The Where, The Why and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science

If you liked Fantagraphics ornate-yet-hip bestiary Beasts! and you find yourself pondering such unknowables as “why do we have an appendix?” or “what existed before the Big Bang?” then hie thee to the library – pronto –  to check out The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science. Although the foreword by David “The Way Things Work” Macaulay might seem to imply the sort of exploded diagrams and exhaustively detailed explanations that made his books so popular in the 90s, the execution of The Where, the Why, and the How is much more Beasts-like. That is to say, you won’t walk away with any clearer sense of what’s behind some of science’s greatest mysteries (for instance how stars are born, or why do whales beach themselves) but you will be introduced to each concept by a specialist in that field and a graphic artist’s exquisite interpretration of said mystery. Some illustrations are charmingly direct — for instance “Do Squirrels Remember Where They Bury Their Nuts” is accompanied by a picture of a squirrel studying a road map — and others are as evocative as they are clever (an elephant using a feather to fly in “Why Do Placebos Work?”) In the end, despite the cross section on the cover, The Where, the Why, and the How is no good at dissecting anything with great certainty, but it excels in showing that there is great beauty and possibility in all the things we do not yet know.

ETA: NPR has a “Free Comic Book Day Cheat Sheet” with recommendations of what to pick up this weekend. But, for the record, I liked comics before they were cool.

Well, one enterprising high-school English teacher is sowing a whole new crop of old-school nerdery, teaching creative writing by having his students create text-based, interactive games. You can see (and play) the students’ games on this thread. Sadly, I tried a few and found no grues, but I appreciate the effort.

I’ll fully admit that I’ve been skeptical of the educational merit of computer games on the whole, but Minecraft actually has some neat things going for it, in case you need to persuade a recalcitrant administrator. Just getting one’s head around Redstone Circuits alone provides a basic foundation for logic, electronics, computer programming, and, OMG, Boolean operators.

C’mon, librarians, if you can’t sell the higher ups on Boolean operators, hang up your MLIS, dust off your resumé, and find a new career. Besides, you know, you can make the kids check out some books and shit when they come to use your computers.

Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative by Vanderbilt’s Jay Clayton looks like a promising example. Starting in July of this year, the course will use the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Lord of the Rings Online MMORPG as its central example of how stories are transformed across media. Sounds like there’s a bit of Keats and narrative theory thrown in for good measure, but also a bit of hanging about in Bree with dwarves and hobbits and such.

Hopefully, it won’t be like the library school class meeting I once had in Second Life. Only once does a class need to be interrupted by an intoxicated Bronie and his detachable phallus to make you question the usefulness of virtual worlds as an educational platform…

Check out the official site to find a local gaming event. Also, go read Board Game Quest’s recommendations of what to play on TableTop Day.

And I hope to start a new, hopefully weekly, series of posts highlighting MOOCs that might appeal to Nerdbrarian readers. Not that I’m going to take them all the courses myself. I’ll be lucky if I have the time to blog about ‘em.

In any case, there’s a list of the recommended reading for the course on Comixology and a suitably cheesy video teaser up on YouTube. The class kicks off next week on April 2nd.

So, instead, why not reach out to local artists and get them to do displays for you? Win-win, you get an attractive display, and they level up on local notability. The Portsmouth Public Library in New Hampshire has been all over this, not only getting artists to do displays, but displaying their art in the library, doing public talks, the works. Awesome.

(Photo: Eric May)

All of which is just background to explain why I find this idea at the Basalt Public Library in Colorado so awesome (and others who have recently jumped in the seed-saving fray).

Now, I’m not terribly keen on how NPR spun the Basalt story, as if public libraries are in need of “saving” from anything other than over-privileged and short-sighted bureaucrats, or as if saving seeds is going to ever justify to taxpayers the public investment, but still: great idea. If public libraries can help improve food security, assist people with learning some DIY skills, and encourage communities to share, that’s fairly awesome, even apart from the rhetoric.

(Photo: Chiot’s Run)

People who say that it’s dumb to turn libraries into book-lined Internet cafes are right … Damn right libraries shouldn’t be book-lined Internet cafes. They should be book-lined, computer-filled information-dojos where communities come together to teach each other black-belt information literacy, where initiates work alongside noviates to show them how to master the tools of the networked age from the bare metal up.

Libraries could do far worse advocate than having Cory Doctorow for an advocate. Read the rest of the article on Raincoast.com.

(Photo: Jonathan Worth)