Category Archives: Science and Nature

September 19, 2025 · 12:01 am

Replaceable You by Mary Roach

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It’s another photograph of the penis [transplanted from the owner’s middle finger], now with a rustic ceramic pitcher hanging off of it. Exactly as you or I could put a hand out, palm up, and hang a pitcher off our middle finger. The pitcher is hand-painted, white with a red and green floral pattern. I’m picturing the man and his partner again, this time having lunch in the kitchen. A little iced tea, my love?

Eventually the day arrives when no further breach is possible. Mr. Baron, wrote his doctor, Richard Martland, “was now informed, the only chance for saving his life was by making an artificial anus . . . the inconveniences resulting from such operation, were candidly pointed out to him.” Mrs. White, on the occasion of her twelfth day without a bowel movement, is presented with the same proposition. Both patients consented. Or rather, as Pring put it, “did not violently object.” And so it went. “An opening was now made . . . and instantly a large quantity of liquid feces and wind escaped,” Martland wrote. Both doctors were impressed by the force with which the matter was expelled, with Pring taking additional note of the “considerable distance” traveled. – There was no mention of a fan in the vicinity.

This book certainly lends new meaning to the expression “an heir and a spare.”

I imagine many of us, certainly folks of my demographic, have had the experience of having parts replaced, probably because of need, but for some because of choice. I know I would happily have my begrudging spine replaced if I had the chance. And there are certainly a few improvements I could use that would be competing for second place on that list. Thus, my interest in Mary Roach’s latest, Replaceable You. (My ex can attest to the truth of the title’s applicability to the entire me.) Of course, I would read anything Mary Roach has written. She is one of my all-time favorite authors. And just in case her work is new to you, she combines a hard-reporting look at a particular scientific realm with a sense of humor that will leave you gasping for breath. Complete swallowing any ingested liquids before reading her work, as they may come blasting out your nose and mouth before you can get a grip. You have been warned.

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Mary Roach – image from Harvard Bookstore – shot by Jen Siska

Roach has made a career of writing about the human body, from conception (Boink) to grave (Stiff), and beyond (Spook), with travels through the alimentary canal (Gulp), the body’s reaction to space flight (Packing for Mars), to war (Grunt) and even to strangeness having to do with our interactions with animals (Fuzz). This time around, she covers a range of body parts subject to replacing. She sniffs out the history of nose jobs back to the 1500s, and lets us in on why they were in such high demand back then. She brings home the bacon by filling us in on the status of pig research (on, not by) for the purpose of developing organs that can be transplanted into humans, a subject close to my heart.

A formal “miniature swine development” project got underway in 1949, a collaboration between two Minnesota powerhouses, the Mayo Foundation (research arm of the Mayo Clinic) and the Hormel Institute (research arm of pork).

There are sections on the replacement, or enhancement, of sexual organs. One of the opening quotes of this review notes a particular form of actual, not kidding, replacement for a male member. Female anatomy comes in for a bit of consideration as well.

Dow Corning…made the first silicone breast implant, circa 1961, this one at the urging of Texas plastic surgeon Thomas Cronin. Cronin had been “inspired by the look and feel of a bag of blood.” It is hard for me not to picture the scene: Cronin standing around the OR, idly gazing at a bag hanging on a transfusion pole and turning to a colleague: Hey. Does that remind you of something? Cronin contacted Dow, and his resident, Frank Gerow, implanted some prototypes into dogs. The team were “excited” by the outcome—and again, stop me from picturing this.

Continuing downstairs…

Who looks at the human digestive tract and thinks, Moist, tubular, stretchy . . . Might that make a reasonable vagina?

Some, apparently. The derriere comes in for a long look as well. Part of this is a consideration of the changing fashions in tush shape, stretching from sane to anime.

I have made it (well in) to septuagenarian with what is probably an unremarkable range of replacement parts. My right arm was the recipient of two metal plates and a bone graft from my hip after a rather nasty industrial accident in 1970. The plates were removed once they had done their job of helping my bones knit, a few years later. The bone graft helped heal another fracture, and was eventually absorbed back into my skeleton.

Roach tells of prosthetic limbs, and the surprising news that some people prefer them to the original. In fact, the initial inspiration for this book came from a reader who had suggested that Mary take on the exciting world of football referees. Understandably, that failed to score, but it turned out that the woman, who has spina bifida, had a problem with her foot. It had, as a result of her other difficulties, become less than useless. She wanted it removed so she could get a prosthetic, but few surgeons would consider electively removing it. Mary joined her at the Amputation Coalition National Conference, and the game was…um…afoot.

It will come as no shock that using one’s own body bits as a source of transplantation offers the huge advantage of sparing you the need for a lifetime of immunosuppressive drugs. The body’s Studio 54 security guard can take a quick look and wave the new part in as the right sort. It worked for me a second time.

Other recent personal additions were the product of open-heart surgery, three stents and an aortic valve replacement. The stents were made up of material extracted from my right leg, and the valve was contributed by a member of our porcine community. I have yet to experience any desire to go digging for truffles in nearby woodlands.

Roach takes joy in comparing the techniques and tools of hip replacement surgery to woodworking, noting that while patients could actually be conscious during the surgery, the clanging, sawing machinery noise would be so disturbing that it is deemed preferable for patients to remain unconscious for the duration. She says that “Hip replacement has the visual drama of a visit to a Chevron station.”

Sadly, I was born with a mouthful of (well, maybe not born with, which would be weird, but ultimately host to a couple of sets, baby and adult) soft teeth (my dentist’s words). This led, over time, to a need for fillings, caps, bridges and dentures.
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If you count up all the teeth that are removed and replaced with implants or dentures, I bet they would lead the pack in sheer numbers of replacement bits. Mary leads us on a walk through dentures in history, the up and down sides, as well as the benefits of not using them at all. Yes, Geoge Washington makes an appearance. You will find the section on spring-loaded replacements both fascinating and alarming, and concerning as well is the fact that so many people have elected to remove healthy teeth in order to install dentures.

Replacing hair is big business these days. But not just up top. Pubic hair is also replaceable. Not only can the short and crinkly be replaced, with hair from the head, but the opposite can be done as well. Of course this can present some grooming challenges, as pubic and head hair grow differently and behave inconsistently when treated with grooming products. Mary subjected herself to a bit of hair harvesting in her travels.

My donor site is smeared with bacitracin, but no gauze is taped in place, because my hair would get stuck. On the flight home, I will feel the back of my head start to ooze. Do you fly Southwest? Don’t sit in 11B.

She delves into the growth industry of 3D printing of bodily materials. It turns out that it is not so simple as it might seem. Each muscle and organ has particular abilities and behaviors that are very difficult to replicate, involving twisting, contracting, and reacting to incoming messaging from the brain. The Star Trek replicator might do a great job of producing “Earl Grey, hot,” but fabricating people-pieces is proving a much more complex undertaking than sci-fi writers imagined.

Eye lenses are being replaced at increasing rates. There are even many people who, as with tooth replacement noted above, are having their natural lenses replaced in order to improve their vision.

I have worn glasses since I was eight years old, for distance. The only issue I had with them was losing track of them. But in the last few years, it became obvious that there was a buildup of material on the left lens of my eye (not just the product of inattentive eyeglass wiping) that made night driving particularly challenging. Oncoming headlights, even non-bright ones, spread a glare across my field of view that was problematic. I had cataract surgery earlier this year (2025), left eye only. And it worked like a squeegee on a filthy window. The headlights are still miserable, particularly when people insist on using their brights, and when many newer cars use lights that are brighter than the prior generations of illumination, but the improvement in my vision was immediate.

She writes about the processes involved in recovering bio-materials from the recently dead, the potential for banking our own cells as a source for future replacement materials, a machine for offloading heart and respiration work from the body temporarily, and introducing us to the wonderful world of ostomies, noted up top.

Mary may write about science, but she is not, per se, a scientist. Thus, she can offer us an every-person view into the subjects she investigates. She reacts how we might react when faced with the same discoveries. She brings the oh, wow!, the joy-of-discovery moments to life for readers, and thus makes what she has learned stick for us more than it would from any dry textbook. If she leaves you in stitches, that might just be a part of your replacement work. If you burst with laughter, bust a gut, if you crack up or your laughter is side-splitting, that may be why you needed the work in the first place. Of course, if you laugh your head off, there is probably no short-term solution to that. Replaceable You is the real thing, as is Mary Roach. She is one of a kind. Accept no substitute. She is irreplaceable.

Nana takes a seat at Kuzanov’s desk and starts opening files on his computer desktop. After a few false starts, she locates a folder of photographs documenting a finger transplant performed on a cancer patient. Most of the man’s penis had been amputated, leaving him unable to do two of the things most men like to do with their penis: penetrate and pee while standing. The surgery would restore both. – She missed one.

Review posted – 09/19/25

Publication date – 09/16/25

I received an ARE of Replaceable You from W.W. Norton & Company in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. And could you check to see if anyone left any spare spines lying around.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

===================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Roach’s personal, Instagram and Twitter pages

Profile – from her site

I grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. My neighbors taught me how to drive a Skidoo and shoot a rifle, though I never made much use of these skills. I graduated from Wesleyan in 1981 and drove out to San Francisco with some friends. I spent a couple years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo. On the days when I wasn’t there in my little cubicle in the trailer behind Gorilla World, I freelanced articles for the Sunday magazine of the local newspaper. One by one, my editors would move on to bigger publications and take me along with them. In the late 1990s, magazines began to sputter out and travel budgets evaporated, and so I switched to books.
People call me a science writer, though I don’t have a science degree and sometimes have to fake my way through interviews with experts I can’t understand.
I have no hobbies. I mostly just work on my books and hang out with my family and friends. I enjoy bird-watching (though the hours don’t agree with me), hiking, backpacking, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night “Animal Planet” show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes’ eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around.

Interviews
—–Stuff to Blow Your Mind on iHeart – Replaceable You, with Mary Roach by Robert Lamb – audio (36 minutes) with available transcript
—–Peculiar Book Club – MARY ROACH is Un-Replaceable! – video – 1:10:03 – from 5:00
—–NPR – From heart to skin to hair, ‘Replaceable You’ dives into the science of transplant with Brandy Shillace
—–Association of Health Care Journalists – Mary Roach calls herself ‘the gateway drug to science’ by Lesley McClurg

Other Mary Roach books we have enjoyed
—–2021 – Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
—–2016 – Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
—–2013 – Gulp
—–2010 – Packing for Mars
—–2006 – Spook Six Feet Over – recently renamed
—–2004 – Stiff

Items of Interest
—–New York Times – 10 Icky Things Mary Roach Has (Unfortunately) Brought to My Attention – by Sadie Stein – from sundry MR writings, in case you have not laughed enough from reading her latest
—–Bauman Medical – What is a Pubic Hair Transplant?
—–Youtube – A particularly disturbing transplantation scene from the 1973 film Oh Lucky Man

Song
—–Beyonce – Irreplaceable

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June 14, 2025 · 12:01 am

How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi by Chris Balakrishnan, Matt Wasowski

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Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. – from Wikipedia

Be There and Be Square – Nerd Nite logo

There was a nerd magazine in 2012, a Youtube presence, and occasional podcasts. This is the first Nerd Nite book.

Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.

There are 71 entries, taken from live presentations done by the authors of each piece. (TED talks for those with short attention spans and a need for alcohol?) Nerd Nites have been held in over 100 cities across the globe. The material here covers eleven scientific areas. (see below) All the entries are brief, so if one does not appeal to your mental tastebuds hang on a couple of minutes for the next one, or just skip past.

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Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski – editors – image (from some time ago) from Facebook

You can digest this book a few morsels at a time, and not have to worry about the fate of a fictional hero or put-upon victim. Nope. The heroes here are the scientists, the presenters. One of the great failings of popular science books, IMHO, is the absence of humor, or poor attempts at it. Not here. There are many moments in this one, and humor in almost all of them. That made me very happy. Of the 71 pieces, almost all are very pop-sciency, understandable by most readers, even me. There were only one or two that made my head hurt. It makes an excellent bed-side read. It was an upstairs book for me, to be read before nodding off, hopefully. Sometimes that takes a while. This is not an all-inclusive list of the articles, but lets you know what might be in store in its eleven sections

1 – Creature Features – on weird animals
2 – Mmmm…Brains – strangeness with how we learn and adapt
3 – Bodily Fluids – on things like coping with poo in space. (In space, no one can hear you fart?)
4 – Doing It – like it suggests, on sex, human and non-human, (no, not with each other. Don’t be weird.)
5 – Health and (un)Wellness – human smells (See Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers) – on therapeutic maggots, adolescent medicine, et al
6 – Pathogens and parasites – on birds, bacteria in birds, zombies, the scotch tape test (don’t ask), viruses
7 – Death and Taxes – mass extinction, cancer, algae
8 – Space, the Big and the Beautiful – ignorance, asteroid avoidance and use, life on Europa?, artificial gravity, studying a pristine meteorite, Webb telescope
9 – Tech (High and Low) – GMOs, dating app, human powered flight, cyborging humans, domesticating bacteria, nuclear fusion
10 – Math is fun – a seminal experiment, the math of gossip, the golden ratio, infinity, cryptography
11 – Careers – things removed from dogs, useless inventions, myths about death, animals CSI, amputations, fermentation, flames.

there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.

I would include a list of my favorite articles, but it would wind up as long as the parts list above. But ok, because I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old, the one that made me laugh the most was To Boldy Go: Dealing with Poop and Pee in Space. Apollo 10 astronauts were gifted with the visual, and no doubt olfactory, treat of a turd meandering about in their capsule. This begins a talk about how one handles bodily waste in zero G. Another on bladder control, or the absence thereof, was sidesplitting. Others, on camel spiders and hangovers, generated a fair number of LOLs.

Some were fascinating, like one having to do with making a brain on a chip. (Can it be served with Salsa?) The pieces on bacteria and their importance to human life, heck, to all life on Earth, were fascinating.

There is plenty of weirdness, about diverse forms of milk, the proper use of maggots in healing, zombie parasites, asteroids, artificial gravity, and here we go with another bloody list. Sorry. Take my word, there is a wealth of material here that will broaden your knowledge base, and serve up plenty of conversational hors d’oeuvres for cocktail party chatter.

It worked quite well for me. There is a downside, though. Because all the articles here are very short, one is often left hungry for more. On the other hand, that limitation might provoke you to sate that desire with a bit of extra research, which is always a good idea. So, never mind.

If science piques your curiosity, if learning new and diverse things makes your heart race, or if you like to laugh, then this book is for you. How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi is a very filling read, one nibble at a time.

Review posted – 06/14/25

Publication dates
———-Hardcover – 02/01/24
———-Trade paperback – 11/04/25

I received a hardcover of How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Author/Editor links

Chris Balakrishnan – Program Director at the National Science Foundation – His personal and FB pages
A list of his articles

Matt Wasowski – Director of New Business and Product Development, Events at SAE International – His FB, LinkedIn and Twitter pages

Items of Interest from the authors (really editors)
—–Soundcloud – excerpt – 5:01
—–Birdsong: How the Twittering Set Learns to Speak
—–“Nerd Nite Published a Book!” by Matt Wasowski – Nerd Nite Austin 155, January 2024

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February 21, 2025 · 12:01 am

Seven Deadly Sins by Guy Leschziner

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The ebb and flow of human history is defined by the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath, gluttony, lust, envy, sloth, greed, and pride. From the wrath that has ignited revolutions, to the greed that has re-sculpted the world map. From the sloth that has led to the fall of empires, to the envy that has built them. From the lust that has led to the fall of politicians and the betrayal of national secrets, to the voracious gluttony that has left our environment in ruination, and the pride that has fueled countless conflicts.

Disorders of the brain, of our genes, or other physical conditions, may give rise to gluttony, lust, wrath or pride. The effects of our environment or our upbringing may produce envy, lust or sloth. Crucially, these disorders unmask what is already in us, what already exists in all of us.

William J. Bennet (before he was outed as a compulsive gambler) is reputed to have said “One man’s vice is another man’s virtue.” Pope Gregory, in the sixth century CE, had a different idea, whittling a larger, earlier list down to seven deadly sins. (One wonders if there might be a grander list of [insert number here] bloody annoying sins). I do remember in my Catholic grammar school days Monsignor Marshall giving a sermon on venial sin (non-deadly, but as far as I can recall not presented as a list), in which he offered up the image of Jesus on the cross, and proclaimed that committing a venial sin was like slapping the nailed Christ across the face, albeit not very hard. No Jewish mother ever delivered a more impactful guilt trip.

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Professor Guy Leschziner – image from The Daily Mail

In his prior book, The Man Who Tasted Words, Professor Leschziner looked at places where the lines between our senses appear to be somewhat porous, sense-A leaking into sense-B for some individuals. Hearing colors, seeing sounds, aphasic things like that. He offered an examination of what is considered usual, and where, in the brain, wires may have become crossed. He looked at individuals who reported such experiences and attempted to trace back into the brain where each sense resided, and connected to others.

Here he uses as his starting point the notion of the seven deadly sins, and offers neurological analysis of behaviors commonly regarded as sinful. Bu the Seven Deadly sins seem to divide into two groups, one based on behavior and one based on emotion. Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth and Greed require action to do actual damage, while Pride, Envy and Lust can remain internal. You may think you are better than everyone else, but unless you do something based on that belief, it makes no difference. Ditto Lust and Envy. In the absence of acting on these feelings, no harm, no foul, so the playing field for looking at The Seven is uneven from the start. The subtext is the question of free will. Are we all functional free agents able to determine right from wrong or are we driven by our biology, by what our brains have, by genetic heritage and experiential conditioning, commanded us to do? And how have the behaviors that have defined our species, that have led to our accomplishments as well as our excesses, our failings, served us? Is there a range within which our less than idyllic urges can function healthfully, and outside of which they constitute pathology?

Look at aberrant behavior. Dive in to see exactly which parts of the brain have been harmed, if any. Map behaviors, needs, urges, inclinations to parts of the brain. In a way, this is a bit like explorations of yore, sailing out to see what lay over the horizon, or, fictionally, heading out on a starship to see what the universe may present. He uses several case studies of people who manifest behaviors illustrative of each of the sins, looking for neurological bases. Just as in his examination of cross-sense irregularities in his prior book, Leschziner looks at these patients with an eye toward identifying which parts of the brain bear the most responsibility for the problematic behaviors. These include a man who had had a brain bleed that changed his personality, a woman who was incapable of feeling satisfied no matter how much she ate, a 34yo man with Parkinson’s and an increasing obsession with sex, a woman who believes her totally faithful husband is cheating on her, a young father who sleeps twenty hours a day, a man has delusions of grandeur until multiple abscessed teeth are removed, oh, and the Panama Papers. Centers of emotional concern include the amygdala, the pre-frontal cortex, a warrior gene, and the hypothalamus internally. He looks at the influence of bacteria, viruses, dopamines, and more impacting from the outside. Increasingly, science can indeed offer some answers to the why of behaviors, to a point.

In his novel, Fleur de Lis, Anatole France wrote. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” There are clearly hypocritical societal interpretations of sin, of what sinful behaviors will be tolerated and which will be sanctioned. (Unless, of course, you are a president with a friendly Congress and SCOTUS, in which case, just go ahead with whatever you are doing there on Fifth Avenue.)

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king
And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything – Springsteen – Badlands

And most societies assign moral responsibility to the actor. The question is whether a person is morally responsible for his/her actions or is a slave to, and predetermined by impulses, by one’s underlying and overwhelming personal psychological makeup.

if you believe that the brain is the origin of our personalities and our character traits, the basis of our decisions, be they good or bad, then it is arguable that much of what defines us is outside of our control.

Whether we are all able to make actual free choices or are slaves to our biology, it is clear that society needs to be able to restrict our ability to harm each other, that protecting each other from the worst in people is a reasonable social responsibility.

It is made clear that the drives that we regard as sinful have provided considerable benefit to our evolution as a species. No lust? No reproduction. No envy? No reason to be more productive. No wrath? No defense against attack.

Leaving the question of evil. At first blush is seems that evil serves no obvious Darwinian purpose. On second thought, though, I expect there might be a case made for evil existing as an existential challenge in order to provide a testing ground against which one might measure strength of character and/or the superiority of one’s genes, whether physical or intellectual. In a way, like ice ages, rapid climate change, or a voracious saber-tooth tiger, evil might be seen as a natural force, even if it manifests through human beings.

Leschziner has offered up a provocative, thoughtful brain-candy-ish look at how science, as it advances, keeps finding biological explanations for fraught psychological behaviors. But our impulses and makeup remain what they are. And this is one of the pleasures of reading The Seven Deadly Sins. Learning what a strange creature is homo sapiens, and how we are put together. It seems quite clear that the real original sin is to have been born human.

extrinsic factors – medication, injury, or functional disturbance of the brain – rather than our values can cause us to act in ways that contravene our moral
code. However, that dividing line between what constitutes normality and pathology shifts in the sand. That line is blurred by the prevailing winds of our views on morality, legality, philosophy and medicine.

Review posted – 02/21/25

Publication date – 12/3/24

I received paper and ePub AREs of Seven Deadly Sins from St Martin’s in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages
Profile

Interviews
The Guardian – Science Weekly Podcast – Are we hardwired to commit ‘deadly sins’? – podcast
 – audio – 23:59
—–The Jewish Chronicle – Were the Nazis inherently evil? ByJennifer Lipman
—–Greed, gluttony, sloth…lust! Why you sinned this Christmas by Anna Maxted

Items of Interest from the author
—–Big Issue – The truth is we’re all sinners – it’s how we survive as human beings
—–Next Big Idea Club – A Scientific Examination of the Seven Deadly Sins

My review of the author’s prior book
—–2022 – The Man Who Tasted Words

=======================EXTRA EXTRA STUFF

George Carlin famously distilled the ten commandments down to two.

It seems pretty clear that the seven deadly sins can likewise be slimmed down as well.

Pride. What does this actually mean?
Believing that you are better than other people? What if you are? Faster, stronger, better looking, smarter. Something more than others. Is recognizing your superiority a sin if it is true? The bible seems to maintain that an “Excessive” self-regard is where the line is crossed, but who gets to determine where the line is drawn between factual and excessive self-regard?

But pride does seem to be a pre-condition for other sins. Wrath, or extreme anger, certainly seems an appropriate response to extreme provocation. Hardly a sin. But in order to get into a sinful bit of wrathful behavior it must be excessive. In order for it to be excessive the deliverer of such wrath must hold a higher view of him or herself vis a vis the target than seems justifiable. Soooo, excessive pride, right? So, scratch wrath, and we are down to six.

Gluttony – excessive consumption to the point of waste.
Wiki tells us that In Christianity, it is considered a sin if the excessive desire for food leads to a lack of control over one’s relation with food or harms the body. But if the desire for food entails loss of control over one’s relation to food, where is free will? Isn’t that a definition of pathology? And a pathological behavior is hardly sinful. And just what constitutes excessive desire? If we remove the pathological from this formula, we are left with a person feeling entitled to consume (and I think it is safe to expand the notion of consumption here from food to all things material) as if they are better or more deserving of such things. Which brings us back to pride. Gluttony eats itself into a coma and we are down to five.

Greed
Catholic.com claims that Greed is the disordered love of riches. Hmmm, who gets to define “disordered?” and doesn’t a love of riches include a personal belief that one deserves such riches? Here we go again. It requires excessive self-regard to crave riches at a “disordered” level, no? Greed crushes itself with massive accumulation of stuff and we are left with four.

For these other sins, we delineate the pathologies that shape our thoughts and behaviours, and set them apart from those underlying character traits through their intensity and consequences. For greed, we do no such thing. Yet greed, like the other sins, is perilous in its most extreme forms, causing harm to individuals and wider society alike.

Is Donald Trump, a career criminal, capable of differentiating between right and wrong, or was he so damaged by his genetics and upbringing and injured by his subsequent business training at the feet of his sociopathic father, that he is incapable of telling or even caring about the difference between good and bad? Similar for Elon Musk. How great would it be were Leschziner able to do a detailed examination of both men’s brains. Because if they are capable of discriminating right from wrong, then we have a pretty clear proof that there are indeed forces of evil loose in the world, which I expect would come as a great shock to few but the most ardent atheists.

Lust and envy seem sub-elements of the same thing, wanting something that someone else has. Surely lust between two unattached people is no sin. It is only when one person (at least) is already attached that lust becomes problematic (presuming a monogamous baseline). So, wanting something (someone) who/which is not yours, but which is attached to, or is owned by someone else. So what? We all want stuff we do not or cannot have. How is this a sin? It seem to me that having feelings like lust and envy is completely natural. It is only when we take actions to effectuate such the desire, to the detriment of others that the sin element is realized. Down to two.

According to Wikipedia Sloth is the most difficult sin to define and credit as sin, since it refers to an assortment of ideas, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and conditional states. One definition is a habitual disinclination to exertion, or laziness. Willful laziness is surely not cool. Just ask any married person whose partner declines to hold up his or her end, opting instead to watch football or soaps. This one seems likely to be based in behavior, as the sinner here engages in slothful behavior, doesn’t just feel…um…slothful. I could certainly see many real-world examples, beyond couch potato chore-avoiders. There are many people who cannot be bothered exercising the intelligence they were born with to examine themselves, their community, public issues, religious beliefs, or much of anything. It may well be that they believe themselves not up to such analysis, and maybe they are not. But for many, if not all, it does seem that the disinclination rests on a belief that they are too good to have to bother with such things, that they have it all figured out and need look no further than the perimeter of their personal bubble…so…excessive pride. And poof! We are down to one.

Pride goeth before the fall, and, apparently every other form of sinfulness. There is only one deadly sin, excessive self-regard, which feeds all the others, and becomes problematic only when put into actual real-world action.

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September 27, 2024 · 12:01 am

Alien Earths by Lisa Kaltenegger

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Before I started searching for life in the cosmos, I just assumed scientists knew how it started on Earth. We don’t.

…it is sobering to realize that for most of Earth’s history, humans would not have been able to survive on this planet. If we could rewind Earth’s history and start again, it seems unlikely that Earth would produce humans again. A planet with different starting conditions and paths of evolution has no obligation to support life similar to Earth’s, let alone curious humans.

The truth is out there.

Are we alone in the cosmos? The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life somewhere else, you realize it is not so straightforward.

At least until the age of permanent haze across the planet, we have always had the stars in our consciousness. Since the second century AD we have had stories about alien worlds. Since Galileo we have been able to see other worlds in the cosmos. A 1792 novel by Voltaire tells of an alien encounter. Concern about extraterrestrial locales has been a part of human consciousness ever since. The concern is certainly fed by the history of strange human invaders helping themselves to land distant from their home soil.

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Lisa Kaltenegger – image from The Guardian – shot by Naomi Haussmann/The Observer

The interest in things alien certainly kicked up in the twentieth century. Many of us grew up in the space age, witness to the first “Beep-Beep” from orbit, the first peopled orbiters, rapt in front of our televisions when mankind first set foot on the moon. Part of this experience is to be awash in the science fiction of our own and earlier ages, dreaming of strange other-world societies, fearful of invasion, eager to learn the lessons of advanced technology. Some were even impressed and excited enough by the technology and the optimism of the age to begin college careers with the dream of becoming aeronautical engineers, and designing some of the hardware of the future.

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Earthrise – image from Wikipedia

But so much of this was based on fantasy, (including that engineering thing) limited to imagining what might exist out there. Even the early observations of other planets in the solar system generated fantasies in addition to scientific elucidation. But in 1995 scientists discovered the first two exoplanets, and new discoveries are now a nearly daily event. Today, because of the major advances that we have made in telescope technology, we are able to see to the far ends of the universe. Enter Lisa Kaltenegger, founder and head of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University

I spend my days trying to figure out how to find life on alien worlds, working with teams of tenacious scientists who, with much creativity and enthusiasm and, often, little sleep but lots of coffee, are building the uniquely specialized toolkit for our search.

In studying what we have seen, it has become possible to detect stars that have planets around them. In fact, most stars have company. The way this is detected is to measure “wobble” in the light being observed from distant places. As if you were looking at a bright light and someone threw a ball across your field of view. The measured light would change and you could tell that something had been there. Keep looking to see if it repeats. If it does, then you probably have a planet orbiting that star. (or an annoying neighbor tossing something back and forth in front of you) Keep pointing the James Webb Space Telescope (the state of the art in telescopy today) to more and more locations in space. And discover more and more planets.

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Jupiter – image from Exoplanet Travel Bureau – NASA

Kaltenegger has been looking into the reality of other worlds her entire career, and in doing so, has advanced our knowledge base considerably. She begins this book with a brief visit to an other planet, one that is very different from ours, a star-facing world that has portions in eternal day, night, and dusk, and local life adapted to the local venues, just to get things started on what we might expect out there, just to challenge our assumptions.

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HD 40307g – A Super Earth – image from Exoplanet Travel Bureau – NASA

She follows with a history of Mother Earth, noting major stops along the evolution of our favorite place. She notes how life might have formed, when, and how that event altered the atmosphere and even the color of our atmosphere. The sequence is important, as her discussion of our exoplanet dreams demonstrates that we are a prisoner of time. What we see with our telescopes (and eyes) arrived here on light, and light must travel at or below the universal speed limit. (a leisurely 186,282 miles per second) So, whatever we see from even a nearby star/planet system originated tens or hundreds of years go, or even billions for our more distant neighbors. Anything residents of out there might have seen of us (really only since we started sending signals into the ether maybe a hundred years ago) is quite dated relative to who and what we are today. Absent the invention of a Warp Drive of some sort, we are doomed to be always too far away in years and miles from other intelligent species. Well, maybe.

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Venus – image from Exoplanet Travel Bureau – NASA

It is possible, I suppose, for a civilization with massive resources to send a desperate one-way mission to save their species from hundreds of light years away. It is unlikely that any visitors from such distant realms would be making reports home. But this need not necessarily apply to all possible visitors. It appears that there are plenty of possible planets within a few light years of us that might present some interplanetary possibilities.

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Mars – image from Exoplanet Travel Bureau – NASA

Kaltenegger delves into the nearer-earth planets, looks at their characteristics, and offers explanations as to their suitability for life. She looks at probable communication issues should we ever come across an ET, suggesting it might be the equivalent of humans attempting to communicate with a jellyfish

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Grand Tour – image from Exoplanet Travel Bureau – NASA

Kaltenegger and her team design computer simulations, based on the hard work of examining concrete materials, inert and biologic, and putting that intel into a database. Check the signature spectrum of every new world and compare it with the growing list of catalogued items.

Today, solving the puzzle of these new worlds requires using a wide range of tools like cultivating colorful biota in my biology lab, melting and tracing the glow from tiny lava worlds in my geology lab, developing strings of codes on my computer, and reaching back into the long history of Earth’s evolution for clues on what to search for. With our own Earth as our laboratory, we can test new ideas and counter challenges with data, inspired curiosity, and vision. This interaction between radiant photons, swirling gas, clouds, and dynamic surfaces driven by the strings of code within my computer, creates a symphony of possible worlds—some vibrant with a vast diversity of life, others desolate and barren.

She notes the core need of life-sustaining planets is to be rocky. Sorry, Jupiter, no gas giants need apply (but their moons might). They also need to be within a certain range of the stars they circle, the so-called “Goldilocks Zone,” not so close as to be too hot nor so distant as to be too cold, and they need to show the presence of key life-sustaining elements.

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Europa – image from Exoplanet Travel Bureau – NASA

Kaltenegger offers readers info on some topics likely to be new to most of us, Stellar Corpses, for example, warm ice, the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, the Great Silence, tardigraves, and plenty more. All of these are explained clearly and simply. It is as if the author is telling us: This is what we have learned. This is what we expect. This is how we go about gathering information, fusing our fields of expertise, learning more, solving the mysteries that the data present. This is our understanding of what is possible. This is our plan for looking further and farther.

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Trappist – image from Exoplanet Travel Bureau – NASA

Alien Earths may not point to an actual catalog of life-sustaining exoplanets, but it does offer an accessible pop-science portrait of the current state of the art in the search. This galactic age of exploration has been ongoing for some time, getting a jolt from the discovery of other worlds. It has advanced to where we are now looking for (and expecting to find) evidence of life on other planets. It is likely that what we find will be pretty basic, single-cell critters, maybe even plant life. And it will probably take a good long time before we can move up to the final phase of the game, finding intelligent life. The time scale for any potential interaction is likely to be considerable, but who knows? The universe is full of surprises among its billions and billions of stars.

So far, despite wild claims to the contrary, we have not found any definitive proof of life on other planets. Until we do, we will continue to improve our toolkit and look for signs of alien life the hard way: searching planet by planet and moon by moon.

Review posted – 09/27/24

Publication date – 04/16/24

I received an ARE of Alien Earths from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Interviews
—–We live in a golden time of exploration’: astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger on the hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life by Emma Beddington
—–Chris Evans Breakfast Show – Lisa Kaltenegger: Is There Alien Life? – Video – 25:39
—–StarTalk – Distant Aliens and Space Dinosaurs – with Neil DeGrasse Tyson – audio – 50:03
—–StarTalk – Astrophysicists Discuss Whether JWST Discovered Alien Exoplanets – Neil DeGrasse Tyson – video – 48:58

Item of Interest from the author
—–Lisa Kaltenegger. On Looking for Signs of life – Video – 10:36

Items of Interest
—–NASA – Jet Propulsion Laboratory – Visions of the Future
—–The Carl Sagan Institute
—–Unilad.com – NASA discovered -planet bigger than Earth with a ‘gas that is only produced by life’

Song
—–Monty Python’s Galaxy Song

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June 14, 2024 · 12:01 am

How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi – edited by Chris Balakrishnan, Matt Wasowski

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Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. – from Wikipedia

Be There and Be Square – Nerd Nite logo

There was a nerd magazine in 2012, a Youtube presence, and occasional podcasts. This is the first Nerd Nite book.

Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.

There are 71 entries, taken from live presentations done by the authors of each piece. (TED talks for those with short attention spans and a need for alcohol?) Nerd Nites have been held in over 100 cities across the globe. The material here covers eleven scientific areas. (see below) All the entries are brief, so if one does not appeal to your mental tastebuds hang on a couple of minutes for the next one, or just skip past.

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Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski – editors – image (from some time ago) from Facebook

You can digest this book a few morsels at a time, and not have to worry about the fate of a fictional hero or put-upon victim. Nope. The heroes here are the scientists, the presenters. One of the great failings of popular science books, IMHO, is the absence of humor, or poor attempts at it. Not here. There are many moments in this one, and humor in almost all of them. That made me very happy. Of the 71 pieces, almost all are very pop-sciency, understandable by most readers, even me. There were only one or two that made my head hurt. It makes an excellent bed-side read. It was an upstairs book for me, to be read before nodding off, hopefully. Sometimes that takes a while. This is not an all-inclusive list of the articles, but lets you know what might be in store in its eleven sections

1 – Creature Features – on weird animals
2 – Mmmm…Brains – strangeness with how we learn and adapt
3 – Bodily Fluids – on things like coping with poo in space. (In space, no one can hear you fart?)
4 – Doing It – like it suggests, on sex, human and non-human, (no, not with each other. Don’t be weird.)
5 – Health and (un)Wellness – human smells (See Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers) – on therapeutic maggots, adolescent medicine, et al
6 – Pathogens and parasites – on birds, bacteria in birds, zombies, the scotch tape test (don’t ask), viruses
7 – Death and Taxes – mass extinction, cancer, algae
8 – Space, the Big and the Beautiful – ignorance, asteroid avoidance and use, life on Europa?, artificial gravity, studying a pristine meteorite, Webb telescope
9 – Tech (High and Low) – GMOs, dating app, human powered flight, cyborging humans, domesticating bacteria, nuclear fusion
10 – Math is fun – a seminal experiment, the math of gossip, the golden ratio, infinity, cryptography
11 – Careers – things removed from dogs, useless inventions, myths about death, animals CSI, amputations, fermentation, flames.

there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.

I would include a list of my favorite articles, but it would wind up as long as the parts list above. But ok, because I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old, the one that made me laugh the most was To Boldy Go: Dealing with Poop and Pee in Space. Apollo 10 astronauts were gifted with the visual, and no doubt olfactory, treat of a turd meandering about in their capsule. This begins a talk about how one handles bodily waste in zero G. Another on bladder control, or the absence thereof, was sidesplitting. Others, on camel spiders and hangovers, generated a fair number of LOLs.

Some were fascinating, like one having to do with making a brain on a chip. (Can it be served with Salsa?) The pieces on bacteria and their importance to human life, heck, to all life on Earth, were fascinating.

There is plenty of weirdness, about diverse forms of milk, the proper use of maggots in healing, zombie parasites, asteroids, artificial gravity, and here we go with another bloody list. Sorry. Take my word, there is a wealth of material here that will broaden your knowledge base, and serve up plenty of conversational hors d’oeuvres for cocktail party chatter.

It worked quite well for me. There is a downside, though. Because all the articles here are very short, one is often left hungry for more. On the other hand, that limitation might provoke you to sate that desire with a bit of extra research, which is always a good idea. So, never mind.

If science piques your curiosity, if learning new and diverse things makes your heart race, or if you like to laugh, then this book is for you. How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi is a very filling read, one nibble at a time.

Review posted – 06/14/24

Publication date – 02/01/24

I received a hardcover of How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

======================================EXTRA STUFF

Author/Editor links

Chris Balakrishnan – Program Director at the National Science Foundation – His personal and FB pages
A list of his articles

Matt Wasowski – Director of New Business and Product Development, Events at SAE International – His FB, LinkedIn and Twitter pages

Items of Interest from the authors (really editors)
—–Soundcloud – excerpt – 5:01
—–Birdsong: How the Twittering Set Learns to Speak
—–“Nerd Nite Published a Book!” by Matt Wasowski – Nerd Nite Austin 155, January 2024

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March 22, 2024 · 12:01 am

The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare

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…deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and in many ways, they actually prefer to share habitat with us. All across North America, as in many other parts of the world, we exist in intimate proximity to deer.

The FAA considers white-tailed deer more hazardous to U.S. civil aircraft than any other animal.

Many images might pop to mind when we think about deer. I am sorry to say that the first one in my tiny mind is the sad vision of road kill. The second is the sheer joy of spotting wild deer in woods, or yards, or, more grandly, in national parks, whether the white-tail native to my part of the world, the mule deer and caribou more prevalent in the west, and even moose. I cannot say I have seen reindeer in the wild, unfortunately. Many visits to the Bronx Zoo introduced me to a much wider range of cervids, the family to which deer belong, including the diminutive muntjacs.

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Erika Howsare – image from her site

Erika Howsare has had more of a connection to deer than, I expect, most of us. She grew up in western Pennsylvania in a family that hunted. In fact, the Monday after Thanksgiving is an unofficial holiday in our state, with most schools, and many businesses closed due to expected high absenteeism. This is one of many foci of interaction between deer and people.

I’d had an inkling, even before writing the book proposal, that deer were involved in all manner of controversies, contradictions, and human strivings. That was what got me interested in them. But I didn’t know too many specifics. When I started researching, one of the first things I did was to set up news alerts on deer and several other related terms.

Within a week, I had a rough outline of some of the major roles deer play in our world. They are victims; they are pests; they are something to hunt as well as something to study and protect. They are the targets of culling operations and the objects of sentimental love. They are trophies and intruders. It was all there in the news cycle. – From the Lithub article

Thankfully, Howsare, a published poet, offers a lot more than the daily deer chyron.

I did start the book from a fairly cerebral place where I thought, “Oh yeah, great subject. Like, this will bring up all kinds of great questions, and I’ll be able to go down all these roads in terms of the research and make these points, and it’s gonna be a really great opportunity to dig into these intellectual questions.”
What I wasn’t expecting was how much it would change me as a person. – from the Phoebe Journal interview

And a wondrous opportunity it proved. You will learn a lot about the human/deer connection, and a bit about deer behavior as well.

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White tailed deer – image from PennVet – University of Pennsylvania

One thing to consider is just how long deer and humans have been interacting. Pretty much as long as there have been people, judging by the content of ancient cave art. They appear in all cultures, and are a rich presence in mythology worldwide. As our first-hand experience of deer is usually liminal, many have come to see deer as ambassadors of the wild world, crossing from theirs to ours, and maybe offering a route away from the world of living humans. Of course, for many of us there is an UR deer image that has been burned into our brains. Really, can you name any other deer this side of Santa’s team?

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Bambi – image from Disney via KRCA.com

They are beautiful and offer us an image of wildland innocence. But for many they have become pestiferous. Consider having spent months planting and tending your beautiful back yard garden, only to wake one day to find that real-life Bambis and their kin have laid waste to all your work. There is also the carnage caused not just to deer but to people and their vehicles from collisions with deer. There are folks whose job it is to collect the bodies. Howsare spent time with one of them.

Deer have been a crucial source of food for people across the millennia, but also of a wide range of materials. Howsare gets trained in earth skills to find out how to make buckskin, and many other useful items formed from deer parts.

We usually think of reintroduction of wildlife having to do with trout, or other finned creatures. You may have heard of attempts to reintroduce predators, like wolves in Yellowstone. But the largest and most successful reintroduction in US history occurred in the early 20th century when deer, which had been driven near to extinction, were reintroduced in many parts of the nation.

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Sweet Tooth – image from Netflix via BBC

Ok, this was not at all included in the book but I kinda hoped it would gain at least a mention, as it does speak to the closeness of our species.

Factlets abound. Did you know that deer can suffer from a chronic, deadly disease that we usually associate with cattle, chronic wasting disease? Or that maybe the notion of adorning rulers with crowns was a way of imitating the stag rack? You will gain an appreciation for the use of deer-based imagery in the film Get Out. There are plenty more.

One of the main points to be gained is seeing how deer are actually quite adaptable, and have managed to carve out an ecological niche at the perimeters of human population.

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Moose – image rom Britannica

A survey course on cervid-sapiens connection makes for an entertaining, informative read on its own. But Howsare incorporates a personal journey into her narrative. Never a hunter, at least not one who shoots anything, she has enough personal connection to folks who do, relations, to want to gain a better understanding of the hunting culture and the rationales of those who kill deer. She looks at her own feelings about deer and hunting. Not all who hunt actually shoot. Hunting can be a group activity, with a diversity of roles, very reminiscent of our prehistoric ancestors. One very appealing element of this learning curve for Howsare was becoming more comfortable with being still, settling into a place and letting herself experience the environment, the moment, fully, a form of meditation almost.

She looks at some of the outrages associate with hunting as well. Like releasing or breeding deer in fenced areas to be killed by people fond of killing things, but not much interested in doing all the research and preparation that serious hunters undertake. Think Dick Cheney hunting quail.

My only gripe about the book is a petty one. I find that science/nature books always go down easier when the information is spiced with a bit of humor. No danger of that here. So, past my personal preferences, The Age of Deer is an easy thumbs up. You will learn a lot and gain a far greater understanding of the relationship between humans and cervids throughout history and our interactions today, finding yourself saying, whether aloud or internally, “I never knew that.”

In the Anthropocene, it seems that far too much of humanity has assumed the position of the prototypical you-know-what frozen in place as the headlights of global doom approach at increasing speed. Deer, at least, have an excuse for such behavior, as their woodland-creature-instinct, however misguided it might be on a paved road, is to become very still so an approaching predator might not see or hear them. Given their abundance on the planet, it is a strategy that has worked out well for them, despite the roadside carnage, as deer remain the last large wild animal in most places. The roaches and rats will not be alone after we are gone. Deer, icons of woodland beauty, are adaptable. They are survivors, and will be keeping them company.

If the American project was, in part, to make a pastoral landscape out of a wilderness, deer benefited from that project in a cultural sleight of hand. We thought of them as part of the wild, but we had misconceived them. Their secret was that they, like us—like squirrels, corn, apple trees, clover, ands sparrows—would flourish in our human garden.

Review posted – 03/22/24

Publication date – 01/20/24

I received a hardcover of The Age of Deer from Catapult in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Catapult
ERIKA HOWSARE holds an MFA in literary arts from Brown University and has published two books of poetry. She also worked in local journalism for twenty years, covering culture and environmental issues. She teaches writing and contributes reviews and essays to various national outlets. A native of Pennsylvania, she lives in rural Virginia.

Interviews
—–Poets & Writers – Ten Questions for Erika Howsare by staff
—–Flyleaf Books – Erika Howsare presents THE AGE OF DEER -Howsare reads from the book then takes questions – the sound quality is poor
—–Phoebe Journal – Hungry Deer and Pissed off Gardeners: An Interview with Erika Howsare by Ashlen Renner

Items of Interest from the author
—–The Atlantic – An Incurable Disease Is Coming for Deer – an excerpt – but requires a subscription
—–Orion – Skin to Skin with a Deer – excerpt
—–Virginia Audio Collective – If You See a Deer – a four-episode companion podcast
—–Lithub – Erika Howsare on Finding Inspiration in Headlines

Items of Interest
—–Be vewy, vewy quiet. – Mister Fudd may be hunting a different species, but his approach applies to deer as well
My review of Stephen Graham Jones’s – The Only Good Indian – a wronged elk on the warpath
—–My review of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s – The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World
—–Gutenberg – The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

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November 17, 2023 · 12:01 am

A Taste for Poison by Neil Bradbury

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… a chemical is not intrinsically, good or bad, it’s just a chemical. What differs is the intent with which the chemical is used: either to preserve life – – or to take it.

Within the annals of crime, murder holds a particularly heinous position. And among the means of killing, fewer methods generate such a peculiar morbid fascination as poison. Compared with hot blooded spur of the moment, murderers, the planned and cold calculations involved in murder by poison, perfectly fit the legal term malice aforethought. Poisoning requires planning and knowledge of the victim’s habits. It requires consideration of how the poison will be administered. Some poisons can kill within minutes; others can be given slowly, over time, gradually accumulating in the body, but still leading inexorably to the victim’s death.

If you are a fan of True Crime, if you are a fan of TV procedurals, if you are a fan of murder mysteries, A Taste for Poison is a must read. You will be much better prepared to keep up with the medical examiners in all venues when you can recognize the victims’ symptoms, at least if the book or show gives you a chance to try figuring it out for yourself before the truth is revealed.

Neil Bradbury grew up fascinated by murder mysteries and poisons. He is a graduate of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the University of Wales School of Medicine, with degrees in Biochemistry and Medical Biochemistry. Although he grew up in the UK, he now lives and works in Illinois, USA, where he’s a scientist, teacher and writer. He also gets to play with nasty chemicals every day (during scientific experiments of course). – from his site

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Dr. Neil Bradbury – image from his site

He has carefully mixed his interests and profession to produce a fun, informative look at poisons through the ages. One might wonder if he wrote the book using a poison pen. I wouldn’t, but some might. He includes looks at the following: Aconite, Arsenic, Atropine, Chlorine, Cyanide, Digoxin, Insulin, Potassium, Polonium, Ricin, and Strychnine. None would qualify as pretty, although cyanide does gift its victims with a lovely ruddy complexion.

One of the primary themes of the book is that poisoning is the misapplication of healing pharma to dark purpose. Think water. Necessary for human survival, comes in many forms. These days it forms a base layer for a surface layer of every imaginable flavor, nifty literary tool too, right? But water-boarding, or tsunami? Not so much.

Bradbury goes through the medically helpful aspects of multiple poisons, then shows how they have been used to kill, who used them, on whom they were used, how the crimes were figured out and prosecuted, and what happened to the poisoners. In doing this he provides us with a history of when it became possible to diagnose (detect) each poison as a murder weapon, (of particular interest in historical mystery dramas) and details the biology of how each works its dark arts inside the human body.

Sadly, for those with a poison-based homicidal urge, the subjects of Bradbury’s reporting, for the most part, were tried and convicted. And today, in the absence of governments protecting state-sponsored poisoners, very few such crimes go unpunished.

You are unlikely to recognize the names here, at least the names of the killers, attempted killers, and victims, but as with many in the history of medicine, that is not unusual. Nevertheless, the details are here, as many crimes are examined.

Bradbury offers a fun collection of historical odds and ends, like how the telegraph, newly in service, foiled the escape of one poisoner. Or how one particular poison may have been at the root of vampire mythology, or how strychnine was used as a pick-me-up in the early 20th century, or the surprising cost of manufacturing polonium, and even a new take on some Van Goh masterpieces.

The only downside for me was that I tended to get a bit lost in the sections detailing the biological and chemical workings of these substances inside the body. I would not say they are extremely technical. I would say that I was always complete garbage at chemistry, and not a whole lot better at biology, so may have nurtured a disaffection that is unlikely to affect you the same way. There is some humor in the book, but not a whole lot.

Still, As a consumer of a considerable amount of crime-based entertainment, I was particularly drawn to this book. The how-dun-it often is as important as the who, and by detailing victim symptomology as well as poisoner and investigator methodologies, we can all get a greater appreciation for the challenges entailed. I may not have had the right chemical receptors for the scientific details, but there is plenty of intel in here that will enhance your engagement in crime shows, and teach you a bit about the history of these substances, many of which exist in common parlance. So, it may or may not be for you. I guess you will just have to pick your poison.

…in France in the late 1600s, the effectiveness of arsenic and disposing of wealthy relatives who had the temerity to remain alive, was so widespread that it gained the name Poudre de succession, or “inheritance powder.”

Review posted – 11/17/23

Publication dates
———-Hardcover – 2/1/22
———-Trade paperback – 8/15/23

I received a paperback of A Taste for Poison from Griffin in return for a fair review. I am happy to report that the tingling feeling in my hands, which began after I first began to read the book, soon abated. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on my site, Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal and Goodreads author pages

Alas, as far as I was able to find, Bradbury’s on-line presence is slender, limited to his personal site and GR author page. Maybe laying low after having taken care of some personal rivals?

Interview
—–Murder & MayhemTalking Poisons with Dr. Neil Bradbury

Items of Interest
—–Listverse – Top 10 Remorseless Poisoners That History Almost Forgot by Radu Alexander
—–Philadelphia Inquirer –A Pennsylvania nurse is accused of killing 4 patients, injuring others with high doses of insulin by Bruce Shipkowski and Brooke Schultz, Associated Press
—–Wikipedia – List of Poisonings through history – from 399 BC to 2021 – a nifty list

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October 20, 2023 · 12:01 am

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Maureen Seaberg

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I had no idea my experience was so different from other people’s. Now I’m convinced that everybody has their own unique holographic experience of the sensory world.”

Synesthesia has been incorrectly defined, in my humble opinion, as “crossed wires in the brain” or “mixed-up senses.” In fact, synesthetes have the same primary response to a stimulus as neurotypical people do. If the numeral 5 appears in newsprint, I know that it is black on a white (well, somewhat beige) background. However, simultaneously, I see navy blue around that number and above that number it, like an aura. Therefore, I’ve created what I believe is a much better definition: Synesthesias are traits in which a sensory stimulus yields the expected sensory response plus one or more additional sensory responses.

For myself, I have always been on the lower end of the taste/smell sensitivity bell curve, presuming there to be such a thing. I have always attributed this to the DNA luck of the draw. Some of it, though, might be a product of my homemaker mother’s abilities as a cook. There were a few things she made that were mouth-watering, but for the most part, it was said of Mom that she had a close relationship with Chef-Boyardee. Thus, it is no shock that my appreciation for cuisine exists in a narrow range. As smell is closely associated with taste, the two have traveled this low experiential road together. But maybe there is some hope for me and for folks with limitations like mine Maybe there are ways to expand the range of flavors and aromas we can detect and enjoy. (Make real friends with our taste buds?) That possibility is one of the points that Maureen Seaberg makes in her new book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made. There are several others.

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Maureen Seaberg – image from Amazon

Seaberg is a synesthete, gifted with abilities beyond the average. Even within that, she is a tetrachromat, proud possessor of four sets of visual cones to our usual kit of three. She has used this extra-sightedness to help a cosmetics firm produce more pleasing hues. She is also a mirror-touch synesthete, which means that she can feel your pain, really.

Patricia Lynne Duffy, a member of the United Nations Staff 1 Percent for Development Fund committee, was safely ensconced in her Manhattan office, but when she read the proposals before her, she felt the pain of the world’s most fragile people.

She is the author of multiple books on her personal experience as a sensory anomaly, and others looking into the science of what makes us different. Among these are Tasting the Universe, Struck by Genius, and The Synesthesia Experience.

While highlighting the differences in human capacity, Seaberg argues that we are all potentially synesthetes, but that our acculturation has defined limits to what our senses regard as the human range. She says we are capable of much more, and cites sundry studies to show our surprising range. One shows that we can detect light down to a single photon.

Is it that we are all, or most of us, or many of us, capable of experiencing, sensing much more of our world that we have to date? Are these tools in our toolbox that we have merely never been trained to use? Seaberg uses the examples of many people who are either synesthetes, or who have naturally enhanced capabilities to argue that we could be experiencing much, much more than we do. She also notes people who, through traumatic events, (a mugging in one case) have subsequently displayed enhanced capacities, supporting the notion that we all may have considerable untapped potential. One surprising element here is her reporting on the benefits of the Montessori teaching method, which encourages multi-sensate learning.

She suggests we incorporate into our psychological and medical frameworks the notion of a Perception Quotient, or PQ. Just as we have for our rational processing with the intelligence Quotient, or IQ, and EQ for Emotional abilities.

Seaberg spends some time with the question of transhumanism, the notion that people can evolve beyond our current biological constraints by incorporating connections (merging?) with technology. She argues against such, contending that our realized and latent capacities can take us a lot further than we have gone, without the need for electronic enhancement.

There’s plenty of evidence that humans are adapting to, even passing, machines by using their senses. Just look at the mind-meld young people have with their personal devices and the manual deftness with which they use them compared to older generations. Maybe the singularity moves in two directions, and we meet somewhere along the way. There’s a human-based component not yet considered. And since we’ve recently learned that human sensory potentials are far greater than we knew, perhaps we have a little more time to think about the value of being Homo sapiens.

In a related vein, she notes that there are mirror-touch synesthetes who blur those lines.

A very small subset of the neurological outliers known as mirror-touch synesthetes have extreme empathy for machines. They are sometimes able to feel the mechanisms in their own sensitive bodies. I call them machine synesthetes or machine empaths.

She touches on some even more esoteric subjects, like the remote viewing program sponsored by the USA military from the 1970s into the 1990s, and the possibility of consciousness permeating more of our biosphere than we may have realized.

If you are looking for a how-to re expanding your sensate horizons I would look elsewhere. The prompts offered for that here are introductory at best. Seaberg does offer some other places to go for that. This is more a treatise on the possibility of capacity expansion, not a manual for expanding ourselves.

If we are indeed the architects of our own reality, it is clear that some of us have been gifted with a superior toolkit for interpreting what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, in that construction process. Maybe for the rest of us there are some tools in the basement or shed that have been gathering dust all our lives, tools that can be cleaned off, greased up, and maybe even powered up. It may or may not be a widespread opportunity, but it is certainly a hopeful and very interesting one. In trying to make sense of senses, Maureen Seaberg has written a fascinating, accessible work on human possibility that should stimulate your curiosity, whether or not you experience collateral sounds, colors, scents or other incomings. Checking this book out would definitely be sensible.

“We genuinely experience scent as the emotion we have attached to it,” one sensory educator said. “Our hearts lift at the aroma that reminds us of a happy day at the beach, or our hearts break a little when we smell the aroma of a long-dead relative’s soap.”

Review posted – 10/20/23

Publication date – 8/8/23

I received an ARE of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages

Interviews
—–Audacy – The Science of Synesthesia and Super Sensors – audio – 30 min
—–PSIfest 2023 – Curious Realm – Maureen Seaberg @PSIFest 2023 – Video – 27:01

Songs/Music
—–Rollingstones – She’s a Rainbow – maybe another form of synesthesia

Items of Interest
—–Untapped Cities – THE SECRET COLORS OF NYC: HOW MAC’S NEW COLOR TALENT SEES THE CITY DIFFERENTLY THAN YOU by Owen Shapiro
—–Charlotte McConaghy’s wonderful novel, Once There Were Wolves, offers a fictional look at someone with mirror-touch synesthesia
—–Wiki – Montessori Method
—–Wiki – The Stargate Project – remote viewing by the military
—–Wiki – Transhumanism
—–Optimax – Tetrachromacy: Do you have superhuman vision?

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September 15, 2023 · 12:01 am

Knowing What We Know by Simon Winchester

book cover

The arc of every human life is measured out by the ceaseless accumulation of knowledge. Requiring only awareness and yet always welcoming curiosity, the transmission of knowledge into the sentient mind is an uninterruptible process of ebbings and flowings. There are times—in infancy, or when at school in youth—during which the rate at which knowledge is gathered becomes intense and urgent, a welling tsunami of information ever ready for the mind to process. At other times, maybe later in life, the inbound knowledge drifts in more slowly, set to adhere and thicken like moss, or a patina.

Digital amnesia, for example, is now widely agreed to be a phenomenon, a thing. It is a condition that posits that words looked up online are often forgotten almost as quickly as they are acquired. Information that we know can easily be Googled needs never be known, or if it is known, needs never to be retained. Telephone numbers, for example, once so often known and the more cherished ones remembered, need not even be known at all now. The name of the person to be called is all that is required. The name is hyperlinked to the phone’s dialing system and merely touching the name gets the distant phone to ring.

Epistemology is one of those ten-dollar words that make my brain hurt, particularly as its meaning is not made obvious through common Latin roots. Speaking it aloud could certainly lead one astray. It is neither the study of urine, excessive alcohol consumption, nor anger, but the study of knowledge. Winchester spends some time trying to define just what knowledge is. If you think it is something consisting of 100% verified, tested, water-tight, bullet-proof factoids, you will be disappointed. Simon traces human thought on this back to the ancients and adopts, as the world has, the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” (JTB) So, not the same thing as facts, information, or truth. Squishier. But still fascinating. He tracks advances in the Theory of Knowledge (TOK), (sadly, nothing to do with the media platform) including the latest thinking.

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Simon Winchester – image from Kepler’s Literary Foundation

The sub-title of the book bears noting, The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic. Once having established what knowledge actually is, Winchester goes on to write about the means by which that knowledge was dispersed. He goes back to the development of the earliest known languages, marking the bridge where pictographic symbols were succeeded by letters representing sounds. It is fascinating to note that the use of written language arose more or less at the same time across the planet, across cultures that had had no contact with each other.

Once languages existed, schools would be needed, to sustain cultures and communities. The earliest known examples sprang up in Iraq and China. So, the means of transmission, beyond the family, was teachers. Some things never change. Winchester notes the considerable similarities between ancient and modern education. And some modern differences.

A Chinese school final exam is to the American SAT as Go is to Go Fish.

He touches on the greatest hits of educational advancement. Gutenberg democratized, to a considerable degree, the acquisition of knowledge, or at least access to books, with his seminal press. A huge, big deal, as regular folks could now read materials that previously been reserved for the clergy and educated classes.

Another advancement earning considerable attention is the library, humanity’s storehouse of knowledge. Winchester goes into some detail on different sorts of libraries and how they spread. There are many fun bits of intel here, such as on the shift from scrolls to folded paper for books, and on an eccentric indexing system used in one notable private English library.

…knowledge has long been seen as far too precious to treat with casual disregard. It needs to not just be kept, but kept safe and secure. For almost as long as language, especially written language, has existed, we have sought ways of collecting, storing, and safeguarding this endlessly swelling body of what is known, of what has been learned, and of all that can then be taught, discussed, challenged, debated, and decided. The most widely recognized and most ancient means of storage is the institution that derives its English name from the Latin word for the inner bark of a tree, on which early works were said to have been written. The Latin word for this bark is liber; by way of centuries of etymological convolution, the English word, used since Chaucer’s time, is, of course, the library.

Each revolution in how knowledge was transmitted was revolutionary well beyond the specific hardware upgrade. It was not just readily printable books that revolutionized the world. Printing presses were used to print newspapers as well, ushering in a world of regular information delivery to great numbers of people. Of course, newspapers have always been used as a source of propaganda and misinformation in addition to true reporting of actual events. So the capacity for mayhem grew with the capacity for a growth in awareness.

Why…did the transmission of knowledges that seem so potentially beneficial to us all get to be so drowned out by the noise of commerce and nationalism and war?

Encyclopedias come in for a close look. They were seen as the informational bible for large numbers of people, as they sought to offer buyers all the information currently known. He covers several of the major such products, including those beyond the Encyclopedia Britannica. (I remember when I was a child in the 1950s Bronx, our local supermarket, an A&P, sold the Frunk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia volume by volume. Hardcover, very thin paper, occasional illustrations. I remember looking forward to the arrival of every single one of the twenty-five volumes. There would always be something of interest.) Such publications continued the work of Gutenberg, making potentially vast amounts of information available to regular people.

Further advances in info transmission were to come. The telegraph shrunk the world of the 19th century the way the internet has done today. Radio broadcasting had a great impact. We learn much about the early days of the BBC, and its Japanese counterpart, including the impact those institutions had on the education, and attitudes toward education, of their respective populations. This was particularly eye-opening.

The middle of the 20th century saw major advances. Computer chips revolutionized everything. Now we can access information on most things instantly, or close enough to it, using a hand-held device. And in place of bookshelf-filling volumes we can check with Wikipedia for information on almost anything.

But knowledge is a feeder to a larger question. Whither wisdom?

What can and may and will happen next to our mental development if and when we have no further need to know, perhaps no need to think? What if we are then unable to gain true knowledge, enlightenment, or insight—that most precious of human commodities, true wisdom? What then will become of us?

This is not a new concern. Socrates was worried that the development of writing would impair people’s ability to understand things. He thought that if people could access written material, they would no longer have a need to memorize said material, by which means they supposedly incorporated it into their personal long-term storage, and had it available at the speed of thought. It is no big stretch to be concerned that the outsourcing of so much intellectual heavy lifting, which has been a product of the computer revolution, might leave our minds flabby and diminished.

Winchester offers a look at the greatest thinkers of all time, polymaths ancient and modern. In addition to the usual suspects, there are some names here that will be unfamiliar. Really? I never even heard of that guy. is a reaction I had more than once to some of the personages in his all-time, intellectual all-star roster.

If there is one thing that I found lacking in the book, well, lacking is not the right word, more like something I would have liked to have seen there. Is a look at how knowledge is lost or destroyed, whether by misfortune of evil intent. For just as knowledge can advance civilization, denial of access to it can help bring about a dark age.

Winchester’s aim here is to wonder how we will fare going forward when so much of our learning is housed outside our brains. Knowledge is a crucial element in the development of wisdom. Will our brains, uncluttered of vast amounts of information, be freed to contemplate deeper truths? Or will the neurons that gather information be too softened to address heavier thinking? Given what I have heard of so many younger people in the work force, I am leaning toward the dark side on this one. But I sure hope I am wrong. Encountering a passel of bright young minds in the last few years keeps alive hopes for better.

Simon Winchester is a national treasure. (probably for two countries, as he is an English-born American citizen) He repeatedly produces amazingly interesting books that open our eyes to parts of the world, contemporary and historical, that might otherwise remain unknown. Considering how much he has taught us through his writings, there is no question but that the world is a much richer place for how much knowledge and wisdom he has imparted to us all through his ongoing production of fascinating material. You may or may not become wise as a result of reading this book, but I guarantee you will become more knowledgeable.

How, in sum, do we value the knowledge that, thanks to the magic of electronics, is now cast before us in so vast and ceaseless and unstoppable a cascade? Amid the torrent and its fury, what is to become of thought—care and calm and quiet thoughtfulness? What of our own chance of ever gaining wisdom? Do we need it? Does anybody? How does a world function if no one within it is wise?

Review posted – 9/15/23

Publication date – 4/23/23

I received an ARE of Knowing What We Know from Harper in return for a fair review.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the Winchester’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

A nice overview of Winchester’s professional life can be found here

Interviews
—–The Michael Schermer Show – Are We Risking Our Ability to Think?
There is a wonderful story re material in the Encyclopedia Britannica about how a relied-upon source can foment truly awful errors.
—–Free Library of Philadelphia – Simon Winchester | Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge
—–Live Talks Los Angeles – Simon Winchester in conversation with Ted Habte-Gabr at Live Talks Los Angeles

Reviews of other Simon Winchester books we have read:
—–2021 – Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
—–2018 – The Perfectionists
—–2015 – Pacific
—–2010 – Atlantic
—–2008 – The Man Who Loved China
—–2005 – Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded
—–2001 – The Map That Changed the World
—–1998 – The Professor and the Madman

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January 13, 2023 · 12:01 pm

Cosmogenesis by Brian Thomas Swimme

book cover

…it feels today that we are in the middle of a profound transformation of humanity.

We don’t live in a cosmos. We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that established its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.

Cosmos – The universe seen as a well-ordered whole; from the Greek word kosmos ‘order, ornament, world, or universe’, so called by Pythagoras or his disciples from their view of its perfect order and arrangement. – from Oxford reference

Genesis – Hebrew Bereshit (“In the Beginning”), the first book of the Bible. Its name derives from the opening words: “In the beginning….” Genesis narrates the primeval history of the world – from the Encyclopedia Britannica

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Brian Thomas Swimme – image from Journey of the Universe

So, Cosmogenesis means, at its root, the beginning of everything. Diverse cultures have come up with diverse understandings of how everything came to be. Where Swimme differs is in seeing the genesis, the beginning, the creation of everything as an ongoing process, not a one-off in deep history.

Cosmogenesis tracks Swimme’s journey from math professor to spokesman for a movement that seeks to rejoin science and spirituality. The stations along this route, which runs from 1968 to 1983, consist of people he considers great minds. He gushes like a Swiftie with closeup tickets to an Eras Tour show over several of these genius-level individuals, while relying on his analytical capacity to note shortcomings in some of the theories some others propose. Swimme mixes his approach a bit. It is in large measure a memoir, with a focus on his intellectual (and spiritual) growth, along with descripti0ns of the places where he lived, taught, and studied, and the people who inspired him, providing some background to the theories and ovbservations to which he is exposed.

A mathematics PhD, with a long and diverse teaching history, he grounds his work in the scientific. But he does not separate the scientific from the spiritual, from the human. In his view, we are all a part of the ongoing evolution of everything, noting that every subatomic part that make up every atom in our bodies, in our world, was present at the Biggest Bang, then was further refined by the lesser bangs of supernovas manufacturing what became our constituent parts. Even today, we bathe, wallow, bask, and breathe in radiation from that original event. It may have occurred fourteen billion years ago, but in a measurable way it is happening still. And we all remain a part of it.

There is a piece of Swimme’s material-cum-spiritual notion that I found very appealing. I have experienced an ecstatic state while perceiving beauty in the world. On telling my son about one such, I remarked that it was like a religious experience. He answered, “why like?” Swimme recruits like experiences to bolster the connection between the humanly internal and the eternal of the cosmos.

Bear in mind that Swimme grew up in a Catholic tradition, which clearly impressed him. There is a strong incense scent of religiosity to his work. Not saying that Cosmogenesis is a religion, but I am not entirely certain it is not.

As a child I had learned that the Mass was where the sacred lived.

I had a very different response to the religious world to which I was exposed as a child through twelve years of Catholic education. There was no connection for me between the Mass and the sacred, whatever that was. Mass represented mostly a burden, a mandatory exercise, communicating nothing about layers of experience beyond the material, while offering hard evidence of the power of institutions to control how I spent my time. I did not, at the time, understand the community building and reinforcing aspect to this weekly tribal ritual, separate from the religious content.

I believe that what we think of as spiritual or spectral is the reality that lies beyond our perceptual bandwidth. The ancients did not understand lightning, so imagined a god hurling bolts. With scientific understanding of lightning, Zeus is cast from an imagined home on Mount Olympus to the confines of cultural history. Science expands our effective, if not necessarily our physical, biological bandwidth, and thus captures, making understandable, realities once thought the domain of imagined gods. But what of feeling? The ecstatic state I experience when witnessing the beauty of the world, is that a purely biological state, comprised of hormones and DNA? Or do we assign to that feeling, which can be difficult to explain, a higher meaning because of our inability to define it precisely enough? And, in doing so, are we not following in the path of the ancient Greeks who assigned to extra-human beings responsibility for natural events? So, I am not sure I am buying in to Swimme’s views.

It is, though, something, to pique the interest of people like myself who have rejected most forms of organized religion, particularly those that focus on a human-like all-powerful being, (see George Carlin’s routine re this. I’m with George.) but who hold open a lane for a greater, a different understanding of all reality. Where is the line between the material and the spiritual? How did we come to be here? Evolution provides plenty to explain that. But we still get back to a linear understanding of time as an impasse. If the (our) universe began with the big bang, then what came before? Einstein showed with his special theory of relativity that time is not so fixed a concept as we’d thought. Things operate at different speeds, relative to each other, depending on distance and speed. Who is to say that there might not be more fungability to our understanding of time, maybe even radically so? In a way, this is what Swimme is on about, ways of looking at our broader reality, at our origins and ongoing evolution, (not just the evolution of our species, but of the universe itself) through other, more experiential perspectives, (a new Gnosticism?) while still including science.

Humans have expressed their faith in a great variety of symbols, many of which have inspired me at one time or another. But today, if you ask for the foundation of my faith, I would say the stone cliffs of the Hudson River Palisades.

Overall I found this book brain candy of the first order. Take it as a survey-course primer for the theory he propounds. There are many videos available on-line for those interested in going beyond Cosmo 101. So, Is cosmogenesis one of the ten greatest ideas in human history as is claimed here? That is above my pay grade. Some of the notions presented here seemed a bit much, but there was enough that was worth considering that made this a satisfying, intriguing read. Suffice it to say that it is a fascinating take on, well, everything, and can be counted on to give your gray cells, comprised of materials that have been around for 14 billion years, a hearty jiggle at the very least.

Everything is up in the air. We are living in a deranged world where nihilism dominates every major state. The contest today is for the next world philosophy.

Review posted – January 13, 2023

Publication date – November 15, 2022

I received a hardcover of Cosmogenesis from Counterpoint in return for a fair review.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages

Twitter and Facebook do not appear to have ever been used you might also try

Interviews
—–Deeptime Network – Brian Swimme — What’s Next? Planetary Mind and the Future – video – 1:12:41 – from 6:50
—–Sue Speaks – SUE Speaks Podcast: Searching for Unity in Everything – podcast – 31:27

Items of Interest from the author
—– The Third Story of the Universe
—–A Great Leap in Being – 28:56
—–Human Energy – Introduction to the Noosphere: The Planetary Minds
—–Journey of the Universe

Items of Interest
—–San Francisco Chronicle – Science doesn’t cover it all, author Brian Thomas Swimme explains
—– George Carlin on religion

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