Somehow I'd placed Size on my reading list and picked it up. I should stop reading stuff by Vaclav Smil. He covers a bunch of topics that you already know (such as when you scale up a human, bones would break, which is why elephant legs are shaped the way they are), but does so in a boring way, often without humor, and frequently with anti-environmentalist side notes drive-by-shooting style.
Early on in the book, there are actually some interesting titbits. For instance, why do you see so many fat kids?
many parents underestimate the body size of their children by placing them in a lower—healthy—body mass index category than they actually belong to. Having parents who do not see the problem as even existing makes it more likely that such children will stay overweight or become obese, an undesirable outcome that may last a lifetime.50 And many perfectly normal adolescents and young adults see themselves as too small or too heavy because we compare bodies and faces with internal templates that are increasingly based on images of faces and bodies encountered daily in mass media.51 Not surprisingly, these perceptions shift the norm well below the population-wide mean, and they foster dissatisfaction, particularly among adolescents and young women. (kindle loc 898)
I also how much of this parent under-estimation is because the size and weight chart used by pediatricians don't map very well to non-white people! I expect that these size and weight charts will be updated as obesity becomes more the norm in the USA, where children are ferried around and not allowed to walk to school or bike to school. But does Smil mention that? No.
There's more interesting stuff about airline seat pitches. Which again, have an interesting history:
in 2017, Flyers Rights, the passenger rights group, petitioned the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to set the rules regarding the minimum pitch, but no regulations came into force before the pandemic—making such efforts moot.37 And the tightening pitch is not the end of it: in 2013, French inventor Bernard Guering filed a patent, on behalf of Airbus, for “a seating device with reduced bulk”—a fancy term for a row of smallish bicycle seats with low backrests mounted on a tube.38 Even worse, in 2010 Ryanair had plans to introduce “vertical seats,” with crammed passengers strapped to thin, near-vertical (an incline of just a few degrees) beds.39 Ryanair even claimed that 2 out of 10 polled passengers said they would fly strapped upright if the fare was halved! And there are also designs aimed at packing in more people by placing seats on top of existing seats (double-decker seating) (kindle loc 1795)
There's a picture of it in the book, but again, no inside story on why the petition failed, what the interaction between passenger packing and fuel utilization is, and how the increasing sizes of passenger girths in the US affect ticket prices. Nope. Smil just blasts through the topic and never returns to it.
There's a section about food needs calculations and an intriguing statement about how they're over-estimated by 10-15 percent in western countries(!!!), but no explanation or even theories about how that overestimation came about (is it because of lifestyle changes? or was there some scientific problems with the methodology used?).
The most boring and useless part of the book comes when Smil devotes 3-4 chapters about normal distributions, power law distributions, and other statistical facts that are better covered in other books. Most of these things have nothing to do with science.
I don't want to say I learned nothing from the book --- there are many interesting parts. But the selection of topics to cover and the lack of depth in coverage leaves me wanting. I feel like he would have been better off dropping the statistics lessons and covering the interesting parts of his book with more depth.
No comments:
Post a Comment