Catching up on media

I read Bernd Heinrich’s _The Geese of Beaver Bog_. It’s short. It’s compelling — I really wanted to know what was going to happen next! I really liked Heinrich’s approach to the project, the book, and the organization of the book. I would read more by him. Short form: when Heinrich’s kids were young-ish, his son wanted to raise a Canada goose. Over the next several years, Heinrich got really into the local goose population’s behavior, and had occasional interactions with the grown goose on its occasional drop-ins when migrating. In the appendices, he describes the work of other ethologists, such as Lorenz, with other goose (graylay, notably). He handles Lorenz’s Nazism forthrightly.

I _wish_ that Heinrich were less contemptuous of human influence over animal development over the millenia / millions of years we’ve been on this planet together. He’s still using terms like “indigenous man” and verbs like “inadvertent”. He just can’t seem to see how managed, how _un_wild “wild” animals (but especially ones like these!) are. There is no real thing such as wild or tame; it’s a spectrum. Anyway. Great book, worth the time.

We read Heinrich for book group. The discussion was not one of our longer ones, and while it was enjoyable, it was relatively tame. But that’s fine! We’re going to read _Painting Chinese_ next month. I’m quite pleased that people are finally taking seriously my, hey, let’s read short books idea. Now that I’ve given up entirely on enforcing the under 300 page rule, they are suddenly complying with my request. Guess that’s what happens when you let them pick things over 450 pages a few months in a row. FAAFO.

I read a sample I downloaded a while ago, of _Strengths-Based Prevention_, by Victoria Banyard and Sherry Hamby. It’s pretty list-y. A lot of what they list is very familiar. It’s probable that the book has great information that could be interesting to learn, but on the other hand, it’s clear from this sample that the field is still not at a point where it’s generating particularly usable options. Sadly. Maybe some day. This is part of an ongoing project to _actually read shit I downloaded_, whether purchased or samples, rather than continually buying and mostly not reading. It’s been a fun project.

I’ve also been catching up on TV, since I was gone for a weekish. That was fun. I _really_ love watching _The Equalizer_.

More samples!

These are _NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT_ book reviews! See, this is tagged not a book review. And the subject line says “samples”. OK? These are notes to me so that I know I went to some effort to decide whether or not to buy and read the thing, and if you think that I’m wrong and would enjoy the book, I’d love to hear _why_ you loved it in some detail. If you are the author and feel I have been unfair to you personally and would like to share your opinion of that with me, just know, it probably won’t go well for either of us.

I’ve tried reading Virginia Sole-Smith’s _The Eating Instinct_ sample several times; I apparently made it 53% of the way through (the sample!) and bailed out. I tried again, and almost immediately figured out what the problem was.

You cannot have a human developmental milestone that requires using a spoon. You can’t. That’s totally cultural. D’oh. Stop that. I used to be so much quicker at spotting nonsense like that when I was actively reading parenting literature, but at least it’s coming back slowly.

I’m mostly posting this so I don’t screw up and order it in the future.

Moving on.

_Food Foolish_ by Mandyck and Schultz

I read the sample before but totally forgot the contents. I reread it and was utterly unimpressed. Said basically nothing. Wasting food is a climate problem. Hunger has been replaced with “bad calories”. We need a new revolution in food and it is … better storage? I mean, maybe. I don’t know. One of the reviews notes that all the stuff about cold storage is a bit sus because one of the authors is highly connected to Carrier. Seems plausible. Not compelling enough to bother, but if someone I trust tells me it is absolutely worth it, I’m prepared to revisit.

_Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook_, Dana Gunders

43% of this sample occurs before where you land if you start at the “Beginning”. Wow. Just … wow.

OK, “A woman from Hong Kong once told me that when she was a child, her aunts and uncles would inspect her bowl and tell her that each morsel of rice she had left would turn into a mole on the face of her future husband! Can you imagine if we thought that way about food in our own lives?”

Let’s go down the list.

What, you think we should be programming girls to grow up to marry men? That’s heterocentric. Bad. Don’t do that.

What, you think we should be shaming people into eating when they are no longer hungry? Pretty sure we’ve been working really hard to _stop that_. Bad. Don’t do that.

Also! Interesting! When we were busy telling kids to eat the peas or whatever because people in China were starving, people in China had their own version of that to tell the kiddos. I expected that, but getting the deets is pretty cool! But the contextualization and framing is so horrifying, I think I could have maintained that ignorance for a while yet.

“There are only two things that are happening with these extra calories. Either we’re eating them or we’re throwing them out, presenting a choice between your waist and your waste. I’ll offer some shortcuts to help you cook the right amounts, so you don’t wind up with unnecessarily huge portions or more leftovers than you’d like.”

That’s … disturbing in some ways, but otherwise getting into the right spirit.

Unfortunately, the core advice conveyed is:

“The basic advice is easy to grasp and much, much harder to practice: Plan your meals, make a shopping list from that plan, and stick to the list — and then stick to the plan.”

Yeah. OK. That is never going to happen. I’ve been polling people about how they feed themselves for decades. I _have_ met a few people who say they meal plan. I have! Really!

Heh heh heh.

From _watching_ people in action over the years, the Correct Strategy is to have a really good repertoire for cooking what you currently have in the house. Any advice that isn’t focused on how to do that is pointless. The author is focused on how to stick to the list, but anyone who has shopped ever knows that if you plan to make a specific set of meals and you generate a list of what you need to make those meals, once you have bought the items and prepared the meals, there will be a lot of bits and bobs left over from the amounts that were the minimum required (or the amount you expected to use but then did not), and now what do you do.

She _does_ mostly recognize this, by having “2. Check the refrigerator” as an item on her plan. In item 6, “Unfortunately, the ingredients we need don’t always come in the portions we need them in.” is recognized.

Honestly, you’d be better off reading one of the cooking without recipes type cookbooks. Her advice isn’t any better than that from a waste-avoidance perspective and the cooking strategies are better in the other cookbooks. She only plans 3 meals a week cooked at home anyway.

Again, if you’ve read (most of) the book, and think it gets much, much better, let me know; otherwise, I’m done.

_Behemoth_, Robin Gaster

Really long sample, but does not appear to be a really long book. Not sure what’s going on here? This is weird tho!

“Twenty-five years ago, Jeff Bezos, Marianne Bezos, and a handful of staff were shipping books out of the Bezos garage.”

So, working backwards. Where’s the apostrophe to indicate possessive on Bezos’ garage? Or Bezos’s garage, depending on which you prefer? Too finicky? How about, who the hell is Marianne. I’m assuming he meant Mackenzie? Presumably? What a _strange_ error!

“And Amazon is far from done with books: its self-publishing platform is a direct attack on the traditional business model for publishers.” Tell me whose team you are on while telling me whose team you are on.

This is _so odd_. “As Shel Kaphen (sic) (Amazon’s first CTO) said, the choice of books “was totally based on the property of books as a product.”2

I’m not totally certain how to order this. First, Shel’s last named is spelled Kaphan. I’m not speculating about this. I went over to FB and checked him in my friends list. Second, Bezos _could_ have picked CDs for the exact same product qualities as books. He didn’t. Bezos picked books because of the nature of the supply and distribution universe. With CDs, it was possible — and they actually did — engage in trust-like behavior to screw retailers and customers. It’s much, much harder to do that with books, and when it was eventually attempted by Apple and the Big N, they were caught relatively quickly.

The 2 refers to a New Yorker piece by George Packer from 2014 called “Cheap Words”. In it, Packer spells Shel’s last name correctly. The error is novel to Gaster.

Also! Packer describes a loony-tunes conversation that Roger Doeren of Rainy Day Books claims to have had with Bezos at the Formerly Known as the ABA show in 1995.

““ Approaching Bezos, he asked, “Where is Earth’s biggest bookstore?”

“Cyberspace,” Bezos replied.

“We started a Web site last year. Who are your suppliers?”

“Ingram, and Baker & Taylor.”

“Ours, too. What’s your database?”

“ ‘Books in Print.’ ””

Somebody was lying here. Maybe everybody was lying here.

Gaster again: “Through just two distributors, Amazon got universal access to all books in print in the US.” *sigh* NO NEVER TRUE.

Not even all trade books. I mean, come on.

“Information was also standardized. Books in Print maintained a listing and ID system which was already available electronically and used everywhere.”

NO NOT TRUE AT ALL. I mean, you could license use of it at various price points and capabilities, but they won’t a metric fuck ton of money, and Bezos didn’t wanna pay it so he did _not_ and over time, the catalog we developed was so good that a lot of libraries (personal communication) ditched _their_ payments to Bowker’s in favor of using the Amazon catalog. Because ours was much better. “In the end, Amazon chose to use a lower quality version of the catalog from Baker&Tylor (sic) precisely because it included a lot of out of print books.”

NO NO NO

First, Taylor, not Tylor. More relevantly, we bought a database from the Library of Congress to get the out of print books. Gaster had some idiot for a source or just made random shit up. This is all _wrong_. _I_ _know_.

OK, I took a break to have a phone call with a friend. It’s supposed to be a weekly phone call, but we’ve missed … like, a month. It was great catching up. Now that I am back here, I have no idea why I wasted so much fucking time and energy on this.

You cannot trust anything in this book. He introduces errors in names that are not present in his sources. He asserts wrong shit everywhere. I have no idea how his analysis is, but how can you build decent analysis on top of a structure that riddled with wrongness? No. I haven’t finished the sample and I’m not going to. Which is a pity, because I wanted to read about logistics at Amazon, but I can’t trust this so I won’t put that garbage inside my head.

Prediabetes, Diabetes and Housing

Here’s an odd one.

https://www.science.org/content/article/war-prediabetes-could-be-boon-pharma-it-good-medicine

I have some mixed feelings about this. It quotes John Ioannidis favorably, and during the pandemic he was pretty vocal in ways that people got pretty mad about and I just don’t know what to think of him.

I was kind of startled by this paragraph:

“A 2011 study in JAMA examined health outcomes in women living in stressful, low-income housing projects who had been randomized into three groups: One got a voucher for better housing and help moving, one a voucher for moving to any area without help, and a control group got neither. Women who got the most housing assistance suffered the least obesity and diabetes—over 20 years, about 15% had become diabetic, compared with 20% in the control group.”

I landed in this article because I got curious about old people (>80 years of age, come on, that is old, don’t argue with me) taking diabetes medication that they did not need (that doctors had told them they did not need). I had heard about a friend’s father doing this, and then I recently learned that I knew someone more closely related to me who was doing this. I wondered if this was common and tried to design a search to answer the question, failed, but ran across interesting other things such as this.

I guess we really should focus on housing first.

Also, I ran across one of those cool Danish studies about olds taking diabetes medication, when (if) they discontinued, when they died, lots of interesting statistics.

Basically, if you are taking medication for your diabetes or prediabetes or whatever, it is in hopes of benefiting about 7 years in the future from reduced risk of wtf. If you are over 75, it’s not clear whether there is any hope of there being such a benefit, and if you are well into your 80s, the odds are very much against living long enough to enjoy it, even if there would be one if you did.

I gotta say, revelatory. I love shit like this. Perspective is all.