The effect of Sputnik on the United States was electrifying. I was about 10 at the time. As it happened, we were on the 2nd and last year of our sojouThe effect of Sputnik on the United States was electrifying. I was about 10 at the time. As it happened, we were on the 2nd and last year of our sojourn in Germany where my father was researching at the University of Heidelberg. The effect there was minimal, but from what I’ve read since, everyone in the U.S. was horrified at the pity shown to the United States, now clearly in a distant 2nd place. There is no doubt it had a substantial impact on the presidential election in 1960 along with the non-existent missile gap.
The author begins with Soviet initiatives, but most of the book, which covers but a year up through 1958, is devoted to American political in-fighting and initiatives. It was former Nazi rocket scientists like Werner Von Braun(1) and his German colleagues who created their own little enclave near Huntsville, Alabama, that gave the U.S. an edge.
Aside from the interesting technical details, D’Antonio provides a broad picture of life in the fifties and especially the cultural changes that were wrought by enormous sums of money poured into places like Cape Canaveral and Huntsville; places that had been mere backwaters exploded into rapidly expanding subdivisions with concomitant increases in real estate values.
Sputnik had enormous policy and cultural implications and changes. Soon, in the guise of protecting America from the Red Menace, every group imaginable from the NEA and National Science Foundation, to politicians who wanted more money for their districts, to weapons manufacturers, to the Air Force and Army at loggerheads on which service was to control missiles, was clamoring for huge increases in the federal budget for their projects. Articles in the press, naively drawing on PR the Soviets were putting out, talked about Russian nuclear trains, ships, airplanes and satellites. So, not only was there a missile gap (ironically thanks to the U-2 Eisenhower knew this was a chimera)(2), but a science gap, and education gap, a you-name-it-gap, and anyone who suggested otherwise had to be a Commie. People who formerly had been unalterably opposed to federal support for local education, now changed their tune and bellied up to the trough. Eisenhower was in a touch position. He warned of the military-industrial symbiosis, but the political pressure from both sides was just too much.
In the meantime, rocket launches at Cape Canaveral were beset with all sorts of failures, some spectacularly public, others seemingly mundane. In one case, because some special paper had been loaded backwards into the printer, the results appeared to be the opposite of what was good, and the missile was destroyed fearing it would go off course or explode uncontrollably.
PR became crucial in the battle between the Army, Air Force and later NASA for control of rocketry. Eisenhower was anxious to have civilian control of space, while the military and people like Edward Teller were anxious to dominate the Russians using military control of space. The perception was the Russians were ahead and they clearly had more powerful rockets, but that dominance vanished quickly. This was the time of Public Relations. Edward Bernays had revolutionized how we view control of consent, and his book Crystallizing Public Opinion and Engineering Of Consent became bibles of the industry. I will have to read them.
It’s astonishing today to see what they got away with in the fifties in the name of science. Project Argos, for example, exploded low-yield high altitude nuclear weapons in space to determine the effect of radiation on all sorts of things, but the main objective was to study the Christofilos Effect hoping that it would be possible to protect against a Soviet nuclear attack by exploding nuclear bombs high over the Pacific. The idea was to create a barrier of electrons that would fry the electronics of Soviet warheads, and possibly also to blind Soviet radar to a U.S. counter-attack. I suppose one could argue the tests were a great success because we learned it wouldn't work. It was all terribly secret, of course.
A truly fascinating look into the culture and history of the U.S., and to some extent Soviet, space race.
(2) Beschloss, M. (2016). Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 affair. Open Road Media. Jacobsen, Annie. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America. Little, Brown, 2014. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair...more
In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk replied, "Well, the people. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
This book is about a specific case, but it's also about much more, an indictment of the current patent system. Myriad Genetics, a company held the patents on two key genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Everyone has those genes, but women with certain mutations in their BRCA genes face much higher risks of breast or ovarian cancer. Through its patents, Myriad had essentially cornered the market on BRCA testing. The company charged more than $3,000 for a test, and insurers didn’t always cover it. Some women weren’t able to get tested because they couldn’t afford it. And the problem went beyond cost: One woman who joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff tested positive for a BRCA mutation but before undergoing surgical removal of her ovaries wanted a second opinion; because of Myriad’s patents, no other lab could confirm the diagnosis.
The Association for Molecular Pathology along with several other medical associations, doctors and patients sued the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office and Myriad Genetics to challenge several patents related to human genetics. The suit also challenged several method patents covering diagnostic screening for the genes. Myriad argued that once a gene is isolated, and therefore distinguishable from other genes, it could be patented. By patenting the genes, Myriad had exclusive control over diagnostic testing and further scientific research for the BRCA genes. Petitioners spearheaded by the ACLU, argued that patenting those genes violated the Patent Act because they were products of nature. They also argued that the patents limit scientific progress. Section §101 limits patents to "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof."
The district court granted summary judgment in favor of petitioners, holding that isolating a gene does not alter its naturally occurring fundamental qualities. (Judge Robert Sweet was ably assisted by his clerk who had an advanced degree in the bio-sciences. Sweey's opinion is worth reading as a clear exposition of both the science and the legal aspects of the case. You can read it here**.)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (specializing in patent cases, it was known as the "nerd's" court) reversed, holding that isolated genes are chemically distinct from their natural state in the human body. In March 2012, Petitioners sought certiorari; and in light of Mayo Collective Services v. Prometheus Laboratories. the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Federal Circuit judgment and remanded, i.e., sent it back for further consideration On remand, the Federal Circuit again upheld the patentability of the BRCA genes. Again appealed to the Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that genes were not patentable although cDNA was, as it was not a product of nature.
The case was unusual in that the Solicitor General's Office took a position in opposition to that of the Patent Office which had declared that since they had permitted patenting of genes already, to reverse that would just mess up previously decided cases. That the SG's office did so, was the result of compromise worked out by many agencies brought together at the behest of Obama to determine what the position of the government should be. (It's worth remembering that Obama's mother had died of ovarian cancer at 56, fighting insurance companies until her death, and his grandmother died of breast cancer.) The compromise was orchestrated by Mark Freeman who serves a gold star for bringing such disparate parties together. It's also notable that Francis Collins, NIH director was adamantly opposed to gene patenting. He had been a co-worker with Mary Kelly and Mark Skolnick in isolating and linking the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations to breast and ovarian cancers. Skolnick had recognized the monetary potential in their discovery and founded Myriad genetics, over the opposition of Kelly and Collins, which monopolized BRCA testing and made lost of money.
There are some very appealing characters: Lori Andrews, the "Gene Queen" an attorney who was upset with the patenting of a test for Canavan Disease; Michael Crighton, whose book Next and NYT op-eds laid some of the public groundwork for the court cases; Dan Ravicher, a successful patent attorney who became disillusioned with the way patents were destroying innovation and who formed his own public interest firm to challenge patents; Tania Simoncelli, the individual most responsible for getting the ACLU interested in gene-patenting; and Chris Hansen, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the court.
A very interesting read that raises all sorts of bioethical, medical, economic, and legal issues.
Listened to this as an audio book and I found all sorts of excuses to do things so I could continue listening (my wife loved it because most of that wListened to this as an audio book and I found all sorts of excuses to do things so I could continue listening (my wife loved it because most of that work involved cleaning.) As almost everyone knows Elizabth Holmes had dropped out of Stanford so she could get rich. She had an idea for a device that would revolutionize blood testing, a nifty idea. Unfortunately it never worked but she insisted in public it did and fraudulently manipulated the data behind the scenes to prevent investors from recognizing that. When VP Biden visited the Theranos lab in 2015 he was presented with rows of machines. The Problem was they were all fake.
She persuaded numerous well-known people to sit on the board and invest. As a young, attractive woman, perhaps that influenced the older men who jumped on board. (Henry Kissinger and George Schultz were among them. Ironically, Schultz, who got his grandson a job at Theranos, refused to believe him when the grandson reported the "place was rotten.") I don't know. Then again, I always wondered about John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin who seemed to offer little except a nice face. The media fell for it, too. Adoring profiles appeared in numerous magazines that did not do their homework. CEOs at Safeway and Walgreens were not immune to her spell.
I found this quote from the NY Times review particularly apt: "Swathed in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to emulate her idol Jobs and preached that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees were discouraged from questioning this cultish orthodoxy by her “ruthlessness” and her “culture of fear.” Secrecy was obsessive. Labs and doors were equipped with fingerprint scanners.
The media was completely bamboozled and fawned all over her. All sorts of evidence was there from employees who were quitting in droves, but they were never interviewed. The old geezers on the board had even been warned by relatives who worked at the company to no avail. The old guys were so enamored of this pretty thing with nice legs that they abandoned their fiduciary responsibility and really should have been held responsible for the disaster. David Boies doesn't escape condemnation either. The esteemed lawyer who charged $1000 per hour had a stake in the company, violating all sorts of ethical tenets, sued anyone who might say something negative about the company, harassing them with private detectives and threats.*
Holmes and her erstwhile boyfriend, ex COO of Theranos, Ramesh Balwani, are now under indictment facing decades of imprisonment if found guilty. As further evidence of her cold manipulative personality, detractors cite her becoming pregnant just before the trial was to begin (resulting in a postponement) as a calculated move to garner sympathy. The story is not over and several podcasts (The Dropout and Bad Blood: the Final Chapter) are reporting on the trial.
Society functions well only when there exists a level of trust. We want (and need) to assume that people are not fooling us. It's OK to be moderately skeptical but actions like Holmes's raise the skepticism bar to an impossible level that will eventually stifle progress.
Russell Gold is a Wall Street Journal reporter whose family had purchased a small Pennsylvania farm as a retreat from Philadelphia. His parents were Russell Gold is a Wall Street Journal reporter whose family had purchased a small Pennsylvania farm as a retreat from Philadelphia. His parents were approached by an oil company offering them $400,000 plus royalties for the right to drill under their land. Being old time sixties environmentalists they were reluctant but it’s a lot of money and since almost all their neighbors had bought in they figured they might as well. He returns to their story periodically throughout the book to highlight the personal conflicts people have.
Gold provides a riveting account of the development of fracking from its extraordinary technological success to its environmental impacts. It’s truly astonishing that this intricate technology has resulted in the United States becoming a net energy exporter barely a decade after “peak oil” had been proclaimed. The book mixes technical details with profiles of the major players, often focusing on the financial details, which can’t be easily separated from the evolution of oil drilling.
It’s perhaps ironic, that most of the anti-fracking environmental antagonism comes from geographical areas not affected by the drilling. Larger cities that depend on natural gas and heating, for example, have become hotbeds of anti-fracking activity, yet those people are little affected by the economic and environmental plusses and minuses of the activity except for lower prices for energy.
Some of the allegiances formed to promote fracking are interesting. The Sierra Club worked with Chesapeake Energy to fight the development of coal plants in Texas and elsewhere, arguing that global warming was a far greater threat.* That Chesapeake was giving them substantial amounts of money didn’t hurt either, but the environmental group has become split among those favoring just conservation opposed to some realists arguing that it’s better to focus on energy that reduces the carbon footprint like natural gas and nuclear power. Ironically, the shift to natural gas means the U.S., which hasn’t ratified the Kyoto protocols, will come closer to meeting the reduction in carbon emissions than any of the signatories.
Gold says that’s a very good thing and supports fracking (the reason why it’s now spelled that way as opposed to the more technically popular “fracing” is interesting) but notes the industry and regulators need to work on better sealing of the wells which is where most of the problems arise. Surprisingly, there was no mention of fracking-generated earthquakes, although perhaps being published in 2014, the concern had yet to be raised.
No energy generating process is unopposed. Dams drown villages; mines are dirty and dangerous; transporting fuel in pipelines, ships, and trains risks spills and fires; drilling is obnoxious, wind generators destroy the landscape and kill birds; and nuclear, in many ways the least harmful, suffers from ignorance of new technology and problems of early technology.
A very interesting read.
*Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame has embraced GMOs, nuclear energy, and other technologies, arguing that global warming is the greatest threat. An interesting article detailing his evolution in thinking is http://e360.yale.edu/features/stewart...
There is very little about the plot I’d like to say other than it’s terrific and you can read all about it elsewhere. I loved the chemistry and the scThere is very little about the plot I’d like to say other than it’s terrific and you can read all about it elsewhere. I loved the chemistry and the science. It’s all about using your brain and knowledge to extricate yourself from difficult situations.
I was also intrigued by the way Weir got the book published. His father, btw, is a particle physicist, his mother and electronics engineer, and Weir himself a computer programmer but writer wannabe. He made a lot of money when AOL was bought out and he was forced to sell his stock at its peak (tough). He took three years off to write, but that went nowhere. When the Internet came along he realized he could write to an audience and after a while began writing a serial that became the Martian. He would also get comments from scientists who were fans suggesting changes in his math or chemistry. You can read much more about how it got to be a movie at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Semy... in this interview with Adam Savage.
Loved this book.
Favorite quote: "Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped."...more
If you are looking for information about Alan Turing, look elsewhere. The title is a metaphor.
The Nazis did the U.S. a huge favor with their boorish aIf you are looking for information about Alan Turing, look elsewhere. The title is a metaphor.
The Nazis did the U.S. a huge favor with their boorish and stupid racial policies. Many prominent Jews were brilliant mathematicians and physicists, and when the “cleansing” of universities began by the Nazis, people like Van Neumann, Einstein, and many others fled to the United States where they were of immense assistance in the development of the atomic bomb.
This book is about the origins and development of the digital age and Dyson spends considerable space on the people and institutions key to that development. The Princeton Institute for Advanced Research, for example, under Abraham Flexner and Oswald Veblen, recruited many of these refugees who helped build the Institute into one of the premier research institutions. I suppose it all has special interest for me as my life span parallels the development of the computer. I was born in 1947. In the 7th grade I became fascinated by ham radio and electrons and studied the intricate workings of the vacuum tube, a device for which I still have some reverence. I’m still dismantling and messing with the insides of computers.
Ironically, given the book’s title, John Van Neumann takes center stage with Turing playing only a peripheral role. Van Neumann’s interest in digital computation was apparently sparked by reading Turing’s seminal article. “On Computational Numbers” that led him to the realization of the importance of stored program processing.
What Turing did that was so crucial was to take Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness theorem that permitted numbers to carry two meanings. Turing took that and thought up the paper tape computer that produced both data and code simultaneously. That realization alone was fundamental in providing the basic building block for the computer.
The builders had conflicting views of the incredible computational power they had unleashed that was to be used for both ill and good. Van Neumann recognized this: “ A tidal wave of computational power was about to break and inundate everything in science and much elsewhere, and things would never be the same.”
It would have been impossible to develop the atomic bomb without the computational abilities of the new “computers.” So naturally, the Manhattan Project is covered along with the influence of the evil Dr. Teller (I must remember to get his biography,) who was the character (Dr. Strangelove) brilliantly played by Peter Sellers. After the war, Teller pushed very hard for the development of the “super-bomb” even though he knew, or must have known, that his initial calculations were flawed because he didn’t have the computational power to do them completely. One number that I questioned was the Dyson’s reporting that when the Russians exploded a three-stage hydrogen bomb in 1961, the force released was equivalent to 1% of the sun’s power. That sounds wildly improbable. Anyone able to contradict number?
Some interesting little tidbits. One computational scientist refused to use the new VDTs, preferring to stick with punched cards (he obviously never dropped a box of them) which seemed far more tangible to him than dots on a screen. I guess fear of new technology is not reserved for non-scientists.
One of the major and very interesting questions addressed by Turing and reported on in the book is what we now call artificial intelligence. When we use a search engine are we learning from the search engine? or is the search engine learning from us? It would appear currently the latter may be true. Clearly, the search engines have been designed to store information and use that information to learn things about us both as a group and individually. I suspect that programs now make decisions based on that accumulation of knowledge. Is that not one definition of intelligence? (I will again highly recommend a book written and read quite a while ago that foresaw many of these issues: The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas Ryan (1977)** . Note that Turing talked about the adolescence of computers and likening them to children.)
Some reviewers have taken Dyson to task for emphasizing abstract reasoning that went into the development of the computer while downplaying the role of electrical engineers (Eckert and Mauchly) in actually building the things. I’ll leave that argument to others, not caring a whit for who should get the credit and being in awe of both parties. On the other hand, the book does dwell more on the personalities than the intricacies of computing. There are some fascinating digressions, however, such as the examination of digital vs analog and how the future of computing might have been altered had Vann Neumann not tragically died so young as he had a great interest in biological computing and the relationship of the brain to the computer.
I have been reading Patrick Smith's blog on Salon for several years. He's a professional airline pilot and always brings sense and rational thinking tI have been reading Patrick Smith's blog on Salon for several years. He's a professional airline pilot and always brings sense and rational thinking to the often hyperbolic world that is so prevalent in a society that prefers the fearful over understanding. I was hooked from the start, especially by his enthusiasm for the journey as opposed to just the destination when traveling. I think he's also correct when he describes air travel as having become so commonplace it's now, by definition, tedious. I found the information to be fascinating and useful. He's opinionated and sometimes pedantic (does one lead to the other?) but since I suffer from the same flaw, it's hard for me to be critical.
I remember my first sight of a 747. I had just dropped off my wife at the Minneapolis Airport decades ago and I had just left the airport and drove by the end of a runway when I was confronted by this behemoth, resembling a ship in size, as it accelerated just a little overhead. "Jesus H. Christ" (note the presence of the middle initial prevents it from being blasphemous - then again, blasphemy is a victimless crime) was all I could come up with. There is no way something that large could ever fly. And now we sit (crammed, if you must know,) in a tube called the "Boeing 747, a plane that if tipped onto its nose would rise as tall as a 20-story office tower. I’m at 33,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, traveling at 600 miles per hour, bound for the Far East. And what are the passengers doing? Complaining, sulking, tapping glumly into their laptops. A man next to me is upset over a dent in his can of ginger ale. This is the realization, perhaps, of a fully evolved technology. Progress, one way or the other, mandates that the extraordinary become the ordinary." What a shame when the extraordinary becomes the ordinary (the laptop being another example.)
Smith's goal is lofty: "I begin with a simple premise: everything you think you know about flying is wrong. That’s an exaggeration, I hope, but not an outrageous starting point in light of what I’m up against. Commercial aviation is a breeding ground for bad information, and the extent to which different myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories have become embedded in the prevailing wisdom is startling. Even the savviest frequent flyers are prone to misconstruing much of what actually goes on. “
I loved his comments about airports and what they should be like. I had no idea the difficulty foreign visitors have simply using an American airport as a transit point to other places. They have to go through immigration, get fingerprinted, suffer all sorts of other indignities, collect and recheck their luggage, not to mention go through TSA indignities again. Even if they are only passing through. This is why US airlines are losing business to airlines like Emirates and Singapore which fly through Frankfurt and Dubai, airports which cater to transit passengers. Why can't airports have short-stay hotels inside secure areas? How about free wireless? Stores that sell something other than Mont Blanc pens? Multiple power ports? Play areas for children (the Kids' Forest in Amsterdam would attract even adults if no one was looking)? Information kiosks that actually dispense information? Not to mention enough seats in the waiting area for the size plane at the gate (no more sitting on the floors.) Airports in other countries have managed to do these things. What's wrong with American airports? I part company with him about airstairs however. Give me a jet-way any day. Taking the bus from the terminal to the plane in Frankfurt and then climbing up a set of stairs in the rain was not what I signed on for. *He* may think it's thrilling and a reminder of yesteryear; not me. And must we be bombarded with constant CNN at the gate which no one ever watches and can't be shut off (there aren't even power cords.)
If you've ever wanted to know what happens when lightning hits an airplane (it happens frequently), what declaring an emergency really means, what planes dump fuel and why, (dumping toilet waste is impossible), and why when someone says the turbulence was so bad they dropped thousands of feet it was probably only 20 feet (I actually enjoy turbulence,) what a walk-around accomplishes, the hidden but crucial role of dispatchers, why V1 is an important decision point, why losing an engine on takeoff is more of an inconvenience than a danger, then this book is for you.
And, of course, how could we discuss flying without mentioning the security theater run by the TSA. As Smith notes, maximum security prisons staffed by jack-booted guards who have total control can't keep knives or drugs out of prisons, so whatever gives the TSA the idea they can prevent box-cutters from getting on an airplane when they have to screen 2,000,000 people a day. And the premise is wrong. They are looking for "things" rather than "people." The success of the terrorists on 9/11 had nothing to do with airport security; it was a failure of "national security." The CIA and FBI failed us. And the terrorists benefited from a mindset that viewed hijacking as they had occurred in the seventies (when in one year there were 40(!) skyjackings, usually resulting in a brief layover in Havana. Armored doors on cockpits would have prevented all of them and what happened on 9/11 (airlines refused for decades to install them because of the cost and added weight.) So now everyone from age 2 to 95 (including pilots who could bring down a plane with a twitch of a thumb - he had a butter knife confiscated from his carry-on once) is considered a suspect even though even a moron knows how to craft a weapon from a ball-point pen. But we all love our delusions (and over 80% of Americans believe in angels.)
He comments on UFOs and the conspiracy theories that pilots have agreed not to talk about them. "For the record, I have never seen one, and I have never met another pilot who claims to have seen one. I had to laugh at the notion of there being a tacit agreement among pilots over anything, let alone flying saucers.... And although plenty of things in aviation are tantamount to career suicide, withholding information about UFOs is not one of them."
Happy flying.
Addendum: 7/2/13 Just read this article that shows precisely what is wrong with aviation coverage in the general media: http://apnews.myway.com//article/2013...
This is an example of everything working exactly the way it should. Note that at no time did the planes come within 1.6 miles of each other, the TCAS system worked the way it should, the pilot could see the other plane, the ATC reported its proximity, the pilot took appropriate action descending 1600 feet, and the only injury (if one could call it that) was that a couple flight attendants "bumped" their heads. Geez, this is so not a story except for the ridiculous reaction of passengers who wanted to get their names in the paper....more
Does anyone really care about James Garfield? You will after reading this book. Were it not for the Emperor of Brazil would Alexander Bell have been rDoes anyone really care about James Garfield? You will after reading this book. Were it not for the Emperor of Brazil would Alexander Bell have been relinquished to the backwater of history? And how ironic that a British Dr. Lister proclaimed knowledge that had it been followed would have saved Garfield's life?
Our reading club decided to read this book for several reasons, perhaps the most important being that Charles Guiteau hailed from Freeport where most of us live. We used to joke it was Freeport's only claim to fame, home of a presidential assassin. I mean why not? I can see it now, assassination fairs, Guiteau banners, restoration of his house (it's still there,) and some nifty slogans. They could even rename the Freeport Pretzels to the Freeport Assassins.
The author narrates dual tracks, following Guiteau and Garfield. They were so different: Guiteau the religious fanatic and loser, and Garfield the rather brilliant orator (albeit verbose), successful Civil War general, and abolitionist who really didn't want to be president. Guiteau bounced from one scheme to another, convinced, especially after his survival from a ship-wreck, that God had special plans for him. He tried evangelical preaching, lawyering ( in the worst sense of the word), and even joined the Oneida Community where he was shunned by most of the members. They believed in non-monogamous relationships, but the women refused to have anything to do with him, calling him by the nickname, Charles Get-Out.
The recounting of the Republican Convention in 1880 is fascinating. Garfield was not even in the running; he was there to support the nomination of a fellow Ohioan. But things got out of hand after the first ballot failed to nominate a candidate and by the 35th ballot the delegates were looking for an alternative. Despite his best efforts, the convention nominated him to run with Chester Arthur as his running mate. How the assassination changed Arthur (another presidential non-entity) and his rejection of Conklin is also quite fascinating. It wasn't until the assassination of McKinley barely two decades later that focused everyone's attention on presidential security.
Presidential openness and availability has changed drastically. The president remained open to the public, walking around the streets with little thought given to security, and Guiteau was able to just walk up to him and Blaine, the Secretary of State, in a train station and shoot him. Guiteau felt slighted because he was sure, in his mind, that he had been responsible for Garfield's election and was therefore deserving of a place in the administration, specifically the representative to France. When it was not forthcoming, God called him to eliminate the president.
Garfield would have survived easily had he been some bum on the street who received no medical care. The bullet had missed all vital organs, but the initial doctor, ignoring all Lister's medical knowledge to the contrary, poked around in the wound with septic bare fingers and the cause of death was out of control septicemia. There was also an unseemly battle for who was to be the "doctor in charge" of the president's care. The winner, Bliss, really screwed up his care. Many soldiers more severely injured in the Civil War had survived just fine. In fact, the policeman who hauled Guiteau off to jail had a bullet still lodged in his skull. The book could have been titled, The Doctor who Killed the President.
For some, the book will be a disappointment as it focuses on Alexander Graham Bell perhaps more than some would wish. Personally, I like this kind of cultural history/biography mix very much. ...more
I love books like this. Take some obscure or mundane topic or subject and dissect it to the nth degree. I doubt if anyone reading this really has a foI love books like this. Take some obscure or mundane topic or subject and dissect it to the nth degree. I doubt if anyone reading this really has a fondness for those slippery, slimy creatures, and yet it turns out they are singularly fascinating. “The freshwater eel, of the genus Anguilla, evolved more than fifty million years ago, giving rise to fifteen separate species. Most migratory fish, such as salmon and shad, are anadromous, spawning in freshwater and living their adult lives in salt water. The freshwater eel is one of the few fishes that does the opposite, spawning in the sea and spending its adulthood in lakes, rivers, and estuaries—a life history known as catadromy (in Greek ana- “means “up” and cata- means “down,” the prefixes suggesting the direction the fish migrates to reproduce).* But among catadromous fishes, the eel is the only one that travels to the depths of the oceans so far offshore. . . .No one has ever been able to find a spawning adult or witness a freshwater eel spawning in the wild. For eel scientists, solving the mystery of eel reproduction remains a kind of holy grail.” And they determinedly try to return to their ocean origins. Place some in an aquarium and they will try every way possible to squirm their way out. If there is no way, they die.
Interesting people abound. Ray, for example, a hermit (or recluse, if you prefer) who lives in a shack off the Delaware river and has a permit, which he inherited from his father, to operate an eel weir. Every year (he has a degree in engineering) he carefully rebuilds the stone weir, repositioning the stones into walls (every year they are destroyed by ice and flooding.) All in preparation for the September run. A good year will yield 2,500 eels weighing on average .85 pounds each. He puts them in salt to kill them then turns them in a cement mixer filled with gravel to get the slime off, guts them with a knife and hot-smokes them to restaurants and passersby saving a few for personal eating. Fascinating.
Eels are relentless in their efforts to return to their "ocean womb." Just try keeping some in an aquarium sometime. They'll be all over your floor. In New Zealand, where the Maori have a long symbiotic relationship with eels, they have been known to roll up in balls to get across land masses and try to get through hydraulic dam generators. Tradition has it they will live for centuries waiting for some typhoon to wash them out to sea from some land-locked pond or lake. For the Maori, it's one of the highest sources of protein for them so when the British, in the guise of the Acclimatization Society stocked everything with trout only to discover eels love trout, they embarked on a vast "kill the eels" program, with detailed instructions on how best to do it on every fishing license. The result was much the same as the campaign that killed off most of the buffalo.
Of course there were unintended consequences. Turns out killing the eels meant the trout, having no natural predatory exploded in population. "The trout in eel-free rivers had become more numerous, yes, but the average size was much smaller. In the 1950s, a biologist named Max Burnett studying the interaction of trout and eels in the streams of Canterbury discovered that the eel, maligned and needlessly slaughtered, was actually in part responsible for the now world-famous trout fishing in New Zealand. By preying on the trout, the eel was culling a population that soon became overpopulated and stunted without them. With the eels in the rivers, the trout were fewer but much larger. Burnett’s work showed that the presence of eels was beneficial and single-handedly turned around public opinion of them. The killing stopped. " And now New Zealand is again celebrated for its trout fishing.
That doesn't mean the Maori can't be cruel to the eels: " People who smoke eel usually leave the skin on the fish but remove the unappetizing slime with salt, ash, or detergent. Even Ray, who had worked in slaughterhouses his whole life, admitted their method was cruel—removing their protective slime while suffocating them.* The eels reacted by writhing and rolling in the dry detergent, trying to use their tails to get it off their bodies, but it only spread the caustic powder. When the eels were dead Ray rubbed them down with a sugar sack to remove any leftover slime, snipped their tails to bleed them, and hung them by their heads. "
Let's be clear; I wouldn't be caught dead preparing or eating eel (more on death from preparing eel in a bit.) But it does have healthful benefits: "Eel meat has well-known health-giving properties.* It is high in vitamins A and E, containing four times more vitamin A than cheese and eight times more than egg, six times more vitamin E than cheese and three times more than egg. Vitamin A is good for human skin. Vitamin E helps prevent aging. Eel is also rich in fish oils that contain antioxidants to aid the immune system and fight sickness. Because of its high concentration of omega-3 fatty acids, eel has been found to help prevent type 2 diabetes. A native of Kyoto told me, “They have a saying in Kyoto—that the girls have beautiful skin because they eat eel.”
Well, maybe. As note above, preparing eel comes with several risks. The blood contains a strong neurotoxin so getting it into one's blood stream through a cut or opening in the skin can cause death. One cubic centimeter of eel blood injected into a rabbit, "causes instant convulsions and death." That's one reason why it's always served smoked or cooked and never raw. Whoopi-do.
Shades of John McPhee (high praise, indeed)...more
"This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why"This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, . . Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved this complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests and savannas and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of modern societies in just a few thousand years. . . I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational."
I hardly feel qualified to make any kind of judgments on this book having little background in philosophy, especially moral philosophy, so I especially appreciate Haidt's lucid summary of the development of moral philosophy through examples and hypotheticals.
I remember several years ago having a visit from the local anti-abortion denizens, nice people, very concerned about youth, etc. They steered the conversation to abortion, their favorite topic. Being of a liberal and hopefully rational and reasoned mindset myself, I described a book I had recently read,The Facts of Life: Science and the Abortion Controversy by Harold J. Morowitz, James Trefil, a small, excellent analysis of the abortion debate that contains a plea for looking at the issue rationally. I described their suggestion that we need to decide what constitutes "human" and then see when the fetus acquires the capability (cerebral cortex) to be human, etc. etc. To which the response was, "well, I don't believe that." All debate and discussions ceases when that statement arrives. Now, I could have said, well, you old biddy, I don't give a fuck what you believe, I'm trying to find some common ground here." But, my mother having raised me as a good little boy who is always polite to old people, I merely sat there rather stunned. That's the problem. How do you create a discussion of issues when either side can just say, well, I don't believe that.
This is not just a conservative or right-wing problem. Try having a rational or reasonable discussion about the merits of circumcision, climate. autism, raw milk or veganism. I guarantee the true believers will immediately assemble with truckloads of vitriol. We all suffer from what Haidt calls "confirmation bias," that is, our gut tells us what to believe first and then we seek out justifications for that belief.
Haidt's book reaffirms what has become fairly obvious: we divide ourselves into tribes and those tribes consist of like-minded people which we use to validate our intuitive predispositions. His stated goal is to attempt to find a way to bridge the divide between two different moral world views., and to find a way for each side to at least understand the other's perspective.
Both left and right are motivated by the moral foundations of care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. But they differ qualitatively: liberals tend to care more about suffering and violence; conservatives care about harm done to others but not as intensely. Conservatives, on the other hand, place more emphasis on fairness, i.e. getting what you deserve. Both sides value liberty but have differing definition as to what constitutes the oppressor. Similarly, with fairness, each side values it but define it differently: liberals view it from the standpoint of equality while conservatives look to proportionality, i.e. fairness is being rewarded for your accomplishments and if you work harder you should be rewarded proportionally.
The biggest divisions relate to sanctity, authority and loyalty. You can easily guess where the preferences of conservatives and liberals lie. Haidt suggests that liberals will fail to gain wider acceptance until they come to terms with those three moral values and find someway to create their own vocabulary validating them. I would add that liberals will have to be more accepting of groups, particularly religious ones (as much as I despise them,) which serve an evolutionary need to discount selfishness and promote group adherence and benefits.
To some extent that's why I am so puzzled by the right's celebration of Ayn Rand who promoted the antithesis of group-think by celebrating independence and selfishness, i.e. think of yourself first and what benefits accrue to yourself through your actions. She hated coercion both governmental and religious, in particular, yet both encourage group adherence and loyalty.
I just wonder how much of what Haidt says come from his intuitive side (the elephant) and how much from the rational or reasoning part (the rider.)
Here's a quote that struck me: "And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically."...more
Forgive me if this “review” seems an agglomeration of tidbits, but I really enjoy little facts and pieces of information, and this book was riddled wiForgive me if this “review” seems an agglomeration of tidbits, but I really enjoy little facts and pieces of information, and this book was riddled with them.
I don’t like fish and frankly the idea of eating it raw, no matter how trendy or gussied up it might be, roils my stomach. Be that as it may, this is a fascinating story, following the ascent (descent?) from a despised, lower class food to one prized by the elite. (Lobster made a similar journey: it was once banned as food for prisoners in jail because it was considered so unseemly and dirty.) The story follows Kate at the California Sushi Academy where, a total neophyte, she has decided to learn how to make Sushi from the masters. It has become less Japanese than international and some of the best chefs are from outside Japan. But, I mean how hard can it be to roll up some raw tuna around rice. Surprise, surprise.
Interestingly, mold is key to Sushi rice and the particular mold strains are guarded in bank vaults or secret caves. The mold is added to rice and eats it with such tremendous speed that if not properly controlled, the heat generated would overheat the incubator. The moldy rice is then mixed with soybeans along with yeast, bacteria and salt. The mush is shoveled into tubs where it sits for months where the digestive enzymes shorten time from 78 million years to seconds and generate amino acids. It’s the enzymes that we want to create glutamate important to human growth, brain development, etc. (Bear with me, I listened to this book on audio and am trying to recreate it from memory.) Anyway, to make a long, but interesting story short, the result is Miso (for more details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miso). It’s very nutritious and as a paste is used in soups and other dishes including, guess what, sushi. The brown liquid at the edges of the Miso is soy sauce.
Msg, monosodium glutamate, is heralded as one of the miracles of this process and an important ingredient in flavoring. Usually associated with Japanese and Chinese food, it’s ubiquitous ands manufactured by the ton, added to meats, chips, fast food, soups , and many other things (it’s hidden under the name hydrolyzed vegetable protein.)
Western scientists had always assumed that the human tongue can taste only four flavors: sweet, bitter, sour, and salty. Asian scientists insisted there was another they called “tastiness” triggered by amino acids and was represented by the amino acid glutamate (msg) . Recently scientists at UC San Diego have found specific receptors for this flavor.
Fresh water fish can be dangerous when used raw for sushi as it is more likely to contain parasites that cause tapeworm. Salmon and trout, in particular as notorious, and the only way to kill the parasites is by freezing at -31 F for 18 hours or for a week at 0 F. Farmed salmon is not as dangerous filled as it is with PCBs and antibiotics. (Farmed salmon has 5 times the levels of PCB as wild salmon. It takes 3 lbs of ground up fish meal to produce 1 lb of salmon. In the wild they eat krill which gives the flesh its pink color - much like flamingoes.) The more fatty farmed salmon has become much more popular with diners making chefs happy since it is much cheaper.
Tuna pose their own special problems, in particular the Bluefin, largest of all the tuna and unusual in that it is warm-blooded and therefore has to age longer, much like terrestrial animals before they are eaten. Another issue is mercury. Since underwater volcanoes and coal-fired energy plants emit mercury which accumulates in the top of the food chain (and Bluefin tuna which often reach 1,500 lbs. are a top predator) pregnant women are told not to eat Bluefin and everyone else is told no more than once-a-week for any kind of tuna. Some of the techniques to factory farm tuna are rather spectacular (I'll resist the temptation to reveal a spoiler but will only say they involve mackerel) and perhaps they might lessen the danger of eating mercury. Another reason to avoid fish.
The evolution of sushi is quite a story in itself, moving from rice being used to preserve fish (and smelling like the “vomit of a drunkard” and being thrown out, to a situation where the rice is more important than the fish. Sushi chefs apprentice themselves for years to learn the secrets of good sushi rice. (I have some Norwegian in my genes, but there is no way you will ever get lutefisk** - literally lye fish - past my nose.)
A major role of the sushi chef is to scope out the customers and adjust the servings and consistency and appearance to the particular customer's taste. I'll avoid a spoiler here and not reveal why it is that Americans will probably never get an authentic sushi; the kind they are served would be rejected as inedible by most Japanese.
I could go on and on. Fascinating book.
** Here’s what Garrison Keillor has to say about it:”Every Advent we entered the purgatory of lutefisk, a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, much as if survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I'd be told, "Just have a little." Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot.”...more
The jaws of a megaladon could open so wide that a modern quarter-horse could stand upright in them and not nick his head on teeth that were estimated The jaws of a megaladon could open so wide that a modern quarter-horse could stand upright in them and not nick his head on teeth that were estimated to have been over 7 inches long. The ancestor of the great white shark, they survived at least four mass extinctions and evolved into a perfect predator.
Great whites have “an aura of gentleness” when they are not feeding. That’s not an assertion I would personally like to test out. Then again, perhaps our genes have an innate fear of dark things that inhabit alien environments, and perhaps our genetic remembrance is a remnant of our ancestors flight from the seas and the megaladon.
There are many hundreds of shark species, yet only four have been known to ingest humans: the Bull shark, White Tip, Tiger, and Great White. Not indiscriminate foragers, contrary to popular lore, great white eyes discriminate and studies have shown they will ignore shapes that don’t resemble one of their favorite meal: seals. A surfboard resembles a seal. Great White congregate around the Farallon Islands and it’s there that Casey went over a period of years to investigate the scientists studying the sharks, seals and birds who congregate in great numbers on these remote and forbidding islands located just west of San Francisco. The researchers came to recognize many of the sharks as individuals with different personality traits: some were clowns, some peevish, others consistently aggressive. They did not engage in the distinctive “feeding frenzy” long associated with sharks, rather they formed a sort of buffet line with the females having the right-away.
Humans have long had a love-hate relationship with sharks. Some civilizations venerated them; others damned them. While working on Pearl Harbor workers discovered large pens that archaeologists determined had been used for gladiatorial-like combat between sharks and local natives. (“ Pearl Harbor was the home of the shark goddess Ka'ahupahau and her brother (or son) Kahiʻuka who lived in caves at the entrance to the harbor, rich in pearl oysters, and who guarded the entrance against sharks. The construction of a Navy dry dock starting in 1919 enraged the local populace who believed the gods’ caves were being destroyed.) I decided to do a little fact-checking and found this entry in a book entitled Maneaters: Hawaiian kings threw living people into specially built enclosures containing sharks, and gladiatorial contests were staged between people and sharks that had been starved. The enclosure was a semi-circle of lava stones enclosing an area of a bout 4 acres at the edge of the sea. There was an opening to the sea where sharks could be lured in. During a contest the entrance was closed off. The gladiator was equipped with nothing more than a shark-tooth knife - a stick with a shark’s tooth at the end. When the shark rushed in for the attack, the gladiator had to swim quickly below and try to slice open the shark’s stomach with the single tooth.
Casey was granted a week-long permission on the island, ostensibly to study the mating habits of the hundreds of thousands of bird who reside there, some of whom were so eager to peck the back of one’s head that helmets were mandatory. This was at the time of massive interest in sharks, so everyone wanted to go to the Farallon’s and those researchers on the islands were under a great deal of pressure as they were seen as taking away the right of hordes of tourists who wanted their chance to see a great white disembowel some other creature. Her disingenuousness and mendacity about the real purpose for the trip lead to consequences for the shark research project.
Getting to the Farallons, home to numerous wrecks and lost ships, was hardly a walk in the park as the 27 miles from the Golden Gate, tended to be often nasty and even the most experienced captains had stories to tell of close calls. Everyone assumed there was nothing to it so they didn’t bring the bare necessities and the weather could change rapidly.
The Farallons is all about death, animals killing each other constantly and that can have a weird effect on those who work there. It drives many away almost immediately. Food supplies are not always delivered regularly, relationships develop, others break up, sometimes one is the cause of the other. And there is the constant noise of the birds, bird shit all over everything and scientists have to wear flea collars on their ankles to keep the bird vermin off them. Forget wearing any clothes you wish to keep.
Nicknamed the “Devil’s Teeth” because of the way they look, the Farallon Islands have an interesting pedigree. They were pretty much left alone until the early 1800’s when Russian fur traders discovered the thousands of seals who resided there and virtually wiped the seals out. The slaughter was so bad that the population dwindled from an annual kill of 40,000 to just 54 by the 1830’s. It wasn’t just seals who lived there but millions of sea going birds, in particular gulls and Murres. For whatever reason, California had no chickens in the mid-19th century, so when someone discovered that Murre eggs, an egg the size of a softball, could be used in place of chicken eggs in baking, there was a stampede to collect eggs and sell them in San Francisco. (The eggs were not any good for omelets or plain as they had a distinctly fishy taste.) Collecting the eggs was not easy on the slippery, guano-covered mountain sides and scalp wounds from gull attacks were common as was death from slipping off the side of the mountains.
The Farallons were the site of the first lighthouse (1853) along the California coast, and desperately needed as shipping traffic increased for the Gold Rush. The lighthouse had to be built twice. The first time they discovered the architect had measured wrongly and the Fresnel lens did not fit, so the building had to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, not an easy task since bricks had to be hauled up the mountain manually. Manning the lighthouse was a lonely business: the weather was usually terrible and the conditions miserable, not to mention antagonism from the Farallon Egg Company which insisted it had claim to the island, a claim not recognized by the government.
One could argue that Casey does not pursue with enough vigor the relationship between the animals and the scientists who study them. She does spend a lot of the book examining the relationships between the scientists themselves. Many reviewers have complained about her infatuation and overemphasis on the people. I like books about people’s idiosyncrasies (and Casey, herself, has many, writing of them self-deprecatingly) and this book has a nice balance of scientific information, geography, and characters.
SPOILER: The last third of the book has engendered considerable criticism. The tone changes and the focus is more on Casey herself than the animals. I quote at length from a review in ScienceBlogs: "It made me wonder if the untold obsession was on the part of the "shark guys" since they inexplicably risked their careers to invite a silly, superstitious drama queen into their midst on the islands -- illegally. Curiously, Casey does such a poor job developing the scientists' personalities beyond describing their perfect muscle tone and passion for surfing that Pyle and Anderson were sadly interchangeable throughout the entire account -- like furniture, actually." Perhaps a bit harsh, but Casey is unsparing of herself, too. (Ref: http://scienceblogs.com/bookclub/2009... )
We are surrounded by waves: electromagnetic, light, radio, and water. They can be helpful providing powedited 3/12/11 to add references and some links
We are surrounded by waves: electromagnetic, light, radio, and water. They can be helpful providing power, light and communication; but they can also carry unimaginable force.
The science of waves and surf forecasting is relatively new. It began in earnest during WW II when scientists realized that successful amphibious landings required some ability to forecast surf sizes on the beaches. It didn’t hurt that there was oodles of money available and scientists, no different than anyone else, like nothing better than to specialize in something that has practical applications for war.
Reports of huge, 100-foot waves have traditionally been dismissed as typical seafaring exaggeration. Shackleton reported having his ship tossed about by the largest wave he had ever seen and one that towered over his ship. Large, seemingly unsinkable ships have disappeared without a trace. One ship that did, the Munchen, left a lifeboat that had been torn from its davits and which normally was suspended 65 feet off the deck. And yet, the physics of waves didn’t predict the possibility of such waves except in extraordinarily rare circumstances, so rare, as to be literally incredible.
Technically a “rogue wave inn oceanography, is more precicely defined as waves whose height is more than twice the significant wave height (SWH), which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record.”
A scientific discovery ship aptly named the Discovery was tossed around like match wood in a storm on the way to Iceland. Fortunately the captain was able to save the 200 foot vessel which was layered with scientific instruments which recorded periodic waves of 100 feet among normal sets measuring 45 feet.
Jan 1, 1995 something happened that made scientists reconsider. On a platform in the North Sea. Seas were high, running around 38 feet as measured by instruments on the platforms underside until an 85 foot wave hit the rig at 45 mph coming out of nowhere. The first confirmed measurement of a freak wave, more than twice the size of its neighbors. The engineers who designed the rig had built it for the one-in-10,000 year 64 foot wave. 85 foot waves were not part of the equation. The emphasis soon shifted from whether these waves existed to how and why they occurred. An oil rig, the Ocean Ranger, went down off Newfoundland that had been designed to withstand 110 foot seas. There were no survivors. (Things were a little more complicated than just the wave according to this entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Ra...) Casey’s version is sensationalized and you have to take some of her descriptions with a dose of salt.
Interesting facts: two large ships sink every week, but the causes are usually just attributed to bad weather. Unlike when an aircraft goes down, rarely is there an investigation that’s more than cursory.
Casey alternates between science and the more prosaic, like surfing. (Her adulation for Laird Hamilton carries a sexual tension that should have had Laird’s wife, herself a striking former beach-volleyball pro, (http://gabriellereece619.typepad.com/...) more than a little concerned. Their swim out to “Jaws” and back and then getting hosed off bordered on prurient.) Some of her similes border on the silly, likening a personal characteristic to being “as wide as interstate 10,” whatever the hell than means. We follow Laird around the world seeking the ever more thrilling ride, as Laird laments the ever-larger crowds, crutches like Surfline that forecasts huge swells with precision, and sponsors and contests. (It should be noted that Hamilton gets lots of endorsements so he can afford to be dismissive of those seeking greater glory.) There’s also little examination of the effect and controversy of tow-in surfing, really the only way to get to the right spot for gigantic waves. Hamilton’s long-time tow-in partner Derrick Doerner even though, as I understand it, he was a champion paddle-in surfer (true surfing??) many years before his connection to Hamilton. Perhaps he was less Adonis-like than Hamilton.
The answer to the formation of these freak/rogue waves was found in quantum physics and Schrödinger’s equation (for you math types: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%...) which describes deep water waves (they have found some waves 600 feet high rumbling around below the surface) and surface waves that become unstable and a central wave will “rob energy from its neighbors” making the troughs on each side of the enormous wave very deep. (The BBC series cited below has some spectacular graphs showing this.) What makes these waves especially dangerous for ships is that they aren’t the typical waves with sloping sides that ships are designed to handle. Rather, these have very steep sides and deep toughs on either side. The captain of the Queen Mary who saw one of these said it reminded him of the cliffs of Dover, straight up. And they break, which means you have millions of tons of water dropping on you, about 100 tons per sq. meter as opposed to a 12 meter wave that’s about 6 tons per sq. meter. (That would make a great Disney ride although it would be guaranteed to bring on massive puking.)
For the truly paranoid or apocalypticly oriented types, I recommend reading the section on the side of the mountain in the Canary Islands that's due to collapse into the ocean generating a 100 foot wave along the east coast of the United States; or, Latuya Bay in Alaska that generated a 1,000 (yes, that's one thousand) foot high wave following an earthquake in 1958. I mean, really. (The USC Tsunami Research Group found evidence the wave may actually have been 1,720 feet high. - http://www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/alas... - I thought Casey was exaggerating so I had to look it up. The wave snapped trees that were six-feet thick.)
Perhaps my favorite part of the book was the section on salvage tugs and their crews. Those who have read other reviews of mine will understand the attraction I have for these stories. Farley Mowat wrote a wonderful novel about ocean-going salvage tugs: The Grey Seas Under: The Perilous Rescue Mission of a N.A. Salvage Tug. One of the hazards Mowat doesn’t even mention was dealing with dangerous cargo. The worst is undeclared pesticides or herbicides. The regulations in carrying such cargo are so onerous –and properly so– that the incentive to carry them illegally is huge. When a ferry, the Princess of the Stars – capsized off the Philippines the salvage experts discovered an extremely hazardous pesticide, Endosulfin, that would have caused devastation on a nearby Sibuyon Island, environmentally pristine sanctuary. Other hazardous cargo such as phenyl, a common ingredient in plastic causes paralysis when its fumes are inhaled. In one case cyanide powder had been labeled as flour.
These intrepid souls head out in the absolute worst weather to rescue ships in distress (For a great video of one such French ocean-going tug see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8K2B1.... (I get seasick just watching this video, notice the wave breaking on the bridge.) For a high seas rescue check out the video of the Flandre’s sister ship, the Bourbon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Na8E....
I would have preferred a little more science (the title is misleading, it’s really more hagiography of Laird Hamilton) and a little less surfing (I'm exaggerating a little, perhaps I'm just jealous.) She’s a good writer although I should point out one never says 25 knots per hour; 25 miles per hour or 25 knots. John McPhee, Casey is not. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating read.
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