What the World Eats, Faith D'Aluisio, 2008, 160 pages, ISBN 9781582462462
This is a children's book. And yet it starts by saying, we're all getting fatWhat the World Eats, Faith D'Aluisio, 2008, 160 pages, ISBN 9781582462462
This is a children's book. And yet it starts by saying, we're all getting fatter and sicker because we eat too much of "energy-dense" food. pp. 9-10. It hits this note harder with a table of "overweight" and "obese" fractions of males and females by country, p. 55. And these "facts about the United States: 8.8% of the population age 20+ have diabetes; taxpayers pay 50% of obesity-related medical costs; 25% of men, 45% of women are on a diet on any given day; 95% will regain the lost weight in 1 to 5 years." p. 145. This is gratuitous shaming. There is no instruction on how to eat to grow slim. Indeed, the author trumpets her ignorance by equating sugars and fats as supposedly foods to avoid, and using the term, "energy-dense," as if lots of grams per calorie were the mark of a good food. For the truth, read /Eat Fat and Grow Slim/ by Dr. Richard Mackarness, and the latest by Gary Taubes. More here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
False data. One of his introductory graphs is of company size vs. income. Shows income near $1 million/year for a 1-person Throws lots of ideas at us.
False data. One of his introductory graphs is of company size vs. income. Shows income near $1 million/year for a 1-person company. If true, we'd all do it. For his fraction-of-people-surviving-this-long-vs.-age graphs, he gives us a smooth curve, then a stairstep one, for the same thing--he wants to identify supposed causes of death, so he redraws the curve to fit what he wants to say. Early in the book there's a plot showing all animals have essentially 1 billion heartbeats per lifetime. Later there's a graph showing larger animals such as horses with lower heartrates and much shorter lives than us. Walking speed is /negative/ in small cities? And nowhere more than .6 m/s (2.16 kph)? (Fig. 42)
No, it won't do. If you don't start with a commitment to true data, your conclusions can have no value.
Starts by trumpeting the value of log-log plots for the kind of relationships he's looking at. Correct. Then retreats to linear plots for just the kind of graphs that need to be log. His log-log plots have a different distance per decade on the horizontal compared to the vertical. So you can't tell by looking at it what the slope is. Numbers an axis, "10^1, 10^2, 10^3," /in thousands of dollars/! Don't do that to us. Say ten to the 4, 5, 6, /in dollars./ Labels axes, 4.5, 5.5, 6.5--meaning ten to the that many people in the city. No. Label 10,000 100,000 1,000,000. City population "6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16" (Fig. 42) means what? No log or linear scale I can think of makes sense of these numbers as range of city populations.
Mishandling graphs really isn't excusable in a book /about/ visually representing relationships among quantities.
He's quite taken with himself and his fellow Deep Thought Thinkers....more
Starts well, by telling us that to integrate two seemingly incompatible branches of physics, the aim is to look for something that reduces to each, at ordinary scales. Schrödinger did this, to find his wave equation. (p. 50 of 277 in the pdf) And that it’s good that theorists are constrained by having to explain the real world. (p. 14 of 277)
You'd need all but dissertation in field theory to even understand his notation. He almost never says what his symbols mean. The equations are almost all not actual equations, but meta-equations, and in shorthand. Integrals without a dsomething; a letter meant to stand in for a group of coordinates, vectors, operators. You’d have to read all the books and papers he cites to find out what, if anything, he’s talking about. (And if you did read them all, would this book add anything? No way to know until you do.) Sloppiness and facetiousness don’t make the book an introduction. If you can’t be understood, maybe you don’t understand the subject as well as you thought.
There's a (white) underclass in England. As it was 100 years ago, described in The People of the Abyss by Jack London, the underclass is people "the work of the world does not need."
Unlike in 1905, England's underclass doesn't slowly die of malnutrition, exposure, and overwork in poor houses.
England still has welfare.
To our current author, it's /because/ of welfare that the lives of the underclass are meaningless.
Not so much.
Lives weren't better in 1905 London, slow starvation. The absence of welfare in the U.S. does not infuse with purpose the lives of homeless veterans.
The world is organized for the greatest good for the greatest wealth.
Ending welfare won't fix it.
(Gifts /only/ to the poor, "earn $1 more and we take back your home and medicine," keep the poor, poor.)
To undermine the working class is an old ploy by the powerful.
Roman victories were pouring slaves into Italy; this led to the loss of the dignity of labor. The small farmer was forced off the land, usurped by large slave-worked estates.
The impoverished farmers, unable to compete with slaves, flocked into Rome which developed a large unruly population of poor people on what we would call "welfare." --Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Chronology of the World, p. 82
Remember too, the biggest beneficiaries of the welfare state are not the poor. It's the middle class and higher, who get most from the governments--in pensions, insurance, home-mortgage deductions, subsidized higher education, employment in government-subsidized industries. Corporate welfare is no aberration in the system: it /is/ the system. (Tony Judt makes some of these points in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.)
Tells us too little. In the 5-body gravitational problem, doesn't describe the motion or initial conditions of the small body, nor explain clearly whaTells us too little. In the 5-body gravitational problem, doesn't describe the motion or initial conditions of the small body, nor explain clearly what happens or why. Says the bodies would move apart with infinite speed by Newton's laws, and leaves it there. If you were going to say anything on this, it should've at least been a description.
James M. Buchanan in The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan advocates totalitarianism in defense of the freedom of the rich to do what they will, at the expense of everyone else. "Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it."
"In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called “economic freedom” and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.
"Buchanan’s programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLean’s discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. We’re getting there."...more
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford, 2017, 401 pages, Dewey 611.0181663 R933b, Library-of-Congress QH445.2, ISBN 9781615194940A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford, 2017, 401 pages, Dewey 611.0181663 R933b, Library-of-Congress QH445.2, ISBN 9781615194940
Little content, some nonsense, much blather.
Gratuitously labels low-carbohydrate diets as "fads," "bunkum," and "nuts" on pp. 69-70. The author has no expertise in metabolism. For the truth, see the books by Gary Taubes, Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney, Richard Macarness, Jason Fung, and Richard Atkins: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Claims that the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today lived 3,600 years ago! p. 164. Seems absurd.
bya = billion years ago mya = million years ago
2 bya eukaryotes, with cell nuclei and mitochondria. p. 34.
6 mya chimps diverge from humans. p. 62.
4 mya bipedal apes. p. 21.
3.2 mya Lucy, australopithecus afarensis. p. 21.
1.9 mya homo erectus begins leaving Africa. pp. 35-36, 66.
1 mya in Africa, Denisovans diverge from Neanderthals and modern humans. pp. 57-58. Or 400,000 ya p. 61.
800,000 ya axe heads in Britain made by homo heidelbergensis. p. 95.
800,000 ya Denisovans diverge from Neanderthals, but remain the same species. p. 60.
700,000 ya homo floresiensis on the island of Flores in Indonesia. p. 26.
500,000 ya Neanderthal and homo sapiens diverge. pp. 41, 66. Or 400,000 ya p. 61. But remain the same species. p. 54. Neanderthals out of Africa. p. 56.
300,000 ya evidence of cooking. p. 69.
200,000 ya anatomically modern humans in Africa. p. 36.
80,000 ya anatomically modern humans in China. p. 36.
60,000 ya homo sapiens in Europe. p. 36. Interbred with Neanderthals. p. 51.
50,000 ya humans in Australia. p. 38.
6,000 ya milk is drunk in Romania, Turkey, and Hungary p. 78.
The premise is blithering. Most of us simply won't survive the collapse of civil society--the collapse of the systems that bring food and water to theThe premise is blithering. Most of us simply won't survive the collapse of civil society--the collapse of the systems that bring food and water to the almost-all of us who have no way of providing it for ourselves--and the resulting violence. It won't be a lack of knowledge that will limit post-apocalypse survivors: it'll be a lack of order, of resources, of ability to rebuild the systems the knowledge will still abundantly exist to show the theory of....more
I've enjoyed Cox's videos, but, for books on the subject, stick with Taylor and Wheeler for relativity, and R.P. Feynman for quantum electrodynamics. I've enjoyed Cox's videos, but, for books on the subject, stick with Taylor and Wheeler for relativity, and R.P. Feynman for quantum electrodynamics. Both brilliant authors....more
Everything the CIA writes is done with an agenda in mind. It's spin: its goal is to convince the reader that the U.S. must be ever ready to intervene Everything the CIA writes is done with an agenda in mind. It's spin: its goal is to convince the reader that the U.S. must be ever ready to intervene all over the world, and that the U.S. (and CIA) have done no wrong.
If you want accurate history of the countries of the world where the CIA and U.S. military have intervened (nearly everywhere), you won't find it here.
A tip of the truth starts to emerge in books such as:
Back on the CIA factbook itself, don't rely on what you read. For instance, the CIA gives navigable waterways' total length per country, showing Vietnam with more than the U.S., and the sum of all countries' totals less than a quarter of their world total. They seem to be lying about the U.S. total at least. cia.gov/library/publications/resource... [or search for navigable waterways]
Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. I, The Present Time (Feb. 1, 1850)
Writing in 1850, at a time when monarchs throughout Europe had recently beThomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. I, The Present Time (Feb. 1, 1850)
Writing in 1850, at a time when monarchs throughout Europe had recently been deposed as worthless parasites; the Irish potato famine left millions starving while Irish food was shipped to England; London was full of poor people, dying from starvation and overwork; wages were below subsistence level; the air and water were being fouled. Carlyle’s solution in Pamphlet I is to enslave the unfortunates who had been incarcerated in “workhouses:” he would force them to hard labor, and flog or kill them if they didn’t work. In Carlyle’s opinion, the “captains of industry” were the people who should be in charge of society. Carlyle blames the poor for their poverty, and would deny the vote to all but the well-off. Carlyle would enshrine the very “consecration of cupidity” he purports to decry.
Unfortunately, “captains of industry” are now indeed in charge of society, these 164 years later. They are increasingly the worthless parasites their monarchial predecessors were. They still live for greed, eagerly enslaving workers, destroying the environment, corrupting the political process....more
Blithering. Reich thinks the winners in society are winners because they "manipulate symbols." No, Bob. The winners are winners because they've been cBlithering. Reich thinks the winners in society are winners because they "manipulate symbols." No, Bob. The winners are winners because they've been cut in on the deal. Wealth goes to those with wealth, not those with exceptional skills: Talented programmers have their projects cancelled, their jobs outsourced to Asia. Talented musicians starve. People go to college because they're wealthy, to a much greater degree than conversely.
Thomas Ray
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