The ALCHEMY OF AIR Summary
The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager is fast-paced account of the early-20th-century quest to develop synthetic fertilizer. Today hundreds of factories convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia in order to manufacture the artificial fertilizers that make modern-day agricultural yields possible. They are based on the technological advance known as the Haber-Bosch process, developed prior to World War I by the German chemists and Nobel laureates Fritz Haber (1868–1934) and Carl Bosch (1874–1940).
Review by Steve Jurvetson
50% of the nitrogen in our bodies came from the Haber–Bosch process. It’s in every protein and every strand of DNA. Ponder that — “half of the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.”
I just finished Hager’s Alchemy of Air, the story of “the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life-and-death importance for the largest number of people. Put simply, this discovery is keeping alive half the people on earth.”
meteorite Summary
Meteorites have long been seen as portents of fate and messages from the gods, their fiery remains inspiring worship and giving rise to legends that have persisted for millennia. But beyond the lore, meteorites tell an even greater story: that of our solar system. In Meteorite, geologist Tim Gregory shows that beneath the charred crusts of these celestial stones lies a staggering diversity of rock types. Their unique constituents, vibrant colors, and pungent smells contain thrilling tales of interstellar clouds, condensing stardust, and the fiery collisions of entire worlds. Gregory explores the world of meteorites to uncover new insights into what our solar system was like before our sun became a star, into the forging of our planet, and into the emergence of life on it. Humans have long looked to the skies for answers to big questions. Meteorite reveals how science is finally arriving at those answers.
Review by Steve Jurvetson
We are all made of tiny balls — trillions upon trillions of chondrules that formed before the planets.
“In our understanding of how Earth came to be, there may be nothing as important as the mystery of the chondrule." — SciAm March 2021
Meteorite by Tim Gregory is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. It describes in sculpted prose how scientists have explored the mysteries of our solar system’s formation and dated the age of the Earth using the ancient time capsules that routinely rain on Earth — meteorites. Here are some of my favorite passages:
“Asteroids are not fragments of a shattered planet; they are fragments that never formed a planet in the first place.”
“Billowing through the protoplanetary disc as a mass of brightly glowing droplets of lava, clouds of freshly sintered chondrule grains swarmed for five million years. Trillions upon trillions of chondrules, in numbers that far exceed the number of stars in the observable Universe, spiraled as gravitational vortices, and coalesced to build the asteroids and the planets. What a sight it must have been.”
Steve Jurvetson with A Thousand Brains author Jeff Hawkins
a thousand brains summary
A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI.
For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence?
Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world—not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.
A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word.
Review by Steve jurvetson
Building on his first book, On Intelligence, Jeff bravely presents a framework for how the brain works to produce intelligence from neurons organized into ~150 thousand cortical columns in his follow-up book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. His decades of self-funded dedication to studying how the brain works afford a possibly unique and unifying perspective.
I think the first 112 pages are the best part of his new book. I’ll focus on that and save a brief critique of his AI constraints for the end. In his first book, Hawkins presents a memory-prediction framework for intelligence. The neurons in the neocortex provide a vast amount of memory that learns a model of the world. These models continuously make low-level predictions in parallel across all of our senses. We only notice them when a prediction is incorrect. Higher in the hierarchy, we make predictions at higher levels of abstraction (the crux of intelligence, creativity, and all that we consider being human), but the structures are fundamentally the same. If that is not mind-bending enough, in his new book, Jeff extends the memory framework to the construct of “reference frames”.
Everything we perceive is a constructed reality, a cortical consensus from competing internal models resident in many cortical columns, the amalgam of 1000 brains. Those models are updated by data streaming from the senses. But our reality resides in the models. Here are the best parts of his new book, in my opinion. I revisit them to learn.
Travelling without moving, as we’ll see…
“The cells in your head are reading these words. Think how remarkable that is.”
Review by Maryanna Saenko
The Wayfinders explores several modern-day traditional cultures - ancient people practicing ways of life that have barely changed over thousands of years, often passed down without written language. Wade Davis is a legend in the worlds of exploration and anthropology. This book, a series of five essays initially written for the CBC Massey Lectures in 2008/09, is dedicated to the proposition that each ancient society, regardless of its lack of “technological advancement” as defined by biased Western standards, possesses a unique genius exquisitely suited to its own time and place.
The book explores feats of human ingenuity rivaling some of the most advanced technological capabilities of modern times. Perhaps most fascinating is the author's explanations of the various cultural worldviews and how steeped in coexistence and harmony they are - entire ways of life beautifully revolving around respect for the surrounding environment. Such cultures are being lost at a rate exceeding global biodiversity loss. Davis points to language as the canary in the coal mine for this culture loss.
“A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world […] Of the 7,000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being taught to children. Effectively, unless something changes, they will disappear within our lifetimes. Half of the world's language are teetering on the brink of extinction.”
Within each distinct culture exists a unique philosophy on how to live and for what to live; as these cultures die, so do our collective abilities to learn from and emulate them. Given ancient cultures' immense wisdom and sustainable essence inspired by survival, Davis argues that we must protect and learn from them. Perhaps we need to adopt a new paradigm before our economic and philosophical systems of competition and wealth accumulation have devoured what's left of our cultural and natural systems.
“Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does not destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.”
Davis makes the point that human ingenuity is essentially limitless in the face of environmental adversity, a point worth remembering as we grapple with climate change. His work also asks us to consider ancient knowledge when considering how to function harmoniously with our environments. This is a good reminder as we explore technological solutions to the climate crisis.
The Wayfinders summary
In The Wayfinders anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis asks what it means to be human. Davis leads us on a journey to celebrate the world’s indigenous cultures. The book takes us to Polynesia and celebrates the art of navigation that allowed the Wayfinders to infuse the entire Pacific Ocean with their imagination and genius. In the Amazon, the People of the Anaconda introduce us to a complex of cultures inspired by mythological ancestors whom even today dictate how humans must live in the forest. Dreamtime stories lead to the melaleuca forests of Arnhem Land and an understanding of the subtle philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. In Nepal, a stone path leads to a door opening to reveal the radiant face of a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, Tsetsam Ani, a Buddhist nun who entered a lifelong retreat forty-five years ago. Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. As expressed by culture, rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit is among the central challenges of our time.