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"!