New year, new laws..

Happy New Year..! 

When the new millennium rolled over more than a decade back someone wrote that it is an extremely precise count down to an arbitrary point in time. :-) It is indeed true when you consider the geological age of the planet. Still if our views are not that extreme, these milestones start to gather more meaning simply because we choose to attribute it to them. One way in which the new year milestone really affects lives is through a basket full of new laws that become effective each year at the stroke of midnight. Since US prides itself as a nation of laws, there is never any dearth of new and unusual laws, particularly since each state promulgates its own set of laws applicable just to that state. By some count, 40,000 new laws went into effect today in US alone..! Here are a few that are noteworthy.

1. California: Students will be allowed to play sports and use school bathrooms "consistent with their gender identity," and not their birth identity. What this means is trans-gender students can choose which team to play sports with and what bathroom to use.

2. Colorado: People can buy up to an ounce of marijuana for recreational use from a state-licensed retail store. This law has been getting a lot of attention as some two dozen retain marijuana stores have opened in multiple cities & towns with state license while as per federal law it is still a crime to buy or sell marijuana..! The federal Department of Justice has indicated that they are not going to spend resources prosecuting these cases and so I hear that people have been lining up in front of the stores today to be one of the first set of customers. The Colorado state will be collecting more than 27% tax from each sale.

3. Delaware: Sale, possession, or distribution of shark fins is prohibited.

4. Illinois: New "lemon pet" law enacted allows pet owners to return the animal or be reimbursed for veterinary costs "if an illness was not disclosed by the seller." Apparently such a law already exists in 21 other states. A different state law prohibits anyone under 18 from using indoor tanning facility.

5. Maine: The 48th state to require a check-off for organ donation on driver's licenses to promote organ donation.

6. Missouri and Montana: Private health insurance plans should cover teleheath (remote) health care services. Since some US states are sparsely populated, hospitals and physicians provide health related services using video conference facilities rather than asking patients to travel long distances to hospitals & clinics. So, laws are evolving to address such developments.

7. Oregon: New mothers will be allowed to take their placentas home from the hospital as health benefits have been linked to ingesting placenta. Different law that went into effect bans smokers from smoking in their vehicles when children are present.

8. All over the country several provisions of the AHA (Affordable Healthcare Act) also known as Obamacare goes into effect today.

What I love are local and national level organizations that are dedicated to regularly scanning and scouring antiquated laws. Without that effort you will be surprised by the number of meaningless laws that hang-around in the books! For several interesting examples, see

http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/north-carolina

By clicking on the names of the states listed on top of this website, you can get to know other dumb laws that are in existence in various states in US of A. If 40,000 laws are enacted each year, I am sure over the years we would have collected several gems. :-)

-sundar.

Book Review: The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

Finished reading Brian Greene's "The Hidden Reality - Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos" last weekend. This is in some ways the third book in the trilogy he has authored. The Elegant Universe spoke about Physics and Universe in general, discussed theory of relativity in a very accessible prose, talked about Calabi-Yaushapes/spaces and string theory in an engaging way. The next one called The Fabric of Cosmos spoke about how space forms the fabric from which the entire cosmos is formed. This third book is focused on the following versions of multiverses plausibly floating around. 

Quilted Multiverse: 

Inflationary Multiverse: 

Brane Multiverse: 

Cyclic Multiverse: 

Landscape Multiverse: 

Quantum Multiverse: 

Holographic Multiverse: 

Simulated Multiverse: 

Ultimate Multiverse: 

I am listing them here since each multiverse is worth a Google search to get lost into. :-)

Book starts with a discussion of how Einstein blinked when theory of relativity ended up showing a universe that is forever expanding or contracting. Feeling quite unsettled, he added the cosmological constant to his math to make it static. Subsequent investigation and actual observations through experiments indeed showed the universe to be continuously expanding and in fact accelerating its expansion. This then leads to the follow up questions on the limits of the universe and the possibility of a quilted multiverse. In subsequent chapters we explore more than half a dozen versions of the multiverses that have been proposed. While the ideas are highly speculative for now, author suggests that this is similar to the days Einstein came up with the theory of relativity that couldn't be tested via experiments immediately due to the limits of technology at that time. But as we know, subsequently ToR was indeed experimentally verified and has practical application today in things like GPS since satellites that provide the signal for our handheld units need to take into account the space-time curvature without which it won't work..! Thus Greene proposes that even the existence of multiverse could one day be experimentally investigated and confirmed even though we may not be able to visit the other universes in existence. Currently there seems to be ideas floating around based on how atomic particles/strings may behave differently if there are additional dimensions that support additional universes. Some of these sections are not as clearly written as the initial and end chapters. Still, he presents very interesting discussions on what can happen if universes bump into each other, can LHC (Preview)create a small black hole that will grow and swallow the whole universe (not likely :-), etc. 

One of the concepts discussed related to string theory is very neat. In the 1980s physicists figured that there are five different types of string theories named (certainly not by marketing experts :-) Type I, Type IIA, Type IIB, Heterotic-O and Heterotic-E. To work out the details of each theory, perturbative approach was usually used, where you do take into account just the major factors in the first round to determine the (rough) result and then go back for a second pass to fine tune it further taking into consideration the second order factors that are lot less influential, followed by another pass taking into account third order factors and so forth to incrementally arrive at as precise a result as possible as the computations get more and more complicated. This is similar to the way we may do mental math to land in the right ballpark first and then narrow down the answer to a more precise value. While doing the math, string coupling constant that defines the probability of one string bumping off of another is used as a factor. Until the early 90s each one of this string theory is considered a silo and physicists worked out the details assigning small values for string coupling constants. But in 1995 there was a big revelation showing that if you keep increasing the value of string coupling constant (SCC) in one of these 5 theories, it slowly morphs into one of the other 4 models with the SCC value dialed much smaller..! Thus, for example, when Type I string theory model's SCC value is raised, it morphs into Hererotic-O string theory with SCC value that is really small..! While this idea itself is very elegant, he explains using this image that looks like a photograph of Einstein when your eyes are close to the image and morphs into Marilyn Monroe when you move back considerably..! Pretty cute analogy. :-) 

One other satisfying proposal put forth is that the multiverse concept will answer the gnawing philosophical question "Why is there a universe instead of nothing?". I can paraphrase it briefly as follows. Since multiverse supports a large number of universes in existence, human beings end up existing in this tangible universe since this happens to be one variation that is capable of supporting our life form. This answer won't work easily if there is only one universe where we exist, which may force us to create a God to explain the creation of the universe. :-) If you find this topicintriguing, do read this paper by Peter Lynds.  

Last couple of chapters touch upon the ideas of the whole world we perceive being a simulation run by someone where human beings are all entities within that simulation (similar to The Matrix movie plot line) and one day can we build computers powerful enough to do such simulations ourselves that will collide back with the simulation we are already on and so forth. Quite an interesting ride/read.

Something should be said about Greene's book titles themselves. Titles like "What They Don't Teach You at Harvard" are amusing gimmicks to catch attention and sell books. If that book had been named "Some Useful Principles for General Management" which is what it was, I doubt if it would have sold that much. On the other end of the spectrum, I find titles of all three of Greene's books almost poetic and at the same time representing the content exactly (truth in advertising). Admirable.

-sundar.

Are you well read?

Last week I received an email from my M.S. thesis advisor who was also in my dissertation committee. Since my grad school days are long past, and since we have kept in touch, over the decades he has become more of a friend. He is in my spam email list and reciprocates in kind sending me mail on his own once in a while. This is what it said:

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I read two linked essays that immediately made me think of you and your own essays about reading and listening and thinking about reading and listening.  The first one titled "Is There Too Much Music?”, is about loving music but being overwhelmed by how much new music there is. The second titled “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything”, is about the question of what does it mean to be well read when there are more good books than anyone could read in a lifetime.  It points to culling or surrendering as ways to cope. 

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I am always grateful to friends who send me such emails unsolicited. Stop now and do read those two pieces before continuing. They are not long. The posts themselves are nothing spectacular but touch upon a good theme that may apply to many of us interested in growing up well-read, well-exposed, culturally/politically/socially aware human beings. They reminded me of a late night ~20 years back around this time of the year in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Another LSU grad student friend of mine and I went to see a play for the first time in BR Little Theater. Since we were students, we got discounted tickets, watched the play which was very nicely put together and proved to be very entertaining with a good bit of humor, drama, mystery all thrown in. As we walked out into the cold night driving back to our apt., we were specifically discussing how despite being in BR for ~5 years, we never watched a play in BRLT and wondered how much else is going on right around us that we will thoroughly enjoy but never get to, be it music concerts, books, lectures, documentaries or any other material/event. We indeed felt a bit bad and promised ourselves to seek out more things that we should learn about/enjoy. Subsequently I did watch a few more plays, went to public libraries to get documentaries such as PBS's Eyes on the prize, Ken Burns' Civil War, US Constitution: The Delicate Balance (Preview) , watched series  like I, Cladius (Preview) , attended few good lectures, etc. 

I always regretted the fact that I never learned Indian classical music formally (which as you may know gets quite technical and tough and is usually a decade long pursuit to get it right), not reading fast enough that is exacerbated by daily family/work pressure, not listening to all the podcasts that I actually know are good ones, and so on. I think even about 10 years back this notion used to spill over into areas like visiting Disney World where I'd want to try every ride, see every show, etc. driving my wife crazy. She used to joke that she needs a vacation after going out on a vacation with me. :-) But I think as kids grow up, I have reluctantly reconciled myself to be more on the surrender side of the spectrum. So, when we go on vacation, I try to be satisfied as long as kids are having fun though we may not see everything, though I may not get to take good pictures/videos (as my son is keen on taking over the camera that makes him really happy and gives us poor pictures/videos :-). 

In my Android smartphone I have subscribed to "The Radiolab" and PRI's "TheWorld" podcasts though I am not listening to them everyday, been trying to finish up Brian Greene's "The Hidden Reality" for the past couple of months, started writing an article in Tamil, trying to watch Season 3 of this Danish TV serial called Borgen at thelinktv.org site.. Nothing is complete. But at least there are a pile of fun things to do as and when possible. Hopefully I will die a content man. :-) 
-sundar. 

The Art of Writing Movies

I enjoy watching movies. Beyond that, I find getting an academic understanding of the movie making process even more interesting. So, when I am watching movies, there is usually a thread in the back of my mind that analyzes the story/scenes finding patterns. For example, I am very familiar with the three-act structure of story telling. So, I try to parse the story line to see where the first act ends, second/third acts begin. Naturally once you learn the grammar, movies that make use of that construction tend to become a little less fascinating. As a friend of mine once said seeing a flower as a flower is joy. But disecting it petal by petal to do research may not be fun anymore. That is true from one point of view, while understanding the meta level construction, how things are put together could provide a different sort of enjoyment. 

Recently my wife and I watched Star Trek: Into the Darkness, a new release still in theaters. Though it was decent, being a safe summer block buster production, it is a case study for three-act structure. Analyzing it further, in the first act it was explained that the villain's human body cells don't die and regenerate very quickly. Then at the beginning of the third act when the protagonist is killed off, I could immediately see the villain's cells will be used near the climax to resurrect the hero again. In fact as we were watching the movie in the theater, once the hero is killed off, we were laughing recalling a Tamil movie called Sivaji that came out in 2007. It pretty much had the same sequence where a young boy killed off by electrocution is revived in the first act setting the audience up so that the same technique could be applied to revive the hero in climax. :-) All these tricks and formulas make story telling repetitive. These thoughts were flowing in when I came across this article (do read it) that explains how Hollywood has gone several steps further since there is a 15 beat formula for writing block buster movie stories now that is almost always followed. You can see this grammar/constructs being used in most Spielberg, J J Abrams type blockbusters. While the formula works overall, it sure makes audience feel "déjà vu allover again" as they watch each new movie. :-)

Movies that defy these rules and still turn out to be good ones are much more interesting. Non-linear story telling gives us a break (as in the old movie Memento with very interesting trivia about chronology at the IMDB site). Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros type portmanteau movies or other variations such as the French/Polish trilogy Blue-White-Red are intriguing for interacting/intersecting across movies & story lines. In that genre, recently saw Cloud Atlas that tells 6 different stories in parallel with same actors appearing in different roles in different stories. Though we can still blame individual stories for following the good old three-act structure, weaving all the stories without causing confusion, is admirable. This is despite the fact that they are even loosely tied to each other with overlaps (unlike  Iñárritu's movies where the connection is often too flimsy as in Babel making the narration totally disjointed). Kudos to writers/directors Wachowski brothers (of The Matrix fame) and Tom Tykwer.

 

Now there are software packages to analyze movie scripts to predict how well it will do in the box office and/or what changes will make it better/cheaper, etc.! So much for art..! :-)

Book Review: In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce

Read this book titled "In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India" by Edward Luce and enjoyed it thoroughly. He is a British journalist, who has served as the New Delhi bureau chief of Financial Times from 2001 to 2006. He is living in Washington D.C. now. His years in India, his position combined with his background (he is married to an Indian who is a World Bank economist) seems to have given him a good grip on a wide range of topics discussed in the book. Though I am not following Indian politics/headlines/hot topics closely on a daily basis, I found his assertions and assessments quite in line with my image of what is India today. In some parts of the world the subtitle seems to be modified slightly as "The Strange Rise of Modern India"..!

He starts off with a visit to Auroville, a spiritual town full of Westerners seeking India's spiritual elixir, which is home to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Starting from there he tours around various parts of India to get a good view of India's schizophrenic mix of ultra modern and medieval economies lingering side by side. Second chapter discusses the extent to which the state permeates people's daily lives, how well entrenched the civilian cadre of officers are, and despite knowing well how corrupt government officials are, and poor villagers still seeing landing a government job (from which no one gets fired) as their path to economic salvation. Moving on, the next section discussing north and south India paints a clear picture of how different the quality of governance is. He provides pointers like the literacy rate in Tamilnadu (about 90%) Vs. Bihar (less than 50%), well paved roads and seemless WiFi service in Hyderabad full of MNC software giants Vs. Patna (capital of Bihar) where making a phone call from your room to the hotel front desk is tough and all the roads are broken, while (even economically poor rural) women in Tamilnadu's coastal region discuss and complain about how they have been paid only 90% of the tsunami relief monies, women in rural north Indian villages won't even come out of their huts to talk to a foreigner. He himself explicitly states that he is not trying to portray Tamilnadu as heaven but compared to several northern states, southern states have much better quality of governance, only 10 to 20% of funds being siphoned off compared to 70 to 80% in the north. 

Subsequent chapters talk in depth about castes, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the sycophants that surrounds the leaders, the Kashmir issue with Pakistan (he had interviewed General Musharraf), the triangular dance going on between India, China and US each with its own intentions and end goals, nuclear deterrent, Bollywood movies and so forth. Everywhere he manages to retain readers' attention. 

  

He visits Dar-ul-Uloom -the House of Knowledge- a large Islamic school in a town called Deoband. The Maulana (an honorific title given to the Muslim leader) asks him if he wants any refershment to which Luce responds with a request for a Nescafe coffee, which is probably the only kind of coffee you will get in those parts. The Maulana says that he had earlier issued a fatwa preventing all faithfuls from consuming any of the American or British products to protest against their attacks on the muslim brethren. Luce trying to argue that he is not a faithful (since he is not aMuslim) and Nestle is actually a company in Switzerland, etc. doesn't help. Still the Maulana after thinking through it a bit comes up with a solution saying the fatwa he issued applies only to products bought after 9/11 and so by locating an instant coffee sachet bought before 9/11, they manage to serve him a cup of coffee..! With such a convenient & thoughtful loophole found in the fatwa for his sake, Luce says it was one of the most satisfying cup of coffee he ever had. :-)

There are no charts or graphs in the book (though there are a bunch of photographs collected in few pages in the middle) and the tone is not too academic but still the work is serious enough to dive into serious topics earnestly. It is his perception of people, places, events, organizations he had come across in India, which is a functioning anarchy. The list of big names in India that he had interviewed sound quite impressive as it ranges from political leaders (Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Vajpayee, Lalu Prasad Yadav), industrialists (Hinduja), tech titans (Nilekani, Premji) to Bollywood stars (Amitabh Bachchan), sport stars, IAS officers, spiritual leaders (Sri Sri Ravishankar) and so on. His wit is entertaining. Describing one of the modern gurus (Ravishankar) very popular in India, he says the guru is sitting in a large prayer hall with hundreds of devotees in front, with flowing long hair and beard, with a nice air conditioner on, looking like Jesus Christ is shooting a shampoo commercial. :-) There are mild jokes thrown in once in a while pointing out things like in India "You don't cast your vote but vote your caste", India never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, etc. While he is on the whole respectful of people & culture, he relentlessly points out all the flaws in the system as in the cases of free or subsidized products and services provided by the government purportedly to help the poor ending up filling up the coffers of the rich and resulting in the exact opposite effect of depriving the poor even more. A good case in point is free electricity state governments provide to help the poor farmers. In reality only the well connected rich farmers who don't need the freebie enjoy the delivery, run the pump sets 24x7 to irrigate their large lands endlessly as there is no incentive to turn the pumps off that results in water table getting lower and lower preventing poor farmers who can't afford electric pumps from accessing any water through their manual means.

In the last section he lists the following four problems that require urgent attention, if India had to reach its envisioned super power status in the future. 

- The challenge of lifting 300 million people out of abject poverty

- Overcoming the dangers of rapid environmental degradation

- Heading off the specter of an HIV-AIDS epidemic

- Protecting and strengthening India's system of liberal democracy

His prescriptions are a bit vague and skimpy. I am also sure that we can add couple more bullets to the list or debate whether these four are the valid ones that should be on top. Similarly, Indian readers may not see a lot of new information in the book, while foreigners may not know the cast of characters well enough to enjoy the book as much as I did. But on the whole he does a nice job of presenting the background history and current status of this land of contrast well to conclude that India is not on autopilot to greatness but it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane.

Planning to read a similar work on China for which  China Goes Global:The Partial Power by David Shambaugh looked like a good candidate. Haven't bought it yet. Do you know of anything better?

-sundar.

Book Review(s)

I bought Viktor E. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" about 3 years back and it was sitting on the shelf patiently ever since. It is a fairly small book of about 160 pages. Frankl was a psychiatrist in Austria, captured by the Nazis and placed in concentration camps for 5 years before he got out and eventually published several books including this one. First half of the book talks about life in the concentration camps during the second world war. While he describes the horrors of people being put to death, the showers, lack of any kind of nourishment, sleeping next to dead bodies and so forth, he is not trying to describe things just for shock value, limiting himself saying enough has been written now that describes these camps, and so there is no need. 

I remember reading a while back as to how our minds adapt themselves to any given situation filling themselves with the task of analyzing what is in front. Thus, a cut in our pinky may look much more important to us taking up our whole thought process though we might have read about/seen on TV an ongoing famine in another part of the world killing thousands of people. But if we are in the midst of a famine, a cut in a pinky won't even register. By the same token, even in as abject a situation as in a concentration camp where you see people dying and put to death daily, our elastic mind adjusts itself to focus on finding some sort of meaning to one's existence so that one can live on. As the author quotes Nietzsche, "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." Getting some peas with the soup (instead of just broth water), cracking jokes about the SS guards, thinking about the nice life one is going to lead after getting out of the camp one day, making up stories about how one's friends & family must be getting along outside and one will meet them soon, etc. all provide causes/reasons for hope that makes one survive the camp day by day. Of course when this hope is lost, author says he saw human beings in the camp simply giving up, not getting up one day to go to mindless work one is forced to do, knowing fully well that not getting up will lead to one's death in the hands of the guards.  He argues that those prisoners who gave up on life were the first to die. The main cause for their death is the lack of a reason to live for rather than lack of food or medicine. These realizations/observations got him to develop his ideas for logotherapy, discussion of which forms the second half of the book.

Contrary to Freudian and other conventional psychiatry ideas that human mind is driven by its pursuit of happiness, Frankl's Logotherapy claims that human beings are driven by a search for a meaning in their lives. This seems to explain as to why even when your existence is reduced to such misery as in a concentration camp, people are able to live on and survive. Where pursuit of happiness doesn't stand a lot of chance to keep you going in such extreme situations, search for a meaning can. 

After he got out of the camps, he had setup a successful practice and had treated depression, loss of hope, bi-polar and other range of psychiatric disorders using this model. He describes his approach by discussing several case studies. For example, a mother who had a mentally disabled child that eventually dies and a remaining one that is crippled. While this situation will be extremely depressing to the mother pushing her towards suicide and pursuit of happiness beyond that point in her life will be very difficult, figuring out a meaning as to how/why it happened appears to work better. In this example, asking the mother, would she have not had the child at all rather than going through this pain always makes the mother realize that her love for the child trumps the pain and so as painful as it may be, she still treasures the experience.  The child that died early lived though short a life filled with her love rather than a long life that is bereft of love while the second one is surviving thanks to her. One can view these as nothing more than clever arguments or tricks. But viewing the same scenario from a totally different perspective does change one's view and if that makes you happy/satisfied giving you a reason to go on with life even under extenuating circumstances, then there is all the more reason to embrace such arguments. Reading such books/ideas periodically should help us realize how blessed we are in our lives and how silly the things we keep worrying/fighting about on a daily basis be it a silly ego tiff with our spouses or some work related issues not going right temporarily. Frankl's genuine tone of humility in his writing is humbling. 

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Also read a novel titled "The Sunshine when she is gone" by Thea Goodman. 

It is a story of a rich young couple living in NYC with a small baby. The city/career oriented life they lead, with a nanny to look after the baby, gets under their skin. So, one day the husband just takes the baby and gets on a plane going to Barbados for a weekend without telling his wife. Of course he flies back after two days and gets back with his wife. While the idea is interesting, execution is not that interesting. To balance out husband's this heinous "crime" violating the wife's confidence, wife cheats on the husband in a contrived scenario and so when they find out what the other did, they are even and they move on. I bought the book after hearing about it in the radio thinking Maya might enjoy the novel. She gave up halfway and I was the one who read the whole book. You can skip this one. :-)

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My son Arjun is on summer vacation. Just to keep him engaged, I get him books to read that should be just above his level. I have commented about Malcolm Gladwell's books before, saying he usually has a grain of a good idea worth writing a Newyorker article about but then adds a lot of fluff and builds a book around it. So, thought they should be good choices for a kid that had just finished elementary school. :-) So, got him The Tipping Point and Outliers from the public library. He loved them and finished reading them in one day each..! 

I had read Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" before and since then swore off Gladwell books. But, Arjun finishing these books one per day put me to shame as I usually take months to finish "Collapse" type books I pick up. I had to convince myself that it is indeed the dense content that slows me down. So, decided to pick up Outliers and I am relieved to report that I could finish it in a day too. I knew the outline since I had read Gladwell's related articles. This might have accelerated my phase. But I could certainly zip through the pages since this book also follows the same model of some simple good observations/ideas written out elaborately in a news paper article style. Gladwell keeps churning out these "academic lite" books that people like to clutch and talk about in dinner parties making him popular and rich. If you agree and haven't read this book, you can just read his articles at http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html on Canadian ice hockey players and  Christopher Langan or read the book synopsis posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book).

Phew.. I feel vindicated and eligible to retain my snobbish notions for some more time, that is until my kids put me back in my place once again. :-)

-sundar.

Book Review: Collapse by Jared Diamond

Read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Similar to his other famous book Guns, Germs and Steel, the breath of material he covers in this book is amazing. This is the opposite end to the kind of books celebrities & authors who churn out dozens of manuscripts produce, where each piece has some little idea or observation with a lot of fluff around it making up some 200 pages. Since Diamond is a Professor in UCLA, he teaches graduate level courses based on this book material.

This 500+ page long book takes us on a nice guided tour of current and ancient civilizations. It starts out in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana and continues on to discuss Easter Islands, Pitcarin and Henderson Islands, The Anasazis, Mayans, Vikings and Fugues, Japan, Somalia, Greenland's Norse, Rwanda/Burundi, Tikopia Island, Haiti Vs. Dominican Republic, Russia, China, Australia and so on darting back and forth in the timeline, geography and civilizations. (As usual India is hardly mentioned anywhere but for a line or two in passing. :-)

Underlying theme is that societies that thrive for several centuries can collapse precipitously just in a decade if attention is not paid to few factors. He distills them into the following five:

- Environmental damage caused by the society

- Climate change

- Hostile neighbors

- Friendly trade partners

- Society's reaction to its environmental problems

It may look like points 1 & 5 could be combined into one and similarly 3 & 4 could be combined into one. Still this gives a framework through which he analyzes multiple societies both in the past and present, some successful and many failed ones. His conclusion is that if we don't pay attention to these factors, our current societies are also vulnerable to such catastrophic collapse. Though some may argue that scientific advancement, communication technology and our awareness of what goes on in different parts of the world will allow us to react to changes to prevent such a collapse, he elaborately argues that it need not be the case. Compared to Easter Island society, we may be much bigger but that gargantuan size can lead to faster environmental damage that may be hard to reverse and a setup with a lot of built-in inertia to implement changes quickly. Globalization also ensures that no one is isolated from changes taking place in one part of the world. So, such collapses to even countries/societies like US are very real possibilities.

The comparison study of Haiti Vs. Dominican Republic is fascinating. While both countries are part of the same island and are poor countries, comparatively DR is in much better shape due to its policies where as Haiti is in miserable condition despite possessing same resources. In another case study he compares the lives of Norse and Inuit in Greenland. The Norse from Norway moved into Greenland and lived there for 450 years and then were forced out of existence completely not being able to survive, though the local Inuits have been successfully living in the Arctic for 1000's of years. There seems to be 4 reasons as to why the Norse vanished from Greenland.

- Fluctuating weather cycles. They entered Greenland during a mild period that was conducive to invasion & settling down but made them complacent.

- Their preconceived ideas of how to live based on the Norwegian society's living style and values helped them first but then lead to their decline.

- They looked down upon Inuit and refused to learn from them.

- The powerful, wealthy Norse had short term interests that were counter to their long term well being.

These observations seem to fit into the five point framework he provides early. As he works through the material the amount of information he throws around is quite impressive. There is a long description as to how the Inuit kayaks are custom made for individuals, thus converting kayak into something the Inuit "wear" as an extension of their clothing as one kayak won't fit the next guy in line. I never viewed the kayak in this way. In a different chapter he describes in detail as to how similar to cross sectional tree rings that are used to study the age of trees, pollen found in successive layers of mud is studied to create a record of weather patterns (how extreme snow was in a year, etc.) spanning decades, cross checking it with tree rings found in the same geographical area. Extremely slow and painstaking research explained well.

The last item on this list is perhaps the most important take away. As societies evolve beyond initial stages where everyone is involved in subsistence agriculture, a class structure gets setup. People on top of this pyramid were kings/queens/chieftains in olden days and billionaires today. This ruling class is usually insulated from negative impacts of their and the society’s actions. So, they become oblivious, fail to take corrective actions though they are the ones with power that could implement changes. They become more and more preoccupied with palace intrigues, fine-tuning laws to favor them, topping the billionaire lists and thus maintaining their hold on power. This “Let them eat cake” mentality might look like an historical artifact that cannot repeat today due to instant communication, democracy, etc. But how the near collapse of the banking system late last decade hardly affected the top bosses could serve as a clear illustration that it applies to contemporary societies as well. We can also argue that the collapse of the US Auto industry, the collapse of the railroad industry before that, collapse of the canal industry before that are all cases in point. In the end when the whole system/society goes down, it takes down everyone with it.

While the title and the framework may paint the author as a rabid environmentalist, he does talk in detail about specific MNC efforts to be environmentally friendly as it makes good business sense for them in the long run. He encourages his readers to strongly support such companies and points out Chevron's oil exploration operation in Papua New Guinea as one such excellent example. This book is certainly worth the read. In addition to this book, there are good lectures given by him on this topic available on TED.com site.

-sundar.