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Get Out Your Monocle! Exploring the Past in the Public Domain

Switzerland, by Sir Frank Fox. 

Originally published by Adam and Charles Black in 1914. Published by Project Gutenberg for Kindle and in other file types. Free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

If you limit yourself to reading just the ebooks available for free on the internet, as I have been doing lately, you wind up inhabiting the world prior to 1923. American copyright laws are complicated, but books published before that magical year, 90 years prior to this one, are in the public domain. It's about as close to time travel as you can reasonably get.

To really immerse yourself in the era, you can read the travelogues of Sir Frank Fox, a kind of early-twentieth century Bill Bryson. An Australian journalist who spent much of his life reporting for newspapers in London, he wrote books about the natural history, geography, and ethnography of various lands, and there are five of them—on Australia, Bulgaria, England, the Balkan Peninsula, and Switzerland—available at Project Gutenberg for free. For this review, I read Switzerland, published in 1914.

As a rule, one of the risks of inhabiting this pre-1923 world is drowning in a sea of unnecessary words. Today the fashion is to write with extreme clarity, projecting each scene into the reader's mind as if he or she were watching a movie, and to snip out all excess verbiage. Not a hundred years ago—reading Fox is a bit like codebreaking, with sentences that sometimes encompass eleven or twelve clauses and words that aren't used much anymore, like “waggish” and “beneficient.” His very first chapter includes a hilariously lengthy Socratic dialogue rebutting the idea that mountain people are more virtuous and vigorous than lowlanders, owing to some magical quality of the mountain air—not the introduction that a modern writer would use, but curiously charming nevertheless, once you adjust your ear to his style.

It's worth noting, too, that this pre-1923 world as represented by its literature is a pretty Anglocentric one. Fox's readers were British subjects, or former British subjects, so perhaps it's no surprise that he is eager to caricature “the Swiss race” and make his own sweeping generalizations about why they are the way they are, while simultaneously tearing down other sentimental depictions. And the chapter on Swiss prehistory is threaded with regular assertions that human society is on an ever-upward trend, with pathetic (yet noble) nomads at the bottom and the 1914 European at the crest.

But it's an interesting experience, revisiting the literary fashions and the inherited wisdom of a time not so long ago. To the modern reader interested in geography and ethnography, and not afraid to put on a monocle and go along for the ride, Switzerland is fun reading. The prehistory chapter includes a great summary of what was known about the villages-on-stilts that fringed many Swiss lakes in Celtic times. The chapter on local writers includes an anecdote about the time Byron, visiting the fashionable salons along Lake Geneva, attempted to scandalize polite society as he had in Britain, and failed. Apparently the Swiss found him tedious. And the chapter on the Alps, along with a compact treatise on the formation and decay of mountains, includes this note:

“M. Charles Rabot [a geographer and mountaineer] asserts that the glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century throughout Spitzenbergen, Iceland, Cetnral Asia, and Alaska. He suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation of the earth's temperature. Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss glaciers, as well as other great ice masses existing on the globe, are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the Alpinist.”

That passage falls with quite a different meaning on our ears today, and one of the great pleasures of reading Fox is looking for these harmonies and dissonances, the moments that reveal how much has stayed the same and how much has changed. If that sounds like fun to you, then there's a cache of free ebooks waiting for you on Fox's Gutenberg author page.

Happy time-traveling.

 

 

Veronique Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

 

Word Rising: In Long-Form Journalism, How Long Is Too Long?

Uprising, by Phil McKenna. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Review by Virginia Hughes

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama made several nods to climate change. To reduce America’s dependence on oil — and the carbon emissions that come from burning it — he pushed for a bigger investment in clean sources of energy, like wind, solar and natural gas. “The natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence,” Obama said. “We need to encourage that.”

Thanks to advances in a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, natural gas production in the U.S. grew by 8 percent in 2011, the sixth consecutive year of growth, leading the International Energy Agency to call this “a golden age of gas.” When burned, natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal does. The Obama administration and some prominent scientists — including Obama’s pick for new energy secretary — say natural gas could be used as a “bridge fuel,” curbing our coal consumption until greener alternatives are ready for primetime.

But what if natural gas isn’t so clean?

That’s the question artfully raised in Uprising, the fourth installment from Matter, an online platform for long-form science journalism. Uprising, like Matter’s earlier stories, presents an engaging narrative with juicy characters doing surprising science at a length of around 6,000 words. Unlike the other Matter stories, though, I’m not sure this one needed more than the 3,000 words of a typical magazine feature.

In Uprising, journalist Phil McKenna tells the story of two unlikely collaborators — Bob Ackley, a big-car-loving libertarian with decades of experience as a gas company technician, and Nathan Phillips, a liberal tree-hugging professor — and their wacky adventures cruising the streets of Boston to map natural gas leaks.

When methane, the primary ingredient of natural gas, leaks into the atmosphere (rather than being burned) it’s a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But nobody knows exactly how much gas is leaking. That’s where Ackley and Phillips come in.

Uprising tells why Ackley and Phillips started to work together, and what they’ve discovered so far: In a paper published last month in Environmental Pollution, they reported finding 3,356 leaks in Boston, including six where gas levels were high enough to cause an explosion. Their study included a city map tracking the leaks, which Matter recreated as a striking black-and-white grid with swashes of red and yellow to indicate the leaks. (And although the study is behind a pay wall, Matter made it somewhat open-access by linking to a Google Doc of the study’s full data set.)

The problem, for me, is that it’s unclear how (or whether) this single study contributes to the greater international debate about natural gas and climate that McKenna did such a great job setting up. The study focused on the number of leaks, rather than their volume, so it can’t say anything definitive about whether natural gas really is worse for the climate than coal.

It’s not that these investigations don’t matter: We learn that Ackley and others are finding similarly frightening numbers of leaks in other cities, such as Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and that some of this data is driving a major lawsuit against a utility company. It’s entirely plausible that these leaks will put a crimp on the natural gas boom. But the story doesn’t say much about how the wider energy community has reacted to this data. It didn’t include any skeptical voices, or any comments from scientists or policy makers who still believe in natural gas as a bridge fuel.

I was expecting the story to answer the initial question posed: What if natural gas isn’t so clean? And when I didn’t get that answer, I was disappointed, in a way that I might not have been had the story been shorter. The view, for me, wasn’t quite worth the climb.

 

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, and Slate, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

Deep Water: A Pretty Good TED Ebook (Really!) About Climate Change

Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise, by Daniel Grossman. TED 2012. TED App for iPhone/iPad, Kindle, Nook. Book web site

[Editor's note: John Dupuis, the author of this review, is the Acting Associate University Librarian at York University in Toronto. He's joined me and other Download the Universe editors on several panels about science ebooks, and he's tempered our optimism with thoughtful skepticism about how ebooks can add to civilization's body of knowledge. (What happens when no one makes Kindles anymore?) Recently, Dupuis wrote about a new ebook from TED on his own blog, Confessions of A Science Librarian. I asked him if he could write an expanded version for Download the Universe.--Carl Zimmer]

Guest review by John Dupuis

I feel a little weird reviewing this book. It's a TED book, you see. What's a TED book, you ask? I'll let TED tell you:

Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article--a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime. TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words--long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.

They're like TED talks, in other words, but they provide longer, more in-depth treatment than is possible in a short talk. On the surface, that's a really great idea. In practice, it can be a bit problematic--just like TED talks.

Carl Zimmer and Evgeny Morozov have gone into fairly extensive detail about the dark side of TED talks and TED books. Basically, the format encourages a kind of hip superficiality and fame-mongering. Ideas want to be famous, to paraphrase the famous saying that information wants to be free. In fact, ideas should be deep and well thought-out. And, you know, even perhaps a little on the valid side, too.

Which brings me to this particular TED book: Daniel Grossman's Deep Water. Here's how TED describes it:

As global warming continues, the massive ice caps at Earth’s poles are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Water once safely anchored in glacial ice is surging into the sea. The flow could become a deluge, and millions of people living near coastlines are in danger. Inundation could impact every nation on earth. But scientists don’t yet know how fast this polar ice will melt, or how high our seas could rise. In an effort to find out, a team of renowned and quirky geologists takes a 4,000-mile road trip across Western Australia. They collect fossils and rocks from ancient shorelines and accumulate new evidence that ancient sea levels were frighteningly high during epochs when average global temperatures were barely higher than today. In Deep Water veteran environmental journalist, radio producer and documentary filmmaker Daniel Grossman explores the new and fascinating science — and scientists — of sea-level rise. His investigation turns up both startling and worrisome evidence that humans are upsetting a delicate natural equilibrium. If knocked off balance, it could hastily melt the planet’s ice and send sea levels soaring.

Going to Extremes: An Ebook About the Climate Forest and the Weather Trees

Going to Extremes, by James Lawrence Powell. iTunes (requires iBooks 2), $0.99

Guest review by Dan Fagin

Bad weather always looks worse through a window, said Tom Lehrer, the songwriter cum mathematician. From my desk at home on Long Island, I can see the backyard grass – okay, crabgrass – slowly yellowing. The thermometer under the yew tree reads 96 degrees Fahrenheit; we haven’t had a respectable rain for weeks. At least my brother in Colorado Springs is back home: He had to evacuate when the Waldo Canyon wildfire advanced to within two blocks of his house. Through my other window on the world – my computer screen – I read that Floridians are still dealing with flood damage from a freakishly early tropical storm, Debby, which struck in June. That’s a mere inconvenience, though, compared to the deadly weather-related chaos in Russia and Brazil.

This is the new normal: weird, hot, and often dangerous weather. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration says that the first six months of 2012 were by far the hottest on record, and that most of the South and West is in severe drought. Scientists, campaigners, and scientist-campaigners have been saying for years that Americans will soon find it impossible to overlook the effects of the 150-year buildup of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere; now, perhaps, that fateful moment has come. Certainly there is some evidence that the extreme weather events of 2011 and 2012 have moved the needle of U.S. public opinion at least slightly toward accepting the reality of human-induced climate change, even if the electorate remains starkly polarized on basic questions climatologists resolved years ago.

There is some irony that extreme weather is having a political impact, because it’s not at all easy to credibly explain the relationship between singular weather events and humanity’s ongoing reckless experiment in atmospheric chemistry. The problem is that what we call “the weather” – atmospheric conditions at a specific place and time – is the product of the extremely chaotic process driven by differences in air and water density which are, in turn, driven by uneven solar heating. (The simplest example: sunlight striking the tropics more directly than the higher latitudes.) Weather on Earth is never perfectly stable because solar energy is never distributed perfectly evenly across the planet’s surface. Climate – the long-term averaging of weather measurements – is unstable, too, but climatic changes are much harder for humans to perceive because of the longer time scale. But even so, if the billions of tons of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases we expel into the atmosphere every year are having an effect – and we now know that they are – then climate, not weather, is where the signal will always be clearest. We may feel this signal in day-to-day weather, but we can most reliably measure it in longer-term changes in climate.

A Time Machine for the Face of Earth

Fragile Earth. Published by HarperCollins. iTunes, $3.95.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Infinity can be cruel. Tablet computers have become so powerful that it's practically impossible to reach the limits of what you can do while creating an ebook. You can embed videos, sprinkle music and voices here and there, let people post a book-inspired thought to Twitter, manipulate a simulated bat, incorporate an encyclopedia of information about chemistry, and on and on. Unfortunately, this virtual infinity of possibilities may leave ebook creators with a virtual infinity of work. Some science ebooks we've reviewed rise to that challenge. They sport a well-integrated collection of features. Other ebooks seem like wild acts of desperation. And others still are acts of wise self-restraint. Yes, you could make a science ebook that does many things poorly. Or you could make a science ebook that does one thing well. One such ebook is Fragile Earth.

Fragile Earth got its start in 2006 as a beautifully disturbing coffee table book published by Collins, filled with satellite images showing how humanity is reworking the planet. "Before" and "after" photographed were paired to show how deforestation, climate change, and other factors have changed the face of Earth. Now Collins has turned it into an app. The Youtube video below gives you a good run-through of its features. The most important one is that instead of putting images side by side, the app does what a book cannot: it lays them on top of each other. You can then use a screen button to slide one picture away to reveal the other one underneath. I'm not quite sure of the visual neuroscience behind this effect, but it works very well. Seeing the same landscape in Alaska covered by glaciers a few decades ago now turned to mostly bare Earth is a sobering experience.

Fragile Earth is not perfect, though. The book and the app alike are presented as a way to see how we're changing the planet. But the app is loaded with other images that show natural changes, such as the devastation caused by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Combining these images together makes no thematic sense; the only thing that joins them together is an elegant slider. There's no introduction where you might find an explanation for what a volcano and the deforested Amazon have in common. Instead, Fragile Earth has short caption that describe the specifics of each set of images but leave you wanting more.

That's too bad, because Fragile Earth illustrates on a profoundly important fact about our species. In 2005, Bruce Wilkinson, a University of Michigan geologist, published a paper called, "Humans as geologic agents: A deep-time perspective." [free pdf] "Humans are now an order of magnitude more important at moving sediment than the sum of all other natural processes operating on the surface of the planet," Wilkinson concluded. We're also having other huge effects on the planet--acidifying the oceans faster than at any time in the last 300 million years, for example. Humanity isn't just leaving a mark on the Earth you can see from space. It's a mark that will be preserved in the fossil record for millions of years to come.

Before and after pictures can go a long way to showing the magnitude of that change. But without context, they can also oversimplify it. If you were to select a before and after pair of pictures of glaciers in the Himalayas, for example, you would not see a frightening retreat over the past decade. In fact, you might not see any change at all. Such specific cases are ripe for cherry-picking by global warming denialists. The reason that this one case does not refute global warming because of the overwhelming evidence of changes caused by global warming on a planetary scale--such as the overall loss of ice from the entire Arctic Ocean.

Fragile Earth would thus be a better app if its pictures had more context and a more coherent point. But I'm also glad that its creators didn't try to grasp for infinity.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

Blowing Windmills and Seeing the Future: Al Gore's Our Choice

Our Choice by Al Gore. iPhone or iPad 

Reviewed by Dan Fagin (guest reviewer)

If you’ve heard Al Gore give a speech, watched An Inconvenient Truth or read anything the former vice president has written, you probably know that two of his obsessions are the innovative use of information technology and the visual image of a spinning Earth, as seen from space. So it’s no surprise that both are central to his first true e-book: Our Choice. Created for the iPad and released in the spring of 2011, it’s anything but a cut-and-paste digital version of the 2009 print volume, as Gore’s previous digital efforts have been. This time, the text has been tricked out with all sorts of digital-only features. There are dozens of unfolding photographs, tightly edited videos and startlingly clever interactive graphics. There’s even a page where you can blow into your iPad’s microphone to spin the blades of an on-screen windmill. Really.

The introductory image sets the tone. It is, predictably, a striking view of our planet, spinning serenely, seen from space. Touch it, Gore’s voice instructs, and when I comply the Earth spins quickly in the opposite direction for a few seconds before stopping and resuming its normal rotation. But now the surface has changed. Huge typhoons loom menacingly near Japan, India and Mexico, and a whopper hurricane is bearing down on Florida. Most of Africa (not just the Sahara) is parched brown; so are Italy, Spain and portions of the American Midwest. The familiar solid white of the Greenland ice sheet now includes patches of exposed land. (You can get a rough idea of how it looks, without the movement, by running your mouse over the planet here.)

All the Beautiful Bioreactors

Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities (TED) by Rachel Armstrong. iPad, Kindle, Barnes & Noble.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

In the opening section of her long essay, Living Architecture (based on a TED talk), materials designer Rachel Armstrong lays out the problem facing all urban residents in a crisp, moving description of Sendai in the wake of the 2011 earthquake. Buildings in the coastal region of Japan had buckled and crumbled, and its streets pulsed with contaminated water. First responders tried to rescue a dog, but found that it wouldn't leave until they followed it to an area where they discovered another dog, barely breathing. Both animals were taken to safety and given medical attention. What this sad scene underscored was that in the face of disaster, all forms of life try to help each other survive. 

Encapsulated in that tale of two dogs is also the problem and, possibly, a solution to troubles in modern cities. As Armstrong explains, metropolitan areas will be home to nearly two thirds of the Earth's population in the next half century, but they are breakable, dangerous, and depend on unsustainable forms of energy. Still, those cities are filled with life that can make it through disasters that shatter buildings. Armstrong, whose research touches on synthetic biology, asks whether it might not be better to build cities that are as resilient (and compassionate) as the lives inside of them.