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Peter Macinnis
Goodreads author profile
born
April 25, 1944
in Australia
gender
male
website
twitter username
genre
influences
Peter Mason, Henry Lawson, Peter Medawar, J B S Haldane, Rudyard Kipli...more
member since
March 2008
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Poisons: From Hemlock to Botox to the Killer Bean of Calabar
— published 2004 — 5 editions |
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Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar
— published 2003 — 2 editions |
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Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World: science and technology in 1859
— published 2008 — 2 editions |
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The Killer Bean Of Calabar And Other Stories: Poisons And Poisoners
— 2 editions |
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Kokoda Track: 101 Days
— published 2007 — 2 editions |
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Australian Backyard Explorer
— published 2009 |
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Rockets: Sulfur, Sputnik and Scramjets
— published 2004 |
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100 Discoveries: The Greatest Breakthroughs In History
— published 2008 — 3 editions |
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The Speed of Nearly Everything: From Tobogganing Penguins to Neutron Stars
— published 2008 |
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Australia's Pioneers, Heroes & Fools
— published 2007 |
Upcoming Events
Australian Schoolyard Naturalist
Author appearance, August 23, 2012 04:14PM
National Library of Australia, Conference Room, Level 4, Parkes Place, Canberra, AU
http://www.nla.gov.au/education/for-teachers-and-students
Author appearance, August 23, 2012 04:14PM
National Library of Australia, Conference Room, Level 4, Parkes Place, Canberra, AU
http://www.nla.gov.au/education/for-teachers-and-students
Author and educator Peter Macinnis will present practical projects related to bi...more
Descants (Nonfiction)
1 chapters
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updated Mar 29, 2010 04:33pm
Description:
Short pieces (I aim at about 700 words a time) on the origins and mutated meanings of certain interesting words. I have about half a book, and I return to fossick around the outlines every now and then.
Peter's Recent Updates
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Peter Macinnis
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| I read this at the suggestion of the author, in order to give we workshop participants at a Sydney Writers' Festival one piece of common ground. I liked the book so much that I went out and got 'Tamar' as well. Love in the time of Cuban missile crise...more | |
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"The pooter is a really neat devices. The design I show here is simple, easy to make, and completely safe.
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Peter Macinnis
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| I had the pleasure of meeting the author a a Sydney Writers' Festival workshop. He had suggested that we read his latest, 'Life, an Exploded Diagram', and I liked that so much that I read this as well. The setting switches between Britain around 1995...more | |
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Peter Macinnis
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Peter Macinnis
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Peter Macinnis
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| It might seem odd that an Australian would list this—and if you look at the shelves, Americans will find one apparent inconsistency. Folks, if you see 'odd' or 'inconsistent', you don't know the full story. Because Britain has and had no written cons...more | |
“The writer found that certain freshwater crustaceans, namely Californian species of Daphnia, copepods, and Gammarus when indifferent to light can be made intensely positively heliotropic by adding some acid to the fresh water, especially the weak acid CO2. When carbonated water (or beer) to the extent of about 5 c.c. or 10 c.c. is slowly and carefully added to 50 c.c. of fresh water containing these Daphnia, the animals will become intensely positive and will collect in a dense cluster on the window side of the dish. Stronger acids act in the same way but the animals are likely to die quickly. . . Alcohols act in the same way. In the case of Gammarus the positive heliotropism lasts only a few seconds, while in Daphnia it lasts from 10 to 50 minutes and can be renewed by the further careful addition of some CO2.”
― Jacques Loeb
― Jacques Loeb
“In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.”
― Shirley Hazzard
― Shirley Hazzard
“Science is part of culture. Culture isn't only art and music and literature, it's also understanding what the world is made of and how it functions. People should know something about stars, matter and chemistry. People often say that they don't like chemistry but we deal with chemistry all the time. People don't know what heat is, they hardly know what water is. I'm always surprised how little people know about anything. I'm puzzled by it.”
― Max Perutz
― Max Perutz
“The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.”
― C.P. Snow
― C.P. Snow
“At one time, the state of culture in Czechoslovakia was described, rather poignantly, as a 'Biafra of the spirit'. . . I simply do not believe that we have all lain down and died. I see far more than graves and tombstones around me. I see evidence of this in . . . expensive books on astronomy printed in a hundred thousand copies (they would hardly find that many readers in the USA) . . .”
― Václav Havel
― Václav Havel
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