Brian Greene in the NY Times

The better half and I just returned from vacation this week (contrary to the comment I recently received, the blog break has not been NSF-induced, but rather from an incredible week + vacationing.) I am adjusting to the time and lifestyle change fine, and spent most of the weekend getting back on track (including a few visits to a lab undergoing a bakeout). This morning I ran across this article in the NY Times by Brian Greene (physicist and author of many popular science books.) It starts with a description of a letter he received from a soldier stationed in Iraq, the kind of letter anyone who fancies themselves a writer must be thrilled to receive. He then spends some time discussing the status of science education in the US. As a scientist who is interested in science education, I thought it was worth linking to.

My only beef is that when discussing the issue of science education Green writes:

It’s much the same story in classes for biology, chemistry and mathematics.

You might notice that once again geology and/or earth science is not given a place on the list of important sciences. I am sure Greene has no problem with geology, that is not what I mean, I just think it is sad how often the "important" sciences are listed off with nary a mention of the science that studies the planet we live on. Other than that, the article is worth a read. He makes the point that science education is "unassailably vertical [paraphrased]" and too often focuses on teaching skills and forgets to involve the grand ideas, the things that might inspire students to want to learn the skills. Or as he writes:

Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”

This is the second time I've blogged about a prominent scientist somehow appearing in the NY Times and forgetting to include geology as an important science. The first time is here, in an article that quotes nobel laureate Leon Lederman.

Slate Articles and Michael Pollan

Not too long ago I blogged about Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. If you've read my review you know that in general I thought it was a very well written and argued book. Pollan has a new book out, called In Defense of Food, which was recently reviewed on Slate. I am a regular Slate reader, and since In Defense of Food is a book I am considering reading, I thought the review might be a good read.

Slate is a weird website. Some of the articles very well written pieces on politics and culture, mixing humor and insight in a way that makes me check the site daily. But, Slate also has a second type of article that appears all too often. The outline of the classic Slate complaint is this: Take something that everyone likes or is in general good, and with a whiny, self-important, high-schoolish rant explain why it is either bad, wrong, or both - written, of course, with a "I would have done it sooo much better" flavor usually reserved for indie music critics in novelty retro t-shirts (One of my favorites is a complaint of how a fictional character is a "fraud.") One way this is done is by misrepresenting the original source. Which leads me to Laura Shapiro's recent piece on In Defense of Food. Now, I haven't read Pollan's new book, but I cannot trust this review because of a glaring misrepresentation.

Shapiro writes:

Pollan's way of doing this is to stage a kind of faith-based dinner party he calls "The Perfect Meal"—perfect because everything on the table will be made from ingredients grown, shot, or gathered near his home in the San Francisco Bay area, from the wild-boar pâté to the cherry galette. By the time he heads out to collect local yeast spores for the bread dough, you feel as though you're not even reading a book anymore but instead gazing stupefied at some sort of life-sized diorama in the Museum of Natural History ("Northern California, ca. A.D. 2000—Worshipping Plants and Animals").

This has nothing to do with the content of the chapter, or what Pollan ends up calling "The Perfect Meal." In addition, it pitches Pollan, and Dilemma, as an elitist and snobby book that provides no "real world" ideas or solutions. As I quoted in my review

Perhaps the perfect meal is one that's been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal [emphasis added]. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted. The reason I didn't open a can of stock was because stock doesn't come from a can; it comes from the bones of animals. As the yeast that leavens our bread comes not from a packet but from the air we breathe. The meal was more ritual than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as the meadows. If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore's Thanksgiving. (pp. 409-410)

Pollan fully admits that the meal foraged and hunted is impractical, he talks about that repeatedly in Dilemma. You might confuse the point if you only skimmed the book and chapter titles, perhaps. Unfortunately I see this as falling into the Slate whiny pattern I mentioned earlier; perhaps confusing the idea of critique with criticism Shapiro wants to find something to complain about in a well reviewed and popular book. That is one of the thing Slate does best, of course, point out why things we like are actually bad. I haven't read Pollan's new book, but I immediately can't trust the rest of Shapiro's review. The misrepresentation goes to the heart of what I consider to be one of the better points of Dilemma, and I can only guess that the trend of exaggeration and misrepresentation is not limited to the example I am using.

To be fair, not all of the review is this off, and I have liked many of Shapiro's pieces in the past. But I am entirely disappointed with the tone of this one. Why misrepresent?

The Omnivore's Dilemma - Review

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is a book about food. That might sound simple, but when I say "about food" I mean about all aspects of food: production, consumption, evolution, emotion, health, community, enviroment, and philosophy. What Pollan set out to do was to describe the creation of 4 different meals. This would take him to restaurants, grocery stores, feedlots, farms, and hidden mushroom gathering sites in the Sierra Nevada, all the while discussing the importance of the food gathering activity in social, economic, political, and environmental terms. His four meals all centered around different aspects of American food culture, and can be thought of as:

1. Industrial - A fast food dinner bought in a drive through and eaten while cruising in a car.
2. Industrial Organic - Organic food bought at a local Whole Paycheck and cooked at home, with ingredients from all over the world, but each grown "organically."
3. Local - After a week's stay at a farm in Virginia, Pollan cooked another meal using only local ingredients (things grown and produced within a defined geographic area).
4. Hunted and Gathered - A meal, once again cooked by Pollan, with food he hunted and gathered within a days drive of his home in Berkeley, California.

If you don't want to read the whole post, in short, it is an excellent book, is now in paperback, and will be thought provoking to anyone who eats food on a regular basis.

Before I go on much further, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am a vegetarian. I have been for about 13 years now, and started reading the book with more than a decade's worth of thought on food (specifically meat and meat production) swirling in my head. Just so you don't think I am a completely unreliable food critic, however, I must also admit that I am a vegetarian who thinks many other vegetarians are incredibly annoying (almost as bad as the people who try to convince me to eat meat or otherwise say idiotic and derogatory things about veggos.) I believe there are a lot of excellent reasons to be a vegetarian, and I get annoyed by people who make up completely new (and usually groundless and/or non-sensical) reasons. For example, claims that meat is inherently unhealthy or that humans cannot properly digest meat really burn me up. Add that to how inundated vegetarian grocery stores and magazines are with all kinds of shark-cartilage-plant-extract-dietary-supplement-snake-oil-nonsense and you can see why anyone might get a little ticked off. Why make up B.S? Why not just stick to the obvious and well proven facts? Why not have an intelligent discussion about the pros and cons of all aspects of food production and consumption? A-Ha! You thought I was digressing, but I just brought us right back to Dilemma.

The first meal Pollan describes is the ultimate in modern industrial fast food. To see where the food comes from, Pollan visits a feedlot where a calf he "bought" is spending it's last days getting fattened up on corn and antibiotics. He also visits some large scale industrial farms in the lower midwest. A large part of the first part of the book deals with the central role that corn plays in our modern industrial food production. Corn, or some corn byproduct, has worked it's way into almost every processed food item that we eat, including most of the beef sold in the US. This last fact is no small feat, especially considering that cows don't naturally eat corn, and in fact cannot digest corn well without help. Corn has the advantage of getting cows fat quickly and adding "marbling" to the beef, but only with the help of drugs and vets. Most feedlot stays are relatively short, so the goal seems to be to pump them full of anything that can get them to the slaughterhouse fat. ****This by the way has stuck in my head. You always hear about "corn-fed" beef like it is some mark of authenticity. Cows don't eat corn! They eat grass! Corn-fed beef is a relatively new invention that requires a veterinary staff armed with drugs to implement. Why did that surprise me?****As one could expect, there aren't many positive sides to the industrial meal, the production and consumption of the food is filled with huge wastes of money and energy, disgraceful animal living conditions, exploitation of labor, absurd government subsidy structures, and consumers inhaling unhealthy food with little connection at all to it's source.

The first part of the book was really not clicking with me. These were arguments I have read and heard many times, and were some of the reasons I swore off meat in the first place. I am beyond the time in my life where I want to read affirmations of my own thoughts, and put the book down for a while. Fortunately I picked it up again, because the stories surrounding the last three meals are fascinating. One aspect of the first section I do want to mention though is his discussion of "reductionist nutrition." Basically, the idea that we know all of the essential fundamentals we need to eat, and if we synthetically fortify foods with these basic building blocks then we will have healthy diets. This is a dangerous way to think, every year there are new things we never knew we couldn't live without, lycopene, antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, the list goes on. The antithesis to reductionist nutrition is eating a variety of fresh foods, what we have evolved eating. I think this discussion especially struck a chord with me because I was also reading (at the time) Apsley Cherry-Garrard's amazing The Worst Journey in the World, a chronicle of Robert Falcon Scott's fatal attempt to reach the south pole. This relates because Cherry-Garrard spends a lot of time on the various diets they experimented with for polar travel, all different combinations of fat, sugar, and protein. This was well before people knew about the importance of vitamins, let alone omega-3 fatty acids. Anyone who thinks they've nailed down what a healthy diet needs (in a reductionist sense) should read these accounts and gain some perspective. These explorers, at the time, were on the cutting edge of understanding what a body needs to survive, and they were missing huge parts (with deadly consequences.) Back to the book...

The second meal, industrial organic, deals a great deal with the arguments for and against organic food. For example, is it better to eat a "conventional" apple from a farm down the road, or an organic one flown in from New Zealand? And just what is "organic," or "free range" anyhow? This section of the book really made me scratch my head. I don't want to just repeat his points, but man, "organic" farms sure can look a lot like conventional farms....

The third meal was the most interesting to read about. Pollan spent a week working on Polyface Farm, a self contained grass farm run by a man named Joe Salatin that raises cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits....and I think that is it..... The idea is that instead of importing nutrients in the form of chemical fertilizers (or corn grown with said petrochemicals), Salatin uses a very well planned and intricate system of animal rotation to raise everything using only his own forest and pasture land. This system fascinated me; allegedly grass grows better if it is nibbled on (but not overgrazed), and with this system Salatin (and his father) have turned an overgrazed wasteland of a farm into a very efficient and productive plot of pasture and forest. Salatin's system is absolutely fascinating, and I'd recommend the book just based on this section alone. It has even made me hunt down a local grass farmer who I know by my eggs from (saturday farmers market). I think what got me thinking the most in this section was the interplay of meat, vegetarianism, organic, and local food. My default preference has always been organic vegetarian, but is that always the "best choice." All organic produce requires animal derived fertilizer, and after the industrial organic section I am now putting more favor on local food. Anyways, those are my dilemnas, the point is that the workings of Polyface Farms and the whole grass farmer idea has made me think more about food and farming than anything I've read in the past decade. No, it hasn't converted me, I'm just saying, it's worth the read.

The final meal was about as close as one could come to the who hunter-gatherer model. Pollan hunted mushrooms, wild pigs, and random greens and fruits to make a dinner focused on things that he "found" himself. I wasn't expecting much from this meal, but once again Pollan does an excellent job of integrating so many aspects of the experience, hunting, foraging, etc., that you get sucked in.

What I ended up really liking about this book was Pollan's sense of even-handedness. When he talks about killing animals, either in a slaughterhouse, on Salatin's farm (he participated in the processing of the chickens), or in the forest of northern California, he uses intelligence without sounding removed, and emotion without sounding sappy. That is a tough balance to strike, and it is easy to slip down either side (either to reaffirm your choice to not eat meat or convince yourself it is OK to). He even nailed on the head one of the hardest parts of being a vegetarian, that is feeling like an inconvenience when friends invite you for meals, feeling like a constant problem, or just a rude and unappreciative guest. When he discussed organic versus local there wasn't always a clear winner, there are pros and cons. In the end, the book isn't so much about what you should do, but more about how you should think about food. I think it has something to offer everyone, and I can't recommend it enough. As a warning, the first part where he keeps talking about corn, that can get a little repetitive, but power on through and trust me it is worth it.

Pollan is an excellent writer, and I just want to end this with a few quotes. First, some of his thoughts on the meals he hunted and foraged:

Perhaps the perfect meal is one that's been fully paid for, that leaves no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted. The reason I didn't open a can of stock was because stock doesn't come from a can; it comes from the bones of animals. As the yeast that leavens our bread comes not from a packet but from the air we breathe. The meal was more ritual than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as the meadows. If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore's Thanksgiving. (pp. 409-410)

And finally to wrap things up

This is not the way I want to eat every day. I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food. But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a manner of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we chose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world. (pg. 411)

And So It Goes, R.I.P Kurt Vonnegut

Author Kurt Vonnegut died last night at the age of 84. In memorium and related to my last post, the following quote can easily be adapted to our discussion of reviews of scientific papers

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Thermochronic Book Club #1 - T.Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez

A while ago I blogged about how I would be challenging myself to read and blog about 5 popular science books over the course of the next year. I solicited suggestions, set a start date, and then, dropped the ball. There are two primary reasons that my geology blogging has been slack lately; first, I finally submitted a manuscript I've been working on, and second, it's NCAA March Madness time, the greatest American sporting event (by a long shot), and so have been a little distracted.

The paper took longer than I had hoped to submit, perhaps because to be honest I am not all that thrilled with it. The science is good, the data important, and the results make sense and need to be published, but for a number of reasons the results are not sexy nor earth-shattering. I know not all science is supposed to be ground-breaking, but still. At least it is out the door, we'll see what the reviewers say.

As far as the NCAA goes, those of you who don't follow or care about the Men's Basketball Championship tournament, during the first four days of the tournament, 48 single elimination games were played all over the country, resulting in some stunning upsets and nail biting finishes. I now live on the east coast of America, which means the games start late here, and finish late, so if I want to watch any I have to stay up past my bed time; this has cut into my other recreational activities (read: blogging).

But, I did finish my first book of the challenge, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez.
I have been meaning to read this book since the 2002 Geological Society of America national meeting in Seattle where I saw Walter Alvarez receive the Penrose Medal. I had actually gone to the awards ceremony because at the same time, John McPhee was also receiving a medal (The GSA Public Service Award) and wanted to hear his acceptance speech. For me, though, Alvarez's acceptance speech really stole the show. I've been looking all over the internet for a transcript with no luck, but regardless, I remember it as being one of the more poetic and heartfelt speeches I had ever heard (especially at GSA). In his talk he briefly discussed the work he is most famous for (and the topic of this book), but more importantly spent time talking about the aesthetics of field work, and the importance of the friendships he had built over the years working on this project. I remember him ending with an image of the end of a field day, sipping wine in some perfect valley in Italy surrounded by friends and the excitement of the story they were all unraveling. Anyways, that was 5 years ago, and the fact that I am only now getting around to reading the book is a little silly, but here we go.

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom chronicles the events that lead to the discovery of evidence for a major extraterrestrial impact at the Cretaceous - Tertiary (or K-T) boundary, the time when all of the dinosaurs (and many other animals) suddenly went extinct, roughly 65 Million years ago. Alvarez began working on a series of limestones in the Appenine Mountains of Italy in an attempt to use paleomagnetics to chart microplate rotations in the Mediterranian. The section he was analyzing stretched over the K-T boundary, preserving an exceptional marine record of that time period. They never found evidence for microplate rotation, but they had stumbled upon something much more significant. What they eventually found was a huge spike in the amount if Iridium present in the clay layer at the K-T boundary. They published this finding in Science in 1990 (Alvarez et al., 1990, Iridium Profile for 10 Million Years of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary at Gubbio [Italy]; Science v. 250, n. 4988, pp. 1700-1702). The Iridium concentrations were such a find because Iridium is not very common in the crust of the earth, most of the Iridium the planet contains is locked up in the core. Meteorites have similar bulk compositions to the earth, but can be completely destroyed upon impact, vaporizing themselves and leaving a fine layer of meteor dust spread around the world. Meteor dust is enriched in Ir compared to the highly differentiated earth crustal rocks, so it shows up as distinct spikes in abundance.

From Alvarez et al., 1990

This is a figure from the Alvarez paper showing the Ir concentration (in parts per trillion) versus stratigraphic position in the limestone. Background Ir levels are barely above the minimum sensitivity of the instrument, but at the K-T boundary there is an enormous peak. This "Iridium Anomaly" has since been found all over the world at the K-T boundary.

I don't want to give away the whole story, because the book is certainly worth reading. Alvarez does an excellent job capturing the process of science and presenting it for the readers in a way that is very interesting to read. It shows that what we find is rarely what we set out to prove, and that some of the most interesting and exciting scientific discoveries are born from the ashes of failed studies.

I've heard versions of this story many times during my geologic career, but the book still kept me interested. Alvarez adds enough background that the story is easy to follow (even for those with no real background in geology), without sounding too basic or redundant. These are qualities I think public science books need to have, especially when done in a genuinely readable style.

There are aspects of this book I found particulary interesting, but they didn't really center around the impact story. The first was his discussion of the tension in the geologic community over uniformitarianism. This idea is often summed up using a quote from Charles Lyell, "The present is the key to the past." Basically, if we want to know how something happened in the past, then we should observe today's processes. There is no need to involve "catastrophic" phenomena to understand geologic features, and that rare and catastrophic events (like impacts) have little role in the history of the earth. I had of course learned about this idea (which is still largely true, but I'll get to that in a minute), but the tension and disagreement over the importance of catastrophic events was something I never really had a feel for. This debate was happening during my lifetime, really during the beginning of my geologic education. The problem, as I see it, was that embedded in the concept of uniformitarianism is a time scale. Things that seem rare and catastrophic on the human time scale (large volcanic eruptions like Yellowstone, extra-terrestrial impacts, some of the floods that occurred when the dams of glacial lakes broke, etc...) are, from perspective of geologic time, fairly common. So it's not really that we have to call upon events that no longer happen, only that we have to expand the idea of everyday geologic phenomena.

The other aspect of the book I really enjoyed was his discussion of how geology, as a science, changed in nature from when he was doing his Ph.D.

Geologic mapping was satisfying and useful, but in retrospect most of it seems to me to have been intellectually pretty routine. While early twentieth century physicists were reading "the thoughts of God," in Einstein's phrase - exploring the majestic curvature of spacetime on the scale of the universe and disovering the weird quantum behavior of the infinitesimarlly small-geologists labored to reconstruct the paths of ancient rivers and the pattern of lands and seas at various times in the past.....Geology simply asked its apprentices to learn the techniques of geologic mapping and to memorize a lot of complicated terminology and then it sent them out to add to the growing knowledge of the rock record of the Earth.
And yet, with hindsight, we can see that the mapping was an investment which is now paying great dividends. Physics could make great discoveries quickly by reducing complicated problems to simpler components because physics investigates the fundamental laws of Nature, which do not change and do not become more complex through time. Geology seeks to understand the earth, which has evolved over 4,600 million years, accumulating more and more historical complexity in its rock record. That century and a half of mapping the Earth produced the detailed knowledge of the rock record which is now allowing geology to emerge as a mature science, skilled at interpreting historical complexity, and therefore perhaps the discipline best prepared to lead science into the holistic world of the twenty-first century. [emphasis added]

First, I'd like to point out that "that century and a half of mapping" is not really over. There are many regions of the world (even the continental US) that still need to be mapped (or remapped). It is a necessary step in understanding the geology of a region, and it introduces and refines most of the skills geologists need (primarly, it hones observational skills). Second, all geologists need to be able to create and read geologic maps, and any attempt to remove this from a curriculum is detrimental to the science. But, geology has changed. This is obvious to anyone who has checked out older theses from their university library; expectations are now very different. This is no surprise, I am sure all disciplines are similar, but I like to keep it in mind. I am tuned to lectures from people older than me about how easy younger generations have it, but that just isn't true. Expectations, abilities, and realities are all different. I suppose as I transition into a grumpy old man I should also keep it in mind.

The final aspect of the book I'd like to touch on is how well it describes what I think all geologists (perhaps all scientists) dream of happening to their research. You stumble upon something that ends up being enormous, and changes the face of science forever. There is no doubt that Walter Alvarez is an exceptional scientist who worked very hard for many years to accomplish what he did, but he also freely admits the role of chance in his discoveries. Things worked out well for him, and I think it instills hope that crazy and unforseen exciting discoveries are out there waiting to be made. Not in the project I finally submitted for publication, but I am sure they must be somewhere.

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom is worth the read, even if you already know the punchline. It is also rather short (which, Mrs. Apparent-dip-but-with-a-different-last-name can tell you is a key factor in my book-choosing process: I turned in 4 papers in 4 different classes on The Red Badge of Courage during my high school and college life).

I am not sure which book I'll be taking on next, but this is off to a good start. Any other thoughts on this book, or if anyone wants to comment on a recent paper by Gerta Keller et al. Chicxulub impact predates K–T boundary: New evidence from Brazos, Texas that appeared in Earth and Planetary Science Letters (Earth and Sanitary Appliance Letters?) Volume 255, Issues 3-4, 30 March 2007, Pages 339-356, I'd appreciate it.