Reading textbooks gives me scary flashbacks of my days as an undergraduate (about 2 weeks ago). I did a little research on the internet and supposedly there are these things kids are calling “light reads” that make reading fun again. Comic books/Graphic novels are the pinnacle of fun, so I put together a quick list of illustrated reading to salivate the mind in absence of raw textbook facts.

1. Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon Guides

First order of business, the master of non-fiction science comics: Larry Gonick. He’s the author of such masterpieces as The Cartoon Guide to Physics, The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, and The Cartoon Guide to the Environment. I own the Physics one so I can testify that these books have high educational merit!

2. Jay Hosler’s The Sandwalk Adventures

Jay Hosler is on fire with biology themed comics. The Sandwalk Adventures is a tale of two mites living on a eyebrow follicle of Charles Darwin. Comics Worth Reading has a nice review. Also check out Clan Apis, Hosler’s comic about honey-bee life and insect society.

3. Jim Ottaviani’s Two-Fisted Science/Dignifying Science/Suspended in Language

“Two-Fisted Science, a Xeric Award-winning and Eisner nominated original trade paperback, features true stories from the history of science. Some are serious, some are humorous, and most are a bit of both. Scientists highlighted include physicists Richard Feynman, Galileo, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, but you’ll find a cosmologist and some mathematicians inside as well.” -GT Labs

Jim Ottaviani is making big moves in the science comics game. Dignifying Science illustrates the stories of a number of famous female scientists like Emmy Noether, Lisa Meitner, Marie Curie, and Rosalind Franklin. Recently, Jim collaborated with Jay Hosler (see above) on Suspended in Language, a biography of Neils Bohr. If you’re in the area, you can catch Jim at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and get your comics signed!

4. Capstone Press’ Max Axiom/Inventions and Discovery Series

Capstone Press brings forth a veritable treasure trove of K-12 science teaching material in graphic novel format. They star Max Axiom, your standard african american superhero scientist in action-packed adventures like The Shocking World of Electricity, The Attractive Story of Magnetism, Investigating the Scientific Method, and Understanding Global Warming. Capstone Press also publishes a bunch of comics about scientists like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, and Jonas Salk. Google Books has a teaser of the Photosynthesis with Max Axiom volume.

5. Apostolos Doxiadis’ Logicomix

Logicomix is a “brilliantly illustrated tale of reason, insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand Russell‘s life”. This novel comes off as one of the more mature reads of this list, so I’m pretty excited for this comic to be released later this year.

6. Matt Fraction’s The Five Fists of Science

Okay, you might not learn a lot from The Five Fists of Science, but who can argue against a steam-punk comic featuring Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain fighting against an evil Thomas Edison?

Step is a 2D open-source physics simulator that was recently added to the KDE Education project.

Vladimir, the original developer and former Google Summer of Code student, posted up a few ideas to improve Step for this years Google Summer of Code. He included one about improving fluid simulation and, being a computational physicist (TM), I decided to go for it. I wrote up a fancy proposal a few weeks ago and I’m happy to say that it was accepted.

A lot of GSOC projects are strictly geeking out behind-the-scenes, but this one is fun, visual, and physics-based. It’s perfect for me.

Compared to Vladimir’s original summer of code, spent designing Step in it’s entirety, my proposal seems like a pretty modest addition. However, fluids are traditionally a very messy subject in the world of physics simulators. If you aren’t convinced, read this thread on the Box2D forums from only a month ago. To quote ElectroDruid on page 9:

“I gave up with having the particles be handled by Box2D, and one of the main reasons was because of the amount of pairs generated. You can up the maximum limits, but eventually you just run out of storage space for the numbers of pairs that can be needed in certain cases. Box2D is great for rigid bodies, but for fluids where you need a lot of particles which interact with each other in close proximity all the time, it’s easy to push the limits to breaking point.”

I’m sure I will have to deal with similar problems encountered in that thread, but I’m optimistic that such issues can be resolved. Throughout the summer I’ll be blogging my progress on the project here, so stay tuned.

Click the thumbnail above to catch a glimpse of a single-sided slice of beauty. I cranked it out for my condensed matter physics final tomorrow morning.

Arguably a waste of potential “comprehension-intensive” study time, preparing an excessive formula sheet always puts me at ease (at least until moments before the exam when classmates are chatting about some obscure textbook chapters).

I usually insert inspirational messages into my formula sheets just in case I need that bonus motivation, but this time… see if you can find Waldo!

P.S., I can’t wait until I can take care of this blog again after my finals.