Jue's Blog (tag:books)

Spent a 4-day weekend at Zach’s vacation house. Best food and rest I’ve had in a long time.

The house was in the woods, at the foot of the Berkshires, on the border of Western Massachusetts and upstate New York.

Brought In Patagonia and The Rest is Noise to read. Didn’t get far into either. Instead, watched Days of Heaven, Chansons D’Amour, Sleeper, Lawrence of Arabia, and Ken Burns’ Civil War Documentary.

Woke up each morning for a run. Next door was a farm, which is to say, a large house with a huge backyard of fenced off, rolling vistas of white. Cows milled about casually in the bitter cold. On a windy morning you could see a soft, diffuse powder floating over the clean edges of the horizon, like smoke backlit by the blinding winter sun.

Brought my 35mm film camera and took pictures compulsively, including a 2-minute exposure of a frigid, star-saturated night, until I broke the shutter. Then I took more on my digital snapshot, and on John’s Pentax when he arrived later in the weekend.

Ate voraciously. Many meals owed to the innovations of Annie and Andrew. Salmon, bread, cheese, dozens of beers and bottles of wine–red and white–steak, french toast, bagels and lox, tortilla chips, tortilla soup, fresh milk (and organic chocolate syrup) and once–only once–went out for a pastrami sandwich.

Last semester of college starts tomorrow. I think I’m ready.

[East Coast Beach, Barbados from Infrared]

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I went home two weeks ago for winter break with half my suitcase full of books. They had been acquired over the course of the semester, from various stores, friends, and libraries, but all had the dubious distinction of being interesting enough to obtain but not to finish.

Not surprisingly, top of the list were course readings. Quantum mechanics for Chemistry. Intro to the Theory of Computation. Justice. The last two were actually interesting, and would make good reading if you were locked up with nothing else to do.

Speaking of locked up, I did manage to pick up a copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a non-fictional (and yet finely wrought) account of a quadruple murder in Kansas in the late 60’s. This–along with the other books on my list, Age of Iron by Coetzee, Four Screenplays by Ingmar Bergman, and Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore about washed-up, depressed, and depressing superheroes–is probably the most pessimistic and misanthropic mélange possible I could have assembled for my exhausted, overworked, and already seasonal-affective-disorder-addled self. Did I mention I went home to Maine for break?

Conclusion: don’t read Watchmen, and ignore the misguided editors at TIME who dubbed it one of the “top 100 novels” of all time. Do read In Cold Blood, regardless of how depressing it sounds, and watch the movie Capote afterward. Oh, and read it during the summer.

Two more gems from The Best American Scientific Writing 2007, both about molecular biology being applied to something unexpected, and both from Discover Magazine.

First, molecular paleontologist Mary Schweitzer uncovers soft tissue in 65-million year-old T-rex fossils. You can imagine the huge uproar the media raised, running the gamut from whimsical (“Now we can create Jurassic Park!”) to the crazy (“Now we know the Earth is only 6000 years old!”). Craziest thing, though, is that when Schweitzer injected the tissue into lab animals their blood raised antibodies active against turkey proteins. There you have it — definitive proof that God exists, and intends for us to eat stuffed T-rex next Thanksgiving dinner. Please, NSF, fund this woman so our gastronomical dreams come true.

Speaking of which, molecular gastronomy is the next hot thing among techno-savvy chefs in Europe, and apparently, a well-funded field of scientific endeavor in France (maybe Mary Schweitzer should try to get funding from the French for potentially growing dinosaur steaks). How could you refuse a grant to these researchers, after hearing the following mouthwatering description of the coagulating proteins responsible for an egg’s texture?

when an egg cooks, its proteins first unwind and then link to form a rigidifying mesh. But not all its proteins solidify at the same temperature. Ovotransferrin, the first of the egg-white proteins to uncoil, begins to set at around 61 degrees Celsius, or 142°F. Ovalbumin, the most abundant egg-white protein, coagulates at 184°F. Yolk proteins generally fall in between, with most starting to solidify when they approach 158°F. Thus, cooking an egg at 158°F or so should achieve both a firmed-up yolk and still-tender whites, since at that low temperature only some of the egg-white proteins will have coagulated.

“Cooking eggs is really a question of temperature, not time,” says This. To make the point, he switches on a small oven, sets the thermostat at 65°C, or 149°F, takes four eggs straight from the box, and unceremoniously places them inside. “I use an oven in the lab; it’s easier. But if the oven in your kitchen is not accurate, cook eggs in plenty of water, using a good thermometer.” About an hour later—timing isn’t critical, and the eggs can stay in the oven for hours or even overnight—he retrieves the first egg and carefully shells it. “The 65-degree egg!” he announces. The egg is unlike any I’ve eaten. The white is as delicately set and smooth as custard, and the yolk is still orange and soft. It’s not hard to see why l’oeuf à soixante-cinq degrés is becoming the rage with chefs in France. (Salmonella can’t survive more than a few minutes at 60°C, or 140°F, so a 65-degree egg cooked for an hour should be quite safe.)

["Cooking for Eggheads" by Patricia Gadsby]

Did you know that even though one egg white can only yield half a pint of meringue, simply by adding water you can extend this limit several-fold? This is because the egg-white proteins hold air bubbles in a matrix containing water molecules, and the limiting reagent normally is water. I know. I’m moving to France.

Ran across a New Yorker writeup on the story of how Grigory Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture, a math problem that has been unsolved for about a century, and is something like this decade’s Fermat’s Last Theorem. This article was in a book–Best American Science Writing of 2007–that I randomly plucked off the bookshelf of a friend. Naturally, being the Internet addict that I am, the first thing I do after reading the article is look it up online, and lo and behold, it has an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to it. Why? Turns out, the piece attracted quite a bit of controversy for the soap opera-esque tale of cat-fighting mathematicians and intellectual dishonesty it covered. The New Yorker was even at one point threatened with legal action by a Chinese mathematician who claimed to have been defamed in the piece, although that has since blown over.

Academic politics and drama notwithstanding, the upshot is, now we have three incredibly interesting–and impeccably written–pieces on the fascinating field of topology from my favorite news sources: National Public Radio, The New York Times, and the article linked to above (and below) in the New Yorker.

Best part of article is when Perelman explains why he refused the Fields Medal for his discovery, and subsequently withdrew completely from professional mathematics. (the Fields is the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and had never been refused since it was first awarded in 1936):

“As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to make some ugly thing”—a fuss about the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”

Russian mathematician Mikhail Gromov then adds:

“To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.” Others might view Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. “The ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else,” he said. “He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.”

["Manifold Destiny" via The New Yorker]

Another interesting article from the “Best Science Writing” collection (and also in the New Yorker): “The Score” by Atul Gawande, a fascinating history of obstetrics and the techno-ethical conundrum the field finds itself in today, in the age of industrialized childbirth and C-sections.

Came across some innovative new thoughts about street design when I was on The Bostonist this morning. The article talks about redesigning Boston’s streets to be more amenable to pedestrians, by applying some rather subtle psychological tricks, which is encapsulated in the “Shared Space” philosophy of street design:

The curb is a big enemy in the Shared Space philosophy, because the curb is a separator, dictating what belongs to the pedestrian and what belongs to the vehicle. There are other enemies as well: signs, lines on the road, even traffic lights. Pioneered by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who died earlier this year at age 62, Shared Space gets the street naked, removes all physical and psychological barriers, and forces cars and pedestrians to share. The concept makes the street safe by making it dangerous to proceed without paying attention. We have some elements of Shared Space here; in Downtown Crossing, Winter and Summer streets have no curb and, in the mornings, commercial vehicles mix with pedestrians.

[via Boston Globe]

On an unrelated note, this type of unconventional, wholistic thinking reminds me of a passage in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve just now managed to jump on the bandwagon and read. The book has chapter after chapter of enlightening–and sometimes shocking–stories about food, farming, industry, etc, but one of the most remarkable sections was about a agricultural (and political) radical named Joel Salatin and his “beyond organic” approach to farming. After the jump: Why I almost want to be a farmer now, and another TED talk