Erlebnis Wissenschaft

for more than a decade, from Was Biotronik alles kann (2002) to Invasion der Waschbären (2014), my books in German were published by Wiley-VCH, mostly in their general pop-science series Erlebnis Wissenschaft (not quite translatable, this suggests science is an exciting experience).

Since the publication of the raccoons’ book in 2014, I have had no luck with further proposals, and have been given to understand that the sales of the series weren’t as good as the publisher hoped. Checking up the programme this summer, I realised that the last new title was published in 2016. One that is listed in 2018 is in fact the paperback version of a book previously published in hardback. Coming from the main website, the list doesn’t even have a link, so I had to use search engines to find it here. So, reluctantly, I am having to switch back to hustle mode and try to find a new publisher.

I can accept that on a purely balance-based reckoning, the books may not have been very profitable, but then again, Wiley-VCH is a huge publisher with successful academic titles (the white and blue design inherited from the original Verlag Chemie) as well as the licence for the German version of the hugely successful “For Dummies” series, not to mention a vast array of academic journals. All of which surely could help to fund a bit of an effort to help the public understanding of science with a series of intermediate level popular science books.

Oh well. I may have written critical reviews of one or two of the titles shown below, but I surely will miss the series.




For this photo I rounded up my own titles in the series and a few from other authors. Since taking the photo I keep discovering others that I forgot (eg the biographies of Haber and Lynen and the memoir of Schatz – for the biographies alone it would be worthwhile keeping the series alive).

gecko alert

I have recently submitted both the book manuscripts that have kept me very busy since September, so I can now begin to reveal what they are about. The first one is a collection of nanoworld-related pieces from the last six years or so, written in German. It is organised similarly to my very first book, Expeditionen in den Nanokosmos(1995), which later appeared in English as Travels to the Nanoworld, although the field has grown and changed a lot since then.

Back in 1995, travels to the world of the invisibly small were the reserve of a very small number of well-equipped and adventurous pioneers. Now there are “nano” labelled institutes and companies everywhere, there are nanosized structures in every computer you can buy in the shops, and there are nanoparticles in most sun lotions.

The field has become so huge that I wouldn’t be able to give a representative account of it. Thus, the idea this time was to present my compilation of nano articles as a collection of “postcards from the nanoworld” without claiming much logic or completeness. These glimpses at the vastness of the small world would be flanked by an introduction and an outlook chapter as they were in my very first book.

This concept worked out very well for the content of the book, but didn’t quite make it onto the cover. The publishers preferred to pick specific ideas from the collection, so we’ve ended up with a gecko-themed book called "Von Geckos, Garn und Goldwasser: Die Nanoweltwelt lässt grüßen" which in a way fits in nicely with my previous platypus collection .

The book is due to come out in September this year and will look like this:



It is already listed at amazon.de. Further details and a dedicated gecko-website to follow soon.

good year for odd book titles

2011 seems to have been a good year for strange book titles, as the diagram shortlist is looking very strong. So good in fact that my suggestion, for which I had very high hopes, didn't make it into the final 7. In fact I had made several suggestions, but the most promising one was:



Karsai Nei Tsang: Therapeutic Massage for the Sexual Organs

Never mind, I love the 7 titles that were selected, haven't even made up my mind yet who to vote for.

The shortlist (complete with explanations from the Booksellers magazine website) includes:

A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two by Peter Gosson (Amberley). A book that documents the sand trade from its inception in 1912 to the present day, focusing on the Welsh coast.


Cooking with Poo by Saiyuud Diwong (Urban Neighbours of Hope). Thai cookbook. “Poo” is Thai for “crab” and is Diwong’s nickname.


Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praakli (Kirjastus Elmatar). Covers styles of socks and stockings found in Estonian knitting.


The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson (Createspace). An analysis of the “Koro” psychiatric epidemic that hit the island of Singapore in 1967.

Mr Andoh's Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh (Royd Press). The story of Koichi Andoh, who travelled from Japan to Yorkshire in the 1930s to train workers at a hatchery business the art of determining the sex of one-day-old chicks.


A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares (Phaidon). Exhaustive overview of the evolution of the modern office chair.


The Mushroom in Christian Art by John A Rush (North Atlantic Books). In which the author reveals that Jesus is a personification of the Holy Mushroom, Amanita Muscaria.

in fact, I've just seen A Taxonomy of Office Chairs at an Oxfam bookshop, but was just about able to resist the temptation. Don't think it will win either.

The Guardian has a picture gallery with the covers of all seven books, in case it helps with the voting.

Lady Gaga and philosophy

To my utter shock and bewilderment, I have just found out that neither of the two publishers that run book series on popular culture and philosophy has yet published a book about Lady Gaga and philosophy. In fact, searching the exact phrase “Lady Gaga and philosophy” I got only two hits, one to the twitter profile of someone who lists her interests and ends the list with these two items (as you would), and the other to a philosophy blog which also notes the lamentable absence of this title.

So, while we are all waiting with baited breath to find out what the serial philosophers will have to offer once they have woken up to the semiotic treasure trove that is the work of Gaga, I’ll start compiling a few suggestions of topics they may want to consider:


Is it music? Why Mozart might have written “Bad Romance” if he were alive today (for more about this, see here)

Is it art? The school of gagaism and its position in the development of occidental art

Baby you were born this way: The quest for sexual identity in the 21st century.

I’m in love with Judas: Gaga vs. God

Scheiße Scheiße be mine: the language and languages of gagaism

P-p-p-pokerface: The semiotics of make-up and masks

I am my hair: Hair style as a cipher for personality in postmodern society

I’m on the edge of glory: Feeding the reward system in the age of individualism

Papa paparazzi: Iconography and perceptions of fame

Monster ball: Identification and motivation of fans and followers

Gossip girl: The education of a cultural icon


All suggestions for additional chapters, and indeed authors, welcome.

I notice that Open Court have among their forthcoming titles "Rolling Stones and philosophy" (due to join a male-only club of artists like Bruce Springsteen and U2), so they are clearly catching up and might get round to the Gaga title in a few decades. My favourite title on their list of 59 books is "Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong?" (2004). The competitors at Wiley-Blackwell have Metallica as their only musical entry. Gaga apart, I really do think one of them should have covered the philosophy of Alanis Morissette by now.

Update June 2012: Open Court now list "Lady Gaga and philosophy" among their future publications, but without a date, so I'm guessing it will be 2013 before it comes out.

Update April 2015: Open Court still has it under "Forthcoming Titles: 2015 and Beyond" at the bottom of the list, now with a release date of 2017. These guys should get their priorities in order. Still no news from Blackwells.





Oh, and as bonus material, here are my random thoughts on the new album, jotted down a bit hastily after the first two or three times playing it:

Would I still enjoy this album if it had arrived in a brown cardboard sleeve and I knew nothing about the artist?
Actually, I think I would. Not all tracks are great, but there is an interesting variety and I sense the genuine artist's urge to express herself in many details. I'm not wildly excited by the first three tracks including the title track, but love the middle section starting with Judas (which I read as an attempt to recapture the glory of Bad Romance).

As someone familiar with several European languages, I find Scheiße interestingly disturbing - it mangles fragments of half a dozen languages into a meaningless but attention-catching pidgin pudding. Gets me every time. My attention tends to wander off after Bloody Mary, and come back for You and I, strangely.

Surely it's not to everybody's taste and will irritate many, but that's what art is supposed to be like. So please ignore the hype and try it with an open mind.

noughties book

I'm still not finished with the process of getting my self-published collection of book reviews, "The noughties brought to book" listed on amazon (forgot to include a copyright page and had to amend and re-publish), which means that so far you can only order it from Lulu.com. Lulu have just emailed me a coupon for free shipping, so anybody in the US can get the book cheaper if ordering before May 5th (e.g. using the link below) and using the code: FREEMAILUK305



Terms and conditions:

Use coupon code FREEMAILUK305 at checkout and receive £2.99 towards your final shipping cost. This amount is the US mail cost for a single book order. Please note: there will be a shipping total listed on your order receipt. This coupon code will reduce your final order total by £2.99, which is the US mail cost for a single book. Purchase must be 3rd party content. Self-purchases of your own content are not eligible. Discount cannot be used to pay for, nor shall be applied to applicable taxes or shipping and handling charges. Shipping destination must be a valid US address. Promotional codes cannot be applied to any previous order. No exchanges or substitutions allowed. Only one valid promotional code may be used per account. Coupon cannot be used in combination with other coupon codes. Offer expires on 5/5/10 at 11:59 PM. Lulu.com reserves the right to change or revoke this offer at anytime. Void where prohibited.

... and the winner is ...

seeing I posted on the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of 2009, I have to report the final result as well.

So the winner, revealed in Horace Bent's blog this week is:

Daina Taimina: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes (A K Peters)



I actually voted for this one, if only on the grounds that it represents an interesting way to popularise mathematics. Although I was also tempted by Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, which didn't reach the medal ranks.

PS: if you do want to take your needlework into non-euclidian realms, amazon.co.uk has the book, but you'll need some patience: Usually dispatched within 1 to 3 weeks. Looks like they're not monitoring this prize.

cute platypus seduces readers

If proof were needed that cute animals on the cover help to sell books, my German title "Der Kuss des Schnabeltiers" (see this blog entry from last September's release) has achieved a respectable sales result (by my very modest standards) in its first year, doing much better than the English version, which doesn't look quite as attractive. Among my German titles, only "Exzentriker des Lebens" (Life on the Edge) had a better start.

I've updated my personal sales ranking here -- guaranteed to be the only bestsellers list my books will ever feature in!

At amazon.de, the current sales ranking is 46,150, which -- again, by my modest standards -- isn't bad. Plus, there is a very enthusiastic review by a kind reader whom I don't even know.

the oddest vote

At last, the shortlist for the most important of all literary prizes has been reveiled. In the running for the Diagram Prize, which honours the oddest book title of the past year, are:

The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes

Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots

What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua?

Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter

More details about these titles are here, and you can vote for your favourite at http://www.thebookseller.com/. Once you've voted, you'll be shown the current percentages of votes. I was very surprised to see that my favourite title was in the lead, though my second favourite was only in 5th place.

Sadly, I had no luck with the titles I proposed this time round, but will keep trying ...

A book collecting timeless jewels from the first 30 years of the prize has been published in 2008, it's called "How to avoid huge ships".

noughties book

The first copies of my self-published collection of book reviews, "The noughties brought to book" have arrived and are looking fine, so I have now set up web pages for the book in the same style as for my other titles.

Next I will figure out how to make the book available via amazon. So far you can only order it from Lulu.com. They appear to ship it from the US, so for the rest of the world shipping charges can be quite expensive.

oxford night life

continuing my occasional "Oxford by Night" series, here's a view of Blackwell's bookshop, which is of course about a million times larger on the inside than it appears to be from the historic facade. Sign of the time, too, that the only writing one can read from the other side of the road says "buy one get one free".

book reviews collection

I've collected all my book reviews from the noughties into a book which is now available from Lulu.com:



Haven't even started to create a website for the new book yet, it all went so quickly. I'm also looking into the option of making it available at Amazon (may have to pay for that, and I get less money from each book, but for the buyer it has the advantage of free P&P). I think what I'll do is to wait for my own copies to arrive (takes two weeks or so), check whether they are ok, and then step up the marketing a little bit. Meanwhile here's the cover:



And yes, this picture is connected to the contents -- there is an essay review about blue skies research in there somewhere.

you've been pottered

I guess it wasn't surprising but I still get slightly depressed looking at Germany's top 20 bestsellers of the decade, published in the current issue of Der Spiegel.

In the fiction list we have Harry Potter in positions 1, 2, 3, 14, 16, and 18. Dan Brown in 5 and 15, Stephenie Meyer in 8, 9, and 20, and Germany's very own fantasy kidult fiction writer Cornelia Funke (Inkheart, etc.) in places 6, 11, 19 (which already counts as good news, I guess). Two German originals which I found mildly interesting (Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the world and Charlotte Roche's Wetlands) made 7 and 4, respectively.

There is the school of thinking that says that many of those millions reading Harry Potter wouldn't have read any book otherwise. But I tend to think if they only read fantasy and nothing else, they might as well read nothing, it wouldn't make much difference. What I am worried about is the other side of the spectrum. A phenomenon like the noughties fantasy tsunami pulls along people from all sides, including those who might otherwise have spent their time reading more intelligent books. So if people come along and say Rowling did great work for public literacy, I have to object and point out that pottermania may also have stopped people from reading more intelligent books and dealing with the real world.

The non-fiction side of the list (another 20 titles including one by the pope) is less easy to categorise but just as depressing. Suffice it to say that a "medicine for kids" title is the only thing that is coming anywhere near science.

how to beat the tabloids

amidst all the fall-out of the Belle de Jour story, I loved yesterday's report in the Guardian, saying that a fellow blogger alerted her when the Daily Mail got wind of it. The clever chap called Darren had figured out her identity from the fact that she appeared to be an experienced blogger even when she started blogging as BDJ, so he looked round the small circle of people in the UK blogging scene and found the right one. He set up a website which casually mentioned both her real name and her pseudonym. At the time this was of course the only website to do so (technically called a GoogleWhack), so anybody searching for both names would end up on his site and register in his visitor stats. So he could sound the alarm when the Daily Mail computers showed up, and Brooke Magnanti was able to out herself before becoming a trophy on the Mail's wall.

Which goes to show -- UK prime ministers past, present, and future take note! -- that one can beat the tabloid press if one is clever enough.

PS With hindsight, there is a clue in her publication list too. Four of the seven scientific papers she co-authored have a title starting with the word "sex". I admit that the papers are not about sex, but about sex-specific effects in cancer epidemiology, but she could have used the term gender-specific ?

writers in oxford

Our local writers' club, Writers in Oxford has teamed up with the local Borders bookshop for an event promoting new books by members. Sadly, this arrived too late for my most recent book, but still the event looks interesting and I might pop round to see how it goes.

That's at Borders Oxford, 6:30 pm, Thu 12th November 2009.

PS talking about all things local, we also have a Cafe Scientifique around here, of which I missed the latest instalment yesterday. Ages ago I did an evening on nanotech and my book "Travels to the nanoworld" there: Nanotechnology comes naturally.

ode to pay

among the few books left in the library room where I am sitting right now is the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911). I just love the slightly battered look of it, and the inadvertent poetry of its three-letter signposts on the spine, such as the "ode to pay":



Other examples include the boarding pass: EVA to FRA and the weapons commission: SUB to TOM. Oh, and if your mother gets ill, you'll need Vol. XVIII.: MED to MUM.


PS for an appreciation of the dramatic potential of full-word Britannica titles, type "Jirasek Lighthouses" into google, you'll find a piece by Alan Coren on google books. Thanks to Aidan for the hint.

the great bluff

From 1998 to 2002, an innocent-looking post-doc from Germany committed what probably amounts to the biggest fraud in physics in recent decades, publishing over 30 forged papers in high profile journals including Nature and Science. In her book "Plastic Fantastic", Eugenie Samuel Reich unravels the reasons why this could happen. I reviewed the book for C&I, using my 1200 words length limit to the last, as I believe that this is in fact a very important question, and the answers I have seen before reading this book haven't really been satisfactory.

The most worrying aspect of the story is that he could have gotten away with it, as I have explained in this snippet:

Had he acted in cold blood and considered his best path towards the Max-Planck directorship that he narrowly missed, he would have slowed down after six or seven papers in Nature and Science. He would have revolutionised fewer areas and backed up his first breakthroughs with some real research or at least with some more real-looking data. This way he would have committed fewer errors, his string of breakthroughs would have appeared less implausible and raised less suspicion. Critics would have taken a lot longer to figure out that there was something wrong with his work. And in that extra time, some of the breakthroughs that he anticipated might actually have happened, so he would have been vindicated by other researchers.

One aspect that in my opinion has been underappreciated is that the huge rewards on offer for publishing certain kinds of results in certain journals (namely Nature and Science) put a massive amount of pressure on people working in labs with this kind of ambition (as I know from experience). Much as societies with steep social inequality breed crime, this situation will always tempt some people to forge these results if they can't get them the regular way. After writing my review of the book, I checked the reviews published in both journals, and found that this issue was neatly swept under the rug in both of them. What a coincidence.

My review is in Chemistry & Industry No. 19, p 26 (restricted access).

guardian technology & the dead tail of blogging

Recently, I've been looking through a pile of Guardian technology sections which I had piled up for a rainy day, and found a comment by technology editor Charles Arthur (Blogging's long tail is dying), where he explains how he tracks blog entries that comment on content of his technology section. So I reckon he must find this -- hi Charles, *wave*.

Anyhow, to Charles's point about blogging, his conclusion is based on two observations: 1) the reported finding that 95 % of blogs out there haven't been updated for 120 days, so are presumed dead. I don't find that terribly surprising, as there are lots of people who try opening a blog, post two entries with their favourite song lyrics, and find it's not for them, leaving the ruin standing for eternity. In MySpace alone one finds thousands of ghost blogs like this.

Observation no. 2) is that the comment tracking device that Charles set up is giving fewer hits than it used to (and being the editor of the section, he hopes it hasn't become less inspiring over the years). So I'll make a point of regularly commenting on the section to buck this trend :)

At least where I'm standing, which is probably somewhere in the middle of the long tail of blogging, I still feel that blogging is alive.

PS: I forgot to mention that I'm now on twitter:

http://twitter.com/michaelgrr

Copenhagen conference reframed

As I mentioned earlier, I learned lots of interesting things at the Copenhagen conference on Framing Research.

Some of it I reframed as a news feature for Current Biology, which appeared last Tuesday and is available here (restricted access, but email me if you want a copy).

Another item published while I was away is my review of:

A short guide to the human genome,
by Stewart Scherer

This is in Chemistry & Industry, issue 13, 13.7.2009, page 30

Snippet:

In his “short guide”, Stuart Scherer has addressed around 80 such questions, using the available database tools and the published literature to give today’s best estimates, pinning the genome and its proteins down as precisely as possible. Regarding the number of genes in our genome, his answers range from 18,357 to 25,685. Each of these “genome FAQs” is addressed in a very short chapter of just one to four pages, often presenting the answer in the form of a table or graph, together with an explanation of how the results were obtained and what factors still limit their precision.

cheerleader or watchdog?

Last week's cover of Nature confronts me with an uncomfortable choice: are science reporters cheerleaders or watchdogs? Well I don't like either of the metaphors, I would be more likely to describe my activity as that of building bridges, translating, communicating, interpreting ... Although there are occasions when I feel that certain parts of science are grotesquely underappreciated so I get out my pompoms and do a bit of cheerleading. More rarely, there are also occasions when I feel that scientists are going against the best interests of society, and I bare my teeth and let out some growling watchdog-like noises. But on the whole I am too busy building bridges across the Two-Cultures-Canyon to be bothered with either the cheering or the barking.

The reports and comments in Nature add to my increasing awareness -- which I talked about at the recent Copenhagen meeting and in my lectures in Germany -- that science reporting is changing quite drastically and rapidly, and we really need to think about how to ensure that the result we want to achieve, i.e. a reasonable level of public understanding of science, and public appreciation of the role science plays in our lives, doesn't fall overboard.

PS What I really don't understand is why the three cartoon characters on the cover had to be all male. Obviously they wanted to avoid the clichee of a female cheerleader, but a female watchdog would have looked really nice next to the male cheerleader ...

leipzig

All going well, I should be in Leipzig by the time this post goes online (oh the magic of electronic time-travel!), where I'm speaking at the GDCh colloquium about my experience as a chemist turned science writer. Maybe also about what I learned from the Copenhagen meeting.