This journal is mostly friends-only. Add and comment to be friended back.

( Previous books )
37. Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein

Podkayne of Mars is one of Heinlein's books written for younger readers. It is about a teenage girl from Mars, related to a high-ranking senator of the Martian Republic. She and her brother tag along with him on a trip to Venus. It's a fast read, quite entertaining and very light reading. Podkayne (or "Poddy" as she goes by) is a delightful character, while her brother's a bit of a sociopath.

( Previous books )
35. The Book of Name Signs: Naming in American Sign Language by Samuel J. Supalla
36. Significant Gestures: A History of American Sign Language by John Tabak

The Book of Name Signs, as the name implies, is about the custom of name-signs in ASL. It discusses the two systems used, and briefly describes the history of it, and has an appendix with several hundred name-signs of the arbitrary name-sign system.

Significant Gestures describes the history of ASL and the difficulties faced by the language and the Deaf in the 19th and 20th centuries. It also gives some linguistic analysis of ASL.

Both were interesting books.

From hazumuchan

As was demonstrated in an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin is unable to name any Supreme Court Case other than Roe v. Wade.

The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historic, to your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun.

Hmm ... there's a number of good cases I can think of.

I'll go with a less well-known one. Ex Parte Merryman. It's not technically a Supreme Court ruling, although the Chief Justice at the time, Taney, did rule on it. Supreme Court justices at the time sat as circuit judges when the Supreme Court wasn't in session.

In this case, Taney ruled that Lincoln's secret suspension of habeas corpus within the boundaries of Maryland (and the arrest, by federal troops, of several pro-Confederate state legislators) was unconstitutional. Taney wrote in his ruling that:

These great and fundamental laws, which congress itself could not suspend, have been disregarded and suspended, like the writ of habeas corpus, by a military order, supported by force of arms. Such is the case now before me, and I can only say that if the authority which the constitution has confided to the judiciary department and judicial officers, may thus, upon any pretext or under any circumstances, be usurped by the military power, at its discretion, the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws, but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.

Lincoln chose to simply ignore Taney, much like Jackson before him. A close friend of Lincoln's later wrote that Lincoln had considered ordering Taney's arrest because of this ruling (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taney_Arrest_Warrant)

Oh, the stupidity, it burns! http://www.abqjournal.com/abqnews/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7333&Itemid=2

( Controversy in Clovis, New Mexico after Lesbian couples shown in high school yearbook )

And follow-up here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,427402,00.html

( article )

( Previous books )
34. Toolmaker Koan by John Mcloughlin

This had some interesting ideas. It's a sci-fi novel, copyright 1988. One thing that always amazes me is how much the fall of the Soviet Union took people by surprise. Toolmaker Koan takes place in the 2030's, starting in 2031, 13 years after the "One-Day War" (a brief nuclear exchange) between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of this war, two major alliances were formed, an American-led Columbian Alliance, covering the Americas, and the Soviet-led United People's Democratic Republics of Eurasia and Africa, which covered the Eastern Hemisphere. So, not only did the author not forsee the fall of the Soviet Union - just before it happened! - but he thought they'd become much more powerful! All of Eurasia, Africa, and Australia were under Soviet control.

However, that's a relatively minor part of the plot, as it takes place almost entirely in space, with the details of Earth politics unimportant.

A Soviet probe sent out to the Oort Cloud discovers an alien probe travelling towards Earth. The Soviet immediately send out a ship to investigate. The Americans also learned of this contact, and sent their own ship, amidst a growing threat of war back home. Contact is made, and a rather interesting alien artificial intelligence is met.

This intelligence is extremely old, and has been exploring the universe for a long time, having discovered, on its own, some unexplained method of instantaneous travel. In its explorations, it has learned of what it calls the "toolmaker koan" or "toolmaker conundrum", a dilemma wherein tool-making cultures inevitably destroy themselves just as they reach space-travel. The intelligence is hoping to assist at least one species in avoiding self-destruction, which is why it visited Earth.

In addition, there are representatives of another species, who had also destroyed themselves long ago in the same process.

It's a rather interesting novel, although there are a number of weaknesses. In particular, while I certainly agree that technological species have the capacity to destroy themselves, and that it probably has happened numerous times, I disagree with the notion that it's inevitable. There's also a number of unexplained and, quite frankly, highly implausible, characteristics of the other self-destructing alien race.

Over all, however, I'd say it's a worthwhile novel.

( Previous books )
33. The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans by G.J. Sawyer and Viktor Deak

The Last Human is a collection of descriptions of various extinct hominid species, from Sahelanthropus tchadensis, which may have been a common ancestor of humans and chimps, or possibly one of the earliest members of the lineage that lead to humans, up through Neanderthals and Homo florensis and, despite the subtitle, Homo sapiens. Each section describes the fossil finds, where they were found, the climate of the area and other life in the area, and what they would've looked like, and what can be deducted about their diet and behavior. It's filled with gorgeous images of reconstructions of these various species.

( Previous books )
32. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

The edition I read contained not only the namesake novella, but a number of other short stories. I read a few of the stories, but couldn't get into them. I Am Legend, however, was a very good story. There's very little similarity between the book and the movie. The main character has the same name, he is the only "normal" human left in the city, with vampire-like creatures all around him. That's about it, however. In the book, for example, Robert Neville was simply killing the vampires. They were also far more similar to the traditional vampires of myth than in the movie. It also took place in Los Angeles, rather than New York. Not sure why they switched coasts. In the book, Neville had no connection with the original plague, other than losing his wife and daughter to it. It's not clear, in fact, what he originally did.

( spoilers )

( Previous books )
28. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (30th anniversary edition)
29. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
30. Coming To Life: How Genes Drive Development by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
31. Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson

( The God Delusion )

( Variable Star )

Heh: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/what_i_hear_when_creationists.php

( previous books )
26. The Dragon Seekers by Christopher McGowan

The Dragon Seekers, subtitled How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin, describes the lives and work of several 19th century "fossilists", the predecessors of today's paleontologists. He talks mostly about Mary Anning, Thomas Hawkins, William Buckland, Gideon Mantell, and Richard Owen.

Mary Anning was an interesting figure. She was a woman of low social status, the daughter of poor laborers, who were Dissenters (that is, not members of the dominant Church of England). Despite the handicaps of being a woman, being poor, and of her religious background, she came to contribute a great deal to the developing science. At the age of just 12, she discovered the first pleisiosaur, and made a number of other important discoveries. She had begun, like her family and many other locals, collecting fossils to sell to rich tourists, but she was more than just a collector. She studied the fossils, read everything she could about other fossils and about zoology, and even dissected living relatives of the fossils she was finding to understand more about them. In her time, however, she did not get anywhere near the credit she deserved. Wealthy male paleontologists would publish papers and give speeches about the new discoveries, without mentioning her, or, at most, only in indirect references such as "the proprietor of the fossil". She was never allowed to join the Geological Society, although she was given a posthumous honorary membership a few years after her death, and her name was rarely mentioned in those meetings, although her importance was recognized, and she did have some fame in her time. But she never had any formal academic honors, nor did she ever make money from books that were published on her finds. The only money she ever made was in selling her finds. As one friend of hers reported "She says the world has used her ill ... these men of learning have sucked her brains, and made a great deal by publishing workds, of which she furnished the contents, while she derived none of the advantages"

Thomas Hawkins was a rather eccentric man, who was infamous for adding to his fossils to give them the appearance of completeness, while obscuring which parts were original and which parts were added. He became the center of a major scandal over fossils he'd sold to a London museum which were found to be artificially enhanced, a scandal which found its way into Parliamentary hearings.

William Buckland was a conservative, who continued to support Catastrophism, long after it had been discredited. Catastrophism was the belief that the world had been visited by repeated catastrophes (of which Noah's flood was the most recent), massive disasters that wiped out life and were followed by new Creations, a theory devised to explain the presence of extinct animals, and the lack of modern animals in earlier eras, in an attempt to reconcile the Genesis account with the fossil evidence. He refused to accept that humans had ever coexisted with extinct animals, since that would imply that God's creations could fail. Humans belonged the the most recent creation. He was an eccentric, and a popular lecturer at Oxford. In his later years, however, his mind began to fade, and his eccentricity grew into outright madness.

Gideon Mantell was, along with his fossiling, a social reformer and a medical doctor, and a rather progressive person for his time, but a man with a tragic family life. One of his daughters died at the young age of 14, and his wife and other children left him, although he did later reconcile with his children, but never his wife.

Finally, Richard Owen. Owen was a major figure in zoology. He dissected countless animals, comparing their anatomies, and comparing them to the fossils he found. He was the first to realize that the Megalosaurus,Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus were part of a new type of reptiles, which he named Dinosauria. He pointed out a number of major anatomical differences between them and present-day reptiles, and produced rather remarkable estimates of the full sizes of those creatures, which, at that point, had only been discovered as partial skeletons, striking down the overestimates that previous paleontologists had given them, by naively scaling up from modern-day reptiles. Owen was a friend of Charles Darwin, and provided many of the key pieces of evidence that Darwin would later use in his Origin of the Species (although Owen had no knowledge of Darwin's work until it was published). It is ironic that Owen's work proved so important for Darwin's, as Owen was bitterly opposed to Darwin's theories. The publication of Origin destroyed his friendship with Darwin, and to his death (in 1892), he remained steadfastly opposed to Darwin's theories.

This takes balls

( Seattle Councilman Tries to Pay Fine Out of City Funds )

---

Top Commenters on hand_of_paper's InsaneJournal
(Self comments excluded from rankings)

1	nihilobstat	82
2	robynsummers	68
3	lalique	64
4	geas_slave	58
5	liebe_maus	51
6	darknessdee	39
7	fenners	35
8	echo42	33
9	nashira	30
10	oldasyouare	29

( 11-47 )
Total Commenters: 48 (1 not shown)
Total Comments: 1,061
Report generated 9/1/2008 12:04:09 AM by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.7

---

55 comments this month, only 26 posts, 2.12 comments per post.

For the month of August, 2008:

---

Top Commenters on hand_of_paper's LiveJournal
(Self comments excluded from rankings)

1	nihilobstat	9
2	darknessdee	7
3	liebe_maus	6
4	hazumuchan	3
5	robynsummers	3
6	nashira	3
7	Anonymous	2
8	lalique	2
9	syderia	2
10	aristoboule	2

( 11-14 )
Total Commenters: 15 (1 not shown)
Total Comments: 55
Report generated 9/1/2008 12:07:44 AM by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.7

---

( previous books )
25. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex is about an individual with a rare genetic condition called 5 Alpha Reductase Deficiency, a rare intersex condition. It can manifest in a variety of ways, but in the case of the character in the book, the individual, while having XY chromosomes, is born with a female external appearance. However, at puberty, the individual changes, and develops into a male body.

The story alternates between the present-day life of the narrator and the story of his family, beginning with his grandparents, living in a small Greek village in Turkey. After the chaos of the Greco-Turkish War, they flee to America, eventually having two children, a son and a daughter. The son later marries his second cousin, and they have two children, a son, and a daughter, the daughter named Calliope, the narrator. It then follows Callie's life (while still alternating with Cal's present-day life), her childhood and adolescence, and the confusion that comes in adolescence when she does not develop normally, and the discovery of her condition, and her, and her family's, reaction. Callie is taken to a doctor who specializes in gender identity and intersex conditions. The doctor believes that Callie should be given hormones and surgery to make her a normal-appearing woman, but Callie, by this point, has come to identify as male, and runs off, becoming Cal. Eventually, the family is reunited.

I rather liked it. Last night, I stayed up until 6 in the morning reading it. The format of the story is also quite interesting, alternating between first person, restricted third person, and omniscient third person styles.

LOL! http://gawker.com/5033920/wall+e-wuz-right

At first I was thinking "God, this article is horribly written", and then I read the last line and I LOL'd. ^_^

Hunh, interesting. Apparently Armstrong and Aldrin were originally scheduled to walk on the Moon on July 21st, but they basically couldn't wait and so got permission from NASA to leave the ship on the 20th, when they'd landed.

http://improbable.com/2008/07/19/the-moon-and-the-21st-or-er-the-20th/

And who can blame them? Would you want to sit around with the whole Moon right outside your window? :-)

( previous books )
24. Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future by Peter D. Ward

Under a Green Sky discusses several mass extinctions of the past, including the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which are believed to have been triggered by global warming, caused, in those cases, by increased volcanism. He describes the rather hellish conditions that were associated with these extinctions, and also goes into great detail about how scientists figured out these events, the evidence that was gathered, and how they were analyzed, and the controversies over those explanations, and, indeed, the initial controversies over the very existence of sudden mass extinctions, as opposed to the old belief in gradual extinctions.

He also describes how the world is presently headed in this direction once again, thanks to our own, anthropogenic, global warming.

This article is pretty interesting. They've found a method that may allow scientists to deduce the original colors of fossilized feathers! We may some day be able to know the color of ancient birds such as Archeopteryx and feathered dinos like Velociraptor!

Happy Canada Day to all the Canadites on my f'list!

Hah! Expelled, Ben Stein's ID/creationist movie, opened in Canada this weekend. Its opening weekend gross nationwide was just $24,374. And, no, there's no missing zeroes there.

Good for you, Canada!

Hmm ... for those of you interested in Japan and/or linguistics, this article is rather interesting.

And in a somewhat-related article: the city of Kyoto offered free public transport to anyone wearing a kimono. That was back in '05, though. :-)

LOL! This is awesome!

Amazing!

Soil on Mars 'good for asparagus'

( Article )

I'm now an administrator of a Facebook group! The store I work at The College Store has set up a facebook page.