an overwhelmingly male field: prevented from doing graduate work at Princeton, she got her Ph.D. at Georgetown in 1954; in 1965 she became the first woman allowed access to the Palomar Observatory. In the June 2016 issue of Astronomy, Sarah Scoles decried the fact that Rubin’s discovery was somehow insufficient for a Nobel Prize, which she will now never win.

Inasmuch as Rubin was a pioneer, she was not the first woman in astronomy, nor the first to obtain a Ph.D., nor the first to be responsible for a discovery that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the cosmos—nor the first for whom recognition was unfairly delayed. Some of the women who came before her are the subject of Dava Sobel’s new book, The Glass Universe, coincidentally out this month from Viking.

A Venomous Roundup

By Jonathan Crowe

On 27 Dec 2016

In Reptiles & Amphibians

Black-tailed Rattlesnake (Crotalus molossus), Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo, December 20, 2008.

Some links on venom, rattlesnakes, and rattlesnake venom:

In April, BBC Earth explored venom overkill — why are jellyfish, snake and other creatures far more venomous than they need to be, especially given the metabolic cost of producing venom? The answer is deceptively simple: “[t]here’s no such thing as absolute toxicity” — venom is tailored to specific prey that may have evolved resistance to it.
Most North American rattlesnake venom lacks neurotoxins, but a recent study finds that their common ancestor did have the genetic ability to produce neurotoxic venom 22 million years ago. That ability has since been lost to specialization (see above): Western and Eastern Diamondbacks lost the ability to produce neurotoxins about six million years ago; Mojave Rattlesnakes, whose venom is neurotoxic, lost a myotoxin gene about four million years ago. [Science News]
A 36-year study of a population of Timber Rattlesnakes in the Adirondacks found that female rattlesnakes waited, on average, until they were 10 years old before having their first litter, and that most had only one litter in their whole lives. This has serious conservation implications. [via]

Opposition in the Age of Gish Gallops

By Jonathan Crowe

On 26 Dec 2016

In Current Events, Politics

The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is a rhetorical strategy of “drowning your opponent in a flood of individually weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.” Donald Trump’s variant of the Gish Gallop substitutes weak arguments with scandals and outrage, any one of which would normally be a political career-ender. But because Trump generates as many outrages in a day as most politicians do in a year, his political career stays alive. How? Because he presents too many targets for his opponents to get any purchase against a single one, and they exhaust themselves. It’s the political equivalent of a bed of nails, where the sheer number spreads the pressure out so that no single outrage can stab you and give you tetanus.

In Trump’s hands, this strategy—wearing out and outlasting any opposition by giving it too many targets—has been extremely effective. He’s been deploying it throughout the campaign and now the transition, and there’s no doubt his presidency will be the same.

A Herpetological Roundup

By Jonathan Crowe

On 14 Dec 2016

In Reptiles & Amphibians

Prairie Ring-necked Snake (Diadophis punctatus arnyi), Harding County, New Mexico. Photo by Andrew DuBois. CC Licence.

Prairie Ring-necked Snake (Diadophis punctatus arnyi), Harding County, New Mexico. Photo by Andrew DuBois. Creative Commons licence.

Five (relatively recent) things make a post:

BBC Earth on snake fungal disease: “In a few species snake fungal disease is having a truly devastating impact. ‘The main species I look at is a rattlesnake called the eastern massasauga,’ says Allender. ‘They have a 92.5% mortality rate from the disease.’”
Wildlife biologist Andrew DuBois takes great photos of wild North American reptiles and amphibians. See his Flickr and Instagram accounts. I’m fond of the garter snake shots, of course, but the species coverage in general is quite comprehensive. (Spadefoots! Ensatinas! Thread snakes!)
On Quora I answered a rather dumb question: How would you defeat a large snake that decided to attack you? “The short version: I wouldn’t need to, and if I did need to, I wouldn’t be able to.” Read on for the long version.
Maclean’s asks what’s killing the animals at Calgary Zoo — they’ve had a rash of sometimes-bizarre deaths, most recently seven penguins. But one stood out, at least to me: “one zookeeper resigned after starving a corn snake to death.” I have kept and raised dozens of corn snakes. They’re the easiest snake out there. As I said on Twitter, “if a zoo can’t keep a CORN SNAKE alive — something 8-year-olds manage to do all the time — that’s a serious red flag.”
Many snakes, including hognose snakes and European grass snakes, feign death as a defence mechanism. I didn’t know that indigo snakes did it too — at their size, I didn’t think they needed to.

Pirate Utopia

By Jonathan Crowe

On 1 Dec 2016

In Book Reviews, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Bruce Sterling’s latest, Pirate Utopia (Tachyon, 2016) brings together several Sterling preoccupations: alternate histories, secret technologies, and liminal, out of the way places. This time the place is the city of Fiume (modern-day Rijeka, Croatia) at a complicated point in its history.

In September 1919, Italian irregulars led by the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio marched into the city to prevent it from being handed over to Yugoslavia in postwar peace talks. A year later the Italian Regency of Carnaro, an anarchic, corporatist, proto-fascist state was proclaimed. It would prove short-lived: D’Annunzio refused to recognize the Treaty of Rapallo, which established Fiume as a Free State, and his regime was expelled by Italian forces in December 1920. Fiume itself would be formally annexed by Italy in 1924.