Three books about machine learning

I recently finished a Udemy machine learning course, and wrote on LinkedIn afterwards: “While I am no [machine learning] expert, this is one step on the way to better skills with [Python]”. So which other steps have I taken along that route to learn more about machine learning?

Here I share my thoughts on three books; two of which I have read cover to cover, and the third which I can hardly put down! When students in our machine learning class ask about books, these are the ones we recommend.

The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book

Andriy Burkov (2019). Self-published, 141 p, ISBN 978-1-9995795-0-0. List price USD35. $30.83 at Amazon.com, £25.27 at Amazon.co.uk.

Andriy Burkov states right at the start that “[This] book is distributed on the read first, buy later principle.” That is the first time I’ve seen this in a book despite the fact you can try a car before buying or visit a house before taking out a mortgage.

This was the first book I read that is fully dedicated to machine learning. I knew a little about the topic beforehand, but wasn’t yet ready to use any machine learning algorithm at that point, so this was a perfect introduction to the what, the why and the how of machine learning. The mathematics are introduced and explained in a way that is accessible without being overwhelming, although I acknowledge that this is of course a very subjective comment.

When I turned the last page of this book (and there are a few more than 100), I was even keener to explore further, and I still refer back to this book when I want a quick summary of a machine learning concept.

Data Science from Scratch

Joel Grus (2015). O’Reilly, 311 p, ISBN 978-1-492-04113-9. List price USD 41.99 at O’Reilly. $38.85 at Amazon.com, £27.56 at Amazon.co.uk.

I read the 1st edition of this book, which uses Python 2.7 but often refers to Python 3.4; the 2nd edition (2019) uses Python 3.6 throughout.

Joel Grus, of Ten Essays on Fizz Buzz fame amongst many other achievements, has a knack of breaking problems down to their constituent parts and gracefully rebuilding a solution. While I sometimes struggled with the level of mathematics he’s comfortable with, I never felt that I couldn’t follow his journey. This book really gave me the sequence of steps in data science, and a fantastic resource to refer back to whenever an algorithm seems too opaque to me.

Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: A Guide for Data Scientists

Andreas C. Müller and Sarah Guido (2017). O’Reilly, 384 p, ISBN 978-1-449-36941-5. $40.00 at Amazon.com, £31.45 at Amazon.co.uk

At the time of writing I am halfway through this book but I’ve already gone through Chapter 2 twice: once with the book and a second time to practice with different data sets. This is symptomatic of my experience with this book so far: it’s totally addictive. Tremendously well explained, building on the power of Jupyter notebooks thanks to all the code being available on GitHub, always explaining and illustrating the effects of only the important hyperparameters in each algorithm — this is fast turning into my go-to companion for machine learning.

If you only buy one machine learning book, or don’t know where to start, this is probably the one to go with.

We all have different technical backgrounds and abilities, and as mathematics figures prominently in the implementation of all machine learning solutions, it’s not the most approachable of subjects. I’d love to hear your comments about books you would recommend to other scientists getting started in machine learning.

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These prices are Amazon's discounted prices and are subject to change. The links contain a tag that earns us a small commission, but does not change the price to you. You can almost certainly buy these books elsewhere. 

The images on this page are copyright of their respective owners and are used here in accordance with fair use doctrine.

Visual explanations of mathematics

It is thought that Euclid wrote Elements in about 300 BC, but Oliver Byrne turned it into one of the true gems of visualization — and made it about 100 times more readable. By seamlessly combining typeset text (Caslon, if you’re interested) with minimalist geometric drawings in primary colours, he didn’t just reproduce the text; he explained it in a new way.

If you like the look of it, it’s even cooler in Nicholas Rougeur’s beautiful interactive version.

This is a classic example of what Edward Tufte, the modern saint of visualization, calls a visual explanation (he wrote a whole book about the subject). We’ve written about the subject before (for example, see Evan’s 2014 post, Graphics that repay careful study). Figures and charts should do more than merely illustrate, they should elucidate.

Too often, equations — for example the myriad equations in any volume of GEOPHYSICS — do not elucidate. Indeed, they barely even illustrate. In some cases, it’s worse: they obfuscate. You might think mathematics is too dry, or too steeped in convention, for it to be any other way. Equations just are. But Byrne showed us that we can do better.

A few years ago, in an attempt to broaden my geophysical knowledge, I bought a copy of Daniel Fleisch’s book on Maxwell’s equations. It’s excellent, and the others in the series are good too. I especially liked the annotated equations; I’ve lightened the annotations in this version, to put them on a separate visual ‘layer’:

In 2010, Randall Munroe of xkcd applied a similar strategy to label The Flake Equation, his parody of the Drake equation:

There are still other examples out there.

Later, I came across some lovely colourized equations by Stuart Riffle, a game developer. There was a bit of buzz about them on social media. Most people loved them, but a few pointed out that they suffer from the ‘legend lookup’ problem, and the colours he chose might not be great for colourblind people. Still, I like the concept — here’s the Fourier transform:

Direct annotation, something Tufte always advocates, avoids the legend lookup problem. In his 2016 Geophysics Tutorial on finite volume methods, Rowan Cockett showed that colour and labels can work together:

And in his Observable post on the predator–prey interaction, modern visualization legend Mike Bostock avoids the problem entirely with the use of pictograms: direct representation of what the symbols represent:

Observable is interesting because the documents are runnable code. And this reminds us that mathematics — equations, data structures, and so on — has another expression: code. While symbolic representation speaks directly to some people, code speaks to others, probably more. Look at Randall Munroe’s annotation of a Wolfram Alpha equation (similar to an Excel formula) from his (wonderful) book, What If:

What I love about this is the direct path to exploring the function yourself. It would take me an hour to implement Fleisch’s electric field integral in code, even with the annotations. Typing in this — admittedly less useful — rocket golf equation will take me two minutes. Expressing mathematics in code is the ultimate explicit and practical expression of an idea.

We have lots of tools to write better mathematics: LaTeX, markdown, Jupyter Notebooks, and so on. But it feels like nothing has really converged yet. Technology that seamlessly mixes symbolic equations, illustrative-and-explicative annotation, and runnable code is, I am sure, not far off. Until then, we do the best we can with the tools we have.

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Have you seen nice examples of annotated equations? I’d love to hear about them; let me know in the comments!

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Don’t miss the follow-up post from 2021: Illuminated equations.

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The work by Byrne is out of copyright. Those by Munroe and Cockett are openly licensed under Creative Commons. The work of Fleisch and Bostock are used in accordance with Fair Use doctrine.

Attribution is not permission

This morning a friend of mine, Fernando Enrique Ziegler, a pore pressure researcher and practitioner in Houston, let me know about an "interesting" new book from Elsevier: Practical Solutions to Integrated Oil and Gas Reservoir Analysis, by Enwenode Onajite, a geophysicist in Nigeria... And about 350 other people.

What's interesting about the book is that the majority of the content was not written by Onajite, but was copy-and-pasted from discussions on LinkedIn. A novel way to produce a book, certainly, but is it... legal?

Who owns the content?

Before you read on, you might want to take a quick look at the way the book presents the LinkedIn material. Check it out, then come back here. By the way, if LinkedIn wasn't so damn difficult to search, or if the book included a link or some kind of proper citation of the discussion, I'd show you a conversation in LinkedIn too. But everything is completely untraceable, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

LinkedIn's User Agreement is crystal clear about the ownership of content its users post there:

[...] you own the content and information that you submit or post to the Services and you are only granting LinkedIn and our affiliates the following non-exclusive license: A worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to use, copy, modify, distribute, publish, and process, information and content that you provide through our Services [...]

This is a good user agreement [Edit: see UPDATE, below]. It means everything you write on LinkedIn is © You — unless you choose to license it to others, e.g. under the terms of Creative Commons (please do!).

Fernando — whose material was used in the book — tells me that none of the several other authors he has asked gave, or were even asked for, permission to re-use their work. So I think we can say that this book represents a comprehensive infringement of copyright of the respective authors of the discussions on LinkedIn.

Roles and reponsibilities

Given the scale of this infringement, I think there's a clear lack of due diligence here on the part of the publisher and the editors. Having said that, while publishers are quick to establish their copyright on the material they publish, I would say that this lack of diligence is fairly normal. Publishers tend to leave this sort of thing to the author, hence the standard "Every effort has been made..." disclaimer you often find in non-fiction books... though not, apparently, in this book (perhaps because zero effort has been made!).

But this defence doesn't wash: Elsevier is the copyright holder here (Onajite signed it over to them, as most authors do), so I think the buck stops with them. Indeed, you can be sure that the company will make most of the money from the sale of this book — the author will be lucky to get 5% of gross sales, so the buck is both figurative and literal.

Incidentally, in Agile's publishing house, Agile Libre, authors retain copyright, but we take on the responsibility (and cost!) of seeking permissions for re-use. We do this because I consider it to be our reputation at stake, as much as the author's.

OK, so we should blame Elsevier for this book. Could Elsevier argue that it's really no different from quoting from a published research paper, say? Few researchers ask publishers or authors if they can do this — especially in the classroom, "for educational purposes", as if it is somehow exempt from copyright rules (it isn't). It's just part of the culture — an extension of the uneducated (uninterested?) attitude towards copyright that prevails in academia and industry. Until someone infringes your copyright, at least.

Seek permission not forgiveness

I notice that in the Acknowledgments section of the book, Onajite does what many people do — he gives acknowledgement ("for their contributions", he doesn't say they were unwitting) to some the authors of the content. Asking for forgiveness, as it were (but not really). He lists the rest at the back. It's normal to see this sort of casual hat tip in presentations at conferences — someone shows an unlicensed image they got from Google Images, slaps "Courtesy of A Scientist" or a URL at the bottom, and calls it a day. It isn't good enough: attribution is not permission. The word "courtesy" implies that you had some.

Indeed, most of the figures in Onajite's book seem to have been procured from elsewhere, with "Courtesy ExxonMobil" or whatever passing as a pseudolicense. If I was a gambler, I would bet that the large majority were used without permission.

OK, you're thinking, where's this going? Is it just a rant? Here's the bottom line:

The only courteous, professional and, yes, legal way to re-use copyrighted material — which is "anything someone created", more or less — is to seek written permission. It's that simple.

A bit of a hassle? Indeed it is. Time-consuming? Yep. The good news is that you'll usually get a "Sure! Thanks for asking". I can count on one hand the number of times I've been refused.

The only exceptions to the rule are when:

• The copyrighted material already carries a license for re-use (as Agile does — read the footer on this page).
• The copyright owner explicitly allows re-use in their terms and conditions (for example, allowing the re-publication of single figures, as some journals do).
• The law allows for some kind of fair use, e.g. for the purposes of criticism.

In these cases, you do not need to ask, just be sure to attribute everything diligently.

A new low in scientific publishing?

What now? I believe Elsevier should retract this potentially useful book and begin the long process of asking the 350 authors for permission to re-use the content. But I'm not holding my breath.

By a very rough count of the preview of this $130 volume in Google Books, it looks like the ratio of LinkedIn chat to original text is about 2:1. Whatever the copyright situation, the book is definitely an uninspiring turn for scientific publishing. I hope we don't see more like it, but let's face it: if a massive publishing conglomerate can make $87 from comments on LinkedIn, it's gonna happen.

What do you think about all this? Does it matter? Should Elsevier do something about it? Let us know in the comments.

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UPDATE Friday 1 September

Since this is a rather delicate issue, and events are still unfolding, I thought I'd post some updates from Twitter and the comments on this post:

• Elsevier is aware of these questions and is looking into it.
• Re-read the user agreement quote carefully. As Ronald points out below, I was too hasty — it's really not a good user agreement, LinkedIn have a lot of scope to re-use what you post there. 
• It turns out that some people were asked for permission, though it seems it was unclear what they were agreeing to. So the author knew that seeking permission was a good idea.
• It also turns out that at least one SPE paper was reproduced in the book, in a rather inconspicuous way. I don't know if SPE granted rights for this, but the author at least was not identified.
• Some people are throwing the word 'plagiarism' around, which is rather a serious word. I'm personally willing to ascribe it to 'normal industry practices' and sloppy editing and reviewing (the book was apparently reviewed by no fewer than 5 people!). And, at least in the case of the LinkedIn content, proper attribution was made. For me, this is more about honesty, quality, and value in scientific publishing than about misconduct per se.
• It's worth reading the comments on this post. People are raising good points.

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Part of the thumbnail image was created by Jannoon028 — Freepik.com — and licensed CC-BY.

Another fossil book

I'm thrilled to introduce the latest book in the 52 Things series!

52 More Things You Should Know About Palaeontology is out. You can buy it direct from us, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and it will soon be available all over the world via Amazon's other stores.

In common with all the books from Agile Libre, it is a scholarly text with some weird features. For example:

• It's fun and easy to read. Each of the 52 essays is only about 700 words long.
• It costs $19, not $49 (I am not making that $49 up. Welcome to academic publishing!)
• It's openly licensed, so you can re-use any of the content with attribution but without permission.
• $2 from every sale goes to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology to support their work.

A book for everyone

Like the first 52 Things on fossils, it's not just for palaeontologists. No matter who you are, I hereby guarantee that you'll find something useful and interesting in there, or your money back. I mean, just look at some of these chapters:

• A closer look at fossil sex, by Benni Bomfleur & Hans Kerp — in flagrante!
• A snake with four legs, by David Martill — chronic limb loss!
• Birds of a fibula, by Jon Tennant — dino bones!
• Fossils for sale, by Tony Doré, OBE, of Statoil — selling shells!
• Gods and monsters, by Andrew Taylor — miracles!
• How kangaroos got their bounce, by Benjamin P Kear — just so!
• Impossible frogs in the Deccan Traps, by Michael Oates — igneous fossils!
• In search of the Balearian mouse goat, by Alun Williams — mouse goats!
• Interview with a Triceratops, by John Scanella — dinosaurs forever!
• Micro-dung and its uses, by Wyn Hughes — tiny poo!
• Traces in the terrarium, by Daniel Hembree — experimental ichnology!
• Vertebrate palaeontology: more than fossil bones, by John Hutchinson — see dino run!

A huge thanks to the 50(!) authors of this volume. Together, I estimate they have over 1000 years of experience to share. Imagine that for a moment. All that learning, centuries in the field, decades in the library, or squinting down microscopes... just to write an essay for you! 

Massive thanks as well to Alex Cullum and Allard Martinius, both of Statoil. It takes a good deal of tenacity to rally 50 people to do anything, let alone write a book together... and they've done it twice. And they've nailed it again — check out what Prof David Polly (Indiana), president of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology had to say about the book:

“[It] looks fantastic. There is a lot of useful and high-level information in it, plus it is entertaining to read. I’m also pleased to see several SVP members in the author list. It deserves to be a great success. (The other books in the series are equally wonderful... having worked with eigenvectors daily for decades, I nevertheless learned something from Ruelicke’s chapter in the Geology volume.)”

I hope you enjoy the book too!

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Have you read 52 Things... Rock Physics? If you enjoyed it, or even if you didn't, we'd love a short review on Amazon.com :) Help spread some geophysics goodness.

Hooke's oolite

The new book

Hooke's engraving

Hooke's microscope

52 Things You Should Know About Rock Physics came out last week. For the first, and possibly the last, time a Fellow of the Royal Society — the most exclusive science club in the UK — drew the picture on the cover. The 353-year-old drawing was made by none other than Robert Hooke. 

The title page from Micrographia, and part of the dedication to Charles II. You can browse the entire book at archive.org.

The drawing, or rather the engraving that was made from it, appears on page 92 of Micrographia, Hooke's groundbreaking 1665 work on microscopy. In between discovering and publishing his eponymous law of elasticity (which Evan wrote about in connection with Lamé's \(\lambda\)), he drew and wrote about his observations of a huge range of natural specimens under the microscope. It was the first time anyone had recorded such things, and it was years before its accuracy and detail were surpassed. The book established the science of microscopy, and also coined the word cell, in its biological context.

Sadly, the original drawing, along with every other drawing but one from the volume, was lost in the Great Fire of London, 350 years ago almost to the day. 

Ketton stone

The drawing on the cover of the new book is of the fractured surface of Ketton stone, a Middle Jurassic oolite from central England. Hooke's own description of the rock, which he mistakenly called Kettering Stone, is rather wonderful:

I wonder if anyone else has ever described oolite as looking like the ovary of a herring?

These thoughtful descriptions, revealing a profundly learned scientist, hint at why Hooke has been called 'England's Leonardo'. It seems likely that he came by the stone via his interest in architecture, and especially through his friendsip with Christopher Wren. By 1663, when it's likely Hooke made his observations, Wren had used the stone in the façades of several Cambridge colleges, including the chapels of Pembroke and Emmanuel, and the Wren Library at Trinity (shown here). Masons call porous, isotropic rock like Ketton stone 'freestone', because they can carve it freely to make ornate designs. Rock physics in action!

You can read more about Hooke's oolite, and the geological significance of his observations, in an excellent short paper by material scientist Derek Hull (1997). It includes these images of Ketton stone, for comparison with Hooke's drawing:

Reflected light photomicrograph (left) and backscatter scanning electron microscope image (right) of Ketton Stone. Adapted from figures 2 and 3 of Hull (1997). Images are © Royal Society and used in accordance with their terms.

I love that this book, which is mostly about the elastic behaviour of rocks, bears an illustration by the man that first described elasticity. Better still, the illustration is of a fractured rock — making it the perfect preface. 

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Now at Amazon.com — Amazon.co.uk — Amazon.fr — Amazon.de — Amazon.it — Amazon.es
Soon at Amazon.ca — Amazon.com.mx — Amazon.com.br — Amazon.co.jp — Amazon.com.au — Amazon.in

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References

Hall, M & E Bianco (eds.) (2016). 52 Things You Should Know About Rock Physics. Nova Scotia: Agile Libre, 134 pp.

Hooke, R (1665). Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, pp. 93–100. The Royal Society, London, 1665.

Hull, D (1997). Robert Hooke: A fractographic study of Kettering-stone. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 51, p 45-55. DOI: 10.1098/rsnr.1997.0005.

52 Things... Rock Physics

There's a new book in the 52 Things family! 

52 Things You Should Know About Rock Physics is out today, and available for purchase at Amazon.com. It will appear in their European stores in the next day or two, and in Canada... well, soon. If you can't wait for that, you can buy the book immediately direct from the printer by following this link.

The book mines the same vein as the previous volumes. In some ways, it's a volume 2 of the original 52 Things... Geophysics book, just a little bit more quantitative. It features a few of the same authors — Sven Treitel, Brian Russell, Rachel Newrick, Per Avseth, and Rob Simm — but most of the 46 authors are new to the project. Here are some of the first-timers' essays:

• Ludmilla Adam, Why echoes fade.
• Arthur Cheng, How to catch a shear wave.
• Peter Duncan, Mapping fractures.
• Paul Johnson, The astonishing case of non-linear elasticity.
• Chris Liner, Negative Q.
• Chris Skelt, Five questions to ask the petrophysicist.

It's our best collection of essays yet. We're very proud of the authors and the collection they've created. It stretches from childhood stories to linear algebra, and from the microscope to seismic data. There's no technical book like it. 

Supporting Geoscientists Without Borders

Purchasing the book will not only bring you profund insights into rock physics — there's more! Every sale sends $2 to Geoscientists Without Borders, the SEG charity that supports the humanitarian application of geoscience in places that need it. Read more about their important work.

It's been an extra big effort to get this book out. The project was completely derailed in 2015, as we — like everyone else — struggled with some existential questions. But we jumped back into it earlier this year, and Kara (the managing editor, and my wife) worked her magic. She loves working with the authors on proofs and so on, but she doesn't want to see any more equations for a while.

If you choose to buy the book, I hope you enjoy it. If you enjoy it, I hope you share it. If you want to share it with a lot of people, get in touch — we can help. Like the other books, the content is open access — so you are free to share and re-use it as you wish. 

Six comic books about science

Ever since reading my dad's old Tintin books late into the night as a kid, I've loved comics and graphic novels. I've never been into the usual Marvel and DC stuff — superheroes aren't my thing. But I often re-read Tintin, I think I've read every Astérix, and since moving to Canada I've been a big fan of Seth and Chester Brown.

Last year in France I bought an album of Léonard, an amusing imagining of da Vinci's exploits as an inventor... Almost but not quite about science. These six books, on the other hand, show meticulous research and a love of natural philosophy. Enjoy!

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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Sydney Padua, 2015. New York, USA: Pantheon. List price USD 28.95.

I just finished devouring this terrific book by Padua, a young Canadian animator. It's an amazing mish-mash of writing and drawing, science and story, computing and history, fiction and non-fiction. This book has gone straight into my top 10 favourite books ever. It's really, really good.

Author — Amazon — Google — Pantheon

T-Minus: The Race to the Moon

Jim Ottaviani, Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon, 2009. GT Labs. List price USD 15.99.

Who doesn't love books about space exploration? This is a relatively short exposition, aimed primarily at kids, but is thoroughly researched and suspenseful enough for anyone. The black and white artwork bounces between the USA and USSR, visualizing this unique time in history.

Amazon — Google — GT Labs

Feynman

Jim Ottaviani, Leland Myrick, 2011. First Second Books. List price USD 19.99.

A 248-page colour biography of the great physicist, whose personality was almost as remarkable as his work. The book covers the period 1923 to 1986 — almost birth to death — and is neither overly critical of Feynman's flaws, nor hero-worshipping. Just well-researched, and skillfully told.

Amazon — Google — First Second.

A Wrinkle in Time

Hope Larson, Madeleine L'Engle, 2012. New York, USA: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. List price USD 19.99

A graphic adaptation of L'Engle's young adult novel, first published in 1963. The story is pretty wacky, and the science is far from literal, so perhaps not for all tastes — but if you or your kids enjoy Doctor Who and Red Dwarf, then I predict you'll enjoy this. Warning: sentimental in places.

Amazon — Macmillan — Author 

Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon

Hergé, 1953, 1954. Tournai, Belgium: Casterman (English: 1959, Methuen). List price USD 24.95.

These remarkable books show what Hergé was capable of imagining — and drawing — at his peak. The iconic ligne claire artwork depicts space travel and lunar exploration over a decade before Apollo. There is the usual espionage subplot and Thom(p)son-based humour, but it's the story that thrills.

Amazon — Google

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What about you? Have you read anything good lately?

Geocomputing: Call for papers

52 Things .+? Geocomputing is in the works.

For previous books, we've reached out to people we know and trust. This felt like the right way to start our micropublishing project, because we had zero credibility as publishers, and were asking a lot from people to believe anything would come of it.

Now we know we can do it, but personal invitation means writing to a lot of people. We only hear back from about 50% of everyone we write to, and only about 50% of those ever submit anything. So each book takes about 160 invitations.

This time, I'd like to try something different, and see if we can truly crowdsource these books. If you would like to write a short contribution for this book on geoscience and computing, please have a look at the author guidelines. In a nutshell, we need about 600 words before the end of March. A figure or two is OK, and code is very much encouraged. Publication date: fall 2015.

We would also like to find some reviewers. If you would be available to read at least 5 essays, and provide feedback to us and the authors, please let me know. 

In keeping with past practice, we will be donating money from sales of the book to scientific Python community projects via the non-profit NumFOCUS Foundation.

What the cover might look like. If you'd like to write for us, please read the author guidelines.

Another 52 Things hits the shelves

The new book is out today: 52 Things You Should Know About Palaeontology. Having been up for pre-order in the US, it is now shipping. The book will appear in Amazons globally in the next 24 hours or so, perhaps a bit longer for Canada.

I'm very proud of this volume. It shows that 52 Things has legs, and the quality is as high as ever. Euan Clarkson knows a thing or two about fossils and about books, and here's what he thought of it: 

This is sheer delight for the reader, with a great range of short but fascinating articles; serious science but often funny. Altogether brilliant!

Each purchase benefits The Micropalaeontological Society's Educational Trust, a UK charity, for the furthering of postgraduate education in microfossils. You should probably go and buy it now before it runs out. Go on, I'll wait here...

1000 years of fossil obsession

So what's in the book? There's too much variety to describe. Dinosaurs, plants, foraminifera, arthropods — they're all in there. There's a geographical index, as before, and also a chronostratigraphic one. The geography shows some distinct clustering, that partly reflects the emphasis on the science of applied fossil-gazing: biostratigraphy. 

The book has 48 authors, a new record for these collections. It's an honour to work with each of them — their passion, commitment, and professionalism positively shines from the pages. Geologists and fossil nuts alike will recognize many of the names, though some will, I hope, be new to you. As a group, these scientists represent  1000 years of experience!

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Amazingly, and completely by chance, it is one year to the day since we announced 52 Things You Should Know About Geology. Sales of that book benefit The AAPG Foundation, so today I am delighted to be sending a cheque for $1280 to them in Tulsa. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy, and of course to the authors of that book for making it happen.

A fossil book

We're proud to announce the latest book from Agile Libre. Woot!

I can't take a lot of credit for this book... The idea came from 52 Things stalwart Alex Cullum, a biostratigrapher I met at Statoil in Stavanger in my first proper job. A fellow Brit, he has a profound enthusiasm for all things outside, and for writing and publishing. With able help from Allard Martinius, also a Statoil scientist and a 52 Things author from the Geology book, Alex generously undertook the task of inviting dozens of awesome palaeontologists, biostratigraphers, palynologists, and palaeobotanists from all over the world, and keeping in touch as the essays came in. Kara and I took care of the fiddly bits, and now it's all nearly done. It is super-exciting. Just check out some of the titles:

• A trace fossil primer by Dirk Knaust
• Bioastronomy by Simon Conway Morris
• Ichnology and the minor phyla by S George Pemberton
• A walk through time by Felix Gradstein
• Can you catch criminals with pollen? by Julia Webb
• Quantitative palaeontology by Ben Sloan

It's a pretty mouthwatering selection, even for someone like me who mostly thinks about seismic these days. There are another 46 like this. I can't wait to read them, and I've read them twice already.

Help a micropalaeontologist

The words in these books are a gift from the authors — 48 of them in this book! — to the community. We cherish the privilege of reading them before anyone else, and of putting them out into the world. We hope they reach far and have impact, inspiring people and starting conversations. But we want these books to give back to the community in other ways too, so from each sale we are again donating to a charity. This time it's the Educational Trust of The Micropalaeontological Society. I read about this initiative in a great piece for Geoscientist by Haydon Bailey, one of our authors: Micropalaeontology under threat!. They need our community's support and I'm excited about donating to them.

The book is in the late stages of preparation, and will appear in the flesh in about the middle of November. To make sure you get yours as soon as it's ready, you can pre-order it now.

Pre-order now from Amazon.com 
Save almost 25% off the cover price!
It's $14.58 today, but Amazon sets the final price...

Update on 2014-10-15 13:05 by Matt Hall

I just found out that it's National Fossil Day in the US today. How's that for a coincidence? Sorry, I mean, how's that for a finely tuned marketing orchestration?

You can follow the NFD action on Twitter.