Non Fiction Authors From England

"There is a way... which comes from economics and social science. It was developed by... Frank Knight, and Keynes used this... The distinction between risk and uncertainty... [R]isk is about things... we... understand... known unknowns, to use Donald Rumsfeld's... great phrase... [something] we can put numbers on, things within... circumscribed situations... A lot of medicine is like this... repetition, a lot of data. ...[I]nsurance is like this ...We know roughly what the chances are, and we can talk about the numbers. Uncertainty is when... we don't know the numbers, or... deeper... we don't even know... the problem... the options... the possible outcomes..."

"[W]e tend to think... of something that's going to happen... soon, or is well understood as risk, but if we're talking about what will happen in the world in ten years time. Who's going to start putting chances on this. You'd be... deluded... There's much... deeper uncertainty or... radical uncertainty..."

"When it comes to vaccines and infectious diseases, nobody is an individual... [With] [i]nfectious diseases... measles when it comes to vaccine decisions, or COVID-19 when it comes to taking precautions, we're not individuals. We are members of society, and there's no... "optimize your individual situation." You have... an absolute responsibility... to protect the people around you, particularly the vulnerable... [T]hat's why... people who avoid vaccinating their kids is outrageous and irresponsible... they are endangering weaker kids who might not be able to have the vaccines because their immune system is compromised or for some [other] reason... [S]imilarly, if young... healthy people... not... harmed by the virus, go around being irresponsible, they are endangering the lives of older people surrounding them, in particular, their own family."

"Probability was only invented a few hundred years ago. It's not a natural way to think at all. It's extremely difficult and complex. Anything that can help people do it, is of benefit."

"[W]e can compare hang gliding... taking heroin... health treatments, with standing next to Hiroshima. We're deliberately... using these numbers to tell uncomfortable stories."

"Psychologists got hold of this lovely idea of why we're trying to do it. I don't care what people do, so I'm not trying to change what they do, particularly. ...It would be nice if they could remember it... get the gist of something... learn something, but I don't even care too much about that. Psychologists have got this great scheme of what, perhaps, we're really trying to do, which is trying to breed some immunity to misleading anecdote, which is... the fact that we're so influenced by idiotic stories we hear on the web, or from our friends and neighbors."

"Misleading anecdote is someone smokes 20 a day and lives to 110, [or] who buys some tablets off the web and their cancer goes away... These are not representative... stories... [T]his is an active area of research, and it's been shown that if you present information in the way that Michael was presenting, as icon arrays, show both the good and the bad, show the totality, [it's been] shown empirically that you can make people less influenced by misleading anecdotes."

"One of the other things we do in the book is talk about radiation... [Y]ou can say exposure to radiation, you can talk in terms of micro-lives or cigarette equivalents. So... a flight to New York, the radiation you get from that is equivalent to smoking a couple of cigarettes, about 1/2 hour of your life... The whole body CT scan... exposing yourself... to possibly an unhealthy dose of radiation... 150 microlives, smoking about 300 cigarettes, about the same as standing about 1 1/2 miles from the Hiroshima explosion. ...[W]hen they advertise these things for a thousand quid, they don't tell you that."

"When it comes to trying to prevent you endangering other people, I don't see anything wrong with persuasion. ...[Y]ou shouldn't be... [endangering people] and you should be trying to be persuaded, if not forced... I get quite Stalinist on these things because... it's so irresponsible for some people to endanger the health of others. If they wanted to make their own decision that only affects them, it's very different, and I wouldn't want to persuade anyone..."

"These s that epidemiologists report, as Michael has so ably shown, tend to get... badly reported in the newspapers. So this... in the '... "Less Meat, More Veg is the Secret for Longer Life" which... probably could well be the case, but the way they report it... They said that if we cut down the amount of red meat... 10% of all deaths would be avoided. ...So 10% of us will live forever eating nuts. This is not true. ...[T]hey're talking about relative risk, but they don't understand."

"When epidemiologists... do studies, when they follow lots of people for years, they measure the effects of various habits, in terms of s. This is what it does to your hazard every year. So if you have a daily sausage or a bacon sandwich, this goes up by about 10%, a fixed amount... as your... annual risk. 10% increase in your annual risk of death, of not making it to your next birthday."

"So we've been trying to think of another metaphor... and the one we caught hold of is... speed of aging. So it's turning these numbers, rather bold numbers quite difficult to understand, into stories, and the story we've got is, "Getting older quicker" or "Aging Slower"..."

"This is called a hazard curve. ...This is the chance of dying before your next birthday, on average. ...[I]t's... on a , so 10%... (1 in 10) 83 year olds will not see 84... 1 in 100 people like me [age 59] will not see their next birthday. 1 in 1,000 thirty-two year olds, and 1 in 10,000 7 year olds... and there is a... lump, sadly jumping up at 17, as you can imagine... boys... a risk-taking lump, but if you ignore that lump... it's a... straight line between... 7 and 90."

"This was discovered by Gompertz in 1825. There's something about our bodies, the way that we age, that means that every year our chance of dying increases by the same amount, 9%."

"Gompertz's observation said that between the ages of 25 and 80, your risk of dying increases by about 9% per year. ...[T]hat means that every eight years your risk of dying doubles, essentially. ...[I]t's going to get you in the end. Mathematics proves it. You can't go on forever, because it's this exponential increase in the risk. Amazing, really powerful. That's why you peg out in the end. It's going to get you."

"Communication is not a one-way process. It's not just telling people things. ...[T]he first rule of communication is to shut-up and... just listen... and good doctors will do that. ...Good doctors will listen and explore the person's values and concerns, and... explore to what extent... that person want[s] to be guided... to be told what to do... and that's... appropriate to want... guidance from a trusted source. ...And ...make sure ...before ...that stage, you have ...genuinely laid out the options in a way that gives it balance. You haven't tried to manipulate them... into a particular direction. ...Very difficult ...but ...a worthy objective, and... having done that, it's perfectly reasonable to... then, give advice."

"[I]n medicine... ... not manipulation or coercion, is when... as a doctor or... authority, you genuinely believe that this action is in the person's best interests, but they don't... want to do it. ...How do you make that an ethical persuasion? It's based on... two things, first... respecting the autonomy of the individuals, that they can refuse... no matter what, respect their ability to choose... the other thing is your authenticity, your integrity, that... you are doing this on behalf of that individual, for their best interest; not... to keep your clinic numbers up or to stop this person being a nuisance...[etc.]"

"That change in life expectancy is not that gripping in itself. So what we've done in the book, it does seem a rather a strange thing to say... "Over an adult lifetime, about... 50-60 years... take a year off your life." It's like losing roughly 1/50 of your life. It's actually ' because of... these daily habits... like losing a week every year of your life, the same as losing 1/2 hour off a day. So we could say... that... 2 hours watching television... it's as if it's taking 1/2 hour... off your life. ...You're aging an extra 1/2 hour sitting on your backside watching television ..."

"There'a a nice thing about 1/2 hour because an adult life expectancy is 55 to 60 years... is actually a million 1/2 hours. A million 1/2 hours is 57 years. So you have got, not all of you... some of you have got a million 1/2 hours to fritter away."

"We spent ages... working... for child heart surgery... such a delicate area, trying to find the wording for... random error or binomial variability... [Y]ou can give a percentage... 95% . Well, am I going to be one of the 5% or one of the 95%? We don't know. It's just chance or luck, fortune. We can't... use those words in... delicate situations... operating on children... Then we came up with a good phrase... which we used and tested on parents... It's "unforeseeable factors," not "unforeseen factors," because that would suggest someone's to blame... [T]he unforeseeable factors could lead some people to... not survive the operation, and some to survive. So... we can put you in a group, but we can't go beyond that... [O]nly what develops over time, in terms of complications, or something like that, could... put... you in one group or another. "Unforeseeable factors," I really like that phrase. I try to use it all the time, I recommend it."

"Currently, there are few books that can help at school level with communication issues in statistics and DS. One exception is Spiegelhalter, a masterpiece in how to communicate easy, not-so-easy, hard, and very difficult topics in statistics. It uses real-world problem solving as a starting point for introducing statistical ideas. One reviewer of the book suggested “it should be compulsory reading for teachers and students of statistics (indeed all subjects that use or produce data), in schools, colleges and universities.” Although the Spiegelhalter book is a great example of communication, the paucity of material in this area shows that there is an urgent need to develop a pedagogy and a corresponding range of resources in writing and communicating statistics and DS."

"Life-expectancy reduced by 1 year = about 30 minutes off your life expectancy for each day with the habit = 1"

"The earth on which we live has too great an influence on ourselves, directly and indirectly, to justify ignorance on the subject of its nature and constitution, or the laws which govern its material existence. The history of the present is too nearly connected with, and too directly derived from, the events of the past to allow us safely to neglect it; and the mode of arrangement of the materials of which the outer film of matter, sometimes called the "," is composed, too deeply involves the question of the daily and yearly change that takes place in what we see about us, to permit with safely any indifference in the comparison of results, often hardly to be distinguished except in degree, and in the probable date of their occurrence. In all these matters the investigations concerning the earth's history, which are most generally understood by the term Geology, are found to be very interesting and important in a general sense, and afford much useful information ..."

"Nature offers many of her books for our study; for every department of knowledge, large or small, may be looked on as a separate volume. Astronomy supplies not a few, Chemistry many more, Zoology and Botany each its quota. Of these a number have been read and studied with more or less success. In a few cases we seem to have learnt something of the general plan of Nature; in others, mere glimpses are made out of local and partial phenomena. Many departments have only lately attracted attention; many, probably, there are which are not yet known to exist. Some, on the other hand, have been in course of development ever since man was an intelligent and observing animal, recording his own experiences for the benefit of future races."

"Europe and Asia are not naturally separated; that is, there is no large ocean and no unbroken chain of lofty mountains serving as a barrier to prevent the inhabitants of the one from entering the other. A , not much higher than those of Scotland, and a , are the boundaries that separate them geographically. The two countries of Russia and Turkey, which alone approach the boundary line, possess territory on both sides of it."

"... Owing to the very minute proportion in which gold is often associated with rocks and mineral substances, it does not generally pay the cost of working; and the districts therefore known as auriferous or "gold-producing," in the the commercial sense of the term, are not so numerous ... Nearly all the gold of commerce has for a long time been obtained from , Brazil, Transylvania, Africa, the East Indian islands, and Carolina in the United States; the whole annual supply being estimated at about 80,000 pounds weight, and its value being about five millions . This however must be regarded as only an approximate value of the average of several years, as the supplies have for some time been increasing rapidly from the Russian mines."

"Every scheme of education being, at bottom, a practical philosophy, necessarily touches life at every point. Hence any educational aims which are concrete enough to give definite guidance are correlative to ideals of life—and, as ideals of life are eternally at variance, their conflict will be reflected in educational theories."

"... the as a substitute for is a law about the metrical properties of space around the "attracting" mass. Since it is to have universal validity, it must be a mathematical formula whose form is preserved when it is transformed from any one system of coordinates to any other; and since each system has its own time-measure as well as its own space-measures, time as well as space must be involved in the metrical properties with which the law deals."

"... during this expedition I was to trudge through sand wastes which had been my forest haunts when I had been in Africa thirty years ago. Here one could actually see all the process of degradation, from high forest through the stages of orchard-bush and savannah to drifting sand. When the forest is cleared for farming or other reasons, the debris is sooner or later burned up. Here we were standing on land where the which had been accumulated over thousand of years had been destroyed in a single season."

"Baker was born in England, educated on the Canadian frontier and at Cambridge, wounded in World War I, and joined the Colonial Service as a forester in Kenya, where he co-founded Men of the Trees (now the ) in 1922 to incite the to reforest their land. He came to appreciate the wisdom of indigenous peoples in protecting the land and forest, and was expelled from the Colonial Service for interposing himself and taking a blow intended for an African."

"He was given this title of "The World's Greatest Conservationist" by ... ..."

"The and Cambridge behind, I enlisted in the in Africa. In November 1920, the call came for me to go to Kenya under the ."

"Through Chief Josiah Njonjo, my righthand man, I called for volunteers, for men who would swear before , the High God, that they would protect the native forest, plant so many native trees each year and take care of trees everywhere. The volunteers were called the Watu wa Miti () ..."

"... New Zealand ... transformation of to and ... The student has an opportunity of studying the various stages of , or witnessing a virgin forest turned into a sheep run. Even a neglected farm will provide valuable data and furnish splendid material for studies of great importance and intense scientific interest. It is possible in a day's ride to study the deterioration of land from virgin forest through successive years of farming or grazing to examples of and s."

"The good will place es to attract helpful birds, and farmers will do well to plant and protect to provide nesting places for their feathered friends. Birds are great distributors of tree seeds ..."

"The experience of the nomadic farmer was that he would find fertile land only in the forest and it was natural for him to make clearings, piling smaller bushes around the greater trees to fell them by burning. The provided rich fertilizer for a season's growth but the land exposed to the elements failed to retain its fertility. So, after reaping a few crops, the nomadic farmer would penetrate ever deeper into the virgin forest ... The next stage in forest degradation is so-called orchard bush, with large trees widely scattered. Then comes a type of fringing forest, which in time will deteriorate into h. After that there is ever sparser vegetation and s, sometimes mobile but more often fixed; then follows the desert floor ..."

"Felling big is dangerous work, especially when the tops of the mighty trees are entangled with creepers."

"Maxwell became Nutkins's legal guardian. It was while living with him in the remote hamlet of Sandaig, western Scotland, that the young Nutkins was bitten by one of Maxwell's pet otters, losing the tips of two of his fingers as a result. This might have put off many young naturalists from a career with animals altogether, but , who first met Nutkins at Maxwell's home in the early 1960s, recalls a very different reaction: "He treated the injury like a war wound – he would hold his hand up and tell the story to impress people, almost as a badge of honour.""

"In the post- era, an air of unease hangs over aspects of ’s life; while in Sandaig he hired two adolescent assistants – Terry Nutkins (who went on to become a well-known TV naturalist) and Jimmy Watt – to help look after the otters. Both under-age, they moved into his home and he became Nutkins’ legal guardian. It was a set-up discomfiting to modern sensibilities, though no allegations have ever been made against Maxwell and those who knew him best believe his desire to be around young boys was merely a product of his stunted emotional development."

"Speaking about how his passion for animals was born, Nutkins would bunk off school and then climb over the fence of . The keepers took him under their wing and allowed him to muck out the elephant enclosure."

"You’re talking about with all animals. And it’s body language with all human beings as well. If you watch very carefully the body language of an animal — get to know it — that is the first phase of respecting that animal."

"During our march the simoom was fearful, and the heat so intense that it was impossible to draw the guncases out of their leather covers, which it was necessary to cut open. All woodwork was warped; ivory knife-handles were split; paper broke when crunched in the hand, and the very marrow seemed to be dried out of the bones. The extreme dryness of the air induced an extraordinary amount of electricity in the hair and in all woollen materials. A Scotch plaid laid upon a blanket for a few hours adhered to it, and upon being withdrawn at night a sheet of flame was produced, accompanied by tolerably loud reports."

"... Gemini was abandoned by her mother and I had to her. Well, I had a choice — either I hand-reared her or else she died. And that was a year ago now. And Gemini now is on the northwest coast of Scotland, and what I want to do is introduce her to the sea. And what I would like eventually is for Gemini to get her own food — get her own fish — to swim freely in the ocean and come back when she wants to."

"Pause in space and go back in time. Explore the genesis of life on this earth and gain a true perspective. A study of the story of the forests of the past is full of romance. How came they into being?"

"Lydick proved that permanent, well-arranged s and crop shelter belts are as much of an asset as barns or plows. They are as essential to agriculture as modern factories are to industry."

"The times that I got to know really well were the times that I was alone with him at . And that Jimmy Watt, the other keeper, went on holiday. And sometimes on these dark winter nights, when you had this really strong wind blowing outside and the hiss of the s … Gavin drank a substantial amount of whiskey … and he did ramble on somewhat. And he told the most wonderful stories sometimes."

"... it is impossible for us not to love whatever is lovely, and of all living things birds were made most beautiful."

"One can only hope … that the countryman will say to the townsman, Go on making your laws and systems of education for your own children, who will live as you do indoors; while I shall devise a different one for mine, one which will give them hard muscles and teach them to raise the and pork and cultivate the potatoes and cabbages on which we all feed."

"... The gardener is usually attended by a friendly robin, and when he turns up the soil the bird will come down close to his feet to pick up the small grubs and worms. Is it not probable that the tameness of the tame young robin so frequently met with is, like that of the robin who keeps company with the gardener or woodman, an acquired habit; that the young bird has made the discovery that when a person is moving about among the plants, picking fruit perhaps, lurking insects are disturbed at the roots and small spiders and s shaken from the leaves? We are to the robin what the cow is to the and the sheep to the —a food finder."

"From the distance at intervals came the piercing cries of the ... sounding like bursts of hysterical laughter. ... This bird, which is about as large as a , selects a low thorny bush with stout wide-spreading branches, and in the center of it builds a domed nest of sticks, perfectly spherical and four or five feet deep. The opening is at the side near the top, and leading to it there is a narrow arched gallery resting on a horizontal branch, and about fourteen inches long. So compactly made is this enormous nest that I have found it hard to break one up. I have also stood upright on the dome and stamped on it with my boots without injuring it at all."