Thursday, December 01, 2011
Foyles
À propos of reading a book about brains by one Antonio Damasio, I decided that I needed to read a book about cells. Not knowing anything about cells or about books about cells, Amazon not much good. So off to Foyles where they carry stocks of books about everything, everything that I have ever wanted books about anyway. As expected, after a fairly small number of minutes, I light upon a large paperback all about cells, a paperback which, having progressed to the 8th edition, looks to be a successful undergraduate text. Lots of pictures. Hopefully more or less accessible to someone with old and ordinary level GCEs in chemistry and physics. Off to the desk to find out how much the thing was and was a touch shocked. Perhaps it is just a long time since I have bought a book of this sort, but I must have looked either poor or dismayed or both as the assistant rapidly announced that I could have 10% off as it had been on the shelf for a while. Done!
Back home, I find that the book 'Becker's World of the Cell' is indeed just the sort of thing that I am looking for. Plenty there to give me the general idea - including for example, that the physical shape, the geometry of large molecules is important. That molecules with chunks of matching shape might get to talk to each other. Impressed by the amount of stuff that there was to learn. Not a problem for me, a casual visitor as it were, but presumably if one was an undergraduate one needed to be able to recite chunks of the stuff if poked. Which would take more brain power than I can muster these days.
At this point I find that there is a companion web site, access to which is granted by the scratch off code at the front of the book. A web site which includes what looks like a facsimile of the book, which might be quite a handy adjunct, when, for example, the text is talking about a diagram which is not on the same page. It also includes various visualisations. I stumbled a bit over java add-ins - which seem to struggle a bit with Chrome sometimes - but then got onto a very nifty visualisation of how photosynthesis works. Moving pictures zooming down from the leaf to the molecule. Clever stuff (even without the sound effects, which are not supported by my PC. Probably just as well as I would probably have found them irritating), which must have taken a good bit of time and effort to put together and which made me feel much better about the price that I had paid for the book.
Also quite happy for Foyles to have the £5 or so more than Amazon that they charged. They earned it.
Also amused along the way to find that the corporate logo for Pearson Education is very like that for the Home Office. Presumably the branding people who sold the Home Office theirs made the reasonable assumption that there was no overlap between the Home Office and Pearson Education: no-one who mattered was going to be annoyed by the fact that the branding people had been able to sell the same art work more than once.
Back home, I find that the book 'Becker's World of the Cell' is indeed just the sort of thing that I am looking for. Plenty there to give me the general idea - including for example, that the physical shape, the geometry of large molecules is important. That molecules with chunks of matching shape might get to talk to each other. Impressed by the amount of stuff that there was to learn. Not a problem for me, a casual visitor as it were, but presumably if one was an undergraduate one needed to be able to recite chunks of the stuff if poked. Which would take more brain power than I can muster these days.
At this point I find that there is a companion web site, access to which is granted by the scratch off code at the front of the book. A web site which includes what looks like a facsimile of the book, which might be quite a handy adjunct, when, for example, the text is talking about a diagram which is not on the same page. It also includes various visualisations. I stumbled a bit over java add-ins - which seem to struggle a bit with Chrome sometimes - but then got onto a very nifty visualisation of how photosynthesis works. Moving pictures zooming down from the leaf to the molecule. Clever stuff (even without the sound effects, which are not supported by my PC. Probably just as well as I would probably have found them irritating), which must have taken a good bit of time and effort to put together and which made me feel much better about the price that I had paid for the book.
Also quite happy for Foyles to have the £5 or so more than Amazon that they charged. They earned it.
Also amused along the way to find that the corporate logo for Pearson Education is very like that for the Home Office. Presumably the branding people who sold the Home Office theirs made the reasonable assumption that there was no overlap between the Home Office and Pearson Education: no-one who mattered was going to be annoyed by the fact that the branding people had been able to sell the same art work more than once.
# posted by Jim @ 1:38 AM 
