A Runner's Ramblings

Shielded

Posted on May 11, 2024 by twsobey

Title: Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable

Author: Joanna Schwartz

Completed: May 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: This was a somewhat depressing read. I think most people understand that police violate people’s civil rights often and the reasons for that can be debated. Having read news articles about civil rights cases being won, I assumed it was common for some kind of amends to be made (not always, but certainly often). This book shows how untrue that narrative is and all the steps one must go through before the police department ever has consequences, even when everyone agrees rights were violated. It clarifies many aspects of our legal system that have always been murky to me and is worth reading by anyone interested in better understanding how we got to the point where police in this country are untouchable.

Many of these topics also came up in a recent 5-4 Podcast.

Highlights:

we must foreground the realities of civil rights litigation when we do. Myths about the dangers of making it too easy to sue police have made a mess of our system. A shared understanding of how officers are shielded from the consequences of their actions, and how those shields leave many victims without a meaningful remedy, must fuel a reimagining of what it means to hold government accountable and what it means to protect and serve.
In the summer of 1919, after a seventeen-year-old Black boy’s raft veered into the “whites only” part of Lake Michigan, a white beachgoer pelted him with rocks until he fell off his raft and drowned. Chicago erupted into violence, with Black people suffering the lion’s share of injuries and death. When the Chicago Commission on Race Relations investigated the Chicago riot, they found Black people’s distrust of the police was widespread and well earned; as Maclay Hoyne, Cook County state’s attorney, testified before the commission, police had “shut their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were very vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get.”
the Wickersham Commission, to examine the impact of Prohibition on police tactics. Two years later, the commission issued a report called Lawlessness in Law Enforcement that concluded, based on evidence from more than a dozen cities across the country, that “the third degree—that is, the use of physical brutality, or other forms of cruelty, to obtain involuntary confessions or admissions—is widespread.”
The Court has justified limitations on Mapp and Miranda in the same way it has justified limitations on Monroe—with concerns that police cannot effectively do their jobs and keep people safe if they must meticulously respect people’s rights.
Congress imagined that through the fee-shifting provision in Section 1988, attorneys would be encouraged to bring Section 1983 cases on behalf of plaintiffs acting as “private attorneys general” to vindicate constitutional rights. But, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting Section 1988, attorneys who represent successful plaintiffs are often paid for only a fraction of their time. And if they lose—which happens more often in civil rights cases than in other types of cases—they will be paid nothing at all.
As Justice Kennedy explained, “Litigation, though necessary to ensure that officials comply with the law, exacts heavy costs in terms of efficiency and expenditure of valuable time and resources that might otherwise be directed to the proper execution of the work of the Government.” In other words, it was more important to protect Ashcroft and Mueller’s time than it was to investigate Iqbal’s allegations that they had violated the Constitution.
There are other civil rights cases that challenge local governments’ conduct—claims, for example, that a police department does not properly train or supervise its officers. A plaintiff will not likely have any evidence about officials’ intentions or local governments’ inner workings until they get to discovery. The heightened pleading requirement puts these civil rights plaintiffs in a bind: they are only allowed discovery if their complaints include evidence supporting their claims, but they need the tools of discovery to access that evidence.
Deputy Sylvester pounded on the door so loudly that the neighbor in apartment 115 came out to ask what the commotion was all about. When another deputy explained that they were looking for the owner of the motorcycle, the neighbor said the owner lived in a different building in the apartment complex. A few seconds later, Deputy Sylvester saw the door of apartment 114 opening, glimpsed a gun, and started shooting.
After the Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Garner, departments adopted its rule prohibiting deadly force against a person fleeing arrest who was not a threat, and studies found a 16 percent reduction nationwide in fatal police shootings. More recently, Seattle and San Francisco have adopted standards less flexible than Graham and have reported a significant reduction in the number of force incidents without a decrease in officer or community safety.
“You shoot me, paralyze me, put me in a nursing home, ruin everything, and I can’t get no type of compensation?” Leaning back in bed, David Collie said, “This ain’t justice.”
Pierson v. Ray, got to the Supreme Court in 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court, held that the officers had good-faith immunity under Mississippi law because they thought the arrests were proper, and that that immunity should apply to the Section 1983 claim as well. Chief Justice Warren explained that this qualified immunity from suit was necessary because, otherwise, officers could be held liable when they mistakenly believed the law authorized an arrest.
In Baxter v. Bracey, an appeals court granted qualified immunity to officers who released their police dog on a burglary suspect who had surrendered and was sitting down with his hands up. Although a prior court decision had held that it was unconstitutional to release a police dog on a suspect who had surrendered and was lying down, the court in Alexander Baxter’s case granted qualified immunity to the officers because, it held, the prior decision did not clearly establish the unconstitutionality of the officers’ decision to release a police dog on a person who was seated with his hands in the air.
Defenders of qualified immunity have not been able to summon a reason why officers who violate the Constitution should be protected from liability simply because a court has not previously ruled nearly identical conduct to be unconstitutional. Instead, the strongest defenses of qualified immunity have been various predictions that the world would be worse off without it. But claims about the need for qualified immunity are unsupported by the facts on the ground.
I studied police misconduct settlements and judgments in eighty-one jurisdictions across the country, over a six-year period, and found that officers paid just 0.02 percent of the more than $735 million that plaintiffs received. Officers in only two of the jurisdictions were required to contribute anything to settlements and judgments entered against them; their average payment was $4,194, their median payment was $2,250, and no officer paid more than $25,000. Officers do not need qualified immunity to protect them from bankruptcy when they are sued; local governments almost always pick up the tab.
Some believe that those structural forces are part and parcel of having a law enforcement system that grew out of slave patrols, and that it is impossible to have a police apparatus that is disentangled from that racist and violent history. Others view police misconduct less through a historical lens than through an institutional one, bred in the bureaucratic crevices of individual agencies. Either way, it is common wisdom that individual acts of police misconduct can’t be wholly separated from the culture of a department or from leaders who encourage that misconduct or look the other way when it occurs. There may be bad apples, but they often come from rotten trees.
Analysis of thousands of qualified immunity decisions revealed that judges appointed by Republican presidents are more likely to grant qualified immunity than judges appointed by Democratic presidents, and judges located in more Republican-leaning regions of the country are more likely to grant qualified immunity. Studies have also found that judges’ personal characteristics may influence their decisions: white judges grant summary judgment to defendants in employment discrimination cases more often than judges of color, and court of appeals judges with daughters are more sympathetic to female plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases than are those without.
not all people trust the police, and the demographics of differences of opinion on this point are noteworthy. Gallup’s 2020 poll found that 82 percent of Republicans had confidence in the police, as compared with 28 percent of Democrats. Fifty-six percent of white adults expressed confidence in the police, but only 19 percent of Black adults did.
As Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in 1972, When any large and identifiable segment of the community is excluded from jury service, the effect is to remove from the jury room qualities of human nature and varieties of human experience, the range of which is unknown and perhaps unknowable. It is not necessary to assume that the excluded group will consistently vote as a class in order to conclude . . . that its exclusion deprives the jury of a perspective on human events that may have unsuspected importance in any case that may be presented.
In the forty-four large jurisdictions, over a six-year period, plaintiffs had received more than $735 million to resolve the police misconduct cases they’d brought. Officers were made to contribute just 0.02 percent of that $735 million. The remaining 99.98 percent of the awards came from the pockets of taxpayers, not police officers. And in the thirty-seven smaller agencies in my study, no officer contributed to any settlement or judgment in a police misconduct case—not one dime. In just two of the forty-four large agencies in my study—Cleveland and New York—could I confirm that officers had personally contributed to a settlement or judgment during the six-year study period: 34 cases (out of 6,887) in New York, and 2 (out of 35) in Cleveland. But, even in these two cities, the likelihood that an officer would be required to make a financial contribution to a settlement or judgment entered against them was remote.
officers were more likely to be struck by lightning than pay anything from their pockets in a police misconduct case.
In fact, the effect of ballooning police budgets on local governments’ financial stability is a far more pressing budgetary concern than are payouts in Section 1983 cases. In many cities—including Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and Los Angeles—annual police spending amounts to between one-quarter and one-third of general fund expenditures. In these same cities, settlements and judgments in police misconduct suits account for between 0.06 percent and 0.64 percent of general fund expenditures.
During the three years of my study, the Chicago Police Department was allocated, on average, about $16.5 million per year for lawsuit payouts. During those three years, plaintiffs in police misconduct suits received more than $52 million per year. When the police department’s litigation fund ran dry—as it did in the first quarter of one of those fiscal years—the police department was not called upon to reduce spending in other areas. Instead, the city council took money from other parts of the city’s budget to make up for the shortfall, often from parts of the budget that were earmarked for the most vulnerable members of the city.
Alan Hevesi, wrote to the police commissioner echoing Holtzman’s recommendations. Even when cases are settled, Hevesi wrote, “there is enough evidence collected to convince the City that the plaintiff has a serious case. The police department should analyze these settled claims, and take steps to review the officers’ performance and propensity to commit acts of excessive force.” NYPD officials did not take Holtzman and Hevesi up on their suggestions.
The Supreme Court could revisit its decisions in Rizzo and Lyons, and make it easier for individuals to seek injunctive relief that would change police department policies and practices. But, given the near impossibility of that happening anytime soon, local governments should take advantage of the leverage they have to make police departments more attentive to the lawsuits brought against them. A local government can, for example, tie the money to pay settlements and judgments—as well as the defense of these cases—to their law enforcement agency’s budget.
research showing that police misconduct lawsuits account for less than 1 percent of local governments’ budgets, while police departments eat up one-quarter to one-third of those budgets.

Posted in Lit Review | Tagged Book Review, books, culture, police, politics | Leave a comment

Running Around the World (Now with Arduino)

Posted on May 4, 2024 by twsobey

About a decade ago, while running with the Boise Area Runners, I challenged the club to (collectively) run around the world in a year. I set up a Google form where people could input their mileage then gave monthly updates about how far we’d gone. We made it back to Boise in November.

Last summer the idea of running around the world came up again when talking about the Southeast Seattle Schools Fundraising Alliance (SESSFA) Move-a-Thon. This time, another parent was voluntold to create the tracking website which gave me time to plan another event. For the final day of the Move-a-Thon we decided to hosted a jog-a-thon at Dunlap Elementary.

The event was held immediately after school so all students could attend. To connect it to the SESSFA Run Around the World Challenge, we wanted to keep track of how far we collectively ran but obviously couldn’t do that with a website. Luckily, a co-worker had a large red button on his desk that used to make funny noises when you pressed it and I had an Arduino.

We measured the course the kids would run, figured out how many laps it would take to get to different cities in and around Washington, then programmed that into the Arduino to track their progress each time someone pressed the button. Not sure how many students would attend or how far they would be willing to run, there were cities included from 12 laps (2.4 miles) to 2000 laps (400 miles).

After each lap, they would slap the big red button, pause to catch their breath, and start the next lap. We had about 35 runners participate. Some ran only one or two laps while others continued running (with only brief snack breaks) for the entire hour and managed to cover four miles. Collectively, we ran 346 laps for a total of 69.2 miles putting us well past Mt. Rainier and only 5.5 miles shy of the Canadian border and by the end of Move-a-Thon, SESSFA kids had run a total of 32,000 miles, 29% over the goal of getting around the world!

As we started cleaning up after the event, several of the longer distance runners came up to me and asked, “Can we do this again next year?” As someone who likes to run and encourage others to do the same, that may have been the highlight of my week. We can most definitely do it again next year!

Congratulations to all the Dunlap and Rainier View Elementary students who came out and ran. You did amazing!

For anyone interested in doing something similar, but unsure about Arduinos, hopefully this next section will help. If you’re never going to build one, the rest of this will probably be pretty boring.

For this project, I used an Arduino Nano. I wired the LCD screen to it just like we show here. The button was connected between digital pin 8 and a GND pin. You can modify the two arrays at the top of the code with the correct number of laps for the cities you pick. Once you upload it, every button click gets you closer to the next city. Good luck with the project and feel free to comment below, if you have questions.

/*
  Dunlap Running Lap Counter 
  Button connected to Pin 8 and GND.
  Output to 16x2 LCD
*/

#include <LiquidCrystal_I2C.h>      // LCD Library
LiquidCrystal_I2C lcd(0x27, 16, 2);     // LCD Declaration, tell the arduino we're using an LCD at I2C address 0x27, 16 column and 2 rows

const int buttonPin = 8;         // input pin for pushbutton
int previousButtonState = LOW;  // for checking the state of a pushButton
int counter = 0;                 // button push counter

// Next three variables are used for debouncing the push button
unsigned long lastDebounceTime = 0;
unsigned long delayTime = 50;
int counted = 0;

int lapsRequired[] = {12, 23, 36, 58, 102, 168, 229, 250, 375, 440, 504, 525, 620, 667, 759, 912, 1050, 1130, 1215, 1525, 1905, 2000};
char *cities[] = {"Columbia City", "Renton", "Bellevue", "Issaquah", "Tacoma", "JBLM", "Olympia", "Mt Rainier", "Canada", "Ellensburg", "Oregon", "Yakima", "Vancouver", "Portland", "Mt Hood", "Salem", "Corv/Pendleton", "Spokane", "Eugen/Pulman", "Roseburg", "California", "Boise"};

void setup() {
  // make the pushButton pin an input:
  pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT_PULLUP);

  lcd.init();               // initialize the lcd
  lcd.backlight();
  lcd.setCursor(0, 0);      // move cursor to   (0, 0)
  lcd.print("Laps: ");
  lcd.setCursor(0, 1);
  lcd.print("City: ");
}

void loop() {
  // read the pushbutton:
  int buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
  // if the button state has changed,
  if (buttonState != previousButtonState) {
    lastDebounceTime = millis();
  }

  if (((millis() - lastDebounceTime) > delayTime)
      // and it's currently pressed:
      && (buttonState == LOW) && (counted == 0)) {
    // increment the button counter
    counter++;
    counted = 1;     //Flag used to only count a button push once
    for (int i = 0; i <= 21; i++) {
      if (counter == lapsRequired[i]) {
        lcd.clear();
        lcd.setCursor(0, 1);
        lcd.print("City: ");
        lcd.print(cities[i]);
      }
    }
    lcd.setCursor(0, 0);      // move cursor to   (0, 0)
    lcd.print("Laps: ");        
    lcd.print(counter);
  }

  if (((millis() - lastDebounceTime) > delayTime)
      // and it's currently pressed:
      && (buttonState == HIGH) && (counted == 1)) {
        counted = 0;
      }
  // save the current button state for comparison next time:
  previousButtonState = buttonState;
}

Posted in Education, Running | Tagged Arduino, Community, Dunlap, Rainier Beach, Seattle | Leave a comment

Mayan Center Village and Dangriga

Posted on April 12, 2024 by twsobey

Just before Avery was born, we had been traveling more with recent trips to the Bahamas and Africa. She went on her first international trip (to Canada) the day after the 2016 Presidential election, when she was about 2 months old. She visited three more countries before all travel stopped in 2020. This year we decided it was time to restart the tradition with a trip to Belize.

Cacao pod split open so the fruit is exposed. Several seeds have been removed — Cacao fruit still in the husk

Our first non-travel day was at the Mayan Center Village on the edge of Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary. The two big attractions for us were the wild cats and chocolate so we started the day touring a farm that grows cacao and, it turns out, so many other fruits. The cacao fruit was so good, I was a little surprised it isn’t imported in that form for people to eat. Next we tried cinnamon, star fruit, sugar cane, and a handful of other fruits and spices. The plants were each grown in their own area but not exclusively and not in neat rows. If we were hiking through without a guide, I doubt I would have realized it was a farm and the birds certainly didn’t realize this bounty wasn’t meant for them. We saw hummingbirds and hawks, lots of songbirds, evidence of many woodpeckers, but the highlight was the toucan that decided to natter at us for a few minutes.

Now that we’d seen how cacao was grown, it was time to visit the Mayan chocolate factory to see how it’s processed. Here, the tour starts with… a trip to another local cacao farm to see how it’s grown. I guess we could have researched that a little better but by the end of our second farm tour, we were very familiar with how cacao is grown. Back at the processing center, we heard about fermenting the seeds to improve flavor and got to taste one seed at this stage. I liked it but it was bitter and didn’t really taste of chocolate yet. Next, the seeds were roasted to creates cocoa nibs. These definitely taste like chocolate but felt nothing like it. Then they pulled out the grinding stone and Avery got to work. I thought I’d read somewhere that it takes hours of grinding to get it smooth enough for chocolate bars. We had it ready in about 5 minutes. Then we added a little sugar that was locally grown and some more cocoa butter before scooping it into molds and setting it in the fridge. Five minutes later, we had some amazing mini chocolate bars. It was such an easy process, we’re going to try it again at home. Maybe we’ll start Drowned Chipmunk Chocolates.

Child using a grinding stone to make chocolate — Avery grinding cocoa nibs

For lunch, we found a roadside cafe that catered to locals. Our beers arrived just in for kickoff of the Man City vs Real Madrid game. The owner found out we had lived in England and informed us that we were clearly cheering for Man City… while he was cheering for Madrid. About a dozen of us watched. Four cheered when Man City scored an early goal. The other eight or so cheered more when Madrid scored two in the next 15 minutes. Avery got bored so we decided to leave at half time. We found out later the game ended in a 3-3 draw.

Across from the Mayan chocolate center is a butterfly garden. For a few dollars, you can go inside a large net enclosure with hundreds of butterflies. The owner has been raising butterflies for over 20 years and appears to have 10+ species. Occasionally, when we stopped moving for long enough, one would land on us. Avery loved the idea of a butterfly landing on her… until one was about to, then it instantly turned into a scary bug and she jumped back. No matter how much we reassured her, she kept jumping.

Hand coming in from the left side with a yellow and black butterfly resting in the fingertips — Obviously a scary insect

It had been a busy morning so we went back to our room to rest for a bit before the night walk in Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary to look for the wild cats. As dusk fell, we rode into the park, seeing fireflies along the way. These were different from the East Coast fireflies we saw last summer that blinked. These just stayed on for several seconds or more. We also saw a Fer de Lance, one of the most dangerous snakes in Belize. Luckily, we were still in the truck. As we started the walk the darkness of night enveloped the jungle. Avery had gone back and forward many times on whether she thought a night jungle walk would be amazing or terrifying. Leaving the parking lot, we were tentatively on the amazing side of the divide. Within the first 200m, we crossed over into terrifying. We paused for a minute to see if anything could persuade her back across the invisible line to no avail. I headed back to the parking lot with her on my shoulders watching the fireflies and occasional bat along the way. While we waited at the ranger station with courage builders in hand (this time in the form of Sprite and Oreos), Dom continued on with the guide. They saw kinkajou climbing through the trees before spotting a puma in the bushes beside the trail. Only the head was sticking out with eyes focused on the creatures with the bright lights in the middle of the dark jungle. They watch each other with varying degrees of curiosity on each side.

The next morning it was time to leave the jungle for the islands so we got a ride to Dangriga where a boat would meet us. We arrived early, dropped our bags, and went to explore the town. Avery was in charge of where we went and her first stop was a beach bar with fruit smoothies. She could have stayed there for days.

Young child sucking hard to drink a thick smoothie through a straw — Rediscovering the joy of a cool drink on a hot day

Nearly 90 minutes later, she finally finished her drink and we were off again. We stopped in grocery stores and clothing shops. We even found an art gallery/winery. It wasn’t entirely clear what the wine was made from. Grapes were unlikely. We had heard some wine is made from the juice runoff during the cacao fermentation process so maybe it was that. Either way, he want ~$20 per person to sample it so we kept walking. Avery eventually pointed us towards a bandstand by the shore. We watched the birds and the waves for several minutes before she asked if she could go stand by the water… then put just her toes in… then up to her ankles… then…

Avery, a young child, squatting down in the surf with her hands and skirt getting wet — “Please, just my toes…”

She was soaked and giggling by the time we had to go catch our boat. I think she’s going to love being on the island.

Posted in Adventures, Travel | Tagged Belize, Travel with kids | 1 Comment

Drunk

Posted on March 28, 2024 by twsobey

Title: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

Author: Edward Slingerland

Completed: Mar 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Why do people drink? We know it’s unhealthy yet we continue to do it. This book covers a lot of different ideas about why evolution hasn’t made us all teetotalers while also covering alcohol’s impact on history and culture. It was a fascinating look at something I consume but don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why I do. Cheers to Edward Slingerland

Highlights:

if there is something in the biome that has psychoactive properties, you can be sure that the locals have been using it for millennia. More often than not, it tastes horrible and has vicious side effects. For instance, ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made from Amazonian vines, is painfully bitter and quickly brings on brutal diarrhea and vomiting. In some South American cultures, people go so far as to lick poisonous toads. All over the world, wherever you find people, you find them doing disgusting things, incurring incredible costs, and expending ridiculous amounts of resources and effort for the sole purpose of getting high.2 Given how central the intoxication drive is to human existence, the archaeologist Patrick McGovern has only semi-facetiously suggested that our species be referred to as Homo imbibens.
sites in eastern Turkey, dating to perhaps 12,000 years ago, the remains of what appear to be brewing vats, combined with images of festivals and dancing, suggest that people were gathering in groups, fermenting grain or grapes, playing music, and then getting truly hammered before we’d even figured out agriculture. In fact, archaeologists have begun to suggest that various forms of alcohol were not merely a by-product of the invention of agriculture, but actually a motivation for it—that the first farmers were driven by a desire for beer, not bread.
My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively altered must have, over evolutionary time, helped individuals to survive and flourish, and cultures to endure and expand. When it comes to intoxication, the mistake story cannot be correct. There are very good evolutionary reasons why we get drunk.
This book argues that, far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication.
The earliest direct evidence of alcoholic beverages deliberately being produced by human beings dates from around 7000 BCE in the Yellow River Valley of China, where potsherds from an early Neolithic village were found to contain chemical traces of a sort of wine, probably not very pleasant by modern standards, made from wild grapes and other fruits, rice, and honey.
In the Pacific, cultures that never adopted alcohol use—possibly because alcohol would interact negatively with toxins acquired by consuming local seafood—ended up turning to kava as their preferred intoxicant.13 Made from the root of an intensively domesticated crop, possibly first brought under human control in the island of Vanuatu, kava has been cultivated by humans for so long that it can no longer reproduce on its own.14 It has both narcotic and hypnotic effects, and is a powerful muscle relaxant.
Humans in Eurasia appear to have been lighting up and tuning out for at least 8,000 years, with cannabis becoming a widely traded and consumed ritual and recreational drug by 2000 BCE.
For millennia, natives of Australia have produced a mixture of narcotics, stimulants, and wood ash, called “pituri,” and used it like chewing tobacco, holding a wad in their cheeks. The active ingredients are various strains of native tobacco and a local narcotic shrub
It is significant that in North America, one of the few places on the globe where native populations did not produce and use alcohol, there existed instead a highly elaborate system of tobacco cultivation and regional trade, with archaeologically recovered pipes dating back to somewhere between 3000 and 1000 BCE.18 Although we do not tend to think of tobacco as an intoxicant, the strains cultivated by Native Americans were much more powerful and intoxicating than what you can now buy at your corner store. When mixed with hallucinogenic ingredients, as it typically was, it really packed a punch.
It is Dudley’s contention that this was also the case for early humans, as well as our primate ancestors and cousins, who—following the waft of alcohol molecules to find and identify the rare prize of ripe fruit—came to associate small amounts of alcohol with high-quality nourishment. Individuals who were particularly enamored of its taste or pharmacological effects would have been more likely to seek it out, acquiring more calories than their teetotaler compatriots.
A very cool evolutionary trick is performed by fruit flies when they sense the presence of parasitic wasps. These wasps are nasty predators that rather unkindly deposit their own eggs inside those of the fruit fly. Under normal conditions, this egg develops into a small wasp larva, which then feeds off the fruit fly larvae, completely devouring them from the inside before emerging to seek out new victims. In an environment where such wasps are a threat, female fruit flies seek out fruit with a high alcohol content on which to lay their eggs. Alcohol is not great for their own larvae, slowing their growth, but little fruit flies tolerate ethanol much better than the sensitive wasp larvae, which are generally killed off.
When it comes to market economies, contemporary households around the world officially report spending on alcohol and cigarettes at least a third of what they spend on food; in some countries (Ireland, Czech Republic) this rises to a half or more.63 Given the prevalence of black markets and underreporting on the topic, actual expenditures must be significantly higher.
Humans, though, are apes, evolved to cooperate only in a limited way with close relatives and perhaps fellow tribe members, acutely alert to the dangers of being manipulated, misled, or exploited by others. And yet we march in parades, sit in obedient rows reciting lessons, conform to social norms, and sometimes sacrifice our lives for the common good with an enthusiasm that would put a soldier ant to shame. Trying to hammer a square primate peg into a circular social insect hole is bound to be difficult. But, as we’ll see, intoxication can help.
‘capital riddle,’ which you either solve or forfeit your head. The player’s life is at stake.”16 The universality of high-stakes riddles in human mythology highlights, in symbolic form, one of the main challenges that confronts us in adapting to our ecological niche: Humans need to be creative to survive.
All of this data suggests that small children are so creative because their PFCs are barely developed. There is nothing policing their thoughts, which has both upsides and downsides. Taking twenty minutes to put on your shoes is the price you pay for thinking out of the box.
cultures as a whole can figure out the solutions to problems that are, in principle, beyond the capacity of any single individual to solve. As cultural evolutionary theorist Michael Muthukrishna and colleagues argue, we need to think of our brains not just as individual organs sitting in our heads, but as part of an extended network, nodes in a massive “collective brain.”
“cultural evolution is often much smarter than we are.” An anthropological survey of island cultures across the Pacific showed that population size and connectedness with other islands correlated positively with the number of tools possessed by a culture, as well as its degree of tool complexity. In modern urban societies, increased population density leads to increased innovation, as measured by proxies such as number of new patents or R&D activity per capita.
Although researchers have long thought that the primary function of play was for skill practice and training, this socializing and trust-building function seems more fundamental. As Stuart Brown observes, “Cats deprived of play-fighting can hunt just fine. What they can’t do—what they never learn to do—is to socialize successfully. Cats and other social mammals such as rats will, if seriously deprived of opportunities for play, have an inability to clearly delineate friend from foe, miscue on social signaling, and either act excessively aggressive or retreat and not engage in more normal social patterns.”
childlike playfulness, something we uniquely crave among primates, is eventually lost. We relish some banter with the hot dog vendor, but keep it short because we’re late for work. As adults, the childish drive to meander, examine boogers, and play becomes subordinated to productive routine. Get up, dress, commute, work, eat, sleep, repeat. This is the realm of the PFC, that center of executive control, and it is no accident that its maturation corresponds to an increased ability to stay on task, delay gratification, and subordinate emotions and desires to abstract reason and the achievement of practical goals.
across the ancient world, we see similar evidence that the first large gatherings of people, centered on feasting, ritual, and booze, happened long before anyone had come up with the idea of planting and harvesting crops. Archaeologists working in the Fertile Crescent have noted that at the earliest known sites the particular tools being used and varieties of grain being grown were more suited to making beer than bread.
As we read in the Book of Proverbs, “Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto them that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”
Donald Horton. In a survey of drinking practices across fifty-six small-scale societies published in 1943, Horton declared that “the primary function of alcoholic beverages in all societies is the reduction of anxiety.”30 He proposed a hydraulic model of alcohol use, arguing that the rate of drinking rises along with an increase in anxiety-generating food scarcity or war, until it runs up against new anxieties generated by excessive drinking. Any given society ends up at an equilibrium between these two extremes.
Even 12,000 years ago, as Wadley and Hayden note, villages in the Fertile Crescent contained 200 to 300 people and already showed signs of private property, wealth inequality, and social stratification. After that, things got much worse, very quickly.
When we see super-fast antelopes darting across the plains of North America, we infer the presence of almost-as-super-fast predators who motivated this speed—in the case of American antelopes, actually the “ghosts” of predators, like lions and cheetahs, who went extinct in the region thousands of years ago.57 Our seemingly supernatural ability to detect lies has similarly been driven by a corresponding ability to deceive. Humans are world-class liars, and we’ve been getting better at it for millennia.
One study, for instance, found that getting strangers to dance in sync with one another—as opposed to conditions where their dancing was partially or completely asynchronous—boosted their pain thresholds (a good proxy for endorphin activation) and reported feelings of social closeness.
Beer before bread advocates see this site, with its stone basins that could hold up to forty gallons of liquid, scattered remnants of drinking vessels, and evidence of extensive feasting on wild animals, as an illustration of how ancient humans were first motivated to come together in large groups by the draw of intoxication and ritual, with agriculture coming after. It is revealing that there are no grain silos or other food storage facilities at Göbekli Tepe. “Production was not for storage,” notes the archaeologist Oliver Dietrich and his colleagues, “but for immediate use.”119 In other words, people gathered in large numbers at this site for temporary, epic, blowout feasts, accompanied by dramatic rituals,120 all of it likely fueled by generous quantities of booze.
In industrialized societies, where we have unions and 9-to-5 workdays with set wages and health care, drinking on the job is discouraged. In pre-industrial societies, facilitating drinking on the job is the only way to get the job done.
Proponents of the beer before bread hypotheses rightly emphasize how the increased cohesiveness and scale of intoxicant-using cultures would give them a distinct advantage in competition with other groups, allowing them to cooperate more effectively in work, food production, and warfare.132 The inexorable pressure of cultural group selection would, in this way, encourage and disseminate the cultural use of intoxicants in the manner that we actually observe in the historical record, and that is completely inconsistent with any hijack or hangover theory of intoxication.
in ancient Persia no important decision was made without being discussed over alcohol, although it would not actually be implemented until reviewed sober the next day. Conversely, no sober decision would be put into practice until it could be considered, by the group, while drunk.
Using the state-level imposition of prohibition as a starting point, he compared counties that had been consistently dry for a long period of time to counties that had been “wet,” but were now suddenly forced to close their saloons and other public drinking venues. He found that prohibition reduced the number of new patents by 15 percent annually in previously wet counties relative to previously dry counties.
As the writers John Markoff and Michael Pollan have documented, psychedelics—primarily pharmaceutical-grade LSD provided by a mysterious, colorful figure named Al Hubbard—played a central role from the very beginning of Silicon Valley’s rise.22 Ampex, an innovative, but now mostly forgotten, Silicon Valley–based manufacturer of storage devices, has been dubbed the “world’s first psychedelic corporation” because of the weekly workshops and retreats it organized around LSD use in the 1960s. LSD was instrumental in the creative design process that gave rise to circuit chips, and Apple founder Steve Jobs claimed that his experiments with LSD ranked as some of his most important life experiences.
Despite lurid reports in the 1960s about LSD-induced insanity or tripping teenagers leaping off roofs, psychedelics are considerably safer, in most regards, than alcohol or cannabis. They are non-addictive, selectively target certain parts of the brain rather than playing havoc with the entire brain-body system, and cause no known side effects. In a 2009 briefing30 the U.K.’s top drug adviser, Dr. David Nutt, ranked LSD (along with cannabis and MDMA) as less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, although he was later forced to resign because of the resulting controversy.
One of the most effective mechanisms human beings have invented for assessing the trustworthiness of a new potential cooperator is the long, drunken banquet. As we have seen, from ancient China to ancient Greece to Oceania, no negotiation was ever concluded, no treaty ever signed, without copious quantities of chemical intoxicants. In the modern world, with all of the remote communication technologies at our disposal, it should genuinely surprise us how often we need a good, old-fashioned, in-person drinking session before we feel comfortable about signing our name on the dotted line.
One of the team’s findings, from survey data about pub use in Britain, found that people who had a neighborhood pub that they frequented regularly had more close friends, felt happier, were more satisfied with their lives, more embedded into their local communities, and more trusting of those around them. Those who never drank did consistently worse on all these criteria, while those who frequented a local did better than regular drinkers who had no local that they visited regularly. A more detailed analysis suggested that it was the frequency of pub visits that lay at the heart of this: it seemed that those who visited the same pub more often were more engaged with, and trusting of, their local community, and as a result they had more friends.
In other words, go to the pub and have a pint or two. All things considered—liver damage, calories, and all—a spot of social drinking is good for you, and this has nothing to do with any French paradox or narrow health benefit. Moderate, social drinking brings people together, keeps them connected to their communities, and lubricates the exchange of information and building of networks. We social apes would find it very challenging to do without it, both individually and communally.
Man, being reasonable, must get drunk. —Lord Byron
let us never lose sight of the fact that drinking, or smoking, or taking an occasional mushroom trip is primordially, atavistically fun. Let us flash our eyes and drink the milk of Paradise. Let us be not afraid to get drunk “in a primary way,” for this is what reconnects us to the flow of experience that other animals get to simply take for granted.
Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, disputed the conclusions of the Lancet article’s authors, noting that the data showed only a very low level of harm in moderate drinkers. “Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention,” he said. “There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”
one reason we have trouble properly valuing the benefits derived from chemical intoxicants is because of a false, but deeply seated, dualism between mind and body that colors our judgment. We have no problem with people altering their mood by watching fluff TV or going for a jog, but grow uncomfortable when their psychoactive hack involves a corkscrew and chilled bottle of Chardonnay. A person who meditates for an hour and achieves x percent reduction in stress and experiences a y percent rise in mood is viewed in a much more positive light than one who spent that hour achieving precisely the same results by downing a couple pints of beer.
The Tohono O’odham people living in the Sonoran Desert home-brew an alcoholic beverage made from fermented cactus juice, but “no family may drink its own liquor lest the house burn down, [although] they may drink at other houses”—a taboo that effectively makes consumption a public act, and therefore one subject to social control.
Laboratory research also shows that people in social drinking conditions report increased levels of “positive mood, elation, and friendliness,” whereas subjects required to drink in isolation report higher levels of depression, sadness, and negative emotion.
Suburbanites typically also lack a social drinking venue within easy walking distance, where they might continue conversations begun earlier in the day or unwind with other regulars between work and dinner. Drinking increasingly occurs only in private homes, outside social control or observation. Knocking back a string of high-alcohol beers or vodka and tonics in front of the TV, even with one’s family around, is a radical departure from traditional drinking practices centered on communal meals and ritually paced toasting.
Survey data suggests that married couples who drink together, and in similar amounts, report higher levels of marital satisfaction and have lower rates of divorce.66 Studies have also shown that drinking together, as opposed to drinking apart, has positive effects on couples’ interactions the following day.
We have noted the widespread use of chemical intoxicants by religious traditions around the world and throughout history. It is also worth returning at this point to a discussion of the non-pharmacological methods they have developed for achieving ecstatic states of mind. It is clear that completely “dry” rituals involving dance, especially extended, vigorous dancing, ideally combined with hypnotic music and sensory and/or sleep deprivation, can provide many of the psychological and social benefits of drug-fueled ecstatic group rituals.
In the 1970s, the psychiatrist and spiritualist guru Stanislav Grof developed a technique dubbed “holotropic breathwork,” whereby intense hyperventilation is used to starve the brain of oxygen and induce LSD-like experiences.77 In a review of non-chemically induced “hypnagogic states,” or episodes of dreamlike disassociation from waking reality, the psychologist Dieter Vaitl and colleagues78 list a variety of techniques by which such states can be induced, including extreme temperatures, starvation and fasting, sexual activity and orgasm, breathing exercises, sensory deprivation or overload, rhythm-induced trance (drumming and dancing), relaxation and meditation, hypnosis and biofeedback.
the few countries that used Covid-19 as an excuse to attempt prohibition, like Sri Lanka, ended up spawning enormous underground networks of home brewers, cooking up barely palatable—but definitely intoxicating—concoctions out of everything from beets to pineapples.11 People want to drink, and even a global pandemic will not stop them from doing so.
To have survived this long, and remained so central to human social life, intoxication’s individual-level advantages, combined with group-level social benefits, must have—over the course of human history—outweighed its more obvious costs. This is why both genetic and cultural “solutions” to the alcohol “problem” have failed to spread as quickly as one would expect if our taste for intoxication were merely an evolutionary mistake.

Posted in Lit Review | Tagged alcohol, beer, Book Review, books, culture, History | Leave a comment

Biking Uphill in the Rain

Posted on February 22, 2024 by twsobey

Title: Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars

Author: Tom Fucoloro

Completed: Feb 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: I’ve been reading the Seattle Bike Blog for a while now and was excited when I heard Tom had a book coming out. This is a great tour through the history of biking in our city. It covers how much biking was happening in the early days of Seattle and how close we’ve come (several times) to building the infrastructure needed to make this a world-class city for those of us on two wheels. With more protected bike lanes getting installed this summer, Seattle is continuing to move in the right direction and the first chapter of the next book is already starting.

Highlights:

Seattle hardly seems like a place for bike culture to flourish. How can anyone think that a bicycle is a good way to get around a city that has hamstring-straining 19 percent inclines in the heart of downtown? Biking from the downtown waterfront to the Seattle University campus just one mile east requires climbing as high as the tallest point in the entire state of Florida.2 And rain falls on that hill 152 days a year.3 Yet bicycling is a major part of Seattle’s past, present, and future.
I practice independent advocacy journalism, meaning I follow the ethical standards of journalism while reporting with an openly stated assumption: more people biking safely is a good thing.
Seattle’s relatively new traffic engineer was not a typical big-city engineer. Rather than threatening the Reasonably Polite Seattleites with arrest or admonishing them for doing something only professionals were allowed to do, he apologized. He didn’t want to remove the posts, but he had to because they weren’t up to code. Then he thanked them for challenging the way the department was building bike lanes, saying he would look into making the idea permanent. Finally, he kindly offered to return the posts if they wanted them back. The world was about to meet Dongho Chang:
Sometimes when a new delivery of bicycles arrived by train, merchant Fred Merrill would make sure everyone in town knew about it. First came the sounds of trumpets and other horns from a marching brass band approaching from the south. Behind the band was a procession of twelve horse-drawn wagons containing 293 new bicycles fresh off the train.
it opened up a recreational experience previously attainable only by those with the means to own a horse. Bicycles certainly weren’t cheap, but they were a lot more affordable to maintain and easier to store than a horse. So buying a “wheel,” as people often called bicycles then, opened up the growing population’s access to the forests and lakes on the outskirts of the developed city. The area was so forested and remote that even in 1901 people biking would sometimes encounter a bear.
“The Argus believes that Mr. Cotterill would make a model mayor for a model city. He has decided opinions and force of character to back them up. But Seattle is not a model city. This paper does not believe that a very large percentage of the population desire to make it so.”
from the University of Washington to Fremont and the then-independent city of Ballard, which had instituted its own bicycle license scheme to pay for its part of the path. The Ballard path was quirky. At one point, the terrain was too hilly to bypass some abandoned farm structures, so the path builders took the walls off an old farm shed and ran the path straight through it.
In 1866, white leaders in Seattle—including many men whose names have been immortalized on street signs such as Terry, Denny, Stewart, Van Asselt, Horton, Maynard, Ballard, Holgate, and more—signed a letter opposing plans for the promised Duwamish reservation along the Black River south of Seattle in modern-day Renton, Tukwila, and Skyway. Their argument was that the reservation was “of little value to the Indians … whose interests and wants have always been justly and kindly protected by the settlers of the Black River country.”
In an effort to raise public awareness about traffic deaths, the Seattle Traffic and Safety Council erected a towering “death thermometer” in 1940 at the intersection of Fourth and Westlake Avenues downtown,
The thunder of military bands rang through the streets of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, playing proud patriotic music through the afternoon and into the evening before Independence Day 1900. As the evening grew late, several thousand people gathered near the band and started decorating and illuminating their bicycles. Illuminated bicycle parades had for years been one of the city’s favorite ways to celebrate,
The short trip demonstrated the challenge facing more widespread adoption of cars in the city: There were not many roads suitable for driving one, and cars were even worse at navigating dirt roads rutted by horses and wagons than people on bicycles were. Early cars did not have the engine power to climb many of the city’s steep hills or the braking power to easily stop on the way down. “The hills of Seattle’s streets offer one comforting assurance to its people,” wrote the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1902, “no crank possessed by the speed mania will ever be able to operate a racing automobile here.”
nineteen-year-old Jim Casey and his friend Claude Ryan put their bicycles to work starting in 1907, delivering messages and packages around the city.12 Ryan’s uncle invested a hundred dollars and gave them a free office in the basement of a saloon in Pioneer Square. Because biking was fast and Seattle was small, the messengers were efficient and their business grew. Soon the American Messenger Service had a team of people making deliveries by bike, foot, and streetcar. The company didn’t purchase its first automobile until 1913, a decision that set it on a different course. Six years later, they made the leap to doing business beyond Seattle when they bought the Motor Parcel Delivery Service and renamed their company the United Parcel Service, also known as UPS.
Eighty-one years later, Seattle still has not gone one hundred days without a traffic death. The closest the city got was a seventy-six-day streak in the spring of 2017, but the city is getting closer. The four longest streaks were in 2017, 2018, and 2020.25 The 100 Deathless Days campaign in 1939 included public service announcements warning people to not be reckless,
The first Seattle newspaper mention of the word jaywalking was in a 1912 Seattle Daily Times editorial suggesting the term would be effective at shaming people who “cut corners” by walking through the middle of an intersection.31 The editorial quotes a Cleveland News editorial at length, part of a trend across the country at the time to carve out more roadway rights for people driving cars. But originally, the term was based on a more common term: jay-driver. When cars first started arriving in cities, people didn’t know how to drive them. People who drove on the wrong side of the road or otherwise broke the normal ways of city streets would be called a jay-driver,
This is an enduring black hole in the logic supporting car culture: the person controlling the fast-moving heavy vehicle is not responsible for the damage they cause so long as they were following the rules of the road when they caused the damage. Even if they are driving too fast to see someone walking in the dark, it’s not their fault unless they were significantly exceeding the speed limit or recklessly impaired. Then if the person driving is absolved of responsibility, no responsibility falls on the transportation agency or traffic engineer who designed the street or set the dangerous speed limit. It’s just nobody’s fault, so nothing changes.
In Seattle, stories of people in cars injuring or killing kids on bikes remained common throughout the 1930s, and bicycle sales in the United States were as low as one bicycle per 500 people.43 (For context, US bike sales in 2015 were estimated at one bicycle per 19 people.
When designing I-5 two decades later, engineers included eleven freeway crossings in the 2.5 miles of “desirable” neighborhoods north of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, but zero crossings for a nearly equal distance next to “hazardous” Beacon Hill. The consequences of this act of state-sponsored racism are still felt today. Freeway projects across the nation were often sold as “urban renewal” projects, and the displacement of lower-income communities of color was intentional.
The effort to build a rapid transit system in the Seattle region kicked off around 1965 as one part of a package of civic investments known as Forward Thrust. The rapid transit system included a forty-seven-mile, thirty-station train system as well as a major expansion of bus transit service. The transit section of the plan was estimated to cost $1.15 billion, but the federal government was prepared to cover two-thirds of that.
Berteig and a group of neighbors and advocates got together to promote a new vision for the railway that would make it the central artery of the city’s walking and biking network. And their history research gave them a name for their idea: the Burke-Gilman Trail. As bold and transformative as their idea was for Seattle, it would also reverberate throughout the country, inspiring and setting legal precedents for the national rails-to-trails movement.
The idea of investing in transportation to enable housing development wasn’t inherently new to cars and highways. Many of the preautomobile streetcar lines in cities were created by private companies as a way to sell homes in developments beyond convenient walking distance from major city destinations and jobs. But streetcars still limited the extent of sprawl because they were costly to build and operate, giving developers a clear incentive to build dense neighborhoods around the streetcar lines to keep ridership high and land value at a premium.
“I’ve been dragging my feet,” the BNR executive told Lagerwey, because he had worried that his superiors would dislike the deal with the city. There was just so much valuable land in the deal, and it all hinged on this document. “I’m retiring at 5:00,” he told Lagerwey. “So I’m going to sign this at 4:59, and then I’m walking out this door and we never have to talk again.” “I said, ‘That sounds good to me.’” Lagerwey laughed while telling me the story.
Unlike a protest march that defies laws against walking down the middle of streets, it is legal to ride a bike on a public street because bikes are vehicles. Police have a long history of taking violent action against people marching in protests, often citing “obstruction of traffic” as a reason. Critical Mass, on the other hand, was both a First Amendment free speech action and also not inherently illegal. Running red lights is illegal and people corking intersections don’t have the authority to control traffic, but these actions are also in the interest of public safety. Is it really appropriate or a proper use of police resources to arrest people for taking actions to maintain safety?
Seattle’s inequitable rollout of the relatively few bike facilities it had was a reflection of who had power within bicycle advocacy, and it painted a picture of who bicycle lanes were really intended to serve. The poorest people are the ones most likely to ride a bike, and it’s been that way for a long time. Bikes are cheaper to buy than cars and don’t require gas or even bus fare. But Seattle wasn’t building bike lanes for people who relied on biking; it was building bike lanes for people who were choosing to bike and had the time and resources to advocate for those bike lanes.
a 2013 University of Washington study supported by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Bike Works measured the amount of time that traffic signals were programmed to provide for people walking across the street.37 They found that the walk signals gave people in the wealthier and whiter Ballard neighborhood in northwest Seattle five additional seconds to finish crossing the street compared to people crossing a comparable street in the lower-income and more diverse Columbia City neighborhood in Rainier Valley. Not only that, but Columbia City residents typically had to wait longer for the walk sign after arriving at the intersection. Racism was programmed into traffic signal computers. Though walk signal timing was far from the only traffic safety problem in Columbia City, the traffic injury rate was six times higher at the Columbia City location than at the one in Ballard.
Sharrows don’t change any rules of the road. Instead, they are intended to remind people driving that people are allowed to bike on the street and that drivers should look out for them. It’s a passive-aggressive way of reminding people of the rules of the road, like an unsigned note left on a smelly office refrigerator. SDOT painted ninety-one miles of sharrows all over the city between 2007 and 2012. They were cheap, easy to install, highly visible, and uncontroversial. They quickly became a symbol of Seattle trying to look bike-friendly while not actually doing the hard work needed to achieve that goal.
Cars are still allowed on a neighborhood greenway, but steps are taken to limit the number of people driving there. Ideally, only people accessing a home on the street should drive on a neighborhood greenway. Significant traffic calming efforts are added, such as speed humps, to slow the few cars using the routes so that the street becomes comfortable for people of all ages and abilities to use. The surest sign of a successful neighborhood greenway is seeing a group of neighborhood kids playing in the street.
SDOT’s Stay Healthy Streets program was an immediate hit, and the city moved quickly to build twenty miles of them in 2020. At one point, expansion was briefly put on hold because SDOT had used every “road closed” sign it owned and needed to get more.
Car travel on the already low-traffic residential streets decreased more than 90 percent in places, a sign that the program was working and that neighbors had embraced the concept. The number of people biking on these streets increased nearly 300 percent. As soon as the “road closed” signs went up, people started walking right down the middle of the street.
Ten days after her death, Seattle demonstrated one part of the solution: a protected bike lane on Second Avenue through downtown and past the Garden of Remembrance. There was practically no opposition to the lane when it opened. People finally understood why we need bike lanes like it. Safe streets advocates were braced for another fight and ready to defend the new bike lane like they had fought to defend so many before, but nobody showed up on the other side of the battlefield. Because there is no War on Cars, and there never was. It was nothing more than an illusion, the belligerent bluster of people whose windshields obscured their views of what really matters in our world: the people we love.
(they decried the “terrorism of the motorized minority”)
The number of other people biking through downtown increased dramatically almost overnight, and riding a bike finally felt like a normal way to get around town. Biking became a reasonable option for many more people who would never have even tried biking on Second Avenue the way it was before. A place to be avoided at all costs became a destination.

Posted in Biking, Lit Review | Tagged bike, Book Review, books, History, Reading, Seattle | Leave a comment

Nuts and Bolts

Posted on January 14, 2024 by twsobey

Title: Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way)

Author: Roma Agrawal

Completed: Jan 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: I was very excited to read this book, hoping it could tell a story of human history and invention by focusing on a handful of inventions/discoveries. I was a bit disappointed. The discussion of science and engineering concepts seemed aimed at an upper elementary or middle school level. From memory, the author went much deeper into these concepts in the interview I heard. It’s not a bad book, just not what I was looking for. If you’re just starting to learn about engineering (and really like “dad joke” level puns), this book could be for you. Otherwise, there are better options available.

Highlights:

It’s difficult to imagine now, but nails were so valued in this pre-industrial era, where materials and skilled workers weren’t readily available, that the British banned their export to their colonies, including North America, where timber housing was the norm. As a result, nails became so precious there that some people even set fire to their homes when moving in order to retrieve the nails from the ashes. In 1619, a law was passed in the state of Virginia to discourage this practice
it was decided to verify whether flush riveting genuinely made a difference to the Spitfire’s speed. The methods they employed to test this were unusual. Engineers glued a split pea to the head of every flush rivet on the plane (making it look, according to one source, like it had a ‘chickenpox infection’), then flew it and noted the speed. More test flights followed, in which the split peas were removed in stages and the results noted. This ultimately vindicated Mitchell’s choice of flat heads: data showed that domed rivets would reduce the top speed of the fighter plane by up to 35km per hour.
we were making jewellery, wine, boats, and musical instruments (which are all pretty impressive feats of engineering) long before we thought up the wheel.
The problem lay in plotting the Earth’s longitudes, a vital means of orientation when approaching land. (Polynesian navigators had been calculating longitude for years through natural observation and knew their patch of ocean well, but these techniques weren’t used in the West.)
designing EMUs for the Apollo Lunar mission – but they had other problems. The suits being designed at the time were stiff and bulky, and severely restricted the astronauts’ movements. In 1967, the industrial division of Playtex – a company that specialised in making girdles and bras – used their experience to create a spacesuit made almost entirely from fabric. They put one of their employees in their prototype and then filmed him running and kicking and throwing a football in the field of a local high school. They won the contract, giving their bra-sewing seamstresses a new project to work on.
Engineering tells an intrinsically human story.
we only ‘own’ an object for a small proportion of its life, and that having a deeper understanding of design will reveal the massive repercussions, the long chain of events that affect our planet every time we produce or consume something,

Posted in Lit Review, Maker | Tagged Book Review, books, engineering, Reading, Science, Science communication, Technology | Leave a comment

Blood in the Machine

Posted on December 27, 2023 by twsobey

Title: Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

Author: Brian Merchant

Completed: Dec 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: The term “Luddite” gets thrown around a lot these days. I had a general idea that it came from people who broke some of the first automated machines about 200 years ago, but they were always portrayed as trying to hold back an inevitable march of technological innovation. This book clarified the history while providing many more details about who they were and why they were fighting. By the end, I had come to accept that despite my love of coding and robotics, I too would likely have been a Luddite. What about you, are you a Luddite?

Highlights:

in the 1800s, automation was not seen as inevitable, or even morally ambiguous. Working people felt it was wrong to use machines to “take another man’s bread,” and so thousands rose up in a forceful, decentralized resistance to smash them. The public cheered these rebels, and for a time they were bigger than Robin Hood, and more powerful.
workers and artisans resisted conditions they found unfavorable by breaking the machines used to exploit them. If merchants or shop owners refused to pay established rates or tried to bypass legal regulations with new technology, workers might smash the machinery they deemed “obnoxious.” At a time when organizing unions was illegal, it was a strategy embraced by workmen whose jobs were on the line with no other recourse: “collective bargaining by riot,” as one historian termed it. “The eighteenth-century master was constantly aware that an intolerable demand would produce, not a temporary loss of profits, but the destruction” of his machinery.
workers did not view technology as inherently progressive; they had not been taught to lionize disruption. To them, devices that would degrade their working conditions, or harm their ability to earn a living, were a moral violation, plain and simple.
This was the original “cottage industry,” and it made for a flexible and family-oriented lifestyle. There was demanding work to be done, and everyone was expected to pitch in, but it was common to work just thirty hours a week, on one’s own schedule, and take long weekends.
He gave up the case, but the point was made: the knitters and the hosiers profiting from their knitting were subject to very different rules. From there, the bitterness between the workers and the hosiers deepened.
“If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new,”
that it was unethical to put men out of work for the sake of directing profit into the hands of a few when times were as bad as they were for so many.
“Managers feel they must automate because ‘everyone’s doing it,’ out of fear that they will be undone by more up-to-date competitors (a paranoia encouraged by equipment vendors). There is this vague belief that the drive to automate is inevitable, unavoidable, and this belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
After all, the machine breakers were not ultimately after the machines themselves but rather the men who were using them to transform social relations and gain power. The Luddites were technologists themselves; they did not hate the machines, though they did not hold any undue respect for them, either.
The croppers were not yet starving but saw the injustice making its way to their doorstep. There was no reason for anyone to starve; the factory owners were still turning profits. If they stopped running new machines, there would be more work to go around. Besides, to the artisans who had taken seriously the traditions and contracts of their trade, using machinery to take market share at the cost of the worker was neither moral nor fair. It infuriated them that the entrepreneurs and factory owners claimed the right to automate people’s work, when it so obviously led to suffering.
But why “Ludd”? There was the legend of Ned Ludd, sure; but that was just that, a legend. There could have been a real Ned Ludd in Leicester (or elsewhere) who smashed his master’s frame and caused enough of a stir that insurgent workmen might adopt his name as their own. Or, the legend could have been retrofitted to suit the machine breakers’ cause. Lludd Llaw Eraint, for instance, was a Welsh hero who lost an arm in battle and was exiled as god-king, only to receive a new silver replacement that allowed him to return as a sort of cyborg warrior deity; Lludd of the Silver Hand would evolve when adopted by British folklore,
The entrepreneurs’ faith in “progress” was rooted in the trendy philosophy of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. “Laissez-faire,” the Luddite historian Brian Bailey wrote, had become “the political dogma of the English bourgeoisie. In fact, it represented freedom for the employers and intolerable repression of the workers.”
The state had placed a bounty on the Luddites’ heads, if anyone dared take it up. As soon as a copy of the proclamation was nailed to the church door in Sheepshead, someone posted a proclamation of their own alongside it: As the government had offered a reward of £50 for the conviction of offenders, there were 50 bullets ready for the body of the first man who should give information. It was signed, “Ned Lud.”
Many of the masters, after all, were men that George and Ben would have known much of their lives. Men that knew their families, their history, their community. These social bonds were not easily broken; it was not easy to stare into the eyes of a friend and say, I am taking your job. (One benefit of machinery was that it could be used as a rhetorical tool as well, to muddy the moral clarity of the situation—a use it’s been put to by owners ever since. It’s the robots, not your boss, that’s coming to take away your job.)
until the nineteenth century, entrepreneurship was not a cultural phenomenon. Businessmen took risks, of course, and undertook novel efforts to increase their profits. Yet there was not a popular conception of the heroic entrepreneur, of the adventuring businessman, until after the birth of industrial capitalism.
We can look back at the Industrial Revolution and lament the working conditions, but popular culture still lionizes entrepreneurs cut in the mold of Arkwright, who made a choice to employ thousands of child laborers and to institute a dehumanizing system of factory work to increase revenue and lower costs. We have acclimated to the idea that such exploitation was somehow inevitable, even natural, while casting aspersions on movements like the Luddites as being technophobic for trying to stop it. We forget that working people vehemently opposed such exploitation from the beginning.
The word innovation, it’s worth noting, carried negative connotations until the mid-twentieth century or so; Edmund Burke famously called the French Revolution “a revolt of innovation.”)
influential economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that improvements in machinery and, subsequently, productivity would lead us to a fifteen-hour workweek at most. If automation could be harnessed for the “common benefit,” as Booth argues, that might be a plausible outcome. Instead, it has consistently played out as Mellor has feared; labor-saving technology has accelerated the accumulation of capital among an ever-shrinking pool of elites.
the Luddite movement was not about technology; it was about workers’ rights. Luddism started as a tactical strike against the technologies of control, but had exploded into a greater expression of the rage against a system where the privileged few with access to the right levers could lift themselves up at the expense of the many.
Technological disruption is not an accidental or inevitable phenomenon, either, but an intentional one. Two hundred years ago, like today, aspiring entrepreneurs and nascent tech titans saw an opportunity to deploy technology to do work, more cheaply, more efficiently, and at greater scale than it had been previously done by skilled workers. They saw an opportunity for disruption, and disruption was the point. They knew that their machines would upend communities and traditions, but also make them money. Sometimes they knew they’d be trampling regulations, but reasoned that such laws were old and outmoded, and that they could justify it later. Motivated by competition with their peers and the promise of profits,
The cloth workers of England at the outset of the Industrial Revolution had every reason to be angry; they were not “unthinking” in their opposition to machinery. They even proposed plans to help cushion the introduction of automation in a way that would be more stable for workers and employers alike. And they were shut out of the process altogether, often ignored or derided, and ultimately left to starve.
The cloth workers were not only proactive, legally minded, and dogged in seeking their fair shake. They were creative, too. They recognized technology was improving—cloth workers themselves were often the ones that improved it—and were on the lookout for ideas as to how machines might be more harmoniously introduced into workplaces to benefit them all. Take, for instance, this idea for blunting the pain of automation by taxing technology: “Proposals were in the air for gradual introduction of the machinery, with alternative employment found for displaced men, or for a tax of 6d. [sixpence] per yard upon cloth dressed by machinery, to be used as fund for the unemployed seeking work.” They suggested placement and retraining programs. They also proposed phase-in periods, or waiting for economic conditions to improve, so that automated machinery could be introduced less disruptively. In fact, these 1800s cloth workers put forward just about every idea that’s gained prominence in the twenty-first century to blunt the pain of automation.
These arguments parallel the ones advanced by Uber and other major gig economy companies like Instacart and Doordash throughout the 2010s and 2020s. Uber’s chief innovation is not that its app summons a car to your location with a smartphone and a GPS signal. It is that it used this moderately novel configuration of technology to argue that the old rules did not apply whenever it brought its taxi business to a market that already had a regulated taxi code.
the owner of a Manchester cotton factory received a letter signed by an Eliza Ludd. It’s one of the most eloquent of the Luddite missives, comparing the ongoing uprising to the American Revolutionary War.
There are few if any known instances of women participating in frame-breaking outright, but “during the troubles of 1812 women continued to be very prominent,”the targets were still factories stocked with the automating machinery, the homes built with profits made from running them, or places that stored or distributed food. Even at its most violent, the Luddite uprising had kept its focus fixed on the implements of inequality, or on a means of evening the scales.
As easy as it is to forget the technologies that have been rejected—whether automated cloth-weaving devices, nuclear power plants, or contemporary facial-recognition tech—“No” is, and has always been, an option—whether by policy or by force.
Whitney even suggested that his device could help end slavery, since laborers would no longer have to do the unpleasant work of picking the seeds out by hand. That is not what happened. Instead, the cotton gin is one of the original sins of automated technology, and the most disastrous case of unintended consequences unleashed upon the world this side of the nuclear bomb. Whitney’s machine was widely pirated, modded, and adopted by plantation owners, who saw little need to compensate the inventor. The cotton gin worked so well that it wildly increased the demand for workers to do every other part of the cotton production process, especially the hoeing and the picking. Slavery, an institution whose future was at the time in question—Northerners wanted it abolished, and were drawing close to legislating restrictions—received a lifeline, then an economic raison d’être. The export of cotton became the biggest industry in the United States, so economically powerful, generating so much wealth for plantation owners, that it helped sustain the institution of slavery for another seventy years.
The words South Carolina had long been a bugaboo for Charles and his friends and family back in Maryland. It was shorthand for a special kind of hell, even in the hellish context of slavery in general.
On May 11, an unremarkable-looking man named John Bellingham sat on a bench in the lobby of the House of Commons, watching the statesmen enter and exit the building. When he finally spotted the prime minister, he stood up, walked over to him, and shot him through the heart at point-blank range. “I am murdered!” Perceval shouted. Bellingham returned calmly to the bench, behind the fallen minister, and placed the literal smoking gun on his lap. He was apprehended without a struggle and taken into custody. Perceval died within minutes. He was the first and, to this day, only prime minister of England to be assassinated on the job. Bellingham later said he thought that Britain would cheer the murder as an act of justice, and he was not entirely wrong—by the time he was led away from the crime scene, a crowd had gathered and many called out their support.
the logic of unfettered capitalism ensures that any labor-saving, cost-reducing, or control-enabling device will eventually be put to use, regardless of the composition of the societies those technologies will disrupt. Consider it the iron law of profit-seeking automation: once an alluring way to eliminate costs with a machine or program emerges, it will be deployed.
public support seemed to be on the wane after the murder of Horsfall. That is what it took to safeguard the emerging factory system, and the normalization of automation—and
Thompson erected the straw man that endures today, that the Luddites were too dumb to see that automation was for everyone’s benefit in the long run. But to argue that a weaver is delusional for recognizing that a machine that destroys his job is “inimical” to his interests seems the eclipsing delusion. If a person must work to survive, and their job becomes automated, you would have to be either deluded or willfully disingenuous to be surprised when they fight to keep it.
The caricature of Luddites as chiefly technophobic, born in the minds of entrepreneurs and elites, was elevated to prominence in this courtroom. It has endured for centuries.
It’s easy to see the Luddites as a driving inspiration, and scholars of the period have argued that Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is a symbolic stand-in for the machine breakers. Mary was less of an outspoken advocate for the Luddites or working-class movements than her husband was. She was liberal in her politics, but, like Byron, the prospect of a bloody revolution made her “shudder.” Even so, Frankenstein was clearly an allegorical work, composed against the backdrop of an uprising in the waning years of the Enlightenment, to the soundtrack of the machinery question that the Luddites beat onto the national stage. The mad doctor may as well be an entrepreneur who uses cutting-edge technology to force someone into a particular way of life—an automated factory, say—and then is surprised when that individual grows angry at his barren, rudderless existence.
“England’s loss was our gain,” John Baker, the former head of one of Australia’s largest telecom unions, said in the 1970s. Ever since the Luddites were “transported” to Australia, he explained, they’ve had an outsized influence on shaping attitudes toward work, and the importance of strong unions. Australia led the world in fighting for eight-hour workdays, mass unionization, and social democracy.
Students for a Democratic Society leader Marco Savio famously encapsulated the Luddite ethos. “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part!” he yelled out from the steps of Sprout Hall at UC Berkeley. “You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels,… upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
“The separation of workplace and home—of working hours and free time—remained the exception for most of human history, only becoming widespread during the Industrial Revolution through the centralization of gainful employment in the factories and offices of the industrialized West at the end of the eighteenth century,” according to Andrea Komlosy, the historian and author of Work: The Last 1,000 Years.
“Algorithmic hiring and firing have become an everyday part of people’s lives, whether we’re talking about customer service agents or warehouse workers.” The aim, she says, is to create an anxious, uncertain workforce that has no choice but to be malleable before the algorithm’s demands.
“The Luddites were actually protesting the social costs of technological ‘progress’ that the working class was being forced to accept,” the sociologist Ruha Benjamin wrote in Race after Technology.
“To break the machine was in a sense to break the conversion of oneself into a machine for the accumulating wealth of another,” notes cultural theorist Imani Perry.
workers might remember how close the Luddites came to repelling the technologies of their oppression. They might remember what worked—tight-knit solidarity, distributed organizing models, shows of power and creativity capable of inspiring influential producers of culture, unrepentantly aggressive actions against those oppressive technologies specifically; and what did not—violence against individuals, a lack of coordination with an empowered political body, the absence of a sustained effort to grow one.
If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are. Robots are not sentient—they do not have the capacity to be coming for or stealing or killing or threatening to take away our jobs. Management does.
We will be able to make better decisions about automation, however, if we understand that, in practice, “the robots are coming for our jobs” usually means something more like “a CEO wants to cut his operating budget by 15 percent and was just pitched on enterprise software that promises to do all the work currently done by thirty employees in accounts payable.”

Posted in Lit Review, Maker | Tagged Book Review, books, Luddite, Reading, Technology | 1 Comment

The Art of Relevance

Posted on October 20, 2023 by twsobey

Title: The Art of Relevance

Author: Nina Simon

Completed: Oct 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: I stumbled onto this book when I saw the author promoting her new book on LinkedIn. We met at the ASTC annual conference over a decade ago and I wrote part of an article she got published in an industry magazine, but we hadn’t spoken in years which is how I’d missed when this was published. It is an interesting look at the important of relevance within the museum/science center world mostly told through a series of stories about different projects at cultural institutions. I was reminded how energizing it can be to organize a great event or exhibition at a science center. As I’ve moved into formal education, I miss that. At schools, we recognize the value of relevance, but achieving it within the confines of static curriculum is often challenging. I feel fortunate that Career and Tech Ed (CTE) classes have more flexibility than most classes and look forward for ways to continue incorporating these ideas into classroom experiences.

Highlights:

we sought, little by little, to understand what mattered to people in our community. To understand how we could replace our locked doors with ones that opened widely to our community and the cultural experiences they sought.
Relevance is a paradox. It is essential; it gets people to pay attention, to walk in the door, to open their hearts. But it is also meaningless without powerful programming on the other side of the door. If the door doesn’t lead to valuable offerings, if nothing touches peoples’ hearts, interest fades.
Relevance is only valuable if it opens a door to something valuable. Once I understood the depth of Princes of Surf, I got embarrassed thinking about all the other projects I thought were relevant, doorways I had built for rooms that were hardly more than stage sets. Too often, our work opens doors to shallow, interchangeable rooms. We adorn the entrances with phrases like FUN! or FOR YOU!, but that doesn’t change what’s behind the doors. We lie to ourselves, writing shiny press releases for second-class objects and secondhand stories. The rechewed meat of culture. We tell ourselves that as long as we link our work to people’s interests on the surface, they’ll be rushing for our door. And they may come in the door… but they won’t come back. Doors to dullness are quickly forgotten.
there are two criteria that make information relevant: 1. How likely that new information is to stimulate a positive cognitive effect—to yield new conclusions that matter to you. 2. How much effort is required to obtain and absorb that new information. The lower the effort, the higher the relevance.
Too often, we expect people to do the work of manufacturing relevance on their own. They won’t. It’s too much work. Our brains crave efficiency. If it takes too many leaps to get from here to there, relevance goes down. The line need not be straight, but it must be clear, and short.
Irrelevance can be damaging, especially for organizations with limited resources to attract and engage people. Irrelevance is just as appealing to those of us doing the work as it is to those we seek to reach. Irrelevance is everywhere. It is in every sexy new technology. Every program pursued strictly to fulfill a funder’s interest. Every short-sighted way that we get people’s attention without capturing their imagination.
There are two kinds of people in the world of relevance: outsiders and insiders. Insiders are in the room. They know it, love it, protect it. Outsiders don’t know your doors exist. They are uninterested, unsure, unwelcome. If you want new people to come inside, you need to open new doors—doors that speak to outsiders— and welcome them in.
To be relevant, we need to cultivate open-hearted insiders. Insiders who are thrilled to welcome in new people. Who are delighted by new experiences. The greatest gift that insiders can give outsiders is to help them build new doors. To say, I want you here—not on my terms, but on yours. I’m excited you think there might be something of value in this room. Let me help you access it.
In my experience, the institutionally-articulated “needs” of audiences often look suspiciously like the “wants” of the professionals speaking. Professionals want silence in the auditorium, so they say “people need respite from their busy lives.” Priests want parishioners to accept the canon as presented, so they say “people need strong spiritual guidance.” Teachers want students to listen attentively, so they say “kids need to learn this.”
When I ask what the phrase “don’t give people what they want, give them what they need” means, I am often told that we should not be pandering to people’s expressed desires but presenting them with experiences that challenge them and open up new ways of seeing the world. I agree. It is incredibly valuable for cultural institutions to present experiences that might be surprising, unexpected, or outside participants’ comfort zones. But I don’t typically hear this phrase deployed to argue in favor of a risky program format or an unusual piece of content. I don’t hear this phrase accompanied by evidence-based articulation of “needs” of audiences. Instead, I hear this phrase used to defend traditional formats and content in the face of change. I hear “don’t give people what they want, give them what I want.”
Recent research in many fields, including education, public health, and public safety, shows that we can be more effective when we focus on assets as well as needs. In asset-based programs, the institution focuses on cultivating and building on people’s strengths instead of filling needs or fixing weaknesses. Instead of penalizing young bullies, asset-based crime prevention programs help assertive children take on leadership roles. Instead of lecturing families about the food pyramid, asset-based nutrition programs encourage families to share their own favorite recipes.
we’ve gravitated towards a “community first” program planning model. It’s pretty simple. Instead of designing programming and then seeking out audiences for it, we identify communities and then develop or co-create programs that are relevant to their assets, needs, and values. Here’s how we do it: 1. Define the community or communities to whom you wish to be relevant. The more specific the definition, the better. 2. Find representatives of this community—staff, volunteers, visitors, trusted partners—and learn more about their experiences. If you don’t know many people in this community, this is a red flag moment. Don’t assume that programs that are relevant to you or your existing audiences will be relevant to people from other backgrounds. 3. Spend more time in the community to whom you wish to be relevant. Explore their events. Meet their leaders. Get to know their dreams, points of pride, and fears. Share yours, too. 4. Develop collaborations and programs, keeping in mind what you have learned.
individuals learning about the people who matter most in their lives and then sculpting new doors for them. Any time we personalize something for someone—based on what they want to receive, not what we want to offer—this happens.
You can elicit someone’s entrance narrative anytime they walk through your doors. This is a simple two-step process. First, find a way to ask the person what brought them in. Then, find a way to affirm and build on their response. You might provide a special recommendation for something to see or do based on their interests. You might seat them in a particular area, help them take a group photo, or invite them to another event.
These new programs fundamentally altered their institution’s offerings. When communities of interest avoid your programming regardless of your marketing investments, you need to change the room. If people attend once and don’t come back, it’s probably a problem with the experience and not the marketing.
Every display and artifact had been reconfigured. But, he explained to us, we were not there to cut the ribbon and marvel at the finished product. We were there to critique the installation and to kick off its next transformation. The director said to us: “We are proud of the new installation that we share with you today. But we also know that this is day one of it becoming outdated.”
The urge to entertain can be a serious distraction from relevance—the kind of irrelevance that makes your work harder to access, not easier. Relevance doesn’t trump compelling—it does something different. The function of relevance is to create a connection between a person and a thing, in a way that might unlock meaning for that person. If you can tell a relevant story first, you are more likely to create an appetite for other compelling information you have to share.
Some institutions get caught up in chasing trends, arguing: “if people on the street are talking about X, we should be talking about X too.” No. If people on the street are talking about X, the organization should ask: is X something that matters to us, too? Does X belong in our room? And if so, how do we want to address X through the lens of our mission, content, and form?
at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. Our mandate was to be the museum of Silicon Valley—not of its material history, but of its pulse of innovation. It was impossible. The exhibits we built were immediately dated. Their physicality, long development timelines, and big budgets dragged them down. They didn’t dance to the thrilling drumbeat of change at the heart of Silicon Valley. They were immutable objects plunked on the sidelines.
Public advocacy work is good for business as well as for mission: a 2015 IMPACTS study of 48 leading US cultural institutions showed a 98% correlation between visitor perception of “delivering on mission” and financial metrics of success like fundraising ability and financial stability.
The stronger your core, the more you can reach out with confidence. The more doors you open, the more relevant you will be.

Posted in Education, Lit Review, Museums | Tagged Book Review, Reading, Science communication | Leave a comment

Religious Literacy

Posted on September 20, 2023 by twsobey

Title: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t

Author: Stephen Prothero

Completed: September 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: This is one of the only books I’ve reread and now that I have, I realized it wasn’t really the book I wanted to read either time. I first read it around 2010 in hopes of learning more about different world religions. I enjoyed it, but didn’t retain most of what was in it. When I read it this time, I was reminded that it is a wonderful overview of religion in America from pre-revolution through the mid 20th century. This is certainly interesting, but both time I was looking for a better understanding of world religions. Luckily he had a recommendation for that, The World’s Religions by Huston Smith. So I’ve added that to my list. I found many of the stories in this book to be interesting, but hope I look back at these notes before considering reading this book for a third time.

Highlights:

In Cultural Literacy, Hirsch, a University of Virginia English professor, argued that much of our common cultural coin had been drastically devalued. (“Remember the Alamo”? Um, not really.) Hirsch traced this problem to John Dewey and other Progressive-era education reformers, who gave up in the early twentieth century on content-based learning in favor of a skills-based strategy that scorned “the piling up of information.” This new educational model produced, according to Hirsch, “a gradual disintegration of cultural memory,” which caused in turn “a gradual decline in our ability to communicate.” Hirsch rightly understood that there are civic implications of this descent into cultural ignorance, particularly in a democracy that assumes an informed citizenry.
Today far too many thinkers, on both the left and the right, cling to the illusion that we live in a “post-Christian” country and a secular world. But evidence of the public power of religion is overwhelming, particularly in the United States. As Boston University law professor Jay Wexler has observed, “A great many Americans rely on religious reasons when thinking and talking about public issues. Ninety percent of the members of Congress, by one report, consult their religious beliefs when voting on legislation. A majority of Americans believe that religious organizations should publicly express their views on political issues, and an even stronger majority believe it is important for a President to have strong religious beliefs.”
Evangelical pollsters have lamented for some time the disparity between Americans’ veneration of the Bible and their understanding of it, painting a picture of a nation that believes God has spoken in scripture but can’t be bothered to listen to what God has to say. The Democratic presidential aspirant Howard Dean, when asked to name his favorite New Testament book, mistakenly cited an Old Testament text (Job) instead. But such confusion is not restricted to Dean’s home state of Vermont. According to recent polls, most American adults cannot name one of the four Gospels, and many high school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.
When the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 put female suffrage on the national agenda, most citizens knew that suffragettes would have to contend with the injunctions in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians (two New Testament letters attributed to the apostle Paul) that women should keep silent in the churches and submit to male authority. Today it is a rare American who can follow with any degree of confidence biblically inflected debates about abortion or gay marriage. Or, for that matter, about the economy, since the most widely quoted Bible verse in the United States—“God helps those who help themselves”—is not actually in the Bible.
The United States is by law a secular country. God is not mentioned in the Constitution, and the First Amendment’s establishment clause forbids the state from getting into the church business. However, that same amendment also includes a free exercise clause safeguarding religious liberty, and Americans have long exercised this liberty by praying to God, donating to religious congregations, and hoping for heaven. So there is logic not only to President John Adams’s affirmation in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796 that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” but also to the Supreme Court’s 1892 observation that “this is a Christian nation.”
Some surveys show that the portion of “Nones” (those who claim no religious preference) is rising in the United States—doubling by one account over the course of the 1990s from 7 percent to 14 percent. But those who have distanced themselves from organized religion have done nothing of the sort when it comes to God or spirituality. In a recent survey of US adolescents, sociologist Christian Smith found that, of the teenagers who claimed “no religion,” fewer than one out of five rejected the possibility of life after death. In a recent study of American adults, nine out of ten of the “no religion” respondents told researchers that they pray. These “Nones,” in short, are about as irreligious as your average nun. Few are Euro-style atheists or agnostics; the vast majority are “unchurched believers”—spiritual people who for one reason or another avoid religious congregations.
Of America’s religions, the most popular of course is Christianity. Half of Americans describe themselves as Protestants, one-quarter as Catholics, and 10 percent as Christians of some other stripe. This makes the US population more Christian than Israel is Jewish or Utah is Mormon.
The Gospel of John instructs Christians to “search the scriptures” (John 5:39), but little searching, and even less finding, is being done.
When religion is mentioned in US history schoolbooks, it is all too often an afterthought or an embarrassment (or both) and clearly a diversion from what is presumed throughout to be a secular story. Historian Jon Butler has called this the jack-in-the-box approach: Religious characters pop up here and there, typically with all of the color and substance of a circus clown, but their appearances—prosecuting witches in Salem in the 1690s or making monkeys of themselves at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in the 1920s—are always a surprise (or a scare), and, happily, they go back into hiding as quickly as they emerge. Readers of American history textbooks might learn something about the religious bigotry of the Puritans and the quaint customs of Native Americans of bygone days.
none of the classic events in American history—the Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution—can be understood without some knowledge of the religious motivations of the generals, soldiers, thinkers, politicians, and voters who made them happen.
When the war ended, both sides saw it as an Armageddon of sorts. Southerners fastened onto the Myth of the Lost Cause, which embraced Confederate soldiers as martyrs and the South as something of a resurrected Christ, while Northerners anointed Lincoln, who was assassinated on Good Friday, as a Christ of their own who shed his blood to atone for the sins of the nation.
Progressive proponents of the Social Gospel, by contrast, saw capitalism as a sin. The novel In His Steps (1897) by the Congregationalist minister Charles M. Sheldon is remembered today for bequeathing to us the query “What would Jesus do?” but its original purpose was to drive home the point that if Jesus were out and about in Victorian America he would be caring for slum dwellers, not selling steel.
Partisans of “muscular Christianity,” recalling that Jesus “came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), contended that their “manly Redeemer” would want them to fight for what is right. Christian pacifists, who worshipped a “sweet Savior,” countered with the story of Jesus rebuking followers after they drew blood from his captors in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:51–52).
also affects Indian tourism (since some high-caste Hindus consider traveling outside of India polluting), AIDS in Africa (where the Roman Catholic Church forbids artificial birth control), and banking throughout the Muslim world (since Islamic law prohibits the giving and receiving of interest).
As a series of recent Supreme Court rulings has made plain, the First Amendment requires that the public schools be neutral with respect to religion. That means not taking sides among the religions, not favoring Christianity over Buddhism, for example, or the Baptists over the Lutherans. But it also means not taking sides between religion and irreligion. As Justice Tom Clark wrote in Abington v. Schempp (1963), public schools may not preach the “religion of secularism.”
As Nord noted, “For some time now, people have rightly argued that ignoring black history and women’s literature (as texts and curricula have traditionally done) has been anything but neutral. Rather, it betrays a prejudice; it is discriminatory. And so it is with religion.”
the Court has repeatedly and explicitly given a constitutional seal of approval to teaching about religion “when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education.”
With the American Revolution came a new rationale for basic literacy, and a new aim. Whereas the revolution of Luther and Calvin had provided a theological justification for reading, the revolution of Washington and Adams provided a civic one. Now children needed to read not only to be good Protestants but also to be good citizens—to free themselves from the tyranny of popes as well as kings. The theory here was simple, and it was rooted in a shared sense of the fragility of democratic government. Unlike European monarchies, which saw educated citizens as a bother at best, the American experiment in republican government, which vested sovereignty in the people and, by the 1820s, extended suffrage without regard to economic means (though, it must be noted, still in regard to race and sex), depended for its survival on an informed citizenry. Or, as James Madison put it, “A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”96 And so two potent justifications for literacy developed side by side. Children would learn to read both to free themselves from sin and to liberate themselves from monarchs—both to save their souls and to save the republic.
One of the myths of American education is that once upon a time (that is, before the Religious Right started to muck around in the public schools) public education was secular. This is simply not so. From their early-nineteenth-century beginnings, common schools were very much a part of an unofficial yet powerful Protestant establishment, which included the leading Protestant denominations and a “Benevolent Empire” of nondenominational voluntary associations dedicated to improving the world through peace, temperance, abolitionism, and other social reforms.
This famine was particularly worrying in light of the feast of secular novels and other “vicious literature” available on the frontier. Pioneers seemed to expend the limited reading skills they possessed on literature that amused rather than edified. As a result, the masses on the frontier were left “in the grossest darkness and spiritual ignorance,” “destitute”
historians Jon Roberts and James Turner have observed, state institutions were if anything more explicitly theological than their private counterparts “since they answered to electorates deeply suspicious even of Catholics, much more of outright unbelievers.” As late as 1905 a study of religion at state universities would conclude that these institutions were “more intensely and genuinely Christian than the average community.”
revivalism made Christians. In fact, it made converts by the millions. Church membership rates more than doubled from roughly 17 percent of Americans at the start of the Revolution to 34 percent in 1850.
The key figure behind the nondenominational or nonsectarian solution to the problem of religion in public education was Horace Mann, the education reformer (and, not coincidentally, Unitarian) who served as the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from its founding in 1837 until 1848. More than anyone else, Mann determined the role religion would play in the nation’s public schools.
the focus of education shifted from teaching religious doctrines to inculcating moral character. The great exodus of religion from the minds of American citizens was under way.181 The effects of this exodus remain with us today, notably in our collapsing of religion into “values” and “values” into sexual morality, which in turn functions via an odd sort of circular reasoning as a proxy for religiosity. At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus’ divinity or Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion.
“Religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt.” Once upon a time, the sermon had educated parishioners about such Christian staples as the Trinity and the Ten Commandments, and the stories ministers told from the pulpit were restricted to the grand biblical narratives of Moses, Abraham, Sarah, Jesus, and Mary. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the sermon descended, as Hofstadter put it, “from the vernacular to the vulgar”; the pew became a place where you could hear the likes of Moody fuming that “an educated rascal is the meanest kind of rascal”
What made you a Christian, both conservatives and liberal Protestants argued, was not affirming a particular catechism or knowing certain Bible stories; rather, what made you a Christian was having a relationship with an astonishingly malleable Jesus—an American Jesus buffeted here and there by the shifting winds of the nation’s social and cultural preoccupations.
4 Gospels. The four narratives of the life of Jesus included in the New Testament of the Christian churches. They are: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
5 Ks. Symbols that identify male members of a Sikh order called the Khalsa, so called because each begins in Punjabi with the letter k. They are: kes, uncut hair; kangha, comb; kirpan, ceremonial sword; kara, steel wrist bangle; kachh, short pants.
5 Pillars of Islam. The key practices of Islam, obligatory for all Muslims. They are: Shahadah, or witnessing that “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God”; salat, or prayer in the direction of Mecca five times a day (dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening); sawm, or fasting (from sunrise to sunset) during the lunar month of Ramadan; zakat, or almsgiving to the poor (via an asset tax); hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, once in a lifetime for all who are physically and financially able.
ahimsa. Term in Hinduism, Buddhism, and especially Jainism, often translated as nonviolence, referring to not harming or wishing to harm. Described by Jains as the highest moral duty,
Jesus repeatedly told his followers that he had come not to strengthen families but to set family members against one another: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also,” he said, “he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
just-war theory. Catholic tradition, dating to Thomas Aquinas, describing both what makes a war just (jus ad bellum) and what conduct is justifiable during such a war (jus in bello). Concerning how to conduct a war, just war theorists often cite such principles as “discrimination” (which says that combatants should direct their aggression against other combatants rather than innocent civilians) and “proportionality” (which says that force cannot be out of proportion to the injury suffered). Just war theory also prohibits torture and mandates proper care for prisoners of war.
Mormons recognize four scriptures: the Bible (“as far as it is translated correctly”), the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants.
The best way for newcomers to read the Quran is not from front to back but from back to front. Start with the Fatihah, but then skip to the shorter, more theological suras in the back. Then read the narratives of the prophets (toward the middle) before concluding with the legalistic content of the long suras at the front.
Like Muslims, Sikhs are strict monotheists who emphasize divine sovereignty. They reject the view that God incarnates in human form, believing instead in a formless God that can be known through singing and meditation. Sikhs too have a sacred center, in this case the Golden Temple of Amritsar, India. Like Hindus, Sikhs believe in karma and reincarnation.

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A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth

Posted on August 14, 2023 by twsobey

Title: A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters

Author: Henry Gee

Completed: August 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: This was an unusual book to me. It started off covering vast swaths of early prehistory at breakneck speed. Often only discussing one species long enough to note the name, what it evolved from, and what species followed after it. It was reminiscent of sections of Genesis (Adam begat Seth; Seth begat Enos; etc). At this stage, I almost stopped reading, which I rarely do. I’m glad I opted to continue on. Several of the later chapters were much more interesting to me. The last chapter also looked ahead in a way that was both reassuring and alarming at once. He argues that we need to continue to all we can to fight climate change and our impact on the environment, but no matter what we do, humans will be extinct in 1000 years. After that, the Earth will quickly (geologically speaking) wipe away any trace we were ever here. The planet doesn’t need “saving”; it will be fine. Life will continue. There will be no people or most of the species we currently know, but that’s the way life has been for billions of years, constantly changing.

Highlights:

Stromatolites—as we have seen, the first visible signs of life on Earth—were colonies of different kinds of bacteria. Bacteria can even swap portions of their own genes with one another. It is this easy trade that means, today, that bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics. If a bacterium doesn’t have a resistance gene for a particular antibiotic, it can pick it up from the genetic free-for-all of other species with which it shares its environment.
Sponges have no distinct organs or tissues. A live sponge pushed through a sieve and back into the water will pull itself together into a different shape but one just as alive, just as functional. It is a simple life that requires little energy—and little oxygen.
Some of the armored heirs of Saccorhytus created their own distinctive suits of chain mail, each link sculpted from a single crystal of calcite. In doing so they became the echinoderms—the spiny-skinned ones—the ancestors of the starfishes and sea urchins of today. All modern echinoderms have a distinctive body shape based on the number five, entirely different from any other animal. In the Cambrian, however, their shapes were more varied. Although some were bilaterally symmetrical, a few were triradial (that is, with a symmetry based on the number three), and yet others were completely irregular.
The evolution of the seed, like the evolution of the amniote egg, allowed plants to break away from the tyranny of water.
As pterosaurs evolved, they grew, until the last of their kind—at the end of the Cretaceous period—were as large as small airplanes and barely flapped at all. Light in build but with enormous wings, all they needed to do to take off was to spread their wings into a light breeze and physics would do the rest. Their success was abetted by a delicate construction, their skeletons modified into rigid, boxy airframes made of bones hollowed almost to paper-thinness.
But dinosaurs also excelled at being small. Some were so small they could have danced in the palm of your hand. Microraptor, for example, was the size of a crow and weighed no more than a kilogram; the peculiar, bat-like Yi, diminutive in name as well as size, weighed less than half that.
A sizable beneficiary was the liver, which generated a lot of heat and, in a large dinosaur, was the size of a car. The air-cooled internal workings of dinosaurs were more efficient than the liquid-cooled mammalian version. This allowed dinosaurs to become much larger than mammals ever could, without boiling themselves alive.
Although vertebrates in general have always laid eggs—a habit that allowed the final conquest of the land by the first amniotes—many vertebrates have reverted to the ancestral habit, found in the earliest jawed vertebrates, of bearing live young. It is all a matter of finding a strategy that protects the offspring without incurring too onerous a cost on the parent. Mammals started by laying eggs. Almost all of them became live-bearers, but at terrible cost. Live-bearing demands vast expenditures of energy, and this sets limits on the sizes that mammals can achieve on land.16 It also limits the number of offspring they can produce at once.
Madagascar, then as now, was a haven for the exotic. In the Cretaceous, many ecological niches there, even vegetarianism, were occupied by crocodiles.40
The dinosaurs’ card had been marked long before. Around 160 million years ago, in the late Jurassic, a collision in the distant asteroid belt produced the forty-kilometer-diameter asteroid now known as Baptistina, along with a magazine of more than a thousand fragments, each more than a kilometer across, some much larger. These harbingers of doom dispersed into the inner solar system.
We humans, at least in childhood, can hear notes as high as 20 kHz, much higher than the highest song of the skylark.6 But humans are cloth eared compared with many other mammals, such as dogs (45 kHz7), ring-tailed lemurs (58 kHz8), mice (70 kHz9), and cats (85 kHz10), and they are profoundly deaf compared with dolphins (160 kHz11). The evolution of the chain of three bones in the mammalian middle ear opened up to mammals an entirely new sensory universe inaccessible to other vertebrates.
When the backbone evolved half a billion years ago, it was a structure held horizontally, in tension. In hominins, it moved through ninety degrees, to be held vertically, in compression. No more radical alteration in the engineering requirements of the backbone has happened since it first evolved, and it can only be regarded as maladaptive; witness that back problems constitute one of the most costly and frequent causes of illness in humans today. Dinosaurs made a huge success of being bipeds but did so in a different way; they held their backbones horizontally, using their long, stiff tails as counterbalances. But hominins, like apes, have no tails and achieved bipedality the hard way.
they took a step that would be as revolutionary as standing upright had been to their now-distant forest ancestors: they learned how to run.
Half a million years ago, Britain was buried under ice a mile thick. In contrast, the climate was so warm 125,000 years ago that lions hunted deer on the banks of the Thames, and hippos wallowed as far north as the River Tees. Forty-five thousand years ago, Britain was a treeless steppe where reindeer roamed in winter and bison in summer.4 Twenty-six thousand years ago, it was too cold even for reindeer.
The hand axe is so distinctive because it has more or less the same design wherever it is found, irrespective of its age or the material from which it is made. Its association with a particular species—Homo erectus—suggests that hand axes, for all their undeniable beauty, were made according to a hardwired, stereotypical design. They were created as thoughtlessly as birds make their nests. If, when creating a hand axe, the maker made a mistake in the sequence of strokes required to chip it from a blank flint, they would not try to fix it or perhaps turn it to some other purpose. They would simply discard the mistake and start again from the beginning with a fresh blank.
Within the next few thousand years, Homo sapiens will have vanished. The cause will be, in part, the repayment of an extinction debt, long overdue. The patch of habitat occupied by humanity is nothing less than the entire Earth, and human beings have been making it progressively less habitable. The main reason, though, will be a failure of population replacement. The human population is likely to peak during the present century, after which it will decline. By 2100, it will be less than it is today.

Posted in Lit Review | Tagged Biology, Book Review, History, Science, Science communication | Leave a comment

A Runner's Ramblings

Shielded

Running Around the World (Now with Arduino)

Mayan Center Village and Dangriga

Drunk

Biking Uphill in the Rain

Nuts and Bolts

Blood in the Machine

The Art of Relevance

Religious Literacy

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth

What I've Been Doing

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