Time for a couple of book reviews.   I've read two books recently that are somewhat divergent from my usual diet of science fiction.

God's Debris: A Thought Experiment - Scott Adams

This book is weird, but really well written.  The author is the creator of the Dilbert comics.  It has a lot of ideas in it, but the one from which the book gets it's name is quite interesting.  What motivates God?  God is omnipotent so there isn't anything he couldn't do and there isn't anything he doesn't know.  So what motivation is there to do anything?  There wouldn't be any challenge and he would know the outcome to everything he might try to do.

There would be only one possible thing that God wouldn't have knowledge of.

What would it be like if God didn't exist?

This might be the only thing that God wouldn't know.

And of course, there would be only one way to find out.

Maybe God committed suicide, and the universe as we know it is God's debris.

From Naked Ape To Superspecies - David Suzuki & Holly Dressel

This book was, well, scary.  I knew that there were a lot of aspects of our civilization that were really screwed up, but I had really no idea just how bad it could get.  It has sections on biodiversity, genetic engineering, overpopulation, globalization, economics, and analyzes many aspects of this planets various societies.

One part in the chapter on genetic engineering tells the story of a German biotech company trying to come up with a bacteria that would quickly eat rotting crop debris.   They came up with a potential candidate and sent it to the US for field testing.   The EPA got it first and assigned it to a small university in Oregon.   Standard procedure would be to put the bacteria in sterile soil so all the variables are under rigid control, but someone (thankfully) decided that didn't make sense, so tried it in living soil.  Every plant that was put into the soil died.   There are organisms in soil called mycorrhysal fungi that give nutrients to plants.   The genetically engineered bacteria ate up the fungi along with everything else.   Without the fungi, the plants couldn't grow.

Worst case scenario in the example would be if they had just used the sterile soil and determined that yes indeed the bacteria ate the crop debris.   They went to the field testing and released the bacteria into the Earth.  Life is hard to contain once it is out in nature.  Especially bacterial life.  The bacteria could have spread and devastated a large amount of land.  I'm not sure how they would have stopped it.

I found the way the economics of our world work even more mind boggling.  Large corporations have way more power than I thought.

It was a good book.  I highly recommend it.