Roy's Foggy Avenues

Books Completed, June 2007

2007-07-11T19:40:00.001-04:00

Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages. by Douglas Macdougall (California UP, 2004)

The Seashell on the Mountaintop: How Nicolaus Steno solved an Ancient Mystery and Created a Science of the Earth. by Alan Cutler (Plume {penguin}, 2004)

An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. by John Steele Gordon (Harper, 2004)

Disgrace. by J. M. Coetzee (Viking, 1999)

The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials, Book I. by Philip Pullman (Knopf, 1996)

Books Completed: May 2007

2007-05-02T19:20:00.000-04:00

Rude Mechanicals. by Kage Baker (Subterranean Press, 2007)

After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. by E. C. Pielou (University of Chicago, 1991)

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. by Robert Sullivan (Bloomsbury, 2004)

The Demon And The City: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel. by Liz Williams (Nightshade Books, 2006)

Book completed in April 2007

2007-05-01T10:44:00.000-04:00

Snake Agent. by Liz Williams (Night Shade Books, 2006)

I only managed one book last month, but it was a pretty darn good one. Snake Agent, is a very solid fantasy hardboiled detective that in feeling is quite reminiscent of George Alec Effinger's Budayeen series, But based in traditional Chinese religion rather than a Third World North Africa of the future. The plotting was good and their was more depth to the characters than I would have expected. The hero's wife, a classic Japanese fox demon, is much more developed than I expected.

I must admit to being a sucker for the genre though, even though this is one of the first examples I have come across. I am a huge fan of Chinese supernatural stories such as those of Pu Song-ling. If you haven't read any I highly recommend you give it a try. As to editions their are quite a few and some of the weirdest stories get left out of many translations. My favorite edition is this rather tacky edition from Beijing Foreign Language Press. There is a new Penguin Classics abridged edition edited by John Minford which Amazon fails to list under Pu, which is rather criminal, would they list the author of Crime and Punishment as Constance Garnett?

[Edit May 2, 2007. Apparently Amazon has a way of updating product details, and they took my suggestion and corrected the author, as messy as the net is, it is nice to see how it can be so easily corrected sometimes.]

Factoids

2007-04-28T12:44:00.000-04:00

In the introduction to his photobiography of Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer (1973) coined the term "factoid." A factoid is a speculation or guess that has been repeated so often that it is eventually taken for hard fact. Factoids have a particularly insidious quality - and one that is spectacularly unbiological - in that they tend to get stronger the longer they live. Unlike "facts," factoids are difficult to evaluate because, although they often begin as well-intended hypotheses and tentative clarifications, they become received wisdom by dint of repetition by authorities.

From Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations. by Norman Yoffee (Cambridge, 2005) pp. 7-8

Interestingly enough Merriam Webster defines factoid as:

1 : an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print
2 : a briefly stated and usually trivial fact

It is probably due to educational television and "light" new media that the latter definition seems to have superseded the former, and while the latter is one of the chief mechanisms of the process by which a factoid is promoted, in the former sense of course. The utility of this word to mean a false fact that is believed through repetition is probably at an end.

We need a new word.

As an aside it would be good, for aesthetic purposes at least, to have a new word that is not attributable to the author of Armies of the Night, or the genre of photobiographys.

On Equilibrium in Ecological history

2007-04-27T12:20:00.000-04:00

The slow response of vegetation to climate change has interesting implications. If climate changes continuously, as it appears to, the vegetation may never succeed in catching with it. In the words of Margret Davis, plant (and also animal) communities are "in disequilibrium, continually adjusting to climate and continually lagging behind and failing to adjust to equilibrium before the onset of a new climactic trend."

This opinion is not universal. The opposing point of view has been advanced by H. E. Wright, Jr., another leader in the field of Quarternary paleoecology. He assumes that vegetation and climate are at present in equilibrium and describes ancient communities that had what appear (to us) to be mismatched mixtures of species as "disharmonious." The implication is that modern mixtures are harmonious. The argument in favor of this view is that climate changes in stepwise fashion and the last step was taken a long time ago; therefore, because the climate has not changed appreciably for a long time, vegetation has by now had time to come into equilibrium with it.

There is a wealth of evidence, however, showing that climactic change is never ending. Even if major climactic "steps" are comparatively quick, it is almost certain that the climate in the intervals between steps undergoes continual lesser changes. In the light of present knowledge, therefore, Davis's view, that disequilibrium in ecological communities is much commoner than equilibrium, is the more acceptable.

It should lead, in time, to a much needed change in popular thought. The notion espoused by so many nonprofessional ecologists-that the living world is "marvelously" and "delicately" attuned to its environment-is not so much a scientifically reasonable theory as a mystically satisfying dogma. Its abandonment might lead to a useful fresh start in environmental politics.

From After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. By E. C. Pielou (University of Chicago, 1991) pp. 100-101

Ecological Inertia

2007-04-25T07:08:00.000-04:00

Except for the earliest plant pioneers in newly deglaciated land, all later arrivals, if they were to success, had to take possession of ground already vegetated. They had to get started in gaps in the existing vegetation. But gaps would have been uncommon, and such gaps as there were would have received far more seeds from whatever plants happened to be abundant in the neighborhood than from the few, isolated specimens forming the vanguard of an invading species. This would have been true even if the climate were slowly becoming less suitable for the established vegetation and more suitable for the invaders. Hence the lag in vegetation change; once a plant species is abundant in a particular area, it can usually hang on there for a long time in spite of the climate's gradually becoming less suitable for it. Many plants have an astonishing ability to persist in unfavorable habitats. The old adage "possession is nine points of the law" sums the matter up.

From After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. By E. C. Pielou (University of Chicago, 1991) p. 99

This incumbency effect is very pronounced in all kinds of places in ecology, and even in society. If you are already there you don't have to be as efficient or as effective in order to compete, because you have the advantage of already being there. It is not just in politics either, what else explains the continued existence of General Motors?

Migration of Vegetation during Ice Ages

2007-04-24T07:24:00.000-04:00

Most People are familiar with maps of the major vegetation types of North America, showing a strip of tundra in the far north, a strip of coniferous forest immediately south of the tundra, and so on. It is easy to envisage similar maps showing the vegetation zones as they must have been at different times in the past, when great ice sheets covered much of the north. And it is not so difficult to visualize a motion picture version, with the zones creeping southward as the ice sheets grew and then creeping northward again when the climate warmed and the ice sheets slowly melted. It is so easy to visualize such scenarios that one is apt to forget that the southward shift of the vegetation zones as the ice expanded, and their northward shift as the ice contracted, were radically different phenomena. Obviously, vegetation does not "creep" in the way that strips of color on a motion picture map do; likewise plants cannot "migrate" or "advance" or "retreat" in the way animals can. To use these words in connection with plants is to speak in metaphors that may be useful as shorthand but are apt to disguise the true nature of what they represent.

The responses of vegetation to growing ice sheets on the one hand, and to shrinking ice sheets on the other, were entirely different. When an ice sheet expanded on of two things happened, depending on the cause of the expansion. If the ice spread because of climactic cooling, then the cooling would also have affected the vegetation ahead of the ice front. The less hardy plants gradually died off, and permafrost (perennially frozen ground...) formed, seriously inhibiting the growth of trees. In other words, a strip of tundra would have developed or, if one was already there, it would have widened, ahead of the ice. But if surging ice lobes caused the expansion, full grown forests would have been overrun by the ice, which crushed and buried them.

In either case, plants did not and do not "migrate." What does migrate is only an abstraction, a line on a map representing the margin of a vegetation zone. The plants themselves die.

From After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. By E. C. Pielou (University of Chicago, 1991) pp. 81-82

On "Normal weather"

2007-04-21T12:37:00.000-04:00

It should now be clear that the physical environment of northern North America has changed dramatically in the past 20,000 years. This environment was (and still is) a complicated and intricate system, powered by the sun and land, ice, freshwater, salt water, and atmosphere as its components. Even if it were lifeless, it would still be dynamic; the components would interact with one another. One of the most interesting aspects of this never ending change from the ecological point of view is that, over the time interval we are considering (and probably for the whole of the earth’s history), physical conditions on this continent (and everywhere else) have never repeated themselves.

At no time has there been a return to “things as they were.” It is true that there must have been times when average temperatures were similar to those at present. Thus, before the beginning and after the end of the warmer-than-now hypsithermal interval, the average annual temperature must, for a while, have been much the same as now. But in other respects, conditions would have been radically different, as there were still extensive ice sheets that would have cooled their immediate neighborhoods, and sea level was still about twenty-five meters lower than at present. Nor is it reasonable to assume that conditions on the ice sheets were the same as those in Greenland and Antarctica today. The North American ice sheets were at a much lower latitude; they did not experience months of winter darkness, and the altitude of the midday sun in summer was much greater.

From After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. By E. C. Pielou (University of Chicago, 1991) pp. 29-30

Books completed March 2007

2007-04-01T14:05:00.001-04:00

Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution. by David Rains Wallace (University of California, 2004)

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. by John M. Barry (Touchstone [Simon & Schuster], 1998)

The Corner That Held Them. by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Virago [Little Brown & Co. {UK}], 2000)

The Road. by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf, 2006)

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 2006)

Books Completed February 2007

2007-03-01T18:33:00.000-05:00

A Princess of Roumania. by Paul Park (Tor, 2005)

Gods and Pawns. by Kage Baker (Tor, 2007)

Tourmaline. by Paul Park (Tor, 2006)

White Tyger. by Paul Park (Tor, 2007)

Off Armageddon Reef. by David Weber (Tor, 2007)

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. by Mark Monmonier (Chicago, 2006)

Titillation from Newfie toponyms

2007-02-25T10:39:00.000-05:00

Above is a map from p. 68 of Mark Monmonier's book From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. The accompanying text is pretty amusing. After discussing, unfruitful, efforts by a Mr. Robert Elford, to change the name of the village of Dildo, Newfoundland, in 1985, Monmonier goes on to say of Newfoundland naming practices:

Diverse factors account for Elford's failure. His initiative laked the homophobic imperative behind the renaming of Gayside, Newfoundland (now Baytona[!!!]), in 1985 or whatever anti-Soviet feeling inspired the renaming of Mount Stalin [now that must be a tale] (a British Columbia landmark now commemorating Don Peck, a highly regarded local conservationist) in 1987. Local residents had few reminders of Dildo's new potentially offensive connotation-sex aids were not a regular feature in the news or a lingering icon of cold war rhetoric-and those with a sense of humor could delight in the salacious juxtaposition of Dildo Arm and Spread Eagle Bay (fig 4.5 [see above]. Indeed, jokes about the name were a way of being noticed, and perhaps an attraction to tourists who might stop by to mail a postcard or sample local hospitality during Dildo Days, a mid-August weekend featuring "a live band...enjoyable games and activities, [and {sic}] a beer tent for people 19 and older." The long standing name was reinforced by its identification of several nearby natural features, and the village had its own postal code (AoB IPo), which would entail the cost and annoyance of changing one's address. What's more, some Dildodians no doubt felt the same sense of priority as residents of Swastika, Ontario, who resisted the provincial government's renaming of their community in 1940 to honor Winston Churchill [interestingly, Swastika's mines were the source of some of the Mitford family's minimal wealth, and the ever delightful Unity claimed to have been conceived there]. Defiantly they ripped down the official sign and put up a replacement proclaiming, "To Hell with Hitler. We had the swastika first."

pp.67-69

As an aside, my initial posting was solely motivated by the amusing graphic, but the Mitford connection is one of those things that makes the internet so gosh darn wonderful.

Books Completed in January 2007

2007-02-01T09:12:00.000-05:00

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. by Cory Doctorow (Tor, 2003)

The Yacoubian Building: A Novel. by Alaa Al Aswany, translated by Humphrey Davies (Harper Perennial, 2006)

The Eternal Frontier. by Tim Flannery (William Heinemann: London, 2001)

Only three books this month, two novels and popular science book. I'll only comment on the novels in this post

The Cory Doctorow book was the most interesting, a real honest attempt to describe life in a post scarcity economy. It was pretty convincing, and clever, but some of the plot elements and the brain uploading/downloading were too glib. For example, the hero suffers a malfunction in his wiring and he must lose his most recent memories if he wants to fix it, it is explained that without the hardware functioning his memories can't be recorded, but one has to wonder how he remembers anything from before the hardware was implanted, say in his childhood. The technology here, as in several other places was not consistent, and its limitations seemed more of a plot device than anything else. But I would still recommend it.

The Yacoubian Building, was also interesting but it seemed very dated and predictable at the same time. Parts of it approached tedium, and the expository discussion of homosexuality was quite odd. The only explanation seemed that for the books Arabic speaking audience the gay theme was quite exotic. The rest of the book was too predictable and I thought for awhile I would not finish it despite it short length. The terrorist plot especially felt like it had been taken from an article in a newsmagazine, but in the end I was charmed and left it feeling fondly toward it. I was glad though that I had finished it.

Darwin and seeing the "obvious"

2007-01-26T03:17:00.000-05:00

Often it requires the genius of a conceptual thinker, which [Louis] Agassiz clearly was, to launch a new way of thinking about natural phenomena. Just how clear-and paradoxically, at the same time unnoticed-the evidence for glaciation was, even to naturalists who were accustomed to careful observation, is nicely illustrated by a passage from Charles Darwin's autobiography. In 1831, just a few years before the publication of Agassiz's ice age theory, Darwin was on a field trip in Wales with a prominent geologist [Adam Sedgwick!]. Anxious to find fossils, they scoured hill and valley, examining the rocks in great detail. But they completely missed the evidence for glaciation that surrounded them. Years later and by then fully aware that the Earth had experienced extensive glaciation, Darwin wrote about his earlier field excursion: "On this tour I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by anyone... neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines."
The italics above are mine. They emphasize the common experience that is implicit in the phrase "point out the obvious." Some things are invisible until someone shows them to you; then they pop up everywhere. Darwin marveled that he and his geological colleague could have overlooked these glacial features that he late found so conspicuous that "a house burned down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley."

From Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages. by Doug Macdougall (University of California, 2004) pp. 15-16

What makes this especially interesting is that this is something Darwin understood completely from his own field. When he first visited the Galapagos Islands on his famous voyage of discovery, he did not realize the significance of what he saw, it was only on reflection after he returned that he began to formulate his Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection. David Quammen in his book The Song of the Dodo., discusses how Darwin did not even realize at the time of his visit the need to catalogue on what island he had collected a specimen on.

The most remarkable aspect of the natural history of the Galapagos, Darwin wrote in his Journal with the wisdom of hindsight, was that "the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings." What he meant by that murky phrasing was that the different islands supported distinct species and subspecies within certain lineages. "My attention was first called to this by the Vice-Governor, Mr. Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought."....

...

Darwin would later regret that he had let the vice-governor's comment about shell differences [among the tortoises] slide past him. "I did not for sometime pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from the two islands." He hadn't guessed [yet] that islands so similar in physical conditions, and so close together, could be inhabited by distinct sets of creatures.

His methodological mistake, as I've mentioned earlier, didn't apply just to tortoises; he had also jumbled some of his bird specimens together without regard to their island of origin. "Unfortunately most of the specimens of the finch tribe were mingled together," he admitted in a later edition of the Journal. Bear in mind that even the first published edition of this Journal was written after he had arrived back in England; it was a literary composition for which his Beagle diary and field notebooks supplied raw material. During the actual field work, his perspective had been different. Collecting with zeal but without time or distance to reflect, he had lumped specimens together carelessly and ignored the suggestive patterns of archipelago speciation [which of course no one had recognized before]. Only later, back in England, with help from taxonomic specialists, did he notice enough to bemoan the mistake and imagine the implications of the data he hadn't quite gathered. Such retrospective insights were exactly what distinguished the Journal (especially in its revised editions) from the diary.

From The Song of the Dodo.. by David Quammen (Scribner, 2004) pp. 215-16

It is easy to regard Quammen as to hard on Darwin, but this issue aside, what this really shows is how even the most perceptive mind can miss the evidence if it does not have any idea to where it is pointing. When he was collecting his specimens it was very unlikely that Darwin could have seen the big picture that having a set of specimens and the leisure to examine them and consider what the collection meant, that he could have known what he was “supposed” to have been seeing.

Psst... over this way

2007-01-25T01:20:00.001-05:00

Psst... over this way, originally uploaded by SwirlingStillness.

Curiously, at least one ice-age giant may return to North America even without the help of humans. Fourteen thousand years ago much of North America south of the latitude of New York was inhabited by a giant armadillo known as Dasypus bellus. At about twenty kilograms it was three times as heavy as the living armadillo, but otherwise the two were virtually identical. Beginning about 13,000 years ago the giant armadillo was driven out of what is now the United States. Human hunting was likely responsible, for the large armadillos probably hibernated in fissures among rocks, where they were easily spotted and dispatched. Some armadillos, however, survived in the dense rainforests and rugged terrain of Central America. These were smaller than those living further north, and they like many species, have shrunk in average body size over the past 13,000 years. This is because they were hunted assiduously by the Indians who considered them a delicious repast and, as we have seen, hunting pressure can lead to the selection of rapidly maturing dwarfs.

As the Indian population itself began to decline in the seventeenth century and hunting pressure eased, the selective pressure felt by the armadillos reversed. Small armadillos began a rapid advance north. Between 1905 and 1914, at the height of their northward charge, they advanced at a rate of more than twenty-five kilometres a year. Today's small armadillos have still not reached as far north as their giant ancestors did 13,000 years ago. This is because they are more likely to die during cold winters than large armadillos-they cannot accumulate as much fat and they lose heat more rapidly. As cold winters kill the smaller individuals, however, natural selection is acting upon the advance guard in the armadillo invasion and they are again increasing in size. If the trend continues, in a few centuries from now the giant Dasypus bellus may once again stalk the Appalachian forests and thrive as far north as New York.

From The Eternal Frontier. by Tim Flannery (William Heinemann: London, 2001) pp. 347-348

(special thanks to Stuart on flickr for this great photo, and the post title, you can see other great photos by him here)

Tobacco

2007-01-24T02:42:00.000-05:00

In order to prevent their leaves being eaten by insects, the shrubs and herbs that make up the genus Nicotiana, to which the tobacco plant belongs, produce an extraordinary cocktail of chemicals. On average 10 percent of the plants' metabolic effort is spent producing just the alkaloids that go into the mix. The flow of chemicals to the glands of some American species is so copious that it literally drowns the insects attempting to make a meal of it. Such devotion of its metabolic efforts indicates the plant faces formidable enemies in nature, and tobacco eating insects are a resilient lot. Indeed, the newly hatched larvae of the tobacco grub recoil at their first bite of a tobacco leaf, but soon reconcile themselves to their toxic food and will thereafter take no other.

South America is the principal home of the tobacco genus [properly the genus Nicotiana], but some members are flung as far and wide as southern Africa and Australia, suggesting that the lineage may be a venerable one which evolved at a time when these landmasses were joined [Gondwanaland]. The North American species probably travelled north with the glyptodonts and sloths after the formation of the Panamanian land bridge. People, like tobacco grubs, acquired a taste for the toxic chemicals, and it was from among these immigrant species that North American Indians first selected plants that offered a good smoke. By AD 500 the Maya were already in the habit, and by the seventeenth century smoking had spread through vast areas of the continent.

Curiously, the tobacco enjoyed by Sir Walter Raleigh and first grown in Virginia in 1612 is not the species cultivated for smoking today. Raleigh relished the aroma of Nicotiana paniculata [This seems to be a very salt tolerant species it appears that makes sense in the Tidewater], which, although it is no longer smoked, has not vanished entirely as a crop-it is still grown in Eurasia as a source of insecticides. [Interestingly enough this does not even seem to be the same species that John Rolfe replaced when he reformed tobacco planting in Virginia, as Nicotiana rustica is usually the plant credited with being too strong. N. rustica has some reputation of being a hallucinigen and being used in Native American mgic and religion, it is fact a Chilean Mapuche import, and it makes sense that it might have introdued by the settlers, just as its successor was introduced from Barbados.] The plant that fills the fields of the American South today is Nicotiana tabacum, which appears to be a hybrid species with Argentinian and Bolivian ancestry.

From The Eternal Frontier. by Tim Flannery (William Heinemann: London, 2001) pp. 277-8

I have always read that Indian tobacco as smoken by Medicine men and shamans was not the same stuff we smoke today, this seems to shed a little light on the subject. The question the becomes, where do I find some Nicotiana rustica to try smokin?

Ecological Release: Grizzlies and North American Indians

2007-01-23T07:09:00.000-05:00

How I wondered, did such large animals diversify so quickly? The answer lies not only in the richness of the continent but in the 'ecological release' experienced by the bears in their new homes. With few competitors and a huge variety of resources they quickly diversified and adapted to local conditions. Indians of course do not represent incipient new subspecies as grizzlies do, but for millennia before 1492 they were adapting through cultural change to local conditions even more rapidly than grizzlies were through natural selection. As a result both Indians and grizzlies have developed exceptional diversity in a very short time.

Whenever a species arrives in a new habitat, a series of evolutionary forces come into playthat have a dramatic effect upon it. The nature of a founding population has a considerable effect on the process. Such populations are never truly representative of the population from which the are drawn, and this leads to a founder effect. It may have been, for example, that there were no expert bow and arrow makers among the first people to cross into North America and this craft my have been lost to the New World through this founder effect. [Surely this is correct, but even if one subscribes to a Clovis first theory of the population of North America, the oldest evidence of the bow anywhere that I know of, from the Mesolithic Natufian complex in the Middle East, and is from at least a millenium after the the latest the Clovis people were in the Americas.]

If the new homeland that a species invades is essentially an open field, with few competitors but lots of food, then the species goes through a period of ecological release. For creatures such as birds this can result in a population that is more varied (in beak shape, leg length or size) than the parent population. This happens because in the absence of competition almost all variants can make a living [and find mates] of some sort. This phase of the evolutionary process is typically brief, occurring over a few decades or centuries. Then as the open field is filled, individuals in the variable population begin to be selected for various traits and begin to adapt to local conditions. Long beaks and long legs may be favored in one environment and short beaks and short legs, or some combination of both, in another.

Thus begins the long and final phase of the adaptive process that makes species. Known as evolution by natural selection, the process can be thought of as a great centrifuge, throwing apart the geographically separated portions of a once similar people or species, creating diversity out of uniformity. The richer and more diverse the environment is, the faster the centrifuge can be thought of as turning. The centrifugal force is felt most strongly after the closing of the frontier, and for organisms like large mammals its results via natural selection are evident only after thousands or tens of thousands of years. For humans, however, who adapt through learned cultures, the process can happen swiftly.

From The Eternal Frontier. by Tim Flannery (William Heinemann: London, 2001) pp. 237-238

Books Completed in December 2006

2006-12-31T23:50:00.000-05:00

Kilrone. by Louis L'Amour (Bantam Books, 2002)

Didn't get much reading done this month. In December I moved back to Texas after 10 years, most recently from San Francisco, and with that and Christmas, and everything else, I've been pretty busy. Still haven't even gotten my books from the movers. Probably the only reason I finished this one is that it is only 152 pages long.

However it was a diverting 152 pages, a pretty decent story that could have been more fleshed out. The rough dialogue fit it. After my recent trip up to Modoc Country, the Northern Nevada setting was pretty vivid. I've only recently starting learning about the American Indians in the Northern Great Basin, and this only makes me want to read a general history.

Kilrone is about a cavalry battalion in Northern Nevada that gets in trouble during the Bannock War, there seems to be a fair amount of research involved, a character seemingly based on Sarah Winnemucca and a few other details, but there is certainly a sort of generic quality to the story, which is mostly a revenge tale about the title character and a corrupt and criminal villain who runs a camp outside the fort. My basic review is that it is as I said earlier: diverting.

Pictures of Mesa Verde

2006-12-18T22:13:00.000-05:00

I was reading this post on NewMexiKen's blog, and since my books are already packed up, I ended up looking up Mesa Verde before Richard Wetherill on Google, and I found these great pictures of Cliff Dwellings from the 1870s. There are quite a few William Henry Jackson pictures on the same site, the index is here.

Area Codes and Population

2006-12-15T13:12:00.001-05:00

I was looking at an area code map this morning, and I noticed that New Mexico (pop 1.9 million) had only one area code, I think I actually knew that before, but I was really surpised that so many states had more than one, even Utah (pop. 2.5 million) and Nevada (pop 2.4 million) had 2 area codes. I noticed that only one other state, West Virginia (pop. 1.8 million), had three congressional representatives and only one area code.

When I first looked at this my first thought was the density of phones, it is interesting that the two highest population states are states that one suspects might have a lower number of telephones, and the lowest population state (Nevada) that has two area codes is one that might easily be suspected of having a higher density of telephone numbers, but the population difference is so great, half a million, between the the 35th and 36th largest states by population that I don't think this really means anything. Other than it is an amazing world we live in when there are more than 2 million Nevadans.

On that note here is a picture of Pueblo Bonito, begun about a thousand years bbefore anyone ever imagined an area code, from atop the Mesa on the North side of Chaco Canyon.

200605292320Chaco 077, originally uploaded by moheroy.

Depressing

2006-12-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

Michael Barone posted a link to this Washington Post story story on Dairy subsidies. It is a really fascinating and extremely depressing read about the nightmare that is farm policy in the United States today. Anyway, I highly recommend reading it.

Rebuilding Cities

2006-12-10T21:47:00.000-05:00

One of the good things about reading policy magazines more than a year after they are published is that one can much more easily separate the wheat from the chaff.

In the September 19, 2006 issue of the New Republic there was a pretty good article about rebuilding cities, what struck me was this portion:

The impulse to rebuild a radically new city is especially pointed in New Orleans, punctuated as it is by a degraded infrastructure, corrupt politics, massive wealth disparities, and, in many neighborhoods, near-Third World living conditions. After a disaster like Katrina, "for the first time, adequate resources become available for thorough physical and design studies," wrote the authors of a 1977 National Science Foundation-funded study on post-disaster reconstruction. "The impossible seems possible ... the opportunity for comprehensive study and major change is at hand."

In fact, the idea of rebuilding a city "bigger and better" has a long - and disheartening - history. After the Great London Fire of 1666, the architect Sir Christopher Wren pushed city leaders to adopt his plans for an orderly city grid, with wide streets that would help slow a future fire. But even the man who built St. Paul's Cathedral had little impact on London's reconstruction. A similar story unfolded after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed over 50 percent of the city's housing stock and wiped out its commercial and industrial sectors. By coincidence, the year before the earthquake, the great architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham had drawn up a master plan for the San Francisco of the twentieth century. But, when the earthquake provided the perfect opportunity to put his plan into effect, it was completely overlooked. Even Chicago, which supposedly rebuilt itself according to exacting new construction codes after a fire wiped out much of its downtown in 1871, was actually first rebuilt in the same shoddy manner as before; it was only after a prolonged political battle that planners put tougher codes in place.

The crux of the problem, planners admit, is that no city, even one as thoroughly devastated as New Orleans, emerges as a tabula rasa. "There is already a plan for reconstruction, indelible stamped in the perception of each resident - the plan of the pre-disaster city," wrote the authors of the NSF study. Not only does the will of the residents to "make it like it was" render an thought of relocation void, but it also makes it difficult to conceive of any urban design that varies too far from the old model - no matter how socially unjust that model may have been.

"Plus Ca Change, Rebuilding a beautiful mess" by Clay Risen, The New Republic, September 19, 2005. pp. 17-19

I think this piece more than anything I have read captures the hubris of the urban planner. While I am no fan of New Orleans, personally I find it only rivalled among major American cities by Las Vegas in its ability to make me feel uncomfortable, the idea of treating any city as a tabula rasa for planners to build a perfect city upon is the sort of idea that should fill one with horror. I know it is received wisdom that the failure to rebuild London along Wren's lines was a tragedy, but am I the only person who is less than enthusiastic for a London along the lines of Dublin, Bath or Edinburgh's "admittedly beautiful" New Town? And of course this wold be an Edinburgh without its magnificent setting or the Old Town and Castle. But the most important part of this is that London's windy traditional streets and cramped conditions are 300+ years later a minor part of the great city that is modern London. Wren's planning may not have been followed, but in the West End and Westminster it is quite clear that this is what modern London has. And the East End would be the same regardless of any of Wren's plans. Cities grow organically, and what may appear desirable in one century is anathema in only a few decades. For example all of the great plans for rebuilding San Francisco were premised on the "removal" of the city's Chinatown, Burnham's famously. This in the same spirit as the author's dreams of building to correct social injustice. One can never recapture what has been destroyed completely, or even in part, but cities are living and organic, even if unfeeling, and there is a reason grand schemes so often come to either nothing or, even worse, sterility.

Devil's Postpile

2006-12-01T13:55:00.001-05:00

200610014 Mammoth Long Valley 053
Originally uploaded by moheroy.

Devil's Postpile National Monument is near Mammoth Lakes, just East of Yosemite in California. It is a really great example of columnar jointing in basalt. Unlike the famous Giant's Causeway in County Antrim, the perspective here is from below so when you look up it is really impressive. And since you can climb up to the top you also get the really neat hexagonal pavement effect as well.

Sadly these days the National Park Service requires you to take a shuttle bus out to see it, and while it is kind of neat it is probably not worth the hassle, since there are so many other interesting things to see in the area. Especially if you have already seen similar formations and are pressed for time. Luckily for me I was there in October just before the park closed and they pretty much left you to your own devices and I was able to drive to the trailhead myself.

Books completed in November 2006

2006-12-01T02:34:00.000-05:00

Soldier of Sidon. by Gene Wolfe (Tor, 2006)

Ines of My Soul. by Isabel Allende (Harper Collins, 2006)

Paragaea: A Planetary Romance. by Chris Roberson (PYR [Prometheus Books], 2006)

I was planning to do better this month, but in the end I didn't get much done, the more interesting books I was reading didn't get finished this month and since I was traveling for Thanksgiving all I managed was some not particularly awesome fantastical fiction.

The Gene Wolfe novel, Soldier of Sidon, was not bad, actually it was pretty good, but it was not especially engaging either. The character of Latro, who forgets everyday the events of the day before has never been very profound and the other characters were always more important. In Soldier of the Mist, and Soldier of Arête, the subsidiary characters are the real emotional focus, especially Latro's young slave, whose name I can't remember, they gave the story emotional resonance that the hero because of his lack of memory lacked. In this book the "river wife" who accompanies Latro is not very well seen, we are told of Latro's affection toward her, but she is never really fleshed out, and in the end I hardly cared. On the whole it was a disappointment.

Ines of My Soul was no disappointment. It was so singularly bad and unoriginal, with such a distracted and slapdash character it was of constant interest. I have never read a less competently constructed and self indulgent book. I hate to mention Georgette Heyer here, especially since she is a far better writer, but at several points I stopped reading Ines of My Soul and began contemplating her. No one has yet managed to write like the inimitable Miss Heyer, and while her magnificent use of adverbs is unique to say the least, it is still magnificent. Isabel Allende however reads like a 14 year old girl who has read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and then attempted to rewrite a Kathleen Woodiwiss novel in that image. It truly has to be experienced to recognize how bad it is. But life is short so I would not recommend it.

Paragaea was interesting but I really didn't care all that much about any of its characters, its world, or its plot, and it seemed too eager to be a classic and too knowing to be what it claimed to be. Edgar Rice Burroughs was certainly not unaware of his pulp qualities but he hardly reveled in the sort of self referential qualities this book exhibits. The afterward was something else altogether and quite shameless.

Hopefully December will be a better month for reading, even with everything else I have going on, so I better get to it.

California Highway 4

2006-11-22T06:25:00.001-05:00

20061014 Sierras CR4 Panorama 1, originally uploaded by moheroy.

Looking Southwest from CR 4 just West of Pacific Grade Summit.

Lake Helen from Lassen Peak Highway

2006-11-17T05:07:00.001-05:00

20061012 Mount Lassen 2 - Plumas (22), originally uploaded by moheroy.

Typically excessive South Cascade scenery.

Flow banding on Southeast Flank of Mount Lassen

2006-11-15T03:37:00.001-05:00

20061012 Mount Lassen 1 (155), originally uploaded by moheroy.

Not all my Lassen pictures turned out badly, but then some things are hard to mess up. This is flow banding on the Southeast flank of Mount Lassen. The direction of the flow is along a line running 25° NW/SE. Which since Mount Lassen is 25° NW suggests that this is the flow's point of origin.

Hat Lake and Reading Peak

2006-11-15T00:48:00.001-05:00

20061012 Mount Lassen 1 (102)
Originally uploaded by moheroy.

More Lassen photots, which while very pretty are kind of dull, I thought this one was one of the better ones, even though it is a little washed out. Also it gives me a chance to play with formatting.

I need to figure out how the picture size is determined. That I have a lot of html to learn is quite obvious. Until I figure this out, I don't think I will be making many more picture posts in this format, it is quite ugly. However posting vertically oriented pictures is a problem aesthetically.

Mount Lassen

2006-11-12T23:55:00.001-05:00

20061012 Mount Lassen 1 (43), originally uploaded by moheroy.

This is from about a month ago, but I was posting these to flickr tonight so I thought I'd post a sample. Sadly I think most of the Lassen pictures are overexposed, I am still figuring out how to use this digital camera. The Nevada pictures are unfortunately even worse.

Decadence

2006-11-09T17:55:00.000-05:00

I'm usually not a fan of Victor Davis Hanson, he is too much of the crotchety old classicist, nothing good has happened since the death of Pericles and all that. And his writing on California, or "Mexifornia" often seem to be only one step from the basest nineteenth century nativism.

But then he is also a sensitive and brilliant man, and reading him, especially his work on the Classics themselves, his book on Hoplite warfare is one of the finest works of historical imagination I have ever read, and I continue to read him. This column on the election and the decline of California is one of the most melancholic things I have read, and every word is truth. How a state so beautiful, can be so self destructive is one of the great mysteries for the ages. It is awful how belief in a modern and advanced California based on Progress and optimism, where all problems can be solved and the future is glorious is in a way of the same sort as belief in the Republican values of Ancient Rome or the idealism of Confucius lamenting the decline of morals since the time of the Duke of Zhou.

Fundamentally I believe there are no Golden Ages, and that we can only look forward, but living in California, that seems like such an antique and unrealistic belief: That belief in the future and in the idea of improvement is a dream out of another age.

Restless Heart Syndrome

2006-11-03T20:58:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about another driveabout, into the great basin this time, across Nevada and back again. Even though I haven't even got close to finishing my posting of my pictures from the last outing on flickr. Then I see this.

I'll be on the road tomorrow before sunrise.

How can I not? I can't wait to be watching the sunrise on US 50, America's Loneliest Road. With that sort of billing how can you miss it.

Need to get some sleep I guess...

Schonchin Butte Cinder Cone

2006-11-01T19:50:00.000-05:00

20061011 Lava Beds NM - California (59), originally uploaded by moheroy.

Black Crater at Lava Beds National Monument

2006-11-01T19:49:00.000-05:00

200610011 Tule Lake - Modoc War 279, originally uploaded by moheroy.

Books completed in October 2006

2006-11-01T19:48:00.000-05:00

The Song of the Dodo. by David Quammen (Scribner, 2004)

The Machine's Child. by Kage Baker (Tor, 2006)

Gilgamesh. translated by Stephen Mitchell (Free Press, 2004)

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement. by Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos, 2006)

Berlin: City of Stones, Book One. by Jason Lutes (Drawn and Quarterly, 2004)

Canby's Cross, Lava Beds National Monument

2006-10-28T09:27:00.000-04:00

200610011 Tule Lake - Modoc War 042, originally uploaded by moheroy.

It was here on April 11, 1873 that General Edward R. S. Canby's Peace Commission was ambushed at parley by a band of Modoc Indians while trying to negotiate during the Modoc War.

Tule Lake

2006-10-26T04:17:00.000-04:00

200610011 Tule Lake - Modoc War 012, originally uploaded by moheroy.

Drainage canal leading East into Tule Lake.

Crater Lake

2006-10-25T08:56:00.000-04:00

20061010 Crater Lake Panorama 10, originally uploaded by moheroy.

Dan Simberloff on Theory in Ecology.

2006-10-03T02:09:00.000-04:00

David Quammen interviewing Dan Simberloff:

“I’m sort of viewed as a professional crank,” he says truly. “I’m disenchanted with lots of community ecology. And my disenchantment to some extent with equilibrium theory stemmed from the same source. That is: Modeling is fun, sometimes it produces elegant structures, but there is a tendency to reify models. To take them as nature, when really all they are is proposed abstractions of nature. I’m concerned when a literature begins to develop on the models themselves, rather than on nature.” There’s a long history of such airy theorizing in the journals of ecology, he says. Too much conceptual scat singing, too little observed data. Far too little experiment. “And the equilibrium theory, it seemed to me, was increasingly that sort of beast. That is, Ed [Wilson] and I did that experiment to try and test it directly.” They went to the mangroves. They censused real arthropods on real islands under the real Florida sun. They not only tested theory against reality; they did it with data from a controlled, focused, carefully manipulated situation. They found a way to convert small bits of functioning ecosystem into a rigorous experiment. :Not many other people did.”

David Quammen in The Song of the Dodo.. (Scribner, 2004) pp. 482-3.

Ahistorical Theory

2006-09-28T06:30:00.000-04:00

"[Robert] MacArthur and [Edward O.] Wilson's predecessors had commonly explained the pattern in historical terms. Remoteness was an impediment that only eons could overcome. Impoverishment together with remoteness suggested that an island's history had been relatively brief. Colonization of any new oceanic island took time-vast sweeps of time, if the island was remote-and remote islands were generally not ancient enough to have acquired great richness of species. So said the historical hypothesis.

But MacArthur and Wilson suspected that history wasn't the answer. Time was the limiting factor only during the earliest period on a new oceanic island, they believed, and most of the world's island ecosystems had long since come to maturity, to a state of balance, to equilibrium, with the number of species on each a reflection of ongoing processes, not historical circumstances. The ongoing processes that most shaped balance, they argued were immigration and extinction."

David Quammen in The Song of the Dodo.. (Scribner, 2004) p. 422.

Historicism versus Process in Ecology.

2006-09-28T03:08:00.000-04:00

“One theme underlay most of his work. This theme-it seems almost a truism now, but [Robert] MacArthur himself considered it worth stating-was the search for patterns. He emphasized patterns and equilibria and ongoing processes, while de-emphasizing the sort of one-time contingent events that figure in historical explanations. Where lies the distinction between those two types of explanation, the process-oriented and the historical? A historian pays special attention to the differences between phenomena, because they shed light on historical contingency. “He may ask why the New World tropics have toucans and hummingbirds,” Macarthur wrote, “and parts of the Old World have hornbills and sunbirds.” The hornbills of Africa and Asia are large-bodied, omnivorous birds with huge beaks allowing them to fill roughly the same ecological niche as the toucans of tropical America; likewise the sunbirds of Africa and Asia are small-bodied bright-colored nectar drinkers, filling roughly the same niches as American hummingbirds. The history-minded biogeographer wonders why hummingbirds, not sunbirds, have occupied the suitable niches on a given continent. MacArthur himself was more interested in in the similarities among phenomena, because similarities reveal the workings of regular processes. He was more inclined to wonder why hummingbirds and sunbirds, despite their different ancestries and their independent histories in two different regions of the planet, are so similar. I’ve already quoted MacArthur’s statement that to do science “is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts,” and the patterns that particularly concerned him were the patterns of biogeography.”

David Quammen in The Song of the Dodo.. (Scribner, 2004) pp. 431-2.

Modernism and Historicism

2006-09-26T08:51:00.000-04:00

"Admittedly even the liturgical movement itself had not been wholly free from historicism. Rereading its literature today, one finds that it was much too influenced by an archaeological mentality that presupposed a model of decline: What occurs after a certain point in time appears ipso facto to be of inferior value, as if the Church were not alive and therefore capable of development in every age. As a result of this, the kind of thinking shaped by the liturgical movement narrowed into a biblical-positivist mentality, locked itself into a backward looking attitude, and thus left no room for the dynamic development of the faith. On the other hand the distance implied in historicism inevitably paved the way for "modernism"; since what is merely past is no longer living, it leaves the present isolated and so leads to self-made experimentation."

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, translated by Adrian Walker, in Mary: The Church at the Source. (Ignatius Press, 2005), p.24.

What Pope Benedict XVI is saying is of course regarding the tensions at Vatican II, but at the same time his point is universal, it applies just as much to the Neo-Confucianism of the Song, in China as it does to 20th century Church politics. The past famously is a foreign country, and when we try to recover it from a distance, we inevitably come up with something that far more reflects "modern" sensibilities than anything that we would have done if we had not tried to throw out our present, in the name of an idealized past.

San Francisco's City Hall

2006-09-22T18:57:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Thursday, I went down to City Hall, here in San Francisco, to attend a planning meeting. It was quite interesting and I will probably write on some of the issues that I felt were raised at the meeting later. But for now I just wanted to post some pictures I took on the 4th floor of City Hall before the meeting and during a recess.

I always find these little touches of Imperial grandeur magical, especially in this city, a city so often intent on elevating coarseness and fixated on the disparagement of glory.

The monogram of the city.

The only Howard Zinn quote you'll ever need.

2006-09-17T09:23:00.000-04:00

"A box cutter can bring down a tower. A poem can build up a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution."

Howard Zinn, from his forward to Cindy Sheehan’s magnum opus, Dear President Bush (City Lights, 2006)

Cuvier and History

2006-09-14T08:45:00.000-04:00

"The Ancient History of the Earth, the ultimate goalwhich all this research is leading, is in itself one of the most fascinating subjects on which the attention of enlightened persons can be fixed. If they take an interest in following, in the infancy of our own species, the almost erased tracks of so many extinct nations, tey will doubtless find it also in gathering, in the darkness of earth's infancy, the traces of revolutions previous to the existence of every nation"

Georges Cuvier (from Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts translated by Martin J. S. Rudwick) as quoted on the last page in When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. by Michael J. Benton (Thames & Hudson, 2003)

Cuvier is clearly discussing natural history, but could not this same statement be made for human history? I think in this context it is possibly a most elegant justification and apology for the study of history for its own sake.

Books completed in September 2006

2006-09-14T03:48:00.000-04:00

Books I have read this month: September 2006

When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. by Michael J. Benton (Thames & Hudson, 2003)

Dawn of Empire. by Sam Barone (William Morrow [Harper Collins], 2006)

Miss Brooke

2006-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

"Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it."

George Elliot, Middlemarch

Years ago I watched the end of the movie Lady Jane, with a friend of mine's girlfriend. This was in Austin, I was already preparing to leave at this time but I was still engaged with the city. I remember watching the frankly unpleasant character of Lady Jane Grey trapped in her own fanaticism and at the same time I saw her own position. If you believe how can you recant? Some years later I was chatting with someone online, it was at the time of the Columbine shootings and the other person mentioned Cassie Bernall, how she had, in the cliched phrase: "said yes." I remember replying, if you believe in God, how can you say anything else? When someone is pointing a gun at your face, how can someone deny God, if the believe? Maybe this is the easiest of martyrdoms, you either say yes or no, but deep down can you believe that your answer matters to the man holding the gun? It is only between you and your soul, and God if he exists. To deny God then is to damn yourself. Whether God exists or not, you are still damned if you deny him. Cassie Bernall may or may not have faced this situation, or uttered the words of conviction, but the situation is universal*. I think my response shocked the other party. Later I was at the 4 star theater here in San Francisco for a Chinese film festival. The film was about an official in either the Warring States period or the Spring and Autumn who sacrificed his own child to save the son of his prince who was entrusted to him. The wife of the theaters owner said to me that that was a pretty horrible decision and I thought at the time: What choice did the minister have? To betray the prince's son was to betray himself. What did it matter if he lost his only child if he was not righteous? I think sometimes I am a fanatic, that this is the mind of the fanatic. But if you believe, what other choice is there?

-update-

* In fact it seems that if anyone said these words it was Valeen Schnurr, who said it after being shot. However after her profession of fath, she managed to crawl to safety as one of the killers reloaded, which is the sort of detail which robs the story of quite a bit of its oomph, in the eyes of those who like to make uplifting semons and publish heartwarming books. At the time of the conversation though neither of us knew it hadn't happened as reported, and the point is still valid.

edited 31 Aug 2006 for Valeen Schnurr comments and spelling

Works Cited

2006-07-21T23:25:00.000-04:00

I have just started reading Shepard Krech's The Ecological Indian Myth and History , It seem like it will be an interesting book, but one annoying quality leaps right out at the beginning. While it has very thorough endnotes, with discussion even, it has no bibliography. This is more than just a minor inconvenience. I have been told that this sort of thing is often the result of production costs but is this really acceptable? The whole point of a bibliography is to help the reader identify the writer's sources and that becomes much more difficult when searching an endnote. Especially one that cites 8 different sources, and this is hardly an exceptional one.

Planning commission

2006-07-20T20:57:00.000-04:00

Today I went down to the San Francisco Planning Commission meeting. It was pretty interesting there was not much controversy but on one item, the extension of a house on Belgrave Avenue in the Twin Peaks area, there was quite the conflict. I have to say I felt bad for the complainant, i.e., the people trying to bring it before discretionary review, but they were so incredibly wrong and so badly served by their attorney, at least in my personal and inexpert opinion that they really had no case to stand on. My favorite part, an opinion I appear to share with the Planning Commission's staff representative had to be when the attorney openly admitted that they had no objection to the construction, the real matter being an unfiled civil dispute over a variance from the early 70s. The whole business was just awful, the self indulgent and utterly disgustingly hypocritical expressions of love from the party complained against, the architect who made my skin crawl and the supposed artistic merits of a laughably ugly house. I must say I am very curious about the 1976 architectural survey that noted this house's importance.

Area Code Overlays.

2006-07-11T20:50:00.000-04:00

This LA Times (registration required) article is pretty fascinating. It is about beginning ten digit dialing in Santa Monica, and it treats the whole thing as a horrible imposition, right down to the requisite local activist opposing it.

What is really fascinating about this though is that aside from what the story says about "guinea pigs" and "if the experiment works," ten digit dialing is actually pretty common in the US. Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul have been doing it for years. It is pretty amazing that California has resisted it all this time.

I don't know how related this is but one thing that always amazed me about San Francisco is that calling the City from Oakland, or vice versa is a long distance call. But calling San Rael in Marin is not, the same goes for LA where calling across town is long distance. In Houston, where I grew up, nothing even remotely in the city was a long distance call.

Ah well, another California oddity like no mileage posts, which I am weirdly getting used to.

The Foggy Avenues of my Mind

2006-07-11T02:29:00.000-04:00

Publishing something on the internet is a pretty narcissistic activity, but it also forces one to actually commit to opinion, to publish a statement than can only be reinterpreted but not replaced. It commits you to actually saying what you are saying.

In a way this is the purpose of "Roy's Foggy Avenues," to force myself to stop reinventing my words from scratch and instead give them the concrete foundation of my previous words. This of course means that this post is the foundation of everything I write after, but I think it would be best to consider this just the first pier of that foundation.

Anyway, it's a start...