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January in the Library: Science!

When I was a child my parents did their best to encourage my interest in the STEM disciplines, with the idea that this interest would see me through to a rewarding career in some technical field or other. You see how that ended. I did, however, have a small collection of picture books about the biosphere, the wonders of the universe, and similar arcane topics, and I consulted them when I thought that an artist’s view of Saturn from one of its moons would do me any good. I fared less well with school-related math/science textbooks, and by the time fate had landed me in a high school chemistry class the muses of precise computation and I were no longer speaking. But science isn’t a guarantee of what some might consider opaque reading, as a walk through our comfortably appointed bookstacks will show.

I asked librarians Larry Gainor and Jane Stimpson to put on their lab coats and find us some science books.

I just finished leafing through a chapter in one of Larry’s picks, Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (Q172.5 E77 G65 2010), in which the author vivisects the works of a Dr. Gillian McKeith, a popular television nutritionist in the UK. You’ll be disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that her fly-by-night credentials and a stunning capacity to cloak fishy health claims in scientific-sounding words have earned her quite a following. She’s been known to sic her lawyer husband on people who put their suspicions about her credibility into print, and I imagine that he stays busy. Goldacre ruminates in an entertaining and informative way on her, the scientific method, the placebo effect, and related themes before teeing off on further enemies of logic and common sense, including homeopathy and vaccine scoffers. Goldacre is a physician in London, and writes a “bad science” column for The Guardian.

If my parents had known that scientific inspiration was often the companion of such outré topics as drug use, dreams, and the sudden onset of unusual psychological states they might have changed their thinking about STEM courses, so maybe it’s a good thing they never saw a copy of Larry’s second selection, Michael Brooks’ Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science (Q 175.37 B76 2012). Both Otto Loewi, a German pharmacologist, and August Kekulé, a German chemist, made paradigm-changing contributions to their fields after following through on inspirations that came to them while fast asleep. Kary Mullis, an American biochemist, and Steve Jobs (I think you know who he is) both cited the powerful psychedelic drug LSD as an important impetus to their later achievements. It bears mentioning that Otto Loewi and Kary Mullis won Nobel Prizes for their work. Sudden and inexplicable inspirations, Brooks shows, were behind remarkable advances in the Manhattan Project and the development of the electric motor. Being by nature drawn to the tamer amusements, however, I think it best for me to concede scientific pursuit to those best suited for it, and proceed to Larry’s third pick.

Uh oh. Ed Regis’ Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (Q 173 R44 1990) is stuffed like a cocktail olive with science that I’m glad my parents probably never gave much thought to. Mambo Chicken celebrates the do-it-yourself scientist; unaffiliated visionaries chasing their technological dreams on a church mouse budget. The book takes its name from the research of one Arthur Hamilton Smith, studying the effects of increased G-forces back in the 1970s. He put several hundred chickens, with everything they’d need to live for a while, into a large centrifuge in a laboratory at UC Davis. He spun them around at two-and-a-half Gs, and kept them G’d up for several months. When the chickens came out their muscles were almost cartoonishly enlarged, in coping with the extra gravity. In fact, their physical capacities increased threefold, by his measurements. I can only wonder how these results were kept a secret from the administrator responsible for varsity sports at the campus, or if they weren’t, what combination of social and organizational pressure kept the school’s star athletes out of the centrifuge.

Let’s see what Jane turned up.

By now you may find yourself tempted to think that extravagant theorizing and an infatuation with untestable hypotheses belong to marginalized Dr. Frankensteins, but you’d be wrong. Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law (QC 794.6 S85 W65 2007) tells us that even very bright people are not immune to them. String theory promised to explain The World and How it Works, except that it didn’t. I hope that you’ll let me get off with not rehashing this in terms that would convince you that I knew what I was talking about, because I don’t. But that shouldn’t worry us; apparently, neither did the many boffins that embraced it as the Swiss army knife of physics theories. Short-list this if you’re pajama-comfy with compound nouns beginning with the word “quantum.”

As I’m plainly out of my depth in the natural sciences I see with relief that Jane included some nice picture books in her list. I was drawn immediately to The Key Muscles of Yoga: Your Guide to Functional Anatomy in Yoga (RA 781.7 L66 2006), where my favorite asanas are modeled by lightly muscled skeletons. Now I can see the exact groups of muscles, tendons, and ligaments that cause me intractable pain when I attempt, for instance, the full lotus position. For some reason the artist put eyes in the skeletons, making them look like the Martians in the Mars Attacks movie of some years back. Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (QM 455 S35 2010) delivers on its title’s promise with microscopic images of the brain. If you’re familiar with the work of H. R. Giger or Jackson Pollock you can skip a trip to the library, and also forget about buying that scanning electron microscope you’ve had your eye on. Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (N72 S3 E55 2009) is a collection of essays on Mr. Darwin and his work, presented in the scholar-lite format that makes it accessible to readers whose SAT English scores were higher than their Math scores. I especially enjoyed “Darwin at Home: Observation and Taste at Down House,” with its period photographs of the Darwin household. I noticed one wallpaper pattern that looked uncannily like the electron microscope pictures in Portraits of the Mind.

Oh, gosh; look at the time. Let’s see if I can find a stamp pad that needs inking around here. Check in next month, when we celebrate African-American Heritage. In the meantime, stay on the qui vive, and use the scientific method carefully in your day-to-day adventures.

Warm regards on a cool day,

Rich

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This is so neat! #sanjaclibrary @sanjaclibrary ・・・ Happy Friday! We're celebrating with a new feature called #bookfacefriday. Want to see more? Check out @austinpubliclibrary on Instagram!

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