Skip to main content

Into the Anthropocosmos - Ariel Ekblaw ***

This is a really strange one. The book is subtitled 'a whole space catalog from the MIT Space Exploration Initiative'. I'm assuming that 'whole space catalog' is a nostalgic reference for those of us old enough to remember the Whole Earth Catalog, that 60s/70s oddity that was somehow a crossover between an Argos catalogue and the DIY-eco-world (and whose idea of 'whole Earth' was about as whole Earth as the World Series). 

The original was a fun browse, even though it would be hard to imagine anyone ever actually using it to buy anything. This new venture claims to be a 'lavishly illustrated catalog of space technology of the future'. I guess the idea is that if you are a billionaire kitting out your latest space mission, or planning your space habitat, this is where you browse to pick up your ideas. Except when you look through the book it really isn't a catalog (sorry, catalogue). There are no sales links... and no prices.

What we get instead is a bit like one of those lavishly illustrated books that organisations produce for their staff and investors, where you get a few large photos on each project and some rather high level text on bits of equipment and studies being produced, presumably by MIT. I get a regular magazine from my old physics department known as CavMag, that tells me what's going on at the Cavendish Laboratory - this feels a bit like a larger scale, far more expensive version of that.

The book is divided into rather entertainingly named sections. We get biome, the envirome (sic), the exobiome, before the disappointingly named 'experiments, orbits and exhibitions'. (Why not experiome, orbome and exhibome?) And finally there's the downright plodding outreach and community. What we really have here is a summary of space-oriented projects, which unless you are either involved in MIT's work, a friend and relation of someone who is, or working in the space industry, probably isn't going to get you excited.

I randomly opened the book to give a bit more detail on a couple of the items in the collection. The first was in the envirome section and entitled 'Reinventing the spindle.' The is apparently 'an art project where the artist investigates textile crafts in microgravity and low-gravity environment, using the "experiments" [my inverted commas] as a basis for greater conversation around the ramifications of space research and colonisation.' Hmm. Another random flip took me to 'EBIFA' in the biome section. This stands for 'Everything is Beautiful Far Away' and is 'a mission and a fantasy realised, in which a wisdom tooth is sent to outer space and back down to Earth again.' Apparently 'The tooth tells the inconsequential but unique story of a person in this universe.' Okay.

I'm not sure I was lucky or unlucky that both those genuinely random selections uncovered smirk-inducing art projects. Other items in the book cover more straightforward space technology or experiments, from oscillating chemical reactions in zero gravity to fermentation in space. Some of these are very likely to produce useful information or starting points for technology for future space missions. Others... well, I wouldn't spend my money on them.

Outside those MIT people, friends and relations, I can't see many readers buying this (rather expensive) book. But it's worth a flip through in the library, if only to wonder how much connection those working in universities have to the real world.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book
Post a Comment
Read more

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more