Biomes (6 minute video) The Complexity of the ‘Omes’ [or To Deal With Big Stuff, Sweat the Small Stuff] How do we deal with complexity? Surveying the omes reveals microbiological research communities struggling to pull together, much like those of us concerned with the complexity of the macro environment that we can see. The masses of […]
Environmental Chemicals, the Human Microbiome, and Health Risk: A Research Strategy, by the National Academies of Sciences This report is a short book in length, but a slow read if like me, you do not have extensive background in microbiome research. Absorbing a minimum of terminology used in the field is necessary to follow it, […]
Learning Groups Teleconference Series on Mondays 8 pm Eastern Standard Time; dial 203-408-3665; that’s it! We started a teleconference series on Mondays. Each call-in starts at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time, and lasts one hour. To join all you have to do is dial 203-408-3665. We’ll have one every Monday evening at 8 pm EST […]
The Greatest Compression (Video 5 minutes) The Greatest Compression Economists occasionally use the phrase, “The Great Compression” to describe the leveling of income inequality during the period 1914-1950. That covers the World Wars, the great depression of the 1930s, and the effects of Communist revolutions. A historian that summarizes this in remarkable detail is Walter […]
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, by Walter Scheidel In this book, Walter Scheidel displays an overwhelming grasp of history, his field of study. His conclusion is that wealth, income, and status inequalities have always been with us, and they won’t go away because […]
Learning Groups Teleconference Series Beginning Monday, Nov. 19, 2018 8 pm Eastern Standard Time; dial 203-408-3665; that’s it! We are starting a teleconference series. The first one will be Monday, November 19, 2018, starting at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time, lasting one hour. To join all you have to do is dial 203-408-3665 at that hour. […]
Untold Stories of Diapers (Video 8 minutes) Disposable Diapers Deep in Doo-Doo Disposable diapers are one of the hardest items to recycle. Almost all go to landfill. How did we wind up in this mess? How It Began In the summer of 1961, I was a young junior engineer for Union Carbide Polymers Division. Proctor […]
Schools Done the W. Edwards Deming Way? After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, by Andrea Gabor Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at the Baruch School, CUNY. Having published in The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Business Week, and The New York Times, she is well grounded […]
Or What’s Objectivity in Journalism, Science, and Life? The ending of Propaganda Blitz, reviewed previously, digs deep into objectivity in journalism. What is it? To answer this question, the authors, David Edwards and David Cromwell, cite ancient philosophers, mainly Oriental ones. They conclude that commercially funded journalism is trapped in the box of business rationality. […]
Tribe of the Whole (7 minute video) Or, Toward a Better Learning Civilization Imagine transforming into something very different, like a werewolf. That we can imagine. Now, imagine living very differently in a completely changed world. That’s more complex. Every detail of life changes. We can only imagine them from analogies to our past. The […]
Fuzz: Implying by Not Talking Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality, by David Edwards and David Cromwell Neither Edwards nor Cromwell are practicing journalists. One was a teacher, the other a scientist. Perhaps that qualifies them to be objective media critics. That’s what they do through a British website called Media Lens that I’d […]
Keeping Up Appearances Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giriharadas This new book is stirring a mini-storm in the world of non-profits, provoked by a guy who has inhabited the institutions he criticizes, Anand Giriharadas. He refers to business thinking as a pattern of logic of business he calls […]
Predicament of Mankind (Video 7 minutes) The Predicament of Mankind: Searching for Causality by Doc Hall Many more issues threaten the environment than climate change, although that one exacerbates all others, and it dominates environmental reporting. The enormity of the social upheaval to mitigate these threats boggles the mind, and imagining Armageddon is depressing. Most […]
Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization by Paul Raskin Paul Raskin is the founding president of the Tellus Institute, a Boston “think tank” that began an initiative called The Great Transition in 2002. That initiative is a vision of how an ecologically threatened world could transition to a sustainable economy. This book […]
No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies, by William T. Vollmann William T. Vollmann (Bill) is a prize-winning professional writer, noted for being adventurous researching his books. For his first, he embedded with the Mujadin fighting the Soviets invading Afghanistan. He follows a story wherever curiosity takes him. This book is no different. It […]
Radical Change (Video 13 minutes) Timed Out: The Environmental Fan is Loaded In the past month, climate scientists emerged from scientific cocoons clanging alarms that climate change is a runaway. If we shut off man-made emissions immediately, natural forces will keep elevating atmospheric CO2 anyway. In mainline media, this set off second tier headlines, below immediate […]
Talking Water (video 18 minutes) Talking Water — Water, Water Everywhere The video explains history of water use and some of the complexities of today’s water issues, but water is both a common subject and a profound mystery. We can never stop learning about it. Water is the stuff of life. It makes up 45-73% […]
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie Judea Pearl is professor of computer science at UCLA with a long, distinguished career in software and artificial intelligence. This book is his third in a series on causality. Dana MacKenzie is a professional writer. The point of […]
A New Myth (Video 5 minutes) A New Mythology for the 21st Century Say “mythology” and we think of Greek mythology or indigenous tribal stories, but we think we follow facts and logic. Actually the 21st century is soaked in myths that we follow more than we think. When facts confuse and emotions tug, we […]
Why Economic Theories Are Screwing Us Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works – and How It Fails, by Yanis Varoufakis and Jacob Moe Yanis Varoufakis will be heard from again. He attracted global attention as the Finance Minister of Greece who tried – and failed – to negotiate Greek debt […]
The Whole Economy is Full of It Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber Although an American and by training an anthropologist, David Graeber is a professor at the London School of Economics. He’s not a stereotypical economist. He’s a rebel in the growing gang of “economists” at Evonomics, seeking a new economic system. Readers […]
The Psychology of Compression Thinking (Video 7 minutes) The Psychology of Compression Thinking The basic points of Compression Thinking have changed little over the past five years. Their internal logic and consistency seem sound. But they are not trending on social media. Shifting from advanced economic norms remains a bridge too far to perturb the […]
The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do by Edward Tenner Edward Tenner, researcher of history and critic of technology, writes regularly for The Atlantic. Noted for a prior book, Why Things Bite Back, Tenner popularized the idea of unintended consequences. Examples from today’s leading edge to ancient times illustrate The Efficiency Paradox. In it, […]
Are We All Avatars in a Big Simulation? Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Jean Glaser and Sheila Faria Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, a contributor to post-structuralism, along with the better-known Jacques Derrida. This bores anyone not deep into philosophy, so why dig into it? Because Simulacra and Simulation is […]
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