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turophile's review against another edition
Every December, I hit a bookstore (usually Common Good Books, owned by Garrison Keillor in St. Paul) or Amazon and pick up a stack of the "Best of" series. My favorite series is the best of science writing - but it was sold out. So I picked up this one. Let's see how it goes.
Vanish - Evan Ratliff. The author, a writer for Wired, sets out to "disappear" for a month and establish a new identify while a $5000 bounty is offered to anyone who can track him down. I'm not sure it's a perfect simulation - if you're really trying to disappear, joining a facebook group dedicated to finding you may not be your best strategy. It's still fascinating and scary to read about the technology available to track people down on-line. Quick, easy read. I enjoyed the author's crisp to the point writing style.
Baby Food - Jill Lepore One of my favorite lines "A brief history of food: when the rich eat white bread and buy formula, the poor eat brown bread and breast-feed; then they trade places." This essay focuses on the rise and fall and rise of breast-feeding, particularly on the role of breast pumps that allow women to provide breast milk to to their babies even if they work a full time job. It raises, but does not answer the question, of the value that our society places on women as mothers in the workforce. At higher class white collar jobs, employers seem to strive to outdo themselves in providing better places for women to "express" their milk - but as the author points out, would the mother and child be better if the mother took the time used to accomplish that and got home from work earlier every day. In our "advanced" culture, we still have not come up with a way to balance a woman's worth in the workplace with her worth as a mother. I would have been curious to see if there are studies on whether the benefits derived from breastfeeding are tied closely to the milk itself, or to the time with the mother. The article raises this questions, but does not address whether there have been any studies on the issue. I wish more time had been put into answering the latter question - though it still does not answer the bigger question, it could help society wrestle through these issues.
Thinking Machine - Douglas Fox. One of those articles I'm certain I'll need to reread again to understand. It describes how computer scientists/engineers are working to create a computer that better replicates the workings of the human brain. Human brains are more efficient from an energy standpoint than our current computers, but less precise. Need to spend more time thinking about the implictations of this.
Vanish - Evan Ratliff. The author, a writer for Wired, sets out to "disappear" for a month and establish a new identify while a $5000 bounty is offered to anyone who can track him down. I'm not sure it's a perfect simulation - if you're really trying to disappear, joining a facebook group dedicated to finding you may not be your best strategy. It's still fascinating and scary to read about the technology available to track people down on-line. Quick, easy read. I enjoyed the author's crisp to the point writing style.
Baby Food - Jill Lepore One of my favorite lines "A brief history of food: when the rich eat white bread and buy formula, the poor eat brown bread and breast-feed; then they trade places." This essay focuses on the rise and fall and rise of breast-feeding, particularly on the role of breast pumps that allow women to provide breast milk to to their babies even if they work a full time job. It raises, but does not answer the question, of the value that our society places on women as mothers in the workforce. At higher class white collar jobs, employers seem to strive to outdo themselves in providing better places for women to "express" their milk - but as the author points out, would the mother and child be better if the mother took the time used to accomplish that and got home from work earlier every day. In our "advanced" culture, we still have not come up with a way to balance a woman's worth in the workplace with her worth as a mother. I would have been curious to see if there are studies on whether the benefits derived from breastfeeding are tied closely to the milk itself, or to the time with the mother. The article raises this questions, but does not address whether there have been any studies on the issue. I wish more time had been put into answering the latter question - though it still does not answer the bigger question, it could help society wrestle through these issues.
Thinking Machine - Douglas Fox. One of those articles I'm certain I'll need to reread again to understand. It describes how computer scientists/engineers are working to create a computer that better replicates the workings of the human brain. Human brains are more efficient from an energy standpoint than our current computers, but less precise. Need to spend more time thinking about the implictations of this.
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