Status of the Farm

I'm about to go off line for a month or so. I tore the tendon in my right arm and in about three hours a good surgeon is going to reattach it. It will be in a cast for about a month so I don't know when I'll be able to type again.

I'm sure this will dismay both of my readers.

Anyway, it's now past the harvest and well into fall. It seems to me that this is the true yearly cycle. We start planning for the next year around Thanksgiving. We order any new trees or seeds around January and start seeds in February. The first planting happens in April: snow peas and spinach. The true planting is complete by the end of May. Final harvest and handling of the fruit is complete by the end of September. Cleanup happens all through October.

That's when we take stock.

It was a pretty good year, all told. We planted or replanted a dozen fruit trees. The mulberry was trying to take over the espalier but seems to like its new space. New apples and pears down in the south patch. We used to have an old hickory down there. After it died the mossy area went to grass and we decided to make a small orchard.

It is clear we're going to have a deer problem. They ate a lot of the new growth. We put fencing around much of it. So we had a control and an experiment. The control is clearly suffering and the experiment (the fenced material) is doing well.

We harvested a lot of peaches but instead of preserving them we ate them either raw or in pastries. We didn't dry any of them but there is still some left in the freezer. There are liable to be peach pies around Christmas.

We got one Granny Smith apple and one crabapple so this goes down as the worst year ever for apples. We had a huge caterpillar bloom in the spring and I'm convinced they had a special liking or apple blossoms.

We had a general problem with pollination this year. The bumblebees didn't show up much in the spring and there were few honeybees. We also didn't see much in the way of native bees. I mean we saw bees but the usual massive hum in May and June was absent. I don't know if this is reflecting the general bee problem or just something specific to our area. We're looking into getting a hive.

It was curious how different plants had different responses to this. We had (and are still having) a bumper crop of persimmons. But they have few seeds. The peaches and grapes did well as did the beans and other garden material. No apricots or apples to speak of. We got four whole nectarines. Count 'em. Four.

The deer have left the main gardens alone in the past. Not this year. They left nothing but weeds. They even ate the squash vine. I don't know what is going on. Over population? Loss of natural forage? We invested in a solar powered electric fence and that stopped them but the damage was done.

The grapes did well. I had a good concord harvest and the Marechal Fochs looked like it was really going to produce well. But then the turkeys got about half the crop. I made about five gallons of wine out of it. The Concords are still  holding down the contents of the freezer. I'll look into that after my arm heals.

It was a good year for wines. I made a currant and a plum wine. We bottled the Reisling over the summer and I put the final cork in six gallons of Albarino  back in August to make way for the M/F. That was bottled and put in the cellar two weeks ago.

We had an outstanding crop of chestnuts. Maybe twenty pounds. We've put them in soup, mostly, and dried the rest.

The garden is still producing a little lettuce. Wendy has set up a late winter garden over on the west side. We'll see how that turns out. We still have to put up fencing around some of the young trees. And we need to plant two mountain ashes over in the newly cleared area near the power lines. Next year we have to finish clearing it out and put it to use.

But I don't want to plan right now. Today, it's enough to watch the leaves fall.

I'll start planning when Thanksgiving rolls around.

Consideration of Works Past: The Fittest

(Picture from here.)

I'd pretty much given up on this one. It was one of those stories where you remember bits and pieces but can't recall the title or author. I'd put up phrases I remembered and got nothing.

Then I was reading an article on "cozy catastrophes" (see here. for the article and here for the wiki.) The phrase is attributed to Brian Aldiss. It means different things to different people. To some, it's a catastrophe that ends with a whimper rather than a bang. The result may or may not be horrific but it leaves behind people who are trying to live in the resulting world and the result isn't all that bad-- for them.

One of the premiere examples-- Oh, wait a minute. Forgot to introduce the novel. The book is The Fittest, by J. T. McIntosh.

Back to cozy catastrophes.

The example often used in SF is Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. The cause of the catastrophe is a stunning light show high above the atmosphere that draws people out by the millions. The next day they are blind. This opens the way for the triffids, a walking plant thing that has been raised for its oil, to try to take over the world. The few sighted people left quickly settle into a few camps, some clearly evil, some misguided and some who are actually better suited to the new environment than the old.

It's this latter category that can give people heartburn. It's analogous to the problems I talked about in Farnham's Freehold. In FF, the main character before the catastrophe is a misanthropic abusive asshat But once the catastrophe is over and the piece picking begins, those people who are preserved or thrive in the aftermath do well precisely because of those asshat qualities that either emerge or were there beforehand.

We've seen this before in a lot of post-apocalypse films. Usually violence. Selfishness. That sort of thing. Heck, The Admirable Crichton, is a play about exactly that, substituting a shipwreck for a global catastrophe. But where the cozy catastrophes can go off the rails is when these qualities turn out to be sqishy. Where people of race or profession or gender are "naturally" disadvantaged in the new world.

Now we get to The Fittest.

In this case, the catastrophe is the endowment of certain animals with human like intelligence: cats, rats, mice and dogs. (There were horses but it didn't work out.) They escaped and the world fell apart. The animals early on figure out that though they were enemies of each other, they didn't like human beings, either. So they did their best to bring down human civilization-- not with that in mind. They weren't that smart.  But they were above to figure out that humans valued wires. So the rats and mice chewed on that. They figured out how to eat what humans sowed. Civilization falls.

This is the kernel I remembered: what happens when animals we either intimidated or dominated were suddenly smart enough to figure out the trick?

There's an old trope in SF where the humans are shrunk down to the size of mice and often have to contend with the household cat or dog. The cat thinks of them as mice with the inevitable conflict. The dog smells them and realizes they are his master and helps. Or some variation thereof. The whole mice or rat with human intelligence has been done a million times in film. Not to mention various indigenous people's tales and Greek stories.

This put a different stripe on it that I liked. It was sort of cool that we could have intelligent animals. What I remembered was the idea and the ending where two of the intelligent dogs take up as partners with the humans. What I had forgotten was the rest of the book.

The Fittest is not a very good book. The main character is the son of the same Paget that invented the animals. Once the danger of the pagets (the popular name for the animals) is realized, his family is persecuted and escapes to France. But the animals take down the world and now it's survival of the fittest. (Hence the title. Get it? Get it?) He ends up with a community in Britain that has successfully repelled paget invasions. There are other surrounding communities that are filled with losers. One community is rapacious, preying on the weak in the evil Mad Max villain manner. Another serves up tribute to them. But only Paget's community has the character to withstand the strife of the new order. Ultimately, they are attacked by the predators, both paget and human, and hold fast. Those that were ill suited to the new life (the weak women, non-whites, and disloyal) are killed.

The roughness is not the problem. Heck, I liked Mad Max. All of them. Rapacious post-apocalyptic psychopaths are my cup of tea. The problem is the choice of survivors, both human and animal.

I can see how intelligent mice and rats, and maybe even cats, could turn on us. Not in the Emperor Palpatine, moustache twirling way that is in this book. Certainly, intelligent mice and rats would give us a terrible time-- hell, we have a problem with them now. Go watch this video and then imagine they're smart. And I think that the relationship we have with cats isn't always based in love. I'm a little dubious about dogs. Not completely. I had a friend who bred Canaan Dogs and they're smart enough to realized they don't have to obey if nothing's in it for them.

But while our relationships with cats and dogs may not be the sweetness and light we want it to be, it's not so antagonistic, either. Smart dogs and cats could make use of us just as we've made use of them. In The Fittest they take a perverse (and often self-destructive) turn towards tormenting humans just for the fun of it. That part I didn't buy. And, at the end, when a couple of dogs actually throw their lot in with the humans it comes to the characters as a surprise.

Hm. Nobody thought to negotiate with the dogs? Or the cats? At least to the extent of making a deal with them against the mice? I guess intelligence is not favored in this brave new world.

I think McIntosh was too enamored of the horrific aspects of the world he was creating. That sort of took over. Still, there's a lot of problems with women characters in this book. They range from the silly and the weak (but beautiful) to the rough yet vulnerable. And they're all scared of mice. Not smart mice. Ordinary mice.

(Where did that idea even come from? I've never met a woman intrinsically afraid of mice. I mean no one wants to get bit in a dark basement. But that woman standing on that chair over there on the movie screen, snatching up her skirts and screaming? Never met her.)

 So: a sad end to a long search.

There's another catastrophe book I want to re-read. It's a story involving the politics of nuclear war, incurable plague, Australian politics on the world stage and killer rabbits. It may be Not with a Bang by Chapman Pincher. But we'll see see how that turns out.

The Bones of the Matter

(Picture from here.)

I've been getting over an injury I got doing judo about a month ago. So, of course, I started thinking about bones.

The skeleton is one of our most obvious anatomical features. I know we can see and feel skin and eyes and hair. But the skeleton is one of our clearest examples of an anatomical system. The bones articulate. They move together. Muscles attach to them.

Where did they come from?

Well, we're vertebrates. That meas we have a dorsal notochord. There's an erroneous concept that vertebrates are animals with backbones. But that's a little tough since chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) don't have a "bone" in their skeleton, excepting teeth. The structural members are all cartilage, not bone. A more precise definition is that vertebrates are animals that have a vertebral column, which may or may not be composed of bone. The column is composed of different elements, called vertebrae, and house the spinal cord. And that sharks have, too.

The two great branches of fish in the vertebrates are the chondrichthyes and the osteichthyes. And that's where mammalian heritage of bone begins. We are descended from the osteichthyes and the hard, calcium rich substance has been with us since.

Fish evolved cartilage before they evolved bone. The cartilaginous fish evolved into two groups: Agnathostomata (fish without jaws) and the Gnathostomata (fish with jaws.)  Agnathostomata include such pleasant fish as lampreys and hagfish.

The Gnathostomata are no stranger to bone. Placoderms showed up over four hundred million years. Some species have bone; some do not. The bones serve as armor, teeth or other purposes. They do not server as structural members. That came later.

The critical feature of bone is the mineralization of the softer tissue. At some point, we developed the ability to impregnate that nice soft tissue with rock. More importantly, we impregnated particular tissue with rock. Structural tissue. Cartilage, though, is crucial. The processing of cartilage is a necessary precursor to bone growth-- mice grown without crucial genes involving cartilage development lack bone. (See here.)

So, how did mineralization get going.

Well, about 1.5 billion years ago a tremendous amount of Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) were washed into the oceans from volcanic and other sorts of tectonic activity. So many organisms took advantage of this new found chemical trove. A lot of weird animals in the Cambrian showed up a bit more than .5 billion years ago. Animals that wore their skeletons on the outside.

A skeleton, inside or outside, soft or hard, gives muscles something to pull against. The structural skeleton can be made out of enclosed water, cartilage, other muscle or bone. The important thing is to give a rigidity to the structure so that organized movement can occur-- at least more than squishy oozing along.

We had, back then, no shortage of skeletons on the outside. This should not come as any sort of surprise. Lots of animals had hard outer bits. Clams, for example, Growing hard bits on the outside was relatively common. So it doesn't seem all that hard to put hinges between the hard bits and get crustaceans and trilobites.

Vertebrates belong to the phylum Chordata, animals with notochords. We have notochords, too. Inside our vertebral column. We like to call it a spinal cord. What's different about chordates is they put their notochord on the dorsal (back) side instead of the belly side. Very early on, we wrapped that notochord with vertebrae and we were off. The skeleton evolved from the vertebrae. Consequently, our skeleton evolved from the inside out while the other animals with hard parts evolved their skeleton from the skin inward.

All of the animals at that time with moving hard parts refined them. We end up with shrimp, crabs and the afore mentioned trilobites. Back in vertebrate company, we evolved fishes, fishes with jaws and jawed fish with bony armor. But no mineralization of the structural members.

One big shift in the vertebrate world was to shift from our friend calcium carbonate, so beloved by our exoskeletal brothers, to calcium phosphate. (CaPO4). This was in the form of calcium hydroxyapatite. (Ca5(PO4)3(OH))

Why change strategies when calcium carbonate had been around for a long, long time?

One idea was that the original use of calcium phosphate wasn't as bone at all. Instead, it was a storage mechanism of phosphorus-- often a biochemical limiting factor. Anyone who has used phosphate based fertilizer knows its utility. ATP/ADP (adenosine tri-phosphate and adenosine di-phosphate) are the way the cell stores and release energy. That P in the abbreviation is for phosphorous. But as nice as this is, why did vertebrates evolve it and not invertebrates? After all, it would have been good for both. It could be that the change to phosphorous was for a wholly different reason and the storage advantage was a happy accident.

Another idea derives from vertebrate activity. From the fossil record and from observation of vertebrate animals in the wild, it looks like we're active creatures. We don't sit around. We run. We hunt. We don't sit and wait for our food to come for us. We go and get it. One of the side effects of this activity is a change in pH-- the acid or base values of the tissue. Calcium carbonate is much more soluble material than calcium phosphate. Consequently, fish that tried to swim hard could find their hard bits not so hard.

The first structures resembling bone we find in the fossil record are teeth or teeth like structures. They are with us to this day. Sharks have teeth. Lampreys have teeth. Teeth are a bit different from normal bone. Both bone and teeth are calcium phosphorous structures but teeth are much harder than bone. But bones can heal. Teeth can't. However, the biochemical structures are close enough that one wonders if the biochemical pathway that brought forth teeth was torqued a bit to bring forth bone.

There are also teeth like structures in the skin to form shields. Remember placoderms? One of the arguments in paleontology is which came first? Teeth or shields? Genetically, they appear to derive from the same source.

Early skeletons were cartilaginous but were not based on collagen, the primary structural protein in connective tissue. Later, when collagen evolved, it was used in the skeleton such as those involving sharks and such. It fell to the ancestors of the bony fishes to invent ossification.

There are two mechanism of ossification: intramembranous ossification, where the bone is laid down directly into connective tissue, and endochondral ossification, where cartilage serves as a template for the bone. Intramembranous ossification happens in bone repair and in the early construction of certain head structures. Endochondral ossification is how the skeleton gets formed.

It didn't happen all at once. Apparently, endochondral ossification started with surrounding connective tissue-- biochemically similar mechanisms for embedding bone in the skin. Eventually, the process of cartilage replacement occurred. How this occurred. There is fossil evidence that early sharks had the ability to deposit bone in tissue though it was not used structurally.

There is also current evidence (see here.) that some sharks can mineralize cartilage in a similar way to how bony fish do it. That said, is this development that occurred since sharks diverged from the rest of the fish? After all, the biochemical means by which mineralization occurs is very old in the vertebrate family tree-- recall our constant friend, the placoderm. And the mechanism for laying down a supportive skeleton is represented in both the boney and cartilaginous fish. We often look at what we call primitive animals and forget that they've been around just as long as we have with just as nasty and powerful selective pressures on them. Sharks diverged from our line 400 million years ago. But they haven't been sitting around since then. They've been evolving, too.

Once structural mineralization occurred, though, the advantage it gave was tremendous. It enables fish to swim fast. In fact, the cartilaginous fish have to derive structures analogous to bone in order to get that upper speed.

Marlins, for example, have a bony skeleton stiffened not only by having just a few vertebrae but also by strapping those vertebrae together with bony strips and ropes of connective tissue. Mako sharks are similarly fast but don't have any such things. How do mako sharks swim fast? They increase their internal pressure against a skin which does not stretch. In this way they mimic what the marlin does. Essentially, they create a fluid skeleton to make up for any deficiencies in their skeleton.

Not to mention that a mineralized skeleton set the stage for invading the land. There are a lot of reasons even an average sized vertebrate dwarfs the largest land invertebrates that ever lived. Skeletal scaling is one of them.

Which brings me back to my ankle. I wish its intramembranous ossification process would get its act in gear.

Consideration of Works Past: Farnham's Freehold

(Picture from here.)

I've been avoiding writing this post for a bit now. Heck, I've been avoiding reading Farnham's Freehold for a while now. There is a whole lot of controversy on that book. While race showed up regularly in his work, FF was the only book where he attempted to actually confront it.

There was a controversy about Podkayne of Mars. It is nothing compared to the controversy around Farnham's Freehold.

Spoiler alert: it's a bad book and not worth re-reading.

But not for the reasons one might think. Or, at least, not solely for those reasons.

Here's the plot, FF's main protagonist is Hugh Farnham, a self-made millionaire. He's one of Heinlein's Perfect Men: He's older, handsome, able to shoot a gun and appreciate a Picasso, incredibly wise-- so wise that everyone defers to his wisdom even when they completely disagree with him. So intelligent that other people appear stupid around him-- wait a minute. Other people are stupid around him. Farnham has a reasonable IQ and everyone else is a Delta Moron. Did I pick up Idiocracy by mistake? Nope. Heinlein's name is on the front page and it's a book, not a movie. Hm.

Anyway, Farnham has built the worlds greatest fallout shelter in his basement and, because Farnham is always right, a nuclear holocaust occurs. They all go to the shelter: Hugh, his worthless son, Duke, his whiny useless wife, Grace, his somewhat useful daughter, Karen, Karen's hot friend, Barbara, and Hugh's black servant, Joe. All of them act out all sorts of Generation of Vipers shtick to show how smart Hugh is and how callow everyone (but Barbara and Joe) is. Everyone goes to sleep except Hugh and Barbara. And they have sex. After all, what should a twenty-something beauty do during the apocalypse than have sex with her grandfather?

The big one hits and blows them forward in time a thousand years. They don't know this originally. They just know that they're in exactly the same spot as they were but everything is beautiful and rustic.

They eke out the pioneer life with Hugh as boss. Karen is also pregnant-- predating nuclear holocaust because, well, reasons. Hugh will not consort with Barbara because he is an Honorable Man and still married to whiny, bitchy Grace. So it looks like it's going to be a Karen/Joe and Barbara/Duke future Eden. (Except that Karen tells Barbara that if Hugh would have her, she'd pick him. Incest be damned.) But Karen dies in childbirth.

Then, they are discovered by the true rulers of earth: Black People.

Turns out that Africa wasn't harmed by the nuclear exchange and ended up colonizing the USA and Europe. All white people are slaves. Our merry band of misfit toys would be slaughtered for just being there (it's a park, sort of) but for Joe. Since Joe is black, they must be his slaves and therefore they won't be hurt but Joe is held responsible.

Long story short: Hugh makes himself indispensable to the Lord Owner. (Surprise!) Grace ends up Lord Owner's consort-- which she likes. She finagles her son (Duke) to be with her but that requires Duke to be castrated. She's comfortable with that. Since he's getting good drugs, Duke is, too. It is discovered that not only have the Black Lords enslaved white people, they are eating them. White people are the main meat staple of the culture. For thousands of years. I'm guessing cows, pigs, chickens, kangaroos, armadillos, dogs, cats, possums and rats were in short supply.

Got to say this about human beings. We're as hard to kill (and as uplifting) as a cockroach.

Lord Owner sends Hugh back to his own time with a device to make it accurate so he can commercialize it. Hugh, of course, dumps the device. They find a mine shaft and stock it in the time they have left and then sweat out the apocalypse with the idea they will be able to change the future. Or it's a parallel world. Something. Afterwards, they make themselves into good frontiersman libertarians. The end.

Okay. That took longer than it should have.

Here's what I think Heinlein was trying to do. And I'm being charitable here. So don't shoot me. I think Heinlein was less malicious than he was inept.

First, I think deep in the abscesses of Heinlein's mind he was thinking that he really wanted to treat any black characters as he would treat any other character. He probably thought the sameness was a virtue. I'm sure he thought he was combating racism. Hugh had to be white-- he was espousing all of Heinlein's pet ideas. He was, in effect, Heinlein himself: he had to be white.

He wanted to put his white characters in a position of oppression-- a role reversal. That's obvious enough. Black/White role reversal to combat racism has a long history from Watermelon Man (Godfry Cambridge) to White Man's Burden (Travolta/Belafonte) to John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. (The book, not the movie made from the book.) One cannot fault Heinlein for attempting something difficult in a noble cause. One can fault him for doing it badly.

But he had a problem: Hugh has to be right. This is the salient point of the entire novel. Hugh is always right. But he's white so if the oppressors are black, Hugh is not going to get much traction. Hence, Joe was born. Joe could have been a partner. A colleague. A friend-- but the structure of the novel prohibits that. Hugh can have no peer. Joe could have been family but Heinlein wasn't that progressive. So Joe is a servant.

Later in the novel Joe ends up throwing in with the black aristocracy. There's a rather good scene where Hugh upbraids him for doing so. Joe responds that until Hugh has tried to hitchhike in Mississippi, he has no understanding of the situation. It is likely the sole place in the book where somebody stands up to Hugh and isn't immediately forced to admit the error of his ways.

And that example is one of a few things where I think the book was on point. Joe owed Hugh (or Heinlein) nothing. Shoes on the other foot: fine. We can't all be saints and it's clear in the context of the book that Joe is trying to get them as good a deal as he can get within the limits of the culture he's in and without sacrificing his own neck.

You can make the argument that the blacks were merely white men with black skins. I can see that. The book takes place thousands of years in the future so I would not expect future blacks to resemble current African American culture. You could make the argument that Joe, being a representative of current African American culture should actually resemble said culture. But Joe is on camera so seldom compared to the white folks he scarcely gets the chance. You could make the argument that Joe, being second only to Hugh in importance of the frontier family's survival and probably the second most important character in the book should have a lot more camera time.

Yeah, you could.

Which brings me to the real problem with the book. Yes to a lot of the criticism of it. Yes it handled race badly. But the core issue of the book is that it is inept. It's clumsy. It stumbles. It's broken. It should have been pulled by the editors as a bad book. Not a controversial book.

Like the whole cannibalism thing. Okay, Heinlein was probably thinking that slavery consumes people's soul. So it's a metaphor for what slavery does to the human spirit.

Come on, Bob. This book was published in 1964. I surmise it was written in 1963. King's I Have A Dream speech, Bob. The Medger Evers murder, Bob. The Birmingham Campaign, Bob. The Birmingham Church Bombing, Bob. Hell, I was an eleven year old kid in Thousand Oaks, California, and I heard about these things. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, a book where a black aristocracy is literally eating white human flesh could be, oh, misinterpreted? 

Like Barbara, and every other woman that shows up in the book (with the exception of his wife) wanting to sleep with Hugh. Including his own daughter. I mean, Heinlein's view of women in this book is little more than sex kitten/breeders but even in that context that's a bit much.

(It would be an interesting thought experiment to rewrite the book from Grace's point of view. Hugh is every bit the despicable villain Grace thinks he is. He connives what he does and makes good sounding excuses afterwards. He built the fallout shelter because of a sick, paranoid fantasy. The fact the nuclear annihilation actually occurs is a coincidence. She is sick and distraught at what she has to do to save herself and her son, viewing the role Lord Owner's consort as consent to rape. Pretty much what every slave woman submitting to master probably thought. That it would have been better to die in the nuclear fire than to have to live here under these circumstances, under these rules. To have Karen think about having sex with Hugh to appease him. Barbara having to view her coming child as a brutal compromise for survival. But I digress.)

Like vast numbers of pages taken up describing interminable hands of bridge. Pages. People agonizing over decisions they made. In bridge.

The book was published in 1964 sandwiched between Podkayne of Mars and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I commented on Podkayne here. Podkayne has its problems. Harsh Mistress is, in my opinion, Heinlein's best adult book. It's flawed but he manages to pull everything he's ever tried to do together in one book. I think it works though it is a product of its time. One of these days I'll put up a post justifying my opinion.

Harsh Mistress is followed by I Will Fear No Evil, which I had considered the worst Heinlein book I had ever read until I reread Farnham's Freehold. Clearly, it was the beginning of the end.

What I was hoping to find was a book where a writer whose work I respect had come out swinging at a subject few in SF were considering in 1964. A swing and a miss is still a swing. What I found was a boring slog through the mud. The game was rained out long before it ever had a chance to start.

Falling into Harvest

(Picture from here.)

It's harvest season on our little microfarm. Nanofarm? Postage Stamp Farm? That might be a good name for the place.

We have two gardens. The main one south of the house and the east garden where the turtles live. Yes, we have livestock. We grow turtles. And chickens, but the chickens give us less trouble. There's a long and sordid history on how we got into raising turtles but it boils down to not wanting the pet trade to decimate animals we like. Turns out from capture to pet store takes a toll on wild animals. So we got into breeding them to compete with the captors. But that's a long story for another post.

Besides, they love to eat slugs. The turtle garden is always slug free.

South of the turtle garden are a grape arbor and two fruit tree espaliers. Moving west we hit the plum espalier and the persimmon tree to reach the main garden. South of the main garden is a small grove of fruit trees planted this year. Moving further west to the south forty is another couple of grape arbors and the leek, scallion, garlic and green onion beds. Moving north from there, next to the house is the west espalier-- a Belgian fence style. Continuing north, behind the house, is the greenhouse.

Everything was hammered this year by caterpillars. We got one-- count 'em, one-- apple on the Granny Smith. We didn't even get many blossoms. Ditto the plums. We did well on peaches and pears-- though we had to harvest the pears early. A local nest of carpenter ants learned a new trick. The found a pear, ate a hole and proceeded to mine the pear through the hole leaving a husk. I have to find the nest. I have blood in my eye and no carpenter ant will be left unscathed.

We had a number of blossoms on the apricot and nectarines but no fruit set on the apricots and we got little on the nectarines-- four, to be exact. I think the same caterpillar problem.

We  have grape vines that are good producers: the marechal fochs and the concord. This spring I cut back both fairly hard and they seemed to thrive on it. Looks like we're going to get a good harvest. The marechal looks like it should be harvested in a week or so and the concord is just starting to purple.

For the last ten years or so I've had an impossible project I've been working on: creating a drinkable concord wine. It must be dry with a hint of concord but no trace of the evil solvent taste concord is known for. I've been having some success. I'm hoping this will be a good year.

The marechal looks to be a good harvest as well. In the last few years I've been in state of war with the yellow jackets. This wasn't helped by the size of the marechal vine. It had become so big that different sections matured at different times-- hence the major cut back.

We didn't have a good year for plums and apples as I said so I won't talk about the espaliers much. The persimmon looks to be a great harvest. The tree is laden with fruit. Of course, it's over a month away and anything can happen.

We moved some trees from the Belgian fence: two filberts and a mulberry. Both were just too vigorous. This is their first year in the new spots so it's a wait for next year scenario. But all the plants seemed to recover well in their new locations. We got a few mulberries but no sign of filberts.

This has been an terrible year for deer. For the first time the deer have decided the main garden, and the adjacent new fruit trees, are one long buffet table. We put up an electric fence a couple of weeks ago and this has discouraged them from the garden. The new trees are hurting. I'll have to put up a cage of some sort to protect them.

We had a good peach harvest but I got lazy and didn't thin them enough so some of the branches of the tree were just too heavy and suffered. We took the result and made peach fruit salad with melons from the garden and froze the remainder. A couple of years ago I made a nice peach wine. We'll see if I do that this year.

The greenhouse did well. We've had two large bunches of bananas that we're drying. The strawberry guavas are going to be ready in a couple of weeks. We've started trying aquaponics which has more difficulties than we perceived. Right now, the we're using goldfish for the fish part and growing vegetables. We've also attempted rice. Average rice yield in Missouri for the last five years was 6,676 pound/acre. That gives a couple of pounds a year for two crops. So we'll see.

Wendy decided that clawfoot bathtubs are the best alternative for our hydroponic attempts. This gives our greenhouse an... eclectic look.

Which leaves the gardens.

We got a good crop of cantaloupes and honeydew but not so great on actual watermelons. This year we tried putting down the black plastic and that seemed to help.

Wendy and I have been gardening at the house since 1993 and in Watertown for several years before that. Wendy's been gardening in New England since she was a child. So we have a good idea of what summer's are supposed to bring. Typically, it has been cool to the possibility of freezing up to Memorial Day. Warming to hot by the end of June. Hot through July and early August. Latter August if variable but by Labor Day things start to cool off. Normally, there's no frost in September but there is some possibility of frost by Halloween. That was the norm until about seven or eight years ago.

Then we started seeing a shift. First, there were wet, cool Junes. Then, we started seeing Hammer of God
heat waves in early May. The apricots would blossom up and then get hit by a frost.

The last couple of years we have seen the HOGs, wet stretches of June, hot Julys and, this year, a cool August. Lots of chaos. That's exactly what the global warming models say: more chaotic behavior. So Wendy and I are adapting like a microcosm of the rest of the world.

So, now we're looking at different varieties that can cope. Some of the heirlooms we've liked in the past can't cope with the variability over the summer. We're trying some new things. This year we're trying yacon, a Peruvian tuber.

We all have to learn to be adaptable.

Consideration of Works Past: The Door into Summer/Double Star

(Pictures from here and here.)

My two favorite Heinlein novels have always been The Door into Summer (1957) and Double Star (1956).

The reasons for this have changed over the ears. TDIS was not one of his most popular novels-- one critic suggested that this was a novel where the commentary by the narrator was the best part. DS, on the other hand, has been roundly praised over the year and won Heinlein's first Hugo.

TDIS is about Dan Davis, an inventor and engineer who is bilked of his company, his livelihood and his fiance by is friend and... his fiance. The love of his life manages to swindle him out of everything. He's about had it and is planning to take the Long Sleep (suspended animation) for thirty years when he bucks up and confronts his partner and his partner's wife-- the fiance mentioned before. They drug him and manage to put him in cold sleep anyway and he wakes up thirty years later.

Davis likes the future and manages to make a place for himself. But he discovers he can go back in time and rectify the situation. He does and then returns back to his new home-- the future-- via a second cold sleep.

Double Star has a completely different story. DS is about Lawrence Smythe, known professionally as The Great Lorenzo. Turns out there is a popular politician that has a resemblance to him: John Bonforte. Said politician has been kidnapped on the eve of an important ceremony for the martians. The ceremony must go on (echoing the old "show must go on" theme) so they hire Smythe to impersonate Bonforte for the ceremony. Eventually, this turns into Mother Night: beware who you pretend to be for that is who you are.

I'm not going to go into the plat synopses in detail-- that's what Wikipedia is for.

The two works had an interesting history together. TDIS has never been one of Heinlein's popular novels. I'll quote Blish as quoted by Wikipedia: "It is surely an odd novel that is at its best when the author is openly editorializing...." Since normally I don't care for the odd Heinlein authorial intrusion but in this case they were fun. But they weren't true Heinlein editorializing. Davis is about as apolitical as a human being can be. He's a good engineer who is swindled precisely because he doesn't much take notice of things that are not interesting to him. Several of the "editorializing" happens when people explain things to him. Sort of like explaining things to Huck Finn in Twain's work. The author may have set it up but it's carried by the character.

Double Star, on the other hand, had significant acclaim and won Heinlein's first Hugo. Several have suggested it might be Heinlein's finest novel. Smythe is equally far from politics as TDIS's Davis, but in a different direction. Davis is a quintessential engineer. He treats the rest of the world with indifference graded to annoyance. Smythe is a consummate actor. He views the world as a stage and himself as the main character. He is flamboyant where Davis is self-contained. Outgoing where Davis is reserved. Curiously passive in what happens to him where Davis actively changes things around him. To quote Wikipedia quoting Blish again, Blish thought Smythe was "only first-person narrator Heinlein has created who is a living, completely independent human being."

From this I take that Blish knew a lot of actors and almost no engineers.

I want to be absolutely clear when I talk about the span of Heinlein's work that I stop in 1970. I don't know happened to RAH after that but it wasn't pretty and I quit reading him.

I think there is an Evil Heinlein and Good Heinlein. Good Heinlein has all of the good characterization, clever prose, humor and good ideas. Evil Heinlein pontificates on how the world ought to be, makes the women characters too stupid to breathe and takes itself very, very seriously. A work has considerable show with Good Heinlein at the helm but if Evil Heinlein gets its fingers inside there's no hope for it. After 1970, Evil Heinlein is ascendant.

So I feel differently from Blish. I tend to like Heinlein's first person narrators better than his other characters. (Podkayne excepted. See here.)  Or, rather, I think Heinlein is best when working under constraints. This is why those works considered "juvenile"-- Red Planet, Tunnel in the Sky, Have Space Suit--Will Travel, Citizen of the Galaxy, etc.-- tend to have so much less Evil Heinlein in them. Since the point of view characters are essentially children or teenagers, the characters cannot be used to found Evil Heinlein wisdom. It is interesting in Tunnel in the Sky (Heinlein's answer to Lord of the Flies), the first and last chapters have Evil Heinlein in them but it is absent in the middle and largest part of the book. The middle part of the book is exclusively from pov's of the teens. A coincidence? I think not.

Double Star and TDIS have a similar constrained nature. Both protagonists are very limited in what they can perceive and understand. Because of this Heinlein is forced to treat them as human beings instead of possible channels for Evil Heinlein. Which brings Heinlein to use his powers for Good rather than Evil.

The books have both aged fairly well. As with most SF works from over fifty years ago they have to be viewed as more Alternate History than prediction. I wish we had bases on the moon in 1970. Both books have few female characters-- a place where Evil Heinlein particularly liked to get its claws wet-- so, for good or ill, that part of RAH is not fully expressed. There's a squishy bit at the end of TDIS that echoes the ending of an earlier juvenile, Time for the Stars that will make a modern reader cringe. One has to have a filter on to read a Heinlein novel with modern sensibility. I think it's still worth doing. Other mileages may differ. Double Star has no squishy bits.

Both of these books were written in the middle fifties. Heinlein was just breaking fifty himself. He'd had a really good ten years-- Heinlein's first published novel was in 1947 though he'd certainly been popular in the magazines before this. So you could say the novels between 1955 and 1961 were where he hit his stride. It's not surprising that these two books happened right then. Both were experiments in characterization. Both were experiments in narrative.

And both are my favorite Heinlein novels.

Humanizing Technology

(Picture from here.)

I'm a big fan of technology. There are technological solutions to many of the world's issues from hunger to clean water. The problems we face are usually how to get people out of the way of solving the problem rather than the problem itself.

That said, I'm definitely not a fan of humanizing technology.

Let me be very clear. I am all in favor of making technology easy. I want getting food and clean water to be so cheap and comfortable that you'd have to spend money and effort not to get it. I want to be able to ask my computational partner, think I'd like that? And have it come back to me with a cogent answer.

But I don't want it to try to act like a human being. I'm not interested in the illusion of an experiential entity.

There's a strong pursuit of this illusion going on now. The most recent one to come across my desk is Jibo, a robotic device that is intended to integrate into a family. To act in the role of a person. (See here.)

Jibo was developed by MIT's Cynthia Breazeal with the expressed intent of becoming "part of the family." (See here.) She feels emotion is the "next wave of this humanized high-touch engagement with technology."

I'm not a fan.

I like a humanized robot voice better than a voice that sounds artificial mainly because it's more intelligible. And I really like some of the capabilities advertised for Jibo. It has strong facial recognition coupled with a good camera. So it can take pictures like nobody's business. Since it can identify users, it's a no-hands portal to the net and can be a real internet helper with reminders and such. My objection isn't what it can do but how it presents itself.

For example, in the Jibo advertisement the robot does things like read a story to a child. According to the article Jibo will "put a smile on your face and make you feel better."

It worries me that someone thinks consumer machine is necessary for that.

I have a dog. It greets me when I come home and puts a smile on my face and makes me feel better. Sometimes it makes a mess. It has to be taken out and walked. If I step on its tail by accident, it yelps in pain so I musn't do that. The dog gives me a gift and requires an obligation. This is a transaction between us. This is a relationship between two experiential entities.

But Jibo is not an experiential entity. It is a machine that is intended to counterfeit the trappings of an experiential entity. It is designed to present the attributes of a relationship without the realization of a relationship.

This bothers me.

I think it's important that we understand who we're talking to. Who we're in actual relationships with. I think, for example, we should be concerned about the welfare of our children, parents and friends. The welfare of celebrities doesn't remotely interest me. I think we should concern ourselves with factual news rather then pleasant fiction. The relationships I have are with my wife, son and dog. Not my toaster. Not my microwave oven. Not my nice talking internet portal.

Fundamentally, it's a distraction. I talked about the Turing Test a while back. Turing had the idea that a device that could imitate a human being could be as intelligent as a human being. Back then most of the literature conflated intelligence with the ability to experience things. After all, how could you be smart and not experience the world?

Now we know that it is quite possible. Intelligence and experience are very separable. We can have quite intelligent systems that have zero experiential nature and really dumb systems that fool people sufficiently to be thought intelligent. In fact, some of the truly creepy ideas in SF are systems that are very intelligent in their execution of tasks without such a nature. Think of Terminator.

Or, even better, remember the old Colossus or War Games movies. Now think of them again and realize there was nothing in those machines but elaborate rules engines. Nothing inside but LEDs and a hum.

Now, if there were a person (entity, experiential organism, alien) in Jibo, I'd be all over it.