How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships are built, broken, repaired by Peter H Kim (2023)

This book is terrible. The Science in it is shockingly bad.  The topics covered are about taking offense, unrelated to trust. I kept hoping it would get better and it just got worse.  1/5 Stars.

1950’s Tech still unsurpassed

I am burdened with cognitive biases. I have sensibilities, ethics, and judgements from an earlier era. I look at large-scale human pursuits, social justice ethics, and public policy through a lens and rubric that biases me for the goals of The Enlightenment  -- Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Interstellar Spacecraft

In the 1950s, we planned, designed, built, and eventually flew (in the 1970's) interstellar spaceships to advance our understanding of our solar system, mostly the outer planets. Over fifty fantastic years later Voyager-2  is still gathering and transmitting data back to us about the interstellar medium. Among the considerations, methods, and technologies that have advanced since the probes were sent out is our consideration of reliability:  The 1950s perception of redundancy is now considered too conservative; we are increasing risk of catastrophic failure by using reserve power to deliver more scientific data from more instruments as Voyager-2 races towards the 21 billion Km mark from the earth.  Let's hope the probe lives 50 more years!  

Could we design, build, and fly interstellar spacecraft today?  Now that private companies like SpaceX have returned civilization to medium and heavy space launch capabilities, the answer in 2024 is "yes."  But are governments or NASA or other publicly funded "science" endeavors interested?  That answer is "no."  We have other concerns, values, and priorities. In the 1950's we cared about discovering the outer planets and the interstellar medium.  We designed space probes and instruments to "science the sh*it out of" the unknown frontier.  Our tech now is focused inward and no longer looking towards the stars.

Weapons Tech 1955

Another interstellar rocket engine concept, the liquid salt water rocket was first developed in 1955 for the "big stick," or the Supersonic Low Altitude cruise Missile (SLAM).  The concept was to create a nuclear-rocket-powered, large hypersonic cruise missile loaded with 10 Hydrogen Bomb warheads. The missile would fly faster than mach 3 at an altitude of 50m, navigate to targets using look-down cameras and a stored map (no inertial guidance, GPS, or other navigation!) and deliver H-Bombs while out-flying interception missiles and radar.  We developed both a scale model and a working prototype of the rocket motor that exceeded their design specs. The full-scale system was tested and verified in 1964.  We discovered the missile could circle the earth for "months," and adjust its speed and rocket exhaust to destroy targets and kill people with sonic booms and nuclear fall-out, respectively.  The missile could continue rampaging after exhausting its supply of H-Bombs. 100 of these missiles were planned. If launched as a revenge "doomsday device," each of these missiles could fly for months, nuke 10 large cities and then poison the world with nuclear fall-out.  If launched as a first- or second-strike nuclear weapon the SLAM could avoid detection, penetrate enemy territory, destroy 10 targets, fly home, and be reused if needed.

Optimism

My point about the 1950s is that our accomplishments were not just the progress & inventions of that time, including:

• Fiber optic cable

• Video Recording

• Hovercraft

• Oral Contraceptives

• Credit Cards

• Solar Power

• Non-stick cooking pans

• Lasers

• Polio Vaccine

• Microchips

• Seat Belts

Most people were optimistic about applications of scientific method and "the future." We envisioned and worked towards rapid improvements in wealth creation, social justice, and understanding our universe.  We planned to control the weather and use nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. What happened?

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W Anthony

The beginning and end of this book are interesting and enjoyable, but the majority of the details in the middle are really boring, 2/5 Stars.  Read the book summary or wikipedia articles on these topics instead.

Moon Dust as an earth cooling Parasol?

(cumulative attenuation from a monodisperse cloud of particles with total mass Mcloud = 109 kg at

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000133

Some of my fellow Gerry's Kids have published a study of how we can cool down the earth with moon dust.  The idea is based on the High Frontier. Throw some construction robots and bulldozers at the moon; the bots set up and maintain solar collectors, mass drivers (magnetic rail guns) and dust factories.  Once deployed, the rail guns shoot 10^10 kg of very fine (100 nm) dust particles at L1  or into an orbit that lingers near L1. The dust reduces sunlight by 1.8%.  Cool the earth.  In the future, we will vacuum up the dust for space habitat construction.

Almost all of the geoengineering methods I have seen (Termination Shock is a fun book!) do not solve the critical problem of reaching zero CO2 emission and then going negative (sequestering CO2) to mitigate ocean acidification, and other deleterious effects of too much CO2.  Humans put almost 3.6% of all new CO2 into the atmosphere and when volcanism has some quiet times, our contribution can go up to almost 4%.

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

Thinking in Systems:

My friend Senthil asks for and shares book recommendations with me.  His 2022 list included this title so I added it to the (large) queue of "holds" at my local library. (Aside: Here is proof my library is better than yours.)  I had low expectations because the book was revised by others after Donella's untimely death and is now over 20 years old.  My fear of the sharp political slant was somewhat unfounded. The book really does make the reader sit back and think. The methods described can expand our horizons to overcome some instinctive cognitive biases.  We can use the simple approaches of the book to see many phenomena from a broader point of view. I enjoyed the book and recommend it. 4/5 Stars.

From Strength to Strength by Arthur C Brooks

Fantastic book with good scholarship, interesting anecdotes about famous musicians, good evidence-based science, and a very compelling take on Ikigai. 5/5 Stars.  Highly recommended. 

Intelligence & Personality

This fascinating preprint appeared today in psyarchiv (https://psyarxiv.com/ar6g3/).  Personally, I have always found personality intrinsically interesting and I am very grateful Psych research has emerged from its history of weak science; Psychology is leading many other areas in combating the reproducibility crisis in science.  For the impatient, this preprint's results are:

Results showed that openness (ρ = .20) and neuroticism (ρ = -.09) were the strongest Big Five correlates of intelligence and that openness correlated more with crystallized than fluid intelligence. At the facet-level, traits related to intellectual engagement and unconventionality were more strongly related to intelligence than other openness facets, and sociability and orderliness were negatively correlated with intelligence. Facets of gregariousness and excitement seeking had stronger negative correlations. . .

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know about the Word

The information in this book is mostly covered in Peter Zeihan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning. But the numbers themselves are interesting and there are other interesting facts. 4/5 Stars.  Vaclav should keep the numbers updated online.

If you think you know what a proton is

 

Think again and read this interesting summary of recent research.  In particular, try to explain how what we currently perceive as a "proton" can sometimes be detected as a quark soup consisting of two charm quarks that weigh 1.3 times as much as the entire proton.  Forget conservation of mass.  Einstein might label it "spukhafte Gewichtsveränderung."

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

Max Shapiro (Tegmark) writes better for a popular science audience than Roger Penrose.  But having just read Cycles of Time, I am wondering how Tegmark's very odd theory at the end accounts for the second law of Thermodynamics.  The end of Tegmark's book is slightly off-topic & very depressing but the entire book is very well-written, worthwhile, and approachable by a lay audience (like me) 4/5 Stars.

Brain Rules for Aging Well by John Medina

Great! 5/5 stars!

Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose

I don't have enough physics to understand why one cosmological concept is more appealing than others.  The concept is cool, though, 2/5 stars.

The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose

The first few chapters, Turing machines formalisms, and walk (inadequate) summary of Gödel's incompleteness theorems were terrible.  However the book warmed up during Penrose's commentaries about Quantum Theory, the odd uses of imaginary numbers, equivalences of large-scale Newtonian phenomena with Schrödinger's equation (my understanding from 1977 was wrong), and his introspective comments on "awareness," 3/5 Stars.