Content tagged with “environment”

“This is a classic of science fiction, clearly. By some accounts, it’s the greatest sci-fi novel ever written. I had been meaning to tackle it for years, but this took on increased urgency with the new film coming out (it was supposed to be this year, but the COVID pandemic has pushed back the…”

“Apparently the population of the planet will start to recede very soon. As sexual education and contraception gains hold around the world, birth rates are dropping below the 2.1 required to stabilize the population. This book is fundamentally about demographics, the changes that have brought us to…”

“This is kind of a weird book, because the title makes you feel like it’s going to be a minute-by-minute discussion of the chemical disaster in Bhopal. But, it’s a 400-page book, and you don’t get to the disaster until about page 290. Seriously. It starts with a discussion of insects and pesticides,…”

“Thrilling story of a cholera outbreak in London in the 1850s, and the physician who tracked down the source. At the time, illness was thought to come from ‘bad air,’ but a physician named John Snow mapped the illnesses and determined that they were clustered around a water pump in Broad Street. No…”

“Fantastically written history of how poorly flight attendants were treated in the 60s and 70s, and how they fought back. Back then, a stewardess was a key selling point for airlines. Most travelers were male, and stewardesses were employed to indulge the male ego with an image of servitude. They…”

“This is a well-researched book, but seems disorganized. It felt like it jumped around a lot, especially between scopes – from macro to micro. The major points I learned: Electricity is unlike any other resource in that it’s not a storable thing. When you use it, it was generated a fraction of a…”

“This book was okay. It’s not what I expected. It talks about infrastructure, but really from a systems and societal perspective. It talks about the ideas of sharing infrastructure, and how that infrastructure has played out in our society. It also goes deep into the effects on women and minorities,…”

“This was apparently a revolutionary book, back when it was published. It pushed back on the idea that industrial accidents were usually the fault of human error. It advaned the idea that in the world of connected systems, humans simply be expected to understand the ultimate ramifications of…”

“It’s…okay. It’s very, very drawn out. The author attempts to trace back the origins of his food. The first chapter is on corn, but interestingly he manages to trace food back to oil – the petroleum based fertilizers that everything grows from. The chapters on beef and chicken processing are…”

“(This post is going to make some people hate me. I’m sorry for this in advance.) I’ve come to some peace about climate change. I wasn’t obsessing about it before, but I do think about it quite a bit. The debate rages over the source of climate change – is it something we’re doing, or something…”

“ Lovely introduction to general systems theory. You come to understand that a ‘system’ can be almost anything, defined by inputs, outputs, rules, buffers, etc. The book discussed how systems can be effected and changed over time. Exactly what I was looking for. ”