Book - Smarter Than You Think

A pulling together of the experimental uses of our new connected virtual world. Not that there is anything inherently new in the way we humans do anything with the computer.  And no new things either.  It is still all down to leadership by an individual that sets the world alight, for the general good or the general bad.  Still, the book is a snapshot in time of where the computer age was in 2012. 

Book - The Malay Archipelago

Alfred Russell Wallace speaking to us from the 19th century.  So what has changed?  Well, the natural environment has for sure.  The  places he visited on the archipelago 150 years ago were already showing signs of the stresses which are today clearing those places of their 'nature'. 

As for human kind, not a lot has changed, sadly. We are still walking the planet with our brains wired for our survival 40,000+ years ago, having long since eliminated all the threats it evolved to counter. Technology is evolving too fast for our biological brains to have any hope of keeping up with it.  Amazingly Wallace recognised this in 1870 with his comment that "....we (the English) are still in a state of barbarism" with reference to the way we run our so called "civilisation".