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555. Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    Bill Bryson (Editor, Introduction), James Gleick (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Henry Petroski (Contributor), Georgina Ferrey (Contributor), Steve Jones (Contributor), Philip Ball (Contributor), Paul C.W. Davies (Contributor), Ian Stewart (Contributor), John D. Barrow (Contributor), Oliver Morton (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Maggie Gee (Contributor), Stephen H. Schneider (Contributor), Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Gregory Benford (Contributor), Martin J. Rees (Contributor), Margaret Wertheim (Contributor), Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Rebecca Goldstein (Contributor), Simon Schaffer (Contributor), Richard Holmes (Contributor), Richard Fortey (Contributor), Richard Dawkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Essays, Science, Nature

490 pages, published 2010

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey, Seeing Further was compiled to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.  The Society was started after a small audience listened to a lecture by  twenty-eight year old Christopher Wren on astronomy with the intention of promoting the accumulation of useful knowledge.  Since its inception, the

Royal Society has fostered scientific exploration and discovery and includes Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Bayes, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, and Alexander Fleming as fellows.  Members of the Royal Society have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. In short, it is has played an enormous role in the creation of modern science.

Quotes 

“We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.”

 

 “Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”

 

“Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”

 

“Human memories are short and inaccurate.”

 

“Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).”

 

 “The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.”

 

“The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”

 

“The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”

“The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”

 

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong”

 

 “To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s

 

“A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).”

 

“And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.”

 

“Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.”

 

“There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.”

 

“As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.”

 

“Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’.”

 

“It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial.”

 

“For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.”

 

“It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed several books by Bill Bryson, I was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, Bryson only serves as the Editor and contributes a brief introduction.  Each chapter is written by a different scientific or literary luminary and focuses on some aspect of life related to the Royal Society.  Some are very interesting and some are incredibly dense, causing my eyes to glaze over.  If you are interested in science, you may like this book but I recommend an ala carte approach.

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542. Making Sense

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sam Harris

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Religion, Politics, Race

444 pages, published 2013

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Sam Harris (neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author) is a very smart guy who has been studying some of the most important questions confronting humanity.  In Making Sense, we hear his interviews with a dozen of the best known world experts and deep thinkers (including Daniel Kahneman, Timothy Snyder, Nick Bostrom, and Glen Loury) on a variety of fascinating issues.

Quotes 

 

My Take

While there were plenty of fascinating things in this book, there were also some parts that really lagged.  It really depends on who is being interviewed by Sam Harris.  My favorites were Daniel Kahneman and Glen Loury.

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536. Humankind: A Hopeful History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Rutger Bregman

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Public Policy

462 pages, published June 2, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

In Humankind, author Rutger Bregman rejects the widely accepted idea that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested and instead presents and supports his thesis that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the key factor to their success.  After giving the reader a 200,000 year history, Bregman demonstrates that we are evolutionarily adapted for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.  He also debunks commonly believed understandings of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, the Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” and shows that a real life shipwreck of boys on a remote island resulted in cooperation and teamwork rather than a Lord of the Flies style degeneration.

Quotes 

“So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”

 

“Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization’……That drug is the news.”

 

“Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.”

 

“An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’

 

“Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.”

 

“It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.”

 

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”

 

“If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.’ George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)”

 

“Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.”

 

“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

 

 “For centuries, even millennia, generals and governors, artists and poets had taken it for granted that soldiers fight. That if there’s one thing that brings out the hunter in us, it’s war. War is when we humans get to do what we’re so good at. War is when we shoot to kill. But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.14 The situation on Makin that night had been do-or-die, when you would expect everyone to fight for their lives. But in his battalion of more than three hundred soldiers, Marshall could identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger. Was it a lack of experience? Nope. There didn’t seem to be any difference between new recruits and experienced pros when it came to willingness to shoot. And many of the men who didn’t fire had been crack shots in training. Maybe they just chickened out? Hardly. Soldiers who didn’t fire stayed at their posts, which meant they ran as much of a risk. To a man, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades. And yet, when it came down to it, they shirked their duty. They failed to shoot.”

 

 “To understand where things went wrong, we have to go back 15,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Up until then, the planet had been sparsely populated and people banded together to stave off the cold. Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.22 Then the climate changed, turning the area between the Nile in the west and the Tigris in the east into a land of milk and honey. Here, survival no longer depended on banding together against the elements. With food in such plentiful supply, it made sense to stay put.  Huts and temples were built, towns and villages took shape and the population grew.  More importantly, people’s possessions grew. What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong. It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into play, the gap between rich and poor opened wide.”

 

“Reading through the 1300 pages of interviews … it’s patently obvious that Eichman was no brainless bureaucrat, He was a fanatic. He acted not out of indifference, but out of conviction. Like [Stanley] Milgram’s experimental subjects, he did evil because he believed he was doing good.”

 

“The emergence of the first large settlements triggered a seismic shift in religious life. Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done. A whole clerical class was put in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry. Had we eaten something forbidden? Said something wrong? Had an illicit thought?37 For the first time in history, we developed a notion of sin. And we began looking to priests to prescribe how we should do penance. Sometimes it was enough to pray or complete a strict set of rituals, but often we had to sacrifice cherished possessions–food or animals or even people.”

 

 “In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’  He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.  And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her. ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”

 

 

 “One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.”

 

My Take

In the same vein as Factfulness, Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks, I found the optimism of author Rutger Bregman in Humankind to be a hopeful and encouraging look at human nature and our future together on this planet.  A nice antidote to all the doomsayers out there.

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528. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ray Kurzweil

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Public Policy

652 pages, published September 26, 2006

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Written by acclaimed futurist Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near explores the role of technology in our post human future.  Kurzweil discusses what he believes will be the next step in our  evolutionary process, the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

Quotes 

“Play is just another version of work”

 

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER”

 

“How Smart Is a Rock? To appreciate the feasibility of computing with no energy and no heat, consider the computation that takes place in an ordinary rock. Although it may appear that nothing much is going on inside a rock, the approximately 1025 (ten trillion trillion) atoms in a kilogram of matter are actually extremely active. Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields. All of this activity represents computation, even if not very meaningfully organized. We’ve already shown that atoms can store information at a density of greater than one bit per atom, such as in computing systems built from nuclear magnetic-resonance devices. University of Oklahoma researchers stored 1,024 bits in the magnetic interactions of the protons of a single molecule containing nineteen hydrogen atoms.  Thus, the state of the rock at any one moment represents at least 1027 bits of memory.”

 

“as long as there is an AI shortcoming in any such area of endeavor, skeptics will point to that area as an inherent bastion of permanent human superiority over the capabilities of our own creations. This book will argue, however, that within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself.”

 

“One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”

 

“But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it’s stuck. —MARVIN MINSKY”

 

“By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality.”

 

“Increasing complexity” on its own is not, however, the ultimate goal or end-product of these evolutionary processes. Evolution results in better answers, not necessarily more complicated ones. Sometimes a superior solution is a simpler one.”

 

“The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis”;”

 

“Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …”

 

“There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.”

 

“A thousand-bit quantum computer would vastly outperform any conceivable DNA computer, or for that matter any conceivable nonquantum computer.”

 

 “Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be “achieved through science and technology steered by human values.”

 

“Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today’s rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We’ll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.”

 

“If we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)”

 

“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. This is because, if something goes wrong, you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. This is why, when someone learns “by rote,” we say that they don’t really understand. However, if you have several different representations then, when one approach fails you can try another. Of course, making too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking! —MARVIN MINSKY213”

 

“Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?”

 

“(As Einstein said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.”)”

 

“If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.”

 

“Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won’t have to stay so small.”

 

“These chunks represent patterns (such as faces) as well as specific knowledge. For example, a world-class chess master is estimated to have mastered about 100,000 board positions. Shakespeare used 29,000 words but close to 100,000 meanings of those words. Development of expert systems in medicine indicate that humans can master about 100,000 concepts in a domain. If we estimate that this “professional” knowledge represents as little as 1 percent of the overall pattern and knowledge store of a human, we arrive at an estimate of 107 chunks.”

 

“In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift (also called innovation) turns the S-curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm, such as three-dimensional circuits, takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation. In such nonhuman species as apes, the mastery of a toolmaking or -using skill by each animal is characterized by an S-shaped learning curve that ends abruptly; human-created technology, in contrast, has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception.”

 

“do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. —NIKOLA TESLA, 1896, INVENTOR OF ALTERNATING CURRENT”

 

“We come from goldfish, essentially, but that [doesn’t] mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe [the AIs] will feed us once a week…. If you had a machine with a 10 to the 18th power IQ over humans, wouldn’t you want it to govern, or at least control your economy? —SETH SHOSTAK”

 

“Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today’s world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.”

 

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, “MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS,”

 

My Take

Twenty years ago I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines and was deeply impacted by the many predictions of amazing technological breakthroughs.  The Singularity is Near was not as shocking as The Age of Spiritual Machines, but is still a fascinating read.  Although The Singularity is Near was published in 2006, I read it fifteen years later in 2021.  As such, I could see for myself whether at least some of Kurzweil’s 2006 predictions materialized.  Many have not, but we are still making incredible technological progress, just at a slower rate.  Kurzweil still makes a strong case that in the long term, life on earth will be changing fundamentally as machines bypass human beings in intelligence.

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525. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Max Tegmark

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Public Policy

364 pages, published August 29, 2017

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Life 3.0, MIT professor Max Tegmark makes a strong case that we are on the precipice of tremendous technological changes that will impact every aspect of life on our planet.  Tegmark explores our post human future and discusses how will artificial intelligence (“AI”) will affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very existence as humans. He looks at possible outcomes after the rise of AI and proposes strategies to keep them beneficial.

Quotes 

“Life 1.0”: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of “Life 2.0”: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes.”

 

“Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.”

 

 “If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!”

 

 “If we don’t know what we want we’re less likely to get it.”

 

“… when people ask about the meaning of life as if it were the job of our cosmos to give meaning to our existence, they’re getting it backward: It’s not our Universe giving meaning to conscious beings, but conscious beings giving meaning to our Universe.”

“The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.”

 

“We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department.”

 

 “This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0”

 

“In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.”

 

“The Matrix, Agent Smith (an AI) articulates this sentiment: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.”

 

“I think of this as the techno-skeptic position, eloquently articulated by Andrew Ng: “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”

 

“The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control.”

 

 “Elon Musk argued that what we need right now from governments isn’t oversight but insight: specifically, technically capable people in government positions who can monitor AI’s progress and steer it if warranted down the road.”

 

“Will life in our Universe fulfill its potential or squander it? This depends to a great extent on what we humans alive today do during our lifetime, and I’m optimistic that we can make the future of life truly awesome if we make the right choices.”

 

“the real risk with AGI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. As I mentioned in chapter 1, people don’t think twice about flooding anthills to build hydroelectric dams, so let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants.”

 

“The question of how to define life is notoriously controversial. Competing definitions abound, some of which include highly specific requirements such as being composed of cells, which might disqualify both future intelligent machines and extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we don’t want to limit our thinking about the future of life to the species we’ve encountered so far, let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate.”

 

“I’m encouraging mine to go into professions that machines are currently bad at, and therefore seem unlikely to get automated in the near future. Recent forecasts for when various jobs will get taken over by machines identify several useful questions to ask about a career before deciding to educate oneself for it. For example: • Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? • Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? • Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?”

 

“The DQN AI system of Google DeepMind can accomplish a slightly broader range of goals: it can play dozens of different vintage Atari computer games at human level or better. In contrast, human intelligence is thus far uniquely broad, able to master a dazzling panoply of skills.

A healthy child given enough training time can get fairly good not only at any game, but also at any language, sport or vocation. Comparing the intelligence of humans and machines today, we humans win hands-down on breadth, while machines outperform us in a small but growing number of narrow domains, as illustrated in figure 2.1. The holy grail AI research is to build “general AI” (better known as artificial general intelligence, AGI) that is maximally broad: able to accomplish virtually any goal, including learning.”

 

 “Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. My wife, Meia, likes to point out that the aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds. Indeed, when we finally figured out how to build mechanical birds in 2011, 1 more than a century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the aviation industry showed no interest in switching to wing-flapping mechanical-bird travel, even though it’s more energy efficient—because our simpler earlier solution is better suited to our travel needs. In the same way, I suspect that there are simpler ways to build human-level thinking machines than the solution evolution came up with, and even if we one day manage to replicate or upload brains, we’ll end up discovering one of those simpler solutions first. It will probably draw more than the twelve watts of power that your brain uses, but its engineers won’t be as obsessed about energy efficiency as evolution was—and soon enough, they’ll be able to use their intelligent machines to design more energy-efficient ones.”

 

“Yet all these scenarios have two features in common:  A fast takeoff: the transition from subhuman to vastly superhuman intelligence occurs in a matter of days, not decades. A unipolar outcome: the result is a single entity controlling Earth.”

 

“It’s natural for us to rate the difficulty of tasks relative to how hard it is for us humans to perform them, as in figure 2.1. But this can give a misleading picture of how hard they are for computers. It feels much harder to multiply 314,159 by 271,828 than to recognize a friend in a photo, yet computers creamed us at arithmetic long before I was born, while human-level image recognition has only recently become possible. This fact that low-level sensorimotor tasks seem easy despite requiring enormous computational resources is known as Moravec’s paradox, and is explained by the fact that our brain makes such tasks feel easy by dedicating massive amounts of customized hardware to them—more than a quarter of our brains, in fact.”

 

“After all, why should our simplest path to a new technology be the one that evolution came up with, constrained by requirements that it be self-assembling, self-repairing and self-reproducing? Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers.”

 

“a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it’s allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity by making its environment messier.”

 

 “it’s not very interesting to try to draw an artificial line between intelligence and non-intelligence, and it’s more useful to simply quantify the degree of ability for accomplishing different goals.”

 

“DeepMind soon published their method and shared their code, explaining that it used a very simple yet powerful idea called deep reinforcement learning.  Basic reinforcement learning is a classic machine learning technique inspired by behaviorist psychology, where getting a positive reward increases your tendency to do something again and vice versa. Just like a dog learns to do tricks when this increases the likelihood of its getting encouragement or a snack from its owner soon, DeepMind’s AI learned to move the paddle to catch the ball because this increased the likelihood of its getting more points soon. DeepMind combined this idea with deep learning: they trained a deep neural net, as in the previous chapter, to predict how many points would on average be gained by pressing each of the allowed keys on the keyboard, and then the AI selected whatever key the neural net rated as most promising given the current state of the game.”

 

“After DeepMind’s breakthrough, there’s no reason why a robot can’t ultimately use some variant of deep reinforcement learning to teach itself to walk without help from human programmers: all that’s needed is a system that gives it points whenever it makes progress. Robots in the real world similarly have the potential to learn to swim, fly, play ping-pong, fight and perform a nearly endless list of other motor tasks without help from human programmers. To speed things up and reduce the risk of getting stuck or damaging themselves during the learning process, they would probably do the first stages of their learning in virtual reality.”

 

“The main trend on the job market isn’t that we’re moving into entirely new professions. Rather, we’re crowding into those pieces of terrain in figure 2.2 that haven’t yet been submerged by the rising tide of technology! Figure 3.6 shows that this forms not a single island but a complex archipelago, with islets and atolls corresponding to all the valuable things that machines still can’t do as cheaply as humans can. This includes not only high-tech professions such as software development, but also a panoply of low-tech jobs leveraging our superior dexterity and social skills, ranging from massage therapy to acting. Might AI eclipse us at intellectual tasks so rapidly that the last remaining jobs will be in that low-tech category? A friend of mine recently joked with me that perhaps the very last profession will be the very first profession: prostitution. But then he mentioned this to a Japanese roboticist, who protested: “No, robots are very good at those things!”

 

“I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.” Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960.  As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds do the same to humans?”

 

“So who’s right: those who say automated jobs will be replaced by better ones or those who say most humans will end up unemployable? If AI progress continues unabated, then both sides might be right: one in the short term and the other in the long term. But although people often discuss the disappearance of jobs with doom-and-gloom connotations, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Luddites obsessed about particular jobs, neglecting the possibility that other jobs might provide the same social value. Analogously, perhaps those who obsess about jobs today are being too narrow-minded: we want jobs because they can provide us with income and purpose, but given the opulence of resources produced by machines, it should be possible to find alternative ways of providing both the income and the purpose without jobs. Something similar ended up happening in the equine story, which didn’t end with all horses going extinct. Instead, the number of horses has more than tripled since 1960, as they were protected by an equine social-welfare system of sorts: even though they couldn’t pay their own bills, people decided to take care of horses, keeping them around for fun, sport and companionship. Can we similarly take care of our fellow humans in need?”

 

“Even if AI can be made robust enough for us to trust that a robojudge is using the legislated algorithm, will everybody feel that they understand its logical reasoning enough to respect its judgment? This challenge is exacerbated by the recent success of neural networks, which often outperform traditional easy-to-understand AI algorithms at the price of inscrutability. If defendants wish to know why they were convicted, shouldn’t they have the right to a better answer than “we trained the system on lots of data, and this is what it decided”? Moreover, recent studies have shown that if you train a deep neural learning system with massive amounts of prisoner data, it can predict who’s likely to return to crime (and should therefore be denied parole) better than human judges. But what if this system finds that recidivism is statistically linked to a prisoner’s sex or race—would this count as a sexist, racist robojudge that needs reprogramming? Indeed, a 2016 study argued that recidivism-prediction software used across the United States was biased against African Americans and had contributed to unfair sentencing.  These are important questions that we all need to ponder and discuss to ensure that AI remains beneficial.”

 

“Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime.”

 

My Take

Life 3.0 is a fascinating look at the tremendous technological change that is on our doorstep and what that will mean for the future of human beings, the planet earth and our universe.  Tegmark thoroughly discusses a diverse array of ideas about our past, present and future in language that the lay reader can easily understand.  A real “thinker” book and highly recommended.

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482. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Ben and Drue Emerson

Author:   Lindsey Fitzharris

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Science, Medicine, Health

304 pages, published October 31, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Butchering Art tells the story of Joseph Lister, a Quaker surgeon in nineteenth-century England and Scotland who solved the riddle of post operative infections.  Drawing from the work of friend Louis Pasteur and his own tireless experimentation, Lister proved germ theory and changed the practice of medicine and saving countless lives.

Quotes 

“The adoption of Lister’s antiseptic system was the most prominent outward sign of the medical community’s acceptance of a germ theory, and it marked the epochal moment when medicine and science merged.”

 

“From the moment he looked through the lens of his father’s microscope to the day he was knighted by Queen Victoria, his life was shaped and influenced by his circumstances and the people around him. Like all of us, he saw his world through the prism of opinions held by those whom he admired most:”

 

“Lister understood that being in a hospital could be a terrifying experience and followed his own golden rule: “Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.”

 

“The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons.”

 

“If Lister had nursed any hope that his diligence and reasoned argument concerning his antiseptic system would convert the American audience, he would be sorely disappointed. One attendee accused him of being mentally unhinged and having a “grasshopper in the head.”

 

“Erysipelas was one of four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses).”

 

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE”

 

“The symptoms syphilis engendered worsened over time. In addition to the unsightly skin ulcers that pockmarked the body in the later stages of the disease, many victims endured paralysis, blindness, dementia, and “saddle nose,” a grotesque deformity that occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face. (Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)”

 

“Let us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic.… Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. —HERBERT SPENCER”

 

My Take

I learned a lot about history and medicine from The Butchering Art which focuses on the story of surgeon Joseph Lister and how he demonstrated the role played by germs in causing infections.  Prior to Lister, surgery was a gruesome affair with unsanitary hospitals and many post-operative infections.  We all owe a debt of gratitude to Lister and all of the scientists who were courageous enough to challenge the status quo.

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473. Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Atul Gawande

Genre:   Non Fiction, Health, Medicine, Science, Memoir, Essays

273 pages, published April 3, 2007

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Better, surgeon and author Atul Gawande explores different aspects of medical care (hygiene, obstetrics, medical malpractice, battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, doctor assisted administration of the death penalty, the treatment of polio in India) and explores how to bring improvements to different systems.

Quotes 

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”

 

“People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.”… Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.”

 

“The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do.”

 

“We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.”

 

“The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?”

 

“Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.”

 

“Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.”

 

“Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.”

“We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.”

 

“Human birth…is a solution to an evolutionary problem: how a mammal can walk upright, which requires a small, fixed, bony pelvis, and also possess a large brain, which entails a baby whose head is too big to fit through that small pelvis…in a sense, all human mothers give birth prematurely. Other mammals are born mature enough to walk and seek food within hours; our newborns are small and helpless for months.”

 

“Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”

 

My Take

I always think the mark of a good non fiction book is how much I learned from reading it.  Well, I learned a lot about modern medicine after reading Better.   It also didn’t hurt that Atul Gawande (author of Being Mortal) is a talented writer with something to say.

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442. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Economics, History, Public Policy

342 pages, published January 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Factfulness is an exploration of how the world is doing so much better than people think.  When asked simple questions such as why the world’s population is increasing, how many young women go to school, or how many people live in poverty, most people get the answers wrong by a large order of magnitude regardless of their education, experience or expertise.  Written by Professor of International Health Hans Rosling, along with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, methodically demonstrates how the world is doing much better than we might think.

Quotes 

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

 

“Look for causes, not villains.”

 

“human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”

 

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

 

“Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”

 

“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

 

“When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

 

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

 

“Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.”

 

“The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.”

 

“The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want”

 

“Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.”

 

“And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn’t make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.”

 

“Ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.”

 

“The next generation is like the last runner in a very long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party when we are done.”

 

“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.”

 

My Take

While Factfulness is an interesting book, it reminded me very much of two other books that I have read on my quest:  Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks.  All of these books preach the same message, i.e. that things are actually going a lot better in the world than we think they are and that worldwide poverty is in decline.  Factfulness author Hans Rosling backs everything up with facts and makes a compelling case.  I’m not sure how things are going in the world in the age of covid-19 and global shutdown.  I’m hoping we can get back on the positive trajectory that Rosling describes.

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439. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  David and Tammis Matzinger

Author:   Adam Higginbotham

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Science, Foreign

561 pages, published February 12, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Midnight in Chernobyl is an exhaustive look at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster which follows individuals from many different facets of the story, from those working in the plant to the scientists who desperately try to mitigate the crisis to the leaders who make the ultimate decisions of life and death.  The book also provides the reader with an inside look at the corruption and rot within the Soviet system that led to both the nuclear disaster and the eventual downfall of the USSR.

Quotes 

“a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty.”

 

“Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.”

 

“Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.”

 

“For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by the end of 1986. Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31.”

 

“A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.”

 

“As the Era of Stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state—space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power—while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.”

 

“and leveling inconveniently situated mountains with atom bombs—or, as the Russian expression went, “correcting the mistakes of nature.”

 

“But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.”

 

“the atomic chieftains of NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute apparently believed that a well-written set of manuals would be enough to guarantee nuclear safety.”

 

“So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely: the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.”

 

“the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation.”

 

“The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 degrees centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.”

 

“Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.”

 

My Take

When I first picked up a thick copy of Midnight in Chernobyl (which clocks in at 561 pages and had been assigned by one of my book groups), I was expecting a bit of a long slog.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Author Adam Higginbotham is a skilled writer who weaves a gripping tale of what went wrong in Chernobyl and how a corrupt Communist system built on deception and covering up unpleasant truths laid the ground work for one of the biggest manmade disasters in the history of the world.  I learned a lot and highly recommend this book.  I also recommend the HBO miniseries Chernobyl which is an engrossing watch.

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428. Lab Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Hope Jahren

Genre:   Nonfiction, Science, Memoir

290 pages, published March 1, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Lab Girl is written by acclaimed scientist and geobiologist Hope Jahren who has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil.  Jahren writes about both her long, difficult journey to become a world renowned scientist and insights from her botanical experiments.

Quotes 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

 

“Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.”

 

“Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to

  1. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that

waited.”

 

“A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”

 

“Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”

 

“We love each other because we can’t help it. We don’t work at it and we don’t sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work — and similarly, there are some things that you just can’t screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him…”

 

“I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.”

 

“No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor — to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades — even centuries — will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.”

 

“My true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.”

 

“Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”       

 

“The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.”

 

 

“After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant’s yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.”

 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”

 

“I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.”

 

“A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.”

 

“America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it.”

 

“Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.  Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood…”

 

My Take

Lab Girl is an informative, interesting and inspirational memoir by the talented scientist/writer Hope Jahren.  Jahren had to overcome a lot of obstacles and endure some tough times before receiving recognition for her work as a geobiologist, but she would not have chosen any other path.  I especially enjoyed reading about her relationship with the idiosyncratic Bill Hagopian, a true American original, Jahren’s career long scientist sidekick.

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