Only counting books I read (or soon-ish will have read) in their entirety…
Below are starting dates, titles, authors, and some quotes / comments that I could think of. :p Hopefully I have not typo-ed up the quotes too badly.
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15-Jan-2022: 1. Kompendium i klinisk kemi by Ulrika Falkenö, Anna Hillström, Bernt Jones, Inger Lilliehöök, Emma Strage, Bodil Ström Holst, & Harold Tvedten
Almost-a-book on clinical chemistry. Directed at vet students, but my vet nursing class also got copies in 2017. I never got around to reading it until now. :p Promptly LOST my copy at a train station :'( BUT it turned out that my nice boss had it as a PDF! 😀
25-Jan-2022: 2. Little brother by Cory Doctorow
Fave! And a re-read.
12-Mar-2022: 3. The alchemist by Paulo Coelho
A re-read.
14-Apr-2022: 4. The language instinct: How the mind creates language by Steven Pinker
"Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old, as we shall see, is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum. Though language is a magnificent ability unique to Homo sapiens among living species, it does not call for sequestering the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent ability unique to a particular living species is far from unique in the animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale."
Quotes "the following pseudo-German notice that used to be posted in many university computing centers in the English-speaking world:
‘ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen and poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen das cottenpickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.’"
"Another team is trying to teach a computer the basics of human common sense, which they estimate to comprise about ten million facts."
"Let me begin with the ability to learn, and by convincing you that there is something to explain. Many social scientists believe that learning is some pinnacle of evolution that humans have scaled from the lowlands of instinct, so that our ability to learn can be explained by our exalted braininess. But biology says otherwise. Learning is found in organisms as simple as bacteria, and, as James and Chomsky pointed out, human intelligence may depend on our having more innate instincts, not fewer. Learning is an option, like camouflage or horns, that nature gives organisms as needed – when some aspect of the organism’s environmental niche is so unpredictable that anticipation of its contingencies cannot be wired in. For example, birds that nest on small cliff ledges do not learn to recognize their offspring. They do not need to, for any blob of the right size and shape in their nest is sure to be one. Birds that nest in large colonies, in contrast, are in danger of feeding some neighbor’s offspring that sneaks in, and they have evolved a mechanism that allows them to learn the particular nuances of their own babies.
Even when a trait starts off as a product of learning, it does not have to remain so. Evolutionary theory, supported by computer simulations, has shown that when an environment is stable, there is a selective pressure for learned abilities to become increasingly innate. That is because if an ability is innate, it can be deployed earlier in the lifespan of the creature, and there is less of a chance that an unlucky creature will miss out on the experiences that would have been necessary to teach it."
"What an irony it is that the supposed attempt to bring Homo sapiens down a few notches in the natural order has taken the form of us humans hectoring another species into emulating our instinctive form of communication, or some artificial form we have invented, as if that were the measure of biological worth. The chimpanzees’ resistance is no shame on them; a human would surely do no better if trained to hoot and shriek like a chimp, a symmetrical project that makes about as much scientific sense. In fact, the idea that some species needs our intervention before its members can display a useful skill, like some bird that could not fly until given a human education, is far from humble!"
"Until the recent invention of the Heimlich maneuver, choking on food was the sixth leading cause of accidental death in the United States, claiming six thousand victims a year. The positioning of the larynx deep in the throat, and the tongue far enough low and back to articulate a range of vowels, also compromised breathing and chewing. Presumably the communicative benefits outweighed the physiological costs."
Contains a list of "human universals" compiled by anthropologist Donald E. Brown. As the list is a 2-page wall of text, I’ll just link to the quote here. 🙂
9-Jul-2022: 5. Vägen till Jerusalem by Jan Guillou
Fave! And a re-read. Book 1 in a trilogy about a knight in the 1100’s. The trilogy (which is available in English) has feminism and Arabian horses and shit. 🙂 And there is just something about historical novels, man. :q Now I really want to read another novel series by Guillou, 10 books about the 1900’s. 😀
15-Jul-2022: 6. The call of the wild by Jack London
My fave novel! And a re-read.
18-Jul-2022: 7. A Shropshire lad by A.E. Housman
Collection of poems that Richard Dawkins kept going on about, so I checked them out. Here’s my fave from the collection:
"Along the field as we came by
A year ago, my love and I,
The aspen over stile and stone
Was talking to itself alone.
‘Oh who are these that kiss and pass?
A country lover and his lass;
Two lovers looking to be wed;
And time shall put them both to bed,
But she shall lie with earth above,
And he beside another love.’
And sure enough beneath the tree
There walks another love with me,
And overhead the aspen heaves
Its rainy-sounding silver leaves;
And I spell nothing in their stir,
But now perhaps they speak to her,
And plain for her to understand
They talk about a time at hand
When I shall sleep with clover clad,
And she beside another lad."
20-Jul-2022: 8. Books do furnish a life: Reading and writing science by Richard Dawkins
Fave! A compilation of book reviews and the like by the Dawk, my fave writer.
"And the point has often been made to me that if you call somebody an idiot you’re not going to change his mind, and that’s possibly true, but you may change the minds of a thousand people listening in and so I’m less inhibited about calling him an idiot."
"It is possible to take a robust view of extinction, even mass extinction. We can tough-mindedly point out that extinction is the norm for species throughout geological history. Even our own swath of chainsaw and concrete devastation is only the latest in a long series of cleanouts from which life has always bounced back. What are we and our domination of the world but another natural process, no worse than many before? The catastrophe that ended the dinosaurs had a consequence that might lead us to take a positively cheerful attitude towards it: us. From a more dispassionate point of view, every mass extinction opens up yawning gaps in the market, and the headlong rush to fill them is what, time after time, has enriched the diversity of our planet.
Even the most devastating of mass extinctions can be defended as the necessary purging that makes rebirth possible. No doubt it is fascinating to wonder whether rats or starlings might provide the ancestral stock for a new radiation of giant predators, in the event that the whole order Carnivora was wiped out. But none of us would ever know, for we do not live on the evolutionary timescale. It is an aesthetic argument, an argument of feeling, not reason, and I confess that my own feelings recoil. I find my aesthetics incapable of quite such a long view.
The dinosaurs are gone. I mourn them and I mourn the giant ammonites, and before them the mammal-like reptiles and the club moss and tree fern forests of the coal measures, and before them the trilobites and eurypterids: but they are beyond recall. What we have now is a new set of communities, our own contemporary buildup of mutually compatible mammals and birds, flowering plants and pollinating insects. They are not better than the communities that preceded them. But they are here, we have the privilege of studying them, they took agonizing ages to build up, and if we destroy them we shall not see them replaced. Not in our lifetime, not in five million years. If we destroy the ecosystems of which we are a part, we condemn not just our own generation, but all the generations of descendants that we could realistically hope to succeed us, to a world of devastation and impoverishment."
"I was invited by the world’s largest computer company to organize and supervise a whole day’s game of strategy among their executives, the purpose of which was to bond them together in amicable cooperation. They were divided into three teams, the reds, the blues and the greens, and the game was a variant on the prisoner’s dilemma game which is the central topic of Axelrod’s book. Unfortunately, the cooperative bonding which was the company’s goal failed to materialize – spectacularly. As Robert Axelrod could have predicted, the fact that the game was known to be coming to an end at exactly 4 p.m. precipitated a massive defection by the reds against the blues, immediately before the appointed hour. The bad feeling generated by this sudden break with the previous day-long goodwill was palpable at the post-mortem session that I conducted, and the executives had to have counselling before they could be persuaded to work together again."
Aaaaaaand… In passing, he mentions an evolutionary biologist called Malte Andersson. This… happened… to… be… the… name… of… my… thesis… examiner… in… 2008. :O Erm. Andersson is a supercommon name; Malte isn’t. :B Basically, we can assume that the Dawk mentioned someone who read my craptastic little biology thesis "Breeding requirements of neotropical birds at Universeum science centre, Göteborg"!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!1 In the same sentence as the great Steven Pinker and 19 other names. He referred to them as "distinguished". Sooooo… THE DAWK THINKS MY THESIS EXAMINER IS DISTINGUISHED! MAYBE THAT MAKES ME APPROXIMATELY 0.00000000001% DISTINGUISHED! THANKS I CAN DIE NOW ^_^
PS. IN OTHER NEWS, THE DAWK GAVE A LECTURE AT THE GOTHENBURG SCIENCE FESTIVAL ON 3-MAY-2022 AND I WAS THERE AND HE SIGNED MY COPY OF "UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW" AND I TOLD HIM HE IS MY FAVE WRITER! :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD Will upload the pics soon-ish.
14-Aug-2022: 9. Tempelriddaren by Jan Guillou
Fave! And a re-read. Book 2 in a trilogy about a knight in the 1100’s.
10-Sep-2022: 10. Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters by Steven Pinker
Both this book and "The language instinct" where OTTFMDA (Often Too Technical For My Dumb Ass), but had many bits my little brain could enjoy as well.
"A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies."
"And ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth and insist that all claims are merely the narrative of a culture lack the courage of their convictions. The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child’s infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman. And though relativism is often adorned with a moral halo, the moral convictions of relativists depend on a commitment to objective truth. Was slavery a myth? Was the Holocaust just one of many possible narratives? Is climate change a social construction? Or are the suffering and danger that define these events really real – claims that we know are true because of logic and evidence and objective scholarship? Now relativists stop being so relative."
He quotes Spinoza: "Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind." (Though I, of course, corrected "humankind" to "sentient beings" – and btw, there should be a catchier word for the latter.) And he quotes Kant’s Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." 🙂 Good, eh?
"The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what’s common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead. Since news is what happens, not what doesn’t happen, the denominator in the fraction corresponding to the true probability of an event – all the opportunities for the event to occur, including those in which it doesn’t – is invisible, leaving us in the dark about how prevalent something really is.
The distortions, moreover, are not haphazard, but misdirect us toward the morbid. Things that happen suddenly are usually bad – a war, a shooting, a famine, a financial collapse – but good things may consist of nothing happening, like a boring country at peace or a forgettable region that is healthy and well fed. And when progress takes place, it isn’t built in a day; it creeps up a few percentage points a year, transforming the world by stealth. As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 PEOPLE ESCAPED EXTREME POVERTY YESTERDAY every day for the past twenty-five years."
"Trump told around thirty thousand lies during his term…"
"So much of our reasoning seems tailored to winning arguments that some cognitive scientists, like Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, believe it is the adaptive function of reasoning. We evolved not as intuitive scientists but as intuitive lawyers. While people often try to get away with lame arguments for their own positions, they are quick to spot fallacies in other people’s arguments."
"My greatest surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino was a reasoned argument." :O
8-Nov-2022: 11. Riket vid vägens slut by Jan Guillou
Fave! Book 3 in a trilogy about a knight in the 1100’s. I… read about half of "Riket" in 2000! Then was interrupted for some reason (maybe a library deadline) and never got around to finishing it until now. :B
2-Dec-2022: 12. Arvet efter Arn by Jan Guillou
Fave! A 4th book in Guillou’s "trilogy". The hero from the first 3 was fictitious. This one is about his grandson, who existed, and kind of invented Sweden.
"Mest angelägna var männen, föga överraskande, att finna en rik änka. Svårare att begripa var vad de sade sig kunna erbjuda i gengäld för denna rikedom de ämnade inhösta. Om detta som verkade svårfattligt för åtminstone de två Ceciliorna berättade Ingrid Ylva lustigt och i ogudaktigt tal att männen för det första var förvissade om att ingen kvinna kunde leva utan manlig lem och för det andra lika förvissade om att inga små söner kunde fostras utan man i huset."
"Ingrid Ylva kväljdes något av att se människor med gott lynne syssla med denna vedervärdiga djurföda. Ingen människa åt svamp utom fordom när det varit flera års missväxt och svälten härjade i landet. Så mycket visste dock de flesta att svamp var ett osäkert sätt att rädda livhanken även för den mest utsvultne. I värsta fall kunde det leda till döden och i bästa fall klarade man sig med några dagars feber och rännskita."
3-Dec-2022: 13. The return of the native by Thomas Hardy
An audiobook, read by… Alan Rickman, who had THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VOICE IN THE WORLD! D’: I actually listened to maybe half of it in… 2007. o_O Usually after my nightly paper round, so I kept falling asleep in the middle of chapters and… Meh… Of course I always meant to finish it, though. 😀 And of course I now listened from the beginning. Haven’t finished it yet. I only listen to it at home where I can properly hear and fully concentrate on THE VOICE. :q
24-Dec-2022: 14. Galileo’s daughter: A drama of science, faith and love by Dava Sobel
Haven’t finished it yet. And had never heard of it until it was recommended by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s "Startalk" podcast. 🙂 (A 2009 ep that I listened to last year…)
"In 1604, five years prior to Galileo’s development of the telescope, the world beheld a never-before-seen star in the heavens. It was called ‘nova’ for its newness. It flared up near the constellation Sagittarius in October and stayed so prominent through November that Galileo had time to deliver three public lectures about the newcomer before it faded from bright view. The nova challenged the law of immutability in the heavens, a cherished tenet of the Aristotelian world order. Earthly matter, according to ancient Greek philosophy, contained four base elements – earth, water, air, fire – that underwent constant change, while the heavens, as Aristotle described them, consisted entirely of a fifth element – the quintessence, or aether – that remained incorruptible. It was thus impossible for a new star suddenly to materialise. The nova, the Aristotelians argued, must inhabit the sublunar sphere between the Earth and the Moon, where change was permissible. But Galileo could see by comparing his nightly observation with those of other stargazers in distant lands that the new star lay far out, beyond the Moon, beyond the planets, among the domain of the old stars. /…/ Having thus impugned the immutability of the heavens, Galileo further attacked the Aristotelian philosophers by turning the telescope on their territory in 1609. His telescopic discoveries transformed the nature of the Copernican question from an intellectual engagement into a debate that might be decided on the basis of evidence. The roughness of the Moon, for example, showed that some of the features of Earth repeated themselves in the heavens. The motions of the Medicean stars [some of Jupiter’s moons] demonstrated that satellites could orbit bodies other than the Earth. The phases of Venus argued that at least one planet must travel around the Sun. And the dark spots discovered on the Sun sullied the perfection of yet another heavenly sphere. /…/ Galileo rued the stubbornness of philosophers who clung to Aristotle’s views despite the new perspective provided by the telescope. He swore that if Aristotle himself were brought back to life and shown the sights now seen, the great philosopher would quickly alter his opinion, as he had always honored the evidence of his senses."
31-Dec-2022: 15. Den fräcka kråkan by Ulf Nilsson & Eva Eriksson
Fave! And a re-read, as it’s a kiddy book that I used to have read to me in the 80’s and that I vaguely remembered. IT’S FUCKING SAD :'(
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Vegan FAQ! 🙂
The Web Site the Meat Industry Doesn’t Want You to See.
Please watch Earthlings.
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You can reach me at yoze83 [AT] yahoo.com
Posted by ratexla (protected by Pixsy) on 2023-01-07 17:20:37
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