Polymath at Large

A good idea gone scratchy

2009-11-13T18:26:00.005-05:00

kw: observations, musings, apparel

Several years ago I began cutting the labels out of my undershirts because they irritate my back. One day my wife brought home some new ones that had the label printed inside. I've been wearing some of them for a year or two.

Recently I noticed a drawback. Some of them were irritating my back even more than the old fabric labels. I felt back there, and the ink was very scratchy! Here is an image of the label printed inside the back of the shirt. If you look closely (try clicking the image for a larger version), you can see white lines through the ink. That is spots where it broke. The ink is actually rather thick. Once it breaks, it tends to curl, making lots of sharp edges. I actually developed a couple of sores where the larger letters rub.

Here is a closeup of part of the label. The breaks are quite evident (particularly on the larger version a click will show you), even in the finer type. Prior to the ink breaking, these have been very comfortable. So what did I do about it?

I now wear them inside out. I don't wear thin, light-colored shirts over them, so I don't expect anyone to notice. I wonder if anyone else does this, or is this too much of a throwaway culture for that?!

When options narrow to surviving, or not

2009-11-11T11:46:00.003-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, disasters

I am very thankful that I have not been through any disasters. Maybe I came close a time or two; I do recall almost driving into a tornado a couple decades back. But I've had no experiences frightening enough to make me freeze, or wet myself, or faint, or whatever else it is I might do in, say, a plane crash.

Even in more mildly unsettling events, however, the way different people react can be fascinating. Once we got lost in the woods, my son and I, while walking with two other fathers and their children. The youngsters were all about ten. We'd taken a wrong turn on a path, and succumbed to the "It must be right around the bend" fallacy that keeps you going on instead of going back. I tend to be a natural leader, but once the gentleman who thought he'd been showing us where to go acknowledged he was lost, my son took over. He made the decisions, saying, "Let's try this way" and so forth. We wandered about three hours until, well after dark, we found our way to an open area someone recognized. One of the fathers remarked on how cool my son was, because the other kids couldn't keep themselves from saying things like, "Will we ever get out?". He hadn't really led us out, but the fact that he was leading meant we were kept from getting panicky.

When real disaster looms, as I read in The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why by Amanda Ripley, the body count is usually reduced if someone takes the lead. Even an inept leader is better than none, because most people in a disaster spend too much time milling about, trying to figure out what is happening. Once they realize something bad really is happening, they waste more time deciding what to gather to take with them.

Ms Ripley tells us that any shocking and frightening circumstance causes a three-step response: Denial, Deliberation, and the Decisive Moment (when any Action that one may take finally gets taken). Those who shift quickly through the first two steps are those most likely to survive, and often are those who help others to survive. Thus, most air crews have been trained, if an airplane crash-lands, to shout instructions to the passengers and hound them out of the cabin. Since most people go into a kind of passive shock that can last a long time, the no-Mr-nice-guy approach is designed to re-shock them into action, but also to give them something and someone decisive to follow so they don't just stampede.

Time and again the author marvels that in story after story told by survivors, people typically behaved very decently and quietly. Panic is actually rather rare. Sometimes that very decency makes things worse; people may try to defer to one another when they ought to be quickly making their way through the exit. The key word here is "quickly"; it doesn't have anything to do with stampeding an exit and blocking it with smashed bodies.

A key lesson about surviving is Rehearsal. It is one thing to buy those cool wire ladders you can hook to a windowsill of your second-story bedroom. It is quite another to actually use it a time or two. Only if you have done it before, will you be able to smoothly get out of your burning house. Otherwise you're likely to find that you can't figure out how to use it, and you either collapse in mid-thought, or jump out the window and crash to the ground, possibly carrying the ladder that was supposed to carry you (it is amazing what people bring with them; nobody likes to flee empty-handed!).

A large section of the concluding chapter is devoted to Rick Rescorla, the security chief who guided all but five of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's 3,000 employees out of the WTC on 9/11. He was the only security chief who was able to persuade his company to practice evacuation. Every other company lost substantial numbers. Rehearsal was the key. I am glad my company engages in evacuation drills. Though this site is nearly all 2- and 3-storey office buildings, being trapped by fire on the second or third floor is just as deadly as on the fortieth.

It takes only a few minutes to empty the building where I work, and it usually takes less than two minutes to empty an airplane. Even in the best of circumstances, it takes hours to empty a city. When the city leaders spend a few days dithering, then finally make limp-wristed declarations of imminent disaster, we wind up with a New Orleans that will never be the same (I am of the opinion that it ought to be abandoned, and should never have become a large city in the first place, but that's for another rant).

Some people seem to naturally perform better under stress. All of us can learn to do better. I live in one of the less disaster-prone areas of the U.S., but it is well for me to pre-think what I will do if we get a direct hit by a hurricane; how I might respond to being trapped by rising floodwaters if I am at a low-lying area at the wrong moment (this was particularly relevant when I lived in Houston); or how I'll react when I am awakened by a smoke alarm (yes, I do replace the batteries twice yearly). When I lived in California, my preparations had more to do with earthquakes. Those who think ahead live to think again.

Heading (far) East? Get ready for a shower

2009-11-10T12:06:00.002-05:00

kw: observations, photographs, astronomy, meteors

Gonna be in the Eastern Hemisphere a week from now? Be sure to stay up late Tuesday Night, Nov 17, into Wednesday morning. The Leonid meteor shower is expected to peak with 200-500 meteoroids per hour (for someone looking straight up and not blinking), about 2145 UTC/GMT. See this NASA presentation for more details.

This image is from APOD, and is the Astronomy Picture of the Day for 11/27/2002. Taken from Spain, the image is a composite of thirty one-minute exposures (ah, what we can do with digital images now!). The shower was very good along the Atlantic seaboard of the US also, though so late it was still going as the sky lightened for dawn. I watched it for a while, then dragged my family out of bed to watch its last quarter hour until the sky lightened too much. They were sufficiently impressed to forgive me.

Sadly (for me), this year the shower's peak occurs at about 4:45 PM local time. But if the sky is clear, I'll still poke my head out just after midnight (7 hours too late) to see what remnants of the shower there may be.

Wishing, as well as one can

2009-11-08T21:21:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, spiritual practices

"If wishes were horses, all beggars would ride" underlay Noelle Oxenhandler's skepticism about wishing. In The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, my Soul—a Memoir of Fulfilled Desire, Ms Oxenhandler begins with a disaster she'd brought upon herself, one whose guilt and latent effects she bore for seven years. She begins to hope things can be better, but though she has been a practicing Buddhist for years, her moralistic upbringing makes her feel guilt about hoping, let alone wishing, for anything for herself.

I can sympathize with her in this: well-deserved depression seems to require about seven years to work itself out. It takes longer for most of us to get over what we have done to others than for troubles that came upon us.

I found it interesting to make this short journey through self-denoted New Age practice and philosophy, in which thoughts are more real than things (or at least, that is the ideal to attain). I found, as the author did, a sad juxtaposition between her gradual embrace of "active wishing" and her dying friend George's fervid embrace of Christian Science. His renunciation of medical intervention in favor of CS healing practices, or rather thoughts, may have hastened his death, but may not have: the power of our mind over our own body is well-attested, though not reliable. Her book is in part dedicated to his memory.

What was his faith but a kind of active wishing also? Nonetheless, there is a definite disjoint between CS and New Age wishing. The author was impelled by a somewhat lesser level of desperation: she was in no imminent danger of dying, after all. She just needed three things: Restoration for her soul (and a pity it is that she never once mentions Psalm 23, though she quotes other Bible passages), a home she can afford to own, and a man (she doesn't say "husband", and so far as can be told, her wished-for lover is not yet her husband).

A Pentecostal preacher I know, wiser than most, once preached, "Yes, God may heal what ails you, but you're still going to die." Ms Oxenhandler had surrounded herself with a large collection of books about wishing. She found most of them unsatisfactory, filled with very fuzzy thinking. Yet the worst of them didn't go so far as to advise wishing to live forever. Somehow, we all know that isn't in the cards (Yes, I know that expression refers to Tarot). At least by mid- to late adolescence we realize we're not here forever.

So what do we desire for the time we are here? Is it OK to wish for world peace and for a better stock portfolio also? Why is one frowned upon and not the other? Month by month the author struggles with this, through her wishing year, in which she does indeed attain her three wishes. She also gains a number of new friends, gets a trip to Hawaii partly subsidized, is able to help her mother go through a troublesome transition in living arrangements when others can't, and finds new confidence in her ability to cope with life as she finds it.

Though her wishes come true through a few surprising twists, none is totally unexpectable. It is pretty clear by the end of the book that wishing, while it seems to manipulate the world, really works its magic on the wishing one. By wishing, with strength and in detail, we focus our own minds, and are thus more prepared to recognize opportunities that typically come and go unnoticed. She tells the story of a relative who was a poor salesman; so poor that, when he was poised to ring a doorbell, would say, "Ah, she von't buy anyt'ing" and leave. Maybe a bit of active wishing would have impelled him to at least ring the bell.

Unless we are wishing for the truly unattainable, chances to help our own wishes come true arrive frequently. In another context, Louis Pasteur wrote, "Fortune favors the prepared mind." Whether we pray for our desires, or use wishing (not being the praying sort), the exercise can prepare us to see what we needed when it arrives.

A long day and low vision

2009-11-06T21:41:00.000-05:00

kw: local events, musings

I saw a retina specialist today, about a spot in my left eye's visual field, but well off-center. I've had retinal hemorrhages in the past, so a couple months ago that was what I thought it was. They normally clear up in three weeks, but a month passed and I could still see it. So I had my regular ophthalmologist look at it. She could see it, and confirmed it is a hemorrhage, partly cleared. But she thought she also saw signs of retinal separation, so she sent me to the specialist.

Two more weeks had passed. Though I can still see the spot, the specialist had a hard time locating it. It is nearly cleared up. She could not see much that concerned her, and a special photograph doesn't show anything suspicious, but wants to wait another month and then do an angiogram. I agreed.

Today's visit took almost three hours. Afterward, the dilation of my eye lasted a further three hours, which I mostly slept off. So I've had a long nap today, but paradoxically, I'm pretty tired and will head for the sack soon after I finish this post.

I admit I had all kinds of worries about this spot. A friend lost her life to a brain tumor that started as an eye tumor, just a couple years ago. I was glad to find out nothing of the sort is involved here. I hope there's no retinal separation, but the specialist doesn't think so.

Had the spot been even more off center, I might never have seen it. It could have come and gone unnoticed. The first retinal hemorrhage I had was right over the fovea, and really messed up the vision in that eye until it dissolved. I'm told the best thing to do for this is to keep my blood pressure low. Guess I'll step up the exercise regimen!

Even freakier

2009-11-05T12:02:00.002-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, philosophy

Yesterday when I reviewed Freakonomics, I was already halfway through its successor. Why is it that the best books go by so fast? A short while ago I finished Superfreakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The authors will again gain notoriety and fame in equal measure, particularly for the articles behind the subtitle: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. I've added their blog at NY Times to my regular reading list, and to the blog links on this page.

And why should suicide bombers buy life insurance? The company isn't going to pay off, unless one had the foresight to buy it two or more years earlier. It is to make themselves harder to profile. Fortunately, the authors purposely refrained from reporting the strongest profilers' tools.

A couple of decades ago, Lewis Thomas wrote of the three levels of medical care: Palliative (we can't do anything besides perhaps make the patient more comfortable), which is quite costly; Restorative (such as surgery or chemotherapy) that can be hideously expensive; and Preventive (vaccines, for example), which is cheap. Chapter 4 of Superfreakonomics expands this idea into many realms, including polio vaccine, of course (I was one of Dr. Salks thousands of experimental subjects, so this is dear to me), Robert McNamara and seat belts, the failed "remedy" of car seats (seat belts work as well, but you could go to jail for belting up your kid), and a simple hurricane prevention device.

That last item leads to the last chapter, about a company with the initials IV and its solutions to a number of ills, including global warming. I was particularly taken by this analysis:

Forty years ago we worried about global cooling.
Soot and smog were blocking enough sunlight to cool the climate.
As we (the First World) cleaned up the air, the earth warmed.
This was probably more due to cleaner air than to carbon dioxide.

I can extrapolate as well as the next fool. I expect the advancing economies of China and India to dirty the air again, probably on an even larger scale. The last eight years have seen a cooling amounting to a quarter of the past twenty years' warming. We may wish for a lot of global warming in about ten-twenty more years! Only after Western air-cleaning-and-remediation technologies become widespread in Asia will warming become a potential threat again.

Just by the by, carbon dioxide is not that strong as a greenhouse gas, and its effects are self-limiting. Increasing the CO₂ by a factor of thirty, to a full one percent of the atmosphere, cannot raise global temperature more than 4°C (7°F). The "runaway greenhouse" of the planet Venus is due to an atmospheric pressure of sixty times that on Earth, composed of more than 80% CO₂. That is 180,000 times the amount of the gas that we "enjoy".

The value of these books to me is the way of thinking, based on its premise: People respond to incentives. The incentives can vary from person to person; for example honor, dignity or social status can be a greater motivator for some people. I once read a book in which a scrupulously honest man, one who bent over backward to avoid any taint of corruption, was manipulated by someone who made him think he might be bribed to favor a certain course of action. Naturally, he overdid his zeal to avoid the bribery and was pushed to the opposite tack.

I once exchanged a series of E-mails with a new company president (I work elsewhere now), who had given a speech with the title "A Passion for Profits". I explained how, by exercising my passion for excellence, profits had always followed. His responses made it clear that, not only did he not understand people who are internally motivated, he was deeply suspicious of them, even threatened. Fortunately I was already halfway through my exit strategy to my present employer.

A final thought: where little or no money is involved, our strongest incentive is usually others' good will. This leads to: Avoid people who are adept at making you feel guilty for your virtues.

Welcoming freaky answers

2009-11-04T12:03:00.000-05:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, philosophy

So can you buy your way into office, or can't you? Ross Perot couldn't, nor Steve Forbes. Most recently, Hilary Clinton came close, but was outvoted by the candidate she outspent (Barack Obama) in the primary. Why? If you ask Steven Levitt, he'll tell you that Obama is simply more likable. Just as Bill Clinton was more likable than Ross Perot in 1992 and as Bob Dole was more likable than Steve Forbes in 1996.

Where does Levitt get the gall to say that? From the numbers. Specifically, from asking the numbers the right kind of question: not "Does money dominate elections?" but "Does money mean more than personality?". Teasing such an answer from the statistics for many elections was done by applying a normalizing technique. Many unsuccessful candidates have run more than one campaign, and in many cases, the same two candidates have faced one another repeatedly.

If Pol B loses to Pol A the first time they campaign against one another, it is very, very unlikely that Pol B will ever win, no matter how much money is spent by either candidate. Once the populace likes Pol A enough to elect him or her, they don't change their mind unless someone even more likable comes along, or they find out that Pol A is really not so nice as was thought. The insight sheds a little more light on the "incumbency effect".

The insight that made Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner famous and infamous in equal measure, in their 2005 book Freakonomics, was the discovery that the Roe vs Wade decision in 1973 was the principal cause of the drop in crime rates that began about twenty years later. In brief, for nearly all women, the instinct to care for a baby is so powerful that she needs a strong incentive to choose abortion. Being too young, too poor, and uneducated together often provide that incentive. As it happens, criminals are mostly those who were born to such a woman. It is just such young women who were unable to get abortions prior to 1973, primarily because of poverty. Once legalized, abortion became relatively inexpensive, and abortions subsequently prevented the birth of large numbers of unwanted children. The proportion of young people who tend to become criminals fell, and with it, crime rates fell. I am decidedly not pro-abortion, quite the contrary, but the logic is inescapable.

What I found fascinating about the book—the whole title is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything—is the notion of asking a question in a particular way to get results that otherwise remain buried in the noise. For example, they examined just those Sumo matches between a wrestler who is assured of an increased ranking and one who needs just one more win to avoid a reduced ranking. The resulting anomaly proved there is some amount of quid-pro-quo occurring.

I stumbled across just such a question more than twenty years ago, when my wife and I had begun to despair of having children. One doctor was proposing a series of painful and costly tests. A move to another state (a well-timed job offer) required getting a new doctor, and this one, within minutes of meeting my wife, noticed she had a lump on her thyroid. Getting the thyroid hormone problem fixed resulted in a pregnancy. I told this to a friend in yet another state, who is also a doctor, and he told me that one-third of "infertility" can be traced to thyroid hormone problems. It is the single biggest cause. When I asked why that isn't checked first, he told me, "It is too cheap."

I'm going to pass this along to these authors, for it is but one aspect of our health care dilemma. They have no doubt put a few other questions to the same dilemma. There has been a lot of talk in the years since most of us were pushed into HMO plans, that medical decisions need to be made by medical professionals, not by insurance company hacks. However, what we really need is that medical decisions be made for primarily medical reasons, at least from the doctors' side. If the patient must make an economic decision, that is up to the patient. To me, the goal of modifying the health care climate in this country ought to be making that economic decision less painful. I'll have to read Levitt and Dubner's next book to see if they tackle this one!

Harking back to my first driving disaster

2009-11-03T06:19:00.002-05:00

kw: observations, musings, driving

I just had to comment on this cartoon. Sad to say, I'd already worked the Sudoku on a following page before I decided to scan the cartoon and post it. Luckily the numbers don't show too bad.

On a rainy day in 1963, I was about 15½, and my Dad would let me put the car in the garage or move it out to the driveway. My street shoes had slippery soles, and when I put my wet shoe on the brake, it slipped off onto the gas pedal. The front of the car got about three feet beyond the back of the garage before stalling.

It didn't burst through the wall like Jeremy's Dad's car here. It pushed the back wall loose from the side walls, bending it a little, and just raised it like a big garage door on a hinge. My Dad is the kind of fellow who thinks little of remodeling houses—with our help, he has moved windows or added a room or half room or roof cupola to every house we owned while I was growing up. After the nest emptied and he retired, he, without our help, added an office loft to the newest house he and Mom bought, by walling off a third of the attic and installing a stairway to it.

So, Dad and I proceeded to jack the garage's wall back into place, replacing a couple of pieces of broken siding, and I had the job or repainting the outside. I wonder what today's paper will show Jeremy doing…

A hedge halved

2009-11-02T14:50:00.002-05:00

kw: observations, local events

The hedge project is finished, and it just about finished me off. Saturday's rain prevented work, which just gave time for my joints to stiffen up. Sunday afternoon was equable enough, so I pressed on and finished about sundown. Now I'm back at my desk job, with a gram of ibuprofen under my belt, so I don't feel too, too bad.

A hedge can be pretty, but it is sure a lot more work than a fence, which you can just paint every few years and be done with.

Fire - judging and cleansing

2009-10-31T13:02:00.003-04:00

kw: book reviews, fiction, fantasy, magic

Coming of age can happen at any age. The term is mostly applied to the early teens. A later transitions is called "finding oneself" or a "midlife crisis". Fire Study by Maria V. Snyder is her third novel about Yelena, a Soulfinder, and all three have had such learning crises as their theme (I didn't read the first two, I located synopses).

I almost stopped in an early chapter. The book seemed to have a common Disney theme: horribly abused young person turns out to be someone really special who saves the day. I kept reading, though, and the novel soon left my expected formula behind. Ms Snyder is that rare writer who can animate more than one hero/heroine, and bring to life complex characters who are neither all good nor all bad. Yelena is the focal point of the book, but she is recipient of as much help as she lends to others.

As a Soulfinder, Yelena is feared, and expected to become a power-hungry magician. As the story unfolds, she gradually learns what she is actually good at, which isn't magic as it is typically known, other than an ability to heal very grave cases. But she can't start a fire, not even a little one, nor cause even a small object to move, by magical means.

Her soulfinding ability affords her a little protection from a powerful magician who wishes to destroy her; in a fight, she can attach the person's soul and, unless the magician disengages quickly, destroy it or drag it out of the body, killing her adversary. She is just a bit more ethical than the average bear, though, and doesn't resort to such killing until somewhat late in the story, when she learns that her primary skill is helping the soul of someone who has died find its way to the sky.

She also learns that the people's fear of Soulfinders is based on confusion with Soulstealers (I'd have used the word Soulthief), those who kill others to appropriate their magical powers. There is also an alternate way to steal magic that relies on a gruesome ritual, potentially making any person with magical gifts into a Soulstealer, effectively. Once Yelena knows the difference, she learns to liberate the souls enslaved by Soulstealers and send them to the sky, reducing the thieves' extraordinary powers.

She has four primary helpers: her lover Valek, her Story Weaver (kind of a magical psychiatrist) Moon Man, her horse Kiki, and an unnamed bat. Her adversaries are primarily two, the duplicitous Roze and an otherwise unnamed "Fire Weaver" who lives in the underworld. A gift Yelena learns, in a rather dramatic way, is how to pass through a fire into the underworld, and how to return.

But all these are metaphors. None of us matures without learning to confront our greatest fears. Living in denial means living a partial or crippled life. We may not be wise enough to choose the right helpers, but oftentimes our best helpers find us. We all have the opportunity to "entertain angels, all unawares". The best stories help us learn about ourselves.

Half a hedge - better than none?

2009-10-30T22:18:00.004-04:00

kw: observations, photographs, local events

When we moved to our current house fifteen years ago, we obtained a hedge for the first time. I would not volunteer to own another hedge, but while we are here, we can't simply ignore it. At the beginning, I saw that it had been badly trimmed for a long time, and was overhanging quite a bit. Hedges need to be slightly narrower at the top, not quite straight up. This was twice as wide at the top, and lower branches had no leaves. I learned that Privet is very robust, so I cut it back to the shape I wanted, and we endured about a year of ugly hedge until it leafed out again.

Since then, no matter how frequently we trim it, it seems to gain on us, and while it has kept a good shape, it is quite a bit thicker than it was. In particular, a 110-foot (30m) stretch overhangs the sidewalk by at least half a meter. I decided to slim it down. I spent half a day at it today, and got half of it cut back. Here is how it looked by midafternoon, looking along the sidewalk to show how the uncut portion hangs over.

I had begun by using a hedge trimmer, but found that many of the branches I needed to cut were too thick for it. I made better headway by using a lopper. At first I was cutting everything upand bagging it, but we soon decided it was better to bundle the long twigs, and just bag small pieces.

I've already let my neighbors know my plans to uglify their view for half a year or so. Luckily, they don't mind. (As I type, the sore muscles and joints of my shoulders and arms reinforce my decision that, whenever we move again, there will be no more hedges! I still have half a day's work ahead of me to finish!!) The upside they all know is, now it will again be possible for two people to walk side by side down that sidewalk.

Here is a panorama of the hedge in its current state: half done.

Preview of coming attractions: This hedge is also troubled by Privet Rust Mites. I've sprayed for them a couple times, but it is quite hard to get to the back sides of the leaves. Come May, just as the leaves begin to grow, I'll be able to spray right through the hedge from the cut side and eliminate the mites.

The close of one long day

2009-10-29T12:08:00.000-04:00

kw: book reviews, mysteries, fiction, continued review

So is it here, under Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, supposedly named for the "Rose Line" or meridian upon which it lies? The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, doesn't end in as big a cop-out as I was expecting, but… The attempt near the end to make Bishop Violet (Aringarosa) into a sort of good guy falls flat, and the long-lost missing family reunion was as expectable as an oncoming train.

I mean, it is sort of a nice note that what Langdon and Neveu really find at Rosslyn is a great treasure indeed. But in a turn as much out-of-the-blue as any hairbreadth, nick-of-time escape, it is just too much to have Langdon return to Paris for a "just maybe this is really it" moment.

Does the tip of the lower pyramid signal a bigger structure below? Does it matter? In the end, the author tries to make nice, stating that Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion were "innocent", just pawns of the real villain. The damage is done already.

I went to the Opus Dei website, where they discuss "mortification" as it is actually practiced. By the way, none of their members is a monk, though some are priests. Their discussion includes a paragraph beginning, "Penance and mortification are a small but essential part of the Christian life." The forty-day fast of Jesus is given as an example. I'll simply state this, according to my own study of the Bible: Jesus, John the Baptist and the Apostles called for Repentance. There is no "penance" in the New Testament. Penance means to pay for your own sins, which the NT writers all state is impossible. Secondly, fasting and early rising are the only "mortifications" found in the NT, and both are clearly seen to be for the purpose of closer fellowship with God, particularly when dealing with troubling events. In my experience, effective fasting occurs when you're too busy to eat.

Finally, I just have to present some symbolism that makes it a lot less likely that Constantine "chose" the four Gospels or any other Bible books. He'd called together Christian leaders from all over the Empire, who had been out of contact for long times because of persecution. The conference just ran away with itself, and the Emperor did little but moderate the louder disputes. And it was not at Nicea that the Canon was settled; that was a council at Chalcedon, about fifty years later.

Once artwork began to be added to the fancier Bibles of the early Middle Ages, the four Evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—had animal avatars added to icons of them. An angel or man for Matthew, a lion for Mark, an ox for Luke, and an eagle for John. These were chosen, because they were the four faces of the Cherubim of the Old Testament, and of the "four living beasts" in Revelation 4. Interestingly, there is a rationale given for each of these choices in traditional theology, but explanations I have seen do not mention the real reason. In Ezekiel 1:10, the four faces of a Cherub are given in the order Man, Lion, Ox and Eagle. This is the real source of the medieval animal choices, and rationale was later applied to fit.

However, in Revelation 4:7 the four creatures (one face each) are, in order, Lion, Ox, Man and Eagle. This order better matches the character of the four Evangelists, in order:

Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus, "son of Abraham, son of David". Matthew is written for Jews, proving that Jesus is their King. The appropriate symbol for a king is a Lion.
Mark has no genealogy. The book focuses on the things Jesus did, much more than on what he said. He is presented as the laboring servant of God. An Ox is appropriate here.
Luke includes a genealogy of Jesus, this one going through a different son of David, and continuing to Adam. The book focuses on Jesus's teachings, and contains the greatest amount of ethical instruction. Jesus, son of Man, is shown to be the prototype of an ethical man, so the Man is the best symbol here.
John presents a transcendent Jesus, the divine Jesus. Only in John do we read that Jesus said, "If you do not believe I am, you will die in your sins." Lion, ox and man are ground-bound. Not so the Eagle, the transcendent creature.

The book of Revelation was written late in the First Century, about 90-95 AD. Even the latest of late-daters dare not put its authorship later than 140 AD. In either case, it is not until 250-300 years later that this symbology even matters. There is no hint in the documents that survive that Revelation 4 had anything to do with the choice of four Gospels out of dozens.

By the way, I have translations of a couple of dozen early Gospels. Other than the four we find in the New Testament, they all read like stories from the Arabian Nights or like miracle-adventure stories. The language is overblown. None has the sparse, descriptive narrative we find in our received Evangelists. I see the hand of God, not just in the choice of the books of the New Testament, but in their order of presentation. The writer of Revelation had no idea that his vision of four beasts would have a connection to the Gospels that would be noticed only fifteen centuries later (you'll find much of what I have written above follows documents written after the Sixteenth Century).

And, even more finally, a big point is made that Jesus "could not" have remained single in First-Century Palestine. Every generation of every culture has had its confirmed bachelors. Paul was also single, only half a generation later. Where he catalogs the married apostles, he mentions "the brothers of the Lord" and Cephas (Peter), but leaves out Jesus (1 Cor 9:5). Since he was defending marriage, he'd have definitely mentioned Jesus had He been married.

Of violets and mirrors

2009-10-28T12:00:00.003-04:00

kw: book reviews, mysteries, fiction, continued review

I've now made it about 3/4 the way through The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. People claim to have read it in one sitting. The standard hardbound is 480 pages, and this large print edition is 737, so that represents quite a long "sitting"! At least eight hours, at my reading speed.

A central figure is Bishop Aringarosa. Did anyone else immediately think "Ring around the Rosie"? It is too bad that the nursery rhyme's connection with the Plague has been debunked, because Aringarosa is the prototype of a plague on humanity. Considering that so much is made of the Rose and its/her identity in the middle part of the novel, the "rosa" in his name makes me suspect more depth to his character than has so far been shown. The "posies" of the rhyme consist of whatever flowers a child may have at hand, frequently the common, weedy yard violet. I have come to think of the character as "Bishop Violet".

When I saw the graphic of the inscription at the beginning of Chapter 71, I immediately recognized it as mirror writing. While Da Vinci is famed for employing it to (slightly) obscure his documents, it has been used by many much less famous folks.

This image shows some of the text that appears below the Vitruvian Man illustration. I don't know what it says, because I can't read Italian, either reversed or direct. In the novel we find a couple pages of explanation as to why Saunière used English for the mirrored inscription. He was French, after all. Well, he is the creature of the author, so he can have whatever prejudices the author finds convenient.

For that matter, the Leonardo of this book is equally the author's creature. I've had a close look at high-resolution images of The Last Supper, and while the person to Christ's right does look a little too pretty to be a man, and has the longest hair in the scene, I am by no means convinced of its femaleness. Even if the real Leonardo wished to depict a woman, and was convinced that Mary Magdalene was at the Supper, that tells us more about him than about the event.

The scene in the fresco itself is ridiculous from a Biblical perspective. The twelve plus Jesus reclined; they did not sit on chairs. They may have sat around one central serving table, or perhaps there were two or more seating areas, for it was a "large upper room".

Here is the image from above, reversed. In this one it is much easier to recognize the letters. I found out decades ago that it is not hard to write in reverse. Simply use your opposite hand. For me that is the left hand. Once your handwriting using your dominant hand is well developed and well practiced, you can take advantage of a property of the nervous system: your right and left hands are "wired" to use complementary (i.e. mirror-image) motions.

Draw a quick circle with your ordinary writing hand. Then do so with your other hand. It will look best if you draw the circle in the opposite direction! With much less practice than you might imagine, you can learn to write backward with that hand, and the handwriting will be the same (in a mirror) as your major hand. This is easiest to do first on a chalk board, then work toward smaller and smaller script until both hands can write at the same size, just opposite directions.

Well, back to my reading. I have a growing suspicion of the butler, since a couple chapters ago the albino Silas is wishing for a miracle, and the hidden narrator tells us that one will occur a few hours later. That's a pretty big clue, Mr. Brown!

Whose code was it, anyway?

2009-10-26T12:00:00.004-04:00

kw: book reviews, mysteries, fiction

This is 243 Lexington Avenue, Brooklyn, NYC, USA, the headquarters building for Opus Dei. The opening page of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown lists this address as one Fact upon which the novel is based. Though I am not pro-Catholic by any means, I recognized from the time the book was published that Mr. Brown is very likely doing quite a disservice to a Catholic service organization. The very secretiveness of Opus Dei does them a disservice, which is why I prefer "daylight in every corner". Secret societies are for mental children (including my grandfather, a Mason).

I didn't read the book in 2003 because I wanted the hype to die down. Most of it has. Now that it is out in a Large Print paperback, I decided to read it. This won't be a usual review; thousands of reviewers have flogged this one. Rather, I'll take a riff now and again as the book triggers them.

Early in the book it is stated that the pentagram, or five-pointed star, is not a symbol of devil worship but of goddess worship, being connected to Venus. Further, that the orbit of the planet Venus traces a perfect pentagram on the sky every four years. The pentagram isn't quite that perfect, but it is pretty good. Every eight years, beginning from an inferior conjunction (closest approach of Venus to Earth), there are five more inferior conjunctions spaced around the ecliptic (or Zodiac). The sixth occurs within two degrees of the first. Two degrees isn't much, but it is four times the width of the moon on the sky, so was easily discernible by the ancients. At the end of the Pentagram article in Wikipedia there is an educational image and explanation of this ecliptic pentagram.

While in the Louvre, Robert Langdon, apparent hero of this tale, has a flashback to a lecture about art, in which he describes the delights of PHI (or Φ), the Divine Proportion, or Golden Section. This number, an unending decimal that begins 1.618, has the property that dividing it into one yields 0.618, or Φ-1. One way to determine Φ to any precision desired is to construct the Fibonacci Series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), in which each number is the sum of the two prior numbers.

Nature is full of these numbers. This sunflower head has seeds that spiral out from the center. If you trace clockwise spirals and counter-clockwise spirals you get 34 of the first and 55 of the second, assuming you use the most open spiral in each direction. These are the ninth and tenth Fibonacci Numbers. If, for example, you select a more steeply-sloping spiral in the counter-clockwise direction, you'll find there are 21, the eighth Fibonacci Number. 55/34= 1.6176 and 34/21 = 1.6190. Both are within 0.6% of Φ. Numbers further in the sequence get you closer.

In his lecture, Langdon states several ratios found in the human body that approximate Φ, though he uses the word "exact" a little too freely. I got out a tape measure to see just how precise these ratios are. I found the following:

My height divided by the height of my navel: 1.704, which is +5%.
Hip height divided by knee height (where on each joint one chooses can make this quite different): Left 1.656, Right 1.644. Both are about +2%.
Shoulder-to-fingertips divided by elbow-to-tips: Left 1.642, Right 1.616. The latter figure is very close; the other is 2% high.
The three joints in my Left middle finger: 2.4, 1.5, 1.1 (all inches), which produces the ratios 1.600 and 1.364. Again, where you choose the joint location can make a big difference. A "near-ideal" 5-inch finger would have joint lengths of 2.5, 1.55, 0.95.

I recall reading that swimming phenomenon Michael Phelps, being 76 inches (193 cm) tall, has the torso of a man four inches taller and the legs of a man four inches shorter. That is, compared to some "perfect" ratio, his navel is four inches too close to the floor (4" = 10 cm). His navel-height-to-tallness ratio is thus about 1.77.

Based on the apparent ubiquity of the Divine Proportion, much is made of the Vitruvian Man diagram, in which Leonardo inscribed a human male figure into a circle in two positions. This figure's proportions are all set to Φ, making it the Ideal Figure. It would be interesting to take a tape measure to a few thousand people at random and see if the average value for a number of these ratios really does come close enough to 1.618 to constitute evidence for the Divine.

By the way, 1618/1000 reduces to 809/500. The sixteenth and seventeenth Fibonacci Numbers are 987 and 1597; their ratio is 1.61803445 which is getting pretty close to 1.61803399 (and some change), a more exact value for Φ, and a great deal more accurate than 809/500.

Now, for my title. Being a quarter of the way through the book, it appears that the Code in question is not really by Da Vinci, but by Saunière, the murdered curator. Maybe I'm wrong…

Hunting the avid reader

2009-10-25T20:29:00.002-04:00

kw: book reviews, story reviews, anthologies, science fiction, continued review

The fifth story in Dreamwish Beasts and Snarks by Mike Resnick has a safari theme, following the first four. The four stories that follow it are on different aspects of the hunter theme.

The Lord of the Jungle is a Tarzan parody, with a lordly ape-man bringing socialism to the apes, though he finally succumbs to a very capitalist proposal.
Bwana, one of the author's "Kirinyaga" series, found also in his book by that name, explores the law of unintended consequences. In this case, it is in this form: "If you bring in a predator to deal with your problem, you now have to deal with a predator that is stronger than your original problem."
Stalking the Vampire is a parody of articles with titles such as "The Tiger on His Own Ground", found in "True Tales" sorts of rags.
The Soul Eater has been called a very different love story. Though this 125-page novella tells an all-too-familiar tale of using hate to hide a love one fears, it puts it in the context of a man and his relationship to an energy being the size of a planetoid. Like the Snark of the first story in the book (see prior day's post), the Starduster/Dreamwish Beast/Soul Eater is misunderstood at nearly every step. This story has a slightly happier ending, however.
Nicobar Lane – The Soul Eater's Story tells a brief version of the tale from the energy being's point of view. Now that's a stretch!

Mike Resnick's unique imagination quails at no challenge, and challenges our assumptions with such stories. A treat.

Safaris in a new light

2009-10-24T15:38:00.002-04:00

kw: book reviews, story reviews, anthologies, science fiction

Mike Resnick sure likes a safari. Having been on several, he favors the hunter/safari genre, though he takes such stories in a few new directions. Fair warning: he also loves a parody.

His new collection Dreamwish Beasts and Snarks is sufficiently outré that it requires both an introduction and an editorial conclusion. For my part, I'm interested in the fresh ideas themselves.

Hunting the Snark deserves a review all its own. This 48-page mini-novella is unique on several fronts. Four filthy rich hunters are getting the first crack at the game on a new planet. In place of "native bearers", we have a baker's dozen alien beings including an expert tracker, plus a pilot and guide (the first person viewpoint), to shepherd the "guests". One member, being well-read, suggests the planet resembles one of Lewis Carroll's fantastic landscapes, from his poem "The Hunting of the Snark." The guide snaps up the name for a mysterious super-predator that has the local lions terrorized. The Snark of this tale is one answer to the question, if a jungle-man were more solitary, bigger than a bear but with all of a feral human's smarts, could "ordinary" hunters cope with him/it?
Stalking the Unicorn with Gun and Camera parodies a hunting magazine's review of a game species. These unicorns aren't your doe-eyed, submissive sorts, either.
Two Hunters in Manhattan pits an ancient vampire against one of the author's favorite "alternative history" figures, the younger Theodore Roosevelt, during a stint as NYC Commissioner of Police.
Safari: 2103 A.D., in the form of diary entries, reminds me of a story that ends, "We listened to the stuffed-up birdies sing." For all I know that is a Resnick story also. In 2103 A.D. any animal weighing over a pound is considered a rarity worth taking expensive safari tours to see and photograph.

That's as far as I've got in a day. More on the way. I note from the titles that at least some of the stories to come are something other than safari/hunting tales.

Colors of Fall, large and small

2009-10-23T09:24:00.005-04:00

kw: photographs, autumn, seasons

About half the leaves have changed in my neighborhood. These trees that border a schoolyard are about as nice a view as I've seen this year. This is a stitch of four photos. Click on it to see a 1600-pixel-wide version.

A stump near the schoolyard has become covered with small shelf fungi (what the Japanese call "tree ears") over the past several years. The view on the right (or below, depending how your browser composites these images) is what we typically see, looking from above. For the one on the left (maybe above), I held the camera below the same spot. These are low to the ground, so recent rains have splashed a lot of dirt particles onto the lower surfaces.

The bush honeysuckle berries are about as nice as they are likely to get. These bushes abound along a path through the woods that we take to get to the schoolyard.

Later in the season, migrating birds will eat the berries, but I'm told they are not edible by people. I didn't try. I remember the Pyracantha berries that used to line the street where I lived in my grade school years. The orange berries were dry and tasteless, and could give you an upset stomach, but at certain times of year the birds devoured them. Thinking about it, I recall a number of berries, including some nearly black purple ones, that birds eat but people don't.

Of course, there are plenty of autumn fruits that people do eat. When we lived in South Dakota, we would gather chokecherries and serviceberries to make jam. One of my professors and I used to simply eat the chokecherries. At first, they are astringent, but you get used to it, then they are very tasty. But when you've had enough, your mouth puckers up nice and tight!

These little crab apples, on a new tree in my yard, are edible, just. They are pretty sour. I decided to leave them on the tree; they will cling until Spring, when migrating birds will strip them off the tree some fine afternoon. When the tree gets bigger I'll start harvesting some of them to make jelly.

On second thought, maybe I'll make them into a jam instead; just strain out the seeds. One of the hardest things about making any apple jelly is getting the juice out of the pulp. Other fruits can be strained through muslin and need just a little squeezing to yield the juice. Apples seem to have invented the super-absorbent gel and one loses most of the juice without using a mechanical press. I gave up on that years ago; now if I want to make apple jelly I buy a bottle of cider and start with that.

Here's one more tree I saw after taking the panorama. It illustrates the tendency of many maples to get redder where they've been colder, or where they were "nipped" first. The color gradation of this tree is very nice.

All this on a walk to the schoolyard to pick up black walnuts!

The lady detectives win another round

2009-10-22T11:48:00.002-04:00

kw: book reviews, fiction, mysteries, african setting

In a little house in Botswana live Precious Ramotswe, her husband Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and two foster children. For much of our time with Mma Ramotswe, we observe her in her little office, the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, with her associate Grace Makutsi. Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith, is the 11^th in his "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series, one of four series in which he has published 24 novels.

This warm-hearted mystery centers on a winning football (i.e. soccer to Americans) team that has suddenly begun to lose consistently. The new owner, Rra Molofololo, has commissioned the Ladies to find a traiter who may be throwing the matches. Along the way, however, there are a few more mysteries to solve and life issues to unravel. Mma Makutsi's fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, is being lured by a rival of hers, and another woman with a similar name has multiple husbands, and they are likely to meet one another soon.

The narrative and dialog have a special flavor that is unique to the series, with its roots in the author's years teaching in Botswana. Africans have their own ways of thinking, which are reflected in the way they speak, whether English or their own tongue. The occasional use of Setswana expressions and dialog hint that the characters speak English rather more than we might expect.

At the end of the book, not every problem could be solved, but the important ones are either satisfactorily concluded or at least more manageable. That is the way life often works out, isn't it? Key insights come from two of the children with which Mma Ramotswe converses, and the proverb "From the mouth of babes…" is invoked, though one clue turns out to be a red herring. Note: you can pre-solve the football mystery if you consider carefully, what is the most-used body part of a football player?

These tales are full of tails

2009-10-21T12:05:00.000-04:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, veterinary medicine, animals, memoirs

All the world loves animal stories. Alf Wight, who wrote as James Herriot, wasn't the first to take advantage of this, but he was one of the best. I was a bit disappointed, however, to learn that his stories were fictional, though based on real events in his life. A new veterinarian-writer has come along, writing in his own name, and I think the stories hew more closely to the truth. I know of a certainty only that I enjoyed them very much.

Thirty six touching anecdotes are gathered in All My Patients Have Tales: Favorite Stories From a Vet's Practice by Jeff Wells, DVM. He has previously written a handbook, the informative and humorous A Veterinarian's Handbook for Horse Husbands, for the man in the life of a horse-loving woman.

In Tales we follow Dr. Wells's career from his entry into Vet school up to about 2005, shortly before the first edition of the book appeared. We get his sense of place regarding eastern South Dakota, where he spent two years, then Colorado, where he's been ever since. We learn of a psychotic cat mascot who keeps order in the Vet clinic's waiting room, a roaming Lothario of a Basset hound who hates having his nails clipped, a cow getting a C-section in a pasture in the midst of a blizzard, and assorted horses. Dr. Wells has come to specialize in horse medicine in recent years.

Along the way we also learn of the Basset hound look-alike who owns the Lothario, a lady biker who faints dead away while her tiny dog's wounds are being cleaned, and assorted rural and suburban animal owners and their various attitudes towards both their animals and the Vet they've asked for help. A strong note throughout the book is that human psychology is a huge part of veterinary practice. It would be easier to figure out for young Vets if they were taught to think like a lawn mower repairman: the customer is the human, who is bringing you something to fix. Yes, you became a veterinarian because you love animals and want to help them, but you also have to help the owner. A kind word and a human touch can improve both owner's and animal's outcome.

The hardest thing for a Vet to do is put down an animal. The author notes that it never gets easier. One's mind knows it is best, but the heart hopes this step can somehow be bypassed, just this once. The owner may suffer more than the Vet, but both are strongly affected. Given that it is the lot of nearly every animal to die in agony, the Vets of the world reduce the load of pain, at least a little.

But most of the time, an animal needs a bit of a helping hand to recover, and recover they do, often amazingly. An animal is seldom as "macho" as some humans. When they feel bad, you know it. Yet, just as with humans, a great variety of very debilitating conditions can be helped by getting some fluids or food into the animal, even via IV sometimes, and many others by antibiotics. The author relates a goodly number of cases that began with an animal barely willing to look up, but up and eating within an hour or two. The will to live is strong and uncomplicated in animals.

The author ends his last chapter with the words, "…we have only scratched the surface", which gives me hope that more is on the way. I'd love reading any sequel Dr. Wells produces.

Fonts and ink

2009-10-20T14:26:00.006-04:00

kw: observations, typography, fonts, efficiency

I heard about this unique ink-saving font from a friend. As you can see, it preserves a "heavy" outline, based on the font Vera Sans, but uses "holes" to remove about 20% of the ink that would ordinarily be used to print. It is found here. At the moment, it has only a Regular version (at least in the free download), so converting a page to print using it will lose any bolding or italic emphasis.

That got me thinking. I've been collecting selected free fonts for years, so I looked through my archives. There are other ways of using less ink while maintaining a good, readable look.

While Verdana is heavily used for web pages, the slightly lighter Arial is used in many, many Windows documents for printing. It is the default in Microsoft Excel and in many PowerPoint templates, for example. However, it is still a bit of a heavyweight, with a large x-height and thick strokes.

I chose the letters e, t, and a to display because together they represent 30% of all letters used in English text. If you consider punctuation, the total proportion drops a couple of points. The caps are shown below the uncials to illustrate the normal leading (or ledding), the extra space added between the topmost ascender and lowermost descender. When Arial is used at 12 point size, default leading is 14.5 points from baseline to baseline.

Because of kerning, and variations from typeface to typeface in spacing standards, the measurements I report below are based on the ink width of the letters and include no between-letter spaces.

Times New Roman, the default font in Microsoft Word, is probably used the most. I once read that 90% if all keystrokes on all desktop computers go into word-processed documents.

The weighted strokes, with various amounts of each letter composed of hairlines, makes TNR a more ink-efficient font than Arial. In a moment, we'll see by how much.

The leading of TNR and Arial are the same, 14.5 points for 12-point type size. By the way, if you want to save paper also on a longer document, you can change the leading to 12 points, meaning that the descender on a "y" could potentially just touch the top of the "A". This is called Solid Setting. I haven't looked into it in detail, but there may be extra space built into the font definition to keep even solid set type from such "collisions".

Years ago I bought a four-face family named Zapf Humanist 601 BT. It has the kind of weighting that TNR uses, but is sans serif, so no ink is used making the little serifs on certain letters. I like it because it is, to me, the most beautiful of the sans serif fonts. At this size, you can see some of the styling and shaping of the strokes.

Whether by chance or by design, it has the same leading as both TNR and Arial. Just by looking at it, one may see that it will use less ink on a printed page than Arial.

This is the only font I've paid for. All others I look for in freeware sites. Similar fonts that are free include (names only, no links; you can look them up) Optimum and Optane. There is a free version of Optima out there also; it is the one the Zapf font is based on, but be careful. Bitstream sells their own version of Optima, and pirated copies abound.

A better comparison of the "e" glyphs from these three fonts can be seen on this gridded image. I digitized these glyphs to determine their ink loading percentages. This is the amount covered by the glyph divided by the rectangle defined by the the baseline-to-baseline distance at normal leading, and the ink-to-ink width of the glyph:

Arial = 22%
TNR = 16%
Zapf = 14.5%

The Zapf font uses (comparing percents to percents here; don't get lost) 66% of the ink that Arial does, and 91% of the ink that TNR uses. TNR uses 73% of the ink that Arial does. Some of this efficiency comes from smaller x-height, but much also comes from the more slender average strokes.

The same analysis for the "t" glyphs shows:

Arial = 25%
TNR = 17%
Zapf = 16%

The Zapf amounts for the "t" glyphs are 73% compared to Arial and 94% compared to TNR, while TNR uses 77% of the ink that Arial does.

The similarity of these figures indicates that the two weighted fonts are well balanced. Their look on the page is the best confirmation of this.

Now, there is yet another way to use less ink. Use the next smaller type size. One company I worked for, before issuing Microsoft Office software, had the default text size in MS Word changed from 12 point to 11 point. There is little visible difference on a printed page, to the eye, but the smaller size uses 84% as much ink. That alone is a 16% saving.

If you want a really thin, ink-efficient font, try this one. It is mid-page at fontspace.com's thin category. I have done no metrics on it, but it clearly will use very little ink. The problem is, there are no (as yet) italic and italic-bold versions, though there is a boldface that is still quite light.

If a body is determined to save printer ink or toner, perhaps some of these ideas will help.

Dante would roll over

2009-10-19T13:47:00.002-04:00

kw: book reviews, fantasy, monsters

It is the Hell of your childhood imagination, the Hell you grew up with. The Hell of demons that look like gargoyles (and worse), of sulfury smells and tentacles and pitchforks and bogeymen and things under your bed that'll get you if you set foot on the floor. It is, like Milton's Hell, a place where Satan rules, but this Hell is locked behind Gates, which keep the human world safe…at least for the time being. It is the Hell of The Gates by John Connolly, and the issue here is not whether you might go there, but whether Hell will come here.

The full title on the cover of the book is The Gates of Hell are About to Open: Want to Peek?. It is a genre new to me, that I call Supernatural Faux-Horror Comedy. There are two story lines here. One is the aforementioned part-Medieval part-childhood fantasy Hell and the desire of its denizens to come here and, well, ruin things. The other is the still-pending restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and its possible power to create a small black hole or wormhole or … something…

The author begins with the beginning of the Universe, so he can explain the Singularity from which everything is supposed to have emerged. Actually (and as he explains), the Singularity becomes everything, not expanding into anything but being the everything that is expanding. Yes, that is a bit confusing to me also, and I've been a Physics major (not a very good one, perhaps). It also sets the tone for the book, a tone of classic British understated humor.

Thus the CERN/LHC thread begins with bored technicians playing Battleship while the collider gets cranking up, when something gets loose and goes zinging away. Then, as they watch, the computer system seems to rewrite its memory to cover evidence thereof. At the same time, just a time zone away in Biddlecombe, four half-serious students of the occult are met in a basement about a pentagram, attempting to contact the "other side". They do so, in spades, and the game is afoot.

Peeking through the window is young (age 11) Samuel Johnson and his dog Boswell. Samuel (and, we suppose, Boswell), sees the Portal open, and the Gates beyond, and the things that shortly transpire as the four are replaced by shape-shifting demons.

If this and the rest of the book were narrated in any straightforward manner, the result would be unendingly horrible. It is not; instead we are treated to a hilarious Keystone Kops-ish attempt by the demons to prepare for a takeover by "The Great Malevolence" (TGM), Satan himself, just as soon as enough power can be stolen from the LHC to melt away the Gates and open the Portal quite a bit wider. Samuel can't get anyone to believe his stories, and he has just four days (until November 1, which we know as All Saints' Day) to thwart TGM's plans.

I don't know if real demons, whatever they may be, are capable of being clobbered by rakes or cricket bats. But this is childhood fantasy writ large. The demons don't fare too well, except for a couple of unusually friendly ones. One of these, named Nurd (unless you pronounce it "Noord" it'll come out "nerd") actually befriends Samuel instead of eating him as instructed (or as it would have been instructed had TGM or his lieutenant though to inform it). This gives Samuel and a couple of his young friends a way to close the Portal, if they are in time (you know the answer to that "if" there, so why am I being coy?).

If only our real demons (existential or not) were so easy to overcome…

21

2009-10-18T19:05:00.002-04:00

kw: local events, observations

21!

It happens to just about everyone, and now it has happened to us. Today was our son's 21^st birthday. I found myself thinking, "How did that happen so fast?" When my wife said just that, I recalled a phone call I got, nearly 22 years ago.

My mother called, and said, "You have no right being 40! I am still telling people I'm in my 20s!" She was being jocular, of course, but there was a bit of genuine existential pain in her words. My mother was the stereotype of a woman who conceals her age. Fortunately, my wife and I make no bones about being 40+ years older than our son. Since I am, myself, a few days away from being 62, he's gotta be 21 now.

But it sure happened fast.

Everything else about food

2009-10-17T15:19:00.002-04:00

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, agriculture, food, history

It is the first book about food that I have read which never mentions taste or eating. There are no recipes. Instead, An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage is devoted to food as the source of civilization, of industrialization, as a weapon, and as the determiner of humanity's future.

History is often seen as, to use Steven Jay Gould's term, a 'punctuated equilibrium': Long periods in which little happens separated by turning points that frequently change everything. In the more historical chapters of the book, the two biggest turning points are the development of agriculture—which brought about civilization by making cities possible—, and the replacement of 'traditional' power by fossil fuels—which made industrialization possible because fewer farmers were needed per acre of crop.

The six sections of the book are:

The Edible Foundation of Civilization
Food and Social Structure
Global Highways of Food
Food, Energy, and Industrialization
Food as a Weapon
Food, Population and Development

In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Malthus predicted that no technology could assure the human race of enough increase in food production to match the continuing geometrical increase in population. Yet it was precisely these two turning points that could free us from the consequences of his gloomy outlook.

The first turning point, agriculture itself, allowed great expansion of the population, but the fixed size of the Earth's cultivable surface set a limit on the total amount of food humanity could produce. The second turning point allowed a much greater expansion of population, and the invention of chemical fertilizers multiplied this potential. However, the cultivable surface has grown no bigger. We can at most double the amount of land now in cultivation…and then what?

A felicitous sociological principle could save us: wealth reduces fertility. The more prosperous a country, the lower its citizens' birth rate. The poor need to 'sire up field hands', and then hope they will have enough surviving offspring to care for them when they are old. Having many children is the only retirement plan available to them. A more prosperous person will at first dream of raising more children, but will soon realize that prosperity itself provides a better retirement plan. Everywhere that has become 'developed' the majority of people began to favor quality over quantity in their descendants. They put fewer eggs in the basket, but watched the basket better. Some developed nations actually have a negative population growth rate.

These sociological forces are expected to lead to an eventual reduction in population. But there is one caveat: sometime, perhaps while today's college kids are still around, fossil fuels will run low to the point we can no longer use them to support the level of industry and transportation that is now 'normal' in developed countries. Only if we develop sustainable energy technologies will our industrial present remain robust long into the future.

Were the human race to lose its ability to produce more energy than growing plants can provide, human population would of necessity drop to about one-third or less of today's level, perhaps two billions. We have become dependent on industrialization and high levels of energy use. While near-future wars could be fought over petroleum, it is more likely that the next war will be about water or food.

Much of the prior two paragraphs is my rumination, not what Mr. Standage writes. He is hopeful. Though there could be wars over food, he expects technology to pull through again, and give us a combination of tools to avert such a tragedy, from better conservation of water and land, to more efficient use of fertilizers, and genetic or crossbreeding products that improve total yields just a little bit more. Should civilization collapse, the Svalbard Seed Bank is the Noah's Ark of the next millennium, available when humanity returns to its senses.

An artful highlight to a poor day

2009-10-16T12:49:00.004-04:00

kw: art, photographs

As I noted yesterday, Monday was the occasion of a very invasive, uncomfortable medical test. There was a bright spot to the day, however. The doctor's waiting room wall sports a large example of United Plates of America, a depiction of the map of the U.S. states using pieces cut from license plates from all fifty states. The artist is Alan Holcombe. He has a series of these he makes upon order, plus he'll make a single-state collage also.

I have been seeing this doctor for about a year, and this visit I remembered my camera. I am rather glad I was able to take this image without flash: handheld at 1/30 sec.

Others use license plates for similar artwork. This is a menu palette from Georgia's Crafts. I wonder who first produced a license plate collage in map format?

When I see certain works of art, I find myself wishing we had words for "more unique" and "most unique", but "unique" is a superlative all by itself! Originating in the Latin epithet for a one-horse town, it refers to something that stands alone. Whatever level of uniqueness this collage may possess, it lifted my spirits on a day I'd otherwise prefer to forget.

So many doctors, so little time

2009-10-15T12:34:00.002-04:00

kw: local events, observations, medicine

To my younger readers: don't get old. Do gain experience, do grow wiser, but if you can bypass that getting older stuff…! It has not been a good week, so far. Grossness alert: I'll try to be discreet, but there's no hiding some things.

Monday, a double invasion: A male has two places a catheter may be inserted. My urologist had convinced me to get a Urodyne test. It determines if the bladder pressure during and just before urination poses a risk to the kidneys. A bladder catheter is used to fill it with saline while back pressure is monitored. The patient/victim reports on how it feels from time to time. A rectal catheter is used to get electrodes where they can measure the myoelectric signals and a second kind of back pressure. A few other electrodes are attached to "nearby areas". I've had cystoscopy before, and that is uncomfortable enough. This time catheter insertion simply hurt. I think a blunter end would have been better. Bottom line: My kidneys are not at risk. But I have to take a few days of antibiotics, as a preventive measure.

Tuesday, seeing things: I've had retinal hemorrhages a few times in the past forty years. They typically dissolve and vanish in about three weeks. This time I had a large one, fortunately off-center, but it wasn't going away on schedule, so I'd gotten a Tuesday AM slot to let my ophthalmologist have a look. The good news: It is indeed a hemorrhage, not some tumor or other fearful thing. The bad news: there is a little separation of layers in the middle of it, so I'll be seeing a retinal specialist in a few days to see if it needs attention. "Attention" usually means doing something with a laser, either to reattach a layer or to prevent further unzipping. I tried going back to work in the afternoon, but my eyes were still dilated and I couldn't read the computer screen well enough to do any work.

Wednesday, a nip and a tuck: I had my annual complete physical exam, and with the prior two days' events, had plenty to report. I also showed my doctor something on my arm, and said I'd thought it a wart and tried to freeze it off. It came right back. "That's not a wart." A little while later, in comes a nurse with needles and scalpels and things, and I had it removed, definitively. Nice chat with doc and nurse while numbing occurs. Pathologist will soon report whether they need to go back to remove more "margin". Now I have a few stitches to shepherd for the coming week. To top it off, there was no record of recent inoculations, so I got a TDaP, which is the updated version of DPT (Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus) vaccines. Any shot with the "T" component gets sore, so I can't sleep on that side for a night or two.

Other than a niggling little concern about the retinal bubble, I have a lot fewer worries than I had on Sunday. I'm pretty much good to go for another year.