Other Non-Fiction Bownds, Deric M.: the Biology of Mind, v1, 31 Aug. 2008

[acidzebra]

In the early 1990's Deric Bownds, Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology and Zoology and Director of Program in the Biology of Mind, University of Wisconsin, Madison developed an interdisciplinary course titled The Biology of Mind. Lecture notes from that course were transformed into a book aimed both at his course students and the educated general public.

This book is essentially a review of current neuroscience. It is not at all technical, very clearly written, and serves as an excellent introductory text, containing copious examples, self-experiments, suggestions for further reading, and footnotes. If you are interested in the human brain and evolution, functions and limitations thereof I highly recommend this book.

This book is available as a paper version from Amazon.com and John Wiley and Sons, and as an free online electronic text here.

I contacted the author and he kindly agreed to let me distribute the text on MobileRead, and was even kind enough to provide higher-resolution images. Attached you will find both the Sony-specific lrf version and a html version for those wishing to "roll their own". I certainly highly recommend this book.

Changes to original text:
- moved footnotes for all chapters to end of text for easier reading.
- hyperlinked all mentions of footnotes, images, and chapters for easier navigation.
- some formatting to optimise for ebook read
- cleaned up HTML a little

Note that the original file was created with FrameMaker and contains quite a bit of superfluous tags, if you are interested in cleaning it up some more let me know.

I ran Calibre's html2lrf with the following command:

html2lrf -a "Deric Bownds" -t "The Biology of Mind" --force-page-break-before-attr="p,class,footnote" --add-chapters-to-toc --no-links-in-toc --chapter-attr="a,class,chapter" --publisher="MobileRead Free Press" --category="Science" "Deric Bownds - Biology of Mind.html"

REQUEST: If someone has a Mac and Adobe Illustrator and some spare time to convert some 70 images to jpg format, give me a ping.

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

REQUEST: If someone has a Mac and Adobe Illustrator and some spare time to convert some 70 images to jpg format, give me a ping.

If you refer to the GIF images supplied, it required neither a Mac nor Adobe Illustrator to do the conversion. A batch convert took about 30 seconds here. I have the results in a 3.3MB zip file called Biology_of_Mind_JPG.zip. Where would you like it sent to?
______
Dennis

[acidzebra]

Hi Dennis,

no, those were low-res files. I've attached the original Illustrator files, you'll have to rename it to .sitx as that is the archive type used (StuffIt). If you could batch them to something more useful (say, gif or jpg images with a minimum width of 550 pixels) I'd be most grateful.

I can open the file with StuffIt Expander and then use Irfanview to look at the files (there are some low-res preformatted ones in there that I used for the book and some high-res vector-based ones), but some of the fonts and formatting go wonky. Someone with a Mac and AI will probably have more success.

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Hi Dennis,

no, those were low-res files. I've attached the original Illustrator files, you'll have to rename it to .sitx as that is the archive type used (StuffIt). If you could batch them to something more useful (say, gif or jpg images with a minimum width of 550 pixels) I'd be most grateful.

I can open the file with StuffIt Expander and then use Irfanview to look at the files (there are some low-res preformatted ones in there that I used for the book and some high-res vector-based ones), but some of the fonts and formatting go wonky. Someone with a Mac and AI will probably have more success.

I tried Irfanview and it had issues.

I got your high res files. First, I had to install Stuffit to unpack the archive. And they're all Postscript, which meant I needed Ghostscript to deal with them, and I have to rename them all to provide .ps extensions so that Windows recognizes what they are. I've converted a couple, but I'm not totally happy with the conversions and need to experiment a bit.
______
Dennis

[Dr. Drib]

acidzebra, thank you for the ebook.

I went ahead and corrected the date to correspond with the style for day, month, and year for all uploads.

Don

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I went ahead and corrected the date to correspond with the style for day, month, and year for all uploads.

Thanks, it was late when I posted.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I've converted a couple, but I'm not totally happy with the conversions and need to experiment a bit.

That's cool - I'm still tinkering with it myself too. It seems font substitution is one of the main reasons it goes wonky.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Hi Dennis,

no, those were low-res files. I've attached the original Illustrator files, you'll have to rename it to .sitx as that is the archive type used (StuffIt). If you could batch them to something more useful (say, gif or jpg images with a minimum width of 550 pixels) I'd be most grateful.

I can open the file with StuffIt Expander and then use Irfanview to look at the files (there are some low-res preformatted ones in there that I used for the book and some high-res vector-based ones), but some of the fonts and formatting go wonky. Someone with a Mac and AI will probably have more success.

I have access to Adobe Photoshop CS and can give it a go to try to convert them. But the problem I have is that Windows XP and WinRAR both say the ZIP file is corrupted. Can you please reattach a working ZIP file please?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have access to Adobe Photoshop CS and can give it a go to try to convert them. But the problem I have is that Windows XP and WinRAR both say the ZIP file is corrupted. Can you please reattach a working ZIP file please?

I have Photoshop here as well, now that I think of it. (I use it seldom enough that I forget I have it. )

I grabbed the Zip last night, and it opened in 7zip with no problem. You might wish to see if there is an update for WinRAR. (Or just grab and install 7zip from http://www.7-zip.org. It's free and open source.)
______
Dennis

[JSWolf]

I really don't want to install another program I really don't need just to open a defective ZIP file. Can you sort it out and repost a working ZIP file please?

[acidzebra]

Guys, many thanks but pdurrant took care of it - he had a mac and the required software to pull it off, much kudos to him. I'll post an updated version of the book after the weekend.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Guys, many thanks but pdurrant took care of it - he had a mac and the required software to pull it off, much kudos to him. I'll post an updated version of the book after the weekend.

Excellent. We'll look forward to the updated book.
______
Dennis

[HarryT]

With 70 hi-res images, it's going to be an awfully big book .

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I really don't want to install another program I really don't need just to open a defective ZIP file. Can you sort it out and repost a working ZIP file please?

Jon, the archive isn't defective. It opens just fine here in 7-Zip, J-Zip, Peazip, Tugzip, Izarc, KGB Archiver, Winzip, and Stuffit for Windows. I'd guess it's using a compression method the version of WinRAR you have doesn't grok.

I think you need to check for an update to WinRAR. A user reported a similar problem elsewhere on MR, and a newer version of WinRAR fixed it.
______
Dennis

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by HarryT

With 70 hi-res images, it's going to be an awfully big book .

No kidding, Paul mailed me 27 Mb of images.

I'll try to find the sweet spot between size and detail, though