not to bad. directions could be better. missing a lot trails. where is the nearest bike shop, store, lodging? maybe I should write a book? .... I am.

Larry Wolfe

This book covers most of the popular trails in my area (panhandle) with detailed information about each. I especially like the authors descpritions on his personal rides. I do have one complaint however. The author gives general info about rescue and local services, but leaves out specifics like local bike shops, hotels, maybe even restaraunts. It would be nice to have this type of info if you are planning on traveling some distance to one of the listed trails so that you could plan accordingly. Otherwise a great book and an interesting read for early evenings when you can't actually be out on a trail tearing across a single-track.

This book is a good beginners guide to mountain biking in Florida. The book is divided into sections of the state which make it easy if you are just looking for a place to ride close to home. Also included is a map of the state with ride location marked on it. There is also another helpful section which lists the trails according to type, for example, beginners, advanced, family, scenic, etc. Each trail has a sketched map layout of the trail along with information on the general location, elevation change, aerobic and technical difficulty, scenery, hazards, services along the way, rescue index, and how to find them.

If you live in Florida, it isn't difficult to find the trails. If you are not a resident, a regular map of Florida and the author's directions should point you in the right direction. To find the trails in the parks, most state parks and trails have maps of the park at the ranger stations. Since the book is about the trails themselves, you will not find information about hotels in the area or where the local bike shop is. However, if the trail is in a park and camping is allowed or, as in the case of the Pinellas Trail, the trail has places to eat, shop, and stay over night along it, the author has noted this.

The only thing we noticed was that the author didn't seem to be from Florida. For example, in a park in our area, he talked about how he biked late at night and regretted doing so. Every Floridian knows better than to brave the bugs & the wildlife at night in a state park on a bike so to us this information was more humorous than helpful:) Otherwise, a good book if you are looking for some ideas on where to ride.

See David Page's (at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.) new research, first hitting the news on June 18, 2003.

An episode in Star Trek - The Next Generation portrays the Enterprise crew encountering a planet populated entirely by androgynes. The cast representing these creatures is clearly composed of only women. As clones, their appearance and outlook is nearly uniform and gender becomes a social ill. If Steve Jones is correct, this condition is the future of the human species. In this book Jones gives a full account of the rise and descent of masculinity, from the formation of the Y [male] chromosome to the current decline in sperm count in human society. As Jones makes clear, we all start in the womb as neuters, but various processes dictated by the father's chromosomes, turn some of us into males.

Jones opens his account with a touch of irony - it was a woman, Nettie Stevens, who identified the male chromosome in 1905. It took nearly a century to perceive the gene controlling sex determination - the SRY [sex recognition gene]. From there Jones explains the role of that short, 20 gene DNA string and its impact. Embryo development relies on sperm-borne chemicals. This input is part of the reason maleness drives the pace of evolution. Sperm is an invader, and the body resists invaders. The chemical changes reflect that fundamental dichotomy and there's nothing universal about male sperm. Its variety reflects the rapid evolutionary pathways taken by various organisms. And few species have evolved as rapidly as humans, Jones reminds us.

That haste, however, has led to vulnerability. Male lines, particularly in our own species, die out quicker. Jones' example is expressed in the recognition that all the family lineages since William the Conquerer had died out. Nor are his examples confined to humans. Hermaphroditic slugs in the French Pyranees are exhibiting an increase in female-only lines. Given his evidence for this happening in modern men, one can only wonder at the cause of this unisex phenomenon.

For it's modern men that are the target of this book. Whatever forces in evolution have reduced the size and impact of the Y chromosome, modern civilization has exacerbated its decline. Clinics in various nations record reduced sperm counts, notably in Italian taxi drivers, American businessmen, Scots shopkeepers. Jones isn't applauding these trends as some proto-feminist. He wants, through this book, for males to become aware of the fate their descendents will confront. Maleness is likely to disappear, and offers pointers to prevent that extinction. More focus, he stresses, needs to be made on the impact of various foodstuffs and industrial chemicals.

Depressing as much of this sounds, there is much to be learned from this book. Jones' ability to impart good science in a readable style makes this book an ideal acquisition. While facts galore are presented here, pedantic stumbling blocks are not. He has no more axe to grind than the desire to increase our awareness of ourselves, both male and female. As he notes, understanding of the operations of sexual mechanisms is still in its infancy. This book will stand for some time until more of our body's hidden secrets are revealed. For we men, let us hope it's not too late. The recent announcement of the mapping of the Y chromosome renders Jones' forecast obsolete, but most of his data remains valid. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Opening this book created an experience never had before. After looking for a short period at the images included, paper started to move. The 2/3 dimensional images gave me the feeling of outer experience.

In this collection's lead essay--one of those long, portentous titles with a colon--the author (and the editor of the collection)Steve Jones, by way of explaining "authenticity" to us, in the most pretentious and leaden language imaginable, quotes, at some length, Lester Bangs writing about the Count Five's LP, "Carburetor Dung." The problem with the quote is that there is not nor has there ever been an album by the Count Five called "Carburetor Dung." Furthermore in Jones' citation of him, Bangs "quotes" lyrics from a Count Five song that doesn't exist. The lyrics are pure Bangs as is the description of the music on the album that doesn't exist.

Nice illustration of "authenticity", no?

I'm the type of person that once I see something like this in a book's opening pages, my radar automatically tunes to acute and--what do you know--a few pages later Jones has Bangs writing about Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" for a "fanzine" called STRANDED. The problem is that STRANDED was a mass-marketed book (I think there are two editions of it?) edited by, I believe, Greil Marcus (or maybe it was Robert Christgau) wherein several rockwriters were asked to do an essay on what LP they'd take with them to the proverbial desert island.

Sometimes the medium is the message, no?

Although much of the rest of this collection is plagued by the decidedly unrock, neo-pedantic language of post post-modern academia, Robert Ray's essay is good as is the one by the poet who entered the Jewel website poetry contest, but as I read I kept thinking, "Well, if the EDITOR got this stuff just plain WRONG in HIS essay . . ."

If you like science and the little details that go with it-you will really enjoy this book. It reads easily yet contains much detail.

I have purchased several chemistry software over the years, and this program is by far the worst. A lot of the videos do not work, and my computer (IBM) frequently freezes up when I run this software. On top of all that, the paranoid distributors of this software make you enter an authentication code each time you want to use the program, so be prepared to constantly have your 70-page manual right next to your pc. This chemistry software is truly frustrating to work with.

I have a copy of the 5th edition of this book, and have not checked out the latest update. However, on leafing through this book inside-out (even upside-down I must say), I must commit to my first judgement of being disappointed altogether. It doesn't even make a good first reading for a student, for after an attempt, a large collective set of questions would be gathered (at least in my case) on the vocabulary. It did not fill in the questions that good finance textbooks are supposed to answer - on deriving equations (at least a simplified version and lots of real-life examples) for derivatives, examples on how decisions could be made via the calculations (step through on what happens when an investor hedges or swaps, etc...) it certainly isn't a book written for the advanced (despite the excellent cover which was ingeniously designed to shift my paradigm upwards as such), and it sure doesn't cover the latest issues - Value-at Risk, Marked-to Market, etc... one big disappointment I faced when I flipped through the chapter on Black-Scholes. It explained that the formulae were derived out of stochastics, and did not even bother explaining a little bit further (c'mon, fill me in on a little bit - get me prepared for the REAL WORLD please). It's a GREAT book due to it's size. The lettering within the paperback version was large, and irritatingly positioned, the examples used were not very factual, and there were heaps of grammatical errors in some of the chapters - now what's the risk of owning such an underlying asset, Mr. Lumby? I wouldn't even think about taking any position. You did not even bother to attempt at clearing up as to why normal curves are used, and what the limitations are... how Monte Carlo Simulations could be used in place... I apologise for this outburst but I hope your 6th edition fills in the holes for my curiosity. Thanks.