#Life 3.0: Being human in the age of AI - Max Tegmark - Review

    For the first time I came across a book where the author tries to coerce us to read the 'prelude', which, of course, I did and later found that it was only a cold-war-era type introduction to a clandestine group that forms the dark side of the internet- and that controls the artificial 'statistical' intelligence. This, the author asks while I was fast reading the second chapter. The Omega and Prometheus are probably the fictional entities that rule the internet and thus have scores of information and data that could be used constructively or otherwise.

Written in an accessible and engaging style- and at times tedious- the book is aimed at the general public and offers a political and philosophical map of the promises and perils of the AI revolution. Instead of pushing any one agenda or prediction, Tegmark seeks to cover as much ground as possible - as you would read here, reviewing a wide variety of scenarios concerning the impact of AI on the job market, warfare, and political systems.

However, Life 3.0 does a good job of clarifying basic terms and key debates (with enough references), and in dispelling common myths. While science fiction has caused many people to worry about evil robots, for instance, the author rightly emphasizes that the real problem is the unforeseen consequences of developing highly competent AI. Artificial intelligence need not be evil and need not be encased in a robotic frame in order to wreak havoc. In Tegmark’s words, “The real risk with artificial general intelligence isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”

            On the easier side, instead of diving deep into ethical issues and valid concerns around AI, he speculates on different scenarios in great detail. So much so that at times we would think that this is a purely fictional work.  He goes into endless speculations of how AI might go wrong in multiple ways and takes the obvious joy of making those as detailed and long.  And then he would suddenly talk about the existing computers and their accomplishments with the aid of Physics and Biology. 

    To give an example of how preposterous his scenarios are he claims the advanced AI will need a lot of energy that would be hard to fulfill (about half an mg of matter to empower the 13W brain) and also that once we are able to build mega architectural structures we could tap into the energy of a black hole to provide the necessary power to get along Life 3.0 (AI revolution). Of course, Life 1.0 is pure bacterial and animal evolution while Life 2.0 is cultural evolution as a result of human beings. The Pandemic was secretly targeted to ensure that nobody who knew anything about Science and Technology survived.

Here are some highlights in the order of the book:

Tiruchirappalli gets a mention as a place for fake suppliers of 'orders' based on AI by the ghost Omega.

That the DNA can store 1GB of energy and not beyond is a topic to ponder upon.

Intelligence is the ability to accomplish goals. John McCarthy coined the word Artificial Intelligence. Natural language translation using AI would be very easy in the future. There is a lot of detail into how memory works and the description of AND and NAND gates take an entire chapter.

    There is a description of the Ariane 5 rocket of the ESA which exploded 37 seconds after its launch due mainly to intelligence failure and was mainly a buggy software manipulating a number too large to fit into 16-bit allocation. The same kind of thing occurred with NASA's Mars climate orbiter - the difference in units caused a 445% error. Another of its Mariner spacecraft malfunctioned due to an incorrect punctuating mark and a Hyphen caused end of shutting down the mission to Phobos.

Robotic surgery accidents were linked to 144 death and 1391 injuries in the US during 2000-2013 and AI drones can kill accurately. Was that catching?

A chapter endorsing fears talks about AI generating fake realistic videos which could help the government and pose dangers of misuse by miscreants. An instance quoted was the failure of a guided missile system that killed 290 people in a Gulf war.  Just as chemists and biologists have no interest in chemical and biological weapons AI researchers also have no interest in building AI weapons.

Work keeps at bay three evils; Boredom, Vice, and need - Voltaire

An intelligence explosion is expected just like an explosion reaction that can occur due to chain reaction as depicted in Nuclear Science. Game Theory and Nash equilibrium find mention.

Freeman Dyson gets almost a chapter. His sphere the size of Earth's orbit would give us about 500 million times more surface area to live on!

The efficiency values given in Table 6.1 is nice and a few are mentioned below:

• 1.     Digesting a candy bar is 0.00000001%
• 2.     Burning Coal is 0.00000003%
• 3.     Burning gasoline is 0.00000005&
• 4.     Fission of Uranium is 0.08%
• 5.     Black hole evaporation is 90%

Galaxies, ET life, and Inorganic intelligence are cited in an elaborate manner in a chapter. Chandrasekar limit which says any mass 1.4 times greater than the sun would explode supports all the explosions observed by present-day telescopes using AI.  Big Crunch is also obvious. For the Big Crunch to occur a rubber band is equated that can burst with over expansion.

Goals: If we cede control to machines that don’t share our goals then we are like to get what we don’t want. Pursue goals instead of following rule of the thumb. That reality is relative and more so because visual experience can’t reside in the retina.

Brain rebels against its genes to become a monk or nun. To gain weight we carve to have more sweets. It is a kind of hacking. The ultimate goals of the system can be independent of intelligence and Consciousness is subjective experience. Water is wet but ice and steam are not - arrangement governs the emergent phenomenon

If it is falsifiable it is not scientific - karl Pepper

The last chapter about AI ethics and principles would make an interesting reading if only the reader is truly connected with AI and the photos pertaining to these meetings and conferences of all the scholars involved make a banging end.

 

#Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain - David Eagleman - Review

There is a perpetual myth about the brain that we do not use it fully to its capacity and that if we start using it to the fullest we might be able to move objects at our will. The ‘Network’ that it is, the brain is not hardwired, David Eagleman contends it is livewired. With his new theory of infotropism, he demonstrates why the fundamental principle of the brain is information maximization: in the same way plants grow toward the light, brains reconfigure to boost data from the outside world.

There is new insight into how the brain can ‘re-pair’ or adapt to new circumstances. This is very close to what we have been discarding lately – ‘evolution theory’. The author starts his narration with a case of a child who can function with one-half of his brain removed, how a blind man can hit a baseball via a sensor on his tongue, how new devices and body plans can enhance our natural capacities, and how paralyzed people will soon be able to dance in thought-controlled robotic suits.

Here are some highlights of the book in the order it goes.

#As we grow, we constantly rewire our brain's circuitry to take challenges, leverage opportunities and understand social structures. The brain consists of 86 billion neurons that shuttle information - 20 times more connections in a cubic centimeter of tissue than the entire Earth’s population. This amounts to adaptability.

“Unconscious actions are more rapid than conscious liberation”. The brain’s plasticity or neuroplasticity is discussed in a few case studies and the conclusion was that it would hold and keep the information forever if needed. When you compare this ‘memory’ with the electronics, you cannot slice out half of them from your smartphone and hope to make a call - Livewire endures!

“Brains are not born as blank, instead they arrive pre-equipped with expectation and the growth of the brain is based on the environment”. So, what we bequeath is more from our ancestors, and rather refined. Research on monkey nerve severed arm did not respond in the cortex but after some months this area was found to get excited when a part of the face was touched. The brain's map is thus flexible.

Phantom Limb, a subject of many a neurosurgeon, has found a mention but with meta-physics- “if an absent limb could give rise to conscious feeling then an absent body might as well”. So where do we go after we die?

An accomplishment of the rewiring is mentioned with an instance of Ronnie, born blind who used other senses to master music – violin - and won as many as six Grammy awards!

Competition for brain cells ‘real estate’, is that our visual system has to deal with darkness for almost 12 hours (from sunset to sunrise). To counter this the brain’s occipital cortex keeps itself active during the night and thus dreaming exists to keep the visual cortex from being taken over by neighbouring areas. And here we have so many interpretations for a dream that merely shuffles the memories! The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are less active during dream sleep than during walking state. Thus we cannot remember dreams, perfectly.

A hypothesis about cochlear and retinal implants read as the “Potato head hypothesis” where plugging into sensory organs the brain figures out how to use them! 

Another research by Nobel Laureate goes as “Vision substitution by Tactile Image projection” in nature - by Bachy-Rita – Here the brain is able to use information coming from the skin as if it were coming from the eyes! Different types of information are found lurking in different regions and the one for vision hearing has a case study. The skin is a mind-boggling sophisticated computational material!

“How to get a better body” deals with unusual growth and abnormal body but with additional talent. Here ‘thinking’ is considered remarkably similar to ‘motor movement’. The neural storm of activity that causes the brain area to light up is much like what you would think you should tell to a depressed friend!

Bauby, an editor of Elle magazine suffered a stroke and could only move his left eyelid. He was able to communicate with the aid of therapists and he thus relayed the agony of being unable to interact with the outside world. 

 All new ideas in the brain come from a mash-up of previously learned inputs and today we get more new inputs than before as children now live in an unparalleled richness.

The discussion about ‘illusion’ takes up some significant space. The brain considers walking as ‘real’ as walking over a treadmill just conveys the stationary fact by the vision. The IBM logo finds a mention due to its illusionary appearance. The Troxler effect is an illusion that demonstrates that an unchanging stimulus in your peripheral vision will soon evaporate so that the parts of the invisible would be obvious to us. Imagine cosmic rain that exists and is invisible. If it is stopped it might give you vision otherwise!

How drugs modify our system is another area of discussion. The drugs change the number of receptors in the brain - so much that the analysis of the dead brain can be used to determine the deceased’s addiction. Neural prediction is mentioned as “People you love become part of you - not just metaphorically but physically”.

The strategy of bacterial movement when searching for some food was interesting to read as how they group and have an objective for movement.

The cognitive area gets sharpened by learning a new language. The language is localized on the left hemisphere and if the left side of the brain comes under the stroke, the person may no longer be able to speak or understand words.

The brain figures out the body map from a simple rule!

The areas that send the most information with the largest representation!

Benefits of a good death:  An example is a sculpture carved out from marble. Creation emerges by taking stone away, not by adding anything. Similarly, neurons look for the right place. They put in feelers. If they’re getting a good response they keep it going. If they get cold shoulder they try luck nearby with other neurons (they get the message that they do not belong)! Thus training for anything new is very significant!

Cell death, apoptosis (suicide), and necrosis (inflammation) are briefly discussed as chemical leak out that can damage neighbourhood but is not a bad thing as it is considered as an engine for sculpting a neuron system!

Saving Brain Forest (re-wired brains, particularly) is compared to rain forest because the neurons are like members of a forest/network which are in constant competition to stay alive!

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference - Aristotle

Brains plasticity is a form of generic expression, for example, the skin pigment genes are variable because humans find themselves at different altitudes and need to change pigmentation to absorb vitamin D!

The enemy of memory is not time, it is other memories. Reading a new book does not overwrite your spouse's name in your memory nor does learning a new vocabulary word makes the rest of your vocabulary worse.

The brain passes what it has learned to another area for more permanent storage.

Memories beautify life, but only forgetting makes it bearable - Honore De Balzac

Different kinds of memory: With each new thing we learn, the better we are able to absorb the next relative fact. The last part of the book is more of a technical aspect including how the brain can be trained and memory or performance be enhanced. The amazing network and memory are discussed brightly and the book made an excellent read.

#The_Intelligence_Trap: Revolutionise your thinking and make wiser decisions – Review

     At a stage of life where we become experts in analysing errors others make, this book comes as a panacea for getting rid of the lingering thoughts on why people often stick to their thoughts stupidly or rather “Why do smart people act stupidly?”

     A fascinating and enjoyable investigation of what intelligence is and isn't, this book tells us about the details that can be sought to analyse why some people lack skills and fail to explain the mistakes they commit.  This thought-provoking and brilliantly researched guide to achieving true wisdom shows us how to be smarter - and how to protect ourselves from the cleverest fools.

     The author points out to certain events with ample examples and references to scientists, scholars, and thinkers on how to cultivate the required qualities to protect us from those errors. “We respect people who act quickly and to be slow is a synonym for stupidity”.

Intelligence is the ability to achieve success in life according to a personals life. And Cultural intelligence is a new term that can open us towards a new window – for instance, for studying abroad or enjoying holidays and maybe on Charity work. The author quotes a few good examples as a corollary to research which can go wrong if viewed by logic alone. “All insects need oxygen, mice need oxygen and, therefore mice are insects!”.  Scientific evidence for all carbon emissions from humans leading to global warming is another often misunderstood term.

Everyone commits mistakes that is not visible to them and even Einstein’s mistakes by behavior were glaring with his colleague Freeman Dyson who spent 8 years avoiding him on the campus! Likewise, Linus Pauling, the man behind the nature of ‘bonds’, falsely claimed that vitamin supplements could cure cancer!

Luc Montagnier’s case was very disgusting to read. He was one of the few scientists who helped discover the HIV virus. After his Nobel award, he was seen proclaiming the idea that highly diluted DNA can cause structural changes to water leading to the emission of electromagnetic radiation. So much he was advocating this that about 35 Nobel laureates signed a petition to strip him of the Nobel! Likewise, Thomas Edison, the discoverer of DC, claimed that AC was too dangerous since it led to death by Electrocution. Edison even dismissed Tesla’s ideas on AC transmissions. Steve Jobs also suffered from a dangerous skewed perception of the world.

In each case, the author permutes that greater intellect was always used for rationalisation and justification rather than logic and reason! 

            Below are some excerpts from the book with direct quotes:

Moral Algebra - dividing a piece of paper / writing advantages and disadvantages like pros and cons and then assigning numbers based on importance and then finding out the balance. Another simple strategy would be to consider the best/worst scenario for each situation offering some boundaries for our estimates.

Mindfulness meditation, which trains people to listen to their body’s sensations and then reflect on them in a non-judgmental way has found a mention along - the emotional compass.

The author maintains that taking up a practice like devoting 15 minutes a day to writing and reflecting on any subject may improve the deliberation process to rule out the most possible error in life. An example quoted was from a study in Bangalore, where a 23% increase in performance was noted after 11 days of rigorous practice.

About native language or importance of mother tongue: If you tell to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head and if you talk to him in his language it goes to his heart - Nelson Mandela

Many doctors make one error for every six patients they see and often these can be corrected before harm is done. Nearly 10% of the deaths in the US could be traced to diagnostic mistakes (that contribute to about 40-80,000 deaths per annum!).

Dunning Kruger effect (The skills you need to produce the right answer are exactly the skill you need to recognize what the right answer is!)  finds a mention in a distinct way though - Reduce over confidence by training or Increasing knowledge to understand the limitation. It also supplements the effect that losers have the delusion of grandeur.  Photos or rather images were supposed to increase participants’ acceptance of statements. It is not just what people think that matters but how they think.

About three Cognitive reflection examples in an arithmetic flavour have been mentioned that are interesting but may be skipped if one has tasted these tests earlier in some form or other. 

Writer Mike Shermer met a nutritionist who advised him to try multivitamin therapy - ingesting a month full of foul-smelling tablets and the result was one of the most expensive and colourful urine in America! I don’t know why this paragraph was mentioned but reading along, it made me laugh out louder.

Sceptical movement encourages the use of rational reasoning and critical thinking in public life. So, it goes about 9/11 that an insider’s job would point to the fact that jet fuel from planes could not have burned hot enough to melt the steel girders in the Twin towers whose melting point is 1500 ºC while the aviation fuel has an m.p of 852ºC.  The lesson is to beware of the use of anomalies to cast doubts.

On Richard Feynman: “He was never content with what he knew or what other people knew. He pursued knowledge without prejudice” -  James Gleick

Polish mathematician Mark Kac wrote in his autobiography.  An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with magicians . . . the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . .Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre.

General intelligence, curiosity, and conscientiousness are together Three Pillars of academic success – a Psychologist. Here’s how it can be. A man throwing plates and catching them is an ordinary event for all, but, Feynman put it into an equation and saw parallels with the electron’s orbit leading to the theory of QED. His best quote, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing anything than to have answers which might be wrong” is a factual provoker of thoughts.

A simple way to boost curiosity includes, being more autonomous while learning this can be writing out what you already know about the material to be studied and then settling upon the question you really want to answer.  I remember more when I feel like I am struggling that when things come easily (rote learning).

By splitting our studies into smaller chunks, we create periods in which we can forget what we have learnt, meaning that at the start of the next session, we need to work harder to remember.

Making of dream: Many Soccer times were losing games despite having top-ranking players. To find out if this was a common phenomenon, social psychologist Adam Galinsky first examined the performance of soccer teams in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.  Galinsky’s team found a ‘curvilinear’ relationship; a team benefited from having a few stars, but the balance seemed to tip at about 60 percent, after which the team’s performance suffered.  The Dutch football team offered a perfect case in point after disappointing results in the Euro 2012 championships and the coach, Louis van Gaal, reassembled the team – reducing the percentage of ‘top talent’ from 73 percent to 43 percent - and they won several matches post shuffling.

Underline each person’s expertise at each meeting and their reasons for appearing in the group.  Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, “Let others succeed must be the top role of a leader”.

#If you have ever worried that your work environment is dulling your mind the best way to protect yourself is to stop imitating mistakes (individual thinking errors).

#For many varied reasons employees simply aren’t encouraged to think. Some companies allow- accidentally or deliberately - functional stupidity within their offices

#German word FACHIDIOT is a one-track specialist who takes single-minded inflexible approach to a multi-faceted problem.

#Nokia's engineers were the best in the world and they were fully aware of the risk ahead and the CEO had said that he was paranoid about all the competition.

#Mindset was if you criticise what is being done, then you are not genuinely committed to it

Hydrocarbon leaks from NASA's disaster in both with Challenger and Columbia space shuttle is mentioned.  Columbia disaster Engineers knew this could happen when the insulating chunk broke off. The damage never occurred in the right places to cause a crash!

Concorde ran over sharp debris left on the runway causing a 4.5 kg chunk of tyre to fly into the underside of the aircraft’s wing - resulting shockwave ruptured fuel tank leading it to catch light during take-off. The plane crashed into a nearby hotel, killing 113 people. Subsequent analyses revealed 57 previous such instances, and in one case the damage was very nearly the same as for Flight 4590 – except, that the leaking fuel had failed to ignite.

     #People are far more likely to note and report near misses when safety is emphasised.  Hence you experience a near miss your risk tolerance will increase and you won’t be aware of it – the blind spot.  The intelligence trap often emerges from an inability to think beyond our expectations.

#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.