The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Changing Minds by Howard Gardner

Psychologist Howard Gardner considers the ways people alter their thoughts and behavior in his book Changing Minds. Gardner is known for his work in multiple intelligences, which play a part in changing minds, though I won’t focus on that aspect of it here.

The heart of the book is the mind-changing factors. To be effective, a mind-changing effort will use multiple factors. Some appeal to the mind such as a rational approach (reason) and relevant data (research). Some appeal to the heart such as right feeling (resonance). Others could appeal to both: resources and rewards and real world events. In addition, a mind-changer must prepare for resistance; it is difficult to change a mind, especially to change the theories of how the world works the people form in youth.

Garnder illustrates these concepts at work through several historical examples, some recent, as well as some examples from his own life. These are arranged by scale, from influencing the large, heterogeneous population of a nation down to an individual changing his own mind (even if he won’t admit he did). He also discusses direct attempts to change minds (by political and business leaders) and indirect attempts (through science and the arts).

As someone who spends part of his time presenting training on safety in an industrial setting, changing behaviors is important to me. My coworkers need to be able to recognize hazards in our workplace and take appropriate steps protect themselves or each other (that is only part of a safety program, but it is an important part). I haven’t decided yet how to apply these concepts, but it seems to me that the mind-changing factors identified by Gardner give me a framework for estimating how effective a training might be by seeing which factors I am using and incorporating additional factors.

Gardner, H. Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Levenson, Thomas. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the Worlds Greatest Scientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Scientists who become detectives have been the stuff of fiction before CSI: launched it into great popularity. Even Sherlock Holmes was a capable amateur scientist, though his scientific inquiries were aimed at making him a better detective. Though the scientist as detective is a fairly popular form of crime literature, the truth of it in one case is stranger than fiction.

Isaac Newton, renowned in his own day as well as ours as one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, left his post at Cambridge University to take a more lucrative patronage job as Warden of the Mint. One of his ostensible duties as warden was to investigate and prosecute cases of counterfeiting. It would be something like appointing Stephen Hawking to direct the Secret Service.

Typically, holders of this position weren’t expected to do more than the minimum required, leaving most of the work to assistants. Newton took his post seriously and pursued crime fighting with the same discipline and analytical rigor he used as a scientist while also completely re-minting all of England’s silver coins.

Readers who are already familiar with Newton’s scientific life might find that Levenson devotes too much of the book to it. His alchemical studies are more important to his work as warden because, even though esoteric from a scientific view, it made him familiar with the material as methods used by the mint and counterfeiters.

Newton put away (or to death) many counterfeiters. Levenson focuses on one, William Chaloner. Chaloner was an extraordinarily successful counterfeiter at his peak and much more ambitious and smart than most of his fellows. Where Newton’s life before the mint gets too much attention, Chaloner’s life doesn’t get enough. Since he was famous mostly for his crimes and some details of a counterfeiter’s life are necessarily hidden, there is probably much less source material to use to reconstruct his life.


The book builds up a little slowly through Newton’s younger day and then seems to rush through his mastership of the mint and his battle of wits with Chaloner. In spite of this weakness, the book is an interesting look on a lesser know chapter of Newton’s life.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

As I read Writing Down the Bones, the writing guide by Natalie Goldberg that was first published in 1984, I found myself being more courageous and honest in my writing. At least I’m more that way in the writing I do for myself.

That is where it starts. Better writing comes from the practice of writing. Goldberg recommends timed writing as a practice. Set the amount of time you plan to write, even if it is as short as 10 minutes, and write as fast and freely as you can.

I’ve been doing something similar for a while. What helped me break through to more scary and fruitful territory is Goldberg’s advice to write a little more. If you feel you’ve written all you can about something, write a little more. I found it pushed me to write down thoughts and feelings I didn’t want to admit I had. I don’t know that these confessions to myself had made me a better writer, but when I break through I feel like I may be able to deal with something I’ve been avoiding.

In both of these practices, writing is a kind of meditation, which Goldberg discusses in several of the book’s short chapters. She draws on Buddhist practices such as meditation throughout the book.

Her Buddhist practices also involve being present, which she suggests is helpful for writers. Be present in your everyday life and in your writing. Be attentive, listen, and you will fill your mind with the wonderful things. These become specific details that ground your writing in real life. Instead of writing about something, you can write what is; your readers will conjure up on their own the emotions associated with the experience you capture in your words.

“Whatever is in front of you is your life, so please take care of it,” Natalie Goldberg, Afterward to Writing Down the Bones

Goldberg believes writing should be tied to the rest of your life. Whatever you’re doing, you’re a writer, and even though you can and should give your full attention to the person or task in front of you, the writing mind is still being primed for its work. And writing is work; it requires effort. Like any worthwhile thing, you get out of it what you put into it. Writing is a process and it needs to be approached with joy, honesty and patience if it is to bear fruit.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

Shut Up & Write! by Judy Bridges

Switch on Your Brain by Caroline Leaf

Take the Leap by Heather McCloskey Beck

Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. 2^nd ed. Boston: Shambala, 2005.

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Barnett, Cynthia.  Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2011.

America has a problem.  We’re a thirsty nation.  Actually, it’s more like we’re addicted to water, abusing it.  We subsidize its use on a grand scale in industries that use it inefficiently, even wastefully, and in locations where it is naturally hard to come by.  We allocate it based on facts that are no longer true, and were doubtful or changing even as we made our policies.  In our sometimes blind enthusiasm, we overreached and now we are mire in unintended consequences.  To top it off, we rarely change our ways until a crisis is already upon us.

Cynthia Barnett describes these problems in her book Blue Revolution.  She also looks around the country and the world for solutions.  Her essential solution is a water ethic.

At one time, people were intimately connected to water.  Farmers watched for rain.  Children fetched pails of it from the stream or worked a pump handle.  Communities were built around watermills where people brought in grain or carried away flour. 

Of course, water is no less essential to modern life.  We depend on it for drinking, cleaning, sanitation and green lawns.  It is essential or the energy that light and cools our homes and powers our computers.  The abundance of food in our groceries stores is partly a testament to the abundance of water used to irrigate fields that don’t get enough rainfall for the crops we grow.

What is different is the way we view water.  For most of us it is cheap, nearly free in comparison to other utilities and services we use in our homes.   We can get as much as we want whenever we want by opening a valve.  Water is something we hold back with dams, divert with canals, and pump through pipes.  It bends to our will—except when it doesn’t.

Our water policies and technologies have often had unintended consequences.  We turned deserts into productive fields, but much of the water is lost to evaporation.  We moved water great distances to supply cities, but it encouraged profligacy that threatens those distant, expensive supplies.  Dams that were engineering marvels may soon stand at the ends of empty lakes.

Sure, changes in technology and policy are needed to stop, and hopefully reverse, these problems.  Barnett doesn’t stop there.  Our approach to water arises from the way we value it, think about it, and relate to it.  Our present state came from valuing water little, thinking about it little unless it was our job, and relating to it little except for those who intensely depended on a highly subsidized supply.

The water ethic Barnett proposes would value water, both in the sense of personal appreciation and economic cost and opportunity.  It would seek the best use of the water we have, especially what is locally available.  It creates opportunities for people to contact water and understand where it comes from and how it is affected by use.  It is something that spreads organically from person to person, neighborhood to neighborhood, business to business, and city to city.

It is an ethic that is within reach, too.  Barnett describes how places that have long had extreme relationships with extreme water environments, like the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia, have changed their relationship with water.  These are not just policy shifts, they are cultural changes.  Even in the United States, there are places where a new water ethic is taking hold and people understand how important and fragile water is.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

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Thanks! by Robert A. Emmons

Emmons, Robert A. Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make Your Happier. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

As a psychologist, Robert Emmons is objective in his study of gratitude. However, he is not neutral about it because his research, and that of others, has shown that gratitude enhances happiness and resilience.


Emmons addresses something interesting about gratitude that other books on the subject don’t address as directly: it is both an emotion and an attitude. He discusses how gratitude is an emotion in a technical, psychological sense, which is not as dry as it may seem. He presents it in understandable terms.

Emotions are fleeting and one can’t feel grateful constantly. This is where the attitude of gratitude comes in. One can adopt a stance toward life that includes an awareness of the gifts one receive, great and small, and the expression of thanks for those gifts.

Such gratitude is not simply a matter of thinking. Emmons devotes a chapter to the “embodiment” of gratitude, the behavioral and physical expression of thanks. Gratefulness may be embodied in a healthier heart, longer life, more positive emotions, reduced pain, better cognition, and better self-care. These are just some of the ways gratitude is good for you.

Another benefit of gratitude is the resiliency thankful people have in trying times. People have an amazing capacity for a tendency toward positive emotions. Within months of great harms like debilitating injury, loss of love ones, or natural catastrophe, people feel positive emotions about as often as before. Even in the midst of huge losses, people can experience positive emotions alongside negative ones. Grateful people don’t ignore the negative; they just also acknowledge the positive. They recognize that things might have been worse and their still glad to have what they have. Grateful people are resilient people.

In studying gratitude, Emmons didn’t limit himself to the science, but looked to cultural traditions too, especially religion. The encouragement of gratitude is universal in major world religions. Gratitude to God, as well as others, is a trait of monotheistic religions. Other religions call for a general attitude of gratitude. He specifically addresses several religious traditions of gratefulness, and his discussion of the pervasive thanksgiving that is called for in Christianity is on the mark.

One of my favorite things about the book is that it devotes a chapter to practicing gratitude. It is easy to take things for granted, so thankfulness is something we need to be develop and sustain through practice. Emmons describes 10 things people can do to cultivate gratitude. Each activity is easy to perform and most are intended for regular practice.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The 4:8 Principle by Tommy Newberry
Gratitude by Melody Beattie
Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Stephen Post and Jill Neimark

Water by Marq de Villiers

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about civil infrastructure, the environment and other matters of technology.

de Villiers, Marq. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Marq de Villiers serves as a guide on a tour of water problems, conflicts and occasional solutions around the world. Though he is not an alarmist, his book seems to indicate that the problems have so far greatly outpaced the solutions.

There are several aspects of water problems and conflicts that de Villiers considers: natural, technological and political. In each area, he provides specific examples of water in or nearing crisis.

The natural distribution of fresh water in the world is uneven. That may be the fundamental aspect of water problems: even where it’s seemingly abundant, it doesn’t occur where and when people want it to make use of it. In parts of the world, this is a dire situation.

The technological solutions people have applied to correct this distribution have resulted in some amazing works of engineering since early in human history. It has also had many unintended consequences. Irrigation that made marginal land productive has made some of that land useless, even desert, through increased salinity. Dams, drainage and transfers have created ill effects in regional climates. Water mining, pollution and other human activity are also threatening the quantity and quality of water even in developed nations. There is hope in the technological area in that much of this harm may be reversible and the human ingenuity that created these technologies might also create sustainable solutions to our water needs.

Political considerations are very important to water issues, particularly when considering the possibility of conflict, even outright war, because of water scarcity. The Middle East and North Africa come to mind as hot spots where water is a critical issue; de Villiers enlightens both the current situation and history of these regions. Though mistrust runs deep between the nations in this region, even seemingly friendly ones, there is hope for solutions to their water problems. North America has its water problems to, and the problems on the Colorado River are surprisingly similar to those on the Nile. The differences in water availability in the United States, Mexico and Canada also makes for interesting relations between these close and usually friendly neighbors. China may present the largest political problems related to water and it’s food production and population that threatens to push it into crisis.

The book closes with four general strategies for dealing with the world’s water problems. First, get more water by either bringing it in from elsewhere or making it (i.e. desalination). Next is conservation and pricing to reduce demand and encourage using water in the most valuable ways. Third is population control; de Villiers seems relieved that world populations have been growing more slowly without major intervention. Finally, you can steal water from others. Since 40 percent people worldwide live in watersheds that cross national boundaries, it becomes a complicated matter of who has what right to the water and this is a potential source of water conflict, though not insurmountable.

Order this book here.

P.S., here is a little something extra for those of you interested in China, especially the probably fictional Emperor Yu the Engineer.

Interesting Stuff March 18, 2011

Another Real-Life Costumed Hero (or Two) Joins the Fray
-Britain Gets Its Own Kick-Ass: Banker Turns into Superhero The Statesman at Night to Fight Crime
-Britain’s Real Life Superhero The Statesman Battles Evil with the Power of Incredible Facial Hair
-Masked Environmental Vigilante “Super Tri” Put on French City’s Payroll
-Phoenix Jones Protects Seattle

Awesome Artist: Dustin Nguyen
Huckabee Toys with Whitehouse Run
I don’t like everything about Batwoman, but I like the art of J. H. Williams III
Jack Kirby My Little Pony

Jane Russell Passes
-“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” Beauty Jane Russell Dies at 89
-Jane Russell
-Jane Russell Dies
-Jane Russell, RIP
-In Memoriam: Jane Russell
-Rants and Raves: Jane Russell

Interesting Stuff Feb. 17, 2011

Practice Babies
-Arthur Explores Lives of Practice Babies Once Raised on College Campuses
-Practice Babies: An Outdated Practice Discovered

Waterworks Museum Opens In Boston
Why my wife doesn’t leave me in charge of decorating
Working Conditions Drive Women from Engineering

Learn Python 3 the Hard Way by Zed A. Saw

I’ve been putting some effort into learning to code in Python. One of the books I turned to is Learn Python 3 the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw.

Shaw leads one through Python coding by providing an example of code in each chapter. You can enter it in your editor and run it. He then provides a set of exercises to break, test, modify or improve the code or come up with something on your own.

Actually, this isn’t a particularly hard way to learn coding. It takes time and effort to work through all the exercises in the book, but learning anything challenging and worthwhile takes time and effort. You’ll learn a lot about Python, what works and how to approach programming computers in general as you work through the book.

I don’t know that I have a good way of elaborating on a book like this. It is a workbook. You work through it slowly, step-by-step at the keyboard of your computer.

If you’re a beginner in programming, this is a good place to start. Python is reputed to be easy to learn, but is a powerful general-purpose language the you can use to do about anything you want. The early chapters and exercises are quite easy and Shaw builds skill upon skill as you proceed. In that sense, Shaw makes it easy, you just have to put in the work.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

How to Build and Android by David F. Dufty

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Shaw, Zed A. Learn Python 3 the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2017.

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Alexander Graham Bell is obviously known for his invention of the telephone. He started his career teaching the deaf to speak using a set of tools developed by his father. This career lead the Scotch-Canadian teacher (Bell became an American citizen in 1882) to meet an American girl, Mabel Hubbard, who he would marry. Helen Elmira Waite tells the story of their life together in Make a Joyful Noise.

Mabel Hubbard lost her hearing at the age of five after being ill with scarlet fever. Her parents were determined that she would continue to speak and understand speech. They were encouraged by news from Germany that schools there were teaching the deaf to speak, but there was little support for it in the United States. Even so, they arranged for a teacher who had the courage to try and Mabel learned to speak and read lips.

Gardiner Hubbard, Mabel’s father, was a businessman and politician in Massachusetts. He became an advocate for the education of the deaf, especially oral education (speech and lip reading). As a child, Mabel testified to a committee of the Massachusetts legislature to demonstrate what a deaf child could learn.

Bell set us a school for the deaf in Boston. Here he was introduced to Mabel, whose family hoped his techniques could help her achieve a more natural speech. He began experimenting with the idea of pushing more signals down telegraph wires, which lead to his invention of the telephone. Gardiner Hubbard became one of Bells backers in these efforts. Even though Bell grew to spend more time developing his telephone, and later testing designs for aviation, he always remained active in education for the deaf.

The Bell family authorized Waite’s biography. The advantage of this is that she had access to family records and the recollections of the Bells’ children and grandchildren. The possible downside is that Waite may have been inclined to present the Bells in the best light. Waite may have been inclined to do this anyway. In his preface, Bell’s son-in-law, Gilbert Grosvenor, mentioned that he and his wife Elsie, Bell’s oldest daughter, had read Waits biography of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan (the Bells knew these ladies and Bell himself encouraged Keller’s parents that she could be educated and connect to the wider world).

Waite does admit to Bell’s stubbornness and sometimes-excessive sense of propriety. If the Hubbards, particularly Mabel, had not pushed, persuaded, coerced, and even tricked Bell into promoting, protecting, and commercializing his invention, he may have tinkered in his shop making a better telephone that no one would use.

Waite’s style is almost conversational; she’s telling a story. I think Make a Joyful Noise is accessible to many younger readers. It is also interesting in that the book is as much about Bell’s private life, particularly his romance and marriage with Mabel, as it is about his invention. In addition, she demonstrates that Mabel was a remarkable and capable person on her own.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Waite, Helen Elmira. Make a Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell. Philadelphia: MacRae Smith Company, 1961.

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Swift, Earl.  The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

The American interstate system is often thought to be a product of the Eisenhower administration.  It’s named for him.  However, the nearly 47,000 miles of interstate were conceived largely before Eisenhower’s presidency.  Even as he observed the Army’s 62-day, cross-country convoy of 1919, engineers were laying the political and technical foundations of national highways.  Earl Swift tells this longer history of the interstates in The Big Roads.

When Americans began calling for better roads, the typical road was mud.  The loudest calls for better roads at the beginning of the 20^th Century were cyclists, especially the colorful Carl Fisher.  Fisher’s most famous work is the Indianapolis Speedway, where a popular 500-mile race continues to be run.  His promotion of the Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast highway (at least on paper), provided an important antecedent to the interstates.

The Lincoln Highway Association operated on a system that informed later highway development.  Rather than build a huge new highway, it selected existing roads for improvement, joining them together in a highway.  New roads were built only if necessary.  The association, a private organization that raised private funds for road improvement and route promotion, was a model for later systems in another way.  The Lincoln Highway was built and improved in pieces by a number of local and state agencies.  The association provided a route, coordination, promotion, encouragement, and sometimes funding, but the road improvements were mostly local works.

Thomas MacDonald, an Iowa highway engineer, was using a similar model as he worked for that state.  He worked with city and county road departments to coordinate improvements leading to a statewide system of decent roads.  When he became director of the Office of Public Roads, he brought this model to the federal highway program, institutionalizing it in the Federal Aid system that began in 1916.

Of course, the U.S. highways that developed under this system were not like modern interstates.  They were open to anyone along them.  In rural areas, they might have been and often still are long ribbons of pavement crossed by the occasional farm road.  In cities, they became crowded with business, especially restaurants and gas stations, that slowed traffic to a crawl.  This problems gave rise to the concept of a limited-access highway, first proposed by Benton MacKaye, the conservationist who conceived the Appalachian Trail.

MacDonald and his engineers began working the concept.  His office produced a report, authored primarily by Hubert Sinclair Fairbanks, that laid out most of the current interstate system in 1938.  Fairbanks supported that idea that better roads might solve problems related to slums and blight in cities.  The recommendations of this report and a follow-up commission were largely implemented in law in 1944, when the term “interstate” first appeared in legislation.

The plans for an interstate system languished during World War II and the years immediately following.  Eisenhower comes into the picture at this time because he strongly supported funding for the interstate system.

Highway engineers saw themselves as providing a good and giving the people what they wanted.  Along the way, as Fairbanks suggested, they could clean up the cities.  As they began to implement their plans in earnest, opposition arose.

Swift gives particular attention to two interstate opponents.  Critic Lewis Mumford provided the intellectual and philosophical foundation for the Freeway Revolt.  Joe Wiles, a black professional and veteran, organized opposition to Interstate 70 in Baltimore which resulted in changes to the plan and help unite the white and black communities in that city.  The federal and state governments began to take seriously the possibility that interstates could have a negative impact on the communities near them

The intestate system, finally completed in the 1990s, is the largest public works project in history.  Now that it is built, it needs to be maintained.  It will be expensive: $225 billion a year for the next 50 years to keep it in good shape.  That is more than twice what we’re spending.  In addition, improved fuel efficiency and reduced driving prompted by the economic downturn has reduced gas tax revenues for the Highway Trust Fund.  In the near future, we may need to find new ways to pay for maintaining our transportation marvel.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

On the Mainlines by William B. Claycomb

Google

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about infrastructure and the environment.

Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Mankind’s attempts to harness rivers have had unintended consequences. Schemes to make land more productive have created deserts. Crops on drained land have produced less food and value than the swamps they displaced. Rivers hemmed in to prevent flooding have flooded more frequently and worse than before.

Pearce isn’t against technology. He sometimes expresses admiration for the dams, canals and other engineering feats about which he writes. However, he’s not impressed when this technology deprives people of the water and wealth it was intended to provide.

Water and wealth is a connection Pearce often makes. For all the lip service paid to the social benefits of grand water schemes, the water tends to go where the money is.

Overall, the world has become more water poor. The poorest have generally lost the most.

In spite of the history, Peace sees hope in the potential of technology that works with the water cycle instead of against it. It is already happening on a small scale where ancient where people are reviving ancient methods of capturing rainwater. Indian farmers are adapting dessert containers for use as a cheap, and more efficient, drip irrigation pipe. On the large scale, river engineers are cutting levees, restoring wetlands and allow river to return to curvy courses. In agriculture, the biggest user and waster of water in much of the world, there is a move to crops that are more appropriate to the locally available rainfall and less dependent on irrigation. Even in Los Angeles, a city known for the lengths it has gone to in order to quench its great thirst in a dry land, activist are seeking to create a more porous city that captures and uses the water that falls there naturally.

To illustrate his points, Pearce travels the world to see the disastrous results of bad water management, the extreme example being the disappearing Aral Sea. He also points out what works, like a restored qanat in Iraq.

You can order this book here.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in Water by Marq de Villiers.

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about civil infrastructure, the environment and other matters of technology.

Burke, James. The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Make the Carburetor Possible—and Other Journeys Through Knowledge. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

Reading The Pinball Effect may leave you feeling like a pinball, bouncing from one thing to another quickly. In places, it’s like a bee, tasting many flowers, but never lingering on one.

Burke is more interested in the links between ideas, innovations and inventions. He touches on many of the important technologies, science, events and movements from a broad section of history, but his subject is the more elusive connections between them.

To Burke, all knowledge is linked, so it doesn’t matter where you start. He starts with hairdressing, which leads to improvements in cruise ships. Before the journey is through, he touches on steam power, the major scientific breakthroughs of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, several political and religious movements of that time, Robin Hood, fairy tales and the telephone. That is just a fraction of the nodes on Burke’s web of knowledge.

Burke further indicates the web-like linkages between ideas by including “gateways” in his book. These marginal notations serve as a print version of a hyperlink. The book bounces around plenty if you read it straight through, so the gateways amount to a gimmick. I wasn’t tempted to read the book in any more than one of the 447 ways made possible by the gateways. If you’d like to flip back to a previous, related section, the gateways will save you a trip to the index.

The book is interesting, especially as a quick survey of the ideas that have shaped our history, especially our science and technology. It is also disorienting. Burke tries to capture the strings on the web of knowledge, the links between ideas, but it seems the one can only really see the nodes, the particular events of history and inventions. It is something like connect-the dots. Burke can show us many dots, and he does, and indicate that they are connected by leaping from one to the next, usually sensibly, but to some degree, it is still up to the reader to draw the connections.

Order this book here.

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Hari Seldon used mathematics to study psychology and society. He developed the science of psychohistory, which he would use to predict future social, economic and political trends. This was utter science fiction when I read Foundation in high school, and doubly so in the 1940s when Isaac Asimov was writing and publishing the stories that would eventually become the novel. (By the way, psychohistory now refers to the application of methods from psychoanalysis to the study of history and social sciences.)

We’ve come a long way. Computers are much more powerful and many of us carry a networked computer around in our pockets much of the day. The computers record a lot of information about us, especially how we use them, and are crunching the numbers so people can anticipate our wants and influence our behaviors.

Stephen Baker gives us a glimpse into that world in his book The Numerati. “Numerati” is Baker’s term for the mathematicians, computer scientists and other math-literate scientists and professionals who are trying to use numbers and equations to describe and predict human behavior.

This type of analysis has applications in many areas. As you might expect, stores, marketers and advertisers are using it to try to sell us stuff. Not only are they trying to persuade us, they are segmenting the market to try to get the highest prices they can for their products from each buyer (and spend less time dealing with die-hard bargain shoppers).

Similarly, politicians are using this type of analysis to reach swing voters. Companies are trying to get the most out of workers.  Health insurance companies are seeking to minimize exposures to risk. Law enforcement is getting all the information it can lay hands on to try to find the terrorist lurking in our midst (finding a needle in a haystack may be easier).

That sounds sinister, and Baker has reservations about the benefits of us sharing so much information, but there are opportunities for those of us who are not numerati, or can’t afford a staff of mathematicians to do our bidding. The numbers that show which workers are most productive could be turned around to help us show our value and potential win a raise or promotion. The numbers that show minute changes in our behavior might help us diagnose and treat diseases earlier and less expensively, or help us live more fully with chronic diseases. They might even match us with a soul mate.

Though science and technology have advanced in the decade since this book was published, the data sciences Baker described are still new. Some of the things we see being done with computers on television or film are still new concepts that don’t work nearly as quickly or accurately as depicted. However, people are working every day to make these technologies better.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Chance by Amir Aczel 

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Fortune’s Formula by William Poundstone

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

How to Build and Android by David F. Dufty 

The Numbers behind NUMB3RS by Keith Devlin & Gary Lorden

The Numbers Game by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot

Rock Breaks Scissors by William Poundstone

Baker, Stephen. The Numerati. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.