Alan Weisman. The World Without Us (2007)

     Alan Weisman. The World Without Us (2007) Suppose every human being would disappear from the face of the Earth? Maybe in a moment, maybe over a few hours or days, but complete disappearance. What would happen to the Earth and the traces of human occupation?
     That’s the thought experiment Weisman runs in this book. He begins by considering how the natural world would take over from us, by rotting and crumbling our homes, our subways, our roads,  and so on. He deals with the effects of our industrial legacy, and considers how the artificial chemicals we’ve dumped into the biosphere might influence future evolution. Finally, he talks about what may remain of our works of the mind the imagination.
     The answers are sobering. Natural processes begin to destroy our artefacts as soon as we stop maintaining them. Subways will flood. Houses will rot away. Bridges will sag and fall. The foundation of skyscrapers will rust, the buildings will lean and then fall. Trees, vines, grasses will grow in and on our works and will crack and split and crumble them. Our corpses will decay, although some of their containers will survive a few hundred years or so. Highly stable molecules will be recycled through the biosphere until some microbes evolve to eat them. Plastics will degrade into flakes, then into nanometre particles, by which time something may have learned how to extract the energy locked up in those molecules. Ceramic tile and pottery will survive thousands of years until geologic processes bury and metamorphose them.
     And Pioneer I and II, and Voyager 1 and 2, and assorted other probes will drift through space and may at some time fetch up in a star system. But the odds that any sentient, intelligent life form will find and decode their significance is vanishingly small.
     Well then, what, if any, traces of our existence will survive us, and for how long? The answer is, lots, but not what you expected. Plastics, ceramics, earthworks and radioactive trash will survive the longest on Earth. The space probes and radio waves will survive longest of all, drifting through space until space dust abrades the probes and radio waves attenuate so much that they can no longer be distinguished from background radiation.
     The subtext of this book is anther question: Can we survive our own successes? Technology is gift that we’ve used to procreate excessively and mine the riches of the planet. Doing that, we’ve changed it, and it will never revert to its pre-human state. In this, we are like all other successful top-level predators. But like any other creature, we will eventually become extinct, either by making our habitat lethal to ourselves, or by evolving into something else. Kurt Vonnegut imagined the latter scenario in Galapagos. Weisman’s book implies that if we don’t do something to at least partly reverse our reconstruction of Earth, a few of us may survive when the inevitable collapse occurs, and those few will become one among many species competing to survive on a planet that begins to reclaim its own. Our continued success is not guaranteed.
     Even if we manage to stumble and muddle our way through the catastrophe that’s already moving through the biosphere, eventually the Sun will destroy us. Weisman doesn’t mention the hope that others have expressed, that homo sapiens terrestris may become homo sapiens stellaris, but even if that remote possibility becomes reality, the Earth and humans as we know them will have ceased to exist.
     An oddly exhilarating book, despite the depressing and gloomy forecasts and implications. Read it. ****

Carola Dunn. To Davy Jones Below (2001)

Carola Dunn. To Davy Jones Below (2001) Daisy and Alec are married, after a couple of weeks in Sussex, they are on their way to the USA on the Talavera. The cast includes Gotobed, a British millionaire, and his wife Wanda, an ex-chorus girl of uncertain age; Arbuckle, an American millionaire; Philip, Daisy’s cousin, and Gloria, Arbuckle’s daughter; Miss Oliphant, a devotee of herbal remedies; Pertwee and Welford, a couple of card sharks; and assorted other characters useful as witnesses and talking scenery. Nicely done fluff, with just enough sleuthing to lull the inattentive reader into pleasant reveries.
      Alec is asked to investigate what at first looks like an accident, but subsequent events are clearly either murder or attempted murder. He’s seasick, which gives Daisy the excuse she needs to ‘vestigate. Between them, and a couple of facts radioed to the ship but not revealed to the reader, a solution of sorts is devised. It fits the facts, but does not make a case for prosecution. Still, it’s best that Alec can do, so all’s well that ends well. **½

Amanda Cross. A Trap for Fools (1989)

Amanda Cross. A Trap for Fools (1989) Canfield Adams, a much-hated professor of Islamic Studies at “the University”, is found dead on the pavement below his office window. He was pushed, it seems, and Kate Fansler is given the job of finding the killer. After much pleasant and occasionally probing conversation, she discovers that shadowy donors compromised one of her colleagues, and that another colleague’s need for cash led to blackmail. Adams found out, so he had to die. Tangles of academic politics obscure the path and impede progress, but Kate “rearranges the narrative” and arrives at the truth, not by logic and careful analysis, but with intuition and imaginative insights. This is the only weakness of this series, but the depiction of academic life, of friendships, of the life of the mind, of love, and characters we care about more than make up for it.

     Every Amanda Cross novel is spiced up with parody and satire of the mostly long-since forgotten intellectual and political buzz of the time. I think Carolyn Heilbrun, the person behind the mask of Amanda Cross, wanted to say things that needed to be said about the socio-politics of her time. She succeeds. That’s another reason I like to read these books. If you want tightly plotted procedurals, they are not for you. But if you want immersion in a pleasant world in which intellect and  feelings are given equal value, along with a bit of a puzzle to keep the story moving, then you will like them. ***

Al Shabab, another bunch of cowardly thugs

This morning, 2 April, 2015, we heard that Al Shabab claimed credit for attacking a university dormitory in Kenya and murdering a number of Christian students, who were accused of polluting the Muslim students by their presence. This evening, we heard that the count is at 147 dead and counting.

Just another example of the cowardly thugs who represent themselves as militants, as fighters for freedom. They didn't even have the guts to show their faces, they all wore masks.

And of course their leaders who ordered this murderous attack are safely out of harm's way, and will ensure it stays that way.

Honourable fighters engaged in a struggle for freedom from oppression?

Cowards, the lot of them.

Jay Ingram. The Velocity of Honey (2003)

     Jay Ingram. The Velocity of Honey (2003) Another collection of essays about the Science of Everyday Life. Ever wonder why honey piles up on your toast as it flows off the spoon? Or why some people are able wake up pretty close to the time they want? Or why you can skip stones on water? The answers are out there, but most of them are incomplete, and lead on to other puzzles. Everyday physics and chemistry is much more complicated than the simplified models of reality that are studied in the lab. Ingram is one of the best popular science writers we have. This book was nominated for the 2003 Science in Society book award.
     The chapter on why bread always lands buttered side down alone is worth the price: the table is just high enough that the toast rotates over 90 degrees before it touches down. It doesn’t always land spread side down of course, occasionally it’s swept off the table with a spin that stabilises it. Spin is one of the main factors in skipping stones, too. Recommended ****

Jihadists: the latest example of terrorist cowards

One of the things that stands out in the history of terrorists is their preference for soft targets. They choose schools, shopping centres, hotels, places of worship, sports arenas, buses and trains. They rarely attack military installations or bases, preferring less well protected police stations. Their attacks on military targets by preference take the form of stealth weapons such as mines buried in roads. And many such organisations have used suicide bombers.

By “they” I mean the leadership of these organisations. They take great care to protect themselves, to avoid taking part in the operations, and to be well out of the way of any counterattacks. They choose targets with little or no capability of returning fire, and they usually send their most expendable members carry out the operations. The most expendable ones are the suicide bombers, who are usually young people who have no other military value, and are naive enough not to notice that the greater good for which they give their lives are the people who send them away to blow themselves up.

In short, terrorists as a group are a mix of idealism, power lust, thuggishness, and rage. The ideology, secular or religious, is both a justification for murder and a lure for alienated and idealistic youngsters who see the mess the world is in and yearn for some meaningful role in making it better. These youngsters become the expendable human weapons-platforms used by the leaders to satisfy their dark urges.

But the one thing terrorist leaders have in common is their cowardice.

Mick O’Hare. Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? (2006)

     Mick O’Hare. Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? (2006) New Scientist’s “Last Word” collects questions and answer about whatever triggers the questioner’s curiosity. This book collects 142 questions from the early 2000s, organised by topic. The section on food and drink is the largest. Does this mean that food os the prime concern, or merely that eating takes so little brain power that there’s plenty left over for idle curiosity about the food?
     It’s a potato-chip book, compulsively readable, highly entertaining, with serious and tongue-in-cheek answers. All kinds of oddities, some of which a moderately well-read geek knows about, and some of which are news to just about everybody. The collection also illustrates the inevitable downside of increasing knowledge: the more we know collectively, the less we know individually. And as the area of knowledge expands, the boundary between the known and the unknown lengthens. This means that the more we know, the more there is to be found out. And that’s a Good Thing.
     Highly recommended. ***