Book Reviewed: Sugarless: A 7-Step Plan to Uncover Hidden Sugars by Nicole M. Avena

How to beat sugar blues This is not a diet book but written from the psychology perspectives that discusses how to beat cravings for sweets. A simple step would be to understand the advantages of consuming high fiber and high protein foods that are equally satisfying and achieve freedom from sugar. High-fiber foods regulate blood sugar, and higher protein diet reduce cravings. There are two types of fibers, the soluble fiber, which absorbs water and forms gel like substance in the digestive system and thus reduces the absorption of sugar and cholesterol in blood. The second, the insoluble fiber that does not dissolve in water and stay in the bulk as stool which is beneficial for digestion. This book is not for readers interested from the diabetes perspective, but addresses issues related to keeping the blood glucose at acceptable levels. The text reads more like a therapist speaking to her patients rather than an author writing a health book for her readers. The book is helpful in some respects but seems redundant since numerous books are written about this subject, and many resources are available online. One in particular is the articles published by the National Institutes of Health about controlling blood sugar (@NIH.Gov). I have been pre-diabetic for many years, and I have avoided being diabetic by the careful choice of food I consume which are not difficult to follow by an average individual. Cravings for sugary food is common and difficult to overcome, but a combination of high fiber and some sugary food is well worth a shot. This may include fresh food, whole foods, and home-cooked meals. Highly processed foods are often affordable and convenient, but they are high in calories and added sugar. A meta-analysis involving a subset of studies demonstrated that chickpeas are effective in reducing blood glucose compared to potatoes and wheat. Chickpeas offer the potential for blood sugar control through low starch digestibility, high fiber, protein, and hormonal effects. Avocados, beans, oatmeal, quinoa, brown rice, whole wheat pasta, almonds, berries which are also high in antioxidants. Whole grains lower the risks of diabetes and heart disease and maintain a healthy blood pressure. Vegetables like broccoli, kale, and Brussel sprouts, rich in fibers are also recommended as a part of a healthy diet.

Book Reviewed: White Holes by Carlo Rovelli

When spacetime breakdown White holes are theoretical objects predicted by the mathematical solutions to the equations of general relativity. One way to think about the gravitational dynamics of white holes is to consider them as time-reversed versions of black holes, the black holes pull matter/energy inward, but white holes are known to expel matter/energy outward, i.e., matter and light can only escape from them, but they can’t enter. White holes are the final stage in the evolution of black holes. According to the author’s arguments, space itself is made up of individual grains or quanta, and when matter inside a black hole reaches these incredibly tiny scales, a quantum repulsive force causes it to bounce back, transforming the black hole into a white hole. The white holes are not visible because nothing can enter them including light. This means that no information, including light or any electromagnetic radiation is coming out of a white hole. Therefore, they are invisible to outside observers. White holes also decrease entropy by expelling matter and energy in a highly ordered manner which is in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. This is a small pocket-sized book of 176 pages which doesn’t discuss how white holes could be detected if they exist but builds the work on the known ideas. If white holes are expelling matter and energy, they could potentially create unique patterns like cosmic ray anomalies that could be measured. Black holes are theorized to emit Hawking radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon, and white holes may absorb radiation from the surrounding universe due to quantum effects resulting in cosmic ray anomalies. Merging black holes produce detectable gravitational waves, and they have been detected, similarly, merging white holes should produce distinct gravitational wave signatures. Theoretical considerations allow white holes to connect with black holes through wormholes, hypothetical tunnels in spacetime that could potentially allow for travel between distant cosmic points or different universes. The extreme gravitational effects near a black hole’s event horizon cause time to pass much more slowly compared to a distant observer, meaning that the transformation of a black hole into a white hole could take billions of years from our perspective on earth. However, primordial black holes which were formed shortly after the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago, may have resulted in white holes. The author claims that the mysterious dark matter which makes up 27% of the universe are white holes. But this is a wild speculation.

Book Reviewed: The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance by Rebecca Clarren

Perspectives of liberty during the formative years of the nation This is author Rebecca Clarren’s confession of collective guilt of her Jewish family in complicit with the decimation of Lakota nation in South Dakota during the expansion of the United States to the Northwestern territories. Her ancestors lived near the heart of Indian reservation where the indigenous population endured massacres, broken treaties with federal and local governments. It is an outright denial of basic human rights of Lakota people. The federal policy had all but exterminated the buffalo population and deprived the Lakota of their land and other resources. They shattered their cultural heritage, and impoverished their reservations. The federal bureaucrats overseeing the brutal boarding schools where Native American children were confined and punished for speaking their language or practicing native culture. Everything you've been taught about America's separation of church and state was a lie in 1869 when President Ulysses S. Grant had appointed Christian missionaries to serve as Indian Agents, official federal representatives on the reservations. These men were in theory moral and beyond corruption in what he called a "peace policy." Grant divvied up seventy-three Indian Agencies among thirteen Christian denominations. Brutality against native kids continued and a recent federal report found that tens of thousands of children died at boarding schools and buried in unmarked graves. Congress, ignoring the promises it had made in both the 1851 and 1868 treaties, allowed settlers to pass through Lakota land and had encouraged them and U.S. soldiers to slaughter the buffalo herds to near extinction. In addition, the United States robbed the Lakota of the gold-rich Black Hills using the threat of cannons and withheld rations. Federal bureaucrats allowed private companies to lease and drill for black gold and other riches, the consent of a Native Nation was required, but that was often overlooked. Oil men sometimes preyed on indigenous ignorance. "There is a dangerous and flammable and explosive substance lurking beneath your land," wrote one oil company to the Ute Mountain Utes in the early 1900s. "We will gladly remove it for you." Author Rebecca Clarren’s family was not responsible for any wrongdoing, but they were beneficiaries of an American occupation. This was a time when the United States wanted white population to migrate to South Dakota. The author’s family emigrating from brutal pogrom in Russia, South Dakota looked attractive for the new immigrants after they discovered the challenges of living as Jews in the cities of the Eastern seaboard. She looks back in time and expresses guilt about her ancestors’ good fortune. Clarren’s most eloquent passages describe her interactions with Doug White Bull, a relative of Sitting Bull, leader of the 19th-century Lakota resistance. Doug’s grandfather fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. At one point, the author accompanies Doug White Bull to the cemetery where his grandfather is buried. When they finally find the gravesite, he kneels and addresses Joseph White Bull in Lakota language. She respectfully steps away. It’s a singularly moving moment embodying Clarren’s observation. The author’s story has intersecting tales of Jewish settlement in the Northwest and the American crimes against the Lakota population. She explains the pride of her ancestors’ endurance in a region known for harsh climate, unforgiving soil, antisemitism, and legal fallout from ill-fated Prohibition-era bootlegging. But overall, the life was good for her family. The author looks for managing her guilt in Jewish texts such as Torah, and discusses with rabbis to find a Jewish way to express her guilt and possibly do good to Lakota people. I find this confounding. She may be proud of her Jewish heritage but why bring her faith when the Lakota population was wronged at every angle of their existence. She should be uniting all religious denominations to do something positive for the Lakota.

Book Review: Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI by George Musser

Consciousness is a fundamental nonlocal reality Recent progress in physics, philosophy, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence (AI) research suggests that consciousness is a fundamental nonlocal field that gives rise to information, matter/energy, emerging spacetime, and of course the laws of physics under which the emergence of life/conscious entities are possible. Consciousness is a creative force that shapes the universe and human beings in a unified field. It is an intelligent information system driving the universe. The crux of the consciousness research is how do we explain the eighty-six billion neurons of the human brain produce conscious experience. In addition, the nervous system is influenced by or influence cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, and immune systems. The human gut bacteria produce many neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and GABA, which are critical for mood, anxiety, concentration, reward, and motivation. Thus, gut microbiome changes how our brains react or produces a conscious experience. There is also the “hard problem” of consciousness that needs to explain as how humans and other organisms have qualia or subjective experiences which encapsulate our personal perception and internal understanding of the world around us. It gets even more complicated as we are learning from AI research that some form of inner conscious experience also emerges from artificial intelligence or the silicon transistors. Indeed, Google recently published an AI-powered robot that can sense and engage with its environment, when a PaLM-E delivered a packet of potato chips to its owner, despite the packet having been hidden in a drawer midway through the experiment. PaLM-E (Pathways Language Model-E) is a groundbreaking 562-billion parameter embodied multimodal language model that seamlessly connects textual data to real-world visual and physical sensor modalities, enhancing problem-solving in computer vision and robotics. Google reports that it has common sense reasoning that compares with average human being. Common sense is one of the products of conscious experience. There is also the hard problem of matter, which is similar to the hard problem of mind. Physics becomes a purely relational description of matter which at the most fundamental level originates out of quantum vacuum, i.e., quantum particles emerge and disappear (annihilates) out of nothing. All this is explained by quantum physics and physics formulas (information). Likewise, a purely relational description of the mind omits the experiential quality of our experience, and conscious experience is reduced to information. These two hard problems are linked, and that the nature of matter is related to the nature of mind and consciousness. The details are hazy at the moment, but the takeaway message is that physics needs to reach outside itself to answer its most fundamental questions, namely conscious observers in the quantum realm. Physicist Carlo Rovelli proposes that reality consists not of things, but of relations; theories, quantum physics, and scientific reasoning indicate that there are no observer-independent absolute entities. Theories of consciousness such as integrated information theory (IIT) and predictive coding supports Rovelli’s assertions which the author discusses in Chapter 3. Additional considerations help readers where the author is going with all this. For example, most physical systems are reactive, meaning that they respond only to their immediate circumstances and affect only their immediate surroundings. Causation in these systems is straightforward; effects are proximate and proportional to causes. But intelligent beings and artificial neural networks create twisty paths between cause and effect. We're not dominos falling dumbly. The universe is not just a landscape in which one thing happens and then another; there are special little causal hubs built to collect influence from across landscape and filter it through a decision process that guides our actions. These little hubs are called human minds. The book reads flawlessly, and the author makes a good effort to describe the challenges of all the scientific disciplines involved in consciousness research, but I have read better reviews on this subject in professional journals.

Book Reviewed: John Brown's Raid: Harpers Ferry and the Coming of the Civil War by Jon-Erik M. Gilot and Kevin R. Pawlak

Prelude to the American civil war: The making of a martyr There are several books about the life and work of abolitionist John Bown, especially his motivation for the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia). Four of seven chapters are devoted to this rebellion. This book is inspiring because it is a story that provides a look at the human side of a challenging mission. His efforts are acknowledged as a cataclysmic event that catapulted the United States towards civil war and even influenced the political career of Abraham Lincoln. John Brown began his movement for the abolition of slavery by attempting to free slaves. When he realized that the time for easy solutions was gone, he perceived that the armed rebellion was the only alternative. The book gives some accounts of his migration from New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio and eventually to the Western territories of Kansas that was drawing southern population to keep Kansas as a pro-slavery state. John Brown fought in Kansas, and then moved his band of rebels to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia for an armed struggle. The book details of the uprising from the beginning to end of the raid on the United States arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. On the last day of his life, John Brown shook hands with those near him on the scaffold and assumed his position. He did not exhibit fear; not a muscle moved, he stood erect and calm during the last few minutes of his life. Reports of Brown's stoicism on the day of his death enhanced his legacy for northern abolitionists. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau compared Brown's death on the gallows to Christ's sacrifice on the Cross. Scores of northerners marked the hour of Brown's execution in solemn tribute and remembrance. Orators spoke of Brown and his purpose. Across the South, bands of men joined military companies. Some of these companies had fallen dormant over the years but became alive again with renewed vigor to protect Southern institutions. Although there are numerous books about John Brown, I found this book reader friendly. It reads flawlessly, and in the appendix section, the author provides references to other books closely related to this work. The walking and driving tours of Harper’s Ferry raid sites are quite helpful.