Month: January 2021

And I thought it was spring fever


Pale greenhouse basil bought from Trader Joe’s gets a boost from some rays before it goes into pesto.

Where did all this energy come from? Why am I spending more time outdoors instead of in front of the computer doom-scrolling? At first I thought it was an ordinary case of spring fever, because January has been mild. But then I realized that it’s relief, and that I feel safe again now that the country has clawed its way back from the brink of fascism.

The news is three parts boring, three parts worrisome, and four parts encouraging — a welcome change from ten parts terrifying.

This time a year ago, the abbey grounds were a mess, with locust, copel, and briar creeping in from the woods and springing up everywhere the mower couldn’t reach. Ken did a lot of clearing last March, so it was only a day’s work for me to whip the yard back into shape with a bow saw and a pair of loppers. The daffodil shoots are two inches high. The garlic is up about three inches. The birds seem very happy, because it has been an easy winter for them so far. Mrs. Squirrel has been climbing on the house, trying to get back into the attic, no doubt because she’s ready to build a nest for her spring babies. I talk her back into the woods with a slingshot (no squirrels are harmed). I saw Mrs. Possum on a recent evening, and she was plump — probably pregnant. Out in the front ditch by the road, I pulled a blackberry stalk out by its roots, and a well-nourished earthworm came up with it. I still have some pruning to do — apples and grapes. The countdown to daffodils is about thirty days.

I can’t wait to start scratching in the dirt. The garden had a good clearing and tilling back in the fall, so it’s looking good for spring — dark, friable, and winter-fallow. I’ve bought all the seeds I need. To get an earlier start, I’m going to experiment with a kind of cold frame bought from Amazon. It’s just metal hoops with a clear cover, enough for one short row of early greens and lettuce.

For the first few years here, the challenge was building up the soil and establishing a landscape. Now the problem is managing the fertility and fecundity — holding back the woods and managing the overgrowth. In one wet summer, the place could turn into a jungle.

Keeping up the yard, garden, and orchard would be impossible without machines. The tiller, which had not worked quite right for two or three years, runs as good as new now that it has a new carburetor, which a neighbor helped me install (or, more accurately, I handed him tools and he installed it). The Snapper mower is now eleven years old and breaks down too often. It will now become a backup mower, replaced by a new zero-turn Ariens mower that I had to order from the factory and that arrived in December. Zero-turn mowers are the new must-have item for homeowners. I’m hoping that a zero-turn mower will save me some mowing time and give me much better options for mowing around trees and obstacles. The chain saw normally gets some exercise only when Ken is here. But I lent it to a neighbor to cut up the beech tree down by the bridge that fell during a storm last March, knowing that the neighbor would return it all shiny and sharpened and with stabilized fuel. (I learned the hard way that one winter is all it takes for gasoline to go bad and gum up carburetors in small engines.) I helped split and load the firewood for the neighbor. These days, though, splitting wood means operating a hydraulic splitting machine.

But we can’t yet totally avert our eyes from the pig circus that was Trump. Over at Lawfare, my old friend Jonathan Rauch, a recidivist centrist if there ever was one, argues that President Biden should pardon Trump. Jonathan’s arguments are reasonable, as long as you can stomach the idea of overlooking a minor matter like an attempt at a fascist coup and treason that served the interests of Putin’s Russia, treason the details of which we still don’t know. I cannot stomach those things. Trump must be neutralized by vigorous application of law and justice. All his crimes must be exposed, as well as whatever it was that Putin was holding over his head. Trump’s children — baby sociopaths, as the New Republic called them — must also be neutralized. They’re a crime family, after all. It was inevitable that, once we wrestled the reins out of the hands of right-wingers and fascists, that radical centrists would want to steer the ship of state again, as they did during the Clinton and Obama administrations. That’s the challenge for progressives now — not letting anyone forget that we progressives earned this, that even Georgia has turned a corner, and that our time has come. For Republicans, “unity” means acting as though they didn’t lose, and continuing to make the rich richer while fattening the livers of authoritarian white people by force-feeding them with propaganda. We have been waiting a long, long time for progress. Centrists and right-wingers have had their way for more than 50 years. This is our last chance to do something about inequality and environmental catastrophe.

I’m ready for some progress. And I’m ready for spring.

Meanwhile, to better prepare you for spring fever, here’s a beautifully produced video on Swedish winters.

Mincemeat pie

Mincemeat pie is not part of my heritage (Southern American), so I disclaim all expertise and experience having to do with it. Not only did I never have mincemeat pie as a child, I don’t remember ever hearing about it. As an adult, I was not curious about making it, just because the name is so ugly — mincemeat. Both halves of the word are equally unappetizing.

But when you’ve got good organic apples, it seems like a shame and a waste to peel them for pie. And yet, if you leave the peelings on, then you spoil the texture of the pie with little strips of leathery apple skin. To make apple pie and preserve the skin, I reasoned, it would be necessary to chop — or mince — the apples. That sent me to Google looking at recipes for mincemeat pie. Most recipes for mincemeat pie don’t have any meat in them. Minced apples — skins intact — are the main event, plus other fruits such as raisins, currants, and even cherries. Some call for suet; some call for butter. Rum seems de rigeur. Almost all the recipes required making the filling, then leaving the filling in the refrigerator for at least three days, but up to six months. That made me wonder whether, especially in the days before refrigeration, the filling for mincemeat pie was allowed to ferment. Does anyone know?

In any case, it was a very good pie. But I would have to say that my first mincemeat pie would never beat my apple pies in a baking contest.

Note 1: In Erma Rombauer’s 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking, she seems to take the “meat” part seriously in one of the recipes, which calls for ground beef. Gross. Hold the meat. I’ll just have the mince.

Note 2: I thought that, as long as rum was on my mind, I might as well flambé the pie, since it has been a long time since I had set any food on fire. But I couldn’t get the rum to light in the evening breeze out of the deck, so I just had the rum.

One-pot cooking

I don’t often do one-pot cooking. But, when I do, I wonder why I don’t do more one-pot cooking. I have a certain bias, I suppose, toward at least three things on the plate and lots of dirty dishes.

Earlier today I came across this recipe at the Washington Post. I went downstairs and made it immediately. It’s another way for me to use the little pumpkins I grow each year. I’ve written about these pumpkins many times in the past, for example, here. Their proper name is Long Island Cheese Squash. Not only are they the best pumpkins I’ve ever had, they keep all winter and then some. I save seeds for next year’s crop. Anyone who sees my little pumpkins asks for seeds, and now many of my neighbors grow them. They’re bound to be very nutritious. They’re rich with pumpkin oil, as you will see if you roast them. You can order seeds from Baker Creek, if they haven’t run out. The demand for seeds has been so high that Baker Creek stopped taking orders for a while in January to catch up on shipping.

As always with recipes, substitute, substitute, substitute. I used pinto beans instead of black beans, and brown rice instead of white rice. I didn’t have a ripe avocado for garnish. But undersalting the pot a bit and applying soy sauce and sour cream at the table worked great. Next time I make this, I think I’ll use pearled barley instead of rice.

I’ve written in the past about how good the Washington Post’s food department has become, good enough to rival the New York Times’ food department. The link to the recipe may be behind a paywall if you’ve used up your ration of free articles for the month. But, even if you subscribe to only one newspaper, the Washington Post would be a good choice.

The temperature at noon today was 45F, and, yes, I had lunch on the deck.

Understanding 5G


Source: Apple

A great many articles have been written about 5G. Few of those articles are technical enough to help you understand the arguments over 5G safety. In addition, few of those articles are technical enough to help you understand which 5G cell phone is right for you, and which 5G cellular provider (such as Verizon or T-Mobile) is right for you. So, at the risk of boring you, let’s get just a little technical.

Safety

First of all, the notion that 5G causes Covid-19, or that 5G involves some kind of new hazard that warrants banning it, is silly in the extreme.

Remember when microwave ovens came on the market? Many people were afraid of them. Now just about everybody has one, and nobody worries about them. Those who tried to promote fear of microwave ovens back then used the same scare word that 5G paranoiacs use now. That word is radiation. If you come across an article about 5G that uses the word radiation, then that article is probably propaganda.

Radiation is all around us. Our bodies themselves at this very moment are producing radiation, mostly in the form of heat. Without the radiation from the sun, there could be no life. We have been immersed in radio waves for more than 100 years. Yes: Life depends on some forms of radiation, and other forms of radiation are dangerous. The difference is in the frequency of the radiation and its intensity.

As far as I can tell, 5G is said to be dangerous because 5G uses frequencies higher than 4G (4G is also called LTE). It is true that 5G uses somewhat higher frequencies. But those frequencies are still (obviously) in the radio spectrum. The properties of different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (of which the radio spectrum is a small part) have been understood for a long time. There is new technology and somewhat higher radio frequencies in 5G, but there is no new science.

Some easy physics

Only one point of physics needs to be understood. That is that electromagnetic emissions of higher frequencies contain more energy than emissions of lower frequencies. A reasonable analogy, I believe, would be a comparison with a spinning flywheel. A wheel spinning fast contains more energy (in the form of angular momentum) than a wheel spinning slowly. Electromagnetic emissions become dangerous to the human body when they contain enough energy to cause either chemical or molecular changes in body tissues. Here we must consider the concept of ionizing versus non-ionizing radiation. The entire radio spectrum including 5G is non-ionizing radiation. When the body is exposed to energy in the radio spectrum, heat is produced. It is not dangerous unless it’s intense enough to cause burns. We’re talking here about an ordinary burn of the same type you’d get if you spilled hot coffee.

Ionizing radiation is much more powerful. Intense radiation at ionizing frequencies will knock electrons out of an atom’s shell. (An atom with the wrong number of electrons is called an ion.) When electromagnetic energy is energetic enough to start altering atoms and chemical molecules, then our cells and our DNA are in danger. If you look at the chart below of the electromagnetic spectrum, you’ll see that the entire radio spectrum (which of course includes 5G) is in a frequency band lower than your microwave oven. And your microwave oven, in spite of its higher frequencies, still produces only heat, because its emissions are not energetic enough to cause ionization.

Life on earth has always been exposed to ionizing radiation in the form of ultraviolet light from the sun and gamma rays from outer space. At low levels, the body can repair molecular damage faster than the damage is done. The problem is when ionizing radiation causes cellular damage faster than the body can repair it. The three factors that determine the degree of danger are, how intense was the source of ionizing radiation, how close were you to it, and how long were you exposed. Tanning beds are far more dangerous than microwave ovens. And medical X-rays are deemed safe as long as the exposure is low and the body’s cells have time to do repairs between exposures.

But that’s enough about ionizing radiation, because 5G emissions — in fact, no radio emissions — are energetic enough to cause any reaction in the body other than hot-coffee heat.

How is 5G different from 4G?

The difference between 5G and 4G that concerns us here is how 5G uses the radio spectrum. Now we need to talk about bands of radio spectrum.

Like 4G, 5G uses multiple ranges of radio frequencies. In fact they use the same frequencies except that 5G uses some higher frequencies, up to 39Ghz. Frequencies that high have advantages as well as disadvantages. The advantage is that there is a hugh amount of bandwidth at those frequencies, so 5G speeds can be faster than 4G. The disadvantage is that frequencies as high as 39Ghz don’t propagate well. Their range is limited, and they don’t penetrate walls as well as lower frequencies. Thus 5G cellular towers that use those higher frequencies must be much closer together.

But 5G works just as well at lower frequencies. The lowest frequencies used by 5G are in the range of 650Mhz to 850Mhz. That’s much, much lower. I call it “low band.” Radio waves at those lower frequencies propagate much better over longer distances, as well as around and through obstacles. Those are the frequencies that were used by broadcast television, until the FCC reallocated frequencies to move broadcast television off those frequencies and reassign the frequencies for cellular communication.

Now you can see why 5G benefits both city people and rural people, and why where you live should factor into your choice of which 5G service provider you want to use.

Verizon vs. T-Mobile

Verizon and T-Mobile took different strategies with 5G. At FCC auctions for 5G spectrum, Verizon’s strategy was to buy licensing for the higher frequencies. T-Mobile, on the other hand, bought as much of the old broadcast television spectrum as it could get its hands on. T-Mobile bought Sprint mainly to acquire Sprint’s spectrum. Keeping in mind that all 5G providers have a range of spectrum, Verizon’s spectrum is on the whole more beneficial to those who live in cities. T-Mobile’s spectrum is on the whole more beneficial to those who live in rural areas. That’s why Verizon’s CEO joined Tim Cook at Apple’s iPhone 12 rollout and boasted that Verizon will have the bandwidth to feed a stadium full of cell phone users. T-Mobile’s advantage for rural users is not yet widely understood, partly because T-Mobile is still in the process of upgrading its rural towers to support low band 5G.

I should mention here that no individual or corporation owns radio spectrum, though we speak of it that way sometimes. In all countries, radio spectrum is seen as a publicly owned natural resource to be managed for the public good. So corporations don’t buy spectrum, they buy a license to use that spectrum. And all licenses have a start date and a termination date and thus must be relinquished or renewed.

Latency

You’ll often hear the word latency in discussions of 5G. Latency refers to the time it takes — the delay — in getting data from one place to another. The latency is lower for 5G. Most people won’t notice any difference. Gamers will. And low latency is a requirement for any device that is being controlled from a distance or that needs to exchange data very fast — self-driving cars, for instance.

Phased arrays

The concept of phased arrays is very exciting for nerds like me, but it’s not something that needs to be understood to make decisions about 5G phones or 5G service providers. So this section is for extra credit.

Cell phones are just radios. All radios require antennas for receiving and transmitting. The size (or really, the length) of an antenna is directly proportional to the frequency that you want to use it on. The lower the frequency, the longer the antenna. A shortwave radio antenna may need to be a hundred feet long or longer. An antenna for 39Ghz would be less than a third of an inch long, or about 7mm. A half wavelength antenna would be only 3.5mm long. With antennas that small, it’s possible to design some very good antennas that will fit inside of cell phones.

Some antennas emit their signals equally in all directions. They’re omnidirectional antennas. Some antennas — directional antennas — can concentrate their signals into a beam. The television antennas that used to be seen on everyone’s chimneys (some people still have them!) are directional antennas. Technically, they’re Yagi antennas. They manipulate the phase of a radio signal inside an antenna so that the antenna focuses its sensitivity in a particular direction. That’s why those chimney antennas often had rotors. Let’s not get too deep into what the phase is. It has to do with the sine wave pattern of alternating current. All radio waves are sine waves.

It’s also possible to make directional antennas that have no moving parts. The antenna’s beam is directed not by rotating a single antenna but by having multiple antennas (four, typically) arranged in a square and using an electronic circuit to alter the phase of the signal to or from each antenna. The antenna can then be steered by turning a dial, or a computer can steer the antenna.

Some newer cell phones will indeed use tiny phased array antennas inside the cell phone. It’s easy to see how cellular communication can be improved if the cellular tower can steer a signal toward wherever the phone is, and if the phone can steer its signal toward wherever the tower is. This is practical, though, only at the highest frequencies used by 5G, where the antennas are small enough to fit inside a cell phone.

Understanding your phone’s (and carrier’s) specs

As you can see, to make a good choice in buying a phone or in choosing a cellular carrier involves understanding enough about 5G to know which phone, or which carrier, is best for you. In general, Verizon is a better choice if you will use your phone mostly in the city, and T-Mobile is a better choice if you will use your phone mostly in a rural area. I’m familiar only with U.S. carriers, so those who live outside the U.S. will have some research to do.

If you dig a bit, you’ll be able to find a phone’s specifications. Here, for example, are Apple’s frequency band specifications for my iPhone 12 Pro Max. (See here for other countries.)

Note that the iPhone 12 supports 5G frequencies all the way from the lowest (600Mhz, band n71) to the highest (39Ghz, n260). So an iPhone 12 should work well for you on 5G no matter where you live or who your cell service provider is.

Some information is hard to get, though

Though your phone’s capabilities can easily be determined, and though we know in general what 5G strategy the different cell service providers are pursuing, what we don’t know is what kind of 5G equipment is installed and operating at particular locations or on particular towers. Also, cell service providers are rapidly installing new 5G equipment, so the situation is changing. The only way to really figure out what’s best for you is to take a particular phone to a particular place and see what kind of service you get. If you want to be a nerd about it, you can get your phone to tell you what band it’s on. I won’t go into that here because it’s too complicated, but I’ll describe my own case.

Two months ago, I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile, because it was easy to see that T-Mobile is better for me because I live in the sticks. The nearest cellular tower is over two miles away. With Verizon, I could get only slow data. The 4G signal was so weak that an iPhone 11 would often fall back to 3G — pathetically slow, though Verizon 4G was almost as slow. It’s 12 miles from me to the nearest tower with 5G. I can’t receive a 5G signal here yet. But switching to T-Mobile was a major improvement for me because the nearest T-Mobile towers use band 71 (600Mhz) for 4G LTE. With an iPhone 12 on T-Mobile, I can now hold a 4G signal and get data speeds that would seem slow to city people but that are a godsend to country folk — around 8Mbps down. In short, I switched to T-Mobile to get a frequency band that Verizon does not have here — band 71 in the old broadcast television spectrum. My hope is that T-Mobile will soon light up 5G on the 600Mhz band, which should give me some — though probably not dramatic — improvement. Those super-high 5G data speeds are possible only at the higher frequencies.

Caveat emptor

As you can see, making choices in 5G phones and 5G carriers can be complicated. It’s a given that people who work in cell phone stores will give inaccurate and misleading information, not least because they don’t understand what they’re selling. For some people (for example, if you live in New York City), decisions may be easy. But for those of us who live in the sticks, there is no choice but to get some understanding of 5G, to know where your towers are, and to drive around from tower to tower testing phones. I have an extra class amateur radio license, and I’ve been playing with radios and antennas for years. The applicable theories — not to mention the safety rules when you’re around radio-frequency currents — are familiar to me. For those without that kind of experience, the best strategy probably is to read, to always be skeptical of what you’re told (especially from people who work in cell phone stores), and to compare notes with your neighbors who may be using different kinds of phones on different carriers.


Source: Wikipedia

Babylonia

Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination. Edited by N.M. Swerdlow. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999. 378 pages.

Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction. Trevor Bryce. Oxford University Press, 2016. 142 pages.

I confess that I don’t find the history of Babylonia very interesting. But I think there’s a reason for that. It’s that we don’t know enough about Babylonia to satisfy my historical curiosity, much of which is about imagining what it might have been like to live in that time and place.

What I find most interesting about Babylonia is how scientific they were. They were pretty darn good at mathematics. Their base 60 math, for example, is still with us today, because we divide circles into 360 degrees, and we divide minutes into 60 seconds and hours into 60 minutes. And Babylonian philosophy probably set the stage for Greek philosophy.

Most of what we know about Babylonia has to do with kings, dynasties, and wars with Babylonia’s neighbors. Yawn. Archeology has revealed surprisingly little, partly because one city was built on top of another, and the water table now stands above the level of the oldest ruins. We have some literature, such as the Gilgamesh epic. But I personally find the Gilgamesh story too old and too remote to mean much today.

So, to my lights, the most interesting part of the history of Babylonia is its astronomy. The earliest astronomy though, should really be regarded as astrology. Its chief purpose was divination to guide the decisions of kings. In the last centuries of Babylonia, though (around 500 B.C.) the study of the stars became truly mathematical and scientific. And astrology became more democratic, so that ordinary people, and not just kings, could have their astrological fortunes told.

Most of what we know about Babylonia comes to us in the form of clay tablets, of which there are a great many. Scribes used a wooden stylus to make marks on wet clay tablets. The tablets were baked. The tablets were regarded as valuable, so over the centuries many of them were preserved.

I have not done a search for historical novels set in Babylonia. But, if I did, I think the most interesting characters would be the astronomers. They constantly watched the sky, day and night. They were supported by the kings, so their observatories must have been nice places — towers, I would hope. And because there was a constant dialogue between the astronomers (or astrologers) and the kings, palace intrigue could help drive the plot.

By the way, this is the first book I have read in Oxford’s series of Very Short Introductions. There are hundreds of titles. I’ll be checking out more those titles in the future. As for the MIT book on ancient astronomy, it’s very technical, and most of the astronomy goes way over my head. However, I enjoy reading books that I don’t fully understand, because there is always something to be learned.

The English Game

“The English Game” is the most recent production from Julian Fellowes, who brought us “Downton Abbey.” It was produced by Netflix, premiered last March, and is available for streaming.

The game is football, which we Americans call soccer. The themes, as with “Downton Abbey,” are class conflict, class reconciliation, and social change. The story begins in England in 1879. Football, developed at places such as Eton College, is regarded as a gentleman’s sport, but football also holds a great appeal to the working class. Two professional Scottish footballers are hired by an English mill owner to play for the mill town’s team. In episode 1, the mill town team first encounters a gentleman’s team in a quarter-finals game at Eton. Class-based unfairness starts up the plot.

Some of the situations are a touch melodramatic, and the series certainly doesn’t have the glamour and appeal of “Downton Abbey.” The cast, though, is excellent. The reward for watching it comes not so much from the plot as from the character development. It’s always a good sign when the cast, characters, and dialogue are good enough for the camera to fill the frame with the characters’ faces.

I’m wondering if I’ll ever be able to properly understand Glasgow accents, though. I’m not the only one. There are many funny YouTube videos about understanding Scottish accents. Strangely enough, I do understand the Scottish MP is this video:

The return of sanity and decency

Though it happened only yesterday, volumes already have been written about the violent desecration of the U.S. Capitol. All sane and decent Americans understand what it means, so there is hardly anything that I can add. But I am reminding myself that, in spite of the obscenity of what we witnessed yesterday, and in spite of the rage that we still feel, we have won. Congress went back into session and certified the election. In Georgia, two Democrats were elected to the U.S. Senate. The fascist Republican Party, come Jan. 20, will be out of power.

If any doubt remained about what the Republican Party has become, or what Donald Trump is, yesterday’s events erased that doubt. It will be years before we really understand what has happened. Investigations can now begin, including congressional investigations and criminal investigations. Republicans now have little power to obstruct or corrupt those investigations, or to conduct sham investigations of their own. Many books will be written, both by those who will add to the truth and those who will try to rewrite history with their lies. History will get it right, even if a frighteningly large percentage of the American population, from their self-made hell on the trash heap of history, invent and believe an alternative history in which the very worst of us are great.

One of the immediate difficulties for many of us is figuring out how to deal with the people around us who voted for Trump, those who are unable to recognize what the Republican Party has become, and those who continue to believe in a future in which a repugnant minority of people who have lost all claim to decency can return to dominating, bullying, insulting, and baiting the rest of us as they work to destroy the American democracy and kick down the people they hate. They were unable to complete that work. The institutions of American democracy withstood the attack. The Southern state of Georgia just sent a Jew and a black man to the U.S. Senate. Given four more years, the dismantling of our institutions and the rule of law would have been completed. Some of them won’t give up. Already there is a competition, as Trump goes down, to lead the fascist movement in America. That competition, of all places, is largely in the U.S. Senate.

For now, though, I’m going to try to stop gritting my teeth, savor the fact that a free and fair election has removed the fascists from power, and wait to see what happens as sanity and decency return to American government. What happened yesterday was not really a threat. It was instead a kind of theater, a ghastly public display of infantile bitterness at the fact of their defeat. The world saw what they are in pornographic scenes that will blacken American history forever, scenes that shock the civilized world and that children do not understand. We all knew that Trump would smash furniture on the way out, though we didn’t foresee just how literal that would be.

Those who supported this deserve our ongoing contempt. They deserve to be shunned. They deserve much worse, actually. And yet the everyday activities of life must go on. What next? Your thoughts and comments are welcome.