I recently finished An Essay on Science and Narcissism by Bruno Lemaitre. I found this book really insightful and thought I would write some notes about it here. The book was published in 2016 although I only just got around to reading it. You can grab a copy for free here.

Long-time readers might remember the short-lived series on quantixed called The Digital Cell. There is a reason why I stopped these posts, which I can now reveal… The Digital Cell will soon be a book! Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, The Digital Cell is a handbook to help cell and developmental biologists get to grips with programming, image analysis, statistics and much more.

As with children’s toys and clothes, books aimed at children tend to be targeted in a gender-stereotyped way. This is a bit depressing.

Raw Data: A novel on Life in Science by Pernille Rørth (Springer, 2016) I was keen to read this “lab lit” novel written by renowned cell biologist Pernille Rørth. I’d seen lots of enthusiastic comments about the book, and it didn’t disappoint.

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty Ben Ratliff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) A non-science book review for today’s post. This is a great read on “how to listen to music”. There have been hundreds of books published along these lines, the innovation here however is that we now live in an age of musical plenty.

I recently finished reading The Art of Data Science by Roger Peng & Elizabeth Matsui. Roger, together with Jeff Leek, writes the Simply Statistics blog and he works at JHU with Elizabeth. The aim of the book is to give a guide to data analysis. It is not meant as a comprehensive data analysis “how to”, nor is it a manual for statistics or programming.

I have just finished reading this excellent book, Statistics done wrong: a woefully complete guide by Alex Reinhart . I’d recommend it to anyone interested in quantitative biology and particularly to PhD students starting out in biomedical science. Statistics is a topic that many people find difficult to grasp. I think there are a couple of reasons for this that I’ll go into below.

Books about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology are plentiful. If you haven’t read any, the best place to start are the books written by some of the Nobelists themselves: “I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier” by Perutz, “My Life in Science” by Brenner.