BeigeJournal

Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World, by Gina Mallet. McClelland & Stewart, 2004.

This is a wonderful book about food by Toronto-based journalist and food critic Gina Mallet. She grew up in post-war England, which gave her experience with bad food, certainly, but her family’s efforts, at home and while traveling, to eat well also brought her into contact with much better food, at a time before corporate farming, health scares, and government regulation.

Her experiences as a youth are quite interesting to me, as I’m not too familiar with life in the UK at that time. Things have changed in Europe, certainly. She writes quite a bit about the history of French cuisine, and a great deal about how attitudes toward and the production of eggs, meat, cheese, and fruit have changed. She writes extensively about how cheeses have been strongly effected by regulations, in the EU as well as the USA, restricting the use of raw milk.

The book contains some recipes here and there, and is written with a positively inspirational tone of joy of food. After reading the egg chapter I was inspired to make my first omelet. I’ve started exploring the cheese section of my favorite store for interesting cheeses (Drunken Goat Cheese, anyone?). I highly recommend the book.

100 Suns, by Michael Light. Knopf, 2003.

One hundred photos of US above-ground nuclear weapons tests. Arranged in no obvious order, with a few pages of captions, generally a paragraph each, collected in the back. I understand the desire to not clutter the photos with the text, but it is awkward to have to keep the book open in two places and flip back and forth. These are mostly very pretty pictures, if you don’t think too much about what they are pictures of. It really is amazing, to those of us who grew up in the modern era of radiation protection guidelines, that people used to set these things off right out in the open, and with soldiers nearby, no less.

There are several Castle Bravo photos, the test that, though expected to yield 4–8 megatons turned out, due to the unexpected boost from lithium-7, to yield 15 MT and a radiological disaster. One wonders why, when testing a fusion bomb, they felt that they just couldn’t wait for more favorable weather. It also seems that a lot of the airdrop tests missed the target, starting with the very first, Crossroads Able. One wonders, if so much trouble was had hitting the target in very carefully organized tests involving dropping live nuclear bombs, when one would imagine extra care would be taken, where the bombs would have fallen in the confusion of actual war. No wonder there was such interest in high-yield weapons.

Hidden Worlds: Hunting for Quarks in Ordinary Matter, by Timothy Paul Smith. Princeton University Press, 2002.

I thought this was a fantastic book, very interesting and fun to read. It’s about the familiar nucleons, the ordinary up and down quarks that they are made from, and the historical as well as current efforts to understand them. Although the frontiers of high-energy physics have moved on beyond the nucleons, there is much left to learn about them, and, since nucleons are what stuff is made of, they are of special interest.

The book contains quite a bit about the interplay between theory and experiment. It gives moderately detailed overviews of a few particular experiments and their accelerators and detectors, rather than trying to touch on everything. It is a largely math-free book and is obviously meant for the curious non-physicist, but does assume some knowledge of physics.

Life on a Young Planet : The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, by Andrew H. Knoll. Princeton University Press, 2003.

This is a fantastic overview of Precambrian paleontology. It is highly readable, with enough detail to be really interesting to someone with an interest in the details without getting bogged down in stable isotope nomenclature or arcane disagreements in taxonomy. Instead, we read of the big, interesting disagreements in taxonomy, the people involved, and the remote locations where the important rocks are found. It’s all here, from the earliest traces of life to the Cambrian, as shown by microfossils, chemical and isotopic signals of life, and genetic analysis of modern organisms.

Joyriding : a practical manual for learning the fundamentals of masterful driving, by Kenneth L. Zuber. Helios Institute, 1998.

This is a book about driving, intended for beginning drivers but useful to all drivers. The author frequently emphasizes the joy of, as the subtitle says, masterful driving, as opposed to just steering and hoping for the best. It is perhaps a message more likely to resonate with young people than just safety and law.

As you’d expect, the book is filled with drawings illustrating proper and improper driving. There are many photographs, most of them featuring rather exotic automobiles, which I suppose adds visual appeal to the book.

Joyriding contains the clearest explanation of proper parallel parking I’ve seen, something sure to be of use to people like me who grew up in suburbs and never got any practice at it.

Overall, an excellent book.

Sea Kayaker’s Deep Trouble: True Stories and Their Lessons from Sea Kayaker Magazine by by Matt Broze, George Gronseth, and Christopher Cunningham. International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 1997.

This is a collection of accounts of sea kayaker’s bad days (terminally bad, in some cases) and the lessons we can learn from other’s mistakes. As a big believer in learning from the mistakes of others and an eager reader of accident reports of all types, as well as a novice kayaker, I found this book interesting and useful.

Several issues appear repeatedly in the reports, particularly failure to get weather information and failure to dress for immersion. We see that even people who are well prepared can get into trouble, but the accounts of their trouble read very differently from the accounts of the trouble people who set out hoping for the best get into when the best fails to happen. I am amazed at the conditions some people set out in without dry suits or wet suits. Wear your PFD is another lesson we can learn, because it is going to be very hard to put it on if you wait until conditions are so bad that you think maybe you’ll need it.

Signaling potential rescuers is a whole lot easier if you have signaling equipment on your person. This book predates the modern 406 MHz personal locator beacons, but clearly a lot of the people in trouble would have been much better off if they could have had one. Handheld marine VHF radios can also be very handy. You might want to read the directions for your flares before you have to use them at night in a storm.

On the whole, the lessons learned are not that surprising, but it is interesting to see how events unfold in real emergencies. Paddlers would do well to read this book and think about their own practices.

Carroll Smith’s Nuts, Bolts and Fasteners and Plumbing Handbook by Carroll Smith. Motorbooks International, 1990.

I learned of this book from Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools website. The title pretty well explains what the book is about. Carroll Smith was a race car builder, and so to some extent the book is race oriented, but anyone who uses fasteners for critical jobs will find the book informative. Quite a bit of the book ends up describing how things are done in aerospace or structural engineering, largely for the purpose of explaining how things are done when they really need to be done right and cost is not important. Smith frequently mentions the very expensive fasteners used on fighter aircraft or rockets to show what is possible even as he dismisses them as far too expensive and hard to obtain for race car use. Those of us who’ve heard a lot about the right way, the wrong way, and the FAA way might find his endless praise of the virtues of aerospace techniques a bit different from what we are used to hearing, but certainly most of the approved fastening methods are very safe and reliable even if sometimes awkward and expensive. Certainly more thought, attention, and money generally goes into aircraft fasteners than goes into what you see on bicycles or street cars, and we can learn a lot from that.

The book starts with a brief introduction to metallurgy to explain stress and strain, elastic limits, yield points, stress raisers, fatigue and the like sufficiently for those not familiar with the basics to understand the rest of the book. Nuts and bolts are a major part of the book, of course, followed by traditional and blind rivets, quick-release fasteners, and flexible hoses and their connectors.

The book is written in a chatty, conversational style. There is always the risk of going to far when using that sort of style, and perhaps he did go a tiny bit too far, but overall I found it very engaging and readable. It is certainly much more fun to read than the written by committee style often found in technical material. Praise for good products and scorn for bad is abundant. There are a great many photographs, drawings, graphs, and tables. At times it would be helpful if the figures were numbered so that the text could refer to them specifically rather than leaving the reader to hunt around for the figure being discussed in the text.

This is a fantastic guide to how and why do things right when bolting, riveting, or plumbing. Highly recommended.

Yesterday, on 03-01, I received an e-mail that began:

When you signed up for the Members Only Web site, you asked us to remind you by e-mail when your membership was about to expire. That time is coming. Our records indicate that your ARRL membership will expire on Jun 30, 2004, and in about a week we will prepare a renewal notice to send you in the mail.

Hmmmm. My membership is about to expire—in 121 days, or one-third of a year. I’m sure happy that they alerted me to this matter urgently requiring my attention.

Oddly, Consumer’s Union seems to be the very worst offender. They start begging for renewals the moment they get the check. Renew now, only 11.5 months left.

Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa by Nicholas Shrady. Simon \& Schuster, 2003.

If you’ve seen this book, you’ll remember it. It’s a parallelogram. It’s the leaning book about the leaning tower of Pisa. It’s kind of an obvious idea, but one does have to admire them for actually doing it. I assume the binding machines are not really designed to make parallelogram books. It won’t pack into boxes neatly. Doesn’t sit on the shelf normally. It must have cost extra all around, but it does get attention. Thankfully, the print isn’t leaning.

It’s quite an interesting book, as much about the history of Pisa, the surrounding region, and the other buildings in Pisa, as about the tower itself. It is not really a book about the technical details of the tower and efforts to keep it from falling over, though of course a bit of that makes it into the book. It is more about the people and events that produced the tower in the first place, and the way it is perceived. I found it very enjoyable.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow. Tor Books, 2003. Also available on the web in a variety of formats under a Creative Commons license.

This is certainly different in style from the last work of fiction I read, Heinlein’s For Us, the Living, which I have also reviewed They are both set in a utopian future, with utopian economics and a utopian social order, but while the story in For Us exists primarily to allow the author to lecture the reader through the characters, Down and Out is considerably more subtle. The unfamiliar concepts are introduced with enough context to understand what’s happening, and more detail is filled in later in a natural manner. I also found suspension of disbelief easier Down and Out even though the technologies described are rather more…advanced. The principle that the less said about how the gadgets work the better seems to hold true.

I think the really clever trick was devising ways, in a story set in a world where death itself can be cured, to keep the tension up high enough to be interesting while still being believable in that context.

I liked the book a lot.