The Best Mixture of Science and Art
Written: Nov 24 '99 (Updated Dec 10 '99)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Intelligent, articulate science writing mixed with art
Cons: Only comes quarterly
|
|
|
| DougAlexander's Full Review: Sciences The Magazine |
Every once in a while, just when you think you're aware of most quality things that are available, something pops up seemingly out of nowhere and gives you a pleasant surprise. This is what happened to me with "The Sciences," a thin, infrequent, and thoroughly enjoyable new visitor to our mailbox.
I'm not a scientist, nor do I play one anywhere but in my imagination, but I do like to keep up with the scientific news. I read the Science Times in the New York Times, scan the science news on CNN.com, and occasionally indulge in a little "Popular Science," but with my first issue of "The Sciences" I realized that I had been missing possibly the most important publication out there for the "lay-scientist." The articles are intelligent, thought-provoking, and most often extremely interesting - take the one in the current issue about a mechanical clock that was built to run for over 10,000 years. The author not only details the clocks inner workings and history, but also muses on the arrogance of assuming that *anything* built by man will last 10,000 years, and how talk of solving the "Y10K" problem amounts to little more than an inflated sense of human importance. It's articles like this that make me leap for the magazine as soon as it arrives - you don't find this kind of thought in "Popular Science" or even "Scientific American," where the former tends toward the whiz-bang gadget crowd and the latter is often barely accessible to someone outside the specific field of each article.
"The Sciences" seems to take pains to publish pieces by articulate, thoughtful authors who are also experts in their field, and the writing never tends toward the unreadable. The crowning touch is the inclusion of actual art, sometimes scientific in origin, more often not, arranged within the text and sometimes equally as interesting.
By all means, if you have any interest in Science and good writing, take a glance at "The Sciences." It is an oasis of intelligence and accessibility in a field that is too full of posturing and pseudo-experts, and I guarantee you'll come away thinking.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
DougAlexander
|
|
Reviews written: 61
Trusted by: 137 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.