David Attenborough

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world. Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus’ Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: ‘When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus’ Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice?

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Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed. My main authority for the cargo cults is David Attenborough’s Quest in Paradise, which he very kindly presented to me. The pattern is the same for all of them, from the earliest cults in the nineteenth century to the more famous ones that grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War. It seems that in every case the islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white immigrants to their islands, including administrators, soldiers and missionaries.

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It is these incomprehensible actions that are the rituals employed by the white man to persuade the gods to send the cargo. If the native wants the cargo, then he too must do these things. It is striking that similar cargo cults sprang up independently on islands that were widely separated both geographically and culturally. David Attenborough tells us that Anthropologists have noted two separate outbreaks in New Caledonia, four in the Solomons, four in Fiji, seven in the New Hebrides, and over fifty in New Guinea, most of them being quite independent and unconnected with one another. The majority of these religions claim that one particular messiah will bring the cargo when the day of the apocalypse arrives.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

Josef the cockroach explained the insect world’s hostility to the show. “It’s not so long ago you seemed to seek to understand us. You were watching The World about Us and Life on Earth, sympathetic portrayals of the natural world, produced by your brilliant BBC, surely the pinnacle of human achievement. David Attenborough avoided clumsy anthropomorphism or the tendency to attribute morality or consciousness to creatures such as Franzi and I, who are essentially automatons driven by need and instinct. But even all those sentimental computer-animated films where a succession of Jewish American stand-up comedians make various innocent insect species into unwilling vehicles for their own urban sexual neuroses seem like War and Peace compared with I’m a Celebrity … It represents humanity at its worst.”

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Their extension of a helping hand towards BBC3 is merely a greedy digital land-grab disguised as an act of philanthropy, no more convincing that Vladimir Putin’s concerned humanitarian excursions into ailing former Soviet states. To accommodate Farty’s empire-building ambition in what was a publicly owned arena would be a betrayal of everything the BBC stood for, worse than the David Attenborough baby polar bear scandal and when those actors all mumbled in that historical drama last year. If I wasn’t already dead I would kill myself.” Can it be right that Conservative cuts to the licence fee weaken areas of the BBC so that they can no longer be serviced fully, and yet these areas still remain attractive to private companies?

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Even though his penis had been mutilated by the culture secretary John Whittingdale’s arsenal of sickeningly modified clockwork toys, his testicles remained largely unscathed by the ferocious musical apes and dancing teeth, and he conceded that “far from being a cut, this is the right deal for my genitals in difficult economic circumstances”. Last week, I found myself watching a repeat of the May meeting of President Obama and the naturalist and former BBC programme director David Attenborough. Slowly and patiently, Attenborough made the case for nature. Its value was beyond the monetary. It was where our imaginations lived. And once it was gone it was gone. He could have been making the case for the BBC. * * * “Why do I always feel with Stewart Lee that whatever point he is making (often ones I agree with) comes second to trying to impress everyone with how clever he is being?”

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

We have forgotten that all of these important issues – in fact, every issue – resides within the most important issue bar none: ‘the planet’. With a broken planet, we will have no gay rights, no feminism, no respect for trans people, no attempt at fairness and justice for people of colour. What we will have is a fight to survive and a lot of violence. It’s only recently that voices such as that of British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough have talked of the collapse of civilizations and societies, or what food insecurity will mean for us, and for generations to come. In February 2019, Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam put it bluntly: ‘War, mass mental breakdown, mass torture, mass rape.’ In all this, our relatively new societal values will be threatened.

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The rape threats that any women of profile receive online, and the racism that is so common, speak to something that has been lying dormant in the murky depths of our society but is now stirring again. Brutality is only kept at bay by the rule of law and by there being a critical number of educated people, in work, healthy and with enough money and food to keep them invested in society. When people cannot feed their families, then the façade of law and order evaporates. When Sir David Attenborough talks of the collapse of civilizations, this is what it means: violence that most of us in the privileged West cannot even comprehend. There is a terrible precedent. Berlin in the 1930s had a flourishing queer community. A man called Magnus Hirschfeld campaigned for rights at his Institute of Sexual Science and conducted the first gender-reassignment surgeries.

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We would be among the last to hold out, together with a solitary fourteen-year-old and a man in a wheelchair. Two nights previously, I was hand-fasted with – and to – my partner at Parliament Square. Our hands were held together with love and superglue, the moon shining over Westminster Abbey. Courting in the middle of a rebellion. David Attenborough’s climate-change programme was being screened by Extinction Rebellion, the ghostly scaffolding sheeting at the Palace of Westminster a backdrop used as a projection screen. An XR banner – ‘Beyond Politics’ – was flying in the trees. Not just courting but courting arrest. We were disappointed that night.

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak
by Rosie Wilby
Published 26 May 2021

Then the screen switches to a calming image of what looks like the African savanna. This must be the control clip to return me to a ‘normal’ arousal state. I hear a familiar voice, which immediately transports me back to the innocence of my nerdy nature-loving childhood. ‘As the seasons change and the rain comes, the grasses spring up once again.’ Bloody hell…It’s David Attenborough in the sex lab. Before I get too engrossed in the fast-motion shots of greenery emerging from the desert plains, my visual panorama alters. This time, a man is lying back on a leather sofa fondling his erect penis. ‘At least that’s a wipeable surface,’ I think. Mind you, there’s something about this man with his dark, playful eyes and firm stomach that connects with me.

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Quite what any forty-something straight woman would be doing bunking off work and pretending to be gay just to get paid ninety pounds for watching dimly lit erotica in physically uncomfortable conditions I don’t know. I can get paid double that for standing on stage being funny for twenty minutes. This weird procedure already feels like it is taking hours, not helped by my procrastination. I give him four out of ten, one point less than the woman. During the next David Attenborough clip, I fleetingly remember a chapter from the book What Do Women Want? The author, New York Times journalist Daniel Bergner, interviews a female scientist who has conducted similar experiments over a number of years with largely heterosexual participants. Where men tend to have a strong correlation between what they are physically turned on by and what they say they’re turned on by, women often have a complete disconnect between the two.

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‘We’ll just zoom in a bit…. oh yes, look… This bit corresponds to the first clip of a woman…and this peak here corresponds to…probably another one of the women…she’s been very popular…oh that’s actually one of the men haha…’ ‘I quite liked him!’ ‘You did! Although on average I think the arousal is just slightly higher during the female clips.’ ‘…and what about during David Attenborough?’ ‘Haha, oh we don’t measure during the control clip.’ ‘Oh that’s a shame.’ ‘I recorded this data with a pair of twins, both lesbians,’ Luke proffers, opening up more graphs. I gulp slightly as I observe the Himalayan peaks of desire achieved by this horny duo. This is quite different to my feeble undulations.

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel
by Lonely Planet
Published 30 Sep 2015

The recommended place to stay is the Mweya Safari Lodge (www.mweyalodge.com); it has a pool – need we say more? 5 Refugio Nacional de Fauna Silvestre Ostional, Costa Rica Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of olive ridley turtles come here to nest each year: keep the kids up late to watch this mass nesting and they will be wide-eyed for days. Your mini David Attenborough can also seek out urchins and anemones in the tidal pools, clock ghost crabs on the beach and indulge in a spot of birdwatching, all within easy reach of the hatching turtles. And then of course there’s the rest of Costa Rica to explore with more turtles, one or two crocodiles, some amazing butterflies and plenty of opportunities for high adrenaline fun such as zip lining through forest canopies and white-water rafting.

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Discover Melbourne’s best wheelchair-friendly restaurants, enjoy spectacular scenery along the Great Ocean Road, and visit one of the world’s best zoos as well as many of the parks that progressive Parks Victoria is opening up to visitors with access issues. Download our free e-book at www.lonelyplanet.com/accessible-melbourne and plan your outdoors adventures here: http://parkweb.vic.gov.au/accessibility. 5 Galápagos & Amazonia, Ecuador So you’ve been watching David Attenborough and thought you’d never be able to access such places in the flesh? Wrong! Lenín Moreno, paraplegic vice president of Ecuador (2006–13) and Nobel Peace Prize nominee did amazing work to improve the lives of disabled people throughout his country. Quito may not be as accessible as the average Western city, but largely thanks to Moreno inroads have been made.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Published 25 Feb 2020

Personal and environmental goals are interlinked, mutually reinforcing, and they both need our attention. A regenerative mindset bridges the gap between how nature works (regeneration) and how we humans have organized our lives (extraction).2 It allows us to “redesign human presence on Earth”3 driven by human creativity, problem solving, and fierce love of this planet. Sir David Attenborough, one of the most renowned naturalists of our time, has warned us that “the Garden of Eden is no more.” We agree. That is why we now have to create a Garden of Intention—a deliberately regenerative Anthropocene. Instead of strip-mined mountains, destroyed forests, and depleted oceans, imagine millions of rewilding projects covering over a billion hectares of forests, regenerating wetlands and grasslands, and restoring coral farms in all tropical oceans.

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This list is vast, and it would be impossible for us to mention everyone here, but we would like to pay special mention to Alejandro Agag, Lorena Aguilar, Fahad Al Attiya, Ken Alex, Ali Al-Naimi, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, Christiane Amanpour, Chris Anderson, Mats Andersson, Monica Araya, John Ashford, David Attenborough, AURORA, Mariana Awad, Peter Bakker, Vivian Balakrishnan, Ajay Banga, Greg Barker, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Nicolette Bartlett, Oliver Bäte, Kevin Baumert, Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Dean Bialek, Sue Biniaz, Fatih Birol, Michael Bloomberg, May Boeve, Gail Bradbrook, Piers Bradford, Richard Branson, Jesper Brodin, Tom Brookes, Jerry Brown, Sharan Burrow, Felipe Calderon, Kathy Calvin, Mark Campanale, Miguel Arias Cañete, Mark Carney, Clay Carnill, Andrea Correa do Lago, Anne-Sophie Cerisola, Robin Chase, Sagarika Chatterjee, Tomas Anker Christensen, Pilita Clark, Helen Clarkson, Jo Confino, Aron Cramer, David Crane, John Danilovich, Conyers Davis, Tony de Brum, Bernaditas de Castro Muller, Brian Deese, Claudio Descalzi, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paula DiPerna, Elliot Diringer, Sandrine Dixson Decleve, Ahmed Djoghlaf, Claudia Dobles Camargo, Alister Doyle, José Manuel Entrecanales, Hernani Escobar, Patricia Espinosa, Emmanuel Faber, Nathan Fabian, Laurent Fabius, Emily Farnworth, Daniel Firger, James Fletcher, Pope Francis, Gail Gallie, Grace Gelder, Kristalina Georgieva, Cody Gildart, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Kimo Goree, Ellie Goulding, Mats Granryd, Jerry Greenfield, Ólafur Grímsson, Sally Grover Bingham, Emmanuel Guerin, Kaveh Guilanpour, Stuart Gulliver, Angel Gurria, Antonio Guterres, William Hague, Thomas Hale, Brad Hall, Winnie Hallwachs, Simon Hampel, Kate Hampton, Yuval Noah Harari, Jacob Heatley-Adams, Julian Hector, Hilda Heine, Ned Helme, Barbara Hendricks, Jamie Henn, Anne Hidalgo, François Hollande, Emma Howard Boyd, Stephen Howard, Arianna Huffington, Kara Hurst, Mo Ibrahim, Jay Inslee, Natalie Isaacs, Maria Ivanova, Lisa Jackson, Lisa Jacobson, Dan Janzen, Michel Jarraud, Sharon Johnson, Kelsey Juliana, Yolanda Kakabadse, Lila Karbassi, Iain Keith, Mark Kenber, John Kerry, Sean Kidney, Jim Kim, Ban Ki-moon, Lise Kingo, Richard Kinley, Sister Jayanti Kirpalani, Isabelle Kocher, Caio Koch-Weser, Marcin Korolec, Larry Kramer, Kalee Kreider, Kishan Kumarsingh, Rachel Kyte, Christine Lagarde, Philip Lambert, Dan Lashof, Penelope Lea, Guilherme Leal, Bernice Lee, Jeremy Leggett, Thomas Lingard, Andrew Liveris, Hunter Lovins, Mindy Lubber, Miguel Ángel Mancera Espinosa, Gina McCarthy, Stella McCartney, Bill McDonouh, Catherine McKenna, Sonia Medina, Bernadette Meehan, Johannes Meier, Maria Mendiluce, Antoine Michon, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Amina Mohammed, Jennifer Morris, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, Kumi Naidoo, Nicole Ng, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, Indra Nooyi, Michael Northrop, Tim Nuthall, Bill Nye, Jean Oelwang, Rafe Offer, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Kevin O Hanlon, René Orellana, Ricken Patel, Jose Penido, Charlotte Pera, Jonathan Pershing, Stephen Petricone, Stephanie Pfeifer, Shannon Phillips, Bertrand Piccard, François-Henri Pinault, John Podesta, Paul Polman, Ian Ponce, Carl Pope, Jonathon Porritt, Patrick Pouyanne, Manuel Pulgar Vidal, Tracy Raczek, Jairam Ramesh, Curtis Ravenell, Robin Reck, Geeta Reddy, Dan Reifsnyder, Fiona Reynolds, Ben Rhodes, Alex Rivett-Carnac, Chris Rivett-Carnac, Nick Robins, Jim Robinson, Mary Robinson, Cristiam Rodriguez, Matthew Rodriguez, Kevin Rudd, Mark Ruffalo, Artur Runge-Metzger, Karsten Sach, Claudia Salerno Caldera, Fredric Samama, Richard Samans, M.

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
by Elaine Morgan
Published 3 Jan 2011

Hundreds of communications came from general readers who sent letters of appreciation, queries, ideas, and cuttings. I would like to thank them all. Among the scientists who supplied comments, information, advice, or permission to use their material, I would like to thank the following (inclusion in this list does not imply any degree of agreement with the aquatic hypothesis): Leslie Aiello, Sir David Attenborough, Michael Chance, Bruce Charlton, Michael Crawford, Stephen Cunnane, Richard Dawkins, Frans de Waal, Christopher Dean, Daniel Dennett, Derek Denton, Robin Dunbar, Derek Ellis, Peter Rhys Evans, Karl-Erich Fichtelius, Robert Foley, John Gribbin, David Haig, Kevin Hunt, Chris Knight, Robert Martin, Desmond Morris, Michel Odent, Caroline Pond, Vernon Reynolds, Graham Richards, P.

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Chris Knight has discussed this in his book Blood Relations, subtitled ‘Menstruation and the Origins of Culture’.10 It deals, among other things, with the phenomenon of synchronised menstruation, and the curious circumstances that the average length of the human menstrual cycle is 29 1/2 days—exactly the same length as a lunar month. Lunar biorhythms are not unknown in nature. They are found in several species of fish and in some species of frogs and toads. They are commonest in marine creatures: seahorses, for example, only lay their eggs at full moon. And when Sir David Attenborough decided to film horseshoe crabs he had to take into consideration not only the right season of the year to turn up on the beach. He also—like the Christian Church working out the date of Easter—needed to know the phases of the moon. ‘Then,’ he recorded, ‘on three successive nights when the moon is full and the tides are high, hundreds and thousands emerge from the sea.’11 When I considered these problems, I could think of no way in which it would have been advantageous for an aquatic ape to synchronise with the tides, unless perhaps on the assumption that the gestation period is a multiple of the menstrual one.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James E. Lovelock
Published 1 Jan 2009

In the 1970s we ceased to be illuminated by the qualities of the natural world and began to see and hear nature through televisual images; often what we saw was filtered or distorted by the thoughts of the presenter. Sometimes we were lucky and saw the real world of nature through the eyes of Sir David Attenborough, but too often it was a politicized account of pollution from industry. Those who were green this way had feelings of guilt and regret; increasing knowledge that once brought wisdom, joy and understanding now confirmed that our carbon footprints were blacker than sin. From childhood on I have thought of myself as someone who wanted to live naturally and respect wildlife and wilderness.

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Kump, Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (DK Publishing, Inc., New York, 2008) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report (Island Press, Washington, DC, 2005) Sir Crispin Tickell, Climate Change and World Affairs (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986) 3 Consequences and Survival Sir David Attenborough, Life on Earth (HarperCollins, London, 1979) Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (W. H. Freeman, Oxford and San Francisco, 1982) Brian Fagan, The Long Summer (Granta, London, 2005) Richard Fortey, The Earth (Harper Collins, London, 2004) Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (Bloomsbury, London, 2006) Tim Lenton and W. von Bloh, ‘Biotic Feedback Extends Lifespan of Biosphere’, Geophysical Research Letters (2001) James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (Allen Lane/Penguin, London, 2006) Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry (Transworld, London, 2006) H.

No. More. Plastic.: What You Can Do to Make a Difference – the #2minutesolution
by Martin Dorey
Published 2 May 2018

This book shows you what you can do to help. Starting today, with just 2 minutes of your time. Open this book with your children, give it to your friends. Spread the word. With its smart, surprising and simple solutions, we can all make a genuine difference. ‘We could actually do something about plastic right now’ David Attenborough. Together we can fix this. #2minutesolution Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version. Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances. About the Author Martin is a writer, surfer and beach lover. He founded the Beach Clean Network with Tab Parry in 2009 and started the #2minutebeachclean hashtag in 2013 after North Atlantic storms left UK beaches littered with plastic rubbish.

My Shit Life So Far
by Frankie Boyle
Published 30 Sep 2009

It’s notoriously difficult to get pandas to mate, and some zoos even resort to showing them videos of ‘panda porn’. Well, that’s not going to help conception, that’s just going to increase his late-night trips to get ‘more bamboo’ while he sneaks into the warden’s office to rifle through DVDs of David Attenborough. They’re doing all sorts of weird stuff with genetics these days. They’re unravelling the DNA code, cutting it up and splicing it together, implanting it and interbreeding species. They’re putting pigs’ hearts into humans instead of meat pies. They’re putting DNA from beavers into elephants and now huge rogue beavers are going on the rampage and elephants are building dams before they go off to find the beavers’ graveyard.

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I’m probably one of the only people in the country who knows this, but Leicester station has the most purgatorial cafÉ in the UK. It has the usual depravity of fruit machines and Formica tables but seasons it with a set of framed photos running all around the walls of famous people who come from Leicester. Gary Lineker, he’s from Leicester. So is David Attenborough and the snooker player Willy Thorne. The fact that none of these people chose to stay in Leicester is irrelevant. So what if they thought that it was better to move away from Leicester? The final face is Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. It says a lot when a town takes pride in being the birthplace of a hugely deformed circus freak.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

We are incapable: ever since Eve’s crime, we’ve been born this way – outlaw failures, fucking and sinning with callous abandon as the planet we’ve been given withers around us. As his talk progresses, two further facts become apparent about John Mackay. One, he likes to speak in questions. Two, he has a bit of a thing about David Attenborough. ‘I know a question David Attenborough wouldn’t ask,’ he says at one point. ‘If creation is true, what would the evidence be?’ Of all the questions ever, this is probably John’s favourite because he believes that the evidence is on the side of God. By education and by thinking, Mackay considers himself to be a scientist.

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Mackay, a geologist and geneticist who seems to possess an eager and audacious intellect, has most recently crossed ideologies with iconic atheist Professor Richard Dawkins – who, not incidentally, once told the Guardian newspaper, ‘People like Mackay thrive by drip-feeding misinformation … we cannot afford to take creationism lightly. It’s not an amusing diversion, but a serious threat to scientific reason.’ John recalls the meeting with a contemptuous sigh. ‘He was trying to be David Attenborough,’ he says. ‘I think it’s because he’s been getting so much flak. People are sick of him. Do you know, if Dawkins is speaking at a university before me, the evolutionists get so disgusted with him they’ll double my crowd? But I led him to a point where he said, “Evolution has been observed, it just hasn’t been observed while it’s been happening.”

A Book for Her
by Bridget Christie
Published 1 Jul 2015

So I’ll just quickly explain to you what I found out feminism means, and then I’ll get on with all the more interesting stuff about cheese and ants. I’m a feminist. All this means is that I am extremely hairy and hate all men, both as individuals and collectively, with no exceptions. Nope. Not even Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen/Paul Hollywood/Ronnie Corbett/Trevor McDonald/David Attenborough or John Nettles circa Bergerac are good enough for me. Oh … it could’ve been you, John. Oh, John. Those blue eyes, those blue jeans, that burgundy car … Oh, John. You could’ve been the thinking feminist’s crumpet, John. But Jersey has no gender equality laws, John. Oh, John, what a wasted opportunity.

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If I was going to talk about attitudes towards women, the conduit I used to facilitate me doing so needed to make more sense. I remembered how clever ants were and thought that if I dressed up as an ant, and talked about what it was like being an ‘ant’ comedian, audiences might be more willing to buy into it. Everyone knows how intelligent ants are. I mean, they’ve been communicating with David Attenborough for years. It’s just a shame he still hasn’t learnt ant for ‘Fuck off, mate, we’re really busy here’, which is what they’ve been saying to him since the 1960s. An ant talking about being an ant comedian would be far less alienating to a comedy audience than a woman talking about being a woman comedian.

Dinosaurs Rediscovered
by Michael J. Benton
Published 14 Sep 2019

This is computerized tomographic scanning, often shortened to CT scanning, in which the scanner captures X-ray images of the internal structure of the bone or rock, and these can be viewed as if they are a stack of slices, spaced maybe fractions of a millimetre apart. This means that museum preparators do not have to risk damaging delicate specimens, say a dinosaur embryo inside its egg, instead capturing a perfect 3D image. Back in the lab, clearing more rock from the plaster jacket. A typical day in the SEM lab in Bristol: David Attenborough pops by in 2017 to see Fiann Smithwick at work. CT scanning of fossils has only become commonplace in the twenty-first century, when scanners, developed first for medical use, became cheap enough that every university or museum could afford one. We commonly scan fossils up to the size of a magnum bottle of champagne; above that, and they have to go to industrial or veterinary scanners designed to scan an aircraft engine or a horse.

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A few experts in biomechanics had suggested ways to model dinosaur jaws like levers, so you could make some basic calculations, but we now have integrated computational methods that allow much more complex – or realistic – questions to be asked. In a 2018 TV programme about ichthyosaurs, the dolphin-shaped marine reptiles, David Attenborough, the host, asked Emily her opinion: ‘So this was the king of the Jurassic sea?’ ‘Or queen,’ came back Emily in a flash. The new engineering approaches are all testable, so palaeontologists are no longer speculating about feeding in extinct animals. Smart new approaches in ecology, especially using food webs, are also beginning to help, but there is so much more to do.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
by Novella Carpenter
Published 25 May 2010

With its late-night newsstands and rowdy bars, a city meant I would never be lonely. When we turned down our street, Bobby was there, guarding the gates. Bill and I met on an elevator, fell in love because of cats, and lasted because of bees. In 1997, I was headed to a class to show David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants to a group of Ecology 101 students. While finishing up my degrees in English and biology at the University of Washington, I worked as a projectionist, paid $3.85 an hour to hit PLAY on a VCR and then sit back in the AV booth and do my homework. Classroom Support Services, my employer, had recently hired a skinny new guy who wore an ugly red wool hat and a too-short sweatshirt.

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Later I would find out he had problems with his ears, especially in the cold wet of Seattle. The cotton balls kept out the elements, as did the red hat. He handed me a folded sheet of yellow paper. I glanced at it—The Speckled Pig Zine, it said. The doors closed, and I walked to my class. A few minutes later, while David Attenborough’s British-accented voice filled the auditorium, I looked through the zine in the booth. Some funny poems, a story about a lost dog, and a questionnaire mostly about cats. (You see a cat. Do you, a. kiss its head? b. kiss its paws? c. kiss it on the lips?) I find men who have felines impossibly sexy.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

The UN Law of the Sea had protected the deep sea from mining activities for over twenty years, and no company has yet been allowed to start mining for minerals. NGOs such as Greenpeace and Conservation International believed that more time is needed for further study before mining can start. This call was backed by prominent naturalists such as David Attenborough. ‘Do you gamble with those uncertainties in favour of the mining operations or do you give the benefit of any doubt to the protection of marine ecosystems?’ David Santillo, a Greenpeace scientist at the University of Exeter, said to me. ‘To me the latter is more important.’ Louisa Casson, an ocean campaigner at Greenpeace, said deep sea mining risked the wholesale ‘extinction of species’.

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print=pdf. 15 Wells, J., ‘Canada’s next billionaire’, MacLeans, 3 June 1996, https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1996/6/3/canadas-next-billio-naire. 16 Ivanhoe Mines, ‘2018 news’, www.ivanhoemines.com/news/2018/strategic-equity-investment-of-c-723-million-in-ivanhoe-mines-by-china-based-citic-metal-has-been-completed/. 17 Ivanhoe Mines press release, 19 September 2018, https://cn.ivanhoemines.com/news/2018/strategic-equity-investment-of-c-723-million-in-ivanhoe-mines-by-china-based-citic-metal-has-been-completed/. Chapter 12 The Final Frontier: Mining the Deep Sea 1 McVeigh, K., ‘David Attenborough calls for ban on “devastating” deep sea mining’, Guardian, 12 March 2020. 2 Pavid, K., ‘Thank the ocean with every breath you take, says Dr Sylvia Earle’, Natural History Museum, 28 November 2017, www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2017/november/thank-the-ocean-dr-sylvia-earle.html. 3 Petersen, S., Krätschell, A., Augustin, N., Jamieson, J., Hein, J.R., Hannington, M.D., ‘News from the seabed – geological characteristics and resource potential of deep-sea mineral resources’, Marine Policy, 70 (2016), 175–87, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X16300732?

London Like a Local
by Florence Derrick

g OUTDOORS g Contents Cemetery Strolls ABNEY PARK CEMETERY HIGHGATE CEMETERY KENSAL GREEN CEMETERY BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND WANDSWORTH CEMETERY NUNHEAD CEMETERY BROCKLEY CEMETERY BROMPTON CEMETERY g Cemetery Strolls g Contents Google Map ABNEY PARK CEMETERY Map 3; 215 Stoke Newington High Street, Stoke Newington; ///sung.animal.bigger; www.abneypark.org Wild and woody Abney Park Cemetery, perhaps most famous for featuring in the music video for Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black”, is a great place to walk off brunch in the company of Stokey’s past residents. Look for the graves of rebels, panto actors and a chap who taught the Victorians all about African and Asian wildlife – essentially the 19th-century David Attenborough (the lion on his grave is the clue). g Cemetery Strolls g Contents Google Map HIGHGATE CEMETERY Map 6; Swain’s Lane, Highgate; ///audio.regard.scrap; www.highgatecemetery.org It’s hard to resist the grand allure of Highgate, with its towering monuments and statues. This is the final resting place of some big names; Karl Marx, George Eliot and Douglas Adams are all buried here, plus Alexander Litvinenko, who is buried in a lead coffin to prevent radioactive leaking.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel
by David Metz
Published 21 Jan 2014

Even if classical travel writing is nowadays constrained by the possibility of tourists reaching the same places as the intrepid author, technology developments in the second half of the twentieth century permitted the return of travellers with their tales in the form of documentary film and video, particularly of rare animal, bird and fish species in hard‑to‑reach habitats. While we tourists might go whale‑watching and, if lucky, catch a fleeting sight of perhaps a minke whale or a basking shark, we know that David Attenborough, to mention only the best‑known television naturalist, will bring us awesome images of creatures that we could never glimpse. So we can enlarge our experience of the world in which we live from our armchair, through books, television and video. To what extent does this substitute for actual long distance trips?

Unnatural Causes
by Richard Shepherd
Published 19 Sep 2018

And when that process, dying, is complete, it sets off another series of processes which eventually return us to the earth and complete the life cycle. The screen lit up above me and the police officers stretched out their legs. A few sipped their coffee and relaxed with the air of men settling down with their wives to watch a David Attenborough wildlife documentary. I didn’t want to give them too much science, so I simply said that oxygen is vital for almost all cells. It facilitates the cells’ multitude of life-sustaining chemical reactions: this is metabolism. On death, when there is no oxygen, muscle cells rapidly become flaccid.

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The blood vessels provide easy channels for the bacteria to spread, causing the haemoglobin there to decompose. Visible result: the extraordinary and beautiful fern-like pattern of the veins closest to the surface becomes clearly etched on the skin as though tattooed in brown. It is often evident on the arms and thighs. I think the police officers were beginning to realize now that this was no David Attenborough documentary. But, like every death process, this rather beautiful stage is temporary. Gradually the pattern is lost as the skin blisters into red and brown fluid. As the blisters burst, the skin sloughs off. One waste product of all this bacterial activity is gas, and so now the body begins to swell.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

In 2016, the UK government asked the public to help name a new polar research ship. Individuals could submit names and then vote on them in an online poll. More than seven thousand names were submitted, but one name won easily, with 124,109 votes: RSS Boaty McBoatface. (The ship was eventually named RSS Sir David Attenborough instead.) Could the government have predicted this result? Well, maybe not that the exact name RSS Boaty McBoatface would triumph. But could they have guessed that someone might turn the contest into a joke, that the joke would be well received by the public, and that the joke answer might become the winner?

…

Department of, 97 just world hypothesis, 22 Kahneman, Daniel, 9, 30, 90 karoshi, 82 Kauffman Foundation, 122 keeping up with the Joneses, 210–11 key person insurance, 305 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 129, 225 KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), 10 knowledge, institutional, 257 knowns: known, 197 unknown, 198, 203 known unknowns, 197–98 Knox, Robert E., 91 Kodak, 302–3, 308–10, 312 Koenigswald, Gustav Heinrich Ralph von, 50 Kohl’s, 15 Kopelman, Josh, 301 Korea, 229, 231, 235, 238 Kristof, Nicholas, 254 Krokodil, 49 Kruger, Justin, 269 Kuhn, Thomas, 24 Kutcher, Ashton, 121 labor market, 283–84 laggards, 116–17 landlords, 178, 179, 182, 188 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 132 large numbers, law of, 143–44 Latané, Bibb, 259 late majority, 116–17 lateral thinking, 201 law of diminishing returns, 81–83 law of diminishing utility, 81–82 law of inertia, 102–3, 105–8, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 129, 290, 296 law of large numbers, 143–44 law of small numbers, 143, 144 Lawson, Jerry, 289 lawsuits, 231 leadership, 248, 255, 260, 265, 271, 275, 276, 278–80 learned helplessness, 22–23 learning, 262, 269, 295 from past events, 271–72 learning curve, 269 Le Chatelier, Henri-Louis, 193 Le Chatelier’s principle, 193–94 left to their own devices, 275 Leibniz, Gottfried, 291 lemons into lemonade, 121 Lernaean Hydra, 51 Levav, Jonathan, 63 lever, 78 leverage, 78–80, 83, 115 high-leverage activities, 79–81, 83, 107, 113 leveraged buyout, 79 leveraging up, 78–79 Levitt, Steven, 44–45 Levitt, Theodore, 296 Lewis, Michael, 289 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 17 lightning, 145 liking, 216–17, 220 Lincoln, Abraham, 97 Lindy effect, 105, 106, 112 line in the sand, 238 LinkedIn, 7 littering, 41, 42 Lloyd, William, 37 loans, 180, 182–83 lobbyists, 216, 306 local optimum, 195–96 lock-in, 305 lock in your gains, 90 long-term negative scenarios, 60 loose versus tight, in organizational culture, 274 Lorenz, Edward, 121 loss, 91 loss aversion, 90–91 loss leader strategy, 236–37 lost at sea, 68 lottery, 85–86, 126, 145 low-context communication, 273–74 low-hanging fruit, 81 loyalists versus mercenaries, 276–77 luck, 128 making your own, 122 luck surface area, 122, 124, 128 Luft, Joseph, 196 LuLaRoe, 217 lung cancer, 133–34, 173 Lyautey, Hubert, 276 Lyft, ix, 288 Madoff, Bernie, 232 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 291 magnets, 194 maker’s schedule versus manager’s schedule, 277–78 Making of Economic Society, The (Heilbroner), 49 mammograms, 160–61 management debt, 56 manager’s schedule versus maker’s schedule, 277–78 managing to the person, 255 Manhattan Project, 195 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 201 manipulative insincerity, 264 man-month, 279 Mansfield, Peter, 291 manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), 15 margin of error, 154 markets, 42–43, 46–47, 106 failure in, 47–49 labor, 283–84 market norms versus social norms, 222–24 market power, 283–85, 312 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 secondary, 281–82 winner-take-most, 308 marriage: divorce, 231, 305 same-sex, 117, 118 Maslow, Abraham, 177, 270–71 Maslow’s hammer, xi, 177, 255, 297, 317 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 270–71 mathematics, ix–x, 3, 4, 132, 178 Singapore math, 23–24 matrices, 2 × 2, 125–26 consensus-contrarian, 285–86, 290 consequence-conviction, 265–66 Eisenhower Decision Matrix, 72–74, 89, 124, 125 of knowns and unknowns, 197–98 payoff, 212–15, 238 radical candor, 263–64 scatter plot on top of, 126 McCain, John, 241 mean, 146, 149, 151 regression to, 146, 286 standard deviation from, 149, 150–51, 154 variance from, 149 measles, 39, 40 measurable target, 49–50 median, 147 Medicare, 54–55 meetings, 113 weekly one-on-one, 262–63 Megginson, Leon, 101 mental models, vii–xii, 2, 3, 31, 35, 65, 131, 289, 315–17 mentorship, 23, 260, 262, 264, 265 mercenaries versus loyalists, 276–77 Merck, 283 merry-go-round, 108 meta-analysis, 172–73 Metcalfe, Robert, 118 Metcalfe’s law, 118 #MeToo movement, 113 metrics, 137 proxy, 139 Michaels, 15 Microsoft, 241 mid-mortems, 92 Miklaszewski, Jim, 196 Milgram, Stanley, 219, 220 military, 141, 229, 279, 294, 300 milkshakes, 297 Miller, Reggie, 246 Mills, Alan, 58 Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Dweck), 266 mindset, fixed, 266–67, 272 mindset, growth, 266–67 minimum viable product (MVP), 7–8, 81, 294 mirroring, 217 mission, 276 mission statement, 68 MIT, 53, 85 moats, 302–5, 307–8, 310, 312 mode, 147 Moltke, Helmuth von, 7 momentum, 107–10, 119, 129 Monday morning quarterbacking, 271 Moneyball (Lewis), 289 monopolies, 283, 285 Monte Carlo fallacy, 144 Monte Carlo simulation, 195 Moore, Geoffrey, 311 moral hazard, 43–45, 47 most respectful interpretation (MRI), 19–20 moths, 99–101 Mountain Dew, 35 moving target, 136 multiple discovery, 291–92 multiplication, ix, xi multitasking, 70–72, 74, 76, 110 Munger, Charlie, viii, x–xi, 30, 286, 318 Murphy, Edward, 65 Murphy’s law, 64–65, 132 Musk, Elon, 5, 302 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 231 MVP (minimum viable product), 7–8, 81, 294 Mylan, 283 mythical man-month, 279 name-calling, 226 NASA, 4, 32, 33 Nash, John, 213 Nash equilibrium, 213–14, 226, 235 National Football League (NFL), 225–26 National Institutes of Health, 36 National Security Agency, 52 natural selection, 99–100, 102, 291, 295 nature versus nurture, 249–50 negative compounding, 85 negative externalities, 41–43, 47 negative returns, 82–83, 93 negotiations, 127–28 net benefit, 181–82, 184 Netflix, 69, 95, 203 net present value (NPV), 86, 181 network effects, 117–20, 308 neuroticism, 250 New Orleans, La., 41 Newport, Cal, 72 news headlines, 12–13, 221 newspapers, 106 Newsweek, 290 Newton, Isaac, 102, 291 New York Times, 27, 220, 254 Nielsen Holdings, 217 ninety-ninety rule, 89 Nintendo, 296 Nobel Prize, 32, 42, 220, 291, 306 nocebo effect, 137 nodes, 118, 119 No Fly List, 53–54 noise and signal, 311 nonresponse bias, 140, 142, 143 normal distribution (bell curve), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 North Korea, 229, 231, 238 north star, 68–70, 275 nothing in excess, 60 not ready for prime time, 242 “now what” questions, 291 NPR, 239 nuclear chain reaction, viii, 114, 120 nuclear industry, 305–6 nuclear option, 238 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 305–6 nuclear weapons, 114, 118, 195, 209, 230–31, 233, 238 nudging, 13–14 null hypothesis, 163, 164 numbers, 130, 146 large, law of, 143–44 small, law of, 143, 144 see also data; statistics nurses, 284 Oakland Athletics, 289 Obama, Barack, 64, 241 objective versus subjective, in organizational culture, 274 obnoxious aggression, 264 observe, orient, decide, act (OODA), 294–95 observer effect, 52, 54 observer-expectancy bias, 136, 139 Ockham’s razor, 8–10 Odum, William E., 38 oil, 105–6 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 O’Neal, Shaquille, 246 one-hundred-year floods, 192 Onion, 211–12 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin), 100 OODA loop, 294–95 openness to experience, 250 Operation Ceasefire, 232 opinion, diversity of, 205, 206 opioids, 36 opportunity cost, 76–77, 80, 83, 179, 182, 188, 305 of capital, 77, 179, 182 optimistic probability bias, 33 optimization, premature, 7 optimums, local and global, 195–96 optionality, preserving, 58–59 Oracle, 231, 291, 299 order, 124 balance between chaos and, 128 organizations: culture in, 107–8, 113, 273–80, 293 size and growth of, 278–79 teams in, see teams ostrich with its head in the sand, 55 out-group bias, 127 outliers, 148 Outliers (Gladwell), 261 overfitting, 10–11 overwork, 82 Paine, Thomas, 221–22 pain relievers, 36, 137 Pampered Chef, 217 Pangea, 24–25 paradigm shift, 24, 289 paradox of choice, 62–63 parallel processing, 96 paranoia, 308, 309, 311 Pareto, Vilfredo, 80 Pareto principle, 80–81 Pariser, Eli, 17 Parkinson, Cyril, 74–75, 89 Parkinson’s law, 89 Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson), 74–75 Parkinson’s law of triviality, 74, 89 passwords, 94, 97 past, 201, 271–72, 309–10 Pasteur, Louis, 26 path dependence, 57–59, 194 path of least resistance, 88 Patton, Bruce, 19 Pauling, Linus, 220 payoff matrix, 212–15, 238 PayPal, 72, 291, 296 peak, 105, 106, 112 peak oil, 105 Penny, Jonathon, 52 pent-up energy, 112 perfect, 89–90 as enemy of the good, 61, 89–90 personality traits, 249–50 person-month, 279 perspective, 11 persuasion, see influence models perverse incentives, 50–51, 54 Peter, Laurence, 256 Peter principle, 256, 257 Peterson, Tom, 108–9 Petrified Forest National Park, 217–18 Pew Research, 53 p-hacking, 169, 172 phishing, 97 phones, 116–17, 290 photography, 302–3, 308–10 physics, x, 114, 194, 293 quantum, 200–201 pick your battles, 238 Pinker, Steven, 144 Pirahã, x Pitbull, 36 pivoting, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 placebo, 137 placebo effect, 137 Planck, Max, 24 Playskool, 111 Podesta, John, 97 point of no return, 244 Polaris, 67–68 polarity, 125–26 police, in organizations and projects, 253–54 politics, 70, 104 ads and statements in, 225–26 elections, 206, 218, 233, 241, 271, 293, 299 failure and, 47 influence in, 216 predictions in, 206 polls and surveys, 142–43, 152–54, 160 approval ratings, 152–54, 158 employee engagement, 140, 142 postmortems, 32, 92 Potemkin village, 228–29 potential energy, 112 power, 162 power drills, 296 power law distribution, 80–81 power vacuum, 259–60 practice, deliberate, 260–62, 264, 266 precautionary principle, 59–60 Predictably Irrational (Ariely), 14, 222–23 predictions and forecasts, 132, 173 market for, 205–7 superforecasters and, 206–7 PredictIt, 206 premature optimization, 7 premises, see principles pre-mortems, 92 present bias, 85, 87, 93, 113 preserving optionality, 58–59 pressure point, 112 prices, 188, 231, 299 arbitrage and, 282–83 bait and switch and, 228, 229 inflation in, 179–80, 182–83 loss leader strategy and, 236–37 manufacturer’s suggested retail, 15 monopolies and, 283 principal, 44–45 principal-agent problem, 44–45 principles (premises), 207 first, 4–7, 31, 207 prior, 159 prioritizing, 68 prisoners, 63, 232 prisoner’s dilemma, 212–14, 226, 234–35, 244 privacy, 55 probability, 132, 173, 194 bias, optimistic, 33 conditional, 156 probability distributions, 150, 151 bell curve (normal), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 Bernoulli, 152 central limit theorem and, 152–53, 163 fat-tailed, 191 power law, 80–81 sample, 152–53 pro-con lists, 175–78, 185, 189 procrastination, 83–85, 87, 89 product development, 294 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 promotions, 256, 275 proximate cause, 31, 117 proxy endpoint, 137 proxy metric, 139 psychology, 168 Psychology of Science, The (Maslow), 177 Ptolemy, Claudius, 8 publication bias, 170, 173 public goods, 39 punching above your weight, 242 p-values, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 Pygmalion effect, 267–68 Pyrrhus, King, 239 Qualcomm, 231 quantum physics, 200–201 quarantine, 234 questions: now what, 291 what if, 122, 201 why, 32, 33 why now, 291 quick and dirty, 234 quid pro quo, 215 Rabois, Keith, 72, 265 Rachleff, Andy, 285–86, 292–93 radical candor, 263–64 Radical Candor (Scott), 263 radiology, 291 randomized controlled experiment, 136 randomness, 201 rats, 51 Rawls, John, 21 Regan, Ronald, 183 real estate agents, 44–45 recessions, 121–22 reciprocity, 215–16, 220, 222, 229, 289 recommendations, 217 red line, 238 referrals, 217 reframe the problem, 96–97 refugee asylum cases, 144 regression to the mean, 146, 286 regret, 87 regulations, 183–84, 231–32 regulatory capture, 305–7 reinventing the wheel, 92 relationships, 53, 55, 63, 91, 111, 124, 159, 271, 296, 298 being locked into, 305 dating, 8–10, 95 replication crisis, 168–72 Republican Party, 104 reputation, 215 research: meta-analysis of, 172–73 publication bias and, 170, 173 systematic reviews of, 172, 173 see also experiments resonance, 293–94 response bias, 142, 143 responsibility, diffusion of, 259 restaurants, 297 menus at, 14, 62 RetailMeNot, 281 retaliation, 238 returns: diminishing, 81–83 negative, 82–83, 93 reversible decisions, 61–62 revolving door, 306 rewards, 275 Riccio, Jim, 306 rise to the occasion, 268 risk, 43, 46, 90, 288 cost-benefit analysis and, 180 de-risking, 6–7, 10, 294 moral hazard and, 43–45, 47 Road Ahead, The (Gates), 69 Roberts, Jason, 122 Roberts, John, 27 Rogers, Everett, 116 Rogers, William, 31 Rogers Commission Report, 31–33 roles, 256–58, 260, 271, 293 roly-poly toy, 111–12 root cause, 31–33, 234 roulette, 144 Rubicon River, 244 ruinous empathy, 264 Rumsfeld, Donald, 196–97, 247 Rumsfeld’s Rule, 247 Russia, 218, 241 Germany and, 70, 238–39 see also Soviet Union Sacred Heart University (SHU), 217, 218 sacrifice play, 239 Sagan, Carl, 220 sales, 81, 216–17 Salesforce, 299 same-sex marriage, 117, 118 Sample, Steven, 28 sample distribution, 152–53 sample size, 143, 160, 162, 163, 165–68, 172 Sánchez, Ricardo, 234 sanctions and fines, 232 Sanders, Bernie, 70, 182, 293 Sayre, Wallace, 74 Sayre’s law, 74 scarcity, 219, 220 scatter plot, 126 scenario analysis (scenario planning), 198–99, 201–3, 207 schools, see education and schools Schrödinger, Erwin, 200 Schrödinger’s cat, 200 Schultz, Howard, 296 Schwartz, Barry, 62–63 science, 133, 220 cargo cult, 315–16 Scientific Autobiography and other Papers (Planck), 24 scientific evidence, 139 scientific experiments, see experiments scientific method, 101–2, 294 scorched-earth tactics, 243 Scott, Kim, 263 S curves, 117, 120 secondary markets, 281–82 second law of thermodynamics, 124 secrets, 288–90, 292 Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S., 228 security, false sense of, 44 security services, 229 selection, adverse, 46–47 selection bias, 139–40, 143, 170 self-control, 87 self-fulfilling prophecies, 267 self-serving bias, 21, 272 Seligman, Martin, 22 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 25–26 Semmelweis reflex, 26 Seneca, Marcus, 60 sensitivity analysis, 181–82, 185, 188 dynamic, 195 Sequoia Capital, 291 Sessions, Roger, 8 sexual predators, 113 Shakespeare, William, 105 Sheets Energy Strips, 36 Shermer, Michael, 133 Shirky, Clay, 104 Shirky principle, 104, 112 Short History of Nearly Everything, A (Bryson), 50 short-termism, 55–56, 58, 60, 68, 85 side effects, 137 signal and noise, 311 significance, 167 statistical, 164–67, 170 Silicon Valley, 288, 289 simulations, 193–95 simultaneous invention, 291–92 Singapore math, 23–24 Sir David Attenborough, RSS, 35 Skeptics Society, 133 sleep meditation app, 162–68 slippery slope argument, 235 slow (high-concentration) thinking, 30, 33, 70–71 small numbers, law of, 143, 144 smartphones, 117, 290, 309, 310 smoking, 41, 42, 133–34, 139, 173 Snap, 299 Snowden, Edward, 52, 53 social engineering, 97 social equality, 117 social media, 81, 94, 113, 217–19, 241 Facebook, 18, 36, 94, 119, 219, 233, 247, 305, 308 Instagram, 220, 247, 291, 310 YouTube, 220, 291 social networks, 117 Dunbar’s number and, 278 social norms versus market norms, 222–24 social proof, 217–20, 229 societal change, 100–101 software, 56, 57 simulations, 192–94 solitaire, 195 solution space, 97 Somalia, 243 sophomore slump, 145–46 South Korea, 229, 231, 238 Soviet Union: Germany and, 70, 238–39 Gosplan in, 49 in Cold War, 209, 235 space exploration, 209 spacing effect, 262 Spain, 243–44 spam, 37, 161, 192–93, 234 specialists, 252–53 species, 120 spending, 38, 74–75 federal, 75–76 spillover effects, 41, 43 sports, 82–83 baseball, 83, 145–46, 289 football, 226, 243 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 Spotify, 299 spreadsheets, 179, 180, 182, 299 Srinivasan, Balaji, 301 standard deviation, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error, 154 standards, 93 Stanford Law School, x Starbucks, 296 startup business idea, 6–7 statistics, 130–32, 146, 173, 289, 297 base rate in, 157, 159, 160 base rate fallacy in, 157, 158, 170 Bayesian, 157–60 confidence intervals in, 154–56, 159 confidence level in, 154, 155, 161 frequentist, 158–60 p-hacking in, 169, 172 p-values in, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 standard deviation in, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error in, 154 statistical significance, 164–67, 170 summary, 146, 147 see also data; experiments; probability distributions Staubach, Roger, 243 Sternberg, Robert, 290 stock and flow diagrams, 192 Stone, Douglas, 19 stop the bleeding, 234 strategy, 107–8 exit, 242–43 loss leader, 236–37 pivoting and, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 tactics versus, 256–57 strategy tax, 103–4, 112 Stiglitz, Joseph, 306 straw man, 225–26 Streisand, Barbra, 51 Streisand effect, 51, 52 Stroll, Cliff, 290 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 24 subjective versus objective, in organizational culture, 274 suicide, 218 summary statistics, 146, 147 sunk-cost fallacy, 91 superforecasters, 206–7 Superforecasting (Tetlock), 206–7 super models, viii–xii super thinking, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 surface area, 122 luck, 122, 124, 128 surgery, 136–37 Surowiecki, James, 203–5 surrogate endpoint, 137 surveys, see polls and surveys survivorship bias, 140–43, 170, 272 sustainable competitive advantage, 283, 285 switching costs, 305 systematic review, 172, 173 systems thinking, 192, 195, 198 tactics, 256–57 Tajfel, Henri, 127 take a step back, 298 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2, 105 talk past each other, 225 Target, 236, 252 target, measurable, 49–50 taxes, 39, 40, 56, 104, 193–94 T cells, 194 teams, 246–48, 275 roles in, 256–58, 260 size of, 278 10x, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 Tech, 83 technical debt, 56, 57 technologies, 289–90, 295 adoption curves of, 115 adoption life cycles of, 116–17, 129, 289, 290, 311–12 disruptive, 308, 310–11 telephone, 118–19 temperature: body, 146–50 thermostats and, 194 tennis, 2 10,000-Hour Rule, 261 10x individuals, 247–48 10x teams, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 terrorism, 52, 234 Tesla, Inc., 300–301 testing culture, 50 Tetlock, Philip E., 206–7 Texas sharpshooter fallacy, 136 textbooks, 262 Thaler, Richard, 87 Theranos, 228 thermodynamics, 124 thermostats, 194 Thiel, Peter, 72, 288, 289 thinking: black-and-white, 126–28, 168, 272 convergent, 203 counterfactual, 201, 272, 309–10 critical, 201 divergent, 203 fast (low-concentration), 30, 70–71 gray, 28 inverse, 1–2, 291 lateral, 201 outside the box, 201 slow (high-concentration), 30, 33, 70–71 super, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 systems, 192, 195, 198 writing and, 316 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 30 third story, 19, 92 thought experiment, 199–201 throwing good money after bad, 91 throwing more money at the problem, 94 tight versus loose, in organizational culture, 274 timeboxing, 75 time: management of, 38 as money, 77 work and, 89 tipping point, 115, 117, 119, 120 tit-for-tat, 214–15 Tōgō Heihachirō, 241 tolerance, 117 tools, 95 too much of a good thing, 60 top idea in your mind, 71, 72 toxic culture, 275 Toys “R” Us, 281 trade-offs, 77–78 traditions, 275 tragedy of the commons, 37–40, 43, 47, 49 transparency, 307 tribalism, 28 Trojan horse, 228 Truman Show, The, 229 Trump, Donald, 15, 206, 293 Trump: The Art of the Deal (Trump and Schwartz), 15 trust, 20, 124, 215, 217 trying too hard, 82 Tsushima, Battle of, 241 Tupperware, 217 TurboTax, 104 Turner, John, 127 turn lemons into lemonade, 121 Tversky, Amos, 9, 90 Twain, Mark, 106 Twitter, 233, 234, 296 two-front wars, 70 type I error, 161 type II error, 161 tyranny of small decisions, 38, 55 Tyson, Mike, 7 Uber, 231, 275, 288, 290 Ulam, Stanislaw, 195 ultimatum game, 224, 244 uncertainty, 2, 132, 173, 180, 182, 185 unforced error, 2, 10, 33 unicorn candidate, 257–58 unintended consequences, 35–36, 53–55, 57, 64–65, 192, 232 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), 306 unique value proposition, 211 University of Chicago, 144 unknown knowns, 198, 203 unknowns: known, 197–98 unknown, 196–98, 203 urgency, false, 74 used car market, 46–47 U.S.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

There is evidence that the British will spend almost six months of their entire lives queuing up for stuff.19 In some places, like Wimbledon or for royal weddings, it’s even seen as part of the ‘fun’ to queue outside all night in a tent. Just about the worst thing you can do in Britain is jump the queue. It’s like farting in a lift. Or not buying a round. Or not being friendly to the vicar’s dog when it’s dry-humping your ankle and its mouth is clamped to your shin. Or criticising the NHS. Or, even worse, Sir David Attenborough. It’s instant pariah status. The really weird thing is that 88 per cent of us have admitted to giving up in a queue and going home empty-handed.20 A quarter of Brits say they hate doing it, yet they keep coming back for more. Why? British people are often shy, well-mannered and modest. There’s a long list of things the British never discuss: constipation, sex, depression, relationships, thrush, money, toilets, feelings, seborrhoea, logorrhoea, gonorrhoea, Chris Rea, diarrhoea, duty or death.

…

It did have Carl Sagan, a brilliant scientist who speculated about intelligent life in the cosmos (not to be confused with the very reasonably priced package holiday company with a similar name). He died prematurely, but not before he had popularised the baton phrase ‘billions and billions’. This was later picked up as a tribute phrase by home-grown British TV all-round super-intelligent science-saucepot, Professor Brian Cox. He and David Attenborough show how great communicators create interest in science. 1970s American culture was really embodied in Scooby-Doo, Where are you!, which extolled the fun you could have with a cartoon dog. You can learn a lot about the relationship between America and Britain from its children’s entertainment.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Published 22 Nov 2013

For design it can provide a fresh alternative to future-based thinking by presenting parallel worlds as thought experiments rather than predictions. But it can be slightly cumbersome because of the need to set up the story before people can engage with the project. James Chambers's Attenborough Design Group (2010) is a simple example of how this approach might translate into a design project. Chambers asks, What if David Attenborough had become an industrial designer rather than a wildlife filmmaker, who, still fond of nature, established the Attenborough Design Group to explore how animal behavior could be used to equip technology products with survival instincts: a Gesundheit radio, which sneezes periodically to expel potentially damaging dust, and Floppy Legs, a portable floppy disc drive that stands up if it detects liquid nearby?

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms
by Iain Overton
Published 15 Apr 2015

The top floor was filled with shotguns whose price tags you had to look at twice to make sure you had not misread them. But it was the middle floor, the walls filled with monochrome pictures of Africa and bookshelves heavy with coffee-table hunting books, that caught my attention. Because there stood a line of DVDs, and one leaped out. Boddington on Cheetahs, it read. But this was no David Attenborough–style film; rather it was highlights of the fastest animal on earth being taken down by a hunting rifle. Others stood beside it: Boddington on Lions, Boddington on Leopards. What Boddington had done was strictly legal, but the images on the back cover felt like the sort of footage, as an investigative journalist, I would have wanted for a film about the ugly world of animal abuse.

…

The possible caveat is that a hunted animal might be shot and injured and not killed outright by a huntsman’s bullet. But then again many animals may sense their looming death when they are herded into an abattoir. 7. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/04/daily-chart-17 8. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/dec/01/nature-urbanisation-david-attenborough 9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26140827 10. http://dianamandache.com/auction-shotgun-king-of-romania/ 11. http://www.face.eu/sites/default/files/documents/english/face_annual_report_2013_en.pdf 12. http://www.face.eu/sites/default/files/documents/english/position_paper_hunttour_-_en.pdf 13. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/11/packing_heat_in_helsinki.html 14. http://www.face.eu/sites/default/files/attachments/data_hunters-region_sept_2010.pdf 15. http://www.conservationforce.org/role4.html; http://www.nssf.org/PDF/research/HuntingInAmerica_EconomicForceForConservation.pdf 16. http://www.gallup.com/poll/20098/gun-ownership-use-america.aspx 17.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

.*2 If a biologist denies the importance of natural selection in evolution, it is pretty safe to assume not that he has some alternative theory but that he simply underrates adaptation as a dominant property of life that needs explaining. Probably he has never set foot in a tropical rainforest, or set flipper over a coral reef, or set eyes on a David Attenborough film. Nowadays, questions about adaptation are high in the consciousness of field biologists. It has not always been so. My old maestro Niko Tinbergen wrote of an experience when he was a young man: ‘I still remember how perplexed I was upon being told off firmly by one of my zoology professors when I brought up the question of survival value after he had asked: “Has anyone an idea why so many birds flock more densely when they are attacked by a bird of prey?” 

…

True to Bill’s iconic status, the BBC news cameras chose to follow Dawkins and Burkinshaw on one of these fact-finding missions, and Sir Christopher was agog in front of the television screen. I vividly remember his summation, the next day, in his distinctive old raconteur’s voice: ‘About Burkinshaw I will say nothing. Dawkins, however, is obviously accustomed to commanding men.’ David Attenborough told me he had exactly the same impression of Bill, and he drew himself up to his full height and pulled a realistically imperious face to illustrate the point. He had stayed with Bill and Diana while on a filming trip to Sierra Leone in 1954, and they remained friends thereafter. I can’t imagine anybody ever calling Bill either Arthur or Francis, although A.F. suited him well enough.

First Time Ever: A Memoir
by Peggy Seeger
Published 2 Oct 2017

He booked us, duo or group, as interval entertainment at theatres, at corporate conventions and once in a circus tent between the clowns and the high-wire merchants. We went along for the ride and the money, the latter sorely needed. We were advocates for the music but were painfully aware that we – and our songs – were misfits in the culture at large. If David Attenborough had been interested in filming our exotic species, he would, like Felix, have accepted an invitation to visit our native habitat, the weekly Ballads and Blues Club session at the ACTT building in Soho Square. Felix climbed the three storeys of killer stairs, tricked out in bowler hat, cashmere overcoat, Savile Row suit with cravat, handkerchief just so in waistcoat pocket and shoes polished to blinding perfection.

…

To Victoria Johansen, my personal assistant, who took over more than her usual share of our business work while I wrote. To Dave Watkins, my patient, long-suffering Faber editor. To the many writers, pundits, eavesdropped people whose words, phrases, ideas I have absorbed for decades and presented without credit herein. To David Attenborough, who had nothing to do with the book but everything to do with fanning the embers of optimism and eco-feminism. He keeps my spirits up. Last but never least, to my children, Neill, Calum and Kitty MacColl, for their support. Like Irene, they are also waiting patiently for me to grow up. Dio, Mike, Charlie and me, c.1937 Clockwise from top left, Mike, Penny, Charlie, Dio, me, Barbara, c.1947.

London Review of Books
by London Review of Books
Published 14 Dec 2017

Working from live models in the gardens of the newly established Zoological Society, the 18-year-old Lear produced his book without any formal training, independent funding, or institutional support. The day after publication, he was nominated for election as an associate of the Linnean Society. According to David Attenborough, Lear is ‘the finest bird artist there ever was’. His drawings were primarily intended to help scientists identify species, yet his birds are exhibitionists as well as exhibits, always more than an instance that confirms a rule. The same impulse can be felt in the nonsense: the hens of Oripò ‘don’t behave like other hens;/In any decent way’.

The Passenger
by The Passenger
Published 27 Dec 2021

Fortunately there is a new generation of young people keen to highlight the wealth of our language and heritage, not in any exclusive way but to show it as an example of the wisdom, creativity and beauty that is contained within all ancient cultures. More people are reconnecting to the natural word, too, and realising that our oceans and landscape need to be cared for. As Mac Eoin says, ‘none of us realised how fragile the sea was until David Attenborough started his programme in the last few years. Now we are beginning to see where we went wrong and what we could do differently.’ The change is in motion. Like the sea, everything is in flux. A miniature cottage on Inis Mór (Inishmore), the largest of the Aran Islands in Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman
Published 23 Sep 2013

A world traveler, he’d lately noticed how crowded the planet had grown, and wondered what might be done. OPT’s mission was to promote research that might determine the optimum, sustainable human population for given regions, as well as for the entire world. Although its goals were grand and it attracted illustrious patrons—esteemed naturalist and BBC broadcaster Sir David Attenborough; primate biologist Dame Jane Goodall; and former UK representative to the UN Security Council Sir Crispin Tickell—its research resources were limited. Its chief focus became its campaign to lower the population of the United Kingdom. It was a campaign that inevitably risked accusation of encouraging racial politics that spawn the likes of the British National Party.

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It is his images of empty Sardinian villages and former East German towns now overrun by wolves that OPT chairman Roger Martin has in his mind as his turn arrives. His voice is calm, but color singes his pale cheeks. “It’s not either-or, either consumption or numbers. It’s obviously both. The total impact is one multiplied by the other.” He quotes OPT patron Sir David Attenborough: “ ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, and utterly impossible if there were more.’ “We all agree that the solution is to empower women to control their own fertility. It doesn’t help, frankly, for people to say, ‘That’s happening anyway, don’t worry.’

Among the Islands
by Tim Flannery
Published 13 Dec 2011

Tim lives on the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. PRAISE FOR TIM FLANNERY ‘A great zoologist … an irresistible author.’ Jared Diamond ‘Tim Flannery is in the league of the all-time great explorers like Dr David Livingstone.’ Sir David Attenborough ‘One of the world’s greatest zoologists … who’s probably discovered more new species than Darwin. He’s a remarkable man.’ Redmond O’Hanlon ‘Absorbing, funny and wondrously learned.’ Bill Bryson ‘A rollicking adventure … surprisingly funny.’ Bookseller+Publisher ‘Flannery is perhaps the most gifted describer of the natural sciences writing today.’

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Currently they just blame it on bad luck when someone like themselves goes under, but eventually they will realise that it is due to an unsustainable system – especially when they look at the dramatically varying economic fortunes of their children and wider family. In the world’s most affluent and unequal of countries, those at the top often say that people are poor because there are too many of them, either too many being born or too many immigrating. This is a common refrain of the elite. David Attenborough recently put it more subtly: ‘We are such a densely populated country … The world is only so big. You simply can’t go on increasing forever, so something’s going to stop it. Either we can stop it or the natural world will stop it for us.’28 David is wealthy enough to be a member of the 1 per cent, and he was quoted on the BBC website having said this on the Today programme.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

Survey-taking millennials have ranked personal development and flexibility above cash bonuses; stated higher expectations for working their own hours; and have rated work-life balance as more essential than any other job quality, including positive work environment, job security, and interesting work. These types of findings (often best read in the voice David Attenborough uses to narrate wildlife documentaries) have led to widespread accusations that millennials (“a fascinating species”) are conspiring to upend the workplace: “The 9 to 5 job may soon be a relic of the past, if Millennials have their way,” begins one column from Forbes.7 Another, from the New York Times, asks, “Are millennials—those born from roughly 1980 to 2000—about to fundamentally change companies for the better?

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures
by Roma Agrawal
Published 8 Feb 2018

Until, that is, I heard the words ‘strong material’ and ‘bridge’ and, as you can imagine, my ears pricked up like a cat’s. The host was talking about one of the most prolific bridge builders in the world – and, exceptionally, the builder is female, and lives in Madagascar. She’s about the size of a thumbnail, has eight very hairy legs and her body is heavily textured like the bark of a tree, which, as David Attenborough went on to explain, is the camouflage that protects her from predators. She also has a spinneret, which is the bit of her body responsible for making her the brilliant bridge engineer she is. Darwin’s bark spider can build a bridge up to 25m long (that’s 1,000 times her own size), spanning rivers or even lakes.

The Rare Metals War
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 15 Feb 2020

To jog our memory, let’s take a look back at one of the shining periods of the humble television. In France, many will recall those Saturday nights in the 1980s at around 10.00 pm when everyone gathered around the box to watch Ushuaïha. The show’s presenter was environmentalist Nicolas Hulot, France’s answer to David Attenborough.10 Viewers were transported to far-flung places to encounter little-known peoples, discover exotic animals that would have had Rudyard Kipling green with envy, and drift silently over epic landscapes in the helium-inflated envelope of a hot-air balloon. Broadcaster TF1 sold viewers the dream — while also selling off the little attention they had left.

Lonely Planet Kenya
by Lonely Planet

Best Places to Eat A Trout Tree Restaurant A Le Rustique A Tusks Restaurant Best Places to Stay A Lewa Safari Camp A Elsa’s Kopje A iKweta Safari Camp A Segera Retreat A Treetops Central Highlands & Laikipia Highlights 1 Mt Kenya Holding a frozen Kenyan flag in your frozen hands atop the frozen summit of Point Lenana, 16km from the equator. 2 Lewa Wildlife Conservancy Doing a David Attenborough with an orphaned rhino then getting up close and personal with its wild cousins. 3 Ol Pejeta Conservancy Spending an evening here learning how to track lions. 4 Meru National Park Communing with the ancestors of some of Africa's most famous lions on safari at this national park. 5 Aberdare National Park Trekking through the otherworldly forests where elephants and bongo lurk. 6 Trout Tree Restaurant Fishing for your supper then climbing a tree at one of Kenya's most original restaurants. 7 Segera Retreat Indulging in Out of Africa nostalgia alongside contemporary art at this sublime lodge.

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The following activities (with sample per-person prices) can be booked through your accommodation. AIl Ngwesi excursions: US$40, half-day ATour of Lewa Wildlife Conservancy's HQ: Free (US$10 if you visit the tracker dogs), one to two hours AOrphan Rhino Project: US$15, 30 minutes (this was where the moving final scene in Sir David Attenborough's Africa series was filmed) AVisit to local school: US$50 donation AHorse-riding safari: US$55, one hour AWalking safari in Ngare Ndare Forest: US$30 conservation fee, one to three hours AQuad bike/buggy safari: Price on application AFlying safari: Price on application THE LEWA STORY Like so many Laikipia properties that later became wildlife conservancies, Lewa Downs was an expansive cattle ranch owned since colonial times by white settlers.

Last Chance to See
by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Published 1 Jan 1990

Get stung by a stonefish and the pain alone can kill you. People drown themselves just to stop the pain.” “Where are all these things?” “Oh, just in the sea. Tons of them. I wouldn’t go near it if I were you. Full of poisonous animals. Hate them.” “Is there anything you do like?” “Yes,” he said. “Hydroponics.” We flew to Bali. David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-Racist Comedian
by Frankie Boyle
Published 23 Oct 2013

When in season tigers mate ten times a day. I’m told the action’s been so hot that even the panda in the next enclosure’s started wanking. BBC One show Frozen Planet was accused of fakery because they filmed a polar bear giving birth in a zoo. Of course it wasn’t in the Arctic – the only time David Attenborough goes somewhere that cold is when they place him in a carbonite freezer in between series. MP John Whittingdale described it as ‘hugely disappointing’ – unlike hearing that an MP is spending his time moaning about wildlife shows during the biggest global recession in recent history. TV definitely fakes stuff more than newspapers, a source close to TV said.

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story
by Rachel Clarke
Published 14 Sep 2017

I’m going to be late for my shift. Come on!’ she ordered. ‘I – I don’t know if I can,’ he told her and, under the circumstances, who could blame him? ‘Oh, for God’s sake! There’s no time for that. Just get over here and do it.’ In an act so swift and primal it was surely worthy of narration by David Attenborough, Nick and Sarah mated. Immediately afterwards, she leaped up to pull on her scrubs. ‘Shouldn’t you, you know, lie on your back with your legs in the air for half an hour or something?’ he asked her. ‘Are you kidding? There’s no time for that: my list is about to start in theatre.’ With that, she was gone and the rest is history, the phrase ‘doing a level seven’ immortalised in one particular family from that moment for ever more.

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Published 14 Aug 2020

Boinski et al. (2008), “Substrate and tool use by Brown Capuchins in Suriname: Ecological contexts and cognitive bases,” American Anthropologist 102(4), 741–761. For a useful online resource on animal tool use, see C. Choi (2011), “Creative creatures: 10 animals that use tools,” LiveScience, November 3, www.livescience.com/16856-animals-tools-octopus-primates.html. 2. For crows cracking nuts, see David Attenborough, “Wild crows inhabiting the city use it to their advantage,” BBC Wildlife, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0. See also A. Taylor et al. (2011), “New Caledonian crows learn the functional properties of novel tool types,” PLoS ONE, December 4; and A. Auersberg et al. (2014), “Social transmission of tool use and tool manufacture in Goffin cockatoos (Cacatua goffini),” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series B 281, 20140972. 3.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

But while the “climate time bomb is ticking,” the UN report also stresses that the world possesses tools to grapple with the crisis, and a viable, if ever narrowing, window in which to make crucial changes. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade,” the report reads, “will have impacts now and for thousands of years.” In his 2021 documentary The Year Earth Changed, the great David Attenborough pointed out that COVID allowed us to see, for a dozen months or so, what the world looked like when humans retreated to their homes and the pause button was pressed on human-created pollution. The movie shows us footage of a leopard patrolling the deserted streets of Mpumalanga, and jackass penguins waddling through Cape Town.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
Published 5 May 2003

Well, little, we hope, but we actually have no idea. We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas. Even the most substantial ocean creatures are often remarkably little known to us—including the most mighty of them all, the great blue whale, a creature of such leviathan proportions that (to quote David Attenborough) its “tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” It is the most gargantuan beast that Earth has yet produced, bigger even than the most cumbrous dinosaurs. Yet the lives of blue whales are largely a mystery to us.

…

It is not a very exciting arrangement, but it is a conspicuously successful one. The world has more than twenty thousand species of lichens. Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. Those the size of dinner plates, writes David Attenborough, are therefore “likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old.” It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence. “They simply exist,” Attenborough adds, “testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.” It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

Yet, even leaving aside the fact that his chest and vocal tract do not allow him to produce sustained sequences of recognisable sounds as humans do, there is still a qualitative gulf between what Kanzi has achieved and what most human beings can express.2 Towards the end of a lifetime spent studying the animal kingdom, the broadcaster David Attenborough was asked what he found the most astonishing creature on earth. He replied: ‘The only creature that really makes my jaw sag so much that I find it hard to stop looking is a nine-month-old human baby. The rate at which it grows. The rate at which it learns. The rate at which it acquires nerves.

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For other views, see Diamond 1993, 54–56 and 141–47 and Lieberman 2007 2. see, for example, IowaPrimate, ‘Kanzi and Novel Sentences’, 9 January 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dhc2zePJFE&noredirect=1. Kanzi’s level of linguistic competence is the result of dedicated work by Sue Savage-Rambaugh 3. quoted in Sarah Knapton, ‘Which Creature Makes Sir David Attenborough’s Jaw Drop? It’s Not What You’d Expect’, Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2015, http://perma.cc/4H5R-F6HW 4. Dunbar 1996, 3 5. I quote from a personal conversation with him. See also Judt 2010, chapter 17 6. Brown 1991, 130–34 7. on cave paintings and musical instruments, see Werner Herzog’s fine film ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’.

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world
by Michael Pollan
Published 27 May 2002

Chapman’s craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together. SOURCES Listed below, by chapter, are the principal works referred to in the text, as well as others that supplied me with facts or influenced my thinking. INTRODUCTION: THE HUMAN BUMBLEBEE David Attenborough’s 1995 public television series The Private Life of Plants probably did more than any book to open my eyes to the natural and human world as seen from the plant’s point of view. The series’ brilliant time-lapse photography immediately makes you realize that our sense of plants as passive objects is a failure of imagination, rooted in the fact that plants occupy what amounts to a different dimension.

Everything That Makes Us Human: Case Notes of a Children's Brain Surgeon
by Jay Jayamohan
Published 20 Feb 2020

They go from being completely helpless squishy things, to angry, sometimes-capable-of-shouting-back-and-throwing-stuff squishy things in no time at all. They crawl, they eat, they communicate, they toddle, they develop fine motor skills – they become tiny people exceptionally quickly. Nought to sixty in a matter of months. No wonder David Attenborough calls them the most impressive creature in the wider animal kingdom. A lot of remarkable brain development occurs in a brief time period – and the plates have to keep up. But what if they don’t? What if those junctions between the different plates fuse too early? It’s called craniosynostosis and it happens, sometimes while the baby is still developing within the womb.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

‘A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.’5 The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise. James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

The No Need to Diet Book: Become a Diet Rebel and Make Friends With Food
by Plantbased Pixie
Published 7 Mar 2019

It’s impossible – you might walk in on your flatmate or family member watching something on TV, videos get shared on social media, billboards are all over the place, and besides, it’s fun to watch TV! Not all popular media is problematic – obviously, I couldn’t possibly have a bad word to say about anything by David Attenborough, for example. Perhaps what we need is greater awareness of what we watch, and to take some time to assess whether what we are watching shows enough diversity in humans and in bodies. Healthy movement Moving your body is a wonderful thing, and carries with it a whole host of benefits, both mental and physical.

A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life
by Tara Button
Published 8 Feb 2018

Play it like a game, with each person getting a chance to ask and answer. Then hold eye contact for three minutes. What’s wonderful about this exercise is that the questions can bring up some real surprises. I played this game with my dad and found out all sorts of things that I didn’t know, from his ultimate dinner guest (David Attenborough) and his favourite feeling (jamming with a band) to what he’s most grateful for in his life (his children). * * * A sense of belonging and community Humans were built to live in tribes or villages, but the current rise of individualism means that we are much less community-minded nowadays; we think predominantly about our own lives.

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help
by New Scientist and Helen Thomson
Published 7 Jan 2021

Experiments have shown that photographs, videos and audio recordings – ‘surrogate nature’ – have a similar, though less powerful, effect. Good results have also been reported with virtual reality. So if you don’t have access to the natural world, look at pictures of it, listen to recordings of birdsong and other natural soundscapes, or maybe watch a David Attenborough documentary. There is of course more to your living arrangements than the trees and forests. What greets you when you step through your front door? A clutter-free kitchen or a toy-filled monstrosity? A clean and tidy hallway, or messy shelves and dirty carpets? Recently, Japanese neatness consultant Marie Kondo hit the headlines with her ‘life-changing magic of tidying up’.

Racing With Death
by Beau Riffenburgh
Published 25 Jul 2008

Because even when Mawson was not in the far south, he seemed to be planning his next journey there, raising the required funds for such massive undertakings, working up his scientific results, or being involved in major governmental, scientific, or policy decisions about the Antarctic. Eventually, he became recognised as perhaps the world’s most eminent authority on Antarctica. Today, scientists, adventurers, and even tourists travel almost at will through the Antarctic continent. It is a part of the planet that David Attenborough, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and others have, each in his own way, made familiar to much of the Western world. This book, however, goes back to a time when people knew far less about this region, and when it was almost unimaginably remote. As much as anybody in history, it was Douglas Mawson who opened up these hostile lands to scientific and geographical experts, to governments, and to the public.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

With Brexit having sucked the breath out of public activism for so long, the sudden eruption of climate-change protests in spring 2019 was all the more surprising. People had seen hot summers, dry and mild winters and extraordinary weather events without previously joining the dots to global warming. But programmes such as David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II seized the attention. Surveys said half of adults were ‘more worried’ now than before and that younger people were generally in favour of action. According to the government’s own attitudes tracker, support for using renewable energy reached a record high of 85 per cent in spring 2019.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

That’s why I believe you can tell a lot about a Black woman’s financial status by how her hair looks. Meaning if my locks are hella moisturized and shiny, you best believe I’m so flush with cash that I’m putting avocado on everything: toast, salads, face masks, whatever! Conversely, if it looks like David Attenborough is about to narrate a gaggle of squirrels playing slapbox on top of my head, then you already know I was chilling with Dante in the eighth circle of Hell: overdraft fees. Thankfully, as my career advanced, I got out of debt and was on camera more frequently, and I needed to elevate my hair game.

How to Be Idle
by Tom Hodgkinson
Published 1 Jan 2004

The hangover should be embraced as a day off, time out from reality, a chance to live in the moment. Ideally, the hangover should be spent at home, with endless cups of tea, friends who are in the same state as you, a daft film like Zoolander (we watched it on New Year' s Day and I cannot remember anything so hilarious) . My friend Nora recently came to stay armed with three of David Attenborough ' s Secret Life of Mammals videos as the ideal hangover accompaniment. And she was right: watching comical penguins loll oping around in the Antarctic wastes was indeed most enjoyable in our flaccid post-party condition. A yet more radical theory of the hangover comes from the notorious hell-raising duo English actor Keith Allen and artist Damien Hirst.

The Descent of Woman
by Elaine Morgan
Published 1 Feb 2001

As to their statistics, the director of the Marine Biological Station at A1 Ghardaqa describes the dugong as possessing a pair of ‘well-developed pectoral breasts’. Steller wrote of the Rhytina: ‘That they produce only one pup is concluded from the shortness of the teats and the number of the breasts’—which were two and pectoral. The manatee is known colloquially in Guyana, according to David Attenborough, as the ‘water-mamma’; and Colin Bertram writes of it: ‘The breasts are indeed a single pair and pectoral, as in man.… In the manatee the teat seems to be almost on the actual hinder edge of the thick flipper just where it joins the body.’ He points out that it would be impossible to tag a manatee by clipping a marker to the base of its flipper, as is done with seals, because the breast would be in the way; and he mentions that when the manatee is lactating the gland is ‘large and shapely’.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

Over time, such projects turned a river into which almost everything was dumped, and in which almost nothing could live, into something in which even environmentally fastidious salmon could, at least potentially, swim. As technology evolves, the nature, pace, and reach of Green Swans evolve in surprising ways, as in the case of the so-called Blue Planet Effect. When the BBC screened Sir David Attenborough’s TV series The Blue Planet, with its hard-hitting footage of wildlife caught in drifting plastic waste, the response was almost instantaneous—and hugely damaging for the international plastics industry. But these are exceptions in a storyline that more typically sees change operating on the basis of too little, too late.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

Related to superlatives are universal statements. Venture capitalist Angela Strange quipped that ‘Every company will be a fintech company,’ which was catnip to the fintech crowd. But restaurants, theme parks and hardware shops are unlikely to ever become fintech firms. On the other hand, Sir David Attenborough’s warning that climate change is ‘our greatest threat’ is a superlative, but not clearly incorrect. Even though we can think of other threats, such as pandemics and nuclear war, they’re not obviously greater than climate change. This counterexample check is useful because superlatives prey on black-and-white thinking.

Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies
by Nick Frost
Published 7 Oct 2015

With enough of both of these things I reckon you could get over just about anything. Just about. It was a difficult decision to write this though. Am I willing to lay out my total being in all its ugliness for the potential of selling 1,500 hardbacks? Do I just want to produce another ‘celeb’ autobiography, written by a ghost, telling you about the time I met David Attenborough? (He was lovely.) No, I didn’t want to do that. If you’re going to tell the story of a life, my life, tell it warts and all. That, to me, is a better reflection of a person. If the tale you tell is too saccharine sweet what can the reader take away from it? What do they learn about you? About a life?

Your Own Allotment : How to Find It, Cultivate It, and Enjoy Growing Your Own Food
by Russell-Jones, Neil.
Published 21 Mar 2008

I would get in touch with the following: G NSALG so that they can get involved and give support and advice; G your local MP (or equivalent in Wales and Scotland); 1 • All About Allotments 17 G your MEP; G the parish and other subsidiary bodies; G the local councillor; G the local press; G local community associations; G green organisations; G allotments are very green and that is a hot political potato at the moment so in order to make a lot of fuss I would also get in touch with the relevant shadow Secretary of State; G anyone else that you think would help (well, known people like David Attenborough or David Bellamy, or even David Beckham if you know them!). Further information can be found on the Department of Communities & Local Government’s website. 2 Our Allotment A few words about our particular allotment and its site. We now have a plot that is some 130 feet long by about 20 feet wide, ie pretty much the standard sized plot of 10 rods, mentioned previously.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

Two years later, she was a producer, travelling the world shooting the documentaries that made the NHU so successful. Not all directors wanted to travel the world with a woman. Many were sceptical that Hosking could cope with carrying heavy film gear and tripods. She proved them wrong. After six or seven years working on David Attenborough films, she had disproved the naysayers but was severely disillusioned by what she had seen in the wild. ‘In all of these projects,’ Hosking recalled, ‘we’d go past horrific ecological devastation. Huge monoculture farms. Dead zones where you can’t film. Climate change was seen as an annoyance, getting in the way of film shoots and messing up our schedules!

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

On my last trip, in the spring of 2018, the sea was choppy and no one talked much, just dozed in the early morning sun. We were headed to the Opal Reef, where, three years earlier, a crew had filmed some of the remarkable scenes of coral spawning for the BBC series Blue Planet II. Guided by the phases of the moon, and with David Attenborough providing discreet and tasteful narration, the garden of corals had simultaneously released clouds of eggs and sperm for the cameras, in the world’s most profligate display of fecundity, a spectacle if there ever was one. But no longer. We moored, tugged on snorkels and masks, and stepped off the stern, clad in full-body “stinger suits” to protect us from the jellyfish.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

The best original thought often comes from those without too much face to lose, those who’ve not yet “made it”. 6. Seek adventures There’s no better word in the English language than adventure: “an exciting experience that is typically a bold, sometimes risky, undertaking[489].” In Britain, and throughout the world, we love our Captain Scotts, our Ernest Shackletons, our David Attenboroughs. Adventures feed the soul. When I’m in the wilderness, in the mountains, climbing, I’m in the moment – nothing else matters. I’m in control, worries recede, life is simpler and sometimes I get those Polaroid moments that stick, providing sustenance. I recall one unusual day on the Black Cuillin with my brother-in-law in the late 1990s.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

Rumblings grew that Wingham would exercise his right to overrule the crowd and make the final call. So it was that on Friday, May 6, Boaty McBoatface was buried at sea. In a clever—and somewhat cynical—move, NERC declared it would name the ship after the great naturalist, TV presenter, and aging national treasure, Sir David Attenborough. A choice no one could really complain about. To soften the blow further, it claimed that the people’s boat would live on in the form of one of the ship’s remotely operated subsea vessels, which would be named Boaty McBoatface. The parliamentary inquiry that followed was partly a slap on the wrist for NERC for all the brouhaha but also a real discussion—in the scientific tradition—of what might be learned from this viral drama.

Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins
Published 7 Aug 2011

Properly read, such spoors amount to maps and pictures, and it seems to me plausible that the ability to read such maps and pictures might have arisen in our ancestors before the origin of speech in words. Suppose that a band of Homo habilis hunters needed to plan a cooperative hunt. In a remarkable and chilling 1992 television film, Too Close for Comfort, David Attenborough shows modern chimpanzees executing what seems to be a carefully planned and successful drive and ambush of a colobus monkey, which they then tear to pieces and eat. There is no reason to think that the chimpanzees communicated any detailed plan to each other before beginning the hunt, but every reason to think that habilis might have benefited from some such communication if it could have been achieved.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2008

He was now one of the founding leaders of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), which he, the Bryans, and others had formed after their Britain-China Friendship Association collapsed in a welter of Stalinist recrimination. In the late 1960s, a visa obtained through SACU was just about the only way for a Briton to gain access to China; the young filmmaker David Attenborough was one of the first to do so. Needham remained its president for thirty-five years, and was able to get visas to China with ease—so long, his later critics pointed out, as he remained staunchly uncritical of the regime’s excesses. He flew back to China first in 1964, and found to his delight that he was to be greeted officially by the government, and by no less than Zhou Enlai, who treated him like an old friend.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey
Published 20 Jul 2015

“The world faces a serious overpopulation problem,” asserted Cornell University researcher David Pimentel in his 2011 article “World Overpopulation.” “The world’s biggest problem?” asks a 2011 op-ed by researchers Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich in the Los Angeles Times. “Too many people,” they answer. “We are a plague upon the earth,” declared nature documentarian Sir David Attenborough. “Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.” Attenborough expressed these dour sentiments in The Telegraph in January 2013. In his 2013 rant Ten Billion, Microsoft Research computer scientist Stephen Emmott argued that humanity’s growing population constitutes “an unprecedented planetary emergency.”

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

This is what I strive to recall when I am holding my head in my hands at the latest piece of strategic management folly or some lousily written news report or appalling daytime show about buying crap at a car boot sale or shopping your benefit-cheat neighbours. I am proud because of Blue Peter, Sherlock and Doctor Who, Monty Python, Fleabag, Mr Tumble, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, David Attenborough, the Proms, Barry Davies (not John Motson), Radio 3 and so on and so on. I’m proud to be associated with an organisation that marries the public sector with a national collective spirit. A massive 96 per cent of the UK population consume BBC products each week. Its services are actively chosen 140 million times a day, despite a hugely competitive, now unparalleled media choice.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

If Ancient Egypt had started with one cubic metre of possessions and grew them by 4.5 per cent per year, by the end of its 3, 000-year civilisation it would have needed 2.5 billion solar systems to store all its stuff. It doesn’t take a scientist to realise that endless exponential growth is absurd, in the true sense of the word. To imagine that we can continue on this trajectory indefinitely is to disavow the most obvious truths about our planet’s material limits. As David Attenborough once so eloquently put it, ‘Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.’ If we are overshooting our planet’s ecological capacity at our existing levels of economic activity, what happens when we factor in exponential growth? Even the near future looks quite bleak.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

Economists deal with controversial issues such as inequality, taxation, public spending, climate change, trade, immigration, and, of course, Brexit. In such a febrile environment, speaking slowly and clearly will only get you so far. To communicate complex ideas, we needed to spark people’s curiosity—even inspire a sense of wonder. After all, the great science communicators—people such as Stephen Hawking and David Attenborough—do not win people over simply by using small words, crisply spoken. They stoke the flames of our curiosity, making us burn with desire to learn more. If we economists want people to understand economics, we must first engage their interest. What is true of economists is equally true for scientists, social scientists, historians, statisticians, and anyone else with complex ideas to convey.

The Beach
by Alex Garland
Published 1 Jan 1996

My body was covered in sticky juice, my eyes were watering because I didn't have time to pull the joint from my lips, and little black fingers were pawing at me from all directions. Eventually all of them managed to get a chunk, and I was left sitting cross-legged in a sea of munching monkeys. I felt like David Attenborough. It was the distinctive sound of falling water that finally led me out of the jungle. I heard it fifteen minutes after leaving the orchard, and then it was just a matter of zoning in on the noise. I came out by the carved tree and immediately dived into the waterfall pool, keen to wash the sweat and papaya juice off my body.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

Much contemporary culture consisted of reinterpreting and, where necessary, bowdlerizing the history and culture of the half-millennium from the Renaissance to the fall of communism to make its achievements more congruent with the twenty-first-century ideology of diversity. In 2015, Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens laundered the plot of the original 1977 Star Wars film into a more multiracial cast, and in 2016 the 1984 comedy Ghostbusters was remade with all-female agents. The BBC announced a more multicultural remake of Kenneth Clark and David Attenborough’s classic Civilisation series from the late 1960s. (The new one was to be called Civilisations.) At one point in 2015, the Washington Post called the black incendiary Ta-Nehisi Coates the country’s “foremost public intellectual”—and it was probably right, since race was getting to be the sum total of what the country’s intellectual life was about.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

Is their role model trans woman Chelsea Manning – a whistle-blower for some, a traitor who betrayed official secrets to others – or Jerry Falwell Jr. – a conservative evangelical icon for some, a hypocrite accused of an improper relationship with a male pool attendant (a relationship he denies), to others? In the UK, should they emulate environmentalist David Attenborough or petrol-head Jeremy Clarkson? Should they be Brexiteers or Remainers? Is it OK for nuns to cover their hair but not Muslim women? Is it acceptable to cover one’s face to limit coronavirus transmission, but not otherwise? Modern societies are inescapably diverse in all sorts of ways, so there are – or ought to be – many different ways of behaving and fitting in.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

The left hemisphere–Head worldview treats the body as a machine and the natural world as a heap of resources to be exploited. This has had inevitable consequences, and if technology cannot come to our aid, it is going to require some very hard conversations within and between countries about burden sharing. There has been some shift in awareness about the heaviness of the human footprint, David Attenborough’s Blue Planet changed the way that many of us think about plastic. But the pious consensus in most rich countries about the threat of climate change is not at all reflected in our behavior as citizens and is unlikely to be so until the threat to us is very much more immediate. And even if there were an authority we could all trust who could spell out the relative risks of different courses of action, there is every likelihood that there would be fundamental disagreements between people of different temperaments as to which course to take, as there was at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

When it becomes clear that I’m either gone or not responding, he hangs up with a final “Fuck you!” just in case I’m there to hear it. Click: he’s gone. I exhale and continue trying to settle my nerves. I could really use a cigarette, but break’s an hour away. Instead I close my eyes and picture a slideshow of calming, happy things: Rajiv. My family. My cats. David Attenborough’s voice. Objects Rajiv has glued googly eyes to. I will my hands to stop shaking and count my breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Te— BEEP! My eyes pop open, and my body roars back into full overdrive as a new caller pops into my headset. I can actually feel the pulse of panic radiating outward from my adrenal glands.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

As you’re going from one spot to another, you’re actually seeing your cow get a light prod from a cattle prod, and you’re feeling a slight poke in your chest from a stick in your side.” After the experience, his subjects ate less meat. One of the participants in the experiment explained, “I truly felt like I was going to the slaughterhouse… and felt sad that as a cow I was going to die.”18 Chasing Coral, a six-minute virtual reality collaboration between Netflix and Sir David Attenborough, similarly uses experiential learning to provide a wake-up call about the ocean’s environmental crisis, with great success in raising awareness. Another virtual reality experience allows people to embody a young girl in a refugee camp going through her day-to-day life. According to the United Nations, showing people the immersive video doubled the number of people who donate to refugee funds.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity
by Anthony Berglas , William Black , Samantha Thalind , Max Scratchmann and Michelle Estes
Published 28 Feb 2015

Of course, any pests that might want to eat the intelligent plants or compete with them for sunlight would need to be dealt with. The advancement of AGIs may not just lead to the extinction of mankind. It may instead lead to the extinction of all conventional biology. Concluding a recent wildlife film, David Attenborough remarked “… if there is one thing that is certain, it is that the evolution of the vertebrates will continue for a long time to come.”. In fact, that is far from certain. If hyper-intelligent plantoids covered much of the earth, they could accurately control the weather by changing their colour to be light or dark and thus control the temperature of the earth.

Hope for Animals and Their World
by Jane Goodall , Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson
Published 1 Sep 2009

They hope, among other things, that by propagating the pines and selling them to botanists, gardeners, and collectors around the country, people will be less desperate to visit the canyon to see the trees in the wild—but I doubt it. I saw one of the two that was donated to Kew Botanical Gardens during my recent visit there. It was planted by Sir David Attenborough and is growing splendidly within its protective iron cage. And in Australia, I had the privilege of planting one of the little saplings on the grounds of Adelaide Zoo. I am, of course, delighted to have seen and even handled living tissue descended from the ancient giants. But it does not stop me longing to visit that dark and mysterious canyon that has, for millions of years, hidden its secret, and stand in the presence of the original trees themselves.

Sunfall
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 17 Apr 2019

As usual, you had to do a little digging to get to the truth. ‘Select favourites only. Past twenty-four hours. Keywords: magnetic storm, solar flare, threat level.’ One thing he hadn’t done yet was change the VA’s settings, so it still spoke in the voice of the old British natural-history broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, a favourite of his mother’s: The top hit discussion is whether the current event was due directly to the weakening of the Earth’s magnetosphere – consensus rating 95.2 per cent – and how soon the Flip will happen and restore the planet’s protective magnetic shield – consensus on when this will occur is in the range of six months to five years from now.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

Liebenberg’s experiences with the San, and his theory that scientific thinking evolved from tracking, are presented in The Origin of Science (2013/2021), The Art of Tracking (1990), and Liebenberg, //Ao, et al. 2021. Additional examples are from Liebenberg 2020. For other descriptions of hunter-gatherer rationality, see Chagnon 1997; Kingdon 1993; Marlowe 2010. 7. A video of a pursuit hunt, narrated by David Attenborough, may be seen here: https://youtu.be/826HMLoiE_o. 8. Liebenberg 2013/2021, p. 57. 9. Personal communication from Louis Liebenberg, Aug. 11, 2020. 10. Liebenberg 2013/2021, p. 104. 11. Liebenberg 2020 and personal communication, May 27, 2020. 12. Moore 2005. See also Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009, and note 8 to chapter 10 below. 13.

In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson
Published 31 Aug 2000

But no less important in terms of species diversity is the isolation that has long existed within Australia. In general terms, Australia comprises scattered pockets of life separated by great zones of harshness. And nowhere is all of this more true than in southwestern Australia. According to David Attenborough (in The Private Life of Plants), this one corner of Australia “contains no less than twelve thousand different plant species and 87 per cent of them grow nowhere else in the world.” Which makes it alarming to report that many of these singular plants are in trouble from a terrible and little-understood malady called dieback.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

Throwing executives, scientists, celebrities, and journalists into the same room “can generate ideas capable of transforming our world,” ExxonMobil gushes. Occasionally, a heretic slips in on the list of invitees. Such was the case with the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, who famously skewered the Davos attendees in January 2019 for flying hundreds of carbon-dioxide-spewing private jets into an event “to hear David Attenborough speak about how we’re wrecking the planet.” He quickly pivoted to the topic of rich people not paying enough taxes, an issue he thought was central to solving a host of society’s problems but, he said, received scant attention at Davos. “It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.”

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
by Richard Dawkins
Published 21 Sep 2009

We believe that the curricula in such schools, as well as that of Emmanuel City Technology College, need to be strictly monitored in order that the respective disciplines of science and religious studies are properly respected. Yours sincerely The Rt Revd Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford; Sir David Attenborough FRS; The Rt Revd Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St Albans; Lord May of Oxford, President of the Royal Society; Professor John Enderby FRS, Physical Secretary, Royal Society; The Rt Revd John Oliver, Bishop of Hereford; The Rt Revd Mark Santer, Bishop of Birmingham; Sir Neil Chalmers, Director, Natural History Museum; The Rt Revd Thomas Butler, Bishop of Southwark; Sir Martin Rees FRS, Astronomer Royal; The Rt Revd Kenneth Stevenson, Bishop of Portsmouth; Professor Patrick Bateson FRS, Biological Secretary, Royal Society; The Rt Revd Crispian Hollis, Roman Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth; Sir Richard Southwood FRS; Sir Francis Graham-Smith FRS, Past Physical Secretary, Royal Society; Professor Richard Dawkins FRS Bishop Harries and I organized this letter in a hurry.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
by Steve Stewart-Williams
Published 12 Sep 2018

This subsequently becomes the starting point for the next round of innovation. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello dubbed this progression the cultural ratchet.29 Extended across time, the cumulative effects of the ratcheting process are astonishing. I remember once watching a David Attenborough documentary in which an orangutan rowed a boat down a river. At first, it struck me as anomalous: Here was this animal skillfully piloting a vehicle it could never have invented itself. But then it occurred to me that human beings are in exactly the same boat, metaphorically speaking. In even the simplest human societies, people use tools they could never have invented themselves.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

One of the most popular shared activities was watching television in the virtual company of others. The talkboarders would chat away to each other throughout the first series of Big Brother – the C4 reality show, aired in 2000, which spied on ‘housemates’ marooned inside a custom-built home. There would always be a gaggle on hand to discuss anything David Attenborough was doing. One poster reflected later: ‘That couldn’t happen now as there isn’t a social media that really allows it (Twitter is too huge) and everyone is On Demand so not watching at the same time.’ We learned from the behaviour of the users. Live coverage of big television ‘events’ became a staple of later coverage on the main site.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

If you’re a conservative you are almost perennially annoyed by Radio 4 but, like me, you may have some sort of compulsive, news-junkie urge to listen to it even though you know it’s probably shortening your life. Until eventually you become just another boring, red-faced idiot shouting at Radio 4 – with the wife raising her eyes, thinking to herself, ‘Here he goes again.’ And yet the conflicting thing is that I love the BBC – I love the sound of David Attenborough and Stephen Fry, I love its high-mindedness, its comedy and its peerless documentary making. I like drinking wine in the kitchen while cooking, with Front Row playing, or the familiar figure of Gary Lineker sharing the nation’s dreams during another World Cup adventure. As a conservative I like institutions – they provide the warm feeling of oxytocin that reminds me I’m not alone in this world – but what happens when they become captured by the other side?

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch
Published 30 Jun 2011

But he persevered because those distinctive statues were the perfect setting for him to deliver the central message of his series – which is also a theme of this book – that our civilization is unique in history for its capacity to make progress. He wanted to celebrate its values and achievements, and to attribute the latter to the former, and to contrast our civilization with the alternative as epitomized by ancient Easter Island. The Ascent of Man had been commissioned by the naturalist David Attenborough, then controller of the British television channel BBC2. A quarter of a century later Attenborough – who had by then become the doyen of natural-history film-making – led another film crew to Easter Island, to film another television series, The State of the Planet. He too chose those grim-faced statues as a backdrop, for his closing scene.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer
Published 31 Mar 2021

We saw how soundtracks from everyday life were absorbed within the imaginary landscapes of musical works. Perhaps birds also do that, take sounds and signals from their environment and weave them into beautiful patterns. The clearest evidence that birds do indeed play with signs is the Albert’s lyrebird of Australia, whose virtuoso mimicry featured in David Attenborough’s BBC series Planet Earth.39 In this clip, the lyrebird mimics the call of a kookaburra (he can impersonate twenty bird species), and gives uncannily precise imitations of a camera shutter, a camera motor-drive, a car alarm and the chainsaws of foresters. His dazzling skill impresses the females, the standard biological explanation.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

On the very rare occasions when they allowed an environmental documentary to be broadcast, their terror of upsetting powerful interests drove them to make catastrophic mistakes. In my view, the most environmentally damaging item ever carried on any medium in this country was a two-part documentary broadcast in 2006 titled, without irony, The Truth about Climate Change. It was presented by ‘the most trusted man in Britain’, Sir David Attenborough, whose word was treated as gospel. Somehow it managed not to mention the fossil fuel industry at all, except as part of the solution: ‘the people who extract fossil fuels like oil and gas have now come up with a way to put carbon dioxide back underground’. Carbon capture and storage is a classic oil-industry talking point, always promised, never delivered, whose purpose is to justify continued extraction.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1994

Darwin…would surely be impressed by the way in which Pinker sheds light on these questions…. A superb book, simply at the level of being a good read: it is packed with fascinating facts and information…. Pinker debunks with panache, cuts through the confusion of jargon, and tells a mean anecdote. He does for language what David Attenborough does for animals, explaining difficult scientific concepts so easily that they are indeed absorbed as a transparent stream of words…. I will be astonished if a better science book of any kind, let alone one accessible to the general reader, comes along this year…. His book is groundbreaking, exhilarating, fun, and almost certainly correct.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

Paradoxically, when we resemble other animals with respect to the social suite, it binds us all together. The more like these animals we are, the more alike we humans must be to one another. CHAPTER 10 Remote Control The male bowerbirds of western New Guinea are extraordinary creatures with a “passion for interior decoration,” according to BBC Planet Earth host David Attenborough. Bowerbirds make elaborate structures known as bowers. These architectural marvels are built around a sort of maypole on the forest floor and have a large conical shape stretching as much as six feet across, with supportive pillars and a thatched roof of orchid stems. Inside, the bird will carefully arrange piles of beetle wings, tropical acorns, black fruits, glowing orange flowers, and even a “lawn” of carefully planted moss.

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

Gore’s world history is the struggle between man and nature, but now it is nature that sets the pace rather than man. Nature, rather than any virtue or vice in man, becomes the driving force behind the collapse of civilizations past and present. Other historians of climate and human geography have recently made the same claim. Ecobiologist David Attenborough has speculated that the real cause of Rome’s collapse was not moral or economic or political collapse but deforestation.72 Gore himself relies on the example of the Mayas as a parable for modern times: a sophisticated and urbanized culture, equipped with mathematics and astronomy, whose agricultural revolution was ruthlessly swept away by an eleventh-century global warming that brought climatic changes and soil erosion.

England
by David Else
Published 14 Oct 2010

Aardman Animations has also produced two successful animated features, Chicken Run (2000) and Flushed Away (2006), in partnership with Hollywood’s DreamWorks studios. * * * The BBC is famous for its news and natural-history programming, symbolised by landmark series such as Planet Earth and The Blue Planet (helmed by the reassuring presence of David Attenborough, a national institution on British screens since the 1970s). The big-budget costume drama is another Sunday-night staple; British viewers have been treated to adaptations of practically every Dickens, Austen and Thackeray novel in the canon over the last decade. More recently ITV has been making inroads into costume-drama territory, notably with Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey.

…

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. Today the university remains one of the top three for research worldwide, and international academics have polled it as the top university in the world for science. Thanks to some of the earth-shaking discoveries made here, Cambridge is inextricably linked to the history of mankind.

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More
by Jason Cochran
Published 5 Feb 2007

Experienced hands appear, slides in hand, to report on their adventures and on the state of the world, as do authors who have recently written works. Non-members get last pick of tickets to the most popular events (held evenings and weekends), but a few excellent series are open to all, including “Discovering People,” in which a travel luminary (such as Jan Morris, Michael Palin, or Sir David Attenborough) is interviewed, or “Discovering Places,” panel discussions on exotic destinations such as Myanmar. Events are mostly free but sometimes cost up to £15, and they break for the summer. Let it not be forgotten that it was at the British Museum where Karl Marx developed the political theories that would sweep the planet and shape the 20th century.

Fodor's Costa Rica 2012
by Fodor's
Published 6 Oct 2011

The coast has miles of beaches peppered with small beach communities, including Dominical, a scruffy but lively surfer haven. The Osa Peninsula. The wild Osa Peninsula consists almost entirely of Corcovado National Park, 1,156 square km (445 square mi) of primary and secondary rain forest straight out of a David Attenborough nature documentary. Golfo Dulce. The eastern Golfo Dulce draws anglers to Golfito, beachcombers to slow-paced Zancudo, and serious surfers to Pavones. South Pacific Planner When to Go The climate swings wildly in the south, from bracing mountain air to steamy coastal humidity.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
by Christopher Hitchens
Published 14 Jun 2007

, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world. Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus’ Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: “When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus’ Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice?

Fodor's Costa Rica 2013
by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.
Published 1 Oct 2012

The coast has miles of beaches peppered with small beach communities, including Dominical, a scruffy but lively surfer haven. The Osa Peninsula. The wild Osa Peninsula consists almost entirely of Corcovado National Park, 1,156 square km (445 square miles) of primary and secondary rain forest straight out of a David Attenborough nature documentary. Golfo Dulce. The eastern Golfo Dulce draws anglers and kayakers to Golfito, beachcombers to slow-paced Zancudo, and serious surfers to Pavones. CHIRRIPÓ NATIONAL PARK Chirripó National Park is all about hiking. The ascent up Mt. Chirripó, the highest mountain in Costa Rica, is the most popular and challenging hike in the country.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
by David Abulafia
Published 4 May 2011

Parker: Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008). More popular accounts of the Mediterranean, often well illustrated, include Sarah Arenson, The Encircled Sea: the Mediterranean Maritime Civilisation (London, 1990), making good use of marine archaeology, and David Attenborough, The First Eden: the Mediterranean World and Man (London, 1987), whose real strength is the illustrations; both books were based on television series. Captivating musings on the Mediterranean are offered by P. Matvejević, Mediterranean: a Cultural Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1999).

State of Emergency: The Way We Were
by Dominic Sandbrook
Published 29 Sep 2010

To know the British (it takes about 15 years to get on nodding terms) will be Europe’s privilege.’51 For Edward Heath, there was no question of allowing the great moment to pass without celebration. He had already appointed an official committee to plan a nationwide festival, chaired by Lord Goodman and including such eminences as the V&A’s director Roy Strong, the new head of the National Theatre, Peter Hall, and the BBC’s new director of programmes, David Attenborough. ‘Fanfare for Europe’, the event was called, and Heath hoped that it might enter history as a great national celebration to rival the Great Exhibition and the Festival of Britain. But with a budget of just £350,000, the Fanfare was always facing an uphill struggle, and the fact that four out of ten people were still opposed to EEC membership made it hard to arouse much public enthusiasm.

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection
by Gardner Dozois
Published 23 Jun 2009

Tauris), by Roz Kaveney, and by more bitching about how we don’t have those flying cars yet (following several similar volumes last year), You Call This the Future? (Chicago Review Press), by Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andrew Wacker. There’s no direct genre connection for mentioning Life in Cold Blood (Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, but SF writers looking to score ideas about really alien creatures and lifeways could do a lot worse than look down into the bogs and swamps where the coldblooded creatures described herein dwell. There were lots of genre movies that did big box-office business this year, although few critical darlings or films thought of as “serious” movies.

Great Britain
by David Else and Fionn Davenport
Published 2 Jan 2007

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. The university celebrates its 800th birthday in 2009; look out for special events, lectures and concerts to mark its intriguing eight centuries. Orientation The colleges and university buildings comprise the centre of the city. The central area, lying in a wide bend of the River Cam, is easy to get around on foot or by bike.