J.D. Steens (Author of Philosophical Travels with Carl)

J.D. Steens rated a book In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It’s an odd novel, in a couple of ways. It uses Auschwitz-Birkenau as the setting for a spiritual retreat. Overall, the various interactions come across as self-indulgent quests - what this place meant to the retreat participants, as opposed to those ...more
Oct 29, 2026 08:47AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
J.D. Steens rated a book The Towers of Hovenweep by Ian Thompson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Hovenweep is on the northwestern edge of the puebloan settlements in the four corners area of the U.S (“the San Juan Puebloans”). The writer of this short publication placed those who lived in the Hovenweep area into the fairly standard anthropologic ...more
Oct 15, 2026 11:07AM · like · see review
J.D. Steens rated a book really liked it The Scars of Evolution by Elaine Morgan	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Morgan is an outlier. She takes on the prevailing paradigm that Homo sapiens emerged from the African savannahs. At the outset, she asks four questions about our species: Why do humans walk on two legs? Why have they lost their fur? Why have they deve ...more
Oct 15, 2026 11:00AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Scars of Evolution by Elaine Morgan. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Scars of Evolution by Elaine Morgan <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
J.D. Steens rated a book liked it The Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The basic thesis is good. Rising population, rising food and product demands, increased pollution and consumption of non-renewables all promise disaster and pertain today, as problems. There is a Malthusian logic that flows from these key growth pres ...more
Oct 15, 2026 10:50AM · like · see review
J.D. Steens rated a book it was ok Nothingness (Essence of Alan Watts 3) by Alan W. Watts	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The book is the third of a ten part series on the short and sweet of Watts’ thinking on Eastern Buddhism. It was published after his death, so this is a remembrance of sorts. The topic of this book is Nothingness. The essence of his thinking in this r ...more
Sep 21, 2026 10:41AM · like · see review
J.D. Steens rated a book liked it Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I re-read, and wrote a separate review here (2018 review follows): I read the book to see if I could get some education on Feynman’s contribution to physics via his QED theory (quantum electrodynamics on the interactions of light and matter). I can’t ...more
Sep 19, 2026 09:38AM · 2 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Genius by James Gleick. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Genius by James Gleick <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
J.D. Steens rated a book liked it A Short History of the Universe (Scientific American Library) by Joseph Silk	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This was written in the typical Scientific American (the magazine) format, which is too technical for my taste. As the title says, it is a short history of the universe and repeats what might be said to be the standard way of looking at this topic: T ...more
Sep 19, 2026 09:24AM · like · see review
J.D. Steens rated a book liked it How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
As the title says, the book is a comprehensive road map to tackling climate change. Though it’s a slog, it is well-thought out, clearly written, and understandable. Gates’ solutions are largely about what tech can do, though he delves into policy as ...more
Sep 19, 2026 08:56AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
J.D. Steens rated a book really liked it Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is an account of the ecological impact of white settlement in 1600s New England. It is historical research at its best. Indians, pre-white settlement, were merged with the landscape and its ecology. In northern New England, they moved from one ar ...more
Sep 19, 2026 08:49AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Changes in the Land by William Cronon. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Changes in the Land by William Cronon <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
J.D. Steens rated a book liked it The Jew and the World Ferment by Basil Joseph Mathews	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is a 1935 history of the Jewish people, from a Christian perspective. The publishing date is significant as it was before the full repercussions of Nazi Germany’s policy toward Jews occurred. At that time, things were beginning to stir regarding ...more
Sep 19, 2026 08:39AM · like · see review

J.D. Steens rated a book

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It’s an odd novel, in a couple of ways.

It uses Auschwitz-Birkenau as the setting for a spiritual retreat. Overall, the various interactions come across as self-indulgent quests - what this place meant to the retreat participants, as opposed to those It’s an odd novel, in a couple of ways.

It uses Auschwitz-Birkenau as the setting for a spiritual retreat. Overall, the various interactions come across as self-indulgent quests - what this place meant to the retreat participants, as opposed to those who died at the hand of the Nazis. The Buddhist and Catholics, for example, tried to make sense of the industrial-level slaughtering in terms of their own worldview. Though he had his own issues, one of the participants saw it as a bunch of “spiritual groupies,” filling time with New Age jargon.

A subplot to all of this is the lusty behavior of the novel’s central character for a young nun who, though seemingly tempted, was able to resist his various entreaties. This was a distraction (one reviewer says it hijacked the novel) and in a way illustrates a lack of seriousness - almost a sacrilege - about the horrific story of the death camps.

But maybe this was Matthiessen’s point. The group participants were either just going through the motions, pretending to connect with this killing venue, or using it as a vehicle to transcend suffering and evil. The central character says as much - on both points: “What had struck him…as a sentimental self-indulgence that ordinarily he would have fled after the first round - a death camp prance of grinning fools as in some lugubrious danse macabre* of the Dark Ages, enacting mankind’s insignificance in the shadow of the scythe - has metamorphosed into gentle rejoicing, transcending the atmosphere of brief and banishing lamentation from the hall.”

This quote sums up the book for me, in a nutshell. The operative word is nutshell for overall, reading it was quite a slog. There wasn’t much in the way of edification - other than another illustration of human superficiality.

A couple of other points to highlight: One of the participants looks at what happened through the lens of evolutionary biology, claiming that the evil seen here was unique to humans and that chimpanzees never intentionally did harm to their own. That’s not what Goodall saw with the chimps. But, overall, his observations were correct: “the human animal has never lost the most primitive traits of the primate predator-scavenger on the savannah….Morally, man’s consciousness has made no progress in all the millennia since his graffiti defaced the cave walls.” So much for Pinker’s thesis.

The book notes the impressive role the Poles played in European history. In the 15th century they ruled Europe “from the Baltic east to the Black Sea,” and great science and scholarship came out of that country. With the rise of the Nazis some of that history was transformed. Many Poles were culpable in turning in “their own” to the Nazi’s and the death camps, and they were far from being innocent victims of Nazi rule. Along with that, Germans and Bolsheviks who coveted Poland’s “mighty grainlands” eliminated “the educated ‘elites’...the plan was to diminish the average intelligence of a whole people on the cold theory that the decadent West would never come to the defense of hordes of leaderless illiterates in a backward hinterland too amorphous and uncivilized to be taken seriously as an independent nation.” If true or not, I can’t say, but it does have an “origin story” quality about it that might relate to the “Polack jokes” that have circulated so freely over the years.

*Dance Macabre (“Dance of Death”) is, per AI, a late Middle Age reference to the “universality of death, illustrating that no matter one’s station in life, the grave claims everyone equally.” ...more

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The Towers of Hovenweep
by Ian Thompson

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Hovenweep is on the northwestern edge of the puebloan settlements in the four corners area of the U.S (“the San Juan Puebloans”).

The writer of this short publication placed those who lived in the Hovenweep area into the fairly standard anthropologic Hovenweep is on the northwestern edge of the puebloan settlements in the four corners area of the U.S (“the San Juan Puebloans”).

The writer of this short publication placed those who lived in the Hovenweep area into the fairly standard anthropological and archeological framework. The initial populations were ”archaic.” They were followed by hunter-gatherer (8-6k years ago) with temporary camps, and then by agricultural settlements (50-1350 CE), though “hunting and gathering continued to be important to the San Juan Puebloans even after a majority of their diet came from cultivated crops and domesticated turkeys.” The first structures appeared “in the farm hamlets in the San Juan River basin” about “A.D. 700,” with the “advent of the Pueblo 1” period, followed by Pueblo II and III periods. There are six main clusters of pueblean buildings, with, the writer states in the title of this publication, the various towers performing a “multitude of uses.”

The writer states that these groupings were “not only egalitarian but each was autonomous answering to no regional central authority.” Within these communities “political decisions were not imposed on the majority from above. Instead, decisions were arrived at by consensus, in which community members reached collective agreements through discussions of issues….There is little evidence in the archeological record that ancestral Puebloans sought power and status through the accumulation of property and goods. If anything, religious leaders may have been expected to forego personal interests entirely to concentrate on the well-being of the community as a whole.”

By the late 13th century, these Hovenweep settlements were empty. The writer dismisses that the speculated move south to the Rio Grande area and lands occupied today by the Hopis was due to drought or hostilities. While dry conditions existed, there is not enough evidence to explain that it existed to the degree that it forced migration away from the area. Regarding the aggressor theory, there “is relatively sparse evidence of violence exhibited in the human remains of the period.” Some exist “but not to the extent that suggests outside danger. If they had been fighting with one another, then one assumes that only the losers would have sought refuge in exile,” adding that the late San Juan population “could be said to have lived fairly peaceful lives.” Having discounted these two variables, the writer then concludes that the most likely reason for migrating to the south was a desire to move “because they wanted to move,” to be closer to larger populations of kindred peoples.

The Hovenweep National Monument information refers to a defensive purpose to the towers, as well as religious, and speculates that drought was the most likely explanation for leaving this area. The San Juan group was apparently aligned with Mesa Verde, and it’s hard not to see the structures built into canyon walls, far removed from agriculture fields on top of the mesas and water in the canyons below, were not for some defensive purposes. And, with religion’s prominence, there is a question about what is meant by the assertion that these groupings of people were non-hierarchical.

The National Monument information acknowledges that not much is really known about the life of these people. The writer of this publication, Ian Thompson, doesn’t show such hesitation. He refers to oral tradition as well as anthropological evidence to fill in a more definitive (and idealized?) history of the San Juan pueblo peoples. ...more

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The Scars of Evolution
by Elaine Morgan

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Morgan is an outlier. She takes on the prevailing paradigm that Homo sapiens emerged from the African savannahs.

At the outset, she asks four questions about our species: Why do humans walk on two legs? Why have they lost their fur? Why have they deve Morgan is an outlier. She takes on the prevailing paradigm that Homo sapiens emerged from the African savannahs.

At the outset, she asks four questions about our species: Why do humans walk on two legs? Why have they lost their fur? Why have they developed large brains? Why did they learn to speak? These are fairly basic questions about our distinctive features vis-a-vis other ape species. The standard answer to these questions is that “‘We do not yet know.’” Fundamental as they are, Morgan notes that most of the responses touch on these questions, but that’s it. A brief reference here and there and then the discussion moves onto questions that can be answered with some certitude and we are left with the knowledge that we are bipedal, naked, conscious and verbal without, really, knowing why these distinctive traits came about.

Morgan proposes that Homo sapiens went through an aquatic phase at (I believe) our split from the chimpanzee lines, roughly 5-6 million years ago. The split occurred in northeast Africa, at the point where three plates (Nubian, Arabian, and Somalian) converged, leaving an isolated land mass (Danakil Island) amid three rift zones. Among other characteristics, this necessitated bipedalism and the naked skin, and layers of subcutaneous fat as the means to survive in a predominantly water environment. I believe she is saying that while we were not fish or aquatic mammals, we did depend heavily on the shoreline and its adjacent waters for our existence.

Morgan systematically lists the problems with the savannah hypothesis, and in turn, systematically lays out her case for why the aquatic ape theory explains what the savannah theory cannot. Her argument is largely discounted by the savannah theorists, and is characterized by some pseudo science. She acknowledges that her theory has its significant detractors but also notes that they are all coming from a prevailing paradigm that allows only for the emergence of Homo sapiens from the forest environment to the open savannah and that those who propose alternatives, such as hers, cannot be correct.

I found the questions asked and her responses to those questions to be thought provoking, in a fresh sort of way. ...more

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The Limits to Growth
by Donella H. Meadows

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The basic thesis is good. Rising population, rising food and product demands, increased pollution and consumption of non-renewables all promise disaster and pertain today, as problems.

There is a Malthusian logic that flows from these key growth pres The basic thesis is good. Rising population, rising food and product demands, increased pollution and consumption of non-renewables all promise disaster and pertain today, as problems.

There is a Malthusian logic that flows from these key growth pressures, but the model and graphs are overly complex and muddle the authors’ argument.

The authors use feedback loops to establish interconnections, but I don’t see these five components to growth as equal. Population pressures drive rising food and product demands and consumption of non-renewables, and their pollution byproducts. The authors don’t break it down this way.

Increased population pressure, combined with the ideology of growth (consumption per se is good), seriously aggravates the problem of depletion and pollution. The authors address the ideological factor in their discussion of “values.” But it is weak, and not detailed as it should be.

Food and product demands, consumption of non-renewables, and pollution are economic problems. What is not highlighted in this book are the non-economic effects of these economic factors. This is more than the pollution that affects the quality of life. It’s about what is entailed in living in a crowded world fed by the ideology of growth - the congestion, the competition for uncrowded and untrammeled spaces, the loss of nature and biodiversity.

The authors pose the question for the future succinctly: Is it better to try to live within limits - “a self-imposed restriction on growth” - or is it better to continue on, with the hope that technology will solve problems when we bump into natural limits? They opt for the former. The alternative to growth is a sustainable equilibrium economy where demand fits within a finite world, and they briefly outline a roadmap about how to get there.

Here we are, 50+ years later. Technology has solved some of the “limits to growth” problems. The Green Revolution has been central. We’ve made some headway on the values front with various environmental issues - pollution controls, protection of species and biodiversity, plant-based diets, green energy, ozone hole closure, etc. And substantial declines in birth rates are being seen, and ironically these seem to be associated with economic development.

Yet, as we put our finger in the dike on these fronts, new holes appear elsewhere. Now we have global warming and uncontrolled AI threatening existence, and nativists who push for population expansion to feed the economic machine.

The authors place their hope on more facts and information, as if these will alter the growth ideology, but the problem is more basic. The human species embodies Schopenhauer’s Will. We are largely self-indulgent machines, focused on the here-and-now who care little about future and broader impacts that emanate from what we are about today. Information and facts help some, but not much if we don’t really care. ...more

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Nothingness (Essence of Alan Watts 3)
by Alan W. Watts

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The book is the third of a ten part series on the short and sweet of Watts’ thinking on Eastern Buddhism. It was published after his death, so this is a remembrance of sorts.

The topic of this book is Nothingness. The essence of his thinking in this r ...more

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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick (Goodreads Author)

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I re-read, and wrote a separate review here (2018 review follows):

I read the book to see if I could get some education on Feynman’s contribution to physics via his QED theory (quantum electrodynamics on the interactions of light and matter). I can’t I re-read, and wrote a separate review here (2018 review follows):

I read the book to see if I could get some education on Feynman’s contribution to physics via his QED theory (quantum electrodynamics on the interactions of light and matter). I can’t say I made much headway. The Gleick account was dense.

Anti-matter has always been baffling. Or, maybe it’s because it was always before my eyes, obvious without need of an explanation. When Gleick writes that in the collision between electrons and antimatter, energy in the form of gamma rays is released. So, is this the release of energy from matter, per Einstein? And then the reverse: “A gamma ray, nothing more than a high-frequency particle of light, could spontaneously produce a pair of particles, one electron and one positron.” Is this the conversion of energy to matter?

The same thought is expressed by Gleick earlier when he notes that, at the beginnings of the quantum era, Bohr found that “When an electron absorbed a light quantum, it meant that in that instant it jumped to a higher orbit….When the electron jumped to a lower orbit, it emitted a light quantum at a certain frequency.”

Gleick writes that “A distinction between force and energy did not emerge clearly until the nineteenth century, and then, gradually, energy began to take over as the fulcrum of scientists’ thinking. Force is, in modern terms, a vector quantity, with both a magnitude and a direction. Energy is directionless, scalar-meaning that it has a magnitude only. With the rise of thermodynamics energy came to the fore. It began to seem more fundamental. Chemical reactions could be neatly computed as operations designed to minimize energy. Even a ball rolling down a hill - moving from a state of higher to lower potential energy - was seeking to minimize its energy.” I am not sure what this quote means. There’s a lot to parse here: Doesn’t energy move in a straight line? (In Einstein’s world, the straight line in spacetime is curved.” This is Minkowski’s world-line.) When Gleick writes that according to the principle of “least action,…particles chose the paths for which the action was smallest,” he seems to be saying that energy has direction as well as magnitude.

Referring to Feynman’s well-known quote of atoms “Attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another,” I think that Gleick is saying that this is the essence of “visible” matter.” Is this quote not only about the formation of matter, the combining/attracting part, but also the repulsing part that preserves particle-matter’s independence?

I liked this from Gleick: When Feynman “parsed 'I think, therefore I am,' it came out suspiciously close to 'I am and I also think.'"

And this: “...why does an object in motion tend to travel forever in a straight line? That, Feynman said, nobody knows. At some deep stage, the explanations must end.” In an interview, Feynman states, “‘The magnets repel each other. But what does that mean? Or why are they doing that? Or how are they doing that?..I must say I think that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask.”

The biographical information was, predictably, good, especially the account of his first love (whose death of which he never seemed to have recovered from) and the suggestion that his eventual fatal cancer(s) might have been related to his work at Los Alamos. I liked his curmudgeon side - his independent thinking and refusal to go along with the flow, repeating without question standard or prevailing viewpoints. He thought philosophy, poetry, and psychology was pretty much on the fluffy side, even though he spent some time exploring the New Age stuff. His sex life seemed borderline out of control. Despite his passion for rhythmic drumming and such, he “disliked most music” and “classical music…he found not just dull but positively unpleasant.”

***
Gleick does a good job picturing Feynman, the person, and it's a good antidote to the somewhat disappointing "Surely You're Joking" Feynman's autobiography. Gleick shows a man deadly serious about his work, with little tolerance for group think, pomp and pretension. He pronounced potpourri "pot por eye" and didn't seem to care. Feynman's passion for life is better portrayed by Gleick than by Feynman in his autobiography. There are surprisingly many videos on the internet of Feynman giving lectures and interviews that Gleick uses in this book. However, these videos themselves best display the power of his personality. The video of Feynman playing the bongo drums is particularly striking.

Gleick spends some time on the subject of "genius." Given Feynman's evident stature, this was a needless addition to the book. While Gleick provided good biographical information, his descriptions of Feynman's contribution to physics were, in the main, unclear.

Feynman, who was not sympathetic to philosophers, was attentive to the hidden assumptions in our language and theory. After Feynman's death, Gleick writes that Feynman's "space in this world was closed" but his "imprint remained: what he knew, how he knows." Gleick's book emphasized that Feynman's contribution was in both areas. That is a nicely worded tribute to Feynman. ...more

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A Short History of the Universe by Joseph Silk

A Short History of the Universe (Scientific American Library)
by Joseph Silk

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This was written in the typical Scientific American (the magazine) format, which is too technical for my taste. As the title says, it is a short history of the universe and repeats what might be said to be the standard way of looking at this topic: T This was written in the typical Scientific American (the magazine) format, which is too technical for my taste. As the title says, it is a short history of the universe and repeats what might be said to be the standard way of looking at this topic: There was a big bang, followed by inflation, and the cosmic history flowed from there.

A good part of that history is about the presumed presence of dark matter and the candidates for what this might be (e.g. dim stars like white and dark dwarfs). Also, there was a substantial discussion about galaxies, and more so than what is provided in other histories. These two topics are related. As I understand it, the current preoccupation with dark matter stems from the motion of spiral galaxies where, it is thought, there is not enough gravitational mass at the galactic core to keep the arms from flinging off into space. Hence, the thinking (Rubin and others) is that something substantial must also exist, which is suspected to be the hidden (and mysterious) dark matter.

Are we looking at galactic motion in the right way? In this book, everything is about Newtonian gravity. It’s about a large gravitational mass, such as the core of a galaxy, that reaches out and pulls matter-energy toward itself. He refers to a “gravitational restoring force” that keeps stars in the disk. The task Silk says is to determine “the total mass required to stop the system from flinging apart.” If that mass is not sufficient, dark matter and its mass fills the gap.

But if one takes Newton’s first law on inertial motion, and combine it with Einstein’s theory, gravitational mass ceases to pull. Rather inertial motion follows the curvature of spacetime toward a large gravitational mass, which just sits there, in spacetime, doing nothing. The source of movement toward the galactic center is not mass pulling, but inertial motion in the presence of curvature. Seen this way, in the sense that more mass is needed to “pull” matter-energy toward itself, the amount of mass is not relevant. All of the motion is coming from incoming matter-energy (gas, dust) per Newton’s second law.

Silk discusses the gravitational versus expansion tension that exists within stars. The former he says pulls inward; the latter pushes outward. But what happens to that explanation if gravity pulls nothing? All the motion is coming from the outside moving inward, and it is this inward motion that is resisted by outgoing expansion from nuclear fusion. He writes that stars in a disk move “in approximately circular orbits around the galaxy center.”* Do stars in galaxies really orbit? Orbiting is a fairly stable equilibrium point between inertial motion and a large gravitational mass, whereas in spiral galaxies at least, the large-scale circular motion moves toward and eventually into the galactic core. Silk also finesses the role of black holes in all of this. At times, a black hole retains its separate integrity with matter-energy orbiting around it. At other times, though, Silk says a black hole pulls matter-energy into it.** The reader is left with the question: which is it?

Following Hubble’s 100 year old description of galactic structures, Silk speculates that undifferentiated proto-galaxies morph into spiral galaxies and these turn into elliptical galaxies, and provides various mathematics to explain why this is a plausible sequence. Looked at through the lens of Newton’s first law and Einstein’s account of gravitational curvature of spacetime, I wonder if the galactic sequence might be explained along the lines of the following: Undifferentiated gas and dust consolidate to form spiral galaxies, which have two main arms, and side arms associated with each, that connect with the galactic core, the large gravitational mass that sits at the center. Over time, those arms move into that core to form barred galaxies and then the ellipticals, with large galactic black holes at their center, that all inertial motion flows to following the curvature of spacetime.

Silk makes several references to jets coming out of stars and black holes. The most striking thing here is that disks and jets seem to be perpendicular to each other, one at the solar or galactic plain and the other at the respective poles, but he is silent as to why this might be so. In an illustration he gives of a spiral galaxy, there are two main arms that constitute the disk, but Silk does not discuss why there are just two and why these seem to be entering the galactic plain. In another illustration (p. 220) two cones are used to illustrate outward movement from a neutron star. Why are there cones versus movement outward from all directions, he doesn’t say.

In a chart, Silk illustrates that over time, density moves from a concentrated to a dispersed state, whereas for space, the movement is from unconsolidated density to consolidated. It’s interesting that one can then draw a diagonal line from a dispersed state in time to a consolidated density in space, though I’m not sure what that might mean, if anything.

At the end of the book, Silk talks about the big bang and comments that “a perfectly uniform big bang would be unacceptable” because fluctuations are an essential ingredient, and these result in the eventual consolidation of matter-energy. Isn’t the operative word here “perfectly.” An explosion would be generally round even though there would be fluctuations that, over time, as heat spreads out into a room, would result in the fairly homogenous cosmos seen today.

*He also says that older stars have elliptical orbits that are not confined to the plane of a galaxy.

**In an illustration, Silk says “Material from a normal star flows into its companion black hole, forming an accretion disk of gas around the hole. The gas grows hot as it spirals toward the center of the disk and emits torrents of x-rays before being swallowed.” ...more

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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates (Goodreads Author)

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As the title says, the book is a comprehensive road map to tackling climate change. Though it’s a slog, it is well-thought out, clearly written, and understandable. Gates’ solutions are largely about what tech can do, though he delves into policy as As the title says, the book is a comprehensive road map to tackling climate change. Though it’s a slog, it is well-thought out, clearly written, and understandable. Gates’ solutions are largely about what tech can do, though he delves into policy as well.

At the outset, Gates says for climate change there are two numbers to focus on. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere every year, and “zero is what we need to aim for.” This is a good way to boil it down. He acknowledges that getting there will be difficult. “The world has never done anything quite this big. Every country will need to change its way.”

Here and there in Gates’ commentary, he notes that some of the solutions are less realistic than others. Meat animals are substantial contributors to harmful climate-impacting gases, but meat eating he says is here to stay. He offers (and has invested in) plant-based meat substitutes, so we can make some changes that way, but not nearly enough to reach the goal of zero emissions in the “how we grow things” sector that contributes 19% of the 51 billion tons a year that are put into the atmosphere. But reading Gates, it’s hard not to sense that much of what he puts forward is not realistic to get to his zero goal.

Along that line, there are two problems with Gate’s outlook. The operative word in the Gates’ quote above is “will need.” It is easy for a convert to say we need to do thus and so, but without motivation, technological and policy solutions will get nowhere. We see this across the board where doubters and resistors abound. We’ve got a major problem with the polarized view regarding not only solutions but whether there’s even a problem itself.

In a way, this is not surprising. We are a here-now, self-interested species who are pretty much unable and unwilling to engage distant harms. It seems to me that a major component, if not the major component of “getting to zero” has to deal with this problem, convincingly, upfront, which is to say, tie distant harms to our immediate self-interest. Yes, converts do this. But, no, public-opinion (and leadership that rests on public opinion) does not. To do “anything quite this big” gets nowhere without converting the unconverted.

The second problem is that he’s silent on the population issue. He lists the things individuals can do to make their contribution to solving the climate gases problem - electric cars, eating a plant-based diet, getting heat pumps, etc - but these pale in comparison to the impact that comes from bringing one extra child into the world (58.6 tons of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life, by one estimate, compared to, say, being car free, which would curb 2.4 tons). Population trends are going down in many developed countries, so that’s a good trend from this perspective, though much of that trend seems to be tied up with the economic development that produces greenhouse gases. The bigger problem though comes from the tech types who advocate larger families, presumably to feed the economic machine. ...more

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Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
by William Cronon

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This is an account of the ecological impact of white settlement in 1600s New England. It is historical research at its best.

Indians, pre-white settlement, were merged with the landscape and its ecology. In northern New England, they moved from one ar This is an account of the ecological impact of white settlement in 1600s New England. It is historical research at its best.

Indians, pre-white settlement, were merged with the landscape and its ecology. In northern New England, they moved from one area to another, which gave the land and game time to recover. It was the life of the hunter-gatherer. Their mobility being paramount, they had minimal possessions. In southern New England, Indian hunting-gathering was mixed in with settlements and agriculture. But in either area, Indians were part of the whole, and the land was free. Property was what was held in common, for the benefit of the group, and “theft was uncommon.”

With colonial settlement, this all changed. Whites cleared the forests for wood and agriculture and bounded the landscape with fences for livestock. In time, the once free landscape became bounded. Property became defined by what could be used and developed by one’s own labor. Wild animals disappeared, especially in southern New England, and the soil became barren. The land had become an economic asset. It was property, owned by individuals, that was used for profit as well as subsistence.

In short, as Cronon writes, “Capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand.” The whites had imported their past and incorporated it into the new world. “For the New England landscape, and for the Indians,” Cronon states, “what followed was undoubtedly a new ecological order; for the colonists, on the other hand, it was an old and familiar life.”

Cultural clashes between Indians and white settlers were widespread. Whites looked at Indian males who hunted and fished as lazy, since that for whites was an idle recreation activity. Indians wondered why the white males did not put their women to work in the fields, instead of doing that labor themselves. Indian governance systems were based on “Kinship and personality” rather than the formal institutional structures used by the whites. This created problems about what was agreed to and what was not agreed to and how agreements would be enforced. There were flybys, but in the end, the interpretation and enforcement favored the whites. The power of the whites prevailed. In time the once welcoming Indians were seen as being in the way. White-person diseases for which Indians had no defense wiped out a good part of the Indian population. The rest were moved out of the way, their land taken by, as the author says, the “white invaders.”

Cronon says the cultural misunderstanding of whites toward Indians provided the justification for the takeover. Indians did not view, as the whites did, the landscape as an economic asset to be developed. That would be a conventional explanation for what transpired here. But I’d argue that misunderstanding was not the operative factor. Even if there was misunderstanding, it would not have mattered in the face of old fashioned greed. The whites wanted what they wanted, and they had the power to get what they want, regardless.

As a last point, Cronon notes that these changes in 17th century New England were just as profound as the era of industrialization that occurred two centuries later. On this point, he writes that, “Although we often tend to associate ecological changes primarily with the cities and factories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it should by now be clear that changes with similar roots took place just as profoundly in the farms and countrysides of the colonial period.” ...more

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The Jew and the World Ferment
by Basil Joseph Mathews

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This is a 1935 history of the Jewish people, from a Christian perspective. The publishing date is significant as it was before the full repercussions of Nazi Germany’s policy toward Jews occurred. At that time, things were beginning to stir regarding
This is a 1935 history of the Jewish people, from a Christian perspective. The publishing date is significant as it was before the full repercussions of Nazi Germany’s policy toward Jews occurred. At that time, things were beginning to stir regarding the Nazi views about Jews and this might explain why “The Jew and the world ferment” is the book’s title.

Surprisingly, there are only a few mentions of Hitler’s Germany. For the most part, the book discusses the origins of the Jewish people, and looks at the somewhat problematic question, “What is a Jew.” To answer that question, Mathews refers to the diversity that exists within Judaism, but I think in the end he lands on the side of Judaism as a religion rather than as a racial or ethnic identity.

This is important because of Mathews’ proclivity to see Christianity as having emerged from Judaism’s roots (God’s chosen people) to become he states the one and only true religion. Through universal principles, Christianity extends Judaism's narrow roots to “Humanity itself.” Jesus is the human face of God and only what Jesus says is true.

This gives Christians the right to evangelize. If, Matthews says, Christians “really do believe that Jesus Christ” is the “ultimate Reality” that “has broken through the veil into the human scene, we cannot possibly keep silent about it.” Mathews acknowledges that this notion is prickly since it annoys people - Jews in this case - who don’t see the world in the same way. Mathews gets around that difficulty by saying that Jews have the right to push back and express themselves but this in no way should curb the Christian attempts to share the light of Christianity with Jews. I suppose this is a Jews for Jesus type thing.

Interestingly, Matthews discusses the history of a Jewish state in Palestine so that these people can finally have their own country, and good Christians everywhere would support such given the common origin of their respective religions. The proponents, he says, “aim at making Tel-Aviv a Semitic Athens; so that Palestine shall be a new cultural center for the world, not only for the Jews but as a Jewish contribution to world culture.” Of course this position bumps into the people who are already there and Matthews says basically that a two state solution would pertain: of the Arabs, he writes that “The idea of either expelling them from Palestine or of submitting them to Jewish rule is simply silly.” Admirable, I suppose, but I’m thinking that with an attitude like Matthews, it’s inevitable that a sense of superiority leads to imposition and domination. In the end, the “survival of the fittest” mentality, not enlightenment, is really the only force that prevails.

The book is a well-written, and telling, time piece. ...more

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