the perks of being a book blogger

On September 2nd, I changed my “about” text to indicate that my tumblr blog would henceforth be focused on book-related things:

“I blog and reblog old books, new books, science books, story books, books I read, find, collect or write. Also: science, photography, art, movies with subtitles, pop/rock/latin music, cello and flute music, fair trade, and a modicum of nudity.”

This was simply because since December last year, the main source of notes for my material and new followers for my blog was reblogging from the lovely bookporn blog, so by September an overwhelming majority of my followers must have found me that way. In order to a) give those followers more of what they fancy, and b) increase the “stick factor”, i. e. the percentage among the visitors who find me via a bookporn reblog who then decide to follow me, I made the whole blog a bit more bookish. It’s not exclusively about books, but sufficiently so to get bookish visitors to accept it as a book blog.

Eight weeks into the experience, I can reveal that this switch has been quite successful. The perks of being a book blogger include:

* most trivially, having a focus that actually fits my existing URL and headline, which is a literary quote (from E.M. Forster, Howard’s End)

* by looking at other book blogs to find material to reblog, I’m getting to look at other people’s books at leisure …

* I’m still able to cover all topics that interest me, as all can be covered in books! Specifically, there is still science (especially scientific illustrations, as can be found in books), music, art, and politics.

* I can find a wider audience for my growing reservoir of book reviews, plus leave a scent mark for those books that I would really like to read but realistically will never find the time to (both are included in the “a book a day” tag)

* the bedtime belles I usually reblog as a sign-off at night look even more seductive if they are reading a lovely book,

* I‘m now gaining two followers per day (as opposed to one per day in the months since last December, while I was benefiting from bookporn influx but had no clear identity for the blog).

* I’m being constantly reminded to actually make time to read a book !

For the time being, this blogspot blog will remain the usual eclectic mix of science, culture etc., so if you like snooping around other people's books, find me at http://proseandpassion.tumblr.com/.

One of those bookish flickr pics of mine which have acquired hundreds of views from the tumblr book fandom.

what the frack

I've avoided the topic of shale gas for a while, seeing that the stupidity of digging up fossil fuels that we can't afford to burn should be obvious to all, but as the UK government seems to have given up on renewable energies and embraced fracking, and we've had some lively protests this summer, I wrote a feature about the recent developments, mainly in Europe, where the responses range from an outright ban on fracking (in France) to enthusiastic support (Poland).

My feature is out today:

Dash for gas leaves Earth to fry

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 20, R901-R904, 21 October 2013, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.10.006

Free access to

HTML text

PDF file

A poster that appeared in the New York City subways a few years ago warned of the impact of fracking on the city’s water supplies. The state has since imposed a moratorium on fracking. (Used with permission from Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, produced with Center for Urban Pedagogy and graphic artists, Papercut.)

aspiring actors

review of

Lucky break

by Esther Freud

Lucky break charts episodes from the interlinked lives of a bunch of aspiring actors who meet at drama school and remain loosely in touch for over a decade after.

As she’s been to drama school herself and is married to an actor, Freud has no shortage of material, and the book is rich in absurd details of both the successes and the frustrations of struggling young thespians, ranging from penguins and pantomimes through to staged conversation with members of the royal family.

The large cast and the episodic nature of the narrative requires quite a bit of attention from the reader. Sometimes I felt like I had to keep track of somebody else’s facebook friends, but as the characters mature and their paths diverge, it becomes easier to remember who’s who. Also, it may help to read the book a bit more swiftly than I did.

It all sorts itself out by the end though, and I felt rewarded for staying the course. I’m almost tempted to start over again, now that I know who’s who. The other perk of reading this is that as a freelance writer I suddenly feel I have an amazingly sane and stable career compared to what these poor souls have to deal with.

october harvest

The monthly roundup of things published in German magazines yields algal biofuels, mind-altering drugs and mysterious mechanisms:

Forschungspolitik: Drogengesetze schaden Neurowissenschaften
Chemie in unserer Zeit 47, 284 DOI: 10.1002/ciuz.201390056 restricted access

Biosprit aus Algen?
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2013, 61, 1035-1036

Ausgeforscht: Struktur und Funktion
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2013, 61, p1083

The last item was inspired by the historical scientific instrument of unknown function shown below. There is a competition on for the best explanation of what it might be for.

PS: My feature on diatoms will appear in the next issue of Chemie in unserer Zeit (December) but it is already online (restricted access).

chemistry in pores

My latest feature in Chemistry & Industry juxtaposes two different approaches to conducting chemistry in nanoporous materials. There's the work of Makoto Fujita's group at Tokyo, who has used self-assembling, crystallisable molecular cages to carry out chemical reactions and even X-ray structure determination with molecules resident in the channels of these materials. Meanwhile, the teams of Achim Müller and Ira Weinstock have used globular molybdenum oxide capsules to study the assembly of minimalist micelles in their interior.

Pores for thought

Chemistry & Industry 2013, No. 10, 20-23

In the same issue, on pages 50-51, you'll find my long essay review of the book "Functional materials from renewable sources".

Both pieces are premium content on the C&I website, I'm afraid, but I'll be happy to send pdf files if you drop me a note. PS I noticed only recently that the tag "chemistry+industry" isn't actually working (at least in Firefox and in Explorer). It does work behind the scenes, on the page where I can manage and edit my entries, but not on the public side. Assuming it's to do with the "+" sign, so I'm replacing it with "chem-and-ind" from now on. To access old pieces, please use the sciencejournalism tag and patient scrolling. Sorry about that.

moving targets

Are plant diseases that cause catastrophic famines a thing of the past? Well, ahem, the pests and pathogens keep evolving, moving and spreading, and human activities like global trade and large scale monoculture often help them. So new threats to food security are emerging, and scientists have to find new ways of saving the crops we eat.

Some very scary things I learned from researching this feature which is now out:

Pests on the move

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 19, R855-R857, 7 October 2013, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.034

Free access to full text and PDF file

Stem rust on wheat stalks. (Photo: Liang Qu/IAEA.)

Dvořák abbreviated

The latest addition to my growing collection of arrangements for cello and flute is an adaptation of the slow movement from Dvořák's cello concerto. I've left out a section in the middle, bringing it down to 6 minutes length. The rest in bar 66 marks the spot.

As the original work is largely a dialogue between the solo cello and the woodwind instruments in the orchestra, I'm hoping that my edit makes some kind of musical sense, but all hints and suggestions for improvements are welcome.

PS: Noteflight members can see a handy list of our other scores here. Mere mortals can access them individually through the earlier blog entries.

a robot's life for me

there are exciting things going on in the fields of robotics, biomimetics, and biohybrids, but for some reason researchers in these fields tend to communicate their important results via conference proceedings rather than high profile journals. So when I went to the conference Living Machines at London in July, I realised that there are lots of things that hadn't shown up in the pages of Nature and Science. I haven't really looked at these issues since publishing "Biotronik" ten years ago - a book in German which looked at biohybrids and the interface between biology and electronics.

Trying to make up for lost time, I wrote a feature about these things, which is out today in Current Biology:

Towards living machines

Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 18, R821-R823, 23 September 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.004

Free access to full text and PDF download.

Vicky Vouloutsi from Barcelona held an intriguing talk about programming social behaviour on the established android system iCub (I could have benefited from such programming in my early life too!), so I took a snap of her and her pet:

mental disorders made accessible

review of

Essentials of psychiatric diagnosis: Responding to the challenge of DSM-5

by Allen Frances

The Guilford Press, New York, June 2013

In April this year, I wrote a feature about the criticism levelled at the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, DSM-5, which appeared in May. One of the critics I cited was Allen Frances, MD, who had criticised from the preparatory stages of the new edition that it was making diagnostic criteria too wide and too vague, at the risk of making mental patients of us all.

Frances is not only a distinguished psychiatrist (he chaired the team that prepared the fourth edition and was also involved with the third edition of the DSM) but also a prolific writer, so he prepared his own, anti-DSM-5 diagnostic guide in time to be published almost simultaneously with the big manual. As he told his publishers about my article, they kindly sent me a review copy of the book.

I was a bit apprehensive at first, as the title sounds somewhat technical and forbidding, but sampling some of the chapters I soon found out that it is highly readable for lay readers. Each chapter for a specific mental disorder has very clear signposting including a screening question, description of a prototype case, and differential criteria to distinguish the condition from separate, but similar ones, or, indeed, from the fringes of normal behaviour. The last distinction is possibly the most important one, as the risk that all variability in human behaviour may get labelled pigeon-holed into psychiatric categories and treated with drugs provided by an all too eager pharmaceutical industry is a growing concern.

The book is “meant for everybody with an interest in psychiatric diagnosis” – not just medical professionals and students, but also anybody who cares about a person who may have mental health problems. Recognising problems early can save lives. And as some of these disorders seem to be spreading, the target audience may well include most of us.

PS: A revised edition has just come out on September 18th. According to the blurb on Amazon, it “features ICD-10-CM codes where feasible throughout the chapters, plus a Crosswalk to ICD-10-CM Codes in the Appendix. The Appendix, links to further coding resources, and periodic updates can also be accessed online (www.guilford.com/frances_updates).”

not showing at a cinema near you

I only just discovered that the annual statistical yearbook from the BFI (British Film Institute) has statistics on everything, including the foreign language films that I would like to see in cinemas but that fail to turn up. So I had a good look at the BFI statistical yearbook 2013:

According to the country of origin stats on page 17, 151 (23%) of the movies released in the UK in 2012 came from other European countries (198 from the US, 162 from the UK). I have a nagging suspicion that figure includes one-off showings at festivals or at specialised cinemas like the Ciné Lumière at the Institut Français in London. At least the number that made it to Oxford cinemas is definitely 5 times smaller. They account for 4.8 % of box office takings, but of course one could argue endlessly which is the hen and which the egg in this story.

Also see the chapter 5, "Specialised Films", which includes specific stats on foreign language films. Apparently, 230 films in 32 foreign languages were released in 2012, accounting for 35.5% of all releases, but taking only 2% of the box-office. Allegedly the number has increased from 96 in 2001, which is contrary to my impression. This is in line with an increase in total releases (and in audience figures), however, so the percentage is stable at 35.5%

Some specific languages (including all that have 10 or more films): French 49 films (I am sure that fewer than 12 were shown here! ), Hindi 44, Tamil 21, Malayalam 19, Turkish 13, Punjabi 10, Spanish 10, German 8, Arabic 4, Italian 3, Mandarin 2, Dutch 1.

On average, foreign language films play at 20 sites on their widest release – the figure for English language films is 159. Commercially most successful foreign language film in 2012 was Untouchable. Three other French films made the top 10 (of non-Hindi foreign language box-office): Amour, Rust and Bone, The kid with a bike (I actually saw this one!). The cumulative stats for the last 12 years have Amélie in 3rd and Volver in 7th position.

Speaking of which, German film “Die Wand” shows exactly once at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Oxford, next Tuesday at 6pm. The same slot will host Fernando Trueba's The artist and the model later this year, which allegedly is on release from this week. After a tweet from me, the distributor, Axiom films, pointed me to the list of "tour dates", so you can check if it comes near you.

Londoners also have the benefit of the annual London Spanish Film Festival at the Ciné Lumière, which will run from September 27th to October 9th this year.

DNA balls

My feature on Spherical Nucleic Acids (SNAs) - a kind of assembly in which short nucleic acid strands stick out radially from a nanoparticle core - is out in the September issue of Chemistry & Industry:

DNA plays ball
Chemistry & Industry 2013, No. 9, pp28-31

This is premium content with restricted access to the full text, but I may get pdf reprints.

Image source: Wikipedia - Adapted from Cutler, J. I., et al., Spherical Nucleic Acids. J Am Chem Soc 2012, 134 (3), 1376-1391. Copyright 2012 American Chemical Society.

PS - as punishment for making fun of people for publishing DNA helices the wrong way round, I've been hit by another inverted helix in the illustrations for this article, which I didn't get to check. Fortunately, it's a detailed ball-and sticks model where the chirality is very hard to verify, so it won't mislead anybody who doesn't know already which way the helix is supposed to turn.

forty years later

Today is the 40th anniversary of the coup in Chile. Thirty years ago, I attended a major event on the eve of the 10th anniversary:

which was a huge arena event with lots of big names. The head of the regional government and future federal president Johannes Rau was sitting in the first row with his very young wife (and I was two rows behind them), when the evening's host Dietmar Schönherr, speaking about the US interference in Nicaragua, referred to the then US president Ronald Reagan as an arsehole. That was front page news the next day.

Based on what I learned that evening and later (eg from books like Joan Jara's excellent biography of her husband Victor), I have never been able to hear any US politician trying to take the moral high ground without grumbling, but look at what your guys did to Chile. And even though it has now returned to democracy, the recent student demos have reminded us that Pinochet's legacy persists in the education system as elsewhere.

Oh well. There doesn't seem to be much going on around here today. Just me and my Victor Jara LPs.