Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)

Force of Nature: How Wal-Mart Started a Green Business Revolution-and Why It Might Save the World by Edward Humes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn't ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it's tough to make a profit (but it's tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn't pay its employees a living wage, faces more gender discrimination lawsuits than I can count... and the list goes on.

But over the past half decade Walmart has also made some astonishing strides toward greening its business.

The sheer economies of scale are astounding. Walmart has enough locations and employs enough people that simply turning off the lights in the vending machines in employee break rooms saves $1.5 million per year.

Any small change the company makes has a huge impact. So when Walmart decides to reduce packaging, make vehicles more fuel efficient, use organic cotton, or make other changes, it can generate millions of dollars in savings and/or have far-reaching effects on the environment.

Things get even more interesting when the company starts looking at ways to encourage suppliers to make their industries (dairy, fish, clothing, electronics, and others) more sustainable.

Of course, the fact that Walmart can have such an impact is also evidence that the company is by its very existence bad for the environment. Walmart and other national and international retail chains depend on shipping supplies and finished products across huge distances in huge quantities -- and many of those items are things that nobody really needs in the first place.

It's nice to think that the solution is to end the era of big-box retailers and go back to mom and pop stores, but that doesn't seem very likely given the current state of affairs, and Humes paints a pretty good portrait of a company using its clout to generate the next-best thing: a world where mass produced products aren't simply stocked on store shelves as if they sprung from the ground already finished. Instead, retailers like Walmart are taking an active role in determining the environmental impact of everything they sell -- and soon may be taking more steps to ensure that consumers also have access to that information to help make better informed choices.

I'm not sure that I'm any more likely to shop at Walmart after reading this book, but it does make me feel slightly better about the direction our consumption-based economy is headed.

My carbon footprint is smaller than most people's. I don't own a car. I work from home. I don't eat meat. And for the past year I've been buying most of my produce from local sources at farmers markets.

But it will take a lot more than my personal choices to change the world... and while Walmart and stores like it are certainly part of the problem, some are also starting to become part of the solution... to a degree.

Humes could probably spend a little more time in this book discussing the areas where Walmart has fallen short of its environmental promises -- and in other areas as well. But he does a good job of describing the process of Walmart's greening since 2004 by putting human faces on the story and profiling the people that are making things happen... or at least trying to... or at least saying they're trying too...

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Mini-review: A Princess of Mars

A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw... and decided to give the first book in the series I try.

It takes a hefty amount of suspension of disbelief to read a sci-fi adventure written a hundred years ago. There's a lot that Burroughs clearly gets wrong about gravity, energy, and of course Mars. There are also some baffling elements such as the idea that human-like species could have evolved independently on multiple worlds, but the Barsoom series is hardly the only offender there.

Burroughs doesn't offer much in the way of character development or even a very complex society. Really? Everyone on the planet speaks the same language and has the same telepathic capabilities?

The tale is also rather violent.

But you know what? It's still a fun read. If there's one thing Burroughs manages to do, it's to grab your attention and keep you wondering what happens next.

I wasn't sure at first whether I'd pick up the next book in the series, but after reading the last few pages I don't think I have much choice.

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Book review: The Deal From Hell by James O'Shea

The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O'Shea


O'Shea may think he's written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation's largest papers, but that's because his own biases are at work here.

Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it's hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly increasing revenue.

He belittles the bosses that want to print the stories "people want" involving celebraties and gossip rather than important news of conflict, politics, and holding government accountable. But he side steps the question of paying for that coverage.

In a perfect world, readers that want to support different types of news would pay for the publications where it exists. Or advertisers would pay to reach those readers. But one problem that people consistently ignore is that advertisers have long been throwing money away on traditional media because there's simply no way to gauge how readers are reacting.

Online ad rates aren't lower because they're less effective, but because they're more effective... but they don't pay enough to support the kind of journalism great papers have produced over the years.

Whether intentionally or not though, he makes a pretty strong case for a public broadcasting style form of member-supported public interest journalism.

Update: OK, I got to the end of the book, and it turns out O'Shea *does* realize that the problem is that journalism emerged as a profession with a non-profit ethos and a for-profit business model. He's now heading up the non-profit Chicago News Cooperative, which I hadn't realized when I started reading. It may very well be a model for the future of news.

That said, it still bugged me how much he belittled local news coverage and praised national and international reporting as a matter of course -- he also tended to paint all online news with the same brush as second class citizens, even though he's now heading up an online news outfit.

He also largely paints a problem without offering a solution... and misses some of the problems in the process. Yes, newspapers have always been delivered to consumers at ridiculously cheap prices considering the costs of printing and distributing them, not to mention reporting the news.

But even if ad revenue wasn't declining, people that have gotten used to getting news for free or cheap online and through broadcast media would probably be drifting away from paying for the print editions.

This book is definitely worth reading if you're interested in the current state of the news industry, but it shines brightest when O'Shea is recounting his own personal experiences in the center of the storm. It's kind of dry reading when he slogs through the financial management of the papers he's talking about and the finer points of the deals that were made.

Like any good news story, it's the people that make this book interesting, not the numbers.


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Crypto

Crypto by Steven Levy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Steven Levy has an amazing talent for taking complicated, technical material and turning into engaging narrative.

I'm not particularly interested in cryptography, but knowing that Levy was interested enough to write a book about it prompted me to pick up Crypto and give it a try.

Not only does he manage to take a complex issue and break it down into (mostly) easy-to-follow language, but the he weaves a story that's not really about codes, cyphers, or security, It's about people -- as all of the best stories are.

Levy brings the people behind the story to life, and lets you know what makes them tick, and that's what makes Crypto fun to read. Incidentally, you end up learning a bit about codes, cyphers, security, and more along the way.

It's also fascinating to see how a small group of people in the 1970s envisioned a future with eCommerce, online bankings, electronic mail and other digital transactions we now take for granted. At the time there was little hard evidence that cryptography had any real use outside of national defense or games.

That said... the story Levy tells unfolds over the course of 30 years, so there are a *lot* of people to get to know over the course of this book's 350 or so pages. While that might not sound like a lot of pages, the book feels longer than it is, because every chapter or two you find yourself starting a new story -- and I sometimes found myself struggling to remember some important detail or person that had been introduced several chapters back when it became important again later.

I'm not sure there would have been a better way to structure things... Crypto is a complicated topic with a complicated history. But while I enjoyed reading this book, I'm not sure I'll want to read it again anytime soon.

Still, it's a compelling enough read that I look forward to picking up another Steven Levy book soon.

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Rule 34

Rule 34 by Charles Stross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters.

The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little flat at times when used as a device to describe things that you would already know if this was really *you* we were talking about.

Still, the most impressive thing here is that Rule 34 is a character-driven story that hypothesis the implications of technological, political, and economic advances over the next decade or so on life, crime, and policing.

I just finished the book though, and I'm already thinking about going back to read it again -- because while the loose ends are tied up at the end, this book is rather dense with information, and knowing who was doing what and why would probably go a long way toward explaining their apparently inexplicable actions earlier on. Maybe...

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Rooftop garden tour (October, 2011)

The last time I wrote about the urban container garden on the roof of our Philadelphia apartment, I was dealing (poorly) with an infestation of bugs that had attacked my Asian greens. I never did come up with a good solution for that problem, but I have to admit I didn't try very hard.

That section of the garden has become something of a science experiment in the past few months as I let the greens go to seed to see what the seed pods would look like. Maybe I'll try growing leafy greens again in the spring, but the growing season on the rooftop is almost over for now.

Eventually when we build a deck on the roof I'd like to create a small cold frame that we can use to grow cold-weather vegetables such as spinach, but for now the garden is in a race against nature to see how many snow peas it can produce.

Overall snow peas have turned out to be my vegetable of the year. By sowing a fairly large number of seeds (given the small space) directly in the soil I've managed to get a pretty good crop this fall. The pea pods mature very quickly once the plants are full grown and I have to pick a few every day -- sometimes even twice a day.

It usually takes 2-3 days to pick enough for a meal, but so far I've been happier with my fall snow pea crop than with anything else I've tried growing on the roof.

The climate probably has a lot to do with that. This fall hasn't been too warm, too rainy, or too cloudy -- although we've had a bit of each condition.

The amount of work I put into trying to grow sweet peppers this summer, on the other hand, is barely paying off. I've picked about three peppers so far -- two with very thin skin and one nice and juicy red bell pepper which was a bit on the small side. I'm hopeful that two last peppers that are hanging on will fully ripen before it gets too cold for the plants to survive.

Halting State

I've been reading science fiction and speculative fiction stories since I was a kid. But I've tended to have a soft spot in my heart for the stories of the past... set in the distant future. Authors have a lot of freedom when they're writing about a distant world we're never likely to visit in our lifetimes... even when that world is earth after a major technological advancement.

The best stories often just take one simple idea and try to run with its implications. What if we lived in a world with robot servants? What if we discovered we could teleport across short distances?

But every now and then contemporary science fiction authors take a much more plausible idea and run with that instead.

When I first read Neuromancer I was blown away by the complete world William Gibson imagined where cyberspace was real. But he wasn't predicting a far-flung future. He was looking at the existing technology of networked computers in 1984 and imagining one way that technology might evolve -- and what some of the implications could be for society.

And so a million cyberpunk novels were born, and I went back to reading classic science fiction stories.

But this week I read Halting State, a 2007 novel by Charles Stross that does for augmented reality what Neuromancer did for the idea of cyberspace. And for the first time I was really impressed with the implications (both good and bad) of this technology which is available today, but which is still in its infancy.

As a technology blogger and reporter I've been covering augmented reality apps for computers and smartphones for a  few years. But I've never been particularly impressed.

Sure, apps such as Layar, which allow you to point your phone's camera down the street and see information about nearby restaurants or tourist attractions pop up over the top of the picture are fun to play with for a few minutes. But right now you have to hold your phone in front of your face and look at it instead of the road ahead of you to get the most out of these apps. Just make sure not to walk into that pole that would be in your peripheral vision if you weren't relying on your phone's narrow-angle lens.

With today's technology, there's almost always an easier way to sift through data than using augmented reality. There are hundreds of apps that will show me a map or list with those same restaurants or tourist attractions -- and those apps help me make decisions much more quickly and efficiently.

But Halting State imagines that by 2018 your smartphone will stay in your pocket and link up to a special pair of glasses that will give you a heads-up display with all the data you could ever need. Walk into a gaming convention and instead of enthusiasts wearing costumes, you can flip a button and orcs and dragons will enter you field of vision. Police officers can use a different augmented layer reality to pull up information they need while on patrol. And of course nobody with one of these setups need ever get lost, since you can see the directions floating right in front of your face.

Halting State isn't just about augmented reality. It also projects the future of video gaming and live action role playing games, distributed computing systems, and a few other trends that might or might not take off. But the world of Halting State feels very plausible based on today's technology and shows why people are so excited about making apps like Layar, even if they don't seem very useful today. In the future they might be.

Of course, as 2018 approaches, this book could end up looking a lot like a 1950s story that imagines human beings colonizing the moon and fighting Martians. Things don't always turn out the way you think they will in the future.

But I enjoyed Halting State and I'm looking forward to reading Rule 34, the second book in the series. It was published in 2011, and I'm wondering if Stross has made any changes to his world of the future to keep in line with the changes in technology over the past few years. You also have to love any author that apparently titles his book after an xkcd comic.