CapitalistImperialistPig

If you haven't  sampled ChatGPT yet, I recommend it.  Deep neural networks and the new technology of transformers are producing a technological revolution that is likely the biggest one yet.  ChatGPT and its relatives can write you a sonnet, a coherent summary of the role of sheaves in algebraic geometry, or a computer program in Python or other languages.  A related technology can produce plausible images of persons, monsters, or imaginary landscapes based on a few words of prompting text.  Yet another can take a minute or so of anyone's speech to produce hard to distinguish speech in the speaker's voice. Would you like to hear the Silmarillion as if read by J. R. R. Tolkien?  It can probably be done.  

  A former English major decides to take some trips down Interstate 80 in the company of geologists.  I 80 runs from Teaneck, New Jersey, to San Francisco, a journey of 2901 miles.  Annals is a title borrowed from one of the founding documents of geology, by James Hutton: “ To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders undistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.” McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World (p. 77). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. Science is always a detective story, but in geology it finds its purest form. McPhee’s book is about the stories those rocks reveal and the geologists who read and tell them.   The interst...

Hunter-Gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian.  Civilizations and agricultural societies generally, tend to be hierarchical.  Why so? One possibility is that the greater productivity and fertility of agricultural societies means that they are always bumping up against the Malthusian bound, the maximum population the land and technology can support.  Peter Turchin has explored this idea in his books, including War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires . He documents how Europe has suffered a repetitive cycle of depopulating wars, followed by peace and a rapid expansion of population until individual farmers have been forced to ever smaller farms or more marginal farmland until the society has become broadly impoverished, at which point widespread wars break out as adventurers and the desperate seek more land at the expense of others. These wars depopulate both losers and winners. Of course the other horsemen of the apocalypse who also do their part. But I...

Svante Pääbo is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the work described in this book. As a student in Sweden Pääbo conceived the dream of decoding the genome of ancient humans and Neandertal Man. This book is the story of that dream, that quest, and all that went into building the scientific institute and international collaboration that achieved that goal thirty years later. Like James Watson’s famous book  The   Double Helix , this is an inside look at how molecular biology is done at the very highest level. Much has changed in biology in the half century plus between these accomplishments and much has stayed the same, but for anyone who wants to know how science really works, here is the story, laid out in compelling detail. We also get a detailed look at the personal life of the author. Pääbo’s thirty year dream culminated in the publication of the Neandertal genome. So what did it take to achieve it? When the author began his quest, methods fo...

  Helgoland is windswept and relatively barren island where Werner Heisenberg repaired to contemplate the puzzles of quantum phenomena, and, ultimately, to invent quantum mechanics.  At this point quantum theory was already a quarter of a century old, invented by Max Planck in 1900 and further developed by Einstein, Bohr, and others but only very special and simple cases could be solved. A method of general application did not exist.  After weeks of intense mental struggle he found an answer in the behavior of tables of numbers, tables that would become the matrices of matrix mechanics. Carlo Rovelli, himself an important physicist, tells that story in the first chapter of his book Helgoland, as well as the struggles of Heisenberg and others to understand what he had found.   In quick succession the English Physicist Paul Dirac and the Austrian Erwin Schrodinger found apparently quite different but completely equivalent formulations of quantum mechanics.   All...

 THE ROMAN REPUBLIC: A Very Short Introduction by David M. Gwynn The history of the Roman Republic is a popular and relatively familiar subject, the setting of numerous movies and several Shakespeare plays.   That history made a deep impression on the Republics that arose in the Renaissance and on the founders of the United States.   A small and rather nondescript city in Italy somehow conquered the entire Mediterranean world over 700 years or so and then destroyed itself in an orgy of internal strife. Like the founders of our Republic, citizens of the world’s republics today should ponder the lessons of Rome’s successes and catastrophic collapse. David M. Gwynn’s brief history is much more interested in the internal dynamics of the Republic than in Rome’s battles and wars.   The armies of the Republic were initially citizen armies, led by the Senatorial classes and manned by small citizen farmers.   After Rome deposed its Kings, power was initially wiel...

 Andrew Knoll tells the story of Earth, its formation, its changes over time, and especially, the story of the interaction of life and geology over that time.  Few if any are more steeped in that story or have contributed more to unravelling it.  The early Earth was not much like Earth today and we could not have lived on it.  Once the crust cooled enough to solidify and for water to condense and form oceans, there were oceans and probably relatively few and small bits of land.  There was no oxygen, so nothing for us to breathe.  A steady stream of potent UV radiation would have made it impossible for land plants and animals of today to live even if there had been oxygen. Nonetheless, the first signs of life appear in the oldest rocks only about a billion years after the planet formed.    How these were found and identified is one of the great detective stories of natural science, and it is told well here.   The subsequent evolution of cyan...