Children's Books discussion
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June 2021: Scientists in the Field
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Traditional.
I could try it as an ebook, and enlarge, but that would break the layout design, and I'm just not that motivated.
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My eight-year-old and I absolutely loved this! I checked it out a few months ago when we were really int..."
Oh fantastic! After all, what really matters is if it appeals to kids, never mind oldsters like me. :)
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Wow, usually tiny font sizes are more an issue with e-books.
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That, the lead bullets and micro trash.
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That, the lead bullets and micro trash."
Lead billets, forgot about that!
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That, the lead bullets and micro trash."
One issue with lead bullets is the fact that although they are now often illegal in many areas, there are still huge amounts of them in lakes etc. and there are still manny hunters who use them.
And lead bullets can also be a threat to human health. When we still lived in Germany, one of our family friends was an avid hunter who often would bring my mother freshly killed pheasants. And I did once bite through a lead bullet that was lodged in my piece of pheasant, which definitely freaked my mother out.
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That, the lead bullets and micro trash...."
Yes, this is still a huge problem :-( There was a display about that at the World Center for Birds of Prey when we visited. Also, condor parents spend two years raising their young so that's another reason it's taken so long for their numbers to recover. The young also need to learn important social skills from their parents... if they don't have the correct social skills with other condors in the community, they will not survive.
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Thanks! Fortunately, many of the dinosaur books I'm sharing with my sons are newer so they have that updated focus and if we read anything more dated we know what most scientists today believe and can proceed accordingly.
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It is still a very interesting book!
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Oh, that sounds GOOD! I'll have to try and get this. My sons are getting interested in sharks, but they don't like the books that make them look like evil monsters and, I have to tell you, a lot of picture books are like that :-( I even put a hold on a Little Golden Book about sharks, thinking it would be fairly tame but, oh my gosh, even *I* flinched at a few of the illustrations. (I'm telling you, don't google the goblin shark too close to bedtime! and, of course, the Great White was shown leaping out of the water in a total Jaws pose--ugh.) I know that some kids are into that sort of thing, but I found the illustrations kind of at odds with the mostly very non-judgmental and strictly informative text that even remarks that the chance a shark will attack a human is very small and that humans cause more harm to sharks than sharks cause to humans and that it's important to protect sharks. The best book I've found about sharks for very young children is Shark Lady: The True Story of How Eugenie Clark Became the Ocean's Most Fearless Scientist which I highly recommend not only for it's actually quite gentle illustrations and positive portrayal of sharks but also as a really fine biography of an inspiring and pioneering (female) biologist.
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It is available on Open Library so you might want to check Swimming with Hammerhead Sharks out there before trying to find a copy. But I really do love that there a no “sharks as terrible monsters” photographs.
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Thank you! Good to know as, unfortunately, my library district doesn't have a copy.
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So I checked again and none of Kenneth Mallory’s photographs in Swimming with Hammerhead Sharks have the typical but exaggerated pictures of close up gaping shark teeth and even the few pictures of non hammerhead sharks just show them swimming with closed mouths. So Mallory certainly does practice what he preaches.
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I'm just a little troubled that it doesn't address a certain controversy head-on, the idea of 'farming' animals (that practice which bothers vegans). Note that I, personally, am not significantly bothered by that. But I am concerned that young readers of the book might be surprised when they eventually learn of the controversy and not know enough to protect their understandings from pseudo-scientists. I hope that I'm wrong; after all, youngsters are learning more about how real science works these days, and are less susceptible to nonsense than many grown folk. And the section covering the controversy about transgenic creations is very good. So a person who reads the book carefully will probably be well-prepared anyway.
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Not my field of interest, but still finding fascinating bits. Politics and sociology, for example, are related fields, as the volcanologists can only advise evacuations, but leaders have to call for them.
Also interesting is the post-mortem which may not be one... there are indication that Mount Merapi may only be warming up for another, perhaps bigger, eruption, as the analysis after the 2010 eruptions. One of the statistics from that struck me is that 18 kilometers out, the layer of ash in the soil was 3 cm deep. Seems like a lot to me!
I liked that the emphasis was on saving lives with science. Yes, it's clear that there's adventure, but you don't become a volcanologist for the thrill; it's not a sport. I also very much appreciate that local scientists are featured.
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Not my field of interest, but still finding fascinating bits. Politics and sociology, for example, are related fields, as the vo..."
This sounds interesting.
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I'm just a little troubled that it doesn't address a certain controvers..."
Thanks for the heads up, as that would definitely also bother me.
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Not my field of interest, but still finding fascinating bits. Politics and sociology, for example, are related fields, as the vo..."
So if politicians refuse to call for evacuations due to potential natural disasters, scientists are basically out of luck. But I bet is politicians refuse to order an evacuation and a devastating volcanic eruption or an earthquake occurred, I bet these same politicians would be very quick to cast blame at scientists.
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I recall reading and liking Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the World's Brightest Bird an..."
The series is pretty long and more books keep being added, which is good (but I also think that many of the earlier tomes should probably be updated).
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I hope so! I'd love to hear from educators about this.
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Me too!
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/californ...
(Warning for sensitive viewers: it does show some hunters with deer they've killed.)
The email also contained the following good news, "In a news release today, we announced that our biologists, along with our partners at Zion National Park and Bureau of Land Management (BLM), have confirmed two [condor] nests in Southern Utah, each housing a quickly growing, fuzzy-gray nestling. This is the first time we have observed multiple condor nestlings in Utah during the same breeding season!"
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Children's Books
Books mentioned in this topic
Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the World's Brightest Bird (other topics)Eruption! Volcanoes and the Science of Saving Lives (other topics)
Stronger Than Steel: Spider Silk DNA and the Quest for Better Bulletproof Vests, Sutures, and Parachute Rope (other topics)
Eruption! Volcanoes and the Science of Saving Lives (other topics)
Eruption! Volcanoes and the Science of Saving Lives (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Dorothy Hinshaw Patent (other topics)Ilima Loomis (other topics)
Loree Griffin Burns (other topics)
Pamela S. Turner (other topics)
Mary Kay Carson (other topics)
More...
Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot is also a great bird book (and a successful conservation story) and I do recommend it. And if you watch..."
The bird dinosaur book is great, but you should also be looking for some recent ones, as today, the vast majority of palaeontologists actually do think that dinosaurs directly gave rise to birds, which was still not yet totally the case when Digging for Bird Dinosaurs: An Expedition to Madagascar was published.