Winter squash

For some reason, I have long underrated winter squash. I rarely bought them, and I never grew them. I suppose my thinking was that anything so hard and heavy must be as hard to cook as a rock and similarly tasteless. I was wrong, as was amply proven by a winter squash that I roasted on the grill a few days ago.

This little beauty is a Long Island cheese squash that a friend grew and sent to the abbey kitchen. It has all the charm of a magical little pumpkin, but it’s harder and heavier. It’s an heirloom squash, and I’ll save its seed for the spring. My understanding from the friend who grew it is that it wants to be planted in compost as soon as the last frost is over. Then, he says, it will keep growing and keep producing until the frost kills it the following fall. One plant, he said, yielded about 80 little pumpkinettes, and his root cellar is crowded with them. Anything that wants to grow and climb all season, and that risks getting pollinated from motley other squashes, would be a poor fit in the larger vegetable garden. But my gardener friend also says that these squash would happily cohabit with the asparagus. The asparagus patch is on the other side of the orchard, with its own fencing, on which the vine could climb.

The abbey is fortunate not only that Ken is a superb gardener, but also that we’re plugged into a network of other superb gardeners. It is time to start thinking about next year’s garden, you know. The seed catalogs will arrive very soon.

Buying eyeglasses on line

A couple of weeks ago, while waiting for an appointment with the eye doctor, I listened to a couple of people ordering glasses from the glasses-fitting technician. I was stunned at the prices they were being quoted, easily $600.

There are rumors about why eyeglasses have gotten so expensive, but from Googling I found it difficult to confirm or deny the rumors — which have to do with lack of competition as big players buy up more and more of the market. If I’m not mistaken, places like Walmart and Costco have better prices, and there’s not a total monopoly. But I like to buy things on line.

I first bought glasses on line two years ago. After doing some reading, I decided that EyeBuyDirect probably was the way to go. I was completely happy with their glasses and their service, so I recently ordered new glasses from them based on my new prescription. If you’re thinking of ordering glasses on line, you should do your own research, because this is probably a fast-changing marketplace.

A simple pair of blue-filtering reading glasses cost me $70. A fancier pair of driving glasses with “adaptive” lenses cost $160. The first pair of glasses I ever had were three-way “progressive” lenses, and I never got used to them. I found it too awkward to tilt my head to whatever angle was appropriate for seeing near or far. I quickly learned that I prefer to have multiple pairs of glasses close to where I use them, with a separate pair of glasses for reading, for driving, and for working at the computer. I only wear glasses when I’m reading or driving, because my vision is still remarkably good.

To order glasses on line, you’ll pick a frame (based on photos and prices of the frames, which works fine for me) and then choose the features you want for the lenses. You enter in the numbers from the prescription that you got from your eye doctor. In one to two weeks, your glasses will arrive in the mail.

There is one piece of information you need for ordering glasses on line that isn’t part of your prescription. That’s the distance between the center of your pupils, measured in millimeters. The first time I ordered glasses, I made my own measurement in front of a mirror (I measured 67mm). This time the glasses technician made the measurement for me, even though I wasn’t buying glasses at the eye doctor’s office. The technician measured 64mm. I was off by 3mm, which is less than an eighth of a inch, so I didn’t do too badly. In any case, I believe that number is more critical for greater levels of correction than I need.

I would say that the main drawback of ordering glasses on line is that you don’t get the benefit of a technician adjusting the frames to better fit your nose and temples. You might be able to do this yourself after watching some YouTube videos.

Stone ground whole wheat biscuits

First of all, I see from the blog log that this blog has some new readers in France. I’m flattered. Please feel welcome …

For years, I did my best with stone-ground whole wheat flour — and avoided it for some purposes — because bread came out like bricks. Now I understand the most important rule for using stone-ground whole wheat flour: soak it.

Soaking it overnight in the refrigerator is best. But soaking it even for an hour really helps. Use water, milk, buttermilk, or whatever is appropriate to your recipe. Add a teaspoon or so of apple cider vinegar.

When making biscuits, the biscuit-making procedure must be modified because we’ve started with wet flour. This is a little extra trouble, but it’s no big deal.

For biscuits, add the shortening to the wet flour in small pieces. Work it into the dough by stirring or kneading. Then add the baking powder and salt and mix again. Instead of coating the dough or the work surface with flour to prevent sticking, use a little oil instead. Shape the biscuits, put them in the pan, and pop them in the oven.

Christmas wish: Deeper woods and a real drawbridge


Woodpiles are a symbol of security, aren’t they? [Click on photos for higher resolution]

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t seem to get past the gloom of the election. The feeling of being surrounded by madness, by mass delusion, and by white hatred keeps intruding. The virtual drawbridge isn’t working very well. I can’t keep myself from checking the news. Here in the sticks, the residents of the abbey can get farther away from the world than most people, but it isn’t far enough.

Yet there have been many times in history when people lived behind walls, if they could. I like to imagine (especially when going to sleep) being inside a defensive castle (such as Blarney castle, below). Comfort food helps. And maybe a little Christmas rum.

I wonder how long it would take to grow a 10-foot hedge of holly. Still, Merry Christmas.


The garden, seeded with winter cover crops that haven’t yet germinated


Ken spreading lime in the garden


I keep fantasizing about a rock wall or a high hedge around the abbey.


Fig tree, hoping for a survivable winter


The gate to the chickens’ summer pasture in the woods


Apple leaves reluctant to let go


Chickens snarfing chickweed


From the orchard


Where I’d like to be

Where poets’ lives matter

In the Irish media, the death of poet John Montague was a major event. As far as I can tell, the American media have not mentioned it, though there is an American connection.

Ten of Montague’s books were published by the Wake Forest University Press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The editors were Dillon Johnston (who founded the WFU press in 1975) and Guinn Batten. Johnston and Batten — old friends of mine — had a very strong interest in Irish poetry and Irish literature, and the WFU press for years was a key publisher of Irish poetry. Johnston wrote Irish Poetry After Joyce (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), which was the first book I ever helped edit. Guinn Batten now teaches at Washington University and is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Duke University Press, 2012). I met John Montague many years ago at an event at Wake Forest.

As far as I can tell, Irish culture still very much looks up to its poets. Its billionaires (if any), not so much.

From Montague’sThe Great Cloak (1978):

At the end of a manuscript
I was studying, a secret message.
A star, a honeycomb, a seashell,
The stately glory of a peacock’s tail
Spiralled colour across the page
To end with a space between a lean I
And a warm and open-armed You.

An hour later, you were at the door;
I learned the word that the space was for.

New York Times recipes

I think that just about the best food publication there is these days is the New York Times. The weekly feature “What to cook this week” is inspiring and always seasonal. The recipes are sensible and reasonably healthy (though I wonder if other people really make so many desserts — I rarely do). The food photography is good, though it seems a little hastily done at times.

The above photo is my version of their Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread. I baked it a little too long because the cranberry filling kept messing up the toothpick test. And by the way, one of the fringe benefits of subscribing to the Times is that you get an on-line “recipe box” where you can save the recipes you’re interested in.

The opposite of entropy, and why we’re alive

entropy-1

Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, by Roger Penrose, Princeton University Press, 2016, 502 pages.

Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 362 pages.

What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger, Cambridge University Press, 18th printing 2016.

Most of Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy is over my head. But, as always with Penrose, I absorb what I can. Penrose ought to be a rock star as a physicist and mathematician. In some circles, he is. I think he’s the Einstein of our age.

But, tough reading though it is, and though it’s not the primary concern of this book, there is one concept in this book that is increasingly clear to me. It’s something that has puzzled me for years. Here is an uncomplicated way to think about the question. Why is it that fresh-squeezed orange juice is such a potent medicine and health-builder, but reconstituted orange juice is not much better for you than soda pop or any other sweet drink?

The answer, I believe, has to do with entropy.

Penrose’s book contains this illustration (I believe it was drawn by Penrose himself). I’ve also quoted the text that appears with the drawing:

entropy-2
Figure 3-16: Life on Earth is maintained by the great temperature imbalance in our sky. Incoming low-entropy energy from the Sun, in relatively fewer higher-frequency (~yellow) incoming photons, is converted by the green plants to far more numerous lower-frequency outgoing photons, removing an equal energy from the Earth in high-entropy form. By this means, plants, and thence other terrestrial life, can build up and maintain their structure.

What is entropy? Entropy is a lack of order. The concept of entropy has everything to do with the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the total entropy (or disorder) of an isolated system always increases over time.

As a living organism, your body is in a highly ordered state. Without a mechanism for ingesting order and eliminating disorder, your body would decompose, and you would die. Your source of the order you ingest is in your food.

Walk into a grocery store. Do you see any food that could have been produced without the sun? Of course not. All food contains negative entropy — that is, order. And the source of that order is the sun. It’s not just the energy of the sun that matters. It’s the fact that the sun is a very hot spot in a cold sky. All life on earth depends on that hot spot in the cold sky. This huge thermodynamic imbalance, or gradient, allows life to create order and avoid entropy.

Penrose again:

By Planck’s E = hv (see §2.2), the incoming [photons] are individually of much higher energy than those returning to space, so there must be many fewer coming into the Earth than going out for the balance to be achieved (see figure 3-16). Fewer photons coming in mean fewer degrees of freedom for the incoming energy and more for the outgoing energy, and therefore (by Boltzmann’s S = k log V) the photons coming in have much lower entropy than those going out. The green plants take advantage of this and use the low-entropy incoming energy to build up their substance, while emitting high-entropy energy [for example, body heat]. We take advantage of the low-entropy energy in the plants, to keep our own entropy down, as we eat plants, or as we eat animals that eat plants. By this means, life on Earth can survive and flourish. (These points were apparently first clearly made by Erwin Schrödinger in his groundbreaking 1967 book, What Is Life?)

Think of it this way:

Question: Why are fresh foods healthier than un-fresh foods, or foods that have been preserved? Answer: Because the fresh foods have the maximum amount of negative entropy from the sun, since plants begin to decompose the moment they’re harvested.

Question: Could we eat compost and other rotten stuff to stay alive and healthy, since compost contains all the nutrients we need? Answer: Probably not, because decomposition has reduced the compost to a disordered, high-entropy state. Simple organisms, of course, can live on compost. Earthworms can live on soil only because they’re very efficient at extracting negative entropy from high-entropy food. They can eat their body weight each day. We humans require food with much lower entropy.

I’ll leave you to think about these concepts, but I think it’s clear how this concept applies to nutrition and health. A healthy diet is about much more than just getting the right vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc. It’s also about getting all those nutrients in the most ordered state possible, as close to the sun as possible. Processed foods are unhealthy not just because they contain a lot of salt, fat, and chemicals. They’re unhealthy also because the processing decomposes the ingredients. If we don’t take in enough negative entropy, some part of our body will surely become disordered beyond the body’s ability to fix it, and we get sick.

The concept of entropy sheds new light on the wisdom of Michael Pollan’s simple rule for eating: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Avoid edible food-like substances.” Those edible food-like substances, in every case, are substances that formerly were food but which were rendered disordered and high-entropy by processing.

Another way of boiling down the concept might be: Choose foods that are as close to the sun as possible, and keep cooking and processing to a minimum to maintain the food’s molecular order.

The new pop-ups and how to defeat them

obnoxious

Remember pop-ups and how obnoxious they were? Then we all got pop-up blockers. But the war wasn’t over.

Using Javascript, the anti-social brats who code web pages came up with a new way to assert domination over us: “overlays,” also called “modal windows.”

With an overlay, a new window opens up, everything behind it turns gray, and you’re stuck until you interact with the new window. Odds are, you’re still putting up with that.

But there is a way to defeat it. If you’re using the Google Chrome web browser, check out an extension named “Auto Overlay Remover.” There may be similar extensions for other browsers, but I’ve not looked into that.

The attitude of web programmers, of course, is “This is my web site, and I’ll control what you do here.” But the attitude of the rest of us is, “This is my browser, your web site is open to the public, and no you won’t tell me what to do.”

Epistocracy?

democracy

Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, Princeton University Press, August 2016, 304 pages.

This is certainly one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a while. And now, after the horror of the 2016 election, is a good time to read it. Note that the book was published before the election and that nothing in the book specifically has to do with the 2016 election.

Brennan’s argument is that democracy does not work. The reason that democracy doesn’t work is that most voters don’t know a damned thing. Are you with him so far?

His argument is that we should consider epistocracy as an improvement on democracy. Epistocracy is government by those who do know stuff — government by wonks.

The moment you propose such a thing, all sorts of arguments — both obvious arguments and arguments that are not so obvious — come up. Brennan attempts to deal with those arguments.

Speaking strictly for myself, I find Brennan convincing, even though his tone is testy and somewhat condescending. I’m not going to get into the arguments here pro and con. There are many points on which I would disagree with Brennan. Nevertheless I take him seriously, as I believe we all should. I’d also give Brennan high marks for heresy, for thinking outside the box, and for hitting the nail on the head on the matter of democracy’s ability to cause train wrecks. If given the chance, idiot voters will elect idiot candidates after campaigns aimed at idiots. All we have to do is point to Donald Trump and then rest our case.

Brennan gives a powerful — and terrifying — account, based on research, of just how little voters actually know. Though I have always understood that voters are idiots, I have underestimated just how little they really know. And it’s actually true that many voters — propagandized voters — know less than nothing. The 2016 election has shown us just how dangerous it is when people can vote but can’t distinguish between real news and fake news. Not only that, but they greatly prefer the fake news.

I will mention three points that come to mind:

1. Brennan’s emphasis is on the competence or incompetence of voters. I don’t think the problem is incompetence. Our right-wing North Carolina legislature, for example, and our Republican Congress, are entirely competent to accomplish what they want to accomplish — namely handing everything over to corporate interests for maximum exploitation by private profit, with the speediest possible transfer of wealth upward to the rich and super-rich. In my view, the question is not so much whether voters or candidates for office are competent, but whose interests are they concerned with.

2. Brennan never points this out, but one advantage of epistocracy would be that candidates for office would no longer have to pander to the stupidity and base instincts of the deplorables. If voters had to prove, before earning the right to vote, that they have appropriate knowledge and the ability to reason, then candidates for office would have to base their campaigns on things that actually matter.

3. Brennan says that politics makes people bitter enemies over small stakes. Not much, really, is at stake in elections, he says. I strongly disagree. Much is at stake. People die if we elect people who love, or profit from, war. People die if we see health care as a privilege meant only for those who can pay for its high costs. If we continue to elect Republicans, they will soon finish the job of allowing corporations and the rich to suck all the value out of the country and make peasants of the rest of us with no civil rights, other than the right to own guns with which to shoot each other. I strongly suspect that the reason the deplorables make a religion of the Second Amendment is that it’s the only part of the Constitution their tiny minds can understand.

Epistocratic government is such a radical idea that it would take a generation or two or three for us to get there. Maybe we should get started, before we become completely enslaved to billionaires. We’ve already reached a dangerous tipping point. More than half of Americans (or, at least, enough to swing the electoral vote), are living in a world of lies, horse shit, and propaganda — and loving it. How can that end well?