sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXVI

 The latest batch:

still thirsty cat

Our neighbour's cat clearly loves our grotty pond water, as he was back drinking out of another bucket of it today.

footings

The trenches have been filled with concrete, and a few courses of bricks laid.  These will be underground, and support the beam and block floor.

thirsty cat

Our neighbour's cat was clearly thirsty, as he spent quite some time drinking from this bucket of revolting pond water. (Our pond is being drained prior to refurbishment, as part of the conservatory work).

trenches

The same little digger, with a different bucket, is being used to dig out the trenches for the conservatory footings.

clearing the ground

This cute digger was used to clear the ground ready for our new conservatory.  We will use the conservatory as a place to keep one of the telescopes, with a level passage onto a small patio outside, making it a lot easier to move in and out than the previous step up-a-bit-then-down-a-lot through the double doors shown. 

roses grow on you

 The climbing roses are glorious at the moment.

they smell lovely, too

book review: Doughnut Economics

Kate Raworth.
Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist.
Penguin. 2017

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Modern economics is clearly not fit for purpose. It is based on false axioms like unbounded rationality, and individual optimisation. It is too narrow a model, not including many important and linked systems, like the family, the state, and the biosphere. It requires continual exponential growth, which is physically impossible, and is destroying the planet. And its predictions have been repeatedly falsified, from repeated financial crashes to ever-increasing wealth inequalities. So what to do?

Raworth lays out a plan for a better economics, based on the visual image of the doughnut. The outer edge represents an upper level of activity, beyond which activity is unsustainable, due to climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss, pollution, etc. And the inner edge represents a baseline activity, below which people cannot thrive: the need for food, water, shelter, healthcare, education, equality, justice, etc. (I would have liked some acknowledgement that it is necessary to demonstrate that the inner edge is indeed inside the outer edge!)

The doughnut forms a useful image to illustrate the goal of the new economics; Raworth then carefully unpicks the requirements to achieve this, identifying seven facets of the new approach. Each chapter digs into a particular facet, such as the goal of economics, the need for systems thinking, the issue of growth, and more. Starting with a brief review of the historical development of the current theories, Raworth shows how they came about, how that often the originators emphasised they were mere approximations or idealisations, yet that they have subsequently come to be been set in stone. This background serves to demonstrate that changing the models is not somehow going counter to some established truth, but is rather correcting old fundamental errors. So next Raworth outlines how to correct the errors, giving a new model and new requirements. And just when each chapter gets to the point where you are thinking “yes, this is all very well and good, but it would never be possible to make that change”, Raworth gives examples of how that change is already happening in certain (albeit often small and local) cases.

So this is informative, constructive, and hopeful. Everyone should read it, and act on it.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

partial eclipse

It was mostly cloudy during the partial eclipse this morning, but there were a few breaks allowing viewing.  In fact, viewing through thinnish clouds made it visible to the naked eye.

We failed to get the camera attached to the telescope, but we did get some pictures of projections through our cardboard solar telescope (bought for the 1999 total eclipse, so it is lasting well!)

projected image (blue tube is solar telescope), 11:26BST 

book review: Range

David Epstein.
Range: how generalists triumph in a specialized world.
Pan. 2019

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We have all heard about the 10,000 hour rule: that to become an expert, it takes this much repetition and practice. So it seems to make sense that the best way to achieve that expertise is to get a good head start: start young, and to focus. Epstein picks apart that advice here. He has two main arguments, illustrated with copious anecdotes, about why range, or breadth of practice, is just as necessary as depth.

First: 10,000 hours is a long time, requiring a lot of dedicated work. So, you need to be engaged with the topic: if you have not instantly picked your specific area (chess, golf, piano, whatever), you should spend some time surveying the field to discover what you want to do. Epstein give examples of world class sports people who engaged in several different sports initially, and world class musicians who played several instruments at first, before they focussed on one. These people at least had a field, and were just deciding which particular subgenre was for them. He also gives examples of people who tried a much broader range of occupations before discovering their vocation: flitting from job to job, never succeeding, giving up and moving on, until finally they found their life’s work; van Gogh is the best known example given here.

Second: the fields where 10,000 hours of focussed practice works are relatively simple: the practitioner gets immediate feedback on how successful they are, and the topic is constrained, so it is clear where to focus the effort and expertise. However, many disciplines today involve wicked problems: there are no immediate or clear markers of success, the boundary of the problem is ill-defined, and expertise can become constraining, limiting the solution approaches considered. In these circumstances, breadth of experience is an advantage.

Some depth is also needed, of course: too much breadth, and you end up knowing nothing about everything, as opposed to too much depth, where you know everything about nothing. So what are needed are T-shaped people: depth in some area, but breadth across areas, too. I am interesting in interdisciplinary working, and also use this metaphor of T-shaped expertise: in successful interdisciplinary teams, the ‘arms’ of the T join up to bridge between the different areas of expertise.

The book is engagingly written, with many fascinating examples, and covers a broad range of ideas, from the Flynn effect of increasing IQ, to where outsiders have provided insight, to why too much grit may not be a good idea. This latter example discusses a problem with many suggested techniques for success: survivor bias. ‘All CEOs do X’, trumpet these works, implying that if you simply also do X, you too can become a CEO. But to evaluate this claim, you also need to know how many unsuccessful people also do X. After all, presumably all CEOs brush their teeth, eat food, and wear clothes, yet these are not the (sole) reasons for their success. In the case of grit, the successful people studied have indeed grittily persevered, yet Epstein provides examples of others who instead gave up, yet also succeeded, just in something different that fits them better.

And, of course, this book itself also suffers somewhat from survivor bias: showing successful people who nevertheless flitted from job to job before their final success again does not imply that flitting from job to job will result in success. However, there is much interesting material here, and certainly it paints an interestingly different picture from the more mainstream view of the need for specialisation.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.