Review: Be The Change by Gina Martin

Rating: 3.5/5
Genre: Non-fiction
Source: eARC from Netgalley for review
Pages: 304


Blurb (from Goodreads)
Without any legal or political experience, I changed the law and made upskirting illegal in eighteen months. But this book is not about changing the law. It's not about me. This is yours. It's your handbook, your road map and your toolkit for pushing for change at absolutely any level. From using social media to gain support and to getting pro bono legal support, to regaining your confidence after a perceived "failure" (hint: there is no such thing), I wrote this book to make sure you believe in your voice, feel ready to put yourself out there and know how to start making things happen. Because my god, if I can do it, so can you.

BE THE CHANGE is an essential handbook for the modern activist, whether your campaign is big or small, local or global . . . or somewhere in between. If you want to challenge injustice in your school, workplace or community; if you want to lend your voice - and more - to a charitable cause close to your heart; or if you are inspired to take on a complex issue on a massive scale, Gina Martin's practical and empowering advice will give you the tools you need to ensure your voice is heard, your actions are noticed and your demands are met.

The Good:

The main thing that pleased me about this book is that it's full of actual practical advice, which you don't always get in this kind of book. For example, it talks about getting started with a campaign - whether it's active, where it's something you just start out of nowhere, or reactive, like hers was when she started the campaign in response to being upskirted. She had an interesting point that you can prepare even for a reactive campaign by being generally educated on the topic and thus knowing where the gaps are for when you're spurred into action. She also talks a little about how to research and diagram and plan out the issue, to break it down into a small, concrete issue that you can tackle, and how to do press releases and interviews. She breaks it down into different stages - awareness, advocacy and action, where you make people aware of the problem and your proposed solution, get members of the public and specific advocates such as celebrities on your side (she even has a bit on reaching out to celebrities and making it as easy as possible for them to do what you want), and then implementing the change you want, which for her was a law. I liked her idea of 'gatekeepers', where you identify the people that can make the change you want and how you're going to get to them - strategy. Hers were Westminster MPs.

I honestly don't have that much more to say in this part of the review - I was happy with it because it was full of straight-forward tips for starting a campaign, and had pretty much no biography. Does what it says on the tin. Plus, she was someone who had almost single-handedly done a successful campaign, so she could actually speak authoritatively on a sort of 'finished activism project'.


The Bad: 

Unfortunately, while it has good advice for doing a campaign on a concrete, social issue like hers (getting a specific law to prosecute upskirting as a sex crime), a lot of it doesn't seem to work very well for abstract, scientific issues like climate change. Climate change can't be fixed with one simple law, and the complexity of the science at hand and the global climate system makes it very hard to think of an unequivocally good thing to advocate. She also kept saying that if you don't have a personal connection to the topic then it's 'not your story to tell' - but for people in my part of the world, that would mean we just wouldn't do climate activism at all because it hasn't affected us badly yet. Even in parts of the world experiencing more frequent droughts and floods and hurricanes, it's very hard to attribute a particular event directly to anthropogenic carbon emissions. I don't think she's wrong, exactly - it's true that having a personal story to tell when you're campaigning makes what you're saying more powerful - but I just don't think it works for climate. Yes, we can and should amplify the stories of those directly affected, but for such a huge global change we need anyone to be able to campaign.

I also wasn't sure about some of her advice, like her declaration that to actually change anything you need to do it from the inside - I feel like revolutions are counterexamples to that! She also says that activists should have an answer and not just point out a problem, which I disagree with. Yeah, ideally have a solution, but if you don't you should still feel free to raise awareness of a problem. There are people employed to come up with solutions.

Some relatively minor niggles: 

• I didn't agree with her politics in parts, like recommending and admiring a homophobic LGBT ambassador, but that's not really to do with the quality of the book
• There was something that felt like performative wokeness - a whole chapter of the book on white privilege, yet (if I recall correctly) nothing about actually using your white privilege to de-escalate situations of police brutality, for example. 

5 Reasons to Climate Strike on Fridays For Future

I've been climate striking outside the Irish parliament (the Dail) for the last 8 weeks, and I want you to join us! Everyone is welcome and you can do it. 

1. To keep the pressure on the government & keep raising awareness and urgency

The main reason: to advocate for action against climate change! 

Repeating protests have a role in keeping the pressure up and letting your government know you care. They can also keep the issue at the top of voters' minds. Climate change is a political problem, not a scientific one.

If you have a particular issue you care about, like preserving the rainforests, you can put that on your sign, or you can keep it simple and demand climate action. 

2. Because it's easier than you think

If you want to participate in Fridays For Future, all you have to do is find a public spot, like a government building, a community hall, or your school or workplace and spend some time advocating for the climate, whether that's chanting or talking to people or bringing a sign. Here's me with my sign - for five of my weeks, I did it alone, so I just sat there with the sign and people came up to me! Before that I didn't even know you could just sit in front of government buildings and campaign - or that people would actively come over to learn more without you even having to say something to them. 

Thank you to Kenji Hayakawa for the photo!

People seem to think it's a big time commitment, but for many people it's not. if you can only come for a few minutes during your lunch break, come! Contribute whatever you can. If you can't make the main 1-2 pm slot, then go for a while at a different time! Many of my weeks have been at other times, like 2-4 pm or 11 am - 1 pm. In a way it's even better to keep it going around the clock. 

You can do it. 

3. To find community, and because everyone is welcome

People are incredibly welcoming at the 1-2 slot in Dublin, and it's great to be surrounded by other people who care about the climate. Seeing everyone's Tweets from around the world about their protests is brilliant - humans need community. 

I had someone ask me recently if only students can go to the strikes - the answer is no, anyone can! The School Strike for Climate was indeed started by an incredible student, Greta Thunberg, but we both need and want everyone who's interested to join in. You don't need to be officially striking from something, either - you can do it on your lunch break if that's what you can contribute.

I haven't even been going for that long and I've already seen people of all ages there, from primary school kids to people in their seventies. Student, engineer, translator, retiree...it doesn't matter, your presence is welcome. And think - if you're a non-student and your friends also think this, maybe seeing you join will make them realise they're welcome too! 

You may also discover that the public are more receptive than you'd think. People frequently come up and give a thumbs up or encourage us to keep going. We get lots of beeps when the 'beep for climate justice' sign is up. People are friendly! I was definitely scared at first, and it still can be scary when I first get there and sit in front of everyone - but in my experience, it's honestly fine. 

You definitely don't need to be a climate scientist or know every climate model off the top of your head - if you live on Earth, you deserve a say. (That includes you, ISS astronauts.) You don't need to be a member of any group.

Oh, and no - you don't have to be a perfect paragon of recycling to come. If you stay home out of shame that you're not a perfect example of virtue, all you've done is stay home. We all cause carbon emissions by virtue of existing in the world, but that doesn't mean we can't fight to make things better! 

4. To get involved and learn

For the longest time, I was worried about climate change but felt completely powerless so did nothing. This protest is a manageable thing that you can, if you wish, use to meet people and build on to join or start new initiatives. Maybe you'll prove to yourself that you can handle more than you think.

I used to spend ages considering donating to environmental charities, but then get sidetracked considering all the different choices and what would make the most impact. Now I've realised that what we need is action. Just start. Learn as you go.

You can learn from your fellow activists. I've been blessed to meet people with such a wealth of knowledge, who've been involved in environmental movements since before I was born. It also makes sure you keep thinking about it but in a positive way, because you're doing something, not just sitting there worrying. That means you can get ideas - I find they don't come until you prove you're receptive to them by taking action!

5. Because everything matters

What if your protest doesn't make a difference? Well, what if it does? You have nothing to lose and a world to save. Each degree of warming matters, each centimetre of sea level rise, each hurricane, each protest, each person.

I live in Ireland, and sometimes people say there's no point protesting here because we're too small to make a difference, and there are worse polluters out there. But small countries can still make a difference! Ireland, for example, is massively missing its emissions reduction targets, and we have obvious places we can improve - we have a huge amount of animal agriculture, and a large fraction of our land surface is covered in peat bogs that need protection to allow them to sequester carbon (peatland covers 3% of the Earth but stores 'twice as much carbon as all standing forests'). Plus, many people living in countries with high carbon emissions live under repressive governments, so those of us lucky enough to live in freer places should use that privilege.

Give it a go this Friday. 

There are loads of other important climate and environmental protest movements, but this one is a great way to get involved. If you've been feeling hopeless or thinking 'what's the point, there's nothing I can do' - this post is for you. 

Action begets action begets hope.

'Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action.' - Greta Thunberg.

P.S. The next big global strike is coming up soon - November 29th!

Review: Adventures of a Computational Explorer by Stephen Wolfram

Rating: 2/5
Source: eARC from Netgalley for review
Genre: Essays
Pages: 421
Publication Date: October 15 2019


Blurb: A pretty random assortment of essays, speeches and blog posts by Stephen Wolfram, the inventor of Mathematica and things like Wolfram Alpha and voice recognition used in Siri.

Overall impression: I'm not a fan of all the arrogance, but even beyond that it's not great. Some interesting ideas.

The Good

There was an interesting chapter doing data science on Facebook data, looking at the clusters of people's friend networks and at lots of different parameters like the amount of people saying they were single, in a relationship, engaged, married, separated and widowed by age. His chapter looking at the personal analytics of his life over decades was also quite interesting, though I thought it must be an intense security risk having all his keystrokes logged and sending stats about himself automatically to his email every day. Assuming he cares about people knowing, I suppose.

He had an interesting point about purpose and how to recognise man-made or alien-made objects, saying that the way we recognise things as purposeful depends on our particular societal history. He said there are some things that are computationally irreducible, where to figure out what happens you just have to follow it along every step, and that traditionally humans have only produced things where we understand the outcome, but that in future we can search the computational universe of possible solutions and select things that work even if we don't know how - like many biological features that we would never be able to invent from nothing but that nonetheless do work. I guess that's sort of a neural net approach.


The Bad

The cockiness is insufferable. Yes, it seems like he is in fact very smart with his PhD at 20 and Eton-Oxford-Caltech and all that, but did we really need to go through him finding the exact day he got his PhD to see that he is still the record-holder for youngest Physics PhD? I feel like as you get older you're supposed to stop making things about you and start making them about the ideas. He sounds iike he might be a proper nerd and not just an asshole but man, how do you come across so arrogant in your own book? He also keeps promoting Mathematica/Wolfram Alpha/Wolfram Language etc, and while it was interesting to learn about abilities they have that I didn't know about, it was a bit much.

Some of the chapters I really just had to wonder why on earth they were included. In particular:

• an entire long chapter about the many options they considered for naming their programming language - ending in just naming it after himself!
• a chapter or two about naming functions for Mathematica and how it's like poetry
• a whole chapter about his personal file system, complete with a picture of the icons currently on his taskbar and of his primary-school Geography homework. I just didn't need to know the details of his folders, I really didn't.
• The details of his personal productivity infrastructure, like how he sets up his laptop with an iPad for presentations and how he runs work calls. 

There was just so much stuff that it seemed utterly egomaniacal to include and think the general public would be interested in. 

Some other chapters I didn't like were probably more just not my thing, like the chapter digging into polyhedra.

It's also largely stuff he's already published elsewhere, so I'm not sure why you'd buy it. Perhaps if you were a Wolfram fan already? That's something that bewilders me about why this was put on Netgalley for review: if your goal is to get good reviews and you already have so many fans who love your work, why not just send ARCs to them? Especially since it seems to be published by his own company.

This is especially the case because a lot of this doesn't seem intended for a general audience. He keeps referencing physics problems I don't know and never explaining them, and I am doing a science degree so I know more about it than the general public. Some of the ideas sounded interesting, like the Principle of Computational Equivalence (seems to be about how simple patterns can end up constructing extremely complex or computationally irreducible things so sophisticated results don't imply complex patterns, which apparently means that beyond a low threshold all intelligence is as good computationally and we can't use complex patterns to infer inteligence), but he didn't explain them properly so it was a waste. I think it's set out in a 1300-page book he spent a decade writing, A New Kind of Science, but if you're going to keep referencing something I don't think it makes sense to expect people to have read a different 1300-page book. You should at least call it a sequel.

He also had a weird bit implying Africans and 'Amerindians' didn't historically use fabric...?

Finally, many of the pictures were impossible to make out on my iPad.

In summary: This was a book by someone who seems to think everything he thinks and does is fascinating, and not the book about the ways we can think about things computationally I thought it was.

Review: Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer

Rating: 4/5
Source: eARC from Netgalley for review
Genre: YA sci-fi thriller
Pages: 288

Blurb: Steph and her mom are constantly on the run, moving every few months to hide from her stalker dad. She finds friends on CatNet, which it turns out is run by a sentient AI called CheshireCat. CheshireCat starts taking actions to protect Steph from her father, but eventually screws up so that Steph must go rescue CheshireCat.










Overall review: 

I really liked this book! I've had a string of not-great reads for review so this was a very welcome change. This is the first thriller I've read in a very long time or ever, and it was great at that while also being super heartfelt. 

The Good:

Firstly, I loved the perspectives - in particular the first-person AI narration in some of the chapters. The book opened with a chapter from the AI which is what really hooked me and made me regret waiting so long to read it. I also loved that that meant I could mostly trust the AI rather than fearing it'd turn out to be the stereotypical bad guy AI. The idea is that CheshireCat is an AI that insead of having a particular moral code cares about individual people - its friends - which really 'humanised' them to me. 

The main perspective is Steph, told in first-person present, but there are also chapters from the AI (often first-person past - didn't know you could just have different tenses like that, but it was cool that those chapters would offer a very different perspective on what had just happened), and chapters full of messages sent in their groupchat on CatNet, which I enjoyed because I like epistolary things like that and they make reading fly by. 

CheshireCat was a very interesting character in general, partly because they were so powerful in some ways (could get into nearly anyone's unsecured phone, security camera etc) but so weak in others (no body). This gave them interesting ethical dilemmas, like whether it was okay to use their immense knowledge and spying ability to intervene on a friend's behalf - even when the friend didn't ask for it. I really loved the idea of an AI that cares.

As you'd hope in a book like this, the author showed good knowledge of tech overall, with little details like sshing into a server and phone tracking. I also thought the online chat was realistic. The near-future setting (so there are lots of drones and self-driving cars and robot teachers) was fun too. 

I was kept guessing as to who was really the villain for a large portion of the book, in that good way where you're not just unsure because you don't have enough information but where you keep being given really strong but conflicting evidence on both sides - was her father dangerous or was her mother just crazy? It was an important question because obviously if her dad's incredibly dangerous they have to stay away from him, but if not her mom is just constantly uprooting Steph's life for no reason.

There's a lot of LGBT rep, and I liked the glimpse of an f/f relationship we see. It was also funny how it matched my experience of being part of a community where you barely know any straight people.

The Bad:

I can't go into detail because of spoilers, but there's something her mam has that other people want, a key to world domination, that seemed a bit over the top and unnecessary as motivation. It was also weird that this very important laptop wasn't better-protected.

The conflict ended somewhat earlier than I'm used to, in the early 90-s %, and I was dismayed to discover that this seems to be the first book in a series. I'm very fond of standalones, but to be fair the author does wrap up this story quite well and just leave one small thread for the future, so it's not a cliffhanger or anything. And I did enjoy the book so I might be convinced to read a series...

Finally, I felt it went on a bit much about gender identity, with one of the non-binary characters repeatedly saying awfully didactic things like 'Shakespeare used they/them pronouns, you know!' at inappropriate times - but then, I suppose that probably is accurate to the character!

In summary

I would definitely recommend this to YA lovers in your life, especially if they're gay and/or into tech or online communities, and even if - like me - they don't normally read thrillers.