Book Reviews

Summary: A suburban housewife and her two friends find out that their neighborhood struggles (PTA, school year books, crazy neighbors, etc) all might be connected to a much deeper problem than they could have expected.

I am very careful with my purchases of books.  Because I aways have a few (hundred) books that I could fall back to reading from my library, I tend to only buy books when they are on sale or I really have a specific interest.  But I also tend to always pick up free Audible credits or promotional books.  Recently there was a $10 promotional credit for Audible.  And I used it to buy audio companions to books that I already had on Kindle, but I had not ever gotten around to reading.  I try to be adventurous because after all I didn’t pay for the credit, I might as well go out of my standard reading practice.

As I have said recently, nothing lately has really been pricking my interest.  Usually when I get in this mood I need to find something funny.

Citizen Insane was billed as a funny cozy mystery.  It is about Barb, a suburban housewife, mother of three and wife of an FBI agent that is a dead ringer for George Clouney.  This is the second book in a series (didn’t realize that when I picked it up, but the first book, Take the Monkeys and Run is free on Kindle). The books in this series are relatively short (less than 200 pages) and funny (almost farcical) look at suburban life.

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Summary: It is ignorance, not knowledge that really drives science.

Stuart Firestein is a professor of Neurobiology and a researcher.  At one point he realized that he loved doing research and coming up with new things to research and questions to ask.  But when he taught his upper level undergrads about Neurobiology he tended to focus not on the questions and what was unknown and where the science was going, but on the facts.

He realized that this gave students the impression that what was important was gaining a foothold in the facts so that they could grasp the concepts of the field.  But what he needed to be teaching them was not the facts (although they did need basic information and concepts that were important), he needed to be teaching them wonder and sparking the creative ideas of his students and helping them understand that no matter how much we will learn, that the very fact of learning opens up new areas of ignorance so that there will never be a point when science has solved all the questions of particular field.

The book is split into two large sections, the first is a description of what Ignorance is all about. Eventually, Firestein started teaching a class on ignorance. He would bring in prominent scientists in their field and talk about what was unknown, what areas were driving their research, what things that scientist would love to know, but can’t because of limitations of equipment or observation.  Essentially, the scientists talked about all the areas of their field that they were ignorant of and how that was driving their science.

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This book is a loose collection of interviews the authors had with ten economists about the free market–its history, future, and contemporary intersection with modern society around the world.

At the beginning, the authors differentiate between what they call Economics 1.0 and Economics 2.0. The former is how economics has been studied for most of its history–in terms of commodities and the “scarce allocation of resources.” The latter is less about raw materials or tracking the swings in supply and demand, and more about the value of information.

Another way of looking at it is that Economics 1.0 studies the hardware in a computer, and Economics 2.0 studies the “software layer” containing the intangible things that have economic value–and the social and political institutions that are a necessary condition for this sort of value to develop. Economics 2.0 explains that when I purchase a new car today, most of the sale price is not going toward the physical materials making up the vehicle; rather, I am paying for all the knowledge and information accumulated over time that go into that vehicle: the physics required to design an aerodynamic body, the electrical components and computer systems that make a thousand minor calculations and adjustments per second as I speed onward, the insights required to design an anti-lock brake system, or airbags, or rear-view cameras, or electric engines.

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