Book Journal 2015: 1
Hey, we're up to real time now. I have no idea if anyone reads these besides me but here goes another:
Dark Banquet: blood and the curious lives of blood-feeding creatures. By Bill Schutt
Another “science for non-scientists” book, educational, decently interesting, and not to be read over lunch for the squeamish. It talks about blood a lot, in case you couldn’t guess. I learned new things, which is often the standard by which I judge these sorts of books. It has humour, frequently a little self-deprecating of the author, who is a vampire bat biologist who went out and did the normal science-writer interviews for all the non-bat chapters. History a-plenty, usually in the history of our understanding of or relationship with the various animals, with a chapter dedicated entirely to blood. The book goes over many useful basic biology things, like how evolution works, how muscle attachment differs between arthropods and mammals, how antibiotic resistance happens, and why birds and bats fly so differently
Useful things I learned: blood-feeding entities can be described as sanguivorous or hematophagous (use THOSE in Scrabble, why don’t you?); the existence of the Mayan vampire bat god Zotz or Camazotz; that one of the reasons Galen’s understanding of human anatomy held on so long, despite being clearly wrong, was probably because in the early Middle Ages church leaders declared his work to be divinely inspired and thus infallible; and that that thing you might have heard about with the little amazon fish swimming into places it oughtn’t isn’t a complete myth, as there is a confirmed case of this occurring from 1997, reported at the 2001 meeting of the American Society of Herpetologists and Ichthyologists.
Among the things I already know were the rolling, growling, Balkans squash vampires. Thank you, Digger.
Thanks to Stacie and Adam Davis, who gave me this book as a solstice present.
Dark Banquet: blood and the curious lives of blood-feeding creatures. By Bill Schutt
Another “science for non-scientists” book, educational, decently interesting, and not to be read over lunch for the squeamish. It talks about blood a lot, in case you couldn’t guess. I learned new things, which is often the standard by which I judge these sorts of books. It has humour, frequently a little self-deprecating of the author, who is a vampire bat biologist who went out and did the normal science-writer interviews for all the non-bat chapters. History a-plenty, usually in the history of our understanding of or relationship with the various animals, with a chapter dedicated entirely to blood. The book goes over many useful basic biology things, like how evolution works, how muscle attachment differs between arthropods and mammals, how antibiotic resistance happens, and why birds and bats fly so differently
Useful things I learned: blood-feeding entities can be described as sanguivorous or hematophagous (use THOSE in Scrabble, why don’t you?); the existence of the Mayan vampire bat god Zotz or Camazotz; that one of the reasons Galen’s understanding of human anatomy held on so long, despite being clearly wrong, was probably because in the early Middle Ages church leaders declared his work to be divinely inspired and thus infallible; and that that thing you might have heard about with the little amazon fish swimming into places it oughtn’t isn’t a complete myth, as there is a confirmed case of this occurring from 1997, reported at the 2001 meeting of the American Society of Herpetologists and Ichthyologists.
Among the things I already know were the rolling, growling, Balkans squash vampires. Thank you, Digger.
Thanks to Stacie and Adam Davis, who gave me this book as a solstice present.