Just a bit of light reading…

Fiction

Zodiac – Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Spook Country – William Gibson

various oddities from H. P. Lovecraft

Non-Fiction

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – Douglas Hofstader

Chaos – James Gleick

Hypersea: Life on Land – McMenamin & McMenamin

Gaia’s Body – Tyler Volk

Papers

  • Hazen, Robert M., Papineau, Dominic, Bleeker, Wouter, Downs, Robert T., Ferry, John M., McCoy, Timothy J., Sverjensky, Dimitri A., Yang, Hexiong Mineral evolution American Mineralogist 2008 93: 1693-1720 (HTML (sub req’d) PDF) Discusses the minerals formed at various stages of earth’s history, and in particular noting the significant diversification caused by life- including humans, who have for example created new species of garnet. 
  • Patricia Cortazzo, Carlos Cervenansky, Monica Marn, Claude Reiss, Ricardo Ehrlich, and Atilio Deana. Silent mutations affect in vivo protein folding in Escherichia coli. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 293 (2002) 537–541 (HTML (seb req’d) PDF) Silent mutations aren’t so silent after all, and analog reality surfaces again!

By Topic

  1. Ocean Acidification