A few weeks ago, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Phil Plait's Death From the Skies. After I caught my daughter looking at the book a couple of times, I managed to bribe convince her to write a review of the book. The result is the following review. I fixed the formatting a little bit, but I had absolutely no role in the development of the text.

Death From the Skies

When I got death from the skies I thought that it would be about people getting an unpleasant visit from flaming meteors, I was wrong. It was about the ways the world will end. I then got depressed and then got an unsettling rush of emotions all at once. Now many people are convinced that I'm bi-polar! But seriously, the book is good. I'll give it that much.

I like that the book isn't full of made up stuff. I like that it has something to do with people getting a wake up call from meteors as well. But what I like the most is that Philip Plait addresses it calmly. He says it as calmly as saying that dinner is ready. So that makes me a little calm instead of losing my mind and making my will with crayons.

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As you may or may not know, there's been some conflict in the scientific publishing industry over the last few years. Traditional business models have been challenged by an "open-access" model, where the papers are freely available to the general public. In the traditional model, the money comes through subscription charges, and the readers pay for the privilege of access to the research. In open access publishing, the papers are freely available. The costs are covered through a variety of means, including fees paid by the authors.

Many of the traditional publishers have clearly felt threatened by the open access movement, and have taken fairly aggressive action to try and curb the perceived threat. (Back in early 2007, for example, an industry group hired a public relations pit-bull, and launched a massively dishonest lobbying effort in an attempt to derail efforts to require free access to papers that report results funded by federal grants.) Apparently, at least some of the major "traditional" publishers are still feeling threatened. Yesterday, an article by Declan Butler appeared on the Nature website that discusses the current state of financial affairs at PLoS. That would be fine, of course, if the article was reasonably objective and neutral in tone. Unfortunately, this one wasn't. The article was not entirely unfair, but it certainly fell far short of what I would have hoped to see from a journal with Nature's history and reputation.

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Wilkins just tagged me with one of those blog meme things. Apparently, he thinks that I've nothing better to do with my time (and, unfortunately, he's totally correct about that). This particular meme involves historical figures. The rules are simple:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.

2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.

3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.

4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

I'm going to do what both Wilkins and Myers did, and pick someone who probably wouldn't ordinarily come to mind. Those two aristocrats picked members of the nobility. I'm commoner than they are, so I'm going to go with a clergyman who started out from more middle-class roots: The Blessed Niels Stensen (1638-1686), Titular Bishop of Titiopolis.

If you're familiar with geology, you probably know Stensen better by the Latinized version of his name: Nicolas Steno.

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