by Nicholas Carr ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2010
Similar in spirit to Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget (2010)—cogent, urgent and well worth reading.
“Is Google making us stupid?” So freelance technology writer Carr (The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, 2008, etc.) asked in a 2008 article in the Atlantic Monthly, an argument extended in this book.
The subtitle is literal. In the interaction between humans and machines, the author writes, machines are becoming more humanlike. And, “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” Carr provides evidence from batteries of neuroscientific research projects, which suggest that the more we use the Internet as an appendage of memory, the less we remember, and the more we use it as an aide to thinking, the less we think. Though the author ably negotiates the shoals of scientific work, his argument also takes on Sven Birkerts–like cultural dimensions. The Internet, he complains, grants us access to huge amounts of data, but this unmediated, undigested stuff works against systematic learning and knowledge. Yale computer-science professor David Gelernter has lately made the same arguments in a more gnomic, but much shorter, essay now making the rounds of the Internet. This privileging of the short and bullet-pointed argument to the considered and leisurely fits into Carr’s theme as well. He observes that with RSS, Twitter, Google and all the other cutely named distractions his computer provides, he has become a less patient and less careful reader of key texts that require real work. It’s a sentiment that one of his subjects, a philosophy major and Rhodes Scholar, brushes aside, saying, “I don’t read books…I go to Google, and I can absorb relevant information quickly.” Ah, but there’s the rub—how can a novice know what’s relevant?
Similar in spirit to Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget (2010)—cogent, urgent and well worth reading.Pub Date: June 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-07222-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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by Dennis L. Mammana & Donald McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 1996
The search for planets around other suns is one of the most daunting tasks astronomers have tackled; here two astronomers sum up the progress to date. Mammana (Fleet Space Theater, San Diego) and McCarthy (Univ. of Arizona) build their discussion around a brief history of their discipline, beginning with the Greek philosophers, who accepted the plurality of worlds as a given. With the gradual improvement of modern astronomical instruments, the true magnitude of the universe became known and the question became not whether there were planets around other stars, but when someone would detect one. In 1963, Peter Van de Kamp of Swarthmore was the first to claim identification of an extrasolar planet, based on three decades of measurements of the position of Barnard's Star. Fellow astronomers failed to duplicate his data, but there were plenty of others on the trail. McCarthy announced his own discovery in 1984: a companion to an extremely faint star known as VB8. Debate raged over whether the companion was a planet like Jupiter or a so-called ``brown dwarf''—an object just below stellar size but with orders of magnitude larger than any known planet. Disks of diffuse material, of the sort from which planetary systems are believed to form, have been detected around a number of stars. The Hubble Space Telescope and a new generation of ground-based scopes have pushed the observational frontiers farther out; and several astronomers are lobbying for even larger instruments, based either in space or on the moon, where observing conditions will be far better than on Earth. A new wave of discoveries—too recent for the authors to address them—seems to have made a firm case for the existence of planets around at least two other stars. A somewhat dry but workmanlike survey of its subject, with interesting sidelights on astronomers and their equipment. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14021-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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by John J. Medina ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1996
Aging is a universal human experience, yet even now a poorly understood one; Medina's book is an accessible summary of what we know. Medina (Bioengineering/Univ. of Washington) begins with a brief description of his own mother's life and last days, which inspired him to investigate the aging process. The text then turns to a discussion of the biological meaning of aging and death. A key point is that death is not the simultaneous failure of an entire organism; it is the failure of some key component, such as the heart or lungs, that brings about the end. Medina thus devotes the middle portion of the book to an examination of how each system of the body changes with age. The skin wrinkles, the bones weaken, the lungs lose their capacity to oxygenate blood. But the processes do not proceed at the same pace; half the nerve cells in the occipital cortex will die before a human reaches old age, but almost all those in the thalamus will survive. Vision and hearing deteriorate, but taste buds actually regenerate. Each chapter is introduced with a brief biography of a person whose death in some way illuminates the system under discussion and adds human interest: Goya for the brain, Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the heart, Casanova for the reproductive system. Finally, Medina looks at aging from the biochemical perspective. One theory suggests that aging is a result of cumulative errors in the reproduction of an organism's cells; another, that it is programmed into the genes and promoted by toxic waste products of metabolism. (There is good evidence for both.) Finally, strategies to combat aging are discussed: exercise, a moderated diet, the replacement of certain hormones that decrease with age. While no one has discovered a way to prevent aging and death, Medina ably brings together what we know about these inevitable processes and provides insight into possible avenues of future research. (47 line drawings)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-521-46244-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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