Pirates, parties, pulps, and PowerPoint: Part 3 of a Download the Universe roundtable on e-reading

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This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

April 25, 2012

On April 4, the Pew Research Center’s released an extensive report on the country’s e-reading habits as part of its Internet and American Life project. It is, as is oftentimes the case with Pew reports, quite interesting and exceedingly bland. (You can find an introduction to the Pew report here; the full report is also available online or as a free download.) 

Continue reading “Pirates, parties, pulps, and PowerPoint: Part 3 of a Download the Universe roundtable on e-reading” →

How Our Brains Set the World Spinning

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

If there’s ever excuse to publish an optical illusion as cool as the “Rotating Snakes,” I’ll take it. This illusion was invented in 2003 by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, and ever since, Kitaoka and other scientists have been trying to figure out why it works. A new paper by Stephen Macknik at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix may have the answer.

As you’ll notice, the circles seem to rotate in response to where you look at the illusion. So Macknik and his colleagues tracked the movement of people’s eyes as they gazed at two of these wheels on a computer screen. Their subjects kept a finger pressed on a button, lifting it whenever they seemed to see the wheels move.

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Walled gardens, cruftiness, and a race to the bottom: Part 2 of a Download the Universe Roundtable on E-Reading

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This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

April 24, 2012

On April 4, the Pew Research Center’s released an extensive report on the country’s e-reading habits as part of its Internet and American Life project. It is, as is oftentimes the case with Pew reports, quite interesting and exceedingly bland. (You can find an introduction to the Pew report here; the full report is also available online or as a free download.) 

Continue reading “Walled gardens, cruftiness, and a race to the bottom: Part 2 of a Download the Universe Roundtable on E-Reading” →

Crap futurism, pleasure reading, and DRM: Part 1 of a Download the Universe Roundtable on E-Reading

Posted on by admin

This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

April 23, 2012

On April 4, the Pew Research Center’s released an extensive report on the country’s e-reading habits as part of its Internet and American Life project. It is, as is oftentimes the case with Pew reports, quite interesting and exceedingly bland. (You can find an introduction to the Pew report here; the full report is also available online or as a free download.) 

Continue reading “Crap futurism, pleasure reading, and DRM: Part 1 of a Download the Universe Roundtable on E-Reading” →

Bricolage and the Tangled Bank: Happy Mistranslations of Evolution

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

I got back home last night to a pleasant surprise: a copy of the new French translation of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. One of the most interesting parts of writing a book is seeing what emerges from the mind of your translator. I’ve usually had good luck with translators. We’ll exchange emails to find a way to capture the spirit of sentences in my books that would make no sense in another language, thanks to the odd figures of speech we use in English. When the book actually arrives, I usually can do little more than hope that it makes sense in Korean or Japanese or Dutch.

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