Recommended: The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror

Bernard Lewis has written a number of very good books about the Middle East. This one, published in 2004, is especially important, because it is evident from the events of the past several decades that the American public in general, as well as the political elite in Washington, don't really understand the world view of the so-called "Arab street", and that has resulted in a number of expensive embarrassments and missteps in our foreign policy.  We tend (quite naturally) to think that the Arab world sees the world more or less the way we do.  But that is not the case - they see a very different world. Lewis does a good job of introducing us to that world view, and the historical antecedents that have shaped it.

Recommended: The Why Axis

The field of economics has been dominated for decades by academic theorists pumping out clever equations to explain economic activity and shape public policy. Gneezy and List represent a new, and probably much more promising approach – going out and doing real-world experiments to see how people actually behave, as opposed to how some theorist in an office thinks they behave. Ever wonder just why people are prejudiced – is it really animus or just economic self-interest?  Ever wonder what really would motivate ghetto kids to apply themselves in school? Ever wonder how to get people to give more generously to charitable causes? This book begins to give the answers, based on real data, not abstract theory.  This is a great book, and a welcome breath of fresh (data-driven) air in a field too often informed by ideology rather than reality.

Reminder: A full list of my recommended books, with their ISBN numbers, can be found in the book list on the sidebar to the right of this posting.

Recommended: Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

Not many years ago, no one knew if planets were common or rare. Now we know they are common, much more common than early estimates had predicted. That increases the odds that there is alien life out there among the stars, though it may mostly be very simple life. Lee Billings surveys the newly-exploding field of planet-hunting, describing in ways accessible to everyone – technical and nontechnical alike – the problems encountered in detecting distant planets and the emerging solutions. He also gives wonderful sketches of some of the main personalities involved. This book is both technically fascinating and spiritually inspiring. It brings back some of the excitement of the early space age, and it reminds one that life on our little planet is precarious, and we ought to pay more attention to preserving it. A great book!

Fad issues

It’s amazing to me how the public can get so worked up about nonsensical issues they don’t even understand. We seem to have issue fads just like we have diet fads.

One of the current hot issues is about genetically-modified foods. Hello?  Nature has been making genetically modified foods for about 4 billion years, and still does so all around the world every day in every species  – that’s what evolution is all about (except for those whose religious ideology requires them, against all evidence, to believe otherwise).  The difference is that nature does it randomly, with sometimes terrible results (think flu or ebola or HIV epidemics), while humans do it carefully in an attempt to do something useful, like increase the vitamin or protein content of a food.

When microwave ovens first came out there was a big fuss about how dangerous the radiation was, mostly by people who didn’t know the difference between ionizing radiation (nuclear weapons) and non-ionizing radiation (light bulbs, fireplaces, microwave ovens). This GM issue is about as silly as that one was.