Here on Earth by Tim Flannery - Book Review

To heal a wounded Earth



Global warming is a `hot' topic nowadays and there have been many books on this subject. However Tim Flannery takes a different approach.

Starting from the very beginning of Earth's creation, Tim takes us through the complete story of our planet and the biography of our species. Though a natural disaster like an earthquake or tsunami would look like catastrophic event to us and other living beings, the earth has been affected throughout its history by many violent events. Some are very rare like an asteroid impact while others like climate cycles and flooding seem more regular and part of systemic process. These events either directly or indirectly seem to have driven the evolution of life from microcellular organisms to finally the human species, over the last three billion years. During this time many species came and went including the powerful dinosaurs. However till humans started settling down by inventing agriculture about ten thousand years ago, no species have created a serious impact on the earth's ecosystem on a global scale.

In the last few thousand years, wittingly or not, humans started changing the earth's ecosystem drastically. Not only did this result in the extinction of a large number of life forms like the mammoths and the bisons, but significant changes to the climate started taking place. With the industrial revolution a couple of hundred years ago, our species multiplied many fold and the energy needed to sustain our civilization is creating so much waste that our planet is unable to bear it.

Is our Earth a living being? Whether we believe that or not, but it is our home and it sure is getting wounded. How do we heal it? Unfortunately there are no easy fixes - but Tim explores various ways by which we can take control and move in the right direction before it gets too late. He explains the science in a very simple and straightforward manner and I would recommend this book strongly to all who are worried about our future.

A Poem by James Clerk Maxwell

We all know James Clerk Maxwell as a great scientist, but he was also a lover of poetry and on occasion used to write a few himself. At a meeting of the British Association in 1874, while listening to the lecture he composed the poem given below (no texting or email then I guess:))

In the very beginnings of science, the parsons, who managed things then,
Being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men;
Till Commerce arose, and at length some men of exceptional power
Supplanted both demons and gods by the atoms, which last to this hour.
Yet they did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way,
With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway.
From nothing comes nothing, they told us, nought happens by chance, but by fate;
There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date!
Then why should a man curry favour with beings who cannot exist,
To compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist?
But not by the rays of the sun, nor the glittering shafts of the day,
Must the fear of the gods be dispelled, but by words, and their wonderful play.
So treading a path all untrod, the poet-philosopher sings
Of the seeds of the mighty world—the first-beginnings of things;
How freely he scatters his atoms before the beginning of years;
How he clothes them with force as a garment, those small incompressible spheres!
Nor yet does he leave them hard-hearted—he dowers them with love and with hate,
Like spherical small British Asses in infinitesimal state;
Till just as that living Plato, whom foreigners nickname Plateau,
Drops oil in his whisky-and-water (for foreigners sweeten it so),
Each drop keeps apart from the other, enclosed in a flexible skin,
Till touched by the gentle emotion evolved by the prick of a pin:
Thus in atoms a simple collision excites a sensational thrill,
Evolved through all sorts of emotion, as sense, understanding, and will;
(For by laying their heads all together, the atoms, as councillors do,
May combine to express an opinion to every one of them new).
There is nobody here, I should say, has felt true indignation at all,
Till an indignation meeting is held in the Ulster Hall;
Then gathers the wave of emotion, then noble feelings arise,
Till you all pass a resolution which takes every man by surprise.
Thus the pure elementary atom, the unit of mass and of thought,
By force of mere juxtaposition to life and sensation is brought;
So, down through untold generations, transmission of structureless germs
Enables our race to inherit the thoughts of beasts, fishes, and worms.
We honour our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grand-mothers too;
But how shall we honour the vista of ancestors now in our view?
First, then, let us honour the atom, so lively, so wise, and so small;
The atomists next let us praise, Epicurus, Lucretius, and all;
Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms combined
To form that remarkable structure, it pleased him to call—his mind.
Last, praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong,
Ere yet the swift whirl of the atoms has hurried us, ruth-less, along,
The British Association—like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes,
The incarnation of wisdom, built up of our witless nobs,
Which will carry on endless discussions, when I, and probably you,
Have melted in infinite azure—in English, till all is blue.

Predictable Magic by Deepa Prahalad & Ravi Sawhney

Physcho-Aesthetics: Aligning Product design to Business Strategy






Product Design is mostly considered as an art form. However in ‘Predictable Magic’, Deepa Prahlad and Ravi Sawhney introduces a framework that they call Phsycho-Aesthetics, through which the design process can be aligned to corporate strategy enabling business to come up with successful product designs. Companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have shown how critical it is to build deep emotional connections between their consumers and product brands. But how do we map this process? How doe we get business managers, engineering professionals and designers on the same page? Read this book to understand how the Phsycho-Aesthetics approach will help a company achieve this.

In the first part of the ebook, the authors show you how their framework can help in developing user-centric designs through consumer ‘personas’, mapping business goals to product features, targeting specific segments with unmet needs, and develop market winning strategies. In the second part they take you through the implementation of the design strategy and how to continuously engage the customers. With many real life case studies understanding of the framework becomes very easy.

I am not sure if entirely new designs or concepts can be created using the Pyshco-Aesthetics approach, but it will definitely help any entrepreneur, business manager or designer in validating their product design approach.

Your Brain and Business by Srinivasan S. Pillay

A case of Pseudoscience!




This book is supposedly meant for coaches of business leaders. Explaining the brain functions and structure, Mr.Pillay attempts to show how leaders can perform better in managing their organizations and getting the best out of their employees. The book is organized into four sections - (a) the Introduction covering the broad principles of how brain science applies to coaching and communicating (b) Relationship section explaining how positive psychology helps in coaching (c) Intervention section on how to effectively convert ideas into actions (d) the Conclusion, where the different brain regions and how the interventions affect them, are explained.

Each chapter lists a number of concepts, their application in business contexts and their connection to 'brain science' which according to the author is a division of neuroscience. Considerable technical jargon is used for explaining the various parts of the brain and how it relates to business activities. Most of it are quite unnecessary, repetitive and irrelevant. Over 35 to 60 references are provided for each chapter making the whole effort look a very impressive and scientific endeavor. However the book drifts from science to pseudoscience by morphing raw scientific facts and hypothesis into seemingly sophisticated tools for solving business management problems without using the rigor needed for good science. Many of the issues raised are real but simple psychology would be sufficient to provide answers to them. Recent discoveries like mirror neuron systems are twisted out of context to make them look very relevant for business leaders. Innovation, Creativity etc are very much dependent on the brain and hence understanding how the brain functions is definitely useful, but for that I would suggest much better books like 'The Tell-tale Brain' by V.S Ramachandran or 'In Search of Memory' by Eric Kandel.

' Your Brain and Business' does not have a single real life case study and it is very difficult to believe that the author has successfully used this approach in enhancing the functioning of business organizations. I would not recommend this book to any business leader or coach.

Science and Pseudoscience! Sense and Nonsense!!

About two thousand seven hundred years back, the Greeks started the scientific revolution. We know the names of the leaders - Thales, Pythagorus, Euclid, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Archimedes.. It is a magnificent list and their achievements still evoke amazement. In spite of phenomenal progress, the civilization died out. I wonder why?. The Roman civilization that followed admired the Greeks but never understood science. They created a great war machine and conquered most of the known world. In a few hundred years, this one also died out. The reasons for this decline are more well understood. Europe entered the ‘Dark ages’ and then the ‘Middle ages’. The only positive spark for human progress for the next thousand years was the Islamic civilization. They built on the Greek foundation, translating the latin books into arabic and making some progress in mathematics, astronomy and medicine. The European Renaissance then took over and changed everything. We are not sure what triggered it - but that laid the foundation for the Western Civilization as we know it today. The corner stone of this civilization is Science & Technology. The progress we have made as a species in the last few hundred years is demonstrated by the fact that there are 7 billion of us living in this small planet and threatening the very viability of our fragile ecosystem.

We now know where we came from and our position in the Universe. We know how we evolved from the bacteria and we are even able to read our source code by sequencing our DNA. We have the power to destroy the earth dramatically in a few minutes or lethargically over a few decades. The progress of science in the last hundred years have been so dramatic and that only a small minority of the population understand the science underlying the technologies that we use in our daily lives. At the same time despite the progress that we seem to have made, to the individual the uncertainties of life do not seem to have diminished. One still can die or suffer a serious injury at any moment due to a disease, accident or calamity; the rich seem to be getting richer and the gap between the rich and poor is increasing. There is a feeling that our economic and social security, and the ‘right to happiness’ is threatened daily.

So maybe it is not that surprising to see many people go back to ‘faith’ and ‘blind belief’ which seems to be a better solution than trying to make sense of all this ‘progress’ that science seems to have brought us. In my home country India this can be seen by the rapid growth of the God men (and god women) and their cults as well increased interest in traditional religious rituals. In my temporary home of the U.S, we can see the revival of Christian fundamentalism, renewed belief in creationism (or Intelligent Design) and similar beliefs. However many argue that even if these beliefs are wrong, there is no major harm being done - if a belief gives one some relief, Why not?

But the growth of pseudoscience is a stark testimony to the fact that blind beliefs can create more harm than is immediately obvious. Let me refer a couple of excellent books that highlight the problems and the damages that it causes to society. ‘Nonsense on Stilts’ by Massimo Pigliucci explains how you can to differentiate ‘Science from Bunk’. He looks closely at science is conducted, disseminated, interpreted and what it means to our society. The book is not an easy read and you will need to put some effort to follow the author’s line of thought. An easier book to read on the same subject is ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre. It is a funny and biting book and targets homeopathy as well as modern nutritionists with miracle vitamin pills. Both books highlight the damage the media and ‘so called experts’ do in spreading false information for short term gains or fame. In the U.S and UK, people refusing to vaccinate children, creationists dismissing Darwin’s theory of evolution, while in India hundreds of thousand of women lining up to conduct Pooja in a temple, the educated software engineer waiting for the ‘auspicious date and time’ (I wonder IST or PST or EST) to join his new job, the politician alleging that his opponent is practicing ‘voodo’ on him and approaching the latest god man for advise - these are symptoms of a major problem and the results of blind belief.

In the next few decades as we combat global warming as well as energy shortage and try to meet the increased expectations of the (soon to be) 9 billion humans, our very survival will depend on the public’s ability to distinguish between science and pseudoscience and act accordingly. Let us hope that we succeed.