August 2009 – Into the Woods

Stigmatized dialects

Mountain Talk, N.C. State University

The Queen Family, N.C. State University

When I reflect on my long relationship with language, it seems odd to me that the schools in these parts never (or at least used to didn’t) actually tell children that they’ve grown up speaking a stigmatized dialect, and that if they want to enter the business, corporate, or professional worlds, they’ll have to learn to speak “standard English” as a second language. (You got tripped up by that “used to didn’t,” didn’t you? Just working in a bit of dialect…)

One could argue over whether the local dialect here in Stokes County is Southern or Appalachian. I would say that in the truly rural areas, the local dialect is Appalachian. Yes, I understand it perfectly, and I love to listen to it. I can still speak it, but I have to pause, think, and flip some sort of switch in my brain, because all my live language circuits have been rewired from years of speaking standard English.

Don’t doubt for a minute that Appalachian English is severely stigmatized. Once, having just told a young man from California in my department at the San Francisco Chronicle that I can speak fluent hillbilly, he said, of course, “Say something in hillbilly.” I thought for a moment, adjusted my mouth, and said something. The look of disgust on his face was genuine and involuntary, as though I’d just pulled a maggoty apple out of a bag.

Even here in North Carolina, Appalachian English is stigmatized. When I was at the Winston-Salem Journal, we had recently hired a young woman from Ashe County who was an experienced clerk and an ultra-fast typist. But she had never learned standard English, and behind her back people made fun of how she talked. This is all the more sad because anyone who can type fast has well-developed language aptitude.

Walt Wolfram, a linguist at N.C. State University, is one of the few people who have ever tried to do something about this stigma. Its human and economic costs are high.

I am no linguist, but I am doubtful that Appalachian English consists mainly of old speech patterns preserved from the British Isles or Ireland. I have traveled some in Scotland, England, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland, and I never heard anything that really reminded me of Appalachian English. The region, at least to my ear, that comes closest is Wales, where English is spoken with a kind of lilting rhythm and cadence, very pleasing to the ear, that sometimes reminds me of the rhythm of Appalachian English.

Sony strikes back

It is so exciting to see competition and innovation in the market for electronic readers. Sony has revealed a new Reader — its third model in the evolution of the Sony Reader. That should keep the Amazon Kindle developers on their toes.

Sony’s new reader includes the feature that put the Kindle miles ahead of Sony — electronic delivery of books and reading material over the cell phone network.

Sony says the new reader will be available in December.

Since Amazon and Sony are serious about the market for this technology, let’s hope Apple has something up its sleeve.

A new model of climate change

100 years from now: Model predicts redder areas will warm the most.

100 years from now: Model predicts bluer areas will get more precipitation.

First of all, I think it’s good to maintain a healthy skepticism about computer models of climate change far into the future. With a model of a system as complex as the earth’s climate, many assumptions have to be made and calibrated, and there is never enough data. Also, I can’t let go of the personal opinion that current models give too little weight to solar variance.

On the other hand, global warming is impossible to deny. Before I made the decision to leave California and move back to North Carolina, I spent a good bit of time looking for climate predictions at the state-by-state level. I never found any. The only thing that seemed clear was that climate scientists expected storms off the oceans to become more severe.

The Nature Conservancy and the University of Washington have put their model, Climate Wizard, on line. Good news for North Carolina: It’s ranked near the bottom (46th) on the getting-hotter scale state by state. The prediction for North Carolina also is for more, rather than less, rain as the climate changes.

But there is bad news for all of us who are fond of eating. The Midwest and California, on which we rely for so much of our food, are predicted by this model to get hotter and drier.

How you used to get your news…

My previous post about the death of Fred Fragler, who hired me for my first job, got me all sentimental about analog communications technology. I mentioned the Associated Press Teletype machines and how it was the job of a newspaper copy boy to look after them. The Winston-Salem Journal had about, oh, eight of them. They made a lot of noise and were kept in their own room adjoining the newsroom.

Here’s a Google video that shows one running, and you can hear how it sounds.

The old Associated Press teletype network used a nationwide network of telephone lines leased from AT&T. Since this technology used telephone lines, it follows that its signal was something that could be carried over the telephone — sound. Sound, of course, can also be carried by radio. Ham radio operators still use this type of signal for communication. It’s radio teletype, which hams call RTTY. It, too, is sound. It sounds like this on the radio. Hams now use computers and computer sound cards to generate and decode this sound.

I’m still working on setting up my radio room here in the new house, and I don’t yet have a radio teletype system set up. When I was in San Francisco, though, I had confirmed (meaning the other side of the communication later sent an acknowledgement) radio teletype contacts with other RTTY operators New Zealand, Japan, the Galapagos, Spain, and Hawaii. Radio teletype actually is a very efficient mode of radio communications, almost as efficient as Morse code.

I’m amused by young’uns these days with their iPhones. “I can call New Zealand with my iPhone,” they might say. Sure they can. But the signal from their iPhone can carry at most for a few miles, then a corporate communication system picks up the data and hauls it to New Zealand. Whereas, in a radio teletype message from San Francisco to New Zealand, there is nothing between the two radios but the ionosphere.

Seems like just yesterday…

Fred Flagler is in the far left foreground, June 1969. — Digital Forsyth, Frank Jones collection

That’s me on the far left. I recognize almost everyone in this photo. That’s Arlene Edwards in the chair in the right foreground, and Wallace Carroll in the chair to Arlene’s left. — Digital Forsyth, Frank Jones collection.

The man who hired me for my first job died Tuesday. That was Fred Flagler, former managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. Here is his obituary in the Winston-Salem Journal.

My first job was as a copy boy. The photos above were taken by Frank Jones in June 1969, the day Gordon Gray told the staff of the Journal that he was selling the newspaper to Media General.

What a lucky young’un I was to get a job as a newspaper copy boy. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect job for me. It exercised so many of my interests — language, communications, communications systems. In those days, news arrived in a room full of Teletype machines. Copy boys tore the printouts out of the machines and distributed the “copy” to the appropriate editors. I also typed local stories into a Teletype machine to be sent to the Associated Press bureau in Raleigh. These teletype machines were my first experience with communications technology. The Teletype signals, by the way, were carried over dedicated telephone circuits.

Frank Jones, the Journal photographer who became an institution and whose photographs document the history of this area for decades, taught me how to send photographs to the Associated Press using one of the most fascinating machines I’ve ever seen, a Steam Punk device if there ever was one. It was a drum scanner, basically. It was analog, of course, with tubes in it that needed time to warm up and stabilize before sending a photo. I spent a lot of time puzzling about what “phase” meant (the operator had to twiddle some controls to get the machine “in phase”). No one could explain “phase” then to my satisfaction. Now, with my amateur radio license and my interest in analog technology, it seems pretty simple.

Fred Flagler, as I recall, always had a line gauge (a metal ruler for measuring picas and points) in his back pocket. It probably was from Fred that I picked up a habit that followed me through my years at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle — never go into the newsroom without a line gauge in your hand. It was sort of a techie nerd’s wand, I guess.

Thank you, Fred. You changed my life.

Homegrown tomatoes on the honor system

While exploring a bit this morning on the other side of Madison, I came across this unattended self-service tomato stand — weigh them yourself and leave the money in the box. I came away with three pounds of tomatoes and some photos. I wish there were places like this closer to me.

Fresh Apple Misdemeanor

I have been reading Robin Hobb‘s fantasy novel “Assassin’s Apprentice.” In the book, some characters were eating hot apple pastries and remarking on how good they were. I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind, and I just happened to have a few apples.

The problem is: How might I whomp up something that will satisfy the craving for apple pastry while keeping the carb load and the glycemic insult down to the misdemeanor as opposed to the felony level? Crêpes of some sort?

Keeping in mind the vegan’s rule for maximizing the kick from plant proteins (seeds + nuts + legumes), I made the crêpe batter from about one-quarter ground walnuts, one-quarter ground sunflower seeds, one-quarter tofu whizzed in the blender with water, and one-quarter whole wheat flour. The apples were not vegan because I cooked them in butter, with lots of cinnamon and some unrefined sugar.

Cooking and eating interests me for all sorts of reasons, most of them obvious. But it’s interesting to experiment with roughly estimating the glycemic load of a meal. If you ate a big meal, and if you’re hungry again in three hours, then it’s guaranteed that your meal was a glycemic bomb. I’m timing how long Fresh Apple Misdemeanor stays with me.

Walnuts and sunflower seeds ready for the grinder

The chickens’ portion is on the left.

What's up with the sun?

Pieter Bruegel, 1565, during the Little Ice Age

Turf houses in Iceland

It is not commonly understood that the output of the sun goes through cycles. I, nerd that I am, didn’t appreciate this until I got my ham radio license and learned about the 11-year solar cycles that affect the propagation of high-frequency (1.8 Mhz – 30 Mhz) radio signals around the planet. But there are other cycles of the sun, maybe periodic, maybe more random, that have had a huge effect on human history.

The history of northern Europe, not to mention Iceland and Greenland, was greatly affected by climate changes thought to be related to changes in the sun’s output.

A new 11-year solar cycle should have begun by now, but it’s late. There have been 670 days without sunspots through June 2009.

A recent paper by scientists from the National Solar Observatory observes that there have been changes in the sun’s behavior that go back farther than the 11 years of the solar sunspot cycle, at least back to 1992. This is troubling, because if the trend continues, the solar situation would look more and more like the Maunder Minimum, which is blamed for the Little Ice Age in Europe, which lasted for hundreds of years, starting as early as the 13th century.

This is all very complicated, and the data is sketchy, but if you’re a weather watcher, and a climate watcher, as I am, then this is something you’ll want to read up on and keep an eye on.

Has U.S. life expectancy peaked?

Life expectancy in the United States is at an all-time high. But like the stock market, it’s starting to look a little toppy. Life expectancy has started to decline in some parts of the United States, particularly rural areas and parts of the South.

According to LifeScience:

“Though the United States has by far the highest level of health care spending per capita in the world, we have one of the lowest life expectancies among developed nations — lower than Italy, Spain and Cuba and just a smidgeon ahead of Chile, Costa Rica and Slovenia, according to the United Nations. China does almost as well as we do. Japan tops the list at 83 years.”

This online medical journal has charts showing how life expectancy is changing area by area. (It’s uncanny how a county-by-county chart of life expectancy looks like a voting-patterns chart.)

This is all very sad, because life expectancy would continue to rise if people took advantage of what we now know about diseases caused by diet and lifestyle.

Egg report

I got a second egg this morning, so I fried them both for lunch today.

The shells were much thicker and harder than any grocery store egg I’ve ever had. The yolks stood up so nicely that it makes one realize that commercial eggs are never truly fresh. The yolks were that dark gold color that I’ve only ever seen in homemade eggs. I was afraid the yolks would not be properly dark, because the dry summer weather hasn’t left me much fresh grass and clover to feed the chickens. As far as I know, it’s primarily chlorophyll that makes the yolks so rich. But my chickens do get a varied diet that includes a lot of fruit and vegetable scraps, so maybe chlorophyll is not as essential as I thought.

I’ve rounded up some sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and wheat berries to mix with their laying mash. They seem to crave protein and go for protein foods first when I take them treats.

The quality of the eggs, and my hens’ happy dispositions, makes me feel even more sorry for the hens that produce commercial eggs. Obviously commercial hens aren’t fed well.