Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Books on Jul 17th, 2007
I can happily recommend Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, although it did strike me as longer than it needed to be. The book, about our food economy, features reporting, analysis, and some self-indulgent introspection. I enjoyed the reporting, in which he details trips into the heart of America’s industrial food-making machine. I was surprised, [...]
Posted in Books, Uncategorized on Jan 9th, 2007
Morgan Spurlock, the hefty man behind the fast food fright flick Super Size Me, has also written a companion book called Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America. Spurlock takes a dim view not only of corporate fast food purveyors but also of the American public’s ability to make sound dietary [...]
Posted in Books on Jul 18th, 2005
One of my favorite books of all time, Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox, went out of print soon after it was published in 1989. A friend of mine happened to own a copy, but when I went to buy one for myself, only expensive collectors’ editions could be [...]
Posted in Books on Jun 16th, 2005
Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
“I have seen the future, and it lives in Miami,” says Alan Burdick of Discover magazine. Burdick, author of the recently released book Out of Eden : An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, excerpted parts of the book for Discover in May’s The Truth About Invasive Species. Unfortunately the [...]
Posted in Books on Apr 18th, 2005
If you are interested in any of the ten thousand opportunistic books about the famous baseball rivalry between New York and Boston, I thoughtfully encourage you to consider The Yankees vs. Red Sox Reader. Happily, this particular instance of the genre includes a short essay by me. Check out the table of contents: there I [...]
Posted in Books on Jan 18th, 2005
Ken Deffeyes, the author of Hubbert’s Peak : The Impending World Oil Shortage, has written another book on the same topic called Beyond Oil : The View From Hubbert’s Peak. Hubbert, a Shell geologist who, back in 1956, correctly predicted that U.S. oil consumption would top out in the early 70s, also foresaw 2001 as [...]
Posted in Books on Nov 23rd, 2004
Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels is a book about vanished Christianities. The religion (and Bible) we know today took centuries to solidify and be codified into regulated Catholic practice. For a long time, there were a variety of groups, all calling themselves Christians, who believed a number of different things about this man Jesus. We [...]
Posted in Books on Jul 25th, 2004
This book is built around the very human stories of the engineers (we’ve heard enough about the astronauts) who built a machine that took men to the moon and back. In less than eight years, they built a great big machine that took people to the surface of the moon and back. The authors have [...]
Posted in Books on Jul 17th, 2004
This is the first of Horne’s trilogy about Franco-German mischief; the other two are about the World Wars. I hadn’t realized how much the Franco-Prussian war set up World War I. If the French are to be chastised for their harsh terms at Versailles in 1918, then the Prussians must answer for what they squeezed [...]
Posted in Books on Jul 10th, 2004
A good read, filled with an obligingly weird cast of characters. There is something deeply appealing about a bruising, trash-talking pro tour for Scrabble heads. The author, Stefan Fatsis, goes native and eventually becomes an expert player himself as he tells his story. I like the part where he’s talking to the former world champ, [...]
