September 2021 – Into the Woods

Summer 2021: Some of us had it easy

Tomato bisque from tomatoes I grew and canned

Nature was not kind to everyone this summer. There were terrifying fires in California and Australia, and deadly floods in the United States, Europe, and Asia. But here in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, it was like 1950 again. The temperature here in my woods never exceeded 94F. Heavy rain sometimes washed ruts in the road (which a neighbor quickly repairs with his tractor), but rainfall was good, though the spring was a bit dry and cold. It has been at least eight months since a power outage that lasted more than two seconds. With a little help from the irrigation system, the 2021 garden was great. Not every summer, I’m afraid, will be so nice.

The poplar tree that overhangs the deck seems to have had a growth spurt. All summer long, half the deck was in shade, with a deck umbrella no longer needed. I don’t think I’ve eaten indoors more than four times since early spring.

One of the many remarkable things about this planet is how the seasons change in the temperate zones. This means we get not only changes in the weather, but also changes in what we eat. After months of buying hardly any produce and relying on the garden, the perennial vegetables are back on the menu. By perennial, I mean winter vegetables and the things that can be profitably shipped from one climate zone to another. My twenty jars of canned tomatoes will extend the memory of the 2021 garden for most of the winter. Most of the tomatoes, I think, will go into soups.

Speaking of soups, I have found that the “warming zone” on my glasstop stove is a great place for simmering soups. With the warming zone set to high, my favorite copper pot will hold a soup at about 192F, a very good simmer temperature.

As for the weather, the Atlantic hurricane season is not over. So it’s not too late for nature to knock us around here, a couple of hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.

Remember the stars?

The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars. Jo Marchant, Dutton, 2020. 388 pages.

Marchant is concerned about how modern people and our cultures have lost touch with the sky. Paradoxically, we think of ourselves as living in a larger world than our ancestors. But in truth, by cutting ourselves off from the sky, we live in a much smaller world.

This process of cutting ourselves off has a long history that began centuries before GPS and light pollution. The invention of clocks, for example, in the Middle Ages, meant that people no longer had to look up at the sky to estimate the time. The regimentation of our lives made possible by clocks is something that never occurs to us, but Marchant covers clocks in the fourth chapter, “Faith,” in which she relates how the development of clocks had a great deal to do with the church, specifically the need of the Benedictine monasteries to be more precise in carrying out their 24-hour cycle of rituals.

Marchant starts with paleolithic cave drawings and works forward in time: sites such as Stonehenge, then Babylon, Egypt, Ptolemy, clocks and the middle ages, ocean navigation, the development of modern astronomy, and the interaction even today of plant and animal life with the celestial world.

This is not an academic book; it’s a survey rather than an in-depth exploration of any of its topics. But the book’s extensive notes provide a good list of sources for further reading. There also is an index. The book will serve as a good reference. It will end up on my best bookshelf.

Deep frying with olive oil?

Rutabaga-Roquefort fried pie, deep fried in olive oil

We have learned in recent years that olive oil is more stable at high temperatures than we knew. Research has shown that the stability of vegetable oils when heated is more complicated than the temperature at which they begin to smoke.

In any case, I can testify that olive oil, when heated to 350 degrees (a good temperature for deep frying) does not smoke.

With all this in mind, I continue to believe that, the less vegetable oils are heated, the better. I don’t deep-fry very often. But when I do, I’d rather use a nice organic olive oil than, say, a peanut oil of doubtful origin.

The olive oil can be re-used if strained and stored nicely. I am strongly of the opinion that, because of the unknown food components that get into the oil during deep-frying, even olive oil should be stored in the refrigerator after it has been used for deep frying.

Foundation?

Whatever this is, it’s not Foundation. If Foundation is what it’s supposed to be, then it’s a complete failure. It’s something entirely different from Foundation. Whatever the difference is supposed to be, it’s nothing new. After watching the first two episodes, I find myself angry, partly because it’s not Foundation and partly because it tries to schnooker us into liking it by recycling ingredients from Game of Thrones (but with space ships).

Critics who like it keep inviting us to compare it with Game of Thrones, which, no doubt, is also what Apple wants. I decline.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books are very cerebral. There is hardly anything cinematic about the books, which no doubt is why several attempts to make a movie went nowhere. It was obvious, when we first learned in 2018 that Apple had commissioned a Foundation series, that some kind of creative reworking would be necessary to make the story cinematic. I was prepared for that. But I don’t like what I see. Those who have never read the books (I’ve read book one in the series at least three times over the years) will probably not be as critical as I am.

Asimov was not interested in romance. He didn’t bother much about setting scenes, let alone creating spectacle. Asimov was interested in ideas, politics, and the interactions between highly intelligent people. Asimov does that mostly with the intelligence of his dialogue, with very little action. This series has lots of action but some of the crudest dialogue I’ve heard in years. To show us that the Gaal Dornick character is highly intelligent, the screenwriters have her winning a math contest and “counting primes” when she’s stressed. But other than that, she behaves and talks like a not-too-bright teenager with reckless taste in boyfriends. As for politics, the Hari Seldon character comes across as a cold and arrogant smartass, up against emperors who are merely Game-of-Thrones cruel rather than near-matches for Hari Seldon’s political genius.

In short, Apple’s Foundation, after watching the first two episodes, looks to me like a dumbed-down derivative. I will watch the next episode, which will be released on October 1, hoping that, if I can get over that it isn’t Foundation, I might find something worthwhile in it. So far it looks like the screenwriters put a drop of Asimov into a food processor, added some scoops of Game of Thrones and The Rise of Skywalker, chopped it up, and spooned it out on Apple TV.

Centrist authoritarians

A radical centrist disciplines a partisan. George Cruikshank, 1839, Wikimedia Commons.

I believe it was Paul Krugman who came up with the term “radical centrists.” Here’s how I would define them: Smug, preening, mediocre intellectuals who strut their undoubted moral superiority, claiming an ability to see “both sides” and believing themselves to be innocent of bias and “partisanship.”

Radical centrism has had a long run. We have a track record now about where radical centrism got us as a political practice. It brought us the “Third Way” of the Clinton administration. It badly tainted and weakened the Obama administration, always blocking progress while averting its eyes from growing threats from the right. Centrism is always about the left conceding to the right, and rarely or never the other way around. Fortunately the Biden administration seems to understand this. It’s not the progressives who are making trouble for Biden, it’s the narcissistic “moderates” such as Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. If people like Manchin and Sinema truly were centrists, they’d be pulling Republicans on board rather than blocking Democrats. Centrists are blind to the one-sidedness of their centrism. That blindness is part of the syndrome. Like fundamentalism, centrism needs to simplify the world to make it comprehensible and comfortable. That both sides are just the same is a centrist axiom, even though nothing is like that in the real world. It is a projection of the centrist mind.

As damaging as centrism has been as a political practice, I would argue that it has done just as much harm as a media practice. Radical centrist pundits and authors imagine that they are doing some kind of principled public service. But what they really have done is serve as apologists for the radical right, paralyzing — for years — any effort to rein in the radical right before the U.S. found itself right on the brink of fascism, Reichstag moment included. Warnings from the left were ignored and vilified as “partisan.” Right-wing lies weren’t just unchallenged; they were amplified and dignified with “equal treatment.” Anything partisan is automatically wrong, you see, because only centrists can see clearly.

Though the Atlantic remains one of America’s best publications, it is nevertheless a refuge, a training ground, and a well-paying employer of the country’s most well-known and most radical of radical centrists. The Atlantic proved that yet again with a new piece yesterday with the title “The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left.” The piece was written by Sally Satel, a right-wing psychiatrist who works for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. A key assumption of radical centrists is that everything is symmetrical with themselves at the fulcrum of virtue. To a radical centrist, if a vice such as authoritarianism exists on the right, then it also must exist on the left. If there is an existential threat from the right (say, fascism, insurrection, and coup), then there also must be an equally severe existential threat from the left. Hence all the shrill warnings about “cancel culture,” a hobgloblin of the centrist mind. Centrists do sometimes warn about threats from the right, but such warnings must always be “balanced” by a symmetrical warning about the left. Such things as authoritarianism and cancel culture must be found on the left, as centrist self-protection against cognitive breakdown.

Fortunately, the damage done by so many years of being instructed by centrists is being exposed. Eric Levitz wrote about it last June in New York Magazine, “The delusions of the radical centrist.” An old colleague of mine in the newspaper business, Dan Froomkin, has a web site devoted to monitoring centrist bias in the media, Press Watch.

It’s bad manners for me to quote Levitz’s conclusion after his longish and thoughtful piece, but here it is: “But America does not need more highbrow apologetics for the conservative movement, nor sophistry that conflates the pathologies of each major party. And unfortunately, this era’s most prominent iconoclasts seem less interested in honestly criticizing America’s lesser evil, than running interference for its greater one.”

That, I would say, is an understatement.

Apple News+

There are two versions of Apple News. The free version, called just “Apple News,” is on all Macintosh computers, iPads, and iPhones. The subscription version, called “Apple News+”, costs $9.99 a month.

For some years, I had casually used the free version on my iPhone, because it often showed me things that I had missed on my daily rounds of a long list of newspapers, magazines, and web sites. After I upgraded to a new version of iOS, some ads appeared for the subscription version. I looked through the long list of publications that are available and immediately subscribed.

Getting news from Europe to Americans is just one example of how Apple News+ can expand our reading horizons. One of the reasons we Americans know too little about Europe (and the world, for that matter) is that American media (including the New York Times) don’t cover Europe well. For years, I had longed for access to the Times of London, but it was hard to justify the cost. Nor did I want yet another password to manage. A part of the hassle of managing subscriptions to paywalled publications is the aggravation of signing in. With the New York Times and Washington Post, I deal with that by always having a tab open to their “my account” pages. Subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post, by the way, are expensive and are not included in Apple News+. Part of the appeal and convenience of Apple News Plus is that you don’t have to sign in to read any of the publications you follow. That’s all handled through your Apple ID, so you’re always signed in to the publications you want to see.

Many times, I have been tempted to resubscribe to the Economist. But an Economist subscription costs about the same as the New York Times, and the sign-in problem was a big deterrent. Apple News+ lets you subscribe to the Economist through Apple News+ and pay for it monthly through Apple. With access to the Times of London and the Economist, suddenly I have new windows into Europe. Previously I had only the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Herald of Scotland. (As far as I can tell, Der Spiegel’s English edition is not included in Apple News+.) The Times of London, by the way, seems to cover Scotland quite well.

Another newspaper that is included in Apple News+ is the Wall Street Journal, still a good newspaper in spite of its wingnut editorial department. Two North Carolina newspapers are included, the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. Both those state newspapers are greatly diminished, but they’re all we’ve got for state coverage.

Magazines include Scientific American, the New Yorker, Wired, the Atlantic, and MacWorld. There is a long list of niche magazines, to which I subscribed to only one lest I be overwhelmed by niche magazines. That exception was Octane, a niche magazine about classic cars.

Some people like reading on their phones. I do not, even though I have a large iPhone 12. It’s on a big iMac screen that Apple News+ excels. The presentation is often just as good as a publication’s web site. There are some ads, but they’re not terribly intrusive.

In short, for news junkies and those who make a serious effort to keep up with the world’s news sources, Apple News+ is both a bargain and a convenient way of centralizing lots of sources.

One thing is missing. Much of what we need to know is to be found in papers from academics and think tanks. That stuff has been privatized. It is very hard to get and also very expensive, unless one has access through a university’s accounts. It’s a cartel that needs to be broken. There is a movement crusading for open access publishing in academia. Apple probably could break that cartel if they wanted to.

As for newspapers and magazines, much has changed. The Times of London today is nothing like the old gray lady it was when I first bought copies of it in London in the 1980s. Many publications still exist but have gone to hell in a basket — Newsweek, for example. Fox News is in Apple News+, making an ax-grinding fool of itself as always. Wired, though provocative, seems to be just as wrongheaded as it always was. The Atlantic’s print version maintains a high standard, but their web site indulges in clickbait. Fox News notwithstanding, and though there is plenty of fluff, Apple News+ seems to have steered away from fringe publications on both the right and the left, as though the word came down from on high at Apple that their mission is to be informative, not provocative. Imagine that.

Here is Apple’s complete list of publications.

The French paradox

Roquefort

Several news outlets carried stories yesterday about a Swedish study which found that full-fat dairy products not only may not be harmful to heart health but actually may be beneficial. For example, there was this story in the Guardian: “Research suggests a diet rich in dairy fat may lower the risk of heart disease.”

I’ll try to consider the case still open, because this was only one study (though a good study that went on for 16.6 years). Still, I have never worried a great deal about modest amounts of butter and cheese, partly because those of us with pastoral ancestors have had thousands of years to adapt to, and even thrive on, dairy foods.

Nor do I feel any pressure to give up my practice of using full cream in my coffee. I moved on from mere half and half years ago. The study involved people in Sweden, who, my guess would be, don’t follow the most Mediterranean of all possible diets. My guess would be that dairy fat would be even more forgiveable when blended with a Mediterranean diet with olive oil, rather than butter or lard, as the main dietary fat. And surely we should stick to the rule that no amount of hydrogenated fat is safe, and that newfangled oils such as corn oil should be avoided.

Artemis

Artist’s representation of the Artemis lunar module. Source: NASA via Wikipedia

This is a twofold post. First, some gripes about the media. And second, a little about NASA’s program to return to the moon and, eventually, to go to Mars.

Some gripes

I fell for the clickbait and its down-with-billionaires appeal. NASA wasn’t on my radar screen, and I was distracted by the breathless media coverage of billionaires and their little rockets. It would have been easy to suppose that NASA was being upstaged and supplanted by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But an excellent piece in yesterdays’s Washington Post (a piece with no clickbait appeal) made it clear that that’s not the case. The article is “NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes.” This is a good piece for starting to get up to speed on what NASA is doing today.

The piece is an interview with Bill Nelson of NASA. The commercial space industry, Nelson says, allows “NASA to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore.” The media have had very little to say about this, having focused on rage and turmoil on earth (and on low earth orbit, where billionaires are having so much fun). Apparently today’s media find Musk and Bezos more interesting than NASA. If you want to know what NASA is doing right now, you need to visit NASA’s web site. The Wikipedia article on Artemis, though poorly written, is comprehensive.

Moon launch

We actually have a NASA moon launch to look forward to later this year, in November or December, if the launch is on schedule. This first launch is covered in a separate Wikipedia article on the first stage of the Artemis program, Artemis 1. This flight will be a test with no humans on board. This year’s flight will be an exciting mission because NASA will be launching, for the first time, its biggest rocket ever. The new SLS rocket will produce 15 percent more thrust than the Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo program.

The third stage of the Artemis program, stage 3, is scheduled for 2024. Two astronauts are to land on the moon and remain there for just under a week.

Here is a YouTube video of NASA’s test firing of the rocket earlier this year, at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. This is a long video. You can skip ahead to about 51 minutes when they actually light up the rocket. Before the rocket starts, you’ll see lots of water flowing. That’s to keep the test site from melting down. By the way, I have seen a rocket engine test-fired at the Stennis Space Center. It was an impressive sight that I will never forget. I have never seen a rocket launch, though. That just might be worth a trip to Cape Canaveral in 2024.

Mechanical math

Calculating at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA/JPL photo.

Starting, say, in the early 1960s, when computer chips started to become available, one of the first applications was making electronic calculators. That was a huge advance in technology, but it also is sad, because mechanical calculators became obsolete. A whole genre of elegant mechanical engineering was lost.

In the film Hidden Figures, a Friden calculating machine is used as a prop, sitting on the desk of Katherine Johnson. In a 1966 photo in the Wikipedia article about Johnson, she is sitting in front of a mechanical calculator. Mechanical calculators got us to the moon (though the Apollo capsules had a rather primitive computer). You can see a Friden STW10 in operation in this YouTube video. Those machines were complex enough to do real math, not just addition and subtraction.

Many machines as elegant and expensive as the Fridens were preserved, and many have been restored. More humble machines, however, of the type used by accountants, met fates that were much more demeaning. Even when they survived, few were considered to be worth restoring.

I had wanted a mechanical adding machine for a long time. Recently I found one in such good condition that it could be restored with little effort beyond cleaning it and oiling it.

Remington Model 10811-10 adding machine

This is a Remington Model 10811 (or Model 10811-10) adding machine. I believe it was made in the early 1960s. It’s a non-electric model, but an electric model of the same machine was available, as you will see in the manual.

It is my curse to want to rescue and adopt every old example of beautiful mechanical engineering. Fortunately I don’t have the space for that, nor would I be able to afford a machine such as a Friden STW10. This Remington adding machine came from eBay, from a seller in East Bend, North Carolina. I met the seller halfway and picked up the machine in person rather than having it shipped. I also learned the history of the machine. I am its second owner. It belonged to the seller’s parents, both now in their late 80s. They ran a TV repair shop many years ago, and they used the adding machine to add up customers’ bills. It was completely dust free, having always been kept covered. The cover came with the calculator.

Machines like this need lots of oil and even a bit of grease in some places. The oil and grease had become gummy, but I’ve started the process of cleaning it up. It works perfectly. I actually will use it for managing money (which is what it was designed for), because the electronic calculator I’ve been using for the past few years isn’t heavy enough and slides around on the desk.

Judging from eBay, there seem to be quite a few of this model of adding machine still in existence. Most are in rough shape, though. I have scanned the eight-page manual, and I’m posting it here for those who are are Googling for the manual. I seem to have one of the few copies of the manual still in existence.

The manual:

Click here for high-resolution version

Who doesn’t love a band?

Stokes County’s biggest public event is the Stokes Stomp, an outdoor music festival that happens each September on the weekend after Labor Day. The Democratic Party had a booth, of course. But I sneaked away from the booth when the army band arrived.

As the band regrouped at the stage for the national anthem, I asked the band director, “When’s the Sousa?” Much to my disappointment, he said that too many members of the band were sidelined with Covid for a concert band performance. Drat. Maybe next year. And by the way, a nicer and more polite group of people you’ll never see.