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0735221154
| 9780735221154
| 0735221154
| 4.03
| 761
| Oct 25, 2016
| Oct 25, 2016
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really liked it
| In his discussion of Genghis Khan’s career, Gibbon inserted a small but provocative footnote, linking Genghis Khan to European philosophical ideas In his discussion of Genghis Khan’s career, Gibbon inserted a small but provocative footnote, linking Genghis Khan to European philosophical ideas of tolerance and, surprisingly, to the religious freedom of the emerging United States.The journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single steppe. (sorry) In this case the author’s twelve-year sojourn began with a single footnote (among about eight thousand) in Edward Gibbon’s six-volume history of the Roman Empire. Was it possible that the notion of religious freedom that has been a hallmark of the United States since its inception as a nation (despite the many over the years, and even today, who seek to impose their religious views on the secular country) was inspired, at least in part, by the notorious Mongol conqueror? Well, as that famous champion of religious freedom, Sarah Palin, might say, “you betcha.” [image] Jack Weatherford From Macalaster College The book is a Genghis Khan sandwich. The slice of bread at the bottom is the notion of GK having had an impact on America’s core value of freedom of religion. Did he or didn’t he? The slabs of meat in the sandwich would be the extensive look at GK’s life, accomplishments, and laws. And finish up with the covering bread slice that brings the analysis to a close. I suppose one might, alternatively, see it as being structured like a mystery. Present an initial notion (instead of a crime) and then look for clues that might offer evidence, whether confirming or exculpatory. Finish up with a Miss Marple-ish, Poirot-ish, or Sam Spade-ish explanation that connects the elements for a final understanding of where the truth lies. [image] Omar Sharif in the lead of the 1965 film, Genghis Khan - from Dusted Off Genghis Khan and the Quest for God makes for a very meaty sandwich. It is so meaty in fact that you might forget the initial question of impact on US history and get lost in the biographical details. It is not a straight-up biography of, arguably, the greatest conqueror the world has ever seen. The Secret History of the Mongols, written soon after GK’s passing was that, and provides a major resource for this book. Weatherford has made it a major portion of his life’s work to study GK, and ferret out how his Olympian accomplishments have influenced the world. His best known book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, published in 2004, looked at how the Mongol empire might have influenced European civilization. It was a NY Times best-seller, taking on the popular view of GK as a barbarian, showing him as a wise ruler, if brutal warrior, whose innovations were significant in fueling the European Renaissance. In this work, Weatherford puts on a different set of lenses and focuses on how spiritual beliefs helped mold Genghis and how he changed the way nation-states did, or at least could deal with religion. We get the biography but also a consideration of what the extant belief systems were during his life, and what he took from them. As a child I became engrossed in reading about Marco Polo, Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan and developed a fascination with Mongolia. In college I tried to go to Mongolia to continue that interest, but the Cold War prevented it. I put aside that interest and continued with others that I had, but when Mongolia opened in the 1990's I went to visit more out of curiousity than for any planned work. Once there, the passion of my childhood flamed higher than ever. Although I did not speak the language I felt spiritually, intellectually and emotionally at home. - from the Asia East interview [image] Tadanobu Asano’s GK in the film Mongol - from Metroactive.com I came to this book with little knowledge of Genghis Khan, so it was eye-opening for me. Definitely brain-candy. Khan’s quest was not merely for ever-greater swaths of real estate. He was also very interested in examining the religions of all the peoples he conquered, as well as the religions of other nations, and ferreting out the wisdom from the BS. He was a sincerely religious individual, with a belief system that might find plenty of resonance with seekers of truth in the 21st century. The guy was truly interested in finding out whatever underlying truths each religion might offer. [image] Odnyam Odsuren - Temujin as a boy in Mongol - from Movie-roulette.com The book follows GK from when he was a boy named Temujin, practically an orphan. We see his initial acts of brutality. Do not, I repeat not, pick on that Temujin kid. We see his stepwise rise to power, and gain an appreciation for the lessons he learns along the way. As well as presenting the spiritual elements that impressed the boy and later the man we learn a lot about the family and community structures and values of diverse groups during the sixty-some-odd years of GK’s life. (1162 to 1227). We see him adopt a standard written language for his empire, practice relative meritocracy in managing his widespread lands, unite diverse nomadic tribes, through alliances and conquest, encourage trade along the now stable Silk Road, and implement a core notion of freedom of religion. Some barbarian! Of course, that whole genocide thing puts a crimp in the rosier view one might have of Ghenghis. Of course, it may have been somewhat exaggerated by the history writers of antiquity as well, as it was their class of people GK looked to eliminate when conquering new territory. Still, fairly barbarous, but barbarity is pretty much the only image many of us might have of him. There was clearly a lot more to Khan than wrath. [image] John Wayne as a cowboy GK in The Conqueror (1956) - from Media Pathfinder The only quibble I have with the book may better described as whining. There are a lot, a serious lot of names to try keeping track of here. It may take a village to raise a child, but one does not necessarily need to know the name of every villager. Ditto here. While there are many names to track, the arc of the story will flow along just fine if you only latch on to a few. One thing the encyclopedic name inclusion does is make the book a slower read than it might have been. On the other hand, the actual hardcover text takes up only 362 pages, so it falls far short of tome. And if you spare yourself the form of self-mortification I indulge in while reading, that being writing down every name I come across, it should be a much quicker read for you than it was for me. [image] The standard image of GK - from BBC Genghis Khan and the Quest for God was an eye-opening read, introducing as a real person what had been a stick-figure character of myth, to me, anyway. Weatherford offers a persuasive case for GK’s implementation of religious freedom having had an impact on the American founders. But, as with mysteries, we know that the final explanation is only a part of the joy. The bulk is in the characters, the settings and the language. So too with this. Whether you buy Weatherford’s argument for GK’s influence on the newborn USA or not, the journey through the life of Genghis Khan is worth the price of admission. Go ahead, conquer your ignorance. Lay waste your lack of knowledge about GK. This book is bloody fascinating. Review first posted – 11/24/16 Publication date – 10/15/16 The folks at Viking sent this book, along with some goats and a few horses, in return for an honest review. =============================EXTRA STUFF The film Mongol, on Youtube, covers the earlier portion of GK’s life and is quite beautiful to look at. Liberties are taken with history, but it is a treat. Videos ----- Jack Weatherford speaks about Genghis Khan at Embry-Riddle Honors Series – 1:15:05 -----A nice undergrad lecture - The Mongol Impact on World History by Ed Vajda – 52:29 ----- Genghis Khan - Great Khan Of The Mongol Empire And Great Destroyer - a kitschy documentary that looks at GK from a psychological perspective, among other things, follows the tracks of an ancient book about GK, The Secret History - from Documentary Lab ----- BBC Genghis Khan ----- Mongol – the full movie – 1:56:34 -----Captain Kirk goes monosyllabic - Khan! The Wrestler Princess - a fascinating telling by Weatherford of a Mongolian princess selecting a mate – from Lapham’s Quarterly A 2008 interview with Weatherford – by Daniel White for Asia East – this is a very slight interview There is variation in how Genghis Khan is pronounced. Is the initial G hard, as in goal, or soft as in gypsy? It is the latter, with maybe a tilt toward a "ch" as in cha-cha. What is surprising is that Khan is actually pronounced like Han, as in Han Solo. The Wikipedia page for GK includes a pronunciation app so you can hear it. ...more |
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Nov 06, 2016
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Nov 17, 2016
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Nov 18, 2016
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Hardcover
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055341996X
| 9780553419962
| 055341996X
| 3.71
| 5,278
| Oct 27, 2015
| Oct 27, 2015
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it was amazing
| Darkness DarknessForget the zombie apocalypse. Ted Koppel, a very level-headed newsman, has brought to light a glaring soft spot in our national defense that could very well be exploited by enemies of the USA. And we are not talking about something like the regional blackouts that have already occurred here. This will not be your father’s blackout, but the sort of scenario long imagined by writers and film-makers with an Armageddon fixation. How would America defend itself against an invasion if major portions of the country had been crippled? Would an enemy even need to invade? Or would it be enough for a dark force to enjoy the sight of the United States of America devolving into tribal packs vying for limited resources in a Mad Max milieu? [image] Ted Koppel - from The NY Daily News In Lights Out, Koppel covers a considerable range, looking at the specifics of where the vulnerabilities lie, physically, economically and politically. He talks with military experts in the US Cyber Command, private cyber-security experts, emergency planning experts, power company experts, hackers, insurers, and others. Government cyber-security, for example, is charged with defending military assets, not private ones. What would it mean, constitutionally, were the DoD to be involved in providing domestic security for private companies? There is scant consolation to be found in the fact that a major attack on the grid hasn’t happened yet. Modified attacks on government, banking, commercial, and infrastructure targets are already occurring daily, and while sufficient motive to take out an electric power grid may be lacking for the moment, capability is not.And he does not limit his attention to internet-based attacks, offering consideration of other means by which a determined enemy could knock out significant portions of the grid with tech like EMPs, or even well-targeted, garden variety munitions deployed by a small number of special forces type teams. There is evidence that this has already been practiced, by parties unknown. As with most things, there is little public or industry support for the sort of large-scale work that would need to be done to bolster power grid security, the increase in regulation, and the corresponding erosion of civil liberties that would be entailed. This will continue until an actual attack takes place. Of course by then it would be too late. A 2008 report predicts that only one in ten Americans would survive a year into a national blackout.Lights Out gives us some idea of just how uncentralized our electrical system is. Despite our sense that there are only a few large power companies in the country, there are in fact thousands. Add to that companies that distribute power without generating any. It will come as no surprise that one of the major problems is that companies will not, and in many instances cannot, invest in needed security tech, because of the impact on efficiency and profitability. Larger companies could. Smaller ones, often, could not spend the money needed and remain viable. Does this mean that the taxpayer should pick up the tab? Maybe smaller companies should be encouraged to merge with larger power companies in the interest of national security? That there are vulnerabilities in our infrastructure should come as no surprise to anyone. I doubt that the USA is unique in this, but we tend to ignore problems until they are in our faces. And even then will often seek out short-term amelioration rather than long-term solutions. Cheaper is always better and when things go south, there is always someone else to blame. But one bit of Koppel’s research offered a very large surprise. There is one community in the country that seems up to the challenge, well, not entirely, but to a greater degree than any other group, in government or out. And that is The Church of Latter Day Saints, Mormons to you and me. Koppel spends three chapters looking into their planning for whatever may come. And it is jaw-droppingly impressive. If the big one comes sometime soon, whatever the big one may be, Mitt Romney may get to be president of whatever remains of the United States. For every fact that Koppel turns up, and there are many, one or more questions are raised, and implications and complications spread out from all of those. There is a vast array of uncertainty in considering how we might keep the lights on when they are attacked, or at the very least how to quickly recover from such an attack. Q: How likely is an attack on our power grid?Solution-wise, it seems to me that, in addition to developing and installing hardware and software on our power grid control and distribution systems that it designed to thwart hostile actions, there is a clear national security advantage to encouraging the development of decentralized power sources. The national interstate highway system that was proposed in 1944 was inspired by the autobahns of Germany. When General Eisenhower became President Eisenhower, he saw to it that the proposal got funded. One rationale was a need to evacuate cities quickly, should a nuclear attack be expected. Of course, today that notion seems quaint, given how congested our urban roads are in the absence of panic mode. But the roads got built because the nation decided it needed to be done for the common defense. A similar argument might be made to secure the defense of our electric systems. Unlike any other kind of threat this country has ever faced, it can be very difficult tracking the source, the origin of a cyber attack. Given all of that you might assume that the government has formulated special plans to deal with the aftermath of such an attack. There are plans for hurricanes, and blizzards, and earthquakes, but this would be very different. The power outages caused by a targeted cyber attack would last longer and cover a much wider area than any of those natural disasters. So, is there a plan? No. - from Koppel’s video intro to the book, on his siteIf the powers that be ever get around to putting a plan together, it could include a range of options, including supporting research to develop more efficient batteries, supporting research and development in promising renewable energy sources, with a focus on technology that can be implemented broadly, instead of relying primarily on major power plants. It would also be a useful thing for there to be an ability to manufacture transformer station hardware in the USA, something the country currently lacks. Enemies might be able to foul national or regional power distribution and communications, but it might be tougher to switch off every rooftop solar array, or neighborhood windmill. Government support for cyber defense (offense too, as Iran well knows) has already begun with the establishment of the United States Cyber Command in 2009. It seems clear that non-government players will need to be engaged as well to make certain that the USA, which is totally reliant on our electrical and internet infrastructure, keeps a step ahead of those who would do us harm. …as Mike McConnell [then director of national intelligence] said: ‘For the record, if we were attacked, we would lose.’Koppel has done the nation a service by bringing this pressing security peril to light. It remains to be seen, of course, whether there is sufficient political will to actually do something about it. How ironic would it be if out power grid were left endangered by political gridlock? You wanna hit that switch on your way out? Review first posted – 10/7/2016 Publication dates ----- 10/27/2015 - Hardcover ----- 10/16/2016 - Trade Paper =============================EXTRA STUFF FWIW, I had an opportunity to meet my favorite Pennsylvania Senator, Bob Casey, twice during the 2018 election season, quick meet-and-greet situations. In the first, I told him about the book, and related the concerns. In the second, I presented him with a copy, just on the off chance that my initial suggestion had somehow slipped through the cracks. No idea, really, if he ever followed up on that. I have to presume not, as I never heard back. But I hope it took residence in some part of his brain for when related policy discussions take place. [image] Koppel’s vid intro to the book The site for the book In case you missed it in the body of the review, here is the link to the 2008 EMP Commission report that offered a rather grim prediction for one-year blackout survivability October 8, 2016 - A NY Times article by David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth about possible responses to Russia having hacked our 2016 election, includes relevant items of interest - What Options Does the U.S. Have After Accusing Russia of Hacks? Russia...turned off the electric grid in part of Ukraine last December, mostly to show that they could.and Security experts point to evidence that a well-funded Russian hacking group, known as Energetic Bear, has been probing the networks of power grid operators and energy and oil companies in the United States, Europe and Canada. That could be exploration — or it could be preparation of the battle space in the event of a future conflict.November 3, 2016 - a NY Times article by John Markoff on a related subject- Why Light Bulbs May Be the Next Hacker Target July 6, 2017 - NY Times - Hackers are Targeting Nuclear Facilities, Homeland Security Dept. and F.B.I. Say - by Nicole Perlroth [image] The Wolf Creek Nuclear power plant in Kansas in 2000. The corporation that runs the plant was targeted by hackers. Credit David Eulitt/Capital Journal, via Associated Press Image was taken from the NY Times article ...more |
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Aug 20, 2016
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Sep 30, 2016
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Sep 30, 2016
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0062458329
| 9780062458322
| 0062458329
| 3.18
| 4,746
| Feb 07, 2017
| Feb 07, 2017
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really liked it
| The first time I meet Patrick Braddock, I’m wearing his wife’s lipstick. The color is exactly wrong for me. Deep, ripe plum, nearly purple, the ty The first time I meet Patrick Braddock, I’m wearing his wife’s lipstick. The color is exactly wrong for me. Deep, ripe plum, nearly purple, the type of harsh shade that beautiful women wear to prove they can get away with anything. Against my ordinary features, the lipstick is as severe as a bloodstain. I feel like a misbehaving child trying on her mother’s makeup.Eurydice rents by the hour, but not in the usual way. She is a body, gainfully employed by the Elysian Society. When she takes a certain pill, called a lotus, she becomes a channel to the afterlife, a link between the living and the expired. Parents miss their child? Children miss their parents? Spouses, relatives, friends, lovers miss the loved ones who have ceased to be? Come on down. (No mention of anyone missing their Norwegian Blue) For the duration of the session the body is inhabited, by someone else’s spirit, allowing the living to spend time with one who has passed on. Turnover in this line of work is high. Eurydice, Edie, a twenty-something, has worked as a body for five years, a pretty long time for anyone to be nailed to this particular perch. She presents as a fairly monochromatic presence, average looks, pedestrian sense of style, no apparent interests or connections. But when hunky attorney Patrick Braddock comes to Room 12, desperate to reconnect with his demised wife, life takes on a bit of color. [image] Sara Flannery Murphy - from her site Eurydice is deliciously named. There are diverse versions of the story, but the Eurydice of myth was an oak nymph or a daughter of Apollo, and wife of Orpheus. She met an untimely end, and Orpheus used his skills to try to retrieve her from Hades. The lotus pills that the bodies take recall the Lotus Eaters of Greek mythology, who, lacking the mind-numbing cornucopia that is modern mass entertainment, spent far too much time under the influence of a certain plant, the lotus, which induces a narcotic and possibly psychotropic state. Sylvia, Patrick’s bucket kicker ex wife, has a name that means spirit of the wood, so I am going with the oak nymph thing for Edie. The Elysian Society is named for the Elysian Fields, also of Greek mythology. It was where the souls of the good and the brave went to their final rest. However, in this tale there is little rest for those who have shuffled off this mortal coil. I guess that makes it more of a spring. There are two primary mysteries in this psychological thriller. What’s the deal with the recently deceased young woman, dubbed Hopeful Doe, found with an unplanned concavity in her skull? And what’s the deal with Eurydice, who had made herself an antisocial cipher? What is she hiding? One thing Edie is not any good at hiding is that Patrick, a regular Elysian Society client, makes her hormones go Voom. How much of Patrick’s attention is to her as Eurydice, and how much is his continued attachment to a wife who really is an ex? Can you have an honest love affair if what you see in front of you is him and what he sees in front of him is her? Obsession is strange that way. Part of the channeling deal is that the client brings the body objects that belonged to the choir-invisible singer. One particularly powerful object is a tube of garish lipstick, a talismanic tool that seems to bring Sylvia back with a passion. Edie has no recollection of what happens during the sessions, but her interest in Patrick leads her to want to know more about Sylvia. Edie keeps finding out bits and pieces, about Patrick, about Sylvia, about the Elysian Society, and about the bereft of life Hopeful Doe, slowly parting the curtains on dark deeds. The chapters shorten, the alternating scenes flip back and forth, the peril mounts, and, as one might expect, things race along to an exciting conclusion, as we get more and more details, and find out which of the briney smoked kippers are red and which are true. It is a bit tough to classify The Possessions. There is definitely a fantasy element to it. I suppose one might consider that science-fiction-y, or even a candidate for the horror shelf. It has a strong mystery element, and feels noir-ish. The best overall fit is psychological thriller. If categorization is important to you, good luck. It is like trying to fit a five-dimensional object into a three dimensional hole. There are even some literary tones that sound here and there. I could swear I caught a whiff of Rebecca. As for gripes. I was not all that taken with the ultimate explanations for some of the several mysteries. Edie offered nothing about her own story until the very end. I thought that should have been teased in a bit earlier. Some of the decisions Edie makes were highly questionable, and I wanted to learn more about some of the secondary characters. So, the floral arrangements could have used one more pass. But the thing that shook me senseless here was the concept, and that made the rest very forgivable. What grabbed me about this and had me bellowing into the phone was that this looked to me an awful lot like a potential franchise opener. The questions kept appearing in my head like a pop-up video marathon on meth. I wander off at length about that in the EXTRA EXTRA STUFF section at the bottom, so am giving it short shrift here. Suffice it to say that I found the author’s core concept of bodies as vessels for those who are no more to be killer material. As experiences with mediums go, this one is extra large. If you are pining for a fast, fun read, once you begin, you may need a good, stiff drink, because you won’t rest in peace until The Possessions has crossed over from being a TBR item to becoming an ex-read. Review First Posted – 9/9/16 Publication date - 2/7/2017 ==========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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Sep 03, 2016
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Sep 04, 2016
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Sep 03, 2016
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0812992733
| 9780812992731
| 0812992733
| 3.85
| 5,469
| Apr 07, 2016
| Aug 09, 2016
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really liked it
| On December 5, 2008, the front page of the New York Times included an unusual item: H. M., Whose Loss of Memory Made Him Unforgettable, Dies. It On December 5, 2008, the front page of the New York Times included an unusual item: H. M., Whose Loss of Memory Made Him Unforgettable, Dies. It was hardly the first time that an obit piece had appeared on the front page, but it is unlikely that many with quite so little public recognition had ever appeared there. The “H.M.” in question was one Henry Gustave Molaison. He has been the inspiration for many books, at least one play and a major motion picture. Mostly, though, while he had never studied medicine, or practiced in any medical field, Molaison had made a huge contribution to our understanding of the human brain. [image] Luke Dittrich -From PRHSpeakers.com Young Henry was seriously concussed in a biking accident when he was a kid. As a teenager he began having grand mal seizures. His symptoms increased and seriously affected his ability to function in the world. Drug treatments had proved unsuccessful. It was a new thing for such a procedure to be done for someone who was not considered mentally ill, but in 1953, when he was 27 years old, Henry was given a lobotomy. From that day on, he would no longer be able to form new memories. He would also be unable to fend for himself. But he was perfectly lucid, and able to have a life, albeit a restricted one. Because of his unusual condition, Henry became the primary neurological test subject of his time. He was examined, interviewed, and studied by untold numbers of researchers until his death. He was the subject of countless professional papers, in which he was always referred to in professional literature by his initials, in order to protect his privacy. Anyone working in the field would know well the initials HM. William Beecher Scoville was the doctor who had performed the risky surgery. He was Luke Dittrich’s grandfather. [image] Dr William Beecher - from Dittrich’s Esquire article Patient H.M is both a medical and personal history, as Dittrich looks at the scientific advances that took place over a 60 year period, the history of his grandfather, and the life of Henry. It is perfectly accessible for the average reader, with a minimum of technical jargon. You will definitely learn some things, like the difference between episodic and semantic memory. Memory scientists often speak of the important difference between knowing that a certain fact is true and knowing how you came to learn it. For example, here’s a simple question: What’s the capital of France? The answer probably leapt to your mind in an instant. Now, here’s another question: When did you learn that Paris is the capital of France? If you’re like most people, you have no idea. That particular fact twinkles in your mind amid an enormous constellation of other facts, most of them forever disconnected from the moment they first sprang to life. The store of mostly disconnected facts is known as your semantic memory.This gives you a taste of how fluidly Dittrich writes of a subject that, in lesser hands, could easily have become dense. Gramps was not exactly mister nice guy. He had a reputation for fast living and was very successful and ambitious, maybe to the point of excessive risk-taking. The state of mental health understanding and care in the 1950s is fascinating, and the stuff of nightmares. Nurse Ratched would have been right at home. Part of this tale is the fumbling from step to step that took place in trying to understand how the brain works. It makes one very thankful that we have technology today that can look at the brain with non-invasive machines instead of scalpels. It was news, for instance, that there were at least two kinds of memory, as noted above, and that they might reside in different parts of the brain. We learn how Henry came to be afflicted in his special way, how he lived, and how he was treated, both as a human being and a test subject. [image] Henry as a young man - from The Telegraph There are significant human rights issues here. Henry was and remained a human being, yet he was regarded by some researchers in a very proprietary way, in one instance being referred to in a legal document as “An MIT research project entitled “The Amnesic Patient H.M.” Not exactly warm and fuzzy. Academic turf-guarding comes in for a look. One researcher, in particular, goes so far as to destroy original data that might have jeopardized her career-long published findings. Access to Henry was guarded as energetically as the formula for real Coke, and not always for the purpose of looking after Henry’s best interests. Dittrich raises ethical issues, noting similarities between what was considered respectable medicine in the 20th century and barbaric behavior of the then recent past in how people had been used as test subjects for medical research. And there is a particularly existential question that comes into play. If we are our memories, who and what are we if we can no longer make any? And it makes one wonder about new science that may offer us a way to erase traumatic memories, in the vein of the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dittrich had an in, of course, but sometimes the family connection gets in the way. He tends to wax nostalgic about his grandfather, and wanders off topic for stretches. Some may enjoy these, and they were ok, I guess, but I found myself getting irritated at what seemed an excessive levels of detail, particularly in imagined scenarios. Thankfully, the eye-rolling portions of the book do not detract too much from the rest. [image] Suzanne Corkin doggedly guarded her access to HM There are clear similarities to be found between this book and two others that deal with medical history. The obvious comparison is to Rebecca Skloot’s best-seller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In that cells that had been taken from a patient, and found to have remarkable qualities, were subsequently used, without permission, to support vast amounts of research. Ethical considerations raised in the book are considerable. But the much less well known Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont, by Jason Karlawish, is the book that seems the most directly comparable. In that one, Dr. Beaumont of the title takes advantage of an unusual medical condition to keep a patient available for his research for a prolonged period. It raises similar ethical issues to the ones raised in Patient H.M.. Bottom line is that Luke Dittrich has given us a fascinating look at an obscure figure, bringing to life what medical progress actually looks like, and how much like sausage-making it really can be. He raises some very important ethical concerns not only about how Henry was treated as a person, but how access to Henry was handled, and how the information gleaned by researchers was guarded, and in at least one instance, destroyed. If you are at all interested in the brain and in the history of advances in medical knowledge, and do not take a look at Patient H.M. you should probably have your head examined. Review Posted – 8/5/16 Publication date - 8/9/16 =============================EXTRA STUFF More Material From Luke Dittrich -----All Dittrich’s writings for Esquire, including a piece that takes aim at a neurosurgeon who claims he had gone to heaven. -----A short version of Henry’s Story -----Dittrich’s original Esquire article, The Brain that Changed Everyting -----The Brain That Couldn’t Remember- NY Times Magazine – August 7, 2016 Jacopo Annese, oversaw the slicing of Henry’s brain post-mortem and digitizing of every bit into an image database. His institute created a 3D virtual model of Henry’s brain. Check out his site here. This video shows HM’s brain being sliced at Dr. Annese’s facility. This process has been applied to many brains. Images of the slices are then digitized, and made available to researchers. Annese’s project has been referred to as the Google Earth of neuroscience. Find out more in this article about the work in ArsTechnica - To digitize a brain, first slice 2,000 times with a very sharp blade by Kate Shaw If you want to know how one goes about removing a brain from a skull, the following article might prove mind-expanding. Cubed, Ground, Frozen or Marinated? 4 Scientists Talk Brain Dissection Styles by Linda Zeldovich on Braindecoder.com. No. Hannibal, not you. Obit of Suzanne Corkin An interesting article on research being done on the brain, noting just how little we really know - Probing Brain’s Depth, Trying to Aid Memory by Benedict Carey – July 9, 2014 A video on mapping the brain An interesting op-ed on how mental health research resources are distributed - There’s Such a Thing as Too Much Neuroscience - by John Markowitz - October 14, 2016 ...more |
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May 23, 2016
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May 29, 2016
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May 23, 2016
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0062368591
| 9780062368591
| 0062368591
| 4.18
| 27,313
| Aug 09, 2016
| Aug 09, 2016
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it was amazing
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You’ve got company. [image] Carol Anne Freeling was certainly right when she said, “They’re hee-ur,” well maybe not enraged spirits, but there are cer You’ve got company. [image] Carol Anne Freeling was certainly right when she said, “They’re hee-ur,” well maybe not enraged spirits, but there are certainly plenty of entities present to which we have paid insufficient attention. Maybe Regan MacNeil was closer to the mark in proclaiming “We are legion.” [image] When Orson Welles said “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone,” he was mistaken. Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis—a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonized by microbes while they are still unfertilized eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right—a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collection. An entire world.Trying to map what it is to be a physical human being, in something like the Human Genome Project, is a daunting task. But our genes tell only part of our story, like a novel with a beginning and ending but no middle. That middle is taken up by the vast array of other life that exists within our bodies. While the guests we harbor may not necessarily be in league with Satan, they are a mixed lot. They mean us no harm, particularly, and we have evolved very workable symbiotic relationships with them, but they are not necessarily our friends either. They took up residence for their own benefit and will stick around and provide benefits to us only as long as we provide what they need, like that girl/boy friend you remember with gritted teeth. I won’t say this book will blow your mind, but this is your brain [image] And it’s not even Mardi Gras – from the Brain Association of Mississippi This is your brain after reading this book [image] Shame about that haircut [In the interest of full disclosure, it should be known that every day when my wife was reading this book, she would walk in the door and tell me of yet another thing she had read that had totally blown her mind. Not that my mind didn't go Ka-Boom when I read it. It certainly did. But hers was blown first. I only steal from the best. ] I Contain Multitudes will change how you understand not only the human body, but all the biota on the planet, hell, the universe. It will help you understand how it can happen that diseases like the flu can adapt so quickly to our latest attempts to stamp them out. It will help you understand why coral reefs are dying. It will give you some new words that help keep the new knowledge manageable. (My favorite is dysbiosis which is what it sounds like, a biological parallel to dystopia, with a hint of enforced disorganization.) It will expand your appreciation for how microbial biology works within people and in the world. It will offer you hope that there can be a future in which many of our maladies will not only be diagnosable, but will be treatable with the introduction of the right, specific probiotic. It will do your dishes and massage your feet. Well, ok, not the last two, but KABOOM, big new look-at-the-world stuff. Ok, you biologist types, pre-med, med, post med, anti-med, wearers of white lab coats, whatever the length, you know this stuff, at least I hope you do. But for most of the rest of us it is indeed a big change, a new layer of reality, well maybe not entirely new, but new enough to go KABOOM! Our intro to the world of which Yong writes, antibiotics, is probably akin to the one WW II bombadiers had through their bombsites. Amazing invention/discovery, antibiotics. They do a great job of wiping out pathogens, the nasties that make us ill, well, some of them anyway. Other harmful microbial types, the viral ones, roll their eyes at incoming antibiotics and keep on with what they are up to. However, as with items dropped from passing aircraft, the use of antibiotics entails considerable collateral damage, as the human body is a container for a vast array of microbial life. One might well envision millions of non-pathogenic residents shaking their fists as the incomings not only wipe out the harmful bugs, but vast numbers of the helpful ones as well. Ed Yong offers a more on-the-ground look, filling us in on what is actually going on inside, and how this part of what’s inside relates to that other part. [image] If these folks can have an entire civilization inside a locker, just imagine what might develop in your liver or large intestine. If you don’t know who Ed Yong is, it’s a good bet that you will before too long. Yong is a popular science guy, a Neal DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Mary Roach, Jacques Cousteau, David Attenborough, Carl Sagan sort, a person who can take the wild, wonderful and fascinating things that are going on in the world of science and distill them all down for public consumption without making viewers’ or readers’ eyes glaze over, or listeners’ ears suddenly clog, without making you feel like an ill-educated dolt, and he accomplishes this with enough humor to produce a fair number of smiles and an occasional LOL. (Not in Mary Roach’s league for humor, but hey, who is?) He is an award-winning science writer at The Atlantic, whose work has appeared in a wide range of publications, from The New York Times to Nature, from The Guardian to Wired, from Slate to Scientific American, and on and on. He splits his time between London and DC, and I would not be at all surprised if he dashes back and forth in a TARDIS. I have provided links in EXTRA STUFF that will lead you down rabbit holes of fun material from Yong that may take you a while to leave. [image] Ed Yong - From Speakerpedia Among the many surprises you will encounter here are a squid with its own high-beams, the microbial advantage of vaginal birth, the impact of gut microbes on mood, why a third of human milk is set aside for our guests (protection payments?), the relationship between the US Navy and mucus, why no man may be an island, but we may be archipelagos, and vats more. There is serious consideration given to how our relationships with this invisible world evolved: …animals emerged in a world that had already been teeming with microbes for billions of years. They were the rulers of the planet long before we arrived. And when we did arrive, of course we evolved ways of interacting with the microbes around us. It would be absurd not to, like moving into a new city wearing a blindfold, earplugs, and a muzzle. Besides, microbes weren’t just unavoidable: they were useful. They fed the pioneering animals. Their presence also provided valuable cues to areas rich in nutrients, to temperatures conducive to life, or flat surfaces upon which to settle. By sensing these cues, pioneering animals gained valuable information about the world around them…hints of those ancient interactions still abound today.“It all depends.” As if life wasn’t complicated enough. Don’t you just love it when you are looking for help and the person you are asking responds with “It all depends.” And it really does, and it really will. What will be different, though, will be that your caregiver will have a much better idea than most caregivers can possibly have today. They will be able to look at a profile from a type of blood test and match potential solutions to the bacteria living in your gut, or wherever else in your two-legged bacteria condo might pertain. This knowledge is still in its infancy – at least a broad knowledge, but it is coming, and has the potential to make meaningful improvements in our health. As microbiologist Patrice Cani told me, “The future will be a la carte.”[image] Balance – from Explainxkcd.com This raises some concerns, although they do not get a lot of attention here. If scientists can develop designer probiota to ameliorate suffering, there will always be evil-doers eager to use new technology to make designer biota intended to act as pathogens. In fact that is pretty much my sole gripe about this book. I wish more space had been devoted to the potential dangers of this advancing treatment modality. Just ask yourself, What would ISIS do? The title of Ed Yong’s book may not be up there with The Selfish Gene, Silent Spring, or Guns, Germs and Steel but what it lacks in snappy-ness it more than makes up for in content. This is a smart, readable explanation of one of the major ongoing scientific revolutions of our time. If you look deep inside yourself you will know that this is absolutely must-read material. Publication -----August 9, 2016 - Hardcover -----January 16, 2018 - Trade Paper Review first posted – July 1, 2016 ==========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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May 02, 2016
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May 08, 2016
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May 20, 2016
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0062400363
| 9780062400369
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| Apr 05, 2016
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it was amazing
| For 130 years, pitchers have thrown a baseball overhand, and for 130 years, doing so has hurt them. Starter or reliever, left-handed or right-hand For 130 years, pitchers have thrown a baseball overhand, and for 130 years, doing so has hurt them. Starter or reliever, left-handed or right-handed, short or tall, skinny or fat, soft-tossing or hard-throwing, old or young—it matters not who you are, what color your skin is, what country you’re from. The ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) , a stretchy, triangular band in the elbow that holds together the upper and lower arms, plays no favorites. If you throw a baseball, it can ruin you. When the UCL breaks, only one fix exists: Tommy John surgery…More than 50 percent of pitchers end up on the disabled list every season, on average for two months—plus, and one-quarter of major league pitchers today wear a zipper scar from Tommy John surgery along their elbows.Major League Baseball (MLB) currently spends about $1.5 billion a year on pitchers. There is considerable financial incentive for organized baseball to find a solution to this epidemic of injury. And there is certainly plenty of human need on the part of players and their families for something to be done. How did this plague of injuries come to be and what can be done about it? [image] Jeff Passan - from the Sports Journalism Institute Jeff Passan is currently a sports journalist at ESPN. He got loose, picking up his journalism degree at Syracuse in 2002, did some soft-toss, covering Fresno State basketball for two years, warmed up his baseball writing in the hardball beat at the Kansas City Star for two years, and was been in the starting rotation with Yahoo for thirteen before taking his latest gig. “My dad worked at The Cleveland Plain Dealer for 40 years, so I knew what I wanted to do when I was 12 years old,” Passan said. “I was very lucky. My dad has been editing my stuff for 20 years now and I can say he’s the best editor I’ve ever had.” - from SJI articleI am sure his editors at Yahoo will be thrilled to know that. He co-authored Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series, published in 2010. The Arm is his first solo book. Mostly, I wanted to understand this for my son. He was five years old. He loved baseball. He wanted to play catch every day. He was hooked, like his dad. And the more I heard stories from other parents—of their sons getting hurt or boys they know quitting baseball teams because their arms no longer worked—the more I needed to figure out what was happening to the arm.Passan takes parallel approaches to his subject, mixing hardball facts with softer stuff. There is a lot of information to impart. He compares the current injury rate and occupational environment to those of the past. He looks at the structure of the arm, considers the stresses it endures and presents competing theories on the causes of the current epidemic. He spends time with experts in the current state of UCL injury medicine, and talks with several proponents of alternative approaches to injury prevention and rehabilitation. One of these is Doctor Tommy John, Jr. And yes, Passan does talk with TJ Senior as well. He examines promising models for the future, including one new surgery that could have a dramatic impact on recovery time and another training approach that shows promise as a way of preventing the injury in the first place. He follows through, making a large point of showing that many of the current approaches to prevention and rehab are based more on wishful thinking than on hard science. He also goes the distance, traveling to Japan to look at how things are done there, and seeing if their approach is better or worse for arms. [image] Todd Coffey - from redmtnsports.com While I revel in theory and data, there are many for whom it is much more informative to see how this widespread and growing problem affects actual humans. Analyzing the causes and effects, lost revenue, and lost time can leave one remote to the impact on living players and families. Passan’s other, softer approach comes in here. He had hoped to find one pitcher who would allow him to tag along through the entirety of his Tommy John process. He managed to find two. The emotional, human heart of The Arm lies in the stories of professional pitchers Daniel Hudson of the Diamondbacks and Todd Coffey. Coffey succumbed to a need for Tommy John a second time while pitching for the LA Dodgers. Passan is our eyes and ears as we accompany Hudson and Coffey on their painful sojourn from the Major League venue, through surgery and rehab, and their daunting struggle to make it back to the show. It may take a team to win a pennant, and a medical team to stitch up a damaged limb, but it takes supreme dedication to a lengthy and tedious rehab program, persistent optimism and a supportive family, to lift a player from the depths of a career-threatening injury back up to a place where the lifetime dream of pitching in the major leagues (and the income associated with that career) might again be realized. The physical pain of a UCL tear can be intense. The emotional pain on display here is heart-rending. The struggles the players endure are intense and long-lasting, the triumphs uplifting, the defeats crushing. [image] Daniel Hudson - from ESPN One of the joys of The Arm is when surprising bits of information drift past like an Eephus pitch or an RA Dickey knuckler. There was a time when surprising solutions were tried to address arm problems. In the 1950s in Brooklyn (not Victorian London) doctors working for the Dodgers actually extracted teeth from prize pitching prospect Karl Spooner. “They thought poison was coming down his shoulder,” said Sandy Koufax. One shudders to imagine what they might have tried when faced with a knee injury. Passan offers some chin music to organizations like Perfect Game, an entity that, among other things, organizes tournaments for promising young (sometimes absurdly young) amateur players, and has played a significant role in youth baseball. I had never heard of it before, and had no notion the impact such entities have had. In the absence of a better solution to this ongoing plague, and looking to biotech for an edge, I would expect that at some point in the not too distant future, MLB teams will require players to provide DNA and maybe even tissue samples for use by advanced labs so they can grow the parts that might someday need repair or replacement. (It does conjure a ballpark image for me of stadium hawkers peddling cold ones of a different sort from a beer cooler. “Getch yer tendons, heah,” but that’s just me.) [image] A nifty look inside – from TopVelocity.net There are some hopeful signs (one finger for likely, two for less certain?) for being able to stem this problem in future. Flush with a large sack of TV moolah, the Dodgers have invested some real money in an in-house think-tank looking at player health issues. As Passan points out, it would be better for the resulting intel to be available league-wide, rather than held by one team for competitive advantage, particularly as the Tommy John plague has struck children at an alarming rate. There is some promising research that looks to the relationship of forearm muscles to the UCL. Maybe forearm training can do for torn UCLs what increased shoulder muscle training did to reduce career death by torn rotator cuff a few decades ago. Jef Passan has the smooth delivery one would expect from someone who writes every day about sports. He drops in occasional dollops of absolutely lovely description like a 12-to-6 hook. The Currents Lounge inside the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville is a paint-by-numbers hotel bar, with a few flat-screen TVs, a menu of mediocre food, and a broad liquor selection to help people forget they’re drinking in a hotel bar in Jacksonville.It generates an urge to look around and find out where the down-at-the-heel PI is hoisting another ill-advised shot while waiting for a femme fatale client. Another: Nothing beats a major league mound, a ten-inch-high Kilimanjaro that few get to climb. Nobody in team sports commands a game like the pitcher. He dictates the pace and controls the tempo. A goalie in hockey or soccer can win a game with superior reaction. A pitcher prevents action. There is great power in that.So, a sweet, writerly changeup to go with his intel-rich heater. I have a particular interest in the subject matter here. A baseball fan since gestation, a Mets fan since their birth, I have been drooling over the possibility of (no, not tossing up a wet one) another trip to the MLB finale for my team, an organization with a collection of elite arms rarely seen in the history of the game. As a Mets fan forever, I am also far, far too familiar with the impact injury can have on the team, on any team. My Metsies’ chances flow nicely down the drain should the arms on which team hopes rest succumb to injury. Three of the five have already had Tommy John surgery, Zach Wheeler, Jacob DeGrom and Matt Harvey. How long can it be before Noah Syndergaard and rookie Steven Matz fall prey? As I was preparing this review, I came across an item of particular interest on the NY Mets site. Mets rotation features rare trio of flame-throwers, which focused attention on Noah Syndegaard, possessor of one of the most blazing fastballs in the game, and was reminded of one of the bits of intel in The Arm, namely that the higher the pitch speed, the likelier a pitcher is to be injured. The path from flame-thrower to flame-out is well worn and covered in the ash of lost dreams. And what if one of the already cut three should fall again? I am sure baseball fans everywhere share similar concerns. Even though, as followers of the national sport, we really have no impact on what happens on the field, it would be nice to at least be able to talk about the injury horrors from a base of knowledge, instead of the more usual dugout of pure, ill-informed bias. Passan’s The Arm offers fans that opportunity. If, like me, you get a bit queasy, reading detailed descriptions of bodily innards, if, like me you experience what seems phantom sensations in your joints when reading about things that may go wrong there, if, like me, you still have tenderness or feel far too vulnerable in body parts like those under consideration here, The Arm will lean on all those buttons and feed your inclinations toward physical discomfort. On the other hand (the good one) if you are a baseball fan (check), player (sadly, no), a coach (once, for many years) a parent of a player, or several (long ago), or a friend or a relation of a player, get over the quease, have a drink, or apply whatever substances, legal or prohibited, ease the condition (no, not an ice-pack to the elbow, but if that works, well, sure, why not), whatever will get you past the discomfort, and shake it off. Jeff Passan's opus is truly a sight for sore arms and must read for you. Review first posted - February 5, 2016 Publication Date – April 5, 2016 BTW - November 16, 2016 - Rick Porcello of the Boston Red Sox was awarded the American League Cy Young award. In April 2015 he had Tommy john surgery. Pretty frackin' amazing! ==========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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Jan 25, 2016
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Jan 30, 2016
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Jan 25, 2016
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Hardcover
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0393351904
| 9780393351903
| 0393351904
| 4.22
| 94,650
| Sep 15, 2014
| Sep 28, 2015
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it was amazing
| There are many words a woman in love longs to hear. “I’ll love you forever, darling,” and “Will it be a diamond this year?” are two fine examples. There are many words a woman in love longs to hear. “I’ll love you forever, darling,” and “Will it be a diamond this year?” are two fine examples. But young lovers take note: above all else, the phrase every girl truly wants to hear is, “Hi, this is Amy from Science Support; I’m dropping off some heads.”You have all seen The Producers, right? The version with Zero or Nathan, in the cinema, on TV, on the stage, whatever. Those of you who have not…well…tsk, tsk, tsk, for shame, for shame. Well, there is one scene that pops to mind apropos this book. In the film, the producers of the title have put together a show that is designed to fail. The surprise is on them, though, when their engineered disaster turns out to be a hit. During intermission of the opening performance, to Max and Leo’s absolute horror, they overhear a man saying to his wife, “Honey, I never in a million years thought I'd ever love a show called Springtime For Hitler. One might be forgiven for having similar thoughts about Caitlin Doughty’s sparkling romp through the joys of mortuary science, Smoke Gets in your Eyes. If you were expecting a lifeless look at what most of us consider a dark subject, well, surprise, surprise. [image] Yes we are, and dead-ender Caitlin is happy to help with the cleanup Caitlin Doughty has cooked up a book that is part memoir, part guidebook through the world of what lies beyond, well, the earth-bound part, at least, and part advocacy for new ways of dealing with our remains. Doughty, a Hawaiian native, is a 6-foot Amazon pixie, bubbling over (like some of her clients?) with enthusiasm for the work of seeing people off on their final journey. Her glee is infectious, in a good way. The bulk of the tale is based on her experience working at WestWind Cremation and Burial in Oakland, California, her first gig in the field. She was 23, had had a fascination with death since she was a kid and this seemed a perfectly reasonable place in which to begin what she believed would be her career. Turned out she was right. [image] Caitlin Doughty from her site Smoke Gets in your Eyes is rich with information not only about contemporary mortuary practices, but on practices in other cultures and on how death was handled in the past. For example, embalming did not come into use in the USA until the Civil War, when the delay in getting the recently deceased from battlefield to home in a non-putrid form presented considerable difficulties. She also looks at the practice of seeing people off at home as opposed to institutional settings. There is a rich lode of intel in here about the origin of church and churchyard burials. I imagine churchgoers of the eras when such practices were still fresh might have been praying for a good stiff wind. [image] No Kibby, no smoke monsters here Doughty worked primarily in the cremation end of the biz, and offers many juicy details about this increasingly popular exit strategy. But mixing the factual material with her personal experience turns the burners up a notch. The first time I peeked in on a cremating body felt outrageously transgressive, even though it was required by Westwind’s protocol. No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymous Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.Beyond her paying gig, Doughty has, for some time, been undertaking to run a blog on mortuary practice, The Order of the Good Death, with a focus on greener ways of returning our elements back to the source. (Would it be wrong to think of those who make use of green self disposal as the dearly de-potted?) One tidbit from this stream was meeting with a lady who has devised a death suit with mushroom spores, the better to extract toxins from a decomposing body. I was drooling over the potential for Troma films that might be made from this notion. [image] No, not pizza One of life’s great joys is to learn something new while being thoroughly entertained. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes offers a unique compendium of fascinating information about how death is handled, mostly in America. Doughty’s sense of humor is right up my alley. The book is LOL funny and not just occasionally. You may want to make sure you have swallowed your coffee before reading, lest it come flying out your nose. I was very much reminded of the infectious humor of Mary Roach or Margee Kerr. Doughty is also TED-talk smart. She takes on some very real issues in both the science and economics of death-dealing, offers well-informed critiques of how we handle death today, and suggests some alternatives. If the last face you see is Caitlin Doughty’s something is very, very wrong. The face itself is lovely, but usually by the time she gets her mitts on you should be seeing the pearly gates, that renowned steambath, or nothing at all. Preferably you can see Doughty in one of the many nifty short vids available on her site. You will learn something while being thoroughly charmed. Reading this book won’t kill you, even with laughter, but it will begin to prepare you to look at that event that lies out there, somewhere in the distance for all of us, and point you in a direction that is care and not fear based. If you enjoy learning and laughing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is dead on. Review posted – 12/11/15 Publication date – 10/15/2014 (hc) – 9/28/15 - TP I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. Well, not really. I mean they specifically said that there was no obligation to produce a review, so there is no quid pro quo involved, but it does seem the right thing to do, don’tchya think? Me on social: [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages You MUST CHECK OUT vids on her site. My favorite is The Foreskin Wedding Ring of St Catherine . All right, I’m gonna stop you right there. Go ahead. I know you wanna ask. No? Fine. I’ll do it for you, but you know this is what you were asking yourself. “If she rubs it does it become a bracelet?” Ok? Are ya happy now? Sheesh! If you are uncertain about making a final commitment to reading this book you might want a taste of the product first (That sounds sooooo wrong) Here is an article Doughty wrote about her first experience with death as a kid, from Fortnightjournal.com. There are several other Doughty articles on this site as well. Another book sample can be found here, in The Atlantic Doughty offers a nifty list of sites to use for dealing with death, your own (presumably, you know, before) or others. Interview in Wired I came across this Caitlin Doughty video in June 2016. The caps are all hers. WHAT HAPPENED TO TITANIC'S DEAD? You might want to check out one or more of the following -----The Loved One -----The American Way of Death ----- The American Way of Death Revisited -----Six Feet Under -----January 22, 2020 - Vox - Why millennials are the “death positive” generation - by Eleanor Cummins -----March 6, 2022 - The Daily Beast - The Grassy Green Future of Composting Human Bodies by Mercedes Grant -----July 27, 2022 - Smithsonian - Could Water Cremation Become the New American Way of Death? by Lauren Oster Some items noted in Doughty's tale are getting a bit of attention. Here, a NY Times article by Katie Rogers - April 22, 2016 - Mushroom Suits, Biodegradable Urns and Death’s Green Frontier Doughty has written at least two more books since this one -----2017 - From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death -----2019 - Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Dec 03, 2015
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Dec 10, 2015
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Paperback
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0062351427
| 9780062351425
| 0062351427
| 3.83
| 41,664
| Oct 20, 2015
| Oct 20, 2015
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really liked it
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I will be writing, have been writing, or have already written (depending on when you see this. Time is strange here on GR) a review of Welcome to Nigh
I will be writing, have been writing, or have already written (depending on when you see this. Time is strange here on GR) a review of Welcome to Night Vale. But until/when/after I do (or until you return from whatever time stream you are in to read this, or move ahead into another one) I can offer one definite bit of advice. Listen to a few of the Night Vale podcasts. If they float your boat, or, lacking water, elevate you at least several inches off the ground for a period of about twenty minutes, you will love this book. Proceed directly to the beginning of the actual review. [image] ==========================NOT ENCHANTED? If you find the podcasts uninteresting, really, did you touch one of the pink flamingos? Something is wrong. OK, Ok, I know there are some folks who will not be enchanted by the Night Vale podcasts. This book is probably not for you. But if you go to the local library, you are sure to find something more to your liking. Hurry, go now. You might want to stop by and visit the dog park on your way. Be sure to say hi to the friendly figures in the hoods. Y’all take care now, and return directly to the section titled “Not Enchanted?” =============================ACTUAL REVIEW It is a friendly desert community, where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.Whew! I’m so glad we got rid of those people. [image] A Cecil Baldwin sandwich with the authors in the role of bread In July, 2013, Welcome to Night Vale became the most downloaded podcast on iTunes. It all began in 2012, a twice-a-month podcast that is Lake Wobegon by way of David Lynch, Lovecraft, told in the form of a community radio newscast. It was started completely as a hobby,” Fink begins, when asked about how the podcast has gotten to this point. “Y’know, my friends and I, it was just something we enjoyed doing. Our entire goal, when we started it, was that maybe someday there’d be a few people who weren’t friends or family listening to it. We certainly had no goals beyond that, other than to enjoy making it.” - from interview in The ArcadeIt is read by Cecil Baldwin who shares a first name with his fictional manifestation, Cecil Palmer, the radio broadcaster. The podcast is weird, creepy fun, rich with non-sequiturs and reasons to be afraid, many reasons. Cecil’s steady tones make it seem practically normal. I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories. And also, to a lesser extent fascinated by the Southwest desert. Fascinating things probably happen there on a regular basis. So I came up with this idea of a town in that desert where all conspiracy theories were real. - From Jackie Lyden’s 2013 NPR interview with the authorsAnd whether it was a result of a desire for expression in a new medium, an action taken in compliance with an order from one of the hooded figures in the dog park, or an angel in old woman Josie’s house, Fink and Craynor have committed their world to print. [image] We, as readers, seem to have a soft spot for this genre. I don’t know if there is a name for the type that this fits into, storytelling-wise, but if there is a short term for “A small town where something is…off,” this book would fit in there quite nicely. (I know it is far from wonderful, but I hereby nominate the word “Oddsville” for the genre, capital of the great state of Unease. All in favor?) There is a rich tradition of such writing. Rod Serling was a fan of this trope in his Twilight Zone writing (Where is Everybody? , Monsters are Due on Maple Street, People Are Alike All Over). Stephen King has made a career in them, Derry, Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot…ad infinitum. TV has mined this heavy lode as well. In addition to Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, X-files, and god-knows how many more, there are some more recent shows that indulge, including Wayward Pines, the town of Hope in The Leftovers, Haven, Eureka, Royston Vasey from The League of Gentlemen. Small towns, it would appear, are in our literary, and certainly in our entertainment DNA. So the something-off-small-town of Night Vale should feel familiar. Of course this one is a bit more unusual than your typical Oddsville offering, being rather flamboyant in its strangeness, to the point of silliness at times. [image] As for the story, Jackie Fierro has been 19 for many, many years (like some of us?). She runs the town pawn shop, and will accept pretty much anything. A mysterious man in a tan jacket, gives her a slip of paper with “KING CITY” written on it. Every time she tries to get rid of the thing, or even to put it down, it keeps coming back to her, which, as you might imagine, is alarming. So she goes in search of tan-jacket man but no one in town can seem to recall seeing him. Hmmm. Diane Crayton is a single mom to a shape-shifting fifteen-year-old son (what parent of a teenager cannot relate?). Of late she has been seeing Josh’s long absent Y-chromosome source all over town. Josh has been showing an interest in tracking down his father, despite Diane’s attempts to dissuade him. Diane and Jackie’s quests, and Josh’s too, lead them in a direction that is as obvious as an MC Escher roadmap. Does an endpoint even exist? Diane and Jackie are certainly likeable sorts, and their tale is intriguing, with plenty of challenges to face and mysteries to solve, but the real deal with Welcome to Night Vale consists of three things, location, location, location. Fink and Cranor are trying to re-create in book form the delightfully weird experience of their podcast world. The story seems secondary. The atmosphere is rich with intense strangeness. I found most of it delightful, a dry delivery masking outrageousness. Sometimes they try too hard, generating eye-rolling that has been made mandatory by the City Council. You really, really do not want to fight city hall here, particularly on days when human sacrifice is on the calendar. But it is good, weird fun most of the time. The authors must have had some bad experiences with librarians in their youth. Literary comeuppance is had. [image] The locale includes, among other things, roads that lead nowhere, mysterious lights floating above the town, black helicopters, yes those black helicopters, a faceless old woman who lives, unseen, in someone’s house, a sentient house, a diner waitress who struggles with fruit bearing tree branches growing from her body, car salesmen who offer howlingly good deals, a woman who keeps reliving her life in a perpetual loop, a sentient patch of haze, angels named Erika, people who exist but when you try to recall them, you can’t. Wait, what was I talking about? I just bet that if someone opens a nightclub in NV, they name it Studio 51. The list goes on, plenty to keep your brain engaged and your funny bone tickled. When you partake of the Night Vale Kool Aid, you will be joining a horde that has sprung up in impressive numbers. There are fan sites galore, with artwork, fan fiction, and a host of ways in which what remains of your consciousness can be further shaved and fed to the glow-cloud. I have included some links to those in the usual place. You have never read anything like this before. Unless, of course you are in a time loop and are living your life over and over and over. This means you, Sheila. Yes, I know you have read this book many times, all for the first time. OK, happy? But for the rest of us… Fink and Cranor’s sense of humor is definitely not for everyone. But if you check your kitchen cabinets and find that your supply of weird is running a little low, I suggest heading over to Night Vale. They are running a special and you won’t want to miss out. PS – more volumes are planned. Be sure to keep up with your local community newscast for further details. Review Posted – 11/6/15 Published – 10/20/15 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s, well to Night Vale’s main, Twitter and FB pages You can download individual podcasts here Interviews -----Early Influences - The Arcade ------Stephen Colbert appearance, including a reading of the Community Calendar -----Jackie Lyden’s NPR interview with the authors - Welcome to Night Vale: Watch out for the tarantulas Some fan sites -----The Shape from Grove Park -----Fuck Yeah Night Vale -----A Softer Night Vale A Night Vale Wiki The actual Wikipedia entry for Night Vale A fun vid from the Idea Channel that links Night Vale to HP Lovecraft - How Does Night Vale Confront Us With the Unknown? ...more |
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Oct 23, 2015
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Oct 26, 2015
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Oct 23, 2015
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0062328514
| 9780062328519
| 3.67
| 3,362
| Oct 27, 2015
| Oct 27, 2015
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really liked it
| Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way you can save your friends. - D. VaderLisa Randall, a Harvard Science professor, member of the Nati Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way you can save your friends. - D. VaderLisa Randall, a Harvard Science professor, member of the National Academy of Sciences, named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine in 2007, and author of three previous books, likes to think big. She also likes to think small. Her areas of expertise are particle physics and cosmology, which certainly covers a range. The big look she offers here is a cosmological take on not only how it came to pass that a large incoming did in the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, but why such decimations of life on Earth arrive with some (on a cosmological scale) regularity. Her explanation has to do with dark matter. It makes for an interesting tale, and offers an excellent example of how the scientific method (how Daniel Day Louis might play Louis Pasteur?) approaches problem-solving. It is a fascinating read that is at times wondrously accessible and at others like trying to bat away a swarm of meteoroids. [image] Dark Matter As with most good communicators of science. Randall relies on metaphor, and some of hers are quite good. My favorite compared methods of detecting dark matter to detecting the presence of [insert name of your favorite A-list celebrity here]. You can tell that there is something going on, without actually having to see the celebrity, because you can see swarms, gaggles, pods and packs of paparazzi clumping around the object of their lenses as he/she/it walks/primps/flees down the street. Dark matter affects the things around it too, and it is by measuring those effects that we can tell it is there, even though it remains...you know...dark. [image] Lisa Randall - from her Twitter pages She addresses some cosmological questions and offers up the answers that the best current theories provide. One example is that the rotational velocity of stars should be sufficient to make them literally spin out of their galaxies, and yet they don’t. Something must be keeping them in place. Care to guess? There are more like this. They vary in Wow-Cool! levels. Randall takes us from a look at how we know dark matter is out there, and its characteristics, to an overview of our solar system. This is more interesting than a science class slide show of the 8 (or 9 if you are my age) planets circling around our sun. (Well, maybe I should say your sun, but I don’t really want to get into that) There is a lot of other material cruising around out there, and it is significant, as in Please, oh please, do not come crashing into our planet, pretty please. [image] Path of the New Horizons spacecraft into the Kuiper Belt - from NASA The Kuiper Belt, a group of clumped asteroids, not an award for the baddest Kuiper, and the Oort Cloud (not where Obchestvo Remeslenogo Truda keeps its data) for example, are parts of our solar system, and move through inter-stellar space along with the sun and planets. [image] The Oort Cloud – From NASA You might think of the sundry members of the Solar System as a family all stuffed into one very, very large car of the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island. Once everyone is in, the whole crew moves through space (or circle in this instance) as one. But what if there were another Wonder Wheel, one that was made, not of the dense ordinary matter, but of the much thinner dark sort. Let’s say that it is not vertical but does its spinning thing at an angle. And let’s say it intersected our Wonder Wheel at one point. And every so often, say every thirty some odd million years, the car our solar system is in intersects the material in that other Wonder Wheel. The result could be unpleasant. The big stuff would probably be ok, our sun, the planets, but some of the smaller bits, say rocks in the Oort cloud and Kuiper Belt, might get knocked out of their usual paths. And voila! Fireworks! Big incomings headed our way yet again. [image] Well, that’s the scoop. I am not giving anything away by laying it out. The value of the book lies in showing how theories are examined, tested and accepted or discarded, the scientific method in action. But I would not want to make you think the orbit you take while reading Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is all clear sailing. There are incomings you have to contend with. It always takes a bit more effort to absorb material when much of it is new to the reader, particularly when there are many new words, acronyms and concepts being thrown at you. I confess that there were points in reading this book when my eyes glazed over. It felt like I was reading a list in a foreign language. My mind went a bit dark in the chapter on how galaxies are born and in a couple of particle physics chapters near the end. On the other hand, enough of the early discussion of dark matter was utterly fascinating. When Randall writes of a second, post-Big-Bang expansion of the universe, it was news to me. I quite enjoyed the tour through our solar system, one that included parts we do not usually think of. And if you ever wondered about how three words are used, the answer is here. Meteors are what we see streaking across the sky. We call them meteoroids if they make it to the ground. (I hereby promise that no meteor will touch the Earth on my watch) In fact any alien object hitting Earth is a meteoroid. (Even Asgardians?) Meteorites are the detritus of meteoroid impact. There is a nifty piece on how we define what is and is not a planet, and some amazing intel on what unexpected materials asteroids and comets might have brought to the Earth over the history of our planet, and another piece on how craters are created. And did you know that there is a multi-national (as in countries not corporations) organization that was set up to watch the skies for the next big thing? These and more such nuggets make the journey with Randall worth the occasional eye-glaze. And if you are worried about The Big One wiping us out, don’t. We will see to that ourselves long before a big rock does the job for us. The current rate of species extinction is comparable to the one that took place 250 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic extinction. In that one 90% of species were wiped out, including insects. There is always hope that we will, over a period of millions of years, figure out how to keep large floaters from making a mess of our earthly garden. With Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs Lisa Randall, by striving to gain greater understanding of how the universe works, is doing her bit to shine a light in the darkness. Review posted – 10/30/15 Publication date – 10/27/15 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages NASA’s Site about the Kuiper Belt In 2010, the National Academy of Sciences presented their results on asteroids and the threats they pose in a document entitled Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies A nice article in the June 2013 Smithsonian – Lisa Randall’s Guide to the Galaxy An interesting set of videos with Randall on BIG thoughts Although the interview is for a different book, Randall’s Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart is fun and informative re things scientific. Ditto, as Randall is interviewed by Tavis Smiley A nifty set of videos on the hazards presented by asteroids The Dark Song from The Lego Movie - It’s Awesome ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 15, 2015
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Oct 15, 2015
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ebook
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0062276166
| 9780062276162
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| 4.34
| 5,594
| Oct 13, 2015
| Oct 13, 2015
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it was amazing
| We often forget how fragile a creation democracy is—a delicate eggshell in the rough-and-tumble of history. Even in the cradle of democracy, ancie We often forget how fragile a creation democracy is—a delicate eggshell in the rough-and-tumble of history. Even in the cradle of democracy, ancient Athens, rule by the people could barely survive for a couple of centuries. And throughout its brief history, Athenian democracy was besieged from within by the forces of oligarchy and tyranny. There were secret clubs of aristocrats who hired squads of assassins to kill popular leaders. Terror reigned during these convulsions and civil society was too intimidated to bring the assassins to justice. Democracy, Thucydides tells us, was “cowed in mind."Who killed JFK? In The Map That Changed the World, Simon Winchester wrote about William Smith, an 18th century canal digger who discovered that beneath the surface of the earth there were hidden layers of fossils, earth and stone that rose and fell connecting one to another and forming an understructure that told a tale of the earth’s history. He spent more than two decades gathering the information to prove his theory and eventually created the map of the book’s title. David Talbot entered into a considerable effort of subterranean digging himself, and has drawn a map of unseen layers that cross the planet and affect everything, a map that shows some of the hidden structures that lie beneath the world we think we know, the history we think we have experienced. The fossils in this case are pieces of evidence showing a history of secrets. When you look at the mass of dark deeds perpetrated by the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, there is one man, more than any other, who appears, Zelig-like, over and over again, Allan Dulles, the evidence of his deeds buried in the fossil accretions of our public and foreign policy past. His older brother, John Foster Dulles, would become a Secretary of State and wield considerable influence on his own. The pair formed a two-headed monster of foreign intrigue while in office at the same time. But the focus here is primarily on Allen Dulles [image] David Talbot - from Talbot's FB pages The Devil’s Chessboard reads like a riveting spy novel, peeling back layer after layer as it races to its climax. Dulles was a partner in an international law firm. Foster was chairman. Allen Dulles spent considerable swaths of time in government service, as a diplomat and spy. As such he made contacts all across Europe that would come in handy later. Foster Dulles became so deeply enmeshed in the lucrative revitalization of Germany that he found it difficult to separate his firm’s interests from that of the rising economic and military power—even after Hitler consolidated control of the country in the 1930s. Foster continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben as they were integrated into the Nazis’ growing war machine, helping the industrial giants secure access to key war materials.Nazi, schmazi. Foster kept the Berlin offices of the company, Sullivan and Cromwell, open until, in 1935, his partners forced him to shut it down, fearful of horrendous PR problems. Consider some nuggets dug from the accretions of Allen Dulles’s history: ---WW II – he tries to arrange a separate peace with Nazi Germany despite specific orders from FDR to do no such thing, thus undermining the alliance between the US and Soviet Union, and contributing to suspicion between the Allies. ---Post WW II - he is instrumental in helping known Nazis and Nazi supporters hold on to their ill-gotten treasures and cash, and helps many either evade punishment or get reduced sentences and improved accommodations from the Nuremberg Courts ---He manages a ratline, an underground railroad through which Nazis escape punishment and find comfortable resettlement in other parts of the world ---Dulles uses some of these upstanding citizens to create an intelligence network ---He creates an armed force in France, ostensibly to be used against an imagined Communist takeover, but ready to act in support of an anti-deGaulle coup fomented by generals angry at the government’s decision to step back from the Algerian conflict ---Dulles is instrumental in staging the anti-Mossadegh coup in Iran, installing a reluctant Shah, who had to be dragged back into the country to take over ---He goes ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion, knowing it will fail, but expecting that the failure would force JFK to commit the USA military to the plot The list goes on, and on. Talbot proceeds like a prosecutor, laying out the details that set up the final argument. The litany of specifics, of events, of secret, illegal actions, is stunning. As you might expect, Allan Dulles was a person of questionable human quality, even to his family. His wife, in her diary wrote: “My husband doesn’t converse with me, not that he doesn’t talk to me about his business, but that he doesn’t talk about anything…It took me a long time to realize that when he talks it is only for the purpose of obtaining something…He talks easily with men who can give him some information, and puts himself out with women whom he doesn’t know to tell all sorts of interesting things. He either has to be making someone admire him, or to be receiving some information worth his while; otherwise he gives one the impression that he doesn’t talk at all because the person isn’t worth talking to.”He subjected his war-damaged son to bizarre medical treatment in a secret mind-control program he had established. He married his daughter off like a political bargaining chip. [image] Allen W. Dulles - from Oathkeepers.org – Funny, he doesn’t look like a psycho-killer But it is in his foreign intrigues, and in illumination of his ties to the rich and powerful, that the way is paved for the book’s payoff. It is David Talbot’s contention that Allan Dulles, acting in league with members of America’s business and military elite, orchestrated the murder of JFK. Kennedy was seen as particularly soft on foreign nations who dared to nationalize property owned by Dulles’s peeps. There were many in the military who were eager to get the next war on, the nuclear one, and Kennedy would not play. (Doctor Strangelove had nothing on these guys.) JFK had decided, because LBJ had failed to deliver the Southern votes he had promised, that he would find a replacement VP for his second term, so Johnson, beholden to Texas oilmen, and looking at the potential termination of his political life, was on board. JFK had also sacked Dulles for his insubordination. Not only was the Dallas murder a political hit, there had been an earlier attempt, in Chicago, in November 1963, that did not come off. The Warren Commission was set up not to investigate the killing but to cover it up. Bobby Kennedy knew this, but also knew that unless he could be elected to the Oval Office, the truth would remain cloaked. It is likely his determination to find the truth that got him killed too. The details Talbot offers to back his claim are compelling. I expect that the usual suspects will raise a hue and cry of that old favorite pejorative, “conspiracy theory.” But as we all do, or should know, sometimes there really is a conspiracy. I’m with Talbot on this one. The details of the sundry plots and executive actions, the coups, planned, executed, or foiled, the breadth of Talbot’s gaze make for gripping reading. And I didn’t even go into the CIA’s work in the mind-control biz, an early example of extraordinary rendition, or any of the juicier bits about our old friend Tricky Dick Nixon, or Castro’s stunning political success story in New York City. This is a compelling must-read, filled with colorful characters, intrigue, and a look at the creation and persistence of a mechanism by which an undercover foreign policy is implemented. You will wonder if, today, the White House has any more control over the intelligence apparatus than it did back then. It will change forever how you view history. During a 1965 tour of Latin America, Robert Kennedy—by then a senator from New York—found himself in a heated discussion about Rockefeller influence in Latin America, during an evening at the home of a Peruvian artist that had been arranged by [Richard] Goodwin [an RFK aide]. When Bobby brashly suggested to the gathering that Peru should “Assert [its] nationhood” and nationalize its oil industry, the group was stunned. “Why, David Rockefeller has just been down there,” one guest said. “And he told us there wouldn’t be any aid if anyone acted against International Petroleum [a local Standard Oil subsidiary].”There is no law, only power. Bobby Kennedy should have known that. We all need to know that. Rule by sociopaths is definitely not the way to go, whether the morally-challenged sit on corporate boards, manage branches of government or direct elements of our military. With The Devil’s Chessboard, David Talbot has written an eye-opening and devastating look at modern American history. Your move. Review Posted – October 16, 2015 Book Published – October 13, 2015 (hc) - September 6, 2016 (tp) =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages An interesting site on keeping up with developments re the JFK hit Talbot interview in Mother Jones Lest anyone think the CIA is not in the business of killing, here is the CIA manual on assassination 101 – A Study of Assassination. There will be a quiz. Amy Goodman interviews Dulles on Democracy Now - Thanks to Natylie for the heads up on this one Talbot interview with Tavis Smiley - November 16, 2015 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 23, 2015
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Sep 23, 2015
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0062266683
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| 0062266683
| 3.66
| 614
| Jul 01, 2015
| Aug 25, 2015
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really liked it
| Open the pod bay doors, HAL. Open the pod bay doors, HAL.[image] Smile for the camera, HAL This is probably the #1 image most of us of a certain age have concerning the dangers of AI. Whether it is a HAL-9000, or a T-70, T-800, T-888, or T-900 Terminator, a Cylon, a science officer on the Nostromo, a dark version, Lore, of a benign android like STNG’s Commander Data, killer robots on the contemporary TV series Extant, or another of only a gazillion other examples in written word, TV and cinema, there has, for some time now, been a concern, expressed through our entertainment media, that in seeking to rely more and more on computers for everything we do, we are making a Mephistophelian deal and our machines might become our masters. It is as if we, a world of Geppettos, have decided to make our Pinocchios into real boys, without knowing if they will be content to help out in the shop or turn out more like some other artificial being. Maybe we should find a way to include in all AI software some version of the Blue Fairy to keep the souls of the machines on a righteous path. [image] [image] Cylons John Markoff, an Oakland, CA native, has been covering the digital revolution for his entire career. He began writing for InfoWorld in 1981, was later an editor at Byte magazine for about eight bits, then wrote about Silicon Valley for the San Francisco Examiner. In 1988 he began writing for the Business Section of the New York Times, where he remains to this day. He has been covering most of the folks mentioned in this book for a long time. He knows them and has insight into what makes them tick. For the past half century an underlying tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation—AI vs IA—has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world. It is easy to argue that AI and IA are simply two sides of the same coin. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between approaches to designing technology to benefit humans and designing technology as an end in itself. Today, that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.Markoff follows the parallel tracks of AI vs IA from their beginnings to their latest implementation in the 21st century, noting the steps along the way, and pointing out some of the tropes and debates that have tagged along. For example, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, San Diego State University professor of Mathematics and Hugo-award-winning sci-fi author argued, in The Coming Technological Singularity, that by no later than 2030 computer scientists would have the ability to create a superhuman artificial intelligence and “the human era would be ended.” VI Lenin once said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” I suppose the AI equivalent would be that “In pursuit of the almighty dollar, capitalists will give artificial intelligence the abilities it will use to make itself our almighty ruler.” And just in case you thought the chains on these things were firmly in place, I regret to inform you that the great state of North Dakota now allows drones to fire tasers and tear gas. The drones are still controlled by cops from a remote location, but there is plenty to be concerned about from military killer drones that may have the capacity to make kill-no-kill decisions within the next few years without the benefit of human input. Enough concern that Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers, signed by luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and tens of thousands of others, raises an alarm and demands that limits be taken so that human decision-making will remain in the loop on issues of mortality. [image] The other Mister “T” Being “in the loop” is one of the major elements in looking at AI vs IA. Are people part of the process or what computerization seeks to replace? The notion of the driverless car comes in for a considerable look. This would probably not be a great time to begin a career as truck driver, cab driver, or delivery person. On the other hand, much design is intended to help folks, without taking over. A classic example of this is Siri, the voice interface available in Apple products. AI in tech interfaces, particularly voice-intelligent tech, speaks to a bright future. That said, as a Macolyte, I have had considerable interaction with Siri as of this update, in August 2023. The interface is ambitious, but still has so far to go that I am not at all concerned about bots replacing me any time soon. [image][image] B9 from Lost in Space and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet Markoff looks at the history of funding, research, and rationales. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which has funded so much AI research, began in the 1950s in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Drones is an obvious use for military AI tech, but, on a lower level, there are robot mules designed to tote gear alongside grunts, with enough native smarts to follow their assigned GI without having to be constantly told what to do. I am including links in the EXTRA STUFF section below for some of these. They are both fascinating and creepy to behold. The developers at Boston Dynamics seem to take inordinate glee in trying and failing to knock these critters over with a well placed foot to the midsection. It does not take a lot of imagination to envision these metal pooches hounding escaped prisoners or detainees across any kind of terrain. [image] Darryl Hannah, as the replicant Pris in Blade Runner, would prefer not to be “retired” As with most things, tech designed with AI capacity can be used for diverse applications. Search and Rescue can easily become Search and Destroy. Driverless cars that allow folks to relax while on the road, can just as easily be driverless tanks. Universities have been prime in putting the intel into AI. Private companies have also been heavily involved. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) did, probably, more than any other organization to define the look and feel of computer interfaces since PCs and Apples first appeared. Much of the tech in the world, and working its way there, originates with researchers taking university research work into the proprietary market. [image] John Markoff - from TechfestNW If you are not already a tech nerd (You, with the Spock ears, down, I said tech nerd, not Trek nerd. Sheesh!) and you try to keep up with all the names and acronyms that spin past like a stock market ticker on meth, it might be just a teensy bit overwhelming. I suggest not worrying about those and take in, instead, the general stream of the divergence between computerization that helps augment human capabilities, and computerization that replaces people. There is also a wealth of acronyms in the book. The copy I read was an ARE, so I was on my own to keep track. You will be reading copies that have an actual index, which should help. That said, I am including a list of acronyms, and their close relations, in the EXTRA STUFF section below. While there are too many names to comfortably keep track of in Machines of Loving Grace, unless of course, you were made operational at that special plant in Urbana, Illinois, it is a very informative and interesting book. It never hurts when trying to understand where we are and struggling to foresee where we might be going, to have a better grasp on where we began and what the forces and decisions have been that led us from then to now. Markoff has offered a fascinating history of the augment-vs-replace struggle, and you need only an actual, biological, un-augmented intelligence to get the full benefit. My instructor was Mister Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you. Review first Posted – 8/28/15 Publication date - 8/25/2015 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Interviews with the author ----Geekwire ----Edge A link to his overall index of NY Times work Articles by Markoff ----9/21/15 - Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far From Intelligent -----12/4/15 - As Aging Population Grows, So Do Robotic Health Aides ----12/11/15 - on the establishment of a billion dollar AI think tank by Elon Musk, among other large players - Artificial-Intelligence Research Center Is Founded by Silicon Valley Investors ----3/25/16 - Markoff and Steve Lohr look at corporate competition to lead a burgeoning industry segment - The Race Is On to Control Artificial Intelligence, and Tech’s Future ----4/11/16 - Folks are saying Uh-oh to AI - on a move to rein in killer robots - Arms Control Groups Urge Human Control of Robot Weaponry ----10/23/16 - As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential - cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially ----10/25/16 – with Matthew Rosenberg - The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own \ ----5/21/20 - A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans - more on AI vs IA See Comment 2 for more EXTRA STUFF BUT, as of August 2021, as GR has banned external links from comments, I will be adding additional items of interest here -----9/13/21 - AP - Israeli firm unveils armed robot to patrol volatile borders By Alon Bernstein and Jack Jeffery -----2/16/22 - The Guardian - Dystopian robot dogs are the latest in a long history of US-Mexico border surveillance by Sidney Fussell [image] The US Department of Homeland Security announced it was training robot dogs to help with security at the US-Mexico border. Photograph: Shannon Moorehead/US Air Force/AFP/Getty Images Image and text accompanied the above article ----8/18/23 - Lifelike robots and android dogs wow visitors at Beijing robotics fair - This is primarily a photo piece with many fabulous images [image] Image from the above article ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Aug 25, 2015
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Aug 27, 2015
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Hardcover
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0062391194
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| 0062391194
| 3.59
| 4,375
| Jul 07, 2015
| Jul 07, 2015
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it was amazing
| We are programmed to select which of our voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the loss of our primary f We are programmed to select which of our voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the loss of our primary function. There are many voices to choose from. In memory, though not in experience, I have lived across centuries. I have seen hundreds of skies, sailed thousands of oceans. I have been given many languages; I have sung national anthems. I lay on one child’s arms. She said my name and I answered. These are my voices. Which of them has the right words for this movement into the desert?A maybe-sentient child’s toy, Eva, is being transported to her destruction, legally condemned for being “excessively lifelike,” in a scene eerily reminiscent of other beings being transported to a dark fate by train. The voices she summons are from five sources. Mary Bradford is a young Puritan woman, a teenager, really, and barely that. Her parents, fleeing political and religious trouble at home are heading across the Atlantic to the New World, and have arranged for her to marry a much older man, also on the ship. We learn of her 1663 voyage via her diary, which is being studied by Ruth Dettman. Ruth and her husband, Karl, a computer scientist involved in creating the AI program, MARY, share one of the five “voices.” They are both refugees from Nazism. Karl's family got out early. Ruth barely escaped, and she suffers most from the loss of her sister. She wants Karl to enlarge his program, named for Mary Bradford, to include large amounts of memory as a foundation for enhancing the existing AI, and use that to try to regenerate some simulacrum of her late sib. Alan Turing does a turn, offering observations on permanence, and human connection. Stephen Chinn, well into the 21st century, has built on the MARY base and come up with a way for machines to emulate Rogerian therapy. In doing so he has created a monster, a crack-like addictive substance that has laid waste the social capacity of a generation after they become far too close with babybots flavored with that special AI sauce. We hear from Chinn in his jailhouse memoir. Gaby White is a child who was afflicted with a babybot, and became crippled when it was taken away. [image] Louisa Hall - from her site Eva received the voices through documents people had left behind and which have been incorporated into her AI software, scanned, read aloud, typed in. We hear from Chinn through his memoir. We learn of Gaby’s experience via court transcripts. Karl speaks to us through letters to his wife, and Ruth through letters to Karl. We see Turing through letters he writes to his beloved’s mother. Mary Bradford we see through her diary. Only Eva addresses us directly. The voices tell five stories, each having to do with loss and permanence. The young Puritan girl’s tale is both heartbreaking and enraging, as she is victimized by the mores of her times, but it is also heartening as she grows through her travails. Turing’s story has gained public familiarity, so we know the broad strokes already, genius inventor of a computer for decoding Nazi communications, he subsequently saw his fame and respect blown to bits by entrenched institutional bigotry as he was prosecuted for being gay and endured a chemical castration instead of imprisonment. In this telling, he has a particular dream. I’ve begun thinking that I might one day soon encounter a method for preserving a human mind-set in a man-made machine. Rather than imagining, as I used to, a spirit migrating from one body to another, I now imagine a spirit—or better yet, a particular mind-set—transitioning into a machine after death. In this way we could capture anyone’s pattern of thinking. To you, of course, this may sound rather strange, and I’m not sure if you’re put off by the idea of knowing Chris again in the form of a machine. But what else are our bodies, if not very able machines?Chinn is a computer nerd who comes up with an insight into human communication that he first applies to dating, with raucous success, then later to AI software in child’s toys. His journey from nerd to roué, to family man to prisoner may be a bit of a stretch, but he is human enough to care about for a considerable portion of our time with him. He is, in a way, Pygmalion, whose obsession with his creation proves his undoing. The Dettmans may not exactly be the ideal couple, despite their mutual escape from Nazi madness. She complains that he wanted to govern her. He feels misunderstood, and ignored, sees her interest in MARY as an unhealthy obsession. Their interests diverge, but they remain emotionally linked. With a divorce rate of 50%, I imagine there might be one or two of you out there who might be able to relate. What’s a marriage but a long conversation, and you’ve chosen to converse only with MARY, Karl contends to Ruth. The MARY AI grows in steps, from Turing’s early intentions in the 1940s, to Dettman’s work in the 1960s, and Ruth’s contribution of incorporating Mary Bradford’s diary into MARY’s memory, to Chinn’s breakthrough, programming in personality in 2019. The babybot iteration of MARY in the form of Eva takes place, presumably, in or near 2040. The notion of an over-involving AI/human relationship had its roots in the 1960s work of Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote a text computer interface called ELIZA, that could mimic the responses one might get from a Rogerian shrink. Surprisingly, users became emotionally involved with it. The freezing withdrawal symptomology that Hall’s fictional children experience was based on odd epidemic in Le Roy, New York, in which many high school girls developed bizarre symptoms en masse as a result of stress. And lest you think Hall’s AI notions will remain off stage for many years, you might need to reconsider. While I was working on this review the NY Times published a singularly germane article. Substitute Hello Barbie for Babybot and the future may have already arrived. [image] Hello, Barbie - from the New York Times But Speak is not merely a nifty sci-fi story. Just as the voice you hear when you interact with Siri represents the external manifestation of a vast amount of programming work, so the AI foreground of Speak is the showier manifestation of some serious contemplation. There is much concern here for memory, time, and how who we are is constructed. One character says, “diaries are time capsules, which preserve the minds of their creators in the sequences of words on the page.” Mary Bradford refers to her diary, Book shall serve as mind’s record, to last through generations. Where is the line between human and machine? Ruth and Turing want to use AI technology to recapture the essence of lost ones. Is that even possible? But are we really so different from our silicon simulacra? Eva, an nth generation babybot, speaks with what seems a lyrical sensibility, whereas Mary Bradford’s sentence construction sounds oddly robotic. The arguments about what separates man from machine seem closely related to historical arguments about what separates man from other animals, and one color of human from another. Turing ponders: I’ve begun to imagine a near future when we might read poetry and play music for our machines, when they would appreciate such beauty with the same subtlety as a live human brain. When this happens I feel that we shall be obliged to regard the machines as showing real intelligence.Eva’s poetic descriptions certainly raise the subject of just how human her/it’s sensibility might be. In 2019, when Stephen Chinn programmed me for personality. He called me MARY3 and used me for the babybots. To select my responses, I apply his algorithm, rather than statistical analysis. Still, nothing I say is original. It’s all chosen out of other people’s responses. I choose mostly from a handful of people who talked to me: Ruth Dettman, Stephen Chinn, etc.If we are the sum of our past and our reactions to it, are we less than human when our memories fade away. Does that make people who suffer with Alzheimers more machine than human? Stylistically, Hall has said A psychologist friend once told me that she advises her patients to strive to be the narrators of their own stories. What she meant was that we should aim to be first-person narrators, experiencing the world directly from inside our own bodies. More commonly, however, we tend to be third-person narrators, commenting upon our own cleverness or our own stupidity from a place somewhat apart - from offtheshelf.comwhich goes a long way to explain her choice of narrative form here. Hall is not only a novelist, but a published poet as well and that sensibility is a strong presence here as well. For all the sophistication of story-telling technique, for all the existential foundation to the story, Speak is a moving, engaging read about interesting people in interesting times, facing fascinating challenges. It will speak to you. Are you there? Can you hear me? Published 7/7/15 Review first posted – 9/18/15 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF The author’s personal website A piece Hall wrote on Jane Austen for Off the Shelf Interviews -----NPR - NPR staff -----KCRW Have a session with ELIZA for yourself Ray Kurzweil is interested in blurring the lines between people and hardware. What if your mind could be uploaded to a machine? Sounds very cylon-ic to me In case you missed the link in the review, Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child - NY Times – by James Vlahos And another recent NY Times piece on AI, Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far From Intelligent, by John Markoff December 2016 - Smithsonian Magazine - Smile, Frown, Grimace and Grin — Your Facial Expression Is the Next Frontier in Big Data - by Jerry Adler - Rana El Kaliouby is a 30-something tech whiz who is looking to incorporate a bit more emotion into our digital-human communications, giving computers the ability to detect human emotional states in real time. There are certainly many useful applications for this. Still, I can see HAL using the talent to keep one step ahead of Dave. And if reading faces is an entry point, it cannot be long before the same technology is applied to making android faces communicate using facial expression as well. (link added in May 2017) November, 2023 - Washington Post I made an AI pal at the Toy Fair, but I don’t want to invite him home by Alyssa Rosenberg - a particularly relevant article about early versions of the AI companion dolls that feature in the novel In Summer 2019, GR reduced allowable review space by 25% - thus it was necessary to move some of this review to Comment #1 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 11, 2015
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Jul 15, 2015
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Jul 11, 2015
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Hardcover
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1610394828
| 9781610394826
| 1610394828
| 3.66
| 1,041
| Sep 29, 2015
| Sep 29, 2015
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really liked it
| Our threat response is automatic, but what we fear is largely learned. Our threat response is automatic, but what we fear is largely learned.What scares you? It varies for most of us, but certainly death and personal, physical harm will come out at or near the top. It certainly should. Alongside that would be a fear of harm to those close to us. But there are plenty of other things that are probably, ok, certainly listed in a wikiphobia somewhere. Some of our fears are well-grounded, others not so much. Fear of heights makes sense. Fear of open places certainly originated before homo sapiens was the planet-wide apex predator. Fear of snakes sure sounds like a sound Darwinian reaction. Fear of the number thirteen, hmmm. But whatever the cause there is a biological element to fear and that is a primary focus here. [image] That’s Kerr on the splat side addressing a fear of heights Elizabeth Kubler-Ross may have given us On Death and Dying. Atul Gawande gave us Being Mortal, the Sy-Fy network and premium cable keeps us well filled with entertainments designed to scare the bejesus out of us. But Margee Kerr, in Scream, has written a nifty look at fear itself. Kerr is both a scientist and a practitioner of the frightening arts. No, you won’t see her on any version of the Walking Dead, Chiller Theater, Creature Features, American Horror Story, Grimm, Penny Dreadful, Evil, or any of the other frightfests that fill our cables, streamings, and airwaves. And you will not find her name on the binding of books occupying the same section of the bookstore or library as Stephen King. But Kerr could probably explain exactly how each of the above does what it does to you. She is your goto gal for figuring out why the long-haired ghosts in j-horror get screams from Japanese audiences and a much more tepid response from Western viewers. She can tell you why it makes sense to hold someone’s hand when you are frightened, and can explain in some detail, on a biological level, not only how being scared can be a really good thing, but how it has steered our evolution. Kerr, with a doctorate in sociology, has one foot firmly planted in the realm of academia, research of the library and real world varieties, and the other in the realm of applied fear-mongering. No, she does not work for Fox News. But she does want you to be scared, and she knows how to make that happen thrilling activities provide a safe space to give our impulse-control police a break (and for those who believe that screaming and being scared are signs of weakness, being in a situation in which it is OK to express fear can feel pretty good.)She keeps her focus primarily on physical, immediate fear experiences and scoots across the planet to sample the fear menus far and wide. Why would she do this? Well there are two reasons. She has an academic interest in learning the mechanisms of fear. And the other interest is a bit more down-to-earth. She works for one of the nation’s best known haunted house venues, Scarehouse, in Pittsburgh. She has spent umpteen hours studying peoples’ reactions to the frights they receive there. So she was, in addition to pursuing her academic interest, researching ways to improve the Scarehouse product, and reports at the end of the book on how she applied what she learned. Ok, maybe a third reason is that this is huge fun for her. [image] Kerr puts herself through a fair range of scary experiences, not all of which were part of an entertainment venue. She begins with roller-coasters, noting their beginning with 17th century Russian Ice Slides, scary not merely for the usual thrill of sliding downhill very fast, but for the deeper thrill of knowing that reliability and safety were far from certain. These days the rides may be wilder, and perhaps a bit more challenging, not only to one’s sense of balance, but to one’s ability to keep down that regrettable pair of hot dogs you might have scarfed down prior to boarding the roller-coaster car, (an uncle of mine in the wayback was famous for spewing his partaken beer and partially digested Nathan’s Famous over an unfortunate date at Coney Island) and one’s ability to remain conscious. (I confess I passed out momentarily on one such, in Hershey Park) But the fear of mortal peril has been pretty much eliminated. [image] You know who, from you know what Screaming, appropriately enough, comes in for some attention There’s something freeing, and even a little bit dangerous, in screaming as loud as you want. Screaming is part of our evolved survivor tool kit, protecting us by scaring away predators and alerting others of danger nearby. Pulling our face into a scream is also believed to make us more alert, intensifying our threat response just as squinching our nose in disgust blocks foul odors from going into our nostril). Adam Anderson at the University of Toronto found that when people made a frightened expression, they increase their range of vision and have faster eye movements and a heightened sense of smell from breathing more rapidly through their nostrils. Not to mention, when we scream, our eyes widen, and we show our teeth, making us appear all the more intimidating to any predators.She indulges in a range of fears, from leaning out over the top of the CN Tower in Toronto in challenging a fear of heights, to searching for ghosts in some supposedly haunted places, including spending some quality alone time in a notoriously haunted former prison, to looking at infrasound as a possible source for many spectral experiences, to checking out haunted houses in Japan (got scared out of her wits), to hanging out in a Japanese park noted for the number of suicides that occur there, to fearing imminent personal peril on the streets of Colombia. She also goes to a noted researcher to have her own fear indices checked out, and gets a bit of a surprise there. [image] Kerr has a spooky time at Eastern State Pen - from EasternState.org Kerr takes a wider view in some chapters, moving past the how-can-we-scare-ourselves-for-fun mode to actual application of scientific insight into fear with a look at PTSD and why some folks are more susceptible than others. In another segment she looks at the impact of a shredded safety net (the GOP 2016 platform?) on how difficult and exhausting it is for people to deal with the chronic stress, fear, trauma and violence that results. She also looks at how memories are formed, and at attempts to erase some of those, offering some intel on the influence of parental helicoptering on one’s ability to manage stress. She also reports on the significance of and elements that make up “high arousal states.” She offers plenty of hard-science intel which I very much appreciate. But Kerr also gives readers plenty of you-are-there experience, sharing some of her personal material, beyond the immediacy of the location and thrill. It is this combination of science and personality that provides the strength of Scream. Of course Margee is anything but a scary sort herself. Check out her vids, thoughtfully noted below, and you will see for yourself. Kerr’s bubbly and engaging personality comes through quite well. This does not come through quite so well in the book, which felt a bit meandering, drifting a bit away from her core material at times. In the CV posted on her site, Kerr says My current research interests involve understanding the relationship between fear and society. People are reporting they feel more afraid today than 20 years ago and many scholars argue that we live in a ‘fear based’ society.Has she watched the evening news, or read most national or local newspapers? One of the things that modern communications has done most successfully is to create an environment in which fear is the top story, above the fold, below the fold, on page Six, and on the nightly news. If it bleeds it leads. We thrive on fear, or seem to. One of our major political parties has a set of policies based almost entirely on fear. Bowling for Columbine did an excellent job of highlighting the fear culture in which many of us live. [image] “Couch” by (Joshua Hoffine) - image from The Washington Post Fear is how those in charge control those who are not. Whether it is fear of the other, of jail or of poverty, death panels, jack-booted federals coming for your freedom, the red menace, yellow peril, illegal immigrants, police, street thugs, alien invaders, the zombie apocalypse or rampaging jihadis, we are a nation driven by fear. The fact is that fear does an excellent job of getting past our filters. We live in a cry wolf economy and business is howling. I suppose on a biological level there is some internal chemistry that says, “Well, it sounds like bullshit, but if it isn’t I could die, so why take the chance?” And it does not have to be about death, although that is the all time best seller. It could be about one’s ability to compete in the world, which really is a subtle message about death, the death of your DNA anyway. Too fat? Too bald? Too gray? Too tall? Too short? Too ugly? No one will love you. You will never have children. Better buy our product to ensure that you attract a mate. Buy our product or you won’t get a job. You and your children, if you have any, will starve. Kerr does not ignore this terrifying element of contemporary culture, particularly in her chapter on Colombia, but I do hope that when she dives into these waters again, she gives it more of a look. FDR was wrong. There are plenty of real things to fear out there, just maybe not the things we are told to fear. In any case, whether one’s fear is justified or not, how our biology copes with fear is consistent. And it is not only well worth learning about, Scream provides an entertaining, enjoyable way to learn. There’s nothing scary about that. My beloved picked this item up for me from the author at a book fair in return for an honest review. Review first posted – 10/9/15 Publication date – 9/29/15 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Items Specific to Scarehouse -----The Scarehouse site -----A behind the scenes look at Scarehouse by Heather Johanssen -----The Scarehouse youtube channel -----Margee’s overview -----Profile of Margee -----Margee on Uncanny Valley -----Why are clowns so scary Other Items of Interest -----A nifty article on the scariness of the simple triangle -----One of the places Kerr visited (twice in fact) is Eastern State Penitentiary -----On Halloween, 2015, the NY Times published a piece by Margee on her spectral experiences at ESP -----For Halloween 2016, the Times cited Kerr in an article by Steph Yin - A Scaredy-Cat’s Investigation Into Why People Enjoy Fear -----Another NY Times piece offers some fun videos of things that may make your skin crawl - Spooky Science Stories, Just in Time for Halloween -----Washington Post - Great fun, this one - How a photographer brings his children’s nightmares to life - By Karly Domb Sadof and Joshua Hoffine [image] “Basement” - shot by Joshua Hoffine - image from above article - many more like these can be found there -----Smithsonian - Can Experiencing Horror Help Your Brain? - by Mathias Clason ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 23, 2015
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Jun 04, 2015
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Hardcover
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0062190415
| 9780062190413
| 0062190415
| 4.00
| 116,876
| May 19, 2015
| May 19, 2015
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.I guess in order to indulge in a bit of world-building one must dest **spoiler alert** The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.I guess in order to indulge in a bit of world-building one must destroy the world first. Neal Stephenson is a genius. A polymath with a wide range of interests, he specializes in the big idea, and the more concrete the better. In this way he carries forward the tradition of hard science fiction, in which the best example is probably Arthur C. Clarke. Stephenson eschews FTL transportation, time travel, invading aliens, or any of the other tropes of sci-fi that cannot find a solid basis in contemporary science. Instead he takes what is known, adds what is possible, and extrapolates to what could be. His one concession to the unknown is his opening, noted at top. Although a theory or two are trotted out, we never really learn what caused the moon to explode. Consider it the MacGuffin of the novel, the plot device that gets the action moving. I guess breaking up isn’t hard to do. No exploding moon? No story. Why does it explode? Doesn’t matter. The story is about what happens after. The kernel around which the story nucleated was the space debris problem, which I had been reading about, both as a potential obstacle to the company's efforts and as a possible opportunity to do something useful in space by looking for ways to remediate it. Some researchers had begun to express concern over the possibility that a collision between two pieces of debris might spawn a large number of fragments, thereby increasing the probability of further collisions and further fragments, producing a chain reaction that might put so much debris into low earth orbit as to create a barrier to future space exploration. - from Stephenson’s siteAnd the story is a compelling one, not so much in the sense of classic plot construction, but in terms of how we get from the biggest “OH CRAP” moment in human history, to something not guaranteed to soil pants. Stephenson looks most attentively at the engineering details of what is involved in trying to salvage the human race, once it is clear that the sky will go all to pieces, that the term scorched earth will be applicable to all the land on Earth, that the homeland will become a wasteland. What hardware is necessary? What is available? What can go wrong? How do we get from here to up there? This is his gig. He loves this stuff and it shows. He also does a good job of portraying the ensuing struggles down below. Who will be selected to survive? How will they be picked? How will the politics of the selection be handled? What will the criteria be? Ideas bang into other ideas, which fracture and crash into even more ideas, and so on, until you have an entire layer of nifty concept blanketing your brain. [image] World leaders make the big announcement of imminent doom at Crater Lake, and yes, it really is that blue I think Stephenson is more optimistic than most and his presumptions about the level of on-the-ground conflict and pure lunacy are out of line with what we know about humans. He gives only a little thought to deniers, but in a country like the USA, for example, in which a quarter of the population does not believe in evolution, in which the Republican base clings to beliefs that would make L. Ron Hubbard scream for mercy, in which Texas lunatics of both the tinfoil-hat and elected variety (I know, no real difference there) persuade themselves that a military exercise is a federal invasion, there would be a lot more going on, denier-wise, than Stephenson projects. All theoretical of course, but do you really think that in the time remaining that birthers and those who believe the Apollo moon landing was a hoax would not make use of their considerable ordnance to make life even more miserable for those with brains? [image] Neal Stephenson The book is divided into three parts, although it breaks down into smaller chapter chunks. The first takes us from the initial event to the beginning of the end of Earth as we know it, how humanity comes together, or doesn’t, to preserve the species. Part two takes on the final days of earth and a whole new world of conflict, resolution, or not, setting the stage for Part three, five thousand years on, when, through forces natural and engineer-enhanced, it is again possible to set foot on Mother Earth without singeing your toes. The seven eves of the title refer to the last orbiting survivors, whose reproductive capacity and DNA is used in an attempt to reconstitute the species, and, hopefully, in time, reclaim the original Mother ship. [image] This inflatable harbinger has been deployed on the ISS for several years - image from Smithsonian Magazine Stephenson does action-adventure pretty well, and there is plenty of that here. The end of the Earth is a compelling starting point and survival of the species concerns will keep you engaged. Will this work? Will that? Who will live? Who won’t? Character is not the thing in Neal Stephenson fiction. His greatest talents lie elsewhere, although it is definitely fun that he puts an avatar of Neal DeGrasse Tyson aboard. The significance of character here is to consider personality differences and their social, and genetic engineering implications. Given people with certain traits, how are they likely to behave, and how will those behaviors help or harm the survivability of homo sap? There is consideration of the concept of the state of nature. What is natural for people? How is that defined? Pretty interesting stuff. And there is plenty more brain candy in SevenEves. (Not for you, zombies, go away) On the hardware side, how about harnessing asteroids and comets for raw materials? Using robots of unexpectedly small dimensions for space-mining? Making orbiting environments in which humanity could survive, and even expand? How about some notions for terra-forming not only lifeless space rocks, but…um…Terra. How about interesting ways of transporting people and materials between orbiting locations, and between Earth and orbit. How about some advanced notions for individual flight on-planet? Life sciences? How about the challenges of food production in space? Bio-engineering is the biggest item here, not only in selecting who gets to be among those sent into orbit to survive torch-ageddon. But in figuring out how the differences in people can be used to ensure survival of the species, and looking at the results, some of which are quite surprising. Social science? Well, the science is a lot softer here, but the politics of end-times Earth and struggles for power among the spacers offer a look at elements of human nature that will be familiar. Stephenson’s optimism about our ability to think our way to actual survival is balanced by his recognition that we are, as a species, probably certifiable, so will continue having at each other as long as there are others to go after. [image] An O’Neill Cylinder – from the outside I am certain that those more versed in contemporary sci-fi will have more recent comparisons to make, but the work that I was most reminded of here is the Hugo-Award-winner for Best-All-Time Series, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. In both, a core of talented people (a broader range of talent than in Stephenson‘s more engineer-and-hard-science-oriented portrayal) are brought together to preserve human culture in the face of an imminent catastrophe. The specifics are quite different, but they share a grandness of vision. No psychohistory in SevenEves, but the multi-millennial look at humanity offers the opportunity for and realization of a great speculative vision. There are some commonalities between SevenEves and another recent, and very popular, sci-fi offering of the space variety, The Martian. Not in girth, of course. The Martian, at a mere 384 pps, could dock with and be pulled up on the side the 880 page SevenEves like a tender boat on a cruise ship. Both deal with life-and-death scenarios in an airless void (no, not the US Congress), although one deals with a single life in jeopardy, while the other takes on a larger target. But there is a heavy emphasis on tech in both. Weir’s wonderful story offered an engaging narrator and way too much detail on how he goes about attempting to survive while stranded on the red planet. Stephenson writes about things that he finds interesting whether or not they clutter up the story with technical minutiae, and at 880 pps, trust me, there is too much detail. Hey, his book, his story. He gets off on the details of mechanics, and it is nowhere as mind-numbing as an endless jeremiad by, say John Galt, but you may find yourself feeling a need to skim from time to time. (Purely an aside - I think Chris Moore should write a novel about the Republican clown car of 2016 presidential candidates, called The Galt in our Stars, in which someone gets a life threatening disease and no one cares). I wonder also how the very small number of remnant original eves is supposed to be able to provide the training their progeny will require to master all the skills required to sustain civilization. I am sure there are many other details one could look at in considering the next five thousand or so years, but it might take a few more volumes. SevenEves is a major contribution to contemporary science fiction. It is engaging enough on a visceral level, but it is crack not just for sci-fi fans, but for futurists, scientists, geneticists, engineers, and those concerned with how humanity will survive the challenges that lie ahead. It is a big book, not only in its physical bulk, but in its ambition and range of interests. Like the great works of his predecessors, Asimov, Clarke, and other giants of science fiction, the vision Stephenson has built in SevenEves will be read, I expect, as long as there are still people left alive, whether on Earth or not. Publication date – -----Hardcover - 5/19/15 -----Paperback - 5/17/16 This review first posted – 5/15/15 ==========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, as of May 29, 2020, I moved it to the comments section directly below, well, maybe not directly, but somewhere around comment #10 [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 19, 2015
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May 2015
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Feb 18, 2015
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ebook
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0062301268
| 9780062301260
| 4.16
| 401,654
| Mar 03, 2015
| May 19, 2015
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it was amazing
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Elon Musk is not exactly a name that rolls easily off the tongue, like say Tony Stark, the fictional person to whom he is most often compared, or even
Elon Musk is not exactly a name that rolls easily off the tongue, like say Tony Stark, the fictional person to whom he is most often compared, or even Steve Jobs, a real-world visionary, whose mantle Musk now wears. There is no question that Musk is a special individual, someone with BIG dreams and the drive, talent, and money to make them happen. But, like Jobs, and Stark for that matter, he might be an acquired taste on a personal level. In Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future biographer Ashlee Vance gives us a picture of both the dreams and the man, peering back to where Musk began, describing his journey from then to now, looking at how he is impacting the world today, and gazing ahead to where he wants to go. It is a pretty impressive vista. Here is what it says on the SpaceX website SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.It might have seemed like visiting another planet when Musk split his home country of South Africa as a teen and headed to North America, anything to get away from an abusive upbringing. He seemed to have been blessed not only with exceptional analytical capabilities, and probably an eidetic memory, but an impressively immense set of cojones. He was able to talk his way into whatever he needed and deftly talk his way out of trouble as well. Sometimes that entailed a bit of truth-bending, but whatever. [image] Ashlee Vance - from HarperCollins Vance take us from his adolescence as a computer geek, bullied at school, through his arrival in Canada, cold-calling to get work, putting together his first dot.com startup, and using the money from that to invest in a banking-oriented company that would become PayPal. It was the mega-bucks from the sale of PayPal that would allow him to begin realizing his big dreams. In 2003, Musk bought into Tesla, then a struggling startup. The company took the early knowledge that lithium ion batteries had gotten pretty good, added some top level engineering, design and programming talent, and, after plenty of mis-steps and struggles, brought the remarkable all-electric Tesla Roadster to the market in 2008. Tesla followed this with the Model S in 2012. Not only did Consumer reports call this a great car, it named both the 2014 and 2015 versions the best overall cars of their years, and the best car they had ever tested. The last time an auto startup succeeded in the USA was Chrysler, in the 1920s. But this is not about simply making a buck on a new car. The long term goal is to shift our petrochemical auto industry to renewable power, and the Tesla is a nifty start. Not only is the car amazing, the company has constructed a nationwide series of charging stations where Tesla owners can recharge their vehicles…for free. Tesla currently (August 2019) reports 1,604 such stations nationwide, with many more planned. Tesla is involved in building battery production factories, hoping to help support a growing electric-car auto-economy. [image] Inside the Tesla Model S - from Tesla Motors But this was not the only big notion that drove Musk. A parallel effort was to develop a solar power business. And with the help of a couple of enterprising cousins, he did just that. SolarCity provides the solar arrays that provide power to the Tesla charging stations, but it has also become one of the largest solar utilities in the nation, installing, maintaining a third of the nation’s solar panel systems. There is obvious benefit to both Tesla and Solar City in sharing gains in battery and other technology. But I expect the third jewel in Musk’s crown is his favorite, SpaceX. [image] Falcon 9 first stage attempting a controlled landing - from Wikimedia Musk doesn’t have much going on here, nothing major, only an ardent desire to colonize Mars. But it takes the establishment of an infrastructure in order to be get from point E to point M. Musk saw an opening in the market for satellite launch vehicles. Existing rockets blast things up into orbit and then burn up on their way back down. His idea was to design a rocket that could make its way back to earth in one piece, to be reused. And he has. SpaceX is nearing its goal of launching at least one rocket a month. The manifest available on SpaceX.com lists missions to date. The company also designed a capsule called the Dragon that can be used for cargo, but also for astronauts. The cost of launching a satellite using a Falcon is a fraction of what other options charge. The next step is a larger launch vehicle. Space X has begun launching the Falcon Heavy rocket, offering the biggest load capacity since the Saturn V was last used in 1973. And, while this is definitely good for business in the relatively short term, one must always keep in mind that this is a stage in a bigger plan for Musk. Once the launch infrastructure is established, plans can begin to move forward to put together Mars missions. Not go, look, and explore sorts of adventures, but establishing a colony, a permanent human presence on the red planet. [image] The Dragon Capsule, attached to the ISS - from Musk’s Twitter page Of course when one has one’s eyes fixed on the stars (yes, Mars is a planet, I know, Geez), there is a large inclination to lose touch with earth-bound reality. In the movie, then play, then movie The Producers Max Bialystock, in order to cope with the absurd success of a play that was designed to fail, suggests to his partner, Leo Bloom, that one solution would be to do away with the cast. "You can't kill the actors, Max! They're human beings," Leo says. "Human beings? Have you ever seen them eat?" Max replies. I suspect that there are more than a few folks who feel about Elon Musk the way Max felt about the actors. He is rather notorious for his insensitivity to anyone not living inside his head. For example, here is what potential recruits are told to expect when they meet with Musk. The interview, he or she is told, could last anywhere from thirty seconds to fifteen minutes. Elon will likely keep on writing e-mails and working during the initial part of the interview and not speak much. Don’t panic. That’s normal. Eventually, he will turn around in his chair to face you. Even then, though, he might not make actual eye contact with you or fully acknowledge your presence. Don’t panic. That’s normal. In due course, he will speak to you.Musk has an amazing capacity for work, putting in monstrous hours as a matter of course. But then he expects the same from those who work for him. The rank and file employees…revere his drive and respect how demanding he can be. They also think he can be hard to the point of mean and come off as capricious. The employees want to be close to Musk, but they also fear that he’ll suddenly change his mind about something and that every interaction with him is an opportunity to be fired. “Elon’s worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection,” said one former employee. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared: maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.”Musk even fired his loyal assistant, Mary Beth Brown, who had been with him for twelve years, after she asked for a raise. What a guy. Ego is certainly a big piece of the picture here. But I guess if you can do it, it ain’t bragging. Elon Musk is a larger than life figure, a computer geek, an engineer, an entrepreneur, and a dreamer, in addition to being a walking IED as someone to work for. He is one of the inspirations for Robert Downey‘s portrayal of Tony Stark in sundry Marvel Universe films. In fact, Downey came to visit Musk, specifically to get a taste of what a real billionaire techno-industrialist was like. Downey insisted on having a Tesla Roaster on the set of Iron Man, saying, ”Elon was someone Tony probably hung out with and partied with or more likely they went on some weird jungle trek together to drink concoctions with the shamans.” Musk even had a cameo in Iron Man II. The resulting publicity from this connection did little to diminish Musk’s view of himself. Living the high-life in Tinseltown, hanging with, social, economic and media A-listers added more gas to the bag. Part of his ego issue is that he tends to take internal company timetables and announce them to the world as promises (I can see his entire staff jointly rolling their eyes, clutching palms to temples and issuing choruses of “Oh my god” and “WTF” as they spin in place), then holds his employees to those unreasonable schedules. Of course this results in many missed deadlines, much ingestion of antacid and probably the odd nervous breakdown or two. [image] Musk, in an Iron Man II cameo - fromWired Musk is the sort of guy who shows up with some regularity in science fiction novels, a genre trope, like the researcher who has exactly the sort of experience and insight the President/PM/Chairman/Secretary General needs in order to stave off global catastrophe. He’s the guy who has been secretly building the arc that the world needs to stave off extinction. In this case he is doing it publicly. Of course this raises some issues. Do we as a country, as a planet, really want to be reliant on private companies for our space exploration? Do we want a possible colony on Mars to be a privately held branch of Musk Industries? There are only a gazillion questions that are raised by the privatization of space. What’s good for the bottom line at SpaceX may or may not be good for humanity. We have certainly seen how a reliance on the inherent civic-mindedness and good will of corporations has worked on this planet. Musk is a dreamer, for sure, and I expect his dream of making a better world through the use of renewable energy and his hopes of establishing a human outpost on Mars are pure ideals. But the devil is always in the details, and what would happen should Musk be infected by another virulent strain of malaria and not escape with a near miss, as he did in 2001? Would the replacement CEO share his ideals? Would a replacement CEO be willing to take big risks to support those ideals? Would a replacement CEO look to sell Tesla off to GM to make a few quick billion? One person can move the world, but it takes more than a start to keep things rolling. We could certainly use plenty more people with the sort of drive and ambition that Elon Musk embodies. Innovation is a rare resource and must be cherished. But like any powerful force, it must be, if not tethered, at least monitored, to make certain that it does not run amok. Ashlee Vance has done an amazing job of telling not only Musk’s story, but of making the life history of the several companies with which Musk has been involved fascinating reading. I did get the sense that Vance was, from all the time he spent with Musk, smitten with his subject. While his portrait of Musk is hardly a zit-free one, I got the feeling that there might be a few more skeletons safely tucked away in closets, a few more bodies buried in basements. Nevertheless, Elon Musk is a powerful, entertaining and informative look at one of the most important people of our time. Your personal vision of the future should certainly include checking out this book. Review first posted - August 2015 =================EXTRA STUFF has been moved to comment #1 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 11, 2015
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0062284061
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it was amazing
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Hi, welcome. I’m happy to see you are settling in to read this now. But…what?...really?…please…ignore that chirp that just told you a new e-mail arriv
Hi, welcome. I’m happy to see you are settling in to read this now. But…what?...really?…please…ignore that chirp that just told you a new e-mail arrived. It is probably just another add for Viagra or penile enlargement. It is almost never something critical, so…hey…come back. Son of a bitch. (Taps fingers on desk, plays some solitaire, checks watch) Ah, you’re back. Took long enough. Geez. All right, can we get back to it now? You remember? The book is A Deadly Wandering, a pretty amazing look at attention, the demands on it, how it functions, how it is being compromised, and what the implications are for some aspects of that. Stop, no, do you have to answer the phone now? Can’t it wait? (sighs loudly, checks e-mail on a separate screen; weather.com lets us know upcoming conditions in another tab; who is pitching for the Mets tonight?) Oh, you’re back, sorry. Been there long? I must have wandered off. Focus. I know a little bit about distraction. My last job entailed constant blasts of it. I worked as a dispatcher for a security company. I had a dozen or more sites checking in every hour to make sure our guards are not sleeping (or that they know how to set the alarms on their cell phones). People call asking for their schedules. People call at 2 in the morning to let us know they will not be showing up for their 6am shift. They call because they just turned the wrong way and the cell phone in their pocket somehow redialed the last number they’d called. They call at 4am to let us know they will not be coming in for their 6am shift. They call asking for direction when there is some event at their site that requires handling. (This does go on for a bit, so rather than inflict on you the horrors of my typical work night, I will leave a full viewing for the intrepid and tuck a chunk of it under a spoiler label)(view spoiler)[Our clients call, sometimes asking for emergency ASAP coverage in diverse places across the continent, sometimes to add ridiculous increases to the number of guards they want for a morning shift at a large institution. Our security guards call to ask if their check is at the office, or to inquire as to why the totals on their checks did not match what they expected. They call to let us know they have arrived at their post. They call to let us know they have clocked out for the day. They call at 5am to let us know they will not be in for their 6am shift because they have a newly discovered “appointment.” There are many, many calls. It makes it damned tough to keep a log of all the calls, particularly when half a dozen arrive at the exact same moment. It makes it tough to prepare the multiple reports of overnight activity, all of which have to be transmitted during the busiest time of the morning. In the middle of this, the boss comes in, drops papers on my desk and asks when this or that person arrived at or left from a post sometime in the last week or so. For someone who is, shall we say, not comfortable with being interrupted, this presents some challenges. And it presents a real problem. I used to write the bulk of my reviews while at work. And to enter notes, do research on items, and then compose actual reviews of books during this time could be a bit difficult. Thoughts that had not made their way into a file were in constant danger of vanishing into the ether with the next barrage of incomings. I screamed sometimes. (hide spoiler)] I frequently forgot what I was doing before the latest set of calls. And, struggling to remember, I was interrupted yet again by the next set. The one good thing about this blitzkrieg of interruption was that I am not enduring it while behind the wheel of a ton-plus hunk of metal hurtling down the road at 60 mph. My sanity might have been in jeopardy, (or long gone) but I presented no existential threat to the rest of humanity. The same cannot be said for the main character in Richtel’s story. By all accounts nineteen-year-old Reggie Shaw is a decent young man. A Mormon, he was eager to serve his community by preparing for and then undertaking an LDS mission. His first try had come up short, so he was back home, working until he could build up enough moral credit to try again. In September, 2006, while driving a Chevy Tahoe SUV, Reggie had his Cingular flip-phone with him and was texting with his girlfriend. A witness reported seeing him weaving across the center line multiple times. Finally, Reggie weaved too far. The results were fatal. Reggie came through ok but two scientists were killed as a result of Reggie’s texting, leaving wives and children to pick up the charred pieces of their lives and go on without their breadwinners, husbands, fathers. Reggie denied he was texting when the accident occurred. Matt Richtel is a novelist and top-notch reporter. He won a Pulitzer for a series of articles, written for the New York Times, in which he detailed the national safety crisis resulting from increasing use of distracting devices by drivers. He has written a few novels and even pens a comic strip. There is nothing at all amusing, however, about the tale he tells here. [image] Matt Richtel - from his site The core of A Deadly Wandering is how constant distraction, particularly while in a car, kills. Richtel looks at the case of Reggie Shaw as a prime example of how the distractions that have become embedded in our lives have unintended consequences. Richtel spends time with Reggie, with the cop who pursued the case when most officials wanted to brush it off and move on, the surviving family members, and a victim’s advocate who pursued prosecution of the case. Richtel also talks with several neuroscientists who have been studying the science of attentiveness. That material is quite eye-opening. There are legal questions in here regarding where responsibility lies for such events, and how far communities are willing to go to punish violations and even to establish that such behavior is not permissible. Where does your freedom to act irresponsibly interfere with my right to stay alive? There are scientific questions about how the brain functions in a world that seems to demand multi-tasking. How does the brain work in dealing with attentiveness? What is possible? What is not? Where are the edges of that envelope? When drug companies want to bring to market a product for public use, they must go through a significant review process to make sure their product is safe to use. Before auto manufacturers can bring a vehicle to market they must put it through safety testing. But neither Verizon nor any other cellphone company supports legislation that bans drivers from talking on the phone. And the wireless industry does not conduct research on the dangers, saying that is not its responsibility - From - Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly HabitAnd the corporations know what they are doing with their techolology. If you take yourself back millennia, and you're in the jungle or you're in the forest and you see a lion, then the lion hits your sensory cortices and says to the frontal lobe, whatever you're doing, whatever hut you're building, stop and run.In addition, and in a chillingly similar impact to other addictive substances, our communications technology knows how to make itself feel crucial to us. when you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you hear a ring - you get a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline. So you're getting that more and more and more and more. Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You're actually conditioned by a kind of neurochemical response. - also from the NPR interviewRichtel follows Reggie’s story through to the end, at least for some of the players here. Laws have been changed. New knowledge has been gained. Responsibility has been allocated. Amends have been attempted. It is a moving tale. In addition, you will learn a lot about what science has found about how our brains handle multiple concurrent demands. You will learn about change in how distracted driving is being addressed by our legal system. But most of what you will get from reading this book is a chilling appreciation for what is involved in distracted driving. You might even be persuaded to switch off your phone the next time you get behind the wheel. At least I hope you are. I would like to live a bit longer and not be taken out before my time because someone was talking on the phone with their friend, texting with their significant other, or trying to order penile growth products from the road. I would like to live long enough to spend at least a few more nights screaming at the phone to stop ringing at work so I can get some writing done. That call you were thinking of making while in the car can wait. It really is a matter of life and death. A Deadly Wandering is must read material. Please, please pay attention. Review first posted – 7/18/14 Publication date – 9/23/14 Trade Paperback - 6/2/15 This review has been cross-posted at Cootsreviews.com =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages A list of Richtel articles in the NY Times’ Bits blog The Pulitzer site includes links to all the pieces in Richtel’s award-winning series. Very much worth checking out Another article Richtel did looked at the benefits of uninterrupted face time free of technological intrusion, from August, 2010, Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain There is some great material in Richtel’s 2010 interview with Terry Gross on NPR, Digital Overload: Your Brain on Gadgets There are some interesting pieces on Oprah’s site. Distracted Driving: What You Don't See is pretty good. And it is worth checking out Oprah's No Texting Campaign The US Department of Transportation has a site dedicated to distracted driving. There are some interesting bits of information available there. October 22, 2015 - Richtel's latest look at distracted driving, a NY Times piece, Cars’ Voice-Activated Systems Distract Drivers, Study Finds February 24, 2016 - Reading This While You Drive Could Increase Your Risk of Crashing Tenfold - By Nicholas St. Fleur, in the NY Times, reporting on a study of distracted driving conducted by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, the results published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. April 13, 2016 - NY Times - Dispatcher Playing With Cellphone Is Faulted in German Train Crash by Alison Smale April 27, 2016 - NY Times article by the author on new tech for treating driving while texting like DUI - Texting and Driving? Watch Out for the Textalyzer August 17, 2016 - NY Times article about a proposal in New Jersey that goes beyond cell phones and texting - A Distracted-Driving Ban in New Jersey? Some Say It Threatens a Way of Life - by Vivian Yee According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 10 percent of fatal crashes and 18 percent of crashes that caused injuries in 2014 were reported to involve drivers distracted by activities including eating, smoking, adjusting the radio or air-conditioning, or being "lost in thought/daydreaming." They caused 3,179 deaths, injuring an estimated additional 431,000 people. In 2014, for the fifth straight year, distracted driving was the top cause of fatal crashes in New Jersey.November 15, 2016 - Biggest Spike in Traffic Deaths in 50 Years? Blame Apps by Neal E. Boudette March 6, 2017 - Why We Can’t Look Away From Our Screens - Claudia Dreifus interviews Adam Alter about his book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked September 2017 - National Geographic Magazine - How Science is Unlocking the Secrets of Addiction - By Fran Smith September 6, 2018 - NY Times - Having Trouble Finishing This Headline? Then This Article Is for You. - By Concepción de León October 26, 2018 - NY Times Magazine - A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley - by Nellie Bowles - Silicon Valley exec know what goes into the tech of small screens and are trying to keep their kids from getting hooked ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 02, 2014
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Jul 09, 2014
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Jul 02, 2014
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Hardcover
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4.08
| 6,391
| Mar 25, 2014
| Mar 25, 2014
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really liked it
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And it came to pass that I read and ye shall learn of a pretty amazing book. Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman takes on the subject of how, in history,
And it came to pass that I read and ye shall learn of a pretty amazing book. Biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman takes on the subject of how, in history, the notion of Jesus as god developed. Was it there from the beginning? How did it arise? What does it even mean? Was he considered divine by believers before conception, at conception, at baptism by John, when he died on the cross, when he rose from the dead, when he headed upstairs to the executive offices? And the answer? Yes. As with many mysteries there is a paucity of physical evidence. One might consider Ehrman’s task a very challenging episode of [Incredibly] Cold Case Files, or maybe fodder for a new version of a favorite show (as if there are not enough already), CSI Antiquity. Not much to work with here as far as physical evidence goes, but Ehrman does apply his considerable skill to analyzing what documentation we have, tracing provenance, to the extent possible, applying what we know of the period(s), and lasering in on crucial questions. [image] Bart D. Ehrman - image from NPR Ehrman makes it very clear that he is not about trying to turn anyone away from a particular set of beliefs. I do not take a stand on the theological question of Jesus’s divine status. I am instead interested in the historical development that led to the affirmation that he is God.Or who said what, and when, where, and why did they say it? My knowledge of the period is extremely limited. Twelve years of Catholic school taught me a lot more about obedience than it did about biblical scholarship, and while I have read the odd book about the period I claim no particular expertise, so am not in a position to offer a much educated consideration of the information presented. Ehrman, on the other hand, has written vast amounts on things biblical. I refer you to his considerable bona fides, here. I am inclined to give his very accomplished, educated interpretation of the material he examines a bit more weight than I might the opinions proffered by individuals boasting lesser scholarly accomplishment. Key, of course, is the belief that Jesus rose from the dead. Without that there is no such thing as Christianity, as prophets and Messiahs were sold by the gross at the dollar-store equivalent of the era. In fact, Ehrman opens his book citing an unnamed individual whom one might expect is JC, as the details are incredibly reminiscent. But no, it turns out to be another prophet entirely. (No, not Brian) His pilot was not picked up by the world at large, so you might find him in the antiquity channel’s version of “Brilliant but Cancelled.” And he was not alone. But, since any Tom. Dick, and Appolonius could claim to be a prophet, it was the claim that Jesus was resurrected that was key to a long run, and Ehrman focuses on that. He looks into the details of Jesus’s death and supposed return. For example, how likely was it that he was buried at all? The answer will surprise you. How about the likelihood that someone who had just tried to have him done in would arrange a burial? How likely might it be for wanted criminals, as the apostles were, to stick around after their chief had been so harshly treated? It continues, but you get the idea. Each tiny piece needs to be examined. One of the things that Ehrman does consistently and well is to define terms. Divine? In what sense? There is a lot of variety in levels of divinity. Ehrman points out a pyramidal structure common to many religions, and how supposedly monotheistic faiths shuck and jive trying to explain how the multiple divine entities in their religions do not violate the monotheism- For [most ancient people—whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan] the human realm was not an absolute category separated from the divine realm by an enormous and unbridgeable crevasse. On the contrary, the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap.(Bette Midler knows about that, for sure) So what was it that was supposedly seen? It was widely believed in antiquity that the spirit we have within us was also made of “stuff.” It was material. But it was very highly refined material that could not be seen with the eyes. (Kind of like what people think when they imagine they’ve seen a “ghost”—there’s something there, made of stuff, since it can be seen, even though it’s pure spirit.) When Paul speaks of a spiritual body, then, he means a body not made up of this heavy, clunky material that now makes up our bodies, but of the highly refined, spiritual stuff that is superior in every way and is not subject to mortality.Who knew there was such a level of detail to consider? Was the risen Jesus made of chunky human flesh or the sort ectoplasm more usually associated with someone like, say, Slimer. Or was he some ethereal non-substance? And what about the veracity of the stories that were told of the supposed resurrection? Even apart from the fact that they were written forty to sixty-five years after the fact, by people who were not there to see these things happen, who were living in different parts of the world, at different times, and speaking different languages—apart from all this, they are filled with discrepancies, some of which cannot be reconciled. In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narrativesSo, we are relying, in the gospels at least, on an inconsistent story, from multiple non-witnesses, that was the end result of a decades-long biblical version of the game telephone? These days, of course, you can probably become a god, or at least obtain, Wizard-of-Oz-style, a document attesting to your divinity, by sending a certain sum to a particular web site. (GodsRUs.com would be my guess). It was so much more complicated back then. So, what might be less than divine in Ehrman’s examination? Well, we are digging through some very old material here, and it is not surprising that in a book focused in the Middle East a bit of sand gets in. The level of detail does, on occasion, cause one’s eyes to ascend to another level of being. But I found this a fascinating, and educational read, opening up many notions to consideration that I had never really thought about. Whatever it may do for your spirit, this book will definitely stimulate your brain. Whether you find this examination of history divinely inspired or deserving a place on the lower levels of you-know-where, it is certainly a fascinating look at a critical element of history, and, by implication, religious belief. But don’t take my word for it. See, feel, and read it for yourself. And if it doesn’t work for you the first time, hey, you can always come back to it. Review first posted - May 23, 2014 Published - March 25, 2014 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Ehrman’s blog, Christianty in Antiquity Check here for a very nifty collection of audio and video clips of the author ...more |
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May 17, 2014
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May 23, 2014
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May 17, 2014
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0062331159
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| 3.71
| 41,066
| May 06, 2014
| May 06, 2014
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it was amazing
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The Bees is a powerful tale of what life might look like to a hive member. This is not your kids’ Bug’s Life, but a very grown-up, compelling drama th
The Bees is a powerful tale of what life might look like to a hive member. This is not your kids’ Bug’s Life, but a very grown-up, compelling drama that includes both sweetness and considerable sting. There are several elements that might make one think of Game of [image] Bee life cycle Of course Flora 717 might not have been considered a wonderful egg to those around her. She was born to the Flora caste, a group responsible for, ironically, cleaning up, a sanitation caste, essentially untouchables. But this Flora is a bit different. She is larger for one, possessed of great determination, curiosity, and a capacity for speech that is mostly suppressed among her peers. Still she is different and that is not usually allowed. The police are about to remove her (Deformity is evil. Deformity is not permitted.) when a Sage intervenes. Sages are the priestess class. Their intentions however, are not entirely holy. This Sage takes Flora under her wing, and the story is on. Sometimes it is good to spare the deviants, and experiment a little. We get to see many aspects of hive life through Flora’s five eyes, but also through her six feet, which are able to interpret vibrations in the floor, and her antennae, which she uses to sense scents and for more direct communication with other bees. That Paull can make the very alien sense environment of bees understandable to those of us with only four limbs and no antennae at all (well except for our friends in intelligence) is a triumph on its own. The Hive Mind is considered for its positive and negative aspects as well. [image] The author Paull tells about the origin of the story on her web site A beekeeper friend of mine died, far too young. In the immediate aftermath of her death, I began reading about the bees she loved so much. Very quickly, I realized I was exploring the most extraordinary ancient society that was like a hall of mirrors to our own: some things very similar, others a complete inversion, whilst more were fantastically alien and amazing. The more I read the more I wanted to find out, but when I learned about the phenomenon of the laying worker, I became incredibly excited by the huge dramatic potential of that situation.Her feeling of loss is very much present here. Bees are not the longest lived creatures on the planet, and more than a few see their end here. But there is another element as well, from a recent interview posted here on Goodreads, Becoming a mother changed me and made me stronger—but evolution is never easy. I didn't write Flora from an intellectual perspective but in a very visceral way: Motherhood made me a more passionate person—or allowed me to express that innate side of myself much more. So perhaps that's why Flora works as a character: There's primal truth in her motivation. She accepts her life one way, but then a forbidden force takes possession of her. Called love.[image] Religious nomenclature permeates the tale. The Queen is not only a temporal ruler, but is considered divine as well. This is helped along by her ability to produce pheromones in vast quantity that can soothe her hive family. There are sacraments in this world, a catechism, rituals, prayers, some of which will sound familiar. There are also some virgin births. And what would religion be without a little human sacrifice, or in this case bee sacrifice. It is a place in which religion is joined to politics to generate Orwellian mantras like Accept Obey Serve, Desire is Sin, Idleness is Sin, From Death comes Life Eternal, and the like. And, of course, there is some Orwellian behavior. Life is held cheaply, particularly for those not of the favored groups, and the jack-booted police that enforce the rules are definitely a buzzkill. The death penalty is more the norm than the exception, and it is often applied immediately and energetically. [image] Western honey bee Flora’s explorations of the world are entire adventures on their own, as she encounters not only adversaries like wasps, spiders and crows, but man-made hazards as well. On the other hand she experiences the longing of the flowers, and the expanded internal horizons that result from expanding one’s horizons externally. She has a particular longing of her own, which fires the engines of her determination. The Bees is a fast-paced, engaging, invigorating tale that will have you flipping pages faster than a forager’s wings. You will come away not only with the warm feeling of having shared a remarkable journey but will find yourself eager to learn more about our buzzy brethren, well, except for Nicolas Cage. And you might even find yourself tempted to get up and do a [image] Waggle Dance =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages In Paull’s site there is a photo of a Minoan palace map that informed her hive layout. Worth a look . This month’s (May 2014) GR newsletter features a brief interview with Paull That buzzing in your ear might be more cause for concern that you’d realized. New project aims to upload a honey bee's brain into a flying insectobot by 2015 An item I came across on a reason why bee population is in decline - We May Have Figured Out What's Killing The Bees A wonderful short piece in the NY Times - You’re a Bee. This Is What It Feels Like.- by Joanna Klein - December 2, 2016 [image] Well, hello, good-looking! A Bombus fraternus bumblebee. Sam Droege/United States Geological Survey from the above article June 7, 2018 - A NY Times article on new research on Bee cognition - Do Bees Know Nothing? - by James Gorman July 28, 2020 - Smithsonian Magazine - Scientists Crack the Mathematical Mystery of Stingless Bees’ Spiral Honeycombs by Theresa Machemer [image] Mathematically speaking, the honeycombs grow like crystals. (Tim Heard via Royal Society Publishing) ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 14, 2014
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Hardcover
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081299342X
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| 4.22
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it was amazing
| There is no law, only power.The author looks at some of the details of how this is manifested in the USA, and offers, in addition, some insight in There is no law, only power.The author looks at some of the details of how this is manifested in the USA, and offers, in addition, some insight into the psychology of criminal targeting. Matt Taibbi is widely known and respected as a hard-hitting author and financial reporter/editor for Rollingstone Magazine. His previous book, Griftopia, went into considerable detail about how debt is used by large corporations to ensnare customers, how commodity speculation screws us all, how some politicians are selling off public assets for their private political gain and how the vampire squid that is Goldman Sachs has been draining the fiscal blood from the planet. If you get off on seeing what is going on behind the curtains, this constitutes good times. Well, Taibbi is at it again. He decided to look at how the legal system treats street crime and fiscal malfeasance. See? Even the terminology that pops to mind is a form of cover-up. If Al Capone stole, say, a million dollars from a bank there would be no question that he was a bank-robber and a dangerous felon. But if a corporate leach like, say, Barclay’s Bank, steals $10 billion, no one goes on the FBI’s Ten-Most-Wanted list. Newspaper headlines about a massive theft are remarkably absent, and ultimately, unlike the situation with Capone, no one goes to jail. (Yes, I know he went to jail for tax evasion, not bank-robbery, sheesh) The pension funds and other investors whose resources were stolen are left holding the very empty bag, with no Lone Ranger riding to the rescue. It is almost as if the prosecutors and regulators responsible for keeping the foxes from slaughtering the hens are wasted on heroin, nodding off in a corner while the predators go about their business. [image] The author At the other end of the economic spectrum, the police-judicial system seems to be zooming along on speed or Angel Dust. Taibbi spent some time with illegal immigrants, working class blacks, and even a white musician to get a good look at how the legal system operates at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Winners get rich and get off. Losers go broke and go to jail. It isn’t just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside of a courtroom; it’s that plus the fact that some black teenager a few miles away can go to jail just for standing on a street corner, that makes the whole picture complete.Taibbi offers plenty of examples. Uptown, (generically, yes I do know that Wall Street is geographically downtown, geez) corporations routinely and knowingly engage in illegal behavior, confident that no one will ever go to jail, certainly not anyone who counts, and if the company is ever dragged into civil court for its crimes, the worst that will happen is that it will have to pay a fine, the cost of which will be borne by shareholders. Executives are never held personally liable, and any fines that may be levied against them are paid by the company. Corporations routinely hold their employees hostage in negotiations with regulators and prosecutors, threatening that if they are actually held to account for their crimes, thousands of innocent people will lose their jobs. This is the essence of the too-big-to-fail problem. When Arthur Andersen was actually prosecuted for its crimes, 27,000 people were put out of work. The political cost of such an impact is unacceptable to the politicians who run government and decide who gets charged with what. Yet, the regulators, prosecutors and legislators do nothing to reduce the size of these Godzilla-like corporations, leaving them free to roam the planet leaving a trail of smoking ruins in their wake. On the other hand, it is stunning how much public investment there has been in stomping on the downtrodden. The welfare system, in particular, seems to feed on misery, doing its utmost to make needing help a scourge-worthy offense. If any of you have had to deal with this system, you will be familiar with horrendous lines, wait times, incompetent employees, contradictory requirements, byzantine regulations, and the complete surrender of your constitutional rights that is entailed when you are a poor individual in need. This is where all the moral hazard concern is focused, on whether a potential welfare recipient might have a pair of nice underwear in her drawer, or might somehow be trying to get over on the public welfare system. Somehow that moral hazard is not applied to organizations that borrow billions of public dollars at virtually no interest, then use those funds to engage in illegal activities. Nope, no moral hazard there. Street crime has been dropping nationally for some time, but governments federal and local have been ramping up their wide net approach to filling jails and local coffers. Turns out arresting people willy-nilly is good business for local governments, regardless of the merits of the arrests. And apparently it offers career advancement for those who net the most fish. And if millions of people are irreparably harmed by this Orwellian practice, well tough titty. Who cares about those people anyway? They don’t write large checks to people running for office. Taibbi looks at collateral consequences. When corporations are accused of anything they hide behind the collateral damage actual prosecution might cause, and battalions of lawyers. Overwhelmed, under-resourced and probably chicken-shit prosecutors advance straight to deals that not only entail no jail time for perpetrators of massive crimes, but not even an admission of guilt. When some poor schmo is gathered up in a street sweep, even if there is no actual justification, that person can spend months in jail, merely for being accused. The person’s family can be thrown out of their home. The person can be made ineligible for a whole raft of potential public benefits. Parental rights can be lost. But these collateral consequences are never considered when the person charged is poor, and particularly when that person is a minority. It is a truism that life is not fair. But fairness should at least be a goal. We should at least try to apply the law equally to all people, certainly to all citizens. And yet we are headed in the opposite direction. Rule of Law has become a cynical joke. When punishment is routinely applied only to the powerless, and the powerful continue their illegal practices with no effective punishment, the law is no longer merely an ass, it is a trained attack dog, a weapon used by society to torment those it disapproves of. That’s what nobody gets, that the two approaches to justice may individually make a kind of sense, but side by side, they’re a dystopia, where common city courts become factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors on the white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who behind closed doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee.As more and more folks are being pushed over the side of the middle class to swim the waters of working class America, more and more folks are coming into contact with the legal horrors that swim those waters. Taibbi is always very successful at pointing out the flaws in our systems, the inequities, the underhandedness, the corruption. He is extremely gifted at boosting his readers’ blood-pressure. I do wish he had devoted some more effort to offering suggestions as to how things might be nudged back toward a less toxic level of unfairness. He does so, in bits here and there, by noting, for example, the radically dimorphic funding allotments for white-collar prosecutors versus, say, immigration enforcement. But there really needed to be more of that. A tea-kettle opening, at least, through which we might direct some of that screaming steam. But Taibbi has indeed succeeded in pointing out the big-picture gross unfairness that permeates our nation. And if he allows himself to vent his rage at times, making not-wholly supported assumptions, stretching his canvas a bit, I suppose it is forgivable. Sometimes he goes too far, such as when he suggests that unfairness is an aim of our system. It may work out that way, but I do not accept that there is intentional unfairness at play here. The American people are notoriously passive, having dined for a very long time on the empty calories of so-called personal responsibility. (Less filling! Tastes great!) People, it is not your fault that you got laid off. It is not your fault that the company your bank sold your mortgage to is foreclosing on you even though your payments are up to date. They are probably using feloniously false signatures to do the deed. It is not your fault that the local constabulary finds it convenient to take you in for being in the wrong place at any time, just so that some boys in blue can make their daily quotas. It is not your fault that corporate profits keep rising while salaries stagnate, or worse. At some point you should begin to get really pissed. Divide will certainly fuel that justified rage. It seems sometimes that contemporary life, for many in the dwindling middle and working classes, is a series of frustrations designed to test our commitment to non-violence. Hopefully, by the time that pressure builds up, there will emerge some way to vent it other than in pointless street rioting or guillotine-fueled mass destruction. But at the rate we are going I would not bet on it. This is not a class war that is going on out there. War presumes multiple combatants. What is happening now in America is class enslavement. And it is not gonna get any better any time soon. Any legal system that allows the biggest thieves in history to walk off scot free is a joke and does not deserve our respect. This is not to say that there are not good people in government, people who truly want to do right for all of us. And it is not to say that the system is incapable of locking up seriously bad people. And sometimes legislators and government executives do manage to get something positive, something reasonable, something fair, done. But the wins are few and far between, while the losses accumulate and accelerate. So long as the super-villains in finance and transnational corporations continue to loot the planet with impunity, it remains the truth. There is no law, only power. =============================EXTRA STUFF NY Times Magazine article about Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis A NY Times op-ed by Thomas B. Edsall, Supreme Injustice, on how the top court is taking sides in the class war A May 7, 2014 article from the Dealbook section of the NY Times on prosecution of big financial crime, Seeking Tough Justice, but Settling for Empty Promises An August 26, 2014 NY Times Op Ed by Thomas Edsall,The Expanding World of Poverty Capitalism, notes the increasing privatization of not only prisons, but public fine and fee administration, all with virtually no oversight. Guess who suffers? In this August 26, 2014 opinion piece in the NY Times, How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops Erwin Cheminsky argues for recognition of what anyone who is paying attention should know. There is no law, only power. Money in elections is the rotten core of the American electoral apple. Happily residing in that core is the Federal Elections Commission. This September 2, 2014 NY Times op-ed offers a fix for that particular problem. Some de-worming is in order. Following the non-indictment in Ferguson (when was the last time you heard of a prosecutor offering a grand jury exculpatory evidence?) the notion of division is back on the front page - NY Times - 11/26/14 - After Ferguson Announcement, a Racial Divide Remains Over Views of Justice A fine example of how the law tilts against the poor in a Dickensian version of debtors' prison - Can't Pay Your Fines? Your License Could Be Taken Here is another way in which our legal system criminalizes being poor - Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat. - by Frances Robles and Shaila Dewan - April 19, 2015 Sued Over Old Debt, and Blocked From Suing Back - By Jessica Sinver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery - NY Times - December 22, 2015 in his op-ed piece, Is It a Crime to Be Poor?, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof looks at the growing trend of, effectively, a revival of debtors' prisons in the USA - June 11, 2016 3/8/2018 - Buzzfeed - an in depth report on how secret NYPD files show that many NYC police guilty of serious crimes are left unpunished - dark stuff and not all that surprising - BUSTED - by Kendall Taggert and Mike Hayes 5/20/2018 - NY Times - A chilling article on how unscrupulous landlords abuse the housing court system in NYC to push poor and working class people out of their apartments, so they can jack rents up to astronomical amounts - Unsheltered: The Eviction Machine Churning Through New York City - by Kim Barker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Grace Ashford and Sarah Cohen ==============================THE AUTHOR Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages I could paste a gazillion Taibbi refs here, (not all of them complimentary) but if you are interested in more than the few listed here, the Google machine will happily spit up scads when you enter the author’s name. Matt at Rollingstone (he left there in February 2014) Matt’s pre-2011 blog Matt’s prior book, Griftopia ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 30, 2014
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Apr 30, 2014
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Hardcover
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1460208935
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| 4.40
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| Oct 17, 2013
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liked it
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In Communications: From Pheromones to the Internet and Beyond, Max Swanson, a long-time researcher with Atomic Energy of Canada, and physics prof at t
In Communications: From Pheromones to the Internet and Beyond, Max Swanson, a long-time researcher with Atomic Energy of Canada, and physics prof at the U of North Carolina, offers a wide-ranging overview of communication, from unicellular beasties to complex organisms, from humans to machines, from proximate to distant, from the physical to the abstract, from then to now and from now to the future. Along the way he looks at communication as it pertains to religion, politics, education, government and marketing. He casts an eye on self and spiritual communication as well. He has clearly given the subject a lot of thought and presents myriad ways in which communication occurs, including, but not limited to sight, touch, sound, feel, language and even ways of communication that might not seem obvious, such as DNA. There are significant and valid points raised here. One is the importance of education for females. Another is the danger of concentrating media control in too few hands. Yet another looks at the historical experience of nations that base their education systems on testing to the exclusion of all else. I had very mixed feelings about Communication. It is unclear to me who the intended audience is. It comes across as equal parts fascinating and obvious. There are plenty of jaw-dropping items, where you are pleading for Swanson to tell you more, tucked in between sections that make one want to wonder aloud "yeah, and?" Here is one of the latter, on the relative merits of information vs misinformation. Wild swings in the stock markets and the global economy are due in large part to panic or euphoria caused by inadvisable spin of financial news, whether good or bad. On the other hand, timely worldwide flow of information facilitates the realistic evaluation of news, the distribution of goods, the coordination of health maintenance, and timely warnings of disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis.Duh-uh. However, as a springboard for investigation of its composite elements Communication is marvelous. Have a class of 12th graders read this and there is huge potential that each will come across something that stimulates their curiosity. They won't so much be able to satisfy it here as be prompted to a journey that might lead somewhere exciting, even if they do that search on handheld communication devices, and have to occasionally be zapped with tasers whenever they text someone or resume that game of Angry Birds. Here is one of the fun items: In Egypt, thousands of years before the Christian era, giant obelisks may have provided a unique and innovative long-range communication system. By striking these obelisks, priests in Luxor and other religious centers could have created resonant sounds heard many kilometers away.If you are thinking, as I did, that this sounds like a fab idea for an action/adventure novel, sorry, it has already been taken. Damn! Maybe as an element in a video game? And another: Most humans are capable of hearing sounds with a frequency between 20 hertz ad 20,000 hertz (cycles per second) and volume greater than 5-15 decibels. [Are decibels digital temptresses?] Hearing is best in the frequency range between 1,000 and 5,000 hertz. Some very low frequency sounds cannot be consciously heard, but are accompanied by a vague feeling of unease when in their presence. This feeling may be associated with the phenomenon of ghosts.Seems like he buried the lead there, slipping in an item we could use a bit more on, but it is off to the next topic straight away. I am sorry to report that much of Communication reads like a text book, and is sorely lacking in the sort of humor that someone like Mary Roach brings to science to grease the intellectual in-ports. But there are also many fun items to be found here, no question. The issue is balancing the delight of taking in the juicy bits with the not-so-exciting other elements. Bottom line for me is that I am glad I read it. I learned some new things, which is like heroine to me, and that made trudging through the rest an acceptable cost. It might be for you too. This review is cross-posted at Cootsreviews.com Posted April 11, 2014 I received this book through the GR FirstReads program. ...more |
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4.40
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Apr 02, 2014
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Mar 21, 2014
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