An optimistic if superficial overview of our brave new (technological) world.
Forget personal jet packs, flying cars, and food pills—welcome to a coming world of robot servants, gene splicing, really long life spans, and fusion power.
In what is more a set of speculative thought pieces than specific predictions, Hulick gathers sound-bite quotes from dozens of researchers and embeds them in general ruminations on the directions that new technology seems to be taking us in fields from cybernetics and space colonization to the search for better energy sources. A focus on the positive leads her to mention but downplay troubling issues such as the already-scary hackability of the internet of things and the near possibility (more likely probability) of “designer babies.” She also argues that artificial intelligence will never trump the human sort because it intrinsically lacks “common sense” and lays out a broadly brushed future scenario in which robots will do all the work while people, on universal basic incomes, enjoy a “never-ending vacation.” Sure. She also regards the use of wind and other renewable power sources as just placeholders until atomic fusion becomes practical, and looks to next-generation 3-D printers she calls “maker machines” to feed the world. Wolski’s blocky paintings, more retro than futuristic, add unimaginative images of generic gizmos or human figures of diverse racial presentations playing with a pet robo-dog, strolling among dinosaurs, climbing out of TARDIS-like teleportation booths, posing in lab coats, or rumbling past on a toddler assembly line. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An optimistic if superficial overview of our brave new (technological) world. (Speculative nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7112-5124-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
A colorful figure in the history of science whose “misses” are as entertaining and instructive as his “hits.” (timeline,...
An introduction to an undeservedly obscure polymath of the scientific revolution.
Justly (if anachronistically, as the term wasn’t coined until the 19th century) dubbing Kircher (1602-1680) in his time “the most famous scientist in all of Europe,” Peters devotes most of this profile just to laying out the immense range of his interests and exploits. Along with writings on music, geology, mathematics, travel, and more, he built microscopes and other devices, demonstrated a megaphone with a 5-mile range, and had himself winched down into a live volcano. Being also a showman (“closer to P.T. Barnum than to Einstein”), he also created in Rome a popular museum of “bizarre and fantastical objects” including magnetic clocks and mermaid bones, ancient obelisks, statues that could talk or vomit, and many other marvels. Reading this book is like a walk through that museum, and if certain passages of the hair-fine text, being printed on low-contrast color blocks, require some squinting, Bikadoroff’s portraits of Kircher and other historical figures (all white) over antique landscapes and images add proper notes of wonder as well as period flavor. Many of Kircher’s works and notions were fanciful or, like that talking statue, outright hoaxes, but others have turned out to be valuable contributions; both get equal play, both throughout and in a final section dubbed “Hits and Misses.”
A colorful figure in the history of science whose “misses” are as entertaining and instructive as his “hits.” (timeline, map, lists of sources and further reading) (Biography. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55451-974-3
Page Count: 60
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
An eye-opener for readers who think their brains have it all figured out (but look what’s telling them that, as the old joke...
A catalog of trickery, from optical illusions to scams and advertising.
“Without your brain” Brown writes, “you’ve got nothing.” But brains are inherently untrustworthy, he points out, going on in a lively mix of examples and easy activities (both hands-on and online) to fool not just eyes, but ears, nose, tongue, and touch. He uses the same approach to describe some of the ways magicians and con artists (with nods to the likes of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and Bernie Madoff) play mind games on susceptible “marks.” Then, borrowing a term from Carl Sagan, he offers some general techniques for sharpening one’s “Baloney Detector” and closes with a hilariously lame rap: “To err is human that goes twice for your mind, / But I think you will find / It is wrongly maligned!” He ignores his own cautions by neglecting to offer proof for his answers to a credibility-testing true/false quiz (or any of his claims, for that matter), but his advice is generally savvy. Along with recurrent character “Brian D. Brain,” a pink, bespectacled blob with tiny arms and legs, Bornoff adds a cast of young cartoon humans—most but not all white—to the stock optical illusions.
An eye-opener for readers who think their brains have it all figured out (but look what’s telling them that, as the old joke goes). (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63322-158-1
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Moondance/Quarto
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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