Deeper into my theme now of biographies of scientists with Mauve by Simon Garfield, about the discoveries of William Perkins. At age 18, Perkins, experimenting with coal tar looking to make quinine in the lab, discovered the first of chemical based colors, "inventing mauve." (This review should be read along with the next one on the discoveries of William Smith, both English men disdained by both the aristocrats and university employed chemists. Both Perkins and Smith's treatment is reminiscent of Rosalind Franklin's.)
While experimenting with chemist August Hoffman in 1865, he noticed that the "slag" at the bottom of equipment had a strange interesting color, the first aniline dye. Fifty years later, there were over two thousand artificial colors. Today, industry uses petroleum as the ready source of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. This is organic chemistry, the science of carbon-compounds.
As Perkins explained what happened, "I was endeavouring to convert an artificial base into the natural alkaloid quinine, but my experiment instead of yielding the colorless quinine, gave a reddish powder ... when digested with spirits of wine gave the mauve dye." (Or as the Victorians said, "morve." Others belittled the chance find, and most of the book then goes on to trace the gulf between pure and applied science, as Perkins himself jumped to the production of dyes rather than stay full time in the laboratory, opening his own factory.
Besides being a life line of Perkins' life's ups and downs, it reprises the factors on the industry and its migration to Germany, the effect of British patent complexities, fashion, accolades and fetes and final near ignorance of this man's contributions to organic chemistry's boon to medicine and every day life products.
Why again am I surprised that the books I choose under a particular theme keep intertwining? Franklin has similar life experience as Perkins, Perkins in turn parallels William Smith's ventures; but oddly enough, this books makes me want to reread one of the books I know leave within easy reach, The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, which on page 169, gives a short and sweet summary of Perkins' discovery and the rise and fall of this color which became associated with mourning and menopausal women. So out of fashion, almost to the nth degree, behooves me to strip wallpaper from two rooms upstairs.
Friday, March 30, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Last Post of the Day, a Novel
I think I've mentioned before that my daughter-in-law's mother is a book editor and when my DIL comes north, she usually brings me a collection of books her mom has reviewed prior to print.
I think Sourdough by Robin Sloan falls into this pre-publication category. When not reading history or science these past eighteen months or so, I would lapse into stories about food. Most of these books were gimmicky, as is Sourdough which is a combination of San Francisco chef hero-worship and Egger's sci fi futurism from The Circle.
It is a bit reminiscent of the book I read about the guy from the Hudson Valley who compulsively made a loaf of bread every day trying to make the perfect one. Her the heroine stumbles into obtaining a mysterious sour dough starter that not only sings to her but one that always bakes the exact same face like crust. So the author tries to add to her book plot/recipe so it appeals to foodies, murder mystery fans and sci fi fiends.
The imagined cutting edge food market along the SF bay literally explodes when the minimalist/chemists steal the organic microbes and the place blows up "like a giant panetone." Come on. Just a dash of humor. And finally spice with RomCom, having the heroine find her true love, an email émigré who used to deliver her take out orders.
This book is like the buffet at 99, don't eat there, don't read this book.
I think Sourdough by Robin Sloan falls into this pre-publication category. When not reading history or science these past eighteen months or so, I would lapse into stories about food. Most of these books were gimmicky, as is Sourdough which is a combination of San Francisco chef hero-worship and Egger's sci fi futurism from The Circle.
It is a bit reminiscent of the book I read about the guy from the Hudson Valley who compulsively made a loaf of bread every day trying to make the perfect one. Her the heroine stumbles into obtaining a mysterious sour dough starter that not only sings to her but one that always bakes the exact same face like crust. So the author tries to add to her book plot/recipe so it appeals to foodies, murder mystery fans and sci fi fiends.
The imagined cutting edge food market along the SF bay literally explodes when the minimalist/chemists steal the organic microbes and the place blows up "like a giant panetone." Come on. Just a dash of humor. And finally spice with RomCom, having the heroine find her true love, an email émigré who used to deliver her take out orders.
This book is like the buffet at 99, don't eat there, don't read this book.
Captivating Book Title: The Thieves of Threadneedle Street
Same trip to Saratoga, same bookstore, same history section. Lure of a book title with the quaintest street name, Threadneedle, a name that brings back wonderful childhood learning to sew memories, and a subtitle that evokes my reading of JP Morgan's life: The Incredible True Story of the American Forgers Who Nearly Broke the Bank of England. (Not my favorite foreign country, by the way.)
I have to say quite bluntly that if my staff had written this book, I would have yelled at them as that sat around my round table, heads down. It is quite impossible to follow the chronology of the crime, who did what when and how were they caught. I sometimes think the author, Nicholas Booth, by writing so non sequitur purposefully intended to make the crime more nefarious. While the perpetrators had multiple levels of scheming going on and devised many side bar trips and aliases, the reader is befuddled to know if what is being presented is occurring, being given as testimony during the trial or part of Pinkerton's investigation. Nor does it help that the criminals were related, having the same last name, associates having the same first names, and everyone pretending to be each other to cover their tracks. A time line or interlock would help someone get through this crime story.
Like reading J P Morgan, the dollar amounts seem small compared to my last work portfolio's values, but unlike Morgan, the description of notes and floats seems so much more primitive than Wall Street banking. It was a time when image was everything, a sort of Brett/Bart Maverick quality of dressing well shysters and schemers.
The story contains the germs of international monetary fraud on a large scale and traces the early days of private detectives. Nonetheless it is a difficult read and a reader only gets footing and balance after hundreds of pages of false directions.
I have to say quite bluntly that if my staff had written this book, I would have yelled at them as that sat around my round table, heads down. It is quite impossible to follow the chronology of the crime, who did what when and how were they caught. I sometimes think the author, Nicholas Booth, by writing so non sequitur purposefully intended to make the crime more nefarious. While the perpetrators had multiple levels of scheming going on and devised many side bar trips and aliases, the reader is befuddled to know if what is being presented is occurring, being given as testimony during the trial or part of Pinkerton's investigation. Nor does it help that the criminals were related, having the same last name, associates having the same first names, and everyone pretending to be each other to cover their tracks. A time line or interlock would help someone get through this crime story.
Like reading J P Morgan, the dollar amounts seem small compared to my last work portfolio's values, but unlike Morgan, the description of notes and floats seems so much more primitive than Wall Street banking. It was a time when image was everything, a sort of Brett/Bart Maverick quality of dressing well shysters and schemers.
The story contains the germs of international monetary fraud on a large scale and traces the early days of private detectives. Nonetheless it is a difficult read and a reader only gets footing and balance after hundreds of pages of false directions.
Where and When: Heaven's Ditch
It was President's Day and the spa was completely booked up. so my friend and I headed to the other Spa, Saratoga. There is a wonderful new local bookstore on Broadway, across from the restored Adelphi where we had oysters and charcuterie at the bar for lunch, were I lost Pat as I headed to the history section. There I purchased a couple of books, the better of the two reprised herein.
Heaven's Ditch - Gold Gold and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly (not the Maverick one) appealed to me as (1) local history and (2) a construction project. (Sideline it is Brett and not Bart that otherwise appeals to me.)
What I didn't count on getting was an extensive history of central NY religious fanaticism. The gold in the book is not the profitability of canal commerce, but the golden tablets Joseph Smith "dug" and therefrom established Mormonism. He was not the only such founder in the area that saw an epidemic of new faiths: Seventh Day Adventists and Anti Masonic political fever, the gullibility preyed upon by both Barnum and Weed himself as a rag newspaper man.
I loved the engineering challenges and creativity recorded in the book. Loved finding the roots of Thurlow Weed who dominated both my recently read books on Jackson, Lincoln and Grant. Instead of doing what I have been doing lately on the title page of my books -- citing page numbers of meaningful quotes and sections I underlined -- someone opening the Canal will find a list of names, names that if I were a school marm back in those days, I would have thoroughly enjoyed, and struggled not to titter, when reading a roster of "Obidiah Dogberry, Orestes Brownson, Enos Thropp, Lowton Lawson, Hamlet Scranton, Ebenezer Hatch, Parly Pratt, Orange Dibble." Wouldn't you just love to ancestry.com these folks for extended family trees? Makes me wish I heard of them when I was using college classmate names on sample driver licenses I inserted into procedural manuals when I worked at DMV.
Tent preaching and a fad of digging for buried treasures portray not only the community entertainment of the age and area but the gullibility of the mass population ... a population that by class was suspicious of the more educated and prosperous who tended to fulfill their own affiliation needs by becoming Masons.
This is a marvelous history book for New Yorkers, Most of whom solely associate a mule named Sal with the Canal, not the native ingenuity generated as the terrain changed from the Montezuma Swamp to the Finger Lakes dolomite. It documents the political ties with the NYS Assembly and the Canal Commission and the need for day laborers, mostly Irishmen from the five corners in NYC, bringing an entire new transient working class into the population of farmers, traders and ministry.
The book made me want to travel through the canal now just to slowly soak in the varying terrain of the State instead of speeding along the Thruway. It also made me think again about State infrastructure investments that end up being unprofitable, decaying remnants of industries which speed by them with never ending technological advancements.
Why doesn't the NYS Education Department require history fairs like science fairs? Let each child in school read a book like this one and report out to the class what hooked him/her about learning more about the State.
Heaven's Ditch - Gold Gold and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly (not the Maverick one) appealed to me as (1) local history and (2) a construction project. (Sideline it is Brett and not Bart that otherwise appeals to me.)
What I didn't count on getting was an extensive history of central NY religious fanaticism. The gold in the book is not the profitability of canal commerce, but the golden tablets Joseph Smith "dug" and therefrom established Mormonism. He was not the only such founder in the area that saw an epidemic of new faiths: Seventh Day Adventists and Anti Masonic political fever, the gullibility preyed upon by both Barnum and Weed himself as a rag newspaper man.
I loved the engineering challenges and creativity recorded in the book. Loved finding the roots of Thurlow Weed who dominated both my recently read books on Jackson, Lincoln and Grant. Instead of doing what I have been doing lately on the title page of my books -- citing page numbers of meaningful quotes and sections I underlined -- someone opening the Canal will find a list of names, names that if I were a school marm back in those days, I would have thoroughly enjoyed, and struggled not to titter, when reading a roster of "Obidiah Dogberry, Orestes Brownson, Enos Thropp, Lowton Lawson, Hamlet Scranton, Ebenezer Hatch, Parly Pratt, Orange Dibble." Wouldn't you just love to ancestry.com these folks for extended family trees? Makes me wish I heard of them when I was using college classmate names on sample driver licenses I inserted into procedural manuals when I worked at DMV.
Tent preaching and a fad of digging for buried treasures portray not only the community entertainment of the age and area but the gullibility of the mass population ... a population that by class was suspicious of the more educated and prosperous who tended to fulfill their own affiliation needs by becoming Masons.
This is a marvelous history book for New Yorkers, Most of whom solely associate a mule named Sal with the Canal, not the native ingenuity generated as the terrain changed from the Montezuma Swamp to the Finger Lakes dolomite. It documents the political ties with the NYS Assembly and the Canal Commission and the need for day laborers, mostly Irishmen from the five corners in NYC, bringing an entire new transient working class into the population of farmers, traders and ministry.
The book made me want to travel through the canal now just to slowly soak in the varying terrain of the State instead of speeding along the Thruway. It also made me think again about State infrastructure investments that end up being unprofitable, decaying remnants of industries which speed by them with never ending technological advancements.
Why doesn't the NYS Education Department require history fairs like science fairs? Let each child in school read a book like this one and report out to the class what hooked him/her about learning more about the State.
IgNobel Men
I never heard of Rosalind Franklin. We've all heard of Francis Crick and James Watson and their Nobel prize for discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. It was Franklin's x-ray photograph of the molecule that showed them what it looked like. Her boss, whom she wasn't even speaking to at the time she shot the molecule, shared in the prize with them.
Rosalind is not the Dark Lady of DNA, except that she worked in a photography lab. She personifies her age: science being predominantly an all boys club where connections and influence tampered with pure discovery in award making. Rosalind like all of us inherited characteristics for her family's genes and her family's history in a point of time. She focused on accuracy and precision, at a cost of forgoing leaps of imagination. All of her work rested on fact and direct observation, she was not a speculator. Her talents and assets were recategorized as flaws and limitations by more tied in ambitious male scientists.
She bounced around the world trying to get a position in a laboratory that was tenured and accommodating. It proved almost impossible.
The book could make a livid feminist extol her as an abused victim of male dominance. That band wagon seems to play a song most younger women no longer listen to. It becomes more a morality tale, of a woman tempered by her culture and time. But aren't we all? It is a tale of caution and insight, suggesting skills women might need to still navigate the world of work successfully.
To Crick and Watson, there was no i teamwork, but a big capital one in PrIze.
Rosalind is not the Dark Lady of DNA, except that she worked in a photography lab. She personifies her age: science being predominantly an all boys club where connections and influence tampered with pure discovery in award making. Rosalind like all of us inherited characteristics for her family's genes and her family's history in a point of time. She focused on accuracy and precision, at a cost of forgoing leaps of imagination. All of her work rested on fact and direct observation, she was not a speculator. Her talents and assets were recategorized as flaws and limitations by more tied in ambitious male scientists.
She bounced around the world trying to get a position in a laboratory that was tenured and accommodating. It proved almost impossible.
The book could make a livid feminist extol her as an abused victim of male dominance. That band wagon seems to play a song most younger women no longer listen to. It becomes more a morality tale, of a woman tempered by her culture and time. But aren't we all? It is a tale of caution and insight, suggesting skills women might need to still navigate the world of work successfully.
To Crick and Watson, there was no i teamwork, but a big capital one in PrIze.
From Leadership to Science but Still Dwelling in Nonfiction
Well, I guess I wasn't really fully back when I announced my return to posting three months ago was I? I must admit retirement is a lot like taking a cure. There are plenty of things I keep doing from my pre R-day life, like fancy cooking, reading and my new hobby -- home improvement construction supervision -- but my urge to communicate has dropped below freezing. Because I restrain myself from calling or writing my former staff, as my voice is now only a weak impression or reminiscence without authority, my brain has concluded that others are equally unaffected by my literary reviews.
Too bad, I will really try over the next couple of days to at least array all the books I have read this fall and winter even if my clever turn of phrase is somewhat rusty.
Since I last posted I did figure out a theme for 2018 -- moving from my quest to understand what makes a good national leader, to reading in the sciences. Let me start with a book I read yesterday in just a couple of hours. (Remember readers, you can always tell an easy book if it has book club discussion questions in the back.) Nonetheless, I found some interesting concepts and contrast and compare opportunities in Irene Pepperberg's Alex and Me.
Pepperberg is a chemist who ended up doing experiments in biology, specifically to determine whether and how language develops in non-mammals; as opposed to those scientists who were working at teaching sign language to chimps and gorilla, she worked with grey parrots that vocalized.
Isn't it the knee jerk reaction that parrots echo back words and phrases in mindless repetition of noises they heard from humans? Was the bird really hungry when Polly asked for a cracker? Dr. P found out her parrot Alex was no birdbrain, as he not only learned how to say colors, numbers, shapes, not to mention food, but also could answer questions to distinguish between them. He understood categorization, comparison.
He listened to what the lab workers said to him and each other in jest and knew under what emotional conditions to say a particular phrase, from wanna go back (into his cage) for both when he was bored doing his experiments to when he was frightened by seeing raptor owls out a window. He could sense human feelings, when to say I'm sorry, and he displayed a sense of humor. When he was bored with a repetitive experiment that he had mastered, he would intentionally give every wrong answer associated with a test (like if there were two items on a table, he would say, 5, 3, 1, 4, everything but 2).
His higher reasoning was evidenced by his ability to associate color, size and number among various items and could answer which category had more of some characteristic in it. Dr. P wanted to see if he understood that words were made up of distinct sounds that could be recombined. Like a baby babbling in a crib, she had heard Alex vocally play with "green" saying cheen, been, keen. Strongly evidencing this insight, one day when he wanted food during a test and kept saying "want a nut" he grew so frustrated he said, "want a nut .... nnn, uh, tuh" and spelled it out for her. When she got a second parrot, Alex would pipe out answers when Griff was slow to reply and often told him to "say better."
Rather than continuing to marvel at the thoughtful language Alex developed, I will now act more like a book reviewer. Pepperberg writes like she is teaching Alex. She seems to be condescending when she tells us the behavioral terms of language development. She stays rigidly within her boundaries of seeing how language develops not making any assumptions about what the ability to speak actually empowers a speaker to express. She sees emotions in her bird, humor, boredom, insistence, authority but does not make the leap between being and saying.
Lastly as I inevitably do, Alex and Me parallels themes and observations expressed more angrily in the book I read just before A&M, Rosalind Franklin The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. (See next post.)
Too bad, I will really try over the next couple of days to at least array all the books I have read this fall and winter even if my clever turn of phrase is somewhat rusty.
Since I last posted I did figure out a theme for 2018 -- moving from my quest to understand what makes a good national leader, to reading in the sciences. Let me start with a book I read yesterday in just a couple of hours. (Remember readers, you can always tell an easy book if it has book club discussion questions in the back.) Nonetheless, I found some interesting concepts and contrast and compare opportunities in Irene Pepperberg's Alex and Me.
Pepperberg is a chemist who ended up doing experiments in biology, specifically to determine whether and how language develops in non-mammals; as opposed to those scientists who were working at teaching sign language to chimps and gorilla, she worked with grey parrots that vocalized.
Isn't it the knee jerk reaction that parrots echo back words and phrases in mindless repetition of noises they heard from humans? Was the bird really hungry when Polly asked for a cracker? Dr. P found out her parrot Alex was no birdbrain, as he not only learned how to say colors, numbers, shapes, not to mention food, but also could answer questions to distinguish between them. He understood categorization, comparison.
He listened to what the lab workers said to him and each other in jest and knew under what emotional conditions to say a particular phrase, from wanna go back (into his cage) for both when he was bored doing his experiments to when he was frightened by seeing raptor owls out a window. He could sense human feelings, when to say I'm sorry, and he displayed a sense of humor. When he was bored with a repetitive experiment that he had mastered, he would intentionally give every wrong answer associated with a test (like if there were two items on a table, he would say, 5, 3, 1, 4, everything but 2).
His higher reasoning was evidenced by his ability to associate color, size and number among various items and could answer which category had more of some characteristic in it. Dr. P wanted to see if he understood that words were made up of distinct sounds that could be recombined. Like a baby babbling in a crib, she had heard Alex vocally play with "green" saying cheen, been, keen. Strongly evidencing this insight, one day when he wanted food during a test and kept saying "want a nut" he grew so frustrated he said, "want a nut .... nnn, uh, tuh" and spelled it out for her. When she got a second parrot, Alex would pipe out answers when Griff was slow to reply and often told him to "say better."
Rather than continuing to marvel at the thoughtful language Alex developed, I will now act more like a book reviewer. Pepperberg writes like she is teaching Alex. She seems to be condescending when she tells us the behavioral terms of language development. She stays rigidly within her boundaries of seeing how language develops not making any assumptions about what the ability to speak actually empowers a speaker to express. She sees emotions in her bird, humor, boredom, insistence, authority but does not make the leap between being and saying.
Lastly as I inevitably do, Alex and Me parallels themes and observations expressed more angrily in the book I read just before A&M, Rosalind Franklin The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. (See next post.)
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