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555. Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    Bill Bryson (Editor, Introduction), James Gleick (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Henry Petroski (Contributor), Georgina Ferrey (Contributor), Steve Jones (Contributor), Philip Ball (Contributor), Paul C.W. Davies (Contributor), Ian Stewart (Contributor), John D. Barrow (Contributor), Oliver Morton (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Maggie Gee (Contributor), Stephen H. Schneider (Contributor), Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Gregory Benford (Contributor), Martin J. Rees (Contributor), Margaret Wertheim (Contributor), Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Rebecca Goldstein (Contributor), Simon Schaffer (Contributor), Richard Holmes (Contributor), Richard Fortey (Contributor), Richard Dawkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Essays, Science, Nature

490 pages, published 2010

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey, Seeing Further was compiled to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.  The Society was started after a small audience listened to a lecture by  twenty-eight year old Christopher Wren on astronomy with the intention of promoting the accumulation of useful knowledge.  Since its inception, the

Royal Society has fostered scientific exploration and discovery and includes Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Bayes, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, and Alexander Fleming as fellows.  Members of the Royal Society have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. In short, it is has played an enormous role in the creation of modern science.

Quotes 

“We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.”

 

 “Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”

 

“Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”

 

“Human memories are short and inaccurate.”

 

“Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).”

 

 “The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.”

 

“The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”

 

“The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”

“The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”

 

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong”

 

 “To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s

 

“A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).”

 

“And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.”

 

“Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.”

 

“There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.”

 

“As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.”

 

“Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’.”

 

“It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial.”

 

“For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.”

 

“It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed several books by Bill Bryson, I was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, Bryson only serves as the Editor and contributes a brief introduction.  Each chapter is written by a different scientific or literary luminary and focuses on some aspect of life related to the Royal Society.  Some are very interesting and some are incredibly dense, causing my eyes to glaze over.  If you are interested in science, you may like this book but I recommend an ala carte approach.

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537. Olive, Again

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Strout

Genre:  Fiction

289 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

The sequel to Olive Kitteridge, Olive, Again continues the story of the unique Olive Kitteridge as she enters old age,  struggling to make sense of her own life and the lives of others in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

Quotes 

“I think our job–maybe even our ‘duty’–is to–To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

 

“Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was.”

 

“And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.”

 

“When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

 

“But we’re both old enough to know things now, and that’s good.” “What things?” “When to shut up, mainly.”

 

 “What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived

 

“God, Olive, you’re a difficult woman. You are such a goddamn difficult woman, and fuck all, I love you. So if you don’t mind, Olive, maybe you could be a little less Olive with me, even if it means being a little more Olive with others. Because I love you, and we don’t have much time.”

 

“And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.”

 

“No. I had enough of babies growing up.” “Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.”

 

“You’re an easy woman to please,” he had said to her. And she had said, “You may be the first person to think that.”

 

“But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go.”

 

“I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”

 

 “When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

 

“I am the opposite of a snob.” Jack laughed a long time. “You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you’re a snob.”

 

“And that woman is not politics. She’s a person, and she has every right to be here.”

 

“And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.”

 

“he was an old man who was talking to himself on a wharf in Portland, Maine, and he could

 

“Stop it! Tell me how it’s really been! He sat back, pushed his glass forward. It’s just the way it was, that’s all. People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.”

 

“She did not have a family as other people did. Other people had their children come and stay and they talked and laughed and the grandchildren sat on the laps of their grandmothers, and they went places and did things, ate meals together, kissed when they parted.”

 

“Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.”

 

“the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary.”

 

 “thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience.”

 

 “Personality disorder? Given the extensive and widespread array of human emotions, why was anything a personality disorder?”

 

“Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, “Oh, it’s just a life, Olive.” Olive thought about this. She said, “Well, it’s your life. It matters.”

 

My Take

It was a pleasure to revisit the character of Olive Kitteridge.  Through her, author Elizabeth Strout shares so many insightful observances of human nature that I often found myself re-reading portions of the book to make sure I registered what was being said.  If you have read Olive Kitteridge and enjoyed it, then by all means read Olive, Again.

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514. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:  Bill Bishop

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Politics, Public Policy

384 pages, published May 7, 2008

Reading Format:   E-Book on Hoopla

Summary

The Big Sort is a social science look at the reasons why America has become so culturally and politically divided. In the past several decades, we have sorted ourselves by neighborhood, religion, political beliefs and culture to the point where many of us now live in echo chambers.

Quotes 

“As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”

 

“like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.”

 

“Education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. Certainly, well-educated Americans see themselves as worldly, nuanced, and comfortable with difference. Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn’t. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view.”

 

“Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004 the gap had grown wide and deep. Answers to questions about child rearing, in fact, provided a better gauge of party affiliation than did income.* The parenting scale was also more closely aligned with “moral issues” than political orientation. Knowing whether a person was a nurturant parent or a strict father provided a better guide to his or her thinking about gay rights than knowing whether he or she was a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.”

 

“The child-rearing scale also helped explain the steady migration of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. It showed that Evangelicals were largely strict fathers. And in 2004, voters who had attended graduate school had a strict father score on the four-question survey that was only half that of voters who hadn’t graduated from high school. “Little wonder our politics today are polarized,” Hetherington and Weiler concluded. “The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues.”

 

My Take

While I found The Big Sort to make some interesting points and got me thinking a bit more about our country’s polarization, it was a bit dense and at times a slog to get through.  It would have benefited from more personal anecdotes.

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435. The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author: Arthur C. Brooks

Genre:   Non Fiction, Public Policy, Politics, Philosophy, History, Economics

261 pages, published July 14, 2015

Reading Format:  e-Book on Hoopla

Summary

In The Conservative Heart, former American Enterprise Institute President and author Arthur C. Brooks writes about his vision for conservatism as a movement for happiness, unity, and social justice that will challenge the liberal monopoly on “fairness” and “compassion.”  While Progressives have always presented themselves as champions of the poor and vulnerable, Brooks argues that they have failed the people they are trying to help as more and more people are hopeless and dependent on the government while Conservatives possess the best solutions to the problems of poverty and declining mobility.  However, because the right doesn’t speak in a way that reflects their concern and compassion, many Americans don’t trust them.  In response to this problem, Brooks presents a social justice agenda grounded in the four “institutions of meaning”:  family, faith, community, and meaningful work.

Quotes 

“No one sighs regretfully on his deathbed and says, “I can’t believe I wasted all that time with my wife and kids,” “volunteering at the soup kitchen,” or “growing in my spirituality.” No one ever says, “I should have spent more time watching TV and playing Angry Birds on my phone.” In my own life, nothing has given my life more meaning and satisfaction than my Catholic faith and the love of my family.”

 

“The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars.”

 

“There is a lot to be mad about in America today, but we must never forget that our cause is a joyous one. Conservatives should be optimists who believe in people. We champion hope and opportunity. Fighting for people, helping those who need us, and saving the country—this is, and should be, happy work.”

 

“Meaningful progress toward social justice cannot be made in sclerotic education systems that put adults’ job security before children’s civil rights.”

 

“the best data consistently show that more than eight in ten Americans like or love their jobs. And incredibly, that result holds steady across the income distribution. This notion that “knowledge work” is fulfilling, but everyone who works in a garage or a restaurant loathes his or her life, is an incredible act of condescension masquerading as concern. The truth is much more egalitarian. Again, economic mobility is crucial, and stagnant wages are a huge problem for American families. But this doesn’t change the deep truth that work, not money, is the fundamental source of our dignity. Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.”

 

“When Ronald Reagan made his case to the American people, he didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what he was fighting against. He spent most of his speech talking about who he was fighting for. This is what conservatives too often forget.”

 

“Households headed by a “conservative” give, on average, 30 percent more dollars to charity than households headed by a “liberal.”

 

“First, we should concentrate each day on the happiness portfolio: faith, family, community, and earned success through work. Teach it to those around you, and fight against the barriers to these things. Second, resist the worldly formula of misery, which is to use people and love things. Instead, remember your core values and live by the true formula: Love people and use things. Third, celebrate the free enterprise system, which creates abundance for the most people—especially the poor. But always remember that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.”

 

“But at the same time, a bloated welfare state that nudges middle-class citizens away from the labor force is moving our society away from the dignity of earned success.”

 

My Take

I had previously read and enjoyed Love Your Enemies by Arthur Brooks, so I had high hopes for The Conservative Heart.  I was not disappointed. Brooks posits compelling ideas and makes a strong case for him.  He also weaves in a lot of on point anecdotes which makes the book very readable.  I was also struck by his thought that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.  It made me think about my relationship to things and how I need to hold them loosely.  Recommended.

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234. Travelers’ Tales Thailand: True Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  James O’Reilley (Editor)

Genre:  Non Fiction, Travel, Humor, Anthology, Short Stories

488 pages, published January 30, 2002

Reading Format:  e-Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

 

 

Quotes 

 

My Take

I read Travelers’ Tales Thailand while visiting Bangkok and Phuket and the book really enhanced my experience.  The stories are generally short and, for the most part, are very well written.  I absolutely recommend this book if you are contemplating a trip to the Land of Smiles.

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