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ink q&a: dennis cass (head case)
technica q&a: james gardner (the intelligent universe)
technica q&a: david linden (the accidental mind)
technical q&a: jack el-hai (the lobotomist)
animation and motion graphics sale
sell us your books online
march is dummies month!
isepp lecture series: mario livio
brain awareness
history of science
new arrivals
doug brown's factoid
bestsellers

Looking for a new place to hang your hat? Architects Mitchell Joachim and Javier Arbona, along with environmental engineer Lara Greden, have come up with a house that grows straight out of the ground. Nature constructs your future home, aptly named the Fab Tree Hab. Sun and water turn the seedlings into a weave of vines and roots that can be plastered over and lived in. I guess ol' Peter Pumpkin-eater was way ahead of his time.

INK Q&A: DENNIS CASS
In Head Case, Dennis Cass infiltrates the world of neuroscience and becomes a human guinea pig on a darkly comic journey to understand the human brain and find out what makes us who we are. Read Dennis Cass's INK Q&A and save 30% on Head Case today.

TECHNICA Q&A: JAMES GARDNER
In The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner addresses the question: What is the ultimate destiny of our universe? In this Technica Q&A, Gardner discusses his favorite teacher, his best (and worst) subject in school, and much more. Check out the Q&A and save 30% off the list price when you buy The Intelligent Universe from Powells.com.

Although it will eventually be hacked, Seagate Technology, LLC, has come up with a hard drive security system that would require authentication to access any of the information on the hard drive. Different from firewalls and other PC security devices, this new technology is embedded directly into the hard drive and would render the information inaccessible and useless to a potential identity thief. Now if they could only perfect a clean-up monkey for those "splashed coffee on the keyboard" incidents.

TECHNICA Q&A: DAVID LINDEN
David Linden describes The Accidental Mind as a guide "through the strange and often illogical world of neural function." In this Technica Q&A, Linden reveals his score on the Geek Test, his favorite book as a kid, and more! Read Linden's Q&A and buy The Accidental Mind for 30% off the cover price.

TECHNICA Q&A: JACK EL-HAI
Jack El-Hai describes The Lobotomist, his biography of Walter Freeman, the physician who introduced lobotomy to the United States, as an attempt to "illuminate his behavior and set his work in the context of the fascinating neuroscience and psychiatry of the time." In this Technica Q&A, El-Hai reveals his writing inspirations, describes his favorite childhood teacher, and more. Read the Q&A and save 30% on The Lobotomist -- it's a no-brainer!

ANIMATION AND MOTION GRAPHICS SALE
Put some mojo in your animation! Save 30% on select animation and motion graphics titles, including techniques for timing, character modeling, interactivity, and more. From Blender to Flash to Maya, all the tools you need are here to keep your characters doing the robot long after your Second Life avatar has gone to bed.

SELL US YOUR BOOKS ONLINE
After thirty years of buying used books over the counter, Powell's now offers the service online. It's so easy: just enter the ISBNs of the books you wish to sell; we'll let you know if we want 'em, and how much store credit we'll pay you for 'em. Or, if you prefer your bookselling the old-fashioned, face-to-face way, bring your technical books to our Technical Store in downtown Portland for cash or store credit -- and give Fup a little love while you're there!

MARCH IS FOR DUMMIES
Please don't take offense if we call you a dummy, but March is Dummies Month. And we don't mean the ventriloquist's kind. Purchase any new (not used) For Dummies title before March 31 and get a $5 rebate from Wiley Publishing. For details on the rebate, and to browse the vast selection of Dummies titles, click here.

You may not remember slide rules, but they were invented by William Oughtred, who was born way back on March 5, 1574. Oughtred, an English mathematician educated at Eton, also invented the "x" symbol for multiplication as well as the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions in math. Slide rules have gone the way of the Dodo bird since calculators became cheap and popular in the 1970s, but fear not: The Oughtred Society, dedicated to the "preservation of slide rules and other calculating instruments," has your back.

ISEPP LECTURE SERIES: MARIO LIVIO
Coming up in ISEPP's Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series: On Thursday, April 19, Dr. Mario Livio, senior astrophysicist and former Head of Science Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute, will speak on the Golden Ratio. Known as "phi," this most fascinating of numbers is astonishingly present in science, art, music, mathematics, theology, nature, and finance. Save 50% off your ticket price for this lecture by using the promotional code found here.

BRAIN AWARENESS
The OHSU Brain Institute (OBI) is holding its first annual meeting in conjunction with the fourth annual Neuroscience Town Hall on Friday, March 30, from 4:30 to 8:00 p.m. This year's Town Hall will focus on support of neuroscience research and will begin with a reception and Advocacy Information Fair. The Town Hall program that follows will honor Regan Carter who helped found OBI's CARENeuro (Center for Advocacy for Research and Education on Neurodegenerative Disease). There is no fee but pre-registration is required. Please register online or call 503-494-7773.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE (FICTION)
Leonard Nimoy celebrates a birthday on March 26. Born in 1931, he shot to fame in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek television series. You can also find records and poetry books by him. But we're a bit partial to his Fortean TV show In Search Of... because of his fascinating and creepy narration of mysteries such as the Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot. Did you know he recorded a folk song entitled "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins"? It appeared on his record, The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy. He would later write two autobiographical books: I Am Not Spock in 1977 and I Am Spock in 1995.

NEW ARRIVALS
New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tackles the controversial subject of global warming in Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a modern classic that has drawn favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. "Good storytelling humanizes an often abstract subject," raves Kirkus Reviews. In barely a decade, the designer toy craze, which originated in Hong Kong, has taken the world by storm. Paul Budnitz's I Am Plastic provides a colorful visual history of the phenomenon, which has energized not only the toy world but the global art community as well. And not just for geeks but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code offers a window into the information age as it follows a team of maverick software developers who seek to liberate the world from information overload.

Don't panic. Have a toast to the late, great author Douglas Adams, who was born on March 11, 1952. Of course, he is best known for writing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But he also had a cameo or two on Monty Python's Flying Circus, was friends with David Gilmour, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjoro in 1994 while wearing a rhino suit (to raise money for a British charity called "Save the Rhino"). He was the first person in the UK to buy a Macintosh computer as well (well, it was either Adams or Stephen Fry).

DVDS
In District B13, a sci-fi action-thriller set in Paris in 2010, a member of an elite police squadron teams up with a vigilante criminal to retrieve a loose nuke stolen by the most powerful gang of District B13. District B13 makes everything Hollywood has lately done in the action genre look clumsy, dull and stale," hails Time magazine. And remember: all DVDs ship free of charge!

DOUG BROWN'S FACTOID
The pits that give pitvipers their name are located between the eyes and nostrils, and aim forward to provide overlapping fields of view.  The pits are structured like pinhole cameras, focusing light on the back of the pits, where neurons are activated.  The pits are sensitive to infrared light and map to the same part of the brain as visual information, so the world looks very different to a rattlesnake.  They can essentially "see" heat.  The pits are only effective when heat sources are within a meter of the snake, but they function even in complete darkness; a rattlesnake in a burrow can see any rodents unfortunate enough to be sharing the burrow.

TECH BESTSELLERS
1. Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug (Web Publishing)
2. Mac OS X Tiger Edition by David Pogue (Macintosh)
3. Photoshop CS2 by Mark Galer (Applications)
4. Internet Annoyances by Preston Gralla (Internet)
5. Unix in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins (Unix)
6. HTML and XHTML Pocket Reference by Jennifer Niederst Robbins (HTML)
7. The Accidental Mind by David J. Linden (Biology)
8. Computer Architecture by John L. Hennessy (Computer Architecture)
9. Joe Celko's Analytics and OLAP in SQL by Joe Celko (Database)
10. LaTeX Companion by Michael Goossens (Web Publishing)

Technica
By Carole R. and Danielle

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