Resolution Indecision

I haven't figured out what my resolution for 2009 is. If you have ideas of something interesting, fun and shareable, let me know. I'm considering gratitude, Italy, castles, insects and the family Fabaceae (the legumes), although nothing seems quite right. Fortunately, I have until sometime around Happy Cricket's birthday/Chinese New Year/most depressing day of the year to figure it out.

In the meantime, I'm fully supportive of The Mister's resolution to cook something from one of our cookbooks every week. Expect upcoming reports on his progress, along with book reviews (I regularly resolve to read 50 a year and I'm pleased to say I haven't fallen behind yet), and rodent and luck updates.

The Fire

Katherine Neville's The Fire is a worthy successor to her fabulously fun book, The Eight.

The Eight is a smart, fast-paced book of historical intrigue, international adventure and chess. It is full of codes, figures of the French revolution, and lucky escapes. Everything is symbolic, and usually adds up to eight (reading the notes from The Fire, I just learned that there were 64 characters in The Eight, which would explain the annoying additions of Bach, Benedict Arnold, and Muammar Gaddafi). It was a huge hit in 1988 because it was fun and there was nothing else like it (DaVinci Code having not been written and Tale of Two Cities having been long forgotten). The Eight was passed around my friends and made it to my parents' book club, where it was received as fun escapism by members of both sexes. Like a good plot-driven puzzle book, everything suddenly fits at the end and it wraps up nicely. It remains one of my favorite books and the kind of book I want to read while travelling.

So, like most fans, I was annoyed at Katherine Neville for writing a sequel. When the Mister asked me what I was reading, I replied, "A book that shouldn't have been written." Yet, like most fans, I was anxious to read it and delighted when Supplement 'Scriber (with whom I shared a love of The Eight while we were roommates in college) gave it to me. Fortunately, Neville does creatively untangle some ends and readers are involved with new characters in a new quest that sheds an interesting light on the quest of The Eight. Of course it is not nearly as good as The Eight and there are twice as many obvious symbols (everything relates to fires, triangles, eights or chess, not just eights and chess) but I still enjoyed reading it.

If you like suspending disbelief and careening on a far-fetched, symbol-studded romp, read The Eight. If you need more, wait a while and read The Fire.

Gripe: Katherine Neville does her homework. The charm in both books is figuring out that this could have happened, at least historically and geographically. Talleyrand did marry that woman and have that chef, Byron did live in Italy and Greece at the end of his life, the Minerva Terrace in Yellowstone has dried up several times . . . At the end of The Fire she lists four pages of experts consulted on topics ranging from the weather conditions at Attu to Baghdad to open hearth cooking. She doesn't list anyone for Colorado, which is probably how she got away with saying that the characters had a cabin at Mesa Verde, "fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau" where one could see the "vast billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks" from the drive lined with blue spruce trees. Huh? The height of the Colorado Plateau is 11,000 feet. 14,000 feet is a good 2,000 feet above tree line in Colorado and few spruces would ever be on the edge of a windswept plateau. Not to mention that there are no three mile high mountains in Colorado, or in the contiguous US for that matter. Katherine, if you bothered to correctly look up the Dine names of the peaks, why couldn't you check their elevation?

Into the Jungle: Find it and read it

Sean B. Carroll's Into the Jungle: Epic Adventures in the Search for Evolution is fantastic. I can't remember a time when I've read a science book so quickly or wanted to recommend it to so many readers (Dad would find it fascinating for the geology-biology connections, Mom would appreciate the human interest stories, my brother needs the biology background, the siblings-in-law [like me and all of my students] could benefit from the breadth of evolutionary thought presented, Sunflower Spinner should use it for her classes . . .). The book contains nine chapters, each about a major "adventure" in evolution, from the voyage of the Beagle to the finding of dinosaur eggs to the connections between genetics and evolution with sickle cell anemia. Each chapter is short, written as a personal story and contains enough evidence (including maps and scraps of original documentation) to explain the science. Because the book is designed as a supplement to an undergraduate non-majors biology text, the stories are all the same length with great documentation and annoying discussion questions at the end. The text book style works, however, as the constraints of format really make reading easy.

Having taken offense at another book blogger making fun of a scientist by equating "writes well for a scientist" to "writes well for a ninth grader", I paid close attention to the writing and, it's true, Carroll writes well for a scientist. He probably shouldn't have written about Darwin's "professional suicide" two pages in a row and there is an awful lot of seasickness and yellow fever going around, but altogether he writes well for a scientist, and, in my book, that's very well indeed.

I just checked Amazon and was pleased to see this book there (mine is a publisher's advance copy and it's being heavily promoted as a educational tool). Carroll's webpage points out that much of the same information is being used for a trade book, Remarkable Creatures. Certainly something would be gained in a book that wasn't written for undergraduates in class (or, as the first Amazon reviewer thought, for middle school science class), but it might also lose its concise focus and simplicity. I'll be interested to hear after you read either.

Luck and Global Climate Change

Even if I weren't studying luck this year, I would have found it a strange coincidence that I read Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe during the same week. I didn't think the 1990 Vonnegut novel (not one of his best; Cat's Cradle is just too excellent, but very good none-the-less) and the 2006 journalistic account of climate change had anything in common when I picked them up in our book room. In fact, I picked up the Vonnegut just because it had so little in common with Field Notes*. Then BAM! Both books are chopped full a quotes and luck and life and we are responsible for the state of the environment and WHAT IN THE WORLD AM I GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

Of course, I haven't figured out the latter yet. Much as I like to think that being a biology professor can help, I read the finals from last week, and if the global responsibility message stuck as well as the content facts I presented, well, I'm an abject failure. And I'm taking off for a long distance drive across the country tomorrow. So I'll ask you to help me figure out what I can do about it and what you are doing as well. We must do something. Of course China must also do something, but it is irresponsible, if not outright wrong, to do nothing to solve a problem just because others are making it worse. In the meantime, I leave you these quotes.

The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck. (H.P. p. 21)

So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them. (H.P. p. 67)

She said, moreover, that perpetual motion was possible, if only scientists would work harder on it. (H.P. p. 130)

Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. (H.P. p. 143)

The earth is a twitchy system. It's clear from the record that it does things that we don't fully understand. And we're not going to understand them in the time period we have to make these decisions. We just know they're there. We may say, 'We just don't want to do this to ourselves.' If it's a problem like that, then asking where it's practical or not is really not going to help very much. Whether it's practical depends on how much we give a damn. (Robert Socolow in F.N. p. 143-144).

Q. "How worried should we be? " A. "How lucky do you feel?" (The New Scientist as reported in F.N. p. 187).

Luck and resourcefulness, are of, course, essential human qualities. (F.N. p 187).

We're going to need both to keep this mess from being a horribly bigger mess than its already going to become. And yes, I know it snowed in New Orleans this week. That does not mean that this is not a problem.

*I've read surprisingly few books about global warming. I'd like to believe it's because I've seen the evidence. With a clear cause, a demonstrated mechanism, and clear results, I've not doubted that CO2 emissions can lead to a change in global temperature. But really, it's that the bad ones offend me and the good ones depress me.

Graphs from Davies, a forestry company's website. They are based on ice core data from antarctica.

Wicked or just out of luck?

I just finished reading Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

It was much better and much less fun than I had anticipated. The book takes itself very seriously. This is a family drama and psychological case study that happens to take place in a fantasy land. Fortunately, Maguire did his homework. While it has been years since I read the Oz books, I know them beyond the Wizard, and I was impressed to find information about tiktokism, Dr. Nikidik and the geography of Oz consistent with my memory. The discussions of good and evil, family and obligation, timing and the soul can be a bit much, but some are genuinely thought-provoking and while there is plenty of preaching going on, the take home message, that there is more to situations than one person can see, is made without preaching. Altogether, a much more complex, compelling story than I expected.

As far as being less fun than I expected: well, this is a book with lime green edges to the pages. A giant fanfare of a musical is based on it. I expected light-hearted. I expected silly. It isneither. I have not seen the musical, but it is almost certainly not based on the book. The premise of the book would make an outstanding musical. The book itself is trying to be a soulless place where nobody ever ever breaks out is song. Well worth reading, but not with the expectation of a goofy romp.

Britches Update

Three weeks in I weighed in at -3.6 pounds this morning. Only one of the three weeks have I come close to my 70,000 step goal. All of the usual excuses apply: cold slippery dark weather, travel, end-of-semester craziness and a yucky cold. This week I'm going to make it despite the weather and the finals.

Knock on Wood

I've always shied away from blaming bad luck as a causal agent. I've lived with and adored black cats, have no problem with 13, and cannot see how a tails up penny could possibly hurt my fortune. Bad things obviously happen, but they just happen; good things are luck or of God.

Yet I do not like to tempt fate. I really do knock on wood when I predict something good is going to happen (and I have a very brief flashback to my dancing days with Happy Cricket and our "Knock on Wood" dance). So join me in tapping on my oak door frames as I mention that this year finals week is going to go smoothly.

My first year teaching my grandfather died during finals week. Last year I had a miscarriage and surgery. Finals begin on Monday and this year I am going to grade exams, bake cookies, shop for Christmas presents and clean my house. That's all. Knock.