2009 Science-Book Challenge

The time has come to announce the 2009 Science-Book Challenge! (Plus an extra-credit treat about the Mandelbrot Set, below.)

I was pleased with the response to last year's challenge–despite it's eleventh-hour appearance–which I'll discuss at more length as we close in on the end of the year. Our attention right now is on getting the Science-Book Challenge for 2009 off to a good, timely start and recruiting lots of new challengers.

Last year the challenge was adopted, slightly after the fact, by Ars Hermeneutica, the 501(c)(3) science education and research company I'm working on/at/for. This year the SBC begins that way, so the "official" page for the challenge is hosted at Ars: Science-Book Challenge 2009.

Our goal is to encourage the reading of books with some science content and, by telling about them, encourage still more people to read books with science content. The rules of the challenge are easy:

1. Read at least three nonfiction books in 2009 related somehow to the theme "Nature's Wonders". Your books should have something to do with science, scientists, how science operates, or science's relationship with its surrounding culture. Your books might be popularizations of science, they might be histories, they might be biographies, they might be anthologies; they can be recent titles or older books. We take a very broad view of what makes for interesting and informative science reading.

2. After you've read a book, write a short note about it, giving your opinion of the book. What goes in the note? The things you would tell a friend if you wanted to convince your friend to read it–or avoid it. Naturally, you can read some of the existing Book Notes for ideas. You might like to read our Book-note ratings for ideas about how to evaluate your books.

3. Don't worry if you find that you've read a book someone else has also read; we welcome multiple notes on one title.

4. Get your book note to us and we'll post it with the other notes in our Book Note section. Use the book-note form or the comment form to get in touch with us. Or, leave a comment here where I'll find it.

5. Tell other people about the Science-Book Challenge: http://ArsHermeneutica.org/besieged/Science-Book_Challenge_2009.

This year I'd like to see word of the challenge spread to more people, and to have more people involved. For that I need y'alls help, of course.

As before, if you'd like to let us know you're taking up the challenge, I'll be happy to put your name and blog link in our list at the official page where we can track your progress and find out what books you've read and written about all in one central place. Use one of the contact links in #4 above, or leave a comment here. All those electronic routes will reach me.

To encourage participation and for eye-catching publicity, we have a new banner/table for 2009. Isn't it pretty? Please, feel free to use it on your own blog to publicize the challenge. The image on the tablet is a portion of the fractal Mandelbrot set, created by Kevin Wong (source); Creative Commons License, used with permission.

And now, before everyone goes off to challenge others and choose their reading for next year, a word about what the "Mandelbrot Set" is. It is a mathematical entity, the set of all points in the complex plane that satisfy a rather simple mathematical constraint.* In the image at right (source), the Mandelbrot set is the part of the plane that is not white. (In addition to the mathematical references in the footnote, let me point out this page from the University of Utah, The Mandelbrot Set, which has lots of pretty pictures and a Java applet that lets you explore and make endless beautiful pictures for yourself.)

The set is named for Benoit Mandelbrot, most famously known for inventing and publicizing the idea of fractals, of which this set is a beautiful (mathematically and aesthetically) example. One of the distinguishing features of fractals is their "self-similarity", the property they have that small parts of them, when magnified, look just like the bigger parts.

For instance, look at the region in the previous illustration labeled "2": is a small circle stuck onto the side of the big, kidney-shaped region. If you look closer you can see that there are even tinier circles stuck all over. In fact, all of the circles, no matter how small, have other circles stuck onto them, which have circles stuck onto them, which have…. It's endless. That's what the animation at left (source) is showing. It zooms in on the circle stuck onto the kidney-shaped thing, only to find another circle stuck on at the left side, and on and on and on. That's self-similarity!

The self-similarity is related to the idea that fractals frequently have non-integer dimensions, but that's a topic we need to save for another time. However, it's worth looking at another example (source) of the self-similarity in this stunning animation, another one that zooms in on a section of the set for a total magnification, from beginning to end, of 11 million. And still, the set keeps looking much the same regardless of the magnification, and there's always lots of interesting detail to see (in fact, about the same amount of detail at each magnification–self-similarity again). Watch for it and you'll see sections pass by that bear a remarkable similarity to the background in our 2009 Science-Book Challenge tablet.

Enjoy the animation once or twice or twenty times, but then send your friends here to see it and recruit them for the 2009 Science-Book Challenge!
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* The details aren't terribly important, but a complex number c is in the Mandelbrot set if the absolute value of the iterative sequence x_{n+1} = x_n + c, starting with x_0 = 0, is bounded (i.e., there is some finite number that the sequence of values never exceeds). More information is at the Wikepedia entry for Mandelbrot Set. More mathematical details can be found in the Wolfram MathWorld article on the Mandelbrot Set, where there are also some additional very pretty pictures.

Posted on November 25, 2008 at 23.55 by jns · Permalink
In: All

2 Responses

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  1. Written by Melanie
    on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 at 16.44
    Permalink

    I'm joining again! I really liked the push it gave me to finish some of the science books I had waiting to be read. Also, the Challenge button is really gorgeous.

  2. Written by Jodie
    on Friday, 12 December 2008 at 09.59
    Permalink

    I love scientific history so I'll think about this.

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