Showing posts sorted by relevance for query 2013. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query 2013. Sort by date Show all posts
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Saturday, July 20, 2013
New & Interesting Stuff July 20, 2013
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Thanks for your patience. Thanks
to everyone who follows Keenan’s Book Reviews.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
New & Interesting Stuff Feb. 6, 2013
Bills to rename I-70 bridge at St. Louis the Stan Musial Memorial
Bridge
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Best of What I Read in 2013
Each year I like to select the top 20 percent of the books I read for
special attention. Though 2013 is a few months behind, I’d still like to
highlight the books I read in that year that are most noteworthy.
1. Second
Kings
2. Revelation
Other annual best-of lists:
Other best-of lists:
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Future Bright by Martin E. Martinez
Higher intelligence
is linked to higher achievement. The demands of our world and culture are
calling for higher achievement to address increasingly complex problems. As
individuals and societies, we should strive to increase intelligence, which is
possible, to arm ourselves to overcome these challenges. This is the opinion
advanced by education
professor Martin E.
Martinez in his book Future Bright.
Martinez builds his case by starting with the link between intelligence
and achievement. He cites studies that indicate that in school,
work,
and personal life, achievement is positively correlated to intelligence.
He moves on to describe what intelligence is, drawing on historic and
current theories and research. A significant portion of the book is devoted to
defining and understanding intelligence. The prevailing model is hierarchical. A
single general intelligence is linked to achievement in all areas. There are
also different types of intelligence that are linked to success in clusters of
specific skills. Intelligence is affected by both genetics and the environment,
and by both individual and cultural factors. If you are looking for a primer on
intelligence that covers a lot of ground relatively briefly, you can find it in
these chapters.
The hope that Martinez offers is that intelligence is, in part,
learned, and it can be increased. Two major types of intelligence, most
strongly related to general intelligence, are fluid and crystalline intelligence.
Fluid intelligence is related to successfully dealing with novel situations.
The heart of fluid intelligence is problem
solving. Crystalline intelligence is
structured knowledge, such as is attained from formal education. It is not
merely an accumulation of facts; it is an organized mental repository of useful
information. The primary skill for crystalline intelligence is critical
thinking, the ability distinguish credible, worthy, and useful ideas.
Problems solving and critical thinking are skills that can be learned
and improved. Similarly, we can learn new information. By these means fluid and
crystalline intelligence, and with them general intelligence, can be increased.
Intelligence is not the only determinant of success, for many
intelligent people are not successful. Another important factor is what
Martinez call “effective character.”
These are personality
traits that Martinez suggests can be learned or improved in most people. The
critical trait is conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness is associated with setting and pursuing goals, working
with diligence, and seeking excellence.
Martinez offers several strategies for increasing intelligence. One
that is in keeping with the motivation behind this blog is to increase
crystalline intelligence (structured knowledge) by reading books. A work as
long a book must be structured well to be coherent from beginning to end. In
addition, effective written communication presents ideas in a manner that lends
itself to analysis by critical thinking. Nonfiction
books are especially useful for cultivating crystalline intelligence.
Though the strategies are aimed at the individual, he discusses how
some of them are adaptable to parenting
and schools. Because Martinez in the early chapters suggests societal benefits
to higher intelligence, it makes sense that his book would also include
suggestions for policy
and cultural adaptions.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Martinez, Martin E. Future Bright:
A Transforming Vision of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Monday, November 14, 2016
Break Out by Joel Osteen
In Break Out, Joel Osteen
encourages readers to leave behind limiting beliefs and stretch themselves to
have faith for and achieve a bigger life. The themes of this book are very
similar to those of his other books.
First, Osteen teaches that God can turn things
around. Your past is not an indicator of your future. God can make things
change quickly. In the meantime, Osteen encourages readers to do what is right.
In light of this, one should dream big dreams. Not only can God turn
things around, He can accomplish more in your life than you can imagine. Hope
for things that seem beyond your reach; God can help you achieve them.
Because you are not living alone, but always have the aid of God, you
don’t have to worry about being inadequate. If you lack anything you need to
achieve your God-given dream, He can provide what you need.
This likewise should affect your prayers. Talk to God about your bid
dreams. Especially talk to God about the promises in His Word or examples of
how He had provided similar help to others.
As I have mentioned in reviews of other books by Osteen, his works are
not especially or uniquely Christian.
Like the works of Norman
Vincent Peale or Robert H.
Schuller, if you strip out any mention of God, you’ll still have a self-help
book. An the self-help messages may help you be happier and achieve more. A
Christian message, however, cannot be stripped of Christ, why we
need him, and what He does for us, and still have content.
Joel Osteen also wrote
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested it
Osteen, Joel. Break Out: 5 Keys
to Go Beyond Your Barriers and Live an Extraordinary Life. New York: FaithWords, 2013.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
As you might expect from the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams
is skeptical of the value of life advice from a cartoonist,
even if he is that cartoonist. Even so, Adams has had very great success in his profession,
so he might be doing something right even if he has a very wrongheaded
explanation of it.
That is a point Adams makes in his book How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win
Big. Some things work even if we don’t understand them. Some beliefs help
us move toward the life we want even if they aren’t correct—often even if we
know they’re wrong. Adams expresses skepticism about a lot of things, and
encourages his readers to use discernment, but he is willing to use what works
with our without a good explanation.
One of those things is affirmations.
Adams does not believe that affirmations shape the universe, or that the human
mind or will or being has the ability to do such a thing. In a late chapter of
the book, he speculates on why they might have some effect or, more likely, how
people might convince themselves that affirmations work. In any case, Adams
correlates some of his greatest successes to his use of affirmations.
Of course, Adams’ life has not been one
of uninterrupted success. The title of the book acknowledges his failures. He
doesn’t get hung up on them. His view was that if he learned
something or gained a new skill from a failed enterprise, he still gained
something. In his estimation, “every sill you acquire doubles your odds of
success.”
“Odds” is a good way to put it. When it
comes down to it, success is a matter of luck. Adams believes that you can take
steps to improve your ability to take advantage of the luck that comes your way
The way you do this is by implementing
good systems. Adams doesn’t believe in goals. You feel like a failure if you
haven’t achieved your goal; you lose your motivation when you complete your
goal. Systems are things you can continue doing as long as they are useful. If
you do something to implement your system, you’ve succeeded. A system is
anything you do regularly in improve the likelihood that you’ll be happy in the
long run.
To Adams, happiness is
the heart of success. If you can sustain happiness, you’re successful in the
ways that matter most. He describes it as a “chemistry experiment.” The idea is
that we know a lot about what makes us happy and we just need to find the right
mix of elements that fits our particular needs. To be happy one needs to
maximize control over their schedule,
find ways to improve skills for a long time (especially in their careers and
hobbies), imagine a better future, take care of health
(diet, exercise and sleep), help others, and reduce daily decision-making
by creating routines.
The book includes a host of other
advice. Most of this advice is told in the context of Adams’ life story. He
particularly focuses on his business and career failures (from which he learned
useful things), the rise of Dilbert
and his battle with a unique health problem.
If you’re interested in this book, you
may also be interested in
Adams, Scott. How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of
My Life. New
York: Portfolio/Penguin,
2013.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy
Leonard
Nimoy is well known for his portrayal of Spock on Star Trek television
series and films.
As a Vulcan,
Spock is of a long-lived species, and his appearance in the 2009
reboot film and its 2013
sequel (Into Darkness) makes him a link
between the new adventures and their predecessors. The actor passed away last
year (2015).
I Am Spock is Nimoy’s memoir relating
to his career as an actor
and a director.
Of course, Spock and Star Trek play
an important role in that career, though Nimoy does not limit his reminiscence
to the franchise.
Throughout the book, Nimoy imagines conversations with Spock. As an
actor in a series where writers and directors change, he saw himself as a
protector of the character (and suggested that other actors take similar
attitudes to such characters). This made him passionate about a character known
for being dispassionate. At the same time, he had the reasonable fear of being
type casted and being unable to get other parts.
Fortunately, Nimoy was able to move on to other things after the three
seasons of the original Star Trek
series. On series television, he played Paris on Mission Impossible. He also had
guest roles on a number of other shows. He also worked on the stage. One gets
the impression for the book that Nimoy had relatively few interruptions in his
career after bringing Spock to life, though not always with the steady paycheck
that comes from being on a series.
Nimoy became interested in directing and tried his hand directing a few
episodes of television shows. He got his chance to direct a feature film with Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
This was a success and he was offered the helm of the next film, The Voyage Home. He also had a great
success as director of Three Men and a Baby.
As a Trek fan, I’m obviously
interested in that part of his career. Even so, I found it almost a relief to
break from that and read about Nimoy’s other projects. Though he does not
present himself as religious, he seemed particularly to relish projects that
provided a connection to his Jewish heritage.
Even the distinctive Vulcan salute was taken by Nimoy from a temple ceremony he
observed as a child.
The book was published in 1995,
so it covers the period up to the sixth Star
Trek film, The Undiscovered Country, and his
appearance on two episodes of The Next Generation. He gave no hint
of imagining that he would reprise the role of Spock 14 years later.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Sunday, April 13, 2014
The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman
A lot has been written over the last few years about expertise,
often referring to a 10,000-hour rule. Research indicates that the people who
exhibit the highest level of expertise, even possibly being a genius, have in
their life put in 10,000 hours or more of deliberate
practice.
Your response to that bit of knowledge might be like mine: “I’d don’t
have 10,000 hours to put into learning something new.” What if you don’t need
to be an expert; you just need to be proficient. Maybe you want to learn
something for your personal edification, and you do not aspire to be great, but
simply to be good enough.
According to Josh Kaufman,
gaining a basic proficiency in a new skill is within reach. With an orderly
approach, it can be achieved in as little as 20 hours. Kaufman event entitled
his book on the subject The First 20
Hours.
Unlike other books on learning
I’ve read, Kaufman focuses more on skill than
knowledge, more on being able to do something than knowing about something.
Acquiring knowledge is important to learning a new skill, and he acknowledges
this by making research a part of his program, but he still emphasizes using as
much of the 20 hours as you can on deliberate practice.
Kaufman lays out a strategy for rapid skill acquisition. If compressed
to a list, it wouldn’t cover the length of a page. Part of what he does is
break down his method into parts that are easy, at least conceptually. That is
one of the methods: breaking a skill into sub-skills that can be more easily
learned and practiced. In this way, his method is simple.
If simple were easy, more things would be simple. Kaufman’s methods may reduce gaining
proficiency in a skill to 20 hours, but they are 20 hours of focused work to
which you must commit yourself. You can give yourself some early wins that will
make it easier to overcome the discouragement that comes when you become
frustrated by difficulties, but The First
20 Hours holds no strategies for overcoming laziness or disinterest.
If Kaufman only described his method, his book would be quite short. He
illustrates the methods by showing how he used them to rapidly acquire six
different skills. In addition to reiterating the steps to rapid skill
acquisition, he demonstrates the variety of skills one can learn. They range
from knowledge-intensive, technical
skills (programming) to physical skills (yoga), and much in between (playing
an instrument).
The skills that interested Kaufman were not skills that were of much
interest to me. Even so, it prompted me to think of skill I would like to
acquire and how I might apply his strategies to the task.
Kaufman also hints that his method could be used by a proficient person
to improve his skill, taking a step closer to expertise. The strategies are
aimed at engaging you in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is the heart
of both acquiring and improving a skill.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg
For those of
us who can remember a time not so long ago when we didn’t have telephones (computers
really) in our pockets and the Internet was
something few were connected to, even of those few who had computers in their
homes, the current state of communication technology
can seem revolutionary. This is tame compared to the changes wrought by
technology that seems commonplace to us now. In The Age of Edison, Ernest
Freeburg describes the amazing changes brought about in the 50 years
following the introduction of electric lighting.
Though Thomas Edison
is a huge figure in electric lighting, especially in the United States,
Freeburg is careful to avoid the myth of the solitary inventor bringing an idea
out of thin air. Many people were working on electric lighting. Edison’s incandescent bulb had advantages
over other lights, especially because he conceived of a complete lighting
system with power sources, distribution and controls in addition to lamps.
There were predecessors in the field, so Edison was working in a social context
of seeking to provide superior lighting.
These
competitors were not only other electric light inventors, but also older
technologies, especially gas. Because electric power did not reach rural areas
until the 1930s, much older artificial lights, like kerosene lamps, persisted
even as electric lights became common in middle-class urban homes.
The first
customers of electric lights were not homeowners, but businesses and cities who
were already customers of lighting systems. These lights transformed cities,
which various economic forces were causing to grow. From public lighting,
electric systems were adapted to retail businesses, arts, entertainment, and
science.
The early
electric lighting market was competitive, unregulated, and wild. Electrocutions
and fires were too common and widely publicized. Light companies were forced to
improve safety by a political
movement that supported municipal government
control and ownership, and insurance company interests. This led to electric codes,
the founding of the Underwriter’s Laboratory (UL) in 1893, college programs in
electrical engineering,
and the unionization of electrical workers.
Commercial
interests dominated the early development of electric lighting. This was not
the only reason electric lights had critics, but it was a significant reason.
Intellectuals criticized the unartistic randomness of commercial messages
seeking outshine each other. They were not especially successful in curbing
electric lights, but the industry began to mature in this context and develop
more attractive, effective and efficient lighting systems that were adapted to
uses in homes and businesses.
Freeburg
wraps up with Henry
Ford’s 1929
jubilee of the invention of the incandescent electric lamp. In 50 years, the
invention transformed almost every part of American life, especially urban life
that was quickly becoming more common as people left farms for opportunities in
cities. One of the telling things is that the event was broadcast on radio.
In 1879, people
huddled around candles and lanterns if they had to have light when the sun went
down, but well within the span of a lifetime electric lights became dominant
and electric appliances were common enough that radios were in homes and many
were able to participate in a distant celebration of a transformative
technology. It is hard to imagine how amazing these changes were to the people
who experienced them.
If you’re
interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Friday, May 15, 2020
The Boom by Russell Gold
The great expansion of natural gas wells that was brought about by new technologies—directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking)—in the last few decades has meant
that a lot more people are physically closer to the energy industry. In 2013, more than 15 million Americans lived within a mile of a fracked
well. Journalist Russell Gold has a personal connection to this
change in the energy landscape; his parents own property in Pennsylvania that they leased out for natural gas
drilling.
In his book, The Boom, Gold explores the history of the oil
and gas industry, and the development of key technologies, that led to the
present abundance of natural gas. This interesting and long history energy
exploration and development has attracted colorful characters.
The natural gas boom has
also created opportunities and challenges. For one thing, fracked wells can
produce a lot more natural gas and get it from rock formations that were
previously considered too impermeable to economically give up the gas they
stored. Now we get gas from these rocks and the natural gas supply that once
seemed limited now seems enourmous, and prices for natural gas have dropped in
response.
In addition, natural gas
produces less carbon dioxide and other pollutants than burning of other fuels such as coal. Even though the U.S. has not participated in
international carbon-control protocols, the growth of natural gas as a fuel,
replacing other energy sources, has made the U.S. one of the few countries to
come close to meeting goals for carbon reduction.
Even so, natural gas is
a fossil fuel that carries some of the problems of its cousins. For instance,
natural gas is mostly methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. Releases of methane reduce some of
the gains made by switching from coal or other less clean-burning fuels to gas.
Cheap gas also makes alternative energy sources such as solar or wind less economically attractive, which may delay the
development of these resources.
Gold seems to balance
these issues. Natural gas is a superior fuel to coal from the perspective of
air quality and climate change. It is probably also necessary to use natural
gas as a bridge to solar and wind as a way to provide stability as these
naturally variable energy sources, along with the energy storage needed to make them truly feasible,
are improved. Other problems with gas, such as potential threats to water quality, can be mitigated with existing
technology, better rules and careful management.
If you’re interested in
this book, you may also be interested in
Gold, Russell. The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American
Energy Revolution and Changed the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Making the American Body by Jonathan Black
In Making the American Body, journalist Jonathan Black explores the history of health and fitness from aerobics to Zumba. Promotion of
physical fitness goes back to the founding of the United States; Black notes that Benjamin Franklin praised the use of dumbbells.
Franklin was known to be a fan of swimming, too. It began to gain some momentum
in the middle 1800s when German immigrants brought the gymnasium (they called it
a Turnverein) to the U.S.
I was draw to the book
because it has a touch of Missouriana in the person of Bernarr Macfadden, self-proclaimed “Father of Physical Culture.” Macfadden had a classic story of
the early bodybuilder. He was a sick, weak kid from the Ozarks who was transformed into a paragon of
masculine pulchritude by his commitment to weight training, healthy eating and clean living. Unlike some of his contemporaries,
Macfadden believed clean living included an active sex life and he campaigned against prudery. His magazines, headed by Physical Culture, featured photographs of nearly naked men and
women in swimsuits.
Fitness promotion is a
small world, and many of its leading figures are connected. Macfadden organized
a contest (probably fixed) that crowned Charles Atlas the “World’s Most Beautiful Man.”
Atlas’ ads in pulp magazines and comic books are probably some of the most
well-known ever, especially the bully of the beach ad. The story of this ad,
told in comics form, is based on a real event in Atlas’ life when he was shamed
by a muscular life guard for his scrawny form and weakness while on a date at
the beach.
Macfadden and many
others were inspired by Prussian strongman Sandow. They saw him at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, where his show was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.
California became a focus of health and fitness
trend that would spread across the country. Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach was a place for weight
lifters and gymnasts to have fun and show off. Steve Reeves, known for playing Hercules in several films, was a product of Muscle Beach. Jack LaLanne, another wimpy kid transformed,
opened gyms, brought workouts to television, and encouraged women to exercise and
do strength training.
Other trends gained
popularity, especially fitness focused on cardiovascular health. This brought
into popular culture Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a physician to astronauts whose 1968 book Aerobics
launched an industry. That industry provided a career for Richard Simmons and a second career for Jane Fonda, who was the first to emphasize
exercise as a way for women to lose weight (though this was an unspoken appeal
long before the 1970s). Bodybuilding made a comeback,
though, especially fueled by the popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I’m not especially
interested in the health and fitness industry, but I found this book to be very
interesting. It provides a historical context for many of the health and
fitness trends that are still part of American culture.
If you’re interested in
this book, you may also be interested in
Black, Jonathan. Making the American Body: The Remarkable
Saga of the Men and Women Whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness
History. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)