[studiotheory]

Vaclav Smil’s “Should We Eat Meat?”

This is not an ideological discussion for or against carnivorousness, as the back cover says. Rather it is a detailed description of what meat is, its role in the evolution of humans, its role in the cultural history of diet, a description of the production of meat for mass consumption, and possible futures. 

Three particularly strong take-aways for me:

• His matter-of-fact description of what meat is (what qualifies has changed over time), in chapter 1, made it unlikely I could eat meat in the near future. The description of how meat is produced added an exponent or two to that time frame. 
  
• His research leads him to believe that humans evolved cognitively as we did due to meat eating, not only from the value of the accessible protein provided but also, and at least as importantly, due to the social skills required to navigate shared hunting and shared feeding. 
  
• Last year 300 MILLION cattle were slaughtered to feed humans. Even though there are 6 billion of us, I still found that shocking. 
  

What if?

I am reading a lot of old science – mostly articles written in the 1800s but some as far back as the 1500s and a few into the early 20th century. Many were decried as wrong, impossible, heresy, but have since been discovered, mostly in the 20th century, to have been on to something. 

What if Gauss was right about ghosts? 

What if physics is not math i.e. it is not a set of natural laws, god-given but rather a type of statistics beholden to probabilities in the same manner.Thus, this would allow for such oddities as ghosts.

Books! My Top 100 from 2009

Found an old list today of my top 100 books. Probably of books I’d read recently, looking at the list. A lot of re-reads, but I think I was moving and purging, so probably giving them all another go before they went. 

My 100 only goes to 52, it seems. 

1.   The Cellist of Sarajevo - Galloway

2.   The Time Traveler’s Wife – Niffeneger

3.   Tiger, Tiger - Alfred Bester

4.   The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester

5.   The Sparrow & Children of God – Mary Doria Russell

6.   God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

7.   Hardboiled Wonderland at the End of the World – Haruki Murakami

8.   Regeneration – Pat Barker

9.   Corelli’s Mandolin – de Bernieres

10.        Half A Yellow Sun – Adichie

11.        The Roaches Have No King – Daniel Evan Wiess

12.        Philosophical Investigations – Philip Kerr

13.        Good Omens – Prachett & Gaiman

14.        Memoirs of a Geisha – Golden

15.        The Master and Margarita – Bulgakov

16.        The Baron in the Trees – Italo Calvino

17.        Midwives – Bohjalian

18.        Hopeful Monsters - Moseley

19.        The Dwarf - Lagerkvist

20.        Anil’s Ghost – Ondaatje

21.        The English Patient - Ondaatje

22.        A Thousand Splendid Suns – Hosseini

23.        The Bone People – Keri Hulme

24.        Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – Lisa See

25.        People of the Book – Geraldine Brooks

26.        Where the Northern Lights Know Your Name – Vendela Vida

27.        I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters - Alameddine

28.        A Tale of Love and Darkness – Amos Oz

29.        The Reader – Bernard Schlink

30.        Suite Française – Némirovsky

31.        The ¨Passion – Jeanette Winterson

32.        They Whisper – Robert Olen Butler

33.        Trainspotting – Welsh

34.        The History of the Siege of Lisbon – Jose Saramago

35.        Play it As It Lays – Joan Didion

36.        The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

37.        All The Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy

38.        The Glass Palace – Amitav Ghosh

39.        Geek Love – Katherine Dunn

40.        Fatelessness – Imre Kertész

41.        The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles

42.        The Map of Love – Ahdaf Soueif

43.        Embers – Sandoe Marai

44.        Before – Irini Spanidou

45.        An Equal Music – Vikram Seth

46.        The Architect of Ruins – Rosendorfer

47.        The Bone People – Keri Hulme

48.        The Remains of the Day – Ishiguro

49.        Netherland – O’Neill

50.        City of Thieves – Benioff

51.        night of the mi'raj by Zoe Ferraris

Losing to one of ones selves

I was playing pool with myself the other night.  I was playing 9 ball, against myself. And I lost. Does this sound familiar?

I’d gone to play pool because I needed to think out a complex problem, and the rote-ness of the game and the required motor skills seems to quiet down something that stands in the way, when I sit at my desk staring at the big question I am trying to answer.

Instead of the Big Question, I started pondering this. How is it that I can play a game against myself and lose? How is it that there is the ability to have two of me playing against each other, but I associate more strongly with one, such that if I lose, I admit it, and I feel beaten?  How do I decide which one is me, and at what point in the game do I choose the me I am, and acknowledge the other me is my adversary? 

As usual, I’ve been asking people if they can lose a game against themself. Some people I’ve do this, and others don’t begin to comprehend how you can lose a game when you are playing against yourself. 

Interesting question of (perhaps) primary selves and secondary selves, some hierarchy that we create when we are interacting amongst our selves. 

Can you lose to yourself? 

The ‘Lost’ Language of Faroese

Yesterday I found a lovely reminiscence by Eric Wilson of his time with Steinbjørn Jacobsen, a Faroese poet, and his experience with the language.  Wilson was asked to escort Jacobsen around the United States on a trip. The State Department had invited him, thinking that he was a political activist who the US wanted ‘on their side’ in case the Faroese bid for independence from Denmark was successful.  (It was successful of a sort. The Faroese voted overwhelmingly for independence and the Danes opted to ignore this.)  Reading his memoir of mis-adventures reminded me of my slight adventures with the Faroese language.

In October of 2012 I awoke in NYC one morning and realized it had been too long since I’d been on a ferry. I tend to ride northern sea ferries and winter was setting in, so the ‘ice permitting’ clause starts to be invoked and the ferries stop running. I bought a ticket for the Smyril line that goes from north east Iceland to the Faroe Islands to northern Denmark. It would take four and a half days, with a stop in the Faroe Islands that would give me enough time to see Tórshavn but not much else.

I had 6 connections to be made to arrive to the ferry dock on time, a rather ridiculous number, and this trip, like many, happened by chance and luck and kindness. I have found, in ferry travel, that everything that can go wrong does, and new wrongs appear that have never been envisaged. I find it a most deep type of meditation, to simply flow with in the direction I need to be going, and accept that it will be. I took a car to a train to a train to a plane to a bus to a plane to a bus to the ferry. I cross the NYC, the Atlantic, and Iceland, arriving in a deep, dark, cold, snow whitened landscape shadowed by an enormous ship with festive lights on the open deck/bar on the top.

The boat left late in the evening, and I wandered the decks and the interior spaces and revelled in my absolute inability to understand any of the languages being spoken. I was reasonably certain I knew which languages they were, a mix of Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish with a smattering of Polish and Romanian. I sat on the deck in the dark of night in an adirondack chair drinking cheap wine from a tap and listened to the languages swirl around me. Cacophany of a sort, but the tones and sense, the affection, and the structures created a cocoon and I was happy. In part it is rare that I don’t understand anything spoken, so it was an opportunity to soak in something else, something visceral. (photos here) 

Occasionally people would stop and speak to me, with their flat clipped scandinavian vowels, wondering what I was doing on a boat like this. The men all wore beautiful knit sweaters and proper boots. There was a scent of oil and fish and cigarette smoked mixed in with the beer and the camaraderie.

The day we spent in the Faroes I took a long walk to the highest point I could see, the light slanting across the oceans and the pyramidic islands with the familiarity of northern Scandinavia, a color with a slight yellow undertone and a deep warmth which turns to a bluer shade in the evenings and always makes me want to stay.

Back on the boat evening dropped in to place with the darkest curtain of night I think I have ever seen; even the stars were swallowed by the sea. The rains picked up and the boat shoved its way across this massive sea, swallowed in the endless dark. It was terrifying, this dark. I’ve never seen a dark swallow all the light with so little effort. The grand seas and the scent of diesel make me at ease, and the evening settled in to my listening of languages and watching of peoples.

I stopped in to a bar inside the ship and a man and a boy were playing music and singing songs. They sounded like torch songs to me, though I understood nothing, and the relationship between man and boy was unclear. The crowd was transfixed and swaying. I felt a bit like I’d happened upon Barry Manilow in an alternate, ocean-borne universe. I couldn’t, however, categorize the language, it didn’t match the sounds or patterns and I listened and listened and finally leaned over to the young man next to me to ask what I was hearing. “Faroese,” he said. “These are the songs we all grew up on.” He floated away for a moment, lost in his own world, then returned, and began to translate for me.

The next night we sat on the deck and exchanged words. We pulled out my notebook and spelled out our names and our words and their sounds and meanings. We took pleasure in how little sense we made to the other. We spoke of languages for hours, the history of his, the structure, how it existed when he was a boy and how it exists now. For the remaining 36 hours, we talked, drew pictures, shared words, and he told me the history of his life, his Faroes, his Faroese.

We caught each other’s eye as we disembarked, but no acknowledgement was made, and we went our ways, to our worlds. 

Knotty Objects | MIT

My friend Carol and I were reviewing the overview of the upcoming MIT Media Lab Summit on Knotty Objects.  The description: 

This July, we will explore the apertures and entanglements between and across design and technology.

The first MIT Media Lab Summit devoted to design, Knotty Objects will gather designers, scientists, engineers, makers, writers, curators, and scholars around the discussion of four complex and omnipresent objects, along with the rich stories they can tell. The objects–brick, bitcoin, steak, and phone–will become lenses through which we examine the transdisciplinary nature of contemporary design.

The MIT Media Lab’s antidisciplinary approach to research positions it to interrogate design and technology’s relationship: the tensions; their affinities and entanglements; their closeness and distance.

Together, the event’s speakers will tackle concepts and products; prototypes and series; manufacturing and construction methods and their relationship with tradition and material culture; designing with bricks, circuits, and cells; and imagining a future that is based on science and fueled by design. 

Carol’s first comment, after reading the presenters’ bios, was, “they should have included archeologists to understand the deep histories of these four items” which tossed us into a half day lost on discussion of the origins and histories of the evolution of brick/the built environment, currency, meat and the cultivation of animals for food from small to factory, and the telegraph/wireless and forward.

We’ve been discussing these as individual streams of development, tied as much as we can to the context of their times, and odd outlying events that seem relevant but haven’t really been integrated. (Vegetarianism, for example, is an interesting counterpoint to the design and technology of steak.) 

Where it begins to get interesting, and we’ve not gotten there, is to consider the co-evolution of these elements, much as one could look at a human as genome+proteome+biome+virome+environment. 

Of course these four all evolved over time in step with the evolution of the world as we know it, but it seems likely that there are interesting and odd inflection points that require some scraping away at and reading of the complex histories of humanity to really understand. 

Another obvious complexity is the uneven (unequal?) distribution of modifications on these four tracks by varying cultures and populations.  The first pass always surfaces the most technologically advanced societies of now, but this doesn’t appear to always be the most interesting, just the most likely to be on the internet and thus the most likely to be visible. 

[These entries are a something of a throwback to the weekly ‘what I’m thinking about’ posts from a few years ago. I have no answers or conclusions, just much pondering. Perhaps it is time I brought those back. And you weigh in with your thoughts. You can also email me, at my twitter handle @gmail. I’d love to hear more from you.]

The origins of science

My research on magnetism, initially a narrow quest to better understand Maxwell’s equations and how the great force of magnetism, along with gravity and electricity, creates the world in which we live, has continually extended out until the enormity of my lack of knowledge occasionally overwhelms me.  (This list should probably include nuclear physics as well, or something on that level, but wasn’t included in my initial press to understand how these three forces interrelate.) 

One of the areas that requires me to delve deeper and to gather greater understanding revolves around the 16th century, and what science was, how it changed, and what it became as time moved forward.  I’ve ended up with a great set of books, not yet entirely finished, that are assisting in providing context for the original texts that I am reading (From those who wrote in English, Latin, Arabic, Chinese as well as French and German.)  It’s a pretty non-academic mix, but I’ve got endless papers and histories to read, and again, all that original source material. (Happy for more recommendations as well. Please suggest!)

These books are:

• Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe. John Freely
• The First Scientist. Brian Clegg (About Francis Bacon)
  
• The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts. Edward Grant.
  
• The Science of Shakespeare. Dan Falk
  
• The Jewel House. Deborah E. Harkness.
  
• To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. Steven Wienberg
  

I’ve also gone back to Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as well as some specific histories of discovery, from Dava Sobel’s work to Philip Ball.  (This is where I inject my usual grumble about my books being largely in storage. I have an entire box I’d like to pull out and flip through, that would be relevant to the broadening of my knowledge in this space, and the fluency to which I can provide context to the time period.)

This morning, as a break, I picked up and read Oliver Sack’s autobiography, On the Move. In addition to being a wonderful read and teaching me a great deal about the history of what he has studied, his emphasis on two things, the history of scientific/medical knowledge, and the narratives that surround our knowing and learning of science and medical fields remind me that the stories we choose to tell and the contexts in which we tell them crucial information to the ‘thing itself’. 

Sack’s book was a beautiful, lyrical, and easy to read reminder of why I have gone back to five centuries of initial sources as I seek to better understand the history of magnetism and how it ties in to the fabric of so much of our world.

Will Putin Ride Magnetic North?

Magnetic north moves and wobbles at the top of the northern hemisphere. It does not coincide with what we think of as geographical north but it is in the general direction. 

When first pinpointed by Ross in 1831 it was located in Canada. On his way to find the pole he also discovered some new land and some new ocean. Back then, he had to track with equipment across ice and land for two years.  

Since then there have been numerous exploratory parties tracking and measuring it’s placement. There are terrestrial tracking stations, and the ESA’s Swarm satellites. Everyone is watching. Everyone is measuring.  It is currently moving towards Siberia, and it has picked up speed in the past few decades. 

While it’s unlikely magnetic north will reach siberia for a few more decades, I just can’t help but try to imagine what Putin would do if it popped up in his sovereign territory.  Would he ride it topless? Declare that no one else could use it? Surround it with tanks? 

In 1833 Ross declared, “The science of magnetism, indeed, is eminently British.”  I am certain Putin could attempt to prove him wrong with great spectacle.