Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

a dream of spring, or plant geeks, seeds and where to find them

I’m enjoying this book by Eric Toensmeier, part of the new (at least to me) generation of American permaculture enthusiasts.

I might not enjoy it as much if I hadn’t already read Edible Forest Gardens, but this book is in part a narrative of how that book came about. These are the kinds of things gardeners read in January (at least, until George R.R. Martin gets around to publishing A Dream of Spring…)

I like this paragraph about being inspired by native peoples’ management of wild landscapes:

As a budding ecologist in the 1970s and 1980s, I learned that the best we can possibly do as environmentalists is to minimize our impact on nature. The ideal footprint would be no footprint at all. That doesn’t really give us a lot of room to breathe, and with that as a model, it’s easy to see why the environmental movement has not won wider acceptance. The most profound thing I have learned from indigenous land management traditions is that human impact can be positive – even necessary – for the environment. Indeed it seems to me that the goal of an environmental community should not be to reduce our impact on the landscape but to maximize our impact and make it a positive one, or at the very least to optimize our effect on the landscape and acknowledge that we can have a positive role to play.

Urban forestry is a good place to start with this vision, and there is some energy behind that (although also a fair amount of negativity and cynicism opposing it). Once we get the trees we want, we can decide that it is okay for a city to have a shrub layer and an herbaceous layer too, and we can work on those. There is also a fair amount of energy and funding behind water management in cities. Once we have the soil and the plants, it seems fairly obvious to bring the water to them. Again there is some cynicism and negativity out there, and a divide between energetic but sometimes scientifically challenged hippies, and the oh-so-practical but oh-so-cynical engineers, who actually could make all this work if they put their minds to it.

One last thing on this book – it has an appendix which lists some sources of seeds and plants I wasn’t familiar with. This is an area where Google lets us down, because these companies sell all sorts of interesting things that I have been looking for, and the typical search algorithms have not been getting me there.

  • Oikos Tree Crops – focuses on native nut and fruit trees, also has some hard-to-find perennials like several varieties of Sunchoke tubers
  • Kitazawa Seed Company – focuses on seeds of Asian vegetables – lots of Thai chilies, basils and eggplant varieties here! I’m also interested in “Malabar Spinach”, which sounds like it could provide me salads all summer with minimal effort, as long as I eat it fast enough so it doesn’t eat my house. (I’m also interested in hardy Kiwis and hops, but these woody vines are a little scarier because if you let them go, you might need a chain saw to remove them.)
  • Evergreen Seeds – another source of Asian vegetable seeds
  • Edible Landscaping – these guys will ship some hard-to-find fruit tree species, like Asian persimmons and pears
  • Fedco Seeds – all kinds of vegetables and fruits, seeds and plants
  • Food Forest Farm – Toensmeier’s site, with a limited selection of very interesting plants
  • Fungi Perfecti – what it sounds like, mushrooms
  • High Mowing Organic Seeds – another general purpose seed company
  • Logee’s – obscure tropical plants, looks great for the houseplant and patio gardener, not so focused on edibles
  • One Green World – lots of fruits, nuts, and berries, focus on the Pacific Northwest
  • Raintree Nursery – more fruit and nut trees
  • Richters – lots of vegetable and herb seeds

on the run

This is by far the most interesting book I have read in a while. It’s interesting in a disturbing way – it’s hard to put down, and hard to stop thinking about after you put it down. I was already familiar with many of the facts, but what makes the book so engaging is how the author mixes the facts with narrative about real people, all from a first person perspective.

I got a much better sense from this of how young men can get entangled with the law in my own city. For the individuals in the book It started early – some got involved in the drug trade because their parents weren’t providing (fathers were absent in many cases, mothers were often hard working but sometimes affected by drug addiction or other problems) and/or because other jobs were hard to come by. Sometimes they were just with older kids who were involved in crimes, and they got charged as accessories. The first charge might be something like drug possession, driving without a license, receiving stolen property, or assault stemming from a playground fight. They were given a fine and put on probation. That made it even harder to get a job. If they fell behind on paying the fine, they could be arrested on some other minor charge, and this time they went to jail. If they had any kind of warrant, were on probation or parole, now they had an incentive to avoid the authorities at all costs. This could mean not getting a formal job, not going to hospitals, not applying for a drivers license or other government identification, not having housing or any assets in their own names. And of course, avoiding the police at all costs. Once they were avoiding the police at all costs, they could get taken advantage of by other more violent criminals, who knew they would not go to the police. Once they were taken advantage of, they could either do nothing, in which case it would happen again, or they could retaliate, in which case it could escalate and become more and more violent, ending in serious jail time for violent crimes or in death. And the handful of young men whose stories are told in the book are not unusual. Keeping track of all these warrants, fines, prisoners, probations and paroles becomes an enormous industry affecting not just a few violent criminals, but the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods. That leads to fathers who are absent and boys who are not provided for, and the cycle repeats.

cyberattacks and superflares

Need some new things to worry about? Look no further!

  1. a catastrophic cyberattack on the U.S. electric infrastructure

In this New York Times bestselling investigation, Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared.
 
Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before.

It isn’t just a scenario. A well-designed attack on just one of the nation’s three electric power grids could cripple much of our infrastructure—and in the age of cyberwarfare, a laptop has become the only necessary weapon. Several nations hostile to the United States could launch such an assault at any time. In fact, as a former chief scientist of the NSA reveals, China and Russia have already penetrated the grid. And a cybersecurity advisor to President Obama believes that independent actors—from “hacktivists” to terrorists—have the capability as well. “It’s not a question of if,” says Centcom Commander General Lloyd Austin, “it’s a question of when.”

2. in case people are not enough to worry about, the Sun could turn on us.

Astrophysicists have discovered a stellar “superflare” on a star observed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope with wave patterns similar to those that have been observed in the Sun’s solar flares. (Superflares are flares that are thousands of times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun, and are frequently observed on some stars.)

The scientists found the evidence in the star KIC9655129 in the Milky Way. They suggest there are similarities between the superflare on KIC9655129 and the Sun’s solar flares, so the underlying physics of the flares might be the same…

Typical solar flares can have energies equivalent to a 100 million megaton bombs, but a superflare on our Sun could release energy equivalent to a billion megaton bombs.

dark matter killed the dinosaurs?

A new book proposes that dark matter changed the course of a comet, which killed the dinosaurs. This article is also interesting to me for its possibly over the top use of analogies to communicate scientific information.

Sixty-­six million years ago, according to her dark-matter disk model, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth at least 700 times the speed of a car on a freeway. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, heating the atmosphere into an incandescent furnace that killed three-quarters of Earthlings. No creature heavier than 55 pounds, or about the size of a Dalmatian, survived. The death of the dinosaurs made possible the subsequent rise of mammalian dominance, without which you and I would not have evolved to ponder the perplexities of the cosmos.

on leadership…

It seems to be out of fashion, but I always find it interesting when people try to draw social parallels between people and animals. This reminds me of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which spends hundreds of pages on ants and termites, and after I worked my way through it I actually feel more of an affinity for these creatures and the complex mini-civilizations they have built.

Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff

Leadership is an active area of research in both the biological and social sciences. This review provides a transdisciplinary synthesis of biological and social-science views of leadership from an evolutionary perspective, and examines patterns of leadership in a set of small-scale human and non-human mammalian societies. We review empirical and theoretical work on leadership in four domains: movement, food acquisition, within-group conflict mediation, and between-group interactions. We categorize patterns of variation in leadership in five dimensions: distribution (across individuals), emergence (achieved versus inherited), power, relative payoff to leadership, and generality (across domains). We find that human leadership exhibits commonalities with and differences from the broader mammalian pattern, raising interesting theoretical and empirical issues.

 

Most Dangerous

Here’s a new book on the Vietnam War…for kids ages 10 and up?

a trailer full of corpses, its floor “streaked with blood and brains.” Arms and legs were falling off the rotting trunks, which made it difficult to count how many bodies were in the trailer. The stench was unbearable. So the bodies were hosed down and the trailer tipped to its side, letting, as one witness put it, a “rivulet of blood-colored water” flow outside. A delegation of American military officers passed by, stepping over the blood “to avoid ruining the shine on their boots.”

Age 10, really? I think everyone at some point does need to know that this stuff happened. Not just know it intellectually, but internalize it, try to come to terms with it, and realize it can’t happen again. I remember being shown a movie of piles of Holocaust victims being moved by bulldozer around 7th grade. I don’t remember my emotions at the time but I remember the image vividly 25+ years later. Still, age 10? I’m not sure, maybe high school would be soon enough.

Anyway, should we assume this stuff only happened in the past? In Afghanistan we are hearing about “military age males” and “enemy killed in action”. Maybe not on the enormous scale of the Vietnam era, but it is the same rhetoric nonetheless. And I don’t think most of us are internalizing it, struggling to come to terms with it, or asking what we should be doing to stop it from happening.

the best and the brightest

The U.S. is sending “advisors” into Syria. This reminds me of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, where he describes the gradual escalation of the Vietnam war. A small force is sent. Then more are sent to protect the perimeter of that force. Then more are sent to patrol out from the perimeter. And so on until you have a president (Kennedy started it, Nixon ended it, but this book takes aim squarely at Lyndon Johnson) with an enormous amount of blood on his hands. Johnson has been judged kindly by history for his domestic programs and civil rights, but anybody who has read The Best and the Brightest might question that. Obama must have read The Best and the Brightest.

Norbert Wiener

Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

According to The Atlantic,

Wiener is best known as the inventor of “cybernetics,” a fertile combination of mathematics and engineering that paved the way for modern automation and inspired innovation in a host of other fields. He was also one of the first theorists to identify information as the lingua franca of organisms as well as machines, a shared language capable of crossing the boundaries between them…

Wiener refused, for ethical reasons, to accept research contracts from the military or from corporations seeking to exploit his ideas. Since the military and corporations were the main sources of research support, Wiener’s defiance hindered his progress during a period of unprecedented technological advance. Besides nuclear weapons, Wiener was perhaps most worried about the technology he was most directly responsible for developing: automation. Sooner than most, he recognized how businesses could use it at the expense of labor, and how eager they were to do so. “Those who suffer from a power complex,” he wrote in 1950, “find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions…”

The complete synthesis of humans and machines predicted by the transhumanists could represent the vindication of cybernetics—as well as Wiener’s ultimate nightmare. His fears for the future stemmed from two fundamental convictions: We humans can’t resist selfishly misusing the powers our machines give us, to the detriment of our fellow humans and the planet; and there’s a good chance we couldn’t control our machines even if we wanted to, because they already move too fast and because increasingly we’re building them to make decisions on their own. To believe otherwise, Wiener repeatedly warned, represents a dangerous, potentially fatal, lack of humility.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport

From Amazon:

In this book we propose the welcome notion that traffic–as most people have come to know it–is ending and why. We depict a transport context in most communities where new opportunities are created by the collision of slow, medium, and fast moving technologies. We then unfold a framework to think more broadly about concepts of transport and accessibility. In this framework, transport systems are being augmented with a range of information technologies; it invokes fresh flows of goods and information. We discuss large scale trends that are revolutionizing the transport landscape: electrification, automation, the sharing economy, and big data. Based on all of this, the final chapters offer strategies to shape the future of infrastructure needs and priorities.

We aim for a quick read–and to encourage you and other readers to think outside your immediate realm. By the end of this book (today, if you so choose) you will appreciate the changing times in which you live, what is new about transport discussions, and how definitions of accessibility are being reframed. You will be provided with new ways of thinking about the planning of transport infrastructure that coincide with this changing landscape. Even if transport is not your bailiwick, we like to think there is something interesting for you here. We aim to share new perspectives and reframe debates about the future of transport in cities.

There’s a somewhat skeptical review of this book on Planetizen, with a ton of links you could drill down into.

Edward Tufte

Here’s a fun interview with Edward Tufte, insult comic and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Here are a couple of his snappy retorts:

…highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality (think phone companies)…

…overload, clutter, and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. So if something is cluttered, fix your design, don’t throw out information. If something is confusing, don’t blame your victim — the audience — instead, fix the design. And if the numbers are boring, get better numbers. Chartoons can’t add interest, which is a content property. Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform. Thus they reduce the credibility of your presentation. To distract, hire a magician instead of a chartoonist, for magicians are honest liars…

Sensibly-designed tables usually outperform graphics for data sets under 100 numbers. The average numbers of numbers in a sports or weather or financial table is 120 numbers (which hundreds of million people read daily); the average number of numbers in a PowerPoint table is 12 (which no one can make sense of because the ability to make smart multiple comparisons is lost). Few commercial artists can count and many merely put lipstick on a tiny pig. They have done enormous harm to data reasoning, thankfully partially compensated for by data in sports and weather reports. The metaphor for most data reporting should be the tables on ESPN.com. Why can’t our corporate reports be as smart as the sports and weather reports, or have we suddenly gotten stupid just because we’ve come to work?

It’s a very interesting point, actually, that people are willing to look at very complex data on sports sites, really study it and think about it, and do that voluntarily, considering it fun rather than boring, hard work. It’s child-like in a way – I mean in a positive sense, that for children the world is fresh and new and learning is fun. What is the secret of not shutting down this ability in adults. I think it’s context.