Pictures and words: A Walk With Me (Frostic, 1958)

    Gwen Frostic. A Walk With Me. (1958) Frostic was a Michigan artist and author, best known for her linocut prints. She set up a successful printing business, selling her prints and greeting cards, stationery and gift items based on her artwork. See more on Wikipedia.
     This book is an example of her work. Printed on deckle-edge paper in earth colours, it’s a mix of text and pictures. I like the images, Frostic has an excellent eye for shape, texture and composition. The images of leaves, landscapes, animals, etc are not only accurate but evocative. Her art is semi-abstract but accurate depiction of natural beauty.
     The texts are not up to the standard of the picturers. She uses a lot of ellipses... to make the reader pause... and take thought... and perhaps... recreate Frostic’s experience... of walking among trees... and shrubs... and flowers... noticing the little things... like mushrooms... and frogs... thus achieving insights... into the mystery... and spiritual meaning... of the natural world.
     An interesting book. Beautifully printed, it’s an example of the book as art or craft object. **

Footnote: This copy was given "With all good wishes to our "Other Bishop - in the north country - Faithfully, Anna May Johns, Midland Mich."

Michael Everett Glover: The Big Lonely and Beyond

Michael Everett Glover. Big Lonely and Beyond (2009) Anyone who’s driven any stretch of the Transcanada Highway knows why the Big Lonely is a good name for it. This book records some of Glover’s travels.
     The sketches are naturalistic, sometimes impressionistic. His paintings are semi-abstract realist. Buildings, boats, cars, railroads, grain elevators, and skies are among his favourite subjects. This sketchbook shows off his skill as a draftsman and his skill in combining and layering shapes to form a composition, His paintings display the same skill in composition plus eye for colour. His palette recalls the Group of Seven, who saw the same colours on their travels. It’s a Canadian thing.
     Glover’s work has a elegiac ambience, often showing us how the works of human beings fade away. But the land endures. We have three of Michael’s small paintings. His website is at https://www.meglover.ca/
     Full disclosure: Michael has been stopping by on his journeys across the country for several years now. He gave us a copy of this book shortly after he published it. I like looking at it. ****

More small victories: Stories From The Vinyl Cafe (1995)

Stuart McLean. Stories From the Vinyl Café. (1995) I like Stuart McLean’s stories. Reading his anthologies, I can hear his voice. His radio show was a staple in our house. This is another feast for his fans, and as good an introduction as any for those unfortunates who don’t yet know his work.
     Why do I like his stories? One reason is sentences such as Sam was pouring his own cereal, getting most of it into the bowl.
     Recommended. ****

Econ 101: The supply web.

Consider the ball point pen. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, it’s still useful despite the increased digitisation of our everyday lives. Millions are sold every day. Millions are discarded every day, too.

The earliest versions of the ballpoint pen date from the 1800s. They were unreliable. The ink usually blobbed and smeared, or dried out. The ball didn’t transport the ink reliably, so the pen skipped, and the writing felt rough. Its modern version was invented by Laszlo Biro, with the help of his brother Gyorgy and friend Juan Meyne. It’s a triumph of technology. Without modern applied chemistry and physics, the pen would be neither reliable nor cheap. Only pencils are cheaper. The vast majority of ballpoint pens are disposable. Even refillable ones are usually thrown out.

The simplest ball point pen is the Bic Cristal™. It has seven components:

1. Barrel: plastic. 2. Cap: plastic. 3. Plug: plastic. 4. Ink reservoir: plastic. 5. Ink: dyes, alcohols, fatty acids. 6. Ball: metal. 7. Ball socket: metal

All parts begin as ores and oil, raw materials which are refined to make feedstock (plastics, metals, ink) with which to make the parts of the pen. The pen is made by the thousands on machines that began as raw materials that were processed into parts for assembly. The pens are packaged, warehoused, and eventually shipped to the retail store. The packaging, warehousing, and transportation also began as raw materials.

The sequence from raw material to final product is called the supply chain. But it’s really a supply web. I have two observations about the supply web.

One, it’s fragile, because every member of it tries to reduce costs. A failure by any member to deliver what’s asked will ripple through the web, sometimes causing shortages of apparently unrelated products. Resilience requires excess capacity, but excess capacity is unused most of the time. That looks like unproductive cost to the accountant, so it’s reduced and even eliminated.

Two, we rely on people to do their work well at every step. The ballpoint pen has involved hundreds of people, from the producers of the ores and oil to the truckers that delivered the product to your local store,. Of these hundreds of people, the only one you deal with in person is the store clerk.

Edited for clarity 2023-10-25

Cigarette advertising of the 1950s

This ad from the 1950s shows how carefully the nicotine drug trade hid the health risks from their clients. Camel cigarettes are made by R. J. Reynolds. They were introduced in 1913. Early ads boasted that the high quality of the tobacco prevented the offering of prizes or premiums, which was a common marketing ploy at the time. (See also cigarette cards.)

The obvious ploy of this ad is of course the link to doctors, who presumably wouldn’t smoke unhealthy cigarettes. The “T-Zone” blurb reinforces that message, as does the cosy middle-class ambience of a well-dressed mother (note the hat) with her well-dressed and intelligent daughter (her plaid skirt hints at a school uniform) facing an avuncular doctor dressed in medical whites and with reassuring grey at the temples. This is a doctor with experience. The books ranged behind the mother tell us he’s well-educated as well as kindly. A doctor to trust.

The ad copy is careful to say exactly what the surveys found, that the most-named brand was Camels. The copy doesn’t give us all the survey data, though. It doesn’t, for example, tell us how many doctors said they didn’t smoke. It doesn’t even tell us how many doctors named Camels, because a smallish number might suggest that many other brands were also popular, or that most doctors didn’t smoke at all. But it does tell us that 113,597 doctors were asked. A reassuringly large, and above all precise number.

The ad is a nice example of how to use images, words, and numbers to create an impression. That the impression may be misleading or false is not, of course, the advertiser’s fault. After all, there isn’t a single false statement anywhere. If the reader of the ad comes away believing that Camel cigarettes are healthy, well, you can’t control people’s thinking. Can you?

Advertising is applied poetry and fiction in the same sense that engineering is applied physics and chemistry. Reading a poem or story creates an imagined experience. So does reading an ad. Watching a story on film or TV creates an imagined experience, too. So does the commercial that interrupts the program. Narrative art controls the reader’s attention. So does an ad. Done skilfully, the ad creates an experience that will prompt the viewer to choose the product the next time they are shopping.

Evolution 101: What it isn’t, and what it is.

It's taken me quite a few decades to clarify my understanding of evolution.

For example, like many people, I once believed that evolution somehow improves a species. Problem is that we think of improvements from our human point of view. That often makes our notions of improvement irrelevant. And even when our notions of improvement are relevant, they may be mistaken.

A widespread mistaken expectation is that evolutionary theory gives definitive answers. It doesn't. No science does, although some answers are more definitive than others.

Several years ago, a blog I read claimed that the epicanthic fold is “unimportant” if not “useless”, and therefore its existence makes the theory of evolution doubtful. For evolution is all about developing useful traits, right?

Well, no, actually. I'll take up the epicanthic fold.

a) "Unimportant" and "important" aren't what a human might think they are. Just because someone may think something is an unimportant feature doesn't mean that it really is. What’s more, “important” depends on context. "Context" for an organism means its environment.

b) The epicanthic fold may be a consequence of genetic drift. Evolution will not eliminate neutral changes in the genome. Accidents of mating may therefore concentrate some part of a genome and so enhance a particular variation of some trait. The primary accident of mating that affects this is the size of the mating pool. In a small population, genetic drift can show up within half a dozen generations or less, and can disappear just as quickly. In larger populations the effect is slower. However, a trait may become universal.  A secondary cause of genetic drift is aesthetic preferences (for want of a better term), aka as "sexual selection".

c) Actually, the epicanthic fold is helpful in the Arctic in late winter and early spring, when there's still lots of snow around, and the sun is higher in the sky. By shading the pupil of the eye, it reduces the glare from snow and sky. Fact is, the Inuit made sunglasses by cutting narrow slits in flat bones which were fastened in front of the eyes. These are artificial epicanthic folds taken to the extreme, so to speak. It’s also helpful in insulating the eye.

d) The epicanthic fold shows up in several variations. I have a version, but it's not like the one you would see on a Japanese person.

Generally speaking, the phrase "survival of the fittest" has caused much misunderstanding of evolution. It does not mean "survival of the strongest or fastest or etc". It means survival of those who fit their environment best; those which are the best suited to their environment. At the time the phrase was coined, “physically fit” was also becoming common. It meant something like “physically well put together, hence suited to strenuous exercise”, but quickly morphed into “physically superior”.

“Being best suited to their environment”  has a consequence that may seem counterintuitive when evolution is seen as primarily explaining changes. Evolution will preserve traits necessary for life, or that maintain a good adaptation to the environment even when the environment changes. That’s why we share so much of our genome with other animals. The shared bits code for features such as enzymes or hearts, without which survival would be impossible or difficult in any environment.

On the other hand, genetic changes can change the environment, because every organism is part of the environment from the point of view of the other organisms in that environment. If the change confers some survival advantage, there will be new selective pressures on some of the other organisms, and they may change, which may change the selective pressures on still other organisms, including the one that triggered the changes. That means that adaptation is a complicated feedback loop. Or rather a feedback tangle, which means it’s a complex system. As in ecosystem. Unfortunately, our brains are not very good at making sense of simple systems, let alone complicated ones.

As for genetic determinism: People who believe that genes rule are way behind the curve. Genes cannot "determine" anything in the absence of environmental inputs, which includes inputs from other components of the organism itself. In fact many genes will have no effect until some environmental trigger causes them to "express", that is, to start making the proteins they specify. What happens next may eventually trigger other genes. This, in a general way, is how an organism grows and develops.

You are what you are because of your genes _and_ your environment, and your environment includes the environment of your ancestors. Environmental factors can change the DNA by a process called "methylation", which affects gene expression. One consequence of methylation is that a mother's or father's illness can affect their children and grandchildren, and possibly even their great-grandchildren.

Evolution is complicated, but it works because of the interaction of the environment and genetic differences between individuals. If an individual lives long enough to reproduce, its genes and the genes of its mate will survive for another generation. If some variation improves the odds of having more offspring than average, that variation may spread through the following generations until it dominates the population. Cumulative changes may make offspring long separated in time and space so different that they are different species.

But what’s a species? That’s another concept that's not so easy to define. I’m not happy with my concept. I may discuss the results of my attempts at clarification here. Or maybe not.

Bread (musings)

     Bread is called the staff of life. When I was a kid, I thought of a staff as made of wood. A staff made of bread made no sense. That was before I understood metaphors of function: Just as a staff supports a man, so bread supports life.

     But in fact through most of human existence, there was no bread. The earliest archeological evidence for bread of a sort is about 30,000 years old. By that time homo sapiens had existed for at least 200,000 years. That bread was a cooked or semi-roasted porridge made of grains; I don’t think anyone nowadays would recognise it as bread. Flatbread baked on hot stones or a griddle is the closest modern equivalent.

     The archeology shows that these first bread makers relied on hunting and gathering for most of their food. Cereal grains were one among several types of seeds gathered for food. It took several thousand years to develop cultivation of grains; perhaps someone noticed that spilled grain would provide a crop the following year, and decided to experiment. However it began, that invention or discovery began the constantly accelerating development of technology that has made our species the dominant life form on this planet. 

     Bread as staple food and agriculture go together, in fact agriculture makes no sense without bread. The earliest agricultural settlements were villages, some fortified, some not, surrounded by fields and pastures. The last users of stone tools built them about 10,000 years ago. When metallurgy was invented around 3500BCE, that technology developed swiftly, and within a few hundred years we find cities dominating the farming villages in their vicinity. These complex polities require writing, an armed force, and centrally administered law to survive.

     I think it’s no accident that the invention of bread and the earliest forms of writing, mnemonic symbols, are nearly contemporary. These symbols were used to help the reader recall everything from lists of trade goods to signs of future events to myths, those stories in which the sacred and secular histories of the tribe were mingled. Surprisingly quickly, these early mnemonic systems developed into scripts. 

     Bread as a staple requires agriculture, which requires a hierarchical social structure to ensure that the backbreaking (and boring) work of plowing, seeding, and harvest is done. A hierarchical society needs an agreed body of rules and customs. Law, in other words, enforced as much by common beliefs as by physical force. Customs, religious and otherwise, express the common understanding of how the world does and should work. Written law codifies those beliefs; the law describes what is to be done and what is not to be done. Writing is also handy for keeping accounts, so much so that writing numbers probably predated writing words. 

     Bread is not only the staff of life, it’s the driver of those changes in human society that we are pleased to label progress.