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1250288347
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| Feb 2024
| Feb 20, 2024
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really liked it
| Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or ex Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. - from Wikipedia-------------------------------------- Be There and Be Square - Nerd Nite logoThere was a nerd magazine in 2012, a Youtube presence, and occasional podcasts. This is the first Nerd Nite book. Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.There are 71 entries, taken from live presentations done by the authors of each piece. (TED talks for those with short attention spans and a need for alcohol?) Nerd Nites have been held in over 100 cities across the globe. The material here covers eleven scientific areas. (see below) All the entries are brief, so if one does not appeal to your mental tastebuds hang on a couple of minutes for the next one, or just skip past. [image] Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski - editors - image (from some time ago) from Facebook You can digest this book a few morsels at a time, and not have to worry about the fate of a fictional hero or put-upon victim. Nope. The heroes here are the scientists, the presenters. One of the great failings of popular science books, IMHO, is the absence of humor, or poor attempts at it. Not here. There are many moments in this one, and humor in almost all of them. That made me very happy. Of the 71 pieces, almost all are very pop-sciency, understandable by most readers, even me. There were only one or two that made my head hurt. It makes an excellent bed-side read. It was an upstairs book for me, to be read before nodding off, hopefully. Sometimes that takes a while. This is not an all-inclusive list of the articles, but lets you know what might be in store in its eleven sections 1 - Creature Features - on weird animals 2 - Mmmm...Brains - strangeness with how we learn and adapt 3 - Bodily Fluids - on things like coping with poo in space. (In space, no one can hear you fart?) 4 - Doing It - like it suggests, on sex, human and non-human, (no, not with each other. Don't be weird.) 5 - Health and (un)Wellness - human smells (See Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers) - on therapeutic maggots, adolescent medicine, et al 6 - Pathogens and parasites - on birds, bacteria in birds, zombies, the scotch tape test (don’t ask), viruses 7 - Death and Taxes - mass extinction, cancer, algae 8 - Space, the Big and the Beautiful - ignorance, asteroid avoidance and use, life on Europa?, artificial gravity, studying a pristine meteorite, Webb telescope 9 - Tech (High and Low) - GMOs, dating app, human powered flight, cyborging humans, domesticating bacteria, nuclear fusion 10 - Math is fun - a seminal experiment, the math of gossip, the golden ratio, infinity, cryptography 11 - Careers – things removed from dogs, useless inventions, myths about death, animals CSI, amputations, fermentation, flames. there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.I would include a list of my favorite articles, but it would wind up as long as the parts list above. But ok, because I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old, the one that made me laugh the most was To Boldy Go: Dealing with Poop and Pee in Space. Apollo 10 astronauts were gifted with the visual, and no doubt olfactory, treat of a turd meandering about in their capsule. This begins a talk about how one handles bodily waste in zero G. Another on bladder control, or the absence thereof, was sidesplitting. Others, on camel spiders and hangovers, generated a fair number of LOLs. Some were fascinating, like one having to do with making a brain on a chip. (Can it be served with Salsa?) The pieces on bacteria and their importance to human life, heck, to all life on Earth, were fascinating. There is plenty of weirdness, about diverse forms of milk, the proper use of maggots in healing, zombie parasites, asteroids, artificial gravity, and here we go with another bloody list. Sorry. Take my word, there is a wealth of material here that will broaden your knowledge base, and serve up plenty of conversational hors d'oeuvres for cocktail party chatter. It worked quite well for me. There is a downside, though. Because all the articles here are very short, one is often left hungry for more. On the other hand, that limitation might provoke you to sate that desire with a bit of extra research, which is always a good idea. So, never mind. If science piques your curiosity, if learning new and diverse things makes your heart race, or if you like to laugh, then this book is for you. How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi is a very filling read, one nibble at a time. Review posted - 06/14/25 Publication date – 02/01/24 I received a hardcover of How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Author/Editor links Chris Balakrishnan - Program Director at the National Science Foundation - His personal and FB pages A list of his articles Matt Wasowski - Director of New Business and Product Development, Events at SAE International – His FB, LinkedIn and Twitter pages Items of Interest from the authors (really editors) -----Soundcloud - excerpt - 5:01 -----Birdsong: How the Twittering Set Learns to Speak -----"Nerd Nite Published a Book!" by Matt Wasowski - Nerd Nite Austin 155, January 2024 ...more |
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Jun 08, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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1250272416
| 9781250272416
| 1250272416
| 3.71
| 83
| unknown
| Aug 08, 2023
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really liked it
| I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of t I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of the sensory world.”-------------------------------------- Synesthesia has been incorrectly defined, in my humble opinion, as “crossed wires in the brain” or “mixed-up senses.” In fact, synesthetes have the same primary response to a stimulus as neurotypical people do. If the numeral 5 appears in newsprint, I know that it is black on a white (well, somewhat beige) background. However, simultaneously, I see navy blue around that number and above that number it, like an aura. Therefore, I’ve created what I believe is a much better definition: Synesthesias are traits in which a sensory stimulus yields the expected sensory response plus one or more additional sensory responses.For myself, I have always been on the lower end of the taste/smell sensitivity bell curve, presuming there to be such a thing. I have always attributed this to the DNA luck of the draw. Some of it, though, might be a product of my homemaker mother’s abilities as a cook. There were a few things she made that were mouth-watering, but for the most part, it was said of Mom that she had a close relationship with Chef-Boyardee. Thus, it is no shock that my appreciation for cuisine exists in a narrow range. As smell is closely associated with taste, the two have traveled this low experiential road together. But maybe there is some hope for me and for folks with limitations like mine Maybe there are ways to expand the range of flavors and aromas we can detect and enjoy. (Make real friends with our taste buds?) That possibility is one of the points that Maureen Seaberg makes in her new book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. There are several others. [image] Maureen Seaberg - image from Amazon Seaberg is a synesthete, gifted with abilities beyond the average. Even within that, she is a tetrachromat, proud possessor of four sets of visual cones to our usual kit of three. She has used this extra-sightedness to help a cosmetics firm produce more pleasing hues. She is also a mirror-touch synesthete, which means that she can feel your pain, really. Patricia Lynne Duffy, a member of the United Nations Staff 1 Percent for Development Fund committee, was safely ensconced in her Manhattan office, but when she read the proposals before her, she felt the pain of the world’s most fragile people.She is the author of multiple books on her personal experience as a sensory anomaly, and others looking into the science of what makes us different. Among these are Tasting the Universe, Struck by Genius, and The Synesthesia Experience. While highlighting the differences in human capacity, Seaberg argues that we are all potentially synesthetes, but that our acculturation has defined limits to what our senses regard as the human range. She says we are capable of much more, and cites sundry studies to show our surprising range. One shows that we can detect light down to a single photon. Is it that we are all, or most of us, or many of us, capable of experiencing, sensing much more of our world that we have to date? Are these tools in our toolbox that we have merely never been trained to use? Seaberg uses the examples of many people who are either synesthetes, or who have naturally enhanced capabilities to argue that we could be experiencing much, much more than we do. She also notes people who, through traumatic events, (a mugging in one case) have subsequently displayed enhanced capacities, supporting the notion that we all may have considerable untapped potential. One surprising element here is her reporting on the benefits of the Montessori teaching method, which encourages multi-sensate learning. She suggests we incorporate into our psychological and medical frameworks the notion of a Perception Quotient, or PQ. Just as we have for our rational processing with the intelligence Quotient, or IQ, and EQ for Emotional abilities. Seaberg spends some time with the question of transhumanism, the notion that people can evolve beyond our current biological constraints by incorporating connections (merging?) with technology. She argues against such, contending that our realized and latent capacities can take us a lot further than we have gone, without the need for electronic enhancement. There’s plenty of evidence that humans are adapting to, even passing, machines by using their senses. Just look at the mind-meld young people have with their personal devices and the manual deftness with which they use them compared to older generations. Maybe the singularity moves in two directions, and we meet somewhere along the way. There’s a human-based component not yet considered. And since we’ve recently learned that human sensory potentials are far greater than we knew, perhaps we have a little more time to think about the value of being Homo sapiens.In a related vein, she notes that there are mirror-touch synesthetes who blur those lines. A very small subset of the neurological outliers known as mirror-touch synesthetes have extreme empathy for machines. They are sometimes able to feel the mechanisms in their own sensitive bodies. I call them machine synesthetes or machine empaths.She touches on some even more esoteric subjects, like the remote viewing program sponsored by the USA military from the 1970s into the 1990s, and the possibility of consciousness permeating more of our biosphere than we may have realized. If you are looking for a how-to re expanding your sensate horizons I would look elsewhere. The prompts offered for that here are introductory at best. Seaberg does offer some other places to go for that. This is more a treatise on the possibility of capacity expansion, not a manual for expanding ourselves. If we are indeed the architects of our own reality, it is clear that some of us have been gifted with a superior toolkit for interpreting what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, in that construction process. Maybe for the rest of us there are some tools in the basement or shed that have been gathering dust all our lives, tools that can be cleaned off, greased up, and maybe even powered up. It may or may not be a widespread opportunity, but it is certainly a hopeful and very interesting one. In trying to make sense of senses, Maureen Seaberg has written a fascinating, accessible work on human possibility that should stimulate your curiosity, whether or not you experience collateral sounds, colors, scents or other incomings. Checking this book out would definitely be sensible. “We genuinely experience scent as the emotion we have attached to it,” one sensory educator said. “Our hearts lift at the aroma that reminds us of a happy day at the beach, or our hearts break a little when we smell the aroma of a long-dead relative’s soap.” Review posted - 10/20/23 Publication date – 8/8/23 I received an ARE of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Audacy - The Science of Synesthesia and Super Sensors - audio - 30 min -----PSIfest 2023 – Curious Realm - Maureen Seaberg @PSIFest 2023 - Video – 27:01 Songs/Music -----Rollingstones - She’s a Rainbow - maybe another form of synesthesia Items of Interest -----Untapped Cities - THE SECRET COLORS OF NYC: HOW MAC’S NEW COLOR TALENT SEES THE CITY DIFFERENTLY THAN YOU by Owen Shapiro -----Charlotte McConaghy’s wonderful novel, Once There Were Wolves, offers a fictional look at someone with mirror-touch synesthesia -----Wiki - Montessori Method -----Wiki - The Stargate Project - remote viewing by the military -----Wiki - Transhumanism -----Optimax - Tetrachromacy: Do you have superhuman vision? ...more |
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Oct 16, 2023
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Oct 18, 2023
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0063142880
| 9780063142886
| 0063142880
| 3.84
| 1,256
| Apr 23, 2023
| Apr 25, 2023
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it was amazing
| The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity, the transmission of knowledge into the sentient mind is an uninterruptible process of ebbings and flowings. There are times—in infancy, or when at school in youth—during which the rate at which knowledge is gathered becomes intense and urgent, a welling tsunami of information ever ready for the mind to process. At other times, maybe later in life, the inbound knowledge drifts in more slowly, set to adhere and thicken like moss, or a patina.-------------------------------------- Digital amnesia, for example, is now widely agreed to be a phenomenon, a thing. It is a condition that posits that words looked up online are often forgotten almost as quickly as they are acquired. Information that we know can easily be Googled needs never be known, or if it is known, needs never to be retained. Telephone numbers, for example, once so often known and the more cherished ones remembered, need not even be known at all now. The name of the person to be called is all that is required. The name is hyperlinked to the phone’s dialing system and merely touching the name gets the distant phone to ring.Epistemology is one of those ten-dollar words that make my brain hurt, particularly as its meaning is not made obvious through common Latin roots. Speaking it aloud could certainly lead one astray. It is neither the study of urine, excessive alcohol consumption, nor anger, but the study of knowledge. Winchester spends some time trying to define just what knowledge is. If you think it is something consisting of 100% verified, tested, water-tight, bullet-proof factoids, you will be disappointed. Simon traces human thought on this back to the ancients and adopts, as the world has, the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” (JTB) So, not the same thing as facts, information, or truth. Squishier. But still fascinating. He tracks advances in the Theory of Knowledge (TOK), (sadly, nothing to do with the media platform) including the latest thinking. [image] Simon Winchester - image from Kepler’s Literary Foundation The sub-title of the book bears noting, The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. Once having established what knowledge actually is, Winchester goes on to write about the means by which that knowledge was dispersed. He goes back to the development of the earliest known languages, marking the bridge where pictographic symbols were succeeded by letters representing sounds. It is fascinating to note that the use of written language arose more or less at the same time across the planet, across cultures that had had no contact with each other. Once languages existed, schools would be needed, to sustain cultures and communities. The earliest known examples sprang up in Iraq and China. So, the means of transmission, beyond the family, was teachers. Some things never change. Winchester notes the considerable similarities between ancient and modern education. And some modern differences. A Chinese school final exam is to the American SAT as Go is to Go Fish.He touches on the greatest hits of educational advancement. Gutenberg democratized, to a considerable degree, the acquisition of knowledge, or at least access to books, with his seminal press. A huge, big deal, as regular folks could now read materials that previously been reserved for the clergy and educated classes. Another advancement earning considerable attention is the library, humanity’s storehouse of knowledge. Winchester goes into some detail on different sorts of libraries and how they spread. There are many fun bits of intel here, such as on the shift from scrolls to folded paper for books, and on an eccentric indexing system used in one notable private English library. …knowledge has long been seen as far too precious to treat with casual disregard. It needs to not just be kept, but kept safe and secure. For almost as long as language, especially written language, has existed, we have sought ways of collecting, storing, and safeguarding this endlessly swelling body of what is known, of what has been learned, and of all that can then be taught, discussed, challenged, debated, and decided. The most widely recognized and most ancient means of storage is the institution that derives its English name from the Latin word for the inner bark of a tree, on which early works were said to have been written. The Latin word for this bark is liber; by way of centuries of etymological convolution, the English word, used since Chaucer’s time, is, of course, the library.Each revolution in how knowledge was transmitted was revolutionary well beyond the specific hardware upgrade. It was not just readily printable books that revolutionized the world. Printing presses were used to print newspapers as well, ushering in a world of regular information delivery to great numbers of people. Of course, newspapers have always been used as a source of propaganda and misinformation in addition to true reporting of actual events. So the capacity for mayhem grew with the capacity for a growth in awareness. Why…did the transmission of knowledges that seem so potentially beneficial to us all get to be so drowned out by the noise of commerce and nationalism and war?Encyclopedias come in for a close look. They were seen as the informational bible for large numbers of people, as they sought to offer buyers all the information currently known. He covers several of the major such products, including those beyond the Encyclopedia Britannica. (I remember when I was a child in the 1950s Bronx, our local supermarket, an A&P, sold the Frunk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia volume by volume. Hardcover, very thin paper, occasional illustrations. I remember looking forward to the arrival of every single one of the twenty-five volumes. There would always be something of interest.) Such publications continued the work of Gutenberg, making potentially vast amounts of information available to regular people. Further advances in info transmission were to come. The telegraph shrunk the world of the 19th century the way the internet has done today. Radio broadcasting had a great impact. We learn much about the early days of the BBC, and its Japanese counterpart, including the impact those institutions had on the education, and attitudes toward education, of their respective populations. This was particularly eye-opening. The middle of the 20th century saw major advances. Computer chips revolutionized everything. Now we can access information on most things instantly, or close enough to it, using a hand-held device. And in place of bookshelf-filling volumes we can check with Wikipedia for information on almost anything. But knowledge is a feeder to a larger question. Whither wisdom? What can and may and will happen next to our mental development if and when we have no further need to know, perhaps no need to think? What if we are then unable to gain true knowledge, enlightenment, or insight—that most precious of human commodities, true wisdom? What then will become of us?This is not a new concern. Socrates was worried that the development of writing would impair people’s ability to understand things. He thought that if people could access written material, they would no longer have a need to memorize said material, by which means they supposedly incorporated it into their personal long-term storage, and had it available at the speed of thought. It is no big stretch to be concerned that the outsourcing of so much intellectual heavy lifting, which has been a product of the computer revolution, might leave our minds flabby and diminished. Winchester offers a look at the greatest thinkers of all time, polymaths ancient and modern. In addition to the usual suspects, there are some names here that will be unfamiliar. Really? I never even heard of that guy. is a reaction I had more than once to some of the personages in his all-time, intellectual all-star roster. If there is one thing that I found lacking in the book, well, lacking is not the right word, more like something I would have liked to have seen there. Is a look at how knowledge is lost or destroyed, whether by misfortune of evil intent. For just as knowledge can advance civilization, denial of access to it can help bring about a dark age. Winchester’s aim here is to wonder how we will fare going forward when so much of our learning is housed outside our brains. Knowledge is a crucial element in the development of wisdom. Will our brains, uncluttered of vast amounts of information, be freed to contemplate deeper truths? Or will the neurons that gather information be too softened to address heavier thinking? Given what I have heard of so many younger people in the work force, I am leaning toward the dark side on this one. But I sure hope I am wrong. Encountering a passel of bright young minds in the last few years keeps alive hopes for better. Simon Winchester is a national treasure. (probably for two countries, as he is an English-born American citizen) He repeatedly produces amazingly interesting books that open our eyes to parts of the world, contemporary and historical, that might otherwise remain unknown. Considering how much he has taught us through his writings, there is no question but that the world is a much richer place for how much knowledge and wisdom he has imparted to us all through his ongoing production of fascinating material. You may or may not become wise as a result of reading this book, but I guarantee you will become more knowledgeable. How, in sum, do we value the knowledge that, thanks to the magic of electronics, is now cast before us in so vast and ceaseless and unstoppable a cascade? Amid the torrent and its fury, what is to become of thought—care and calm and quiet thoughtfulness? What of our own chance of ever gaining wisdom? Do we need it? Does anybody? How does a world function if no one within it is wise? Review first posted - 9/15/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 4/23/23 ----------Trade paperback - 4/23/24 I received an ARE of Knowing What We Know from Harper in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Winchester’s personal, Twitter and FB pages A nice overview of Winchester’s professional life can be found here Interviews -----The Michael Schermer Show - Are We Risking Our Ability to Think? There is a wonderful story re material in the Encyclopedia Britannica about how a relied-upon source can foment truly awful errors. -----Free Library of Philadelphia - Simon Winchester | Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge -----Live Talks Los Angeles - Simon Winchester in conversation with Ted Habte-Gabr at Live Talks Los Angeles Reviews of other Simon Winchester books we have read: -----2021 - Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World -----2018 - The Perfectionists -----2015 - Pacific -----2010 - Atlantic -----2008 - The Man Who Loved China -----2005 - Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded -----2001 - The Map That Changed the World -----1998 - The Professor and the Madman ...more |
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Sep 13, 2023
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Sep 13, 2023
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1640093982
| 9781640093980
| 1640093982
| 4.35
| 104
| unknown
| Nov 15, 2022
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really liked it
| …it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.-------------------------------------- We don’t live in a cos …it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.-------------------------------------- We don’t live in a cosmos. We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that established its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.Cosmos - The universe seen as a well-ordered whole; from the Greek word kosmos ‘order, ornament, world, or universe’, so called by Pythagoras or his disciples from their view of its perfect order and arrangement. – from Oxford reference Genesis - Hebrew Bereshit (“In the Beginning”), the first book of the Bible. Its name derives from the opening words: “In the beginning….” Genesis narrates the primeval history of the world - from the Encyclopedia Britannica [image] Brian Thomas Swimme - image from Journey of the Universe So, Cosmogenesis means, at its root, the beginning of everything. Diverse cultures have come up with diverse understandings of how everything came to be. Where Swimme differs is in seeing the genesis, the beginning, the creation of everything as an ongoing process, not a one-off in deep history. Cosmogenesis tracks Swimme’s journey from math professor to spokesman for a movement that seeks to rejoin science and spirituality. The stations along this route, which runs from 1968 to 1983, consist of people he considers great minds. He gushes like a Swiftie with closeup tickets to an Eras Tour show over several of these genius-level individuals, while relying on his analytical capacity to note shortcomings in some of the theories some others propose. Swimme mixes his approach a bit. It is in large measure a memoir, with a focus on his intellectual (and spiritual) growth, along with descripti0ns of the places where he lived, taught, and studied, and the people who inspired him, providing some background to the theories and ovbservations to which he is exposed. A mathematics PhD, with a long and diverse teaching history, he grounds his work in the scientific. But he does not separate the scientific from the spiritual, from the human. In his view, we are all a part of the ongoing evolution of everything, noting that every subatomic part that make up every atom in our bodies, in our world, was present at the Biggest Bang, then was further refined by the lesser bangs of supernovas manufacturing what became our constituent parts. Even today, we bathe, wallow, bask, and breathe in radiation from that original event. It may have occurred fourteen billion years ago, but in a measurable way it is happening still. And we all remain a part of it. There is a piece of Swimme’s material-cum-spiritual notion that I found very appealing. I have experienced an ecstatic state while perceiving beauty in the world. On telling my son about one such, I remarked that it was like a religious experience. He answered, “why like?” Swimme recruits like experiences to bolster the connection between the humanly internal and the eternal of the cosmos. Bear in mind that Swimme grew up in a Catholic tradition, which clearly impressed him. There is a strong incense scent of religiosity to his work. Not saying that Cosmogenesis is a religion, but I am not entirely certain it is not. As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.I had a very different response to the religious world to which I was exposed as a child through twelve years of Catholic education. There was no connection for me between the Mass and the sacred, whatever that was. Mass represented mostly a burden, a mandatory exercise, communicating nothing about layers of experience beyond the material, while offering hard evidence of the power of institutions to control how I spent my time. I did not, at the time, understand the community building and reinforcing aspect to this weekly tribal ritual, separate from the religious content. I believe that what we think of as spiritual or spectral is the reality that lies beyond our perceptual bandwidth. The ancients did not understand lightning, so imagined a god hurling bolts. With scientific understanding of lightning, Zeus is cast from an imagined home on Mount Olympus to the confines of cultural history. Science expands our effective, if not necessarily our physical, biological bandwidth, and thus captures, making understandable, realities once thought the domain of imagined gods. But what of feeling? The ecstatic state I experience when witnessing the beauty of the world, is that a purely biological state, comprised of hormones and DNA? Or do we assign to that feeling, which can be difficult to explain, a higher meaning because of our inability to define it precisely enough? And, in doing so, are we not following in the path of the ancient Greeks who assigned to extra-human beings responsibility for natural events? So, I am not sure I am buying in to Swimme’s views. It is, though, something, to pique the interest of people like myself who have rejected most forms of organized religion, particularly those that focus on a human-like all-powerful being, (see George Carlin’s routine re this. I’m with George.) but who hold open a lane for a greater, a different understanding of all reality. Where is the line between the material and the spiritual? How did we come to be here? Evolution provides plenty to explain that. But we still get back to a linear understanding of time as an impasse. If the (our) universe began with the big bang, then what came before? Einstein showed with his special theory of relativity that time is not so fixed a concept as we’d thought. Things operate at different speeds, relative to each other, depending on distance and speed. Who is to say that there might not be more fungability to our understanding of time, maybe even radically so? In a way, this is what Swimme is on about, ways of looking at our broader reality, at our origins and ongoing evolution, (not just the evolution of our species, but of the universe itself) through other, more experiential perspectives, (a new Gnosticism?) while still including science. Humans have expressed their faith in a great variety of symbols, many of which have inspired me at one time or another. But today, if you ask for the foundation of my faith, I would say the stone cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades.Overall I found this book brain candy of the first order. Take it as a survey-course primer for the theory he propounds. There are many videos available on-line for those interested in going beyond Cosmo 101. So, Is cosmogenesis one of the ten greatest ideas in human history as is claimed here? That is above my pay grade. Some of the notions presented here seemed a bit much, but there was enough that was worth considering that made this a satisfying, intriguing read. Suffice it to say that it is a fascinating take on, well, everything, and can be counted on to give your gray cells, comprised of materials that have been around for 14 billion years, a hearty jiggle at the very least. Everything is up in the air. We are living in a deranged world where nihilism dominates every major state. The contest today is for the next world philosophy. Review posted – January 13, 2023 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - November 15, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - December 12, 2023 I received a hardcover of Cosmogenesis from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Twitter and Facebook do not appear to have ever been used you might also try Interviews -----Deeptime Network - Brian Swimme -- What's Next? Planetary Mind and the Future - video – 1:12:41 – from 6:50 -----Sue Speaks - SUE Speaks Podcast: Searching for Unity in Everything - podcast - 31:27 Items of Interest from the author ----- The Third Story of the Universe -----A Great Leap in Being - 28:56 -----Human Energy - Introduction to the Noosphere: The Planetary Minds -----Journey of the Universe Items of Interest -----San Francisco Chronicle - Science doesn’t cover it all, author Brian Thomas Swimme explains ----- George Carlin on religion ...more |
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Jan 08, 2023
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Jan 10, 2023
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1250151171
| 9781250151179
| 1250151171
| 3.48
| 592
| Oct 2022
| Oct 11, 2022
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really liked it
| The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.---------------------------------- The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.-------------------------------------- …consciousness is not something passed on or recycled--like single molecules of water, which are retained as they move about the earth as ice, water, or dew--from one living creature to the next…instead consciousness should be grown from “scratch” with only a few well-timed molecular parts from plans laid out. It is not drawn from a recycled tap of special kinds of cells or dredged from the vein of free will. No, the darn thing grows. From its own rules. All by itself. And we have no idea how or why.When I was still a programmer it was necessary to understand the many characteristics of, and rules about using, the objects that we would place on the screen in an application. Under what conditions did one appear? Physical dimensions, like width and height. Does it have a borderline around it? How wide is that line? Does it have a background color? How about a foreground color? Can it display images, text, both? Where does it get its information, keyboard entry, internal calculation? and on and on and on. Fairly simple and straightforward once one knows how it works. But consider the human brain, with billions of neurons, and a nearly infinite possible range of interactions among them. Somehow, within that biological organ, there is a thing we refer to as consciousness. We are who and what we are, and saying so, thinking so, makes us conscious, at the very least. But how did this gelatinous, gross substance, come to develop awareness of self? And just what is consciousness, anyway? [image] Patrick House - image from Attention Fwd -> Patrick House, a Ph.D. neuroscientist, researcher and writer, offers a wide range of looks at what consciousness might be, mostly by looking at details of the brain. How do the characteristics of zombie food come to be, and how do they combine to create something far greater than a tasty meal for the hungry dead? He looks at many of the currently popular ideas that try to get a handle on the fog that is consciousness. The book is a collection of possible mechanisms, histories, observations, data, and theories of consciousness told nineteen different ways, as translations of a few moments described in a one-page scientific paper in Nature, published in 1998, titled “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter.” The idea is an homage to a short book of poetry and criticism, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which takes the poem “Deer Park” by Wang Wei and analyzes nineteen different translations of it in the centuries since it was originally written.He points out more than once that our brains did not emerge in an instant, all sparkling, from the build-a-brain factory. They evolved, from the very first living cell, so at each step of the evolutionary ladder, whatever traits favored survival and reproduction became dominant, pushing prior adaptations into the DNA equivalent of attic storage. Some of the accretion of the prior adaptations may vanish over time, but bags of the stuff are still lying about. In tracing how our brains evolved, He points out qualities, like the brain’s need for cadence, and timekeeping, shows that language and action are comparable products of the brain and reports on how speech arose from systems that governed movement. He looks at the brain’s mission of preventing our bodies from losing 1.5 degrees of internal temperature, at how we map out the sensate terrain around us, and at the significance of size in brain complexity. Imagery runs rampant. There is a chapter on the pinball machine as an appropriate metaphor for consciousness. It was a TILT for me. But ineffective chapters like that one are rare, and can be quickly forgotten when the next chapter offers another fascinating perspective, and bit of evolutionary vision. Another, more effective image, was scientists looking for “surface features” of the brain that might tell us where consciousness lies, like geologists surveying terrain to identify likely ore locations. Throughout the book House refers to a patient, referred to as Anna, who, while having neurosurgery, had her brain poked in various locations by the surgeon, testing out the function of different parts of her gray matter, prompting some unexpected results. Grounding much of the discussion in the experience of an actual person helped make the material more digestible. As I read, questions kept popping up like synapses flashing a signal to the next synapse. First of all is a definition of consciousness. What is it? How is it defined? Probably the most we can hope for is to infer its existence from externalities, in the same way that astrophysicists can infer the presence of a black hole by measuring the light coming from nearby objects, without ever being able to actually see the black hole, itself. Is there a measurable range of consciousness? Is entity #1 more or less conscious than entity #2. (Man, that is one seriously self-aware tree) How might we measure such a thing? This is actually addressed in one of the chapters. I would have been interested in more on consciousness in the world of Artificial Intelligence. If programmers put together a sufficient volume of code, with a vast array of memory and data, might there be a possibility of self-awareness? What would it take? For an item on an electronic screen, one can find out the specific characteristics that comprise it. And with that knowledge, check against a list of possible items it might be. It might be a text-box, or a drop-down menu, or a check-box, a button that triggers an action when clicked. But with the brain, while we can compile a considerable list of characteristics, there is not really a list against we can check those things to arrive at a clear conclusion. Oh yeah, any entity, biological or electronic, that possesses at least some number of certain core characteristics, can be considered to be conscious. Nope, it does not work that way. I found by the end of the book that I had learned a fair bit about how brains evolved, which is always a wonderful experience, but was as uncertain at the end as at the beginning about just what consciousness is. I expect that House shares that leaning, to at least some degree. There is no one such thing as “consciousness,” and the attempt to study it as a singular phenomenon will go nowhere.But he does suggest that consciousness exists as a range of experiences rather than as a singular entity with firmly defined borders. It is a fascinating read, even if the core definition is lacking. One thing is for sure, it is brain candy of the first order whether you are self-aware or not. And just for fun, for next week’s class, be prepared to discuss the difference between consciousness and the mind. Review posted – October 29, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - September 22, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - 3/5/24 I received an ARE of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the House’s personal, and Twitter pages Items of Interest -----Wang Wei - Deer Park ...more |
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| Jun 14, 2022
| Jun 14, 2022
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really liked it
| “At a time when our planet is experiencing terrifying and unprecedented levels of change, what corresponding transformations have you witnessed in you “At a time when our planet is experiencing terrifying and unprecedented levels of change, what corresponding transformations have you witnessed in your lives, yards, neighborhoods, jobs, relationships, or mental health?” That’s the question that Tajjia Isen and I asked the contributors to this anthology. We wanted to hear their personal stories, allow then to serve as witnesses of this incredibly complex moment in history. - from the Introduction-------------------------------------- This is what climate change is. It’s what it does to the psyche, along with the body and the places we love. It’s nearly invisible until the moment something startles you into attention. A creeping catastrophe waiting with arms outstretched to deliver a suffocating embrace. And once the knowledge is gained, there is no unknowing it. You are no longer climate blind. You see and cannot unsee.Things change. Often it happens too slowly for us to notice. Sometimes processes have been evolving for a while and take a sudden, tipping point jump into the observable. But often it takes being away for a while to get a visceral sense of change. [image] Tajja Isen - image from Catapult, where she is Editor in Chief What do you notice, and what slips by as just the normal range of expected experience? I have been around long enough to have personal elements that fit in with the editors’ approach. I was not keeping track of the frequency or height of the snowfalls that marked winter growing up in the Bronx. Does it snow more now? Less? Maybe, but not that I could say from personal observation, particularly. Although there was a stretch of years when it began to seem that snow was a thing of the past. Then it returned. I would have to look through tables of data to really know. Summers were hot growing up, days in the 90s, maybe a few in triple digits. Fire hydrants, including the one in front of the apartment building where I was raised, were opened, sometimes by friendly firefighters, sometimes by unauthorized people, so kids like me could get some relief from the heat. Are NYC summers hotter now? I don’t really know off the top of my head. Again, I would have to check tables of historical data. But I do know that Summer nights in New York were increasingly uncomfortable over my many years there, with overnight lows far too often in the 80s. Yes, the city holds the heat well, but it held it well during the entirety of my life. Something had changed. Then there was Superstorm Sandy. [image] Amy Brady - image from LitHub In a way, the editors asked their contributors to respond to a lawyerly question: What did you notice and when did you notice it? With the extra of asking how the noticed change(s) impacted them. Editors Amy Brady and Tajja Isen have put together essays from nineteen writers from around the world, each exploring what they have noticed. In 2022, we are witnesses to one of the most transformative moments in human history: a time when climate change is altering life on Earth at an unprecedented rate, but also a time when the majority of us can still remember when things were more stable. We are among the first—and perhaps one of the last—human populations to have memories of what life was like before. To us, the “new normal” is not how it’s always been. Our lives jostle against incongruous memories of familiar places. We are forced to confront, in strange and sometimes painful ways, how much those places have changed.Being swamped with relentless tales of big scale environmental horror can have a numbing effect. Numbers, estimates, projections, possible outcomes, blah, blah, blah. We can stop hearing after a while, tune it out. Outrage is appropriate and we experience that, but it is not something we can endure continuously. At our core, humans are creatures of story, not statistics. For as long as we have existed people have concocted origin stories, not origin reports. So, maybe story is a better way to communicate, to connect, to inform people, some people anyway, about the real on-the-ground reality of global warming. And that is what we have here. These nineteen stories are memoirish, covering the far reaches of the planet and a range of personal experiences. Landscapes that have been transformed by warming, devastating long-term drought, massive reduction in wildlife, invasive species wreaking havoc on formerly stable ecosystems, growing public consciousness of particles per million in the air, and on. Some are a bit tangential. In Unearthing, Lydia Yuknovich focuses on the harm done by the Hanover, Washington facilities that produced much of the fissile materials used in America’s nuclear bombs. Her witness to the very personal impact of radioactive pollution on a peer growing up is not really a global warming tale, however heart-breaking. Some focus less on personal global warming miseries to look more at human interactions, class, racial and gender politics coming in for some attention Some tales are wonderful in their strangeness. Walking on Water looks at how those charged with relocating both people and native deities to make way for a huge dam in Africa interact with local people and customs. Signs and Wonders notes, and celebrates, the increasing weirdness in the world, as long-hidden things begin to reappear when landscapes change and glaciers recede. Some offer strong imagery. In Cougar, Terese Svoboda builds on an experience she had while driving, in which she narrowly avoided hitting a cougar that was making a dash across a Nebraska highway. She looks at ways the creature is making a comeback, among other elements in her story, and sees cause for hope that humanity can find a way as well. In The Development, one of my favorite stories in the collection, Alexandra Kleeman notes a slice of green near her Staten Island apartment and pays attention as this (at least temporarily) abandoned piece of NYC is taken over by nature, plants left alone to grow, to spread, wildlife moving in. The optimism of regeneration lives side by side with the dread that it is only a matter of time before developers carve a pristine, straight-line urban walkway out of it. Lacy M. Johnson tells of her religious father, in Leap. He was a white collar at a coal plant, justifying the environmental carnage being caused as God giving people the Earth to use however we want. Some focus on illness. Warming has expanded the range of ticks that carry Lyme disease to the chagrin of well, everyone. Having had the pleasure some years back, I can very much relate to this concern. Lyme disease gets a mention in two of the stories. Porochista Khakpour’s Season of Sickness tells of his travails with Lyme and the joys of black mold in his apartment, and on. Is warming only generating more risks, or is it also impacting our resistance? The collection is rich in beautiful writing and insight. The sense of place is particularly strong throughout. It certainly offers a prompt most of us can work from. What have you noticed? And how has it impacted your life? One change that stands out from personal experience is a product of the others, expectations. Growing up, most of us, I believe, expected that the physical world would continue on pretty much as it had. That is no longer the case for anyone who pays any attention to environmental events in the world. While the fear of imminent and instantaneous destruction in the 1950s and 1960s, helped along by duck-and-cover drills during the Cold War, may have dissipated, (although it has certainly not been eliminated) the existential threats of today have more to do with our less flash-bang demise. The ticking up of temperatures worldwide makes us all frogs in the proverbial pot of warming water. And it seems an insuperable task trying to get those in charge of the range to turn off the flame, or at least turn it down enough. Will my children and grandchildren be able to see the places in the world I have been able to see? Will all those places even exist? What does warming mean for their longevity? Human lifespans increased significantly in the USA over the 20th century. I have already outlived my father. Will my children outlive me? We know that change is possible. When I was a kid it seemed that everyone smoked. After decades of effort, smoking was much reduced. Hope is a reason to go on, to keep trying, but one change I see is a whittling back of hope itself. Sure, there are positive developments. Electric cars have arrived and renewable energy production is growing as a percentage of overall supply. General awareness has surely grown. Our understanding of the complicated parts that make up global warming is expanding, increasing the possibility that fixes, or at the least ameliorations, can be identified, whether or not they are implemented. But is that enough to stave off the worst? Is anything, at this point, enough? Are we in the world of Don’t Look Up, where the only sane response is resignation? I sure hope not. We must learn to become conservationists of memory. Otherwise, this damage we have done to our planet will cost us our past, as it may already have cost us our future. And without a past or a future, what are we? Nothing. A flickering violence of a species, here such a short time, insatiable, then gone. - Omar El Akkad Review posted – July 8, 2022 Publication date – June 14, 2022 I received a copy of The World As We Knew It from Catapult in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Amy Brady’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Links to Tajja Isen’s’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Publishers Weekly - 'The Raw Data of Someone Else's Life': PW Talks with Amy Brady and Tajja Isen by Liza Monroy -----Writer Unboxed - Seeking the Existential, the Intimate, and the Urgent: Essays That Model Masterful Storytelling by Julie Carrick Dalton Items of Interest from the author(s) -----LitHub - A list of pieces Brady wrote for LitHub -----Orion Magazine - excerpt - Faster Than We Thought by Omar El Akkad ...more |
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006306488X
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| Sep 07, 2021
| Sep 07, 2021
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really liked it
| Technologists have no unique skill in governing, weighing competing values, or assessing evidence. Their expertise is in designing and building tec Technologists have no unique skill in governing, weighing competing values, or assessing evidence. Their expertise is in designing and building technology. What they bring to expert rule is actually a set of values masquerading as expertise—values that emerge from the marriage of the optimization mindset and the profit motive.-------------------------------------- Like a famine, the effects of technology on society are a man-made disaster: we create the technologies, we set the rules, and what happens is ultimately the result of our collective choices.Yeah, but what if the choices are not being made collectively? What’s the bottom line on the bottom line? The digital revolution has made many things in our lives better, but changes have come at considerable cost. There have been plenty of winners from the digitization of content, the spread of the internet, the growth of wireless communication, and the growth of AI. But there have been battlefields full of casualties as well. Unlike actual battlefields, like those at Gettysburg, many of the casualties in the battles of the digital revolution did not enlist, and did not have a chance to vote for or against those waging the war, a war that has been going on for decades. But we, citizens, do not get a say in how that war is waged, what goals are targeted, or how the spoils or the costs of that war are distributed. [image] Reich, Sahami, and Weinstein - image from Stanford University In 2018, the authors of System Error, all professors at Stanford, developed a considerable course on Technology, Policy, and Ethics. Many Technical and Engineering programs require that Ethics be taught in order to gain accreditation. But usually those are stand-alone classes, taught by non-techies. Reich, Sahami, and Weinstein wanted something more meaningful, more a part of the education of budding computer scientists than a ticking-off-the-box required course. They wanted the teaching of the ethics of programming to become a full part of their students’ experience at Stanford. That was the source for what became this book. They look at the unintended consequences of technological innovation, focusing on the notions of optimization and agency. It is almost a religion in Silicon Valley, the worship of optimization uber alles. Faster, cleaner, more efficient, cheaper, lighter. But what is it that is being optimized? To what purpose? At what cost, to whom? Decided on by whom? …there are times when inefficiency is preferable: putting speed bumps or speed limits onto roads near schools in order to protect children; encouraging juries to take ample time to deliberate before rendering a verdict; having the media hold off on calling an election until all the polls have closed…Everything depends on the goal or end result. The real worry is that giving priority to optimization can lead to focusing more on the methods than on the goals in question.Often blind allegiance to the golden calf of optimization yields predictable results. One genius decided to optimize eating, so that people could spend more time at work, I guess. He came up with a product that delivered a range of needed nutrients, in a quickly digestible form, and expected to conquer the world. This laser focus managed to ignore vast swaths of human experience. Eating is not just about consuming needed nutrients. There are social aspects to eating that somehow escaped the guy’s notice. We do not all prefer to consume product at our desks, alone. Also, that eating should be pleasurable. This clueless individual used soy beans and lentils as the core ingredients of his concoction. You can guess what he named it. Needless to say, it was not exactly a marketing triumph, given the cultural associations with the name. And yes, they knew, and did it anyway. There are many less entertaining examples to be found in the world. How about a social media giant programming its app to encourage the spread of the most controversial opinions, regardless of their basis in fact? The outcome is actual physical damage in the world, people dead as a result, democracy itself in jeopardy. And yet, there is no meaningful requirement that programmers adhere to a code of ethics. Optimization, in corporate America, is on profits. Everything else is secondary, and if there are negative results in the world as a result of this singular focus, not their problem. How about optimization that relies on faulty (and self-serving) definitions. Do the things we measure actually measure the information we want? For example, there were some who measured happiness with their product by counting the number of minutes users spent on it. Was that really happiness being measured, or maybe addictiveness? Algorithms are notorious for picking up the biases of their designers. In an example of a business using testing smartly, a major company sought to develop an algorithm it could use to evaluate employment candidates. They gave it a pretty good shot, too, making revision after revision. But no matter how they massaged the model the results were still hugely sexist. Thankfully they scrapped it and returned to a less automated system. One wonders, though, how many algorithmic projects were implemented when those in charge opted to ignore the down-side results. So, what is to be done? There are a few layers here. Certainly, a professional code of ethics is called for. Other professions have them and have not collapsed into non-existence, doctors, lawyers, engineers, for example. Why not programmers? At present there is not a single, recognized organization, like the AMA, that could gain universal accedence to such a requirement. Organizations that accredit university computer science programs could demand more robust inclusion of ethical course material across course-work. But the only real way we as a society have to hold companies accountable for the harm already inflicted, and the potential harm new products might cause, is via regulation. As individuals, we have virtually no power to influence major corporations. It is only when we join our voices together through democratic processes that there is any hope of reining in the worst excesses of the tech world, or working with technology companies to come to workable solutions to real-world problems. It is one thing for Facebook to set up a panel to review the ethics of this or that element of its offerings. But if the CEO can simply ignore the group’s findings, such panels are meaningless. I think we have all seen how effective review boards controlled by police departments have been. Self-regulation rarely works. There need not be an oppositional relationship between tech corporations and government, despite the howling by CEOs that they will melt into puddles should the wet of regulation ever touch their precious selves. What a world: what a world! A model the authors cite is transportation. There needs to be some entity responsible for roads, for standardizing them, taking care of them, seeing that rules of the road are established and enforced. It is the role of government to make sure the space is safe for everyone. As our annual death rate on the roads attests, one can only aim for perfection without ever really expecting to achieve it. But, overall, it is a system in which the government has seen to the creation and maintenance of a relatively safe communal space. We should not leave to the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter decisions about how much human and civic roadkill is acceptable on the Information Highway. The authors offer some suggestions about what might be done. One I liked was the resurrection of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. We do not expect our elected representatives to be techies. But we should not put them into a position of having to rely on lobbyists for technical expertise on subjects under legislative consideration. The OTA provided that objective expertise for many years before Republicans killed it. This is doable and desirable. Another interesting notion: “Right now, the human worker who does, say $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get an income tax, social security tax, all those things.Some of their advice, while not necessarily wrong, seems either bromitic or unlikely to have any chance of happening. This is a typical thing for books on social policy. …democracies, which welcome a clash of competing interests and permit the revisiting and revising of questions of policy, will respond by updating rules when it is obvious that current conditions produce harm…Have the authors ever actually visited America outside the walls of Stanford? In America, those being harmed are blamed for the damage, not the evil-doers who are actually foisting it on them. What System Error will give you is a pretty good scan of the issues pertaining to tech vs the rest of us, and how to think about them. It offers a look at some of the ways in which the problems identified here might be addressed. Some entail government regulation. Many do not. You can find some guidance as to what questions to ask when algorithmic systems are being proposed, challenged, or implemented. And you can also get some historical context re how the major tech changes of the past impacted the wider society, and how they were wrangled. The book does an excellent job of pointing out many of the ethical problems with the impact of high tech, on our individual agency and on our democracy. It correctly points out that decisions with global import are currently in the hands of CEOs of large corporations, and are not subject to limitation by democratic nations. Consider the single issue of allowing lies to be spread across social media, whether by enemies foreign or domestic, dark-minded individuals, profit-seekers, or lunatics. That needs to change. If reasonable limitations can be devised and implemented, then there may be hope for a brighter day ahead, else all may be lost, and our nation will descend into a Babel of screaming hatreds and kinetic carnage. For Facebook, with more than 2.8 billion active users, Mark Zuckerberg is the effective governor of the informational environment of a population nearly double the size of China, the largest country in the world. Review first posted – January 28, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - September 21, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - September 6, 2022 [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Rob Reich’s (pronounced Reesh) Stanford profile and Twitter pages Reich is a professor of Political science at Stanford, and co-director of Stanford’s McCoy Center for Ethics, and associate director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial intelligence Links to Mehran Sahami’s Stanford profile and Twitter pages Sahami is a Stanford professor in the School of Engineering and professor and associate Chair for Education in the Computer Science Department. Prior to Stanford he was a senior research scientist at Google. He conducts research in computer science education, AI and ethics. Jeremy M. Weinstein’s Stanford profile JEREMY M. WEINSTEIN went to Washington with President Obama in 2009. A key staffer in the White House, he foresaw how new technologies might remake the relationship between governments and citizens, and launched Obama’s Open Government Partnership. When Samantha Power was appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations, she brought Jeremy to New York, first as her chief of staff and then as her deputy. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as a professor of political science, where he now leads Stanford Impact Labs. Interviews -----Computer History Museum - CHM Live | System Error: Rebooting Our Tech Future - with Marietje Schaake – 1:30:22 This is outstanding, in depth -----Politics and Prose - Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami & Jeremy Weinstein SYSTEM ERROR with Julián Castro with Julian Castro and Bradley Graham – video - 1:02:51 Items of Interest -----Washington Post - Former Google scientist says the computers that run our lives exploit us — and he has a way to stop them -----The Nation - Fixing Tech’s Ethics Problem Starts in the Classroom By Stephanie Wykstra -----NY Times - Tech’s Ethical ‘Dark Side’: Harvard, Stanford and Others Want to Address It -----Brookings Institution - It Is Time to Restore the US Office of Technology Assessment by Darrell M. West -----New York Times - Feb. 3, 2022 - A Change by Apple Is Tormenting Internet Companies, Especially Meta By Kate Conger and Brian X. Chen - Apple allowing people to opt out of advertiser tracking having an impact Makes Me Think Of -----Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks -----Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez -----Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff ...more |
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| 3.95
| 3,000
| Apr 26, 2022
| Apr 26, 2022
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it was amazing
| The disaster goes by different names. Sometimes it’s called the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. For years, it was called the Cretaceous-Tertiary, o The disaster goes by different names. Sometimes it’s called the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. For years, it was called the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, mass extinction that marked the end of the Age of Reptiles and the beginning of the third, Tertiary age of life on Earth. That title was later revised according to the rules of geological arcana to the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, shorted to K-Pg. But no matter what we call it, the scars in the stone tell the same story. Suddenly, inescapably, life was thrown into a horrible conflagration that reshaped the course of evolution. A chunk of space debris that likely measured more than seven miles across slammed into the planet and kicked off the worst-case scenario for the dinosaurs and all other life on Earth. This was the closest the world has ever come to having its Restart button pressed, a threat so intense that—if not for some fortunate happenstances—it might have returned Earth to a home for single-celled blobs and not much else.-------------------------------------- The loss of the dinosaurs was just the tip of the ecological iceberg. Virtually no environment was left untouched by the extinction, an event so severe that the oceans themselves almost reverted to a soup of single-celled organisms.This is a story about two things, Earth’s Big Bang and evolution. K-Pg (pronounced Kay Pee Gee - maybe think of it as KFC with much bigger bones, where everything is overcooked?) marks the boundary between before and after Earth’s own Big Bang, manifested today by a specific layer of stone in the geologic record. [image] Riley with Jet - image from The Museum of the Earth Ok, yes, I know that the catastrophic crash landing of the bolide, a seven-miles-across piece of galactic detritus, most likely an asteroid, that struck 66.043 million years ago, give or take, was not the biggest bad-parking-job in Earth’s history. An even bigger one hit billions of years ago. It was nearly the size of Mars, and that collision may have been what created our moon. Black makes note of this in the book. But in terms of impact, no single crash-and-boom has had a larger effect on life on planet Earth. Sure, about 3 billion years ago an object between 23 and 36 miles across dropped in on what is now South Africa. There have been others, rocks larger than K-Pg, generating even vaster craters. But what sets the Chicxulub (the Yucatan town near where the vast crater was made, pronounced Chick-sue-lube) event on the apex is its speed and approach, 45 thousand mph, entering at a 45-degree angle. (You wanna see the fastest asteroid ever to hit Earth? Ok. You wanna see it again?) It also helps that the material into which it immersed itself was particularly likely to respond by vaporizing over the entire planet. An excellent choice for maximum destruction of our mother. And of course, its impact on life, animal life having come into being about 800 million years ago, was unparalleled. In the short term, it succeeded in wiping out the large non-avian dinosaurs, your T-Rex sorts, Triceratops grazers, brontosaurian browsers, and a pretty large swath of the planetary flora as well, burning up much of the globe and inviting in a nuclear winter that added a whole other layer of devastation. Aqueous life was not spared. You seen any mososaurs lately? Even tiny organisms were expunged en masse. (Cleanup in aisle everywhere!) [image] Image from Facts Just for Kids Here’s what the Earth looked like just before, just after, and then at increments, a week, a month, a year, and on to a million years post event. It is a common approach in pop science books to personalize the information being presented. Often this takes the form of following a particular scientist for a chapter as she or he talks about or presents the matter under consideration. In The Last Days… Black lets one particular species, usually one individual of that species per chapter, lead the way through the story, telling how it came to be present, how it was impacted by the…um…impact, and what its descendants, if there would be any, might look like. She wants to show why the things that were obliterated came to their sad ends, but also how the things that survived managed to do so. [image] Quetzcoatlus - image from Earth Archives But as fun and enlightening as it is to track the geological and ecological carnage, like an insurance investigator, (T-Rex, sure, covered. But those ammonites? Sorry, Ms. Gaea, that one’s not specified in the contract. I am so sorry.) is only one part of what Riley Black is on about here. She wants to dispel some false ideas about how species take on what we see as environmental slots. [image] Mesodma - image from Inverse Some folks believe that there are set roles in nature, and that the extinction of one actor (probably died as a result of saying that verboten word while performing in The Scottish Play) leads inevitably to the role being filled by another creature (understudy?) As if the demise of T-Rex, for example, meant that some other seven-ton, toothy hunter would just step in. But there is no set cast of roles in nature, each just waiting for Mr, Ms, or Thing Right to step into the job. (Rehearsals are Monday through Saturday 10a to 6p. Don’t be late), pointing out that what survived was largely a matter of luck, of what each species had evolved into by the time of the big event. If the earth is on fire, for example, a small creature has a chance to find underground shelter, whereas a brontosaurus might be able to stick it’s head into the ground, but not much else, and buh-bye bronto when the mega-killer infrared pulse generated by you-know-what sped across the planet turning the Earth into the equivalent of a gigantic deep fryer and making all the exposed creatures and flora decidedly extra-crispy. [image] Thescelosaurus - image from Wiki Black keeps us focused on one particular location, Hell Creek, in Montana, with bits at the ends of every chapter commenting on things going on in other, far-away parts of the world, showing that this change was global. When the impact devastates the entire planet, it makes much less sense to think of the specific landing spot as ground zero. It makes more sense to see it as a planet-wide event, which would make the entire Earth, Planet Zero. It was not the first major planetary extinction, or even the second. But it was the most immediate, with vast numbers of species being exterminated within twenty-four hours. [image] Thoracosaurus - image from artstation.com I do not have any gripes other than wishing that I had had an illustrated copy to review. I do not know what images are in the book. I had to burrow deep underground to find the pix used here. I expect it is beyond the purview of this book, but I could see a companion volume co-written by, maybe, Ed Yong, on how the microbiomes of a select group of creatures evolved over the eons. For, even as the visible bodies of critters across the planet changed over time, so did their micro-biome. What was The Inside Story (please feel free to use that title) on how the vast array of bugs that make us all up changed over the millions of years, as species adapted to a changing macrobiome. [image] Purgatorius - image from science News I love that Riley adds bits from her own life into the discussion, telling about her childhood obsession with dinosaurs, and even telling about the extinctions of a sort in her own life. What glitters throughout the book, like bits of iridium newly uncovered at a dig, is Black’s enthusiasm. She still carries with her the glee and excitement of discovery she had as a kid when she learned about Dinosaurs for the first time. That effervescence makes this book a joy to read, as you learn more and more and more. Black is an ideal pop-science writer, both uber-qualified and experienced in her field, and possessed of a true gift for story-telling. Also, the appendix is well worth reading for all the extra intel you will gain. Black explains, chapter by chapter, where the hard science ends and where the speculation picks up. Black incorporates into her work a wonderful sense of humor. This is always a huge plus! [image] Eoconodon - image from The New York Times Pull up a rock in the Hell Creek amphitheater. Binoculars might come in handy. An escape vehicle (maybe a TVA time door?) of some sort would be quite useful. Get comfortable and take in the greatest show on Earth (sorry Ringling Brothers) There literally has never been anything quite like it, before or since. The Last Days of the Dinosaurs a joy to read, is one of the best books of the year. From the time life first originated on our planet over 3.6 billion years ago, it has never been extinguished. Think about that for a moment. Think through all those eons. The changing climates, from hothouse to snowball and back again. Continents swirled and bumped and ground into each other. The great die-offs from too much oxygen, too little oxygen, volcanoes billowing out unimaginable quantities of gas and ash, seas spilling over continents and then drying up, forests growing and dying according to ecological cycles that take millennia, meteorite and asteroid strikes, mountains rising only to be ground down and pushed up anew, oceans replacing floodplains replacing deserts replacing oceans, on and on, every day, for billions of years. And still life endures.Review posted – May 13, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - April 26, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - October 24, 2023 I received an ARE of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs from St. Martin’s Press in return for working my ancient, nearly extinct fingers to the bone to write a review that can survive. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter pages Profile from Museum of the Earth Vertebrate Paleontologist & Science WriterInterviews -----IFL Science - IFLScience Interview With Riley Black: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs - video - 15:40 – with Dr. Alfredo Carpineti - There is a particularly lovely bit at the back end of the interview in which Black talks about the inclusion in the book of a very personal element -----Fossil Friday Chats - "Sifting the Fossil Record" w/ Riley Black” - nothing to do with this book, but totally fascinating Items of Interest from the author -----WIRED - articles by the author as Brian Switek -----Scientific American - articles by the author as Brian Switek -----Riley’s site – a list of Selected Articles -----Science Friday - articles by the author -----Excerpt Items of Interest -----Earth Archives - Quetzlcoatlus by Vasika Udurawane and Julio Lacerda -----NASA - Sentry Program -----Science Friday - Mortunaria - a filter-feeding plesiosaur -----Biointeractive - The Day the Mesozoic Died: The Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs - on the science that produced our understanding of how the dinosaurs died out – video – 33:50 -----Wiki on the Hell Creek Formation -----Destiny - The First Minutes The Dinosaurs Went Extinct - about 13 minutes - video on the short term impact of the impact - pretty intense ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 25, 2022
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May 10, 2022
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Nov 22, 2021
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Hardcover
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1324001933
| 9781324001935
| 1324001933
| 3.84
| 25,620
| Sep 14, 2021
| Sep 14, 2021
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really liked it
| …I…follow along behind a small group of conservation officers heading to the lawn outside. Their leather hiking boots squeak as they walk. “So she …I…follow along behind a small group of conservation officers heading to the lawn outside. Their leather hiking boots squeak as they walk. “So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, and there’s a bear in the back seat earing popcolrn.” When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, “Ever tase an elk?”Mary Roach is up to her old tricks. A science writer now publishing her seventh book, Roach has written for many publications, including National Geographic, Wired, NY Times Magazine, and many more. She begins with a notion, then goes exploring. Roach tells Goodreads, in a book-recommendation piece, that she came across a potential story about cattle breeders staging deaths to commit insurance fraud. She even had a grand theft avocado story lined up, but the local Smokeys would not let her come along, which was a requisite. She shifted to wildlife. I paid a visit to a woman at the National Wildlife Service forensics lab who had authored a paper on how to detect counterfeit “medicinal” tiger penises. - from the GR pieceWait! What? (there is link to the study in EXTRA STUFF, of course) But again it was nogo accompanying the officers into the field. Really? Her presence would blow a National Wildlife Service raid on a market selling junk johnsons? It is pretty easy to come up with a descriptive for such unwarranted reticence. (Rhymes with sickish.) In any case, in her investigative travels, Mary came across a weird 1906 book about the prosecution and execution of animals and realized she had her hook. What if animals were the perpetrators of crimes instead of people? She breaks the book down into “criminal” categories, homicide, B&E, man-slaughter, larceny, even jaywalking, and off we go. [image] Mary Roach - image from Lapham’s Quarterly First, and foremost, I need to let you know straight away that you will be laughing out loud at least every few pages. This is not an experience I have with any other writer, and yet have had it consistently with Mary Roach, across the several books of hers that I have read. Ditto here. Well, fine, your sense of humor may not be like mine, but Mary has the key to my funny-bone. Her intro offers a stunning representation of just how stupid people have been when attempting to enforce laws on animals over the course of history. Python-worthy material, totally side-splitting, and jaw-dropping. Really, they actually did that? Yes, gentle reader, they totally did. On June 26, 1659, a representative from five towns in a province in northern Italy initiated legal proceedings against caterpillars. The local specimens, went the complaint, were trespassing and pilfering from people’s gardens and orchards. A summons was issued and five copies made and nailed to trees in forests adjacent to each town. The caterpillars were ordered to appear in court…Of course no caterpillars appeared at the appointed time, but the case went forward anyway.It goes on. Would have been tough making a charge stick anyway. They would have just blamed each other. It was that caterpillar, not me. I was nowhere near that orchard. And even if they were jailed they would have just flown out anyway. The law may be a ass, far too often, but sometimes it truly boggles the mind. As usual, Mary interviews experts in all the areas she investigates. She begins her contemporary explorations with a gathering of Canadian Conservation officers (in the USA) getting Wildlife Human Attack Response Training or WHART. They don’t, but you go right on ahead and call it what it is, CSI-Wildlife – DUUUUUM-DA-DUM! Mary brings plenty of funny to her reporting, but a lot of it is simply laying out the facts and letting them make you laugh themselves. For example, the test manikins are named for brands of beer. Good one, eh? And there is that quote at the top of the review. You will also learn some real-world intel like the significance of a round versus a more oval drop of blood at a crime scene. As usual with Mary, you will find yourself learning a whole bunch of information you never knew you wanted to know, like how to tell the difference between a bear and a cougar kill. (No, not that sort of cougar, the one with fur and claws, a mountain lion, Geez! and no, no, no, not that sort of bear, creatures of the Ursus genus, not those other large hairy beasts. Stop that right now!) She considers issues with elephants, leopards, cougars, bears, macaques, gulls, vultures and other birds, rats and mice, trees, and beans. Come again? The lines here get a bit vague. It is not just animals that are the focus but some non-critter-based elements of nature as well. Sticking with critters for the moment, there are considerable challenges in managing the interface between people and animals. For instance, the vig that farm mice seem to extract from farmers regardless of what is done to get rid of them can turn peaceable crop-growers homicidal. Mary looks at the control methods that have been tried, and explores a promising, more laid-back approach. Rats in the Vatican (which is an outstanding name for a band, just sayin’) present the challenge of managing the property while taking seriously the lead of Saint Francis of Assisi, an animal rights figure of long-standing, and a major inspiration for Pope, ya know, Francis. Mary talks to the guy in charge of this problem (I could not help but imagine Father Guido Sarducci, sorry), the Vatican Director of Gardens and Garbage, Rafael Torning. The considerable Vatican rat population has a taste for wires, and damages a lot of machinery. VG&G does what they can, trying to avoid using nasty chemicals. But even so, aren’t there ethical concerns? So, she talks with the house bioethicist, Father Carlo. Let’s just say that if you could count the number of angels on the head of a pin, Father Carlo could very nicely twist all of them into pretzels with his words. [image] A possible solution to half of the Vatican’s Gull-and-rats problem? - image from the Irish Sun The Vatican has a considerable problem with herring gulls as well, thousands of ‘em. None of this Mary Poppins Feed the Birds nonsense. The feathered rabble that descend on Saint Peter’s seem more like the gathered horde in that Hitchcock movie. You will not come away from this book fond of gulls. I found her lapsed-Catholic’s tour of the Vatican to be worth many, many indulgences, rich as it was with fun details and ambience. Chapters on elephants and leopards are particularly alarming. …when a leopard stalks and kills more than three or four people, villagers consider it a demon. - [it, clearly, considers them takeout]There was one historical case in which a single leopard killed over a hundred people. Mary travels with government and non-government people as they try to educate local populations in best practices for avoiding potential conflict. Not all leopard attacks are the same. You will learn the sorts. And not all attacking leopards are handled the same way. She looks at changes that have been at least partially implemented to try to reduce the carnage. (Indoor toilets, for example), and the challenges going forward in handling the problem, getting leopards to leave people alone. [image] Leopard - image from Wild Cats India When it comes to elephants, Mary Roach knows her shit, literally. She reports on a Smithsonian project that measured daily defecation by an Indian elephant. A poop scooper will not do. Maybe a poop plow? 400 pounds, give or take, per diem. Elephants loom large as a danger, laying waste to crops, trampling fields and bulldozing buildings. People are sometimes accidentally trampled. Sometimes it is no accident, as when one elephant did a headstand on someone. A bull elephant in an elevated period of breeding excitement, called musth, is particularly aggressive and a mortal peril. She can also tell you about the effectiveness of small arms against big pachyderms. Keep your powder dry. Most bullets do little or no damage. Even a bit of armor-piercing ordnance intended for tanks needs a follow up to get the job done. [image] Indian elephant in musth - image from Wikipedia Monkeys in India come in for a look. Macaques in particular, have made pests of themselves in urban areas, becoming aggressive thieves, to the point of violence, and even of extortion, as some will steal your phone, handing it back only when you pay the fee in food. Government officials struggle to come up with solutions, tough in a place where the monkey is a sacred animal. It is impossible to deliver directed doses of birth control without endangering other native wildlife, for example. Roach delivers a bleak portrait of official finger-pointing and inaction. [image] Street Monkeys in India – image from Outlook While reporting on the damage done to area farms and people, and the impact of wildlife in places populated with humans, Roach does point out that a lot (all) of these conflicts result from people expanding into the native territory of dangerous or potentially pestiferous, animals. I was surprised that there were parts of the book dedicated to non-creature natural perils. The material is interesting, but thematically it felt a bit off the central topic. There is much surprise information (well, for me anyway) about “danger trees,” those fully grown trees that have come to the end of their lives, at least in terms of growing. They still serve as useful woodland citizens by providing places in which creatures can nest, wood in which bugs can live, biomaterials that will be absorbed back into the woods. This is all good, but there is still one problem. The rotting tops of these gentle souls can come crashing down on passers-by, unaware of the peril. The approach that is taken, by woodland managers makes one wonder whether it is better to yell “Timber” or “Fire in the Hole!” [image] Decay throughout this tree makes it too hazardous to fell with a saw. It was felled with one bundle of fireline explosives taped to the side of the tree - image and text from the US Forest Service There is an element in this book that you should be aware of. The disposal of animals considered pests. This is of particular relevance in places where invasive species have arrived and laid waste to significant segments of the local fauna, and/or flora. Not all of these are the usual suspects, stowaway rats wiping out bird populations with their fondness for eggs, brown snakes, ditto and far too many others, often foolishly introduced by people attempting to counteract an earlier invasives problem. Some of the invaders are adorable and not on your likely list of things that MUST BE EXTERMINATED NOW. Mary looks at the techniques attempted (usually failed) and on the thought that goes into trying to make a creature’s passing as quick as possible. You might want to skip that chapter (14). Many of my daily companions are on that list and, although I did read it all, it was disquieting at times. Just lettin’ ya know. I hope this does not turn you off the book if you are otherwise interested. She does focus on ways in which people can live in coexistence with nature. This includes a greater understanding of the deer-in-the-headlights syndrome, and a workable approach for reducing roadway carnage. [image] Deer in the headlights - image from Bryans Blog I have issues with the titling of the book. The raised-patch addition to the hardcover jacket goes very nicely with the patches my wife and I picked up at many US National Parks. Mary might have called it Nature Gone Wild, but that was already taken. Naming it Fuzz, though, (maintaining the tradition of single-syllable Mary Roach book titles) does make it seem like it is about the police-type officials who are charged with coping when forces of nature interfere with people. Although there were indeed some badged officials in her stable of interviewees and guides through these fascinating worlds, she spoke as often with people who were researchers or administrators, and the stories were about the problems, not so much the law enforcers. Many may be related to parks here and there. Some were employed by wildlife services, but it just did not sit well with me. Her reporting is as much about a wider view of the issues as it is about the direct, Book-em, Danno “crimes” supposedly perpetrated on people by the furry or feathered set. So, I will not shy away from this. When it comes to actually describing what the book is about the title is decidedly fuzzy. There. I did it, and I am not sorry. Well, ok, maybe a little. Not that I can come up with anything better, just whining. That done, it is clear that wherever Mary Roach shines her light there will be surprises, there will be new knowledge, and there will be smiles, lots and lots of smiles, covered with copious quantities of laughter. Follow along behind Mary as she opens some closed doors, peeks into some hidden corners, and pesters defenseless officials to find fascinating, wondrous real-world material. Even despite that one grim chapter, I found myself reacting as I always do to a Mary Roach book, laughing out loud, often, very, very often. There is a definite joy in trailing after Mary as she shines her very bright light into unseen corners and calls back “Hey guys, come see what I found!” If you have enjoyed her books before, this one should do quite nicely. There is nothing fuzzy about that at all. Feeding animals, as we know, is the quickest path to conflict. The promise of food motivates normally human-shy animals to take a risk. The risk-taking is rewarded, and the behavior escalates. Shyness becomes fearlessness, and fearlessness becomes aggression. If you don’t hand over the food you are carrying, the monkey will grab it. If you try to hold onto it, or push the animal away…it may slap you. Or bite you. The Times of India put the number of monkey bites reported by Delhi hospitals in 2018 at 950. [When your teenager makes off with your car, just remember that it all began when they were small, and you made the mistake of offering them food] Review first posted – October 29, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - September 21, 2021 ----------Trade Paperback - August 30, 2022 I received this book from Barnes & Noble in return for cold, hard cash [image] [image] [image] ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I moved it to the Comments section directly below. But in Summer 2021, GR disallowed the use of external links in the Comments section, so I have posted the entire review, including EXTRA STUFF, on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 02, 2021
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Oct 23, 2021
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Oct 27, 2021
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Hardcover
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0593136381
| 9780593136386
| 0593136381
| 4.34
| 2,373
| Aug 17, 2021
| Aug 17, 2021
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it was amazing
| The wind slammed against the Harding-era transmission tower, ripping a heavy electrical line from its brittle iron hook. It was 6:15 A.M. The 143-p The wind slammed against the Harding-era transmission tower, ripping a heavy electrical line from its brittle iron hook. It was 6:15 A.M. The 143-pound, 115-kilovolt braided aluminum wire—known as a jumper cable—fell through the air. A piece of the rusted hook fell with it. The energized line produced a huge bolt of electricity, reaching temperatures up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and zapping the steel tower like lightning as it charred the pillar black. Droplets of molten metal sprayed into the dry grass. That’s all it took.------------------------------------ …this was how the fire spread so quickly: It wasn’t a single unbroken front but a hail of embers.Welcome to the new normal. [image] sign - may you find paradise to be all its name implies - Image from KQED In November 2018, one hundred fifty miles north of San Francisco, the town of Paradise became the epicenter of what would be called The Camp Fire. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history. (The Dixie Fire that was raging at the time this review was prepared had not yet been controlled, so we do not yet know if it was even worse.) The Camp Fire does not even make the top ten list for the most acres destroyed by fire. That dubious honor goes to the August Complex fire of 2020, which burned over a million acres. The Camp Fire destroyed only 153,336 acres. But in other metrics it leads the way. Almost 19,000 structures were destroyed. The property loss was over $10 billion, (I have seen a report indicating that the cost exceeded $16 billion) about 10 percent larger than the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the former title holder. Most importantly, the official death toll from the Camp Fire was 85, an undercount of at least fifty according to the author’s tally of wrongful death suits lodged against PG&E, and her knowledge of deaths that did not fit into the very restrictive official definition. In looking at lists of the worst wildfires ever, concentrated as it is in the last few years, and with no likelihood that conditions will improve any time soon, it is a certainty that we, as a planet, the USA as a nation, and California in particular are living in a powderkeg and giving off sparks. [image] Lizzy Johnson - Image from her site Johnson had been the fire reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle prior to the Camp Fire. (She has since moved on to the Washington Post) …this book is the product of more than five hundred interviews and nearly five years of full-time wildfire coverage. I even enrolled in a professional firefighting academy to better understand fire…It’s the product of coming to love a community that I embedded in: spending hours strolling across Paradise on my evening walks, buying ice cream sandwiches from the Holiday Market, eating more containers of green curry from Sophia’s Thai than I can count. The people whose lives I’ve chronicled in this book offered me unfettered access to their day-to-day lives without any expectations. They were not compensated for their time. - from Acknowledgments [image] Burned vehicles during Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. on Thursday, November 8, 2018 - image and text from SF Gate She even stayed with some of them. Johnson provides a wealth of detail. Not just two dimensional, or even three, but adding time into the mix to make for four. We get personal histories of people who were impacted by the fire, specifically in how they came to be there, and the history of the place from before the 1850 goldrush. This includes some history on the Native American Konkow tribe, with lore that addresses the challenges of coping with wildfire. She also looks at PG&E’s history of poor line maintenance, and the legal system’s history of failing to make them pay for their malfeasance or force them to adequately change their ways. [image] Timeline – from the National Institute for Standards and Technology As for the structure of the book, I was reminded of The Longest Day, an epic 1962 war film that told, from a variety of perspectives, the story of the D-Day invasion of Europe in World War II. By knitting the diverse experiences together we get a sense of the overall event that would have been impossible in a more linear Boy-Meets-War type narrative. Paradise is a lot like that. We jump from the desperate bus-driver to the town manager to the maintenance man at the hospital to the pilot trying to dump flame retardant on the blaze, to the people on their off-road vehicles trying to find a location in which to shelter that had no combustible foliage, to the police chief, to the town manager, to the fire chiefs, to a woman who gave birth by Caesarian section that very day, and winds up being driven around by a stranger, trying to find her husband and a way out. and on. But somehow, the book never felt disjointed. Each person is given sufficient detail. We get to know them some, not too much, but enough to care. And we track their progress over that terrible day. I found it helpful while reading to have a browser tab open to a Google map of Paradise so I could follow each person on their fraught peregrinations. Johnson tracks the progress of the fire, from its ignition by the downed power line at 6:15 am on November 8, 2018, step by step. She tracks her residents through that day to where they are now, in August 2020. [image] Fire tornado explainer - from the San Francisco Chronicle Johnson’s focus is on the personal. There is a reason for that. Early in her fire reporting, Johnson noticed that many fire stories—hers included—sounded similar; they often relied on the same beats, the same kinds of quotes, the same tropes. (A woman who left her wedding ring at home, for example, only for it to burn.) Johnson began to wonder if disaster fatigue happened when stories felt predictable. So she changed her approach to make the fire secondary, a “supporting character” in a more surprising and nuanced human story—and readers paid attention. Too often, she said, coverage tries to hit people over the head with a “climate change caused this” moral. “I’m now thinking more like, What does climate change feel like? If we changed the model, maybe people will listen more, and we can do more work with our storytelling. - from the Columbia Journalism Review interviewOne can only hope. [image] The Camp Fire burns in the hills on November 10, 2018 near Big Bend, California. Fueled by high winds and low humidity the Camp Fire ripped through the town of Paradise - image from SF Gate Simple human error accounts for some of the carnage. A public emergency warning system failed to reach half the residents because it had never been tested locally, and a systems flaw had not been detected. And our old bugaboo of inadequate communication and coordination among the responsible emergency authorities was not helpful. In the larger context, it is the myopic focus on immediate financial or political motives that has created much of this problem. For example, a Code Red system for alerting people of an emergency is privately owned, requiring people to subscribe. Only 11% did. [image] from the Camp Fire - image from Cal Fire Maybe, after a four-lane road had been paved on the western edge of town several years before, cutting two lanes from the Skyway, providing extra parking for downtown businesses and removing the “expressway” feel of the road, ignoring pleas that this would be a deadly choice the next time a major fire hit, might, just might have been an incredibly bad, short-term decision with deadly long-term consequences. Someone in Paradise should be nominated for the Larry Vaughn Award for exceptional short-sightedness in the face of mortal peril. [image] NASA shot of the fire The experience of reading this book was unlike that of anything else I have read in recent memory. The closest I can think of is Five Days at Memorial, several years back. How quickly, how easily our civilization can be overwhelmed, our safety completely compromised. [image] Evacuating the hospital - image from The Daily Mail There were moments when I had to step away from reading, and just breathe, because the specifics of the fire were so upsetting. The stories Johnson tells are heart-wrenching, and often horrifying. It was like reading a real-life end-times, zombie-apocalypse novel. Someone hiding from the flames under a vehicle, pokes a hole in a tire just to get breathable air. After a victim of the fire is lifted from a flat surface, a layer of molten flesh remained. Just writing these words brings a sob. [image] A Cal Fire pilot maneuver's an S2-T tanker to make a drop on the Walbridge fire at sunset near Healdsburg, Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020. - Image from the Press Democrat – photo credit Kent Porter – What it would have looked like had planes not been called back due to 70 mph winds and horrific down and updrafts Another part of the experience was learning new things, many of them dire, like the fact that trees were becoming so hot that the water and sap inside them heated to a point where they basically exploded. Things like the temperature becoming so high that metallic elements in the ground solidified into shards, and propane tanks became missiles and major sources of shrapnel. AT&T’s landlines melted. Internet service cut out as communications hardware on towers was destroyed. Things like the underground pipes carrying the town’s water becoming so hot that they melted, leaching carcinogenic materials into the water supply. (Repair/replace cost $50 million.) Things like the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from this one fire matched the output of the entire state’s factories and traffic in a week. Things like the incineration of so many structures created clouds of toxic sub-2.5 micron particles that lodge in the lungs of any breathing thing. There are plenty more things to be learned here, not all of them quite so extreme. But all of them worth knowing. She looks at the topography, and how that impacts wind currents, the changes in the local flora, the psychology of disaster response. The scientific explanations in the book were clear and informative [image] Firefighter Jose Corona monitors a burning home as the Camp Fire burns - image and text from SF Gate It is easy to engage with the folks Johnson profiles, and root for them to survive. It helps that we can presume that all of the primary actors here make it out, else Johnson would not have been able to interview them, and we would not be reading their stories. But she succeeds in showing us what global warming means on the ground, to actual human beings, over 125 of whom are no longer with us, and many of whom have been scarred, physically and or emotionally, for life. [image] shot from the fire – image from The Daily Mail There is very little mention of political party here. Local representation is heavily Republican. Everyone burns at the same temperature, but maybe voting for the party of climate change denial while living in a tinderbox might be seen as somehow ironic, if not feckless and arrogant. Trump popped by for a photo op and a chance to blame Californians for the fire, claiming that they should have been raking out the leaves in the woods. (The largest wildland property owner in California is the federal government, by the way. The state is in charge of about 3% of it.) The town voted for him in 2016, but by 2020 had seen quite enough orange light and switched, at least at the presidential level. [image] Sheriffs yell to drivers to evacuate the area off of Pentz Road during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018 - image and text from SF Gate As this book and countless other reports make clear, we have a wildfire problem. Serious research into the causes, both global and local, has been done. More is ongoing, and there will, for sure, be more ahead. Even more than has already been done, public policies will have to be crafted to encourage, and where possible, mandate best practices, and enforce restrictions on private and public use of land in the wildland-urban interface. There are many facets to this, from power line protection, roadway construction, widening, or even closing, development requirements, such as mandating fire-safe materials for new construction, and supporting retrofitting older buildings. Communications among first responders has been improved, but much remains to be done. Total deregulation, allowing property owners to do whatever they want with their property can very concretely endanger the property and lives of all those around them. We have an obligation to each other to not be totally indifferent about the safety of our communities and neighbors. Common sense regulation should be implemented. In the wider view, gaining new knowledge of areas that are likely to burn should inform policy on where new development is allowed at all, where further development should be halted, and where rebuilding burned areas is ill-advised. ( Between 1970 and 1999, 94 percent of the roughly three thousand houses destroyed by wildfires in California had been rebuilt in the same spot—and often burned down a second or third time.) Your freedom to do whatever the frack you want ends where my charred skin begins. Insurance companies, with the most to lose financially, have already made getting fire insurance tougher, if it is available at all, in fire-prone communities. [image] Cars escape the Camp Fire as they drive south on Pentz Road in Paradise, California, on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018 - image and text from SF Gate I love this book. It is among my favorites for the year. I have much praise to offer and very few gripes. While I understand that the author’s intent was to make global warming on-the-street real, and appreciate that she has succeeded in doing just that, I would have liked a bit more on the long-term medical impact of wildfires, and the politics of the local public officials, particularly their views on global warming. [image] A bulldozer dislodged abandoned vehicles from a blocked roadway after the fire. The scene suggests that a burnover, a dangerous event where fire cuts evacuees off from escape routes, took place. There were at least 19 over the course of the fire. – image and text from National Institute for Standards and Technology Trade paperback - August 16, 2022 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. As of August 2021, GR will no longer allow external links in comments, so, if you want to see the entire review in one place please head on over to my site, Coot's Reviews. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 02, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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Aug 02, 2021
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Hardcover
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1250783712
| 9781250783714
| 1250783712
| 3.56
| 392
| Aug 26, 2021
| Aug 31, 2021
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it was amazing
| We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switch We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.-------------------------------------- All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.Up for a bit of time travel? No, no, no, not in the sci-fi sense of physically transporting to another era. But in the mostly imaginary sense of picturing oneself in a prior age. Well, maybe more than just picturing, maybe picturing with the addition of some visceral experience. Charles Foster has written about what life is like for otters, badgers, foxes, deer and swifts, by living like them for a time. He wrote about those experiences in his book, Being a Beast. He wonders, here, how experiencing life as a Paleolithic and a Neolithic person can inform our current understanding of ourselves. I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans. [image] Charles Foster - image from Oxford University His journey begins with (and he spends the largest portion of the book on) the Upper Paleolithic (U-P) era, aka the Late Stone Age, from 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, when we became, behaviorally, modern humans. Foster is quite a fan of the period, seeing it as some sort of romantic heyday for humanity, one in which we were more fully attuned with the environments in which we lived, able to use our senses to their capacity, instead of getting by with the vastly circumscribed functionality we have today. Interested in the birth of human consciousness, he puts himself, and his 12 yo son, Tom, not only into the mindset of late Paleolithic humans, but into their lives. He and Tom live wild in Derbyshire, doing their best to ignore the sounds of passing traffic, while living on roadkill (well, I guess they do not entirely ignore traffic) and the bounty of the woods. They deal with hunger, the need for shelter, and work on becoming attuned to their new old world. We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.In one stretch Foster fasts for eight days, which helps bring on a hallucinatory state (intentionally). Shamanism is a major cultural element in the U-P portrait he paints. It is clearly not his first trip. He recalls an out-of-body experience he had while in hospital, the sort where one is looking down from the ceiling at one’s physical body, seeing this as of a cloth with a broader capacity for human experience. He relates this also to the cave paintings of the era, seeing them, possibly, as the end-product of shamanic tripping. This section of the book transported me back to the 1960s and the probably apocryphal books of Carlos Castaneda. Social grooming was important to ancestors of our species. But, with our enlarged brains able to handle, maybe, a community of 150 people, grooming became too cost-intensive. To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.It sure gives the expression rubbed me the wrong way some added heft. He has theories about religion, communication, and social organization that permeate this exploration. He posits, for example, that late Paleo man was able to communicate with a language unlike our own, a more full-body form of expression, maybe some long-lost form of charades. There is an ancient language, thought to have been used by Neanderthals, called HMMM, or holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and memetic communication. It is likely that some of this carried forward. And makes one wonder just how far back the roots go to contemporary languages that incorporate more rather than less musicality, more rather than less tonality, and more rather than less bodily support for spoken words. He writes about a time when everything, not just people, were seen as having a soul, some inner self that exists separately, although living within a body, a tree, a hare, a blade of grass. This sort of worldview makes it a lot tougher to hunt for reasons that did not involve survival. And makes understandable rituals in many cultures in which forgiveness is begged when an animal is killed. This becomes much more of a thing when one feels in tune with one’s surroundings, an experience Foster reports as being quite real in his Derbyshire adventure. This tells him that Paleo man was better able to sense, to be aware of his surroundings than almost any modern human can. Foster has a go at the Neolithic as well, trying to see what the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture was like, and offers consideration of the longer-term impacts on humanity that emanated from that change. This is much less involved and involving, but does include some very interesting observations on how agriculture revolutionized the relationship people had with their environment. …the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.He notes that even when farming took root, many of those newly minted farmers continued living as hunter-gatherers for part of the year. He finishes up with a glance at the contemporary. More of a screed really. He notes that phonetic writing severed the connection our languages have with the reality they seek to portray. Pre-phonetic languages tend to be more onomatopoeic, the sounds more closely reflecting the underlying reality. He sees our modern brains as functioning mostly as valves, channeling all available sensation through a narrow pipeline, while leaving behind an entire world of possible human experience that we are no longer equipped to handle. To that extent we all have super-powers, of potential awareness, anyway, that lie waiting for someone to open the right valve, presuming they have not been corroded into inutility by disuse. He tells of meeting a French woman in Thailand whose near-death experience left her passively able to disrupt electronic mechanisms. She could not, for example, use ATMs. They would always malfunction around her. He takes a run at what is usually seen to indicate “modern” humanity. I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.He argues that trackers, for example, can abstract from natural clues the stories behind them, and those existed long before so-called “modern man.” He calls in outside authorities from time to time to fill in gaps. These extra bits always add fascinating pieces of information. For example, Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.Foster is that most common of writers, a veterinarian and a lawyer. Wait, what? Sadly, there is no telling in here (it is present in his Wiki page, though) of how he managed to train for these seemingly unrelated careers. (I can certainly envision a scenario, though, in which we hear lawyer Foster proclaiming to the court, “My client could not possibly be guilty of this crime, your honor. The forensic evidence at the scene clearly shows that the act was committed by an American badger, while my client, as anyone can see, is a Eurasian badger.”) It certainly seems clear, though, from his diatribes against modernity, where his heart is. In the visceral, physical work of dealing with animals, which lends itself to the intellectual stimulation of a truer, and deeper connection with nature. The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.In that case, I am far more useful in the world than I ever dreamed. GRIPES Foster can be off-putting, particularly to those us with no love of hunting, opening as he does with I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. (Well, as least it wasn’t haggis.) I can well imagine many readers slamming the book shut at that point and moving on to something else. Will this be a paean to a manly killing impulse? Thankfully, not really, although there are some uncomfortable moments re the hunting of living creatures. Sometimes he puts things out that are at the very least questionable, and at the worst, silly. Our intuition is older, wiser and more reliable than our underused, atrophied senses. Really? Based on what data? So, making decisions by feelz alone is the way to go? Maybe I should swap my accountant for an inveterate gambler? He sometimes betrays an unconscious unkindness in the cloak of humor: The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.I doubt it. One stylistic element that permeates is seeing an imaginary Paleo man, X, and his son. Supposedly these might be Foster and Tom in an earlier era. It has some artistic appeal, but I did not think it added much overall. All that said, the overall take here is that this is high-octane fuel for the brain, however valved-up ours may be. Foster raises many incredibly fascinating subjects from the origins of religion, language, our native capabilities to how global revolutions have molded us into the homo sap of the 21st century. This is a stunning wakeup call for any minds that might have drifted off into the intellectual somnolence of contemporary life. There are simply so many ideas bouncing off the walls in this book that one might fear that they could reach a critical mass and do some damage. It is worth the risk. If you care at all about understanding humanity, our place in the world, and how we got here, skipping Being a Human would be…well…inhuman. It is an absolute must-read. We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites. Review posted – 9/17/21 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 8/31/21 ----------Trade paperback - 8/9/22 This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! I received an ARE of Being a Human from Metropolitan Books in return for a modern era review. Thanks, Maia. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages By my count this is Foster’s 39th book Foster’s bio on Wiki Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'Interviews -----The Guardian - Going underground: meet the man who lived as an animal - re Being a Beast by Simon Hattenston -----New Books Network - Defined by Relationship by Howard Burton – audio - 1h 30m Items of Interest from the author -----Emergence Magazine - Against Nature Writing - on language as a barrier to understanding -----Shortform - Charles Foster's Top Book Recommendations Items of Interest -----Wiki on Bear Grylls - a British adventurer – mentioned in Part 1 as an example of someone more interested in the technology of survival than the point of it (p 62 in my ARE) -----Wiki on Yggdrasil - mentioned in Part 1 – humorously (p 85) -----Wiki on the Upper Paleolithic -----Dartmouth Department of Music – a review of a book positing that Neanderthals used musicality in their communications Review Feature - The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen - Foster addresses this in this discussion of the origins of human language -----Wiki on Carlos Castaneda -----Discover Magazine - Paleomythic: How People Really Lived During the Stone Age By Marlene Zuk Like it says – an interesting read ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 16, 2021
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Sep 13, 2021
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Jun 30, 2021
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Hardcover
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1524742678
| 9781524742676
| 1524742678
| 4.27
| 2,393
| unknown
| Mar 16, 2021
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really liked it
| [In 2016] Ed Boyton, a Princeton University professor who specialized in nascent technologies for sending information between machines and the huma [In 2016] Ed Boyton, a Princeton University professor who specialized in nascent technologies for sending information between machines and the human brain…told [a] private audience that scientists were approaching the point where they could create a complete map of the brain and then simulate it with a machine. The question was whether the machine, in addition to acting like a human, would actually feel what it was like to be human. This, they said, was the same question explored in Westworld.AI, Artificial Intelligence, is a source of active concern in our culture. Tales abound in film, television, and written fiction about the potential for machines to exceed human capacities for learning, and ultimately gain self-awareness, which will lead to them enslaving humanity, or worse. There are hopes for AI as well. Language recognition is one area where there has been growth. However much we may roll our eyes at Siri or Alexa’s inability to, first, hear, the words we say properly, then interpret them accurately, it is worth bearing in mind that Siri was released a scant ten years ago, in 2011, Alexa following in 2014. We may not be there yet, but self-driving vehicles are another AI product that will change our lives. It can be unclear where AI begins and the use of advanced algorithms end in the handling of our on-line searching, and in how those with the means use AI to market endless products to us. [image] Cade Metz – image from Wired So what is AI? Where did it come from? What stage of development is it currently at and where might it take us? Cade Metz, late of Wired Magazine and currently a tech reporter with the New York Times, was interested in tracking the history of AI. There are two sides to the story of any scientific advance, the human and the technological. No chicken and egg problem to be resolved here, the people came first. In telling the tales of those, Metz focuses on the brightest lights in the history of AI development, tracking their progress from the 1950s to the present, leading us through the steps, and some mis-steps, that have brought us to where we are today, from a seminal conference in the late 1950s to Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron in 1958, from the Boltzmann Machine to the development of the first neural network, SNARC, cadged together from remnant parts of old B-24s by Marvin Minsky, from the AI winter of governmental disinvestment that began in 1971 to its resumption in the 1980s, from training machines to beat the most skilled humans at chess, and then Go, to training them to recognize faces, from gestating in universities to being hooked up to steroidal sources of computing power at the world’s largest corporations, from early attempts to mimic the operations of the human brain to shifting to the more achievable task of pattern recognition, from ignoring social elements to beginning to see how bias can flow through people into technology, from shunning military uses to allowing, if not entirely embracing them. [image] This is one of 40 artificial neurons used in Marvin Minsky’s SPARC machine - image from The Scientist Metz certainly has had a ringside seat for this, drawing from hundreds of interviews he conducted with the players in his reportorial day jobs, eight years at Wired and another two at the NY Times. He conducted another hundred or so interviews just for the book. Some personalities shine through. We meet Geoffrey Hinton in the prologue, as he auctions his services (and the services of his two assistants) off to the highest corporate bidder, the ultimate figure a bit startling. Hinton is the central figure in this AI history, a Zelig-like-character who seems to pop up every time there is an advance in the technology. He is an interesting, complicated fellow, not just a leader in his field, but a creator of it and a mentor to many of the brightest minds who followed. It must have helped his recruiting that he had an actual sense of humor. He faced more than his share of challenges, suffering a back condition that made it virtually impossible for him to sit. Makes those cross country and trans-oceanic trips by train and plane just a wee bit of a problem. He suffered in other ways as well, losing two wives to cancer, providing a vast incentive for him to look at AI and neural networking as tools to help develop early diagnostic measures for diverse medical maladies. [image] Marvin Minsky in a lab at M.I.T. in 1968.Credit...M.I.T. - image and caption from NY Times Where there are big ideas there are big egos, and sometimes an absence of decency. At a 1966 conference, when a researcher presented a report that did not sit well with Marvin Minsky, he interrupted the proceedings from the floor at considerable personal volume. “How can an intelligent young man like you,” he asked, “waste your time with something like this?”This was not out of character for the guy, who enjoyed provoking controversy, and, clearly, pissing people off. He single-handedly short-circuited a promising direction in AI research with his strident opposition. [image] Skynet’s Employee of the month One of the developmental areas on which Metz focuses is deep learning, namely, feeding vast amounts of data to neural networks that are programmed to analyze the incomings for commonalities, in order to then be able to recognize unfamiliar material. For instance, examine hundreds of thousands of images of ducks and the system is pretty likely to be able to recognize a duck when it sees one. Frankly, it does not seem all that deep, but it is broad. Feeding a neural net vast quantities of data in order to train it to recognize particular things is the basis for a lot of facial recognition software in use today. Of course, the data being fed into the system reflects the biases of those doing the feeding. Say, for instance, that you are looking to identify faces, and most of the images that have been fed in are of white people, particularly white men. In 2015, when Google’s foto recognition app misidentified a black person as a gorilla, Google’s response was not to re-work its system ASAP, but to remove the word “gorilla” from its AI system. So, GIGO rules, fed by low representation by women and non-white techies. Metz addresses the existence of such inherent bias in the field, flowing from tech people in the data they use to feed neural net learning, but it is not a major focus of the book. He addresses it more directly in interviews. [image] Frank Rosenblatt and his Perceptron - image from Cornell University On the other hand, by feeding systems vast amounts of information, it may be possible, for example, to recognize early indicators of public health or environmental problems that narrower examination of data would never unearth, and might even be able to give individuals a heads up that something might merit looking into. He gives a lot of coverage to the bouncings back and forth of this, that, and the other head honcho researcher from institution to institution, looking at why such changes were made. A few of these are of interest, like why Hinton crossed the Atlantic to work, or why he moved from the states to Canada, and then stayed where he was based once he settled, regardless of employer. But a lot of the personnel movement was there to illustrate how strongly individual corporations were committed to AI development. This sometimes leads to odd, but revealing, images, like researchers having been recruited by a major company, and finding when they get there that the equipment they were expected to use was laughably inadequate to the project they were working on. When researchers realized that running neural networks would require vast numbers of Graphics Processing Units, GPUs (comparable to the Central Processing Units (CPUs) that are at the heart of every computer, but dedicated to a narrower range of activities) some companies dove right in while others balked. This is the trench warfare that I found most interesting, the specific command decisions that led to or impeded progress. [image] Rehoboam – the quantum supercomputer at the core of WestWorld - Image from The Sun There are a lot of names in The Genius Makers. I would imagine that Metz and his editors pared quite a few out, but it can still be a bit daunting at times, trying to figure out which ones merit retaining, unless you already know that there is a manageable number of these folks. It can slow down reading. It would have been useful for Dutton to have provided a graphic of some sort, a timeline indicating this idea began here, that idea began then, and so on. It is indeed possible that such a welcome add-on is present in the final hardcover book. I was working from an e-ARE. Sometimes the jargon was just a bit too much. Overall, the book is definitely accessible for the general, non-technical, reader, if you are willing to skip over a phrase and a name here and there, or enjoy, as I do, looking up EVERYTHING. The stories Metz tells of these pioneers, and their struggles are worth the price of admission, but you will also learn a bit about artificial intelligence (whatever that is) and the academic and corporate environments in which AI existed in the past, and is pursued today. You will not get a quick insight into what AI really is or how it works, but you will learn how what we call AI today began and evolved, and get a taste of how neural networking consumes vast volumes of data in a quest to amass enough knowledge to make AI at least somewhat…um…knowledgeable. Intelligence is a whole other thing, one of the dreams that has eluded developers and concerned the public. It is one of the ways in which AI has always been bedeviled by the curse of unrealistic expectations. [image] (left to right) Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio - Image from Eyerys Metz is a veteran reporter, so knows how to tell stories. It shows in his glee at telling us about this or that event. He includes a touch of humor here and there, a lightly sprinkled spice. Nothing that will make you shoot your coffee out your nose, but enough to make you smile. Here is an example. …a colleague introduced [Geoff Hinton] at an academic conference as someone who had failed at physics, dropped out of psychology, and then joined a field with no standards at all: artificial intelligence. It was a story Hinton enjoyed repeating, with a caveat. “I didn’t fail at physics and drop out of psychology,” he would say. “I failed at psychology and dropped out of physics—which is far more reputable.”The Genius Makers is a very readable bit of science history, aimed at a broad public, not the techie crowd, who would surely be demanding a lot more detail in the theoretical and implementation ends of decision-making and the construction of hardware and software. It will give you a clue as to what is going on in the AI world, and maybe open your mind a bit to what possibilities and perils we can all look forward to. There are many elements involved in AI. But the one (promoted by Elon Musk) we tend to be most concerned about is that it will develop, frighteningly portrayed in many sci-fi films and TV series, as a dark, all-powerful entity driven to subjugate weak humans. This is called AGI, for Artificial General Intelligence and is something that we do not know how to achieve. Bottom line for that is pass the popcorn and enjoy the show. Skynet may take over in one fictional future, but it ain’t gonna happen in our real one any time soon. Review posted – April 16, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - March 16, 2021 ----------Trade Paperback - February 15, 2022 I received an e-book ARE from Dutton in return for…I’m gonna need a lot more data before I can answer that accurately. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews, all in one piece. Stop by and say Hi! ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 16, 2021
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Apr 03, 2021
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Apr 13, 2021
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Hardcover
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1640093672
| 9781640093676
| 1640093672
| 4.32
| 208
| Feb 16, 2021
| Feb 16, 2021
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it was amazing
| Except during the lockdown to slow the COVID-19 virus, cities drown us in sound. Buses grind gears, trucks beep, and street-corner preachers call d Except during the lockdown to slow the COVID-19 virus, cities drown us in sound. Buses grind gears, trucks beep, and street-corner preachers call down damnation on it all—what does this do to the human being, whose ears evolved as a warning system? In daylight, our eyes can warn us of danger in front of us. But our ears alert us to opportunity and danger twenty-four hours a day, from every direction, even through dense vegetation and total darkness.It’s quiet, too quiet. And it’s getting quieter. There is a soundscape, a world of vibrations, wherever we are. I started reading this collection in a laundromat, pen and notebook at the ready. The wall-mounted TV blares The Goldbergs, an upgrade from the unspeakable Judge Judy, but still, noise that attempts to pierce my concentration, vying for attention. I sit on a bench at a table just inside a set of long, tall windows. A soft drink vending machine hums a steady note. Washing machines and dryers rumble. The irregular shmoosh-shmoosh of traffic passing on a wet street is muted by the window, higher tones intercepted by the glass. The only natural sound is a man with an operatic voice eager to engage on the subject of marriage as he folds newly-dry clothing on a table. While the urban orchestra may be largely comprised of mechanical instruments, it is not entirely so. The occasional dramatic crack and bang of nearby lightning are giant cymbals and following kettle drum, fading to a flutter-tongue trombone. [image] Kathleen Dean Moore - image from her site The sounds of nature we experience most are weather-related. The howl of a gale, the whistle of a sustained wind as it slips past constructed edges, the susurrus of wind-shuddered trees, the plik-plik-plik of hail, the long shushing notes of rain. The screech and hiss of cats fighting offers the sudden blare of a coronet and soft mallets on a high-hat. Aside from that, we do not hear mammals beyond, for the most part, neighborhood canines who make their presence felt when mail or packages are delivered or when someone approaches too close to their no-walk zone. I seriously doubt you have heard much from our fellow urbanites of the rodent family. Ground hogs save their conversation for underground, raccoons chitter on occasion when deciding among themselves which garbage can is most accessible. Roaches, ants, bedbugs and termites being notoriously quiet, the buzz of crickets and cicadas is the likeliest insectile sound we will experience, depending on whether you live in close proximity to a hive of bees, yellow-jackets, or hornets. And, of course, the occasional pestiferousness of a horsefly, or mosquitoes. Depends what part of the world you inhabit, of course. [image] Gulls on Anacapa Avian life probably offers the most sound from creatures in our natural aural canvas, the pik-o-wee of a red-winged blackbird, towee-oh-towee-ooh-towee-oh of a robin the hee-ah, hee-ah of the blue jay, the caws of covids, and gurgle of pigeons as they strut on an adjacent rooftop out of reach but within lunging distance of murderous pet felines safely contained behind windows, the rustle of feathers as a startled mourning dove launches. It is the sounds of avian life that receives the most coverage here. [image] Great Blue in the Everglades All this competes with the incessant onslaught of the television, 24/7, or so it seems, spewing news and noise into the world. City traffic also offers ongoing background noise. In my neighborhood there is the added joy of numberless hordes eager to blast car stereos at teeth-shattering volumes, as they pick up pizza next door. And there’s the hair place across the street that has proven resistant to civil pleas to lower the volume on the music they blast onto the sidewalk in hopes of attracting, I am guessing, the hearing-impaired. Silence is a rare event, and is unnerving because of that infrequency. [image] Frigate Bird in the Dry Tortugas I was living in Brooklyn when 911 happened. The sirens were ever-present, well, more ever-present than usual, masking the sudden absence of all air and most street traffic. Any city resident could tell from auditory clues alone that something very bad had happened. The soundscape changed, more than the hush created by a large snow. There was a different quality to it all, and it was unnerving, as if the quiet was in anticipation of another disaster. That was a sudden shift, and thus noticeable. The shift Kathleen Dean Moore writes of is a very different sort, more like the apocryphal frog in a pot of boiling water, which does not notice the gradual increase in heat until it is too late. [image] Great Egret in Everglades It is necessary to leave the larger cities (unless, of course, yours features sufficient acreage to allow one true aural relief from the urban) to have a chance at a more natural chamber orchestra. The sound of waves at oceanside, of burbling streams in the woods, or rushing rivers before they become major thoroughfares. In the absence of prowling predators, there is usually no such thing as woodland silence. Particularly at night the airwaves are alive with diverse calls and responses, come-ons and threats, warnings and conversations. But the rich chorus of the unpeopled world is being silenced, as member after member of that grand orchestra has been removed from their seat. Vivaldi incorporated the sounds of wildlife into his masterpiece, The Four Seasons. Let’s hope that critter-mimicking played-instruments or recordings are not all we have left of the sonic scape of the world of wildlife. [image] Green Heron in the Everglades It is, of course, not just creatures that Moore writes of. There are plenty of other sounds she celebrates, the song of dripping water in a luminous cave, the calming sounds of a singing mother soothing a squalling infant, the roar of the surf, the music of wind playing over cacti spines like a bow over strings, and plenty more. While a wide range of auditory experience is noted in this book, the largest representative of sounds that may be lost is the songs of birds. [image] Anhinga in a tree - Everglades I am no one’s idea of an outdoorsman, thus my very urban point-of-reference noted above. But neither have I been locked in a box. National Parks hold a magnetic attraction and I have been fortunate enough to have visited a bunch. Moore’s effervescent tale of a pika sitting on her son’s shoe while somewhere above the treeline, and squeaking out a warning when Moore happened to move about in the family camp downhill from her progeny reminded me of having seen a pika sitting atop a rock in Glacier National Park, and issuing the same squeak. There is an excellent chance that a few of the critters she mentions here might be found in whatever part of the states you live in, or similar creatures in places outside the states. That occasional direct connection adds to the enjoyment of reading about experiences she has shared with us. [image] Tri-colored Heron – Everglades In Earth’s Wild Music, Kathleen Dean Moore, has produced a cri du couer about the anthropo-screwing of our planet. She notes, in particular, the auditory element of our world, our experience of it, and the diminution of the actual evironment of sound on our planet as species go extinct. [image] Juvenile White Ibis – Everglades It is a book rich not only with a blaring call for recognition of what is taking place, for concern and action, but with notes of information, many of which will make you say to yourself, “Huh, I never knew that,” whether silently or aloud. The calls of shorebirds, which evolved at the edge of the sea, have high frequencies, audible over the low rumble of surf. In the forest, birds have low-frequency voices because the long wavelength of the low tones are not as quickly scattered or absorbed by the tangle of leaves and moss.or The true gifts of the saguaro are the stiff spines set in clusters on the pleats of their trunks. When the wind blows across the spines, they sing like violin strings. Better yet, when you pluck a spine, it will sing its particular tone. If a person is patient in her plucking she can play music on a saguaro cactus.It was a jaw-dropping read for me, not just for the content, but for the gift of poetic description that Moore brings to her mission. I experienced the same piercing joy in reading this book that is usually reserved for books by Ron Rash or Louise Erdrich. The gifts of nature tell us there is a persistence to life that no measure of insolence or greed can destroy…the natural world holds us tight in its arms—calm as we tremble, patient as we mark the days “until this is over,” strong as we weaken. When the time comes, the natural world will embrace us as we die. It will never leave us. If we are lonely, Nature strokes our hair with light winds. If, frightened in the night, we wander outside to sit on a bench in the moonlight, it will come and sit beside us. If we are immobilized, having lost faith in the reliability of everything, still the Earth will carry us around the sun. If we feel abandoned, the Earth sings without ceasing—beautiful love songs in the voices of swallows and storms. This sheltering love calms me and makes me glad.Moore has been at this for some time. This is her eleventh book, continuing her lifelong dedication to writing about the moral imperative for protecting the only planet we have. I am two things, a philosophy professor and a natural history writer. They speak to the same thing, I think, which is developing a responsible relationship with a place, so that you can openly learn about it and it can openly inform you and you feel this moral urgency in protecting it. - from the NHI interviewIt is not so much that this book should be read slowly, it MUST be read slowly, sips, not gulps, savoring the stunning beauty of her words, the appreciation of, the wonder at our world, the sorrow at what has already faded. It reads like a novel that does not link scenes through action, but through theme. Yet those scenes can be compelling. There are 32 essays. In a chapter set in Washington state, flooding had loosened the grip on the earth of a stand of huge cedars, sufficient so that biblical winds could push them over, into each other, causing a cascade of tree onto trailers, stoving them to ruin, across roads, requiring the liberal use of chainsaws to clear passage, with the residents holed up in a local tavern hoping for surcease like a science fiction town hoping for the best against an invading zombie army. In another, she comes face to face with a cougar in a cow field. There is the song of water dripping in a luminous, unsuspected cavern, more like glass than stone. [image] Pelicans – Everglades ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] I also cross-posted the entire, un-broken-up, review to my site, Coot's Reviews. Stop on by and make some noise [image] [image] [image] [image] Re-posted February 18, 2022 for release of the trade paperback - February 22, 2022 ...more |
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Feb 11, 2021
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Mar 07, 2021
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Mar 09, 2021
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Hardcover
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0593182715
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| 0593182715
| 3.94
| 2,035
| Mar 09, 2021
| Mar 09, 2021
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really liked it
| …the question of what it means to be alive has flowed through four centuries of scientific history like an underground river… More than 150 years l …the question of what it means to be alive has flowed through four centuries of scientific history like an underground river… More than 150 years later, despite all that biologists have learned about living things, they still cannot agree on the definition of life.I have had the pleasure of driving up a mountain through mist and cloud, and of walking in London through pea soup fog. Where exactly did the clear air end and the more particulate air begin? It is not entirely…um…clear. Sure, there is a difference between standing, or driving in air that one cannot visually penetrate and looking through a wide outdoor expanse on a cloud-free, crystalline winter day. But it is not a barrier drawn with a straight edge. Thus it appears with the line between living and not-living. With the examples detailed in Life’s Edge, it is clearer than ever that there are more things under heaven and earth than had been dreamed of in our philosophies. There are those, certainly, who proclaim that this or that specific location is where the thing called life begins. Rules have been drawn up to plant markers, to draw lines. But like an outdoor crime-scene police-tape, the fog of what lies within and without wanders freely past those lines, with no regard for the designs or preferences of humans. [image] Carl Zimmer - image from The Psychology Podcast New York Times science columnist and multiple-award-winning science-writer Carl Zimmer’s fourteenth book takes readers on an exploration to that amorphous borderland between the living and the non-living. It is a journey that raises a lot more questions than it answers. Zimmer employs a tried and true approach, each chapter moving on to the next lab, the next researcher, the next wild bit of research, and filling in with nice chunks of science history, as he circles around the question. [image] Alysson Muotri – image from The Stem Cell Podcast Many of the things Zimmer reports on are fascinating. Some, however, will disturb your sleep. For an example of the latter, Alysson Muotri, at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, takes skin samples and reprograms them into neurons to study neurological diseases and possible treatments. They are grown into miniature organs called organoids, and are allowed to reproduce, up to a point. When he started growing these things, he assumed that they could never become conscious. “Now I’m not so sure, he confessed.” Zimmer tells, also, of a researcher, a very long time ago, who was notorious for experimenting on living animals. [image] Cerebral organoid - image from European Research Council Clearly a significant concern for our culture is where “life” begins, and further, where “human life” begins. It all comes down to definitions. Is Thomas Aquinas’s notion of the “ensoulment” of human embryos the same as defining when life becomes human life? There have been other notions employed in the history of Christianity. Zimmer looks at how legal definitions of life, for purposes including supporting abortion laws, and concerning a widening spectrum of medical and legal issues, fail to hold up under scientific scrutiny. [image] ”It’s Alive!” (or is it?) – from Frankenstein – image from Buzzfeed The concern here is not just what is life, but how can we tell when something actually is alive? He looks at how humans perceive life and react to it. We have a sense of life being present or absent, an intuition that is not unique to our species. Ravens hold what can only be seen as funerals for dead flock members. Chimps engage in group laments for late members, as do many other creatures. To be alive is to not be dead…Humanity did not come to this realization through logic and deduction. Our understanding of death is not like Darwin’s theory of evolution or Thompson’s discovery of the electron. It has its origins in ancient intuitions.Zimmer looks at metabolic rate. In the 17th century, there was a widespread fear of being afflicted with a death-like state that might leave its victims without detectable breath or heartbeat, thus generating a rampant terror of being buried alive. This concern inspired a well-known short story. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. - Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature BurialZimmer reports on a woman who was pronounced dead, twice. (third time's the charm?) Where is the line between brain death and true, no backsies, total death? Can a person meet the criteria for brain death one day, and later not meet it? [image] From The Night of the Living Dead - image from Wikipedia But what constitutes life? How about adding some ingredients to agar, leaving it alone for a few hours and then finding a thriving slime mold, one with remarkable survival skills. What about spores, some of which can survive in space? Are spores alive? Or only potentially alive, or an ingredient in a recipe for making life? Scientists have been arguing over whether viruses are alive for about a century, ever since the pathogens came to light. Writing last month in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, two microbiologists (Hugh Harris and Colin Hill) at University College Cork took stock of the debate. They could see no end to it. “The scientific community will never fully agree on the living nature of viruses,” they declared. - from Zimmer’s Secret Life piece in the NY Times [image] “I vunder vut it vood be like to be really dead” – image from The Indy Channel Whether you prefer your undead to be of the vampiric, zombie, or reanimated sort, or are more inclined to unicellular spore candidates, or maybe pre-conscious organoids, there are plenty of candidates for entities on the fringes of life. In addition to providing readers with a better handle on the attempt to delineate the line between life and not-life, there are plenty of interesting questions raised and fun facts to be gleaned. We learn, for example, that Erwin Schrödinger was set up by the government at Trinity College. (But he may have simultaneously both been there and not, depending on whether any students saw him give a lecture.) We also learn that when Vitamin C was discovered, the discoverer wanted to name it “Godnose.” And how about meteorites as a possible source of Terran life? Or maybe they contributed one or more of the ingredients necessary for the recipe? I particularly enjoy when science writers imbue their work with a sense of humor. That is mostly lacking here, which is disappointing. But there is plenty of material to keep your brain cells flashing on and off. Who decides on a definition of life? In an ideal world, science should lead on matters that are subject to physical investigation and repeatable experimentation. And yet… It may be enough for you to align with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, when it came time to issue a ruling pertaining to pornography, said that he knows it when he sees it. We as a species tend to think that we know life when we see it. But it would be a good thing to recognize that all extant definitions of life are squishy, relying on philosophy or religion for their support. So I would appreciate it if no one would use their definition to tell me or anyone who does not share their perspective what they can or cannot do. Because when it comes to folks twisting science to political ends, I know it when I see it. Life’s Edge may not provide a definitive guide to the line between living and nonliving. Such a line does not really exist in biology. But it does point out where the arguments lie about where those lines might be drawn, or, at least, where they might be investigated. It raises the larger question, though, of whether that line can, at least from a scientific perspective, be drawn at all. Life is what the scientific establishment (probably after some healthy disagreement) will accept as life. Review first posted – March 19, 2021 Publication dates ----------March 9, 2021 - hardcover ----------March 8, 2022 - trade paperback I received an e-book ARE if Life’s Edge from Dutton in exchange for an honest review, and some of those interesting things that have been growing, unasked, in my basement. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, Tumblr, PInterest, and Twitter pages I heartily recommend you check out Siddhartha Mukherjee's amazing NY Times review What Does It Mean to Be a Living Thing? Items of Interest from the author -----What is Life - audio – A series of live conversations between writer Carl Zimmer and eight leading thinkers on the question of what it means to be alive. -----Slate – excerpt - What on Earth are These Things? - on organoids -----NY Times - The Secret Life of a Coronavirus - is it alive? Songs/Music -----From Sondheim’s Company - Being Alive -----Aerosmith - Livin’ On the Edge -----Opening of Saturday Night Fever – The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive -----Madonna - Borderline -----GaGa - Edge of Glory -----Shruti Haasan - Edge -----Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life - Every Sperm is Sacred ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 23, 2021
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Mar 10, 2021
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Feb 23, 2021
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Hardcover
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0593137957
| 9780593137956
| 0593137957
| 4.19
| 13,520
| Mar 23, 2021
| Mar 23, 2021
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really liked it
| …your memories for what happened…are wrong …your memories for what happened…are wrongI will start off with what this book is not. Sticking - Before I began reading Remember I wanted to get my predisposition down in words. I think that a lot of how memory functions has to do with Darwinian selection. Brains that remember crucial elements of life, like where the cave lion lives, are much likelier to survive long enough to pass on their genes than the recently departed person who could not make that particular memory come to the fore. In a less lethal way, events that have dangerous impact seem likelier to pop to mind than more benign ones. I remember many social faux pas I made in my life, and still cringe at the recollection, probably because I felt that those errors caused me harm, by lowering me in the eyes of the other parties involved, impairing my career advancement, costing me the friendship of someone I admired. If your teacher, for example, someone who has power over you (albeit not the life and death sort) is loud, or cruel, or unkind to you, that image is likely to burn deeper than a casual insult from someone you care nothing about, someone who has no impact on your life. The boss hassling you as an employee is likely to stick a bit more than a co-worker doing the same. The wonderful aspects of life might stick as well, but it seems that there are fewer of them that have the bite that the negative ones offer. Do that again and you will feel GREAT! seems less likely to stick and stick hard than don’t do that again or you could die, whether literally, professionally, or in terms of social dealings! Genova does not really get into this, memory capacity as a means of natural selection, to my great disappointment. But how memory sticks is covered. We will come back to this. [image] Lisa Genova - image from Ringling College Library Association - 2021 This is not a book about being. It does not address the large questions surrounding how much of our identity is tied up in what we can remember. (Well, not much, anyway) Are we more than the sum of our remembered experiences? If we can no longer recall those events, do we stop being who we were? Genova took this on more directly in her novel, Still Alice. There is some of that in here, but it is not a focal point. This book is more an on-the-ground explanation for some elements of memory, with suggestions for how we might improve. You want to remember the name of someone you just met? Genova has advice on how to get better at that. You want to remember material for a test? Genova has advice on how to get better at remembering your material. To support the advice, she offers some fascinating, and very accessible material on the science of how both short and long-term memories are formed. She also offers considerable solace to those of us who might wonder if we are losing it, when we frequently forget why we got up to come into this room, or where we parked the car, or where we left the keys…ad nauseum. It’s all good. Don’t sweat it. If you forget who your children are, that would be something else entirely. There is a lot to be said for the word recollect when it comes to summoning memories. In fact we do not dip into a cranial vault and drag out specific events from our past on command. The process is much more one of reassembling the sundry bits that make up a memory, or collecting them again, re-collecting them from diverse bins, sound here, scent there, tactile bits someplace else, sight another location entirely, feelings from some other room in another wing. Unlike perception and movement, which reside in specific addresses in our brains, we don’t have specialized memory-storage neurons or a memory cortex. Vision, hearing, smell, touch, and movement can all be mapped to discrete geographic regions in the brain…When we remember something, we’re not withdrawing from a “memory bank.” There is no memory bank. Long-term memories don’t reside in one particular neighborhood in your brain.And in so-doing, there is, almost inevitably, alteration. ….every time we retrieve a stored memory for what happened, it’s highly likely that we change the memory…Memory isn’t a courtroom stenographer, reading back exactly what was said. When we recall what happened, we typically fetch only some of the details we stored. We omit some bits, reinterpret parts, and distort others in light of new information, context, and perspective that are available now but weren’t back then. We frequently invent new information, often inaccurate, to fill in the gaps in our memories so that the narrative feels more complete or pleasing. What we remember about the past is often influenced by how we feel in the present. Our opinions and emotional state now color what we remember from what happened last year. And so, in revisiting episodic memories, we often reshape them.She goes over different kinds of memory, the steps involved in storing (or not) each. She looks at the impact of writing down your take on something that just happened. There is a surprise there. Sleep comes in for a look. It plays a significant role in how memories are retained. Stress can also have a major impact on memory, both in the moment of our fight-flight-freeze experience, and in the aftermath of it. Strong emotion of a more usual sort also has an impact on memory retention. Genova looks at why we forget and how it is that different people can have such diverse takes, even after having seen exactly the same thing. Most of the advice seems sound. Sometimes, though, the offered suggestions is off-base. One way to help retain memories, she writes, is to get in touch with your inner feelings. Oh, OK, sure, forget about that whole taking years in talk therapy thing, just do it, right? Genova is, after all, a neuroscientist, not a shrink. Maybe this worked for her personally, but seems a reach for most people. In a more personal vein, that she found A Star is Born (which is a wonderful film) more memorable than LaLa Land (one of the all-time great films) is just sad. Maybe she just wasn’t paying attention, or maybe had not had enough sleep the night before taking it in. Genova comes to her interest in the brain not only from a professional place of interest, but from her personal experience. When her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Genova dug into the available science about the disease. Her undergrad degree in Biopsychology from Bates and her PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard gave her the necessary tools to learn. But what science could not offer was a sense of what it feels like to be afflicted with Alzheimer’s. That provided the motivation to write her first novel. Dozens of publishers turned it down, so she self-published in 2007, and got some notice. Still Alice, was picked up by Simon & Schuster in 2008 and published by that house in 2009, becoming an international best-seller. Julianne Moore earned a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of linguistics professor Alice Howland, coping with Early-onset Alzheimers's in the 2014 film of the book. Genova continued writing fiction, publishing four more novels. Each built on her expertise in neuroscience and skill as a writer to show what people face, and how they cope, or don’t, when neurological challenges present. Her 2011 book, Left Neglected looks at recovery after a major brain injury; 2012’s Love Anthony considers autism; Inside the O’Briens, out in 2015, tells about life for a man in his forties diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease; and Every Note Played shows us a musician suffering through ALS. In addition to her writing, Genova is a professional speaker about Alzheimer’s, and has appeared on many TV programs and in several documentary films. She says that the acting classes she took while writing Still Alice were a huge help in building her ability to put her emotions on the page. I expect that that training also helped her a lot with her public speaking. Remember is Genova’s first non-fiction book. She applies her deep knowledge of how the brain works, adds the insight she has gained from her fiction writing, and offers a well-grounded look at memory, filling us in on what to worry about, what not to sweat, and how to improve what we want to improve. Remember is a very readable explanation of how one of our most important human capabilities works. You will learn some new things and be comforted about some shortcomings that are really no big deal. It is definitely worth your time, if you can remember to pick up a copy and read it. It is through the erosion of memory that time heals all wounds. Review posted – March 26, 2021 Publication date – March 23, 2021 Harmony Books sent me an ARE, in return for…what?...something. It’s right there on the tip of my tongue. No worries, though. I am sure it will come back to me right before I go to sleep. And a special thanks to MC for remembering to notify me about this book. I won’t forget that. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Lisa Genova – Conversation from Penn State - by Patty Satalia – from 2011 – mostly about Alice -----Women to Watch - Lisa Genova, Neuroscientist & Novelist by Sue Rocco – audio - 44:44 – from 2020 Items of Interest about the author -----Cape Cod Magazine - Total Transformation - by Laurie Balliett - not really an interview of Genova, but about her. Definitely worth checking out -----Writer’s Digest - Living for All It’s Worth: The Novels of Neuroscientist Lisa Genova Explore Love and Empathy by Emily Esfahani Smith Items of Interest from the author -----TED talk - What You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s ----- A Conversation Between Good Friends Lisa Genova and Greg O’Brien - On Alzheimer’s – video - 1:39:08 -----From iUniverse to Simon & Schuster - on how she went from self-publishing to international acclaim – video – 2:28 Items of Interest -----The Penny Test - Encoding and Storage: How Our Perceptions Become Memories -----Robert Altman on Kurosawa’s Rashomon -----Wiki on the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Related books of interest -----The amazing novel, Thomas Murphy -----My review of Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich - Genova refers to H.M. in Chapter 1 -----Carved in Sand by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin Songs/Music -----The Fantasticks - Try to Remember -----The Earls - Remember Then -----The Shangri-Las - Remember (Walking in the Sand) -----The Platters - Remember When -----Sarah McLachlan - I Will Remember You -----Adele - Don’t You Remember -----Nat King Cole - Unforgettable ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 07, 2021
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Mar 16, 2021
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Dec 06, 2020
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Hardcover
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0393634973
| 9780393634976
| 0393634973
| 4.11
| 687
| Jul 28, 2020
| Jul 28, 2020
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it was amazing
| In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold o In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold on a trade route linking Egypt and the Middle East. An apocalypse is a revelation—literally an uncovering—about the future that is meant to provide hope in a time of uncertainty and fear.The above was quoted from the book. But in Olson’s Twitter feed he offers a slightly different take. The title is The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age. To be clear, apocalypse refers to the threat of nuclear war, not to the site itself.Most of us, if asked, could probably identify the Manhattan Project as the national undertaking that produced the atomic bombs used in World War II, and as the Ur prototype for every future absolutely-positively-got-to-do subsequent development drive, to be referred to forever as A Manhattan Project for [insert your national need here]. Many people, certainly those of my (boomer) generation, can easily recall seeing film clips of that first test explosion in New Mexico, and probably later tests that vaporized large portions of Pacific islands. But if we, as a group, were to be asked where the material that fueled those terrible explosions came from, I doubt that a majority would know. It was manufactured, primarily, in Hanford, Washington. [image] Nuclear reactors line the riverbank at the Hanford Site along the Columbia River in January 1960. The N Reactor is in the foreground, with the twin KE and KW Reactors in the immediate background. The historic B Reactor, the world's first plutonium production reactor, is visible in the distance. - Image and text from Wikipedia Steve Olson must have a fondness for things that go BOOOOOM!!! His last book was The Untold Story of Mount St. Helen’s. At least his earlier work did not deal in things that would be stopped by the TSA. This is a history. It was the drive during World War II to develop a nuclear bomb that drove the establishment of Hanford, and many other places. There have been a lot of books written about Los Alamos, and fewer about Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But the place that made the glowing special sauce has received scant historical attention, relatively. Olson, a local, sought to correct that imbalance. [image] Steve Olson - image from his Twitter pages I’ve been getting ready to write this book pretty much my whole life. I grew up in the 1960s in Othello, Washington, a small town in the south-central part of the state just over a ridgeline from a mysterious government facility called Hanford. We knew that Hanford was involved in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Some people in town knew that it manufactured a substance called plutonium. But it was the Cold War. It was best not to ask too many questions. In 1984 I visited Hanford to write a story for Science 84 magazine, and by the end of the trip, I had decided to write a book about the place. Thirty-six years later, the book is done. - from the NASW interviewThis is a story of war, science, politics and people. It is a story of what was known, what knowledge was needed to move forward, whether known or not, a story of personal ambition and national requirements under the direst of circumstances, a story of patriotism and risk. Yes, we know how it all turned out, but maybe did not know where the turns were that needed to be made to ensure that outcome, maybe had less of an idea about who was involved, what they worked on, where, and why. And maybe did not know what blind alleys were entered before a clear route was constructed. [image] Aerial view of Hanford Construction Camp - image from the National Building Museum And that development began with science. Olson walks us through the steps that had to be taken to advance from theory to implementation. Here is some of it: 1932 - discovery that neutrons are the glue holding electrons and protons and the nucleus of atoms together 1934 - a French scientist discovers that bombarding any material with subatomic particles creates unstable materials that decay down to stable ones. This was a huge discovery, artificially induced radioactivity. 1939 - German scientists discovered that bombarding uranium with neutrons does not cause it to change into materials adjacent on the periodic table, but to split, releasing vast amounts of energy. Uh oh. Might be a good idea to get some control over this before it was developed by someplace Hitlerian and applied to a dark purpose. And so on…There were many steps leading from the science to the making of an operational bomb (and using nuclear power to generate electricity for that matter). I bet that for most of us many of these details will be news. Many were for me. In 1941, the US government, alarmed by the possibility of a Nazi-bomb, gets cracking, FDR accepting the recommendation of Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), established earlier that year.. [image] The B Reactor at Hanford was the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor. It produced plutonium for the device tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The B Reactor was permanently shut down in 1968, and is now being converted into a museum. - image and text from The National Buildings Museum – Secret Cities exhibition ”I knew that the effort would be expensive, that it might seriously interfere with other war work. But the overriding consideration was this: I had great respect for German science. If a bomb were possible, if it turned out to have enormous power, the result in the hands of Hitler might enable him to enslave the world. It was essential to get there first, if an all-out American effort could accomplish the difficult task.”Even before it was known if a bomb could be made at all, it was known that there were materials that would be needed for it, and at a large scale. December 16, 1942 found Col. Franklin T. Matthias…and two DuPont engineers headed for the Pacific Northwest and southern California to investigate possible production sites. Of the possible sites available, none had a better combination of isolation, long construction season, and abundant water for hydroelectric power than those found along the Columbia and Colorado Rivers. After viewing six locations in Washington, Oregon and California, the group agreed that the area around Hanford, Washington, best met the criteria established by the Met Lab scientists and DuPont engineers. - from The Atomic Heritage FoundationOlson writes of the displacement of locals that took place. Part of the project entailed housing tens of thousands of new Hanford workers. Five years before Levittown, the United States government built the first standardized suburb. Of course, it came with a surveillance state attached, and provided endless fodder for conspiracy theorists and science-fiction writers with diverse notions of an Oddville sort of place. (All hail the Glow Cloud) He tells of the construction of the first nuclear reactor, and many that followed, and the enormous buildings that were used for chemically extracting plutonium from the product of the reactors. We learn about the environmental degradation that resulted and the eventual acceptance of responsibility for cleaning up. (without, of course, adequate funding to do the job completely, now estimated to require $300 to $600 billion) [image] Aerial view of “Queen Mary” chemical separation plants at Hanford, Washington - image from the U.S. Department of Energy. Olson tells of the various teams that were working on different aspects of the Manhattan Project, even where the name for the project originated, as well as the origin of the element name plutonium. He uses a familiar technique for history writing, focusing on specific individuals and letting us follow them through at least part of the story. This gives the events the more personal feel of a human element, relieving us of the perils of a straight up recitation of facts. Prime among these is Glenn Seaborg, a co-discoverer of plutonium. We follow him from his education in Physics and Chemistry at UC Berkeley, headed by Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer, through several stages of the big project to come. We get to know Enrico Fermi, Leona Woods, the only woman on Fermi’s team, Susan Leckband, who arrives at Hanover in the 1980s with a high school degree, and winds up running the place, and others. There were plenty of personality conflicts that made forward movement sometimes difficult. Olson gives considerable space to a very moving description, by Nagasaki resident Dr. Raisuke Shirabe, of his experience of the bombing and its after-effects. [image] A 1963 explosives test near Hanford to determine the safest underground spot for disposing of radioactive waste – image and text from NY Times - Credit...Associated Press And we learn details that are amusing and alarming, like a radioactive vending machine and the surprising material used for swabbing aluminum tubes for the reactors, and the considerable challenges entailed in transporting plutonium and other dodgy materials from Hanford to (well, that’s classified). Add in the challenge of maintaining a safe work environment without letting the workers know what it was that they were working on. [image] A contemporary (6/3/2020) view of Hanford from the ridgeline between Hanford and Othello, where Olson was raised - his photo, from Twitter Olson brings us up to the present with the changes Hanford has gone through in the years since the war, the environmental toxicity that became apparent, cleanups that have been done, and remain, and how the facility is being used today. It does seem quaint that the expectation in the 1940s, when large amounts of radioactive waste were first being generated, was that science would come up with a solution to that problem before too terribly long. We are still waiting for that. [image] Many roads around Hanford are marked with signs warning travelers they're entering a hazardous area (The Oregonian) Hanford, Washington, provided a critical service to its country in a time of war, and got our nation militarily prepared, for good or ill, for the Cold War to come. It did this at considerable cost to its people and its environment. It holds a unique place in the annals of our nation, and should never be forgotten. By writing a popular history that is informative as well as entertaining and very readable, Steve Olson has made it likelier that Hanford will be remembered by a wide swath of Americans, who might never, otherwise, have learned of it, and thus, has done a service to us all. The Apocalypse Factory is not a disastrous ending to anything, but a very welcome revelation. The most recent studies indicate that a nuclear exchange of even 50 Nagasaki-type bombs would produce climate changes unprecedented in recorded human history and threaten the global food supply. A large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons would so reduce temperatures that most of the humans who survived the initial bombing would starve. Many people are concerned today that climate change poses a threat to human civilization but the most certain and immediate threat still resides in the nuclear weapons sitting in missile silos, bombers, and submarines around the world. Review first posted – August 7, 2020 Publication dates ----------July 28, 2020 - Hardcover ----------January 4, 2022 - Trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] I received an ARE of this book from Norton, but was sworn to secrecy until this review was unleashed on the world. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and GR pages Interviews -----National Association of Science Writers (NASW) Steve Olson: Apocalypse Factory -----NPR - Main Street on Prairie Public - audio – 53:00 – by Doug Hamilton Items of Interest -----Atomic Heritage Foundation - Hanford, WA -----Wiki on Vannevar Bush - it was his recommendation to FDR that got The Manhattan Project started -----Wiki on the Hibakusha, survivors of the nuclear bombs -----Atomic Age - The Trinity Test ...more |
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it was amazing
| Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effect Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effectively once you’re aware of the pitfalls posed by the cognitive biases and illusions I’ve cited in this book.Bob Feller is reported to have said “Baseball is only a game, a game of inches, and lots of luck.” There is plenty of truth in that. But with the technological advances we have seen in the last decade, it may be that baseball has become a game of microns and milliseconds. The benefit of having so much more data available today than has ever been at the fingertips of field or general managers, not to mention bookmakers and bettors, (that means you, Pete) is that what’s been considered revealed wisdom in the national game can now be subjected to ever more penetrating analysis. What that analysis reveals is that many presumably valid ideas have now been shown to be demonstrably false. So why do so many baseball pros continue to rely on notions that are nonsense? Keith Law has some answers for that. [image] Keith Law - image from The Athletic In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues that what makes a so-called free economy productive is that people will act with a rational self-interest to pursue desired ends. Did Smith ever actually meet people? Sure, we have the capacity for rational thinking. And we even use it sometimes. But it is only one factor in how decisions are made. Decisions must, for good or ill (mostly ill), pass through a gauntlet of possible errors and biases. Law has pulled together a rich collection of poor excuses. We are all subject to biases, fallacies, aversions, and other non-rational forces of one sort and another, but ferreting out where irrational tilt lies is in the realm of psychology, and its dismal relation, economics. Law has been known to take on purveyors of bullshit before. You might enjoy his Twitter exchange with evolution-denier, Kurt Shilling, here. ESPN actually suspended his Twitter account for a while (without suspending Shilling’s) which suggests that they have a lot of evolving to do. He took considerable umbrage with purveyors of baseball-related bullshit in his first book, Smart Baseball. Tilting at the windmills of bovine droppings is clearly Law’s thing. And we are all the better-informed on account of that. In the highlighted paragraph at the top of this review, Law makes clear that while it is baseball that he is using for his examples, it is a wider reality that he hopes to influence. In doing so he espouses the wisdom to be found in a seminal work of behavioral science, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, which is referenced throughout. He bolsters his analysis with references to research done by other experts as well. There are thirteen chapters in the book, well fourteen if you add the Conclusion, each looking in some detail at particular types of bias, showing how that bias, or those biases impact decision-making, by players, umpires, field managers, team owners, and probably you and me. He offers not only backup on the theories behind each, but demonstrates the applicability of the theory with very real-world baseball examples. If you are averse to strong-opinions, Law may turn you off. He showed some rough tonal ledges in his first book, mostly absent here, but if you still believe that your best hitter should bat third, and that Joe Dimaggio deserved the MVP over Ted Williams in the year when the former hit in 56 consecutive games and the latter hit 406, you should be prepared to back those opinions up with facts, because Law can, and he makes perrsuasive arguments. One thing that Law does not do is dabble much in politics. It is clear from his introduction that it is his intent to show how biases enter into our judgments in all sorts of ways. Baseball is the lens through which he shows how diverse biases impact decisions in a bad way. But he wants to show how they impact all our decisions. Political creature that I am, a full Notre Dame (before the fire) of clanging bells was pushing my application of Law’s lessons to the political arena. Here are a couple of examples. Law looks at the success of manager Bob Brenly’s 2001 World Series vs the Yankees. The D’Backs won the series despite, not because of, Brenly’s decision-making. Law offers a considerable stack of judgmental errors Brenly made that should have resulted in his team being drubbed. Yet, the D’Backs won, and thus Brenly will evermore be known as a World-Series-winning manager. This is outcome bias. Results matter more than anything. But only if you are not interested in the future. Could a bad manager expect to have success going forward with the same set of instincts? Not bloody likely. Law quotes Thinking, Fast and Slow for this: We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.Fifty two Americans were taken hostage in Iran on November 4, 1979, after Iranian students took over the American embassy in Tehran. In April, 1980, President Carter ordered a rescue mission. The attempt failed, and Carter’s re-election prospects were irretrievably damaged as a result. There were plenty of other forces at play, including the GOP indulging in secret negotiations with Iran to encourage them to hang onto the captives until after the November 1980 elections, and the ABC show Nightline dedicating their nightly coverage to the “Hostage Crisis,” making sure to keep the issue at the top of everyone’s consciousness for the entirety of the election season. Whatever one may think of Jimmy Carter as president, it was a daring move to attempt a rescue. The failure was not his. It was in the implementation of Operation Eagle Claw. Yet, Carter took the blame for it, unfairly in my view. Results matter, but they are not all that matters. The unsuccessful resolution of the hostage crisis before the November 1980 elections doomed Carter, even though he made the best decision possible under impossible circumstance. He might have lost anyway, but the failure of the rescue mission made that loss a certainty. The illusory truth effect. Why do we cling to truths long after they’ve been disproven or lost their usefulness? Is it really just a matter of hearing something preached as true so frequently that our minds accept them not just as fact, but as the default perspective that must be actively dislodged by the jaws of life? Yes, as it turns out.In his examples, Law writes about batter protection in a lineup. (A batter will get a juicier selection of pitches to swing at if the batter following him is a more dangerous hitter.) Turns out there is no real statistical evidence to support the notion. Yet, through persistent repetition over time, by people who should know better, belief in lineup protection persists. Can any of you offer a real-world number for how many times you have heard Donald Trump speak the words “no collusion?” I doubt any of us who do not live in caves really can. And if you are an adherent to right-wing media, Fox, Rush, Sinclair, or the like, you are probably speaking it aloud in your sleep, to the alarm of your bed-partner. Despite a detailed commission report that offers fine detail on just how that collusion was carried out, there are still people who believe that Trump did not collude with Russia in his 2016 presidential campaign. There are probably even people who are not of the cultish right who harbor doubts about it. It is pretty clear that repeating something over and over and over and over and over…continued ad nauseum, has the same effect on reason that the Colorado River had on the landscape of the Grand Canyon. I could go on, but you get the idea. Law identifies a passel of these, including anchoring, availability, hindsight, optimism, order, outcome, recency, status quo and survivorship biases. He tosses in a handful of fallacies, some aversions, and a soupçon of other irrational tiltings. I do not really have any gripes with the book, but there was one instance in particular in which I thought Law tilted the wrong way. When a specific fact or example comes to mind more readily, we tend to overemphasize that fact or example—maybe we ascribe too much importance to it, or perhaps we extrapolate and assume that that example is representative of the whole. This phenomenon is called availability bias, and I think it’s one of the easiest biases to understand but one of the hardest to catch in yourself, because it’s not just natural, but easy. Your brain is just doing what you asked, right? You thought about some question, and your brain went right to the hard drive and pulled out something relevant. Your brain didn’t go to the archives, although, and it probably just gave you one thing when you actually needed the whole set.I believe Law dismisses a concern that should be obvious. For example, he regards the selection of the last place Cubs’ Andre Dawson for the 1987 MVP as a travesty, given that his numbers were bested by several players in the league. But that presumes that numbers are the only things worth considering in casting those ballots. Dawson, as Law notes, had taken on collusion by MLB ownership in their attempt to protect the notorious reserve clause. He offered the Cubs a contract with the salary left blank. He would play for any amount of money. It forced the Cubs’ owner’s hand, and helped advance the cause of possible free agency. His statistical value as a player may have been well below that of some other players, but his courage, and sheer value to the game was unparalleled. It was for this that he was likely rewarded by MVP voters. In this instance, Law contends that it was Dawson’s being in the news every day in coverage of the free agency issue that won him the award, the availability bias of frequent and recent repetition that moved voting Dawson’s way. But do not be put off by that. There is a vast amount to love in The Inside Game. It offers a way to explain not only why so much misunderstanding bedevils baseball, but how such misunderstandings permeate all human activity. It is a look not just inside how baseball decisions are made, but how perspectives and decisions are arrived at inside our own heads. 2020 was a lost year for baseball, entirely for the minors, and largely for the top tier. 2021 again offered a 162 game season. Given that hospitalizations for Covid in Spring 2021, despite increasing numbers of people being vaccinated, have been increasing, made that prospect less than certain. The first game of the season for my Mets, for example, did not go off as hoped because at least one Washington Nationals player had come down with Covid, and at least four others were contact-traced into quarantine. You may find yourself with a few baseball-watching hours freed up by such forms of misery. If so, you can sustain your connection to the national pastime by passing some productive time with Keith Law. It will help you prepare for what games are actually being played in MLB, given whatever plague is making the rounds when you get to it, and offer you the bonus of offering insightful information about the wider world, and how we frail humans function. Check this one out. It’s the right call. Review posted – March 27, 2020 Publication dates ----------April 21, 2020 - hardcover ----------April 6, 2021 - trade paperback =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages You should know that his personal site is for things unrelated to sports. He had a blog on ESPN, but one must sign in to get the full benefit, and he no longer work there. These days he is a sen ior baseball writer for The Athletic, also a pay site. You can find his podcast for them here. My review of the author’s prior book -----2017 - Smart Baseball Interview -----Hittin' Season - Episode #376 - with John Stolnis Thanks to GR friend (although, sadly, a Phillies fan) Regina Wilson for letting us know about this excellent interview Items of Interest -----Baseball Prospectus - Going Streaking by Russell Carleton -----Fangraphs -----Wiki on Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow ----- Wiki on Richard Thaler’s book Nudge -----Wiki on Richard Thaler’s book Misbehaving -----Baseball’s reserve clause ----- Operation Eagle Claw ...more |
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really liked it
| On January 13, 2017, a brief article from Washoe’s [Washoe County, in Nevada] public health officials was published in the Centers for Disease Cont On January 13, 2017, a brief article from Washoe’s [Washoe County, in Nevada] public health officials was published in the Centers for Disease Control’s Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, and it sent shockwaves around the world. It was the first report of its kind—never before had a US county public health official written about a complete failure of every single antibacterial drug that they had available to them.It was darkly serendipitous that I was reading this book in March, 2020, and that the book would find its way to bookstores in April, when, no doubt, we would still be facing considerable personal and global, medical and economic challenges from what must be deemed public enemy number one, COVID-19. If you will indulge me, I would like to talk a bit about the current [2020] crisis which, while very much related to the book under review, is only one element. I promise to get to the actual book review part before too long. The SARS epidemic began in 2002. According to the National Health Service in the UK “There’s currently no cure for SARS, but research to find a vaccine is ongoing.” Tick tock, guys, I mean eighteen years is not enough? It gives you some idea of the level of concern about COVID-19. Even the nomenclature can be a bit confusing. “CO” is for “corona,” the type. “VI” is for virus, duh-uh. “D” however, may not be obvious but will be after you read this. Disease. See? The “19” is not the 19th iteration of this malady, but represents the first year in which it was identified, or 2019. You will not find a COVID-18. The actual virus is called “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”, or SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. And Yes, it is very much related to the earlier SARS virus and disease. Two days before my wife was due to return to NYC where she worked several days a week, the first case was confirmed in Manhattan. She still went in. Work is work. In the absence of a corporate ok, most people were reluctant to just call out. How many other people were faced with the same challenge? Go in or stay home? How can one judge the risk if there is no good information yet on how vulnerable one might be to picking up the virus at, say, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or at Grand Central Station or on the A train, or on the local bus? Maybe your Uber or taxi driver is a carrier and does not even know it. Paranoia can be understandable at such times. For myself, I do not need to interact much with the world, relatively. A good thing, given that I am in the age group most susceptible to the worst results from the virus. But the world does come to me. My wife’s trips to NYC stopped for now, corporate encouraging employees to work from home as much as possible, but we still have a truck-driver relation in the house on a daily basis, and we still have to shop, for food, meds, and other things. COVID-19 is a global peril because there are currently no drugs available that can dispatch it. [well, there weren't in 2020] Forget a vaccination that is probably well over a year away, if even then. The best one can hope is that, if you get it, you can endure the flu-like symptoms for the duration of the infection, and that your symptoms do not become severe. For the optimistic, The National Institutes of Health reports that they are testing a possible treatment. No date was offered on when the test period would end, or when a decision could be made as to the efficacy of the treatment, the drug Remdesivir, nor, if proven effective, how long it might be before production could be scaled up to provide the vast volumes of the drug that will no doubt be needed. It used to be that afflictions were named for the place where they were first discovered. MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, comes to mind. And it should be known that the Spanish flu actually originated in Kansas, but was first copped to in Spain. Locality use in nomenclature for diseases is now considered unacceptable, as stigmatizing. Of course, there are cynical folks on the right who are deliberately attempting to distract political attention from the colossal failure of the Trump administration in the face of this crisis by poking racist nerves and referring to COVID-19 as the Chinse flu, the Wuhan flu or the Wu-Flu. The hope is that it will prompt Dems to go after them for their racism, and then they could be talking about the attack by Dems and not the administration’s lies, failures, cover-ups, and cluelessness. This week, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. My wife did not travel to Manhattan, but worked the full week from home, and will (and did) until directed otherwise. But the reality of the threat continues to grow (the NBA just postponed the entire 2020 season), MLB has postponed all games, Spring training and regular season, a pointless ban on travel from most of Europe has been announced, and tests for COVID-19 remain in mortally short supply here in the USA. If you can’t test anyone, you can’t confirm an increase in the number of cases, or so I expect the thinking goes in some quarters. Thanks for indulging me, now on to the book. [image] Muhammad H. Zaman - image from NTNU Returning to the opening quote from the book, people and bacteria have been engaged in an arms race for a long time, or it might be better called an AMRs (Antimicrobial resistance) race, and it appears that the microbes are one up on us at present. This is a biography. One might think of it in terms that some of us of a certain age might associate with a TV show from the way-back, This Is Your Life. A celebrity guest would be introduced, then we watched her or him react to a procession of people from their life, usually teachers, old friends, mentors maybe, arresting officers, whatever. I suppose one might think of Biography of Resistance in a similar vein. We are told at the beginning that a malady has been found (see opening quote) that has proved resistant to all known antibiotics. The bug in question was a CRE (carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae). Many Entero bacteria are harmless, but this family member was Klebsiella pneumoniae, the culprit behind not only many a UTI, but life-threatening sepsis and pneumonia, as well. All known antibiotics (26 at the time) were tried. The patient died of sepsis. So how did this particular bacterium come to be, or, more importantly, how did this level of resistance come to be? We travel back to when we first found out about our previously unseen fellow Earthlings, and track the advance of our knowledge of them through the centuries. From seeing them at all to understanding that not all our fellow passengers were benign. The action picks up in the mid-late 19th century, as, now recognizing some true enemies, means are found to do battle with them. Then they develop longbows, and we develop armor-plated vehicles, and they develop rocket fired grenades and we develop aircraft and on and on it goes. This history is often fascinating. One of the things that many popular science books do is to use people as vessels with which to deliver historical and scientific information. (Maybe like inserting a curative virus inside a friendly-looking bacterium in order to slip past defenses of the malignant microbe?) We can more easily relate to other people than we might to raw descriptions of science. And if the scientists in question sometimes have oversized personalities, so much the better. It makes for better story-telling. Some of the names here will be familiar, particularly to any who work or dabble in the life sciences. Maimonides, for example, nailed a description of pneumonia symptoms in the 12th century. Robert Locke’s Micrographia, published in 1665, showed that there is an entire world of living things inside the smallest objects. Antonie van Leeuwenhook built a better Where there is discovery there is often ego, sometimes to the point of personal, professional, and decidedly dickish competitiveness. Some early work in the examination of pneumonia descended to this level, sadly. You will learn about Robert Koch, a German microbiologist who, in addition to doing breakthrough work on fighting the black death, ran an institute that produced world class international researchers as if he had found a magic way to clone genius. You will also learn of household-name science icons who were not above fudging data when necessary to prove a point. [image] Robert Koch was the Professor Xavier to a generation of microbiological superheroes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, training such household names as Kitisato (a household name in Japan), Julius Petri, yes, of that dish, and Paul Ehrlich, notable for his concerns about population growth, finding a cure for syphilis, and a for being the father of chemotherapy. - image from NobelPrize.org It is worth knowing how antibiotics actually work, what it is that they do, and how they do it. (Teachers and classmates report how the biographed bac snuck off the schoolgrounds and got into all sorts of trouble, while somehow maintaining top grades) Zaman offers a very readable description of ways in which antibiotics (ABs) go after bacteria and utterly fascinating material about the defenses, some of which are remarkably complex, that bacteria have developed (evolved) to fend off such attacks, including using antibiotic attackers as food. He also reports on different sorts of ABs that have been developed over time, things like bacteriophages, (bacteria eaters) aka phages, sulfa drugs, and a kind of fungus that disarms bacteria. One large surprise is that bacteria develop antibacterial defenses independent of the presence of humans. (Brothers and sisters appear on stage, telling about what a rotten sib the bacterium was) It would appear that we have joined a battle that has been raging for as long as bacteria have been on the planet. Another is the sources that are used when looking for new AB materials to bring to bear in the ongoing war. It was also heartening to learn of a particular confluence of disparate scientific disciplines joining forces to advance our knowledge, and hopefully enhance our armory. [image] Actually, resistance, despite some temporary setbacks, seems to be working out pretty well for pathogenic (hostile) microbes (Lifelong friends, business associates and rivals offer some final praise for the guest of honor) Bringing us up to the present, Zaman catches us up on the dangers we face in the globalization of infection, the misuse of antibiotics as a contributor to the growth of AB resistance, the latest insight on how resistance is replicated, and delves smartly into sociopolitical elements of international health care politics and economics. Some of this is unsurprising, as companies that make their money selling antibiotics lobby against any restrictions, and too many have reduced or eliminated investment in AB research and development, because such products are less likely to earn an optimal ROI than drugs intended for regular, ongoing use. He points out how important it is to involve people other than scientists in the drive to develop new defenses. Economists, politicians, social scientists, anthropologists, writers and more all need to play a part in helping us find ways to survive in what has become, and what we have helped make, a hostile environment. Mother’s milk for policy geeks. [image] Chart is from AMR review Gripes - I did not keep a running total, but the sheer number of named researchers did seem a bit encyclopedic at times, as if the author felt compelled to incorporate as many people as possible into his narrative. I expect, in reality, he was pulling hair out because of having to leave so many other scientists out of the narrative, but the number left in seemed a bit excessive. I doubt this can be defended as a gripe, more of a personal preference, really. But I find that science writing is hugely enhanced by the presence of a degree of levity. Mary Roach is the most stunning example of the application of (often jejune) humor to otherwise serious popular science narratives. You will be in no danger of having your latte shoot through your nose as you are ambushed by something totally hilarious in this one. Sip on in confidence. At the very least, The Biography of Resistance will give you some perspective, a more informed look at just how challenging it is for medical science to keep ahead of (or more accurately catch up to) the resistance that diverse, harmful bacteria keep coming up with to make us ill. Doctor Zaman covers a lot of territory in this very readable, relatively brief (263 pages) book. From the history of our learning what microbes are to showing how antibiotics attack bacteria, and how bacteria fight back, to showing the impact of antibiotics in the world, showing how their overuse has worsened an already challenging problem, pointing out what is currently being done, and offering a broad strategy for moving on, incorporating diverse disciplines. You will learn a lot, and I cannot imagine a timelier book as we try to make our way through what could well be called by future historians 2020: The Year of the Plague If nothing changes, and we continue on the path we’re now on, by 2050 the world will lose 10 million people a year, every year, to resistant infections. Review first posted – March 13, 2020 Publication date – April 21, 2020 =============================EXTRA STUFF - See below ...more |
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it was amazing
| There is a vast arterial power humming all around us, hiding in plain sight. It has shaped our civilization more than any road, technology, or poli There is a vast arterial power humming all around us, hiding in plain sight. It has shaped our civilization more than any road, technology, or political leader. It has opened frontiers, founded cities, settled borders, and fed billions. It promotes life, forges peace, grants power, and capriciously destroys everything in its path. Increasingly domesticated, even manacled, it is an ancient power that rules us still.---------------------------------------- …not only are we humans an urban species, we are also a river species. Indeed nearly two thirds (63 percent) of the total world population lives within 20 kilometers of a large river Some 84 percent of the world’s large cities…are located along a large river. For the world’s megacities the number rises to 93 percent.We are river people, most of us anyway, although we may or may not be aware of it. The places where we live, work, and gplay tend to center around our streaming waterways. Even settlements at the coast of seas and oceans tend to be located where rivers empty into the larger bodies of water. As significant as light, land, breathable air, and tolerable temperature ranges, rivers have powered the development of homo sapiens from hunter-gatherer to space traveler. As with most things that underlay, and power our lives, I expect that most of us do not give our rivers much thought. [image] Laurence Smith - (looking suspiciously like the character Bernard Lowe of Westworld – we presume Smith is human) - image from Institute at Brown for Environment & Society I grew up, as most of you probably did, near a river. At the breakfast table in our third-floor apartment in the Bronx, the morning light was so bright, so glaring that we had to pull down the shade in our single kitchen window. The golden beams came at us from the west, reflected off the windows of George Washington High School in Manhattan, across the Harlem River, which was about four blocks to the west. I never thought much about the river, although it was so close by. Unlike the morning glare, it was not directly visible from any of our windows, and was not in clear sight from most of the places I frequented. In Rivers of Power, which could as easily have been titled The Power of Rivers, geographer Laurence Smith offers a drop of geological history on how they came to be, but focuses mostly on how rivers and humans have worked together throughout our shared time on Earth. His analysis cites the challenges rivers present to their neighbors, but mostly the benefits they offer, which he divides into five general categories, Access, Natural Capital, Territory, Well-Being, and Means of Projecting Power. He then looks at major rivers of the world through this quintuple lens to broaden and deepen our appreciation for this very necessary, but sometimes unseen partner. [image] The Sherman Creek Generating Station on the Harlem River, the Hudson River visible at top – image from Hidden Waters blog The river was bordered on the Bronx side by Penn Central tracks, accessible through holes nicely cut in chain-link fences. It was a good place to tape coins to tracks allowing rolling stock the chance to flatten and stretch them to the delight of wastrel urchins. The most frequent floating stock I recall passing by just beyond the tracks consisted of barges loaded with coal for a local powerplant. [image] A Nilometer on Rhoda Island, Cairo – image from Wikipedia It will come as no great surprise that the first great societies in human history arose around rivers. You will know about early Mesopotamia on the Tigris and Euphrates, and Egypt on the Nile. But you may not know about another that far pre-dated both, the Harappan civilization of the Indus and Ghaggar Hakra river valleys. It is one of the great joys of this book that it brings to light such nuggets of information that were completely new, well, to me, anyway. I had never before heard, for example, of a nilometer (see image above), a significant tool used by Egyptian leaders. It allowed those in charge to see the clarity of the water and depth of the river at a given moment and thus be prepared for excessive or insufficient annual flooding of the Nile River Valley, with huge implications for the harvest to come. [image] Guns along the Hudson - Saratoga Battlefield - my shot Laurence looks at how civilizations grew up along rivers. There are obvious advantages, from fresh water for drinking and cleaning to irrigation, from transportation to military defense. While rivers provided water for community needs, and as technology progressed, could be used to power waterwheels and cool manufactories, they were also a tool that could be used by those upriver for political and/or military advantage. A nation, or community located upriver could divert so much of the river’s water that a downstream community could find its crucial resource seriously diminished or totally gone, and, in addition, the disadvantage of being downstream from polluters. Rivers allow for the emplacement of forts and armaments that could protect a community from a naval invasion, and offer highways on which raiders could attack poorly defended communities (think Vikings). [image] The Ganges - image from Encyclopedia Britannica - © Jedraszak/iStock.com But there are many other ways that rivers impact our lives, and have done so for as long as there have been people living in communities. They have served as a focal point for religious practices. The Ganges is used as a site into which Hindus deliver the cremated remains of their dead. The river Jordan was a memorable site in Christian lore as the place where Jesus was baptized, and today rivers are still often used in baptismal rites. And let us not forget underground waterways in myth, like the Rivers Styx, Acheron, and Lethe. River as judge-and-jury has a place in history too, not necessarily a good place. In the Hammurabi Code, for instance, a charge of sorcery was adjudicated by tossing the accused (one wonders if a local rat-bastard accused some poor schmo of turning him into a newt) into the Euphrates. If the newly dunked swims to shore, not guilty. If the accused drowns, oh, well. (that turning people into a newt thing would have really come in handy). I expect there are probably books to be written (undoubtedly some already have been) about rivers, real and imagined, in religion, literature, and mythology. Smith touches on this in this book, but it is not a major focus. I had a small unfortunate intersection with the Harlem as a young man. A friend and I were at the water’s edge, very close to the Washington Heights Bridge. I was there helping him clean his car, at some point in the late 60s, on a summer afternoon. I availed of a very lengthy bit of rope that some daring soul had tethered to the underside of the bridge. There was a knot at the bottom, but I did not have the firmest grip on the rope with my hands or on the knot with any other body parts, and my arm strength not being what I might have hoped, I soon found myself swinging out over the Harlem River, for a brief bit of fun, then desperately plunging toward the water as my grip gave way. I can’t say it was awful, no body parts or other unspeakables floated past, but it was not considered an ideal bathing venue, so I swam back to shore, soaked, somewhat gritty, and mortified. Smith offers a considerable survey of what is happening in the great rivers of the world today, physically and politically. The great dam building that is going on echoes the burst of dam building that took place in the early-mid twentieth century in the West. When the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), across the Blue Nile, was completed in 2022, it became the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa. The Three Gorges Dam in China, across the Yangtze, achieved a generating capacity of 22,500 megawatts when it was finally finished. It has also required the displacement of over a million people and has caused significant ecological damage. Many older dams in the west are being taken down, with an eye to reviving stifled ecological systems. [image] The Three Gorges Dam - as of 2009 – image from Wikipedia Not very far west the Hudson offered a much grander vista, and probably cleaner swimming, although it would take some years before environmentalists, led by Pete Seeger, forced a river cleanup. The view from the train on the Hudson Line, of what is now Metro North, is ta-die-faw. The Palisades formation on the western side of the Hudson was and remains magnificent, particularly celestial in its autumnal finery. The view is even better at the more leisurely pace afforded by the Day Line cruise from the western piers of midtown Manhattan up-river to places like Bear Mountain Park and West Point. This was a most welcome respite for someone who had experienced worlds that were not entirely composed of brick and concrete only on day trips in summer camp. There has been considerable change in the use of river-front land in cities across the world. Rotting piers of earlier mercantile and industrial ages have given way to increasing development of waterside property for high-priced residences, office towers, and commercial spaces, AND for public use. Smith points out the history of law that preserves riverine access for all. It has certainly been far from universally applied. But today, most major world cities have been working to make their rivers accessible to the general public. As people become more urbanized, the need, and yes, it is a need for most, for exposure to the outdoors, for a connection to nature, can be satisfied at least somewhat by walks along or other activities in riverfront parks. There came a time when my ancient car still ran, when I could still drive to work in Queens late at night, and drive (if you can call the stop-and-go nightmare of NYC rush hour traffic driving) home to Brooklyn in the morning. But on Sunday mornings, after my overnight shift, I went elsewhere. Eventually I would diversify, but for a while I would tote my digital SLR to Brooklyn Bridge Park, and environs, to shoot urban landscapes, as the more remote ones were no longer within my means. The need to shoot was powerful, but equally as strong was the comfort to be had in being in a place where the East River was coursing under a series of bridges, on it’s way to meeting up with the outflow of the Hudson en route to the Atlantic. It was an idyllic time of day to be there, early morning, as the sun rose, or soon after. Floods of tourists have yet to arrive. A trickle of joggers trot past. Winter is best for relative solitude there. I told my son once that seeing the beauty of such places, whether urban or wilderness, filled me with a kind of transcendental joy that seemed to my atheistic self something like religion. “Why something like?” he asked. Why indeed. [image] While most of my BB Park shots were taken early in the morning, I did manage an evening outing there once or twice. Smith concludes by looking ahead at what amazing new tech promises for the future, and for what global warming portends for rivers. Advances in coming technology, particularly small hydro power installations, amelioratives like a project planned for New Orleans, Los Angeles working on finding new sources of fresh water, new satellite swarms that allow incredibly greater monitoring of earthly waterflows and conditions. I cannot say that I have any real gripes about the book. It is well-written and informative, presenting a wealth of information about the history of humanity’s relationship with rivers, and explaining how rivers have helped found and shape civilizations. It will definitely remind you of Jared Diamond’s work. Not a gripe, but I do enjoy a bit of levity in non-fiction. I guess it serves a similar purpose to comic relief in dramas. No danger of running into that here. Still, Rivers of Power will get your gray cells flashing, and maybe push you to think a bit about the river that is nearest you now or the river you recall from when you were growing up. Instead of memory lane, it might be more like memory creek. Today it is bedrock legal principle across the globe that rivers cannot be owned. Even in countries with strong capitalist traditions, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, rivers are a class apart, reserved for the public good. This puts rivers in a category distinctly different from other natural resources. It is extremely common for land, trees, minerals, and water from other natural sources (e.g. springs, ponds, aquifers) to be deemed private property. Rivers, air, and oceans, however, are treated very differently. Review first posted – March 20, 2020 Publication date – April 21, 2020 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
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Mar 17, 2020
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Feb 07, 2020
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Hardcover
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4.20
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it was amazing
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[image] Max Brooks - image from StrategyStrikesBack.com So, I was doing a little research on Max Brooks, having recently received an ARE of his latest [image] Max Brooks - image from StrategyStrikesBack.com So, I was doing a little research on Max Brooks, having recently received an ARE of his latest (as of 2019) book, and came across this graphic history, and advocacy book, that traces our experience with germ warfare of diverse sorts, looks at where we are today, and highlights some of the challenges we face in protecting ourselves from such assaults in future. [image] Image from Comic-watch.com This includes noting the anti-vaxxer movement, among other political perspectives, as reducing our security against incoming bacteria and viruses. It was written for the Bipartisan Commission on Bio Defense, and financed by the Hudson Institute. This does not pretend to be an in depth study. But, as an introduction to the subject, it offers a very accessible, short-read take on the dangers we face, what has happened in the past, and what we might do to help protect our future. Definitely worth your time, and it will not take much of it. The price is right, too. There is a link to a free download below. Published - April 27, 2019 Review first posted - December 30, 2019 Free Download of Germ Warfare can be found here. My review of Brooks' novel, Devolution ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 30, 2019
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3.63
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really liked it
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Jun 08, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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3.71
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really liked it
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Oct 16, 2023
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Oct 18, 2023
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3.84
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it was amazing
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Sep 13, 2023
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4.35
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really liked it
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Jan 08, 2023
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Jan 10, 2023
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3.48
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really liked it
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Oct 24, 2022
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Oct 26, 2022
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4.09
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really liked it
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Jul 05, 2022
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3.88
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really liked it
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Jan 23, 2022
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Jan 23, 2022
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3.95
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it was amazing
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May 10, 2022
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Nov 22, 2021
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3.84
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really liked it
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Oct 23, 2021
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Oct 27, 2021
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4.34
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it was amazing
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Aug 02, 2021
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3.56
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it was amazing
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Jun 30, 2021
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4.27
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really liked it
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Apr 03, 2021
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Apr 13, 2021
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4.32
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it was amazing
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Mar 07, 2021
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Mar 09, 2021
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3.94
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really liked it
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Mar 10, 2021
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4.19
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really liked it
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Mar 16, 2021
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Dec 06, 2020
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4.11
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it was amazing
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Jul 20, 2020
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3.91
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it was amazing
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Mar 21, 2020
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Mar 25, 2020
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3.88
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really liked it
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Mar 09, 2020
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Mar 09, 2020
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3.86
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it was amazing
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Mar 17, 2020
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4.20
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it was amazing
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Dec 2019
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Dec 30, 2019
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