Musings

As the link mentions, the bookstore is in the former Advance Gloves building….

My bonus for forgetting my passport (which meant I couldn’t travel with JCB to Windsor to do errands, including snagging a case of Tanqueray in a lower proof than available in the US of A for my FIL) was several hours browsing in John King Books, the (almost) original downtown Detroit location. I wandered the first and second floors, skipped the third floor (looked like all fiction), and climbed to the fourth. I had my heavy coat. Ya gotta love a bookstore with limited heating and lights over each aisle that you turn on while you’re there and off when you leave.

I behaved myself and only snagged seven volumes; that’s restraint!

And, no, I didn’t see Jay Leno or Teller in the stacks….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 6 Comments »

A lovely bottle of bubbly we shared on Xmas Eve; hand-carried to us all by S. from Germany.

The OLPC laptops are making a (positive) difference, the WP reports; kids favor especially using the camera and video capabilities. Their story is from very rural Peru. Give one (or more) here. You can choose to get one for yourself, too!

The snooty discriminating French may bow to market pressure and expand the geographic area that can produce effervescent wines that can legally be called champagne. Well, at the earliest in 2009, and the vines won’t come on line until, um, at least 2015…leaving them plenty of time to reverse or adjust the decision….

The NYT has finally published (dated yesterday; hmm, I was too busy to read the paper and missed it then) an article that explicates the anthropologist’s analysis of Diamond’s “Collapse”—basically too much environmental determinism and an unbalanced argument about human decisions. Diamond is a geographer, and gets it a bit, well, skewed (you’ve probably gotten that from me eight or ten times; apologies for the repetition). Yes, climate change is a factor, but, the complexity of cultural evolution isn’t addressed properly in D’s volume. [Reminder to self: get that MS finished!]

Posted at 9:09 AM | 2 Comments »

If…*

You’d think that by now biologists agree on what a gene is and have moved on.

Apparently not.

And the reason is both historical and scalar.

It’s historical in that the term was originally used in biology and genetics in a particular way that made sense at the time. Then, as research continued, scientists uncovered additional complexity in the role of genes and genetics. In addition, they began to look at genes from new scales and perspectives.

Thus, while a geneticist tends to still see genes as locatable regions of genomic sequences, those who delve into phenotypes and function tend to find that an insufficient definition. For example, DNA, that old workhorse considered the master molecule of life, is now seen to be sometimes quite passive (meaning other factors can act or dominate), and just plain multifunctional in ways that weren’t known when the locatable regions concept was developed.

If you want to read more (I’m not being sarcastic!), check out this 2007 paper by Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel in PLoS ONE, one of the free, on-line Public Library of Science journals (hence: “PLoS”).

My take on this: see, scale makes all the difference (sorry to flog this idea, but, as I’m sure you’ve discerned, this is one of my truths).

Corollary: it may be difficult to match your language and concepts to the scale of analysis. If you’re using the words already in use, they may no longer suffice if defined in old ways. On the other hand, if you introduce new vocabulary, you may introduce layers of confusion. Still, the latter may well be the best choice.

Philosophical question: does this topic link somehow to my current “off-duty” reading that has settings in China, Tibet, and Turkey?—three different volumes….

Keller, Evelyn Fox, and David Harel (2007) Beyond the Gene. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1231. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001231 [Apologies to AFK if she’d prefer to be “Fox Keller, Evelyn”; I see both in the Google-able world.]

Sidebar: I see pink champagne, rechristened rosé champagne of course, is très chic, but I remain a prosecco gal! (Especially at those prices!)

Okay, one more. How could I not link to this, on a huge ice skating rink in Mexico City’s main plaza, created atop forty-six miles of chilling tubes, energized by ten truck-generators? Did they make the rink because the US border is harder to cross these days?—so they import the cold?

* If your eyes are sharp and your screen is good, you’ll see ice—the picture is from several years back, but right here in good ol’ ATL….

Today’s vocabulary—peripeteia

the sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, often used referring to fictional narrative.

Posted at 7:16 PM | 1 Comment »

Doh!

I can hardly believe it took me until today to realize that burning candles, fireplaces, and campfires add to the carbon footprint!

Posted at 4:59 PM | Comments Off on CARBON sources

The share of the population possessing college degrees in the 1970s is the best predictor of which northeastern and midwestern cities have done well since then.

That is, northeastern and midwestern cities in the US of A….

Edward L. Glaeser says this in an article about Buffalo’s potential for “coming back” from the decline of this once-important manufacturing and transshipment hub.

Glaeser makes the point that however much tax/government money flows into the community, and however wise and effective are the projects that money is used for, what really makes the difference are citizen-originated entrepreneurial undertakings that effectively use human capital. Glaeser cites Boston and Minneapolis as examples of that kind of turn-around.

What Glaeser doesn’t mention, at least in this article, is that both those cities also have important, prominent, and vibrant university and medical communities that maintained their eminence throughout the second half of the last century. I keep thinking both have to have been important components of the mix of factors that allowed the reinvention/survival of those cities—factors that aren’t prominent in dear old Buffalo….

You will not be surprised to know that I read Glaeser’s article while thinking about Detroit and other cities in my home state. Same huge population and economic declines as Buffalo. Same elevated percentages of poor(ish) and generally poorly educated people. And the educational and medical training and treatment nexuses of the state are not in Detroit. Not good odds….

I also wonder if there are parallels among European cities, once prominent in transportation networks webbed among ports along coasts or rivers….

Posted at 11:12 PM | Comments Off on Declines/resurgence

Mexican field turned over with moldboard plow (rather 16th C in design), probably pulled by an ox.

The Byzantine plow was, technically, not a plow at all, but a sole ard.

Boy, there’s a term you don’t see every day. “Sole ard.” Kinda makes your knees weak, doesn’t it?

FYI, apparently a sole ard scratches the surface rather than turning it over like the plows we see today. The tool is suitable for shallow tilling, as in arid areas, and requires less effort to use than moldboard plows (less force is needed than to overturn the soil).

Bryer, Anthony. 2002. “The Means of Agricultural Production: Muscle and Tools,” in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1, Studies, vol. 39. Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou, pp. 101–13. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Page 107.

Posted at 6:13 PM | 2 Comments »

We learned many new vocabulary words at the Corning Museum of Glass, which I should have expected but didn’t.

Some words describe the glass objects, or parts of them. Others derive from the manufacturing process. All of them are not in the vocabularies of most of us. Take these two words: goblet and prunt. You are most likely familiar with the first and probably not with the second.

Technically, a goblet is a bowl on a stem supported by a foot.

Prunts are dabs or blobs of glass attached to the stem. They are both decorative, and sometimes embellished with a stamp, and can help improve the drinker’s grip.

This goblet (sorry, I didn’t photo the identification tag, but I suspect, hmm, maybe German?) has green prunts that have been stamped with a knobbly texture.

These goblets are fairly large, would have been relatively costly for most households, held alcoholic beverages, and may have been passed among diners—all the more reason for increasing the likelihood of safe passage by enhancing the grip.

Posted at 4:56 PM | Comments Off on Prunted goblet

The other day in western PA we were surprised by a smallish yet chubby black bear that scrambled across a guardrail and zipped across the road in front of us (no photo, sorry) in a mad dash for the woods on the other side (add your own riff on the old chicken-crossed-the-road joke here), but this snow we found in PA? in NY? is more evocative of winter for me. In our part of Atlanta, we see snow on the ground maybe every two or three years, although I guess with global warming that frequency may decrease. On the other hand, during the Little Ice Age, there was more snow across the Southeast, so that DeSoto and his bunch suffered a cold and unpleasant winter in 1539 and 1540 (I think) in southeastern North America. Can you tell I’m thinking about cycling and fluctuations (actually, both in nature/climate, and in societies)?

Posted at 11:22 PM | Comments Off on Snow (again)

On a late-afternoon walk exploration in the neighborhood of friends, a place unfamiliar to us in any detail, we discovered a lovely county park, sheltering historic Trimborn Farm.

As we wandered among the outbuildings clustered around the house, they all seemed to be related to farming until I spotted this one long stone structure that seemed quite industrial. Of course, we’d wandered onto the property through a side field, completely bypassing the hysterical marker, so we had no cues from the written word.

The Guru, determined to utilize all powers bestowed by the iPhone, quickly googled and discovered we were looking at the remains of a lime operation.

Diversification in farm country, I thought….

Posted at 7:25 PM | Comments Off on Trimborn Farm

Seems like our future, maybe the future of life “as we know it” on this planet, is wrapped up in water. Gotta have water.

Gotta have air, too, but it seems that we can survive long enough to reproduce when we live with polluted air. For example, consider smokers, who deliberately inhale highly polluted air (although other airborne contaminants are more dangerous than the typical modern US ciggy), and modern urban China. No lack of reproductive success with either of those populations.

Food, well, yup, that’s a necessity. But we get our food primarily from agribusiness. And agriculture is without a doubt dependent on water, so our food sources depend on water. too.

By water, I don’t mean simply potable water, or rainfall, or even groundwater. But the big, capital W water: that is, water from anywhere.

If I decided to go into the legal profession, I’d specialize in legal issues associated with water. It ties into human rights, civil rights, group vs individual rights, ownership, distribution control, the whole shebang.

I’m thinking, in fact, that the folks who are specialists in other resources (petroleum products, scarce metals and minerals) are already working to corner markets and build in legal loopholes to give Them advantages in the economics of water. I also figure that The Angler and his ilk have been getting laws changed to help those folks, and that we’ll only find that out sometime in the mist-free future….

At first glance, I was mystified today when I examined our water/sewer bill and discovered we pay over twice as much for sewage (based on how much water we consume, so the volumes are—assumed to be—the same) than for water. But then I figured, I suppose it costs more to make sure sewage doesn’t contaminate, tada!, water, than it does simply to deliver clean water to my house.

Next topic to ponder: how better to use graywater (more on this in the southwest than these parts: examples from Arizona and New Mexico), a practice promoted in a leaflet included with our water/sewer bill. Someone who goes to the trouble of toting their shower water out to plants was lauded. We use our dish water on outdoor plants, but the shower water goes down the drain (for now). As I understood it (maybe this is now incorrect: note to self, check on this), we couldn’t directly pipe our graywater into the yard, but we can carry it out there. Some people use graywater (sometimes greywater) for flushing, and I guess that may not be a violation.

Rather twisted logic there, no?

So, would the agribusiness water demand drop if we consumed significantly less grain (takes lots of water to grow and process) replacing it with non-starchy vegetables (as diet specialists recommend would improve our health)?—veggies sold only minimally processed?

Posted at 5:30 PM | Comments Off on Water, water…