Read Prisoners of Geography

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The full title of the book is Prisoners of geography: Ten maps that explain everything about the world. It came out in 2015, but it looks like another book came out by Tim Marshall in 2021 concerning 12 maps, but seems to be a book for children.

It was really interesting to see how much of an impact geography has on the economics and politics of a country or a region. Since the book was written in 2015, he could not foresee how the two different Trump administrations would gum up the works of international relations between the United States and many of the countries discussed.

In a way, it seems like the book predicted the land war between Russia and Ukraine, the importance of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, and the issues between Israel and the Gaza strip. But, those three conflicts have been brewing for a long time, so it isn’t surprising that some conflicts popped up in the last 10 years.

Take the information with some grains of salt. What he writes about in some parts of the world might be more trustworthy than in other parts of the world.

The Edge of Space-Time by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

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Finished the book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. I picked up a signed copy from the Rogue Bookshop, in Beloit, Wisconsin, when we were visiting some family near there.

I had tried to read her first book (The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred) in digital format, but I’d rather read it in print. Maybe I will do that later.

Anyway, I enjoyed the read. I learned some new things about particle physics, and I learned a lot about different cultures in the process. I knew that she is a queer black Jewish woman with a PhD in physics, so I figured she would have a different take on science, and this did not disappoint. I am glad she weaved in some rap musicians, and I even understood some of the references. About the only complaint is that she called her photograph of M27 the Dumbbell nebula as M57 the Ring Nebula. (See figure 11.1 sandwiched between pages 204-205.)

I kept so many sticky notes, it will take a bit to list all of the interesting and new things she wrote about.

  • Page xvii – “The universe is too fucking fabulous for capitalism, y’all.” Yes, it is.
  • Same page – She mentioned a quote from her mom – she worried if “anyone would be excited about the glories of the cosmos, ‘Without joy, what the fuck is the point?'” I agree.
  • Page 11 – book citation – Weinberg, Steven, Gravitation and cosmology: principles and applications of the general theory of relativity. New York : Wiley, [1972]
  • Page 22 – She did not mention that we are in a corner of the Lanaia Keia supercluster of galaxies.
  • Page 26 – book citation – Space from Zeno to Einstein : classic readings with a contemporary commentary / edited and with a commentary by Nick Huggett. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [1999]
  • Page 34-35 – “Across generations, there persists the lingering question of why we want to know space. My position is that it is the foundation of reality, and thus we should want to know it.” I do want to try to figure out what reality is in this universe.
  • Page 42 – “We all live life in the slow lane.” We will never feel relativistic effects from moving fast or accelerating to ludicrous speeds, even if we went 25,000-35,000 mph. 35,000 mph is about 0.0052% the speed of light.
  • Page 49 – General relativity / Robert M. Wald, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984 is a good book to explain the difference between gravitational mass and inertial mass. I’ve never really wrapped my brain around the fact that they are equivalent, but that they could be different. I guess page 66 of that book explains it.
  • Page 51 – Two books – The fabric of the cosmos : space, time, and the texture of reality. Greene, B. (Brian), New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. and All that she carried : the journey of Ashley’s sack, a Black family keepsake. Miles, Tiya, New York : Random House, [2021]
  • Page 53 – Archibald Wheeler said that “Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move.”
  • Page 72 – Lewis Carroll book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the looking glass. I really should read those.
  • Page 75 – She is happiest “with a 0.7mm Pilot G2 gel pen on nice, smooth paper.” Good to know that she has a favorite writing instrument.
  • Page 79 – book citation – The large scale structure of space-time, Hawking, Stephen, Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1974. She gave the title of this book from a line in the opening paragraph of that book.
  • Page 85 – Star Trek: The Next Generation reference. “Remember me” episode about Beverly Crusher being in a pocket universe.
  • Page 86. The radius of an elementary particle should be 10^-13 cm. She forgot the minus sign.
  • Page 96 – In physics, a field is simply a physical quantity that has a value at every place in space and time. This is a good way of thinking of that. Wish I learned that 41 years ago in college. The word field came from Michael Faraday working with bismuth and magnetism across empty space.
  • Page 101 – book citation – Edward Bouchet : the first African-American doctorate. New Jersey : World Scientific, 2002.
  • Page 104 – Particles are just material manifestations of fields that exist at every point in space-time.
  • Page 107 – article – https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/frances-oppenheimer
  • Page 108 – “But the universe is always there for us to understand–all of us. No one person or group has been fundamentally granted unique purchase on it.”
  • Page 110 – “It turns out that developing an early appreciation for whimsical nonsense has served me well as a scientist.”
  • Same page – book citation – Queer phenomenology : orientations, objects, others / Sara Ahmed. Durham : Duke University Press, 2006.
  • Page 120 – book cite – The principles of quantum mechanics. Dirac, P. A. M. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1958.
  • Page 140 – book cite – Trap History: Atlanta Culture and the Global Impact of Trap Music (Paperback)
  • Page 144 – book cite – Quantum mechanics : a modern development, Ballentine, Leslie E., River Edge, NJ : World Scientific, 1998.
  • Page 147 – book cite – Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the universe halfway : quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham : Duke University Press, 2007.
  • Page 161 – Newton thought that the concept of time was straightforward – also called duration. Absolute. True.
  • Page 166 – book cite – The Janus point : a new theory of time, Barbour, Julian B., New York : Basic Books, 2020.
  • Page 167 – Entaxy is the concept of an unboxed universe. It is not trending towards chaos, but towards complexity
  • Page 169 – book cite – Hertog, Thomas, On the origin of time : Stephen Hawking’s final theory, New York : Bantam Books, [2023].
  • Page 174-175 – book cite – On the connexion of the physical sciences, Somerville, Mary, London : J. Murray, 1840. “The heavens afford the most sublime subject of study which can be derived from science.”
  • Page 203 – book cite – Overbye, Dennis, Lonely hearts of the cosmos : the scientific quest for the secret of the universe, New York, NY : HarperCollins, [1991] and then the subtitle changes to Overbye, Dennis, Lonely hearts of the cosmos : the story of the scientific quest for the secret of the universe, Boston : Back Bay Books, 1999.
  • Page 212 – book cite – Bright galaxies, dark matter, and beyond : the life of astronomer Vera Rubin, Yeager, Ashley Jean, Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2021.
  • Why Are We Here? Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Of The Universe, Seyda Ipek – Youtube video.
  • Page 220 – Discussion of the work of Chien-Shiung Wu. Look at this article,  Kam, Chon-Fai; Zhang, Cheng-Ning; Feng, Da Hsuan (December 1, 2024). “Chien-Shiung Wu’s trailblazing experiments in particle physics”. Physics Today. 77 (12): 28–35. doi:10.1063/pt.oufp.zwkj. ISSN 0031-9228.
  • Page 223 – book cite – All you can ever know : a memoir, Chung, Nicole, New York : Catapult, 2018. Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But Nicole grew up facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, and wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth. Here Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, and chronicles the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets.
  • Page 232 – book cite – The elephant in the universe : our hundred-year search for dark matter, Schilling, Govert, Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022.
  • Page 241 – Black holes in quantum gravity – Daniel Harlow – https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10367.
  • Page 245 – The JWST is the Just Wonderful Space Telescope. I wondered how she thought of it.
  • Page 255 – book cite – Three roads to quantum gravity, Smolin, Lee, New York : Basic Books, 2017. (New edition from the original book of 2001/02?) Brings up the topic of spin foams
  • Page 257 – Hawking, Stephen W., and Thomas Hertog. “Populating the landscape: A top-down approach.” Physical Review D—Particles, Fields, Gravitation, and Cosmology 73, no. 12 (2006): 123527. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.73.123527
  • Page 276 – Comments on mining. Learned about the global coltan market. This is tantalum and niobium.
  • Page 280 – Jemison told an interviewer (Giovanni) that space belongs to all of us. But how does it belong to us. Is there capitalistic ownership involved.
  • Page 283 – We have not yet worked out how to best poop in space.
  • Page 285 – Two Chinese films, the Wandering Earth and the Wandering Earth II.
  • Same page – book cite – Kim, Bo Young, I’m waiting for you : and other stories, New York, NY : Harper Voyager, [2021] about time travel. an engaged couple coordinate their separate missions to distant corners of the galaxy to ensure—through relativity—they can arrive back on Earth simultaneously to make it down the aisle. But small incidents wreak havoc on space and time, driving their wedding date further away.
  • Page 290 – How should the land on Hawaii big island be used? She has an article in the Nation magazine. The Fight for Mauna Kea Is a Fight Against Colonial Science. The protests by Native Hawaiians against the Thirty Meter Telescope are a cry for respect for indigenous autonomy. by Keolu Fox and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mauna-kea-tmt-colonial-science/
  • Page 293 – The universe is the “best story we’ve ever been in conversation with our about.”
  • Page 298 – Octavia Butler reminds us that “the future isn’t written until it is happening” and thus, we still have an opportunity to shape the future.
  • Page 307 – She acknowledge the work of the people in the UNH library. “Supported by an underfunded but very mighty team.”
  • Page 317 – “Libraries are fucking awesome.”

The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan

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The full title is The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel. I think I learned about this book in a segment on Sunday Morning. I try to be a good tourist by not being an “old tourist” – one who simply wants to check a box on some list or to visit a place for bragging rights.

Other places have done a good job of reviewing or talking about the book, so I don’t think I need to be verbose here.

I like that she covered Hawaii and Iceland as travel destinations, but I was surprised that she really didn’t talk about the “Disney effect” on travel very much. While she did have a segment about Disneyland in Paris, she didn’t discuss Disneyland in CA, nor Disney World in FL at all.

I learned that Thomas Cook was one of the first people to set up a business arranging for tours of places. Some other things to consider reading include:

There are plenty of other resources mentioned (such as Fodor’s and Frommer’s), the ones above are items I might like to explore a little more.

Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating

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Got this book from the Jeffco Whale of a Used Book Sale a couple of years ago.

Brian Keating is an astrophysicist/cosmologist. He had dreams and desires of winning the Nobel Prize in physics, but there was an issue with the results of the BICEP2 project. But, he was prominent enough to be able to nominate candidates to the prize for a year or two.

He certainly does have some good ideas for ways to improve the award. Pages 272 to 274 give his main recommendations.

  1. Add prizes in new and emerging disciplines
  2. Award the physics prize to groups of any size
  3. Give retroactive awards
  4. Allow for posthumous awards
  5. Recognize that true discovery is serendipitous In other words, he would like to see more prizes given to people who make unexpected discoveries, not just confirmation of previous theories

Other things of note:

Pages 174-175. “There is a fierce competition that begins the day you declare yourself a physics major. First, among your fellow undergraduates, you spar for top ranking in your class. This leads to the next battle: becoming a graduate student at a top school. Then, you toil for six to eight years to earn a postdoc job at another top school. And finally, you hope, comes a coveted faculty job, which can become permanent if you are privileged enough to get tenure. Along the way, the number of peers in your group diminishes by a factor of ten at each stage, from hundreds of undergraduates to just one faculty job becoming available every few years in your field.” Brian Keating, Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor

Yeah? Um, no. I don’t think so. I was a physics major, and I had NO interest in sparing for top ranking in my class.

Page 228. He also had the idea that the nominated people or groups should also be publicized, just like how people know who is up for Academy Awards. It can be an honor just to have been nominated.

Page 244. He mentions Planck data as showing that what BICEP2 found, was simply polarized light from dust grains in the Milky Way, it was not primordial polarized light from the time of the Big Bang.

After reading that he likes to hang with the likes of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Lex Fridman, and Jordan Peterson, my opinion of him drops waaaayyy down considerably.

He is turning into a physics YouTuber chasing clout. I am going to stay away from him.

Finally read Quantum Bullshit

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The full title is Quantum Bullshit: how to ruin your life with advice from quantum physics. I picked up this book at a JCPL Whale of a Used Book Sale.

I read a little of the book before diving into it, but I was not prepared for the huge number of times fuck and shit appeared in the tome. While I had a feeling profanity would be used quite a bit, I did not expect it to be used that much.

Here are some things of note:

  • He dedicated the book to “Albert Einstein: You would have hated this.” I agree. However, I think he might have learned some stuff, such as how his work led to lasers, and so much more.
  • He took a good dig at our current President by comparing him to Lord Kelvin. If Lord Kelvin was alive today, he would be the kind of person TYPING INSULTING THINGS IN ALL CAPS ON TWITTER, and that is not very becoming for leaders in science–or a country.
  • I learned that when things glow when they are hot, whether it is lava or copper or iron at 1000 degrees C, they glow in the same color–bright red. (Both of these on page 5.)
  • Page 42. There is three volume set called the Crystal Bible. The link goes to the first in the series by Judy Hall. This covers the “properties of each crystal including the spiritual, mental and psychological, emotional and physical effects, including its use in crystal healing.” Yup, this is some bullshit.
  • Page 45. Cymophobia is the abnormal fear of waves. This could be from Wi-FI to 5G to windmills to electric power lines to ocean waves.
  • Page 93. At several points in the book, he references the old TV show Numb3rs that ran from 2005 to 2010. While the author has not watched a single episode, he did not care for the premise, but I somewhat fondly remember the show. It was ok, since it may have shown mathematicians as somewhat normal people.
  • Page 127. “Realism comes in many flavors, which we will get to soon. Antirealism, on the other hand, says nope to all that shit. It also comes in many flavors, but generally it says that reality is not independent of who’s asking about it or that it really doesn’t matter since the question is irrelevant—like asking what a square tastes like.” Funny. Justin had written on a preschool project that something tastes like a triangle. Then we realized what he was talking about. We would cut up pancakes for breakfast, and some of the corner pieces were triangle shaped, and maybe those got hard after sitting for a while on his plate.
  • Page 176. “It’s important not to ridicule people who believe in bullshit. Regardless of what you think about insults, and far be it for some asshole quantum physicist to lecture you about morality, the fact is, you can rarely change behavior by insulting someone’s intelligence. There is ignorance, and there is willful ignorance. Naive people who fall for bullshit deserve your sympathy, not your scorn. Go on, insult those amoral bullshitters all you want—you only want them to go away after all—but don’t insult Papa.” This is good advice. When people believe bullshit, telling them about the truth with facts will probably just make them retreat more into the bullshit. People just cling to closely held beliefs no matter what.
  • Page 190. Introduced to the concept of the Great Filter by Robin Hanson. “The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare.” So, the universe has a way to filter out life from reaching a technological point where we could easily communicate with each other at the same time. The 1998 updated essay is here. I am also surprised that he did not mention the Dark Forest hypothesis.

Brian Goldstone book – There is no place for us

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I first saw a segment on a Sunday Morning show about the book and about some of the families covered. I was surprised to see that the Colorado School of Mines had the book (but no longer), so I checked it out.

There are plenty of other reviews (and NYT and the WSJ that are probably behind paywalls), so I don’t feel a need to discuss a lot about it.

Page 90 – One of the couples (Natalia and Maurice) met at the Beltway Plaza Mall in Greenbelt, MD. I used to work there back in the early 1990s. Yeah, I could see how that area had gotten rougher in the last 33 years. I do miss the Three Brothers Pizza place.

Page 117 – There is a mention of a book by Samuel Stein, Capital City. I might want to look into that sometime.

The wild dark by Craig Childs

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The full title of the book is The wild dark: Finding the night sky in the age of light. Not sure where I heard of the book, but I checked it out from the JeffCo Libraries.

It is an interesting trip for the author and one of his friends to bike North out of Las Vegas, and they stop every night to view the night sky in a different Bortle zone. He also uses an SQM to determine how dark different places are on the journey. I know that the Bortle scale has its limitations, and it can change from night to night, but it is a good estimate when skies are clear.

The book started off with an editing error with two places saying “A little darker and you get hundreds of stars.” The first instance probably meant to say — a little darker and you get dozens of stars.

On page 19 – I learned that de Mairan figured out what circadian rhythm is.

On pages 59-60, he lends some credence to astrology so my scientific view of him goes down a notch.

Page 81 – There are indigenous peoples in Alaska and other parts of the Arctic that see a very large constellation called Yahdii.

Page 91-92 – The January 17, 1994 Northridge, CA earthquake. He noted how it took out power in the area. He said that power was disrupted in other states, too, and even up into Canada. Then, he said that people were calling emergency centers (and other news outlets) about a giant silvery cloud. He said that it was the first time people were seeing zodiacal light, but I would guess that the Milky Way would be the cause for alarm most likely.

Page 97 – Basin and Range Dark Sky Cooperative

Page 108 – The author talks about how he can eat most anything found in the wild, such as worms, insects, rackrabbit, little crabs (and other gelatinous creatures), and chuparosa flowers. That last plant had caused him to get sick. So, maybe you shouldn’t always eat found plants or whatnot.

Page 121 – He meets up with Mark Bailey.

Page 130 – Some people in the Hopi Native American tribe did not like the fact that people went to the Moon. Should people “be allowed to touch these sacred bodies in space?” I think yes, people should be allowed to explore space in an ethical way. We do not want to send bacteria to other water-filled moons such as Europa or Enceladus.

Page 150 – The Webb Space Telescope was used to find that there were 540 (or more) free floating planets in and around the Orion Nebula? The research was posted to the arXiv, but it isn’t in a journal yet.

Page 165 – He mentions that his county commissioner was Kris Holstrom, who was a commissioner in San Miguel County, Colorado. Looks like he lives in Norwood, CO.

Page 169 – The City art installation in Nevada.

The book finishes with Craig and his buddy meeting up with a bunch of friends in a supposedly Bortle 1 zone in the middle of Nevada. It would have been nice to see what path they took on the way there, and where exactly they all met at the end. But, since they found some indigenous artwork on the way there (pages 145-146), they might not want to reveal where they found it. Or, they could have told some native art experts where it was so that it could be protected and preserved.

This is another good overview of the book.

The last man who knew everything

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Recently read the book, The last man who knew everything: The life and times of Enrico Fermi, father of the nuclear age. I picked up the book at the Whale of a Used Book sale from the Jeffco Libraries. On the cover of the book, it had some stickers saying that it was in St. Anthony’s Hospital and OrthoColorado Hospitals. It is a gift to people from the Volunteer Services Department. I am glad the book found its way to me.

I found the book illuminating. I might try to read some other books about Enrico and the Fermi family.

  • Fermi, Laura, Atoms in the family : my life with Enrico Fermi, University of Chicago Press, 1954
  • Segrè, Emilio, Enrico Fermi: physicist, University of Chicago Press, 1970
  • Webb, Stephen, If the universe is teeming with aliens … where is everybody? : seventy-five solutions to the Fermi paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life, Springer, 2015
  • Guerra, Francesco, The lost notebook of Enrico Fermi : the true story of the discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity, Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2018
  • Segrè, Gino, The Pope of physics : Enrico Fermi and the birth of the Atomic Age, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2016

There were two things that struck me.

  1. Page 355. Nella’s daughter Olivia, and Judd’s daughter, Rachel, have been involved in documenting the legacy of the family. Olivia has two blogs — https://fermieffect.com/ and https://neutrontrail.com/. Rachel wrote the book, Picturing the bomb: Photographs from the secret world of the Manhattan Project / introduction by Richard Rhodes ; [text by] Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, New York : H.N. Abrams, 1995.
  2. Page 359. Fermi-Dirac statistics were developed 100 years ago at the end of 1925 and published in 1926. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics for more information.

Well, there were a lot of other things that I learned about Enrico, but it is too much to include in a short blog post.

A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson

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This is a big thick book, and it took me a while to read it. Just 544 pages, including the notes and references.

I like the way Bill Bryson writes, and I will try to read more of his work now. I started to keep track of some of his references, but it probably would have been too much work. I did note on page 54 when he recommended Timothy Ferris and his book, Coming of Age in the Milky Way. I will try to get that sometime. There is a 1988 edition, and a 2003 version, but I am not sure how much the 2003 edition is different.

It did have some negative reviews in Amazon, and I could see how many readers would find this tedious and difficult to finish. Maybe if I read some of his other books, then I would see that this one was actually a bore. In any case, I found it interesting, but bite it a chapter at a time. It would be a chore to try to read it straight through.

The meaning of it all?

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Richard P. Feynman wrote the book, The meaning of It all: thoughts of a citizen scientist.

I was surprised to see that it came out in 1998, even though the lectures that the book is based on were given in April of 1963. It took 35 years for the lectures to be more widely distributed. Maybe he did not want the lectures to be published at all. It seems like the audio or video of the lectures were found, and the text of his lectures were transcribed into this book. There are many cases where the book reads directly from his audio statements; it was not from his notes. He says “and so on” an awful lot. This is his thought filler like the word ummm for many people. On page 109-110, he said “It’s hard for me to explain how exciting that is, and how interesting. And, I’ve used up more time than I ought.” He continues on till page 117-118 when he says “I also appreciate that I’m talking too long, so I will mention them only. But it’s out of proportion. I wanted to spend more time.” Those phrases would not have been written in his notes.

I also found that the book did not really address the meaning of it all. The first two lectures of the three were better, and I found the last lecture to be long and rambling from one topic to another. On page 61 out of 122 pages (half of the book), he did state that the first two lectures were more organized, and that the last of the three lectures was more off the cuff. Specifically, he said that “I developed them slowly and carefully, completely, in two.” and “So, since I already contracted to give three lectures, the only thing I can do is to give this potpourri of uncomfortable feelings without having them very well organized.” Yes, indeed he did.

He was also of a time when the vast majority of scientists were men, so most of the book reads in a misogynistic way. He just assumed that a scientist is going to be a man.

I agree with several other reviewers that sections one and two are the most coherent, so if you come up on this book, just delve into the first half of the book. I agree with Timothy Ferris when he said section three had a “somewhat ‘ragged’ speech that followed.” It is also “badly dated and atrociously edited” and the book “does not honor his memory.”