Hopefully Interesting

Last Tuesday I faced a horrible dilemma as two books I'd been eagerly awaiting,  Too Like the Lightning  and The Age of the Em,  both came out the same day.  Luckily I was nearly done with the book I'd been reading, The Human Advantage  by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, so I could quickly finish that before moving on and I wasn't tortured by a third option of whether to just put it aside. In some ways this book was a good complement to  The Secret of Our Success  since it's another book about humanity's place in the world.  But this one is much more about where we fit in with other species in terms of our brains and less about the story of how we got there.  The real meat of the book is how the author figured out a good way to measure the number of neurons in a brain and was able to do the first real comparisons across species as to the number of neurons in their heads. The method was surprisingly simple as brilliant ideas sometimes are.  ...

I bet a lot of the people reading this blog have heard of the Drake Equation but, as a recap, the idea is that given some assumptions you should be able to calculate how many alien civilizations there ought to be in the Milky Way.  There are a few problem with the way the equation is put together but in general it's hard make make assumptions strict enough that the galaxy shouldn't have lots of other civilizations.  And now that it's looking like  most stars have planets  that leads to the  scary  conclusion that maybe civilizations just don't last very long. But thankfully I read a book recently that makes me a bit more hopeful.  A while ago I read  Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane which I really ought to have reviewed here because it was an excellent book.  It discusses how mitochondria allowed eukaryotic cells to become much larger than their forebears, the roll they plan in apoptosis or cell suici...