Welcome to Litsy!

A candidate for last year‘s Canadian NF award: each chapter tackles a different “blind spot” that collectively are contributing to impending global destruction. The writer examines big banks, food production, technological monitoring, time keeping, energy creation, and much more. The diversity of the themes meant it didn‘t always feel like it hung together, but provided a breadth of info.
#Booked2021 #WomenOnScience
#Nonfiction2021 #Nature

Fascinating factoid #6 (sorry, these are getting more depressing): kids in some schools in the U.S. need to consent to be fingerprinted to receive school lunches.

Fascinating (and disturbing) factoid #5: companies in China require employees to wear helmets that monitor their brainwaves to assess the quality of their work.

Fascinating factoid 4: the 13th-century English Magna Carta included standards of measurement for wine and beer to reduce corruption.

Fascinating but depressing factoid number three: factory workers in Britain, the US, and China aren‘t allowed to take bathroom breaks because their time is so strictly monitored. Employee time monitoring began in the middle ages when workers lobbied to work indoors at night, breaking in the convention of ending work with the church bell or with the sunset.

Fascinating factoid number two: the classic New York stoops (like we see on Sesame Street) was originally to prevent the high mounds of waste from overflowing into peoples living space, and Wall Street was originally named in Dutch after the wall that kept the garbage-managing pigs from invading people‘s flower gardens.

One of many fascinating factoids: pigeons can learn in two weeks to distinguish between benign and malignant breast cancer scans, which can take professionals over a year.

Tong surveys various "blind spots" that keep us from seeing a bigger picture. Most worryingly, social and civilizational blind spots keep us ignorant of problems with our food supply, energy generation, and disposition of waste. Artificial notions about space, time, privacy, and ownership damage our happiness and future. Mixed feelings on this one: it's engaging and important but also unfocused and vague on solutions. And: "references online"???

In life, we all have a moment when we wake up to a bigger picture.

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Timely observation, I think.