Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

The Sixth Extinction

Here’s a half hour Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote the book The Sixth Extinction. Her descriptions of ocean acidification and amphibian extinction are particularly eye-opening. The whole thing is worth a listen (better to listen than try to read this transcript), but I especially liked this exchange:

GROSS: So this is going to sound like a horrible question, but, you know, I don’t get to see barrier reefs. I don’t get to see coral. I live in the city. What impact does it have on my life if coral reefs can’t grow anymore and if they start declining because of the acidification of the oceans?

KOLBERT: Well, I guess I’d give you two answers. The first answer is, you know, we are effectively undoing, you know, the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world, which has taken tens of millions of years to reach this point. We’re sort of unraveling that. And if that is something that you just say, well, I don’t care about, then I guess I’d say, well, what do you care about?

(LAUGHTER)

KOLBERT: But on another, on a more, you know, personal sort of like, OK, I want to know how – you know, what’s it mean to me, I guess my answer would be we’re not sure. You know, no one’s – we haven’t done this before. You don’t get to sort of see this experiment run over and over again. So we’re doing, it’s often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don’t know what the end point’s going to be.

H.T. Odum

I promised some posts about H.T. Odum this year, so here goes.

First, because I’m cheap, I bought a used copy of his 1983 book Systems Ecology: An Introduction, that a library was getting rid of. This book was reissued in 1994 as Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology. My 1983 copy has some typos and endearingly quaint references like this:

The amount of memory within the computer useful for storing programs is usually between 8000 and 64,000 bytes.

He probably updated that in the 1994 version, but whatever it was updated to probably still sounds endearingly quaint today. It reminds us how far we have come.

The 1983 book has a chapter on “analog computers”. Digital computers have come so far and are so powerful that I guess we have forgotten that this sort of thing used to be useful. An analog computer is basically a circuit, and you can simulate almost any kind of system with a circuit – in a hydraulic system, water flow is analogous to electric flow and friction is analogous to electric resistance, for example. Essentially, he took the idea that energy flows through any kind of system and drew beautiful circuit diagrams of how those systems work. Almost any kind of system between the sub-atomic scale and the astronomical scale – mechanical systems, cells, organisms, ecosystems, cities, farms, economies, etc. Although the systems can get pretty complex, in both structure and behavior, they are all based on a set of surprisingly simple core building blocks, and the same set of core building blocks can describe any of these seemingly very different systems.

All the systems are concerned in some way with controlling the flow of energy and using it to do useful work. This concept is fairly obvious in electrical and mechanical systems, but it is also present in my body right now, where electrons are being passed through a series of complex chemical bonds that allow my body to operate its various organs, maintain my temperature, and repair tissues as they break down and build new tissues (hopefully not too much more, at this point.) A rainforest, a coral reef, a city, and the global economy are similarly engaged in controlling the flow of energy and using it to perform useful work. One of his key concepts was that systems try to maximize “power”, or find the right flow rate of energy that can be converted into the most useful work. Extracting the most work always involves controlling or limiting the flow in some way, which always results in some dissipation as heat. (I should mention, he doesn’t use the word “work” in exactly the same sense that I am, but I find it useful to think of work as the amount of energy that was converted into something useful.)

Another core concept was “embodied energy”, which I think of as the sum of all the useful work it took to get to a certain point in a system. For example, a fish has more embodied energy than the plants it ate, and an eagle more than the fish it ate, and a city more than the farms and mines that produced the raw materials to sustain its people and its economy.

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

This post is a must read. I did not expect anything in it. It’s hard to pick a quote because the whole thing is quotable. Anyway:

There are two main sources of bacteria that we looked at. There is a methane-digesting bacteria that you basically grow on natural gas. And then we can either eat that directly or process it or say, feed it to rats and then eat the rats. Then there’s the bacteria that we can grow directly on wood. Or on leftover mushroom waste. And so this would be taking down a tree, pulverizing it, turning it into a slurry, and then letting the bacteria go at it.

So for instance, there are bacteria that secrete sugars they then use to feed themselves. You can pull out the sugars, and eat those ourselves and leave the bacteria and the partially decaying wood pulp. And we can feed that stuff to other things. So for instance, rats digest wood to some degree, particularly after it is partially broken down that way. This makes a fairly good solution. We could feed something similar to chickens. And chicken is something maybe people would maybe be happier to eat than bacteria milkshakes.

So – we’re going to cut down all the trees, which is going to be hard because they will be frozen. Then we pulp them, feed the pulp to bacteria, then to rats, then eat the rats. Please people, let’s not let it get to this point.

It also reminded me of the yeast vats in The Caves of Steel. Also how certain yeast strains can make wheat beer taste like bananas, even though there are no bananas in there. It has occurred to me before that fungi could be a key to feeding people in a world that was photosynthetically limited for one reason or another.

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, has a new book about six inventions that “got us to now”. The list he has come up with is “glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light“. I’ll put it on my short to medium term reading list, because it doesn’t sound extremely exciting to me, but I did like his first book and its focus on the “adjacent possible”. His point there was that every once in a while you might have an Einstein with major breakthroughs that seem far ahead of their time, but for the most part progress is incremental, and what seems like a breakthrough in retrospect is made possible by a series of earlier incremental steps. Digital computers are a good example – Charles Babbage and others came up with all the necessary theory to build them in the 18th century, but they would have to have been built out of gears and powered by steam. The invention of electricity, transistors, silicon chips, etc., and the building of all the infrastructure systems to support them, eventually paved the way for our laptops, smartphones, and supercomputers today.

This also reminded me of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” novel in which the British and French governments actually build the enormous computers envisioned by Babbage, and put them to various bureaucratic and nefarious purposes.

F.E. Smith

BBC has an interesting article on predictions made by F.E. Smith, a British aristocrat. These were predictions made in 1930 for the year 2030. BBC calls them “strange”. A couple really are strange, but several of them either have come true or still could by 2030. If technological progress is truly exponential, then 2015 is too soon to rule out any outcome for 2030 – remember the old saw about the lily pond and day 29.

  • average lifespan of 150, and a cure for cancer – there have been huge gains in lifespan, but obviously nowhere near this; but it could still happen; I’m reading The End of Illness by David Agus right now. One of his points is that the discovery of highly effective treatments for infectious diseases (antibiotics, etc.) has led to a focus on disease as an invader to be fought, rather than a focus on the patient’s body as a complete system, which is what is needed for better cancer treatment. He is not optimistic about a cure, but thinks that with better prevention and early detection most people could live healthy lives to 100 or more. I am also reminded of Long For this World, a book about Aubrey de Grey, who has proposed a radical (and seemingly drastic, not to mention painful) cure for cancer that he believes could allow people to live for hundreds or even a thousand years.
  • a 16-24 hour average work week – certainly this is not the average work week for people who work today. But is it so weird? This guy probably knew John Maynard Keynes, who was making exactly these sorts of projections based on long-term increases in productivity (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren). These productivity increases, and related increases on overall monetary wealth, actually have come to pass. But two things have happened. First, the wealth is distributed unevenly, so that some people don’t have to work at all, while others have to work a lot. Of the richer countries, a few in Northern Europe have taken steps in the direction of sharing both wealth and work hours, while the Anglo-American countries and emerging Asia generally have not. Second, as we have become wealthier, we have come to see some things as necessities that would have been seen as luxuries in the past. Air conditioning comes to mind. Robert and Edward Skidelski talk a lot about these issues in How Much is Enough.
  • a color TV in every home 🙂 which would lead to a return to direct democracy 🙁
  • synthetic meat – has already happened in the lab, almost certainly will be commercialized by 2030 I would think
  • new “physiologically pleasant substances…as pleasant and harmless…” 🙂 “…as tobacco” 🙁

Books I mention above (which I am not selling):

Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs highlights three international conferences in 2015 that may be important:

In July 2015, world leaders will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to chart reforms of the global financial system. In September 2015, they will meet again to approve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide national and global policies to 2030. And in December 2015, leaders will assemble in Paris to adopt a global agreement to head off the growing dangers of human-induced climate change.

The fundamental goal of these summits is to put the world on a course toward sustainable development, or inclusive and sustainable growth. This means growth that raises average living standards; benefits society across the income distribution, rather than just the rich; and protects, rather than wrecks, the natural environment.

Growth that protects the natural environment – I think it’s theoretically possible, but we’re a long way from that and it’s easy to be pessimistic. But at least some leaders recognize that there is a problem worth discussing. His vision is essentially one of technological progress allowing decarbonization of the energy supply:

Back in 2009 and 2010, the world’s governments agreed to keep the rise in global temperature to below 2° Celsius relative to the pre-industrial era. Yet warming is currently on course to reach 4-6 degrees by the end of the century – high enough to devastate global food production and dramatically increase the frequency of extreme weather events.

To stay below the two-degree limit, the world’s governments must embrace a core concept: “deep decarbonization” of the world’s energy system. That means a decisive shift from carbon-emitting energy sources like coal, oil, and gas, toward wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric power, as well as the adoption of carbon capture and storage technologies when fossil fuels continue to be used. Dirty high-carbon energy must give way to clean low- and zero-carbon energy, and all energy must be used much more efficiently.

Clean energy would be an enormous breakthrough. But would it end all our problems, allowing us to grow indefinitely from that point without consequences? In their book Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update, Donella Meadows et al. explain why that might not necessarily be the case:

in a complex, finite world, if you remove or raise one limit and go on growing, you encounter another limit. Especially if the growth is exponential, the next limit will show up surprisingly soon. There are layers of limits.

What might the next limit be? maybe depletion of the phosphorus supply, loss of fertile soil, collapse of the oceans, a catastrophic plague affecting crops or people, etc. The point is just not to think that solving the carbon emissions problem would end all the problems caused by our enormous footprint on the natural world.

Looney Tunes

What the…

For once, I’m speechless…

The real Agenda 21 is not a secret conspiracy. At least, it’s not secret – it’s right here. I think the main reason people make up stuff about it rather than actually reading it, is that it’s mind-numbingly boring. I certainly haven’t read it all the way through. I don’t think anyone could. From a quick skim, it’s about sustainable development, but it’s hardly radical. In fact, it’s generally pro-trade and pro-growth.

slavery

What happens when an economic system is designed to support the profit-seeking of a small class of immoral people? Well, that sort of thing might have happened somewhere in the world in the past, but certainly not in the United States. Oh wait…

The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph…

The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits…

Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

These are quotes from a New York Times review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist.

automation

Longreads has an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. “Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,” he wrote. “And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.” It was at this point that what Hughes termed “technological momentum” took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. “The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.” Progress had found its groove.

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. The assumptions underlying industrial operations have already changed. “Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” explains W. Brian Arthur, an economist and technology theorist at the Santa Fe Institute. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital.” As an example, he points to freight shipping. Not long ago, coordinating a shipment of cargo across national borders required legions of clipboard-wielding functionaries. Now, it’s handled by computers. Commerce of all sorts is increasingly managed through, as Arthur puts it, “a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines.” To be in business is to have networked computers capable of taking part in that conversation. Any sizable company has little choice but to automate and then automate some more. It has to redesign its work flows and its products to allow for ever-greater computer monitoring and control, and it has to restrict the involvement of people in its supply and production processes. People, after all, can’t keep up with computer chatter; they just slow down the conversation.