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.
- 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?
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).
Other Paleo Postings
Posted at
20:07
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