Tonight at 6 pm EST I’ll be talking about my ebook,Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through The Mind. (Amazon /BN/ Mobipocket ). You can listen live to Your Health Connection on KSKA Public Radio, and even ask questions via phone or email.
Originally published May 2, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Charles Darwin was the original crowd-sourced scientist. He may have a reputation as a recluse who hid away on his country estate, but he actually turned Down House into the headquarters for a massive letter-writing campaign that lasted for decades. In her magisterial biography of Darwin, Janet Browne observes that he sometimes wrote over 1500 letters in a single year. Darwin was gathering biological intelligence, amassing the data he would eventually marshall in his arguments for evolution. In the letters he wrote to naturalists around the world, Darwin asked for details about all manner of natural history, from the color of horses in Jamaica to the blush that shame brought to people’s cheeks.
A number of Loominaries have asked if there is a Kindle version of A Planet of Viruses. As of this morning, the answer’s yes. Please infect your reading device!
Originally published April 29, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Via fellow Discover blogger Sean Carroll, I came across Jorge Cham’s podcast/comic/video about cosmology. I’m embedding it here, not just because it’s a very good summary of where we stand in understanding the stuff of the cosmos, but because Cham–he of PhD comics–has done something fascinating here. He has combined three different media into something new. I think, on the whole, it works very well. It moves a bit too fast for my eye sometimes, and can get a little herky jerky. But a living comic illustration of a scientist talking? Me likes.
Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
Originally published April 28, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The Browser, one of my favorite sites for gathering interesting reads I can wield in my perpetual battle on behalf of procrastination, has a great feature calledFiveBooks. From time to time, they ask a writer to select five of their favorite books on some particular topic, and then interview them about their choices. I was honored to be interviewed for today’s FiveBooks (just after Ian McEwan–yikes!). I chose the theme of “the strangeness of life” and then scanned my bookshelves for some favorite books that deal with it in one way or another. If you have any interest in good writing on natural history (including human natural history), I’ll wager you’ll like them all. Check it out.
Originally published April 28, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.