, , , , , , ,

442. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Economics, History, Public Policy

342 pages, published January 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Factfulness is an exploration of how the world is doing so much better than people think.  When asked simple questions such as why the world’s population is increasing, how many young women go to school, or how many people live in poverty, most people get the answers wrong by a large order of magnitude regardless of their education, experience or expertise.  Written by Professor of International Health Hans Rosling, along with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, methodically demonstrates how the world is doing much better than we might think.

Quotes 

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

 

“Look for causes, not villains.”

 

“human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”

 

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

 

“Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”

 

“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

 

“When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

 

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

 

“Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.”

 

“The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.”

 

“The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want”

 

“Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.”

 

“And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn’t make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.”

 

“Ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.”

 

“The next generation is like the last runner in a very long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party when we are done.”

 

“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.”

 

My Take

While Factfulness is an interesting book, it reminded me very much of two other books that I have read on my quest:  Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks.  All of these books preach the same message, i.e. that things are actually going a lot better in the world than we think they are and that worldwide poverty is in decline.  Factfulness author Hans Rosling backs everything up with facts and makes a compelling case.  I’m not sure how things are going in the world in the age of covid-19 and global shutdown.  I’m hoping we can get back on the positive trajectory that Rosling describes.

/by
, , , , , ,

440. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Epstein

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business, Psychology, Self Improvement, Science

352 pages, published May 28, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Range, author David Epstein takes on the accepted wisdom that the key to success in most fields involves singular focus from a young age combined with thousands of hours of deliberate practice, i.e. the 10,000 hour rule immortalized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  Think Tiger Woods or Mozart.  Epstein takes a contrarian view and explores the view that the most effective path to success is to dabble and/or delay.  He looks at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, and shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. Inventors who cross domains and engage in multiple disciplines have the greatest impact.  Range makes the case that failing is the best way to learn and shows that frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers.

Quotes 

“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.”

 

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.  Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”

 

“Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”

 

“Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”

 

“You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”

 

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”

 

“The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.”

 

“breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

 

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.”

 

“While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”

 

“First act and then think…We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”

 

My Take

I enjoy reading books that challenge long held assumptions and Range falls squarely into that camp.  I have long believed the conventional wisdom that early focus, repetitive practice and hyper specialization were the road to success.  However, author David Epstein makes a compelling case, backed up with data, that the road to greatness is often a meandering one, with failure, course changes and a broad range of interdisciplinary influences rating as essential elements.  In reading this book, I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci, the biography of the iconic artist and inventor who drew on a wide range of influences for some of his most creative and groundbreaking work.

/by
, , , , ,

439. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  David and Tammis Matzinger

Author:   Adam Higginbotham

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Science, Foreign

561 pages, published February 12, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Midnight in Chernobyl is an exhaustive look at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster which follows individuals from many different facets of the story, from those working in the plant to the scientists who desperately try to mitigate the crisis to the leaders who make the ultimate decisions of life and death.  The book also provides the reader with an inside look at the corruption and rot within the Soviet system that led to both the nuclear disaster and the eventual downfall of the USSR.

Quotes 

“a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty.”

 

“Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.”

 

“Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.”

 

“For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by the end of 1986. Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31.”

 

“A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.”

 

“As the Era of Stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state—space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power—while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.”

 

“and leveling inconveniently situated mountains with atom bombs—or, as the Russian expression went, “correcting the mistakes of nature.”

 

“But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.”

 

“the atomic chieftains of NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute apparently believed that a well-written set of manuals would be enough to guarantee nuclear safety.”

 

“So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely: the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.”

 

“the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation.”

 

“The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 degrees centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.”

 

“Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.”

 

My Take

When I first picked up a thick copy of Midnight in Chernobyl (which clocks in at 561 pages and had been assigned by one of my book groups), I was expecting a bit of a long slog.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Author Adam Higginbotham is a skilled writer who weaves a gripping tale of what went wrong in Chernobyl and how a corrupt Communist system built on deception and covering up unpleasant truths laid the ground work for one of the biggest manmade disasters in the history of the world.  I learned a lot and highly recommend this book.  I also recommend the HBO miniseries Chernobyl which is an engrossing watch.

/by
, , , ,

428. Lab Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Hope Jahren

Genre:   Nonfiction, Science, Memoir

290 pages, published March 1, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Lab Girl is written by acclaimed scientist and geobiologist Hope Jahren who has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil.  Jahren writes about both her long, difficult journey to become a world renowned scientist and insights from her botanical experiments.

Quotes 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

 

“Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.”

 

“Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to

  1. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that

waited.”

 

“A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”

 

“Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”

 

“We love each other because we can’t help it. We don’t work at it and we don’t sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work — and similarly, there are some things that you just can’t screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him…”

 

“I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.”

 

“No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor — to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades — even centuries — will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.”

 

“My true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.”

 

“Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”       

 

“The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.”

 

 

“After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant’s yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.”

 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”

 

“I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.”

 

“A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.”

 

“America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it.”

 

“Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.  Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood…”

 

My Take

Lab Girl is an informative, interesting and inspirational memoir by the talented scientist/writer Hope Jahren.  Jahren had to overcome a lot of obstacles and endure some tough times before receiving recognition for her work as a geobiologist, but she would not have chosen any other path.  I especially enjoyed reading about her relationship with the idiosyncratic Bill Hagopian, a true American original, Jahren’s career long scientist sidekick.

/by
, , , ,

399. The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Mike Brady

Author:   Michio Kaku

Genre:    Nonfiction, Science, Technology

368 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Future of Humanity focuses on human space travel and colonization of other planets.  Futurist Michio Kaku explores how developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology could enable us to build habitable cities on Mars, nearby stars might be reached by microscopic spaceships sailing through space on laser beams, and technology might one day allow us to transcend our physical bodies entirely and achieve immortality.

Quotes 

“I sometimes think about how easy it is for a nation to slip into complacency and ruin after decades of basking in the sun. Since science is the engine of prosperity, nations that turn their backs on science and technology eventually enter a downward spiral.”

 

“Do we have enough food to feed the people of the world as they become middle class consumers? The hundreds of millions of people in China and India who are now entering the middle class watch Western movies and want to emulate that lifestyle, with its wasteful use of resources, large consumption of meat, big houses, fixation on luxury goods, et cetera. He is concerned we may not have enough resources to feed the population as a whole, and certainly would have difficulty feeding those who want to consume a Western diet.”

 

“Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, once declared, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”

 

“It’s easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie-all just by thinking. Astronauts of the future may use the power of their minds to pilot their spaceships or explore distant planets. Cities may rise from the desert of Mars, all due to master builders who mentally control the work of robots.”

 

“One reason why childhood lasts so long is because there is so much subtle information to absorb about human society and the natural world.”

 

“An even more advanced form of uploading your mind into a computer was envisioned by computer scientist Hans Moravec. When I interviewed him, he claimed that his method of uploading the human mind could even be done without losing consciousness. First you would be placed on a hospital gurney, next to a robot. Then a surgeon would take individual neurons from your brain and create a duplicate of these neurons (made of transistors) inside the robot. A cable would connect these transistorized neurons to your brain. As time goes by, more and more neurons are removed from your brain and duplicated in the robot. Because your brain is connected to the robot brain, you are fully conscious even as more and more neurons are replaced by transistors. Eventually, without losing consciousness, your entire brain and all its neurons are replaced by transistors. Once all one hundred billion neurons have been duplicated, the connection between you abd the artificial brain is finally cut. When you gaze back at the stretcher, you see your body, lacking its brain, while your consciousness now exists inside a robot.”

 

“If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us. When we dig beneath our feet into the soil to unearth the fossil record, we see evidence of many ancient life-forms. Yet only the smallest handful survive today. Millions of species have appeared before us; they had their day in the sun, and then they withered and died. That is the story of life.”

 

My Take

As a lifelong lover of science fiction and futurism, The Future of Humanity was an fascinating read for me.  Kaku writes about lots of interesting ideas in a manner that is accessible to the lay reader.  I also learned a lot.

/by
, , , , , ,

388. American Wolf

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Nate Blakeslee

Genre:    Nonfiction, Animals, Nature, Science, History, Environment

320 pages, published August, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

American Wolf follows the story of Rick McIntyre, a park ranger in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park, who spends all of his time studying and teaching about wolves.  We also learn a great deal about the different wolf packs that inhabit Yellowstone and the legal fight to protect them.

Quotes 

“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore.”

 

“Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”

 

“What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way.”

 

“But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world. He loved to quote the early-twentieth-century English philosopher Carveth Read: “Man, in character, is more like a wolf… than he is any other animal.”

 

“By the 1920’s, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in “Of Wolves and Men”, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained?

There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”

 

My Take

Well, I learned a lot about wolves after reading this book.  If you have an interest in them, then I highly recommend this book.  If you don’t, you still might like it.

/by
, , , , ,

381. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Malcolm Gladwell

Genre:    Nonfiction, Psychology, Sociology, Science

400 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? Talking to Strangers is all about what happens when we encounter people we don’t know, why it often goes awry, and what it says about us.

How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to ‘get’ other people?

Quotes 

“To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception – is worse.”

 

“The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet… The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

 

“Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.”

 

“The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.”

 

“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.”

 

My Take

Like all Malcolm Gladwell books, Talking to Strangers is a fascinating read.  I always learn something new and unexpected from him.  In this book, my main takeaway is that while trusting others and giving strangers the benefit of the doubt can occasionally lead to an unfortunate result, it is the price that we all have to pay to live in a society that works.

/by
, , , , ,

366. Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Losure

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Science, History

176 pages, published February 1, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Isaac the Alchemist is a biography of Isaac Newton, the father of physics, an extraordinary mathematician, and leader of the scientific revolution.  It starts with his boyhood living in an apothecary’s house and traces his life through Cambridge and adulthood where he made remarkable discoveries and immeasurably impacted science, physics and mathematics.

Quotes 

“The outlines of birds and beasts and sailing ships could still be seen in the apothecary’s attic in Grantham, along with the drawings of men and mathematical symbols. But the boy who who had made them was gone. He had taken his notebook with him: his secret world of star names and tawny lions and golden ink made from quicksilver.”

 

“He could travel in his mind, though. He did it all the time.”

 

“When your head is filled with things that other people don’t seem to give much thought to – chymistry, star names, mandrake root, mathematicall magick – it can be hard to make friends. Being short, secretive, and smarter than everybody else doesn’t help.” 

My Take

A bit dry, but I did learn a lot about Isaac Newton.

/by
, , , , ,

360. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Tammis and David Matzinger

Author:   John Carreyrou

Genre:  Non Fiction, Business, Crime, Science

339 pages, published May 21, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Bad Blood is written by John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of massive fraud and deception by Silicon Valley startup Theranos which was at one time valued at 9 billion dollars and whose board of directors included such luminaries as George Schulz, David Bois, David Mattis and Henry Kissinger.  Carreyrou tells the fascinating of Stanford drop out Elizabeth Holmes, who fancied herself as a female Steve Jobs, and her quest to revolutionize the lab testing business by making blood tests significantly faster and easier.   However, when the technology didn’t work, Theranos started down a path of deception, obfuscation and harassment of anyone bold enough to challenge them.

Quotes 

“A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.” 

My Take

I first heard about Theranos when I watched a 60 minutes expose on Elizabeth Holmes.  That piqued my interest to read Bad Blood.  However, I had to wait for my husband Scot to finish it before I had a turn.  After I finished, my mom and stepdad breezed through it in short order.  What a fascinating, page turner!  An extremely compelling true story with lots of larger than life characters, plot twists and a morality tale.  Highly recommended.

/by
, , , , , ,

350. It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lenna Kotke

Author:   Gregg Easterbrook

Genre:  Sociology, Economics, Public Policy, Politics, Science

352 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In It’s Better Than It Looks, author Gregg Easterbrook surveys a number of different metrics to see how well the world is doing and makes a convincing case that things are much better than most people think.  Under every meaningful measure, the modern world is better than it ever has ever been.  In the United States, disease, crime, discrimination, and most forms of pollution are in long-term decline, while longevity and education keep rising and economic indicators are better than in any past generation. Worldwide, malnutrition and extreme poverty are at historic lows, and the risk of dying by war or violence is the lowest in human history.

Quotes 

 

My Take

As a naturally optimistic and grateful person, It’s Better Than It Looks is my kind of book.  It is a clear-eyed look at how humanity is actually faring in the 21st century and the answer is amazingly well.  When you think about the fact that 70 to 80 million people died during World War II alone, you have a much better appreciation for how much things have improved worldwide in the past 70 years.  It’s Better Than It Looks reminded a lot of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, another worthy read on this same topic.

/by