Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol reviewed by Claire

Anya's Ghost is a murder mystery ghost story. It is a comic book. My favorite books are comic books. The colors of these pictures are gray, black and white and dark purple.

There is a teenager girl, who doesn't have the best life ever, called Anya that falls into a deep hole. The hole has a skeleton in it. A ghost appears sitting on the skeleton. The ghost is named Emily and she can't go very far away from her bones so she is stuck in the hole too. She says she was murdered. Anya is rescued but accidentally has Emily's finger bone in her bag. The bone must have fallen into the bag somehow. So Emily can get out of the hole.

The rest of the book is about Anya trying to solve the mystery of who killed Emily. Emily was a nice ghost for most of the book. But the ending was not what I expected. The ghost got stronger and became able to pick things up and move things around. Then Anya went to the library and she was shocked  to discover a newspaper article that showed a picture of Emily and said "local girl missing after double murder". Now Anya knew that Emily was not murdered but a murderer!

Anya went back home to dispose of the bone but Emily had taken it and moved it around the house. She has turned very mean and scary. So when Anya finally finds the bone she brings it back to the hole to drop the bone in. Emily gets really mad and tries to push Anya in the hole but it had no effect. So Anya drops the bone in the hole and the ghost is dragged down with it. But a minute later Emily's skeleton climbs out. She doesn't look at all as nice as the ghost did before Anya discovers she is a murderer. Emily's skeleton starts falling apart and then she falls back into the hole.

This book was filled with smoking teenagers who called each other hot chicks.  There were lots of teenagers trying to be cool. My favorite line was "Dude, I have like only one sucky friend. My life is total crap".  Most of the books I have read are not as vulgar as this one. But is was very funny for me. Every time I came to a funny line (like the Dude one) I read it out loud to my family.

Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, by John

Born 1908 Roger Tory Peterson lived his life as a super birder and he created his first guide in 1934. A Field Guide to the Birds (east of the Rockies) was an instant success; the 2,000 copies sold out in the first 2 weeks. The reason his guide was so popular was probably due to the fact that no one had ever created anything like what Roger created. It was the worlds first field guide!!! That guide was the foundation of all modern field guides. Peterson died in 1987 but his legacy and his books live on.

The newest edition to his classic guide was printed in 2008, of course Peterson didn't update his guide personally he being long past. No, this guide was updated by a number of famed birders, adding new range maps, 40 new paintings by Michael DiGiorgio, new text and digitally updated paintings by Peterson. As well as making new editions to the eastern and western guides they came out with a new one to all the birds of North America, this is the one I have.

The Great
This guide is arranged in the classic order with paintings on right, text and some extremely detailed maps on the left. One of my favorite things about this guide are the status's which are given next to the English and scientific names above the body of the text blocks. The status tells how common each species is in North America, generally it just says "Fairly common" or "Uncommon" etc, etc.

Next to the status is a big "M" and then a number. The "M" stands for map and the number matches up to the number on the map. Now you may be wondering why the maps would need a number if they were right next to the text. The answer is simple, there are in fact two maps for each species (excluding vagrants of course). One map I have already noted as being next to the text (in the front of the book), the other maps are placed in the back. Along with being much larger these maps also have notes on the likelyhood of vagrancy to other parts of the country and notes on migration among other range related things. These pages are nicely arranged and very educational to flip through.

There are quite a few flight pages and these pages, similar to the Nat Geo guide, show the birds on the right hand page and on the left descriptions of their different wing plumages.

Sizes of the birds are given under the name. Descriptions are very informative discussing habitat, voice (discounting Boobies, Tropicbirds, Cormorants and pelagic species which we are all unlikely to hear) and similar species. This guide contains many rarities and vagrants as well as introduced species.

Before every family of birds are a few lines discribing the family. Here is what is said about the corvids: "Large perching birds with strong, longish bill, nostrils covered by forward-pointing bristles. Crows and ravens are very large and black. Jays are often colorful (usually blue). Magpies are black and white, with long tail. Sexes alike. Most immatures resemble adults. <b>FOOD</b>: Almost anything edible. <b>RANGE</b>: Worldwide except s. S. America, some islands, Antarctica" Yes, I know isn't a masterpiece, but it is interesting and useful. I would never have been able to tell you that corvids don't live in southern South America before reading that.

This guide has a very nice illustrated introduction on IDing birds, something that would be very useful for any beginning birder. Before the introduction on page number one is a "ONE PAGE INDEX" listing bird families in alphabetical order from Albatrosses to Yellowthroats.

In the back of the book, squeezed tightly between the range maps and the index, is a "Life List" that follows the ABA checklist. This list contains more species than the book (not surprisingly). The book does not mention Xantus's Hummingbird due to its rareness in the ABA area but the Life List lists this bird and many other species which the book lacks.

The very last few pages are taken up with one of my favorite sections of the whole book. These pages are filled with silhouettes. There are three separate spreads. One spread depicts a black and white shore filled with water loving species, the second shows a mixed flock of birds in flight (on this spread 26 species are shown flying) and on the last spread is a colorless painting of a country roadside showing 32 different species. These are fun pages to quiz yourself on by covering up the list of species shown on the page.

The OK
The gulls are separated into two sections; adults and immatures, this may require you to flip around a bit more, before finding the bird you are looking for.

I can't say I am a huge fan of the paintings, I have seen nicer. These paintings, while not being completely stunning (in general), are very useful for tough IDs. All the field marks are pointed out with black arrows, and many of the birds are shown in flight. Generally species are shown in a few different plumages.

The bottom edge of each page is colored in order to help the reader find the birds with more speed. For example all the shorebirds are color tabbed olive green. To me this doesn't seem like it would be all that useful.

The Awful
My only real problem with this guide is that its very big. It would be hard to carry a book like this out into the field with you unless you want bring a backpack.

This guide I would recommend to any birder though I think it would be better for a beginning birder to start out with a smaller guide.

This is the story about The Cat in The Hat by Anna

This is my favorite book. I just finished it yesterday. It has 61 pages. I read it out loud to my mother.  And it is the biggest book I have ever read.

I love how the cat lies. I like the most about how the cat lies about falling. He said "I can hold more, oh I can hold more" and then he fell on his head with a BUMP!

The little girl and boy they saw all the things fall. And the little fish said "No, no, that cat should not be here - make that cat leave, tell him that you don't want to play!"

And then the fish said "You bent our new rake, you sank our new ship in the cake, you spilled our milk!" and then the cat ran out of the house and then as fast as a fox he was holding a red box and as fast as a fox he came in the house.

He got up on the red box, with the tip of his hat, and then he said "take a look for yourself" and then he picked the hook and then Thing Number One and Thing Number Two they both ran to the little girl and boy and they said "would you like to shake hands with me?"

And then Sally and I we did not know what to say. So they had to shake hands with Thing One and Thing Two. And I would not like to shake hands with them. If I were the little boy I would just make that Cat in the Hat leave.

So they got out our kites and they bumped them on the wall. Ran down the hall. Bumped everything off the wall. They messed every single thing up. They ran in mothers bedroom and they got out mothers gown with red, white and pink spots on it. And they flew the kites all around.

(I just got a new kite and my sister Claire, she got one too. At the beach we flew them around but one time I let go of my kite so it flew in the swamp. I got it back by Mama getting it. It stayed up in the air all the time at RISD beach - oh yes, it did!)

And then the fish said "I see our mother, she is very close, I see her right now!" And then he fell out of the pot. And the fish said "We have to do something - what if mother comes and sees a MESS on the ground!"

And then he ran as fast as he could to get the net so he could catch those Things Number One and Thing Number Two. 

With a plop he caught them at last.

And then the cat came out carrying the red box and then he came back in with a machine what cleans up everything they mess up. 

We need a machine like that Cat in the Hat (I think he made it). We need it because we just play around and make a mess in the girls room and we have to clean it up but it is hard to clean messes up.

You should read The Cat in The Hat.

The End

by Anna 

First Post

It was my idea to start this blog, so I thought I should do the first post.

Recently I've been interested in teleology, the appearance of purposes in nature, and the closely related notion of final causes, or action directed towards a goal.  One of the major characteristics separating our present tradition of science from ancient and medieval science is the rejection of final causes and the limitation of explanations to efficient or mechanical causes (one billiard ball hitting another and causing it to move would be an example of an efficient or mechanical cause - it's not that the billiard ball wanted to go into the pocket, it's that it was hit in a certain way with a certain force that determined it's motion with a push.)

An ancient scientist, witnessing the growth of an oak from an acorn, thought that the acorn developed towards the goal of being an oak - it almost "wanted" to be an oak.  Modern scientists don't think that things move towards goals; they think they are determined by prior causes (like the billiard ball was).  A modern scientist would look for the various tiny proteins in cells that push developmental changes from behind.  This causes this, causes this, causes this.  What we call the goal comes about, but not because it was a goal.

The rejection of final causes in favor of mechanical causes and the conviction that nature is deeply mathematical are the two defining characteristics of modern scientific thinking.  The break from the ancient and medieval scientific tradition began in the 1600's with thinkers like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.

My recent reading has centered around these themes.

I've been reading some medieval philosophy to get a better grasp on what thinking about the world teleologically (in terms of final causes) was really like.  It's a very foreign way of thinking for someone brought up with modern common-sense conceptions (conceptions deeply based in the modern scientific view of the world).  While I'll admit that I don't find every argument convincing, I am drawn to medieval thought's concern with Being over beings - with the problem of understanding what it is to exist, to be, over analysis of things that do exist.  (This is exactly the kind of concern that the first modern scientific thinkers were eager to abandon.)

I've also been reading a collection of papers on the philosophy of science.  Most of the readings are by logical positivists, a group of early 20th century scientists and philosophers who believed that only scientifically verifiable statements are meaningful.  The essays I've been reading are attempts to deal with the problem of teleology in biology.  For the most part, they've been arguing that any teleological statement (e.g., ascribing a "function" to an organ) can be translated into a mechanical statement without loss of information.  

A Cell Biology textbook has been taking up a lot of my night-time reading sessions.  Beyond the thrill I get from learning how weird everything really is, I like thinking about the tension between seeming purposes and mechanical causes in the most basic processes that constitute life.