Ice Ghosts:A Shortage of Maps

I'm going to step outside the usual topic space here and cover an interesting but frustrating book I read partly on the flight to London Calling (which is about the only connection it has to genomics).  Ice Ghosts, by Paul Watson, covers the searches for the lost Franklin Expedition, a mid-1800s British Navy attempt to find the Northwest Passage.  It's a pretty good book, after all it did win a Pulitzer Prize,  The topic is thrilling: explorers under difficult conditions and a mystery that lasted over a century.  There are lessons for science in general, such as the value in carefully evaluating oral histories that some would discard as unreliable. But what is maddening for me is that in a book for whic h a central theme is poorly understood geographies and their interpretations, the set of supplied maps fail miserably at assisting in the telling of the story.Read more »
Source: Omics! Omics! - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Source Type: blogs