Long time readers will know that I enjoy reading the books and thoughts written by Christopher Lloyd.

I am subscribed to receive emails from ‘What on Earth Books‘, which add to his thoughts on the themes in his books and this one popped up in my email box today (including the picture above):

WHILST PUTTING the final touches to a new Indian edition of the What on Earth? Wallbook – due out next year – I happened to come across a remarkable seventh century Indian sage called Brahmagupta. He is the supposed inventor of the numbers 1-9 and the first person to use 0 to denote a place value  - a truly magic bullet that has transformed the practice of arithmetic.

Numbers have genuinely changed the world – spreading via the Islamic House of Wisdom in ninth century Baghdad, then to Italy via Leonardo of Pisa (better known as Fibonacci) in the early thirteenth century and finally across the globe with the inexorable rise of Western science.

Our modern lives are now utterly ruled by these 10 abstract symbols. Let’s zoom out for a moment and see how the big picture reveals the gargantuan impact of Brahmagupta’s ingenuity as his new-fangled numbers demonstrate their complete conquest over all three stages of human experience: global, local and personal.

1) Global – just think about what our world would be like without numbers. No computers, no GSM phones, no Internet – everything digital is instantly zapped into oblivion. Now remove all statistics, GDP, probability and betting. Of course there could be no stocks and shares, in fact no modern capitalism. Barter and exchange  - or at least a new Gold Standard  - would replace credit cards, Internet banking and paper money.

In fact, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how artificial civilization as we know it depends almost entirely on these numeric symbols for its very survival.

2) Local - My recent experience with trying to get a small bank loan to help fertilise the green shoots of our successful but embryonic What on Earth Publishing business has caused various scales to fall from my eyes. One is the realisation that having numbers rule our everyday lives is not always something to be cheery about.

Most people agree that today we are in the midst of the worst global economic downturn in living memory. The only genuine way out – so hindsight suggests – is for new entrepreneurial, start up businesses to generate products and services that consumers want and thereby help to restore growth.

To do that, of course, you normally need a bank – the vortices of our financial, number-crunching world.  Banks make and destroy money out of thin air because today money is digits on a screen – not gold or silver (now just imagine how utterly magical our would seem to a medieval alchemist whose lifelong struggle was to turn lead into gold!).

Of course to build and grow a business you need start up capital – perhaps to build a product line or a channel to market. But, thanks to the appalling economic ruin presently engulfing us, banks are nowadays understandably highly risk averse. They require absolute confidence that any loans they make will be repaid.

So I fully expected that my local bank would demand my house as security for our small business loan. Fortunately, I have no mortgage or outstanding personal debts and the amount of the loan I sought was easily less than 10% of the value of my property…

Neil, the slightly rotund and seemingly amiable local branch manager of HSBC, assured me there would be no problem – he just had to run it through the system (an automated number-crunching, credit checking computer system) and then run it by the bank’s credit control team (who as a customer you never get to meet or talk to about your business).

Initially signs were extremely positive.

‘Yes!’ said Neil, “The system says we can lend you the money you want – probably without security!”

Hurrah!

Thinking that the loan was all but in the bag, I paid a large bill to my printers on time rather than make them wait several extra weeks for the loan to come through. What matter, I thought, because it only took our balance about £2,000 into the red, well within the limits of our agreed overdraft facility.

Bu then I did not hear from Neil for two weeks, which seemed strange. I chased him, asking for an update.

“Ahem – I’m afraid we’ve hit a problem,” he sheepishly explained. “Now the system says that since you are now financing your business on debt not revenues, it won’t allow me to lend you anything at all.”

So within a fortnight the bank had gone from offering us tens of thousands of pounds as a loan to refusing to lend us a penny.

I was dumbfounded.

“Are you telling me that if I had not paid my bills on time, you would have made me the loan. But now that I have you won’t?”

Neil apologised saying there was nothing he could do as he couldn’t ‘override the system’.

‘But you can have my house as security…..” By now I was blathering on in disbelief…. ‘But I have no personal debt, no mortgage, and the business has never exceeded its overdraft facility and we have a perfect record for paying its bills …. And you said we are a valued customer…. And the economy needs small growth business like us to revive….and the money will all feed into the local economy…… and.”

But there was no point.

The reality is that Neil has no actual function other than to relay what the system says. He is a charade. He says he loves our business, our books, our mission, our passion. But that’s totally irrelevant. If the computer says no, – then it’s no. End of story.

His final words to me were:

“We cannot not lend to you as your business is not mature enough, we want to see more evidence of income and growth before we will be in a position to lend you anything”.

And then I put down the phone because words are truly useless in the face of a world ruled by abstract numbers.

3) Personal – The personal consequences of a world ruled by number devils are just as horrific. Such simple symbols represent the ultimate abstractions, delicious fodder that appeals exclusively to the left side of our brains. Numbers delight our left-minded neurons because they are fragmented, controllable, solvable and right or wrong. It doesn’t matter that the world these symbols inhabit and construct is utterly illusory and totally divorced from natural reality, because, for the operating system represented by the left side of our brains, control and certainty, is, literally, all that counts.

So no surprises that our right-side emotional, personal, holistic, natural, visual, artistic, empathetic, spiritual selves is drowned out and crushed by the collective tyrannies of GDP, credit scoring, share prices, bank bonuses and interest rates. In fact so utterly is our species now ruled by abstract numeric symbols that, ironically, no body is in control at all!

I guess the global financial crisis has an upside afterall by exposing the left-brain delusion  – underpinned by a world of abstract numbers – so it is finally being laid bare for all to see. Witness how today’s economic forecasts are even worse than our weather forecasts! And as for a pension – forget it – they are a fictitious futuristic mirage!

Brahmagupta, you may have been a sage in your day – and, in the best Indian traditions, your ingenuity was utterly profound. But I am sorry to say that the unintended consequences of what you devised have earned you the hottest seat in my personal Divine Comedy. Located just alongside Neil from HSBC, right in the middle of the burning fiery furnace of hell, is this Indian guru, the number devil himself.

Best Wishes,

-chris

PS: I would normally do a little quote from the post and a link, but the page isn’t displaying properly…

My consideration when deciding how to vote was which choice is the most democratic.  The latest ‘Wallbook Weekly‘ post by Christopher Lloyd explains that democracy first evolved 100 million years ago:

Bees  make a collective colony-wide decision each year on where is the best location for their next nest. This is a critical decision – the very survival of the colony depends on it – so inevitably natural selection has determined that the best possible decision making process is the one that has stood the test of time.

I shan’t go into the intricacies of exactly how the bees do their voting – you can read all out it here or refer to the Honey Bees chapter on pages 152-3 of What on Earth Evolved? 100 Species that Changed the World.

But in summary, a team of scouts will identify various potential nesting sites and then report back the location of each one to the rest of the community by means of their various dances. Other bees check out the sites before returning to the nest and scoring each one based on the length of the dance they perform in the direction of the site they think is best. After about two weeks the site with the best score is the winner and the colony swarms. It has been estimated that using this form of range voting, bees will choose the best location approximately 90% if the time.

If such excellent decision-making already exists in nature, why don’t we humans follow the same pattern in our own fledgling democracies?

One view is that bees have had millions of years to learn – through trial and error – what works best, while human forms of democracy are still very much in their infancy. Another is that modern humans are an arrogant species usually incapable of learning and listening to nature – at least in our modern, urban form.

So what does all this have to do with the choice we made today?

Well, the idea of scoring votes is clearly much closer to AV than is our traditional system of first-past-the-post. And the reason bees use scoring rather than first-past-the-post isn’t just because it tends to make better decisions. It’s also because a colony of bees has evolved to behave like a super organism not an aggregation of individuals.

What that means is that no single bee is precious of its own right to an individual vote, or is in the least bit concerned about how effectively the colonies government suits its own individual self-interest. Instead, bees do what is best for the survival of their genes throughout the generations to come. The absence of fertility in many individual bees is another aspect of this super efficient decision making body. In the same way, individual cells in our bodies sacrifice themselves for the good of our corporate whole through a process called apoptosis. When they do not, we get cancer.

Range voting therefore tends to be about making decisions that are best for the community as a whole – regardless of any individual’s self-interest. Conversely, first-past-the-post systems tend to have more to do with the inalienable right of an individual voter to cast their vote exclusively for a single candidate (or party), regardless of whether that candidate counts for more or less than 50% of the votes cast.

Mother nature always knows best

You can read the full article here.

From BBC Science reporter Paul Rincon:

Japan’s coastline may have shifted by as much as 4m (13ft) to the east following Friday’s 8.9 Magnitude earthquake, according to experts.

Data from the country’s Geonet network of around 1,200 GPS monitoring stations suggest a large displacement following the massive quake.

Dr Roger Musson from the British Geological Survey (BGS) told BBC News the movement observed following the quake was “in line with what you get when you have an earthquake this big”.

The quake probably shifted Earth on its axis by about 6.5 inches (16.5cm) and caused the planet to rotate somewhat faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 millionths of a second.

Japan’s meteorological agency has proposed updating the magnitude of the earthquake to 9.0.

This would make it the joint fifth biggest quake since instrumental records began, but other agencies have not yet followed suit.

Japan lies on the infamous “Ring of Fire”, the line of frequent quakes and volcanic eruptions that encircles virtually the entire Pacific Rim.

The dense rock making up the Pacific Ocean’s floor is being pulled down (subducted) underneath Japan as it moves westwards towards Eurasia.

Dr Brian Baptie, also from the BGS, explained that the quake occurred on the subduction zone along two tectonic plates, the Pacific plate to the east and another plate to the west, which many geologists regard as a continuation of the North American plate.

As the Pacific plate moves westwards underneath Japan, it drags the North American plate downwards and westwards with it.

As an earthquake occurs, the upper plate lurches upwards and eastwards, releasing strain built up as the two plates grind against one another.

In the most recent case, this movement gave a kick to the seabed, displacing a large amount of water and leading to the tsunami waves which devastated coastal areas in the Sendai region.

“The Pacific plate has moved a maximum of 20m westwards, but the amount of movement will vary even within the fault,” said Dr Musson.

“That doesn’t mean the whole country has shifted by that amount because the actual displacement will decay further from the fault.”

Geonet is operated by Japan’s Geographical Survey Institute (GSI). Work on the array began in 1993, and it has now grown into the largest GPS network in the world, according to the GSI.

Its data show a movement eastwards of up to 4m in coastal areas of Japan.

Dr Ken Hudnut, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Pasadena, California, told MSNBC that information resources linking GPS readings to maps, such as driving directions and property records, would have to be changed as a result of the shift.

“Their national network for property boundary definitions has been warped,” he explained. “For ships, the nautical charts will need revision due to changed water depths, too (of about 3ft). Much of the coastline dropped by a few feet, too, we gather.”

Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Christopher Lloyd in his weekly Wallbook post reflects on the US president’s statement that these events remind us of how fragile we are as a species:

Although that’s right, it shouldn’t take disasters like the unfolding trauma in Japan to remind us of our vulnerability. Every hill and mountain top, every cliff edge – all the land we live on ultimately only exists because of the countless catastrophes stimulated by plate tectonics that causes the earth to buckle, split and rotate endlessly around the globe over eons of time.

Chris illustrates his post with a graphic that represents the giant tsunami that was partially responsible for the demise of dinosaurs:

A giant six-mile wide meteorite travelling at 17,000 miles per hour is thought to have been the cause. Just imagine what gargantuan tidal waves (sorry tsunamis) must have occurred after its impact in the ocean, somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico. Recent tsunamis, be they Indonesian or Japanese, would have been the merest ripples by comparison.

Those land-hugging dinosaurs not vaporised by the impact would have been drowned by a tsunami. Those living on the other side of the world would have been less fortunate. They would most likely have suffered a longer trauma before inevitable death as dust in the upper atmosphere blocked out the sun, perhaps for as long as a year – the ultimate power-cut.

Humanity was almost made victim of a different natural disaster, long before the first civilisations emerged. When the Toba super-volcano in Sumatra erupted c. 70,000 years ago it was the most powerful natural disaster to have stuck in 25 million years. On the other side of the world populations of our human species, Homo sapiens, are thought to have dwindled to a few as 2,000 as a result – the tiniest of genetic bottlenecks through which the 7 billion of us alive now are all beneficiaries.

Chris then goes on to say:

The Japanese will pick themselves up, I have no doubt. They did so following the traumas of World War II – as did Germany – becoming one of the most efficient, economically productive nations on Earth, driven by the part competitive, part collaborative human spirit of striving to rebuild and renew.

Even-so for a world leader to have to remind us how fragile we are as a species – past, present or future – sounds to me like another failure of education. Big history constantly tells us how vulnerable we are – how totally shaped our form and culture is by the natural world.

The full post called ‘Waves of Destruction’ can be found here.

Today saw the  launch of Christopher Lloyd’s latest book in the What on Earth series, it is called What on Earth? Wallbook. You might recall my recent Blog post on one of his previous books.

The new book is an interesting concept because you can read it like a book or display it on a wall.  It contains 13.7 billion years of history in timeline which is just over 7 feet long and features over 1000 pictures.  Chris sees the timeline as a visual way of taking in the enormous, but compelling story of planet, life and people over the last 13.7 billion years.

TWELVE streams of colour provide the backdrops along a timeline on which all the major events of natural and human history unfold. Space, Earth, Sky, Sea, Land and Humanity account for the story of evolution while Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australasia convey the rise and fall of human civilisations.

At the top of the timeline is a series of globes. To begin with they track the movement of the world’s continental plates which collide into a single supercontinent, and then prise apart again, a geological cycle that repeats over millions of years.

Later on, these globes reflect a similar rhythm with the rise and fall of human civilisations. Empires, like the Earth’s crust, erupt, collide and crumple, but their converging and splitting happens on a far tighter scale where centimetres measure centuries not millions of years…

On the back is a 7,000 narrative guide that tells the story in words, cross referring the most seismic moments in global history with the timeline overleaf…

You can find out more about the book and the concept behind it on the newly launched dedicated web site.

In conjunction with the book launch Chris launched an appeal for people to help him compile a dossier of strategies that could and should be employed to engage our nation’s young minds with a thirst for learning:

Please send me your best and worst memories of education.

Perhaps you are being educated now or maybe you are an educator? If so, what engages you in learning? What do you find motivating and inspiring? What in your experience makes an effective learning environment – at home or school? How should the curriculum be organised? What is the right balance between learning and testing?

I am committed to collating and presenting these ideas, along with a copy of the What on Earth? Wallbook, to Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, at the Conservative Party Conference in early October. I shall also post a copy here at www.whatonearthbooks.com for you to download.Tell your friends about it – involve anyone you know who has an interest in eradicating the cancer of boredom from our schools. Who knows? Perhaps officials at the Department of Education will then turn their heads to making sense of our blue-sky thinking and convert at least some of our creative ideas into practical policy.

Please email your ideas to chris@whatonearthbooks.com

Synopsis (from book cover):
Why have creatures evolved as they are? which species have had the biggest impact on the world we live in? Where does humanity fit in?

Christopher Lloyd leads us on an exhilarating journey, from the birth of life on the early Earth to the present day, as he seeks answers to these fundamental questions. Along the way he reveals the extraordinary stories of the fifty most successful species that have evolved in the wild – such as slime, sea scorpions, dragonflies and dung beetles – followed by fifty species that have thrived as a result of man’s interference – from dogs, cats and camels to yeast, coffee and bananas.

The 100, species are finally scored and ranked in order of their impact on the planet, life and people. Which species comes top? How do life forms adapt to a world dominated by nearly 7 billion humans? What on earth evolved? exposes the struggle between the forces of nature and the mind of mankind for control of life, and the earth itself.

Review:
What on Earth Evolved? is the follow on volume from What on Earth Happened?, you can see my review of the first book here.

The book takes a unique approach to science, history, geography and nature by looking at 50 species that evolved in the wild without intervention and 50 species that have thrived due to man’s intervention.  All types of species from large to small are included such as – algae, virus, fish, plants, animals and insects.

The book which is full of interesting and surprising facts is accessible and educational and will appeal to both the young and the old.  The aim is to give an enriched understanding of history through the eye of the natural world and I think it achieves this aim.  I found it very readable from cover to cover, but it is also a book you can just dip into or refer back to using the index and chapter headings.  Most  pages have colour illustrations which for me added to the enjoyment of the book.

The final part of the book where it lists the rank of impact of the 100 species chosen into a table of influence is designed to stimulate thought and debate.  I can imagine sitting up late into the night with my friends discussing some of the species included in the book.  One such topic may be the how the export of roses from the heart of Kenya has reduced a lakes’ water level  3 meters below minimum safety levels.  Water accounts for 90% of a cut flower and these roses are being exported from one of the driest places on the planet to the worlds wettest countries in Europe.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the fascinating lecture that launched the book, you can see my review of the launch here.

More information can be found on the book’s dedicated website, where you can also access the list of the 100 species ranked in order.

Note:  The review is based on the hardback version, an abridged paperback version has recently been published.

On the way to the Royal Institution, I found myself in a military book shop and ended up buying a military history book, which is most unlike me.  A visit to the museum in the Ri was a must and, amongst other things, I learned that 10 elements were discovered in the institute and also that 14 Nobel prize winners conducted research there.  Just inside the museum there was a visual display of the periodic table showing the 10 elements that were discovered and which lit up in time to the Tom Lehrer song Elements.  I still can’t get the tune out of my head.

The real reason for the Ri visit, the launch of Christopher Lloyd’s new book “What on Earth Evolved“, was great fun. The theatre was small and intimate and the people attending were diverse; from the adorable school girls all dressed neatly in their uniforms complete with hats to the obvious older and wiser Ri regulars.  The atmosphere was vibrant and Chris gave a fascinating talk summarising the themes and ideas behind his new book.

Chris explained that 100 species feature in the book.  The first 50 evolved naturally in the wild before the age of man but the second 50 had evolved because of man’s intervention.  The talk was complete with props, audience participation and overhead visuals.  The 100 species are all ranked in order of their impact and survival on the planet.  So where does man feature in the list?  He comes in at number 6, the number one slot is taken by the humble earthworm.  I am able to confirm personally that earthworms are very resilient but we won’t go into that further!

One fascinating fact I learned is that when individual bits of green slime were put into a maze with food placed at each entrance, the pieces joined up, found the shortest route between the entrances of the maze and shared the food.

Following the talk there were questions from the audience such as ‘Is reason enough to stop global warming?’ and ‘How does God fit into all of this?’

David Haines of Singtastic had been asked by Chris to write a song especially for the book launch.  He wrote two because he didn’t want to go along the patter patter route of the elements song.  I noticed as I went to the Singtastic site to get their link that I appear in one of the photos!!!

Chris has a great depth of knowledge, understanding and insight.  It was a privilege to hear him speak and also lovely to be able to have a quick chat with him during the book signing after the event.

Now I need to finish reading Chris’s book so I can tell you what I think about it

I will leave you to enjoy the songs from the evening, along with the artwork from the book…