Science at Collins

Your Inner Fish is a ridiculously fun book. Possibly you have not thought of evolutionary development and Organizers and hox genes and paleontology as a really good time and entertaining reading material (though, if you’re reading this blog, possibly you have); either way, you will find it to be absolutely the case in this book by Neil Shubin.

If you’re looking for something to keep you entertained this spring break, especially something mind-boggling in a good way, I would advise heading right on over to the New Books shelf & checking Your Inner Fish out. By the time you come back from break, you’ll hopefully have found something of value—since your options include really elegant experiments, plain wonder, or a better understanding of the logic behind some of our bodies’ more apparently illogical constructions.

Transportation  is the focus of the Live Green challenge’s second week. The photo at left  is linked to a list of selected books at Collins Library on the topic.

You’ll find statements of the problems, new designs and directions for vehicle design, and assessments of urban transportation planning. Check one of them out, or search our catalog for more.

Flower bundles by Brian Beggerly

Every so often, I’d like to highlight some good reads here at Collins, and the combination of the end of the summer and the flowers at the farmer’s market last night reminded me of a pair of books I’d recently finished, both published almost simultaneously. They might keep the rapidly disappearing summer feeling hanging around a bit longer.

Favored Flowers: Culture & Economy in a Global System, by Catherine Ziegler, gives a scholarly reading of the economic and cultural meanings of the global flower market. Amy Stewart’s Flower Confidential, on the other hand, takes a more historical and natural historical approach, running readers through the development of currently popular flower breeds, modern growing technology, and changes in our appetites for flowers. Both discuss in some detail the environmental impacts of large-scale flower growing, in the U.S. and developing nations. For an interesting look at a commodity we take for granted, and a wallop of color as the season grays over, either book is a great choice.

Scanning the geology shelves last week, I ran into a book I’d never have imagined existed: Herbert C. Hoover’s (yes, that Hoover’s) notes, as contributed to the Geologic Atlas of the United States’s Pyramid Peak folio.

The notes were reissued in facsimile in 1979, and reproduce the handwritten records Hoover took in the summer of of 1894 as part of his summer job as an assistant to the USGS. Paid at $60 per month, he worked with the USGS to support himself at Standford. Ultimately, these notes and the work of the rest of the team, headed by Dr. Waldemar Lindgren, were synthesized into the Gelogical Atlas of the United States, Folio 31, Pyramid Peak Folio.

Among other gems, the preface gives insight into Hoover’s reconciliation of creation and evolution. Noting the inconveniences of the horse—lack of a camel’s water tank and a coat of scaly armor, as well as an inconveniently low number of legs causing a bumpy gait—Hoover suggested that the animal was a ‘mistake of creation’ as all the features he desired “were known to creation prior to the geologic period when the horse was evolved”.

For more information, check out the notes yourself. For even more primary source information on Hoover the geologist, check out his 1909 book on The Principles of mining, or his 1912 translation of Agricola’s De re metallica.