State of the Farm, Spring, 2022

(Almond tree from the back porch.)

It has been a long winter.

 

Not in terms of temperature. Not in terms of snow. The winter was relatively mild in both cases.

 

That said, this winter has been mired in external things: the state of the country, the fear of infection, the loss of contact with coworkers, friends and family. Over this winter, we have grappled with how to have a meaningful, fulfilling conversation, delving into matters of conviction and humor, over zoom.

 

I attended the February Boskone in person. That was—to me, at least—a nightmare. Not because seeing people wasn’t welcome or spending time with actual human beings wasn’t something I craved, but because I had to do it with all of those same issues: fear of infection, wearing a mask, limiting social distance.

 

None of that has anything to do with the farm. But it serves as a context within which or farm activities take place.

 

Let’s see.

 

We’re worried about upcoming food issues. Notably drought in the Midwest and far west and the war in Ukraine. While Ukraine’s wheat mostly supplies Africa, nothing in the modern world is unconnected. It’s not at all clear how the food production industry is going to respond. Does that mean as wheat consumers we’re now competing with Africa? Will compassionate wheat supply drive up prices here at home?

 

The percentage of allowed ethanol in fuel has now been increased—which, again, puts food and fuel in competition with one another. I have thought this was a problem since day one. Ethanol as a fuel supplement: good. Ethanol production from carbon intensive corn such that the ethanol is carbon positive: bad. Putting farmers in a position of getting more for their corn as fuel than as food: bad.

 

For a while, we’ve been trying to bring in enough calories from our meager acreage to make a difference to our bottom line. We do fairly well producing crops that don’t have a strong impact on our caloric intake: fruit from trees, greens, etc. We had a significant pollination problem last summer and didn’t get any Cornelian cherries or persimmons at all. The Marechal Foch grapes did well but the Concords caught a fungus I’m still working on. Apples have always been a problem. But we did well with bananas, peaches, and pears.

 

Calorie crops have been a more troubling matter.

 

Our main caloric successes have been corn, squash, and potatoes. We’ve done very well with corn and squash. Potatoes have been variable. We were doing quite well a few years ago but in the last two years, when we lost our outdoor cat, we’ve been overrun by rodents and bunnies. Last summer we tried to increase our bean harvest and lost it to the rabbits. The potatoes were lost to mice and and the strawberries to the chipmunks.. I could strangle Chip and Dale with a clear conscience. We did well with corn and squash, though. We’re finishing leftover squash and still have jars of dried corn.

 

So, what are we doing this year?

 

Let’s start with the fruit.

 

You may recall how we lost all of our plums a few years ago to black knot. This left one of our espaliers completely vacant. We’ve been letting it set fallow all that time, though we did plant strawberries in the space. (See my murderous plans for Chip and Dale above.)

 

I’ve been experimenting with quinces that last few years. We had a quince that came with the house and the original produced fruit regularly. But, since it is in the potential lead field of the century+ old house, we haven’t eaten any. So far, transplants haven’t wanted to reproduce. We did get some success with a pineapple quince I planted about six years ago. It produced very tasty fruit.

 

The quince is a strange fruit. Many varieties are picked hard and left to soften or are cooked. They have quite a nice taste. Best of all, they are immune to most of the diseases of apples, pears, and plums. So, this year, we committed to repopulate the espalier with four new, and reportedly tasty, quince. I planted them yesterday, bare roots and all. We will see.

 

We have four grape arbors. The Concord and Marechal Foch arbors are on the middle to north part of the property and the other two arbors are on the southern part of the property, down closer to the road. Except for the Concord fungus, the northern arbors have been rocks. The vines are thick and woody. However, I’ve had trouble with finding the right variety to fit in the southern arbors. We have two seedless varieties down there that are… okay. They are still young but not producing much. We will see.

 

I also tried Einset grapes—a seedless grape that has wine capabilities. It seemed to die back two winters ago and then came back aggressively last spring. That struck me as odd. I tasted the grapes and they tasted mysteriously like Concords—not the described Einset flavor at all. When we bought them, they were listed as zone 5. Subsequent investigation on other sites has them listed as zone 7. We are zone 4-5. My suspicion is they are a grafted grape and the winter killed the Einset part and left the graft base to grow—which, I think, is a Concord variation. I was going to pull it up—I have a Concord—but the fungus has given me pause.

 

The fourth slot on the southern arbors is vacant and we’ve ordered a Somerset to fill it. This is a grape hardy to zone 3 so we have good hopes.

 

I said we had four arbors. We had five but pulled the weak and spineless grape out from it. We’re replacing it with two vines: a Doctor Yao Climbing Yam Cinnamon Vine and the Eastern Prince Schisandra Vine. This is sheer whim. A hardy yam on one side of the arbor and a Russian sweet fruit on the other. What the hell.

 

We tried plums again on the other side of the property, far from the plum espalier we had to tear down. Both plum varieties were black knot resistant. Both of them got it so we pulled them out.  We replaced them with two jujube (Chinese date) trees. I had some jujubes in China and was quite taken with them. But we won’t be seeing any harvest for a bit.

 

Some efforts we’ve done in the past are bearing fruit. (Heh.) The new pears from a few years ago are showing flower buds. Last summer, we had a few fruit on the new peach but Chip and Dale got to them before we did. A self-fertile kiwi may be flowering this year—which is good news. Most kiwis are male/female. We planted a pair a few years ago and the female didn’t make it and the male likes to tear apart fences. So far, I haven’t been able to kill it.

 

We have a hardy passion fruit (Maypop) that is established. We have had no fruit as yet but we’re hopeful.

 

The rest of the fruit trees have blossomed or are about to blossom. The weather seems to be cooperative for pollination and we went ahead and purchased orchard bees. We’ll know in a few weeks. Last year we had paw-paws for the first time and they were fantastic. We have more flower buds this time between two of the four trees and the other two appear to be established. The paw paw fruit is fantastic.

 

We’ve planted sugar beets and peas already but nothing has come up yet. I’m a little concerned we either planted them too early or the seeds were bad. I’m going to take some sugar beet seed and plant them in peat pots and see if anything comes up.

 

The corn is growing in sets—we developed a technique for pre-growing corn a few years ago using peat-pots. The common wisdom was that you couldn’t transplant corn. But if you pre-grow it in a peat pot and plant the pot, the corn doesn’t seem to care.

 

We planted the carrots, turnip greens,  broccoli rabe this weekend.

 

We’ll be planting potatoes and corn, along with squash and beans. We’ve gotten some chicken wire with which we’re going to line the main garden and hope the bunnies will be kept at bay. We lost our beans to the bunnies last year. Bugs Bunny must die. My sympathies lie completely with Elmer Fudd.

 

We’ve purchased a very tall raised bet kit from Birdies which we saw being used on Self Sufficient Me. That is still a work in progress.

 

I tilled the garden this year and we plan to amend the soil with chips from a tree we’re dropping. We’ll be laying it out in the next week or so.

 

I’ve gone part time this year and so most of the garden burden will fall on me. Planting the quinces (and digging up the old stumps) was hard on me. I’m trying to figure out more efficient (and less taxing) ways to do things. It has been impressed on me that I’m not getting any younger.

 

That’s it for the farm report.

Disappearing Books

 

(Picture from here.)

 

One of the Boskone 2022 panels I was on was the Disappearing Books panel. These are books that were popular or at least well-known at time of publication but have since become relatively unknown.

 

This is a fairly common panel topic I’ve been on a number of times.

 

There are a number of ways books disappear. A more successful work or author overshadows those of lesser stature. (I’m looking at you, 13^th Floor vs The Matrix) Generational changes make works less palatable to the new audience. Random changes in the markets cause them to just disappear. The complete works of an author can essentially vanish.

 

That’s for good works. Bad works might persist or vanish for completely different reasons.

 

Older generations can be useful in bringing deserving past works forward. Or, they can berate the younger generation what they should be reading while that younger generation rolls their eyes.

 

This was brought home to me when I was trying to introduce my son to Heinlein via Red Planet. We were doing fine until Heinlein went out of his way to make the mother of the main character stupid. Ben saw through that immediately and has never read Heinlein again.

 

I have been tempted to edit Heinlein ever since. But that’s another story.

 

Anyway, as time goes forward, not all works stick with us. They fall behind with an ever-dwindling audience. I think some of these works should be reconsidered.

 

The good news is that some of these books have become more accessible in recent years via internet commerce and ebooks. Internet commerce have made used bookstores and their contents available to the general public. Amazon has helped here by creating a near infinite shelf space and enabling contact between consumer and storefront.

 

In addition, some of these disappearing books have been formatted into ebooks. I think there might still be issues of ownership—one of the main impediments of bringing these books to the reader—but some of these books are making a small comeback. I have included links where I found them. In addition, I put a “Discussed here” link where I’ve talked about these books before.

 

Another interesting sidenote is some of these books have been brought back into print in special editions. William F. Temple’s Shoot at the Moon were published a few years ago by the British Library Science Fiction Classics. SF Gateway brought out Colin Kapp’s The Dark Mind.

 

It’s possible the disappearing book list may, itself, disappear.

 

Here’s my list:

 

Works that have pretty much disappeared, given the above caveat

These are works that came and went. At least, whenever I talk about them, I get blank looks. They were good enough to get published but not popular enough to survive.

·         The Green Rain, Paul Tabori: the population of the world turns green. Hijinks ensue. (Discussed here.)

·         The Transfinite Man (AKA, The Dark Mind), Colin Kapp: The dark side of one man can change the world. (Discussed here.)

·         Shoot at the Moon, William F. Temple: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf goes to the moon. (Discussed here.)

·         The Revolving Boy, Gertrude Friedberg: deep, personal story of a boy marked by being born in space. (Discussed here.)

 

Works by well known authors that are themselves not as well known.

By this, I mean these authors are still known and there’s a population of people familiar with them, but these particular works theirs aren’t considered very often. Again, most of the time I get blank looks when I bring them up.

·         P. K. Dick: The Man Who Japed: religious dictatorships are held up by those who live in them. They have no sense of humor. (Wiki here.)

·         John Brunner: The Whole Man: crippled telepath searches for himself. (Discussed here.)

 

Works whose authors have fallen out of favor but are still worth reading.

The authors here have fallen out of favor often for good reasons. Their approach often clashes poorly with modern sensibility and the author doesn’t have enough of a following to be retained. Heinlein is a good example of a problematic author with enough momentum to be kept in print. These works, however, didn’t seem to matter so much. If they aren’t gone yet, they are disappearing slowly.

·         Clifford D. Simak (Discussed here.):

o   Goblin Reservation: SF treatment of mythological peoples (goblins, trolls, etc.) as lost indigenous people

o   The Werewolf Principle: search for identity by a shapeshifter

o   Time is the Simplest Thing: reach for the stars with the mind

·         T. J. Bass, The Godwhale (Discussed here.): man evolves into a totally urban being but some are left behind.

·         Robert Sheckley:

o   Immortality, Inc: The afterlife, and everything we associate with it, is true. (Discussed here.)

o   Mindswap: prefigures the idea behind Repo Man: everything that can be conceived of is true.

·         A. E. van Vogt (Discussed here.):

o   The Beast: What got human beings to civilization isn’t going to get them past civilization. (BTW: this is a recurring theme in VV’s work that I like, regardless how clumsily he pursues it.)

o   The Weapon Shops of Isher: The NRA if it worked for good rather than evil

o   Rogue Ship: another attempt at the same theme as The Beast.

Honorable Mentions

These are works that are either read outside of SF and fantasy, been tossed out for problematic material, or subsumed out of existence by bad adaptations. I’m only going to bother with two.

 

Rudyard Kipling, All The Mowgli Stories: (Discussed here.) I bring in this one because while it is often cited and made into media, it has yet to be brought in properly. Kipling’s work has been censored for the taint of white oriented, British Empire, colonialist approach—all of which are valid criticisms that apply to most 19^th century literature.

 

However, the Mowgli stories have been relentlessly mined with terrible results. The stories themselves bear almost no relationship to the media counterparts. Case in point, Kaa, the rock python, is one of Mowgli’s fast friends in the book and his dread enemy in the Disney films.

 

There is less of a relationship between the actual Mowgli stories and the movies or the public consciousness than there is, say, between Blade Runner than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

 

<*Ahem*> Speaking of Philip K. Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: I have it put on this list because Androids has been almost completely subsumed under Blade Runner. The vast majority of people who have seen the film have not read the book. (Unfortunately, the case for most adaptations like Mowgli above.) Go read this book and forget Blade Runner. The two are only barely related.

 

Cheese Ends, 20220328

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Our local grocery store has an item in the deli called “cheese ends.” These are the ends of cheese wheels of blocks that become too small to cut easily. They bundle them together and sell them as a package. Good cheese in bits and pieces but of good quality.

 

That’s what I’m calling this new section. Rather than the long-winded and exhaustive approach to a single subject, these are interesting bits and pieces that came over my desk, packaged up for your consumption.

 

Before we get started, a shout out to two readers in Luxembourg and Australia. I watch my tiny set of sales closely and I’ve been seeing someone out there buying one book after another. As if, *gasp*, they might be reading them.

 

Thank you. I think I’ve doubled my readership.

 

Both of you—no, I have to correct that. The four of you—who read this blog know I have no trouble acknowledging the fact of climate change—so far without the help of magical thinking. There are a lot of greenhouse gases to consider but the two main ones under discussion are CO2 and methane. (CH4.) Emission of CO2 is pretty well nailed down. Partly because there is so much being emitted that we can see where and partly because the CO2 measured is easily discerned from the CO2 coming from natural sources.

 

Methane is a harder nut to crack. Methane derives from a lot of natural sources: disintegration of peat bogs, post-forest fire recovery, natural seepage from ancient deposits. But it is also pumped out of the ground both for its own sake and as a byproduct of oil extraction. This is important because though the volume of emissions is relatively low, methane hits far outside its weight class in its climate impact—as much as 30-80 times the effect of CO2. It’s low-hanging fruit as far as mitigating climate change.

 

A recent study has used a satellite has shown on the order of 1800 “ultra-emitters”—large methane plumes from single sources. Two-thirds were from the oil and gas industry (surprise!) and three countries, including the US, were responsible for the majority of the problem.

 

While this isn’t happy news, it’s the kind of issue that can be addressed. It would be nice if, maybe, that $20 billion in subsidies for the O&G industry could be made contingent on them cleaning up their act.

 

When we read about stone tool culture, we get the idea that all humans derived the same tools over time. This is a Clovis point. This is an Oldowan chopping tool. This is an Acheulean hand ax. As if all humans in the culture pick up the new technology at the same time.

 

This is like saying that as soon as oil paints were created, all artists in the world became oil painters overnight. There are a lot of ways to create art. There are a lot of ways to create tools. Not all of them survive for us to unravel them in the modern world.

 

Enter the site in Xiamabei, China.

 

40,000 years ago, the people in this locale used tiny bladelets of stone less than four centimeters long to do everything: cut meat, whittle wood, scrape hides. Not big, heavy hand-axes. But tiny bits hafted onto bone handles apparently using ochre as an adhesive component. No one else has ever seen these sorts of tools used at this period. Not Neanderthal, Denisovan, or Homo sapiens. There’s no direct evidence of who these people were, either, though there is evidence of some contemporary humans a few hundred kilometers away.

 

What I find interesting here is that humans will create tools out of local stuff and for their own needs in isolation. Sure, there was probably an invention of the Clovis point and it spread around. But if it hadn’t, enterprising humans would have created something different that worked as well.

 

Years ago, Stephen Jay Gould was on an NPR talk show and I managed to get in. The question I put to SJG was, okay, the dinosaurs (and a lot of other species) managed to get wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous. But that’s only half the story and the least interesting half at that. The important part is why did birds and mammals survive? What made them so special? He did not have an answer—which is not surprising since there is no good answer. Dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, and marine reptiles were eliminated, while mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles survived. How come?

 

Recently, though, there is a hint.

 

It looks now like the timing of the Chicxulub Meteor might have had something to do with the selectivity of the extinction. Analyzing fossilized fish killed in the impact, the meteor struck in the spring, smack in the middle of Northern Hemisphere reproductive activities. Animals that required long hatching times and rearing, like non-avian dinosaurs, would have been disproportionately affected compared to short-timers like small mammals and birds.

 

Animals, however, in the Southern Hemisphere would have been getting ready to bed down for the winter and presumably be better able to survive the effects.

 

It’s not a perfect explanation but it’s a step in the right direction.

 

In the category of flat out strange experiments, a Nature article described a team that took an antiproton—an antiparticle of the mass of a proton but with a negative charge—and put it in orbit around a helium ion. Then, they watched it dance through the orbitals spitting out photons. The reason they tried something like this is to get very precise measurements of the qualities of antiparticles. One big hole in modern physics is why is there a vast preponderance of normal matter instead of an even mix of normal matter and antimatter.

 

But it’s a strange idea for essentially a negatively charged proton wandering through the electron orbitals of a helium atom like a fat electron. I can’t get my mind around the quantum mechanics of that. What sort of bonds would be possible? Would a covalent bond between a carbon with antiprotons and an oxygen with electrons be possible? I.e., would they instantly annihilate one another or would they be able to share for some finite period of time? The mind boggles.

 

I’ve made allusions in my fiction that I think language didn’t evolve by itself but had antecedents in song and gesture—we sang before we spoke.

 

A recent paper from the Royal Society suggests that gestures may predate spoken language.

 

This is not a new idea. Scientists have hypothesized this since the eighteenth century. But it’s been hard to get any hard evidence. These researchers set up what I would consider a fairly rigorous mechanism. They created two groups of producers from Vanatau that would attempt to present a word both orally and gesturally. Two groups of receivers were matched from Australian undergraduate students by age and sex. The producers’ efforts were recorded. Gestural production was recorded without sound. Vocal production was recorded without video. The matched interpreters were to attempt to guess the words being presented in the recording. There were Australian/Australian combinations as well as Vanatau/Australia combinations. The details are in the paper.

 

The results were interesting. First, there was a significant signal similarity in the way the producers attempt to communicate the same words. Second, gestural modality was more successful than vocal modality. Third, the gestures used to communicate had a significant commonality for the same words. There was signal similarity in both vocal and gestural communication but there was more commonality with gestures than with vocals.

 

So, maybe we didn’t only sing before we spoke, maybe we gestured.

 

Speaking of gestures—are at least manual dexterity—there is a new paper that investigates some interesting wrinkles in our hands.

 

Archeologists and paleontologists have long discussed why Homo sapiens, out of all the primates, get the fat end of the stick. Big brains? Upright posture? Ability to sweat well? Our hands?

 

All of these have been important and none of them are more important than our lovely, lovely hands. We have a precision grip, a wonderful combination of stability, strength, and flexibility. How do we do that?

 

This paper investigates a small piece of that action: how fingers apply force at the tip. If you view a finger as a set of cylinders held in place with a mechanical linkage, one interesting feature is that as the force increases, the assembly tends to suddenly buckle. Human fingers don’t do that. Why?

 

It turns out that maintaining a strong precision grip is a dance between stability and strength that requires fine neural control. In effect, the system positions the hand in a way as to prevent buckling such that the mechanics of the system provide the stability.

 

Moving off-planet, unless you’ve been living under a rock, there has been a continuing buzz for some time now about the detection of gravity waves.

 

These were postulated by Einstein long ago. If space-time acts as a sort of fabric warped by mass—resulting in gravity—then sufficiently large changes in energy or mass could cause a shift in that fabric. A wave analogous to the ripples in a pond caused by dropping a rock. Those waves could propagate through space at the speed of light.

 

Two black holes merging could produce such ripples and these were detected at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) when it first became operational.

 

LIGO operates with two perpendicular lasers interfering with one another. A gravity wave is a distortion in space-time and when it rolls over LIGO, it distorts space, causing the space between the lasers to stretch and contract. This changes the interference pattern and, lo, gravity waves are detected.

 

The very first gravity waves were detected in 2015 resulting from the merger of two black holes of 35 and 30 times the mass of the sun at a distance of 1.4 billion light-years. The energy carried away from the event by gravity waves was 50 times greater than the combined power of all light radiated by all stars in the observable universe. While that is an inconceivable amount of energy, gravity waves follow the inverse square law such that by the time it reached us, the amount of energy contained was very, very small.

 

One wonders what it would have been like to be just a few light-years distance. Would there be anything left?

 

Regardless, this is the problem faced by LIGO and other like gravity wave observatories. They need to be incredibly sensitive even to detect fairly large events.

 

Enter the Moon.

 

Researchers at the University College, London, have come up with a way of measuring quite small gravity waves by measuring the perturbations in the Moon’s orbit. LIGO and its sister observatories are sensitive to specific frequencies of events. Slower events, such as those that may have occurred in the early universe, are beyond them.

 

But the moon has a 28-day orbit, translating to a frequency of interest to early universe scientists. The device is right there to be used. All we need is to instrument it.

 

Finally, some very interesting news on the origin of life front.

 

I talked a little about the origins of life back in the day. (See here and  here.) To boil it down, there are two very basic actions life has to execute: metabolism and reproduction. There have been discussions as to whether this required a cell boundary or not. Whether the metabolism came first and reproduction came later. Whether reproduction came first, etc.

 

One continuing interest is if RNA came first. RNA is interesting. It can be used to retain information. (RNA viruses do exactly that.) It has some enzymatic capabilities. It’s a good candidate. But RNA is not terribly stable.  One of the discussions involves how RNA information had to be handed over to DNA. DNA isn’t all that stable, either, but it is more stable than RNA.

 

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created RNA that appears to be able to engage in natural selection. This means RNA can reproduce, diversify over generations, develop complexity, and be subject to Darwinian evolution.

 

This is big for several reasons. As stated previously, RNA has some enzymatic capability as well. Thus, this research presents the exciting possibility that reproduction and metabolism could have arisen together. We just need a boundary to contain it and we have a very simple living cell. Maybe. We’ll see.

 

That’s it for this edition of Cheese Ends. The next will come… someday.