As mentioned before (see here) this is a book recommended to me by Avi Basu. As I had mentioned there, the author’s basic premise is that while we remember an invention for its immediate effect, in reality, there are a lot more profound downstream effects that we do not pause to realize. One example he talked about was how the printing press led to telescopes and microscopes. In a fashion that you will fail to connect – even after I tell you that one led to the other.

He calls this the “hummingbird effect”.

The six “inventions” the author focuses on are Glass, Cold (as in air conditioning), Sound (recreation of sound), Clean (-liness), Time and Light.

To me, the book starts on a high note, maintains the level of excitement for a couple of more chapters but towards the end (Time and Light), I found the discussions to lose the energy and sometimes the point the author was trying to make to be a little abstruse.

But that should not take away any merit from the very interesting and unique way Steves has tried to tie together the tapestry of various inventions.

Did you know that the world renowned glass making island of Murano (we visited in 2015 and got this from there) was a result of protecting public safety? (the glassmakers were banished there)

Did you know the origins of air conditioning included cutting up huge ice pieces from lakes in Massachussetts and then shipping them to the tropics? The invention of air conditioning not only circulated air molecules, it circulated people too! Hitherto barren lands – now called Texas, Florida and California rapidly saw people move there due to the tolerable temperatures that could be created inside. Florida went from less than a million people in 1920s to the Top 4 populous state in under 50 years!

This has had a very interesting effect – on Presidential Elections!! The redistributing of electoral colleges that air conditioning effected decisively moved election attention to the Sun Belt.

The ability to recreate sound quickly gave rise to the radio and then jazz. The author asserts that jazz – which created overnight celebrities (mostly Africa-Americans) led to a profound breakthrough – for the first time, white America welcomed African-American culture into its living room. Eventually paving the path to the birth of the civil rights movement.

In another interesting example, the author traces how a dangerous and unauthorized experiment with chlorine (lime) released into a New Jersey water tank proved the thesis a John Seale had – chlorine disinfects water of its contamination – and how that eventually led to people taking daily showers (a rather modern less-than-100-year practice in the USA). Which then led water to be used for as social entertainment – the swimming pool – which then led women to shed multiple layers of clothing that was the common practice to exposing almost all skin in public in a very short period of time!!

Go figure!!

One interesting point in the book – while we remember a person for an invention (Edison for light bulb, as an example), it is rarely one person who actually invents anything. (In fact, Edison did not invent the lightbulb but that is a story for another day). All inventions are fundamentally built on work (and other inventions) done by others and sometimes within a small period of time, multiple people invent the same thing. The time and forces of nature are just right at that point.

Easy reading. Recommend it.

This time it is a recommendation from Avi Basu – Steven Johnson’s “How We Got To Now”. This book focuses on six inventions and the surprising downstream long term changes they have brought – “Hummingbird Effect” – as he calls it. These are inventions that you will not come up with very quickly – glass, air conditioning etc.

And that is his point – while we easily understand the short term, immediate effect of these inventions, if you think thru it a few more steps, you will realize that the long term effects have been profound for these seemingly innocuous inventions. As an example, he cites how the printing press gave way to our understanding of the edges of the universe.

While the connection is not apparent at first, the author points out how spread of printed material made people realize they are farsighted (could not read as well the smaller scripts) which gave rise to glasses (lenses) which gave rise to microscopes on one end and telescopes on the other. Without the need to read the small print so often, we would have never stumbled upon lenses, the author argues.

Will continue to enjoy reading the book by the fire the next few evenings.

This is an absorbing book if you have any cursory interest in numbers and how they came about. Alex Bellos, a British journalist has a good story telling style and presents fairly well some of the mysteries behind numbers.

For example, did you know…
… if we did not go thru math classes, we would naturally think of numbers in logarithmic scale? We would think 1,2,3, a few, many… We understand ratios better than differences. (Remember that example from a previous post on why we would not walk 50 yards to buy a car for one buck less but will do so for a 2-buck coffee?).

… that base 10 is very inconvenient? 12 is the most convenient base (explaining 60 minutes to an hour, 12 inches to a foot…). But 10 became standard because it was easier to count with our fingers that way. Ever wondered why a finger is also called a ‘digit’?

… there are some fascinating stories about Pi. You can read about them in a prior post here

… why do we call a variable “x”? Originally we used upper case vowels for variable and consonants for constants. Descartes switched to lower case. He denoted variables from the end… “z”, “y”… and constants from the front “a”, “b”… But while publishing his book, the printer started running out of “z”s and asked if he could use “x”. (there was not much use of “x” in words). Descartes replied that he did not care. The rest became history. If not for the printer running out of letters, we could have had Z-Rays to check your chest infection today or Malcolm Z !!

… what an ambigram is? See this post on how I now have started writing my name in ambigram.

… that the largest number smaller than 1 simply does NOT exist?

… that leaves tend to sprout out at 137.5 degrees relative to the previous leaf? (if you see from the top of the shoot) This is rooted in the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci sequence. (It maximizes the sunlight the plant can get regardless of the number of leaves)

… (speaking of Fibonacci numbers)… that most flowers have petals that is a number in the Fibonacci sequence? So do the spirals in a pineapple, spruce cones, sunflowers…

This and many other fascinating facts that our teachers never used to make math really interesting to us can be found in this book. You do not need to know math to enjoy this easy reading book

Highly recommend it.

This book took me a lot of time to finish. It is a fairly dense book and filled with too many medical terms that made me slow down to get the full impact. Even then, I suspect I caught only some of the major points.

The author – a neuroendocrinologist from Stanford University – tries to explain how stress messes up pretty much every system we have in our body. The funny title of the book is to highlight the point that humans are the only animals that get stressed about what MIGHT happen in the future.

There are about twenty odd chapters. Each chapter has essentially two parts. The first part explains how a system works – circulatory, nervous, sensory, reproductive etc etc. I found these portions fascinating since it helped me understand a little more about how our body works. The second part of each chapter focuses on how stress – or rather the specific hormone “glucocorticoids” plays havoc with the systems when over produced OVER A LONGER PERIOD OF TIME. I do not believe I could concentrate as much in these portions to follow everything.

Here are some interesting snippets…

1. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. Not so for humans.

2. The diseases that plague us now are ones of slow accumulation of damage – heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular diseases etc…

3. Our stress response system gets mobilized not only in response to actual stress but in expectations of them too.

4. A funny quote – The sympathetic nervous system mediates the four F’s of behavior – flight, fight, fright and sex. (Get it? 🙂 )

5. No cell in your body is more than five cells away from a blood vessel – yet the circulatory system takes up only 3 percent of body mass.

6. Only vertebrates gain acquired immunity as they grow up. Invertebrates do not. It is not exactly known why this is so.

7. Being under stress does make you more susceptible to cold

8. During stress, memory for emotional components is enhanced (although the accuracy is not necessarily all that good), whereas memory for the neutral details is not.

9. If you test young and old people and give them lots of time to complete an IQ test, there is little difference. As you stress the system – in this case, by making the subjects race against a time limit – scores fall for all ages, but much further among older people.

10. Genes are rarely about inevitability in humans. It is more about propensity and tendency.

I enjoyed the book. Hope you will too!

William Irvine has written this book on Stoicism from a unique perspective – he teaches Stoicism in college and is a practicing Stoic himself.

Among other things, he does a good job of tracing the history of Stoicism. Most of us know and read about the Roman version of Stoicism. But Stoicism started in Greece and had a couple of more interesting facets – reasoning logic (if A, then B; A; ergo B) and physics!!! But they got dropped by the Romans when Panaetius of Rhodes took the philosophy from Greece to Rome.

He also does a good job of explaining the different philosophical schools that competed with Stoicism at that time – Cynics, Epicureans, Skeptics, Megarians and so on.

The practices that the author suggests to any aspiring Stoic are:
(*) Negative Visualization – to fight off “hedonic adaptation and appreciate what you have
(*) Dichotomy of Control – the author extends it to Trichotomy of control – to not worry about the things you cannot control and “internalize goals” when you have some control.
(*) Fatalistic about the past and present but never the future
(*) For advanced practitioners, practice “voluntary discomfort”
(*) Being selective of which social function you attend and who you associate with.
(*) Use self-deprecating humor to counter insults
(*) Deal with anger by reminding yourself of the impermanence

Some interesting quotes from the book:
“Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes”
“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing”
“If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself”
“To know how many are jealous of you, count your admirers.”
“If we seek social status, we give other people power over us.”

It was in the beginning of April that I had received an email from Erin Stahmer bringing my attention to David Allan’s TEDx talk titled “Who Knows What is Good or Bad?”. While reading the transcript, I found a reference to a Taoist parable that David credited the book “Religions of Man” for.

That is how I got curious about the book. Getting the book was a little more difficult though. This is not available in electronic format. So, had to order the paper version and wait for two weeks for it to appear. For about a month, I was a sight laying down in the bed every night with a highlighter in my mouth trying to take the book in.

Overall, two thumbs up. Loved the book and some of the quotes in it. It also made me put all the important religions on a timeline of when they started. Do you know which is the oldest religion and which is the youngest one?

The author does not get into too much historical details other than explain the societal background against which each of the religions emerged and then explains the basic precepts of each one of them and how they came about.

Some of the facts I learned:
1. How Abraham came to have two sons and how they eventually evolved into the two strands of Jews and Muslims
2. Violence in nature is aplenty. But violence within the species is fairly concentrated in humans only.
3. Had it not been a guard who would not let Lao Tzu go thru the Hankao Pass (he was trying to get away from society on his water buffalo) without writing down his thoughts, we would have never had a religion called Taoism!

Some of the quotes I enjoyed:
1. Tagore: “Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as a friend”
2. Talleyrand – “You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them”
3. Asked on his deathbed whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau replied, “I didn’t know we had quarreled”.

Happy reading!

Overall, I would give it a thumbs sideways.
If you have ever read any book on meditation, the concept of being in the now or slowing down, then you can skip this book. If you have not, this might be a good first book to get introduced to the concepts.

To me the benchmark to beat is still Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.

Compared to that, this book would come across superficial and trying to address too many topics in too few pages. I am not sure I can recommend this.

But if you are very early in the journey of understanding your own self and how to stay still, this is bound to be a great first read.

There is something this book talks about from Taoism that appealed to me. And that is how nothingness can have a lot of meaning when it is put in the correct context. A cubic meter of air in front of you means nothing. Unless I put a clay cover around it. Suddenly it can hold water (like a pitcher). The concept of doing nothing, achieving nothing … cannot be truly understood unless you put the context of a full life around it.

This book came by recommendation of Soumyadipta. Overall, a very enjoyable book. The basic theory is about how the best ideas that won wars or conquered diseases were rejected for many years as completely lunatic ideas before they got accepted. Hence “Loonshots” (lunatic + moonshots).

The book has some incredible anecdotes and stories. Sometimes though you might get lost in the intrigue of all those stories and lose the basic point of what the author is trying to build up to. I had to go back thru the book and skim it a second time to tie all those points he was making into the overall roadmap he had planned to establish.

Some great case studies of radar, insulin, Apple, Polaroid, Pan Am and such success or failure stories. One very interesting conclusion is that to support really large loonshots, you need the support of government. Nobody has as much money and capacity to digest failures. The author takes us thru the glorious days of American breakthroughs when government and science came together.

You will learn about the magic of power of 2.5. Did you know that a lot of things – e.g. casualties in civil war and the frequencies of them or forest fire size (area) and occurrences are all correlated by a factor of 2.5?

You will also learn how the optimum size of human groups is 150. We naturally tend to congregate in that size. Apparently, the neocortex size and the social group size of all primates follow a fairly strict straight line. And if you extrapolate to homo sapiens neocortex size, you will arrive at 150!!

If you are an organizational leader, there are some thought provoking ideas here – about how to keep an organization viable and productive as it goes thru transitions. The example of molecules of water and ice co-existing at 32 F and freely intermixing is a powerful one.

You will also learn about the power of systems thinking (understanding why we took a decision in the past) versus outcome thinking.

And even if you are not an organizational leader, you will find a lot of Aha! moments in this book.

Now, I have to say that before I picked up this book, I read up the reviews and there were a lot of scathing ones (some sounded very personal). After reading the book, I do not think the author deserves any of that. Certainly, as I mentioned, the diversity of examples and theories the author gets into – and there are lots of them – makes you forget how they relate to the original roadmap but a simple re-read solved that problem for me.

Thumbs up from me.

This was a very quick read and as very quick read books tend to be, not particularly helpful to me. Now, I have to admit that I am fairly disciplined (some would suggest even OCD) in how I go around planning my day, weeks and years. Most of the things suggested here are things I found I already do (e.g. minimize TV – for me it is zero time, avoid news – I catch up weekly thru Economist – exactly what one of the author does, block calendar times, reflect etc etc). It is possible that others might find some nuggets of wisdom here and there.

One suggestion did catch my eye – I am going to try that. It talks about how while discussing or debating, we get caught up on facts. e.g. we would be talking about Coronavirus and somebody would be mentioning how Italy now has more deaths than China. Somebody else would doubt it and then immediately we would go to our phone and Google to get to the facts.

The book suggests that it is too distracting and that we should try keeping a “Random question list” and check later. That is an intriguing thought. Of course, now I am worrying – do I have to carry a piece of paper all the time? Or do I have to fish out my phone to write down the question anyways? Also, without the fact at that point, can the discussion continue at all? Not very sure, but I will see how this works.

One thing though, the authors have written the book in a very funny way.

Still, it will not get in my recommended read list.

I am going to try to tamp down on the hyperbole but I am not sure how. This book is three thumbs up. Yes, I am aware I have two thumbs,

If I were to name three books that have had the deepest influence on me, they would be (*) The Top Five Regrets of a Dying Man (*) The Power of Now and this book (*) Why We Sleep.

I received this from my younger daughter as a Christmas gift. I finally picked it up for reading sometime in January. This was such a great book that I had to read cover to cover – TWICE !! Unfortunately, in the last two months, I have talked about this book in way too many group gatherings – undoubtedly putting them to sleep. Which, ironically, is what this book is all about.

Fantastic book to understand sleep. And dispel some myths about sleep….

Did you know that…

(*) Sleep is not about lack of wakefulness. There is a boat load of stuff your brain is doing when you are sleeping.
(*) Our brain shuts off the portion of itself that controls motor movements when we dream. Do you know why? Else we will act out our dream!! (try to get off from bed and run away when we dream we are being chased)
(*) Adolescents sleeping late and waking up late? That is not a choice. They need that. It is an evolution thing.
(*) Most sleeping pills do not control your sleep. They just act as sedatives (blunt out your brain)
(*) We have no concept of time when we dream. In fact the concept of time when we dream dilates 3X to 4X!
(*) NREM sleep helps you move your memories from the day from short term (hippocampus) to your long term (frontal cortex) but it is your REM sleep that helps you stick those memories to past memories (making you learn)
(*) Dolphins and whales sleep with one side brain shut off at a time!
(*) Evolution wise, we are biphasic sleepers (once after lunch and then the long sleep at night)
(*) Older adults need less sleep? Yeah, that is a myth
(*) We wash our face before we go to sleep because feelings clean causes better sleep? Another myth! But there is a biological reason why we should wash down our feet, hand and face/whole head to induce sleep.
(*) 65 degrees room temperature is ideal for deep sleep (that is too cold for me!!!)
(*) You are on high fat/low carb diet? You are messing up your REM sleep (leading to learning) but getting deep NREM sleep (short term memory cleaning is good)