Category: Books

Arabic Numerals Enabled Better Accounting Systems

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Humans have been recording counts for at least 35,000 years, if the notches in a Paleolithic-era baboon’s fibula are an indicator.
. . .
Before the 13th century, European businessmen recorded figures in Roman numerals and computed with their fingers or a counting board. But these creaky accounting systems began to buckle under the growing complexity of regional and international finance. In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa–better known by his family name, Fibonacci–published the “Liber Abbaci,” or “Book of Calculation,” a 600-page tome detailing the rules of Hindu-Arabic arithmetic and algebra. Fibonacci’s volume was directed not to scholars but to merchants, the first work in the West to demonstrate the commercial utility of Eastern mathematics. The book was an instant success and propelled the Pisan maestro d’abbaco to fame.
The “Liber Abbaci” inspired a flood of regionally produced (and lesser) primers on the subject. Arithmetic schools sprang up throughout Italy and would eventually count among their pupils da Vinci and Machiavelli. German merchants flocked to Venice during the 1300s to learn the new accounting practices. In “The Man of Numbers,” mathematician Keith Devlin makes the case that Fibonacci’s book spearheaded the decline and fall of the Roman numeral and transformed scientific, technological and commercial calculation in the West.
At age 15, Fibonacci accompanied his father, a Pisan trade representative, to the North African port of Bugia (now Bejaia, in Algeria). In the preface to “Liber Abbaci,” Fibonacci writes of his early introduction to the “art of the nine Indian figures” and their computational power. After more than a decade of his own studies and tutelage under Arabic mathematicians across North Africa, he returned to Pisa to write his masterwork. Such was the acclaim that Fibonacci appeared before Emperor Frederick II–a colorful intellectual who referred to himself as Stupor mundi or Wonder of the World–and vanquished the emperor’s court mathematician in an arithmetic duel.
. . .
. . . as Mr. Devlin reminds us, even something as prosaic as a sequence of 10 numbers can remake an entire world.

For the full review, see:
ALAN HIRSHFELD. “BOOKSHELF; Counting On Progress; Roman numerals were fine for adding and subtracting. Fibonacci saw that complex math required a better system.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., JULY 7, 2011): A13.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

Book under review:
Devlin, Keith. The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution. New York: Walker & Company, 2011.

The Huge Value of Exposing Ourselves to Unexpected Evidence

Bill Bryson tells how much we learned from the remains of a man from the neolithic age, who has been called Ötzi:

(p. 377) His equipment employed eighteen different types of wood – a remarkable variety. The most surprising of all his tools was the axe. It was copper-bladed and of a type known as a Remedello axe, after a site in Italy where they were first found. But Ötzi’s axe was hundreds of years older than the oldest Remedello axe. ‘It was,’ in the words of one observer, ‘as if the tomb of a medieval warrior had yielded a modern rifle.’ The axe changed the timeframe for the copper age in Europe by no less than a thousand years.

But the real revelation and excitement were the clothes. Before Ötzi we had no idea – or, to be more precise, nothing but ideas – of how stone age people dressed. Such materials as survived existed only as fragments. Here was a complete outfit and it was full of surprises. His clothes were made from the skins and furs of an impressive range of animals – red deer, bear, chamois, goat and cattle. He also had with him a woven grass rectangle that was three feet long. This might have been a kind of rain cape, but it might equally have been a sleeping mat. Again, nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined.
Ötzi wore fur leggings held up with leather strips attached to a waist strap that made them look uncannily – almost comically – like the kind of nylon stockings and garter sets that Hollywood pin-ups wore in the Second World War. Nobody had remotely foreseen such a get-up. He wore a loincloth of goatskin and a hat made from the fur of a brown bear – probably a kind of hunting trophy. It would have been very warm and covetably stylish. The rest of his outfit was mostly made from the skin and fur of red deer. Hardly any came from domesticated animals, the opposite of what was expected.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Reasons to Hope for 150 Year Life Span

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Ms. Arrison is in the hopeful camp. She recounts advances in stem-cell research, pharmaceuticals and synthetic biology. And the tinkering with genes still goes on. We learn about Dr. Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California in San Francisco, who discovered that the life span of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans could be doubled by partially disabling a single gene. Further improvements on the technique resulted in worms living six times longer than normal. “In human terms,” Ms. Arrison says, “they be the equivalent of healthy, active five-hundred-year-olds.” That may be a bit much to expect, but Ms. Arrison says she is confident that “human life expectancy will one day reach 150 years.”
. . .
What is more, technology heavyweights are paying attention, including Bill Gates (if he were a teenager today, Mr. Gates once said, he’d be “hacking biology”) and Jeff Bezos (“atom by atom we’ll assemble small machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs”). Larry Ellison, of Oracle, started a foundation more than a decade ago to support anti-aging research; the institution donates about $42 million a year.
. . .
And if humans do begin living to 150, then what?
. . .
. . . , Ms. Arrison argues that apocalyptic prophecies are unlikely to be realized. Increasing wealth and mankind’s adaptability and ingenuity mean that as new problems emerge, new solutions will be forthcoming. “In looking at the trends of history,” she says, “we can see that even when there are downsides to a particular wealth- or health-enhancing technology, the problem is often fixed once the population reaches a point where it feels secure in spending the resources to do so.”

For the full review, see:
NICK SCHULZ. “BOOKSHELF; Bioengineering Methuselah; Human beings living to be 150? And you thought Social Security and Medicare were in trouble now.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., August 31, 2011): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Book under review:
Arrison, Sonia. 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Easter Island Was Ravaged by Rats, Peruvian Slaving Parties and Nonnative Diseases, Not by Ecocide

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Source of book image: http://0.tqn.com/d/archaeology/1/0/g/L/1/Statues-That-Walked-sm.jpg

The natives call Easter Island “Rapa Nui.”

(p. C5) With the forest gone, Rapa Nui’s soil degraded; unable to feed themselves, Mr. Diamond argued in his best-selling “Collapse” (2005), Easter Islanders faced “starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism.” The fall was abrupt and overwhelming; scores of giant statues were abandoned, half-finished. Roggeveen had discovered a ruin–and a powerful eco-parable.

Books and articles by the hundred have pointed to Rapa Nui as the inevitable result of uncontrolled population growth, squandered resources and human fecklessness. “The person who felled the last tree could see it was the last tree,” wrote Paul G. Bahn and John Flenley in “Easter Island, Earth Island” (1992). “But he (or she) still felled it.” “The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious,” Mr. Diamond proclaimed. “The clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources,” he said, Rapa Nui epitomizes “ecocide,” presenting a stark image of “what may lie ahead of us in our own future.”
No, it doesn’t, write archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo in “The Statues That Walked,” a fascinating entry in the pop-science genre of Everything You Know Is Wrong. Messrs. Hunt and Lipo had no intention of challenging Mr. Diamond when they began research on Rapa Nui. But in their fourth year of field work, they obtained radiocarbon dates from Anakena Beach, thought to be the island’s oldest settlement. The dates strongly indicated that the first settlers appeared around A.D. 1200–eight centuries later than Heyerdahl and other researchers had thought.
Wait a minute, the authors in effect said. Rapa Nui is so remote that researchers believe it must have been settled by a small group of adventurers–a few dozen people, brave or crazy, in boats. The new evidence suggested that their arrival had precipitated catastrophic deforestation “on the scale of decades, not centuries.” The island then probably had only a few hundred inhabitants. Some ecologists estimate that the island originally had 16 million palm trees. How could so few people have cut down so much so fast?
. . .
The real culprit, according to “The Statues That Walked,” was the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), which stowed away on the boats of the first Polynesian settlers. In laboratory settings, Polynesian rat populations can double in 47 days. Throw a breeding pair into an island with no predators and abundant food and arithmetic suggests the result: ratpocalypse. If the animals multiplied as they did in Hawaii, the authors calculate, Rapa Nui would quickly have housed between two and three million. Among the favorite food sources of R. exulans are tree seeds and tree sprouts. Humans surely cleared some of the forest, but the real damage would have come from the rats that prevented new growth.
“Rather than a case of abject failure,” the authors argue, “Rapa Nui is an unlikely story of success.” The islanders had migrated, perhaps accidentally, to a place with little water and “fundamentally unproductive” soil with “uniformly low” levels of phosphorus, an essential mineral for plant growth. To avoid the wind’s dehydrating effects, the newcomers circled their gardens with stone walls known as manavai. Today, the researchers discovered, abandoned manavai occupy about 6.4 square miles, a tenth of the island’s total surface.
More impressive still, about half of the island is covered by “lithic mulching,” in which the islanders scattered broken stone over the fields. The uneven (p. C6) surface creates more turbulent airflow, reducing daytime surface temperatures and warming fields at night. And shattering the rocks exposes “fresh, unweathered surfaces, thus releasing mineral nutrients held within the rock.” Only lithic mulching produced enough nutrients–just barely–to make Rapa Nui’s terrible soil cultivable. Breaking and moving vast amounts of stone, the islanders had engineered an entirely new, more productive landscape.
Their success was short-lived. As Messrs. Hunt and Lipo point out, the 18th and 19th centuries were terrible times to reside in a small, almost defenseless Pacific nation. Rapa Nui was repeatedly ravaged by Peruvian slaving parties and nonnative diseases.
. . .
Easter Island’s people did not destroy themselves, the authors say. They were destroyed.
. . .
Oral tradition said that the statues walked into their places. Oral tradition was correct, the authors say. By shaping the huge statues just right, the islanders were able to rock them from side to side, moving them forward in a style familiar to anyone who has had to move a refrigerator. Walking the statues, the authors show in experiments, needed only 15 or 20 people.
In a 2007 article in Science, Mr. Diamond estimated that hundreds of laborers were needed to move the statues, suggesting that the eastern settlements of the island alone had to have “a population of thousands”–which in turn was proof of the island’s destructive overpopulation. By showing that the statues could have been moved by much fewer people, Messrs. Hunt and Lipo have removed one of the main supports of the ecocide theory and the parable about humankind it tells.

For the full review, see:
CHARLES C. MANN. “Don’t Blame the Natives; It was a rat that caused the sudden collapse of Easter Island’s civilization.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JULY 30, 2011): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

Source of book under review:
Hunt, Terry, and Carl Lipo. The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Bathtubs Started Out “Extremely Expensive” and Then Prices Fell

(p. 372) At last the world had baths that looked good and stayed looking good for a long time. But they were still extremely expensive. A bath alone could easily cost $200 in 1910 – a price well beyond the range of most households. But as manufacturers improved the processes of mass manufacture, prices fell and by 1940 an American could buy an entire bath suite – sink, bath and toilet – for $70, a price nearly everyone could afford.

Elsewhere, however, baths remained luxuries. In Europe a big part of the problem was a lack of space in which to put bathrooms. In 1954 just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath. In Britain the journalist Katharine Whitehorn has recalled that as recently as the late 1950s she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman’s Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms as not enough British homes had them, and such articles would only promote envy.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

The Lancet Accused Snow of Being “in the Pocket of Business Interests”

(p. 365) It is hard now to appreciate just how radical and unwelcome Snow’s views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with ‘pestilent vapours, miasms and loathsome abominations of every kind’ and make themselves rich by poisoning their neighbours. ‘After careful enquiry,’ the parliamentary inquiry concluded, ‘we see no reason to adopt this belief.’

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Finance and Strategy Should Be More Integrated

ChristensenClayton2011-07-19.jpg“‘God never said that finance and strategy are fundamentally different functions.’ –Clayton Christensen” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ interview quoted and cited below.

MR. MURRAY: We’ve talked about the innovator’s dilemma, but what’s the solution?
MR. CHRISTENSEN: The financial function stands in the way of much of this. God never said that finance and strategy are fundamentally different functions, yet the business schools decided to teach strategy and teach finance. This gets implemented in companies where strategy is the responsibility of this group, and finance this group. And a lot of the things that make sense financially make no sense strategically.
. . .
MR. MURRAY: The United States has led the world in various types of innovation for much of the past century. Is that something that will continue?
MR. CHRISTENSEN: I am very worried about America. I was thinking about this hard over the past year. It turns out that the majority of the entrepreneurs that made Silicon Valley happen weren’t Americans. They were from Israel, China and India. We were a magnet to bring to our shores the best technologists in the world. Now our message to the rest of the world is, “You guys, we don’t want you.” The minute we say that and push those to Singapore and to Britain and elsewhere, I worry.

For the full interview, see:
Alan Murray, interviewer. “The Innovator’s Solution; Clayton Christensen, Glenn Hutchins and Ellen Kullman on being cutting edge–without breaking the bank.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., June 27, 2011): C9.
(Note: bold and italics in original; ellipsis added.)

Larry Page’s Wonderful Crusade to Save Us Time

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Source of book image: http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/intheplex.jpg

On C-SPAN’s book TV I saw the last part of an interesting and entertaining interview with Steven Levy that was originally recorded at the Computer History Museum on April 6, 2011. Levy is the author of of In the Plex which I have not read, but which is now on my to-read list.
At the end of the interview, Levy read a passage from his book about how Larry Page is obsessed with reducing latency, which is a technical term for how long we have to wait for something to happen on a computer.
Isn’t it wonderful that Larry Page is on a crusade to save us from wasted time?

Book discussed above:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: “latency” appears on the following pages of Steven Levy’s book: 93, 184, 185, 186, 187, 207, 262, and 398.)

If Truman Had Not Used the Bomb, Hundreds of Thousands More American Soldiers Would Have Died

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) . . . , the author reminds us of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who had died in the conventional bombings of places like Tokyo and Kyoto while Roosevelt was president, but with relatively little opprobrium attaching to FDR. Father Miscamble cites as well the horrific massacre of innocents for which the Japanese were responsible, a savagery still being unleashed in the summer of 1945, and the awful cost of battle in the Pacific, including 6,000 American dead and 20,000 wounded at Iwo Jima and 70,000 casualties suffered while capturing Okinawa. With these precedents, Herbert Hoover warned Truman that an invasion of the Japanese home islands could result in the loss of between half a million and a million American lives. Marshall, Leahy and Gen. Douglas MacArthur each had his own projected figures, none of them wildly different from Hoover’s.

Under these circumstances, it was inconceivable that Truman would not have ordered the use of a potentially war-winning weapon the moment it could be deployed. It is impossible to imagine the depth of the public’s fury if after the war Americans had discovered that their president, out of concern for his own conscience, had not used the weapons but instead condemned hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to certain death on the beaches and in the cities of mainland Japan.

For the full review, see:
ANNE JOLIS. “BOOKSHELF; In Defense Of ‘Little Boy’; Herbert Hoover warned President Truman that invading Japan would cost at least half a million American lives.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 13, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book reviewed:
Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan, Cambridge Essential Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

The Stinking Past

(p. 356) The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described. They worked in teams of three or four. One man – the most junior, we may assume – was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and the third and fourth carried the buckets to a waiting cart. Nightsoil work was dangerous as well as disagreeable. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions since they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 related the case of one nightsoil man who went into a privy vault in a London tavern and was overcome almost at once by the foul air. ‘He call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face,’ one witness reported. A colleague who rushed to the man’s aid was similarly overcome. Two more men went to the vault, but could not get in because of the foul air, though they did manage to open the door a little, releasing the worst (p. 357) of the gases. By the time rescuers were able to haul the two men out, one was dead and the other was beyond help.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.