There's discussion about using the Mac mini as a media center: "the central brain of our system; the glue that holds all the devices together. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio/video recorder, audio/video playback, audio/video download, and it even makes a decent audio/video production unit, as well." The cute li'l box has processing, storage and network to serve, slurp, and schedule.
But what I'm missing isn't just processing power -- it's interface focus.
Right now, my laptop is a fine media machine if I want to focus on watching video or listening to music. But it's useless for background tasks. Any media - related task steals 100% of focus and processing power.
What I really want is a good-sized, networked, tablet that I can use for social software like Last.fm for simultaneous playing and browsing. An iPod UI is fine for selection, but it's just too small for the social and topical browsing that's key to my media experience. I want it to be portable, not tied to a desktop display. The storage doesn't need to be tied to the display -- a networked storage gizmo would be ideal.
The mini combines the storage, networking, and processing, and leaves off the display. I want the display and processing, which can be decoupled from the storage.
This is all possible today with a good-sized budget. A table is $1600, a network storage gizmo is $800. In order to make a tablet practical, vendors would need to cost-optimize for a configuration that splits display from storage.
Note to more advanced home media hackers -- what do you think?
I needed to make a photocopy of my driver's license and credit card for an internet order where the shipping address was different from the billing address. My home office copy machine is sheetfed, so I need to go out to copy the little pieces of plastic.
So I called the South Congress HEB. Their photocopy machine is behind a service desk. They won't let me copy my own driver's license and credit card, because they are "copyrighted".
A slightly longer trip to Office Depot did the trick.
The emotional punch of satire depends on participation in the culture; Jon Stewart telling the Crossfire goons "you're hurting us" was shocking and scathingly funny.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, Bunuel skewers the social conventions of the postwar French elite; the genteel obsessions with food, the correct way to serve alcohol, polite table manners, formal dress for dining with friends at home. Behind the politeness there is adultery, drug-dealing, murder, and political oppression; and a dream life where fear, violence, torture and death break through the surface.
The humor and shock of Discrete Charm can be appreciated but not quite felt. At times, the satire needs to be deciphered like Moliere and Chaucer. The class satire in particular needs footnotes. A bishop is invited to dinner, though he has signed on as a gardener; military officers are part of the club; the driver and maid are the subject of condescension. I'm surely missing the nuances.
I rented Discreet Charm for remedial film reference. In the making-of-Tenenbaums DVD extra with Wes Anderson, the director called on Luis Bunuel for inspiration with some difficult scene.
From Bunuel, perhaps, Anderson inherits the intertwingling of the bizarre and ordinary. Perhaps Anderson is trying to borrow Bunuel's matter-of-fact tone with the bizarre. Bunuel acheives deadpan, Anderson's tone is sometimes just dead.
The heart of both films is psychological. Anderson's therapeutic themes are angst, anomie, and emotional dishonesty. Bunuel is sincerely Freudian -- ordinary life hides a vivid dreamworld of sex, violence, and death.
I appreciated Discreet Charm, and really enjoyed the 90-minute biography of the filmmaker on the Criterion DVD. The biography interviews Salvador Dali and other contemporaries of Bunuel's avant-garde youth and actors who played in the various films over 50 years. There's footage of Bunuel, Dali, Lorca and crew being young, hip and beautiful.
The repressive cause and high cost of avant garde rebellion is shown in pictures; the theater showing L'Age D'Or that was bombed by right-wing militants; a contemporary shot (I think) of the friends reacting to Lorca's murder by Nationalist soldiers at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War; the church hierarchy giving a Nazi salute; friends who put Bunuel up at their house when he couldn't get a job in the US because of the Hollywood blacklist.
Bunuel's friends and colleagues tell fond stories of roguish humor and strict personal habits; the atheists's attraction to religious ceremonies and priests. The bio is rather hagiographical, leaving out the dirty laundry about cruelty to his wife, drinking, the feud with Dali.
The bio gives context to Bunuel's old-fashioned avant garde esthetic. These days, the idea of shock on film travels across a wide cultural gulf. When Janet Jackson bares a breast on TV, many are shocked, and just as many wonder what the fuss is about. In college film class, Bunuel's work is standard text in college film class, and "transgressive" is a conventional compliment. The horrifying images of Bunuel's early work are the subject of fond father-son conversation in blue-state America. Shocking images in grossout comedies and horror movies are mainstream commercial products.
If I had the time, it would be fascinating to look up the reactions to "Discreet Charm" in 1972. Did people see an old radical domesticated into satire? Were the scenes of marital nookie in the bushes and decorous adultery considered titillating? Were the bloodied ghosts considered chilling or tame? It was a popular movie at the time -- what did people like about it then?
In a technology and politics mailing list, there was some enthousiastic discussion about developing common taxonomy in order to build political agreement.
I think this view misunderstands the role of categories in shared understanding.
At fine-grained, concrete level, a shared schema for voter and constituent data is extremely powerful.
At the larger level, though, labels don't get you that far toward shared understanding and shared effective action.
Meaning isn't in the nouns. Meaning is in the stories we tell. Meaning is in the actions we take. Meaning is annealed out of conversation. Meaning is in a strategy and supporting tactics.
Folksonomy might make the software challenge easier -- the disparate political blogs and websites could just pick their own categories, and aggregation tools like Technorati tags could reveal the implicit concensus about labels.
But folksonomy won't get us that far toward shared meaning and action, either. Del.icio.us tells us that the most popular tags are blog, programming, web, music, software, design, news, and linux. The tag popularity metric shows what topics are popular, and lets the reader browse through the popular content under the tag.
It still requires an act of synthesis to describe what people really care about, when they bookmark "music", "software", and "design".
It still requires acts of human organization and communication to build shared understanding, agreement, and effective action.
In the Wes Anderson interview in The Royal Tenenbaums, the director talked about how he storyboards the movie down to the last minute detail of decor, but he's always surprised by the way that actors bring the story to life. That comment explains the affect of the Royal Tenenbaums. I'd want to watch it again to catch the the fabulous dollhouse details of the 1970s/80s Chas Adams house, with a family of eccentric ex-prodigies gone to seed. And to catch the subtleties as Gene Hackman plays an aging scoundrel trying to worm his way back into the affections of his alienated family. I just love how he's habitually manipulative, nasty, and mean; and how he fumbles awkwardly with a new resolution to occasionally tell the truth.
But the map and the territory don't quite mesh. The characters inhabiting the eccentric character definitions -- Gwyneth Paltrow's repressed and secretive failed playwright; Luke Wilson's despairing washed-up tennis pro enact the border between anomie and caricature.
Reviews of the movie make a lot of the superficial eccentricity of the set and the mannerisms of the characters. Each character has his or her own shtick; the playwright has a wooden finger; the envious next-door-neighbor pop-western novelist wears fashion cowboy gear and wanders in a chemically-fueled dreamworld.
But the heart of the movie is simpler, more mundane, and more sentimental. Children, raised by a remote mother and absent father, create their own fantasy worlds, and then have to live in them. They confront each other as adults, and struggle with reconciliation and forgiveness. At heart, it's about the imaginary worlds built in the carpeted dens of the lonely children of divorced parents. At heart, it's a therapist's office fable.
There are special pleasures in reading with a net-connected computer handy. Often, when I'm reading a fun book, I'll use the net to look up references and research side topics. If the book is recent, you can often find online book tour interviews. So, when I was reading the Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, I found this NPR interview. Readng The Birth of the Mind by Gary Marcus, I found this radio interview.
The radio interviews have only the highlights and greatest hits of the book. But it gives some context to the book, to hear Menand's reflective tone and Marcus' cascading enthousiasm.
It's been brought to my attention that the nofollow tag is supposed to pertain only to comments.
This is small comfort to those of use who experience weblogs as conversation. Some of the best comments refer to resources, citations, counter-examples. Links that are especially valuable to page-rank, because they are selected in context.
Google etc are trying to remove the reward from spam, but in the process they're removing the reward for conversation.
Google has proposed a method to fight weblog comment spam that would dramatically decrease the influence of blogs. Comment spam is a nasty plague, but this cure is worse than the disease. I don't understand why SixApart is racing to adopt this suicidal approach.
The proposal will prevent Google's search engine from following links found in weblogs, by putting a rel="nofollow" link attribute on web links. Blog tool vendors including SixApart raced to support the new proposal (via Joi Ito
Blogs rank highly in Google's search results because weblogs are link-rich media, and Google's search algorithms put heavy weight on links. Blog influence is a good thing -- items that are rated highly by millions of distributed, independent actions deserve to be brought to the surface.
As described by Sunir Shah and fellow Meatball wikizens, the proposal will destroy the influence of weblogs by not counting the links.
The brilliance of Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, blogs, and other social software is that the actions of millions of individual users, done to benefit themselves and their small communities, have combined, emergent benefits at a larger scale.
Links give us the ability to combine all of our whispers into a roar. If you dampen the signal amplification, we're just friends talking to each other. Social software stops being a source of emergent intelligence.
The most compelling bit about Adam Werbach's jeremiad about the death of environmentalism was the vision for a New Apollo Project that would invest in clean energy infrastructure, end dependence on foreign oil, reduce contribution to global warming, and create new business opportunities and jobs.
When Werbach and his team took the story on the road to a town struggling with the lost of manufacturing plants, they were astonished at the hope and enthousiasm that the vision inspired.
Ironically, the rest of the speech is a classic jeremiad exhorting environmentalists to renounce their faith in jeremiads. An environmentalist myth tells a story about a pristine beginning, followed by decline and gruesome collapse and decay. So Werbach tells the elegaic tale: the idealistic beginnings of the environmental movement in the vision of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, through its decline into policy wonkdom and voter-alienating pessimism, and defeat at the hands of cheerful Republican exploiters.
The screed about the death of environmentalism is aimed at persuading old true believers to give up hope in winning environmental issues on their own, and to join the broader progressive movement. If you're not an old-time true believer, the speech isn't meant for you. If you're an old-time disbeliever, the speech will confirm your stereotypes.
Here's the lesson for rest of us, who are looking to assess today's situation, and what to do now. Diamond's Collapse wants to be our generation's Silent Spring. In "Collapse", Diamond argues persuasively that societies need to make foresighted decisions to avert the collapse of their civilization brought on by environmental destruction.
The way to inspire people and leaders to make those good decisions isn't just fear. Fear alone will lead people to put their heads in the sand. The way to inspire people is to provide an hopeful vision that reframes the threat of scarcity into an alternatve vision of abundance.
I'd love to hear a political candidate wrap a story of energy independence, technology progress, business opportunity, and national security. It uses the same story, framed as hope, not fear.
Prompted by reading Jared Diamond's Collapse, I did a bit of information foraging on the progress of some sustainable environmental practices.
One of the bright sides in the US is organic agriculture, which has been growing by more that 20% annually for over a decade, and about 40% of consumers have bought organic food. The growth has taken organic food mainstream - most organic food is now bought in ordinary supermarkets, and organic companies, for better and worse, are being bought out by big food conclomerates.
Organic food still accounts for only 2% of the overall food market. But 20% annual growth can lead to a "tipping point" in a decade or two, when production techniques considered "niche" today become the norm.
The big deal, it seems to me (with no special expertise other than homework) is soil health. With organic farming, soil fertility is renewable, but conventional agriculture mines the soil. Soil degradation can lead to disastrous Easter Island-style problems.
Fisheries and forests are also being mined to the point of collapse. Jared Diamond mentioned the Marine Stewardship Council as the most reputable organization that is certifying fisheries for sustainable practices. The Forest Stewardship Council provides similar certification for forestries.
The activities of these groups seem less mature than organic agriculture. There are 11 fisheries that are certified by the MSC today, and 40 that have applied for certification. According to the most recent newsletter, 4% of the world’s total wild fish supply is now in the MSC assessment process. Right now, though, the only sustainably produced wild fish you can by at Whole Foods is Alaska Salmon.
The FSC claims that it has certified about 42 million hectares in more than 60 countries.out of 3.9 billion hectares of forest worldwide. The FSC partners with major buyers of wood products, including Home Depot and Kinkos.
When I lived in Boston (til 1999), I had friends who were excited by Community Supported Agriculture, also known as Farm Shares. This is essentially subscription farming. A small farm sells subscriptions to a growing season's worth of produce for $300 - $400. A successful CSA might have a few hundred customers. Every week, the customers are delivered a box of fresh produce.
At the time, this seemed to be socially beneficial but economically challenging, and that picture doesn't seem to have changed. A successful CSA generating $350/month from 250 customers yields $525,000 for a farm with a few employees and capital costs. Most farmers aren't doing nearly that much business. The median number of customers was 20. According to this survey, the median gross income from a CSA farm was $15,000.
A successful CSA, like this one requires a challenging combination of farming, person-to-person customer service and grass-roots marketing savvy. Given the economics and skill mix required, I wonder whether a franchising program of sorts would help?
With the cost of land near customers, it's not clear that this could ever be profitable without systemic land subsidy. Of course, the current agricultural system is heavily subsidized, but the subsidies support big corporations. And there is plenty of private support for institutions (churches) that provide services communities find valuable. But today, only a tiny minority feel that they want to subsidize a local farm.
In any event, it's clear that organic farming is economically viable in today's market system, and sustainable fish and forests might be. But CSA looks like it's not.
Meanwhile, the global water supply is integrated very poorly into the market system, so agricultural and individual users of water have little interest to conserve. Full privatization is wrong too -- poor people would die of thirst.
Global warming needs political solutions, and the US government has its head in the sand while the ice caps melt.
Potentially promising progress in some areas, solutions further away in others.
danah boyd wants to like Books We Like, an online service for collective discounts and recommendations in book purchasing.
In the comments, Brad deGraf writes about supporting the import of an existing book spreadsheet, and a future feature that will import Amazon wishlists.
Even nicer would be something that combined an Amazon purchase list, with the "I've read that" responses to Amazon's recommendations (which catch books you've read but not bought on Amazon).
For this to work, Amazon would need to componentize its records of the books its customers have purchased (from them or elswhere). Then Amazon, or somebody else, would enable the user to create a public view that could weed out gift books (Audobon Quarterly, for the birdwatching uncle), and purchases one might rather not advertise.
Or perhaps, if more purchases are done through Books We Like, their database will become the master for more of us, rather than Amazon's.
Because BWL is an infomediary, they would have more of an interest than Amazon in providing tools for individuals to manage and combine their book databases. Amazon offers APIs but has a conflict -- they have less of an interest in letting customers control their own data.
SixApart, maker of TypePad and Movable Type weblog services and tools just bought LiveJournal, driving business praise and social angst about the role of the merger on the community.
LiveJournal is a hosted online journal community that is thriving and well-loved by its millions of active participants. danah boyd worries that SixApart will suppress freedom of expression. "My second concern is that Six Apart will not be prepared to deal with the userbase and will initiate practices that are more detrimental because of fear. [For example, what's the best way to handle an LJ community dedicated to cutters trying to outdo each other via images?"
The social implications of the merger are foretold by Clay Shirky's writings on Nomic online worlds. When online communities have commercial hosts (or non-commercial hosts who own the server and the code), some differences between the will of the citizens and the business interests of the hosts are inevitable.
Shirky's article had some interesting and prescient reflections on models for online community governance. Just as democracies evolved to reconceptualize rulers as public servants, elected at the discretion of the populace, there may eventually emerge models of community governance where the host is chosen and serves terms at the discretion of the community.
In order for this to work, content needs to be a lot more portable and platforms need to be more commoditized. And there will need to be new rules and traditions for the management and governance of community infrastructure. In the long run, fees are taxes, governance is the will of the people, and online infrastructure services are public services like roads and schools.
Meanwhile, the in physical world, there's a trend toward the privatization and corporatization of neighborhoods, controlled by developers and management companies. These corporate-sponsored neighborhoods run into the same sorts of tensions as corporate-sponsored online communities.
In the 90s, Disney Corporation's efforts to develop Celebration, a Disney-branded community with houses, schools, and community services drew lots of attention. The pristine Disney vacation image foundered in the day to day reality of school board politics, and Disney eventually sold celebration.
The commercial quality control of the management companies conflicts with free speech in the physical world. There's a bill in the Texas Legislature to permit the display of large American flags, in violation of management company enforced decorum.
Online and in 3D, there are tensions between neighborhoods and corporate hosts. Democracy has value, whether the infrastructure is bits or pixels.
The Birth of the Mind, by Gary Marcus, tells a fascinating story discovered in recent years about how genes drive the development of the brain. The primary puzzle is how 30,000 genes enable the creation of billions of neurons and trillions of connections. The answer is that genes aren't like a blueprint with each gene coding for a component. Instead, genes act like computer programs, with behavior that is switched on and modified based on developmental and contextual cues. Brain wiring isn't complete at birth or in childhood. Learning consists of rewiring the brain across the human lifespan.
Marcus hypothesizes for further research that the difference betweeen humans and chimpanzees isn't just brain size, it's differences in the developmental program. The same components are re-used and extended -- the "then" parts of the genetic conditionals -- the proteins produced -- are the same but the "if" sections are different -- the conditions and sequence in which the proteins are produced.
One of the interesting areas of discovery how modules are repurposed. The FOXP2 gene has been discovered to play a role in human language capabilities; it's also used in the heart, lungs, and other areas. Another gene, PAX6, which controls eye-building, also used for "development of the central nervous system
and endocrine glands, and regulates a range of cellular processes, including proliferation, migration, adhesion and signalling." (from this paper by Marcus on FOXP2).
The story Marcus tells is complementary to the science sections of The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain, which describes the developmental patterns of neural growth. In human brains, neurons get extend and infiltrate from motory, sensory, and emotional centers through to centers of reason and planning, extending vocal calls to speech, foraging instincts to ethnic cuisine, emotions to poetry, weddings and funerals.
Unlike the Symbolic Species and recent books by Steven Pinker, Gary Marcus' mentor at MIT, this book doesn't stray as far into unprovable speculation about human nature and the origins of consciousness and culture. Which is just as well -- the science is fascinating with less speculation. It is quite a thrill to read about a body of scientific knowledge that is growing so rapidly.
Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves is on the speculation side of the continuum. No surprise, since Dennett's a philosopher. The book tries to show how evolution can give rise to free will.
The first part of the book is a defense of an old philosophical perspective called "compatibilism", whereby human free will is compatible with a deterministic universe. Even though natural events are predetermined, humans can choose to avoid determined events. For example, I might be genetically nearsighted, but can choose to wear glasses. The logical failure case is the intersection of multiple agents that each have free will. Ghandi chose nonviolent tactics to oppose British colonial rule, Indians chose to follow Gandhi's nonviolent approach, and the British agreed to concede.
Following the defense of compatibilism, Dennett cites game theory and evolutionary biology to explain how humans may have evolved tendencies to co-operate, to develop ethical norms and social judgement. Dennett's discussion of ethics seems rather impoverished. The examples he gives are mostly about the use of prison as just punishment, rather than the less extreme ethical issues that pervade social life. When discussing "free will", Dennett tries to zero in on the rare circumstance of pure free choice, rather than the common situations where ones choices are influenced by habits (which one has chosen at some earlier date).
Dennett is vehemently in opposition to traditional, religiously derived perspectives. The book is studded with barbs against unnamed opponents who are supposedly terrified of the liberating impact of Dennett's evolutionarily derived secular philosophy.
Yet spiritual thinkers from various traditions have more nuanced and insightful discussions about the range of ethical behavior, from parent-child relationships, to social gossip, to business ethics, to more extreme cases of crime and punishment. It is commonplace in Jewish ethical writing, for example, to talk about choosing good companions, teachers and habits to foster good choices.
Like Steven Pinker, Dennett scornfully replaces traditional ethical thought with modern, science-justified speculations that don't, however, seem particularly wise. It is possible that moral philosophy guided by evolutionary science will contribute wisdom about the human condition; but these writers haven't done it.
The developing science of mind, shaped by research in genetics, developmental biology, psychology, computational modeling, and evolutionary analysis is generating fascinating results. So far, the science seems more compelling to me than the philosophical speculation surrounding it.
In an Edge interview, Gary Marcus talks about how his perspective on the "nature/culture" issue differs from his mentor, Steven Pinker.
Pinker allows less room for improving the human condition than I would. I don't think we disagree a whole lot about the nature of the facts, but Pinker tends to put his emphasis on the ways in which the biology constrains us in one direction or another, and he puts less emphasis on ways in which learning can change those things. I would say that the ability to learn is actually one of the things that humans are really good at. One of our unique talents is an incredible facility for learning, an incredible flexibility in learning, that even some of our closest primate cousins don't have. Our miraculous abilities to learn actually open up lots of possibilities, and by not stressing this, Pinker in his latest book paints a somewhat darker picture of human nature than I would.
Jared Diamond's latest book is superb. Collapse tells the story of civilizations that collapsed as a result of environmental destruction (Easter Island, the Maya), and societies that avoided a similar fate with prudent decision making (Japan).
The book surpasses earlier books covering similar cautionary material, including
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations
Here's why the book is so good.
In addition to stories about civilizations that collapsed as a result of environmental degradation (Easter Island, the Maya), Diamond also tells the story of societies that managed to avoid environmental distruction through prudent and farsighted decision-making (the Japanese Tokugawa shogus decided to stop logging and reforest; Tikopia, the Pacific island that decided to stop raising pigs because the pigs were destructive to the island's fragile vegetation, though pigs were prestigous in Polynesian culture. Diamond provides examples of societies (including Japan) that made decisions to protect their environment by top-down command, and societies that made similar decisions through bottom-up processes (like the New Guinea Highlands).
Diamond does comparative analysis, assessing various environmental and geopolitical factors, showing, for example, how Easter Island's ecosystem was more fragile than other Polynesian colonies, and how Greenland's environment was less appropriate for Scandinavian customs than other Norse colonies. He shows how environmental initial conditions interacted with cultural practices and decisions to facilitate decline. The comparative approach lends credibility to the analysis of contemporary cultures (Australia, China) threatened by environmental degradation.
The treatment of the environmental records of big businesses is another area where Diamond's balance give's the book credibility and usefulness. For example, Diamond compares the record of Chevron, which maintained a meticulous record of environmental responsibily in its Indonesian oil drilling, with the reprehensible record of Pertamina, also drilling for oil in Indonesia. He compares the grudging acquiescense of Arco at cleaning up polluted mines in Montana, with the evil record of Pegasus Gold, which left its Montana mines leaking cyanide, took $5 million in bonuses for the board of directors, and declared bankruptcy to avoid cleanup responsibility
Diamond also provides valuable perspective on the best places for citizen activism to have leverage. For example, the drive for sustainable wood harvesting has been led by big consumer-facing companies, including Home Depot and Kinkos, which are huge buyers of wood products, and are highly sensitive to public opinion. The logging companies that supply them don't care about habitat or individual consumers -- but they do care about the bulk purchases of Home Depot.
Diamond avoids the hyperbole of doom used by some environmentalists as a rhetorical strategy. And he shows how some societies managed to make good decisions, in time to successfully reverse decline. Therefore his assessment of the risk faced by our interconnected global civilization, and the responsibility faced by leaders and citizens, is more persuasive, and more chilling.
It's early January, but this may be the best book to read all year.
Not long ago, I read two good history books from alternate schools of history.
Willard Sterne Randall's biography of Alexander Hamilton tells the life story of a "great man" -- how Alexander Hamilton overcame poverty and social prejudice against his out-of-wedlock birth, through ambition, hard work, and what we'd call networking -- to become a leading figure in the founding of the United States.
The catchy but shallow metaphorical "frames" of George Lakoff make one nostalgic for the good, old-fashioned Enlightenment. The 18th century world had slavery shadowing the rhetoric of freedom, and plenty of smaller vicious customs like tarring and feathering and duels. The politics of the time were often vicious, personal, and corrupt. Hamilton was vain, insecure, and contentious; biographies of other founding fathers reveal plenty of flaws.
But the bold and ultimately successful ambition of the founding fathers leave the student of history in awe. Alexander Hamilton made a comprehensive study of European economic and financial theory and practice, and drew up a blueprint for a nation's financial institutions.
Following an election campaign in which George Bush's indifference to ideas and facts was portrayed as a strength, and Kerry's nuanced equivocation made intellect seem weak, it's inspiring to read about founding fathers who were both smart and brave, and whose intellectual achievements were integral to their bravery.
The book is relatively weak on Hamilton's contributions to the structure and philosophy of US government (he wrote most of the Federalist papers), and his role in creating the US financial system. Chernow's more recent biography is probably the place to go for more substance on those topics.
The Hamilton bio is surprisingly strong on the twists and turns of the Revolutionary war. Battles and feints that come off as "one thing after another" in textbook accounts make sense as strategic moves and historical turning points. The sheer stress and uncertainty are brought to life.
In contrast to the old-fashioned individual and dramatic focus of "Alexander Hamilton", Cod takes a broader, impersonal look at world history through the theme of the prosaic codfish, which supported economic life and cooking from Iberia to Scandinavia, Canada to the Carribean for hundreds of years.
The cod was part of the North America/Carribean/European trade that gave Alexander Hamilton his initial opportunity -- as a teenager, he started as a clerk in a trading house on the Carribean island of Nevis. His bosses, New York traders, eventually paid his way to college and introduced him to New York business, political and social circles.
Cod was a core part of the trade economy that the American Colonists went to war to protect; taxes on molasses, and later on sugar and tea penalized the Carribean leg of the trade route. The New England cod trade was part of the painful irony of the American revolution -- New Englanders defended their rights to be represented in tariff decisions, and voiced opposition to slavery on principle, but were silent about the role of slaves in the far side of their trade routes.
The story, in the end, is an environmental fable. North American fisheries have proven unable to refrain from destroying the cod population with factory fishing methods. By contrast, Iceland has managed to understand the danger, and reduce fishing to sustainable levels.
The decline of fish, soil and water are part of a current danger to civilization -- Jared Diamond's latest, on the role of environmental mismanagement in the fall of civilizations throughout history, is at the top of the pile to read next.
For Peterme who always asks for recommendations, the lively recounting of the revolutionary war is the strongest reason to read the Hamilton biography. Cod is a strong addition to the shelf of commodity-oriented social history, with an appealing system picture connecting food, politics, and the environment.
Neither book is brilliant, both are good and well worth reading.