Amsterdam, October 2023

An informal diary of our trip to Amsterdam, with pictures.

EP #11: Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood*, Oliver Sacks, 2001

Entry 11 in the Essays Project with CT; the ‘summer of Sacks’ has turned into the fall of Sacks. It is interesting to be getting such a comprehensive view of a single person’s life and writing. Uncle Tungsten was apparently written in response to the spontaneous surfacing of childhood memories as Sacks approached his 60th year. We’ve read some other essays from that time, mostly from Everything in its Place (essays on South Kensington and Humphry Davies), and found those very good though we hope considerable new ground will be covered. [Later: New ground is being covered — there is not a lot of repetition…]

* Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks, 2001.

w/KC: Four Essays by E. B. White* [The Planet]

September 2023

From “The Planet” section of the book “Essays of E. B. White.” Reading with KC, Fall 2023.

Part III: The Planet

Letter from the East (1975)

Reads, in fact, like a long letter to a friend or family member. Moves across a variety of topics: seeds and seed catalogs; a local wedding; mining; local aquaculture; the energy crisis and nuclear and tidal energy. It has a lot of nice turns of phrase:

EP #10*: The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks

*The River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ According to the introduction, this book was posthumously assembled at Sack’s direction a couple of weeks before his death. One of the catalysts was a televised panel with other notable scientists and scholars — Gould, Dyson, Dennet, etc. — that was later captured in a book called “A Glorious Accident.” This book contains a wide range of essays on scientific topics, with, I suspect, particular attention to history.

w/CS: Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flyn

September 2023

Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flynn, 2021.* This book looks at how nature — fungi, plants, animals – are re-colonize landscapes that have been destroyed and abandoned by humans. Examples include massive slag piles, nuclear test grounds, etc. It examines both how primary succession occurs in unpromising circumstances, and how the absence of human presence facilitates re-wilding. In the introduction, the author notes that we are now in the midst of a vast self-directed experiment in re-wilding, driven in part by the concentration of people in cities (and a soon-to-be-decreasing population), and in part by the depletion of non-sustainable natural resources that leave ‘waste lands’ behind.

Post-reading comment: There are three or four chapters in the book that are great, and really align with the aims laid out above. Unfortunately, more of the chapters, particularly as one progresses in the book, are more in the line of what I would call disaster tourism: lyrical descriptions of degraded environments and terrible situations, with little or no mention of how the ecosystem has adapted or not.

* Reading with CJS, fall of 2023

EP #9*: On the Move: A Life, Oliver Sacks

*On the Move, Oliver Sacks, 2015.

These are my notes on On the Move, Oliver Sacks autobiography (billed as volume 2, but the publisher, volume 1 being Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, written a couple of decades earlier). This is part of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ These are not, of course, essays, but we have become interested in Sacks, and it is interesting to see the essays against a fuller narrative of his life.

w/CS: Assembling California*, John McPhee

July 2023

* Reading with CJS. Page numbers cited are from Annals of the Former World, a collection of his work of which Assembling California is only one part. The parts of the AC, as described below, are not well-separated in the text; they only appear in the table of contents.

w/RB: An Immense World: : How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us, Ed Yong

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us, Ed Yong, 2022.

Overall, a good book. Yong writes well, and sometimes has very nice turns of phrase, though I’d say his gift is more for clarity and content than lyricism. The downsides of the book — small ones but nevertheless there — is that he often doesn’t go as deeply into the mechanisms and neurophysiology of sensing as I would like. It is also the case that one gets a bit of whiplash from looking first at this organism, and then at that, and then at that — but I don’t see how that could have been avoided in this sort of book.

To summarize briefly and incompletely, here are some of the points I found most interesting:

What we think of as a single sense (e.g., vision) can be quite complex. All of the following can be separate: distinguishing light from dark areas; color vision (and bi- tri- and tetra-achromatism); ability to see polarized and/or UC and/or infrared light; and more.
Also, the same sense can be configured and deployed in different ways: the shape of an organism’s visual field is tightly bound with its role in the food web; an organism may have one, two or multiple eyes, and may be able to move them independently; and so on.
Some senses seem easy to evolve, in that they have been independently evolved at many different points in time. And then lost, and then re-evolved.

April 2023 – February 2024

Introduction

The book begins with a fanciful description of a room with different creatures in it, including a human, a robin, an elephant, a spider, and so on. It uses this to make the point that the different creatures, although all in the same room, have radically different impressions of the room and its occupants. What is evident to one is invisible to another. An organism’s very particular view of its environment – is referred to as its umveldt, coined by Jacob Uexkull in 1909.

EP #8*: Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks

Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

These are my notes on Oaxaca Journal, by Oliver Sacks, 2019. This is part 8 of the course of essay reading I am doing with CT; in particular, this is part of what we have dubbed ‘The Summer of Sacks.’ Strictly speaking, these are not essays but rather chapters — or daily entries – from a journal he kept of a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with the American Fern Society.

Introduction

Sacks opens by writing of his love of the Natural History journals of the nineteenth century, and their blend of the personal and professional. He notes that most of the naturalists were essentially amateurs, self-taught, and feeling their way before or as biology and botany were crystalizing into sciences. He adds:

This sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egotism and a lust for priority and fame, still survives here and there, it seems to me, in certain natural history societies, and amateur societies of astronomers and archaeologists, whose quiet yet essential existences are virtually unknown to the public. It was the sense of such an atmosphere that drew me to the American Fern Society in the first place, that incited me to go with them on their fern-tour to Oaxaca early in 2000.
Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, p xiv

w/KC: The Immense Journey, Loren Eisley

May 2023; July 2023

Essays by Loren Eisley, first published in 1946. Although an independent book, I am reading these essays (with KC) in a two-volume edition of his complete works, so the page numbers in the quotes may not align with Immense Journey.

So far, I have enjoyed all the essays. While I would say “The Snout” is my favorite, I think “The Flow of the River,” is the one I’d most recommend to others… and it may well turn out to be my favorite. At this point I’m only about six essays into the book,

BG: A Book of Essays by David Foster Wallace

30 May 2023

The book is titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, 1997; I read it with my book group.

Favorites are *’d

* Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley

Harpers, 1990 — 3

A nice essay. A lot of good bits of description and nice turns of phrase. Discusses Foster’s ‘career’ as a ‘near-great’ high school tennis player, something which he made interesting to me in spite of the topic. I thought the beginning was brilliant, making a connection between the midwestern landscape and geometry, which is then further pursued in tennis. Here’s a sample from the beginning:

College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids – and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.
—David Foster Wallace, Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, 3

w/KC: Three Essays [Florida] by E. B. White

May, 2023

From the book “Essays of E. B. White.“

Part IV: Florida

I wonder a bit about the connection between E. B. White and Florida. His three essays — that span three decades – seem to me to paint it as a depressing and morally derelict place. Yet here he is, and here he stays…

On a Florida Key

This essay did not thrill me, but it did one thing of note. It began with about two pages of description of the rented cabana in which White and his wife were staying. While it did sketch a good picture of the place — how could it help it after piling detail on detail on detail — I rapidly became restless and hoped that it would add up to something. But it really didn’t, not even at the end of the essay.

The bit I liked was anchored by this:

In the kitchen cabinet is a bag of oranges for morning juice. Each orange is stamped “Color Added.” The dyeing of an orange, to make it orange, is man’s most impudent gesture to date. It is really an appalling piece of effrontery, carrying the clear implica-ton that Nature doesn’t know what she is up to.
E. B. White, A Florida Key (in Essays of E. B. White, p 173

ILSG 2023 Conference Notes

April 23-26, 2023

I attended the Institute of Lake Superior Geology meeting from April 23 to 26, 2023. I provide a brief description of the field trips in my Journal blog entry for May 1. These are notes I made during (and sometimes but not always about) the conference talks.

The conference papers were, for me, something of a mixed bag. Some were a bit too abstruse for me to follow, some ventured in to extreme detail on subjects I didn’t care so much about, but others introduced me to interesting comments, or provided provocative perspectives on what I had imagined were settled matters.

EP #7* – Everything in Its Place, Oliver Sacks

April – June, 2023

Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, Oliver Sacks, 2019.

Favorites
Waterbabies, 1997
Remembering South Kensington, 1993
Travels with Lowell, 1988
The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, 2009
Botanists on Park, 2009
Orangutan

EP #5*: Favorites from the Golden Age of the Am. Essay** 1945-1970

2023

Favorites:
An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer
Writing about Jews, Philip Roth
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention, Gore Vidal
One Night’s Dying, Loren Eisley

w/CS: The Ends of the World, Peter Brannon

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions. Peter Brannon. 2017

April – June 2023

Summary of Periods and Mass Extinctions

Edicarian: 635-538. First appearance of wide-spread multi-cellular organisms in ocean: Soft-bodied microbial organisms forming mats and other structures, and free-floating filter feeders.
End-Edicarian extinction: ~448. 86% species went extinct.* Possibly due to advent of burrowing organisms that disrupted largely sessile ecosystem. Not an official mass extinction because of a very incomplete fossil record.
Cambrian: 538-485. Warm shallow seas flank margins of several continental remnants of the breakup of the supercontinent Pannotia. In ocean there is the advent of hard-bodied complex organisms, and subsequent explosion of diversity into all phyla known today. The land bare except for microbial crust; arthropods and mollusks begin to adapt to life on land towards the end of this period.
Ordovician: 485 – 433. High CO2 levels and continents inundated with vast shallow seas jammed with life: brachiopods; trilobites; cephalopods; eurypterids; grapholites; and jawless fish. Many isolated continents and islands, with continents at south pole and a global sea occupying most of the northern hemisphere. First spores of land plants (fungi and simple plants) at 467Ma, with their spread possibly releasing phosphorous into the ocean stimulating algal blooms and CO2 sequestration.
End-Ordovician extinction:~345 Ma. 75% species went extinct.* Major ice age, likely precipitated by biogenic CO2 depletion, followed by a whip-lash of warming.
Silurian: 443-419. Gondwanaland and island chains provide diversity of environments; in the ocean early fish diversify into jawed and bony fish. Terrestrial life expands in the Silurian-Devonian Terrestrial Revolution: vascular plants emerge from more primitive land plants, and three groups of arthropods (myriapods, arachnids and hexapods) became fully terrestrialized.
Devonian: 419-359. Gondwana supercontinent in the south, Siberia to the north, and Laurussia to the east. Free-sporing vascular plants form extensive forests (Archaeopteris); by the middle of the Devonian several groups have evolved leaves and true roots; by the end the first seed-bearing plants appear.
Late-Devonian extinction event: ~250 Ma. 96% species went extinct.* Two major extinction pulses, and many smaller pulses. One theory is that it is due to the release of nutrients by the punctuated spread of land plants as they developed vascular systems with leaves and roots, and seeds.
Carboniferous: 359-299. Age of amphibians — also first appearance of amniotes from which both reptiles and mammals came. Vast rainforests covered the land, and insects diversified. The latter part of the Carboniferous experienced glaciations, low sea level, and mountain building as the continents collided to form Pangaea. A minor marine and terrestrial extinction event, the Carboniferous rainforest collapse, occurred at the end of the period, caused by climate change
Permian: 299-251. On land: The Carboniferous rainforest collapse left behind vast regions of desert in the continental interior. Amniotes, which could better cope with the conditions, diversified into the synapsids (the ancestors of mammals which came to dominate the Permian) and the sauropsids (reptiles). . In the ocean fish diversify with placoderms dominating almost every known aquatic environment, alongside coeleocanths, with sharks and bony fishes on the sidelines.
End-Permian extinction: 251.9 Ma. 80% of species went extinct.* The Siberian Traps were created at 252 Ma and also interacted with the Tunguska sedimentary basin filled with carbonates, shale, coal and salt in layers up to 12 Km thick; it is the worlds largest coal basin. When the magma intersected the basin, it caught fire, detonated in multiple places, and released vast about of CO2 and methane, on top of the CO2 produced by the eruption contributing to global warming and ocean acidification and anoxia. Other chemicals produced by the incineration of the Tunguska basin contents may have destroyed the ozone layer.
Triassic: 252-201. Brannen argues for a long 5 – 10 million year recovery, but that is disputed. The ancestors of crodcodiles dominated the Triassic; ancestors of dinosaurs and first true mammals appear, but were not dominant. The global climate during the Triassic was mostly hot and dry. Pangea had deserts spanning much of its interior until ita began to gradually rift into Laurasia and Gondwana to the south. In line with this the climate shifted from hot and dry to more humid, with a massive rainfall event called the Carnian Pluvial Event that lasted a million years.
End Triassic Extinction: 200 Ma. 80% of species went extinct.* Volcanism from the rifting of Pangea produced flood basalt that covered more than 4 million square miles. The CO2 concentration doubled or tripled, raising the already warm temperatures by at least 3 ° C. The final extinction pulse was fast: on the order of 20,000 years.
Jurassic: 201.4 – 145. Gondwana begins to rift. Climate warm and humid.
Cretaceous: 145 – 66. Gondwana completes rifting and by the end of the period today’s continents are recognizable, but with shallow inland seas in North America and Africa and between Greenland and Norway.
End Cretaceous Extinction: xxx. 76% of species went extinct.* Most likely some combination of the eruption of the Siberian Traps and the Chixtulub impact lead to global warming and an extended period of darkness. Almost all large animals eliminated, including all dinosaurs excerpt ancestors of birds.

Percent of species that went extinct, for any one event, vary considerably among sources. These numbers are better read as an indicator of relative severity.

Notes on Graphic Granite and Perthitic Textures

While I am used to thinking of granite as an evenly but coarsely textured rock consisting of quartz, feldspars and micas, it is also the case that it can take on very different appearances.

One reason for a different appearance may be that the composition varies from ‘prototypical’ granite, say, with more feldspar, or more quartz, etc. Basically, if one moves around the QAPD diagram, variations in composition can lead to different appearances.

A second reason for a different appearance may be that in the case of certain minerals — Feldspars (and apparently quartz as well) – they may be comfortably intermixed at higher temperatures and pressures, but as they cool (either slowly, or in the presence of water), the may pass through a phase where the different minerals become immiscable and sort themselves out (exsolution), resulting in a distinctive texture. Examples below.

BG: To Shake the Sleeping Self, Jedidiah Jenkins

Thursday, 23 February 2023

To Shake the Sleeping Self, by Jedidiah Jenkins, is part travelogue, part coming of age memoir.

A Re-evaluation after some Discussion

The comments below reflect my opinions upon finishing my first read of the book. After a discussion with my book group — which is the reason this made it to my reading list — and revisiting the last few chapters, I find myself a bit better disposed towards it. Another member commented that the end of the book felt as though it was a recapitulation of the narrator’s birth — it ends with his mother wet and shaking and exhausted, while he has — at her urging — left her behind to complete his trip. It is a nice ending, and leaves me a bit more hopeful that the narrator experienced some meaningful change. I also looked at the few chapters before, where he is reflecting on his trip, and see there that he recounts some important realizations that I don’t really believe came out at the time. Perhaps I missed it, or perhaps he didn’t reveal all his thoughts, in order to get a bigger bang at the end of the book. I think the book would have been stronger if we’d witnessed his changes throughout the journey, rather than in hindsight at the end…

From here on are my original comments:

EP #6*: Favorites from the Contemporary American Essay

April-May 2023

Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, 2005
Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, 2013
Leslie Jamieson, The Empathy Exams, 2013
Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
John McPhee, Draft #4, 2017
Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003

* Part 6 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

** The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Philip Lopate

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig (1974)

I recall this book as having had a big impact on me during high school, though in looking at the copyright the soonest I would have read it would have been the last semester of my senior year. Looking back, I have only vague recollections of what was striking about it. Three impressions stand out: I remember resonating with the discussion of quality, and the connection between technology and what I then would have called mysticism; the sharpest memory I have remains the revelation, in the middle of the book, about Phaedrus; and many of the descriptions of landscapes and moving through them stayed with me – in particular, there is a passage I hope to encounter again (assuming I did not imagine it), about riding along a road and the landscape dropping away before them and opening a vast vista…