David Attenborough

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The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world. Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus’ Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: ‘When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus’ Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice?

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Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed. My main authority for the cargo cults is David Attenborough’s Quest in Paradise, which he very kindly presented to me. The pattern is the same for all of them, from the earliest cults in the nineteenth century to the more famous ones that grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War. It seems that in every case the islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white immigrants to their islands, including administrators, soldiers and missionaries.

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It is these incomprehensible actions that are the rituals employed by the white man to persuade the gods to send the cargo. If the native wants the cargo, then he too must do these things. It is striking that similar cargo cults sprang up independently on islands that were widely separated both geographically and culturally. David Attenborough tells us that Anthropologists have noted two separate outbreaks in New Caledonia, four in the Solomons, four in Fiji, seven in the New Hebrides, and over fifty in New Guinea, most of them being quite independent and unconnected with one another. The majority of these religions claim that one particular messiah will bring the cargo when the day of the apocalypse arrives.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

Josef the cockroach explained the insect world’s hostility to the show. “It’s not so long ago you seemed to seek to understand us. You were watching The World about Us and Life on Earth, sympathetic portrayals of the natural world, produced by your brilliant BBC, surely the pinnacle of human achievement. David Attenborough avoided clumsy anthropomorphism or the tendency to attribute morality or consciousness to creatures such as Franzi and I, who are essentially automatons driven by need and instinct. But even all those sentimental computer-animated films where a succession of Jewish American stand-up comedians make various innocent insect species into unwilling vehicles for their own urban sexual neuroses seem like War and Peace compared with I’m a Celebrity … It represents humanity at its worst.”

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Their extension of a helping hand towards BBC3 is merely a greedy digital land-grab disguised as an act of philanthropy, no more convincing that Vladimir Putin’s concerned humanitarian excursions into ailing former Soviet states. To accommodate Farty’s empire-building ambition in what was a publicly owned arena would be a betrayal of everything the BBC stood for, worse than the David Attenborough baby polar bear scandal and when those actors all mumbled in that historical drama last year. If I wasn’t already dead I would kill myself.” Can it be right that Conservative cuts to the licence fee weaken areas of the BBC so that they can no longer be serviced fully, and yet these areas still remain attractive to private companies?

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Even though his penis had been mutilated by the culture secretary John Whittingdale’s arsenal of sickeningly modified clockwork toys, his testicles remained largely unscathed by the ferocious musical apes and dancing teeth, and he conceded that “far from being a cut, this is the right deal for my genitals in difficult economic circumstances”. Last week, I found myself watching a repeat of the May meeting of President Obama and the naturalist and former BBC programme director David Attenborough. Slowly and patiently, Attenborough made the case for nature. Its value was beyond the monetary. It was where our imaginations lived. And once it was gone it was gone. He could have been making the case for the BBC. * * * “Why do I always feel with Stewart Lee that whatever point he is making (often ones I agree with) comes second to trying to impress everyone with how clever he is being?”

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

We have forgotten that all of these important issues – in fact, every issue – resides within the most important issue bar none: ‘the planet’. With a broken planet, we will have no gay rights, no feminism, no respect for trans people, no attempt at fairness and justice for people of colour. What we will have is a fight to survive and a lot of violence. It’s only recently that voices such as that of British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough have talked of the collapse of civilizations and societies, or what food insecurity will mean for us, and for generations to come. In February 2019, Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam put it bluntly: ‘War, mass mental breakdown, mass torture, mass rape.’ In all this, our relatively new societal values will be threatened.

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The rape threats that any women of profile receive online, and the racism that is so common, speak to something that has been lying dormant in the murky depths of our society but is now stirring again. Brutality is only kept at bay by the rule of law and by there being a critical number of educated people, in work, healthy and with enough money and food to keep them invested in society. When people cannot feed their families, then the façade of law and order evaporates. When Sir David Attenborough talks of the collapse of civilizations, this is what it means: violence that most of us in the privileged West cannot even comprehend. There is a terrible precedent. Berlin in the 1930s had a flourishing queer community. A man called Magnus Hirschfeld campaigned for rights at his Institute of Sexual Science and conducted the first gender-reassignment surgeries.

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We would be among the last to hold out, together with a solitary fourteen-year-old and a man in a wheelchair. Two nights previously, I was hand-fasted with – and to – my partner at Parliament Square. Our hands were held together with love and superglue, the moon shining over Westminster Abbey. Courting in the middle of a rebellion. David Attenborough’s climate-change programme was being screened by Extinction Rebellion, the ghostly scaffolding sheeting at the Palace of Westminster a backdrop used as a projection screen. An XR banner – ‘Beyond Politics’ – was flying in the trees. Not just courting but courting arrest. We were disappointed that night.

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak by Rosie Wilby

Airbnb, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Santayana, Jeremy Corbyn, Kintsugi, lateral thinking, lockdown, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social contagion, social distancing, zero-sum game

Then the screen switches to a calming image of what looks like the African savanna. This must be the control clip to return me to a ‘normal’ arousal state. I hear a familiar voice, which immediately transports me back to the innocence of my nerdy nature-loving childhood. ‘As the seasons change and the rain comes, the grasses spring up once again.’ Bloody hell…It’s David Attenborough in the sex lab. Before I get too engrossed in the fast-motion shots of greenery emerging from the desert plains, my visual panorama alters. This time, a man is lying back on a leather sofa fondling his erect penis. ‘At least that’s a wipeable surface,’ I think. Mind you, there’s something about this man with his dark, playful eyes and firm stomach that connects with me.

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Quite what any forty-something straight woman would be doing bunking off work and pretending to be gay just to get paid ninety pounds for watching dimly lit erotica in physically uncomfortable conditions I don’t know. I can get paid double that for standing on stage being funny for twenty minutes. This weird procedure already feels like it is taking hours, not helped by my procrastination. I give him four out of ten, one point less than the woman. During the next David Attenborough clip, I fleetingly remember a chapter from the book What Do Women Want? The author, New York Times journalist Daniel Bergner, interviews a female scientist who has conducted similar experiments over a number of years with largely heterosexual participants. Where men tend to have a strong correlation between what they are physically turned on by and what they say they’re turned on by, women often have a complete disconnect between the two.

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‘We’ll just zoom in a bit…. oh yes, look… This bit corresponds to the first clip of a woman…and this peak here corresponds to…probably another one of the women…she’s been very popular…oh that’s actually one of the men haha…’ ‘I quite liked him!’ ‘You did! Although on average I think the arousal is just slightly higher during the female clips.’ ‘…and what about during David Attenborough?’ ‘Haha, oh we don’t measure during the control clip.’ ‘Oh that’s a shame.’ ‘I recorded this data with a pair of twins, both lesbians,’ Luke proffers, opening up more graphs. I gulp slightly as I observe the Himalayan peaks of desire achieved by this horny duo. This is quite different to my feeble undulations.

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, David Attenborough, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, sharing economy, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sustainable-tourism, tech billionaire, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, walkable city

The recommended place to stay is the Mweya Safari Lodge (www.mweyalodge.com); it has a pool – need we say more? 5 Refugio Nacional de Fauna Silvestre Ostional, Costa Rica Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of olive ridley turtles come here to nest each year: keep the kids up late to watch this mass nesting and they will be wide-eyed for days. Your mini David Attenborough can also seek out urchins and anemones in the tidal pools, clock ghost crabs on the beach and indulge in a spot of birdwatching, all within easy reach of the hatching turtles. And then of course there’s the rest of Costa Rica to explore with more turtles, one or two crocodiles, some amazing butterflies and plenty of opportunities for high adrenaline fun such as zip lining through forest canopies and white-water rafting.

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Discover Melbourne’s best wheelchair-friendly restaurants, enjoy spectacular scenery along the Great Ocean Road, and visit one of the world’s best zoos as well as many of the parks that progressive Parks Victoria is opening up to visitors with access issues. Download our free e-book at www.lonelyplanet.com/accessible-melbourne and plan your outdoors adventures here: http://parkweb.vic.gov.au/accessibility. 5 Galápagos & Amazonia, Ecuador So you’ve been watching David Attenborough and thought you’d never be able to access such places in the flesh? Wrong! Lenín Moreno, paraplegic vice president of Ecuador (2006–13) and Nobel Peace Prize nominee did amazing work to improve the lives of disabled people throughout his country. Quito may not be as accessible as the average Western city, but largely thanks to Moreno inroads have been made.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Personal and environmental goals are interlinked, mutually reinforcing, and they both need our attention. A regenerative mindset bridges the gap between how nature works (regeneration) and how we humans have organized our lives (extraction).2 It allows us to “redesign human presence on Earth”3 driven by human creativity, problem solving, and fierce love of this planet. Sir David Attenborough, one of the most renowned naturalists of our time, has warned us that “the Garden of Eden is no more.” We agree. That is why we now have to create a Garden of Intention—a deliberately regenerative Anthropocene. Instead of strip-mined mountains, destroyed forests, and depleted oceans, imagine millions of rewilding projects covering over a billion hectares of forests, regenerating wetlands and grasslands, and restoring coral farms in all tropical oceans.

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This list is vast, and it would be impossible for us to mention everyone here, but we would like to pay special mention to Alejandro Agag, Lorena Aguilar, Fahad Al Attiya, Ken Alex, Ali Al-Naimi, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, Christiane Amanpour, Chris Anderson, Mats Andersson, Monica Araya, John Ashford, David Attenborough, AURORA, Mariana Awad, Peter Bakker, Vivian Balakrishnan, Ajay Banga, Greg Barker, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Nicolette Bartlett, Oliver Bäte, Kevin Baumert, Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Dean Bialek, Sue Biniaz, Fatih Birol, Michael Bloomberg, May Boeve, Gail Bradbrook, Piers Bradford, Richard Branson, Jesper Brodin, Tom Brookes, Jerry Brown, Sharan Burrow, Felipe Calderon, Kathy Calvin, Mark Campanale, Miguel Arias Cañete, Mark Carney, Clay Carnill, Andrea Correa do Lago, Anne-Sophie Cerisola, Robin Chase, Sagarika Chatterjee, Tomas Anker Christensen, Pilita Clark, Helen Clarkson, Jo Confino, Aron Cramer, David Crane, John Danilovich, Conyers Davis, Tony de Brum, Bernaditas de Castro Muller, Brian Deese, Claudio Descalzi, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paula DiPerna, Elliot Diringer, Sandrine Dixson Decleve, Ahmed Djoghlaf, Claudia Dobles Camargo, Alister Doyle, José Manuel Entrecanales, Hernani Escobar, Patricia Espinosa, Emmanuel Faber, Nathan Fabian, Laurent Fabius, Emily Farnworth, Daniel Firger, James Fletcher, Pope Francis, Gail Gallie, Grace Gelder, Kristalina Georgieva, Cody Gildart, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Kimo Goree, Ellie Goulding, Mats Granryd, Jerry Greenfield, Ólafur Grímsson, Sally Grover Bingham, Emmanuel Guerin, Kaveh Guilanpour, Stuart Gulliver, Angel Gurria, Antonio Guterres, William Hague, Thomas Hale, Brad Hall, Winnie Hallwachs, Simon Hampel, Kate Hampton, Yuval Noah Harari, Jacob Heatley-Adams, Julian Hector, Hilda Heine, Ned Helme, Barbara Hendricks, Jamie Henn, Anne Hidalgo, François Hollande, Emma Howard Boyd, Stephen Howard, Arianna Huffington, Kara Hurst, Mo Ibrahim, Jay Inslee, Natalie Isaacs, Maria Ivanova, Lisa Jackson, Lisa Jacobson, Dan Janzen, Michel Jarraud, Sharon Johnson, Kelsey Juliana, Yolanda Kakabadse, Lila Karbassi, Iain Keith, Mark Kenber, John Kerry, Sean Kidney, Jim Kim, Ban Ki-moon, Lise Kingo, Richard Kinley, Sister Jayanti Kirpalani, Isabelle Kocher, Caio Koch-Weser, Marcin Korolec, Larry Kramer, Kalee Kreider, Kishan Kumarsingh, Rachel Kyte, Christine Lagarde, Philip Lambert, Dan Lashof, Penelope Lea, Guilherme Leal, Bernice Lee, Jeremy Leggett, Thomas Lingard, Andrew Liveris, Hunter Lovins, Mindy Lubber, Miguel Ángel Mancera Espinosa, Gina McCarthy, Stella McCartney, Bill McDonouh, Catherine McKenna, Sonia Medina, Bernadette Meehan, Johannes Meier, Maria Mendiluce, Antoine Michon, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Amina Mohammed, Jennifer Morris, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, Kumi Naidoo, Nicole Ng, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, Indra Nooyi, Michael Northrop, Tim Nuthall, Bill Nye, Jean Oelwang, Rafe Offer, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Kevin O Hanlon, René Orellana, Ricken Patel, Jose Penido, Charlotte Pera, Jonathan Pershing, Stephen Petricone, Stephanie Pfeifer, Shannon Phillips, Bertrand Piccard, François-Henri Pinault, John Podesta, Paul Polman, Ian Ponce, Carl Pope, Jonathon Porritt, Patrick Pouyanne, Manuel Pulgar Vidal, Tracy Raczek, Jairam Ramesh, Curtis Ravenell, Robin Reck, Geeta Reddy, Dan Reifsnyder, Fiona Reynolds, Ben Rhodes, Alex Rivett-Carnac, Chris Rivett-Carnac, Nick Robins, Jim Robinson, Mary Robinson, Cristiam Rodriguez, Matthew Rodriguez, Kevin Rudd, Mark Ruffalo, Artur Runge-Metzger, Karsten Sach, Claudia Salerno Caldera, Fredric Samama, Richard Samans, M.

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis by Elaine Morgan

classic study, David Attenborough, lateral thinking, sexual politics

Hundreds of communications came from general readers who sent letters of appreciation, queries, ideas, and cuttings. I would like to thank them all. Among the scientists who supplied comments, information, advice, or permission to use their material, I would like to thank the following (inclusion in this list does not imply any degree of agreement with the aquatic hypothesis): Leslie Aiello, Sir David Attenborough, Michael Chance, Bruce Charlton, Michael Crawford, Stephen Cunnane, Richard Dawkins, Frans de Waal, Christopher Dean, Daniel Dennett, Derek Denton, Robin Dunbar, Derek Ellis, Peter Rhys Evans, Karl-Erich Fichtelius, Robert Foley, John Gribbin, David Haig, Kevin Hunt, Chris Knight, Robert Martin, Desmond Morris, Michel Odent, Caroline Pond, Vernon Reynolds, Graham Richards, P.

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Chris Knight has discussed this in his book Blood Relations, subtitled ‘Menstruation and the Origins of Culture’.10 It deals, among other things, with the phenomenon of synchronised menstruation, and the curious circumstances that the average length of the human menstrual cycle is 29 1/2 days—exactly the same length as a lunar month. Lunar biorhythms are not unknown in nature. They are found in several species of fish and in some species of frogs and toads. They are commonest in marine creatures: seahorses, for example, only lay their eggs at full moon. And when Sir David Attenborough decided to film horseshoe crabs he had to take into consideration not only the right season of the year to turn up on the beach. He also—like the Christian Church working out the date of Easter—needed to know the phases of the moon. ‘Then,’ he recorded, ‘on three successive nights when the moon is full and the tides are high, hundreds and thousands emerge from the sea.’11 When I considered these problems, I could think of no way in which it would have been advantageous for an aquatic ape to synchronise with the tides, unless perhaps on the assumption that the gestation period is a multiple of the menstrual one.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

In the 1970s we ceased to be illuminated by the qualities of the natural world and began to see and hear nature through televisual images; often what we saw was filtered or distorted by the thoughts of the presenter. Sometimes we were lucky and saw the real world of nature through the eyes of Sir David Attenborough, but too often it was a politicized account of pollution from industry. Those who were green this way had feelings of guilt and regret; increasing knowledge that once brought wisdom, joy and understanding now confirmed that our carbon footprints were blacker than sin. From childhood on I have thought of myself as someone who wanted to live naturally and respect wildlife and wilderness.

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Kump, Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (DK Publishing, Inc., New York, 2008) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report (Island Press, Washington, DC, 2005) Sir Crispin Tickell, Climate Change and World Affairs (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986) 3 Consequences and Survival Sir David Attenborough, Life on Earth (HarperCollins, London, 1979) Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (W. H. Freeman, Oxford and San Francisco, 1982) Brian Fagan, The Long Summer (Granta, London, 2005) Richard Fortey, The Earth (Harper Collins, London, 2004) Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (Bloomsbury, London, 2006) Tim Lenton and W. von Bloh, ‘Biotic Feedback Extends Lifespan of Biosphere’, Geophysical Research Letters (2001) James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (Allen Lane/Penguin, London, 2006) Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry (Transworld, London, 2006) H.

No. More. Plastic.: What You Can Do to Make a Difference – the #2minutesolution by Martin Dorey

carbon footprint, David Attenborough, food miles, microplastics / micro fibres

This book shows you what you can do to help. Starting today, with just 2 minutes of your time. Open this book with your children, give it to your friends. Spread the word. With its smart, surprising and simple solutions, we can all make a genuine difference. ‘We could actually do something about plastic right now’ David Attenborough. Together we can fix this. #2minutesolution Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version. Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances. About the Author Martin is a writer, surfer and beach lover. He founded the Beach Clean Network with Tab Parry in 2009 and started the #2minutebeachclean hashtag in 2013 after North Atlantic storms left UK beaches littered with plastic rubbish.

My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

airport security, banking crisis, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, credit crunch, dark matter, David Attenborough, Jon Ronson, Live Aid, out of africa, pez dispenser, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, traveling salesman, urban planning

It’s notoriously difficult to get pandas to mate, and some zoos even resort to showing them videos of ‘panda porn’. Well, that’s not going to help conception, that’s just going to increase his late-night trips to get ‘more bamboo’ while he sneaks into the warden’s office to rifle through DVDs of David Attenborough. They’re doing all sorts of weird stuff with genetics these days. They’re unravelling the DNA code, cutting it up and splicing it together, implanting it and interbreeding species. They’re putting pigs’ hearts into humans instead of meat pies. They’re putting DNA from beavers into elephants and now huge rogue beavers are going on the rampage and elephants are building dams before they go off to find the beavers’ graveyard.

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I’m probably one of the only people in the country who knows this, but Leicester station has the most purgatorial cafÉ in the UK. It has the usual depravity of fruit machines and Formica tables but seasons it with a set of framed photos running all around the walls of famous people who come from Leicester. Gary Lineker, he’s from Leicester. So is David Attenborough and the snooker player Willy Thorne. The fact that none of these people chose to stay in Leicester is irrelevant. So what if they thought that it was better to move away from Leicester? The final face is Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. It says a lot when a town takes pride in being the birthplace of a hugely deformed circus freak.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science by Will Storr

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, full employment, George Santayana, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jon Ronson, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Simon Singh, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, the scientific method, theory of mind, twin studies

We are incapable: ever since Eve’s crime, we’ve been born this way – outlaw failures, fucking and sinning with callous abandon as the planet we’ve been given withers around us. As his talk progresses, two further facts become apparent about John Mackay. One, he likes to speak in questions. Two, he has a bit of a thing about David Attenborough. ‘I know a question David Attenborough wouldn’t ask,’ he says at one point. ‘If creation is true, what would the evidence be?’ Of all the questions ever, this is probably John’s favourite because he believes that the evidence is on the side of God. By education and by thinking, Mackay considers himself to be a scientist.

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Mackay, a geologist and geneticist who seems to possess an eager and audacious intellect, has most recently crossed ideologies with iconic atheist Professor Richard Dawkins – who, not incidentally, once told the Guardian newspaper, ‘People like Mackay thrive by drip-feeding misinformation … we cannot afford to take creationism lightly. It’s not an amusing diversion, but a serious threat to scientific reason.’ John recalls the meeting with a contemptuous sigh. ‘He was trying to be David Attenborough,’ he says. ‘I think it’s because he’s been getting so much flak. People are sick of him. Do you know, if Dawkins is speaking at a university before me, the evolutionists get so disgusted with him they’ll double my crowd? But I led him to a point where he said, “Evolution has been observed, it just hasn’t been observed while it’s been happening.”

A Book for Her by Bridget Christie

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, Costa Concordia, David Attenborough, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, obamacare, Rubik’s Cube, Russell Brand, sexual politics, TED Talk

So I’ll just quickly explain to you what I found out feminism means, and then I’ll get on with all the more interesting stuff about cheese and ants. I’m a feminist. All this means is that I am extremely hairy and hate all men, both as individuals and collectively, with no exceptions. Nope. Not even Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen/Paul Hollywood/Ronnie Corbett/Trevor McDonald/David Attenborough or John Nettles circa Bergerac are good enough for me. Oh … it could’ve been you, John. Oh, John. Those blue eyes, those blue jeans, that burgundy car … Oh, John. You could’ve been the thinking feminist’s crumpet, John. But Jersey has no gender equality laws, John. Oh, John, what a wasted opportunity.

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If I was going to talk about attitudes towards women, the conduit I used to facilitate me doing so needed to make more sense. I remembered how clever ants were and thought that if I dressed up as an ant, and talked about what it was like being an ‘ant’ comedian, audiences might be more willing to buy into it. Everyone knows how intelligent ants are. I mean, they’ve been communicating with David Attenborough for years. It’s just a shame he still hasn’t learnt ant for ‘Fuck off, mate, we’re really busy here’, which is what they’ve been saying to him since the 1960s. An ant talking about being an ant comedian would be far less alienating to a comedy audience than a woman talking about being a woman comedian.

Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton

All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Bayesian statistics, biofilm, bioinformatics, classic study, David Attenborough, Ernest Rutherford, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, ocean acidification

This is computerized tomographic scanning, often shortened to CT scanning, in which the scanner captures X-ray images of the internal structure of the bone or rock, and these can be viewed as if they are a stack of slices, spaced maybe fractions of a millimetre apart. This means that museum preparators do not have to risk damaging delicate specimens, say a dinosaur embryo inside its egg, instead capturing a perfect 3D image. Back in the lab, clearing more rock from the plaster jacket. A typical day in the SEM lab in Bristol: David Attenborough pops by in 2017 to see Fiann Smithwick at work. CT scanning of fossils has only become commonplace in the twenty-first century, when scanners, developed first for medical use, became cheap enough that every university or museum could afford one. We commonly scan fossils up to the size of a magnum bottle of champagne; above that, and they have to go to industrial or veterinary scanners designed to scan an aircraft engine or a horse.

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A few experts in biomechanics had suggested ways to model dinosaur jaws like levers, so you could make some basic calculations, but we now have integrated computational methods that allow much more complex – or realistic – questions to be asked. In a 2018 TV programme about ichthyosaurs, the dolphin-shaped marine reptiles, David Attenborough, the host, asked Emily her opinion: ‘So this was the king of the Jurassic sea?’ ‘Or queen,’ came back Emily in a flash. The new engineering approaches are all testable, so palaeontologists are no longer speculating about feeding in extinct animals. Smart new approaches in ecology, especially using food webs, are also beginning to help, but there is so much more to do.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

back-to-the-land, crack epidemic, David Attenborough, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, hobby farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mason jar, McMansion, New Urbanism, Port of Oakland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Silicon Valley, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog

With its late-night newsstands and rowdy bars, a city meant I would never be lonely. When we turned down our street, Bobby was there, guarding the gates. Bill and I met on an elevator, fell in love because of cats, and lasted because of bees. In 1997, I was headed to a class to show David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants to a group of Ecology 101 students. While finishing up my degrees in English and biology at the University of Washington, I worked as a projectionist, paid $3.85 an hour to hit PLAY on a VCR and then sit back in the AV booth and do my homework. Classroom Support Services, my employer, had recently hired a skinny new guy who wore an ugly red wool hat and a too-short sweatshirt.

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Later I would find out he had problems with his ears, especially in the cold wet of Seattle. The cotton balls kept out the elements, as did the red hat. He handed me a folded sheet of yellow paper. I glanced at it—The Speckled Pig Zine, it said. The doors closed, and I walked to my class. A few minutes later, while David Attenborough’s British-accented voice filled the auditorium, I looked through the zine in the booth. Some funny poems, a story about a lost dog, and a questionnaire mostly about cats. (You see a cat. Do you, a. kiss its head? b. kiss its paws? c. kiss it on the lips?) I find men who have felines impossibly sexy.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

The UN Law of the Sea had protected the deep sea from mining activities for over twenty years, and no company has yet been allowed to start mining for minerals. NGOs such as Greenpeace and Conservation International believed that more time is needed for further study before mining can start. This call was backed by prominent naturalists such as David Attenborough. ‘Do you gamble with those uncertainties in favour of the mining operations or do you give the benefit of any doubt to the protection of marine ecosystems?’ David Santillo, a Greenpeace scientist at the University of Exeter, said to me. ‘To me the latter is more important.’ Louisa Casson, an ocean campaigner at Greenpeace, said deep sea mining risked the wholesale ‘extinction of species’.

…

., ‘Canada’s next billionaire’, MacLeans, 3 June 1996, https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1996/6/3/canadas-next-billio-naire. 16 Ivanhoe Mines, ‘2018 news’, www.ivanhoemines.com/news/2018/strategic-equity-investment-of-c-723-million-in-ivanhoe-mines-by-china-based-citic-metal-has-been-completed/. 17 Ivanhoe Mines press release, 19 September 2018, https://cn.ivanhoemines.com/news/2018/strategic-equity-investment-of-c-723-million-in-ivanhoe-mines-by-china-based-citic-metal-has-been-completed/. Chapter 12 The Final Frontier: Mining the Deep Sea 1 McVeigh, K., ‘David Attenborough calls for ban on “devastating” deep sea mining’, Guardian, 12 March 2020. 2 Pavid, K., ‘Thank the ocean with every breath you take, says Dr Sylvia Earle’, Natural History Museum, 28 November 2017, www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2017/november/thank-the-ocean-dr-sylvia-earle.html. 3 Petersen, S., Krätschell, A., Augustin, N., Jamieson, J., Hein, J.R., Hannington, M.D., ‘News from the seabed – geological characteristics and resource potential of deep-sea mineral resources’, Marine Policy, 70 (2016), 175–87, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X16300732?

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Even if classical travel writing is nowadays constrained by the possibility of tourists reaching the same places as the intrepid author, technology developments in the second half of the twentieth century permitted the return of travellers with their tales in the form of documentary film and video, particularly of rare animal, bird and fish species in hard‑to‑reach habitats. While we tourists might go whale‑watching and, if lucky, catch a fleeting sight of perhaps a minke whale or a basking shark, we know that David Attenborough, to mention only the best‑known television naturalist, will bring us awesome images of creatures that we could never glimpse. So we can enlarge our experience of the world in which we live from our armchair, through books, television and video. To what extent does this substitute for actual long distance trips?

Unnatural Causes by Richard Shepherd

call centre, David Attenborough, haute couture, Piper Alpha

And when that process, dying, is complete, it sets off another series of processes which eventually return us to the earth and complete the life cycle. The screen lit up above me and the police officers stretched out their legs. A few sipped their coffee and relaxed with the air of men settling down with their wives to watch a David Attenborough wildlife documentary. I didn’t want to give them too much science, so I simply said that oxygen is vital for almost all cells. It facilitates the cells’ multitude of life-sustaining chemical reactions: this is metabolism. On death, when there is no oxygen, muscle cells rapidly become flaccid.

…

The blood vessels provide easy channels for the bacteria to spread, causing the haemoglobin there to decompose. Visible result: the extraordinary and beautiful fern-like pattern of the veins closest to the surface becomes clearly etched on the skin as though tattooed in brown. It is often evident on the arms and thighs. I think the police officers were beginning to realize now that this was no David Attenborough documentary. But, like every death process, this rather beautiful stage is temporary. Gradually the pattern is lost as the skin blisters into red and brown fluid. As the blisters burst, the skin sloughs off. One waste product of all this bacterial activity is gas, and so now the body begins to swell.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

In 2016, the UK government asked the public to help name a new polar research ship. Individuals could submit names and then vote on them in an online poll. More than seven thousand names were submitted, but one name won easily, with 124,109 votes: RSS Boaty McBoatface. (The ship was eventually named RSS Sir David Attenborough instead.) Could the government have predicted this result? Well, maybe not that the exact name RSS Boaty McBoatface would triumph. But could they have guessed that someone might turn the contest into a joke, that the joke would be well received by the public, and that the joke answer might become the winner?

…

., 228 security, false sense of, 44 security services, 229 selection, adverse, 46–47 selection bias, 139–40, 143, 170 self-control, 87 self-fulfilling prophecies, 267 self-serving bias, 21, 272 Seligman, Martin, 22 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 25–26 Semmelweis reflex, 26 Seneca, Marcus, 60 sensitivity analysis, 181–82, 185, 188 dynamic, 195 Sequoia Capital, 291 Sessions, Roger, 8 sexual predators, 113 Shakespeare, William, 105 Sheets Energy Strips, 36 Shermer, Michael, 133 Shirky, Clay, 104 Shirky principle, 104, 112 Short History of Nearly Everything, A (Bryson), 50 short-termism, 55–56, 58, 60, 68, 85 side effects, 137 signal and noise, 311 significance, 167 statistical, 164–67, 170 Silicon Valley, 288, 289 simulations, 193–95 simultaneous invention, 291–92 Singapore math, 23–24 Sir David Attenborough, RSS, 35 Skeptics Society, 133 sleep meditation app, 162–68 slippery slope argument, 235 slow (high-concentration) thinking, 30, 33, 70–71 small numbers, law of, 143, 144 smartphones, 117, 290, 309, 310 smoking, 41, 42, 133–34, 139, 173 Snap, 299 Snowden, Edward, 52, 53 social engineering, 97 social equality, 117 social media, 81, 94, 113, 217–19, 241 Facebook, 18, 36, 94, 119, 219, 233, 247, 305, 308 Instagram, 220, 247, 291, 310 YouTube, 220, 291 social networks, 117 Dunbar’s number and, 278 social norms versus market norms, 222–24 social proof, 217–20, 229 societal change, 100–101 software, 56, 57 simulations, 192–94 solitaire, 195 solution space, 97 Somalia, 243 sophomore slump, 145–46 South Korea, 229, 231, 238 Soviet Union: Germany and, 70, 238–39 Gosplan in, 49 in Cold War, 209, 235 space exploration, 209 spacing effect, 262 Spain, 243–44 spam, 37, 161, 192–93, 234 specialists, 252–53 species, 120 spending, 38, 74–75 federal, 75–76 spillover effects, 41, 43 sports, 82–83 baseball, 83, 145–46, 289 football, 226, 243 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 Spotify, 299 spreadsheets, 179, 180, 182, 299 Srinivasan, Balaji, 301 standard deviation, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error, 154 standards, 93 Stanford Law School, x Starbucks, 296 startup business idea, 6–7 statistics, 130–32, 146, 173, 289, 297 base rate in, 157, 159, 160 base rate fallacy in, 157, 158, 170 Bayesian, 157–60 confidence intervals in, 154–56, 159 confidence level in, 154, 155, 161 frequentist, 158–60 p-hacking in, 169, 172 p-values in, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 standard deviation in, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error in, 154 statistical significance, 164–67, 170 summary, 146, 147 see also data; experiments; probability distributions Staubach, Roger, 243 Sternberg, Robert, 290 stock and flow diagrams, 192 Stone, Douglas, 19 stop the bleeding, 234 strategy, 107–8 exit, 242–43 loss leader, 236–37 pivoting and, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 tactics versus, 256–57 strategy tax, 103–4, 112 Stiglitz, Joseph, 306 straw man, 225–26 Streisand, Barbra, 51 Streisand effect, 51, 52 Stroll, Cliff, 290 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 24 subjective versus objective, in organizational culture, 274 suicide, 218 summary statistics, 146, 147 sunk-cost fallacy, 91 superforecasters, 206–7 Superforecasting (Tetlock), 206–7 super models, viii–xii super thinking, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 surface area, 122 luck, 122, 124, 128 surgery, 136–37 Surowiecki, James, 203–5 surrogate endpoint, 137 surveys, see polls and surveys survivorship bias, 140–43, 170, 272 sustainable competitive advantage, 283, 285 switching costs, 305 systematic review, 172, 173 systems thinking, 192, 195, 198 tactics, 256–57 Tajfel, Henri, 127 take a step back, 298 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2, 105 talk past each other, 225 Target, 236, 252 target, measurable, 49–50 taxes, 39, 40, 56, 104, 193–94 T cells, 194 teams, 246–48, 275 roles in, 256–58, 260 size of, 278 10x, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 Tech, 83 technical debt, 56, 57 technologies, 289–90, 295 adoption curves of, 115 adoption life cycles of, 116–17, 129, 289, 290, 311–12 disruptive, 308, 310–11 telephone, 118–19 temperature: body, 146–50 thermostats and, 194 tennis, 2 10,000-Hour Rule, 261 10x individuals, 247–48 10x teams, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 terrorism, 52, 234 Tesla, Inc., 300–301 testing culture, 50 Tetlock, Philip E., 206–7 Texas sharpshooter fallacy, 136 textbooks, 262 Thaler, Richard, 87 Theranos, 228 thermodynamics, 124 thermostats, 194 Thiel, Peter, 72, 288, 289 thinking: black-and-white, 126–28, 168, 272 convergent, 203 counterfactual, 201, 272, 309–10 critical, 201 divergent, 203 fast (low-concentration), 30, 70–71 gray, 28 inverse, 1–2, 291 lateral, 201 outside the box, 201 slow (high-concentration), 30, 33, 70–71 super, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 systems, 192, 195, 198 writing and, 316 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 30 third story, 19, 92 thought experiment, 199–201 throwing good money after bad, 91 throwing more money at the problem, 94 tight versus loose, in organizational culture, 274 timeboxing, 75 time: management of, 38 as money, 77 work and, 89 tipping point, 115, 117, 119, 120 tit-for-tat, 214–15 Tōgō Heihachirō, 241 tolerance, 117 tools, 95 too much of a good thing, 60 top idea in your mind, 71, 72 toxic culture, 275 Toys “R” Us, 281 trade-offs, 77–78 traditions, 275 tragedy of the commons, 37–40, 43, 47, 49 transparency, 307 tribalism, 28 Trojan horse, 228 Truman Show, The, 229 Trump, Donald, 15, 206, 293 Trump: The Art of the Deal (Trump and Schwartz), 15 trust, 20, 124, 215, 217 trying too hard, 82 Tsushima, Battle of, 241 Tupperware, 217 TurboTax, 104 Turner, John, 127 turn lemons into lemonade, 121 Tversky, Amos, 9, 90 Twain, Mark, 106 Twitter, 233, 234, 296 two-front wars, 70 type I error, 161 type II error, 161 tyranny of small decisions, 38, 55 Tyson, Mike, 7 Uber, 231, 275, 288, 290 Ulam, Stanislaw, 195 ultimatum game, 224, 244 uncertainty, 2, 132, 173, 180, 182, 185 unforced error, 2, 10, 33 unicorn candidate, 257–58 unintended consequences, 35–36, 53–55, 57, 64–65, 192, 232 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), 306 unique value proposition, 211 University of Chicago, 144 unknown knowns, 198, 203 unknowns: known, 197–98 unknown, 196–98, 203 urgency, false, 74 used car market, 46–47 U.S.

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

There is evidence that the British will spend almost six months of their entire lives queuing up for stuff.19 In some places, like Wimbledon or for royal weddings, it’s even seen as part of the ‘fun’ to queue outside all night in a tent. Just about the worst thing you can do in Britain is jump the queue. It’s like farting in a lift. Or not buying a round. Or not being friendly to the vicar’s dog when it’s dry-humping your ankle and its mouth is clamped to your shin. Or criticising the NHS. Or, even worse, Sir David Attenborough. It’s instant pariah status. The really weird thing is that 88 per cent of us have admitted to giving up in a queue and going home empty-handed.20 A quarter of Brits say they hate doing it, yet they keep coming back for more. Why? British people are often shy, well-mannered and modest. There’s a long list of things the British never discuss: constipation, sex, depression, relationships, thrush, money, toilets, feelings, seborrhoea, logorrhoea, gonorrhoea, Chris Rea, diarrhoea, duty or death.

…

It did have Carl Sagan, a brilliant scientist who speculated about intelligent life in the cosmos (not to be confused with the very reasonably priced package holiday company with a similar name). He died prematurely, but not before he had popularised the baton phrase ‘billions and billions’. This was later picked up as a tribute phrase by home-grown British TV all-round super-intelligent science-saucepot, Professor Brian Cox. He and David Attenborough show how great communicators create interest in science. 1970s American culture was really embodied in Scooby-Doo, Where are you!, which extolled the fun you could have with a cartoon dog. You can learn a lot about the relationship between America and Britain from its children’s entertainment.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

For design it can provide a fresh alternative to future-based thinking by presenting parallel worlds as thought experiments rather than predictions. But it can be slightly cumbersome because of the need to set up the story before people can engage with the project. James Chambers's Attenborough Design Group (2010) is a simple example of how this approach might translate into a design project. Chambers asks, What if David Attenborough had become an industrial designer rather than a wildlife filmmaker, who, still fond of nature, established the Attenborough Design Group to explore how animal behavior could be used to equip technology products with survival instincts: a Gesundheit radio, which sneezes periodically to expel potentially damaging dust, and Floppy Legs, a portable floppy disc drive that stands up if it detects liquid nearby?

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The top floor was filled with shotguns whose price tags you had to look at twice to make sure you had not misread them. But it was the middle floor, the walls filled with monochrome pictures of Africa and bookshelves heavy with coffee-table hunting books, that caught my attention. Because there stood a line of DVDs, and one leaped out. Boddington on Cheetahs, it read. But this was no David Attenborough–style film; rather it was highlights of the fastest animal on earth being taken down by a hunting rifle. Others stood beside it: Boddington on Lions, Boddington on Leopards. What Boddington had done was strictly legal, but the images on the back cover felt like the sort of footage, as an investigative journalist, I would have wanted for a film about the ugly world of animal abuse.

…

The possible caveat is that a hunted animal might be shot and injured and not killed outright by a huntsman’s bullet. But then again many animals may sense their looming death when they are herded into an abattoir. 7. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/04/daily-chart-17 8. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/dec/01/nature-urbanisation-david-attenborough 9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26140827 10. http://dianamandache.com/auction-shotgun-king-of-romania/ 11. http://www.face.eu/sites/default/files/documents/english/face_annual_report_2013_en.pdf 12. http://www.face.eu/sites/default/files/documents/english/position_paper_hunttour_-_en.pdf 13. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/11/packing_heat_in_helsinki.html 14. http://www.face.eu/sites/default/files/attachments/data_hunters-region_sept_2010.pdf 15. http://www.conservationforce.org/role4.html; http://www.nssf.org/PDF/research/HuntingInAmerica_EconomicForceForConservation.pdf 16. http://www.gallup.com/poll/20098/gun-ownership-use-america.aspx 17.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

.*2 If a biologist denies the importance of natural selection in evolution, it is pretty safe to assume not that he has some alternative theory but that he simply underrates adaptation as a dominant property of life that needs explaining. Probably he has never set foot in a tropical rainforest, or set flipper over a coral reef, or set eyes on a David Attenborough film. Nowadays, questions about adaptation are high in the consciousness of field biologists. It has not always been so. My old maestro Niko Tinbergen wrote of an experience when he was a young man: ‘I still remember how perplexed I was upon being told off firmly by one of my zoology professors when I brought up the question of survival value after he had asked: “Has anyone an idea why so many birds flock more densely when they are attacked by a bird of prey?” 

…

True to Bill’s iconic status, the BBC news cameras chose to follow Dawkins and Burkinshaw on one of these fact-finding missions, and Sir Christopher was agog in front of the television screen. I vividly remember his summation, the next day, in his distinctive old raconteur’s voice: ‘About Burkinshaw I will say nothing. Dawkins, however, is obviously accustomed to commanding men.’ David Attenborough told me he had exactly the same impression of Bill, and he drew himself up to his full height and pulled a realistically imperious face to illustrate the point. He had stayed with Bill and Diana while on a filming trip to Sierra Leone in 1954, and they remained friends thereafter. I can’t imagine anybody ever calling Bill either Arthur or Francis, although A.F. suited him well enough.

First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger

belling the cat, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Easter island, index card, Kickstarter, Nelson Mandela, place-making, pre–internet, Skype, the market place

He booked us, duo or group, as interval entertainment at theatres, at corporate conventions and once in a circus tent between the clowns and the high-wire merchants. We went along for the ride and the money, the latter sorely needed. We were advocates for the music but were painfully aware that we – and our songs – were misfits in the culture at large. If David Attenborough had been interested in filming our exotic species, he would, like Felix, have accepted an invitation to visit our native habitat, the weekly Ballads and Blues Club session at the ACTT building in Soho Square. Felix climbed the three storeys of killer stairs, tricked out in bowler hat, cashmere overcoat, Savile Row suit with cravat, handkerchief just so in waistcoat pocket and shoes polished to blinding perfection.

…

To Victoria Johansen, my personal assistant, who took over more than her usual share of our business work while I wrote. To Dave Watkins, my patient, long-suffering Faber editor. To the many writers, pundits, eavesdropped people whose words, phrases, ideas I have absorbed for decades and presented without credit herein. To David Attenborough, who had nothing to do with the book but everything to do with fanning the embers of optimism and eco-feminism. He keeps my spirits up. Last but never least, to my children, Neill, Calum and Kitty MacColl, for their support. Like Irene, they are also waiting patiently for me to grow up. Dio, Mike, Charlie and me, c.1937 Clockwise from top left, Mike, Penny, Charlie, Dio, me, Barbara, c.1947.

London Review of Books by London Review of Books

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Piers Corbyn, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tulip mania, Wolfgang Streeck

Working from live models in the gardens of the newly established Zoological Society, the 18-year-old Lear produced his book without any formal training, independent funding, or institutional support. The day after publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same impulse can be felt in the nonsense: the hens of Oripò ‘don’t behave like other hens;/In any decent way’.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

A world traveler, he’d lately noticed how crowded the planet had grown, and wondered what might be done. OPT’s mission was to promote research that might determine the optimum, sustainable human population for given regions, as well as for the entire world. Although its goals were grand and it attracted illustrious patrons—esteemed naturalist and BBC broadcaster Sir David Attenborough; primate biologist Dame Jane Goodall; and former UK representative to the UN Security Council Sir Crispin Tickell—its research resources were limited. Its chief focus became its campaign to lower the population of the United Kingdom. It was a campaign that inevitably risked accusation of encouraging racial politics that spawn the likes of the British National Party.

…

It is his images of empty Sardinian villages and former East German towns now overrun by wolves that OPT chairman Roger Martin has in his mind as his turn arrives. His voice is calm, but color singes his pale cheeks. “It’s not either-or, either consumption or numbers. It’s obviously both. The total impact is one multiplied by the other.” He quotes OPT patron Sir David Attenborough: “ ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, and utterly impossible if there were more.’ “We all agree that the solution is to empower women to control their own fertility. It doesn’t help, frankly, for people to say, ‘That’s happening anyway, don’t worry.’

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures by Roma Agrawal

3D printing, air gap, Anthropocene, British Empire, clean water, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elisha Otis, Guggenheim Bilbao, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Leo Hollis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method

Until, that is, I heard the words ‘strong material’ and ‘bridge’ and, as you can imagine, my ears pricked up like a cat’s. The host was talking about one of the most prolific bridge builders in the world – and, exceptionally, the builder is female, and lives in Madagascar. She’s about the size of a thumbnail, has eight very hairy legs and her body is heavily textured like the bark of a tree, which, as David Attenborough went on to explain, is the camouflage that protects her from predators. She also has a spinneret, which is the bit of her body responsible for making her the brilliant bridge engineer she is. Darwin’s bark spider can build a bridge up to 25m long (that’s 1,000 times her own size), spanning rivers or even lakes.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Survey-taking millennials have ranked personal development and flexibility above cash bonuses; stated higher expectations for working their own hours; and have rated work-life balance as more essential than any other job quality, including positive work environment, job security, and interesting work. These types of findings (often best read in the voice David Attenborough uses to narrate wildlife documentaries) have led to widespread accusations that millennials (“a fascinating species”) are conspiring to upend the workplace: “The 9 to 5 job may soon be a relic of the past, if Millennials have their way,” begins one column from Forbes.7 Another, from the New York Times, asks, “Are millennials—those born from roughly 1980 to 2000—about to fundamentally change companies for the better?

Among the Islands by Tim Flannery

British Empire, colonial rule, David Attenborough, European colonialism, Kula ring

Tim lives on the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. PRAISE FOR TIM FLANNERY ‘A great zoologist … an irresistible author.’ Jared Diamond ‘Tim Flannery is in the league of the all-time great explorers like Dr David Livingstone.’ Sir David Attenborough ‘One of the world’s greatest zoologists … who’s probably discovered more new species than Darwin. He’s a remarkable man.’ Redmond O’Hanlon ‘Absorbing, funny and wondrously learned.’ Bill Bryson ‘A rollicking adventure … surprisingly funny.’ Bookseller+Publisher ‘Flannery is perhaps the most gifted describer of the natural sciences writing today.’

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Currently they just blame it on bad luck when someone like themselves goes under, but eventually they will realise that it is due to an unsustainable system – especially when they look at the dramatically varying economic fortunes of their children and wider family. In the world’s most affluent and unequal of countries, those at the top often say that people are poor because there are too many of them, either too many being born or too many immigrating. This is a common refrain of the elite. David Attenborough recently put it more subtly: ‘We are such a densely populated country … The world is only so big. You simply can’t go on increasing forever, so something’s going to stop it. Either we can stop it or the natural world will stop it for us.’28 David is wealthy enough to be a member of the 1 per cent, and he was quoted on the BBC website having said this on the Today programme.

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

To jog our memory, let’s take a look back at one of the shining periods of the humble television. In France, many will recall those Saturday nights in the 1980s at around 10.00 pm when everyone gathered around the box to watch Ushuaïha. The show’s presenter was environmentalist Nicolas Hulot, France’s answer to David Attenborough.10 Viewers were transported to far-flung places to encounter little-known peoples, discover exotic animals that would have had Rudyard Kipling green with envy, and drift silently over epic landscapes in the helium-inflated envelope of a hot-air balloon. Broadcaster TF1 sold viewers the dream — while also selling off the little attention they had left.

Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Best Places to Eat A Trout Tree Restaurant A Le Rustique A Tusks Restaurant Best Places to Stay A Lewa Safari Camp A Elsa’s Kopje A iKweta Safari Camp A Segera Retreat A Treetops Central Highlands & Laikipia Highlights 1 Mt Kenya Holding a frozen Kenyan flag in your frozen hands atop the frozen summit of Point Lenana, 16km from the equator. 2 Lewa Wildlife Conservancy Doing a David Attenborough with an orphaned rhino then getting up close and personal with its wild cousins. 3 Ol Pejeta Conservancy Spending an evening here learning how to track lions. 4 Meru National Park Communing with the ancestors of some of Africa's most famous lions on safari at this national park. 5 Aberdare National Park Trekking through the otherworldly forests where elephants and bongo lurk. 6 Trout Tree Restaurant Fishing for your supper then climbing a tree at one of Kenya's most original restaurants. 7 Segera Retreat Indulging in Out of Africa nostalgia alongside contemporary art at this sublime lodge.

…

The following activities (with sample per-person prices) can be booked through your accommodation. AIl Ngwesi excursions: US$40, half-day ATour of Lewa Wildlife Conservancy's HQ: Free (US$10 if you visit the tracker dogs), one to two hours AOrphan Rhino Project: US$15, 30 minutes (this was where the moving final scene in Sir David Attenborough's Africa series was filmed) AVisit to local school: US$50 donation AHorse-riding safari: US$55, one hour AWalking safari in Ngare Ndare Forest: US$30 conservation fee, one to three hours AQuad bike/buggy safari: Price on application AFlying safari: Price on application THE LEWA STORY Like so many Laikipia properties that later became wildlife conservancies, Lewa Downs was an expansive cattle ranch owned since colonial times by white settlers.

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine

David Attenborough, Isaac Newton, out of africa, South China Sea

Get stung by a stonefish and the pain alone can kill you. People drown themselves just to stop the pain.” “Where are all these things?” “Oh, just in the sea. Tons of them. I wouldn’t go near it if I were you. Full of poisonous animals. Hate them.” “Is there anything you do like?” “Yes,” he said. “Hydroponics.” We flew to Bali. David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Boinski et al. (2008), “Substrate and tool use by Brown Capuchins in Suriname: Ecological contexts and cognitive bases,” American Anthropologist 102(4), 741–761. For a useful online resource on animal tool use, see C. Choi (2011), “Creative creatures: 10 animals that use tools,” LiveScience, November 3, www.livescience.com/16856-animals-tools-octopus-primates.html. 2. For crows cracking nuts, see David Attenborough, “Wild crows inhabiting the city use it to their advantage,” BBC Wildlife, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0. See also A. Taylor et al. (2011), “New Caledonian crows learn the functional properties of novel tool types,” PLoS ONE, December 4; and A. Auersberg et al. (2014), “Social transmission of tool use and tool manufacture in Goffin cockatoos (Cacatua goffini),” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series B 281, 20140972. 3.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

When in season tigers mate ten times a day. I’m told the action’s been so hot that even the panda in the next enclosure’s started wanking. BBC One show Frozen Planet was accused of fakery because they filmed a polar bear giving birth in a zoo. Of course it wasn’t in the Arctic – the only time David Attenborough goes somewhere that cold is when they place him in a carbonite freezer in between series. MP John Whittingdale described it as ‘hugely disappointing’ – unlike hearing that an MP is spending his time moaning about wildlife shows during the biggest global recession in recent history. TV definitely fakes stuff more than newspapers, a source close to TV said.

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke

clockwatching, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, imposter syndrome, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, post-truth, profit motive, sensible shoes, Snapchat, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

I’m going to be late for my shift. Come on!’ she ordered. ‘I – I don’t know if I can,’ he told her and, under the circumstances, who could blame him? ‘Oh, for God’s sake! There’s no time for that. Just get over here and do it.’ In an act so swift and primal it was surely worthy of narration by David Attenborough, Nick and Sarah mated. Immediately afterwards, she leaped up to pull on her scrubs. ‘Shouldn’t you, you know, lie on your back with your legs in the air for half an hour or something?’ he asked her. ‘Are you kidding? There’s no time for that: my list is about to start in theatre.’ With that, she was gone and the rest is history, the phrase ‘doing a level seven’ immortalised in one particular family from that moment for ever more.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Yet, even leaving aside the fact that his chest and vocal tract do not allow him to produce sustained sequences of recognisable sounds as humans do, there is still a qualitative gulf between what Kanzi has achieved and what most human beings can express.2 Towards the end of a lifetime spent studying the animal kingdom, the broadcaster David Attenborough was asked what he found the most astonishing creature on earth. He replied: ‘The only creature that really makes my jaw sag so much that I find it hard to stop looking is a nine-month-old human baby. The rate at which it grows. The rate at which it learns. The rate at which it acquires nerves.

…

For other views, see Diamond 1993, 54–56 and 141–47 and Lieberman 2007 2. see, for example, IowaPrimate, ‘Kanzi and Novel Sentences’, 9 January 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dhc2zePJFE&noredirect=1. Kanzi’s level of linguistic competence is the result of dedicated work by Sue Savage-Rambaugh 3. quoted in Sarah Knapton, ‘Which Creature Makes Sir David Attenborough’s Jaw Drop? It’s Not What You’d Expect’, Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2015, http://perma.cc/4H5R-F6HW 4. Dunbar 1996, 3 5. I quote from a personal conversation with him. See also Judt 2010, chapter 17 6. Brown 1991, 130–34 7. on cave paintings and musical instruments, see Werner Herzog’s fine film ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

Well, little, we hope, but we actually have no idea. We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas. Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us—including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its “tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” It is the most gargantuan beast that Earth has yet produced, bigger even than the most cumbrous dinosaurs. Yet the lives of blue whales are largely a mystery to us.

…

It is not a very exciting arrangement, but it is a conspicuously successful one. The world has more than twenty thousand species of lichens. Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. Those the size of dinner plates, writes David Attenborough, are therefore “likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old.” It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence. “They simply exist,” Attenborough adds, “testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.” It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is.

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan

back-to-the-land, clean water, David Attenborough, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Francisco Pizarro, invention of agriculture, Joseph Schumpeter, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, means of production, off-the-grid, paper trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker

Chapman’s craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together. SOURCES Listed below, by chapter, are the principal works referred to in the text, as well as others that supplied me with facts or influenced my thinking. INTRODUCTION: THE HUMAN BUMBLEBEE David Attenborough’s 1995 public television series The Private Life of Plants probably did more than any book to open my eyes to the natural and human world as seen from the plant’s point of view. The series’ brilliant time-lapse photography immediately makes you realize that our sense of plants as passive objects is a failure of imagination, rooted in the fact that plants occupy what amounts to a different dimension.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

‘A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.’5 The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise. James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

The No Need to Diet Book: Become a Diet Rebel and Make Friends With Food by Plantbased Pixie

Albert Einstein, confounding variable, David Attenborough, employer provided health coverage, fake news, food desert, meta-analysis, microaggression, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, sugar pill, ultra-processed food

It’s impossible – you might walk in on your flatmate or family member watching something on TV, videos get shared on social media, billboards are all over the place, and besides, it’s fun to watch TV! Not all popular media is problematic – obviously, I couldn’t possibly have a bad word to say about anything by David Attenborough, for example. Perhaps what we need is greater awareness of what we watch, and to take some time to assess whether what we are watching shows enough diversity in humans and in bodies. Healthy movement Moving your body is a wonderful thing, and carries with it a whole host of benefits, both mental and physical.

A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life by Tara Button

behavioural economics, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, Fairphone, gamification, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, Internet of things, Kickstarter, life extension, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, meta-analysis, period drama, planned obsolescence, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, thinkpad

Play it like a game, with each person getting a chance to ask and answer. Then hold eye contact for three minutes. What’s wonderful about this exercise is that the questions can bring up some real surprises. I played this game with my dad and found out all sorts of things that I didn’t know, from his ultimate dinner guest (David Attenborough) and his favourite feeling (jamming with a band) to what he’s most grateful for in his life (his children). * * * A sense of belonging and community Humans were built to live in tribes or villages, but the current rise of individualism means that we are much less community-minded nowadays; we think predominantly about our own lives.

Everything That Makes Us Human: Case Notes of a Children's Brain Surgeon by Jay Jayamohan

computer age, David Attenborough, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, stem cell

They go from being completely helpless squishy things, to angry, sometimes-capable-of-shouting-back-and-throwing-stuff squishy things in no time at all. They crawl, they eat, they communicate, they toddle, they develop fine motor skills – they become tiny people exceptionally quickly. Nought to sixty in a matter of months. No wonder David Attenborough calls them the most impressive creature in the wider animal kingdom. A lot of remarkable brain development occurs in a brief time period – and the plates have to keep up. But what if they don’t? What if those junctions between the different plates fuse too early? It’s called craniosynostosis and it happens, sometimes while the baby is still developing within the womb.

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help by New Scientist, Helen Thomson

Abraham Wald, Black Lives Matter, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Flynn Effect, George Floyd, global pandemic, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lock screen, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, TED Talk, TikTok, ultra-processed food, Walter Mischel

Experiments have shown that photographs, videos and audio recordings – ‘surrogate nature’ – have a similar, though less powerful, effect. Good results have also been reported with virtual reality. So if you don’t have access to the natural world, look at pictures of it, listen to recordings of birdsong and other natural soundscapes, or maybe watch a David Attenborough documentary. There is of course more to your living arrangements than the trees and forests. What greets you when you step through your front door? A clutter-free kitchen or a toy-filled monstrosity? A clean and tidy hallway, or messy shelves and dirty carpets? Recently, Japanese neatness consultant Marie Kondo hit the headlines with her ‘life-changing magic of tidying up’.

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

The hangover should be embraced as a day off, time out from reality, a chance to live in the moment. Ideally, the hangover should be spent at home, with endless cups of tea, friends who are in the same state as you, a daft film like Zoolander (we watched it on New Year' s Day and I cannot remember anything so hilarious) . My friend Nora recently came to stay armed with three of David Attenborough ' s Secret Life of Mammals videos as the ideal hangover accompaniment. And she was right: watching comical penguins loll oping around in the Antarctic wastes was indeed most enjoyable in our flaccid post-party condition. A yet more radical theory of the hangover comes from the notorious hell-raising duo English actor Keith Allen and artist Damien Hirst.

Racing With Death by Beau Riffenburgh

British Empire, David Attenborough, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, scientific management

Because even when Mawson was not in the far south, he seemed to be planning his next journey there, raising the required funds for such massive undertakings, working up his scientific results, or being involved in major governmental, scientific, or policy decisions about the Antarctic. Eventually, he became recognised as perhaps the world’s most eminent authority on Antarctica. Today, scientists, adventurers, and even tourists travel almost at will through the Antarctic continent. It is a part of the planet that David Attenborough, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and others have, each in his own way, made familiar to much of the Western world. This book, however, goes back to a time when people knew far less about this region, and when it was almost unimaginably remote. As much as anybody in history, it was Douglas Mawson who opened up these hostile lands to scientific and geographical experts, to governments, and to the public.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

With Brexit having sucked the breath out of public activism for so long, the sudden eruption of climate-change protests in spring 2019 was all the more surprising. People had seen hot summers, dry and mild winters and extraordinary weather events without previously joining the dots to global warming. But programmes such as David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II seized the attention. Surveys said half of adults were ‘more worried’ now than before and that younger people were generally in favour of action. According to the government’s own attitudes tracker, support for using renewable energy reached a record high of 85 per cent in spring 2019.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Over time, such projects turned a river into which almost everything was dumped, and in which almost nothing could live, into something in which even environmentally fastidious salmon could, at least potentially, swim. As technology evolves, the nature, pace, and reach of Green Swans evolve in surprising ways, as in the case of the so-called Blue Planet Effect. When the BBC screened Sir David Attenborough’s TV series The Blue Planet, with its hard-hitting footage of wildlife caught in drifting plastic waste, the response was almost instantaneous—and hugely damaging for the international plastics industry. But these are exceptions in a storyline that more typically sees change operating on the basis of too little, too late.

The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan

back-to-the-land, Carrington event, David Attenborough, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, Norman Mailer, sexual politics, stakhanovite

As to their statistics, the director of the Marine Biological Station at A1 Ghardaqa describes the dugong as possessing a pair of ‘well-developed pectoral breasts’. Steller wrote of the Rhytina: ‘That they produce only one pup is concluded from the shortness of the teats and the number of the breasts’—which were two and pectoral. The manatee is known colloquially in Guyana, according to David Attenborough, as the ‘water-mamma’; and Colin Bertram writes of it: ‘The breasts are indeed a single pair and pectoral, as in man.… In the manatee the teat seems to be almost on the actual hinder edge of the thick flipper just where it joins the body.’ He points out that it would be impossible to tag a manatee by clipping a marker to the base of its flipper, as is done with seals, because the breast would be in the way; and he mentions that when the manatee is lactating the gland is ‘large and shapely’.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

That’s why I believe you can tell a lot about a Black woman’s financial status by how her hair looks. Meaning if my locks are hella moisturized and shiny, you best believe I’m so flush with cash that I’m putting avocado on everything: toast, salads, face masks, whatever! Conversely, if it looks like David Attenborough is about to narrate a gaggle of squirrels playing slapbox on top of my head, then you already know I was chilling with Dante in the eighth circle of Hell: overdraft fees. Thankfully, as my career advanced, I got out of debt and was on camera more frequently, and I needed to elevate my hair game.

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies by Nick Frost

Alexander Shulgin, call centre, David Attenborough, hive mind, impulse control, job-hopping, Norman Mailer, Rubik’s Cube, tech billionaire

With enough of both of these things I reckon you could get over just about anything. Just about. It was a difficult decision to write this though. Am I willing to lay out my total being in all its ugliness for the potential of selling 1,500 hardbacks? Do I just want to produce another ‘celeb’ autobiography, written by a ghost, telling you about the time I met David Attenborough? (He was lovely.) No, I didn’t want to do that. If you’re going to tell the story of a life, my life, tell it warts and all. That, to me, is a better reflection of a person. If the tale you tell is too saccharine sweet what can the reader take away from it? What do they learn about you? About a life?

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

The best original thought often comes from those without too much face to lose, those who’ve not yet “made it”. 6. Seek adventures There’s no better word in the English language than adventure: “an exciting experience that is typically a bold, sometimes risky, undertaking[489].” In Britain, and throughout the world, we love our Captain Scotts, our Ernest Shackletons, our David Attenboroughs. Adventures feed the soul. When I’m in the wilderness, in the mountains, climbing, I’m in the moment – nothing else matters. I’m in control, worries recede, life is simpler and sometimes I get those Polaroid moments that stick, providing sustenance. I recall one unusual day on the Black Cuillin with my brother-in-law in the late 1990s.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

On my last trip, in the spring of 2018, the sea was choppy and no one talked much, just dozed in the early morning sun. We were headed to the Opal Reef, where, three years earlier, a crew had filmed some of the remarkable scenes of coral spawning for the BBC series Blue Planet II. Guided by the phases of the moon, and with David Attenborough providing discreet and tasteful narration, the garden of corals had simultaneously released clouds of eggs and sperm for the cameras, in the world’s most profligate display of fecundity, a spectacle if there ever was one. But no longer. We moored, tugged on snorkels and masks, and stepped off the stern, clad in full-body “stinger suits” to protect us from the jellyfish.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Rumblings grew that Wingham would exercise his right to overrule the crowd and make the final call. So it was that on Friday, May 6, Boaty McBoatface was buried at sea. In a clever—and somewhat cynical—move, NERC declared it would name the ship after the great naturalist, TV presenter, and aging national treasure, Sir David Attenborough. A choice no one could really complain about. To soften the blow further, it claimed that the people’s boat would live on in the form of one of the ship’s remotely operated subsea vessels, which would be named Boaty McBoatface. The parliamentary inquiry that followed was partly a slap on the wrist for NERC for all the brouhaha but also a real discussion—in the scientific tradition—of what might be learned from this viral drama.

Your Own Allotment : How to Find It, Cultivate It, and Enjoy Growing Your Own Food by Russell-Jones, Neil.

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, discovery of the americas, Easter island, information retrieval, Kickstarter, mass immigration, spice trade

I would get in touch with the following: G NSALG so that they can get involved and give support and advice; G your local MP (or equivalent in Wales and Scotland); 1 • All About Allotments 17 G your MEP; G the parish and other subsidiary bodies; G the local councillor; G the local press; G local community associations; G green organisations; G allotments are very green and that is a hot political potato at the moment so in order to make a lot of fuss I would also get in touch with the relevant shadow Secretary of State; G anyone else that you think would help (well, known people like David Attenborough or David Bellamy, or even David Beckham if you know them!). Further information can be found on the Department of Communities & Local Government’s website. 2 Our Allotment A few words about our particular allotment and its site. We now have a plot that is some 130 feet long by about 20 feet wide, ie pretty much the standard sized plot of 10 rods, mentioned previously.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

Two years later, she was a producer, travelling the world shooting the documentaries that made the NHU so successful. Not all directors wanted to travel the world with a woman. Many were sceptical that Hosking could cope with carrying heavy film gear and tripods. She proved them wrong. After six or seven years working on David Attenborough films, she had disproved the naysayers but was severely disillusioned by what she had seen in the wild. ‘In all of these projects,’ Hosking recalled, ‘we’d go past horrific ecological devastation. Huge monoculture farms. Dead zones where you can’t film. Climate change was seen as an annoyance, getting in the way of film shoots and messing up our schedules!

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

He was now one of the founding leaders of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), which he, the Bryans, and others had formed after their Britain-China Friendship Association collapsed in a welter of Stalinist recrimination. In the late 1960s, a visa obtained through SACU was just about the only way for a Briton to gain access to China; the young filmmaker David Attenborough was one of the first to do so. Needham remained its president for thirty-five years, and was able to get visas to China with ease—so long, his later critics pointed out, as he remained staunchly uncritical of the regime’s excesses. He flew back to China first in 1964, and found to his delight that he was to be greeted officially by the government, and by no less than Zhou Enlai, who treated him like an old friend.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

Properly read, such spoors amount to maps and pictures, and it seems to me plausible that the ability to read such maps and pictures might have arisen in our ancestors before the origin of speech in words. Suppose that a band of Homo habilis hunters needed to plan a cooperative hunt. In a remarkable and chilling 1992 television film, Too Close for Comfort, David Attenborough shows modern chimpanzees executing what seems to be a carefully planned and successful drive and ambush of a colobus monkey, which they then tear to pieces and eat. There is no reason to think that the chimpanzees communicated any detailed plan to each other before beginning the hunt, but every reason to think that habilis might have benefited from some such communication if it could have been achieved.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

“The world faces a serious overpopulation problem,” asserted Cornell University researcher David Pimentel in his 2011 article “World Overpopulation.” “The world’s biggest problem?” asks a 2011 op-ed by researchers Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich in the Los Angeles Times. “Too many people,” they answer. “We are a plague upon the earth,” declared nature documentarian Sir David Attenborough. “Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.” Attenborough expressed these dour sentiments in The Telegraph in January 2013. In his 2013 rant Ten Billion, Microsoft Research computer scientist Stephen Emmott argued that humanity’s growing population constitutes “an unprecedented planetary emergency.”

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

If Ancient Egypt had started with one cubic metre of possessions and grew them by 4.5 per cent per year, by the end of its 3, 000-year civilisation it would have needed 2.5 billion solar systems to store all its stuff. It doesn’t take a scientist to realise that endless exponential growth is absurd, in the true sense of the word. To imagine that we can continue on this trajectory indefinitely is to disavow the most obvious truths about our planet’s material limits. As David Attenborough once so eloquently put it, ‘Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.’ If we are overshooting our planet’s ecological capacity at our existing levels of economic activity, what happens when we factor in exponential growth? Even the near future looks quite bleak.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

This is what I strive to recall when I am holding my head in my hands at the latest piece of strategic management folly or some lousily written news report or appalling daytime show about buying crap at a car boot sale or shopping your benefit-cheat neighbours. I am proud because of Blue Peter, Sherlock and Doctor Who, Monty Python, Fleabag, Mr Tumble, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, David Attenborough, the Proms, Barry Davies (not John Motson), Radio 3 and so on and so on. I’m proud to be associated with an organisation that marries the public sector with a national collective spirit. A massive 96 per cent of the UK population consume BBC products each week. Its services are actively chosen 140 million times a day, despite a hugely competitive, now unparalleled media choice.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Economists deal with controversial issues such as inequality, taxation, public spending, climate change, trade, immigration, and, of course, Brexit. In such a febrile environment, speaking slowly and clearly will only get you so far. To communicate complex ideas, we needed to spark people’s curiosity—even inspire a sense of wonder. After all, the great science communicators—people such as Stephen Hawking and David Attenborough—do not win people over simply by using small words, crisply spoken. They stoke the flames of our curiosity, making us burn with desire to learn more. If we economists want people to understand economics, we must first engage their interest. What is true of economists is equally true for scientists, social scientists, historians, statisticians, and anyone else with complex ideas to convey.

The Beach by Alex Garland

David Attenborough, friendly fire, Khyber Pass, South China Sea

My body was covered in sticky juice, my eyes were watering because I didn't have time to pull the joint from my lips, and little black fingers were pawing at me from all directions. Eventually all of them managed to get a chunk, and I was left sitting cross-legged in a sea of munching monkeys. I felt like David Attenborough. It was the distinctive sound of falling water that finally led me out of the jungle. I heard it fifteen minutes after leaving the orchard, and then it was just a matter of zoning in on the noise. I came out by the carved tree and immediately dived into the waterfall pool, keen to wash the sweat and papaya juice off my body.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Much contemporary culture consisted of reinterpreting and, where necessary, bowdlerizing the history and culture of the half-millennium from the Renaissance to the fall of communism to make its achievements more congruent with the twenty-first-century ideology of diversity. In 2015, Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens laundered the plot of the original 1977 Star Wars film into a more multiracial cast, and in 2016 the 1984 comedy Ghostbusters was remade with all-female agents. The BBC announced a more multicultural remake of Kenneth Clark and David Attenborough’s classic Civilisation series from the late 1960s. (The new one was to be called Civilisations.) At one point in 2015, the Washington Post called the black incendiary Ta-Nehisi Coates the country’s “foremost public intellectual”—and it was probably right, since race was getting to be the sum total of what the country’s intellectual life was about.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Is their role model trans woman Chelsea Manning – a whistle-blower for some, a traitor who betrayed official secrets to others – or Jerry Falwell Jr. – a conservative evangelical icon for some, a hypocrite accused of an improper relationship with a male pool attendant (a relationship he denies), to others? In the UK, should they emulate environmentalist David Attenborough or petrol-head Jeremy Clarkson? Should they be Brexiteers or Remainers? Is it OK for nuns to cover their hair but not Muslim women? Is it acceptable to cover one’s face to limit coronavirus transmission, but not otherwise? Modern societies are inescapably diverse in all sorts of ways, so there are – or ought to be – many different ways of behaving and fitting in.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

The left hemisphere–Head worldview treats the body as a machine and the natural world as a heap of resources to be exploited. This has had inevitable consequences, and if technology cannot come to our aid, it is going to require some very hard conversations within and between countries about burden sharing. There has been some shift in awareness about the heaviness of the human footprint, David Attenborough’s Blue Planet changed the way that many of us think about plastic. But the pious consensus in most rich countries about the threat of climate change is not at all reflected in our behavior as citizens and is unlikely to be so until the threat to us is very much more immediate. And even if there were an authority we could all trust who could spell out the relative risks of different courses of action, there is every likelihood that there would be fundamental disagreements between people of different temperaments as to which course to take, as there was at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

When it becomes clear that I’m either gone or not responding, he hangs up with a final “Fuck you!” just in case I’m there to hear it. Click: he’s gone. I exhale and continue trying to settle my nerves. I could really use a cigarette, but break’s an hour away. Instead I close my eyes and picture a slideshow of calming, happy things: Rajiv. My family. My cats. David Attenborough’s voice. Objects Rajiv has glued googly eyes to. I will my hands to stop shaking and count my breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Te— BEEP! My eyes pop open, and my body roars back into full overdrive as a new caller pops into my headset. I can actually feel the pulse of panic radiating outward from my adrenal glands.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

As you’re going from one spot to another, you’re actually seeing your cow get a light prod from a cattle prod, and you’re feeling a slight poke in your chest from a stick in your side.” After the experience, his subjects ate less meat. One of the participants in the experiment explained, “I truly felt like I was going to the slaughterhouse… and felt sad that as a cow I was going to die.”18 Chasing Coral, a six-minute virtual reality collaboration between Netflix and Sir David Attenborough, similarly uses experiential learning to provide a wake-up call about the ocean’s environmental crisis, with great success in raising awareness. Another virtual reality experience allows people to embody a young girl in a refugee camp going through her day-to-day life. According to the United Nations, showing people the immersive video doubled the number of people who donate to refugee funds.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

Of course, any pests that might want to eat the intelligent plants or compete with them for sunlight would need to be dealt with. The advancement of AGIs may not just lead to the extinction of mankind. It may instead lead to the extinction of all conventional biology. Concluding a recent wildlife film, David Attenborough remarked “… if there is one thing that is certain, it is that the evolution of the vertebrates will continue for a long time to come.”. In fact, that is far from certain. If hyper-intelligent plantoids covered much of the earth, they could accurately control the weather by changing their colour to be light or dark and thus control the temperature of the earth.

Hope for Animals and Their World by Jane Goodall, Thane Maynard, Gail Hudson

carbon footprint, clean water, David Attenborough, Easter island, Google Earth, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa

They hope, among other things, that by propagating the pines and selling them to botanists, gardeners, and collectors around the country, people will be less desperate to visit the canyon to see the trees in the wild—but I doubt it. I saw one of the two that was donated to Kew Botanical Gardens during my recent visit there. It was planted by Sir David Attenborough and is growing splendidly within its protective iron cage. And in Australia, I had the privilege of planting one of the little saplings on the grounds of Adelaide Zoo. I am, of course, delighted to have seen and even handled living tissue descended from the ancient giants. But it does not stop me longing to visit that dark and mysterious canyon that has, for millions of years, hidden its secret, and stand in the presence of the original trees themselves.

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

As usual, you had to do a little digging to get to the truth. ‘Select favourites only. Past twenty-four hours. Keywords: magnetic storm, solar flare, threat level.’ One thing he hadn’t done yet was change the VA’s settings, so it still spoke in the voice of the old British natural-history broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, a favourite of his mother’s: The top hit discussion is whether the current event was due directly to the weakening of the Earth’s magnetosphere – consensus rating 95.2 per cent – and how soon the Flip will happen and restore the planet’s protective magnetic shield – consensus on when this will occur is in the range of six months to five years from now.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Liebenberg’s experiences with the San, and his theory that scientific thinking evolved from tracking, are presented in The Origin of Science (2013/2021), The Art of Tracking (1990), and Liebenberg, //Ao, et al. 2021. Additional examples are from Liebenberg 2020. For other descriptions of hunter-gatherer rationality, see Chagnon 1997; Kingdon 1993; Marlowe 2010. 7. A video of a pursuit hunt, narrated by David Attenborough, may be seen here: https://youtu.be/826HMLoiE_o. 8. Liebenberg 2013/2021, p. 57. 9. Personal communication from Louis Liebenberg, Aug. 11, 2020. 10. Liebenberg 2013/2021, p. 104. 11. Liebenberg 2020 and personal communication, May 27, 2020. 12. Moore 2005. See also Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009, and note 8 to chapter 10 below. 13.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Throwing executives, scientists, celebrities, and journalists into the same room “can generate ideas capable of transforming our world,” ExxonMobil gushes. Occasionally, a heretic slips in on the list of invitees. Such was the case with the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, who famously skewered the Davos attendees in January 2019 for flying hundreds of carbon-dioxide-spewing private jets into an event “to hear David Attenborough speak about how we’re wrecking the planet.” He quickly pivoted to the topic of rich people not paying enough taxes, an issue he thought was central to solving a host of society’s problems but, he said, received scant attention at Davos. “It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.”

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

We believe that the curricula in such schools, as well as that of Emmanuel City Technology College, need to be strictly monitored in order that the respective disciplines of science and religious studies are properly respected. Yours sincerely The Rt Revd Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford; Sir David Attenborough FRS; The Rt Revd Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St Albans; Lord May of Oxford, President of the Royal Society; Professor John Enderby FRS, Physical Secretary, Royal Society; The Rt Revd John Oliver, Bishop of Hereford; The Rt Revd Mark Santer, Bishop of Birmingham; Sir Neil Chalmers, Director, Natural History Museum; The Rt Revd Thomas Butler, Bishop of Southwark; Sir Martin Rees FRS, Astronomer Royal; The Rt Revd Kenneth Stevenson, Bishop of Portsmouth; Professor Patrick Bateson FRS, Biological Secretary, Royal Society; The Rt Revd Crispian Hollis, Roman Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth; Sir Richard Southwood FRS; Sir Francis Graham-Smith FRS, Past Physical Secretary, Royal Society; Professor Richard Dawkins FRS Bishop Harries and I organized this letter in a hurry.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

One of the most popular shared activities was watching television in the virtual company of others. The talkboarders would chat away to each other throughout the first series of Big Brother – the C4 reality show, aired in 2000, which spied on ‘housemates’ marooned inside a custom-built home. There would always be a gaggle on hand to discuss anything David Attenborough was doing. One poster reflected later: ‘That couldn’t happen now as there isn’t a social media that really allows it (Twitter is too huge) and everyone is On Demand so not watching at the same time.’ We learned from the behaviour of the users. Live coverage of big television ‘events’ became a staple of later coverage on the main site.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

If you’re a conservative you are almost perennially annoyed by Radio 4 but, like me, you may have some sort of compulsive, news-junkie urge to listen to it even though you know it’s probably shortening your life. Until eventually you become just another boring, red-faced idiot shouting at Radio 4 – with the wife raising her eyes, thinking to herself, ‘Here he goes again.’ And yet the conflicting thing is that I love the BBC – I love the sound of David Attenborough and Stephen Fry, I love its high-mindedness, its comedy and its peerless documentary making. I like drinking wine in the kitchen while cooking, with Front Row playing, or the familiar figure of Gary Lineker sharing the nation’s dreams during another World Cup adventure. As a conservative I like institutions – they provide the warm feeling of oxytocin that reminds me I’m not alone in this world – but what happens when they become captured by the other side?

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

This subsequently becomes the starting point for the next round of innovation. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello dubbed this progression the cultural ratchet.29 Extended across time, the cumulative effects of the ratcheting process are astonishing. I remember once watching a David Attenborough documentary in which an orangutan rowed a boat down a river. At first, it struck me as anomalous: Here was this animal skillfully piloting a vehicle it could never have invented itself. But then it occurred to me that human beings are in exactly the same boat, metaphorically speaking. In even the simplest human societies, people use tools they could never have invented themselves.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

But he persevered because those distinctive statues were the perfect setting for him to deliver the central message of his series – which is also a theme of this book – that our civilization is unique in history for its capacity to make progress. He wanted to celebrate its values and achievements, and to attribute the latter to the former, and to contrast our civilization with the alternative as epitomized by ancient Easter Island. The Ascent of Man had been commissioned by the naturalist David Attenborough, then controller of the British television channel BBC2. A quarter of a century later Attenborough – who had by then become the doyen of natural-history film-making – led another film crew to Easter Island, to film another television series, The State of the Planet. He too chose those grim-faced statues as a backdrop, for his closing scene.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

We saw how soundtracks from everyday life were absorbed within the imaginary landscapes of musical works. Perhaps birds also do that, take sounds and signals from their environment and weave them into beautiful patterns. The clearest evidence that birds do indeed play with signs is the Albert’s lyrebird of Australia, whose virtuoso mimicry featured in David Attenborough’s BBC series Planet Earth.39 In this clip, the lyrebird mimics the call of a kookaburra (he can impersonate twenty bird species), and gives uncannily precise imitations of a camera shutter, a camera motor-drive, a car alarm and the chainsaws of foresters. His dazzling skill impresses the females, the standard biological explanation.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

On the very rare occasions when they allowed an environmental documentary to be broadcast, their terror of upsetting powerful interests drove them to make catastrophic mistakes. In my view, the most environmentally damaging item ever carried on any medium in this country was a two-part documentary broadcast in 2006 titled, without irony, The Truth about Climate Change. It was presented by ‘the most trusted man in Britain’, Sir David Attenborough, whose word was treated as gospel. Somehow it managed not to mention the fossil fuel industry at all, except as part of the solution: ‘the people who extract fossil fuels like oil and gas have now come up with a way to put carbon dioxide back underground’. Carbon capture and storage is a classic oil-industry talking point, always promised, never delivered, whose purpose is to justify continued extraction.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

Paradoxically, when we resemble other animals with respect to the social suite, it binds us all together. The more like these animals we are, the more alike we humans must be to one another. CHAPTER 10 Remote Control The male bowerbirds of western New Guinea are extraordinary creatures with a “passion for interior decoration,” according to BBC Planet Earth host David Attenborough. Bowerbirds make elaborate structures known as bowers. These architectural marvels are built around a sort of maypole on the forest floor and have a large conical shape stretching as much as six feet across, with supportive pillars and a thatched roof of orchid stems. Inside, the bird will carefully arrange piles of beetle wings, tropical acorns, black fruits, glowing orange flowers, and even a “lawn” of carefully planted moss.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

Darwin…would surely be impressed by the way in which Pinker sheds light on these questions…. A superb book, simply at the level of being a good read: it is packed with fascinating facts and information…. Pinker debunks with panache, cuts through the confusion of jargon, and tells a mean anecdote. He does for language what David Attenborough does for animals, explaining difficult scientific concepts so easily that they are indeed absorbed as a transparent stream of words…. I will be astonished if a better science book of any kind, let alone one accessible to the general reader, comes along this year…. His book is groundbreaking, exhilarating, fun, and almost certainly correct.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Gore’s world history is the struggle between man and nature, but now it is nature that sets the pace rather than man. Nature, rather than any virtue or vice in man, becomes the driving force behind the collapse of civilizations past and present. Other historians of climate and human geography have recently made the same claim. Ecobiologist David Attenborough has speculated that the real cause of Rome’s collapse was not moral or economic or political collapse but deforestation.72 Gore himself relies on the example of the Mayas as a parable for modern times: a sophisticated and urbanized culture, equipped with mathematics and astronomy, whose agricultural revolution was ruthlessly swept away by an eleventh-century global warming that brought climatic changes and soil erosion.

England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Aardman Animations has also produced two successful animated features, Chicken Run (2000) and Flushed Away (2006), in partnership with Hollywood’s DreamWorks studios. * * * The BBC is famous for its news and natural-history programming, symbolised by landmark series such as Planet Earth and The Blue Planet (helmed by the reassuring presence of David Attenborough, a national institution on British screens since the 1970s). The big-budget costume drama is another Sunday-night staple; British viewers have been treated to adaptations of practically every Dickens, Austen and Thackeray novel in the canon over the last decade. More recently ITV has been making inroads into costume-drama territory, notably with Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey.

…

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. Today the university remains one of the top three for research worldwide, and international academics have polled it as the top university in the world for science. Thanks to some of the earth-shaking discoveries made here, Cambridge is inextricably linked to the history of mankind.

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More by Jason Cochran

Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, context collapse, David Attenborough, Easter island, electricity market, Etonian, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Skype, Stephen Fry, urban planning

Experienced hands appear, slides in hand, to report on their adventures and on the state of the world, as do authors who have recently written works. Non-members get last pick of tickets to the most popular events (held evenings and weekends), but a few excellent series are open to all, including “Discovering People,” in which a travel luminary (such as Jan Morris, Michael Palin, or Sir David Attenborough) is interviewed, or “Discovering Places,” panel discussions on exotic destinations such as Myanmar. Events are mostly free but sometimes cost up to £15, and they break for the summer. Let it not be forgotten that it was at the British Museum where Karl Marx developed the political theories that would sweep the planet and shape the 20th century.

Fodor's Costa Rica 2012 by Fodor's

Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The coast has miles of beaches peppered with small beach communities, including Dominical, a scruffy but lively surfer haven. The Osa Peninsula. The wild Osa Peninsula consists almost entirely of Corcovado National Park, 1,156 square km (445 square mi) of primary and secondary rain forest straight out of a David Attenborough nature documentary. Golfo Dulce. The eastern Golfo Dulce draws anglers to Golfito, beachcombers to slow-paced Zancudo, and serious surfers to Pavones. South Pacific Planner When to Go The climate swings wildly in the south, from bracing mountain air to steamy coastal humidity.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world. Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus’ Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: “When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus’ Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice?

Fodor's Costa Rica 2013 by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

airport security, Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, David Attenborough, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, place-making, restrictive zoning, satellite internet, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, urban sprawl

The coast has miles of beaches peppered with small beach communities, including Dominical, a scruffy but lively surfer haven. The Osa Peninsula. The wild Osa Peninsula consists almost entirely of Corcovado National Park, 1,156 square km (445 square miles) of primary and secondary rain forest straight out of a David Attenborough nature documentary. Golfo Dulce. The eastern Golfo Dulce draws anglers and kayakers to Golfito, beachcombers to slow-paced Zancudo, and serious surfers to Pavones. CHIRRIPÓ NATIONAL PARK Chirripó National Park is all about hiking. The ascent up Mt. Chirripó, the highest mountain in Costa Rica, is the most popular and challenging hike in the country.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

Parker: Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008). More popular accounts of the Mediterranean, often well illustrated, include Sarah Arenson, The Encircled Sea: the Mediterranean Maritime Civilisation (London, 1990), making good use of marine archaeology, and David Attenborough, The First Eden: the Mediterranean World and Man (London, 1987), whose real strength is the illustrations; both books were based on television series. Captivating musings on the Mediterranean are offered by P. Matvejević, Mediterranean: a Cultural Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1999).

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

To know the British (it takes about 15 years to get on nodding terms) will be Europe’s privilege.’51 For Edward Heath, there was no question of allowing the great moment to pass without celebration. He had already appointed an official committee to plan a nationwide festival, chaired by Lord Goodman and including such eminences as the V&A’s director Roy Strong, the new head of the National Theatre, Peter Hall, and the BBC’s new director of programmes, David Attenborough. ‘Fanfare for Europe’, the event was called, and Heath hoped that it might enter history as a great national celebration to rival the Great Exhibition and the Festival of Britain. But with a budget of just £350,000, the Fanfare was always facing an uphill struggle, and the fact that four out of ten people were still opposed to EEC membership made it hard to arouse much public enthusiasm.

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

Tauris), by Roz Kaveney, and by more bitching about how we don’t have those flying cars yet (following several similar volumes last year), You Call This the Future? (Chicago Review Press), by Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andrew Wacker. There’s no direct genre connection for mentioning Life in Cold Blood (Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, but SF writers looking to score ideas about really alien creatures and lifeways could do a lot worse than look down into the bogs and swamps where the coldblooded creatures described herein dwell. There were lots of genre movies that did big box-office business this year, although few critical darlings or films thought of as “serious” movies.

Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. The university celebrates its 800th birthday in 2009; look out for special events, lectures and concerts to mark its intriguing eight centuries. Orientation The colleges and university buildings comprise the centre of the city. The central area, lying in a wide bend of the River Cam, is easy to get around on foot or by bike.