Nonfiction Books

"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."

"“So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then?” I asked. He blinked at me as if I were stupid. “Well, what do you think you do?” he said. “You die of course. That’s what deadly means.”"

"“The most poisonous spider is the Sydney funnel web. We get about five hundred people a year bitten by spiders. A lot of them used to die, so we had to develop an antidote to stop people bothering me with it all the time.”"

"There is in Melbourne a man who probably knows more about poisonous snakes than anyone else on earth. His name is Dr. Struan Sutherland, and he has devoted his entire life to a study of venom. “And I’m bored with talking about it,” he said when we went along to see him the next morning, laden with tape recorders and note books. “Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them what to do. Don’t get bitten in the first place. That’s the answer. I’ve had enough of telling people all the time. Hydroponics, now, that’s interesting. Talk to you all you like about hydroponics. Fascinating stuff, growing plants artificially in water, very interesting technique. We’ll need to know all about it if we’re going to go to Mars and places. Where did you say you were going?” “Komodo.” “Well, don’t get bitten, that’s all I can say. And don’t come running to me if you do because you won’t get here in time and anyway I’ve got enough on my plate. Look at this office. Full of poisonous animals all over the place. See this tank? It’s full of fire ants. Venomous little creatures, what are we going to do about them? Anyway, I got some little cakes in case you were hungry. Would you like some little cakes?”"

"I’m always very sympathetic when I hear people complaining that all they ever get on television or radio chat shows is authors honking on about their latest book. It does, on the other hand, get us out of the house and spare our families the trial of hearing us honking on about our latest book."

"It [seeing an aye-aye] was the kind of moment about which it is hard not to feel completely dizzy. Why? Because, I realised later, I was a monkey looking at a lemur. By flying from New York and Paris to Antananarivo by 747 jet, up to Díego-Suarez in an old prop plane, driving to the port of Maroantsetra in an even older truck, crossing to Nosy Mangabé in a boat that was so old and dilapidated that it was almost indistinguishable from driftwood, and finally walking by night into the ancient rainforest, we were almost making a time journey back through all the stages of our experiments in twig technology to the environment from which we had originally ousted the lemurs. And here was one of the very last of them, looking at me with, as I say, serene incomprehension."

"Antananarivo is pronounced Tananarive, and for much of this century has been spelt that way as well. When the French took over Madagascar at the end of the last century (“colonised” is probably too kind a word for moving in on a country that was doing perfectly well for itself but which the French simply took a fancy to), they were impatient with the curious Malagasy habit of not bothering to pronounce the first and last syllables of place names. They decided, in their rational Gallic way, that if that was how the names were pronounced then they could damn well be spelt that way too. It would be rather as if someone had taken over England and told us that from now on we would be spelling Leicester “Lester” and liking it. We might be forced to spell it that way, but we wouldn’t like it, and neither did the Malagasy. As soon as they managed to divest themselves of French rule, in 1960, they promptly reinstated all the old spellings and just kept the cooking and the bureaucracy."

"The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur. It is a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals. It looks a little like a large cat with a bat’s ears, a beaver’s teeth, a tail like a large ostrich feather, a middle finger like a long dead twig and enormous eyes that seem to peer past you into a totally different world which exists just over your left shoulder."

"[Mark Carwardine]’s role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise."

"The human individual is born now to live in a society for which his fundamental instincts are altogether inadequate. He has to be educated systematically for his social rôle. The social man is a manufactured product of which the natural man is the raw nucleus. (p. vii)"

"The march of the modern and the reconstitution of the world's knowledge apparatus : H.G. Wells, encyclopedism, and the world brain"

"Like Otlet, Wells has assembled in his essays and addresses ... a preview of the World Wide Web: a colossal, globally accessible compendium of everything knowable. Although the World Wide Web clearly lacks the authority and editorial consistency both Otlet and Wells favor, the notion of a practicable universal source of information preceded the realities of the Internet and the World Wide Web by several decades. (pp. 151-2)"

"Reading the 1955 paper once again reminds me of the inspiration that the concept had from my early interest in encyclopaedism. In 1970, Manfred Kochen commented on its role in the worldwide encyclopaedic movement.13 Today the Internet has enabled the development of Wikipedia and other grand schemes that will make the H.G. Wells dream of a World Brain a reality. 13. Kochen M. WISE - world information synthesis and encyclopedia. J Document, 1972; 28:3 22 - 343."

"Commenting on my Google Library vs. Publishers piece, George Dyson sent me this great piece from HG Wells. I already reposted it to the comments on that blog, but this is enough of a relevant historical artifact that it deserves its own top level posting. (As always, George does an amazing job of reminding us all of how many of the ideas we are wrestling with are not new, just because we finally have the technology to realize them.)."

"... it's a good idea and has been justified by events, in that the sciences do have journals which are abstracts of the increasingly unmanageable output of the profession. As far back as his utopian science fiction, Men Like Gods, he envisaged publication available to all. Until the world wide web, this was just a dream. Yet, it seems unlikely that the internet will be enough to help education win the race against catastrophe. (One of Wells' most famous pronouncements is that "Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe.")."

""... every child can stretch a hand across a keyboard and reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed." -- Bill Clinton's State of the Union message, January 1998. Similarly: H. G. Wells, World Brain, "There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind." "If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van." -- Vannevar Bush, As We May Think."

"Unfortunately, humankind's problems may be so profound, and our ability to respond so divided, unmotivated, and feeble, that attempts to deal with them are doomed to failure. "Grand schemes" such as Wells's World Encyclopedia, Dewey's Thought News, Kochen's WISE, and Jungk's Everyman Project, have periodically sprouted up, attracted a modest following, and then faded away, apparently without a trace. The proponents are likely to be dismissed as cranks by the media and by the conventional wisdom of the era; their schemes are generally utopian, overly ambitious, and, ultimately unrealistic. (p. 282)"

"... I present some preliminary considerations for a new world brain or civic intelligence that is based on and addresses current social and technological realities. similar to the approach taken by Leibniz, Dewey, and Wells, I am proposing an approach that builds on the development and use of appropriate communication and information systems. Of course humankind's communication and information systems are currently undergoing massive changes at the global level. the civic intelligence challenge is to develop programs, applications, and policies that help shape this juggernaut into useful forms. We need to ask in what ways can connecting a huge and potentially unruly and fractious group of people from a multitude of cultures and life circumstances help society as a whole deal more effectively and equitably with problems and other issues of shared concern. (p. 273)"

"World Brain or Global Brain proponents tend to extrapolate quite extravagantly the capabilities and implications of emerging technology. For Wells it was microfilm. Today it is the infinitely more sophisticated Internet and World Wide Web which have enmeshed our globe in a fantastically intricate and diffused communications infrastructure. By means of this technology as World or Global Brain proponents imagine it taking shape, the effective deployment of the entire universe of knowledge will become possible. But this begs unresolved questions about the relative value of the individual and the state, about the nature of individual and social benefits and how they are best to be allocated, about what constitutes freedom and how it might be appropriately constrained. It flies in the face of the intransigent reality that what constitutes the ever-expanding store of human knowledge is almost incalculably massive in scale, is largely viewpoint-dependent, is fragmented, complex, ceaselessly in dispute and always under revision."

"As most of you know, H.G. Wells' World Brain has become a metaphor for a futuristic view of information science and technology. Others prefer to credit Vannevar Bush's Memex. However, I have always given H.G. Wells the priority and even commissioned a major and unusual work of art in 1981 by Gabriel Liebermann with technical assistance from Vernon Porter at Texas Instruments. Their holographic etching entitled "The World Brain" resides in the lobby at ISI in Philadelphia. Wells was also on my mind when I wrote "Towards the World Brain," which includes my testimony before a Congressional Subcommittee on Education and Labor of the US House of Representatives of the 88th (1963-64) Congress. Here is how I described the "Information Crisis" to a lay audience ..."

"Although Wells could not have known it at the time, he was writing about the Internet and the World Wide Web. How amazed and delighted he would have been by this revolution had he lived another half century!"

"The Workshop will deal with the next level of international information systems, one stage above the Internet and the Web - humanity's global communication system / network - the World Brain / World Mind."

"Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence. The base technologies of digital electronics, general-purpose computer architectures, software and interaction are mature and provide solid foundations for computer science. The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies."

"The motivation for an "information highway" was expressed in 1937, just prior to the advent of computer technology, when Wells was promoting the concept of a "world brain" based on a "permanent world encyclopaedia" as a social good through giving universal access to all of human knowledge. He remarks: "our contemporary encyclopaedias are still in the coach-and-horses phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. Encyclopaedic enterprise has not kept pace with material progress. These observers realize that the modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of facts and ideas than was ever possible before." (Wells, 1938) Bush, a technical advisor to Roosevelt, published in 1945 an article in Atlantic Monthly which highlighted problems in the growth of knowledge, and proposed a technological solution based on his concept of memex, a multimedia personal computer: "Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose...The difficulty seems to be not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." (Bush, 1945) The world brain has continued for over fifty years to provide an active objective for the information systems community (Goodman, 1987), and memex is often quoted as having been realized fifty years later through the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen and Secret, 1994)."

"In his most prescient passage in the World Brain Wells wrote: The general public has still to realize how much has been done in this field and how many competent and disinterested men and women are giving themselves to this task. The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica. This passage is very suggestive of the World Wide Web, although we have some way to go before all the world’s literature is available on-line to scholars. Wells was conscious that simply putting a microfilm projector on to peoples’ desks would not be sufficient. In addition, he proposed creating a universal index, and envisioned that "A great number of workers would be engaged perpetually in perfecting this index of knowledge.""

"Thus did Otlet early in the century envisage the kind of encyclopedia the idea of which independently attracted H.G. Wells's interest in those last few fateful years before the outbreak of the Second World War (Rayward, 1992). It was an idea of encyclopedia not greatly dissimilar from that about which Bush was to speculate in the context of memex in the first years of peace following the War."

"General references on the idea of an automated encyclopedia, or, more general, a universal encyclopedia not necessarily using computers. Wells 1938 Pollard 1938 Bush 1945.7 (However, Bush is concerned with the structure of an individual's "external memory," not with a public data store.) Manly 1960 Doren 1962.7. Bohnert et al. 1963, 10- (excellent brief overview; extensively quoted in this article.) Milbrath et al. 1964.9? p. 1-2 Licklider 1965 Davis 1965.5 Kochen ed. 1967 Soergel 1971, Section B6.2, p. 214-234 (This section is superseded by the present article, except for some specifics given in footnotes) Pager 1972.2 (covers data structure, interrogation of, and input to an automated encyclopedia in mathematics.) Kochen 1972.12"

"It is indeed paradoxical that libraries and archival repositories preserve large masses of documents without having the resources to catalog, analyse and circulate them [...]. The Universal Network of Documentation is called on to organise the liason of these reservoirs and repertories, of producers and users. The ultimate goal is to realise the World Encyclopedia according to the needs of the twentieth century. (p. 357)"

"In 1937 the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation organised a World Congress for Universal Documentation in Paris. This was an enormous congress attended by representatives of governments as well as by those interested in documentation in a more private capacity. It was, in fact, the first time that such a large, influential congress had been held in the field since the IIB conferences of 1908 and 1910 and those of the UIA in 1910 and 1913. Here Otlet and La Fontaine came into much respectful praise. Their positions as grand old men of European documentation were clearly acknowledged. The idea of a Universal Network or System for Documentation was taken up and the IID once more changed its name and statutes to become the International Federation for Documentation, in order better to promote this. Here there was much talk of H. G. Wells' idea of a World Brain, a new form of the encyclopedia, an idea which, in a different form, Otlet had been writing about for decades. Here Otlet met Wells and made "magnificent improvisations". (p. 356)"

"John Desmond Bernal#World Encyclopaedia"

"John Desmond Bernal#Different stages in the educational process"

"And another thing which we English speakers have a right to ask for [...] is a general summary of contemporary knowledge and ideas, a real modern, adequate Encyclopaedia, kept up to date and available for the use of any one. That would hold us all together as nothing else would do. We should all be of a mind and nothing on earth would have the strength to stand against our thinking. But is there anything of the sort? No. The latest Encyclopaedia in my study is dated 1929 -- eight years old -- and it is a very imperfect performance at that. Very old-fashioned. Very little better than the Encyclopaedias of a hundred years ago. Discovery and invention have been going on vigorously for the past eight years -- but how am I to learn quickly about that new stuff? There is not a sign of a new one in sight. Does any one care -- any of our education departments? Not a rap. The French just now -- in spite of threats of war, in spite of great financial difficulties are making a new and a very admirably planned Encyclopaedia. You may think an Encyclopaedia is something only rich people can afford to buy. It ought not to be. If you can afford a radio set -- if you can afford a motor-car, surely you can afford a summary of human thought and knowledge. Encyclopaedias need not be as dear as they are, any more than books or bibliographies. Cheaper books, handy bibliographies, a great encyclopaedia, our English-speaking world needs all these things. When automobiles first came along, they seemed likely to become a rich man's monopoly. [...] Henry Ford altered all that. He put the poor man on the road. We want a Henry Ford today to modernize the distribution of knowledge, make good knowledge cheap and easy in this still very ignorant, ill-educated, ill-served English-speaking world of ours. Which might be the greatest power on earth for the consolidation of humanity and the establishment of an enduring Pax for all mankind. (pp. 193-4)"

"Cheap good books -- and next comes the problem of how to hear of them -- so that we may -- from the ends of the earth -- order the ones we really want and spend our sixpences properly. Well, probably half my hearers have never heard of what is called documentation, and they think bibliography is something remote and scholastic and all that sort of thing. But really it is nothing more or less than indexing all that has been written in the world, so that you can find out quickly and surely what has been done, by whom, and under what title. Don't you want to know that? And do you know it? There are hundreds of clever people working out methods of indexing and in a little while it will be quite possible to print and keep up-to-date bibliographies, lists of all the best books, in every great group of subjects in the world. It would be as easy to keep up such bibliography as it is to keep up the issue of railway time-tables. The cost of producing these book guides need not be very much greater than the cost of producing those time-tables. I doubt if today a hundred thousand of us use any bibliographies at all. What is the good of reading unless you know what books to read? Bibliographies ought to lie about in every educated household. (pp. 191-2)"

"Nothing can pull our minds together as powerfully as books. We all want to read books according to our interest and habits. We find them so dear to buy or so difficult to borrow that most of us cannot read half the books we hear about. And three-quarters of what books there are, we never hear about at all. (p. 189)"

"History has gone into reverse. Instead of being scattered about the earth and forgetting one another, a thing which happened to the Aryan speakers and the Mongolian speakers of the past, we English speakers are being drawn together and learning more and more about each other. This reversal of the old order of things has been going on ever since the steamship and the railways appeared, a century ago. It goes on faster and faster. In the past new dialects were continually appearing; now dialects are disappearing. The curse of Babel has been lifted from over three hundred million people. This coming together is a new thing in human experience. (p. 188)"

"I want to talk about ourselves and the community to which we belong. I see that as a tremendous world brotherhood full of possibilities and full of promise for the hope, the peace, the common understanding of all mankind. (p. 186)"

"I refuse to call myself foreign or alien among any people who speak, read and think in English. (p. 174)"

"Labour parties have failed to become anything but trade-union parties and trade unionism is nothing more than the defensive organization of the workers under a private capitalistic system. Its natural tactics are defensive and obstructive. It aims at shorter hours, better pay and a restraint upon dismissals. It is unable to imagine a new system. But a hundred years ago Karl Marx evolved a fantastic notion, partly from an inadequate analysis of British trade unionism and partly out of his inner consciousness, that the worker mass could become a mighty reconstructive force in the world. With no Blue Prints of what it was going to reconstruct. That would be the heresy of Utopianism. That delusion, embodied in communism and labour socialism, has undermined and checked the forces of science and creative liberalism for a century. (pp. 164-5)"

"In my survey of the minimum knowledge needed to make an efficient citizen of the world, I laid great stress upon history. It is the core of initiation. History explains the community to the individual, and when the community of interests and vital interaction has expanded to planetary dimensions, then nothing less than a clear and simplified world history is required as the framework of social ideas. The history of man becomes the common adventure of Everyman. (pp. 141-2)"

"Education and social existence are reciprocal. Its informative side has to be essentially social elucidation. So that the ideal teacher can never be a specialist; he has to have a working conception of the world as a whole into which his teaching fits. When I write or talk to teachers about the real magnitude of their task I am apt to feel like Max Beerbohm's caricature of Walt Whitman urging the American eagle to soar. It remained ruffled and inactive on its perch. Nevertheless for good or ill the future is in the hands of the teachers as it is in the hands of no other men and women and the more this is recognized the more urgent our criticisms of them will have to be. (p. 138)"

"Plainly we have to make a centralized and uniform organization but, as Mr. Watson Davis is here to remind us, it need not have any single local habitation because the continually increasing facilities of photocopy render reduplication of our indices and records continually easier. In these days of destruction, violence and general insecurity, it is comforting to think that the brain of mankind, the race brain, can exist in numerous replicas throughout the world. (pp. 91-2)"

"It is probable that the idea of an encyclopaedia may undergo very considerable extension and elaboration in the near future. Its full possibilities have still to be realized. The encyclopaedias of the past have sufficed for the needs of a cultivated minority. They were written "for gentlemen by gentlemen" in a world wherein universal education was unthought of, and where the institutions of modern democracy with universal suffrage, so necessary in many respects, so difficult and dangerous in their working, had still to appear. Throughout the nineteenth century encyclopaedias followed the eighteenth-century scale and pattern, in spite both of a gigantic increase in recorded knowledge and of a still more gigantic growth in the numbers of human beings requiring accurate and easily accessible information. At first this disproportion was scarcely noted, and its consequences not at all. But many people now are coming to recognize that our contemporary encyclopaedias are still in the coach-and-horses phase of development, rather than in the phase of the automobile and the aeroplane. Encyclopaedic enterprise has not kept pace with material progress. These observers realize that modern facilities of transport, radio, photographic reproduction and so forth are rendering practicable a much more fully succinct and accessible assembly of fact and ideas than was ever possible before. (p. 83-4)"

"And for me at any rate this [prediction] is no Utopian dream. It is a forecast, however inaccurate and insufficient, of an absolutely essential part of that world community to which I believe we are driving now .... I have been talking of real intellectual forces and foreshadowing the emergence of a vital reality. I have been talking of something which may even be recognizably in active operation within a lifetime -- or a lifetime or so, from now -- this consciously and deliberately organized brain for all mankind. (pp. 79-80)"

"It seems possible that in the near future, we shall have microscopic libraries of record, in which a photograph of every important book and document in the world will be stowed away and made easily available for the inspection of the student.... The general public has still to realize how much has been done in this field and how many competent and disinterested men and women are giving themselves to this task. The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica. (pp. 76-77)"

"So that while I believe that ultimately the knowledge systems of the world must be concentrated in this world brain, this permanent central Encyclopaedic organization with a local habitat and world-wide range . . . yet nevertheless I suggest that to begin with, the evocation of the World Encyclopaedia may begin at divergent points and will be all the better for beginning at divergent points. (p. 74)"

"A World Encyclopaedia no longer represents itself to a modern imagination as a row of volumes printed and published once for all, but as a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared. It would be in continual correspondence with every university, every research institution, very competent discussion, every survey, every statistical bureau in the world. It would develop a directorate and a staff of men of its own type, specialized editors and summarists. They would be very important and distinguished men in the new world. The Encyclopaedic organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralize mentally but not physically. Quite possibly it might to a large extent be duplicated. It is its files and its conference rooms which would be the core of its being, the essential Encyclopaedia. It would constitute the material beginning of a real World Brain. (pp. 69-70)"

"I put forward this new encyclopaedism as a possible method, the only possible method I can imagine, of bringing the universities and research institutions of the world into effective co-operation and creating an intellectual authority sufficient to control and direct our collective life. I imagine it as a permanent institution -- untrammeled by precedent, a new institution -- something added to the world network of universities, linking and co-ordinating them with one another and with the general intelligence of the world. (p. 68)"

"An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today, a wealth of knowledge and suggestion that -- systematically ordered and generally disseminated -- would probably give this giant vision and direction and suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but that knowledge is still dispersed, unorganized, impotent in the face of adventurous violence and mass excitement. (p. 67)"

"A great new world is struggling into existence. But its struggle remains catastrophic until it can produce an adequate knowledge organization ... An immense, an ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today, a wealth of knowledge and suggestion that – systematically ordered and generally disseminated – would probably give this giant vision and direction and suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but the knowledge is still dispersed, unorganized, impotent in the face of adventurous violence and mass excitement. (p.66-67)"

"[The educated specialist] can increase knowledge, but without a modern organization backing him he cannot put it over. He can increase knowledge which ultimately is power, but he cannot at the same time control and spread this power that he creates. It has to be made generally available if it is not to be monopolized in the wrong hands. (p. 66)"