There was a book review in this week’s Nature that I had to pass along (link, sadly, for subscribers only, but you get the first few lines of it). It reviewed a book, Lilavati’s Daughters: The Women Scientists of India, published by the Indian Academy of Sciences.
If you like, the whole of Lilavati’s Daughters can be found at the IAS’ website here. Some of the autobiographical essays that I’ve read–and I haven’t read them all–are just great. So good, in fact, that I’m thinking I might buy the book (available from Scholar Without Borders). Sure there is a slight (okay, whopping) premium over the base price of Rs300 to get it here, but $25 is worth a great book. Plus, I suppose I see buying a book like this as a show of support for women in science.
Even if they are all usually smarter than me. Damn you, nerds of the fairer sex!
Yours in women in science,
Matt
I knew there was something I hadn’t blogged about here that I wanted to: JACS Image Challenge. If you’ve never visited it, it’s a fun little game that JACS is hosting on their spiffy new AJAX-y beta site.
They present you with an image or images from a paper, some text, and then ask you a question about it. Most of the time, you don’t need to read the paper to know the answer if you have a reasonable chemistry background. But, that doesn’t mean to say you’ll always get it right. What you can be sure of, though, is that you’ll usually go “Oh yeah…” when you get one wrong.
For me, the current challenge (#35 as of writing), is one that is pretty easy for me. And, I suspect, for just about anyone. But, some are a bit out of my field, like biochem or inorganic. I can give a slightly educated guess, but random might be more effective for this theorist. But, it is JACS: you get theory, experiment, analysis, everything, all in one journal.
Plus, sometimes you get a really cool one. Looking back to recent ones, there is #30 where you get a fun video of some rather impressive science. Or, there is #31 which, after answering, you find that most visitors actually get it wrong (myself included). And, thus, I learned something new!
This is just a little annoyance of mine, but it’s something that’s been grating on me. Recently, I decided to make a concerted effort to use CiteULike as a way to semi-organize the papers I read on the web. (I’m fairly certain that I had a previous account a while back, with quite a few (50, 60) papers in it, but for the life of me I can’t seem to remember/find it.)
Still, that is no reason not to start again. So, I’ve been adding papers, and I noticed something that just bothers me. When you add a paper to CiteULike, you get to “rate” your…enthusiasm about the paper. From “Top priority!” (5 stars) to “I might read it” (2 stars), it’s all good. But then you get to “I don’t really want to read it” and that gives it one star. That one star seems…odd to me.
To me, one star still means it’s a paper I want to read. Maybe it’s in astronomy or some field I don’t know much about, but if I’ve taken the time to press the CiteULike button and save it to my “library”, it seems like the least amount of interest would be “might read it”, not “not gonna do it”[1]. Read the rest of this entry »
