The Rhetoric

I’ve been reading Paul Krugman’s New York Times column for quite a while now and am a big fan. I especially like his ideas about the government setting a floor price on gasoline. After he won the Nobel Prize in Economics this year I decided to read his latest book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

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Mr. Krugman is an excellent writer and, therefore, this book was easy to read and flowed nicely. It is, above all, a pragmatic book about economic policy, history, and politics. He begins with a long explanation of the history of economics in the United States and how public policy has had dramatic effects on income and class inequality over time. He then spends significant pages discussing the history of the Republican party and the rise in power of “movement conservatism”. Finally, he describes specific policies we should enact to fix the problems that plague our country economically.

What I enjoyed most about this book was reading about the political and economic history of the United States. It strengthened my opinions about our urgent need for single-payer universal health care and totally changed my views about labor unions. Mr. Krugman is a brilliant intellectual and an incredible communicator. I can only hope he has some advisory role in an Obama administration.

Now I have to purchase my own copy so I can reread it and mark it up. Unfortunately, the copy I read must be returned to the library. :)

book review, politics book review, economics, liberal, paul krugman

I recently finished reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. It is an excellent primer on the (not-so-new) paradigm of collaboration including wikis, open source, ideagoras, peer-production and truly global corporations.

I was recently asked what could be a better system for improving products than unregulated, free-market, winner-take-all, every-man-for-himself, amoral (and often immoral), profits-above-all-else capitalistic competition. The answer, of course, is collaboration (they are not mutually exclusive). Today, from Flickr to Boeing to Firefox to BMW, collaborative enterprises are improving our world and creating the products we love.

I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in business, economics or the twenty-first century.

From the website:

In the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superceded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant primer on one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand the key forces driving competitiveness in the twenty-first century.

Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how the masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles.

book review, business, economy book review, wikinomics

For my recent birthday my best mate sent to me Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country. It was on my Amazon.com wishlist.

The book is a short 145 pages and only took a couple hours to read. It is packed with wisdom, humor and insight. Here are a few quotations.

Referring to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Vonnegut wrote:

Want a taste of a great book? He says, and he said it 169 years ago, that in no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men. Okay?

How timely. Some things never change, it seems.

Read more…

book review, philosophy, politics, religion book review

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin

This is an excellent book by paleontologist Neil Shubin. He talks about our evolutionary relationships with other species and how that ancestry effects us today. I enjoyed reading about our olfactory, skeletal, optic and hearing anatomy and physiology and how those systems evolved from primitive life forms. Shubin’s discussion of DNA and the fossil record were also enlightening.

Neil was part of the team that discovered  Tiktaalik on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada. If ever there were a transitional fossil (a silly notion), Tiktaalik is it.

This is an easy read (took me about two days). I kept wondering how young-earth creationists could explain the overwhelming evidence without evolution over geologic timescales.

I particularly like this quote from the Epilogue (pg. 200).

The unknown should not be a source of suspicion, fear, or retreat to superstition, but motivation to continue asking questions and seeking answers.

Ever wonder why you’re fat, have hemorrhoids, hiccup and get twitchy eyes when you drink too much alcohol? The answers to these puzzlements and more are in the pages of this book. Ever wonder why your cranial nerve is such a mixed-up mess? Me, neither. But the answer is here, too.

The discussion about our embryonic development is quite fascinating. Cells start dividing and folding and clumping together until, well, you’re you. What makes skin smooth and not bumpy? How do all those skin cells communicate with each other to orchestrate the great endeavor we call you? What binds cells together and what is between them? See, now you want to run out and get your own copy, huh?

book review, science anatomy, book review, evolution, physiology, science

I recently joined the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. NAPP has been an extremely valuable resource for helping me hone my Photoshop skills. If you are comfortable using Photoshop but want to take your game to the next level, I highly recommend joining NAPP. The member magazine, Photoshop User, is full of product reviews, interviews, tips, and tutorials. Practice files for the tutorials can be downloaded from the website so you can follow along with the same files used in the magazine. Photoshop User TV is a weekly video podcast in which The Photoshop Guys (Scott Kelby, Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski) discuss Photoshop and demonstrate loads of valuable tricks, tips, and tutorials. Members get access to all previous shows.

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book review, photography 7-point system, art, book review, design, digital darkroom, napp, photoshop, scott kelby

Daniel Dennett is a Tufts University professor and a great writer. He also summers in Maine which gives him extra points in my book. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is a book written by a philosopher to the pious. He doesn’t actually answer the big questions or make conclusive arguments as Dawkins, Harris, or Stenger have in other books I’ve read, but instead tries to pursuade the reader that religion can and should be examined.

Mr. Dennett argues early on that religion, like classical music and nudity, is natural. Religous belief seems to be as ubiquitous in ancient peoples as much as it is today. Religion, however, is terribly expensive. Why then is it ubiquitous and what makes it a successful meme? Is the mystery what makes religion appealing? If so, will studying it destroy its value? Possibly, Mr. Dennett points out, but the consequences of not learning everything we can about religion would be much worse.

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book review, philosophy, politics, religion atheism, book review, danieldennett, education, libertarian, science

Carl Sagan’s new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, is easily one of my favorite books. Dr. Sagan’s description of the cosmos opened up for me an interest I will undoubtedly cherish for the rest of my life. He describes nebulae, star formation, comets, galaxies, planets, star clusters, and darkness. One of my favorite quotes is about the vast nothingness of space.

“The universe is mainly made of nothing, that something is the exception. Nothing is the rule. That darkness is a commonplace; it is light that is the rarity…We must remember that the universe is an almost complete and impenetrable darkness and the sparse sources of light, the stars, are far beyond our present ability to create or control.”

Carl died more than 10 years ago. In 1985 he gave a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion. His widow, Ann Druyan, felt that in the wake of September 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution that it was time to publish those lectures. Her search for the transcripts led her to one of the 1,000 filing cabinets in the archives at Cornell University.

I’ve long been mystified as to why people of “faith” give so little thought to how the world their god created actually works. In his first lecture Carl asks,

“If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understand nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy?”

In lecture two Dr. Sagan explains why it is decreasingly necessary to invoke god as an explanation for natural phenomenon.

“So as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It’s a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm. The theologians give that one up, and it walks over onto the science side of the duty roster.”

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book review, philosophy, religion astronomy, atheism, book review, carlsagan, cosmos, science, space