Why the Toast Always Lands Buttered Side Down (Yes, there's an explanation).

 

Richard Robinson. Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down: The Science of Murphy’s Law. (2005) Just what the title says – an investigation into failure, and our propensity to underestimate the probability that something will go wrong. We evaluate the odds as high or low in terms of our desired outcomes. So we buy lottery tickets. We evaluate risk in terms of our fears. So many people would rather drive than fly. Selective memory supplies the misleading data that confirms our fears or supports our desires. So we see coincidence as proof of some rule or of divine protection.

And so on.

Many of these mistakes in parsing the universe are summed up in proverbs. A watched pot never boils. Oh yes it does, but the few times you watch it, it seems to take forever. The extended version is the apparently universal experience that something works perfectly well until you show it off to someone. It’s especially embarrassing when that something is you playing the piano.

All in all, a nicely done, often amusing, and mostly painless reminder of the science that explains why the world often doesn’t work the way we want it to. By the way, toast does land buttered side down more often than not. That’s because it usually drops from about table height, and thus has just enough time to turn over so it’s buttered side down just before hits the floor.

Recommended. ***

What's the Economy For? (Patel, The Value of Nothing, 2009)

Raj Patel. The Value of Nothing. (2009) Modern economic theory ascribes a value of $0 to externals. For example, treating effluent before discharging it into the nearest watercourse costs money, but untreated effluent costs nothing. More precisely, leaving the purification of effluent to natural processes costs nothing. 

Since we believe the aim of our economy is to maximise profit, we believe that the aim of our producers is to minimise cost, which in turn means to maximise externals. It also means minimising the provision of social goods, which cost money. Thus the drive to minimise taxes, which pay not only for necessities but also for amenities. Finally, the drive to maximise profits spurs the quest to privatise public goods such as education and parks, and to oppose the transfer of necessary services such as healthcare from private to public organisations.

Patel’s book is an extended discussion on the value of those external processes that suppsedly cost nothing. Hence the title. He begins by estimating the full cost of those zero-cost externals. An example is the $3.95 hamburger whose true cost is about $200.

Like many others who have meditated on the costs of using nature to do our dirty work, he concludes that these externals provide services of value, if only the monetary cost avoided by using them. From that starting point, he widens his discussion. The book is an argument for an economy that recognises that ecosystems are fundamental, and instead of treating them as zero-cost, treats them as the essential and hence most valuable part of the economy. He understands that any change to our economic systems entails changes to our politics, and discusses those as well, adducing examples of successful local, communal control.

Well, that’s a simplification of this book, which touches on everything that’s implied by the question What is the economy for? 

Recommended. ****

Ig Nobel Prizes: Laugh, then Think.

Marc Abrahams. The Ig Nobel Prizes 2 (2004) The Ig Nobel Prizes were devised at Harvard. They’ve grown in size and prestige. Many Nobel winners have happily participated in awarding them, and most winners of the Ig Nobels have felt honoured by the recognition of their research, which First makes you laugh, then makes you think. Traditions such as folding the event program into paper airplanes to be launched at the stage, and a rigidly enforced time limit on the acceptance speech, maintain the Goonish ambience.

Anyone can nominate anyone for an Ig Nobel. Some of the prizes are not so subtle satiric critiques of pseudoscience and other nonsense, but most are awarded for valid scientific discoveries, and many are more significant than a quick read my suggest. Like anecdotes, they may prompt deeper questions than the one they answered.

This collection is well worth whatever you pay for it. I found my copy at a yard sale, hence wildly under-priced compared to its value. A few examples:

2001 Ig Nobel for Astrophysics, to Rex and Rexella Van Impe, evangelists, for their discovery that black holes meet all the criteria for Hell.

2004 Ig Nobel for Public Health, to Jillian Clarke, high school student, for her investigation of the 5-Second Rule for food that falls on the floor. (It fails, but by how much depends on the floor covering).

2024 winners here: https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

A valuable reference work. Recommended ****

Le Carre, A Murder of Quality (1968)

 

John Le Carre, A Murder of Quality. (1968) A murder at a B-list public school brings Smiley out of retirement when Miss Brimley, a war-time colleague, receives a letter that disturbs her. The puzzle is nicely knotted and solved, but what kept me reading was Le Carre’s skewering of pseuds. Carne School prides itself on upholding standards of behaviour long past their relevance. This is the crack through which the light escapes and the darkness of murder seeps in.

Le Care’s other strength is characterisation. We want to know more about these people. Le Carre presents the characters as they present themselves, and I was deceived by the murderer and his victim as much as every other character in the story was, including Smiley himself. The final unravelling of the mystery satisfies psychologically, which is rare in mysteries that turn on deceptions that we wish to see punished. Odd, that we want both justice and justification.

Recommended. ***½

A Movie version (1991) is available on YouTube.

Guns, Guns, Guns: A History of Gun Violence (Lapham's Quarterly, 2018)

  Lapham’s Quarterly, A History of Gun Violence. (2018) A depressing read, with enough data to show that humans have generally expended more effort and skill on making effective weapons than any other tool. War has always been as much about the combatants’ ability to manufacture effective weaponry as about their mastery of strategy and tactics.

The perfection of the hand gun by Colt, Smith & Wesson and others has made gun violence almost as normal as bread. It has also made killing so easy that murder has become the default ingredient of many crimes that would be successful without it. The US Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution has encouraged a sense of personal entitlement that has spread into all other aspects of communal life, so that conflict is for many people now the prime mode of relating to others.

As usual, an excellent overview of the subject, consisting mostly of firsthand accounts and analyses based on knowledge of the history. But a melancholy read. The cover is an interpretation of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Recommended. ****

Alligators in the Sewer (and other Folk Tales)

Thomas J. Craughwell. Alligators in the Sewer (1999) Folk tales, or real stories that happened to a friend of a friend, or FOAF. The compiler serves up relevant research into older versions of the tales. The plot generally remains the same, only details of technology and lifestyle change with the times. A first class potato-chip book, which I will dip into repeatedly as time and occasion offer. 

Recommended, if you can find a copy.

BTW, there are no alligators in the sewers of New York or any other city.

****