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  Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari -...

  FlashBooks, Dean Bokhari

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  Book Summary of Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari 
  About | Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari • Since the beginning of history, humanity has considered itself more special than the rest of the world. And the last few centuries of technological progress have only cemented our dominance over other animals. Yet, the future of humanity is anything but clear. Because humans have tackled the long-enduring problems of hunger, global plagues and war, science and technological interest will soon need to focus on new challenges. Based on Harari's predictions, that future won’t look anything like the world we know today.  
   
  Harari wrote Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow as a sequel to his earlier book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity. After looking at what made humans stand out in the first place (Sapiens), Harari turns his attention to the future and the likely attempts to upgrade humans into gods. What may seem impossible today (immortality, complete control over mood) might become possible in the future. The pace of technology and the prevalence of immersive data systems like Google is changing how humans relate to the world and challenging beliefs about the value of humans in the first place. Will all jobs be replaced by robots? Will the world be run by a class of upgraded super-humans? What will we do if this happens? By looking at history to predict the future, these are the questions that Harari answers. 
   
  Here’s what you’ll learn about in this summary: 3 challenges humanity has been fighting against since the beginning of time, and the challenges that'll begin to fill our time insteadWhy humans are more like machines than special beings with souls and free willHow the value of humans will change as technology continues to advanceAnd much more

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  Desert Terroir - Exploring the...

  Gary Paul Nabhan

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  A culinary journey through the flavors of the southwestern borderlands from an agricultural ecologist and “natural storyteller” (Times Literary Supplement).   Why does food taste better when you know where it comes from? Because history—ecological, cultural, even personal—flavors every bite we eat. Whether it’s the volatile chemical compounds that a plant absorbs from the soil or the stories and memories of places that are evoked by taste, layers of flavor await those willing to delve into the roots of real food.   In this book, Gary Paul Nabhan takes us on a personal trip into the southwestern borderlands to discover the terroir—the “taste of the place”—that makes this desert so delicious. To savor the terroir of the borderlands, Nabhan presents a cornucopia of local foods—Mexican oregano, mesquite-flour tortillas, grass-fed beef, the popular Mexican dessert capirotada, and corvina (croaker or drum fish) among them—as well as food experiences that range from the foraging of Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions to a modern-day camping expedition on the Rio Grande. Nabhan explores everything from the biochemical agents that create taste in these foods to their history and dispersion around the world. Through his field adventures and humorous stories, we learn why Mexican oregano is most potent when gathered at the most arid margins of its range—and why foods found in the remote regions of the borderlands have surprising connections to foods found by his ancestors in the deserts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. By the end of his movable feast, Nabhan convinces us that the roots of this fascinating terroir must be anchored in our imaginations as well as in our shifting soils.  Includes illustrations

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  The World After Capital

  Albert Wenger

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  Technological progress has fundamentally altered how humanity lives. 
  When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the Agrarian Age, it was land. Following the Industrial Revolution, capital became scarce. Now, digital technologies have shifted scarcity from capital to attention. Previous shifts have been marked by major crises including wars, famines and pandemics; our current resistance to change is resulting in the buildup of pressure such as the rise of militant nationalism, increased mass migration, and a growing mental health crisis. 
  The longer we ignore this by continuing to patch the Industrial Age system, the more we risk a horrific transition. We are dramatically under-allocating attention to threats such as the climate crisis, as well as opportunities such as fundamental research. 
  Thanks to the great success of capitalism, we are now able to address the scarcity of attention. But markets can’t be used to allocate attention because prices do not and cannot exist for the greatest problems facing humanity, which require our full attention. In order to free up human attention, we must urgently embrace the Knowledge Age. 
  The World After Capital, written by Venture Investor Albert Wenger, starts by exploring the unique nature of digital technology and how it differs radically from previous technologies. Wenger then provides the philosophical underpinnings for a transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age guided by humanism and its values. The World After Capital argues for a dramatic enhancement of economic freedom (through universal basic income), informational freedom (through shifting control of computation to network participants), and psychological freedom (through embracing mindfulness). 
  The World After Capital provides both a thesis of abstract ideas about the past and future, and actionable steps that each and every one of us can take starting today.

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  Ice Diaries - An Antarctic Memoir

  Jean McNeil

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  What do we stand to lose in a world without ice?
  		 
  A decade ago, novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil spent a year as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey, and four months on the world’s most enigmatic continent — Antarctica. Access to the Antarctic remains largely reserved for scientists, and it is the only piece of earth that is nobody’s country. Ice Diaries is the story of McNeil’s years spent in ice, not only in the Antarctic but her subsequent travels to Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, culminating in a strange event in Cape Town, South Africa, where she journeyed to make what was to be her final trip to the southernmost continent.
  		 
  In the spirit of the diaries of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, McNeil mixes travelogue, popular science, and memoir to examine the history of our fascination with ice. In entering this world, McNeil unexpectedly finds herself confronting her own upbringing in the Maritimes, the lifelong effects of growing up in a cold place, and how the climates of childhood frame our emotional thermodynamics for life. Ice Diaries is a haunting story of the relationship between beauty and terror, loss and abandonment, transformation and triumph.

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  Biogeography - A Very Short...

  Mark V. Lomolino

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  Biogeography is the study of geographic variation in all characteristics of life—ranging from genetic, morphological and behavioural variation among regional populations of a species, to geographic trends in diversity of entire communities across our planet's sufrace. From the ancient hunters and gatherers to the earliest naturalists, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and scientists today, the search for patterns in life has provided insights that proved invaluable for understanding the natural world. And many, if not most, of the compelling kaleidoscope of patterns in biological diversity make little sense unless placed in an explicit geographic context.The Very Short Introduction explains the historical development of the field of biogeography, its fundamental tenets, principles and tools, and the invaluable insights it provides for understanding the diversity of life in the natural world. As Mark Lomolino shows, key questions such as where species occur, how they vary from place to place, where their ancestors occurred, and how they spread across the globe, are essential for us to develop effective strategies for conserving the great menagerie of life across our planet.

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  Introducing Infinity - A Graphic...

  Brian Clegg

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  Infinity is a profoundly counter-intuitive and brain-twisting subject that has inspired some great thinkers – and provoked and shocked others.
  
  The ancient Greeks were so horrified by the implications of an endless number that they drowned the man who gave away the secret. And a German mathematician was driven mad by the repercussions of his discovery of transfinite numbers.
  
  Brian Clegg and Oliver Pugh's brilliant graphic tour of infinity features a cast of characters ranging from Archimedes and Pythagoras to al-Khwarizmi, Fibonacci, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Cantor, Venn, Gödel and Mandelbrot, and shows how infinity has challenged the finest minds of science and mathematics. Prepare to enter a world of paradox.

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