The Sand Dollar And The Slide Rule: Drawing Blueprints From Nature [Paperback]

Delta Willis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 1996

In The Sand Dollar and the Slide Rule, Delta Willis explores the relationship between natural forms and human engineering and the beauty, economy, and efficiency in the way birds fly, fish swim, and trees grow. She then applies this knowledge to design, and how humans can adapt such natural blueprints for everything from ultra-light aircraft to massive skyscrapers.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Willis is an idiosyncratic and interesting writer reminiscent of Diane Ackerman; she follows her own curiosities about the natural world, taking readers along on a delightful trip. As with her The Hominid Gang (LJ 9/1/89), there is much gentle science in this account of how successful engineering and research so often mirror the natural world, but it is presented in a highly nonsystematic and occasionally highly oblique way. Willis discusses architecture, aerospace design, fossils, motion pictures-a cornucopia of themes gathered in a thought-provoking container and knitted together with warm and friendly prose. A fascinating and uncategorizable book that will delight readers who like being aware of the natural world and its human-made permutations.
Mark L. Shelton, Worcester, Mass.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

An associational exploration of how biological forms inspire human architecture, this work ambles among the geometric connections between pterodactyls and birds and planes, trees and buildings, and beehives and their mathematical expressions. Willis navigates through dozens of such connections with ease, as she cut her teeth as a science journalist and isn't bashful about imparting an endearing sense of wonder. Her hero in the field is D'Arcy Thompson, a pioneer acknowledged by biology experts such as Peter Medawar and Stephen Jay Gould. Thompson, an amateur scientist, who wrote the influential book On Growth and Form in 1917, which is still in print, apparently animates Willis as well; she repeatedly cites the Scottsman's strong views on the purposes and functions of shapes, be they shells, fishes, or leaves. Buckminster Fuller, too, felt the weight of Thompson's opinions even as he designed a revolutionary method of weight distribution--the geodesic dome--which Willis devotes an entire chapter to. With her abundant enthusiasm, this author is bound to captivate those interested in biology on the visible, macro scale, and under Willis' prompting, they will easily grasp patterns that have previously escaped them. Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (June 18, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201488310
• ISBN-13: 978-0201488319
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,510,693 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The genius of things, June 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sand Dollar And The Slide Rule: Drawing Blueprints From Nature (Paperback)

This book is worth every penny. In an era when we're lucky to glean one or two inspiring ideas from a book of nonfiction, Delta Willis has packed this one with dozens-- possibility space, tensegrity, morphodynamics... And the details: did you know that a fly has a three-speed gear shift for its wings? Or that the branches of an oak tree are frequently longer than the tree's height? Nature's designs are not always ideal, but they have uncanny ways of dealing with the conditions of this planet, using a great economy of means. The author introduces us in a very personal way to the researchers, inventors, and engineers who've tried to understand and/or use nature's schemes, and continue to do so. At the center of the book is the patriarch of "growth and form," D'Arcy Thompson, whose legacy is perhaps still not fully realized. His predecessors (Leonardo da Vinci, Fibonacci...) and successors (Fuller, Seilacher...) are juxtaposed more on the basis of pertinence than conventional plodding chronology. The author shows a natural playfulness, weaving her own experiences into the explanations, and allowing her personages to speak for themselves. Dolf Seilacher's words occasionally shows signs of nature experimenting on the spot.

In the spirit of her controlling metaphor, the sand dollar, Willis gives immediate delight like the flower design etched on a sand dollar's back, and deftly reveals the underlying intrigue such as the sand dollar's intricate food grooves, tube feet, and system of sand ballast under the thin etched dome.

Faced with this abundant evidence of genius in nature's designs, I found myself asking what exactly this genius could be. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, these are "paths that a sensible God would never tread." But while physical laws describe a trend to disorder (entropy), life plays with designs and moves toward greater order, as if consciousness were not an exclusive property of the brain.

This book is full of "possibility space" and it's a good read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable, but flawed, February 27, 2007

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Sand Dollar And The Slide Rule: Drawing Blueprints From Nature (Paperback)

What's to enjoy: Wide-ranging and approachable essays on many different sciences and scientists. Willis has a light and fluent style that really pulls the reader down into the analogy between a sea urchin and a blimp, an athletic stadium and a soap bubble, and more. Along the way, the author constructs roadside memorial shrines to great thinkers who are not memorialized in the main stream of the history of ideas. A few facts in every story invite the prepared reader to search more deeply, but do so without snubbing the intelligent and interested layman.

What's not: A few maddening faults of phrase, and one profound blooper - at least, one that I caught. In one (p.22), the word "captives" appears where "captors" would have made sense. In another (p.56), the relationship between aeordynamic stalling, lift, and horizontal braking breaks. Speaking from my own skydiving and parachuting experience, "veering up" doesn't directly create the stall. Instead, the induced stall creates a tradeoff that buys upward acceleration (lower downward speed) at the cost of forward velocity - a tangible tradeoff of kinetic and potential energy. Yet another (p.114) confuses the theories and theorems of Pythagoras. The one that truly galled me, though was the assertion (p.213) that Goedel's theorem involves randomness. It does not. It pulls undecidability (or 'unreason' if you must)surgically and certainly out of the fundamental structure of reason itself, once "reason" meets certain criteria. Its inexorable, inevitable nature is what makes Goedel's theorem so profound and beautiful, not a hand-waving appeal to a roll of the dice. Willis would have us bury decidability alive under piles of probabilistic Nerf balls. Goedel's stiletto cuts to the heart of decidability in one straight stroke,and pierces it.

This book really is a rich feast for the intellect. Willis has done a good job of presenting science - strong, deep science - in a way that appeals and excites. She proves, on nearly every page, that deep science isn't necessarily obscure. The simple shape of a tree, for example, emerges from a profound set of design goals, including survival in normal kinds of exceptional winds, and including survival of another kind under even more exceptional wind loads. The few glitches (very few, I admit) just weakened all of this book's good, at least for me.

//wiredweird

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars TRAINING A SPOTLIGHT ON TANGIBLE REALITY, February 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sand Dollar And The Slide Rule: Drawing Blueprints From Nature (Paperback)

Delta Willis has mastered the art of making scientific concepts easy to understand. Her celebration of our natural universe and enthusiasm for the scientists who inspire her is infectious. A joy of discovery, steeped in a sense of the absurd, makes her writing both knowledgeable and niave -- and devilishly fun. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.