Of Chemie, Cosmos, and Climate

Posted on August 20, 2021 by smellincoffee

What’s Eating the Cosmos tackles some of the big questions in modern cosmology, beginning with the basics — how do we know what’s out there? Where is it, what is it made of? — and continuing onward to the more changing questions, those which stretch the limits of our imagination. Although Davies is dealing with heady topics, including the plausibility of time travel, the evaluation of the universe’s fate, and even why we have matter at all. Although I can’t pretend to fully understand all of the subjects discussed — relativity and quantum mechanics are demanding topics, to say the least — Davies’ writing is lucid, using clear illustrations, and provides an outline education that allows the reader to come away with a sense of having a better idea of the shape and fate of the universe.

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid  caught my eye immediately, not only for its title but for its subject: climate change biology.  Although  humans have the ability to escape within our heads and pretend things which are happening aren’t, really,   plants and other animals live much closer to Earth and cannot remove themselves from facts. When faced with the threat of climate change, they must either move, adapt, or die.   I have previously read of how some plants and animals have adapted to intense environmental challenges created by human activity (Unnatural Selection),  was eager to dive into this one.  Given the complexities of global ecosystems,  it’s not surprising to learn that altered circumstances are throwing things into disarray: one potentially disastrous trend is inducing mismatches between plant blooms and the re-emergence of their pollinators.  The struggle for survival is not a recent development, though, and  both flora and fauna alike are altering themselves to survive: starfish are withering in the warming waters of the Eastern seaboard, but now able to expand into northern waters once too frigid for their tolerance.  At least a quarter of the Earth’s animal population is actively on the move, changing its ranges, and possibly up to 80% of populations are in flux. Plants, too, are getting in on the action – trees moving their ranges uphill, or dandelions altering their leave shapes.  Although  the weirding effect is potentially catastrophic, it’s also an exciting if unnerving time to be a biologist, given the extraordinary display of plasticity we now have the opportunity to witness. 

Chemistry for Breakfast brought another interesting title to the table, authored  by the most compelling chemistry teacher in media since Walter White.  Mai Thi-Nyugen Kim’s night gig is YouTube star, however, not meth kingpin, and she has a very popular channel called “maiLab”  that offers science-ed videos in German. Nguyen-Kim recounts a day in the life of a chemist, using the day’s events to deliver an introduction to the basics of die Chemie.  The personal, narrative style succeeds brilliantly and  offers side-lessons into the grueling workday of a doctoral candidate.  As Nguyen-Kim guides readers through the basics of chemistry – the classic atomic model, the interactions of valence electrons,  the differing kinds of bonds, etc – she also offers practical at-home experiments to illustrate the lessons being offered.  I’ve never encountered a chemistry book this readable before, and was disappointed to find that her YouTube channel (which I’d intended to dive into) only had German content.  Nguyen-Kim’s passion for the subject and clarity in delivering its principles makes her first book a valuable one for readers who want to retain some basic appreciation of both the spirit of science and the study of what matter is and how it changes.  

I’m including a video from maiLab below to give you an idea of her personality. Those who don’t speak German can turn on close captioning, and via settings turn on auto-translate. Google does an impressive job of on-the-fly English captions!

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I have found the Most Interesting Thing On YouTube

Posted on August 16, 2021 by smellincoffee

Imagine listening to a book which has strengthened minds for centuries — Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations — not as a dry narrative, but as a performance, a motivational mixtape with impassioned delivery, with a beat. I encountered “Self Control”, taken from Aurelius’ tribute to his adopted father and mentor Antonius Pious, a few weeks back and have found it ideal for walks and workouts. It’s part of the above album, which includes Books I and II of the Meditations. I hope this project continues, because it’s astonishingly creative.

His attitude to the gods -no superstitiousness
His attitude to men — no demagoguery
No currying favor, no pandering
Always sober, always steady
Never vulgar or a prey to fads
Hard work and persistence
Self control, always cheerful
Strength, perseverance, self control

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Attack Surface

Posted on August 14, 2021 by smellincoffee

Attack Surface
© 2020 Cory Doctorow
385 pages

When the Bay Bridge blew up, Masha wanted to catch the guys that did it. That desire for justice and revenge brought her to employment with the Department of Homeland Security, and still later a private security contractor busily creating tools and methods to make every bit of digital communication happening between targets open to collection, analysis, and manipulation. But before she knew it, Masha and her coworkers were enabling some of the worst governments in history to harass and destroy those who would protest for their rights. As her conscience begins making itself known, Masha struggles to find a way to absolve her guilt — by passing on tips for opsec to the resistance, for instance. But no man or woman can serve two masters, and ultimately Masha has to choose. Attack Surface is very nearly a great novel of redemption; as it stands, it is merely a cool one, a good one.

When I first read Little Brother, the novel that created the storyline that Attack Surface is set in, I thought: this is cool as hell. Doctorow combined the excitement of a “man vs the police state” novel with modern cybersecurity tools from his main character that apply equally in our world; the novels are educational thrillers, calling the reader to start covering their digital tales from corporate and government surveillance. Attack Surface is thoroughly in that line, but this time we’re on the other side — viewing citizens from the perspective of the hunter-coder, who spends their time figuring out what thread of our lives they can invent a tool to grab hold of, what they can expose and use to achieve their goals of total control. We see this world through Masha, a lamentably insecure young woman who admires the Fierce Strong Women she works for, even if one of them does remind her of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS; she admires their strength, even though it comes from the expense of others, and no doubt enjoys the high she gets from seeing other’s lives unfold before her, opened at her bidding through tools of her own creations. Ultimately, that high is no match for the self doubt, the conviction that she’s helping evil — and one wonders where Masha would be without her friend Tanisha, a professional activist who constantly calls Masha on her compromises.

As stirring as Masha’s interior struggle is, her insecurity makes her an incredibly difficult person to enjoy spending time with — unfortunate, because she’s the only viewpoint character. She is constantly miserable, unless she’s drunk or power-tripping, and she lives her life in constant judgement of others, including her friends. It may be purposeful characterization, or just Doctorow’s own harpyness; it’s been too long since I read any of his other fiction to say with confidence. Masha’s ‘good’ friends aren’t any more enjoyable to hang around with: they’re all woke ideologues, and political posturing dominates their time when hipster fashion and food trends cease to amuse them; none of them seem to enjoy anything, beyond complaining and marching in the streets against the cops. Now, as obnoxious libertarian, I’m no stranger to idealistic conviction or raging against the state : I do it devotedly, but it doesn’t consume my life the way it does for these characters. Frankly, the entire book seems to be full of anhedonics.

Often cool, often obnoxious: Attack Surface is a strange mix of the sweet and sour. However, it does have the reccommendation of Edward Snowden, so — if in doubt, give it a whirl.

Related:
Little Brother, Homeland; Doctorow. The previous books in this ‘series’, though this is a standalone.
No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald
Permanent Record, Edward Snowden.

He had been living a double life: Snowden the tech helped build the security state, and Ed the user valued his privacy to the point of using Tor for regular browsing. Now, increasingly, Ed couldn’t countenance the realities of the work he’d been doing. At first he tried to rebel by simply spreading the word about the need for protecting privacy, in general, or by giving people the tools and knowledge to bypass surveillance in countries hostile to free expression, like Iranians subjected to the role of the ayatollahs, he eventually decided that the most effective way of fighting back was to reveal what was being built.

From my review of Permanent Record, Edward Snowden
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Back to Earth

Posted on August 13, 2021 by smellincoffee

Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet and our Mission to Protect It
© 2021 Nicola Stott
304 pages

A staple of astronaut memoirs is the attempt to communicate the near-religious experience of seeing the Earth from space for the first time, a moment which no picture (authors like Massimino aver) can really capture.  Earth appears both beyond momentous and achingly vulnerable,  its billions of human lives protected only by the thinnest whisp of an atmosphere. Nicola Scott makes the implications of that fragile image her theme, musing on lessons that her work in NASA, and particularly her time abroad the shuttles and the station, have taught her.  

Across three shuttle missions and two ISS expeditions, Stott has lived well over a hundred days in space. Life aboard the Station, where only a thin skin of metal protected Stott and her crewmates from death, where their resources were scarce and closely monitored, and everyone out of necessity shouldered responsibility for their common fate, made her doubly aware of the importance of stewardship once back to Earth. Stott’s memoir of her time in space is unusual in that it lacks the usual forward-driving narrative, the strictly biographical arc. Instead, she focuses on her mission of raising awareness about the dangers of climate change, and of encouraging those who are resigned to despair to take up the sword again and get in the fight. “Focus”, however, is something of a misstatement; the book is organized into seven principles that she’s developed in the course of her life. These are not strictly rooted in climate change or disaster response, and on the whole are fairly general: “Stay grounded”, “Make haste slowly”, “Live as crew, not passengers”. Each receives a series of reflections drawn from Stott’s life, so despite the lack of an overt biographical focus, the reader who is interested in Stott’s background will pick up details as they progress — including the fact that her father was an amateur pilot who built his own airplanes.

Stott doesn’t launch into a thorough argument about Co2’s effects or human culpability, but instead touches on widespread talking points ranging from the greenhouse effect to water scarcity, while at the same time offering a defense of ISS activity against claims from critics that the money could be spent better elsewhere. The lessons themselves are nice enough, but not penetrating or compelling. While I admire her passion and professional accomplishments, the book left me wanting. I still enjoyed reading it, for her brief stories about the people she’d worked with, her hushed wonder at seeing the Earth from space, and so on, but it never seized my imagination or made me think more deeply or differently about its content.

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There Is No Cloud

Posted on August 12, 2021 by smellincoffee

There Is No Cloud
© 2021 Kat Wheeler
189 pages

Okay, Google,  I’d like to set up a Routine. When I am murdered alone in my office, please call the police, unlock the door, and turn off the coffee pot.   Matt Rodriguez is the inventor of the HomeTechHub,  a network-integrated device with an inbuilt AI which can control any smart device in its same network – from lights to window shades.   It’s made Matt and his partners  ludicrously rich, but all the automation in the world didn’t stop someone from swiping their way into the building, sneaking into his office, and whacking him with an old fashioned crowbar.  Detective Will Justus is assigned to investigate the murder, while simultaneously Cam, a  bourbon-sipping saleswoman turned with a question bugging her is poking into a defective Hub to find out why it’s not playing nice with the network. What she discovers will risk forcing her to share a fate with the hub’s creator. There is No Cloud does double duty as a murder mystery and a tech-thriller,  centered on the amount of information digital assistants and smart devices can corral about their users.  

Despite the apparent creepiness of a mic’d-up device sitting in one’s home, passively listening our every word and sending it off to Amazon or Google, over half of Americans regularly use a voice assistant —  through their phones, if nothing else, using them for everyday tasks like shopping, calendars, and media interaction. There is No Cloud  focuses on how vulnerable we can be if these devices are compromised – or deliberately used against us, to chilling effect. Although I’m a little skeptical of the book’s  over-powered Home Tech Hubs (which integrate with any  third-party smarttech, and once on the network have Total Access to anything that on the same network,  permissions or encryption be damned). There Is No Cloud succeeds in creating a story based on the potential for abuse inherent in these devices.  and each main character’s private investigation ultimately brings them together, looking for the truth.  Although it’s fairly obvious from the start that the cases are connected, the question is how – was Matt murdered for creating spyware, was  he being spied on and just coincidentally murdered, or was it something else?   The reader is kept fairly well teased  as to whether the solution will be a personal grudge or a matter of business, and a strong pair of markedly different main characters maintains personal interest in the story.

There is No Cloud is a very promising start for a new author!

Related:
The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things

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More evil than I thought

Posted on August 12, 2021 by smellincoffee

I’ve personally never been able to retain bookmarks, even the fancy ones friends have sent me from faraway places like South Korea.

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Of Mars, Antarctica, and the human condition

Posted on August 11, 2021 by smellincoffee

Mars is a cold tease, an object of immediate interest to anyone who believes humanity needs to continue to venture outward.  It’s neither so hostile or so far from us to preclude manned missions entirely,  and it has its own resources that could, with a bit of planning and savvy, be used to support an expedition. Still, Mars: A Natural History is as close as you or I will ever get to Mars:   not only does Simon Borden take us through its past, told through the features of its landscape, but he uses bursts of a second-person narrative to put us on the surface of Mars itself, both in the past and present, to as though we were literally exploring the red tunes.  Borden’s  talent for description, already developed through his primary vocation as a science fiction author, is well on display here, both in the analysis of Mars’ geological features, and in the narrative imaginings that take us there as future and past explorers.  

Why can’t we all just…get along?  But we do. Our bodies are forged in cooperation, writes Nichola Raihani:   we are the creation of cells that banded together,  strengthened by outside prokaryotes who we put to work as mitochondria.  Our cells create organs, tissues, and structures, culminating in an individual, who then cooperates with still others to form a massive global society of people sitting and staring at their phones.  Humans are uniquely cooperative, frequently coming together en masse to help out perfect strangers — behavior unobserved in any other species, where altruistic behavior is limited to one’s immediate family circle. Nevertheless, we’re still fairly fluid about expanding or reining in the circle of those we care about; a wide-scale disaster can elicit both solidarity (volunteer search efforts, blood banks, etc) and selfishness (supply hoarding). I thought her analysis of the role of cooperation in human evolution and society to be a mixed bag; her observation that cooperation and competition are usually conjoined (we cooperate most often to compete against others or a mutual obstacle) was noteworthy, for instance, but understanding menopause as a cooperative action (grandmothers shutting down their own systems to prioritize her children’s child rearing efforts within the same household) was needlessly subtle compared to Jared Diamond’s more straightforward speculation that menopause is a way for the female body to protect itself against increasingly more dangerous pregnancies, and to focus resources on existing children or grandchildren. Raihani’s own speculation depended on a pervasive mother/daughter-in-law dynamic and potential power struggle. On the whole, The Social Instinct is full of interest, and I especially appreciated its expansive cell-to-societies survey, but I found some of its claims more dubious than others.

The Call of Antarctica introduces younger readers to the lure of Earth’s most remote continent,  which despite its withering severity has attracted explorers for over two centuries. The title alternates between history and an introduction to Antarctica’s unique climate, including the threats posed to it by human behavior, and prominently features the career of George W.  Gibbs Jr, a black man who joined several Antarctica expeditions and whose journal is quoted throughout the text, offering a first-hand look into early exploration.  Gibbs’ story is unusual in that despite the era (the 1940s), he was regarded among the expedition members as one of their own, and went on to serve in the US Navy during World War 2, earning a series of medals for his steadfast service there. The photographs included in the book are well-chosen to convey the continent’s savage beauty, and though this is written for younger readers, I still found a few surprises in store – like the existence of dry valleys,  areas locked off from the ice by mountains and which see less precipitation than any place on Earth.   Although the book’s mix of biography and natural exploration is sometimes distracting, I appreciated learning Gibbs’ story.  (On an interesting note: the author is a direct descendant of Gibbs, allowing for a generous amount of Gibbs’ personal photos to be used.)

Note: All three of the above were NetGalley advance reading copies, provided to me by the publisher with no expectations other than a review.

Still more science to come — including climate change-induced evolution, the chemistry of everyday life, and the stars in their courses. (And believe it or not, I still have astronaut books…)

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Broadcast

Posted on August 9, 2021 by smellincoffee

Broadcast
© 2017 Liam Brown
288 pages

Most people, if approached by a corporation and asked for permission to plant a microchip in their brainstem, would say “Nope” and back away from the crazy man. But David Callow isn’t most people: he’s a famous for being famous YouTuber whose main asset is a pretty face, and his time in the spotlight is beginning to fade. Becoming the star of a revolutionary new show and broadcasting Himself, Unfiltered! seems just the ticket for reigniting his career and avoiding the pitfalls of has-beendom. Lost on David in his anxiety to stay hip are the terms and conditions he eagerly signs on to, and by the time he realizes there’s more to the experiment than enhancing his stardom, he’s absolutely lost.Broadcast is a chilling look into the possible future of neurotechnology, and a not-too-subtle critique of social media’s effects on our mind.

David is easily the shallowest, most self-absorbed character I’ve ever endured in fiction — and I’m fairly certain that this is done on purpose. A youtuber and ‘influencer’, he spends most of his time snapping shots of himself and offering insipid thoughts about the meaning of life. His decision to take part in the experiment is not the result of a careful examination, or a purposeful interest in advancing neurotechnology; it is instead the reaction of a weak, vain main who fills his nights with booze and MDMA and shudders at the thought of losing his status as a celebrity. Were it not for for the sheer interest in the story itself — the possibilities of the Mindcast technology, and the knowing reader’s speculation that something horrible is going to happen, we just don’t know what it is yet — he would not be worth reading about. As the story progresses, however, as David begins to realize the awfulness of having his every thought exposed to the world, when people avoid him for fear of what he’ll think about him, when he becomes a total victim of his own solipsism — one can’t help but feel sorry for him. The vanity falls away, replaced by fear, isolation, panic. The technology can do far more than was told to him, and he is powerless to remove it — he is nothing but the unwitting prisoner of his own mind and the corporation that effectively controls it.

Broadcast is short, but effective in drawing the reader into this story that begins with an obnoxious dolt, and ends in existential dread, rendered especially salient by the reader being just as anxious as the subject.

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The Disappeared

Posted on August 6, 2021 by smellincoffee

The Disappeared
© 2019 Amy Lord
368 pages

“I’ve been quiet for years. And where did it get me? Well?’

Clara Winter was only a child when her father disappeared. A poet and English teacher, he made the mistake of criticizing Britain’s new order, the martial rule imposed on it after a terrorist attack at Whitehall. Now, a teacher in her own right, Clara prepares to follow in her father’s footsteps, and will face down the very man who took him from her life in the bargain.

I checked out The Disappeared after spotting it on goodreads because it brought to mind the increasingly frequent issue of books being pulled from marketplaces for being Wrongthink, like When Harry Became Sally. (I immediately imported a copy from a private seller in defiance of Amazon’s attempt to smother dissent.) The Disappeared has little to say on that particular aspect of censorship, however, as its villains are fairly generic Grumpy Military Men who seal Britain off from Europe and institute such rampant bookburnings that Clara’s students have no idea what 1984 is: the book has been cast into the memory hole, as it were. Clare and her boyfriend Simon are both private dissidents, who sneak into a university library with such voluminous holdings that not everything juicy has been banned yet: they attempt to fight the Man in their own way, by offering a secret history course. After Simon is taken by Grumpy Goons in a Grumpy Man Van, the plot accelerates.

The meat of The Disappeared, frankly, is not the spectre of a dictatorship in Britain (thanks to covid, we all get to live in draconian dystopias, with the added joy of smothering ourselves when we’re not avoiding each other), or the message about censorship, but the absolutely twisted family dynamics that poor Clara grew up in. Her stepfather is not just any member of the Authorisation Council: he’s the very man who arrested her father and personally oversaw his long, drawn out interrogation while he was seducing his victim’s effective widow. It gets worse.

I appreciate the core point of The Disappeared, the importance of stories and ideas and the inherent immortality in preventing people from accessing them. Fighting censorship — eviscerating censorship, tying it up and throwing it screaming off a cliff into a pit of spikes and alligators and noseeums — has never been more important than in the 21st century. The story here, though, is generic aside from family dynamics more twisted than anything seen since…oh, Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra VII. The regime is so nondescript that it’s chief grumpy man is simply the “First General”, and to infuse it with personality I imagined something like the world of V for Vendetta or the televised version of The Man in the High Castle.

The Disappeared is entertaining and relevant, but lacks a certain…oomph.

Related:
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi. A teacher holding a covert literary course amid a regime that bans Wrongthink.

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Obey little, bake much: The Choice

Posted on August 5, 2021 by smellincoffee

The Choice
© 2019 Claire Ward
400 pages

There’s always a choice.

“Let them eat cake,” Marie Antoinette supposedly said of the people too poor to buy bread, and the words inspired revolution. The Choice throws that on its head, and makes it rallying cry — LET US EAT CAKE! Set in a dystopian Britain where an insufferably invasive and cloyingly matronizing government headed by Mother Mason has turned everyday life into a misery. The Choice examines how the choices that individuals make enable tyranny — both at the polls and in their lives, as rebellion can begin from the smallest of personal stands. It is a strange mix of Betty Crocker meets 1984, where technocratic control, a saccharine tyrant in pearls, and intense social pressure create an environment depressingly familiar. A most unusual dytstopian novel (it has an award from Good Housekeeping), The Choice strikes a chord.

Set in Britain, the book picks up seven years into the reign of Mother Mason, who was elected on a Health and Decency platform. The circumstances of her rise to power are a little murky, but she’s a literal Health Nazi: sugar and alcohol are verboten, and people who skip leg day at the gym are abducted at the grocery store and taken away. At that grocery store, certain articles like butter are strictly rationed, and to gain access requires submitting to a weigh-in, where agents of the state consider weight and the person’s fitbit activity before permitting them their pat or two. The state is incredibly, obnoxiously intrusive, using deliverymen to spy on people’s homes looking for smuggled-in sugar, constantly pushing citizens to narc on errant behavior, and — above all — forever hectoring, nagging, advising. People are infantalized and treated like toddlers, especially as the book wears on and the main character becomes a rebellious baker.

The Choice has an unusual protagonist in Olivia Prichard, who in another life was an accomplished baker, cake artisan, and small business owner but who now malingers as a frustrated housewife, with no outlet for her creative energy. I appreciate the perspective, though, because Olivia’s plight demonstrates how tyranny and government stupidity affects the common man and woman down to the household level; it also raises the stakes, since unlike Winston Smith Olivia has children who the state can threaten to seize from her if she doesn’t comply. Raising money to smash the state — “Cut the Apron Strings” — through a bake sale is an amusing mix, seditious and wholesome at the same time. Although some aspects of the worldbuilding are unrealistic (the economy of Britain is entirely too healthy given the measures in place ), I like Ward’s twist.

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