Guns, Germs, and Steel -- Take 2

Despite, my best efforts, I'm not sure I gave Guns, Germs, and Steel the attention I (and J) said I should have.  I tried!  I think this is maybe a book better read than listened to, since then you're less likely to be doing something else as well.

Regardless, I did enjoy it.  I think I even got a few nuggets of wisdom out of it, though I do not consider myself expert enough to judge the quality of the arguments the author made.

Diamond starts out his history with broad history of the settlement of peoples, specifically on their domestication of plants and development of agriculture.  He makes an interesting point about the spread of various domesticated plant species across land masses with broad latitudes but limited longitudes (for example, the Eurasian pan-continent), while masses oriented longitudinally (Africa, the Americas) experienced a much more limited spread of species due to the variability in climate.  The same is largely true for technological developments.  Domestication of animals also played a role in how large a developing society became.  He ends with an analysis of the different structures and sizes societies can take: band, tribe, chiefdom, or state.

PBS did a television special based on the book, and also has a website full of interesting information here. 

I now face a dilemma: I also have his book Collapse on audio.  Do I listen to it, knowing I will probably have the same issue with attention, or do I read it, knowing that I may never get around to it?

Goal #11

Goal #11: online bookmarks, phase I - the personal computer.

I have a lot of bookmarks.  They need some organization.  This is going to be at least a three-week project, through I may not do them all right in a row.  Or maybe I will.  We'll see if I'm on a roll.

Phase I consists of sorting through all the bookmarks I have "saved" on my personal computer.  Do I need this one?  Do I use it?  Does it even work anymore?  How should it be categorized?  That sort of thing.  Then I will get them all in order, on my personal computer anyway.

Recap of Goal #10: Oh my god, the craziest thing happened at my first left-handed meal!  I was eating some of T's leftover potatoes (we went to brunch at First Watch), and I realized that, with my left hand, I was misjudging the distance to the potato. Sometimes I would overshoot, sometimes I would undershoot, and my fork would just meet empty plate.

I tried my right hand, and got my potato with no problem.  I pointed this out to T, who is left handed, and he reached for a couple of bites of my waffle to test out his skills.  Left hand? No problem.  Right hand?  A little slower, but still no problem.

Then he did a little experiment with me.  He put the salt shaker somewhere near the middle of the table, and - quickly and without much thought - I was supposed to use my left hand to reach out and touch it.  I missed.  I underestimated the distance.  Again, but this time with my right hand?  Dead center on the top of the salt shaker.

As many of you know, I was born amblyopic (specifically exotropic).  My depth perception is terrible generally, and I think that's why I was missing the potatoes with my left hand.  First of all, I'm a righty, so my fine motor skills are less developed in my left hand.  But Ty, who's a lefty, can still manage to get the distances correct with his right hand, so it must be something more than that.  It seems that the compensatory skills I've developed to judge distances somehow work better when I'm using my dominant hand.  Maybe it's just because I've had more practice with it, so my brain communicates with it more effectively.

Anyway, super strange.

Neal Degrasse Tyson and NASA

This past Friday, Neil deGrasse Tyson was on Science Friday.

Prior to that hour of radio, I had no idea that Dr. Tyson was on a campaign to educate Americans about the importance of continuing space exploration.  Boy, do I know that now.

It's not clear how much success he's having on that mission but it is clear that he's passionate about it, and perhaps more importantly, he's a great ambassador.  He's like a good professor: he communicates well, he listens to questions with interest - and then answers them!, and he gets excited about his subject matter.  If you asked me prior to the show whether I wanted to listen to an hour-long podcast about raising money for space exploration, I would have said "no way."  But I listened to the whole thing, and enjoyed it!  (Hear Dr. Tyson talk about the most astounding thing in the universe here.)

During the show, someone asked whether we shouldn't be focusing on the problems here at home rather than worrying about outer space.  Dr. Tyson responded by pointing out that the federal government spends 50 times as much on domestic social programs as we do on the entire NASA budget.

I have no idea how much of that money spent on social programs I actually see.  My first instinct is to say, "not much," but it's probably more than I would think.  Regardless, I'm certain that, penny for penny spent, the amount of enjoyment or satisfaction or whatever you want to call it which I get from NASA projects far outstrips that from federal social programs.  (For evidence, see here, here, and here.  And look!  Even in that last post, I was in agreement with Neil.  I just didn't think I'd want to hear him talk about it.  Lesson learned.)

Now, I grant that when things go wrong at NASA, they can go so spectacularly, disastrously wrong that they put other government missteps to shame.  However, given their relatively paltry budget, NASA seems to do a darn good job avoiding those disasters, or at least taking them seriously when they do happen.  I bet lots of politicians could learn something there.

On a related note, WU professor Ray Arvidson is the science advisor to NASA's Curiosity Project (aka the Mars Science Laboratory).  He was written up recently in the St. Louis Business Journal.

Long live my little rovers!

[Aside: have you seen NASA's most recent satellite photo of Earth?  If not, you can check it out here, and the story includes a link to download a high-res copy for your own self.]

An Organized Kitchen

These pictures are long overdue, but I thought I'd entertain you all with how I spent my last few days of winter: by organizing the kitchen and getting crafty!

(Okay, so some of my labels are a little crooked, but still.  I think I did a pretty good job.  In any case, my organizational OCD is at bay, for now.)

What I'm Reading Now -- Guns, Germs, and Steel

I'm a few tracks in, and I can already tell that I'll have to put a little more effort into listening to Guns, Germs, and Steel than I have to other books recently.

At least at the beginning, the author covers the subject matter in such sweeping statements that if you miss one or two, all the sudden you're centuries behind the discussion and have no idea how he got from A to B.

He's already told me that his goal is to disprove the biological superiority theory for why some societies thrive while others fail, so I'm thinking these broad generalizations will give way to more in-depth discussion once we get the background info out of the way.  We'll see.
 
Also, I really like Diamond's (or his publisher's) use of the Oxford comma in the title.

The Painted Drum -- Take 2

I finished with The Painted Drum over the weekend, and rather enjoyed it.

It's told in four parts, each part narrated by one of three voices.  The suspense of the novel is in the unfolding of the story each narrator tells, and discovering exactly how how the drum connects them to one another.

The book starts and ends with Faye Travers, a New Hampshire woman who appraises estates and actions estate property for a living.  She discovers a valuable drum from the Ojibwe tribe of North Dakota, to which her mother is connected.  Faye discovers the drums origins, and later how it continues to affect the Ojibwe living near its new owner.

Common themes run across the three stories.  Redemption seems too strong a word for the strongest theme.  Recognition, perhaps?  Acknowledgment?  Sort of a coming to terms.  Unlike Beginners, which I watched recently, The Painted Drum seems to have a more realistic, if also slightly more depressing, outlook.

Goal #10

Goal #10: eat with my left hand.

What a silly thing to do!  But really, I'm going to work on this.  Beware of flying escargot if you're my dining partner.  But why am I doing this?

I've gotten into the bad habit of scarfing down my food without really taking the time to appreciate it.  Since I'm a righty most of the time, eating will my left hand will force me to slow down a bit, and hopefully in the meantime, I'll enjoy what I'm eating.

Recap of Goal #9: a qualified success!  I made little to no progress on my work e-mail, but my personal e-mail inboxes look LOADS better and more manageable!

What I Watched -- Beginners

My timing is not usually too good, but I lucked out with Beginners.  I had gotten it from the library just days before Christopher Plummer won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.  Plummer plays Hal, a 75-year-old cancer patient who comes out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor). 


For some reason, despite all the things I liked about this movie, I was not totally taken in by it.  I liked Plummer as the old man with a new lease on life, however temporary.  I liked McGregor as the confused, somewhat wayward son who just bumbles along because he has nothing else to do.  I liked the photo montages which punctuated the film.  I loved Arthur the dog.  (Perhaps not incidentally, Arthur is Christopher Plummer's first name.)

But I just wasn't swept away.  Maybe everything was a little too neat and tidy, despite Oliver's bumbling.  Or maybe he just reminded me of one of those clueless people for whom everything seems to work out swimmingly, regardless of whether they put any work or even thought into the direction in which their life is heading.  Maybe it was my disbelief that beautiful French actresses fall out of the sky and onto your couch, even in L.A.  Maybe it was just a story too unfamiliar from my own. 

Bottom line: whatever it was, while I enjoyed the movie, I didn't fall under the spell of the story and probably won't watch it again.

What I'm Reading Now -- The Painted Drum

Louise Erdrich, as it turns out, has written many books.  She's one of those authors who sort of flies under the radar - from what I can tell her books are generally acclaimed but do not become singular sensations like Olive Kitteridge, Jodi Picoult books, or anything recommended by Oprah.  When they're new, you can usually find them on those displays of new books in the bookstores, but not for long.

I've read only one of her other books: The Beet Queen (which I always get mixed up with a completely unrelated book I read: Queen of the Turtle Derby and other Southern Phenomena, which in turn I get mixed up with a series I've never read: the Sweet Potato Queens books; it's the "queen" thing).  Anyway, I read Beet Queen when I was living in London, and frankly I don't remember the details too well, but I do remember enjoying it.  Why I haven't read more of her stuff, I can't say.  (Same with Anne Tyler.  I read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant when I was in London, liked it, and haven't read anything else of hers.  She's another fly-under-the-radar type.)

Since I've gotten this far without actually telling you what I'm reading but talking about lots of other books, I guess it's time: The Painted Drum.  Erdrich is half Native American (Chippewa), and many of her books deal with Native American themes, including this one.

Outliers -- Take 2

As I expected (and hoped), this was a fun read.  Gladwell picks well-known and interesting subjects to investigate and support his basic conclusion, which is this (he says this at the beginning, so it's not really a spoiler): outliers aren't, in fact, outliers at all.

We have this idea that people like Bill Gates are somehow so extraordinary that their accomplishments are way out of reach for anyone else.  But in fact, their accomplishments are a combination of talent honed through lots of work (10,000 hours needed to become an expert) and coincidence or circumstances that they were able to exploit to make the most of those talents.  This is not groundbreaking information, but it's nonetheless an interesting personal and social study.

My biggest criticism: he does, in fact make his point at the beginning, and again at the end, with a study of his own ancestors.  What falls between are basically a series of case studies, all with similar themes and plots, which is a little flat.  By the time you've heard the same story three or four times, you know how it's going to end.  It's kept interesting because the actual means, the breaks each person gets, are different, even though the outcome is the same.  Generally, though: enjoyable.