#Underland - Robert Macfarlane - Review

 

    A kind of travel book, "Underland" presents the world beneath our feet.  It explores the archaeological facts of rare places on Earth and covers caves, ammonites, sinkholes, gorges, and.... the tragedies associated with them. The author presents caving history around the Oxford philosophy student Neil Moss as the most notorious one. It is about the Peak Cavern near Derbyshire, 1000 feet from the entrance he was stuck and died out and the place was converted into a tomb of Dark matter with molten cement being poured and sealed. 

     There is a slight deviation from 'under' to 'above' as the author discusses dark matter and gravitational lensing, which slightly evokes interest in reading. The 5% of the Universe's mass is made of matter we can touch and the rest of it we have to feel- is the most mysterious thing about our existence. The search for Dark matter has produced a network of working sites and labs that are dedicated to research.  It seems to resemble what we call religion rather than what we call science. Thus, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists. Mutualism is the fascination between organisms. Plants and fungi find a lot of descriptions in the book

     The second chamber (chapter) has what we have been reading under 'kahaf' where seven sleepers of Ephesus - the people of kahaf- fleeing religious persecution in the city of Ephesus go into 300 years of sleep and wake up in a different era - though here it is described by a painting.

     Arctic landscape and Anatolian Plateau to Paris and Mediterranean find description followed by quarries below the Paris town and many surrounding areas. The author likes the sound of sleep exhausted by nerves and travel. It is here that there is a reference to manholes. Opening manhole covers the sewer workers, particularly in India,  should be happy on seeing flies and cockroaches, which means toxic gases haven’t gathered in there.

 As there is no continuity to the narration, here are some excerpts from the chapters:

     The history of the river in Italy with the Northern cape of south Africa where scuba divers have died is described in an agonizing colour. There is a mention of the decayed body of Dreyeres's head, the Abyss of Caros, the Slovenian highlands of Austria Hungary Italy, and limestone rocks.

     That 1000 years of snow going on to become glaciers coated with millions of trees on iced and frozen canopies is intriguing.

     Lofoten of Norway and its description is attractive throughout the chapter and carries on to the Ardeche Gorges Andoya of Norway where Nuclear waste is buried is mentioned. The drill for oil at Lofoten and Vesteralen is portrayed as industrial pollution and the author says: "What we excrete comes back to us". Karakorum fighting of India with its neighbour and the slaughtered human bodies is described as gruesome.

     Mining licenses given in Greenland Narsaq, Worlds largest Uranium deposit was amazing to learn. Neils Bohr visited here in 1957 as China-Australia joint company took to mining.

     Ice has memory and remembers details for millions of years, now with plastics, crates, kayaks, and melamine cups there is more capping to this withered cream of the Earth. Compressed ice in Antarctica acts like a blanket trapping geothermal heat and when bedrock ice absorbs some heat they melt slowly.

     There are nearly 500 or so freshwater lakes beneath Antarctica's ice and the Polar bears can smell food sources 20 miles away. There is more penning of Greenland than any other underland on this Earth; this is interesting as it has a reservoir of undiscovered life and aura.

     The meltwater of Knud Rasmmussen glacier is presented with Northern lights background - Olkiluoto in Finland has another Uranium reserve and the author says it was created in a Supernova explosion 6.6 billion years ago. This is really thrilling that cold places can have radioactive deposits. Going with Uranium the author describes its rods that can remain hot even after decades of cooling in a Pool!

     Katabasis - But for every Theseus who enters the labyrinthine darkness of the Underland to triumph against the Minotaur there are many more Eurydice who never returns. Such fears, Robert Macfarlane points out, are embedded deep in our language where “height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down.”

     Nevertheless, his journeys deep into the earth “far from the human realm”, is melancholic and claustrophobic, and are occasionally correctly frightening. Macfarlane remains obsessed with the fear and fascination generated in the human heart by extreme landscapes, and he clearly savors the adrenaline rush.

     Underland is, as its title suggests, “a book about burial and unburial and deep time”, “the awful darkness inside the world”, “of descents made in search of knowledge”, to study the places where “we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save”.

     Coupled with history, geography, and some science, this book is, also, for those who would like to go on adventures. I had a slight feeling that should a movie be made with appropriate music it would be worth watching like "127 hours" - where A R Rahman's music added to the icing on the cream of the incident.

 

#The_Interstellar_Age: Inside the Forty Year Voyager Mission - by Jim Bell - Review

This is an awe-inspiring account of how the twin Voyager space probes, launched by NASA in 1977, have traveled farthest into the Cosmos than any other human-made machine. Now about 23.5 and 19.5 billion kilometers from home, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 became the first and second spacecraft to exit the solar system in 2012 and 2018 respectively. (Watch live status here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/)

Planetary scientist Bell, who worked on the mission from the time he was an undergraduate, chronicles the two probes' journeys, their revelations about our solar system, and the many people who have dedicated their careers to the mission, including an account about orbital dynamics engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot maneuvers around planets that enabled the Voyagers to travel so far. A theoretical aspect includes the timing of the launch when the 16-year planetary alignment was just right for the rendezvous with the giant planet. 

The book mentions with ache the sleepless times spent over several missions, including its immediate predecessor the Mariners along with Magellan, Pioneer, Galileo, Cassini, and of course, the Hubble space telescope. The Engineers behind all these missions, the author pretends, needed to be paranoids!

The JPL's commands were interesting to read:

Fly to a certain place

Turn on the camera

Point it in that direction

Take 12 photos

Turn off the camera

Turn on the magnetic sensor

Collect those measurements

Transmit 

Restart camera

For every mission, this probably was the mantra for success, and the code.

It is here that I came across Carl Sagan's suggestions to include “golden records” loaded with pictures and sounds—from whale songs to Bach to Chuck Berry—to represent our planet to any extraterrestrial beings that might encounter. The lines "Jaat Kahan ho" by Surshri Kesar Bai was included among 27 other songs. Here is the list of other included things that have flown out of Earth:

"Hello to everyone, we are happy here and you there"

Diagrams of DNA - recipe of life on Earth

Maths definitions

Physics unit definitions

Solar system, parameters, and solar spectrum

Egypt and its river Nile - Red sea

Anatomy of man, the fertilized ovum, Fetus, and other 116 items

And we still now know that no one has acknowledged the encounter of these!

The middle part of the book carries interesting aspects of astronomy including how they were looked upon by astronomers in the 1970s because at that time most of the measurements were based on optical telescopes only. There is an account of atmospheres of Saturn and Titan, Tethys and Mimas, Enceladus and Rhea, Io and Dion, and this really instilled a chill interstellar aspects into my inception of what really interstellar is. Jupiter could accommodate more than 300 Earths and has saved the Earth from several meteor hits by swallowing them into its atmosphere (due to huge gravity). One single rotation of Jupiter is about 10 hours despite its size and its magnetic field is great and is about 5 times larger than the moon. 

Here are some other highlights:

# The Uranus hemisphere is dark for 42 Earth years and then this reverses between North and South. 

# Gofer is the word the author has used to describe persons who go for this and go for that and there were a lot of  them at the JPL 

# Building images is a stricter part esoterically 

# A KB object, Eris is about 1500 miles wide with a moon called Dysnomia

# No particle from any galaxy can pierce the bubble of the suns heliosphere 

# Robotic planetary mission cost related with the dog toys for a year by Americans

# Heliopause - edge of the heliosphere

# Discovery of Earth-like planets is by tiny wobbles in stars' motion caused by the gravitational tug of planets orbiting around but with a lot of time!

# The risk of any tiny particle hitting the spacecraft has been described as equivalent to stopping a tractor at 50 mph using a housefly (Voyager's speed is 36000mph)

The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries moving on still and at about 22 and 18 light hours away from Earth, respectively!

The book has an end chapter "The End?". The author probably means that there is no end in sight to the interstellar (discovery) era as Juno, another spacecraft is presently now inside Jupiter and Voyagers are still moving! Overall, reading this book could give us a feeling of connectivity to Universal Consciousness.

#The_Joy_of_Science - Jim Al-Khalili - Review

     

    This is perhaps the first book in my career that I could finish in a single go over a trip to Hyderabad, which implies that Jim Al-Khalili's lucid writing did not allow me to stop anywhere. Though the book has no new information it just glides over the facts on how to master knowledge related to science - or shall I say epistemology?

The title “The Joy of Science” is somewhat a misnomer because it harps only over the previous knowledge of the science of any person without which this would just be a prologue to some advice on writing about Science. The book consists of 8 short chapters that essentially amount to a brief textbook on critical thinking. Many probably won't need these instructions, but for more seasoned readers, there’s not a whole lot of new material, particularly for those already familiar with the works of Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Michio Kaku or Richard Feynman. Here I am presenting the gist of the chapters.

1. Something is either true or it isn't: This part is very general in which the author talks about the opinions which are more valid than evidence. In science, we use different models to describe nature, and thus it is important that we gather data and be true to it. Data Dredging - also known as p-hacking- has been the order of the day where data is misused deliberately in order to find something that can be presented as statistically significant. This part, I felt, recommends us to go for modeling of science and use intelligence to arrive at certain conclusions. What do you feel when someone says Humans have walked on Moon?  If the answer is nay, then you belong to that huge group of conspiracy theorists who with half-baked knowledge are ruling the internet.

2. It's more complicated than that: Again the concept of believing in science is discussed with a few examples where people do not accept the facts of science. The theory of evolution implies that life evolves randomly and without purpose but this goes against the religious beliefs of a few. The idea that simple explanations are more likely to be correct than complicated ones is known as Ockham's razor. Likewise, the Theory of Relativity finds mention with a reference to the cosmological constant that was removed and later included in the theory. 

3. Mysteries are to be embraced, but also to be solved: There are three types of mysteries, the author says - i) Those that can be explained but cannot be predicted, like Earthquake, Pandemics, etc. ii) Those that are yet to be explained but that exist physically, like the purpose of Stonehenge, nature of dark matter and dark energy and iii) those that cannot be explained rationally like ghosts, fairies, worldly apparitions, and aliens. The purpose of this book, I understood here, was to convey the entire aspects of the Pandemic that shook the entire humanity, on a scientific basis.

4. If you don't understand something....: Well the title itself is so long and it tells us that nothing is beyond our understanding. Anyone with a deep knowledge of the subject, whether a plumber or a musician, will gain knowledge through dedication, time, and effort. It is here that I got to know about the 'Imposter Syndrome' - the feeling that we are not up to a task entrusted to us or that others' expectations of our ability are higher than our own - that I had this one in my earlier part of the academic career. A kind of soft-skill objective can be felt reading this chapter, particularly for the teachers and the students alike.

5. Don't value opinion over evidence: This chapter proved to be the crux of the entire write-up. Because of the huge amount of misinformation through the meta-media and the tendency to glue to the "breaking news" media, we often give out our opinions without proper evidence or logic. We have failed to discriminate between what is important and what deserves our attention. Science requires a certain level of commitment to understanding. The authors go on to make us evaluate ourselves over one of the old paradoxes in physics - that if you can travel faster than light and if you hold a mirror, would you be able to see your image? Yes!

6. Recognize your own biases...: Again a longer title for this chapter that deals with a piece of advice for the incompetent. If you are incompetent you can't know you are incompetent!  The skills you need to produce the right answer are exactly the skill you need to recognize what the right answer is. This has a name too - The Dunning Kruger Effect. Solipsism is a view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

7. Don't be afraid to change your mind: Nowadays, it is impossible to distinguish between fake and real images, videos, or audio, and likewise what is fake and what is real is beyond cognition. One needs to develop strategies to deal with this. Artificial Intelligence comes to the rescue!; for example, the author compares climate change denial to receiving an unfavorable diagnosis from a doctor. It goes like this: Upon receiving the diagnosis, you decide to get a second, third, fourth, and fifth opinion from the best doctors in the world, who all confirm the original diagnosis, presenting to you all the evidence in its favor, including x-rays, lab tests, etc. You then receive a sixth, more favorable diagnosis from a less reputable doctor and conclude, based exclusively on that one assessment, that you’re perfectly healthy after all.

8.  Stand up for reality: It is widely acknowledged that things are likely to get worse before they get better - a scientific method that the author advises us to follow. We trust in science because it works and because we recognize where we would be without it. 

     Conclusively, the author provides some good information and uses some compelling and thought-provoking analogies to drive home his points - particularly how to enjoy science and the joys associated with it.

#Algorithms_to_Live_ by - Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths - Review

# Beginning a book has always been a tougher one and if good, finishing it off is that much easier.   This one starts with a few flashes of things around our lives, exemplary classified into technical and     logical terms. I was captivated by much of this book wherever the author used past events to tune into the future with more coherence, citing several laws unknown to me. Although this book is subtitled   'the computer science of human decisions, it's really about the    intelligence of human decision-making (which is often supported by computers) - I suspect the 'computer science' label is to make it more attractive than boring old  mathematics.   The  book  tends to skip   over the    mathematical    workings,   concentrating on the outcomes   and   how   they're   relevant   to   the kind of   decisions  we  make  in  everyday  life -  and it is that application side that makes it particularly interesting.

Here are some chapter-wise (book) markings:

# The ‘Secretary Problem’ deals with when should you stop interviewing a secretary candidate because the last one to be interviewed is just based on time and not on talent. It might seem there can be no sensible advice, but mathematically it's very clear. You wait until you've got through 37% (an empirical rule) of the choices, then pick the next one that's better than any you've seen before. It's not that this will necessarily deliver your best of all possible worlds. But it will give you a better result than any other mechanism for deciding when to go for a particular option.  The authors point out that there are approximations to get around this, which include that the approach can also apply to the amount of time available for the process. There are several such corollaries in our lives nowadays, particularly the feeling that if we could have waited a few more days we would have got a better mobile.

Gold digging is more likely to succeed than a quest for love.  The author stresses the need to evaluate the choices. Some problems are better avoided than solved.

Quote: Stopping early and starting late are two ways to fail.

# Explore / Exploit: Gathering information (by all means) is all about the second chapter. You are more likely to explore new restaurants when you are moving into a city than when you leave. There is this mention of clinical trials which have often been the subject of some movies and the author points here to the 40 years of trial on human syphilis that was halted as it was notoriously anti-health and is a grim reminder of the uncertain ventures which humans always do.

Who would you like to spend time with – family or friends. Older people preferred family and young ones not, but they later changed their opinion after some ordeals. So, experience counts.

Quote: To try and fail is at least to learn: to fail to try is to suffer

# Cache: The concept of caching can revolutionize your filing system. The Akamai is into the caching business and has been a pioneer in the system as it handles about half of the entire internet traffic in the third world. The problem is not storage but organizing. This section is reveling to read. There is a reference to how IBM evolved.

Quote:  Forgetting is as important a function as remembering – the mind has an infinite capacity for memories but only a finite amount of time to search for!

 # Scheduling: This section deals with interesting aspects of timing or prioritizing and mentions the “Gatt chart” that was used to build the Hoover dam and has assisted IKEA, Amazon, and SpaceX in scientific management. The author suggests that the earliest due date is optimal for reducing maximum lateness. An interesting incident of priority reversing caught my attention. The incident is related to Perseverance – the spacecraft to Mars that was programmed to take and send pictures from 309 million miles. The high priority of the robot was to move the data in and out of the information bus. But due to scheduling, the robot was neglecting as the system resources were prioritised over that. The multimillion-dollar project would have failed if the engineers from the Earth did not re-program it to re-schedule and change priorities (read IRQ).

When you switch tasks you pay a price. Humans have this tendency and the author comes up with the mention of a few rules such as Bayes’s Rule (communicates a sensible strategy for gauging your expectations and then revising them as new information comes in), Laplace Law, and Copernicus principle. The Laplace law was interesting to me as it gave a simple formula to win; (w+1)/ (n+2) – where w is the winning ticket and n is the number of attempts. While talking about these things I had a slight notion that the author was talking about order and disorder of things and in thermodynamics we have the third law to govern these things (read entropy). Things that tend towards some kind of natural value and things that do not, are the two types of things.

Then this Multiplication rule made an interesting entry – the total wait people expect is one and a third time as long as they have waited for. Marshmallow test over children who wait suggested that slow learners or those who wait had better future or rather mature future.

Occam’s razor principle, nevertheless old, has a new foray “all things being equal the simplest possible hypothesis is probably the correct one’’.

Quote: Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. Do the difficult things when they are easy and do the great things while they are small.

#Relaxation: It teaches us to simplify problems to gain traction on them, to not let the perfect solution be the enemy of the good enough, and when to disobey the law. There is Lagrangian relaxation, where the main idea is to relax the problem by removing the “bad” constraints and putting them into the objective function, assigned with weights.

Randomness encourages us to lean into the role of uncertainty and to latch onto small improvements and happy accidents. This section also deals with the ‘Monte-Carlo’ method and its origin. Stan Ulam, who also helped develop the atomic bomb suggested this method based on the famous card play pop-ups in Monaco. That sampling can succeed where analyses may fail is the heart-line of this concept. Replacing exhaustive probabilities and calculating with sample simulations have been very successful and we use these methods in Quantum Mechanics still.

Quote: The perfect is the enemy of the good.

# Networking is a fun dive into the world of communication, and the algorithms that govern our interactions online. From Packet-Switching to Circuit-Switching the section deals with the advent of networking, and wireless as well. There is a mention of the paper by Gordon and Prabhakaran on the ecological study that relates an algorithm on networking to be about a million years old. Obviously, humans have been on the logic route for long!

Peters’ principle that we often hear made a sensible end to this chapter: Eventually every spot in an organization will come to be filled by someone doing that job badly. I enjoyed a loud laugh in my mind because is it not this thing that is happening everywhere now!

Quote: Now is better than never - Zen

# Game theory is about the mind games we play when trying to anticipate the thoughts and actions of others, and how those mental models play out from poker to work schedules. I know, you know that I know, I know that you know that I know, the three levels reminded me of six types of personalities clashing when two persons talk. Dominant strategies avoid recursion altogether. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds: the pessimist fears this is true. The Game theory offers a suitable answer – Happiness is the lock.

 Christian and Griffiths conclude with a pitch for "computational kindness" where we can use our knowledge of algorithms to reduce the amount of mental work we have to do. We can design a society with optimal laws and incentives that make the right thing the easiest thing. At the end of this session of the book, I just felt I have sharpened my approach to what logic is and I feel that this book lives true to its title. A lot of work and plenty of biblical references make this book worth keeping, reading, analysing, and diving into all sorts of logic. 

#Limitless - Tim Peake - Review

If you have read Scott Kelly's  "Endurance", prior to this "Limitless", then I bet you would be left to compare which one fared better in terms of achievement and narration around an astronaut's life. Scott overcame several hurdles including his own health and spent more than a year in space, while Tim mentions more of hard work and luck. 

    Tim definitely went through his challenges, had his doubts, and fought for what he wanted. The repeating narration of several sorties and the description of those places and flights simply might look like you are reading a diary of flight personnel. The book made me go slow on reading these and at one stage I stopped reading completely because it appeared more of military or army missions than any challenge related to space or science. He mentions a lot of traveling, going on endless courses, and playing many pranks, which usually would not evince interest in readers of science. It appeared like an account of a military man showing his durability with missions and moving effortlessly towards every objective put forth by the army of his superiors. His experience with Parachutes on ice, (one at 125 mph and about 14000 ft)  and jumping along with synchronized maneuvers is a bit thrilling and his description of small sorties, particularly with Apache helicopters, take up enough space. Something to learn was the smell of the helicopters, which were always metallic, and the dead man's curve - a graph specific to each type of helicopter.

    That the military has the balance of seriousness literal life and death but also allows one to have a good group to back you up and reckon life with.  However, it is noteworthy that he spent 18 years in the military, constantly thriving and looking for opportunities to push himself before it occurred to him that he could apply for astronaut training.  

After 'fast reading' a few chapters, I found some interest in the last section of his book. The selection from among over two thousand applicants for the post of five astronauts and subsequent interviews at various geographical locations were the only challenges for him. Because ESA has its offices all over Europe, every other round was in some different location. Being an English, he writes, there was no big ordeal in attending those interviews. But he does describe the efforts he had to put in more so because at some point the UK was not interested in sending its citizen to space. At this point of time, he had to take up canvassing for space travel with various government and political officials and organisations. He had a tough time convincing these officials as to why space travel and research were important. Finally, after months of hard toiling, the participation of the UK in the ESA's mission was confirmed. 

    He spent five years in training, learning how to cope with G-force and zero-gravity living; the rudiments of the spacewalk; and how to live in isolation with his future crewmates, including the American Tim Kopra and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko - with whom his mission was planned. This followed several tests related to his body (health) and the interesting one, that frustrated him, was clipping the ear to get a blood sample for lactic acid analysis. Passing by, he writes about Scott Kelly and the NEMO missions too. He mentions a sharp analytical mind along with a well-known sense of humor as a key factor for his selection. 

    At some point, he mentions that he would have been there with Sarah Brightman which made him feel dejected because it was thought that her name might fetch some funds for the project - with a reference to a space tourist as he mentions Anousheh Ansari. The ESA mission he flew was named after Newton's seminal work 'Principia'.

    When you were being taught how to do a section attack you were deliberately overloaded with information so that something would be bound to go wrong. That sums up his endeavor with the selection and meeting the mission.

    Finally, the ordeals with the Russian rituals do come up in his writing where he mentions the compulsory possession of coins pressed by trains during the journey from the base camp to the launch pad. And the pissing over the left rear-tyre of the transport vehicle which brought 'good luck' to Yuri Gagarin just makes you wonder how much superstition still is a challenge with the scientists. His launch account is interesting and as soon as he reached space he praises the experience of life and narrates the ordeal he went through after tweeting about a wrong call he made to his sister from there. 

    Very enthusiastically he talks about the spacesuits and the space-walks, one of which was abandoned as a huge water bubble lurked suddenly in the helmet of another astronaut who was with him. He describes the Soyuz landing as somebody hitting you with the baseball bat after you are tied to a metal chair.  There were ups and downs on his return. He got vertigo in the shower after return (something to do with the water rushing past his ears) and readjusted to the constant wearying pull of the Earth. 

    During his stay, he writes, a staggering 33 million people were engaged with this mission and about 2 million children took up projects. That is a huge data! This is probably the first book that crossed the Pandemic of 2020 while writing. He mentions this dark onset very casually. 

A quote from his book: Be ready for life never to be same again - Frank De Winne