Tim Flannery reviewing The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning in the November 19 issue of the New York Review of Books:

"In his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, James Lovelock argues that Earth's system of self-regulation is being overwhelmed by greenhouse gas pollution and that Earth will soon jump from its current cool, stable state into a dramatically hotter one.

The Gaia concept and climate change science are intimately connected, and Lovelock has spent most of his career trying to understand the consequences of increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

All climatologists acknowledge the existence of such climatic jumps — as occurred for example at the end of the last ice age. But chaos theory dictates that the scale and timing of such leaps are inherently unpredictable, which means that they cannot be incorporated into the computer models of Earth's climate system that such scientists use to project future climate change. Yet this is precisely what Lovelock attempts to do — using his own computer modelling — in The Vanishing Face of Gaia. A new climatic jump, he concludes, will occur within the next few years or decades, and will involve an abrupt increase in average global surface temperature of 9 degrees Celsius — from 15 to 24 degrees Celsius (59 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit). Such a shift, he contends, will trigger the collapse of our global civilisation and the near extinction of humanity ...

One of the strongest impressions one gets from The Vanishing Face of Gaia is that Lovelock disagrees with almost everyone. But it is the green movement that evokes his most piquant criticism. He sees Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a book that is often cited as starting the modern environmental movement, giving birth to what he calls a "narrow restrictive faith" that pushes "a partisan and contentious political cause, which at best was no more than a partial expression of the humanism of Christianity or Socialism, and at worst an anarchic extremism."

More here.

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Google's Eric Schmidt on what the web will look like in five years

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said at a recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. Highlighted comments include:

"Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content. Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly. Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today. Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away. "We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video. "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results." There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time. "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?" It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

The full piece is at NYT ReadWriteWeb.

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Ki ndle, price war changing the way we read

Jeffrey Brown explores the shifting world of book publishing, and examines how technology and readers are changing the industry. At the NewsHour website there is a full transcript. You can also see the full video via streaming or you can download the audio here.

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In short

Electric Literature is a new quarterly literary magazine which "seeks nothing less than to revitalise the short story in the age of the short attention span”. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased writers such as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis and Jim Shepard. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print."

Electric Literature’s web site

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Prix Goncourt winner

Three Powerful Women, by French-Senegalese author Marie NDiaye, takes France's top literary honour

"NDiaye won the prize for her novel Trois femmes puissantes (Three Powerful Women), which weaves together the stories of Norah, who arrives at her father's home in Africa; Fanta, teaching French in Dakar, who is forced to follow her partner back to a miserable life in France, and Khady Demba, a young, penniless African widow who is trying to join her distant cousin Fanta in France". More here

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Odd book title

A Pictorial Book of Tongue Coating. Anonymous. Kyoto. Yukonsha Publishing. 1981.

Not to be found in the Libraries Australia database.