Everyday Survival – Laurence Gonzales ***

This, like every game of football comes in two halves. The first is a delight. There was no doubt while reading this that Everyday Survival would be awarded five stars. The second gets into a bit of a mess that doesn’t really merit more than two stars – so the resultant rating is an average.

I absolutely loved Laurence Gonzales’ description of how we make mistakes and errors when the way we are programmed to react, allowing the older, lower segments of the brain to take control, fails to cope with a misunderstanding or unnoticed change in the situation. I won’t spoil his policeman after training to disarm someone with a gun anecdote here, but it is absolutely wonderful – I’ve been telling everyone I can think on ever since. I even experienced this sort of error myself this week. Every Thursday I have to go and switch on the heating in a hall where I will be running an event in the evening. This Thursday I went along and flicked the switch. However, when I came back later the hall was cold. I hadn’t noticed someone had left the heating on. I was just programmed to flick the switch and didn’t notice I was turning it off rather than on. For me this was just a mild irritation. Gonzales shows us how it can lead to people putting themselves at risk or losing their lives.

The book is also interesting in the way it ventures into an exploration of early man, and apes to see where this programmed ability and survival risk comes from. However, then the book wanders, drifting out into global warming, our impact on the planet, the nature of entropy and our role as energy conduits, which collectively results in a handful of chapters that have none of the appeal of the early chapters, which ramble and really give the reader very little more than a vague sense of unease.

The contrast I think is nicely summed up in a wonderful line Gonzales gives us. ‘Exactly how does the big bang, some 10 or 20 million years ago, go about producing Fruity Cheerios?’ A wonderful idea, ruined by substituting ‘million’ for ‘billion.’ A real shame.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...

Search This Blog