690-699: The Building Trades. How to Build Your Own Tiny House

 You guys, I could have read about how to prevent water damage in my home, or manage contractors, or use paint to create 26 fabulous effects, but I am tired, and I just didn't want to. Instead I wanted to fantasize about a project I would never in a million years actually attempt: building a tiny house, courtesy of author Roger Marshall. 

Reason number one I would never build myself a tiny house: The permits! So many permits you need! If you build it on land, you have to think about things like zoning and septic and "soil perc," which I guess I was already supposed to know about. If you want to build it on wheels, there are regulations and laws of physics governing where you can drive and park the thing. Too much!

Reason number two: building a whole entire house is no joke. I have built a bookshelf; I have built a "buffet" (a.k.a. a giant plywood box with legs screwed on the bottom and butcher block screwed on the top); but to build a whole entire house that you would actually be able to live in without freezing to death? Come on, that should be left to the professionals.

So why look at the book at all? Because I have always been intrigued by maximum use of small spaces. Cruise ship cabins, boat interiors, sleeper cars on trains, and three-bedroom houses for 6 people all are so delightfully ingenious! After all, we are hard-wired to think tiny things are cute, whether they are picnic tables for squirrels or Cape Cod cottages barely big enough to sleep in.

That said, I think there might be a better book if your purpose is just to admire the ingenuity of a living space that's bigger on the inside. This book just had too many pictures of how to caulk a window and not enough of how to grow plants and store a wardrobe in 256 square feet.

680-689: Manufacturing for specific uses: Stop Stealing Sheep and learn how type works!

 Would you like this book?

The easiest way to answer that question may be to look at the extensive sample available here. My guess is that you will either instantly fall in love with the sharp graphics, bright colors and varied typefaces featured, or you'll just be left cold. 

I loved it, but that might be because I was a calligrapher for about 20 years, starting at age 14, so I have been thinking about letterforms most of my life. Kerning, ligatures, ascenders and descenders and serifs were a big part of my life for a long time and are still something I can get excited about. Then there's the whole beautiful range of things one typeface family can do. Bold, italic, condensed, extra condensed, the same typeface can grab your attention or fade into the background, anchor a concept or dance across the page. Readability can be enhanced-- you can even cue the reader's speed-- by line length and spacing. And when it comes right down to it... letterforms are just beautiful!

This post was set using the Saira font family, one of the few available in Blogger that has a wide variety of weights. When it comes to fonts, you always have choices-- choose wisely-- and have fun!

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!

Relaxation As a Productivity Hack: Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Ariana Huffington liked this book more than I did. She makes some good points, but she doesn't address the fact that Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less can make you feel like you need to go lie down. Then, she is a household name throughout the world. For those of us who don't yet have a Wikipedia entry at all, the idea that we should get a good night's sleep and take a walk and go down the Shore for a week, not because we like to, but because Einstein did, can be a bit, I don't know, exhausting.

However, it was gratifying to see how many of the chill habits of highly effective people I already practice. Long walks? Check. Weekly day off? Check. Stop while you're still ahead? Almost always. Actually, let's talk about that one a minute. The idea is that you start a project because it's your job; at some point you find the flow; and at some later point it's on the schedule to move on to something else. It's tempting to want to keep pushing until you "come to a good stopping point," but I learned when I was a calligrapher that it's better to stop in the middle of a word than at the end of a paragraph. When you come back, you'll be more able to re-enter the rhythm you had developed and will get a more consistent result. In the same way, whether I'm making a list or working on an art project, if I have to stop, I try to do so before I hate the whole thing. 

The practice I was most interested in was Recovery. That's when you just go off grid for an evening or a day or a weekend and engage in relaxation, exercise more control over your environment than you normally might, and choose "mastery experiences" (recreational activities that are challenging but that you do well), all so that you can mentally detach from work altogether. 

This is a practice I have been engaged in for years: it's the principle of the Sabbath Rest. "On six days shall you labor and do all your work, and on the seventh shall you rest." Scholars turned the Sabbath into its own sort of work, debating exactly how much you could carry, how far you could walk, and what kinds of emergencies you could respond to on this beautiful day, but it can also be practiced more simply. The goal is to take a day completely off from whatever you construe as work and choose activities that will facilitate physical, mental, emotional and spiritual restoration. 

For me, a perfect Sabbath rest may include an extended period of Bible study, time to work on an art project, reading a novel, and/or some time outside. It will not include a lot of conversation, heavy physical work, political angst or, of course, directly work-related activities like test prep or researching lesson plans. But I will often find that towards the beginning of this recovery period, in odd moments, ideas related to work will come bubbling up from my subconscious. It's worthwhile to quickly scribble these in my calendar. Not all of them hold up under the cold light of Monday morning, but some of them are pretty worthwhile, and I couldn't have seen any of them while I was in the thick of the moment-by-moment struggle.

It turns out, according to this book, that all these habits of doing things that don't look like work are actually productivity tools. Stuffing the day, week, month and year full of scheduled activity doesn't get the same results, in quantity or quality, as leaving margin. Margin enables us to mentally and physically putter around completing small tasks and solving intractable problems while maintaining energy reserves for our periods of deep concentration. Even naps and sleep give us the mental margin to be more accurate or effective when we come online again. So, although I don't particularly recommend the book, I do recommend the concept: Rest.

610-619: Medical Knowledge Book Haul

The theme of the 600s is applied science and "how-to." Applied biology is medicine, and medicine is a very broad category. I love brain science, so that's the common thread between the books I grabbed.

The Unspeakable Mind, by Shaili Jain, M.D., looks like a terrific book about PTSD.  The author tells stories to illustrate her points about PTSD as a humanitarian and public health issue. She seems solutions-oriented and hopeful, and her style certainly is inviting and readable. If I had the time and the wherewithal to read a book about PTSD, this would be the one. 

But here's how I know that this is not the time for me to read a book about PTSD: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. It was described to me as the go-to book about PTSD, but it has also been described as intense and disturbing. It is possible that it would be an extremely helpful book for someone such as myself undergoing trauma therapy; however, since the process of reading the detailed and extreme stories of other survivors is in itself so traumatizing, I wouldn't undertake it without support. I got to page 55 before the stories, illustrated with unattractive diagrams and photos, were just more than I could handle. However, I did take away one vital point: trauma is processed through story, and the journey of healing is, at least in part, the discarding of the "cover story" that makes your trauma understandable and palatable to the outside world, and the discovery of the true story, the story that may not be for public consumption but that explains you to yourself.

The Undoing Project just had a neat title, and the author wrote both Moneyball and The Big Short. I actually can't understand what it is about in terms of brain science, but it is clearly also or even mainly about the friendship between the two men who discovered whatever it is that they discovered. I'm sure it is an enjoyable read for fans of Freakonomics and Dan Ariely. 

Rest, by Ale Soojung-Kim Pang, is the book I read all the way through. It was relaxing, I'll give it that... I did get a few naps while working through chapters with titles like "Walk," "Stop," Sabbaticals," and, yes, "Naps." However. It was not exactly the ode to lounging that I was looking for. Pang's examples-- and there were a lot-- were all high achievers. From Anthony Trollope to Stephen King, from Churchill to Eisenhower, they may have only worked four hours a day (for some definition of work), walked 5 miles a day, and taken a month off every year, but they still were or are exceptional in their fields. It's just a little exhausting reading 5 pages on the science of naps, followed by three pages listing all the super-famous people who take naps, if you are in a job situation where neither a nap nor any degree of fame is remotely within your reach! 

Extra Credit: Four Views on Hell, Preston Sprinkle, Ed.

I am a person of faith. I love that I can have some kind of relationship with the mind that made the cosmos. When you say it that way, it really helps you realize why Paul said that "now we see through a glass, darkly"! I believe with all my heart in eternal life, but the few times in my life I actually thought I was facing death, I was surprised at how terrified I was. And when family members were facing death, I was even more surprised at the still, small voice that prompted me: "You should study Hell."

Wait, what now?! Who wants to think about Hell?

First, every single person I've ever talked to who has lost a loved one, no matter what beliefs they professed about life, the universe and everything, reported some sense of that person's continued presence in their lives after death. So there's that.

Second, I've never talked to a person of faith who believed in "eternal conscious torment" (aka "Hell" as commonly understood), who wasn't beset by a nagging sense that it wasn't actually a very great idea.

So, reluctantly, I actually started looking hard at what the Bible says about the afterlife. I read a couple of books, including the excellent Four Views on Hell (Dewey 236.25). This fine review beautifully summarizes the structure and purpose of the book in detail. 

I also read all four Gospels, marking everything Jesus said that might possibly refer to dire punishments waiting after death. I even watched some movies about preachers and teachers struggling with the same issue. I highly recommend Hell and Mr. Fudge, but you might also enjoy Come Sunday. 

Thanks to Four Views  and another, denser book called Hope Beyond Hell, which advocates in great detail for a Biblically rigorous form of Universalism, I went deep down rabbit holes involving Hebrew and Greek verb tense sequence, the cultural significance of the location called "Gehenna," and how long an eon is, exactly. (A great overview of some of these issues , to whet your appetite for a whole book on them, can be found in a 3-part series from Brazen Church blog.) 

My conclusion: faithful and reasonable people can differ about what exactly the Bible teaches about life after death, and we really won't know every exact detail until we get there! 

While I dived deep, though, I also pulled back to the big picture: Why did the idea of eternal conscious torment bother me, anyway? Why was it that even when I tried to imagine Hell as inhabited only by demons and Hitler, it seemed like an eternity of it was, for lack of a better word, overkill? 

I applied the reasoning Jesus taught us: "If you, being evil, give good things to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give?" If I, a deeply flawed human being, don't really need even Hitler to suffer eternally, why should God? Even though I grew up in a punitive culture that views justice in terms of making the perpetrator pay for suffering with his own suffering, could there be another kind of justice-- restitutional justice focused on returning to the victim what was lost, and reconciling the perpetrator to the community?

I came to believe that the Bible is NOT clear that after we die, God will send some of us to Heaven to sit on clouds and play harps and others to Hell to burn forever without ever being consumed. What the Bible IS clear about includes the following:

Actions have consequences. Sorting out those actions and consequences is the work of a lifetime. I think a relationship with God and the stories He told helps.

God made us out of love, so we could be with Him. Heaven and Earth were meant to be one, and we are all meant to be with God.

Humans make this world a Hell at times, and woe betide us when we contribute to that.

Meanwhile, God through His Spirit is constantly working to expand His Kingdom on earth -- His dwelling place and the one intended for us from the beginning. We are expected to work with God in this project.

When suffering and death entered the world, so did God, and, in the person of Jesus, volunteered to live in one of the most barbaric ages of history. He was born and raised in poverty and even refugee status, He was routinely harassed, and ultimately He was tortured to death. He didn't put us through anything He Himself didn't experience. 

This is what God does about evil: He gets right in the middle of it and lets it destroy Him.

And then He rises from the dead, and eternal life-- life after death with God-- becomes available to everybody.

I have a lot of theories about how all of this *might* work out, but the bottom line is that God loves ALL, ALL have sinned, and Christ died for ALL. That is why nowadays, when I talk about people who have died, I often say they are "with God." I don't know exactly what they may be experiencing, but I do feel confident that they are in God's hands, experiencing His love as best they are able. They are doing just fine. They are with God, and God is love, and everything is going to be all right in the end!

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"!

590-599: Zoology. A Not-At-All Silent Spring

I've been enjoying being an amateur naturalist! I've learned fun facts about creatures ancient and modern, gigantic and tiny, sentient and... didn't I learn that plants may be sentient too? Zoology is a great way to finish up the Science century of the Dewey Decimal System. Still working under Covid-19 restrictions, I couldn't peruse library shelves. But birds are, contrary to popular opinion, animals (I mean, what else would they be? Vegetables? Minerals?), and a hot topic this spring. Mourning doves nested on the office windowsill. A cardinal family moved into the bush outside the downstairs bathroom window. There was a hawk in my oak tree earlier today. And this spring is anything but silent, as decreased traffic from the pandemic seemed to encourage the birds to appear out of nowhere in every tree in town, singing their heads off from 4 a.m. till after dark every day.

Everyone's been talking about two new bird books: What It's Like to Be a Bird, by David Sibley, and The Bird Way, by Jennifer Ackerman. We also have a beautiful reproduction of Audubon's Birds of America. The first thing I learned from all these books is that there are a lot of different kinds of birds! I think I can identify about 20 or 25 North American species, but there are hundreds, and then all the others around the world! And each one has its own song and its own behavior patterns.

Let's compare and contrast our two new neighbors. First, the cardinals. In March there was much hopping around in the half-dead hemlock trees out back, with multiple males and one female sitting on the evergreen branches singing like they were in a Christmas movie.  Finally, Ms. Cardinal made a selection amongst her suitors-- I have no idea how! Scientists think the crest that the male can raise and lower, and the richness of his bright coloration, may have something to do with it. The new pair built a pile of twigs in the heart of a bush, inaccessible and almost invisible even once we knew where to look. In fact, we did not even realize it was there until after the babies were hatched and sticking their little beaks up in the air like cartoon birdies chirping "feed me, feed me!" They kept Mama busy flying back and forth to provide for them, while Daddy continued to hop around the hemlocks, standing guard. And then they were gone-- Mama, Daddy, and the babies had vacated the premises when we weren't even looking.

The mourning doves were different from first to last. We became aware of their activites when one of them starting sitting next to the open window of my husband Mark's upstairs office, uttering the beautiful "hoo-hoo-hoo" that is so instantly recognizable... for hours at a time. Apparently, that was Mr. Dove's way of saying, "I've got a home for you-hoo-hoo." Mrs. Dove (they typically mate for life) found it agreeable, probably because someone else-- someone much smaller-- had already built a tidy little mud-lined picture-book nest right at the corner, so they just needed to build an addition to accommodate their size. Their "improvements" were-- well-- not much of an improvement. Certainly when they were done the nest was bigger, but it was, as the Audubon society says, "flimsy" in appearance, and it seemed certain that Mr., Mrs., and any little bundles of joy to follow would surely fall right off the window ledge at the first storm. But Mrs. Dove boldly took up her post.

Mrs. Dove liked nothing better than to look askance at Mark all day long, glaring at him out of one beady eye, just daring him to come any closer to her little darlings. She did not leave her post for a solid three weeks-- two weeks to hatch, and another week just to keep the newborns warm. I thought I heard some fluttering outside the window one evening which might have been Mr. Dove coming to relieve her, as I have heard they do. But during the day, it was Mrs. Dove's shift, and she spent at least 12 hours sitting squarely on top of her lean-to nest.

Around the beginning of week four, we noticed that Mrs. Dove had edged off the nest a bit-- always keeping her back between us and the babies, and always giving us the evil eye if we approached to try to peek in. Despite her best efforts, we got a glimpse of the little ones sticking their beaks in her throat to drink the "crop milk" she secreted. Pretty soon they were big enough that their heads stuck over the top of the nest and she couldn't completely hide them. Now they are fledged and don't drink "milk" any more, and she and the Mr. will sometimes leave them unattended for a minute or two, presumably because it takes both of the adults to rustle up enough seeds for a family of four.

Around the same we began to hear a new sound in our neighborhood, almost like a gull's cry. I finally learned what it was one day when a hawk was mobbed right to the oak tree in the front yard. He sat on a branch for a minute and unmistakeably was the source of the repeated caw. Since then, I've realized that he works a territory about three blocks square. Imagine my surprise when I heard him calling 100 yards in front of me, and then heard the distinctive crashing and rustling of another hawk coming in low through the trees right over me and to the right. With all the trees in full leaf, I hear more bird activity than I see.

David Sibley

That's why I was particularly grateful for what I could learn about bird sounds from Ackerman's book. I learned that species usually make more than one call or song, that each member of a species has a slightly different song, and each individual's songs can be varied to suit the purpose. Even a simple, maybe not-so-bright bird like the mourning dove has one sound it makes at rest and another when landing or taking off, and the trademark coo can be of varying lengths. Birds vocalize to identify themselves, to find their flocks, to warn not only their flock but other birds and even other species of danger, to claim and identify territory, and to communicate during migration. The decrease in traffic noise due to Covid-19 may be one reason for our not-so-silent spring-- when birds can learn from each other and take turns standing guard, they are safer and can eat more and reproduce more!

580-589: Botany. The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben

Early this year, I read The Overstory, by Richard Powers, a work of such stunning beauty that I had to keep putting it down to absorb its images. It was a novel about trees, really, although human characters slipped in and out of the lyrical descriptions of growth, life and decay on a grand scale. I read it with my phone handy so I could look up some of the unfamiliar species mentioned, and felt my heart rate slow as it aligned with the pace of life in the forest. I also learned some very interesting facts-- or at least I hoped they were facts. Powers alluded to a number of books in the novel and endnotes. On further research, The Hidden Life of Trees seemed like the one that might have inspired him most directly.

For one thing, The Hidden Life of Trees is itself almost a fictionalized account of forest biology. The tone is breezy in the extreme, and Wohlleben makes free with anthropomorphic references to trees' thoughts, emotions and plans. Trees are pictured as having etiquette, going to school and screaming. There are mother trees, street kids, and, most importantly, tree communities. The tone of the book has caused a lot of controversy and frustration, especially in Germany and France, and certainly made me question whether the author really was doing science.

But, as it turns out, the "controversy" around The Hidden Life of Trees could really just be better described as "irritation." No botanist is accusing Wohlleben of getting his facts wrong, just of presenting the information in a more informal way than is usual for science writing.

And there is a lot of information! Just about every tree behavior and aspect of the life of the forest that The Overstory depicts can be found in this book. All the astounding tales of tree symbiosis, cooperation, adaptation and interaction with other species are factually accurate. Trees do make sounds and emit electrical impulses. They do sense the passage of time and, of course, the vital changes in available light that will affect their ability to photosynthesize. They do form complex ecosystems with other beings, from mammals to microorganisms, and exhibit coordinated behaviors. And, most impressively, they really do live for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. 

On a walk the other day, I saw this interesting example of a tree that Wohlleben would call a "street kid," a tree that has been planted in the narrow space between sidewalk and street and is having trouble finding any place to send its roots.  Roots need oxygen just like branches do, which is why most houseplants don't like to sit in water-- they need to breathe! Apparently the ground under streets and sidewalks is compacted by machinery before paving. Of course that makes it difficult to grow through and also eliminates air pockets. That's why roots end up in water and sewer line-- they are just trying to get some air!
This same tree also may be a good example of one that can reproduce from its root system. The root is covered with bright green sprouts with tiny leaves. Are they hoping to become trees, or do they think they are branches coming from the trunk? Maybe that is a distinction without a difference. It will be interesting to keep an eye on these little sprouts over the summer and see how big they get.

This delightful and easy read explained many other things I have observed in the garden and neighborhood. For example, some trees- oaks notoriously-- produce tannin in their leaves. That's the same thing that is in tea, that makes it bitter if you let it steep too long. It's also the reason that wine is often aged in oak-- the tannins are considered a flavor enhancer. It turns out that the tannin is a defense mechanism against fungus and enables oaks to survive wounds such as lightning strikes that would weaken and expose other kinds of trees. Unfortunately, it also is disagreeable to grasses and other herbaceous plants, which is why gardening under an oak tree is a constant argument with nature. Wohlleben is all about not arguing with nature, and would, I'm sure, advocate for cooperating instead, by choosing plants that love shade and don't mind tannin, like ferns and hostas.

Gardening also helped me relate to this book because trees are like smaller plants in many ways. Some of them can reproduce vegetatively, from their roots, as do dandelions or mint. All of them can reproduce from seed and have all kinds of different schemes for getting their seeds fertilized and distributed. Seeds might have wings to fly out from under the source tree's shadow (as dandelion seeds do), or they might come encased in delicious fruit (as berries are) so that some helpful animal will come along and carry them off to a new location-- perhaps digesting them first! Some trees just drop their seeds right under their own shade and let a battle for sunlight ensue, as do many flowers.

But one thing is true of every tree (and every flower): trees produce seeds in reckless excess. The quantity of maple keys or sharp little acorns or pinecones that one tree can drop on a lawn is truly astonishing and seems completely unnecessary for the survival of the species! Personally, I sweep maple keys off the porch, pull out maple tree sprouts from the flower beds, fill bags with pinecones for mulching, and hurt my feet on acorns that blanket the ground, wondering why trees have to be so messy. But the consistent observer of nature can learn that squirrels and other little animals appreciate this abundance, even if we don't. They are busy all year, snatching up the free lunch that falls at their feet.

In the wild, tree seeds face just as many obstacles to growth as they do when humans such as myself are actively trying to fight back the forest. Most are eaten by those little animals. Those that survive to sprout will usually be eaten by rabbits and other medium-sized animals. The deer will probably take care of the rest; they can eat a new tree up to three feet high. Even if a baby tree manages to survive long enough to come off the lunch menu for the animals of the forest, it will probably be getting very little light on the forest floor and will therefore be weak and susceptible to insects and fungus. It may very well die and return to the earth in the form of humus. Given all these obstacles, although a tree will produce more than a million seeds in its lifetime, often only ONE of them will live to maturity!

The abundance of seeds should not be a source of dismay to me, even when it's inconvenient. After all, like the squirrels, I owe my dinner to the fact that plants of all kinds are designed to produce far over and above the number of seeds needed to perpetuate their species. I eat corn, rice, wheat and oats-- those are all seeds. I eat meat and dairy products from animals that ate those seeds, too. I eat peaches and strawberries and grapes that contain seeds. Really, the whole animal kingdom is dependent on the fact that one plant can make many seeds, many more than it needs for its own purposes!

A wild forest supports a tremendous amount of life, both visible and invisible, and it also supports our souls. A deciduous forest is full of birdsong and the rustle of creatures great (deer) and small (chipmunks, frogs) moving through the brush and leaf litter on the forest floor. We enter and feel that we have found a place outside time and all that's merely human. Life of a completely foreign kind is busy all around us, as our breathing slows to match the scale of business that is conducted 100 feet in the air and unfolds over centuries. In a healthy, natural forest, the trees are at peace, because they are well-watered and their balanced ecology protects them from insect, fungus and animal attack. Leaves are eating sunlight, and mosses are eating dust, and the tree is breathing in my unwanted carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. The light in a forest is actually green under the canopy, since the leaves have absorbed every other color.

A pine forest has a deeper hush to it. The needles underfoot absorb footfalls and make the soil too acidic to support wild undergrowth. There is less food for birds and small mammals, and so, less rustling and less birdsong. The forest seems to soak up sound as it presides over a silence that has existed for longer than any human life. Furthermore, pine needles dispense phytoncides that disinfect the atmosphere and discourage mosquitos, while the breath of the trees and the shelter of their branches creates a microclimate that provides welcome respite from extreme weather. In any kind of well-balanced forest, our hearts find shalom.

All these processes are revealed in The Hidden Life of Trees. The knowledge and wisdom of this book will enrich your next walk in the woods and your relationship to our largest and oldest neighbors on this planet. Highly recommended!

570-579: Biology. River out of Eden, by Richard Dawkins, and The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Muherjee

When I had to pick a book on biology in the midst of the 2020 Covid-19 nationwide shutdown, without access to a public library, I was hard-pressed to even know where to begin. E-book libraries are not organized by Dewey Decimal number, sadly, and the entire topic of "Science" yielded only about 150 titles-- less than I would expect my local library to carry on biology alone!

Fortunately, my husband is a science buff, and as he perused the limited offerings, he got very excited about The Gene. After all, it's just been released as a Ken Burns documentary. All the usual suspects are raving about it. Just two problems: it was waitlisted at the library (yes, e-books have waitlists; licensing issues, don't ask), AND it's a jillion pages long.

Both problems were easily solved by a certain mega-retailer's policy of providing samples of e-books free of charge. In this case, the entire first section, focused on history, was available. I think that was a solid 150 e-book pages and got me all the way from Aristotle to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble-Minded. That was plenty to be going on with.

My husband's other suggestion was that I read a book by Richard Dawkins. "Why in the world would I want to do that?" I asked, mindful of Dawkins' reputation as a militant evangelist for atheism. My husband answered that the book in question had been given to him by a medical doctor we went to church with, following a conversation about creation and evolution. "Oh, if Dr. Palmer recommended it, that's all right," I thought, observing also the book's blessed brevity, and took the plunge.

Muherjee and Dawkins make surprisingly good companions. Both have highly readable styles and clear agendas. Muherjee wants you to understand what DNA is, how genes were discovered, and no doubt many other fascinating facts about the mechanics of heredity... featured in the five sections that I was too cheap to pay for and too impatient to read (I'm still in the 500's, people, and I'm not getting any younger!).

Dawkins, who I'm going to focus on from here on out, just wants to prove one thing: that God is unnecessary. Why does he use a Bible word in the title of his book and pepper the whole thing with references to Eve and perfection and "God's utility function"? Maybe to get the attention of people like Dr. Palmer and then me... or maybe because the world just intuitively appears to be... designed. Just saying.

He writes, "Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into existence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at all. Without gradualness in these cases, we are back to miracle, which is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation." This quote makes it very clear what Dawkins wants to do: not prove that gradual evolution was and is, in fact, the only mechanism of speciation, but to prove that it is a sufficient explanation for all the complexity of the life we see around us.

However. I didn't read the book to argue with it. I don't have the background. I read it because I had to read something, and it seemed like a book of general knowledge that general people ought to have. Looked at as an introduction to the concept of the origin of species via evolution, I would say it was pretty helpful. It cleared up some misunderstandings for me, even as it raised other questions.

One thing it didn't do was challenge my faith. In fact, I enjoyed knowing more details about how evolution could produce such detailed organisms as the eye. I loved the analogy of DNA as digital  information that works like a computer program, because it enabled me to see God not only as a great artist and a great engineer, but also as a great information technologist.

I even appreciated learning about the difference between analog and digital information. Turns out analog is like waves or spectrum colors or anything else that seems clear until it's not. So we all know what blue is and what green is. But what happens in between? Shades of grey indeed! Well, even though life is analog, it seems the DNA that programs cells is digital! I guess it's just like this photo, which uses binary code to depict an analog gradient. Maybe I'm just easily amused, but I think that's cool!

As I'm writing this, I sit in my yard listening to birds and watching bees visit flowers. Thinking of evolution as an ongoing process, I consider whether the wildflowers that I allow to grow in my lawn may evolve in response to the pressure not only of pollinator and animal activity, but also to my actions with the lawnmower. Will only the showiest flowers, the ones in sheltered places, or those that grow lower than the mower blade survive to reproduce? If the same lawn is tended in the same way for generations, will the violets be shorter and the buttercups even taller and brighter?

I also consider the evolution of viruses and of insects that are making headlines today-- "superbugs" in two senses. I remember the mass extinction events I read about when I was in the Dinosaurium-- sort of the opposite side of the same coin. And I wonder: what makes us think that we are living at the end point of the processes God put in place "in the beginning"? Both the direct actions of humans and the pressures that all species put on each other... couldn't they result in further changes in species that we think of as having "arrived" at their final form?

I have a few questions that remain unanswered. I particularly don't understand the course of human evolution so far. Presumably other books address this question: if evolution is driven by survival of the fittest, why are humans so ill-fitted for survival in the wild? Why wasn't astigmatism eliminated from our gene pool millenia ago? What in the world made the absence of fur a survival trait for our ancestors? Why are we so poorly armed, with nails instead of claws and weak teeth instead of nice pointy fangs? What's so great about being bipedal? I'm not saying a theory of special creation particularly answers this question, I'm just saying it's a question!

Dawkins does not address this question, but he does speak to the issue of how the handicaps of aging have survived the pressures of survival. "Everybody is descended from an unbroken line of ancestors all of whom were at some time in their lives young but many of whom were never old. So we inherit whatever it takes to be young, but not necessarily whatever it takes to be old." I have sometimes thought that survival of the fittest was not all it is cracked up to be, leaving intact arthritis, heart disease, and all kinds of other useless and maladaptive conditions. But now I understand that since these things don't typically impact survival until AFTER we have passed on our DNA, they wouldn't be selected against even in the most hostile environments. That still doesn't explain why four-year-olds need glasses, though!

Taken together, both these books taught me more about the mechanics of the origins of species without turning me into a mechanist. They really exemplify the whole reason I undertook this project in the first place: I wanted to learn a little bit about a lot of things, things I might not expect to be interested in. After all, it's the Bible that tells us that "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter." (Proverbs 25:2, NASB)