Fourmilog: None Dare Call It Reason

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Reading List: Rockets and People. Vol. 1

Chertok, Boris E. Rockets and People. Vol. 1. Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [1999] 2005. ISBN 978-1-4700-1463-6 NASA SP-2005-4110.

This is the first book of the author's monumental four-volume autobiographical history of the Soviet missile and space program. Boris Chertok was a survivor, living through the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, World War II, all of the postwar conflict between chief designers and their bureaux and rival politicians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in Poland in 1912, he died in 2011 in Moscow. After retiring from the RKK Energia organisation in 1992 at the age of 80, he wrote this work between 1994 and 1999. Originally published in Russian in 1999, this annotated English translation was prepared by the NASA History Office under the direction of Asif A. Siddiqi, author of Challenge to Apollo (April 2008), the definitive Western history of the Soviet space program.

Chertok saw it all, from the earliest Soviet experiments with rocketry in the 1930s, uncovering the secrets of the German V-2 amid the rubble of postwar Germany (he was the director of the Institute RABE, where German and Soviet specialists worked side by side laying the foundations of postwar Soviet rocketry), the glory days of Sputnik and Gagarin, the anguish of losing the Moon race, and the emergence of Soviet preeminence in long-duration space station operations.

The first volume covers Chertok's career up to the conclusion of his work in Germany in 1947. Unlike Challenge to Apollo, which is a scholarly institutional and technical history (and consequently rather dry reading), Chertok gives you a visceral sense of what it was like to be there: sometimes chilling, as in his descriptions of the 1930s where he matter-of-factly describes his supervisors and colleagues as having been shot or sent to Siberia just as an employee in the West would speak of somebody being transferred to another office, and occasionally funny, as when he recounts the story of the imperious Valentin Glushko showing up at his door in a car belching copious smoke. It turns out that Glushko had driven all the way with the handbrake on, and his subordinate hadn't dared mention it because Glushko didn't like to be distracted when at the wheel.

When the Soviets began to roll out their space spectaculars in the late 1950s and early '60s, some in the West attributed their success to the Soviets having gotten the “good German” rocket scientists while the West ended up with the second team. Chertok's memoir puts an end to such speculation. By the time the Americans and British vacated the V-2 production areas, they had packed up and shipped out hundreds of rail cars of V-2 missiles and components and captured von Braun and all of his senior staff, who delivered extensive technical documentation as part of their surrender. This left the Soviets with pretty slim pickings, and Chertok and his staff struggled to find components, documents, and specialists left behind. This put them at a substantial disadvantage compared to the U.S., but forced them to reverse-engineer German technology and train their own people in the disciplines of guided missilery rather than rely upon a German rocket team.

History owes a great debt to Boris Chertok not only for the achievements in his six decade career (for which he was awarded Hero of Socialist Labour, the Lenin Prize, the Order of Lenin [twice], and the USSR State Prize), but for living so long and undertaking to document the momentous events he experienced at the first epoch at which such a candid account was possible. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union could the events chronicled here be freely discussed, and the merits and shortcomings of the Soviet system in accomplishing large technological projects be weighed.

As with all NASA publications, the work is in the public domain, and an online PDF edition is available.

A Kindle edition is available which is perfectly readable but rather cheaply produced. Footnotes simply appear in the text in-line somewhere after the reference, set in small red type. Words are occasionally run together and capitalisation is missing on some proper nouns. The index references page numbers from the print edition which are not included in the Kindle version, and hence are completely useless. If you have a workable PDF application on your reading device, I'd go with the NASA PDF, which is not only better formatted but free.

The original Russian edition is available online.

Posted at 21:50

Friday, May 18, 2012

In the mail: Fitness for Geeks

Fitness for Geeks by Bruce W. Perry is now out from O'Reilly. I am interviewed on page 63 about The Hacker's Diet and paleo. You can find the interview in Amazon's “search inside” by searching for “Walker”. A Kindle edition is also available.

Posted at 16:52

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Reading List: Soft Target

Hunter, Stephen. Soft Target. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4391-3870-0.

This has to be among the worst nightmares of those few functionaries tasked with the “anti-terrorist” mission in the West who are not complacent seat-warmers counting the days until their retirement or figuring out how to advance their careers or gain additional power over the citizens whose taxes fund their generous salaries and benefits. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, a group of Somali militants infiltrate and stage a hostage-taking raid on “America, the Mall” in a suburb of Minneapolis (having nothing to do, of course, with another mega-mall in the vicinity). Implausibly, given the apparent provenance of the perpetrators, they manage to penetrate the mall's SCADA system and impose a full lock-down, preventing escape and diverting surveillance cameras for their own use.

This happens on the watch of Douglas Obobo, commandant of the Minnesota State Police, the son of a Kenyan graduate student and a U.S. anthropologist who, after graduating from Harvard Law School, had artfully played the affirmative action card and traded upon his glibness to hop from job to job, rising in the hierarchy without ever actually accomplishing anything. Obobo views this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to demonstrate how his brand of conciliation and leading from behind can defuse a high-profile confrontation, and thwarts efforts of those under his command to even prepare backup plans should negotiations with the hostage takers fail.

Meanwhile, the FBI tries to glean evidence of how the mall's security systems were bypassed and how the attackers were armed and infiltrated, and comes across clues which suggest a very different spin on the motivation of the attack—one which senior law enforcement personnel may have to seek the assistance of their grandchildren to explain. Marine veteran Ray Cruz finds himself the man on the inside, Die Hard style, and must rely upon his own resources to take down the perpetrator of the atrocities.

I have a few quibbles. These are minor, and constitute only marginal spoilers, but I'll put them behind the curtain to avoid peeving the easily irritated.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

On p. 97, FBI sniper Dave McElroy fires at Ray Cruz, who he takes to be one of the terrorists. Firing down from the roof into the mall, he fails to correct for the angle of the shot (which requires one to hold low compared to a horizontal shot, since the distance over which the acceleration of gravity acts is reduced as the cosine of the angle of the shot). I find it very difficult to believe that a trained FBI sniper would make such an error, even under the pressure of combat. Hunters in mountain country routinely make this correction.
On p. 116 the garbage bag containing Reed Hobart's head is said to weigh four pounds. The mass of an average adult human head is around 5 kg, or around 11 pounds. Since Hobart has been described as a well-fed person with a “big head” (p. 112), he is unlikely to be a four pound pinhead. I'd put this down to the ever-green problem of converting between republican and imperial units.
Nikki Swagger's television call sign switches back and forth between WUFF and WUSS throughout the book. I really like the idea of a WUSS-TV, especially in Minneapolis.
On p. 251, as the lawyers are handing out business cards to escapees from the mall, the telephone area code on the cards is 309, which is in Illinois. Although I grant that it's more likely such bipedal intestinal parasites would inhabit that state than nice Minnesota, is it plausible they could have gotten to the scene in time?

Spoilers end here.

Had, say, 200 of the 1000 patrons of the mall taken hostage availed themselves of Minnesota's concealed carry law, and had the mall not abridged citizens' God-given right to self-defence, the 16 terrorists would have been taken down in the first 90 seconds after their initial assault. Further, had the would-be terrorists known that one in five of their intended victims were packing, do you think they would have tried it? Just sayin'.

This is an excellent thriller, which puts into stark contrast just how vulnerable disarmed populations are in the places they gather in everyday life, and how absurd the humiliating security theatre is at barn doors where the horses have fled more than a decade ago. It is in many ways deeply cynical, but that cynicism is well-justified by the reality of the society in which the story is set.

A podcast interview with the author is available.

Posted at 22:53

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Reading List: Ameritopia

Levin, Mark R. Ameritopia. New York: Threshold Editions, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4391-7324-4.

Mark Levin seems to have a particularly virtuous kind of multiple personality disorder. Anybody who has listened to his radio program will know him as a combative “no prisoners” advocate for the causes of individual liberty and civil society. In print, however, he comes across as a scholar, deeply versed in the texts he is discussing, who builds his case as the lawyer he is, layer by layer, into a persuasive argument which is difficult to refute except by recourse to denial and emotion, which are the ultimate refuge of the slavers.

In this book, Levin examines the utopian temptation, exploring four utopian visions: Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto in detail, with lengthy quotations from the original texts. He then turns to the philosophical foundations of the American republic, exploring the work of Locke, Montesquieu, and the observations of Tocqueville on the reality of democracy in America.

Levin argues that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were well aware of utopian visions, and explicitly rejected them in favour of a system, based upon the wisdom of Locke and Montesquieu, which was deliberately designed to operate in spite of the weaknesses of the fallible humans which would serve as its magistrates. As Freeman Dyson observed, “The American Constitution is designed to be operated by crooks, just as the British constitution is designed to be operated by gentlemen.” Engineers who value inherent robustness in systems will immediately grasp the wisdom of this: gentlemen are scarce and vulnerable to corruption, while crooks are an inexhaustible resource.

For some crazy reason, most societies choose lawyers as legislators and executives. I think they would be much better advised to opt for folks who have designed, implemented, and debugged two or more operating systems in their careers. A political system is, after all, just an operating system that sorts out the rights and responsibilities of a multitude of independent agents, all acting in their own self interest, and equipped with the capacity to game the system and exploit any opportunity for their own ends. Looking at the classic utopias, what strikes this operating system designer is how sadly static they all are—they assume that, uniquely after billions of years of evolution and thousands of generations of humans, history has come to an end and that a wise person can now figure out how all people in an indefinite future should live their lives, necessarily forgoing improvement through disruptive technologies or ideas, as that would break the perfect system.

The American founding was the antithesis of utopia: it was a minimal operating system which was intended to provide the rule of law which enabled civil society to explore the frontiers of not just a continent but the human potential. Unlike the grand design of utopian systems, the U.S. Constitution was a lean operating system which devolved almost all initiative to “apps” created by the citizens living under it.

In the 20th century, as the U.S. consolidated itself as a continental power, emerged as a world class industrial force, and built a two ocean navy, the utopian temptation rose among the political class, who saw in the U.S. not just the sum of the individual creativity and enterprise of its citizens but the potential to build heaven on Earth if only those pesky constitutional constraints could be shed. Levin cites Wilson and FDR as exemplars of this temptation, but for most of the last century both main political parties more or less bought into transforming America into Ameritopia.

In the epilogue, Levin asks whether it is possible to reverse the trend and roll back Ameritopia into a society which values the individual above the collective and restores the essential liberty of the citizen from the intrusive state. He cites hopeful indications, such as the rise of the “Tea Party” movement, but ultimately I find these unpersuasive. Collectivism always collapses, but usually from its own internal contradictions; the way to bet in the long term is on individual liberty and free enterprise, but I expect it will take a painful and protracted economic and societal collapse to flense the burden of bad ideas which afflict us today.

In the Kindle edition the end notes are properly bidirectionally linked to the text, but the note citations in the main text are so tiny (at least when read with the Kindle application on the iPad) that it is almost impossible to tap upon them.

Posted at 23:58

Monday, May 7, 2012

Reading List: Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?

Gergel, Max G. Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? Rockford, IL: Pierce Chemical Company, 1979. OCLC 4703212.

Throughout Max Gergel's long career he has been an unforgettable character for all who encountered him in the many rôles he has played: student, bench chemist, instructor of aviation cadets, entrepreneur, supplier to the Manhattan Project, buyer and seller of obscure reagents to a global clientele, consultant to industry, travelling salesman peddling products ranging from exotic halocarbons to roach killer and toilet bowl cleaner, and evangelist persuading young people to pursue careers in chemistry. With family and friends (and no outside capital) he founded Columbia Organic Chemicals, a specialty chemical supplier specialising in halocarbons but, operating on a shoestring, willing to make almost anything a customer was ready to purchase (even Max drew the line, however, when the silver-tongued director of the Naval Research Laboratory tried to persuade him to make pentaborane).

The narrative is as rambling and entertaining as one imagines sharing a couple (or a couple dozen) drinks with Max at an American Chemical Society meeting would have been. He jumps from family to friends to finances to business to professional colleagues to suppliers to customers to nuggets of wisdom for starting and building a business to eccentric characters he has met and worked with to his love life to the exotic and sometimes bone-chilling chemical syntheses he did in his company's rough and ready facilities. Many of Columbia's contracts involved production of moderate quantities (between a kilogram and several 55 gallon drums) of substances previously made only in test tube batches. This “medium scale chemistry”—situated between the laboratory bench and an industrial facility making tank car loads of the stuff—involves as much art (or, failing that, brute force and cunning) as it does science and engineering, and this leads to many of the adventures and misadventures chronicled here. For example, an exothermic reaction may be simple to manage when you're making a few grams of something—the liberated heat is simply conducted to the walls to the test tube and dissipated: at worst you may only need to add the reagent slowly, stir well, and/or place the reaction vessel in a water bath. But when DuPont placed an order for allene in gallon quantities, this posed a problem which Max resolved as follows.

When one treats 1,2,3-Trichloropropane with alkali and a little water the reaction is violent; there is a tendency to deposit the reaction product, the raw materials and the apparatus on the ceiling and the attending chemist. I solved this by setting up duplicate 12 liter flasks, each equipped with double reflux condensers and surrounding each with half a dozen large tubs. In practice, when the reaction “took off” I would flee through the door or window and battle the eruption with water from a garden hose. The contents flying from the flasks were deflected by the ceiling and collected under water in the tubs. I used towels to wring out the contents which separated, shipping the lower level to DuPont. They complained of solids suspended in the liquid, but accepted the product and ordered more. I increased the number of flasks to four, doubled the number of wash tubs and completed the new order.
They ordered a 55 gallon drum. … (p. 127)

All of this was in the days before the EPA, OSHA, and the rest of the suffocating blanket of soft despotism descended upon entrepreneurial ventures in the United States that actually did things and made stuff. In the 1940s and '50s, when Gergel was building his business in South Carolina, he was free to adopt the “whatever it takes” attitude which is the quintessential ingredient for success in start-ups and small business. The flexibility and ingenuity which allowed Gergel not only to compete with the titans of the chemical industry but become a valued supplier to them is precisely what is extinguished by intrusive regulation, which accounts for why sclerotic dinosaurs are so comfortable with it. On the other hand, Max's experience with methyl iodide illustrates why some of these regulations were imposed:

There is no description adequate for the revulsion I felt over handling this musky smelling, high density, deadly liquid. As residue of the toxicity I had chronic insomnia for years, and stayed quite slim. The government had me questioned by Dr. Rotariu of Loyola University for there had been a number of cases of methyl bromide poisoning and the victims were either too befuddled or too dead to be questioned. He asked me why I had not committed suicide which had been the final solution for some of the afflicted and I had to thank again the patience and wisdom of Dr. Screiber. It is to be noted that another factor was our lack of a replacement worker. (p. 130)

Whatever it takes.

This book was published by Pierce Chemical Company and was never, as best I can determine, assigned either an ISBN or Library of Congress catalogue number. I cite it above by its OCLC Control Number. The book is hopelessly out of print, and used copies, when available, sell for forbidding prices. Your only alternative to lay hands on a print copy is an inter-library loan, for which the OCLC number is a useful reference. (I hear members of the write-off generation asking, “What is this ‘library’ of which you speak?”) I found a scanned PDF edition in the library section of the Sciencemadness.org Web site; the scanned pages are sometimes a little gnarly around the bottom, but readable. You will also find the second volume of Gergel's memoirs, The Ageless Gergel, among the works in this collection.

Posted at 18:49

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Tom Swift and His Undersea Search Now Online

The twenty-third installment of the Tom Swift saga, Tom Swift and His Undersea Search, is now posted in the Tom Swift and His Pocket Library collection. As usual, HTML, PDF, PDA eReader, and plain ASCII text editions suitable for reading off- or online are available.

In this adventure, Tom's eccentric friend, Wakefield (“bless my treasure chest”) Damon has joined forces with a a smooth operator named Dixwell Hardley who claims to know, being the only survivor of the wreck, the location of the Pandora, sunk in the West Indies carrying gold worth millions of dollars on its way to finance a revolution in a South American country. Although Tom is put off by Hardley's behaviour, his friendship with Damon persuades him, after he has verified that the ship did indeed exist and was lost in the region claimed, to update his submarine and set off to recover the fortune.

Before departure, however, Tom discovers that this Dixwell Hardley is the very same person who swindled his sweetheart Mary Nestor's uncle out of his share in a Texas oil well whose discovery and development he financed. With this, the undersea mission becomes as much about payback as payoff. Many hazards lurk under even the most placid sea, and Tom and his intrepid crew encounter an assortment of them, the playing out of which unmasks Hardley's character. In the end, despite surprises, everybody gets what's coming to them.

Tom Swift novels are generally accurate when it comes to technical details (while freely bending things as required to make Tom's inventions work, of course). In this book, I noticed two apparent lapses which could have been remedied without affecting the plot in any way. In chapter 15, Tom fires his electric gun, which sends “a powerful charge of electricity, like a flash of lightning, in a straight line toward the object aimed at” toward the attacking creature. It is dubious in the extreme that firing such a weapon in the salt water of the ocean would result in anything other than a short circuit, which may prove more detrimental to Tom than the intended target. In chapter 17, when the compressed air supply has been exhausted and the crew are at risk of suffocation, Tom exhorts them to lie down with their faces near the floor because “The freshest air is near the floor; the bad air rises, being lighter with carbonic acid.” In fact, carbon dioxide is around 50% denser than air, so it would be concentrated near the floor. Perhaps the author is confused by the counsel, when escaping a fire, to crouch near the floor, but that's because the heated combustion products will rise above the cooler, uncontaminated air.

Two public domain Tom Swift novels remain to be posted. When all are complete (this is a long-term project begun in 2004; I have averaged between two and three novels a year), I will revise the already-posted books, bringing their production standards up to those of the more recent postings and incorporating corrections to typographical errors spotted by readers.

Posted at 15:37

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Reading List: Manifold: Time

Baxter, Stephen. Manifold: Time. New York: Del Rey, 2000. ISBN 978-0-345-43076-2.

One claim frequently made by detractors of “hard” (scientifically realistic) science fiction is that the technical details crowd out character development and plot. While this may be the case for some exemplars of the genre, this magnificent novel, diamondoid in its science, is as compelling a page-turner as any thriller I've read in years, and is populated with characters who are simultaneously several sigma eccentric yet believable, who discover profound truths about themselves and each other as the story progresses. How hard the science? Well, this is a story in which quantum gravity, closed timelike curves, the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, strange matter, the bizarre asteroid 3753 Cruithne, cosmological natural selection, the doomsday argument, Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, entrepreneurial asteroid mining, vacuum decay, the long-term prospects for intelligent life in an expanding universe, and sentient, genetically-modified cephalopods all play a part, with the underlying science pretty much correct, at least as far as we understand these sometimes murky areas.

The novel, which was originally published in 2000, takes place in 2010 and subsequent years. NASA's human spaceflight program is grounded, and billionaire Reid Malenfant is ready to mount his own space program based on hand-me-down Shuttle hardware used to build a Big Dumb Booster with the capability to conduct an asteroid prospecting and proof-of-concept mining mission with a single launch from the private spaceport he has built in the Mojave desert. Naturally, NASA and the rest of the U.S. government is doing everything they can to obstruct him. Cornelius Taine, of the mysterious and reputedly flaky Eschatology, Inc., one of Malenfant's financial backers, comes to him with what may be evidence of “downstreamers”—intelligent beings in the distant future—attempting to communicate with humans in the present. Malenfant (who is given to such) veers off onto a tangent and re-purposes his asteroid mission to search for evidence of contact from the future.

Meanwhile, the Earth is going progressively insane. Super-intelligent children are being born at random all around the world, able to intuitively solve problems which have defied researchers for centuries, and for some reason obsessed with the image of a blue disc. Fear of the “Carter catastrophe”, which predicts, based upon the Copernican principle and Bayesian inference, that human civilisation is likely to end in around 200 years, has uncorked all kinds of craziness ranging from apathy, hedonism, denial, suicide cults, religious revivals, and wars aimed at settling old scores before the clock runs out. Ultimately, the only way to falsify the doomsday argument is to demonstrate that humans did survive well into the future beyond it, and Malenfant's renegade mission becomes the focus of global attention, with all players attempting to spin its results, whatever they may be, in their own interest.

This is a story which stretches from the present day to a future so remote and foreign to anything in our own experience that it is almost incomprehensible to us (and the characters through which we experience it) and across a potentially infinite landscape of parallel universes, in which intelligence is not an epiphenomenon emergent from the mindless interactions of particles and fields, but rather a central player in the unfolding of the cosmos. Perhaps the ultimate destiny of our species is to be eschatological engineers. That is, unless the squid get there first.

Here you will experience the sense of wonder of the very best science fiction of past golden ages before everything became dark, claustrophobic, and inward-looking—highly recommended.

Posted at 20:47

Monday, April 23, 2012

Reading List: The Omnivore's Dilemma

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-14-303858-0.

One of the delights of operating this site is the opportunity to interact with visitors, whom I am persuaded are among the most interesting and informed of any audience on the Web. The feedback messages and book recommendations they send are often thought-provoking and sometimes enlightening. I don't know who I have to thank for recommending this book, but I am very grateful they took the time to do so, as it is a thoroughly fascinating look at the modern food chain in the developed world, and exploration of alternatives to it.

The author begins with a look at the “industrial” food chain, which supplies the overwhelming majority of calories consumed on the planet today. Prior to the 20th century, agriculture was almost entirely powered by the Sun. It was sunlight that drove photosynthesis in plants, providing both plant crops and the feed for animals, including those used to pull ploughs and transport farm products to market. The invention of the Haber process in 1909 and its subsequent commercialisation on an industrial scale forever changed this. No longer were crop yields constrained by the amount of nitrogen which could be fixed from the air by bacteria symbiotic with the roots of legume crops, recycled onto fields in the manure and urine of animals, or harvested from the accumulated droppings birds in distant places, but rather able to be dramatically increased by the use of fertiliser whose origin traced back to the fossil fuel which provided the energy to create it. Further, fossil fuel insinuated itself into agriculture in other ways, with the tractor replacing the work of farm hands and draught animals; railroads, steam ships, trucks, and aircraft expanding the distance between production on a farm and consumption to the global scale; and innovations such as refrigeration increasing the time from harvest to use.

All of these factors so conspired to benefit the species Zea mays (which Americans call “corn” and everybody else calls “maize”) that one could craft a dark but plausible science fiction story in which that species of grass, highly modified by selective breeding by indigenous populations in the New World, was actually the dominant species on Earth, having first motivated its modification from the ancestral form to a food plant ideally suited to human consumption, then encouraged its human servants to spread it around the world, develop artificial nutrients and pesticides to allow it to be grown in a vast monoculture, eradicating competitors in its path, and becoming so central to modern human nutrition that trying to eliminate it (or allowing a natural threat to befall it) would condemn billions of humans to starvation. Once you start to think this way, you'll never regard that weedless field of towering corn stretching off to the horizon in precisely the same way….

As the author follows the industrial food chain from a farm in the corn belt to the “wet mill” in which commodity corn is broken down into its molecular constituents and then reassembled into the components of processed food, and to the feedlot, where corn products are used to “finish” meat animals which evolved on a different continent from Zea mays and consequently require food additives and constant medication simply to metabolise this foreign substance, it becomes clear that maize is not a food, but rather a feedstock (indeed, the maize you buy in the supermarket to eat yourself is not this industrial product, but rather “sweet corn” produced entirely separately), just as petroleum is used in the plastics industry. Or the food industry—when you take into account fertiliser, farm machinery, and transportation, more than one calorie of fossil fuel is consumed to produce a calorie of food energy in maize. If only we could make Twinkies directly from crude oil….

All of this (and many things I've elided here in the interest of brevity [Hah! you say]) may persuade you to “go organic” and pay a bit more for those funky foods with the labels showing verdant crops basking in the Sun, contented cows munching grass in expansive fields, and chickens being chickens, scratching for bugs at liberty. If you're already buying these “organic” products and verging on the sin of smugness for doing so, this is not your book—or maybe it is. The author digs into the “industrial organic” state of the art and discovers that while there are certainly benefits to products labelled “organic” (no artificial fertilisers or pesticides, for example, which certainly benefit the land if not the product you buy), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (the villain throughout) has so watered down the definition of “organic” that most products with that designation come from “organic” factory farms, feedlots, and mass poultry confinement facilities. As usual, when the government gets involved, the whole thing is pretty much an enormous scam, which is ultimately damaging to those who are actually trying to provide products with a sustainable solar-powered food chain which respects the land and the nature of the animals living on it.

In the second section of the book, the author explores this alternative by visiting Polyface Farms in Virginia, which practices “grass farming” and produces beef, pork, chickens and eggs, turkeys, rabbits, and forest products for its local market in Virginia. The Salatin family, who owns and operates the farm, views its pastures as a giant solar collector, turning incident sunlight along with water collected by the surrounding forest into calories which feed their animals. All of the animal by-products (even the viscera and blood of chickens slaughtered on site) are recycled into the land. The only outside inputs into the solar-powered cycle are purchased chicken feed, since grass, grubs, and bugs cannot supply adequate energy for the chickens. (OK, there are also inputs of fuel for farm machinery and electricity for refrigeration and processing, but since the pastures are never ploughed, these are minimal compared to a typical farm.)

Polyface performs not only intensive agriculture, but what Salatin calls “management intensive” farming—an information age strategy informed by the traditional ecological balance between grassland, ruminants, and birds. The benefit is not just to the environment, but also in the marketplace. A small holding with only about 100 acres under cultivation is able to support an extended family, produce a variety of products, and by their quality attract customers willing to drive as far as 150 miles each way to buy them at prices well above those at the local supermarket. Anybody who worries about a possible collapse of the industrial food chain and has provided for that contingency by acquiring a plot of farm land well away from population centres will find much to ponder here. Remember, it isn't just about providing for your family and others on the farm: if you're providing food for your community, they're far more likely to come to your defence when the starving urban hordes come your way to plunder.

Finally, the author seeks to shorten his personal food chain to the irreducible minimum by becoming a hunter-gatherer. Overcoming his blue state hoplophobia and handed down mycophobia, he sets out to hunt a feral pig in Sonoma County, California and gather wild mushrooms and herbs to accompany the meal. He even “harvests” cherries from a neighbour's tree overhanging a friend's property in Berkeley under the Roman doctrine of usufruct and makes bread leavened with yeast floating in the air around his house. In doing so, he discovers that there is something to what he had previously dismissed as purple prose in accounts of hunters, and that there is a special satisfaction and feeling of closing the circle in sharing a meal with friends in which every dish was directly obtained by them, individually or in collaboration.

This exploration of food: its origins, its meaning to us, and its place in our contemporary civilisation, makes clear the many stark paradoxes of our present situation. It is abundantly clear that the industrial food chain is harmful to the land, unsustainable due to dependence on finite resources, cruel to animals caught up in it, and unhealthy in many ways to those who consume its products. And yet abandoning it in favour of any of the alternatives presented here would result in a global famine which would make the Irish, Ukrainian, and Chinese famines of the past barely a blip on the curve. Further, billions of the Earth's inhabitants today can only dream of the abundance, variety, and affordability (in terms of hours worked to provide one's food needs) of the developed world diet. And yet at the same time, when one looks at the epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other metabolic disorders among corn-fed populations, you have to wonder whether Zea mays is already looking beyond us and plotting its next conquest.

Posted at 23:29

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Reading List: Kill Shot

Flynn, Vince. Kill Shot. New York: Atria Books, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4165-9520-5.

This is the twelfth novel in the Mitch Rapp (warning—the article at this link contains minor spoilers) series, but chronologically is second in the saga, picking up a year after the events of American Assassin (December 2010). Mitch Rapp has hit his stride as the CIA's weapon of choice against the terror masters, operating alone with only the knowledge of a few people, dispatching his targets with head shots when they least expect it and, in doing so, beginning to sow terror among the terrorists.

Rapp is in Paris to take out the visiting Libyan oil minister, who has been a conduit for funding terrorist attacks, including the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing which killed Rapp's college sweetheart and set him on the trajectory toward his current career—this time it's personal. The hit goes horribly wrong, leaving a trail of bodies and hundreds of cartridge casings in a posh hotel, with the potential of a disastrous public relations blowback for the CIA, and Rapp's superiors looking at prospects ranging from congressional hearings at best to time in Club Fed. Based on how things went down, Rapp becomes persuaded that he was set up and does not know who he can trust and lies low, while his bosses fear the worst: that their assassin has gone rogue.

The profane and ruthless Stan Hurley, who trained Rapp and whose opinion of the “college boy” has matured from dislike to detestation and distrust, is dispatched to Paris to find out what happened, locate Rapp, and if necessary put an end to his career in the manner to which Hurley and his goons are accustomed.

This is a satisfying thriller with plenty of twists and turns, interesting and often complicated characters, and a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. We see, especially in the interrogation of “Victor”, how far Rapp has come from his first days with Hurley, and that the tension between the two may have at its roots the fact that they are becoming more and more alike, a prospect Rapp finds repellent. Unlike American Assassin, which is firmly anchored in the chaos of early 1990s Beirut, apart from a few details (such as mobile telephones being novel and uncommon), the present novel could be set at almost any time since 1990—historical events play no part in the story. It's best to read American Assassin first, as it provides the back story on the characters and will provide more insight into their motivations, but this book works perfectly well as a stand-alone thriller should you prefer to start here.

Posted at 15:46

Friday, April 13, 2012

Paleo Postings: Paleo diet and supplements

A reader inquires:

Shouldn't the Paleo Diet itself contain the all the (expensive?) vitamins and minerals that you list as your dietary supplements?

Not necessarily. While it is true that one can certainly obtain most essential micronutrients from regular dietary intake, doing so requires substantial attention to detail that many people, including me, are not willing to expend the time to do. Then there are matters such as Vitamin D. Ancestral humans spent most of their time outdoors and most hunter/gatherers lived closer to the equator than the bulk of the human population does today. Consequently, they had no difficulty synthesising sufficient Vitamin D from sunlight on their skin. To avoid deficiencies, some foods in the West are “fortified” with Vitamin D, principally milk and breakfast cereal. But these are two of the food groups (dairy and grain) which do not meet the paleo guidelines, so without a supplement you're quite likely to be deficient (unless you spend a lot of time in the Sun around the year). A doctor in practice in California (!) said that she routinely tests her patients (who are not on any special diets) and finds about 40% are deficient in Vitamin D.

I view paleo primarily as a way to avoid substances which ancestral humans did not consume to which natural selection cannot (by its very mechanism) adapt those older than the age of last reproduction. Given that there is substantial biochemical evidence that these foods (in particular grain, and especially wheat and derived products) are linked to a variety of late-onset diseases, this bolsters the evolutionary argument. The connection between the consumption of highly glycemic foods (sugars, processed flour, etc.) and insulin resistance, which leads to obesity and type 2 diabetes, is extremely persuasive.

Note also that in the paleolithic, individuals who survived the very high rate of infant and child mortality (which persisted until the advent of modern medicine and public health measures) and managed to live to age 15 could expect to live a mean 39 years more, for a total mean lifespan from birth of 54 years. If you're a person today who hopes to enjoy a mean lifespan from birth of around 80 years, you become interested in things such as antioxidants, micronutrients which prevent loss of bone mass and calcification of soft tissues, and dietary components which reduce systemic inflammation, which can have a wide variety of deleterious consequences. It is possible to obtain these from diet (after all, the molecules in supplements are mostly extracted from vegetable sources), but it would be quite an effort to balance all of them. For example, you can get all of the zeaxanthin and lutein recommended to prevent or slow macular degeneration in the eye and the development of cataracts by eating a large spinach salad every day. But would you want to, and would you keep it up? It's a lot easier to take a pill and be sure (especially as most of these substances are water soluble and pose no risk of overdose).