What good books have you read recently?

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

So are yuo supposed to tell Bush how to run America?

[Cain]

Bush is a tool.  If he read The Prince, all the oil execs and Enron people would've died in plane crashes or of heart attacks by now.  As well as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

[Fredfredly ⊂(◉‿◉)つ]

i actually dedicated my to cheney.

heh. my paper sucks, but im DONE!

also i put a pcture of Prince on the cover....heh heh

[Cain]

Oh dear God...

Good work with the dedication though.

[Sinister Dexter]

Reading Four Past Midnight by Stephen King.  I'm actually about halfway through Secret Window, Secret Garden.  King's very good at what he does.

Finished Deception Point by Dan Brown, the best suspense writer I've ever read.

[Cain]

Brown?  Suspense writer?  Please for the love of God read some Ludlum or Robert Little, asap.

Now reading John Horgan - The Psychology of Terrorism

[East Coast Hustle]

I just finished "The Outlaw Sea" by William Langeweische.

Cain, you need to read this one. Ignore the nominal point of the book and focus on his description of the ocean as an economic and geopolitical entity and how it deals with the problems that arise in relation to the concept of nation-states.

[Cain]

That does sound interesting, I'll order it as soon as I'm back home.

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC]

Reading: "The Montauk Project" - LAIL

[Cain]

I'm reading the Inculabula stuff that relates to that.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Not a book but:

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear & Loathing in Elko
http://www.gonzo.org/elko.txt

[deet]

I've read two books from the library in the last few weeks

Magical Thinking, by Augusten Burroughs. It's a good book written by a guy who may have a schizoid personality (hence magical thinking.) There's nothing _too_ obscene, but he does give um.. graphic descriptions of acts that would have him arrested in Utah, and a few of them involve Catholic priests. Don't say I didn't warn you! It's still interesting, but yeah... the blowjob-from-the-undertaker chapter caught me off guard.

I pulled a random book off the fiction shelves this morning, called 'Zombie.' by Joyce Carol Oates. I know if the guy who wrote the review on the back cover read the book, but it's still decent. A lot of ampersands; It's kind of like being inside the conciousness of a delusional murderer. So far, in 80 pages, I've learned how to perform an ice pick lobotomy.

"Hammer the pick five centimeters deep, through the bony deposit. Move pick medially seven to ten degrees, then laterally fifteen to twenty degrees. Remove with a twist, apply pressure to the eye socket to prevent hemmoraghing." MMMMM, I sure hope the chick sitting behing me on the bus didn't read it over my shoulder

[awake]

i am in the middle of a philip k dick reading frenzy

last books i read this last month


do androids dream of electric sheep ? (for the 2nd time)
the 3 stigmata of palmer ledritch(for the 2nd time)

the penultimate truth (1st time)

in the middle of the divine invasion


and next in line are


galactic pot healer
a scanner darkly
flow my tears(2nd time)
martian time slip
dr bloodmoney



pkd is the shit.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I just started reading a zombie book called "Breathers"

So far, so good.

[Kai]

Just read a really good article from the Journal of Conservation Biology (Noss 1996) called "The Naturalists are Dying Off". The author echoes my own believe, that people in the biological sciences are spending way too much time at computers making models and way too little time in the field doing simple studies of observation and comparison. Not all science is experimental; just look at classic astronomy. Natural history, the observational study of organisms in their environment, is as important if not the most important thing a biologist should learn. Not only that, but natural history study is what gets people INTERESTED in biology. Darwin, the greatest biologist of all time, was a conssumate naturalist. Yet we are more and more retreating to computer labs and producing models with equations; how do we separate the model from the actual reality if we spend no time in the field "letting the organism speak to us", as Barbara McClintock would say. There are less and less taxonomists and systemacists every year as people retire and positions are not replaced. Natural history has become a lesser science. This is very sad.

Whats even sadder is that this lapse of care for naturalism is causing mistakes. Ecologists with no real grounding in taxonomy and natural history have been making many mistakes leading to introductions of invasive species. But how could they know? They spend all day in a computer lab with eletronic models and points of data representing organisms. They don't really know the organisms at all.

So, this paper and I are calling for a return to natural history study, where organisms once again become living beings in the context of a living planet rather than points on a screen, and where utmost enthusiasm is placed upon understanding systematics and life history rather than gaining yet another brownie point by writing a paper about some useless meaningless model.