Politics, extreme weather events, international crises: all instances in which you might feel you’d want an expert handling things at the top. Someone experienced and with reasoned judgement would, you might hope, anticipate, or at least be able to handle, the unforeseen.
In (Biteback), Paul Goodwin reveals just how far the forecasting industry has become entwined with our everyday lives. It keeps supermarket shelves full, ensures that call centres are adequately staffed and anticipates demand on the electricity grid. Yet prediction is far from an exact science. Walking us from the financial crisis of 2007-2008 to the perilous consequences of predicting elections, Goodwin provides a compulsively readable account of both the fallibility and necessity of human forecasters. We are still more likely to judge electoral candidates on appearance than competence, and even those experienced in prediction impart their own bias to algorithmic projections. Forewarned is a fascinating book – and not at all a reassuring one.
(MIT Press) is an altogether more academic exploration of the forecasting we are most familiar with. Despite striking advances in meteorology, Robert Hoffman and his co-authors argue that forecasts are most likely to improve not with the arrival of software that can replicate the cognitive processes of human forecasters, but with programs that can model the weather itself with greater accuracy. Forecasting, they insist, remains very much the domain of human reasoning operating in the face of vast volumes of data.
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Surgery and geology from the past
In the 19th century, although meteorology was not yet recognised as a science, the professionalisation of surgery was gathering pace across London. Prior to the advent of anaesthesia and infection control, operations were quite literally a quick and dirty business. In (Allen Lane), a rich, lively and frequently gory read, Lindsey Fitzharris guides us through the transformation that the profession underwent over the ensuing decades. In the Victorian era, the prospect of being operated on was, quite frankly, terrifying, and readers may find themselves in mild awe of Joseph Lister and his fellow practitioners who, dissatisfied with a post-surgery mortality rate that hovered around 20 per cent, crafted an expert, caring and entirely safer practice out of what was barely more than blind experiment and butchery.
No wonder Charles Darwin couldn’t stomach the operating theatre, and gave up an early foray into medicine. A career of extensive nautical voyages followed, but as James Costa explains in (W. W. Norton), Darwin’s expert knowledge of the natural world derived largely from his penchant for incessant questioning and experimentation in his own home. Costa appends a do-it-yourself guide to some of these experiments. The naturalist frequently recruited his children to assist in them – though floating seeds across salt water for several weeks, for instance, may not hold quite the fascination for today’s aspiring scientists that it did for Darwin.
(Bloomsbury) by Brenda Maddox is an altogether less genteel evaluation of “gentlemen geologists” of the 18th and 19th centuries. Though there were women among their ranks, including novelist George Eliot and renowned “mother of palaeontology” Mary Anning, Britain’s early practitioners of geology were in large part wealthy men not principally concerned with scientific enquiry. The search for coal seams and scientific evidence of biblical events such as the great flood proved far greater motivators.
Though somewhat defeated by a tendency to skip about – alighting on one historical figure only to jump back in time to another, and another – Maddox has assembled a keenly interesting account of an era in which the balance of knowledge (and consequently power) began to shift away from the church and into the hands of the public – or at least, one affluent quarter of it.
Quick guides
Figuring a topic out from scratch is no easy matter. Little Ways to Live a Big Life, a new series from publishers Quercus, imparts some limited expertise in under 60 pages on subjects ranging from drawing to playing the piano and counting to infinity.
The usefulness of such slim volumes in the age of Wikipedia is questionable, but there’s much to be said for brevity, and James Rhodes’s piano guide is certainly welcoming and easy to follow. is the most enjoyable volume so far and (thankfully) the one least likely to come in handy. British Airways senior first officer Mark Vanhoenacker ensures that readers will never look at an approaching runway in quite the same way again.
