David Chaffetz. Raiders, rulers and traders. The horse and the rise of empires.

    Eminently readable book with a lot of interesting information. However, what is strange, for Chaffetz is a horse rider himself, there is very little information on the evolution of harnesses, saddles, stirrup and other equipment needed to turn a horse into an indomitable war machine. Peacetime application of horses does not interest him that much. 

    Chaffetz' numbers of the size of pre-modern armies are taken from contemporary chronicles and are not reliable because chroniclers shamelessly exaggerated the numbers of the opponent and diminished the numbers of their own. For instance, he estimates the size of Mongol hordes as 600,000. But the army of such size in the absence of railroad supply would simply eat their horses first, and then die itself from starvation. In fact, the Mongols divided their troops into corps of 10,000 riders (tumen), each of each traveled by a different road. The next village, which they would plunder -- and they ate only meat considering plant eaters as cud chewing animals -- must be located within a length of march supported by slaughtering the village livestock. 

Angela Merkel. Freedom. Memoirs 1954-2021.

        

       Firstly, the English translations of non-fiction books cannot be considered true to the originals because New York publishing milieu edits them to conform to the ruling neocon ideology. Being beset in all corners of this big country, neoconservatism still runs triumphant in the BosNyWash corridor. So, I cannot be held responsible for the parts, which were either excised, heavily edited or added by request of the American editorial houses. 

Secondly, because the memoirs these days are created by professional imagemakers, they are serving the primary role of glorifying the notional author rather that to be testimony to the facts of her life. So, the most interesting things in the current memoirs are the ones, which inadvertently cropped into the memoirs past attention of media gurus. Such was a tacit admission by Chrystie Freeland, a former deputy Prime Minister of Canada that, during her time as a Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, she moonlighted for the Russian oligarchs in the capacity similar to Ghislaine Maxwell supplying them with nubile flesh. Without insider trading tips obtained during their drunken orgies, how could she come so well off from Moscow as to finance from pocket her electoral campaign? 

    Angela Merkel is certainly in a completely different bracket from C.F. both as a politician and as a human being. The only new thing except forgettable names for her foreign policy advisers I learnt from cursory glance of her book was her hatred of dogs for she mentions Putin's "canine stubbornness" or some other negative characteristic ascribed to dogs. 

    The most interesting events in foreign policy, which she could have described but did not was removal of Muammar Khaddaffi -- because she mentions the chaos after his demise and very probable cautionary messages to the Ukrainian Government after the Minsk accords she helped to negotiate. She now admits that the treaties were signed -- and deposited to the UN, which she mentions as her achievement -- in a bad faith, which is a centuries-long tradition of German diplomacy beginning at least from the violation of Pragmatic Sanction by Friedrich II. But, unlike Scholz, she probably cautioned the Ukrainian leaders that she would look the other way at their violations and help them, militarily and economically only if they do not challenge two basics. Namely, they would not make loose talk of obtaining nuclear weapons and try to recover Crimea by the military means. 

I shall look at "Freedom" again to find snippets other than her hatred of canines, which make the book worth reading. 

       

Venki Ramakrishnan. Why we die.

    Nobel Prize winner V. Ramakrishnan (Biology and Medicine, 2009? for the study of ribosomes) is a first-class mind. He refutes most of the myths about mortality. When there is a theory of mortality, he explains that the things are more complicated than meets the eye. All in all, we don't know why we die. There are many mechanisms of aging and apoptosis on the cellular and sub-cellular level but none can consistently explain longevity of organisms across the species.

    Some of the reasoning of Ramakrishnan is deficient. For instance, similarly to Dawkins, he argues that group selection is impossible because in the case of mutation beneficial for the group but imposing cost on the individual, the individuals without this mutation would outcompete the mutated individual in their progeny. 

    This is not convincing because, for instance, there could be several mutually incompatible mutations both leading to evolutionary success. In an imaginary example, a bird of prey can be more successful hunter by flying quieter or flying faster. These properties may be incompatible by fluid mechanics or genetics. Individual having both mutations faces a double energy cost. So it is likely that the population would include both species. Economists call this a separating equilibrium. 

    Owls are not eusocial, so the story ends here. But, for a tribe, a population of excessively aggressive individuals due to random mutation, who consume resources much in excess of minimal needs (soldiers), and individuals who produce food in excess of their individual needs (peasants), obviously is beneficial in terms of survival of both. The tribe becomes well defended and well fed, which is impossible by preponderance of a single group in genetic makeup. 

    There is another train of thought concerning decreasing returns of workers with aging and the need for retirement. However, this reflects the look from the ivory tower of Cambridge, also similar to Dawkins'. The problem is that the countries steadily increase the pension age. But the jobs available for those without Cambridge private pensions are exceedingly rare. And most of them are poorly suitable for the age. I provide a short list.  

                      School bus driver.

                      Security guard.

                       Medical orderly. 

                       Airline baggage handler.

                       And so on. 

Sarah Scoles. Countdown.

  A book written on the basis of Sarah's interview with the people (scientists, engineers, etc.) who maintain nation's nuclear weapons. Sarah, unlike many science journalists, is sufficiently competent to dissemble the information obtained from them but, for the life of me, I could not understand what the book was about. I suspect that she had to clear the book with the censors and they, as the Soviet censors of old, butchered the text till a full unrecognizability. 

Natalie Cabrol. The Secret Life of the Universe. An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life

    During my childhood and youth, the search for the life in the Universe was the domain of crackpots and madmen. Now, it is the main driver of planetary research and few grants in it can be awarded without a promise of a potential significance for astrobiology. 

    The book by Natalie Cabrol stands out from many similar books by its systematic approach, grouping the exoplanets by their astrophysical characteristics and discussing the possibilities of life or lack thereof in each. Especially exciting is her description of the traces of life in our Solar System. It is not a superb writing but quite an achievement in putting in a small, by the modern standards, book, so many insights into the search for life in the Cosmos.