"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari

Publisher:[Toronto] : Signal, 2014.

Copyright Date:©2014

ISBN: 9780771038518 

9780771038501 

Characteristics: 443 pages :,illustrations, maps

This is an excellent book that is well worth the praise that it has garnered to date. It covers areas as diverse as politics, history, religion, economics, and much more in a well researched and very understandable format.

The author's writing style is very refreshing with the odd bit of humour thrown in to keep the reader interested. Even though the style is easy to read, the topics covered are quite complex, but this will hopefully not dissuade anybody from reading it.

I would recommend this book to anybody who is looking for a good overview of human history, and what we've managed to accomplish in the 100,000 years or so. It would also I believe make a good addition to a senior level courses in anthropology or sociology as it analyses their disciplines from a layperson's standpoint.

Definitely a book I'll be adding to my collection!

"Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race" by Daniel J. Fairbanks

Publisher:Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2015.
ISBN: 9781633880184
Characteristics: 191 pages : ,illustrations ;,23 cm

Having taken quite a number of anthropology and biology courses during my university training, I already knew that racism as a constructed concept that was based on the supposed superiority of certain groups of people. Dr. Fairbanks however was not writing his book for me, but was doing so for the rather large percentage of the population that hasn't already grasped this concept.

Dr. Fairbanks goes into great detail, but in a very readable way that explores the genetic, historical, and various other aspects of racism and hopefully puts them to bed for good. His discussion of topics such as: What is Race, African Origins, Ancestry versus Race, Skin Colour, Diversity and Health and Intelligence, and finally the Perception of Race covers this topic in a thorough manner that really should convince even the diehards, and leave everyone more enlightened.

Unfortunately, as is typically the case when dealing with humans there will always be certain factions (primarily religious, or other insular group) that will refute his explanations. There is likely nothing that intelligent individuals can do about these types of people except pity them in their ignorance, and help them as best we can in doing simple tasks like wiping their noses.

Yes, I know the above sounds very condescending - it was meant to be. I have no tolerance for racism, and even though I was exposed to it rather frequently as a child, I try to combat it as best I can in my daily life. Hopefully I'm succeeding.

"Feminism & Men" by Nikki van der Gaag

Publisher:London : Zed Books ; Halifax : Fernwood Publishing, 2014.
ISBN: 9781780329116
Characteristics: 246 pages :,illustrations ;,22 cm

This book was a very interesting read, that opened my eyes to a number of issues regarding feminism, ones that I hadn't considered in depth before. Ms. van der Gaag does extremely good job of outlining the various issues. A great deal of the book deals with why men act the way they do with regard to women, and the author gives excellent examples from all over the world to support her thesis.

I found it particularly disturbing to learn of the number of men in the world who believe that women are essentially just sex objects, second class citizens, or dare I say slaves. That this opinion seems to be directly relatable to the culture they are raised in, what is even more disturbing as nothing like this was ever mentioned to me when I studied different cultures during my anthropology degree. It all seems to be relatable to the macho image that men are indoctrinated into, and expected to exhibit throughout their lives.

Ms. van der Gaag notes a number of websites that give further information on this subject, and I would encourage people to check them out. Three of the main ones are:

http://menengage.org/

http://www.heforshe.org/en

http://www.whiteribbon.com

"The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman

Publisher:New York : St. Martin's Griffin, [2009]

Copyright Date:©1997

ISBN:9780312536633 

Characteristics:xviii, 264 pages ;,21 cm
The Forever War was a very well written book based on the authors experiences in Vietnam. It was written in 1974, and as the author explains in his introduction as long as you can get past the part where the beginning of the novel is set in the late 1990s then you're good to go.
The premise of the book is that a new recruit William Mandella is one of the first troopers to be dispatched to fight what turn out to be a clone warrior species named the Taurans. What I found to be one of more interesting aspects of this story is the fact that Mr. Haldeman actually did research on relativity and took this into account. The vast majority of Science Fiction stories don't do this and assume Einstein's theory is somehow gotten around. Not so in "The Forever War" as while Mandella's first deployment takes 2 years his time, 10 years have passed on Earth.
Other things on good ol' Earth are different as well, the population is growing at an alarming rate, and this has led many people to develop same-sex relationships in an attempt curb the population. Later on we find that this is encouraged by Earth's authorities, but that nobody bothered to tell the troopers who are still heterosexual. Needless to say this causes a number of problems for Mandella, and he therefore re-enlists spending more years in the service, in ever longer voyages which results in even more time dilation.
In many instances there isa great deal of humour in the story, though possibly not intentionally as at one point Mandella comes back to Earth to find that virtually the entire population in homosexual, and in a total reverse heterosexuality is now considered to be aberrant behaviour and he's labelled the "old queer".
A very good read - not sure why it took me so long to read it!

"Unmentionable The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners" by Therese Oneill

Publisher:New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

Edition:First edition.

Copyright Date:©2016

ISBN:9780316357913 

Characteristics:viii, 307 pages :,illustrations
Unmentionable is a fascinating look at what the Victorian Age. Ms. Oneill gives you the unvarnished truth behind what life back then was really like. The premise behind this book is that a modern woman takes a trip back in time, and lives in the 19th century, with Ms. Oneill as her guide. She does the whole thing with a humorous twist that keeps you reading, long after the light should have been out.
Many people believe they know what the 19th century was like from watching movies, and reading popular novels, and romances. However reality was much different, as the author reveals interesting items such as bathing habits (pretty much none), using arsenic as a facial cleanser, lead based cosmetics made from lead and lard (that isn't a typo), diets, courtship, what a woman should expect on her wedding night, birth control (or lack thereof in most cases), public behaviour, how to be a good wife, etc.
Now as a male, I was not the intended audience for this book, but I still found it absolutely fascinating. It is true my conceptions of the 19th century were totally skewed, but now I have seen the light. While I haven't written any historical fiction set in the the 19th century, I believe I would like to give it a try someday, but the amount of research needed to make it authentic would be mind blowing. Luckily, Ms. Oneill gives a detailed bibliography.
This book would be a fantastic resource for any writer of historical fiction, historical commentary, science-fiction (for those into time travel). In addition to this you can add students of history, anthropology, politics, gender studies, etc.

Science in the Movies (and television).

So far we have covered two very important parts of why it is very unlikely we have ever been visited by extraterrestrials, namely: first was the distance, and second why would they bother to come here. There have been literally thousands of television programs and feature films that fit the very broad description of "Science-Fiction" (over 5000 in fact according to IMDB) however, how many of them are scientifically accurate? Most are nowhere even close, and a great number do science such a disservice that they should really be classified as something like pseudo-science fiction. There is no way of classifying all the errors that some of these shows make, but the majority are things that any junior-high school student (and likely some elementary ones as well) know are not correct.

One of the biggest blunders that is continuously made is the sounds in space. Very elementary problem here - in order to have sound propagate you need air, and there is none in space so therefore there can't be any sound. The only movie I can think of off hand that got this right is 2001: A Space Odyssey. This same thing goes for explosions. "Bang" is a sound and therefore if there's no air there's no bang. This is taken to absurd lengths in virtually all films, and now-a-days when every space film seemingly has to have a battle sequence. Okay, I assume you get the point so I won't harp on it any longer.

Another problem that is very common in these films is that every alien is a bilaterally symmetrical biped, with stereoscopic vision (two eyes, both facing forward), two arms, etc. With the exception of the Star Wars series - which admittedly still lots of those good ol' bipeds there was at least a number of other aliens present (Jabba the Hut comes to mind). Now you'd think that with the huge budgets that Hollywood has for their films that they could do something a little original. Probably the biggest violator of this is the Star Trek franchise in which not only are they virtually all bipedal, but in some cases the difference between alien races is simply a few bumps on the forehead. In fact I can only recall one alien in the original series that looked alien and that was the Horta (an acidic rock dissolver, that looked like a large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese). Now admittedly I am not a Trekkie, and I haven't seen any of the newer episodes but with seventy some episodes in the original series and only one alien-looking alien the odds aren't too good that they've had any original thoughts since.

I don't want to harp on the silliness of Star Trek too much more, but they take things to absurd limits by not only making virtually all the aliens look the same, but also allowing them to interbreed. Come on people this is really basic biology. The prime example of this silliness is Mr. Spock. Why is it silly? For starters he is supposedly an alien, whose bodily chemistry is based on copper (not iron like ours), his parent's Amanda & Sarek - yes I had to look this up - mated (with a little genetic help it is stated), and successfully conceived a child. Now the chances of this happening (even with significant genetic assistance) is about as likely as a human successfully mating with a rose and producing a either living person that would never have to use deodorant, or a flower that can do calculus. Why, after all they did say there was some genetic help? Simple the two races have a different body chemistry (copper vs. iron remember), different chromosome numbers (humans have 23 vs. Vulcans' have some other number), different gestational periods (nine months vs. who knows what), etc. etc. ad nauseum. It was stated at one point that all races in Star Trek evolved from an ancient one, but this is absurd as well as basic evolutionary law says that species that are isolated will eventually be incompatible mates with other species. So enough about Star Trek.

So come on Hollywood lets see some science in your science fiction! Mind you when it comes down to it there hasn't been much original work come out of Hollywood for many many years so I guess the chances of anything like this happening is pretty slim.

TTFN

Classification and Critical Thinking

As you may have read in my last post there are many ways for classifying a given group of people such as the religion they practise, their sexual orientation, their cultural and societal backgrounds, their politics, their physical characteristics, and their individual practises.

This covers a lot of territory as you can imagine, but is it really necessary to classify people into these groups? Well it's not necessary per say, but humans as a species are for the most part classifiers it is one of the ways we make sense of things, and we've been doing it for a few hundred thousand years or so, so the chances of us being able to break the habit is pretty slim. I say a few hundred thousand because anatomically modern humans first appeared around two hundred thousand years ago. Before this there were other species of primates such as Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy and her kin) which go back around three million years, and primates themselves go back around sixty-five million years. Now we have no way of knowing whether our predecessors classified things and likely we'll never know, but the chances are pretty good they did even if in only very rudimentary ways. In any case we as modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens in case your interested) do classify things, and this tends to create problems (some intentional, and some not) in this little old world of ours.

Now why we classify things is a topic worthy of a lot of study and it has been studied for quite a while, but this blog is not a do it yourself degree in sociology, or psychology, so we'll leave it at that.

As the header for this blog states I'm going to be talking about critical thinking, and classification is one component of this subject. When we think critically we are forced to divide things into the plausible, and the not plausible (to put it very broadly, as there are typically varying degrees of plausibility). But before this is taken the wrong way I must point out that when someone thinks critically this does not mean that they simply take a firm unwavering stance on something, and let the dice fall where they may. This is what differentiates critical thinking from skepticism. Critical thinkers are by nature skeptical, but skeptics in many cases are not critical thinkers as they have already decided what the answer is.

Now there is nothing wrong with being a skeptic, but if you are then you have to be prepared to defend your ideas, as many people will automatically consider you to be against any idea that is somewhat controversial - in other words you become one of those dreaded "debunkers". And once you've been classified as a debunker, then it'll stick with you and will automatically be transferred to pretty much any topic that is even the slightest bit off centre.

It is much better to publicly classify yourself as a critical thinker (at least in my opinion), as in this way you don't automatically have a prejudgement against you. And you can reinforce your case by saying you are willing to entertain the notion that certain phenomena are possible, and then investigate what really is the story.

An example seems to be in order here.

Let's say you encounter a person who says they believe their house is haunted, because they hear footsteps at night.

Now a hardened skeptic would likely dismiss this as total nonsense, and thereby cause the person to not only consider them as being a rude git, but also likely cause the person with the belief to be embarrassed. If this is done enough times then I would assume it could lead to further distress on their part.

But if we look at this same scenario from the point of view of a critical thinker then we get a totally different outcome. The critical thinker who is told about the belief that there is a ghost would take the person at face value rather than making an automatic judgement and try and find out why they believe this. Ultimately this might lead to the person allowing the critical thinker to investigate the problem, and thereby determine what the noises actually are. This second solution I feel goes a long way to reassuring the person with the belief, and ultimately is much more productive as it no only confronts their fears, but it also instructs the person. Additionally it's unlikely they'll think the critical thinker is some rude git either.

TTFN

Definitions Part II

Yesterday's article was about computer, and I realize that it is probably too late to change the common usage of the term "hackers" to "crackers", but if we try who knows. But enough said about computers.

The real focus of this article is with regard to the term "tolerance". Now by definition (once again courtesy of Apple) we get: "1 the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behaviour that one does not necessarily agree with : the tolerance of corruption | an advocate of religious tolerance." For the root term Tolerate we get "allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference : a regime unwilling to tolerate dissent. • accept or endure (someone or something unpleasant or disliked) with forbearance : how was it that she could tolerate such noise?"

Now both of these definition point toward enduring, or putting up with something, which makes me wonder why politicians, religious leaders, the media, and many many others continue to use this term when speaking of things such as gay rights; other religions, cultures, societies, practises, etc. So if anybody says something like "I/We should all tolerate …" then anybody who can use a dictionary should be able to tell that what they're really saying is something like "I/We really consider these people to be wrong but we'll put up a facade to make it look like we are supporting them in hopes that nobody will notice. So how can we make it look like we're helping them, and how can I/we look like the good guy at the same time?"

Now I don't know about you, but that sounds like one hell of a lousy attitude to take / put forth. In fact let's assume that this mystery person is an elected official. If you voted for this person, and then based on the above paragraph found out that they tolerate something that you believe very strongly in, do you really think you'll be getting proper representation from this person? Come on now - be honest with yourself!

Now if we switch gears slightly, and change to the term acceptance we have a totally new definition: "agreement with or belief in an idea, opinion, or explanation."

If we all accepted the fact that things such as gay rights; other religions, cultures, societies, practises, etc. we're alright and then went on with our lives wouldn't this world be a better place? After all if we did then the hypothetical person up above would be saying "I/We realize that people all over the world are different, and that they all have different opinions, backgrounds. I understand this, now let's get on with solving the problem at hand."

Personally I accept that there are people in this world who have different religions (in fact there are somewhere between 400 and 1000 depending on how you classify them), different sexual orientations (a good handful of those too), that come from different cultures (probably a few hundred of these as well), were raised under different societal structures (a few hundred more, although there will be a great deal of crossover with the cultures), their political ideology, their physical characteristics, and their individual practises as well. But are any of these really all that important?

Now can we please get along and solve the various problems this world of ours has?

TTFN