complich8′s journal

More on audiobooks. Recently tore through Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (all via Audible. Might as well do some reviewing…

So Stephen Pinker’s got a really, really academic, very thorough style that really comes across in The Blank Slate. The whole book is a giant refutation of the idea that humans lack a complex, hard-wired human nature. Pinker methodically picks apart the argument from a biological and neurological perspective, then proceeds to pick apart why people are so attached to the idea of the tabula rasa, and from there proceeds to address the social consequences of the prevalence of the theory.

It’s a pretty intensive treatment — Pinker goes through every obvious argument, refutes it, addresses possible rejections of that refutation, and builds a solid case for his position at every step along the line, almost to annoying levels of thoroughness. He pulls in a wide variety of philosophers, biologists, and thinkers in general and paints a pretty complete picture. Very well-constructed, but a little plodding at times. Hard to get through, but definitely worthwhile.

Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded was also a bit hard to get through, but not for the same reasons as The Blank Slate was. While TBS suffered from its density and thoroughness, Friedman’s style is a bit less thorough, less philosophical, and more repetitive. I don’t have any idea how many times he belabors the phrase “Hot, Flat and Crowded” in the book, but it’s enough that I felt like it was gratuitous.

The book was a meandering trip through the dangers of growing populations of ever-richer people aiming for an American lifestyle replete with energy-hungry devices, polluting cars and factories, and a simply lousy way of getting that energy. It didn’t address the catastrophic consequences of dramatic global warming in quite the way I expected, but rather alluded to them while outlining the insane acceleration in emissions that rising standards of living for literally billions of people in the next couple decades will surely bring forth. He lays out the positive motivations for mitigating the problem that are true whether sea level rises three inches or three meters in the next century or so, and describes an energy economy based on large-scale adoption of sustainable sources.

The biggest reason the book was hard to get through, though, was its repeated rambles down utopian futuristic fantasies of repugnant lifestyles and micro-scale energy economies completely miss the fairly basic reasons that what he’s proposing probably probably can’t work. Beyond that, aiming at specific products, which in the two years or so since the book came out have proven quite untenable. He proposes this lifestyle that’s something like massively sedentary, which, as someone who already lives a very sedentary lifestyle, I don’t see as sustainable — I struggle with the health implications of my lack of ground covered on a daily basis as it is.

Other than getting a little preachy about some things and a little repetitive about others, and screwing up the science in a couple annoying and persistent places, he makes a good case for green, and that’s not a bad thing. All in all, I’d call it worth a go, but there’s definitely some parts where if you’re like me you’ll find yourself skipping a bit and being a bit annoyed.

Lastly, I gave a binge-listen to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This book promised, on its surface, to be an interesting run through the psychology of food and consumption, and with that regard, it delivered — kind of.

Pollan structures his book around four meals he prepares, and gimmicky set-ups to get to them. He pretty much goes from the industrially-raised corn and corn-fed beef culminating in an industrialized McDonald’s dinner to a Whole Foods “organic” meal to a meal gleaned from a particular local food operation to a hunter-gatherer meal, while exploring the food chains that the foods come from and interact with, their origins and backgrounds and how they came to be on his plate. In the process, he struggles with the ever-present question a modern omnivore faces: “what should I eat?”

This book sort of loops back in itself in almost a stream-of-consciousness way, reflecting the same thoughts and ideas in a couple different places, pulling back from the eating to think about the origins of the food, the perspective of the eater, the perspective of the eaten, evolutionary strategies, symbiosis, and what he often calls the “true cost” of various foods. Sometimes, these “true costs” are the hidden costs of industrialization — for example, fuel to produce industrial corn, fuel to transport it, energy input and water to refine it into an edible form, the cost to public health of eating a diet rich in corn. Some of the book focuses on pretty scientific topics, while others wax almost spiritual, agape at the limitations of either the author’s understanding, or the limits of the science.

Pollan brings up a lot of pretty interesting points as he explores his true costs, and as he wanders through industrial food production, then through a farm in the Shenandoah valley, through a brief flirtation with vegetarianism and into full-on hunter-gatherer mode, exposing in the process the inherent self-contradiction of a place like Whole Foods going nationwide and selling out-of-season organic Argentinian asparagus, the purported organic benefits of which likely ceased to exist over the days or weeks it spent on a boat from a continent away, and on trucks on the highway, before landing on his plate. Some of his descriptions called back to The Jungle, with his graphic descriptions of his own slaughter of chickens at Polyface Farm, and his description of how a slaughterhouse killing floor works.

Wandering from his own struggles with the question of what to eat, Pollan runs through the problems of how to feed himself, how to feed the country, the possibility or lack thereof of feeding cities without doing what we do, the ethics of eating animals, our atavistic conceits and a whole host of other issues.

One big problem I had with this one was that Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” is still fairly fresh in my mind, and so I have a lot of trouble with the strong presence of “the noble savage” in Pollan’s work. Every time he extolled the virtues of some prehistoric species or civilization and how it negotiated its way into a complex web of symbioses called out in my mind the assumption that the primitive, uncivilized way is inherently better. Some of these assertions seemed to me a bit too accepting.

Pollan doesn’t prescribe sweeping answers, doesn’t claim that industrial food is evil or that organics are always better, and does pull back some of the veil in ways that ordinary folks don’t normally get a chance to do, so that much was interesting. His refreshing acknowledgment that his hunter-gatherer meal and the organic foods he got were not for everyone and were the conceits of a modern person with a lot of opportunities to engage in those things was certainly appreciated. He engages with some of the intrinsic absurdity of his stated goal, while at the same time constructing a narrative that is both enlightening and edifying. So … again, worth a read, but with caveats.

I guess the takeaway from these last two is that we face systemic problems, the answers to which are either hard to do or simply unclear, and that we must nevertheless boldly engage these problems to make the future a better place. That’s the story, that’s where it’s sticking.

A year or so ago, my roommates and I noticed, as we were fighting a mouse problem, that one possible access mode to the house was a dogwood that was pretty close to an attic vent. We’ve got wall voids that go pretty much all the way up to the attic, so it seemed like a valid thing to think about.

Other than that, we also noticed squirrels running around the roof, going down our chimney. In short, the whole house was porous. So we got the chimney re-sealed, we did other rodent exclusion work and pretty much got the mouse problem in check. And we went to trim away the tree branches from the side of the house.

And that’s when I noticed it. Much of the thick, vibrant foliage on that dogwood wasn’t dogwood leaves. It was some sort of insane climbing invasive vine that had gotten to the top of the tree and completely established a canopy. It was a mess. And it was wild grape.

Well, tracing the vines back to a root location, I chopped them down and did my best to remove them, and I think the tree’s been doing better since losing its aggressive competitor. Hard to tell though, the damage was probably already done. Anyway, I cut back the vine and left it at that.

Well, fast forward a couple months, through the winter and into today, and I was out in that area raking up some dead leaves, pulling some ivy vines, etc, and one apparent vine was buried a bit better than the normal ivy runners. Pulling on it revealed a bigger thing that looked exactly like the above-ground grape vines. And more pulling and digging and following had me pulling out probably in the neighborhood of 30 foot long vines from just under the surface of the ground, snaked out into the lawn, running along the house … just everywhere. It was really phenomenal. I filled one of those kraft paper yard waste bags with ivy vines, late-fallen leaves and rogue wild grape roots, and I know for sure I didn’t get all of them either from that vine head, or from that part of the yard.

So let that be a lesson to anyone who’s paying attention. Wild grape is insane. Kill it. Kill it fast. Kill it with fire, if you can. Because if you don’t kill it, it’ll kill your trees, it’ll kill your grass, it’ll take over your whole damned yard from both above and below with a virulence and implacability that trumps even ivy.

That’s all.

I’ve found that I still have a lot of vivid snapshot memories from my childhood. Lots of stuff I hadn’t thought about in a very long time is still there, still swimming around in my head. Fragments of events long gone, lessons in impermanence, lessons in perspective, lessons in folly and wonder and futility and friendship and hope and love.

So I’ve been debating with myself. Do I give away the many small chapters of my life’s story, all the memorable things, all those banal snapshots, all those random images seared into my being? Or do I keep that part of myself private?

If I keep it private, I risk having what might be a wealth of instructive anecdotes from my childhood wither and fade, as I get ever farther removed from those experiences. But if I make those stories public, maybe I risk rendering my whole existence transparent and banal. Would I be better off reserving those stories for some discussion that I think they might be relevant to, even knowing that for many of them, that day will never come?

Are my formative memories fair game? Should they be as a masterwork on display for all to share? Or should they be precious gems hidden in the mattress, hoarded, known only to those we most trust, and only then in part? Would sharing that much about myself enhance or diminish my narrative?

I guess it comes down to a more fundamental question. As a person with a fairly rich intellectual life, how much of that do I want to really share with the world at large? Is there value in maintaining a certain mystique? And does that value outweigh the potential detriments of coming across as shallow by merely not exposing whatever depth is there? Is it better to be perceived as superficial, concealing the depths to which I might plunge, or to reveal both the full extent of my depths and, implicitly, the full extent of the limits of them?

I’m … still going back and forth on it.

So last week and this week I’ve got back-to-back travel schedules. The Louisville trip was to move the hardware out of the original rack that was too shallow (so the back door wouldn’t close, which the management at the site didn’t like) into a new one. Drama ensued, because the new rack was round-hole and we didn’t bring round-hole mounting hardware to make it work. But a bit of creative on-site fab work on the part of one of the people there had us retrofitting the old rails into the new rack, in a slightly kluddgey but ultimately effective way.

Flights were direct on USAirways/republic, out was on an embraer erj170, which is pretty good for seat space but not great for legroom. Return was on an erj145 (the 2-1 seat layout). Tiny seats and I couldn’t even pretend to stand up in the aisle, which had a clearance of maybe 5 foot 8, so I was practically crawling in it. Not something I intend to aim for…. I’ll stick to the 2-2′s in the future if I can.

Louisville itself was uneventful — we spent a lot of time onsite, and went to Buck Head’s again for one dinner (it was pretty good). Watched some curling. Really, not much to say there.

Right now I’m in Minneapolis. This is the first solo business trip I’ve taken, so I guess that’s a bit of a milestone. I’m on this trip to install a dev server on the site here, so it should be pretty easy.

Flying in out and back are all southwest, via midway. I was initially uneasy about flying Southwest, because of the no-assigned-seating thing (fearing a long line-up and a big free-for-all scrum), because of the whole we-only-fly-737s thing (they spec out as having some of the smallest seats in US airframes), and because of the very recent, very salient, very relevant-feeling Kevin Smith “too fat to fly” episode. I’ve been sort of yo-yoing in the 350-360 range pretty much since the days got short… something like seasonal depression or something I guess.

Well, it turns out that so far, so good. You do online check-in on southwest, and get into it fairly early, and you end up in the A group and find a place to sit. Flying in the middle of the week, middle of the day, seemed like both flights so far were running between 1/2 and 2/3 full, so all the middle seats were open, and while the seats are certainly no 777 seats, they’re also not as bulky as big modern seats, so the seats themselves don’t take as much space as the seats on a lot of other planes. I was actually, just barely, comfortable on both the trip from IAD to Midway and from Midway to MSP. Nobody gave me crap about being big, and with the open space I could pretty easily spread out after takeoff. So that was cool, I guess.

Anyway, so now I’m chillin in a Fairfield literally across the parking lot from Mall of America. I wandered around there tonight to find food (ended up just grabbing a slice at Sbarro). Mall of America is almost surreal … it’s definitely pretty huge, but other than the massive surplus of materialism, the most striking thing I noticed was the food courts. Every one of the standard-issue mall type food court spots was waving samples at everyone walking by. It’s such a buyer’s market getting cheap food on a weeknight, you could hit the two courts sampling and leave full without spending a dime. It’s also kind of a trip how they have like 3 or 4 roller coasters (including one that looks pretty goddamned intense) right in the middle of the mall, where most malls put the food court. To say nothing of the store with the 9 foot tall vases. I wish I had brought my camera on this trip.

Oh, also, Minneapolis in February…. not really a good idea. Just saying. It’s pretty bitter now that I’m acclimated to the mild winters of temperate Maryland.

Right, so … tomorrow onsite, then tomorrow night red-eyeing it back to dulles (again via midway). Might follow up the post, might not.

I realized that I may have spent more last year on coffee and cookies than on giving last year. I’m not sure if that says I’m drinking too much coffee and need to lay off the sweets, or that I was stingier than I thought last year.

2010, 2%. That’s the goal.