Madrugada.

“Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.” –George Orwell, 1984

I had to be at a meeting at 8am recently. This caused no small amount of anxiety in me. The night before, I laid out my clothes, set my coffeemaker, made sure my bag was packed, made sure I knew where my keys and phone were and took a Unisom.

I was on time. But I sat in a corner with my coffee and glared at everyone.

I’ve been a night person since birth. When I was a toddler, I’d happily sit on my mom’s lap all night while she studied for her college exams. I hate getting up early. By early, I mean before noon. I almost didn’t graduate from high school because I was late every. single. day. I took all night classes in college. My normal bedtime as an adult is around 1am. And it’s grudging. I get up at 7am every day and drive my husband to work. I communicate entirely by blinking and pointing.

As an added bonus, I’m also a lucid dreamer. I sleep like a minute a night. Good times!

In my search for information about night owls, I came across an article at WebMD: Why You’re an Early Bird or a Night Owl.

And I quote:

Besides the obvious problems with being a night owl if you have a day job, “night owls tend to be more depressed, have a higher dependence on caffeine, and use alcohol more,” Sharkey says. But the news isn’t all bad. A recent study in Belgium found that night owls are able to stay more focused as the day goes on, compared with early risers.

Morning people, however, also have advantages. “Larks generally sleep better, have more regular sleep patterns, and have more flexible personalities,” Sharkey says. They also tend to be happier and feel healthier than night owls, according to a recent study from the University of Toronto.

Yeah, morning people sleep better and feel healthier! The whole world is built around them! Of course I am more depressed and drink more caffeine and booze, I’m tired ALL THE TIME. I’d like to make some of these happy little morning larks keep to a 6am to 2pm sleep schedule- see how “flexible” and “healthy” they feel after that? [grumble, grumble.]

Curious about what happens when you sleep? Because it’s crazy!

The Secret Life of Sleep, Kat Duff

It has become increasingly clear that our sleep shapes who we are as much as, if not more than, we shape it. While most sleep research hasn’t ventured far beyond research labs and treatment clinics, The Secret Life of Sleep taps into the enormous reservoir of human experiences to illuminate the complexities of a world where sleep has become a dwindling resource. With a sense of infectious curiosity, award winning author Kat Duff mixes cutting-edge research with insightful narratives, surprising insights, and timely questions to help us better understand what we’re losing before it’s too late. The Secret Life of Sleep tackles the full breadth of what sleep means to people the world over. Embark on an exploration of what lies behind and beyond our eyelids when we surrender to the secret life of sleep.

 The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest, Penelope A. Lewis

In recent years neuroscientists have uncovered the countless ways our brain trips us up in day-to-day life, from its propensity toward irrational thought to how our intuitions deceive us. The latest research on sleep, however, points in the opposite direction. Where old wives tales have long advised to “sleep on a problem,” today scientists are discovering the truth behind these folk sayings, and how the busy brain radically improves our minds through sleep and dreams. In The Secret World of Sleep, neuroscientist Penny Lewis explores the latest research into the nighttime brain to understand the real benefits of sleep. This is a fascinating exploration of one of the most surprising corners of neuroscience that shows how science may be able to harness the power of sleep to improve learning, health and more.

The Secret History of Dreaming, Robert Moss

What do the first major oil discovery in Kuwait, Mark Twain’s fiction and Harriet Tubman’s success conducting slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad have in common? They were all experienced first in dreams. Robert Moss traces the strands of dreams through archival records and well-known writings, weaving remarkable yet true accounts of historical figures influenced by their dreams. With eloquent prose, Moss describes beautiful Lucrecia de Leon, whose dreams were prized by powerful men in Madrid and then recorded during the Spanish Inquisition. The Secret History of Dreaming addresses the central importance of dreams and imagination as secret engines in the history of all things human, from literature to quantum physics, from religion to psychology, from war to healing.

Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, David K. Randall

Like many of us, journalist David K. Randall never gave sleep much thought. That is, until he began sleepwalking. One midnight crash into a hallway wall sent him on an investigation into the strange science of sleep. In Dreamland, Randall explores the research that is investigating those dark hours that make up nearly a third of our lives. Taking readers from military battlefields to children’s bedrooms, Dreamland shows that sleep isn’t as simple as it seems.

Go The F**k To Sleep, Adam Mansbach

Go the F**k to Sleep challenges stereotypes, opens up prototypes, and acknowledges that shared sense of failure that comes to all parents who weary of ever getting their darling(s) to sleep and briefly resuming the illusion of a life of their own. Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s verses perfectly capture the familiar – and unspoken – tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations and laugh at their absurdity.

Hear Samuel L. Jackson read it. (NSFW!)

sweet dreams!

suzy

Reaching for Emotional Comfort Food

Season 2 contains my favorite episode, “The Alien in the Spaceship.”

I like to think that everyone has something—a book, a movie, a TV show, a radio drama—that they turn to when life isn’t going so super awesome, or even when they’re just tired or a little stressed.

My favorite emotional comfort food is the television show Bones, which is now in its tenth season. I’m glad there are new episodes to look forward to, but I’m equally happy watching previous seasons. Over. And over. And over (much to my husband’s consternation).

The reason for this obsession is simple: Bones features confident, intelligent women using their brains to fight bad guys.

This isn’t one of those police procedurals in which there’s a token lady or two (often a tomboy cop). From the second season on, fully half of the starring cast is composed of brilliant lady scientists, and two of them are people of color. Frequent guest stars include more awesome ladies, as well as more people of color.

The basic premise isn’t all that different from other science-based procedurals like CSI or NCIS: A team of scientists examines the evidence using advanced knowledge and technology, and the cops use their guts to hypothesize and suss out motives.

The evidence, however, consists primarily of human skeletons. Dr. Temperance Brennan, nicknamed Bones, is a forensic anthropologist who can reconstruct a person’s life and how they were murdered from the impressions and marks left on the bones.

The murders Bones and her partner FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth solve are fascinating, but the dialogue between the two of them is stimulating as well. Brennan relies on hard science to inform her worldview, and has a tendency to reduce everything from body functions to human emotions to scientific facts. Booth believes in god and his instincts, and their differences come out in frequent discussions about culture, love, children, work, and religion.

Bones isn’t perfect—in later seasons there’s a tendency to reduce female happiness to getting pregnant—but compared to most other shows, it holds up pretty well against my stringent feminist criteria.

The next new episode won’t air until March, so you have plenty of time to watch the previous nine seasons.

–Kelly

Of Food & Science.

I tend to improvise a lot when I cook. After mastering a few beloved recipes from favorite cookbooks, and learning that just about anything tastes good with a solid base of fried onions and garlic, I’ve found that I rarely need to measure ingredients while cooking. Sometimes though, it’s fun to take a closer look at what I’m preparing and think about what might be happening on a molecular level.

 Luckily, the library has many fine books on not only cooking, but the science of cooking. A recent interview on NPR’s Splendid Table turned me onto the new book Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient. If you’ve ever wondered not only how to make the perfect scrambled or poached egg, but also why cooking it a certain way yields varying results, then this is the book for you. Consider for a moment all of the wonderful joys the egg brings us—pasta, custards, cakes, quiches, cookies. If you are interested in learning more about all the wonderful foods that are dependent on the humble egg, then this is the book for you.

  Of course, if you are interested in the science behind cooking, you have to check out one of Harold McGee’s books. Both Keys to Good Cooking and On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen should give you plenty “molecular gastronomy” to ponder while working in the kitchen.

 

 

 And for those cheese enthusiasts out there (of which I’m one) there is a new book just for you, titled simply The Science of Cheese. If you are not content to simply eat cheese, this book will teach you everything from the history of cheese to how new cheeses are created.

 

 

If you would like to move beyond the science happening in your kitchen to the science happening in your belly, then by all means check out Mary Roach’s latest book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal about that most taboo of topics: digestion. Like her other great reads, Ms. Roach is able to take a somewhat unsavory subject and spin it into a series of fascinating, informative, and often very funny reads.

 

So how about you? What books on cooking (or science) are you savoring right now?

-Tara

Om Sweet Om: Yoga For Everybody

Downward, dogs! Originally spotted on Facebook.

Ask ten different people why they maintain a yoga practice, and you just might get ten different answers. Given that the generic term “yoga” refers to an interconnected bundle of physical, mental, and spiritual disciplines, this makes perfect sense: everyone comes to yoga seeking different things, and there is no universal agreement on what a yoga practice “should” be. Of course, these flexible boundaries also leave room for plenty of heated, contentious debate about who is “doing it wrong,” and if you’re interested in that sort of squabble, you can learn more here and here.

If, however, you’d rather learn a little bit more about what the library has to offer on the subject, read on. There’s something in the stacks for everybody, from the long-time practitioner to the yoga-curious bystander, so even if you’re just trying to understand why anybody would want to twist their bodies into different shapes, you’ll find something in our collection. As ever, we strongly suggest you talk to a doctor first if you have any questions about how something you read might apply to your specific situation.

Asana Sampler:

We carry a pretty extensive collection of active practice books and DVDs, so consider treating yourself to a day at the library to examine the books firsthand. They are fairly popular, though, so a follow-up catalog search, by subject or keyword , can ensure you don’t miss anything. You can always consult one of our pre-made resource lists, or ask a librarian. Some of the more interesting titles I found during my own catalog search include:

The No-Om Zone: A No-Chanting, No-Granola, No-Sanskrit Practical Guide to Yoga, Kimberly Fowler. Some people avoid yoga because they think it’s “too weird” or maybe just a step further outside of their comfort zone than they’re ready to go. Fowler, who felt the same way about yoga at first, has written a book designed to allay those fears. You could call it “Yoga for Skeptics,” but beginners should take note: this book is designed for people who are already in pretty good shape from other types of workouts/sports.

Big Yoga: A Simple Guide for Bigger Bodies, Meera Patricia Kerr. Beauty and health come in all sizes, and so does yoga practice in this introductory volume.  Kerr, who describes herself as “beefy, athletic and loud,” models a variety of adaptive poses and provides a solid introduction to yoga practice in a positive, encouraging way. Includes many photographs of people who look like actual people, having a good time working out.

Yoga for Computer Users: Healthy Necks, Shoulders, Wrists, and Hands in the Postmodern Age, Sandy Blaine. Stuck at a desk all day? Blaine’s book offers a series of poses you can do at your desk without getting funny looks–or at least, no funnier than usual–from your officemates. There’s even a longer practice sequence, designed to be done sometime after you’re off the clock, for people who routinely spend their days at a computer. The primary focus is on making stretching, mindfulness, and calm a part of your normal routine, instead of trying to shoehorn it in on top of everything else. Great for the time-pressed (and, honestly, who isn’t?).

Real Men Do Yoga, John Capouya. Designed to reassure you that you will not lose your man card if you take a class with your sweetie,  Capouya’s book focuses on how yoga can be just one part of a well-rounded fitness program, and can even enhance performance by adding flexibility to the mix. Packed with commentary from professional athletes and regular joes alike, this volume focuses on the physical and mental branches of yoga, but leaves space for those who want to learn more to probe into the philosophy as well. Covers a variety of fitness levels.

Yoga Philosophy 101

Interested in the spiritual beliefs behind the physical postures?  Start here:

Yoga: The Greater Tradition, David Frawley

Light on Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Patanjali (various translations available)

Pathways to Joy, Swami Vivakanenda

Memoirs

Still not ready to step on a mat yourself? Pick up one of these memoirs to see what others have gained from their practice.

Will Yoga and Meditation Really Change My Life?: Personal Stories from 25 of North America’s Leading Teachers, ed. Stephen Cope

Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Poses, Claire Dederer

Yoga Bitch: One Woman’s Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment , Suzanne Morrison

Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude, Neal Pollack

Research for Skeptics

Never going to do it, but still intellectually curious about it? Call these picks, “evidence-based yoga.”

The Science of Yoga, William J. Broad

American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West, Philip Goldberg

The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, Robert Love

The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, Stefanie Syman

Whether your explanations lead you to the process of choosing a teacher/studio, a satisfying private yoga practice, or simply more knowledge than you had before you started investigating, I hope the process brings you joy. I started my own yoga practice with a library book, and am currently sampling the wonderful variety of classes, teachers and studios Pittsburgh has to offer. For those of you currently practicing, can you recommend a book, teacher, studio or type of yoga for your fellow readers to playtest?

–Leigh Anne

Sports, Sex, and Crunching Numbers

In this information age, you might feel deluged with factoids, survey results, statistics, and countless other tidbits that you don’t know what to do with.  But in the following two books, four authors (and teams of assistants) have done massive amounts of research, a great deal of data mining, and a bunch of number crunching.  So you just get the fun part of reading their findings, speculations, and conclusions about two of the most fascinating subjects imaginable: sports and sex.

Moskowitz, Tobias J. and L. Jon Wertheim

Scorecasting: the Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won

After reading this book, I think football teams waste too much money on first-round draft picks, I don’t think icing the kicker is so clever, and I have newfound respect for Bill Belichick’s strategy of often going for it on 4th down.  Rest assured, it also covers other sports: baseball, basketball, golf, etc.  My rational side loved seeing the mathematical undoing of the shibboleths of sports radio hosts and players and coaches at press conferences.  Finally, I can’t help mentioning the annoying cover blurb where the self-aggrandizing co-author of Freakonomics praises this book because it resembles Freakonomics.

Ogas, Ogi and Sai Gaddam

A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire

The subtitle is a little misleading because it’s not really an “experiment.”  Ogas and Gaddam tried to avoid the pitfall of most sexual behavior studies whose subjects typically are young, white, well-off, college students.  Instead, they mined immense amounts of data from Internet users’ searches, preferences, habits, interests, purchases, etc.  (Don’t worry, it was anonymous.)  They combined this with an impressive review of previous research as demonstrated by the enormous bibliography.  As with many other studies, the results both accentuated differences in men and women yet at the same time recognized the enormous spectrum of desire and sexual behavior for all people, whatever their gender, age, or orientation.  I would have liked to see more emphasis on cultural differences, though, because while the Internet is indeed worldwide, its user base still skews toward well-off, college educated people.

What are some of your billions of thoughts about books and studies that try to apply scientific rigor to human behavior and recreation?

— Tim

Relearning Science Basics

This past weekend I made a five-hour drive across the state to my hometown near Scranton, PA. To make the drive a little more interesting, I borrowed the audiobook version of Natalie Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. If you’re not already familiar, Natalie Angier is a science writer for The New York Times. The Canon is her attempt to write a book that explains the most crucial aspects of the major hard sciences from physics through astronomy, and she does a terrific job of it.

In fact, she did such a good job that all I’ve been thinking about since being immersed in 13.25 hours of science love is how much more I need to learn. Of course, I now need to buy a stereoscopic microscope, a chemistry set, and a telescope. But I also need to read more too, so here are a few books where I might begin:

The Joy of Chemistry: The Amazing Science of Familiar Things by Cathy Cobb and Monty L. Fetterolf

Physics Made Simple by Christopher G. De Pree  

Biology: An Everyday Experience  by Albert Kaskel, Paul J. Hummer, and Lucy Daniel

Astronomy: A Self-Teaching Guide by Dinah L. Moche 

Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey

Have you begun any new love affairs with knowledge lately?

–Wes

Women and the Sciences

Last week the New York Times reported on a study by the National Science Foundation which found that women still face significant bias in the sciences.  In addition to this report, several books on the subject have been written recently, such as The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls, which examines a few different theories about why women remain so underrepresented in the sciences.  One argument asserts that biological gender differences give men and women different abilities in math and science, and the book Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps- And What We Can Do About It takes a closer look at that theory. Other books, such as Removing Barriers: Women in Academic Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics look at other reasons why there is a gender gap in the sciences, and ways to remove that gap. 

Books like Scientific Pioneers: Women Succeeding in Science look at the women who have already made huge strides in the sciences, and we have many more books on the subject of women in the sciences as well. And of course, we have lots of books for both women and men on different fields of science.

-Irene

The Return of Black Holes, Beakers, and Books

This spring, CLP’s popular science book club Black Holes, Beakers, and Books returns with three book selections about nature and climate change. What’s most exciting about the upcoming meetings is that employees of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History will be joining us with exhibit objects to supplement our first two discussions, and the author of our third book selection will be joining our discussion via telephone. Check out the selections and discussion dates below. Each meeting will be from 3:00 to 4:00pm in the Director’s Conference Room on the First Floor:

Sunday, March 21, 2010
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
by Mark Lynas
What will happen to the earth and human civilization if the planet warms by one-to-six degrees Celsius? Mark Lynas tries to answer this question by looking at warming data past and present, concluding that, depending on the level of warming, the consequences range from the loss of mountain glaciers and coral reefs to the total destruction of life on the planet. An employee of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History will be joining us with objects from the Polar World exhibit to discuss the impact of climate change on arctic life!

Sunday, April 18, 2010
The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One
by Sylvia A. Earle
Described by some as “a Silent Spring for our era,” The World is Blue is Sylvia Earle’s depiction of Earth’s oceans in crisis, as overfishing, pollution, and climate change drive species into extinction and throw off the delicate balance of the entire planet’s ecosystem. An employee of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History will be joining us with objects from the Whales/Tohora exhibit to supplement our discussion of Sylvia Earle’s book!

Sunday, May 16, 2010
Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season
by Bruce Stutz
Part science, part travelogue, Chasing Spring follows Bruce Stutz’s journey across America to “see spring in various phases.” What he discovers on his trip is both fascinating and disturbing: climate change is causing spring to arrive earlier, resulting in altered migration patterns for animals, glaciers that melt more quickly, and unbalanced relationships between plants and pollinators. Bruce Stutz will be joining our discuss via teleconference!

I hope to see you there!

–Wes

lunar lore

Lunar libration

Last Wednesday marked the twelfth full moon of 2009, but it isn’t the last full moon of the year. Another will occur on December 31st. While the definition of a blue moon has varied over time, the current meaning describes the phenomenon of two full moons occurring in one month.  If you’re fond of using the expression “once in a blue moon,” you might want to be careful–literally, you’re saying “once every 2.71542689 years.”

According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the full moon on the 2nd will be the traditional “Cold Moon,” while the one on the 31st will be called the “Blue Moon,” although you can participate in the Almanac’s contest to name it.  During the New Year’s Eve full moon, there will also be  a partial lunar eclipse, when the Earth will just barely cast its shadow on the lunar surface, although the event will be invisible to almost all of the US.

Our connection with the moon is varied and fascinating.  For example, we all know the superstition that the full moon causes people to act crazily.  The etymology of “lunatic” actually derives from the Latin word for moon, luna.  Rich folklore from all over the world surrounds our nearest astral neighbor. 

Our scientific relationship with the moon is no less exciting.  From conspiracies about whether men really walked on the moon to close observations of the moon’s effect on tides, the scientifically-minded also keep an eye on the sky.  In fact, December’s lunar lineup seems a fitting finale for a year in which two missions, by India and NASA, discovered water on the moon.

Happy sky gazing!  Don’t forget to let out a little howl, too.

–Renée

The Emotion Machine

On Sunday, December 13th, the Black Holes, Beakers, and Books: Popular Science Book Club will conclude its Fall 2009 Mortals & Machines series with the book The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. The Emotion Machine is a call for a “back to basics” approach to using the human mind as a model for artificial intelligence. Marvin Minsky finds his academic home at MIT, where he is a scholar of cognitive psychology, robotics and artificial intelligence, among many other things. He is tentatively scheduled to speak to the book club in a teleconference on the day of our meeting.

Our meetings are always free and open to the public, so feel free to stop by!

–Wes