Advice for Earthlings

Bob Holmes, contributor

IMAGINE you live in a home with heating and water systems that run themselves. Food gets delivered regularly, stale air is exchanged for fresh, and waste removed promptly. But lately, instead of working beautifully, warning lights are flashing at an alarming rate - yesterday it was too hot and today the water doesn't taste so good. What to do? You pull out the instruction book.

Frank Rhodes had such a guide in mind when he wrote Earth: A tenant's manual. It's a splendid idea for a book and the "tenant's manual" metaphor provides an excellent organising principle. Rhodes, a geologist and former president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, begins by describing the property: its location, its contents and what makes it unique. Next, he reviews the history of the place, starting with the formation of the solar system and continuing through the origin and evolution of life, the evolution of humans and our rise to dominance. He follows this with a quick look at some recent environmental problems: climate change, pollution and overpopulation.

Rhodes gets down to the nitty-gritty in the last third of the book, when he surveys each of the main ways in which we rely on Earth for sustenance: water, air, soil, food, energy and materials. For each, he describes where it comes from, the current state of supply and prospects for the future.

Unfortunately, like many product manuals, this book comes across as a hasty, unedited hotchpotch that never quite delivers what the reader needs.

Rhodes rambles and repeats himself, often devoting several pages to a minor sideline such as the history of petroleum drilling, while skipping over other, more important subjects, such as Canada's carbon-intensive Tar Sands, in half a sentence. His figures and tables are often poorly explained and only tangentially relevant to the text - occasionally even duplicated in different chapters for no apparent reason. Most worryingly, Rhodes is sloppy with his facts. On one page, Earth's oldest rocks are 4.03 billion years old; a few pages later, they're 3.8 billion. Our atmosphere's greenhouse effect keeps Earth either 32 ?C or 15 ?C hotter than it would otherwise be. If he can't get these little things right, can we trust him on the big ones?

Book information
Earth: A tenant's manual
by Frank H. T. Rhodes
Cornell University Press
?18.50/$29.95

The science of sleight-of-hand magic tricks

Catherine de Lange

ON THE first day of clown school, Alex Stone wondered where his life had gone wrong. "The other members of my peer group were professors and doctors and corporate lawyers," he writes. "Not me. I was in an old warehouse taking clown classes. Honk! Honk!"

Just months before, Stone had been studying for a PhD in physics at the Columbia University in New York City. Against the wisdom of his loved ones, he was lured away from his studies into an underground world of hardcore magicians. With the dedication of an athlete, he trained his hand muscles to manipulate cards and coins with unbelievable dexterity and learned to cheat at poker without detection. But it wasn't until he acknowledged the role of science in magic that he really mastered his act. The more he knew of the science, the better he became.

In Fooling Houdini, Stone recounts with humour and humility his love affair with magic and the experiences it affords him. We share his realisation that magic and science are deeply connected. Magicians capitalise, for example, on the tricks of perception that our brains play to allow us to make it through the day while being bombarded by information. Mind readers rely on human psychology, and mathematics underlies many elaborate card tricks.

Science also turns to magic for answers. Indeed, after Stone demonstrated his dexterity by stealing research psychologist Arien Mack's watch without her noticing, they went on to collaborate on an experiment. They stole the watches off subjects focused on other tasks to test whether "intentional blindness" - whereby distracted people fail to see the glaringly obvious - also applies to touch.

Eventually, Stone learned that a good magic act is more than fancy tricks; it has to be personal and tell a story. Thankfully, he applies the same rules to this book, fitting the science around the story rather than forcing it in. To write a captivating and charming book all about magic is a hard trick to pull off, but like all good magicians, Stone makes it seem effortless.

Book information
Fooling Houdini
by Alex Stone
Cornell University Press
?12.99/$26.99

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