Built From Broken

I think someone from GMB must have recommended Scott Hogan's no-nonsense guide to keeping the body running.  Since our library had a copy I perused it very quickly and found it quite interesting.  While I haven't double-checked any of the references and investigated the quality of the studies Hogan cites, it does appear to live up to its subtitle: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body.  The focus throughout is not on how to build the most muscle mass or train for any specific sport, but on what really counts as we get older -- the ability to maintain a wide range of motion in a variety of circumstances.  Hogan provides some scientific backing to an empirical conclusion I had already arrived at; this basically comes down to how well your joints and connective tissue function.  So what we really need to train is joint health.  

Coming at fitness from this slightly different angle doesn't necessarily imply a huge change in the exercises we do.  The book is filled with pretty standard looking stuff.  But knowing what the prime target is, and knowing something about the way joints differ from muscles in their response to training, can definitely change how we do many of these exercises.  The takeaway isn't earth shattering nor terribly different from the approach GMB constantly cultivates.  We want to move more often, with greater attention to the details of our exercise, through a greater range of motion (with perhaps a lighter load), and above all, more slowly (especially in the eccentric phase).  In addition to explaining why these principles are important to our joints and giving us a list of exercises, Hogan describes a 4 week workout program that includes an interesting periodization.  Though the exercises stay the same, each week is devoted to a specific goal like "connective tissue remodeling", "hypertrophy", "strength", and "endurance plus energy loading".  The changing goals correspond to changes in not only sets and reps and weights, but in how we perform the exercises.  Since I just finished the book, I can't comment on how effective this workout program is for healing painful joints and preventing injury, but it sounds plausible and I'm eager to give it a shot.

The Volcano Lover

Even though she's gotta be high in the running for the sexiest female intellectual of all time, I'd only ever read a few of Susan Sontag's essays.  So when the cat bookstore kindly furnished a copy of one of the novels, I figured I had to give it a shot.  I found it a bit slow going for the first hundred pages or so but it gradually grew on me.  While Sontag never makes this obvious, and doesn't even tell you the names of the characters, it turns out she's written a historical novel.  

The plot consists in the real lives of three famously intertwined characters from 17th century English history -- William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the kingdom of Naples, his second wife Emma Hamilton, the most famous and notorious beauty of her age, and Horatio Nelson, the British answer to Napolean, the most famous war hero of his day.  As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia articles, the plot is historically accurate, and Sontag's fiction lies only in her narrative attempt to get inside the experience of these characters.  This accuracy also accounts for why the novel begins relatively slowly, and as a meditation on the art of collecting.  Sir William was one of those Englishman who "discovered" the beautiful antiquities of "backward" regions that today populate the British Museum (such as the Portland Vase).  This placid existence of a wealthy collector accounted for the first 50 years of Sir William's life.  Things only changed when, after his first wife died, he made his greatest find and discovered Emma, a former prostitute pawned off on him by his cousin.  Emma turned out to be not merely a beautiful trophy wife, but so remarkably intelligent and creative that she quickly became the talk of Europe despite her scandalous history.  Despite an age difference of 30 years, the two married and lived quite happily for many years.  Until Horatio Nelson turned up on the doorstep one day, fresh from his historic victory in the Battle of the Nile but desperately ill and in need of nursing.  Thus began a passionate affair between Emma and Nelson that Sir William, now in his dotage, simply accepted as inevitable.  At this point the center of gravity of the novel naturally starts to shift away from Sir William, and becomes more of a reflection on gender relations circa 1800.  Sontag shines most in the way she illuminates the psychology of the asymmetric situation you can easily discover by examining the wikipedia articles.  A huge chunk of Emma's is taken up by her decade long involvement with Nelson, but Emma barely merits a passing mention in the much longer Nelson article, despite the fact that she bore him a child and that the two lived in open sin for many years while Nelson remained married to another woman.  History demands that both the hero and the temptress fit in a certain mold, and Sontag imagines how ill-fitting this must have been for these larger than life characters.

Finally, my favorite part of the novel was the last 50 pages, which contain a lovely narrative twist (not to be confused with a plot twist) that I won't spoil.

A History of Mathematics

Back when I was working on the Leibniz project, I realized that I could do with a better grasp of the history of mathematics.  Deleuze was making all sorts of references to the development of the calculus that I mostly followed, but only more or less.  So, after a bit of research, I settled on this Boyer and Merzbach tome.  It definitely did help me better understand the way that the calculus was originally oriented around infinite series; this has mostly been lost in how it is taught today (well, at least how it was taught 30 years ago).  But I actually found that the most interesting part of the book was the first 300 pages leading up to the calculus.  It was fascinating to read about things like Mesopotamian sexagesimal fractions and the incredible work of Apollonius on the conics.  While it's a cliche, it really does give one a renewed appreciation of how far ahead of their time the Greeks were.  Unfortunately, even though I read it slowly and in small doses, I find it hard to recommend the book as a whole.  While I began reading pretty closely and working out some of the problems myself, by the final 150 pages or so I was mostly just skimming.  Once they go past Euler and Gauss you pretty much need a complete undergraduate education in pure math to follow much of the story. 

Breath

I find that I'm usually not quite the intended audience for most popular science writing, so I can end up sounding overly critical of books I have actually enjoyed.  The genre frequently leaves me as frustrated by its incompleteness and lack of depth as it does intrigued by the research it covers.  While James Nestor's bestseller is no exception to this pattern, I would still recommend the book.  I haven't seen anyone else cover, even superficially, this many aspects of breathing in one place.  The topic is simply so interesting that it shines despite the breezy, introductory, should-be-read-at-1.5X quality to the writing. 

Nestor begins with a discussion of the evolutionary changes in human head and neck structure caused by our adaptation to cooked food.  These seem to have made breathing inherently more problematic for us than for any other mammal.  In modern times, we've compounded these problems by adopting softer diets that exercise our jaws less, as well as by living in that state of chronic low grade tension otherwise known as "civilization".  All of these changes make it more difficult to breathe effectively through our noses and to take full, deep breaths.  And this is apparently very bad for us.  

Nestor goes on to explain some of the reasons for why this is bad, and some of the ways we can combat it.  But he's more interested in striking anecdotes about rogue research than in consensus science, so most of these come off as pretty sketchy and not always coherent.  For example, he sometimes tells us that what we really want to do is learn to tolerate higher levels of carbon dioxide in the blood by extending our exhale and breathing much more slowly than we often do.  At other points he encourages us to breathe much harder, almost to the point hyperventilation, in the style popularized by Wim Hof.  Then again, maybe we should use yogic breathing techniques like alternate nostril breathing and etc ...  To sort out which of these partially contradictory ideas actually has any scientific support would require an extended tour through Nestor's bibliography (a very nice resource to have online).  While that might be an interesting project, I imagine the correct conclusion is likely predictably underwhelming: it depends.  The 'best' breathing techniques are wildly likely to depend on how you are and what you want to accomplish.  And this is of course precisely why these techniques are hard to study scientifically.  Which means that Nestor's book is ultimately most useful as a survey of possible ways to breath that we can experiment with personally.  So I'm excited to go through his instructional videos and see what happens.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I've had Kuhn's classic on the shelf since college, but somehow never gotten around to reading the whole thing.  Which in a way is too bad, since it could have saved me a lot of time -- Kuhn articulates more or less the same beef I've had with science for many years now, but in much clearer and more concise form.  The book is a classic for very good reasons.

Kuhn's basic thesis is so well known that it's hardly worth spending much time repeating it.  Science does not progress towards truth through successive falsification, as if asymptotically approaching some limit.  Instead, it progresses through revolutionary shifts between completely incompatible paradigms, shifts which are catalyzed from within by the way each round of "normal", or paradigmatic, science extends and develops the paradigm it unquestioningly takes to be the true model of reality.  In short, Kuhn takes science to be an evolutionary process where new scientific theories arise like new species that simply out-compete the old ones, rather than somehow disproving them.  This process tends to produce theories of increasing complexity, scope, and accuracy that can legitimately be seen as 'progress' in some sense.  But as with Neo-Darwinian evolution, this isn't progress towards some one true final species. 

While I was already familiar with, and largely agreed with, this thesis, reading the original version of it was still rewarding for several reasons.  First, because you can clearly hear Kuhn's tone, which is in marked contrast to many of the people who popularized his idea.  As he points out in the postscript, Kuhn does not consider himself a relativist.  On the contrary, he began life as a physicist and thinks of his historical and philosophical project as being more, not less, 'scientific' and empirical about how science actually works.  At no point does he suggest anything close to the idea that scientists can just make up whatever theory they like, that all theories are equally good, or that the sole factor in the acceptance of a paradigm is simple social consensus.  He is even a firm believer in the 'progress' of science.  However, as the quotes suggest, since Kuhn rethinks the very structure of science, his theory changes what we mean by the terms science and progress.  He wants us to see that since science isn't the successively closer approximation of truth we took it to be, it doesn't progress the way our textbooks teach us.  And while he cannot, by hypothesis, argue that this is a truer view of the scientific enterprise, he does a fine job of putting forward all kinds of perfectly empirical and theoretical reasons to convince us we should adopt this view of science.  So while he he takes seriously the observation that all the science we know of is practiced by a certain species of hairless chimp, he does not intend to suggest that science is merely a social construct.  We should recognize the reductionist relativist position for what it is historically -- a weaponization of Kuhn by struggling humanities departments.

Second, I was delighted to discover the extended use he made of the gestalt switch model for perception.  Scientific revolutions take us from seeing the duck to seeing the rabbit.  After a phase shift, the same data crystalizes in a new way.  Today, we could make the same point even more effectively by discussing Predictive Processing and the Bayesian Brain framework.  Kuhn actually already moves in this direction by repeatedly arguing that scientists are not simply interpreting neutral facts and assembling a theory from a sea of bottom up data, but are using their prior training to directly perceive the entities their theory posits from the top down as real.  Scientific revolutions are the sudden shifts in scientific perception triggered when experimental errors and theoretical anomalies reach a critical threshold that causes us to adopt a new set of priors, a new paradigm.  I think part of what made Kuhn's book controversial was the way this inverts the flow of information in our usual model of perception; it's hard to convince most folks that they are actively constructing and inferring their world (and self) when it feels like these things are simply given to them.  Of course, if you've already drunk the kool-aid, this controversial analogy is part of what makes the book brilliant.

Nexus

I breezed through a copy of Ramez Naam's techno-thriller at the suggestion of a local bookstore hooligan.  They claimed it was such a gripping and fast paced read that I would surely want to move right on to the other two books in the series.  Since I agree completely with the first part of this assessment, it's somewhat surprising that the second half breaks down; while I thoroughly enjoyed Nexus, I have no plans read Crux or Apex.  The trouble is that Naam writes good but quite generic sci-fi, and seems above all to be auditioning a script for the next Bourne franchise film -- his creative motto is apparently, "always be blowing up".  But while it was certainly a quick and engrossing read, there's something inherently unsatisfying about a story that takes all kinds of themes I'm interested in -- drugs, meditation, AI, neuroscience, geopolitics -- and mashes them together in the least surprising and interesting ways.  

The main plot device is solid idea.  Imagine if you could take a programmable psychedelic, as in, a drug that actually consisted of chips that stayed in your brain and could be used to send signals in and out of it.  Theoretically, this would let you change your perception in more fine grained and functional ways that simply flooding your system with serotonin.  It would also provide a sort of weigh station between normal human experience and the experience of that great staple of modern sci-fi -- the fully digital being.  Naturally, once we became able to program individual brains like this, we would surely want to start networking these analog-digital hybrids.  Which then makes each hybrid computer a potential hacking target, and etc ... You can imagine where it goes from here.  This is a fine premise that affords connection to a bunch of interesting questions, each of which is represented by Naam's well-drawn if slightly predictable and cardboard characters.  The trouble is that Naam is so prisoner to his screenplay that he doesn't have time to delve too far into any of these from an intellectual perspective.  The reader apparently cannot be counted on to wait more than about 10 pages between either tense near misses or gory combat scenes.  Eventually, this makes the plot feel kinda predictable and paint-by-number, and gives it that Hollywood sheen that leaves every movie looking like every other.  Will the good guys win in the end?  I'll admit that I'm kinda curious what happens.  I guess I'll just watch the Netflix series to find out.  But that too will take material suited for a 90 min film and, using suitably timed explosions and faux-epic grandeur, scatter it over 600 minutes of television.  And sometimes, you should just write a single novel, not a trilogy.

The Origins of the Second World War

I no longer recall who suggested that A.J.P. Taylor's short study of European politics between the Wars was a masterpiece.  Which is too bad because they were right and I should listen to more of their suggestions.  Taylor does a great job of explaining the tensions remaining after the Treaty of Versailles, and then tracing these lines of force forward as the complicated machinery of European politics played out over the following 20 years.  Since I've never studied the details of this history before, all I can say is that it is a fascinating story that seems well supported and well argued enough to perhaps be mostly true.  The book has apparently come in for a lot of criticism, and the reason for this is entirely predictable -- he doesn't blame the war on how evil Hitler was.  However, Hitler's inherent evilness is only a convincing historical explanation for people who just want to have a simple way to avoid considering the question.  For the rest of us, it's obvious that while Hitler's evilness may be a true and even necessary cause of the war, it is far from sufficient.  By explaining anything Germany might have done, it explains nothing about what it actually did.  

Instead, Taylor suggests that while Hitler transformed Germany domestically, his foreign policies were almost identical to all other German leaders since the end of WW1.  Since that war ended with German defeat and humiliation, but not a dismemberment of the German state, the goal of German leaders and the German people thereafter was to restore their greatness as the largest power in Europe.  And since Germany was the size of France and Britain combined, Taylor asserts that both those countries accepted that a restoration of German power was the inevitable outcome of the gradual dismantling of Versailles.  Naturally, they both also hoped that this could be delayed as long as possible, and ultimately carried out peacefully.  The shocking part of Taylor's thesis is that he suggests Hitler shared this latter goal.  Hitler had no intention of starting a great war with France and Britain in 1939.  He merely used the threat of force to hurry along the process of reunifying the German speaking people who had been separated off into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland).  Germany had long sought this reunification, and the French and British had long assumed it would eventually happen despite whatever objections those small countries might have.  So while successive occupation of these three areas was indeed the direct trigger for the start of the war, Taylor argues that their reincorporation into Germany was not a sign of Hitler's endless desire to dominate the world.  Instead, Hitler's tactic all along was one of bluffing then waiting.  He threatened to use military force, and constantly exaggerated the capability of the German army (apparently much to the discomfort of his generals), but only as a means of pressuring the various European powers to acquiesce without a fight.  Unfortunately, gambling is a dangerous business.  Sometimes people call your bluff, and the rest is history.