Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, by Eric Topol Eric Topol hit the news big time in 2004 as the chief whistleblower questioning the validity of research that led the FDA to approve the Merck drug, Vioxx. Amid scandal, Merck withdrew Vioxx and paid a big fine. The New York Timesinvestigated Topol’s […]
Big Other (video 5 minutes) Big Other by Robert W. “Doc” Hall During the first few hundred years of industrial expansion, mankind profited by learning to control nature. During the last 20 years or so, we have learned to profit big time by controlling – or manipulating – human nature. Let’s call this new phenomenon […]
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff Shoshana Zuboff is Professor Emerita from Harvard Business School. Her research career began by studying the history of work, and she gradually focused on how the digital world was changing the work world. It’s a long […]
Nature’s Business (6 minute video) Can We Learn to Think Like Nature? Industrial societies can’t keep living the way they do now because their systems make the environment unnatural. Climate change draws the most attention, but were the climate not changing, many other problems, some poorly understood, might be just as perilous. An example is […]
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra Fritjof Capra is well known for scientifically proposing that the universe, including humans, is a complex web of relationships, and for examining the concept of universal unity in religious beliefs, especially Buddhism. Originally written in 1975, The Tao of Physics is the classic book about the integration of everything. This […]
(24 minute video and article) From Compression to Symbiosis. By Doc Hall. Evolution is geological as well as biological. Predictions of geologic evolution are that life on Earth will continue in some form for perhaps 600 million more years. Whether human life will continue to evolve that long is doubtful, but working with nature instead […]
Commercial Thinking vs. Scientific Thinking Unsavory Truth, by Marion Nestle Except for political propaganda, hardly any field is more laden with misleading BS than nutrition. It comes from purveyors of food all wanting to sell their products. Those most influential are big food corporations. They can and do influence nutrition research. Marion Nestlé (no relation to […]
Background for Environmental Symbiosis A Rough Ride to the Future, by James Lovelock This book is a fun read by a scientific maverick, written at age 95. He’s now 99, still going strong. A prolific scientist and inventor, Lovelock is best known for two things: 1) inventing the electron capture detector, which detects particles in […]
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 […]
