Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Here Comes the Sun...

A solar storm is causing beautiful sky shows the world over and similar activity could wreak havoc as the magnitude of solar activity ramps up in years to come. Though the sun gives life it seems that it is more than capable of taking life as well. In fact, as scientists explore and document our existence we find danger lurking everywhere. Particle accelerators could end the universe in an instant. The city of Berkeley has regulated nanomaterials for fear of the special properties that these building blocks, too small to be seen, have by virtue of their miniscule scale. And it is not just the unseen aspects of nature that we have to be concerned about, here in the PacNW we just acknowledged the 30 year anniversary of the eruption on Mt. St. Helens. Truly, danger is around every corner.

But surely it's not all that bad. We live in a safe world, right? Not according to Robert Brockway, the author of Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead. Brockway will bring your anxieties to a fever pitch with tales of experiments in green energy that could consume the earth in a massive fireball or robots like EATR, an autonomous device that fuels its prowling by "eating" biomass that it encounters in its travels. It has been said that the horrific and the ridiculous are joined at the hip and Everything is Going to Kill Everybody provides comic evidence to that effect. The casual style Brockway writes in makes this a quick and engaging read and he can be excused for not delving deeply into details from such examples as the company that wanted to harvest the energy from contained tornadoes or the Soviet soldier who saved us from a thermonuclear war by ignoring his superiors. After all, when it comes to death most of us appreciate a light touch.

Yes, the Sun is going to have some big flare ups over the next few years that could disable much of the technology that we rely on. Then there is inescapable fact that it will some day expand, cook and engulf the earth. But how do we make the most of our relationship with this great giver of life in the meantime? Claudio Vita-Finzi's The Sun: A User's Manual describes, in humbling detail, the best and the worst aspects of our nearest star. The same charged particles that, ejected from the Sun in excess, disrupt our communication satellites also shield us from harmful cosmic rays. The Sun is is our primary source of energy and will almost certainly outlast our species but it is carcinogenic. It is tempting to call these paradoxes but Vini-Finzi's expansive text makes it clear that the Sun's nature (like much of the phenomena that we both rely on and cower in fear of) is not dual. It is only the limited bandwidth of our experience of reality that makes it seem so.

And so what if the Sun could wipe out life as we know it, who needs iPhones and air traffic control anyway. Authors Rex Ewing and Doug Pratt take a fearless and practical approach to life under the Sun. Got Sun? Go Solar: Harness Nature's Free Energy to Heat and Power Your Grid-Tied Home gives entertaining and detailed advice for working with solar power both in the civil world (permits, paperwork and contracting insights) and in the potentially post-apocalyptic world (living off the grid). Chapters on wind and geothermal energy have been added since the 2005 edition making Got Sun an even more complete guide to moving forward into an uncertain future.

A final thought- someday the Sun will cook us but until then you might try using the Sun to cook! Solar cookery is a fun way to expand your picnic options. Lighten your load by leaving the camp stove at home on those backpacking excursions this Summer.

A Gut Check You Can Take to the Bank

Last week the New York Times reported on an unusual medical case involving a husband/wife transplant. The uncommon aspect of this transplant procedure was not the relationship between the donor and recipient. What was striking about this operation was the material being donated, bacteria from the husband gastrointestinal tract. The patient had lost 60 pounds in eight months due to constant and debilitating diarrhea. By delivering a serum made out of her husband's stool and saline solution, the attending doctor was able to alleviate this life threatening condition, literally, overnight. It turns out that the flora of the wife's gut had been colonized by microbes outside the typical spectrum of those that are useful and productive within the human body. Bacteria from her husband's body were able to flourish and provide the necessary digestive assistance allowing her to make a full and speedy recovery.

Though written with children in mind, Poop Happened: A History From the Bottom Up is a resource of great fecundity. The bacteriotherapy described above (also referred to as a fecal transplant) is a relatively novel application for excrement, especially when compared to the history detailed in Poop Happened. Sarah Albee's work underscores the historical methods used to deal with all matters excremental and does not shy away from details. From knights in armor to astronauts, everyone has to go sooner or later. But how? Poop Happened takes a peek at the particulars of evacuation but also addresses the larger issues of public health related to effective waste treatment and what can happen when that treatment is unavailable or just plain hasn't been invented yet!

Anne Maczulak's The Five Second Rule and Other Myths About Germs: What Everyone Should Know About Bacteria, Viruses, Mold and Mildew acknowledges that many of our most strongly held beliefs about microbes are unduly biased. The bathroom is not the dirtiest room in your house and only a small percentage of the micro-organisms in our surroundings could be considered pathogens. For the most part we live in harmony with, and require the assistance of, the wee beasties in our environment. Maczulak's writing style is direct and informative and she provides plenty of examples to illustrate her overarching themes. The Five Second Rule reads a bit like a text book which lends its directives a certain gravity. Helpful sidebars distill in the most important information into an easy to reference format.

Just what would our world be like without microbes? Is such a thing desirable, or even possible? Idan Ben-Barak would answer those last to questions with a resounding, "No." Without micro-organisms we would perish in days if not hours. So why are people so fixated on eliminating these unseen life forms? Ben-Barak's The Invisible Kingdom: From the Tips of Our Fingers to the Tops of Our Trash, Inside the Curious World of Microbes takes a magnifying glass to the many issues that inform our gut reactions to bacteria, fungi and viruses. His conclusion is that they are not only essential and inextricably interwoven into our environment, they may just be a source of salvation. Microbes could be the key to eliminating radioactive waste and may provide a delivery device for helpful medicines. In short, we may do better to increase rather than decrease our reliance on the invisible creatures with which we share our world.

Beyond Humanity

Beneath my primly-buttoned cardigan beats the heart of a gadget lover. I fantasize about being an early adopter. It was very difficult for me not to just run out and buy a new iPad on credit. Personal choice and public servant salaries prevent me from rushing out to buy every next new gadget that comes along. I love to track technology trends, however, and I am looking forward to a future that embraces technology even further and incorporates it more deeply into our daily lives. Reading the news on my iPhone the other day (I do have some gadgets), I stumbled across an article about the opening of Singularity University and the burgeoning movement springing up around its leading thinker, Ray Kurzweil and the theories put forth in his book The Singularity is Near. Singularity University is not an accredited institute of higher education, but rather a seminar of sorts that entices business and government leaders to pay for the opportunity to meet with high-level thinkers. No less than Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, showed up as a speaker for one class as a robot, with his body somewhere else. People who believe in The Singularity believe that with the exponential advancement of computing power, it is inevitable that one day humans will transcend biology. We will merge with machines and with their help become a hyper-intelligent species. Something we can't even comprehend.

One-time virtual reality guru and Internet innovator Jaron Lanier may take issue with the idea that the future of technology is to supercede human intelligence and humanity as we know it. He's entitled his collection of essays You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Lanier is not a techno-optimist like Kurzweil. He calls into question the widely-held view from the Web 2.0 world that the wisdom of crowds and crowd-sourced intelligence are the ultimate expressions of humanity. Anonymous comments and the primacy of "content" over valuing an individual's work are targets here, as is the operating system Linux, beloved by computing collectivists. He even criticizes the Singularity, suggesting that if people in the cult of technology believe it is soon, they may stop working to design for humans alive today and prepare for the events it might bring.

Whenever I think about the Singularity and how the future is predicated on processing power increasing exponentially and ever-improving hardware, I am a little skeptical. Of course, I don't work in Silicon Valley with a team of people who are planning, designing, and engineering the future. I work at a library, where people still long for the card catalog, and stuff breaks down, and lots of people don't even have access to the internet at home, let alone want to transcend humanity through microchips. Okay, I guess I'm a lot skeptical. This skeptical worldview is not just informed by my experience in the public library--I read, too. If you've ever read anything by Tracy Kidder, you'll know that he can make riveting reading out of the work of a team of engineers struggling to build a new computer in the late 1970's. What they are striving for is no less than The Soul of a New Machine. And what they encounter along the way are failures, disappointment, errors, and bugs, bugs, bugs. My skepticism about the Singularity is informed by this glimpse into how innovation proceeds: in fits and starts and with all the complexity of human emotion included.

Another scientist who thinks big wasn't afraid to proclaim A New Kind of Science stemming from his work with cellular automata. Stephen Wolfram's book thudded onto the desks of science-minded folks around the world in 2002, tipping the scale at 1192 pages. If you don't want to cart it home, he's also made it available online in its entirety. His central premise is that even extremely complex processes in nature are triggered by very simple "programs." By all accounts a very readable book, I have to admit that I skipped reading about Wolfram's mathematical breakthroughs and am enjoying the results of his outstanding brain by using his "Computational Knowledge Engine," Wolfram|Alpha. Not a search engine as we typically understand them, it asks you to, "Enter what you want to calculate or know about." Using this tool takes a little practice, and I highly recommend using the Examples by Topic page to get a flavor of what is possible. What excites me about Wolfram|Alpha is that it can create new knowledge and new information on the fly, not just scan the text of web pages and line up the links for me. For example, I used an example search "goats in France" and added "/human population" to find the number of goats per capita in France. This can take a little finessing--adjusting search terms and getting tips--but you'll have fun figuring it out.

Safety First!

Surgical teams in three quarters of Oregon hospitals have started using a simple tool to make operations safer, and it’s cut down on mistakes by 30%! This new tool is a short checklist developed by the World Health Organization (though we have our own version in Oregon), and it gives nurses, technicians, and doctors a methodical way to make sure they have all their ducks in a row. Do we all know each other by name? Check! Do we have the right patient and do we know what operation we’re performing? Check! Does this person have any allergies? Check! Have we removed all the sponges, surgical towels, needles, and instruments we used in this person’s body? Check!

Are you fascinated to learn more about how this works? I’ve got the book for you: The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande (a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School who also writes for The New Yorker). Gawande examines checklists in construction, investing, aviation and other fields, but he focuses on checklists in his own profession, medicine. Here’s what I found most fascinating: research has shown that surgeons are so rock star-like that it’s hard for other members of a surgical team to interrupt if they notice something’s amiss. It’s too intimidating! But, when people are polite and friendly, it makes that interruption feel collegial instead of confrontational – that is, if everyone has to say “Hi everyone, I’m Dr. So-and-so and I’m the anesthesiologist” (or whatever), they’re more likely to speak up when something’s wrong.

Safety checklists were first developed in aviation, and even those of us who have never once fantasized about being behind the controls of a jet airplane have seen this in action. Before takeoff in every commercial flight, flight attendants (whose main job is promoting safety, although they will also get you a ginger ale if you ask nicely) take their passengers through a miniature safety training. If that doesn’t do it, you can always review the information in the safety card in your seat pocket. Eric Ericson and Johan Pihl’s Design for Impact explains the history of airline safety cards, and reproduces hundreds of elegant, amusing, and instructive examples from the last fifty years of safer flying.

Everyone knows that scientists have to follow careful safety protocols – Professor Max Axiom, Super Scientist teaches kids the basics of science experiment safety measures in Lessons in Science Safety. This helpful comic from Donald B. Lemke, Thomas K. Adamson, Tod Smith and Bill Anderson gets readers ready to learn basic lab science safely with sections on preparing for the lab, working safely, handling accidents, and cleaning up. Entertaining and instructional!

Putting Things in Order

The American Psychiatric Association is working on a new revision to its massive catalog of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This time around, proposed revisions include eliminating a hard-and-fast distinction between Asperger's syndrome and autism, revising the criteria for some eating disorders, and offering a new tool for suicide risk assessment.

We humans are very interested in categorizing and classifying our world. Art and cultural historians, doctors, biologists, librarians, and many other thinkers have used classification as a tool (however flawed) to bring order where there appeared to be chaos. The news about revisions to the DSM has reminded me of several fascinating books about how we have managed (or mismanaged) this sort of tidying, and how to use classification systems to our advantage:

In Naming Nature, New York Times science journalist Carol Kaesuk Yoon outlines anthropological evidence that naming systems to describe plants and animals are universal among humans; as well as scientific research that indicates there is a special part of the brain used for naming natural objects, different from the part of the brain that we use to name inanimate or human-made objects! Yoon's narrative is readable and thought-provoking, particularly when she discusses the depth of meaning in traditional taxonomies, and argues that when we discard these traditional naming systems in favor of systems based on evolution, genomes, or chemical structures, we lose something meaningful. Folk taxonomies, she asserts, have a certain je ne sais quoi scientific taxonomies will never attain.

Take a look at the traditional names we use for plants and animals, though, and you might start to get confused. Is it a hawk, or a falcon? A moth, or a butterfly? What's the difference between corn and maize? Or mushrooms and toadstools? Answers to all these questions, and more, are to be found in This is Not a Weasel: A Close Look at Nature's Most Confusing Terms. In this helpful but entertaining reference, Philip B. Mortenson explains the history and etymology of common names of plants and animals – but even better, he looks carefully at the differences between confusingly similar organisms. Readers will leave Mortenson's tutelage with a clearer understanding of what makes a mammal a mammal, the differences between spines and thorns, and so on.  Useful knowledge indeed.

Of course, science is not the only place we employ classification systems. Per Mollerup illustrates this vividly with Marks of Excellence: The History and Taxonomy of Trademarks. The book is large, colorful, and richly illustrated, but it is more than a visual reference. Mollerup first presents an intelligent history of trademarks, their use, their ideal function, and their cultural role. Then, he lays out a detailed taxonomical structure for trademarks, with branches for different types. For example, at the roughest level, there are graphic marks, and non-graphic marks.  Among graphic marks, a further division can be made between letter marks, and picture marks.  Each element of this taxonomy is described in the text, and illustrated with specific examples of real-life trademarks. Marks of Excellence is fascinating to leaf through, but Mollerup's explanations and history are so interesting that they would be worthy of attention even if the illustrations were not so many, so varied, and so beautiful.

Climate and Civilizations

One of the most-reported outcomes of last week's G8 talks in L'Aquila, Italy was the agreement reached by the rich and poor nations alike to attempt to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). There has always been a lot of disagreement among politicians and laypeople about whether our climate is actually changing, and if it is, whether the changes are part of a natural fluctuation or are due to human activity.* On the other hand, the scientific community is in overwhelming agreement that climate change is occurring, that it's dangerous, and that it's because of industry and other human endeavors. News from the G8 has got me thinking, just what would it mean for the world's climate to warm by 2 degrees Celsius, or more?

I'm no scientist, so to understand this set of questions better, I turned to Mark Lynas's Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Lynas wanted to know what climate change could actually do to the Earth, so he read thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers reporting experiments that model future climate change and its effects. Six Degrees is essentially a literature review, reporting the results of all these studies in an intelligent narrative meant for non-scientists. There are six chapters, explaining what scientists think will happen with each successive degree (Celsius) of global warming, including its effects on coral reef ecosystems, changing ocean currents and weather patterns, monsoon failures, melting mountain glaciers, and many other horrors. This layperson's report on the science is excellent and valuable, but Lynas also examines how the effects of global warming might affect people, politics, and the societies of the world. Overall, it's a very sobering book, but valuable for anyone who wants a good, solid introduction to how the best scientific minds would answer the question, "What if?"

We are not the first culture to face the question of our own possible demise. Many societies have collapsed in the past, for a variety of reasons, and their stories might give us some ideas for what to avoid, and how we might best cope, if indeed, major changes are in our future. Archaeologist Brian Fagan has written many books about how climate has affected human history, and one of these, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, describes the worldwide changes during the "Medieval Warm Period," in the years 800 to 1300. Europe flourished during this period – Norse sailors established settlements as far away as Greenland and Newfoundland, wine was successfully produced in England. But other regions of the world suffered drought, which Fagan argues contributed, among other things, to the collapse of the classical Mayan civilization in North America. Fagan is a great writer, and he manages to make the most arcane scientific points both clear and interesting.

There are lots of other books about the collapse of past civilizations – two noted examples are Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World.  But Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World tackles a related but slightly different subject – the worldwide wave of famines that occurred in the late 19th century, in India, China and Brazil. Again, this is sometimes a challenging book to read, well, because it's difficult to read about starvation without empathizing with the people affected by it. But Davis's astute breakdown of how the worldwide economic system (and, more specifically, the economic interests of Britain) put pressure on social and practical dynamics that had been in place in these three countries to such a degree that when El Niño weather patterns struck, people were not able to adjust, and famines resulted. He further argues that famine relief was hampered by the same systems that helped create it – the world economic market was not flexible in this regard, and the British empire did not find it in its interests to help feed the hungry in Brazil, India, or China.

* I should note, for those who are interested, that the library has many books which argue that global warming is a myth, is a natural cycle not caused by a rise in human-produced carbon emissions, is caused by something outside the earth's atmosphere, or is otherwise not threatening the well being of the earth. Some examples are: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by S. Fred Singer, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels, and Global Warming: The Truth Behind the Myth, by Michael L. Parsons.

Students and anyone interested in reading both sides of the political debate at the same time might enjoy the essay collections Global Warming: Opposing Viewpoints, edited by Cynthia A. Bily, and Global Warming, edited by Debra A. Miller. For a wider variety of essays and opinion pieces about global warming (or indeed, about any controversial issue), you might want to take a look at the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (be sure to have your library card number and PIN handy; you'll need them to log in, since this is a library database!).