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Showing results for tags 'books'.
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Writing a weather book, that is. This was published in 2003 but I only just chanced upon it while browsing through Select Books, a local book website. It goes without saying that I ordered it straight away. Am looking forward to reading it. As I mentioned before, I still hope Singapore will one day have its own little pocket guide book on weather for the public.
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My latest acquisition : I saw some reviews in the forum here, so I decided to see if the book was available in Singapore. There are two big bookstores here, Borders and its rival, Kinokuniya. Besides a large collection of books, Borders has comfy chairs, a music section with a good selection of CDs, and a cafe. Kinokuniya has a convenient delivery service where you can order your books online and have them delivered the very next day. Moreover, if you order more than S$50 worth of books, there is no delivery charge. I checked both bookstores' websites and both appeared to have the weather book, plus another by CS Lewis (Mere Christianity) which I'd been thinking about getting for some time. The weather book had a different cover to that mentioned on the forum, though. The edition with the tropical cyclone was nicer; there are so many beautiful weather phenomena that could have been featured & they had to choose an umbrella. I went to Borders first. There were plenty of books in the religion section, but they didn't seem to be in alphabetical or any sort of order. After searching for a while, I gave up and went to the information counter. The staff member went off to look but returned & informed me that the book was out of stock. Then I asked about the weather book. At first, he couldn't find it in the database. For one thing, I wasn't sure if the title was just "Weather" or "Collins Gem Weather". Then I wasn't sure if Storm Dunlop was the author or if that referred to something else (I mean, what sort of name is that?). Finally he got it on his computer screen & went off to look for it. He returned, saying that it, too, was out of stock. After that I went to Kinokuniya. This time I went straight to the service staff at the information counter. Mere Christianity? In a short while she came back with it. Then we had some confusion finding the weather book in the database again, but once she'd located it, she went off & retrieved it in a jiffy. Final score : Kinokuniya 1 Borders 0
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I have a number of met. books. Most are textbooks, but there are also some that I bought just to enjoy, like these : . . I bought Spacious Skies second hand from Foyles in London. I really like the book - it contains dozens of great photos accompanied by brief explanations. I think it necessary for a weather enthusiast to own a couple of such books. At the time I bought this, the use of the internet wasn't widespread, so the best way to see a variety of weather phenomena was through books like these. Textbooks don't contain a lot of photos, & you can hardly be a meteorologist if you only know the phenomena through equations on a piece of paper. I bought "Weather" from the old MPH bookshop in Stamford Rd. This bookstore used to be something of an institution in Singapore. It was near my old school, & I have many fond memories of dropping by once school was over to browse. Alas, it has since closed down. Anyway, I looked at "Weather" quite a number of times before deciding to buy it. There are hundreds of weather books out there, & I'd already studied met. so I didn't really need another basic weather book. But I liked its layout & design a lot : lovely pictures, little side stories, weather quotes & proverbs, virtually every facet of the weather was given a brief section - from climate change to cloud identification to different weather phenomena and forecasting methods. I thought, if I had to produce a weather book it would be one like this, basically a celebration of all things meteorological. I didn't understand the choice of cover, though; how can a painting of weather phenomena ever surpass photos of the real thing?
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I like this book. It contains 32 interviews with well-known meteorologists. Each interview was originally published in the WMO Bulletin. In the book, the author Hessam Taba recalls where the idea of the interviews came from : "...when I came back from my summer holiday in Sept 1980, I heard that Professor Jacques Van Mieghem had died. His sudden disappearance affected me deeply; we had worked together for many years and I had conceived a profound respect for him. I wished very much that I had kept something - his thoughts expressed in a letter or his recorded voice ... It was then that it occurred to me that, even if I had missed my chance with Van Mieghem, I could still document the reminiscences and reflections of other eminent scientists." What I like is that each interview touches on the personal side of the meteorologist, as well as the professional ... how they came to be interested in meteorology, why they'd chosen it as their profession. There is also a hilarious account of the author's student-teacher relationship with Professor Carl-Gustaf Rossby (which for some reason I keep reading over again because it's so funny, I didn't know Rossby was such a character), and a delightful description of one of the meteorologists' houses (J. Bessemoulin) in the Pyrenees which was converted from an old water mill so that the river flowed under the living room. This captured my imagination but I wonder what happens when there's a flood and the river rises. Although in a remote spot the house had modern amenities and even a fax to receive met. analyses and forecast maps. At the end of the interview, Mr Taba would usually ask the interviewee if he had any advice to give to a young person who was aspiring to be a meteorologist. I agree with a lot of the answers they gave : "...it is a happy profession...The subject is intrinsically attractive, it is related to nature and the environment, it has no unpleasant overtones and is entirely beneficial to the human race..." - Professor R.C. Sutcliffe "...Personally, I am very glad that I chose meteorology. It enabled me to get to know many interesting people ... and not only meteorologists, since meteorology interacts with many other fields of human activity. It was wonderful for me to be able to meet so many eminent people from different countries at WMO meetings ..." - Mr J. Bessemoulin "...one thing that I would advocate is that the young person spend as much time as possible out of doors; climb mountains, go to the seashore, get a feel for the atmosphere and the environment. I cannot help feeling that a great many of our modern meteorologists do not know how the atmosphere operates; they are rarely outside, most have never made regular weather observations ... They see satellite pictures, synoptic analyses, but I have the impression that they are not acquainted with Nature as she actually runs. Since the atmospheric sciences deal with natural phenomena, you should live with them for a while ..." - Professor H.E. Landsburg