600-609: Introduction to applied science. Bunch of Amateurs, by Jack Hitt

Melvil Dewey dedicated the 500s to "natural science" and the 600s to "useful arts," encompassing everything from agriculture to engineering. As it happens, I have already read my share of medical books and home management advice, but I look forward to learning "how to" in some new areas, too. I gotta get inspired about all this applied knowledge and practical advice; thus, Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt.

Jack Hitt is interested in people who do things for the love. He’s hoping that he’ll meet someone who gets a genius grant or invents a time machine, and although, spoiler alert, that doesn’t happen, what does happen is he gets transported, not by the mechanics of inventions, but by the character of the inventors. By which I don't confirm or deny that the inventors are characters but attest that they have character: intelligence, curiosity, persistence and a certain humility, a comfort with being the smartest and yet the poorest or least known person in the room.

Hitt, like the walrus in Alice in Wonderland, talks of many things, among which:

• Dobsonian telescopes, so called because a guy named John Dobson Johnny Appleseeds his way around the country teaching people how to make them out of porthole glass, cardboard tubes, and an eyepiece cannibalized from a pair of cheap binoculars
• The process of figuring out how to make a slightly bigger telescope— with a lens about a meter wide— out of scavenged industrial waste and ready-made components for less than the price of a used car
• How Ben Franklin invented Americans when he went to France
• How a French “transcriber” discovered the shocking truth about Franklin's famous and numerous relationships with French women (they were platonic!) and became one of America's best-known Franklin scholars
• How a loose federation of people with kitchen labs are using recombinant DNA to attempt to create everything from new vaccines to glow-in-the-dark Jello
• That American robots look like they are made to do jobs like tighten lug nuts, vacuum floors, or detonate mines; Japanese robots look like people or animals; and European robots already have a bill of rights because they are that close to robot consciousness
• How various amateur experts have claimed to discover, aka invented:
• Irish settlements in Southeast Connecticut dating from the time of Brendan the Navigator
• “Caucasoid” settlements in the Southern US far predating the crossing of the Bering Strait
• The return of the believed-to-be-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker

Along the way, we learn many fun facts. For example, in one timely passage, Nina Jablonski, paleoanthropologist, theorizes that skin pigmentation is an evolutionary response not to the dangers of sunburn but to the need to regulate the amount of Vitamin D3 manufactured just under the skin in response to intense sunlight. Too little, you feel like crap. Too much…. Oh rats, you also feel like crap! So, assuming humans emerged in Africa with relatively dark skin to protect from excessive D3 manufacture and then began to travel,  evolutionary pressure would favor darker skin near the Equator, and lighter skin in areas that have less sunshine AND no dietary sources of D3, like Scandinavia. In areas like the Arctic, abounding in seal and whale meat, light skin would provide no evolutionary advantage, so the population remained dark. “When we look at the different races… All that we are seeing, the only thing we are seeing when we look at skin color, according to the science, is a meandering trail of Vitamin D3 adaptation rates.”

There’s also a highly relevant-to-our-moment discussion of cognitive biases in the chapter about “Kennewick man.” Apparently it is quite hard for us humans to gain accurate information about reality. We are constantly falling for the first analysis we hear, preferring a confident person who doesn’t know what they are talking about to a tentative person who is getting ready to find you all the facts. We then get caught up in avalanches of bad information that land us squarely on the wrong side of the mountain. Basically: it’s really easy to be wrong, and this book is full of people who are enthusiastically, persistently wrong about topics they really, really love! 

But no fear: it also includes many others who succeed in their quests-- whether for glow-in-the-dark Jello or a bigger, cheaper telescope. So: here's to "how to"!