Tag Archives: shakespeare

God’s Doodle – Tom Hickman

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God’s Doodle

The Life and Times of the Penis

Tom Hickman

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $10.99

Publish Date: October 21, 2013

Publisher: Counterpoint Press

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


“A remarkably entertaining and informative look at the male organ down through the ages . . . undeniably funny.” — Booklist   Throughout history, man has revered his penis as his “most precious ornament.” From small to large, thick to thin, smooth to wrinkled, Hickman lets the history of this mystery hang out for all to see. It is a stiff subject, but we easily settle in with the likes of Bill Clinton, Michelangelo’s David, and Shakespeare as they followed their heads. If you were to wrap your hands around anything less than two-inches, it should be God’s Doodle , a brilliant history of the penis that hits the topic right on the head. It reaches through time and looks at how the penis trended long before one was ever posted on Twitter.   You will be impotent with both laughter and information as you read “ . . . subtly, unhurriedly and mercilessly” (Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex ), as Hickman discusses ancient literatures and mathematical quandaries of possible positions, such as Greece’s “the lion on the cheese-grater,” which still keeps scholars from being cocksure about the potential.   “[A] well-researched, dryly witty and worthwhile read.” — Salon   “Tom Hickman tells the story of its ups and downs with enthusiasm and a mostly straight face.” — The Economist

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God’s Doodle – Tom Hickman

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Pantone’s color of the year might vanish from nature by 2040

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Every December, experts at the Pantone Color Institute comb through the world’s Rolodex of hues to determine the color of the next year. 2019, they have decreed, is the year of “Living Coral.” The “living” part is important: Dead coral is white, which hasn’t even earned a spot on the color wheel, let alone color of the year.

The announcement, much awaited by those fashionable enough to care, comes a little over a month after a monumental United Nations climate report found that the world’s coral reefs may experience a mass die-off as soon as 2040. Already, half of Australia’s 1,400 mile-long Great Barrier Reef has perished in bleaching events. Coral reefs are the bedrock of diverse coastal ecosystems, so a massive coral wipeout could also lead to the disappearance of other rare colors found among aquatic species.

What’s the purpose of memorializing the hues of a dying planet? As Slate’s Christina Cauterucci pointed out, the selection “feels like a troll directed at a planet rapidly growing inhospitable to the many organisms that call it home.”

Pantone’s announcement states, “In its glorious, yet unfortunately more elusive, display beneath the sea, this vivifying and effervescent color mesmerizes the eye and mind.” Living Coral’s retreat from the real world might be exactly why some find it so vivifying. The choice carries a whiff of ecotourism — the word for when travelers flock to the world’s disappearing landscapes, such the quickly melting glaciers of Glacier National Park.

The selection also feels like a throwback to a time when colors were valued for their elusiveness in nature. Before colors could be made synthetically, dyes were derived from natural sources, and the hard-to-find hues were considered more valuable. The original purple, for example, was obtained from a small mollusk found the Phoenician trading city of Tyre. As only the rich could afford it, this delicacy of a color became associated with royalty.

There’s a critical difference between Living Coral and the purple of mollusks: Coral isn’t meant to be so rare.

The color has a long history. “By the late 14th century it was recognized as a shade of red, from coral that was found in the Red Sea,” says David Kastan, an English professor at Yale and the author of the book On Color. “Shakespeare, for example, several times refers to ‘coral lips’ or a ‘sweet coral mouth.’”

Now that history may be nearing its end. While Pantone may have immortalized Living Coral in 2019’s most fashionable throw pillows and sweaters, crowning it color of the year seems unlikely to help the actual living coral that spans the sea.

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Pantone’s color of the year might vanish from nature by 2040

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Biology Through the Eyes of Food – J. José Bonner

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Biology Through the Eyes of Food
Biology of Food
J. José Bonner

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $38.99

Publish Date: January 6, 2016

Publisher: J. José Bonner

Seller: Jose Bonner


Food .  Who doesn’t like food?   We all like food — but why make it so difficult for students, teachers, and the general public to visualize and understand the processes that happen inside us when we eat food, or the ecological impacts of food production, or the evolutionary histories of humans, plants, and animals that have produced the present-day “food landscape?”  Traditional biology textbooks tell us the facts, but rarely relate these facts to the world as both teachers and students experience it.  Traditional biology texts and the teaching methods that support them lead far too often to students thinking that biology is “just something you do in school,” divorced from the Real World. It doesn’t need to be this way. The author has been fortunate enough to have spent a dozen years working with non-biology majors at a large state university.  This textbook has grown out of a concerted effort to make biology more accessible and more clearly relevant to the world outside the classroom.  Using students’ writing as a window into students’ thinking, the author sought to learn what conceptions students developed as a result of different teaching strategies.  Similarly, the author sought to discover alternate conceptions that students brought with them to the classroom, and whether those conceptions were built from prior teaching or from popular culture.  Not surprisingly, developing scientific understanding depends strongly on seeing why learning it matters.  The relationship to food helps provide this link.  Scientific understanding also depends critically on visualizing scientific processes — just as understanding a novel depends on visualizing the setting, the characters, and their actions.  It is challenging, however, to visualize processes that occur on a molecular level, and are far too small to see directly.  It is similarly challenging to visualize processes that occur far too slowly to be perceived.  It is, perhaps, even more challenging to link multiple processes together to build the Big Picture, when human working memory is limited to manipulating only a handful of items at one time. For challenging topics, the author tested alternative teaching strategies, in an effort to develop a strategy that would foster more-accurate and more-durable student learning.  Frequently, this meant discarding the traditional teaching methods and creating something quite different.  Therefore, the reader may find strange (even heretical!) the order of presentation, the methods of presentation, and the relative emphases of topics, compared to traditional biology textbooks.  The effect, however, proved to be successful for a great many of the author’s students.  Many remarked that, for the first time, biology made sense. It is hoped that this textbook can offer insights to high school and college biology teachers, and inform their own searches for more-effective teaching methods.  It is also hoped that students will find it a useful resource, and that anyone interested in food and biology enjoys it. Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. Polonius, Hamlet , Shakespeare

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Biology Through the Eyes of Food – J. José Bonner

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