→ March 19, 2015
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Paleofantasy.

My list of breakout player picks for 2015 is up for Insiders. There’s no chat this week due to travel (I’m leaving Arizona this morning), but I’ve got several other posts up and two more coming this week:

* Javier Baez and Brandon Finnegan
* Taijuan Walker and some Dbacks
* Carlos Rodon, Tyler Danish, and Robbie Ray
* University of Arizona infielders Kevin Newman and Scott Kingery

Marlene Zuk’s Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live takes no prisoners in its assault on that trendy diet fad, one that is based on both bad science and bad history in concluding that we should eat a diet of mostly meat and vegetables, without grains, dairy, or sugar. You can certainly eat whatever you want, but the charlatans pushing this diet and lifestyle are using a deft blend of myth and outright bullshit to convince people to give up huge swaths of their diet, perhaps with dangerous consequences.

Zuk’s emphasis in the book is more on human evolution than “paleo” idiocy; the latter is more of a hook to get readers into what could have been a dry history of the portions of our genes that determine what foods we can (and thus do) eat. Zuk organizes her narrative around the activity or food that paleo hucksters claim we should eschew, but within each section delves into the evolutionary history and evidence that tell us why, in essence, we eat what we eat and we do what we do. Along the way, she sneaks in some broader attacks on those who believe evolution isn’t true, or misunderstand it (deliberately or otherwise) to draw erroneous conclusions. Foremost among them is that evolution is not goal-directed, and does not have a conclusion or an apex. We are not the end, we are still evolving, and whatever you may believe about the meaning of our existence, we’re not the peak of some lengthy process.

Her greatest assaults, however, are on the codswallop tossed about by paleo authors and enthusiasts who claim, in short, that we have switched to a diet to which we are ill-suited from an evolutionary perspective. Zuk explains, with copious evidence, that humans have continued to evolve since the Paleolithic era, and thus have digestive and metabolic capabilities that we didn’t have during the so-called paleo era. Her leading example is a big one for me: lactase persistence, the genetic ability to continue to produce the lactase enzyme past childhood, most prominent in the Lapp populations of northern Scandinavia and in some sub-Saharan African groups. Such genes have only started to spread, but Zuk argues that if this is an evolutionary advantageous development (as it appears to be), it will likely spread through natural selection over a long enough period of time. She uses similar examples to discuss how we can get nutrition and energy from grains that may not have been as bio-available to us tens of thousands of years ago.

She also explains in a similarly comprehensive fashion that paleo peeps weren’t the good ol’ boys that they’re claimed to have been, and that the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture didn’t therefore rob us of some essential dietary attributes or destroy our metabolisms. She puts the claim that cancer is a modern ailment to the test, and shows that the lack of evidence for cancer in, say, ancient Egyptians, is a case where we can’t conclude that there’s evidence of absence because cancer cells decay quickly and would rarely leave any sign in bones and other hard matter in the corpse. The idea that obesity, cancer, diabetes and other “modern” diseases are entirely the result of a sedentary, agriculture-based diet and lifestyle – and can be prevented or cured via a paleo diet – is just so much bunk. It’s not supported by the historical evidence, and it relies on the evolutionary myth that we were or will ever be perfectly adapted to our environment. Our environment changes, we change in response to it, but there’s no steady state at the end of the line. (Well, maybe after the sun swallows the earth, but that’s beyond the scope of this book.)

Zuk relies heavily on evidence, as any debunking tome should, but her writing is also very clear without oversimplifying, and she does an excellent job of presenting arguments that appeal to our logic or reason without relying on that alone to convince us. She explains why certain genes or blocks of genes might have first spread within human populations, based on certain advantages they conferred – even genes that simultaneously confer some disadvantage. Cystic fibrosis is an autosomal recessive genetic condition, meaning that you have to receive copies of the defective gene from both of your parents to get the disease; if you get just one copy, you’re a “carrier” but won’t get CF. You will, however, have some degree of immunity to cholera, one of the thousands or perhaps millions of tradeoffs and compromises that constitute our genetic makeup, a point to which Zuk returns frequently to hammer home her argument that there is no “perfect” in evolution, or even a clear positive direction. (Zuk never broaches religion, but it’s evident that she rejects the notion of evolution as a guided process, or as Francis Collins’ concept of evolution as the divine way of “delivering upgrades.”)

Paleofantasy may not be the book to convince your creationist friends that they’re out to lunch, although Zuk does present her fair share of evidence to support the theory of evolution; it is, however, the book to give that paleo friend of yours who won’t shut up about gluten and lactose. Eat what you want, of course, but wouldn’t you rather choose your diet based on facts rather than frauds?

Next up: A reader suggestion – Pope Brock’s Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam.

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→ November 26, 2014
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Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.

I knew David Foster Wallace was brilliant when I read Infinite Jest, a wildly imaginative, sprawling novel that showcased DFW’s prodigious vocabulary as well as his deep knowledge of a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects. Even with that background, I was flabbergasted by Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, in which DFW delves into abstract set theory and other similarly abstruse topics from the history of math, explaining much of it lucidly and with humor until he gets too close to the finish to avoid relying on the reader to understand more of set theory than most readers will.

The book is less an explanation of the number infinity – which isn’t a single number, at least not in the sense that 1 or 5 or π or √2 – than the history of mathematicians’ attempts to deal with it. DFW starts with the Greeks, where most math stories begin anyway, even though the Greeks didn’t like or accept infinity or zero or the irrationals. (Zero came from Indian mathematicians, and reached Europe by way of Arab mathematicians quite a bit later.) The Greeks encountered questions around infinity, particularly in the famous paradoxes of Zeno, who liked to play semantic games around what we now refer to as convergent series – a sum of a series of terms that never ends but that approaches a specific limit as the number of terms grows. (In a related note, DFW fails to answer the question of how Zeno never got punched in the face for coming up with these paradoxes.) This discomfort with infinity continued through the writings of Aristotle and the Catholic Church’s influence over all manner of academic research, which included the idea that infinity was the sole province of God rather than of man, meaning we never got anywhere with infinity until the end of the Dark Ages and the separation of mathematics and religion during the Renaissance.

The pace of the narrative picks up at that point thanks to the explosion of advances in math and related areas of science. The empirical foundation that limited mathematical explorations until the 1600s is tossed aside in favor of more abstract thinking, with appearances by Kepler, Newton, and my homeboy Galileo, as trigonometry and eventually calculus displace geometry as the central philosophy guiding mathematical thinking and what we now think of as number theory. DFW presents an extraordinarily clear explanation of calculus, especially the infitesimals that underpin differentiation and integration and, as the name implies, connect it to the main topic of the book. The goal here is to get to Georg Cantor, the brilliant and mentally ill mathematician whose work remains the foundation of modern set theory and who was the first to recognize that there are different degrees of infinity (ℵ0 and ℵ1, at the least) but died unable to prove that those two infinities had no other infinities between them.

DFW’s writing is clear and witty thoughout the book, with many examples drawn from a former professor of his that help elucidate many of the more recondite concepts around infinity. His explanations of one-to-one mapping and Cantor’s diagonalization method of proving that real numbers are nondenumerable are outstanding, especially the latter, which I knew was true but still wanted to disbelieve because it just sounds impossible. Unfortunately, in the last 40-50 pages of the book, DFW gets so far down the set theory rabbit-hole that I found it increasingly hard to follow, such as discussions of ordinality versus cardinality and power sets of power sets. I got off the math train in college after multivariate calculus with vectors, in part because continuing meant pushing into more abstract areas – linear algebra was the next course, which starts the shift from empirical math to abstract – but that left me a little lost as Everything and More slid into Cantor’s work on the various infinities and work on numerability of sets.

Cantor’s transfinite numbers are the real goal of the narrative here, rather than what I would call the lay opinion of ∞ (what Cantor referred to as “absolute infinity”). A transfinite number is infinite in that it is greater than all of the finite numbers, but has some properties in common with the finites. If you’re familiar with the ℵ0 I mentioned above – the first transfinite cardinal number, corresponding to the number of members (cardinality) of the set of natural numbers (non-negative integers). Cantor’s continuum hypothesis, which appeared first on the famous list of unsolved math problems David Hilbert presented in 1900, posited that there was no set with cardinality (number of members) between the natural numbers and the real numbers (the cardinality of which Cantor designated as ℵ1). The hypothesis itself may be unprovable, at least within the confines of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory … which DFW mentions but doesn’t explain, concluding instead with the explanation that later work by Kurt Gödel (the incompleteness guy) and Paul Cohen (who proved that the hypothesis and the ZFC’s axiom of choice were independent) set the question aside without really solving it. At least, I think that’s what he said, because I was just barely treading water by the final page. Which also made me wonder if all of these reviewers quoted as giving the book raves actually finished and understood the whole thing; I imagine the number of people who have sufficient math background to follow DFW down to the bitter end is pretty small.

Apropos of nothing else, the biggest laugh I got from the book was when DFW referred to a mathematician as a world-class pleonast, which is the pot writing a three-page letter to the editor about the mote in the kettle’s eye.

Next up: Ned Beauman’s 2012 novel The Teleportation Accident, recommended by a fellow bibliophile I met in New York in August.

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→ March 19, 2014
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Three history of science books.

I have one new post up on ESPN.com, on prep lefty Brady Aiken, the top prospect right now for this year’s Rule 4 draft.

I’ve listened to three history of science audiobooks in the last month, two of which became more relevant in the wake of Monday’s announcement of a discovery of evidence relating to the initial moments after the Big Bang. Of those three books, one was excellent, one was disappointing, and one had a little bit of both.

By far my favorite of the three was Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science, a book about the discovery of quantum mechanics and the difficulty the theory’s proponents had in convincing the advocates of the standard model of physics – a group that included Einstein and Bohr – that God does indeed play dice, at least with subatomic particles. The book is thorough, speaking as often as possible through the words of its many characters, while making a complex scientific subject easily accessible to lay readers who, like me, may not have taken a physics class in 20+ years.

The book builds up to Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, and then deals with the massive fallout (pun intended) from the theorem’s introduction and subsequent examinations within a skeptical physics community. The principle is popularly interpreted to mean that we cannot simultaneously know the location of a subatomic particle and its velocity, but that oversimplifies it a bit. Heisenberg actually argued that the more accurately we can measure the position of a particle, the less accurately we can measure its momentum. This is separate from the observer effect, also discussed by Heisenberg, which states that the act of observing a particle alters the characteristics of that particle that the observer is attempting to measure. The uncertainty principle itself is critical to the understanding of quantum mechanics and measuring the behavior of subatomic particles after the demise of the “predictable” model of classical physics. This uncertainty is an inevitable result of the fact that every particle in the universe is also a wave, which is where Herr Schrödinger comes into play.

Uncertainty has to deal with a lot of phenomena that aren’t covered in high school physics classes, and some that are but might be unfamiliar, such as the discovery that electrons do not in fact orbit the nucleus of an atom as planets in the solar system do. The book also has the best explanation I’ve come across of the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, as the physicist himself looms large in the early days of the theory and refinements of quantum mechanics. The paradox was Schrödinger’s response to the seemingly impossible claim of the quantum theorists that a subatomic particle could simultaneously exist in multiple “states.” Schrödinger’s cat existed in a box where a canister of poison would open with the release, at some arbitrary point in time, of a single particle. He argued that if quantum mechanics were true, the cat would simultaneously be alive and dead – at least until the observer opened the box, at which point the cat would clearly have to move entirely to one state (alive) or the other (dead). This paradox sidestepped the question of whether quantum characteristics of subatomic particles do or should apply equally to relatively large objects, but the paradox has led to multiple interpretations, from the slightly insane (the Copenhagen interpretation, where observing the object ends the superposition of multiple states) to the totally insane (the many-worlds interpretation, where observing the object splits the universe into two universes and I can’t even continue with this). I’ve always understood it as a probabilistic model: The cat is only “half alive and half dead” in a mathematical sense, as in 1/2(alive) + 1/2(dead). No one can seriously argue that the cat exists in two superposed states until we open the box, right?

Lindley’s greatest trick here is to present the various scientists involved in the debate over quantum phenomena, particularly Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and Schrödinger, as full-fledged individuals, capable of insight, humor, doubt, and even pettiness. Heisenberg’s postulate threw a huge wrench into the well-oiled machine of classical physics, where the behavior of particles was thought to be predictable and well-understood. Heisenberg didn’t just say that their behavior was unpredictable, but that it could never become predictable, and that there was an upper bound on our ability to observe and understand the behavior of certain subatomic particles.

—

The second book of the three, the one on which I’d put a middling grade, was Ray Jayawardhana’s Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe*, about the lengthy and difficult question to understand these particular subatomic particles, ones that seemed to also defy conventional wisdom on how such particles should behave. Neutrinos are almost massless and can pass through an entire planet without touching another particle. They also explain the full process involved in beta decay, where an atomic nucleus emits an electron or a positron as well as electron neutrino (or antineutrino, but hold that thought). Without the neutrino to balance the scales, physicists were left with an apparent loss of momentum and energy from beta decay. As it turns out, the Italian physicist Wolfgang Pauli wasn’t just making stuff up when he posited the existence a previously unknown particle, which another Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, dubbed the “neutrino,” or “little neutron.”

* Subtitles have gotten completely out of control.

Jayawardhana starts off with a brisk history of physicists’ understanding of the atom and radioactive decay, getting us fairly quickly to Pauli and the stir that his hypothesis created in the world of nuclear physics. Undiscovered particles are always good fun in that realm, but Pauli’s subatomic idea was a naughty bit, appearing to have no mass, possibly having no charge (but having “spin,” tying to Pauli’s other great contribution to science, for which he later won a Nobel Prize), and defying decades of attempts to find it. Pauli’s guess was right, as the neutrino did exist, but wasn’t discovered until 26 years after his first paper describing it, and physicists continue to build larger and more expensive contraptions to capture enough neutrinos to try to better understand them, graduating from capturing solar neutrinos (emitted during the nuclear fusion that powers the star) to those that reach us from distant supernovae. Neutrinos also gave rise to our understanding of the weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and are one of the handful of remnants left over from the Big Bang still hanging around the background fabric of the universe.

When Jayawardhana is explaining the “invention” of the neutrino, its formation, and the various “flavors” of neutrinos now known to science, he keeps the material moving and strikes the ideal balance between rigor and accessibility. But the last third of the book bogs down in descriptions of those enormous devices used to try to catch the little sneaks, and the lengthy efforts involved in funding those experiments and waiting for results. The discussion of why neutrinos matter suffers in comparison for its brevity, when in fact that’s the topic that deserved greater explanation. The revelation that neutrinos may actually serve as their own antiparticles is just thrown in near the end of the book, even though that’s kind of a big deal. Jayawardhana also falls into the trap of dismissing the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat by saying, without any explanation, that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead inside of the box, an interpretation that, even if you accept it, isn’t the only one out there.

Unrelated to the book itself, the audiobook was narrated by Bronson Pinchot, so if you’ve always wanted to hear Balki talk to you about double beta decay, here’s your chance.

—

The disappointment was Dava Sobel’s A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos, a description of Copernicus’s earth-shattering (pun intended) discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, not, as the Catholic Church decreed, that the universe revolves around the earth. Copernicus also pointed out that the stars are much farther away from earth than scientists of his era believed them to be. Sobel’s book paled in comparison to her wonderful debut, Longitude, but also suffers from the paucity of original source material, as Copernicus left little besides his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and after his death the work was condemned by the very church he’d once served as a canon.

To fill in the gap, Sobel resorts to a dubious technique of imagining dialogues between several of the major players in the drama, incorporating a short play in the middle of her more serious work. Historical fiction itself is problematic enough when the author puts words or actions with real historical figures, but Sobel’s device here seems unconscionable. That we know so little of Copernicus’ life beyond his magnum opus is lamentable, but it is no excuse for fabricating an entire personality for him and others involved in the story of his discovery, such as making Georg Rheticus, the mathematician who published On the Revolutions, into a pederast. Expanding the tome to discuss Johannes Kepler, who built on Copernicus’ work and discovered that planetary orbits are elliptical rather than circular, at greater length would have been a better use of the space.

—

I’ll apologize here for any errors in my descriptions of the physics explained in these books. Please submit any corrections or clarifications in the comments.

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→ January 25, 2014
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The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Ramanujan was one of the most remarkable and prolific mathematicians who ever lived, a self-taught prodigy who grew up in modest circumstances in south India during the time of the British Raj, rediscovering the previous 150 years’ worth of number theory while also uncovering over 3000 theorems and identities of his own. “Discovered,” in a sense, by the far more famous English mathematician G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan moved to England for about five years, where his work finally received a wider audience, but where he also contracted an unknown illness that eventually killed him at age 38.

Robert Kanigel’s biography The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan tells two main stories – that of Ramanujan himself, and a partial biography of Hardy, whose professional life was thoroughly altered by his time working with Ramanujan and to whom we owe most of the credit for what we know of Ramanujan’s life and work today. It’s a very strong, even-handed biography of Ramanujan, sympathetic without becoming patronizing, but was extremely light on its discussion of the math itself, with just a few cursory discussions of some of his findings that still bear his name today.

Born in southern India in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu, near the city of Madras (now known as Chennai), Ramanujan was a member of the Brahmin caste, the highest social stratum in the caste system, but was born into a poor family and received only a basic education. His mother was domineering and remained deeply involved in his life even into his adulthood and arranged (by her) marriage, only, according to Kanigel, supporting her son’s obsession with mathematics when it appeared it would at least bring him fame – and bring her fortune. Ramanujan failed out of university twice because he couldn’t be bothered with any coursework other than mathematics, but in that subject he was light-years ahead of his professors, filling notebooks with conjectures and equations, most of which he knew intuitively to be true, but couldn’t have published – even if he’d had access to such outlets – because he didn’t need to or understand how to develop the proofs.

In 1912 and 1913, Ramanujan, at the encouragement of some of the few Indian nationals in a position to advise him, sent letters with copies of some of his work to three English mathematicians, only one of whom responded: G.H. Hardy, at the time a professor of maths at Trinity University at Cambridge. Hardy was a purist, a mathematician who studied number theory (the study of the behavior and properties of the integers, with a special emphasis on prime numbers) for its own sake and overtly disdained any branch of “applied” mathematics – that is, math that had a practical purpose, such as the math required in physics or engineering. Hardy was open-minded enough upon seeing Ramanujan’s letter that he overcame his skepticism about an uneducated Indian clerk coming up with mathematical insights that took Western experts over a century to develop and wrote back, asking to see more of Ramanujan’s work. (There’s some irony in Hardy’s hesitation and the other mathematicians’ rejections of Ramanujan, as number theory has its own tradition in India dating back over 1500 years.) The subsequent correspondence led to an invitation for Ramanujan to come spend two years with Hardy at Cambridge, two years that turned into five before ill health sent Ramanujan back home to south India, where he died shortly thereafter.

Kanigel’s presentation of the life of Ramanujan leans toward the personal rather than the professional side, focusing extensively on his upbringing, cultural opposition to much of what he did and wanted to do with his life, and on the non-professional side of his life in England. The emotional cost to Ramanujan of traveling to a foreign country where he’d face outright prejudice but also would struggle with differences in language, weather, and, most importantly for Ramanujan, food. The devoutly spiritual and nominally Hindu mathematician was a strict vegetarian, but had great difficulty adapting his diet to the abysmal food of World War I-era England, where to cook something implied cooking it to death, where all flavor and texture was safely removed from the item to be consumed. Hardy was Ramanujan’s mentor in maths, but not in life, as Hardy does not (in Kanigel’s telling) have any close emotional ties to anyone but his sister once their parents had passed away, and with Ramanujan’s wife in India for the entire time he was in England, Ramanujan lacked for friends and for anyone who could help him look after himself. Kanigel reports on the speculation that malnutrition contributed to Ramanujan’s illness and decline, but his book was published before the 1994 report that he died of an amoebic infection in his liver common in India at the time he lived there.

I also found Kanigel’s mini-biography of Hardy, essential to the story of Ramanujan, fascinating. Hardy’s a great figure for biographers, appearing in one of my favorite books about math, Prime Obsession, for his role in attacking the unsolved Riemann Hypothesis. (Ramanujan’s pre-Hardy work was remarkable, but he did make some mistakes, one of which involved Riemann’s zeta function; Ramanujan assumed the function had only real zeroes, not complex ones, but its complex zeroes lie at the heart of the Hypothesis.) He’s also ripe for caricature, something Kanigel avoids entirely. A lifelong bachelor, Hardy was obsessed by numbers, but also had an equal passion for cricket (and, after a stint at Princeton, baseball). He was a strict atheist who once set out a goal for himself to craft a disproof of the existence of God convincing enough to convert most of the general public, and a pacifist who fought persecution of Trinity colleagues who spoke out against British involvement in World War I. Hardy viewed Ramanujan with great pride, almost as a father would view a son, someone with limitless natural talent whom Hardy could mold into one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known, and he was diligent about assigning credit to his protégé whenever possible. He brought Ramanujan to the world, yet it also seems that Ramanujan brought much more out of Hardy than we’d otherwise have had.

My lone criticism of The Man Who Knew Infinity is its scant treatment of the math in question. The reader of a book like this probably has an appetite for math, and the author has merely to explain the theorems or identities under discussion, not to teach them or prove them. Kanigel does very little of any of this, only dipping occasionally into discussions of continued fractions and some of Ramanujan’s explorations of the nature and frequency of prime numbers. Kanigel appears to have skipped the mathier material in favor of asking open-ended questions about the source of Ramanujan’s inspiration and culpability for his illness and death.

Kanigel’s epilogue discusses the final years of Hardy’s life, but it is his discussions with Ramanujan’s widow, Janakiammal, that punctuate the book’s last handful of pages. Still alive at the time of the book’s publication in 1991, Janakiammal spent a long part of her life as a widow in obscurity and poverty before she was rediscovered several decades after her husband’s passing, eventually reaping rewards, both honorary and monetary, before her death in 1994 at age 95. Her few comments evoke a great bitterness at how her husband’s legacy was underappreciated and how her own life was adversely affected by that and by quarrels with Ramanujan’s family.

Next up: The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Robert Farrar Capon, a chef and Episcopalian priest. The 1967 book is a classic of the food-writing genre and was reissued in 2002 as part of the Modern Library Food series, edited by Ruth Reichl.

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→ December 26, 2012
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The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat and Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

I have a piece up today for Insiders on the Joel Hanrahan trade. There is no Klawchat this week due to the holidays.

If I asked you who invented penicillin, you’d probably give the standard answer of Alexander Fleming, and maybe recall a story of him accidentally getting some bread mold in a Petri dish and noticing its antibacterial qualities. Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, ended up sharing a Nobel Prize for this discovery and received accolades for decades beyond his death, even though, as Eric Lax details in the surprisingly gripping The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle, Fleming wasn’t actually the first to identify that the Penicillium notatum mold could kill several dangerous species of bacteria, nor was he at all involved in the massive effort to translate this laboratory accident into a usable weapon for human medicine.

Lax’s work is brief (263 pages) and very easy to read, but his research into the subject of the discovery and development of the now-ubiquitous drug is thorough and relied heavily on first-person accounts from the era, including journal notes, correspondence, and interviews with surviving members of the team at Oxford that undertook years of experiments to figure out how to scale mold production and also understand its functioning. Fleming did share the Nobel with the Australian Howard Florey and the German-born Ernst Chain, but the latter two, working at the Dunn School of Pathology under the privations of wartime England, managed to demonstrate that P. notatum was safe to use in humans and effective against bacteria, including Streptococcus and Staphylococcus, that at that time had no known chemotherapeutic antagonists. (That is, if you got a staph infection from a scratch from a rose thorn, there wasn’t much hope for your recovery.) Fleming wasn’t even the first to notice that P. notatum had antibacterial properties – the Belgian bacteriologist Andre Gratia apparently observed it three years earlier, but, like Fleming, didn’t follow through.

Lax attempts to shine light on those who deserve it, not just Florey and Chain but others, including Norman Heatley, without whose knowhow the drug might never have been produced in quantity. Lax goes back to the myth of Fleming’s discovery of the mold’s effects – Fleming did indeed discover it, but the legend of how he did so, which he himself propagated once Florey’s team made the drug viable, is likely false, according to Lax’s research. The focus then shifts to the Dunn School and the difficulties Florey had in assembling a team, finding funding for their work, and in producing enough of the stuff to keep the testing going – even salvaging penicillin from the urine of patients fortunate enough to receive it, as more than half of what a patient was given was eventually excreted via the kidneys. Lax’s access to contemporary documents and later in-person accounts allows him to flesh out the personalities of these central actors, as well as providing details on some of the early successes and failures of the drug as the scientists figured out how best to use it, including the now-common practice of administering an antibiotic for a week or more past the disappearance of symptoms. I’ll also leave the very amusing detail of how pencillin extraction moved from P. notatum to the more potent P. chrysogenum to those of you who choose to read the book.

Where Lax could have gone further was in explaining the science behind penicillin’s action, which he mentions just briefly near the end of the book. Penicillin is a beta-lactam antibiotic that inhibits cell wall development in bacteria, especially Gram-positive ones – meaning that when one cell tries to divide, its cell wall will rupture rather than expanding and closing around each resulting cell, so no new cell is formed and the original cell becomes a wall-less and very fragile spheroplast. Resistance to penicillin also only earns scant mention, again at the very end of the book, with some polite hand-waving about the subject and positive words about penicillin’s continued effectiveness against Streptococcus, but no mention of the rise of Staphylococcus bacteria that have evolved resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics in general. This is a history of science book that leans more toward history yet is a little light on the science for my tastes, but that may increase its accessibility to less science-inclined readers and absolutely made it an easier book to tackle.

If you like your popular science books a little heavier on the science, I also just read Jonah Lehrer’s first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist ($5.98 through that link), which draws parallels between various famous practicioners of the fine arts (and one very famous chef) and later discoveries, mostly by neurologists, that showed that the artists’ insights into human psychology and behavior were biologically justified. Lehrer’s star was nearly extinguished when the first chapter of his 2012 book Imagine – a book I enjoyed tremendously – was found to contain fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, after which the publisher pulled the book from publication entirely rather than edit and re-release it. (It’s still a great book if you want to learn more about how to be more creative, especially in the workplace.) Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more like a collection of nonfiction stories that share a basic narrative structure: Lehrer introduces a famous writer, musician, or artist, describes his/her oeuvre and a particular advance or insight for which s/he is known, then explains the science behind that insight, discovered decades after the artist’s work.

My favorite chapter was, of course, the one on chef and culinary writer Auguste Escoffier, one of the fathers of modern French cuisine and the man who first wrote down a specific method – not just a recipe, but a concept – for making brown veal stock, now the foundation for an entire family of sauces without which French cuisine as we know it would not exist. Escoffier’s great contribution, according to Lehrer, was his understanding of what we now know as umami, the so-called “fifth taste” – the intensity of flavor produced by glutamate, which is recognized by the tongue and is found in rich foods from Parmiggiano-Reggiano to anchovies to soy sauce to cured meats to mushrooms. (It’s also found in powdered form as monosodium glutamate.) The chemical basis behind Escoffier’s insight was first discovered after he had already risen to prominence in European food circles and wasn’t fully demonstrated until long after his death. Lehrer uses these eight examples to plead for greater interaction between the science and art worlds, arguing that each can learn from the other if they speak a common, “third” language. That message is largely lost on me as someone who works in neither sphere, but some of the anecdotes, including the ones on Paul Cézanne and Igor Stravinsky, were fascinating reads because they involved areas of the fine arts in which I have little to no background, even as a casual fan. I don’t take a jaundiced view of Lehrer’s earlier work just because of the debacle around Imagine, so just as I still recommend that book with the caveats around its veracity, I recommend Proust Was a Neuroscientist as well even if its underlying message isn’t as powerful.

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→ November 30, 2012
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The Orchid Thief.

Susan Orlean’s 1998 book The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession showed up in Allison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much as one of that author’s favorite narrative non-fiction works, so I grabbed a used copy as soon as I came across one. “Narrative” is only loosely applicable to Orlean’s work, which violates one of my main rules on non-fiction works – unless the author is the subject, the author shouldn’t appear in the book much, if at all – but The Orchid Thief mostly succeeds in spite of Orlean’s heavy presence on the pages because her twin subjects, orchids and the wackadoos who collect them obsessively, are so fascinating. The book was adapted, loosely, by Charlie Kaufman for his script for Adaptation., which is more about Kaufman’s difficulty adapting the book for the big screen than it is about the story in the book itself.

The thief of the book’s title is John Laroche, who was arrested in 1994 while working for the Seminole Nation in Florida as a horticulturalist who wanted to build a nursery and lab that could clone rare orchids, creating a sustainable revenue source for the tribe while feeding Laroche’s own mad obsession with the flowers. Laroche hoped to exploit a loophole in federal laws on taking endangered plants from federally-protected lands by employing Seminole tribe members to take these rare orchids from lands technically under the Seminole Nation’s control, a legal inconsistency that opens up into an ethical quandary over adminstration of lands under Native American control, which Orlean unfortunately chooses not to address. Instead, she follows the crazy people in the orchid world, each one more eccentric than the last, while also explaining the botany of orchids and why people from so many walks of life become so obsessed with them.

Laroche has much in common with Bartlett’s own anti-hero, the book thief John Gilkey, between the psychology behind his madness and his ability to rationalize actions that are immoral and often illegal. Laroche isn’t quite the unrepentant thief that Gilkey is, as the latter merely deluded himself into believing that it was right for him to steal rare books because he couldn’t afford them, whereas Laroche had concocted a broader environmentalist rationalization that by exploiting the loophole, he’d force the government to close it, all while making money for the Seminole Nation and himself. Orlean describes Laroche as rakish and charming, even as good-looking, but on the printed page he comes off as erratic, self-centered, and exasperating. I couldn’t imagine being friends with this man, so it’s hard to see him as an object of desire for women – and there’s no evidence beyond Orlean’s own descriptions to indicate that he is one.

The strongest characters in The Orchid Thief aren’t the collectors or dealers, however, but the flowers themselves. Orchids – technically plants in the family Orchidaceae, which includes over 20,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, according to Wikipedia – are tough to grow, requiring seven years from seed to bloom; bloom only for very short periods, as little as a single day per year; and depend on complicated relationships with other species to propagate, which has led, through natural selection, to unusual colors and shapes in the flowers designed to attract and/or trap birds or insects, allowing for the spread of an orchid’s pollen. Wild orchids also require the presence of specific fungi to provide sufficient carbon for the seeds to germinate properly, a symbiotic relationship that Orlean doesn’t mention in an otherwise lengthy discussion about just how rare orchids are. The orchids that Laroche wanted to steal grow in the forbidding Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida, a low-lying swampy expanse that is very difficult to access or navigate, but that forms the largest known home for the rare dendrophylax lindenii, also known as the ghost orchid, which Orlean becomes mildly obsessed with sighting in the wild while writing the book. (Orlean does provide an entertaining diversion on Florida land scams in the same area, where operators sold useless parcels of swampland to gullible cold-weather inhabitants.)

By the end of The Orchid Thief, the Seminole nation has fired Laroche and hired a less ambitious, more practical horticulturalist to run their nursery, while Laroche swears off orchids forever, leaving Orlean scrambling a little for a resolution to her book that doesn’t read like Acheron Hades just went into the original and erased the final dozen pages. The final chapter, which covers her trip into the Fakahatchee with a park ranger to try to spot a ghost orchid, would stand alone very well as a magazine feature, but its tenuous connection to the remainder of the book is a major reason why I wouldn’t call this a narrative work. It’s more of a broad study of interconnected stories around a single, compelling subject, one that touches on themes from morality to biology to beauty and madness, with a nonlinear and thus non-narrative structure that works because Orlean’s language is strong and clean.

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→ July 23, 2012
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The Golden Ratio.

Some recent ESPN links: Analyses of the Jays/Astros ten-player trade and the Brett Myers trade, as well as a big post on players I’ve scouted in the AZL over the last week, including Jorge Soler. The Conversation under the Myers piece has been rather bizarre, as a few (presumably male) readers are saying I shouldn’t have brought up Myers’ 2006 arrest on domestic violence charges. Needless to say, I think these complaints are spurious.

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I’m a big fan of mainstream books about mathematics, most of which would probably be best classified as “history of math” even if they’re discussing a currently unsolved problem, such as John Derbyshire’s excellent book on the Riemann Hypothesis, Prime Obsession. (And yes, I’m aware of Derbyshire’s political writing, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Riemann book is very well done.) Mario Livio’s book The Golden Ratio: The Story of φ, the World’s Most Astonishing Number was on my wish list for a long time because it seemed like a perfect blend of the academic and applied branches of mathematics, as the irrational number φ appears in numerous places in nature and (I thought) art. Unfortunately, Livio’s book spends more time talking about where φ is not than about where it is, making this more of a book of mythbusting than of math.

Livio does provide a solid introduction to φ, an irrational number equal to (1 + √5)/2 = 1.6180339887… that has several interesting properties, including:

* φ2 is equal to φ + 1, or 2.6180339887…
* 1/φ is equal to φ – 1, or 0.6180339887…
* If you take any line segment AB and place a point C on it such that the ratio of the longer half to the shorter half is equal to the ratio of the entire segment to the longer half, the ratio in question will be equal to φ
* The ratio between consecutive terms in the Fibonacci sequence – the series 0, 1, 1, 2, where each successive term is equal to the sum of the two terms before it, thus continuing with 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ad infinitum – approaches φ. The ratio between the 17th and 16th terms is already 1.61800328…
* φ is also the result of the peculiar expression

The golden ratio also appears in many polygons and polyhedrons of interest not just to mathematicians but to artists, architects, and even botanists, as it appears in the spacing of leaves around the stems of many plants. But interest in the ratio has spurred no end of specious or outright fictitious claims about its appearance, including an oft-repeated one about its inclusion in the dimensions of the Parthenon (obtained by gaming the measurements to achieve the desired result) and another claiming Leonardo da Vinci used it in the Mona Lisa (similarly bogus). Livio devotes so much of the book to debunking these and other claims that by the time he gets around to discussing the golden ratio’s actual appearances in art, architecture, and nature, he’s devalued his subject by spending too little time explaining where φ is and too much time explaining where it ain’t.

Next up: I’m a bit behind here, having already finished Michael Ruhlman’s superb The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, the book that first established him as one of the best writers on food and cooking today.

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→ March 31, 2012
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Saturday five, #2.

Five books, five links to my own stuff, and five links to others’ articles.

I’ve read eight books since my last post on any of them, so I’m going to take a shortcut and catch up by highlighting the five most interesting. Now that spring training is ending, I hope to get back to regular dishblogging soon.

* Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is the one non-fiction book in this bunch, a history-of-math tome that incorporates a fair amount of philosophy, physics, and religion all in a book that’s under 200 pages and incredibly readable for anyone who’s at least taken high school math. The subject is the number zero, long scorned by philosophers, theologians, and even some mathematicians who resisted the idea of nothing or the void, yet which turned out to be critical in a long list of major scientific advances, including calculus and quantum mechanics. I generally prefer narrative non-fiction, but Zero moves as easily as a math-oriented book can get without that central thread.

* Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town is one of three major Hammett short-story collections in print (along with The Continental Op and the uneven The Big Knockover), and my favorite for its range of subjects and characters without feeling as pulpy as some of his most commercial stories. The twenty stories are all detective stories of one sort or another starring several different Hammett detectives, including early iterations of Sam Spade and the character who eventually became the Thin Man, as well as a western crime story that might be my favorite short piece by Hammett, “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams.”

* Readers have recommended Tim O’Brien’s short story cycle The Things They Carried for several years, usually any time I mention reading another book that deals with the Vietnam War and/or its aftermath. The book, a set of interconnected stories that feels like an novel despite the lack of a central plot, is based heavily on O’Brien’s own experiences in that conflict, especially around death – of platoon mates, of Viet Cong soldiers, of Vietnamese civilians, and of a childhood crush of O’Brien’s who died at age 9 of a brain tumor. The writing is remarkable, more than the stories themselves, which seemed to cover familiar ground in the genre, as well as O’Brien’s ability to weave all of these disconnected stories into one tapestry around that central theme of death and the pointlessness of war. The final story, where he ties much of it together by revisiting one of the first deaths he discussed in the book, is incredibly affecting on two levels as a result of everything that’s come before.

* I’m a big Haruki Murakami fan – and no, I haven’t read 1Q84 yet and won’t until it’s in paperback – but Dance, Dance, Dance was mostly a disappointment despite some superficial entertainment value, enough to at least make it a quick read if not an especially deep one. A sequel of sorts to A Wild Sheep Chase, it attempts to be more expansive than that earlier novel but still feels like unformed Murakami, another look at him as he built up to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a top-ten novel for me that hit on every level. Dance is just too introspective, without enough of Murakami’s sort of magical realism (and little foundation for what magical realism it does contain) and no connection between the reader and the main character.

* I loved Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a funny, biting satire on upper-class life in the United States just after World War I, so I looked forward to House of Mirth, present on the Modern Library and Bloomsbury 100 lists, expecting more of that sharp wit but receiving, instead, a dry, depressing look at the limitations of life for women in those same social circles prior to the war. It’s a tragedy with an ironic title that follows Lily Bart through her fall from social grace, thanks mostly to the spiteful actions of other women in their closed New York society; it’s a protest novel, and one of the earliest feminist novels I’ve read (preceded, and perhaps inspired, by Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), but I found myself feeling more pity than empathy for Lily as a victim of circumstances, not of her own missteps.

Next up: I’m reading Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman (filmed as The American) and listening to Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works. The Booth book is on sale through that link for $5.60.

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Five things I wrote or said this week:

On Jeff Samardzija’s revival.

This week’s chat.

One batch of spring training minor league notes, including the Angels, A’s, Rangers, and Royals.

Tuesday’s “top 10 players for 2017” column, which I emphasized was just for fun and still got people far too riled up. There’s no rational way to predict who the top ten players will be in five years and I won’t pretend I got them right. But it was fun to do.

I interviewed Top Chef winner and sports nut Richard Blais on the Tuesday Baseball Today podcast, in which he talked about what it was like to “choke” (his word) in the finals on his first season and then face the same situation in his second go-round. We also talked about why I should break my ten-year boycott of hot dogs.

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And the links…

* The best patent rejection ever, featuring Borat’s, er, swimsuit.

* A spotlight on Massachusetts’ outdated liquor laws. For a state that likes to pretend it’s all progressive, Massachusetts is about thirty years behind the times when it comes to alcohol, to say nothing of how the state’s wholesalers control the trade as tightly as the state liquor board does in Pennsylvania. The bill this editorial discusses would be a small start in breaking apart their oligopoly, but perhaps enough to start to crumble that wall.

* I admit it, I’m linking to Bleacher Report, but Dan Levy’s commentary on how Twitter has affected what a “scoop” means, especially to those of us in the business, is a must read. And there’s no slidshow involved.

* The Glendale mayor who drove the city into a nine-figure debt hole by spending government money to build facilities for private businesses – including the soon-to-be-ex-Phoenix Coyotes – won’t run for a sixth term, yet she’s receiving more accolades than criticism on the way out. Put it this way: Given its schools, safety, and public finances, we never considered Glendale for a second when looking to move out here.

* The “pink slime” controversy has led the manufacturer to suspend production at three of its four plants. That makes for a good headline, but are job losses really relevant to what should be a discussion of whether this is something people, especially schoolchildren, should be consuming? And now the controversy is moving on to carmine dye, derived from an acid extracted from cochineal beetles and used in Starbucks frappuccinos. If nothing else, I applaud the new emphasis on knowing exactly what we’re eating.

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→ August 24, 2011
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I mentioned this on Twitter earlier, but The Wire: The Complete Series on DVD is just $73 today on amazon through that link. Disclaimer: I don’t own it, because I’m buying episodes to watch on my iPad (which will cost me more in the long run, actually).

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Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (currently just $8 in paperback on amazon) is, by far, the best nonfiction book I’ve read since The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, weaving together a scientific breakthrough, a personal tragedy, and Skloot’s own difficult effort in gathering the information required to write the book into a single compelling narrative that succeeds despite the lack of a definitive resolution or even clear “good” and “bad” sides to the central conflict.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor African-American woman who died very young of cervical cancer in 1951, after receiving radiation treatments at Johns Hopkins that started too late to save her very aggressive form of the disease. A researcher at the school had been trying for some time to grow a long-lasting culture of human cells without success, but the sample he took from Lacks’ cancer turned out to be, as the book’s title implies, immortal, launching a scientific revolution that is partially responsible for many medical miracles we take for granted today – and a commercial revolution from the sale of these “HeLa” cells that has paid her descendents a grand total of zero dollars.

In 1951, there were no laws on medical privacy nor were there laws or even good guidelines on informing patients about what might happen to tissues or fluids collected from them during treatment; a doctor or hospital could use extra samples for research and the patient wouldn’t even know about it, let alone require compensation. A lengthy medical case decided in 1990, Moore v. Regents of the University of California, would later establish that the patient has no right to financial remuneration from such usage (unless, of course, he established those rights in advance, such as by patenting any unique genes*), but in Lacks’ era there were no such rules, nor even understanding that these biological samples could have substantial financial value. (The researcher in the Moore case, David Golde, comes off as particularly sleazy in Skloot’s retelling. He took his own life in 2004.)

*This part resonated a little more strongly with me, as my daughter and I do share a unique mutation that causes an inborn error of metabolism called 3MCC, in which the third step in the breakdown of the essential amino acid leucine produces the “wrong” waste product. (The disease isn’t unique, but our mutation had not been seen before. We’re special like that.) I’m largely asymptomatic beyond an inability to build muscle mass, but my daughter has been hospitalized once for a metabolic crisis and has now been a vegetarian for almost three years to avoid excessive protein intake. I’m still trying to get an answer from Children’s Hospital in Boston on their policies in this area.

What’s worse in this case, however, is that Lacks’ family – widower, siblings, and children – were completely unaware that her tissues had been taken, were being used in research, or had generated millions of dollars in value for others. The family, still poor, still mostly uneducated, and without health insurance, learned about HeLa in the 1970s, and it created a mixture of emotions ranging from fear to anger to wonder (including whether their mother could “feel” what was being done to these cells) that opens up windows on to racial inequalities, , medical ethics debates, and the conflict between public good and privacy rights.

Skloot herself worked on this book for nearly a decade, largely because the Lacks family, scarred by past media attention and con artists looking to latch on to their plight, resisted her efforts to interview them for the book. She eventually forged a strong friendship with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, a fascinating woman whose emotional growth was probably stunted by losing her mother at such a young age yet who abounds with manic energy that drives her (and Skloot) forward on the research path. Deborah never seems to think of the compensation question, but simply wants to learn about her mother and about what has happened to her cells, perhaps to create a connection that was denied to her when her mother died.

The Lacks family gives the book the narrative structure it needs – the rise of HeLa cells from their origins to a major scientific breakthrough would make for a nice pamphlet, but doesn’t have the drama to drive a work of narrative non-fiction. Following the Lacks family’s struggles from losing Henrietta, from media coverage of the HeLa cells, and from their outrage at how their mother’s cells were used without consent, compensation, or even the correct name (she was often referred to as “Helen Lane” in medical journals), makes the book so powerful. The book requires no knowledge of science beyond a high school biology class, as Skloot provides sufficient explanation of cell structure and replication for anyone to follow along, and her presentation of the ethical issues involved is extremely balanced and surprisingly dispassionate for someone who became very close to the human subjects of her research. As easy as it is to react to the Lacks saga by arguing that her family should at least have been paid after the fact, Skloot points out through her story that it’s not even clear who would pay her (the oncologist who harvested the cells didn’t profit personally from them), and that many of the leaps made through the use of HeLa cells for testing, like Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, relied in no small part on the easy availability of these cells. It’s as complicated as any good story should be, informative, emotionally involving without resorting to sentimentality, and gives you enough of both sides to make you angry and make you question your own outrage as you read.

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→ March 31, 2011
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Five Equations that Changed the World.

My predictions for 2011 went up yesterday. Podcast and chat on Thursday.

Somehow I forgot to review Michael Guillen’s Five Equations that Changed the World
, a very strong look at five equations and the scientists who developed them that’s explained with very little math at all. Guillen’s target is the lay reader, a term which, since I haven’t taken a physics class since 1990, would include me.

The five equations aren’t hard to guess – they are, in the order in which Guillen presents them, Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity, Daniel Bernoulli’s Law of Hydrodynamic Pressure, Faraday’s Law of Electromagnetic Induction, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (discovered by Rudolf Clausius), and, of course, E = mc2, courtesy of Albert Einstein. But rather than just give the reader the equations and their derivations, Guillen crafts a short story around each, with background on each scientist’s life before the discovery*, the process that led to the development of the equation, and a brief epilogue on some major event or subsequent discovery that hinged on the equation itself. (For example, Newton’s law led to the manned mission to the moon, while Einstein’s led, of course, to the atom bomb.)

* So, does a scientist discover an equation, develop it, or something else? He doesn’t invent it, certainly; these are, as far as we know, immutable laws of our universe. I thought about using “unearth” to describe this process, but it seems to mundane, especially for Clausius’ and Einstein’s contributions. I’m open to suggestions here.

Newton’s and Einstein’s stories are rather well-known, I think, so I would say the most interesting sections of the book were the three that those two bookended. Clausius’ story was probably the least familiar to me, as I probably couldn’t have named him if asked. And what made his story interesting was how many other discoveries or developments had to happen along the way for him to be able to articulate his equation – including the invention of the thermometer, the creation of the calorie as both a unit and as a theory for the source of energy, and the life’s work of Julius Robert Mayer, a Bavarian doctor who first expostulated that all the energy in the universe had to add up to the energy that existed at the universe’s start (that is, the First Law of Thermodynamics), only to find himself rejected and ostracized by both the scientific and religious establishments of the time.

The final section of the book, on how Einstein’s theory of relativity led to the development of nuclear weapons, is a bit poignant as Einstein lived to see the destruction and regretted his role in encouraging President Roosevelt to order the development of the bomb. (I would imagine Einstein realized, however, that since the Germans would have eventually developed it themselves, the Manhattan Project was as much as a defensive move as an offensive one, even though it became an offensive weapon when we figured it out first.) Slightly less interesting, to me at least, was the extent of the family squabbles in the section on Bernoulli, where a pattern of fathers becoming jealous of talented sons tended to repeat itself in a way that would probably land them on Maury Povich today.

If you like the sound of this book but want something mathier, check out my review of Prime Obsession, a book about the development of the Riemann Hypothesis, perhaps the leading unsolved problem in mathematics today.

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