Book: The Canon by Natalie Angier

Or A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

Natalie Angier is a science writer (biology) for the NYTimes for which she has won a Pulitzer, so she is apparently doing a good job.

I liked the book, although I had it out from the Herrick Public Library for over two months, as I kept reading other books in between. I surely did not understand every sentence, but it didn't matter. It is not obtuse, boring writing at all. She is a word mistress, plays with words, makes word associations that make sense and are fun and aren't usually used in describing atomic structure or the Big Bang or evolutionary biology.

There is an introduction and nine chapters. I am just going to pick a sentence or two from each chapter to illustrate her style.

Introduction:

"They told jokes, like the one about Physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose famed uncertainty principle says that you can know the position of an electron as it orbits the nuclear heart of an atom, or you can know its velocity, but that you can't know both at once."

Thinking Scientifically:

"The last spring of my father's life, before he died unexpectedly of a fast-growing tumor, he told me that it was the first time he had stopped during his walks through Central Park in New York, and paid attention to the details of the plants in bloom: the bulging out of a bud from a Lenten rose, the uncurling of a buttery magnolia blossom, the sprays of narcissus, Siberian bugloss, and bleeding heart."

"Yes, our children should be taught much more math and in far greater depth than they currently are in the average American classroom. Absolutely. But we must face the sad truth that children can take it, and adults cannot. As a consequence of brain biology, children are brilliant at learning new languages of all sorts. Their neurons are practically liquid, pouring across local loci and making new friends and synapses with hardly a grunt of effort."

"After analyzing these and other statistics, you may conclude, as the young student did, that her weekly manicures are reasonably harmless, but that she wouldn't want to work ten-hour shifts in a nail salon and that maybe she should give really big tips to the women who do."

Probabilities:

"It is also a venue large enough for rarities to become regulars, where so many millions of lottery tickets have been sold that ridiculous patterns emerge. A sixty-year-old Australian man buys a Lotto ticket before leaving for vacation, worries that he bought the wrong sort of ticket, and asks a friend back in Sydney to buy another, then frets on returning home that his friend fumbled the request and so decided to spring for a third entry--and ends up with three winning tickets in hand."

(and more lottery stories, the way and why people invest money , medical test results...all of these more interesting and understandable because of probabilities)

"If you hear that the incidence of a childhood cancer rose by 50 percent between last year and this, take a look at the number for the preceding five years."

Calibration:

"As of late 2006, for example, the U.S. national debt stood at $8.5 trillion. You can write that out in long form, as 8,500,000,000,000 and almost feel the red ink flowing from your veins."

"The fastest computers perform their calculation in picoseconds, or trillionths of a second...."

...or how about the "attosecond, a billionth of a billionth of a second..." or the faster zeptoseconds and yoctoseconds or the "briskest time span recognized to date...the chronon, or Planck time, which lasts about 5 x 10 to the minus 44 seconds...(superscript -44)." FAST!

"...nearly everything is far away, farther away than you think....The one exception to this fearful farness is the moon. Our moon is only 240,000 miles away, or ten times the circumference of Earth..."

"A human white blood cell is twelve microns wide. If the surface of your pinhead were wallpapered with white blood cells, you would be looking at about 28,000 of them."

Physics:

"Even for the simplest atom, hydrogen, which has just one electron whizzing about the single proton of its nucleus, the electron has so many points it may be found, so many places it has been and will be again, that the entire boundary of the hydrogen atom can be envisioned as a spoonful of cloud. "

"The four fundamental 'forces' of natures: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force, and the weak force."

"This last section ended with a paean to electron hostility...I love subatomic nomadism when it's not wasting time raising manes or sticking skirts to stockings but is instead making itself useful to toasting bagels and running blenders, or for that matter allowing brain cells to fire or muscle cells to extend or contract."

"Importantly, charged atoms seek to fill their vacant shells or to shed their excess electrons and return to the bliss of Swiss neutrality..."

Chemistry:

"...carbon makes for a just-right class of molecules. Carbon is strong, resourceful, flexible, sociable. With its outer shell of four electrons and four electron slots for rent, carbon is supremely suited to molecular bondage. It happily collaborates with nearly every actor on the periodic table, save helium, neon and the four other noble elements, so-called for their snobby refusal to connect chemically to anything."

Evolutionary Biology:

(Quoting David Wake from Berkeley): "My grandfather was Lutheran pastor...and he never, in his long, rich life, felt any conflict between his religion and his scientific knowledge....My grandfather was the one who first taught me about evolution. He taught me to respect evidence and to remember that religion must always accommodate reality."

There is so much is this chapter: Darwin, natural selection, mutation, immunity, fossils, biogeography, taxonomy, intelligent design, DNA....all in lively prose.

Molecular Biology:

"So how do mouth bacteria manage to hang on and hammer through the enamel of live teeth, and in less than a single lifetimes?"

"...most scientists argue that because a virus doesn't engage in such essential rituals of life as eating and excreting, and is entirely reliant on the apparatus of the host cell it infects to create new viral particle for it, a virus isn't a true life but a protolife, a wannabeing, a parasitic paralife..."

"you may be the proud possessor of 74 trillion cells, but the jargon of cell biology can make you fell like an alien without a green card or city map."

....and more about proteins, enzymes, DNA, genes, all interesting.

"Every time a cell divides and its DNA is replicated, mistakes are made....Most of the mistakes in DNA replication are spotted by proofreading proteins and corrected before cell division is through; and of those few that slip through, most don't matter, for they fall into a harmless region of the genome. Once in a while though, a serious mutation is overlooked and ends up in the final DNA script of the daughter cell, a change in the code that will yield a rotten, dysfunctional protein product somewhere down the line. And by far the rottenest proteins are those the 'liberate' a cell from the constraints of its community, for they are the proteins that turn a cell cancerous."

Geology:

"The deepest hole ever drilled got 7.6 miles down, a mere two-thousandths of the distance to the planet's searing inner core."

....and stuff about plate tectonics, the core, mantle and crust of Earth and how "calcium is cycled in great, intersecting loops through water, air, mud, body plans living and dead, now drifting into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas, now sinking into sediment as rotting gymnosperm forest."

"Earth is just right for life, and life has clung to its skin for more than 3 billion years, if sometimes just by the skin of life's teeth: 99 percent of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct."

Astronomy:

"The image of Jupiter you see in your backyard telescope is how the planet looked half an hour ago..." and the light from the North Star is seen "as it was back when Will Shakespeare was still wearing shorts."

"Our sun is a good star, a stalwart star, and its life span is only halfway through."

"Our sun, for example, fuses 700 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, and in so doing radiates away pieces of itself each day, splashing warmth and light across the solar system and My Very Educated Mother and her Nine (or eight) Pies and their retinue of moons, and the asteroid belt, and Hale-Bopp, and Comet Kohoutek, too."

Astronomy really does boggle my mind and this chapter both clarified some of the bogglement and added to it.

This definitely got way too long, but perhaps it may entice someone to read this book.

Book: On the Wing by Alan Tennant

Or also titled: To the Edge of the Earth with the Peregrine Falcon.

Alan Tennant was in love with peregrines, so he captured them (using pigeons as bait), attached a tiny transmitter and radio-tracked them with the help of a pilot named George Vose and his single-engine Cessna.

What an adventure. They start from the barrier islands off the east coast of Texas and follow the peregrine they name Amelia as far as they can with a small plane, well into Canada to the northern boundary of the great boreal forest. Amelia kept going into the tundra but they could no longer follow in their plane; the tundra was too boggy in the spring. Perhaps she would nest on the MacKenzie River or would go on to Alaska.

Alan guides some natural history tours, spends time in Denali and has a polar bear encounter in Barrow. He then finds himself in Umiat on the Colville River in northern Alaska where he watches peregrines in their nests on the cliffs along the river, the young birds so ferocious and so driven by hunger that even the parents need to be vigilant and careful around these wild offspring.

Peregrines live by eating other birds, slashing them with razor-sharp feet after snatching them in the air or on the ground. They fly amazingly fast and acrobatically. They are fierce.

Back in Texas, he rides out a hurricane, and then decides to follow three more radio-trasmitted peregrines south into Mexico, Ecuador, Belize and Guatemala. Where will these birds winter? He and George have a few heart-stopping moments in the plane due to mechanical malfunctions; they are scrutinized and detained by various police, military and airport officials as they sneak around the skies with minimal or no legal permission. They eventually follow one of the peregrines out over the open ocean, but they have to turn back, limited by fuel capacity, without determining the bird's destination. They often lose signals and pick them up again days later, or not. Much of the time they fly in huge circles or S-shpaes, either to stay with the slower-flying peregrines or to try to find them anew each day.

One day they put down on island of Ambergris near San Pedro (Saint Pete) off the eastern coast of Belize and get swooped into a Day of the Dead celebration. Alan calls the town the "quintessential Caribbean party town." The next day, he rents a bicycle and where "Ambergris protrudes farthest to sea, the peregrine parted a flurry of frightened gulls, then swerved serenely through the halo empty space their struggling bodies had left behind." He bicycles on and catches a green vine snake just because he can, and then lets it go. Jeez.... (He has written more books about snakes than birds and is a snake expert.)

"It seemed strange to be searching for a barren-ground arctic peregrine above wet tropical forest whose nearly 400 lofty tree species could not have been more different from the bonsai wold of every tundrius's birthplace..."

They finally go as far as they can and know they have done as much as they can. They run out of land and money. Alan is not willing to cross the open ocean to South America even as George is plotting and thinking it is possible. Alan told him that "although he was probably willing to ultimately go down in the plane, I was not."

The author tells us again how DDTs caused egg-shell thinning and how the peregrine population declined severely until DDTs were banned. But there are other pesticides and petrochemical hazards that are in the food chain and are cumulative in avifauna and, in fact, in fauna in general, including humans. Many of the countries south of the Rio Grande do not have the same regulatory infrastructure as the US, and birds know no borders.

So, the book is both a specific tale and a general one; it is the story of a couple of peregrines and the places they live and their migratory routes, and it is also a plea for global awareness of our common and shared environment and how we will all suffer from the consequences of maltreatment of our land and water and air. For Alan, for all of us, the peregrine is a symbol of "wildness that preserves the world."

George and Alan go their separate ways. "As I tossed my duffel into the truck I heard our old motor cough, miss and come to life. Then '469 was in the air, heading west into the still-bright evening sky. Soon, I knew, Vose would trim its angle of ascent and fold his big wrinkled hands over his lap and, feeling lost that I was not on aboard, for a long time I watched the little plane rise. Then, so far off I could barely make him out, below the first small stars the old skyhawk dropped a notch and cut two tight circles, wagging his wings good-bye." Isn't this a lovely sentence?

A story of one man's passion; a tale of peregrines, masters of their universe of sky.

Black-legged Kittiwake

For nearly two weeks, the Michigan birding listserv described a Black-legged Kittiwake at Grand Haven. For the first week of the sightings, the weather was very wintry, so I guess I expected the Kittiwake (rare for Michigan) would not stay around. But it did and then there were two of them. BLKIs usually winter at sea, off the coasts of New England and the Maritime provinces and then breed in the far north. But, this is what makes birding exciting.....here they were, in my backyard, so to speak.

Finally, Maria and I drove to GH last Friday, stopping at Pigeon Lake on the way where we saw a bonanza of mostly black, white and reddish birds: swans, buffleheads, common goldeneyes, ring-necked ducks, scaups, red-breasted and common mergansers, a solitary striking hooded merganser very near the shore, redheads, canvasbacks, a bald eagle, coots and Canada geese. On to GH, where we found the BLKI venue, but it was inclement and Maria had had chemo earlier that week and didn't feel like standing out in the wind. So that was a reconnaissance trip.

On Sunday afternoon, I went back and stood on Chinook Pier on the channel for 90 minutes with about 2 dozen other birders, several with spotting scopes and digiscopes. It was in the high 30s and not too uncomfortable, at least for awhile.

I saw white-winged scoters, including a male in breeding plumage, black with the white comma around his eye and white wing patch, along with four or five females or juveniles. There were ring-billed and Herring gulls, mergansers, goldeneyes, a few swans, buffleheads, etc. I chatted with a couple of guys. We all watched bald eagles periodically stir things up by flying around high in the sky. The gulls and other waterfowl would half-heartedly fly up and about, but quickly settled in again when the eagles left.

No Black-legged Kittiwakes though. I left as my digits started to freeze and the wind increased.

That was Sunday. On Tuesday, I saw that a kittiwake had been seen around 6 p.m. on Monday, so after dithering and carrying on the inner dialogue about whether to try for it or not, I finally just went, leaving at 4:30 p.m.

There were only a few cars in the parking lot where one can stay in a warm car and sort of look out over the docks and the channel where there is a mix of jumbled ice and open water. (The docks are bubbled here which accounts for the open water and which attracts the waterfowl.) I kept looking through the binocs at the gulls flying by and within 10 minutes I saw it!

I quickly got out of the car and got good looks at it for about 5 minutes, as it swooped and circled gracefully overhead. I was totally thrilled! This is a bird that looks a lot like a gull, a rather small delicate gull with grey mantle, white head and all-black wingtips--like they have been "dipped in ink." This bird was a juvenile and had a black terminal tail band, the distinctive black M-pattern on the wings and best of all, the black markings on the white head. It was buoyant and flew fast overhead, back and forth, for a few minutes and then headed west down the channel and was gone. I hung around another 30 minutes, but it didn't come back.

The western sky all the way home was stunning as seen from Lakeshore, reddish and golden and brilliant beyond the tall, black, silhouetted trees on the dunes.

There were scaups, goldeneyes and swans near the bridge at Pigeon Lake. They were swimming about in new areas of open water, pink-tinted from the sunset, and still bordered by fissured ice.

Book: The African Queen by C. S. Forester

Well, no one could possibly read this book after seeing Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in the movie and not think of them constantly. I wonder how this book would read had the movie never been made. It WAS quite an adventure, though Charlie Allnutt is not nearly as attractive as Humphrey Bogart; he seems rather doltish and a bit wimpy. Rose comes across more like Hepburn and she inspires Charlie. Their trials down the river were as daunting or more so than those in the movie...biting insects, incredible heat, wild white-water rapids, nearly impenetrable reedy marshes, waterlily-clogged muck, thunderstorms and significant mechanical issues. Also, the end of the novel sort of whimpers...

For those who may not have seen The African Queen, it is the story of Rose, a missionary type in the heart of Africa, who finds herself escaping the Germans via a rather decrepit boat and its captain, Charlie. He is an unlettered roustabout with a kind heart but little vision, and Rose convinces him they can make it down the river, get past a German lookout, find a large German patrol boat, the Konigin Luise, and blow it up withe explosives that Charlie will fashion.

It is also a story of how these two fall in love, a rather odd development given their respective histories up to this time in both of their lives, but not totally unbelievable I guess. For once, I liked the movie much better than the book; however, for the most part, the movie is faithful to the book. It's just the characters in the movie are extraordinary and in the book, only Rose is.

Book: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The setting of this novel is Jackson, Mississippi in the sixties. It is about black maids (the help) and their white, mostly young, women employers. They are day maids; they come in and clean, cook, do the laundry, endlessly polish the silver, and raise and love the young children in these homes. They are often treated despicably; they are considered barely human. Blacks, to many southerners, were inferior in so many ways and were to be kept at a remove to protect white society...or something. I still don't get it, but I wasn't born and raised in that culture. I also know there were exceptions, and that it remains a complex, sophisticated, ongoing history.

This is a story of how one young white woman, newly graduated from Ole Miss, begins to question what is right before her eyes, what has always been a given in her life, and how she becomes a power of one in her small world.

I kept thinking, as I read the book, that this all happened in my lifetime, not a century ago and not in some other country. While I knew, of course, of the civil rights movement, of the large events that defined that time in the south, this novel describes the lives of blacks, always living in fear of white reprisals and whims, all the while maintaining their separate homes, churches and communities, always working hard to keep families intact, taking comfort from each other and, finally, in this novel, finding a voice.

It is also a portrait of the deep south with its politics, its heat and humidity, its history and social mores, including the proper ways for young white women to conduct their lives in the mid 20th century. There are wonderfully believable characters, especially Aibileen and Minny, two of the help...and Hilly, the archetype racist of that era, who insists that the bathrooms the maids use be outside of the homes and which she calls her Home Help Sanitation Initiative.

There is a wonderful chapter titled The Benefit, which is an account of the annual Junior League dinner dance, but all the other chapters are written from the perspectives of Minny, Aibileen or Ms. Skeeter (the recent Old Miss graduate).

"This heartbreaking story is a stunning debut..." from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Sarah Sacha Dollacker.)

Read it; you'll probably like it....

Book: Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

When I was young, I read a book titled Exiled to Siberia. Probably my Dad had it on his bookshelf, or perhaps it was a library book, although I don't think it was. I only have a hazy and vague sense of this book but have always remembered it and knew that Siberia was a last resort awful prison place and that Vladivostok was in that part of the world.

Ian Frazier obviously has wanderlust. For this book, he calls it the "dread Russia-love." He makes several trips over 20 or so years and Travels to Siberia is the result. He usually traveled with one or two Russians, with whom he develops a love-hate relationship, but for whom he ultimately is grateful. Frazier isn't as intrepid as, say, Paul Theroux, who seems to just go and do his traveling, somewhat curmudgeonly, but without expectations of more comfort and efficiency. He makes his way, perhaps with unacknowledged help, and it seems that he just "does it" without much fretting.

Frazier also goes off on grand adventures but with more trepidation and, in this book, he was usually accompanied by a Russian guide/translator/facilitator. Frazier actually does make serious attempts to learn Russian and eventually can communicate somewhat. As he says at one point, he could understand about one sentence of five; however, moving about in the more remote parts of Russia with limited communication skills would have made these trips more difficult...and they were difficult enough.

I like both authors, Paul Theroux and Ian Frazier. They both describe the Russia through which they traveled in vivid fascinating detail. In Frazier's case, it was Siberia and for the most part southern Siberia, with the exception of a wonderful trip to the Chukchi Peninsula, right across from Alaska...probably the part Sarah Palin sees. And he also spent some time in the western cities, usually in preparation for his Siberian travels.

It is a long book, nearly 500 pages, but interesting for the duration. Frazier fills in Russian history along the way, but not so much that it detracts from his odyssey. His favorite revolutionary Russians were the Decembrists (of the failed December 14, 1825 uprising) many of whom ended up in Siberia. "Like few young officers before or after, those of the Decembrists' generations dashed. They drank champagne, went to balls, broke hearts and had theirs broken, gambled away their estates on the draw of a card. Though dueling was illegal, they dueled..." and then, Frazier says, "Of course they failed--disastrously, spectacularly. Almost better to avert your eyes. None of them even managed to die gloriously. When the time came, they did not do one thing right."

So these snippets of history are part of this tale, along with the dailiness of travel, mostly by car, but also by plane and train, with descriptions of the land and rivers, the mostly horrible roads, the snow, the snow roads, the people, the food, the mosquitos, the taiga.... Frazier continually wishes to see gulags, and his guide gets sullen on this topic, so that thread also runs through the book. Nor does his guide like cities, and they rush through them but often camp close to the towns, Frazier then brooding alone in his tent while the guide(s) go in search of nearby nightlife.

The book has no photographs but does have several sketches by Frazier, most of which I wished had been photographs. I wonder why he didn't use a camera?

He makes an interesting comment on how he feels "Stalin gets a pass" for a "large fraction of the 55 million Russians killed by unnatural causes as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, from its beginning in 1917 to the fall of communism in 1992...As time passes, he [Stalin] seems to be sidling into history as one of those old-timey, soft-focus monsters--like Ivan the Terrible, like Peter the Great--whose true monstrosity softens to resemble that of a ogre in a fairy tale."

Russia, and especially Siberia, is rich in natural resources, including oil, natural gas, diamonds, nickel, titanium....I certainly did not know that when "Saudi Arabia reduced its oil production in 2005 and 2006, Russia became the largest oil-producing country in the world...with experts estimating that at least 80 billion barrels of Russian oil are yet to be found." For all of Russia's problems becoming a modern world player, it is foolish to discount them. It is an amazing country.

Travels to Siberia is a grand adventure for anyone with a curiosity about Russia, present or past, written with self-deprecating humor and lively prose as the author tries to explain his fascination for Russia which, for me, was successful.