Stewart Brand inspired Cool Tools. This blog is a continuation of the user-generated recommendation mechanism that Brand invented in the Whole Earth Catalog (which I worked on in its later years). Brand has spent his long career successfully changing people’s minds by offering them tools. The tool he offers here is simply the tool of “changing your mind.” How do you do it rationally, smartly, wisely? What kind of evidence do you need? What is more important, principles or pragmatism?

This book can be seen as a challenge to green theory and green dogma, but it directly challenges ideology itself. I think this is Brand’s best book yet. As you follow his arguments, you get a great education in following science and data rather than righteous assumptions. Instead, says Brand, assume much of what we think is true isn’t, and then go from there with a fresh look at the evidence. Being pragmatic about something as complex as a technological planet can lead you to unconventional ideas for dealing with planetary woes — even if they seem contrary to cherished beliefs. Some of the solutions — like nuclear power and genetically modified crops — will be dismissed as outright heresies among greens. But you get to watch a great mind change his mind. As Brand’s education continues he makes as good a case for these heresies as you’ll hear anywhere.

This book may change your own mind about things you thought you believed. What more can you ask of a book?

About 99% of the scientists involved in climate studies, paleontology, atmospheric chemistry, and planetary ecology agree on the presence of human-caused global warming. We call that a scientific consensus. But in every science there are a few heretics who don’t agree on the consensus. That 1% dissent is what powers science forward. In fact, tolerating heretics is what makes science different from religion. The dissent is usually wrong, but every once in a while if you don’t kill it off, it corrects the consensus.

What should we do with the 1% who dissent about global warming? By logic, we should embrace them, but currently “deniers” of global warming have become demonized, which is a sign that global warming has become slightly religious. Which is a shame because many global warming skeptics are not crackpots or paid shills, but first-class prestigious scientists with a minority view.

Throughout its history, science usually advances from the edges. Heretics should be cherished for forcing edges to the center. The most respected scientific global warming heretics have been rounded up in this very readable book, The Deniers. Significantly, many of the eminent scientists included here don’t call themselves deniers at all. They say, “I believe global warming is evidenced in all these other fields; Except in the field that I am expert in, the evidence is totally bogus.” One by one the field-specific heretics make their case. And a number of them are rather persuasive. But at the moment there is no unified alternative theory of climate change, so the critique of global warming amounts to exposing holes in the current science. Any good scientific theory will have holes.

Until the heretics can change the consensus, we should proceed with the remedies that make sense no matter how climate change rolls out: getting off oil and coal, upping conservation, drastically increasing efficiency, expanding solar, wind, nuclear, and embracing cities while protecting wildlife habitat.

At the same time cherish your heretics. This is a solid, fairly evenhanded treatment of this particular heresy. It’s the best volume I’ve seen that presents the scientific case (such as it is) for skepticism of the standard claims of anthropogenic global warming. There might be something in these skepticisms, there might not. We should fund more of these heretics. That’s science at work.

Tide data, like time and gps coordinates, now flows freely almost anywhere you desire, so there is no reason not to tap into this stream. Plugged into the data I feel more in tune with the outside, and better prepared when I head to the shores.

Downloadable applications like Mr. Tide 3 for the Mac can chart tide highs and lows on any day you want anywhere in the world. Mr Tides displays results in a brilliant visual graph (image below).

But usually all I want to know is what is the tide right now, and for that purpose widgets are perfect. One keystroke and the answer pops up on my screen. There are two free tide widgets for the Mac. In both you set your preferred default place, and then when you invoke the widgets screen it will display current tides and highs and lows for the day. Tide Widget is simplicity itself and works better on my PowerPC version Mac, while Tide App shows the sunset and sunrises as well but prefers an Intel Mac. For 99% of the time, Tide Widget gives me exactly what I need instantly. (Tell me which Windows widgets are best and I’ll append them here.)

Yes, you can get the Tide App for your iPhone (I haven’t used it there yet), or the previously-reviewed Tide Tool for your Treo.

– KK

Tide App
Free, available from TideApp

Tide Widget
Free, available from August Hahn

Mr. Tides
Free, available from August Hahn

(top pic via National Renewable Energy Lab)

Do the primeval laws governing the universe precede the existence of the universe; if so, in what realm do they operate? Or do the laws expand into existence along with the universe itself? If the latter, what determines the rules of the laws’ arrival? This big set of questions is usually pushed away from science and left for theologians and philosophers to invent answers for. Cosmologist and astrophysicist Paul Davies reclaims these fundamental topics as suitable for scientific answers. He reports from the frontiers of knowledge where researchers are measuring, quantifying, and theorizing on the nature of universal laws. Davies includes in the range of answers the very weird possibility that we sentient observers may be partly responsible for the fundamental laws of nature. Let that one sink in. This is an incredibly heady, trippy book, done with masterful clarity and sanity. It’s probably the “biggest” book I’ve ever read.

– KK

Cosmic Jackpot
Paul Davies
2007, 336 pages
$18

Available from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

Mutability was [Wheeler's] byword. He liked to quip that “there is no law except the law that there is no law.” Adopting the catchy aphorism “law without law” to describe this contrarian position, Wheeler maintained that the laws of physics did not exist a priori but emerged from the chaos of the quantum big bang – coming out of “higgledy-piggledy” was the way he quaintly expressed it – congealing along with the universe that they govern in the aftermath of its shadowy birth. “So far as we can see today,” he maintained, “the laws of physics cannot have existed from everlasting to everlasting. They must have come into being at the big bang.” Crucially, Wheeler did not suppose that the laws just popped up, ready-made, in their final form, but that they emerged in approximate form and sharpened up over time.

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Super-turtle! To avoid an infinite regress (the bottomless tower of turtles) one might consider a levitating superturtle, which is self-explaining and self-supporting. Theologians call this “a necessary being,” and some have tried to prove that such a being exists. Some scientists have argued for the necessary existence of a unique superunified theory.

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The novel feature Wheeler introduced via his delayed-choice experiment was the possibility of observers today, and in the future, shaping the nature of physical reality in the past, including the far past when no observers existed. That is indeed a radical idea, for it gives life and mind a type of creative role in physics, making them an indispensable part of the entire cosmological story. Yet life and mind are the products of the universe. So there is a logical as well as a temporal loop here. Conventional science assumes a linear logical sequence: cosmos -> life -> mind. Wheeler suggested closing this chain into a loop: cosmos -> life -> mind -> cosmos. He expressed the essential idea with characteristic economy of prose: “Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics.” Thus the universe explains observers, and observers explain the universe. Wheeler thereby rejected the notion of the universe as a machine subject to fixed a priori laws and replaced it with a self-synthesizing world he called “the participatory universe.” By postulating a closed explanatory loop, similar to the self-consistency argument of Benioff that I considered in the previous section, Wheeler deftly circumvented the infamous tower-of-turtles problem. There is no need for a levitating super-turtle if the bio-friendly universe explains itself.

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To understand the high information content of life, we must recognize that it is a product not of the laws of physics alone, but of the laws of physics and the history of the environment together. Life emerged and evolved its immense complexity as the result of a process that took billions of years and required a vast number of information-processing steps. A biological organism therefore encapsulates the products of a complex and convoluted history. To sum it up in a phrase, life as we observe it today is 1 percent physics and 99 percent history.

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

Programming the Universe

The Intelligent Universe

Oxymoronica

This superb biography of Einstein is really a biography of his ideas. It mines the newly opened archive of Einstein’s prolific correspondence for clues into his theories. We watch his ideas stir in embryonic form out of witty exchanges with his family and other scientists. We hear the evolving defense of his unorthodox approaches, and his lovely explanations to those who don’t understand. Einstein turns out to be a wonderful writer — as is Walter Isaacson, his biographer — and someone who thought and spoke in pictures. Although I’ve read explanations of special relativity and unified field theory many times, reading this biography was the first time I really came close to fully understanding them. A scrutiny of an idea’s origins is perhaps the best path to its understanding. One thing this vivid biography of concepts makes clear is that Einstein’s chief talent was not his genius, but his imagination. “Imagination,” Einstein wrote, “is more powerful than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

– KK

Einstein: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson
2007, 704 pages
$20
Available from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

The group would usually make their way to the Congress hall together, working on ways to refute Einstein’s problem. “By dinner-time we could usually prove that his thought experiments did not contradict uncertainty relations,” Heisenberg recalled, and Einstein would concede defeat. “But next morning he would bring along to breakfast a new thought experiment, generally more complicated than the previous one.” By dinnertime that would be disproved as well. Back and forth they went, each lob from Einstein volleyed back by Bohr, who was able to show how the uncertainty principle, in each instance, did indeed limit the amount of knowable information about a moving electron. “And so it went for several days,” said Heisenberg. “In the end, we — that is, Bohr, Pauli, and I — knew that we could now be sure of our ground.” “Einstein, I’m ashamed of you,” Ehrenfest scolded. He was upset that Einstein was displaying the same stubbornness toward quantum mechanics that conservative physicists had once shown toward relativity. “He now behaves toward Bohr exactly as the champions of absolute simultaneity had behaved toward him.”

As with his letter six months earlier, Einstein went on to reveal quite casually a momentous scientific breakthrough, one that would be expressed by the most famous equation in all of science: “One more consequence of the electrodynamics paper has also crossed my mind. Namely, the relativity principle, together with Maxwell’s equations, requires that mass be a direct measure of the energy contained in a body. Light carries mass with it. With the case of radium there should be a noticeable reduction of mass. The thought is amusing and seductive; but for all I know, the good Lord might be laughing at the whole matter and might have been leading me up the garden path.”

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

Corliss Sourcebooks

The MindMap Book

The Singularity is Near

This chart rewards careful study. Inspect one timeline of the universe from the Big Bang to yesterday. It skips through this vast scale in 16 jumps, each period nested inside the preceding epic. Combined here is cosmic history, geological history, biological history and cultural history into one unified, universal snapshot of the Great Story.

– KK

Universal Heritage Chart
27 x 39 inches
$13
(shipping not included)
Available from timelineposter.com (currently unavailable)

Also available from Scribd

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

Cartoon History of the Universe III

Correlated History of Earth

Singularity is Near

No stranger to big questions is complexity theorist James Gardner. In this ambitious book, which is something of a reprise of his seminal first book, Biocosm, he takes to task just about every quandary left in the cosmos (there’s a lot of them), particularly that most important of mysteries: Why is our seemingly barren universe so conducive to biological life? The result is something of a primer on the rapidly changing future, sown from the fertile mind of a scientific generalist. Gardner encourages us to climb under Sputnik’s wing and look at the Earth from a decidedly more galactic perspective, pummeling us with cogent, and barely conceivable, ideas about the role of artificial intelligence in human evolution, superstrings, robotics and the potential impact of extraterrestrial contact on our metaphysics.

Having laid out the outrageous fecundity of human potential, Gardner unveils his own “Selfish Biocosm” theory, a sort of utopian trans-humanism. Gardner sees our planet — our galaxy, even — as part and parcel of a vast transterrestrial community of intelligence. He posits, quite powerfully, that the seemingly unlikely biological evolution of our planet is not the result of chance and evolution, but of a cosmic reproductive cycle, a “coming alive” of the Universe.

Even though they teeter at the edge of science fiction, Gardner’s ideas are compelling, and, ultimately, place us at center stage of an inspiring, still-unfolding cosmic saga.

It is works like this which provide us with a rare combination: a commitment to “truth,” and, usually, a view of humanity as being part of a larger, more complex system — which is very empowering. After all, when you’re thinking about Big Questions, like whether or not the Universe is shrinking, the petty trials of everyday life are much simpler to overcome.

– Claire L. Evans

The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos
James Gardner
2007, 269 pages
$18
Available from Amazon

DISCLOSURE: As it turns out, I attended grade school with Jim Gardner’s son.
I didn’t make the connection until I interviewed him a couple weeks ago. — Claire L. Evans

Sample Excerpts:
If the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is correct, it means that we are not only the spawn of stardust, but the architects of star-laden universes yet to come. It means that physics and chemistry eerily adumbrate the details of biology in a very specific way and that the emergence of life and intelligence is a predictable climax to the impressive but lifeless symphony of inanimate nature. It means that, against all odds, the impersonal laws of nature have somehow – amazingly and miraculously — engineered their own comprehension. And, strangest of all, they have done so by catalyzing the evolution of a conscious primate on one obscure planet who dares to dream of uncovering the ultimate secrets of the entire universe.

There is at least a plausible hope that extraterrestrial civilizations and our own terrestrial civilization will eventually evolve toward a roughly equivalent state of intellectual competence, and that the forces of cultural evolution will someday, if only in the far distant future, converge in a manner that will make genuine interstellar communication possible, even among species that began the long trek toward sentience at very different starting points in time and space. If it eventually occurs, this moment of convergence might conceivably prove to be the opening motif in a cosmic concert of cultures — the sounding of a deep chord heralding the birth of a cosmic community.

The grand experiment known as Biosphere 2 — in which eight people, along with many animals and plants, locked themselves for two years into an optimistically self-sustaining glass dome — has not gotten the credit it deserves. This semi-scientific, semi-theatrical adventure is a vitally important experiment for any long term space venture, and a fantastic lab for planetary studies. The Biosphere 2 trial yielded many insights, both of nature and human nature, but because it was marred by pathological secrecy, personality flaws, and unexpected technical glitches, its achievements were ignored in science and overlooked by the press. I’ve written a lot about the scientific lessons of Biosphere 2, but nothing about the “human experiment” because the insiders were not talking. Now at least one of them is.

The kind of mavericks needed for any wild-eye utopian undertaking are usually remarkable and remarkably flawed. This hairy experiment was no exception. Its large-scale audacity was guaranteed to produce large-scale doses of human drama, which is what eventually filled the Biosphere 2. This book, written by one of the participants, is unflinching in its honesty and does a fair job of recounting the intense two-year journey of the eight inside, and what was learned. Before you set off for the stars, read this.

– KK

The Human Experiment: Two years and twenty minutes inside Biosphere 2
Jane Poynter
2006, 368 pages
$19
Available from Amazon

Author’s website

Sample excerpts:

What confused people all the more was that Biosphere 2′s magic — and possibly its Achilles’ heel — was that it was not conceived as any single thing, making it impossible to pigeonhole. It was a scientific project, a tool for furthering our knowledge of ecosystems and systems ecology. It was an artistic expression in its extraordinary architecture. It was business enterprise, meant to make money from spin-off technologies and later, tourism. It was an educational tool to inspire people of all ages. And it was an engineering project, developing a prototype for long-duration, self-sustaining space bases. If you ask twenty people who were part of the project what the aim of it was, you would receive close to twenty different responses.

So, the question remains, were we a cult?

The real difficulty in honestly answering that question lies in the definition of cult. The meaning is so diffuse that it is nearly useless. However, the predominant flavor of the word is pejorative, which I wholeheartedly reject. Those who study cults today make a clear distinction between dangerous cults and other forms of tight-knit groups that can include corporations.

Some of the common denominators between definitions of cults did fit our group. There is usually a domineering charismatic leader, a sense of isolationism, and a central ideal. John had been our unquestioned leader and was increasingly authoritarian. Before coming to Biosphere 2, I had seen John only a few times each year on his rounds through each IE project. He could be mean and humiliating, but he was also funny and inspiring. But now John remained at Biosphere 2 most of the time. His grip on the group tightened with every piece of bad news.

The isolationist attitude was particularly acute toward people who questioned our way of life. Our central ideal was the way of life itself. But I can say unequivocally that we were not a cult if the definition includes brainwashing and loss of individuality. And we certainly were not a cult based on G. I. Gurdjieff — an early-twentieth-century American mystic with followers in Europe and America — as some claimed who heard that we read some of his works.

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Here I am showing off newborn triplet goats. Vision, the goat in the foreground, was one of four female African pigmy goats. Along with a male goat, Buffalo Bill, chickens and pigs also ran around the animal bay. (more…)

Not a map really, but a 5-foot-high chart showing in one glance 4,000 years of human history on a global scale. Thirty years ago I saw this on the wall of someone’s dorm room and it flipped me out then, and every time I’ve seen it since. Its beauty is how Mr. Sparks divies up world power (somewhat crudely) into its main factions graphed in each increment of fifty years since 2000 B.C.E. Different civilizations are color-coded so one can easily trace the flow and ebb of culture over the centuries.

It has three uses for me: whenever I am reading about some historical event I can instantly see what else was going on in the world at that time (for instance, what was happening in France during the Ming Dynasty). I also get a very intuitive sense of the rises and falls of civilizations, a pattern that no other chart or book has been able to give me. And hanging on the wall, it never fails to elicit gaps of shock when visitors recognize our modern place in the chart. At ten bucks, it’s a bargain education.

– KK

Rand McNally Histomap of World History
John B. Sparks
1952, 66 x 11 inches

As of December 4, 2006 this item is out of stock from the North American Montessori Teacher’s Association. However the author’s granddaughter wrote to me to say that she has copies she is willing to sell at $12 (+$8 shipping). Email Jacquie Glanz: jacquieglanz at yahoo.com.

So far this is my favorite one-volume gallery of the other inhabitants in our universe. Organized by ascending distance from us, it includes portraits of known planets, remarkable stars, flamboyant nebula, and outstanding galaxies. Better than any other atlas, or map, or online source, this book gives you a really good picture of this place called the universe.

– KK

Universe
A Journey from Earth to the Edge of the Cosmos
Nicholas Cheetham
2009, 224 pages
$30, from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

Uranus
Planet
163 light minutes
Uranus’ northern hemisphere is emerging from the grip of a long, dark, winter. Winters on Uranus are compounded by the fact that at the poles the Sun does not rise for 21 years as a consequence of the planet’s extreme axial tilt. As sunlight returns, the frigid atmosphere warms stirring spring storms that blow bright clouds of crystallized methane before them at up to 420 kph (260 mph).

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Ant Nebula Mz3
Planetary nebula
3 thousand light years
Another addition to our menagerie of dying stars is this light-year-sized stellar insect. No common-or-garden variety of nebula, this creature surpasses all its cousins by producing a record breaking 3.6 million kph (2.1 million mph) outflow of charged particles. Such is the spectacular diversity of planetary nebulae, one might be forgiven for eagerly anticipating our own Sun’s demise.

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Eskimo Nebula NGC2392
Planetary nebula
5 thousand light years
This Eskimo’s parka disguises another bipolar planetary nebula. Its second lobe is concealed directly behind this one – we are viewing the nebula edge on. The parka’s orange fur trim is though to be formed by slow-moving globules of gas streaming in an eroding flow of faster-moving material. And it is moving quickly: this Eskimo’s hood is growing at 1.5 million kph (900,000 mph).