"The wandering bands of Sapiens storytellers were the most important and destructive force the animal kingdom ever produced." This phrase appears early in book. It is another book about the rise of human kind on this Earth. It is similar to Guns, Germs and Steel and A Brief History of Everything. I read it mostly for the early history: the invention of languages, stories, religions, gods and kings and such. In that respect it delivered. One myth the book explodes is the idea of primitive cultures as being more in touch with and more cooperative with nature. It is not true. Every human group, everywhere, wasted no time in bending the environment to its one uses, and grabbing all the low hanging fruit as fast as they could, lest the other guy get it. Think the death of the North American mega fauna and the hands of the native populations. It takes on what the author calls "romantic consumerism"… the general idea that you life is best served by jetting all over the world and getting exposed to as many cultures as possible. It also attacks cultural relativism for the evil that it is. The author made an interesting observation about religions in general. They can be broken down into three gross categories: Many gods (polytheism); Two gods (dualism); And one god (monotheism). Polytheism is marked by a laid back attitude. If you meet someone who believes in another god, no problem. You just add it to the list. Dualism is marked by conflict: Creator versus destroyer; good versus evil; heaven versus hell. Monotheism (i.e.: the big three) is awash in the blood of the non-believers. Roman Catholicism is kind of an odd-man-out. They believe in one god with three faces (father son and holy ghost). They embrace dualism with God versus Satan. And they are also polytheistic in that they have hundreds of saints, and each saint has its followers. Practically speaking, "saint" is just another word for demigod. The author uses the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" incorrectly and more than once. Truth be told, few people know how cliché is intended to work. It has some interesting observations about money and credit. The author argues that the British obtained global imperialist domination over France because they paid their bills and were a good credit risk. Credit at the time was a new concept that the French failed to appreciate. The last few chapters get into philosophy, happiness, and extrapolating the modern world out into the future, a most dangerous game. An easy read, with the occasional bit of humor.
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Another very enjoyable book from Christie Blatchford. I have always liked reading her columns in the NP. Her earthy style of writing is restrained in newsprint, but not so in her books. It is a worthy successor to Helpless, the story of the OPP and the feds turning their backs on the small town of Caledonia, ON. Truth be told, the sins of the system as described in Life Sentence do not hold a candle to the system allowing politics and ambition to trump even the most basic tenets of the rule of law in Caledonia. A nice type size and good leading means a fairly quick read. The book is broken into broken into several large chunks consisting of an anecdotal review of her career; then four long chapters on the big cases: R v. : Abreha, Elliott, Bernardo; and Ghomeshi. In the opening chapter, she recounts some fun moments, like when the Special Investigative Unit that investigates police shootings hired a hot homicide detective only to discover that he was a fraud; or the when the government hired a race relations specialist who told lawyers that the Holocaust was not racist because no black people were involved. She notes as well, after years of legal wrangling, Duffy is back in the Senate sucking on the same teat as before. And more importantly, she asks why judges do not get the same scrutiny as senators. She points out that judges work for us, and that it is within our rights to criticize them, and they have a duty to disclose expenses just like everybody else. In Abreha, Christie rails against the condescending treatment of jurors. In fact, we just had the Oland case pitched due to an issue of jury instruction. Jurors seem to be unable to get even the most trivial of research sources themselves, like having access to a dictionary. It is assumed that jurors are incapable of, for example, separating past misdeeds from current misdeeds, but it is inherently assumed that lawyers and judges are capable of such feats, as well as many others that mere mortals can only aspire to. Blatchford quotes one juror who said: "The arrogance of the judicial system doling out just enough information to keep us pure 'intolerable'. " I agree. In some cases, judges have actually lied to jurors. Actually, they all lie to the jurors, because they all say the same thing at the end of the trial… "You have now heard all the evidence.", and that is almost always a lie. If you say that is not right, you will get a lecture on "probative value versus prejudicial effect". IMHO: If we are going to have juries, they should have all the facts. The Elliott case focused on a judge Cosgrove who went right off the rails during the trial. To make a long weird tale short, Cosgrove was incompetent. He threw his weight around illegally, and, at the end of the day, still did not acknowledge his misdeeds. Cosgrove was a patronage appointment. The Canadian Judicial Council was involved and actually debated whether "incompetence" should be tolerated in judges, so untouchable as they are once appointed. Camp is another judge recently in the news who actually used "ignorance of the law" as an excuse for his errors as a judge!. The appointment process is totally screwed up in Canada, but the good news is that it is getting better. Reading about Bernardo again is hard. The facts of the case are stomach-turning. The Bernardo trial was totally screwed up by the prosecution. Innocent lawyers were trashed by the system. Politics, optics and expediency ruled the court's decision making processes. The crown made a deal with the devil (Homolka) when they definitely should not have. But worse for the legal system, victims were granted de facto status in the court, with their own attorney, who the crown then tasked to do things that were clearly in conflict. This mess resulted in some really dumb stuff. The press was not allowed to see the Homolka tapes (due to the victim's weight in the court), but could hear them. But the sound was bad, so the crown provided a transcript that they could not read, but the cops could read it to them. So the reporters had to scribble the text from the readings of the cops while listening to a tape, which they could not understand, of a video they were not allowed to see. The Bernardo case saw the legal system turn on itself, and it was ugly. This rise of the victim does not bode well, and we are seeing the impacts today. The victim should have no say in the evidence presented at trial, but in Bernardo, they ruled the roost. The state even went after reporters for breaching court orders WRT banned information, information that they had made public earlier. In one instance, the OPP fabricated evidence to get at a lawyer who had crossed the Province's AG, who was hip deep in conflict issues. Finally, the Ghomeshi trial is discussed, and it too was a fiasco. Once again, the victims rose up, screwed up everything, and disappeared. The details of the Ghomeshi trial are still fresh in most peoples mind, but if you want more, read the book. This was a good read. The system is not broken. I am sure 95% of convictions are routine and well handled. But it seems the bigger the trial, the more it seems like the lunatics are running the asylum. We recently had a literal show trial and it showed us that the judge was a screw-up. This book is better than its sequel, A Most Improbable Journey. It deals with larger issues and documents one of the great over-arching discoveries of the 20th century, namely that the Earth was hit by a 10 km wide rock in the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs as well as many other kinds of creatures, such as the ammonites (nautilus like critters that ruled the oceans for millions of years). This all took place October 29, 65,000,0000 years ago, at 9 AM in the mourning. The impact was stupendous. The rock was so big, it's leading edge was grinding a huge hole (the Chicxulub Crater) in the Earth while the trailing edge was still in the upper atmosphere. A second later, it was all over but for the fallout, burning atmosphere, huge tsunamis, and a stifling hot (due to released CO2) "winter", and dust that blacked out the sky. The simultaneous exploding of every nuclear weapon on Earth would be like a fart in the wind by comparison. The story of the discovery surrounds the KT boundary, a thin layer of clay that marks the end of the Cretaceous (and the dinosaurs) and the start of the Tertiary (the first layer of which is the Danian, after the Danish site where it was first described). The idea was floated that a impact may have killed the dinosaurs. Walter's famous physicist Dad, Luis, suggested looking for a radioactive isotope of an element that is found in meteors, but generally not on the Earth's surface, in the KT boundary. Iridium was the final choice. The other "tell" is something called "shocked quartz, which I will leave to reader to find out about. Skip to the end: Iridium was found all over the word in the KT (K is used because C was taken, and it also came from the German for chalk). This is where the story is different from other scientific detective stories. I cannot recall a discovery that had so many scientists excited from so many disciplines. Geology, of course, but paleontology, archeology, planetary astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, the physics of impacts, and so on. Soon, evidence was popping up in multiple fields at once, and an idea that was poo-poo-ed became accepted fact in a just a few short years. Sadly Luis died before his idea bore fruit. This is a very approachable book, and a quick must-read for any student of the processes of science (aka human knowledge). Since then ( around 1990), 130 more ancient craters have been found. Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs; Steve Brusatte; 2018; Harper Collins; 349 pgs; index, notes11/9/2020 If we ignore DJ Trump, we live in the best of times. I am fascinated by the world of dinosaurs and their kin. We have been masters of the Earth for a few thousand years. The dinosaurs were on top for 150 million years. They are still with us today as birds… a little less dangerous than T. Rex. Steve Brusatte is a young enthusiastic paleontologist. He is probably the best writer on the subject I have read. His book is not a who-dun-it like books on the fate of the dinosaurs, but rather an epic tale of natures forces and dumb luck clashing together. It ends, of course, with the Yucatan impact of a 6 mile across asteroid or comet 65 million years ago. We are in the best of times because we have learned more about dinosaurs since I was born than we ever knew before. One hundred years ago, if you found a rock that might contain a fossil, you could spend months trying to free it from its matrix of rock only to find a common bone. Today, scientists can run it through a CT scan and find out in minutes. Ground penetrating radar can let researchers look underground without having to dig. And, of course, computer modeling has vastly improved our understanding of how these animals lived and died. There is no appreciable jargon used. It is just a fine, engrossing read that gives good picture of our current understanding of the subject and a look at the people who will dominate it for the next few decades, I was reading Evolution vs. Creationism and noticed the name Robert Park. He is a physicist who often spends time doing skeptical work, like debunking perpetual motion machines and such. His name was raised in the context of expert witnesses in court and the concept of pseudoscience. He wrote up a list of seven "tells" of Voodoo Science which has made its way into US jurisprudence. I wrote such a list myself in the late 1980s. I was pleased to see that my list and his were in agreement, although my list was longer and more detailed. As I mentioned, I do not think he stole my list. The list could be conjured up by anyone with and skeptical background with penchant for navel gazing. But I got there first. In any case, Park's book Voodoo Science was mentioned and so I read it. Voodoo science is an umbrella term for four kinds of dubious science.
The first chapters focus on belief in general, perpetual motion machines (PMMs, and a fellow named Newman) and the infamous Pons and Fleischmann (P&F) case (Cold Fusion). Newman has been pushing his "engine" that runs on nothing for decades. Despite the fact that the Patent Office will not entertain PMMs, Newman managed to get political backing to test his engine. It failed, but Newman is still at it to this day. Cold Fusion is still alive today, but the search is confined to outcasts and fraudsters. In the beginning, P&F said they needed light water to make the magic work. They were asked if anything changed if they used normal water. They tried that and it made no difference, so they never mentioned light water again. Again and again, they would trumpet a new breakthrough, gather the press, and then explain why what they said they would do or say did not happen. "My dog ate my homework" sort of thing. P&F are a case study of scientists gone wrong, and both are now laying low. They were sincere at the beginning, but eventually they turned to out right fraud. Most of the topics in this book are familiar to me, and I understand most of the physics. But I still learned a thing or two. For example, homeopathy (chemistry for dummies, literally), in 1938, got a special exemption from FDA oversight in its BS health claims because one senator slipped it into the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. Park was outspoken about the space program. He, like most informed scientists, saw what NASA was doing was largely a waste of science's time and money. I speak mostly of the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. I love space exploration and what it has accomplished. But from a science perspective, manned missions are a colossal waste. We have learned an enormous amount about the solar system inside my life time… but all of that was done by automated, computer driven, robotic exploration. The International Space Station, Mir and others produced no science. None, zero, zip. The one promise that I recall, new drugs, did not happen. Add to that is the fact that space is ridiculously dangerous. Solar flares, micro gravity, and radiation are not things we are evolved to deal with. As much as I would like to see humanity on Mars, it will not happen any time soon, nor should it. You might think that the space station would be a great place to put a telescope. Not so. It is not stable enough. Why? Because people keep changing the center of gravity and bumping into things. To get good images, the observing platform must be free of all vibration. The author spoke to a Russian space scientist about what the Mir cosmonauts did all day. "They try to stay alive" was the response. Fun Fact: SF author and visionary Arthur C Clarke proposed the idea of communication satellites. He thought they would require a space program just to visit them to swap out blown tubes! Some times, one's vision gets a bit blurry. Power lines and links to cancer was once a thing. It was rubbish. One reason people were concerned was that they knew the Russians were beaming microwaves at the US embassy in Moscow. So that kind of EM is bad, right? Nope. The Russians were using beamed microwave energy to power bugs that they had literally built into the embassy. The microwaves themselves were harmless. The book is somewhat optimistic about the law and science. Judges are starting to understand that they are not equipped to deal with Voodoo Science. Judges understand the language of law, not the language of science. Judges are coming to realize that they must act as gate keepers on some issues of science. To do this, rules for "experts" are slowly coming together. Park spoke of Deepak Chopra and his invocation of quantum mechanics (the most successful theory in science history) to justify pretty much anything. Let me summarize: Deepak is an idiot. This book is an easy read. The science in the book is easily approachable for the lay person. |
AuthorLee Moller is a life-long skeptic and atheist and the author of The God Con. Archives
January 2024
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