Peter's comments (member since Mar 31, 2008)

Peter's comments from the Science and Inquiry group.

Carolyn wrote: "How does someone become a scientific artist, I wonder"

Sorry to revisit this so late, but just the other week, I chanced on a book by Jane P. Davidson: 'A History if Paleontology Illustration', Indiana University Press. The author is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno. I was on my way to dinner before a play, so I scribbled a couple of notes to myself which were then submerged for a bit.

It may be worth a browse,

peter

I hope that some time this year we will take the time to discuss 'The Origin of Species'. I lay it on the table now, aware that November would be more appropriate.

peter

In Australia, they say that 90% of snakebites come from people trying to kill or catch snakes. The other 10% are just unlucky, and apparently, those who die are fewer than those who die of bee stings. I don't try to catch or kill them, though I once nearly picked up a black snake that I mistook for a piece of tyre tread. I stopped in time, and I still pick up rubbish in the wilderness, but I do it more slowly.

Now about the explorers-from-the-sea: artists were used to reproduce the appearance of the coast as it was mapped, but they also did flowers and some of them did animals.

Now about recent fossil art from Oz: I am at my grand-daughter's house and heading from here to Melbourne (flying over the bushfire areas just on sunset), so I cannot look to see what unshelved books I would recommend, but look for Mary White and also for Tom Rich and his spouse, Pat Vickers-Rich, also John Long. There are others, not yet shelved, but the names elude me. It's summer, after all.

Carolyn wrote: "How does someone become a scientific artist . . ."

Jenny Uglow's Nature's Engraver sheds some fascinating light on Thomas Bewick, who was close to being a scientific artist.

I can't speak for archaeology teams, but many Australian explorers, especially those on ships had artists with them. I have no idea how much training they got in advance.

In many cases, though, art was completed back in Europe, using badly-stuffed bodies, or even study skins. I saw a pic (done 1790) the other day of a parrot that is all dishevelled as though it has been through the tumble-dryer and sitting on an English tree. Sarah Stone did it from a study skin, of that, there can be no doubt. You can see it from this URL: http://tinyurl.com/bjbp2g

Later: I meant to add that even a 16-foot snake looks large. We encountered one coming out of the New Guinea mountains: it was across the road with its head in the drain on one side and its tail on the other. Its neck had been wired (I guess somebody was tired of losing pigs. We moved it off the road, marked the place, raced to the pub and told a taxidermist who raced out to salvage it and then bought us all a beer as finder's fee.

Sorry, it's summer here in Australia, and we tend to go wandering off to the beach or the nearest bit of shade at this time of year. I used to teach science, so did my wife, and we have produced two scientist offspring (plus a lawyer: nobody's perfect -- but he did a science-law degree for a while before dropping the science).

Now I have the piece of paper that proclaims me as "retired", I write books, mainly in the area of the histories of things, popular science, science history, stuff like that. I'm a "Goodreads Author" if you need more specifics.

I also write for youngsters, and right now, I am working on a historical fiction series for YA (young adult), with strong emphases on science and technology in Australia in the 1850-1870 period. This reflects my interest in an era when tree bark, seahorse teeth, dog droppings, fish guts and boiled sheep were all legitimate raw materials.

I signed off today on the page-proofs of a book for the National Library of Australia: superficially, it is about the people who explored Australia, beneath that, it is about the technology of exploration with workable projects for readers (10-14) to tackle. Ah well, at least you know why I wandered off!

Tracy, try Marcia Bjornerud, "Reading the Rocks".

I decry the lack of reading about geology these days. In 'Victorian Britain', Sally Mitchell says Harriet Martineau reported that by the 1830s, the middle classes were buying five times as many books on geology as they were novels.

Aha! So we're awake? Good. I'm still here and willing to follow. At the moment, I am reading several Australian books (hard for others to access) and Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth.

A book that has just come out in Australia is worthy of notice. Pasteur's Gambit tells the story of an Australia, afflicted in 1888 with a vast plague of rabbits.

Pasteur was scratching for funds to establish the Pasteur Institute, and sent his nephew, Adrien Loir, to Australia to pursue a 25,000 pound prize for a biological control method.

Loir fell among thieves, duplicitous anti-vaccinists, nest-feathering rogues and plain bastards, formed a liaison with Sarah Bernhardt and had assorted other adventures, lied to and disobeyed his uncle (wisely so) and in the end, had a victory of sorts.

The era and the area are both within my area of specialisation, and I knew the bare bones of the story -- in fact, I had even considered it as a case for treatment, but I felt there would not be enough meat.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong! It is a brilliant, gripping and complex tale. The book is only out in Oz so far, but use blackmail, threats or physical violence as necessary to get your hands on a copy.

On another note, the original query was about women's medicine, so could I suggest my own Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World: science and technology in 1859 which is out in Australia this week and in the UK in six weeks? Part of the story is the battle assorted women had to get into medicine.

I am back in Oz, after six rather hectic European weeks, but I own a copy, so re-reading starts tonight. Count me in.

Many thanks for the suggestions. With a week to go before I leave, I have completed all the deadlines and I am off to the bookshop (store if you prefer) tomorrow to see what I can find. Meanwhile, I am reducing emails to a minimum -- see you all again around August 10.

I have Schama's history of Britain in hardback, as yet unread, apart from bits I looked at when the TV series was on. As we will be taking a week of recovery time in Amsterdam and environs, the Dutch culture choice sounds excellent. Thanks!

I live in Australia. Going almost anywhere involves seven hours of flying (it takes about 4 hours to get out of Australia if we are headed to Asia or Europe).

So we Australians who can read need books that will engage. The rest watch movies.

I am about to fly to Tallinn via Stockholm, which is most of 24 hours flying and waiting, and I NEED reading matter. My top nomination would be Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men but I have read that. The same problem assails titles by Jared Diamond , Simon Winchester and Mark Kurlansky.

I will probably go with a new Giles Milton or Michael Pollan, but I earnestly beg and entreat for recommendations. It needs to be an engaging story with lots of pages, or I would just take Lyell's Principles of Geology which is on top of my to-read stack (and has been for 18 months -- it never makes it onto the plane!).

What would you take for a long trip?

It would count as a science for me. Not the Schliemann cut-scrimmage-and-plunder style, not the Elgin style, but the modern sensitive and thoughtful style. In any case, it uses a great deal of science, from thermoluminescence to carbon dating to palynology and more. Like all branches if interpretative science where evidence is rare or sui generis (think human paleo-anthropology), archeology is full of vituperation and polemic, but they have a place in science.

Here is a link to something germane that I prepared earlier (some years earlier, if you require chemical precision):
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/macin...

Elizabeth, protocol be hanged -- sounds like a great book, and if I spot it in Europe in the next two months (I am about to head to selected Baltic states, Low Countries and bits of Central Europe, so chances may not be good), I will happily but it -- if not, I will order it when I get back, if it has not reached Australia's shores.

I am quietly assembling a list of books to try to round up before I take off, so folks, please keep those titles rolling in!

Uncle Tungsten Oliver Sacks
The Periodic Table Primo Levi
Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher Lewis Thomas

I am another new one -- I live in Australia, but get around, and my shallowness makes monomolecular layers look profound My credentials: I have visited Henri Mouhot's tomb, outside Luang Prabang; I make stone axes; I have visited Les Eyzies and Lascaux and I have handled the Piltdown skull.

I have visited Marie Curie's birthplace; I have consumed a beer in the John Snow pub in what used to be Broad Street; I carried a giant kangaroo's fossil toe bone in my shirt pocket at work every day for two years; I saw Galileo's finger in Florence before they put it on the Web and I know the first name of the inventor of the Wimshurst machine.

I once couriered a type specimen of a very ancient fish from Edinburgh to Australia, in contravention of EU regulations, rather than surrender it to a customs official who asked if it came under anthropology or zoology; I once exhibited two savages in a golden cage for three days and I have frizzled the hairs on my leg by standing too close to lava on the slopes of Kilauea. All those are close enough to true enough for government work.

Everybody has their faults: I have mine in a block of varved shale, sitting on my desk. They are all normal.

Well, something had to be . . .