Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Know-It-All


This is a book that I found at the teacher’s yard sale at the end of the year (so that we could lighten our loads when moving across the world) on the free table. I only had a few weeks left, but I was confident that I could squeeze in another good book.

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
A. J. Jacobs

This is exactly my type of book. I mean, I do love fiction, comedy, romance, etc, but I do really love reading funny, non-fiction books (enter my obsession with anything penned by Bill Bryson). This is the story of an editor at Esquire who decides that he wants to read the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica. The book is organized into chapters for each letter of the alphabet. In each chapter, Jacobs has bold words as headings and the paragraphs that follow offer up anecdotes, definitions, and fun facts from the encyclopedia as well as the occasional thread of his autobiography.

I loved reading the encyclopedic things that he chose to share in addition to following along with his personal experience at the time of reading the book. I also really liked that as he read the book, Jacobs encountered several different sentences, phrases, or ideas that he found inspiring or wise. A few that I could easily retrieve and summarize, thanks to his “wisdom” entry in the index, in order as I encountered them in the book:

[My summaries in text, his words in quotes.]
A poem by John Dyer in 1699: A little rule, a little sway/a sunbeam in a winter’s day/is all the proud and mighty have/between the cradle and the grave. “On the one hand, it’s a wisely humbling poem... But on the other hand, the verse plays to my cynical side, the whatever-you-do-doesn’t-matter-because-you’ll-eventually-die side.”
“Ecclesiastes offers exactly the correct reaction to [the fact that life is desperately, insanely, absurdly unfair]. There’s nothing to be done about it, so enjoy what you can. Take pleasure in the small thing.”
Jacobs tells the story of a told to him by a lawyer friend about a Middle Eastern potentate who gathered the wise men in his kingdom to assimilate all the knowledge into a book for his sons to read and then kept sending the wise men back to write a shorter book until finally the wise men returned and gave a single sentence: This too shall pass.
Flaubert says that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing because you can’t learn the secrets to life from a textbook. 
“In his final speech, [Horace Mann] told students: ‘Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.’ Good wisdom. Great wisdom even. I have to remember that.”
Jacobs describes meeting with a rabbi to discuss some of his issues with Judaism and talks to him about scholarship in Judaism. The rabbi says that scholarship is ‘more than an ethical good… it’s a tool for survival. The emphasis on telling a story – that’s one way to express yourself Jewishly.’ When Jacobs brings up Ecclesiasted, the rabbi says that ‘we shouldn’t be focused on the competing of a task. When you’re going from A to Z, if you make it to Z, great. But if you don’t, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.’ 
A quote from the Tolstoy entry: ‘Stiva [from Anna Karenina] though never wishing ill, wastes resources, neglects his family, and regards pleasure as the purpose of life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that evil, no less than good, derives from the small moral choices human beings make moment by moment.’ 

Friday, July 15, 2011

Survival of the Sickest, chapter 1 and 2 summaries

Spoiler alert! 
I already did my little write-up/reading response for Survival of the Sickest, but I am now going to talk about some specifics. I wrote these two paragraphs after I slowly read the first two chapters, but then my parents came and I read the rest on the beach, so the summaries didn't happen. I still thought I would post them though, since they were already written. But let's be honest, if you are really interested, you should probably read the book. I am summarizing a lot of data and research that has been well explained and just giving you my exclamatory remarks in reaction to what I read. I am excited to share, but I think you should follow up by reading all about it for yourself.

Chapter 1:
First of all, hemachromatosis is a hereditary disease, the most common genetic disease for people of European descent, in which the body can't register that it has enough iron. So it continuously absorbs as much of it as possible, and this can have very, very serious side effects (including death). Iron is very important for bacteria, cancer, and other things to grow. The way this disease is most easily treated? Blood letting. Looks like all those crazy blood-letting, leech-sticking doctors weren't mistreating everyone. What is the author's argument for why this disease stuck around? To really oversimplify things: that during the black plague in Europe, people with more iron in their system were more likely to die because bacteria feeds on iron. Women, children, and the elderly were significantly less targeted than men. But people with hemachromatosis also happen to have white immune system blood cells with considerably less iron than the normal person, and this counteracted the precise way that the bubonic plague killed its victims - through their own immune system. Therefore, their immune system was actually able to fight off the bubonic plague, allowing them to live while 1/3 - 1/4 of the population died off. Even though hemachromatosis will eventually overload your system with iron, unabated, and cause you to die, it will save your life against normal infections. On the other hand, anemia has evolved because not having enough iron in your system means that it is hard for bacteria to live. While we do need iron, anemia has helped many populations avoid things like malaria.

Chapter 2:
Diabetes is much more common in people of Northern European descent and very uncommon in people of purely African, Asian, and Hispanic descent. The Younger Dryas was an ice age that occurred 13,000 years ago. After many rounds of scientific research and revision, it was discovered that the Younger Dryas took only a decade to develop and then lasted only three years. That means that one population went through a very significant (30 degree) temperature drop during their lifetime. Many Europeans died out. How does this relate to diabetes? Well, one thing that sugar does is lower the freezing temperature of water. Pure water freezes at 32 degrees, but water with other substances in it, like sugar, freeze at much colder temperatures. Our blood, being largely composed of water, then, would also freeze at a lower temperature if it had higher levels of sugar. Brown fat is a type of fat that the body produces in extremely cold temperatures that quickly burns sugar into heat. So a diabetic in Northern Europe during the Younger Dryas would have lived because their higher levels of blood sugar would have kept their blood liquid and let their brown fat burn that sugar into heat.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Languages Grew from a Seed in Africa

I saw a link to an article today on facebook about all languages being born from a single one.

Languages Grew from a Seed in Africa, a Study Says
By Nicholas Wade
New York Times, April 14, 2011

The premise of the article is to summarize the research done by Quentin D. Atkinson. His research suggests that, based on the phonemic patterns across the world, all languages evolved from one that started in Africa some 50,000 - 100,000 years ago, which coincides pretty well with the theory that all humans evolved in Africa around that time as well.

To help clarify things a bit, the definition of phoneme, courtesy of one of my favorite books (rather, the computer mac version of it), the OED:

phoneme |ˈfōnēm|noun Phoneticsany of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and in the English words pad, pat, bad, and batCompare with allophone .DERIVATIVESphonemic |fəˈnēmik; fō-| |foʊˈnimɪk| |fəˈnimɪk| |-ˈniːmɪk|adjectivephonemics |fəˈnēmiks; fō-| |-ˈniːmɪks| nounORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French phonème, from Greek phōnēma ‘sound, speech,’ from phōnein ‘speak.’

allophone |ˈaləˌfōn|noun Linguisticsany of the speech sounds that represent a single phoneme, such as the aspirated in kit and the unaspirated in skit, which are allophones of the phoneme k.DERIVATIVESallophonic |ˌaləˈfänik| |ˈøləˈfɑnɪk| |aləˈfɒnɪk| adjectiveORIGIN 1930s: from allo- [other, different] phoneme .

As I taught my kids (students) words and word parts this past year, they started consistently pestering me for definitions and origins for many of the words that we came across. I was happy to tell them, but I only wished that I had my handy dandy OED mac application to use and project up on the wall of the classroom to always give them an accurate and satisfactory answer.

Basically, his examination of languages shows that they have less phonemes the further away from Africa on the human migration route that they are. So African languages have the most (more than 100), English has about 45, and Hawaiian has only 13. This parallels other research that shows a similar pattern of less genetic diversity in humans the further they are from Africa.