670-679: Manufacturing. Stationery Fever!!

from the Wonderfair Website

When you visit my home town, Lawrence, Kansas (that is on your bucket list, right?), be sure to check out my favorite store there, and one of my favorite stores in the world: Wonderfair, rightly titled Print Palace of the Great Plains. There you will find everything to write on, everything to write with, and a curated selection of other unparalleled paper-adjacent delights. If this doesn't quicken your heart, this blog post is not for you.

If it does, you may need the current Dewey Decimal selection, Stationery Fever, by John Z. Komurki. This book is a joy to behold and a fount of information about the origins, uses and unimagined possibilities of everyday objects like pencils, erasers and staplers. Read this book, appreciate its beautiful design, drool over the pictures of hitherto unimagined variations on the theme of "school notebook"-- but beware, because the love of office supplies can be a dangerous -and expensive-- condition. Here are just a few stunning pieces of design that are waiting to beautify your desk or backpack: 

https://cwpencils.com/shapes-paperclips/

Beautiful paperclips, designed by Daphna Laurens. I mean, okay, they're paper clips, but aren't they elegant? CW Pencil Enterprise carries several other charming types of paper clips and pushpins as well.

https://www.stabilo.com/com/products/highlighting/highlighters/stabilo-boss-original-pastel/

The classic Stabilo Boss highlighter, available in 23 colors, is suitable not only for study but also for coloring and sketching, as illustrated above. It is noteworthy as one of the few watercolor pens on the market with a thick, arthritis-friendly barrel. 

https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/notebook-classic.html

The Leuchtturm notebook is available in readymade versions, but why not specify your own size, ruling and cover color? No matter what you choose, you will also get the most blindingly obvious and brilliant innovation in notebooks known to man: numbered pages and a table of contents. Journal writers, sketchbook keepers, and recipe collectors, you know what this means! For the first time in your life, you will actually be able to find that one thing you put in that one notebook sometime last winter-- provided you kept the table of contents updated!

https://www.uistencils.com/products/everyday-carry-kit

Are you in UI/UX? I wish I was, because is not the above just a beautiful object? It is designed specifically for phone app developers.

https://bellezainfinita.com/es/inicio/24-cuadernos-9788493508739.html

You guys, these notebooks! They just have to be seen to be fully appreciated. I had to order them from Present and Correct in the UK, but they are totally worth it. They are works of art that you can collaborate with as you keep your journal. They just have to be seen to be believed! Go online and look at the photos, but then just bite the bullet (if you live in the US) and pay the terrible exchange rate and the exorbitant postage, as they are the most elegant and inspiring journals you will ever own. Each volume is lined in the way indicated on the cover: ruled, grid, slanted and circular-- but every spread is a different pattern!!! Imagine the possibilities as you unspool your circular thinking or create a newspaper about your day with a page containing beautifully designed lined and unlined sections.

See what I mean? The more you know about paper, pencils, and staplers, the more you realize that these items you use every day can really be inspiring!

660-669: Chemical Engineering. Chromotopia, by David Coles

 Most beginning artists quickly realize that they need to know how to use color. For that, I refer you to the classic and beautiful Interaction of Color (also available as an iPad app!) for which colors to select, and to Color by Betty Edwards for how to create the colors you choose out of a 15-tube palette. Edwards nods to the chemistry of color when she talks about the limitations of color mixing and the behavioral differences between all the hues labelled "blue." But if all that information leaves you wondering, "But why? Why are there so many blues (or greens, or yellows, or...), and why do they have such odd names, and why are they all different kinds of prices, and why do they not do as I expected when I mix them?" -- well, for those kinds of questions, Coles is your man.

Color is chemistry, as it turns out. Well, and physics-- the physics of light. Chromotopia is everything you ever wanted to know about how color is made. Turns out paint-- or dye, or any kind of color-- is not made out of, I dunno, color, or magic light-refracting science. It's all made out of stuff. Everything from bugs to plants to rocks to poop to rust has been ground up, boiled, burned, corroded and/or infused to make pigments that, when added to oil or egg or water, become paint or dye. They are chemicals that react with other chemicals, sometimes with unexpected results--ultramarine can become pink when heated; cobalt can react with other additives to become green, violet or yellow. 

From Egyptian Ceramic Art, by Henry Wallis

People have been making pigments out of whatever they had around ever since the cave paintings, and the whole time they've been trying to solve three problems: expense, toxicity and lightfastness. Expense was the first challenge. Colors that weren't made of dirt and smoke and wood were typically made of ground-up gemstones or of organic matter than had to be highly concentrated, like indigo or tyrian purple. The Egyptians were the first to synthesize a brilliant color, the blue of faience.

However, both natural and synthetic pigments can be dangerous. Vermilion was made with mercury, which was mined by slaves who typically were killed by the work. Lead white has been used since ancient times, but, of course, was recently discovered to be highly toxic. Emerald green is made of arsenic, which you would think would be a dealbreaker, but, no-- It was available for sale until 1960! 

Lightfastness may seem like a trivial problem compared to the others, but any artist who has worked hard on a watercolor only to find its blues and greens disappearing in sunlight will agree that it must be addressed. The impermanence of color has affected our understanding of art history, too-- many medieval paintings seem to represent grass and trees as blue only because the greens they could access were unstable. And the Greeks did not choose to live in a rarified, Instagram-ready all-white world-- ultraviolet light studies have revealed that they painted their statues in vibrant, lifelike colors. Therefore, advances in lightfastness are just as welcome as those in affordability and safety.

PS-- if you want to make your own colors, there are five recipes at the back of the book. However, this book is not really designed to make you a better painter; it will just help you develop your respect for your materials!

650-659: How to Succeed, How to Succeed, How to Succeed in Business

Ugh. Okay. I've read The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. I've read The Search for Excellence. I've read Who Moved My Cheese? I've read The One-Minute Manager and The Black Swan and even Selling the Dream . But the how-to business book I would read again (or at least watch the movie)? The one, the only, the inimitable How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, by Shepherd Mead. 

I first read this book when I was approximately 9 years old (I was a precocious child). I have no idea why I would have picked it up-- maybe I liked the cover. Maybe I liked the hit song that came from the musical: "I Believe in You," as sung by Michele Lee. But once I started reading, I was completely intrigued by the idea that anyone-- anyone!-- could game their way up the corporate ladder with just a few simple tools. Learn to say, "Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes;" ease your way into an empty office; be sure to invent reasons to be absent during work hours but visible evenings and weekends; oh, and disregard all the references to "men." Surely that's "men" as in "all men are created equal," not "men" as in "men's room." 

As you might have gathered, aspects of the book have not aged well (all those "men;" how to write a six-page memo), while others (how to crib, er, generate impressive ideas) are more relevant than ever, as the new and charming introduction by Stanley Bing explains. The important point, however, is that unlike Lean In, Lead from the Outside, Dare to Be Great, and even How to Win Friends and Influence People, Mead's classic has two unbeatable advantages. One: it will not make you tired before you even start reading it. And two: there's a musical version widely available for 3 bucks on streaming services. 

So, if you want to succeed, go ahead-- do it without really trying!

640-649: How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen

Do you ever look at a book list and think to yourself, "Check, check and check?" That's how I felt when I went to the 640s-- because, dear children, I came of age before the Internet. That's right, kids-- no YouTube, no food bloggers-- in fact, no HDTV. If we wanted to know how to do something around the house, we had to hie ourselves to the library or the book sale and darn well touch dead trees to figure it out.

Cookbooks? Um, yeah! I learned to cook-- well, actually, from my mom, but she told me to read cookbooks, not just look up recipes in them, so I read More with Less and The Joy of Cooking. DIY around the house? A book taught me to build in bookshelves and construct an extra kitchen cabinet-- they weren't works of art, but they got it done. Another one showed me how to paint fake wood panelling (hint: immediately) or staple fabric over it. Fashion, hair and makeup? Not really my biggest thing, but I might have read a slim volume or two in junior high and high school-- and I definitely jumped on the Color Me Beautiful bandwagon. Living your best life around the house--there's a book for that. De-cluttering-- hm, I could write the book on that. I can throw your crap away like a boss. In fact, I can even get rid of things you actually wanted! Just leave them at my house without explanation-- in six months or less they will be out the door. Marriage? I speak all five love languages and know what animal my spouse is. I was a FLYLady until I found out that meant I had to put shoes on first thing in the morning. I dared to discipline and hugged a porcupine and parented with love and logic and definitely raised some readers. But one thing I never did was find out How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen. It is a sort of sequel to How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, and was written by Faber's daughter, Joanna Faber, and Joanna's friend since childhood, Julie King.

I'd sort of vaguely heard of the earlier book, which came out in 1980, but, shame on me, I never bothered to read it. I thought I had a plan, and when that plan started to reveal its limitations, I had no plan B. And then everyone grew up and it was a moot point. And then they started having kids... and I knew that as a grandparent, I wanted a new plan A.

It was actually one of my sons who recommended How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen to me. He pitched it as not only the best book on child-rearing but also the best book on communication, period, that he had ever read. And now that I have read it too, I am sold.

People, don't do what I did. Don't miss this book. Don't miss these ideas. You need them now. You need them yesterday! They are powerful. And, bonus, you will not hurt yourself reading this "survival guide." It is full of scenarios and real-life experiences of people using the tools and/or failing to do so... and, you guys, every one of these stories, not surprisingly, features a kid between the ages of 2 and 7, so they're all adorable!

What are these tools, you ask? Here they are, just in the order they appear in the first half of the book:

• Acknowledge feelings, with words, writing, art, or even just quiet attention
• Validate feelings by giving in fantasy what you can't give in reality
• Make a chore into a game-- and appreciate progress!
• Offer acceptable and meaningful choices
• Put the child in charge
• Instead of commanding:
• Give information
• Say one word
• Describe what you see and/or how you feel
• Write a silly note
• When necessary, take action without insult
• When something goes wrong:
• Express your feelings strongly
• Show your child how to make amends
• Remove the object or change the situation that's causing problems
• Ultimately, maybe reconsider your expectations
• Problem-solve:
• Acknowledge your child's feelings
• Describe the problem
• Brainstorm ideas without criticism
• Decide what ideas you both like
• Try out your solutions!
• Praise specifically, not generally:
• Describe what you see
• Describe the effect on others
• Describe effort
• Describe progress
• For kids who are differently wired (to use the authors' term):
• Join them in their world
• Take time to imagine and verbalize what your child is experiencing
• Put into words what your child is trying to communicate
• Adjust expecations and manage the environment rather than the child
• Use notes, checklists, pictures, songs, gestures instead of just endless words
• When all else fails, ask yourself: 
• Are they hangry?
• Are they sleepy?
• Are they overwhelmed?
• Are they just not ready for this situation?

...and that's just the first half of the book! The whole second half applies these tools to various situations: food, mornings, siblings, shopping, lies, tattles, cleaning up, doctors, hitting and sleep. There are even chapters about what to do when parents get angry and when the tools don't work.

These tools make a great combination with the concepts in Parenting with Love and Logic. Love and Logic is built on the concept that you can't control anyone else, you can only control yourself, and that if you set boundaries around your own behavior so that you avoid frustrating situations, you will be able to more calmly respond to whatever other people bring at you. How to Talk teaches you how to not be a jerk while setting those boundaries. And these two ideas --controlling your own behavior so that you get more of what you want out of life, and respecting other people's feelings and desires whether you can grant them or not-- are vital for everyone!

630-639: Gardening Books in February

Today is a good day-- it was above freezing for most of the daylight hours. There are 5 inches of snow on the ground... maybe 6 or 7. It's hard to know, with the freeze-and-thaw, snow-and-rain cycle that has been February 2021. Is this just the snow from Thursday? Did we have snow Monday, too? Constant shoveling has created a small mountain of debris that is starting to avalanche back across the sidewalk. 

And of course we're still in quarantine lite, so there'll be no eating out or going to the movies while we wait for spring. Our new entertainment is looking at the stories told by the animal tracks criss-crossing what once was our lawn. 

In light of all that, what better way to occupy an hour than with a gardening book? Good Weed, Bad Weed  is a delightful guide to the stuff that actually *wants* to grow in your garden. The author, like me, is a big advocate of a lawn sprinkled with tiny flowers. I have a rule never to mow till after Easter, and even then sometimes I leave patches of of "lawn" that are full of snowdrops and buttercups for another month. The borough has yet to come after me-- if you make the patches look tidy enough, I guess they come under the classification of "weedy garden" rather than "unmowed grass."

A close-up of my lawn last spring

The book confirmed a lot of things I already knew or suspected. Thistle must be eradicated, preferably by pulling rather than digging. That stuff I thought might be crabgrass? It is, and my lawn would be better off without it, even though it *is* green and sort of vaguely grassy. Wild garlic and onion can absolutely be eaten, which is a good thing because it is almost impossible to completely eradicate them from the lawn and garden. Violets and buttercups are a joy and should be encouraged wherever possible. Fleabane and wild aster are not everybody's thing, but there's nothing wrong with cultivating them if you like.

I did learn some very useful new information. Don't pull dandelions until they are blooming, because the blooms are cheerful and the plant won't spread till it goes to seed. The best approach to a lawn overfull of crabgrass, wild onions, and henbit is to reseed the lawn every year in early spring. (The book says to seed again in fall, but in our situation, when we are still raking in mid-December, that would probably be pretty ineffective.) Plaintain (not the fruit, the broadleaf weed) only grows in compacted soil, so an aerator will discourage it. The thing I always thought was bugleweed is probably henbit, and the thing with the little yellow trumpet-shaped flowers is not clover but wood sorrell. By any name, both are welcome in the grass, and neither in the flower beds!

Now if only the snow would melt, I can get out there and start pulling my weeds and appreciating my wildflowers!

Cold War Kid: A Nuclear Family Vacation, by Hodge and Weinberger

 

"Shall we play a game?" says the War Operation Plan Response computer to Matthew Broderick's character in War Games. I was 22 years old when this movie came out and thought it was one of the most important I'd ever seen. I had grown up in the shadow of my own little desk as I dutifully "duck and cover" drilled, and in the shadow of the civil defense symbol on public buildings. By the time I was 8 I had figured out that global thermonuclear war is a game where the only winning move is not to play-- how hard would it be for our nation's leaders to come to the same resolution?

And yet, 38 years after that movie came out, 32 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US still holds 5,800 nuclear weapons, and missileers sit in underground bunkers all over the US awaiting the order that would release one or more of the nation's 450 ICBMs on a pathway to mutual assured destruction.  

In 2008, Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger set out on a road trip that turned into two years' worth of vacations spent in nuclear silos, radioactive wastelands, and hidden communities throughout the US and around the world. And they learned and saw with their own eyes that, ironically, military authorities and civilian communities alike depend on the maintenance, monitoring, testing and even manufacture of weapons of mass destruction for their daily livelihood, and that, therefore, the worldwide nuclear arsenal is not going anywhere. 

Each chapter details a trip to a different site associated with nuclear weapons. Reading the whole book leaves one with the distinct feeling that the whole nuclear enterprise was and continues to be tinged with madness. In Nevada, the US "nuked its own territory nearly a thousand times to demonstrate to its adversaries the devastating strength of its arsenal." At Los Alamos, James Mercer-Smith, a thermonuclear weapons designer in a country that theoretically no longer makes nuclear weapons, talks about how much he loves the holes created by underground testing of his weapons. In labs like Livermore, the Reliable Replacement Warhead was being touted as the "responsible" way to continue mutual assured destruction-- but, you know, not at excessive levels. Just enough destruction to keep us safe. 

In Tennessee, the authors went to Oak Ridge, a town created to be home to the Y-12 National Security Complex, where to this day you can attend job fairs to learn about exciting careers at a factory that has strikes, unions, safety procedures, and also Top Secret clearances and little things like 1800 grams of highly enriched uranium found in a 20-year-old air filter. Just another day on the factory floor. In Nebraska, visiting STRATCOM, the authors learned about "global strike," the new term of art for preemptive attack plans including nuclear weapons as just part of a standing strategy for launching a war of aggression. (Fun fact: the Air Force Global Strike Command, which includes ICBM and Air Force Nuclear Command forces, will be doing a flyover at this year's Superbowl! Yay!) 

In Wyoming, a missileer named Lieutenant Strickland is asked how she feels about the 'pivotal key turn, the one task she will perform only once, if at all. "I've been doing this for two years," she said cheerfully, "and it makes me anxious every time." ' She works in a facility that was built for conditions that had already ceased to obtain by the time it was completed in 1965 and has become even more obsolete in light of the greatest threats actually facing the US today, foreign and domestic terrorism.

On the other hand, Site R, the mysterious "undisclosed location" facility everyone knows about just outside Gettysburg, is going strong and has been recommended not only by our authors, but (as one of the country's strangest military bases) by Popular Mechanics. I guess that's good news for the south-central PA economy? 

Of course the fun doesn't stop in the US. The authors went to nuclear testing sites in Kazakhstan, where the biggest claim to fame is the deformities suffered by some residents; to Russian sites associated with the United State's 500-million-dollar effort to reduce the threat from that country; and to Iran to see the nothing-to-see-here locations where that country is building up its scientific and technical nuclear expertise while definitely of course not building any weapons. And after all of this, the authors are left asking:

Where was the debate over nuclear strategy? We had spent two years traveling the world to understand how nations view nuclear weapons. We came away less convinced than ever that there was any strategy to speak of.

It seems us cold-war kids are destined to live in that proverbial mushroom-cloud shadow all our lives. In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the White House, Nancy Pelosi publicized her conversation with military authorities on the extent of outgoing President Trump's access to nuclear codes, giving voice to my own concerns if no one else's. The current issue of Wired features a story imagining global thermonuclear war between the US and China. As long as someone, somewhere thinks MAD is good sense, nobody's winning the arms race. 

 

620-629: Engineering-- Applied Physics

The holdings of the local library in this classification mainly consist of books about transportation, with a smattering of other applications of physics (civil engineering; nuclear power plants). There are also a few fun memoirs and histories of people involved in these endeavors. I particularly recommend Rocket Boys, the book that became the also highly recommended movie October Sky. I read this charming and uplifting (as it were) story of boys from coal country who became rocket scientists in the 90s, so let me know if it holds up. I was also tempted by Fly Girls, about the cohort of early female pilots to which Amelia Earhart belonged. 

But my husband is in IT, and he recommended I read his favorite engineering book, To Engineer is Human: the Role of Failure in Successful Design, by Henry Petroski. Since he's in testing and quality assurance, the idea of failure as part of the road to success is very meaningful to him. And since I had just experienced some professional failures of my own, I thought there might be some universal lessons for me. 

And indeed Petroski is very pro-failure. "Success may be grand, but failure can often teach us far more....With each tottering attempt to walk, our bodies learn from the falls what not to do next time. ...toys teach us the reality of structural failure and product liability...Breakdowns of man and machine can occur if they are called upon to carry more than they can bear." In mass-produced goods, toy or otherwise, failure is not surprising and is one of the main ways manufacturers discover how to improve their products.

However, in structural engineering, it is frowned upon to build something that you are pretty sure could be better and then wait for consumers to break it so you can figure out where improvement is needed. And that's kind of where he got technical enough that I had serious trouble continuing and decided to switch books. After all, I'd gotten what I needed: sometimes you can't know how something will break until you try it!

I then took a stab at The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, by John Edward Huth, who is, surprisingly, a particle physicist. This book, however, is about navigation, its history and practice, especially as pertaining to seafaring. I was extremely interested in the first few chapters of the book, where he laid out the problems with overreliance on GPS and talked about mental map-making. 

I am an avid hiker, and while I like to stay on trails, it is important to me to know where I am geographically. There is a map in my mind, with a little red dot that tells me where I am. This book helped me realize that, while I can study a print map and remember it pretty well, it's the little red dot that I really need. It turns out that to correctly place myself on my mental map, I use all kinds of cues. Am I going uphill or down? Do I hear or smell water? Is the light changing, suggesting a meadow or at least a clearing up ahead? Can I hear traffic, telling me where the road is? Can I see houses, and do I know what street they are on? 

When using a physical map, I have often experienced the phenomenon called map bending, wherein the traveler selectively disregards certain details in her surroundings that would indicate that she is not where she wants to be. It's so easy to do... after all, trail maps are not always well-updated, and there are so many excuses one can offer oneself to align the little red dot in one's head with the desired outcome according to the map. And yet. Ruthless honesty is the only way to get unlost. Standing at a clearly marked trail intersection that is black and gold instead of blue and red and looking at a fork instead of a hairpin turn, trying to talk yourself into believing that you are where you thought you were will be as successful as doing a jigsaw puzzle by smashing the pieces in that don't quite fit. 

If you do realize that you are not where you thought you were, that you don't, in fact, know where you are, that you have no map and no cell phone coverage and no sight or sound of civilization, Huth offers a really useful list of strategies. Some are highly unlikely to be successful, such as trying to walk in a straight line or trying to follow unclear, unmarked paths or watercourses. Some, while tedious, might be very fruitful, such as establishing a base of operations, like a trail intersection, and then exploring out in every direction. This only works if the hiker a) does not exceed her ability to find the base again and b) is willing to admit that a given path is no good and return to base to try another. 

Seeking a high point seems like an obviously good idea, but, as anyone who has read The Hobbit knows, sometimes the "high point" is not actually very high, and a lot of energy is expended for nothing. Probably the safest strategy to use is to backtrack, but this requires the hiker to be able to make all the same turn choices in reverse that she made in the outgoing journey-- which may just result in being more lost! My favorite strategy can be used both in and outdoors, when available, and even while driving: find something very tall and head for it. Do not lose sight of it! This approach guarantees that you will find the very tall thing, if nothing else. 

In our pandemic world, hiking is one of the few recreations still available to us. The slight possibility of getting lost, or the entertainment of seeking to construct a fully accurate and interactive mental map of a hiking area, enriches the experience as we seek to make our own fun outdoors. So it turns out engineering isn't just for engineers!