Wednesday, 23 May, 2012

The power of Habit Charles Duhigg • Random House, 2012, 371 pp. Duhigg’s new look at human behavior analyzes some fascinating issues: the birth of the modern Civil Rights movement, the use of data-mining to suck another buck from the customer, the techniques for building a mega-church, and even the methods a corporate titan who [...]

Dangers lurk on a walk in the woods or a swim in the ocean, writes Gordon Grice: “… no matter how much we may love them, wild animals are not our friends.”
Nature, Grice asserts, is surprisingly scary, or surprisingly natural. We know that sharks, coyotes and wolves are dangerous — although much of our “knowledge” is myth compounded by hearsay.

Dangers lurk on a walk in the woods or a swim in the ocean, writes Gordon Grice: “… no matter how much we may love them, wild animals are not our friends.”
Nature, Grice asserts, is surprisingly scary, or surprisingly natural. We know that sharks, coyotes and wolves are dangerous — although much of our “knowledge” is myth compounded by hearsay.

If many scientific quests should be marked with an academic form of caution tape: “Progress = 2 steps forward + step back,” cosmologists have been in steady retreat for decades. The “cosmo” girls (and mainly boys) who explore the origin and fate of the universe were once mocked as data-free arm wavers. Then, in 1964, cosmo was promoted into a science by the discovery that echoes of the Big Bang were rattling around the universe.

Could good come from a wave of poisonings eight decades ago? Yes, argues Deborah Blum, in a quick, entertaining read that, for better not worse, does not teach exactly what the title promises. Rather than a handbook for agents of arsenic or quaffers of chloroform, the book instead shows how a scientific establishment grew up to detect poison and deter poisoners.

This is a long book with an audacious claim — that human violence has precipitously declined over the centuries. After the cataclysms of the 20th century, neuroscientist Steven Pinker recognizes a need to “soften us up,” which he does with a cold-blooded review of ancient animosity, starting with the signs of foul play found in ancient stiffs retrieved from ice and bog.

To most of us, the instinctive response to insects is to swat, spray, scratch and swear. But to biologist Marlene Zuk, insects in all their astonishing diversity are the prime lens for examining biology and evolution. With six legs, tiny brains, chitinous external skeletons and countless adaptations to niches within niches in the environment, you’d think insects would have invented just about every sexual and “child”-raising oddity imaginable

Read this delectable book, and you are going to love squid. Not calamari on a plate, but in the ocean or the lab. The giant squid has gradually emerged from obscurity after being mocked as a fisherman’s fable. The giant can change color in a fraction of a second and has monstrous eyes suited to the deep, dark ocean. Its 13- meter tentacles are covered with grasping structures with a degree of dexterity that belies the label “sucker.”

Does technology have desires? Is it alive? Can technological change be predicted or controlled? Baffling questions, and who better to tackle them than Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine. But until I read that Kelly doesn’t own a smart phone, I figured this for a lightweight celebration of the technological universe, or “technium.” Kelly makes big, controversial claims, but he backs them up with solid, historical arguments.