Neil deGrasse Tyson is cool. No question. He doesn't pack much into this short book, but whatever he does talk about is always cool. Even too cool somNeil deGrasse Tyson is cool. No question. He doesn't pack much into this short book, but whatever he does talk about is always cool. Even too cool sometimes. Sagan used to awe us with this stuff, but deGrasse Tyson makes it easy to feel like a nerd, by oversimplifying concepts and letting some of his smooth arrogance pass onto the reader.
But, there are always enough nuggets to keep your true inner nerd interested: Like when he explains how Quarks have fractional charges that come in thirds, and that the force that keeps two or more of them together actually grows stronger the more you separate them... Wow, right? And the whole discussion on dark energy and dark matter is the coolest bit, because Tyson is at his best in dealing with still unexplored bits of the subject.
All in all, Tyson's geeky, aloof, arrogant voice remains consistent through this book as well - and those of us who derive pleasure from a likeable know-it-all like Tyson talking down to know-nothings, will enjoy every bit of it. Especially, when the arrogance arising from the backing of science and its capabilities are laced with just the right dose of Sagan-like, pale-blue-dot-like humility about how the arrow of knowledge always gives us humans a smaller and smaller role in the universe....more
Not half as good a narrative as The Emperor of All Maladies, but still a good account of the Gene's journey and where it is going. It will hold your aNot half as good a narrative as The Emperor of All Maladies, but still a good account of the Gene's journey and where it is going. It will hold your attention even if you have read multiple accounts of the progress of Genetics such as Watson's, because most histories of the Gene focus on the Genome project or on the early phase of discovery of genetics, Mukherjee instead focuses on the applications that are currently ongoing and how those fields have developed.
My only complaint: the focus of the book is on the Human Gene and hence on Medicine, while the story of the Gene is surely about much more than medicine - extending to Food, Evolution, Economics and perhaps Politics - the Gene has a very wide role to play in our future and we need to develop perspective on that future today. Mukherjee gives a glimpse of where Medicine is going, but perhaps could also have shown us where We are going....more
Dawkins fanboy tries to dress up an ideological book as a scientific one. Tries to show that Darwin's theory of evolution is just a byproduct or a speDawkins fanboy tries to dress up an ideological book as a scientific one. Tries to show that Darwin's theory of evolution is just a byproduct or a specific version of the general theory of evolution proposed by Adam Smith about the emergent order that will prevail bottom-up in any free society of selfish actors. In the process ends up unwittingly using just another"skyhook" - that of benevolent evolution - throughout, by arguing endlessly that all the good things happened bottom-up and all the bad things happened top-down.
Except that, as per the core argument, all top-down things also must have been products of evolution. If Everything Evolves, all things good or bad, bottom-up or top-down evolved too. Hence the concept of evolution cannot in itself justify just let everything play out - including economics, institutions and even climate change, for that matter. There is really no guarantee things will always play out well if 'bottom-up' - just look at the latest elections!
Just "Let Everything Be" can't be the ultimate policy outlook unless Ridley truly believes The Invisible Hand to be the Hand of God directing everything as if by providence towards the good of mankind. And if that is not so and Evolution indeed is blind, then perhaps the occasional nudges in the right direction may work too?
As with most left vs right debates, the book only enforces for me the fact that pure free market is not the solution, nor is a command economy - evolution can take us to either side and we need to intervene to keep the balance, and that continuous self-correction is part of our social evolution too, as is the occasional over-correction. No Skyhooks needed, we just need to be less in thrall of 'Men of System'.
There, I have used enough pointed references for one review. Now enjoy the historic day.
It is an increasingly accepted speculation that souls might in fact be made of dark matter. According to our latest models, they (daOur Souls are Dark
It is an increasingly accepted speculation that souls might in fact be made of dark matter. According to our latest models, they (dark souls) condense first and allow life to settle down around them. Of course, they can't be detected since they are not detectable by ordinary matter science.
On death, the souls depart from the body, and can go to heaven/cause rebirth via re-agglomeration depending on religious practices of the ordinary matter person associated with the soul. It is not yet fully understood how religious practices affect the dark matter core of a person. However, we do know that the souls get affected by a lifetime of sins, penance, charity, etc.
It is accepted by now that no life can form without a dark soul though some scientists still like the older idea that a soul is required only for higher life forms, probably only humans. Lower life forms can agglomerate without the gravitational-religious pull exerted by the soul-core. The source of this mysterious force that is akin to gravity but applies only to life-forms is yet to be discovered. It is exciting to consider that life might be the only source of interaction between dark and ordinary matter, outside the even more mysterious realm of gravity.
This allows us to speculate that ghosts might be real. In certain religions, certain required practices being not performed would mean that the soul-core is not fully freed from its person-form. This makes it unstable and dangerous, in a limbo state between dark and ordinary matter, and causes it to react in unpredictable ways with ordinary matter - sometimes violating the laws of ordinary matter physics. It is not entirely clear how this comes about.
Dark matter souls normally interact with entirely new forces and particles that do not interact with ordinary matter. But it has been observed over time that religion can have an effect on this. It is a matter of great speculation how nature of reality is altered by the gravitational-religious forces that seem to transcend the dark-ordinary boundary and allow some diffuse interactions. A new temple is proposed to be built near CERN to test the interactions and to identify the carriers of these interactions. We anxiously await the results. We are also hoping to bump into a few celebrity souls/ghosts over there. It is a whole new world that awaits us!...more
Bostrom is here to imagine a world for us (and he has batshit crazy imagination, have to give him that). TImagine a Danger (You may say I'm a Dreamer)
Bostrom is here to imagine a world for us (and he has batshit crazy imagination, have to give him that). The world he imagines is a post-AI world or at least a very-near-to-AI world or a nascent-AI world. Don’t expect to know how we will get there - only what to do if we get there and how to skew the road to getting there to our advantage. And there are plenty of wild ideas on how things will pan out in that world-in-transition, the ‘routes’ bit - Bostrom discusses the various potential routes, but all of them start at a point where AI is already in play. Given that assumption, the “dangers” bit is automatic since the unknown and powerful has to be assumed to be dangerous. And hence strategies are required. See what he did there?
It is all a lot of fun, to be playing this thought experiment game, but it leaves me a bit confused about what to feel about the book as an intellectual piece of speculation. I was on the fence between a two-star rating or a four-star rating for much of the reading. Plenty of exciting and grand-sounding ideas are thrown at me… but, truth be told, there are too many - and hardly any are developed. The author is so caught up in his own capacity for big BIG BIIG ideas that he forgets to develop them into a realistic future or make any the real focus of ‘dangers’ or ‘strategies’. They are just all out there, hanging. As if their nebulosity and sheer abundance should do the job of scaring me enough.
In the end I was reduced to surfing the book for ideas worth developing on my own. And what do you know, there were a few. So, not too bad a read and I will go with three.
And for future readers, the one big (not-so-new) and central idea of the book is simple enough to be expressed as a fable, here it is:
The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows
It was the nest-building season, but after days of long hard work, the sparrows sat in the evening glow, relaxing and chirping away.
“We are all so small and weak. Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help us build our nests!”
“Yes!” said another. “And we could use it to look after our elderly and our young.”
“It could give us advice and keep an eye out for the neighborhood cat,” added a third.
Then Pastus, the elder-bird, spoke: “Let us send out scouts in all directions and try to find an abandoned owlet somewhere, or maybe an egg. A crow chick might also do, or a baby weasel. This could be the best thing that ever happened to us, at least since the opening of the Pavilion of Unlimited Grain in yonder backyard.”
The flock was exhilarated, and sparrows everywhere started chirping at the top of their lungs.
Only Scronkfinkle, a one-eyed sparrow with a fretful temperament, was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavor. Quoth he: “This will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst?”
Replied Pastus: “Taming an owl sounds like an exceedingly difficult thing to do. It will be difficult enough to find an owl egg. So let us start there. After we have succeeded in raising an owl, then we can think about taking on this other challenge.”
“There is a flaw in that plan!” squeaked Scronkfinkle; but his protests were in vain as the flock had already lifted off to start implementing the directives set out by Pastus.
Just two or three sparrows remained behind. Together they began to try to work out how owls might be tamed or domesticated. They soon realized that Pastus had been right: this was an exceedingly difficult challenge, especially in the absence of an actual owl to practice on. Nevertheless they pressed on as best they could, constantly fearing that the flock might return with an owl egg before a solution to the control problem had been found.
An attempt to "apply Darwin's theory of evolution and competition to cognitive psychology." To do this the author had to populate the mind with variou An attempt to "apply Darwin's theory of evolution and competition to cognitive psychology." To do this the author had to populate the mind with various species (gnomes, elves, etc) and have imagined competition/cooperation (coordination = competition + cooperation) between them to explain brain functioning. The whole metaphor falls pretty flat in my opinion, and the author uses up most of the book talking about known experiments about brain functioning. The ties to the original metaphor are weak and usually limited to a breezy statement or two at the beginning of each chapter.
Now, I am perfectly okay with the "coordination = competition + cooperation" model for how the brain functions. But to link it to Darwin's theory of evolution and Natural Selection is a bit of a stretch. If the author had been more consistent in his approach, it would have been fun, at the very least.
I am guessing most of the science text-books borrowed from this masterpiece to convey these ideas effectively. But that also means that when someone g I am guessing most of the science text-books borrowed from this masterpiece to convey these ideas effectively. But that also means that when someone goes back and reads the original it sounds too text-book-ey, in presentation and content. Not many ideas here which you wouldn't have been exposed to, but still a valuable book to turn to if you are coming to the field for the first time, or after a long break.
I am giving it 3 stars only because I didn't get much out of it and had to skim through it looking for paragraphs which I couldn't predict the content of by merely glancing at the first sentence. However, it is a well presented, coherent summation of the most important scientific discovery of the age. Worth a read. Worth assigning to any class of young students....more
Historians like Braudel can only dream of the kind of history that can be written now. Now that we have minute and granular data on billions of indivi Historians like Braudel can only dream of the kind of history that can be written now. Now that we have minute and granular data on billions of individuals, on how they are living, of what they like, what they search for, who they prefer to be with, what they enjoy reading and watching, where they spend their time, how they react to political events, what their fears are, etc. -- a veritable flood of data -- a dataclysm.
This book is an early, tentative, and often highly constrained attempt at creating the sort of narrative that this flood of data allows. It is restricted to the data collected from a dating site and hence comes with all the constrains and conditions that would imply (the sample would tend to be young, unmarried, middle-class and mostly male, for instance).
Event though the book does not have any revelations about who we are (when no one is looking -- or at least, when we think so!), it does attempt to corroborate some of the social research that usually reaches us as anecdotes with hard data, and that is its real value -- as a trend-setter.
If you read a lot of popular nonfiction, there are a couple things in Dataclysm that you might find unusual. The first is the color red. The second is that the book deals in aggregates and big numbers, and that makes for a curious absence in a story supposedly about people: there are very few individuals here. Graphs and charts and tables appear in abundance, but there are almost no names. It’s become a cliché of pop science to use something small and quirky as a lens for big events—to tell the history of the world via a turnip, to trace a war back to a fish, to shine a penlight through a prism just so and cast the whole pretty rainbow on your bedroom wall.
I’m going in the opposite direction. I’m taking something big—an enormous set of what people are doing and thinking and saying, terabytes of data—and filtering from it many small things: what your network of friends says about the stability of your marriage, how Asians (and whites and blacks and Latinos) are least likely to describe themselves, where and why gay people stay in the closet, how writing has changed in the last ten years, and how anger hasn’t. The idea is to move our understanding of ourselves away from narratives and toward numbers, or, rather, to think in such a way that numbers are the narrative.
That is why the author says that he likes to think of his book a sort of Anti-Outliers. The exciting stories are not limited to what a few exceptional individuals are doing, but also in the aggregated activities of millions of Joes. No anecdotes for you, but here are some fun graphs....more
What do you do when you really don’t have much to tell on a subject, especially when you care a lot about it? You tell an Wishing Yourself A Good Night
What do you do when you really don’t have much to tell on a subject, especially when you care a lot about it? You tell anecdotes and try to keep it interesting. Most neuroscience books these days tend to be packed with anecdotes that are weird, but on which there is no scientific consensus. The reader is left to his/her own devices on what to make of all the stories. This book is not much different. It starts with an admission that we know next to nothing about sleep - the activity that occupies 1/3
rd
of our lives.
The author sets off an a quest to discover more about his own sleep conditions and finds that he has fallen into a strange rabbit hole that exists just on the other side the pillow, and which most of are never aware of.
Once I started really thinking about sleep for the first time, the questions came in waves. Do men sleep differently than women? Why do we dream? Why is getting children to fall asleep one of the hardest parts of becoming a new parent, and is it this hard for everyone around the world? How come some people snore and others don’t? And what makes my body start sleepwalking, and why can’t I tell it to stop? Asking friends and family about sleep elicited a long string of “I don’t knows,” followed by looks of consternation, like the expressions you see on students who don’t know the answers to a pop quiz. Sleep, the universal element of our lives, was the great unknown. And frankly, that makes no sense.
A few take aways:
1. The Need for sleep:
Most of us will spend a full third of our lives asleep, and yet we don’t have the faintest idea of what it does for our bodies and our brains. Research labs offer surprisingly few answers. Sleep is one of the dirty little secrets of science. We don’t know about sleep, and the book opens with the most obvious question of all—why we, and every other animal, need to sleep in the first place.
Here we hear many horror stories of sleep-deprivation: Within the first twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation, the blood pressure starts to increase. Not long afterward, the metabolism levels go haywire, giving a person an uncontrollable craving for carbohydrates. The body temperature drops and the immune system gets weaker. If this goes on for too long, there is a good chance that the mind will turn against itself, making a person experience visions and hear phantom sounds akin to a bad acid trip. At the same time, the ability to make simple decisions or recall obvious facts drops off severely. It is bound to end in severe consequences - including death. It is a bizarre downward spiral that is all the more peculiar because it can be stopped completely, and all of its effects will vanish, simply by sleeping for a couple of hours.
2. The Amount of sleep:
Humans need roughly one hour of sleep for every two hours they are awake, and the body innately knows when this ratio becomes out of whack. Each hour of missed sleep one night will result in deeper sleep the next, until the body’s sleep debt is wiped clean.
3. The Stages of Sleep:
Researchers now say that sleep is made up of five distinct stages that the body cycles through over roughly ninety-minute periods. The first is so light that if you wake up from it, you might not realize that you have been sleeping. The second is marked by the appearance of sleep-specific brain waves that last only a few seconds at a time. If you reach this point in the cycle, you will know you have been sleeping when you wake up. This stage marks the last stop before your brain takes a long ride away from consciousness. Stages three and four are considered deep sleep. In three, the brain sends out long, rhythmic bursts called delta waves. Stage four is known as slow-wave sleep for the speed of its accompanying brain waves. The deepest form of sleep, this is the farthest that your brain travels from conscious thought. If you are woken up while in stage four, you will be disoriented, unable to answer basic questions, and want nothing more than to go back to sleep, a condition that researchers call sleep drunkenness. The final stage is REM sleep, so named because of the rapid movements of your eyes dancing against your eyelids. In this type of sleep, the brain is as active as it is when it is awake. This is when most dreams occur.
4. The Ideal Pattern of Sleep (that you are not following):
Natural light is the way to go. Artificial light messes up your sleep patterns and the body pays for it in the long run. Post-Edison world has come close to banishing the night, but our bodies still live in a world where sun is the only source of light, and have all sorts of troubles processing artificial light induced sleep patters. More and more health problems are being tied to unnatural sleep patterns and Light Pollution.
Example: Electric light at night disrupts your circadian clock, the name given to the natural rhythms that the human body developed over time. When you see enough bright light at night, your brain interprets this as sunlight because it doesn’t know any better. The lux scale, a measure of the brightness of light, illustrates this point. One lux is equal to the light from a candle ten feet away. A standard 100-watt lightbulb shines at 190 lux, while the lighting in an average office building is 300 lux. The body’s clock can be reset by any lights stronger than 180 lux, meaning that the hours you spend in your office directly impact your body’s ability to fall asleep later. That’s because your body reacts to bright light the same way it does to sunshine, sending out signals to try to keep itself awake and delay the nightly maintenance of cleanup and rebuilding of cells that it does while you are asleep. Too much artificial light can stop the body from releasing melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep.
Poor sleep is just one symptom of an unwound body clock. Circadian rhythms are thought to control as many as 15 percent of our genes. When those genes don’t function as they should because of the by-products of artificial light, the effects are a rogue’s gallery of health disorders. Studies have linked depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and even cancer to overexposure to light at night. Researchers know this, in part, from studying nurses who have spent years working the graveyard shift. One study of 120,000 nurses found that those who worked night shifts were the most likely to develop breast cancer. Another found that nurses who worked at least three night shifts a month for fifteen years had a 35 percent greater chance of developing colon cancer. The increased disease rates could not be explained as a by-product of working in a hospital.
In one of the most intriguing studies, researchers in Israel used satellite photos to chart the level of electric light at night in 147 communities. Then, they placed the satellite photos over maps that showed the distribution of breast cancer cases. Even after controlling for population density, affluence, and other factors that can influence health, there was a significant correlation between exposure to artificial light at night and the number of women who developed the disease. If a woman lived in a place where it was bright enough outside to read a book at midnight, she had a 73 percent higher risk of developing breast cancer than a peer who lived in a neighborhood that remained dark after the sun went down. Researchers think that the increased risk is a result of lower levels of melatonin, which may affect the body’s production of estrogen.
There could be more discoveries on the horizon that show detrimental health effects caused by artificial light. Researchers are interested in how lights have made us less connected to the changing of the seasons. “We’ve deseasonalized ourselves,” Wehr, the sleep researcher, said. “We are living in an experiment that is finding out what happens if you expose humans to constant summer day lengths.”
5. What Should Be Your Sleep Schedule?
In the Canterbury Tales, one of the characters in “The Squire’s Tale” wakes up in the early morning following her “first sleep” and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the “first sleep” on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for serious study. Sleep, it seems, wasn’t always the one long block that we consider it today.
This natural mode of sleep sounds weird to the post-Edison world of artificial lights and 6 hour sleep cycles. But it was a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast.
For most of human history, every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the “first sleep” that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning—the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was perhaps the most popular.
Experiments confirm this tendency: Thomas Wehr, who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that the ubiquitous artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep habits. On a whim, he deprived subjects of artificial light for up to fourteen hours a day in hopes of re-creating the lighting conditions common to early humans. Without lightbulbs, televisions, or street lamps, the subjects in his study initially did little more at night than sleep. They spent the first few weeks of the experiment like kids in a candy store, making up for all of the lost sleep that had accumulated from staying out late at night or showing up at work early in the morning. After a few weeks, the subjects were better rested than perhaps at any other time in their lives.
That was when the experiment took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime. It was as if their bodies were exercising a muscle they never knew they had. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life. Not long after Wehr published a paper about the study, Ekirch contacted him and revealed his own research findings.
Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn’t artificial light—and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows—people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep.
6. Sleep & Performance
The places where most of the cutting edge research happens and great places to understand the importance of sleep is the Military and Sports fields - areas where human excellence, endurance and performance is pushed to the limits. It stands to reason that these fields notice the effects of sleep problems first. Many sports teams no take great trouble to make sure Light is adjusted to natural cycles, athletes get the full quota of sleep, etc. It s only a matter of time before rest of popular culture catches on - just like many health ides, diets, exercises etc.
7. Sleep Timings Change with Age:
The three basic stages of adulthood—teenage, middle age, old age—have drastically different sleep structures. Teenagers going through puberty find it impossible to fall asleep early and would naturally sleep past ten in the morning if given the choice. Their grandparents often fall asleep early in the night, but then find that they can’t stay that way for more than three or four hours at a time. Middle-aged adults typically fall between the middle of these two extremes, content to fall asleep early when circumstances allow it, yet able to pull an all-nighter when a work project calls for it. These overlapping shifts could be a way to ensure that someone in the family is always awake and keeping watch, or at least close to it. In this ancient system, it makes sense that older adults who are unable to move as fast as the rest of the family are naturally jumpy, never staying in deep sleep for long, simply because they were the most vulnerable to the unknown.
The other stage - babyhood is a time with no sleep structure at all. They sleep and wake up independent of the light/circadian rhythms. To the eternal consternation of all parents!
So human society is biologically designed to live in different time zones?!
Biology’s cruel joke goes something like this: As a teenage body goes through puberty, its circadian rhythm essentially shifts three hours backward. Suddenly, going to bed at nine or ten o’clock at night isn’t just a drag, but close to a biological impossibility. Studies of teenagers around the globe have found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o’clock at night and keep pumping out the hormone well past sunrise. Adults, meanwhile, have little-to-no melatonin in their bodies when they wake up. With all that melatonin surging through their bloodstream, teenagers who are forced to be awake before eight in the morning are often barely alert and want nothing more than to give in to their body’s demands and fall back asleep. Because of the shift in their circadian rhythm, asking a teenager to perform well in a classroom during the early morning is like asking him or her to fly across the country and instantly adjust to the new time zone—and then do the same thing every night, for four years. If professional football players had to do that, they would be lucky to win one game.
8. What Sort of Bed Should You Choose?
The biggest question—whether a bed should be hard or soft—has a long and confusing history. In 2008, the medical journal Spine seemed to settle the question of firmness. It found that there was little difference in back pain between those who slept on hard mattresses and those who slept on softer ones. How hard a person likes his or her bed is a personal preference and nothing more.
In fact, the bed that you find the most comfortable will most likely be the one that you are already sleeping on.
9. Forget The Bed - Sleep Hygiene Is What You Need
While a comfortable mattress may have little impact when it comes to sleep quality, there are several other aspects of the bedroom that do. Taken together, they form what specialists call sleep hygiene. Most are common sense.
- No coffee before bed / in the evening
- Nor is drinking alcohol before bedtime a smart move. Alcohol may help speed the onset of sleep, but it begins to take its toll during the second half of the night. As the body breaks down the liquid, the alcohol in the bloodstream often leads to an increase in the number of times a person briefly wakes up. This continues until the blood alcohol level returns to zero, thereby preventing the body from getting a full, deep, restorative sleep.
- Developing a few habits with the circadian rhythm in mind will most likely make sleep easier. Adequate exposure to natural light, for instance, will help keep the body’s clock in sync with the day-night cycle and prime the brain to increase the level of melatonin in the bloodstream, which will then bring on sleepiness around ten o’clock each night.
- By the same token, bright lights—including the blue-and-white light that comes from a computer monitor or a television screen—can deceive the brain, which registers it as daylight. Lying in bed watching a movie on an iPad may be relaxing, but the constant bright light from the screen can make it more difficult for some people to fall asleep afterward.
- Walk around your house and switch off all bright lights half an hour before you sleep, including the TV, the iPad and the laptop.
- Recent studies have shown that body temperature also plays an outsized role in getting decent sleep. Takes steps to have a comfortable temperature: Take a cold shower, etc.
- Even a small increase in the amount of exercise a person gets leads to measurable improvements in the time that it takes to fall asleep and stay that way. This is particularly true for older adults.
10. The Effort Is Worth Your Time
But, though its effects were subtle, devoting extra time and attention to this most basic of human needs impacted nearly every minute of my day. Because I was improving my sleep, I was improving my life. And all it took was treating sleep with the same respect that I already gave other aspects of my health. Just as I wouldn’t eat a plate of chili-cheese fries every day and expect to continue to fit into my pants, I structured my life around the idea that I couldn’t get only a few hours of sleep and expect to function properly. If there was one thing that I took away from my talks with experts more than any other, it is that getting a good night’s sleep takes work.
And that work is worth it. Health, sex, relationships, creativity, memories—all of these things that make us who we are depend on the hours we spend each night with our heads on the pillow. By ignoring something that every animal requires, we are left turning to pills that we may not need, experiencing health problems that could be tamed, and pushing our children into sleep-deprived lives that make the already tough years of adolescence more difficult. And yet sleep continues to be forgotten, overlooked, and postponed. Any step—whether it comes in the form of exercise, therapy, or simply reading a book like this one—that helps us to realize the importance of sleep inevitably pushes us toward a better, stronger, and more creative life.
Sleep, in short, makes us the people we want to be. All you have to do is close your eyes.
In addition to all the sleep advice, the best part of the book was the full-fledged dissing of poor Freud: Far from being full of hidden symbols, most dreams were remarkably straightforward and predictable. Dream plots were consistent enough that, just by knowing the cast of characters in a dream, scientists could forecast what would happen with surprising accuracy. - “None of Freud’s claims are true by any of our standards today,” Domhoff said, dipping his spoon into his yogurt. “If you look at dreams—if you really look at them like we have—then you see that it’s all there, out in the open. You don’t need any of these symbols.” He went on. “Freudians got all caught up in the idea that there were hidden meanings to our dreams. But their interpretations only worked because we share a system of figurative language and metaphor.”
This reads too much like a bureaucratic/corporate vision document.
It goes through the routine: of the necessity for developinVision Document #14568934
This reads too much like a bureaucratic/corporate vision document.
It goes through the routine: of the necessity for developing core competencies, technology vision, comparing with a few competitors, and so on.
However, a quick summary:
The vision is to convert India into a ‘developed nation’ by 2020, this being defined as an India that will be one of the five biggest economic powers, self–reliant in energy and food security.
To this end, we are told that the primary focus is to be on developing technological competence in the core areas that India wants to excel in. This includes better use of hybrid rice, agro-processing, industry linkages, etc. in Agriculture; Developing better commercial applications and extraction technologies for our indigenous mineral wealth in Primary Sector; India to be a net exporter of technology and High-end products in Industrial Sector; a world leader in Services, especially in Software Sector; Develop our Strategic Sectors such as Defense, Satellite, etc. by focusing on dual-use technologies that will have better civilian applications; To support all this focus on the two enabling sectors most - Health and Infrastructure, in as inclusive a fashion as possible - for these are the two focus areas which will ensure that the all the progress we attain by working so hard elsewhere reaches the poor of India.
There is plenty of data, charts, and all the things that make a good report. But in the end it is not very readable and there are no big ideas that can be a take-away for the curious reader. The few good (read quotable) sections in the book are the ones directly taken from Kalam’s various speeches. I feel they are the only direct contributions by Kalam to this book.
The “vision” behind writing a book like this, to lay out a broad roadmap for technological progress, is pretty good, but the execution is quite bad… that is ironical - a good metaphor has been achieved through this book....more
How would it be to live in the very near future? What will happen once we cross the rubicon, the point beyond which Glimpses Of An Ordinary Future
How would it be to live in the very near future? What will happen once we cross the rubicon, the point beyond which climate change overwhelms the Anthropocene and humans are no longer in charge of their surroundings?
We should expect high human drama under such extreme duress, right?
Wrong.
Daily life will carry on. That is what will happen.
So What’s New in The Very Near Future?
Extinction Rate in Oceans Now Faster Than on Land. Coral Reef Collapses Leading to Mass Extinctions; Thirty Percent of Warm-water Species Estimated Gone. Fishing Stocks Depleted, UN Declares Scaleback Necessary or Commercial Species Will Crash.
Topsoil Loss Nears a Million Acres a Year. Deforestation now faster in temperate than tropical forests. Only 35% of tropical forests left.
The average Indian consumes 200 kilograms of grain a year; the average American, 800 kilograms; the average Italian, 400 kilograms. The Italian diet was rated best in the world for heart disease.
300 Tons of Weapons-grade Uranium and Plutonium Unaccounted For. High Mutation Rate of Microorganisms Near Radioactive Waste-treatment Sites. Antibiotics in Animal Feed Reduce Medical Effectiveness of Antibiotics for Humans.
Environmental estrogens suspected in lowest-ever human sperm counts. The Antarctic ice has started to break up as early as May every year.
The El Nino cycle has accelerated so much that it is now called The Hyper Nino. The Gulf Stream has begun to shut down and the water no longer sinks due to the influx of fresh water from glaciers. Europe faces a complete ice age.
Two Billion Tons of Carbon Added to the Atmosphere This Year. One of the five hottest years on record. The Fed Hopes U.S. Economy Will Grow by Four Percent in the Final Quarter.
I was constantly reminded of the movie The Day after Tomorrow when I read this. But unlike DAT, 40 Signs is not designed as a disaster story, but as a ‘domestic comedy’, to use KSR’s own phrase. It is not meant to shock and awe the audience; or to use the disaster potential of sudden climate change to produce high drama. Instead it is a very subtly constructed future, achieved by sketching ordinary people from specifically selected walks of life that the audience knows are bound to be affected, and thus pays attention for tiny hints on how they have been in fact affected even as they go about their daily lives.
We soon notice that the plot advancing moments have a tendency to be connected to the changed world they live in. For example, the elevator scene shows how life, or at least the perception of daily life, has changed radically from our’s when flooding of the subway system is par for the course and does not even make the list of things to be discussed over dinner.
And thus it turns out that their lives have been altered immensely by the gathering doom -- it is just that they are now used to every incremental change and walks, almost casually, into the gathering ‘whimper’ that awaits them at the end.
The Theaters of the Future
There is not much here plot wise or excitement wise compared to a the dense action of Red Mars, but as always KSR makes up for it by the wealth of ideas and thoughts provoked.
The plot operates mostly in what KSR clearly considers to be the Theaters of the Future - Science & Politics. In fact, a core sub-plots of the book, and one of the key ideas in it, is about the Paradigm Shift (yup, Kuhn again) that has to occur in the field of science to make the scientists aware of their political responsibility. He says that an unfortunate repercussion of the World Wars' political promotion of science was that this overt politicization of Science led to an almost knee-jerk reaction -- the scientific community withdrew almost entirely from politics and took a much more ’neutral’ role. This meant that they no longer get directly involved in important political questions and so a vital and authoritative voice that can save humanity is lost to us. This has to change.
A Disaster Too Slow
Of course, most of the characters are scientists or politicians, and all of them have adequate information, theories and concerns, and fully appreciates the threat that global warming poses, but they just can't seem to awaken a Day After Tomorrow sort of urgency in their lives.
No matter how fast climate change occurs, it is not fast enough to not let us say ‘let us get used to this’, and to postpone decisive action for later.
The disasters just cannot strike fast enough for them to really act!
The most environmentally aware and empathetic politician in the book has this to say even as world falls apart around him:
Then the words burst out of Charlie: “So Phil! Are you going to do something about global warming now?”
Phil grinned his beautiful grin. “I’ll see what I can do!”...more
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