Book

Summary Sally Adee, a well-published science and technology journalist, writes her first book about a major shift she has been witnessing in biology, and it all has to do with electricity. She opens the book with a brief history of what we know about electricity and how we discovered what we do know. Spoiler alert: it includes a lot of frogs. The main thing she wanted to highlight was that during the beginning of research into electrical phenomena, the field quickly branched into two directions. One branch focused on what was called animal electricity, while the other focused more on non-animal electricity. At this early stage of research, neither branch had reliable tools to conduct empirical science. There was a high degree of speculation in both fields, but with the breakthrough of the first battery, this quickly changed, at least for non-animal electricity. Suddenly, there was a reliable way to create, measure, and distribute this mysterious energy. When it came to animal electricity, there were no such tools to reliably create results, yet the claims held an intuitive weight and were picked up by many scientists and many more quacks. Eventually, there were so many scandals involving wild, unsubstantiated claims that the whole field of animal electricity was dismissed as pseudoscience. Technology kept improving, and eventually, measurement tools got precise enough to handle the tiny charges created by biological organisms, vindicating much of the early animal electricity scientists. However, their theories about how electricity actually worked in the body were correct only in the broadest sense. Much of the theories had to be thrown out or reworked in the one step forward, two steps back investigation of science. So what does this promising approach to biology offer us? Quite a bit. Scientists have utilized it for a while to stimulate hearts with pacemakers or calm down brains with epilepsy. Beyond this, being able to manipulate our electrome (as Adee calls it) holds tantalizing promises of faster wound healing, limb regeneration, reversing cancer, and slowing aging. The catch is that the system is much more complicated and interconnected than any of man-made electronics. Adee explains that instead of simple positive-negative wires exchanging electricity in our body, we utilize charge differentials in chemicals themselves. Each cell in your body acts like a little battery with the capacity to become more negatively or positively charged than its surroundings. Each cell also has ion channels that allow specific molecules in or out, depending on the state of the overall system. The takeaway here is we have only relatively recently begun to realize the role that electrical charges play in the nervous system. Now, we are discovering that this same mechanism for communication extends through every cell in your body. At this point, we don’t know enough to manipulate these distributed electrical systems precisely, but being able to do so looks like the biggest hurdle between us and a medical revolution. ...

I’ve been reading this a lot recently, for my own pleasure of course, and I can’t help but picture a dark clear night in the deserted streets of Moscow. A homeless Ivan leans back emptying the contents of a clear glass bottle into his bottomless stomach. He trips over a curb and falls, landing on his back. His head cracks against something sharp and solid. Tasting metal in his mouth, he feels something warm start to trickle down his back. Unable to move he stares into the dark sky. He can only see the brightest of stars, the rest, like so many potential futures left unrealized, are hidden by light pollution. In the distance he can hear a train’s lonely call, the walls of the sleeping city echo back their ghostly replies. While nearby, giant smokestacks exhale their black life into this last night of nights. Completely alone, his voice barely above a whisper he says ...

Long-form notes on Lecky’s moral history—the same piece as under Reviews, listed here as an essay.

Also available as a long essay. Thoughts This book was thoroughly enlightening but quite dry and dense and around 850 pages. This is partially why I have written such an extensive summary hoping to convey some of the themes that I think are important to know without just saying “read the book”. When it comes to topics like morality it is easy to have an axe to grind. Lecky provides what appears to me to have been an even-handed recounting of this slice of history. This book is full of useful information and interesting context that is often lost when trying to understand the events of history. I am sure there are mistakes and misunderstandings, but there is so much else that is of value that what few mistakes there are will be dwarfed by the new perspective given to the reader. I found myself often copying large sections of the text while in other parts leaving surprised questions marks when a new fact that sounded preposterous turned out to be true. If you have the time, this book is worth it. ...

So I listened to this as a dramatic reading while driving to and from Cincinnati, and I think this is how I will consume Shakespeare plays from now on. The actors have had to do all the work of translating the archaic language and sentence structure into universal feeling which made the play much easier to digest. I also mostly listened to this so I could really appreciate the hidden subtleties of this skit. ...

Summary This follows the main character, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, for a couple of days after he is once again kicked out of school for his failing grades. Knowing that he has a couple of days before his parents receive the notice, Holden decides to wander around the town. The story ends up unfolding over a weekend, starting on a Saturday and ending the following Monday afternoon. Thoughts First of all, I can’t write this review without talking about the style. From the start of the first paragraph to the end of the last line, Salinger’s style never stopped annoying me. This is because he decided to write it from the subjective viewpoint of Holden, who, as I said, was a teenager in the ’40s. Thus, the story is written in the lingo of a teenager from the ’40s. This means that all the things that you would typically do to write well are thrown out the window in favor of keeping the narration somewhat similar to how a teenager would actually talk. The overall effect is, as one book critic put it, “like mainlining castor oil.” ...

This book sets out to answer the question that most people have thought about once or twice, but quickly dismiss because they are afraid of where their intuitions take them. The question is, why did certain civilizations advance into “civilized” modern cultures while others seemed to have gotten left behind in the stone age. Why does the UN exist in the same timeline as people who are still hunting with stone weapons? What might intuition say? Probably some form of “manifest destiny”. Well, that sort of thinking is thankfully inappropriate in our current discourse, but this self-censorship kills the question before a reasoned and viable alternative is presented. Therefore, due to the fear of your probably racist intuitions, you don’t spend enough time to see how they could possibly be wrong, you just ignore them like your aunt with the bad breath and close hugs. Well, Jared Diamond wants to give you some reasons you can look at that aunt with bad breath and show her the door. ...

There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool (Nature) has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface. So basically, it is this whole thing. Huysmans was a novelist in the 19th century whose early works were part of the naturalistic school which sought out beauty and truth in the mundane, but later in his life this changed. He began to feel cramped and redundant inside the confines of nature and wished to supersede it through artifice. Maybe this would give us a more visceral or concentrated glimpse of beauty? Enter what is known as the “Decadent” literature. This school found its poster child in Dorian Gray, and this is how I came to hear about it. On a reread of the Picture of Dorian Gray, there was this quote: ...

Summary All the Pretty Horses follows the story of John Grady Cole and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. Cole, sixteen years old, was raised on a ranch his entire life. His grandfather has just died and he discovers the ranch is about to be sold. He convinces Rawlins to join him and they both take off to Mexico hoping to find cowboy work. Thoughts My initial summation of this book was going to be “Hemmingway meets Coen brother’s No Country for Old Men”, but then I found out that Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men. So now I guess the summation should be “Hemmingway meets McCarthy”. Sidebar This impression is created by a writing style called Polysyndeton. Going down this rabbit hole a little, it turns out that this is the style that gives the King James Bible and Shakespeare their distinctive cadence. From what I can tell it is a fancy name for run on sentences that would get red lined on English exams. ...

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. Summary A recently released prisoner named Shadow is on a return flight home when there is a mix up and his seat gets upgraded to first class. Waiting for him is a mysterious stranger with a job offer. Thoughts Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this book. A book that almost lives up to the hype, but would have been slightly better to have stumbled on without knowing anything about it. Neil Gaiman draws out scenes and situations so vividly that they became almost scars in my memory. In the age of pictures, it is difficult to make people see with just words. That is not a problem in this book, you will see what is happening, even if sometimes you didn’t want to. ...