This week’s Reading Challenge is all about a little something called “science”. Or, as they say in
French: science.
Science is the
scientifical study of things with a certain scientificity. Scientists study
science in order to gain a sciential knowledge and produce scientisms. A good
scientist can scientize with the best of them. Some scientists are so scient,
they study scientometrics. You could say such scientistic persons are well scienced - these scientiates are better versed in scientificalness than scientasters, at the very least.
Say, did you know we
have a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary?
How about some book
reviews?
Science fiction is about science. It’s in the name.
There are many books on science fiction written by
scientists, take Carl Sagan’s Contact,
or one of Arthur
C. Clarke’s many books. There is also JCU research
that suggests science fiction has a part to play in how we communicate real science.
And that takes us to Red
Mars, the first in Kim Stanley Robinson’s award winning Mars trilogy (Red
Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars). The story begins in the near future
and tells the story of the colonisation of Mars. Red Mars starts us on Mars, inside a tent city before backtracking
and telling the story of the first hundred people who were sent to establish a
human presence on the planet.
Where’s the science? There’s the space elevator, the
terraforming of a whole planet, the creation of soil, and a whole lot more.
Kim Stanley Robinson researches the science and bases his
work on the potentially possible. This first book of the immense trilogy introduces
the political, social and environmental aspects of forming a new colony on
another planet.
This big book is part of an even bigger trilogy so it’s a
good thing that this is a page-turner.
Yes, once again I have
managed to shoehorn a graphic novel into my book choice for a Reading
Challenge. That’s just the way I roll, baby. If I can find something illustrated, I will.
The Manga Guide To series consist of a number
of books that use the ancient and noble Japanese art of comic books to provide
an introduction to a topic that might be mindnumbingly boring or a conceptual
leap beyond what normal people do, think and understand. As soon as our budget
lets us get away with it, I will be ordering The Manga Guide to Statistics.
Two first year college
students, Ami and Rin, are on the verge of failing their introductory molecular
biology course due to the fact that they haven’t turned up to any classes. If
you did that at JCU, you’d be sent a strongly worded email. In Rin and Ami’s
case, however, they are sent to an island belonging to the professor (a Dr Moro
– geddit?) so a cute research assistant called Marcus can use an immersive
virtual reality device called the “Dream Machine” to take them on a tour though
the building blocks of cells.
Call me crazy, but if
the cute research assistant used the fancy virtual reality machine to deliver
the lectures in an immersive and engaging way in the first place, maybe the
girls wouldn’t have skipped class. But I digress.
It’s a bit like the Magic Schoolbus, only hyped up on sugar
and with more exposed midriffs. I learnt that a chicken egg is actually just
one big cell and that “helix” is a shape – the shape of a coiled telephone
cable, to be precise. I also learnt actual information about DNA, RNA, replication
and transcription – which was all very interesting, but in the long term I’ll
probably remember that thing about the egg and the helix. What can I say?
Dammit, Jim, I’m a librarian, not a doctor.
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