Ghost Map

[UtahDan]

Want to share a really good book that I just read. I don't think I heard about here so sorry if it has already been reviewed.

This is a book by Steven Johnson who also wrote Everything Bad is Good for You (which I am reading next) and is about a deadly cholera outbreak in the Soho district of London in the 1850s and how a physician and vicar solved the riddle, the former who postulated a water-borne theory of transmission, and the latter who validated it in the process of trying to debunk it.

But more than the interesting history it is about how statistical data came to be used to deduce larger trends in big cities (where most people now live) and how this water shed moment was the foundation for all sorts of public health policies and approaches that have been used since.

Two other very interesting themes also emerge. The first is how phenomenally resistant the scientific and governmental "establishment" can be to a new idea, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the current theory is wrong, when the current theory gratifies their pre-existing beliefs about the social order. In this case, the establishment was committed to the idea of "miasma" (this is in the era when scientists had just discovered microbes but not yet related them to disease) which essentially held that disease was spread through bad smells. Since bad smells were associated with he lower classes who didn't live as clean as those of better breeding, there was total commitment to the idea that disease was the just desserts of being of low birth and the attendant squalor. Of course, this was completely wrong. Everyone has a visceral reaction to the smell of death and sewage so its obvious that these smells must produce disease, right? It took many years, even after mountains of proof, for this view to change and some went to their graves maintaining it.

It makes one wonder what we are ideologically committed to (in the broadest sense, not just in the religious sense) that is in spite of the evidence.

The other interesting idea is that big cities are the greenest places on earth because services can be provided to them so much more efficiently, and that they are the healthiest places on earth for their in habitants as well. A persuasive statistical case is made for this. For example, NYC if made a separate state would immediately be the 12th most populace but the 51st in terms of energy consumption. This because 82% , walk, ride a bike to take public transit to work. Water, sewer, electricity are provided more efficiently and over much shorter lines than if the same population were spread out.

Anyway, I recommend it without qualification as very through provoking, even if it does wander a bit after the initial narrative gets tied up about 3/4ths of the way through.

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Lond...6952365&sr=8-1

[jay santos]

Originally Posted by UtahDan

Want to share a really good book that I just read. I don't think I heard about here so sorry if it has already been reviewed.

This is a book by Steven Johnson who also wrote Everything Bad is Good for You (which I am reading next) and is about a deadly cholera outbreak in the Soho district of London in the 1850s and how a physician and vicar solved the riddle, the former who postulated a water-borne theory of transmission, and the latter who validated it in the process of trying to debunk it.

But more than the interesting history it is about how statistical data came to be used to deduce larger trends in big cities (where most people now live) and how this water shed moment was the foundation for all sorts of public health policies and approaches that have been used since.

Two other very interesting themes also emerge. The first is how phenomenally resistant the scientific and governmental "establishment" can be to a new idea, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the current theory is wrong, when the current theory gratifies their pre-existing beliefs about the social order. In this case, the establishment was committed to the idea of "miasma" (this is in the era when scientists had just discovered microbes but not yet related them to disease) which essentially held that disease was spread through bad smells. Since bad smells were associated with he lower classes who didn't live as clean as those of better breeding, there was total commitment to the idea that disease was the just desserts of being of low birth and the attendant squalor. Of course, this was completely wrong. Everyone has a visceral reaction to the smell of death and sewage so its obvious that these smells must produce disease, right? It took many years, even after mountains of proof, for this view to change and some went to their graves maintaining it.

It makes one wonder what we are ideologically committed to (in the broadest sense, not just in the religious sense) that is in spite of the evidence.

The other interesting idea is that big cities are the greenest places on earth because services can be provided to them so much more efficiently, and that they are the healthiest places on earth for their in habitants as well. A persuasive statistical case is made for this. For example, NYC if made a separate state would immediately be the 12th most populace but the 51st in terms of energy consumption. This because 82% , walk, ride a bike to take public transit to work. Water, sewer, electricity are provided more efficiently and over much shorter lines than if the same population were spread out.

Anyway, I recommend it without qualification as very through provoking, even if it does wander a bit after the initial narrative gets tied up about 3/4ths of the way through.

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Lond...6952365&sr=8-1

Sounds like a cool book. On the energy consumption thing, you have to take into account the energy consumption that industry uses. Not a lot of power plants, refineries, pulp and paper plants, etc. within NYC city limitis.