First, a confession. I attended four different middle schools and three different high schools. I managed to take Earth Science, Environmental Science, and then Biology five times over before pursuing a liberal arts degree. I never learned much of anything about chemistry in school, so that bar may be artificially low. The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a wandering, at times rambling, collection of stories that winds along with the Periodic Table of Elements. Like a good liberal arts science class, the book does […]
If Sam Kean had been around when I went to school, I might have majored in Science
I’m not sure at what point in my adult life I decided I love science, but if I had been able to read books by Sam Kean when I was in school, I might have come to this conclusion at a much younger age. Then again, I think the interest has always been there (at one point I thought I would be a zoologist, because I liked animals), but the knowledge didn’t seem accessible to me. Whether it was because I was a girl and […]
A solid series of newish books
The Book of Unknown Americans – 4/5 stars I liked this book a lot and I really thought I was going to….well not not like it, but find it mediocre or something like that. I am not sure why I thought this, and well, I should probably explore that and really don’t want to at the same time. The book is told from many voices; almost all recent, first, or second generation immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The voices range in scope and circumstance, […]
Come for the Science; Stay for the End Notes
Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, for a few reasons. For one thing, he is a complete mad man about research. In chapter 2 of The Disappearing Spoon, Kean records the longest word in the English language. This champion of all English verbiage turns out to be a word that describes a protein on the first virus ever discovered and measures 1185 letters. (I’m not going to record it here because proofing that shit would take up the rest of my day.) What impresses […]