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Did You Like My Ebook? Don't Lie!

Lying. By Sam Harris. Kindle. $2.99

Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz

I won’t lie:  I didn’t much like Sam Harris’ ebook Lying, and had I paid money for it rather than received it as a free download, I might have felt cheated.  While I’ve enjoyed some of his earlier work, this book felt flimsy and overly simplistic.

Harris offered the free download when Jonah Lehrer’s deceptions were just beginning to be seen as part of a larger pattern:  many of my colleagues felt that this was a cheap shot and an obnoxious type of self-promotion, but I wasn’t offended and thought it might offer insight into Lehrer’s deceit.

I was wrong:  what we have here is a book that tries to make the case that lying is virtually always wrong, with little more nuance than a “Just Say No” campaign.  The few scraps of science that are included— for example, a studies showing that one tenth of the information shared by husbands and wives involves deceit, and a full 38% of conversations among college students include at least one lie— are fascinating.

But they go nowhere. Given the high level of deception found, it seems clear that lying is common human behavior and often serves some useful purpose, a discussion of which could have been informative.  Instead, we get lectures on why we should always share difficult truths. We’re even given the classic example of learning of an affair of which one partner is unaware, with nary a thought to the possibility that the couple could have an open marriage or a mutually agreed “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Moreover, Harris actually wants us to tell people that they do “look fat in that,” in order to spur better wardrobe choices and/or weight loss and to avoid “robbing” our friends or partners of a chance to change for the better. (No mention is made of the possibility that such truth telling can be a form of hostility).

There’s no discussion of the developmental significance of lying in a child’s understanding of the minds of others, no look at the evolutionary aspects of deception, no exploration of why social lies are so common— nothing here but moralizing with little subtlety, let alone material that could guide understanding of the sad situation that undid a promising journalist.  Honest!

 

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and the author of five books, most recently Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered, with Bruce Perry, M.D. Ph.D.

The Beautiful Planet Meets The Immortal Cassini

Cassini HD. Thinx Media. Published Saturday 9/15. iPad. Free on 9/15, then $1.99.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Mars Curiosity, with its sky crane and all, is certainly impressive. But I'm a Cassini fan myself. It left Earth in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. It has winged around the ringed planet ever since, hurtling by Saturn's many, many moons along the way. Every year it has delivered images back to Earth that are not simply gorgeous but deeply informative about the outer zone of our Solar System. Its success and its stamina have gotten its mission extended twice. It will keep snapping pictures of Saturn and its moons until 2017, when it crashes into the planet.

I've tried to keep up with the flow of images at the Cassini web site, but after eight years of daily footage, there is just too much to handle. To appreciate everything it has found, we need curation.

One form of curation can be found at sites like Bad Astronomy, where Phil Plait regularly posts Cassini images that he finds particularly worthy. Thinx Media now provides curation of a different sort, by loading some 840 images into an app they call Cassini HD.

The images are organized into categories--starting with the planet itself, followed by images of its moons, and then its rings, and finally by false-color pictures. You can plow through the photos one at a time, swipe after swipe, or jump to two navigation systems: either a drop-down menu, or a gallery linked to a diagram of Saturn and its moons.

I preferred jumping around the Saturnian system. At the moment, my favorite moon of Saturn is Daphnis, a five-mile-wide rock that draws a thin path of ice and dust out of the planet's rings. If you like what you see, you can use Cassini HD's nicely integrated functions to email or tweet a photo, save it to the iPad's photo app, or send it to Tumblr or Facebook.

There are two big shortcomings of Cassini HD. For one thing, it's not particularly HD. You can't zoom in on details of the photos on the app. For a closer look at Titan or Enceladus, you will need to look at NASA's biggest versions of their images on their web site.

The other shortcoming is the text--the reason that I'm reviewing this app at Download the Universe. Each section of Cassini HD kicks off with a paragraph, or a few. Each photo comes with a one sentence caption, which you can expand into a longer version. But, as far as I can tell, all the text comes verbatim from NASA's web sites. I won't call this plagiarism, but I will call it disappointing. Every caption comes with an identical paragraph about the Cassini mission. One caption I came across informs you what Cassini will be doing in 2005--because it was written by someone at NASA in 2004. The captions point you to other pictures for further information, but they include the original links, so that you end up on NASA's web site instead of jumping to other images in the app. There's useful information to be gathered the text, but you will get little pleasure along the way. In this respect, Cassini HD is a far cry from The Solar System, which featured original text by the science writer Marcus Chown.

On balance, however, Cassini HD is a good value. The Solar System will set you back $13.99. Cassini HD will cost you just $1.99--and it's free tomorrow, when the app goes live. I like to know that even if I'm out of Wi-Fi range, I can always take a trip through Saturn's rings. The text may not sing, but the pictures are still transporting.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

Death and Other Options: How To Think (Hopefully!) About Global Health

What’s Killing Us:  A Practica Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems by Alanna Shaikh. TED Books 2012, Kindle, iBookstore, Nook

Reviewed by Tom Levenson

The last decade of the seventeenth century was a great age for London’s media junkies. Paper had become cheap enough to permit the emergence of the first  real newspapers in the English-speaking world.  The censors saw their reign end in 1696, the year after Parliament declined to renew the Licensing Act. With that, printers no longer had to fear harsh penalties for operating an unapproved press.  Free lance journalism was emerging as a plausible way to make a sort of a living – even if one of its most prominent practitioners, Daniel Dafoe, did do his stint in debtor’s prison.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that a torrent of what we may call new media poured forth. If you had something to say and even quite modest means, you could say it – and plenty did. Readers could lay their hands on learned disputes on the question of singing in church; coiners advising the government on the best methods to prevent counterfeiting; at least one poem by a law student on the subject of long vacations.

All of these appeared in the form that truly came into its own in the 17^th century. That would be the pamphlet: a modest tract, easier to write, cheaper to print, swifter to plow through than any scholar’s tome…

…All of which is to say that there is nothing new under the sun.

Flash forward roughly three hundred years, and lay your digital mitts on the subject of this review, Alanna Shaikh’s What’s Killing Us.  It is an e-bite of an argument, less than forty pages to cover Shaikh’s top-ten list of global health problems.  It is a pamphlet by any other name, and hence an example of one of my favorite everything-old-is-new-again gifts of the digital revolution. 

One note before getting to the meat of Shaik’s work. Sharp-eyed readers will see that I’ve left unmentioned one property of What’s Killing Us.  It’s a TED book, and TEDity has come in for its lumps here. This one doesn’t, or shouldn’t, in part because it does not attempt to reduce the difficult reality of global health to a trademarked Big Idea.  Instead, it is an example of what TED promises but does not always deliver – a guide to thinking about a the complexity of an issue that enables – really demands that -- the reader join in figuring out what the hell to do.

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.

Interplanetary Cuisine

Space Nutrition, by Scott M. Smith, Janis Davis-Street, Lisa Neasbitt & Sara R. Zwart. Published by NASA Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. iPad (iBooks 2 and iOS5 required), free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

A couple of months ago, I attended a trade show for the processed food industry. There, wandering among booths hawking hydrolyzed vegetable protein, phosphate, and guar gum, I learned that despite its implication in the obesity epidemic, the processed food industry views itself as a direct descendant of Louis Pasteur and his pasteurization process—a provider of safe food for millions. This was profoundly unsettling, and I was relieved when I happened across a pair of NASA food scientists standing before a poster. In space, how food is preserved and packaged isn’t a matter of merchandizing. It is still, as in the days of Pasteur, a matter of survival.

This thesis and the science you need to know to understand it are presented in Space Nutrition, a free ebook put together by members of NASA’s Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. Though it makes extremely limited use of multimedia (warning: it only functions in the landscape orientation), Space Nutrition is a passable introduction to the special difficulties of getting a balanced diet in space, where bone loss is a given, nutrients are absorbed differently than on Earth, and everything must have a long shelf life. Perhaps more importantly, it's a window into the enthusiasms and curiosity of the scientists who wrote it.

The book, which is pitched at children grades 5-8, grew out of a long-running space nutrition newsletter [pdf], and this heritage may be responsible for its poor organization. There are sections, for example, called “Space Food” and “Space Flight Research” in the chapter called Nutrition, but the chapter called Space Flight Nutrition has only one section, entitled “Being Healthy is not Just About Nutrition (even though we like to think it is!)” (caps theirs). Frustratingly, the details of how space flight affects the human body and the nutrients in food are never enumerated in one place. This hampers its usefulness as a primer.

But for me, and I suspect for any kids reading it, the book's primary charm is in the photographs and asides that you can’t find in a Wikipedia article on the subject. One photogallery is full of snapshots taken by excited Nutritional Biochemistry Lab members as they drive to Kennedy Space Center to pick up astronaut blood samples from the ISS, which they use to determine the effects of space flight on nutrient absorption, bones, and muscles. The shots of the Experiment Payload truck that retrieves the samples and of the little blue NASA duffel bags they are carried home in give the process of space research a refreshing physicality.

And spaceflight seen from a food scientist's point of view is endearingly kooky. Crumbs are a big no-no for space foods—they fly around and clog the instruments. Tortillas that last almost a year, on the other hand, are a very exciting development, the authors write, because you would need three hands to make a traditional sandwich with two slices of bread and a slice of baloney in space. The book's history of manned spaceflight missions reads like no other you'll find. Gemini: Shrimp cocktail, chicken and vegetables, pudding, applesauce. Apollo: bread slices, cheddar cheese spread, frankfurters, fruit juice. Skylab: steak, vanilla ice cream.

These colorful details, at least for me, don't quite make up for the organizational problems. But the book is free, and if you or your kid are interested in space flight or astronaut food, it's certainly worth downloading.

The book also raises the hope, however faint, that perhaps someday we will seek to turn the considerable power of food science not towards making potato chips fly off the shelves, or devising yet more uses for soy protein, but towards getting humans on other planets.

Veronique Greenwood is a 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.

The New Republic gets Download-The-Universe-ish!

Here at Download the Universe, we're pleased to see a venerable publication like the New Republic give some attention to science ebooks--in the August 23 print edition, no less. In "The Naked and the TED," Evgeny Morozov takes a look at three ebooks published by TED. His harsh verdict is a lot like our reviews of a couple TED titles (me on The Demise of Guys, David Dobbs on Smile). He even refers to my review in the piece--although he doesn't actually mention Download the Universe, a shout-out that would have been most appreciated. 

Morozov's main object of scorn is a TED ebook called Hybrid Reality. I can see why. It's one of those utopian manifestos promising solutions to all our woes--political, social, medical, and so on--through advances in technology. Attacking a book like Hybrid Reality is not a big jump for Morozov--he writes frequently about the hidden threats to democracy posed by the Internet.

Morozov's writing has one main mode--the snarky attack. It works just fine when he's going after smiley-faced privacy-assassins like Facebook. But Hybrid Reality doesn't just invoke the Internet to promise us a better tomorrow. It also pledges that the Human Genome Project, neuroscience, and other branches of science will provide cures for what ails us. And since Morozov loathes the authors of Hybrid Reality, he stands ready to belittle whatever they like. If they like the Human Genome Project, for example, then it must be bogus. "The Human Genome Project," Morozov declares, "for all the hype it generated a decade ago, has not accomplished much."

What ruler is Morozov using to measure the project's accomplishments? He doesn't tell us, so we'll have to guess. If he relied solely on breathless news articles in the late 1990s and thought we'd have a cure for every disease known to man in under ten years, then I can see why he's disappointed. 

But if Morozov had done the right thing and had looked at the actual scientific impacts of the Human Genome Project, he'd see that scientists have indeed accomplished much. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, scientists have discovered a previously unknown lineage of extinct humans in Siberia. As I wrote last month in the New York Times, scientists are gaining a new appreciation of the role that microbes play in our bodies--an appreciation only possible because scientists sequencing the human genome figured out how to assemble complete genomes from broken pieces. By sequencing the entire genomes of patients, scientists can pinpoint the mutations responsible for genetic diseases. That's just the start of a very long list. (And let's not forget the $141 in economic benefit for every $1 of government investment in the Human Genome Project.) 

Morozov's dismissal of results like these is just as glib as the techno-utopianism that he attacks. 

Because Morozov is perpetually on the attack, I have no idea if he really thinks that the Human Genome Project is yet another bogus technological fix. Does he think that genome research can't possibly solve any problems? More broadly, I wonder what Morozov thinks is the proper place of technology and science in society. If I've missed this in Morozov's writings, I'd be happy for someone to point it out to me.

Like the Human Genome Project, ebooks are guilty by association--or at least ones published by TED: 

When they launched their publishing venture, the TED organizers dismissed any concern that their books’ slim size would be dumbing us down. “Actually, we suspect people reading TED Books will be trading up rather than down. They’ll be reading a short, compelling book instead of browsing a magazine or doing crossword puzzles. Our goal is to make ideas accessible in a way that matches modern attention spans.” But surely “modern attention spans” must be resisted, not celebrated. Brevity may be the soul of wit, or of lingerie, but it is not the soul of analysis. The TED ideal of thought is the ideal of the “takeaway”—the shrinkage of thought for people too busy to think. I don’t know if the crossword puzzles are rewiring our brains—I hope TED knows its neuroscience, with all the neuroscientists on its stage—but anyone who is seriously considering reading Hybrid Reality or Smile should also entertain the option of playing Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja.

This is fun to read, but it raises questions that it can't answer. Are ebooks by their nature corrupting? Or does Morozov only object to ebooks that are produced by one organization that he doesn't like? Here at Download the Universe, we don't flinch from calling garbage what it is. But we also find ebooks that delight us. Is such a thing even possible in Morozov's moral universe? I know for a fact that Morozov reads Download the Universe, and so let me end with four words: Our comment thread awaits.

--Carl Zimmer

 

 

The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze

The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Scientific American $3.99   Kindle, iBook, Nook,  Sony Reader

Guest review by Jaime Green

I love the Olympics, although I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the special-occasion feel, or the every-two-years anticipation--a longer wait than for next Christmas. (I do remember when both summer and winter games were held in the same year, though not well enough to recall whether the four-year wait heightened the thrill or if the crush of excitement was too much, gymnastics and archery only six months from figure luge and ski jump.)

The exotic sports at the Olympics also add to its thrill. Sure, people will snark about the two weeks a year we care about synchronized diving --“Where were you during world championships last year!?”--but for those two weeks we do care! We cram our brains with obscure knowledge. Every four winters we learn about triple axels and the salchow--how the heck to spell salchow--and then we let it all go dormant for the next four years, until we can debate the finer points of fencing again.

It's this thrill of the unusual, and of learning its finer points, that I was looking for in Scientific American's ebook, The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. And coming into it looking for that angle, I was disappointed that the book stayed so true to the first part of its title: the science of sports. That's what this ebook is full of. What it is not full of, and what I missed, was the science of the Olympics.

This first ebook from the editors of Scientific American reads much more like a collection of articles than a single work, and as such it is a perfectly serviceable survey on the science of sports. Pieces are divided into eight sections: The Psychology of Winning, Pushing Human Limits, Drugs and Doping, Concussions, Comeback from Injury, Gear that Gives an Edge, Fitness: Expert Advice for You, and Closing Ceremonies. The pieces, written especially for this ebook by individual Scientific American editors and contributors, explore the physiology, biochemistry, and neurobiology of sports. They also examine recent incidents, such as doping scandals, that bring science and sports together in less savory ways.

Although the lack of unity was sometimes frustrating on a straight-through read--back-to-back articles sometimes retread each other's ground, re-explaining a concept or re-defining a blood protein--it still makes for a nice collection to pick your way through. There's no need to read in order, so you can follow your interests, from the mental acuity of an elite athlete to the most common Olympic injuries and then over to how playing sports can boost children's brain power. You'll learn something cool whichever path you take. And there's a lot to learn. Even if you didn't need this ebook to teach you that the ACL isn't the Achilles tendon but is actually in the knee, there is satisfyingly deep discussion of topics ranging from psychology to blood doping to the physics of prosthetic legs.

The questions tackled in this ebook go beyond the science of sports, too, in several cases engaging with the ethical questions that scientific advances raise. Do steroids make better athletes, or do they make cheaters? How many restrictions should be put on young athletes to protect their brains from concussions? Where does an athlete find the balance between improved performance and dangerously low body fat? These questions make interesting food for thought, and perhaps also foundations for important decisions. The ramifications extend far beyond the Olympic arenas.

Yet I still wished this ebook spent more time within those Olympic arenas. Many pieces focus surprisingly squarely on the topic of the ebook's subtitle: winning. It's as if the ebook's authors decided that Olympic equals elite, and then just wrote about how elite athletes win. But I don't care if Michael Phelps gets the gold. I care that he is stunning to watch. (In the pool, I mean.) And I want to know the science behind his performance--of something that feels specifically, uniquely Olympic. Articles that focused on baseball and American football felt similarly dissatisfying. They're sports, yes, but hardly what we think of as Olympic sports. (In fact, now that baseball's been dropped from the games, neither is an Olympic sport.) For readers drawn to this ebook for the Olympics and not for the sports, this may be a disappointment.

Also potentially disappointing--or virulently frustrating, depending on your level of investment--are some gaps in the scientific and athletic arguments. Jesse Bering's piece, “Why We Love Sports: Success of the Fittest,” proposes that sports compel us as fans and spectators because they serve as a demonstration of reproductive prowess. (Think of football as the peacock tail-feathers of our species.) This argument itself is a stretch. Sports audiences are so dramatically weighted toward men who are not looking to the field for mates. Bering doesn't even give the plausible counterarguments lip service. What about the primal need for play? Tribal affiliations and the strengthening power of us vs. them? The evolution and ritualization of hunting and combat practice? Heck, maybe even mirror neurons, who knows?

In a piece called “Does Exercise Really Make You Stronger?” Coco Ballantyne asserts that “the longer, harder and more often you exercise, the greater the health benefits.” She fails to offer the important caveat against overtraining, which plagues professional and devoted amateur athletes alike, with increased risk of injuries and often dramatic negative effects from overstressing the body. An article on preventing shin splints was similarly narrow-sighted, failing to mention the calf-strengthening exercises that have saved the shins of every new runner I know. 

The highlights of the book examined the subjects that I, and most readers, have no experience with. The articles on top-level cyclists and swimmers, on Olympic runner Oscar Pistorious' prosthetic legs, drew me in much more and carried that charge of the slightly esoteric that make me love the Olympics. Even an article on advanced swim gear brought a little frisson of elite, advanced technology. And “Who Wins the 40-Yard Dash: Squirrel, Elephant, Pig, Human?” armed me for some fun small-talk to fill the breaks between track and field events over the next two weeks.

For the most part, though, the science here is decidedly pedestrian. Readers who want to learn about the geometry of a rhythmic gymnast's twirling ribbon or how a pentathlete slows her heart rate before she shoots will have to wait. Maybe there will be something for us in another four years.

 

Jaime Green is a graduate student in Columbia's MFA writing program. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Spezzatino, The Hairpin, and Parabasis. She is writing a book about the possibility of life in the universe.

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.

An overstuffed colon and a perfectly sized Kindle Single

An Unexpected Twist, by Andy Borowitz. Kindle Single, $0.99 (free borrowing with Amazon Prime).

Reviewed by Seth Mnookin

Last week, The New Yorker found itself in the news as the result of a newly acquired blog. I know what you’re thinking -- “Enough already with Jonah Lehrer!” -- but this had nothing to do with journalistic ethics or onanism or anything else that might get the folks at Poynter all hot and bothered; this had to do with a blog that is proudly, deliberately “composed entirely of lies,” a blog whose author assured his readers that he will strive to be “as inaccurate as always, and if I ever write something that turns out to be true you have my deepest apology and my promise that it won’t happen again.”

I’m talking, of course, about The Borowitz Report, which Andy Borowitz started 11 years ago as an outlet for his daily, 250-word send-ups of the news. (This morning’s entry: "N.R.A. Proposes Sweeping Ban on Movies.") In that time, Borowitz has become one of the most lauded satirists in the country -- think of him as a literary Jon Stewart. His name graces the cover of one of the most successful Library of American volumes ever (The 50 Funniest American Writers* (*According to Andy Borowitz)). He was voted by Time magazine readers as having the #1 Twitter feed in the world. He even hosted the National Book Awards -- twice.

He also got married (in early 2008) and had a daughter (in late 2009). It’s what happened in between those two events that supplies the content for An Unexpected Twist, which Amazon recently named the best Kindle Single of the first half of the year. Borowitz's essay begins with him bloated, severely constipated, and turning down his wife’s suggestion of a midday quickie, which, he acknowledges, “should be a sign that something is terribly wrong.”

eBooks and the democratization of crackpottery

Self-publishing to avoid peer review is now available to just about everyone.  Indivisible Earth nicely demonstrates a lot of what can go wrong.

 

Indivisible Earth: Consequences of Earth's Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant, by J. Marvin Herndon, edited by Lynn Margulis. Published by Thinker Media. Available for Kindle for $3.99.

Reviewed by John Timmer.

 Peer review is an inherently conservative process.  New ideas are compared to what we think we already know and, if they don't match up well, then the ideas' proponents can be in for a very rough time. Those on the fringes of science, who may struggle for years to get a single paper published by a journal, will often paint peer review as a stifling process that does little more than enforce a mindless orthodoxy. 

If you wanted to do an end-run on peer review and put your ideas out for public consideration, your options used to be pretty limited: pay a lot of money to self-publish a book that no one would buy. 

Digital media has changed that. Web pages are cheap, and can make psedoscience seem very polished. (Just look at the Electric Universe site, where a bunch of "comparative mythologists" will try to convince you that gravity has little to do with the large-scale structure of the cosmos.). And, as Amazon (and later Apple) opened the door to self-published eBooks, anyone with an idea that isn't getting respect via peer review could now place it before the a large potential audience.

J. Marvin Herndon has done just that.  Herndon is a physicist by training who, after spending time in the private sector, has turned his attention to planetary science. He has some ideas that, to put it mildly, are pretty fanciful. But, thanks to eBooks, he's now able to let those ideas float free of the burden of peer review. Indivisible Earth is one of several of the books Herndon has on offer, and its subtitle lays out why the scientific peerage might not greet it kindly: "Consequences of Earth's Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant."

The number of established scientific ideas Herndon would like to overthrow is staggering. Current models of planet formation (both rocky and gas giant)? Completely incompatible with Indivisible Earth. The formation of our Moon via collision? Presumably never happened (the Moon is never mentioned in the book).  The composition of the Earth? We've got it all wrong.  Plate tectonics?  A big mistake. The mantle convection that drives the plates and volcanic hot spots like Hawaii? Doesn't exist. The plate motion that creates earthquakes? There is no plate motion, silly.

Oh, yes, and most of the Earth's uranium has sunk to the core, where it's acting as a massive reactor, powering the planet's magnetic field. Herndon doesn't think small.

The writing itself is fine, in that it's easy to follow these ideas. It's just that the scientific reasoning has gaps you could drive an aircraft carrier through. I'll give just a few examples.

At some point in the past, Herndon realized that certain measurements of the Earth's properties matched up well with those of a class of meteorites called enstatite chondrites. Therefore, he concludes, Earth must have formed by the aggregation of these materials. To back this up, he shows a graph of the properties of enstatite chondrites vs. ordinary chondrites. 

But the graph itself makes one thing very obvious: ordinary chondrites, as their name implies, are much, much more common than enstatites. Suggesting the Earth somehow selectively aggregated from rare meteorites would, I would think, seem to demand some mechanism by which that selectivity took place. Herndon, apparently, considers mechanisms optional.

That's just warming up — he's still got all of plate tectonics to get rid of. 

Current models of gas giant formation indicate that these giant planets require a rocky core with a mass about 20 times that of Earth's before they can start a runaway accumulation of gas. Rather significantly, the Kepler planet-hunting telescope has recently found empirical evidence that these models are correct: gas giants only seem to form when there's a lot of rocky material around. Herndon thinks the early Earth must have been part of a gas giant and, to get there, he's forced to rely on a model that was state-of-the-art  in 1944. Everything we've learned since is simply ignored.

Once the Earth was at the center of a gas giant, Herndon thinks the intense pressure of the massive atmosphere compressed the gas giant's rocky core so that it shrunk to the point where its surface was completely covered by what we now call continental plates. In other words, the entire surface of our present planet was once much smaller, and all land mass.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of this, figuring out the radius of a sphere that would have the same surface area as our current land mass. It was only half the planet's present size. Using that radius to calculate the sphere's volume, it's possible to figure out the density (assuming a roughly current mass).  That produced a figure six times higher than the Earth's current density — and about three times that of pure lead. I realize that a lot of the material in the Earth can be compressed under pressure, but I'm pretty skeptical that it can compress that much. And, more importantly, if Herndon wants to convince anyone that it did, this density difference is probably the sort of thing he should be addressing. He's not bothered; the idea that the continents once covered the surface of the Earth was put forward in 1933, and that's good enough for him.

To get rid of the gas, Herndon posits that our Sun went through what's called a T Tauri phase, where the process of gravitational collapse drives a strong stellar wind that could blast off the gas giant's atmosphere. But that phase often takes place before planet formation (half the T Tauri stars we know about still have protoplanetary disks). Did our own Sun go through this phase after planet formation was complete? Who knows — Herndon certainly doesn't feel compelled to provide any evidence.

With the gas gone and its pressure relieved, the Earth could expand, with the continents separating out as it did.  This, for Herndon, creates the illusion of continental drift.  The mid-ocean rifts? They're just cracks left over from this expansion. The subduction zones deep in the ocean? Same thing. The former subduction zones that have ended up being driven to the surface by tectonic action?  Well, those would be hard to place within Herndon's model, so they never get mentioned.

There are so many issues like that that it's not even clear that Indivisible Earth belongs at Download the Universe —we're focused on science eBooks, and this clearly isn't part of the scientific process that most of us recognize. At the same time, crackpots and fringe ideas have been a part of the social activity we call science for so long that I suspect they predate the use of the term. In that way, the book could provide a valuable example: This is what crackpottery looks like, and shows why peer review is important.

It's also an interesting footnote in the history of fringe ideas. For reasons that aren't at all clear (given that she was ostensibly a biologist), the book was edited by the late Lynn Margulis. Margulis is rightly famous for taking a fringe idea — eukaryotic cells contain compartments that were once free-living cells — and, with the backing of data she and others generated, making it a central part of modern biology.

Armed with the prestige that she rightly earned, however, Margulis spent much of the rest of her career poking her thumbs in the eyes of the establishment that had given her a hard time, pushing forward fringe ideas even when they were obviously incompatible with data we already had. She suggested that HIV might not be infectious and pushed through a paper that suggested insects have an evolutionary history that's is impossible to square with what we know of their genomes. Her willingness to advance the clearly off-target ideas in Indivisible Earth is a classic example of Margulis in action, and provides an interesting case study in that sense.

She wasn't alone in helping Herndon, though, as the book is credited to a publisher, Thinker Media, Inc.  As near as I can tell, Thinker has a nice Facebook page, but hasn't bothered to actually set up a company website yet (see update below). The company claims to provide various services to authors for a cut of the profits, rather than for a payment from the author, as is the case with traditional vanity presses. 

If its business model has been updated for the digital age, the services the company provides haven't. On some levels, Indivisible Earth fails as an ebook. It's got a number of color diagrams and images, all of which have extensive captions.  But its primary platform appears to be the Amazon Kindle, which means it really should be readable on a black-and-white e-ink screen. The diagrams are not, and their captions are displayed in a light grey that's nearly impossible to make out on the screens.  I ended up having to download it onto my phone to complete the review.

Indivisible Earth is thus a bad ebook with bad scientific content. But for someone wanting a glimpse into what goes on at the far fringes of the scientific endeavor, it might be worth the low cost of entry.

UPDATE: Someone who works with Thinker Media informed me that they recently changed their domain name, and that the company's new site is up and running. 

John Timmer spent 15 years doing scientific research before deciding he'd rather write about it. He's now the science editor of the technology news site  Ars Technica. He received a Kindle on the day Amazon first introduced them, and has been following eBook and eReader technology ever since.