Visual relation-based search engine for books

It seems more and more when I am looking for a book or a review of a book I end up on a page that links to Amazon. I can't remember exactly how I found this site (amaznode), but it's a way to search through Amazon's catalog visually.

The way it works is that it connects books through the 'customers who bought this also bought this' data. It's kind of interesting.
For example, in the screenshot image above I put in 'Patagonia geology' into the search box and the book cover thumbnail images started popping up. Another moment later, connections denoted by lines were drawn. This image is a snapshot in the process...it kept going until it filled in the entire Amazon catalog that satisfied the search terms.

The main group of books near the top are a bunch of travel and trekking books. The group to the right is a bunch of Patagonia fly fishing books, and the third major group near the bottom of the image represents a group of South American cookbooks. I'm not sure where the geology search term comes in here....hmmm.

And then you can move your cursor over the thumbnail and the book title pops up. If you click on it, a little box pops up from which you can go to the regular Amazon page or say 'put in cart' and keep going.

This style of searching and the visual revealing of links is becoming more abundant on the web. I'm not sure it's robust enough (yet) to replace any searching methods, but it is an interesting additional way to find things. Especially, when you are curious about how the different books are linked. I would guess those researching marketing trends might find this very interesting.

It's fun. Try it.

Books...Google-style

I think Google is going to show up at my apartment one day and digitize me. They are unstoppable.

A friend and colleague of mine was raving about GoogleBooks to me the other day, so I decided to give it a look. WARNING: be prepared to spend some time!

One of the nice things about this book search engine is that you can tell it to return "full view" books. Most of the newer books out there and probably most mainstream fiction is only available as a preview (which is useful in its own right).
But...if you search the "full view" books you can find some really neat things.

For example, I put in "Patagonia geology" as the search term and Darwin's chronicles from the Beagle was right there!

So, this is great...perhaps you are one who makes yourself stay in your office and work instead of getting sidetracked by random books in the library. Well, now you can get even more sidetracked sitting at your desk.

Review of 'Thin Ice' by Mark Bowen

PLEASE NOTE: As of August 2007 his blog has moved...you can find this same post at the new blog here. Thanks.

A couple months ago, Thermochronic over at Apparent Dip started a list of popular science books and will be reviewing them as he reads/re-reads them (here's the first).

He asked fellow geobloggers to suggest books for this effort.
I recently finished Thin Ice by Mark Bowen...i'm going to provide a short review here (hopefully not stealing Thermochronic's thunder!).

The subtitle of this book, Unlocking the secrets of climate in the world's highest mountains, succinctly sums up what this book is about. Bowen successfully weaves together adventure and science. For any of you out there who have done a lot of field work, you will like it. There are many anecdotes about working and surviving in the field, ranging from humorous to tragic. I tend to like stories about adventurers who are also scientists (rather than people going through hardships just to do it).

Lonnie Thompson, a climate scientist at Ohio State University, and an assortment of others from his research team are the main 'characters' in this story. For decades, Lonnie and his team have been drilling and studying cores from high alpine ice sheets, including Peru (Quelccaya), Bolivia (Sajama), Tanzania (Kiliminjaro), and Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (Dunde). An interesting aspect of this story is how in the 1970s and 80s the paleoclimate community more-or-less regarded alpine cores, especially from low latitudes, as useless to climate reconstruction. Everyone believed all the answers were in the big continental ice caps near the poles (Greenland and Antarctica). The results from Thompson's work showed that these ice caps have records going back maybe not has far as the continental ice sheets but much farther than had been postulated (100,000 years). Furthermore, the climatic fluctuations that are recorded in these lower-latitude archives have important implications for weather patterns that the polar records just cannot address. Bowen also includes great sections on the history of climate and paleoclimate science interspersed with the narrative of the ice coring work of Thompson's team.

I found this book to be at a great level for a scientist (who's not a paleoclimate expert) or a layperson who is motivated. That is, you need some background to stay engaged but you don't need to be an expert in atmospheric dynamics.