Tag: science

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#BookReview: The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger

Rare Blend Of Science And Mysticism Marred By Racism And Misandry. Quite honestly, I read the Audible version of this book, where Schlanger’s wonder of her topic comes through in her breathy, reverent reading of her text – and kudos to her, as not many authors can pull off reading their own text for the Audible version. (Though yes, this *is* far more common in nonfiction.) But *because* I read the Audible, I actually had to borrow this book from the Jacksonville Public Library, where I live, to check the length of its bibliography – which does in fact clock in at a relatively healthy 25%. So despite the extraordinary claims made throughout this text, at least it is reasonably well documented.

All of the above noted, however… Schlanger makes some *remarkable* claims throughout this text, and while I don’t agree with at least one 1* review on Goodreads that she was nearly dogmatic – my summary of that review’s arguments – about her insistence on her so-broad-as-to-be-nearly-useless definitions of concepts such as “intelligence” and “communication” and “consciousness”, I *do* agree that Schlanger stretches these words so as to be nearly incomprehensible to anyone.

While Schlanger does a remarkable job as a journalist covering all aspects of her chosen topic, she also crosses the boundary lines of science and mysticism so early, often, and frequently that to read this book is very nearly to watch a Dr. Strange MCU movie and accept that the conceits of its mystic “sciences” are real in the reality in which you are reading this review. Her skills as a writer make the text flow beautifully and, again, reverently… but the grasp on objective reality one would normally expect in a popular science book… isn’t always as “there” as it should be in such a book. Instead, Schlanger’s embrace of the (at least near) mystic is more readily apparent, particularly through certain sections of the text.

And while this is bad enough, and let’s call it a half star deduction, these are almost style issues – few would bat an eye if this were labeled more a philosophy or ethics book than a science book.

No, the real problem with the text, at least for me, was the frequent excusing of mystics claiming to be scientists by claiming that their mysticism is no worse than far more accomplished actual scientists such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, pointing to their own mystic beliefs (common in their era over 100 yrs ago) and proclaiming “but those were white men” (an exact quote) and so their mystic beliefs were excused. No ma’am. Their mystic beliefs were excused because they achieved great scientific accomplishments. The people you excuse have not reinvented the way humans live or communicate many times over, and if they ever manage to achieve a similar accomplishment, you won’t be the only one excusing their mysticisms. It is the blatant and pervasive racist misandry of these types of comments throughout the text that results in the other half star deduction, as they are not *so* pervasive as to necessitate a full star deduction of their own.

Overall this is absolutely an interesting read on many fronts, one that one can learn a great deal from and on that is documented enough that its claims should be taken seriously – but as we all know, sources *can* be cherry picked, so a great deal of discernment and further reading is also very much in order after reading this text.

Recommended.

This review of The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger was originally written on December 11, 2024.

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#BookReview: Sea Of Grass by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty

Seemingly Comprehensive Review Of Its Field Marred By Dearth Of Bibliography. This is one of those books you pick up randomly because “hey, I don’t actually know more than the very rough basics about the American Prairie”, and it will actually give you a largely well rounded view of the entire topic, from its ancient origins and pre-European development through the Indian Wars/ Manifest Destiny era and through the Dust Bowl years all the way up to mostly current farming tech/ practices in the region. Yes, the commentary is titled perhaps a touch toward the left side of the dial, but honestly it wasn’t anywhere near as pervasive or preachy as some other similar texts tend to get, so eh, it was enough to mention here but now I’m moving on.

No, the real problem, at least with the Advance Review Copy edition I read roughly 6 months before publication, is the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 7% of the overall text – a far cry from even the 15% of my newly relaxing standard for bibliography length, much less the 20-30% of my former standard. So that’s the star deduction – for all of the facts presented, there simply isn’t anywhere near enough bibliography to back them up – much less the more editorial commentary.

Overall a seemingly strong primer on the topic, I know I learned a lot about a lot here, and I suspect many will as well. I simply wish it had been better documented.

Very much recommended.

This review of Sea Of Grass by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty was originally written on December 3, 2024.

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#BookReview: Selling Out The Spectrum by Liam O’Dell

Solid Enough Primer On The Topic Marred By Dearth Of Bibliography. This is one of those books where, as others have noted, O’Dell clearly has his own perspectives and they clearly come through, and yet he also does a reasonably balanced job of showing both sides to any given issue – while clearly favoring whichever side he does. For those perhaps unfamiliar with the Actually Autistic/ Autistic Adult community and the reasons it clashes so often with researchers of all forms and levels, this is a solid compendium of the issues at hand and an introduction to just how complicated some of them can be.

The primary blemish here is the dearth of the bibliography, clocking in at just 10% of the overall text – at least in the Advance Review Copy form I read weeks before publication. Adding to this is the editing/ formatting choices of at least this format – hopefully corrected in the full final form – that left footnotes in odd places that made it unclear at times whether one was reading a part of the narrative or a footnote, which got quite jarring indeed at times.

Still, for the actual information contained here, even while this particular Autistic doesn’t *fully* agree with many of the perspectives of the author, this truly does at least show the relevant issues and shows each of them from a variety of angles – which is always appreciated.

Recommended.

This review of Selling Out The Spectrum by Liam O’Dell was originally written on November 8, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum

Weather Machine : Political Machine :: forge : weave. Hey, first time I’ve ever used an analogy in that particular format in the title of a review. The answer, of course, is that all four are ways of making different things. Forging is the process of creating metal objects, weaving is the process of creating cloth objects. Similarly, a “political machine” is the process of creating some political outcome, and according to Blum in this text, a “Weather Machine” is the process of creating a… weather forecast.

Blum begins with a history of some of the earliest attempts at forecasting the weather for a given location, moving from the realm of religion and superstition to the realm of science – religion and superstition by another name, but sounding better to the “modern” ear. The history largely culminates with a discussion of the early 20th century concept of the “Weather Machine”, a giant warehouse full of human computers using slide rules to run calculations based on observations placed into a mathematical model in order to predict the weather.

An admiral goal well ahead of its time… but once computers (and particularly supercomputers) became a thing… perhaps an ideal no longer ahead of ours. It is here, in the era of computing, that Blum spends the rest of the text, showing how the first and earliest computer models found success all the way up to showing how certain modern models and teams work to forecast ever further out ever more rapidly… and how all of this now largely happens inside the computer itself, rather than in the suppositions of “trained meteorologists”.

In other words, this is a book not about weather itself, but about the process and, yes, *business*, of creating a weather *forecast* and the various issues and histories tha come to bear in this process.

Ultimately a very illuminating work about the business side of forecasting, Blum could have perhaps spent more time showing how say hurricane and tornado forecasts are formed and how much they have progressed in the last few decades, rather than forecasting more generally – but he also ultimately stayed more true to his general premise in staying more general, showing how forecasting *as a whole* has gotten so much more detailed without diving too deep into any particular area of forecasting itself.

Ultimately a rather fascinating look at a topic few people truly understand.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum was originally written on October 3, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

Interesting And Comprehensive Examination Marred By Leftist Ideology. If you can overlook (or if you like) the *frequent* bigotries against “males”, “white males”, and/ or “rich white males” and if you agree with Greta Thunberg re: “Climate” “Change” (or whatever the hell they’re calling it now as you read this review), you’re going to love this book. The star deduction comes specifically because of such slanted “reporting”. (I read the Audible version of this book and thus can’t comment on the length of its bibliography one way or another.)

If the above doesn’t apply to you, you should read this book anyway.

Because when it stays on subject about the efforts to map the seas and specifically the deepest parts of them, both cutting edge and throughout history, this book actually is quite good. Tretheway manages to show both the necessity of the effort and just how dangerous it can be in both academic and very real senses, along with all of the problems associated with having the data or not as well as gathering the data in the first place. Along the way we’re going to encounter quite a few legendary people, some truly globally famous even well outside their exploratory regions, others famous only within very narrow, sometimes quite niche, fields – but famous nonetheless. She manages to make the reader care about both the historic exploration and the current efforts, up to and including even using AI drones to get data humans otherwise can’t easily obtain. And all of this is quite remarkable indeed.

It is simply a shame that she had to integrate so much bigotry into this reporting – it truly could have been a truly remarkable work otherwise. And yet, the tale as written is still strong enough even with the integrated bigotry to still warrant a read by truly everyone remotely interested in the oceans for any reason.

Recommended.

This review of The Deepest Map by Laura Tretheway was originally written on July 1, 2024.

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#BookReview: Chamber Divers by Rachel Lance

Reads Almost Like Fiction – And Should Give Soraya M. Lane Inspiration For A Future Novel. First, this is one of the better researched books I’ve come across in all of my Advance Review Copy reading efforts – over 1100 books since 2018 – at 45% documentation. Kudos to Lance for being so thorough there.

And she needs it – because this is one of the more fantastical nonfiction books you’re ever going to come across. A brother and sister experimenting on themselves – as their father, who also experimented on himself *even with chlorine gas*, had trained them to do – gathering a team of like minded scientists to push the limits of the human condition under extreme environments, later in a direct race to help save their country from annihilation.

Before Jacques Cousteau developed SCUBA, there were the scientists working to discover what, exactly, humans could survive under water. What, exactly, happened as the human body was compressed to ever higher pressures? What happened as that pressure was relaxed – either suddenly or gradually? How could we allow humans to survive at ever increasing pressures, and what, exactly, were the limits?

And then… Normandy.

It had already been tried once, and failed miserably – because the soldiers didn’t have the data these very scientists were racing to obtain. Could they get it in time for the next invasion attempt?

They could… and they would change the face of warfare (and, to be honest, some entertainment and other scientific pursuits) forever when they did.

This is their story, told for seemingly the very first time.

Very much recommended. And please tag Soraya Lane and beg her to bring this story to actual fiction.

This review of Chamber Divers by Rachel Lance was originally written on April 10, 2024.

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#BookReview: Alien Earths by Lisa Kaltenegger

Solid Examination of The Field Of Planet Hunting. This is a solid look at how scientists find extra-solar planets and work to determine what they may be like – compositionally, temperature, whether life (as we understand it) may be possible, etc. Written for a general audience by a US-based Austrian native scientist working at the Carl Sagan Institute, the author clearly knows her stuff, but perhaps the English can be a touch stilted at times. It wasn’t enough to distract from the book for me, but there absolutely were a few “huh, weird phrasing” moments. Which happens even with fully native English speakers even in the same country – I’m sure there are Americans reading this review who will question even my own phrasing, and I’m a son of the Southern US to the tune that parts of my family have been on the North American continent since the second generation of Europeans to get here at all.

Overall truly a fascinating book, and Kaltenegger’s own experiments sound quite fun and interesting to boot. The only flaw I noticed here was such a small bibliography, which is where the star deduction comes into play. Still, this is ultimately a solidly written depiction of a truly fascinating part of interplanetary science. Very much recommended.

This review of Alien Earths by Lisa Kaltenegger was originally written on April 9, 2024.

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#BookReview: The War Below by Ernest Scheyder

Do The Needs Of The Many Outweigh The Desires Of The Few? 20 years ago as I was wrapping up my Computer Science degree requirements at Kennesaw State University just outside of Atlanta, GA, there was a massive debate raging around campus. At the time, the school – new to the “University” title, having had it for less than a decade at this point – was trying to grow from the commuter college it had been since its inception 40 yrs prior into a full fledged research level University… complete with student housing. The problem was that where the University wanted to place some of its first dorms was on the hill directly behind the Science building… where an endangered plant of some form was found, which kicked off rounds and rounds of going back and forth with various Environmental Protection Agency types. To be quite honest, I was never directly involved in any of this, but being on the school’s Student Media Advisory Board for a couple of years, I was connected enough to at least the reporting that I heard about at least the high points.

In The War Below, Scheyder looks at just these types of examples, where larger, grander ideas butt up against some much more local concern. Where the larger, grander idea is always “The only way we can see to fight climate change and stop carbon emissions while maintaining the global economy as we currently know it is to produce advanced electronic machines that require certain minerals to function, therefore we must obtain these minerals wherever they may be found.” Which admittedly means that for those that are more adamant that human-caused climate change isn’t a real thing or is some level of alarmist bullshit… well, you’ve been warned about a central tenet of this book in this review now.

However, Scheyder doesn’t really stay on the climate change debate itself, instead focusing on the more micro battles. “We found a supply of this particular mineral – but as it turns out, this particular plant that only exists in this exact spot also is dependent on this mineral, and therefore some are acting on behalf of the plant to stop us from getting to the mineral.” Or “We found a supply of a different mineral – but it happens to be under a location that some Native Americans consider sacred, and they’re trying to stop us from destroying their sacred spot.” Or “We found a supply of another mineral – but it happens to be in the middle of a town, and nearby residents don’t want to sell their land to us.” Every chapter is built around these and other variations of the same types of battles, pitting humanity’s need for these particular minerals against some more local, more intimate desire.

Scheyder does a remarkably balanced job of talking to both sides and presenting both sides in a way that they will likely consider the reporting on themselves to be pretty close to fair – as he notes within the text a few times, his job isn’t really to make a decision for humanity so much as to present the competing interests and allow humanity the chance to choose for itself.

Is our survival – as we currently see it – worth forcing ourselves on someone who is more intimately connected to that spot on Earth than most of us will ever directly be?

This book isn’t the call to arms that Siddarth Kara’s Cobalt Red, released almost exactly one year earlier and describing the outright horrors and abuses rampant throughout much of the cobalt industry specifically, was. Instead, as noted, it is more of a balanced and even nuanced look at the competing interests surrounding how and even if certain materials can be obtained in certain locations, and how these small, individual battles can impact us all at a global level.

In the case of KSU’s Student Housing vs the plant, fwiw, apparently it was resolved in favor of KSU’s Student Housing at some point in the last 20 yrs, as now the entire hill that was once a battleground is now a few different student housing complexes. In the cases Scheyder details… well, read the book. Some of them were still ongoing at the time Scheyder had to hand his book off for final editing, but he gives up to that moment details on where they are in such instances.

Very much recommended.

This review of The War Below by Ernest Scheyder was originally written on January 9, 2024.

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#BookReview: Ignition by M.R. O’Connor

Controversial Yet Mostly Solid – But Needs Better Documentation. I first became interested in fire management over a decade ago, when I read an article on wired.com on July 8, 2012, where it made the case that perhaps our modern American efforts to suppress wildfires… had actually led directly to fires becoming ever bigger and more destructive. Over the following 11 yrs, I would both watch the movie Only The Brave, about the Yarnell Hill fire that claimed so many firefighters’ lives less than a year after that Wired article came out (which I just realized when researching for this review) and read the book Granite Mountain/ My Lost Brothers (it has used both titles) by Brendan McDonough that the movie was based on. I had also already seen numerous controlled/ prescribed burns as a native of the Southern US, and distinctly remember several over the years in the woods directly behind Lee County (GA) High School – where country singer Luke Bryan, American Idol Season 11 winner Phillip Phillips, and San Francisco Giants great Buster Posey had all attended.

All of that to say that here, O’Connor spends a year actively working with wildland firefighter crews roaming the western US (well, west of the Mississippi – she starts and ends in Nebraska), learning their ways, their thoughts, their struggles. And creating a compelling voice for her effort in this book. She gets the same certifications they do, goes through the same training and meetings, and does everything she is qualified to do per those trainings, and in turn we as readers get a first hand account of what it is really like on said crews. (Which McDonough’s book is also great at – just be prepared for some *very* dusty rooms near the end of that tale.)

Through this memoir portion of the book – interwoven with other interviews and research that I’ll get to momentarily – she is particularly strong and vivid. Truly, read the book for these passages if for no other reason, as it really brings home what a difficult, demanding, and yes, frustrating job this can be.

Even the research, both interviews and historical, is truly remarkably well done. It is this section in particular (along with, perhaps, some of the commentary from the fire teams she is on) that will likely prove most controversial, as it really drives home the exact point that at least parts of that 2012 Wired article were making – the “suppression only” firefighting tactics we’ve used against wildfires primarily over only the last century or so really do seem to be causing more harm than they are doing good. And, as it turns out… pretty well everyone knew this before we started doing it. From millennia before Europeans came to the Americas, Native Americans had already been using fire to shape and control their environment in numerous ways, and had already developed tactics that worked *with* nature for the good of all beings. O’Connor’s work here makes a particularly strong case that at minimum, these strategies need to be more actively considered. Indeed, much the same way that Gilbert Gaul’s 2019 book The Geography Of Risk made such a strong case for re-examining coastal development strategies in the face of hurricane damage.

The one weakness here is a quibble, perhaps, but it is consistent with my other non-fiction reviews (and I did already mention it in the title of this review, above), and that is that at just 14% bibliography, it falls a bit short in my own experience – where 20-30% documentation seems to be more standard. Extraordinary claims – and yes, challenging the prevailing “wisdom” of the last century qualifies as such – require extraordinary evidence, and while O’Connor’s case through her narrative is stellar, her documentation is sadly quite lacking.

Still, overall truly a fascinating read that deserves far more attention than it may ultimately wind up getting. Very much recommended.

This review of Ignition by M.R. O’Connor was originally written on October 11, 2023.

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#BookReview: The Lost Supper by Taras Grescoe

Intriguing Romp Through The History Of Food That Fails The Sagan Standard. One of the core features of the scientific method, and indeed of rational thought more generally, is what is known in some circles as the “Sagan Standard” after he quoted it so much: Extreme Claims Require Extreme Evidence.

And this is where this otherwise truly intriguing tale utterly fails, coming in at just 10% documentation despite claims as extreme *even in the prologue* as claiming that 90% of US milk production comes from a particular breed of cows and ultimately is the product of just two bulls that ultimately created that particular breed.

Reading the text as less science and history – even though much science and history are discussed – and more as the “creative nonfiction” Grescoe writes of once describing his writing to a security officer as, the book flows quite a bit better and provides quite a bit of interesting and intriguing nuggets for people of various persuasions to track down on their own. For example, the global histories Grescoe explores, from the Aztec culture of eating certain bugs to the Phonecian/ Mediterranean culture of eating very fermented fish to the Canadian First Nations’ peoples’ culinary pursuits and several others as well all provide rich stories that *beg* for a more documented history. On the other hand, if one is more gastronomically inclined ala the author, perhaps one simply wants to try to track down these particular foods and techniques for him or herself to sample these items as the author did – including a particular breed of pig that “originates” from a small island not far from where this reviewer lives on Florida’s First Coast.

Ultimately, once one abandons any standard of documentation the way one would abandon any sense of “reality” upon entering a cinema to watch the latest MCU movie and appreciates the sheer spectacle of what is presented to you… this is a truly great book that foodies in particular will absolutely love. Given the literal hundreds of different shows about food and culinary pursuits, including several actively traveling around the world highlighting various dishes and techniques just as this book does… clearly there is a market for exactly this kind of tale, and this one does in fact appear to work perfectly within that market. Very much recommended.

This review of The Lost Supper by Taras Grescoe was originally written on September 3, 2023.