Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

What I've read recently:

The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel. This is a history of photographic astronomy using glass plates--photometry, spectral lines, and how the photos they were used to study variable stars--and of the Harvard Observatory and the women who did much of the work. Many of the women were first hired as "computers," doing calculations for (originally only male) astronomers, before starting to do astronomy on their own. The group included Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who figured out the luminosity-distance relationship in Cepheid variables, and thus the distance to the Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda galaxy; Annie Jump Cannon (of the OBAFGKM star classifcations); and Cecilia Payne Groposchkin, who became the first person of any gender to get a PhD in astronomy from Harvard, with a dissertation showing that our sun is made mostly of hydrogen and helium.

The book is about both the astronomical work, and the lives of the people doing it, including the ways the women involved had to fight to do it, and be recognized for their work, in both the US and Europe. It weaves together several lives, and stories, over more than half a century. One important thread is Mary Anne Palmer (Mrs. Henry) Draper, who dedicated many years, and money, to support and fund the Henry Draper Memorial to carry on her late husband's cataloging work. (All those "HD" star catalog numbers are from that work.)

Tricks for Free, by Seanan McGuire. This is another InCryptid story, this one about/narrated by Antimony Price (younger sister of Verity, who introduced the series). She's on the run from the Covenant, and thus separated from all her living family (though her dead aunts visit occasionally), fighting sorcerers in an amusement park. She has a team of Cryptid allies, her boyfriend Sam comes back (and they decide/declare that they are boyfriend and girlfriend) and everything moves fast. This was fun, but leans significantly on what happened in previous books.

Around the World in Eighty Trees, by Jonathan Drori. Drori gives us eighty brief pieces about eighty trees he finds interesting, either for botanical or cultural reasons--with locations, usually at the level of "Morocco" but sometimes US states, and for ailanthus it's "Brooklyn, USA." Each tree's essay is illustrated with color drawings. The book discusses trees I hadn't known of, and includes some things I hadn't known, or thought about, and is pleasant, mostly restful reading, a few trees at a time. (The articles on some trees sections talk about global warming or near-extinction from overuse). Recommended by mrissa.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard to Talk about Race, by Robin diAngelo. This is more or less what it says on the tin, from the viewpoint of sociology/activism: why it's difficult for white people to talk about race, and the ways that silence about race maintain white supremacy--and that this is not accidental. DiAngelo offers some suggestions about how white people can talk about race, including both ways to talk to (and sometimes challenge) each other, and ways to listen respectfully and not shut down people of color who are taking about racism. The book looks at both structural racism and microaggressions, and how people (don't) talk about hate crimes. I have this as a library ebook, and may need to buy a copy so I can reread it, and maybe use some of her bibliography. It's shorter, and easier to read, than I'd expected. (Your mileage may vary, either if you're less familiar with sociology and some of the terminology, or if the topic is especially stressful for you.) Note: diAngelo is writing from an American viewpoint, and points out both that other parts of the world will be somewhat different, and that American movies, magazines, music, etc. are part of the environment all over the world.

Current reading:

• So Far So Good, by Ursula Le Guin (still, I'm dipping into it, a few poems at a time)
• Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, a collection of short pieces, including humor and reporting
• At the Mouth of the River of Bees, short stories by Kij Johnson

Someone at Weather Underground is live-blogging the current (just starting) northeast U.S. snowstorm. In the comments, among the maps and discussions of what models the National Weather Service using, user pegleg666 posted a link to a post-Sandy blog post containing the Cuban poet José Martí's description of the blizzard of 1888 and its aftermath.

I grabbed The Nature of New York, An Environmental History of the Empire State, by David Stradling pretty randomly from the "new arrivals" shelf at the library. This isn't natural history, it's a description and discussion of how humans have affected the environment of New York, and vice versa. The author notes that state borders are somewhat arbitrary, especially for a discussion of environment, but that in addition to New York being a somewhat manageable topic for discussion, the borders themselves made a difference, especially starting in the late 19th century: while early white settlers in New York cut trees to make farmland or for lumber in much the same way as settlers elsewhere in the region, reforestation was driven significantly by government policy. The most important canal-building, which made a large difference to the environment and how people interacted with it, was sponsored by the state government. Early conservation legislation was also at the state level, notably under both governors Roosevelt (both took some of those policies to the national level as president).

Another theme of the book is identification with place. That was driven partly by people thinking of themselves as New Yorkers, rather than (or in addition to) as Americans, or as residents of Brooklyn or Albany or Buffalo. Stradling connects this to Hudson River School art, which romanticized American and especially New York landscapes. A lot of this book focuses on the Hudson Valley, both for the obvious bits such as its importance for transport, and as a way to discuss the creation and maintenance of farmland and sources of timber. Early conservation efforts were significantly about saving the appearance of the land: not just the value of wilderness, but of specific scenic areas. Places like Storm King mountain were close enough to New York City to attract the attention and interest of people with the money and influence to push for their preservation.

This is 400 years in one book; if you know about a particular topic, the discussion may feel shallow. But there are already entire books on the Hudson River School, Robert Moses, and Love Canal, and the best place to start with Jane Jacobs is her own writing. Love Canal is traced here from a failed canal-building project, one of many such, through the casual use of abandoned canals as chemical dumps, to the equally casual practice of building on poisoned land, and the wastes seeping out, through citizen activism, to the EPA's Superfund. By the time Stradling had covered that and Brownsville and the epidemic of insurance-driven arson by landlords in the Bronx, I was surprised not to find anything on the failed Shoreham nuclear project, and its effects on Long Island politics.

Conversely, I hadn't known that agriculture in and near New York City that thrived when agriculture further upstate didn't, specifically because of the amount of stuff that needed to be transported within the city, and hence the amount of horse manure available to local farmers as fertilizer. The general overview of city history (I suspect any city) is of agriculture moving further away as cities develop. The occasional book or article mentions horse droppings as a pollutant on city streets, often in terms of "see, the automobile wasn't all bad." But Stradling argues that city farmers didn't just have easy access to markets for their fresh produce, they had the advantage of not having to let their land lie fallow or rotate their crops, an advantage over farmers elsewhere in the state.

Stradling only touches on pre-European habitation here: he's working mostly from written records, when he isn't discussing the visible topography and most recent geology. This choice may also be affected by the common assumption that the earlier human inhabitants of the Americas didn't change the environment much. I don't know how true it is for New York; we're starting to find evidence that it's not at all true in the Amazon basin. That's aside from the point that if the first human settlers wiped out the mastodon, horse, giant ground sloth, and several other species, that will have affected the environment in important ways.

The New York Times has an article on the 200th anniversary of the Manhattan street grid. I hadn't realized, and probably should have, that hundreds of buildings north of Houston Street were either moved or torn down to fit the grid plan. (Greenwich Village was explicitly excluded from the grid, which is obvious on looking at a map or wandering around that part of town.

Less cheerful, the state of the Japanese electrical grid is bad, and unlikely to be fixed in time for summer. The main problem is loss of capacity; a smaller one is that Japan has two incompatible grids, one at 50 Hz and one at 60 Hz, dating back to decisions made in the 1890s. There's a lesson here about excess capacity, and how quickly it can become necessary, which I suspect nobody in North America is going to be allowed to act on. [via autopope]

Twenty years ago, I woke up, turned on the radio, and heard “Berliners continue to celebrate in their no-longer-divided city.” That was a pleasant surprise, in an odd way a fine and memorable birthday present.

Google has gone to some trouble to make sure I know that [Bad username or unknown identity: ”bcholmes”] and I also share our birthday with Sesame Street. I’m just old enough that I didn’t learn much from Sesame Street: but I have a younger brother, and I did watch, and I’m still fond of Grover and Kermit, and remember Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus and the Cookie Monster and Miss Piggy and Oscar. Quite a bit later, I watched The Muppet Show. I also have fond memories of The Electric Company, and still give 02134 when a store asks my zip code for demographic purposes.

There are gorgeous purple flowers, mostly roses, on my desk here. *grin*

In response to something james_nicoll wrote, I said

If you need imports, you need access to something that will buy those imports. Wheat or tin or oil or good woven cloth or machine parts. A Heinlein character observed that the problem with wheat as the basis for a monetary standard isn't lack of value--it's that it's too perishable. But tin or oil are reasonably good in that regard, and in the end, you can't eat the gold.

I am now wondering--and realizing this is a gap in my education--whether pre-Conquest Spain had a strong economy, or whether the convenient "the gold led to centuries of inflation and the decline of the local economy" is closer to "they tried to build a strong economy on conquest, and it didn't work, though some people got rich in the short term."

Can anyone recommend a reasonable English-language history of Spain (or of Europe but covering Spain) for, say, 1400 or so through the Thirty Years' War that covers economics, rather than just kings and wars and adventurers? "Spain" in this case meaning the territory that we now think of as Spain--Iberia minus Portugal. Fine if it also includes Portugal, and discussions of Latin America for that period are a plus.

More saved comments. (  'straightness' and what counts as attractive, history, silliness, reactions to other people's emotions, guilt as a motivator for anti-racist acts, passing time and old t-shirts, packrat tendencies )

More saved comments: ( critics and criticism, reasons for coming out, body image, chai, names, how long nations last )

The headline on this obituary reads Pham Xuan An, spy, reporter. For the last ten years of the Vietnam War, An was Time magazine's chief Vietnamese reporter, and "so well-known for his sources and insight that many Americans who knew him suspected he worked for the CIA." Right game, wrong team: he was a Communist spy.

Thanks to a question by polyfrog, leading to a Wikipedia article <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/declarations_of_war_in_the_united_states>, I now know when the peace treaty ending World War II was signed. It's officially the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany," and may be the last significant thing the German Democratic Republic ever did. The treaty was signed in Moscow in September 1990, a few weeks before the reunification of Germany.

I also found myself wondering why, after a few dozen members of Congress voted against war with Germany in early 1914, only Jeanette Rankin voted against war with Austria-Hungary a few months later. Also why she voted against war with Japan in 1941, but not against war with Germany three days later. The Wikipedia article doesn't list who voted how, so I'm guessing she abstained rather than voting in favor. (Rankin served exactly two terms in Congress; one beginning in 1917, the other beginning in 1941.)

No, this has little to do with anything, except for my general desire to know about everything. I'm already working on it, hence the digression about Rep. Rankin, not mentioned in any of what I read tonight.