I have been interested in the Canadian island of Baffin Island since ‘Frozen Fire: a Tale of Courage‘ by James Houston was a set text when I went to school. Baffin Island, which straddles the Arctic Circle in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago is in many ways the archetypal ‘Arctic’ location – it has sea ice,… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Books
The map is not the territory
1. The divide in the discipline of Geography Geography is a somewhat schizophrenic discipline. Is it a ‘social’ science or is it a ‘hard’ science? The two aspects of the discipline have been in conflict since the ‘quantitative revolution‘ of the 1950s and 1960s within Geography, and the ‘hard’ science of Geography is represented in… Read more »
A snow book, northern Scotland
Adam Watson has been continuously observing and collecting data about snow in the north-east of Scotland (and particularly in the Cairngorm mountains) since the 1930s, and this important book represents the culmination of that activity. It will have a strong claim in the future to being the standard reference work in the discipline of research… Read more »
It’s a fine day for the hill
Adam Watson can surely lay claim to being a true ‘Mountain Man’ of Scotland – perhaps the premier contemporary claimant to this auspicious title! Adam Watson’s recently published ‘It’s a fine day for the hill‘ (subtitled ‘And once in a blue sun and moon’, the meaning of which is explained in the book) is his… Read more »
Cool Britannia
Iain Cameron (with whom I visited a long-lasting snowpatch on Aonach Mòr last October, see the blog posting ‘Autumn snowfields in Lochaber‘) and Adam Watson have just written a book together, called ‘Cool Britannia‘. This book is a welcome guide for anyone interested in the little-known area (although now coming to more public prominence after… Read more »
The new world of scientific research on the web
One of the areas that overlaps my professional life and personal interests is the use of the Internet (and specifically the World Wide Web) for scientific research – and although in my professional life I work closely with academic researchers, I’m also interested in how the web can be used by non-scientists to make a… Read more »
Two important books about the power of the Internet
I’ve just finished reading two interesting books about the modern Internet and where it’s going. They are: ‘The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand’ by Chris Anderson ‘Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’ by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Spend some money if you want a serious website
Back in May I wrote about living on the open-source planet. This approach to web-based software development is often associated with the LAMP (I prefer the P to stand for Perl) ‘stack’ of technologies.
h2g2 and how to use a controlled vocabulary to classify the universe
I recently read ‘Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams‘ by M.J.Simpson, which to be honest was pretty dull, but it did get me thinking about the thing Adams is most famous for, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘.
“England, thy beauties are tame and domestic…”
I recently watched the second episode of the BBC series ‘Mountain (with Griff Rhys Jones)‘ and found it pretty disappointing. It seemed to spend more time talking about Coleridge, Wordsworth and Kendal mint cake than about mountains. I also checked out the book that accompanies the series and my disappointment increased further. Of the 250… Read more »
I am a software engineer / database administrator / web developer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my spare time I like to travel and take photographs (especially of mountains). See my main website here: Eddie's Photo Archive