CapitalistImperialistPig

When agriculture came to Europe, the average European lost eight inches in height.  They didn't recover until well into the Twentieth Century. The industrial revolution also stunted people for a few decades - probably due to more disease rather than worse nutrition.

I really hate giving up on a book. This leaves me deeply conflicted when I don't like the book. There are many things to hate in NY 2140, starting with the structure, a series of episodes each starring one of the not very interesting characters. Many of these episodes seem utterly pointless, not advancing the plot nor saying anything interesting. Many seem devoted to the author's theory of finance, a subject I don't think he understands at all well. Others consist of dialog less interesting than anything you might here in the grocery store. A who done it ought to have a plot, and it ought advance at a sprightly pace. Nobody seems to have mentioned this to the author. It's like one of those amateur play productions where you spend more time watching the stage hands move the furniture than watching the action. To be continued. UPDATE: 51%, Story picking up speed, finally.

Science fiction was a big part of my youth, from age ten until at least the end of my teens. Much of what I loved was already classical, from Jules Verne to Edgar Rice Burroughs to the golden age of SF in the 1930s-1950s. Lately, I've turned back to SF in a small way, but mostly been disappointed. Currently I'm reading New York 2140 , a fairly highly praised book by Kim Stanley Robinson. The hard SF of my youth was filled with astonishing predictions: nuclear power, space travel, robots, communication satellites, smartphones. There were some others that didn't work out: time travel, psychokinesis, and that staple of Popular Science, flying cars, but overall, guys like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were amazingly prescient as well as entertaining. The central conceit of New York, 2140 is that sea levels have risen 50 feet due to global warming, but that Manhattan underwater is still thriving, and many major buildings of today, suitably reinforced ...

The nuclear hysteria of the fifties was pumped up by some of the smartest US physicists, especially Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and John Wheeler. Of course lots of others, even smarter, saw through it, including Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Rabi. So did Eisenhower, at least to a degree. Unfortunately, logic and reason have a hard time competing with hysteria, especially when politicians on the make, like Symington and McCarthy join the chorus. Eisenhower: This would be a deterrent—but if the contest to maintain this relative position should have to continue indefinitely, the cost would either drive us to war—or into some form of dictatorial government. Such intense anxiety demanded alleviation. Conveniently, there was a scapegoat at hand to slaughter. Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 529). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. That scapegoat was Oppenheimer. Teller's hysteria with regard to Oppenheimer was due in part to humiliation. Oppe...

History is one damn thing after another.......Arnold Toynbee. I signed up for a history course this term, and I have to say that one of the textbooks occasionally exhibits that trait in mind numbing detail: The founder of one of these dynasties was Ahmad Khwajagi Kasani, also known as "Makhdum-i Azam" ("The Great Master"; 1461-1542). As his nisba suggests, he hailed from Kasan, a town in northern Fergana near present-day Chust. He left it for Tashkent, presumably in order to become a murid of Muhammad Qazi Burhan al-Din (d. 1515), one of Khwaja Ubaydallah Ahrar's khalifas . Svat Soucek. A History of Inner Asia (Kindle Locations 2219-2221). Kindle Edition. The shrine, which came to be known as Char Bakr, grew into a complex that included a khangah, a mosque, a madrasa, and the endowments supporting it dramatically increased after the Janibegid victory in 1557. The Juyharis too increased their wealth by becoming involved in commerce, manufacturing, and ag...

This caught my eye, from the early pages. After Germany fell, he[Eisenhower] walked through the Nazi concentration camp called Ohrdruf--Nord, a subcamp of Buchenwald, with his friend, the tough talking General George Patton. Patton threw up. Ike ordered the mayor of Gotha to turn out the townspeople to remove the dead bodies. The mayor and his wife went home that night and hung themselves. Ike took this as a sign that the Germans might not be beyond redemption. And, from Ike's first inaugural: Science seems ready to confer on us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life on this planet. Ponder that one, Trump fans.

Despite my more or less disastrous encounter with the chapter on Phi, Tononi's theory of consciousness, I think this is a pretty good book. One can learn a lot about what makes consciousness possible and impossible, and the often ingenious techniques used to investigate it. Christof Koch's Consciousness has all that and more: historical and philosophical background of the problem, meditations on his own history and behavior, and some interesting stuff on his mentor and "Sun," Francis Crick. I recommend it to anyone interested in this fundamental concept. Koch is confident that consciousness is not something exclusively human. Chimps, dogs, mice and birds have some version of it. Perhaps even bees and flies have it. Many of the key insights into it have come from investigations of the mouse brain, a key target of the Allen Institute that Koch leads. Koch's studies have led him to a certain amount of respect for our junior partners in consciousness: Then, i...

A bit more Koch: turning water into wine is so outlandish that it can be rejected using Occam’s razor. It is far more likely that something else, obeying the laws of physics, was the cause. Maybe the wedding organizers discovered long-forgotten flasks of wine in the basement. Or a guest brought the wine as a gift. Or the story was made up to cement Jesus’ reputation as the true Messiah. Remember Sherlock Holmes’ advice: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Miracles are not in the cards. The fabric of everyday reality is woven too tightly for it to be pulled asunder by extranatural forces. I’m afraid that God is an absentee cosmic landlord. If we want things to happen down here, we had better take care of them ourselves. Nobody else is going to do it for us. Koch, Christof. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press) (pp. 157-158). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition. I dunno. Turning water into wine? ...

Hunting for qualia is Christof Koch's life. His scientific quest is the nature, location, and scientific description of consciousness. He tells the story of that quest in his book Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Some early excerpts that capture the personal feel of the book: At this point, I need to introduce qualia, a concept beloved by philosophers of mind. Qualia is the plural of quale. What it feels like to have a particular experience is the quale of that experience: The quale of the color red is what is common to such disparate percepts as seeing a red sunset, the red flag of China, arterial blood, a ruby gemstone, and Homer’s wine-dark sea. ... In this book, I highlight stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness. Just as light presupposes its absence, darkness, so consciousness presupposes the unconscious. As Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, and others realized in the late nineteenth century, much of what...

Human nature exhibits some unusual behavioral traits - unusual but not unprecedented in the animal kingdom. In particular, we are capable of a very high degree of altruism and have a strong tendency to group ourselves into tribes. Like ants, bees, termites, certain shrimps and naked mole rats and a handful of others, we are a eusocial species. All such species, asserts Edward O. Wilson, writing in The Social Conquest of Earth , start with the adoption of a defensible nest. One solid principle drawn from this analysis of the hymenopterans, and other insects as well, is that all of the species that have attained eusociality, as I have stressed, live in fortified nest sites. A second principle, less well established but probably nonetheless universal, is that the protection is against enemies, namely predators, parasites, and competitors. A final principle is that, all other things being equal, even a little society does better than a solitary individual belonging to closely related s...

By the middle of the Second Millennium, BCE, Bronze Age civilizations had developed a "globalized" economy, encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean and other nearby areas. Tin was brought from as far away as Afghanistan to be incorporated into copper to produce the eponymous metal of the age. A vigorous trade in food, textiles, metal and artifacts was conducted by land and sea, and alliances sealed by exchange of royal princesses intermeshed the royal families of Hittites, Egyptians, Cypriots, Babylonians, Trojans and others. Diplomacy and trade relied on Akkadian as a lingua franca . Shortly after 1200 BCE, nearly all of these city kingdoms were destroyed, often by fire and military force. Exactly who or what was responsible doesn't seem to be well understood, but then I haven't gotten quite that far in the book: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric H. Cline. Excerpt: The warriors entered the world scene and moved rapidly, leaving death and des...

Tax exempt foundations seem to be a peculiarly or at least mainly American institution. The Rockefeller Foundation was the first. John D. Rockefeller, under pressure from the anti-trust movement and embarrassed by the exposes that had revealed the morally and legally dubious tactic by which his empire had been constructed, set out to donate a big chunk of his wealth to causes benefiting the public good: education, art, science and public health. A number of other public spirited (or intimidated) individuals followed suit. These early foundations faced a good deal of public scrutiny and criticism. Partially as a result of that skepticism, these early foundations were mostly explicitly nonpartisan and science based. This was not to be the case in the age of what Jane Mayer calls the age of "weaponized philanthropy." They were a creation of the ultra-wealthy who found they could have their ideological cake and eat it too. With the onset of World War II, Sarah Mellon Scaife...

The Amazon Kindle versions of lots of science books are terrible. This is because the super-sucky software cannot handle equations or figures appropriately. It's like postscript was never invented. Equations are frequently reduced to tiny images - pictures of equations rather than actual equations. Inline equations fare even worse - exponents are lost, Greek letters become inequivalent Roman ones, subscripts disappear. It's really something of a tragedy that Amazon has captured the e-reader market with its incompetent page rendering. I wonder if there are any plans to fix it.

Exploding Superstars: Understanding Supernovae and Gamma Ray Bursts by Alain Mazure and Stephane Basa is a very well-written and interesting book, somewhat marred by flaws which I prefer to attribute to the evil that has come to dominate Springer. If you prefer to avoid the rant and get to the recommendation, skip the next paragraph. The book is a translation from the French original, and, so far as I can tell, excellently done, but the title is a bit misleading. Although Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts are prominently featured, the real subject is cosmology, as indicated the the original French title, which was something like "the Universe in all its glory". The text makes frequent mention of twenty or so color plates - these do not make an appearance in this English edition - a considerable loss. There are also many dozens of figures and diagrams many of which appear to have originally been done in color but have been reproduced by some idiotic process which destroys ...

Organized movements to warn against war developed and grew in the decades before World War I. Prescient individuals from Alfred Nobel to the elder Field Marshall von Moltke foresaw the catastrophic effects of war with modern weapons. These movements were a counter current to the growing militarism of the age, and a reaction to arms race that gripped all of Europe and beyond. Their reach was not uniform, however. The German peace movement never had more than about 10,000 members, who were drawn mainly from the lower middle classes. Unlike Britain, for example, it did not attract eminent professors, leading businessmen or members of the aristocracy. Where senior clergy supported the British or American movements, in Germany the churches generally denounced it on the grounds that war was part of God’s plan for mankind. 25 Nor did liberals take the lead in supporting peace in Germany as they did in other countries such as Britain and France. Macmillan, Margaret (2013-10-29). The War ...

The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek's book is aimed at the public, but it has a lot that I, a physicist whose experience has been distant from particle physics, found revealing and insightful. His themes are the modern version of the ether, which he calls the Grid, the origin of mass, and the unification of physics. At the center of these is the standard model, which he likes to call the Core, and especially Quantum Chromodynamics, or QCD, his contribution to which won him the Nobel Prize. It's focused squarely on the underlying ideas though there are a small number of those personal anecdotes that enliven many popular accounts of physics. His seem chosen to illustrate physics more than personality. One I liked was his account of how he baited Murray Gell-Mann (the inventor of quarks) by telling him that he was working on improving Feynman's Parton Model, which had been formulated to explain the results of prob...

My experience with the book was a bit conflicted. On the one hand, I thought that I learned a lot, and certainly finished with more respect for and, I like to think, understanding of Hindu thought. Despite the heavy presence of scholarly apparatus (thousands of citations and hundreds of endnotes), there are some curious inexactitudes ( India lies mostly in the Northern Hemisphere - so far as I can tell India and its islands lie entirely in the Northern Hemisphere). The author is addicted to a chatty, discursive, and frequently frivolous tone which I sometimes found annoying. It's important to note that the author hasn't written a history of India, but a history of its main religion. There are bits of the history of the country included, but mainly just as background. Because it's a history, the focus is on evolution and change. Moreover, as the author declares at the outset, her focus is not on the central figures of the religion, it's priestly and other high cas...

I should perhaps add that I experienced the American dream at the age of twenty -two, when I was hired by a university near Boston just after finishing my doctorate. This experience proved to be decisive in more ways than one. It was the first time I had set foot in the United States, and it felt good to have my work recognized so quickly. Here was a country that knew how to attract immigrants when it wanted to! Yet I also realized quite soon that I wanted to return to France and Europe, which I did when I was twenty-five. Since then, I have not left Paris, except for a few brief trips. One important reason for my choice has a direct bearing on this book: I did not find the work of US economists entirely convincing. To be sure, they were all very intelligent, and I still have many friends from that period of my life. But something strange happened: I was only too aware of the fact that I knew nothing at all about the world’s economic problems . My thesis consisted of several relatively...

Thomas Piketty states his principal conclusions early in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: What are the major conclusions to which these novel historical sources have led me? The first is that one should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income. The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality that took place in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices tha...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy......................Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5 You probably know that the Prince of Denmark was not talking to or about Immanuel Kant - he hadn't been born yet. Despite the title, I'm not either. I have in mind the thought that we humans quite naturally sort things into categories. In their book, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought , George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note that categorization is a fundamental characteristic of life. Every time an amoeba decides to move toward what it senses as food, or a bacterium turns on some enzymatic system in response to a change in local chemistry, it is, in effect, making a decision, characterizing or categorizing its environment. For creatures with brains and nervous systems, the categorization can be made more explicit. Our eyes, for example, have about a million sensory cells, but only 100,000 fibe...