Category: Books

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was excellent Passover reading, for reasons I’ll explain. The book is set in a counterfactual present where secular Yiddish culture wasn’t crushed by the Holocaust. Instead, it migrated to a gritty frontier district in Alaska with yiddish-speaking cops, crooks, lowlifes, idling chess-players, dissolute klezmorim, pork-loving secularists and insular hassidim. According to a review at the Yiddish Book Center website, “the entire project actually began life as an essay from the late 1990s about a phrasebook called Say It in Yiddish, which seemed to Chabon to be a guidebook to a land that has never existed, where one needs to know how to say “What is the flight number?” and “I will call a policeman” in mameloshn.

In the book’s fictional world, Sitka Alaska becomes the refuge of millions of Jews after the Holocaust when the Zionist settlement in Israel was crushed. The refuge was temporary, the 60-year agreement is about to expire, and most Jews are facing deportation once more. The irreverent homicide detective hero is estranged from his ex-wife and nurses his alienation in a worlds-fair shot glass of slivovitz. The villains of the piece are a secretive chassidic sect who operate an organized crime ring and conspire to bring about redemption with a violent Messianic plot. The book explores classic Jewish themes of exile and redemption from thoroughly secular antimessianic perspective, making for tasty Passover reading.

The book was heavily advertised as the adventure of a literary author in the wilds of genre fiction. I was concerned that I’d find it over-written (for example, I hated Everything is Illuminated). But Chabon did a fine job of translating Chandler. His figurative language is apt. A few examples culled by a NYMag review Landsman’s ex-wife “accepts a compliment as if it’s a can of soda that she suspects him of having shaken.” A pretentious, overly formal journalist speaks Yiddish “like a sausage recipe with footnotes.” An awkward father-son hug “looked like the side chair was embracing the couch.” The neoyiddish slang is entertaining – a cellphone is a shoyfer and handgun is a sholem.

I had only two quibbles. The book has a characteristic of many mystery-thrillers – the plot climax is convoluted and cartoonlike; I stop caring, skim, and then read back to parse what is supposed to have happened. I care about the resolution of the characters and themes, but the plot to destroy the world, whatever. I’m glad to see that the book is getting a film treatment by the Coen brothers, and you can read the wannabe movie scenes in the vehicle chases and underground escapes.

The other quibble is a bit of political correctness. Spoiler alert, if you haven’t read the book yet and care….
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There are two key characters who die; one is a closeted gay man, and the other a macha bush pilot described as “lesbian in everything but sexual preference.” I thought we were 30-40 years past the date when people with sexuality off the center of the bell curve needed to meet a tragic end. It was entertaining that the woulda-been messiah was a gay ex-chassid junkie who tied off with tefillin, but I wished that he had found a nice boyfriend somewhere along the line.

I strongly recommend the book. Chabon has written a fun translation of Chandler into “Jewish”, does a great job with language, setting and atmosphere, a decent job with character and theme, and adapts the traditional plot in an entertaining manner. If you haven’t read it yet, enjoy.

Who are the agribusiness giants with a lock on so much of California’s water? The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American Empire is a history of the vast cotton empire in the dry bed of what used to be a large inland lake in the California central valley. The founders of the empire, Horatio Alger adventurers from Georgia, bought up land, had four rivers dammed, dried up the lake and used the water for irrigation.
The Georgia farm emperors brought elements of plantation culture with them; poor white, Mexican, and black laborers had rough lives, with the most opportunity available for whites, some opportunity for Mexican immigrants, and the least opportunity for black laborers, although racist violence and sharecropping oppression wasn’t as vicious as the south. There were attempts to organize, and grueling strikes; in the end unions lost their foothold.
The cotton empire was able to lock in its own water supply from the rivers that used to feed the lake, so they weren’t involved in the great state and federal water projects that send Sierra water south. They did participate in the strange alliance between Northern environmentalists and central valley agriculture to defeat the peripheral canal in the early 80s; the greens thought the proposal didn’t protect the environment enough, and the farmers thought that it might protect the environment too much. The cotton giants also played a role in the endless legal battles to work around the 160 acre limit for federally funded irrigation projects, a rule which was only obeyed in creative workarounds and exceptions. The book has interesting, behind-the-scenes glimpses of the seduction of politicians to support the exemptions.
The book touches on the environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture; the destruction of the native habitat, of course; the poisoning of water, fish, birds from toxic buildup in the water; the poisoning of workers from pesticides, and the hostility of the farmers to the scientists attempting to measure the impact of the poisons.
The authors are former LA Times journalists, and it shows in the style. The story is built, piece by piece, from interviews with the secretive main character, family members, executives, retired laborers, washington lobbyists, and from records of legislative sausage-making and legal battles. The strength of the style is journalistic narrative drama and attention to detail, in stories about family feuds, boardroom battles, and immigrant sagas; and a fine eye for tragedies that passed un-noticed in the wider world; the babies who died of hunger in strikes, a 16-year old black farm worker without a license who died when the truck he was driving overturned, the Native Americans who remembered the once lush lake territory. As journalists in the muckraking tradition, the authors have a keen sense for corruption at petty and grand scales. The book’s weakness is a lack of systematic perspective on the social, political, and environmental context. The authors are Californians and have a strong feel for the background stories. They have opinions that shape the stories, and they state their conclusions explicitly at the end; plantation agriculture is by its nature bad for democracy, and the balance between commerce and environment has been drawn much too far towards commerce. But the authors’ style or knowledge shies away from the big picture.
Conclusions for peterme: I strongly recommend this book. Excellent in sweep, drama and detail. I bought the book wanting to learn more about California’s agribusiness giants, and their role in politics, environment, society, and the book satisfied those goals.
The book also got me thinking more about cotton. I prefer to buy produce local and organic where possible, but hadn’t given too much thought about fabric. Given the environmental cost of cotton, perhaps I should go for organic cotton too. But where farmers market food is a good value in high season, and the quality is astoundingly great, organic cotton staples seem to be 4x the price of conventional, the selection is skimpy, and the quality, hard to say. Organic cotton seems to be at an earlier stage of market maturity than organic food, which was pricy and scrawny 20 years ago. Being an early adopter will help grow the market.

What was most interesting to me about Citrus: A History was not any of these main threads of the story: origins in Asia, spread by Jewish and Arab trade and settlement in Europe, its spread the the New World with colonialism and slavery, the connection to real estate empires in Florida and California. Other intriguing sections of the book include a citrus grower in the Carribbean who was a pioneer in the anti-slavery movement, and the role of citrus crate art in promoting the myth of California. But what was most interesting to me about the book is its premature victory hymn to the triumph of industrial agriculture.
The author, Pierre Laszlo, is an emeritus chemistry professor, and he is attracted to the stories of the early and mid-20th century government scientists who innovated in finding and developing new strains of citrus and growing methods. Without irony or caveat, he praises the great California irrigation projects that send Northern California’s water through the Sacramento/San Joaquin delta into the Central Valley, to feed vast citrus plantations. If a dedicated policy and scientific program was able to create today’s monoculture agricultural empires, a different policy and scientific research could create different, and more sustainable results.
An Amazon reviewer criticized the book for being like a cut-and-paste collection of Wikipedia entries. The criticism has some merit. Orange: A History, takes many of its anecdotes from easily-found secondary sources The book certainly does not have the coherent narrative and research of classics in the genre, like Sidney Mintz Sweetness and Power, which tells a powerful and tragic story of the rise of sugar production through the colonial system, and Cod, by Mike Kurlansky, which tells the tragic story of the decline of the once-ubiquitous Atlantic fish. Some cursory browsing finds some of the claims in Orange dubious. It’s a nice story that citrus was first brought to Europe and North America by Jews using the citron to celebrate Sukkot, but it is contradicted by other easy-to-find sources.
Summary: if you’d enjoy a collection of anecdotes about the history of citrus, you’ll enjoy this book. If you want to read some brilliant nonfiction on the history of food, read Mintz on Sugar or Kurlansky on Cod instead if you haven’t already.

How does “Kos”, the founder of the vast DailyKos web-based liberal community site, think about online organizing? Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in the Digital Era is Markos Moulitsas Zuniga’s manifesto, a self-concious descendent of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for radicals.
It seems counterintuitive, but much of Kos’ methodology for online organizing is about using digital tools for storytelling and advocacy to affect traditional broadcast media. Where 60s radicals got the attention of the mass media with colorful street protest, those tactics have worn out much their usefulness. 21st century organizers use the net to bring stories to the mainstream media and keep stories on the air; like Trent Lott’s support for segregation and Virginia Congressman George Allen’s “macaca” racism.
Kos’ thinking is much like a mass media political consultant; he thinks in terms of creating compelling narratives with heroes and villains, suspense and victory. He takes lessons from the right wing think tanks in terms of “working the referees” by providing prepackaged opinions and spokespeople for progressive ideas. And he has tactics for political combat, such as “punch up, not down” – making powerful political enemies can be an advantage if it brings fame and credibility.
Kos is proud to be more partisan than ideological. He believes with some justification that the weakness of the left has been the focus on ideological purity and individual causes above pragmatic victory. So environmental groups and womens groups would support moderate Republican candidates, even though a Republican majority would be on the whole much worse for the causes of the environment and reproductive freedom.
But a tactical, pragmatic, narrative-oriented approach could also lead to winning battles but losing the overall war. Without an overall progressive vision, it’s hard to say which compromises to make. It’s one thing to help get candidates elected; and other thing to monitor that the candidates are actually better once elected.
Kos’ tactical focus on influencing the existing mass media is effective and powerful. It is only counterintuitive from the perspective of naive techno-determinists. At the same time, the tactical focus leaves for others more ambitious efforts to “be the media.” The “talking heads” shows will continue to be influential, and placing new and different speakers is needed to change the terms of debate. Meanwhile, over at TalkingPointsMemo, Josh Marshall gradually builds an alternative model literate, partisan, rigorous journalism.
Taking on the System avoids what I think is the worst weakness of Alinsky’s work. Alinsky conceived of political organizing as enabling the powerless to confront the powerful. By definition, the organizer works behalf of those without power; it would be a contradiction in terms for the powerless to win. Kos doesn’t have any trouble thinking about winning; it may not be fast or easy; but it is possible and desirable to pass civil rights legislation for gay people and to staff Congress with progressive democrats with backbone. Where Alinsky led protests, Kos leads efforts to get candidates elected and and unelected.
But an attraction to power can lead to co-optation. It has been exciting to see NetRoots Nation, the conference for progressive bloggers, draw the presidential candidates and many congressional leaders, showing that the netroots have become an influential constituency. But it was disconcerting and distressing that while NetRoots nation was under way in 2008, while bloggers were hobnobbing with legislators and party honchos, Congress passed an extension to the FISA legislation that legitimized warrantless wiretapping. Liberal bloggers were partying while the Democratic congress helped mortgage the constitution; the netroots didn’t or couldn’t use the access of Netroots Nation to demand adherence to the constitution.
Kos’ pugnacious partisanship appears to be a stark contrast to Barack Obama’s vision of transcending red and blue America, though, in standing up for himself against attacks and proactively defining his opponents, Obama is demonstrating the desired backbone. Time will tell whether the postpartisan rhetoric and zealous partisan advocacy are complementary, with the partisans creating air cover for the post-partisan success; or whether they are opposed, with an outcome of cross-party harmony, or progressive victory with victors setting the terms. My guess is that they are complementary; a guess bolstered by the Obama campaign’s late unleashing of 527s to help with campaign defense.
Kos himself focuses largely on media and message; he pays much less attention to the nitty gritty of getting out the vote, fundraising, and lobbying once the candidates are elected. Which isn’t to say these things aren’t important; the large Kos community is a platform for much fundraising, cheering and support for volunteers doing canvassing and voter registration; and some legislative advocacy too. I don’t think that Markos himself would argue that his interests are the only important aspect of organizing, and would be glad to acknowledge these complementary disciplines.
In a few places, Kos’ wisdom comes across as a bit facile. In one chapter, he exhorts entrepreneurial organizers to boldly reach beyond their previous experience and not ask for permission to lead. The organizers of Netroots Nation taught themselves how to coordinate a conference and then recruited pros. Eli Pariser taught himself the brand new art of email advocacy. In another chapter, he encourages activists to stick to their knitting, and not to go beyond their area of core strength, as when Cindy Sheehan attempted unsuccessfully to play a larger role as global peace activist. Stick to your knitting and dare to dream are both fine aphorisms, but how to tell which is which? Kos doesn’t really say.
Overall, Kos’ book is a strong contribution for those who want to participate in online organizing, and those who want to understand the role of DailyKos and the Netroots. Clay Shirky’s Here Come’s Everybody was light on how new digital tools will be used for organizing. Taking On the System provides a rich picture of a critical set of tactics and methods for organizing online.

This weekend I read three very different books on the human mind and brain.
Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence poses a speculative theory about how the neocortex works. Hawkins asserts that the distinctive aspect of human intelligence is that it allows us to make predictions. Based on a few strands of previous research, some insight, and aggressive reverse engineering, Hawkins proposes a neural architecture that enables humans to generalize patterns from raw sensation, allowing us to predict the next notes of a familiar song and to extend knowledge with analogies.
The hypothesis about how the neocortex works is interesting. The way that it proposes the generation of predictions by a combination of top-down and bottom up feedback is clever. The observation that sense-making requires a dimension of time — not just music, but touch and sight — is insightful. Unlike the evolutionary hypothesis of say, Terrence Deacon on the origins of symbolic thinking, Hawken’s algorithm is testable. However, Hawkins’ understanding of intelligence leaves out some crucial factors. Hawkins is interested in the mind as disconnected from emotions and desires. He believes that computers that have predictive intelligence without ambition, lust or greed will have the good of human intelligence, without the flaws introduced by the passions.
This dualistic vision ignores the insights of Antonio Damasio, a neurologist whose theory of intelligence embraces the emotions. Damasio observes patients with injuries to emotional processing, and finds that they lack the senses of fear and anticipation that enable people to make functional decisions. A lack of normal empathy prevents someone from getting along with other people. A computer that implemented predictive learning without emotions might be some combination of sociopathic and unwise. A computer that implemented learning without boredom and forgetting might not even be optimally effective at synthesis.
Hawkins focuses on the connections between neocortex and senses, but ignores the connections between neocortex and emotional parts of the brain. The neuroscience bits of Deacon’s book explain how in humans, the connections between the limbic system and the neocortex became intertwined as humans evolved. There’s a biological basis to Damasio’s observation that emotions are part of intelligence.
Where Hawkins focuses on human intelligence as a superb prediction engine, Gary Marcus focuses on the flaws and glitches in human smarts in areas such as decision-making, language, pleasure-seeking, and mental illness. In Kluge, the Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Marcus counters against evolutionary and anti-evolutionary arguments that the human mind reflects the best of possible worlds. Instead, the mind is a hodgepodge awkwardly cobbled together.
We don’t do a good job of making decisions about financial risk, or resisting temptation, because of our biological tendency to maximize short-term gain. Here, Markus shares a bias with Hawkins, that reason would result in better outcomes. But if you eliminated the motivations of hope, greed and fear, a rational being might not take the risks that drive good as well as bad aspects of human society.
Marcus points out the ambiguities in human language as a sign of the awkward results of evolution assembling a speech system from older parts. Here, what Marcus sees as a bug, Hawkins might see as a feature or at least a side effect. Ambiguity in language is a result of the generalizing, pattern-matching engine that drives human intelligence. The same design that makes it hard for us to remember details makes it possible for us to recognize and create new patterns.
Marcus’ book is flawed because he compares workings of the human brain with a straw man that has perfect reason. The interesting thing is not how the human mind is perfect, or how it breaks, but why it works the way it does, and how the way things break shows the way things work most of the time.
This is the focus of Oliver Sachs’ Musicophilia. Where Hawkins and Marcus are theorists, Sachs is an anecdotalist. He tells story after story of individuals who gained heightened musical abilities, or diminished musical abilities, due to changes in the brain. The stories themselves are fascinating but have little theory to explain why most humans are attracted to music, or to explain the aspects of the brain that govern parts of musical appreciation and skill.
Reading Musicophilia alongside Hawkins, it makes sense that music plays on the human mind’s attraction to structure and mild surprise. The recent advances in therapies depending on neuroplasticitity are also nicely explained with a theory of how the neocortex is designed for continuous learning. The stories of how memory of musical performance and sequence is retained in patients who can’t store new memories can be explained by a theory that old memories and learned processes are storied differently than new stuff.
Summary recommendations, for Peterme.
* I liked On Intelligence. Some reviewers give Hawkins grief because he brings very little evidence of the neurological or biohistorical basis of his speculations. He was frustrated by the lack of academic support for the kind of science he wanted to do as a younger man; and so he thumbs his nose at the establishment and its puny traditions of supporting arguments. Nevertheless, his argument is testable, so evidence will win in the end. The bigger weakness is his discounting of the role of emotion in intelligence.
* I didn’t like Kluge. I thought it was much weaker than Marcus’ earlier books, which had a stronger grounding in scientific detail, melding infant development, evolutionary developmental biology, and computer modeling. In his earlier books, Marcus built interesting arguments about brain development from rich evidence. This book has some interesting anecdotes, but is mostly a polemic against some common fallacies. The fact that the straw men are common doesn’t make debunking them more interesting; the book reads like he is arguing against poorly educated undergrads.
* I liked Musicophilia, despite its limitations. The book consists of anecdote after anecdote, without much connecting theory; but the stories are interesting, and it’s an entree onto some hopefully more robust studies on music, mind, and neuroplasticity.

There is a fascinating book that I don’t think has been written yet, on the social history of statistics. This book isn’t it.
The Lady Tasting Tea by David Salsburg is entertaining for a geeky value of entertaining, but it doesn’t live up to its subtitle. The book is a set of biographical sketches of the people who pioneered statistical techniques such as analysis of variance, significance tests, sampling methods. It mentions a few sentences on the impact of stats on experimental design, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other scientific topics, but doesn’t go into any depth on the impact on scientific practices or discoveries.
The anecdotes about the careers of the pioneering statisticians raise interesting questions about the relationship between statistics and modern industry. The book’s heroes work in agriculture, measuring yield and pesticides; industrial process control, monitoring the production of beer and cotton. They also contributed to social policy, working out theory and politics of eugenics; measuring economic activity for the new deal.
It’s interesting reading these stories in the context of the debacle of modern industrial food production. Controlling the variations in batches of Guinness led to the bland hegemeny of Budweiser; the study of yields in England led to the pesticide and fertilizer treadmill, soil decline, and big dead zones in the ocean. Chester Bliss’ pesticide experiments showed that at any dose of pesticides, some bugs survived. In the short run, his calculations led to effective doses; in the long run, to pesticide-resistant bugs. Incremental progress and quality control that seemed so rational and positive turned out to have counterproductive results.
It’s interesting that the heroes of Salsburg’s book are so obscure compared to the scientists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers of the last two centuries. Statistics appears as the servant to science and politics and industry. In the 20th century there’s an aspect of Tom Lehrer’s apolitical rocket scientist Werner von Braun — “once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down.”
The story I’d really like to read would be a comprehensive social history of statistics — the relationship between statistics and the evolution of modern society and industry. There are some interesting-looking books about Eighteen Century public health and the emergence of statistical thinking in the 19th century. How did the trends continue into the 20th century? A number of Salsburg’s subjects created departments of statistics in the mid-20th century, presumably to meet a growing need. It would be interesting to see a graph of where those students went to work in industry and government. Was the answer just “everywhere”? Or is the adoption of statistical methods uneven, and does this tell any interesting stories?
Summary: Salsburg’s book adds some interesting biographical spice to names and terms that many people know only from menu items in math programs. But don’t expect in-depth history.

The Country in the City tells the story how Bay Area residents organized to preserve open space. It is an inspiring and encouraging tale. The evidence of success is visible on any clear day. The culture and organizing practices that kept the hills green is active today, as Bay Area towns organize to combat greenhouse gas emissions.
The story of California water by contrast, is an ongoing tale of human folly. Battling the Inland Sea, by Robert Kelley, focuses on the efforts to deal with chronic flooding in the Sacramento / SanJoaquin delta. The Great Thirst is a magisterial overview of water use and water wars in California.
Robert Kelley wasn’t just a bystander to the ironies of water history, but an actor. In the the 50s, he served as an expert witness, marshaling the history of the century of failed efforts to control flooding in the delta. The earlier efforts, he concluded, were doomed to fail because they lacked a comprehensive perspective of the delta water system. Estimates of the volume of seasonal floods were off by factors of hundreds. Piecemeal flood control efforts were next to useless.
Kelley puts the history of delta flood control in the perspective of the history of California political culture. In the 1800s, politics was polarized between Democrats, who distrusted central authority and formal education, and believed in local control, and Whigs, who believed in the enlightened rule of an educated elite. The local-control approach to flood control was a disaster. Landowners on either side of a river mounted futile arms races to build levees on their side of the river and sabotage the levee on the other side.
During the civil war era, Southerners broke with the Whig party, and the remnants formed the Republicans, but the traits of political culture remained. The centralizing, technocratic, elitist impulse held sway in the early 20th century and enabled larger, more centralized projects. Kelley seemingly sympathizes with the Whig point of view. With the massive, California State Water Project in the 50s and 60s, Kelley is confident that they finally got it right (I have the 1989 edition from the library, I don’t know if he’s more appropriately pessimistic in the 1998 version)
But they didn’t. The vast quantities of water siphoned from the delta has left the ecosystem on the verge of collapse. A judge’s recent order limiting water export from the Delta to protect the endangered Delta Smelt has thrown the system into disarray. A recent special legislative session to deal with the water issues ended without agreement.
Reading the 150 year history of the Inland Sea in the context of current events is sobering enough. The Great Thirst surveys California’s water follies with a panoramic perspective of California’s massive water works. The draining of the Sacramento Delta to irrigate farms and supplement Southern California’s water supply is parallel to Los Angeles’ taking of Owens River water, and San Francisco’s appropriation of Tuolumne river water with the Hetch Hetchy dam.
In recent decades the hubris of the great waterworks has been tempered by values of conservation and environmental protection. The LA area has learned conservation lessons — its population has grown over the last 20 years, but water consumption has barely increased Scientists have realized that surface water and groundwater supplies are connected, and groundwater recharge is seen as a major source of storage.
Systematic problems remain. Farmers get subsidized water at 1/100th of the cost paid in the city, and farmers consuming 80% of the state’s water. Pesticides, industrial pollutants, and urban runoff pollute groundwater and streams. There are periodic droughts. Meanwhile, global warming threatens to cut water supply by 50% or more.
Like Kelley, Hundley puts the history of water in the context of political culture. Hundley’s analysis is proportionate to the book’s broader scope.
Hundley contrasts the system of California’s early Spanish rulers — central authority dividing water proportionately, in times of need, for the common good — with the American system. The American system has been cobbled together from a hodge podge of legal principles, including riparian (water control to the landowner of the banks of the river), appropriator (whoever claims the water first), and homesteader (a principle of Reclamation law, honored more in the breach than the observance, which allocated water only to small independent farmers). None of these principles recognizes compromise and common good; and a result has been endless court battles in the attempt to win a zero sum game.
While “The City in the Country” left readers with the feeling that concerted organizing can make a big difference in the environmental health of a region. The books on water history leave the reader with the feeling that our civilization is not unlikely to head down the path of ancient Mesopotamia, where irrigation led slowly toward environmental and political demise.

Have you ever wondered what all of those gizmos were in the local power station? Wondered how water treatment works? The benefits and drawbacks of different styles of bridges? Brian Hayes, whose day job is a senior writer at American Scientist, didn’t just wonder. He took pictures over a 15 year period, found out how things worked, and explained it to the rest of us in Infrastructure, The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape. As a science writer, Hayes avoids “coffee table book” syndrome, where beautiful pictures are matched with superficial text. He figures out how the system works and explains it. The pictures are fabulous, and would be even better if they were complemented by some diagrams with labels — it wasn’t always easy to figure out which bit of circuitry or process gear was which (the picture below is a set of air-blast switches with porcelain insulators at the Ravenswood power plan in Queens).

The hardback first edition was titled: “A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape.” Hayes describes the artifacts of the industrial landscape like nature guides describe birds and mountains. While describing the artifacts and systems, Hayes also strives to explain why the industrial landscape is obscure to many of us. From Hayes’ point of view a major reason for the obscurity of industrial objects in plain sight is that industrial infrastructure has an image problem. There is a great divide between the green/populist image of “Dark Satanic Mills” and the reality of the engineered systems that our society depends on, which have a pragmatic intricacy, elegance and beauty of their own. Hayes sees a self-reinforcing gulf between the negative stereotype of the industrial landscape, and the paranoid and secretive attitude of some industrial organizations. Hayes therefore describes the industrial systems as they are, without much critique, in the hope of increasing appreciation and understanding.
Still, Hayes notices the smokestack-scrubbing, emissions-reducing, landscape-restoring, material recycling, and other environmental innovations that have modified industrial systems in recent decades. These were put into place because of valid criticism of the destruction wrought by industry. Mining companies that behead mountains in West Virginia and oil refineries that create cancer alley in the Houston area may be secretive because they don’t want to share information about the harm they cause.
Seeing the big picture of industrial systems also felt like looking at a crystal on the verge of phase change. Oil processing, roads and bridges for gas-fueled cars and trucks, centralized energy power plants and big power grids; factory farms; massive waste creation and disposal systems — all of these depend on the last century’s abundance of cheap energy, and much of it is going to change, hopefully without civilization collapsing. Renewable, decentralized energy generation, electrified transport, sustainable agriculture, cradle to cradle no-waste manufacturing or bust. I’m wanting to read “Infrastructure” as annotated by Natural Capitalism and the Journal of Industrial Ecology, showing the opportunities to reduce wasted material and energy throughout the industrial ecosystem. I hope that this book appears 50 years from now like a tour guide to Colonial Williamsburg, with descriptions of blacksmithing, barrel-making, candle-dipping, quill pen cutting, tub laundry, and other antique technologies.

The thesis of Cats Paws and Catapults is an argument against naive biomimicry. There is a fashionable and romantic belief that natural design is “better” than manmade technology, and human technologists should therefore borrow designs from nature.
The clearest counterarguments Steven Vogel brings are about locomotion by air and water. The attempt to use birds as a model for human flight set inventors off in the wrong direction. Birds are smaller than people, and so the characteristics of their flight technology is different. Larger entities need to go faster to stay aloft. Propellers and jets are superior to flapping wings for heavy humans; lighter birds don’t need the speed. Similarly, marine creatures are smaller than ships. Waves pose a significant barrier for smaller, lighter swimmers, so most marine locomotion happens beneath the surface of the water. Characteristics change yet again at smaller sizes; some insects like water striders are just the right size to take advantage of surface tension.
“Cat’s Paws” compares and contrasts human technology with natural technology in a range of domains: structure, shape, materials, locomotion, using lots of examples from the worlds of biology and artifact. Vogel explains the physical principles, benefits and tradeoffs for the different design approaches, using words to describe the basic math. The material would be even more fun and memorable with animated calculators that showed the changing properties of flight, structural support, and so on, allowing participants to see the impact of changing values. I wonder if this simulation exists somewhere.
The argument is made with a light hand, and the bulk of the book consists of delightful comparisons and contrasts between very different ways of solving design problems. When it comes to biomimicry, Vogel argues the most effective examples involve borrowing some aspects of a natural design, such as a dolphin’s streamlined shape inspiring aerodynamic vehicles, a beetle’s jaws inspiring chainsaw teeth, and the adhesive characteristics of burr inspiring velcro. The models are adapted from nature to the specific design problem and materials needed for the human requirement.
The critique of naive biomimicry focuses largely on the operating characteristics of the technologies: how they solve the presenting design problems of structure and motion. In doing so, Vogel misses a few key points about how and why human designers might want to emulate nature.
Vogel explains that human technology is able to leverage much higher temperatures and temperature ranges than natural technologies. The book, published in 1997, takes for granted the enormous amounts of seemingly cheap fossil fuel energy that allows humans to run our blast furnaces and jet engines. Sample throwaway quote: “One must remember that, their image makers notwithstanding, utility companies are in the business to sell, not save power.” (California fixed this in 1982, when the state Public Utilities Commission came up with the decoupling idea that would allow utility profits to grow while sales declined.)
Another topic that the book doesn’t address at all is waste. Human production processes have tended to create vast quantities of frequently harmful waste; smog, nonbiodegradable plastics, heavy metals in rivers, fertilizer-created dead zones in oceans. Natural processes tend to consume byproducts instead of creating waste, perhaps because they evolved at slower scale in the context of ecosystems, and perhaps because of accidents of chemistry. Birds digest fruit pulp and excrete the seeds that grow another plant. Animals at the end of their life become food for vultures, larvae, and bacteria.
To date, human industrial technologies have been hugely wasteful of energy and materials. Our culture needs more sustainable processes, not because it sounds romantic but because the current solutions won’t last. Vogel’s insight that natural models are best adapted, not borrowed, can be seen in industrial parks that use the byproducts of one manufacturing process as the feedstocks for another, and the use of microbes to detoxify industrial waste.
There are other areas where science and technology have gone beyond the information available to Vogel when he wrote the book a decade ago. Human artifacts are assembled or processed, while natural artifacts are grown. The growth process consists of an development process that creates the organism, and the ongoing chemical processes that sustain the organism; both sets of processes governed by genetic programs. Human products are often assembled at the macroscopic level, while biological products are assembled at the molecular and cellular levels. It would be interesting now, and probably even more interesting ten or twenty years from now, to read a version of the book taking into account insights and progress in the areas of gene-driven development and nanotechnology.

Recently read two books by physicians with different angles on the same topic: how doctors make mistakes. Jerome Groopman is an oncologist who writes in how Doctors Think about the prejudices, biases, and cognitive errors that result in missed diagnoses. Doctors make mistakes when they dislike their patients, when they like patients to much, when they fail to listen to patients enough; when they see the common and miss the unusual, when they are in love with their own expertise. Groopman focuses on the personal and interpersonal, the nuances the doctor-patient relationship and the thought processes in the doctor’s mind.
Atul Gawande is a surgeon who focuses in Better on system problems and process solutions; methods for mass immunization, saving the lives of wounded soldiers, combatting hospital infection, and extending the lives of cystic fibrosis patients. The two doctors advocate different paths to improvement; Gawande encourages increased measurement, system improvement, and standardization; Groopman encourages personal reflection and better communication with patients, and is distrustful (with evidence) of computer-aided protocols that lead doctors to override their better judgment.
While the two physicians have different takes on how to reduce mistakes, they seem both to be a part of an underlying shift in how doctors respond to mistakes. A desire to maintain authority and prevent liability discouraged doctors from acknowledging mistakes. The newer mindset sees that analyzing mistakes with a focus on learning rather than blame can help prevent more errors.
Both doctors criticize the impact of “managed care” on the quality of medicine. Groopman writes about how doctors are encouraged to rush, eliminating doctor-patient relationships, and how drug company perks affect doctors’ judgement. Gawande describes how insurance-company protocols are designed to reduce reimbursement rather than to improve care. Incentives in the US health care system for quality, cost, and accountability are not complementary. We keep paying more and get better technology but not on the whole better care.