The Frankenstein Universe: How The New York Public Library Blew Up the Ebook

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Frankenstein: The Afterlife of Shelley's Circle. The New York Public Library. Web site. iPad app. Free.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

"Reviewed" is too generous a term for this post. If I set out to write a proper review this colossal labyrinth of an ebook, you would have to wait for weeks, perhaps months, for my verdict. But since this particular work is free, I think the most that's necessary is to point you in its direction and wish you well. I downloaded Frankenstein this morning, and I've been enjoying perusing it greatly. While it's not a perfect ebook, I expect I'll be delving back into it for a long while.

Frankenstein comes to us from the New York Public Library. If you've ever been there, you've probably seen one of their impressive exhibits. As one of the greatest libraries in the world, the New York Public Library is also a great literary museum. To put on an exhibit, they will typically select some of the finest treasures from their collections, such as rare books, letters, maps, and prints. Frankenstein is like an exploded version of one of their exhibits. It's drawn from the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. As I wandered through the app, I sometimes wonder if there was anything in the collection that they didn't include in it.

At the core of this ebook is Mary Shelley's classic meditation on science and humanity's urge towards creation. Here you can listen to a dramatic reading from one chapter. The ebook contains accounts of the making of novel, as well as its reception. Essayists contemplate the powerful hold the story has had on us ever since, and how we've adapted its themes to science's progress, from the advent of nuclear weapons to our age of stem cell manipulations and genetic engineering. The whole project is lavishly illustrated with paintings and photographs.

This morning on the ArtsBeat blog at the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler wrote that "the app spins out widely and wildly." I have to agree with her. I found myself paging through stills from a disastrous 1981 Broadway production of Frankenstein that closed after one night, and asked myself, "Why am I looking at this?" I can't say that the experience gave me any insight into the book's place in our culture. The essays on Shelley's circle of friends veer off far from her novel. The app includes not one but two graphic novels. Frankenstein is also loaded with interactive features, which are nicely integrated technologicaly, but not thematically. While reading the piece on the making of the novel, you are invited to pop out a poll: "Do you get the most inspiration from creating on your own?" Why, yes I do! The app then informed me that 84% of the 13 people who voted agree with me. How 'bout them apples?

The ebook also has some technical flaws. I'm still clinging to my iPad 1, and I find that Frankenstein slows down its performance like no other ebook I've used. On more than one occasion, it even crashed. Which is odd, given that Frankenstein deals mainly in texts and pictures, which should make pretty modest demands on a tablet device. On top of the app's slow performance, it displays its essays in small windows that you have to scroll through, which took me back to the early days of the web. Sometimes when you follow a link, the app dumps you into the web-site version, as if you've fallen into a parallel universe.

If you find yourself annoyed by anything in Frankenstein, bear two things in mind. 1. It's free. 2. One touch of the screen will quickly take you to a different part of the app. Any time I've gotten bored by something in Frankenstein, I've found myself intrigued seconds later by one of the hundreds of elements of this app.

Perhaps that's the true sign of the greatness of Shelley's novel. The book was a Big Bang, and the universe it created is still expanding.

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

Wonders of Geology: Getting High On Mountains

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Wonders of Geology; An Aerial View of America's Mountains by Michael Collier. Published by Mikaya Press. iPad (iOS4.2 or later required), $12.99.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

“All true paths lead through mountains.” When I was growing up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, this line from the poems of Gary Snyder was a family touchstone. It probably came via my dad, who is mountain-obsessed, a chaser of summits and cirques who has hiked and trekked on five continents and now lives in the Alps. I've felt vaguely uneasy the past eight years or so, living here among the extremely low hills of the Eastern United States, and the photographs of Michael Collier, in the Wonders of Geology app, bring it all back: Yes, mountains really are where it's at.

The app was written and narrated by Collier, a geologist and physician who has been taking photographs from the cockpit of his 1955 Cessna professionally for more than 40 years. Based on his book Over the Mountains (An Aerial View of Geology), it is laid out in several sections that first teach you how to read a landscape's history from geological cues, then lead you through various American ranges to see for yourself how the mountains were formed.

$12.99 might seem steep, when there are plenty of ebooks out there for a buck. But this app is worth it. You'll be revisiting it for a long time, even after you've absorbed its lessons.

Most of the information comes to you in Collier's own rich, craggy voice. He describes the Earth's inner workings while a seemingly endless parade of fantastic scenes slips by–dunes, alluvial fans, thick, crystalline glaciers. The images are stunning, saturated with color and full of light. In one of my favorites, a Sierra valley cradles a string of glacial lakes that reflect a fierce gray-blue sky. In another, a peak in Morro Bay is bathed in the soft pink of a sunrise, and you can zoom in to see the ripples of the surf.

Collier is a deft and expressive narrator, peppering his explanations with charming turns of phrase. Tectonic plates bomb around the Earth's surface like “irresponsible bumper cars”; ridges caused by spreading centers ring the planet “like the stitches on a baseball.” He shifts expertly from the profound to the colloquial. “Plate tectonic theory has ushered in a new consciousness of the Earth's age,” he says, with grave wonder. Then his voice slips into a smile, and he quips: “How much time we talkin' bout? Lots.”

In fact, Wonders of Geology is less an ebook than a kind of hand-held, interactive exhibit, with ever-present audio guide. Photos and explanatory graphics outnumber pages of text many times over. When you do come across a page of prose, it's almost an interruption. I found myself thinking petulantly, Wait, I have to read this? Why aren't you reading it to me?!

Occasional textual interruptions aside, the app is a delight. I particularly enjoyed seeing glamor shots of mountains I know well, like the Panamints of Death Valley and the sere Eastern Sierra, where I learned to core bristlecone pines as a high school kid. The app includes so many ranges that any fan of North American mountains should be able to find their own familiar faces.

To be honest, though, I don't remember these mountains ever reaching quite the height of gorgeousness evident in Collier's photographs. Maybe you have to be several hundred feet up in a 57-year old biplane to get this level of insight. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is how my dad experiences them: intoxicatingly beautiful, mountains as drug.

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors. Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, TheAtlantic.com, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter .

I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All.

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. TED Books. Kindle, Nook, iBooks, $2.99

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Tonight, I want to talk to you about a national crisis. A global crisis. A crisis of such tremendous proportions that you may not even be aware that it is engulfing you and your loved ones and your neighbors in flames.

What is this crisis? It is a crisis of our brains. The brains of our fellow citizens are being digitally rewired. How? Here is how. Hundreds of millions of people are gazing at online videos, spending billions of aggregate hours slack-jawed in front of their monitors. These videos are sucking up all the time that these people would otherwise spend reading the great books that you and I grew up with. Remember those days back in the Reagan administration when we little tykes would page through Cicero and Racine? No more. Instead, we face an epidemic of short-term distraction. These videos last no more than 18 minutes, and often less. As soon as one video is over, we can choose from hundreds of others with the click of a mouse. Each one is different from the last, flooding our brains with an unnatural wealth of variety. Very soon, we even become addicted to that variety. Yes, that's right, addicted. It's an addiction no different from cocaine, heroin, vodka, bingo, Ben & Jerry's, Law & Order streamed on Netflix, or MySpace.

Wait, I meant Facebook. Nobody uses MySpace anymore, so that can't be addictive.

Right. Where was I?

These videos are so addictive that they are cracking the very foundation of human civilization. The endless barrage of these tiny films erodes the circuitry in our prefrontal cortex that normally enable us to focus for long periods of time and compose Petrarchan sonnets to our loved ones. These videos evade the true complexity of life. They provide us with easy resolutions. They flatter us, rather than forcing us to ask tough questions about ourselves or our political system. We become zombies as the reward centers of the brain explode like fireworks, leaving us helpless victims for mind-controlling masters. Is it any wonder that the rise of these videos to global domination correlates perfectly with the rise of Kim Kardashian? What else could possible account for this coincidence?

Therefore we must take immediate steps to ban TED talks.

****

Continue reading “I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All.” →

Science by Candlelight

Posted on May 24, 2012 by admin

The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday, (Griffin, Bohn And Co., London, 1861), available free from Project Gutenberg in multiple e-reader formats and also from LibriVox as a free audiobook.

reviewed by Deborah Blum

"There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."

It was the above line that first caught my attention. The recognition that we often best appreciate our extraordinary natural world by seeing it through the lens of the ordinary: crystalline structure as revealed by the stitchery of winter frost, the chemical dance of light and life found in the changing colors of leaves, the hot whisper of oxygen as it sends the flame higher.

That recognition has driven much of my own science writing – the idea that we can often illuminate science through tales of the everyday. I wish I could tell you that I'd thought of it first, that it was somehow primordially my own. But, at best, I think I can claim to be carrying on a time-honored tradition. Because it's very clear that the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday was doing that and doing it exceptionally well some 150 years ago.

Here at Download the Universe, we reviewers are mostly looking toward the future – what we hope is the promise of e-books, their potential to transform the reading experience. Possibly transcend it. But I want to take this opportunity to explore another aspect of the electronic publishing world, the ability to explore our past, the free archives offered by publishers like Project Gutenberg.

Founded in 1971 by the late Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg began as a labor of love, the painstaking transfer of books in the public domain – many of them once forgotten– into digital life. The Gutenberg website now makes 39,000 free e-books available. It also links with digital partners to provide access to another 60,000 e-manuscripts. Like Faraday's candle–to stretch that analogy a little here - it offers an open door, a brightly lit access to the words, and even the wisdom, of our past. Like no other generation, we can explore this virtual library, stumble across old chemical histories of candles and learn to think differently about our own work.

And stumble is exactly what I did.

I see you are not tired of the candle yet, or I am sure you would not be interested in the subject in the way you are.

Not that it was much of a fall. More of a sidestep. I spend a lot of my time writing about and researching the history of science, for books like The Poisoner's Handbook, my recent story of poison, murder and the invention of forensics in the early 20th century. I do so because I believe–no, really, I know–that we cannot understand who we are unless we understand how we got here. And so I was doing some research into the history of chemistry and Faraday's book almost immediately appeared in my browser.

This, I think, is the other magic wrought by on-line publishers like Project Gutenberg. You can be happily rambling through the history of chemistry (a phrase, I know, that only a geek could write) and suddenly discover that a scientist born in the close of the 18th century (1790) understood perfectly the very principles of science communication that you'd been preaching in the 21st century.

Continue reading “Science by Candlelight” →

What the Moon is Really Made of

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Moon Rocks: An Introduction to the Geology of the Moon by Andrew G. Tindle and Simon P. Kelley. Published by The Open University. iPad (iBooks 2 and iOS5 required), free.

Guest review by Veronique Greenwood

In 1988, after 12 men had walked on the surface of the Moon and nearly 850 pounds of lunar rocks had been ferried back to Earth, 13% of Americans were purportedly still under the impression that the Moon was made of green cheese. While I hope that number has shrunk in the last couple decades, I can testify that I know precious little more about the Moon than that it is indeed made of rock and that during the Cold War, bits of it were glued to plaques and passed out as gifts. Also, at some point, I believe some golf was played there.

If you're looking to sound like less of a dunce at astronomer cocktail parties, you might want to check out The Open University's free 70-page ebook on the basics of Moon geology. It's well, if plainly, written and provides links to the original research that underlies our understanding, though on several important counts it falls short of fulfilling its promise as an interactive textbook.

I learned some interesting tidbits, especially in the first chapters, that made me look at the Moon differently. For instance, we're still not really sure how it formed; each of the leading theories explains some, but not all, of what we've observed about it. One of the most widely accepted models proposes that the Earth was struck by an object the size of Mars about 4.6 billion years ago, and the debris flung off by the cataclysm coalesced into the Moon. Alongside this rather dry description was a truly alarming figure showing sequential shots of our planet in the 23 hours after the impact, lurching on its axis and spraying out matter like a soaked tennis ball shedding water.

But the breathtaking violence wasn’t over yet. As it turns out, after the planets of our solar system themselves coalesced from surrounding debris millions of years earlier, there had been quite a lot of stuff left over. This floating junk was cleared from the inner part of the solar system by the planets sweeping around their orbits. Once the giant planets—Jupiter and Saturn—started to creep outwards, things got nasty fast. “Resonance effects caused orbital eccentricities that destabilised the entire planetary system,” the text relates. “Rapid and dramatic movement of the giant planets then occurred, causing 99% of the mass of the primordial disc to be ejected from the solar system and for much of the remainder to be thrown inwards to cause an influx of asteroids and thus a surge of impacts on the inner planets.”

To translate: as the planets shifted into a new alignment, they pulled on each other gravitationally such that their neat, concentric orbits went all to hell, and they careened around in a way that sets my teeth on edge just thinking about it, in the process flinging a punishing rain of giant boulders onto the inner planets, which is how our Moon got so bunged up.

The next chapter fast-forwards several billion years. Things are much quieter. It's 1971, and the Apollo 15 astronauts are collecting pieces of the moon when one of them, David Scott, gasps and cries, “Guess what we just found! Guess what we just found.” As related in a transcript of the mission audio, he's found a crystalline rock, which is beautiful proof that when the Moon was young, it formed a crust like Earth's.

I was excited to see that the book contained an embedded video of the Apollo 15 astronauts making their discovery. I love these fuzzy old recordings, these time capsules of men with gentle mid-twentieth century American accents exclaiming “Oh boy!” when they come across a chunk of lunar feldspar. But whenever I clicked on the video (I tried several times), it froze up, and all I got was the audio.

Audio from the Moon is better than no audio from the Moon, but I was much more disappointed when I got to the book's interactive activities. The book makes several mentions of petrology—the geology equivalent of pathology. Basically, you take fine slices of rock and look at them through a microscope in various kinds of light and identify the minerals within. With each mention of petrology I looked forward to trying it out for myself with the book's “virtual microscope.”

When I reached it, I skimmed the first activity's description, which laid out how the different kinds of light revealed the identifying properties of minerals, and jumped right into the interactive element. Once I was in, though, I saw that there was no interpretive text. There were zoomable views of the sample in various lights, but all of the explanations of what I was looking at were stranded back out in the main text. To learn anything about what to look for, I had to close the interactive element, read from the text, then open the element and try to click back to exactly the place where I had been before.

This was roughly as frustrating as being told you can look at either a guidebook or a city map, but never both at the same time.

As a result, I got very little from the seven virtual microscope activities, aside from some aesthetic enjoyment. I would have learned more if I'd had a paper textbook and a companion app that could be used together at the same time. I’m surprised that the Open University, a 41-year-old UK institution whose focus is distance learning, would have bungled this point.

The disappointment of the virtual microscope aside, the book succeeds fairly well as a teaching text for curious amateurs. I know quite a bit more about the Moon now than I did before. I can say with certainty that it's not made of green cheese but of things that–to a Moon n00b like me–can seem just as fanciful: substances like the mineral olivine, which is a remarkable canary yellow under cross-polarized light; and moondust, which, for reasons that are still mysterious, smells just like gunpowder.

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter .