Doot Doot Garden Blog

More than a decade ago, I came across a little hand-drawn journal in a second-hand bookstore in Cambridge. Written by Dan Price, it was called the Moonlight Chronicles, and I was completely charmed by the beautiful drawings and the quirky descriptions of his life and travels. Ten years later, at another Cambridge store, I happened on another inspirational drawn travelogue. This one was called Carnet de Voyage, and the art, by Craig Thompson, is far more virtuosic than Price’s oddball line drawings. But the charm is the same: an eccentric aesthete takes you for a walkabout looking through their talented eyes. In this case, Thompson is traveling around France and Morocco. The artwork is really gorgeous.

I went on to buy Thompson’s larger opus Blankets, which is another amazing piece of work, and after that I tracked down his blog, Doot Doot Garden. The blog is fun because you get to see him unfold some of his creative process, from the tools he uses to unpublished sketches and work in progress. And, as with all cartoonists, you will eventually find a long thoughtful interview in The Comics Journal.

For some reason, I find comics artists as a rule to be far more articulate and engaging in describing their artistic process than a typical musician, writer, or purely visual artist. I’m not sure if that’s because of the nature of the work (being both graphical and narrative) or that I simply enjoy the medium. In any event, I highly recommend Blankets, Carnet de Voyage, and old copies of the Moonlight Chronicles, if you’re lucky enough to find some.

The World of Tomorrow

It’s fun to chuckle while watching old and errant predictions of the future, like this one of Disney’s House of the Future. After watching a few of these videos, I have decided that the thing I miss most about the future-that-didn’t happen isn’t so much the jetpack or the silvery jumpsuits, but the chirpy background music. The voice-over is so close to self-parody that I can’t help being charmed: “While Father has a quick electronic shave… Junior brightens up ‘here and there’ with the electric toothbrush!” Here’s a longer and more informative promotional video. The repetitive bragging about plastics isn’t surprising given that the house’s sponsor is the Monsanto Chemical Company’s Plastics Division. But just imagine how the same premise would be received today. Start packing, sweetie! A giant chemical corporation is building us a plastic house! [cue music]

But suppose we uncovered an old prediction that got the future exactly right. What would that look like? Maybe something like this: The Astounding World of the Future.

I love the stress that the announcer puts on the words: “You’re welcome Mr. Robot Banker! Have a nice day!” It’s easy to do a bad world-of-the-future parody, but this is very well done and worth watching all the way through. And they got the music right too. (spotted on Steve Crandall’s blog)

Path Dependency in Economic Development

How is it that two people with similar talents and backgrounds can end up in such different places? This is the old nature versus nurture problem, and one way to unwind it is in terms of path dependence. Early choices, choices that may appear trivial at the time, lead to vastly different outcomes because of the branching structure of outcomes and future options. As Robert Frost says, “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” According to this line of reasoning, you don’t need genetic determinism to explain big differences. The same rain drop, depending on where it falls, can just as easily end up in the Atlantic as the Pacific.

This same reasoning can be applied on larger scales. How can two similarly situated countries diverge so dramatically? A look around the globe provides some fascinating case studies. Haiti and the Dominican Republic. North and South Korea. Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Here’s something I’ve always wondered about: why isn’t Argentina better off than it is? In Paul Kedrosky’s blog I came across this Financial Times treatment of the U.S. vs. Argentina and path dependency in economic development: Argentina: The superpower that never was.

That’s the weird thing about history. It coulda turned out different, ya know?

Infectious information

Words and virus particles are both infectious units of information that depend on human vehicles for transport. Their flows are often correlated too, since a quarantine on words can cause an outbreak of virus. The Spanish flu flared so spectacularly in part because no one was willing to talk about it; wartime censorship locked down information about the disease. The very name Spanish flu came about because the neutral Spaniards were the only ones willing to talk about it in their relatively unfettered newspapers. In the honored tradition of shooting messengers, whoever comes forward to announce a disease is forever linked to it by name. Or, as we used to say in high school, the smeller is the feller.

The phrase Spanish influenza still sounds chilling to my ear. Our latest flu may or may not be on so destructive a course, but in terms of pure poetry, which sounds most menacing: Mexican flu, swine flu, or H1N1? This last one, H1N1, has the sinister sound of a science fiction villain, but I prefer it. Its name is based not on origin but on content. Since it describes the actual nature of the virus, it gives me a certain semantic power that the dark image of a rooting pig does not. Semantic power may not prevent you from getting sick, but it can inoculate you against the formidable informational aspects of the flu: dread and panic. As these spread more quickly and widely than the flu itself, this data vaccine should not be lightly dismissed.

H1N1 is a shorthand that, like a Mafia nickname, both describes and identifies. Fat Tony. Frankie the Beard. “Big Cough” Fluey. If you were a lung cell, you would see H1N1 coming and recognize him by his fancy coat, a protein coat studded with hemagglutinin subtype 1 (H1) and neuraminidase subtype 1 (N1).

To underscore the informational nature of viruses, here’s the genome: GenBank sequences from 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak. It’s all there. Need some virus? Ask a DNA synthesis vendor (like Mr. Gene) to print some up for you. Should we suppress the NIH web site that tells you how to make H1N1? Or would that merely encourage the wild publication of the virus inside human rib cages around the world? It’s a complex game of information trade-offs, but one thing’s for sure. We’re better off now than we were in 1918.

Galaxy on the rise

Once on a camping trip in Utah, I took a picture of our group late at night. I had a tripod and used a long exposure, but not being a very skilled photographer, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. When the pictures came back from the lab, I was in for a surprise (historical footnote: in ancient times, photographs were “developed” at remote mountaintop “laboratories” and returned to you on the backs of fast-trotting donkeys). I couldn’t find my night-time snapshot. It was a while before I realized what looked like a mid-day shot was actually taken at midnight. The sky was bright blue and the colors were vibrant. Only the tiny traces of stars in the sky and our blurry faces gave it away. It was hard to believe my little camera could see such a different world.

On Kevin Kelly’s sprawling site I came across this lovely time-lapse animation taken at a star party in Texas. Amazingly, it was taken with an SLR camera on tripod. Put on your slow eyes and watch the earth turn.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4505537&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

I’m familiar with what the Milky Way looks like in dark skies, so I was watching this video thinking “It’s going to be subtle… is that it? No… is THAT it? No.” But that camera has better eyes than you or I do. When the galaxy comes up, trust me, it’s not subtle.

Of Pans and GigaPans

It’s easy to think of a camera as an artificial eye. This lets you imagine that a photograph is something your eye might see if only your equipment was better. But when you take dozens of photos and stitch them together into one giant picture, the result is a strange hybrid. It looks like a snapshot, but it’s more of an experiential perch. It’s a vista point where you can linger, zooming, panning, and constantly finding novelty in the details.

GigaPan Systems is a company that helps you make these so-called gigapan images. They sell motorized tripods and special software that makes it straightforward to create such an image. They’ve been getting a lot of good press lately; you may have seen the GigaPan image of President Obama’s inauguration. Anyone can upload images to the GigaPan site. My friend Roy bought one of their tripods in time for a trip to South Africa. Here’s his shot of Boulders Beach near Capetown. Can you find the penguins?

Once you start thinking in terms of gigapixel super zoom images, it’s not hard to apply the same idea to things other than landscapes. Here’s s picture of two leaves and a flower. Would ya look at the size of that stamen!

It doesn’t stop there. You can keep making GigaPan pictures smaller until you get NanoGigaPan images like this ant.

It’s all good fun zooming in on an ant’s facial hair, but wouldn’t a NanoGigaPan image just be a Pan image?

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Aristotle observed that an object falls at a rate that is proportional to its weight. Heavy objects fall quickly, and light objects fall more slowly. Makes sense, right? For hundreds of years Aristotle’s word on this was so widely accepted as truth that there was simply no point in performing an experiment to verify or contradict it. Why bother? It was enough to say Ipse dixit, literally “he said it.” If it was good enough for the old man, it’s good enough for me. It took the righteous and contrary Galileo to proclaim what anyone who bothered could see: Look here! I drop a grape and an orange together and they fall at the same rate. This man Aristotle is either a fool or a liar.

When we look back at this episode, Galileo is always our friend. We sit next to him on the bench and chuckle. Grinning and pointing at the Aristotelian dopes, we ask him: How can all those people be so stupid?

Galileo is right not to be so impressed with us. Now as then, it happens all the time.

To choose a more recent example, why are Americans getting so fat? The answer is obvious. We’re rich, lazy, and overfed. Case closed. But the data doesn’t support the story. Exercise and caloric intake don’t correlate with weight gain. And perversely, sometimes malnutrition, poverty, and obesity appear to be best friends. What’s going on? Science writer Gary Taubes has taken on this important subject in his book Good Calories Bad Calories. Here’s a lecture of him talking about his book.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=4362041487661765149&hl=en&fs=true

My brother Paul is an endocrinologist who is especially taken with the book. He talks about it all the time. He talks about it so much that I asked if he’d be willing to write about the book and why it matters. Happily, he agreed, and here is the result…

Continue reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories”

To Do lists with Zenbe

I wanted a nice simple To Do list web service. I’ve been looking for ages.

In theory, it should be easy to get what I want. There are plenty of options to choose from, some of which are quite well-developed and popular. But most of the dedicated To Do managers are too fancy for me and add too much overhead. I don’t want to think about categories and subcategories and tags and expected effort and priority codes.

In order to make me happy, it only has to do a few things. I just want an easy way to make a simple list, and having created the list, I want to move the items up and down the list as needed. Also, it needs to be accessible from any computer. My Outlook task list at work is plenty good (and nicely integrated with work email), but it’s locked up inside my company firewall. I can’t get to it from home.

For a while, I was a sucker for every To Do list out there. The only one I used for any length of time was the obscure tasktoy, written by Toby Segaran. But it’s pretty crude and, as a side effort of one person, it’s clearly not going to grow up anytime soon.

I’m telling you all this because I’ve found my true love at last: Zenbe Lists. Zenbe.com wants you to use their email and calendar. I don’t need those particular services. But the Zenbe To Do list manager at lists.zenbe.com is just brilliant. Best of all, it has a very nice iPhone client. It all syncs up, and life is good.

My uncle in Italy during WWII

Sixty-five years ago this week my Uncle Bill had a terrific headache. While touring through the Italian countryside near Santa Maria Infante, a piece of metal that would have killed him hit his helmet instead. I am glad for that.

I came across some Life magazine pictures being hosted by Google, and I asked him if they looked like what he saw. He fought west of Monte Cassino, where most of these pictures were taken, but he did say that this view typified what he saw much of the time.

gothic-line

He graciously agreed to write down some memories of that time and let me publish them here. Thanks Uncle Bill, and happy birthday!

It might be appropriate to outline my involvement in the infamous Italian campaign. On turning 18, I was drafted, after a year in college. In the fall of 1943 I was sent for basic infantry training to Fort McClellan in Alabama. After 13 weeks of training the companies were divided into two groups, one going to Fort Ord in California for the Pacific and the other to Fort George G. Meade in Maryland for the Atlantic. After a week at home I was sent to Fort Meade and then to Camp Patrick Henry in the Hampton Roads area, embarking on a troop transport for Oran, North Africa. Naples had fallen and a British ship took me to Naples. From there I subsequently found myself in the front lines north of the Garigliano River, the Gothic Line. There I was inserted, as a replacement, into a combat division, the 88th Infantry Division, 350th Regiment, first Battalion, Company B.

In an active combat division the attrition rate is high, some 60 percent in six months. Replacements are necessary. Unfortunately, replacements are at a disadvantage. Not having trained with your comrades, replacements were strangers in the midst of veterans. You were sent up to the line, stuck in a foxhole, not even knowing your comrades in the next foxhole over.

For a couple on months the Gothic line was static. I did watch the massive bombing of Cassino in March and could see the eruption of Vesuvius to the south. It was a spectacular display but I would have appreciated a better and more comfortable seat than a foxhole. On May 11, after an unusually fierce artillery bombardment, we pushed off, headed for Anzio. I remember walking behind tanks through devastated villages. Once, near Santa Maria Infante, my helmet was hit by shrapnel. My helmet was holed and I was knocked silly but the wound was superficial and after a few hours I was sent back into the line. We eventually met the troops from the Anzio beachhead and on June 4th we entered Rome, the first infantry troops in the city.

North of Rome, progress was rapid with only sporadic German resistance. On July 14, 1944, while trying to circle around a German machine gun emplacement, I was hit in my left ankle and foot. After some hours I was evacuated to a cave, where along with other wounded soldiers and civilians, I remained for a couple of days before being carried across the valley to battalion aid station, thence to Rome for surgery, to Naples and a hospital ship home. I had been ZIed, a wound sufficient to be sent to the Zone of the Interior, home!!!

My memories of Italy have been softened and blurred by time. Sixty years puts a bit of a strain on recall. I do remember the rain, the mud, and being supplied entirely by mule trains, carrying supplies in and the dead and wounded out. I remember the isolation and fear lying in a foxhole. I remember the never ending mountains and the uncanny ability of the Germans to use this advantage in defense. I remember the dead and the wounded and the cruelty on both sides. Sherman had it right.

I also remember the freedom from fear when pulled back from the front for R & R, the walk through Rome treated as conquerors, returning to Rome and seeing the Pope at the Vatican, those were the good days. I remember the trip home on the hospital ship, the attentive nurses, fried chicken and, most improbable, all the ice cream one could eat. And I remember my parents, scraping to borrow tires to make the trip to McGuire General Hospital in Richmond to visit me.

If you’re interested in the Italian campaign, I recommend Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, which I wrote about previously here. Also, while trying to locate some information on Santa Maria Infante, I found some old newspapers that have turned up on public archives. Here’s a link to a short article on the Americans marching through Santa Maria Infante and Castellanorata, but if you zoom out, you get a fascinating glimpse into a day of news in the all-consuming story of that war.

Peak Everything

Our best predictions of the future, which is to say, when those predictions work, tend to be straight-line extrapolations based on trends that don’t change too much. Our worst predictions occur when previously stable trends start to do loopy nonlinear things. Trendquakes.

We’re in for a lot of those in the next few decades.

There’s a lot of talk about peaks of one kind or another, trends that have done nothing but grow in living memory now starting to reverse course. Peak oil has been a popular term since the publication of Ken Deffeyes’ book Hubbert’s Peak. The premise is that the rate at which we squeeze oil out of the ground has topped out and is now in a terminal decline. Tim O’Reilly has pointed out that we may also be in the era of peak consumption, or perhaps more aptly, peak waste.

In the American Scientist this month there’s an article that dwells not so much on the environmental concerns of burning all that oil as the limits to growth once that “free” energy starts to dry up: Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil. In it, the authors mention Richard Heinberg’s concept of peak everything.

One of the more interesting peaks is peak population. Everyone who was born in 1965 or before (hey, that’s me!) has seen the world’s population double to its current value of 6.8 billion. The world’s population will never double again. Peak population isn’t expected until 2050 or so, but there is an inescapable and sustained depopulation in our future, something that hasn’t happened in a thousand years.

Sustained depopulation will be new when it’s happening across the entire globe, but it’s happening already in more places than you might suspect. In Russia, it’s gotten so bad they call it “hypermortality”. Read about it in the World Affairs Journal: Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb. Here’s another demographic snapshot of a changing world from the Wilson Quarterly: The World’s New Numbers. Birthrates are falling all over the world with the exception sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, Africa will become the global centroid of both Christianity and Islam.